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Humphries - Issue Two - ColloquySomething Critical is Mything: Identity and Intertext in Northrop Frye Ralph Humphries
Nineteenth-century literary criticism read literature as a commentary on the world it inhabited. The commentators understood what they read in terms of the judgments and values they registered in it, and which they themselves, as commentators, as critics, made explicit - as if, somehow, the literary text under investigation always fell short in this regard. Their criticism, then, took up, or extended, the intention of the texts they engaged, as they understood it: to say something significant about the world. In this climate, the literary object, as literary, scarcely existed. Where successful, it was a transparency, in itself barely visible, so well did it convey a world. This is, briefly, the caricature of this period of literary criticism produced by those polemicists who, coming after, were keen to situate themselves in the vanguard of a new critical method. Let us take an early example. Russian Formalism sought to purify literary criticism. Or it sought to invent it as properly literary. It eschewed various 'extraneous' considerations (biographical, historical, psychological, and so on) and concentrated its attention on the language of the text. This was the way to discern the intrinsic principles of the text's construction: the principles of its literariness . The idea of a content (or meaning), referring to a region of non-literarity, was not so much abrogated as uneasily sublimated by a formal poetics - or a stylistics. The language of poetry is, according to the formalist Victor Shklovsky, an 'impeded, curbed, distorted, language' (1990:6). It employs a range of artistic devices, which has the effect of making things strange: the process of defamiliarisation, or 'enstrangement' (to use Benjamin Sher's neologism (intro. Shklovshy 1990:xviii-xix)). What becomes important, subsequently, is the shaping, or formation of the text, and the textual effects of this shaping. The Shklovskian concepts - art-as-device and enstrangement - are an attempt to say something about literature in general - to say something about the specificity of the literary. But there is a tension here already, in this phrase: 'the specificity of the literary.' It is a tension in the Formalist project between the particular text and a generalintertextuality, between an individual work of literature and literature itself. To undertake the task of determining the literary object as such is to generate an exemplary text: the 'intertext' - which is an object composed of betweens, of interstices. In this process, specific texts come to serve as illustrations of the intertext, which is the condition of their being. Consequently, there is literary theory, which would determine, by one means or another, the essential characteristics of the intertext (which are the essential characteristics of the text in general). Since the condition of possibility of texts precedes them, as their condition, then, somehow, literary theory, coming after literary works, would anticipate them - would antecede them. It is not hard to understand how, all of a sudden, theory comes first. Theory displaces literature as anterior: that is, theory, reading literature, prefigures it; or, theory, reading literature in order to grasp its possibility, prefigures it by (re)producing this possibility. Yet the tension between a work of literature and literature itself remains unresolved. At what point does the consideration of literature, departing from specific literary works, leave literature behind? This is the question of theory, and here we ask it in relation to an exemplary and intrepid intertextualist: the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. And there is another tension too: between literature and literary criticism. If such criticism is literary, is genuinely literary, is it too literature? Perhaps, one of the peculiar by-products of the close consideration of literariness is, even while determining the specificity of a literary language, to bring about a convergence (that is, an increasing indistinction) of the two: literature and literary criticism. Or, at least, to register the two as always already converging. For Shklovsky, the devices of art work to disconcert the automatism of quotidian perception by way of a tropological transplantation. The mundane object is transported to a place where recognition is not possible without the engagement of a new perception. In metaphor, for example, a particular alignment, or realignment, which is also a substitution, produces both a semantic identification and a disjunction. The thing identified in this way enters literature enstranged from ordinary speech by an alteration of semantic resonance. The thing is transformed. This kind of formalist poetics, attentive to artistic devices, examines a particular text and defines its literary qualities. Literary language is a departure from what is called 'ordinary language.' (Or, perhaps, literary language reminds us of what is already strange in ordinary language by bringing this strangeness into the foreground.) The sense of 'literature' is limited to the properties of the text as a linguistic construction, and the context of the text is the concept of a literary discourse defined stylistically.