{"id":21810,"date":"2011-03-19T22:58:38","date_gmt":"2011-03-20T02:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/"},"modified":"2011-03-19T22:58:38","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T02:58:38","slug":"northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/","title":{"rendered":"Northrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard"},"content":{"rendered":"

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

The roots of Frye\u2019s expansive vision of culture have often been remarked.\u00a0 Blake and the Bible are obviously central to the development of his ideas, and much has been written about Frye\u2019s debts to both.\u00a0 Much has been written as well about other significant influences on Frye: Nella Cotrupi\u2019s book on Frye and Vico, Glen Gill\u2019s study of Frye and twentieth\u2011century mythographers (Eliade, Jung, and others), Ford Russell\u2019s account of the influence of Spengler, Frazer, and Cassirer on Frye, and S\u00e1ra T\u00f3th on Frye and Buber. \u00a0No one, however, has considered the ways that Kierkegaard influenced Frye\u2019s thought.\u00a0 As the impact of Kierkegaard on Frye is relatively substantial, the purpose of this essay is to examine Frye\u2019s use of Kierkegaard.[1]<\/a> Direct influence is sometimes difficult to demonstrate, but parallels between and similar ideas held by the two can be instructive. \u00a0Kierkegaard helps to define, illustrate, and develop Frye\u2019s thought.\u00a0 Along the way, we will also glance at Frye\u2019s critique of certain Kierkegaardian ideas.<\/p>\n

Frye was attracted to Kierkegaard for the same reason he was attracted to Spengler and a host of other visionaries who wrote what he called \u201ckook books.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cI was well aware,\u201d he writes,<\/p>\n

all the time I was studying [Spengler and Frazer] that they were rather stupid men and often slovenly scholars. \u00a0But I found them, or rather their central visions, unforgettable, while there are hundreds of books by more intelligent and scrupulous people which I have forgotten having read. Some of them are people who have utterly refuted the claims of Spengler and Frazer to be taken seriously. But the thinker who was annihilated on Tuesday has to be annihilated all over again on Wednesday. . . . This is not merely my own perversity: we all find that it is not only, perhaps not even primarily, the balanced and judicious people that we turn to for insight. \u00a0It is also such people as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, H\u00f6lderlin, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, all of them liars in Wilde\u2019s sense of the word, as Wilde was himself. \u00a0They were people whose lives got smashed up in various ways, but rescued fragments from the smash of an intensity that the steady-state people seldom get to hear about. \u00a0Their vision is penetrating because it is partial and distorted: it is truthful because it is falsified. \u00a0To the Old Testament\u2019s question, \u201cWhere shall wisdom be found?\u201d there is often only the New Testament\u2019s answer: \u201cWell, not among the wise, at any rate.\u201d (CW 4, 39\u201340) [2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frye had more than a passing acquaintance with the writings of Kierkegaard.\u00a0 His library contained fourteen books by Kierkegaard, twelve of which he annotated: The Concept of Dread<\/em>, The Concept of Irony<\/em>, The Diary of S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard<\/em>, Either\/Or (vol. 1)<\/em>, Fear and Trembling, The Journals of S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard<\/em>, Of the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle<\/em>, The Point of View for My Work as an Author<\/em>, The Present Age<\/em>, Repetition<\/em>, The Sickness unto Death<\/em>, and Stages of Life\u2019s Way<\/em>.\u00a0 Frye also owned Kierkegaard\u2019s Edifying Discourses: A Selection <\/em>and volume 2 of Either\/Or<\/em>; in his essay \u201cBlake\u2019s Bible\u201d he refers to Attack upon Christendom<\/em> (CW 16, 423); and in The Great Code<\/em> he mentions a translation of The Present Age<\/em> different from the one he owned.\u00a0 As Frye quotes a phrase from Concluding Scientific Postscript<\/em>, he may have read that work as well.[3]<\/a> On the evidence we have, then, Frye was familiar with a substantial number of the books by Kierkegaard that were available in translation during his lifetime.<\/p>\n

In his 1949 diary Frye reports that he has begun reading Kierkegaard\u2019s Concept of Dread<\/em> again. (CW 8, 189).\u00a0 This would have been Walter Lowrie\u2019s translation of the book, which appeared in 1944 (the translations into English of Kierkegaard by Lowrie, Alexander Dru, and David and Lillian Swenson began to appear in the early 1940s).\u00a0 So Frye\u2019s reading of Kierkegaard had begun at least by the late 1940s and perhaps earlier.\u00a0 There is a steady stream of references to Kierkegaard\u2013\u2013more than 250 altogether\u2013\u2013in Frye\u2019s writings, beginning in 1949 and continuing in his published and unpublished work through the posthumous The Double Vision<\/em> (1991).\u00a0 He began to reread Kierkegaard in the late 1980s, and he gives a fairly extensive account of this rereading in Notebook 50.<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s attention to existentialism in general followed closely on the post\u2011World War II manifestations of the movement.\u00a0 \u00a0He reports using the word \u201cexistentialist\u201d in a January 1949 discussion with his Victoria College colleagues, and by 1950 he is lecturing on the \u201cexistential movement\u201d (CW 8, 100, 282).\u00a0 Several dozen instances of his use of the word can be found in his diaries from the late 1940s and early 1950s.[4]<\/a> Frye wrote nothing extensive about existentialism, but two thumb\u2011nail accounts of the movement can be found in \u201cSpeculation and Concern\u201d (CW 7, 254-6) and \u201cThe University and Personal Life\u201d (CW 7, 367).<\/p>\n

The central Kierkegaardian topoi that make their way into Frye\u2019s writing relate to his understanding of the myths of freedom and concern; the either\/or dialectic; the principle of repetition; Kierkegaard as a prophetic, kerygmatic, metaliterary writer; and his role in the revolutionary explosion in nineteenth\u2011century thought, which Frye characterizes by the metaphor of the drunken boat. \u00a0I propose to examine what Frye says about these subjects in turn.\u00a0 It is often best to let Frye speak for himself, so the generous supply of quotations from his published and unpublished work results in a kind of Kierkegaardian anthology.<\/p>\n

1. The Myth of Concern<\/p>\n

The OED gives twenty\u2011one meanings for \u201cconcern\u201d as a noun.\u00a0 In common parlance the word refers to an active interest or an important relation to some matter.\u00a0 In the mid\u20111960s Frye began to use the word in a special way.\u00a0 Rather than recurring to the common distinction between fact and value, Frye says in a 1965 essay entitled \u201cSpeculation and Concern\u201d that the existential terms \u201cconcern\u201d and \u201cengagement\u201d are touchstones for what the humanities create. Three years later in reflecting on the history of his interest in the Bible, Frye writes,<\/p>\n

I was beginning to see that the language of religion and the language of literature were closely connected, but the reason for the connection did not really become clear to me until the existentialist people came along after the war and I began reading Kierkegaard and his followers. The reason for the connection is that myth is the language of concern. Man is in two worlds: there is a world around him, an objective world, which it is the business of science to study. But there is also the world that man is trying to build out of his environment, and this is the world which depends on man\u2019s view of himself and his destiny, or his concern about where he came from and where he is going to, and all his hopes and his ideals, his anxieties and his panics, come into his view of the society that he wants to build. (CW 27, 274)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In The Critical Path<\/em> (1971) Frye expands the meaning of the word \u201cconcern,\u201d setting up an elaborate dialectic between the myths of freedom and concern.\u00a0\u00a0 In The Great Code<\/em> \u201cexistential concern\u201d enters into Frye\u2019s account of kerygma, and eight years later \u201cconcern\u201d is given another twist in chapter 2 of Words with Power<\/em>, entitled \u201cConcern and Myth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frye never points to a source in Kierkegaard for his appropriation of the word \u201cconcern,\u201d but \u201cconcern\u201d in the senses just specified (Bekymring\u2013\u2013concern, care, interest, worry) appears throughout the Danish theologian\u2019s works.\u00a0 He writes, for example, \u201cNot until the moment when there awakens in his soul a concern about what meaning the world has for him and he for the world, about what meaning everything within him by which he himself belongs to the world has for him and he therein for the world\u2013\u2013only then does the inner being announce its presence in this concern.\u201d\u00a0 What this awakened concern yearns for is \u201ca knowledge that does not remain knowledge for a single moment but is transformed into action the moment it is possessed\u201d (Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses<\/em> 86).\u00a0 Or again: \u201cThere is a truth whose greatness, whose sublimity we are accustomed to extol by saying that it is an objective truth, that it is equally valid whether one accepts it or not. . . . There is another kind of truth, or if this is more unassuming, another kind of truths, which we might call the concerned truths\u201d (Edifying Discourses<\/em> 87).[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Frye read Kierkegaard before he read Paul Tillich, the appeal of the word \u201cconcern\u201d might also be traced to the first volume of Tillich\u2019s Systematic Theology<\/em>, which appeared in 1951.\u00a0 Tillich had been significantly influenced by Kierkegaard during his student years at the University of Halle.\u00a0 \u201cThe word \u2018concern,\u2019\u201d Tillich writes, \u201cpoints to the \u2018existential\u2019 character of religious experience. \u00a0We cannot speak adequately of the \u2018object of religion\u2019 without simultaneously removing its character as an object. \u00a0That which is ultimate gives itself only to the attitude of ultimate concern. \u00a0It is the correlate of an unconditional concern but not a \u2018highest thing\u2019 called \u2018the absolute\u2019 or \u2018the unconditioned,\u2019 about which we could argue in detached objectivity.\u00a0 It is the object of total surrender, demanding also the surrender of our subjectivity while we look at it. \u00a0It is a matter of infinite passion and interest (Kierkegaard), making us its object whenever we try to make it our object\u201d (Systematic<\/em> 12). \u00a0Frye had heard Tillich lecture at the University of Toronto in February 1950,[6]<\/a> and he owned and annotated four of Tillich\u2019s books.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

Speculation and Concern<\/em>.\u00a0 In Frye\u2019s essay of this title, which aims to differentiate between the sciences and the humanities, \u201cspeculation\u201d is his shorthand for the detached mode of inquiry of the sciences.\u00a0 \u201cConcern,\u201d on the other hand, is what we find in the containing forms of myths; \u201cit is in these myths that the nature of man\u2019s concern for his world is most clearly expressed\u201d (CW 7, 256).\u00a0 One version of \u201cconcern\u201d is found in existentialism, particularly in Kierkegaard\u2019s notion of \u201cethical freedom\u201d: Existentialism, Frye writes, \u201cinsists that if we think of the external world as a human world, certain elements become primary that are carefully kept out of science: the imminence of death, the feeling of alienation, the pervading sense of accident and of emptiness, and the direct confrontation with something arbitrary and absurd.\u201d\u00a0 Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201cethical freedom\u201d refers to the person, in Frye\u2019s words, \u201cwho has passed beyond speculation.\u00a0 It would be better to use the existential terms engagement or concern to express the contrast between a reality which is there to begin with and the greater reality which, like religious faith or artistic creation, does not exist at all to begin with, but is brought into being through a certain kind of human act\u201d (CW 7, 254, 256).\u00a0 The parallel between speculation and concern, on the one hand, and Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201caesthetic\u201d and \u201cethical\u201d stages, on the other, will be considered shortly.\u00a0 The point here is that \u201cconcern\u201d in the sense of committed or engaged derives from Kierkegaard and his twentieth\u2011century followers.<\/p>\n

\u201cConcern\u201d can mean a troubled state of mind, uneasiness, or anxiety (Kierkegaard\u2019s Angest<\/em>), and this is the meaning it occasionally has for Frye.\u00a0 In his radio talk, given as a prelude to a performance of Auden\u2019s For the Time Being<\/em>, Frye writes, \u201cKierkegaard says that all human activity, without exception, is the product of concern or anxiety about human life, so from one point of view all human activity is hysterical, compulsive and neurotic.\u201d\u00a0 Frye then advises his audience to \u201c[l]isten for the word \u2018anxiety\u2019 in Auden\u2019s play: it\u2019s a very important word.\u00a0 The neurotic can\u2019t get at his neurosis or become conscious of it without the help of a psychoanalyst.\u00a0 But for anxiety, which defeats all of us equally, there aren\u2019t any psychoanalysts.\u00a0 To try to become conscious of this takes us into the mystery of what theologians call original sin and whatever it is that makes all human life grow out of a tense and frightened dissatisfaction.\u00a0 We can no more see inside this than we can see our own backbones\u201d (CW 25, 298\u20139).[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Myths of Freedom and Concern<\/em>.\u00a0 In The Critical Path<\/em> Frye claims \u00a0that the process of interpreting the social myths of culture is \u201cvery similar to criticism in literature\u201d and that \u201cthe different forms of critical interpretation cannot be sharply separated, whether they are applied to the plays of Shakespeare, the manuscripts of the Bible, the American Constitution, or the oral traditions of an aboriginal tribe. \u00a0In the area of general concern they converge, however widely the technical contexts in law, theology, literature or anthropology may differ\u201d (CW 27, 84). \u00a0This is the main assumption on which the book is based: while literary critics are not qualified to handle all the \u201ctechnical contexts\u201d of culture, they are especially prepared, particularly if they are archetypal critics, to interpret the cultural phenomena that form the social environment of literature. \u00a0\u201cThe modern critic,\u201d Frye says, \u201cis . . . a student of mythology, and his total subject embraces not merely literature, but the areas of concern which the mythical language of construction and belief enters and informs. These areas constitute the mythological subjects, and they include large parts of religion, philosophy, political theory, and the social sciences\u201d (CW 27, 67).<\/p>\n

