{"id":8253,"date":"2010-02-18T01:45:33","date_gmt":"2010-02-18T05:45:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=8253"},"modified":"2010-02-18T01:45:33","modified_gmt":"2010-02-18T05:45:33","slug":"northrop-frye-on-medicine-a-talk-to-the-doctors-at-moncton-city-hospital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/02\/18\/northrop-frye-on-medicine-a-talk-to-the-doctors-at-moncton-city-hospital\/","title":{"rendered":"Northrop Frye on Medicine: A Talk to the Doctors at Moncton City Hospital"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fp-logo\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We are showcasing another paper being added to the Frye Festival Section in our Journal<\/a> section. This one is by Bob Denham and was delivered at the Frye Festival<\/a> in April, 2004.\u00a0 It can be found in the Archive here<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Northrop Frye Literary Festival, <\/em>Moncton<\/em>, <\/em>NB<\/em>, April 2004<\/em><\/p>\n

It is difficult to imagine a body of accomplishments larger than those of the man who is honored by having his name attached to this festival.\u00a0 His preeminence as a literary theorist, his labors on behalf of Canadian culture, his devoted work as a public servant, his achievements as a teacher at Victoria College for more than sixty years, and of course the massive body of writing that has instructed and delighted us for almost seventy\u2011five years now\u2014these achievements have been well documented. \u00a0The written responses to his work\u2014the books and essays and reviews occasioned by his own eloquent prose\u2014require a fairly thick volume just to record, and they have originated on every continent of the globe save Antarctica.\u00a0 No Anglo-American critic has as great an international reputation as Frye.\u00a0 As for his national reputation, five years ago a panel of experts for Maclean\u2019s<\/em> magazine chose Frye as the second most important Canadian in history?[1]<\/a> To date there are twenty\u2011eight books devoted in whole to his work.\u00a0 He has been the subject of international conferences in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Italy, Korea, and China\u2013-in fact twice in China.\u00a0 And there are more than 200 translations of his books into twenty languages.\u00a0 All this bears witness to an accomplishment that even a disinterested observer would have to call monumental.<\/p>\n

Whatever one says about Frye will always fall short, and I feel in danger of taking a big fall this noon, for what can one say to a group of doctors as doctors<\/em> about Northrop Frye.\u00a0 Well, I thought it might be of some interest to call up a few things that relate to the topic of Frye and medicine, which is a topic no one has really talked about much. \u00a0And then we\u2019ll open up the floor for questions and comments.\u00a0 I doubtless won\u2019t be able to answer your questions, but I am naturally very interested in the kinds of questions you might have about Moncton\u2019s most famous native son.\u00a0 It was as a child in Moncton, incidentally, that Frye, as he records in one of his notebooks, had the fantasy \u201cof becoming a great astronomer & discovering a new planet beyond Neptune that I was going to call Pluto.\u201d\u00a0 This wouldn\u2019t be particularly noteworthy, except that the fantasy occurred more than a decade before Pluto was actually discovered.\u00a0 I mention this little anecdote to remind us that Frye was a genius.\u00a0 Whether ESP is an aspect of genius, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

