Author Archives: Bob Denham

More Frye and the Bible

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Blake’s Plato

Reponding to Nicholas Graham’s post

I certainly agree that Frye’s reading of the Bible is guided by typology and that there is a certain prophetic power in his biblical criticism. I was by no means trying to give a full account of Frye’s reading of the Bible. My remarks were in the context of the earlier posts about the meaning of the phrase “literary criticism of the Bible.” All I was trying to suggest was that Frye’s approach relies on two fundamental literary principles, myth and metaphor or narrative and image––the mythos and dianoia that Frye devoted so much space to in Anatomy of Criticism. Typology and prophecy, as I understand those terms, are terms from biblical, rather than literary, criticism. I agree also that “vision” is also absolutely central to Frye’s enterprise, and I wrote a fairly long chapter in my book on Frye and religion (89–125) trying to make a case for its centrality and relating it to terms such as “insight,” “enlightenment,” “epiphany,” “recognition” and (the central visionary faculty) “the imagination.” But again “vision” is a term that does not spring from the vocabulary of literary criticism, though it is perhaps obliquely connected to Aristotle’s opsis. No one would want to reduce Frye’s reading of the Bible to myth and metaphor. But they are literary principles, and so no one would want to ignore them either. As I understand Frye, “vision” and “prophecy” belong to what I called the Bible’s centrifugal, kerygmatic thrust.

Frye and the Bible

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bible

Responding to comments by Russell Perkin and Michael Happy

It seems to me that Frye is looking at the Bible from the point of view of a literary critic. He begins with the assumption that, unlike other sacred books, the Bible is a unity. He is interested in the pursuing this unity as it manifests itself in the Bible’s myths and metaphors. The former he examines in terms of the movement from Creation to Apocalypse, with all of the lesser up and down U–shapes in between. The latter he examines largely in terms of recurring images. He of course brackets out any number of other features that a literary critic might legitimately want to investigate, especially those having to do with literary texture. His concern is with structure. That’s the centripetal thrust of The Great Code, Words with Power, and his Bible lectures. According to the class notes from his Religious Knowledge course, he called this the synthetic approach. The centrifugal thrust, largely absent from his Bible lectures, has to do with the kerygmatic myths to live by. That is, as a sacred book, the Bible is more than literary. Frye worries a great deal about what to call this, finally settling on “kerygma.”

One can approach a written text, sacred or otherwise, from any number of perspectives––biographical, historical, formal, sociological, cultural, religious, and so on. When I was in school in the 1960s biblical scholars such as Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth were engaged in a type of interpretation called redaction criticism, which began to pay attention to large units of the Bible, such as the first six books, as creative, literary forms in their own right. Since that time there has been an explosion of literary approaches to the Bible, and there is a large industry today devoted to the poetics of biblical narrative and imagery. The degree of interest among Biblical scholars in such approaches is revealed by a glance at the annual programs of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature. The dialogue works both ways: we have literary critics interested in the narrative and metaphorical features of the Bible, and we have biblical critics interested in the Bible’s literary features. Not long ago I was glancing at study of that most intractable book, the Book of Revelation, by Leonard Thompson, a well known biblical scholar. Thompson realizes that he can’t crack the code of Revelation without speaking about its genre, its narrative structure, and its metaphoric unity, all of which are literary matters. Which is pretty close to Frye’s approach.

One of my favorite examples of Frye’s mythical–metaphorical approach is his commentary on the Priestly and Jahwist creation accounts in chapters 5 and 6 of Words with Power. Whether the correct label for this “a literary criticism of the Bible,” I dunno. I guess I’d say it’s a reading of the Bible from the perspective of a literary critic who is interested in texts as wholes and in the structure of their narratives and imagery. Or is all of this too obvious to need remarking?

