Category Archives: Guest Bloggers

Trevor Losh-Johnson: Diagrams and Paraeducation

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Some days ago, I sent out letters requesting information on professors who take an active, scholastic interest in Northrop Frye.  I have a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Santa Barbara, and am looking for English graduate programs where I may incorporate Frye’s diagrammatic method into specific research.  Professor Adamson has kindly invited me to post something here about how my interest in Frye arose in part through working as a teacher with orthopedically handicapped students.

My experience with such students is a product of my work as a substitute teacher in the greater Los Angeles area.  It is difficult to obtain consistent teaching assignments now, especially considering our certain governor’s propensity for terminating education funds.  I have therefore found more work with less orthodox students, which is something to which my father has devoted his entire teaching career.

My work in one of these classes coincided with some cursory reading of [Roman] Jakobson].  I was taken with Jakobson’s model of metaphor and metonymy, based on his work with language acquisition and aphasia.  While my interaction with students was not nearly as systematic, it greatly reinforced my sense of the metonymic workings of language acquisition.  When a child is learning to read, an unknown word is often sounded-out, and then replaced with a known word that rhymes with those sounds- sip becomes ship, cot cat.  I can recall a student named Elijah who had had clustered brain tumors as an infant.  He would tell stories structured only on a series of metonymy- What did the monkeys do next?  They attacked the car.  What did they say?  They ate me!  What happened then?  I fed them pizza and chicken!  This of course does not do justice to Elijah’s stories.  They were products of an outrageous and brilliant associative process that defied logic, space, and mortality.  While the origins of many of the images (a TV show?  The expected vandals in his neighborhood?) were private and beyond communication, many of them were contiguous images, constantly displaced into the unfolding narrative.

While I am not an expert in cognitive science, or in cognitive approaches to narrative, my experience with Elijah certainly made me very receptive to Frye’s distinction between centrifugal and centripetal forms of criticism.  In Elijah’s stories, the etiological and centrifugal origins of the plot and characters were subordinated to the centripetal patterns of the narrative.  It was in the telling of those patterns that he found extreme communicative joy and liberation of imagination.  Near the penultimate page of the Anatomy, Frye writes, “The link between rhetoric and logic is ‘doodle’ or associative diagram, the expression of the conceptual by the spatial” [335, Princeton edition].  The only way of decoding what in Elijah’s stories made him laugh was to follow the logic of “babble,” to trace the imaginative puns and metonymic displacements of imagery.

What had initially brought me into Comparative Literature was my interest in the revelatory symbol, and how one may understand the processes and degrees of symbolization at work in such varied writers as Spenser and Joyce.  I now find most useful those dialectical oppositions that do not act as privileged dichotomies, but rather as polar continuums, allowing for maximum modulation and movement.  What seems uniquely powerful about Frye’s schemata is his capacity to set such integral distinctions while displacing them into his modal diagrams.  His passage in the Anatomy on babble and doodle, the radicals of melos/opsis [270-81], is one of the few examples I know of a critic assimilating the rudimentary and associative nature of linguistic development into a broader, synoptic view of literature.  A critic, whom I cannot remember any more, wrote that one drawback to Frye is that he does not establish an etiological theory of linguistics.  The lack of a theory of such a priori things (which may have something to do with negative capability) in no way diminishes his achievement of establishing schematic first principles to literature; first principles that may be modified as suits the subject.

The conceptual by the spatial, so totalizing in Frye, is a pragmatic and teachable method of scholarship which I hope to pursue in my graduate studies, wherever those shall be.  The above does not sum up my reasons for wishing to undertake a study of Frye and his applications to modes of symbolism,  but it does note the more humane and fundamental values I perceive in him.

Mervyn Nicholson: Frye, Freud, Displacement

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It’s true that Frye used Freud in a variety of ways, but that does not mean that their “models” or outlook were similar.  As I noted earlier, their attitudes toward human desire were very different.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Freud re-creates a key concept in Freud’s great book, The Interpretation of Dreams (and elsewhere), namely:  displacement.  This term is a fascinating illustration of the way Frye’s thinking worked, the way he absorbed and adapted earlier conceptions.