In any event, Frye and medicine is an interesting subject to think about.\u00a0 The body was a central metaphor in Frye\u2019s criticism, as it was in the work of his great literary hero, William Blake.\u00a0 In editing Frye\u2019s diaries several years back I was struck by Frye\u2019s concern for the health of his own body and psyche.\u00a0 He reveals a great deal through self-analysis, writing about his abnormal fears, his physical insecurity, his self-consciousness, his introversion, his sanguine humour and his dark moods, his claustrophobia and paranoia, his grieving over the death of a colleague, his phobia about animals, and so on.\u00a0 And he writes at length about his various bodily deficiencies and physical ailments: his deviated septum, hay fever attacks, constipation, insomnia, and various states of stupor induced by too much alcohol.\u00a0 He probes his own ego as well, often from a Jungian perspective.\u00a0 I would guess that the details in Frye\u2019s description of his symptoms would provide a fairly good basis for diagnosis.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I can think of only one sustained investigation of the topic of Frye and medicine, a paper written by Rebecca Hagey twenty years ago.\u00a0 It\u2019s entitled \u201cCodes and Coping: A Nursing Tribute to Northrop Frye,\u201d and it was published in Nursing Papers\/Perspectives on Nursing<\/em>.[2]<\/a> Hagey, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology and who was at the time an associate professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto, argues that the theory of interpretation in Frye\u2019s The Great Code<\/em> can be useful in the art of nursing, for the dramatic narratives that are shaped from the nurse-patient relationship attend to images, struc\u00adtures of meaning, symbolic codes, and transformations.\u00a0 And these things, Hagey maintains, are more im\u00adportant in nursing care than rigid models and mechanical procedures for diagnosis.\u00a0 Her paper is mostly based on analogies between Frye\u2019s theories of language, myth, typology, and the phases of revelation, on the one hand, and patient care on the other.\u00a0 How, Frye asks, does one read and interpret a text.\u00a0 How, asks Hagey, does the \u201cnurse \u2018read,\u2019 interpret and make sense of coping processes in Western culture.\u201d[3]<\/a> She presents several stories about patients, and then applies what Frye says about mythical, metaphorical, and typological constructs to these cases, concluding that diagnoses and coping strategies that ignore such constructs become mechanical and thus lead to alienation in health care settings.\u00a0 Now that\u2019s a rather unexpected conjunction of two fields\u2013-nursing and literary criticism\u2013-and I\u2019m not convinced that the parallels are all that substantive, but Hagey does show that nursing is always confronting the different phases of language that Frye examines in The Great Code<\/em>, and that matters of metaphor and story and dramatic setting are always a part of the context of nursing.<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s library contains very few books that one could call medical.\u00a0 He owned the revised edition of Benjamin F. Miller\u2019s The Complete Medical Guide<\/em>,[4]<\/a> which I suppose he consulted for his various ailments. \u00a0And he annotated his own a copy of Howard Wilcox Haggard\u2019s Devils, Drugs and Doctors: The Story of the Science of Healing from Medicine-Man to Doctor<\/em>,[5]<\/a> a somewhat crude and na\u00efve account of medical history but one filled nevertheless with the kind of arcane and esoteric lore that always attracted him.\u00a0 In one of his diaries, Frye takes a fairly extensive series of notes on the book (1942, par. 61)<\/p>\n

One of the medical tragedies in Frye\u2019s life occurred in 1936, when he was twenty\u2011three.\u00a0 He was getting ready to head off to study at Oxford: thus, he\u2019d be separated from his girlfriend Helen Kemp for a year.\u00a0 Frye had left the Kemp\u2019s cottage in Gordon Bay for Moncton, where he was to spend a month before sailing for England.\u00a0 This is the first trip home he had made since the summer of 1933, and the visit produced little comfort.\u00a0 He was distressed that he would not see Helen Kemp for a year. His mother, now sixty\u2011five, had aged considerably, and his father was barely managing to eke out a living.\u00a0 Frye arranged his passage to England from Montreal, rather than Halifax, with the hope that Kemp might meet him there before he sailed.\u00a0 \u201cI want to see you,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0 Kemp replied sometime during the third week of August (the letter is missing from the files), saying that she was ill.\u00a0 Frye quickly advised her to see a doctor when she returned to Toronto from Gordon Bay, adding that she shouldn\u2019t \u201cjump to conclusions quite so quickly this time\u2014I\u2019ve been away two weeks, remember.\u201d\u00a0 Kemp wrote again from Gordon Bay with the news that she \u201cmay have to have some kind of treatment\u201d for she seems \u201cto have missed a month,\u201d and the subsequent letters confirm what they both suspect\u2014that Kemp was pregnant, apparently for the second time.\u00a0 \u201cI keep telling myself,\u201d Frye said in his next letter, \u201cthat I can\u2019t have caused it both times, that there must be something else the matter, but that doesn\u2019t work.\u201d\u00a0 On 27 August, Kemp, having gone back to Toronto with her mother, sent Frye the news that she had had an abortion, performed by a doctor who had learned a new method in Germany.\u00a0 Abortion was illegal in Canada at the time, but Kemp\u2019s mother, working through a nurse who was \u201cvery competent, experienced and sympathetic,\u201d was able to make the necessary arrangements.\u00a0 Frye did send $15 to help pay for the operation, but on the whole he was somewhat insensitive to the plight of Kemp, who ended up with an infection that did her body more harm than the abortion.\u00a0 Her frank account of the details of all this is not pleasant.<\/p>\n

