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Frye on Leonard Cohen

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q

“Hallelujah,” performed live in London during Cohen’s recent world tour

At 75 Leonard Cohen remains a potent cultural force: his song “Hallelujah” has become something of a universal hymn over the last decade or so, and has been covered many times by people like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Jeff Buckley, John Cale, k. d. lang, Rufus Wainwright — as well as by a handful of American Idol contestants looking to up their game.  Below is a selection of Frye’s comments on Cohen’s work, beginning when he first appeared on the scene with Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956).

Leonard Cohen, Let Us Compare Mythologies (McGill Poetry Series; [Toronto:] Contact Press) is the first in a series of books featuring McGill poets, which we owe, as we owe so much, to the generous enthusiasm of Louis Dudek. The poems are of very unequal merit, but the book as a whole is a remarkable production. The erotic poems follow the usual convention of stacking up thighs like a Rockette chorus line, and for them Mr. Cohen’s own phrase, “obligations, the formalities of passion,” is comment enough. But it is an excess of energy rather than a deficiency of it that is his main technical obstacle. Sometimes moods and images get tangled up with each other and fail to come through to the reader, or allusions to books or paintings distract the attention and muffle the climax, as in Jingle. In short, this book has the normal characteristics of a good first volume.

To come to his positive qualities, his chief interest, as indicated in his title, is mythopoeic. The mythologies are Jewish, Christian, and Hellenistic. The Christian myth is seen as an extension of the Jewish one, its central hanged god in the tradition of the martyred Jew (“Saviors”), and Hellenism is the alien society which Christianity has come to terms with and Judaism has not. The mythical patterns of the Bible provide some of the paradigms of his imagery:

The sun is tangled

in black branches

raving like Absalom

between sky and water,

struggling through the dark terebinth

to commit its daily suicide.

Other mythical figures, such as the femme fatale at the centre of Letter, Story, and Song of Patience, and the dying god of Elegy, are of white‑goddess and golden‑bough provenance. Mr. Cohen’s outstanding poetic quality, so far, is a gift for macabre ballad reminding one of Auden, but thoroughly original, in which the chronicles of tabloids are celebrated in the limpid rhythms of folksong. The grisly Halloween Poem, with its muttering prose glosses, is perhaps the most striking of these, but there is also a fine mythopoeic Ballad beginning “My lady was found mutilated,” which starts with a loose free verse idiom and at the end suddenly concentrates into quatrains. The song beginning My lover Peterson is simpler but equally effective, and so is another disturbing news item called Warning. In Lovers he achieves the improbable feat of making a fine dry sardonic ballad out of the theme of a pogrom. No other Canadian poet known to me is doing anything like this, and I hope to see more of it-‑from Mr. Cohen, that is. [“Letters in Canada”]

Once technique reaches a certain degree of skill, it turns into something that we may darkly suspect to be fun: fun for the writer to display it, fun for the reader to watch it. In the old days we were conditioned to believe that only lowbrows read for fun, and that highbrows read serious literature to improve their minds. The coming of radio did a good deal to help this morbid situation, and television has done something (not enough) more. We now live in a time when Leonard Cohen can start out with an erudite book of poems called Let Us Compare Mythologies, the chief mythologies being the Biblical and the Classical, and evolve from there, quite naturally, into a well‑known folk singer. [“Conclusion” to Literary History of Canada]

The verbal wit that comes through in, say, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, in some of Needham’s essays (see Mr. Conron’s article), in the concrete poets, is a sign of the presence of seriousness and not the absence of it, the serious being the opposite of the solemn.  [“Conclusion” to Literary History of Canada]

A parenthetical remark in Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers links a similar feeling of guilt to the colonial mentality of Canadians: “Some part of the Canadian Catholic mind is not certain of the Church’s victory over the Medicine Man. No wonder the forests of Quebec are mutilated and sold to America.” [“Haunted by Lack of Ghosts”]

While I was reviewing English Canadian poetry during the fifties, I noticed how many of the best people were turning erudite, allusive, even academic. I felt that this indicated the growth of an unforced and relaxed sense of a cultural tradition, one which could now be absorbed instead of merely imitated or echoed. Of course all the anxieties listed above were still in the air, and I was widely regarded as encouraging a new form of inhibited provincialism. But what I saw in, for example, Leonard Cohen’s Let Us Compare Mythologies, Jay Macpherson’s The Boatman, Margaret Avison’s Winter Sun, James Reaney’s Suit of Nettles seemed to me an attitude to cultural tradition that looked forward rather than back.  [“Culture as Interpenetration”]

