Author Archives: Bob Denham

Alberto Manguel: “The Blind Bookkeeper”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8zyK3DtXxQ

Manguel giving the Fitzi-Continis Lecture, “Borges and the Impossibility of Writing,” at Yale University, February 3, 2010

Toro Magazine has a review of Alberto Manguel‘s The Blind Bookkeeper (or Why Homer Must Be Blind) — an expansion of his Antonine Maillet – Northrop Frye Lecture at this year’s Frye Festival in Moncton — and which begins with Frye’s almost unbelievably prescient unfinished 1943 essay, “The Present Condition of the World” (recently cited here and here).

THE BLIND BOOKKEEPER (or Why Homer Must Be Blind)
By Alberto Manguel
Goose Lane Editions
$14.95
80 pages

POSTED BY: Salvatore Difalco

Which brings me to the last of my three recommended reads: Alberto Manguel’s elegant bijou of concision, The Blind Bookkeeper, a bilingual transcription of The Antonine Maillet – Northrop Frye Lecture delivered at The University of Moncton by Manguel this past April. An unfinished paper Northrop Frye wrote in 1943 on “the state of the world,” and his ideas of what to expect after the end of the war and the role that literature might play in a time of peace, act as the starting point for Manguel’s moving meditation on the complex and complimentary roles of writer and reader throughout history. Frye’s essay, prescient in 1943, has never been more relevant than today, given the current spiritual and cultural bankruptcy of our neighbours to the south, with their toxic mix of demented evangelism, material superabundance, and pure aggression.

In considering the state of reading and writing today, against the backdrop of ongoing global conflict, Manguel turns to the blind Homer, the archetype of the poet who can see into the future through his knowledge of the past, as inspiration and guide. And with Homer at his side, and Northrop Frye on his heels, he charts a history of war in relation to literature (or, conversely, a history of literature in relation to war). But this overly simplifies what amounts to a stunning tour de force by Manguel. The title of his lecture, hinging on the word bookkeeper, is telling. What´s clear is that Manguel, a bibliophile in every sense of the word, who as a youth in his native Argentina spent four years reading to and hanging out with that meta-bibliophile Jose Louis Borges, loves literature and books, and that love permeates and lights up every sentence.

“Literature is a collaborative effort, not as editors and writing schools will have it, but as readers and writers have known from the very first line of verse ever set down in clay. A poet fashions out of words something that ends with the last full stop and comes to life again with its first reader’s eye. But that eye must be a particular eye, an eye not distracted by baubles and mirrors, concentrated instead on the bodily assimilation of the words, reading both to digest a book and be digested by it. ‘Books,’ Frye once noted, ‘are to be lived in.’” p.27)

Which brings me back to my initial complaint about the length of the books being offered for review this autumn, and how the times, distracted, overburdened, demand, along with relevance, concision. That being said, I’m not against long books, per se, but I do detest being told that these current, bloated offerings, written by relative unknowns, are necessary, groundbreaking, brilliant, and all but worthy of being canonized. Given the entire history of literature, and the existence of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce, Borges, et al, publishers and publicists alike should step out from their fairylands, and maybe hire a few competent editors to slough off all the dead skin they’re carrying around.

Notebook 13: Three Lost Sections Recovered

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I am working on three sections from Notebook 13 which I glossed over when Michael Dolzani was editing the Renaissance Notebooks and which then disappeared between the cracks. These include notes on the Alexander lectures, notes for T.S. Eliot, and a series of entries on the imagination. They should have gone into the Miscellany volume.

Here’s one passage I could have used in my various efforts to explain interpenetration:

The conceptual elements of irony include myths of cyclical return, of “entropy,” of the all too human, of the inferno & the “dystopia,” of the assimilation of the human (i.e. the social) to the natural, & of historical myths like those of Vico & Spengler. Comedy has progress & evolution, metamorphosis, providential design, salvation & enlightenment in religion, victorious identifying dialectic in philosophy. Romance, besides the quest, pilgrimage & treasure finding myths in its structure & its conceptual identity by interpenetration, destroys the antithesis of subject & object, time & space, creator & creature. The hunch that the Avatamasaka doctrine of interpenetration is the meaning of romance is just a hunch, but a hunch that is going to work out all right. No hunch that’s been in my mind for twenty years can be wrong. I suppose I might reconsider my idea of calling the lectures the [“Information”?] of Tragedy, etc. Or Spirit – sounds vague and sentimental. Or perhaps just plain “theme.”

