Author Archives: Bob Denham

Quiet Consummation

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When he was still a student Frye set out to write a novel called Quiet Consummation.  In 1935, he wrote to Roy Daniells:

I come up blushing shyly to confess that I am taking advantage of my unaccustomed freedom to start working a bit on a novel.  Its provisional title is Quiet Consummation.  It’s not much of a novel, but I want to get it out of my system.  No plot or theme or thesis or anything, just yet.  It’s laid out in sonata form.  Amusing, I think, if it comes off at all.  I am beginning to realize that while I may and probably will turn out some fairly decent things on Blake and Shakespeare and Augustine and the rest critically, the larger problem they refer back to, the relation of religion and art in symbolism, will require fictional and dramatic treatment.

In Notebook 5, which apparently dates from about this time, Frye sketched on the flyleaf, “Quiet Consummation / A Novel in Sonata Form / Eratus Howard / Part One, Exposition”; on the second leaf is an “Analysis” of the novel, outlined as the exposition, development, and recapitulation. [Frye was apparently adopting the name of his brother––Eratus Howard Frye––as a pseudonym].  He was never able to realize this fantasy.  Notebook 5 contains nothing else about Quiet Consummation, and there is not so much as a whisper about it elsewhere his early notebooks.  But Frye did return to it fifty years later when he was looking for a form that would combine the creative and the critical––something aphoristic, anagogic, erudite, imaginative, even fictional that would be a quiet consummation of his life’s work.

One proposal for the final book in Frye’s ogdoad, which he called Twilight, was a book of aphorisms.  The desire to complete such a book emerges from a dozen or so entries in Frye’s Late Notebooks.  “I wonder,” he writes, “if I could be permitted to write my Twilight book, not as evidence of my own alleged wisdom but as a ‘next time’ (Henry James) book, putting my spiritual case more forcefully yet, and addressed to still more readers” (Late Notebooks, 1:417)  The reference here is to James’s The Next Time, the story of a writer whose work is admired by a small coterie but who is frustrated by his failure to reach a large audience.  Frye proposes several models for his anagogic book, and he says, “I wouldn’t want to plan such a book as a dumping ground for things I can’t work in elsewhere or as a set of echoes of what I’ve said elsewhere.”  “Such a book would feature,” he adds “completely uninhibited writing” and “completely uninhibited metaphor-building,” and some of the entries might even be fictional. [For Frye’s additional speculations on the anagogic book, see Late Notebooks, 1: 172–3, 238, 372.]

Toward the end of Notebook 50, when Frye realizes that he may not live much longer, he suggests still another variation on the final book.  He scribbles somewhat cryptically, “Opus Perhaps Posthumous: Working Title: Quintessence of Dust.  Four Essays.”  And then, a dozen entries later, he adds, “Quintessence and dust; Quarks or pinpoints; Quest and Cycle: Quiet Consummation” (Late Notebooks, 415, 417).  “Four Essays,” the subtitle of Anatomy of Criticism, hints at the conventions of the anatomy as a genre.  “Quintessence of Dust” is a phrase from Hamlet’s dialogue with Rosenkranz and Guildenstern (act. 2, sc. 2), and of course “Quiet Consummation” (the phrase comes from Guiderius and Arviragus’s song in Cymbeline, 4.2. 280) returns us to Frye’s 1935 fantasy.

Here are a couple of the models Frye proposes for Twilight:

This may be a crazy notion, or it may be one of my central intuitions coming to a head.  I’ve always wanted to write something in the conventionally “creative” modes towards the end of my life.  I’ve even thought of a long poem, though I certainly know that I’d have to go through quite a metamorphosis before I could bring that off—even so, I was thinking only of the kind of versified speculation that Buckminster Fuller brought out a while ago.  Fiction of course I’ve thought of more frequently, but learning the mechanics of any kind of fiction is a disheartening and unpredictable procedure at my age.  So I’ve thought most frequently of a book of brief essays or meditations, perhaps a century of meditations like Traherne’s, though naturally of a very different kind.  I’ve often said too (to myself) that a book like Anatole France’s Jardin d’Epicure [a bricolage of essays, dialogues, epigrams, and other short prose fragments] would be ideal in format and general conception for me, except that I’d want my book to display a less commonplace mind than his was.  (Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings, 155–6)

