Summary of Chapter 2
The “Second Essay” of The Anatomy of Criticism is “Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols.” In the “Polemical Introduction,” Frye defines ethical criticism as “consciousness of the presence of society.” He goes on to say that ethical criticism is also about how art communicates from a past society to a present society. Given that this chapter on ethical criticism is subtitled “Theory of Symbols,” we can already guess that it is symbols, for Frye, that relate to “the presence of society” and do this work of communicating between societies. As in the previous essay, the task of this essay is then to break down symbols into their different kinds. Frye offers five: motif, sign, image, archetype, and monad. Each belongs to what Frye calls a “phase” of symbolism: literal, descriptive, formal, mythical, and anagogic, respectively.
The motif is the “literal” symbol. By this, Frye refers to what a symbol means in context, or how words take on meaning in relation to one another. This symbolism is “centripetal,” meaning it comes into itself. It enjoys the rhythms of its own language instead of referring to meanings outside the text. Think about how a string of words sounds rather than what they represent or mean. In contrast, the sign, or “descriptive” symbol, is centrifugal, referring to things outside the text. When I describe a tree, I am describing something that is outside the text: trees. Thus, a sign does not belong to the text, but to the conventions we have for talking about and naming our world.
Different kinds of criticism are inspired by attention to different phases of symbolism. If you’re a literal critic, you’re interested in motifs, or the rhythm of language itself. This corresponds, in turn, to what we have come to call New Criticism: criticism interested in the work of literature as an autonomous work of art, divorced from its creator, society, and history. You study only the text. In contrast, if you are a descriptive critic, you’re interested in signs, or how a text refers to people and things outside of itself. That means you’re more likely to do historical and biographical criticism, connecting a text to its author or the society to which the author belonged or the historical period in which the author wrote.
The same can be said of the other phases of symbolism: each has a specific kind of symbol, and each has a specific way of doing criticism associated with it. The image is the symbol of the formal phase. An image does not simply refer to something in the world. That’s the difference between a tree as a sign and a tree as an image. When an image, a tree invokes particular feelings, like hope and a sense of renewal. As an image, it does not simply describe a tree, referring to trees in the real world. Instead, it manipulates the tone and feeling of a text. The kind of interpretation associated with imagery is allegorical criticism, providing interpretations of a text in terms of what secret meanings it has. After all, you have to interpret the tree in order to see that it is not just a tree.
The archetype is the symbol of the mythical phase. This is how symbolism operates in multiple works of art. For instance, the tree as an archetype of giving life occurs in multiple works of literature in the West, from the Book of Genesis to Johnny Appleseed. Considering the tree as an archetype is considering how it functions across multiple texts, drawing connections among them. In turn, this phase of symbolism is associated with “archetypal criticism.” That means criticism that deals with conventions, genres, and traditions in literature. Here, we are interested in categories that transcend any one text. Lots of texts have trees as symbol; that’s what makes the tree an archetype.
Finally, there is the anagogic phase, whose symbol is the monad. “Anagogic” refers to a spiritual or mystical interpretation, and “monad” refers to the totality of all beings, or everything in one thing. Thus, we continue to move higher and higher in a hierarchy; we started with the text by itself in the motif, through to genres of texts in archetypes and now the whole universe in the monad. What Frye really means is something like “universal meaning.” This is the realm of human nature. Instead of a criticism of genres, we have a criticism of human desires, the aspirations of society, and the progress of man. And there are also the universal human stories of good versus evil and man versus nature.
To recap: five symbolic phases (literal, descriptive, formal, mythical, and anagogic) corresponding to five types of symbols (motif, sign, image, archetype, and monad) and five types of literary criticism (textual, historical, interpretive, conventional/generic, and spiritual/religious). This is the core of the chapter. But along the way, Frye also glues on other categories. Thus, the literal, descriptive, formal, mythical, and anagogic also have parallels to the five modes from the previous chapter: ironic, low mimetic, high mimetic, romantic, and mythic. Once again, we move from low to high, from inferior to divine. Finally, each symbolic phase also has an associated kind of art. For instance, the descriptive phase, dealing with signs of the real world, is associated with realism and naturalism. The anagogic phase, dealing with universal themes, is associated with biblical scripture.
Analysis of Chapter 2
This chapter can prove to be a difficult one. Frye starts by talking about something that seems familiar—symbolism—but quickly suggests we are dealing with something more complicated than what we expected. So, too, does Frye offer familiar terms, like a motif, and provide unfamiliar definitions. This is an effect of what Frye is trying to accomplish in Anatomy of Criticism as a whole. Frye want to give us a toolkit for reading literature, and that means defining and re-defining terms that are familiar to us. At the same time, he wants to provide a logical system of literature, which means he has to derive concepts even if they seem counterintuitive. In other words, he doesn’t start with a word like “motif” and then give us a definition. Instead, he starts by deriving different kinds of symbolism, and motif is the name he provides once he has identified a part in his system that needs a name.
Faced with this uncharted territory, the key to reading Frye is to let the internal logic of his system—rather than our previous understandings of the words he is using—be our initial guide. In the previous chapter, for instance, Frye said he was going to offer a system of modes, which go from stories in which characters are the most powerful to stories in which they are the least. The names he gives to different parts of this system—from mythic to romantic down to ironic—don’t really have that much to do with myths, romances, or irony. What matters is the position these names designate in a gradient of power. Once we understand the gradient or system Frye is trying to describe, it is easier to understand the names he gives to the positions within that system.
In this chapter, the system is symbolism. A symbol can be virtually anything in Frye’s formulation: anything that a literary critic isolates to study. So right away we know we have to discard any preconceived understanding of what a symbol is. The system that Frye proceeds to fill in is a gradient of what something in a literary work refers to. He goes from the most internally focused to the maximally outwardly focused. Thus, the different levels of symbolism move from a symbol that refers only to itself all the way to a symbol that refers to the entirety of human nature and the cosmos. A “motif” is the name for the smallest, and a “monad” is the name for the largest. Again, we cannot understand what Frye means by motif simply by understanding the world alone. We have to instead think of motif as the first phase of a larger system, moving from smallest to largest.
As in the previous chapter, it is also important to see these different phases of symbolism as not being mutually exclusive. In the previous chapter, we saw how the fictional and thematic are “aspects” of literature, rather than mutually exclusive categories. Similarly, a symbol can have different aspects, ranging from the literal to the descriptive all the way to the most expansive, which is the anagogic. A “tree” can be both a word with a sound, a sign of trees in the real world, or a symbol of birth and truth and human goodness. What matters is the level of symbolism on which we consider the tree. In this chapter, Frye is asking us to zoom in and zoom out. That is the primary movement of literary criticism here.
As mentioned in the summary, this chapter is about “ethical criticism,” by which Frye means criticism dealing with society and social context. This itself is a kind of zooming in and zooming out. On the one hand, symbolism asks us to zoom out from a work of literature in order to observe patterns in multiple works of literature. On the other hand, symbolism asks us to zoom in, to see how within a work of literature there are symbols that refer to a larger society and humanity. Ethical criticism is a task of matching the small and the large, to see both how a work of literature is in society and to see how society is in a work of literature.
