FRYE Myth As The Matrix of Literature

Myth as the Matrix of Literature
Author(s): Northrop Frye

Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Georgia Review, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Fall 1984), pp. 465-476
Published by: Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia by and on Behalf of the University of
Georgia and the Georgia Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41398705 .
Accessed: 10/11/2012 19:30
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia by and on Behalf of the University of Georgia and the
Georgia Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Georgia Review.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.52.70 on Sat, 10 Nov 2012 19:30:25 PM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
e
Northrop Fry
as the Matrix of Literature

Myth
ДТ the beginning of the Anatomy of Criticism,there is a statement

jfjLto the effectthatthatbook is "pure criticaltheory." I now somewhat
regret that phrase, not simply because one tends to lose faith in purity
with advancing years, but because of the discovery, which I made soon
afterward,that I was much less interestedin "pure critical theory" than
I thoughtI was. My central interestis really in practical criticism,which
I had originallyhoped the Anatomy would be; and my two central con-
ceptions have always been myth and metaphor. The Anatomy speaks of
the modes of literatureas fictionaland thematic,which are conceptions
developed from Aristotle's mythos (plot, narrative) and dianoia (often
translatedas "thought"). Every work of literaturehas both a narrative
movement,which carries us from a beginning to an end in a temporal
sequence, and an underlying "structure" (a term derived from the mo-
tionlessart of architecture),which we try to study as a simultaneousand
spatialized arrangementof metaphors.
I have arrived at an age where a good deal of my energy has to go
into writing Festschriftenfor my contemporaries, and recently, faced
with such an assignment,I found myself getting interestedin William
Morris again. I say again because I was fascinatedby him when I was still
a junior instructor.One reason for the fascination was his remarkable
temperamentalaffinitywith Blake; another was that, like Blake, he was
unfashionable,and unfashionablewritershave always interestedme. To
be unfashionableimplies a negative collective value judgment, and while
value judgmentstell us nothingreliable concerning the poet about whom
they are made, they tell us a great deal concerning the cultural condi-
tioning of the person who makes the judgment. For a writer to be un-
fashionable may, and often does, indicate that his writing exemplifiesa
differentset of standards from the ones in the ascendant during his
Mi]
4 66 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
lifetime.William Morris was obviously one of the most remarkable,pro-

ductive, and creative personalitiesof Iiis century; yet except for News
fromNowhere, which was tolerated as a kind of curiosity,and a few of
his poems that kept getting into anthologies, nearly his entire literary
output seemed to criticsfor a long time to be almost stillborn.
We can perhaps see why if we turn to another Victorian poet who
is about as far apart from Morris as one could get, Gerard Manley
Hopkins. In Hopkins' letters and sketches for critical essays there are
certain suggestionsthrown out that seem to be differentaspects of one
central conception. He distinguishes,for example, between two levels
of meaning in poetry: a level of "overthought,"the explicitmeaning con-
veyed by the syntax,and a level of "underthought,"the deeper meaning
conveyed by the imagery and metaphors. (If, for example, we study
carefullythe images used in the opening scene of Shakespeare's Henry V,
attendingparticularlyto theiremotional resonances, we shall hear some-
thing very differentfrom the rather simple-minded patriotismof the
explicit meaning.) There is also in Hopkins the much betterknown dis-
tinction between running rhythm and sprung rhythm, the running
rhythm being dependent on the constant coincidence of accent and
meter, and sprung rhythmbeing syncopated and more closely related
to the rhythmsof music. Finally, most significantof all, Hopkins distin-
guishes between what he calls a sequential or transmissionalform of
thinkingand anothertype which he calls meditative,which stops at one
point and groups its ideas around itself.
In all threeconceptions thereis an obvious preferenceforthe under-
thought,the sprung rhythm,the meditativecircling around a theme. To
this discontinuous and centripetalview of poetry Morris forms a com-
plete antithesis.Morris is interestedprimarilyin tellingstories,in moving
frompoint A to point В in a narrative; and to make his stories readable
he preserves a clarity and lucidity of texture designed for sequential
reading. He sticks to the standard "running" meters that English litera-
ture imported fromFrench and Italian; he avoids the kind of discontin-
uous meditative quality that would obstruct continuous reading; his
overthoughtand underthoughtare nearly always the same thing. In this
Morris was continuingthe traditionof the great Romantics, all of whom
cultivatedthe long verse narrative,usually leaving theirgreatestachieve-
ment in such narrativeunfinishedat their deaths. The Romantics wrote
for a marketthat responded to storiesin verse: Byron even remarksthat
he is writingDon Juan in verse ratherthan prose because verse is "more
NORTHROP FRYE 467
in fashion."But the vogue for continuous narrativepoetry vanished with

