“The world of the final festival is a world where reality is what is created by human desire, as the arts are created.”
Frye, A Natural Perspective (115)
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Category Archives: Bob Denham
Sylvia Maultash Warsh: “The Queen of Unforgetting”
Sylvia Maultash Warsh has published a novel featuring Northrop Frye, The Queen of Unforgetting. An extended excerpt can be read here.
The synopsis provided by Cormorant Books reads:
Approaching a scholar and critic as legendary as Northrop Frye is a daunting task — but not for Mel Montrose. Armed with a prestigious academic award and a nothing-to-lose attitude, she convinces Frye to supervise her ambitious thesis exploring E.J. Pratt’s epic poem about Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf. To embark on her study, Mel takes a job at the newly reconstructed historical site at Sainte-Marie-among-the-Hurons, where de Brébeuf and seven other missionaries met their tragic ends. But Mel soon learns that delving into Ontario history is no escape from her own when an obsessed admirer threatens to destroy her academic career.
Frye and the Mona Lisa
Further to Michael’s post
“I must run across to the Louvre now, as it is getting late. The mob always goes straight to the Mona Lisa as the greatest drawing card. I’m a little annoyed with Leonardo just now. That miserable Bacchus and John the Baptist—which are of course open to doubt as to their authenticity—with their sickly smiles and their rather cloying chiaroscuro” (Frye to Helen Kemp. 25 September 1938)
Two years earlier Frye had reported to Helen on his visit to the Art Institute in Chicago: “The Art Institute has a special exhibit which I have visited twice, once with [my sister] Vera, once with Eleanor [Craig]. Renaissance painting–Tintoretto, Titian, two Leonardos‑‑one called the “Madonna of the Yarn Spinners,” a magnificent Italian Madonna, with the same inscrutable Mona Lisa smile, and the freshest and rosiest youngster I have ever seen. Some of the representations of the Christ‑Child are almost blasphemous‑‑he looks sometimes like a manikin of forty, sometimes like a wizened old priest. One Raphael‑‑very simple but breath‑taking‑‑a man dressed in black. Two Botticellis‑‑one I could have sworn was modern French. Our old friend Lippo Lippi, and one of his incubi, Fra Angelico. (Try your hand at Fra Lippo Lippi sometime, contrasting the medieval type with Early Renaissance in initial letters or marginal designs.) The Renaissance pictures were all very soft and quiet in color. But the medieval ones were different. Nearly all of them had gold backgrounds, and the figures were splashes of brilliant reds and greens. The haloes were bewilderingly ornamented. Poses stiff and architectural, often notably Byzantine. But a sort of quaint childlike humor all through. One picture of the Last Supper shows a little spaniel in the foreground gnawing a bone. One Madonna and Child shows the latter with his fist stuck in a dish of candy. A weird one of John the Baptist’s head brought to Sabine has a moving picture effect. The head appears twice, and so do three attendants, at different stages in the procession. I liked these medieval pictures best of all, I think. Then the Dutch school. Some rare humor here too. One a young group of smokers trying to blow rings. A beautiful Rembrandt‑‑“Girl at Half‑open Door” and a portrait of his father. Several Franz Hals‑‑all the “Laughing Cavalier” type. And an exquisite picture of a “Woman Weighing Gold.” And so on. The Dutch primitives disappointed me a bit. There is an English room‑‑several graceful Gainsboroughs, a Romney, Reynolds, Raeburn, Zoffany, and Hogarth. American colonial painting, including the two famous Gilbert Stuart portraits of Washington. Whistler‑‑the great portrait of his mother‑‑one of the biggest attractions‑‑a superb picture in gray and black. And the Thames “nocturne”‑‑the one that started the row with Ruskin. Sargent‑‑a lovely study of an Egyptian nude girl‑‑surprisingly slim for the Orient. Modern French too‑‑a room full of Matisse and Picasso. That man Matisse knew how to handle color. A picture of Picasso’s of a youngster eating out of a bowl called “Le Gourmet” is very popular‑‑Eleanor said it was her favourite” (Frye to Kemp, 1 July 1933).
