Author Archives: Bob Denham

Interdisciplinary Connections

polymath

In relation to the Adamson/Chrusch dialogue about ways that cognitive science, logic, and other disciplines might contribute to our understanding of Frye, it might be useful to reverse the context of the issue of dependency and consider the ways that Frye has contributed to thinking in other disciplines. The most extended commentaries on Frye’s work are naturally within the field of literary criticism, but Frye was an interdisciplinarian, writing on numerous issues outside of literature –– social, political, psychological, historical, philosophical, religious, linguistic, legal, and educational. He wrote about music, the fine arts, sacred texts, ballet, film, advertising and propaganda, the church, folklore, Canadian culture, comparative anthropology, humor, Utopias, student protest movements, the humanities, and numerous other nonliterary topics. Frye was, of course, a polymath, and like other instances of the homo universalis, his ideas, especially those that form his literary theory, continue to spill over into other disciplines, affecting them in substantive ways. His ideas have been applied by philosophers, historians, geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, and by writers in the fields of advertising, marketing, communication studies, nursing, political economy, legal theory, organization science, social psychology, and consumer research. The contribution to other disciplines is one measure of the substance of a writer’s thought. One thinks of the way Chomsky’s work has influenced, even developed, other fields of inquiry. The following survey, which does not include the books and essays by scores of biblical critics and educational theorists who have drawn on Frye’s work, is a preliminary record of the dialogue between Frye’s criticism and other disciplines. Interestingly, the debts to Frye come not so much from his writings about nonliterary topics: they derive, with a handful of exceptions, from the principles set down in Anatomy of Criticism.

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Frye the Scientist

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pluto

This might be of particular interest to Clayton Chrusch, Adam Bradley, and Trevor Losh-Johnson, among others.

Frye on Form and Volume

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. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, CW 13, 208)

Frye on Geometry and Beauty

When I entered University in the old Pass Course I was neither wise nor experienced, being seventeen; but my cultural tastes were formed. I had always done well in English, liked history and languages, thought I could do philosophy, hated science, and loathed mathematics with an adolescent’s fanaticism. However, I had to take math, so I sulkily bought a formidable treatise on “Analytic Geometry,” by someone named De Lury, whom I had never heard of nor wanted to hear of, and proceeded to read the only part of it which it was possible to read, the Preface. At the end of the Preface I came across some such remark as this: “The student should get a sharp pencil & a decent set of instruments, because without clear and accurate diagrams a great deal of the beauty of the subject will be lost.” I stared at that sentence for a long time, and then thought, “By golly, that could be true.” I never got further with mathematics, and never got the point of the subject, but from that day I have never doubted that there was a point to get, and that for those who know it mathematics is one of the major disciplines of beauty. (Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings, CW 25, 14)

[Daniel Bertrand De Lury, a special lecturer in mathematics at the University of Toronto. Analytic Geometry seems not to be in the data base of any Canadian or U.S. library, although De Lury published several volumes on mathematics through the University of Toronto Press for the Ontario Research Foundation.]

Prophetic Genius: Frye the Astronomer

In one of his notebooks he records this fantasy: “In my childhood I dreamed of becoming a great astronomer & discovering a new planet beyond Neptune that I was going to call Pluto.” [Pictured above] Frye calls this a “curious form of e.s.p. that he possesses,” and with good reason, as Pluto wasn’t actually discovered and so named until a decade later. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, CW 13, 68)

Frye and Chesterton

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chester

Responding to Russell’s post earlier today:

Russell, Frye didn’t write anything extended on Chesterton, so far as I know. He read at least The Victorian Age in Literature and The Everlasting Man when he was a student at Emmanuel College. Here are about three dozen passages in his writings, some of them trivial, that refer to Chesterton.

