Linguist Robert de Beaugrande, who died in June 2008, set up a very generous website of his books and articles here. One of those books is Critical Discourse: A Survey of Contemporary Literary Theorists (1988). His chapter on Frye is here.
This book has been cross-posted in the Denham Library. We will link to all books posted online involving Frye as we discover them.
An except from Noah Richler’s talk at the Frye Festival last month, soon to be published in its entirety by Goose Lane Press.
We Are at War
If Parliament remains true to the decision it made in 2008[1], then by December 2011, Canadian soldiers will leave Afghanistan and our participation as combatants in NATO’s International Security Assistance Force will have ended. I’m not speaking to you, today, to judge this undeclared war—though technically speaking, we are not fighting a war but are involved in a “counter-insurgency” operation[2] and so conveniently not bound by the Geneva Conventions. No, appropriate to the Festival’s flattering invitation I come to the topic of this war, let’s call it a war, in the shadow of the master, Northrop Frye. As someone with a keen interest in story, I am fascinated by how the manner in which we narrate our lives lays the way for the journey we make through war’s repeating cycle of insult, escalating injury and then exhaustion. I am here to consider how we have talked ourselves into this war[3], through it—and now, finally, are talking ourselves out of it.
The Canadian Military Then and Now
Ten years ago Canada considered itself a ‘peacekeeping’ nation despite having a diminishing presence in actual UN peacekeeping operations around the world. More than 100 000 Canadians have participated in UN operations since 1948[4] but a mere 317 Canadians in blue helmets were serving in small numbers in various missions around the world in September, 2001[5], when Canada’s rank among contributing nations had plummeted to 33rd among contributing nations[6].
Now (at the end of February, 2010) it ranks 57th.[7] Today, our Forces are still nowhere near the 1.1 million who fought over the course of the Second World War when, despite our relatively meager population—of which more than 45 000 gave their lives—this country had the third largest navy, the fourth largest air force and six land divisions fighting[8], but it is probably fair to say that at the present time the Canadian Forces enjoy a much higher and more visible profile than they have done for fifty years and that the solemnity with which Canadian military fatalities are honoured is the envy of other armies and countries fighting in the ISAF in Afghanistan.
It’s unlikely that the character of Canadians was altered so fundamentally in that time, but there is no question that a wholesale revision of a couple of our myths of identity at least provided the suggestion of such a change. It is this occurrence on the narrative plane that I wish to examine through the limited evidence of the voices of a few of the soldiers and their families but more so the journalists and pundits who write and comment on the war for the Canadian news media. Today, in a hyper-narrated world that I believe Northrop Frye would have found tremendously exciting, not just poets but you and I and especially the press are Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Reporters[9], in the heat of the moment, articulate the national story and in this regard I believe their pronouncements to be reasonably scientific barometer of how not just the content but also the form of stories have been manipulated to permit the war and, in the very moment we are living in, are about to excuse us from it.[10]
How Stories Work (According to Northrop Frye)
Stories are the mirror of a society’s worldview and present themselves to us in myriad forms, the range of which is no longer academic. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, presented a “Theory of Modes” in which the form of a story could be classified by the relative “elevation” of its characters who were superior or inferior to we mortals in kind or in degree. Gods, superior to us in kind, operate in a world not subject to the laws of ours mundane one in stories Frye called ‘myths’. Stories that feature characters living in the same world that we do and who are like us in kind but superior to ordinary humans in degree, are romances with heroes. The hero, says Frye, “is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.” He is a hero in a high mimetic mode—the hero “of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.”[11] The hero is in low mimetic if he is utterly like us in kind and in degree. Such a character is, says Frye, “of realistic fiction”—and not very grand at all. He is, writes Frye, “one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience.”
Frye, however, reluctantly toiling in the ‘Bush Garden’ (a phrase he borrowed from a student of his called Margaret Atwood), was in the habit of judging stories at a remote distance. Today these story forms are close and immediate. We negotiate not just with Islamism but a host of creeds that as recently as fifty years ago entered the imaginations even of scholars merely on paper or as the result of anthropological travels to distant lands. Now they live not just down the street, they’re next door and inside the house and in your son’s or daughter’s bedroom. We live in a world where the means to fabricate or subscribe to a story and disseminate it have never been more powerful or more commonplace—means that are, quite literally, at our keyboard fingertips, and we have come to understand their astonishing power because ordinary life has taught us to recognize and to use our viral capacity as their agents. Stories have never been less remote. They are dynamic to the point of being positively volatile and—I’m much influenced by the English biologist Richard Dawkins’s notion of memes, here—they act as the foot soldiers of narrative cultures that are virulently, intensely competitive.