I suppose one doesn’t have to be a literary critic to pay attention to features of a text that are literary, but if you’re trained to consider the centrality of such things as metaphor in any text, you’re more likely to see things that those untrained do not. Spend ten minutes, for example, leafing through any collection of hymns. You’ll discover that God is a mighty fortress, Christ is a master workman, Christ is a star of the East, Christ is a dying lamb, the earth is a story teller, the Holy Spirit is a dove or a divine fire or a wind, Christ is a solid rock and similar figures from the mineral world (such as Rock of Ages), God’s mercy is a bright beam, Christians are soldiers (and also from that hymn, we are the body of Christ), the hour of prayer is sweet, the heart is a dwelling place, Christ is the light of light, Jesus is a shepherd; and of course all the royal metaphors imported from the Old Testament of the “Christ is king” or “Christ is ruler” variety and the associated metaphors of crowns, diadems, and thrones. Some hymns give us rather difficult instructions, such as “fold to thy heart thy brother” or “lift up your hearts,” the folding of a brother and the lifting of a heart seeming to be rather difficult things to do literally. Sometimes we get dual metaphors, as in the hymn “O Holy City,” where we’re told that “Christ the Lamb doth reign,” a figure that combines a pastoral and sacrificial image with a royal or regal one: Christ is a lamb: the lamb is a king. In “O Master of the Waking World,” we’re told that Christ has all the nations in his heart, an extraordinary metaphor that rather strains our powers of comprehension. In another hymn we’re called on to deliver our land from “error’s chain.” Why “chain”? Well, the hymnist needs a word to rhyme with “plain” and “slain,” but we nevertheless sense the direction in which the figure takes us: the heathen nations (the hymnist mentions India and Africa, along with, of all places, Greenland) are imprisoned (that is, chained) by error. Even in “My Country, ’tis of Thee” freedom is said to be a holy light, and as one of the imperatives is for it to ring from the mountain side, freedom also seems to be a bell. In “It Singeth Low in Every Heart” we’re told that the dead “throng the silence of our breasts,” indicating that in our breasts, where everything is silent, we have a host of dead souls or maybe just dead people hanging out, an image that is something of a problem for the literal minded. In “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,” we were told in the first stanza that “God is health” and in the second stanza that God is a bird. As we’re sheltered under the wings of God, this appears to be a mother bird, a hen perhaps. The hymnist doesn’t say that God is like a mother hen, but that he is one. In one of the choral responses we implore the Lord to makes us a sanctuary, which means a sacred place or a place of refuge.

My guess is that form critics and redaction critics and canonical critics and reader–response critics are less likely to be attuned to such metaphors than a critic interested in figurative language.

Criticism in Society

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imre-salusinszky

Imre Salusinszky in his new role as columnist for The Australian

Imre Salusinszky’s Criticism in Society stands above all other similar collections of interviews with contemporary critics.  Here is a footnote to Russell’s post, adapted from something I wrote in the introduction to the Collected Works Anatomy.

In Imre Salusinszky’s Criticism in Society, an exemplary collection of interviews with Frye, Derrida, and seven others in the pantheon of the literary establishment (Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, Barbara Johnson, Frank Lentricchia, and J. Hillis Miller), it is clear that Frye remained an informing critical presence in the late 1980s in the consciousness of most of these critics. (Outside of Derrida, Barbara Johnson is the only interviewee who does not refer to Frye.)  The interviews begin with Derrida and Frye, and those that follow often play off against the two grand masters.  Each critic read the previous interviews and thus had the opportunity to comment on what had come before. [Note that most of these interviews can be read at the above link to the text.]  This, along with the comments each critic (save Derrida) is asked to give about Wallace Stevens’s “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” gives a coherence to the collection. [An animated video of Steven’s reading the poem is included after the jump.] The first interviewee, following the conversations with Derrida and Frye, is Harold Bloom, whose influence of Frye is substantial and longstanding.

Harold Bloom read Fearful Symmetry shortly after it was published, and he reports that it “ravished my heart away.  I thought it was the best book I’d ever read about anything.  I must have read it a hundred times between 1947 and 1950, probably intuitively memorized it, and will never escape the effect of it.”  Bloom adds that he “wouldn’t want to go read it now because I’m sure I would disagree with all of it “Criticism in Society 62).  In his foreword to the Anatomy, Bloom remarks that Frye’s view of poetic influence was, as mentioned earlier, a matter of “temperament and circumstances.”  This is a reference to correspondence the two had in 1969 about Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence.”  Bloom had written Frye: “I can understand why you do not see Poetic Influence as an anxiety or melancholy, as I do, because of what you call the myth of concern” (letter of 18 January 1969).  Frye replied: “If you mean influence in the more literal sense of transmission of thought and imagery and the like from earlier poet to later one, I should think that was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstances and temperament.  But of course it is true that the great poet’s maturity brings with it a growing sense of isolation, of the kind one feels in Yeats’ Last Poems, Stevens’ The Rock, and perhaps even Blake’s Job series” (letter of 23 January 1969).  Bloom then replied, “I don’t, as you say, mean influence in any literal sense, since I agree that it simply happens, and temperament alone governs whether it causes anxiety or not.  I think that I am studying what your other remark indicates, the deepening isolation of the strong poet’s maturity, particularly as one feels it in the later stages, in Paradise Regained & Samson, in Wordsworth from 1805 on, in Jerusalem, as well as in late Stevens and Yeats” (letter of 27 January 1969).  These remarks suggest that Frye did not at all reject Bloom’s theory of the anxiety of influence because influence was a matter of “circumstances and temperament”: they agree that anxiety has something to do with the mature poet’s isolation.  Bloom is, therefore, very selective in his Foreword to the Anatomy about what Frye had conveyed to him in their correspondence.

