Author Archives: Bob Denham

Religious Knowledge, Lecture 18

Dieric Bouts the Elder, Elijah in the Desert, ca. 1465

Lecture 18. February 17, 1948

In tragedy, something comes through directly, a vision beyond that of the social and the moral. Iago is a figure in a tragedy but he is not heroic. Macbeth is an experiment in a tragedy where the hero and the villain are the same person. Emotions of pity for the hero through the reproach of the audience somewhere; for example, they blame Iago. In a social tragedy, such as the lynching of a negro, the audience is morally condemned for tolerating such cruelty. A tragedy in which man is innocent and blames God for the scheme of things is not a real tragedy. Even Henley’s Invictus—“I am captain of my soul”—is still handing out a high moral line.

Job gets past this morality stage. He will not condemn himself, and therefore his three friends have nothing more to say. At this point, Job leaves the moral aspect and goes on to the tragic. Elihu has an organic role because he brings the tragedy to a focus.

The arguments with the friends are based on law. Wisdom means following the tried and tested ways––the fool is he who breaks away, etc. Yet, the law has not brought Job the wisdom he wants.

Elihu is the Old Testament conception of the prophet. He has no personal authority––I must speak; therefore it is God talking to you. The three friends are the old men of Job’s generation. Elihu is the young spirit of prophecy. He condemns Job on grounds that are implicit rather than implicit. He places the condemnation on a broader basis and comes closer to the doctrine of original sin: Job is condemned because he exists. Elihu deals with the “otherness” of God from man. This is the first step in religious feeling, the sense of the opposition of the divine and the human; the feeling that man cannot reach God through the human means of reason, etc.

God himself breaks in on Elihu’s speech and pushes him aside. It sounds as if God was merely continuing his speech, but he turns it upside down. The same thing is being said, but from a different quarter. Elihu has found the scent somehow or other. The voice which is outside Job is Elihu, but when the voice is inside Job, it is God. The Lord answers Job out of a whirlwind, the symbol of confusion. It is confusion in terms of what is going on around him. That is, out of Elihu’s words without knowledge and the confusion they create in Job, comes God’s voice.

Elijah is the typical prophet, and Elihu’s name is close to his. Kings 1:19: Elijah repeats Jesus’ period in the wilderness and also Moses’ exile, so that he is the Law and the Prophet. Verse 9: the word of the Lord is represented by the pronoun “he.” And he said unto him, “What doest thou here, Elijah?” The action turns inside Elijah. He goes through the wind, earthquake, fire and doesn’t find God in any of them. But it is after the fire that there comes “a still small voice.”

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Frye and War Literature

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Manitoba Cemetery, Somme, France, where Frye’s brother Howard (killed in action 18 August 1918) is buried. It is worth noting that Canada’s last known First World War veteran died just this past week — John Babcock, who enlisted at age 15 and died aged 109.

Responding to Peter Webb’s post and a subsequent exchange in the Comments:

Peter, I don’t by any means think that Frye’s biography explains the general absence of attention to war stories in his writing, but his own painful experiences might have caused him to cast his glance elsewhere.

In 1944 he did review Joseph Schull’s I, Jones, Soldier, a narrative poem, about which he said: “describe[es] the thoughts in the mind of an officer just before zero hour. Jones is a sensitive soldier, and is not content to go into action with a merely physical integration; he wants a spiritual one, too, and some insight into the fundamental faiths which are the laws of his own being and consequently the causes of his being there. He reviews his military career up to that point with a good deal of detachment and humour, and rejects the ready-made formulas—patriotism, justice of one’s cause, product of a Depression generation, and the rest—with a sharp insight. When he gets down to his mental bedrock, he finds ‘one earth, one Man, one Truth’ [48]: perhaps in answer, though the poet does not say so, to the ‘Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer’ with which he is challenged by his enemy. These are of course inarticulate ideas, and he talks very vaguely about them, but fundamental ideas usually are inarticulate, and the poem does not lose its narrative logic.”

Frye reviewed as well, also in 1944, Karl Shapiro’s V-Letter and Other Poems. Shapiro, Frye writes, “is not a ‘war’ poet: he is simply a poet who happens to be in the army, and because he is a poet patterns go on forming and metres go on clicking in his mind, regardless of what else is happening [vi]. Sometimes, of course, the war enters the poetry—most poignantly, perhaps, in the poem on the amputation [The Leg]—but on the whole Mr. Shapiro makes no attempt to ‘interpret’ the war to us by composing metrical editorials.”

