Author Archives: Bob Denham

Centre for Comparative Literature: Letter to the President

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Below is a letter I sent yesterday to University of Toronto President Naylor, with copies to both Dean Gertler and the provost, regarding the proposed closing of the Centre for Comparative Literature.

Dear President Naylor,

The discussion about the fate of comparative literature at the U of T might gain some measure of clarity from what Northrop Frye always emphasized, that cultural movements flourish when they are decentralized, unlike political and economic movements, which tend to centralize.  When the study of culture is centralized, such as will occur if comparative literature is amalgamated into a unite‑and‑conquer proposal that brings the study of all languages and literatures together under one administrative umbrella, uniformity replaces unity and bondage supplants freedom.  While the centralizing tendency may work in such social sciences as, say, Geography & Planning, it never works in the humanities.  The centralizing movement erases identity.  Dean Gertler has written about how the centralizing movement we call globalization should not trump the decentralized nation­‑state, which remains a key space for organized labor (“Labour in ‘Lean’ Times: Geography, Scale, and National Trajectories of Workplace Change”).   While the parallels between internationalism and an amorphous department of languages and literature, on the one hand, and local autonomy and a separate identity of comparative literature, on the other, are not exact, to pay tribute to the former in what Gertler calls “lean” economic times is surely short‑sighted.

As Frye has written, “to distinguish what is creative in a minority from what attempts to dominate, we have to distinguish between cultural issues, which are inherently decentralizing ones, and political and economic issues, which tend to centralization and hierarchy” (“National Consciousness and Canadian Culture”).

This past year I was an external reviewer for a dissertation by a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature at the U of T.   It was an exceptional piece of work, combining a number of disciplines––language, game theory, mathematics, critical theory, music, painting––into a genuine contribution to humanistic learning.  It will be a depressing state of affairs if such extraordinary and mature scholarship is no longer permitted to flourish at the U of T.  Everyone in the field, even those of us at a distance, knows what a distinguished program Comparative Literature at the U of T is.  To consign to the dustbin an exemplary program founded by Canada’s greatest man of letters would be a travesty of the highest order, and it would cause those of us who see the U of T as a flagship university in both Canada and the rest of the world to lose faith.

Yours truly,

Robert Denham

John P. Fishwick Professor of English, Emeritus, Roanoke College

Frye and Poststructuralism

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anatomy grammatology

Tomorrow is Frye’s birthday, and the day after that is Derrida’s.  It’s a good time to reflect on their fateful collision as two leading figures in literary criticism a generation ago.

From the time of the Anatomy Frye maintained that criticism should be a system of interpenetrating rather than conflicting modes.  But as poststructural critics came to take center stage in the 1970s and 1980s, Frye grew less sanguine about realizing his critical ideal.  In his last major works, Words with Power and Myth and Metaphor, he began to take an oppositional stance toward poststructuralism, especially to cultural criticism and deconstruction.  But as one might expect from a critic who very seldom argued in a public way against critical views different from his own, his critique of these two postmodern approaches is relatively muted.  This is not the case, however, in Frye’s unpublished notebooks, where his critique of, say, Derrida, is explicit and direct.  The degree of Frye’s opposition to cultural criticism (or what he calls ideology) and deconstruction is almost always sublimated or displaced in what he chose to publish; in the notebooks, it is not.  The scores of entries that Frye makes in his late notebooks about poststructural critical positions reveal the anxiety he has about his own position in the critical world, as well as his concession that the model of interpenetrating critical visions is more or less doomed.  And they reveal directly what is at times almost concealed in his late published work.

Material that follows is from Frye’s notebooks.  The first section is from an unedited version of a notebook Frye wrote in the late 1980s.  After paragraph [732] the entries come from several of Frye’s other notebooks.

On Derrida, de Man, Foucault, Deconstruction, Marxist and Feminist Criticism, Ideologies, and Other Varieties of Post-______ Talk from the Late Notebooks.