In his Late Notebooks Frye provided two glosses for his talk to the doctors at Mt. Sinai Hospital, “Literature as Therapy,” which Frye delivered from notes rather than from a manuscript:
When I talked to the doctors at Mt. Sinai I found myself improvising a thesis I didn’t understand at the time. I said the sympathies and antipathies in nature that underlay Galenic medicine don’t exist as that, but similar forces may exist in the mind. I thought of mother after a post-parturitional disease following Vera’s birth: she had what sounded (ironic for a woman who never touched a drop of alcohol in her life) just like delirium tremens. She said that reading Scott’s novels, dropped on her by my grandfather, brought her round. Scott in those days was the acme of serious secular reading. What I felt was that the plots of formulaic fiction conventions could act as a sort of counter-delirium. Similarly the Old Testament God may be a counter delirium to a nation trampled on by foreigners. I know how vague this sounds, but there’s something that may emerge. (Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World, CW 6:673–4).
I told the doctors about mother & Scott’s novels, suggesting that romance creates a counter-delirium. We don’t buy Galen’s sympathies and antipathies any more: they don’t exist in nature (amethysts for drunks, saffron for jaundice, etc.). But they may exist in the reality-realism metaphorical-objective context. The confrontation technique in the casting out of a humor. Jonson, Shakespeare’s TS [The Taming of the Shrew], the Fool-Edgar in Lear. My point in the Lear lecture about words fighting evil (my 1940 experience with Churchill) at the centre of the words-and-power conflict (Late Notebooks, CW 5:243–4)
Carmelo Tropiano is a Professor of English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College
“Literature [is]…a means of concentrating and intensifying the mind and of bringing it into a state of energy, which is the basis of all health.”
—Northrop Frye, “Literature as Therapy”
In November of 1989, Northrop Frye gave a lecture titled, “Literature as Therapy.” In his discussion, he expounds on the notion that literature possesses curative properties: That reading a novel or a poem, for example, in some sense restores both psychological and bodily “balance,” and that there is an inextricable linkage between the body and the mind that lends authenticity to the concept that “such imaginative constructs as literature…would have a direct role to play in physical health” (469). Frye provides several literary anecdotes to buttress his thesis (Dickens and Shakespeare), and then relates the following personal account:
I remember my mother telling me of undergoing a very serious illness after the birth of my sister, and in the course of the illness she became delirious. Her father, who was a Methodist clergyman, came along with the twenty-five volumes of Scott’s Waverley novels and dropped them on her. By the time she had read her way through them she was all right again. (475)
The cathartic effects of reading appear to segue into the purging of destructive “imbalances” that contribute to physical illness. Perhaps part of the reason behind Frye’s mother’s recovery has to do with the time required to complete twenty-five volumes. What is, however, certain, and the main idea that Frye seems to suggest here, is that literature enables transformation; and that fictional texts, necessarily, do not have any creative boundaries imposed on them in the same way that non-fictional texts do. Rather than challenge the status-quo, non-fictional texts seem to reify what is. As Frye aptly notes, stories employ “poetic language,” requiring the reader to “detach himself” (474). What literature conveys “is the sense of controlled hallucination…where things are seen with a kind of intensity with which they are not seen in ordinary experience” (475). The literary experience foments ambiguity and dislocation—the aesthetic pedigree of the novel or short story is that they revel in the uncertain, the antithesis to the non-thought of received ideas that defy critical examination. How can we, for instance, query the biological construct of a cell or the number of nucleotides in a strand of DNA? Literature, on the other hand, approaches and expresses truths in an indirect sort of way, in non-explicit, non-objective trajectories. Reading means entering into the boundless possibilities of the imagined and is unsettling to the real-world with its plethora of codes, dense practicalities, and auras of conventionality. The story is the imaginative space where the inexorabilities and vicissitudes of existence are explored. It is little wonder why Plato banished the poets from his ideal republic (those involved in iconoclasm)—they offered a “counter environment” as Frye would say, “in which the follies and evils of the environment are partly reflected” and ultimately purged. The artist sets up something “antipathetic to the civilization in which it exists.” The artist’s vision is one in which the reader participates, and in such a way as to procure a deeper awareness of the world beyond one’s environment; it is a practice that enables a reader to gain insights, through appropriation, that will make his own life more comprehensible. For Frye’s mother, the “counter-delirium” offered to her by reading Scott’s novels facilitated what Coleridge called, “a willing suspension of disbelief”; that is, a susceptibility to being led into an experience that is potentially disruptive, and, in the end, transformative. The healing properties in literature, thus, are those that allow us to dislocate ourselves from our surroundings, and in Frye’s mother’s case, from herself and her illness. Our attention, therefore, will be on something else for a change, which surely contributes to “balance.”
