{"id":14288,"date":"2010-07-25T00:56:38","date_gmt":"2010-07-25T04:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?page_id=14288"},"modified":"2010-07-25T00:56:38","modified_gmt":"2010-07-25T04:56:38","slug":"frye-on-chess","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/","title":{"rendered":"Frye on Chess"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Robert D. Denham<\/em><\/p>\n

Frye often uses chess as an example of a rule\u2011governed game or set of arbitrary convention, which he likens to the conventions of literature.\u00a0 But there are more than ninety references to chess scattered throughout his work.\u00a0 A large number of these speculate on chess as an archetype.\u00a0 Then there is the cryptic phrase \u201cchess-in-Bardo,\u201d which Frye associates with the theme of ascent and the world of romance\u2013\u2013what he calls the Eros archetype.\u00a0 Solving the \u201cchess-in-Bardo problem,\u201d he writes, \u201cwill give some indication of what it means to live in a totally mythical universe\u201d (CW 9, 56).\u00a0 Frye circles around the \u201cproblem\u201d throughout his notebooks, associating chess-in-bardo with the agon<\/em> or contest, with the recognition scenes in Alice in Wonderland<\/em>, The Tempest<\/em>, and Finnegans Wake<\/em>, and with a vision opposite from that of the dice-throw in Mallarm\u00e9 (the Adonis archetype).\u00a0 Michael Dolzani\u2019s reading of the chess-in-bardo problem focuses on its associations with the agon<\/em> and the recognition.\u00a0 See his Introduction, in CW 9, liv\u2013lv.<\/p>\n

By the time he came to write The Secular Scripture<\/em> (1976) Frye had caught up with the ignis fatuus that he had been tracking since the 1940s.\u00a0 In that book he provides a clue to the meaning of \u201cchess-in-bardo\u201d in a brief commentary on Alice in Wonderland<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Alice passing through the looking-glass into a reversed world of dream language is also going through a descent. . . . Before long however we realize that the journey is turning upwards, in a direction symbolized by the eighth square of a chessboard, where Alice becomes a Psyche figure, a virginal queen flanked by two older queens, one red and one white, who bully her and set her impossible tasks in the form of nonsensical questions. Cards and dice . . . have a natural connection with themes of descent into a world of fatality; chess and other board games, despite The Waste Land<\/em>, appear more frequently in romance and in Eros contexts, as The Tempest<\/em> again reminds us.\u00a0 As Alice begins to move upward out of her submarine mirror world she notes that all the poems she had heard have to do with fish, and as she wakes she reviews the metamorphoses that the figures around her had turned into. (155\u20136)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chess-in-bardo, then, involves a dialectic of two opposing forces: agon<\/em> and anagnorisis<\/em>, choice and chance, descent and ascent.\u00a0 Neither of the opposite forces can abolish the other, for each has \u201cits own centre\u201d (CW 9, 288), as in the magic of Prospero and its renunciation.\u00a0 Frye says that The Tempest<\/em> leans in the direction of chess-in-bardo (CW 9, 340).\u00a0 But at the same time, chess-in-bardo appears to be related to reversal, as in the ascent of Alice.\u00a0 \u201cChess in Bardo?\u00a0 Is it a modulation of dice in Bardo?\u201d Frye asks.\u00a0 \u201cA chess move is a decisive choice that may not abolish chance, but sets up a train of consequences that forces it to retreat into the shadows\u201d (CW 5, 318).\u00a0 Chance may never completely disappear in chess, but each move works toward an eventual reversal.\u00a0 The entry in Notebook 50 following the one just quoted appears to be related: \u201cPerhaps sacrifice is the carrying out of death in reverse, identification through death to union with God–well, obviously it\u2019s that.\u00a0 This identity with death turns into an identity across death\u201d (CW 5, 318).\u00a0 This is another way of describing the movement from death to rebirth in The Tibetan Book of the Dead<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But there are other meanings that attach themselves to chess in Frye\u2019s writings, as can be seen in the passages that follow.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Chess in the Notebooks and Diaries<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> (CW 9)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[39]\u00a0 Chess<\/strong>: I think in its normal context it\u2019s an Eros symbol, a love game rather than a Kriegenspiel.\u00a0 As it clear is in The Tempest<\/em>, in some naive romance (including the Mabinogion, where it\u2019s replaced by an unspellable & probably unpronounceable Welsh equivalent and perhaps in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where whatever game it is is translated \u201cdraughts\u201d by Wallis Budge.\u00a0 The Eliot one is ironic, of course, and there the 32 pieces of chess<\/strong> have some connexion with the poor creature\u2019s teeth that have to come out in her 32nd year.\u00a0 Poe was interested in chess<\/strong> (and<\/em> in checkers) as well as in teeth\u2014Berenice\u2019s, that is: all 32 of them.\u00a0 Going back to the Book of the Dead, I should remember that most Eros settings are, like Dante\u2019s, on the other side of this world, which means often the underworld, a quite different world from the world of Thanatos, which is Hades or hell, a world of life in death.\u00a0 In short, I have to remember that spatial projections are variable.\u00a0 [CW 9, 138]<\/p>\n

[40]\u00a0 Remembering that Lewis Carroll is a very knowledgeable guide through certain parts of the labyrinth, it\u2019s significant that the story about cards ends in a lawsuit and the story about chess<\/strong> (where the pieces are the Eros colors red and white) in a catechism (and banquet).\u00a0 Chess<\/strong> is Platonic Eros, linked to the victory of dialectic (the Russians are the best chess<\/strong> players) and the symposium.\u00a0 Cards have overtones of divination & fate (Pushkin\u2019s Queen of Spades; the Methodist horror of them, etc.): it marks the victim or it\u2019s the deus ex machina<\/em> trump. [CW 9, 138\u20139]<\/p>\n

[82]\u00a0 Apparently mab<\/em> is Welsh for youth, and eventually got to mean a story\u2014in other words a quest-romance or Orc story.\u00a0 Queen Mab would then be from the country of the young, the Irish Tirnanog, and as such she makes an appropriate appearance in Romeo & Juliet.\u00a0 My Adonis quadrant is really a Percival quadrant: if I could crack the code of that legend I\u2019d have it.\u00a0 And how the Alice books do keep creeping back! It may have been wrong to have once made a WT [The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>] : cards :: T [The Tempest<\/em>] : chess<\/strong> association, but something there is central.\u00a0 The mock-battles of the red & white knights of Tweedledum & Tweedledee have something to do with the chess<\/strong> symbolism.\u00a0 So chess<\/strong> has a war-and-love aspect, and the red & white (or black & white) opposition is part of it.\u00a0 And of course there\u2019s the Grail & cards business\u2014note that in Alice no suits except hearts are mentioned, & of course the heart is the Grail suit.\u00a0 I wonder if this damn book is going to turn out to be a gigantic preface to Shakespeare?\u00a0 [CW 9, 150]<\/p>\n