From Northrop Frye’s Student Essays: “The relation of the artist to the scientist boils down to one very similar to his relation to the moralist or propagandist. The scientist explains, and his words and images denote; the artist suggests, and his words and images connote. No two people will look at a picture in the same way; and if I am looking at one, all the other possible reactions to it, which I may or may not share, form a sort of nimbus around my head, which I try to get away from. If I am looking at Mona Lisa, for instance, I withdraw into myself in order to escape from both Walter Pater, except by responding to a meaning in the picture essentially “evocative” and “spell‑bearing” (CW 3, 377).
Frye on Haydn
Further to Michael’s post, Frye on Haydn in Notebook 5
If I had such a thing as a favorite composer, it would be Haydn. I think it’s Haydn anyway. I’m going to write something on him someday. More and more I find myself turning to Bach & Haydn, which means more & more away from Mozart. Mozart’s a skeptic & Haydn’s a Christian. Haydn has everything. He has all of Schubert’s ease of melody sags or goes soupy the way Schubert does. He’s as witty as either Mozart or Scarlatti: I’ve just read through 37 minuets & 24 German dances, a grueling test for any composer & he says something pointed & epigrammatic practically every time. But he has more than wit: he has an amazing eloquence & range in his melodic line: he can be marvellously “singable” & yet swoop over everything form a soprano to a bass range: D major sonata in Book I with the lovely long Adagio. He may not be as profound a thinker generally as Mozart, but I think he’s a greater thinker in musical form than Mozart: he has a sense of organic unity about him & an originality of creative thought, still in musical form, Mozart hasn’t. Haydn develops a plot; Mozart works out a situation. But the plot really develops, that’s the point. He had much more influence over Beethoven than Mozart, I think, particularly in things like the Pathétique: only Beethoven is analytic & disruptive where Haydn is synthetic. He’s really almost more radiant than Beethoven for that reason. His trios are more fun to read on a piano than Mozart’s because they’re all piano & Mozart’s are balanced: Mozart’s are more expertly written, but it’s plot & situation again, & Haydn’s more fun. In things like the G major sonata, Book II, slow movement, his impersonality, gone serious, just drops you out of sight: he’s too wrapped up in pure music ever to be sad or cynical, like Mozart. He hits cold depths of ice Mozart doesn’t get down to because he doesn’t believe enough. Sometimes the coldness of pure Rococo, the winter-chill of our autumnal culture: slow movement of C major quartet, op. 59 No. 2 or something in the fifties: 55, I guess. But that doesn’t mean he’s an abstract music writer. Sometimes Bach is unplayable, either because, as in the Art of Fugue, he’s just writing absolute music, or because he’s gone beyond all reading or reproduction into pure thought, as in the C# minor of the WTC I [The Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1]. Sometimes Beethoven’s unplayable when he’s appealing to a wrench in the guts too physical for a performance to reach, as in the Coriolan or the 106. (That doesn’t necessarily mean greatness, any more than an unactable play is necessarily great because King Lear is unactable). But Haydn always has a powerful ease of reproduction: his music exists only for performance. His piano sonatas are in one idiom, his string quartets in another, etc. That’s why he’s the easiest of all composers to play: he thinks so purely in terms of the genius of reproducing instruments. Hence he’s an amateur-family musician, and could do what the Bible could almost have done (not quite: its achievement is overrated) for amateur-family English prose style. He’s probably the only great composer who could have written a national anthem. But he’s got something ultimate in his time & Mozart & Beethoven & Goethe haven’t: there’s too much Goethe in Mozart and too much Beethoven in Goethe. Something of the rebirth of imagination: the thing Blake had. Haydn was no Bach and couldn’t do the Mass or Passion job to save his soul, if it had ever been in any danger, but the Creation does give the perfect Paradise-existence of the imaginative mind: the super-pastoral note. I daresay the Seasons is the same thing: I haven’t heard or read it, but winter is as pastoral an idea as summer. He’s been so grossly underrated for the same reason that Mozart used to be: a supreme genius of comedy, patted on the back for being amusing, like Dan Chaucer and gentle Shakespeare—the Papa Haydn approach. Chaucer, being ironical, is Mozartian; Haydn’s closer to the 13th c. (Notebook 5, CW 25, 163–5)
Frye and Helen Kemp on A. Y. Jackson
Further to Michael’s post, Frye and Helen on Jackson in the Correspondence.
