{"id":6442,"date":"2009-12-25T05:28:56","date_gmt":"2009-12-25T09:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?page_id=6442"},"modified":"2009-12-25T05:28:56","modified_gmt":"2009-12-25T09:28:56","slug":"annotations-in-fryes-books","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/annotations-in-fryes-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Annotations in Frye’s Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among the materials in the Northrop Frye collection at the Victoria University Library are some 2053 books from Frye\u2019s own library that he annotated.\u00a0 These books represent about forty percent of his books that came to Victoria University after his death, the books without annotations having now been put in the regular collection or otherwise disposed of.\u00a0 (The list of Frye\u2019s annotated books is available online at http:\/\/library.vicu.utoronto.ca\/special\/frye.htm)<\/p>\n

An \u201cannotated\u201d book means that it has passages that Frye marked in the text or comments he wrote in the margins or both. \u00a0He marked passages by underlining words and phrases, by enclosing a portion of the text in parentheses, by putting a line in the margin that would run vertically beside a passage, or by enclosing a portion of the text with a square bracket.\u00a0 The marginal lines and square brackets ordinarily do not point to more than five or six lines of text.\u00a0 Frye\u2019s markings are usually quite neat, and they are almost always in pencil. The markings are sometimes, in fact quite often, accompanied by marginal comments.\u00a0 If the side margins were too narrow, Frye often put his comments at the top or bottom of the page. \u00a0Some books contain hundreds of marginalia: in the three volumes of Madame Blavatsky\u2019s Secret Doctrine<\/em> (one is an abridgement) Frye made 303 marginal notations, and there are hundreds of other marked passages, even though there are no marginalia past p. 174 of the second volume of the unabridged edition.\u00a0 He made 175 marginal notations in Boehme\u2019s Six Theosophic Points. <\/em>On the other hand, in Jane Robert\u2019s two-volume The \u201cUnknown\u201d Reality: A Seth Book<\/em> there is only one barely perceptible mark in volume 1.\u00a0 Some books have three or fewer markings\u2013\u2013for example, Margaret Schlauch, The Gift of Language<\/em>, Arthur Versluis, The Egyptian Mysteries<\/em>, Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education and Other Essays<\/em> and Adventures of Ideas<\/em>, Roger Zelazny, The Isle of the Dead<\/em>, C.D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature<\/em>, Chao Pi Ch\u2019en, Taoist Yoga<\/em>, W. Richard Comstock, The Study of Religion and Primitive Religions<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n

Frye also corrected typographical errors and misspellings he ran across, and with his eye for such things he appears to have missed very few of these.\u00a0 There are thousands of such corrections.\u00a0 In Ken Wilber\u2019s Spectrum of Consciousness<\/em> Frye corrected eighty-three misspellings: after noting five on one page he wrote in the margin, \u201cGod, what a lousy proofreader\u201d (31).\u00a0 On the last page of Chayim Bloch\u2019s The Golem<\/em>, after twice correcting the misspelling of Tycho Bache, Frye wrote, \u201cThe Golem must have done the proofreading.\u201d\u00a0 He marked nine typographical mistakes on p. 226 of Stan Gooch\u2019s Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom<\/em>.\u00a0 Frye was alert to other kinds of textual details as well.\u00a0 He observed, for example, that in a footnote on p. 376 of A.E. Waite\u2019s The Holy Grail<\/em> the publication date of Karl Simrock\u2019s Parcival und Titurel<\/em> was given as 1876, whereas in the bibliographic appendix more than 200 pages later the date was recorded as 1857.\u00a0 Quite why Frye\u2019s eye would be drawn to a detail like this in a 624-page book is uncertain, but it is typical of the careful attention he gave to many of the books he read.\u00a0 The amount of such close observation revealed in the annotations is extraordinary.<\/p>\n

In a number of books Frye made marginal markings and comments for several hundred pages and then stopped.\u00a0 It is tempting to think that he simply quit reading at that point.\u00a0 But in many cases he resumed his annotations several hundred pages later.\u00a0 In some books, one encounters over the course of several hundred pages only a single line or brief passage marked or typographical error corrected.\u00a0 Marguerite Yourcenar\u2019s Coup de gr\u00e2ce<\/em> contains no markings until the final page, where Frye wrote following the last paragraph, \u201cferocious damn story.\u201d\u00a0 Or, to take another example, in Otto Rank\u2019s The Myth of the Birth of the Hero<\/em>, the only mark <\/em>in the book is Frye\u2019s underlining of \u201csensorialism\u201d on p. 103 with a question mark in the margin.<\/p>\n

Books that have a sheet laid in have been placed in the \u201cannotated\u201d collection even if they contain no other marginalia.\u00a0 The thing most frequently laid in is a small sheet or card on which Frye constructed a table of twenty-six lines, beginning with the seven-letter sequences \u201cy o u a u o y,\u201d \u201cy o u b u o y,\u201d \u201cy o u c u o y\u201d and continuing through the alphabet to \u201cy o u z u o y.\u201d\u00a0 Occasionally he made one of these grids with the \u201cy\u201d omitted, making a five-letter sequence (\u201co u a u o,\u201d o u b u o,\u201d etc.), and in at least one case there is a chart with only three letters in the twenty-six line column: \u201cu a u,\u201d \u201cu b u,\u201d and so on.\u00a0 The grids are almost always incomplete: one or more of the slots will be blank, the initial letter having been omitted.\u00a0 Some of the grids have the letter \u201ca\u201d added to the right and left sides.\u00a0 There are dozens of these word games, if that is what they are.\u00a0 These mysterious palindromic sequences can be found as well in Frye\u2019s notebooks, and they are scattered throughout other manuscripts in the Frye collection.<\/p>\n

The other kind of sheet laid in, though less frequently, is a version of what is known as \u201cetaoin shrdlu\u201d (pronounced \u201ceh-tay-oh-in shird-loo\u201d by linotype operators), which represents the twelve most common letters in English according to their frequency of use.\u00a0 On a small sheet of paper Frye would set down the letters of the alphabet according to one version of the frequency of use data:<\/p>\n

E T A O I N<\/p>\n

S H R D L U<\/p>\n

C W M F Y P<\/p>\n

G B K V J Q<\/p>\n

X Z<\/p>\n

Some of his charts omit the final two letters.\u00a0 Frye would mark through each letter in the chart with an \u201cX,\u201d and then for some of the lines he would enter a proofreader\u2019s deletion symbol to the right.\u00a0 Whether or not Frye played this letter-frequency game while he was reading the books into which the slips were inserted is uncertain, but that is one possibility.\u00a0 Perhaps these two games are simply diversions; perhaps they are related to Frye\u2019s interest in what he called \u201cthe alphabet of forms.\u201d\u00a0 The former may have some connection to the secret name of the seven-day week that Robert Graves deciphers in The White Goddess<\/em> or one of Graves\u2019s other alphabet riddles.<\/p>\n

