The Illustrated Northrop Frye

By Garden Urthark

This five-part application of Northrop Frye's theory of archetypal criticism to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick examines Melville's masterpiece as an encyclopedic romance.

Following Ishmael's descent into and return from a demonic sea world of experience, Moby-Dick exhibits the U-shaped pattern of development typical of romance.

Melville broadens and deepens the thematic and formal complexity of his romance through the encyclopedic use of archetypes, particularly those of satire and tragedy.

As Ahab pursues his tragic quest for the great White Whale, Ishmael embarks on an often-satiric inner quest for meaning in his universe. Which, as this inner quest turns out, appears to be the only reason Ishmael survives while Ahab and the rest of the crew don't.

The five chapters that make up The Illustrated Northrop Frye are, Chapter 1: The Dragon Quest; Chapter 2: Descent to a Lower World; Chapter 3: The Tearing Apart of “Reality”; Chapter 4: The Death Struggle; and Chapter 5: Ishmael’s Ascent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Garden Urthark
• Release date: Jun 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9780978516260

Garden Urthark

Bishuasi, la mia amore,nella mia vita, che meravglia.Mi trovo fra la perduta gente,voglio mangiare la tua melauna pezza alla volta, mentre,era tu, beh, che me l'ha offerta.Tu faccia me matto! Mia testavole con uccelli belle belle,mio cuore con luce dei stelle,brucciando secoli e secoli.Galessie brute e bellegridano contro nostri nemici!Vieni ai miei abbraccio muoro, da vero, senza bacci.Translation into English / Traduzione in ingleseSalvation, my love,in my life, what a wonder.I find myself among the lost people,I want to eat your appleone piece at a time, while,it was you, well, who offered it to me.You make me crazy! My headflies with beautiful beautiful birds,my heart with starlight,burning centuries and centuries.Brute and beautiful galaxiesthey shout against our enemies!Come to my hugsor I die, truly, without kisses.Garden Urthark is an enterprise that contains, as in an ark, the revolutionary process of transforming reality into a vision of human love and freedom.

Book preview

The Illustrated Northrop Frye

by Garden Urthark

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 1978 Albert J. Miele, Jr.

Copyright 2009 Albert J. Miele, Jr.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smaswords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

To Northrop Frye, my wife, Sung,

and my son, A.J.

Contents

Preface to the 2009 Edition

Chapter 1: The Dragon Quest

Chapter 2: Descent to a Lower World

Chapter 3: The Tearing Apart of Reality

Chapter 4: The Death Struggle

Chapter 5: Ishmael’s Ascent

Notes

About the Author

About the Cover

Preface to the 2009 Edition

I originally completed The Illustrated Northrop Frye in 1978. In 2009, I updated some of my use of language, changing, for example, the archaic use of man to humanity. I also changed my references to Moby-Dick from the first (1967) to the second edition (2002) of Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford’s Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick.

In examining the scholarship on Melville and Moby-Dick from 1978 to today, I have found no detailed studies anything like my own, which is a practical application of Frye’s theory of archetypal criticism, as set forth mainly in Anatomy of Criticism and The Secular Scripture, to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Except for the changes just mentioned, I have decided to issue this 2009 edition of The Illustrated Northrop Frye virtually unchanged from its original form with the hope that it may contribute to whatever renaissance of Frye criticism may currently be underway or may occur in the future.

Chapter 1: The Dragon Quest

In the terms of Northrop Frye’s theory of archetypal criticism, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick is an encyclopedic romance. The closest equivalent to Frye’s term encyclopedic romance in traditional terminology would be epic romance. Richard Chase, in The American Novel and Its Tradition, and Edward Rosenberry, in "Moby-Dick: Epic Romance," each use this traditional term to describe Moby-Dick. This term is perhaps the inevitable one for Melville’s great book, Chase says. "But Moby-Dick is extremely impure art, it is a hybrid, one of the most audacious surely that have ever been conceived. Chase is thus dissatisfied with the adequacy of epic romance" as a descriptive term for Moby-Dick. In a bibliographical note, Rosenberry acknowledges his debt to Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism in helping him to decide to call Moby-Dick an epic romance, the best term, in his view, for his intended uninitiated reader. But in the same bibliographical note, Rosenberry says that the "classification of Moby-Dick as a type of prose fiction is a difficult and unresolved question. He too is dissatisfied with the term epic romance." This study proposes to help solve this problem of classification.

