![\"ouija\"](\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2010\/01\/ouija.jpg\")
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I remember Imre Saluszinsky writing to me years ago, when the Late Notebooks were first published, saying how astonished he was when he read passages from Notebook 44 such as the following, in which Frye is reacting to Helen\u2019s death:\u00a0 \u201cWhen Helen died, the real Helen became an angel in heaven\u2026.Helen was a pile of ashes, an absence to me, and an angel: perhaps she\u2019s a genius to me (or anyone else who loved her and is still living or not living and still confused)\u201d (CW5: 254).\u00a0 Could Frye really mean that he thought Helen could be an angel?\u00a0 Frye is a liberal intellectual, and for liberal intellectuals such metaphors as \u201ceternal life\u201d are merely figures of speech, not realities.\u00a0 Surely eternal life really means to survive in the memories of friends, or to be \u201cone with nature\u201d by becoming part of the nitrogen cycle.\u00a0 But if Frye was opposed to demythologizing the Bible, he would also have been opposed to demetaphorizing it. (I promise to use that hideous word only once).\u00a0 This makes us uncomfortable:\u00a0 it seems to move Frye closer to the kind of fundamentalist literalizers that he himself so often satirized.\u00a0 So we are perhaps most comfortable thinking of the quoted passage \u201cmerely\u201d as an irrational outburst of unbearable grief.\u00a0 After all, the idea is not even Christian:\u00a0 dead human beings do not become angels in Christian heaven.<\/p>\n
However, this entry is the final one in Notebook 44; it occurs 117 pages after the announcement that Helen has died.\u00a0 A mere 11 pages after that announcement, Frye is in a state of mind that most of us could understand more readily; moreover, in this earlier passage, he links Helen\u2019s death to the passage from Hebrews<\/a> that people have been discussing lately:\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019ve said that I have hope about another life, but I don\u2019t have faith, in the Hebrews sense of a hypostasis of hope.\u00a0 The furthest I can get is a negative faith:\u00a0 I do not<\/em> believe that those ten squalid and humiliating days in the Cairns hospital is the total end of a lovely and lovable human being.\u00a0 (Total for all practical purposes:\u00a0 Butler & others would talk about surviving in the memory of others, but miserable comforters are they all.\u00a0 She\u2019s in heaven, Catherine said:\u00a0 but I don\u2019t know where (or what) heaven is, or whether the word \u2018where\u2019 applies to it\u201d (CW5: 148).<\/p>\n Yet Frye gradually develops that negative faith in the direction of a positive faith in Helen\u2019s continued presence<\/em>, in passages such as the following:\u00a0 \u201cBut grief emphasizes the pastness of the past, and so works against the mythical imagination. Helen was\u2014that\u2019s the beginning of tears and mourning.\u00a0 Helen is.\u00a0 What she is, perhaps, is a central element in the unseen which will clarify my understanding, if such clarification is granted to me\u201d (CW5: 139).\u00a0 Here, the hope for eternal life has been provided with substance and evidence: Helen is not absent, but present, here and now.\u00a0 However, I think faith has two aspects, present and future.\u00a0 It provides an experience of infinity and eternity here and now, the world in the grain of sand, eternity in an hour.\u00a0 But the alternative translation of hypostasis <\/em>as \u201cassurance\u201d for the future may be an aspect of faith as well.\u00a0 This is the theme of Milton\u2019s Nativity Ode<\/em>:\u00a0 that on the morning of Christ\u2019s nativity, our redemption is accomplished now<\/em>\u2014but not yet. In Frye\u2019s case, Helen is present now, but that presence provides hope for a future in which they will be reunited in eternity.\u00a0 Only a saint could maintain such faith continuously, but the memory of such moments helps to sustain us in the dark times, when \u201cwe find ourselves staring blankly into an unresponding emptiness, utterly frustrated\u00a0 by its indifference,\u201d as Frye puts it in \u201cTo Come to Light<\/a>,\u201d a sermon of 1988.<\/p>\n Frye\u2019s sense of Helen\u2019s presence as a guardian spirit and Beatrice figure apparently remained on the level of intuition and not of direct vision.\u00a0 He was<\/em>, after all, an intellectual.\u00a0 But in others, extremity has at times produced actual visions, such as Blake had after his brother Robert died.\u00a0 An unexpected publishing phenomenon of the last couple of months has been that of Jung\u2019s Red Book<\/em><\/a>, in which he recorded and illustrated a series of visions he had over a period of several years, midway in the journey of his life, when he had been cast out of the Freudian movement and found himself in a dark wood.\u00a0 Intellectuals, liberal and otherwise, have always been convinced that Jung was a nut case, and one awaits the inevitable reviews of the Red Book<\/em> proclaiming that their hunches have been confirmed.\u00a0 But the funny thing is, all sorts of people have become fascinated enough with the volume to pay $195 dollars for it.\u00a0 Perhaps I should not be so impatient with such intellectuals, but they seem totally unaware of how they\u2014like most people, to be sure\u2014have carefully arranged their lives so that nothing visionary or uncanny could ever enter into them.\u00a0 This provides circular proof for them that the visionary and uncanny do not exist, except as pathological delusions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But it seems to take only a small step outside the boundaries of routine \u201cnormality\u201d to provoke a response from the invisible world on the other side of ours.\u00a0 (Commentators on Freud note that his Unheimlich<\/em>, translated as \u201cuncanny,\u201d literally means \u201cun-homelike\u201d).