The Reynolds Lecture for 2012, presented at Emory & Henry College, reflects on Frye’s view of metaphor only toward the end,  I’ve often felt that theories of metaphor–at least those I’m familiar with–turn out to be founded on principles of similarity, comparison, analogy, or likeness.  Frye’s theory is unique in that it’s founded on sameness or identity.  I try to consider some of the implications of that view in the conclusion of the lecture.

What’s a Meta For?

Reynolds Lecture, Emory & Henry College, 28 March 2012

Robert D. Denham

It goes without saying, a phrase we use to mean that we should say at once, how honored I am to be the Reynolds Lecturer for 2012 and on the occasion of the 175th anniversary of the founding of Emory & Henry College, where I worked and played for some twenty‑three years.  Early on in my tenure here the dean of the college, Dan Leidig, assigned me to chair the Reynolds Lecture Committee, and so I had the good fortune of helping bring to campus such eminent humanists as Helen Vendler, James Redfield, John Simon, Wayne Booth, and Northrop Frye, among others.  I never dreamed, of course, that I would be joining their ranks as a Reynolds Lecturer, and I naturally feel that this is an instance of the ridiculous linking up with the sublime.  At the same time, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, which is both humbling and elevating.   The first Reynolds lecturer at Emory & Henry––in 1963––was Norman Cousins, peace activist and long‑time editor of the Saturday Review.  Two years later the president of the college, William Finch, whose son Tyree has joined us tonight, introduced the second Reynolds lecturers (there were two that year, on successive nights), both distinguished poets and critics, John Crowe Ransom and Reed Whittemore.  The shoulders of giants, indeed.

I’ve called my lecture tonight “What’s a Meta For?”––a title stolen from a quip by Marshall McLuhan: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a metaphor?”  McLuhan, too, was a thief: he was twisting the end of a line from Browning, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”  That is, the notion of an ideal world, which we may never attain, nevertheless motivates us to seek something better than what we’ve now got: it may elude our grasp but in our Utopianism we still reach for it.  I think metaphor in its most radical forms may have something to do with our linguistic reach exceeding our grasp, which is a notion I’ll come back to.  Rather than trying to define tonight what metaphor is, I’ll be reflecting on some of the contexts in which we encounter metaphor.

Metaphor is, of course, along with myth, one of the basic building blocks of literature.  John Keats’s masterful Ode on a Grecian Urn begins with three metaphors.  Keats is speaking to the urn: he addresses it by saying, “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian.”  In these nouns of direct address Keats, who was in his early twenties when he wrote the poem, is identifying the urn with a bride, a child, and a historian.  The suggestions that issue from the three metaphors are fairly complex.  Of course everyone knows that an urn is not a bride, and yet Keats is saying that it is a bride and not just that: she’s a bride who’s still chaste.  Furthermore, she’s married to quietness.  And she is also a child, or rather a foster‑child, who has been nourished by her adoptive parents, silence and slow time.  We could spend the rest of the evening investigating the magical language of Keats’s poem––its metaphors, paradoxes, and puns.  The point I want to make is that the extraordinary uses to which Keats puts figurative language is commonplace among poets.  Here’s another, the opening lines of one of Jeff Daniel Marion’s old Chinese poet poems: “Over the river this quarter moon / tilts in its dark well, / a gleaming dipper / spilling October.”  Here the moon is a gleaming dipper, and the heavens are a dark well.  This is the way poets talk.

Metaphor, however, is an aspect of language that belongs not just to poets and novelists and playwrights.  In a story in a recent issue of a college student newspaper I read about the soccer team’s “dream season, the “noise” that it took to wake the team up from its dream, about a “sudden death” period, about the opposing team’s drawing “first blood.”  And I read in a college catalogue, a most unpoetic document, about “cultivating students’ sensitivity,” students being, in this metaphor, something you run a plow through, like dirt.  In one of her “Messages from the President” in the alumni journal Emory & Henry’s Rosalind Reichard quotes George Peery, class of 1894, who forty years later became the governor of Virginia, as saying that the ideals “cultivated” at Emory & Henry deeply influenced his life.  That’s the plowing metaphor again.  The Indo‑European root for “cultivate” means to revolve or move around, which is what the plow does to the field.  In the most recent alumni journal President Reichard moves from the garden to the sea, speaking about the “tides of influence” that have rippled forth from Emory & Henry.  Perhaps this metaphor comes from her inaugural address, where she quoted an alumnus as saying that Emory & Henry continues to send “out tides of influence that touch the whole hungry soul of man.”  Because the alumnus begins with a watery metaphor, he would doubtless have been better served, at least to those not given to mixed metaphors, to have said “the whole thirsty soul of man.”  A final example from President Reichard comes in her message in the recent annual report.  “Emory & Henry,” she says, “is a beacon of hope envisioned by her founders.”  And then she extends the metaphor saying that the college is a glowing light in the heart of many of us that will shine brightly for many decades.  So here we have an administrator and a mathematician, Rosalind Reichard, using one of the key elements of the language of poetry.

