Category Archives: Bob Denham

Frye on Chess

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chess

Cross-posted in the Robert D. Denham Library

Frye often uses chess as an example of a rule‑governed game or set of arbitrary convention, which he likens to the conventions of literature.  But there are more than ninety references to chess scattered throughout his work.  A large number of these speculate on chess as an archetype.  Then there is the cryptic phrase “chess-in-Bardo,” which Frye associates with the theme of ascent and the world of romance––what he calls the Eros archetype.  Solving the “chess-in-Bardo problem,” he writes, “will give some indication of what it means to live in a totally mythical universe” (CW 9, 56).  Frye circles around the “problem” throughout his notebooks, associating chess-in-bardo with the agon or contest, with the recognition scenes in Alice in Wonderland, The Tempest, and Finnegans Wake, and with a vision opposite from that of the dice-throw in Mallarmé (the Adonis archetype).  Michael Dolzani’s reading of the chess-in-bardo problem focuses on its associations with the agon and the recognition.  See his Introduction, in CW 9, liv–lv.

By the time he came to write The Secular Scripture (1976) Frye had caught up with the ignis fatuus that he had been tracking since the 1940s.  In that book he provides a clue to the meaning of “chess-in-bardo” in a brief commentary on Alice in Wonderland:

Alice passing through the looking-glass into a reversed world of dream language is also going through a descent. . . . Before long however we realize that the journey is turning upwards, in a direction symbolized by the eighth square of a chessboard, where Alice becomes a Psyche figure, a virginal queen flanked by two older queens, one red and one white, who bully her and set her impossible tasks in the form of nonsensical questions. Cards and dice . . . have a natural connection with themes of descent into a world of fatality; chess and other board games, despite The Waste Land, appear more frequently in romance and in Eros contexts, as The Tempest again reminds us.  As Alice begins to move upward out of her submarine mirror world she notes that all the poems she had heard have to do with fish, and as she wakes she reviews the metamorphoses that the figures around her had turned into. (155–6)

Chess-in-bardo, then, involves a dialectic of two opposing forces: agon and anagnorisis, choice and chance, descent and ascent.  Neither of the opposite forces can abolish the other, for each has “its own centre” (CW 9, 288), as in the magic of Prospero and its renunciation.  Frye says that The Tempest leans in the direction of chess-in-bardo (CW 9, 340).  But at the same time, chess-in-bardo appears to be related to reversal, as in the ascent of Alice.  “Chess in Bardo?  Is it a modulation of dice in Bardo?” Frye asks.  “A chess move is a decisive choice that may not abolish chance, but sets up a train of consequences that forces it to retreat into the shadows” (CW 5, 318).  Chance may never completely disappear in chess, but each move works toward an eventual reversal.  The entry in Notebook 50 following the one just quoted appears to be related: “Perhaps sacrifice is the carrying out of death in reverse, identification through death to union with God–well, obviously it’s that.  This identity with death turns into an identity across death” (CW 5, 318).  This is another way of describing the movement from death to rebirth in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

But there are other meanings that attach themselves to chess in Frye’s writings, as can be seen in the passages that follow.

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“The Perennial Philosophy”

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perennialphilosophy

One of Frye’s primary sources for mystical texts was Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, where he found his “oft-thought good ideas well-expressed as well as [his] bad ones” (CW 13, 24).  The philosophia perennis, a phrase popularized by Leibnitz, was for Huxley the timeless and universal ground of all Being––what he calls “the divine Reality.”  Metaphysically, the divine Reality underlies everything in the world, including human minds.  Psychologically, it is the same thing as the soul.  Ethically, the ultimate end of the human enterprise is to be found in the immanent and transcendent ground of Being.  Huxley proposes that this ground of Being in all religions is one and the same and that it constitutes the essential core of each religion.  His book, which Frye read shortly after it was published in 1945 (New York: Harper), is an anthology of selections from the tradition of the philosophia perennis, sandwiched between Huxley’s commentary. What follows are Frye’s notebook entries that refer to the perennial philosophy.  For an account of Frye’s reading of Huxley, see Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World, pp. 176–80.

