Rodney Baine and Charlie Bell

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chapelmerton

Merton College Chapel

Rodney Baine, mentioned in the 1950 diary entry for 23 August, was a U.S. Rhodes Scholar studying at Oxford, whom Frye met during his early days at Merton College in 1936 –– one of several fellow students he chummed around with.  Other friends were Joseph Reid from Manitoba, Alba Warren from Texas, Charles Bell from Mississippi (all Rhodes Scholars) and a hard‑drinking New Zealander, Mike Joseph.  In 1937 Frye spent time between terms touring Italy with Baine and Joseph and once back in Oxford he took up residence in a boarding house some distance from Merton College, sharing a suite with Baine and Joseph.  Frye apparently had not seen Baine between their Oxford days and the 1950 chance encounter on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, where Frye was studying during his Guggenheim year.  After stints at MIT, the University of Richmond, and Delta State University of Alabama at Montevallo, Baine landed a teaching position in 1962 at the University of Georgia, where he became a distinguished eighteenth‑century scholar.  Among his publications were books on on William Blake, Daniel Defoe, Robert Munford, and James Oglethorpe.  In 1981 Baine’s son James established the Rodney M. Baine Lecture Fund to commemorate his father, and in April 1982 Frye presented the Rodney Baine Lecture, “An Illustrated Lecture of Blake’s Jerusalem” at the University of Georgia.  Baine died in 2000.

In the full diary entry for 23 August 1950 Frye wrote, “Evidently he [Baine] was closely involved in the Charlie-Mildred bust up: in fact he had a hand in drawing up the articles of separation, & is still friendly & still corresponds with both.  He says that when we saw them they probably weren’t even living together, as Mildred had kicked him out of the house soon after he got back from Italy.”  The reference is to the divorce of Charlie Bell and Mildred Winfree, with whom he had lived during his year at Oxford.  Frye adds: “Charlie’s present wife [Diana (Danny) Mason] is a Quaker, & he reports that he has had the happiest year of his life.  Bell later taught at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s College in both Annapolis and Santa Fe.  Several years back Charlie Bell sent me his reminiscences about Frye from the time of their Oxford years.  I reproduce it here, with editorial insertions in square brackets:

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Circle of Fifths and the Great Doodle

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400px-Circle_of_fifths_deluxe_4.svg

Some very interesting comments from Michael Sinding:

Many thanks for this information, Bob, fascinating as always.

Re: the Circle of Fifths. I’m only going by the Wikipedia article, and I don’t know if I’m saying anything new here, but beyond the relations of harmony and discord in the Circle, it’s also worth noting the important of progression, resolution and mood in both the Circle and the Anatomy’s theory of myths.

The article says: “To the ear, the sequence of fourths gives an impression of settling, or resolution. (see cadence)… [T]he tonic is considered the end of the line towards which a chord progression derived from the circle of fifths progresses.” Also, progression-resolution in the Circle seems to be often either upwards or downwards.

In Anatomy, myths are defined by certain resolutions and moods. And resolution and mood imply a certain foregoing sequence of elements.

Examples:

“The obstacles to the hero’s desire, then, form the action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution” (164).

“In drama, characterization depends on function; what a character is follows from what he has to do in the play. Dramatic function in its turn depends on the structure of the play; the character has certain things to do because the play has such and such a shape. The structure of the play in its turn depends on the category of the play; if it is a comedy, its structure will require a comic resolution and a prevailing comic mood” (171-72).

Re: Frye and Joseph

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mann 

Sara, that’s a really interesting post. Frye quotes Genesis 49:22, “Joseph is a fruitful bough” recurrently as one of his standard examples of metaphor, which is a bit odd in terms of his view of the story! What you say suggests that he read the Joseph story more “realistically” than he usually does with the biblical text. On that level, Joseph is not the most appealing character: he “brought a bad report” to Jacob of the handmaids’ sons, and he follows this with the egocentric and even blasphemous dreams. (When I teach this story in my Bible and Literature course, I find very divergent responses to Joseph.)

Frye would obviously have been aware of the theory that the Joseph story represents the interpolation of Egyptian material into the narrative: I wonder whether he thought it was discordant with the rest of the story?

You mention that the Joseph story is generally highly regarded, and I also wonder whether Frye comments anywhere on the greatest retelling of it, and one of the great modern works inspired by the Bible, Thomas Mann’s Joseph tetralogy. I think this is one of the most neglected masterpieces of modern literature – perhaps partly because of its forbidding length.

By the way, Samuel was another biblical character whom Frye did not like!

Today in the Frye Diaries, 16 September

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyJAytr1ebc

1942: Frye’s other extra-curricular pre-occupation of the time: movie music. [Above, the kind of thing that Frye is presumably talking about — the closing sequence from Citizen Kane. Spoiler Alert! “Rosebud” is revealed.]