But back to more mundane texts, like college catalogues.  I pick one up and read about the holder of a degree, about the fortifying of students’ minds, about launching on a voyage of discovery, about the important voice the students have in shaping programs (two metaphors there), about higher education being a marketplace of ideas, about instructional tools, about a semester spanning the summer months, about the library as an electronic gateway, about instructional software and flexible seating, about developing a strategy for accomplishing goals, and so on.  So even in the most unpoetic and leaden prose, we find metaphor.  (“Leaden” in that sentence is of course also a metaphor, one that derives from metallurgy.)

Or one can turn to the daily press, which wouldn’t on the face of it seem to be a particularly fertile field for metaphor.  (Note “fertile field.”)  In the headlines of the Roanoke Times I read that the GOP leader will step down, that a mountain is hiding a quiet threat, that the media are too soft on the president, that three-year college degrees are a fast track, that a basketball player has come to the end of the road, that loyalists slam Cuban defectors.  Here are two from a David Brooks editorial:  (1) Mitt Romney is a corporate vulture and (2) when people read Ron Paul the scales fall from their eyes.  This last one comes from the account of the conversion of Ron Paul’s namesake, St. Paul, a.k.a Saul, on the road to Damascus.  In Acts we’re told that “something like scales fell from his eyes” and he could see again.  That’s simile, not metaphor.  But the simile has become a metaphor in common parlance, referring to a person who has come to a sudden realization.  “Road to Damascus experience” is a metaphor growing out of the same story.  Here are a few more from the headlines in the New York Times of 17 January 2012: “Romney Opponents’ Main Target in G.O.P. Debate,” “For Romney’s Rivals Time Is Running Out,” “Romney Keeps Eye on Obama,” “The Invisible Hand behind Wall Street Bonuses,” “Iran Face‑Off” (that one’s from hockey), “Wikipedia To Go Dark,” “Israelis Facing a Seismic Rift Over Role of Women,” and “Bang for the Buck.”

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Frye as book Nazi, here.

Two new books on Frye, Northrop Frye in Context by Diane Dubois (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012), here, and The Illustrated Frye by Garden Uthark, at Smashwords, here.

Terry Eagleton–“that Marxist goof from Linacre College”–pontificates on Frye and others, here, in The Daily Beast. Does Eagleton have any idea of the meaning of the word ‘authoritarian’? And how can we trust someone who describes Frederic Jameson as “a magnificent stylist”? Nonetheless, Frye made the list of his five favorite works of criticism. Actually six, since he slips in Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending in the preamble.

If you’re in the Ottawa area, or feel like a trip to the nation’s capital, catch the Van Gogh at the National Gallery. Running there until Sept. 3, it is a remarkable display of his landscape and Nature paintings. Viewing it is a moving and exhilarating experience. It is most certainly worth the trip. Gazing on one painting after another, it is hard not to feel that Van Gogh’s art simply towers over that of his many great contemporaries. It is the prophetic quality that makes the difference. Like that of the equally visionary film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky, Van Gogh’s relationship to Nature  is emotional and hallucinatory. It ccnfronts us with what our mind-forged manacles prevent us from ever seeing. What George Eliot says in Middlemarch–of  what it would be like to have a completely unfiltered empathy for other human life–might equally be applied to Van Gogh’s perception of Nature: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

You can find the gallery’s description of the exhibition here, and a CBC review here:

Here are some excerpts from Frye on Van Gogh:

What’s transcendental in Blake is not the statically geometrical, but the sense of arrested energy: the wriggling vines & snakes, flames & the like.  This is what I meant earlier in talking of his Van Gogh classicism.  It’s an expression of the belief that every object is an event. (CW 9, 14)

 

The word “reality” should not mean statically a certain form of what is perceived, but dynamically a quantum, a certain charge or energy of perception–in practice, I suppose, the minimum consistent with consciousness. Any change of perception over that contains an element which is unreal in some contexts and a greater reality in others. As unreal, it’s generally called subjective, or perhaps emotional, or sometimes imaginary; as more real, it’s imaginative or creative.

This is pure Blake–I’ll never get out of that framework, I suppose–also Shelley’s doctrine of poetry as the overcoming of the inertia of habit.  (Whether Wiener’s formula that communication overcomes entropy is anything more than a vulgarization of this I don’t know.)  Anyway.  I got this, as usual, through the back door: remembering that very unpleasant book,  The Story of O, it seemed to me that no actual woman’s body could bear that charge of fetishism: it’s only in fantasy that all that flogging & branding & chaining could exist as an experience with its own kind of reality.

