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In his account of the thematic modes in Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> Frye says that the general theme in the ironic mode is the pure, timeless moment of vision, and the examples of such vision he gives are \u201cRimbaud\u2019s illumination<\/em><\/a>, Joyce\u2019s epiphany<\/a>, the Augenblick<\/a> <\/em>of modern German thought, and the kind of nondidactic revelation implied in such terms as symbolisme<\/a> <\/em>and imagism<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Frye himself had several of these moments of vision.\u00a0 The earliest, reported in John Ayre\u2019s biography<\/a>, was during his early high school years in Moncton when he suddenly realized that he could shed without consequence the moral and religious dogmas of the fundamentalist envelope in which he had been raised.\u00a0 Frye did not recall what triggered the revelation: he simply realized on a walk to school one day that the albatross of fundamentalist teaching \u201cjust dropped off into the sewers and stayed there.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n There were other epiphanies: one in Edmonton (1932), one (perhaps two) with Blake<\/a> (1933), another in Seattle (1951), and still another on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto (early 1950s).\u00a0 The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks<\/a><\/em> contain a hint of a fifth epiphany\u2013\u2013in 1944 on a walk down Bathurst Street in Toronto.\u00a0 A final epiphany may have occurred in Yugoslavia only four months before Frye\u2019s death: he speaks of \u201cthat loud flash I got in Zagreb: the ideal of spontaneity, where the moment of composition and the moment of performance are the same\u201d (The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> <\/a>1:415).<\/p>\n Frye refers to these moments variously as intuitions, epiphanies, illuminations, and enlightenments.\u00a0 Most of them were experiences of unity\u2013\u2013experiences, as he says, \u201cof things fitting together\u201d in a momentary flash of insight (Northrop Frye in Conversation<\/a><\/em> 48). \u00a0Although Frye did speak about the Blake and Edmonton epiphanies in several interviews, he never mentioned them in his books and essays.\u00a0 But in his notebooks there are more than thirty references to one or another of these experiences, the most important of which seem to have been what he calls his Seattle and St. Clair illuminations.\u00a0 I have found Frye\u2019s accounts of these experiences to be as endlessly fascinating as they are enigmatic.\u00a0 The references are often quite cryptic.\u00a0 In Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary<\/a> <\/em>I took a stab at analyzing the Seattle and St. Clair epiphanies (90\u20136), but the different kinds of recognition that came to Frye on these occasions remain something of a riddle.\u00a0 Perhaps some blogger out there would be interested in sifting through the various notebook entries with the aim of providing illumination of these illuminations.\u00a0 What follows are the relevant passages.\u00a0 The references at the end of each entry are to the volumes in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye<\/a>.\u00a0 Page breaks and other editorial insertions are within square brackets.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A.\u00a0 1932. <\/strong>Edmonton<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 <\/strong>In the late summer of 1932, Frye had gone to Edmonton to dispose of the books of his aunt Mary Howard, his mother\u2019s second youngest sister, who had died 28 July 1932.\u00a0 About his time there he writes, \u201cI found myself reading Spengler<\/a> in the Edmonton YMCA\u2014one of the great nights of my life, & one that unknown to me had converted me into a critic of my own distinctive kind\u201d [Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings<\/a><\/em> 28]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 <\/strong>A much more recent dream concerns a maroon-colored book which mentions St. Augustine<\/a> & explains everything; an archetype that started with Spengler in Edmonton & grew through the spring of 1940 when I was holding Lovejoy<\/a>\u2019s Chain of Being<\/a> in my hand and trying to find out about Neoplatonism<\/a> [Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em> <\/a>31].<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 <\/strong>In the old diagram the Logos vision is a universal full of particulars; the corresponding point of alienation in the new one is a total similitude, Blake\u2019s \u201cgeneralizing gods\u201d [Jerusalem<\/a><\/em>, pl. 89, l. 30 (Erdman,<\/a> 248)].\u00a0 The old Thanatos, or life frozen in hell, similarly becomes the reversal of rebirth, as the total similitude of death turns into the particular point of light that turns similitude into the universal identity.