Comment Re: Sokal Hoax

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cold-fusion 

One of our readers, Alan, in response to Michael Sinding’s post, makes this observation about the Sokal hoax:

Thanks for the link to Berube – he is now on my Google Reader list – though his comparison of the Sokal hoax to Pons-Fleischmann is fatuous, so I distrust him automatically; Pons-Fleischmann set off a firestorm of skepticism (I remember, I was there) in the scientific community, which is neither so gullible, nor so in love with false scientific legitimation, as the cultural studies community. Sokal went beyond his original hoax and produced further devastating critiques of many in the ‘theory’ community (never Derrida, though, if I recall).

Michael Sinding: Big Picture

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universe1

I’ve got some remarks on the interesting recent discussions about literary theory, cultural studies & new historicism, social aspects of literature, and the like. These remarks started out small but grew rapidly, as remarks are wont to do if they’re not nipped in the bud.

I agree about some of the problems in literary studies today diagnosed by others here. You do seem often to get, as Joe Adamson suggests, an assumption that ethical issues are cut and dried, that it’s obvious what the right opinions or ideologies are, and that they should be monitored. The critical work then gets highly political, without being highly ethical: they’re not interested in thinking about, say, how a text might complicate ideas about what’s right and wrong and why, just in castigating the wrong-thinkers and praising the right-thinkers.

And I would agree with Russell Perkin that cultural studies and new historicist critics do pay a lot of attention to the social function of literature. The thing is, they tend to have quite a narrow notion of that social function—essentially, as Joe says, that literature is a ‘shill for the establishment’. Often it’s just assumed, but here’s Franco Moretti putting it baldly, in Signs Taken for Wonders (1983, rpt. 2005): “let us say that the substantial function of literature is to secure consent. To make individuals feel ‘at ease’ in the world they happen to live in, to reconcile them in a pleasant and imperceptible way to its prevailing cultural norms. This is the basic hypothesis” (27). Moretti is a brilliant guy, but still. Why is the hypothesis so narrow, and basically wholly negative? Literature is just another kind of mystification. He may have changed his views since this book, but throughout, there is no hint that there is any other social function, or any other function at all. And it seems in line with views that persist today.

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Frye as Teacher

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Frye_image_for_website_3395554

In the course of editing Frye’s Diaries––more than a decade ago now––I sought to identify the more than 1,200 people whose names crop up in the diary entries.  I corresponded with a number of these people, most of whom were his students at Victoria College in the 1940s and 1950s.  To take one year as an example, I wrote to seventy‑eight people who made an appearance in the 1949 diary: fifty‑nine responded.  I would ordinarily inquire of all those I wrote whether they remembered the occasion mentioned by Frye, and I would usually invite them to provide some biographical information about themselves and to share their memories of Frye as a person and teacher.  I often requested the correspondents to help identify others mentioned in the diaries.  I was interested in learning specific details in order to annotate the Diaries, but my invitation to the correspondents to reflect on their experiences with Frye and on the Victoria College scene at the time would help me, I hoped, to reconstruct the social landscape on campus during the seven years covered in the Diaries.  The correspondents were generous in their responses.  The more than one hundred replies I received, many quite extensive, provide a rather remarkable body of reminiscence.

One leitmotif that runs throughout the letters I received is the power and generous presence that Frye had as a teacher.  Here is a sampler of the correspondents’ tributes:

• Northrop Frye was the greatest single influence in my life. (Phyllis Thompson)

• My own memories of Frye are filled with respect and gratitude.  What incredible luck to have been “brought up” by him!  I remember the excitement of his first lecture every fall. There was a ping of the mind, like a finger snapped against cut glass.  You came back from your grungy summer job and then there it was, the whole intellectual world snapped into life again, the current flowing. (Eleanor Morgan)

• I still cannot believe my good fortune in having been taught so many stimulating courses by a person of such brilliance and compassion.  His ideas were electrifying, encyclopedic, and revolutionary. . . . Each year when I returned to the university, the hinges of my mind sprang open, and my brain pulsed with the excitement of Frye’s thinking, his eloquence, and his wit.  But what keeps his influence on my life vivid and profound to this day is that he enabled us to translate the leaps of intellect we experienced in his lectures into the emotional underpinnings of a way to look at the world and one’s place in it––in short, to be in the world, yet not of it. (Beth Lerbinger)

• Frye would lecture without notes, yet the class rarely turned haphazard.  He asked questions constantly that required a knowledge not only of the Bible and classical mythology, but also of the major works in English and American literature.  No one could keep pace with all the references, but still the effect was to illuminate and give a structure to a rich and fascinating verbal universe.  And then, as an added bonus, just when you thought he had reached the conclusion his investigation was leading to, he would use that “conclusion” as the opening position in a new line of investigation. (Ed Kleiman)

• In short, the Frye course [Religious Knowledge] in one way made for a lot of fun at home.  In another way it changed our lives forever. (M.L. Knight)

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“Small World”

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Responding to Bob Denham’s earlier post:

