52
RICHARD POIRIER
literary study? So much so that the conception of literature is itself
tied to an idea of "works," which can
be
coherent, rather than to
a feeling for "writing," an act in which there are various and mys–
terious exertions of energy? The search for coherence has been mostly
a disservice to the very classics in which modem critics have been
most eager to find it:
M oby Dick, The Waste Land,
and
Ulysses.
Why not cultivate the protean reader to match that emerging type
of ourselves which Robert Lifton calls "the protean man"?
I am afraid that such a man would be no more assisted by a
literary education conducted along lines laid down by Northrop Frye
than he would along those extrapolated from Eliot, at his most for–
mulaic, the Southern Agrarians or even Arnold - there being in
each case a different degree of "spatialization" of literature and of
possible responses to it. Frye can
be
commended for many things,
and one of these is his skepticism about the Arnoldian exaltation of
great works of literature as religious or political creed. Instead, he
proposes that culture be treated as "the total body of imaginative
hypothesis
in
a society and its tradition." Note, however, that he still
prefers to believe in the word "body" as applied to works of imagina–
tion, to believe in a corpus of work, however enlarged, as the subject
of study. There is still to be a "field," in which, as Alvin
KibeI
has
pointed out, the relations of literature to primal fantasies are logical
and not chronological. Predictably, he distrusts literary study which
tries, in conjunction with psychology and anthropology, to under–
stand works of art as the expression not of a necessarily coherent
self, but of an anarchic one, a self frustrated rather than helped
in expressing itself by the dominant modes of civilization or by liter–
ary forms.
Frye can
be
a very liberating critic, both in range and perspec–
tive, as when he remarks that "in Shakespeare the meaning of the
play is the play, there being nothing to be abstracted from the total
experience of the play. Progress in grasping the meaning is progress
not
in
seeing more in the play, but in seeing more of it." And yet,
as Reuben Brower has shrewdly noted, "progress" in Frye means not
something about the accumulated experience, the dynamic unfold–
ing of experience in the reader and in the work, of flashes of life.
He means instead a progress that distances us from the play, that
takes us on a spatial excursion from " the individual plays to the