[117] Ideas for article on movie music. Orson Welles’ incessant woo-woo noises, a full series of drum rolls & trombones slithering from solemn burp to gloomy blop. Most incidental music is just ‘flourish,’ ‘sennet,’ ‘exeunt with a dead march’ stuff, a bag of tricks ‘sound effects,’ in short. Oscar Levant describes the sweep (Aug. 29) & feels that the producer always wants tutti, like the parvenu who wouldn’t have any second violins in his orchestra. He quotes a Russian film (Shostakovich) opening with a lone piccolo, followed by a flute. This indicates a lack of enterprise in experimenting with timbre. Hollywood can’t use woodwinds: they can’t shiver their timbers: only brass. The piano’s very effective percussive tone they leave out: they overdo harps & leave out tom-toms & gongs ever for horror films. Conventional orchestra background for everything: no regrouping. Motto from Ecclesiasticus. Nobody listens, so no leitmotif, an obvious point, one would think. Quotation, of course, and plagiarism. Uniformly heaving scoring: all harmonic tricks & general air of having found the lost chord, mostly the dominant discords. Why not long stretches of scenery & music for real drama, towards an operatic movie? Because nobody listens. This all the more essential as real music has dropped behind. There’s no amusing popular song: just bawling & nasal honks. Swing is stuck on a treadmill of rhythm, even Duke Ellington. Might recall ‘motion picture moods’ of Rapee as showing plagiarism bias. Often more effective. Farmyard Symphony vs. Fantasia, use of Beethoven’s Pastoral. Even good tricks, high pedal-point on Snow White, 19th c. What I mean by vocal music is that musical comedies can’t last. Songs are painful to photograph, singers even more so, & the camera is too relentless in its pursuit: musical comedy plots are pretty fragile…Need more Gershwins? Might explain about ‘syncopation’ of jazz. If chromatic harmony is played out the movie is the place for new experiments, not the concert hall. Of course there is a good deal going on, the train-boat sequence of The Reluctant Dragon. Oh, we’re getting there: that should be enough for a necessarily rather vague & ill-informed article. After all, I don’t know anything about montages or pan shots or fadeins or the rest of the patter.

Sára Tóth: Why Did Frye Dislike the Joseph of Genesis?

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 joseph

Joseph, in Genesis, has always totally baffled me: he bulks so large and so crucially in the Bible’s greatest book, but what to make of that I don’t see.  I’ve encountered several times the assertion that he’s a type of Christ; but what’s really Christlike about him?  (Late Notebooks, 337)

 What Stevens calls the “metaphor that murders metaphor” [Someone Puts a Pineapple Together, l. 27] is a metaphor not realized to be a metaphor, & so “taken literally.”  Note that such an unrealized metaphor becomes metonymic, i.e., the “best available” metaphor, & so starts us on the downward path of authority & hierarchy.  The Biblical archetype of this is the dream of Joseph of ascendancy over his brethren, which pushes them all into Egypt. (Late Notebooks, 359−60)

 We have recently learned about Frye’s superlatives, but would it not be equally fascinating to have a look at some of his dislikes? Learning that Genesis is the greatest book of the Bible for Frye was not the greatest of surprises, even though I would have voted for Job. However, it has brought to my mind something I have long been intrigued about: why did Frye dislike the story (or rather perhaps the character) of Joseph, “the fruitful bough”? Why did he feel uncomfortable with a story in the greatest book of the Bible, which has been celebrated as one of the best stories ever told?

For all I know, Joseph has been recognized by the precritical hermeneutic tradition as one of the fullest types of Christ in the Old Testament. Several church fathers (Ambrose the most eminent among them), whose imaginative readings of the Bible have certainly inspired Frye, note parallels in the story of Joseph and Jesus. Both are despised and rejected by their brethren. Both are sold by pieces of silver and descend into the pit which symbolizes darkness and death. Joseph, as well as Jesus, is tempted and goes through trials before his ascension, as it were, to glory. Prefiguring the Eucharist, Joseph ultimately becomes the saviour of the people by nourishing them from the Egyptian granaries, etc. A perfectly U-shaped narrative, mirrored in countless literary tales, apparently a brilliant example for the order of words. Then why the dislike?

Of course we can find hints in Frye’s work pointing towards a possible explanation. Apparently, despite its literary perfection and archetypal depth, he couldn’t help seeing Joseph’s story mostly as a myth of authority, manifested in immature adolescent dreaming for ascendancy over siblings, ultimately an unconscious craving for power and glory. For a thinker with such a high evaluation of dreams and desires, calling certain dreams “agressive and self-promoting” (Words with Power 235) is very strong language. What turns dreams into an ideology of power, Frye interestingly suggest, is interpreting them literally, just like Joseph did in the first phase of the story. (Later, however, Joseph does become a very creative interpreter of dreams, which, although mentioned in Words with Power, is not really considered a character development.) Frye, who attributed great importance to Jesus’ rejection of wordly power beginning with the temptation scene (see RW 210) and ending with the cross, certainly did not consider Joseph “Christ-like” in his craving for and exercise of power.

