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The Bible and Literature with Northrop Frye: Proposed DVD

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We are delighted to present the following announcement from Bob Rodgers:

In 1981-82, as producers at the then U of T Media Centre, Bill Somerville and I recorded Northrop Frye’s classic lectures and seminars on The Bible And Literature, and have recently had them converted from analog video to the digital format. Now an independent producer, I am in discussions with Carol Moore, Chief Librarian at the Robarts Library, U of T, to adapt this material to DVD format for global distribution in the educational market. Each of 24 programs will include a full video-taped lecture, a related seminar, and interactive contextual and explanatory notes.The Main Menu reads as follows:

The Bible and Literature with Northrop Frye

Program One

An Approach to the Bible and Translations of the Bible (The Lecture)

Lecture Breakdown

Seminar Segment

Lecture Transcript

References for Lecture One

Study Guide

Series Synopses

The video and support materials are designed for private study, at home or in a library, just like a book, but with interactive references at a click. As Frye intended, the information is aimed at undergraduate students lacking the basic familiarity with the Bible he believed was needed to respond adequately to western literature. Secondary applications are for use in seminars or informal study groups where this or that section of the DVD may be used for stimulation or talking points by the seminar or group leader.

For a short video clip from the lecture segment of the pilot DVD, go to http://davidsharp.ca/Frye/. For technical reasons the picture quality of this clip is inferior to that of the DVD. We have also produced a test pilot of Program One and have a limited number of copies to send to “Friends of Frye” who would like to receive a copy by mail free of charge. If you would like one, please send us your postal address and we will do our best to get it out to you.

What we would like in return is your assessment of the value of the series, a testimonial or endorsement if it meets with your approval, and an indication as to whether or not your institution is likely to aquire it. While some units will be available earlier, we anticipate completion of the full 24 part series to take 18 months from the start of production.

We are receiving queries about this undertaking from across Canada, the US, and abroad. Your response would be much appreciated as we bring it to fruition.

Contact: Bob Rodgers, Producer …. 416 504 2196….< r.rodgers@primus.ca>
ARCHIVEsync…. 110 The Esplanade, Suite 611. Toronto. Ontario M5E 1X9

Germaine Warkentin: “How might ‘The Educated Imagination’ lead us forth into the 21st Century?”

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From the Frye Literary Festival, Moncton: Germaine Warkintin’s opening remarks at a roundtable discussion on April 22, 2009. We will shortly be archiving material from the Frye Festival in a dedicated area.

A few months ago I was asked by a colleague to lecture at an American university of good repute, and he asked me to send him several different topics to choose from. I produced four, one of which was a paper on Northrop Frye. About a week later he got back to me. “I think we’d like you to talk about the 17thC Jesuit,” he said; “I can’t find anybody here who is interested in Frye.”

That’s an academic response, and it came from young people who are still in grad school, people who were probably about six or eight years old when Frye died in 1991. And it’s contradicted by the excellent sales figures of Frye’s books, from Fearful Symmetry (1947) to The Double Vision (1991). Forty-four years of work, still being attended to by someone out there, as this wonderful festival clearly shows. What’s going on here?

The first thing to note is that the loss or diminution of the repute of a major intellectual figure is almost inevitable in the years after his or her death; we can all think of examples. But this is clearly a diminution in only one area, the academic study of literary theory. It doesn’t seem to be the case with a wider audience. As a matter of fact, Northrop Frye is almost alone among critics in commanding a wider audience in this day of intensely specialized academic critical discourse.

Perhaps my own response to The Educated Imagination offers a clue here: I edited it, with his other early critical writings, for the “Collected Works,” and I asked for the job because I love it as a piece of writing. It operates on me in just the way Jean Wilson just described in her presentation. Frye can be a marvelous writer: coolly compassionate, sometimes slangy, immensely literate of course, and as engaging as a favourite uncle. In life he wasn’t much like an uncle — he was actually rather shy, at least when I knew him, between his early fifties and his death. But his writing created that uncle-like impression.

This is one of the best examples I know of Frye’s own theory about how literature functions: the writer’s imagination creates not a mirror of the external world, but a possible model of experience for the reader to work with — and within. In his writing Frye provided the model of an immensely wise and witty reader of the canonical works of western literature. It’s a model that invites the reader into that imagined world, composed of King Lear, The Divine Comedy, the poetry of Paul Valery and Wallace Stevens, the criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, and of course what for him were the really big books: Blake, Finnegan’s Wake, the Bible.

