Monthly Archives: September 2009

Today in the Frye Diaries, 3 September

Leave a reply

 hitler

1942: Reflections on the war, which again, is not going well for the allies: the disaster of the Dieppe Raid on August 19th is becoming increasingly apparent.

[95] Anniversary of the war, so we’re told: see Aug. 19. It occurred to me a short while ago that I never really considered the possibility of our losing the war. I mean by that that I had never sat down and figured out how I could conscientiously go on living if we did. I’m beginning to understand how paralyzed, hopeless, hag-ridden and stupefied the average intellectual anti-Nazi on the European continent must be — have been.

1950: No entry.

Ian Sloan: Frye and Paul Hawken

3 Replies

 BLESSED_COVER_02072007-726881

Our first Guest Blogger, Ian Sloan, is minister at Centenary United Church, Hamilton, Ontario.

I have recently joined Centenary United Church in Hamilton, Canada, an inner-city church in the downtown core of Hamilton committed to being a safe and diverse community of faith offering acceptance and hope.  Faced with a scope of responsibility to this community that seems (as I begin) to be overwhelming, and looking for thought and practice large enough to meet the challenges I am committed to meet, I was struck by the similarities between the following comment in the last chapter of Frye’s Double Vision [“The Double Vision of God”] and a passage from the author’s introduction to a recent book on environmentalism.

Frye writes:

I sense a longing for some kind of immense creative renovation, which, I should imagine, would have to be the product of a large-scale social movement. Earlier in the century a proposal for such an awakening would automatically have been responded to with the word “revolution,” a donkey’s carrot still held before the student rebels of the sixties. Revolutions, however, are culturally sterile: they weaken the traditions of the past but put nothing in their place except second-rate versions of the same thing. I think the real longing is not for a mass movement sweeping up individual concerns, but for an individualized movement reaching out to social concerns. Primary concerns, that is: food, shelter, the greening of the earth, and their spiritual aspects of freedom and equal rights. (56-57)

Environmentalist Paul Hawken writes in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World (Penguin, 2007):

By any conventional definition, this vast collection of committed individuals does not constitute a movement. Movements have leaders and ideologies. People join movements, study their tracts, and identify themselves with a group. They read the biography of the founder(s) or listen to them perorate on tapes or in person. Movements, in short, have followers. This movement, however, doesn’t fit the standard model. It is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with. It is taking shape in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, companies, deserts, fisheries, slums – and yes, even fancy New York hotels. One of its distinctive features is that it is tentatively emerging as a global humanitarian movement arising from the bottom up…I sought a name for the movement, but none exists. ..No one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye. What does meet the eye is compelling: coherent, organic, self-organized congregations involving millions of people dedicated to change. (2-4)

How does  Frye “belong” to the movement Hawken describes? How might you?  If it seems like it could go somewhere, I may from time to time blog here about how I might.

The Play’s the Thing: Frye and “Homo Ludens”

1 Reply

homoludens 

Yves Saint‑Cyr has recently completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled The Glass Bead Game: From Post‑Tonal to Post‑Modern (University of Toronto).  It’s an intellectually ambitious and stimulating romp through a wide range of complex literary, critical, and musical texts, painting, and mathematical theory.  In his chapter 3 Saint‑Cyr turns to Frye in order to illuminate Hermann Hesse: Frye’s theory of modes and his theory of the phases of the mythoi of comedy can, Saint‑Cyr argues, help reveal the formal structure of Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel.  But as Saint‑Cyr says early on, the ends and means of this project can be reversed: he wants to investigate the implications of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game “to model the role of recursive paradox in literary criticism.”  This seems to point in the direction of Frye as a Glass Bead Game player.  Saint‑Cyr does say that Frye might well conceive of literary criticism rooted in mythology as a Glass Bead Game, an inference he makes from one of the three places in his writing where Frye refers to the Glass Bead Game, but he never really develops the idea that Frye’s critical constructs are themselves a Glass Bead Game.

Not that he should have, but there is certainly enough in Frye’s published works to make such a case.  Bloggers interested in the topic should consult Graham Forst’s “‘Frye Spiel’: Northrop Frye and Homo Ludens,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36, no. 3 (September 2003): 73–86.  Forst argues that “play is reading’s central motif and that for Frye, readers see things holistically only when “playfully” detached: literature “is the quintessential ‘playful’ medium because it is ‘detached from immediate action.’”  But I suspect the last word on Frye and homo ludens [“man at play”] will have to take account of what he both says and implies about play in the notebooks, considering such constructs as the Great Doodle, the ogdoad (which began when Frye was nine as a dream of writing eight concerti), and the omnipresent HEAP (Hermes‑Eros‑Adonis‑Prometheus) scheme.  These are all like a giant board game, a centripetal structure on which Frye continually moves the pieces as he works to show how imaginative patterns inform self and society, cultural creations, history and philosophy––indeed, everything in the poetic and religious cosmos. 

