Literature Is a Conscious Myth: On Frye's View of Literary Fiction

Northrop Frye, who made a highly synthetic overview of literature from a macroscopic horizon, won world renown with the myth-archetype criticism he constructed; at the same time, he has also been reproached by postmodern scholars for his “transcendent, self-sufficient mythic-modernist framework.” (1) But in fact, because this theory possesses an enormous inclusiveness, it has become precisely a growth-point for many postmodern theories. Likewise, his discussion of literary fiction, by virtue of that same inclusiveness, constitutes a powerful inner tension and explanatory force.

I

In speaking of literature's “sense of reality” (reality), Frye points out that the sense of reality (reality) differs from realism (realism); it is more capacious—fantasies, romances, and the like can all possess a sense of reality. The structural principles of literature are myth and metaphor, both of which violate common sense and logical rules, yet at the same time make people “believe.” Literature's sense of reality in fact contains a paradox: on one hand it clearly expresses, in literature, “this thing really happened”; on the other hand it implicitly reminds people that “this thing never happened at all.” You cannot but believe both sentences at once. “In literature, it is only when things become true-yet-false illusions that we can see them, because only thus can subjective experience be used to replace objective experience; though it is but a kind of restrained illusion, at such times people's sensation of things is more intense than what can be experienced in daily life.” (2) This is to say, literature is built upon the foundation of illusion; it seems truly and really to exist, vividly displayed before our eyes, and yet it is a thing that does not actually exist, that has never happened in the real world. Just as with Hamlet and Falstaff, “they neither exist nor do not exist; seemingly empty illusions, yet they really and definitely have name and place.” (3) Literature is illusion, is fiction, and yet is also a unique fiction, a fiction possessed of a real sense of reality and held in check. Because literature has a real sense of reality, it can enter deep into people's hearts, move them, and arouse resonance; and because the stories literature tells are not really-occurring real life but lie in the world of illusion and fiction, people can possibly cast off the manifold pressures, disturbances, and relations of interest of the real world, throw themselves wholly into this world, deeply experience the experience the literary world provides, and finally gain intense feelings never had in daily life.

Then how is this fictional literary world, possessed of a real sense of reality, constituted? On this, Frye has a unique understanding. In Frye's view, the literary work is polysemous; it is itself a symbol-system, and different modern critical schools tend to select from it some one stratum or certain unique symbols to interpret the work. But the literary work, as a symbol-system, is an integral existence and exerts its action as an integral whole; therefore literary criticism had best not consider separately the meaning of some one stratum of the work, but should place literature in a series of related fields—that is, examine it as a whole within “phases” (phase).

Frye holds that literature, as the art of language, first of all contains a literal and a descriptive phase. From this phase, the word simultaneously has two mutually opposed tendencies, “centripetal” and “centrifugal”: centrifugally it expresses or describes an external objective object; centripetally it becomes the constitutive factor of a larger meaning, becoming the structural unit of the verbal structure, and so building up a mutually-related matrix structure, no longer the symbol of an independent external object. Literature is a special form of language. In literature, the expression of objective facts or objects is subordinate to the basic aim of the work's own creating of a verbal structure; the symbol's symbolic value is subordinate to its being a structural unit of a mutually-related matrix; from this is constituted a kind of “self-sufficient verbal structure.” Although in the reading process the reader's attention may move simultaneously in two directions and produce two modes of understanding, the verbal structure of literature determines that the ultimate direction of its meaning is centripetal, and the centrifugal meaning can only be secondary. When literature's diction “turns inward,” taking its own structure as the core of attention, this verbal structure becomes estranged from the real world and builds up another imagined fictional world. In this world there is no longer any so-called true or false; it becomes not only “self-sufficient,” but the value of its sound, meaning, and motif-structure is also realized, and a world is thereby manifested. So Frye says: “The inward-turning meaning, and the self-enclosing verbal arrangement, is the domain of response bound up with pleasure, beauty, and interest. Contemplation of a transcendent arrangement, whether or not it is an arrangement of words, is evidently the chief source of aesthetic feeling and of the pleasure that follows from it.” (4) The descriptive phase of diction, because it expresses outward an objective object, is related to the object and its context, and its meaning is therefore relatively stable and clear; the verbal structure, because of its inward turn, becomes detached from the external world, dissolves its relation to the concrete real context, and its meaning thus becomes “blended” and polysemous. “Blending,” as a characteristic of literature—and especially of poetic language—endows diction with manifold functions and manifold powers, making diction possess a richer and deeper aesthetic import.