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Sára Tóth Re: “Necessary Angels”

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Responding to Michael Dolzani:

Michael, am I right to think that in this wonderfully moving post you have actually brought a very personal example from Frye’s life to illustrate a distinction typical of his later works, the distinction between “purely” literary metaphor and what is beyond it: kerygma or existential or ecstatic metaphor? I take it you are saying that the so-called “liberal” phase is the phase of literature proper, when let’s say “heaven” is a symbol of something hypothetical, a vision of a spiritual interpenetrating world or “panoramic apocalypse”, something we contemplate as a hypothesis independently of its reality status. To say that Helen’s presence or heaven is surely more real for Frye than just her survival in people’s memories is to take us further than this, to the world of existential metaphor.

This takes me to what is the most significant sentence of your post: “I think the order of words is present, not as an empirical fact, but as Helen was present.” This has raised several questions for me. First, the later Frye identifies his own “order of words” as a hypothetical literary vision, an “ironic separation from all statement of facts”, adding that this is as far as he got in Anatomy (Myth and Metaphor 114). Or see this: “So the panoramic apocalypse, the thematic stasis, the myth as dianoia or picture, represents the end of experience as knowledge. It’s normally as far as literature can go, and the dianoia it reaches is a design of hypothetical metaphor.” (Late Notebooks I:91) What you suggest – that Helen’s presence expressed by the metaphor of heaven is more than hypothetical, and it is of the same nature with the order of words – is seemingly in contradiction with the above. Perhaps, to try to answer my own question, the solution lies in the nature of Frye’s dialectical thinking and the key word here is “normally”. What I mean is that kerygma is, on the one hand, definitely beyond literature (literature plus), on the other hand all literature is potentially kerygma. I find both poles of the dialectic in Frye.

My other question is related somewhat. If “the order of words” is not an empirical fact but a creative vision as you say, what then do we make of Frye’s science analogy in the Anatomy? I do not want to stray to the territory of the philosophy of science (where I am not at home), and I know that Frye later dropped the science analogy, what puzzles me though is that even in Spiritus Mundi he writes in a similar vein that the vision has an objective pole, that “the order of words is there, and it is no good trying to write it off as a hallucination of my own” (118). Now if what you suggest is that in fact Helen’s presence in heaven is neither simply literary metaphor for Frye, nor something “factual”, then it must be, well, yes, I have to say it, something like “religious truth”, in the best possible sense of the term. But I wonder how Frye would have reacted if someone had insisted, say that “the resurrection of Christ has an objective pole, the resurrection is there, and it is no good trying to write it off as a hallucination of the disciples.” I hope the parallel is clear.

Is it too far-fetched to say that whereas the claim for objectivity sits awkwardly within the thinking of a Blake disciple, perhaps the late Frye’s move towards “otherness” could logically lead towards an increased emphasis on objectivity, towards the hunch that reality might be more than our imaginative creation, that in fact reality – the text, if you like, in a very wide, postmodern sense − answers back? All in all, I would humbly suggest that in this respect Paul Ricoeur’s thinking is perhaps more balanced in some ways than Frye’s, the Ricoeur who in his book on metaphor has worked on a nuanced interpretation of mimesis, saying that “the enigma of metaphorical discourse is that it ’invents’ in both senses of the word: what it creates, it discovers; and what it finds, it invents” (Rule of Metaphor, 239).

Michael Dolzani: Necessary Angels

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I remember Imre Saluszinsky writing to me years ago, when the Late Notebooks were first published, saying how astonished he was when he read passages from Notebook 44 such as the following, in which Frye is reacting to Helen’s death: “When Helen died, the real Helen became an angel in heaven….Helen was a pile of ashes, an absence to me, and an angel: perhaps she’s a genius to me (or anyone else who loved her and is still living or not living and still confused)” (CW5: 254). Could Frye really mean that he thought Helen could be an angel? Frye is a liberal intellectual, and for liberal intellectuals such metaphors as “eternal life” are merely figures of speech, not realities. Surely eternal life really means to survive in the memories of friends, or to be “one with nature” by becoming part of the nitrogen cycle. But if Frye was opposed to demythologizing the Bible, he would also have been opposed to demetaphorizing it. (I promise to use that hideous word only once). This makes us uncomfortable: it seems to move Frye closer to the kind of fundamentalist literalizers that he himself so often satirized. So we are perhaps most comfortable thinking of the quoted passage “merely” as an irrational outburst of unbearable grief. After all, the idea is not even Christian: dead human beings do not become angels in Christian heaven.

