For Bob Denham: k d lang and Roy Orbison, Crying
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-EiKPrAOHA
After the jump, k d singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah
Saturday Night Video
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Monthly Archives: February 2010
New Additions to the Denham Library
Victoria College Chapel
Bob Denham has provided us with two new additions to the Denham Library.
The first is class notes for Frye’s course on Milton, 1953 – 1954. This is the eighth set of class notes to be added to the Library. Bob jokes that soon enough Frye scholars will in effect be able to attend Frye’s classes without registering or paying tuition.
The second is a previously unpublished set of notes on the Victoria College chapel windows, perhaps intended for a lecture or a sermon. This is most definitely very rare Frygiana. Take a look.
We are also very pleased to tell you that our new administrator, Clayton Chrusch, is slowly but surely making his way through the Denham Library collection to correct minor formatting problems that arise when translating from one text software to another.
Frye and Heidegger: A Response to Nicholas Graham
Martin Heidegger
In response to Nicholas Graham’s posts here and here
Aligning Frye’ conception of culture with such anti-humanistic, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic thinkers as Strauss, Voeglin, Lonergan, and Heidegger, is highly questionable and requires further elaboration to be credible. Frye’s conception of the function of literature and criticism in society is antithetical to the conservative and reactionary views of any of these thinkers, all of whom argued for a transcendental norm against which any merely human creative or imaginative power is to be invidiously measured. They are all anxious defenders of an authoritarian and anti-democratic myth of concern against the myth of freedom–proponents of the great butter-slide theory of Western culture, in which it all runs downhill after Plato or Aquinas.
Frye believed strongly that the function of literature lay in its social vision, the idea of a free society, even if that idea “can never be formulated, much less established as a society.” Frye adopted and gave added strength throughout his writings to Arnold’s
axiom that ‘culture seeks to do away with classes.’ The ethical purpose of a liberal educaton is to liberate, which con only mean to make one capable of conceiving of society as free, classless, and urbane . . . No discussion of beauty can confine itself to the formal relations of the isolated work of art; it must consider, too, the pariticpation of the work of art in the vision of the goal of social effort, the idea of complete and classless civilization (348).
It is true that Frye makes use of a number of concepts or formulations of Heidegger’s (poetry as dwelling, language uses man), but the use is selective and limited and the idea in question invariably undergoes a transmutation that emancipates the idea from Heidegger’s philosophy and makes it Frye’s. He does the same with some of Derrida’s terms, and with countless other thinkers and writers with whom he otherwise shares very little. In his social and political views, the one thinker he does share a good deal with is the great John Stuart Mill. For Frye, literature and imaginative culture as a whole accomplish what Mill envisioned as necessary in the progress to a fully mature society: they liberalize, democratize, individualize. This is about as far away from Heidegger as one can get. For Heidegger, human beings are simply the historical medium of consciousness through which Being reveals or conceals itself. It was Heidgger’s contempt for modernity and for democratic and liberal views that led him to the delusion–if it were not simple opportunism–that the Nazis were Germany’s, and das Sein‘s, salvation from the horrors of liberal democracy. For a good discussion of Heidegger’s relationship to the Nazis, see the Wikipedia article “Heidegger and Nazism.”
Archetype vs Convention
Responding to Jonathan Allan
Thank you so much for your post, Jonathan.
This may be tangential to your intent, but this post revealed to me why I am wrong to insist so strongly on the word convention instead of archetype. Literature and the verbal imagination develop not in a single society but in many relatively or absolutely separate societies at once. Conventions are rooted in their culture of origin and thus bound to their society and to connecting societies, but archetypes are rooted in the nature of human beings and the human verbal imagination, and therefore are not restricted by social boundaries. Archetypes certainly become conventions, but they clearly have roots that are deeper than the particularity of the society they manifest in.
I suppose the same could be said for many kinds of conventions, not just literary. It is certainly possible to have purely arbitrary conventions (like weights and measures), but human nature often plays a role in forming conventions. And so it is not just that archetypes often become literary conventions, but that even non-literary conventions are, in a sense, archetypal.
Is it possible that the claim that literature is archetypal boils down to the claim that the conventions of literature are rooted in human nature? I suppose Frye would complain that such a formulation reduces literature to something non-literary. Perhaps what you need to add is the recognition that human nature is not static but actually develops and grows in contact with civilization and culture, so that there is a symbiotic relationship that develops between human nature and the verbal imagination, both growing together. And so the archetypal nature of literature is really its permanent bilateral relationship with human nature.