Canadian landscape painting has to deal with a sharp hard light and solid blocks of clear colour: consequently a tendency to conventionalize outlines has been inherent in it from the first. Thomson, being interested in problems of linear distance and in the breaking up of light which they suggest, dodged this tendency, but it is strong in Jackson and Emily Carr, and of course far stronger in Lawren Harris, who saved himself from dropping into a facile formula (like Rockwell Kent) by turning to out-and-out abstract painting. (CW 12, 12)
The Group of Seven felt that they were among the first to look at Canada directly, and much of their painting was based on the principle of confronting the eye with the landscape. This made a good deal of their work approach the flat and posterish, but that was a risk they were ready to take. Jackson, Lismer, and Harris all found this formula exhaustible, and have all developed away from it. Thomson and Emily Carr represent a more conscious penetration of the landscape: they seem to try to find a centre of rhythm deep within their subject and expand from there. Milne combines these techniques in a way that is apt to confuse people who look at him for the first time. (CW 12, 73)
I am, of course, deeply appreciative of the honour that Carleton University has done me. It is particularly an honour to receive this degree in the company of Mr. A.Y. Jackson, as well as a great pleasure, because Mr. Jackson is an old friend. (CW 12, 272)
Writers don’t interpret national characters; they create them. But what they create is a series of individual things, characters in novels, images in poems, landscapes in pictures. Types and distinctive qualities are second-hand conventions. If you see what you think is a typical Englishman, it’s a hundred to one that you’ve got your notion of a typical Englishman from your second-hand reading. It is only in satire that types are properly used: a typical Englishman can exist only in such figures as Low’s Colonel Blimp. If you look at Mr. Jackson’s paintings, you will see a most impressive pictorial survey of Canada: pictures of Georgian Bay and Lake Superior, pictures of the Quebec Laurentians, pictures of Great Bear Lake and the Mackenzie River. What you will not see is a typically Canadian landscape: no such place exists. In fiction too, there is nothing typically Canadian, and Canada would not be a very interesting place to live in if there were. Only the outsider to a country finds characters or patterns of behaviour that are seriously typical. Maria Chapdelaine has something of this typifying quality, but then Maria Chapdelaine is a tourist’s novel. (CW 12, 275)
Frye Alert
A reader’s response to a Frank Rich editorial, “The Rage Is Not about Health Care,” in the New York Times cites Frye on the hero:
The fact that the McConnells, Boehners, Cantors, and even McCains fear the wrath of unhinged, racist, screaming Teabaggers is the clearest indication possible that none of them are leaders. They are sheep. Abject figures who might be pitied for their impotence if they were not positioned to affect the direction of this country so negatively.
Literary critic Northrop Frye described the true leader as a hero, one who stands apart from the crowd, whose power stems from being able to adopt a position from strength rather than from weakness. Does this description call to mind anyone from the Republican party?
Historian and philosopher Isaiah Berlin, in his essay “From Hope and Fear Set Free” outlines the features that distinguish a rational person from an unfree, fearful person. Berlin states that the rational man is one who can act freely, not mechanically, who acts upon sound motives. The fearful man “is like someone who is drugged or hypnotised.”
Do the current crop of Republican “heroes” sound like either of these archetypes? Of course, it’s the second. They who foment fear are themselves fearful. They who are bound by ideological chains are barely able to see clearly. They who stand, not apart from the mob, in a position of strength, but hiding from it, in a fetal position of fear, cannot lead. They can only cower and whine and threaten.
