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PHILIP HALLIE
.complex tectonic . earthquake of them centering . on·. his radical .split
between mind and body (he showed how hopeless . this split was when
he tried rather half-heartedly to connect the mind with the body by
means of his laughable pineal gland-here was a scientist who knew
he was in trouble when he could not make connections intelligible).
One does not have a system, in the strict sense of that word, when
the connections between basically different parts are unintelligible or a
matter of faith. On the other hand, one of the reasons why Darwin's
hypothesis about organisms and their environments is systematic and
progressive is that there are in it rich patterns of observable relation–
ships between his two sorts of entities---organism and environment.
The difference between the two hypotheses is the difference between
an hypothesis that causes more puzzles than it does illumination and
one that makes its subject-matter more intelligible than it was before.
Or to put it another way, the difference is between an arbitrary, fictive
model and a scrupulously descriptive generalization from the facts.
Frye's complex dichotomy, or set of dichotomies, takes a special
form in his discussions of Archetypal Criticism. In the Third Essay of
the
Anatomy
he makes a distinction between what is "deliberately"
written and what is "creatively" written. To write deliberately is to
perform "an act of conscious will," as when one writes down a recipe;
the poet does this when he "displaces" or ·makes plausible an archetype
in a particular poem. To write creatively is to be a midwife to one's
own mind, to let "the universal spirit of poetry" push an archetype into
one's consciousness. In the finished product of literary art this dis–
tinction becomes a distinction between "the theme itself" of a w.ork
and the "rhetorical decoration" of that work, the "form" of the work,
the conventions or recurrent archetypal images it embodies, and the
"content," ". . . life, reality, experience, nature, imaginative truth,
social conditions...." Poets "displace" myths in somewhat the same
way a midwife wraps up a new-born baby, deliberately, for good rea–
sons, but secondarily, inessentially-the primary work is not done so
deliberately or actively. And again, the ·different processes produce
different effects--form and content.
Any inquiry into the relationship between these tw.o profoundly
different processes or products is bound to be as unfruitful as our initial
inquiry into the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in
Frye's writings. For instance, if we look at the first three "phases"
or ways of critical analysis (the literal, the descriptive, and the formal),
and then look at the last two phases (archetypal and anagogic), we
find it difficult to relate these two sets to each other. The descriptive,