In any case, I think we should actually encourage archetype spotting. Obviously such projects can’t be the end of criticism, but they are a quantum leap ahead of archetype ignoring.
TGIF: Oh, What the Hell . . .
. . . here’s the unedited much talked about interview last week of Jon Stewart by Bill O’Reilly
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4WGtg1uXQQ
The rest of the interview after the jump.
The Frye Festival Archive in the Northrop Frye Journal
On Monday we will be rolling out a dedicated Frye Festival section in the Frye Journal portion of The Educated Imagination, featuring papers delivered over the years at the annual Frye Festival in Moncton, New Brunswick. (You can register for this year’s Festival here.)
Our first addition to the archive will be Jean O’Grady’s paper, “Re-valuing Value,” delivered in 2007. On Monday we will cross-post it here at the blog as well as in the Journal, as we will do with all papers added to the Frye Festival archive. We’ll try to provide you a steady stream of them in the weeks leading up to this year’s Festival, which runs between April 19th and 25th. Be sure to visit the Festival website here.
Nicholas Graham: Myth and Metaphor
Responding to Bob Denham’s post
I would like to suggest that myth and metaphor are a higher form of question and answer.
Myth and metaphor operate on the level of Vico’s priority of poetry, the first level of language, and also the second level of language which is oratory.
Question and answer operate on the third level of language which is philosophical and on the lowest or forth level of language which is scientific or descriptive.
Myth and metaphor are what make poetry and oratory centripetal. Question and answer are what make philosophy and science centrifugal.
These two worlds of a) Myth and Metaphor & b) Question and Answer are perhaps what Blake had in mind when he wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
If we consider what makes Frye different from Derrida it is the fact that Derrida is a philosopher, using a different and constricted form of language; and the problem in the 70s was that the people who took over the English Departments were operating on the level of philosophy or the third level of language. What makes Frye shine, and stand apart, is the fact that he continued to opeate in terms of myth and metaphor: “to guard the vision in the time of trouble.” Blake’s Jerusalem. (See Michael Happy’s incisive article, “The Reality of the Created: From Deconstruction to Recreation”, Frye and the Word.)
Constructive philosophers like Leo Strauss and Bernard Lonergan, Gadamer, Heidegger, etc., provide accounts of the roots of our degraded culture and all agree with Heidegger that the only solution to our problems is to learn that on this earth we must learn to dwell poetically. But that is as far as they go. They do not rise to the higher level and operate, as Frye can, within the language of myth of metaphor.
Philosophical accounts of our culture are very helpful, if limited verbally, in attempting to recreate our culture. Lonergan provides us with an analysis of the levels of consciousness in terms four imperatives at four levels: Be Attentive, Intelligent, Reasonable, Responsible in his book, Method In Theology. This is hard to contradict unless we want to propose and promote their opposite. And he even devotes an entire book to examining the act of insight in his book, Insight, where we find a section on “The Longer Cycle of Decline”. This along with what Leo Strauss calls “The Waves of Modernity”, are what Frye terms, at a higher level, accounts of the roots of “single vision.”
The act of insight is what connects a question with an answers; questions evoke insights and without insights our answers are mere empty concepts.
An analysis of our culture in terms of myth and metaphor is what Frye offers us, but the question that remains to be examined is what connects myths and metaphors? It is the act of vision. So we must turn our attention to both the act of insight and the act of vision to find the double vision that our society so badly needs. Rollo May entitles his book The Cry for Myth, and James Joyce in the Circe chapter (15) of Ulysses calls our attention to the “intellectual imagination”.
Ironically, it was Rudolph Bultmann (student of Heidegger) who wrote so much about “demythologizing” who also made popular the word, kerygma, which is so central to Frye, who lifts it from the language level of philosophy and theology, and places it squarely in the context of and at the language level of anagogy, poetry and rhetoric.
As our individual acts of insights build up into intelligible emanations or philosophical theories over a lifetime, so our acts of vision, (which we express in poems, paintings, and love songs) create and recreate the visionary emanation that we identify with at the moment of death.
Similarly, a society lives or dies according to its vision. Such a vision is expressed, through the process of creation and recreation, in the Hebrew and Greek Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and through what Blake calls his infernal or Bible of Hell.
