[Let me] begin my argument with Frye by quoting two authors in whose classic thought Frye finds several of his own starting points—Plato and Aristotle. Plato, in the Ion …, where the rhapsode is quizzed to the point of saying that a rhapsode (that is, a literary critic) will know the right things (ha prepei) for a man to say, the right things for a woman, for a slave, or for a freeman—but not what the slave, if he is a cowherd, ought to say to his cows, or what the woman, if she is a spinning-woman, ought to say about the working of wool. And Aristotle in chapter IX of the Poetics, where in general he says that poetry is more philosophic and of graver import than history, and in chapter XXV, where he says that, if a poet utters technical inaccuracies about the pace of a horse or about medicine or any other art, the error is not essential to the poetry; and if he does not know that a doe has no horns, this is less serious than if he portrays the doe "inartistically," "indistinctly," "unimitatively," or "unrecognizably"—amimētōs. No translation of this adverb makes very good sense, because with this word Aristotle is touching a tender spot in the mind of criticism. He is defining a circle of paradox (or contradiction) within which literary theory has ever since that time continued to move—and Frye no less than any other thinker who makes a serious effort to explain the difficulty. I mean the double difficulty, of poetry in relation to the world, and of criticism in relation to value—the so-far irreducible critical experiences: that literature is both more lively and less lifelike than the real world (this impossible pig of a world); that criticism cannot demonstrate value but is at the same time inescapably concerned with trying to do so. Frye is in no different situation from Aristotle, Coleridge, Croce, or Richards, in having to confront these experiences and in being unsuccessful in trying to simplify them. In his thinking on these problems Frye differs from other literary theorists mainly in the extreme assurance, the magisterial sweep and energy, with which he at moments attempts (or pretends) to detach literature from the world of reality, and criticism from evaluation, and in the aplomb with which he involves himself in the oddities, implausibilities, even patent contradictions, required for this detachment. Thus, literature, on the one hand, has no reference to life, it is autonomous, like mathematics, and sufficient to itself; it "takes over" life, envelops and absorbs it, swallows it. Literature is made out of other literature. At the same time literature does refer to life, it must; it began with real life in a primitive situation, and it is concerned with promoting values for real life, the vision of the ideal society (unless we mean that this is only a dream—as perhaps we do—but then why all the talk about the difference between the genuine and the phoney?). Lincoln Wasn't There is the title of a recent well-conceived spoof on the ritual theory of mythic origins. If we were to judge by numerous passages in Frye, we'd have to conclude that the ocean wasn't there either, the wine-dark ocean that washed the shores of Greece, nor the rosy-fingered dawn, nor the pine-clad mountains. Nothing was there but the blind bard himself, the words of some earlier ballads, and an audience, which presumably did not include any ox-eyed or white-armed women, or any men who were crafty, sulky, proud, brave, or cowardly.

In his Polemical Introduction of 1957, Frye is intent on purging criticism of several wrong kinds of valuing, the biographical or genetic, the rhetorical, the moralistic, and the socially prejudiced. Like Arnold in 1880, he wishes to distinguish such exercises of mere locally public taste from judgments of "positive value," which he says are the proper business of criticism. He can and is willing to distinguish "ephemeral rubbish," mediocre works, random and peripheral experience, from the greatest classics, the profound masterpieces, in which may be discerned the converging patterns of the primitive formulas. At other moments, however, he says that criticism has nothing whatever to do with either the experience or the judging of literature…. The patterns of the 1957 Introduction have approximately repeated themselves in later pronouncements…. In his MLA pamphlet statement of 1963 and also in a lecture published in College English for October, 1964, Frye thinks critics ought to avoid the risk of working from their own likes and dislikes and keep a business eye open to their reputations and their effectiveness. Critics who attack Milton only damage their own images. In the latter essay, "good" and "bad" become "not something inherent in literary works themselves," but qualities of activity or passivity in our own "use" of literature, so that evaluative criticism itself is no longer to be directed toward literature but toward earlier bad criticism. Frye is a candidate for the votes of all shades of appreciators and scientists in criticism—except that of the unhappy analyst who finds himself under obligation to make comparisons. His key terminology and his most picturesque statements suggest some kind of neutral anatomizing, but we must remain unsure, as he no doubt is unsure, whether he wishes to discredit all critical valuing whatever, or only the wrong kinds of valuing.

