648 / 676
650
PHILIP HALLIE
language is not really oriented towards space, but ultimately towards
time, then its description can never be as plastically "closed" as Mr.
Miller would have it, nor can it be so loftily disengaged from actual
exegesis or history. A text that exists in time cannot be projected in a
definitive and well-rounded shape. It has to be integrated into a con–
tinuous interpretation, for it is itself a fragment in the incessant inter–
pretation of Being which makes up our history. Those so-called spatial
and meta-historical visions of literature are in fact still imprisoned in
the fallen time from which they try to free themselves. This is all too
apparent in the conventional view of literary history to which both
authors remain committed; I have already mentioned Mr. Frank's rather
useless excursion into eighteenth-century esthetics. But in Hillis Miller's
book, the error is more insidious, for he seems to hold to the naive
fiction of a past "where being and value lie in
this
world" and he seems
to think of Romanticism as the last period in which man set out "to create
through his own efforts a marvelous harmony of words which will inte–
grate man, nature and God." Romanticism is precisely the period during
which the illusory character of spatial analogies was being revealed, often
in a much more radical and consistent manner than in post-Romantic
symbolism and Victorian poetry. I can think of no better challenge for
the critical method so competently represented by these two writers,
than to apply it to the main figures of the Romantic period.
Paul de Man
THE MASTER BUILDER
FEARFUL SYMMETRY. By Northrop Frye. Bellcon Press. $2.45.
ANATOMY OF CRITICISM. By Northrop Frye. Princeton. $6.00.
FABLES OF IDENTITY. By Northrop Frye. Hllrcourt, Brllce & World. $2.95.
THE WELL·TEMPERED CRITIC. By Northrop Frye. Indillnll. $4.50.
The center of our concern in this review will be Northrop
Frye's "system" or "structure" of criticism. His first book, on Blake's
poetry, was important, and so were his two most recent books,
Fables
of Identity
and
The Well-Tempered Critic.
But these days Frye is in–
fluential and controversial mainly in so far as he is proposing and
applying an overarching system of criticism. Hence, the main emphasis
nere will be upon his most sustained effort to build such a system,
Anatomy of Criticism.
Still, the paradoxes in the early pages of this book tempt one
to