It’s Frye-Day and CBC Radio’s local morning show is completely devoted to the Frye Fest, with information and interviews with authors.  I’m listening now to Linden MacIntyre being interviewed.  He’s talking about his own early life and relation with the Catholic Church, and about his life as a writer.  He’s picking up on the theme of yesterday’s roundtable, “Stories, and What They Do,” talking about what fiction can do that no other form of writing can do.  He’s talking about his own religious upbringing, and his understanding of the Bible, as stories and metaphors, perhaps without Frye’s great faith in the power of myth and metaphor.

Next up on CBC will be Nino Ricci.  Nino, Linden, and Annabel Lyon will be featured this evening at an all-English event, with Noah Richler as host.  We call it “An Evening of Canadian Lit.”  Most events are bilingual, French authors and English authors alternating.  Tonight’s event is all English, making a special appeal to English speakers who find all they can do with French authors usually is look and not listen.  Block it out.  Tonight we make it easy for them.

At noon today I’m looking forward to the roundtable “Writing Lives and Afterlives” with Noah Richler, Daniel Poliquin, Nino Richler, and Maryse Rouy.  The discussion will be about the relation between historical figures (famous or not) and the narratives (fictional or biographical) that writers create.  Jean Fugère will be moderator.  Fugère, from Quebec, has been coming to the Frye Fest for many years now, serving as moderator, MC, and interviewer.  He’s always well prepared, well read, and has a great ability to ask the right question.  I missed his interview yesterday with Noah Richler, occupied as I was with the very pleasant task of keeping Annabel Lyon company at dinner, along with my wife and a friend.

Nino is talking now, mostly about his Trudeau biography.  The narrative arc is from conservative, reactionary early Trudeau to “independent” and “outspoken” later Trudeau.  Public persona was arrogant; privately, friends thought him too shy even to get into politics.  It’s a brief interview with Nino, now over.  No discussion of “Origin of Species” or anything except the Trudeau bio.  Somewhat disappointing in its narrow scope, but good publicity for today’s roundtable and tonight’s event.

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Yesterday at 4pm I introduced Beth Powning, novelist, and Robert Moore, poet, and then, with about 40 others, enjoyed a lively and intimate conversation.  What sticks with me is their discussion of the false starts that each of them took in their writing career.  Beth, when she first moved to Canada from the U.S., tried writing short stories and, as she said, almost killed herself in the process.  Slowly she found her way, with a book of photographs accompanied by text, and several other kinds of writing, including a memoir Shadow Child, until she came into her own as a novelist.  Robert spent ten years writing plays until he realized he didn’t have the talent to create plots and his plays were all intended to set his characters up to speak poetically.  After the conversation 8 of us, including Beth and Robert and their spouses, went out to dinner.  Most pleasant.

At noon yesterday Guy Gavriel Kay was guest speaker at the YMCA literacy luncheon; I wasn’t there, but I heard he was brilliant.  He gave an extemporaneous speech that connected directly to the many literacy volunteers present.  I had heard him Tuesday evening, in conversation, and found him to be brilliant and witty, especially on the subject of science fiction and fantasy being genres separate and stigmatized.  There are two generations now, he said, of readers and writers for whom the stigma and the separation no longer apply.  He was heard to say that he would’ve liked to stay longer at the festival.

At noon I was at the ‘Frye Symposium’ roundtable on “Voyaging into the Unknown in Folk Tales and in Dreams.”  The four panelist (3 storytellers and folklorists, and 1 Jungian scholar and analyst) all focused on the forest as the image of the unknown where magical, unusual, transformative things happen.  Craig Stephenson talked about this in terms of Frye’s idea that “the fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life, then, is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”  This vision, this transformation, this reaching for the golden dawn, only comes through the experience of loss, descent, ashes.  For all four panelists the key moment is the moment when the individual finds herself lost in the forest.  The storytellers all love this moment, because it gives them freedom to take the story off the beaten path.  In this context, then, it was instructive for a member of the audience to rise and quote Frye, to the effect that the one great story, enclosing all others, is the story of loss of identity and recovery of identity, in the form of resurrection, golden age, etc.