Creatively, of course, the surcharge of reality takes the hallucinatory form of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.  That kind of excess is acceptable as  potentially real; but the question remains unsolved: to what extent, & in what sense, is it actually there?  Probably if I knew that I’d know too much to want to write books.  However, the objective world is only “material”: it’s there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects.   I suppose even here there [are] still possibilities: it can’t be just anything.  But perhaps extracting a finite schema from the variety of mythologies, literatures, or religions might contribute something to the understanding of what some of these possibilities could be.  The individual can’t create his own world, except in art or fantasy: society can only create a myth of concern.  What fun if one could get just a peep at what some of the other worlds are that a new humanity could create–no, live in.   (CW 9: 287-288)

 

The fact that creative powers come from an area of the mind that seems to be independent of the conscious will, and often emerge with a good deal of emotional disturbance in their wake, provides the chief analogy between prophecy and the arts. The creative people that we most instinctively call or think of as prophetic, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Blake, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, Strindberg, show the analogy very clearly. Some people pursue wholeness and integration, others get smashed up, and fragments are rescued from the smash of an intensity that the wholeness and integration people do not reach.  (CW 18: 164)

 

Realism is often associated with, and often rationalized as, a scientific view of the world, but the impetus behind realistic art, good or bad, is of social and not scientific origin. There is a curious law of art, seen in Van Gogh and in some of the Surrealists, that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination. (CW 27 “Design as a Principle in the Arts” 232)

As a follow-up to the previous post, for a very Frygian take on Bradbury as a writer of romance, a teller of tales, read Margaret Atwood’s article in The Guardian. Interestingly, she identifies him with the Gothic tradition in American literature, with Poe and Hawthorne, two writers and a tradition central in Frye’s writings on romance.

Atwood plays down Bradbury’s identity as a writer of science fiction and reminds us of his credentials as a writer of tales of horror and weird adventure.  She herself has avoided the categorization, preferring the term speculative fiction for her own The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx and Crake. In spite of his reputation as the master builder of  literary pigeon cotes, Frye would have strongly agreed. Science fiction, fantasy fiction, speculative fiction, tales of adventure and wonder, all of these are forms of romance, and have the most congenial and promiscuous relations. As Michael Dolzani writes in his fine introduction to Frye’s Notebooks on Romance,

Frye is not terribly interested in the definition of literary genres or categories, because definitions imply an essentialist view of literture that he does not share. “Romance” is not an essence or exactly deliminted area but  a context: that is, a set of expectations for the imagination of either the writer or the reader. Some of the fun and creativity of any literary form comes from the possibility of playing either with or against the expectations of the context; it can be even more creative to play with and against the conventions at the same time. Thus, the title of the second chapter of The Secular Scripture is “The Context of Romance.” (xxii-iii)

As Frye himself put it, the context provided by such definitions is “something like a magnetic field, not a farmer’s field with a fence around it” (Myth and Metaphor 81).

The context of Frye’s own interest in fantasy fiction and science fiction is his life-long study and exploration of romance. Here is a sample from Notes 56a:

When Tolkien first came out a lot of people would say “I can’t read fantasy,” with an air of conscious virtue. But when he became popular it became evident that a tradition was behind him. The basis of this tradition was George MacDonald and William Morris, and while my enthusiasm for Tolkien himself was never white-hot, Morris was the man after Blake who most interested me, just as Spenser was the man before. But  gradually it became clear that the whole tradition of what I call sentimental romance, Scott, Wilkie Collins, Sheridan LeFanu, even Rider Haggard, was involved. Now there’s a flourishing industry in reprinting works of “adult fantasy,” of which I’m availing myself. It’s also clear that the whole development of science fiction, and the kind of writing on the periphery of that (e.g. [Kurt] Vonnegut) attaches itself to sentimental romance, not to realism, and makes the tradition of the former important to grasp. (CW 15: 191)

In a note to his discussion of science fiction in his introduction, Dolzani provides a glimpse into the extent of Frye’s reading in this particular area:

The NFL [Northrop Frye Library: the books in Frye’s personal library, now in the Victoria University Library]  includes at least one work by the following twentieth-century science fiction and fantasy writers; an asterisk after the name means that one or more volumes by the author is annotated: Richard Adams,* Piers Anthony,* Isaac Asimov,* Margaret Atwood, Alfred Bester, James Blish,* Hannes Bok,* Ray Bradbury,* James Branch Cabell,* Robert W. Chambers,* John Christopher, Arthur C. Clarke,* Mark Clifton,* Samuel R. Delany,* Lord Dunsany,* E.R. Eddison,* H. Rider Haggard,* Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert,* William Hope Hodgson,* Fred Hoyle,* M.R. James,* R.A. Lafferty,* Ursula LeGuin,* Stanislaw Lem,* C.S. Lewis,* David Lindsay,* Arthur Machen,* Walter M. Miller, Mervyn Peake,* Olaf Stapledon,* J.R.R. Tolkien,* H.G. Wells, T.H. White,* Charles Williams,* Colin Wilson,* John Wyndham,* Roger Zelazny.* He also owned a number of anthologies and books of criticism of science fiction and fantasy, including Alexei and Cory Panshin,  The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (New Ycrk: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1989), for which he wrote a publisher’s blurb. (CW 15: 379)

This affinity is most evident in The Secular Scripture, but it is already apparent in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) where Frye defines science fiction in terms of romance:

What we have said about the return of irony to myth in tragic  modes thus holds equally well for comic ones. Even popular literature appears to be slowly shifting its center of gravity from murder stories to science fiction or at any rate a rapid growth of science fiction is certainly a fact about contemporary popular literature. Science fiction frequently tries to imagine what life would be like on a plane as far above us as we are above savagery; its setting is often of a kind that appears to us as technologically miraculous. It is thus a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.

In the  preface to the Italian translation of The Secular Scripture Frye notes that the references in his study of sentimental romance “are mainly to Spenser, Scott, William Morris, and contemporary science fiction.”