Quote of the Day

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anxiety

“I do not recall reading any literary criticism, as opposed to literary biography, until I was an undergraduate. At seventeen I purchased Northrop Frye’s study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, soon after its publication. What Hart Crane was to me at ten, Frye became at seventeen, an overwhelming experience. Frye’s influence on me lasted twenty years but came tumbling down on my thirty-seventh birthday, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, “The Covering Cherub or Poetic Influence.” Six years later, that had evolved into The Anxiety of Influence, a book Frye rightly rejected, from his Christian Platonist stance. Now, at seventy-eight, I would not have the patience to reread anything by Frye but I possess almost all of Hart Crane by memory, recite much of it daily and continue teaching him. I came to value other contemporary critics—Empson and Kenneth Burke particularly—but have now dispensed with reading them also. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Walter Pater, Emerson, Oscar Wilde I go on reading as I do the poets.”

Harold Bloom, “The Point of View for My Work as a Critic: A Dithyramb.”  The Hopkins Review 2, no. 1 (Winter 2009), New Series: 28–48.

“The Key to all Mythology”

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mythologies

I

In one of the notebooks for his first Bible book Frye writes, “For at least 25 years I’ve been preoccupied by the notion of a key to all mythologies. I used to call this the ‘Druid analogy,’ & its components included Atlantis, reincarnation, cyclical symbolism.  But surely that’s all in the Bible, & the Bible as is (Atlantis-flood, reincarnation = historical repetition, etc.).  I think I have to make this book [The Great Code] the key to mythologies” (CW 13, 198).  By “Druid analogy” Frye means the religious myths and rituals of natural religion in its most primitive forms.  In another of his Bible notebooks he calls it the “pagan synthesis,” which is an analogy to the Biblical and Christian mythology.

In Fearful Symmetry Frye speaks of the myths of inspired bards of the ancient Druid civilization and the earlier myth of Atlantis, combined with the myths of the giant Albion and of Ymir, as containing “the key to all mythologies, or at least to the British and Biblical ones” (CW 14, 178).

In The “Third Book” Notebooks Frye writes that “Part One of this book, the Book of Luvah, to some extent recapitulates AC [Anatomy of Criticism] by taking the mythos of romance as the key to all mythical structure.  This incorporates the epic & the sentimental-romance speculations that got squeezed out of AC.  From here one could go either into Urizen, speculative mythology in metaphysics and religion, by way of Dante & the church’s thematic stasis of the Bible & the Druid analogy, or (as I favor now) into the applied mythology of contracts & Utopias (Tharmas) by way of Rousseau, William Morris,  & various second-twist prose forms, including those of St. Augustine. (CW 9, 63)

Frye made a valiant effort to provide a key to all mythology, trying to fit everything into what he called the Great Doodle, which was primarily his symbolic shorthand for the monomyth.  Originally Frye conceived of the Great Doodle as “the cyclical quest of the hero” (CW 9, 214) or “the underlying form of all epics” (ibid., 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” (ibid., 260) or “the total cycli­cal journey of the incarnate Logos” (ibid., 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, 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 (par. 190), mean­ing only that the quadrants themselves are insufficient to establish the larger geometric design of the Great Doodle.

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” (Notes on Romance, weblog).  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 (CW 5, 416) or as the cardinal points of a circle (CW 9, 147–8, 159, 177, 198, 200, 204, 249, 254).  Frye even over lays one form of the Logos diagram with the eight trigrams of the I Ching, saying that they “can be connected with my Great Doodle” (ibid., 209), and one version of the Great Doodle recapitulates what he refers to throughout his notebooks as “the Revelation diagram” (CW 13, 193), the intricately designed chart that Frye passed out in his Bible course.

The Great Doodle, then, is a representation, though a hypothetical one, that contains the large schematic patterns in Frye’s memory theatre: the cyclical quest with its quadrants, cardinal, and epiphanic points; and the vertical ascent and descent movements along the chain of being or the axis mundi. It contains as well all of 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, centre and circumference.

There are other large frameworks that structure Frye’s imaginative uni­verse, such as the eight-book fantasy—the ogdoad—that he invokes re­peatedly throughout his career, or the Hermes-Eros-Adonis-Prometheus (HEAP) scheme that begins in Notebook 7 (late 1940s) and dominates the notebook landscape of Frye’s last decade.  The ogdoad, which Michael Dolzani has definitively explained (“The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye’s Notebooks,” in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky [Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999], 19–38), is fundamentally a conceptual key to Frye’s own work, though it is related in a slippery and often vague way to the Great Doodle.  The HEAP scheme, in its half-dozen variations, is clearly used to define the quadrants of the Great Doodle, and there are countless other organizing devices, serving as Lesser Doodles, that Frye draws from alchemy, the zodiac, musical keys, colours, the chess board, the omnipresent “four kernels” (commandment, aphorism, oracle, and epiphany), the shape of the human body, Blake’s Zoas, Jung’s personality types, Bacon’s idols, the boxing of the compass by Plato and the Romantic poets, the greater arcana of the Tarot cards, the seven days of Creation, the three stages of religious awareness, numerological schemes, and so on.

