The Frye Festival Archive in the Northrop Frye Journal

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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.

Nicholas Graham: Myth and Metaphor

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Responding to Bob Denham’s post

I would like to suggest that myth and metaphor are a higher form of question and answer.

Myth and metaphor operate on the level of Vico’s priority of poetry, the first level of language, and also the second level of language which is oratory.

Question and answer operate on the third level of language which is philosophical and on the lowest or forth level of language which is scientific or descriptive.

Myth and metaphor are what make poetry and oratory centripetal. Question and answer are what make philosophy and science centrifugal.

These two worlds of a) Myth and Metaphor & b) Question and Answer are perhaps what Blake had in mind when he wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

If we consider what makes Frye different from Derrida it is the fact that Derrida is a philosopher, using a different and constricted form of language; and the problem in the 70s was that the people who took over the English Departments were operating on the level of philosophy or the third level of language. What makes Frye shine, and stand apart, is the fact that he continued to opeate in terms of myth and metaphor: “to guard the vision in the time of trouble.” Blake’s Jerusalem. (See Michael Happy’s incisive article, “The Reality of the Created: From Deconstruction to Recreation”, Frye and the Word.)

Constructive philosophers like Leo Strauss and Bernard Lonergan, Gadamer, Heidegger, etc., provide accounts of the roots of our degraded culture and all agree with Heidegger that the only solution to our problems is to learn that on this earth we must learn to dwell poetically. But that is as far as they go. They do not rise to the higher level and operate, as Frye can, within the language of myth of metaphor.

Philosophical accounts of our culture are very helpful, if limited verbally, in attempting to recreate our culture. Lonergan provides us with an analysis of the levels of consciousness in terms four imperatives at four levels: Be Attentive, Intelligent, Reasonable, Responsible in his book, Method In Theology. This is hard to contradict unless we want to propose and promote their opposite. And he even devotes an entire book to examining the act of insight in his book, Insight, where we find a section on “The Longer Cycle of Decline”. This along with what Leo Strauss calls “The Waves of Modernity”, are what Frye terms, at a higher level, accounts of the roots of “single vision.”

The act of insight is what connects a question with an answers; questions evoke insights and without insights our answers are mere empty concepts.

An analysis of our culture in terms of myth and metaphor is what Frye offers us, but the question that remains to be examined is what connects myths and metaphors? It is the act of vision. So we must turn our attention to both the act of insight and the act of vision to find the double vision that our society so badly needs. Rollo May entitles his book The Cry for Myth, and James Joyce in the Circe chapter (15) of Ulysses calls our attention to the “intellectual imagination”.

Ironically, it was Rudolph Bultmann (student of Heidegger) who wrote so much about “demythologizing” who also made popular the word, kerygma, which is so central to Frye, who lifts it from the language level of philosophy and theology, and places it squarely in the context of and at the language level of anagogy, poetry and rhetoric.

As our individual acts of insights build up into intelligible emanations or philosophical theories over a lifetime, so our acts of vision, (which we express in poems, paintings, and love songs) create and recreate the visionary emanation that we identify with at the moment of death.

Similarly, a society lives or dies according to its vision. Such a vision is expressed, through the process of creation and recreation, in the Hebrew and Greek Bible, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and through what Blake calls his infernal or Bible of Hell.

David Damrosch and World Literature

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David Damrosch of Harvard has recently been extolling the virtues of world literature in a series of books, papers, and lectures.  You can see his lecture last year at Simon Fraser University here.  Last week he lectured at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto as the Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory.  During his seminar on “How to Read World Literature” (also the title as his most recent book), he provided an example of how we might go about “teaching” world literature with three poems: one from the east, two from the West (one British and one Argentine).  Moreover, the poems were from three different periods and one author was unknown.  (These are in fact the first three poems discussed in “What is Literature?” in How to Read World Literature, 8-13.)  In other words, the only thing that seemed to unite these poems is that they are understood – for one reason or another – to be poems and in some way identifiable as literature. Throughout his talk, Damrosch spoke in terms which had such an obvious affinity with Frye that I was surprised it wasn’t declared outright to be derived from Frye.  Therefore, after being encouraged to think about modes, symbols, myths, seasons, genres, and themes for more than an hour, I found it impossible not to ask outright: So what is new about this, and how is it different from Northrop Frye?