Literature's literal and descriptive phases exist simultaneously with the two tendencies, inward-turning and outward-turning; with suppositional factors and assertive factors they constitute an inner sense of tension. When the descriptive aspect of the symbol-system is strengthened, literature inclines in its narration toward realism, and in its meaning toward didacticism. Naturalist literature goes further still, the work becoming to some degree a representation of real life. And once the outward-turning tendency oversteps the boundary, literature will, with the disappearance of the fictional factor, transform into an aesthetically-deprived document. As against realism and naturalism, romanticist literature stresses inwardness, stresses the creation of imagination. But symbolism goes to the other extreme; it stresses the meaning of the verbal-structure aspect, taking literature as an inward-turning language-arrangement, and successfully strips the seedling of literature's supposition out from the descriptive. Through his exposition of literature's literal and descriptive phases, Frye lets us see that the various literary schools are constituted in the tension of inward and outward, of suppositional and assertive factors, and continually shift position within it.

In the formal phase that Frye proposes, “form” refers to the way of connecting the literal meaning and the descriptive meaning and of fusing the two opposed sides. “The common meaning of ‘form’ (form) seems likely to link these clearly opposed aspects. On one side, form contains what we call the unifying thing of literal meaning or structure; on the other side, it also refers to such supplementary terms as imagery and event, used to express the thing shared with external nature.” (5) The chief way of this fusion of opposites is the image, the image-series, and the image-structure; it exists between approaching nature and stressing fiction, between example and admonition.

If one does not regard a single work in isolation, but links the work to literature as a whole and examines it from the macroscopic level, then “genre” and “convention” become important problems within it that cannot be overlooked. In Frye's view, literature is not formed by the pooling-together of one independent work after another; all literary works are conventionalized, and convention is the thing literature shares. Literature can possess its own life, can imitate nature and social reality, can reproduce experience, express thought, and so on; but literature itself is not constituted by these. Poetry can be produced only from other poetry; fiction only from other fiction. Literature forms itself; it forms from within and not from without, and its common wealth is convention. Convention makes poetry, fiction, drama, and other literary works into communicable, transmissible things; convention pools the works into literature. But in the literary work, convention does not exist as an abstract thing; it is a typical or recurrent image, this communicable unit, which Frye calls the “archetype.” It is precisely because literary archetypes exist that literary creation and reception can proceed normally. In this sense, the poet is the father of his own poems; “he is, at most, a midwife, or more precisely, the womb of the natural mother: it may be said, she takes him as her own private property.” Poetry then “anxiously casts off the poet, crying out to sever the umbilical cord and feeding-tube of the poet's own self.” (6)

From the archetypal aspect, literary narration is a repeated act of symbolic exchange, whose essence is “ritual”; the meaningful content of literature is the result of a wish not yet realized in reality and conflicting with reality—and this is exactly the working mechanism of the dream. The unity of ritual and dream in the form of symbolic exchange is myth. Therefore myth explains ritual and dream: myth not only provides meaning for ritual, but also provides narrative for dream; it is, further, the embodiment of the identity of ritual and dream. This is what Frye calls the mythic phase. Myth, as the crystallization of human experience, originates from the rhythms of nature and the cycle of life; these recurrent movements shape the human mind, construct the human pattern of experience, and become the structural principle by which the human perceives the world and realizes exchange. Literature is precisely the telling of stories through the structural principle of myth, so Frye says: “Literature is a conscious myth, because, as society continually develops, its mythic stories have gradually changed into the structural principle of story-telling, and its mythic notions, sun-gods, and so on, have changed into the metaphors habitual in thinking. In a fully mature literary tradition, writers all live within a traditional system of stories and images.” (7) Frye goes further to hold that, in a given cultural environment, myth, imperceptibly and unconsciously, permeates literature and fuses into one with it. Myth, with the heaven-and-earth its peculiar language sketches out, is also the heaven-and-earth of literary imagination.

