The Educated Imagination

The following review by Frye, overlooked for the Collected Works, appeared under the “Turning New Leaves” column of the Canadian Forum 38 (December 1958): 206–7.  Frye reviews Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, trans. Max Hayward and Mania Harari (London: Collins and Harvill Press).

Reading this book is quite an experience; reviewing it, for one who knows no Russian, is an exercise in frustration.  It is abundantly clear that it is more of an epic poem than a novel.  The two main attributes of the conven­tional novel, vitality of character drawing and logicality of plot, are hardly present at all.  The story is a series of detached episodes connected by the most preposterous coincidences.  Characters wander in and out, or die and come back to life under other names. Only the incidental char­acters are described with much vividness, while the main figures loom up as cloudily as the heroes of Ossian.  But all the time we are aware that some different principle of unity is holding the book together, a principle based, as in most poetry, on the imagery, and on the symbolic values attached to that imagery.  It is not the picture of the revolution and civil war that organizes the narrative; it is the meaning that the author gives to such figures as the caryatids on a building, to iced rowanberries and lilacs, to the weeping face of the heroine Lara, to a waterfall that is associated with the dragon of a knight-errant romance, to the Siberian forest and its wolves, to the incessant references to the festivals of the Church, especially Christmas and Easter.  The author himself says that his hero was a poet interested in the tech­niques of symbolisme, because it is based on the principle “that communion between mortals is immortal, and that the whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.”  A series of poems at the end, supposedly by Zhivago, provide the symbolic keys to the story.  But nobody can unravel this kind of writing except in the original language.  The translators do their best, but candidly admit that their translation has been done in a hurry and that it makes no attempt to give much more than the general sense.  What follows is consequently very tentative, and is designed only to encourage others to read the book for themselves.

The story itself is simple enough.  Yury Zhivago, whose father’s suicide starts the book off, is brought up in Czarist Russia and studies medicine.  He is also a poet, but does not regard poetry as a profession.  Drafted as a medical officer in the First World War, he sees the revolution bring unparalleled social chaos to Moscow, where he lives, and sets out with his wife and family to a village in the Urals.  There he manages, through the charity of an old friend, to live on the land for a while, though his emotional life is complicated by the reappearance of a girl he had known from childhood, Lara, now married to a non-party revolu­tionary whose new name is Strelnikov.  In the civil war Zhivago is kidnapped by the Reds because of his medical knowledge, and spends some years with the partisans in incredible hardship and misery, while his family make their way back to Moscow, whence they are exiled from the country.  Released at last, Zhivago goes back to the Ural village and has a brief and beleaguered affair with Lara, until it becomes obvious that Lara and her husband are next on the shooting list.  A middle-age roué named Komarovsky, who had debauched Lara in her youth and who is one of those greased eels that can wriggle through any society, communist or bourgeois, takes Lara off to the “Far Eastern Republic” in East Siberia, while Strelnikov shoots himself and Zhivago goes back to Moscow, a broken man.  Zhivago dies of a heart attack in a Moscow street car, and Lara, back from the Far East, disappears into “one of the in­numerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.”  An epilogue, dated during the Second World War, says that “a presage of freedom was in the air throughout these post-war years, and it was their only historical meaning.”  Thus the book ends in a mood of serenity and hope.  We, of course, know that it has a second epilogue.

Doctor Zhivago is not by any means an anti-Red polemic, and it is only the terrified Soviet bureaucrats who have made it one.  In this country, where it is assumed that it is part of the job of a serious novelist to make serious criticisms of his society; it would hardly have raised a ripple or real controversy.  Zhivago was, like Pasternak himself, a grown man when the revolution began, and hence feels detached from the struggle to the extent of not accepting the official version of it as a crude melodrama of heroes and villains.  “It’s only in bad novels,” the author remarks, “that people are divided into two camps and have nothing to do with each other.  In real life everything gets mixed up.”  But he makes it clear that however brutal and savage the Reds were, the Whites were far worse, as, like all Fascists, they added sexual sadism to ordinary brutality.  Pasternak merely says what the communists themselves would say, in other and more carefully controlled contexts, that the real revolution, the bringing of freedom and equality to man, has not yet begun.  Also, like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky before him, though in a way quite different from either, he is comparing the Russian society of his time with the vision of life set out in the Christian Gospel.