\u00a0 That is what resurrection means now<\/em>.<\/p>\n This is the point Spengler misses, naturally: Toynbee<\/a> realized it was there but couldn\u2019t state it.\u00a0 The Edmonton vision kept revolving around this like a halcyon bird on the sea of chaos.\u00a0 I suspect it was in the FS [Fearful Symmetry<\/em>] <\/em>vision the thing I couldn\u2019t grasp because it was itself the driving force of the book.\u00a0 I may have glimpsed it in the \u201cwalking fire\u201d & the [227] prayer to the poor naked wretches of Lear.\u00a0 Paravritti [turning around]; Wiederkehr [return]: the descent through & return through the vortex; the movement of Byzantium<\/em>. [Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em> 226\u20137]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 4. <\/strong>From Northrop Frye in Conversation<\/em>, an interview with David Cayley<\/a><\/p>\n Cayley: Did you see right away that you had found your teacher in Blake?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: Not right away. But here was a fascinating character that very little had been said about. Two years later, after my graduation, I was at Emmanuel, where Herbert Davis, who was a Swift scholar in the graduate school, gave a course on Blake, and I signed up for it. I was assigned a paper on Blake\u2019s Milton<\/a><\/em>, <\/em>one of his most difficult and complex poems, and started working on it the night before I was to read it. It was around three in the morning when suddenly the universe just broke open, and I\u2019ve never been, as they say, the same since.<\/p>\n Cayley: What was it? I know you can\u2019t describe the experience, but what was it in Blake that provoked this experience?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: Just the feeling of an enormous number of things making sense that had been scattered and unrelated before. In other words, it was a mytholog\u00adical frame taking hold.<\/p>\n [922]Cayley: A conversion?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: Conversions usually relate to the other side, the experience. As a Methodist I was brought up converted. I never went through a conversion pro\u00adcess.<\/p>\n Cayley: A reconversion?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: Well, it was really getting the other half of what conversion is about.<\/p>\n Cayley: What provoked it?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: The feeling that here I was dealing with an extremely complex poem of Blake\u2019s about Milton, with whom he obviously had a very close, intricate love\u2013hate relationship. Toward the end, I had the feeling that what united Blake and Milton, for all their differences\u2014one was a Puritan and the other was very much an eighteenth-century nonconform\u00adist\u2014was their common dependence on the Bible and the fact that the Bible had a framework of my\u00adthology that both Milton and Blake had entered into. Of course, by that time I\u2019d shucked all the anxiety side of the religion I was brought up in.<\/p>\n Cayley: What actually happened that night?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: I don\u2019t know that I can say what it was. But it was an experience of things fitting together. I\u2019ve had two or three nights where I\u2019ve had sudden visions of that kind, visions ultimately of what I myself might be able to do. Fearful Symmetry, <\/em>for example, was started innumerable times, but the shape of the whole book dawned on me quite sud\u00addenly one night. And the same thing happened once when I was staying in the YMCA in Edmonton, where I was for very dubious reasons reading Spengler\u2019s Decline of the West<\/em>, <\/em>and I suddenly got a vision of coherence. That\u2019s the only way I can describe it. Things began to form patterns and make sense. [Interviews<\/em> with Northrop Frye<\/em><\/a> <\/em>922]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 5. <\/strong>Tragicomedy also picks up a childhood interest of mine, the impact that the plots of Scott<\/a> had on me when I had practically nothing else to compare them with.\u00a0 The Bible of course goes back into very deep childhood, and my interest in Classical mythology was also very intense in pre-school times.\u00a0 Blake is later, and Rencontre probably grows mainly out of my Spengler enthusiasm, which also hit its peak in the fourth year, although the great night in Edmonton was two years earlier.\u00a0 I think I realize now that what Spengler gave me was a sense of interpenetration of symbolism: everything that happens in the world symbolizes everything else that happens.