The Critical Path<\/em> treats a wide-ranging body of such subjects, including the difference between oral and writing cultures, Renaissance humanism, the critical theories of Sidney and Shelley, Marxism and democracy, the idea of progress, advertising and propaganda, social contract theories and conceptions of Utopia, contemporary youth culture, McLuhanism, and theories of education. \u00a0What holds these diverse subjects together is the dialectical framework of that Frye establishes: whatever issue he confronts, it always is set against the background of what he sees as the two opposing myths of Western culture, the myth of concern and the myth of freedom.<\/p>\n

The myth of concern comprises everything that a society is most concerned to know. \u00a0It is the disposition which leads one to uphold communal rather than individual values. It exists, Frye says, \u201cto hold society together. . . . For it, truth and reality are not directly connected with reasoning or evidence, but are socially established. \u00a0What is true, for concern, is what society does and believes in response to authority, and a belief, so far as a belief is verbalized, is a statement of willingness to participate in a myth of concern. \u00a0The typical language of concern therefore tends to become the language of belief\u201d (CW 27, 23). \u00a0\u201cConcern\u201d is basically a social category: a society\u2019s body of concerns are all those religious, political, cultural, and economic presuppositions that the members of society generally assent to and that therefore make communication possible. \u00a0Concerns spring from humanity\u2019s desire to know where it came from, what its nature is, and where it is going.<\/p>\n

A myth of concern has its roots in religion and only later branches out into politics, law, and literature. \u00a0It is inherently traditional and conservative, placing a strong emphasis on values of coherence and continuity. \u00a0It originates in oral or preliterate culture and is associated with continuous verse conventions and discontinuous prose forms. \u00a0And it is \u201cdeeply attached to ritual, to coronations, weddings, funerals, parades, demonstrations, where something is publicly done that expresses an inner social identity\u201d (CW 27, 29).\u00a0 Concerns, can of course, compete with one another, and the monopoly of Christian concern in Western culture started to give way in the eighteenth century so that a plurality of myths of concern, including secular ones, began to arise (CW 27, 33).<\/p>\n

The myth of freedom, on the other hand, is committed to a truth of correspondence. \u00a0It appeals to such self-validating criteria as \u201clogicality of argument or (usually a later stage) impersonal evidence and verification.\u201d \u00a0It is inherently \u201cliberal,\u201d helping to develop and honoring such values as objectivity, detachment, suspension of judgment, tolerance, and respect for the individual. \u00a0It \u201cstresses the importance of the non-mythical elements in culture, of the truths and realities that are studied rather than created, provided by nature rather than by a social vision\u201d (CW 27, 29). \u00a0It originates in the mental habits which a writing culture, with its continuous prose and discontinuous verse forms, brings into society.<\/p>\n

The way Frye uses this broad dialectic of freedom and concern can be illustrated by his treatment of two classic defenses of poetry, Sidney\u2019s and Shelley\u2019s. \u00a0Placing Sidney\u2019s view of poetry against the background of Renaissance humanism, Frye concludes that Sidney accommodates the role of the poet to the values of a reading and writing culture, to the norms of meaning established by writers of discursive prose. \u00a0\u201cThe conception of poetry in Sidney,\u201d he says, \u201cis an application of the general humanistic view of disciplined speech as the manifestation or audible presence of social authority\u201d (CW 27, 44). \u00a0For Sidney, \u201cwhat is most distinctive about poetry is the poet\u2019s power of illustration, a power which is partly an ability to popularize and make more accessible the truths of revelation and reason\u201d (CW 27, 45). \u00a0In other words, poetry is not qualitatively distinct from the other verbal disciplines. \u00a0What actually occurs in Sidney\u2019s view of poetry, according to Frye, is that the original characteristics of the myths of freedom and concern are interchanged: \u201cThe myth of concern takes on a reasoning aspect, claiming the support of logic and historical evidence; the myth of freedom becomes literary and imaginative, as the poet, excluded from primary authority in the myth of concern, finds his social function in a complementary activity, which liberalizes concern but also . . . reinforces it\u201d (CW 27, 51).<\/p>\n

In Shelley\u2019s defense, on the other hand, we return to a conception of poetry as mythical and psychologically primitive.<\/p>\n

Shelley begins by neatly inverting the hierarchy of values assumed in Sidney. . . . Shelley puts all the discursive disciplines into an inferior group of \u201canalytic\u201d operations of reason. They are aggressive; they think of ideas as weapons; they seek the irrefutable argument, which keeps eluding them because all arguments are theses, and theses are half-truths implying their own opposites. . . . The works of imagination, by contrast, cannot be refuted: poetry is the dialectic of love, which treats everything it encounters as another form of itself, and never attacks, only includes. . . . This argument assumes, not only that the language of poetry is mythical, but that poetry, in its totality, is in fact society\u2019s real myth of concern, and that the poet is still the teacher of that myth. . . . [I]n Sidney\u2019s day, it was accepted that the models of creation were established by God: for Shelley, man makes his own civilization, and at the centre of man\u2019s creation are the poets, whose work provides the models of human society. The myths of poetry embody and express man\u2019s creation of his own culture, rather than his reception of it from a divine source. (CW, 27, 64, 65)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is no denying the fact the Frye\u2019s sympathies lie on the side of Shelley, for both of them believe that the language of literature represents the imaginative possibilities of concern. \u00a0And both of them are opposed to the constrictive view of Sidney which makes the critic an evaluator and which makes poetry subservient to whatever established framework of concern an elite society happens to be championing at the moment. \u00a0To say that literature contains the imaginative possibilities of concern means, for Frye, that it displays \u201cthe total range of verbal fictions and models and images and metaphors out of which all myths of concern are constructed\u201d (CW 27, 67). \u00a0Frye\u2019s conclusion is that while Shelley\u2019s (and his own) view of poetry take us back to the areas of concern expressed in primitive and oracular mythology, the critic\u2019s approach to the values expressed by a myth of concern must derive from the myth of freedom. \u201cThe critic qua<\/em> critic,\u201d Frye says, \u201cis not himself concerned but detached\u201d (CW 27, 67).<\/p>\n

The merging of freedom and concern, however, is what produces the social context of literature. If there is a central thesis to The Critical Path<\/em> it is the dialectical tension Frye seeks to establish between the myths of freedom and concern. This tension comprises his own central myth, as it were, and the cultural phenomena he examines throughout the book are interpreted from the perspective of this tension. A corollary to the tension is the necessity for a pluralism of myths of concern, which can only occur in societies with open mythologies.<\/p>\n

The basis of all tolerance in society, the condition in which a plurality of concerns can co-exist, is the recognition of the tension between concern and freedom. . . . Concern and freedom both occupy the whole of the same universe: they interpenetrate, and it is no good trying to set up boundary stones. Some, of course, meet the collision of concern and freedom from the opposite side, with a naive rationalism which expects that before long all myths of concern will be outgrown and only the appeal to reason and evidence and experiment will be taken seriously. . . . I consider such a view entirely impossible. The growth of non-mythical knowledge tends to eliminate the incredible from belief, and helps to shape the myth of concern according to the outlines of what experience finds possible and vision desirable. But the growth of knowledge cannot in itself provide us with the social vision which will suggest what we should do with our knowledge. (CW 27, 73\u20135)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is where Frye\u2019s view of the social function of criticism enters the argument; the literary critic, or at least Frye\u2019s ideal critic, is prepared to see that myths of concern in society are like those in literature in that they represent the range of imaginative possibilities of belief. \u00a0There are parallels between Frye\u2019s myths of freedom and concern and the two stages that Kierkegaard in Either\/Or<\/em> calls the \u201caesthetic\u201d and the \u201cethical.\u00a0 Either\/Or<\/em> is the chief source of the existentialist tradition and, for Frye, the \u201cclassical statement of the relation of concern and freedom\u201d (CW 27, 88).[9]<\/a> We will examine the either\/or dialectic in section 2.<\/p>\n

As for the social function of art, Frye thinks that Kierkegaard position on that issue is essentially wrongheaded:<\/p>\n

The whole argument (over the social function of art) today is confused by the \u201cexistential\u201d views of S.K. [S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard] (through Auden), which oppose a theatrical or \u201caesthetic\u201d view of reality to an ethical or active one, & then go through that to repetition.\u00a0 But S.K.\u2019s repetition is really Aristotle\u2019s anagnorisis, and the fallacy of both aesthetic & ethical attitudes is in the common objectification of reality.\u00a0 I\u2019m not talking about idolizing works of art, & S.K. shouldn\u2019t be talking about an external substantial reality as well as existence, or rather, as characteristic of the existential situation.\u00a0 Real existential thinking is hypothetical: that\u2019s the first use of art that goes beyond quid agas<\/em>.\u00a0 At a certain point all ethical situations become unreal: that\u2019s why casuistry is a dismal & illiberal science.\u00a0 Art trains us in the vision of the unmodified, unimprovised existential situation. (CW 23, 234)[10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Concern and Myth<\/em>.\u00a0 This is the title of chapter 2 of Words with Power<\/em>, and in that book, as well as in The Double Vision<\/em> and a number of essays from the 1980s, Frye distinguished between primary and secondary concerns. \u00a0Frye first used the phrase \u201cprimary concern\u201d in The Critical Path<\/em> (1971): \u201cFor Kierkegaard the detached, liberal, and impersonal attitude fostered by the study of an objective environment, and which flowers into comprehensive intellectual systems like that of Hegel, is an \u2018aesthetic\u2019 attitude. \u00a0It is fundamentally immature because with this attitude man tries to fit himself into a larger container, the general outlines of which he can see with his reason, but forgetting that his reason built the container. \u00a0The crisis of life comes when we pass over into the commitment represented by \u2018or,\u2019 take up our primary concern,\u201d escape from our psychological defences (what Kierkegaard calls \u201cshut\u2011upness\u201d in The Concept of Dread<\/em>), \u201cand thus enter the sphere of genuine personality and ethical freedom\u201d (CW 27, 88).\u00a0 A decade later Frye began to define \u201cprimary concerns\u201d and to set them in opposition to \u201csecondary concerns.\u201d\u00a0 His attention to the distinction becomes a frequently sounded refrain in his late work: almost 200 instances of his use of the two phrases occur in Late Notebooks<\/em> alone, and some fifty instances appear in his essays from the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Primary concerns are the universal, individual, and physical needs and desires of human beings.\u00a0 In his Late Notebooks<\/em> Frye engages in uninhibited speculation about the primary concerns, letting his mind play freely with the basic things essential for our survival and noting a number of analogues and links with other categories in his thinking about his second book on the Bible.\u00a0 The following chart can be taken as a summary of the chief features in this expansive free-play:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Frye eventually settles on food, sex, property, and freedom of movement as the four primary concerns but not before wondering if they do not form a quincunx, with breathing in the middle,[11]<\/a> and he vacillates on whether Tillich\u2019s \u201cultimate concern\u201d might not be primary.[12]<\/a> There are other qualifications\u2013\u2013\u201cActually food, like breathing, while it\u2019s a primary concern, isn\u2019t one on quite the level of the others.\u00a0 Sex can expand into unity with nature, property into creativity, and freedom of movement into freedom of thought, but eating and drinking, along with breathing, have to remain on a more or less allegorical level\u201d (CW 6, 641)\u2013\u2013and permutations: \u201cI don\u2019t include health in my four concerns, but it could come under property (Job\u2019s boils are an attack on his property in the Aristotelian sense) or freedom of movement (note how often those cured by Jesus are sick of the palsy)\u201d (CW 6, 660). \u00a0\u00a0These qualifications, which come from Frye\u2019s notebooks, disappear in his accounts of the primary concerns in Words with Power<\/em> and The Double Vision<\/em>, where the variations are resolved into the four concerns just mentioned. \u201cThe axioms of primary concern,\u201d Frye says in a repeatedly sounded refrain, \u201care the simplest and baldest platitudes it is possible to formulate: that life is better than death, happiness better than misery, health better than sickness, freedom better than bondage, for all people without significant exception\u201d (CW 26, 51\u20132).[13]<\/a><\/p>\n