In Freud, “displacement” is a technique of dreams:  dreams shift emotional emphasis from important to unimportant objects.  Intense emotion is thus “cathected” from its actual inspiration to an object that stands in for it, that “displaces” it, in order to conceal from the conscious mind the source of anxiety (or desire, desire being normally the cause of anxiety in Freud).  Neurosis does the same thing: the emotion causing the neurosis is “displaced” from its real object to things that are irrelevant or connected by some chain of association.

Frye picks up the term and changes its meaning.  In Frye, “displacement” refers to literature’s habit of adapting mythical forms to standards of plausibility or accepted morality.  In Anatomy of Criticism [150, Princeton edition] he illustrates displacement with an ingenious exposition of the use of ghosts.  Displacement is a function of the modes he outlines in the first essay—the kind of things you can have in a story is determined by the kind of world assumed in the story, and that world is indicated by the powers of the protagonist.  Displacement in this sense is a vital and powerful conception, showing how mythical formulas are adapted and reappear in realist texts, but in displaced form.  Instead of a man turning into a bat and flying away, you might have him associated with bats in some significant way, or wishing he could fly away with bats (my example — OK, Bram Stoker’s example).

Frye’s use of “displacement” gave the term new life.  From Frye, it went on its merry way in literary theory, being a natural sort of concept for deconstruction, where what is is not and what is not is what is, and “dis placement” is also “placement”.

My book 13 Ways of Looking at Images deals with Freud’s conceptions at length.  The Interpretation of Dreams is one of the great books, when it is detached from Freud’s psychoanalytic apparatus.  In this respect, I think my adaptation of Freud is close to the kind of method Frye worked with.

Matthew Griffin: Influence Without Anxiety

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In his first guest blogging appearance, Matthew Griffin considers the influence Frye has had beyond the academic sphere upon novelists and poets.

While much of the discussion on this blog has revolved around how Frye has been an influence on other critics, I think it also worth remembering his potent effect on novelists and poets as well. A reflection on what it is to write and to think about literature that has been formative for me is Robert Kroetsch’s essay, “Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye” (It’s perhaps easiest to find in The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New.  Don Mills: Oxford, 1989. 151-162.)  While we’d do well to remember an axiom from the Polemical Introduction, that the author “has a peculiar interest, but not a peculiar authority” as a critic of the author’s own work (CW 29: 7), Kroetsch writes that it was an encounter with Frye’s thought “that exhausted me into language” (151). He describes giving a seminar on Milton, using the just published Anatomy of Criticism as his “critical starting point,” only to be asked what the ideas therein were all about (154). Kroetsch describes his answer as follows:

I began, in answering that request, to talk about the hero, the nature of the hero, in literature, in the modern world, in my Canadian world, and in a way I haven’t stopped, and here, today, thirty years later, I’m still giving the report, though now Northrop Frye himself has become the hero under discussion, a peculiarly Canadian hero, in a modern world that has assigned to critics and theorists a hero’s many tasks.  We live at a time when the young critic as tram faces the uncomfortable fate of becoming the old critic as god. (154)

Kroetsch’s essay marvels at just what influence Kroetsch has had on Canadian writing in particular, before finally concluding of Frye, that in “his collected criticism, he locates the poetry of our unlocatable poem.  In talking about that poem, he becomes our epic poet. Grazie” (161).

Perhaps in this idea is fodder for our own reflections about how we might relax our own anxieties of influence, and look to see Frye’s impact upon writers beyond the sphere of criticism proper?

Re: Mervyn Nicholson’s “Desire (2)”

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Mervyn, we are obviously not going to agree, since I suspect we are beginning from very different points and proceeding with very different assumptions. But here are a couple of specific points in response to your post.

