154
MORRI S DICKSTEIN
remains synoptic and generalizing. Frye always establishes a distance, at
once heuristic and self-protective, between himself and his subject. He
aims at precision of outline rather than intimacy or concreteness of
detail. The second of the three lectures which make up
The Modern
Century
is called "Improved Binoculars"; for the New Critical micro–
scope Frye substitutes archetypal binoculars, both of which turn criticism
into pseudo-science, both of which enable one to see without being
seen, almost without being there. Here
is
a typically summary sentence
from the present book: "Whatever is progressive develops a certain
autonomy, and reactions to it consequently divide: some feel that it
will
bring about vast improvements in human life by itself, others are more
concerned with the loss of human control over it." How many disorderly,
passionate commitments are crudely but not uselessly put in their place
by so schematic a resume! The prose is unmistakeably Frye's, a medium
conveying its own distinctive message. Frye has a deserved reputation
for writing "well" (read: clearly and fluently), but there is something
passionless and cerebral about his very lucidity, something machinelike
in his unflappable evenness of tone. His style is so free of mannerism
that it has itself become a recognizable manner. It proclaims a detach·
ment and intellectual purity, a resilience against existential doubts and
confusions. Its message is Only Disconnect, in return for which it offers
knowledge without pain or risk.
A
certain idea of the university is therefore central to Frye's plan for
society as a whole. He sees the university both as an achieved model of
community and as a center of that disinterestedness and "spiritual
authority" which enable us to see the "real form of human society" as
"revealed to us through the study of the arts and sciences" (as he writes
elsewhere). He follows a number of modern writers (and the later
Blake) in seeing society as a "respressive anxiety-structure" which can
be undermined only by a revolution in human consciousness, not through
political activism. Frye is therefore sanguine about the growing intimacy
between contemporary art and the university. He envisions a university,
energized by the modernist consciousness and the modernist antagonism
to contemporary life, becoming an instrument of social change. Along
with the communications media (much of it unfortunately in enemy
hands), our artistic and educational institutions, he says, form a "leisure
structure" which could eventually rival the power of the economic and
political structures, since it can "fulfil the entire range of non-material
human needs"; hopefully, this will create "a system of checks and
balances which will prevent anyone of our new three estates from
becoming too powerful."