Here are some excerpts:

When the novel developed, romance continued along with it in the “Gothic” stories of “Monk” Lewis and his Victorian successors. William Morris is to me the most interesting figure in this tradition for many reasons, one of them being his encyclopedic approach to romance, his ambition to collect every major story in literature and retell or translate it. In the twentieth century romance got a new lease of fashion after the mid-1950s, with the success of Tolkien and the rise of what is generally called science fiction.

No genre stands alone, and in dealing with romance I have to allude to every other aspect of literature as well. Still, the conventions of prose romance show little change over the course of centuries, and conservatism of this kind is the mark of a stable genre. In the Greek romances we find stories of mysterious birth, oracular prophecies about the future contortions of the plot, foster parents, adventures which involve capture by pirates, narrow escapes from death, recognition of the true identity of the hero and his eventual marriage with the heroine. We open, let us say, [Sir Walter Scott’s] Guy Mannering, written fifteen centuries later, and we find that, although there are slight changes in the setting, the kind of story being told, a story of mysterious birth, oracular prophecies, capture by pirates, and the like, is very much the same. In Greek romance the characters are Levantine, the setting is the Mediterranean world, and the normal means of transportation is by shipwreck. In science fiction the characters may be earthlings, the setting the intergalactic spaces, and what gets wrecked in hostile territory a spaceship, but the tactics of the storyteller generally conform to much the same outlines. (CW 18: 6)

If we define popular literature as what ignorant and vicious people read, the prejudice implied will make it impossible to understand what is going on in literature. Similarly, if we define the primitive only as the chronologically early, we create an illusion of literature gradually improving itself from naked savagery to the decent clothing of accepted cultural values. But actually the primitive is a quality in literature which emerges recurrently as an aspect of the popular, and as indicating also that certain conventions have been exhausted. The Greek romancers, for all their coyness, are more primitive in this sense than Homer or Aeschylus; the Gothic romancers, like many of the poets contemporary with them, are primitive in a way that Pope and Swift are not, and so are the folk singers and and science fiction writers of our own day as compared with Eliot or Joyce. (24)

The prevailing conception of serious fiction is enshrined41 in the title of F.R. Leavis’s book The Great Tradition, a study of George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad which assumes that these writers are central in a hierarchy of realistic novelists extending roughly from Defoe to D.H. Lawrence. The assumption seems reasonable, yet when empires start building walls around themselves it is a sign that their power is declining, and the very appearance of such a title indicates a coming change of fashion on the part of both writers and readers. As soon as a defensive wall is in place, the movements of the barbarians on the frontiers, in this case the readers of romance, Westerns, murder mysteries, and science fiction, begin to take on greater historical importance. These movements assumed a more definite shape after the appearance of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in the mid-1950s. On the T.S. Eliot principle that every writer creates his own tradition, the success of Tolkien’s book helped to show that the tradition behind it, of George MacDonald and Lewis Carroll and William Morris, was, if not “the great” tradition, a tradition nonetheless. It is a tradition which interests me rather more than Tolkien himself ever did, but for a long time I was in a minority in my tastes. Over twenty years ago, in the remotest corner of a secondhand bookshop, I picked up a cheap reprint of William Morris’s The Roots of the Mountains. The bookseller remarked that the two little green volumes had been sitting on his shelves since the day he opened his shop in 1913. Fortunately he had some other stock that moved faster, but if the shop is still there it is probably featuring paperback reprints of William Morris romances in a series which, though still cautiously labelled “adult fantasy,” seems to be finding its public. (30-31)

A study of mirror worlds in romance might range from the Chinese novel best known in the West by the title The Dream of the Red Chamber to some remarkable treatments of the theme in science fiction, such as Arthur Clarke’s The City and the Stars and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. (72)

Doubles in time are, of course, much more complicated than doubles in space: the great pioneer work here is Henry James’s unfinished The Sense of the Past, and the doubles produced by some kind of “time machine” have been extensively explored in science fiction. (78)

Technology, for capitalism and still more for Communism, seemed at one time to promise the kind of human ascendancy over nature that would accompany the final recovery of myth, but the poets have dragged their feet in its celebration. Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Morris, Yeats, Pound, are only a few of those who have shown marked hostility to technology and have refused to believe that its peaceful and destructive aspects can be separated. The poets see nothing imaginative in a domination of nature which expresses no love for it, in an activity founded on will, which always overreacts, in a way of life marked by a constant increase in speed, which means also an increase in introversion and the breaking down of genuine personal relationships. The great exception, the literary movement that was expected to seize on technology as its central theme, was assumed to be science fiction. But the way in which science fiction, as it has developed from hardware fantasy into software philosophical romance, has fallen into precisely the conventions of romance as outlined here is so extraordinary that I wish I had the time and the erudition to give it a separate treatment. Visions of utopias, or properly running communities, belong in its general area; but, in modern science fiction, anti-utopias, visions of regression or the nightmarish insect states of imaginative death, must outnumber the positive utopias by at least fifty to one. (118)

Oskar Werner and Cyril Cusack in Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury died this Tuesday. Frye mentions Bradbury in the entry on “Satire” in the Harper Handbook:

 Perhaps the most concentrated form of fantasy is the presentation of the imaginary ideal state known as the UTOPIA, where all activity is ritualized and where every individual fits perfectly into the social mould. And perhaps the most concentrated form of satire is what is now called the DYSTOPIA, the Utopian parody of a world turned by malice or cunning into a nightmarish hell, as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Yevgeny Zamyatyn’s We, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ape and Essence. A good deal of SCIENCE FICTION is based on dystopian allegories (for example Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz), where the relation to the social pitfalls in contemporary technology is close enough for frightening plausibility in the fantasy. (CW 18, 384)

Bob Denham has directed me to two other references, from the volume he edited, Northrop Frye: Selected Letters, 1934–1991. Here is the first, a letter to Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles,  dated 31 March 1969.

Frye and Bradbury had been seated together at some unidentified faculty dinner.  Bradbury asked Frye for two of his books, which Frye mailed to him.  Bradbury wrote on 16 March 1969, thanking Frye for the books and saying that he hoped they could “meet again some day under quieter auspices, and not have to discuss the pros and cons of such 1968 vaudeville miseries as HAIR.”  With his letter, Bradbury sent Frye several of his own books, prompting the present reply.

Dear Mr. Bradbury,

I am just taking off for your part of the world again, but your books have just arrived and I did want to thank you for them.  I am quite familiar enough with your work to know that the statement quoted from Isherwood in one of the introductions, that yours is a very great and unusual talent, is a simple factual statement. (130)

Then there is the following, a letter to the biologist David W. Ehrenfeld,  Barnard College, Columbia University, dated 15 January 1974:

In reply to Ehrenfeld’s query (28 December 1973): why is Spengler not juxtaposed more often in the critical literature with Roderick Seidenberg?  Ehrenfeld reports that he had just read Frye’s essay on Spengler, “The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler”( Dædalus, 103 [Winter 1974]: 1–13), which he found to be reminiscent of Orwell’s critical style. 

Dear Mr. Ehrenfeld:

Thank you very much for your letter.  I am glad if I was like Orwell, who seems to me an admirable stylist, but he is impossible to imitate, because his lucidity is a direct product of his moral integrity.

I cannot say that I know Seidenberg’s book well enough to answer your questions properly.  From what I can gather of him, I should say that you have answered them yourself pretty accurately.  I don’t know why he isn’t mentioned more often: I suppose one thing is the difference in date.  Seidenberg seems to me to be predominantly a writer reflecting the age of science fiction as an extremely important and central cultural development.  But the kind of questioning of cultural values which he embodies seems very like the kind of thing one keeps running into in Clarke, Bradbury, Ballard, and others.  In general, I am inclined to feel that Seidenberg’s thesis is really a more superficial and simplified version of Spengler’s, as you yourself strongly hint. (163)

I wish you the best of luck in your own reflections on the subject.

The reference is to “Post‑historic Man (New York: Viking, 1950).  Seidenberg argued that the human race was being trapped into moral immobility by rational mechanisms aimed at organizing and thus controlling the natural and human world,” and Ehrenfeld believes that Seidenberg “has posed a plausible and direct challenge to Spengler’s view of history.”

What follows is the text portion of “Collecting Frye’s Thoughts,”  a story by Mike Landry, from the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal, part of a special feature on Northrop Frye (April 21, 2012).  Mike Landry is the Telegraph-Journal’s arts and culture editor. He can be reached at landry.michael@telegraphjournal.com.

Now retired in Emory, Va., former professor Robert D. Denham has dedicated decades of his career to compiling and then annotating Frye’s bibliography. In the process, he has assembled an extensive and unparalleled near nine-metre library of Frye-related material, which he hopes to donate to the Moncton library.

In the southwestern corner of Virginia, a 30-minute drive north of Tennessee and North Carolina, about 850 metres above sea level in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is Northrop Frye country.

To say it’s an unlikely home for the world-renowned Canadian literary theorist would be an understatement. It’s inconceivable that the tiny town of Emory, Va., 1,000 kilometres from Toronto, would account for arguably the most impressive personal library of Northrop Frye’s work.

Frye visited the town only once, for two days, in 1979, to give The Reynolds Lectures at Emory & Henry College. And while snow is still melting from Frye’s old stomping grounds in Moncton in early April, those in Emory are busy mowing their lawns.

Yet, in the study of Robert D. Denham’s home in Emory, almost nine metres of shelf space is allocated to Frye. It takes almost 40 pages to list all the books, monographs, journals and offprints in Denham’s collection. It’s so extensive, the two editions of Anatomy of Criticism not in the collection are a translation from Tunisia and an Italian edition from a print run that was destroyed by the publisher.

Add then, not measured on his shelves, are the eight videotapes and 56 audiotapes Denham has collected. Nor included is what Denham refers to as ‘Frygiana’: Frye’s writing desk and chair; a silver bowl, presented to Frye on the occasion of his giving the Jacobs Lecture at Columbia University; a bronze bust of Frye by Hanna Boos; and more than 50 other items of miscellany.