What is it that enables Frye to get away with these violations of logic and order? Unquestionably, the speed and energy of his style. Let me insert here a general encomium on the liveliness, the moments of vivid wit and charm which Frye brings to the contemporary critical scene—the freedom and swash and slash with which he employs what in his lectures The Well-Tempered Critic he himself has so well described as the rhythm of association, the discontinuous, the aphoristic, the oracular style. In The Educated Imagination, Frye quotes a teacher of his, Pelham Edgar, who once told him "that if the rhythm of a sentence was right, its sense could look after itself." It is true that in order to write, we must have something to say. But having something to say, adds Frye, means "having a certain potential of verbal energy." Frye has learned the lesson of his teacher surpassingly well. Two other papers than the one I have written might take their departure from this point: one in praise of Frye's many brilliant theoretical, but local, insights, one in complaint against his frequently shuffling associational logic and syntax, which at the worst I would describe as a kind of verbal shell game. I have written neither of those papers, but a paper on Frye's system, which, despite one or two disclaimers on his part regarding its importance, is after all the most prominent feature of his writing. At the moment, I am saying that Frye has contributed much to the gaiety, the fun, and hence in a certain sense to the health of modern American criticism. He has enlivened our proceedings. For this we should be grateful. Frye's vigorously urbane recitals will start in our minds echoes of many voices in the idealist and mythopoeic tradition, from Blake to Frazer, Cornford, or Lord Raglan. But most often I find myself hearing again the masterly jokes which I read first as a boy in those dialogues of Oscar Wilde The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist. "Hours ago, Ernest, you asked me the use of Criticism. You might just as well have asked me the use of thought." "The elect spirits of each age, the critical and cultured spirits, will grow less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what Art has touched." "As a method, realism is a complete failure … wherever we have returned to Life and Nature, our work has become vulgar, common and uninteresting." "One touch of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of Art."

Because, of course, as Frye could have explained to Wilde, the work of art is made of other works of art, and other works of art are made of the mythic archetypes. (pp. 76-81)

In his MLA pamphlet statement of 1963, Frye, repeating in capsule form his earlier accounts, wishes to put all remarks about the mere structure, themes, imagery, and language of poems in a class which he calls "commentary" or "allegorical" commentary. A second sort of remarks, all those that look in the direction of genre, convention, classical allusion, and myth, he distinguishes radically from the former, and he calls these latter not commentary but "identification," and this is the supreme act of criticism. Similarly, in his Nature and Homer, of 1958, he argues that we cannot say good or bad of a literary work unless we can say what it is, what kind of literary work. As if one were to say, "This is a good comedy," and Frye were to answer, "Oh no, it isn't. It's a good satire in the third comic phase." In this line of thought, we are reminded forcefully of the relative proximity of Toronto to Chicago. In Frye's system, conventions and genres constantly play the role of premature ultimates. So far as I can see, Frye has never offered a shred of evidence for this kind of exclusiveness and essentialism—but rather much that tells specifically against it: for instance, in his lectures on Shakespeare, the primitive conventionalism which he insists is the structural basis of such unsuccessful plays as Pericles and Cymbeline. There would seem to be no reason whatever why a comic convention, a pastoral allusion, or a mythic stereotype should be considered a trace of the tough and abstruse essence and identification of literature, while a centrally structured image, a dramatized theme, or a persistent verbal technique should not be, but should be only something marginal, "easy" enough to notice, as Frye says, a mere topic of "commentary." The mythic archetypes, centering in the slain king, are Frye's King Charles's Head—"his allegorical way of expressing it"—turning up if not at the beginning, middle, and end of most of his essays, at least by the end in those instances where we begin to hope that they may have been forgotten. (pp. 82-3)