[84]\u00a0 Chess<\/strong> is on the Eros side: the will co-operates with fate, and because everything\u2019s displayed it can be a love game.\u00a0 The medieval symbolism of chess<\/strong>, I understand, associated the Queen with the Virgin Mary & the King with her Son.\u00a0 The castled king then is Amalthea hiding her florid son, & checkmate is not, or not only, the dead fisher king, but the disclosure of the infant divine child by the surrounding Titans.\u00a0 Cards, on the other hand, are concealed from the opponent & so suggest fatality.\u00a0 In Yeats\u2019s terms, cards are antithetical and chess<\/strong> primary (the contrast Yeats draw, by the way, between an Oedipus going underground & Christ ascending from the standing position of crucifixion (ignoring the burial, but let that go) shows how he\u2019s got his symbolism arsy-versy antithetical falls, primary rises.) The disclosure of the child of love by the Titans, or birth in a world which is hostile to it but temporarily awed & silenced because it doesn\u2019t dare touch the frowning form, is certainly one form of the point of epiphany.\u00a0 Only fully-developed chess<\/strong> could symbolize this, but any board game would be emblematical of love & war. [CW 9, 151]<\/p>\n

[85]\u00a0 Cards, on the other hand, are the parental figures, polarized by the movement of the seasons.\u00a0 Lance & grail are the male & female sexual symbols of the solar centre or winter solstice: sword & dish, with the severed head, of the John the Baptist summer solstice & the Lammas night.\u00a0 The first two are red, the second two black.\u00a0 In chess<\/strong> white plays against black or red.\u00a0 When black wins the babe is born a boy & the cycle turns: when white wins the female babe springs from the hearth.\u00a0 I think I\u2019m inheriting something here from the Nova Section Ledge.\u00a0 Of course there\u2019s demonic chess<\/strong>, associated with rape & 32 teeth by Eliot, and erotic cards, as in Alice in Wonderland, with gardeners painting white roses red.\u00a0 [CW 9, 151]<\/p>\n

[182]\u00a0 The Logos vision exists as apocalypse or total metaphor, it exists as cosmic coherence (music & mathematics), & it exists finally as a coup de des or epiphany of coherence.\u00a0 In between comes the discontinuous epiphanic Logos of the Gospels.\u00a0 I suppose the cosmic coherence one reflects in part the intense schematism of the arts: music as arbitrarily conventional as a chess<\/strong> game, painting as the permutations of Euclid, etc.\u00a0 In Mallarm\u00e9 [Un Coup de D\u00e9s<\/em>] <\/em>the birth of a god from a virgin is transformed to the birth of a poem from an undifferentiated purity broken into, even defiled, by the creative act.\u00a0 Azure & the white page are the most common images.\u00a0 Also how epiphanic fragment breaks free of the encyclopedic synthesis.\u00a0 In Mallarm\u00e9 Victor Hugo is a kind of demonic leviathan who has swallowed all the themes of poetry in his rhetoric. [CW 9, 175]<\/p>\n

[196]\u00a0 I need to know something about the language of astrology (including numerology) for the Logos half & something more-considerably more, in view of Yeats & Rimbaud\u2014of the language of alchemy.\u00a0 Alchemy seems to run up the whole E side, from Rimbaud\u2019s \u201cseasons\u201d in hell to Marvell\u2019s \u201cannihilation.\u201d Also games: chess<\/strong>, like alchemy, runs up the E. side, or at least all board games do: card games go down the W. side, & dice, from mummer\u2019s plays to Mallarm\u00e9, hovers around the south.\u00a0 Some kind of labyrinth game-of-Troy dance belongs somewhere, I think.\u00a0 [CW 9, 179]<\/p>\n

[215]\u00a0 The concealed eighth is the discovery or recognition of the thematic stasis of the sequence in the reader\u2019s mind.\u00a0 Sometimes a central emblem (white whale, scarlet letter) symbolizes this.\u00a0 I must go back to my analyses of Between the Acts & Gryll Grange.\u00a0 Note that six of these are three doubled (cf. the rovescio & binary patterns in music, the Narcissus-double theme in Poe, & the chess<\/strong> scheme where the queen & king are respectively peripety & recognition & the other three pieces are doubled).\u00a0 [CW 9, 184]<\/p>\n

[243]\u00a0 If I go back to my hundred-sections idea, section 1 is the centripetal-centrifugal conspectus, with, perhaps, a note distinguishing the categories of literature from the mnemonic devices for grouping them.\u00a0 Section 2 begins with the literature-inheriting-a-mythology stuff, the two creation myths, & the two worlds of upper & lower consciousness.\u00a0 Somewhere along here I want to embark on a historical survey of the Logos myth: how the mathematical vision, for example, declines after Newton, & then either turns demonic (Blake\u2019s Europe<\/em>, Nietzsche\u2019s eternal recurrence, Yeats\u2019 Vision<\/em>) or else gets reborn by way of some kind of games theory.\u00a0 Hesse\u2019s Glasperlenspiel & Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s Igitur<\/em> & Coup des Des<\/em> belong here, though I don\u2019t just know how yet.\u00a0 I suppose chess<\/strong> in Bardo gets attached.\u00a0 One of the things I find encouraging about this project is the way I\u2019m being compelled to face things I\u2019ve ducked in the AC: Poe\u2019s Eureka<\/em>, the epic circle, & the like.\u00a0 Browne\u2019s quincunx, too.\u00a0 Because a lot of things seem to be converging on Yeats\u2019 double gyre or hourglass figure, of which the X is one form: a conscious world where the mind is at the centre or top; a lower world where the mind is looking into itself below, \u201cPoetic Cosmology\u201d: it sounds like Vico.\u00a0 [CW 9, 190\u20131]<\/p>\n

[245]\u00a0 Browne says of chess<\/strong> that in its original form it figured \u201cthe whole world, the motion of the planets, with eclipses of sun & moon.\u201d Invented by Thoth, according to Phaedrus 270.\u00a0 This is the GC [Gardenb of Cyrus<\/em>] <\/em>, where the quincunx takes the form mentioned above, an upper & lower pyramid representing perception from a centre & circumference respectively\u2014close to Yeats\u2019 hour-glass & Blake\u2019s vortex, & one of the things I\u2019m looking for.\u00a0 [CW 9, 191]<\/p>\n

[253]\u00a0 Browne\u2019s GC [The Garden of Cyrus<\/em>] <\/em>(the remark about chess<\/strong>, by the way, comes from Servidas, S.V. tabula<\/em>, according to L.C. Maslin: cf. similar games in the Utopia, and, of course, the labyrinth-dance or game of Troy in Virgil) is about the quincunx, but is fascinated by the crux ansata or sign of Venus, the circle with a cross below it.\u00a0 In me, the cross is the four forms of fiction & the circle the episodes of drama & lyric. \u00a0I kept trying to inscribe the cross in the circle in AC, with indifferent success.\u00a0 Ultimately, I suppose, my [Liberal] is a circle & my [Tragicomedy] a cross, but I can\u2019t think of that when I\u2019m writing [Liberal]: I have to inscribe it within again.\u00a0 [CW 9, 192\u20133]<\/p>\n

[311]\u00a0 Divination is part of the attempt to evoke a Logos vision, or something akin to it, out of a Thanatos one: a hidden order that the divination elicits.\u00a0 Hence the catalogue in Rabelais.\u00a0 So dice, Tarot cards, most chess<\/strong>, & for that matter astrology, conceived as a knowledge of the future, are all p.d.e. [point of demonic epiphany] visions.\u00a0 [CW 9, 207]<\/p>\n