In A Map of Misreading Bloom remarks that Frye’s myths of freedom and concern are a Low Church version of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic myth of Tradition and the Individual Talent, but that such an understanding of the relation of the individual to tradition is a fiction. “The fiction,” Bloom says, “is a noble idealization, and as a lie against time will go the way of every noble idealization.  Such positive thinking served many purposes during the sixties, when continuities, of any kind, badly required to be summoned, even if they did not come to our call.  Wherever we are bound, our dialectical development now seems invested in the interplay of repetition and discontinuity, and needs a very different sense of what our stance is in regard to literary tradition” (A Map of Misreading 30).  This remark contains more than a hint of the anxiety of influence.  But regardless of whether one agrees with Bloom’s projection about what our development “seems” to involve, it is mistaken to suggest that Frye has failed to observe the “interplay between repetition and discontinuity.”  In words that could stand as a motto for theories of misprision, he says that “the recreating of the literary tradition often has to proceed . . . through a process of absorption followed by misunderstanding” (The Secular Scripture 163).  Even if Frye’s ultimate allegiances are to a continuous intellectual and imaginative universe, to order rather than chaos, to romance rather than irony, he cannot be accused of having turned his back upon the discontinuities in either literature or life.  Nor should we let Bloom’s remark deceive us into thinking that in the 1960s Frye began suddenly to summon continuities as a bulwark against the changing social order.  The central principles in Frye’s universe remained constant over the years.

The history of Bloom’s relationship to Frye is one of attraction and repulsion.  Bloom can say, on the one hand

To compare lesser things with greater, my relation to Frye’s criticism is Pater’s relation to Ruskin’s criticism, or Shelley’s relation to Wordsworth’s poetry: the authentic precursor, no matter how one tries to veil it or conceal it both from oneself and from others.  Frye is surely the major critic in the English language.  Now that I am mature, and willing to face my indebtedness, Northrop Frye does seem to me . . . a kind of Miltonic figure.  He is certainly the largest and most crucial literary critic in the English language since the divine Walter [Pater] and the divine Oscar [Wilde]: he really is that good.  I have tried to find an alternative father in Mr Burke, who is a charming fellow, but I don’t come from Burke: I come out of Frye. (Criticism in Society 62)

On the other hand, Bloom never abandoned his quarrel with his critical father.  In the Salusinszky interview, he reaffirms the statement he made about Frye’s “myth of concern” being a Low Church version of Eliot, though he says he would “phrase it a little more genteelly now, out of respect for Mr. Frye” (ibid., 63).  Moreover, Frye was never agonistic enough for Bloom (“Frye may be the first great critic in English literature whose pugnacity is diverted to other purposes”), and Frye’s view of the common reader and of democratizing the critical process always grated against Bloom’s elitist sensibility:

Mr Frye has, thank heavens, nothing in common with the Marxists, pseudo-Marxists, neo-Marxists, und so weiter, but like them he has idealized the whole question of what might be called––to use his own trope for it––the extension of the franchise in the realm of literature and literary study.  Idealization is very moving: it is also very false.  It allows profound self-deceptions, at both the individual and the societal level.  Literature does not make us better, it does not make us worse; the study of it does not make us better, it does not make us worse.  It only confirms what we are already, and it cannot authentically touch us at all unless we begin by being very greatly gifted. (ibid., 58)

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Frye on Salinger

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jd-salinger

Interviewer: Do you mean to imply by this that there have been no important new writers or styles since the 1930s?

Frye: No, no. There is no dearth of new writers and new styles. Norman Mailer has been classed as an important new writer.

Interviewer: What do you think of his work?