The interesting thing about Frye’s last-book fantasies is their correspondence to the notebooks themselves.  Frye himself makes the connection between the “aphoristic book” and his “notebook obsession” (Late Notebooks, 172–3), and the notebooks are a Promethean exercise in uninhibited writing and metaphor-building.  His notebooks are, of course, not Twilight, not the anagogic book of aphorisms that he dreamed about—“‘my own’ book of pensées,” as he called it (Late Notebooks, 1:372).   But it is possible that the core of Twilight ould have come from a selection of his notebook entries.  Frye says that Twilight is “ideally  . . . a book to be put away in a drawer and have published after my death” and that he always thought of the final book in his ogdoad fantasy as “something perhaps not reached” (Late Notebooks, 1:238, 173).  Perhaps his notebooks do in fact serve as the quiet consummation of his life’s work.

Frye and Thanksgiving

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turkey_Full

Some pertinent (and impertinent) references to the theme and occasion of Thanksgiving. 

“The Concept of Sacrifice” (Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, CW 3).

There are many motives in primitive sacrifice: communion, propitiation, bribery, feeding of the god, establishment of a blood bond, reinforcing the efficacy of a curse, obtaining of an oracle, transferring of a disease to an animal, preserving a newly built house, and so on: but all of these fall under the two fundamental categories of communion and gift, or an application of either idea.  Probably sacrifice starts simply with man’s fondness for company and for a feast, the feast being the only occasion on which the idea of group cohesion becomes evident, through relaxation of activity.  Refreshments are the mainstay of social activity, as such, in any level of civilization, and there is no reason to suppose that primitives at the very beginning of conscious life had any loftier spiritual attitude than, say, we evidence toward Thanksgiving.  Even when the idea evolves of the critically important ritual feast with overtones of a larger significance, the meal is retained.  It does not occur to the primitive that the god does not necessarily eat or drink.  He leaves food for the god, who eats it up in the form of a jackal, vulture, or hyena.

Bible lecture no. 12, “The Question of Primogeniture” (Northop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, CW 13).

In the New Testament, if you look at the beginning at the Gospel of Luke, you find again the story that I referred to about the birth of John the Baptist, which picks up and repeats the theme of late birth.  The birth of Jesus is not said to be a late birth of the same kind, but again a triumphant hymn of thanksgiving is ascribed to the Virgin Mary at the time of the birth of Christ, the hymn which we know as the Magnificat [1:46–55].  The Magnificat has obviously been influenced by, if not modelled on, the Song of Hannah, and repeats this theme of social overturn.

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Gloria Boyd: Norrie dans le metro

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As it’s the eve of Thanksgiving, this poignant little memoir published in The Globe & Mail eight years ago seems appropriate.

FACTS & ARGUMENTS ESSAY from the Toronto Globe and Mail, April 25, 2001.

Escalating insight into a subway friend. Probably the big reason he enjoyed talking to me was that I didn’t know and didn’t care who he was.

By GLORIA BOYD

I took a French literature course at the University of Toronto 22 years ago.  Since parking was difficult, I would take the bus and the subway to class.  Every time I tried to get off the bus, the exit was blocked by an elderly, portly gentleman dressed in a dark coat.  I would brush past him with a swift, “Excuse me,” and run down the subway stairs, only to find that there was no train.

Eventually, the old man ambled down and gave me an amused look, as if he wanted to say, “You see, there’s no point in rushing.”  Three times a week I would stand on the platform, anxiously looking to the left to see if a flickering light emerging from the tunnel would announce the approaching train.  Afterwards, I would turn my head in the opposite direction to watch the old man walk down the stairs.  He walked slowly and patiently, distributing his weight evenly over each step with precision and determination.  The train must have known to wait for him, as it always pulled in obligingly as he reached the platform.