As for the annotations themselves, one typical form is the shorthand comment that Frye repeatedly used for various reactions: astonishment (\u201cOh, God\u201d), disappointment that a point isn\u2019t developed or conclusion drawn (\u201cwell . . .\u201d), approval (\u201cnice,\u201d \u201cvery nice\u201d), bafflement (\u201chuh?\u201d), skepticism \u201c(uh huh\u201d), and mistakes in grammar or diction (\u201cugh,\u201d \u201ctsk\u201d).\u00a0 What he meant to convey by two of these brief remarks, \u201cyuh\u201d and \u201cthis,\u201d is uncertain. \u00a0The latter or some alternate form (\u201cthis point,\u201d \u201chere\u2019s this,\u201d \u201cthis link,\u201d \u201cthis, again\u201d) appears frequently, and it may mean nothing more than nota bene<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The date when Frye annotated a particular book is almost impossible to determine, though occasionally he will provide a clue.\u00a0 We know, for example, from a notation on p. 16 of The Books of Charles Fort<\/em> that he read that book in 1952 and that he read Ouspensky\u2019s In Search of the Miraculous<\/em> when he was sixty-three.\u00a0 It is clear from the following entry that Frye read Nietzsche\u2019s Thus Spake Zarathustra<\/em> first when he was thirty-one and then again ten years later:<\/p>\n

What Nietzsche needed was a good-natured affectionate Hausfrau who would make him wipe dishes.\u00a0 This remark is not merely a small man\u2019s glib revenge on a great one, as all Nietzscheans would automatically say.\u00a0 Veblen points out that economically productive labour, as distinct from leisure-class swagger, is historically descended from women\u2019s work.\u00a0 The self-conscious masculinity and overestimate of swagger in N. [Nietzsche] are of course connected; and without this disease N. would have seen the production of art as the keystone of his thought.\u00a0 Production of art is imgve [imaginative]; production of superman only voluntary.\u00a0 In his gospel of work even Carlyle was wiser than N., for a time.<\/p>\n

[written in darker pencil]\u00a0 1953.\u00a0 The notes in lead pencil were written ten years ago, when (a) I read N. in light of Nazism (b) N. was competing with<\/em> Blake in my mind.\u00a0 Fortunately, I got only to p. 140.<\/p>\n

The last of Frye\u2019s lighter lead-pencil entries is on p. 139.\u00a0 He went back through his earlier annotations and made a number of additional remarks in the margins of the first 139 pages, and then copiously annotated the rest of the 1100-page book, The Philosophy of Nietzsche<\/em> (New York: Modern Library, n.d).<\/p>\n

Such evidence for the dating of annotations is extremely rare.\u00a0 And while the copyright dates of the books as they are entered in the Victoria University Library\u2019s list can<\/em> indicate a point before which Frye could not have annotated a book, these entries do not always provide the date of the edition Frye was actually using.\u00a0 The edition of A.J. Arberry\u2019s Sufism<\/em>, for example, is given as 1950, but the edition Frye annotated was the fourth impression of 1968.\u00a0 Thus the two references to Frye\u2019s student Peter Fisher in the marginalia were written after Fisher\u2019s death in 1958.<\/p>\n

Frye marginal markings\u2014the vertical lines, brackets, and parentheses\u2014are interesting to contemplate because they call attention to passages that he felt to be important for some reason or another.\u00a0 The 166 passages Frye marked in Whitehead\u2019s Science and the Modern World<\/em> or the 100 passages he marked in Walt Anderson\u2019s Open Secrets: A Western Guide to Tibetan Buddhism<\/em> would obviously be revealing to someone studying Frye\u2019s interest in Whitehead or Buddhism.\u00a0 But the most engaging of Frye\u2019s annotations are by far his marginal comments.\u00a0 Outside of the brief epithets already mentioned, these notes are of two general kinds\u2014brief notes that record some analogue, parallel, or archetype and longer comments, observations, or critiques.\u00a0 The latter include charts and diagrams Frye occasionally constructs in margins or fly-leaves.<\/p>\n

Examples of the short inscriptions are found in A.E. Waite\u2019s The Holy Grail<\/em>, where Frye records such parallels and themes as these in the margins: \u201cdreams and the anima\u201d (131), \u201cEros Regained\u201d (137), \u201cdemonic parody of incarnation\u201d (155), \u201cantihistorical Yeatsian Christ\u201d (155), \u201cDante colors\u201d (185), \u201cshape of FQ [Faerie Queene<\/em>]\u201d (186), \u201cBurnt Norton\u201d (226), \u201calienation myth\u201d (445), \u201cYeats\u201d (463), \u201cecho of N.T.\u201d (192), \u201cechoes of Simon Magnus\u201d (191).\u00a0 Or Frye would jot down various archetypes he recognized in something Waite wrote about: \u201cEnoch archetype\u201d (57), \u201cwater of life\u201d (63), \u201cWandering Jew\u201d (87), \u201cstruggle of brothers\u201d (95), \u201cdark tower\u201d (145), \u201cJoseph archetype\u201d (147), \u201cthe younger son type\u201d (181), \u201cExodus archetype\u201d (182), \u201cEve archetype\u201d (185), \u201cSimeon\u2014archetypal name\u201d (202), and \u201cdivine child\u201d (421).\u00a0 There are thousands of such marginal jottings in Frye\u2019s books.\u00a0 He seems not at all concerned with remarking on Waite\u2019s purpose or argument or evidence, though he will from time to time make a comment like this one, a response to Waite\u2019s critique of Jessie Weston\u2019s study of the grail myth: Waite \u201clacks a certain kind of imagination: T.S. Eliot saw what she meant\u201d (434).\u00a0 A similar series of archetypal parallels and analogues can be found in another of Waite\u2019s books, The Quest of the Golden Stairs<\/em> (1974), where Frye records more than fifty comments in the margins.<\/p>\n

