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Making It New: Frye and Modernism
by Thomas Willard
In notes made while preparing the Whidden Lectures at McMaster, which he called his “Whiddens” or “McMasters,” Frye wrote that he thought of them as “propaedeutic,” preliminary to the longer book he was planning as a sequel to his Anatomy of Criticism, published in 1957 (“Third” 53). He wrote that they would “best be thought of as a legacy-of-Romanticism series,” attempting to define the “modern.” The lectures would contribute to his long-term goal of providing a unified vision of the arts (“Third” 35). In them, Frye used the word “modern” as a “cultural term” describing an “international style in the arts” that began, approximately, with the death of Baudelaire in 1867 (Modern 51). He said he would like to capitalize the word when used this way, much as one capitalizes the word “Romantic” when describing the poetry of Wordsworth rather than a story in a popular magazine. At the same time, he appreciated the difficulty of defining what was modern. After all, any poet who speaks to his or her time is, as such, “modern.” The very word goes back at least to Cassiodorus in the fifth century, as E. R. Curtius points out in his classic study of European literature, where he calls modernus “one of the last legacies of late Latin to the modern world” (254).
Frye was not especially interested in periodization. Indeed, whereas the literary historian and theorist René Wellek wanted to distinguish a period of symbolism between Romanticism and modernism, and berated Frye for finding symbolism everywhere (Wellek), Frye saw the whole legacy of Romanticism in terms of literary symbolism.1 In the early version of the Anatomy’s essay on the “Theory of Symbols,” he identified three different uses of the symbol associated with Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and the later Yeats (“Three”). While limiting the term “modernism” to the “anti-Romantic” phase between 1900 and 1940, he effectively recognizes three different phases of modern writing in his lectures: an early phase before the year 1900, the high modernism preceding World War II, and a late phase following 1940. Nevertheless, he knew how difficult it could be to draw boundaries. In the opening lecture, he told a joking anecdote about a Canadian university (possibly Toronto) where the English department decided it must offer a course in modern poetry, but could not agree whether such poetry started with The Waste Land or ended there.2 The department was said to have reached a compromise by creating a second course in contemporary poetry, which, he joked, would soon have to be supplemented by a course in “post-contemporary” writing (Modern 22).
Frye’s contemporary, the British critic Frank Kermode, saw a similar need to distinguish early and late periods in the modern arts and coined the terms “paleo- and neo-modernism” for the purpose (Continuities 8). In lectures also published in 1967, he argued that modernism, old and new, was characterized by a series of crises—crises intensified by a sense of impending apocalypse (Sense 93-102). This theme was common enough in the Cold War era, and Frye made similar remarks (Modern 19, 94, 118). However, Kermode distinguished himself from Frye on what he considered a key point. Because he was lecturing on fiction, Kermode wanted to show that the apocalyptic sense drove novelists to break old expectations. He gently chided Frye for having forgotten the “fictiveness of all fictions” and thus having reduced modern novels to myths (Sense 42). If he was referring to the “Theory of Myths” in Frye’s Anatomy, his objection could be extended to, say, the dramaticity of all drama. Kermode accepted the origins of fiction in myth and assumed that readers’ expectations were conditioned by myth. Frye, on the other hand, knew that his contemporaries often ignored the myths underlying modern culture. He wanted to draw attention to these myths, but first he had to explore the gap between modern society and its sustaining myths.
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1 Frye was not alone in this respect. A large anthology of “backgrounds to modern literature,” published in 1965, devotes the first and longest part to symbolism (Ellmann and Feidelson 7-225).
2 When Frye began teaching, in the 1930s, the anthology used in English courses at Toronto went no further than Swinburne (Representative). When he later taught the fourth-year course in Modern Poetry, he started with Hardy and Housman and finished with Eliot and Auden, according to the notes of James Carscallen in 1955-1956. By the 1970s he had added handouts of contemporary poetry, mainly Canadian.
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[Distillate © HA&L + Thomas Willard | {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.] [This article is sponsored by The Rotary Club of Hamilton AM, acknowledged with thanks by the Editors and Samizdat Press.]
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