[321]\u00a0 This association of the upper world with a daughter-figure clears up a point or two: the descent of innocence, Alice & the Dickensian girl-child, Marvell\u2019s drop of dew.\u00a0 It would be wonderful if I could see AW [Alice in Wonderland<\/em>] consistently as an Adonis descent, or parody of one, with the red & white roses, the beheading queen, the cards, & the final trial, & ATLG [Alice Through the Looking-Glass<\/em>] as an Eros descent, I mean ascent, with chess<\/strong>, red & white queens, & the white knight as the melancholy Virgil-guide who can\u2019t go all the way.\u00a0 Even the mirror fits, Tui being a lake.\u00a0 [CW 9, 210]<\/p>\n

[367]\u00a0 My zodiac, if I haven\u2019t it already, starts at Nous (Aries) & goes around: low & high Eros are the Bull & the Twins, the Logos summer vision the backward moving Crab; high & low Adonis are the Yeatsian lion & Virgin; Nomos is of course the Balance; the scorpion & archer dominate Hermes; Thanatos is on the Tropic of Capricorn & the winter solstice; the water-bearer & the fish take us up Prometheus.\u00a0 Now, if there\u2019s a precessional reverse-movement to take care of, we sank into high Prometheus with Christ & our outlook has had something fishy about it ever since: the universe recedes on all sides like the ocean.\u00a0 Alice goes into the mirror world & hears poems about fish: asks why & is given a riddling answer about undishcovering the fish or dishcovering the riddle.\u00a0 Chess<\/strong>, by the way, is another mirror-image: one social establishment manoeuvering against another, its demonic shadow.\u00a0 Maybe this precessional movement will account for some of my mirror-reversals.\u00a0 Alice is a girl-child created queen in the mirror-world: the creation of the youngest daughter, la jeune parque<\/em>, is SE, Lear being the tragic & failing version of that arch. [archetype].\u00a0 Perdita & the winter solstice.\u00a0 [CW 9, 221\u20132]<\/p>\n

[541]\u00a0 I still should do some thinking about the I Ching: 64 is the number of squares in chess<\/strong>, 32 of pieces.\u00a0 The hexagrams would have to be in sequence, & no doubt I should study the sequence.\u00a0 Of course they have a primary connexion with divination, oracle, knowledge of the future, & hence Thanatos.\u00a0 But my six phases, each three overlapping with another three, indicates some connexion in my own mind.\u00a0 [CW 9, 261]<\/p>\n

[547]\u00a0 Check Lydgate\u2019s Reason & Sensuality, founded on Les Ecless Amoureux for erotic chess<\/strong>, not that I expect much. . . .\u00a0 [CW 9, 262\u20133]<\/p>\n

[551]\u00a0 I suppose my original atomic notion of 32 points was influenced by my desire to have for once a piece of writing where I could isolate units, instead of going into my usual tizzy.\u00a0 Probably I can\u2019t, even though the Anatomy itself broke up into bits\u2014large bits, it\u2019s true.\u00a0 I suppose I should introduce the archetypes on their \u201ctonics\u201d: the chess<\/strong> game seems to be in upper Eros with the earthly paradise and the associations with music & dance (Hyp, T [Hypnerotomachia<\/em>, The Tempest<\/em>]) though there are demonic forms in Eliot & Poe.\u00a0 Similarly with the Alpha-Omega business associated with usually underground rivers (Coleridge, Kenneth Patchen, etc.) & the feast of languages stealing the scraps, where the tonic is lower Hermes.\u00a0 There are games in all the quadrants, but the game of athletic contest (the epic game) has its tonic in Adonis, the game of fate (cards) in Hermes, the game of chance (dice, divination) in Prometheus, & the game of strategy (chess<\/strong> & board games) in Eros.\u00a0 Note however the Adonis chess <\/strong>games in medieval romance (if so).\u00a0 [CW 9, 263\u20134]<\/p>\n

[555]\u00a0 Two stitches dropped above: The chess<\/strong> game in Hyp<\/em> [Hypnerotomachia<\/em>], with its overtones of music & dance, suggests the dancing spirits on the palace floor in Yeats\u2019 Byzantium<\/em>; the \u201cpagan\u201d episode the Pan stage in Ash Wednesday.\u00a0 Also the detailed vision of buildings & \u201cmathematic form\u201d in Hyp.<\/em>: cf. Yeats\u2019 Statues<\/em>.\u00a0 [CW 9, 264\u20135]<\/p>\n

[92]\u00a0 What is a speculative myth, the subject of Two?\u00a0 It\u2019s a myth designed to contain, and provide a vision for, experience.\u00a0 Therefore the further it gets away from actual evidence the purer it is.\u00a0 I\u2019ve worked this out in some detail in my Bible lectures.\u00a0 For metaphysical cosmology, a much tougher job, I need Alexander, McTaggart & Whitehead.\u00a0 It may become Three, but wherever it goes, it\u2019s the chess<\/strong>-in-Bardo one.\u00a0 [CW 9, 21]<\/p>\n

[172]\u00a0 I have always distrusted what I call Reuben the Reconciler in thought: the syncretism that \u201creconciles\u201d Plato & Aristotle or St. Thomas & Marx.\u00a0 I think every great structure of thought or imagination is a universe in itself, identical with & interpenetrating every other, but not similar or harmonizable with any other.\u00a0 Syncretism is Coleridge\u2019s fancy playing with fixities & definites, & it leads to the net of relations, not to the archetypal universal unique.\u00a0 My earlier notebooks, where I wanted to move all the big names in modern literature and thought around like chess<\/strong> pieces, were fanciful in this sense.\u00a0 What I now want to do is pick epiphanies out of them for my own purposes.\u00a0 [CW 9, 39]<\/p>\n

[245]\u00a0 I hope the Book of Luvah will solve such things as the chess<\/strong>-in-Bardo problem, and that it will give some indication of what it feels like to live in a totally mythical universe, where a dragon is literally \u201cthe seeing one.\u201d\u00a0 Note that I-IV is the progression from the mythical to the verbal universe, mythology to literature and what literature informs.\u00a0\u00a0 [CW 9, 56]<\/p>\n

[289]\u00a0 Huizinga\u2019s book, Homo Ludens<\/em>, doesn\u2019t distinguish contest play, like a game of tennis, from construct play: only the latter (except for some kinds of argumentative rhetoric) belongs in lit. csm.\u00a0 The opposite of play is (a) seriousness (b) work.\u00a0 This distinction has to do with the form-content one.\u00a0 Suppose I\u2019m asked to give a Convocation address: I want to say something \u201cserious\u201d people will remember, & so I \u201cwork\u201d on a speech.\u00a0 But the form<\/em>, the whole symbolic set-up of a Convocation, is ceremonial play, a symbolic let\u2019s pretend.\u00a0 Chess<\/strong> is contest play, so chess<\/strong> in Bardo is the repetition of agon, specifically the Oedipus agon or killing of the king.\u00a0 [CW 9, 66]<\/p>\n

[12]\u00a0 Anyway, this type is closer to Cymbeline<\/em> and The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>\u2014I had a strong feeling when doing the Bampton Lectures that the four romances corresponded to four primary types of mythos.\u00a0 The Tempest<\/em> starts beckoning in the direction of that chess<\/strong>-in-Bardo will-o-wisp I\u2019ve been chasing for thirty years.\u00a0 Also Lear\u2019s search for the natural man. [CW 9, 340]<\/p>\n

