The latest Frye Festival Newsletter is out and can be read here.
Remember that this year’s Frye Festival is April 19 – 25.
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Reposted with Extensive Links: Update From The Frye Festival
Aberdeen High School, where Frye graduated in 1928, is now Centre Culturel Aberdeen, a place where the francophone community has come together to share in the creation, performance, and exhibition of Acadian art. It’s a nice irony that what was all English in Moncton in the 1920s is now mostly French. In Frye’s time there was no French language high school in Moncton, and the French were thrown into the English system. Several francophones who were students at the time of Frye remember his helping them with their English essays. “He was an uncommonly soft touch,” John Ayre says (p. 43), “for anyone who genuinely wanted help with assignments. […] This was a central character trait quite directly connected with his Methodist background: if someone deserving asked for help, he gave it. It was both a strength and a bedevilment all through his later life.”
The back and forth, the up and down, the ‘creative tension’, between francophone and anglophone communities is what mainly sets Moncton apart. When Frye returned to Moncton in November, 1990, a few months before his death, to give a talk at L’Université de Moncton, he was so pleased to see that Moncton was now home to an institution of higher education of such quality. The auditorium at Edifice Jeanne-de-Valois was completely packed with people thrilled to see the great man’s return. When someone in the audience, hoping to create some linguistic tension of his own, asked Frye if he understood French, Frye replied that he had trouble understanding any language his hearing was so bad. Thus he sidestepped the language issue, which was an issue, perhaps, for just this one person.
Because Moncton is a bilingual city, it’s natural that the Frye Festival, set in Moncton, is bilingual. From the beginning the festival has made every effort to bridge the gap between the language communities. It’s an ever-narrowing gap, with more and more Anglophones learning French and respecting the French fact and most Francophones, while fighting threats to language and culture, perfectly at ease speaking English. Interpenetration has been built into our festival from the beginning. We live and breathe Frye at that level, and practice his approach to conflict.
Alvin Lee: “Northrop Frye’s Thoughts on Translation”
We are continuing to feature papers presented at the Frye Festival over the years. Here we are presenting General Editor of the Collected Works Alvin Lee’s opening remarks to a round table discussion on “Translation: Collaboration or Betrayal?”, delivered in 2002. It has also been added to the journal’s Frye Festival Archive here.
`Northrop Frye’s Thoughts on Translation’
Frye said some important things about translation from one langue to another. He also, in GC chapter 1, borrowed the French term langage, to help him see what kinds of things are expressible in all languages, and so need to be taken into account by all translators of les langues. I’ll try to identify some of what was involved for Frye in each of these two verbal areas.
By langue or ‘tongue’ Frye meant what you and I normally do when we distinguish English from French or Italian, or Hebrew from Greek or Sanskrit, or Chinese from Japanese and Korean. When we speak of language in this sense, we are indicating the words on the actual tongues of a particular people, as they live together and interact in words. Historically many such languages have come to be written down, though many more have not; and so some of the latter have disappeared—perhaps we should say they have never appeared. Most obviously a langue is a complex system of sounds. Frye realized that it is the sound-associations within a language that are the first casualty in translation, even though these `are of immense importance in building up linguistic responses.’ ‘The assonances between words of similar reference, the standard rhymes, the words of multiple meanings that allow for puns, these are all accidents, or, as philologists like to say, “pure” coincidences. Yet they make up a texture that enters into the mental processes of all native speakers of the language.’ This ‘texture, extending as it does to a dense mass of idioms that can often be translated only by a complete rephrasing of the original, helps to make language one of the most fragmented of all human phenomena.’(The Great Code, 4)
Given these facts, said Frye, ‘everyone concerned with language is aware of the extent to which reading a translation is a settling for the second best.’ (4)
News From the Frye Festival
Feeding imaginations for 11 years:
The Frye Festival announces its line-up of 2010 bestsellers!
Canada’s only bilingual international literary festival is heading into its second decade and has again attracted some of the world’s best authors to Moncton. The Festival unveiled its line-up today for the 2010 edition which will be held from April 19-25. These renowned authors will ALL meet with students in their classrooms and auditoriums; they will conduct workshops, participate in on-stage conversations, chat with booklovers in book clubs, and feed imaginations of all ages.
