1942:
[131] Three lectures and busting with shit: went home early this afternoon. Then to Havelock’s for a debating society executive meeting, Eric has taken quite a shine to me evidently & he certainly does work hard at debates. They varied between political and local-scandal subjects, suggesting “should formal parties be suspended?” I said it would be more interesting to say “should formal dresses be suspended?” They came to no conclusions but are planning a group of inter-year debates.
1942:
[130] Well, today was the Retreat. I got through it somehow, dividing it into “The Search for Wisdom” (morning) and “The Search for the Word” (afternoon). I said everything is learned by the scientific method and absorbed in the personality as an art, a knack or flair. The former is knowledge, the latter wisdom & the goal of an “arts” course. Knowledge of itself is lumber or a machine: a liberal education implies the elimination of pedantry & vulgarity & the achievement of a fully integrated personality. Students come to college because they want to grow. Mental growth is a fact like physical growth. But the possessor of a liberal education is not his own end, nor do his class affiliations or social responsibilities exhaust his duties, for there are no douanes in culture. Hence wisdom is the entry into a universal order and a world of spiritual values. The discussion was good but the staff talked too much. I stressed “scientia,” knowledge, as against “love of wisdom,” philosophy, which defines defines the human attitude towards the knowledge. Love today is interest, the difference between the good & mediocre student of equal intelligence. In the afternoon I went on with “The Search for the Word”: wisdom reveals spiritual values but does not save more than a few Stoics of exceptional strength who have the very rare quality of heroic wisdom from an evil physical world. Besides, the personal is superior to the impersonal. Hence wisdom becomes less an abstract noun & more a concrete entity of mind, or person: a saviour, furthermore, a God also man. Hence wisdom which arrives at the Logos has expanded into revelation or vision. The kids couldn’t get that, of course, and fought whether you could know if God exists or not. However, I really think the Retreat was less hideously futile than usual.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQpsL_kh6pE
Sonata in C, 2nd movement, Mitsuko Uchida, piano
1942: The new term gets under way.
[129] Chancellor Wallace in a sermon quoted George H. Palmer on the death of his wife: ‘Who can contemplate the fact of her death & not call the world irrational if out of deference to a few particles of disordered matter it excludes so fair a spirit?’ Remarks like that don’t usually impress me, but this one does.
A couple of insightful responses to Joe’s earlier post:
Clayton Chrusch:
I understand what you are saying. I think the difference is that relating literature to economics or politics or power relations between the sexes, is setting up a determinism with the implication that literature has no empirical structure that is proper to itself; in other words, it empties literature of literary content.
But bringing logic or even math to the table is a different matter, because these are tools that can be used to build a properly literary structure, they are not the structure itself, they do not usurp the content of literature. Frye liked to make analogies between the study of literature and other disciplines, and if you consider other disciplines, you see that the use of mathematics or logic does not work to subordinate them to something outside themselves.
Frye liked to use diagrams. That did not subordinate literature to geometry or graph theory.
I’m not insisting that everyone think as I do, but I do believe that if people with a logical temperament could find a place in literary studies, they could do a lot to build an objective(ish) “science” of literary convention which would establish the properly literary structure of literature.
Jan Gorak:
It does seem a shame that no one seems to ask why anyone would want to cast a work in literary form any more – something that The Educated Imagination itself addressed so well I always thought. I also think Frye – and many of his contemporaries – were much better at seeing and talking about the various constructions human beings deploy and the motives for deploying them. Contemporary critics seem to have gone back to the dark ages on questions like this, so that you often wonder whether they would even recognize an allegory if one bit them! It would also seem relevant to say that although Frye thought that he inhabited the same imaginative universe as Blake, Coleridge etc, most contemporary theorists are convinced that anything before 1968 let’s say is completely out of their field of vision, so you get bizarre frames of reference brought to bear in the name of “redefining the Victorian idea” or whatever. Sho’ is a mysterious discipline these days. Good to be in touch!
1942:
[128] Full of shit again. Every once in a while I get shocked by the callousness and brutality of members of my class: I was thinking of that Sunday afternoon at Millars. Mildred [Oldfield Millar] was speaking of young David’s tendencies to run across the road, & I said ‘You can imagine the state of mind of mothers on Charles St., or places where kids have to play on the streets.’ One woman said ‘Oh, I don’t think those people care much.’ Cats would care, and hens would care, but the mothers of Charles St. don’t give a damn.
1942:
[126] Morley [Callaghan] & Eleanor [Godfrey] dislike the English but don’t fully understand why: it’s because they’re Catholics, of course. The confusions of interests today are curious. Heywood Broun turned R.C. after he’d become convinced, wrongly of course, that it wasn’t inherently Fascist. He judged the church by a political standard assumed superior to it. Yet if he had realized this he’d have sold out to the reactionaries. Funny deadlock.
[127] The theory of democracy about the will of the people being the source of government is, in that form, just will-worship like Calvin’s.
Bob Denham leaves a get well Skeltonic for Jean O’Grady in the Comments section. On behalf of all of us here, Jean, get well soon!
A wreck? Oh, hell!
Dear Jean, Get well!
Of all projects
Your grand index
Is what we need.
So we now plead
With all due speed
For you to heal.
Our commonweal
Is what’s at stake.
For goodness sake,
Quickly repair:
Our sober prayer.
1942:
[125] Lectures began this morning: all lectures begin half an hour early: T.T.C. request for staggered hours. I told my kids they’d been staggering into 9 o’clocks at 9.30 for years. Opening lecture to 2e [Restoration and 18th century literature] thorough but dull. I don’t do the Trinity this year: Child does it, or part of it. To Marion Darte’s for a party including Eleanor [Godfrey], Ray [Godfrey], the Callaghans & a chap with one leg from Winnipeg. Very dull evening: tiresome discussion with wild generalizations about the sexes which I engaged in only because I didn’t want to sulk. Eleanor was stewed and sullen and Morley has a thick streak of ham in him anyway. But does tell a story well – when he does.
1942:
[124] Had to go down to Dundas St. to collect my glasses, then Conservatory, then Music Library, picking up Byrd, then Convocation: an unqualified disaster which it bores me to write about. Helen down with a cold, as I said before.
[Note that the Conservatory building was the original home of McMaster University, pictured above in a vintage postcard.]