We’ll be posting all three recovered sections from Notebook 13 in the library shortly.

Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Definitive Collection

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhHODhTIvgo&ob=av2e

Rolling Stones, “It’s only Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Top of the Pops, 1974 (It’s still the pre-video age, but this segment is famous for its production, even for a Top of the Pops feature) Previous posts on Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll here and here.

Here is a much more complete collection of Frye’s references to rock & roll.

Literature, as ordinarily conceived, is so small and specialized a part of one’s reading that we forget how much of our total verbal experience is untouched by it. For many a student in grade eight whose verbal experience is centred on television, The Lady of the Lake may be a pretty meaningless collection of words, something that those unaccountable adults, for whatever reasons of their own, think he should read. The way out of this is not to try to choose the kind of literature that can compete with the appeal of television—no such literature exists. But the teacher should understand that teaching literature means dealing with the total verbal experience of students. The points of contact between literary and subliterary experiences should be kept in mind; obviously the same forms of comedy and romance and irony that appear in literature also turn up in television drama or rock ballads. I am not saying that a teacher should be constantly pointing such resemblances out, only that they are occasionally useful. Far more important, however, is the fact that students are being steadily got at by a rival mythology determined to capture their imaginations for its own purposes, armed with far more skill, authority, and prestige than any teacher has. This is why I think students should be encouraged to become aware of the extent to which they are being conditioned by the mass media, as a central part of their literary training. Some of them have reacted with a general hatred and contempt for everything their society produces, but that, of course, is quite as dependent on conditioned reflex as anything it revolts against. Besides, it does not distinguish between genuine and false forms of social mythology. What is absurd about growing up absurd is adjustment mythology, not society itself. (On Teaching Literature, CW 7, 449)

Coming to point (crazy Oedipus) where we can’t afford supremacy of ideology any more: let’s have a war and smash that guy’s ideology. Primary concerns must become primary. (Leads directly to authority of poet, but not in this paper.)

Feeling that this is so led in sixties to revival of ecstatic metaphor: drugs, yoga, Zen, folk singers, rock music (Woodstock) would bring in a new conception of community. Revitalized tribal culture in McLuhan. (CW 6, 599)

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More Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll: “This is exactly the spread that I want”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXCvZ0cWM-w

“What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?” from the Mothers of Invention‘s We’re Only in it for the Money (above), their absurdist parody of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (“What’s the ugliest part of your body? / Some say your nose / Some say your toes / I think it’s your mind”)

Frye in “The Only Genuine Revolution”:

Mickleburgh: What about modern ballads and film criticism? Some people quite strongly argue that the English department should assume a major responsibility for film criticism and for teaching such things as the Beatle records. Some people think it helps to make Beowulf contemporary if you relate the Beowulf themes to some of the Beatle records.

Frye: I think that I’d actually prefer to let the student make those connections himself, because this is where the student can find an immediate sense of discovery on his own. If he can find that the kind of rock and roll records which he is going to be listening to anyway really have a family likeness in their symbolism and their imagery to the kind of literature he’s learning about at school, this creates a personal discovery which I wouldn’t want to take away from him and put into the regular curriculum. I teach a graduate course in university on literary symbolism, and I tell my students that they are to write essays on anything in literature that happens to interest them. One year I picked up two essays side by side: one was on the Gilgamesh epic of ancient Sumeria—about 3,000 years older than the Bible; the other was on the rock and roll group called The Mothers of Invention. And I thought, “Oh boy, this is it—this is exactly the spread that I want.” Naturally most of the other essays fell somewhere in between those two extremes. (CW 24, 165)