“It’s anal neurotic, I guess, this collecting stuff,” Denham says. His other “collecting fetish” has led to 2,700 modern poetry books in his library. “I don’t know how to explain it, it’s kind of like stamp collecting – I’ve got to have it complete, but I keep finding more stuff.”

A former John P. Fishwick Professor of English Emeritus at Roanoke College, just east of Emory in Salem, Va., Denham published his enumerative bibliography of Northrop Frye in 1974. He then collaborated with the University of Toronto Press to publish an annotated bibliography in 1987. Denham has been involved in editing nine of the 30 Collected Works of Northrop Frye.

He’s put his collection to good use, and Denham wants to make it available to the wider public. He contacted the Frye Festival last fall about donating his Frye material to the Moncton Public Library, and in May someone from Moncton is heading down to assess the collection. In addition to his primary sources, Denham is also sending his hundreds and hundreds of secondary sources relating to Frye. Denham hopes to turn the Moncton library into a centre for Frye studies – one of the few places someone so inclined could find not only a signed 1947 copy of Fearful Symmetry, but an edition in one of 19 languages and its reviews from across the decades and the world over.

“He’s not on the lips of every post-structuralist thinker, but someone is thinking about him out there,” Denham says regarding Frye’s enduring appeal. A study he did a few years ago documented the rise in secondary sources about Frye, and his prevalence in hundreds of school curricula.

Denham purchased his first Frye book, Anatomy of Criticism, on a whim in the early ’60s while browsing the shelves of the University of Chicago bookstore. He had only recently come across literary criticism while pursuing an MA in religion and art.

He wouldn’t read the book until he had left to serve in the army in 1964. By the time he returned to the University of Chicago to complete his PhD in 1970, he decided to write his dissertation on Frye’s critical method. He was drawn to specializing in history and theory of criticism as he felt it would be a good base for an undergraduate professor. Traditionally, then, dissertations were written on dead thinkers, but Denham’s supervisor was interested in critical theory and had invited Frye to lecture in ’68.

“Once I discovered Frye, there wasn’t much going back. He was a large presence, and you always discovered something new.”

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Old Vic, the original building of Victoria College

Victoria’s Contribution to the Development of Canadian Culture

Northrop Frye

 The following talk was presented at Victoria College on 10 November 1977.  It has not been previously published. Although the talk seems to end abruptly, there is no indication in the typescript that additional material followed from what we have here.

My three predecessors in this series have built up a picture of a highly rational ethos and a lively atmosphere of debate and argument, sometimes good humoured and sometimes acrimonious.  The axiom of any liberal arts college with a church connection must always be that faith and reason are complementary and not contradictory.  When faith and reason collide, as unfortunately they keep doing with the greatest regularity, the community becomes polarized.  By one group, reason is seen as under­mining faith, and so, eventually, morals.  By the other group, the insistence on faith which contradicts instead of fulfilling the demands of reason is seen as stifling all liberal knowledge and intellectual honesty.  This issue became particularly acute in Victoria College after Darwinian evolution had begun to make its impact and the so-called “higher criticism” of the Bible had begun. Victoria adopted an “if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em” attitude to evolution.  This approach to the Bible was preoccupied with the question of whether the account of Creation in Genesis was poetic or scientific.  Many people in the Faculty of Theology had been trained in science, and brought to the study of the Bible minds that had been brought up in such areas as chemistry and biology.

For my purposes I have to begin with this issue, and isolate in it a cultural dimension, that I think is likely to be overlooked.  The average Victoria student in the nineteenth century, coming from a Methodist background, found himself in a world that was split imaginatively rather than intellectually.   In front of him was a tough, gritty, competitive world of nineteenth century Upper Canada.  Tucked away in a corner of his mind, and given an airing on devotional occasions, was a world of magic, wonder and mystery, in which Jonah could spend three days in a fish’s belly and Elijah could go up to heaven in a chariot of fire.  The split between the two worlds enabled most students to deal with the contemporary world before them very effectively on its own terms.  But having the other world on their minds helped to keep a cultural balance.

The Massey family bulks very large in early Victoria history, and although Vincent Massey was a graduate of University College, he did a great deal for the Victoria community both during his term as Senior Tutor in Burwash and later.  He became, of course, a major cultural influence for the whole of Canada, particularly through the Commission which he chaired, and which brought out the “Massey Report” in 1949.  The introduction to this report, almost certainly written by Massey himself, spoke of the roots of cultural life in nineteenth century Canada, with strong emphasis on the role played by the church.  He begins with a tribute to the expert and dedicated church organists who came from England to Canada.  My own music teacher [George Ross] was, one of them, and I well remember how the congregation of St. John’s United Church in Moncton used to make their way out of the church with no notion that they were being wrapped up in something like the St. Anne’s Fugue. He then goes on to speak of the roots of literature:

Not only in music but in letters did the church make important contributions to the life of the community.  The rector or the pastor of the church lectured on Dante or on Browning, on Victor Hugo or on Lewis Carroll; he was in wide demand with his lantern slides of London or the Holy Land, and in many of the smaller places his was the only library for many miles.