However, this entry is the final one in Notebook 44; it occurs 117 pages after the announcement that Helen has died. A mere 11 pages after that announcement, Frye is in a state of mind that most of us could understand more readily; moreover, in this earlier passage, he links Helen’s death to the passage from Hebrews that people have been discussing lately: “I’ve said that I have hope about another life, but I don’t have faith, in the Hebrews sense of a hypostasis of hope. The furthest I can get is a negative faith: I do not believe that those ten squalid and humiliating days in the Cairns hospital is the total end of a lovely and lovable human being. (Total for all practical purposes: Butler & others would talk about surviving in the memory of others, but miserable comforters are they all. She’s in heaven, Catherine said: but I don’t know where (or what) heaven is, or whether the word ‘where’ applies to it” (CW5: 148).

Yet Frye gradually develops that negative faith in the direction of a positive faith in Helen’s continued presence, in passages such as the following: “But grief emphasizes the pastness of the past, and so works against the mythical imagination. Helen was—that’s the beginning of tears and mourning. Helen is. What she is, perhaps, is a central element in the unseen which will clarify my understanding, if such clarification is granted to me” (CW5: 139). Here, the hope for eternal life has been provided with substance and evidence: Helen is not absent, but present, here and now. However, I think faith has two aspects, present and future. It provides an experience of infinity and eternity here and now, the world in the grain of sand, eternity in an hour. But the alternative translation of hypostasis as “assurance” for the future may be an aspect of faith as well. This is the theme of Milton’s Nativity Ode: that on the morning of Christ’s nativity, our redemption is accomplished now—but not yet. In Frye’s case, Helen is present now, but that presence provides hope for a future in which they will be reunited in eternity. Only a saint could maintain such faith continuously, but the memory of such moments helps to sustain us in the dark times, when “we find ourselves staring blankly into an unresponding emptiness, utterly frustrated by its indifference,” as Frye puts it in “To Come to Light,” a sermon of 1988.

Frye’s sense of Helen’s presence as a guardian spirit and Beatrice figure apparently remained on the level of intuition and not of direct vision. He was, after all, an intellectual. But in others, extremity has at times produced actual visions, such as Blake had after his brother Robert died. An unexpected publishing phenomenon of the last couple of months has been that of Jung’s Red Book, in which he recorded and illustrated a series of visions he had over a period of several years, midway in the journey of his life, when he had been cast out of the Freudian movement and found himself in a dark wood. Intellectuals, liberal and otherwise, have always been convinced that Jung was a nut case, and one awaits the inevitable reviews of the Red Book proclaiming that their hunches have been confirmed. But the funny thing is, all sorts of people have become fascinated enough with the volume to pay $195 dollars for it. Perhaps I should not be so impatient with such intellectuals, but they seem totally unaware of how they—like most people, to be sure—have carefully arranged their lives so that nothing visionary or uncanny could ever enter into them. This provides circular proof for them that the visionary and uncanny do not exist, except as pathological delusions.

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Michael Dolzani: Spiritual Otherness (2)

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Von Carolsfeld, Samson Destroys the Temple, 1880

Responding to Matthew Griffin and Clayton Chrusch, regarding my earlier post.

Matthew, I am moved by the warmth and generosity of your response. I’m very glad what I wrote was useful to you, all the more because there is a reciprocity: your response was what chiefly inspired a follow-up posting of mine that I’ll be sending along as soon as I’m sure it’s entirely coherent. The Hebrews passage is indeed a key, and I thank you for reminding me of it. Epiphany is a perfect time to be discussing these things–I hadn’t even thought about that!

Second, to Clayton Chrusch: Wow. I admire the marriage of articulate intellect and emotional intensity in this response. Literary criticism could use more of this directness. You raise issues so immense that I know I haven’t thought through them completely yet, but you deserve at least something of an immediate response. Concerning God, yes, as Jesus he is an object, a historical personage–and therefore bound up with all the ambiguities of our relationship to objects, starting with the fact that there is no historical evidence that he even existed. The quest for the historical Jesus leaves us more distanced from God than ever. God could also be considered as a subject, but not as what we usually mean by a subject, namely, the ego of the natural man. Jung’s Self/ego distinction is helpful here, and the Jungian Self is in fact a God-image. If God is a person, it is not the same sense in which I am a person. For example, he is not limited by time and space, those conditions which define ego-consciousness. When Paul says, “I, yet not I, but Christ in me,” he is speaking of the person of Christ as dwelling within him, an interpenetration that the ego or natural man is not capable of. I’m sure you know all this; I’m just struggling to clarify my vocabulary.