One way to describe what is original in Frye is to say that it consists in an extreme and violent conjunction of schematism and concreteness; that is, on the one hand, of abstraction, universalism, archetype, inclusive system, and on the other hand, of high coloration, detailed specificity, a wildly luxuriant growth of the flora and fauna, the constellations, of Frye's world of the imagination. Let us say a little more first about the schematism. This is something which Frye is often willing to labor. The study of literature seems to become, not knowing more and more precisely the character of each literary utterance (though we find at least token assertions of the individual and ineffable, as in the essay on Milton's Lycidas), but just the opposite, knowing each one under the most universal aspects possible. (pp. 83-4)

[No] system of sheer abstractionism or universalism has ever commended itself for long to the world of literateurs and critics, any more than to the world of poets. Plato's purity, such as it was, was conspicuously the frame of reference of an antipoetics. How Aristotle, countering Plato, used the concrete and rich colors of actual Greek epic and drama to give conviction and interest to his system of universals is a story for another day. A system does need its colors, its precious realizations, its exhibits. And so we come to the more specific side of Frye's mythopoeia, the detailed realization. We can readily enough see the reason for this contrasting side of the system. Still it is odd, and it is strained. The idea turns out to have not only a Greek or Latin name but a phallus, a mask, a goatskin jacket, a red wig, a sword, a staff, or what not. As one reviewer has remarked, Frye's Anatomy is "about as stripped and quintessential as the Albert Memorial." "To generalize is to be an Idiot," said Blake, and he left his dictum joined in the record with the rebellious and exuberant particularity of his own art, where Adam is wrapped in the coils of the big green serpent and God has wings of brass. In his Introduction of 1957 Frye notices this opinion of Blake's and in the name of the archetypes he rejects it. His own articulations of the archetype are more true to his master—both in degree of specificity and in degree of fantasy…. Frye wants all the idealism, autonomy, and absoluteness of a subjective humanization but at the same time a highly concrete typology, variegated specific categories, a brimful inhabited world of Aristotelian genres, styles, and characters. Occam! thou shouldst be living at this hour! Benedetto Croce! thou shouldst be living at this hour! I am thinking of such arrangements as Frye's twenty-four overlapping divisions of the seasonal cycle of myths, or his permutations of high, middle, and low styles, complicated by the ideas of hieratic and demotic, and of verse, prose, and associative (or speech) rhythms, at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels, or the endless recital of parallel conventions, or hopeful parallels, or qualifications or exceptions to parallels, among Shakespeare's comedies and romances. (pp. 84-5)

In his moments of most nearly pure archetypal abstraction, Frye's types are in a sense true patterns. But in that sense they are also truistic, simplistic, and uninteresting. (p. 86)

Frye needs not only his own cast of characters and his special plots but his own language or vocabulary of displaced diction—derangement of epitaphs. It is a strange language. Consider, for instance, in the Polemical Introduction of 1957, the term "tropical," with its marginal or archaic meaning of "figurative," apparently introduced here mainly because of its oddity. It gives the reader something to wonder about and thus may make him fail to realize the momentary bizarre focus by which study of figures can be equated with "the rhetoric of verbal ornament" and at the same time can be imputed to social and moral prejudice. Frye's vocabulary is not an accident but a necessary engine for the projection of some of his slanted visions. Despite frequent complaints about merely "rhetorical" kinds of literary criticism, Frye will also assert, in other contexts, that rhetoric necessarily intervenes between grammar and logic and hence that there can be no really logical argument in words. This is in effect his defense of his own style, which we have already seen in different phrasing. Consider, for a second example, the term "literal," at the bottom level of symbol-reading in the second essay of the Anatomy, whereas "literal" in the well-known medieval system, as Frye himself labors to point out, means something which corresponds to the second level in his essay, the realistic "descriptive." Frye divides the term "literal," in his own way, between a tautology—"a poem cannot be literally anything but a poem"—and the notion of some kind of sheer verbal (or "letter") music and sheer verbal (or "letter") imagery, apparently independent of any sign value the words may have. Nobody else would use "literal" as Frye uses it here. The very thin slice of symbolism which he is talking about ought to be called, if anything, the "alphabetical" or perhaps the "phonemic," but such a name would advertise the fact that no such kind of criticism ever really occurs. (pp. 90-1)