Damrosch’s method, however, is different from Frye’s inasmuch as it appears to consist of little more than a kind of archetype-spotting where the critic pursues a recurring symbol and then duly catalogues the instances of its recurrence.  For Damrosch, as long as the symbol is in play, then there is relevant critical activity in chasing it down.  This is not really what Frye had in mind when he laid out the principles of archetypal criticism.  Frye’s attitude, that is, seems to be, “yes, of courses there are symbols, but the question is why they recur, not merely how they recur.” In this regard, if there is to be a conception of world literature, as seems to be the goal of this “New” Comparative Literature as represented by scholars like Damrosch, it is only possible insofar as it seeks a homogenization of literature according to some universal experience manifested by recurring archetypes.

Damrosch writes in How to Read World Literature: “[w]riters in metropolitan centers do not necessarily need to adapt their methods in order to be accessible to readers beyond their home country, since many of their literary assumptions and cultural references will be understood abroad on the basis of readers’ past familiarity with earlier classics in their tradition” (107-8).  Damrosch thus provides a defence of the Great Tradition or the Western Canon or the Canon of whatever tradition, and appears to argue that it is necessary to know other Canons in order comprehend work outside of one’s own tradition.  The aim of world literature, therefore, is not to celebrate difference but rather to find sameness.  We only need look to Anatomy of Criticism to find a similar but extensively elaborated mode of reading: “[t]he repetition of certain common images of physical nature like the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be called even ‘coincidence,’ which is the name we give to a piece of design that we cannot find a use for it.  But it does indicate a certain unity in the nature that poetry imitates, and in the communicating activity of which poetry forms part.  Because of the larger communicative context of education, it is possible for a story about the sea to be archetypal, to make a profound imaginative impact, on  a reader who has never been out of Saskatchewan” (AC 99, emphasis mine).  Frye argues that “[o]nly the archetypal critic can be concerned with its relationship to the rest of literature” (AC 100).  Moreover, and with specific reference to Damrosch’s argument: “[t]hus the centre of the literary universe is whatever poem we happen to be reading.  One step further, and the poem appears as a microcosm of all literature, an individual manifestation of the total order of words” (AC 121).  However, unlike Damrosch, it does not seem that Frye is advocating the practice of mere archetype-chasing. In his comparison of two poems – “Western wind, when wilt thou blow” and the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Nombrarte” – Damrosch comes to the conclusion that “[i]nstead of a fertile spring wind that can reunite loves, here we have an ill wind that blows no one any good and only brings a bitter aftertaste” (9).  So what unites two poems, for Damrosch, is simply an “image of physical nature” (which is to say, precisely what Frye noted over fifty years ago but without saying nearly as much).

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Update from the Frye Festival

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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.

Quote of the Day

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Actually, two quotes from Kingsley Amis on popular and serious literature

I have been reading Zachary Leader’s vast biography of Kingsley Amis (The Life of Kingsley Amis, 2006).  Amis had a strong interest in popular, or “genre” fiction, and he wrote books about science fiction and about Ian Fleming’s James Bond series.  Here are two quotations from the latter book, The James Bond Dossier (1965):  “I think wish fulfilment is a common and normal human activity.  I find self-advertised maturity, pride in maturity, at least equally suspect.  No adult ought to feel an adult all the time.”  And even in works of anti-escapist, ‘serious’ literature,  Amis argues that a process of compensation is at work: “one of the qualities that took us to it in the first place is its implicit assurance that life is coherent and meaningful, and I can think of no more escapist notion than that.”

