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This engaging discussion has led Joe<\/a>\u2013\u2013in his third answer to what for Frye is the function of literature in society\u2013\u2013to what I see as the punch line in Frye, the notion of expanded consciousness that comes from vision.\u00a0 Frye has a compelling account of this and other matters in his essay, \u201cLiterary and Linguistic Scholarship in a Postliterate World,\u201d where he says, after giving his familiar example of metaphorical identification in the Palaeolithic cave drawings, \u201cLater we find the metaphorical imagination expanding into the worlds of dream, belief, vision, fantasy, ideas, as well as human society and nature, and annexing them all to the enlarging consciousness\u201d (\u201cThe Secular Scripture\u201d and Other Writings on Critical Theory<\/em>, <\/em>CW 18, 294).\u00a0 [This comes from the volume Joe and Jean Wilson edited, which is, I think, the richest collection of Frye\u2019s essays on critical theory.]<\/p>\n In the 1970s Frye often wrote about what he called the four levels of awareness, but \u201cawareness\u201d as a category tends to disappear from the writings in the last decade of his life, having been replaced by \u201cconsciousness.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This word is often modified by \u201cenlarged,\u201d \u201cexpanded,\u201d and \u201cintensified.\u201d\u00a0 The cave drawings at Lascaux<\/a>, Altamira<\/a>, and elsewhere are an example of what L\u00e9vy-Bruhl<\/a> called participation mystique<\/em>, the imaginative identification with things, including other people, outside the self, or an absorption of one\u2019s consciousness with the natural world into an undifferentiated state of archaic identity.\u00a0\u00a0 In such a process of metaphorical identification the subject and object merge into one, but the sense of identity is existential rather than verbal (See Words with Power<\/em>, 250, and Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em>, 2:503).<\/p>\n But what does the \u201cintensity or expansion of consciousness\u201d entail for Frye?\u00a0 This is a somewhat slippery phrase to get hold of because Frye reflects on the implications of the phrase only obliquely.\u00a0 But several years ago I nevertheless tried to set down some of the chief features of \u201cexpanded consciousness.\u201d\u00a0 It came out like this:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 It is a function of kerygma.\u00a0 Ordinary rhetoric \u201cseldom comes near the primary concern of \u2018How do I live a more abundant life?\u2019\u00a0 This latter on the other hand is the central theme of all genuine kerygmatic, whether we find it in the Sermon on the Mount<\/a>, the Deer Park Sermon<\/a> of Buddha, the Koran<\/a>, or in a secular book that revolutionizes our consciousness.\u00a0 In poetry anything can be juxtaposed, or implicitly identified with, anything else.\u00a0 Kerygma takes this a step further and says: \u2018you are what you identify with.\u2019\u00a0 We are close to the kerygmatic whenever we meet the statement, as we do surprisingly often in contemporary writing, that it seems to be language that uses man rather than man that uses language\u201d (Words with Power<\/em>, 116).<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 It does not necessarily signify religion or a religious experience, but it can be \u201cthe precondition for any ecumenical or everlasting-gospel religion\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1:17).<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Whatever the techniques used to expand consciousness (for example, yoga<\/a>, Zen<\/a>, psychosynthesis<\/a>, meditation<\/a>, drugs), or whatever forms it takes (for example, dreams, fantasies, the \u201cpeak experiences<\/a>\u201d described by Maslow, ecstatic music), the language of such consciousness always turns out to be metaphorical.\u00a0 Thus literature is the guide to higher consciousness, just as Virgil was Dante\u2019s guide to the expanded vision represented by Beatrice (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 2:717; Words with Power<\/em>, 28\u20139).\u00a0 Still, Frye believes that language is the primary means of \u201cintensifying consciousness, lifting us into a new dimension of being altogether\u201d (LN<\/em>, 2:717).<\/p>\n 4. \u201cVision\u201d is the word that best fits the heightened awareness that comes with the imagination\u2019s opening of the doors of perception.