Monthly Archives: September 2009

The Greek Modes and the Circle of Fifths

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Modal-Glyph

Responding to Peter Yan and Adam Bradley:

Yes, Frye certainly did know about the Greek modes.  In “Modal Harmony in Music” he writes:

In the sixteenth century much greater freedom of tonality was available.  The major and minor modes were then celled Ionian and Aeolian respectively, but four others were used.  Arranged in order of sharpness, they are:  Lydian (F to F on white notes: present major with raised fourth); Ionian (C to C: present major); Mixolydian (G to G: present major with lowered seventh); Dorian (D to D: present natural minor with raised sixth); Aeolian (A to A: present minor); Phrygian (E to E:  present natural minor with lowered seventh).  A seventh mode, the Locrian, B to B or Phrygian with lowered fifth, had probably only a theoretical existence.  These four additional modes, like the two we now have, ended on the tonic chord.  Thus, if all modes were impartially used today, a piece ending on G would have a key signature of two sharps in the Lydian modes, one in the major, none in Mixolydian, one flat in Dorian, two in minor, three in Phrygian.  Or a piece with a key signature of one sharp could be C Lydian, G major, D Mixolydian, A Dorian, E minor, or B Phrygian. (Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings, 185)

And in “Baroque and Classical Composers” Frye writes:

When rhythm changes from 4/4 to 3/2 the minim of the latter = crochet of former.  Key signatures only either none or one flat, & occasionally two flats: no sharps.  Fellowes finally, bless his heart, coughs up some dope on the modes.  If the piece has no flat in the signature, look at the last bass note and that will give you the mode.  A = Aeolian (minor scale), B = Locrian (theoretically: it’s never used), C = Ionian (major scale), D = Dorian, E = Phrygian, F = Lydian, G = Mixolydian.  That’s if the melody is authentic: if it’s plagal then prefix hypo to the mode.  If there is a flat, transpose a fourth down or fifth up (G with a flat = D without one); if two, tr. [transpose] a tone up.  Hence many key signatures until the 18th c. were a flat or a sharp short.  Modulation & equal temperament go together. (ibid., 175)

As for the circle of fifths, sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s Frye provided a schematic for the circle as a way of outlining the twenty‑four parts in the first three units of his ogdoad: Liberal, Tragicomedy, and Anticlimax.  The twenty‑four letters of the Greek alphabet provided Frye a convenient name for each of the twelve major and the twelve minor keys.  C = alpha, A = beta, G = gamma, etc.  Frye didn’t actually draw a diagram, but in his Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (paragraphs 57, 58, 63, and 73 of Notebook 18), he set down the constituents of a diagram and gave a brief description of the thematic contents of each of the twenty‑four parts, illustrating what he means by saying that the circle of fifths provides a “symmetrical grammar” (Spiritus Mundi, 118).

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Trevor Losh-Johnson: Diagrams and Paraeducation

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375px-Brain

Some days ago, I sent out letters requesting information on professors who take an active, scholastic interest in Northrop Frye.  I have a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara, and am looking for English graduate programs where I may incorporate Frye’s diagrammatic method into specific research.  Professor Adamson has kindly invited me to post something here about how my interest in Frye arose in part through working as a teacher with orthopedically handicapped students.

My experience with such students is a product of my work as a substitute teacher in the greater Los Angeles area.  It is difficult to obtain consistent teaching assignments now, especially considering our certain governor’s propensity for terminating education funds.  I have therefore found more work with less orthodox students, which is something to which my father has devoted his entire teaching career.

My work in one of these classes coincided with some cursory reading of [Roman] Jakobson].  I was taken with Jakobson’s model of metaphor and metonymy, based on his work with language acquisition and aphasia.  While my interaction with students was not nearly as systematic, it greatly reinforced my sense of the metonymic workings of language acquisition.  When a child is learning to read, an unknown word is often sounded-out, and then replaced with a known word that rhymes with those sounds- sip becomes ship, cot cat.  I can recall a student named Elijah who had had clustered brain tumors as an infant.  He would tell stories structured only on a series of metonymy- What did the monkeys do next?  They attacked the car.  What did they say?  They ate me!  What happened then?  I fed them pizza and chicken!  This of course does not do justice to Elijah’s stories.  They were products of an outrageous and brilliant associative process that defied logic, space, and mortality.  While the origins of many of the images (a TV show?  The expected vandals in his neighborhood?) were private and beyond communication, many of them were contiguous images, constantly displaced into the unfolding narrative.

While I am not an expert in cognitive science, or in cognitive approaches to narrative, my experience with Elijah certainly made me very receptive to Frye’s distinction between centrifugal and centripetal forms of criticism.  In Elijah’s stories, the etiological and centrifugal origins of the plot and characters were subordinated to the centripetal patterns of the narrative.  It was in the telling of those patterns that he found extreme communicative joy and liberation of imagination.  Near the penultimate page of the Anatomy, Frye writes, “The link between rhetoric and logic is ‘doodle’ or associative diagram, the expression of the conceptual by the spatial” [335, Princeton edition].  The only way of decoding what in Elijah’s stories made him laugh was to follow the logic of “babble,” to trace the imaginative puns and metonymic displacements of imagery.

