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social life. For various reasons (I should say they
are
historical),
many
of our important poets and writers can no longer take immediate
and
confident possession of their imaginative paradigms. A suspicion
d
popular fantasy has intervened that is not wholly unsalutory; and
thiI,
combined with the felt need for imaginative discipline, has produced
an
unaccustomed, universal premeditation of mythic references. One effect
of Mr. Frye's system is to present this -self-consciousness as an unambiguous
gain in power; like science, literature imposes (has always imposed?) a
purely formal system of relationships upon experience; it is therefore
autonomous, free of particular assertions and preferences. To the objection
that archetypal analysis works as well upon cheap entertainments as upon
literature important to the tradition, Mr. Frye can answer that for the
teaching of physics the simplest high school experiment will do
to
il–
luminate basic principles, and affords its own pleasure. The real discrimi–
nation the critic has to make is one of complexity; popular fiction,
nursery rhymes and folk tales "displace" mythic patterns onto experience
peremptorily, at the behest of non-literary impulses, whereas the mature
work of art points more clearly inwards, at the total coordination of dream
and reverie--it extends the possibilities of intramural reference to
an
ultimate point. When we do science, we learn to read the work of other
scientists as expressions of a single effort at mathematical interpretation;
when we do literature, we must learn to read the whole of it as one
Symbolist poem-vast, anonymous, endlessly patient of interpretation.
What difference does the -study of literature make in our social or
political or religious attitudes? That, says Mr. Frye, is the important
question to ask, and the trouble with his system is that it leaves no room
for an answer. Science proposes the total coordination of measurement,
and literature the total integration of fantasy-life; it is "a wis'h-fulfillment
dream and an anxiety dream, that are focused together." (There is more
of
I.
A. Richards' neural balances here than the difference in rhetoric
might lead one to suspect.) But science makes a difference to life, it has a
technical issue, because it is practical at the core. The application of
mathematical symbolisms to experience, in any but the most primitive
fashion, increasingly demands a physical basis in action; one can't simply
contemplate the world to discover the mathematical form of events.
For something like the mathematization of all that is calculable to be an
ongoing enterprise, not an abstract possibility, science requires the
conditions for ever-increasing complexity of experiment-the minute co–
ordination of action that technological society affords. 'Only in a world of
rigorously manipulated events can the ways in which mathematical
symbolisms take on concrete meaning be rigorously determined; only in
