{"id":5816,"date":"2009-12-05T18:26:24","date_gmt":"2009-12-05T22:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=5816"},"modified":"2009-12-05T18:26:24","modified_gmt":"2009-12-05T22:26:24","slug":"fryes-seattle-illumination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2009\/12\/05\/fryes-seattle-illumination\/","title":{"rendered":"Frye’s Seattle Illumination"},"content":{"rendered":"

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=7E4S-E2qAX8<\/p>\n

The finale of Verdi’s <\/em>Falstaff.<\/p>\n

Joe Adamson\u2019s post<\/a> about the stages of ascent and descent reminded me of Frye\u2019s Seattle epiphany, which he conceived of as part of a dialectic that occurs along the <\/em>axis mundi.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an adaptation of something I wrote several years back about this epiphany\u2013\u2013what Frye called his Seattle illumination, referred to in an earlier posting, \u201cFrye\u2019s Epiphanies<\/a>.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The references to the Seattle epiphany are somewhat cryptic: they center on what Frye calls the passage from oracle to wit.\u00a0 The oracle was one of Frye\u2019s four or five \u201ckernels,\u201d his word for the seeds or distilled essences of more expansive forms.\u00a0 He often refers to the seeds as kernels of Scripture or of concerned prose.\u00a0 The other microcosmic kernels are commandment, parable, and aphorism, and (occasionally) epiphany.\u00a0 Frye sometimes conceives of the kernels as what he calls comminuted forms, fragments that develop into law (from commandment), prophecy (from oracle), wisdom (from aphorism), history or story (from parable), and theophany (from epiphany).\u00a0 There are variations in Frye\u2019s account of the kernels (aphorism is sometimes called proverb, for example, and occasionally pericope and dialogue are called kernels), but those differences are not important for understanding the oracle-wit illumination.<\/p>\n

Oracle is almost always for Frye a lower-world kernel.\u00a0 It is linked with thanatos, secrecy, solitude, intoxication, mysterious ciphers, caves, the dialectic of choice and chance, and the descent to the underworld.\u00a0 The locus of the oracle is the point of demonic epiphany, the lower, watery world of chaos and the ironic vision.\u00a0 The central oracular literary moments for Frye include Poe\u2019s Arthur Gordon Pym<\/a>\u2019s diving for the cipher at the South Pole, the descent to the bottom of the sea in Keats\u2019s Endymion<\/em><\/a>, Odysseus in the cave of Polyphemus<\/a>, the Igitur episode in Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s Coup de D\u00e9s<\/em><\/a>, the visit to the cave of Trophonius<\/a>, and, most importantly, the oracle of the bottle<\/a> in Rabelais, who was one of Frye\u2019s most admired literary heroes.\u00a0 As for wit, in the context of the Seattle illumination, it is related to laughter, the transformation of recollection into repetition, the breakthrough from irony to myth, the telos<\/em> of interpenetration that Frye found in the Avatamsaka Sutra<\/em>, new birth, knowledge of both the future and the self, the recognition of the hero, the fulfillment of prophecy, revelation, and detachment from obsession.\u00a0 The oracular and the witty came together for Frye in the Finale of Verdi\u2019s Falstaff<\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n

