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Yves Saint\u2011Cyr has recently completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled The Glass Bead Game: From Post\u2011Tonal to Post\u2011Modern<\/em> (University of Toronto).\u00a0 It\u2019s an intellectually ambitious and stimulating romp through a wide range of complex literary, critical, and musical texts, painting, and mathematical theory.\u00a0 In his chapter 3 Saint\u2011Cyr turns to Frye in order to illuminate Hermann Hesse<\/a>: Frye\u2019s theory of modes and his theory of the phases of the mythoi <\/em>of comedy can, Saint\u2011Cyr argues, help reveal the formal structure of Hesse\u2019s Das Glasperlenspiel<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 But as Saint\u2011Cyr says early on, the ends and means of this project can be reversed: he wants to investigate the implications of Hesse\u2019s Glass Bead Game \u201cto model the role of recursive paradox in literary criticism.\u201d\u00a0 This seems to point in the direction of Frye as a Glass Bead Game player.\u00a0 Saint\u2011Cyr does say that Frye might well conceive of literary criticism rooted in mythology as a Glass Bead Game, an inference he makes from one of the three places in his writing where Frye refers to the Glass Bead Game, but he never really develops the idea that Frye\u2019s critical constructs are themselves a Glass Bead Game.<\/p>\n Not that he should have, but there is certainly enough in Frye\u2019s published works to make such a case.\u00a0 Bloggers interested in the topic should consult Graham Forst\u2019s \u201c\u2018Frye Spiel\u2019: Northrop Frye and Homo Ludens,\u201d Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature<\/em> 36, no. 3<\/a> (September 2003): 73\u201386.\u00a0 Forst argues that \u201cplay is reading\u2019s central motif and that for Frye, readers see things holistically only when \u201cplayfully\u201d detached: literature \u201cis the quintessential \u2018playful\u2019 medium because it is \u2018detached from immediate action.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 But I suspect the last word on Frye and homo ludens<\/em> [“man at play”] will have to take account of what he both says and implies about play in the notebooks, considering such constructs as the Great Doodle<\/a>, the ogdoad<\/a> (which began when Frye was nine as a dream of writing eight concerti), and the omnipresent HEAP (Hermes\u2011Eros\u2011Adonis\u2011Prometheus) scheme.\u00a0 These are all like a giant board game, a centripetal structure on which Frye continually moves the pieces as he works to show how imaginative patterns inform self and society, cultural creations, history and philosophy\u2013\u2013indeed, everything in the poetic and religious cosmos.\u00a0<\/p>\n The notebooks reveal the expansive free\u2011play of Frye as himself as homo ludens<\/em>.\u00a0 His own comments on his expansive \u201cgame\u201d illustrate that in the tradition of both Huizinga<\/a> and Schiller<\/a> (and of the anatomy form itself) playing the game is serious business.\u00a0 The game has scores of lesser doodles\u2013\u2013permutations, based on schema that Frye has drawn from alchemy, the zodiac, the chessboard, musical keys, colors, the omnipresent \u201cfour kernels\u201d (commandment, aphorism, oracle, and epiphany), the shape of the human body, Blake\u2019s Zoas, Jung<\/a>\u2019s personality types, Bacon<\/a>\u2019s idols, the boxing of the compass by Plato<\/a> and the Romantic poets<\/a>, the Greater Arcana <\/a>of the Tarot cards, the seven days of Creation, the three stages of religious awareness<\/a>, numerology<\/a>, among other schema.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s Frye\u2019s enigmatic \u201cchess\u2011in\u2011bardo<\/a>,\u201d which involves a dialectic of two opposing forces: agon<\/a><\/em> and anagnorisis<\/a><\/em>, choice and chance, descent and ascent. \u00a0All of these things can be seen as a web or net of interconnected imaginative processes, like the jeweled net of Indra<\/a>.\u00a0 To use Saint\u2011Cyr\u2019s phrases, it\u2019s a \u201cconceptual model\u201d and an \u201cepitome of symbolic construction.\u201d\u00a0 The game involves the organizing of cultural symbols, literary ideas, poetic motifs, philosophical categories on a two\u2011dimensional grid, like a game board.\u00a0 Its form is both dialectical and cyclical and at times, when Frye speaks of the gyre or vortext, it\u2019s even three\u2011dimensional.\u00a0 It\u2019s not unlike the description of the Glass Bead Game that Hesse\u2019s Knecht provides in his letter to Tergularius, where \u201cevery symbol and combination of symbols led . . . into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge\u201d (Magister Ludi<\/em>, 104\u20135).\u00a0 This sounds like a description of Frye\u2019s own ogdoad.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In short, the application of the Glass Bead Game to Frye\u2019s own extraordinary game\u2011playing would be a topic worth investigating.\u00a0 It would fill in the hints in that direction we get from Saint\u2011Cyr.