Sir Arthur Sullivan

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Today is Sir Arthur Sullivan‘s birthday (1842 – 1900).

Here is an excerpt from Frye’s student review for Acta Victoriana of the Music Club’s April 1933 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.

But here, in the calm hush and cloister-quiet of Gate House, the artistic conscience of the Music Club rises to defend itself.  If there ever was a time when Pinafore could be well done, it argues, that time has long since passed.  Considered as a whole the farce is clumsy and ill-conceived, besides being unendurably hackneyed, and it simply cannot be sustained on its own momentum.  No human power can prevent that unspeakable finale from dragging painfully to a limping and inept close.  All the standard actors of the Music Club are good for lots of entertainment, says the conscience, but they could do nothing with their parts; they had to kick them off the stage and substitute themselves.  The cast of characters in Pinafore are all stuffed shirts and artificially bulged chemises, O critic, but those who took their places are wholesome happy youngsters who are all friends of yours, and you for one know that the fairy changelings are infinitely more attractive. (CW, 17. 233-4)

Frye’s doubts about the contemporary appeal of Gilbert and Sullivan notwithstanding, after the jump there’s a delightful version of “The Sun, Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” from Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, a wonderful film about the creation of The Mikado.  Yes, and okay, there’s a performance of “Three Little Maids From School” from the same film too.  (If you haven’t already seen this movie, put it on top of your list.)

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Janet Ritch: “Crucified Woman Reborn: Current Responses”

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When the organizers of the conference coming up at Emmanuel College on May 14–15 first got together to discuss possible responses to Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey’s sculpture Crucified Woman, we tried to lay the field open. We invited responses from women and men of any faith, value, or belief system. Yet when it came down to it, we all agreed that our rising awareness of degradation to the environment, of the sex trade, and of the prison system was linked to both a feminine consciousness and to Aboriginal issues in Canada.

Marjory Noganosh, an Ojibwe elder who will open and close the event, is preparing a keynote address on the theme “Mother Earth and Women.” At the time of writing, the Federal Metal Mining Effluent Regulations of the Fisheries Act has redefined lakes as “tailing impoundment areas,” which allows the dumping of toxic waste into Sandy Pond, Newfoundland, and the destruction of land sacred to the Tsilhqot’in in British Columbia. The tailing ponds laced with arsenic, mercury, and cancer-causing benzene at the Alberta Tar Sands will, by 2020, have extended to one billion cubic metres of toxic sludge, continuing to destroy land the size of England and threaten the lives of the Chipewyan people – to name just some of the people adversely affected. If the white man cannot be at peace with the land, perhaps women can bring them to it, but it is hard to see how Marjory, or anyone else, might invoke the necessary miracle.

As for the prison system, Marian Botsford Fraser recently published a few stanzas of a poem by Renée Acoby, an Anishnawbe métisse from Louis Riel country, who has been incarcerated in the Edmonton Institution for Women for over ten years on a sentence now extended to over twenty years. The sub-committee gathering poetry decided to request permission to include this poem in our collection. Marian even encouraged me to write to the prisoner-poet myself. Renée’s response begins:

Thank you very much for your support and positivity.☺ This is the first time I have heard about the sculpture by Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey; I find it intriguing, uplifting, and empowering. Is this a yearly gathering? What a wonderful way to raise awareness and pay tribute to the suffering and strength of women … I am extremely honoured and humbled by your invitation to present my poem.

Such courtesy from a “dangerous offender”! We are equally honoured to include her poem and two others she has written in our compilation.

“The Key to all Mythology”

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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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“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)

Noah Richler: “What We Talk About When We Talk About War”

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An except from Noah Richler’s talk at the Frye Festival last month, soon to be published in its entirety by Goose Lane Press.

We Are at War

If Parliament remains true to the decision it made in 2008[1], then by December 2011, Canadian soldiers will leave Afghanistan and our participation as combatants in NATO’s International Security Assistance Force will have ended. I’m not speaking to you, today, to judge this undeclared war—though technically speaking, we are not fighting a war but are involved in a “counter-insurgency” operation[2] and so conveniently not bound by the Geneva Conventions. No, appropriate to the Festival’s flattering invitation I come to the topic of this war, let’s call it a war, in the shadow of the master, Northrop Frye. As someone with a keen interest in story, I am fascinated by how the manner in which we narrate our lives lays the way for the journey we make through war’s repeating cycle of insult, escalating injury and then exhaustion. I am here to consider how we have talked ourselves into this war[3], through it—and now, finally, are talking ourselves out of it.

The Canadian Military Then and Now

Ten years ago Canada considered itself a ‘peacekeeping’ nation despite having a diminishing presence in actual UN peacekeeping operations around the world. More than 100 000 Canadians have participated in UN operations since 1948[4] but a mere 317 Canadians in blue helmets were serving in small numbers in various missions around the world in September, 2001[5], when Canada’s rank among contributing nations had plummeted to 33rd among contributing nations[6].

Now (at the end of February, 2010) it ranks 57th.[7] Today, our Forces are still nowhere near the 1.1 million who fought over the course of the Second World War when, despite our relatively meager population—of which more than 45 000 gave their lives—this country had the third largest navy, the fourth largest air force and six land divisions fighting[8], but it is probably fair to say that at the present time the Canadian Forces enjoy a much higher and more visible profile than they have done for fifty years and that the solemnity with which Canadian military fatalities are honoured is the envy of other armies and countries fighting in the ISAF in Afghanistan.