Frye says in the first essay of the Anatomy (on the status of protagonists) that his alignments of "high" and "low" are not evaluative but only "diagrammatic." This … must be questioned. Evaluations, and diagrammatic evaluations, do obtrude all through these essays. Consider, for instance, the verbal critics, the New Critics, groveling in the wintry cellar of verbal irony, and at the other end of things the heroes on the high sunlit plains of myth and romance lifting their gaze to the apocalyptic windows of the morning. But, to put value aside, diagrammatic descriptions ought at least to be capable of diagram. If they are not, there would seem to be a grave question as to what they are saying. Frye is really, in the long run, not very careful with his diagramming. In the very complicated third essay of the Anatomy, on the mythic cycle, spring is comedy, and summer is romance. And much turns on that analogy. But in the essay on "The Archetypes" of 1951, spring had been romance, and summer had been comedy. And in the collected Fables of 1963 Frye does not scruple to reproduce that essay without adjustment and without warning to his audience. Presumably we are not expected to notice such misalignments or to boggle at them.

The fact is that Frye moves from the descending sequence of his first essay—romance, high mimesis (most tragedy, central tragedy), low mimesis (most comedy), irony—to the embarrassment of a very different sequence of "broader categories" in the third essay: spring (comedy), summer (romance), autumn (tragedy), winter (irony-satire)…. By a proper attention to the terminally climactic structure of the spring and autumn seasons and the medially climactic structure of the winter and summer seasons, Frye might have worked out his diagram and might have succeeded in whirling his twenty-four literary subcategories at least consistently around the seasonal cycle. (pp. 91-3)

The eighteenth-century age of sensibility and much of the nineteenth century tended to validate literature by an appeal to the authentic heart and mind of the primitive folk and of the closely related childish and naïve. We recognize today, at least when we are wide awake and thinking about any identifiable time or place, that that heart and mind are no more authentic than any other. So far as that simple and sincere mind exists—outside of modern myths—it can be mistaken, uncouth, outlandish, stupid, and brutal, at least as much as any other. Yet such loyalties die hard. It is possible that we in our own way (we scholars, especially, saturated in our devotion to the past) have been turning to another deep part of the eighteenth-century preromantic mind—the inclination to authenticate certain visions by the method of forgery. Poetry itself is nowadays conceived, at least by some of our most progressive thinkers, as a kind of forgery, that is, a bold visionary mistake. "Literature, like mythology," writes our chief authority and the subject of this paper, "is largely an art of misleading analogies and mistaken identities." Extend this idea to criticism, as seventy-five years ago Oscar Wilde showed the way. The idea of poetry as myth will readily extrapolate to the idea of criticism as myth, and thus, by the shortest of leaps, to that of criticism as forgery. Facts, apparently, are not needed. The deduction of our whole argument is logical, not historical. Still the envisioned facts of a literary ur-history and a prehistory serve the very useful purpose of suggesting a kind of antique authority and terminus for veneration. A "primitive response" is "demanded." It is no doubt as futile to try to bring mythopoeic criticism to the measure of observation and reason as it was for W.W. Skeat to normalize the language of Chatterton's Rowley—by which he succeeded only in purging Chatterton of his main poetic value. Visionary criticism enjoys, I think, not quite the immunities of visionary poetry. Yet this kind of criticism may be in a sense, in its own moment and for its own creator, indefeasible. For the rest of us, what if the cast of critical characters should all turn out to be phantoms? (p. 95)