[4]  The story element in myth (mythos) links it to folktales.  The function of literature is to recreate the myth behind the ideology.  All poets are affected by the ideologies of their time, but criticism discovers layers of meaning (Hopkins’ underthought and overthought, Derrida’s deconstruction) distinguishing the two. decon discovers layers of meaning

[7]  The language of ideology, being thesis-language, contains its own opposite.  Ideology functions properly in a tolerance that tries to contain the opposite.  Dogmas that exclude the opposite are pernicious.  The worst are those that back up political dogma with a religious or quasi-religious one.  ideologies of exclusion

[28]  It’s ironic that Marxism, which tried to define ideology as the rationalizing of non-Marxists, should have turned into the one movement of our day that absolutizes ideology.  absolutizing of ideology in Communist movements.

[44]  Criticism approaches a literary work which is a metaphor-cluster made explicit.  Why do we need the critic?  Because there’s so much implicit in the metaphor-cluster that he didn’t make explicit.  Mainly, of course, the relation of contexts, to other cultures, of words.  “Deconstruction” is such a dreary negative word for all this.  “Deconstruction” is “a dreary negative word” for the process of making explicit what in the poem remains only implicit, the relation of the contexts of words.

[63]  I’ve often noticed how stories with a strong mythical (plot) emphasis are placed in a framework, or are assumed to be told to the writer, or discovered by him in a drawer, etc.  Look up that storm story, where there are four or five wrappings.  It’s as though we were supposed to dig for the story underneath the ideological surface: a model of what “deconstruction” ought to be.

[79]  So many dreary disputes in 20th c. French literature where we have non-Marxist writers saying they just want to be apolitical and neutral, with the Marxists telling them that “neutral” statements are just as political ones.  Of course they are.  They’re the other half of the Marxist ideology, and just as essential to it.

[93]  I am told that the structure of the Anatomy is impressive but futile, because it would make every other critic a Gauleiter of Frye.  People don’t realize that I’m building temples to––well, “the gods” will do.  There’s an outer court for casual tourists, an inner court for those who want to stay for communion (incidentally, the rewards of doing so are very considerable).  But I’ve left a space where neither they nor I belong.  It’s not a tower of Babel: that tries to reach something above itself: I want to contain what, with a shift of perspective, contains it.  Why am I so respected and yet so isolated?  Is it only because I take criticism more seriously than any other living critic?

[97]  It seems more natural to begin with myth & concern rather than with metaphor & identity.  But it’s involved with this whole “writing” nonsense.  As soon as you “see” a joke it’s written, in some sense or other: what you hear up to that point is unintelligible except as sound, hence the musical metaphors.  And every narrative is a displacement of a metaphorical diagram, much as the 5th Symphony is a displacement of the tonality of C minor.  When one applies such a conception to Sartor Resartus, say, one can make the link with my deconstruction as an attempt to get past ideology to myth.  [Frye is actually deconstructing ideology in an effort to get past it to myth, and he says as much in one notebook entry.]

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Frye in Our Colleges and Universities Today (2010)

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The critical canon, like the literary one, naturally changes over time.  The anthology of criticism I used as a student in the 1960s––The Great Critics, ed. Smith and Parks (3rd ed., 1951)––included a number of critics very seldom read nowadays (e.g., Henry Timrod).  The first edition of this anthology (1932) included Marco Girolamo Vida; the second edition (1939), Antonia Sebastian Minturno.  The fact that critics come and go is a commonplace observation.  Henry Hazlitt’s The Anatomy of Criticism, widely read in the 1930s, has more or less disappeared.  Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism has had a much better fate, but the question is frequently raised about Frye’s status today.  Has he, like Henry Timrod, disappeared into the dustbin of history?  “Who now reads Frye?” asks Terry Eagleton, rhetorically.