the twentiethcentury: Eliot's remarksabout "dissociation of sensibility"
were a polemic againstit; Hopkins, many decades afterhis death, entered
English literatureas a typical ťwentieth-ctntmypoet; and criticstrained
in the standardsof the modern period tended, like my late friendand col-
league Marshall McLuhan, to develop out of those standardsa preference
for simultaneous apprehension in contrast to linear modes of under-
standing.
Yet if one reconsidersMorris, one findsan oddly prophetic quality
about himwhich is disconcertingin someone who has been so confidently
assigned to the lumber room of minor poets. His interest in Marxist
socialism, for example, was regarded by most of his contemporaries,in-
cluding even his very sympatheticbiographer Mackail, as the kind of
regrettableperversionthatgenius is oftenattractedto. But while Marxism
was a minoritymovementin the England of the 188o's, one would hardly
He was
say now that Morris' interestin it was freakishor peripheral.
certainlya bourgeois sympathizer with socialism rather than a proletarian,
but then socialism has since become- at least in the Soviet Union- a
of
bourgeois adversary of capitalism rather than a new development
Then Morris produced at the end of his life a series of
society. again,
same title- The Wood
prose romances,which all have much the Beyond
the World, The Well at the World's End , The Water of the Wondrous
Isles- and seem to be very full of trees and water. Nobody paid much
attention to these books at the time, and they seemed to represent an
almost schizophrenically differentinterestfrom his political views. The
few who were interestedin the romances, like Yeats, had little interest
in his socialism; the few who sympathized with his socialism, like Shaw,
had even less interestin the romances.
If one looks at the various long romances which have followed upon
the sensational success of Tolkien, however, one findsa traditiondevel-
the prose romances of
oping which was quite obviously initiated by
Morris (who was among other thingsa major influenceon Tolkien him-
self). In such works as Frank Herbert's "Dune" books, Roger Zelazny's
"Amber" books and Ursula LeGuin's "Earthsea" books, both history
and geography have been invented, as in Morris; and while such stories
are often classified as "science fiction," there is relatively little interest
in technological hardware. What emerges is a rather primitivetype of
romance, sometimesin the form of adventurous intrigue,sometimesre-
himselfto some-
mindingus of folktales.So here again Morris committed
468 THE GEORGIA REVIEW
thing almost totally ignored in his own time, and ignored with even
greater enthusiasmlater on, which has had an odd resurrectionin our
own day. Similarly,Morris' cultural enthusiasmfor the Middle Ages is
often regarded as imaginativelyinconsistentwith his revolutionaryatti-
tude to his own time, but this also is nonsense, and the contemporary
romances we have just spoken of often driftback into a kind of medieval
ambience, even when they are close enough to conventional "science
fiction" to avoid Morris' anti-technological attitudes. Along with the
flourishingof such romance we have a lively development of retold
mythological themes: Arthurian, ancient Egyptian, Scandinavian, and
others.So Morris' curious compulsion, not merely to write storiesbut to
retellall the famous storiesof the past, seems to have some contemporary
relevance as well.
Value judgments, as I said above, express the cultural conditioning
of the period that makes them. The cycle of fashionthat ignored Morris
for so long, and then brought him (or the cultural interestshe followed)
again into the center,seems to me to be an aspect of a larger cycle, one
that keeps moving fromstructuralintereststo an interestin texture,from
a constructiveinterestin what literatureis building up to a more analyt-
ical interestin the materialthat literatureis made of. Perhaps the struc-
tural and post-structuralschools of criticism today represent another
phase in thatcycle, repeatingto some degree the complementaryinterests
of the historical criticismand the rhetorical or "new" criticismof the
thirtiesand forties,and even going back to the interestof Elizabethan
critics in, on one hand, mythological commentaryexplaining something
of the shape and structureof the great mythicalstories,and on the other,
textbooks of rhetoric analyzing the various devices of verbal figuration.
I imaginethatthispendulum of fashionwill keep swingingback and forth
between one interestand the otheruntil criticsfinallyget it throughtheir
heads thatthey have to have both going on at once.
This bringsme back to the point that the two elementsof literature
are the myth,the narrativethat moves, and the metaphor, the link that
connects. Myth is a word I preferto anchor in its literarycontext,where
for me it is essentiallyand always Aristotle's mythos, narrativeor plot,
which in turnrefersto the movementof literature.The paradox of using
the spatialized metaphor of "structure" for somethingthat moves has its
confusing aspect, but it does express the fact that all the arts, whether
mobile like music or static like painting,have both temporal and spatial
aspects. A Chinese jar, as Eliot says, moves in its stillness;music is played
NORTHROP FRYE 469
from a score that can be studied as a simultaneous unit. A simultaneous