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[Portrait of George Herbert by Robert White,  1674]

The following review by Frye of books by Rosamond Tuve and Douglas Bush was overlooked in the several bibliographies of Frye’s writing I have compiled over the years.  It is therefore not included in volume 28 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance.   I stumbled across a reference to the review when I was doing a database search for something else.  The review appeared sixty years ago in Renaissance News 6, nos. 3–4 (Autumn–Winter 1953): 46-8.

Rosemond Tuve. A Reading of George Herbert, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, 216 p., 17 pl. $5.

 Douglas Bush. Classical Influences in Renaissance Literature.  (Martin Classical Lectures, Vol. XIII) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (for Oberlin College), 1952. 60 p. $1.50.

 Miss Tuve’s reading of George Herbert is concerned largely with the scriptural typology in his poetry.  She shows that Herbert is unintelligible without some understanding of the tradition of allegorizing Scripture which had become incorporated in the liturgy and which can be found almost anywhere one looks in Herbert’s period: in sermons, in hymns, in the books of hours, in stained-glass windows, in patristic writings, breviaries, glosses and commentaries.  She has laid particular stress on pictorial analogues, and the book is handsomely illustrated in conse­quence.  She is not out for source-hunting: her primary aim is to explain the grammar of the language that Herbert spoke.

The assumption that the Bible is one book, rigidly unified in its sym­bolism, is primary in the typological tradition, and so is the Augustinian principle that the Old Testament is revealed in the New and the New concealed in the Old.  It follows that every significant event in the Old Testament typifies the Incarnation, notably the Exodus, the deliverance of God’s people from bondage, which is the keystone of Old Testament symbolism.  Miss Tuve shows how such an approach to the Bible clears up Herbert’s use of such images as the Jordan, Joseph’s coat, Naaman, Melchizedek, and the like, and how the use of a Biblical image echoes all the Biblical uses of that image.  Thus the vine carried out of the Promised Land typifies Christ the true vine; the cross links with the forbidden tree of Eden and the brazen serpent of the wilderness, the winepress of Isaiah with the blood of Christ, and so on.

The first half of the book deals with the poem ‘The Sacrifice,’ and takes as its starting point the relation of the poem to the liturgy of the Improperia, the ‘Reproaches’ of Good Friday.  It is also concerned with Empson’s analysis of the poem in Seven Types of Ambiguity, and illustrates the deficiencies of a criticism which deals only with the linguistic surface of a poem, without knowing its real language, the language that is rooted in convention and cultural tradition.  A good deal of Empson’s criticism, especially his remarks about ‘jokes’ and the like, springs from the clichés about the metaphysical style that we have inherited from Johnson’s Life of Cowley.  The notion that Herbert is a metaphysical poet of this type was not Johnson’s, and is not Miss Tuve’s: she shows that in many respects Herbert belongs solidly to the allegorical school.

The book is of great value for the study of Herbert, and of even greater value if taken as an introduction to the study of Scriptural typology.  One would like to see her do a companion study on Vaughan, whose imagery, for all the nonsense talked about his hermetism, is also Biblical, though less liturgical than Herbert’s.  In a way it is rather a reflection on the comprehension of the humanities by the humanists that such a study should have to be written at all.  ‘What kind of readers do we make,’ Miss Tuve asks, ‘whom circumstances have intervened to make ignorant of what every literate man once knew?’  The elementary principles of typology are data that no humanist has any excuse for not knowing.  If other scholars can be prodded into learning them in order to understand Miss Tuve’s demonstration of the inadequacy of Empson’s critique of Herbert, perhaps we have stumbled on a real function of the new criticism.