I think the only time Frye glanced at war from the Nazi point of view was in his review of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs (reprinted in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture), but it’s clear that he doesn’t know quite what to make of Jünger’s allegory.

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A Birthday Panegyric

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[Editor’s note: Bob insists on calling this “doggerel.” We call it “Skeltonic.” And the answer to Bob’s closing question: Yes, yes, yes! We intend to inaugurate the annual Robert D. Denham BBQ and Scotch Quaff come May.]

Last week this blog
Was six months old.
It’s earned a bronze,
A silver, gold.

Record we now
The debts we owe
To Michael, Clayton
And to Joe.

They’ve trod a maze
And shined the lights
On our meanders
And forthrights.

A panegyric
To all three.
Come quaff a stein,
Won’t you, with me?

Frye on Hockey

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Gordie Howe and Denis Brodeur

Here’s Frye on pucks
For all Canucks
And others who like
Sports on ice.

Tim Horton knew
That Norrie flew
Around the rink
Not once but twice.

Watching a hockey game is not directly a spectator sport, because anyone interested enough in hockey to watch a game knows how the game is played, & through that knowledge can see much more of what is going on, with or without a commentator, than the players. (CW 13, 95)

The difference between leisure and distraction or boredom is not so much in what one does as in the mental attitudes toward it. It’s easiest to see this if we take extreme examples. Our television sets and highways are crowded on weekends with people who are not looking for leisure but are running away from it. Leisure goes to a hockey game to see a game: distraction or boredom goes to see one team trample the other into the ice. (CW 10, 224)

Wherever we turn in this problem, we keep falling over the word “education”: but if education means trying to get people to stop going to hockey games and go to discussion groups on great books instead, education isn’t going to help much either. (ibid., 225)

We get bored because we feel that something is missing inside ourselves. We look outside ourselves for the missing place, either aggressively, by trying to bully somebody, or by trying to forget about ourselves by throwing ourselves into some kind of illusion. For this state of mind, illusion is a lot better than reality. Far better to go into squealing hysterics over a rock‑and-roll singer than over a dictator: far better to fight the Russians in a hockey game than on a battlefield. But illusion can’t fool everybody all the time. Some people, sooner or later, have to wake up and look for the missing piece inside themselves. (ibid., 225)

The television camera, being essentially an extension of one person’s eyes, peers, squints, and pries; it is looking for a single visual focus. The focus is “where it’s at,” and television has a great deal to do with the obsession of the last few years with this phrase. If we ask what television does best in extending the individual’s visual range, it seems clear that it is particularly good at, for example, football and hockey games. These are, as I suggested earlier, different from baseball in that they are specifically “where it’s at” games, where it’s at being usually where the ball or puck is. Focussing on the ball or puck also clarifies the pattern of opposition in the game being played: that is, it illustrates the strategy of one team confronting another. The result is that television tends to report everything as though it were some kind of football or hockey game, and the vogue for “confrontation” and polarized issues is a major social feature of society’s effort to absorb the television way of seeing. (ibid., 296)

I wish the makers of such films would realize that no event has any meaning without its visual context and without its historical context. This program was what André would call incestuous: it was begotten, born, and bred of the television medium. It looks dead now, for the same reason that no one wants to hear about last year’s football games. The assumption throughout was that a person’s “real” character is the one he would demonstrate on one side or the other of a polarized issue, and this assumption is preposterous. The confrontation issue, including football and hockey games, is a form of social ritual. (ibid., 298)

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Frye and the Honour Course

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Students_at_Victoria_College_1910

In response to Joe Adamson’s post:

Frye’s earliest defense of the Honour Course is in a piece he wrote for Acta Victoriana at the end of his fourth year at Victoria College: “The Pass Course: A Polemic.” There he argues that one of the virtues of the Honour Course is that “the subjects are all grouped around a restricted and clearly defined area of knowledge” (CW 7, 38). In his “Response to the Macpherson Report,” which is posted in the blog’s Library, Frye wrote “The Honour course represents a unique contribution to undergraduate teaching on the continent, and at its best it affords as good an undergraduate training as can be got anywhere.” This was a judgment he continued to defend, repeating it, for example, in a 1973 letter to Martha England (Selected Letters, 151) and elsewhere. Otherwise:

The General Course in arts assumes that an integrated curriculum, even in so specialized a world as ours, is, up to a point, possible at the university level. The Honour Course, on the other hand, is based on the assumption than any genuine discipline can be used as a centre of knowledge, the radius of expansion from the centre being the student’s responsibility. Either assumption is justifiable, but that of the Honour Course is perhaps closer to this age of intellectual pluralism. (“The Critical Discipline,” CW 7, 113)

I have been accused, if that is the word, of defending the Honour Course whenever I get a chance, and this is one more chance. I remain obstinately of the opinion that the Honour Course, with all its rigidity and built-in administrative absurdities, gave the best undergraduate training available on the North American continent, and the best teacher training for the instructor as well. (“The Beginning of the Word,” CW 7, 540)

Other of Frye’s judgments about the Honour Course can be found by following the entries in the index to Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (CW 7).

Here’s the way Mary Culley described the Honours course in English during the early 1950s:

The Honours Course in English Language and Literature was arranged sequentially. In the first year we started out with Anglo‑Saxon up to the Middle Ages (Chaucer, Malory, the miracle plays); second year, the Elizabethan Age (Shakespeare, the Reformation, Milton); third year, the Age of Reason, the classicists, early Romanticism; fourth year, later Romantics, the Victorian Age, and early twentieth century. In each time period we took three or four English courses––novels, drama, poetry, essays, plus parallel courses of the same period from Honours History, Honours Philosophy, and Honours French (or another language). Marvellous. (Letter of 7 June 1994)

One of the attractions of the Honour Course for Frye was this notion of parallel courses, so that while students were studying medieval literature during their first year, they would be studying medieval history and medieval philosophy at the same time.

Religious Knowledge, Lecture 17

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“…a blend of the tragic, comic and satiric”

Lecture 17. February 10, 1948

To understand Job, you must see that the book is a blend of tragic, comic and satiric. All great drama is a blend of these three. The satiric tone is a blend of the moral and the humorous. Pure humor is not satire; pure denunciation is not satire.

Satire is a detachment from evil; it brings out its wrongness and ridiculousness. You can’t find anything more detached from evil than God; therefore, there are some aspects of the sardonic in God, or the gods. This is inescapable in any serious religion. Wrath is the reaction of good when confronted with evil, and wrath is the opposite of irritation. God is incapable of irritation, which is a personal egocentric thing which desires to triumph over and score off someone. Wrath is impersonal, detached.

God speaks in the tones of the wrath of the sardonic. Yet these tones are different from Job’s friends who approach him with elaborate friendliness and politeness. They talk in vague, general terms about the goodness of good and the badness of evil.

Then their approach sharpens; the reproaches come clearer to a point of open antagonism. They are trying to hint that Job had better “‘get right” with God. They are trying to interpret their own sense of the wrath of God, of man in an evil state. But Job insists that he’s done nothing wrong. The friends become irritated; they want to score him off. Job tries to score them off, too. All agree there must be some justice somewhere. Only Job’s wife suggests something else: curse God and die. At the end, God curiously enough seems of the same opinion. Man searches for a God equal to him. God feels the same way; he wants a man equal to him.

The dialogue breaks down into a deadlock. If Job has done nothing wrong, then nothing makes sense. His friends are pious Jews thinking in terms of the Hebrew law, the best of the Pharisaic mind that Jesus condemns. They try to interpret God’s design in terms of the law. Job comes to the discovery that rain falls on the just and unjust alike; the sun shines upon evil and good alike.

Job, his three friends, and Elihu are all under the same cloud. The breakdown point is that there is no revelation of God to Man. All seems to be mystery. The collapse is tragedy and satire, not comedy.

Tragedy and satire are inseparable. There is an ironic kernel in all Shakespeare tragedies. Hamlet’s death is a tragedy, yet it takes place after a muddled attempt at revenge. Horatio must tell that Hamlet has been a damn fool. In Othello’s last speech he is trying to cheer himself up and rescue some fragment of dignity. It is not that he realized what a fool he has been, but what a fool he is. In Antony and Cleopatra, the Antony who held the stage in Julius Caesar, the demagogue, in this play is crowded right off the stage by Cleo. She has him killed off in Act IV and has the fifth act to herself. She puts on a good show, but the irony is that it is a good show. Octavius comes in at the end of her show and says, “Oh yes, I heard she was doing some research on a painless way to die.” The hanging of Cordelia, in Lear, blasts any theory that there is a moral order in tragedy.

