Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology

by Northrop Frye

In this outstanding collection of sixteen essays, the world-renowned critic and scholar discusses various works in the central tradition of English mythopoeic poetry, paying particular attention to the centrality of Romanticism.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Criticism, Poetry, Essays, Literature, Mythology

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Born in Quebec but raised in New Brunswick, Frye studied at the University of Toronto and Victoria University. He was ordained to the ministry of the United Church of Canada and studied at Oxford before returning to UofT.

His first book, Fearful Symmetry, was published in 1947 to international acclaim. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was to deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on, among others, Harold Bloom and Margaret Atwood.

In 1974-1975 Frye was the Norton professor at Harvard University.

Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986 he married Elizabeth Brown. He died in 1991 and was interred in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, Ontario. The Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College at the University of Toronto was named in his honour.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop...

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books that changes how you see something. It sounds trite and commonplace; people are always claiming that the way they see something has been changed. But how often is it really true? How often do you really see things in a completely new way? Northrop Frye has made me see literature and literary criticism in a new way here. (And his ideas can also be applied to music and the visual arts.)

(Disclaimer: I was never a student of literature. Frye's ideas may be old hat to you! For all I know, Frye's ideas have been discredited. I don't keep up.)

I don't really know what "fables of identity" means. The book is a collection of previously published writings on topics both general ("the archetypes of literature") and specific (Emily Dickinson). I think you can sum up the book with his sentence "Literary shape cannot come from life; it comes only from literary tradition, and so ultimately from myth." (This is from the essay "Myth, Fiction, and Displacement.") He begins his essay on Wallace Stevens with the observation that "Wallace Stevens was a poet for whom the theory and the practice of poetry were inseparable." This sounds like a fairly commonplace idea, except that it's the crux of Frye's vision of literature. Frye is especially interested in Stevens because Stevens understands that "the only ideas the poet can deal with are those directly involved with, and implied by, his own writing: that, in short, [here he is quoting Stevens] "Poetry is the subject of the poem."

I loved the way the book shocked me. It was iconoclastic. For the poet/writer, experience counts for little or nothing, Frye says. (Yet, "write what you know" became a literary commandment at some point.) "...life or experience cannot be the formal cause of art; the impulse to give a literary shape to something can only come from previous contact with literature." While Wordsworth claimed to be "letting nature and experience be his teacher" in the poems of the Lyrical Ballads, says Frye, don't be fooled. This claim itself is a literary convention. "The efficient cause of a poem may be the poet; its material cause may be nature, life, reality, experience, or whatever is being shaped. But its formal cause, the literary shape itself, is inside poetry, poetry being, not a simple aggregate of poems, but a body of forms and categories to which every new poem attaches itself somewhere." Thus back to Stevens: "Poetry is the subject of the poem."

Frye strips away the pejorative associated with conventional. Literature is conventions. After you read this book you will wonder what "unconventional" even means.

I loved the way Frye wrote about the reverberations between works of literature, the way "every literary work catches the echoes of all other works of its type in literature, and so ripples out into the rest of literature and thence into life..." (The sentence ends with him stating that this is often, wrongly, called allegory.) I've long thought of music exactly the same way. Every "classical" piece of music refers to every other classical piece of music. They're enmeshed in a giant web, across centuries and geographies, all speaking to each other.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another solid collection by a great critic. I liked particularly the essays on Spencer, Byron, Emily Dickinson and William Yeats. I was less impressed by his pieces on Milton, Joyce and Shakespeare.
Taken as an ensemble, the essays reiterate Frye's thesis that the mission of English Literature is to retell the great story of the Bible; that is to say, that man fell from grace in the Garden of Eden, was redeemed by Christ on the cross and now awaits the apocalypse.
In the essay on Byron, Frye argues that Byron marks a great turning point in literature. Spencer, Milton and Blake assumed the existence of a four-level divine hierarchy with God on top, man on the next rung, followed by physical nature and finally sin. Byron simply felt that man was a product of the physical energy of nature.
In the essay on Yeats, Frye also laments the disappearance of a Christian worldview from western civilization following the French Revolution. He argues that the 19th century was spent looking for a new symbolic tradition. Many English writers made the mistake of looking for it in the Roman Catholic tradition. Swinburne drew from pagan mythology while Wagner looked for a symbolic system in the German nation. Yeats in the 20th century then tried to construct a symbolic language using concepts from popular occultism most notably from Mme. Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine." Thus deep into an erroneous worldview, English writers began to admire leaders like Mussolini and Hitler.
"Fables of Identity" would be an excellent book to read following Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism" and the "Great Code". For the reader unfamiliar with these two works, however, it will be largely incomprehensible.