[1] As the promulgator of a new science of criticism (which is not a science of literature[2] ), Northrop Frye undertakes to refamiliarise what the poet has defamiliarised. (This is, perhaps, the peculiar task of all interpretation, and even the concept of enstrangement performs a familiarising function.) In Frye's criticism, the task of familiarisation is a totalising and schematising endeavour whose aim is to discover the primal roots of poetry, and to trace their various efflorescences. He does not seek the psychological roots of poets, but poetry's own mythic source. Like the sun, the source illuminates literature in its totality. Frye's science would disclose the Muse herself, who is no longer the divine explanation for poetry's miraculous generation, though she is the source, the well-spring, the sacred fount. She is the place of identity, and this place is the house of archetypes in which she lives. It is for these mythico-literary archetypes, primitive units of poetic construction - and not in themselves entirely drained of mystique - that Frye adumbrates a grammar of transformation and (re)generation. Thus, each poem in the language is assimilated to a critical system which describes literature in terms of a fundamental continuity, mapping a course from the source to its late manifestation. Literature is this architecture, an 'order of words.' The context of the poem is still a literary discourse, but it is now more than a sum-total of linguistic devices - it is the total form of Western literature. [3] For Frye, then, form is not the elucidation of the individual poem's essential unity (its complex and integrated structure of meaning as an autonomous object) by means of close textual analysis. Frye tends away from a consideration of this kind of specificity, for he is concerned to disclose literary form itself, which is all-embracing. Such a form emerges from an inductive survey of the whole of Western literature. However, even Frye must make a start, and that starting point has a kind of particularity. Specifically, and initially, Frye discovers a critical method in the early Romantic poet William Blake - whom he adopts as his precursor. Frye's first major work, Fearful Symmetry (1947), develops the thesis that immanent in the poetry of William Blake is the method by which it can be interpreted. Here Frye recognises the possibility of formulating an ideal critical strategy by whose means the poem would, in a sense, read itself (a truly literary criticism which 'passifies' the critic). In fact, Frye discerns in Blake the operation of a theory that could well be extended to produce a systematic, critical assimilation of all literature. So, how does Blake's poetry theorise? In Blake, Frye argues, the processes of poetic creation are articulated by way of the poetic medium itself. Blake does not understand poetry in a secondary, descriptive relation to the world. Not only is poetry about poetry, but reality itself is transformed in the poetic process. Rather than God-given, this redeemed reality is a product of the human creative imagination. For Frye, this way of thinking, diverging from the currency of the eighteenth century, is central to the development of Romanticism. In the epoch prior to Blake's essentially romantic innovation, poetry, as such, had no substantive value. It existed only subordinately, only in so far as it was the vehicle of various allegorical meanings, which it was the task of the commentator, one assumes, to exhume. Poetry remained subjected to its quasi-mimetic capacity for explaining the world as an already-created thing. Blake's thought took a different course. He 'identified the creative imagination of the poet with the creative power of God' (Frye n.d:17). The physical, natural world is sub-moral, sub-human, sub-imaginative, and 'every act worth performing has as its object the redeeming of this nature into something with a genuinely human, and therefore divine, shape' (18). Note: the ' genuinely human' is the divine. This is the substance of a Blakean humanism that Frye both locates in Blake and makes an essential ingredient of his own critical vision. Against the allegorical - which, as Frye understands it, reduces literature to meaning - stands myth:
