Northrop Frye
THE OVERSTANDING READER
The question has often been raised about the moral benefits of
studying literature. Clearly the relation in which the reader is a subject look–
ing at an object set against him is not one that will necessarily improve the
personal character of the reader, unless he very much wants it to. This fact
is particularly clear in painting, because of the accident that so many paintings
can be bought and possessed instead of becoming the focus of a community.
The narrator of Browning's poem "My Last Duchess," who has his wife
murdered because she smiled at other people, but who cherished her picture
which smiled only at him, was what is known as a cultivated man, but the
cultivation had not done much for his moral sense.
In literature there is the factor of the difference, almost the opposition,
between the kinetic appeal of rhetoric and the imaginative appeal of poetry.
Rhetoric belongs to a moral,
quid
agas
or "What should we do?" mode. Thus
rhetoric does attempt to be a moral stimulus - usually a bad one, unfortu–
nately, the stimulus to hatred being by far the easiest available - but litera–
ture does not act in this way, except through some historical accident, or un–
less (as in inspirational verse or propaganda novels) the works of literature
involved are really disguised forms of rhetoric. And yet I think almost any
serious writer, if asked what kind of contact he wanted to make with his
public, would say that his aim had something to do with making his reader a
different person from what he was before.
Two forms of identity are involved in studying a work of literature.
There is identity
as ,
which is a basis of ordinary knowledge, and is a matter
of fitting individuals into classes. We know this creature to be a cat, we iden–
tify it as a cat, because we recognize it to be an individual of the class"cat."
But, it will be objected, we are overlooking the uniqueness of the cat: there
are millions of cats, everyone quite discernibly different in appearance and
temperament from this one. This is a kind of mental confusion which seldom
affects the status of cats, where it is easier to understand the traditional dis–
tinction between
esse
and
essentia,
but it is constantly obscuring the theory of
criticism. We never know the unique as such: uniqueness belongs to experi–
ence by itself The contemplation of the literary structure as a representation,
an individual of the class "poem," unites experience and knowledge.
There is also identity
with,
which has several dimensions. A metaphor
of the "A is B" type expresses an identity
with
that is not found in ordinary
experience. We do, however, experience a form of identity-with in time, as
when I feel that I am identical with
all
the personalities I have been or had
Editor's Note: Excerpted from
Words with Power
by Northrop Frye. Copyright
©
1990 by Northrop Frye. To be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