Secondary concerns are ideologies arising from the social contract.\u00a0 They have to do with religious beliefs, patriotic attachments, class systems, gender status, communal structures of authority, and various other forms of identity politics.\u00a0 Historically, secondary concerns have almost always trumped primary ones:<\/p>\n

We want to live and love, but we go to war; we want freedom, but depend on the exploiting of other peoples, of the natural environment, even of ourselves. \u00a0In the twentieth century, with a pollution that threatens the supply of air to breathe and water to drink, it is obvious that we cannot afford the supremacy of ideological concerns any more. \u00a0The need to eat, love, own property, and move about freely must come first, and such needs require peace, good will, and a caring and responsible attitude to nature. \u00a0A continuing of ideological conflict, a reckless exploiting of the environment, a persistence in believing, with Mao Tse-Tung, that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, would mean, quite simply, that the human race cannot be long for this world. (CW 4, 170).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is why Frye says that primary concerns had better become primary again, or else.[14]<\/a> In Frye\u2019s theory of language in chapter 1 of Words with Power<\/em>, he calls the third mode of language \u201cideological\u201d or \u201crhetorical,\u201d the function of which is to rationalize authority, and \u201cideological language supports the anxieties of social authority\u201d (CW 26, 47).\u00a0 Of course the myths that spring from primary concerns are most often less about the satisfaction of these concerns than about the anxieties associated with their not getting satisfied.\u00a0 Sexual frustration, for example, is a universal theme of romance.<\/p>\n

Anxiety<\/em>.\u00a0 Anxiety as a psychological and existential state is a regular part of Frye\u2019s critical vocabulary.\u00a0 The word itself, along with its synonyms \u201cdread\u201d and \u201cAngst,\u201d appears well over 900 times in Frye writings.\u00a0 As already noted, in the 1940s Frye read and then reread Kierkegaard\u2019s The Concept of Dread<\/em> (or Anxiety or Angst, depending on the translation).\u00a0 Frye was also doubtless influenced by Paul Tillich\u2019s The Courage To Be<\/em> (1952), a copy of which he owned. \u00a0Tillich distinguishes three kinds of existential anxiety: ontic (brought on by a sense of fate and death), moral (resulting from guilt or condemnation), and spiritual (caused by feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness).\u00a0 And Frye was naturally familiar with Freud\u2019s various theories of anxiety as both caused by and causing repression.\u00a0 But Kierkegaard\u2019s The Concept of Dread<\/em> appears to be a more seminal influence.<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s most extensive consideration of anxiety is in the first chapter of The Modern Century<\/em>, where he examines the dilemma of alienation and anxiety in contemporary society, associated in large measure with the idea of technological progress.<\/p>\n

[F]or most thoughtful people progress has lost most of its original sense of a favourable value judgment and has become simply progression, towards a goal more likely to be a disaster than an improvement. \u00a0Taking thought for the morrow, we are told on good authority, is a dangerous practice. \u00a0In proportion as the confidence in progress has declined, its relation to individual experience has become clearer. \u00a0That is, progress is a social projection of the individual\u2019s sense of the passing of time. \u00a0But the individual, as such, is not progressing to anything except his own death. \u00a0Hence the collapse of belief in progress reinforces the sense of anxiety which is rooted in the consciousness of death. \u00a0Alienation and anxiety become the same thing, caused by a new intensity in the awareness of the movement of time, as it ticks our lives away day after day. \u00a0This intensifying of the sense of time also, as we have just seen, dislocates it: the centre of attention becomes the future, and the emotional relation to the future becomes one of dread and uncertainty. \u00a0The future is the point at which \u201cit is later than you think\u201d becomes \u201ctoo late.\u201d (CW 11, 18)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then, changing his image from the clock to the mirror, which also focuses the issue on the response of consciousness to time, Frye says,<\/p>\n

Looking into the mirror is the active mind which struggles for consistency and continuity of outlook, which preserves its memory of its past and clarifies its view of the present. \u00a0Staring back at it is the frozen reflection of that mind, which has lost its sense of continuity by projecting it on some mechanical social process, and has found that it has also lost its dignity, its freedom, its creative power, and its sense of the present, with nothing left except a fearful apprehension of the future. (CW 11, 26).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Flash forward twenty\u2011three years to the seventy\u2011eight\u2011year\u2011old Frye giving his final series of lectures at Emmanuel College, six months before his own death, when the consciousness of death was very much on his own mind:<\/p>\n

Reverting to our remark about the God of promises, all our conditioning is rooted in our temporal existence and in the anxiety that appears in the present as the passing of time and in the future as death. If death is the last enemy to be destroyed, as Paul tells us [1 Corinthians 15:26], the last metaphor to be transcended is that of the future tense, or God in the form of Beckett\u2019s Godot, who never comes but will maybe come tomorrow. The omnipresence of time gives some strange distortions to our double vision. (CW 4, 235)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These reflections on time and anxiety have their parallels in Kierkegaard\u2019s often intractable speculations about time in chapter 3 of The Concept of Dread<\/em>.[15]<\/a> After defining time as \u201cinfinite succession\u201d (76) Kierkegaard says that our tendency to divide time into the past, present, and future, which he calls spatialized time, is fraught with difficulties.\u00a0 \u201cIf in the infinite succession of time one could in fact find a foothold which would serve as a dividing point, then this division would be quite correct.\u00a0 But precisely because every moment, like the sum of moments, is a process (a going\u2011by) no moment is a present, and in the same sense there is neither past, present, nor future.\u00a0 If one thinks it possible to maintain this division, it is because we spatialize a moment, but thereby the infinite succession is brought to a standstill\u201d (76\u20137).\u00a0 Here is Frye\u2019s similar version of the idea:<\/p>\n

In our ordinary experience of time we have to grapple with three dimensions, all of them unreal: a past that is no longer, a future that is not yet, and a present that is never quite. We are dragged backwards along a continuum of experience, facing the past with the future behind us. The centre of time is \u201cnow,\u201d just as the centre of space is \u201chere,\u201d but \u201cnow,\u201d like \u201chere,\u201d is never a point. The first thing that the present moment does is vanish and reappear in the immediate past, where it connects with our expectation of its outcome in the future. Every present experience is therefore split between our knowledge of having had it and our future-directed fears or hopes about it. The word \u201cnow\u201d refers to the spread of time in between. (CW 4, 198\u20139)[16]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When we experience time horizontally in this manner, Frye says, the primary emotion is anxiety (CW 29, 235).\u00a0 For Kierkegaard, however, dread enters the discussion only after he has posited the category of the eternal\u2013\u2013the fullness of time in Christianity that makes all things new.\u00a0 \u201cThe possible corresponds precisely to the future.\u00a0 For freedom the possible is the future; and for time the future is the possible.\u00a0 Corresponding to both of these in the individual life is dread\u201d (82).\u00a0 Frye\u2019s account of going beyond the temporal is less riddling, but the concluding lines of The Double Vision<\/em> have a similar accent:<\/p>\n

The omnipresence of time gives some strange distortions to our double vision. \u00a0We are born on a certain date, live a continuous identity until death on another date; then we move into an \u201cafter\u201d-life or \u201cnext\u201d world where something like an ego survives indefinitely in something like a time and place. \u00a0But we are not continuous identities; we have had many identities, as babies, as boys and girls, and so on through life, and when we pass through or \u201coutgrow\u201d these identities they return to their source. \u00a0Assuming, that is, some law of conservation in the spiritual as well as the physical world exists. \u00a0There is nothing so unique about death as such, where we may be too distracted by illness or sunk in senility to have much identity at all. \u00a0In the double vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present, every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another order. \u00a0Our life in the resurrection, then, is already here, and waiting to be recognized. (CW 4, 235)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frye\u2019s notion of the physical and the spiritual being simultaneously present is similar to Kierkegaard\u2019s saying \u201cthe eternal is the present . . . the eternal is annulled (aufgehoben<\/em>) succession\u201d (77).\u00a0 Aufgehoben<\/em> is the Hegelian triple pun, meaning cancelation (or annulment), preservation, and lifted to another level.\u00a0 To lift to another level is one version of making all things new, which is Frye\u2019s interpretation of what Kierkegaard means by repetition\u2013\u2013which we will come to in section 3. \u00a0What Kierkegaard does not see is \u201cthat angst is the state of Blake\u2019s Spectre of Urthona: the egocentric or proud desire to possess time, the revolt against the consciousness of death\u201d (CW 8, 222).<\/p>\n

2. Either\/Or<\/p>\n

We have already mentioned the \u201caesthetic\u201d and the \u201cethical\u201d stages in the either\/or choice.\u00a0 The \u201caesthetic\u201d attitude for Kierkegaard is \u201cthe detached, liberal, and impersonal attitude fostered by the study of an objective environment . . . which flowers into comprehensive intellectual systems like that of Hegel\u201d (CW 27, 88). It conceives of art as \u201ca permanently detached object of contemplation\u201d (CW 27, 152).\u00a0 It takes its name from the fact that Kierkegaard saw a similarity between this attitude and the place of art in society, and its archetypal character is the medieval\u00a0 Don Juan, \u201cthe universal lover surrounded by a mass of attractive objects\u201d (CW 27, 54).\u00a0 The pursuit of intellectual and physical pleasures creates dread and eventually leads to despair.\u00a0 Either we remain trapped in the \u201caesthetic\u201d mode, seeking ways to relieve our boredom, or else we pass over into the realm of the \u201cethical.\u201d\u00a0 This is the realm of genuine subjective personality, characterized by commitment, freedom, and the acceptance of faith.<\/p>\n

Although the parallels are not exact, Frye\u2019s myth of freedom with its disinterested detachment has its counterpart in Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201caesthetic\u201d attitude, and his myth of concern is aligned with Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201cethical\u201d attitude, with its emphasis on radical engagement and individual freedom. \u00a0There is a parallel, too, in the model of the tragic Neigung-Pflicht<\/em> conflict, the conflict between inclination and duty, as in Kant\u2019s Foundation for the Metaphysic of Morals<\/em> (CW 5, 19).<\/p>\n

But as we know from Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>, Frye rejects all either\/or choices.\u00a0 He will not be cornered into accepting the Kierkegaardian \u201ceither-or\u201d position. He wants the best of both possible worlds: the detached, liberal, impersonal values of the \u201caesthetic\u201d attitude which Kierkegaard rejects and the values of commitment which come from the primacy of concern. He, of course, does not think Kierkegaard\u2019s own solution is satisfactory: \u2018\u2018If we stop with the voluntary self-blinkering of commitment, we are no better off than the \u2018aesthetic\u2019: on the other side of \u2018or\u2019 is another step to be taken, a step from the committed to the creative, from iconoclastic concern to what the literary critic above all ought to be able to see, that in literature man is<\/em> a spectator of his own life, or at least of the larger vision in which his life is contained\u201d (CW 27, 88\u20139).<\/p>\n

This is Frye\u2019s answer as to how one can be detached yet joined to the community of concern at the same time. It is an answer in which the visionary imagination becomes the ultimate criterion, for only in the world of imagination can the tension between freedom and concern be properly maintained. It is out of this tension, Frye concludes,<\/p>\n

that glimpses of a third order of experience emerge, of a world that may not exist but completes existence, the world of the definitive experience that poetry urges us to have but which we never quite get. If such a world existed, no individual could live in it. . . . If we could live in it, of course, criticism would cease and the distinction between literature and life would disappear, because life itself would then be the continuous incarnation of the creative word. (CW 27, 117)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frye comes to a very similar conclusion in Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>, where the \u201caesthetic\u201d perspective of art as an autonomous must be complemented by \u201cethical\u201d criticism.\u00a0 But because art can never be subservient to the external goals of truth and beauty, ethical criticism must be complemented in turn by archetypal criticism, which relates literature to civilization,\u00a0 or \u201ca vision of the goals of human work\u201d (CW 22, 105).[17]<\/a> Finally, archetypal criticism must be complemented by anagogic criticism\u2013\u2013which focuses on a completely visionary verbal universe.[18]<\/a> The parallel in Kierkegaard is his movement from the aesthetic to the ethical in Either\/Or<\/em> followed by the discovery that he must get beyond the ethical to the religious stage, which he proceeds to do in Fear and Trembling<\/em> and Stages on Life\u2019s Way<\/em>.\u00a0 The real either\/or turns out to be a choice between the aesthetic and the ethical, on the one hand, and the religious, on the other.\u00a0 Kierkegaard says we move to the religious sphere, the ultimate subjective action, by a leap of faith and by, in his famous phrase, \u201cthe teleological suspension of the ethical\u201d (Fear and Trembling<\/em> 59).\u00a0 Kierkegaard wants to transcend the speculative and disinterested in favor of the commitment of ethical freedom, but the either\/or dilemma can itself be transcended.\u00a0 In The Critical Path<\/em> Frye puts the Kierkegaardian position in these terms:<\/p>\n