Art subjugated to the physical, natural world in which we live is a fallen art, its singularly redemptive power abandoned to the chaos of historical, moral, and existential relativism that characterises the movement of abstract thought. True redemption must come in another form. Mythopoeic literature is the redemptive transformation and recuperation of a world not yet human. This is the primary work of the imagination: humanisation. Humanisation is the artistic realisation of what human desire wants: 'a heaven eternally separated from a hell.' Frye affirms the absolute primacy of imagination, and distinguishes it carefully from any mystical or sacramental connotations. Here, Frye's target is an Eliotism which subordinates art to a superior, and spiritually existential, reality, towards which art inclines, seeking in its supreme instances consummation with the transcendent world. The end of this art is the elevated consciousness of the mystic. This is not criticism, according to Frye, but a 'pre-critical religious participation.' For Blake:
Though this 'humanisation of reality' is the 'end of poetic vision,' it is also the beginning: myth. For Frye, there is no doubt: the mythical beginning is the end, and the end is the humanisation of reality. Identity is the mechanism of humanisation, and myth, disrupting chronology, is the locus of identity. Myth is originary and distinctive for not conforming to what we have come to call 'plausibility,' which is a field - the field of the plausible - mapped out today, and for some time now, by natural science (which we would have carefully to distinguish from Frye's science of criticism). In myth, imagination rules. The weakening, or failure, of imagination is marked by the incursion, and then dominion, of an external, non-human (or non-humanised) reality. Deference to this reality is marked by the ascendence of the genre of realism. Art then seeks to be 'realistic,' to reveal a prior world, whose nonhuman essence is external to knowledge of it. Frye's affirmation of myth and the Romantic imagination leads him towards an art not subjugated by the realist imperative. In The Secular Scripture(1976), for example, realism is characterised as a form of artistic conservatism. Realism inhibits the spirit of romance, yoking imagination (our saving grace) to the disorder of the 'fallen' (or unredeemed) world by the very attempt to comprehend the world in the field of its otherness. We recognise here Frye's most pervasive value judgment, and it is implicit in the word 'displacement': art loses its way when it allows the reality principle too much credence. The realistic imperative is a betrayal of the destiny of art, which is to forge its own reality in the furnace of imagination. Romance, the product of the pure mythopoeic imagination, is the natural culmination of artistic development. In this scheme, Shakespeare's Prospero is the quintessential figure of the artist (Shakespeare's romantic self-portrait, his self-mythologising). The prominence of the generic categories of romance and realism reflect Frye's emphasis on structure. In Shakespeare's comedies, for example, Frye argues that resolutions are structural, not moral, and character in his plays is a function of the story (character is 'in-formed' by structure, just as the structuralist subject is in-formed by structure). Characterisation conforms to the typologies set forth in his Anatomy of Criticism. Ultimately, we can arrive at a structure of comedy that will embrace all Shakespeare's comedies. This result would be the pure Shakespearian comedy, a play Shakespeare never wrote but which is the formal or intertextual condition of all his comedies. Structure for Frye is access to totality. Totality is oriented and stabilised by identity. Totality and identity: these concepts - insistent, recurrent and contiguous in Frye's theory - function complementarily in the Fryian system. Frye's notion of structure (a variant of totality) is thoroughly intricated with his concept of identity: it is identity which embeds the individual, the singular, in its structural matrices - locates it in the web of its sociality, embeds it in (its) nature, relates the individual as individual to itself as a pure function of structure. It is identity too that allows us to participate in the literary work, and yet leads us outward from it in a transcendental escalation, from the work to the work's genre, to the meaning of the genre, to the meaning of literature as a whole. We are then participants in a larger identification whereby the human and natural worlds are united. That is: the natural world is fully humanised. It enters literature. Literature subsumes the world, incorporates it. This is the mythopoeic: the Gods are nature imbued with the human; the Gods are the natural world identified with the human. Frye conceives a vast work of integration: perhaps it is possible, he speculates in The Secular Scripture, to conceive of a totality of secular narratives, to understand all stories as 'forming a single, integrated vision of the world, parallel to the Christian and biblical vision' (1976:15). The backbone of this thesis is his theory of romance: 'Romance is the structural core of all