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655
of criticism" (his italics) are either as confusing as we have seen them
to
be
in the opening of this paper, or they are as vaguely metaphorical
as they are in
The Well-Tempered Critic,
where he assures us that
though the fleeting and permanent aspects of criticism look separate
they are in fact "inseparable, two halves of one great whole which is
the
possession
of literature...." (his italics). But how can the mean–
ingless and the meaningful, the temporal and the eternal, the par–
ticular and the universal have any relationship to each other if all
we know about them is that they contradict each other?
If
ever there
was a "schizophrenic dichotomy" between the emotive and the de–
scriptive or between the historical and the structural it is in the works
of Northrop Frye; if ever basic principles failed to explain each other
but simply raised more problems than they solved, it is in these works.
A totally intelligible body of knowledge must exhibit intelligible rela–
tions between its parts, not simply reassure the reader that there are
some sort of relations between them.
Of course such a split as Frye's is not new in the history of
system-building. Plato had one much like Frye's when he discussed the
"participation" of forms in individual things ; and Descartes had a
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