In response to my previous posting, Clayton Chrusch has some very wise words. They remind me, sadly, how little value is given to listening and charity among many literary scholars:

Thank you so much, Joe, for your thoughtful response to my comment. I’ve been thinking about it, and my thoughts have been going in many different directions.

I owe too much to Frye to criticize him for the way he approached his work. My point about Frye being unfair to Chesterton is a minor point and I am not really invested in it because, though I am a fan of Chesterton, I have deliberately not read his criticism.

Also as far as teaching, criticism, and literature go, I’ll be happy to discuss that with you in a forum that doesn’t involve me putting down my ideas in writing and making them public. You obviously have a lot more experience than I do.

I believe that in science, politics, and religion (as far as it affects other people), a rational defence of one’s beliefs is necessary, or at least an admission that they are taken on authority from someone else. These are three spheres that are too consequential to be left to private judgement.

You say that Frye didn’t think arguing was productive, and that no one can argue anti-gay protesters out of their beliefs. Those are actually two quite separate claims, and the first in no way depends on the second. As I’m sure you know, I’ve argued with anti-gay activists, and though you cannot change their minds, there is a lot of productive stuff that can happen, beginning with the recognition of an opponent’s humanity. Most debating or arguing is unproductive because it is being done badly on both sides. There is no real listening, no real charity, no real belief that the other person is basically motivated by a loyalty to goodness and truth, no real attempt to find out what that goodness or truth is, no real attempt to get over differences and achieve reconciliation. One bad tactic you see over and over again is an obstinate refusal to admit that an opponent’s facts and reasons have any validity at all. But even if only one side is debating in a charitable way, the experience can be transformative.

I may not always leave an argument with a renewed hope for humanity, but I think I leave with a clearer vision of humanity, a stronger desire for reconciliation, and often more humility.

We understand our dear colleague, Jean O’Grady — associate editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye and biographer of Margaret Addison — suffered a bicycle accident over the weekend.  We wish her a full and speedy recovery.

Clayton Chrusch makes some very acute observations, reminding me of the closing pages of the Anatomy where Frye draws the analogy between the language of mathematics and the language of literature: “The mathematical and the verbal universes are doubtless different ways of conceiving of the same universe”  (Anatomy, 354, Princeton edition). Here are Clayton’s comments:

Skimming through the essay [“The Dialectic of Belief and Vision”], I came across this sentence which seems like a justification or at least a motivation of the totality of Frye’s work:

“It is only mythology, I feel, that can really express the vision of hope, the hope that is focused on a more abundant life for us all, not the hope of finally refuting the arguments of Moslems or Marxists.”

I think this is likely the sentiment Joe had in mind when he expressed frustration with my interest in logic and truth claims.

I think we can all agree that we need to express visions of hope, and we also have to refute bad arguments. (If you disagree with me, I have some arguments you will have a hard time refuting.)

One more note on logic, from the perspective of a former computer science student. Logic is not just about making and refuting arguments, but it is a branch of mathematics that is beautiful and awe-inspiring and full of untapped possibilities. The logicians I have encountered in my computer science education are brilliant and exuberantly imaginative people. Knowing these people, I know that logic can do more for us than it is doing now because it has not nearly been exhausted.

The fact that people openly despise myth and happily worship reason doesn’t mean that people are any more rational than they are imaginative. The war goes on on both fronts.

