English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory Comments on Fry's "The Function of Criticism..." Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 In discussing Frye, I left the notion of the "verbal universe" rather abstract. The way to round things off is to connect what I said about math to myth: Frye explains that mathematicians can assimilate everything that happens in purely mathematical terms. When he acts as a critic (and not a critic of other critics, as in the essay we read), he employs myth to interpret the individual works and authors he is focusing on. And myth is Frye's version of mathematics: it allows him to encompass and interpret all of the literature he wants to talk about. His own criticism shows that he inclines toward considering myth an adequate way of dealing with the "verbal universe" he alludes to in his essay—I mean that for Frye, everything we call literature could be made to fit within its scheme. Myth is a purely "literary" way of explaining not only literature but our place in the world around us. That's why mythologists like Joseph Campbell are fascinating to listen to and have such profound appeal as explainers. And it is why poets like the Romantic "prophet" William Blake have such appeal for critics like Frye: Blake creates one mythological universe after another; he makes them and then unmakes them so soon as they begin to look systematic and stale. Myth-making is Blake's process of imaginative creation, and as we know, for the Romantics human imagination resembles or even equals the creative power of God. When Shelley writes in "Ode to the West Wind," "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?" he is writing in mythological terms about the regeneration of the individual and communal human spirit. It's not hard to see what's happening here: people have long observed the changing of the seasons and drawn them into an intensely human range of experience: the wonder of birth (spring), the joy of youth (summer), the sombre period of adulthood, with all its responsibilities and advancing pensiveness (fall), the bleakness of old age (winter), and then again to rebirth, and so the cycle continues forever and for all living things. The Greek "mythos" means "story"; Shelley, like many poets since the ancients, is telling us a story about the movements of the human spirit, and he's doing it in terms that his grasp of myth (a handing down, in part, from literary predecessors) has allowed him to derive from the observation of nature. One final comment to store up for future use: a lot of contemporary critics are determined to "demystify" and "demythologize" art and the criticism written about it. It's pretty clear that Frye does not see myth as a vehicle for ideology (as in my example about the Nazis and their grand stories about the German gods and the state as a transcendent work of art)—in fact, it is the very thing that makes sense of individual literary texts; it delimits and clarifies the verbal universe in which we live and move.
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