\u00a0 Nobody had really established this before, though there are hints of it in Ruskin<\/a>; today it\u2019s a staple of pop-kulch McLuhan<\/a>\u2013Carpenter stuff, but they (at least McLuhan) got it through Wyndham Lewis<\/a>, whose Time and Western Man is a completely Spenglerian book.\u00a0 So I think Spengler will have a lot to do with Rencontre, which will be, as I think, historical, showing how all the things I\u2019m interested in, myths, fables, narrative structures, and concepts are intertwined in a historical progression.\u00a0 The general introduction I wrote for HBJ is the core of Rencontre, of course.\u00a0 But there\u2019s a lot to be got out of Spengler yet, chiefly something he expresses without the faintest notion that he is expressing it: a sense of the relativity of time.\u00a0 I\u2019d draw very different inferences from the inferences he draws from the fact that Alexander and Napoleon are \u201ccontemporaries.\u201d [ 309]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 6. <\/strong>I have never had the sort of experience the mystics talk about, never felt a revelation of reality through or beyond nature, never felt like Adam in Paradise, never felt, in direct experience, that the world is wholly other than it seems.\u00a0 I don\u2019t question the honesty, or even the factuality, of those who have recorded such experiences, but I have had to content myself with the blessing to those who have not seen & yet have believed\u2014if one can attach the word \u201cbelief\u201d to accepting statements as obviously true as the fact that I have seen New York.\u00a0 The nearest I have come to such experiences are glimpses of my own creative powers\u2014Spengler in Edmonton and two nights with Blake\u2014and these are moments or intervals of inspiration rather than vision.\u00a0 I\u2019m not [61] sure that I want it unless I can have clarity about other things with it.\u00a0 What are all the miracles and divine visions of Bernard of Clairvaux<\/a> to me when I know that he preached vehemently in favor of crusades?\u00a0 I had rather been inpercipient all my life than preach a crusade.\u00a0 And much as I admire the clarity of structure in the religious thought of Eliot<\/a> or C.S. Lewis<\/a>, I don\u2019t want it if it\u2019s inseparable from the controversial one-upsmanship of After Strange Gods<\/em> or the 16th c. history.\u00a0\u00a0 I feel I must have God on my own terms, because God on somebody else\u2019s terms is an idol. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye 1964\u20131972 <\/em>60\u20131]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n [Frye wrote in a number of places about Spengler\u2019s influence on him.\u00a0 Here is one succinct account: \u201cSpengler was a cultural critic like Ruskin (who had also come to influence me a good deal): his illustrations were historical, but that did not make him primarily a historian. He did something that no historian can do without ceasing to be one: showed how all the cultural products of a given age, medieval or Baroque or contemporary, form a unity that can be felt or intuited, though not demonstrated, a sense of unity that approximates the feeling that a human culture is a single larger body, a giant immersed in time.\u201d [The Critical Path\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> <\/a>401]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n B.\u00a0 Blake. Fall of 1933. <\/strong>Toronto<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 1.<\/strong> Letter to Pelham Edgar<\/a>, 9 August 1948.\u00a0 \u201cThe third year came your eighteenth century, and I signed up for a paper on Blake.\u00a0 From then on I was hooked.\u00a0 You may remember the paper.\u00a0 In my fourth year I could hardly talk about anything but Blake, and Helen gave me the one-volume Keynes Poetry and Prose for my graduation present.\u00a0 Next year was theology, and I snatched at a graduate course on Blake that H.J. Davis was giving.\u00a0 That year I read all the secondary sources on Blake, and Davis assigned me a paper on Milton<\/em>.\u00a0 I sat down to write it, as was my regular bad habit in those days, the night before, and around about two in the morning some very curious things began happening in my mind.\u00a0 I began to see glimpses of something bigger and more exciting than I had ever before realized existed in the world of the mind, and when I went out for breakfast at five-thirty on a bitterly cold winter morning, I was committed to a book on Blake. (Northrop Frye: Selected Letters 1934\u20131991<\/a><\/em> 37).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 2. <\/strong>Interview with Peter Gzowski<\/a><\/p>\n Gzowski: Was there a real epiphany? People who write about you talk about epiphany at one time or another, but was there ever a moment in your life of which it\u2019s possible to say, \u201cthere was something before and something else after\u201d?