Classification of Moby-Dick’s form has indeed proved a dilemma for critics from the time of publication in 1851 to today. It quickly becomes apparent that the cause of the critical dilemma over this work’s form is not to be found in Moby-Dick at all, but in the inadequate literary terms used to examine it—prehistoric stone tools compared with Frye’s surgical clamps and scalpels. Hence one ingenious modern critic finds himself inventing his own term to describe a principle of formal symmetry in the organization of the chapters. In "‘Careful Disorder’: The Structure of Moby-Dick, Herbert Eldridge terms this principle enveloping," but although his discussion is illuminating, his term is obscure. Would that Moby-Dick could be crammed into an envelope and mailed off to eternity. The critics would be all the happier. The critical dilemma Moby-Dick raises demonstrates a failure of literary criticism. Moby-Dick has been called just about everything, even gothic novel. One eminent critic seems to suggest that the cetological material is so well written that the book might well serve as a primer for beginning students of cetology.

The major stream of criticism with which this study has to do, however, is the tradition which has attempted to relate Moby-Dick to myth. A hodge-podge of approaches greets the eye. The close relation between myth and romance form disturbed one 1851 critic immensely. He found a great deal of myth and mystery in Moby-Dick. He also found the result a primitive formation of profanity and indecency. Thus he concluded his review: The book-maker and book-publisher had better do their work with a view to the trial it must undergo at the bar of God. For this critic biblical myth is sacred literature. Hence his criticism becomes value-judgment criticism, and of the worst kind. The work’s meaning and form get shoved aside, and the critic clambers up the critical platform he erects to spout off his personal religious credo. Frye hopes to eliminate such autobiographical criticism from the scholarly study of literature. Thus Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism: Value-judgments are founded on the study of literature; the study of literature can never be founded on value-judgments.

Frye’s approach to literature is the opposite of the personally reductive. His approach is scientific. It is one in which the connections between one fact or interpretation and another are clearly defined and related to a logical concept of literature as a whole. The characteristics of literary works, when literature becomes an object of study, are as infinite and variable as the characteristics of any object in nature. Scholarly study of literature must have its own conceptual framework, Frye says, so that knowledge of literature will add up to a coherent whole and so that literary criticism will be a field of study all its own, and not an adjunct to other fields such as psychology, history, or philosophy.

In Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford describes Moby-Dick as one of the first great mythologies to be created in the modern world. This remark captures the spirit of Frye’s idea that myths have been transformed into romances. But, clearly, the function of romance, and of the other forms of literature, is and will continue to be different from the function of the myths of the past. The romance form will probably not gain the kind of authority once given to myths. Nor should romance become the center of a new religion, though some of the cults which have sprung up around certain writers suggest as much. The Melville cult is a good example. Literature is taking over the imaginative authority once given to myth. But it is working within the realm of authority being given by society to the idea that a truly free society is desirable and that in a truly free society the individual will be free. The myth of such freedom is the central ideal of romance and each individual work plays a part in making this myth a reality by offering a vision of it.

Nathalia Wright’s Melville’s Use of the Bible and Richard Chase’s Herman Melville: A Critical Study contain excellent myth criticism on Moby-Dick. The difference between these studies and this one, however, is that Wright and Chase seek to show the direct relations between myth and Moby-Dick, while this study identifies the important mythical influences, then turns to Frye’s work to see how these myths themselves figure as the archetypes behind the conventions of the literary forms. The conventions, as Frye presents them, are then sought out in Moby-Dick. This study examines the myth’s relation to Moby-Dick as the myth passes through Frye’s theory of criticism. Hence the myth itself is not as important as the conventions that it gives rise to.