In an entry in this blog some time back (26 September 2009) Jonathan Allan reported on the contempt for Frye he heard at a Canadian Studies Conference.  Allan, however, goes on to surmise that “Frye, in most instances, is now covered in survey courses of literary theory.”  I suspect this is the case, though descriptions of such courses are often so brief and lacking in specificity that without a syllabus at hand it is impossible to know what’s on the reading list.  Still, there are indications that Frye is still being read.  His Fearful Symmetry was among the most frequently borrowed books from the English Faculty Library at Oxford during the Trinity Term 2009 and the Hilary Term 2010, and if we survey what is available on the web, we discover that Frye has not at all disappeared from college and university course descriptions and syllabi.  The list that follows records the results of such a survey.  My guess is that it represents only a fraction of those courses in which Frye is required or recommended reading or is otherwise the focus of an entire course or of a course unit.  (I quit searching after I had recorded 400 entries.)  There are doubtless a number of course in twentieth‑century literary criticism, Shakespeare, Blake, Canadian literature, and other subjects where Frye is read, but, again, this information is not always available in the catalogue course descriptions that are available on the web.

The list represents courses offered during the past ten or so years.  (A few entries are for high school courses and M.A. exam reading lists).  In most instances the entries provide the course title, name of the instructor, the year offered, and a brief account of the “Frye content.”  The list is extraordinarily fluid: instructors come and go, courses and added and dropped, catalogue listing changes from one year to the next, and web sites go dead, and URLs are broken.  Still, the list reminds us of the widespread attention Frye continued to receive during the past decade, and so it serves as an answer, at least in part, to Eagleton’s rhetorical question, “Who now reads Frye?”

Bloggers are invited to send me additions to the list (denham@roanoke.edu).

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Quote of the Day: Frye on Mulroney

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlkEkyS3gOQ

Mulroney’s dramatic call for a Royal Commission to clear his good name starts to go awry . . .

In his notes for “Levels of Cultural Identity,” Frye says early on:

De Tocqueville says almost nothing about Canada, even though most of the people there in his day spoke his native language, but he does have one wonderful sentence I want to quote: it describes the Mulroney regime perfectly. (CW 25, 231)

That sentence is:

In Canada the most enlightened, patriotic and humane inhabitants make extraordinary efforts to render the people dissatisfied with those simple enjoyments which still content them . . . more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere. (Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley [New York: Knopf, 1960], 1:296–7 [chap. 8].)

Frye on Bardo

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Cross-posted in the Robert D. Denham Library

In Mahayana Buddhism, bardo, a concept that dates back to the second century, is the in-between state, the period that connects the death of individuals with their following rebirth.  The word literally means “between” (bar) “two” (do).  The Bardo Thödol, or “Liberation through Hearing in the In-Between State,” distinguishes six bardos, the first three having to do with the suspended states of birth, dream, and meditation and the last three with the forty-nine-day process of death and rebirth.  In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is the principal source for Frye’s speculations on bardo, a priest reads the book into the ear of the dead person. The focus is on the second three in-between states or periods: the bardo of the moment of death, when a dazzling white light manifests itself; the bardo of supreme reality, in which five colorful lights appear in the form of mandalas; and the bardo of becoming, characterized by less-brilliant light. The first of these, Chikhai bardo, is the period of ego loss; the second, Chonyid bardo, is the period of hallucinations; and the third, Sidpa bardo, is the period of reentry.

