Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

1. Theory of Modes
ANATOMY OF CRITICISM BY NORTHROP FRYE

2. In literary fiction the plot consists of somebody doing something.
The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is
what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by
the author and the consequent expectations of the audience.
Fictions, therefore, may be classified [...] by the hero's power of action, which may be
greater than ours, less, or roughly the same

3. If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the
hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a
story about a god.
Myth

4. If superior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is the typical
hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human
being.
The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly
suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance violate no rule of probability once the
postulates of romance have been established.
Romance
Legend
Folk Tale

5. If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a
leader.
He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he
does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.
High Mimetic
Epic
Tragedy

6. If superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us.
We respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same
canons of probability that we find in our own experience.
Low Mimetic
Comedy
Realistic Fiction

7. If inferior in power or intelligence to ourselves, so that we have the sense of looking
down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity, the hero belongs to the ironic
mode.
This is still true when the reader feels that he is or might be in the same situation, as the
situation is being judged by the norms of a greater freedom.
Ironic

8. Tragic Fictional Modes
Treatment of fear and pity in
 Romance
 High Mimetic Tragedy
 Low Mimetic Tragedy
 Irony

9. Romance: acceptance of pity and fear
Fear
 fear at a distance or terror turns into
the adventurous
 fear at contact or horror turns into the
marvellous
 fear without an object or dread turns
into a pensive melancholy.
Pity
 pity at a distance or concern turns into
the chivalrous rescue.
 pity at contact or tenderness turn into a
languid and relaxed charm.
 pity without an object (a kind of
animism, or treating everything in
nature as though it had human feelings)
turns into creative fantasy.

10. High mimetic tragedy: pity and fear
raised and cast out
 Pity and fear become, respectively, favorable and adverse moral judgement, which are
relevant to tragedy but not central to it.
 The particular thing called tragedy that happens to the tragic hero does not depend on
his moral status.
 The "flaw" is not necessarily wrongdoing, much less moral weakness: it may be simply a
matter of being a strong character in an exposed position.
 A place of leadership, in which a character is exceptional and isolated at the same time,
giving us that curious blend of the inevitable and the incongruous which is peculiar to
tragedy.

11. Low mimetic tragedy: pity and fear
communicated externally as sensations
 Pity is treated through pathos which presents its hero as isolated by a weakness which
appeals to our sympathy because it is on our own level of experience.
 The central tradition of sophisticated pathos is the study of the isolated mind, the story
of how someone recognizably like ourselves is broken by a conflict between the inner
and outer world.
 Fear is also sensational, and is a kind of pathos in reverse [...] normally a ruthless figure
strongly contrasted with some kind of delicate virtue, generally a helpless victim in his
power.

12. Irony: pity and fear reflected to the reader
from the art
 Irony turns away from direct statement or its own obvious meaning, takes life exactly as it finds it, fables
without moralizing, has no object but his subject.
 Tragic irony becomes the study of tragic isolation as such, and it thereby drops out the element of the
special case.
 The incongruous and the inevitable, which are combined in tragedy, separate into opposite poles of irony.
The typical victim, the scapegoat, is neither innocent nor guilty.
 The archetype of the inevitably ironic is Adam, human nature under sentence of death. The archetype of
the incongruously ironic is Christ, the perfectly innocent victim excluded from human society. Halfway
between is the central figure of tragedy, human and yet of a heroic size. His archetype is Prometheus, the
immortal titan rejected by the gods for befriending men.

13. Comic Fictional Modes
The theme of the comic is the integration of society, which usually takes the
form of incorporating a central character into it.

14. Romantic
 Idyllic in tragic mode corresponds to the elegiac in romantic comedy.
 Its chief vehicle is the pastoral.
 It preserves the theme of escape from society to the extent of idealizing a
simplified life in the country or on the frontier.

15. High mimetic comedy
 A central figure who constructs his own society in the teeth of strong
opposition, […] achieving a heroic triumph, complete with mistresses, in
which he is sometimes assigned the honors of a reborn god.
 Just as there is a catharsis of pity and fear in tragedy, so there is a catharsis
of the corresponding comic emotions, which are sympathy and ridicule.
 The comic hero will get his triumph whether what he has done is sensible
or silly, honest or rascally.
 Like the tragedy contemporary with it, this is a blend of the heroic and the
ironic.

