Frye and Longinus

Frye and Longinus Robert D. Denham (bio) There he stood on the renewing crags of time, stood on the ringed summit of the sublime universe. Ferenc Juhász The earliest reference to Longinus in Frye's work is in a 1953 review of books by Allen Tate, Herbert Read, and Francis Fergusson, where he says that the theme of Read's The True Voice of Feeling "is essentially the same as the problem of ecstasis or 'transport' in Longinus," adding that this "problem" had been "ably handled" by Tate. He is referring to Tate's "Longinus and the 'New Criticism'" from a collection of Tate's essays, The Forlorn Demon (1953). About the same time, Frye writes this somewhat riddling entry in Notebook 37: "Re the first lecture: sublime process as beautiful product (Longinus on sublime). Sublime includes self-identification (process). Interest in a convention ... more congenial to the aesthetic, especially in paradoxical forms of it like T. E. Hulme's. The rhetorical relation expects to instruct & delight" (CW 23:126).1 The "first lecture" is most [End Page 87] likely a reference to the first address Frye gave at Princeton in 1954. Invited by E. D. H. Johnson of the Special Programs in Humanities at Princeton to institute a new series, known as the Class of 1932 Lectures, Frye gave four talks at Princeton in 1954: "The Critic and His Public," "Symbols of Fact and Fiction," "The Language of Poetry," and "Myth and Society" (Ayre 244). In his preface to Anatomy of Criticism, he notes that much of the substance of the book came from his Princeton lectures. In any event, Frye seems intent on exploring the connection between Longinus' emphasis on the sublime process and the Aristotelian "aesthetic" approach. The opposition between "convention" and "rhetorical relation" is apparently an opposition between final and instrumental value: the aesthetic needs no justification beyond itself, whereas rhetoric is concerned with the ways and means of instruction and delight. The reference to Hulme seems to be that his call for formal restraint and concrete imagery ("dry hardness"), along with his attacks on Romanticism, means he is a "classicist" and does not belong to the Longinian camp. The notebook entry on "the first lecture" suggests that in his thinking about the beginning of the Anatomy Frye has in mind two approaches the critic might take to literature, one emphasizing process and the other product. And in fact this opposition turns up at the end of the Anatomy's first essay where Frye expands on the meaning of the terms "fictional" and "thematic" in his theory of modes. A "fictional" work for Frye is one that has internal characters, as in novels, epics, and plays. A "thematic" work is one in which there are no characters involved except the author and the reader, as in lyrics and essays, or in which the internal characters are subordinated to the writer's argument, as in allegories and parables. The foundational category in the first essay is Aristotle's ethos, or, rather, Frye's expansion of this term: even though the meaning of "character" in "fictional" works differs from its meaning in "thematic" works, ethos is the constant term in both. Here is the passage at the end of the first essay: The difference in emphasis that we have described as fictional and thematic corresponds to a distinction between two views of literature that has run all through the history of criticism. These two views are the aesthetic and the creative, the Aristotelian and the Longinian, the view of literature as product and the view of literature as process. For Aristotle, the poem is a techne or aesthetic artefact: he is, as a critic, mainly interested in the more objective fictional forms, and his central conception is catharsis. Catharsis implies the detachment of the spectator, both from the work of art itself and from the author. The [End Page 88] phrase "aesthetic distance" is generally accepted now in criticism, but it is almost a tautology: wherever there is aesthetic apprehension there is emotional and intellectual detachment. The principles of catharsis in other fictional forms than tragedy, such as comedy or satire, were not worked out by Aristotle...

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