After a while he started to smile at me and I smiled back.  Then the smiles turned into “Good morning,” and one day he sat down beside me and we started to talk.  We never bothered to introduce ourselves and talked about impersonal subjects—the theatre, cinema and travel.  He told me that he was going to take his wife to Australia, and I talked about my impending visit to my native Hungary.  I began to look forward to my subway rides with the old man.  Looking back now, I realize that I did most of the talking and he listened patiently to my incessant silly chatter.

Then one day I had to tell him, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you today.  I have to analyze a poem.”  I explained that I was taking a French literature course at the University of Toronto and added, “I don’t know if you know anything about poetry, but I find it most confusing.”

The old man didn’t answer, and sat silently beside me as I read and re-read a poem by Rimbaud.  It wasn’t until I closed my book that he turned to me and asked, “What seems to be your problem?  Is it the French?”

“Oh, no. My French is fine.  It’s just that poetry is taught so differently now from the way it was when I went to school, and all those metaphors and similes drive me crazy.”

The old man said he would like to recommend a book which might help me.  He didn’t strike me as someone who knew much about literature, but I wasn’t going to hurt his feelings, and obediently wrote down the title of the book.  After I left him, I realized he hadn’t told me the name of the author.  I went back to him as he was coming up the escalator and said, “You didn’t tell me who wrote the book.”

“I did,” he replied quietly.

A little surprised, I asked “So, what’s your name?”

He answered shyly, almost inaudibly, “Northrop Frye.”

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Frye & Football (Or, as we call it here, Soccer)

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From Angelo Tallarita, “Italy Camp Focus: We Are No More Than a River of Shadows”

Now October asserts itself, bringing with it a flurry of media news and a legion of chrysanthemums. Autumn is the season of tragedy, according to Northrop Frye. The time when great empires and glittering cities bow down into nameless mud and murk. If that is the case, then it certainly befits the Italian national team at the moment – champions of the world and conquerors of everything in football a few years ago and now incapable of coming to terms with the death and implosion of its own ageing stars. The blue shirts look faded, more than they have done in a while…

This season our team is a beautiful idle woman, bored and tipsy. We look at her like people who are conscious of some coming disaster, yet we have forgotten how to tell her. Around her chrysanthemums, the flowers of autumn, bloom to herald the funerals of a generation deep in winter.

Full article here:

http://www.footballitaliano.co.uk/article.aspx?id=653)

Expanded Consciousness

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This engaging discussion has led Joe––in his third answer to what for Frye is the function of literature in society––to what I see as the punch line in Frye, the notion of expanded consciousness that comes from vision.  Frye has a compelling account of this and other matters in his essay, “Literary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World,” where he says, after giving his familiar example of metaphorical identification in the Palaeolithic cave drawings, “Later we find the metaphorical imagination expanding into the worlds of dream, belief, vision, fantasy, ideas, as well as human society and nature, and annexing them all to the enlarging consciousness” (“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, CW 18, 294).  [This comes from the volume Joe and Jean Wilson edited, which is, I think, the richest collection of Frye’s essays on critical theory.]

In the 1970s Frye often wrote about what he called the four levels of awareness, but “awareness” as a category tends to disappear from the writings in the last decade of his life, having been replaced by “consciousness.”   This word is often modified by “enlarged,” “expanded,” and “intensified.”  The cave drawings at Lascaux, Altamira, and elsewhere are an example of what Lévy-Bruhl called participation mystique, the imaginative identification with things, including other people, outside the self, or an absorption of one’s consciousness with the natural world into an undifferentiated state of archaic identity.   In such a process of metaphorical identification the subject and object merge into one, but the sense of identity is existential rather than verbal (See Words with Power, 250, and Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 2:503).