Sources:
Frye, Northrop. “Literature as Therapy.” The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical
Theory 1976-1991. Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 463-534.
A Marylhurst University student, Sarita Ruckert, has posted her essay on The Great Code and the books of Esther and Jonah here.
Further to Joe’s post, more Frye on Reagan:
Of course it takes some effort to become more self-observant, to acquire historical sense and perspective, to understand the limitations that have been placed on human power by God, nature, fate, or whatever. It was part of President Reagan’s appeal that he was entirely unaware of any change in consciousness, and talked in the old reassuring terms of unlimited progress. But the new response to the patterns of history seems to have made itself felt, along with a growing sense that we can no longer afford leaders who think that acid rain is something one gets by eating grapefruit. I wish I could document this change from recent developments in American culture, but I am running out of both time and knowledge. It seems clear to me, however, that American and Canadian imaginations are much closer together than they have been in the past. (CW 12, 653)
Both Governor Reagan and the local SDS issued statements, and there is a curious similarity in their statements. They both say that the people’s park was a phoney issue, and that the real cause was a conspiracy—the Governor says of hard-core student agitators, the SDS says of right-wing interests operating “probably at the national level.” Both are undoubtedly right, up to a point. There is a hard core of student agitators: one of them was grumbling in the student paper, a day or two before the lid blew off, that “not a goddam thing was happening at Berkeley,” and that something would have to start soon because Chairman Mao himself had said, in one of his great thoughts, that revolution is no child’s play. On the other side, Governor Reagan is clearly staking a very ambitious career on the support of voters who want to have these noisy young pups put in their place once and for all. Both are very pleased with the result: the Governor is visibly admiring his own image as a firm and sane administrator, and the SDS are delighted that the police have “over-reacted” so predictably and helped to “radicalize the moderates.” But the more one thinks about these two attitudes, the clearer it becomes that the militant left and the militant right are not going in opposite directions, even when they fight each other, but in the same direction. For both the Governor and the SDS, the university is ultimately an obstacle, which will have to be destroyed or transformed into something unrecognizable if their ambitions are to be fulfilled. (CW 7, 386-7)
At Berkeley, one sees clearly how the supporters of Governor Reagan and the supporters of SDS are the same kind of people. The radical talks about the thoughts of Chairman Mao, not because he is really so impressed by those thoughts but because he cannot endure the notion of thought apart from dictatorial power. The John Bircher uses slightly different formulas to mean the same thing. In the past week I have seen, and heard about, the most incredible acts of police brutality and stupidity against the students. And yet even this is not one society repressing another, but a single society that cannot escape from its own bungling. Whatever we most condemn in our society is still a part of ourselves, and we cannot disclaim responsibility for it. (ibid., 392)
The Soviet Union is trying to outgrow the Leninist dialectical rigidity, and some elements in the U.S.A. are trying to outgrow its counterpart. But it’s hard: Reagan is the great symbol of clinging to the great-power syndrome, which is why he sounds charismatic even when he’s talking the most obvious nonsense. (CW 5, 398)
BILL MOYERS: I’ve often thought that one of the secrets of Ronald Reagan’s appeal was that he was able to make Americans feel as if we were still the mighty giant of the world, still an empire, even as around the world we were having to retreat from the old presumptions that governed us for the last fifty years. Did you see any of that in the Reagan appeal?
FRYE: Oh yes, very much so. It’s the only thing that explains the Reagan charisma. In fact, I think that what has been most important about Americans since the war is that they have been saying a lot of foolish things—the Evil Empire, for example—but doing all the right ones. I think nobody but Nixon could have organized a deal with China, for example. (CW 24, 893-4)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaWsewOKhgw
Further to Joe’s post, Todd Alcott’s “Television is a Drug”.