 

Thus, without losing its specific historical orientation through Judaism and Christianity, the Bible is an archetypal model of a perennial philosophy or everlasting gospel.  At least, that’s what I’d call it if I were writing a book on religion.  We really do move from creation to recreation. (CW 5, 28)

I have an old note about eros and logos, creation by desire and creation by the Word.  It may be linked with another which quotes Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy as saying that the soul is female and the spirit male.  Note that the new heaven and the new earth is the real Tao, yang & yin in perfect balance. (CW 5, 10)

Wisdom in the Bible is an outgrowth of Torah, instruction, the completion of the knowledge of good and evil in its genuine form.  Biblical wisdom is not just wisdom, not the wisdom of Egypt or Sumeria, any more than its Yahweh is Ptah or Enki.  It has affinities, of course, but not to the point of blurring its identity.  That’s why Hebrew wisdom develops dialectically into prophecy, which again is Biblical prophecy, not Zoroaster or Tiresias prophecy.  All religions are one, not alike: a metaphorical unity of different things, not a bundle of similarities.  In that sense there is no “perennial philosophy”: that’s a collection, at best, of denatured techniques of concentration.  As doctrine, it’s platitude: moral maxims that have no application.  What there is, luckily, is a perennial struggle. (CW 5, 110)

In the third lecture I want to proceed from the gospel to the Everlasting Gospel, and yet without going in the theosophic direction of reconciliation or smile-of-a-fool harmony.  The synoptics make Jesus distinguish himself from the Father, as not yet more than a prophet: it’s in the “spiritual” gospel of John that he proclaims his own divinity.  (That’s approximately true, though one has to fuss and fuddle in writing it out.)  Yet John is more specifically and pointedly “Christian” than the synoptics: the direction is from one spokesman of the perennial philosophy and a unique incarnation starting a unique event.  Buddhism and the like interpenetrate with the Everlasting Gospel: they are to be reconciled with it.  I don’t quite yet know what I mean. (CW 6, 618–19)

Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy is a book I must keep in touch with: my point about the soul as female & the spirit as male (p. 174) is there in full force. (CW 13, 360)

The second stage is the mind’s withdrawal from creation into the death-consciousness of contemplation and observation.  God here becomes a first cause and (as in St. Thomas) a clearing-house of absolute terms—essence, being omni- this and that.  Here everything is focussed on the judgement that accompanies death, which in turn is the inevitable consequence of an act of creation, a making of the world.  As it proceeds, its one God becomes less personal, & the stage ends in “Thou art That” mysticism, the so-called perennial philosophy.  It starts with a personal Creator & ends in a “hid divinity,” a God beyond God. (CW 13, 100)

The third, as I now see, is an essay on the typology of the Bible leading up to the question of what comparative religion compares, or, what does religion as a whole say, when considered, not as religio or social observance, or as symbolism, which doesn’t say anything, but as doctrine, in the sense of an imaginative vision which is also existential and committed?  I don’t believe in a “perennial philosophy,” but there is something here. (CW 13, 110)

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“A New Handbook of Literary Terms”

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From the preface to A New Handbook of Literary Terms by David Mikics (Yale University Press, 2007)

An ideal bibliography should include older, respected works that continue to shape our sense of what criticism can to. Auerbach’s Mimesis, first published in Switzerland in 1946, is still the indispensable book on realism. Mimesis is referred to repeatedly here, as is Northrop Frye’s definitive Anatomy of Criticism (1957), the best treatment of genre. Frye, like Auerbach, opened up a whole new world for criticism with his book, which continues to be central to literary study fifty years after it was written. A student who wants a sure grounding in literary history, and at the same time an exhilarating experience of criticism at the height of his powers, would do well to read Mimesis and Anatomy of Criticism—along with other synoptic and original works like James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of the Faerie Queene, Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, Geoffrey Hartman’s Beyond Formalism, Martin Price’s To the Palace of Wisdom, Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel, Ronald Paulson’s Satire and the Novel, Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image, and William Empson’s Some Versions of the Pastoral. Curtius’ European Literature the Latin Middle Ages remains the essential guide to the topoi that engage medieval and Renaissance literature. These fourteen books, some of them published as long ago as the 1930s (Empson), provide the background and assumptions for much later work. Some more recent volumes, like Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, share the ambitions and innovative character of those I have just listed. The Handbook takes care not to slight younger critics—there are quite a few references from the new, twenty-first century—but I have emphasized those books that have already stood the test of time.

Frye Alert

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london-hayward-gallery-0906-de

A notice from The Hayward Gallery, London, 28 May 2010:

The British Art Show Prelude
Three of Britain’s most exciting emerging artists–Roger Hiorns, Phoebe Unwin, Mick Peter–the Turner Prize-nominated artist, the painter and the sculptor use Northrop Frye’s model of seasons/genre to explore some issues in contemporary British art. Chaired by Tom Morton and Lisa Lefeuvre, Curators of British Art Show 7.

