Educating the Imagination: Northrop Frye, Past, Present, and Future 9780773597365

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E d u c at i n g t h e I m a g i n at i o n

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Educating the Imagination Northrop Frye Past, Present, and Future

Edited by

A l a n B e w e l l , N e i l t e n K o r t e n a a r, and Germaine Warkentin

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2015 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4572-4 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4573-1 (paper) 978-0-7735-9736-5 (epdf ) 978-0-7735-9737-2 (epu b )

Legal deposit fourth quarter 2015 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Educating the imagination: Northrop Frye past, present, and future / edited by Alan Bewell, Neil ten Kortenaar, and Germaine Warkentin. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. I S B N 978-0-7735-4572-4 (bound). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4573-1 (paperback). – I S B N 978-0-7735-9736-5 (ePDF ). – ISBN 978-0-7735-9737-2 (ePU B) 1. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991.  2. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 – Criticism and interpretation.  I. Bewell, Alan John, 1951–, editor  II. Kortenaar, Neil ten, 1958–, editor  III. Warkentin, Germaine, 1933–, editor P N 75.F 7E48 2015    801'.95092    C2015-904927-X C2015-904928-8

This book was typeset by Interscript in 11/14 Garamond.

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations ix Introduction 3 Al an B ewe l l, N e i l T e n Korte na a r, an d G e r m ai n e Wa rke nti n Reading between the Books: Northrop Frye and the Cartography of Literature  16 R ob e rt B r i n gh u rs t Northrop Frye beyond Belief  36 I an B al f ou r Prophecy Meets History: Frye’s Blake and Frye’s Milton  48 G ord on Te s key From the Defeated: Northrop Frye and the Literary Symbol  65 M i ch ae l D olz a ni Power to the Educated Imagination! Northrop Frye and the Utopian Impulse  83 R o b e rt T . Ta lly J r Verum Factum: Frye, Jameson, Nancy, and the Myth of Myth  96 G ar ry S h e rbe rt

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vi Contents

Frye, Derrida, and the University (to Come)  114 Ale xan d e r D i ck Frye’s Principles of Literary Symbolism: From the Classroom to the Critical Classics  132 T h om as W i ll a rd Romanticism and the Beyond of Language: Northrop Frye and the Wordsworthian Imitation of the Point of Epiphany  147 M ark I t t e n s oh n Correspondences: Frye, De Man, Romanticism  164 Ad am Cart e r “Our Lady of Pain”: Prolegomena to the Study of She-Tragedy  185 T ro n i Y . G ra nd e Chanting Down Babylon: Innocence and Experience in the Contemporary Humanities  206 J. E dward Ch ambe rli n Notes 227 Bibliography 249 Contributors 267 Index 271

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Acknowledgments

This collection was made possible by a S S H R C Connections Grant. The editors would also like to thank Andrea Charise, who played a key role in its organization, and Adrienne Todd, who did an outstanding job in preparing this collection for publication.

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Abbreviations

ac cp cw

ei fs gc mc pl ss wp

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Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Frye, Northrop. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Frye, Northrop. Collected Works of Northrop Frye. General editor Alvin Lee. 30 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996–2012. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press, 1982. Frye, Northrop. The Modern Century: The Whidden Lectures. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton, 2005. Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. Frye, Northrop. Words with Power, Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.

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E d u c at i n g t h e I m a g i n at i o n

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Introduction A l a n B ewel l , N ei l t e n Ko rt e n a a r, a n d  Germa i n e W a rke n t in When the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye died in January 1991 he was at once among the most celebrated and censured of theoreticians of literature, and had been so for nearly five decades. His first book, the startlingly original study of William Blake Fearful Symmetry (1947), had been received with admiration, but somewhat gingerly, by what at that time was a small community of Blake scholars. Anatomy of Criticism (1957) had initially drawn baffled responses from his fellow academics, to whom he seemed to be offering an approach to literature that, in its apparently dogmatic emphasis on a total systematic understanding of the fundamental laws governing all of literature, challenged everything they stood for. Through his outpouring of articles, reviews, and public lectures, with the publication of The Educated Imagination (1963), first delivered as the 1962 Massey Lectures for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, with books on Shakespeare’s comedies and romances and on his tragedies, on Milton, on English Romanticism, and on Canadian literature, and with his book on the life of literature in society (The Critical Path, 1971), Frye became during the 1960s and ’70s the most cited literary critic and theorist in the world; no one carried more authority in the field of literary criticism and theory. By the 1980s, however, with French theory making its portentous entrance, with the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s, and with the rise of more historically inflected literary criticism, his reputation seemed to suffer an eclipse. Yet it is safe to say that the Frye we know today is a very different figure from the dogmatic theorist he has sometimes been thought to have been, and he is  more widely read than the academy is aware. The one hundredth