What applies to a Christian commitment in Kierkegaard applies also to commitments to other myths of concern, where Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201caesthetic\u201d would be replaced by \u201cescapist\u201d or \u201cidealistic\u201d or what not. Kierkegaard is saying, in our terms, that concern is primary and freedom a derivation from it, as the present discussion has also maintained. The individual who does not understand the primacy of concern, the fact that we belong to something before we are anything, is, it is quite true, in a falsely individualized position, and his \u201caesthetic\u201d attitude may well be parasitic. But Kierkegaard, like so many deeply concerned people, is also saying that passing over to concern gives us the genuine form of freedom, that concern and freedom are ultimately the same thing. This is the bait attached to all \u201ceither or\u201d arguments, but it does not make the hook any more digestible.<\/p>\n

It is worth pausing a moment on this point, because Kierkegaard is not really satisfied with his own argument. \u00a0He clearly understood the fact that freedom can only be realized in the individual, and sought for a Christianity that would escape from what he calls \u201cChristendom,\u201d the merely social conformity or religio of Christianity. He speaks of the personal as in itself a subversive and revolutionary force, and sees the threat of what we should now call the totalitarian mob in the \u201cimpersonal.\u201d \u00a0For him the highest form of truth is personally possessed truth, and he is not afraid to face the implications of what I think of as the \u201cparanoia principle.\u201d \u00a0This is the principle, lurking in all conceptions of a personal truth transcending the truth of concern, that it is only what is true only for me that is really true. This principle brings us back to the conception of a definitive experience . . . as an unattained reality of which literature appears to be an analogy. (CW 27, 89)[19]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In The Great Code<\/em> Frye suggests that the disinterested and committed dialectic can be transcended by an Aufhebung<\/em>; and similarly, by a process of canceling, preserving, and lifting to another level Kierkegaard\u2019s either\/or dilemma can be transcended as well (CW 19, 244\u20135).\u00a0 As I have argued elsewhere, Frye makes a similar move to the religious sphere, especially in his late work.\u00a0 The teleological becomes the ultimate recognition scene for the reader, described by Frye as apocalypse, epiphany, revelation, spiritual self\u2011discovery, a reversal into the vision of the Logos, and similar religious\u2011laden phrases.\u00a0 Both writers are engaged in efforts to get beyond.\u00a0 For Kierkegaard, the move is beyond the aesthetic and the ethical\u2013\u2013\u201cthe leap into the existential\u201d (CW 23, 164).\u00a0 For Frye, it is beyond the poetic, the hypothetical, myth, time and space, language, and death.\u00a0 The leap into the existential takes one into the realm of faith:<\/p>\n

The relating of one\u2019s \u201cliteral\u201d understanding of the Bible as a book to the rest of one\u2019s knowledge, more particularly of the Bible\u2019s \u201cbackground\u201d in history and culture, thus creates a synthesis that soon begins to move from the level of knowledge and understanding to an existential level, from Dante\u2019s \u201callegorical\u201d to his \u201ctropological\u201d meaning, from Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201ceither\u201d to his \u201cor.\u201d Such an intensification, whether it has anything to do with the Bible or not, takes us from knowledge to principles of action, from the aesthetic pleasure of studying a world of interesting objects and facts to what Kierkegaard calls ethical freedom. This shift of perspective brings us to the word \u201cfaith.\u201d (CW 19, 250)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As regards Hegel, Kierkegaard levels an attack on the systematic philosophy of Hegel and replaces it with one more closely attuned to human needs.\u00a0 Kierkegaard has been called a radical Christian theologian, a religious thinker in the Augustinian tradition, the father of existentialism, an ethicist, a social and psychological critic, a metaliterary writer, an early postmodernist, but he was also a staunchly anti\u2011Hegelian philosopher.[20]<\/a> Frye had a very different view of Hegel.\u00a0 In his late work Frye embraced the dialectical transition described by Hegel as an Aufhebung<\/em>, a term used to embody the idea, as indicated above, that oppositions can be transcended without being abolished.\u00a0 Again, the verb aufheben has a triple meaning: \u201cto lift or raise,\u201d \u201cto abolish or cancel,\u201d and \u201cto keep or preserve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Frye and Hegel are climbing a spiraling ladder to a higher level of being, except that Frye is moving upward by way of the language of myth and metaphor. \u201cIf Hegel had written his Phenomenology<\/em> in mythos-language instead of in logos-language,\u201d Frye remarks in one notebook, \u201ca lot of my work would be done for me\u201d (CW 5, 192).\u00a0 In Frye’s notebooks Hegel often becomes a preoccupation. \u00a0Hegel\u2019s use of Begriff<\/em> or concept in his journey up the ladder of being and his view of dialectic as Aufhebung<\/em> get mentioned in passing in The Great Code<\/em> and Words with Power<\/em>, but Hegel and Hegelianism are referred to in the notebooks more than 220 times, and Frye declares in Notebook 53, \u201cThe rush of ideas I get from Hegel\u2019s Phenomenology<\/em> is so tremendous I can hardly keep up with it\u201d (CW 6, 631). \u00a0Elsewhere Frye gives an eloquent testimony to Hegel as \u201cthe great philosopher of anabasis\u201d (CW 9, 89) and to Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em> as the \u201ctremendous philosophical masterpiece\u201d that through its upward thrust finally abolishes the gap between subject and object (CW 4, 194).[21]<\/a><\/p>\n

Thus, while Kierkegaard offered a critique of the Hegelian system because it was removed from the lived existential experience of everyday life, Frye mined Hegel\u2019s system for insights he could appropriate for his own use.\u00a0 Still, as Merold Westphal argues, Kierkegaard was never simply an anti\u2011Hegelian.\u00a0 While he critiques Hegel, at the same time he \u201cincorporate[s] Hegelian insights\u00a0so that the critique [is] an Aufhebung<\/em>, a cancellation that preserves and a preservation that cancels\u201d (103).<\/p>\n

3. Repetition<\/p>\n

The earliest reference to Kierkegaard\u2019s Repetition<\/em> is in Frye\u2019s diary entry of 26 January 1952, where he says that he is reading the book for the second time, adding wryly that \u201cone wouldn\u2019t expect a book with a name like that to yield much on the first reading\u201d (CW 8, 488).\u00a0 He is mostly interested in identifying the book\u2019s genre, which he decides is a combination of the nineteenth\u2011century existential anatomy and the confession, after the manner of Carlyle\u2019s Sartor Resartus<\/em>.[22]<\/a> Frye is not immune to the difficulties that everyone faces in reading Kierkegaard, especially the \u201caesthetic\u201d works with their layers of pseudonymous speakers: \u201cThe trouble is that he disguises the confession & approaches the anatomy quizzically, so it\u2019s hard to figure out just what the hell he does mean.\u00a0 Like his Victorian contemporaries in England, he has a stentorian censor at his elbow ready to roar down any irony it doesn\u2019t feel it can control.\u00a0 By that I mean that one has to distinguish irony within a convention from irony that threatens the convention.\u00a0 Or humor, perhaps, even more than irony\u201d (CW 8, 488\u20139).\u00a0 But Frye concludes by remarking that Repetition<\/em> \u201cdeals with my epic circle idea, that the essential quest is cyclic, but returns, not to the same point, but to the same point renewed and transformed.\u00a0 As opposed to recollection, it\u2019s the Protestant justification by faith as opposed to the Catholic sacramental repetition of substantial presence.\u00a0 At least I think it is: whether he [Kierkegaard] knows it or not is another matter\u201d (CW 8, 489).[23]<\/a> Less than a week later Frye reports that in his graduate seminar he \u201ctried to bring in Kierkegaard, equating looking down the spirals of the tower with his \u2018recollection\u2019 and looking up with his repetition or anagogical vision of all things new\u201d (CW 8, 495).<\/p>\n

Here Frye picks up on the central distinction with which Kierkegaard\u2019s book opens\u2013\u2013the difference between recollection in Plato\u2019s sense of anamnesis and repetition.\u00a0 In his first paragraph Kierkegaard writes,<\/p>\n

repetition is a crucial expression for what \u201crecollection\u201d was to the Greeks.\u00a0 Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition.\u00a0 The only modern philosopher who has had an intimation of this in Leibnitz.\u00a0 Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. (Fear and Trembling<\/em> \/ Repetition<\/em> 131)[24]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This distinction makes its way into Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Kierkegaard has written a fascinating little book called Repetition<\/em>, in which he proposes to use this term to replace the more traditional Platonic term anamnesis or recollection. \u00a0By it he apparently means, not the simple repeating of an experience, but the recreating of it which redeems or awakens it to life, the end of the process, he says, being the apocalyptic promise, \u201cBehold, I make all things new\u201d [Revelation 21:5]. \u00a0The preoccupation of the humanities with the past is sometimes made a reproach against them by those who forget that we face the past: it may be shadowy, but it is all that is there. \u00a0Plato draws a gloomy picture of man staring at the flickering shapes made on the wall of the objective world by a fire behind us like the sun. \u00a0But the analogy breaks down when the shadows are those of the past, for the only light we can see them by is the Promethean fire within us. \u00a0The substance of these shadows can only be in ourselves, and the goal of historical criticism, as our metaphors about it often indicate, is a kind of self-resurrection, the vision of a valley of dry bones that takes on the flesh and blood of our <\/strong>own vision.\u00a0 The culture of the past is not only the memory of mankind, but our own buried life, and study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which we see, not our past lives, but the total cultural form of our present life. \u00a0It is not only the poet but his reader who is subject to the obligation to \u201cmake it new.\u201d (CW 22, 321)[25]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Platonic view, then, is that knowledge is recollected from the past.\u00a0 Kierkegaard\u2019s Christian position is that repetition, which is both a contrast and a complement to Plato\u2019s view, finds its final apocalyptic formulation in the verse from Revelation.\u00a0 Kierkegaard does not actually quote or otherwise point to the biblical passage.[26]<\/a> The warrant for Frye\u2019s using \u201cBehold, I make all things new\u201d is apparently this passage from Repetition<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has been\u2013\u2013otherwise it could not be repeated\u2013\u2013but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new.\u00a0 When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been, when one says that life is a repetition one says: actuality, which has been now comes into existence. (149)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frye thinks that Kierkegaard may have derived the idea of repetition from biblical typology, but even if he did not, the two are related, as what is prophesied in the Old Testament is fulfilled in the New.\u00a0 Frye makes this observation in Creation and Recreation<\/em>, where he is arguing against the notion of eternal recurrence in the natural religion of pagan mythology and in Nietzsche (CW 4, 73), and he repeats it in The Great Code<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Kierkegaard\u2019s very brief but extraordinarily suggestive book Repetition<\/em> is the only study I know of the psychological contrast between a past directed causality and a future directed typology. \u00a0The mere attempt to repeat a past experience will lead only to disillusionment, but there is another kind of repetition which is the Christian antithesis (or complement) of Platonic recollection, and which finds its focus in the Biblical promise, \u201cBehold, I make all things new\u201d (Revelation 21:5). \u00a0Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201crepetition\u201d is certainly derived from, and to my mind is identifiable with, the forward moving typological thinking of the Bible. \u00a0Perhaps his book is so brief because he lived too early to grasp the full significance of his own argument, as typological rhetoric was then only beginning to take on many of its new and remarkable modern developments. (CW 19, 101)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kierkegaard\u2019s repetition, then, buttresses the quarrel Frye always had with the implications of the cycle. \u00a0The treadmill of endless repetition, the dull sameness in the myth of the eternal return, the Druidic recurrences of natural religion, the doctrine of reincarnation\u2013\u2013all these backward\u2011looking cyclic myths were antithetical to Frye\u2019s belief in the Resurrection, one of his firmest religious convictions. \u00a0The cycle never permitted what he called the revolutionary culbute or overturn in individual and social life\u2013\u2013the possibility for a genuine reversal and a new beginning. \u00a0\u00a0\u201cIn literature there\u2019s the cyclical quest where we either come home again (Sam in Tolkien) or attain Kierkegaard\u2019s repetition, recreating the original form\u201d (CW 5, 261).\u00a0 Another powerful verse from Revelation for Frye was 22:17: \u201cAnd the Spirit and the bride say, Come. \u00a0And let him that heareth say, Come. \u00a0And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.\u201d \u00a0These words at the very end of the Bible signal for Frye a new beginning, a new creation, and this new beginning is in the mind of the reader. \u00a0All of this relates directly to the goal of Frye\u2019s quest in his late work\u2013\u2013his effort to discover the Everlasting Gospel, Milton\u2019s Word of God in the heart, and the interpenetration of Word and Spirit.<\/p>\n

