Category Archives: Notebooks

Love

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love

A footnote to Clayton Chrusch’s “The Hermeneutics of Charity,” drawn from some paragraphs on love I wrote about elsewhere.

The genuine Christianity that has survived its appalling historical record was founded on charity, and charity is invariably linked to an imaginative conception of language, whether consciously or unconsciously. Paul makes it clear that the language of charity is spiritual language, and that spiritual language is metaphorical, founded on the metaphorical paradox that we live in Christ and that Christ lives in us (The Double Vision, 17).

The various principles that are the foundation of Frye’s concept of identity (metaphor, kerygma, possession, the fourth awareness, higher consciousness) should lead us, he says, to “myths to live by.”  But what are these existential myths that come from “the other side” of the imaginative?  What are the “coherent lifestyles” that Frye’s hopes “will emerge from the infinite possibilities of myth”? (Words with Power, 143). Although he often appears hesitant to give a direct answer to these questions, preferring to assume the role of Moses on Mount Pisgah, the answer does surface in the conclusions of his last three books where the gospel of love becomes the focus of his discussion.

Frye’s speculations on love begin early.  In Notebook 3 (1946–48) he probes the meaning of love in different contexts: his own erotic and fantasy life, his attitude toward the Church, his reflections on yoga and on time.  Here are two representative reflections:

Joachim of Floris has a hint of an order of things in which the monastery takes over the church & the world.  That is the expanded secular monastery I want: I want the grace of Castiglione as well as the grace of Luther, a graceful as well as a gracious God, and I want all men & women to enter the Abbey of Theleme where instead of poverty, chastity and obedience they will find richness, love and fay ce que vouldras; for what the Bodhisattva wills to do is good. (Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, 17)

Each dimension of time breeds fear: the past, despair & hopelessness & the sense of an irrevocable too late: the present, panic & sense of a clock steadily ticking; the future, an unknown mystery gradually assuming the lineaments of the consequences of our own acts.  Hope is the virtue of the past, the eternal sense that maybe next time we’ll do better.  The projection of this into the future is faith, the substance of things hoped for.  Love belongs to the present, & is the only force able to cast out fear.  If a thing loves it is infinite, Blake said, & the act of love is itself a vision of a timeless world. (ibid., 59)

Frye’s speculations on love reappear some thirty-five years later in the conclusion of The Great Code, where he probes the meaning of the Word of God in the context of Biblical language.  This language, Frye says, is enduring, inclusive, welcoming, and beyond argument, and it can move us toward freedom and beyond the anxiety structures created by the human and divine antithesis (231–2).  The Great Code, however, provides little concrete guidance about the function of love in the myths we are to live by, though the notebooks for The Great Code contain numerous entries on “the rule of charity.”   But during the eight years following The Great Code Frye devoted a good deal of energy to working out the implication of the language of love.  In Notebook 46 (mid- to late 1980s) he writes, “Love is the only virtue there is, but like everything else connected with creativity and imagination, there is something decentralized about it.  We love those closest to us, Jesus’ ‘neighbors,’ people we’re specifically connected with in charity.  For those at a distance we feel rather tolerance or good will, the feeling announced at the Incarnation” (Late Notebooks, 2:696).  This “only virtue” idea gets developed in Words with Power where love, Paul’s agape or caritas is said to be “the only genuine form of human society, the spiritual kingdom of Jesus” (89).

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Quiet Consummation

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When he was still a student Frye set out to write a novel called Quiet Consummation.  In 1935, he wrote to Roy Daniells:

I come up blushing shyly to confess that I am taking advantage of my unaccustomed freedom to start working a bit on a novel.  Its provisional title is Quiet Consummation.  It’s not much of a novel, but I want to get it out of my system.  No plot or theme or thesis or anything, just yet.  It’s laid out in sonata form.  Amusing, I think, if it comes off at all.  I am beginning to realize that while I may and probably will turn out some fairly decent things on Blake and Shakespeare and Augustine and the rest critically, the larger problem they refer back to, the relation of religion and art in symbolism, will require fictional and dramatic treatment.

In Notebook 5, which apparently dates from about this time, Frye sketched on the flyleaf, “Quiet Consummation / A Novel in Sonata Form / Eratus Howard / Part One, Exposition”; on the second leaf is an “Analysis” of the novel, outlined as the exposition, development, and recapitulation. [Frye was apparently adopting the name of his brother––Eratus Howard Frye––as a pseudonym].  He was never able to realize this fantasy.  Notebook 5 contains nothing else about Quiet Consummation, and there is not so much as a whisper about it elsewhere his early notebooks.  But Frye did return to it fifty years later when he was looking for a form that would combine the creative and the critical––something aphoristic, anagogic, erudite, imaginative, even fictional that would be a quiet consummation of his life’s work.

