(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Frye was a Canadian literary critic and theorist.
He hypothesised a “unified imaginative system”, a “total schematic order, interconnected by recurring or conventional myths and metaphors”, archetypes, underpinning all literature (Frye 2006a, 417; Frye 2009, 407). These archetypes and myths are the foundations of culture—from religious texts and the classical world—and literature is derivative of myth (Frye 2008a, 8). Living in a culture suffuses an author with the archetypes it transmits through religion and art, so they necessarily embed and express these concepts in the author’s work. Accordingly, we “can get a whole liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature” (Frye 2000a, 100). All books are connected.
As soon as we start to consider what a text means or sounds similar to, we become critics, and the unity underlying literature requires the critic to interpret every work in the context of all the works they know, to attempt to grasp literature as a whole (Frye 1964, 105; Frye 2002a, 236). Their primary activity is understanding literature by establishing a context for the works they study (Frye 2009, 160–161). As critical readers, we comprehend texts by relating them to the author’s life and times, literary history, and literature’s unity (ibid.). In this way we understand more deeply and more broadly because in understanding one work better we better understand those that we’ve read already, and by better understanding literature as a whole, we better understand each work therein (Frye 2007a, 309).
Criticism is not a threat to literature. The only thing that “ literature” is the “stock response” to either literature or its criticism, “which is always founded on prejudiced, ignorant and unacknowledged value-judgements” (Frye 2002b, 97). Strong criticism “annihilates the stock response by bringing it to life with a new understanding” (ibid.). Critical reading on this view demands recognising and avoiding making such responses.
If archetypes link texts, then critical reading means recognising these archetypes. To do this we must often “stand back” from a text to see how it repeats elements from other texts (Frye 2000a, 140). Stepping back further we identify other levels on which meaning can be found in text, depending on our approach to symbolism: the literal, descriptive, formal, and anagogic1 (ibid.). The book is “the world’s most patient medium” because it “comes back with exactly the same message no matter how often you consult it”, so by adopting a different view of meaning we can change how we interpret this message (Frye 2008b, 714).
There’s a distinction between our “direct experience of the work of itself, while we’re reading”, which is pre-critical; and the “conscious, critical response we make after we’ve finished reading (Frye 1964, 104). The latter practice improves our pre-critical responses—again suggesting that better understanding literature’s unity develops in us a deeper, more sagacious disposition to other works.
As readers we have a “consciousness that subjects itself to the text and understands, and another that, so to speak, overstands”. Without this ability to overstand we are “a pedant who understands but does not comprehend” (Frye 2008a, 84). This detached, overstanding role is performed by the critical reader, while the imaginative reader willingly suspends belief and implicitly adheres to literary convention (Frye 2002b, 96–7). To do otherwise is to be a “reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts”, and so clearly has “no business in literature” (Frye 2000a, 76).
There are different approaches, then, that we need to adopt in reading imaginative literature: as we read, we surrender to the world of the text, playing by the rules of the genre; but afterwards, we need to explicitly criticise the text, exploring how it connects to other works, in order to comprehend.
People who have little interest in books may express an indifference in that they’re “not blown about by every wind of doctrine” (Frye 2003a, 20–21). People who are deeply interested in books need to acquire a similar distance from what they read: we need a “growing detachment from what we possess and a growing sympathy with what is alien” (Frye 2000b, 156; Frye 2003a, 20–21).
Literature is an “autonomous verbal structure”, whose meaning is “hypothetical”, bearing an “assumed relation to the external world” (Frye 2000a, 74). The “universal imagination” involved in a text explains why this meaning is independent of its author (Frye 1958, 394). This is why “we do not get closer to the author’s meaning by getting closer to the book’s meaning. The greater the book, the more obvious it is that the author’s consciousness merely held the nozzle of the hose” (Frye 2010, 15). On this view, an author can’t help but reproduce cultural archetypes, and if they didn’t, we wouldn’t relate to their work.
The classics are “what’s worth studying” (Frye 2007b, 340). A great book is “a work that refuses to go away, that remains confronting us until we do something about it, which means also doing something about ourselves” (Frye 2000c, 90). Or, as Frye puts it elsewhere (Frye 2006b, 283):
Every work of literature has to die and be reborn in the individual studying it. It doesn’t just stay out there; it becomes part of him or her. Without that death and resurrection there is no genuine possession of literature
The “real intensity” of a work emerges from rereading it, almost as “a technique of meditation” (p. 198). If the poet is genuine, we’ll remember the “poem, or part of a poem, without making a conscious effort to do so” (Frye 2003b, 132–3).
Yet, Frye admits that he’s handicapped in his scholarship by “the immense difficulty I find in finishing long works of fiction. I seem to get the point after about 100 pages” (Frye 2002b, 208). This suggests that even excellent readers, and prolific academics, don’t necessarily share the conventional approach to finishing a book.
We have seen that literature implies “a community of shared imaginative experience” (Frye 2003c, 150). A book connects those whom it affects: it is “a stationary visual focus of a community” (Frye 2009, 316). But books also have “the opposite tendency of individualising the audience” (Frye 2003c, 150). In this way we can use them as a “companion in a dialogue with ourselves” to “structure and make sense of the flood of automatic gabble that keeps rolling through the mind” (Frye 2000b, 602–603).