Bob, A quibble about Frye and David Lodge (whom I have been working on recently). Lodge’s Small World is self-consciously “An Academic Romance,” and Lodge used Frye’s writings on romance to help him think about the genre. But I don’t think that his Professor Kingfisher has much in common with Frye. Kingfisher, “a man whose life is a concise history of modern criticism,” is born in Vienna, and has links to Prague structuralism before coming to the USA to become a leading figure in New Criticism. All of that makes him resemble Rene Wellek, who of course wrote a history of criticism. (In other ways, the character does not correspond to Wellek.) I remember that Lodge once commented in an interview that his deconstructionist friends, who in their theorizing denied any connexion between literature and any non-linguistic reality, were the ones who were most adamant in their questions about who various characters in Small World “really” were! From an archetypal point of view, the name Kingfisher signals that the character originates in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance via T. S. Eliot, so the idea for the character was perhaps inspired by Frye’s theorizing of romance.

Don Harron: My Frye, His Blake

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Don Harron

Some years ago one of Frye’s former students, Don Harron, sent me a copy of My Frye, His Blake, saying that it had been rejected by a university press because it was not academic enough.   Harron’s summary of Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, however, was intended not for an academic audience but for the common reader.  Harron calls his 279‑page summary a down‑sizing of Frye’s complicated and sometime difficult exposition of Blake’s prophecies.  My Frye, His Blake is an abridgement of Fearful Symmetry.  It is not so much an effort to simplify Frye as to make him more accessible to the nonspecialist by presenting, in Pound’s phrase, the “gists and piths” of Frye’s book––a concentrated form of its argument, combining his own summaries with Frye’s words.  I’m hopeful that it might yet find a publisher.

Here’s Harron’s preface:

BEFORE BEGINNING

To deal first with that somewhat presumptuous and proprietary title: I am one of Northrop Frye’s former students, but can lay no special claim to him.  Like James Hilton’s fictional “Mr. Chips,” he and his wife Helen remained childless throughout their lives, but bred thousands of devoted, surrogate progeny like myself, who considered them both as role models during that green island in our lives we call college days.

I was heartened by the announcement that all of Frye’s literary output is to be re-issued in a thirty‑volume collection.  At the same time I worried that his legacy might be confined to academic circles, and miss the larger public he freely sought during his lifetime.  This attempt of mine to summarize the first of his many books may be construed by some as a kind of Blake for Dummies, but that is not my intention.

The origin of My Frye, His Blake stems from the first essay I ever wrote for the great man back in 1946.  I forget the subject of my paper, but I will never forget the mark he gave me.  It was a C‑minus.  He added the words: “This is mostly B.S. , but you do have a gift for making complex ideas simple.”  The latter half of that cryptic statement is the reason for this book.

I was a freshman at Victoria College, University of Toronto, in 1942, but since I was enrolled in a course known as Sock and Fill (Social and Philosophical studies), I didn’t have any lectures with Northrop Frye that first year.  It was months before I got to hear him in a public lecture on “Satire: Theory and Practice.”  I sat beside two nuns from St. Michael’s College who rocked back and forth with delight as Frye quoted Pope and Swift and Dr. Johnson and added more than a few ripostes of his own.  They nearly rolled in the aisle when he quoted Dante reaching the dead center of evil and passing through the arse of the Devil to the shores of Purgatory.

When I returned to Vic in 1945 after two years’ undistinguished service in the RCAF, it was general campus knowledge that the book Northrop Frye had been thinking about and writing for more than ten years was on the English poet and engraver William Blake (1757–1827).  Fearful Symmetry is considered by many to be the most complex of Frye’s writings.  It was his second book, the Anatomy of Criticism written ten years later, that gave him his international reputation as a literary critic.  When I took courses with him in Spenser and Milton during my undergraduate years 1945–48, he was in the throes of preparing the Anatomy, and a good deal of that book came out in his lectures to us.

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Thanks to Clayton Chrusch

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blake-the-last-supper

Fearful Symmetry was the very last of Frye’s major works that I read, and by the time I  first read it, I had re-read just about everything else a few times over. I don’t know why I put it off for so long. I rationalized that it is a youthful work (even though it is clearly not that), a mere precursor to Anatomy where the “real work” begins, and a study narrowly focused on a still somewhat obscure poet. So, predictably enough, when I finally came to read it, it blew open all the doors and sent my carefully arranged mental furniture flying. It’s a book that still haunts me. Fearful Symmetry possesses all of Frye’s runic power to summon up the fearsome but benign authority of the Magus/prophet: not, as he says elsewhere, the oppressive mystery that conceals, but the liberating mystery that reveals.

I am therefore very grateful that Clayton Chrusch has undertaken to provide us with a weekly summary, chapter by chapter. By the time I reach the end of each installment, I’m a little breathless with excitement. Such is the power of the book that Clayton’s lucid exposition effortlessly taps into it. I look forward to his next.

