Theory: Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye, 1912-1991. A Canadian, actually. His "Anatomy of Criticism" is less difficult and more entertaining than I expected.

I want to begin making some very broad connections between features of Chinese life writing across the ages, which has driven me towards both history texts and literary theory. It's always a surprise to see how these two types of writing interrelate. Professor Wakeman's article had a reference to Northrop Frye intriguing enough for me to pursue the connection.

Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. 
Professor Frye throws his mind against the literature of "Western" and "Classical" ages. He comes up with a set of "modes" that broadly matches against certain stages of history -- the classical era, the middle ages, the Renaissance, the 17th through 19th centuries, and the 20th century. Overall, for example, literature has tended to become more and more ironic, which is to say in its most basic sense less and less concerned with the Gods and more and more concerned with humans and their foibles.

My notes for the first essay turned out roughly structural, reproducing Frye's own roughly three-part division of his discussion into the tragic, comic and thematic modes of literature down through the ages.

As with so much literary criticism and theory, this is also in part a vast reading list that I intend, somehow in my own feeble way, to pick at.

The last great threat to the establishment of Qing rule did not come from Ming loyalists such as Wan Shouqi, but from Wu Sangui, Shang Kexi, and Geng Jingzhong, the Chinese generals who had been allowed to establish three privileged quasi-independent regimes (on the Fukienese and Cantonese coasts and along the border with Annam and Burma) in return for having conquered South China in the name of the Manchus. In 1673, when the independence of the Three Feudatories was challenged by the young and vigorous Kangxi Emperor, the generals rose in rebellion. Many Chinese turncoats joined them, but two critically important Han banner leaders refused: in Fujian, Governor-General Fan Chengmo rejected Geng Jingzhong's invitation to join the rebellion, and he was thrown in jail; in Guilin, Governor Ma Xiongzhen was also imprisoned when he insisted on remaining loyal to the Qing dynasty. Their ensuing martyrdoms were truly tragic acts -incongruous and inevitable, heroic and ironic-that were dramatic preludes to the neoclassicism of High Qing during the following century. (See the discussion of tragic modes in Frye 1969:39-42)-Frederick Wakeman, Jr.

First Essay

Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes

Fictional Modes: Introduction

The elevations of characters, inspired after Aristotle's Poetics:

1. myth: stories of gods. e.g Teutonic myths

2. romance: superior men, in degree. prodigies of courage and endurance. knight-errantry, saints. (thaumaturgic prophets of Israel.)

3. A Leader: hero that Aristotle had in mind. High mimetic mode. Drama, particularly tragedy

4. a sense of common humanity, our own experience; Vanity Fair, "novel without a hero." Low mimetic mode. Middle class. Defoe.

5. inferior to ourselves: ironic mode. 20th century.

An overpacked statement (both mistaken and not, blunt and not):

Oriental fiction does not, so far as I know, get very far away from mythical and romantic formulas.

naive and sentimental; tragic and comic



Tragic Fictional Modes



1. Dyonysiac. dying gods. Orpheus, Jesus. the "solemn sympathy" of nature. Ruskin's pathetic fallacy thus a proper thing, not a fallacy. The Dream of the Rood. Kingsley's ballad.

2. Romance. the hero is still half a god. elegiac. hybris and harmatia. Beowulf, Passing of Arthur by Tennyson.

3. High mimetic tragedy. mortality. social and moral fact. catharsis. Angst. the marvellous; Queen Mab. Pity and Fear, pillars that can become mixed: Othello, for example. The "flaw" harmartia can be circumstantial only. The Mirror for Magistrates.

Tragedy belongs chiefly to the two indigenous developments of tragic drama in fifth-century Athens and seventeenth-century Europe from Shakespeare to Racine. Both belong to a period of social history in which an aristocracy is fast losing its effective power but still retains a good deal of ideological prestige.