1. I must expand the conception of dandyism as, essentially, a comic literary convention entering life around the second half of the 19th c. The dandy develops out of the Cléante type of comic moral norm, detached from what is seen as a crowd of preoccupied attached obsessed people, all facing in the same direction. The dandy is essentially conservative, because the facing-one-direction people make an assumption of progress, yet his impact is that of a devil’s advocate, reversing the melodramatic maxims in which society believes. Apart from the French developments, Oscar Wilde popularized the attitude, the progenitor of which in England is really Matthew Arnold, both in his life & in his comedies. An Ideal Husband has the dandy in one of his proper roles—that of gracioso-hero. His attitude is comic-existential, puncturing the balloons of false idealism. A Woman of No Importance has a far more brilliant dandy, but Wilde, partly through an effort to be “fair” to the other side, partly through a streak of masochism, & partly through sheer laziness, completely foozled the conclusion. Anyway, the dandy attitude survives in the early (twenties) essays of Aldous Huxley, whose epigrams are mainly inverted clichés, in Yeats’ association of dandyism & heroism, in Lytton Strachey, & in the contemporary New Yorker—see its Knickerbocker figure and again the inverted melodrama clichés of its cartoons. G.K. Chesterton is an anti-dandy; Shaw uses the dandy formula of course, but never puts much of himself behind it. I think something of this might get into an essay on Samuel Butler, who isn’t a dandy, but uses one as a norm in WAF [The Way of All Flesh], & is in marked contrast to William Morris, who’s a tough little Cockney drudge, to use Carlyle’s opposite term. (Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism,” CW 23, 265)

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The Phases and Modes of Language

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ling

Frye may not have, as Trevor Losh‑Johnson reports someone as saying, an “etiological theory of linguistics,” if that means a theory of the origin or causes of language, but he does have a theory of language––in fact, several theories. He begins his talk “The Expanding World of Metaphor” by saying:

Let us start with literature, and with the fact that literature is an art of words. That means, in the first place, a difference of emphasis between the art and the words. If we choose the emphasis on words, we soon begin to relate the verbal structures we call literary to other verbal structures. We find that there are no clearly marked boundaries, only centres of interest. There are many writers, ranging from Plato to Sartre, whom it is difficult, or more accurately unnecessary, to classify as literary or philosophical. Gradually more and more boundaries dissolve, including the boundary between creators and critics, as every criticism is also a recreation. Sooner or later, in pursuing this direction of study, literary criticism, philosophy, and most of the social sciences come to converge on the study of language itself. The characteristics of language are clearly the essential clue to the nature of everything built out of language.(“The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory 1976–1991, CW 18, 342–3)

The “characteristics of language” are naturally a part of Frye’s theory of language, the two chief forms of which in his late work are in the first chapters of The Great Code (phases of language) and Words with Power (modes of language). The first chapter of The Great Code, in typical Frye fashion, is elaborately schematic. It begins with Vico’s notion of the three ages of humanity, and then moves through more than a dozen different categories to classify the tripartite phases that language has, more or less historically, passed through: the poetic, the heroic, and the vulgar; the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic; the mythical, the allegorical, and the descriptive; the metaphorical, the metonymic, and the similic, and so on. Frye glances at the historical locus of each of these phases, the way each formulates subject‑object relations, the meaning of such words as “God” and “Logos” in each, and the typical form that prose takes in each phase. All of this anatomizing, devoid of Frye’s examples and illustrations, can be summarized in this chart:

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The Greek Modes and the Circle of Fifths

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Responding to Peter Yan and Adam Bradley:

Yes, Frye certainly did know about the Greek modes. In “Modal Harmony in Music” he writes:

In the sixteenth century much greater freedom of tonality was available. The major and minor modes were then celled Ionian and Aeolian respectively, but four others were used. Arranged in order of sharpness, they are: Lydian (F to F on white notes: present major with raised fourth); Ionian (C to C: present major); Mixolydian (G to G: present major with lowered seventh); Dorian (D to D: present natural minor with raised sixth); Aeolian (A to A: present minor); Phrygian (E to E: present natural minor with lowered seventh). A seventh mode, the Locrian, B to B or Phrygian with lowered fifth, had probably only a theoretical existence. These four additional modes, like the two we now have, ended on the tonic chord. Thus, if all modes were impartially used today, a piece ending on G would have a key signature of two sharps in the Lydian modes, one in the major, none in Mixolydian, one flat in Dorian, two in minor, three in Phrygian. Or a piece with a key signature of one sharp could be C Lydian, G major, D Mixolydian, A Dorian, E minor, or B Phrygian. (Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings, 185)

And in “Baroque and Classical Composers” Frye writes:

