From Jim Nohrnberg: FOOTNOTE TO FORMER POSTING CITING 
N.FRYE ON TASTE:

Thinking of Tolkien and World Wars I & II reminds me of 
W.P. Ker on Beowulf
(on the waves of chaos beating upon the dykes of the 
world) and likewise of
Oswald Spengler. We cannot count the Louis Montrose who 
said that since
"the human subject is always already inscribed in 
ideology" poet and critic
are alike "an effect rather than a source of culture," 
among the offspring,
as opposed to the students, of Northrop Frye, yet New 
Historicists are
likewise honorary Spenglerians, in possession of Frye's 
"'great intuition
[...] of every historical phenomenon being symbolic of 
every other
phenomenon contemporary with it' (NoteBooks 44, 54)" 
(Robert Denham, et
al., in Re-Reading Frye 142). Yet authors like Tolkien -- 
or even Terry
Pratchit -- are surely sources as well as effects of at 
least their
respective literary cultures (especially if the cinema and 
Barnes and Noble
bookstores can be included here). You cannot understand a 
work of
literature without understanding its context, as C.S. 
Lewis argued in
Leavis' Cambridge, or its readers' nervous and affective 
systems, as I.A.
Richards' discovery and exposition of "stock responses" 
seemed to show
(Practical Criticism, 1929). But neither, it seems, can 
you divide
literature into all the social contexts and interpretive 
communities that
have created it without a appreciable literary remainder, 
the fiction that
survives the veriest pulp. "Frye's separation of 'culture' 
from 'social
conditions' suggests that for him literature exists apart 
from the
sociopolitical and that 'social' means other than 
relationships of power.
When Frye defines a major literary work as 'a place in 
which the whole
cultural history of the nation that produced it comes into 
focus'
(E[ducated]I[magination], 123), the term, 'the whole 
cultural history of
the nation,' means something entirely different from the 
'historically
specific sociopolitical dimension' of the poet and 
therefore of his work"
-- in the very carefully chosen words of Prof. Hamilton, 
writing an edited
volume called Re-Reading Frye (107-08), from which my 
citation of Montrose
is also taken. Even a New Criticism leader like I.A. 
Richards -- and
likewise the later William Empson -- did not disavow the 
historical
specificity in question. A deterministic New Historicism 
cannot, however,
grant the major literary work control over its own 
conditions, or the
capacity to re-organize and re-tool them. But in Frye's 
thinking, the poet
could transcend such conditions by attaching the literary 
work to
traditions and conventions and metaphoric structures above 
and beyond them.
This metaphysical skyhook was often a myth--latent or 
manifest--which the
poet re-makes to keep it news. Frye thus challenged the 
Old Historicist
notion of a literary work as a mere reflection of the 
history of ideas
contemporary with it, in which it was "rooted." Yet he 
hardly subscribed
to New Historicist notions of texts as inextricably 
"embedded" and as it
were complicitous in (and enslaved by) historical 
conditions (RF 108); for
then their arguments could never be original or perceptive 
or able to take
a disinterested or reconstructive view of a root metaphor. 
(Carlyle did
this in Sartor Resartus, where he had Swift's Tale of Tub 
before him: but
how much room is there in the "embedded" conception--the 
perjured cultural
producer witlessly in bed with power and patronage--for a 
Swift? --Or for
any comparable prophet, visionary, projector, utopian, or 
any revelation of
the world or any clairvoyant reaction to it, or even for 
the critic
himself? But if literature is "rooted" in an imaginatively 
free mythology
as much as an ideologically "bound" one, then it declines 
from the one as
much as it inclines towards the other.
The watchwords in Frye's own "archetypal" approach to 
literature
were convention, tradition, and genre, as much as myth and 
symbol, but all
the terms suggest his demand for constants in teaching 
literary criticism
as a discipline, as opposed to a parade of rhetoricized 
positions or
passing intellectual fashions. Péter Pásztor, in the same 
Re-Reading Frye
volume as quoted from above, cites an unsympathetic paper 
of the Hungarion
Marxist Zsolt Virágos, who argues that "seeing myths in 
works of art is
justified, but seeing myths as the source of works of art, 
as myth critics
invariably do, lacks all foundation" (RF 129). But Frye 
does not always
see myths as the source of works of art, any more than he 
sees the
"collective unconscious" as the source of myths. Rather, 
he sees myth as
"in-formation"--a model for creating structure, symbolism, 
metaphors, and
conventions for stories and plots, and a key to their 
workings or meanings.
Marxist critics invariably view social conditioning in the 
same way as myth
critics, "as the source of works of art," and raise a 
similar objection of
misplaced consequentiality: the post hoc ergo propter hoc 
fallacy. I
don't think Frye, as the student of Blake, is very likely 
to make that
mistake. ("Rousseau, Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein," 
Frye asserts,
"'have changed our mythology'" [RF 114]: we have not 
changed theirs. St.