It’s unlikely that the character of Canadians was altered so fundamentally in that time, but there is no question that a wholesale revision of a couple of our myths of identity at least provided the suggestion of such a change. It is this occurrence on the narrative plane that I wish to examine through the limited evidence of the voices of a few of the soldiers and their families but more so the journalists and pundits who write and comment on the war for the Canadian news media. Today, in a hyper-narrated world that I believe Northrop Frye would have found tremendously exciting, not just poets but you and I and especially the press are Shelley’s “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Reporters[9], in the heat of the moment, articulate the national story and in this regard I believe their pronouncements to be reasonably scientific barometer of how not just the content but also the form of stories have been manipulated to permit the war and, in the very moment we are living in, are about to excuse us from it.[10]

How Stories Work (According to Northrop Frye)

Stories are the mirror of a society’s worldview and present themselves to us in myriad forms, the range of which is no longer academic. Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, presented a “Theory of Modes” in which the form of a story could be classified by the relative “elevation” of its characters who were superior or inferior to we mortals in kind or in degree. Gods, superior to us in kind, operate in a world not subject to the laws of ours mundane one in stories Frye called ‘myths’. Stories that feature characters living in the same world that we do and who are like us in kind but superior to ordinary humans in degree, are romances with heroes. The hero, says Frye, “is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.” He is a hero in a high mimetic mode—the hero “of most epic and tragedy, and is primarily the kind of hero that Aristotle had in mind.”[11] The hero is in low mimetic if he is utterly like us in kind and in degree. Such a character is, says Frye, “of realistic fiction”—and not very grand at all. He is, writes Frye, “one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience.”

Frye, however, reluctantly toiling in the ‘Bush Garden’ (a phrase he borrowed from a student of his called Margaret Atwood), was in the habit of judging stories at a remote distance. Today these story forms are close and immediate. We negotiate not just with Islamism but a host of creeds that as recently as fifty years ago entered the imaginations even of scholars merely on paper or as the result of anthropological travels to distant lands. Now they live not just down the street, they’re next door and inside the house and in your son’s or daughter’s bedroom. We live in a world where the means to fabricate or subscribe to a story and disseminate it have never been more powerful or more commonplace—means that are, quite literally, at our keyboard fingertips, and we have come to understand their astonishing power because ordinary life has taught us to recognize and to use our viral capacity as their agents. Stories have never been less remote. They are dynamic to the point of being positively volatile and—I’m much influenced by the English biologist Richard Dawkins’s notion of memes, here—they act as the foot soldiers of narrative cultures that are virulently, intensely competitive.

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More Frye on “Literature as Therapy”

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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)

Carmelo Tropiano: “Literature as Therapy”

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Carmelo Tropiano is a Professor of English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College

“Literature [is]…a means of concentrating and intensifying the mind and of bringing it into a state of energy, which is the basis of all health.”

—Northrop Frye, “Literature as Therapy”

In November of 1989, Northrop Frye gave a lecture titled, “Literature as Therapy.”  In his discussion, he expounds on the notion that literature possesses curative properties: That reading a novel or a poem, for example, in some sense restores both psychological and bodily “balance,” and that there is an inextricable linkage between the body and the mind that lends authenticity to the concept that “such imaginative constructs as literature…would have a direct role to play in physical health” (469).  Frye provides several literary anecdotes to buttress his thesis (Dickens and Shakespeare), and then relates the following personal account:

I remember my mother telling me of undergoing a very serious illness after the birth of my sister, and in the course of the illness she became delirious.  Her father, who was a Methodist clergyman, came along with the twenty-five volumes of Scott’s Waverley novels and dropped them on her. By the time she had read her way through them she was all right again. (475)

The cathartic effects of reading appear to segue into the purging of destructive “imbalances” that contribute to physical illness.  Perhaps part of the reason behind Frye’s mother’s recovery has to do with the time required to complete twenty-five volumes.  What is, however, certain, and the main idea that Frye seems to suggest here, is that literature enables transformation; and that fictional texts, necessarily, do not have any creative boundaries imposed on them in the same way that non-fictional texts do.  Rather than challenge the status-quo, non-fictional texts seem to reify what is.  As Frye aptly notes, stories employ “poetic language,” requiring the reader to “detach himself” (474).  What literature conveys “is the sense of controlled hallucination…where things are seen with a kind of intensity with which they are not seen in ordinary experience” (475).  The literary experience foments ambiguity and dislocation—the aesthetic pedigree of the novel or short story is that they revel in the uncertain, the antithesis to the non-thought of received ideas that defy critical examination.  How can we, for instance, query the biological construct of a cell or the number of nucleotides in a strand of DNA?  Literature, on the other hand, approaches and expresses truths in an indirect sort of way, in non-explicit, non-objective trajectories.  Reading means entering into the boundless possibilities of the imagined and is unsettling to the real-world with its plethora of codes, dense practicalities, and auras of conventionality.  The story is the imaginative space where the inexorabilities and vicissitudes of existence are explored.  It is little wonder why Plato banished the poets from his ideal republic (those involved in iconoclasm)—they offered a “counter environment” as Frye would say, “in which the follies and evils of the environment are partly reflected” and ultimately purged.  The artist sets up something “antipathetic to the civilization in which it exists.”  The artist’s vision is one in which the reader participates, and in such a way as to procure a deeper awareness of the world beyond one’s environment; it is a practice that enables a reader to gain insights, through appropriation, that will make his own life more comprehensible.  For Frye’s mother, the “counter-delirium” offered to her by reading Scott’s novels facilitated what Coleridge called, “a willing suspension of disbelief”; that is, a susceptibility to being led into an experience that is potentially disruptive, and, in the end, transformative.  The healing properties in literature, thus, are those that allow us to dislocate ourselves from our surroundings, and in Frye’s mother’s case, from herself and her illness.  Our attention, therefore, will be on something else for a change, which surely contributes to “balance.”

Sources:

Frye, Northrop. “Literature as Therapy.” The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical

Theory 1976-1991. Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 463-534.