Frye: Personally, I find his books rather lengthy and somewhat insensitive. That is not to suggest of course that he lacks integrity—I don’t think he does. And then I can only make a personal judgment, not a critical one, since I have never read his books that closely.

Interviewer: What about J.D. Salinger?

Frye: Ah yes! Now there is someone with whom I have much more affinity. His, I think, is a really unique insight into life in this era. Mind you, his preoccupation with Zen and Oriental culture does strike me as a bit phoney. But his study of the Daemon child, for instance, is awfully well done. There is nobody else I know who has done quite that thing. And this work is not just important as an “adolescent scream” to be put on university reading courses because students can easily identify with the characters. It has great tragic and ironic implications. Of course this has very little to do with its wide popularity. Like Nabokov’s Lolita, it is an example of a substantial piece of fiction of this era which has been widely read not for the things that make it great but for its incidental appeal to a certain audience.

More from Frye on Relevance

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Herbert Marcuse

Frye on Zweckwissenschaft:

One main theme of Part Three is: the N-S axis of concern is revolutionary, & the W-E one is liberal, not speculative, but simply broadening & enlarging. Revolutionary characteristics are: the enforced loyalty of a minority group (Jews, early Christians); belief in a unique historical revelation; resistance to “revisionism”; establishment of a rigorous canon of myth; rejection of knowledge for its own sake (demand for relevance or Zweckwissenschaft). Judaism was the only revolutionary monotheism produced in the ancient world, and Christianity inherited the characteristics that made Tacitus scream & Marcus Aurelius talk about their parataxis [sheer obstinacy].

(The “Third Book” Notebooks, Notebook 12, par. 304)

A certain amount of contemporary agitation seems to be beating the track of the “think with your blood” exhortations of the Nazis a generation ago, for whom also “relevance” (Zweckwissenschaft, u.s.w.) was a constant watchword. Such agitation aims, consciously or unconsciously, at a closed myth of concern, which is thought of as already containing all the essential answers, at least potentially, so that it contains the power of veto over scholarship and imagination. Marcuse’s notion of “repressive tolerance,” that concerned issues have a right and a wrong side, and that those who are simply right need not bother tolerating those who are merely wrong, is typical of the kind of hysteria that an age like ours throws up. That age is so precariously balanced, however, that a closed myth can only maintain a static tyranny until it is blown to pieces, either externally in war or internally through the explosion of what it tries to suppress.

(The Critical Path, 155)

Relgious Knowledge, Lecture 16

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Macbeth, First Folio, 1623

Lecture 16. February 3, 1948

ELEMENTS OF TRAGEDY

Aristotle’s catharsis means that the audience is not to have pity or fear.  The correct response is: the hero is a man suffering from the tragic flaw; how very like things are. The Greek idea of fate was not external; it is the way things always happen.  The law of human life is not moral, but a law nevertheless.

Tragedy is a kind of implicit comedy.  It is the full statement of which comedy gives only a part.  The complete story of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is a comedy.  The implicit resurrection gives balance and serenity.  Tragedy completes itself as comedy. The story of Christ has no ultimate tragedy.  Death is a tragedy, but there is resurrection here.

In other tragedies the hero dies on stage and he revives in the mind of the audience.  Tragedy is the development of the ritual of sacrifice.  The typical act is the death of the central figure, the king or prince in whose death the people find life.  Aristotle’s catharsis is not a moral quality.  It casts out pity and fear, which are moral good and moral evil.

To say that Macbeth is a bad man is the reaction of terror, of moral evil.  Sympathy with him on the grounds of fate, his wife’s influence, etc., is pity: moral sympathy with the hero.  The real function of tragedy gets beyond moral reaction.  The point is not whether Macbeth was good or bad.  Tragedy goes beyond that.  The catharsis in the audience is that the dead man on the stage is alive in them.  The audience is united in the death of the hero.  Modern tragedies are moral in that they stimulate sympathy or condemnation.  Shaw’s St. Joan is moral.  In King Lear, though,  his death is a release. He attempted to find divinity in his kingship and failed. He found it in suffering humanity.

From the spectator’s point of view, Job is funny.  The watcher is released from the action and his perspective, therefore, is one of comedy.  Tragedy has the reversal of perspective.  Tragedy is a work of art seen from the spectator’s point of view as entertainment.  Hamlet asks to be written up: Othello, the same. Tragedy has a point when limited in art form and seen by an audience.