One of the ironies of this unhappy episode is that Kemp\u2019s father was engaged in making birth control information available in Canada. \u00a0When Helen Kemp had been studying art in England two years before, her father had requested that she send him Marie Stopes\u2019s books on birth control, which were considered contraband in Canada; which she did, and he circulated these books, as well as others already in his possession, to a number of friends and acquaintances. \u00a0In any event, my guess is that this back\u2011alley \u201ctreatment,\u201d as Helen Kemp called it, was they reason they could never have children.\u00a0 The irony, in other words, ends up being a tragedy.<\/p>\n

Frye could have fun at the expense of doctors.\u00a0 In his 1942 Diary he writes, \u201cMy druggist tells me that a new drug act has been passed preventing several drugs, including codeine and phenobarbol [phenobarbitol], to be sold over the counter without a doctor\u2019s prescription, thus greatly reducing the effectiveness of such potent medicines as the one that\u2019s helping me.\u00a0 Sounds like a medical stranglehold on their apothecary enemies of 3000 yrs.\u00a0 There may be a lot to be said on both sides, but doctors today are such ignorant barbarians, & their sense of heresy is priestly rather than scientific.\u00a0 They are in fact the modern priests, supported by women, with the advantage over the priests of being able to tickle their bellies as well as ask them about their sex lives.\u00a0 They shouldn\u2019t win too complete a victory over anyone\u201d (Sept. 1, par. 91).\u00a0 One finds such accounts of the medical profession scattered through Frye\u2019s diaries and notebooks.\u00a0 In a notebook from the 1940s, he says of Helen\u2019s doctor that she \u201cis enough of an old woman to have a pleasant mixture of superstition & ancestral wisdom mixed in again with her medical knowledge\u201d (Notebook 3, p. 68), and it\u2019s clear that Frye has more faith in the \u201cancestral wisdom\u201d than in the \u201cmedical knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

But all this is mostly gossip, and so we should turn to the one piece Frye wrote explicitly for medical doctors.\u00a0 It\u2019s called \u201cLiterature and Therapy,\u201d and it dates from 1989, less than a year before Frye was to undergo chemotherapy himself.\u00a0 The talk was given at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto at the invitation of Dr. John Roder.\u00a0 Like many of Frye\u2019s talks this one was constructed on the spot from notes.\u00a0 Dr. Roder taped the lecture and later provided me a copy of the tape.\u00a0 It had a gap in it at the place that the tape had to be flipped over and reinserted.\u00a0 Happily, a student had also recorded the lecture, and so I was able to fill in the missing portion.\u00a0 In any event, we have the talk in its entirety, and we have two notebook entries in which he reflects on the thesis of \u201cLiterature and Therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s gambit is typically witty.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019ll read his first two paragraphs:<\/p>\n

When I was looking over the connections that came to my mind between literature, more particularly English literature, and the medical profession, I remembered that in the Middle Ages the doctors had a popular reputation for scepticism and that there was a medieval proverb that said that wherever there are three doctors there are at least two atheists.\u00a0 When Chaucer introduces a physician on his Canterbury pilgrimage, he remarks that \u201cHis studie was but litel on the Bible,\u201d1<\/sup> and that was a sort of in-joke, picking up the general assumption.\u00a0 That notion lasted even as late as the seventeenth century, when Sir Thomas Browne, who was a doctor himself, wrote a book called Religio Medici<\/em>, the doctor\u2019s religion, which, even at that time, was a catchy title because a doctor\u2019s religion would sound like something of a paradox.\u00a0 In fact, Browne speaks in his opening sentence of the general scandal of his profession.\u00a0 Nevertheless, he writes a book on his religion, because it relieves him of the tedium of what he elsewhere calls \u201cthe fruitlesse importunity of Uroscopy.\u201d2<\/sup><\/p>\n

Well, considering how much hysteria there was at that time about the smallest deviation in doctrine, to say nothing of atheism, one wonders why this remained on the level of a relatively harmless joke.\u00a0 One or two things occur to me on that point.\u00a0 There\u2019s a very shrewd comment in George Eliot\u2019s Middlemarch<\/em> about a doctor who had a reputation for being a sceptic, but, instead of that ruining his reputation in a small Victorian town, his scepticism actually raised his stock very considerably because his patients greatly preferred to deal with somebody who thought entirely in terms of natural causes and natural cures.3<\/sup> Then again, the doctors\u2019 study of medicine, which at that time was derived very largely from Galen, was intensely materialistic, in the sense of dealing with the body and the mind as a single and indivisible unit.\u00a0 Of course, the practice of medicine then was full of magic, but it was based on the conception of natural sympathies and natural antipathies, a notion which we\u2019ll come to later in the context of literature.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me summarize the essay briefly,<\/p>\n