The following list is a sampling of Frye\u2019s marginalia that relate to the idea of interpenetration, and idea that he picked up from Plotinus, Oswald Spengler, Alfred North Whitehead, David Bohm, Owen Barfield, the Mahayana sutras, and elsewhere, and that became for him an important critical principle:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype<\/em> (1973).\u00a0 Edinger wrote that \u201cthe psyche also manifests itself through a multitude of unique, separate centers of being, each of which is a microcosm . . . \u2018an absolutely original center in which the universe reflects itself in a unique and inimitable way\u2019 [here Edinger is quoting from Teilhard de Chardin\u2019s The Phenomenon of Man<\/em>].\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cpoint of interpenetration.\u201d<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros<\/em> (1967).\u00a0 In a scene between Lord Gro and Lady Merrian she asks, pointing a sword at his throat, who and how many are in his company.\u00a0 Eddison then wrote: \u201cHe answered her like a dreamer, \u2018How shall I answer thee?\u00a0 How shall I number them that be beyond all count?\u00a0 Or how name unto your grace their habitation which are even now closer to me than hand or feet, yet o\u2019er the next instant are able to transcend a main wilder belike them even a starbeam hath journeyed o\u2019er.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cinterpenetrating spiritual world.\u201d<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom<\/em> (1958).\u00a0 Eliade wrote: \u201cClearly his situation [the yogin\u2019s] is paradoxical.\u00a0 For he is in life, yet liberated; he has a body, and yet he knows himself and thereby is peru\u015fa<\/em>; he lives in duration, yet at the same time shares in immortality; finally, he coincides with all Being, though he but a fragment of it, etc.\u00a0 But it has been toward the realization of this paradoxical situation that Indian spirituality has tended from its beginnings.\u00a0 What else are these \u2018men-gods\u2019 of whom we spoke earlier, if not the \u2018geometric point\u2019 where the divine and the human coincide, as do being and nonbeing, eternity and death, the whole and the part?\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cinterpenetrating point.\u201d<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0 Jos\u00e9 Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy<\/em> (1964).\u00a0 Ortega wrote that the sciences \u201cmust somehow achieve articulation with one another, without one of them holding the other in subjection.\u00a0 This can only be done by basing themselves anew on philosophy.\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cnonsense.\u00a0 It can only be done by interpenetration.\u201d<\/p>\n

5.\u00a0 P.D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man\u2019s Possible Evolution<\/em> (1954).\u00a0 Oupensky, in a passage about what he calls the \u201chuman centers\u201d (intellectual, emotional, instinctive) as they relate to a diagram of the human body (head, chest, lower body and back), wrote, \u201cIn reality each center occupies the whole body<\/em>, penetrates, so to speak, the whole organism.\u00a0 At the same time, each center has what is called its \u2018center of gravity.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cinterpenetration of a specific number.\u201d<\/p>\n

6. Gopi Krishna, Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man<\/em> (1971).\u00a0 In the top margin of p. 275 Frye wrote, \u201clanguage is the ultimate atom<\/em> or solid unit of experience: breaking through it leads to interpenetration.\u201d<\/p>\n

7.\u00a0 Plotinus, The Enneads<\/em>.\u00a0 In sec. V.8, Plotinus wrote: \u201cTo \u2018live at ease\u2019 is there; and to these divine beings verity is mother and nurse, existence and sustenance; all that is not of process but of authentic being they see, and themselves in all: for all is transparent, nothing dark, nothing resistant; every being is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; light runs through light.\u00a0 And each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, and infinite the glory.\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cvision of interpenetration.\u201d\u00a0 In his notebooks one of the passages that Frye frequently pointed in connection with interpenetration\u2014he quotes it in The Double Vision\u2014<\/em>is the idea that \u201ceverything is everywhere at all times.\u201d\u00a0 Frye encountered this idea in Whitehead\u2019s Science and the Modern World<\/em>, and in his annotation to that passage in Whitehead\u2019s book Frye wrote: \u201cthis doctrine of the universal mirror is a point for me, I think.\u00a0 The passage is almost identical with Plotinus, V, 8.\u201d<\/p>\n

8.\u00a0 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em> (1949).\u00a0 Campbell wrote, quoting from Louis Ginzberg\u2019s The Legends of the Jews<\/em>: \u201cFor God did not appear from one direction, but from all simultaneously, which, however, did not prevent his glory from filling the heaven as well as the earth.\u00a0 In spite of these innumerable hosts there was no crowding on Mt. Sinai, no mob, there was room for all.\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cvision of interpenetration.\u201d<\/p>\n

9.\u00a0 Frye underlined the word \u201cinterpenetration\u201d in the following passage from G.R. Levy\u2019s The Phoenix\u2019 Nest: A Study in Religious Transformations<\/em> (1961): \u201cBeyond all distinctive converse, we come to Interpenetration, which only supervenes completely at the height of vision . . . when all differences between immortal and mortal are seemingly dissolved.\u201d\u00a0 Levy goes on to say that interpenetration corresponds to Teilhard de Chardin\u2019s Omega point.<\/p>\n

10.\u00a0 Alphonse Louis Constant (pseud. \u00c9liphas L\u00e9vi), The History of Magic<\/em> (n.d.).\u00a0 Frye marked this passage in a note on p. 102:\u00a0 \u201cThe possibility of communication with those who have left this life is a question of the interpenetration of worlds.\u00a0 To say that the human spirit departs or comes back is a symbolic expression, like the statement that the heaven is above us.\u201d<\/p>\n

11.\u00a0 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit<\/em> (Findlay and Miller ed., 1977).\u00a0 Hegel wrote that the supersensible world \u201cis itself and its opposite in one unity.\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cinterpenetration.\u201d<\/p>\n

12.\u00a0 In his introduction to The Divine Names <\/em>and The Mystical Theology <\/em>of Pseudo\u2011Dionysius the Areopagite (1977), C.F. Rolt wrote: \u201cAccording to Dr. McTaggart each human soul posses behind its temporal nature a timeless self and each of these timeless selves is an eternal differentiation of the Absolute.\u00a0 Now if these timeless selves are finite, then none embraces the whole system.\u00a0 And if that is so, in what does the Spiritual Unity of the whole consist?\u00a0 If, on the other hand, they are infinite, then each one must embrace the whole System, and if so, how can they remain distinct?\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal answer to this last question: \u201cinterpenetration.\u201d<\/p>\n

13.\u00a0 Francis Huxley, The Way of the Sacred<\/em>.\u00a0 Frye extensively annotated two different editions of Huxley\u2019s book (Doubleday, 1974) and (Dell, 1976).\u00a0 On p. 323 of the Dell edition, Frye underlined \u201cinterpenetration\u201d in Huxley\u2019s paragraph about the Gandavyuha Sutra<\/em>, the thirty-ninth book of the Avatamsaka Sutra<\/em>, which was another important source in the development of Frye\u2019s understanding of interpenetration.<\/p>\n

