Category Archives: Bob Denham

Frye in Chinese

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Cross-posted in the Denham Library here.

Frye’s books continue to be translated into Chinese.  The most recent is a translation of The Secular Scripture (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2010).  Trans. Xiang-Chun Meng.  The other Chinese translations are:

 

Anatomy of Criticism

Piping de Pouxi.  Trans. Chen Hui, Yuan Xianjun, and Wu Weiren.  Tianjin: Baihua Literature and Art Publishing House, 1998.

Piping de Jiepou.  Trans. Chen Hui, Yuan Xianjun, and Wu Weiren; revised by Wu Chizhe and annotated by Wu Chizhe and Robert D. Denham.  Tianjin: Hundred-Flower Literary Press, 2000.

The Educated Imagination, Creation and Recreation, and The Well‑Tempered Critic

Fulai Wenlun Sanzhong [Three of Frye’s Critical Monographs]: Xiangxiangli de Xiuyang, Chuangzhao yu Zai Chuangzhao, Wenlian de Pipingjai (Trans. Xu Kun et al., rev. with a preface and annotations by Wu Chizhe.  Hoh‑Hot: University of Inner Mongolia Press, 2003.

The Modern Century

Xian dai bai nian.  Trans. Sheng Ning.  Shenyang: Liaoning Educational Press; Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998.

The Critical Path

P’i ping chih lu: Lo-ssu-lo pu Fu-lai chu.  Trans. Wang Fengzhen and Min-li Chin.  Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998.

The Great Code

Wei da de dai ma: Shengjing yu wen xue. Trans. Hao Zhengyi, Fan Zhenguo, and He Chengzhou.  Beijing: Peking University Press, 1998.

Words with Power

Shenlide Yuyan: Shengjin yu Wenxue Yanjiu xubian.  Trans. Wu Chizhe.  Preface by Ye Shuxian. Beijing: Social Sciences Documentation Publishing House, 2004.

Selected Essays

Nuosiluopu Fulai Wen lun xuan ji [Northrop Frye: Selected Essays].  Ed. Wu Chizhe.  Beijing: China Press of Social Sciences, 1997.

Contents: “The Responsibilities of the Critic” / “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” / “The Search for Acceptable Words” / “Literature as Therapy” / “The Archetypes of Literature” / “Forming Fours” / “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” / “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts” / “Expanding Eyes” / “Literature as a Critique of Pure Reason” / “The Koine of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language” / “The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange” / “The Mythical Approach to Creation” / “Conclusion” to Literary History of  Canada” (1965), / “Criticism and Environment” / “The Cultural Development of Canada” / “The Stage Is All the World” / “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas” / “Blake after Two Centuries” / “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism”

Frye-Welch Correspondence, 1968-1970

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We have posted in the library letters written by Frye to Jane Welch (later Widdicombe) at the beginning of her long tenure as his devoted secretary: she began working for Frye in 1968. Frye’s travels during these three years took him to Ireland and London; Berkeley; Bellagio, Italy; Islamabad, Pakistan; and Merton College, Oxford.  During this time he was working on The Critical Path, which, he tells Jane Welch in one of his letters from Merton College, “is the first book since the Anatomy of Criticism that I’ve actually written, i.e., that hasn’t been a series of public lectures.  It’s also a very important book.  I probably won’t live to see it recognized as such, but you may” (no. 16).  Then there are the usual Frye quips, such as “I’m not all that anxious to read the Blake Newsletter, and I never believe anything I see in such things anyway, as a matter of principle” (no. 11), and “A big research library is wasted on me, too bad I never learned to read, and I’m getting itchy feet again” (no. 17).

You can read them all here.

More on Murray and Witchcraft

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Further to yesterday’s post on the Salem Witch Trials, the complete passage cited in that post is reproduced below.

What follows are a couple of further observations on Margaret Murray’s book and witch-craft.

I stumbled on something in the Masseys that may be important. The creative subconscious is potentially communicable, and so it’s different from the Freudian subconscious.  It’s social & not individual—it has links with Jung’s collective unconscious, but I don’t know what they are.  Finnegans Wake, anyway, is about that subconscious.  Reading Margaret Murray’s books on witchcraft [The God of the Witches (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), and The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921)], one can’t believe any part of her argument that assumes an actual religious organization, but that some subconscious demonic parody of Xy [Christianity] was extracted from all those poor creatures under torture is quite obvious, and its consistency doesn’t surprise me: it’s the same kind of thing primitive tribes produce, often by self-administered torture.  The witch-finder himself was a psychopath, or soon became one by sticking pins all over naked women, and so they were linked in a communal dream. [Northrop Frye Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism,” CW 23, 288]

[The reference to the Massey Lectures: “Ordinary life forms a community, and literature is among other things an art of communication, so it forms a community too.  In ordinary life we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination.  Underneath literature there is another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols. . . . This is the myth-making power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another” [The Educated Imagination, CW 21, 474).]

The myth of the devil is ultimately the myth of the rejected projection.  During the father-making-the-world phase the devil was Eros-Dionysus, & his dame the white goddess.  I can’t buy Margaret Murray’s thesis that the horned-god cult actually existed, but that obscene parodies of Christian rituals could be extracted by torture in an obscene parody of psychotherapy is obvious enough.  The false devil is the buried Orc, the pharmakos victim of the social anxiety-structure; the genuine devil is the prince of this world, & is usually identified with God. [The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9, 69]

[In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), Margaret Murray argued that what the Christian authorities called witchcraft was actually the survival, throughout the Middle Ages and up to the Reformation, of a pre-Christian fertility cult.  A copy of Murray’s The God of the Witches (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), is in the Northrop Frye Library at Victoria College.]

In Joyce’s Ulysses we have a Jewish father-figure, a Christian (so to speak) son-figure, a mother-wife-whore figure, and a spiritual visitant whose name suggests fire and water (Blazes Boylan).  I think I see why HCE is Protestant: the descent into alienation is the real point of Protestantism.  Also, many great cultures have arisen from an invasion which split society into an ascendant & a subjected class, the latter producing most of the women, & their indigenous beliefs forming the dark half of the culture.  Thus Egypt; thus India; thus the North, where Grimm’s & Margaret Murray’s reconstructions of the submerged cult merge. [The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, CW 9, 268–9]

Alberto Manguel: “The Blind Bookkeeper”

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

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

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

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

POSTED BY: Salvatore Difalco

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

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

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

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

Notebook 13: Three Lost Sections Recovered

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frye in “The Only Genuine Revolution”:

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

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

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

Frye on Hegel

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latenotebooks

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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