Monthly Archives: December 2010

Edith Sitwell and “Fearful Symmetry”

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On this date in 1964 Edith Sitwell died (born 1887).

Sitwell provided an enthusiastic review of Fearful Symmetry in the Spectator (10 March 1947) where she observed: “To say it is a magnificent, extraordinary book is to praise it as it should be praised, but in doing so one gives little idea of the huge scope of the book and its fiery understanding.”

Here’s Frye in his letter of thanks to Sitwell on January 7, 1948:

Dear Miss Sitwell:

Ever since I read your review of Fearful Symmetry in the Spectator I have been wanting to write you and wondering what to say.  I have finally decided that the best thing to say is thank you.  (Denham, Selected Letters, 24-5)

After the jump, a much longer letter to Sitwell written on April 12th of that same year.  Headnote and footnotes courtesy of Bob Denham.

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Northrop Frye and John Lennon: “War is Over — If You Want It”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ZT1h-RzKc

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death (1940-1980).

It is a pleasure to commemorate him with local talent — Kori Pop performing “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” filmed just over a week ago by Mitch Fillion of Southern Souls.  This is a sneaks-up-beside-you rendition of the song in a simply conceived but beautiful video.

In “The Quality of Life in the ’70s,” Frye picks up on Lennon’s theme, “War is over — if you want it,” a phrase that appeared on billboards during the Christmas season forty years ago in cities all over the world, including Toronto:

One of the more genuinely attractive aspects of the protest movements of the late 1960s has been the insistence with which they have raised the question of “Why not?”  Some time ago one of the Beatles put up advertisements over Toronto saying “War is over–if you want it.”  It was not perhaps a very successful enterprise, but what it said was true enough.  War is over if we want it, and so is the whole nightmare of human folly and tyranny.  It will probably not be over in the 1970s, but there is nothing in the will of God, the malice of the devil, or the unconsciousness of nature to prevent it from going.  What prevents it are the bogies and demons inside us.  We have been calling these demons up pretty frequently during the past few years of confused and infantile illusions, and they have never failed to respond to our call.  But they have no power except what they get from us, and certainly no power to stop us, if we want it, from making the 1970s an era of grace, dignity, and peace.  (CW 11, 296)

The footnote to this paragraph in the Collected Works reads:

NF is referring to John Lennon’s Christmas 1970 release Happy Christmas (War is Over).  Lennon himself paid for a billboard on Yonge St. that proclaimed this message to the citizens of Toronto.  (CW 11, 376)

Video for “Happy Christmas (War is Over)” after the jump.  Also, the remix by George Martin of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” interpolating “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and “Helter Skelter.”  Really needs to be heard to be appreciated.  Finally, a photo of Lennon with the 19th century circus poster that inspired the song.  Lennon claimed the entire thing came from that poster.  In any event, if you look hard enough Pablo Fanques and the Hendersons will all be there.  (While, of course, Henry the Horse dances the waltz.)

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Frye and Rhetoric

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Regarding Bob Ashley’s earlier comment on Frye and rhetoric

The first essay I ever published was a paper written for Wayne Booth’s course in “Rhetorical Criticism”:  “Northrop Frye and Rhetorical Criticism.”  Xavier University Studies 11, no. 1 (1972): 1–11.  Booth became my mentor and dear friend.  Everything I know comes from Booth and Frye.  Like Bob, I’m too far removed from the academy to know much of anything that’s going on in rhetorical studies.  I scanned the Frye bibliography of secondary materials for “rhetoric” and came up with the list below.  Most of these studies are only tangentially related to the issue Bob raises, though Hernadi, Gorak, and Kenny might prove useful.  I think if I were to study the issue I’d start with Frye’s Seattle epiphany on oracle and wit (see previous post here), and then try to relate this to his sense of an ending.  Frye’s endings are often oracular.

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk.  American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.  Examines the poetic strategies of Poe, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson and relates them to the four levels of symbolism in Frye’s Anatomy.

Dillon, George L.  “Rhetoric.”  The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism.  Ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, 616–17.  Summarizes Frye’s theory of rhetoric, along with the theories of I.A. Richards and Paul de Man.

Druff, James H., Jr. “Genre and Mode: The Formal Dynamics of Doubt.”  Genre 14 (Fall 1981): 295–307 [299–302].  Believes that Frye’s distinction between genre and mode is too clear-cut and that we can understand better some of the disharmony in the forms of modern fiction if we see the two concepts as related, genre having a historical dimension and mode a rhetorical one.

Gorak, Jan.  “Frye and the Legacy of Communication.”  In Lee and Denham, Legacy, 304–15.  Opposes Frye’s view of communication, derived from literature as a means of human liberation, to the coercive communication of contemporary media––rhetorical or dialectical communication.  In his late writings Frye is eager to explore the interactions between the two.

