BOOKS
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correlative of physics, literature. The change comes when men cease to
regard number as the inherent property of certain things (or stop
thinking of love and anxiety as the invariable concomitants of certain
situations) and begin to see it as an infinitely diverse set of purely formal
relations, whose manifold reference to experience may be universally
coordinated.
No human society is
too
primitive to have some kind of litera–
ture. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become
distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in
religion, magic, and social ceremonies. But we can see literary
expression taking shape in these things, and forming an imagina–
tive framework, so to speak, that contains the literature descend–
ing from it.
Of course, teaching literature is somewhat complicated by the fact that
mankind has unaccountably neglected to denominate the basic structural
elements of literature, while the units and operations of mathematics have
long possessed appropriate names; but Mr. Frye labors prodigiously to
supply the deficiency, ransacking a formidable erudition for terms. This
isn't criticism as many have come to understand it, because what Mr.
Frye is doing doesn't involve the assertion of preferences; but if criticism
is to develop a rigorous pedagogy, personal testimony will have to go, and
Mr. Frye bravely salutes the prospect of its departure.
Mr. Frye's argument does not always move in this breathless at–
mosphere, but something like a close analogy to mathematics lies behind
his assault upon various theories--psychoanalytical, anthropological, and
literary-which understand works of art as the expression of an archaic
self thwarted by the historical forms of civilization. Like the teacher of
physics, the critic must not regard the utterances with which he deals as
relevant to a given personality, thwarted or consummated, as the case may
be.
The relation of literature to primal fantasy, according to Mr. Frye,
is logical, not chronological; and the presence of the king's son, the
mimic death, the executioner, the substituted victim, no more identifies
Gilbert's
The Mikado
as "disguised" fertility rite than the use of cardinal
numbers identifies advanced physics as a "disguised" form of counting.
The critic who discovers anything more concrete at the heart of the
poetic wood than a central monomyth, inconceivably diverse, has reverted
to a pre-literary Pythagoreanism.
One can see how Mr. Frye's argument admirably suits the senti–
mental, post-Symbolist revival of myth in our literary culture. Every man
has his own imaginings, and every period in history its public fantasies, a
continuous, unremitting dreaming in concert, which gives meaning to