I absolutely agree with you that “real” and “true” are words that may be applied to the imagination; otherwise, the imagination’s products are just beautiful illusions, and that gets us nowhere. I was just trying to make the distinction that “real” and “true” here must mean something other than “objectively factual.” A scientist or historian means something else by these terms. That’s why the reality and truth of the spiritual world cannot be proved by scientific or historical methods.

As for suffering, I don’t think you misspoke–in fact, that was probably the part of your response that I admired the most. I see why you qualify the response, though: yes, there are things more important than avoiding pain. Though I’m sure you’d agree that we have to be careful to state this precisely, because what we’re really talking about here is martyrdom. For the Tibetan monks, or the early Christian martyrs, this meant accepting their own suffering for the sake of something more important. But when I teach Milton’s Samson Agonistes, I ask students the troubling question: what makes Samson different from a suicide bomber? Samson too experiences “a renovation of the will so complete and so secure that it doesn’t matter any longer what place” he is in (marvelous passage, by the way). But he also finds acceptable the suffering of the Philistines who will die along with him when he pulls down the Temple, just as the suicide bombers felt when they brought down our Temple, the World Trade Center. Anyway, thank you for a searching and stimulating response.

Ed Lemond: Report from the Frye Festival

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The Frye Festival takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick, where Frye lived for the greater part of his youth, from 1919 to 1929, when he left to study at the University of Toronto. He was born in Sherbrooke, and Moncton, especially for his mother, was hard exile, as John Ayre’s biography makes clear. But Moncton is where he grew up and Moncton shaped him in crucial ways. In a talk he gave at the 2003 festival, titled “Moncton, Did You Know?” Bob Denham looked at Frye’s years in Moncton and asked the question, What happened to Frye in Moncton that set him, at age 17, firmly on the path that he was to follow. A copy of this talk can be found on the festival website, www.frye.ca, and in the book Verticals of Frye/Les Verticales de Frye, a collection of festival talks I edited in 2005.

The first festival took place in April, 2000, with about 50 authors – poets, novelists, playwrights – in attendance. And we invited David Staines to talk about Northrop Frye. Thus began a splendid series of talks by scholars and others with intimate knowledge of Frye, including Branko Gorjup, Nella Cotrupi, Bob Denham (who has given 3 talks over the years), Naïm Kattan, John Ayre, Michael Dolzani, B.W. Powe, Alvin Lee, Jean O’Grady, Glenna Sloan, and Germaine Warkentin. As well, each year we’ve organized, as part of the same ‘Frye Symposium’, at least one roundtable in which these same speakers and others, including Glenn Gill, Jeffrey Donaldson, Joe Velaidum, Peter Singer, and Jean Wilson.

In April, 2006 the festival inaugurated a second series of talks, which we call the Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, featuring a well-known writer/thinker with no necessary connection to Frye. Neil Bissoondath spoke in 2006, followed by David Adams Richards in 2007, Alberto Manguel in 2008, and Monique LaRue in 2009. Paul Curtis at the Université de Moncton, a member of the Frye Board of Directors, has been the driving force behind these talks. Goose Lane Editions of Fredericton has published each talk in a handsome, bilingual, paperback format.

In April, 2010, our invited speaker for the Frye Symposium lecture is Craig Stevenson, who will give a talk on Jung and Frye. Our invited speaker for the Maillet-Frye lecture is Noah Richler. The tentative title for Noah’s talk is “The Unknown Soldier” and it will be a polemic on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. I don’t know if he will have anything to say about Frye. I take it as a sign of growth on our part that we’ve invited Noah, and a token of Noah’s sense of adventure that he would gladly accept an invitation to a festival named for Northrop Frye. In his book This Is My Country: What’s Yours? Noah takes Frye to task on several fronts. He finds the phrase ‘garrison mentality’ especially objectionable. With this phrase “he was expressing (a) Eurocentric judgment and planted a stigma on the Canadian literary psyche for a good few decades afterwards.” Much of Noah’s book is an exploration and celebration of the aboriginal contribution to Canadian culture and literature and so for him “the bush is not empty but occupied. And if it was occupied, then it was therefore habitable and safe – and the towns were not ‘garrisons.’ Recognizing, in particular, that aboriginal peoples were living in spaces that Northrop Frye and others of his generation had previously considered wild, dangerous, and empty of culture if not of people, was the spur of a creed of ethnic and cultural sensitivity that was learned in the bush and then transferred to the cities.”

