Reflections upon Northrop Frye quotation
“Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them. Most of the answers, such as Newman’s ‘liberal knowledge is its own end,’ merely appeal to the experience of those who have had the right experience. Similarly, most ‘defenses of poetry’ are intelligible only those well within the defenses. The basis of critical apologetics, therefore, has to be the actual experience of art, and for those concerned with literature, the first question to answer is not ‘What use is the study of literature?’ but, “What follows from the fact that it is possible?’”
That gulf between the 10% of the people who buy 90% of the books and the rest of the world can feel deep. I get a little bored with nonreaders, I admit. Their disinterest in literature is only a little more understandable to me than I am to them because the minority always has to understand the majority better than the reverse because the minority is living in the world of the majority.
So in the introduction of his book, Frye is posing a strategy of answering the question. When he asks what it means that we can study literature, he doesn’t just mean read it closely and deduce the meaning of a particular book. From the rest of the intro, it is understood that he means “study” in a systematic, hopefully scientific, way.
What does it mean that we can use science to understand the world? Does the orderliness of the universe, which allows scientific understanding, have additional philosophical import? So if literary criticism is possible, what does that say about literature? Does fiction have natural laws?
But Frye’s question assumes that literary criticism is possible (he is a professor, after all). So assuming that it is possible, then does this mean that literary works have as much in common with each other as chemicals using the elements of the periodic table? If we could break down the periodic table of fiction, what would it reveal about the elements of the mind? Wouldn’t all ideas come from the same basic mental elements, but mixed into different chemical compounds like art, science, philosophy, and religion?
That gulf between the 10% of the people who buy 90% of the books and the rest of the world can feel deep. I get a little bored with nonreaders, I admit. Their disinterest in literature is only a little more understandable to me than I am to them because the minority always has to understand the majority better than the reverse because the minority is living in the world of the majority.
So in the introduction of his book, Frye is posing a strategy of answering the question. When he asks what it means that we can study literature, he doesn’t just mean read it closely and deduce the meaning of a particular book. From the rest of the intro, it is understood that he means “study” in a systematic, hopefully scientific, way.
What does it mean that we can use science to understand the world? Does the orderliness of the universe, which allows scientific understanding, have additional philosophical import? So if literary criticism is possible, what does that say about literature? Does fiction have natural laws?
But Frye’s question assumes that literary criticism is possible (he is a professor, after all). So assuming that it is possible, then does this mean that literary works have as much in common with each other as chemicals using the elements of the periodic table? If we could break down the periodic table of fiction, what would it reveal about the elements of the mind? Wouldn’t all ideas come from the same basic mental elements, but mixed into different chemical compounds like art, science, philosophy, and religion?