In one of his notebooks Frye also draws a connection between, on the one hand, Platonic recollection and what Blake calls the inhibiting memory that has nothing to do with imagination, and on the other, Kierkegaard\u2019s repetition and the kind of \u201chabit or practice memory that makes imagination expressible\u201d (CW 13, 109\u201310).\u00a0 Frye\u2019s notion of practice memory (habitus<\/em>) was derived from another of his nineteenth\u2011century heroes, Samuel Butler.\u00a0 Practice memory is unconscious memory developed from habit that gives us the freedom to create.\u00a0 In that sense it is always future\u2011directed, like repetition.\u00a0 Frye does not mention Kierkegaard in his essay on Butler\u2019s Life and Habit<\/em>, though he does make the Kierkegaard\u2013Butler connection in two other notebook entries:<\/p>\n

Repetition develops, in a Hegelian way, spirally & through aufhebung<\/em>, in three stages.\u00a0 In the first stage freedom, existing in pure experience, dreads repetition as the thing that would spoil it; in the second it comes to terms with it, and as it were harnesses its energy (this is the habitus-repetition I got from Butler, though S.K. [S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard] doubtless wouldn\u2019t think so); in the third freedom & repetition are identified, where repetition is eternity and a new creation.\u00a0 It\u2019s heaven, in short, just as Nietzsche\u2019s recurrence is hell, the place Antichrist goes to prepare for his disciples. (CW 5, 363)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201crepetition\u201d image . . . is founded on . . . the habit-memory of practice rather than the straight anamnesis memory. (CW 9, 236)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another analogue for Kierkegaard\u2019s repetition that Frye sees is in Irenaeus\u2019 recapitulatio.\u00a0 Irenaeus held recapitulation to be the \u201csumming up\u201d of human history in Christ as the epitome of redemption (Irenaeus, bk. 5, chap. 20), and this, Frye says, is \u201cthe \u2018repetition\u2019 of Kierkegaard, the new heaven and earth, the restated myth\u201d (CW 5, 169).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In sum, Kierkegaard\u2019s Repetition, which Frye returned to repeatedly over the course of forty years provided a foundation for and helped to define recreation.<\/p>\n

4. The Metaliterary Mode<\/p>\n

In The Great Code<\/em> Frye adopts the word \u201ckerygma\u201d to indicate that while the Bible has obvious poetic features, it is more than literary because it contains a rhetoric of proclamation.\u00a0 \u201cKerygma,\u201d the form of proclamation made familiar by Bultmann, thus designates the existentially concerned aspect of the Bible, as opposed to its purely metaphoric features.\u00a0\u00a0 Bultmann sought to \u201cdemythologize\u201d the New Testament narrative as an initial stage in interpretation: the assumptions of the old mythologies, such as demonic possession and the three-storied universe, had to be purged before the genuine kerygma could be \u201csaved,\u201d to use his word.\u00a0\u00a0 Frye, of course, has exactly the opposite view of myth: \u201cmyth is the linguistic vehicle of kerygma\u201d (CW 19, 48).<\/p>\n

But having made his point about kerygma Frye drops the word altogether from the rest of The Great Code<\/em>, except for a passing reference toward the very end of the book (CW 19, 252).\u00a0 In Words with Power<\/em> the word \u201ckerygma\u201d disappears completely from Frye\u2019s analysis in the \u201csequence and mode\u201d (or \u201clanguage\u201d) chapter; we have to wait until chapter 4, where we learn that the excluded initiative\u2013\u2013what lies hidden in the background of the poetic\u2013\u2013is what leads to kerygma, even though Frye does not initially put it in these terms.\u00a0 He begins by saying, \u201cOur survey of verbal modes put rhetoric between the conceptual and the poetic, a placing that should help us to understand why from the beginning there have been two aspects of rhetoric, a moral and a tropological aspect, one persuasive and the other ornamental.\u00a0 Similarly, we have put the poetic between the rhetorical and the kerygmatic, implying that it partakes of the characteristics of both\u201d (CW 26, 105\u20136).\u00a0\u00a0 The Aufhebung<\/em> process now begins its lifting operation, as Frye expands the meaning of kerygma far beyond what it had meant in The Great Code<\/em>.\u00a0 It now becomes synonymous with the prophetic utterance, the metaliterary perception that extends one\u2019s vision or the Longinian ecstatic response to any text, sacred or secular, that \u201crevolutionizes our consciousness.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Kerygma takes metaphorical identification \u201ca step further and says: \u2018you are what you identify with\u2019\u201d (CW 26, 110).\u00a0 We enter the kerygmatic realm when the separation of \u201cactive speech and reception of speech\u201d merges into a unity (CW 26, 111).<\/p>\n

In one of his notebooks from the late 1980s Frye reports that he is trying to reread Kierkegaard but that he does not \u201cfind him an attractive personality, because he seems to play the same cat-and-mouse game with his reader that he did with poor Regina\u2013\u2013and that God played with Abraham and Job.\u00a0 He\u2019s a trickster writer, in short, and interests me because a literary critic sees him as doing the opposite of what he thought he was doing, obliterating the barriers between the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.\u00a0 That is, he\u2019s clearly a \u201cmetaliterary\u201d writer, like Dostoievsky, Kafka and perhaps Nietzsche (well, Mallarm\u00e9 too)\u201d (CW 5, 361).[27]<\/a> Frye finds the most valuable insights in works where Kierkegaard assumes the mask of one of his many pseudonymous authors and gets beyond the aesthetic\u2013ethical\u2013religious stages or spheres of existence.\u00a0 These insights Frye calls \u201cmetaliterary,\u201d and his most extended discussion of this feature of Kierkegaard\u2019s prose is found in Notebook 50 (CW 5, 361\u20136):<\/p>\n

Oh, God, if Kierkegaard had only carried through his \u201crepetition\u201d scheme, instead of sneaking it out . . . in the course of abusing a harmless reviewer for not reading what he hadn\u2019t written!\u00a0 I\u2019m not clear why his three stages are related only by transcendence, or why Hegel\u2019s logic of immanent mediation has to be rejected.\u00a0 But I\u2019m sure he did, at that point, though he lost his grip on it soon afterward. . . . It doesn\u2019t matter that the context is one more ow-oo about Regina: that\u2019s the right context, a myth with enough \u201cexistential\u201d urgency to push it in a metaliterary direction, a Vita Nuova<\/em> in reverse. (CW 5, 365)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even though Frye finds the really valuable works by Kierkegaard are his \u201caesthetic\u201d books\u2013\u2013those signed with pseudonyms\u2013\u2013the metaliterary mode has its drawbacks: \u201cThe ability to write very well very easily may lead to Kierkegaard\u2019s disease: the esthetic barrier against the kerygmatic\u201d (CW 5, 342). \u00a0So not all of the pseudonymous works are kerygmatic.\u00a0 In his Late Notebooks<\/em> Frye writes:<\/p>\n

Sickness unto Death<\/em> is a work of casuistry, an existential rhetorical form which is not kerygmatic, except in so far as it uses the Lazarus myth.\u00a0 It\u2019s another example of pre-mythical rhetoric usurping the post-mythical kerygmatic.\u00a0 Fear & Trembling<\/em> is also casuistry, though in a less concentrated form.\u00a0 Casuistry means that the ethical area is not one of freedom: it\u2019s a labyrinth.\u00a0 S.K. realized this, or came to realize it, in theory; but he never found a genuinely kerygmatic style: his \u201caesthetic\u201d style is much the closest to it, but one in which a Socratic irony enters. (CW 5, 364)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kierkegaard struggled to go beyond the \u201caesthetic,\u201d Frye writes, \u201cbut could produce only dialectical & rhetorical forms (he says this in his diary, but I can\u2019t find the reference)\u201d (CW 5, 365\u20136).[28]<\/a> This notebook entry gets expanded in Words with Power<\/em> as follows:<\/p>\n

The existential movement of the 1940s, also, revolved around a number of figures\u2014Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Sartre\u2014who were primarily literary figures, the word \u201cexistential\u201d referring to tendencies in them that were metaliterary, trying to get past the limitations of literature into a different kind of identity with their readers. \u00a0Kierkegaard divided his works into the \u201caesthetic\u201d or literary, which he published under pseudonyms, and the \u201cedifying,\u201d where he spoke in his own name as an \u201cethical\u201d writer and teacher. \u00a0He realized that there was a prophetic dimension on the other side of the aesthetic, but evidently did not realize that it was only in his aesthetic writings that he came anywhere near expressing it. \u00a0The edifying writings revert to standard dialectical and rhetorical forms, one book on the boundary line between the two, The Sickness unto Death<\/em>, being essentially a work in the seventeenth-century rhetorical genre of casuistry. \u00a0The implications for the conception of the kerygmatic are, first, that kerygmatic writing normally demands a literary, that is, a mythical and metaphorical, basis; second, that the kerygmatic does not, like ordinary rhetoric, emerge from direct personal address, or what a writer \u201csays.\u201d (CW 26, 109\u201310)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In the kerygmatic world one is released from the burden of speech and writing: \u201cThe gospels are written mythical narratives, and for casual readers they remain that. \u00a0But if anything in them strikes a reader with full kerygmatic force, there is, using the word advisedly, a resurrection of the original speaking presence in the reader. \u00a0The reader is the logocentric focus, and what he reads is emancipated both from writing and from speech. \u00a0The duality of speaker and listener has vanished into a single area of verbal recognition\u201d (CW 26, 108). \u00a0We do not speak in the kerygmatic world, but God does, which is why the voice of revelation is \u201crhetoric in reverse\u201d (CW 6, 660). When Frye uses kerygma in the sense of the prophetic or metaliterary utterance, human speech or writing does enter the picture, and while there is no metaliterary style, there is a metaliterary idiom which takes the kerygmatic as its model (CW 5, 369). \u00a0It is because of this idiom that Kierkegaard is a one of \u201cthe forerunners of the new spiritual emancipation of man\u201d (CW 13, 296). \u00a0Frye even projects his own kerygmatic anthology. \u00a0He says, without commentary, that it would include Blake\u2019s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell<\/em>, Buber\u2019s I and Thou<\/em>, and selections from Dostoevsky, Kafka, Rimbaud, and H\u00f6lderlin (CW 5, 366).\u00a0 As we have seen, it would include Kierkegaard\u2019s \u201caesthetic\u201d works as well, and we could add to the list some of Northrop Frye\u2019s more visionary and oracular pronouncements\u2013\u2013those that issue from what he refers to as heightened or expanded consciousness.<\/p>\n

For Frye one of the central archetypal scenes of the intensity of consciousness that arises from the desire to identify is found in the Paleolithic cave drawings, references to which appear on more than thirty occasions in his work. \u00a0The cave drawings at Lascaux, Altamira, and elsewhere represent \u201cthe titanic will to identify\u201d (CW 18, 346). They are an example of what L\u00e9vy-Bruhl called participation mystique, the imaginative identification with things, including other people, outside the self, or an absorption of one\u2019s consciousness with the natural world into an undifferentiated state of archaic identity.\u00a0 In such a process of metaphorical identification the subject and object merge into one, but the sense of identity is existential rather than verbal (CW 6, 503).<\/p>\n

But what does the intensity or expansion of consciousness entail for Frye? This is a difficult question to answer with certainty, for Frye reflects on the implications of the phrase only obliquely. But we do know, first, that it is a function of kerygma; second, while it does not necessarily signify religion or a religious experience, it can be \u201cthe precondition for any ecumenical or everlasting-gospel religion\u201d (CW 5, 17); third, the language of such consciousness always turns out to be metaphorical; fourth, \u201cvision\u201d is the word that best fits the heightened awareness that comes with the imagination\u2019s opening of the doors of perception; fifth, the principle behind the epiphanic experience that permits things to be seen with a special luminousness is that \u201cthings are not fully seen until they become hallucinatory. Not actual hallucinations, because those would merely substitute subjective for objective visions, but objective things transfigured by identification with the perceiver. An object impregnated, so to speak, by a perceiver is transformed into a presence\u201d (CW 26, 87); sixth, intensified consciousness is represented by images of both ascent and descent; seventh, expanded consciousness is both individual and social, it amounts to revelation (CW 5, 61).<\/p>\n