comprehensionof a play or novel or poem as a motionlessstructureseems
to me quite feasible and desirable, except that as soon as attained it has
to be abandoned and a new cycle of understandingbegun.
Mythos or narrative exists in both literary and extraliterarytypes
of verbal entities,in anything which we read in sequence. It does not
necessarily have to be a story, although in early verbal cultures almost
all narrativesare likely to be stories. In more complex cultures there are
conceptual narrativesin works of philosophy and books where we call
the narrativean "argument." In fact, narrative exists in everythingthat
has a sequence even if we do not read it sequentially, like a telephone
book. The words "history" and "story," again, have come to mean dif-
ferent things, and we adopt a rough practical distinction between a
history which is paralleled against certain events going on outside the
book being read, and a story which exists for its own sake without any
continuousparallelingof thissort.But mythosor narrativewill be present
whether the work is historyor story: the phrase "decline and fall" in the
title of Gibbon's historyindicates the underlying narrative,along with
the principle on which he selected and ordered his material.
We may raise the question in passing whether it is really possible to
write historydiachronically,except in special formslike that of Pepys's
Diary. It seems more probable that every historianhas to stand outside
the historyhe is recording and take a synchronic view of it. The implica-
tion is that a historyis at once "true" and "untrue"- "true" because it
deals with verifiablestatements,"untrue" because these statementsare
being selected and arrangedin a formthat is no longer purely sequential.
or of
"Myth" is often vulgarly used to mean a false statement, mirage
narrative to a reader both the
ideology: this is because every conveys
assertionthat this event happened and that it could not have happened
in preciselythatway and in that identical context.
Literature seems to begin in a corpus of stories,and some of these
stories,which are classifiedas folk tales, show an extraordinaryversatility
in surmountingall barriersof culture and language and making an ap-
pearance in one society afteranother. In another development, however,
a group of stories does take root in a specific society, and when that
circle around
happens they seem to draw a kind of temenos or magic
themselves,and begin to exist in time. Eventually, this produces a dis-
tinction between the popular and the canonical, the folk tale and the
myth,which are not really two distinctkinds of literaturebut two social
adaptations of the same original corpus of stories. Mythical stories will