4. Low mimetic tragedy. sensations of pity communicated externally. Pathos. Little Nell's death. Clarissa Harlowe, Hardy's Tess, James's Daisy Miller. inarticulateness of the victim. Wordsworth sailor mother, flat, dumpy style.  "The Sailor's Mother." failure of expression, Swift's memoir of Stella. tear-jerking. the terrible figure: SImon Legree. inner/outer life: Bovary, Melville's Pierre, Lord Jim, Ibsen's Brand. "The type of character involved here we may call by the Greek word alazon, which means impostor, someone who pretends or tries to be something more than he is. The most popular types of alazon are the miles gloriosus and the learned crank or obsessed philosopher." Tamburlaine, Othello. Faustus. Tartuffe. Browning monologue. Synge's playboy, Shaw's sergius. Gothic thrillers, dark hints of interesting sins.  "The result as a rule is not tragedy so much as the kind of melodrama which may be defined as comedy without humor." Coen bros' Blood Simple, for example.

The root idea of pathos is the exclusion of an individual on our own level from a social group to which he is trying to belong. Hence the central tradition of sophisticated pathos is the study of the isolated mind, the story of how someone recognizably like ourselves is.

5. Ironic.

The conception of irony meets us in Aristotle's Ethics, where the eiron is the man who deprecates himself, as opposed to the

alazon. Such a man makes himself invulnerable, and, though Aristotle disapproves of him, there is no question that he is a pre-destined artist, just as the dazon is one of his predestined victims. The term irony, then, indicates a technique of appearing to be less than one is, which in literature becomes most commonly a technique of saying as little and meaning as much as possible, or, in a more general way, a pattern of words that turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning. (I am not using the word ironic itself in any unfamiliar sense, though I am exploring some of its implications.)

possibly no hamartia: just gets isolated from her society.

Thus the figure of a typical or random victim begins to crystallize in domestic tragedy as it deepens in ironic tone. We may call this

typical victim the pharmakos or scapegoat. We meet a pharmdkos figure in Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, in Melville's Billy Budd, in Hardy's Tess, in the Septimus of Mrs. Ddloway, in stories of persecuted Jews and Negroes, in stories of artists whose genius makes them Ishmaels of a bourgeois society. The pharmakos is neither innocent nor guilty. He is innocent in the sense that what happens to him is far greater than anything he has done provokes, like the mountaineer whose shout brings down an avalanche. He is guilty in the sense that he is a member of a guilty society, or living in a world where such injustices are an inescapable part of existence. ...The pharmakos, in short, is in the situation of Job.

incongruous and inevitable, opposite poles. Kafka, Trial. failed Prometheus. Kafka and Joyce's Shem, mythic. Also Henry James, see the story "The Altar of the Dead."

These references may help to explain something that might otherwise be a puzzling fact about modern literature. Irony descends

from the low mimetic: it begins in realism and dispassionate observation. But as it does so, it moves steadily towards myth, and dim outlines of sacrificial rituals and dying gods begin to reappear in it. Our five modes evidently go around in a circle.

Comic Fictional Modes



1. The Apollonian, the hero accepted into society.

2. "idyllic" (corresponding to "elegiac" above), pastoral. idealizing a simplified life in the country or on the frontier.

3. High mimetic: Aristophanes old comedy. Menander->Low. Plautus, Terence. low bias. social comedy. sympathy and ridicule, corresponding to pit and fear. The Birds: balance the heroism and irony.

4. New Comdedy: young people who want to marry. Prospero, a rare character. Domestic comedy. Pamela's virtue rewarded. rarely any sexual energy. Balzac or Stendal: moral ambiguities. the alazon or picaro may win.

5. ironic comedy. driving out the pharmakon: Jonson's Volpone, Tartuffe, Falstaff, certain scenes in Chaplin. thepederasty of Cleisthenes. The Clouds a counterpart to Plato's Apology.

But the element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important

theme of ironic comedy. Even in laughter itself some kind of deliverance from the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be very important.

The irony of the contemporary detective story. Sherlock Holmes. v. Crime and Punishment, for example.

In the growing brutality of the crime story (a brutality protected by the convention of the form, as it is conventionally impossible that the man-hunter can be mistaken in believing that one of his suspects is a murderer), detection begins to merge with the thriller as one of the forms of melodrama. In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.



We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there.

seeing it as a symptom of society's own viciousness. Graham Greene novels. (Se7en is what I think of). parody: ridicule. parody of tragic irony, as in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust. Huxley, Those Barren Leaves.