David Damrosch and World Literature
David Damrosch of Harvard has recently been extolling the virtues of world literature in a series of books, papers, and lectures. You can see his lecture last year at Simon Fraser University here. Last week he lectured at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto as the Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory. During his seminar on “How to Read World Literature” (also the title as his most recent book), he provided an example of how we might go about “teaching” world literature with three poems: one from the east, two from the West (one British and one Argentine). Moreover, the poems were from three different periods and one author was unknown. (These are in fact the first three poems discussed in “What is Literature?” in How to Read World Literature, 8-13.) In other words, the only thing that seemed to unite these poems is that they are understood – for one reason or another – to be poems and in some way identifiable as literature. Throughout his talk, Damrosch spoke in terms which had such an obvious affinity with Frye that I was surprised it wasn’t declared outright to be derived from Frye. Therefore, after being encouraged to think about modes, symbols, myths, seasons, genres, and themes for more than an hour, I found it impossible not to ask outright: So what is new about this, and how is it different from Northrop Frye?
Damrosch’s method, however, is different from Frye’s inasmuch as it appears to consist of little more than a kind of archetype-spotting where the critic pursues a recurring symbol and then duly catalogues the instances of its recurrence. For Damrosch, as long as the symbol is in play, then there is relevant critical activity in chasing it down. This is not really what Frye had in mind when he laid out the principles of archetypal criticism. Frye’s attitude, that is, seems to be, “yes, of courses there are symbols, but the question is why they recur, not merely how they recur.” In this regard, if there is to be a conception of world literature, as seems to be the goal of this “New” Comparative Literature as represented by scholars like Damrosch, it is only possible insofar as it seeks a homogenization of literature according to some universal experience manifested by recurring archetypes.
Damrosch writes in How to Read World Literature: “[w]riters in metropolitan centers do not necessarily need to adapt their methods in order to be accessible to readers beyond their home country, since many of their literary assumptions and cultural references will be understood abroad on the basis of readers’ past familiarity with earlier classics in their tradition” (107-8). Damrosch thus provides a defence of the Great Tradition or the Western Canon or the Canon of whatever tradition, and appears to argue that it is necessary to know other Canons in order comprehend work outside of one’s own tradition. The aim of world literature, therefore, is not to celebrate difference but rather to find sameness. We only need look to Anatomy of Criticism to find a similar but extensively elaborated mode of reading: “[t]he repetition of certain common images of physical nature like the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be called even ‘coincidence,’ which is the name we give to a piece of design that we cannot find a use for it. But it does indicate a certain unity in the nature that poetry imitates, and in the communicating activity of which poetry forms part. Because of the larger communicative context of education, it is possible for a story about the sea to be archetypal, to make a profound imaginative impact, on a reader who has never been out of Saskatchewan” (AC 99, emphasis mine). Frye argues that “[o]nly the archetypal critic can be concerned with its relationship to the rest of literature” (AC 100). Moreover, and with specific reference to Damrosch’s argument: “[t]hus the centre of the literary universe is whatever poem we happen to be reading. One step further, and the poem appears as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the total order of words” (AC 121). However, unlike Damrosch, it does not seem that Frye is advocating the practice of mere archetype-chasing. In his comparison of two poems – “Western wind, when wilt thou blow” and the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Nombrarte” – Damrosch comes to the conclusion that “[i]nstead of a fertile spring wind that can reunite loves, here we have an ill wind that blows no one any good and only brings a bitter aftertaste” (9). So what unites two poems, for Damrosch, is simply an “image of physical nature” (which is to say, precisely what Frye noted over fifty years ago but without saying nearly as much).
Update from the Frye Festival
The Frye Festival is a whirlwind of activity, as anyone who has been here can testify. What started out as a two-day festival is now a week-long, non-stop celebration of the written word. A lot of our effort goes into our School / Youth Program. About 10,000 young people, at all grade levels, get to hear and meet Frye Festival authors. For some of the authors this is old hat, while for others it’s a new and (usually) very rewarding experience. Young people are directly involved in the festival in several other ways, through essay writing contests, volunteering opportunities, and one evening at the festival devoted completely to young writers still in high school – an evening we call ‘Café Underground’. Sometimes our focus on Frye gets a little blurred in all this flurry of activity, but we always come back. (We plan, of course, to come back in a big way in 2012, Frye’s centenary.) Frye, we believe, would whole-heartedly approve of our emphasis on young people and education.