In Frye’s Bible lectures he mentions the bardo in connection with the issue of whether one can be released from various projections and repressions and so escape from the wheel of reincarnation, or at least have the possibility of escaping next time around if one will only be attentive.   There, he said,

The word “apocalypse,” the name of the last book of the Bible, is the Greek word for revelation.  That is why the book is called Revelation in English translation, and what John at Patmos sees in the book is a panorama of certain things in human experience taking on different forms.  There is an analogy which seems to be a fairly useful one in the Oriental scripture known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. When a man is dying, a priest comes to his house, and when the man dies, the priest starts reading the Book of the Dead into his ear, because the corpse is assumed to be able to hear the reading and to be guided by what is said.  The priest explains to the corpse that he is going to have a progression of visions, first of peaceful deities and then of wrathful deities, and that he is to realize that these are simply his own repressed thoughts and images coming to the surface because they have been released by death; and that if he could only understand that they are coming out of his mind, he could be delivered from their power, because it is really his own power.  lt is also assumed that practically every corpse to whom this book is read will be too stupid to understand what’s going on, and will go on from one blunder to another until finally he wakes up in the world again: because the assumption behind it is one of reincarnation.  [CW 13, 587–88]

Otherwise, in his published writing Frye refers to bardo infrequently––once in The Great Code, once in A Study of English Romanticism, once in “The Journey as Metaphor,” and twice in “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism.”  In his notebooks and diaries, however, the word “bardo” appears more than one hundred times, and Frye’s own copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead contains some 240 annotations.  In Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World I point out that Frye almost always uses “bardo” in a telic sense: it represents a stage toward the end of the quest, and it is related to such ideas as epiphany, resurrection, recognition, and apocalypse––ideas that are omnipresent in Frye’s writings.  But his understanding of bardo warrants further study.

The following entries represent, I think, all of the places in Frye’s “unpublished” writing (now a part of the Collected Works), where the word “bardo” appears.  The “published” references are at the end.  The annotations have been omitted.  All material within square brackets is an editorial addition.

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Frye on Chess

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chess

Cross-posted in the Robert D. Denham Library

Frye often uses chess as an example of a rule‑governed game or set of arbitrary convention, which he likens to the conventions of literature.  But there are more than ninety references to chess scattered throughout his work.  A large number of these speculate on chess as an archetype.  Then there is the cryptic phrase “chess-in-Bardo,” which Frye associates with the theme of ascent and the world of romance––what he calls the Eros archetype.  Solving the “chess-in-Bardo problem,” he writes, “will give some indication of what it means to live in a totally mythical universe” (CW 9, 56).  Frye circles around the “problem” throughout his notebooks, associating chess-in-bardo with the agon or contest, with the recognition scenes in Alice in Wonderland, The Tempest, and Finnegans Wake, and with a vision opposite from that of the dice-throw in Mallarmé (the Adonis archetype).  Michael Dolzani’s reading of the chess-in-bardo problem focuses on its associations with the agon and the recognition.  See his Introduction, in CW 9, liv–lv.

By the time he came to write The Secular Scripture (1976) Frye had caught up with the ignis fatuus that he had been tracking since the 1940s.  In that book he provides a clue to the meaning of “chess-in-bardo” in a brief commentary on Alice in Wonderland:

Alice passing through the looking-glass into a reversed world of dream language is also going through a descent. . . . Before long however we realize that the journey is turning upwards, in a direction symbolized by the eighth square of a chessboard, where Alice becomes a Psyche figure, a virginal queen flanked by two older queens, one red and one white, who bully her and set her impossible tasks in the form of nonsensical questions. Cards and dice . . . have a natural connection with themes of descent into a world of fatality; chess and other board games, despite The Waste Land, appear more frequently in romance and in Eros contexts, as The Tempest again reminds us.  As Alice begins to move upward out of her submarine mirror world she notes that all the poems she had heard have to do with fish, and as she wakes she reviews the metamorphoses that the figures around her had turned into. (155–6)