Branko Gorjup, in his talk at the April, 2001 festival, entitled “Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics,” recounts some of the previous negative reaction to Frye’s ‘Canadian’ criticism. The common theme of these negative assessments seems to be that Frye’s ideas about Canadian literature are based on “imported theories and values.” Perhaps this is all a misreading of Frye. Frye, in conversation with David Cayley, says, “The phrase ‘garrison mentality’ has a certain historical context, and the phrase has got overexposed.” This is a very gentle way of saying that it’s usually not a good idea to take things out of historical context. Branko ends his essay, however, by asking: “Was Frye really ‘misread’ or was it simply that his work required multiple readings?” And he quotes Eli Mandel, as conceding that “the real influence of Frye is to have shown the precise points where local creation becomes part of the civilized discourse he speaks of as criticism and creativity, the world of wonder, the universe of words.”

The Bush Garden, where so much of the damage was done, if I can put it that way, was first published in 1971, and I have in my possession, a precious fruit from my years as a bookseller, Timothy Findley’s signed copy of the first paperback edition. It’s interesting that the first words he underlines, on page 213, are these: “And Canada has produced no author who is a classic in the sense of possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his best readers (Canadians themselves might argue about one or two, but in the perspective of the world at large the statement is true).” I like to picture Timothy Findley at Stone Orchard reading these words and saying to himself, By God, just you wait. (In 1977 he published The Wars.) Of course, Frye did wait, for it all to happen, as he knew it would. Findley also underlines, and gives two long slashes in the margin, to this from page 222: “Again, Canadian culture, and literature in particular, has felt the force of what might be called Emerson’s law. Emerson remarks in his journals that in a provincial society it is extremely easy to reach the highest level of cultivation, extremely difficult to take one step beyond that. In surveying Canadian poetry and fiction, we feel constantly that all the energy has been absorbed in meeting a standard, a self-defeating enterprise because real standards can only be established, not met.” Whether he agreed or disagreed with Frye’s historical perspective, Findley was intent on lifting himself above and beyond the force of Emerson’s law. That he succeeded, as did so many others of his generation, is something we can all celebrate.

Griffin and Chrusch: Responding to Michael Dolzani

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Bosch’s Epiphany, 1495

Michael Dolzani’s first post has drawn a couple of thoughtful responses:

Matthew Griffin:

Thanks so much for this piece. It’s proven quite helpful to me, as I try to come up with some coherent thoughts for a pair of Epiphany sermons.

Epiphany is one of the principal feasts of the Church year, and celebrates the greater spread of God’s saving work beyond just the Israelites. It’s the time of year when we read the account in the gospel of Matthew of the magi coming to see the child, led by a star–and I think that one could argue that such is the quintessential example of natural religion (and then absorbed into Christianity). After all, the magi follow a star and bring tribute, ill-understanding (in the gospel writer’s eyes, at any rate) the full import of who they were meeting.

Where I would want to offer nuance to your argument is around the assertion that “the imgaination does not ‘believe in God’: belief is concerned with the evidence for or against objects, and God is not an object.” I think my quibble stems from a passage of scripture close to Frye’s heart–”Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen” (Hebrews 11.1). In fact, it was a passage that kept cropping up in papers given at the Frye & the Word conference a few years back, and it’s key to my own reading of Frye: he’s sure that faith isn’t, as he quotes “believing what you know ain’t so”–but is something other than factual, other than straight subject/object dichotomy. It’s how Frye does this that makes Words with Power such an important book in my life, and I thank you for reminding me of that as I try to think about what it means to help others re-read a myth that reveals something of how God is.

Clayton Chrusch:

The passage that Matthew identifies is the same one that I think could use some clarification. God (the Father) may not be an object, but he is, according to the view I am defending anyway, a subject, and subjects (like the human mind, for example) are still facts, and their existence can be treated (more or less) in the same way the existence of objects can be treated. According to the Christian view, God, in the person of Jesus, is actually an object, in the sense of a physical entity. But perhaps you are not contrasting objects with subjects but objects with persons. Persons, though, are also facts, and we can believe in them both in the sense of acknowledging their existence and also in the sense of trusting them.

I certainly understand Blake’s rebelliousness and share his disgust with the church which contents itself with being at best a little less bad than institutions of a similar size, wealth, and power. But I see a distinction between the church and the teachings it espouses, the teachings, in fact, that it usually betrays. And I also see a distinction between the teachings of the church, in all their inadequacy and perversion, and the truth of which they are a distortion.

So I don’t see imagination and fact as incompatible. An imaginative scientist is very good at coming up with theories that articulate and explain facts. An imaginative Christian is very good at envisioning what it means to be a God whose only motive is love and also what it means to be a child of such a God. But a vision may be a vision of what is real. The imagination shows us not only what is not true, but also what is true.