[66]\u00a0 Prometheus symbolism for Eight comes mostly out of Rabelais.\u00a0 It begins in the oracular message, the deciphered code, & the \u201csymbol-essences\u201d of Endymion<\/em> concealed in the scraps of languages.\u00a0 This in turn is connected with divination, the coup de D\u00e9s, the game of chess<\/strong> in the lower world.\u00a0 Cannibal giants, the paradox of stupid power & articulate intelligence, anal imagery, Dante shat out of Satan, the piss-floods in Rabelais, all belong–Birds & frogs.\u00a0 Ariel & Caliban.\u00a0 The soul & the sleeping body vs. the rising body.\u00a0 [CW 9, 287]<\/p>\n

[73]\u00a0 If I could arrive at a suggestion about that the commedia<\/em> would have four parts after all, an Ulro of images on a cave wall, a Generation of the attainment of freedom, a Beulah scherzo of fourteen sections taking me to 78, the Tarot number & a favorite of the Rabelais, & then a Last Twilight of 22, in which the different languages of the arts (V) might suggest a way of climbing up Babel again.\u00a0 The scherzo might not only deal with but be the chess<\/strong> in Bardo problem: the opposed forces each with its own centre.\u00a0 I talk as though I were about seventeen years old: actually I feel more like a bull in the ring, learning fast but therefore soon to die.\u00a0 [CW 9, 288]<\/p>\n

[254]\u00a0 Also Egyptian is the boxes-of-Silenus mummy cases, of one inside another: Rabelais.\u00a0 Anointing the body for burial: Mark 14:8,[\u201cShe hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying\u201d\u2014Jesus\u2019s words about the woman from Bethany who poured a precious ointment on his head.] so it survives.\u00a0 Evidently it was dice<\/em> games that were found in T\u2019s tomb.\u00a0 Cards are Adonis & Hermes; dice is Thanatos; chess<\/strong> & the like Prometheus & Eros.\u00a0 [CW 9, 335]<\/p>\n

[29]\u00a0 There\u2019s some connexion between chess<\/strong> or cards and the alphabet of forms.\u00a0 Chess<\/strong> in The Tempest<\/em> is an Eros mingling, Miranda, like Alice, becomes a queen and the king dies [(shahmot?) this phrase also in notebook 8].\u00a0 In Thanatos visions they\u2019re emblems of fatality & enmity: the chess<\/strong> & Tarot pack of The Waste Land<\/em>.\u00a0 Wonder if it has something to do with the triumph of the female will that goes all through Eros, & is parodied by the femme fatale.\u00a0 [CW 9, 112]<\/p>\n

[50]\u00a0 The S to E quadrant is the progress toward the new built city.\u00a0 Aeneas leaves the burning Troy (W), then wanders W to S until he reaches Carthage (S) and Dido.\u00a0 The sixth bk. recapitulaes this journey, as he meets Dido again.\u00a0 The Tempest<\/em> is founded on the same journey, & its action has two levels: the Prometheus S to E one for Prospero and the court party, and the Eros E to N one for Ferdinand & Miranda.\u00a0 The Waste Land<\/em> combines the two, adding Augustine.\u00a0 The first section is W to S descent, substituting desert for forest, then the Dido chess<\/strong> world & death by water (Carthage & Phoenicia), then the final exit from the world of falling towers & the fisher king & Teiresias with the risen Christ.\u00a0 It also absorbs the Dante escape from hell through the center of the earth (upside down in air were towers).\u00a0 Thus this Carthage-Italy progress is a Classical parallel to the Egypt-to-Jerusalem Hebrew one, the escape from Africa, vs. the Rasselas descent into it.\u00a0 Thus once again the Exodus prefigures the Resurrection.\u00a0 The content of all this is old, but the overall shape is getting clearer.\u00a0 I see more clearly why \u201cSicily\u201d haunts Shakespearean romance: it\u2019s the land of the two levels of Proserpine, and of Arethusa.\u00a0 For the action of WT [The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>] exists on an old Leontes-Hermione level & a young Florizel-Perdita one even more obviously than that of The Tempest<\/em> does.\u00a0 Perhaps this is the reason, not only for Shakespeare\u2019s anxiety to have the parental figures taken care of, but for the change that the romances make in the green world symbolism.\u00a0 [CW 9, 117\u201318]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW 15)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

[35]\u00a0 There\u2019s a chess<\/strong> metaphor on p. 149 [of Parzifal], & with the four suits of cards the whole Parzival-Alice-Waste Land-Frazier complex is in front of me, if I could only read it.\u00a0 [CW 15, 176]<\/p>\n

[40]\u00a0 Book 8 hasn\u2019t much of interest except a curious episode where Gawain is caught unarmed & his girl friend takes him upstairs in a castle where he grabs a chess<\/strong> board for shield & she<\/em> throws chess<\/strong> pieces down on the besiegers, every hit being a knockout.\u00a0 As I think I\u2019ve said, there\u2019s a Bardo link in the fact that so many of the fights lead to reconciliations.\u00a0 [CW 15, 178]<\/p>\n

[33]\u00a0 Yeats hasn\u2019t really any brain, & like many non-intellectuals (Poe, for instance) he turns to mathematical symmetry, as others turn to chess<\/strong>, cards & detective stories. . . . [CW 15, 102]<\/p>\n

[63]\u00a0 Deirdre, Yeats\u2019 Tristan story, I can\u2019t make much of: young king, old king & female will destroy themselves in a sterile C of L [Court of Love] situation: the dragon images have overtones, the chess<\/strong> game none that I can see.\u00a0 Cathleen ni Houlihan illustrates the pathetic muddle of the Irish confusion of national & radical ideals, acquiescing in a French invasion (why not a German one?) to drive the English out.\u00a0 The false position of Yeats as an English poet is pathetic, but the play shows how Maud Gonne addled his brains.\u00a0 In The Hour-Glass, besides what I have, the net appears both as the net of love (SW [The Shadowy Waters<\/em>] & \u201cThe Fish\u201d in WR [The Wind Among the Reeds<\/em>]) & the net of reason & morality (\u201cInto the Twilight\u201d & Deirdre).\u00a0 In The Unicorn from the Stars, besides what I have, note the harvest & vintage imagery.\u00a0 [CW 15, 114]<\/p>\n

[94]\u00a0 Coleridge\u2019s distinction between imagination & fancy is of great importance for allegory.\u00a0 All allegorical interpretation consists of drawing analogies.\u00a0 Some analogies are imaginative, or, as we say, have a \u201creal\u201d relationship to the work of art.\u00a0 Others are fanciful, & then we say the reltionship is strained or far-fetched.\u00a0 In one case we are relating something else to the work of art, in the other we\u2019re treating the work of art as a pattern in a prefabricated universe, & matching it to other patterns. Fanciful analogies produce coincidences, mentally unusuable designs (see above).\u00a0 I might work out an elaborate analogy of King Lear to a game of chess<\/strong>, yet everyone would say it was an exercise in ingenuity, not an interpretation of King Lear.\u00a0 In pure anagogy, of course, there<\/em> are<\/em> no<\/em> analogies<\/em> at<\/em> all<\/em>, and the distinction disappears.\u00a0 This may be the point about alchemy.\u00a0 It\u2019s certainly the point of a hell of a lot of things.\u00a0 [CW 15, 159\u201360]<\/p>\n