fiction: being directly descended from folk-tale, it brings us closer to a sense of fiction considered as a whole, as the epic of the creature, man's vision of his life as a quest' (15). There is an internal dialectic in fiction between the romantic and the realistic. The realistic tendency, which is, in a sense, unliterary, 'moves in the direction of the representational and the displaced.' The romantic, on the other hand, moves 'in the opposite direction, concentrating on the formulaic units of myth and metaphor' (37). The Romantic period is a culmination of the anti-representational, mythopoeic, impulse of romance. Though this mythopoeic movement responds to literariness in its impersonal essence, it is at the same time a movement into the interior: 'the metaphorical structure of Romantic poetry tends to move inside and downward instead of outside and upward, hence the creative world is deep within.' At a certain point, this closure determines a problem: Frye becomes concerned not to make this internalisation the ultimate creative terminus, and a significant complication arises in the evolution of his neo-romantic humanism:
The tale so far has argued that (the hu)man is the measure. The work of imagination has been to redeem, to transform that which is other than (hu)man. But here, in The Secular Scripture, a later work, Frye turns from a conclusion that appears, suddenly, narcissistic, and invokes God - invokes a God who, or an 'elsewhere' which, is not (hu)man. What is the nature of this essential, extra-human, 'elsewhere'? Does the necessity of its invocation compromise the promise of Frye's humanism? Or is it precisely God who manifests as other than human at the moment when Frye approaches the final totality? Is it God who appears at the moment of the invocation of the All? If so, then the system, at its limit - at the point at which it seeks to embrace literature itself - has undergone an inversion. What then is left of the system? Is it destroyed, or realised? There is a puzzle here that Frye's rhetorical facility does not make entirely clear, though we recognise his solution. The system survives as a humanism (and essentially so) inasmuch as we identify God and (the hu)man. In which case the 'elsewhere' which is God's is also an elsewhere - that is, an alterity - internal to (the hu)man. But if this is a little like an 'unconscious,' is it possible to say where it is? Is it inside or outside? And does not the contrariness of such an 'internal elsewhere' disrupt the simplicity of literary transmission? These kinds of complications press at the margins of the Fryian system, quietly threatening it - though, in the grip of Frye's eloquence and mastery, they might never penetrate so far as to disturb a dreamless and tranquil sleep. It is the invocation of identity that sustains the calm and stability of the system. Identity has a partner in the system, equally integral to its humanism:freedom. The facility of Frye's criticism derives from his sense of the freedom of the mythical inheritance. His identifications mark essential continuities in literary history, passageways by which the poet travels in time towards true domicile in the archetype. This is a pure freedom. And this pure freedom is the potential and the realisation of a pure communication. Identity is the path of this pure communication, which links past, present and future - more than this: which unifies them. Frye, the critic, pilot of the critical plane, speaking with calm and assurance, takes us around the literary world on a tour of tradition. Unlike the experience of some less optimistic post-war critics, for Frye tradition is a welcome inheritance, the glorious fruit of the human enterprise. The intertextual tour is an exhilarating journey across the human landscape, and it is not a mute or opaque adventure, but readily communicable, brought to life in Frye's own sublime pedagogy. Frye excels in the vista, and, under his powerful illumination, the vista never ceases to expand towards totality. There is, at the promised end, a culmination in which all will be bathed in light. But what is it exactly that is illuminated by Frye's universal poetics? A difficult question to which we might hazard a reply: what is illuminated by Frye is the (w)hole of literature. This is an over-worked pun, but in this instance entirely apt. Can the genuine critic aspire to be anything less than an exemplary symptom of this absence (hole) and totality (whole) which the critic announces, names, determines, inhabits, invokes, an exemplary symptom of this thing at whose limit the literary critic would find for him or herself a vocation - this thing called 'literature'? The formulation of a universal poetics requires a basic dynamic principle of poetic construction. Shklovskian 'enstrangement,' for example. In Frye's system, 'enstrangement' is termed 'displacement.' Both are principles of poetic evolution. In displacement, what is