The audience’s perspective is comic because they are the watchers.  The tragic hero is unaware of the humiliation of being watched.  Lear is mercifully unaware of this when scampering around the stage mad.  Hamlet feels that all eyes are upon him.  He feels this to such a point that he takes it out on Ophelia.  He kills Polonius because he is being watched.  In Aeschylus’ Prometheus, he is stretched out on a rock.  He speaks first so that people won’t stare at him.  He says, “Behold the spectacle.”

Job sees God as an inscrutable watcher.  In Chapter 7. he describes his fallen state––no sense in what happens––if there is a God who doesn’t interfere, then he is merely the watcher, and this is unbearable to Job.  Verse 11: “Am I a sea or a whale that thou settest a watch over me?”  Verse 8: “The eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no more; thine eyes are upon me and I am not.”  A sense of loneliness, but of being watched.

Othello’s black skin means that all eyes are drawn to him.  Here, it is subtler.  The comforters are not making fun of Job.  But sympathy is harder to put up with then ridicule.  Job knows God acts — but why this way?  It worries Job.

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Some Musings on Death, Culled from Here and There in Frye’s Notebooks

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rebirth

The creation is not in the past; the Last Judgement is not in the future; we must get a proper view of creation that isn’t a projected sexual or artefact myth: when we get it the Last Judgement conception will clear up, & when that clears up there shall be a way open for a conception of life without birth & death that isn’t either before birth or after death. (11f.29)

Death is a process, not a condition.  A stone is not dead: when did it die? (11f.66; see Great Code, 157)

It’s only in nature’s Heraclitean fire that time is irreversible.  Hopkins is impressionist, he likes “dappled” things, because that preserves the sense of identical particulars while coming to terms with the dissolution of all form.  But the resurrection isn’t just a comfort, or even what makes the particular adamant or immortal diamond: it’s something that stops the irreversibility of time.  What is immortal is not the life we are going to live after death, but the life we have lived.  The Resurrection must be retrospective. (11f.98)

Death is not the opposite of life; death is the opposite of birth.  The new birth that Jesus spoke of to Nicodemus is also a release from death.  Matthew & Luke have infancy narratives about a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes; Mark & John start with the symbol of the second birth through water & the spirit.  Coming out of the water with the redeemed from the dragon. (11f.144)

I come back to the feeling that one’s eternal existence is to be connected, not with where one is going after death, but with where one is at death.  (21.30)

The total similitude of death turns into the particular point of light that turns similitude into the universal identity.  That is what resurrection means now. (21.473)

Birth means death & consciousness means nothingness.  Between birth & death you can help produce other bodily lives: between consciousness & nothingness you can help produce creative activity.  Hence maybe the two poles of the Atman, Thou & That, can produce the new child-spirit who is also ourselves. (11e.7)

The business of life is to make a path for the incarnation: the business of death is to make a path for the resurrection. (11b.31)

My hunch is that grief of survivors, being so largely self-pity, distresses, perhaps even impedes, progress to a world that makes more sense.  I know that she [Helen] would forgive me my sins of indolence and selfishness in regard to her, and therefore God will.  I hope only that she knows now that I genuinely loved her very dearly, so far as human frailty permits.  God bless, protect, and keep her among his own.  I hope to see her again; but perhaps that is a weak hope.  Faith is the hypostasis of what is hoped for, the elenchos of the unseen. The one thing truly unseen, the world across death, may, according to my principle, be what enables us to see what is visible. (44.170)

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In Memoriam

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1957

Frye in 1957, the year he published Anatomy of Criticism

Abbate, Gay.  “Frye’s Legacy: Scholarship, Loyalty, Humanity: Lighting a Path for Those Who Follow.”  University of Toronto Bulletin 4 February 1991: 6–7.

Abley, Mark.  “One of Canada’s Foremost Intellectuals Dead at 78.”  Whig‑Standard (24 January 1991): 3.

“Anatomising Literature”  The Guardian [London and Manchester] (25 January 1991): 39.

Atwood, Margaret.  Canadian Literature 129 (Summer 1991): 242–3.

________.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 4–5. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 7.

________.  “The Great Communicator.”  Globe and Mail (24 January 1991): C1; rpt. in Journal of Canadian Poetry 6 (1991): 1–3.

________.  [Tribute].  Brick 40 (1991): 3.

Barber, David.  “The Formidable Scholar.”  The Whig-Standard Magazine (2 February 1991): 5. [Based on an interview with A.C. Hamilton.]