Hernadi, Paul. “Ratio Contained by Oratio: Northrop Frye on the Rhetoric of Nonliterary Prose.”  In Denham and Willard, Visionary Poetics, 137–53.  Argues that the ideas in the last section of the theory of genres in the Anatomy prefigure several current concerns in the study of texts, including the question whether literature can be distinguished from nonliterature.  Concludes that Frye’s answer to the question is ambiguous: ratio both contains and is contained by oratio.  In this respect Frye differs from both the formalists, who see clear distinctions between the literary and the nonliterary, and the poststructuralists (e.g., de Man and Eagleton), who do not.

Kenny, Robert Wade. “Truth as Metaphor: Imaginative Vision and the Ethos of Rhetoric.”  In The Ethos of Rhetoric.  Ed. Michael J. Hyde, et al.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. 37–55.  On Frye’s view that imaginative vision is the fundamental feature of human experience for Blake and the significance of such vision for rhetorical theory and practice.  Also remarks on the teleological thrust of Frye’s criticism and his view of existential metaphor.

Kristeva, Julia.  ‘The Importance of Frye.”  In Lee and Denham, Legacy, 335–7.  An homage to Frye, in which the Anatomy is said to have opened up “the field of literary criticism to an ambition which may appear excessive but which, only in this way, can ever hope to approach the extraordinary polysemy of literary art and take up the challenge it permanently poses.  The modalities of criticism, designated or hoped for by Frye . . . can be disputed; others can be added.  But it is undeniable that these types of critical approaches allow us, once they are linked, to decompartmentalize the technical enclosures in which contemporary literary theory habitually delights and to aspire to a capable interdisciplinarity.  The particular emphasis that Frye puts on the archetype as symbol which links one poem to another and allows us to unify and integrate our literary experience seems to me indeed an ethical requirement––not to lose sight of the content conveyed by rhetorical play, and to anchor this content in the Western metaphysical tradition.”

Kuchar, Gary.  “Typology and the Language of Concern in the Work of Northrop Frye.”  Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Litterature Comparée 27, nos. 1–2 (March–June 2000): 159–80.  Examines Frye’s view of typology as a mode of rhetoric and historical mode of thought and its relation to his understanding of metaphor and primary concerns.  Also outlines the relationships between Frye’s views and Patristic exegesis, Lacanian psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology.

Long, Douglas. “Northrop Frye: Liberal Humanism and the Critique of Ideology.”  Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’Études canadiennes 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 27–51.  Despite Frye’s wish to contribute to the discussion of fundamental socio-political issues, his reflections have received scant attention from social scientists.  Illustrates some of Frye’s political concerns and insights and discovers, especially in Words with Power, the basis for a critique of the modes of political discourse. Concentrates on the difference between the divisive rhetoric of ideology, expressive of the human urge of domination and advantage, and the inclusive and unifying language of myth, expressive of what Frye calls “primary concerns.”  See also Michael D. Behiels’s introduction to this issue, 9–14.

McCutcheon, Russell T.  Review of Marc Manganaro’s Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell. University of Toronto Quarterly 66, no. 1 (Winter 1996–97): 359–63.  On, among other things, Manganaro’s analysis of the rhetoric of Frye’s comparative method in The Critical Path.

Manganaro, Marc.  “Northrop Frye: Ritual, Science, and ‘Literary Anthropology.’”  Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, & Campbell. New Haven: Yale UP. 1992, pp. 111–50.  On the relations between Frye’s criticism and the comparative method of anthropology.  Argues that Frye’s view of the way science uses facts and theory is similar to Frazer’s.  Frye’s authority derives from his “invoking what cannot be imagined: the perfect, ultimate originary unity of things.”  The rhetoric Frye uses to map out his views of literature is found also in his social and educational theories: it reveals Frye’s commitment to structure, continuity, and essentialism, as well as his mystification of the “historically contingent” and ideology.

Sutton, Jane.  “The Death of Rhetoric and Its Rebirth in Philosophy.”  Rhetorica 4, no. 3 (1986): 203–26.  Examines the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the methods of Frye, Kenneth Burke, and Hayden White.

Thomas, Brook.  “The New Historicism and the Privileging of Literature.”  Annals of Scholarship 4 (Summer 1987): 23–48.  Draws on Frye’s discussion of the distinctions between literary and nonliterary discourse in the Anatomy, pointing out that although Frye claims all discourse is rhetorical and therefore literary, “this does not mean that there is no such thing as literature.”  Looks at the critique of Frye by Terry Eagleton, maintaining that Eagleton’s view is a caricature and observing that both critics advocate the transforming power of literature.  Finds Fredric Jameson’s “reading through Frye” to be a much better way of transforming Frye’s ethical view of literature into a politically sensitive criticism.