Chess-in-bardo, then, involves a dialectic of two opposing forces: agon and anagnorisis, choice and chance, descent and ascent.  Neither of the opposite forces can abolish the other, for each has “its own centre” (CW 9, 288), as in the magic of Prospero and its renunciation.  Frye says that The Tempest leans in the direction of chess-in-bardo (CW 9, 340).  But at the same time, chess-in-bardo appears to be related to reversal, as in the ascent of Alice.  “Chess in Bardo?  Is it a modulation of dice in Bardo?” Frye asks.  “A chess move is a decisive choice that may not abolish chance, but sets up a train of consequences that forces it to retreat into the shadows” (CW 5, 318).  Chance may never completely disappear in chess, but each move works toward an eventual reversal.  The entry in Notebook 50 following the one just quoted appears to be related: “Perhaps sacrifice is the carrying out of death in reverse, identification through death to union with God–well, obviously it’s that.  This identity with death turns into an identity across death” (CW 5, 318).  This is another way of describing the movement from death to rebirth in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

But there are other meanings that attach themselves to chess in Frye’s writings, as can be seen in the passages that follow.

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“The Perennial Philosophy”

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perennialphilosophy

One of Frye’s primary sources for mystical texts was Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, where he found his “oft-thought good ideas well-expressed as well as [his] bad ones” (CW 13, 24).  The philosophia perennis, a phrase popularized by Leibnitz, was for Huxley the timeless and universal ground of all Being––what he calls “the divine Reality.”  Metaphysically, the divine Reality underlies everything in the world, including human minds.  Psychologically, it is the same thing as the soul.  Ethically, the ultimate end of the human enterprise is to be found in the immanent and transcendent ground of Being.  Huxley proposes that this ground of Being in all religions is one and the same and that it constitutes the essential core of each religion.  His book, which Frye read shortly after it was published in 1945 (New York: Harper), is an anthology of selections from the tradition of the philosophia perennis, sandwiched between Huxley’s commentary. What follows are Frye’s notebook entries that refer to the perennial philosophy.  For an account of Frye’s reading of Huxley, see Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World, pp. 176–80.

 

Thus, without losing its specific historical orientation through Judaism and Christianity, the Bible is an archetypal model of a perennial philosophy or everlasting gospel.  At least, that’s what I’d call it if I were writing a book on religion.  We really do move from creation to recreation. (CW 5, 28)

I have an old note about eros and logos, creation by desire and creation by the Word.  It may be linked with another which quotes Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy as saying that the soul is female and the spirit male.  Note that the new heaven and the new earth is the real Tao, yang & yin in perfect balance. (CW 5, 10)

Wisdom in the Bible is an outgrowth of Torah, instruction, the completion of the knowledge of good and evil in its genuine form.  Biblical wisdom is not just wisdom, not the wisdom of Egypt or Sumeria, any more than its Yahweh is Ptah or Enki.  It has affinities, of course, but not to the point of blurring its identity.  That’s why Hebrew wisdom develops dialectically into prophecy, which again is Biblical prophecy, not Zoroaster or Tiresias prophecy.  All religions are one, not alike: a metaphorical unity of different things, not a bundle of similarities.  In that sense there is no “perennial philosophy”: that’s a collection, at best, of denatured techniques of concentration.  As doctrine, it’s platitude: moral maxims that have no application.  What there is, luckily, is a perennial struggle. (CW 5, 110)

In the third lecture I want to proceed from the gospel to the Everlasting Gospel, and yet without going in the theosophic direction of reconciliation or smile-of-a-fool harmony.  The synoptics make Jesus distinguish himself from the Father, as not yet more than a prophet: it’s in the “spiritual” gospel of John that he proclaims his own divinity.  (That’s approximately true, though one has to fuss and fuddle in writing it out.)  Yet John is more specifically and pointedly “Christian” than the synoptics: the direction is from one spokesman of the perennial philosophy and a unique incarnation starting a unique event.  Buddhism and the like interpenetrate with the Everlasting Gospel: they are to be reconciled with it.  I don’t quite yet know what I mean. (CW 6, 618–19)

Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy is a book I must keep in touch with: my point about the soul as female & the spirit as male (p. 174) is there in full force. (CW 13, 360)

