Study Guide for The Educated Imagination
Northrop Frye (1912-1991) read his Massey Lectures over the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (CBC radio) in 1962. First published by Indiana University Press in 1964, the six
lectures present key concepts from Frye's Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton
University Press, 1957).
NOTE: Page Numbers might not correspond, as a different version of the book was used.
Chapter One. "The Motive for Metaphor."
Frye begins by exploring the relation of language and literature. "What is the relation of
English as the mother tongue to English as a literature?" he asks (p. 16), and before he can give
an answer, he has to explain why people use words. He identifies three different uses of
language, which he also terms types or levels of language.
1. "The language of consciousness or awareness" is our means of "self-expression," our
means of responding to the natural environment: "the world as it is." This language
produces conversation.
2. "The language of practical sense" is our means of "social participation," our means of
taking part in our civilization. This language produces information.
3. "The language of literature" is our means of entering the world of imagination: "the world
we want to have." This language produces poetry, first of all.
Science and literature move in opposite directions. Science begins with the external world
and adds imagination. (Mathematics is the imaginative language of science, Frye suggests in a
later chapter.) Literature begins in the imaginative world and becomes involved in civilization.
Frye now deals with the distinctive feature of literary language. When language implies
an identification of the speaker and the object, it becomes metaphoric. "The desire to associate,"
and to find connections between inner experience and the external world, is what Wallace
Stevens calls "The Motive for Metaphor."
This chapter provides an introduction to the book. It raises questions that will not be
answered until Frye has set out a general theory of literature. These include the question of
education--"What is the place of the imagination ... in the learning process?" (p. 16)--answered in
chapter 5. They also include a series of questions about the social function of literature and
literary education, to be answered in chapter 6:
"What good is the study of literature?" (p. 13)
"Does it help us to think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than
we could without it?" (p. 13)
"What is the relation of English as the mother tongue to English as a literature?" (p. 16)
"What is the social value of the study of literature?" (p. 16)
What is "the relevance of literature in the world of today?" (p. 27)
Chapter Two. "The Singing School"
The literary motive--the "impulse to identify human and natural worlds" (p. 39)--creates
metaphors of objects we encounter in space and myths of relations over time. (Conceived thus, a
myth is a metaphor placed in time, and a metaphor is a myth take out of time.) Frye concedes
that the modern reader stranded on a desert island, and forming a new society there, does not
have the same experience of language as the "primitive." A modern reader will bring his or her
experiences of language and literature. However, he insists that there is a useful analogy between
primitive myths and the most sophisticated works of literature. "Literature is still doing the same
job that mythology did earlier" (p. 57) As he points out in the next chapter, literature is like
magic in that both depend on identification: "That why literature, and more particularly poetry,
shows the analogy to primitive minds" (p. 76).
Myths tend to stick together to form a mythology. That is so because myths are
conventional, because one myth inspires another. Similarly, in our culture, one novel inspires
another. Frye does not accept the romantic theory that literature is uniquely inspired. "A writer's
desire to write can only have come from previous experience of literature," says Frye, "and he'll
start by imitating whatever he's read" (p. 40). This leads to conventions in form as well as
content: "Literature can derive its forms only from itself" (p. 42), he says and again, "The writer
of literature can only write out what takes shape in his mind" (p. 46), Literary conventions enable
the writer to incorporate personal experience into literature.
The major conventions of Western literature--tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance--are
"typical ways in which stories get told" (p. 49). Frye suggests that they represent "episodes" in
the story of literature itself (p. 52). As he view it, all literature tells a large cyclic story--"the
story of the loss and regaining of identity" (p. 55). It can be seen in the hero's quest, where the
hero leaves the safety of his society to face a monster and returns, or in the lover's plight, where
the man is attracted to a woman, and marries her and is buried by her. But it's most complete
representation in the West is the Biblical story of the Fall of man from his original home and the
eventual return to a promised land or a heavenly kingdom.
Chapter Three: "Giants in Time"
Moving from metaphor and myth, Frye turns to literary symbolism, where he finds his
answer to the question, "What kind of reality does literature have?" (p. 61). The "correspondence
of the natural and human" deriving from the impulse to draw analogies "is one of the things that
the word 'symbol' means" (p. 66).
Paraphrasing Aristotle's Poetics, he argues that literature is concerned with universals and
thus with general examples and thus invites an impartial response. "The poet's job is not to tell
you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always
takes place"(p. 63).
From this point, he concludes that literature is concerned with symbolic action, that
literary or mythological characters are typical, and that the world of poet imagery is "totally
symbolic" (p. 75). He then moves to the principle of "literature as a whole" (p. 49): "you don't
just read one poem or novel after another, but enter into a complete world of which every work
of literature forms a part" (p. 69). Hence there is a progressive element in the study and teaching
of literature: as we read more works, we become able to generalize from our experience of
literature.
Frye can now anticipate the social function of literature, to be discussed in chapter 6.
"What is the use of studying the imagination?" he asks (p. 77). He values literature, first, because
of "its encouragement of tolerance" (p. 77), produced by "the power of detachment in the
imagination" (p. 78). Once a person like Mark Anthony or Cleopatra becomes a literary character
(like the heroes of Shakespeare's tragedy) we think of them differently. Indeed, literature tends to
swallow life. "And the imagination won't stop until it's swallowed everything" (p. 80).