When rhythm changes from 4/4 to 3/2 the minim of the latter = crochet of former. Key signatures only either none or one flat, & occasionally two flats: no sharps. Fellowes finally, bless his heart, coughs up some dope on the modes. If the piece has no flat in the signature, look at the last bass note and that will give you the mode. A = Aeolian (minor scale), B = Locrian (theoretically: it’s never used), C = Ionian (major scale), D = Dorian, E = Phrygian, F = Lydian, G = Mixolydian. That’s if the melody is authentic: if it’s plagal then prefix hypo to the mode. If there is a flat, transpose a fourth down or fifth up (G with a flat = D without one); if two, tr. [transpose] a tone up. Hence many key signatures until the 18^th c. were a flat or a sharp short. Modulation & equal temperament go together. (ibid., 175)

As for the circle of fifths, sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s Frye provided a schematic for the circle as a way of outlining the twenty‑four parts in the first three units of his ogdoad: Liberal, Tragicomedy, and Anticlimax. The twenty‑four letters of the Greek alphabet provided Frye a convenient name for each of the twelve major and the twelve minor keys. C = alpha, A = beta, G = gamma, etc. Frye didn’t actually draw a diagram, but in his Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (paragraphs 57, 58, 63, and 73 of Notebook 18), he set down the constituents of a diagram and gave a brief description of the thematic contents of each of the twenty‑four parts, illustrating what he means by saying that the circle of fifths provides a “symmetrical grammar” (Spiritus Mundi, 118).

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Barry Callaghan’s Memoir of Norrie and Morley (and a little Alice Munro too)

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barrelhousekings

Lest this blog get too serious, here’s a little episode from Barry Callaghan, Barrelhouse Kings (Toronto: MacArthur and Co., 1998), pp. 551–7. [The ellipses are Callaghan’s.] A briefer account of the Frye/Gale episode is recorded in an interview with Callaghan by Roger B. Mason in Books in Canada 22, no. 5 (July 1993).

The supper to launch A Wild Old Man on the Road –– a story about two writers, a meditation on the nature of celebrity, youth and age, fathers and sons, betrayal and love— was given at George Guernon’s Le Bistingo by General Publishing, his new house headed by my old friend and first publisher, Nelson Doucet. There were some seventy people there . . . the one writer in the country that Morley [Barry’s father] truly admired and felt affection for — Alice Munro — and the premier, David Peterson, and Zachary flew in from Saratoga, and Peter Gzowski and Greg Gatenby, Robert Fulford and Northrop Frye all had a chair. In charge of chairs, I had mischievously put the actress Gale Garnett beside Frye on a banquette. The great scholar, whose public manner was often “shy reluctance” (masking an enthusiasm for the scatological), eyed her ample cleavage. People kept interrupting with “Good evening, Doctor Frye” and “Very pleased, Doctor Frye,” until Gale—a forthright literate woman of gumption, beauty and wit, a trouper in the finest sense (schooled as a girl by John Huston, a star in Hair, a companion to Pierre Trudeau, a journalist for The Village Voice, novelist and a mature actress in fine movies, including Mr. and Mrs. Bridge), said, “Doesn’t anyone ever talk to you like a human being?”

“Not often,” Frye said.

“I’ve a cure for that,” she said, taking two red sponge balls out of her purse. She squeezed one, it opened, and she clamped it on his nose. She damped the other on her own nose and the two sat side-by-side beaming, clowns on a banquette.

A film producer from Amsterdam cried, “Norrie, how are you?” Frye stood up and clasped his hands, saying, “Fine, fine.” Gale handed out a half-dozen clown’s noses and soon Greg Gatenby and Francesca Valente, director of the Istituto Italiano, and Premier Peterson were posing with Frye for snapshots, all clowning, happily wearing red noses.

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Study Guide: Some Notes and Questions on The Educated Imagination

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With the school year beginning, a lot of students out there will be encountering Frye for the first time, and The Educated Imagination is likely to be their first encounter. Here, therefore, is a study guide and some questions for them to consider as they read.