<\/em> [816]<\/p>\n Frye: I don\u2019t know whether it would be as complete as that, but there certainly were moments when I realized I was turning a corner. When I stayed up all night to write a paper on Blake for graduate school, I knew, at the end of it when I went out for breakfast, that I was going to write a book on Blake, and fifteen years later it appeared.<\/p>\n Gzowski: Can you describe that understanding? How would you know that?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: I don\u2019t know whether it would be as complete as that, but there certainly were moments when I realized I was turning a corner. When I stayed up all night to write a paper on Blake for graduate school, I knew, at the end of it when I went out for breakfast, that I was going to write a book on Blake, and fifteen years later it appeared.<\/p>\n Gzowski: Can you describe that understanding? How would you know that?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: Well, I had the very bad habit, in those days, of writing my assignments the night before I was to deliver them, and somewhere around three in the morning something very funny started happening in my mind. I was commenting on one of Blake\u2019s most complex and difficult poems [Milton<\/em>] and I began to get glimpses of a world that I had never imagined could exist in that many dimensions before, and nothing came clear at that point except that crystal clear determination: someday or other, I\u2019d write a book about this.<\/p>\n Gzowski: That\u2019s Blake. I mean . . . you were Blake.<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: Yes. [Interviews with Northrop Frye<\/em> 815\u201316]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 <\/strong>Interview with Ian Alexander<\/strong><\/p>\n Alexander: You\u2019ve spoken of your coming to an awareness of Blake as a kind of epiphany. Can you describe that experience?<\/em><\/p>\n Frye: Perhaps you mean the time when I was taking a graduate course in Blake with Herbert Davis, who later went to Oxford. I was assigned a paper to write on Blake\u2019s Milton<\/em> <\/em>for which there was, of course, no secondary material whatever. My very bad habit in those days was to start a paper the night before I was to read it. About half-past three in the morning some very funny things started happening in my mind, and I began to see dimen\u00adsions of critical experience that I\u2019d never dreamed existed before\u2014a sudden expansion of the horizon. When I went out for breakfast\u2014I remember it was a bitterly cold morning\u2014I knew that I was to write a book on Blake. And fifteen years later I did. [Interviews with Northrop Frye<\/em> 739]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n [In excerpt no. 6 under Edmonton, above, Frye says there were two Blake epiphanies, but about the second one he is otherwise silent, except perhaps for the reference to \u201ctwo or three nights\u201d in the interview with David Cayley (see no. 4 under Edmonton, above.]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0[In one of his notebooks, Frye writes that all of his fictional ideas \u201ctend to revolve around Rilke<\/a>\u2019s idea of the poet\u2019s perceiving simultaneously the visible & the invisible world.\u00a0 In practice that means a new type of ghost or supernatural story, possibly approached by way of some science fiction development.\u00a0 The idea is a vision of another life or another world so powerfully plausible as to make conventionally religious & anti\u2011religious people shake in their shoes.\u00a0 I\u2019ve begun notes on this many times, but threw away my best notebook, written in Seattle, in a London (Ont.) hotel.\u00a0 By \u2018shake in their shoes\u2019 I don\u2019t mean threats, but the ecstatic frisson or giggle aroused by plausibility\u201d [Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings <\/em>140].\u00a0 This is the only place Frye ever mentions having disposed of a notebook, a regrettable act, especially since he calls it his \u201cbest notebook.\u201d\u00a0 As it was written in Seattle it seems highly likely that it would have contained an account of his Seattle epiphany.\u00a0 But we do have the following accounts of the Seattle illumination.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 1. <\/strong>In the summer of 1951, in Seattle, I had an illumination about the passing from the oracular into the witty: a few years later, on St. Clair Ave. I had another about the passing from poetry through drama into prose.\u00a0 They were essentially the same illumination, perhaps: the movement from the esoteric to kerygma.\u00a0 Any biography, including Ayre\u2019s, would say that I dropped preaching for academic life: that\u2019s the opposite of what my spiritual biography would say, that I fled into academia for refuge and have ever since tried to peek out into the congregation and make a preacher of myself.