Frye calls the Seattle illumination a \u201cbreakthrough,\u201d and the experience, whatever it was, appears to have been decisive for him.\u00a0 He was thirty-nine at the time, literally <\/em>midway through his journey of life.\u00a0 One can say with some confidence that the Seattle epiphany was a revelation to Frye that he need not surrender to what he spoke of as the century\u2019s three A\u2019s: alienation, anxiety, absurdity; that he realized there was a way out of the abyss; that he embraced the view of life as purgatorial; that, in short, he accepted the invitation of the Spirit and the Bride in Revelation 22:17.\u00a0 \u201cThe door of death,\u201d Frye writes, \u201chas oracle on one side & wit on the other: when one goes through it one recovers the power of laughter\u201d (\u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks<\/em>, 162).\u00a0 And laughter, for Frye, is the \u201csudden release from the unpleasant\u201d (Notebooks on Romance<\/em>, 73).\u00a0 Oracles are, of course, ordinarily somber, and wit, in one of its senses, is lighthearted.\u00a0 Pausanius tells us that the ritual of consulting the oracle in the cave of Trophonius was so solemn that the suppliants who emerged were unable to laugh for some time: but they did recover their power to laugh.\u00a0 There is a \u201cporous osmotic wall between the oracular and the funny,\u201d Frye writes in Notebook 27 (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1:15). <\/em>Similarly in Gargantua and Pantagruel<\/em>, when Panurge and Friar John consult the oracle of the Holy Bottle, there is, if not literal laughter, an intoxicating delight that comes from the oracle\u2019s invitation to drink; and we are told that the questers then \u201cpassed through a country full of all delights.\u201d\u00a0 This is why \u201cRabelais is essential to Dante\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1:15).\u00a0 But laughter here is more than a physical act.\u00a0 It is a metaphor for the sudden spiritual transformation that is captured in the paravritti<\/em> of Mahayana Buddhism<\/a>.\u00a0 Paravritti<\/em> literally means \u201cturning up\u201d or \u201cchange,\u201d and according to D.T. Suzuki it corresponds to conversion in religious experience.\u00a0 In the Lankavatara Sutra<\/em><\/a> we are told that in his transcendental state of consciousness the Buddha laughed \u201cthe loudest laugh,\u201d and in his marginal annotation of this passage Frye notes that \u201cthe laugh expresses a sudden release of Paravritti.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> Frye describes the oracular mind as lying beneath the conscious one whose original archetype is the cave of Trophonius (353).\u00a0 This is the world of the penseroso<\/em> mood–the return to the womb or the imaginative withdrawal that we get in sixth phase romance.\u00a0 To escape from what Frye calls the \u201coracular cave\u201d (\u201cThird Book\u201d Notebooks<\/em>, 198) is to enter the world of the \u201cawakened critical intelligence\u201d or wit (Anatomy<\/em>, 185\u20136).\u00a0 It is, as described in Notebook 21, \u201cthe passage from dream to waking\u201d (Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible<\/em>, 227).\u00a0 To leave the dream-cave is to turn one\u2019s back on what in the Anatomy<\/em> Frye refers to as the reductio ad absurdum<\/em>, \u201cwhich is not designed to hold one in perpetual captivity, but to bring one to the point at which one can escape\u201d (233).\u00a0 This means that the movement of oracle to wit is the movement from the world of magical nothingness to full awareness or recognition.\u00a0 In Beyond the Body: The Human Double and the Astral Planes<\/em>, Benjamin Walker<\/a> concludes that what ultimately happens to the soul is that it loses its body on earth and loses its sense of individuality in the celestial abodes.\u00a0 Reacting to this conclusion, Frye wrote in the margin of Walker\u2019s book, \u201cyou don\u2019t lose<\/em> anything: you lose the lower sphere, or nothingness.\u201d\u00a0 What you gain, by contrast, is self\u2013knowledge and creative energy.\u00a0 In one of his more revealing commentaries on oracle, this one on the oracle at Delphi, Frye writes,<\/p>\n

The motto of Delphi was \u201cknow thyself,\u201d which suggests that the self intended was a conscience far below the ego with its anxieties of self-interest, far below all social and cultural conditioning, in short the spiritual self.\u00a0 For that self to \u201cknow itself\u201d would constitute the unity of Word and Spirit in which all consciousness begins and ends.\u00a0 Such a spirit could produce its own oracles, and they would be not only genuinely prophetic but genuinely witty.\u00a0 Finnegans Wake<\/em> is the only book I know which is devoted entirely to this hidden intercommunion of Word and Spirit, with no emergence into the outside world at any point, but of course the creative energy involved has produced all literature. (Words with Power<\/em>, 251)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wit is both an efficient and a final cause of satire.\u00a0 One of the differences between irony and satire is that the former represents humanity in a state of bondage, whereas the effort to escape from bondage marks the latter.\u00a0 In one of his notebooks for Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> Frye writes, \u201csatire goes up the ladder of laughter, through the low norm of the experiential & the high norm of the innocent, to participating in the laughter of the gods at the fallen state of man (which is sadistic if God & man are not mutually involved).\u00a0 That gives me a Lankavatara quote\u201d (178\u20139), the Lankavatara quotation being the \u201cloudest laugh\u201d passage, mentioned above, that Frye annotated in his copy of the Lankavatara Sutra.<\/em> This is apparently what Frye means when he writes that by moving in a Lankavatara direction he hopes \u201cto bust the supremacy of the existential\u201d (ibid., 208), with all of its ritual bondage and poker-faced Angst<\/em>.\u00a0 By the time he came to write The Secular Scripture<\/em>, some twenty-five years after the Seattle experience, Frye put the axis mundi<\/em> movement in these terms in his chapter on \u201cThemes of Ascent\u201d:<\/p>\n

