Anatomy of Criticism:

Four essays

By: Northrop Frye

Publisher: Princeton University

ISBN: 0691060045

J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century

By: Thomas Shippey

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company

ISBN: 0618257594

The following is a section from one of Northrop Frye’s four essays from his masterwork Anatomy of Criticism.

In the second paragraph of Poetics Aristotle speaks of differences in works of fiction which are caused by the different elevations of the characters in them. In some fictions, he says, the characters are better than we are, in others, worse, in still others on the same level. This passage has not received much attention from modern critics, as the importance of Aristotle assigns to goodness and badness seems to indicate a somewhat narrowly moralistic view of literature. Aristotle’s words for good and bad, however, are spoudaios and phaulos, which have a figurative sense of weighty and light. In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same. Thus:

1.       If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories.

2.       If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is a typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvelous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him, and enchanted weapons, talking animals, terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of miraculous power violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been established. Here we have moved from myth, properly so called, into legend, folk tale, mäarchen, and their literary affiliates and derivatives.

3.       If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero which Aristotle had in mind.

4.       If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience. This gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most comedy and of realistic fiction. “High” and “low” have no connotations of comparative value, but are purely diagrammatic, as they are when they refer to Biblical critics or Anglicans. On this level the difficulty in retaining the word “hero,” which has a more limited meaning among the preceding modes, occasionally strikes an author. Thackeray thus feels obliged to call Vanity Fair a novel without a hero.

5.       If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic mode. This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.

Looking over this table we can see that European fiction, during the last fifteen centuries, has steadily moved its center of gravity down the list. In the pre-medieval period literature is closely attached to Christian, late Classical, Celtic, or Teutonic myths. If Christianity had not been both an imported myth and a devourer of rival ones, this phase of Western literature would be easier to isolate. In the form in which we possess it, most of it has already moved into the category of romance. Romance divides into two main forms: a secular form dealing with chivalry and knight-errantry, and religious form devoted to legends of saints. Both lean heavily on miraculous violations of natural law for their interest as stories. Fictions of romance dominate literature until the cult of the prince and the courtier in the Renaissance brings the high mimetic mode into the foreground. The characteristics of this mode are most clearly seen in the genres of drama, particularly tragedy, and national epic. Then a new kind of middle-class culture introduces the low mimetic, which predominates in English literature from Defoe’s time to the end of the nineteenth century. In French literature it beings and ends about fifty years earlier. During the last hundred years, most serious fiction has tended increasingly to be ironic in mode.

Something of the same progression may be traced in Classical literature too, in a greatly foreshortened form. Where a religion is mythological and polytheistic, where there are promiscuous incarnations, deified heroes and kings of divine descent, where the same adjective “godlike” can be applied either to Zeus or to Achilles, it is hardly possible to separate the mythical, romantic, and high mimetic strands completely. Where the religion is theological, and insists on a sharp division between divine and human natures, romance becomes more clearly isolated, as it does in the legends of Christian chivalry and sanctity, in the Arabian Nights of Mohammedanism, in the stories of the judges and thaumaturgic prophets of Israel. Similarly, the inability of the Classical world to shake off the divine leader in its later period has much to do with the abortive development of low mimetic and ironic modes that got barely started with Roman satire. At the same time the establishing of high mimetic mode, the developing of a literary tradition with a consistent sense of an order of nature in it, is one of the great feats of Greek civilization. Oriental fiction does not, so far as I know, get very far away from mythical and romantic formulas.[1]

Speculative fiction can learn something about itself from Frye’s divisions. He implies a progression or evolution of literature moving from myth, to romance, to high mimetic, then low mimetic, and finally ironic modes. One can easily assign a growing awareness of self and the place of self in the universe that leads to each of these modes. The need for gods fades with more rational expectations. The need for unnaturally powerful heroes and divine kings dies with realizations of their humanity and mortality. Eventually, even fascination over great intellect and human excellence wanes leading to a dismissal of the common man himself. One can almost smell the growing, grasping grip of nihilism as Frye’s evolution continues towards the ironic and perhaps some more hateful mode that might encompass a great deal of postmodern literature today.

Yet at roughly the exact time the ironic mode dawns and flowers with the Modernists of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot, speculative fiction suddenly springs to life in the works of Jules Verne, HG Wells and J.R.R. Tolkien. Why? Why now? As the last shreds of idealism fade from “serious literature” why is that gap suddenly filled with a new kind of fiction? A kind of fiction that Frye would classify as mimetic, romance, or myth?