This takes me to perhaps the profoundest reason for Frye’s dislike. To interpret Joseph as a type of Christ is not the only possible symbolical reading of this narrative. In the Egyptian scenes, Joseph quite relentlessly manipulates his brothers with a noble purpose in view: to make them confront their past crime and elicit a change of heart in them. In short: here is the trickster God of the Old Testament toying with human beings, a father figure who disciplines those subjected to him from a position of authority, a vision of God Frye felt uncomfortable with. If we argued that Joseph’s rule here prefigures the exaltation of Christ, his resurrection and ascension, Frye would probably answer that the proper type of Christ’s resurrection in the Old Testament is the Exodus, a deliverance from Egypt and not an arrival into it.

Actually, it was Luther, himself suffering at the hands of an incomprehensible and hidden God, who provided the classic interpretation of Joseph’s doings as an allegory of how God works in the world. Luther conceives of this world as a delusive play of appearances, where God, as it were, has to hide himself and perform tricks or inflict sufferings in order to achieve his good and merciful purposes. Repulsive as this vision may seem to a follower of Blake, a note by the late Frye I have already quoted elsewhere resonates surprisingly with Luther’s ideas: “God’s power works only with wisdom & love, not with folly & hatred.  As 99.9% of human life is folly & hatred, we don’t see much of God’s power.  He must work deviously, a creative trickster, what Buddhists call the working of skilful means.” (Late Notebooks 212) If Frye had approached the story in Genesis with a focus on the “folly and hatred” of Joseph’s brothers, he might have seen less a power display in Joseph’s attitude and perhaps more a tact and wisdom which not only inflicted pain on others but also on himself. It is not a negligable detail that Joseph wept three times with increasing intensity behind his mask.

Re: Logic and Literature

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 miracle

Frye, I think, would never attempt to dismiss logic –– a word (with its congeners) that appears seventy nine times in the Anatomy –– as a keystone of intellectual inquiry. And logic, along with grammar and rhetoric, is one of the three pillars in Frye’s analysis of discourse in the Fourth Essay of the Anatomy –– an analysis in which he greatly expands the meaning of the terms of the medieval trivium. The best analysis of this is Paul Hernadi’s “Ratio Contained by Oratio: Northrop Frye on the Rhetoric of Non Literary Prose,” in Northrop Frye: Visionary Poetics: Essays on Northrop Frye’s Criticism New York: Lang, 1991), 137–53. And, of course, Frye was fond of drawing analogies between literature and mathematics, as in this passage:

Mathematics, like literature, proceeds hypothetically and by internal consistency, not descriptively and by outward fidelity to nature. When it is applied to external facts, it is not its truth but its applicability that is being verified. As I seem to have fastened on the cat for my semantic emblem in this essay, I note that this point comes out sharply in the discussion between Yeats and Sturge Moore over the problem of Ruskin’s cat, the animal that was picked up and flung out of a window by Ruskin although it was not there. Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith. The distinction between an empirical fact and an illusion is not a rational distinction, and cannot be logically proved. It is “proved” only by the practical and emotional necessity of assuming the distinction. For the poet, qua poet, this necessity does not exist, and there is no poetic reason why he should either assert or deny the existence of any cat, real or Ruskinian. (Anatomy, 93).

The question is not, I think, whether Frye denigrated logic and mathematics. The question, rather, is whether ratio or oratio is prior. If Frye had thought logic and mathematics were prior, he would not have ended up being a literary critic.

In 1979 Frye wrote to Ruth El Safar, “As I said, I had not had your letter before I returned home so it was all the more pleasant to have it when I got home. It was extremely helpful to me, because Denham’s book on me is just out [Northrop Frye and Critical Method], and it reminds me that almost everybody seems to be preoccupied with my charts and diagrams and with the question of whether they are logically airtight or not, instead of reading me as you do for what incidental help I may give to them in their own work.” This stung a bit, but it helped me to see that a kind of hard headed application of neo Aristotelian logic applied to Frye’s distinctions rather misses the point.

Logic and Literature

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180px-Euclid

Clayton Chrusch makes some very acute observations, reminding me of the closing pages of the Anatomy where Frye draws the analogy between the language of mathematics and the language of literature: “The mathematical and the verbal universes are doubtless different ways of conceiving of the same universe”  (Anatomy, 354, Princeton edition). Here are Clayton’s comments:

Skimming through the essay [“The Dialectic of Belief and Vision”], I came across this sentence which seems like a justification or at least a motivation of the totality of Frye’s work:

“It is only mythology, I feel, that can really express the vision of hope, the hope that is focused on a more abundant life for us all, not the hope of finally refuting the arguments of Moslems or Marxists.”