But what does the “intensity or expansion of consciousness” entail for Frye?  This is a somewhat slippery phrase to get hold of because Frye reflects on the implications of the phrase only obliquely.  But several years ago I nevertheless tried to set down some of the chief features of “expanded consciousness.”  It came out like this:

1.  It is a function of kerygma.  Ordinary rhetoric “seldom comes near the primary concern of ‘How do I live a more abundant life?’  This latter on the other hand is the central theme of all genuine kerygmatic, whether we find it in the Sermon on the Mount, the Deer Park Sermon of Buddha, the Koran, or in a secular book that revolutionizes our consciousness.  In poetry anything can be juxtaposed, or implicitly identified with, anything else.  Kerygma takes this a step further and says: ‘you are what you identify with.’  We are close to the kerygmatic whenever we meet the statement, as we do surprisingly often in contemporary writing, that it seems to be language that uses man rather than man that uses language” (Words with Power, 116).

2.  It does not necessarily signify religion or a religious experience, but it can be “the precondition for any ecumenical or everlasting-gospel religion” (Late Notebooks, 1:17).

3.  Whatever the techniques used to expand consciousness (for example, yoga, Zen, psychosynthesis, meditation, drugs), or whatever forms it takes (for example, dreams, fantasies, the “peak experiences” described by Maslow, ecstatic music), the language of such consciousness always turns out to be metaphorical.  Thus literature is the guide to higher consciousness, just as Virgil was Dante’s guide to the expanded vision represented by Beatrice (Late Notebooks, 2:717; Words with Power, 28–9).  Still, Frye believes that language is the primary means of “intensifying consciousness, lifting us into a new dimension of being altogether” (LN, 2:717).

4. “Vision” is the word that best fits the heightened awareness that comes with the imagination’s opening of the doors of perception.  What the subject sees may be “only an elusive and vanishing glimpse.  Glimpse of what?  To try to answer this question is to remove it to a different category of experience.  If we knew what it was, it would be an object perceived in time and space.  And it is not an object, but something uniting the objective with ourselves” (Words with Power, 83).

5.  The principle behind the epiphanic experience that permits things to be seen with a special luminousness is that “things are not fully seen until they become hallucinatory.  Not actual hallucinations, because those would merely substitute subjective for objective visions, but objective things transfigured by identification with the perceiver.  An object impregnated, so to speak, by a perceiver is transformed into a presence” (Words with Power, 88).

6.  Intense consciousness does not sever one from the body or the physical roots of experience.  “The word spiritual in English may have a rather hollow and booming sound to some: it is often detached from the spiritual body and made to mean an empty shadow of the material, as with churches who offer us spiritual food that we cannot eat and spiritual riches that we cannot spend.  Here spirit is being confused with soul, which traditionally fights with and contradicts the body, instead of extending bodily experience into another dimension.  The Song of Songs . . . is a spiritual song of love: it expresses erotic feeling on all levels of consciousness, but does not run away from its physical basis or cut off its physical roots.  We have to think of such phrases as ‘a spirited performance’ to realize that spirit can refer to ordinary consciousness at its most intense: the gaya scienza, or mental life as play. . . . Similar overtones are in the words esprit and Geist” (Words with Power, 128).  Or again, St. John of the Cross makes “a modulation from existential sex metaphor (M2) to existential expanding of consciousness metaphor (M1)” (Late Notebooks, 120).  As in Aufhebung, things lifted to another level do not cancel their connection to the previous level: “M2” is still present at the higher level.  Chapter 6 (“The Garden”) of Words with Power “is concerned partly, if not mainly, with getting over the either-or antithesis between the spiritual and the physical, Agape love and Eros love” (Late Notebooks, 2:451).  Again, “spiritual love expands from the erotic and does not run away from it” (Words with Power, 224).

7.  Intensified consciousness is represented by images of both ascent and descent: “images of ascent are connected with the intensifying of consciousness, and images of descent with the reinforcing of it by other forms of awareness, such as fantasy or dream.  The most common images of ascent are ladders, mountains, towers, and trees; of descent, caves or dives into water” (Words with Power, 151).  These images, which arrange themselves along the axis mundi, are revealed with exceptional insight in some of Frye’s most powerfully perceptive writing, the last four chapters of Words with Power.  In these concentrated chapters Frye illustrates how four central archetypes connect the ordinary world to the world of higher consciousness: the mountain and the cave emphasizing wisdom and the word, and the garden and the furnace emphasizing love and the spirit.