familiar, the archetype, is recycled, presented in a new guise, which is the product of a literary-historical movement from myth towards 'realism' (in itself chimerical for Frye). But is the archetype familiar? For Shklovsky, the enstrangements of poetry extrovert its artifice. Poetry is enstranged not from poetry but from ordinary language, which engages only automatic perceptions. The new alignment arrives like a sudden shock. This is what Shklovsky calls 'the experience of life.' The term 'enstrangement' describes the new, or modern - which is the poetic, inasmuch as poetic language, enstranged, achieves its poeticity as its novelty - inextricably, and perhaps uncomfortably, bonded to an anterior, familiar, automated, language. The effect is transgressive. There is also a voluntarism here: by intention and action, the poet defamiliarises. Enstrangement is the act of an individual. 'Displacement' has a grander, less particular resonance. It is not an effect within a poem, achieved as a distinction from a nonpoetic language. Displacement is a mechanism within literature. But within literature, it is nonetheless an inclination towards the nonliterary, towards 'reality,' ordinary life - towards the real itself. This, in Frye's understanding, is the error of displacement: seeking the real out there. The poet is passive, a pawn in the vast natural cycle (or spiral) of literature, which speaks through the poet. The expansive movement of generic modulation displaces the archetype, gives it a new guise. The continuity is marked by the archetype itself: what does not change amidst change. The archetype is the nondisseminative, or nondisseminated, at the heart of a general dissemination. The archetype is what is subject to dissemination. [4] 'Displacement' captures Frye's understanding of literature as mythocentric, an infinite return, or centripetal movement, in which the great poets, the redemptive poets, the poets of 'replacement,' are those driven blindly towards coition with their mythic origin. Or is it that, as the bearer of the poem, it is the poet who receives the archetype, and the archetype which is driven to a new incarnation, the archetype which takes possession of the poet? In this heat, the poet is made anonymous, is barely an individual, is a cipher, a pure function of the literary mechanism. The poet is lost in the embrace of literature. Each time the poet strikes an archetypal chord, the chord rises above the diachronic cacophony of literary history and returns to a consummation with its origin, uniting all literature in the identity of the archetype, which is a harmony. The poet, both dispersing and discerning his or her personality in the impersonality of the literary itself, realises a distinctively Fryian epiphany, a still point in the pandemonium of nature and history. Displacement marks the continuity in change. But, immersed in the panorama of its large-scale retrospectivity, Frye's view of literature tends to pass over the contingencies of the unspatialised moment, the precarious presentnesses of literature when it seeks to break its contract with tradition. What Paul de Man describes as the 'sheltering inwardness that history can provide' is very much the impression we retain from Frye's literary history. For de Man:
This 'specificity' queries the implications of Frye's free-wheeling and conquistadorial intertextuality. Something more localised stands in defiance of such a method. How can we consider the outline (Frye's word) of literature without a theory of literary specificity? Yet, as de Man's essay suggests, modernity and history (tradition) are hardly separable - in fact, they seem 'condemned to being linked together in a self-destroying union that threatens the survival of both.' A critique of Frye's system as a theory of context without an adequate theory of the text becomes an oversimplification, since the two will not necessarily be readily distinguishable. Displacement is hardly a notion adequate to describing the 'progress' of literature, even when balanced by a dialectically antagonistic movement that is anti-representational (that is, non-realist). When displacement is expanded to include the 'kidnapping' of romance by various social mythologies, its scope broadens. But what now limits, or contains, the aptitude of this term? Displacement becomes, then, a general term for the factors that make a text what it is, what it is specifically - historical, social, psychological factors, and so on. The term functions most effectively within the Fryian system, which radiates from a centre: quest romance as the sub-structure of all literature. Displacement, marking a differential movement, opens onto identity: the eternal romance of the same. The place which is displaced is the place of the archetype. What is repeated in repetitions is the archetype, which is the origin. The theory of the archetype replaces what was displaced: it returns to the centre, though it was always there. 'It': the thing itself, the archetype. There is an experience of the archetype, which is an experience of light. One is illuminated by it. The archetype (unlike the stereotype) shines. [5] Only manifest in time, at different times, it is timeless. It marks a timelessness that is literature's, that is the essence of the literary experience: absolution. The Formalist concept of estrangement and Frye's concept of displacement converge in what Geoffrey Hartman calls 'profanation' or 'trespass':