The point of tragedy is not punishment, but that the hero fell, whether he deserved it or not. That is the irony.

The author of the Book of Job is not trying to clear God’s name, as Milton was. There is no self-defensive, aggressive tone as in Milton’s God. At the end, God speaks with what seems colossal impudence. He feels he has a right to condemn Job, in a sense, for feeling that he is righteous in his own eyes. The reader has the curious feeling that God has done something wrong, in view of the prologue.

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“Hunch”

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Joe’s post on abduction as hunch reminds me of how often Frye uses the word “hunch.” It doesn’t appear in Fearful Symmetry or Anatomy of Criticism, but in The Educated Imagination there are two apposite passages:

Imagination is certainly essential to science, applied or pure. Without a constructive power in the mind to make models of experience, get hunches and follow them out, play freely around with hypotheses, and so forth, no scientist could get anywhere. But all imaginative effort in practical fields has to meet the test of practicability, otherwise it’s discarded. The imagination in literature has no such test to meet. You don’t relate it directly to life or reality: you relate works of literature, as we’ve said earlier, to each other. Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time. (CW 21, 470)

You can’t distinguish the arts from the sciences by the mental processes the people in them use: they both operate on a mixture of hunch and common sense. A highly developed science and a highly developed art are very close together, psychologically and otherwise. (CW 21, 442)

In his notebooks Frye repeatedly writes about his hunches: I count 158 instances of the word strung out over the eight volumes.

Northrop Frye on Medicine: A Talk to the Doctors at Moncton City Hospital

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We are showcasing another paper being added to the Frye Festival Section in our Journal section. This one is by Bob Denham and was delivered at the Frye Festival in April, 2004. It can be found in the Archive here.

Northrop Frye Literary Festival, Moncton, NB, April 2004

It is difficult to imagine a body of accomplishments larger than those of the man who is honored by having his name attached to this festival. His preeminence as a literary theorist, his labors on behalf of Canadian culture, his devoted work as a public servant, his achievements as a teacher at Victoria College for more than sixty years, and of course the massive body of writing that has instructed and delighted us for almost seventy‑five years now—these achievements have been well documented. The written responses to his work—the books and essays and reviews occasioned by his own eloquent prose—require a fairly thick volume just to record, and they have originated on every continent of the globe save Antarctica. No Anglo-American critic has as great an international reputation as Frye. As for his national reputation, five years ago a panel of experts for Maclean’s magazine chose Frye as the second most important Canadian in history?[1] To date there are twenty‑eight books devoted in whole to his work. He has been the subject of international conferences in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Italy, Korea, and China–-in fact twice in China. And there are more than 200 translations of his books into twenty languages. All this bears witness to an accomplishment that even a disinterested observer would have to call monumental.

Whatever one says about Frye will always fall short, and I feel in danger of taking a big fall this noon, for what can one say to a group of doctors as doctors about Northrop Frye. Well, I thought it might be of some interest to call up a few things that relate to the topic of Frye and medicine, which is a topic no one has really talked about much. And then we’ll open up the floor for questions and comments. I doubtless won’t be able to answer your questions, but I am naturally very interested in the kinds of questions you might have about Moncton’s most famous native son. It was as a child in Moncton, incidentally, that Frye, as he records in one of his notebooks, had the fantasy “of becoming a great astronomer & discovering a new planet beyond Neptune that I was going to call Pluto.” This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, except that the fantasy occurred more than a decade before Pluto was actually discovered. I mention this little anecdote to remind us that Frye was a genius. Whether ESP is an aspect of genius, I don’t know.

In any event, Frye and medicine is an interesting subject to think about. The body was a central metaphor in Frye’s criticism, as it was in the work of his great literary hero, William Blake. In editing Frye’s diaries several years back I was struck by Frye’s concern for the health of his own body and psyche. He reveals a great deal through self-analysis, writing about his abnormal fears, his physical insecurity, his self-consciousness, his introversion, his sanguine humour and his dark moods, his claustrophobia and paranoia, his grieving over the death of a colleague, his phobia about animals, and so on. And he writes at length about his various bodily deficiencies and physical ailments: his deviated septum, hay fever attacks, constipation, insomnia, and various states of stupor induced by too much alcohol. He probes his own ego as well, often from a Jungian perspective. I would guess that the details in Frye’s description of his symptoms would provide a fairly good basis for diagnosis.

