Aristotle is Frye’s most frequent interlocutor in Anatomy of Criticism. Frye begins his discussion of modes with Aristotle, and so, too, does he consider Aristotle as a starting point in his discussion of genre. “We discover that the critical theory of genres is stuck precisely where Aristotle left it,” Frye announces in the “Polemical Introduction.” This is a problem because, according to Frye, “the Greeks hardly needed to develop a classification of prose forms. We do, but have never done so.” Later, he elaborates, “The Greeks gave us the names of three of our four genres: they did not give us a word for the genre that addresses a reader through a book, and naturally we have not invented one of our own.”
Aristotle is a giant in genre criticism, but Frye’s reading of him is actually selective and occasionally wrong. Frye’s main source is Aristotle’s Poetics, an unfinished work of aesthetic theory that focused primarily on the study of tragedy. Mieke Bal has remarked that every theorist of genre turns to the Poetics, so that “almost any position [in the theory of genre] can be based on Aristotelianism” (171). What Frye principally derives is the “three of our four genres,” which he calls drama, lyric, and tragedy. But, surprisingly, this three-part scheme is actually no where to be found in the Poetics. Gerard Genette, in a stunning study from the 1990s called The Architext, shows that a division of genre into three forms, attributed without citation to Aristotle or at least the Greeks by seemingly everyone including Frye, was actually invented in the Renaissance, almost two millennia later!
What Aristotle does discuss in the opening paragraphs of the Poetics is a distinction among these forms: “Epic poetry and Tragedy, as also Comedy, Dithyrambic poetry, and most flute-playing and lyre-playing” (1455). This is quite a list of objects, cutting across the different levels of Frye’s analysis. Tragedy and comedy, for instance, would be examples of “mythoi” in Frye’s formulation, which are not the same as genre. Poetry, on the other hand, would be a kind of genre, if it is what Frye means by “lyrics.” This is because, in Frye’s account, genres have to do with how a text is primarily presented (whether out loud, in a book, on stage, etc.) and “mythoi” have to do with the moods a text invokes.
For Aristotle, in contrast, there are these three ways of distinguishing the items in his list: “But at the same time they are different from one another in three ways, either by a difference of kind in their means or by differences in the objects or in the manner of their imitations” (1455). The last way, “manner,” seems to correspond to what Frye says about “radicals of presentation”: the way in which a text is presented, which is how to identify genres. But where to fit “means” and “objects,” which in Aristotle correspond to the rhythm of a text and what a text is about? These cannot be attributed to, say, the modes, symbols, or myth that comprise Frye’s other three chapters.
Frye clearly had a lot of respect for Aristotle, but he is using a different set of rules and objects than Aristotle used, and he departs in fundamental ways in the kind of analysis he performs. It is not the case that Aristotle provided the three genres Frye thinks he is revising. Rather, Aristotle was working with a chaotic and unordered list of objects that cut across genre, symbol, and myth. Frye perhaps gives Aristotle too much credit for having invented genre, not to mention providing three out of four of them. Perhaps part of the innovation on Frye’s account is providing a more strictly hierarchical set of literary terms altogether. That way, we not only add a genre, but have a firmer foundation on which to argue what genre even is, in contrast to symbols, modes, and myths.