There are no leaders on the right. They are led to the brink, like Lord Franklin’s doomed expedition, by addled fanatics like Limbaugh and Beck, and inanities like Palin; dragging down everyone with them, insisting that their weakness of mental acuity be recognized as some kind of sign that they are not “intellectuals” or socialists.
This country needs the balance of at least two functioning parties, both of which have leaders ready to stand up for the best America has to offer and to point her in the right direction. Unfortunately, we have only one rational party.
And if the above descriptions don’t fit any Republicans, they do seem to fit at least one Democrat.
That gentleman in the Oval Office.
Frye’s References to Debussy
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpOuSc9WApk
Debussy’s “Hommage a Rameau”. Arturo Michelangeli, piano.
Further to Michael’s earlier post
I may be cracked, and mustn’t arrive at premature conclusions, but I think I can exhaust and distinguish the styles of [William] Byrd, [John] Bull & [Orlando] Gibbons. Byrd is an intensely virile, straightforward composer: his rhythm is the most positive element in his style, and that has the slightly march-like swing of all good English music, even when written by a German like Handel or a Frenchified composer like Purcell. His forms are bare and intense: it’s his immediacy that makes him fond of sharply outlined pictures—he’s more interested in programme music than the other two and does more with the lilting folk tunes. Bull is dreamy, sensuous, atmospheric, and early Debussy, with lovely & expressive melodic lines weaving through his harmonies. Like Debussy, too, he has a sharp wit, as in the King’s Hunting Jigs. Gibbons is more Mozartian: he has great architectonic power & a much larger synthetic sense of form, and commands the full fortes in style of writing in a way which really puts him far ahead of Frescobaldi & his more conventional fugues: in fact, he’s the 16th c. at its ripest. To him, as to Mozart, music is a mystery to be explored by a clear mind. He’s a synthesis of Byrd’s classic & Bull’s romantic style. . . . Bull was the Debussy of his time, and his music has the same subtle, delicate, mysteriously ectoplasmic quality about it. (Notebook 5)
The immensely increased range that modal harmony affords to music makes it incredible that it did not play a more active role in the art between 1600 and 1900 than is generally assigned to it. There are explicit examples of course: the Lydian movement in Beethoven’s op. 132 quartet; the Dorian movement in Brahms’ fourth symphony. But it would be interesting to examine the subject further, particularly in modern music. Recently I was reading through a volume of piano pieces by Sibelius, and came across one in a set of pieces with names of trees, I think op. 85, in G sharp minor with a four-sharp key signature and a flat supertonic throughout—in other words in G sharp Phrygian. Debussy’s Hommage a Rameau, also in G sharp minor, has the E sharped through the last half-dozen bars, and so ends in G sharp Dorian. Chopin’s Prelude in F major, op. 28 no. 23, has a Mixolydian cadence, a fact which draws squeals of ecstasy from Huneker, who presumably never read Byrd, who did the same thing in every tenth piece he wrote. (“Modal Harmony in Music”)
When I start learning to compose I shall investigate modal harmony: I find myself quite baffled by the stupidity of musicians in ever dropping it. Arranged in order of sharpness, they are Lydian, Ionian or major, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian or minor, Phrygian, Locrian. Lydian is a shade brighter than major, Dorian a shade more majestic than minor, Phrygian & Mixolydian, Phrygian especially, gloomy and plaintive. I dare say a lot of Bach’s minor music is really Dorian, a lot of Chopin’s Phrygian, a lot of Beethoven’s major Lydian, a lot of Mendelssohn’s Mixolydian. You see, it’s an interlocking scheme. A piece of B Lydian would have a key signature of 6#; in B major, of 5#; B Mixolydian, 4; B Dorian, 3; B minor, 2; B Phrygian, 1; B Locrian, none. I ran across a piece in G# by Sibelius (a set of tree-pieces op. I think about 85) with 4#—G# Phrygian, in other words. Debussy’s Hommage à Rameau ends in G# Dorian. Wonder if a spectrum association would ever be made by some future Scriabine: Lydian red, etc. I’ve got more notes on this in Elizabethan music somewhere. (Diaries)