All of these schematic formulations are a part of the key to all mythologies.  But where did they come from?  The came, of course, from Frye’s extensive knowledge of the literary tradition, the myths of literature arranging themselves in his expansive memory theater.  But they also came from Frye’s reading of the mythographers.

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Quote of the Day

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doublevision

“A glance at the human situation around us reveals war, famine, arbitrary acts of injustice and exploitation, violence, crime, collapse of moral standards, and so on almost indefinitely.  Even in prosperous countries a spiritual barrenness produces innumerable acts of ferocity and despair . How does human life of this kind differ from life in hell?  Hell is often supposed to be an after-death state created by God in which people are eternally tortured for finite offences.  But this doctrine is merely one more example of the depravity of the human mind that thought it up.  Man alone is responsible for hell, and much as he would like to pursue his cruelties beyond the grave, he is blocked from doing so.  God’s interest in this hell is confined to “harrowing” or redeeming those who are in it.  At the same time there are honesty, love, neighbourliness, generosity, and the creative powers in the arts and sciences.  Human life appears to be a mingling of two ultimate realities, which we call heaven and hell.  Hell is the world created by man, and heaven, or at least the way to it, is the world created through man by God.”

Frye, The Double Vision (CW 4, 230)

More Frye on “Literature as Therapy”

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doctorisin

In his Late Notebooks Frye provided two glosses for his talk to the doctors at Mt. Sinai Hospital, “Literature as Therapy,” which Frye delivered from notes rather than from a manuscript:

When I talked to the doctors at Mt. Sinai I found myself improvising a thesis I didn’t understand at the time. I said the sympathies and antipathies in nature that underlay Galenic medicine don’t exist as that, but similar forces may exist in the mind. I thought of mother after a post-parturitional disease following Vera’s birth: she had what sounded (ironic for a woman who never touched a drop of alcohol in her life) just like delirium tremens. She said that reading Scott’s novels, dropped on her by my grandfather, brought her round. Scott in those days was the acme of serious secular reading. What I felt was that the plots of formulaic fiction conventions could act as a sort of counter-delirium. Similarly the Old Testament God may be a counter delirium to a nation trampled on by foreigners. I know how vague this sounds, but there’s something that may emerge. (Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World, CW 6:673–4).

I told the doctors about mother & Scott’s novels, suggesting that romance creates a counter-delirium. We don’t buy Galen’s sympathies and antipathies any more: they don’t exist in nature (amethysts for drunks, saffron for jaundice, etc.). But they may exist in the reality-realism metaphorical-objective context. The confrontation technique in the casting out of a humor. Jonson, Shakespeare’s TS [The Taming of the Shrew], the Fool-Edgar in Lear. My point in the Lear lecture about words fighting evil (my 1940 experience with Churchill) at the centre of the words-and-power conflict (Late Notebooks, CW 5:243–4)

More on Reagan

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NA.0210.Reagan37

Further to Joe’s post, more Frye on Reagan:

Of course it takes some effort to become more self-observant, to acquire historical sense and perspective, to understand the limitations that have been placed on human power by God, nature, fate, or whatever. It was part of President Reagan’s appeal that he was entirely unaware of any change in consciousness, and talked in the old reassuring terms of unlimited progress. But the new response to the patterns of history seems to have made itself felt, along with a growing sense that we can no longer afford leaders who think that acid rain is something one gets by eating grapefruit. I wish I could document this change from recent developments in American culture, but I am running out of both time and knowledge. It seems clear to me, however, that American and Canadian imaginations are much closer together than they have been in the past. (CW 12, 653)