Chapter Four: "The Keys to Dreamland"
Frye now deals with the respective claims of the reader and writer, the producer and
consumer of literature. "We need two powers in literature," he says, "a power to create and a
power to understand" (p. 104). Both writer and reader need to understand literary convention.
For a writer, it is not enough to be self-expressive (remember that this is the language of
conversation). "To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be
literature-like" (p. 91). It is necessary to be imaginative, in other words. "The world of literature
is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination" (p. 96).
For a reader, it is necessary to understand the experience of literature. "The top half of
literature is the world expressed by such words as sublime, inspiring, and the like, where what
we feel is not detachment but absorption" (p. 100). This is the half of romance and comedy. The
bottom half is, then, the language of tragedy and irony, or satire, where we may experience
alienation from the world is it ought to be. As one becomes a more capable, or better educated,
reader, one is able to deal not only with the literal statement and the allegorical sense (for
example, that the donkeys and elephants in the story are political beings). One enters the ethical
dimension, mentioned in the previous chapter, and rises finally to an overview that Frye
describes in semi-religious language:
"No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the
dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that,
and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees
itself" (p. 101). And again: "Literature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation, and criticism is
not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgment of mankind"
(p. 105).
Chapter Five: "The Verticals of Adam"
Now that Frye has set out his "theory of literature," he must explain in what ways it offers
"guidance on the question of how to teach literature, especially to children" (p. 109). He starts by
suggesting, "The teaching of literature needs a bit more theory" (p. 109). Compared to music, for
example, where a student learns about the diatonic scale and the major relations of notes and
chords, literature seems to have few basic principles.
First the "general principle" of literature as Frye sees it in chapter 2: "literature follows after a
mythology" (p. 110). In Western European literatures, including English, the "most complete"
mythology is that in the books of "Christian Bible," from Genesis to Revelation (p. 110). By
"mythology" Frye simply means set of stories, with no reference to their literal or historical truth.
"Everything has a story," Frye insists; a literary work is not "disguised information" (p. 116).
Therefore, the best way to educate a reader is to start with the foundational myths of the culture:
with Biblical and the Classical myths, and only then move on to the major story forms. Children
will find comedy and romance easier to grasp first, and will be better able to deal with tragedy
and irony in secondary school. As they progress they need to set their experience of English
literature in a double context, including "languages other than English", "arts other than
literature" (p. 117).
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Fairy tales "restore the primitive perspective that mythology has" (p. 120)
Start at the center, poetry; work toward the circumference, nonfiction (p. 121)
Concentrate on classics, "a great work of literature is also a place in which the whole
cultural history of the nation that produced it comes into focus" (p. 123)
Recognize that literature provides "a kind of imaginative key to history" (p. 124)
Recognize that "The book itself is a literary form, descended from and related to other
literary forms" (p. 124)
The final question, for Frye, is "what the real place of literature in education is" (p. 127). The
teacher's task is to show students how "the myths and images of literature also enter into and give
form to all the structures we build out of words."
Frye now offers some definitions:
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"The theory of literature is what I mean by criticism, the activity of uniting literature with
society, and with the different contexts that literature itself has" (p. 127).
"The great bulk of criticism is teaching" (p. 127)
"The end of literary teaching is not simply the admiration of literature; it's something
more like the transfer of imaginative energy from literature to the student" (p. 129)
He will build on these definitions in the final lecture.
Chapter Six: "The Vocation of Eloquence"
The final talk is addressed to readers rather than writers, consumers of literature, rather than
producers. Frye promises to explain "what literature can do and what its uses are, apart from the
pleasure it gives" (p. 134). His first suggestion is that literature can educate the imagination:
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"Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed
to train and improve the imagination" (p. 134)
"We have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one"
(pp. 134-35)
He returns to his dominant theme, saying, "My subject is the educated imagination, and
education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn't just
train the mind: it's a social and more development too" (p. 152).
Frye notes that the imagination, as an intermediary between the emotions and the intellect,
provides the basis of social life, thus reiterating a point from his first lecture. The educated
imagination knows what to make of advertising; indeed, says Frye, "Our reaction to advertising
is really a form of literary criticism" (p. 138). Sensitivity to the use of words, freedom from
cliché, is only possible for people who use their imagination (p. 154). And because the educated
imagination is a necessity of life in a political world, the study of literature is not an "elegant
accomplishment" but a means of entry into a "free society" (pp. 147, 148). The crisis of
emptiness in modern life only underscores our need for education (p. 150), and specifically for
literary education and reflection on the world that writers want: "a vision inside our minds, born
and fostered by the imagination" (p. 151).
Frye takes the Tower of Babel as the organizing myth for the last talk and the whole series,
suggesting "that the Tower of Babel is a work of human imagination, that its main elements are
words, and that what will make it collapse is a confusion of tongues" (p. 155). The confusion of
tongues at Babel is a loss of identity, for Frye, and a failure of imagination. Only a strong
imagination, which is to say an educated one, can fulfil the Renaissance dream of rebuilding
knowledge from the ruins of Babel.