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I\u2019m taking this preposterous assignment [Frye\u2019s Double Vision <\/a>lectures] so seriously. [Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em> 2:621]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 2. <\/strong>\u201cGod is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s Foucault<\/a>\u2019s Order of Things<\/em> p. 298, what I should have quoted earlier instead of the Nietzsche <\/a>nonsense he goes on with [par. 635].<\/p>\n This may take me back to the Seattle intuition: Finnegans Wake<\/a> is a kind of hypnagogic<\/a> structure, words reverberating on themselves without pointing to objects (but not without naming<\/em>, as in Mallarm\u00e9<\/a>: see a previous note [par. 241]).\u00a0 This may be the hallucinatory verbal world within which God speaks. [Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em> 1:399]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 3.<\/strong>\u00a0 Things to think about in Seven: the world of the dead as a potential culbute; the substitute interrex as a reminder of the Golden Age or reign of Saturn; [interrex = the mock-king.\u00a0 See Words with Power<\/a><\/em>, 262.] the world of identity in Atlantis or underground as the pre-metaphorical world of Homer & the Bible [See Words with Power<\/em>, 247\u20139.] (at present cut out of Four; perhaps it fits better in Eight).\u00a0 Power without words is certainly Eight. [See Words with Power<\/em>, 308.]\u00a0 Detective stories shouldn\u2019t be split between the two chapters. [See WP<\/em>, 264\u20135.]\u00a0 The pre-Homeric cipher-world must have links with my Seattle epiphany\u2013whatever happened to the St. Clair one? [Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em> 1:405]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 4. <\/strong>I cut out the primitive cult (18th c.) in Seven, but maybe it\u2019s part of the Seattle epiphany and the cave archetype.\u00a0 If the demonic descent of Seven is into exile, surely the cave is home<\/em>. [Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em> 1:405]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 5. <\/strong>Virgil\u2019s Book Six<\/a> as summing up most of these themes: perhaps there I could introduce the Igitur descent too.\u00a0 And that takes me into the oracular-laughter Rabelais<\/a> climax I\u2019ve been stewing over since Seattle days. <\/strong>[Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em> 2:491]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 6.<\/strong> When have I had sudden runs like this (if this is one) and is there a pattern in them? There\u2019s the oracle-wit stuff in Seattle, the mind-soul-body stuff, undated, but a Sunday morning, and the stuff at the beginning of the \u201cmystical\u201d notebook in 1946 [Notebook 3].<\/p>\n Also the St. Clair [Anticlimax] stuff, which seems slightly out of key with this, but may define the whole relation of 1 to 2 & 3.\u00a0 2 anyway.\u00a0 I wonder if the right order is Eros<\/a>–Adonis<\/a>, Nous<\/a>–Nomos<\/a>, Oedipus<\/a>–Prometheus<\/a>, Thanatos<\/a>–Logos<\/a>?\u00a0 I doubt that, because the Eros-Adonis cycle is a mere abstraction without the rest of it.\u00a0 Think of the way Wolfram<\/a>\u2019s Adonis poem on Parzival<\/a> dives straight for Amfortas<\/a>\u2019 balls\u2014still, that doesn\u2019t really reverse the movement.\u00a0 Something about the L\u2019Allegro<\/a>–Il Penseroso <\/a>double-climax of Eros reappearing as Nomos & Nous:\u00a0 one the maternal cycle & the other the paternal (projected) creator.\u00a0 But the Orc<\/a> cycle is a complete<\/em> cycle, not a semicircle. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 162\u20133]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n 7.<\/strong> I\u2019ve known since Seattle that the S. gate was oracular & witty. I associated it then with the lyric.\u00a0 But perhaps wit is the epiphany of oracular mystery\u2014hence the recovery of the power of laughter in the cave of Trophonius<\/a>. The fragmented or comminuted vision out of the dark, the coup de d\u00e9s.\u00a0 I suppose ultimately there\u2019s only one encyclopedia, the educational contract, of which all the \u201cdisciplines\u201d are quadrants & all works of art epiphanies.\u00a0 I suppose the association of the S-gate with music is not new\u2014it\u2019s in Blake\u2019s Urthona<\/a>\u2014but it\u2019s useful all the same. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 178]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n 8. <\/strong>Ever since Seattle I\u2019ve seen a point near the d.e. [demonic epiphany] where oracle becomes wit, where the visitor to Trophonius recovers the power of laughter. What\u2019s the corresponding point in the N?