Mr. Bush’s two lectures form an excellent introduction to the spirit of Renaissance culture.  Generalization and illustration alike are made with a sense of perspective that can only come from great scholarly authority.  He knows better, of course, than to distort his subject by taking it too literally.  There certainly were Classical influences on Renaissance literature, but it is not possible to distinguish the new influences from the older ones transmitted from the Middle Ages.  No one in English criticism has done more to show this than Mr. Bush himself.  The genuinely new features—a growing secularization of learning, more knowledge of Greek, better and printed texts, a sharper historical sense, and a number of distinctive developments such as the Senecan Stoicism of Chapman—are lightly but clearly touched.  Again, it is not possible to contrast Classical with Christian influences, thereby treating Erasmus and Montaigne as though they accepted the kind of antithesis between Christian superstition and non-Christian enlightenment that one may find later in Gibbon or Shelley.  The medieval conception of pagan wisdom as a natural theology contained by the Christian revelation is substantially that of nearly all Renaissance humanists.  Hence if one says, for instance, that one Classical influence on Renaissance literature was a sense of form, a good deal of this sense turns out to be simply the medieval sense of cosmological order persisting unchanged.  These and other considerations indicate that Mr. Bush’s lucid summary of his subject is not as easy as it looks.

The editors of the American Scholar, for its thirtieth–anniversary issue, asked a number of distinguished scholars, writers, and critics to select what were for them the outstanding books of the past thirty years (1931–1961)––books notable for originality or enduring significance or for revelation in changes in thoughts and attitudes.  Below is Frye’s reply from American Scholar 30, no. 4 (Autumn 1961): 606.  This little tidbit was just uncovered: it was not included in Frye’s Collected Works.

Thirty years would include the publication of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1939.  This is the only twentieth‑century book that I find myself living with, in the way that I live with Tristram Shandy, Burton’s Anatomy, Dickens, and the greater poets.  It is an inexhaustible word‑hoard of humor, wit, erudition, and symbolism; it never, for me, degenerates into a mere puzzle, but always has on every page something to astonish and delight.

It is, of course, no secret that Frye was a great fan of Finnegans Wake.  He kept his copiously annotated copy of the book on the shelves directly behind the desk chair in his office in Northrop Frye Hall.  The twenty‑nine volumes of the Collected Works have now been expanded by another 72 words.

Pontifus, one of the bloggers at a website called Super Fanicom, has an entry devoted to a reading of the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism.  Super Fanicom is described as

a nerd media and “alternative” pop culture blog.  That usually (but not always) means anime and video games.  We tend to be less sociological and more textual—we focus on discrete shows/games rather than the producers and consumers of those things.

The blog by Pontifus, who hails from Virginia, can be found at http://superfani.com/tag/northrop-frye/  It’s entitled “Of Diebuster, structure, and the parents of gods.”  Pontifus explores the structure of Diebuster, a six‑episode video animation, by turning to Frye’s theory of modes.  He writes:

 Now, I do enjoy examining structure, probably more than I enjoy examining socio-culturo-historico-things in the usual way.  But structural nuances, I must admit after a thousand-odd words about them, are not much of a starting point, which is to say that my thoughts on a story don’t begin with the specifics of its twists and turns.  Customarily, I’ll try to attach broad identifiers to a thing, but Diebuster even makes that difficult — about which I am thrilled, as any excuse to combine Northrop Frye and mad speculation is a good one.

Another blogger at Superfanicom, Cuchlann, had previously written a five–part series on his reading of the “Theory of Modes.”  The first of these, “Adventures in Criticism pt. 1,” can be found at

http://superfani.com/2009/01/02/adventures-in-criticism-pt-1/

The subsequent “Adventures in Criticism,” all having to do with the theory of modes, can be accessed by following the “Next Post” thread at the end of the entry. The four subsequent posts, Adventures in Criticism, pts. 2–5 can be found at the first URL given above, though the posts are in reverse order.  Cuchlann begins as something of a contrarian, but he mellows as he gets more deeply in the theory of modes.

Both Pontifus and Cuchlann appear to be aiming for a taxonomy of anime, which is doubtless a first.