One proposal for the final book in Frye’s ogdoad, which he called Twilight, was a book of aphorisms.  The desire to complete such a book emerges from a dozen or so entries in Frye’s Late Notebooks.  “I wonder,” he writes, “if I could be permitted to write my Twilight book, not as evidence of my own alleged wisdom but as a ‘next time’ (Henry James) book, putting my spiritual case more forcefully yet, and addressed to still more readers” (Late Notebooks, 1:417)  The reference here is to James’s The Next Time, the story of a writer whose work is admired by a small coterie but who is frustrated by his failure to reach a large audience.  Frye proposes several models for his anagogic book, and he says, “I wouldn’t want to plan such a book as a dumping ground for things I can’t work in elsewhere or as a set of echoes of what I’ve said elsewhere.”  “Such a book would feature,” he adds “completely uninhibited writing” and “completely uninhibited metaphor-building,” and some of the entries might even be fictional. [For Frye’s additional speculations on the anagogic book, see Late Notebooks, 1: 172–3, 238, 372.]

Toward the end of Notebook 50, when Frye realizes that he may not live much longer, he suggests still another variation on the final book.  He scribbles somewhat cryptically, “Opus Perhaps Posthumous: Working Title: Quintessence of Dust.  Four Essays.”  And then, a dozen entries later, he adds, “Quintessence and dust; Quarks or pinpoints; Quest and Cycle: Quiet Consummation” (Late Notebooks, 415, 417).  “Four Essays,” the subtitle of Anatomy of Criticism, hints at the conventions of the anatomy as a genre.  “Quintessence of Dust” is a phrase from Hamlet’s dialogue with Rosenkranz and Guildenstern (act. 2, sc. 2), and of course “Quiet Consummation” (the phrase comes from Guiderius and Arviragus’s song in Cymbeline, 4.2. 280) returns us to Frye’s 1935 fantasy.

Here are a couple of the models Frye proposes for Twilight:

This may be a crazy notion, or it may be one of my central intuitions coming to a head.  I’ve always wanted to write something in the conventionally “creative” modes towards the end of my life.  I’ve even thought of a long poem, though I certainly know that I’d have to go through quite a metamorphosis before I could bring that off—even so, I was thinking only of the kind of versified speculation that Buckminster Fuller brought out a while ago.  Fiction of course I’ve thought of more frequently, but learning the mechanics of any kind of fiction is a disheartening and unpredictable procedure at my age.  So I’ve thought most frequently of a book of brief essays or meditations, perhaps a century of meditations like Traherne’s, though naturally of a very different kind.  I’ve often said too (to myself) that a book like Anatole France’s Jardin d’Epicure [a bricolage of essays, dialogues, epigrams, and other short prose fragments] would be ideal in format and general conception for me, except that I’d want my book to display a less commonplace mind than his was.  (Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings, 155–6)

The interesting thing about Frye’s last-book fantasies is their correspondence to the notebooks themselves.  Frye himself makes the connection between the “aphoristic book” and his “notebook obsession” (Late Notebooks, 172–3), and the notebooks are a Promethean exercise in uninhibited writing and metaphor-building.  His notebooks are, of course, not Twilight, not the anagogic book of aphorisms that he dreamed about—“‘my own’ book of pensées,” as he called it (Late Notebooks, 1:372).   But it is possible that the core of Twilight ould have come from a selection of his notebook entries.  Frye says that Twilight is “ideally  . . . a book to be put away in a drawer and have published after my death” and that he always thought of the final book in his ogdoad fantasy as “something perhaps not reached” (Late Notebooks, 1:238, 173).  Perhaps his notebooks do in fact serve as the quiet consummation of his life’s work.

The Social Function of Literature

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Thank you so much for your comment, Clayton, in response to my previous post. You ask some big questions: “What does a life look like that has listened to what literature has to say? How does having an educated imagination affect one’s commitments? Or does concern replace commitment?” Any answer I offer here will simply be a stab in the dark, but here goes.