Kierkegaard helped Frye to define the kerygmatic utterance, and though Kierkegaard may have failed to get beyond the dialectical and rhetorical thrust of his prose in the late works, in some of his early ones he does write in a metaliterary mode.<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0The Drunken Boat<\/p>\n

Kierkegaard plays a seminal role in the \u201cdrunken boat\u201d metaphor, which Frye uses to characterize the great nineteenth\u2011century revolutionary figures.\u00a0 The others are: Schopenhauer, Darwin, Freud, and Marx.\u00a0 The image derives from Rimbaud\u2019s Le Bateau ivre<\/em>, which depicts the poet\u2019s boat tossed perilously upon the waves like a cork. The battering sea threatens the little boat, which represents the enduring values and structures of civilized society.\u00a0 Whether boat can survive the forces that lie below depends on the optimism of the mythographer.\u00a0 The dialectic might be summarized like this, the undulating line representing the sea, separating what is present above from what lies below:<\/p>\n

\"Philosophers\"<\/p>\n

What lies below the surface of the sea corresponds to the demonic level of the pre\u2011Romantic great chain of being.\u00a0 Frye sometimes refers to the boat as an ark: \u201cthe boat is usually in the position of Noah\u2019s ark, a fragile container of sensitive and imaginative values threatened by a chaotic and unconscious power below it\u201d (CW 17, 89).\u00a0 What is \u201cabove\u201d are the human values of intelligence and morality, of social and cultural tradition.\u00a0 Below the bateau ivre, writes Frye is \u201c[o]ften an innocent world, the sleeping beauty of nature & reason in Rousseau, Blake\u2019s Orc & buried Beulah, Shelley\u2019s Mother Earth & Asia.\u00a0 From Schopenhauer on it becomes increasingly inscrutable: menacing to conservatives & redeeming to revolutionaries; the world as will, Darwin\u2019s evolution, Kierkegaard\u2019s dread, Freud\u2019s libido-id, Marx\u2019s proletariat\u201d (CW 23, 290).\u00a0 What lies below can be both a support (Marx, Darwin) and a threat (Kierkegaard, Freud, Schopenhauer).\u00a0 It can also lead to a creative descent.<\/p>\n

The earliest account we have of this revolutionary topocosm is in Frye\u2019s description of a 1950 lecture he gave in his course on Nineteenth\u2011Century Thought: \u201cI started Huxley, but got off on the general anti-Cartesian or existential movement which, I said, produced in Darwinism a reversal of the Cartesian derivation of existence from consciousness.\u00a0 I went on to show the connection of this with Schopenhauer\u2019s will & idea, Nietzsche\u2019s will to power & the \u201call too human,\u201d Marx\u2019s ruling-class & dispossessed, Freud\u2019s ego & libido & the whole psychological conception of that which is mental & yet not conscious (I linked the anti-Freudian French existentialist doctrine of conscious freedom with the Cartesian tradition) & Kierkegaard\u2019s \u2018spiritless\u2019 natural reason & dread (which, as I saw for the first time, links both with the Nietzsche-Marx revolutionary pattern & with Bergson\u2019s identification of the subconscious will with duration: the existential is always the Spectre of Urthona)\u201d (CW 8, 282).[29]<\/a> This gets elaborated in Frye\u2019s 1952 essay, \u201cTrends in Modern Culture,\u201d where he writes that in the Romantic movement<\/p>\n

nearly all branches of culture, the conscious mind is seen as deriving its strength from a subconscious reality greater than itself.\u00a0 Hence the importance of suggestion and evocation in Romantic art, of the surrender of conscious intelligence to spontaneous mythopoeia.\u00a0 After Schopenhauer, this subconscious world becomes evil, sinister, and yet immensely powerful, and visions of nightmarish terror begin increasingly to creep into the arts.\u00a0 No matter where we turn in the culture of the immediate past, the same picture meets us, a picture reminding us less of the harassed boat than of the young lady of the limerick who smiled as she rode on a tiger.\u00a0 In Schopenhauer the world of conscious idea thus rides on a cruel (except that it is unconscious) and inexorable world of will with the whole power of nature behind it.\u00a0 In Freud, the conscious mind attempts, with very partial success, to hold in check a mighty libidinous desire.\u00a0 In Darwin, the conscious mind is the sport of an unconscious evolutionary force.\u00a0 In Marx, civilization is the attempt of a dwindling minority to keep a vastly stronger majority away from its privileges.\u00a0 In liberal thought, freedom is the possession of integrity by a small group constantly threatened by a mob.\u00a0 In Kierkegaard, the consciousness of existence rests on a vast shapeless \u201cdread\u201d as big and real as life and death together.\u00a0 There is hardly a corner of modern thought where we do not find some image of a beleaguered custodian of conscious values trying to fend off something unconscious which is too strong to be defeated.\u00a0 It seems the appropriate cultural pattern for a period in which the tiny peninsula of Western Europe was encircling the world. (CW 11, 260\u20131)[30]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frye\u2019s thesis is later expanded in \u201cThe Drunken Boat:\u00a0 The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism\u201d (1963), which is further developed into the first chapter of A Study of English Romanticism<\/em> (1968).\u00a0 \u00a0Here Frye argues that in Romanticism we have a profound change in the spatial projection of reality.\u00a0 This means that the old hierarchy of existence (the great chain of being) with its divine, human, and natural levels was turned upside down.\u00a0 The metaphorical structure of the Romantic writers tended to move inside and downward instead of, as in the older model, outside and upward.\u00a0 Romanticism, then, was primarily a revolution in poetic imagery.<\/p>\n

Kierkegaard also plays a role in Frye\u2019s expansive vision of the four levels of meaning.\u00a0 In one twist on Dante\u2019s four levels (literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic), Frye relates the levels to both their Blakean analogues and their corresponding revolutionary thinkers.[31]<\/a><\/p>\n

