68
GEORGE LEVINE
Few of us seriously engaged with literature are capable either of
ignoring or of dealing adequately with these attacks. Whether critics
like it or not, their preoccupation with literature makes of them an
elite, and membership is essentially alienating. This is a tired formula–
tion, but it is important here because the best of our critics (and
some of the worst) are struggling to avoid the implications of the spe–
cialness of their activity. One typical contemporary response - though
not one acceptable to Frye, Bradbury or Steiner - is to accept a kind
of cynical despair and admit that literature is simply a particularly
.sophisticated kind of pleasure and that criticism of it can therefore
have meaning only for sophisticated epicureans. Concern for literature
then becomes something altogether separate from political or social
concern, and the critic accepts schizophrenia of the sort evident
in
William Morris's highly expensive art and highly socialist politics.
Frye, whose earlier criticism had left him vulnerable to attack as
a man who insulated literature from social concern, has evidently felt
the pressure to make clear what he has meant
all
along in insisting
on the specially insulated nature of literature and literary study. His
argument in
The Critical Path
is, therefore, worth following in some
detail. It represents a highly systematic and apparently logical explora–
tion of the relation of criticism to society. I find it particularly instruc–
tive because it resolves itself into an unacknowledged paradox in which
the path can be seen either as a dead end or a large circle, a charac–
teristic impasse.
As one would expect, Frye's analysis is largely concerned with
the historical development of myths. In the beginning, says Frye, the
poet was the spokesman for
his
culture, and he articulated the myths
"that it most concerns" his "society to know." He calls these "myths
of concern." "The myth of concern," he says, "exists to hold society
together, so far as words can do this. For it, truth or reality are not
directly connected with reasoning or evidence, but are socially estab–
lished. What is true, for concern, is what society does and believes in
response to authority, and a belief, so far as belief is verbalized, is a
statement of willingness to participate in a myth of concern."
This
myth went to make poetry deeply traditional, and the poet lived at the
very center of society as a transmitter of tradition and spokesman for
its highest ideals. The apple enters the garden, however, as oral cul–
ture is transformed into writing culture, and truth is seen not in terms
of authority but in terms of "correspondence, the alignment of a struc–
ture of words or numbers with a body of external phenomena." Em–
piricism introduces the "myth of freedom": "The myth of freedom
is