\u00a0 Is it where the allegro & penseroso ecstasies touch?\u00a0 I suppose it must be. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 194]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n 9.<\/strong> The transition<\/em> from [Liberal] to [Tragicomedy] will come out of the intuitions that have been swirling around me for twenty years (at least) connecting the Christian commedia<\/em> with the Tempest, which is the telos of [Tragicomedy], with Sakuntala<\/a>, Menander<\/a>, The Birds<\/a><\/em>, & the dianoia<\/em> of romantic comedy generally.\u00a0 The transition from [Liberal] to [Anticlimax] starts with the St. Clair enlightenment, also nearly twenty years old.\u00a0 Note the Blake rhythm, and the recapitulation of my four undergraduate years.\u00a0 The transition from [Anticlimax] to [Rencontre] probably revolves around the oracle-wit business at Seattle. Then [Anticlimax] presents literature as a cycle of discontinuous epiphanies. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 332]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n 10. <\/strong>Anticlimax<\/em> \u00a0(A or \u00d9), the third (Leviticus<\/a>) book of the tetralogy, chapters 25\u201336, grayish-white, the Book of Urizen<\/a>, is concerned with the anatomy prose form, the conceptual myth, the relations of mythology to philosophy, and prose rhythm.\u00a0 It\u2019s primarily a book on Plato.\u00a0 Its opening, & the transition from \u00f9 [Tragicomedy<\/em>], which ends with drama, is based on the St. Clair illumination; its close, where the theme of communication connects with l [Rencontre<\/em>], is based on the Seattle oracle-wit classification. [Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks on Romance<\/em> 83]<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n 11. <\/strong>Now, if the St. Clair vision is the [Tragicomedy]-[Anticlimax] transition, & the Seattle one the [Anticlimax]\u2011[Rencontre] transition, I suppose this point is the [Liberal]-[Tragicomedy] transition.\u00a0 They\u2019re really\u2014at least the first two\u2014all the same point: the passage from dream to waking, oracle to wit.\u00a0 Only that\u2019s<\/em> the Logos point of mystery, becoming the revelation of the original wisdom: I\u2019m looking perhaps for a third or Holy Spirit awakening of love which succeeds all knowledge & prophecies, the opposite of epiclesis. [Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em> 227]<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 12.<\/strong> The first chapter is relatively easy to set up: the second can simply start with the Blake reversal.\u00a0 The third has<\/em> to be Eros Regained, and the survival of the Platonic Eros, through Virgil & Ovid, as providing the basis of the human response to love & a human form of creation.\u00a0 The Eros-Orpheus<\/a> area entails the union with the blackbird; hence Chapter Four has to be the Adonis-Oedipus-Adam area of the white goddess.\u00a0 Then (I\u2019m more doubtful about this) by way of his psychopomp role we go into the world of Hermes<\/a>.\u00a0 Proteus<\/a>, the metamorphosis trickster who leads us to the alpha-omega sense of words & numbers.\u00a0 The St. John Salome<\/a> business appears at the end of Adonis: the Igitur<\/a> chance-choice business here, recapitulating my Seattle illumination, takes me into the Promethean Atlantis rising from the waves, where knowledge of the future (up to a point not destroying freedom of will) is again permitted. [Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em> 370\u20131]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n D.\u00a0 St. Clair. 1950 or 1953 (?). <\/strong>Toronto<\/strong>. Drama to Prose<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n [In Notebook 53 Frye says that the St. Clair revelation occurred on New Year\u2019s Day a few years after the 1951 Seattle epiphany.\u00a0 But from his account of an experience on St. Clair Ave. on 1 January 1950, it may be that the St. Clair experience happened six or so months before the Seattle one.\u00a0 See The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 2:621, and The Diaries of Northrop Frye<\/em> 215.\u00a0 In addition to the references to the St. Clair illumination above (Seattle, nos. 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 11), the St. Clair epiphany appears in the following places.]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 1.<\/strong>\u00a0 It looks at present like three volumes.\u00a0 First, the circle of images, Eros-Summer, Adonis-Autumn, Oedipus-Winter, Prometheus-Spring.\u00a0 (Though they\u2019re actually transitions: Eros is spring-to-summer, etc.).\u00a0 This is the real [Tragicomedy] scheme.