Levels of Meaning\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Blakean Analogue\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Revolutionary Sources\n\nPsychological\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Urthona\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Jung\n\nHistorical\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Luvah\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Spengler\n\nMythological\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Tharmas\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Frazer\n\nTheological\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Urizen\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Kierkegaard (CW 23, 64)<\/pre>\n
In our own time the structures of Romantic imagery are carried over into Auden\u2019s For the Time Being<\/em>, Auden having been very much influenced by Kierkegaard.\u00a0 Auden\u2019s play, in which the word \u201canxiety\u201d is sprinkled liberally throughout,<\/p>\n
develops a religious construct out of Kierkegaard on the analogy of those of Marx and Freud. \u00a0The liberal or rational elements represented by Herod feel threatened by the revival of superstition in the Incarnation, and try to repress it. \u00a0Their failure means that the effort to come to terms with a nature outside the mind, the primary effort of reason, has to be abandoned, and this enables the Paradise or divine presence which is locked up inside the human mind to manifest itself after the reason has searched the whole of objective nature in vain to find it. \u00a0The attitude is that of a relatively orthodox Christianity; the imagery and the structure of symbolism is that of Prometheus Unbound<\/em> and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell<\/em>.\u00a0 (CW 17, 89)[32]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Frye sometimes speaks of the drunken boat complex as a \u201cvortical explosion\u201d (CW 23, 37\u20138, 39, 81; CW 18, 168; CW 20, 168\u20139).\u00a0 \u201cVortex\u201d is a word that Kierkegaard uses in The Concept of Dread<\/em> (18), Repetition<\/em> (222), Either\/Or<\/em> (Penguin ed., 1992, 168), and elsewhere.\u00a0 Frye may have recalled the image of the sailor in Edifying Discourses<\/em> \u201cwho is out to sea, when everything is changing about him, when the waves are constantly born and die\u201d (16), but his chief source for \u201cvortex\u201d is Blake, who uses the word in both The Four Zoas<\/em> and Milton<\/em>.\u00a0 The central passage for Frye comes from the latter: \u201cThe nature of infinity is this: That everything has its \/ Own vortex; and when once a traveler thro Eternity. \/ Has passed that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind \/ His path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun \/ Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty\u201d (bk. 1, pl. 15, ll. 21\u20135). \u00a0\u00a0Here is Frye\u2019s gloss on the passage:<\/p>\n
Blake says that everything in eternity has what he calls a \u201cvortex\u201d (perhaps rather a vortex\u2011ring), a spiral or cone of existence.\u00a0 When we focus both eyes on one object, say a book, we create an angle of vision opening into our minds with the apex pointing away from us.\u00a0 The book therefore has a vortex of existence opening into its mental reality within our minds.\u00a0 When Milton descends from eternity to time, he finds that he has to pass through the apex of his cone of eternal vision, which is like trying to see a book from the book\u2019s point of view; the Lockian conception of the real book as outside the mind on which the vision of the fallen world is based. This turns him inside out, and from his new perspective the cone rolls back and away from him in the form of a globe.\u00a0 That is why we are surrounded with a universe of remote globes, and are unable to see that the earth is \u201cone infinite plane.\u201d\u00a0 But in eternity the perceiving mind or body is omnipresent, and hence these globes in eternity are inside that body. (CW 14, 341)[33]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Vortex for Frye is an active or moving geometric shape, an image that helps him to visualize different events, particularly transformative ones, in the structure of literary and religious narrative and meaning.\u00a0 In his published writing the word appears only occasionally: in The Secular Scripture<\/em> he uses it to describe the passage of the action through a recognition scene in Terence\u2019s Andria<\/em>, and in Words with Power <\/em>to characterize the pattern of creative descent in Melville.\u00a0 But in his notebooks he repeatedly calls upon the vortex to assist him in visualizing, particularly, passages from one state to another, as in Blake\u2019s account of Milton\u2019s descent.\u00a0 Vortexes can move in two directions: they can whirl upward or spin downward.\u00a0 They can attach themselves to each other at the point of the cone or they can expand outward into an apocalyptic or demonic universe.\u00a0 In the drunken boat complex the vortex is an image of revolutionary change, a change in consciousness that enters the modern world with Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Darwin.\u00a0 Revolutionary changes can be individual moments of transformation, recognition, or enlightenment, or they can be social.\u00a0 Along with the \u201cvortical explosion\u201d of Kierkegaard we have the central examples for Frye of Dante\u2019s two vortices, the swirling descent into the inferno and the circular climb up the purgatorial mountain.\u00a0 \u00a0Similarly, with Yeats\u2019s double gyres in A Vision.<\/em> But Frye writes about the vortex mostly in relation to a sudden awareness that moves one from a lower state of being to a higher one.\u00a0 Opsis is the underlying category.\u00a0 One bursts through to a new awareness where things can now be seen differently.\u00a0 \u201cWhen the action passes from one level to the other through the recognition scene, we have a feeling of going through some sort of gyre or vortex\u201d (CW 18, 62), and recognition scenes are often accompanied by reversals, as in the case of Oedipus the King<\/em>, where the central metaphors are light and darkness, blindness and sight.[34]<\/a> But nothing is ever purely visual in Frye: there is always a dialectic of space and time, and the vortex can apply to both categories, as we see in this notebook entry, which is an abstract parallel to what Milton experienced in Blake\u2019s poem:<\/p>\n
The cycle of the Word is a series of epiphanies–creation, law, prophecy and apocalypse–and the cycle of the Spirit is a series of responses–exodus, wisdom, gospel and participating apocalypse.\u00a0 The true response is the historical one turned inside out.\u00a0 Not just upside-down: that\u2019s the other half of the Word cycle.\u00a0 But the Bible uses the up-down metaphors in the crucial first two chapters of Acts [the descent of the Spirit, the ascent of the Word].\u00a0 What gets turned inside-out, as I said in GC [The Great Code<\/em>] and have been stumbling over all my life, are the categories of time and space.\u00a0 At present we tend to think of eternity and infinity as time and space indefinitely extended, which they are anyway, and they have to go into a real reverse, another vortex. (CW 6, 462).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Frye\u2019s vortices do not interpenetrate like Yeats\u2019s, but they can come together at their apexes to form an hour-glass figure.\u00a0 This point of contact takes place in the human mind, and after the vortical explosion has occurred, we can look back from where we have come, as if in a mirror.\u00a0 Blake\u2019s Jerusalem<\/em>, Frye says, \u201cattempts to show that the vision of reality is the other one inside out.\u00a0 The poem shows us two worlds, one infinite, the other indefinite, one our own home and the other the same home receding from us in a mirror\u201d (CW 12, 372\u20133).\u00a0 Frye writes about the vortex in more than forty notebook entries, some of which are as cryptic as Kierkegaard\u2019s difficult speculations.[35]<\/a> But the effect of the whole is another of Frye\u2019s verbal formulas, this one a dynamic image, for trying to grasp what happens when one bursts through to a moment of \u201cillumination.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0Frye\u2019s theory of the vortical explosion among nineteenth\u2011century revolutionary figures, in which Kierkegaard plays a defining role, is one of the keys to his visionary poetics.<\/p>\n
Notes<\/p>\n
[1]<\/a> Here and there I have borrowed some sentences from my Northrop Frye and Critical Method<\/em> and Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary<\/em>.\u00a0 All references to Frye\u2019s writing are to the Collected Works of Northrop Frye<\/em> (CW) (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996\u20132011).<\/p>\n
[2]<\/a> \u201cKierkegaard was half a nut, after all\u201d (CW 5, 210).\u00a0 \u201c[T]he great prophetic figures of modern literature, Rousseau or Swift or Kierkegaard or Dostoevsky, may often not have been much more than wrongheaded neurotics in their historical and biographical context\u201d CW 18, 168).<\/p>\n
[3]<\/a> In his Notebooks for \u201cAnatomy of Criticism,\u201d<\/em> Frye says about a lecture he gave in Vancouver: the \u201ctalk started with my usual stuff on nursery rhyme, then established that ordinary speech is associative & not prose, then said that associative babble was the voice of the ego, which is always sub-literary, that this ego-voice is projected in the dead-language, ation-ation, rhythmless impersonal jargon of the lonely crowd.\u00a0 That the impersonal babble is the voice of the collective or aggregate ego, & according to Kierkegaard \u2018essentially demoralizing.\u2019\u00a0 It consists in prodding reflexes of [the] inattentive, & is seen in advertising, then propaganda, then exhortatory jargon of the collective tantrum kind\u201d (CW 23, 285).\u00a0 The Kierkegaardian phrase he quotes is from this passage in Concluding Unscientific Postscript<\/em>: \u201cIn this age, and indeed for many ages past, people have quite lost sight of the fact that authorship is and ought to be a serious calling implying an appropriate mode of personal existence.\u00a0 They do not realize that the press in general, as an expression of the abstract and impersonal communication of ideas, and the daily press in particular, because of its formal indifference to the question whether what it reports is true or false, contributes enormously to the general demoralization, for the reason that it is impersonal, which for the most part is irresponsible and incapable of repentance, is essentially demoralizing (28).<\/p>\n
[4]<\/a> In a 1952 diary entry, Frye writes: \u201cAt tea we got into a discussion of existentialism, prompted by the fact that Jessie [Macpherson] had just seen the Sartre play that Don Harron is in\u2014they call it Crime Passionel<\/em> here, although I think its original title was Mains Sales<\/em>.\u00a0 I seemed to be the only one present who had much notion of existentialism, & of course I know very little, but we kept quite an animated discussion going\u201d (CW 8, 583).\u00a0 For the other references to \u201cexistential\u201d and \u201cexistentialism,\u201d see, in addition to those in the index of CW 8, pp. 167, 243, 257, 376, 488, 591 and 592.<\/p>\n
[5]<\/a> On Kierkegaard\u2019s use of Bekymring<\/em> as a term of philosophical import, see Stokes.<\/p>\n
[6]<\/a> \u201cI cleared out & went to Tillich\u2019s lecture\u2014a huge crowd in Wycliffe.\u00a0 He talked on the \u2018theology of despair\u2019: the attempt to start with despair as a \u2018limit-situation.\u2019\u00a0 It disappointed me a little, as I\u2019d read enough Kierkegaard to figure it out myself.\u00a0 Even the feeling it gave me of being on top of Tillich was hollow: I didn\u2019t want to feel on top of Tillich: I wanted to feel a contact with something fresh\u201d (CW 8, 247\u20138).<\/p>\n
[7]<\/a> Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality<\/em> (1964), Christianity and the Encounter of World Religions<\/em> (1964), Systematic Theology<\/em> (3 vols., 1951\u201363), and Theology of Culture<\/em> (1964).<\/p>\n
[8]<\/a> On the Kierkegaard\u2013Auden connection see CW 6, 487; CW 8, 306; CW 10, 127; CW 12, 108; CW 13, 229\u201330; CW 16, 328; CW 17, 89; and CW 23, 234\u20135.<\/p>\n
[9]<\/a> The fact that Frye separates freedom from concern and that freedom is a characteristic of Kierkegaard\u2019s concerned or ethical state should not be a stumbling block: they are using the word \u201cfreedom\u201d in two different senses.\u00a0 Frye does say that the person of \u201cethical freedom\u201d is the one \u201cwho has passed beyond speculation\u201d (CW 7, 256).\u00a0 For him there is a double opposition in Kierkegaard\u2019s notion of ethical freedom.\u00a0 It is opposed, on the one hand, to the aesthetic point of view, and on the other to the synthetic rationalism of Hegel (CW 19, 44).<\/p>\n
[10]<\/a> Quid agas<\/em> is the moral level of medieval allegorical interpretation, having to do with right action.\u00a0 In Fools of Time<\/em> Frye speaks of the \u201caesthetic in the perverted Kierkegaardian sense of externalizing man\u2019s ethical freedom\u201d (CW 28, 323).<\/p>\n
[11]<\/a> \u201cPrimary concerns a quincunx: breathing in the middle surrounded by (a) food & drink (b) sex (c) property (money, possessions, shelter, clothing) (d) freedom of movement\u201d (CW 6, 701\u20132).\u00a0 \u201cThe most primary concern of all, breathing, is transformed into spirit, & the spiritual meaning of food & drink, of love, of security & shelter & the sense of home, all follow it (CW 5, 166).\u00a0 \u201cAir, the primest of primary concerns\u201d (CW 5, 125).\u00a0 \u201cSpirit gets its name from the most primary of all primary concerns: breathing.\u00a0 And air is the medium for seeing and hearing\u201d (CW 5, 175). \u201cSpirit means breath, the most primary of all primary concerns, the great sign of the appearance of birth, the thing we can\u2019t live twenty minutes without.\u00a0 Spirit is the antitype then of air, the invisibility that makes the real world visible\u201d (CW 5, 183).<\/p>\n
[12]<\/a> \u201cIs ultimate concern a primary concern?\u00a0 I think not.\u00a0 No one can live a day without being concerned with food: anybody can live all his life without being concerned about God (CW 5, 78).\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m wrong about religion as an ultimate but not a primary concern.\u00a0 Where did I come from and where am I going are primary concerns, even if we don\u2019t believe there are any answers\u201d (CW 5, 121).\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s my Eros-Adonis axis, of course, and it unites the primary concerns of life, food and sex, with its primary anxiety and ultimate concern, death, and the passage through death.\u00a0 I should start thinking in terms of primary anxieties: they help to show how Tillich\u2019s \u2018ultimate concern\u2019 is also a primary one\u201d (CW 5, 165).\u00a0 In The Critical Path<\/em> Frye writes, \u201cIn origin, a myth of concern is largely undifferentiated: it has its roots in religion, but religion has also at that stage the function of religio, the binding together of the community in common acts and assumptions. \u00a0Later, a myth of concern develops different social, political, legal, and literary branches, and at this stage religion becomes more exclusively the myth of what Tillich calls ultimate concern, the myth of man\u2019s relation to other worlds, other beings, other lives, other dimensions of time and space\u201d (CW 27, 23). And in Framework and Assumption<\/em>\u201d Frye says, \u201cPaul Tillich distinguishes the religious concern as \u2018ultimate\u2019: it may be that, but it can hardly be primary.\u00a0 One cannot live a day without being concerned about food, but one may live all one\u2019s life without being concerned about God.\u00a0 At the same time one hesitates to rule out the conscious and creative concerns from the primary ones\u201d (CW 18, 432).\u00a0 See also CW 27, 247.<\/p>\n
[13]<\/a> Cf. the almost identical formulations in CW 6, 434; CW 18, 266, 353; CW 26, 51\u20132<\/p>\n
[14]<\/a> CW 4, 354; CW 6, 545; CW 18, 354, 434; CW 26, 52<\/p>\n
[15]<\/a> On Kierkegaard\u2019s ideas about time see the articles by Taylor and Bedell.<\/p>\n
[16]<\/a> Cf.\u00a0 \u201cWe experience time in a way that is continu\u00adally elusive and frustrating and exasperating, be\u00adcause we\u2019re dragged through time facing the past with our backs to the future. We know nothing about the future except by the analogy of the past. That means that all our hopes, when they\u2019re projected into the future, have this extraordinary limitation about them. If somebody starts out on a career, let\u2019s say as a doctor or a social worker, he or she must have some kind of vision of a world of better health or of better social organization in his or her mind in order to carry on the career with any kind of consis\u00adtent energy. It\u2019s that sense of the vision in the present which is the real dynamic. You can die without seeing that come. In other words, you can give up the future as far as your own life is concerned and still carry on with the same vision\u201d (CW 24, 1016). \u201cWe try to cope with time facing the past, with our backs to the future, and in relation to time human life seems to be a kind of untied Andromeda, constantly stepping back from a devouring monster whose mouth is the mouth of hell, in the sense that each moment passes from the possible into the eternally unchangeable being of the past. At death we back into a solid wall, and the monster then devours us too\u201d (CW 27, 358). \u201c[T]here is no such thing as a forward\u2011looking person.\u00a0 That is a metaphor from car\u2011driving, and it applies to space but not to time. In time we all face the past, and are dragged backwards into the future.\u00a0 Nobody knows the future: it isn\u2019t there to be known.\u00a0 The past is what we know, and it is all that we know\u201d (CW 11, 285\u20136).\u00a0 \u201cMan has doubtless always experienced time in the same way, dragged backwards from a receding past into an unknown future\u201d (CW 11, 16).<\/p>\n
[17]<\/a> Cf. \u201c[The Kierkegaardian antithesis of ethical freedom & aesthetic idolatry is as unsatisfactory as ever\u201d (CW 23, 253\u20134).<\/p>\n