Of the universal rationalization of history to make the preceding age, the age of the father, an aberration from the great tradition (the second father or old wise man) which is now being carried on by the new people. Thus music does fine as far as Mozart, is just awful until modern times, & starts again with Debussy. How this affects Ruskin’s championing of Turner & his denigration of the rococo & baroque. (Diaries)
Frye and Fairley
From Barker Fairley: Portraits (Toronto: Methuen, 1981): 48–9
Further on Barker Fairley and the refusal of U.S. customs to grant him a visa to lecture on Goethe at Bryn Mawr because of his leftist sympathies (he had supported a Soviet friendship organization), these passages from Frye’s Diaries:
“Poor old Barker still feels pretty blue: he was just beginning to start exploring U.S.A. & get some real recognition when they slammed the door on him & he has to pick up a trip to England as consolation prize, & of course he knows all about England.” (20 March 1950)
“Barker [Fairley] is taking the C.P.R. [Canadian Pacific Railway] train to St. John that goes across Maine, so he says he’ll have a chance to piss on the United States. Just the same Barker has been deeply hurt by his exclusion. I wish the Americans didn’t do all the silly things the Communists expect them to do and know in advance how to take advantage of.” (9 April 1950)
The lectures that Fairley was to give at Bryn Mawr were later published as Goethe’s Faust: Six Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). Fairley incidentally painted Frye’s portrait in 1969, which is reproduced above.
About his subject, Fairley has this to say:
I first ran into the name of Northrop Frye when, returning to Canada in 1936, I read an article by him in The Canadian Forum about that delightful dance troupe “The Ballet Joos.” They acted, or rather danced, scenes from social life. I remember particularly “The City,” which conveyed both gregariousness and loneliness and gave me a pleasure greater than any I got from classical dancing. Does he remember this too with the same vivid pleasure, I wonder?
He now switches my mind back to the University of Toronto as it was then. It seemed to me in those days that University College with its undenominational freedom was carrying the torch of the humanities ahead of the other colleges. This was a pardonable illusion, which any of the four colleges was entitled to. But what with Northrop Frye and his mastery of the whole field of literature as we know it and his colleague, Kathleen Coburn, with her command of the Coleridge battalion — to say nothing of her very special autobiography In Pursuit of Coleridge — it appears now that I was wrong and that Victoria is in the lead as taking the University’s name more effectively abroad than I ever expected.
My portrait of Northrop Frye is a third attempt after two ignominious failures. I was with Aba Bayefsky the first time. He succeeded — more than succeeded — and I collapsed. After a second collapse I said, “Norrie, let me try again.” He agreed. And sure enough, that inscrutable face of his yielded at last, and his gentle nature came through to my great delight.
Frye and Border Security
Barker Fairley by Frederick Varley, 1920
Further to Michael’s post on Peter Watts’s conviction for obstructing a border guard.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Exhibit A is Frye’s editorial, which appeared in the Canadian Forum 29, no. 346 (November 1949): 169–70.
Nothing to Fear But Fear
For some months now the American immigration authorities have been busily defending our otherwise undefended border. A number of labour leaders, students, and unfrocked Communists have been held up, turned back, or refused visas, and on a principle of chance well known to duck hunters, they have even managed to bag a few authentic members of the Labor Progressive Party. The recent refusal of visas to Professor Shortliffe of Queen’s and Professor Barker Fairley of Toronto, amounting in at least the latter case to permanent exclusion, has brought the matter more into the open. As practically every Canadian has friends or relatives in the States, Canadian protest has been somewhat muffled. When made, it has usually been carefully qualified by two points: first, that it is intelligible that the U.S.A. should want to exclude people with a vocation for overthrowing its government by force; and second, that as a sovereign nation it has a perfect right to exclude whom it likes.