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The editorial cartoon in this morning’s paper shows Frye in profile, very short legs,mostly all head, with a big double chin and the top half of the head covered in dark volcanic ash, and in the thought bubble the words “The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book … not the passenger jet.”  Frye’s just walking past a newspaper vending machine, and the headline on the newspaper is “Authors Cancel Because of Volcanic Ash.”  The volcano’s still working for us, even as it’s causing tremendous hardship to so many.  It’s definitely not a trade-off that we desire.

We lost two authors to the volcano, as I mentioned yesterday, and last evening we lost a storyteller to the snow crab fishery.  Apparently the crab fishery is in disarray this year, and Gilbert Sewell, Mi’kmag storyteller from the north of the province, who is also deeply involved in the fishery, was called to an emergency meeting at the exact moment he was to arrive in Moncton.  Host Ronald Labelle, an experienced storyteller himself, filled in, and made some other adjustments, and the evening was great – everything we’d hoped.  People are telling us we should have a storytelling event every year.

One thing I noticed is that the English storytellers (Kay Stone and Ronald) stood front and centre on the stage and relied on their words and facial expressions to tell their stories, whereas the French storytellers preferred to sit on the stool that was provided and made great use of hand and arm gestures, and bodily movements, to tell their stories.  They shaped their words and made us see what was happening.  I wonder if this might be true more generally of English and French professional storytellers.  But whether English or French, they kept us enthralled, for 3 hours!

Today at noon the focus on storytelling will continue, at a roundtable on “Voyaging into the Unknown in Folk Tales and in Dreams.”  The panelists include 3 experienced, professional storytellers, and one Jungian analyst, Craig Stephenson.  Key Frye concepts, such as katabasis, descent, and labyrinth, will be shadowing the discussion, and perhaps there will be a way to bring them out more explicitly.

At 4pm this afternoon two New Brunswick authors, Beth Powning and Robert Moore, will engage each other in conversation.  Beth recently published the novel “The Sea Captain’s Wife,” to wide acclaim.  Robert is one of the finest poets in this part of the world.  They will begin the discussion by talking about the ‘place’ they go to when they are creating a work of art, whether a poem or a novel or a memoir.  And how that (interior) place they go to is related to the place where they live.

There’s lots more going on today – the YMCA Literacy Luncheon featuring guest speaker Guy Gavriel Kay, Dialogue in French with Gracia Couturier and Christiane Duchesne, Book Club in French with Martin Winckler, Café Underground featuring performances by high school students of their own written works, and many school visits.  The authors almost always enjoy these school visits, even when things get a little confused sometimes.  Apparently Guy Gavriel Kay’s school thought he was coming on Thursday instead of Tuesday, but some quick thinking made it all come out all right.  With 30 authors, and probably close to 100 total classroom visits, it all goes amazingly smoothly, thanks to organizers Nancy Pipes (English) and Roxanne Richard (French).

Today’s highlight, for me, will be 8pm this evening when Craig Stephenson presents a talk entitled “Reading Frye Reading Jung.”  It looks like we may have a very good turn-out for this talk.  In the audience will be Alberto Manguel, who has accompanied Craig on his trip.  We – and they! – are hoping the ash cloud won’t prevent them from returning to France, sometime later this week.

The festival is officially launched, and the cold, rainy weather seems to be letting up, promising some sun and warmth.  We had an impressive roster of sponsors and politicians at the launch, including the Premier of the province, a Liberal, and Conservative Senator Rose-May Poirier, speaking for the federal government.  All praised our efforts, our success, and promised continued support.  “You are certainly doing all the right things,” Poirier said, in French.  Sweet words, in whatever language.  Several speakers made a point of quoting Frye’s words on the importance of imagination, and on the importance of basic literacy.

The big news, in the eyes of the media, is that we did actually lose 2 authors to the volcano, contrary to what I said yesterday.  “Volcanic ash cloud casts shadow on Metro” is the headline on the front page of the local newspaper.  We’re always glad for any publicity we can get.  The two authors are somewhat peripheral to the festival, so we’re not really hurting.  The big worry was Craig Stephenson, but he’s here.  I look forward to meeting Craig this afternoon and driving him to a local high school, where he will meet a psychology class.