[41] I have previously thought about the detective story: the main themes are as follows.\u00a0 It is primarily a dramatization of law, & therefore turns on the rightness of sacrifice, which is possible only in terms of moral justification.\u00a0 A detective story is regularly a murder story, in which a criminal murder at the beginning is polarized by a judicial one at the end–usually offstage, & sometimes barely indicated, depending on the author\u2019s priggishness & his relish for hanging.\u00a0 Suicide often does as well.\u00a0 The sacrificial pattern is made more explicit by the regular device of throwing suspicion on one character & then making him the victim of the next murder.\u00a0 The general shape is like a chess<\/strong> problem: white to mate (i.e. kill) the black king in so many moves from a given situation.\u00a0 But the real appeal is a gambling one: of a group of characters, the reader picks his, the roulette wheel spins, & if the reader\u2019s number is called he feels he\u2019s been completely logical & has beaten the system.\u00a0 The nearer the story comes to justifying his choice as mysteriously & not obviously right, the better it is.\u00a0 The gambling instinct is closely connected with the sacrificial one, where the victim is chosen by lot, & all through the story the reader watches the vacillating handwavering about among a group of characters until it stops & indicates one.\u00a0 In this, as I\u2019ve said elsewhere, we reach pure caricature of the novel form.\u00a0 The novel is designed to reveal character, the detective story to conceal it, as the fact that one of the characters is capable of murder is the concealed clue.\u00a0 Hence there must be a general woodenness of character–in short, poker faces.\u00a0 [CW 15, 75]<\/p>\n

[17]\u00a0 About this business of logical patterns: that\u2019s what explains the fascination of cards, where the logical pattern is part of a haphazard chance chaos with fitful glimpses of pattern\u2014runs of luck, etc.\u2014running through it.\u00a0 Gambling is an exact symbol of what man does with nature, especially in card games requiring a degree of skill.\u00a0 Pure gambling of course is fate-worship, & its devotees become superstititous. The association of card-playing with the \u201cwitch,\u201d the ancient female will, comes out in many places\u2014in Pope, in [Lamb\u2019s?] Essay, & in various novelists\u2019 observations on the passion of old women for cards.\u00a0 Old men, too, for backgammon & chess<\/strong>.\u00a0 [CW 15, 30\u20131]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks for \u201cAnatomy of Criticism\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

[131]\u00a0 The romance patterns in Shakespeare that he has in common with the grail romances are, or rather include, the substituted bride (Lancelot & Elaine) & of course the chess<\/strong> game.\u00a0 I\u2019m as much in the dark as ever about the latter, & as the bride is in the former (Rachel & Leah): I started off with it, & it still tantalizes.\u00a0 Note that Eliot\u2019s Middleton references are better than I suggest, especially the WW one: [The reference is to Eliot\u2019s own note to Thomas Middleton\u2019s Women Beware Women<\/em> in The Waste Land<\/em>, pt. 2, l. 138] they\u2019re part of the ironic pattern, as The Tempest & Grail ones are the romance ones they parody.\u00a0 [CW 23, 294\u20135]<\/p>\n

[117]\u00a0 Hunch: Meaning, as I say, is equivocal or univocal.\u00a0 Univocal meaning is logical meaning, & is the logical or sensible formulation of the common field of experience.\u00a0 Hence logic is the art of commentary.\u00a0 Equivocal meaning is formal (in literature verbal) meaning, & is that autonomous comprehension of the world where form & content are one.\u00a0 It is integritas & claritas, anterior & posterior to logic.\u00a0 Wittgenstein seems to make a place for equivocal meaning, in a somewhat paradoxical way, but the Carnap people who lump together all non-univocal meaning as \u201cemotional\u201d or \u201caffective\u201d are merely ignorant.\u00a0 They cannot, to begin with, distinguish art from rhetoric.\u00a0 As all meaning is ultimately equivocal, I suspect that logical positivism may be just a game of chess<\/strong>.\u00a0 I don\u2019t believe really that criticism is really a universal translation of art, though I don\u2019t know what else it is at the moment.\u00a0 [CW 23, 52]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em><\/strong> (CW 13)<\/p>\n

[186]\u00a0 Card symbolism seems to have an affinity to Mrs. Battle\u2019s \u201cquadrate or square,\u201d whereas chess<\/strong>, as Alice discovered, is a mirror game.\u00a0 There\u2019s the major mirror of red & white, & the minor mirror of the doubled bishops & knights & castles.\u00a0 The curious ambiguity of seven & eight recurs: chess<\/strong>, like the I Ching, is ogdoadic: 8 powers, 16 pieces, 32 total pieces, 64 squares.\u00a0 The Tempest chess<\/strong> game is an Eros breakout of the mirror; the Waste Land of course is the demonic narcist kind. \u00a0Maybe it\u2019s the hermaphroditism of the lovers, though.\u00a0 Tarot symbolism recurs to sevens; also to \u03c0, the 22\u20137 proportion (the Fool being 0, it isn\u2019t quite 22).\u00a0 Note the septenary principle in card-playing, preserved in bridge: four are playing but only three play.\u00a0 Similarly with the medieval Tarot, I understand.\u00a0 The total number, 78, is often mentioned by Rabelais.\u00a0 [CW 13, 173]<\/p>\n

[574]\u00a0 I\u2019ve thought of Six as perhaps in part the core of the next book, which will probably have to start with the Shakespeare romantic comedies & unravel the whole complex of Cupid & Psyche, Perdita lost & found, Miranda and Alice playing chess<\/strong>, Marina rising again<\/em> from the sea, the Dickensian girl-child among grotesques.\u00a0 Not especially Biblical, except for S.S.\u00a0 This little girl is a daughter<\/em>-figure, & daughters don\u2019t seem to get much of a play in the Bible: the Gnostics seem keener on them.\u00a0 [CW 13, 247]<\/p>\n

If you distinguish work and play, I think you may see that work is energy expended for a further aim in view; whereas play is the expression of energy for its own sake, or the manifestation of what the end in view is.\u00a0 A tennis player or a chess player may work very hard to win a match or to improve his game, but what he is doing when he actually comes in contact with chess or tennis is playing.\u00a0 As I have tried to show in dealing with Biblical imagery, the images of the revealed world in the Bible are the images of human work: the city, the garden, the sheepfold, the farm, and so on.\u00a0 But the word \u201cplay\u201d as associated with wisdom is the living in a way which is a manifestation of these forms when they are completed.\u00a0 Whenever a thing exists for its own end, rather than as a means to a further end, that thing is associable with play rather than with work.\u00a0 That is why even such terrible and horrifying works as King Lear<\/em> and Macbeth<\/em> can still be called \u201cplays\u201d: because they manifest the way human life is as it is, and are not presented to you with any further end in view.\u00a0 [Bible Lectures, CW 13, 549]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature<\/em> (CW 20)<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0 I still don\u2019t know what the significance of the game of chess<\/strong> is in The Tempest<\/em>, and I find Eliot\u2019s Waste<\/em> <\/em>Land<\/em> notes and his references to Middleton somewhat less than helpful.\u00a0 But I wonder if it has anything to do with a possible symbolism connected with shah mat<\/em>: \u201cthe king is dead.\u201d\u00a0 Cards no doubt have similar affinities: Lewis Carroll deals with both in parallel terms, & the card game in The Rape of the Lock<\/em> comes I think from a Latin Ludus Scacchia<\/em> (by Vida?).\u00a0 Wilson Knight notes the black and white character of the dramatis personae in Lear<\/em>.\u00a0 Cf. the dice-playing in mumming.\u00a0 [CW 20, 99]<\/p>\n