As the hero or heroine enters the labyrinthine lower world, the prevailing moods are those of terror or uncritical awe.\u00a0 At a certain point, perhaps when the strain, as the storyteller doubtless hopes, is becoming unbearable, there may be a revolt of the mind, a recovered detachment, the typical expression of which is laughter.\u00a0 The ambiguity of the oracle becomes the ambiguity of wit, something addressed to a verbal understanding that shakes the mind free.\u00a0 This point is also marked by generic changes from the tragic and ironic to the comic and satiric.\u00a0 Thus in Rabelais the huge giants, the search for an oracle, and other lower-world themes that in different contexts would be frightening or awe\u2011inspiring, are presented as farce.\u00a0 Finnegans Wake<\/em> in our day also submerges us in a dream world of mysterious oracles, but when we start to read the atmosphere changes, and we find ourselves surrounded by jokes and puns.\u00a0 Centuries earlier, the story was told of how Demeter wandered over the world in fruitless search of her lost daughter Proserpine, and sat lonely and miserable in a shepherd\u2019s hut until the obscene jests and raillery of the servant girl Iambe and the old nurse Baubo finally persuaded her to smile.\u00a0 The Eleusinian mysteries which Demeter established were solemn and awful rites of initiation connected with the renewal of the fertility cycle; but Iambe and Baubo helped to ensure that there would also be comic parodies of them, like Aristophanes\u2019 Frogs<\/em>.\u00a0 According to Plutarch, those who descended to the gloomy cave of the oracle of Trophonius might, after three days, recover the power of laughter. (129)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe moment of illumination,\u201d Frye writes in one of his marginalia to the Rigveda<\/em>, is \u201chumorous & not pompous.\u201d\u00a0 A further gloss on the Seattle experience is Frye\u2019s juxtaposition, in one of his sets of typed notes for The Secular Scripture<\/em>, of the recovery of laughter in the cave of Trophonius, located at the south point of his mandala, with \u201cBlake\u2019s boy born in joy.\u201d\u00a0 This is a reference to the boy in The Mental Traveller<\/em> who \u201cwas begotten in dire woe\u201d\u2013\u2013another example of the gleeful release arising from the gloomy, oracular depths.\u00a0 Or, as Frye says in Notebook 21, \u201cLaughter means hostility in the ironic direction and assimilation in the paradisal one\u201d (Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible<\/em>, 231).<\/p>\n

Finally, the oracle\u2011wit distinction is parallel to a number of Frye\u2019s other bipolar distinctions.\u00a0 By collapsing the distinctions we experience in ordinary waking reality, the oracular is metaphorical.\u00a0 The process is like that of condensation in Freud\u2019s account of dream\u2011work, accidental slips, allegories, and the like: a single word or image comes to represent two or more ideas, memories, or feelings.\u00a0 In contrast, the witty, having to do with recognition, is metonymic: one thing is put for another, as in Freudian displacement, and so is accommodated to waking experience once we have ascended from the oracular cave.\u00a0 Condensation occurs in a pre\u2011recognition state.\u00a0 Displacement belongs to daylight world where one recognizes the point of the joke\u2013-the \u201coh\u2011I\u2011see\u201d moment of release and illumination.\u00a0 Similarly, to use another of Frye\u2019s distinctions, oracle represents a centripetal movement into the identities of metaphor, as in the interrelationship of words in Finnegans Wake<\/em>; and wit, a centrifugal movement out into the world of realistic awareness, as in the continuous narrative of War and Peace<\/em>, where myth has been adapted to the canons of plausibility.<\/p>\n