We recognise here something of de Man's characterisation of the impulse towards modernity. In the profanation of tradition is sought the sacred itself, and not merely a time-worn ritual, made meaningless by empty repetition. This 'exemplary trespass' is the possibility of literature: that is, literature is made in what exceeds it, in what exceeds itself, for the 'exemplary trespass' is nothing less than the profanation of literature itself. But can it ever be an exemplary trespass? Can this trespass enter theory so painlessly? Does this crossing bring self-transcendence, heroism, myth, literature, regeneration? Just as these thoughts - Frye's, de Man's and Hartman's - seem to converge, so we find de Man exceeding them:
What is there in the absence of this present? The present would arrive with this transcendence in which is located the well-spring of the modern - of the now. The present that does not 'ever come into being' is identity. Yet identity is the unity of present, past and future in the archetype. Frye's theory does not concern itself with this problem of modernity. But, is de Man's conclusion necessarily entirely antagonistic to Frye? It is Frye who has alerted us to an 'interdependence between past and future' which is not a simple determinism (Frye does not predict), but is nonetheless inescapable. Frye's spatialisation attempts to chart this interdependence, attempts to discern the way in which literary time is articulated. And that such an interdependence may prevent 'any present from ever coming into being' makes what we might call Frye's 'nostalgia' a very sensible way to approach criticism - perhaps the only way. A nostalgia for the purity of myth? This is the myth of myth - of its originality. Is not this myth inescapable? Yet 'nostalgia' is not quite the right word. And Frye does have what amounts to a sense of modernity in his concept of identity. It is the strategic deployment of this concept that redeems (the present) time. Through identity, and by way of its tropic partner, metaphor, Frye's odyssey escapes de Man's grim, 'Iliad ' perspective (his 'realism,' as it were) and takes possession of the present - takes possession, in fact, of all time. Frye's success is dependent on his misreading, on his failing to identify, the concept: identity. The poetical passion is for identity: that curious word that combines two very different, two opposite , tendencies (autonomy and symbiosis), and, in bringing them together, identifies them. Something is trapped inside the word 'identity,' something which both defines the 'thing'as itself , and as it is identical to something else. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye adumbrates what he terms Blake's 'private symbolism.' Later, in rejecting this concept, he was led to three conclusions:
Has the archetype been realised? This is Frye's distinctive Platonism. The archetype occupies the space of identity: 'poems are made out of the same images.' Frye must overcome the mediacy of literature. Literature mediates, but it does not mediate a beyond of literature. It does not bear the truth of something extra-literary. Literature mediates the archetype: the pure image, the literary itself. We cannot have an experience of literature that is only an experience of similarity. Frye must transcend mere similarity, in which the archetype is obscured. The simile, pointing weakly to a similarity, does not unite, but (unwittingly) stresses the distance and the difference between things. Marking resemblance only, it is a trope of fragmentation, of dissolution, of slipping away, fading. It would appear to mark a convergence, but it is a convergence on nothing. Similarity is at the same time dissimilarity. Identity in poetry is metaphor.[6] The simile mediates or bridges, the metaphor unites. Identity is the incorporation and transformation of difference: unity. Identity superimposes something perfectly onto something else - which is, as such, 'unelsed.' It is identified,'samed.'Presence is a pure experience of this superimposition, in which, perhaps, the superimposition is concealed. By means of this concealment, the (mythical) thing appears. The (mythical) thing is. The (mythical) thing is present. Its presence is felt. There is no difference. Difference is always 'from' or 'between.' The pure thing, in its pure thinghood, has no environment, or is its own. Frye has a doctrine of identity: 'poems are made out of the same images, just as poems in English are all made out of the same language.' Introducing this doctrine, he notes: 'it is identity that makes individuality possible.' Frye presents this to us as a paradox, but as a paradox whose fundamental truth solves, or resolves, the paradox. But can we rest with the truth of this essential paradox? Indeed, it is precisely as a resting (or still) point that identity functions. In the Old Testament, how does God identify Himself? 