16. Low mimetic comedy
 Presents an erotic intrigue between a young man and a young woman which is
blocked by some kind of opposition, usually paternal, and resolved by a twist
in the plot, the comic form of Aristotle's "discovery".
 At the beginning of the play the forces thwarting the hero are in control of the
play's society, but after a discovery in which the hero becomes wealthy or the
heroine respectable, a new society crystallizes on the stage around the hero
and his bride.
 The hero himself is seldom a very interesting person: in conformity with low
mimetic decorum, he is ordinary in his virtues, but socially attractive.

17. Ironic comedy
 Driving out the scapegoat or pharmakos from the point of view of society.
 Ironic comedy brings us to the figure of the scapegoat ritual […]. The element of play is
the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be
an important theme of ironic comedy.
 The detective story, the formula of how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos and gets rid
of him.
 Detection begins to merge with the thriller as one of the forms of melodrama where two
themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent
idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience.
 One pole of ironic comedy is the recognition of the absurdity of naive melodrama, or, at
least, of the absurdity of its attempt to define the enemy of society as a person outside
that society. From there it develops toward the opposite pole, which is true comic irony
or satire, and which defines the enemy of society as a spirit within that society.

18. Thematic Modes
The primary interest is in dianoia, the idea or poetic thought that the reader gets from the
writer.
In thematic literature the poet may write as an individual, emphasizing the separateness of
his personality and the distinctness of his vision. This attitude produces most lyrics and
essays.
 Poetry of the isolated individual - "episodic"
Or the poet may devote himself to being a spokesman of his society. Such an attitude
produces poetry which is educational in the broadest sense: epics of the more artificial or
thematic kind, didactic poetry and prose.
 Poetry of the social spokesman - "encyclopaedic"

19. Myth
 The poet's visionary function, his proper work as a poet, is to reveal the
god for whom he speaks.
 In the mythical mode the encyclopaedic form is the sacred scripture.
 In the mythical mode the central or typical form , the germ out of which
the encyclopaedic forms develops, is the oracle.

20. Thematic romance
 In the period of romance, the poet, like the corresponding hero, has become a
human being, and the god has retreated to the sky. His function now is
primarily to remember.
 The age of romantic heroes is largely a nomadic age, and its poets are
frequently wanderers. Or, if the poet stays where he is, it is poetry that travels.
 Its typical episodic theme is perhaps best described as the theme of the
boundary of consciousness, the sense of the poetic mind as passing from one
world to another, or as simultaneously aware of both.

21. High mimetic
 […] a society more strongly established around the court and capital city, and a
centripetal perspective.
 The encyclopaedic poems of this period are national epics unified by patriotic
and religious ideas.
 The central episodic theme is the centripetal gaze, which, whether addressed
to mistress, friend, or deity, seems to have something about it of the court
gazing upon its sovereign, the court-room gazing upon the orator, or the
audience gazing upon the actor.
 The high mimetic poet is pre-eminently a courtier, a counsellor, a preacher, a
public orator or a master of decorum, and the high mimetic is the period in
which the settled theatre comes into its own as the chief medium of fictional
forms.

22. Low mimetic
 The thematic poet becomes what the fictional hero was in the age of romance, an
extraordinary person who lives in a higher and more imaginative order of
experience than that of nature. A sense of contrast between subjective and
objective, mental state and outward condition, individual and social or physical
data, is characteristic of the low mimetic.
 The encyclopaedic tendency of this period is toward the construction of
mythological epics in which the myths represent psychological or subjective states
of mind.
 The central episodic theme is the analysis or presentation of the subjective mental
state.
 The thematic poet of this period is interested in himself, not necessarily out of
egotism, but because the basis of his poetic skill is individual, and hence genetic
and psychological. He confronts nature directly, as an individual.

23. Ironic
 Poets begin with the ironic gesture of turning away from the world of the market-
place, with all its blurred sounds and imprecise meanings: they renounce rhetoric,
moral judgement, and all other idols of the tribe, and devote their entire energy to
the poet's literal function as a maker of poems.
 The poet makes the minimum claim for his personality and the maximum for his art.
At his best he is a dedicated spirit, a saint or anchorite of poetry.
 The central episodic theme is the theme of the pure but transient vision, the
aesthetic or timeless moment, the kind of non-didactic revelation implied in such
terms as symbolisme and imagism.
 The comparison of such instants with the vast panorama unrolled by history
("temps perdu") is the main theme of the encyclopaedic tendency.