[18]<\/a> \u201cThe archetypal view of literature shows us literature as a total form and literary experience as a part of the continuum of life, in which one of the poet\u2019s functions is to visualize the goals of human work. As soon as we add this approach to the other three, literature becomes an ethical instrument, and we pass beyond Kierkegaard\u2019s Either\/Or dilemma between aesthetic idolatry and ethical freedom, without any temptation to dispose of the arts in the process. \u00a0Hence the importance, after accepting the validity of this view of literature, of rejecting the external goals of morality, beauty, and truth. The fact that they are external makes them ultimately idolatrous, and so demonic. But if no social, moral, or aesthetic standard is in the long run externally determinative of the value of art, it follows that the archetypal phase, in which art is part of civilization, cannot be the ultimate one. We need still another phase where we can pass from civilization, where poetry is still useful and functional, to culture, where it is liberal, and stands on its own feet.\u201d (Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>, CW 22. 107)<\/p>\n
[19]<\/a> On the \u201cparanoia principle,\u201d see also (CW 13, 93).<\/p>\n
[20]<\/a> For the Kierkegaard\u2013Hegel connection, see Westphal, Perkins, and Stewart.<\/p>\n
[21]<\/a> For a fuller treatment of Hegel\u2019s influence on Frye, particularly Frye\u2019s appropriation of the Hegelian Aufhebung<\/em>, see my Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World<\/em>.<\/p>\n
[22]<\/a> \u201cConfession and anatomy are united in Sartor Resartus<\/em> and in some of Kierkegaard\u2019s strikingly original experiments in prose fiction form, including Either\/Or<\/em>.\u201d (CW 22, 293)<\/p>\n
[23]<\/a> Frye refers to the \u201csacramental repetition\u201d elsewhere as the \u201csacramental analogy,\u201d by which he means the Neo\u2011Thomist emphasis on belief as an imitation of Christ.\u00a0 That is, one sets up a construct or model, such as a saint\u2019s life or laws prescribed by Scripture, and then makes one\u2019s life a sacramental analogy to that, with the result of ritual or institutional continuity.<\/p>\n
[24]<\/a> \u201cIt sounds as though \u2018recollection\u2019 is the word that translates as anamnesis, and refers to an accumulation or structuring of the past\u201d (CW 5, 364).<\/p>\n
[25]<\/a> In one of his notebooks, Frye equates repetition and anagnorisis (recognition, discovery) (CW 23, 232).<\/p>\n
[26]<\/a> On the verse from Revelation, see also CW 13, 151.\u00a0 In one of his notebooks Frye says that \u201cKierkegaard\u2019s repetition doesn\u2019t have to replace Plato\u2019s anamnesis: they\u2019re two halves of the same myth, the visual certainty of past & future internalized in the present\u201d (CW 13, 215).<\/p>\n
[27]<\/a> Elsewhere, Frye says that Kierkegaard \u201crecreates hieratic in the post-Hegel era\u201d (CW 13, 277) and that he leans toward the poetic (CW 5, 261).<\/p>\n
[28]<\/a> The passage Frye had in mind was written by Kierkegaard in 1846: \u201cI wanted particularly to represent the various stages or spheres of life [aesthetic, ethical, religious], if possible in one work, and that is how I consider all my pseudonymous writings.\u00a0 With that in mind it was important to keep an unvarying balance so that, for instance, the Religious should not appear at a later time when I had become so much older that my style would have lost some of the lofty, imaginative expansiveness proper to the Esthetic.\u00a0 The idea is not that the Religious should have this exuberance, but that the writer should be capable of producing it and making it clear that if the Religious lacked this style the reason certainly was not that the writer lacked the necessary youthfulness\u201d (The Diary of S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard<\/em>, 60).<\/p>\n
[29]<\/a> \u201cThe Spectre of Urthona is the isolated subjective aspect of existence in this world, the energy with which a man or any other living thing copes with nature. It is neither the Selfhood, which is Satan, nor the \u2018vegetable\u2019 existence, which is Luvah; it is that aspect of existence in time which is linear rather than organic or imaginative. If one had to pin the conception down to a single word, one might call Blake\u2019s Spectre of Urthona the will\u201d (CW 14, 288).<\/p>\n
[30]<\/a> The tiger limerick: \u201cThere was a young lady of Niger \/ Who smiled as she rode on a tiger; \/ They returned from the ride \/ With the lady inside, \/ And the smile on the face of the tiger.\u201d<\/p>\n
[31]<\/a> On Kierkegaard\u2019s role in the elaborate scheme of the \u201cthree awarenesses\u201d or revolutions in human consciousness, see my Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary<\/em>, 76\u20139, and charts 5\u20137 in the appendix.<\/p>\n
[32]<\/a> On the Auden\u2013Kierkegaard see Auden\u2019s \u201cPresenting Kierkegaard\u201d in The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard, 3\u201322, and Mendelson, passim.\u00a0 Auden was also significantly influenced by his reading of Tillich<\/p>\n
[33]<\/a> Expanding on infinity and eternity in a letter to a friend, Frye writes, \u201cRevelation encourages us to think in terms of infinity and eternity, not in the mathematical sense, but in the religious sense.\u00a0 As we experience time, the present, the only part of it we do experience, never quite exists.\u00a0 As we experience space, the centre or the \u2018here,\u2019 never quite exists either\u2013-everything we experience in space is \u2018there.\u2019\u00a0 Under the impact of revelation the whole fallen world turns inside out, into an eternal now and an infinite here.\u00a0 In terms of the Kantian distinction between the thing perceived and the thing in itself, we never see the thing in itself because we are the thing in itself.\u00a0 Reality is the immediate data of ordinary experience universalized\u2013-that it why it is revealed to the childlike rather than the sophisticated in us.\u00a0 The beginning of the vision of eternity is the child\u2019s realization that his own home is the circumference of the universe as far as he is concerned.\u00a0 The end of it is the regenerate Christian\u2019s realization that the universe is a city of God, the home of the soul, and the body of Jesus\u201d (Selected Letters<\/em>, 31\u20132).<\/p>\n
[34]<\/a> The reversal in Oedipus the King is, of course, closely connected with the ironic reversal of the central metaphors: Teiresias (the seer) is literally blind but can figuratively see; Oedipus can literally see and is renowned for his knowledge and insight but is figuratively blind to his own situation; and then at the reversal Oedipus is able figuratively to see only after he has literally blinded himself.<\/p>\n
[35]<\/a> For the notebook entries having to do with the vortex, see CW 20, 100, 120, 148, 162, 164, 169, 171; CW 13, 47, 96, 217, 227, 332, 474; CW 5, 46; CW 6, 436, 437, 462, 690; CW 15, 33, 49, 55, 73, 101, 108; CW 9, 72, 77, 107, 179, 191, 197, 260; CW 23, 6, 19, 25, 26, 27, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 59, 62, 263.<\/p>\n
Works Cited<\/p>\n
Northrop Frye\u2019s Collected Works:<\/p>\n
CW 4 = Northrop Frye on Religion<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O\u2019Grady.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.<\/p>\n
CW 5 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks, 1982\u20131990: Architecture of the Spiritual World<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.<\/p>\n
CW 6 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks, 1982\u20131990: Architecture of the Spiritual World<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.<\/p>\n
CW 7 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Writings on Education<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Goldwin French and Jean O\u2019Grady.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.<\/p>\n
CW 8 = The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942\u20131955<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.<\/p>\n
CW 9 = The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964\u20131972<\/em>: The Critical Comedy.\u00a0 Ed. Michael Dolzani. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.<\/p>\n
CW 10 = Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936\u20131989<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.<\/p>\n
CW 11 = Northrop Frye on Modern Culture<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Jan Gorak. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.<\/p>\n
CW 12 = Northrop Frye on Canad<\/em>a.\u00a0 Ed. Jean O\u2019Grady and David Staines. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.<\/p>\n
CW 13 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.<\/p>\n
CW 14 = Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Nicholas Halmi.\u00a0 Intro. Ian Singer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.<\/p>\n
CW 15 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Romance<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Michael Dolzani.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.<\/p>\n
CW 16 = Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Angela Esterhammer.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.<\/p>\n
CW 17 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Imre Salusinszky.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.<\/p>\n
CW 18 = \u00a0\u201cThe Secular Scripture\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.<\/p>\n
CW 19 = The Great Code: The Bible and Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Alvin A. Lee.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.<\/p>\n
CW 20 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Michael Dolzani.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.<\/p>\n
CW 22 = Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.<\/p>\n
CW 23 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks for \u201cAnatomy of Criticism.\u201d<\/em> Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.<\/p>\n
CW 24 = Interviews with Northrop Frye<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Jean O\u2019Grady.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.<\/p>\n
CW 25 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings.<\/em> Ed. Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.<\/p>\n
CW 26 = Words with Power: Being a Second Study of \u201cThe Bible and Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Michael Dolzani.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.<\/p>\n
CW 27 = \u201cThe Critical Path\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963\u20131975<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Eva Kushner and Jean O\u2019Grady.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.<\/p>\n
CW 29 = Northrop Frye\u2019s Writings on Twentieth-Century Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Glen Robert Gill.\u00a0 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.<\/p>\n
Selected Letters = Selected Letters, 1934\u20131991<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert D. Denham.\u00a0 West Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Co., 2009.<\/p>\n
Other Works Cited:<\/p>\n
Bedell, George C.\u00a0 \u201cKierkegaard\u2019s Conception of Time.\u201d\u00a0 Journal of the American Academy of Religion 37, no. 3 (1969): 266\u20139.<\/p>\n
Cortupi, Caterina Nella. \u00a0Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process<\/em>.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000.<\/p>\n
Denham, Robert D.\u00a0 Northrop Frye and Critical Method.<\/em> University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1978.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2004.<\/p>\n
Gill, Glen Robert. \u00a0Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth<\/em>.\u00a0 Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006.<\/p>\n
Irenaeus.\u00a0 Against Heresies.<\/em> Trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut.\u00a0 From Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. \u00a0Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885. http:\/\/www.newadvent.org\/fathers\/0103520.htm<\/p>\n
Kierkegaard, S\u00f8ren.\u00a0 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to \u201cPhilosophical Fragments.\u201d<\/em> Trans. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong.\u00a0 Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 The Diary of S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard. <\/em> Trans. Gerda M. Anderson.\u00a0 Ed. Peter P. Rohde.\u00a0 New York: Philosophical Library, 1960.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 Edifying Discourses: A Selection. <\/em> Trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson.\u00a0 Ed. Paul L. Holmer.\u00a0 New York: Harper, 1959.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. <\/em> Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.\u00a0 Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 Fear and Trembling \/ Repetition. <\/em> Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong.\u00a0 Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard.<\/em> Presented by W.H. Auden.\u00a0 New York: David McKay, 1952.<\/p>\n
Mendelson, Edward.\u00a0 The Later Auden<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999.<\/p>\n
Perkins, Robert L. \u00a0\u201cHegel and Kierkegaard: Two Critics of Romantic Irony.\u201d Review of National Literatures 1<\/em>, no. 2 (Fall 1970): 232\u201354.<\/p>\n
Russell, Ford. \u00a0Northrop Frye on Myth: An Introduction.<\/em> New York: Garland, 1998.<\/p>\n
Stewart, Jon.\u00a0 Kierkegaard\u2019s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.<\/p>\n
Stokes, Patrick.\u00a0 Kierkegaard\u2019s Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.<\/p>\n
Taylor, Mark C.\u00a0 \u201cTime\u2019s Struggle with Space: Kierkegaard\u2019s Understanding of Temporality.\u201d\u00a0 Harvard Theological Review\u00a0 66<\/em>, no. 3 (July 1973): 311\u201329.<\/p>\n
Tillich, Paul.\u00a0 Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality<\/em>.\u00a0 Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1964.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 Christianity and the Encounter of World Religions<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Columbia UP, 1964.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 The Courage To Be<\/em>. \u00a0New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1964, copyright 1952.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 Systematic Theology. <\/em>Three vols. in one.\u00a0 Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967.<\/p>\n
______.\u00a0 Theology of Culture.\u00a0 Ed. Robert C. Kimball.\u00a0 New York: Oxford UP, 1964.<\/p>\n
T\u00f3th, S\u00e1ra. \u00a0\u201cRecovery of the Spiritual Other: Martin Buber\u2019s \u2018Thou\u201d in Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Work.\u201d \u00a0In Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old.<\/em> Ed. David Rampton.\u00a0 Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2009. 125\u201342.<\/p>\n
Westphal, Merold.\u00a0 \u201cKierkegaard and Hegel.\u201d \u00a0In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard.<\/em> Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 101\u201324.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Robert D. Denham The roots of Frye\u2019s expansive vision of culture have often been remarked.\u00a0 Blake and the Bible are obviously central to the development of his ideas, and much has been written about Frye\u2019s debts to both.\u00a0 Much has been written as well about other significant influences on Frye: Nella Cotrupi\u2019s book on […]<\/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-21810","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nNorthrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard - 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\/northrop-frye-and-s\u00f8ren-kierkegaard\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Northrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"by Robert D. Denham The roots of Frye\u2019s expansive vision of culture have often been remarked.\u00a0 Blake and the Bible are obviously central to the development of his ideas, and much has been written about Frye\u2019s debts to both.\u00a0 Much has been written as well about other significant influences on Frye: Nella Cotrupi\u2019s book on […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s\u00f8ren-kierkegaard\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/03\/primary_concerns_3_cropped.png\" \/>\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=\"82 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/\",\"name\":\"Northrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard - The Educated Imagination\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/03\/primary_concerns_3_cropped.png\",\"datePublished\":\"2011-03-20T02:58:38+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/03\/primary_concerns_3_cropped.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/03\/primary_concerns_3_cropped.png\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Northrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard\"}]},{\"@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":"Northrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard - 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\/northrop-frye-and-s\u00f8ren-kierkegaard\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Northrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard - The Educated Imagination","og_description":"by Robert D. Denham The roots of Frye\u2019s expansive vision of culture have often been remarked.\u00a0 Blake and the Bible are obviously central to the development of his ideas, and much has been written about Frye\u2019s debts to both.\u00a0 Much has been written as well about other significant influences on Frye: Nella Cotrupi\u2019s book on […]","og_url":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s\u00f8ren-kierkegaard\/","og_site_name":"The Educated Imagination","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/03\/primary_concerns_3_cropped.png","type":"","width":"","height":""}],"twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Est. reading time":"82 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/","url":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/","name":"Northrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard - The Educated Imagination","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/03\/primary_concerns_3_cropped.png","datePublished":"2011-03-20T02:58:38+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/03\/primary_concerns_3_cropped.png","contentUrl":"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2011\/03\/primary_concerns_3_cropped.png"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-s%c3%b8ren-kierkegaard\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Northrop Frye and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard"}]},{"@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"}]}},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}