“The Frye Festival has grown and flourished in the last ten years thanks to our many partners, sponsors, volunteers, and a great team. We are set to enter this new decade on excellent footing,” says Festival Chair, Dawn Arnold. “We have been privileged to witness many memorable moments over the last ten years and literature has gained great grounds in our schools, among our youth, and throughout our entire community. There is truly something for everyone at this year’s Festival,” says Arnold.
A Great line-up
Thirty invited authors from Canada and France will take part in the event including three who are currently on national bestseller lists and two who are long-listed for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Heading the bestseller list is Linden MacIntyre, author of the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel The Bishop’s Man. MacIntyre will be joined on stage by Annabel Lyon and Nino Ricci for an evening of English Canadian literature, hosted by journalist and radio broadcaster, Noah Richler (author of This is My Country, What’s Yours?). Annabel Lyon won the 2009 Rogers Writers Trust Award for Fiction for her novel The Golden Mean and Nino Ricci’s most recent novel, The Origin of Species, earned him his second Governor General’s Award for Fiction.
As always, the Festival will feature local New Brunswick authors such as Beth Powning, author of The Sea Captain’s Wife, children’s authors such as Cary Fagan and Nancy Wilcox Richards, and poets such as Christian Bök, winner of the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence for his book Eunoia. Fred Stenson (The Great Karoo) and Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajavo) are also among the invited authors.
On the Francophone side, bridging the two solitudes like no other living Canadian author is the award-winning novelist Daniel Poliquin. Poliquin’s novel A Secret between Us (Douglas & McIntyre 2007, short-listed for the Giller Prize) will be featured in a giant Community Read during the Festival. Daniel Poliquin is the author of nearly a dozen books in French and all have been translated into English. He is also the author of a book on René Levesque which has been nominated for a number of awards. The author is a noted literary translator himself, who has translated many important books into French, including works by Mordecai Richler, Jack Kerouac, and W.O. Mitchell.
Fans will surely be looking forward to meeting and hearing from Guy Gavriel Kay whose books have increasingly blurred the boundaries between history and fantasy. Other invited authors not to miss: Jungian analyst Craig Stephenson; children’s author and performer Jacob Berkowitz; novelist and creative writing professor Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer; folklorist and storyteller Kay Stone; and playwright and poet Robert Moore.
Northrop Frye on Medicine: A Talk to the Doctors at Moncton City Hospital
We are showcasing another paper being added to the Frye Festival Section in our Journal section. This one is by Bob Denham and was delivered at the Frye Festival in April, 2004. It can be found in the Archive here.
Northrop Frye Literary Festival, Moncton, NB, April 2004
It is difficult to imagine a body of accomplishments larger than those of the man who is honored by having his name attached to this festival. His preeminence as a literary theorist, his labors on behalf of Canadian culture, his devoted work as a public servant, his achievements as a teacher at Victoria College for more than sixty years, and of course the massive body of writing that has instructed and delighted us for almost seventy‑five years now—these achievements have been well documented. The written responses to his work—the books and essays and reviews occasioned by his own eloquent prose—require a fairly thick volume just to record, and they have originated on every continent of the globe save Antarctica. No Anglo-American critic has as great an international reputation as Frye. As for his national reputation, five years ago a panel of experts for Maclean’s magazine chose Frye as the second most important Canadian in history?[1] To date there are twenty‑eight books devoted in whole to his work. He has been the subject of international conferences in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Italy, Korea, and China–-in fact twice in China. And there are more than 200 translations of his books into twenty languages. All this bears witness to an accomplishment that even a disinterested observer would have to call monumental.
Whatever one says about Frye will always fall short, and I feel in danger of taking a big fall this noon, for what can one say to a group of doctors as doctors about Northrop Frye. Well, I thought it might be of some interest to call up a few things that relate to the topic of Frye and medicine, which is a topic no one has really talked about much. And then we’ll open up the floor for questions and comments. I doubtless won’t be able to answer your questions, but I am naturally very interested in the kinds of questions you might have about Moncton’s most famous native son. It was as a child in Moncton, incidentally, that Frye, as he records in one of his notebooks, had the fantasy “of becoming a great astronomer & discovering a new planet beyond Neptune that I was going to call Pluto.” This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, except that the fantasy occurred more than a decade before Pluto was actually discovered. I mention this little anecdote to remind us that Frye was a genius. Whether ESP is an aspect of genius, I don’t know.