At 6pm this evening, Guy Gavriel Kay, acclaimed writer of historical fantasy, will talk about his new novel, “Under Heaven.”  He’s on a countrywide book tour, with a two-day stop in Moncton.  Tomorrow, Wednesday, he’s the invited speaker at the YMCA Literacy Luncheon, which celebrates the many high-school age volunteers who give their time to help others come, in Glenna Sloan’s words, to “a love of reading.”

At 7pm this evening we have gathered 6 storytellers, English and French, who will entertain us and give us examples of the magic of telling a story, of the sort that comes out of the oral tradition.  Ronald Labelle, good friend and Professor at University of Moncton, specialist in folklore and the oral tradition, has organized the evening for us, and will host the event.  The best-known of the storytellers are André Lemelin from Quebec, and Kay Stone from Winnipeg.  Gilbert Sewell, from Papineau First Nation in New Brunswick, will also be here.  Gilbert was at our first festival in 2000.

Local French-language publisher, Éditions Perce-Neige, will host an event at 10pm, featuring 4 of their newly published authors.  Though my wife, Elaine, is francophone, from Quebec originally, my own French is bit shaky, and I may skip this all-French event.  It’s going to be a busy-enough day, and we’ll be tired.

The Festival has set up Headquarters in a room at the Delta Beausejour Hotel, where all the authors stay.  People are there almost around the clock, working to make sure everything goes smoothly.  Our two paid staff are Rachelle Dugas, executive director, and Roxanne Richard, assistant.  Everyone else is a volunteer, including Dawn Arnold, President of the Frye Board, who works tirelessly at every level, fundraising, mixing with politicians, and details of programming.  We have hundreds of volunteers, helping with such things as driving authors to schools, selling tickets at the door, introducing authors, etc.  It is, as Nella Cotrupi noted with such warm words when she was here in 2002, an extraordinary community effort.

The child sex abuse scandal that’s rocking the Roman Catholic Church guarantees that Linden MacIntrye’s The Bishop’s Man will continue to chart the bestseller list for a while longer.  Winner of the Giller Prize last fall, it’s well worth the read, topical or not.  In an interview last fall, in connection with his winning the Giller, MacIntyre talked about what draws him to the novel.  As a journalist with CBC’s ‘The Fifth Estate’ he has covered the story of the church’s attempts to cover up incidents of sexual abuse.  The novel allows him to do something that he cannot do as a journalist.  It allows him to go inside the minds of his characters.  It allows him to inhabit his characters and bring them to life as full human beings, with all their virtues and vices.

In his book This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, Noah Richler takes up this same question as to what makes the novel special and seemingly immune to constant threats to kill it off.  “What sets the novel apart is the ‘imaginative leap’ that its author makes in order to create and then inhabit a character, and that its readers make in turn.  This simple dynamic is what gives the novel its identity. … And in this assumption that readers make – that we are all, at some base level, alike – lies the magnanimity, but also the aggressive and even colonizing impulse of the novel.   For the novel is a hegemonic thing, righteous on behalf of a certain conception of humankind’s place in the world.”

The novel does what other forms of storytelling (such as the epic and the mythic stories that we associate with “oral” societies’) cannot do.  Again quoting Richler: “The novel says, ‘For me to know you and portray you in good faith, I must remember that you and I are fundamentally alike.  Perhaps only circumstance is what has made us different’.”  Novelists do their work by “putting themselves in their protagonists’ shoes and making that imaginative leap, no matter their creations’ extremities of character.”  There is no absolute evil in the novel, as there is in the epic and in creation myths.  The worst characters in a novel are still human beings, like all the rest of us.  “This quality puts the novel close to be an ‘end of narrative,’ if you like – a form of story that is as versatile and enduring as the belief in human rights that it reflects.”

Others have less faith, or no faith at all, in the novel’s versatility and endurance.  Books heralding the death of the novel are nothing new, and the latest is David Shields’ Reality Hunger.  The novel as we know it, with its linear plot and defined character, is, Shields believes, dead – or worse, irrelevant.  “Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in a neatly wrapped-up revelation.  Life, though – standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the Web – flies at us in bright splinters.”  Our reality is fragmented, chaotic, asymmetrical, elusive and noisy, and since reality is what we hunger for, the conventional novel is obviously inadequate for the task.  It’s a throwback to a bygone era.  We need something new.  Shields’ prescription is what he calls the ‘lyric essay’ – based on the collage technique, the structural equivalent of our splintered reality.