\u201cLiterature and Therapy\u201d is at the highest level of generality a reflection on catharsis<\/em>, which, as Frye understands its implication in tragedy, results in a kind of restorative balance and harmony.\u00a0 This is another of Frye\u2019s many twists on Aristotle: self\u2011integration rather than detachment is, for Frye, the cathartic reward.\u00a0 Twenty\u2011five years earlier had remarked that \u201cthe therapeutic power of the arts has been intermittently recognized. . . but the fact that literature is essential to the mental health of society seldom enters our own speculations about it.\u00a0 But if I am to take seriously my own principle that works of literature are not so much things to be studied as powers to be possessed, I need to face the implications of that principle.\u201d[6]<\/a> In the talk he gave at Mt. Sinai Hospital he does draw out the implications of the principle, noting the restorative power not simply of tragedy but of ironic and comic modes as well.\u00a0 And the conjunction of body and mind in the literary experience leads Frye finally to argue that \u201cthe immense recuperative power of literature\u201d is a matter of vision, for literature is, in his words, a \u201ccontrolled hallucination, where things are seen with a kind of intensity with which they are not seen in ordinary experience.\u201d\u00a0 Literature is therapeutic, in short, because it provides a counter\u2011environment to the illusions of ideology and the delusions of ordinary experience.\u00a0 Frye illustrates what he means by a little story from his mother\u2019s life:<\/p>\n

I remember my mother telling me of undergoing a very serious illness after the birth of my sister, and in the course of the illness she became delirious.\u00a0 Her father, who was a Methodist clergyman, came along with the twenty-five volumes of Scott\u2019s Waverley novels and dropped them on her.\u00a0 By the time she had read her way through them she was all right again.\u00a0 What impressed me about that was her own conviction that the Scott novels were in fact the curative agent.\u00a0 While I suppose any kind of new and absorbing interest might have been equally beneficial, still I\u2019ve read most of those novels myself, and would not be at all surprised if the plots of Scott\u2019s novels did not form a kind of counter-delirium which had to do with her own recovery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a notebook entry that dates from 1990, Frye comments on the talk he\u2019d given, saying<\/p>\n

When I talked to the doctors at Mt. Sinai I found myself improvising a thesis I didn\u2019t understand at the time.\u00a0 I said the sympathies and antipathies in nature that underlay Galenic medicine don\u2019t exist as that, but similar forces may exist in the mind.\u00a0 I thought of mother after a post-parturitional disease following Vera\u2019s birth: she had what sounded (ironic for a woman who never touched a drop of alcohol in her life) just like delirium tremens.\u00a0 She said that reading Scott\u2019s novels, dropped on her by my grandfather, brought her round.\u00a0 Scott in those days was the acme of serious secular reading.\u00a0 What I felt was that the plots of formulaic fiction conventions could act as a sort of counter-delirium.\u00a0 Similarly the Old Testament God may be a counter delirium to a nation trampled on by foreigners.\u00a0 I know how vague this sounds, but there\u2019s something that may emerge.[7]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, it seems to me, is a version of art as catharsis, a view of how art works on the mind and imagination and even the body that\u2019s been around\u00a0 at least since Aristotle.\u00a0 The most important thing about dramatic tragedy (its final cause), says Aristotle, is that it purges the emotions of pity and fear that have been raised in the audience during the production.\u00a0 There are at least thee theories of what Aristotle meant my catharsis: catharsis as clarification, catharsis as purification, and catharsis as purgation.\u00a0 I prefer the more literal third view, but even here, does Aristotle mean that we\u2019re so exhausted by having been gripped by pity and fear that all emotion is purged?\u00a0 Or does he mean rather that once the play is over we are relieved of the emotional engagement and can stand back from the play, detach ourselves from it, and take pleasure in seeing something that was well-\u00admade?\u00a0 I think the latter.\u00a0 The only other place Aristotle uses the word katharsis<\/em> in the context of the arts is in the Politics<\/em>.\u00a0 The passage says in effect that music and poetry can relieve the unpleasant feelings experienced by people who\u2019ve fallen into a religious frenzy: they are restored, Aristotle says, \u201cas though they had found healing and purgation.\u201d\u00a0 This seems to be pretty close to what Frye speculates happened to his mother.\u00a0 We note that it\u2019s the conventions of literature\u2013-in this case, the conventions of fictional romance in Scott\u2019s novels\u2013-that are the means to the end: they are what, according to Frye, rid his mother of her delirium.\u00a0 In The Double Vision<\/em>, Frye writes,<\/p>\n