Earlier post, “Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll“

Frye on Hegel

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Hegel is the central philosophical figure in Words with Power. In one of his late notebooks, Frye writes, “If Hegel had written his Phenomenology in mythos-language instead of in logos-language a lot of my work would be done for me. The identification of Substance with Subject-Spirit in the Preface is mythically the central issue of the Reformation, overthrowing the sacramental ‘spiritual substance’ of the Eucharist & replacing it with the growing Spirit that takes over the Subject.” (Late Notebooks, CW 5, 192). Later he writes, “The rush of ideas I get from Hegel’s Phenomenology is so tremendous I can hardly keep up with it.” (Late Notebooks, CW 6, 631)

The extent to which Hegel enters into Frye’s thinking as he was writing Words with Power and The Double Vision can be seen in the following selections from the Late Notebooks:

I suppose the whole book turns on the thesis that the spirit is substantial: it’s the realizing of primary concern out of the language (Word) of primary mythology. Only the total Word can make the spirit substantial. Everything else, including Marx’s critique of Hegel, is ideological. I don’t want to become a conservative Hegelian, and my goal is not absolute knowledge, whatever that is, but the Word & Spirit set free by each other and united in one substance with the Other detached from Nature and identified as the Father. This doesn’t subordinate the female: it wakens and emancipates her, Eros Regained in short. Jesus’ establishing of the identity of the other as Father is what makes him the definitive prophet. (CW 5, 9)

Perhaps I’ve been overlooking the narrative of, first, heaven and earth locked together in a sexual union, second, an Oedipal Son or Logos pushing them apart to form the world of consciousness-creation, third, this Logos growing, like the Begriff in Hegel, until Heaven and Earth reach the Tao balance as Father and Spirit. (ibid., 10)

If I’m right about the Word growing like the Begriff in Hegel [previous entry], the Phenomenology is an Odyssey as well as a Purgatorio climb. The Odyssey is the cycle redeemed, beginning & ending at home; the Purgatorio is the climb to polarization. (ibid., 11)

Hegel himself calls the Ph. [Phenomenology] a ladder (II.2.5). (ibid., 18)

Forms of spiritual growth: the father-soul and the mother-body (dying to) bring forth the spirit-child. I think this is alchemic. Odyssey pattern: the old beggar, least likely to succeed, growing in reverse of ordinary aging until he becomes not just master of the house but the body of the house. Hegel’s Begriff, the infant exposed and abandoned by the common-sense world, turning out to be the Prospero of the whole show. (ibid., 18)

I’ve often said that Hegel’s Ph G [Phänomenologie des Geistes] interests me deeply in itself, but not as a preface to Hegel’s system. This is linked on my part with my feeling that Moses was the only person who ever saw the Promised Land. The system is only a Prussian Canaan. (ibid., 19)

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A Note on “Northrop Frye and Critical Method”

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Northrop Frye and Critical Method is now posted in the Robert D. Denham Library here

As I explain in the headnote to the Preface, Northrop Frye and Critical Method was written when I was operating in an Aristotelian mode. It focuses on Anatomy of Criticism. Almost forty years of hindsight––what Frye calls the “rear‑view mirror”––enables one to see things in somewhat different contexts. Some of these contexts I have attempted to examine in the Introduction to the Collected Works edition of the Anatomy (available in the Library here). In the early 1970s the Anatomy was from my perspective the central book by Frye that needed to be accounted for. Numerous books and essays, of course, followed in its wake, and the considerable body of writing Frye did in the last decade of his life has a decidedly different emphasis from what he wrote thirty years earlier. I have tried to account for this emphasis in Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World. Still, the Anatomy catapulted Frye from being a recognized authority among the small circle of Blake scholars to someone with an international presence. And most of what continues to be written about takes its cues from the Anatomy. If Northrop Frye and Critical Method helps to illuminate what that book was all about, I will naturally be most pleased.

I express my deepest thanks to Jonathan Cox, whom I had the good fortune of teaching and learning from in the undergraduate classroom, for his devoted labor in formatting the electronic text. Thanks are also due to Michael Happy, the indefatigable webmaster of “The Educated Imagination,” which has its first birthday celebration today, for suggesting that the book, long out of print, be made available to a wider audience, and to the Pennsylvania State University Press, for releasing the copyright back to me.