In any event, Frye and medicine is an interesting subject to think about. The body was a central metaphor in Frye’s criticism, as it was in the work of his great literary hero, William Blake. In editing Frye’s diaries several years back I was struck by Frye’s concern for the health of his own body and psyche. He reveals a great deal through self-analysis, writing about his abnormal fears, his physical insecurity, his self-consciousness, his introversion, his sanguine humour and his dark moods, his claustrophobia and paranoia, his grieving over the death of a colleague, his phobia about animals, and so on. And he writes at length about his various bodily deficiencies and physical ailments: his deviated septum, hay fever attacks, constipation, insomnia, and various states of stupor induced by too much alcohol. He probes his own ego as well, often from a Jungian perspective. I would guess that the details in Frye’s description of his symptoms would provide a fairly good basis for diagnosis.
Jean O’Grady: Re-Valuing Value
This is Jean O’Grady’s first post — and the first paper to be added to our new Frye Festival Archive in the Frye Journal. Jean is the associate editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, published by University of Toronto Press. She gave this paper at the Frye Festival in Moncton in 2007. An expanded version of it appears in Northrop Frye: New Directions From Old, published by University of Ottawa Press.
Sir Edward Elgar, composer of sublime symphonies, concertos, and choral works, found it infuriating to be almost universally identified as the author of the Pomp and Circumstance marches. I suspect that Frye found it similarly irksome, after the publication of his Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, to be known, not for having mightily mapped the literary universe, but as the critic who said that critics shouldn’t make value judgments. Of course he had made it clear that he was talking about the academic critic, the theorist of literature, and not the reviewer in the local newspaper, but still his assertion had been found highly controversial. The polemical introduction to the Anatomy had actually made two points which kept coming back to haunt Frye: first, that criticism was, or should be, a science; and second, that the critic’s function was not to say whether a work of literature was good or bad, successful or unsuccessful, but to tell us what sort of work it was. The two points are in fact related, since Frye was trying to move away from the stereotype of the critic as a gifted amateur of exquisite discrimination who journeyed among the masterpieces, poking disdainfully at the second-rate with his gold cane. Instead, he proposed a survey of all the literature that has been written, highbrow or popular, in fashion or out of fashion, in order to map out its genres, types, and archetypes: this was a structure of knowledge that, just like the sciences and social sciences, could be taught and that each scholar could help to build up. As Frye said in The Well-Tempered Critic, “Without the possibility of criticism as a structure of knowledge, culture . . . would be forever condemned to a morbid antagonism between the supercilious refined and the resentful unrefined” (136).
I first read the Anatomy as a student, in 1962, and I can hardly tell you how exciting and liberating this notion was, along of course with the Anatomy‘s actual demonstration of archetypal patterns, of plot shapes that repeated themselves from Spenser to Harlequin romances, and of the unsuspected interrelations among works. Literature was so much richer and more fascinating when one could start to make connections rather than worrying about one’s possibly bad taste! The book opened up wide vistas of intellectual adventure in my chosen field, and made me feel like a participant in and contributor to a glorious endeavour.
The inclusiveness of the Anatomy, its openness to works of popular literature or of dubious morality, should surely endear Frye to the various types of postmodernist, feminist, or postcolonial critics, who complain that the dominant group or class has defined a “canon” that unfairly excludes some works or makes them marginal. Frye was precisely against singling out what he called a “selected tradition” of great works, which would inevitably turn out to have been written by dead white males. No narrow moral criteria apply in the Anatomy, which contends that “morally the lion lies down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Sade and Jane Austen, . . . all are equally elements of a liberal education” (14). As Frye told Imre Salusinsky in an interview, “The real, genuine advance in criticism came when every work of literature, regardless of its merit, was seen to be a document of potential interest, or value, or insight into the culture of the age”.
Value, as Frye expressed it in this early stage, resides in literature as a whole. As we read, we absorb an imaginative pattern of apocalyptic or demonic imagery and of narratives that fall into the four basic types of comedy, tragedy, romance, or irony; each individual poem or work helps to fill in or reinforce the overall pattern. As Frye put it in The Educated Imagination, “Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time” (39). This total pattern, “the range of articulate human imagination as it extends from the height of imaginative heaven to the depth of imaginative hell” (EI, 44), is what Frye calls “the revelation of man to man”. Such a verbal universe, built up equally by Biblical epics and the most run-of-the-mill adventure stories, provides a model or goal for humankind’s work, thus giving literature a vital role in the building up of civilization.
