The Myth in the Theoretical Works of Northrop Frye

Abstract

Northrop Frye devoted a significant amount space to myth in his theoretical works, attributing several extremely important functions to it.
Myth, according to Frye, participates in the constitution of genre conventions, but also supra-genre literary forms; it conditions a certain kind of structural and inter/paratextual organization and positioning of individual works and literature as a whole; it determines qualitative and classifying features of poetic images; it conditions narrative practices and matrices; finally, and perhaps most importantly, it represents a system of experiential, narrative and image forms that are, having been changed to a degree, incorporated into the literary works themselves. Thus, Frye‘s definition of myth, as well as its roles, and functions it gains by being incorporated into literature, is of great import for Frye‘s other theoretical considerations, as the Canadian theorist never loses sight of the experiential horizon of myth as he attempts to establish a synthetic theoretical view of literature as a whole, which is his primary occupation in Anatomy of Criticism. Myth is the obverse of literature, and sometimes it is enough to scratch beneath the surface to recognize its contours, still present, at times rigidly preserved, but more often changed almost beyond recognition.
Frye noticed this and therefore based his theoretical system, presented in Anatomy of Criticism, acknowledging the importance of myth. The significance of the myth is underscored, above all, through its three features, which greatly influenced the theoretical views expressed in the Anatomy of Criticism.
First and foremost, the myth represents a kind of narrative, experiential, semantic and image register from which literature itself borrows abundantly. Myth is also the starting point from which Frye constructs a system of poetic images. Finally, recognized mythical conventions help the Canadian theorist to propose a system of supra-genre features that conceptually encompasses all of literature. It is worth noting that Frye favours the aspect of a myth that refers to the story conventions thereof, that is, to the structural and narrative element of the myth itself, while paying somewhat less attention to the experiential horizon of the myth. In his essay „Myth, Fiction, and Displacement“, Frye points to the importance of several determinants of myth that appear, reshaped, in literary texts. He notes some of the most important conventions of myth (such as cyclicity, reference and convention), as not only important determinants of myth, but also determinants of literature itself. The Canadian theorist understood very well that the mythic experience persists in literature, across the centuries and still today, changed, yes, but never annulled or gone, and that one should always keep it in mind when analysing literature.
Frye‘s archetypal mythic criticism has as its goal an attempt to detail the incorporation of mythic material into literature and the contextualization of a literary work within the mythic semantic universe, with the aim of theoretically classifying literature itself into certain structural, intertextual and semantic niches more easily.