Frye in Court

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60yearslater

Frye is called on in a 2009 amicus curiae brief in a case against Frederik Coulting by J.D. Salinger, who had asserted that Coulting’s book, 60 Years Later, “infringes [his] copyright rights in . . . the character Holden Caulfield.”  (Frye’s remarks on Salinger in an earlier post here.)

In the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

__________________________________

J.D. SALINGER, individually and as trustee of the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v. FREDRIK COLTING, writing under the name John David California, WINDUPBIRD PUBLISHING LTD., NICOTEXT A.B. and ABP, INC., doing business as SCB Distributors, Inc.,

Defendants-Appellants.

On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York

BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE PUBLIC CITIZEN, INC.

“That ability to “build freely upon the ideas” in others’ work is essential to First Amendment protection because even the most creative or artistic activity depends on the ability to borrow from what has gone before.  “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.” Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 97 (1957). As Frye put it, we have inherited “a literature which includes Chaucer, much of whose poetry is translated or paraphrased from others; Shakespeare, whose plays sometimes

follow their sources almost verbatim; and Milton, who asked for nothing better than to steal as much as possible out of the Bible” (p. 16 of the brief).

Frye on “Space and Shape Pollution”

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selectedletters

The Saunterer — aka H. Charles Romesburg, Professor of Environment and Society, Utah State University — cites Frye from the recently released Northrop Frye: Selected Letters on urban “space and shape pollution” in a March 9th, 1970 letter to A. E. Parr:

I have been living in Toronto for forty years, have seen it change from a quite habitable town to the usual wilderness of freeways and highrise apartment buildings, and consequently I have experienced something of what you call the realities of sentiment and nostalgia.  I am quite convinced that space and shape pollution is quite as important a social problem as noice and dirt.  (Northrop Frye: Selected letters, 1934 – 1991. McFarland Publishers, 2009)

You can read the full post here.  Take some time to browse around the blog.  It’s worth the effort.

Frye and G. Wilson Knight

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g wilson knight

 

 

G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985) was professor of English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, in the 1930s; he returned to Britain in 1941, where he taught at the University of Leeds until 1962; his main interest was Shakespeare, many of whose plays he produced and acted in; his best‑known book, Wheel of Fire, was published in 1930.  What follows are the references to Knight in Frye’s writing:

 

1. There’s a series of New Directions studies on “Makers of Modern Literature,” by Harry Levin on Joyce, very well reviewed, & now one by David Daiches on Woolf, said to be not so good.  Wilson Knight is producing another book, this time on Milton.[1] A new Simenon translated, two stories again.  He’s so good that his stories don’t even depend for their interest on the puzzle. [Diaries]

2. Well, Crane’s third lecture was a little easier to follow: more names and historical connections.  But his relativism and pluralism are breaking down into an Aristotle (and Crane) contra mundum attitude.  Everybody’s in the other camp—the camp where poetry is treated as a form of discourse.  Now I’ve lost Aristotle: I don’t understand how he’s distinguishable from this.  Anyway, the discourse people include the Latin rhetoricians, the medieval people, the critics of the Renaissance who thought they were Aristotelians but weren’t, the romantics, and the romantic tradition extending to the new critics & the myth critics.  The last group includes Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Francis Ferguson, Wilson Knight, and me.  [Diaries]

3. King Lear attempts to achieve heroic dignity through his position as a king and father, and finds it instead in his suffering humanity: hence it is in King Lear that we find what has been called the “comedy of the grotesque,”[2] the ironic parody of the tragic situation, most elaborately developed.  [Anatomy of Criticism, 237]

4. But he was quickly bored if the conversation ran down in gossip or trivialities. The personnel at his parties naturally changed over the course of years, but from Bertram Brooker and Wilson Knight in the 1930s to Marshall McLuhan and Douglas Grant in the 1960s, he never wavered in his affection for friends who could talk, and talk with spirit, content, and something to say. [“Ned Pratt: The Personal Legend”]