[Adam Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a lit geek, admittedly so; more particularly, I enjoy reading about how to read literature. Which is why I read books like this one by Canadian Lutheran cleric and literary theorist Northrop Frye. I’m a real sucker for anything that will advance the discussion of literary typology and mythic archetypes. When I saw that a number of the essays in this book addressed just that very thing, I got a used copy to see if it would be helpful.

Full disclosure: I did not read the whole book. Fables of Identity is a collection of essays and some of them were on subjects I had no interest in, like the work of Lord Byron or Emily Dickinson or (dear God, no!) James Joyce. I might return to these essays at some later point if and when they prove themselves relevant to something I’m working on. Otherwise, life is just too short (and there are too many books) to spend slogging through everything.

Thus, this review covers chapters 1-8, 11, and 14, ranging from “The Archetypes of Literature” to “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism.” These selected essays were perfectly suited for addressing some ways of reading literature as educated and informed readers and critics. For example, in the essay “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas,” Frye addresses the central issue which Biblical critics have yet failed to understand:

The next principle is that the provisional hypothesis which we must adopt for the study of every poem is that that poem is a unity. If, after careful and repeated testing, we are forced to conclude that it [a work of literature] is not a unity, then we must abandon the hypothesis and look for the reasons it is not. A good deal of bad criticism of Lycidas has resulted from not making enough initial effort to understand the unity of the poem. To talk of “digressions” in Lycidas is a typical consequence of a mistaken critical method, of backing into the poem the wrong way round. (p. 123).

In “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” Frye speaks of the causes of artistic inspiration:
The imaginative or creative force in the ind is what has produced everything that we call culture and civilization. It is the power of transforming a sub-human physical world in a world with human shape and meaning, a world not of rocks and trees, but of cities and gardens, not an environment but a home. The drive behind it we may call desire, a desire which has nothing to do with biological needs and wants of psychological theory, but is rather the impulse toward what Aristotle calls telos, realizing the form that one potentially has. (p. 152)

One of the best emphases Frye has in the book is emphasizing that symbolism is not an ill-defined mishmash, but a system of types and archetypes and themes. In “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” he writes,

just as the words of a language are a set of verbal conventions, so the imagery of poetry is a set of symbolic conventions. This set of symbolic conventions differs from a symbolic system, such as a religion or a metaphysic, in being concerned, not with a content, but with a mode of apprehension. . . . Just as the teacher of a language is a grammarian, so one of the functions of the literary critic is to be a grammarian of imagery . . . (p. 218).

In fact, it is the loss of this garmmar of imagery that has contributed to the decline in artistic quality and the reader’s ability to understand works of previous eras that made use of this grammar of imagery. Frye writes,

when critics forgot how to teach the language of poetic imagery the poets forgot how to use it . . . . We shall never truly fully understand the nineteenth century until we realize how hampered its poets were by the lack of a coherent tradition of criticism which would have organized the language of poetic symbolism for them, (p. 220).

This goes double for the twentieth (and twenty-first) century in which symbolism seems to have been eroded to the point which each work, if it has symbolism at all, has a scattershot approach to them and not a cohesive tradition of them.

Overall, the book was technical, perhaps dense, but always full of fresh insight.

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magisterial in nature and over far too early, "Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology" by esteemed Canadian critic Northrop Frye is a foray into the world of Archetypal criticism, a movement which, it seems to me, does much to explain the nature of literature, and the world, to its viewers. This work, broken up into three distinct segments, consists of Part I, four chapters on the categories of this style of critique; Part II, this criticism as applied to artists as diverse as Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, and Lord Byron; and Part III, concerning Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, and Joyce. And all along our reading journey (this book too is a 'quest,' as Frye points out here), we encounter the rigorous thought of Frye, twinned with his fluid and fluent prose stylings, that he is so well known for. One finds oneself simultaneously entertained and instructed, oh so delightfully, by Frye's efforts, so much so that one finds oneself immeasurably mournful on completing this wonderful book of criticism. To describe this book as fulfilling all the requirements of a 'good' read would be to denigrate it deeply. It is, in fact, one of the best books on the subject matter, literature and its 'discontents,' in the history of the genre. So, while there is some repetitiveness of focus compared to his other works of criticism (Blake's mythology is a great favorite of his), this work is still well worth the effort of reading due to its salience of focus and its ease of comprehensibility. This is truly a fine book of criticism, and is a 'must read' for those interested in criticism and its nature!

[Prisoner 071053]

Got this for my birthday too.