Pity the Northrop Frye Scholar? Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism": Fifty Years After

Northrop Frye never traveled to Spain, but, being a comparativist and a polymath, he was naturally familiar with the Spanish cultural tradition, especially its art and literature.As a twenty six year old, Frye saw Picasso's Weeping Woman at a 1938 exhibition in London, which prompted him to remark that Picasso was "one of the greatest revolutionary geniuses in Western culture" (Modern Culture 94), and one finds references throughout his work to Spanish painters other than Picasso, especially to Goya and El Greco.I think Frye's first choice for a place to visit in Spain would have been the Altamira caves, only a couple of hours northwest of here.The Paleolithic drawings at Altamira fascinated him: they represented for him the imaginative identification with things outside the self -an absorption of human consciousness with the natural world into an undifferentiated state of archaic identity.1 In such a process of metaphorical identification, which he called "ecstatic metaphor," the subject and object merge into an existential unity.Frye was also attracted to the Spanish mystical tradition, as it is found especially in St. John of the Cross.He wrote an early essay on the rationalistic mystic Ramon Lull, who hailed from Mallorca and whose first major work was written in Catalan.We know from the annotated books in Frye's own library that he read Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life, and Ortega's What Is Philosophy?In his taxonomy of the specific forms of drama, he takes the name for the myth play from Calderón's autos sacramentales, the international study of which is of course centered right here at the Universidad de Navarra (see http://griso.cti.unav.es).And Frye's analysis of the eiron as an archetypal character draws on the gracioso-the scheming valet of Spanish drama as represented by, say, Figaro.Cervantes, as one might expect, appears repeatedly in Frye's criticism: Don Quixote, which Frye first read as a twenty year old (Correspondence 1: 52), is his primary example of the comprehensive fictional form that includes the novel, the romance, and the anatomy.Frye's most extensive commentary on Spanish literature is his 1949 essay on Don Quixote, occasioned by a new English

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