Frye and Obscenity (2)

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Here is a selection from the diaries and notebooks referencing obscenity.

Anatomy Notebooks.

[118] The conception of semniotes is beginning to take shape. Primitive tribes distinguish serious tales & less serious ones; this distinction appears later as the distinction between myth & legend or folktale. One has to distinguish between an intensive encyclopaedic tendency, which selects & expurgates & builds a canon, from the extensive one that we find in satire & in prose fiction generally. The latter is exploratory of the physical world: hence satire & irony are “obscene,” just as painters are forever poking into women’s bedrooms & toilets (the actual process of changing a menstrual pad or cacking on a pot is, however, considered unpaintable). Hence literature expands through satire & through the genre of fiction (cf. Shaw’s preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet on the “Eliza in her bath” problem in drama). Folktales expand the original quest-archetype, which is forever collapsing into semniotes. Cf. The Egyptian masturbating god with Jesus’ clay & spittle. Semniotes is connected with abstraction was well as morality—we often speak of “pure” abstraction, & the purifying of myth is like the purifying of mathematics. (CW 23, 241)

[The issue Shaw examines is the difference between impropriety in books and in plays. He reports that Sir William Gilbert remarked, “I should say there is a very wide distinction between what is read and what is seen. In a novel one may read that ‘Eliza stripped off her dressing-gown and stepped into her bath’ without any harm; but I think that if it were presented on stage it would be shocking.” Shaw proceeds to demolish the illustration as an argument for censorship on stage (Preface, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet [New York: Brentano’s, 1928], 69).]

[Semniotes appears to be NF’s coinage, derived from σεμνός, decent, modest. On the Egyptian myth, see AC, 156.]

In the circle of myths, I must work out some more oppositions between romance and irony. Irony-satire is always what is called “obscene,” & hence is the exact opposite of the element in romance which is the release of erotic fantasy. Sadist fantasies (Romantic Agony, Spenser’s Amoret & whosit in 6—not Seven, though she fits, but the C of L [Court of Love] one—Mirabell, I think, & my William Morris stuff), masochist ones (I think less common, but cf. the C of L) & other erotica (in Freud’s sense of Eros) are found. I’ve just been reading an admirable piece of science fiction: [John Wyndham’s] “The Day of the Triffids.” Catastrophe blinds all the human race except the merest handful of survivors—Flood archetype. Brought on by human folly—Atlantis archetype. (The writer is intelligent enough to note both). Heroine makes her appearance being whipped. Harem (two extra girls) introduced, but censored out. Little girl often picked up—erotic archetype censored out. The flood archetype is the transference of an infantile fantasy: suppose everybody died except me & the people I could boss, or at least play (i.e. work) with. The comfortable good [?] & the world shut out feeling, the sense of holiday, turns up early when they loot a Picadilly flat: I don’t know if this kind of erotica, which turns up in the dismissal of catechumens theme in ghost stories (Turn of the Screw) has a name, but it’s linked with the regression to the family unit which is a part of the Flood archetype. Several important things have to be worked out. Pr. ph. 4. (ibid., 246)

Late Notebooks.

[222] Rimbaud again: “Venus Anadyomene” is a deliberately “shocking” poem, but not obscene: no hatred is expressed for the poor creature. “Mes Petites Amoureuses” I thought obscene at first, because of the hatred (“Que je vous haïs!”) and sadistic wishes to break their hips. Yet the real context of this poem is the Lettre du Voyant, in which it is included, and the letter prophesies a new age of poetry where women will have a leading part. The “amoureuses” are not girls but false Muses. He says the poem isn’t part of the argument, but (a) it is (b) one can take that remark both ways. (CW 5, 39)

[715] For mother’s generation Scott was the pinnacle of serious secular reading: no one realized that he inverted a popular formula, and isn’t “serious” in the way Jane Austen or Balzac are. This point has been confusing me: it’s involved me in one of those “revaluation” antics I detest so much, and which invariably appear when there’s a confusion of genres. If Scott had been allowed in his day to be, if not “obscene,” at least as sexually explicit as Fielding, he’d have been more centrally in the Milesian tales tradition. (ibid., 247)