\u00a0 What the subject sees may be \u201conly an elusive and vanishing glimpse.\u00a0 Glimpse of what?\u00a0 To try to answer this question is to remove it to a different category of experience.\u00a0 If we knew what it was, it would be an object perceived in time and space.\u00a0 And it is not an object, but something uniting the objective with ourselves\u201d (Words with Power<\/em>, 83).<\/p>\n 5.\u00a0 The principle behind the epiphanic experience that permits things to be seen with a special luminousness is that \u201cthings are not fully seen until they become hallucinatory.\u00a0 Not actual hallucinations, because those would merely substitute subjective for objective visions, but objective things transfigured by identification with the perceiver.\u00a0 An object impregnated, so to speak, by a perceiver is transformed into a presence\u201d (Words with Power<\/em>, 88).<\/p>\n 6.\u00a0 Intense consciousness does not sever one from the body or the physical roots of experience.\u00a0 \u201cThe word spiritual in English may have a rather hollow and booming sound to some: it is often detached from the spiritual body and made to mean an empty shadow of the material, as with churches who offer us spiritual food that we cannot eat and spiritual riches that we cannot spend.\u00a0 Here spirit is being confused with soul, which traditionally fights with and contradicts the body, instead of extending bodily experience into another dimension.\u00a0 The Song of Songs<\/a> . . . is a spiritual song of love: it expresses erotic feeling on all levels of consciousness, but does not run away from its physical basis or cut off its physical roots.\u00a0 We have to think of such phrases as \u2018a spirited performance\u2019 to realize that spirit can refer to ordinary consciousness at its most intense: the gaya scienza<\/em>, or mental life as play. . . . Similar overtones are in the words esprit<\/em> and Geist<\/em>\u201d (Words with Power<\/em>, 128).\u00a0 Or again, St. John of the Cross<\/a> makes \u201ca modulation from existential sex metaphor (M2<\/sub>) to existential expanding of consciousness metaphor (M1<\/sub>)\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 120).\u00a0 As in Aufhebung<\/em>, things lifted to another level do not cancel their connection to the previous level: \u201cM2<\/sub>\u201d is still present at the higher level.\u00a0 Chapter 6 (\u201cThe Garden\u201d) of Words with Power<\/em> \u201cis concerned partly, if not mainly, with getting over the either-or antithesis between the spiritual and the physical, Agape love and Eros love\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 2:451).\u00a0 Again, \u201cspiritual love expands from the erotic and does not run away from it\u201d (Words with Power<\/em>, 224).<\/p>\n 7.\u00a0 Intensified consciousness is represented by images of both ascent and descent: \u201cimages of ascent are connected with the intensifying of consciousness, and images of descent with the reinforcing of it by other forms of awareness, such as fantasy or dream.\u00a0 The most common images of ascent are ladders, mountains, towers, and trees; of descent, caves or dives into water\u201d (Words with Power<\/em>, <\/em>151).\u00a0 These images, which arrange themselves along the axis mundi<\/em>, are revealed with exceptional insight in some of Frye\u2019s most powerfully perceptive writing, the last four chapters of Words with Power<\/em>.\u00a0 In these concentrated chapters Frye illustrates how four central archetypes connect the ordinary world to the world of higher consciousness: the mountain and the cave emphasizing wisdom and the word, and the garden and the furnace emphasizing love and the spirit.<\/p>\n 8.\u00a0 Expanded consciousness is both individual and social.<\/p>\n 9.\u00a0 The raising of consciousness is revelation (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1:61).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This engaging discussion has led Joe\u2013\u2013in his third answer to what for Frye is the function of literature in society\u2013\u2013to what I see as the punch line in Frye, the notion of expanded consciousness that comes from vision.\u00a0 Frye has a compelling account of this and other matters in his essay, \u201cLiterary and Linguistic Scholarship […]<\/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":[16,82,87,170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-intensified-consciousness","category-kerygma","category-words-with-power"],"yoast_head":"\n