Freud acknowledged the role of desire in literature; indeed, it seems to be the motivating force for the creative imagination. For him the ego is “the hero of every daydream and every novel.” This is the place where unsatisfied desires can be fulfilled.

Second, I recognize that of course there are radical currents in Frye’s thinking. But he resembles Freud in his “conservative” response to the student protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. The “disobedience, chaos, [and] disorder” that prevailed on some campuses, encouraged by numerous faculty members, struck him as a betrayal of the true mission of the university. Ironically, Blake figured prominently in the pantheon of writers admired by student radicals (as did Freud, which, as you mention, Frye pointed out).

He sometimes described himself–perhaps to provoke his “cultured despisers”–as a “bourgeois liberal.”

Mervyn Nicholson: Desire (2)

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“Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained, and the restrainer or reason usurps its place and governs the unwilling.  And being restrained, it by degrees becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. . . . Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.”  “Enough, or too much”—but never less than enough.

That’s Blake.  That’s Frye. 

Yes, Frye did refer to human beings as psychotic apes, contemplating the record of misery and horror that history displays.  “Desire” in Frye, as in Blake, is of course not the same as the compulsion to hurt and control others—“to govern the unwilling”—which is a mental illness, not desire at all.  Frye was not like Freud, especially on the issue of desire.  It is ironic, Frye says, that Freud has become a prophet of eros—ironic, because Freud was deeply pessimistic about human nature; he wanted, Moses-like, to hand down the law from his height of authority.  Frye was not a pessimist of this type, at all. 

That’s another thing that makes him so different.  Consistent with his profound valuation of desire, Frye was deeply committed to what goes with it, namely, an insistence on the value and meaning of life, confidence in the meaningfulness of existence, in fact in the divinity of life.  There is something divine in human nature—that’s Frye.  Indeed this divine aspect is manifested in our desires, in our wishes and their converse, our fears, and what we do about our fears and desires.  Such a conviction is utterly at odds with poststructuralism, particularly in deconstruction, which floated on a sea of shallow, leisure-class pessimism.

But then, on the topic of desire, Frye is unlike most of intellectual culture.  Desire is almost universally devalued—in religion (Christianity-Judaism-Islam is full of it), in philosophy, in psychology (certainly in the psychoanalytic tradition, which so many academics find irresistibly appealing), in economics—you name it.  Curiously, the one area that consistently respects desire is literature—Frye’s area.  By contrast, the prevailing attitude is that human desire is a problem, often THE problem.  “Good” is reflexively understood to mean “obedience.”  (“Were you good today?” Mommy asks, meaning “Did you do what you were told—did you obey?”)  If people could only stick to obeying authority—doing what they are told to do, wanting what they are told to want, and no more—they would be OK.  Instead, they foolishly listen to desire.  Ignorant desire then gets them into all kinds of problems and causes problems for those who obey.  This is of course Freud’s program: superego, with its “Don’t” command, must replace “libido.”  “Thou shalt not,” as Blake puts it in “The Garden of Love.”  Even in economics, supposedly about people doing what they want, scarcity is the ruling principle.  There is not enough.  Some people will have to do without. 

In fact, this is a key reason why desire is so much distrusted: desire incites disobedience, chaos, disorder.  Most of history shows us a tiny minority of the population in control of the rest of the population, who work for a living (as opposed to owning for a living).  Unless those who do the work have their desires carefully pruned to fit the dominant arrangement, there is going to be trouble.  There are a lot of reasons why desire is so distrusted, and it is not an accident that Blake is considered and considered himself a radical.

Frye was not a radical quite in Blake’s style, but there are plenty of radical currents in his thinking.  You don’t have to read far in his notebooks—or his publications—to find him saying radical things, things that have annoyed a lot of people.  One of the most important things he says is to insist on the value of human desire.

This partly explains, by the way, why he is so despised in the academy today.

Clayton Chrusch: Frye, Sin, and Desire

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Clayton Chrusch responds to both Merv Nicholson and Russell Perkin on what makes Frye different.