[197] The whole section on the Spirit and the transition to kerygma needs [sic] more careful expression. Of the chaos of myths waiting for the Spirit to brood on them, ranging from the profound to the frivolous, the reverent to the obscene, which can be “believed”? Belief here means the creative use of a recognized fiction. Myths that cannot be “believed” remain in the imaginative corpus, as possibilities only. [See WP, 129.] (ibid., 294)

[593] I think, with a modicum of that horrible obscene four-letter word (ugh) WORK, these four chapters will come off all right. Eight will simply extend the ascending ladder into evolutionary & other views that start with nature & end with man. The intensifying of consciousness bit & the four levels of time & space will fit into the end.

[594] Now what do I do?

[595] Well, first you finish the fucking book. (ibid., 377)

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Frye on Religion in the Late Notebooks: A Little Anthology

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Notebook 27.

[87] Re the previous (but one) note: expanded consciousness is not religion, of course, but it may be the precondition for any ecumenical or everlasting-gospel religion. Note that the gospel-church begins with ecstatic phenomena (speaking in tongues), and that our own time is rich in frenzies and hysterias along with more genuine phenomena. LSD (when it’s a good trip) appears to increase the intensity of the feeling of oneness with the object.

[104] The Word-Spirit dialogue is slowly assuming a spiral or ladder shape: it conceivably might work out to a counterpart of Hegel’s Ph [Phenomenology of Spirit], only in images instead of concepts, with a religion of parable forming its crisis. And, of course, there’s the other great hope that it would follow the four levels of meaning.

[106] The dialectic movement from creation to exodus is clearing. The forming of a specific mythology is the only possible response to a hidden creation. As Blake says, religion is a specific social development of the Poetic Genius [All Religions Are One]. In a sense a mythology negates or denies the creation, on Hegelian principles.

[128] In metaphor, as I said, across [par. 122], we have Joseph “here” and bough “there”: by identifying them in an assertion which “everybody” knows is not “real” identity we eliminate space and have only verbal space. Similarly with myth and time. The god, I said, stabilizes the metaphor: all religions lean in a subjective (Dionysian) direction, where you identify with the god through a group, or an objective one where the god remains transcendental and adored.

[136] I’ve mentioned how in the 19th c. religion gets identified with the find-the-true-church puzzle [par. 43]. Newman is the pattern here. I suppose S.K.’s [Kierkegaard’s] attack on “Christendom,” perhaps even Nietzsche’s anti-Xn [anti-Christian] polemics, are a kind of neo-Protestantism.

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

[197] I have very few religious books, & those I have stress the mystics. I have great difficulty, nonetheless, in reading, say, Boehme, because mystics (less true of Boehme than of others) seem so masochistic: isn’t this stuff just wonderful that we have to say we believe anyway? But now Boehme is making more sense as I move closer to light and signature symbolism. Once more, it’s not that I “believe” him but that this is the kind of link between the Bible and the creative imagination that I’m looking for.

[206] I need more on primary & secondary concern. I want the Innis stuff about Reformers & Marxists settling into an adversary situation. Marxism in theory transcends ideology, & some bourgeois masochists (Barthes) go along with this. But when we look at what Lenin says about religion it’s clear that a counter-ideology is being set up: there’s no transcendence of ideology. So my faith-ideology-secondary concern and charity-transcendence-primary concern still stands.

[207] Anyway, the religious-secular dichotomy doesn’t work, except as an illusion of ideological adversaries. A “pro-religious” attitude merely keeps an “anti-religious” one in business, and vice versa. That’s the real implication of my aligning revolutionary psychologies in Biblical religions and Marxism, not some bromide like “Marxism is really a religion after all” (though I’ve said it is in interviews). Everybody knows that all religious social phenomena are inextricably bound up with “secular” elements in politics and economics. So in reverse.

