Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Questioning Northrop Frye’s Adaptation of Vico
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people. In his day there had been no permanently successful example
of a democracy, so Vico assumed that after going through those three
phases, society went into a ricorso, and did the whole thing all over
again. He said too that there was a language for each of these stages:
for the age of the gods there was a hieroglyphic language; for an age
of the heroes, a hieratic language; and for an age of the people, a
demotic language. These languages were all forms of writing because
Vico believed that people communicated by signs before they could
talk. His theory is bound up with a rather curious mythology according
to which the original inhabitants of the world before the flood were
giants who carried on in a very unseemly manner until they were terrified
by a thunderstorm, after which they dashed into caves dragging
their women behind them. So began private property. […] It seemed to
me that Vico’s distinction was something that one could adapt, although
it would have to be a very free adaptation. I won’t buy his ricorso, at
least not in the form in which he gives it. I don’t think that people communicated
by signs before they could talk. At the same time I do feel
that this conception of three phases of language which have some kind
of relationship to hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic might make a
certain sense. (Frye 2000, 24; emphasis added)
On Frye’s reading, the problem with Vico is his lack of openness
to the future: Vico does not appear to have realized that, if all human
knowledge and understanding is grounded in myth, we are not ipso facto
condemned to fall back into sheer myth, insofar as myth finds its catharsis,
its redemption, or continuous incarnation in literary production and
its “criticism”—a criticism entailing the extraction of literature’s archetypal
structures through which literature’s mythical powers may be brought to
enrich our lives (Frye 1965, 111). If words are born “with power,” it is only
through the refinery of criticism that words’ raw, mythical power becomes
suitable fuel for spiritual empowerment, i.e. for the empowerment of the
human will, and thus for a life lived with utmost intensity (ibid., 15, 192).
Admittedly, in Vico we find no such outlet. Throughout his
magnum opus—Principi di Scienza Nuova d’Intorno alla Comune Natura
della Nazioni (hereafter, SN44)—the very term “future” or any cognate
thereof never appears. Even what is “new” (nuovo) in Vico’s work is nothing
substantially new. On Vico’s word (following the Roman Seneca), what is
“new” about his work is what is always new, i.e. what appears as new in every
age (compare SN44, Bk. V.3, last paragraph, and SN30, “Idea of the Work,”
par. 38). The very title of Vico’s Opera inverts the terms of Galileo’s title, “New
Science” (Nuova Scienza), thereby emphasizing, “new,” as the particular or
special aspect of the universal subject of science per se (compare ibid. and