When I reread this, my eye paused on the phrase “lantern slides of the Holy Land.”  It indicates the way in which the Bible was not simply a source of faith and morals, but an imaginative and cultural focus as well.  The controversies between faith and reason are usually presented simply in their own terms, and as late as the novels of Grace Irwin, some of them written in 1969, that is how they were still being presented as the realities of faith colliding with the unrealities of human rationalizing.  But I think that the cultural dimension in the display is in the long run more important.  Perhaps the rationalizers and higher critics of the Bible, however admirable their motivation, did not realize the extent to which, in assigning the magic and miracle of the Bible to unreality, they were making the entire world as tough and gritty and competitive as the world of ordinary life.

One of the earlier poems of E. J. Pratt, which appeared in Newfoundland Verse, is called  “The Epigrapher”:

 

His head was like his lore—antique,

His face was thin and sallow-sick,

With god-like accent he could speak

Of Egypt’s reeds or Babylon’s brick

Or sheep-skin codes in Arabic . . .

And every occult Hebrew tale

He could expound with learned ease,

From Aaron’s rod to Jonah’s whale.

He had held the skull of Rameses––

The one who died from boils and fleas . . .

From that time onward to the end,

His mind had had a touch of gloom;

His hours with jars and coins he’d spend,

And ashes looted from a tomb,—

Within his spare and narrow room . . .

And thus he trod life’s narrow way,—

His soul as peaceful as a river—

His understanding heart all day

Kept faithful to a stagnant liver.

 

This poem puzzled me for many years, partly because of the curious virulence of the tone, which was unusual for Pratt.   What was it about epigraphers that he disliked so much?   When the poem appeared,  the best known scholars in that sort of area were Charles Currelly, whom I shall return to shortly, and S. H. Hooke, the great Old Testament scholar who after a somewhat turbulent career at Victoria College, went to the University of London.  But neither of them had stagnant livers: Currelly was a person of extra­ordinary drive and energy, and Hooke was an athlete of professional competence in several areas, who was still writing books with unabated enthusiasm in his nineties.  It seems to me that the antagonism is real to the kind of pedantry that unconsciously attempts to take out of life everything that the imagination needs to nourish it.

Again, in James Reaney’s play, Colours in the Dark, a certain Dr. Button is introduced, who lectures on the Bible and finds great delight in telling his students that the Bible contains nothing except the most primitive and repulsive forms of superstition.  One distressed student says: “But don’t you believe in anything?”  Dr. Button says: “No, not since I caught old Professor So-and-so putting twelfth‑century shards in a ninth‑century dig.”   Here again the issue is presented as one of faith against reason, but the real issue is that of imagination against minimal reality.

If there is a centre or core to Frye’s theory of literature, it is metaphor. One could argue that myth is just as central. No doubt. But myth itself is the unfolding of a  metaphoric structure of imagery.  A myth is the story of a god, and a god is a metaphoric union of a human form, a divine personality, with Nature.

In my teaching I often turn to two passages from Anatomy on the “radical form of metaphor.” The first is from the second essay on levels of meaning, which concludes with a discussion of  different modes of metaphor:

In the anagogic aspect of meaning, the radical form of metaphor,  “A is B,” comes into its own. Here we are dealing with poetry in its totality, in which the formula “A is B” may be hypothetically applied to anything, for there is no metaphor, not even “black is  white,” which a reader has any right to quarrel with in advance. The literary universe, therefore, is a universe in which everything  is potentially identical with everything else. This does not mean that any two things in it are separate and very similar, like peas in a pod, or in the slangy and erroneous sense of the word in which we speak of identical twins. If twins were really identical they would be the same person. On the other hand, a grown man feels identical with himself at the age of seven, although the two manifestations of this identity, the man and the boy, have very little in common as regards similarity or likeness. In form, matter, personality, time, and space, man and boy are quite unlike. This is the only type of image I can think of that illustrates the process of identifying two independent forms. All poetry, then, proceeds as though all poetic images were contained within a single universal body. Identity is the opposite of similarity or likeness, and total identity is not uniformity, still less monotony, but a unity of various things.  (124-25)

The second definition is from Frye’s discussion of the rhythm of association that characterizes lyric:

The fusion of the concrete and abstract is a special case, though a very important one, of a general principle that the technical development of the last century has exposed to critical view. All poetic imagery seems to be founded on metaphor, but in the lyric, where the associative process is strongest and the ready-made descriptive phrases of ordinary prose furthest away, the unexpected or violent metaphor that is called catachresis has a peculiar importance. Much more frequently than any other genre does the lyric depend for its main effect on the fresh or surprising image, a fact which often gives rise to the illusion that such imagery is radically new or unconventional. From Nashe’s “Brightness falls from the air” to Dylan Thomas’s “A grief ago/’ the emotional crux of the lyric has over and over again tended to be this “sudden glory” of fused metaphor. (281)

One thinks of Pierre Reverdy’s definition of the poetic image, cited by André Breton in the first surrealist manifesto:

The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be — the greater its emotional power and poetic reality… [Pierre Reverdy, Nord-Sud, March 1918]

A related idea, another touchstone for Breton, is Lautréamont’s famous image “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”

Breton’s great love poem “Union Libre” (1931) is one of the most striking examples of such catachrestic fusion. “Union Libre” is the French term for common-law marriage, a sexual union outside the law. What better title could there be for a poem whose radical uniting of disparate realities obeys no normative censor of any kind, and whose subject is both a delirious sexual union and the delirium of verbal fusion in which, as Breton puts it elsewhere, “the words make love.”