5. There were many little magazines and attempts at experimental theatre (I can’t answer for the dance groups, of which as I remember there were several), but they fought hard and died quickly—all but the unique and miraculous Canadian Forum, which a dozen university staff members, then as now, worked hard to keep going and up to standard. A few rumours also seeped through from other colleges, of how Wilson Knight at Trinity had revolutionized the study of Shakespeare, of how Gilbert Norwood had written of Classical drama with a sophisticated knowledge of the modern stage, of Charles Cochrane’s mighty struggle with Christianity and Classical Culture. [“Autopsy of a Old Grad’s Grievance,” in Northrop Frye on Education]

6. Surrey, however, established a new pentameter line for his century. Its prestige captured Spenser, who had begun with accentual experiments and contrapuntal singing-matches, but for his epic moved away from musical rhythms, as Milton moved toward them. Shakespeare, however, and most Elizabethan drama with him, grew steadily swifter in movement, breaking out of the line into galloping recitativos, with the diction becoming sharper and more dissonant, the imagery grimmer and more sombre, the thought more tangled and obscure—in short, more musical in every way. The use of music by Shakespeare, however, is outside our scope: his musical accompaniments and imagery have been dealt with, notably by Granville Barker and Wilson Knight, but such features as the contrapuntal construction of King Lear have yet to be analysed.  [“Music in Poetry”]

7. This inductive movement towards the archetype is a process of backing up, as it were, from structural analysis, as we back up from a painting if we want to see composition instead of brushwork. In the foreground of the grave-digger scene in Hamlet, for instance, is an intricate verbal texture, ranging from the puns of the first clown to the danse macabre of the Yorick soliloquy, which we study in the printed text. One step back, and we are in the Wilson Knight and Spurgeon group of critics, listening to the steady rain of images of corruption and decay. [“Archetypes of Literature”]

8. The inductive studies of the recurring imagery of King Lear by Wilson Knight and Caroline Spurgeon have, for me at least, gone a long way to illuminate this meaning, and I think a careful comparison of the different contexts in which such words as “nature” and “nothing” appear would do a good deal more. [Review of Critics and Criticism]

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Texts for a Fire Sermon

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PhoenixBird

A bobbin, vortex, whirling gyre,

The tongues ascend, a silent choir,

A phoenix trope for pure desire.

The painter sees as flames aspire

The anagram of Frye is Fyre.

As for the theft of fire, many of the stories put the source of fire in the under world, where the sun is at night, so that when the thief of fire returns he is also the rising sun.  [Notebook 7.22]

There’s the Paravritti, the Beulah-Eden vortex through the ray of fire which opens out into the mystic rose. [Notebook 7.33]

Engineering metaphors or thought models start of course with fire and the wheel.  One gives metaphors of spark, scintilla, energy & the like: most of our organism metaphors take off from it.  [Notebook 18.10]

In the Great Doodle (apocalyptic) the spiritual world is (a) the fire-world of heavenly bodies (b) the lower heaven or sky.  Hence it is normally (a) red with the seraphim (b) blue with the cherubim.  Blue & white mean virginity, red & white love; red white & green is the point of epiphany. [Notebook 18.98]

Whenever Eros got into the Xn trdn. [Christian tradition] (Inge has it in his book on mysticism) Eros (not Cupid) is certainly a Gentile type of Christ, and Prometheus of the Spirit.  Fire seems right; it’s what the gyre kindles.  Try to think about Abraham’s furnace; fire descending to the altar (less Elijah than Chronicles), the three “children” (magi?) in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace [Daniel 3].  Blake certainly thought Los’s furnaces had something.  Smart on Abraham’s.  Speaking of magi, they should have been women, as they’re antitypes of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon. [Notebook 27.147]

Man is asleep and fantasizing in the ladder, garden and seed worlds.  His central activity there is quest, the projection of Word into Deed that enables him to go on sleeping.  In the fire world he’s compelled to wake up, hence the first thing he does is withdraw the quest.  [Notebook 27.188]

What the released flame of Prometheus illuminates is, among other things, the true ladder as the four phases of meaning.  The flame, by the way, has to include the occult link between the living fire & the warm-blooded organism I mentioned in GC [The Great Code, 161-2]. [Notebook 27.190]

The fire-chapter should include, first of all, Little Gidding and the two Byzantium poems.  SB [Sailing to Byzantium] is a panoramic apocalypse: every state of the chain of being appears on fire as nature is destroyed & the artifice of eternity replaces it.  Byzantium burns from the inside.  Note how intensely Heraclitean both Eliot & Yeats get when they enter the fire. [Notebook 27.250]

