Justice & Law Quote by Northrop Frye

Frye takes a scalpel to the modern myth of artistic originality: not that writers borrow, but that the culture must deny it in order to keep the market humming. The sting is in "elaborately disguised". Convention in literature - the inherited plots, genres, archetypes, and stock moves that make stories legible - isn’t merely present; it’s masked. Copyright becomes the mask, a legal fiction that flatters both author and buyer by insisting each book is a one-off breakthrough, "distinctive enough to be patented."

The key rhetorical move is the verb "pretending". Frye isn’t arguing that copyright is evil in itself; he’s exposing its ideological effect. The law doesn’t just protect labor, it manufactures a story about labor: art as proprietary invention rather than participation in a long-running communal grammar. By yoking "work of art" to "patented", he collapses the romantic aura of the artist into the language of industrial property. The point is cultural, not procedural: once art is framed like a gadget, convention has to be disavowed, because admitting shared structures would weaken the claim of exclusive ownership.

Context matters. Frye, writing in the mid-century wake of mass publishing and a booming culture industry, built his criticism around recurring literary forms. From that vantage, copyright reads less like a neutral safeguard and more like a social agreement to misrecognize how art actually works: repetition with variation, tradition with tweaks. He’s warning that the fetish of the "inventive" work doesn’t elevate literature; it narrows our vision of it.