![\"quiet\"](\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/10\/quiet.jpg\")
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When he was still a student Frye set out to write a novel called Quiet Consummation<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 In 1935, he wrote to Roy Daniells:<\/p>\n I come up blushing shyly to confess that I am taking advantage of my unaccustomed freedom to start working a bit on a novel.\u00a0 Its provisional title is Quiet Consummation.\u00a0 It\u2019s not much of a novel, but I want to get it out of my system.\u00a0 No plot or theme or thesis or anything, just yet.\u00a0 It\u2019s laid out in sonata form.\u00a0 Amusing, I think, if it comes off at all.\u00a0 I am beginning to realize that while I may and probably will turn out some fairly decent things on Blake and Shakespeare and Augustine and the rest critically, the larger problem they refer back to, the relation of religion and art in symbolism, will require fictional and dramatic treatment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In Notebook 5, which apparently dates from about this time, Frye sketched on the flyleaf, \u201cQuiet Consummation \/ A Novel in Sonata Form<\/a> \/ Eratus Howard \/ Part One, Exposition\u201d; on the second leaf is an \u201cAnalysis\u201d of the novel, outlined as the exposition, development, and recapitulation. [Frye was apparently adopting the name of his brother\u2013\u2013Eratus Howard Frye\u2013\u2013as a pseudonym].\u00a0 He was never able to realize this fantasy.\u00a0 Notebook 5 contains nothing else about Quiet Consummation, and there is not so much as a whisper about it elsewhere his early notebooks.\u00a0 But Frye did return to it fifty years later when he was looking for a form that would combine the creative and the critical\u2013\u2013something aphoristic, anagogic, erudite, imaginative, even fictional that would be a quiet consummation of his life\u2019s work.<\/p>\n One proposal for the final book in Frye\u2019s ogdoad, which he called Twilight, was a book of aphorisms.\u00a0 The desire to complete such a book emerges from a dozen or so entries in Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 \u201cI wonder,\u201d he writes, \u201cif I could be permitted to write my Twilight book, not as evidence of my own alleged wisdom but as a \u2018next time\u2019 (Henry James) book, putting my spiritual case more forcefully yet, and addressed to still more readers\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1:417)\u00a0 The reference here is to James\u2019s The Next Time<\/em><\/a>, the story of a writer whose work is admired by a small coterie but who is frustrated by his failure to reach a large audience.\u00a0 Frye proposes several models for his anagogic book, and he says, <\/em>\u201cI wouldn\u2019t want to plan such a book as a dumping ground for things I can\u2019t work in elsewhere or as a set of echoes of what I\u2019ve said elsewhere.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cSuch a book would feature,\u201d he adds \u201ccompletely uninhibited writing\u201d and \u201ccompletely uninhibited metaphor-building,\u201d and some of the entries might even be fictional. [For Frye\u2019s additional speculations on the anagogic book, see Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1: 172\u20133, 238, 372.]<\/p>\n Toward the end of Notebook 50, when Frye realizes that he may not live much longer, he suggests still another variation on the final book.\u00a0 He scribbles somewhat cryptically, \u201cOpus Perhaps Posthumous: Working Title: Quintessence of Dust.\u00a0 Four Essays.\u201d\u00a0 And then, a dozen entries later, he adds, \u201cQuintessence and dust; Quarks or pinpoints; Quest and Cycle: Quiet Consummation\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 415, 417).\u00a0 \u201cFour Essays,\u201d the subtitle of Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>, hints at the conventions of the anatomy as a genre.\u00a0 \u201cQuintessence of Dust<\/a>\u201d is a phrase from Hamlet\u2019s dialogue with Rosenkranz and Guildenstern (act. 2, sc. 2), and of course \u201cQuiet Consummation\u201d (the phrase comes from Guiderius and Arviragus\u2019s song in Cymbelin<\/em>e, 4.2. 280) returns us to Frye\u2019s 1935 fantasy.<\/p>\n Here are a couple of the models Frye proposes for Twilight:<\/p>\n This may be a crazy notion, or it may be one of my central intuitions coming to a head.\u00a0 I\u2019ve always wanted to write something in the conventionally \u201ccreative\u201d modes towards the end of my life.\u00a0 I\u2019ve even thought of a long poem, though I certainly know that I\u2019d have to go through quite a metamorphosis before I could bring that off\u2014even so, I was thinking only of the kind of versified speculation that Buckminster Fuller<\/a> brought out a while ago.\u00a0 Fiction of course I\u2019ve thought of more frequently, but learning the mechanics of any kind of fiction is a disheartening and unpredictable procedure at my age.\u00a0 So I\u2019ve thought most frequently of a book of brief essays or meditations, perhaps a century of meditations like Traherne<\/a>\u2019s, though naturally of a very different kind.\u00a0 I\u2019ve often said too (to myself) that a book like Anatole France<\/a>\u2019s Jardin d\u2019Epicure [a bricolage<\/em> of essays, dialogues, epigrams, and other short prose fragments] would be ideal in format and general conception for me, except that I\u2019d want my book to display a less commonplace mind than his was. \u00a0(Northrop Frye\u2019s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings<\/em>, 155\u20136)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The interesting thing about Frye\u2019s last-book fantasies is their correspondence to the notebooks themselves.\u00a0 Frye himself makes the connection between the \u201caphoristic book\u201d and his \u201cnotebook obsession\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 172\u20133), and the notebooks are a Promethean exercise in uninhibited writing and metaphor-building.\u00a0 His notebooks are, of course, not Twilight, not the anagogic book of aphorisms that he dreamed about\u2014\u201c\u2018my own\u2019 book of pens\u00e9es,\u201d as he called it (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1:372). \u00a0\u00a0But it is possible that the core of Twilight ould have come from a selection of his notebook entries.\u00a0 Frye says that Twilight is \u201cideally\u00a0 . . . a book to be put away in a drawer and have published after my death\u201d and that he always thought of the final book in his ogdoad fantasy as \u201csomething perhaps not reached\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1:238, 173).\u00a0 Perhaps his notebooks do in fact serve as the quiet consummation of his life\u2019s work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When he was still a student Frye set out to write a novel called Quiet Consummation.\u00a0 In 1935, he wrote to Roy Daniells: I come up blushing shyly to confess that I am taking advantage of my unaccustomed freedom to start working a bit on a novel.\u00a0 Its provisional title is Quiet Consummation.\u00a0 It\u2019s not […]<\/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":[16,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bob-denham","category-notebooks"],"yoast_head":"\n