What’s the Biblical setup?  I think it’s polarized between the first coming of Christ in water and his second coming in fire. [Notebook 27.259]

To go from the ladder-garden world to the ark-flame one, think of going from Ash-Wednesday to the Quartets, from The Tower to A Vision (if only Yeats had got the vision!).  Note that I was first attracted to archetypal criticism by Colin Still’s book on The Tempest, with its central conception of the ladder of elements, a conception going back to the pre-Socratics.  Heraclitus says there’s an exchange of “fire” and of “all things,” as there is of “gold” for “wares.”  That’s something to chew on.  [Notebook 27.263]

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Frye’s 100 Chapter Book

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fryelevine

Several weeks back Michael Happy asked me if it would be possible to reconstruct a three‑dimensional diagram of Frye’s Great Doodle, the intricate and grand schematic of the alphabet of forms that figured so importantly in his design for his aborted “third book.”  I replied that I didn’t think so because it would be too complex.  What is the Great Doodle?

Frye writes at one point that he’s not revealing what the Great Doodle is because he does not really know (CW 23, 76–77), but his frequent references to it reveal that it is primarily his symbolic shorthand for the monomyth.  Originally he conceived of the Great Doodle as “the cyclical quest of the hero” (CW 9, 214) or “the underlying form of all epics” (CW 9, 241).  But as he began to move away from strictly literary terms toward both religious language and the language of Greek myth and philosophy, another pattern developed, one with an east-west axis of Nous-Nomos and a north-south axis of Logos-Thanatos.  At this point the Great Doodle took on an added significance, becoming a symbolic shorthand for what he called the narrative form of the Logos vision: “the circular journey of the Logos from Father to Spirit” (CW 9, 260) or “the total cyclical journey of the incarnate Logos” (CW 9, 201).  But the Great Doodle is never merely a cycle.  Its shape requires also the vertical axis mundi and the horizontal axis separating the world of innocence and experience.  These axes, with their numerous variations, produce the four quadrants that are omnipresent in Frye’s diagrammatic way of thinking.  In Notebook 7 he refers to the quadrants as part of the Lesser Doodle (CW 23, 76), meaning only that the quadrants themselves are insufficient to establish the larger geometric design of the Great Doodle.

But the Great Doodle has still further elaborations.  In the extensive notes he made for his Norton Lectures at Harvard (The Secular Scripture) Frye remarks self-referentially that in book 14 of Longfellow’s Hiawatha the heroine “invents picture-writing, including the Great Doodle of Frye’s celebrated masterpieces.”  The reference is to Hiawatha’s painting on birch bark a series of symbolic and mystic images: the egg of the Great Spirit, the serpent of the Spirit of Evil, the circle of life and death, the straight line of the earth, and other ancestral totems in the great chain of being. Frye elaborates his Great Doodle in a similar way, the Hiawathan “shapes and figures” becoming for him points of epiphany at the circumference of the circle––what he twice refers to as beads on a string (CW 9, 241, 245).  The beads are various topoi and loci along the circumferential string. They can be seen as stations where the questing hero stops in his journey or as the cardinal points of a circle.  Frye even overlays one form of the Logos diagram with the eight trigrams of the I Ching, saying that they “can be connected with my Great Doodle” (CW 9, 209), and one version of the Great Doodle recapitulates what he refers to throughout his notebooks as “the Revelation diagram,” the intricately designed chart that he passed out in his course “Symbolism in the Bible.”

The Great Doodle, then, is a representation, though a hypothetical one, that contains the large schematic patterns in Frye’s memory theater: the cyclical quest with its quadrants, cardinal points, and epiphanic sites; and the vertical ascent and descent movements along the chain of being or the axis mundi.  It contains as well all the lesser doodles that Frye creates to represent the diagrammatic structure of myth and metaphor and that he frames in the geometric language of gyre and vortex, center and circumference.  (See Michael Dolzani’s exposition of the Great Doodle in his introduction to The “Third Book” Notebooks.)

Frye drew scores of diagrams in his notebooks but never one for the Great Doodle.  And, as I say, it seems practically impossible to in include all the features of Great Doodle in a single diagram, even a two‑dimensional one.  But Michael Happy’s question got me to thinking about Notebook 11f, which dates from 1969–70, where Frye toys with the idea of constructing a book of one hundred sections, which are clearly a part of the Great Doodle.  Here are his initial musings about this scheme:

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