show structuralanalogies to other stories all over the world, but despite
this structuralsimilarity,they will contain traditionalnames and specific
affinitiesto religion and legendary historythat establish them within a
single society. If we examine certain featuresof culture even today, we
can see both of these tendencies operating. Justas we find creation and
flood and fall mythswith similar structuralfeaturesall over the world,
so, in any given period of history,we find techniques in fiction and
poetry that spread rapidly fromone language or culture to another. But
thisgoes along with a curiously decentralizingrhythmthat has been very
consistentin the historyof literature.
Great empires, as such, seldom produce great literature,with the
most obvious exceptions,such as Virgil, illustratingthe rule. There seems
to be somethingvegetable about the creative imagination,
somethingthat
seems to want a relatively limited environment,so that in proportion as
a literaturebecomes more matureit tends to settle into
relativelysmaller
units.The population of England was small enough for English literature
to be essentiallya London literaturedown to the end of the eighteenth
century,but afterWordsworth the situationchanged rapidly. In another
centuryor so we findthat "English literature"produces a Dylan Thomas
growing out of south Wales, a Hardy out of Dorset, a D. H. Lawrence
out of the Nottingham area, a Yeats out of Sligo, and so on. As
early as
the preface to Shelley's VrometheusUnbound we findthe statementthat
for England's literaryproduction to be broadened, the
country should
be broken down into a number of self-containedunits, states like those
of Renaissance Italy. The statementalso illustratesthe confusion between
the decentralizingrhythmsof culture and those of political and economic
developments,which tend ratherto centralize.
Similarly,if we look at American literature,we find an aggregate
of Southern literatures,New England literatures,expatriate literature,
and so on over all the country. If we want to know what the creative
imaginationtells us about American life, we learn it by adding together
what Faulkner tellsus about Mississippi,Robert Frost about New
Hamp-
shire,and so on. The same development has occurred very dramatically
in Canada within the last twenty years. This odd paradox of
techniques
common to the whole world but developed within a local, even a
pro-
vincial, area, seems to be the way in which a great deal of literature
operates. After a briefvisitto Guyana, I got interestedin Wilson Harris,
and immediatelyafterreading one of his novels I read a Canadian novel
NORTHROP FRYE 471
set in Alberta. The two novels were not at all like each other, but they
used certain techniques, such as telling the story on two levels of time
at once, that marked them both as mid-twentieth-centurynovels.
I suggestedabove thatsuch cultural developmentsare quite different
from political or economic ones, which not only centralize but become
more uniformas they grow. One cannot take offin a jet plane and expect
to finda radically differentway of lifein the place where the plane lands.
If we tryto unite a political or economic movement with a cultural one,
certain pathological developments, such as fascism or terroristicanar-
chism, are likely to result. If we try to annex culture to a centralizing
political or economic movement,we get a pompous and officializedim-
perialismin the arts.It is simplisticto make too sharp a distinctionbetween
two aspects of human life thatmust always both be present- for example,
the production of a literaturemay be local, but its marketing follows
economic rhythms-but still the lurking antagonism between cultural
and political phenomena is important.It means that one social function
of literaturein our timeis to help create a kind of counterenvironment.
So far I have been speaking mainly of spatial patterns,of the way
in which literatureseems to break down into smaller geographical units
and, even in thisvery unifiedworld, still continues to exploit differences
in language- language being, especially in its literaryaspect, one of the
most profoundly fragmented of human activities. The question then
arises, how does this phenomenon act in time? I have always, from the
very beginning of my critical interestsin literature,been impressed by
the stabilityof literarygenresand conventions,by the uniformityof, say,
comic characterization from Greek times to our own, by the way in
which traditionalmyths and folk tales keep on being adapted by poets
and novelists century after century. This re-creation of traditional pat-
terns,in particular,makes mythology a real and continuing presence.
human
Mythology, in its origin,is a structureof what I think of as
concern. That is, it is an expression of the fact that man not only lives
in nature,but builds a human world out of nature.That human world, so
far as it is verbal, is made out of human beliefs and anxieties and hopes
and ambitions,and consequently it faces inward towards human society
and its concerns, not outward towards nature. That is, mythology is not
a proto-science.But it is bound to make certain assumptionsabout nature
thatmay be contradictedby furtherexaminationof nature; these assump-
tions are likely to be defended by entrenched social interests,and so
collisions of mythology and science result,as in the kind of opposition
provoked by Galileo and Darwin. But genuine mythology tends to

