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 →Literature 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
Comerado, this is no book,Who touches this, touches a man,(Is it night? Are we here alone?)It is I you hold, and who holds you,I spring from the pages into your arms-decease calls me forth.
Walt WhitmanRead
Novelists go about the strenuous business of marrying and burying their people, or else they send them to sea, or to Africa, or at the least, out of town. Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death.
Cynthia OzickRead
People ask me why I write strong women, and I say, 'Well, I don't like stupid ones.' Who would want to read about weak and whiny women? Are they people who assume women are weak and whiny? If so, why do they think that?
Diana GabaldonRead
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
StendhalRead
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.
V. S. NaipaulRead
In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.
Jacques DerridaRead