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Aberdeen High School, where Frye graduated in 1928, is now Centre Culturel Aberdeen, a place where the francophone community has come together to share in the creation, performance, and exhibition of Acadian art.  It’s a nice irony that what was all English in Moncton in the 1920s is now mostly French.  In Frye’s time there was no French language high school in Moncton, and the French were thrown into the English system.  Several francophones who were students at the time of Frye remember his helping them with their English essays.  “He was an uncommonly soft touch,” John Ayre says (p. 43), “for anyone who genuinely wanted help with assignments. […]  This was a central character trait quite directly connected with his Methodist background: if someone deserving asked for help, he gave it.  It was both a strength and a bedevilment all through his later life.”

The back and forth, the up and down, the ‘creative tension’, between francophone and anglophone communities is what mainly sets Moncton apart.  When Frye returned to Moncton in November, 1990, a few months before his death, to give a talk at L’Université de Moncton, he was so pleased to see that Moncton was now home to an institution of higher education of such quality.  The auditorium at Edifice Jeanne-de-Valois was completely packed with people thrilled to see the great man’s return.  When someone in the audience, hoping to create some linguistic tension of his own, asked Frye if he understood French, Frye replied that he had trouble understanding any language his hearing was so bad.  Thus he sidestepped the language issue, which was an issue, perhaps, for just this one person.

Because Moncton is a bilingual city, it’s natural that the Frye Festival, set in Moncton, is bilingual.  From the beginning the festival has made every effort to bridge the gap between the language communities.  It’s an ever-narrowing gap, with more and more Anglophones learning French and respecting the French fact and most Francophones, while fighting threats to language and culture, perfectly at ease speaking English.  Interpenetration has been built into our festival from the beginning.  We live and breathe Frye at that level, and practice his approach to conflict.

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Feeding imaginations for 11 years:

The Frye Festival announces its line-up of 2010 bestsellers!

Canada’s only bilingual international literary festival is heading into its second decade and has again attracted some of the world’s best authors to Moncton. The Festival unveiled its line-up today for the 2010 edition which will be held from April 19-25. These renowned authors will ALL meet with students in their classrooms and auditoriums; they will conduct workshops, participate in on-stage conversations, chat with booklovers in book clubs, and feed imaginations of all ages.

“The Frye Festival has grown and flourished in the last ten years thanks to our many partners, sponsors, volunteers, and a great team. We are set to enter this new decade on excellent footing,” says Festival Chair, Dawn Arnold. “We have been privileged to witness many memorable moments over the last ten years and literature has gained great grounds in our schools, among our youth, and throughout our entire community. There is truly something for everyone at this year’s Festival,” says Arnold.

A Great line-up

Thirty invited authors from Canada and France will take part in the event including three who are currently on national bestseller lists and two who are long-listed for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Heading the bestseller list is Linden MacIntyre, author of the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel The Bishop’s Man. MacIntyre will be joined on stage by Annabel Lyon and Nino Ricci for an evening of English Canadian literature, hosted by journalist and radio broadcaster, Noah Richler (author of This is My Country, What’s Yours?). Annabel Lyon won the 2009 Rogers Writers Trust Award for Fiction for her novel The Golden Mean and Nino Ricci’s most recent novel, The Origin of Species, earned him his second Governor General’s Award for Fiction.

As always, the Festival will feature local New Brunswick authors such as Beth Powning, author of The Sea Captain’s Wife, children’s authors such as Cary Fagan and Nancy Wilcox Richards, and poets such as Christian Bök, winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence for his book Eunoia. Fred Stenson (The Great Karoo) and Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajavo) are also among the invited authors.

On the Francophone side, bridging the two solitudes like no other living Canadian author is the award-winning novelist Daniel Poliquin. Poliquin’s novel A Secret between Us (Douglas & McIntyre 2007, short-listed for the Giller Prize) will be featured in a giant Community Read during the Festival. Daniel Poliquin is the author of nearly a dozen books in French and all have been translated into English. He is also the author of a book on René Levesque which has been nominated for a number of awards. The author is a noted literary translator himself, who has translated many important books into French, including works by Mordecai Richler, Jack Kerouac, and W.O. Mitchell.