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Frye and Comparative Literature

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An editorial in the Globe and Mail for 17 July begins by claiming that “Northrop Frye was not much attached to the term ‘comparative literature,’ and it would be a mistake to gather, from a controversy at the University of Toronto about the merger into a larger entity of that university’s Centre for Comparative Literature, which he founded, that his legacy is embodied in any academic institution.” I am not aware of anything Frye wrote that would affirm his attachment to the phrase, and whether he harbored some secret dislike of the phrase, we can never know. But in the thirty volumes of his Collected Works there is never a hint that he was not attached to the term. Far from it: his writings are replete with all manner of references to comparative literature, comparative morphology, comparative religion, comparative mythology, the morphology of comparative symbolism and other forms of comparative study. To be sure, Frye’s presence is too large to be confined to any institution, such as the Centre for Comparative Literature. But this does not gainsay his support of the institutions of comparative literature––its journals and yearbooks, its conferences and colloquia, and its professional organizations. Frye published in the journal Comparative Literature and the Yearbook of Comparative Literature. In 1958 he attended the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, where he delivered a paper. He also presented papers at the eleventh and fifteenth triennial congresses of the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes (1969, Islamabad; 1981, Phoenix, AZ). In 1974 he delivered a paper at the Comparative Literature Colloquium at the University of Toronto. In 1978 he gave a lecture on “Comparative Literature: What Gets Compared?” at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Frye may not have been attached to the term “comparative literature,” but he was clearly supportive of its institutions, including a number outside of the University of Toronto.

Aristotle says that the ability to discover likenesses in the mark of genius, and Frye, who was an analogical thinker of the first order, was forever discovering comparable conventions in mythology, literature, and religion. “[E]very problem in literary criticism,” he wrote, “is a problem in comparative literature” (“Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas”). In his Diaries he says that “an exhaustive comparative study of symbolism” is part of the job he must complete.

The editorial writer for the Globe and Mail says that what we should pay attention to are Frye’s books rather than to such institutions as the Centre for Comparative Literature. One of those books, Fearful Symmentry, concludes with this appeal: “Blake’s doctrine of a single original language and religion implies that the similarities in ritual, myth and doctrine among all religions are more significant than their differences. It implies that a study of comparative religion, a morphology of myths, rituals and theologies, will lead us to a single visionary conception which the mind of man is trying to express, a vision of a created and fallen world which has been redeemed by a divine sacrifice and is proceeding to regeneration. In our day psychology and anthropology have worked great changes in our study of literature strongly suggestive of a development in this direction, and many of the symbols studied in the subconscious, the primitive and the hieratic minds are expanding into patterns of great comprehensiveness, the relevance of which to literary symbolism is not open to question.” What better way to understand these symbolic patterns than in an program devoted to comparative study. Frye then adds, “myths and dreams are crude art‑forms, blurred and dim visions, rough drafts of the more accurate work of the artist. In time the communal myth precedes the individual one, but the latter focuses and clarifies the former, and when a work of art deals with a primitive myth, the essential meaning of that myth is not disguised, or sublimated, or refined, but revealed. A comparative study of dreams and rituals can lead us only to a vague and intuitive sense of the unity of the human mind; a comparative study of works of art should demonstrate it beyond conjecture.” This is not the voice of one who wants to detach himself from comparative study.

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Northrop Frye Chair and the Centre for Comparative Literature

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Several years back, Paul Gooch, president of Victoria University presented a paper for discussion by the Academic Advisory Committee of the Victoria College Council (10 June 2008). It read in part, “Given Vic’s history, it is no accident that we have the Literary Studies undergraduate program here. Its students are first-rate, and many have gone on to graduate work in the area. Now that the graduate Centre for Comparative Literature is on the Vic campus, there can be fruitful collaboration between these two programs. To transform literary and comparative study, and to give leadership to the Northrop Frye Centre, the key is a senior joint appointment: a Northrop Frye Chair. It is a serious lack that Victoria does not have a chair in the name of Northrop Frye, and we will make this an important priority. The total cost is $3 million. Again, the Chair will be located in the Northrop Frye Centre.”

If Comparative Literature at the U of T is scuttled, it would appear that President Gooch’s vision for a Northrop Frye Chair, integrally related to the Centre for Comparative Literature, will have to be sacrificed, which would be another black eye for the U of T.