The Fable Of Recognition: A Study Of Northrop Frye As A Prophet

Northrop Frye is a famous Canadian literary critic, but his fame enjoyed its peak in the 50s and 60s as a representative of the myth-archetypal school of literary criticism. When deconstruction was on the rise, it faded greatly, and what's more, sometimes Frye was taken as a notorious obstinate structuralist. When I started doing research on him, I found that articles solely on him and his artistic insight are astoundingly rare, certainly abnormal for such an erudite and influential philosopher. In fact, even his fame as an archetypal critic is not based on a genuine grasp of his thought, and he himself declared that he resented being classified into other schools which he did not belong to.This misunderstanding, as I see it, is an outcome of the difference of awareness between him and the logical and reasoning literary critics, with the former taking the free flow of life's energy, the full function of the vital but unpredictable Holy Spirit as the Truth while the latter holding that truth is a correspondence between mind and the outer world, be it social, psychological or natural. This article is an attempt at a full comprehension of the Spirit, and based on this, a full understanding of Frye and his should-be influence on our literary and actual life. It first tries to elucidate the Spiritual dimension and the life state when it is forgotten or refused, and then it devotes itself to the discovery of this dimension and the entering into the Spirit; which is a major structure of all aspects of Frygian thoughts.The first chapter follows Frye's method; i.e., turning to concrete works. Thus it starts with a study of the creation story in the Bible. By tracing the process of Adam and Eve's full-spirited creative life and their later fall into division, alienation and the restriction of life, it describes the free spiritual identity and how it has fallen into oblivion; and beyond this, it also shows how the same physical being can take on different spiritual identity. It further pushes the boundary of a single story back to include many others, especially the fall of Macbeth, illustrating how we have a spiritual dimension besides a physical one and how the refusal of this spiritual dimension as an illusion or a simple oblivion of it can land our life in a wasteland of fear and cruelty and conformity, and handicap our philosophical insight of what our life should be. This can be taken as an effort to illustrate and clarify the basis of Frye's thoughts.The second chapter can be taken as an application, showing how sense experience, language, speech, and society become demonic parodies if devoid of life and spirit. Human beings have a tendency to search for unity, but this tendency has its origin in the spiritual world, and a project of it into the physical world will surely result in a dilemma, a bondage within a cage, a restriction of what should be the most free--the imaginative life. In the discussion of the fall of language, it is pointed out that the problem with serious philosophy and the holiness-denial literary criticism is that they are bound in by the spirit-denial language mode.The third and fourth chapters are the process from oblivion to recognition, a rise from bondage. In the third chapter the recognition scene is in the literary experience. A Rose for Emily is scrupulously studied to demonstrate different levels of recognition, from mystery discovery, to social focus, and at last, to the discovery of the genuine identity as a creative and imaginative life free of all illusions of social myths. This recognition of identity can not be contained within a single literary work, and in this chapter it is pointed out that a work which we usually do not connect with A Rose for Emily—Romeo and Juliet--is the same with it as far as the recognition of life is concerned. Later, more works are included to demonstrate that the recognition of Spirit is the central theme of all literary works. A highly conscious spiritual work, the Bible, is studied to see how, in it, it is made explicit that the Designer of literary works is not the author, nor the reader, nor the text, but the Life and Spirit.In the fourth chapter, the process of recognition of genuine identity in one's actual life is discussed. First, we have the sense that we do not belong to this world; then we begin a pilgrimage toward something Holier, which results in laws given by higher beings, but we find that these laws are restrictions and we are forced to accept them; the next step is to discover through experience that these laws are necessary for a happy life, but the discovery of the laws' rightful place and the willing obedience are still in the sphere of reason and necessity; later we have the emerging of our life, a vision that we ourselves are high beings degenerated; and based on this, we discover that the Spirit is not outside us, but inside, which enables us to march forward toward the whole freedom, the double vision that can create for us Heaven on Earth.This fall-and-rise shape is the genuine form of Frye's vision, and his effort is to bring us from the unconsciousness to the consciously active life, to break through for our essential being, the Real Man in us, a way leading to more freedom. In this sense, he is not speaking out of a subjective will or an objective correspondence, but out of the Spirit, the metaphorical energy. It is in this sense that Frye, in this thesis, is called a prophet. This concern for the centre of humanity is what led Frye in all his studies. Structures, archetypes and all others alike are only surfaces underlied and permeated and illuminated by it.In the course of this study, I paid special attention to the profound sameness between Frygian thoughts and Chinese Taoist culture (especially between the Bible and Zhuang Zi), which may be taken as an effort of pushing the recognition scene beyond one culture to all cultures (at least two). I hope this may also in some way enlighten cross-culture and cross-religion studies.