The spatial or schematic form of chapter 1:

Levels of Mind
1. (Theoria or dianoia) Speculative or contemplative: one’s mind is set over against nature. Separating, splitting, or analytic tendency: me vs. not me; intellect vs. emotions; art vs. science.
2. (Praxis) Social participation: motivated by desire (one wants a better world); intellect and emotions now united; necessity (work what one has to do); adapting to environment; transforming nature.
3. (Poesis) Vision and imagination: also motivated by desire but here it’s a desire to bring a social human form into existence, i.e., civilization; freedom.

Corresponding Levels of Language
1. Language of consciousness or awareness; the language of nouns and adjectives. Language of thinking.
2. Language of practical sense and skills (work, technology); language of teachers, preachers, advertisers, lawyers, scientists, journalists, etc.); language of necessity. Language of action.
3. Language that unites consciousness (level 1) with practical skill (level 2); language of imagination; literary language; language of freedom. Language of construction.

Attitudes
1. Awareness that separates one from the rest of the world
2. Practical attitude of creating a human way of life in the world.
3. Imaginative attitude or vision of world as imagined or desired.

Chapter 1, “The Motive for Metaphor” (phrase from title of a Wallace Stevens poem)

1. What are the two points—one simple and one complex—Frye makes in connection with the relevance of literature for today (pp. 16ff.)?
2. What is the motive for metaphor?
3. What does Frye mean by “a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind”?
4. What does Frye mean my transforming nature into “something with a human shape”? What does he mean by “the human form of nature,” which he seems to say is the same thing as “the form of human nature.”

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An Outline of Frye’s The Double Vision

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doublevision

For students and aficionados alike, a point-by-point outline of The Double Vision.

Preface. Frye remarks on the incompleteness of the total argument in The Double Vision after three chapters and his decision to add a fourth. Why only “after considerable hesitation”?

I. The Double Vision of Language

[Autobiographical element: Methodist emphasis on experience and exposure to Biblical narrative: conditioning factors in a literary criticism that focuses on story and vision (3)]

A. The Whirligig of Time, 1925-90:

1. Myths = the functional units of human society. Before the Depression years, capitalism was St. George who had triumphed over Marxism; mid-thirties, socialism (or communism) was St. George and fascism was the dragon; today, capitalism democracies are St. George and communism is the dragon.

2. Similar whirligig in Hegelian and Marxist notions of conflict: Hegel = conflict of ideas leading to ultimate goal of freedom; Marx = class conflict and struggle over means of production. Today, Hegelian thrust for freedom being revived.

3. Cyclical rhythm of history produces different myths of freedom, but these are secondary myths or ideologies that don’t result in genuine freedom, which comes from primary, not secondary concern.

B. Primitive & Mature Societies:

1. Primary concerns = food, sex, property, freedom; secondary concerns = political & religious ideologies. Western democracies have been better at fulfilling the needs that spring from primary concerns, but McCarthyism, American imperialism, etc. show that something is still needed, something beyond the material: the spiritual.

2. The difference between the spiritual aspect of primary concerns and ideology or secondary concerns can be seen in the difference between primitive & mature societies:

a. Primitive societies: hierarchical; individual subordinated to the group

b. Mature societies: group functions to create genuine individuality (an “individualized society”); mature societies contain spiritual people: soma pneumatikon (spiritual body), rather than soma psychikon (natural body)

C. The Crisis in Language: the difference between ideological & spiritual concern is a difference in language

1. Descriptive or demonic literalism: descriptive accuracy, logical argument, ideological, creedal dogma

2. Imaginative literalism: counter-historical, counter-logical language of myth, metaphor, paradox, interpenetrative, open, kerygmatic vision. Imaginative literalism is a key point in Frye. For whatever else it is, the New Testament is written in literary language. “The literary language of the New Testament is not intended, like literature itself, simply to suspend judgment, but to convey a vision of spiritual life that continues to transform and expand our own. That is, its myths become, as purely literary myths cannot, myths to live by; its metaphors become, as purely literary metaphors cannot, metaphors to live in” (17-18). Kerygma or proclamation.

Key concept: interpenetration: here (p. 18) defined as “the free flowing of spiritual life into and out of one another that communicates but never violates.” See also the beginning of chapter 3, where Frye, drawing on Whitehead, sees interpenetration as “spiritual vision.”

The language of spirit is the language of love.