Barnes, Bart.  “Canadian Literary Critic Northrop Frye Dies at 78.”  Washington Post (24 January) 1991: D6.

Barilli, Renato.  “Frye, corsi e ricorsi della letteratura.”  Corriere della Sera (27 January 1991).

Bemrose, John.  “The Great Decoder: Northrop Frye Explored Culture’s Myths.”  Maclean’s 104 (4 February 1991): 51–2.

Bevington, David.  “Northrop Frye.”  American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 137, no.1 (March 1993): 125.

Bissell, Claude T.  The Independent [London] (26 January 1991): 12.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 10.

________.  “Northrop Frye Remembered.”  University of Toronto Magazine 18 (Spring 1991): 10.

________.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 8–9.

Brown, Gord.  “Norrie’s Wisdom Lives on in His Writings and Students.”  the newspaper [University of Toronto] (30 January 1991): 5.

Buckley, Jerome. “Northrop Frye Remembered by His Students.”  Journal of Canadian Poetry 6 (1991): 4.

C., G.  “Northrop Frye, dalla Bibbia alla civiltà della parola.”  La Stampa (25 January 1991).

C., R.  “É morto Frye l’innovatore.”  La Nazione (25 January 1991).

Chamberlain, Ted.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 9–10.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 11.

Christian Century 108 (20–27 March 1991):  321.

Cook, Eleanor.  “Northrop Frye as Colleague.”  Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 18.

Cooley, Dennis.  “The Educated Imaginer: Northrop Frye (1912–1991).  Border Crossings 2 (April 1991): 78.

Cosway, John.  “Changes.” The Sunday Sun [Toronto] (27 January 1991): 109.

“Critic Northrop Frye Dead at 78.”  Toronto Star (23 January 1991): 28.

Dahlin, Karina.  “ U of T Remembers Its Greatest Humanist.”  University of Toronto Bulletin (4 February 1991): 1–2.

Denham, Robert D.  “Northrop Frye: 1912–1991.”  Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 24 (Spring 1991): 158–9.

Downey, Donn.  “Literary Scholar Regarded as Great Cultural Figure.”  Globe and Mail (24 January 1991): D6.

Fabiny, Tibor.  “Érdekeltség és szabadság” [“Concern and Freedom”].  Nagyvilág (December 1991).

Fisher, Douglas.  “A Frydolator Remembers.”  Toronto Sun (25 January 1991): 11.

________.  “Frye was Right about Quebec.”  The Sunday Sun [Toronto] (27 January 1991): C3.

Fletcher, Angus.  “In Memoriam.  Northrop Frye (1912–1991).”  New Vico Studies 9 (1991): 153–4.

Flint, Peter.  “Northrop Frye, 78, Literary Critic, Theorist and Educator, Is Dead.”  New York Times (25 January 1991): B14.

Foley, Joan.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 6.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 8.

Forst, Graham.  “Remembering Norrie, Critic and Teacher.”  Vancouver Sun (26 January 1991): D24.

“Frye, Herman Northrop.”  Current Biography 52, no. 3 (March 1991): 60.

“Frye’s Genius Recalled in Tributes.”  Toronto Star (24 January 1991): D1.

Fulford, Robert.  “Frye’s Soaring Cathedral of Thought.”  Globe and Mail (26 January 1991): C16.

Garrido-Gallardo, Miguel Angel.  “Northrop Frye (1912–1991).”  Revista de Literatura 53 (January–June 1991): 175–7.

Globe and Mail (25 January 1991): D8.

Guarini, Ruggero.  “Una vita per due gemelle, bellezza e verità. . . .”  Il Messaggero (25 January 1991).

Hamilton, A. C.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 10–11.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 11.

________.  “Northrop Frye: 1912–1991.”  Quill & Quire 57 (March 1991); rpt. in Journal of Canadian Poetry 6 (1991): 5–7.

Harron, Don.  “A Memory of Frye.”  Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 19.

Hartley, Brian.  “Life in the Resurrection: Remembering Northrop Frye.”  Herald (March, 1991).

Hoffman, John.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 2.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 4.

Jensen, Bo Green.  “Kritikeren, Northrop Frye, 78 †r.”  Weekendavisen [Denmark] (1 February 1991).

Johnston, Alexandra F.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 14–15.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 15.

________.  “In Memoriam: Chancellor Northrop Frye.”  Victoria College Council, Minutes of the Meeting of 11 February 1991.  Typescript. 3 pp.