I think this is likely the sentiment Joe had in mind when he expressed frustration with my interest in logic and truth claims.

I think we can all agree that we need to express visions of hope, and we also have to refute bad arguments. (If you disagree with me, I have some arguments you will have a hard time refuting.)

One more note on logic, from the perspective of a former computer science student. Logic is not just about making and refuting arguments, but it is a branch of mathematics that is beautiful and awe-inspiring and full of untapped possibilities. The logicians I have encountered in my computer science education are brilliant and exuberantly imaginative people. Knowing these people, I know that logic can do more for us than it is doing now because it has not nearly been exhausted.

The fact that people openly despise myth and happily worship reason doesn’t mean that people are any more rational than they are imaginative. The war goes on on both fronts.

Frye and Jazz

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 jazz

In response to Michael Sinding’s Comment:

I think Frye never wrote anything extensively on jazz. He gets a good bit of mileage out of the observation that Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes pulses with a kind of jazz syncopation, repeating that observation three or four times. And there are scattered references to jazz here and there. Here are some:

From Diaries: “It snowed frantically all day, and I sat around wishing the chair in my office was more comfortable, wishing I didn’t have to read that goddamned Edgar book again, wishing I didn’t have to go to the Senior Dinner, wishing I could get started at my book and the hell with all this bloody niggling, wishing the college weren’t getting into such a rah-rah Joe College state, and so on. Regarding this last, Ken Maclean [MacLean] made the very interesting suggestion that Canada was having a post-war Jazz age of its own. It missed, very largely, the 1920 one, but now that we’re getting the post-war children, a lot of prosperity, and a tendency to make the Americans do the responsible jobs, along with a certain backlog of “progressive” education, we seem to be starting where the Americans have left off. (27 March 1952)

In his “Letters in Canada” reviews for 1957 there’s a reference to a poem by a jazz saxophonist. In the same column for 1959 we get this: “John Heath’s Aphrodite is a posthumous collection of poems by a writer who was killed in Korea at the age of thirty four. There is a foreword by Henry Kreisel, who is apparently the editor of the collection. The effect of these poems is like that of a good jazz pianist, who treats his piano purely as an instrument of percussion, whose rhythm has little variety but whose harmonies are striking and ingenious. There is a group of poems in quatrains, split in two by the syntax, where most of the protective grease of articles and conjunctions is removed and subject, predicate, object, grind on each other and throw out metaphorical sparks.”

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Freud and Frye

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freud

I’ll leave it to those who know Freud better than I do, but in response to Merv’s post below, it seems to me that Frye freely adopts Freud in Anatomy: “ritual” and “dream” and “displacement” are all Freudian concepts, aren’t they?  It may be that he is more “liberal” than Freud, but Frye, as always, is generous in adapting the best work of others.  Hell, he makes Spengler relevant in  a way that just about no one else could.

Is a cigar sometimes just a cigar?

Merv Nicholson: Desire (3)

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 divine

The third and last of Merv’s series on Desire.  The first and second posts can be found here and here.

The big point, the astonishing point, is that Frye valued desire.  (His mentor, Blake, did too, of course.)  This is a far bigger point about Frye than almost anything else.

For example, a key passage from Anatomy of Criticism:

“’The desire of man being infinite,’ said Blake, ‘the possession is infinite and himself infinite.’  If Blake is thought a prejudiced witness on this point, we may cite Hooker: ‘That there is somewhat higher than either of these two (sensual and intellectual perfection), no other proof doth need than the very process of man’s desire, which being natural should be frustrate, if there were not some farther thing wherein it might rest at the length contented, which in the former it cannot do.’”

 Frye was a radical thinker—someone who went to the “roots”—but he was not a political radical (not in any simple way, that is).  He was not a Leftist.  He was, however, a committed Social Democrat and supporter of the New Democratic Party of Canada (in the U.S. that would make him an extreme leftist “liberal”).  He detested Stalinism and authoritarianism of any stripe; there is an anarchist strain in his outlook.  It’s interesting that his wife seems to have been much further to the left than Frye was.

 The most important thing that Freud and Frye had in common was that their name begins with FR and has one syllable.  Freud, in Frye’s view, was a pessimistic thinker and an authoritarian: Freud was deeply mistrustful of human desire and regarded desire as dangerous: it must be carefully clipped and pruned, whatever its value for ambitious men, like him.  In this—and this is the real point—Freud was consistent with conservative thinkers generally. 

 Most of tradition and traditional thought is hostile to human desire.  

Why this is so is an interesting question.  But the point is that it isn’t Frye.  Frye valued human desire—indeed his whole way of thinking is an affirmation of human desire.  This is an astonishing and vital fact about him.

 Frye was different.