The poem is loosely based on the Renaissance blazon, in which the poet praises  the beauty of his mistress by enumerating the various attractions of her body.  The breathtaking sequence of bewildering but exhilarating images, in an exuberant parody of the Song of Songs, is  erotically charged while evoking at the same time a union of the bride (“ma femme,” my wife or woman) with Nature and a world of the most diverse particulars.  The epithetic structure of each image allows for a violent yoking of remotely related but surprisingly fitting realities.

Such a “free union” of images brings to mind Bakhtin’s observations about the use of the blason in Rabelais and His World (425-430), and in the section on “The Rabelaisian Chronotope” in the essay “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” (The Dialogic Imagination, 167-206), Bakhtin analyzes  the ways in which a grotesque fusion of images decreates and recreates the verbally organized conception of the world. Bakhtin’s understanding of poetic and literary imagery, particularly in its relation to the matrix of objects and phenomena (food, drink, copulation, birth and death) is is, in fact, very close to Frye’s, where such images are an outgrowth of the primary concerns of food, sex, freedom, and property.

Here is Breton’s extraordinary poem. I have consulted a number of versions in English, but the translation is my own:

Free Union

My wife of the wood fire hair
Of heat lightning thoughts
Of the hourglass waist
My wife of the waist of an otter in a tiger’s jaws
My wife of the mouth of cockade and a bouquet of stars of the latest magnitude
Of teeth like the tracks of white mice over the white earth
Of the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife of the tongue of a stabbed wafer
Of the tongue of a doll which opens and closes its eyes
Of the tongue of fabulous stone
My wife of eyelashes in the vertical lines of a child’s handwriting
Of eyebrows like the edge of a bird’s nest
My wife of temples like the slate of a glasshouse roof
And the steam of breath on the windowpanes
My wife of the champagne shoulders
Of the shoulders of a fountain with dolphin heads under ice
My wife of the wrists of matches
My wife of fingers of luck and the ace of hearts
Of fingers of new-moan hay
My wife of armpits of marten and beechnuts
Of Midsummer Night
Of armpits of camphor and a nest of angel fish
Of arms of sea foam and a sluice-gate
And a blend of wheat and mill
My wife of the rocket legs
Of legs of clockwork and movements of despair
My wife of calves of elder marrow
My wife of the feet of initials
Of the feet of a bunch of keys
Of the feet of tippling caulkers
My wife of the neck of pearl barley
My wife of the throat of Val d’Or
Of the throat of a rendezvous in the very bed of the torrent
Of breasts of night
My wife of breasts of marine molehill
My wife of the breasts of crucible of ruby
Of breasts of the spectral rose beneath the dew
My wife of the unfolding belly of the fan of days
Of the belly of a giant claw
My wife of a bird’s back in vertical flight
Of the quicksilver back
Of the back of light
Of the nape of rolled stone and moistened chalk
Of the fall of a glass which has just been emptied
My wife of the hips of a skiff
Of hips of chandelier and arrow feathers
And stems of white peacock quills
Of imperceptible balance
My wife of the rump of stoneware and asbestos
My wife of the rump of a swan’s back
My wife of the rump of springtime
Of the sex of a gladiola
My wife of the sex of a gold-mine and platypus
My wife of the sex of seaweed and yesteryear’s  candies
My wife of the sex of a mirror
My wife of eyes full of tears
Of eyes of violet panoply and magnetized needle
My wife of the savanna eyes
My wife of eyes of water that quenches thirst in prison
My wife of the eyes of wood eternally under the axe
Of water level eyes
Of eyes at the level of air and earth
Of eyes at the level of fire

I am grateful to Bob Denham for sending me this link to a post by one “Garden Urthark”. Definitely worth reading. Don’t miss the comment and the response.

Click here.

Remarks by Northrop Frye on Having Received a Toronto

Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement, 13 October 1987.

[Frye was presented for the award by Pauline McGibbon, his classmate and friend and lieutenant‑governor of Ontario.]

Thank you very much Pauline and ladies and gentlemen.  I suppose if one gets a lifetime achievement award one must have done fairly well in what we’re told is the primary Canadian virtue––survival.  I’ve lived in Toronto continuously for nearly sixty years, and as your hostess remarked earlier this evening it wasn’t always a fun town.  In 1929 there were no decent restaurants––after all it was an Anglo‑Saxon community.  There was nothing to drink––after all it was Ontario.  And there were millions of churches.  There was only one thing to do on Sunday but you had a lot of choices to do it.

From there, of course, Toronto grew into this tremendous, exhilarating, cosmopolitan city.  One disadvantage of a city as it grows larger is that it gets more impersonal, and there’s less a sense of belonging.  What this extraordinary honor has done for me is to make me feel that not only does Toronto care about its own cultural life, not only is it aware of it, not only does it want to encourage it, but it gives those who live and work here a sense of belonging.  That is the feeling that I think I would have had in any case if anyone else in my field had got the award, but then, of course, I wouldn’t have had a chance to say so.