14.\u00a0 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought<\/em> (1971, Harper trans.).\u00a0 Heidegger wrote: \u201cOnly something that is itself a location<\/em> can make space for a site.\u00a0 The location is not already there before the bridge is.\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginal annotation: \u201cinterpenetrating world.\u201d<\/p>\n

15.\u00a0 C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis<\/em> (1970).\u00a0 Frye underlined the word \u201cinterpenetration\u201d on p. 375.<\/p>\n

16.\u00a0 Charles Ponc\u00e9, Kabbalah<\/em> (1973).\u00a0 Regarding the Kabbalistic speculations of the sixteenth-century alchemist John Dee, Ponc\u00e9 wrote: \u201cthe center [of the point of creation], is contained within man as well as within space.\u201d\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginalia: \u201che has a good sense of interpenetration.\u201d\u00a0 Regarding Ponce\u2019s discussion of \u201cthe monad of pure energy\u201d in the concepts at the center of Kabbalistic thought, En-Sof and Sefiroth, Frye wrote \u201cthe everything everywhere\u201d in the margin.<\/p>\n

What use can be made of Frye\u2019s annotations, the examples of which just outlined are generally limited to those on religion, the occult, the hermetic tradition, alchemy, the Kabbalah, states of consciousness, new age science, Eastern religion, mysticism, and what Frye called his \u201ckook books\u201d?\u00a0 Those interested in, say Frye\u2019s connection with Dante would be interested in his copious annotations to The Divine Comedy<\/em>, which have been extensively catalogued (258 pp.) by Nicholas Graham, and will be a part of a forthcoming book, Northrop Frye on Dante<\/em>, by Graham <\/em>and <\/em>Domenico Pietropaolo (Ottawa: Legas).\u00a0 Frye\u2019s relation to James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, would doubtless profit from examining his edition of the Finnegans Wake <\/em>and Collected Poems<\/em>, which are profusely annotated.\u00a0 The marginalia can add to what we learn from Frye\u2019s notebooks about interests that appear very infrequently in his published work.\u00a0 When Frye wrote in the margin of Stan Gooch\u2019s Guardians of the Ancient Wisdom<\/em>, \u201ccentrifugally this is crap: centripetally it\u2019s fascinating\u201d (177), the brief comment illuminating.\u00a0 Gooch\u2019s book is a survey of certain occult themes that he finds in Robert Graves, Margaret Murray, Sir James Frazer, Geoffrey Ashe, and others.\u00a0 What Frye means is that he is interested in the imaginative use he finds in Gooch\u2019s material, not how it conforms to experience in the ordinary world.\u00a0 The marginalia have to do with poetic coherence rather than scientific correspondence.\u00a0 The study of Frye\u2019s annotations is in its early stages: it might well prove to be a valuable resource for Frye studies.<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s annotations contain thousands of examples of what he called \u201carchetype spotting\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em> 129, 130, 369, 564\u20135), which he saw as a danger to be avoided in his writing because it would be seen as a substitute for genuine argument.\u00a0 By archetype spotting he means the kind of thing that he notes in the books by A.E. Waite catalogued above; or the marginalia in, say, G.R. Levy\u2019s The Gate of Horn<\/em>, where one finds the following jottings in the chapter on \u201cThe Cave as Temple and Tomb\u201d: \u201cthreshold,\u201d \u201cterrible mother,\u201d \u201cVirgin or lamb vs. Kali or serpent,\u201d \u201cmouth of hell,\u201d \u201cHS [Holy Spirit],\u201d \u201csphinx riddle,\u201d \u201cscapegoat for Azazel,\u201d and so on.\u00a0 But there is a great deal more than archetype spotting in the marginalia, as this final sampler illustrates: <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2022 E.R. Eddison, A Fish Dinner in Memison<\/em> (1968).\u00a0 On the last page of the novel: \u201chow anybody could set out this preposterous Vala-vision with such lucidity & still believe it is beyond me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism<\/em> (1956): \u201cif only he wasn\u2019t such a fucking<\/em> priest.\u00a0 There are no dangerous <\/em>thoughts.\u00a0 That\u2019s God-ass-licking\u201d (122).<\/p>\n

\u2022 George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind<\/em> (1956).\u00a0 \u201cThis would be a better story if it weren\u2019t for all the parsonical crap about providence in nature, symb. by north wind\u201d (267).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Macrobius, Commentary on the Book of Scipio<\/em> (Columbia University Press ed., 1952).\u00a0 \u201cif I could articulate a theory of recovery from projection for all this it would make \u041b [Rencontre] a pretty important book\u201d (end of chap. 11, 133).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, The Book of Secrets\u2014I: Discourses on \u201cVigyana Bhairava Tantra\u201d<\/em> (1977).\u00a0 Rajneesh wrote: \u201cWhat are the symptoms of being in love?\u00a0 Three things: First, absolute contentment.\u00a0 Nothing else is needed; not even God is needed\u201d (349).\u00a0 Frye\u2019s marginalia: \u201cThe hell it isn\u2019t; I loved like that once & the silly wench fell out of love.\u00a0 I needed God then, very badly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 G\u00e9rard de Nerval, Selected Writings<\/em> (1973).\u00a0 \u201cthe thing is he\u2019s so damn<\/em> close to something like the Avatamsaka vision\u201d (170).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man\u2019s Spiritual Consciousness<\/em> (1955).\u00a0 There is only one annotation in this book, at the end of chap. 1, p. 25: \u201ccurious how quickly fashions change in philosophy: this chapter is almost incomprehensible now.\u00a0 (She says so herself, 43).\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Charles Williams, Descent into Hell<\/em> (1979).\u00a0 On the last page of the novel: \u201cGod, what horseshit.\u00a0 Sickness isn\u2019t damnation, if there is such a thing, and there probably isn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Philip Rawson, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy<\/em> (1973).\u00a0 On Rawson\u2019s account of the male and female principles, Shiva and Shakti, Frye wrote: \u201cAlbion & Vala: female as the space around<\/em> the male; later what\u2019s under<\/em> him\u201d (18).\u00a0 On Tantra\u2019s rejection of the tradition of Indian asceticism, Frye wrote: \u201cthe ideas of dirt and filth derive from excretion; and what can\u2019t be taken up with us is excreted.\u00a0 Because the sex organs also excrete, they\u2019ve often been thought of as unredeemable.\u00a0 They\u2019re the driving force of redemption, as here\u201d (21).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Stephen Larsen, The Shaman\u2019s Doorway: Opening the Mythic Imagination to Contemporary Consciousness<\/em> (1977).\u00a0 In response to Larsen\u2019s comment about validating the myth of the individual,\u201d Frye wrote, \u201can ind. m. [individual myth] is always a psychosis\u201d (160).\u00a0 And in response to Larsen\u2019s account of the process of consciousness in the psyche, Frye wrote, \u201cwhat you want is a Word of God\u201d (174).<\/p>\n