More Frye and the Bible

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Blake’s Plato

Reponding to Nicholas Graham’s post

I certainly agree that Frye’s reading of the Bible is guided by typology and that there is a certain prophetic power in his biblical criticism. I was by no means trying to give a full account of Frye’s reading of the Bible. My remarks were in the context of the earlier posts about the meaning of the phrase “literary criticism of the Bible.” All I was trying to suggest was that Frye’s approach relies on two fundamental literary principles, myth and metaphor or narrative and image––the mythos and dianoia that Frye devoted so much space to in Anatomy of Criticism. Typology and prophecy, as I understand those terms, are terms from biblical, rather than literary, criticism. I agree also that “vision” is also absolutely central to Frye’s enterprise, and I wrote a fairly long chapter in my book on Frye and religion (89–125) trying to make a case for its centrality and relating it to terms such as “insight,” “enlightenment,” “epiphany,” “recognition” and (the central visionary faculty) “the imagination.” But again “vision” is a term that does not spring from the vocabulary of literary criticism, though it is perhaps obliquely connected to Aristotle’s opsis. No one would want to reduce Frye’s reading of the Bible to myth and metaphor. But they are literary principles, and so no one would want to ignore them either. As I understand Frye, “vision” and “prophecy” belong to what I called the Bible’s centrifugal, kerygmatic thrust.

Nicholas Graham: Frye and the Bible

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Giovanni di Paulo, Dante and Beatrice Leaving Heaven, ca. 1465

Responding to Bob Denham’s post

I like and agree with all that you say about Frye and the Bible, Bob, but feel there are a few things missing, like typology and prophecy. To say that Frye is looking at the Bible from the point of view of a literary critic is correct but seems to me to be a far too cold and detached statement–Frye as a scientific anatomist.

In Fearful Symmetry Frye is learning from Blake and teaching us that the Bible is a complete book of vision. With my philosophical and theological frinds I have enjoyed many heated and lively conversations, but we always seem to reach an impass when we come to the word “vision”. Their favorite word is “insight”, the eureka moment, and this seems to be pretty well an established occurrence in consciousness, and the title of a major work by that other great Canadian thinker, Bernard Lonergan.  This “insight” is the basis for an alternative to faculty psychology, dealing with the soul and its attributes, which has now been abandoned in the wake of scholasticism. The nearest scholasticism comes to Blake’s “vision” is with the word “emanation”, as in Aquinas’ “intelligible emanations”, our participation through the act of “insight” in the light or mind of God. Understanding is what we achieve each time we have an “insight”. The historian Herbert Butterfield states that the rise of modern science outshines everything since the birth of Christianity. Modern science comes with the Enlightment and philosophers like Paul Ricoeur, Gadamer, Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss are now trying to dismantle its stranglehold and go beyond it.

In this sense, Frye does not approach the Bible as a scientist or literary critic but, instead, as a prophet and poet. What emerges from Fearful Symmetry is Blake’s universal cry that we find at the opening of his poem Milton: “Would to God that all the Lord’s people were Prophets.” Numbers XI. ch. 29 v.

To go beyond either/or, Frye approaches the Bible both as a literary critic where he suspends value judgements but also as a prophet like Jeremiah where he uses value judgments to tear down and to build up. [See Jean O’Grady’s brilliant article “Re-valuing Value“.] The key to prophecy is typology, the Medieval approach to the Bible, displayed to us splendidly in Dante’s Divine Comedy. In “Paradiso” Canto 6, Justinian is the only speaker, and here we deal with the Law; canto 10, the Circle of the Sun, the Circle of the Sages, we deal with Wisdom; canto 17 deals with Prophecy. His great, great grandfather tells Dante must go back to earth and assume the mantle of the prophet and poet. Armed with the phases of revelation: Law, Wisdom, Prophecy, Etc., Dant must construct for us The Divine Comedy, which is nothing less than a recreation of the Bible.

Frye’s engagement with the Bible brought about a fundamental change in him as it did in Dante, and it was this change into prophet and poet that was necessary before he could present us with his lasting emanation, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, which we must learn to read as the Bible for our time.

Frye and the Bible

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bible

Responding to comments by Russell Perkin and Michael Happy

It seems to me that Frye is looking at the Bible from the point of view of a literary critic. He begins with the assumption that, unlike other sacred books, the Bible is a unity. He is interested in the pursuing this unity as it manifests itself in the Bible’s myths and metaphors. The former he examines in terms of the movement from Creation to Apocalypse, with all of the lesser up and down U–shapes in between. The latter he examines largely in terms of recurring images. He of course brackets out any number of other features that a literary critic might legitimately want to investigate, especially those having to do with literary texture. His concern is with structure. That’s the centripetal thrust of The Great Code, Words with Power, and his Bible lectures. According to the class notes from his Religious Knowledge course, he called this the synthetic approach. The centrifugal thrust, largely absent from his Bible lectures, has to do with the kerygmatic myths to live by. That is, as a sacred book, the Bible is more than literary. Frye worries a great deal about what to call this, finally settling on “kerygma.”