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Archetype Spotting

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Responding to Jonathan Allan and Clayton Chrusch

A footnote to “archetype spotting”: I think Frye refers to this procedure only once in his published writings––in his entry on “archetype” for the Harper Handbook to Literature. There he says,

Lycidas contains a reference to “that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe” [l. 106], the hyacinth, thought to have obtained red markings resembling the Greek word ai (“alas”), when Hyacinthus was accidentally killed by Apollo. Milton could of course just as easily have left out this line: the fact that he included it emphasizes the conventionalizing element in the poem, but criticism that takes account of archetypes is not mere “spotting” of such an image. The critical question concerns the context: what does such an image mean by being where it is? (CW 18, 361).

(In his 1963 essay “Literary Criticism” Frye does speak of theme spotting. [CW 27, 128])

But in his notebooks Frye refers to the practice of “archetype spotting on several occasions:

Some fallacies in the archetypal approach beside the historical one: the counting one (if there are a lot of archetypes it’s a good poem), the spotting one, & others. (CW 23, 111)

I need more theory to connect these examples: otherwise it’s just archetype-spotting. (CW 5, 129)

The primary area of communication is conscious: it isn’t a case of deep calling to deep [Psalm 42:7]. If half the world uses an archetype & the other half doesn’t, it’s clear that it can mean something to that other half. The mystique of the unconscious has bedevilled myth critics. If you find fragments of a huge myth in primitive times, the process that put it all together is most likely to be in Shakespeare or Wagner or someone producing a waking dream for conscious minds [Plato, Sophist, 266c]. Such a writer would actualize what is potential in the archaic mythology. People resist this, because a poet’s consciousness may get self-conscious, turn coy or cute and go in for archetype-spotting. The poet (modern) is in the position of a medieval dog hitched to a mandrake root: it doesn’t matter so much if he goes mad, but the root he’s pulling is not just his own tail. (CW 5, 130)

The sense of unreality I feel about this book focused originally on the thinness of literary allusions: even things as deep in me as Shakespeare weren’t getting in. Then there was a sense of too much archetype-spotting, in contrast to real argument. That extended to too much kerygma spotting in 4. Finally I’m back to the Introduction, where I don’t even repeat my original confidence in the Bible as the only sacred book with a literary shape. Put that back in, you stupid bastard. [See WP, xviii, xx.] (CW 5, 369)

Many years ago young Woodberry [J.C. (Jack) Woodbury, a student at Toronto 1951–54], when a student of mine, spoke of the triviality of “archetype-spotting,” and I’ve always tried to recognize that. (CW 6, 564–5)

Every poem is “unique,” in the soft-headed phrase, and “archetype spotting” is a facile and futile procedure; but the traditions and conventions of poetry make a shape and a meaning. They move toward a future (emergence of primary concerns), and they expand into a wider present. (CW 6, 641)

The value of the book will be in this deductive expounding of the myth, not in spotting the archetypes around the compass. (CW 9, 263)

Here we see that Frye’s considers “archetype spotting” to be facile enterprise, and he warns against substituting it for argument. Having said this however, we need to remind ourselves that Frye did engage in a good bit of archetype spotting himself, especially when he was making notes on the texts he was reading. In Notebook 7, for example, he does engage in some rather extensive archetype spotting in Frobenius, Silberer, and Jung (CW 23, 8–15). The same is true of his Notes on Romance (in the weblog Library). Finally, the margins of the books in Frye’s personal library are filled with hundreds of notations about this or that archetype. A sample of these can be found in “Annotations in Frye’s Books,” also in the weblog Library. To speak about an archetype in a literary or any other work, you must of course first be able to spot it. Frye’s point is that if you do only this, then you’ve not made much of a contribution to critical understanding. It’s a procedure that can produce trivial observations, if they are not seen in some wider context of function, structure, and meaning.

Frye’s Valentines

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Here are some Valentine references culled from various sources.

[A verse to an unknown lover]

BE MY ♥

I will be your valentine.
Will you be my concubine?
On ambrosia let us dine,
With a glass of sparkling wine.
Let us now our limbs entwine.
I’ll be prone and you supine,
So our two hearts will align.
You’ll be mine, and I’ll be thine.
Cupid’s arrow is our sign
In our lover’s sacred shrine.
The world will never us malign:
Lover, you are all divine.

Just kidding.

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