The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him. [p.250]
Northrop FryeRead
A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Literature requires suspension of disbelief, and those who cannot do so should not engage with it.
Northrop Frye emphasizes that literature involves a unique engagement with reality and imagination, where readers must willingly set aside their disbelief to appreciate fiction. He criticizes those who critique literary works based on their inability to understand the context of the narrative, equating such readers to people who mistakenly take fictional stories at face value, thereby missing the essence of literary appreciation.
Themes
LiteratureFictionImaginationSuspension Of DisbeliefCritique
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared in a literature class to spark discussion about interpreting fiction.
More from Northrop Frye
All quotes βLiterature is a human apocalypse, man's revelation to man, and criticism is not a body of adjudications, but the awareness of that revelation, the last judgement of mankind.
Northrop FryeRead
To bring anything really to life in literature we can't be lifelike: we have to be literature-like
Northrop FryeRead
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
Northrop FryeRead
We do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.
Northrop FryeRead
Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.
Northrop FryeRead
Similar quotes
Bless my soul,β whispered the old bartender, βHarry Potter . . . what an honor.
J. K. RowlingRead
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
Italo CalvinoRead
I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
Robert CaroRead
I think that an author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Benjamin DisraeliRead
As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonRead
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mould of the body and mind entire.
Virginia WoolfRead