\u2022 The Wisdom of Laotse<\/em> (1948, trans. Lin Yutang).\u00a0 In response to Laotse\u2019s epigram that his \u201cteachings are very easy to understand and very easy to practice, \/ But no one can understand them and no one can practice them,\u201d Frye wrote, \u201ca very brief statement of the essential paradox of the great religions\u201d (297).\u00a0 At the end of book 4, Frye wrote,<\/p>\n

Laotse\u2019s Commentary of Genesis<\/em><\/p>\n

In the beginning God created heaven and earth.
\nThat was where the trouble started.
\nBefore, there was chaos,
\nWhich is what the wise man still seeks.
\nHe divided light from darkness, dry land from sea,
\nBut we got sea and darkness anyway.
\nSilly blundering old bugger,
\nWhy couldn\u2019t he have left well enough alone.\n<\/p>\n

\u2022 Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity: The Gifford Lectures, 1916\u20131918<\/em> (1966).\u00a0 At the end of the introduction, Frye wrote: \u201cThis kind of writing reminds me of the British music of the period\u2014Elgar, Holst, Delius.\u00a0 The connections are as rigorously self-limiting as Mendelssohnian music.\u00a0 The prior social consciousness from which the individual withdraws is ignored.\u00a0 The animal context of consciousness, including the subconscious, is ignored.\u00a0 Here\u2019s my foot.\u00a0 There\u2019s that stone.\u00a0 But it\u2019s more languid than the Johnson-Handel culture\u201d (31).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death<\/em> (1973): \u201cdeath is one of the things the unconscious is unconscious of\u201d (22).\u00a0 \u201cfull humanness includes intelligence and sanctity, both of which are maladjustments\u201d (58).\u00a0 \u201crecognition of the creature removes the barrier to the spiritual body, and that\u2019s<\/em> what\u2019s repressed\u201d (87).\u00a0 \u201c[Becker\u2019s] discussion of Freud entirely personal: discussion of S.K. [Soren Kierkegaard] never even mentions Regina.\u00a0 If S.K. has the right to resist doubt, what hasn\u2019t Freud the right to resist faith?\u201d (124)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Louis Pawls and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians<\/em> (1975): \u201cThis is an important book for me as it confirms my hunch of a Druid analogy\u201d (185).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Nicolas Berdyaev, Truth and Revelation<\/em> (1957).\u00a0 Diagram on the verso of the back fly-leaf, coordinating the Megillot and the Book of Jonah with Frye\u2019s four \u201cconfiscated gods\u201d\u2013\u2013the so\u2011called HEAP scheme:<\/p>\n

Logos
\n(S.S. [Song of Songs])<\/p>\n

Adonis
\n(Eccl [Ecclesiastes])<\/p>\n

Eros
\n(Ruth)<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Hermes
\n(Jonah)<\/p>\n

Prometheus
\n(Esther)<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Thanatos
\n(Lam. [Lamentations])<\/p>\n

\u2022 H.P. Blavatsky, An Abridgement of \u201cThe Secret Doctrine\u201d<\/em> (1966).\u00a0 At the end of the Preface, xxvi: \u201cessence of religion [for Blavatsky] not the Poetic Genius but a doctrine, not the constructing power but something it constructs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy<\/em> (1953). \u00a0\u201cthe end of repeating the experiment of the creation is to be one with Christ\u2019s power of transforming substance (red and white) into his spiritual body\u201d (266).\u00a0 \u201cthis link: the end of alchemy is to give the mind real transforming powers\u201d (267).\u00a0 \u201clike many writers on occult subjects Jung doesn\u2019t take seriously the dark senex-hermaphrodite world with evil & misery & suffering.\u00a0 It\u2019s all part of a purely intellectual game with him\u201d (286).\u00a0 \u201cthe prima materia & the ultima materia or perfectum opus are the same thing, & they\u2019re obviously both God, the beginning and the end of the quest\u201d (309).\u00a0 \u201cthought it crude to be rude, so he keeps his crown on\u201d [comment on an allegorical woodcut of the sun and moon copulating, both wearing only their crowns] (316)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man<\/em> (1961).\u00a0 \u201cI get the impression that the translator of this book doesn\u2019t understand it\u201d (36).<\/p>\n