J[ohnson], P[hil].  “A Tribute to Northrop Frye.”  Pietisten 6 (April 1991): 5.

Juneau, Pierre.  “The Power of Frye’s Words.”  The Financial Post (28 January 1991): 8.

________.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 13–14.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 14.

Kenner, Hugh.  “Northrop Frye, R I P.”  National Review 43 (25 February 1991): 19.

Kushner, Eva.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 12–13.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 13.

Laux, Cameron. The Independent [London] (30 January 1991): 13.

Lee, Alvin.  “Northrop Frye: 1912–1991.”  The McMaster Courier (12 February 1991): 5.

________.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 11–12.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 12.

Lee, Hope. “Tribute to Northrop Frye.” Presented on the CBC Sunday Morning Program, 27 January 1991. Typescript, 1 p.

“Literary Critic Dies.”  Richmond Times-Dispatch (24 January 1991): B2.

“Literary Critic Rode Subway Daily to Work.”  Niagara Falls Review (24 January 1991): 7.

Lombardo, Agostino, Baldo Meo, and Piero Boitani.  “Il Pagione [A Tribute to Frye].”  Broadcast on Italian Radio—RAI, 19 February 1991, at 4:30 p.m.

McBurney, Ward.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 6–7.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 89–9.

McGibbon, Pauline.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 4.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 6.

McIntyre, John P.  “Northrop Frye (1912–91).”  America 165, no. 1 (6 July 1991): 14–15.

Marchand, Philip.  “Frye Really Believed that Literature Could Save Society.”  Toronto Star (24 January 1991): D1.

________.  “Premier, Friends Pay Tribute to Northrop Frye.”  Toronto Star (30 January 1991): E1, E6.

Meo, Baldo.  “Northrop Frye e i nuovi furori della critica letteraria.”  l’Unita 25 (January 1991): 19.

Miller, Daniel.  “Northrop Frye Remembered by U of T.”  the newspaper [University of Toronto] (30 January 1991): 10.

Moriz, Andre.  “Northrop Frye Tribute Service Draws 800.”  The Varsity [University of Toronto] (31 January 1991): 12.

“La morte in Canada di Frye: critica e società.”   Il Gazzettino [Venice] (25 January 1991).

“É morto Northrop Frye teorico della letteratura.”  Corriere della Sera (25 January 1991).

“É morto il critico Northrop Frye.”  Il Giornale (25 January 1991).

“É morto il critico Northrop Frye.”   Il Tempo (25 January 1991).

“É morto a Toronto Northrop Frye risalì al ‘profondo’ dell’opera letteraria.”  Gazzetta del Sud (25 January 1991).

“Morto critico litterario canadese Northrop Frye.”  ANSA News Agency, Rome (24 January 1991).

Mulhallen, Karen.  “In Memoriam, Northrop Frye, 1912–1991, R.I.P.”  Descant 21–22 (Winter–Spring 1990–91): 7.

Newsweek (4 February 1991): 76.

“Northrop Frye.”  St. Louis Post-Dispatch (24 January 1991): 4C.

“Northrop Frye.”  The Daily Telegraph (25 January 1991): 19.

O’Malley, Martin.  “The Ordinary Side of an Extraordinary Man.”  United Church Observer (March 1991): 16.

Nolan, Nicole, and Hilary Williams.  “Memorial for Frye.”  The Strand [Victoria University] (30 January 1991): 1.

“Northrop Frye.”  Times [London] (26 January 1991): 12.

“Northrop Frye 1912–1991.”  Toronto Star (1 November 1992): 70.

“Northrop Frye.”  Toronto Star (24 January 1991): A26.  [Editorial].

Outram, Richard.  “In Memory of Northrop Frye.”  Globe and Mail (16 February 1991): C16; rpt. in Northrop Frye Newsletter 3, no 2 (Spring 1991): 36.

Pentland, Howard.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 15–17. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 17.

Placido, Beniamino.  “É morto Northrop Frye.”  La Repubblica (25 January 1991).

Polizoes, Elias.  “Northrop Frye’s Legacy Pivotal.”  Varsity [University of Toronto] (25 January 1991): 12

Prichard, Robert.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 2–3.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 4.

Rae, Bob.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 3–4.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 5.

Reaney, James.  “Northrop Frye: He Educated Our Imagination.”  Toronto Star (24 January 1991): A27.

“Remembering Frye.”  Globe and Mail (26 January 1991): C10.