One can approach a written text, sacred or otherwise, from any number of perspectives––biographical, historical, formal, sociological, cultural, religious, and so on. When I was in school in the 1960s biblical scholars such as Gerhard von Rad and Martin Noth were engaged in a type of interpretation called redaction criticism, which began to pay attention to large units of the Bible, such as the first six books, as creative, literary forms in their own right. Since that time there has been an explosion of literary approaches to the Bible, and there is a large industry today devoted to the poetics of biblical narrative and imagery. The degree of interest among Biblical scholars in such approaches is revealed by a glance at the annual programs of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature. The dialogue works both ways: we have literary critics interested in the narrative and metaphorical features of the Bible, and we have biblical critics interested in the Bible’s literary features. Not long ago I was glancing at study of that most intractable book, the Book of Revelation, by Leonard Thompson, a well known biblical scholar. Thompson realizes that he can’t crack the code of Revelation without speaking about its genre, its narrative structure, and its metaphoric unity, all of which are literary matters. Which is pretty close to Frye’s approach.

One of my favorite examples of Frye’s mythical–metaphorical approach is his commentary on the Priestly and Jahwist creation accounts in chapters 5 and 6 of Words with Power. Whether the correct label for this “a literary criticism of the Bible,” I dunno. I guess I’d say it’s a reading of the Bible from the perspective of a literary critic who is interested in texts as wholes and in the structure of their narratives and imagery. Or is all of this too obvious to need remarking?

I suppose one doesn’t have to be a literary critic to pay attention to features of a text that are literary, but if you’re trained to consider the centrality of such things as metaphor in any text, you’re more likely to see things that those untrained do not. Spend ten minutes, for example, leafing through any collection of hymns. You’ll discover that God is a mighty fortress, Christ is a master workman, Christ is a star of the East, Christ is a dying lamb, the earth is a story teller, the Holy Spirit is a dove or a divine fire or a wind, Christ is a solid rock and similar figures from the mineral world (such as Rock of Ages), God’s mercy is a bright beam, Christians are soldiers (and also from that hymn, we are the body of Christ), the hour of prayer is sweet, the heart is a dwelling place, Christ is the light of light, Jesus is a shepherd; and of course all the royal metaphors imported from the Old Testament of the “Christ is king” or “Christ is ruler” variety and the associated metaphors of crowns, diadems, and thrones. Some hymns give us rather difficult instructions, such as “fold to thy heart thy brother” or “lift up your hearts,” the folding of a brother and the lifting of a heart seeming to be rather difficult things to do literally. Sometimes we get dual metaphors, as in the hymn “O Holy City,” where we’re told that “Christ the Lamb doth reign,” a figure that combines a pastoral and sacrificial image with a royal or regal one: Christ is a lamb: the lamb is a king. In “O Master of the Waking World,” we’re told that Christ has all the nations in his heart, an extraordinary metaphor that rather strains our powers of comprehension. In another hymn we’re called on to deliver our land from “error’s chain.” Why “chain”? Well, the hymnist needs a word to rhyme with “plain” and “slain,” but we nevertheless sense the direction in which the figure takes us: the heathen nations (the hymnist mentions India and Africa, along with, of all places, Greenland) are imprisoned (that is, chained) by error. Even in “My Country, ’tis of Thee” freedom is said to be a holy light, and as one of the imperatives is for it to ring from the mountain side, freedom also seems to be a bell. In “It Singeth Low in Every Heart” we’re told that the dead “throng the silence of our breasts,” indicating that in our breasts, where everything is silent, we have a host of dead souls or maybe just dead people hanging out, an image that is something of a problem for the literal minded. In “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,” we were told in the first stanza that “God is health” and in the second stanza that God is a bird. As we’re sheltered under the wings of God, this appears to be a mother bird, a hen perhaps. The hymnist doesn’t say that God is like a mother hen, but that he is one. In one of the choral responses we implore the Lord to makes us a sanctuary, which means a sacred place or a place of refuge.

My guess is that form critics and redaction critics and canonical critics and reader–response critics are less likely to be attuned to such metaphors than a critic interested in figurative language.