I think I misspoke in my original comment by suggesting that the hope of Christians is the end of suffering. The end of suffering is only a secondary Christian hope, but the primary one is equally factual. Suffering is bearable, but what I cannot bear, what makes me want to pluck out my own eyes or throw myself off a cliff is being bad–hurting other people or behaving dishonestly. If I hate torture, it is not because it is painful but because it reaches down into a person’s will and takes possession of it for evil purposes. If I really knew that I could be good and remain good, I would not be afraid of any amount of pain. This is not something I am making up as an ideal, but something that is a part of real life to Tibetan monks, for example, being tortured in Chinese prisons.

And so I don’t see salvation as admittance into a very pleasant place, but as a renovation of the will so complete and so secure that it doesn’t matter any longer what place we are in.

Jonathan Allan: Northrop Frye’s Virginity

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Millais’s Ophelia, 1852

Jonathan Allan, a doctoral candidate in English at University of Toronto, will be joining us as a byline correspondent

As I complete the closing chapters of my dissertation and begin an extensive revision, I realize that I have an ongoing debate with Frye in my own notebooks: a debate that unfortunately does not unfold in the dissertation. There is one point of contention that I run up against over and over again.

Frye writes of the “magical emphasis on virginity [in romance], the fact that virgins can do things others can’t” (CW XV:219, 236); he adds that “virginity is somehow in tune with an unfallen version of the world itself” (CW XV:219). More specific to my own concerns is Frye’s observation that “this prudery [about virginity in romance] is structural, not moral” (CW XV:187). Most of these notions find their way into The Secular Scripture in which Frye writes that “apart from the idealizing of the pre-sexual state, there is a sense in which virginity is an appropriate image for attaining original identity: what is objectively untouched symbolizes what is subjectively contained so to speak” (153; CW XVIII:101). Earlier in The Secular Scripture, Frye writes: “one can, of course, understand an emphasis on virginity in romance on social grounds. In the social conditions assumed, virginity is to a woman what honor is to a man, the symbol of the fact that she is not a slave. Behind all the ‘fate worse than death’ situations that romance delights in, there runs the sense that a woman deprived of her virginity, by any means except a marriage she has at least consented to, is, to put it vulgarly, in an impossible bargaining position. But the social reasons for the emphasis on virginity, however obvious, are still not enough for understanding the structure of romance” (73; CW XVIII:49-50). It is clear that virginity becomes a central aspect of the romance structure and that the role of virginity is not moral. However, if this is really indeed the case, why has Frye gendered virginity? Why is virginity uniquely concerned with the female subject?

The romance as a generic model does not preclude the hero from being a virgin or virginal; thus, it seems imperative to ask why this model of purity is not ascribed to both the male and female if it only serves a structural goal? Indeed, if one looks to contemporary fiction, it might be demonstrated that the “virginal” male is certainly present: Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight goes to great pains to ensure the virginity of its hero; likewise, in a recent review of Dan Brown’s latest opus, The Lost Symbol, Maureen Dowd notes: “[e]ven though Katherine seems like [Robert] Langdon’s soul mate – she even knows how to weigh souls – their most torrid sex scenes consist of Robert winking at her or flashing her a lopsided grin.” There are surely dozens of examples of this virginal behaviour that extends beyond the female to the male. It is likely there is debate about whether the male virgin even exists – two recent books on the subject would certainly cast doubt upon such a notion; Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History (2007) and Anke Bernau’s Virgins: A Cultural History (2007) seem to evade the question entirely and only refer to it when absolutely necessary.

If virginity affords the heroine “magical powers,” what is the source of the “magical powers” of the hero? In upcoming work, I aim to reconsider the question of virginity in Northrop Frye’s theorisations of romance; however, such a study, as I am quickly learning, requires a re-reading of the very notion of virginity precisely because cultural historians seem not to recognize the very possibility of such a notion. In this regard, it is hardly surprising that Frye should not have considered the question of the hero being virginal. This question of virginity, of course, is not unique to the amorous romance novel alone; one need only think as far as Treasure Island wherein one could define the island itself as virginal – though most of the male characters seem rather virginal as well. One might also consider a tale like Peter Pan as yet another example of the virginal hero; however, in the case of Peter Pan there is a movement towards asexuality or a sexless identity.

Thus, the question that I keep returning to is: how can virginity be structural alone and not also part of a greater moral concern? The romance need not offer a defence of abstinence – as is the case of Meyer’s Twilight – but virginity must, and I would argue does, serve some purpose beyond the structure of the narrative. The only way, I would imagine, that virginity could serve some structural purpose alone – one that allows for magical things to happen – is if this virginity existed in both hero and heroine. For this virginity to exist, it must also be recognized, and therein lies the problem – how does one account for this seeming paradox in Frye’s theory of romance? Thus, the question that now haunts my current research (and as I begin to finish my dissertation with better questions than when I started) is about the nature and theory of virginity in the romance.