[141]\u00a0 In Irish legend (cf.\u00a0 Yeats, On Baile\u2019s Strand) Cuchulain when he kills his son & goes mad fights the waves,& in a sense Lear does too.\u00a0 I have always believed in the essential identity of the storm in Lear & the tempest in T [The Tempest<\/em>], & just as the T is under water, the analogy or mirror-world, so Lear goes as far under water as drama can represent him.\u00a0 T is a looking-glass world concerned with a game of chess<\/strong>, as W is an underground world: an old hunch of mine, founded on grotesquely inadequate & wrong information, may have something.\u00a0 [CW 20, 154]<\/p>\n

[150]\u00a0 Spenser\u2019s British symbolism is Arthurian; but Elizabethan drama avoided Arthur, &, like Blake, dealt with Geoffrey\u2019s pre-Arthurian material: Locrines Lears & Cymbelines & Gorboducs, but no Modreds or Guineveres or Tristans, & when Milton turns to drama his reference(Sabrina) is also pre-Arthurian.\u00a0 Also, like Blake & the 18thc. generally, they left out the creeping Saxon & started in the \u201cGothic\u201d period: Alfred went unsung, & Edgar, who\u2019s important in Hakluyt.\u00a0 Wonder why.\u00a0 I think Merlin (one of the forms of Marlowe\u2019s name, as his contemporaries noticed) may have got in through a popular taste for magicians, & I seem to remember an Edmund Ironside, & there are a couple of references in Hamlet to Danish suzerainty over England.\u00a0 The question of Roman ascendancy is complicated by the number of Roman Emperors, including Constantine & in a sense Caesar, who came from Britain.\u00a0 See \u201cThe Dream of Maxen Wledig\u201d in the Mabinogion, where there\u2019s a game of chess<\/strong> too, as there frequently is in Celtic stories.\u00a0 Note here how Cy [Cymbeline] symbolism expands into T [Tempest] symbolism.\u00a0 [CW 20157\u20138]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em><\/strong> (CW 5 and 6)<\/p>\n

[10]\u00a0 Wilson: epigraph: it\u2019s an ill wind that blows nobody\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

McLuhan\u2019s point is that multiple models are the great 20th c. discovery.\u00a0 Like Ulysses.\u00a0 (I\u2019d say it was really the rediscovery of the variation form (ideally 32 or 33).[)]<\/p>\n

He makes a lot of 23: 24 & 33 are closed<\/em> cycles, because you say twelve o\u2019clock or north time.\u00a0 23 and 32 have the open spark gap I mentioned in FS.\u00a0 Maybe this is the 7-8 relation too.\u00a0 And my 15 (16)\u2014And the climacteric 63 (64 I Ching, chess, etc.).\u00a0 Blake-Jung\u2019s 3 & 4. (No: 7 > 8 won\u2019t work: it would have to be 8-9 diagrammatically, although 7 > 8 has a lot of tradition going for it.\u00a0 As I\u2019ve known since Blake, 7 is an event<\/em> number in time, which includes space by turning 8.[)]<\/p>\n

Note the close paranoia links: if you get fixated on 23, you develop a \u201cthat\u2019s for me\u201d feeling about every 23 you see.\u00a0 He\u2019d be nowhere without Jung\u2019s \u201csynchronicity.\u201d<\/p>\n

At present only the real nut books, Wilson\u2019s & Bentov\u2019s, are interesting to me.\u00a0 I get nothing out of Marilyn\u2019s [Marilyn] Ferguson\u2019s goo-goo books on the Aquarian conspiracy or Fritjof Capra\u2019s two books on the Tao of Physics.\u00a0 Commonplace mind.\u00a0 David Bohm I did get something from.\u00a0 [CW 6, 713]<\/p>\n

[192]\u00a0 In Through the Looking Glass the alchemical marriage is celebrated between the Red King and Alice the White Queen, where it\u2019s symbolized by a mutual dream. [See WP<\/em>, 208.]\u00a0 As Alice is the second white queen, in something like a filial relationship to the bumbling and scatterbrained earlier queen who turns into a sheep, her reaching the Eighth Square is also an anabasis of Kore.\u00a0 The Alice books are inexhaustibly suggestive, one with cards & one with chess<\/strong>, one ending with a trial and the other with a banquet, and the riddle in the second: Why are all the poems about fish?\u00a0 They\u2019re a source of the kind of mad and unprintable intuitions that supply most of the real power in this myth game: too bad people are so stupid I have to keep them secret.\u00a0 [CW 5, 293]<\/p>\n

[313]\u00a0 Chess<\/strong> in Bardo?\u00a0 Is it a modulation of dice in Bardo?\u00a0 A chess<\/strong> move is a decisive choice that may not abolish chance, but sets up a train of consequences that forces it to retreat into the shadows.\u00a0 [CW 5, 318]<\/p>\n

[443]\u00a0 Considering what I\u2019ve learned from Shakespeare, there isn\u2019t much from him so far.\u00a0 Leontes kills the anima inside him, but she revives at the words \u201cour Perdita is found\u201d [The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>, 5.3.121] although Perdita, like the second female in MT [The Mental Traveller<\/em>], has to come to the man she loves [l. 49].\u00a0 Each man kills the woman he loves, but finds her alive again after she\u2019s been hidden.\u00a0 The Tempest world is submarine & temporal: the renewal of the previous world, symbolized by Milan, doesn\u2019t amount to much, except for the seed of something genuinely renewed in the F-M [Ferdinand-Miranda] marriage, the vision of the world saved from the flood, and the chess<\/strong> game, whatever that is. \u00a0Perhaps chess<\/strong>, like the sword-mirror-purple flower complex in Yeats\u2019s dialogue, is \u201cemblematical of love & war\u201d [A Dialogue of Self and Soul<\/em>, l. 19], the Adonis world caught up & sublimated.\u00a0 [CW 5, 345\u20136]<\/p>\n

[178]\u00a0 Then again, he\u2019s [Rabelais] full of all the choice-and-chance stuff at the bottom of the imaginative world: the long lists of divination devices [bk. 3, chap. 25], games of chess<\/strong> in the fifth book [chap. 24], and the like.\u00a0 The bottle-oracle is partly that too [bk. 5, chaps. 34 ff.]. [CW 6, 458\u20139]<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Diaries of Northrop Frye<\/em> (CW\u00a0 8)<\/strong><\/p>\n

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[504]\u00a0 My Canadian mail is beginning to trickle through now, & I\u2019ve had two letters reacting to my radio talks.\u00a0 One was from an English teacher in Buffalo, who said he\u2019d made tape recordings of them, and had listened to them several times to use for teaching purposes.\u00a0 He\u2019s a Catholic, & disagrees with me on Swift\u2019s view of original sin as orthodox.\u00a0 The other was from a poor mad creature in Sydney who\u2019d been fired from a high-school teaching job in 1916 & had woven it into a complex occult fantasy.\u00a0 Some sort of numerology connected with chess<\/strong> and some Chinese thing she calls wun-tzu\u2014I wonder if someone\u2019s playing a joke on her, as it sounds like the \u201cWun hung\u201d type of joke.\u00a0 I always try to reply to such people, as they\u2019re dreadfully lonely, and usually I can catch a glimmer of reason, or at least something I can put into a sane formula, but this time I can\u2019t get even a glimmer.\u00a0 Poor old soul.\u00a0 I wonder why they seek me out.\u00a0 [CW 8, 418\u201319]<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Chess in Frye\u2019s Own Published Writings<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Northrop Frye on\u00a0 Modern Culture<\/em> (CW 11)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of poets, perhaps Auden in English has given us most clearly the sense of creation as play, an expression of man as homo ludens<\/em>. The contrived and artificial patterns of his verse are consistent with this, just as the light verse they resemble is more contrived than heavy verse, and play\u2011novels like detective stories more contrived than \u201cserious\u201d fiction. Val\u00e9ry\u2019s view of poetry as a game bound by arbitrary rules like chess<\/strong> is similar, and Val\u00e9ry remarks that \u201cinspiration\u201d is a state of mind in the reader, not in the writer\u2014another example of the modern tendency to turn as much activity as possible over to the reader.\u00a0 [CW 11, 38]<\/p>\n