become a literary structure,and is re-created by the poets: collisions
between literaryand scientificviews of the world are both rare and in-
significant.For one thing,poets may be quite content with a world of
four elements,phases of the moon, alchemic or astrologicalimagery,and
other constructsno longer used in science; for another, when concern
becomes reallyimportantand no longer merelyan anxietyof superstition,
as in the concern about atom bombs and pollution, scientistsare as much
involved in the concern as poets are.
To return briefly to William Morris: I referred earlier to what
seemed almost a compulsion on his part not merely to write stories but
to retell all the great storiesof the past, to translatethe Aeneid, Beowulf,
the Odyssey, old French romances, and Icelandic Sagas. This suggests
somethingdouble-edged about the relationshipof cultural developments
to the temporal sequence of history. As the historical examination by
scholars of the motifs of mythology and folk tales gets carried back
furtherinto the past, it comes up against the sense of a very remote time
in which the complete storywith all its implicationswas intact,of which
only broken and garbled fragmentshave survived.One sees thisoccasion-
ally spoken of as a possibility-for instance at the beginning of Jessie
Weston's From Ritual to Romance- but it is almost certainlyan illusion.
To understandwhat a mythfully means one has to look forward in time
to the various ways in which the poets have treatedit. Certain very
primi-
tive stories about the triumph of summer over winter might be more
clearly understood from a complex and late work like Shakespeare's
Winter's Tale than fromthe St. George folk dramas of the English coun-
tryside.In fact, anyone who studies the folk drama is sure to have the
later literary developments affectinghis understanding of it, however
unconsciously.
My referenceto JessieWeston's book has another aspect: whatever
the view that Arthurianscholars take of it, it was a major influence on
The Waste Land, one of the seminal poems of our time. I suspect that it
proved so suggestive to Eliot because its author got many of her ideas
out of Wagner: in other words, her treatmentof the Arthurian legend
was unconsciously based on a feelingof the legend's being re-created and
moving forwardin time. For when Wagner startedworking on Parsifal,
his obvious source was Wolfram von Eschenbach, who had already made
an appearance as a character in an earlier Wagner opera and had sug-
gested the subject matterof another.But Wagner found that there were
NORTHROP FRYE 473
certain elementsin the Grail legend which seemed very central and very
primitive,or at least far more suggestive metaphorically,that Wolfram
did not know about. In Wolfram the Grail is not a chalice or cup, nor is
the spear carriedin the Grail procession the spear of Longinus. Hence the
word "primitive,"just used, need not necessarily mean earliestin time.
There is another sense in which the temporal movement of culture
tends to be reactionary,in a specialized way. Every country in the world
today is committed by the nature of twentieth-centurytechnology
to some kind of social revolution, and the social consequences of revo-
lution are normally in the direction of greater uniformity.Intellectuals
have a great desire to help pitch in and turn the wheel of history,and
thereby show that ideas of the kind they have amount to something in
the historicalprocess afterall. This is the activitythat has been described
as the trahisondes clercs, the betrayal by intellectualsof theirreal social
function.
To understandthis better,we may turn to Plato, where the central
figureis Socrates, and where the martyrdomof Socrates is the crucial
event around which most of Plato's work revolves. The imagination of
posterityhas naturallyfocused on the unforgettabledignityand serenity
of Socrates in the Apology and the Phaedo. But Plato himselfwas a revo-
lutionarythinker,and devoted many of his late years to the construction
of the Laws, a blueprintfor a revolutionarysociety where Socrates does
not appear, and where no such figure as Socrates ever could appear,
because one of its main principles is that teachers are to be rigidly cen-
sored in everythingthatthey say and teach. Something similarhappened,
perhaps,with the growth of Christianityinto a social institution.Culture
is often, and I hope rightly,thought of as a progressively liberalizing
force in society. But it seems to be also a force that continually moves
backward to what is symbolically, at least, a pre-revolutionarytime, a
timewhen Jesusor Socrates is still alive, and when the vital ideas of vital
people are stillof profound social significance.
In the tendency to re-create an earlier time as a cultural model for
the presentor future,the significanceof the use of mythology by poets
and novelistscomes into focus. Myth, we saw, differsfromhistoryin that
it is not bound to a sequence of events, but is a presentationof human
historyin a participatingform,so that in a myth one can feel that one's
own life and fortunesare involved in the story being told. The black
spiritual "Go down, Moses: let my people go" indicates what power a
myth can have long after its connection with history has disappeared.
The medievalism of William Morris had nothing to do with any desire

to returnto the political or economic or religiousstructuresof the Middle
Ages: the medieval period for him was a cultural model only, and its
standardsof art and craftsmanshipwere the only elementsthat he wished
to apply to his own time.
The mythology that has been decisive for the cultural tradition
which we ourselves inheritedis the Biblical one. Biblical mythology is
revolutionary,formulated by a people who were tribal and never im-
perial, who thought in terms of an eventual overturn of the historical
process in which the power of the kingdomsof Egypt and Babylon would
be destroyed. The Biblical myth is intensely patriarchal and male-
centered: its own deity was male, and it consistentlyopposed the mother-
goddess cults that were so prominentin the east Mediterranean world
at the time.
The reason for this is that the mother-centeredmythology tends to
be associated with the natural cycle, which may lead to the implication
that man is essentially an unborn being, that he remains all his life
imprisoned within the cycle of nature, emerging from its womb but
returningto its tomb. This is the mythological kernel, perhaps, of the
story of Oedipus, the ruler who comes to griefthrough an unconscious
clinging to the mother. In Genesis the firstwoman is formed out of the
body of the firstman; Adam is related only to a father,and in renouncing
thatrelationshiphe returnsto his only mother,the motherearth who for
himis only a principle of death. The Genesis storyis not simply a ration-
alizing of patriarchal values: it is also a revolutionary break from the
cyclical view of human destiny: we have to be cut off from the mother
to get born. As Yeats pointed out, Classical civilization developed both
a cyclical view of history and a tragic version of the Oedipus myth;
whereas Christianitygives us a revolutionaryview of historyand a comic
Oedipus myth- comic of course only in the sense of an action leading to
reconciliation.
The Bible sets up an ideal of love which is primarilyGod's love for
man, agape or caritas,a disinterestedlove which acts as a model for tlie
love that man must develop towards God and his neighbor. Love rooted
in the sexual instinctis described by the New Testament as (or ratheris
included in the conception of) philia, which makes it really a form of
gregariousness.The word eros does not occur in the New Testament,
nor does what it describes.But of course Eros, which suggestsan essential
kinship with nature (particularly nature as natura naturalis,the prolif-
NORTHROP FRYE 475
erating and burstingforthof life in an organic process), was central to