Saddlemyer, Ann.  University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 7–8.  Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 9.

Sewell, Gregory.  “Literary Critic Northrop Frye Dead.”  Varsity [University of Toronto] (25 January 1991): 1.

Stefani, Claudio.  “Il molto reverendo Frye.”  Il Resto del Carlino (25 January 1991).

Stone, George Winchester.  “Herman Northrop Frye (14 July 1912–23 January 1991).”  PMLA 106, no. 3 (May 1991): 564, 566.

Stuewe, Paul.  “Northrop Frye, 1912–1991.”  Books in Canada 20, no. 2 (March 1991): 9.

Teskey, Gordon.  “Eulogy of Northrop Frye.”  Annual Dinner of the Milton Society, San Francisco, 28 December 1992.  Typescript. 4 pp.

Theall, Donald F.  “In Memoriam.”  Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 2 (July 1991): 288–90.

Thompson, Clive.  “Frye First and Foremost a Great Teacher.”  The Strand (30 January 1991): 5.

Time (4 February 1991): 61.

Toronto Star (26 January 1991): D7.

Tredell, Nicholas.  “Northrop Frye.”  PN Review 17 (May–June 1991): 8.

Vega, María José. “La Literatura como Orden: En la muerte de Northrop Frye.”  Revista de Extremadura (Segunda época) 9 (September–December 1992): 71–4.

Warkentin, Germaine.  “The Loss of Northrop Frye.” http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v04/0923.html

Weinbrot, Howard.  “On Northrop Frye in Minneapolis, 1990.  A Memorial.” Johnsonian News Letter 50 (September & December 1991): 39–5.

Frye and Science

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In Notebook 27 Frye writes:

I’m giving up the “science” bit in AC: it’s impossible to explain to this generation of critics what I mean.  I never did have the analogy of the physical sciences in mind: the model was always social science, man studying himself.  What I thought of was a merging of criticism with semiotics and linguistics.  When critics keep saying that there can’t be a science of criticism, what they’re really saying is “I can’t and won’t write this kind of criticism,” and I can’t say they’re wrong because I can’t & won’t write it myself.  People will write it some day, and I thought it might be a good thing to alert the critics of the 50’s to the ultimate end of what they were actually doing.  But if it’s just a prophecy with no present practical use, the hell with it. (CW 5, 85)

As Michael Dolzani says, Frye’s scientific heroes were of the visionary kind––Whitehead, Jeans, Alexander, Bohm.  I’ve always wondered whether Frye was familiar with the paradigm theory in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions––a theory that would seem to have attracted him.  He owned a copy of the book, but I think there’s no evidence that he ever read it, though he seems to have discussed it in an interview with Gilbert Reid.  Frye had more than a casual interest in science fiction and in the views of new‑age scientists––what he called “the Tao of physics people” (Ken Wilber, Fritjof Capra, et al.).

Frye was familiar with several popular accounts of science.  He read C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science, Isaac Asimov’s The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science and The Neutrino: Ghost Particle of the Atom, and he read as well several of Carl Sagan’s books (Bocca’s Brain, The Cosmic Connection, and The Dragons of Eden).

Frye’s library contains annotated editions of a wide variety of other books on science, including Edwin Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Stewart Copinger Easton’s Roger Bacon and His Search for a Universal Science, David Hay’s Exploring Inner Space: Scientists and Religious Experience, his colleague John Irving’s Science and Values, Gordon N. Patterson, Message from Infinity: A Space-age Correlation of Science and Religion, and Rudy Rucker’s, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite.

Books that Frye owned but did not annotate include Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science: A Critical Survey Written for the Cultured Non-mathematician, Karl Pearson’s The Grammar of Science, Oliver R. Reiser’s The Integration of Human Knowledge: A Study of the Formal Foundations and the Social Implications of Unified Science and Unified Symbolism for World Understanding in Science, and C.H. Waddington’s The Scientific Attitude.

At school I was taught that substances keeping form & volume were solids, those keeping volume but not form liquids, & those keeping neither gas.  Even then I could see that there ought to be a fourth class keeping form but not volume.  And there is a tradition, though admittedly a very speculative one, which says that there is a fourth class of this kind, & the one that includes all organisms or living beings.  Also, that just as solids, liquids & gases have a symbolic connexion with, respectively, earth, water & air, so organisms, especially warm-blooded animals, are units of imprisoned fire.  (CW 13, 208)