8.  Expanded consciousness is both individual and social.

9.  The raising of consciousness is revelation (Late Notebooks, 1:61).

Who’s Anatomy?

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AnatomyOfCriticism

“The present cannot really be known or understood except through the past.  It follows inescapably that the more we know of the past the more we know of the present.  As T.S. Eliot has . . . said, the poet is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” 

“I sometimes think with Oscar Wilde that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

Do these two passages have a faint Frygian ring to them?  They are from Anatomy of Criticism.  Not Frye’s Anatomy but The Anatomy of Criticism  by Henry Hazlitt, pp. 155 and 239.

While on the topic––In 1982 Wayne Booth wrote to Frye to apologize for listing Anatomy of Criticism as The Anatomy of Criticism in the bibliography of The Rhetoric of Fiction, saying that it would be corrected in the next edition.  Frye replied: “Well, I don’t suppose it did any harm to either book to have mine listed as “The” Anatomy for a brief time.  Most people when speaking to me about it say ‘your Anatomy,’ which is much more disconcerting.  In the meantime, I am very pleased that ‘The’ Rhetoric of Fiction continues to do so well.”

Ghosts and Angels

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Ghosts

Several of my plans have come smack up against a theory of Bardo, & I can’t help wondering if I don’t need at least a literary theory of ghosts, if not of the whole supernatural. I must start with the vampire theme in Wuthering Heights & see if I can attach it to my floating notions about the echo & the preservation of identity in DM [Daisy Miller], & of the returning ghost in Senecan revenge plays as neurotic, blocked & bound to a pattern of recurrence. The ghost theme in Eliot’s Waste Land (water-nymphs recalling the bodiless souls of Purgatory) winds up with a quotation from the Spanish Tragedy [ll. 266 ff., 432]. Also the Kurtz business, Kurtz being, like Heathcliffe, a “lost violent” soul [The Hollow Men, l. 15–16]. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism,” CW 23, 222)

Angels

If I had been out on the hills of Bethlehem on the night of the birth of Christ, with the angels singing to the shepherds, I think that I should not have heard any angels singing. The reason why I think so is that I do not hear them now, and there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped. (The Critical Path, 114)

History tells the reader what he would have seen if he’d been present, say, at the assassination of Caesar. But what the Gospels tell us is rather something like this: if you had been present on the hills of Bethlehem in the year nothing, you might not have heard a chorus of angels. But what you would have seen and heard would have missed the whole point of what was actually going on. Thus, the antitypes of history and of prophecy as we have them in the gospel and the apocalypse give you not what you would have seen and heard, or what I would have seen and heard, but what was actually going on which we don’t have the spiritual vision to reach to. (“Kerygma,” in Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, CW 13, 588)

Archetype

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Responding the Clayton Chrusch:

Frye uses the word “archetype” in different contexts for different purposes.  Peter Yan reminds us that Frye called himself a “terminological buccaneer,” and Frye was forever taking over his critical language from other writers.  The obvious example is his borrowing mythos, ethos, dianoia, melos, lexis, and opsis from Aristotle’s account of the qualitative parts of dramatic tragedy.  In Frye these words hardly resemble at all the meanings that the literal‑minded Aristotle assigned them in the Poetics.  Frye redefines them and greatly expands their meaning for his own purposes.  In this respect Frye is no different from any other critic.  It often takes considerable digging to discover what critics mean by this or that term.  A great deal of ink has been spilt in the effort to speculate on what Plato meant by mimesis (certainly different from what Aristotle meant by the term), and to what Aristotle meant by katharsis, Longinus by ekstasis, Sidney by “figuring forth,” Dryden by “nature,” Pope by “wit,” Keats by “Negative Capability,” and so on.