What had initially brought me into Comparative Literature was my interest in the revelatory symbol, and how one may understand the processes and degrees of symbolization at work in such varied writers as Spenser and Joyce.  I now find most useful those dialectical oppositions that do not act as privileged dichotomies, but rather as polar continuums, allowing for maximum modulation and movement.  What seems uniquely powerful about Frye’s schemata is his capacity to set such integral distinctions while displacing them into his modal diagrams.  His passage in the Anatomy on babble and doodle, the radicals of melos/opsis [270-81], is one of the few examples I know of a critic assimilating the rudimentary and associative nature of linguistic development into a broader, synoptic view of literature.  A critic, whom I cannot remember any more, wrote that one drawback to Frye is that he does not establish an etiological theory of linguistics.  The lack of a theory of such a priori things (which may have something to do with negative capability) in no way diminishes his achievement of establishing schematic first principles to literature; first principles that may be modified as suits the subject.

The conceptual by the spatial, so totalizing in Frye, is a pragmatic and teachable method of scholarship which I hope to pursue in my graduate studies, wherever those shall be.  The above does not sum up my reasons for wishing to undertake a study of Frye and his applications to modes of symbolism,  but it does note the more humane and fundamental values I perceive in him.

Today in the Frye Diaries, 23 September

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summerinparis

1942:  

[125] Lectures began this morning: all lectures begin half an hour early: T.T.C. request for staggered hours. I told my kids they’d been staggering into 9 o’clocks at 9.30 for years. Opening lecture to 2e [Restoration and 18th century literature] thorough but dull. I don’t do the Trinity this year: Child does it, or part of it. To Marion Darte’s for a party including Eleanor [Godfrey], Ray [Godfrey], the Callaghans & a chap with one leg from Winnipeg. Very dull evening: tiresome discussion with wild generalizations about the sexes which I engaged in only because I didn’t want to sulk. Eleanor was stewed and sullen and Morley has a thick streak of ham in him anyway. But does tell a story well – when he does.

Frye and Negative Capability

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180px-John_Keats_by_William_Hilton

I am a bit puzzled by Clayton’s comment in response to Russell’s post on Chesterton, suggesting that Frye did not want to give clear answers because he did not want people to be stuck with them, and that his reticence to give answers means that he did not want to enter into a dialectical process. Frye certainly did not want to impose ideas or beliefs on anyone, or even assert them in a context of dispute. One reason is that, even though people are passionate and articulate in asserting their beliefs, ideologies or matters of belief do not lend themselves to evidence or certainty. No one is going to argue anti-gay protesters out of their belief that homosexuals are polluting the world with sin. Frye would have been terrible on CNN, but this does not mean that Frye’s posture is non-dialectical. It depends on what meaning you give the term. The issue of Frye’s elusiveness when it comes to “answers” or categorical statements and judgments recalls the passage in the introduction to The Great Code that I quoted in a previous post.

It is clear that in his writings Frye’s approach is very much that of a teacher, not an ideologue or a polemicist, or a preacher or professor of some faith. Frye does in his books and essays and lectures exactly what he says a teacher should do: recreate the subject in the student’s mind. Frye has stated on occasion that he eschewed argument or disputation, and just wasn’t interested in it. It is clearly partly temperamental, but more that he just didn’t see it as particularly productive. Teaching isn’t about arguing or promulgating something. The contrast with aspects of the contemporary scene in literary and cultural studies, which often verges on ideological indoctrination or the imparting of correct thinking, is striking, and only demonstrates–at least for me–what is so appealing about Frye’s posture.

Frye says the teacher, precisely because he has more knowledge than the student, should be the one asking the questions, rather than giving the answers. As in one’s own thinking, asking the right questions is always the key, and this demands a high degree of negative capability. Keat’s statement of the issue is always worth quoting:

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. [Letter to George and Thomas Keats dated Sunday, 28 December 1817.]

The anxious reaching after truth–as a matter of belief–is a liability that can end up blocking progress to better answers and better questions. I find this is the case with many students: they are often all too ready to reduce a symbol or theme to a significance outside the text and literature, such as what beliefs the author held. But this is just as much the case with many critics. Frye is not criticizing Chesterton for his beliefs, but for the way he subordinated his imagination and perceptiveness about literature to his beliefs. That is Frye’s point about value judgments: they are simply a dead end when it comes to the knowledge of literature.

Such judgments are rhetorical in the sense Frye gives that term in Words with Power: they involve a subjective response and cannot be the basis of criticism. One can try to persuade others by the compelling logic of one’s argument, or rhetorically, by an appeal to the compulsions of emotion and belief, the domain of ideology, belief, and advertising. But literature is not about compulsion, even though it may be subordinated to an author’s wish to propogate the truth he or she believes in. Frye certainly uses logic and rhetorical devices to recreate his subject in the minds of his readers. But he does his best not to subordinate his understanding of literature to his own beliefs, which he most certainly had. One of the teachings he imparts is that literature itself does not try to persuade at all: it deals with the conceivable, the imaginable, regardless of the facts or truth, scientific or religious.

Today in the Frye Diaries, 20 September

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Britnell

1942:Glasses broken, but somehow life goes on.

[122] Staggered around without my glasses trying to read Morris’ Early Romances, which I got yesterday morning from Britnell’s along with several other second-hand Everymans for my new course. Harold & parents dropped in with the Lambert kids. Jessica goes to Trinity – a very sweet kid as far as I could see, which of course wasn’t very far.