Other valuable studies, similar to Chase’s and Wright’s, include H.B. Kulkarni’s Moby Dick: A Hindu Avatar, which examines Moby-Dick in terms of Hindu myth, and H. Bruce Franklin’s The Wake of the Gods, a study of Moby-Dick in terms of Egyptian myth. Frye often hints at the influences of Eastern myths on Western ones, but his aim is to describe the conventions of Western literature in terms of biblical and classical myth. These studies by Franklin and Kulkarni, then, are pioneer efforts at determining more clearly what the Eastern influences are, as Jessie Weston, for instance, in From Ritual to Romance, helps to determine them when she shows that the romantic Fisher King figure and the grail cycle of romances in which he appears descend from the ancient Eastern fertility myths of Tammuz and Adonis, both Dying and Reviving Gods, according to Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye sets forth his theory of archetypal criticism as part of the inductive leap he makes toward establishing literary criticism as a science. For Frye the conventions of the literary forms derive from the varying ways in which the archetypes, or recurrent structural patterns, images, and symbols which form myths, are displaced into literary works. The term displacement describes the process of taking archetypes out of their mythical contexts and of placing them within narrative contexts by some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery and the like. Frye identifies four basic mythoi or pre-generic forms for all fiction. These are comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. Of course Frye also describes genres and more specific types of fiction, but this study will attempt only to show why, on the archetypal level, Moby-Dick would be classified as an encyclopedic romance. On the generic level, Moby-Dick is, in Frye’s own words, a romance-anatomy or a combination of specific types of prose fiction he calls the romance and the anatomy. But the task of showing how he arrives at this generic classification from the pre-generic one is the copestone for this study which shall be left to posterity.

Frye derives his four mythoi or pre-generic plot structures by studying the structure of myths. He identifies the basic communicable unit of structure in myth as the archetype. The archetype is a recurrent pattern, image, or symbol. It is an associative cluster or complex variable which acts as the underlying unit of design in myth. After identifying the archetype in myth, Frye traces its appearance throughout literature, and he discovers that it is not only the basic unit of form in myth but also the basic unit of form in all works of imaginative literature. An example of an archetype appears in the great fish image of the Jonah myth. This great fish is one form or modulation of a recurrent symbol which may be found all throughout myth and literature. Frye calls it the dragon archetype. In Frye’s own words, for instance, Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville’s novel: he is absorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward. The dragon archetype is integral to the romance form, though it can appear less significantly in any of the other forms of literature. The quest to slay the dragon or archetypal dragon quest is the shaping design behind the romance form. Hence Frye identifies the archetypes in myths, but he develops his mythoi by tracing the archetypes through literature to see how they conventionally appear in stories. The key to archetypal symbolism, then, is mythology. From Frye’s point of view, for the literary critic myth is not a guide to acts of popular piety, nor is it a canon for superstitious belief or doctrine. It is a potential grammar of archetypal symbolism and literary form.

Myth presents the grammar of archetypal symbolism because, like any grammar, it is a highly conventionalized form of symbolism. The central difference between myth and other forms of literature, and the reason why myth is so important for archetypal criticism, is that society gives greater authority to myth than to any other form of imaginative literature. Mythology is the imaginative center of society. It unifies a society by explaining social views on such matters as death and the afterlife, law, morality, and cosmology. Study of the structure of myths reveals the fundamental structure of all forms of imaginative literature. If works of the imagination are to be at all communicable within society, they have to communicate by using the imaginative forms the society provides, but the author need be no more conscious of using these forms than he need be conscious of using the grammar of verbal language itself. Moreover, the classification of his work is based upon the relation between his work and other works of literature, not upon the relation between the work and the author. Hence in this study of Moby-Dick, no attempt will be made to show the degree to which Melville may have been conscious of using the archetypes which are to be described as the basis of his work’s form.

Biblical mythology has held the central position of imaginative authority in Western verbal culture. Clustering around this biblical center, however, is classical myth which is of a lesser authority. Classical myth has lost its position of central authority to biblical myth. It has thus become known as fabulous literature. Other forms of fabulous literature include folk tales, legends, and the like. But mythical and fabulous stories are identical in structure, and both are central sources of archetypal symbolism in society. Classical myth, once the center of authority in Western verbal culture, still has a profound influence on archetypal symbolism. Biblical myth, now fast losing its central position of authority, is quickly becoming fabulous literature itself. It is losing its authority to the secular scripture of romance, the most conventionalized form of literature to develop out of myth. Hence the mythological universe is presently undergoing a profound change from an imaginative vision in which God and Christ are heroes and idols of worship and in which life in a heavenly kingdom is the goal to one in which humanity is the hero and freedom humanity’s goal. The