Summary of Chapter 4
The final essay of Anatomy of Criticism is on “Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres.” This is the point Frye has been building up to the whole time, ever since his complaint in the Introduction that genre criticism has not progressed since Aristotle. The ambition of this chapter is to provide a foundation for understanding genres through the modern period. But Frye begins by going back to the ancient Greeks, who, according to Frye, offered three genres: drama, epic, and lyric. The insight provided by the Greeks is that genres have to do with the form of presentation. Dramas are acted, epics are spoken, and lyrics are chanted or sung. To Frye, this is what makes the study of genres “rhetorical criticism”: it is the study of the rhetoric, or presentation, of texts. Different genres are to be distinguished according to the “radical of presentation.” “Radical” means fundamental, so what Frye is saying is that genres are defined by the fundamental form of presentation they take. A drama can eventually be printed on a page, for instance, but it is fundamentally a genre intended to be acted on stage. Performance is its radical of presentation.
If genres are categorized in this way, Frye says, there must be four genres, instead of the three offered by the Greeks. Drama, we have suggested, is one of them. Frye also retains the lyric from the Greeks, and its radical of presentation is a hypothetical dialogue between “I” and “thou.” That’s because lyrics are fundamentally addressed to another individual, such as a lover, muse, or God. Frye revises the Greek “epic” into a broader genre he calls “epos.” Epos is the genre of works that are fundamentally spoken out loud. This includes classic epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey, but it would also include poems meant to be recited out loud even if not so "epic" in length or subject matter. The fourth genre, the one Frye says the Greeks did not have a term for, is fiction. This is the genre of the printed page: works of literature that are fundamentally meant to be read in a book. In this genre Frye includes, for instance, all the modern novels.
Four genres, each defined by their form of presentation: acted dramas, spoken epos, printed fiction, and intimately addressed lyrics. As in previous chapters, Frye then goes on to add more descriptions to each of the genres and to offer some sense of their respective histories. In particular, he fills in the typical relation of the poet or author to each genre, the relation of the audience, the genre’s typical subject or what it tries to represent, and its typical rhythm. What is important is how a category essentially defined by one attribute—the radical of representation—takes on other attributes. In turn, the radical of representation facilitates connections between different attributes, so that we can see how a genre also refers to how different kinds of audience, subject, and rhythm are brought together.
In a drama, the poet is hidden from the audience, because the poet wrote the lines but does not perform them; the actors do. The audience is a group of people assembled to watch the drama. What a drama typically represents is the outer world of sound and imagery, and its rhythm tends to be “decorous,” which means it is determined by the play itself. In other words, the dramatic rhythm is created to be appropriate to the subject matter.
In epos, by contrast, the rhythm of is metrical, which means it has some regularity and repetition. The subject matter of epos is usually action; the poet, rather than actors, is the performer, speaking the poem; but the audience is still similar to a drama: it is a group of people listening to the poet speak.
In fiction, on the other hand, the poet is completely absent. You read the book, rather than listening to the poet. And that means that the audience of a fiction is no longer a group like it is for drama or epos. Instead, the audience is a single reader. What fictions represent, Frye says, is assertion, which means it imitates the form of an argument. Its rhythm, in turn, is continuous and logical, unfolding the logical interconnections of a plot.
The lyric, finally, represents the inward thoughts and feelings of the poet, and its rhythm is therefore more subjective or “oracular,” working through associations of images rather than a logical connection of events. Because a lyric is a poet addressing someone else, for instance God or a lover, its audience is never addressed by the poem. We are never ourselves God or the lover. Instead, it is like the poet has his back to the audience, and the audience simply eavesdrops on what he is saying.
Perhaps the most widely cited section of this chapter—and of The Anatomy of Criticism as a whole—is Frye’s discussion of the different types of fiction, the genre of the printed page. We tend to think of novels when we think of fiction, but Frye shows how the novel is only one type of fiction. In order to do so, he imagines two different variables. The first is the variable of personal/intellectual. Some fictions are more about people and some fictions are more about ideas. Notice this is similar to the distinction Frye made in the First Essay between “fictional” and “thematic” forms. But now, we are talking about a distinction within fiction as a genre. The second variable Frye discusses is extroverted/introverted, which refers to whether a fiction is more objective or more subjective. If a fiction is primarily interested in the feelings of characters, it is introverted, whereas if it is more interested in a social or physical world, it is extroverted.
