155
It
would be hard to fully disentangle possibility from fantasy here.
If
The Modern Century
gives us Frye's politics of culture it should be
evident from this brief glimpse how apolitical he really is. For Frye,
despite the determined impersonality of his work, the only genuine
avenue of change is individual, not social or institutional; he asserts "that
no improvement of the human situation can take place independent of
the human will to improve, and that confidence in automatic or imper–
sonal improvement is always misplaced." What distinguishes Frye from
Eisenhower or from a doctrinaire conservative is his Blakean vision of
unfallen man, his liberal faith in the individual will to change, which he
discerns beneath the rubble of alienation and social manipulation, just
as
he can see the "buried or uncreated ideal" of America - embodied in
"Thoreau, Whitman, and the personality of Lincoln" - beyond the
machinations of a superpower and its Asian war. H is politics are at once
blind and visionary.
Frye's emphasis on the autonomous and self-critical individual makes
him as sensitive as Marcuse to the prevailing fonns of manipulation in a
supposedly free society, such as advertising and propaganda. (The first,
the diagnostic lecture is easily the best thing in the book.)
It
also makes
him
a pungent critic of the technological detenninism of McLuhan and,
more platitudinously, of the crude historical determinism of some Marx–
ists. But he takes no account of the revisionist Marxism of recent years,
which seeks a middle way that unites individual and historical change.
Such a unity was anticipated by Blake in his figure of Orc, who embodies
what many of the Romantic poets first saw in the French Revolution:
not only political emancipation but a renewal of human nature, a libera–
tion of the mind from the trammels of repression.
But Blake himself grew disenchanted, and the hero of the later
prophetic books is no longer the rebel Orc, who now becomes trapped
in a cycle of revolution and reaction, but the artist Los, the visionary
who will preside over an apocalyptic transfonnation of human conscious–
ness. Frye follows this later Blake, but though there are some moving
utopian moments in
The Modern Century,
what he gives us in the
prescriptive parts is often no more than a dreary and pallid version of
Blake's faith in art as an instrument of salvation. His projected alliance
between art and the universities, itself a far cry from apocalypse, does a
grave disservice to both of them. Were the universities ever the strong–
holds of Arnoldian disinterestedness that he imagines?
If
so, internal
pressures of advocacy have arisen to combat other forces of social control
and manipulation. Frye largely ignores the current fennent that may be
completely transfonning the university. He refers to recent manifestations