I wanted to follow up the intriguing debate concerning Frye’s view of human desire and its limitations. Frye addresses the question squarely in the closing section of chapter 2 of The Secular Scripture. He first introduces the doubled heroine motif, which he recurs to throughout the book, as one version of complementary poles: “In English literature, perhaps the purest evocations of the idyllic world are Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, where the alternating rhythm of ritual and dream, the need to experience as part of a community and the need to experience as a withdrawn individual, have been transformed into complementary creative moods” (59). He then writes, in the closing paragraph:

The mythological universe has two aspects. In one aspect it is the verbal part of man’s own creation, what I call a secular scripture; there is no difficulty about that aspect. The other is, traditionally, a revelation given to man by God or other powers beyond himself. These two aspects take us back to Wallace Stevens’s imagination and reality. Reality, we remember, is otherness, the sense of something not ourselves. We naturally think of the other as nature, or man’s actual environment, and in the divided world of work and ego-control it is nature. But for the imagination it is rather some kind of force or power or will that is not ourselves, an otherness of spirit. Not all of us will be satisfied with calling the central part of our mythological inheritance a revelation from God, and, though each chapter in this book closes on much the same cadence, I cannot claim to have found a more acceptable formulation. It is quite true that if there is no sense that the mythological universe is a human creation, man can never get free of servile anxieties and superstitions, never surpass himself, in Nietzsche’s phrase. But if there is no sense that it is also something uncreated, something coming from elsewhere, man remains a Narcissus staring at his own reflection, equally unable to surpass himself. Somehow or other, the created scripture and the revealed scripture, or whatever we call the latter, have to keep fighting each other like Jacob and the angel, and it is through the maintaining of this struggle, the suspension of belief between the spiritually real and the humanly imaginative, that our own mental evolution grows. (59-61)

This both/and principle runs through the book. At the end of chapter 1, he writes that “[t]he great classics of literature . . . are following the dictates of common sense, as embodied in the author of Ecclesiastes: ‘Better is the sight of the eye than the wandering of desire.'” They are “‘what the eye can see: it is the genuine infinite as opposed to the phony infinite, the endless adventures and endless sexual stimulation of the wandering of desire.” But he immediately adds, closing the paragraph: “But I have a notion that if the wandering of desire did not exist, great literature would not exist either” (30). He then concludes:

There is a line of Pope’s which exists in two versions: ‘A mighty maze of walks without a plan,’ and ‘A mighty maze, but not without a plan.’ The first version recognizes the human situation; the second refers to the constructs of religion, art, and science that man throws up because he finds the recognition intolerable. Literature is an aspect of the human compulsion to create in the face of chaos. Romance, I think, is not only central to literature as a whole, but the area where we can see most clearly that the maze without a plan and the maze not without a plan are two aspects of the same thing. (30-31)

Frye observes later in his argument that “[t]here is a strongly conservative element at the core of realism, an acceptance of society in its present structure” (164). The same is true of comedy, which “ends with a festive society” and “is contained by social assumptions.” And of course if it were not for tragedy, as Frye says in Anatomy, “all literary fictions might be plausibly explained as expressions of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of repugnance: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested quality in literary experience,” as “the main characters are emancipated from dream, an emancipation which is at the same time a restriction, because the order of nature is present” (206-07 in the Princeton edition). Romance, in contrast, is “the nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream” (186). Now most critics and readers, met with such an observation on its own, would probably take this to be a condemnation of romance, very much along traditional lines: romance is escapist fiction, a form of day-dreaming or literary masturbation. But that is not how Frye means it. Not by a long shot. This wish-fulfilment is the basis of a revolutionary or “genuinely ‘proletarian’ element in romance . . . which is never satisfied with its various incarnations, and in fact the incarnations themselves indicate that no matter how great a change may take place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever, looking for new hopes and desires to feed on” (186). This seems to be Merv Nicholson’s point about Frye and desire, and this is perhaps why Frye deems Utopia the greatest form of prose fiction, because it is the form of no place. There is an essential complementarity, an equality and fraternity, among the mythoi, but romance is Frye’s favorite child, precisely because, endlessly propelled by desire, “it has no continuing city as its resting place” (172). The passage I quoted at the beginning of this posting ends, significantly, with the following sentence: “The improbable, desiring, erotic, and violent world of romance reminds us that we are not awake when we have abolished the dream world: we are awake only when we have absorbed it again.” Inescapable romance, inescapable choice of dreams . . .