Frye, as you well know, does not assume that an active reader of literature automatically becomes a “good person.” I am reading the Third Book Notebooks right now, and I am struck with the emphasis he puts on education or the “educational contract” over the social contract as informing society and therefore social and political action: in other words, for him, the university is the ideal or Utopian form of society. In one of his previous posts Michael Happy cites Frye’s statement that universities are, or should be the engine room of society. Criticism and literature are, for Frye, a central, indeed perhaps the central part of that engine room, which is the world of the arts and sciences. This world, along with–in a much more complicated way–religion, seem to be the only thing that proves we are something more than “psychotic apes” on a berserk rampage bent on destroying both human society and the earth. I love Michael’s image of the crowbarring and “hacking away that has been done by self-declared iconoclasts and comfortably tenured revolutionists” that in the end have only weakened public support for liberal education, and thus undermined any strong intellectual defence against the very clear and present danger: the increasing privatization of the universities and the very sinister encroachments of corporate capitalism.

In terms of concern and commitment, as you also well know, Frye places ideology (political or religious belief) and  kerygma (spiritual proclamation) on the opposite sides, as it were, of literature, and the lines here tend to blur in certain forms of literature. Obviously, there are more rhetorical forms which aim at persuasion. On the kerygmatic side, in my own field of study, I think of Thoreau, whose Civil Disobedience and Walden are obviously much more prophetic and geared towards informing our actions than something like Poe’s poetry and tales which, if you could ever treat them as prescriptions, would lead you straight to suicide, murder, or a mental institution. A serial killer might read Poe that way, and indeed Poe pops up famously in thrillers and crime fiction precisely in that guise: as a guru for psychopaths. There is a killer in one of Michael Connolly’s novels, for example, who reads Poe “kerygmatically,” if one can use the term in such a context. Fictional though it may be, this is an extreme example of the countless possible illustrations of Milton’s famous statement: “a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool will do of sacred Scripture.”

It is often difficult to find something like a later concept in Frye–one is so often proved wrong–but it is my impression at least that he puts a greater emphasis in his later writings on the prophetic dimension of literature, especially post-romantic literature. Here the prophetic is not conceived of so much as informing a program of action as confronting history with vision. Writers like Dostoyevsky or Kafka seem to leap over their times in their capacity to give us an unsettling vision of the most nihilistic and catastrophic potential in their respective Zeitgeists, as though they had a sixth sense of the cultural fissures that were going to lead straight to the horrors of the Holocaust, concentration camps, and the Gulag.

On the ideological side, as Frye points out, literature is always more or less compromised. In the pre-eighteenth century dispensation the imagination is almost completely constrained by what the calls in The Critical Path a central “myth of concern.” In The Third Book Notebooks, he observes that “ literature, being part (the central part) of the myth of concern, is profoundly impure” (CW 9: 67). According to him, in the post-romantic age this myth of concern breaks down, but slowly, and is still with us to some extent. At the same time, with the ascendancy of science and a liberal myth of freedom the writer is increasingly freed from any central ideological constraint. (This was Melville‘s point in a letter when he said that even Shakespeare for all his truth-telling was constrained by the feudal order of his time, and that “the declaration of independence makes a difference.”) The dark side of this is that ideologies become polarized and you end up with writers like Celine–or “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot/fighting in the Captain’s tower,” as Bob Dylan’s lyric goes– writers whose personal programs of action are often repugnant, at least to those of us who are not authoritarians, anti-Semites or fascist sympathizers. Literature gets both more imaginatively pure (Poe, Mallarme, etc) and messier, if that makes any sense.

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Today in the Frye Diaries (2)

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Regarding Today in the Frye Diaries, Frye’s response to Helen’s death 40 years later.

From Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1: 137–40, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 153, 156, 160, 191, 197, 204, 254, 345, 374, 379–80

This is not a diary, but Helen is dead. Not of cancer: she died in peace, I was told. Her Alzheimer fantasies were already turning her against me: she seemed to feel I could get her out of hospital if I only wanted to. It’s better for her to go now than to go through the final Alzheimer cycles, and it was very like her to slip out of the world so unobtrusively. I know nothing: Ned’s “iron door” doesn’t budge a crack. I think I know when she died—3.10 p.m. AEST,—but that may be an illusion. But they say there are helpers, and for so gentle and pure a spirit there must be. My hunch is that grief of survivors, being so largely self-pity, distresses, perhaps even impedes, progress to a world that makes more sense. I know that she would forgive me my sins of indolence and selfishness in regard to her, and therefore God will. I hope only that she knows now that I genuinely loved her very dearly, so far as human frailty permits. God bless, protect, and keep her among his own. I hope to see her again; but perhaps that is a weak hope. Faith is the hypostasis [substance] of what is hoped for, the elenchos [evidence] of the unseen. The one thing truly unseen, the world across death, may, according to my principle, be what enables us to see what is visible. I dreaded seeing her in the hospital, because she never smiled at me: she would smile at Jane, but I couldn’t keep the worry out of my face and tone, and I bored her. Besides, when Jane [Widdicombe] told her she was in hospital and had to get better before she could go home, she said “I can take that from you.” When I tried to say the same thing, she said “Don’t be so portentous.” It was the last thing she said to me, and it sounds like an oracle. Meanwhile there is Jane, a daughter sent by God instead of nature. Guardian angels take unexpected but familiar forms, as in Homer.