Clayton Chrusch on Frye and Education

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Responding to Mervyn Nicholson’s review of Frye’s Writings on Education, Clayton Chrusch writes:

I came across On Education when I returned to university to complete my undergraduate degree after a two year absence. I quoted it in nearly every essay I wrote for the rest of my time as an undergraduate. I had read The Educated Imagination as a teen and then again as a frosh, but did not understand it. But when I found On Education, I found something I could understand because it was essentially practical, even ethical. Not that I understood it all immediately. The remaining essays I wrote as an undergraduate had, beside the exploration of their primary subjects, the secondary agenda of coming to understand this little book of Frye’s. It was with On Education that I began my stack of index cards, and it still dominates that stack.

But the roots of my involvement with Frye’s thinking on education are even deeper than that. My grade twelve high school English teacher, Mr. Madill, handed out an article by Frye that appeared in the Toronto Star (Jan 26, 1986) called “Don’t you think it’s time to start thinking.” I still have it. The article is a humble little manifesto that I am sure Frye tossed off in twenty minutes, but it has in no way been superseded by anything I have read or thought. It is still the definitive articulation of my own views.

One of the things Frye writes is: “The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and cliches, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking.”

The only thing I would add to this is that the verbal formulas can become arbitrarily sophisticated without ever breaking into thought. There does seem to be a certain intangible moral element in education, as there is in everything. I suspect this intangible ultimately has something to do with whether we care for the truth itself or only our own possession of it. If we are willing to be wrong so that the truth can be right, I think we are on the right track. It’s hard to imagine Frye’s own verbal formulas being thrown up as a pretence of thought, but if Frye ever becomes as influential as he deserves to be, the false intellectuals of the world will certainly use him as they use whatever else commands authority.

I suppose what I am getting at is a defense of my more traditional idea of truth which certainly ties back to my more traditional idea of God that I alluded to it my last comment on belief. Frye shows us the necessary path to intellectual liberation, but being necessary does not make it sufficient. There’s an ingredient missing, an absolute, unconditional loyalty to a truth that we can neither have nor be. I don’t think Frye views things this way. Speaking about absolutes is a step too far for Frye, but I do not see how we can truly think unless we are willing, not only to build on what we have thought, but also dismantle what we have thought, even what we have believed passionately, and that is extremely painful and so requires a detached loyalty to something outside of us.

Michael Dolzani: Frye and Spiritual Otherness

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We are delighted to post this response by Michael Dolzani on the question of Frye’s anti-supernaturalism. Michael, editor of several of the Collected Works, will be joining us as a byline correspondent.

I think I understand why Clayton Chrusch refers to Frye’s “anti-supernaturalism,” and his entry puts its finger on one of those issues in Frye studies whose intractability proves how truly central they are. As Bob Denham says, Frye seemed open to belief in all sorts of paranormal phenomena, both the spontaneous ones that occur in séances and the significant coincidences that Jung explained by “synchronicity” and also the deliberately evoked and controlled phenomena of magic and occultism. However, Bob notes that Frye did not think of such phenomena as supernatural. A Renaissance magician like Prospero—or, in real life, Marsilio Ficino—believed that he was drawing upon the hidden powers of nature. Such “natural magic” could be white or black, good or evil, depending upon the will that summons and controls it. Witches may claim to serve the devil, but the devil’s attributes—the cloven hooves, horns, tail—clearly indicate that this kind of devil is merely a nature spirit. The hidden powers of nature can sometimes be imagined as a whole hidden realm, an Otherworld like the Celtic Faerie, and perhaps the Tibetan Bardo. But this realm is not supernatural; in the early 1947 essay “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” as well as in the early notebooks it is closely related to, Frye calls it “hyperphysical,” meaning that it is not super-natural, above nature, but an extension of nature. To mistake it as supernatural is an example of what the early notebooks repeatedly call “the deification of the void.”