Both Governor Reagan and the local SDS issued statements, and there is a curious similarity in their statements. They both say that the people’s park was a phoney issue, and that the real cause was a conspiracy—the Governor says of hard-core student agitators, the SDS says of right-wing interests operating “probably at the national level.” Both are undoubtedly right, up to a point. There is a hard core of student agitators: one of them was grumbling in the student paper, a day or two before the lid blew off, that “not a goddam thing was happening at Berkeley,” and that something would have to start soon because Chairman Mao himself had said, in one of his great thoughts, that revolution is no child’s play. On the other side, Governor Reagan is clearly staking a very ambitious career on the support of voters who want to have these noisy young pups put in their place once and for all. Both are very pleased with the result: the Governor is visibly admiring his own image as a firm and sane administrator, and the SDS are delighted that the police have “over-reacted” so predictably and helped to “radicalize the moderates.” But the more one thinks about these two attitudes, the clearer it becomes that the militant left and the militant right are not going in opposite directions, even when they fight each other, but in the same direction. For both the Governor and the SDS, the university is ultimately an obstacle, which will have to be destroyed or transformed into something unrecognizable if their ambitions are to be fulfilled. (CW 7, 386-7)

At Berkeley, one sees clearly how the supporters of Governor Reagan and the supporters of SDS are the same kind of people. The radical talks about the thoughts of Chairman Mao, not because he is really so impressed by those thoughts but because he cannot endure the notion of thought apart from dictatorial power. The John Bircher uses slightly different formulas to mean the same thing. In the past week I have seen, and heard about, the most incredible acts of police brutality and stupidity against the students. And yet even this is not one society repressing another, but a single society that cannot escape from its own bungling. Whatever we most condemn in our society is still a part of ourselves, and we cannot disclaim responsibility for it. (ibid., 392)

The Soviet Union is trying to outgrow the Leninist dialectical rigidity, and some elements in the U.S.A. are trying to outgrow its counterpart. But it’s hard: Reagan is the great symbol of clinging to the great-power syndrome, which is why he sounds charismatic even when he’s talking the most obvious nonsense. (CW 5, 398)

BILL MOYERS: I’ve often thought that one of the secrets of Ronald Reagan’s appeal was that he was able to make Americans feel as if we were still the mighty giant of the world, still an empire, even as around the world we were having to retreat from the old presumptions that governed us for the last fifty years. Did you see any of that in the Reagan appeal?
FRYE: Oh yes, very much so. It’s the only thing that explains the Reagan charisma. In fact, I think that what has been most important about Americans since the war is that they have been saying a lot of foolish things—the Evil Empire, for example—but doing all the right ones. I think nobody but Nixon could have organized a deal with China, for example. (CW 24, 893-4)

Frye on Machiavelli

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niccolo-machiavelli_uffizi

Frye taught Machiavelli’s The Prince in English 2i, English Poetry and Prose, 1500–1660.  In his 1949 Diary he writes about his lecture on The Prince: “I’m clarifying my view of a militant organization as pyramidal.  In Machiavelli all peacetime activities are geared to a war economy, of course: it’s a state militant as the Roman Catholic Church is a Church militant” (CW 8, 91).   About a later lecture on Castiglione, he writes, the “lecture said very little except to point out the Prince-Courtier link, & link Machiavelli’s doctrine that appearance (e.g. of virtue) is essential in government with Castiglione’s similar doctrine of the continuous epiphany of culture” (ibid., 98).  Three years later at a party for R.S. Crane, where Frye reports on snippets of the conversation, he says “I said Machiavelli’s Prince, if he had a courtier to advise him, wouldn’t draw Castiglione’s Courtier: he’d get something more like Ulysses, full of melancholy Luciferian knowledge of good & evil, of time & the chain of being” (ibid., 562).

In Elizabethan society Machiavelli became, as Frye says in Fools of Time, “a conventional bogey” in Renaissance drama (20).  The Machiavellian villain is, in Frye’s taxonomy of characterization in Anatomy of Criticism, the tragic counterpart of the vice or tricky slave of comedy.  Examples of this “self-starting principle of malevolence” are Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear, along with Bosola in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (CW 22, 202).  The Machiavellian villain “often acts without motivation, from pure love of evil” (“Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy”).  In his Notebooks on Renaissance Literature Frye has several references to this unmotivated, automomous principle of evil that makes the villain Machiavellian (CW 29, 130, 144, 275, 278).

The virtues of the prince are force, courage, and cunning.  Frye never tires of pointing out that these are not moral virtues but tactical virtues based on the art of illusion.  This means that for the prince his virtue is not actually virtue at all but only seems to be—a public relations enterprise.  What the prince has to do is pretend to exhibit these virtues.  Appearance becomes more important than reality, and so the prince is like a character in a play—one who puts on a mask.  Frye often contrasts Machiavelli’s view of the prince with Castiglione’s of the courtier (see, e.g., CW 23, 35; CW 7, 266–73, 528; CW 5, 178–9, 232; CW 27, 204; CW 13, 105; CW 20, 171; Myth and Metaphor, 292).  He gives the most extended account of the differences in his essay on Castiglione:

We have derived two words from the metaphor of the masked actor: hypocrite and person.  The former contains a moral value judgment, the latter does not.  If we compare Castiglione on the courtier with Machiavelli on the prince, we see a remarkable parallel: both are constantly on view: what they are seen to do is, socially speaking, what they are; their reputations are the most important part of their identity, and their functional reality is their appearance.  The difference is that Machiavelli’s prince, being the man who must make the decisions, must accept the large element of hypocrisy involved; must understand how and why the reputation for virtue is more important for him than the hidden reality of virtue.  It is essential for the prince to be reputed liberal, Machiavelli says, though he is probably better off if in reality he saves his money.  For the courtier, whose social function is ornamental rather than operative, the goal is an appearance which has entirely absorbed the reality, a persona or mask which is never removed even when asleep. In regard to women, we are told that men “. . . sempre temono essere dall’arte ingannati” (1.40) [bk. 1, sec. 40?], that is, of being manipulated. For the prince manipulation is essential; for the courtier it is not. (“Il Cortegiano”).

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Two Previously Unpublished Letters [Updated]

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norrie&helen

[Update] These letters are now posted in the Denham Libary under “Previously Unpublished Material” here.

The two letters below from Frye to Helen Kemp regarding his mother Cassie have never been published.

The first letter is undated but it was written sometime during the summer of 1940, when Frye had left Toronto to visit his sick mother in Moncton, NB. Helen, who had accompanied him on a trip to Moncton in July, had returned to their home on Bathurst Street in Toronto.

My pet:

Thanks for your letter.  Nothing much has happened here.  I want to leave soon: I couldn’t leave as long as mother had her bad spell: she was at her worst the day after you left.  She’s getting much better but she won’t have a doctor, and that’s that.  She gives a hundred and fifty different reasons: the house is so dirty she’d be ashamed to have a doctor in, God’s told her to take cod‑liver oil (which we got her), Dad would never pay the bill and we shouldn’t––the whole thing is that she’s got the idea she has cancer, and is afraid to have a doctor tell her so.  Whether she has or not I of course don’t know, not being a doctor, but even if she has the worst thing we could do would be to bring in a doctor over her head.  Dad, however, says she’s had this cancer bug since Vera was a baby.  Her conversation is still a monologue of sickness and death and how many corpses that ghoul Aunt Dolly collected for her accursed boneyard.  Mentally and physically, she’s a hundred years old.

I find Blake difficult here.  Vera writes and says she’s coming to see us at Christmas, bless her heart.  After one look at where they put my Forum article I gave in and got a haircut.  I’ve been trying to locate my dentist, but he seems to have disappeared or joined the army or something.  I drive around with Dad and lift cans of paint around for him––how he manages alone I don’t know.  He hasn’t made any more trips, but talks of going to Toronto this week.  We’ve got to look around and find a girl to come and live here during the winter: if she got her room free it would be well worth it.  Sorry about the cut in the budget––not altogether unexpected, I suppose, and if Baldy is not too much of a born grafter to save on Ent. it perhaps won’t matter much.

There’s a bulky dress bag folded up on top of your suitcase: do you want it?

Dad saw Lichtenberg the other day and tried to tease him by telling him that another builder, a cheap shyster who undercuts his competition and swindles his clients, was tearing the town wide open and getting all sorts of orders.  “Yeh,” said Lichtenberg.  “I hear a rooster crowed like hell all vun morning.  By night his head vass off.”  I love you.

Norrie.

Vera = Frye’s sister

Aunt Dolly = Elthea Howard, eldest sister of Frye’s mother

Forum article = the reference is uncertain but the obvious candidates are “Poetry.” Canadian Forum 20 (July 1940): 125–6, and “War on the Cultural Front.” Canadian Forum 20 (August 1940): 144, 146.

Baldy =  Martin Baldwin = curator and director of the Art Gallery of Toronto

Lichtenberg = Described by Frye in the Diaries as a “good-natured German in Moncton . . .  who had been a peaceful, thrifty, industrious contractor there for thirty years.  For two wars the local Gestapo have cut their teeth on him: when the news is bad or they get tired of reading spy stories they’d go up and practise on him. . . . Dad’s friendship for Lichtenberg has come in for much unfavorable comment in that stinking little kraal Moncton.”

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Quotes of the Day

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First_Folio

“Persona or mask: nothing under it except another persona, but still important to know that we are playing roles.” Holograph note Frye scribbled at the end of a typescript of some notes for a talk.  1991 accession, box 36, file 1.

“As Hamlet proves in its soliloquies, we dramatize ourselves to ourselves even when alone.”  From Frye’s CRTC report.