\u2022 George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Fairy Romance for Men and Women<\/em> (n.d.).\u00a0 \u201ccycle closing over the point of epiphany.\u00a0 On my diagram the north door is the fourth one & the door of rebirth south: opposite of Blake & the Beulah tradition\u201d (182).\u00a0 \u201cisland, the Atlantis with its head above the sea, is the restored individuality.\u00a0 You can only describe your mind in the terms suggested to you, from whatever aspect of the \u2018material world\u2019 you\u2019re interested in\u201d (162).\u00a0 \u201cI built palaces like these at around ten.\u00a0 Before that the palaces were in underground caves\u201d (94).\u00a0 \u201cfor some reason or other the memory must be the opposite of the past, the mental selection being so largely a matter of self-realization\u201d (83)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture<\/em> (1955).\u00a0 \u201cThe rules of the game include accepting the assumptions of the question.\u00a0 This in turn is what I call the trumpery show of logic\u201d (114).\u00a0 \u201cit makes a difference whether play is content<\/em> or not.\u00a0 If not, it\u2019s simply construct\u201d (152).\u00a0 \u201cplay contains<\/em> seriousness: hence seriousness has something to do with content, play with form.\u00a0 He [Huizinga] seems to associate seriousness with mimesis (form outside)\u201d (190).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Charles Fort, The Books of Charles Fort<\/em> (1941).\u00a0 Frye made copious annotations throughout the 1062 pages of this book.\u00a0 On the final page, he wrote: \u201cThis book is a disappointment.\u00a0 Partly because he\u2019s a \u2018character\u2019 now, and buttonholes and bores; partly because of more references to religion; he can kid me that he knows something of astronomy, but I know he knows bugger-all about religion.\u00a0 The real trouble is that, like BD [Book of the Dead<\/em>?], it\u2019s the first essay on a theme that would take three books to work itself out.\u00a0 Also, of course, his insistence on his relativism gets mechanical.\u00a0 There are brilliant things in Fort, but he\u2019s no Samuel Butler, I think.\u201d\u00a0 At the end of a curious introduction by the secretary of the Fortean Society, Frye wrote: \u201cafter all, my <\/em>disciples are even dopier\u201d (xxvi).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man<\/em> (1951).\u00a0 \u201cI suppose that if one differentiated West & East as mathematical & mythical continuum one would make more sense of [F.S.C.] Northrop\u2019s book,\u201d a book from which Cassirer had quoted (217).\u00a0 \u201cSo the historian is the collector of symbolic forms in time; the cultural philosopher collects them in conceptual space.\u00a0 The latter deals with apocalyptic; the former with the cyclic analogy.\u00a0 Note the simple pluralism common to Spengler & Cassirer\u201d (178).\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cAs a historian or critic of philosophy Cassirer\u2019s often very suggestive.\u00a0 But he\u2019s a bust as a Gurreat [Great] Thinker, and what he says himself about art is mostly horseshit\u201d (170).\u00a0 \u201cNote that the literal-sigmatic antithesis recurs on a higher level: anagogy is however not a mere disembodied antithesis of archetypal work.\u00a0 Maybe there\u2019s a sixth factor here [beyond the five levels of the Anatomy<\/em>], & if so, a seventh\u2014I\u2019ve been groping for two apocalypses, one disembodied but not quite the analogy of innocence\u201d (141).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Thomas Pynchon, V<\/em> (1964).\u00a0 Pynchon wrote: \u201clife\u2019s single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane\u201d (300).\u00a0 Frye wrote \u201cballs\u201d in the side margin and then added at the top margin, \u201cI think P. [Pynchon] is pretending to endorse this shit, unwilling to admit that his creation is really speaking better than he can.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Edward Bulwer Lytton, Zanoni<\/em> (1906).\u00a0 Regarding this passage, \u201cMy child!\u00a0 My child!\u00a0 Thy mother shall save thee yet,\u201d Frye wrote: \u201cOh, shit.\u00a0 Why make so much noise<\/em>?\u00a0 Mothers are obsessed hysterics.\u00a0 So what?\u201d (311).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo<\/em> in The Philosophy of Nietzsche<\/em> (Modern Library, n.d.).\u00a0 At the end of sec. 1, Frye wrote, \u201ccurious: N\u2019s [Nietzsche\u2019s] attitude toward Z. [Nietzsche had written that Thus Spake<\/em> Zarathustra <\/em>was a \u201csign of the times\u201d] is, psychologically, exactly the same as mine toward FS [Fearful Symmetry<\/em>].\u00a0 Except that I have an even greater sense of detachment from it.\u201d (Frye annotated both editions of Thus Spake Zarathustra<\/em> that he owned.)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Jacob Boehme, Six Theosophic Points<\/em> (1958).\u00a0 \u201cIn Boehme, as in Milton, God \u201cbegins,\u201d for us, only in epiphany\u201d (Berdyaev\u2019s introduction, xxi).\u00a0 \u201cI used to call this Ungrund mysticism the deification of the Void, which is apparently just what it is.\u00a0 I also thought of it as anti-Blakean, but I\u2019m not so sure\u201d (ibid., xxiii).\u00a0 \u201cBeing is the union of the contraries.\u00a0 Evil is the negation cast out of both\u201d (ibid., xxi).\u00a0 \u201cAnd God said let there be light and there was light.\u00a0 a) Creation is by the Word\u00a0 b) The Word must be a suffering God\u00a0 c) The Word withdraws from the first will to \u2018recognize\u2019 it as transformed Nothing\u201d (15).\u00a0 \u201cin Adonis the creature is Narcissus, looking into the mirror; in Eros he (or rather she) becomes the mirror\u201d (19).\u00a0 \u201cin Boehme creation is not so much a making as an emanation: it\u2019s closer to birth, hence the Thanatos source, but it\u2019s different from that too\u201d (23).\u00a0 \u201cI suppose this hidden identity is what is occult about occultism\u201d (41).\u00a0 \u201chis [Boehme\u2019s] Magic is Blake\u2019s imagination, but what his imagination is in Blake, I dunno\u201d (132).\u00a0 \u201cthe Father is what the Son proceeds from: the mother is what it returns to (the same thing)\u201d (142).\u00a0 And at the top margin of p. 23, this chart:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
fire-anguish<\/td>\n><\/td>\nlight<\/td>\n><\/td>\nair & wind<\/td>\n><\/td>\nfire flash<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Father<\/td>\n><\/td>\nSon<\/td>\n><\/td>\nSpirit<\/td>\n><\/td>\nbirth of man<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1st<\/sup> pr. [principle]<\/td>\n><\/td>\n2nd<\/sup> pr.<\/td>\n><\/td>\n3rd<\/sup> pr.<\/td>\n><\/td>\n4th<\/sup> form<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

\u2022 William Butler Yeats, Explorations<\/em> (1962).\u00a0 \u201cI think my intuition in my 1947 article [\u201cYeats and the Language of Symbolism\u201d] was correct.\u00a0 The externalized inspiration of A Vision<\/em> places Yeats at phase 1, & God appears as a gigantic spider or vampire sucking everything out of man\u201d (405).\u00a0 \u201cIn Plato poetry is eikasia, whereas it ought to be dianoia.\u00a0 In Blake mathematics are [sic] memory and ought to be imagination.\u00a0 Yeats does something to convert Blake\u2019s perspective.\u00a0 What\u2019s abstract about A Vision<\/em> is not the geometry but the biography\u201d (340).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Paul Val\u00e9ry, The Art of Poetry<\/em> (1958).\u00a0 \u201cV[al\u00e9ry] manages to avoid the \u2018neo-classical\u2019 return to the ego that produces bureaucratic art like W. Lewis & Pound\u2014art without dignity\u201d (125).<\/p>\n

\u2022 Thomas Traherne, Centuries of Meditations<\/em> (1908).\u00a0 \u201cTraherne interprets image as similitude, Blake as identity.\u00a0 Traherne\u2019s view is the core of what\u2019s wrong with Arianism\u201d (195).<\/p>\n