But if the deification of the void is false supernaturalism, it is certainly a valid question whether Frye believed in a real supernaturalism. I am not surprised that this controversy has erupted in relation to Fearful Symmetry, where Frye is closest to Blake. Blake tended to equate “nature” with “fallen world” in a way that sometimes—misleadingly, I think—suggests that he is the kind of Gnostic who rejected the physical world altogether. That cannot really be true: a bird cannot be a world of delight closed to our senses five if it is merely fallen or illusory. But Blake is pushed in that direction by his repudiation of “natural religion,” all the more so because most of the conventional Christianity of his time and ours is really natural religion in disguise. Natural religion is what happens when the “natural man” [1 Corinthians 2:14], Paul’s term for the fallen aspect of ourselves, tries to imagine the supernatural. The result, as Browning showed, is Caliban upon Setebos, the reason being that the natural man cannot think or imagine beyond the natural. What is the natural? In this context, it is the cloven fiction, the split between the subject and a world of objects alienated from the subject. If the natural man is the subject, God must be the ultimately objectified Object, either projected into the heavens as an inscrutable sky-god (Urizen, Nobodaddy, Shelley’s Prometheus) or into the depths as the Immanent Will of Hardy and his chief influence, Schopenhauer. This is really another kind of deification of the void. Such a God is a Holy Terror, tormenting his followers as he tormented Job, afflicting them outwardly with boils and tragedy, inwardly with the theological nightmares of predestination, the terrors of eternal hellfire, and the intractable guilt of people like Luther.

I find that intelligent Christians of good will are puzzled and put off by the anger of people like Blake and Frye. Such Christians are thinking in terms of a God who is, as Clayton Chrusch says, the beautiful hope of those who are suffering. But Frye grew up in the realm of Protestant fundamentalism, and I grew up within pre-Vatican II Catholicism, with the same rebellious result. Frye, especially the younger Frye, refuses to suppress all the troubling questions; like Job, he stands up and cries out for answers. And unlike Job, but like Blake, he refuses to be shouted down because God has a bigger loudspeaker.

So the natural man cannot be truly spiritual; he can only be superstitious, worshipping and trying to placate a spook conjured by his own anxieties. But Paul’s “spiritual man” is identified by Blake with the imagination. The imagination does not “believe in” God: belief is concerned with the evidence for or against objects, and God is not an object. God is not a “fact,” at least not in this sense. The natural man thinks that, if God is not a fact, he must be a mere fiction or illusion, but it is one of the primary missions of Words with Power to get beyond that impasse.

That is why I think Sara Toth’s essay “Recovery of the Spiritual Other” (in Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old) is an important contribution to Frye studies. Sara observes that, beginning as early as the 1970s, Frye increasingly speaks of a “spiritual otherness.” To the imagination or spiritual man (or woman), God is “other” and yet not objective. In the Preface to Spiritus Mundi, Frye writes, “For Blake and Yeats, on the other hand, there is nothing creative except what the human imagination produces. Stevens polarizes the imagination against a ‘reality’ which is otherness, what the imagination is not and has to struggle with. Such reality cannot ultimately be the reality of physical nature or of constituted human society, which produce only the ‘realism’ that for Stevens is something quite different. It is rather a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves; and sooner or later all theories of creative imagination have to take account of it.” Autobiographical aside: my first contact with Frye was in 1976. At the age of twenty-five, I wrote him a fan letter thanking him graciously acceding to my visiting father-in-law’s request to autograph a copy of Spiritus Mundi for me. In my letter, I specifically mentioned the “spiritual otherness” passage as seeming like a fascinating new direction for him. He wrote back saying that he was working on a book on the Bible, and that this was one of the issues it was important to get right.

Frye is distancing himself in that Preface from Blake’s identification of the human imagination as God. Although Blake is right in a sense, there is different aspect of God which remains other. What is an otherness that is not objective? It is a “spiritual” otherness. And what does that mean? Well, I wish I knew. I edited Words with Power, including the chapter “Spirit and Symbol” that is Frye’s deepest exploration of this, and still feel I do not entirely understand it—though I feel that it does mean something, and though I have been trying to grasp it since I was twenty-five. I think Frye himself was looking for clues in other writers: Sara notes his interest in Buber’s I-Thou relationship. I myself have been struck by how, of the two great Protestant theologians of his time, Frye seems more fascinated by the neo-orthodox Barth than the liberal Tillich. What I think he found in Barth was the vision of a spiritual otherness smashing through the limitations of human desires, human understanding, human words: a transcendence whose revelation or kerygma shatters the mind-forg’d manacles of the fallen world. When David Cayley asks Frye, “Why do you take it as given that God is transcendent?” Frye responds, “I don’t know what else is transcendent. Otherwise, you’re left with human nature and physical nature….Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has grown out of physical nature. It has various ideals and hopes and wishes and concerns, but its attempts to realize these things are often abominable, cruel, and psychotic. I feel there must be something that transcends all this, or else.” When Cayley asks, “Or else what?” Frye responds, “Or else despair.”