I once argued with a Frye scholar about original sin. I claimed that Frye was the biggest apologist for the doctrine of original sin that I knew, and I was told I was completely mistaken, that Frye thought the doctrine was one of the worst ideas ever invented.

What I realized after that conversation was that Frye insists (like Blake) on the reality of the Fall, but never equates the Fall with original sin. As Frye puts it in Fearful Symmetry, the fall and creation are the same event. For Frye, it is self-evident that we live in a fallen world, and it is hard for me to imagine a sane person who would not agree with him. But that falleness is not the result of human sin, but rather the matrix of human sin. There is no primordial guilt for Frye. I think Frye in general had little interest in guilt, and that is not because he denied the reality of sin, but like Blake, he accepted the reality of sin but denied the reality of Judgement (this is probably his biggest departure from orthodoxy).

As for desire, it seems to me that his abandonment of the term, in favour of “concern,” was an attempt at greater precision, but it seems to correspond with a loss of some of the explosive energy we see in his Blake book.

But even in Fearful Symmetry, I don’t think desire is seen as a good in itself. Rather, what is good is action, and action is conceived of as desire seeking form. And there are even more caveats. If the desire is to frustrate or impede action, the resulting action is not worthy of the name. And desire that is not acted upon is pestilent.

And also it is specifically the desire feeding creation that is good. Any desire for a created thing is “the cry of a mistaken soul”. Even the erotic delights of Beulah are temporary and must give way either to creation or alienation.

Michael Sinding: Frye and the Curriculum

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Michael Sinding responds to Russell Perkin.

Russell Perkins’ question “How do Frye’s ideas relate to the state of literary studies today?” is an excellent one, and deserves some airing out.

One’s initial impression of the answer may be, “not at all.” But Bob Denham has done plenty of work to show how Frye’s ideas continue to inform research and teaching in all kinds of ways. So why do we get that impression?

What I find striking is that when you look at the history of specific topics and questions in literary studies, it’s not unusual to find that Frye has made a major and permanent contribution. As a fr’instance, I’ve been going through studies of satire. In a recent anthology, Ruben Quintero’s Companion to Satire (Blackwell, 2007), Frye is still pretty prominent, though not so prominent as Bakhtin. Paul Simpson’s On the Discourse of Satire (John Benjamins, 2003) says that Frye’s study shaped much criticism, and that his definition of satire seems to be more widely referenced than any other. And Frye makes a respectable showing in John Frow’s Genre (Routledge, 2006), along with Aristotle, Bakhtin, Derrida, Todorov. These are pretty different kinds of books, too. The Companion is fairly introductory, Simpson’s is mainly a linguistic study, Frow is more poststructuralist, especially Foucauldian (it’s in the New Critical Idiom series). I think you’d find this is true with many other topics, though no doubt some (genre, structure & form generally) more than others.

And yet for all of our interest, there is not (yet?) a strong momentum continuing to develop his ideas, as there is with, say, Bakhtin. Something about Frye’s assumptions and style seems uncongenial to the sea-changes literary studies underwent with post-structuralism and afterwards. So even though Hayden White and Fredric Jameson greatly admired Frye, their followers don’t seem to share the interest, and you don’t see Frye talked about much in e.g. PMLA. Perhaps it’s that he never did engage much with those sea-changes. He continued to work with his own assumptions and system, despite occasional references to Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, et al. Bakhtin didn’t engage with them at all, of course, but his ideas were simply better suited to poststructuralism’s impulses and directions.

But I don’t think we want a defensive / defiant celebration of Frye’s supposed old-fashioned-ness, or unfashionable-ness. In short, Frye’s connections with current literary studies seem peripheral, not central, or in the background rather than the foreground.

I’d like to see Frye have more of the kind of continuing reconsideration that Bakhtin does: putting his main ideas into play with current movements, themes, and questions, and tested and developed accordingly. Think of how much he has to say about culture, including popular culture, worldview and ideology, the social contexts of literature and criticism, as well as all the brilliant structural studies … . There’s a lot that is untapped.