'I am what I am,' He announces. Shakespeare's characters frequently make statements with the same Old Testament inflection. In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio says to Romeo, 'Now art thou what thou art.' Emphasising the now , this is the formula of presence: the art of presence. What is stated here, chiasmatically, is an identity . Yet the sentence subsists in time, and, like time, is articulated, and what is determined by the pivotal 'what' is not identity, but distinction, a distinction that the formula seeks to bridge, and in doing so exposes. Each half of the sentence is determined by the other. Thou art . . . What? What thou art. And so on. An identity is announced, but its arrival is suspended. Or it arrives only as the pivotal 'what' itself. Can we rest with it? With what? The problem of (and for) the concept of identity is given in an old paradox: identity is both one and two. If two things are identical, they are the same thing; if they are the same thing, they are not two things. Without some moment of temporal arrest, the concept of identity leads logically to its own negation, or deferral. Language - which is, in a sense, an identifying mechanism - expresses identities only in so far as they are inhabited by this cleavage, only in so far as they are, at the same time, differences.[7] Whence, then, does metaphor draw its power to identify? From identity itself. If metaphor is simply substitution, or juxtaposition, or resemblance, or concatenation, and not an essential identification, Frye's scheme fails. It loses its centre. It cannot maintain the whole. The system becomes the very space of a loss. It marks this loss. 'Possession' is then not a figure of totality, but the sign of this loss. Identity is not a figure of unity, but a sign of an originary entropy, of the failure of the system to locate its systematicity other than as an perpetual digression. So, what if the system fails? Might we not then be compelled (with de Man) to describe poetry also by the quality of its failing? Of its falling into the hole of metaphor? For it is not only Frye who requires the identifying power of metaphor. Poetry itself seeks, by way of metaphor, to bring the thing itself into the present, to disclose it - the archetypal, the mythical thing. And Frye is completely rigorous in identifying this thing with the essence of literature, with literature itself . The essential poetic or literary effect, which the literary critic seeks to identify, is located here. Let us recall again Frye's doctrinal pronouncement: 'poems are made out of the same images, just as poems in English are all made out of the same language.' The concept of identity has another important implication. It situates the origin, representing it as not singularly located in place and time, as not fixed, but as a simultaneity and omnipresence. The origin is here. The mythopoeic poet not only recreates, but creates the origin: (re)creates it. The concept of identity makes re-creation and creation indistinguishable. The origin is not therefore a temporal and spatial beginning, but an a-temporal, a-spatial locus: the origin is everywhere; the origin is nowhere. (This is the point at which an impossible distinction is made: everywhere/nowhere. An impossible decision.) Frye's spatialising reflects the a-temporality of identity, but how could he represent identity a-spatially? To realise identity, it must be here and there: (t)here. Where might this mythical place be? Negatively then, this no-where, no-when, non-point of origin, non-point of non-presence, we might call, with an appropriate elision, the 'norigin.' How can we not describe it as if it were a place, a 'where'? The norigin is the spirit of the transcendental, the ineffable, in poetry. It is the space where 'All Human Forms are Identified.' It is the ground of both literary history and modernity. It is the 'specificness' of specificity (ie. the lack of it). It is the absolute individuality in anonymity which is the essence of the Nietzschean Dionysus, a 'self insatiable for non-selfhood.' It is the lost piece that would solve the puzzle of experience. The curious thing is that we cannot say that the norigin does not exist: it exists as non-existence (it is the source of paradox). Language - which works by difference, which, identifying, differentiates - requires a norigin, which is itself the context and condition of language. The norigin is only defined by what it is not, just as language