Every year, as I mentioned in a previous post, we schedule two major talks or lectures, the Antonine Maillet – Northrop Frye Lecture and the ‘Frye Symposium’ Lecture. We also schedule three roundtable discussions where festival authors bring fresh insight to ideas and topics that (more often than not) have a fairly direct connection to Frye. We’ve had some remarkable exchanges over the years. My hope is that as we dig deeper into our archives (audio and video recordings, old computer files, etc.) we’ll be able to post some of this material on the blog. I remember, for example, a wonderful prepared statement that Glen Gill read at a roundtable in 2005, on the subject “Myth and Identity: The Role of Myth in Forming a Sense of Identity.” Other panelists on that round table were Jean O’Grady, Yves Sioui-Durand, and Maurizio Gatti. In April, 2000, at our very first roundtable, we asked the panelists (including David Adams Richards, France Daigle, Louise Desjardins, and George Elliott Clarke) to discuss Frye’s statement that “the regional is the real source of the poet’s imagination.” In 2003, with John Ralston Saul as moderator, we explored the topic “Mythology and National Identity,” with authors Bernhard Schlink, Naim Kattan, France Daigle, André Roy, and Joyce Hackett. A crowd of about 200, with the Governor General in attendance, set the room abuzz. After 10 years it’s become clear that our roundtables, relaxed, informal, aimed at the “sophisticated amateurs” in the audience, have become one of the most anticipated features of the festival.
But we’re not always successful in posing the right question or getting the right slant on a particular theme. Sometimes we pose a question that scares the public away, as in 2008, with “The Eros of Reading: Why Some Students Fall in Love with Reading and Others Do Not.” The discussion, with panelists Peter Sanger, Glenna Sloan, Monique Leblanc, and Andy Wainwright, was brilliant, and especially important in the context of New Brunswick’s terrible literacy statistics, but we failed to bring out the audience that it deserved. Sometimes we have a good question and excellent panelists, but they bring such different perspectives that they end up talking past one another. We are working on three roundtables for this April (two months from now!), a little worried that we haven’t got them quite right. We have a title for one of the roundtables (“Stories, and How They Work”) that is broad and vague enough that it might work just fine or might have trouble finding its feet, depending on the moderator and panelists. But with Jean Fugère as moderator, and Linden MacIntyre, Annabel Lyon, and two equally outstanding francophones, we have high hopes. The same is true of our Friday noon roundtable, with Jean Fugère again as moderator. The topic is “Writing Lives and Afterlives” and the panellists will include Nino Ricci, Daniel Poliquin, and Noah Richler. The idea is to explore what happens when fiction writers write biography, bringing the narrative gift to a non-fiction genre. They may end up exploring something very different, of course, much to our surprise and (if we’re lucky) delight.
Last year’s ‘Frye Symposium’ roundtable was on the topic “How Might The Educated Imagination lead us forth into the 21st Century.” Panelists included Jean Wilson, Germaine Warkentin, Serge-Patrice Thibodeau (award-winning Acadian poet and publisher), and Serge Morin (retired philosophy professor who invited Frye to Moncton in the fall of 1990, to give the Pascal Poirier Lecture at L’Université de Moncton). I’ve already posted a copy of Germaine Warkentin’s opening remarks at this roundtable, and I hope to post Serge’s remarks, once I get a better copy. The topic for this year’s symposium roundtable is “Voyaging into the Unknown in Folk Tales and in Dreams” which I think has many Frygian ramifications, not least the life-long obsession with the downward spiral, the cave, the labyrinth, katabasis, etc. Three of the panellists (André Lemelin from Quebec, Kay Stone from Winnipeg, and Ronald Labelle from Moncton) are experts in storytelling and folklore, invited to the festival for a special storytelling event. The 4th panellist, Craig Stephenson, is a Jungian analyst invited to the festival to give a talk on Jung and Frye.
Any suggestions for improving, changing, revamping any of these 2010 roundtable titles and topics would be welcome, these next few weeks. A press conference to announce the authors and draft program for 2010 is scheduled for next Tuesday, February 16. We hope there will be big Fryes and small Fryes in the audience come April, especially at the lectures and roundtables, and that you will have questions that come straight out of Frye. Perhaps, if you can’t attend, you might pose a question that one of us here could ask.
You can register here.
Quote of the Day
Actually, two quotes from Kingsley Amis on popular and serious literature
I have been reading Zachary Leader’s vast biography of Kingsley Amis (The Life of Kingsley Amis, 2006). Amis had a strong interest in popular, or “genre” fiction, and he wrote books about science fiction and about Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. Here are two quotations from the latter book, The James Bond Dossier (1965): “I think wish fulfilment is a common and normal human activity. I find self-advertised maturity, pride in maturity, at least equally suspect. No adult ought to feel an adult all the time.” And even in works of anti-escapist, ‘serious’ literature, Amis argues that a process of compensation is at work: “one of the qualities that took us to it in the first place is its implicit assurance that life is coherent and meaningful, and I can think of no more escapist notion than that.”