Merv Nicholson: “What Makes Frye Different” (1)

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Mervyn Nicholson, in the first of what promises to be a series, considers what makes Frye different.  In this installment: Desire.

Frye is unusual as a literary-cultural critic-theorist in many, many ways.  But one way that I find fascinating is Frye’s attitude toward human desire.  Frye was a champion of human desire, as was his mentor, William Blake.

But in this Frye, like Blake, is opposed to practically the entire history of culture, a history of hostility to desire.  For Christianity, human desire is corrupted by the Fall, and can not be trusted.  What is needed is obedience to authority; by contrast, human desire is in fundamental conflict with the requirements of obedience.  The problem began with Adam and Eve who disobeyed, followed desire, and thus brought death into the world along with everything else that is bad, from mosquitoes to forest fires.

Christianity is not alone in distrusting and even disowning human desire.  Philosophy has rarely had much respect for desire, which it typically puts somewhere in the basement of human faculties, right next to if not actually in the trash barrel, along with illusion, opinion, prejudice, and other detritus of consciousness. Post-structuralism in its core form of deconstruction maintains the same hostility to desire.  Deconstruction as theorized by Jacques Derrida and practiced for example by Paul de Man, has for its keynote a conviction that desire equates with the unreal.  An entire attitude is summed up in the dictum of Paul de Man: “Metaphor is error because it feigns to believe in its own referential meaning.”  Metaphor and metaphoric thought is indistinguishable from deception, above all self-deception.  Political economy—economics—has stressed the dangers of human desire, from at least Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population on.  The standard economics text begins with the premise that “economics is the science of scarcity”: there isn’t enough to go around.  In the conflict between what we want and what we can have, necessity always wins.  People must keep desire in check, or disaster will result.

Freud, despite his liberal views, is consistent with traditional attitudes. The entire psychoanalytic tradition is deeply mistrustful of desire.  What you want but cannot have, you then create imaginary satisfactions for.  For example, we fear to die, so we “make up” an afterlife, an imaginary compensation.  This view of desire, as the origin of illusion, is fundamental to Freud, who lays it out with particular clarity in The Future of an Illusion.  The test of an illusion is whether it is a wish fulfilment.  “What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes,” Freud explains.  “Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation . . . the illusion itself sets no store by verification.”  Dreams are of course illusory satisfactions, as Freud argues in The Interpretation of Dreams: dreams are all wish-fulfilments.  But wish-fulfilments are by definition illusory satisfactions.  This is also a theme of the revisionist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, as well as of Melanie Klein and the “object relations” school of psychology.  Make-believe compensates for loss and alleviates frustration.  But it is still make-believe, and make-believe causes problems.  Similarly, Freud insisted that fantasies, conscious and unconscious, cause neurosis—fantasies so endemic in fallible human nature that they begin in infancy.  In Freud’s view, infants fantasize pretty weird things because they want weird things, and that weird wanting affects them for the rest of their lives.—our lives, in fact

Frye is so different from this tradition! he insists throughout his writing and throughout his career that human desire is good, that it is a guide, that the distinction between what we want and what we do not want — as Frye himself argues in The Educated Imagination — is the basic axis of existence and of civilization itself.  Literature is a product of human desire, as is all of civilization.  By showing us what we want and what we do not want, literature functions as a guide to ourselves and a means of evaluating the society we have created and that we also have the power to change.  For Frye, desire is who we really are.

Jeffery Donaldson: “Museum”

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Jeffery Donaldson has graced us with this poem about an encounter with a ghostly familiar,  if not a “familiar compound ghost.” Jeffery is currently working on an article about the significance of Frye to a poet, to be published in New Quarterly.  A video of Jeffery reading the title poem from his latest collection, Palilalia, can be found at the end of this post.