Humanity has come to dominate this earth. We shape the environment: dam rivers, raze and raise mountains, and dare the airless void of space. We fiddle shamelessly with the building blocks of life: genetically modify plants and livestock, attempt DNA remedies and cures, and ponder the possibilities of longevity treatments and genetically enhanced humans. Our physicists are on the thresholds of discovering the unifying laws of superstring theory, quantum mechanics, and time itself. At the absolute pinnacle of our power we find most serious literature in its most ironic mode according to Frye’s scheme. As progress shows us the height of man, literature paradoxically shows us man at his worst. Speculative fiction is the answer to that irony. Speculative fiction serves two purposes: to acknowledge our power and to idealize—or perhaps re-idealize—the human.

First, to acknowledge power. J.R.R. Tolkien most fully embodies this concept in his created mythology of middle-earth. As Thomas Shippey points out in Author of the Century, Tolkien’s creative work is the most stunningly audacious work of literature in perhaps the history of literature. Shippey shows us a Tolkien who, acknowledging the traditional mythologies Greek, Roman, Scandinavian, and Teutonic, is aggrieved over the lack of any such a tradition for Britain. So he writes one. This bears repeating: so he writes one! On his own, he invents an entire cosmological myth in the Frye sense and imbues it with all the art, variety, and intricacy of existent myth of oral and ancient traditions. Using fragments of texts and half-forgotten words he fills these voids and interstices with the glory of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. It is a work that flies absolutely in the face of contemporary literary criticism and the ironic mode in which it swims. More importantly, it is an acknowledgment of power. Instead of the divinely inspired myth we have received through tradition, Tolkien submits terrestrially inspired myth that serves a purely terrestrial aim of self-satisfaction. Tolkien has claimed ownership of literary tradition and history itself. That is power. That power has almost single-handedly created an entire genre known as Fantasy (and to a lesser extent much of science fiction) claiming several shelves in most bookstores. While few authors dare such creative power with the same self-awareness of purpose that Tolkien possessed, Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, David Eddings, Raymond Feist, George Martin, and all the rest are carving out histories and cosmologies sprung fully formed not from the head of Zeus but from the minds of the authors. If gods will do the bidding of humans, what worlds would we create and what conflicts and struggles would we find important? This is a question that speculative fiction dares to consider and answer. Humans are claiming divine creation for themselves

Secondly, to re-idealize the human. Research and technology have suddenly made seemingly impossible concepts passé. Eric Van Daniken and his ilk posit that ancient gods were merely advanced extraterrestrial’s that seemed godlike to the primitive earthlings (not that Van Daniken should enjoy any sort of scientific credibility  but merely exemplifies a very popular position that very advanced technology can seem like divine gift to the uninitiated). What Jules Verne gives us in Nemo and what HG Wells threatens us with in his invading Martians is the human advancing back up the spectrum growing from ironic to myth on the basis of technology. It is the power of action to suspend the normal laws of the universe through the use of manmade technology. Poseidon requires divinity to move through the waters and wrestle with the monsters of the deep. Nemo requires only his inventive mind and his submarine the Nautilus. Yahweh rained destruction on cities that offended his sensibilities through divine might while the Martians lay waste to cities based upon their superior military technology. Even the dystopias of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, by showing what awfulness can come to be through the choices technology brings us, also implies by its very subject matter the heights that can be attained if the opposite choices are made. The very best science fiction (and to a lesser extent fantasy) inspires the audience with its high mimetic and romantic structure that humanity can reach what is essentially paradise based not upon divinity but rather due to natural evolution. Much of science fiction—as is obviously the case in Star Trek, Star Wars, and Asimov—is unflappably optimistic. Even darker works of Phillip K. Dick, William Gibson, and similarly stark and apocalyptic works including even the mainstream Road Warrior movies of Mel Gibson hold within them the ideals of a greatness declined, an Eden barely missed, an Icarus flying too close to the sun, or—as Robert Browning would say—a reach that exceeded its grasp. Humans are attempting to raise themselves to the divine.

Speculative fiction is a sudden realization and rejection of the ironic mode. It is a literary audience aware of its potential and reversing itself back up the literary modes that Frye has identified. Its growing popularity is that rejection of the bitter and hopeless works steeped in the ironic modes so popular in the post-modernistic traditions. Those critics that continue to extol the virtues of the ironic will continue to lose touch with a reading public that is beginning to feel its power and a people that seek to improve themselves and the world around them, and a society that dreams of a better place.