\u00a0 In Words with Power<\/em> Frye writes:\u00a0<\/p>\n In ordinary speech we distinguish work and play (GC<\/em> 125): work is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake. Discursive language is working with words, which means that the words should normally be laid out in a straight line leading to the centre of what is being said. But we speak of playing the piano or tennis, and of dramas, even tragedies, as plays. Doing such playing well takes a lot of work, of course, but the end of the work is, or is closely allied to, the self-contained energy of play. It seems clear that the popular conception of discursive prose as more responsible and serious than poetic language is an aspect of the work ethic, an aspect of ideology strong enough for poets themselves to feel its pressure. Nonetheless literature constitutes the intensely difficult and exacting operation of wordplay, and even granting that there is something of Hermann Hesse\u2019s Glass Bead Game<\/em> about the arts, the element of play in them should not be misunderstood as withdrawing from the serious business of society. The distinction of work and play is symbolized by Val\u00e9ry in the contrast of walking and dancing: one has a goal in the distance, the other does not. But when a highly skilled person is performing his skill, it is hardly possible to distinguish the two: the dancer is<\/em> the dance, as Yeats implies. What then is expressed by this work-play? This brings us again to the word \u201cconcern,\u201d a word I have dropped already once or twice, and hope is self-explanatory, as I am not using it in any special sense. (41-2)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0The other two places where Frye refers to the Glass Bead Game are in The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks<\/em>:<\/p>\n Somewhere along here I want to embark on a historical survey of the Logos myth: how the mathematical vision, for example, declines after Newton, & then either turns demonic (Blake\u2019s Europe<\/em><\/a>, Nietzsche\u2019s eternal recurrence<\/a>, Yeats\u2019 Vision<\/em><\/a>) or else gets reborn by way of some kind of games theory.\u00a0 Hesse\u2019s Glasperlenspiel & Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s <\/a>Igitur<\/em> & Coup de D\u00e9s<\/em> belong here, though I don\u2019t just know how yet.\u00a0 I suppose chess in Bardo gets attached. One of the things I find encouraging about this project is the way I\u2019m being compelled to face things I\u2019ve ducked in the AC: Poe\u2019s Eureka<\/em><\/a>, the epic circle, & the like.\u00a0 Browne\u2019s quincunx<\/a>, too.\u00a0 Because a lot of things seem to be converging on Yeats\u2019 double gyre or hourglass figure, of which the X is one form: a conscious world where the mind is at the centre or top; a lower world where the mind is looking into itself below.\u00a0 \u201cPoetic Cosmology\u201d: it sounds like Vico<\/a>. (190\u20131)<\/p>\n In any case the sequence Virgil<\/a>–Proust<\/a> seems the organizing one: the motto of Adonis<\/a> movement is always \u201cThe only paradises are those we have lost.\u201d It seems to me too that Glasperlenspiel<\/em> is a movement from Adonis pastoral to Adonis reality, & that at the end the Master enters death at Nomos<\/a>, in a reversal of the Eros<\/a> Socrates<\/a>-pupil situation, leaving the labyrinth a Hermes<\/a> Oedipus<\/a> inheritance. (202)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u00a0For those interested in pursuing the issue, here are some sources for the homo ludens\/<\/em>Huizinga theme in Frye:<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 1:114<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Late Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 1:256<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Great Code<\/em> 125 (in Collected Works edition, 145)<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The \u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks of Northrop Frye<\/em> 66<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe Bridge of Language,\u201d in On Education<\/em> 167 (Collected Works: Northrop Frye on Modern Culture<\/em> 329)<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Secular Scripture<\/em> 56 (Collected Works: The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em> 40)<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cVision and Cosmos,\u201d in The Secular Scripture and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em>, 220<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Northrop Frye\u2019s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts<\/em> 105, 113, 122, 124, 548\u20139 (the final reference is also in Frye and Macpherson, Biblical and Classical Myths<\/em>, 174\u20135)<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Modern Century<\/em> 68 (Collected Works: Northrop Frye on Modern Culture<\/em> 38)<\/p>\n Outside of Huizinga Frye wrote about games and game\u2011playing in a number of places.\u00a0 Here\u2019s one example:<\/p>\n As a literary critic, I am much concerned with symbols and with conventions, and a graduation ceremony like this one [at Franklin and Marshall College] is both symbolic and conventional. We spend a lot of time playing games, where certain rules are set up and certain illusions agreed upon. Some of these games are contest games, like tennis or writing examinations; some are ritual and ceremonial games like this one. Everything about this occasion: the processions, the gowns, the speeches, the conferring of degrees, are part of an elaborate symbolic let\u2019s pretend. You will not feel tomorrow any different from the way you feel today, but nevertheless we are pretending that today you cease to be a student, whose natural impulse it is to change everything in sight, and that tomorrow you will be an alumnus, whose natural impulse it is to keep the college the way he remembers it.\u00a0 (Northrop Frye\u2019s Writings on Education<\/em>, 317; a slightly different version appears in Reading the World<\/em> 105)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Yves Saint\u2011Cyr has recently completed a Ph.D. dissertation entitled The Glass Bead Game: From Post\u2011Tonal to Post\u2011Modern (University of Toronto).\u00a0 It\u2019s an intellectually ambitious and stimulating romp through a wide range of complex literary, critical, and musical texts, painting, and mathematical theory.\u00a0 In his chapter 3 Saint\u2011Cyr turns to Frye in order to illuminate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,17,120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-call-for-papers","category-play"],"yoast_head":"\n