September 8, 2004
Northrop Frye: quotes on criticism
Last week a friend asked me why I chose to be a critic. The answer I provided her then was insufficient, and thinking about the question some more—the start of the new season is always a good time for this kind of reflection, just ask Jerry Saltz (see his "Where are we now?"-type essays from 2003, 2002, 2001, and 2000)—I returned to the "Polemical Introduction" to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, one of my favorite discourses on the subject. Here are some select quotes:
"There is no real correlation either way between the merits of art and its public reception. [...] A public that tries to do without criticism, and asserts that it knows what it wants or likes, brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory. [...] To defend the right of criticism to exist at all, therefore, it to assume that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge existing in its own right, with some measure of independents from the art it deals with."
"The first thing the literary critic has to do is to read literature, to make an inductive survey of his own field and let his critical principles shape themselves solely out of his knowledge of that field. Critical principles cannot be taken over ready-made from theology, philosophy, politics, science, or any combination of these."
"Literature is not a subject of study, but an object of study.... Criticism...is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom: a verbal imitation of a human productive power which in itself does not speak."
I think substituting "visual art" for "literature" works fairly well with this essay, which was originally published in 1957. Here are earlier quotes on the subject that I've posted to the site: Arthur Krystal on literary criticism and Helen Molesworth on art criticism.