Francis hearkens to a voice that causes him to break with 
his social
conditioning, not reproduce it. Shaw makes Saint Joan a 
harbinger of
female self-determination, Reformation martyrdom, and a 
people's claim to
its own national sovereignty. His Joan may be being read 
as symptom, but
surely also also as a prophetic harbinger and a voice 
crying in the
wilderness.)
In The Modern Century (1967) Frye suggested that the 
complex
relation of myth to "thought" was morphological: "the myth 
of the fall
becomes the informing idea of Gibbon's history of Rome, or 
the myth of
sleeping beauty Rousseau's buried society of nature and 
reason" (106). He
once compared Spenser's knights going out on quests to 
Humanist scholars
uncovering and recovering Classical texts in and from 
monastary libraries.
Against such works as Paul Radin's proto- Levi-Straussian 
Primitive Man as
Philosopher, Frye might have said that the terms are quite 
reversible --
for if philosophers, like "natives," are less than whollly 
aware of their
own metaphors, then ideology dissimulates myth as much as 
the other way
'round. For an example: Kant says, "We assume ourselves to 
be free in the
order of efficient caues so that we may conceive ouselves 
to be subject to
moral laws int he order of ens. Then we consider ourselves 
as subject to
these laws because we have conferred upon ourselves 
freedom of will.
Freedom and law-making of will are both autonomous and are 
therefore
correlative concepts" (Metaphysical Foundations of Morals, 
III). This
sounds like what Frye would call a "myth of concern," that 
is, once we give
it the form it originally took in Exodus. Hence its 
possible translation:
"The people were redeemed from bondage to Pharaoh at the 
Reed Sea, and then
subscribed to God's law at Sinai; departing from Egypt and 
adopting a
Mosaic code in the mount are equally 'autarchic-making' 
for Israel, and are
therefore correlated episodes."
    But who or what controls the myth? In Romantic 
literature the
creative imagination is the possession of an individual 
mind, however
attuned to Herder's "zeitgeist." A corresponding critical 
imagination
allows the subject born into the social contract to 
perceive, criticise,
reform, and recast his own cultural formation. At this 
point Prof.
Hamilton, in the cited volume about Frye, compares the 
various thinking of
Arnold, Leavis, and Raymond Williams, on the role of 
culture in the
humanizing and improving of our natural lot; he leaves 
implicit the
leadership role that has fallen to these great educators 
themselves, who
were, after all, individuals in possession of an 
imagination that could
envisage society's better nature--or "identity"--and 
reform its culture in
that direction. There is something of that purpose in even 
the veriest
fantasy writer, no?
But to consider the work of cultural production and 
development
>from a slightly different viewpoint: if culture really is like an organic
whole (a la Herder), and if that whole is actually more 
like the
population with which it co-habits (a la Malthus or 
Buckle), then a culture
only survives in the long run reproductively: and through 
those
modifications of form that are called adaptations (a la 
Darwin). These are
produced, as it were, experimentally: less by the 
developmental logic
peculiar to teleology, and more as the result of trial and 
error. The
happier of these experiments or adaptations survive to 
reproduce themselves
and keep culture alive, and they become the new culture. 
In this analogy,
the "nature" that culture alters would merely be other 
forms of itself.
The transformation of nature first by agriculture and then 
by the
technology of civilization is really only a metaphor, it 
follows, for
the evolution of one kind of culture into another. Indeed, 
Leavisite
"[s]electors of great traditions" (Frye's phrase, Anatomy, 
346, on
class-biased arbiters of taste), are themselves to be 
numbered among the
agents of the change, and so perhaps is the invasion of 
this list by an
apparently non-Spenserian topic.
The question of the macro-object of scientific literary 
study--to
return to the proper object of Frye's own stated 
project--might redirect
itself towards a more demographic mapping of literature's 
innovation,
variety and speciation. If we take the Anatomy's 
"Polemical Introduction"
seriously, and combine it with the Frye's classification 
of kinds and
modalization of production, we could consider a science of 
criticism on the
analogy of biology or economics, as Franco Moretti has 
more recently
recommended. The array of literary species would result 
from "natural
selection" and "genetic variation," or from the invisible 
hand of the
market-place and the temporary security of ecological or 
market niches.
Frye's symbols and motifs and techniques would be 
literature's selfish
genes; new kinds and techniques would emerge, like new 
species and
populations, from new conditions, or like new products 
from new markets or
means of manufacture ("media"). But the analogy is 
limited, of course,
insofar as individual minds (Lamarck-like) create the new 
species
themselves. Still, one wants to know how Spenser came to 
create -- and his
public to comprise a market for -- a synoptic narrative of 
Elizabethan
civil servants in the guise and disciplines of medieval 
knights (like
people arming for tourneys and jousts or wearing hats with 
moose horns down
at the moose club hall), and how and why heterocosmic 
parallel worlds get
matched with with the purposes of narrators like those of 
Spenser and
Tolkien (or authors like Mervyn Peake and Umberto Eco) in 
specific and
seemingly self-doubting cultural milieux. I wonder if the 
story of
Phedon's abuse and distress is not more interesting than 
it seems, once we
see it as quite possibly addressed to something like this 
second question.
But each to his or her own taste.