70
GEORGE
LEVINE
I don't like this
kind
of poetry' can never be uttered by a serious critic."
The critic's obligation is to see literature as a body of knowledge which
can be studied systematically, and as critic he must free himself from
all merely personal responses. The reason for this is clear: Arnold's kind
of arbitrative disinterestedness has failed, and we must find a higher
disinterestedness transcending the limits of any concerned segment
of
society (Arnold, ultimately, represented only one concerned group).
One needs to stand outside of concern altogether, committed only to the
truth of correspondence
and
to literature.
This rather transcendentalizes Arnold's position. Since literature can
mean anything, it really means everything: "Everyone deeply devoted
to literature knows that it says something, and says something as
a
whole, not only in its individual works." At the risk of being charged
with less than devotion (such charges are the center of Frye's rhetoric),
I profess that I did not know that literature said something as a whole.
In any case, Frye goes on to what is surely almost visionary: "In turn·
ing from formulated belief to imagination we get glimpses of a concern
behind concern, of intuitions of human na ture and destiny that have
inspired the great religious and revolutionary movements of history."
Literature then becomes the one true church of the humanist skeptic,
and worship in it is "study," the interpretation of the scrolls. The
modern critic thus becomes again a part of the saving remnant. He
is
"a student of mythology, and his total subject embraces not merely liter·
ature, but the areas of concern which the mythical language of can·
struction and belief enters and informs. These areas constitute the
mythological subjects, and they include large parts of religion, philo–
sophy, political theory, and the social sciences."
Frye's theorizing returns us to Arnold's impossible situation. The
ideal of Platonic contemplation and Arnoldian disinterestedness now
be.
comes the only ideal which will lead us back into history. We are asked
to retain our sense of history, to understand how myths of concern
can lead to exclusion and narrowing and, in political terms, repression;
how myths of freedom can lead to an ahistoricism as damaging as the
oppression because it dooms the myths to become themselves exclusive
and intolerant. In fact, Frye gives us a brilliant, almost mystical artic·
ulation of the modern liberal's position, and with precisely the sort
of
dogmatic innocence we have seen in the response of many academic
liberals to the threat of student insurrection. We must study history
by
standing outside of it, but Frye surely stands too far above the various
concerned contenders for power. He manages an extraordinarily bril·
liant and bloodless history of Western civilization in literary terms and