Classical mythology. In the Middle Ages the poets developed, mainly
out of Virgil and Ovid, a cult of Eros which was in effectremindingthe
religious, political, and other authoritarianestablishmentsthat they had
leftsomethingout thatwas essentialto the human imagination,something
thathad to be reckoned with as a powerful cultural force.
The structureof authoritythat derives from the Bible was founded
on spatial metaphors in which God is associated with the sky- with a
world "up there"- and a demonic world located somewhere "down
below." Because of the immenseprestigeof Virgil and the sixthbook of
the Aeneid, the downward journey still survived in poetry; and the
notion of a titanic figurewho was imprisoned underground, yet retains
a forbidden knowledge of a mysterious future, also remains latent in
Western,consciousness. This is the figureof Prometheus, and Eros and
Prometheus represent an aspect of reality that was minimized in the
Biblical and Christianmythological tradition,but was potentiallypresent
all along and has reemergedmost powerfully in our own time.
In a sense, poetry is always polytheistic,because the central form
of metaphor is the god: the identificationof some kind of personal spirit
with some aspect of the order of nature. Gods are ready-made metaphors,
and fall into poetry with a minimumof adaptation. A rigid monotheism
like that of Judaism or Christianityor Islam would have considerably
narrowed the varietyof culture if it were not that in the Western world,
at any rate, the poets insistedon clinging to the great gods that were still
immanentin the form of gigantic human powers. The old structureof
authoritywas an ordered hierarchywith God on top, the perfect world
he had made (and to which it is our primary duty to return) directly
underneath,the "fallen" world into which we are born below that, and
the demonic world at the bottom. This cosmology had many analogies
to the human body, fromthe upper regions corresponding to the human
brain to the lower regions corresponding to that mixture of the sexual
and the excretory which has always bothered poets. We now live at a
time when that inheritedstructure of authority in the Western world
is undergoing a process of revolutionary change and imaginative re-
creation.There is a profound awareness of thisprocess among our serious
writers,though not always a conscious awareness.
The metaphor, like the myth, opens up a channel or current of
energy between subjective and objective worlds. Its typical formulation,
"A is B," both assertsan identityand conveys the sense that thisidentity
47<S THE GEORGIA REVIEW
makes no sense in everyday experience. Hence it is a microcosm of an

order of reality that is neithersubjective nor objective, but bridges the
gap between them. (We note in passing that it is impossible to charac-
terize metaphors except by other metaphors.) Because the metaphor
assertsan identitythat we cannot, in an ordinarycontext,take seriously,
literaturebecomes a form of play, keeping an ironic distance from the
use of words in which theirconventional meanings (and theirconsequent
differencesfrom one another) are primary.
The development of a literaturewhich is aware of its mythical and
metaphoricalbasis seemsto be a centralfactorin helpingus to get through
a profoundlyrevolutionaryperiod without a loss of freedom.The criti-
cism of literaturecan make us conscious of our mythicaland metaphorical
conditioning, as well as of its opposite, our activity as subjects in an
objective world where words do not formmodels of experience, but are
only servomechanismsforacquainting us with thingsand events.Writers
today, in particular,have developed a growing interestin fantasy,where
our conventional notions of time and space are shaken up and mixed
together. A process of re-creation and metamorphosis,which enables
new mythicalformsto emerge in all kinds of unpredictableways, is what
I look forward to in the literatureof the present and immediate future:
an imaginativeexploration that is not confined eitherto the mythical or
the nonmythical,but moves with creative freedom between both.

FRYE Myth As The Matrix of Literature

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

FRYE Myth As The Matrix of Literature

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Myth as the Matrix of Literature

Author(s): Northrop Frye

as the Matrix of Literature

ДТ the beginning of the Anatomy of Criticism,there is a statement

lifetime.William Morris was obviously one of the most remarkable,pro-

in fashion."But the vogue for continuous narrativepoetry vanished with

from a score that can be studied as a simultaneous unit. A simultaneous

adaptations of the same original corpus of stories. Mythical stories will

provoked by Galileo and Darwin. But genuine mythology tends to

The medievalism of William Morris had nothing to do with any desire

erating and burstingforthof life in an organic process), was central to

makes no sense in everyday experience. Hence it is a microcosm of an

You might also like