The Frye Festival Archive in the Northrop Frye Journal
On Monday we will be rolling out a dedicated Frye Festival section in the Frye Journal portion of The Educated Imagination, featuring papers delivered over the years at the annual Frye Festival in Moncton, New Brunswick. (You can register for this year’s Festival here.)
Our first addition to the archive will be Jean O’Grady’s paper, “Re-valuing Value,” delivered in 2007. On Monday we will cross-post it here at the blog as well as in the Journal, as we will do with all papers added to the Frye Festival archive. We’ll try to provide you a steady stream of them in the weeks leading up to this year’s Festival, which runs between April 19th and 25th. Be sure to visit the Festival website here.
Update from the Frye Festival
The Frye Festival is a whirlwind of activity, as anyone who has been here can testify. What started out as a two-day festival is now a week-long, non-stop celebration of the written word. A lot of our effort goes into our School / Youth Program. About 10,000 young people, at all grade levels, get to hear and meet Frye Festival authors. For some of the authors this is old hat, while for others it’s a new and (usually) very rewarding experience. Young people are directly involved in the festival in several other ways, through essay writing contests, volunteering opportunities, and one evening at the festival devoted completely to young writers still in high school – an evening we call ‘Café Underground’. Sometimes our focus on Frye gets a little blurred in all this flurry of activity, but we always come back. (We plan, of course, to come back in a big way in 2012, Frye’s centenary.) Frye, we believe, would whole-heartedly approve of our emphasis on young people and education.
Every year, as I mentioned in a previous post, we schedule two major talks or lectures, the Antonine Maillet – Northrop Frye Lecture and the ‘Frye Symposium’ Lecture. We also schedule three roundtable discussions where festival authors bring fresh insight to ideas and topics that (more often than not) have a fairly direct connection to Frye. We’ve had some remarkable exchanges over the years. My hope is that as we dig deeper into our archives (audio and video recordings, old computer files, etc.) we’ll be able to post some of this material on the blog. I remember, for example, a wonderful prepared statement that Glen Gill read at a roundtable in 2005, on the subject “Myth and Identity: The Role of Myth in Forming a Sense of Identity.” Other panelists on that round table were Jean O’Grady, Yves Sioui-Durand, and Maurizio Gatti. In April, 2000, at our very first roundtable, we asked the panelists (including David Adams Richards, France Daigle, Louise Desjardins, and George Elliott Clarke) to discuss Frye’s statement that “the regional is the real source of the poet’s imagination.” In 2003, with John Ralston Saul as moderator, we explored the topic “Mythology and National Identity,” with authors Bernhard Schlink, Naim Kattan, France Daigle, André Roy, and Joyce Hackett. A crowd of about 200, with the Governor General in attendance, set the room abuzz. After 10 years it’s become clear that our roundtables, relaxed, informal, aimed at the “sophisticated amateurs” in the audience, have become one of the most anticipated features of the festival.
But we’re not always successful in posing the right question or getting the right slant on a particular theme. Sometimes we pose a question that scares the public away, as in 2008, with “The Eros of Reading: Why Some Students Fall in Love with Reading and Others Do Not.” The discussion, with panelists Peter Sanger, Glenna Sloan, Monique Leblanc, and Andy Wainwright, was brilliant, and especially important in the context of New Brunswick’s terrible literacy statistics, but we failed to bring out the audience that it deserved. Sometimes we have a good question and excellent panelists, but they bring such different perspectives that they end up talking past one another. We are working on three roundtables for this April (two months from now!), a little worried that we haven’t got them quite right. We have a title for one of the roundtables (“Stories, and How They Work”) that is broad and vague enough that it might work just fine or might have trouble finding its feet, depending on the moderator and panelists. But with Jean Fugère as moderator, and Linden MacIntyre, Annabel Lyon, and two equally outstanding francophones, we have high hopes. The same is true of our Friday noon roundtable, with Jean Fugère again as moderator. The topic is “Writing Lives and Afterlives” and the panellists will include Nino Ricci, Daniel Poliquin, and Noah Richler. The idea is to explore what happens when fiction writers write biography, bringing the narrative gift to a non-fiction genre. They may end up exploring something very different, of course, much to our surprise and (if we’re lucky) delight.