Museum

But one writes only after one has willed to renounce the will,
and the wisest of poets have always insisted that in the long
run all poetry that is worth listening to has been written
by the gods.

—Northrop Frye

Subway, in the middle of my commute,
   I found myself in a dark corner.
The line vanished into the underground
   in two directions, the clack and crow-screech

of steel wheels echoed in recession
   of the just missed five-o-nine
from the tunnel’s depths. Museum Station.
   A chilled solitude widened around me

and water-drops pooled in mimicked snips
   between the rails below. The ceiling lamps’
subdued fluorescence seemed to cast no shadows
   and were like peering through green water.

Exhibits from the ROM in glass cases
   with aboriginal wooden masks descended
like messengers from the real world above,
   whose outsize faces gestured witness and alarm

in the apocalyptic style of indigenous myth.
   Farther up, the February dusk
was tawny, the air tasteless and dull
   as pewter plate. Fog had moved in on

Old Vic’s scrubbed-stone but now vague
   turrets uncobbling upwards to the last
vanished spire, as though parting illusion
   from the epigraph above the stairway arch,

still insisting, after these twenty years,
   that the truth would set me free.
All gone up in a mist now, as far
   as I could see. I pictured them above,

the Burwash quad, Pratt, and residence,
   whose faux-gothic walls hold the city at Bay
like the brim of an empty cup, and where
   the mind-set of college years, memories

of what unwritten words, burn perpetually
   as in a crucible. I wonder now had I known,
those years hiding my fidgets, of the tics
   Touretters spend their days trying to release,

or heard of how the obsessive’s repetitions
   grind every last impulse to its death,
would I have finished more, managed
   the regimental habitus
and got things done?
 Continue reading →

Ian Sloan: Frye and Paul Hawken

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Our first Guest Blogger, Ian Sloan, is minister at Centenary United Church, Hamilton, Ontario.

I have recently joined Centenary United Church in Hamilton, Canada, an inner-city church in the downtown core of Hamilton committed to being a safe and diverse community of faith offering acceptance and hope.  Faced with a scope of responsibility to this community that seems (as I begin) to be overwhelming, and looking for thought and practice large enough to meet the challenges I am committed to meet, I was struck by the similarities between the following comment in the last chapter of Frye’s Double Vision [“The Double Vision of God”] and a passage from the author’s introduction to a recent book on environmentalism.

Frye writes:

I sense a longing for some kind of immense creative renovation, which, I should imagine, would have to be the product of a large-scale social movement. Earlier in the century a proposal for such an awakening would automatically have been responded to with the word “revolution,” a donkey’s carrot still held before the student rebels of the sixties. Revolutions, however, are culturally sterile: they weaken the traditions of the past but put nothing in their place except second-rate versions of the same thing. I think the real longing is not for a mass movement sweeping up individual concerns, but for an individualized movement reaching out to social concerns. Primary concerns, that is: food, shelter, the greening of the earth, and their spiritual aspects of freedom and equal rights. (56-57)

Environmentalist Paul Hawken writes in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World (Penguin, 2007):

By any conventional definition, this vast collection of committed individuals does not constitute a movement. Movements have leaders and ideologies. People join movements, study their tracts, and identify themselves with a group. They read the biography of the founder(s) or listen to them perorate on tapes or in person. Movements, in short, have followers. This movement, however, doesn’t fit the standard model. It is dispersed, inchoate, and fiercely independent. It has no manifesto or doctrine, no overriding authority to check with. It is taking shape in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, companies, deserts, fisheries, slums – and yes, even fancy New York hotels. One of its distinctive features is that it is tentatively emerging as a global humanitarian movement arising from the bottom up…I sought a name for the movement, but none exists. ..No one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye. What does meet the eye is compelling: coherent, organic, self-organized congregations involving millions of people dedicated to change. (2-4)

How does  Frye “belong” to the movement Hawken describes? How might you?  If it seems like it could go somewhere, I may from time to time blog here about how I might.