\u00a0 Second, the axis of speculation, taking in the cores of [Anticlimax] (the E or Hermes point, with most of my St. Clair stuff in it, though some is N) and of [Rencontre] (the W or Apollo<\/a> & Phaeton<\/a> point).\u00a0 Third, the climax of my life & not to be attempted before retirement, the axis of concern, the cores of [Paradox] (N, though Blake would say S) and [Ignoramus] (S) & the analogies of plenitude & vacancy, faith & doubt. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 148]<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 2. <\/strong>Or, perhaps, the Mercator-projection<\/a> laid down out of what I know & teach, which is mainly lyrical poetry; a second volume based on fiction and the sequences<\/em> of imagery; a final volume making the St. Clair vortex illumination from drama to concept. That\u2019s my old scheme again with [Liberal] & [Rencontre] identified.\u00a0 Which is perhaps the answer I\u2019ve been groping for for so long.\u00a0 [Rencontre] was always a demonic, Romantic, fragmented book; [Liberal] always an epic & encyclopedic one.\u00a0 Now I seem to be working toward the idea of encyclopedia manifesting itself in epiphanic fragmentation. \u00a0The real [Rencontre] might be concerned with the informing languages of experience, and\/or the book of the centre. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 178\u20139]<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 3.<\/strong> I suppose one of the things that\u2019s bothering me is: are there epiphanic points at W & E, taking us into worlds of event & concept?\u00a0 Praxis.\u00a0 The great mystery of the heroic act that the poet can only watch and record.\u00a0 Theoria.\u00a0 The distant vision or Pisgah<\/a> sight.\u00a0 The mystery of the act and of the scene.\u00a0 Perhaps those [Anticlimax] notes I collected that New Year\u2019s Day on St. Clair Avenue were really about the E point of epiphany.\u00a0 Perhaps the W p. of e. [point of epiphany] is a sacramental world of imitative ritual: anyway, it has a lot to do with kairos, repeating the moment in time.\u00a0 From the Incarnation we go into the Pauline occasion-epistle.\u00a0 The note across the way [i.e., par. 185] about the ultima cena<\/a><\/em>, on this theory, sounds W rather than S: the completing of the Presence.\u00a0 Yes: we could think of a W pt. of epiphany into a world of ritual based on analogy to myth.\u00a0 The E one is not strictly dream but the organizing or shaping power inherent in conscious thought.\u00a0 The W passage is Augenblick, the moment of decision when art becomes significant or chosen act; the E is the moment of incarnate dialectic or recognition, when subjective idea & objective fact identify. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 47]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 4. <\/strong>Two, then, on the katabasis<\/a> or epic descent-quest, corresponds to its recovery in 6.\u00a0 It\u2019s concerned with continuous fictional forms, epic & romance.\u00a0 Three is on the dialectic separation at the bottom of the quest, and is concerned with dramatic or episodic fictional forms.\u00a0 Four starts off with the great St. Clair intuition, & deals with thematic continuous forms, confessions & quests for identity, in the course of which social & historical displacements are established.\u00a0 It\u2019s the Augustine-Rousseau<\/a> book, as aforesaid.\u00a0 Five deals with all my comminution ideas, and is the second twist on the anatomy. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 90]<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 5. <\/strong>I notice that every major change of the last few years has been in the direction of naturalizing<\/em> my themes, fitting them to the obvious things I know, or can most easily discover at my time of life.\u00a0 Anchoring [Rencontre] in the old history of English literature scheme does away with having to learn linguistics & such; similarly, if the [Tragicomedy]\u2011[Anticlimax] drama-to-prose gyre (St. Clair) goes through sentimental romance I wouldn\u2019t have to try to mug up any communication theory.\u00a0 One could start with the four forms of fiction & work through a turned-on-side version of the descent theme of [Tragicomedy]. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 333]<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 6.<\/strong> That\u2019s Part One: Part Two is devoted first to confessions & anatomies, then to contracts & Utopia<\/a>s.\u00a0 William Morris<\/a> bulks large here, but the St. Clair illumination does too.\u00a0 Three, revolving around Plato, deals with the informing patterns of thought.\u00a0 Note that [Anticlimax] occupies the theoria<\/em> territory & [Rencontre] the praxis<\/em> one.\u00a0 Hence [Rencontre] has to be historical in its outlook. [The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 336]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n\n