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Frye’s Superlatives

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The first step in developing a genuine poetics is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism, or talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowledge. This includes all the sonorous nonsense that we so often find in critical generalities, reflective comments, ideological perorations, and other consequences of taking a large view of an unorganized subject. It includes all lists of the “best” novels or poems or writers, whether their particular virtue is exclusiveness or inclusiveness. It includes all casual, sentimental, and prejudiced value judgments, and all the literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange. (Anatomy of Criticism 18)

From Frye’s Notebooks (lifted from Northrop Frye Unbuttoned) 

The Greatest Book Ever Written (at Oxford).  I’m in Oxford now, & from my point of view the greatest book ever written at Oxford is the Anatomy of Melancholy. [RT, 132]  (Abbreviations and links to texts below.)

The Greatest Book in the Bible. Genesis. [LN, 1:337] 

The Greatest British Monarch.  King Arthur. [LN, 2:598]

 The Greatest Creative Mind of Modern Times.  Shakespeare. [NRL, 108]

 The Greatest Critic of His Time (potentially).  If Hopkins could only have got rid of his silly moral anxieties, his perpetually calling Goethe a rascal and Whitman a scoundrel and the like, he’d have been the greatest critic of his time. [RN, 325]]

 The Greatest Eros Poet (English).  The greatest Eros poet in English is probably Marvell. [RT, 136]

The Greatest Eros Poets (Non-English).  Dante & Plato are the world’s greatest Eros poets. [RT, 407]

The Greatest Example of Linearity. Christianity to the Bible was typically a linear, step by step response, the sacramental disciplinary habitus of which the greatest illustration is the interlocking march of Dante’s terza rima from one end of the chain of being to the other. [RT, 240]

 The Greatest Fiction Writer of the Century (potentially).  God, I wish D.H. Lawrence had some sense of real satire: if he had he’d have been by long odds the greatest fiction writer of the century. [LN, 1:322]

 The Greatest Form of Prose.  The Utopia. [LN, 1:404]

 The Greatest Form-Shaper.  Dante is an analogical visionary & stands opposite the Scripture, the “paradox” involved being that the greatest of form-shapers turns out to be the supreme analogist or reverser of the Word (Logos). [NAC, 4]

 The Greatest Historical Novel.  War and Peace. [LN, 1:407]

 The Greatest Imaginations.  Defeated nations have the greatest imaginations. [RT, 185]

 The Greatest Impersonator in History.  There are three kinds of geniuses: imposers, imposters, & impersonators, & I may be the greatest impersonator in history. [RN, 33]

 The Greatest Literary Genius after Blake.  The greatest literary genius this side of Blake is Edgar Allan Poe. [LN, 1: 165]

 The Greatest Masterpiece of Experimental Prose in English Fiction.  Tristram Shandy. [LS, 63]

The Greatest Moral Virtue. Jesus speaks of hypocrisy, which may be a vice in the gospel context but is one of the absolutely essential cementing force that holds society together. Morally, it is the greatest of all virtues. [LN, 1:270]

The Greatest Number of Demonic Images.  The book with the greatest number of demonic images in it I ever read (the Inferno of course doesn’t count) was Melmoth the Wanderer. [TBN, 142]

The Greatest Occasional Writers.  The occasional writing, of which the supreme example is the epistles of Paul, & the greatest English example probably Burke, needs more development. [RN, 77]

 The Greatest Play of Shaw.  Saint Joan. [LS, 180]

 The Greatest Poet for Shakespeare.  Ovid [TBN, 315]

 The Greatest Protestant Poet of the Pathos.  Bach [FMW, 166]

 The Greatest Shakespearean Comedy.  The Tempest. [LS, 158]

 The Greatest Symposium Writer.  Plato. [LN, 2:552]

 The Greatest Thanatos Poem.  The Iliad. [NR, 168]

 The Greatest Titanic Spirit in Literature.  Hamlet himself is the greatest example in literature of a titanic spirit thrashing around in the prison of what he is. [LN, 1:13]

 The Greatest of Vices.  Pride is the greatest of vices partly because it is the most futile of vices: man has nothing to be proud of. [LS, 87]

Abbreviations and links to primary texts after the break.

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