Epic Theory in Frye's Anatomy of Criticism
Northrop Frye's Classic Helps Define Epic Genre in Narrative Art
Aug 8, 2009
Northrop Frye’s classic text The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is about the underlying systematization of literary criticism as a whole. Part of that system is the epic, a genre which, though popular in antiquity, has been hard for critics to pin down in modern literature.
While Frye has much to say about the epics of the Western tradition, he does not delve too deeply into the problems of epic criticism. However, implicit in his work is a wide-ranging view of what exactly the epic is. This view can be seen as a mid-twentieth-century critical trend.
Epic Genre Criticism up to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism
Frye's Anatomy of Criticism recognizes that the way the epic has been defined since antiquity – as, roughly, a long heroic poem – has long been problematic.
“We complained in our introduction,” Frye writes, “that the theory of genres was an undeveloped subject in criticism. We have the three generic terms drama, epic, and lyric, derived from the Greeks, but we use the latter two chiefly as jargon or trade slang for long and short (or shorter) poems respectively” (246).
For Northrop Frye, genres in literary criticism should be used to clarify "traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them” (247-48). Genres should not be rigid, and recognize the fluidity of different kinds of literary expression.
Northrop Frye's Theory of the Epic Genre
Frye posits that the basic and ideal “genre” of the epic’s transmission is from a reciter to an audience. Even epics that, in practice, were immediately written down and not always read aloud, such as the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, nevertheless assume this ideal.
Frye subordinates the epic “proper” – heroic poetry – to what he calls the “Encyclopaedic form,” an all-encompassing type of literary work. With this theory, Frye can reconcile the Bible with the Iliad and Odyssey, which fellow critic Erich Auerbach, in his Mimesis (1953), offhandedly says are epic (7, 11), but does not go on to explain how.
Northrop Frye's Theory of Modes
But more interesting than Northrop Frye’s theory of genres when discussing epic is his theory of modes, because Frye's definition of genre is concerned more with the manner in which a work is presented. Frye outlines how a fiction's mode can be classified by “the hero’s power of action,” and the third of five classifications he presents runs as follows:
"If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature. This is the hero of the high mimetic mode [Frye’s italics], of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind" in the Poetics. (33-34)
Can Anatomy of Criticism Help Define the Epic?
Northrop Frye's theories of genre and mode present a way to define the epic that does not shackle itself to verse, as had many critical definitions which had come before. War and Peace, for instance, can be an “epic novel," even though Tolstoy's masterpiece is in prose.
At the same time, the implications for non-literary narrative are also fascinating, though Anatomy of Criticism does not bring them up. Frye's "high mimetic mode" offers a way of understanding how a film or even an opera can be called "epic" as well.
Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. ISBN-13: 978-0691069999.
Erich Auerbach. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. ISBN-13: 978-0691113364.
 |
 |