\u2022 P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching<\/em> (1949).\u00a0 \u201cI suspect that G. [G.I. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky\u2019s teacher] got very little of this, except hints, from \u2018schools\u2019 in the Orient.\u00a0 I think he dredged it out of the level of his mind that remembers all the \u2018ancient wisdom.\u2019\u00a0 If so, finding a teacher & school may not be so essential: it\u2019s another form of the superstition of apostolic succession, which the Viennese quacks have taken over.\u00a0 The real teacher could just as well be Christ (transmitted for me through Blake), or a book.\u00a0 This is not to deny the value of teachers & schools where they exist, but when they don\u2019t there\u2019s nothing but the desert & the still small voice\u201d (116).\u00a0 Regarding what \u201cG.\u201d says about being subordinated to another man\u2019s will,\u201d Frye wrote, \u201cnobody but the risen Christ has such a will.\u00a0 Every teacher is a courtier, an adviser.\u00a0 Anyone who wants advice is a prince\u201d (161).\u00a0 \u201cthe principles of the school are certainly the right ones if there have to be schools.\u00a0 There aren\u2019t any schools, so there must be something wrong with the argument.\u00a0 If there were schools, organized as the apostolic succession idea, they\u2019d simply follow his own law of octaves & end up biting their arse.\u00a0 The insistence of a school reads like an obsession.\u00a0 See pp. 312\u201313.\u00a0 I distrust this you-must-have-a-teacher line because (a) at 63 I haven\u2019t found one & probably won\u2019t, so I\u2019m wasting my time reading this (b) it\u2019s a me-or-else line in practice & if I distrust this in the Gospels I certainly distrust it in G.\u201d (237)<\/p>\n

\u2022 Jessie Weston, From Ritual to Romance<\/em> (1957).\u00a0 \u201cWhen women do get initiated into Mithraism they\u2019re apt to stand under the wrong end of the bull\u201d (end of chap. 12).<\/p>\n

\u2022 On the last page of Weston\u2019s book, following the list of other Anchor books, Frye constructed two \u201cchain of being\u201d charts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
d. [divine]<\/td>\npriest<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
h. [human]<\/td>\nking<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
a. [animal]<\/td>\nshepherd (or horseman]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
v. [vegetable]<\/td>\ncarpenter (or doctor)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
m. [mineral]<\/td>\nsmith<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\nd<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\nsp [spiritual]<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
old king<\/td>\nh<\/td>\nhero<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
dragon<\/td>\na<\/td>\nhorse<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
wasteland<\/td>\nv<\/td>\nfertile land<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
chapel perilous<\/td>\nm<\/td>\ncity<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
sea<\/td>\nw [watery world]<\/td>\nriver > fountains<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

\u2022 Mircea Eliade, The Scared and the Profane<\/em> (1959).\u00a0 \u201cYou can\u2019t advance an inch spiritually from superstition without accepting the total profanity of space and so isolating (\u2018inside\u2019) the sacral feeling.\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t he know that?\u201d (23).<\/p>\n

\u2022 At the end of The Sacred and the Profane<\/em>, Frye sets down these charts of sixteen of Shakespeare\u2019s comedies and romances (omitting Troilus and Cressida<\/em>):<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
AY [As You Like It<\/em>]<\/td>\nTN [Twelfth Night<\/em>]<\/td>\nLL [Love\u2019s Labour\u2019s Lost<\/em>]<\/td>\nMV [The Merchant of Venice<\/em>]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
MND [A Mids. Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>]<\/td>\nCE [Comedy of Errors<\/em>]<\/td>\nMA [Much Ado about Nothing<\/em>]<\/td>\nMW [ Merry Wives of Windsor<\/em>]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
TGV [Two Gentlemen of Verona<\/em>]<\/td>\n(P) [Pericles<\/em>]<\/td>\nAW [All\u2019s Well that Ends Well<\/em>]<\/td>\nTS [The Taming of the Shrew<\/em>]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
WT [The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em>]<\/p>\n<\/td>\nT [The Tempest<\/em>]<\/td>\nMM [Measure for Measure<\/em>]<\/td>\nCy [Cymbeline<\/em>]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

6.\u00a0 TN, LL
\n5.\u00a0 T, WT, CE
\n4.\u00a0 MV, MA
\n3.\u00a0 MV, MND, AY, TGV
\n2.\u00a0 TS, AW
\n1.\u00a0 MM<\/p>\n