is a differential mechanism. If we invest the norigin with substantive value, we invoke a self-negation - that is, our theory will contain, will be inhabited by, its own nemesis. We speak nonsense. But this is inevitable. Frye cannot do without a norigin, for without it there is no identity. There is a norigin. In which case, the norigin is the origin. There is an origin. In the necessity of the norigin, even while defined as a negative originology, is its inversion: the norigin is the origin. We recall that Frye suggests that individuality comes from identity. Identity is the presence of two as one, of one as two. Identification is a temporal, or etiolated, process rather than an instantaneous act: a building and burning of bridges in a succession that refuses absolute simultaneity. Is there a meeting, a true contact which restores presence to the articulated syllables of (an always already) recorded time? This is the revolution that Frye envisages: it happens in the imagination at the magical nexus where language transcends itself and time is stilled - the point of identity. It is a crushing and impossible focus. Matter is compressed until it unites with itself in the heaviest of nothings - the norigin is a black hole. Frye speaks then of a revelation from God. This God has little to do with belief, though He may be related to a kind of faith. He is an imaginary incarnation of desire. And surely all strong interpretation is implicated in the act of trying to incarnate its own god, or point of identity, as it strives in its own words to identify the text - as it strives to account for the experience of a blinding light which is at the heart, the mythical heart, of the experience of literature. But, recall, God appears for Frye when it seems that (the hu)man has become cut off from the outside, that the inward-gazing from which creative power is drawn has become a perfect narcissism. God arrives as a necessary 'elsewhere': non-(hu)man, what comes from beyond. Is this renewal? Perhaps then, romantically, God is Imagination . . . the desiring (self)incarnation of pure Imagination. The difficult question here, which Frye only half asks, is, 'Where is Imagination?' Or, in fact: 'Where is literature?' Is it here, or elsewhere? The problems multiply when we try to conceive a history of the imagination (a history called 'literature'). The past is only useful to us, only available, according to Frye, insofar as it is a continuity. Frye's theory seeks to (re)gain a literary past, to forge a literary history, and hence to give literature a positive identity. This positive, systematic identity for literature is not just the science of criticism , but the determination of the intertext (in this case, the quest romance) as the essence of literariness. Yet the critical attempt to throw some light on literature as a whole is the symptom of a loss that can have no clear origin. We register this loss most directly in Frye's insistence on possession and identity. Is it only the quality of this sense of loss - manifest in the taxonomical adornments of the system, in the ordering of his possessions - that distinguishes Frye from inferior critics? Literary criticism abandons the world in search of literature itself. It may even, at a certain limit, formulate this shift of focus (this translation) as the incipience of a general textuality - a general 'becoming-text,' or, perhaps, a ubiquitous textual always-alreadiness (there is always already the text). Yet concentration on the text reveals a difficult truth: there is no text. Only half aware of this truth, literary theory moves into the space of the absence of the text, understood, with the best of intentions, as the space between texts. It formulates the intertext as the law of the between. As the very possibility of literature, it formulates what is as diaphanous, as opaque, as the text itself. The intertext haunts the space between texts; it reads between them, echoing their absences, seeking the law of their predestination in the hollows of the word. The intertext is a text, a sub-, super-, a pre-text, and is the ghostlier for it: it is a myth. But it is a thing too, and cannot be seen through. There is an intertext: the thing itself. Like a seaborn sailboat dependent on the pale breath of the wind, theory stakes everything on this.[8] Endnotes 1. In what follows I make
no attempt to distinguish systematically poetry and literature.
Return to endnote
reference. Bibliography de Man, Paul (1971) Blindness and Insight
, New York: Oxford University Press. RALPH HUMPHRIES is the editor of Cypher (Journal of the Australian Society For Continental Philosophy). He has published in Southern Review, Meanjin, Sophia, and has an article, "The Value of The Variable: An excursion in the abyss of precision', forthcoming in Philosophy Today (Chicago). He is a doctoral candidate in the Centre For Comparative Literarture and Cultural Studies at Monash University. |