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Rodney Baine and Charlie Bell

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Merton College Chapel

Rodney Baine, mentioned in the 1950 diary entry for 23 August, was a U.S. Rhodes Scholar studying at Oxford, whom Frye met during his early days at Merton College in 1936 –– one of several fellow students he chummed around with. Other friends were Joseph Reid from Manitoba, Alba Warren from Texas, Charles Bell from Mississippi (all Rhodes Scholars) and a hard‑drinking New Zealander, Mike Joseph. In 1937 Frye spent time between terms touring Italy with Baine and Joseph and once back in Oxford he took up residence in a boarding house some distance from Merton College, sharing a suite with Baine and Joseph. Frye apparently had not seen Baine between their Oxford days and the 1950 chance encounter on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, where Frye was studying during his Guggenheim year. After stints at MIT, the University of Richmond, and Delta State University of Alabama at Montevallo, Baine landed a teaching position in 1962 at the University of Georgia, where he became a distinguished eighteenth‑century scholar. Among his publications were books on on William Blake, Daniel Defoe, Robert Munford, and James Oglethorpe. In 1981 Baine’s son James established the Rodney M. Baine Lecture Fund to commemorate his father, and in April 1982 Frye presented the Rodney Baine Lecture, “An Illustrated Lecture of Blake’s Jerusalem” at the University of Georgia. Baine died in 2000.

In the full diary entry for 23 August 1950 Frye wrote, “Evidently he [Baine] was closely involved in the Charlie-Mildred bust up: in fact he had a hand in drawing up the articles of separation, & is still friendly & still corresponds with both. He says that when we saw them they probably weren’t even living together, as Mildred had kicked him out of the house soon after he got back from Italy.” The reference is to the divorce of Charlie Bell and Mildred Winfree, with whom he had lived during his year at Oxford. Frye adds: “Charlie’s present wife [Diana (Danny) Mason] is a Quaker, & he reports that he has had the happiest year of his life. Bell later taught at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s College in both Annapolis and Santa Fe. Several years back Charlie Bell sent me his reminiscences about Frye from the time of their Oxford years. I reproduce it here, with editorial insertions in square brackets:

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Re: Logic and Literature

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miracle

Frye, I think, would never attempt to dismiss logic –– a word (with its congeners) that appears seventy nine times in the Anatomy –– as a keystone of intellectual inquiry. And logic, along with grammar and rhetoric, is one of the three pillars in Frye’s analysis of discourse in the Fourth Essay of the Anatomy –– an analysis in which he greatly expands the meaning of the terms of the medieval trivium. The best analysis of this is Paul Hernadi’s “Ratio Contained by Oratio: Northrop Frye on the Rhetoric of Non Literary Prose,” in Northrop Frye: Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye’s Criticism New York: Lang, 1991), 137–53. And, of course, Frye was fond of drawing analogies between literature and mathematics, as in this passage:

Mathematics, like literature, proceeds hypothetically and by internal consistency, not descriptively and by outward fidelity to nature. When it is applied to external facts, it is not its truth but its applicability that is being verified. As I seem to have fastened on the cat for my semantic emblem in this essay, I note that this point comes out sharply in the discussion between Yeats and Sturge Moore over the problem of Ruskin’s cat, the animal that was picked up and flung out of a window by Ruskin although it was not there. Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith. The distinction between an empirical fact and an illusion is not a rational distinction, and cannot be logically proved. It is “proved” only by the practical and emotional necessity of assuming the distinction. For the poet, qua poet, this necessity does not exist, and there is no poetic reason why he should either assert or deny the existence of any cat, real or Ruskinian. (Anatomy, 93).

The question is not, I think, whether Frye denigrated logic and mathematics. The question, rather, is whether ratio or oratio is prior. If Frye had thought logic and mathematics were prior, he would not have ended up being a literary critic.

In 1979 Frye wrote to Ruth El Safar, “As I said, I had not had your letter before I returned home so it was all the more pleasant to have it when I got home. It was extremely helpful to me, because Denham’s book on me is just out [Northrop Frye and Critical Method], and it reminds me that almost everybody seems to be preoccupied with my charts and diagrams and with the question of whether they are logically airtight or not, instead of reading me as you do for what incidental help I may give to them in their own work.” This stung a bit, but it helped me to see that a kind of hard headed application of neo Aristotelian logic applied to Frye’s distinctions rather misses the point.