\u2022 On the back fly-leaf of The Sacred and the Profane<\/em> Frye constructs an outline for the \u201cThird Book,\u201d the book he intended to write after Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\nI.Continuous Fictional Forms\n          1. Scripture and Scared Books; Encyclopaedic Forms\n          2. Romance: Na\u00efve\n                              Sentimental\n          3. Epic\n          4. Mimetic Fiction\n          5. Ironic Fiction and the Return to Myth\nII. Episodic Fictional Forms\n          1. Genres of Drama\n          2. Comedy (\u201cspring equinox\u201d)\n          3. Epiphanic Romance (\u201csummer solstice\u201d)\n          4. Tragedy (\u201cautumn equinox\u201d)\n          5. Epiphanic Irony (\u201cwinter solstice\u201d)\nIII. Continuous Thematic Forms\n          1. Myth and Concept\n          2. The Informing of Theology\n          3. The Informing of History\n          4. The Informing of Metaphysics\n          5. The Informing of Law and the Social Sciences\nIV. Episodic Thematic Forms (Lyric)\n          [here the outline is left blank]\n<\/pre>\n
\u2022 Another book outline, this one for a book on the Bible, is found on the back fly-leaf of Yeats\u2019s A Vision<\/em>, two different editions of which Frye annotated.\u00a0 This is from the 1956 Macmillan edition:<\/p>\n
\n1.\u00a0 Introduction: Purpose and Scope\n2.\u00a0 The Up & Down Cycle, the Messianic prototypes, etc.\n3. \u00a0The Messianic hero: four stages\n          3a.\u00a0 Mysterious origin\n          3b.\u00a0 Emergence, SS [Song of Songs], Ruth\n          3c.\u00a0 Defeat & death\n          3d.\u00a0 Culbute triumph: Esther\n4.\u00a0 The Psalms & the theme of coronation\n5.\u00a0 The story of Israel and of Christ\n6.\u00a0 The Christian Apocalyptic\n7.\u00a0 The Parousia [opposite?]\n8.\u00a0 Job\n9.\u00a0 Ecclesiastes\n10.\u00a0 Apocrypha\u2014Word in the Heart\n<\/pre>\n
\u2022 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?<\/em> (1972).\u00a0 \u201cN\u2019s [Nietzsche\u2019s] cycle and Calvin\u2019s pred. [predestination] are the two insane<\/em> views of modern times.\u00a0 Calvin\u2019s sanity is a problem\u201d (110).<\/p>\n
\u2022 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought<\/em> (1975).\u00a0 \u201cHeidegger seems to live in that world of Borges where there are no nouns, only verbs\u201d (202).<\/p>\n
\u2022 Ursula Le Guin, The Wind\u2019s Twelve Quarters<\/em> (1976).\u00a0 Regarding the first short story in this collection, Frye wrote: \u201cstraightforward story of earth-spirits on a different time clock: Why does one need another planet?\u00a0 If this is science fiction so is Rip Van Winkle.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 One of the more expansive of Frye\u2019s marginalia is Lady Murasaki\u2019s The Tale of Genji<\/em>, two different editions of which Frye annotated.\u00a0 The paragraphs that follow are from the 1957 Allen and Unwin edition of this long novel (1135 pp.):<\/p>\n
The title \u201cdwellers above the clouds\u201d indicates that courtiers were thought of, & wished to be thought of, as leading a severe & untroubled life of pleasure & privilege.\u00a0 Murasaki shows them as spoiled, frustrated, and boring each other (with the women often quite literally) to death.\u00a0 Is the brutal selfishness of the men something she accepts as a datum of life, or something she is satirizing?\u00a0 The latter by implication, certainly.\u00a0 (46)<\/p>\n
Interesting to know if the original has anything of the Virginia Woolfish quality of the translation. (81)<\/p>\n
Genji reminds me of the flower known as the red-hot poker.\u00a0 If I were a Japanese I could make a poem out of that. (108)<\/p>\n
When night lets fall her sable hood<\/p>\n
How may one know which dame one scrood? (153)<\/p>\n
The most startling feature of this wonderful story is the sense of social security\u2014no reference to torture, imprisonment, beatings, violence, executions, or even war.\u00a0 In the court, life is like a modern university: when the emperor gets bored with emperoring he just quits, with no questions or upsets.\u00a0 Murasaki makes it clear that this security extends only to a stratospherically elevated group, but within that group, civilization is complete. (184)<\/p>\n
The story is realistic in the sense that nothing supernatural or incredible (in her terms) occurs & in the sense that all human foibles & weaknesses are fully displayed.\u00a0 But there\u2019s another feature that makes it a romance in my sense\u2014or one of my senses.\u00a0 That\u2019s her acceptance, not of her own society only, but of that society\u2019s idealized picture of itself.\u00a0 People who are socially the best people, in other words, really are the best people.\u00a0 The exact degree of a girl\u2019s beauty (except for Kiritsubo) depends primarily on her heredity, like a knight\u2019s chivalry in Malory. (184).<\/p>\n
The jealous mistress Rukujo sets up a Ligeia pattern, killing Yugao & Aoi by projecting a part of herself & bewitching them.\u00a0 She even speaks through them just as Ligeia does.\u00a0 After her death she becomes more formidable, a prowling ghoul who seizes on Murasaki.\u00a0 Yugao is a sleeping beauty archetype: the incarnate dream of the perfect mistress discovered in a completely isolated spot.\u00a0 (Not completely isolated: she\u2019d already been discovered by Genji\u2019s brother-in-law, who\u2019d had a child by her, but that doesn\u2019t bother Genji: he just wants to adopt the child.\u00a0 Civilized buggers.)\u00a0 (359)<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a growing sense of bondage as the story proceeds.\u00a0 The structure is less obviously teleological than that of a Western story: the metaphor of a horizontal [indecipherable word] picture is more than just an analogy.\u00a0 The reader is almost unaware of the rigidity of Japanese etiquette in the first volume.\u00a0 Genji is like the sun (I don\u2019t know how much can be forced into his name Hikaru) who sees and [warms?] everyone.\u00a0 Wherever he<\/em> goes, women strip, and wait, panting.\u00a0 But towards the end even Genji runs his head into screens, and the sense of barriers is all over the Kaoru section.\u00a0 Barriers are an obsession with Kaoru himself, and with Niow the emphasis is thrown on the hampering of an emperor\u2019s son.\u00a0 What takes over, as people get increasingly bored with themselves and their amusements, is religion, in its completely anti-worldly monastic form. (538)<\/p>\n
The disappearance & pretended death of Ukifune (\u201cfloating boat\u201d) introduces another archetype, treated with ironic inconclusiveness.\u00a0 The incident that looks like a comic gimmick turns out to be a means of clinching the sense of ironic frustration increasing throughout the story.\u00a0 The end is a technical device permitting further continuity\u2014touch of the primitive endless form\u2014but a perfect end in itself.\u00a0 Ukifune, who\u2019s practically a schizophrenic, is a reborn daughter & mistress, but the final recognition scene, with a young brother adroitly introduced, is left suspended with an irony that reverses the perspective.\u00a0 Ukifune is not dead to the world in any spiritual sense: she\u2019s just dead; but the growing sense of unreality about the world of desire and the final feeling that the story really is endless, gives [sic] us a final aerial view with the dream of human life becoming an abstract pattern underneath. (937)<\/p>\n
Murasaki makes considerable use of displaced characters, which are sometimes rationalized by conceptions of Karma & reincarnation.\u00a0 Thus a character, generally a woman, will replace or double for an earlier character whom she greatly resembles\u2014Ukifune\u2019s relation to the dead Agemaki. (938)<\/p>\n
Thus Genji is the son of the Emperor and his dearly loved concubine Kiritsubo.\u00a0 After her death, the Emperor tries to console himself with Fujitsubo, who resembles her: Genji has a son by her supposed to be the Emperor\u2019s.\u00a0 That\u2019s straight Oedipus displacement.\u00a0 The little girl Murasaki is adopted by Genji because she reminds him of her aunt and his mistress.\u00a0 The minute the poor youngster\u2019s vagina is big enough to hold him, in he pops, and later on when Genji\u2019s son Yugiri sees her by accident (normally young son\u2019s are kept away from their father\u2019s women) he falls in love with her.\u00a0 This in itself comes to nothing, but Genji\u2019s second wife has a bastard by someone else, tying up the Oedipus pattern very symmetrically. (938)<\/p>\n
If Frye were to have written an essay on The Tale of Genji<\/em> the essential core could well have comes from these notes.\u00a0 Similar marginalia still lie hidden in the books in Frye\u2019s library.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Among the materials in the Northrop Frye collection at the Victoria University Library are some 2053 books from Frye\u2019s own library that he annotated.\u00a0 These books represent about forty percent of his books that came to Victoria University after his death, the books without annotations having now been put in the regular collection or otherwise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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-6442","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nAnnotations in Frye's Books - 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\/annotations-in-fryes-books\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Annotations in Frye's Books - 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