A generation ago many people plunged into radical politics in the hope of finding a total programme of this kind, but all forms of politics, including the radical form, seem sooner or later to dwindle into a specialized chess<\/strong> game. Many others at various times have sought the same total activity in religion, a more promising place, but often a disappointing one, with rather second rate cultural rewards. It would simplify my argument considerably at this point if I could say that the leisure structure was the missing piece of society, that it is what we can give an unqualified loyalty to, and that it does fulfil the entire range of non material human needs. There is however no reason to suppose that the leisure structure, as it grows in social importance, will produce a social institution any better (if no worse) than business or politics do: the most we can hope for is a system of checks and balances which will prevent any one of our new three estates from becoming too powerful.\u00a0 [CW 11, 56\u20137]<\/p>\n

Anatomy of Criticism<\/em><\/strong> (CW 22)<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The characterization of romance follows its general dialectic structure, which means that subtlety and complexity are not much favoured. Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist it they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it they are caricatured as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character in romance tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white pieces in a chess<\/strong> game. In romance the \u201cwhite\u201d pieces who strive for the quest correspond to the eiron <\/em>group in comedy, though the word is no longer appropriate, as irony has little place in romance.\u00a0 Romance has a counterpart to the benevolent retreating eiron <\/em>of comedy in its figure of the \u201cold wise man,\u201d as Jung calls him, like Prospero, Merlin, or the palmer of Spenser\u2019s second quest, often a magician who affects the action he watches over. The Arthur of The Faerie Queene<\/em>, though not an old man, has this function. He has a feminine counterpart in the sybilline wise mother-figure, often a potential bride like Solveig in Peer Gynt<\/em>, who sits quietly at home waiting for the hero to finish his wanderings and come back to her. This latter figure is often the lady fox whose sake or at whose bidding the quest is performed: she is represented by the Faerie Queene in Spenser and by Athene in the Perseus story. These are the king and queen of the white pieces, though their power of movement is of course reversed in actual chess<\/strong>. [CW 22, 181\u20132]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye on Education<\/em><\/strong> (CW 7)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The word \u201cconvention\u201d expresses one very important kind of similarity that we find in our reading. A detective story is a simple example of a conventional form: we know before we start reading it that there is going to be a corpse, a number of suspects, police called in, an inquest, and the eventual discovery of the murderer just at the end. If we bought a detective story and didn\u2019t find this kind of material in it we\u2019d feel cheated. Of course every individual work of literature has to be just enough different from all the others to make reading it a distinct experience. But the similarities within the type are equally important. A radio or television serial will use the same characters, the same incidents, the same turns of speech, and if these familiar features didn\u2019t turn up, that programme\u2019s ratings would go down fast and far. So there are aspects of literary experience that are very like games. Each game of chess <\/strong>or bridge may be different, but the conditions within which the game is played do not change. We notice too that it is in popular forms like the detective story where this rules-of-a-game feeling is strongest. The word \u201cgenre,\u201d like the word \u201cconvention,\u201d expresses a similar sense of classification or type in the things we read. If we are told in advance that what we are going to read is a comedy or tragedy or romance or novel, we expect certain features that we should not expect if the indication were different. \u00a0[CW 7, 434\u20135]<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Books where the conventions are very clear remind us a good deal of games: each game of chess<\/strong> or tennis will be different, but there is a controlling set of rules that remains the same for every type of game. In the book trade this means that there will always be a constant pressure to turn out the predictable and highly professional product, whatever its category. [CW 7, 584]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries<\/em> (CW 17)<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

When a sympathetic character dies, a strongly religious projection of this power often appears: the \u201cJudgement\u201d expected shortly by Miss Flite in Bleak House<\/em>, for instance, stands in apocalyptic contrast to the Chancery Court. Dickens\u2019s Eros world is, above all, a designing and manipulating power. The obstructing humour can do only what his humour makes him do, and toward the end of the story he becomes the helpless pawn of a chess<\/strong> game in which black can never ultimately win.\u00a0 [CW 17, 307]<\/p>\n

Notice that we speak of \u201cplaying\u201d the piano, just as we speak about playing tennis or chess, and just as we call dramas, even the most terrible tragedies, \u201cplays.\u201d In ordinary speech we distinguish work and play, work being energy expended for a further end in view, play being energy expended for its own sake. Doing any kind of playing well, whether on the stage or at a piano or chess<\/strong>board, takes an immense amount of work, but when the work has its end in play we can see the point in it much more clearly. Nothing gives greater pleasure than spontaneous activity, but the spontaneous comes at the end of a long discipline of practice. It never comes early except when it is something we have inherited as part of our previous evolutionary development\u2014something our ancestors have practised before us. [CW 17, 350]<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/h1>\n

The Secular Scripture<\/em> and Other Writings on Critical Theory <\/em>(CW, 18)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the general area of romance we find highly stylized patterns like the detective story, which are so conventionalized as to resemble games. We expect each game of chess<\/strong> to be different, but we do not want the conventions of the game itself to alter, or to see a chess<\/strong> game in which the bishops move in straight lines and the rooks diagonally. Whether we consider detective stories worth reading or not depends on our willingness to accept the convention.\u00a0 [CW 18, 32]<\/p>\n

We saw that Alice in Wonderland<\/em>, for all its lightness and humour, preserved some of the traditional imagery of a lower-world descent. Alice passing through the looking-glass into a reversed world of dream language is also going through a descent; the incidents are largely suggested by nursery rhymes, but we may note the twin theme in Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Before long however we realize that the journey is turning upwards, in a direction symbolized by the eighth square of a chess<\/strong>board, where Alice becomes a Psyche figure, a virginal queen flanked by two older queens, one red and one white, who bully her and set her impossible tasks in the form of nonsensical questions. Cards and dice, we said, have a natural connection with themes of descent into a world of fatality; chess<\/strong> and other board games, despite The Waste Land<\/em>, appear more frequently in romance and in Eros contexts, as The Tempest<\/em> again reminds us. As Alice begins to move upward out of her submarine mirror world she notes that all the poems she had heard have to do with fish, and as she wakes she reviews the metamorphoses that the figures around her had turned into. [CW 18, 103]<\/p>\n

The Great Code: The Bible and Literature <\/em>(CW 19)<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Preacher is not recommending activity for its own sake, but pointing to the release of energy that follows the giving up of our various excuses for losing our way in the fog: \u201cBetter is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the desire\u201d (6:9), as he says. But the phrase \u201cwork ethic\u201d suggests the question of what is not work, and our normal habits of language tell us that one opposite of work, at least, is play. Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children\u2019s play, or as a manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in \u201cplaying\u201d chess<\/strong> or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfilment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for. [CW 19, 145]<\/p>\n