Fans will surely be looking forward to meeting and hearing from Guy Gavriel Kay whose books have increasingly blurred the boundaries between history and fantasy. Other invited authors not to miss: Jungian analyst Craig Stephenson; children’s author and performer Jacob Berkowitz; novelist and creative writing professor Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer; folklorist and storyteller Kay Stone; and playwright and poet Robert Moore.

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The Frye Festival is a whirlwind of activity, as anyone who has been here can testify. What started out as a two-day festival is now a week-long, non-stop celebration of the written word. A lot of our effort goes into our School / Youth Program. About 10,000 young people, at all grade levels, get to hear and meet Frye Festival authors. For some of the authors this is old hat, while for others it’s a new and (usually) very rewarding experience. Young people are directly involved in the festival in several other ways, through essay writing contests, volunteering opportunities, and one evening at the festival devoted completely to young writers still in high school – an evening we call ‘Café Underground’. Sometimes our focus on Frye gets a little blurred in all this flurry of activity, but we always come back. (We plan, of course, to come back in a big way in 2012, Frye’s centenary.) Frye, we believe, would whole-heartedly approve of our emphasis on young people and education.

Every year, as I mentioned in a previous post, we schedule two major talks or lectures, the Antonine Maillet – Northrop Frye Lecture and the ‘Frye Symposium’ Lecture. We also schedule three roundtable discussions where festival authors bring fresh insight to ideas and topics that (more often than not) have a fairly direct connection to Frye. We’ve had some remarkable exchanges over the years. My hope is that as we dig deeper into our archives (audio and video recordings, old computer files, etc.) we’ll be able to post some of this material on the blog. I remember, for example, a wonderful prepared statement that Glen Gill read at a roundtable in 2005, on the subject “Myth and Identity: The Role of Myth in Forming a Sense of Identity.” Other panelists on that round table were Jean O’Grady, Yves Sioui-Durand, and Maurizio Gatti. In April, 2000, at our very first roundtable, we asked the panelists (including David Adams Richards, France Daigle, Louise Desjardins, and George Elliott Clarke) to discuss Frye’s statement that “the regional is the real source of the poet’s imagination.” In 2003, with John Ralston Saul as moderator, we explored the topic “Mythology and National Identity,” with authors Bernhard Schlink, Naim Kattan, France Daigle, André Roy, and Joyce Hackett. A crowd of about 200, with the Governor General in attendance, set the room abuzz. After 10 years it’s become clear that our roundtables, relaxed, informal, aimed at the “sophisticated amateurs” in the audience, have become one of the most anticipated features of the festival.

But we’re not always successful in posing the right question or getting the right slant on a particular theme. Sometimes we pose a question that scares the public away, as in 2008, with “The Eros of Reading: Why Some Students Fall in Love with Reading and Others Do Not.” The discussion, with panelists Peter Sanger, Glenna Sloan, Monique Leblanc, and Andy Wainwright, was brilliant, and especially important in the context of New Brunswick’s terrible literacy statistics, but we failed to bring out the audience that it deserved. Sometimes we have a good question and excellent panelists, but they bring such different perspectives that they end up talking past one another. We are working on three roundtables for this April (two months from now!), a little worried that we haven’t got them quite right. We have a title for one of the roundtables (“Stories, and How They Work”) that is broad and vague enough that it might work just fine or might have trouble finding its feet, depending on the moderator and panelists. But with Jean Fugère as moderator, and Linden MacIntyre, Annabel Lyon, and two equally outstanding francophones, we have high hopes. The same is true of our Friday noon roundtable, with Jean Fugère again as moderator. The topic is “Writing Lives and Afterlives” and the panellists will include Nino Ricci, Daniel Poliquin, and Noah Richler. The idea is to explore what happens when fiction writers write biography, bringing the narrative gift to a non-fiction genre. They may end up exploring something very different, of course, much to our surprise and (if we’re lucky) delight.