the Oriental scriptures tell us that very advanced stages of enlightenment bring miraculous powers of various kinds, including healing, but that these powers should never be regarded as more than incidental by-products, and may even distract one from the real goal of liberation. \u00a0If so, the miraculous element in the Gospels, which describe a life lived on a plane of intensity that none of us have much conception of, should cause no surprise, and there are clear indications that the Gospel writers were more impressed by Jesus\u2019 miracles than Jesus himself was. \u00a0Jesus performs his miracles with reluctance, almost with irritation; he imposes secrecy on those he cures; he tells his disciples that they can do as well as that themselves. \u00a0But the Oriental analogues may begin to give us some faint notion of what Heilsgeschichte<\/em> or sacred history really talks about.[8]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here we return, as we almost always do in Northrop Frye\u2019s late writings, to the religious power of words.\u00a0 I\u2019ll close with a quotation from Anatomy of Criticism<\/em>, and then we can have some questions:<\/p>\n

The traditional theory of catharsis implies that the emotional response to art is not the raising of an actual emotion, but the raising and casting out of actual emotion on a wave of something else. We may call this something else, perhaps, exhilaration or exuberance: the vision of something liberated from experience, the response kindled in the reader by the transmutat\u00adion of experience into mimesis, of life into art, of routine into play. At the center of liberal education something surely ought to get liberated. The metaphor of creation suggests the parallel image of birth, the emergence of a new\u2011born organism into independent life. The ecstasy of creation and its response produce, on one level of creative effort, the hen\u2019s cackle; on another, the quality that the Italian critics called sprezzatura<\/em> and that Hoby\u2019s translation of Castiglione calls \u201crecklessness,\u201d the sense of buoyancy or release that accompanies perfect discipline, when we can no longer know the dancer, from the dance. (AC, 93\u20134)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/a> See Maclean\u2019s<\/em> cover story for 1 July 1998, \u201cThe 100 Most Important Canadians in History.\u201d\u00a0 The panel made its choices in ten broad categories\u2014Activists, Artists, Stars, Thinkers and Writers, Characters, Discoverers and Innovators, Entrepreneurs, Heroes, Nation Builders, and Scientists.\u00a0 The panel selected Georges Vanier\u2014war hero, diplomat, and for eight years, beginning in 1959, Governor General of Canada\u2014as Canada\u2019s leading hero and the most important Canadian in history.\u00a0 Frye ranked second in the list, and first among those in the category of Writers and Thinkers.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Rebecca Hagey. \u201cCodes and Coping: A Nursing Tribute to Northrop Frye.\u201d\u00a0 Nursing Papers\/Perspectives on Nursing<\/em> 16 (Summer 1984): 13\u201339.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Hagey, 24.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> \u201cCriticism, Visible and Invisible.\u201d The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society<\/em> (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 84.\u00a0 The essay appeared originally in College English<\/em> 26 (1964): 3\u201312.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Northrop Frye\u2019s Late Notebooks, 1982\u20131990: Architecture of the Spiritual World<\/em>, ed. Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000): 2:673\u20134.\u00a0 Cf. this remark in Notebook 44: \u201cI told the doctors about mother & Scott\u2019s novels, suggesting that romance creates a counter-delirium.\u00a0 We don\u2019t buy Galen\u2019s sympathies and antipathies any more: they don\u2019t exist in nature (amethysts for drunks, saffron for jaundice, etc.).\u00a0 But they may exist in the reality-realism metaphorical-objective context.\u00a0 The confrontation technique in the casting out of a humor.\u00a0 Jonson, Shakespeare\u2019s TS<\/em> [The Taming of the Shrew<\/em>], the Fool-Edgar in Lear<\/em>.\u00a0 My point in the Lear<\/em> lecture about words fighting evil (my 1940 experience with Churchill) at the centre of the words-and-power conflict\u201d (Late Notebooks<\/em>, 1:243\u20134)<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion<\/em> (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1991), 55\u20136.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are showcasing another paper being added to the Frye Festival Section in our Journal section. This one is by Bob Denham and was delivered at the Frye Festival in April, 2004.\u00a0 It can be found in the Archive here. 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