PARTISAN REVIEW
71
sustains an aloofness to all its ideals but the ideal of tolerance, rejection
of which makes him utterly intolerant himself. His own position is
undercut either way one looks at it.
If
he does manage that total tol–
erance he aspires to, he is subject to his own critique of the too
tolerant: "those who do not wish to exclude anything run the risk of
losing their identity and having their total inclusiveness turn into its
terrible opposite, the sense of a totally meaningless universe." Democ–
racy, he says, is the only practicable solution to the problem of contend–
ing value systems. It accepts, "as part of a permanent tension between
concern and freedom, a plurality of myths of concern, in which the
state assumes the responsibility of keeping the peace among them." The
state, then, is without identity - a totally negative conception of the kind
Mann implies in "Mario and the Magician." But though Frye's argu–
ment remains at the level of the ideal, one cannot fail to see that the
state is never dispassionate, must itself be preoccupied with its own
power. Neither Frye nor the state can be altogether reliable arbiters
between contending myths.
It is preoccupation with the ideal that injures Frye's argument,
for it lacks a sense of the reality of human motives and activities,
governed not by strange mythic powers, intellectual ideals, feelings in
a vacuum, but by complicated and unsystematic structures of human
relation, greed, lusts for power, love, self-deception, psychoses, neuroses,
hungers, hopes, pains, etc. The ideal prevents Frye from dealing with
some of the facts of the present crisis - that, for instance, the disinter–
estedness and tolerance in the liberal humane tradition have been in–
voked regularly to keep power for those who have it and to reject
those who do not; that the study of literature as a system of knowl–
edge is the privilege of an elite; that this study, in doing violence to
the personal response, does violence to literature itself; that the dispas–
sionate study of science (and here, I know, I verge on Ludditism) has
terrifying moral consequences; and that disinterestedness is only an
ideal and not a full human possibility.
At his worst, then, Frye sometimes looks like an intelligent Mr.
Casaubon, seeking his key to all mythologies. But he understands much
of the criticism I have been making, and it would be fairest to allow
him
the formulation:
Preserving a myth of freedom along with a myth of concern in
society is difficult and dangerous, for while a society with an open
mythology is obviously better for human life than a society with
a closed one, yet an open mythology is by no means a panacea.
Not only is there a constant pressure within society to close its