Because the archetype is the basic unit of human exchange, and mythic structure is the structural principle of exchange, it thereby becomes literature's most central determining factor. Even if a writer possesses originality, he cannot escape these factors. So-called originality is in fact only a “comparatively deep imitation” of these factors; every kind of attempt at the novel and the new can only produce “hidden or complex archetypes.” Even at the descriptive stratum of literature, what on the surface is an outward, imitative description of reality is in fact “reality” constructed according to mythic structure; reality is no longer the original natural state—it has been re-composed and re-grouped by the structural principle of myth. Therefore literary description is not a faithful reflection of external reality, but follows the verbal structure of myth—“holding that the form of arranged order is an illusion of an external psychic projection that comes from the exterior of the diction.” (8) This is to say, the story a literary work tells is in essence not gained from observing human life and behavior; it “is all a means of story-telling.” Literary form cannot come from life, but can only originate from literary tradition, and therefore in the last analysis is reduced to myth. (9) The mythic phase, from a deep stratum, influences and determines all the other phases of literature. It is precisely this determinative factor that separates the literary world from the real world, making it “a hypothetical creative entity,” a self-contained fictional world, a living world that does not exist in reality and yet exists everywhere in human experience and is connected to the order of experience. For reality, it is fictional; and for human experience, it possesses a sense of reality, and is the more able to enter deep into people's hearts, to move them, to shake them.

II

Literature is built upon every kind of archetype. On one hand, the story literature tells cannot do without mythic structure; the writer's various creations can only be the ceaseless “reconstruction” or “displacement” of myth, and myth provides the writer a very ancient ready-made framework. But precisely because mythic structure is the structural principle of all literary works, it also turns into the unconscious, becoming a natural thing, no longer possessing the power to stir the human heart. And therefore, on the other hand, a great work needs to seek anew the path of returning to the original ground, drawing strength and passion from human original experience. “Great classic works seem to have a general tendency, to want to return to the original form… A profound and far-reaching literary masterpiece draws us, as it were, into a certain realm, and at such a time we discover that a great quantity of meaningful archetypes have merged into perfect oneness.” (10) This is to say, the writer ought not, like the “Apollonian” culture that Nietzsche pointed to, merely passively submit to mythic ritual; rather he ought, with the “prophetic mind” that “Dionysian” culture possesses, actively and tensely go to feel the manifestation of the god of myth.

To enter such a creative state, the writer can only borrow the help of what Plato called the “dream of the sober mind” and what Freud called the “daydream.” Frye holds that the cycle of human waking and sleeping, and the cycle of light and dark in the natural world, are closely corresponding, and that this correspondence is inverse: by day the human is in fact controlled by darkness, falling into frustration and weakness; by night, in the human inner world, there may on the contrary be a self-awakening of the conquering hero. Literary creation, through the “daydream,” resolves this kind of oppositional relation, regarding the hero of the daytime sun and of the dark night as one, constructing a world in which inner desire and the external environment mutually fuse.