Northrop<\/em> Frye on Twentieth\u2011Century Literature <\/em>(CW 29)<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

The recognition scene in The Tempest<\/em> discovers Ferdinand playing chess<\/strong> with Miranda, a game which ends either in checkmate, the death of the king, or in stalemate, like the two unions in the second section of The Waste Land<\/em> which is called \u201cA Game of Chess.\u201d\u00a0 [T.S. Eliot<\/em>, <\/em>CW 29, 227\u20138]<\/p>\n

A James novel is \u201creally\u201d a story of forces of demonic evil and angelic innocence sweeping across fully articulate and intelligent beings who are largely unaware of them. It is just as \u201creally\u201d a story of chess<\/strong> pieces moving through an endgame that can result only in checkmate or stalemate. One has to read James by a stereo vision that brings the two realities into focus. [\u201cHenry James and the Comedy of the Occult,\u201d CW 29 364]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye on Shakespeare<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is not until the scene at the end of the second act, with its repeated \u201cshut up your doors,\u201d that our sympathies definitely shift over to Lear. Regan says, \u201cHe is attended with a desperate train,\u201d meaning his fifty (or whatever their present number) knights, but they seem to have sloped off pretty promptly as soon as they realized that they were unlikely to get their next meal there, and Lear\u2019s \u201cdesperate train\u201d actually consists only of the Fool. When we catch her out in a lie of that size we begin to see what has not emerged before, and has perhaps not yet occurred to them: that \u201chis daughters seek his death,\u201d as Gloucester says. It is during and after the storm that the characters of the play begin to show their real nature, and from then on we have something unique in Shakespeare: a dramatic world in which the characters are, like chess<\/strong> pieces, definitely black or white: black with Edmund, Goneril, Regan, and Cornwall; white with Lear, Cordelia, Edgar, Gloucester, Kent, and eventually Albany. [104]<\/p>\n

The action of the play seems to be proceeding to a conclusion that, however sombre and exhausting, nonetheless has some serenity in it. But just as we seem about to reach this conclusion, there comes the agonizing wrench of the hanging of Cordelia and the death speeches of Lear. Naturally the stage refused to act this down to the nineteenth century: producers settled for another version that married Cordelia off to Edgar. We act the play now as Shakespeare wrote it, but it\u2019s still pretty tough even for this grisly century. I said that in the course of the play the characters settled into a clear division of good and bad people, like the white and black pieces of a chess<\/strong> game. The last of the black pieces, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund, have been removed from the board, and then comes the death of Cordelia. Part of this is just the principle that the evil men do lives after them, Edmund\u2019s repentance being too late to rescind his own order. But there seems to be a black king still on the board, and one wonders if there is any clue to who or what or where he is. [119]<\/p>\n

A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

The perspective taken in these lectures is also, I hope, uncommon enough to be of some value. Each play of Shakespeare is a world in itself, so complete and satisfying a world that it is easy, delightful, and profitable to get lost in it. The result is that the bulk of Shakespearean criticism consists, rightly, I think, of commentary on individual plays. The present book retreats from commentary into a middle distance, considering the comedies as a single group unified by recurring images and structural devices. From this point of view they seem more like a number of simultaneous chess<\/strong> games played by a master who wins them all by devices familiar to him, and gradually, with patient study, to us, but which remain mysteries of an unfathomable skill. More important, the reader is led from the characteristics of the individual play, the vividness of characterization, the texture of imagery, and the like, to consider what kind of a form comedy is, and what its place is in literature. It is hoped that this will help him to understand more clearly the relation of his experience of Shakespeare to his experience of other literature and drama. [viii]<\/p>\n

A final few words to explain the title of this chapter and to introduce the theme of the next one. All myths have two poles, one personal, whether divine or human, and one natural: Neptune and the sea, Apollo and the sun. When the world of sea and sun is thought of as an order of nature, this polarization becomes a god or magician who controls the natural machine at one end, and the natural machine itself at the other. Tragedy, irony, and realism see the human condition from inside the machine of nature; comedy and romance tend to look for a person concealed in the mechanical chess<\/strong> player. When Ben Jonson speaks disapprovingly of dramatists who are afraid of nature, and run away from her, we find his meaning clear enough. When he says of himself that he is \u201cloath to make nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget tales, tempests, and such like drolleries,\u201d the reversal of the phrase is more puzzling, although the implied comparison with Shakespeare is equally evident.\u00a0 [70]<\/p>\n

Northrop Frye\u2019s Student Essays<\/em><\/strong> (CW 3)<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

Medieval science was inclined to regard the world as complicated rather than complex, because a world in which universals were real would be one which could be explained in very simple formulae, such as the cardinal numbers.\u00a0 And we should expect this tendency to association of ideas, as shown in the endless attempts to interrelate all possible groups of three, four, seven, and twelve, to find counterparts in literature.<\/p>\n

Thus, we find in Chaucer\u2019s poetry standard symbolic patterns like the game of chess<\/strong> and the elaborate anatomical description of the beloved lady which meet us in The Book of the Duchess<\/em> [614\u201369, 939\u201360: 273, 276], and the astrological and mythological frameworks of such poems as the Complaint of Mars<\/em>. [CW 3, 438]<\/p>\n

The extremely conventional lament, with its many stock patterns\u2014the succession of oxymorons leading into the tirade against Fortune [617\u2013709: 273\u20134], with the rather tedious conceit of the chess game, the detailed description of the lady\u2019s soul and body, and the extremely varied lists of references\u2014all lead us to suspect that the formalizing of personal grief characteristic of the great elegies of the language is a virtue made of necessity.\u00a0 Death is so impartial and commonplace an event that it is difficult to describe a particular death in particular terms. [CW 3, 441\u20132]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Robert D. Denham Frye often uses chess as an example of a rule\u2011governed game or set of arbitrary convention, which he likens to the conventions of literature.\u00a0 But there are more than ninety references to chess scattered throughout his work.\u00a0 A large number of these speculate on chess as an archetype.\u00a0 Then there is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-14288","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nFrye on Chess - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Frye on Chess - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"by Robert D. Denham Frye often uses chess as an example of a rule\u2011governed game or set of arbitrary convention, which he likens to the conventions of literature.\u00a0 But there are more than ninety references to chess scattered throughout his work.\u00a0 A large number of these speculate on chess as an archetype.\u00a0 Then there is […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/wp-includes\/js\/tinymce\/plugins\/wordpress\/img\/trans.gif\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"47 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/\",\"name\":\"Frye on Chess - The Educated Imagination\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/wp-includes\/js\/tinymce\/plugins\/wordpress\/img\/trans.gif\",\"datePublished\":\"2010-07-25T04:56:38+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/wp-includes\/js\/tinymce\/plugins\/wordpress\/img\/trans.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/wp-includes\/js\/tinymce\/plugins\/wordpress\/img\/trans.gif\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Frye on Chess\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/\",\"name\":\"The Educated Imagination\",\"description\":\"A Website Dedicated to Northrop Frye\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Frye on Chess - The Educated Imagination","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/frye-on-chess\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Frye on Chess - The Educated Imagination","og_description":"by Robert D. 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