Making Literature Out of Frye

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newdefenders

Frye appears in "The Pajusnaya Consignment" (above, July 1984) in Marvel's New Defenders series

In addition to Amis’s The Rachel Papers Frye has made his way into a number of poems, plays, novels, and discursive texts.  An earlier post catalogued his appearance in contemporary poems.  As for the other genres, one of the central characters of David Lodge’s Changing Places (1974) refers humorously to the perpetual motion of an elevator, “a profoundly poetic machine,” as symbolizing Frye’s theory of modes in Anatomy of Criticism (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1975; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 212–13.  Professor Kingfisher in Lodge’s Small World (1985), a sequel to Changing Places, is a fictionalized version of Frye.  In Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water Dr. Joseph Hovaugh is modeled on Frye.  Here are further examples:

•  The following bit of dialogue occurs in Frederic Raphael’s play, Oxbridge Blues, from Oxbridge Blues and Other Plays for Television (London: BBC, 1984).  Victor is a serious writer.  Wendy is his wife:

Victor:  I didn’t think you felt like discussing it.

Wendy:   I don’t even know what “it” is.  What is it?  I know you’re ridiculously jealous of Pip and you can’t even bring yourself to accept his generosity without looking as though you’d much sooner be reading the collected works of — of — of — oh — Northrop Frye.

Victor:  I would.  Much. The Anatomy of Criticism, though flawed, was a seminal work in some ways.  Why did you happen to choose that name?

Wendy:  I wanted someone with a silly name.

Victor: I don’t find Northrop particular silly.

Wendy:  Well I do. I find it very silly indeed.  Not as silly as you’re being, but still very silly.

•  From Gail Godwin’s The Odd Woman (New York:  Knopf, 1974), 257–8:

Was Gabriel’s project quixotic?  For almost two years, she had vacillated between thinking him a nearsighted fool and a farsighted genius.  How could she tell?  Surely there must be a way to measure it, but how?  After the fact, it became a bit simpler.  For instance, in the field of literature, of literary criticism, she knew Northrop Frye was a genius—even though some respectable scholars like Sonia Mark’s husband detested Northrop Frye.  Frye’s ideas made sense; they rested on valuable hypotheses; they lit up the entire realm of literature for you.  After you had read Frye, you thought of your favorite books as parts of a large family.  You not only saw them as you had before, but you saw behind them and in front of them. It was like meeting someone, forming an opinion about this person, then being privileged to meet the person’s parents and grandparents, as well; and then being privileged to meet the person’s children, and grandchildren!  Of course, someone like Max Covington would say, The person himself, alone, should be judged.  What do parents have to do with it?  What do his children have to do with it?  They only confuse and diffuse you from the proper study of the object, which is:  the object itself.

She had tried to lift her assurance about Frye—as one might gingerly try to lift an anchovy from its tin and place it, undamaged, on a plate—and transfer it toward her wavering confidence in Gabriel.  Surely, during the forties and fifties when Frye was painstakingly filling his wife’s shoe boxes with notecards for Anatomy of Criticism, Mrs. Frye had had an occasional qualm.  Or had she? After all, Frye had done Fearful Symmetry first.  She had that to build on.  She knew that her first closetful of shoeboxes had come to something.  Whereas, with Gabriel, there was only the queer, eccentric little monograph, published half a lifetime ago!

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Frye and Martin Amis

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rachel

It’s really interesting to read in Russell’s earlier post that Martin Amis considered attending U of T in 1971 to study with Frye before publishing his first breakout novel, The Rachel Papers, in which Frye plays an integral part in the protagonist Charles Highway’s intellectual development.  It’s been a very long time since I’ve read the novel, but if I remember correctly, Highway must read Frye more or less under the covers, in secret: it is completely symptomatic of a time when Frye had somehow become anathema to the British idea of literary scholarship.  I know I’m a partisan, but I’d still say that in the long run, the British lost out in the bargain.  When the Franco-American poststructuralist tide was rising in the 1980s, the English school had very little to fight back with on literature’s behalf, and the lingering Leavisites certainly weren’t going to get the job done.

Frye also appears regularly in Amis’s critical writings, and is part and parcel with the contrarian badboy outlook that continues to carry him as both an author and a critic.  (One of his best observations is that a literary critic’s most essential attribute is a spine: something to tingle when tingling is the required response.)  Anyone interested in getting a sense of Frye’s influence on Amis should check out his excellent collection of articles and reviews, The War Against Cliche.

12 March 1974: Northrop Frye Looks to the Twenty-First Century

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fryerobed

I have been browsing in a recently acquired copy of Bob Denham’s new collection, Northrop Frye: Selected Letters, 1934-1991.  These build up a picture of Frye largely in the role of  professional academic.  It is a wonderful book, and the range of correspondents and subjects is remarkable.  For example, Frye writes to Martin Amis in 1971 about the latter’s interest in studying at the University of Toronto, and to Greg Gatenby in 1987 with some very amusing memories of meeting Wallace Stevens at Columbia University in 1948 .  In 1974, Frye looks to the future while commenting to Bob Denham on his Northrop Frye: An Enumerative Bibliography, a copy of which Frye has just received:

The bibliography is a most impressive achievement: your introduction in particular, which I had not seen before, seems to me an excellent and very judicious one.  Reading through Section 3, I am astonished at the number of people who seem to have rushed into print with the notion that my view of literature is preposterous.  Something tells me that the twenty-first century will have a good deal of difficulty in understanding what all the fuss was about.

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.