Precisely what happened in Seattle and why it happened will no doubt remain mysteries.\u00a0 As oracle belongs to the complex of things Frye associates with metaphor, and wit with those things associated with myth, perhaps the Seattle experience had to do with the realization that these to principles would become the backbone of the Anatomy<\/em>.\u00a0 In any case, there is no difficulty in accepting Frye\u2019s judgment that the intuition was a breakthrough: it certainly helps to explain his treatment of the themes of romance in the secular scripture and the last four chapters of his second book on the sacred scripture.\u00a0 Nor is there difficulty in understanding what he means when he says, \u201cI\u2019ve spent nearly eighty years trying to articulate intuitions that occupied about five minutes of my entire life\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 2:636).\u00a0 The Seattle illumination may not have involved only laughing in the face of irony\u2013\u2013the telling moment that Frye saw in Trophonius and Rabelais and in the pure detachment of the Buddha\u2019s laugh.\u00a0 It may have been related also to the vision of dice-throwing in Mallarm\u00e9\u2019s Igitur<\/em>, which Frye summarized some years later this way: \u201cin Mallarm\u00e9 the dice represent a world where, in Yeats\u2019s phrase, choice and chance are one.\u00a0 Throwing dice is a commitment to chance that does not abolish chance, but is in itself a free act, and so begins a negating of negation that brings something, perhaps everything, into being again\u201d (Words with Power<\/em>, 292).\u00a0 The dice-throwing seems also to be linked (one of Frye\u2019s favorite words) with the metaphorical-game tradition, which explores the metaphorical foundation of discursive prose and which Frye sees as characterizing some of his own work.\u00a0 \u201cThe word game,\u201d he writes, \u201cis linked to the fact that its centre of gravity is that mysterious area I\u2019ve talked so much about, where the oracular and witty seem different aspects of the same thing\u201d (Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible<\/em>, 301).\u00a0 In The Secular Scripture<\/em> Frye writes that in comedy the device that breaks the spell of death or paralysis is the recognition scene, and the word \u201crecognition,\u201d as Aristotle and Oedipus the King<\/em> remind us, has to do with figurative seeing, whether comic or tragic.\u00a0 And here again the recognition scene \u201ctransforms a story into a kind of game\u201d (Secular Scripture<\/em>, 130).\u00a0 The point of all this for Frye is that the abyss must be entered and the nightmare vision confronted before a triumphant reversal can occur.\u00a0 It may not be for Frye, as it was for Heraclitus, that the way up and the way down are one and the same, but he sometimes comes close to suggesting that:\u00a0 \u201cThe principle of the higher or unfallen world is harmony or concord; the principle of the lower world is metamorphosis, the passing out of one state of being into another.\u00a0 But perhaps a sufficiently penetrating wisdom could see in metamorphosis itself a kind of harmony, a principle of change moving in correspondence with the worlds above\u201d (Northrop Frye on Literature and Society<\/em>, 183).\u00a0 To pass through the door of wit permits one to embark on the purgatorial journey, that journey of spirit-making that figures so importantly in the notebooks and finally gets articulated in the chapters 4\u20138 of Words with Power<\/em> and in The Double Vision<\/em>.\u00a0 In any event, moving both directions on the axis mundi<\/em> is part of the double movement of the spiritual vision that defines and is defined by Frye\u2019s religious quest.<\/p>\n

One final gloss on how recreation can emerge from the descent downward, from a 1971 letter to Brian Coates:<\/p>\n

I think one should keep in mind, when dealing with modern literature, that the mythical map of the universe is much more ambiguous than it was before the Romantic period.\u00a0 For Dante, heaven was up there, hell down there, and consequently all myths of descent were likely to have a sinister or demonic implication.\u00a0 In modern times, the poles of the mythical universe are not heaven and hell, nor are the poles consistently associated with certain spatial projections.\u00a0 The two poles are alienation and identity.\u00a0 In some writers, including Blake and Shelley, the pole of alienation is associated with the sky, and the pole of identity with a submerged world like Atlantis.\u00a0 It is quite possible to have a demonic descent them, as the one in Heart of Darkness<\/em> or the Waste<\/em> <\/em>Land<\/em>.\u00a0 But it is equally possible to have a journey to the deep interior in search of identity.\u00a0 It is only in this latter case that the theme of rebirth is really built into the mythical structure.\u00a0 The theme of rebirth may of course also be expressed by the theme of eternal recurrence, as it is in Yeats and in Finnegans Wake<\/em>.\u00a0 And of course recurrence may be looked at in two ways: as an ironic unending cycle or as an image of recreation and the making of all things new.\u00a0 In Finnegans Wake<\/em> it is unmistakably both; Yeats warbles on the point, partly because he was trying to listen to \u201cinstructors\u201d who didn\u2019t know what they were talking about (Northrop Frye: Selected Letters, 1934\u20131991<\/em>, 124).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=7E4S-E2qAX8 The finale of Verdi’s Falstaff. 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