“Obambi”. That’s Maureen Dowd‘s nickname for Obama which she employed right through the primaries until his nomination in 2008. The problem with it? Well, it of course has nothing to do with anyone recognizable as Barack Obama, a remarkably capable politician who, by the time he’d announced his candidacy, had already made a career of overseeing the self-destruction of his opponents. But Dowd pushed the “Obambi” conceit for almost two years because she could. As is regularly the case, she lacked the discipline to weigh whether or not she should. This, remember, is the same person who during the 2000 election gleefully perpetuated the fiction that Al Gore claimed to have “invented the internet”, and suggested that he is “so feminized” that he is “practically lactating”.
And that’s a pattern of behavior with Dowd which is disturbing for at least a couple of reasons. The first is that she never lets a fact get in the way of a low blow she regards as clever, and the second is that she has an unmistakable tendency to feminize males in order to dismiss them — and moreover does so almost exclusively with Democrats, calling them “the mommy party” (you can guess who “the daddy party” is). She likewise occasionally masculinizes women for much the same purpose, most especially Hillary Clinton — or “Hillzilla”, as Dowd dubbed her during the primaries. Gender stereotyping is one of a number of strategies that Dowd regularly resorts to in place of anything that might be characterized as responsible criticism.
Here are some notable examples of Dowd’s effort to emasculate Obama — because girly-men are, you know, self-evidently a joke that everybody gets: “diffident debutante“, “America’s pretty boy“, “effete“, “emotionally delicate“, “weak sister“, “legally blonde“. Ask yourself: Does any of this even remotely coincide with your estimation of the man, however you feel about his politics? And why diminish him with feminine comparisons? What is going on here?
This is just one thread in a whole skein of such behavior. Media Matters for America has a more complete catalogue of Dowd’s persistent use of gender stereotypes here. Allegedly feminized men are not fit to govern according to Dowd, and most certainly not when they are Democrats. But “tough guys” like John McCain (who once publicly called his wife a cunt) can, when the mood is upon her, set Dowd’s atavistic heart aflutter. It is so persistent a pattern that it’s difficult not to wonder what lies behind it.
This matters because the Times is the flagship of a supposedly “liberal media”, and its opinion makers still draw a lot of water. Dowd in particular plays the celebrity circuit with personal profiles in mass circulation magazines and appearances on television whenever she has a book to sell, such as the widely panned Are Men Necessary? We live in a world where we’re apparently required to put up with the lies that Fox News manufactures on an hourly basis in the name of “balance”. So it’d be nice if the paper of record didn’t propagate twice a week the neurotic, unfunny, unclever babble of Maureen Dowd, which gets said not because it necessarily has anything to do with anything that is actually happening, but because it is formulated by someone who isn’t responsible enough not to say it.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt7pPKXDhPc
The anniversary of the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony passed earlier this week, so here is the entire thing, conducted by Arturo Toscanini.
Further to the previous post, here is some cultural studies avant la lettre: Frye on Reagan, the Pope, and “the prison of television.”
[282] Television brings a theatricalizing of the social contract. Reagan may be a cipher as President, but as an actor acting the role of a decisive President in a Grade B movie he’s I suppose acceptable to people who think life is a Grade B movie. The Pope, whose background is also partly theatrical, is on a higher level but the general principle still holds. It goes with reaction, identifying the reality with the facade. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, just for once, it could be true that Father knows best? Emotional debauch of father-figuring. (Notebook 27)
[492] American civilization has to de-theatricalize itself, I think, from the prison of television. They can’t understand themselves why they admire Reagan and would vote for him again, and yet know that he’s a silly old man with no understanding even of his own policies. They’re really in that Platonic position of staring at the shadows on the wall of a cave. The Pope, again, is another old fool greatly admired because he’s an ex-actor who looks like a holy old man.
[493] Watching a television panel of journalistic experts discussing the (Bush-Dukakis) election, it seemed to me Plato’s cave again and Plato’s eikasia, or illusion at two removes–show business about show business. All one needs to know about such horseshit is how to circumvent whatever power it has. I’m trying to dredge up something more complex and far-reaching than just the cliché that elections today are decided by images rather than issues–they always were. It’s really an aspect of the icon-idol issue: imagination is the faculty of participation in society, but it should remain in charge, not passively responding to what’s in front of it. Where does idolatry go in my argument? End of Three? (Notebook 44)
[85] Why do Americans continue to cherish Reagan, including millions of Americans who know he’s an ass? I think they’re bored by their own indifference to the world, but can only focus their minds on a boob-tube leader. (Notebook 50)