The second stage is the mind’s withdrawal from creation into the death-consciousness of contemplation and observation.  God here becomes a first cause and (as in St. Thomas) a clearing-house of absolute terms—essence, being omni- this and that.  Here everything is focussed on the judgement that accompanies death, which in turn is the inevitable consequence of an act of creation, a making of the world.  As it proceeds, its one God becomes less personal, & the stage ends in “Thou art That” mysticism, the so-called perennial philosophy.  It starts with a personal Creator & ends in a “hid divinity,” a God beyond God. (CW 13, 100)

The third, as I now see, is an essay on the typology of the Bible leading up to the question of what comparative religion compares, or, what does religion as a whole say, when considered, not as religio or social observance, or as symbolism, which doesn’t say anything, but as doctrine, in the sense of an imaginative vision which is also existential and committed?  I don’t believe in a “perennial philosophy,” but there is something here. (CW 13, 110)

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“A New Handbook of Literary Terms”

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From the preface to A New Handbook of Literary Terms by David Mikics (Yale University Press, 2007)

An ideal bibliography should include older, respected works that continue to shape our sense of what criticism can to. Auerbach’s Mimesis, first published in Switzerland in 1946, is still the indispensable book on realism. Mimesis is referred to repeatedly here, as is Northrop Frye’s definitive Anatomy of Criticism (1957), the best treatment of genre. Frye, like Auerbach, opened up a whole new world for criticism with his book, which continues to be central to literary study fifty years after it was written. A student who wants a sure grounding in literary history, and at the same time an exhilarating experience of criticism at the height of his powers, would do well to read Mimesis and Anatomy of Criticism—along with other synoptic and original works like James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of the Faerie Queene, Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, Geoffrey Hartman’s Beyond Formalism, Martin Price’s To the Palace of Wisdom, Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel, Ronald Paulson’s Satire and the Novel, Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image, and William Empson’s Some Versions of the Pastoral. Curtius’ European Literature the Latin Middle Ages remains the essential guide to the topoi that engage medieval and Renaissance literature. These fourteen books, some of them published as long ago as the 1930s (Empson), provide the background and assumptions for much later work. Some more recent volumes, like Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, share the ambitions and innovative character of those I have just listed. The Handbook takes care not to slight younger critics—there are quite a few references from the new, twenty-first century—but I have emphasized those books that have already stood the test of time.

Frye Alert

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A notice from The Hayward Gallery, London, 28 May 2010:

The British Art Show Prelude
Three of Britain’s most exciting emerging artists–Roger Hiorns, Phoebe Unwin, Mick Peter–the Turner Prize-nominated artist, the painter and the sculptor use Northrop Frye’s model of seasons/genre to explore some issues in contemporary British art. Chaired by Tom Morton and Lisa Lefeuvre, Curators of British Art Show 7.

Frye in Court

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60yearslater

Frye is called on in a 2009 amicus curiae brief in a case against Frederik Coulting by J.D. Salinger, who had asserted that Coulting’s book, 60 Years Later, “infringes [his] copyright rights in . . . the character Holden Caulfield.”  (Frye’s remarks on Salinger in an earlier post here.)

In the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

__________________________________

J.D. SALINGER, individually and as trustee of the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v. FREDRIK COLTING, writing under the name John David California, WINDUPBIRD PUBLISHING LTD., NICOTEXT A.B. and ABP, INC., doing business as SCB Distributors, Inc.,

Defendants-Appellants.

On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York

BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE PUBLIC CITIZEN, INC.

“That ability to “build freely upon the ideas” in others’ work is essential to First Amendment protection because even the most creative or artistic activity depends on the ability to borrow from what has gone before.  “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.” Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 97 (1957). As Frye put it, we have inherited “a literature which includes Chaucer, much of whose poetry is translated or paraphrased from others; Shakespeare, whose plays sometimes

follow their sources almost verbatim; and Milton, who asked for nothing better than to steal as much as possible out of the Bible” (p. 16 of the brief).