That means there are four main subgenres of fiction. Fictions that are introverted and personal are called “Romance.” In this, Frye includes works such as Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Fictions that are introverted and intellectual are called “Confession.” Here, Frye includes works classically called Confessions, such as those by Augustine and Rousseau. Fictions that are extroverted and intellectual are called “Anatomy.” This would include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which explores a social world, but more to represent ideas than to explore people themselves. Finally, fictions that are personal and extroverted—about people but with an eye to a wider, objective social world—are the ones we should call “Novel.” Classic examples include the novels of Tom Fielding, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen.
Having discussed four primary subgenres of fiction, Frye acknowledges that many works of fiction are hybrids, belonging to more than one category. Moby Dick is both a romance and an anatomy, for instance. Most interestingly, James Joyce’s Ulysses, according to Frye, is all of the above: it is at the same time a novel, a romance, a confession, and an anatomy. What makes it all four is that, in the text, all of them are “of practically equal importance, and are essential to one another.” That means this isn’t just a random mosaic of different conventions, but a fully integrated form in which different conventions come together.
Analysis of Chapter 4
Reading this chapter, there is a sense that this is what Frye has been building up to throughout Anatomy of Criticism. Notice the general form: Frye started with modes, which are internal to a work, then moved onto symbols, which appear across multiple works, then myths, which are collections of symbols, and now genres, which seem to be the largest category of literature. Frye has moved from small to large, something he does within each chapter, too. And, most importantly, he finally returns to the point made in the Introduction that genre criticism has not advanced since Aristotle. This is Frye’s chance to shine, moving the ancients into the modern period.
As in previous chapters, Frye has a similar method: he looks for a basic principle and then creates a taxonomy through it. Here, the principle is the “radical of presentation.” They key is the “radical.” In today’s world, it seems that any work of literature can be presented in multiple media. A story might first be printed, then adapted into a musical, then adapted into a film. But by pointing to the “radical,” Frye can cut through this messy media landscape and look just at the original or originally intended form of presentation. This is classic Frye: reducing complexity in order to make a small number of categories. Then, Frye can make things more complicated again: in this instance, going on to explore the different rhythms, subject matter, audience, and speaker of each genre.
It is important that Frye’s four genres form a taxonomy rather than what some would call a typology. A typology is a closed system; once it is formed, there can be no more categories added. A taxonomy is an open system. Think of a taxonomy of insects; scientists are always discovering new insects, and therefore adding new categories, because a taxonomy is open to that kind of addition. Theoretically, since Frye defines genres according to the radical of presentation, one could keep adding genres if one discovered more radicals of presentation. Are there new genres in the age of the television, and now the Internet? Is Twitter a different form of presentation than other written forms before it? These are open questions that contemporary genre theorists actively debate.
Although Frye’s genre system is a taxonomy, some of his other systems seem to be more like typologies. For instance, the four subgenres of fiction are created by adopting two variables—introverted/extroverted and personal/intellectual—and then multiplying them by one another to get four possibilities. This is different from the way Frye got his four genres, because they are logically deduced rather than inductively discovered. That being the case, we might ask what legitimates the adoption of these particularly variables? As Christine Brooke-Rose argues, they aren’t a perfectly logical set of pairs (146). Introverted and extroverted are contradictory, like positive and negative or light and dark. That makes them a closed pair: you can’t add a third term. But personal and intellectual are not contradictory in the same way. They’re more like colors: you can have red and blue, for instance, but that still leaves room for yellow and green. The system seems to be closed but is logically open. What does that do to Frye’s thinking about types of fiction? Could there be more kinds of fiction? Or has he picked the wrong criteria for differentiating fictions?
This chapter raises more questions than it answers, in other words. But perhaps that is part of the point. In the Polemical Introduction, Frye said these essays were indeed “essays,” in the classical sense of attempts, rather than final statements. Frye has managed to amass an incredible amount of information and provide a huge tool kit for the study of literature. But that doesn’t mean this is a final statement. Indeed, if the whole point of having a tool kit is that others can now study literature as well, Frye seems to invite students to take up the mantle. There remain many questions, both historical and theoretical, that the literary critic has left to answer. Anatomy of Criticism aims simply to provide a common vocabulary with which these critics can begin to write those answers.