\u00a0 Years ago, I made Frye a gift of James Merrill\u2019s verse epic, The Changing Light at Sandover<\/em><\/a>, mostly because Merrill wittily drops Frye\u2019s name on the very first page.\u00a0 I am pretty sure Frye never read it, but the whole narrative is purportedly based on a series of Ouija board conversations that Merrill and his partner David Jackson had over many years, both with spirits and departed friends.\u00a0 There is no reason, in my view, to think that Merrill is making this up.\u00a0 My view, to be honest, is colored by an uncanny Ouija board experience I myself had many years ago with a couple of friends\u2014an experience startlingly parallel to Merrill\u2019s, though it took place decades before the publication of Sandover<\/em>.\u00a0 And, believe me, I am one of the intellectuals who normally live a life of routine banality (there is no room for the uncanny in the life of a department chair).<\/p>\n One of the departed is Yeats, whose wife had communications with the dead through automatic writing.\u00a0 As usual, the skeptics pounce on the admission of Yeats\u2019 wife that she faked part of it, but Yeats had plenty of uncanny experiences of his own.\u00a0 Granted, Yeats was clearly trying to believe in as many things as he possibly could:\u00a0 he reminds one of Blake\u2019s Ezekiel, deliberately eating dung and lying on his left side in order to jump start the machinery of vision.\u00a0 Nonetheless, to reject the uncanny or the visionary outright is superstition in the opposite direction.\u00a0 There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by the philosophers\u2014as Hamlet discovers.\u00a0 We cannot dismiss the Ghost in Hamlet <\/em>as Hamlet\u2019s delusion born of his obsession with his dead father and faithless mother.\u00a0 It is Denmark itself that provokes the Ghost to walk, a Denmark anxious and neurotic in a period of chaos and crisis.\u00a0 Once Hamlet is infected, he begins seeing the Ghost when no one else does, fitting it into his system of private obsessions.\u00a0 But originally the Ghost is either a product of collective hysteria\u2014or a Ghost.\u00a0 Likewise, the safe way to read Macbeth<\/em> is as the story of a man who convinces himself that three nutty old women can really tell the future.\u00a0 But that is much too reductive a reading of a play in which nothing is real but what is not.<\/p>\n We are not just speaking of peculiar, marginal experiences:\u00a0 there is an aspect of this that touches literary criticism.\u00a0 Frye did not have the dramatic visions of a Blake or Jung, complete with characters and dialogue.\u00a0 But he did have visions of a more intellectual kind, usually epiphanies of order, of \u201can immense number of things making sense.\u201d\u00a0 There is a sudden outburst in one of Pound\u2019s Cantos<\/a>:\u00a0 “Splendor!\u00a0 It all coheres!\u201d\u00a0 Out of these epiphanies arose Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>, with its conception of a total order of words.\u00a0 No one still knows quite what to make of this.\u00a0 Deconstruction looks at a text and sees aporias; cultural studies looks at the literary tradition and sees an army of ignorant ideologies clashing by night.\u00a0 Even to a more common sense point of view, it seems obvious that \u201cunity\u201d and \u201ctotal pattern\u201d are simply not \u201cthere,\u201d and are being projected out of some kind of wish-fulfillment, comparable to the wish to think of Helen not as an Alzheimer\u2019s patient dead in a hospital halfway around the globe but as a spiritual presence here and now, and forever.\u00a0 But I think the order of words is present, not as an empirical fact, but as Helen was present.<\/p>\n Any text first confronts us as an Otherness, and therefore presents the appearance of a tehom<\/em>, a waste and void, a Chaos because we do not comprehend it, mysterious and alien.\u00a0 But we find, eventually, that it is not merely Chaos after all, and we find that out by interacting with it. We interrogate the text, and it talks back.\u00a0 We discover that we are not free to make it speak anything we want:\u00a0 it seems to speak what it wants to speak, though at the same time we are not sure these communications are not coming out of, or at least being influenced by, our own unconscious; and we are not sure our unconscious has not been conditioned by our ideology or the rules of our interpretive community or whatever. \u00a0But, nonetheless, interpretation is conversation with Otherness, a passing back and forth, by means of which an I-It relationship becomes, at least ideally, an I-Thou<\/a>.\u00a0 Thus, to engage with a text is to talk with a Ouija board.\u00a0 (Those who feel that Ouija boards are kitsch may read Lewis Hyde<\/a>\u2019s Trickster Makes This World<\/em> and note the resemblances between it and the methods of divination practiced by the Yoruba in West Africa.\u00a0 Or, for that matter, between it and the I Ching<\/em><\/a>, which Frye was very much interested in). \u00a0\u00a0What we do is create an order of words out of chaos\u2014with the understanding that by \u201ccreate\u201d we do not mean arbitrarily superimpose, but rather mean something more like \u201cevoke.\u201d\u00a0 Out of the chaos, as the result of creative struggle, arise order and pattern; out of absence dawns presence\u2014the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.\u00a0 This is how we read; this is how we live our lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember Imre Saluszinsky writing to me years ago, when the Late Notebooks were first published, saying how astonished he was when he read passages from Notebook 44 such as the following, in which Frye is reacting to Helen\u2019s death:\u00a0 \u201cWhen Helen died, the real Helen became an angel in heaven\u2026.Helen was a pile of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"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":[150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirtual-vision"],"yoast_head":"\n