The dream lets the writer escape the control of the daytime, releasing his originally prepared, suppressed self-desire and latent creative power. The process by which this imagination unfolds is both the re-creation of myth and the descent of metaphor; in an instant, the subjective and the objective fit together in the dream-world. Myth and metaphor always come hand in hand; the sun-myth and the sun-god (the metaphor of the hero and self-desire) are intimately related; they together nourish the wellspring of human thought, and jointly express the human identity of the subjective world and the objective world. “The world that metaphor evokes in our hearts is not the many things strung together by force or far-fetched analogy, but a surging, vital undercurrent, which between the subjective and the objective ceaselessly trickles and flows. This kind of metaphor may trigger or transform into more sustained, ceaseless, or more rational thinking; but when it meets such cases, metaphor is not replaced by rational thinking, but lurks behind it, becoming the inexhaustible source of inspiration.” (11) Dream and imagination open the mental black-box screened by consciousness, where there lurk the rich resources of human experience and the boundless creative power. On the contrary, in Frye's view, lively reason seems to hire “thought-police” as its own assistant, pursuing and eliminating every illicit impulse; or, as if appointing the “brainwashing teacher,” to suppress this kind of impulse. Therefore, the more thoroughly the writer breaks down the screen of consciousness, the more fully his creative power gets exercised. In speaking of the poet Yeats's creation, Frye points out that Yeats always strove to let himself sink deep beneath consciousness, to enter the undercurrent of the “world-spirit,” and let it transform into the medium of creative power. This creative power is rooted in the tradition handed down generation to generation; it does not belong to the individual, but to one's own race, and from the undercurrent of racial memory it brings us the primal gods and myths. This is to say, a true literary masterpiece is neither a reflection of real life nor a void creation by an individual, but belongs to the race; it returns into the race's original experience, and the race's experience gains expression through the individual.

From this it can be seen that Frye's literary fiction possesses a multiple fictionality. In the literal and descriptive phases, although the centripetal and centrifugal tendencies exist simultaneously, the centrifugal is subordinate to the centripetal, so that the literary work is estranged from the real world and constitutes another independent world not directly related to reality. In the mythic phase, literature is not only constrained by mythic structure, but only by being deeply rooted in tradition, returning to original experience, and re-recollecting the primal gods and myths, does it possess true literary value. These myths tell not of things really happening in the real world; they belong to another fictional world, and this return to the mythic world must again be realized by means of imagination and dream. The two strata above mutually influence each other: the structural characteristic of the literal phase, with its centripetal tendency, leads the reader toward an independent world, a world built of diction; the mythic phase, by separating the mythic world from the real world, precisely strips language out of the real context, suspending it in the imagined fictional world, becoming “a verbal structure that exists for its own sake,” (12) becoming a blended, polysemous metaphor. Therefore the mythic phase also determines that literature's literal and descriptive phases can only take the centripetal as the dominant tendency. What literature speaks is the language of myth, not the language of fact; it is a suppositional verbal structure that has cancelled the value of true-and-false.

But the myth Frye speaks of is by no means an abstract thing lacking historical content; in The Critical Path, Frye further endows myth with historicity. He holds that mythic stories not only form a myth-group, but are also rooted in a specific culture. On one hand, when myth is concretized at the center of a culture, the surroundings of that culture will be cloaked with a circle of the marvelous, and a literature will historically form within a limited range constituted by language, reference, allusion, belief, tradition, and so on. On the other hand, “as a culture develops, its myth tends to embrace every discipline and expand into a general myth, which contains a society's views of its own past, present, and future, its relations with neighbors and others, its tradition, its social and religious responsibilities, and its final destination.” (13) Therefore myth is not merely a kind of original experience; though it is rooted in human original experience, it is also closely related to a specific social culture, and evolves with the development of culture. These continually reconstructed myths both inherit original experience and adapt to a specific social history, and exert an important action on social history. Among them, the myth that gets fully developed or encyclopedically compiled contains everything a society needs to know, which Frye calls “the myth of concern.” The existence of the myth of concern is for the cohering of society; the language of the myth of concern tends to become the language of belief; the authority of concern is itself a kind of socially-established power-mechanism authority; it contains and shapes people's views of past, present, future, and various relations; therefore the myth of concern is in fact ideology, or something like ideology.