Well, so it has, but its officials need not be so contemptuous of the national sovereignty of Canada, which, even if smaller, is quite as highly civilized, and quite as interested in democracy. It is an insult to Canada to have American authorities in charge of Canadian immigration who do not know the elementary facts of Canadian political life, and who cannot distinguish a Communist from a social democrat. Earlier in the summer a prominent CCF leader had some difficulty in getting a visa because he had been called a Communist in a Trestrail pamphlet. But no American official should be handling Canadian immigration at all unless he knows all about the trustworthiness of Trestrail pamphlets. A similar political astigmatism must have blurred the official view of Professor Shortliffe, who, though he has associated himself with the CCF, was otherwise merely a professor of French trying to proceed to an appointment in French at Washington University.
Professor Fairley wanted a visa to fulfil an invitation to lecture on Goethe at Bryn Mawr. For any normally competent official, the only question of importance would be: is there anything in this man’s record to indicate that he is going to do anything more subversive than lecture on Goethe? And the answer to that question was obviously no. Professor Fairley is a world famous Goethe scholar, and has never made a political speech in his life. But the officials, in a frenzy of misapplied subtlety, looked up all the occasions on which he had lent his name to the support of a Soviet friendship organization, and gravely decided that he was not sufficiently at war with Russia to be admitted even for a month. After all, had not Mrs. Fairley been sent home from the Peace Conference some months before? True, that action was as high handed and foolish as the exclusion of her husband. But perhaps the authorities reasoned that if they made two foolish decisions over the same family, they would save their faces by their consistency.
Religious Knowledge, Lecture 19
Le Hire, Job Restored, 1648
Lecture 19. February 24, 1948
THE SEARCH FOR WISDOM
There are concentric spheres in the Book of Job. The inner sphere is a morality play with virtue and vice in argument with friends. From the deadlock of the argument to the end of Elihu’s speech is another sphere. The still-wider concentric sphere is that of a divine comedy—God watching Job and then restores him. There are ironic overtones to the “tragic” story.
The same concentric pattern is in the life of Jesus. The active Jesus, the teacher and healer, is the kernel of the story. His tragedy is another sphere. Then comes the divine comedy of redemption. King Lear is a morality play at heart with the good people against the bad. Outside that is tragedy which is not moral because Cordelia dies. Around that is the adumbration of the comedy, of a man who attempted to find divinity in kingship but finds it only in suffering humanity.
In the last chapter, verse 8, Job becomes the redeemer of his friends. “And my servant Job will pray for you.” But Job has suffered too much for the restoration of his flocks and children to be the answer to his problem. Job’s is a personal search for wisdom.
What the restoration of his children represent are the symbols of that new wisdom.
In the Old Testament, the histories focus on a king. In the prophecies, they focus on the watcher as opposed to the doer of the New Testament. Job is the third division of the Old Testament, the Wisdom books, like Solomon, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. What takes place is a personal form of wisdom.
Comedy will not come with restoration. Too much has happened. God is too responsible. Job is not hankering after his goods and children but the reality of which they are symbols; this he identifies with wisdom. He begins the search for wisdom with “why did God do this to me?” This expands into “what is God?” The search for God is the search for wisdom. And God is inside Job.
In Chapter 10, God describes Behemoth and in Chapter 14, Leviathan. The chief point is this description is the phrase “he is king over all the children of pride.” Why is this so significant? Why does it enlighten Job so that he says “now my eye sees thee.” We would expect God to lead him to Satan, but he leads him to Leviathan. Satan and Leviathan are the same person. Satan stands for the tyranny of nature and man. Job sees the form of his tragedy as a monster, that is, now he can see it because he has been coughed out of the belly of Leviathan.
Job is detached from a world of the tyranny of man and nature. He has found a new centre of balance in a spiritual world where God is, which is inside himself. He no longer lives in the moral world of the conflict of good and evil. The world he is in has only heaven and hell, a personal God who is human against a monster which is evil, that is, Satan.