Wuthnow, Robert.  Rediscovering the Sacred: Perspective on Religion.  Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1992.  Chapter 3, “Religious Discourse as Public Rhetoric,” uses Northrop Frye and Susan Rubin Suleiman as complementary visions on how persons from different perspectives can begin to understand one another.

Cicero

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R73nvRPNSHA

The death of Cicero in the HBO series Rome, which (the pathos of this scene aside) pretty much portrays him as Frye suggests below.

On this date in 43 BCE the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero was assassinated.

Frye in notes 52:

Anyway, wherever it goes, the first chapter [of Words with Power] is beginning to involve some consideration of the social conditioning of writers as reflected in their prose styles.  I notice how completely we are committed today to what I see as the direct descendant of the “prophetic”: to writers of piercing if often partial insight.  For anyone who values, for example, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, for whatever reason, such an author as Cicero is the pits: he’s nothing but a ragbag of platitudes and cliches.  Yet Cicero represented the summit of style, good taste and authority down to the 18th c., because he was the spokesman of the acknowledged social structure.  I find this Ciceronian majesterial style still in Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon in the 18th c.: they would have seldom agreed with each other, but they have in common a sense of speaking out of the centre of social rationality. (CW 6, 470)

Picture of the Day: Frye’s Clown Nose

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This is the elusive photo of Frye wearing a clown nose at a party for Morley Callaghan.  That’s Morley’s son Barry Callaghan standing next to him.  The photo (along with Frye’s blurb) appears on the back cover of Barry’s Fifteen Years in Exile, his memoir about his years at the Exile Quarterly. The very pleasant circumstances in which the photo was taken are described in this post from last year.

“Remembering Northrop Frye: Recollections by His Students and Others”

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Regarding the earlier post about a collection of letters called Remembering Northrop Frye: Recollections by His Students and Others in the 1940s and 1950s:

The context for Remembering Northrop Frye is Frye’s diaries, which he kept intermittently from 1942 until 1955.  Altogether there are seven diaries, or at least seven different books in which he recorded his daily activities, typically at the end of each day.  In the early 1990s I began transcribing the diaries, which form a substantial body of writing––more than a quarter million words altogether.  They were published as The Diaries of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.  Collected Works of Northrop Frye, vol. 8).  In the course of this project I sought to identify the more than 1,200 people who are mentioned by Frye.  I corresponded with a number of them, most of whom were his students at Victoria College in the 1940s and 1950s.  To take one year as an example, I wrote to seventy‑eight people who made an appearance in the 1949 diary: fifty‑nine responded.  I would ordinarily inquire of all those I wrote whether they remembered the occasion mentioned by Frye, and I would usually invite them to provide some biographical information about themselves and to share their memories of Frye as a person and teacher.  I often requested the correspondents to help identify others mentioned in the diaries.  I was interested in learning specific details in order to annotate the diaries, but my invitation to the correspondents to reflect on their experiences with Frye and on the Victoria College scene at the time would help me, I hoped, to reconstruct the social landscape on campus during the seven years covered in the diaries.  I received two unsolicited letters, sent to me at the urging of other correspondents.  All were generous in their responses.  Altogether the replies I received, many quite extensive, provide a rather remarkable body of reminiscence, and that is what is the reproduced in the eighty‑nine letters in Remembering Northrop Frye, scheduled to be released by McFarland and Co. early in 2011.

One motif that runs throughout is the power and generous presence that Frye had as a teacher.  Here is a sampler of the correspondents’ tributes:

• Northrop Frye was the greatest single influence in my life.  His view of things permanently altered the shape, not only of literature, but of life as I saw it.  And even now, though inevitably modified––& I fear sometimes distorted––Norrie’s view of literature and the world still shapes my own. (Phyllis Thompson)

• My own memories of Frye are filled with respect and gratitude.  What incredible  luck to have been “brought up” by him!  I remember the excitement of his first lecture every fall. There was a ping of the mind, like a finger snapped against cut glass.  You came back from your grungy summer job and then there it was, the whole intellectual world snapped into life again, the current flowing. (Eleanor Morgan)

• I still cannot believe my good fortune in having been taught so many stimulating courses by a person of such brilliance and compassion.  His ideas were electrifying, encyclopedic, and revolutionary. . . . Each year when I returned to the university, the hinges of my mind sprang open, and my brain pulsed with the excitement of Frye’s thinking, his eloquence, and his wit.  But what keeps his influence on my life vivid and profound to this day is that he enabled us to translate the leaps of intellect we experienced in his lectures into the emotional underpinnings of a way to look at the world and one’s place in it––in short, to be in the world, yet not of it. (Beth Lerbinger)

