Northop Frye

Northrop Frye – Essay 1 of Anatomy of Criticism

I found the introduction to Anatomy of Criticism uninspiring, but the first essay, “Theory of Modes,” was rewarding. In it, Frye divides literature up into five main modes, in descending order: mythic, romance, high mimetic, low mimetic, and irony. The mythic mode is about gods and demi-gods (the hero is different in kind from us); the romance is about a hero who exists in a world close to ours, but one in which “the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended” (33) (the hero is different in degree from us); the high mimetic mode takes place in a world just like ours, but follows a leader or other important people (the hero is just like us, but with greater authority and passions); the low mimetic mode doesn’t seem to have a hero, as it just gives us a variety of normal people; in the ironic mode, the subjects are inferior to us in “power or intelligence” and thus “we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity” (34). As Frye points out, as works like Ulysses seem to blend the ironic and the mythic, it turns out that these are not hierarchical distinctions, but circular ones.

As always, I read with an eye to naturalism. It seems clearly that naturalism represents a tragic mode, and thus it is at times either a tragic low mimetic mode or a tragic ironic mode. Frye describes the low mimetic (domestic) tragedy as the expression of the sensation of pathos. He states “the root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong” (39). This seems to be the perfect definition for the low mimetic version of naturalism: in The Damnation of Theron Ware, in An American Tragedy, in Martin Eden and other novels a young man attempts to join a slightly higher social group and fails. And the young man in each of these cases is on our level not in terms of class, but in terms of intelligibility; he can speak and be understood. Furthermore, the contrast to the low mimetic tragedy is the Horatio Alger story; it is exactly like low mimetic version of naturalism, except that this time lower class individual is accepted into the next social class (45).

But the next step down, the ironic mode, gives us the works of Zola, of Hamlin Garland, and the great novel McTeague. In this ironic tragedy, the fiction writer “pretends to know nothing” (40); unlike a London or Harold, who beats us over the head with the various philosophies that offer up different values for life, there are absolutely no articulate characters proposed in this kind of life. Frye puts it this way: “Thus pity and fear are not raised in ironic art: they are reflected to the reader from the art” (40). The author has absented himself from judging the circumstances; he simply puts them on the page for the reader to see, and pretends “to know nothing, even that he is ironic” (40). And Frye agrees with my central tenet: that the force that sends the hero into his spiral is random. “Thus the central principle of tragic irony is that whatever happens to the hero should be causally out of line with his character […] Irony isolates from the tragic situation the sense of arbitrariness, of the victim’s having been unlucky, selected at random or by lot, and no more deserving of what happens to him than anyone else would be” (41). As much sense as this makes for the works Frye is discussing (such as The Trial) it doesn’t seem that useful for my understanding of naturalism. Or rather, it is useful insofar as it gives an explanation for why the works of naturalism operate as tragedies of the arbitrary, but not why the authors think such a system would be compatible with naturalism.

This connect up for me to something that Frye notes in the introduction; when discussing how authors are frequently not the best critics of their own work, Frye quotes John Stuart Mill: "the artist [...] is not heard but overheard" (5). I don't think that's uniformly true; for Frye, I think that's supposed to explain why Ibsen is not a good critic of Ibsen, because we are supposed to overhear Ibsen's ideas (in his art) not hear them (in his direct commentary to us). But I think this distinction becomes problematic/interesting when we apply it to the low mimetic/ironic distinction. We can only overhear the artist who pretends to know nothing; we must overhear the message of Zola. But we can hear Jack London loud and clear in some of his books; when his characters spout philosophies based on the works that he himself has read, it becomes hard not to hear him. And of course we hear him in The Jungle as well, in which he has a brief cameo as a socialist speaker.

More tidbits:

Frye describes naturalism’s movement from low mimetic to irony: “On the other hand, the term ‘naturalism’ shows up in its proper perspective as a phase of fiction which, rather like the detective story, though in a very different way, begins as an intensification of the low mimetic, an attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic of that attempt, in pure irony. Thus Zola’s obsession with ironic formulas gave him a reputation as a detached recorder of the human scene” (49)

Naturalism as a fringe version of literature; if literature is a different mode of language, more interested in putting together words in a certain way than simply conveying knowledge, then “literature goes about as far as a representation of life, to be judged by its accuracy of description rather than by its integrity of a structure of words, as it could go and still remain literature” (80)

Finally I want to extract from Frye the idea of the "green world" in comedy which Cavell makes so much of, and which I've argued that Deleuze has inverted. Frye writes: "We may call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme of the triumph and love and life over the waste land...Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world" (182). This sounds exactly like Deleuze's argument that naturalistic cinema represents the fusion of an originary world and a real milieu, as displayed in Stroheim's Blind Husbands. But in Blind Husbands, everything is reversed: the suitor is in fact an interloper, and the blocking father figure is in fact a husband. And yet the suitor seems to have been successful, until we see that, in contrast to the comedy, the note the woman gives him is actually a repudiation of his interests. And we find that out while the suitor and the husband are on the peak, and there, in a terribly bleak green world, they behave like animals to one another, and the result is the death of the suitor. Cinematic naturalism, at least, seems to be the exact inverse of Frye's "new comedy," and that starts with the fact that the simple and pastoral "green world" has become an "originary world" of cruel impulses.