The word “archetype” was perhaps an unfortunate choice because of its association with Jung.  Thus, David Richter is led to call Frye a psychoanalytic critic because, like Jung, he used the word “archetype.”  Frye read a good deal of Jung, but his appropriation of the word archetype antedates most of what he read in Jung.  In reading around in the eighteenth‑century as preparation for writing Fearful Symmetry, he stumbled on the conception of archetype in The Minstrel by James Beattie (the writer mentioned by Peter Yan).  No one would have ever guessed that a footnote in a relatively obscure poem by an obscure poet (and moral philosopher) would have been the source of Frye’s conception of the archetype, given many obvious possibilities from Plato’s “forms” on, and we might think Frye to be engaging in a bit of leg‑pulling here were it not for his more extensive discussion of his debt to Beattie’s footnote in “Criticism, Visible and Invisible.,” where he writes:

It is true that I call the elements of literary structure myths, because they are myths; it is true that I call the elements of imagery archetypes, because I want a word which suggests something that changes its context but not its essence.  James Beattie, in The Minstrel, says of the poet’s activity:

From Nature’s beauties, variously compared

And variously combined, he learns to frame

Those forms of bright perfection

and adds a footnote to the last phrase: “General ideas of excellence, the immediate archetypes of sublime imitation, both in painting and in poetry.”  It was natural for an eighteenth-century poet to think of poetic images as reflecting “general ideas of excellence”; it is natural for a twentieth-century critic to think of them as reflecting the same images in other poems.  But I think of the term as indigenous to criticism, not as transferred from Neoplatonic philosophy or Jungian psychology. However, I would not fight for a word, and I hold to no “method” of criticism beyond assuming that the structure and imagery of literature are central considerations of criticism. Nor, I think, does my practical criticism illustrate the use of a patented critical method of my own, different in kind from the approaches of other critics.  (“The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1963–1975, 154–5)

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“Frye was Different”

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Northrop Frye

Responding to Merv Nicholson:

Isn’t it the case as well that Frye is different in the attention he devoted to Spirit, especially during the last decade of his life, when he wrote about hardly anything else? There’s a pulsating drive in his late work to get beyond the poetic. The social function of both literature and criticism is, to be sure, a part of his “difference,” and this is an area that younger people interested in Frye might well investigate, as it has not been comprehensively examined. Another area, which relates to Frye as a religious thinker, is his theory of metaphor. As I’ve snooped around in the various writings on metaphor from Aristotle to I.A. Richards, Max Black, and Paul Ricoeur, I don’t find anyone who bases a theory of metaphor on the principle of identity. They all fall back on theories of resemblance or substitution, theories that are founded on the principle of analogy (Blake’s similitude). Frye is different in insisting on what he calls in The Double Vision “imaginative literalism.” Frye on metaphor is another area of his thinking that deserves systematic exploration.

Today in the Frye Diaries (2)

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Regarding Today in the Frye Diaries, Frye’s response to Helen’s death 40 years later.

From Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1: 137–40, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 153, 156, 160, 191, 197, 204, 254, 345, 374, 379–80

This is not a diary, but Helen is dead. Not of cancer: she died in peace, I was told. Her Alzheimer fantasies were already turning her against me: she seemed to feel I could get her out of hospital if I only wanted to. It’s better for her to go now than to go through the final Alzheimer cycles, and it was very like her to slip out of the world so unobtrusively. I know nothing: Ned’s “iron door” doesn’t budge a crack. I think I know when she died—3.10 p.m. AEST,—but that may be an illusion. But they say there are helpers, and for so gentle and pure a spirit there must be. 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 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 [substance] of what is hoped for, the elenchos [evidence] 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. I dreaded seeing her in the hospital, because she never smiled at me: she would smile at Jane, but I couldn’t keep the worry out of my face and tone, and I bored her. Besides, when Jane [Widdicombe] told her she was in hospital and had to get better before she could go home, she said “I can take that from you.” When I tried to say the same thing, she said “Don’t be so portentous.” It was the last thing she said to me, and it sounds like an oracle. Meanwhile there is Jane, a daughter sent by God instead of nature. Guardian angels take unexpected but familiar forms, as in Homer.

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