Last year’s ‘Frye Symposium’ roundtable was on the topic “How Might The Educated Imagination lead us forth into the 21st Century.” Panelists included Jean Wilson, Germaine Warkentin, Serge-Patrice Thibodeau (award-winning Acadian poet and publisher), and Serge Morin (retired philosophy professor who invited Frye to Moncton in the fall of 1990, to give the Pascal Poirier Lecture at L’Université de Moncton). I’ve already posted a copy of Germaine Warkentin’s opening remarks at this roundtable, and I hope to post Serge’s remarks, once I get a better copy. The topic for this year’s symposium roundtable is “Voyaging into the Unknown in Folk Tales and in Dreams” which I think has many Frygian ramifications, not least the life-long obsession with the downward spiral, the cave, the labyrinth, katabasis, etc. Three of the panellists (André Lemelin from Quebec, Kay Stone from Winnipeg, and Ronald Labelle from Moncton) are experts in storytelling and folklore, invited to the festival for a special storytelling event. The 4th panellist, Craig Stephenson, is a Jungian analyst invited to the festival to give a talk on Jung and Frye.
Any suggestions for improving, changing, revamping any of these 2010 roundtable titles and topics would be welcome, these next few weeks. A press conference to announce the authors and draft program for 2010 is scheduled for next Tuesday, February 16. We hope there will be big Fryes and small Fryes in the audience come April, especially at the lectures and roundtables, and that you will have questions that come straight out of Frye. Perhaps, if you can’t attend, you might pose a question that one of us here could ask.
You can register here.
Registration with the Frye Festival
You may register with the upcoming Frye Festival in Moncton, New Brunswick here.
Update from the Frye Festival
One of the delights we have every April is introducing Frye to authors who have never heard of him and are curious to know more, as happened, for example, when Bernhard Schlink was here in 2004. Sometimes we are surprised when an author reveals a personal connection to Frye that we didn’t know about. Last year Don McKay, one of Canada’s great poets, took delight in telling the story of his mother’s encounter with Frye in the 1930s, when she took a class from him that influenced her at the time and later, toward the end of her own life, came back to inspire her when she wrote her memoirs. Andy Wainwright, Ross Leckie, and others studied with Frye and have fond memories. Peter Sanger has a longstanding interest in Frye; and, unless I’m mistaken, also studied with him. Richard Ford was familiar with Frye from his student days in the 60s. (Ford’s complete conversation with Globe and Mail’s Books Editor Martin Levin can be seen via the festival website’s U-Tube link.)
Robert Bly, who was here in 2001, said, in accepting our invitation, “Frye is one of my favorite people.” There’s a lot of common ground between the two that would be worth exploring, even if the direct influence each way is perhaps minimal. Blake’s “the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” is where they both begin, in their thinking about education. The idea of freedom is at the centre of everything they do. Neither shies from talking about and mapping the spiritual world, even when such activity is out of fashion. But what especially interests me is Bly’s idea of ‘deep image’ in comparison with Frye’s analysis of existential or ecstatic metaphor. Though ‘deep image’ suggests a location in the psyche, Bly prefers to think of the image as a place “where psychic energy is free to move around” (as quoted in Kevin Bushell’s essay “Leaping Into the Unknown: the Poetics of Robert Bly’s Deep Image”). Frye says, “Metaphor is the attempt to open up a channel or current of energy between subject and object” (as quoted in Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World, p. 70). Ecstatic metaphor, at the top of the ladder of metaphorical experience, creates “a sense of presence, a sense of uniting ourselves with something else” (Frye words, as quoted by Bob Denham, p. 72). The free flow of psychic energy is what counts for both. For Bly (at least the early Bly) a true or authentic poem has to involve the “leap” from the conscious, everyday world to the unconscious, universal world. For Frye it’s the gap between subject and object that’s obliterated in ecstatic metaphor. Frye’s is, if anything, a more expansive concept.
Over the years Bly moved deeper and deeper into the study of Jung and Jung’s concept of the unconscious. Throughout the nineties he worked with the Jungian analyst Marion Woodman and in 1998 they published their book The Maiden King. Frye’s interest in Jung was also deep and important. As Bob Denham says, “Frye sometimes expressed anxieties about being considered a Jungian, but he was much more deeply immersed in Jungian thought than is commonly imagined” (Religious Visionary, p. 196). Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy is a rich source for Frye, as Bob Denham wonderfully recounts. “In Anatomy of Criticism, alchemy is seen as a repository of archetypes (rose, stone, elixir, flower, jewel, fire).” (Religious Visionary, p. 194).