The notebooks reveal the expansive free‑play of Frye as himself as homo ludens.  His own comments on his expansive “game” illustrate that in the tradition of both Huizinga and Schiller (and of the anatomy form itself) playing the game is serious business.  The game has scores of lesser doodles––permutations, based on schema that Frye has drawn from alchemy, the zodiac, the chessboard, musical keys, colors, the omnipresent “four kernels” (commandment, aphorism, oracle, and epiphany), the shape of the human body, Blake’s Zoas, Jung’s personality types, Bacon’s idols, the boxing of the compass by Plato and the Romantic poets, the Greater Arcana of the Tarot cards, the seven days of Creation, the three stages of religious awareness, numerology, among other schema.  Then there’s Frye’s enigmatic “chess‑in‑bardo,” which involves a dialectic of two opposing forces: agon and anagnorisis, choice and chance, descent and ascent.  All of these things can be seen as a web or net of interconnected imaginative processes, like the jeweled net of Indra.  To use Saint‑Cyr’s phrases, it’s a “conceptual model” and an “epitome of symbolic construction.”  The game involves the organizing of cultural symbols, literary ideas, poetic motifs, philosophical categories on a two‑dimensional grid, like a game board.  Its form is both dialectical and cyclical and at times, when Frye speaks of the gyre or vortext, it’s even three‑dimensional.  It’s not unlike the description of the Glass Bead Game that Hesse’s Knecht provides in his letter to Tergularius, where “every symbol and combination of symbols led . . . into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge” (Magister Ludi, 104–5).  This sounds like a description of Frye’s own ogdoad. 

Continue reading →

Today in the Frye Diaries, 2 September

Leave a reply

 dancing

1942:

[92] The radio is going: why is so much dance music thin, wailing, dismally melancholy and wistful, like a train going through a forest at night? [Ed. represented by a classic at the above link.] Is it intended to reproduce the complaining of the libido? Certainly it’s aimed at below the waist, & suited to a dimly lit dance hall with adolescents shuffling up & down the floor rhythmically rubbing their genitals together.

[93] I’m acquiring too many vulgar expressions, like bum’s rush for W.C. & cowflop for female wallflower.

1950: No entries for September 2, 3, 4.

 

Perkin and Denham on the Epiphanies

Leave a reply

blake1 

I thought this exchange between Russell Perkin and Bob Denham in the Comments section of Bob’s post on the epiphanies was worth bringing forward for more attention.

Perkin:

Bob, that’s really interesting stuff! Do you have anything to say about the realization about The Four Zoas that John Ayre describes Frye experiencing “while sitting in the bored husband’s seat in a women’s wear shop on Yonge St. just below Bloor” (p. 177)? Does Frye record this anywhere – Ayre doesn’t give a source. It’s not so much a spiritual vision as a realization about how he had to present Fearful Symmetry. What Ayre calls the “absurdly mundane circumstances” fascinate me. Rather like Francis Thompson seeing Jacob’s ladder pitched between “heaven and Charing Cross”?

Denham:

Russell: I’d forgotten about Ayre’s account of the Four Zoas recognition–Los displacing Orc, it seems to have been. It certainly sounds like one of those momentary flashes of insight and similar to the others. So far as I know, Frye doesn’t mention it elsewhere, but it pretty clearly should be added to the list. Perhaps he recorded something about it in his original Blake notebook, which is not extant.

It would be interesting to know that date of this epiphany. Early 1940s, I’d guess. Frye does have a similar account of Orc-Los business in his 1950 diary: “The tactic of the Blake article is shaping up a little. After I outline his archetypal imagery, which derives from the unfallen world, I go on to archetype of narrative. The archetypal narrative is the heroic quest, which is the Orc cycle. This is in Blake, but he’s not primarily interested in it, as he sees the cyclic shape of it too clearly. That’s the reason for the difficulty in trying to wedge Jungian archetypes, which are all narrative ones, into Blake. The shift over from the Orc cycle to the Los pattern of progressive & redemptive work is really the centre of the problem in [L] [Liberal] that converges on what I call the dialectic development of the conception of the hero. In Blake the cycle of narrative emanating from & returning to the unfallen world is seen so constantly as a simultaneous pattern of significance that the reader has to get this perspective before he can read: it isn’t unfolded to him passively in a narrative sequence.” (Diaries, 431).

Thanks for calling attention to the omission. Continue reading →

Today in the Frye Diaries, 1 September

Leave a reply

brattlestreet 

1942: Frye loses access to the medication that offers relief for his chronic hay fever.  He therefore unleashes against the medical profession.

[91]… My druggest tells me that a new drug act has passed preventing several drugs, including codeine and phenobarbol [phenobarbitol], to be sold over the counter without a doctor’s prescription, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of such potent medicines as the one that’s helping me. Sounds like a medical stranglehold on their apothecary enemies of 3000 yrs. There may be a lot to be said on both sides, but doctors today are such ignorant barbarians, & their sense of heresy is priestly rather than scientific.

1950: The Frye’s move into the Brattle Inn on Story Street, just off of Harvard Square. John Ayre in his biography describes it “a glorified boarding house where they ate on a card table and washed their dishes in the bathtub” (226).  (A house in the Brattle/Story Street neighborhood is pictured above.)

[586] Today we completed our move to Story Street… [T]he place is much better set up for working than the house was: it has an excellent desk and a place to put books. It was hot & we got tired quickly: I did actually most of the unpacking in the evening… Mrs. Baillio…continues to be a dear; they’ve put up a new double bed in the place of the twin beds they had before; they’ve moved in new furniture (two enormous easy chairs, one a rocker), & in general I think we’ll live comfortably, if not luxuriously.