Last year’s ‘Frye Symposium’ roundtable was on the topic “How Might The Educated Imagination lead us forth into the 21st Century.” Panelists included Jean Wilson, Germaine Warkentin, Serge-Patrice Thibodeau (award-winning Acadian poet and publisher), and Serge Morin (retired philosophy professor who invited Frye to Moncton in the fall of 1990, to give the Pascal Poirier Lecture at L’Université de Moncton). I’ve already posted a copy of Germaine Warkentin’s opening remarks at this roundtable, and I hope to post Serge’s remarks, once I get a better copy. The topic for this year’s symposium roundtable is “Voyaging into the Unknown in Folk Tales and in Dreams” which I think has many Frygian ramifications, not least the life-long obsession with the downward spiral, the cave, the labyrinth, katabasis, etc. Three of the panellists (André Lemelin from Quebec, Kay Stone from Winnipeg, and Ronald Labelle from Moncton) are experts in storytelling and folklore, invited to the festival for a special storytelling event. The 4th panellist, Craig Stephenson, is a Jungian analyst invited to the festival to give a talk on Jung and Frye.

Any suggestions for improving, changing, revamping any of these 2010 roundtable titles and topics would be welcome, these next few weeks. A press conference to announce the authors and draft program for 2010 is scheduled for next Tuesday, February 16. We hope there will be big Fryes and small Fryes in the audience come April, especially at the lectures and roundtables, and that you will have questions that come straight out of Frye. Perhaps, if you can’t attend, you might pose a question that one of us here could ask.

You can register here.

One of the delights we have every April is introducing Frye to authors who have never heard of him and are curious to know more, as happened, for example, when Bernhard Schlink was here in 2004. Sometimes we are surprised when an author reveals a personal connection to Frye that we didn’t know about. Last year Don McKay, one of Canada’s great poets, took delight in telling the story of his mother’s encounter with Frye in the 1930s, when she took a class from him that influenced her at the time and later, toward the end of her own life, came back to inspire her when she wrote her memoirs. Andy Wainwright, Ross Leckie, and others studied with Frye and have fond memories. Peter Sanger has a longstanding interest in Frye; and, unless I’m mistaken, also studied with him. Richard Ford was familiar with Frye from his student days in the 60s. (Ford’s complete conversation with Globe and Mail’s Books Editor Martin Levin can be seen via the festival website’s U-Tube link.)

Robert Bly, who was here in 2001, said, in accepting our invitation, “Frye is one of my favorite people.” There’s a lot of common ground between the two that would be worth exploring, even if the direct influence each way is perhaps minimal. Blake’s “the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” is where they both begin, in their thinking about education. The idea of freedom is at the centre of everything they do. Neither shies from talking about and mapping the spiritual world, even when such activity is out of fashion. But what especially interests me is Bly’s idea of ‘deep image’ in comparison with Frye’s analysis of existential or ecstatic metaphor. Though ‘deep image’ suggests a location in the psyche, Bly prefers to think of the image as a place “where psychic energy is free to move around” (as quoted in Kevin Bushell’s essay “Leaping Into the Unknown: the Poetics of Robert Bly’s Deep Image”). Frye says, “Metaphor is the attempt to open up a channel or current of energy between subject and object” (as quoted in Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World, p. 70). Ecstatic metaphor, at the top of the ladder of metaphorical experience, creates “a sense of presence, a sense of uniting ourselves with something else” (Frye words, as quoted by Bob Denham, p. 72). The free flow of psychic energy is what counts for both. For Bly (at least the early Bly) a true or authentic poem has to involve the “leap” from the conscious, everyday world to the unconscious, universal world. For Frye it’s the gap between subject and object that’s obliterated in ecstatic metaphor. Frye’s is, if anything, a more expansive concept.

Over the years Bly moved deeper and deeper into the study of Jung and Jung’s concept of the unconscious. Throughout the nineties he worked with the Jungian analyst Marion Woodman and in 1998 they published their book The Maiden King. Frye’s interest in Jung was also deep and important. As Bob Denham says, “Frye sometimes expressed anxieties about being considered a Jungian, but he was much more deeply immersed in Jungian thought than is commonly imagined” (Religious Visionary, p. 196). Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy is a rich source for Frye, as Bob Denham wonderfully recounts. “In Anatomy of Criticism, alchemy is seen as a repository of archetypes (rose, stone, elixir, flower, jewel, fire).” (Religious Visionary, p. 194).

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