Northrop Frye's Notebooks on Romance

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

As well as being a prolific author of scholarly books, Northrop Frye was
an inveterate note-taker while preparing and writing these same books.
The University of Toronto Press Collected Works has already published
five substantial volumes of these notebooks (the book under review is
the fifth), and three more are scheduled. When read in bulk, they can be
frustratingly repetitious and sometimes enigmatic; still, they provide a
glimpse over the shoulder of a remarkable scholar wrestling to get his
ideas into a presentable order.

At the same time, one wonders how many people truly need such a
scholarly book. After all, we already have The Secular Scripture (1976),
A Study of English Romanticism (1968), and various essays on the subject
scattered through other collections. Given these completed writings, the
tracing of Frye’s fragmented and anguished search for the most
satisfying way of presenting his ideas seems a minor matter. Surely
there are technologies that could offer more economical ways of making
this material available to the dedicated few for whom it is important?

This book, then, is for Frye aficionados. Those who, however impressed
by Frye’s intellect, do not consider his literary approaches
infallible may well find support here for their reservations. I refer
not merely to his curt, often contemptuous dismissal of critics with
whom he disagrees, but to the way in which so many of his observations
give the impression that he is less interested in literary works as
artistic achievements than as grist for his relentless
pattern-constructing mill. For instance, there is considerable
discussion of W.B. Yeats here, but Frye concentrates almost wholly on
his visionary “system,” with little apparent interest in his
qualities as a Romantic poet. For many of us, the priorities seem
skewed.

As usual in this series, the editing is of high quality, though I
noticed that LS and MD were missing from the abbreviations page. And did
Frye really write “gutteral” (there is no sic) in the excerpt that
appears on page 46?