As against the myth of concern, there exists another—the myth of freedom. The myth of freedom is a part of the myth of concern, yet it stresses the non-mythic factors in culture; it does not directly appeal to concern but appeals to a more self-verifying standard, such as the logic of argumentation or impersonal evidence and verification. From this it evolves a kind of social-psychological attitude, including objectivity, judgment and inference, tolerance, and respect for the individual. The verbal expression of these attitudes Frye calls “the myth of freedom.” The myth of freedom is produced from concern; it cannot leave concern and exist depending on concern, and yet it forms a kind of tension, endowing the myth of concern with openness and diversity. Literature's fictional world exists precisely in this tension. Literature is both the “great code” of concern, and yet on the whole not a super-myth of concern; the content it contains is more than the sum-total of all existing myths of concern; it simultaneously speaks two languages, the free language and the language of concern, because the central life of literature is the human and human-ness. If we see the ideological function that Frye's myth of concern possesses, then literature, on one hand, cannot escape ideological control, and at the same time is not equivalent to ideology; it holds fast to the human, to human-ness, and to life itself. So Frye says: “The imagined external-world part is a holiday and a world of rest-and-peace, in which we can rest, break free from belief and promise, and embrace a greater marvel that transcends everything we can systematically expound and express.” (14)

Frye's myth of concern already possesses the characteristics and functions of ideology; in Words with Power, Frye then explicitly raises the question of ideology, and uses the two concepts of “ideology” and “rhetoric” interchangeably. He holds that rhetoric is the speaker's intentional adoption of discourse-techniques to make the reader prostrate himself, enticing the reader to accept his viewpoint unconsciously. And ideology is precisely, through discursive rhetoric, secretly exerting influence on the reader, or forcing the reader—unknowingly and unconsciously—to receive intellectual mastery; “its aim is to persuade, and to make the reader gladly and willingly produce that influence in his heart. The fundamental aim of rhetoric is to make author, language, and reader mutually identify.” (15) The “words with power” that Frye speaks of originate precisely from speech-act theory. Speech is act; it possesses the force beyond words, can produce the after-effect of speech; and rhetoric is precisely an important means of discourse's actually exerting influence. In Frye's view, ideology is the concrete application of myth in a specific social culture; the myth it adapts and reconstructs is the myth that we, situated within ideology, must believe in or profess to believe. This adapted and reconstructed myth conscripts discursive rhetoric, forcing rhetoric—wittingly or unwittingly—to submit to and serve its ideological aim, silently and soundlessly exerting ideological influence.

At the same time, Frye also points out the complexity of the relation between literature and ideology. Frye took the creation of Balzac and Solzhenitsyn as examples; he said that Balzac and Solzhenitsyn implied in their works their ideological viewpoints, and these viewpoints enriched their works, while their imagination withdrew from ideology, producing an inner distance—and it is precisely in this process of withdrawal and the generating of distance that the novel was formed. Literature has the right to oppose ideology, but not in the manner of scientific knowledge. Balzac and Solzhenitsyn, through the inner distance from ideology, let us “sense” or “feel” the ideological reality of that world. This is to say, literature, while containing ideology, simultaneously opens up a distance from ideology; while implying an ideological viewpoint, it simultaneously possesses a perspective distinct from ideology. Therefore Frye says: “Literature is the embodiment of language, not the embodiment of belief and thought: it can speak of anything, therefore in a certain sense, it has said nothing at all. It provides technical resources for the myth of concern, but it does not itself expound.” (16)

Frye's myth-archetype criticism attempts to make a macroscopic, deep overview of literature as a whole; his interpretation becomes the “meta-narrative” with the most modernist character. And at the same time, Frye's myth-archetype criticism, because it interprets literature from multiple perspectives and on multiple strata, and because it strives to enclose within the integral interpretation of literature things originally belonging to different theoretical systems, is bound to be filled with inner contradiction, possessing a pluralistic re-interpretive space; its theoretical tension precisely provides the possibility of leading toward postmodernism, and becomes the growth-point for many postmodern theories. Frye closely links literature, culture, and myth together, stressing that myth continually shifts position and reconstructs as history develops, endowing myth with ideological character; this makes his theory possess important reference-value for contemporary cultural studies. And Frye's revelation of the mythic rootedness of human thought and discourse also makes his theory an important theoretical foundation for new historicism—and especially for Hayden White's dissolving of the boundary between literature and history, and even of the boundaries between the other disciplines.