Even popular literature appears to be slowly shifting its center of gravity from murder stories to science fiction or at any rate a rapid growth of science fiction is certainly a fact about contemporary popular literature. Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us as technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.

[Pause. romantic v. realistic.

If we take the sequence De Raptu Proserpinae, The Man of Lmv's Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, Pride and Prejudice, An American Tragedy, it is clear that each work is "romantic" compared to its successors and "realistic" compared to its predecessors. On the other hand, the term "naturalism" shows up in its proper perspective as a phase of fiction which, rather like the detective story, though in a very different way, begins as an intensification of low mimetic, an attempt to describe life exactly as it is, and ends, by the very logic of that attempt, in pure irony. Thus Zola's obsession with ironic formulas gave him a reputation as a detached recorder of the human scene.

Hence, perhaps, the reputation among some that Yang Jiang is a detached writer of baogao wenxue. ironic tone v. ironic structure. the reader invited to share. Dickens, for example. Elitism's risk: a moral value-judgment disguised as critical. Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we

must then learn to recombine them.Canturbury Tales: low mimetic with irony techniques. don't oversimplify. the mimetic tendency itself as a pole. mythos. the constructive principles of story telling remain the same, either way. Tom Jones, Moses, linked by birth. displaced myths. mythoi. plot formula. towards verisimilitude, then, with irony, beginning to move back. [I'm really on to something with yuan'er bu nu]



Thematic Modes

Aristotle: melody, diction, spectacle; mythos or plot, ethos (characters and setting), dianoia or "thought"

When a reader of a novel asks, "How is this story going to turn out?" he is asking a question about the plot, specifically about that crucial aspect of the plot which Aristotle calls discovery or anagnorisis. But he is equally likely to ask, "What's the point of this story?" This question relates to dianoia, and indicates that themes have their elements of discovery just as plots do.

the hero, the hero's socity, the poet, the poet's readers --

There can hardly be a work of literature without some kind of relation, implied or expressed, between its creator and its auditors. When the audience the poet had in mind is superseded by posterity, the relation changes, but it still holds. On the other hand, even in lyrics and essays the writer is to some extent a fictional hero with a fictional audience, for if the element of fictional projection disappeared completely, the writing would become direct address, or straight discursive writing, and cease to be literature.

on allegory: genuine allegory cannot be added by critical interp alone. Western v. classical. epigrams, eclogues, ridicule....Ovid and Snorry, "educational" value for collecting stories by theme.



2. Episodic and encyclopedic. [cf. the distinction between memoir and autobiography] ecstatic, ollaves of the Celtic world: killing with satire. the encyclopedic form: cf. Yokai. episodice forms. Isaiah, Koran. Hesiod: king's and tribes to remember. Gower of the Cursor Mundi, Malory, catholicity, Widsith or wandering minstrel. nomadic satirist. [cf. Blogs, 赋, Knechtges, Frye's book itself an example]. The Inferno



3. High mimetic. The Faerie Queene, The Lusiad, Jerusalem Delivered, Paradise Lost....Pilgrim's Progress. Cynosure or centripetal gaze. Devotion. look on the lady, the soveriegn. Crashaw. Herber. "temples"

4. Low mimetic: Icelandic sagas, Orlando Furioso. Romanticism. Hyperion vs. Pride and Prejudice. Romantic agony. Faust. the self. Egotism, subjective mental state. Rousseau, the Prelude. [node here]

5. symbolism. craftsmen. anchorite. Flaubert, Rilke, Mallarmé (Shi Zhecun). temps perdu. big works with a sense of contrast between the course of a whole civilization and the tiny flashes of significant moments which reveal its meaning. : Finnega's Wake, The Waste Land, Between the Acts. the craftsman becomes once again oracular. the idea of a return. Nietzsche's new divine power vs. identical recurrence. Joyce's theory of history. Romantic provincialism is still around. Eliot's royalism, fascism of Pund. how tradition reappears! "existential projection." philosophy, soitical meliorism, metabiology: literature a "shadow" onto philosophy, not terribly sophisticated.



Coda: plato's contradictions on poetry. paranomasia. the Longinian v. catharsis. aesthetic distance, intellectual detachment, emotions purged, penseroso. ecstasis or absorption. Lycidas, Samson Agonistes.