• Frye would lecture without notes, yet the class rarely turned haphazard.  He asked questions constantly that required a knowledge not only of the Bible and classical mythology, but also of the major works in English and American literature.  No one could keep pace with all the references, but still the effect was to illuminate and give a structure to a rich and fascinating verbal universe.  And then, as an added bonus, just when you thought he had reached the conclusion his investigation was leading to, he would use that “conclusion” as the opening position in a new line of investigation. (Ed Kleiman)

• In short, the Frye course [Religious Knowledge] in one way made for a lot of fun at home.  In another way it changed our lives forever. (M.L. Knight)

• In 1950 while at library school there was no need for me to run hard at either studying or football so I and a classmate would range the campus auditing lectures and we found Frye had the largest, most intent crowds and the most graduate students.  Even now I take up my lecture notes, particularly on Job and Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, and find him stimulating. (Douglas Fisher)

• The outstanding lecturer, the one who made my university education a spiritual one, setting the mode for the rest of my life, was Northrop Frye. . . . My memories of Northrop Frye are fond and precious.  I still have the essays I wrote for him, with his comments on them.  I have a collection of almost all of his published books. . . .  I wrote to him a few times.  I recall that one letter, probably the one that occasioned his notation in his diary, was to thank him for what he had taught to me, because of the perspectives he gave me about life. (Jodine Boos)

• His shyness and genuine modesty, coupled with a witty self-deprecation, made him the quintessential Canadian.  Underneath all that, of course, was the finest literary mind in the Western world. (Don Harron)

• I really did not know Norrie as a teacher.  I was never in one of his classes, but in our interviews he taught me much & indeed he knocked a lot of fuzziness out of my head.  He could not make me into a scholar, but he did encourage me as a poet; I owe him a great deal, & I always felt friendly towards him. (George Johnston)

• I was in Philosophy & English and we had marvellous, thrilling courses with Frye on the Elizabethan period, Spenser & Milton, 19th Century Thought, The English Bible . . . They filled my thoughts for three years!  Frye was university for me.  Nothing else counted.  I couldn’t just take notes on his lectures, I had to try to write down every single word he said. . . . I got so spoiled listening to Frye that I couldn’t stand other lecturers. (Gloria Vizinczey)

• I expect a lot of people, when they heard he had died, said to themselves, “I may as well lay down my pen since there is no one in the world for whom I can now write, no one whose good assessment I crave.” (Catharine Hay)

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Osbert Sitwell

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Osbert with his sister Edith

Today is Osbert Sitwell‘s birthday (1892-1969).  Sitwell’s sister, Edith, provided a warm review of Fearful Symmetry in the Spectator (10 October 1947).

Here’s Frye’s diary entry for January 4, 1949:

Lunch with Osbert Sitwell at the University Club–Lionel Massey gave the party, & Doug LePan & Paul Arthur & a man I didn’t know were there.  Sitwell was a high-coloured solid-looking aristocrat with iron-grey hair, who until he opened his mouth could have been either a cultivated man or a barbarian.  Wonderful lunch–oysters & a fine dry red Portuguese wine.  The conversation was commonplaces, though highly cultivated commonplaces.  He is deeply impressed by my book–says he’s recommended it to a lot of people including the painter John Piper.  Edith [Sitwell] is at the St. Regis on East 50th St, New York.  He’s Jung’s sensation type, not a thinker primarily.  (CW 8, 62)

Christina Rossetti

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PAABJ0hH84

Rossetti’s “When I am Dead, My Dearest”

Today is Christina Rossetti‘s birthday (1830-1894).

Frye in “The Bride from the Strange Land,” his essay about the Book of Ruth:

In English literature the best known allusion to Ruth is Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, where the poet says that the nightingale’s song may have pierced “Through the heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears among the alien corn” [stanza 7].  It is a beautiful but curious reference: as we say, Keats certainly knew the Book of Ruth, but there no hint in it that Ruth was ever homesick for Moab or that she regarded the corn fields around her as in any sense alien: after all, her late father-in-law still owned some of them.  The tendency to sentimentalize the story recurs  in a sonnet by Christina Rossetti, called Autumn Violets, which has as its last line “a grateful Ruth tho’ gleaning scanty corn.”  This is not, it is true, a direct reference to the Biblical book, but we may note that actually, thanks to Boaz’ patronage, Ruth did fairly well out of her gleaning.  I make these somewhat pedantic comments because I suspect that one reason for the comparative neglect of the Book of Ruth by later writers is the irrepressible cheerfulness of the story, which is all about completely normal people fully understanding one another, and leaves the literary imagination with very little to do.  That said, we could justify the Keats allusion by observing that Ruth does not give the impression of being merely a mindless puppet of Providence, and may well have had darker and deeper feelings than the narrative presents.  (CW 4, 112-13)