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anniversary of Frye’s birth has made this an ideal moment for reassessment. To examine whether Frye’s reputation needs to be refurbished, to assess what needs to be retrieved from his critical insights today, and to take the measure of where literary and cultural scholarship currently stand by gauging our distance from and our dependence on him, scholars came to Victoria University at the University of Toronto in October 2012, and a selection of their essays is collected here. During the course of his long career – he began teaching at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College in 1938 and was still lecturing two months before he died – Frye pondered not only the fundamental unity of all literature, as he did in the Anatomy, but also its relationship to society and to the human spirit. Trained as an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada (a union of Methodist, Congregational Union, and Presbyterian congregations), though he never sought to minister to a congregation, Frye’s engagement with literature was also deeply infused with a lifelong consideration of the imaginative dimensions of the Bible and the relationship between religious books and the life of the spirit. He wrote two major books on the Bible (The Great Code, 1981, and Words with Power, 1990), along with the posthumously published The Double Vision (1992), which expands upon and elucidates ideas developed in these books. In studies of religious language, narrative, and imagery, Frye refused to separate the lives that we live in the world from our ways of seeing and interpreting that world. As his great exemplar William Blake argued, “As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers.” In all of Frye’s writings, on literature or religious texts, we are reminded that how we read is a fundamental expression of who we are. What made literature and the Bible so important to him was that they had the capacity to change our seeing. Frye’s life as a public intellectual was paralleled by a lively personal education, recorded in more than seventy notebooks and unknown by anyone else until after his death. Frye remains widely read – not just the Anatomy, but especially best-selling shorter works like The Educated Imagination. More than six decades after its publication, Fearful Symmetry still sells three hundred copies a year. His books are frequently translated. In Moncton, New Brunswick, where he spent his youth, there is a lively writers’ festival bearing his name. Significantly, 2012 also marked the completion of the thirty-volume standard edition of his Collected Works. People continue to listen to what Frye has to say, and in these essays we can begin to recognize what it is they hear.

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Introduction 5

In the late 1970s, with the extraordinary rise and institutionalization of  literary theory, to which Frye himself contributed, literary criticism might be said to have entered its winter phase, as critique and suspicion became the indispensable tools of literary analysis. The anatomist of criticism, of course, had a vision capacious enough to include autumn, and even the winter of irony that follows, in a larger imaginative schema. With his early commitment to a holistic understanding of the forms and myths that make up the body of literature, with his belief that anatomy would disclose the unity of the human spirit as it was displayed in the forms of the human imagination, and with his emphasis on establishing the continuities linking human creation in all spheres of life, Frye stood apart from critical theories that were less interested in what human beings share than in what separates them. Northrop Frye was absolutely sui generis. In his day a towering presence in the academy, and a shy but authoritative presence at the University of Toronto, Frye was a modest man, though well aware of the place he had gained in the larger academic scheme of things. He did not care overmuch about his elevation, or what came after. He was a born classroom teacher, with a huge following among the undergraduates he loved to teach all his professional life. At least as large as his modesty was his confidence that there was a scheme of imaginative things, and in the generative potential of his description of that scheme. That confidence remained unshaken, though the form of its expression evolved throughout his long career. In retrospect it has become clear how much he himself belonged to summer and to the return of romance, a return that he projected onto the whole. No one can read Frye without recognizing what an extraordinary writer he was. He was the master of a witty, elegant, demotic style, one that emerged and developed in the classroom and was polished in hundreds of reviews and public lectures. He may be the only literary critic of his time who can be read for sheer pleasure, which may account for his continuing popularity among a non-professional readership. In the academy, Frye may actually have suffered from the clarity, the grace, and the unbounded self-confidence with which he wrote, but these are qualities that will endure. In his essay “Reading Between the Books: Northrop Frye and the Cartography of Literature,” Robert Bringhurst nicely captures this aspect of Frye’s authorial style. “He looks you in the eye all the while he is writing,” Bringhurst writes, “and he does this without taking

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his eye off the subject, which is patently not limited to either him or you.” In a style that was at once immensely learned and yet direct in reaching toward his readers, Frye brought us new ways to think about literature and our relationship to the world. The prophetic, the gnomic, and the riddling in critical discourse may seem better suited to the temper of the times and to the world of academics, yet if Walter Benjamin is quoted for inspiration, that sense that one is on the verge of something, we turn to Frye for comprehension, for the sense that one now understands something. Frye never shrank from the idea of system, though over the years he would weigh, and weigh again, how to conceive of his own. A revelation since his death – one not yet entirely absorbed into Frye scholarship – is the conversation he held with himself in his notebooks. Full of hypothetical imaginative structures, diagrams, profane insights, and cheerful self-­ mockery, they represent the private space where his imagination worked most hectically to sketch – and just as often erase – the patterns in which he tended to think (Frye was by far his own most severe critic). The notebooks, many now available in the Collected Works, provide an essential companion both to Frye’s magisterial “big” books and to the numerous collections of lectures and essays that, steering away from larger theoretical claims yet infused with his vision, provide a rich trove of his readings of particular authors: Shakespeare, Milton, and especially the Romantic poets. It may be that Frye’s system-building smacks too much of the theological for today’s skeptical tastes. But he was no theologian, and as Ian Balfour so ably demonstrates in his essay “Northrop Frye Beyond Belief,” Frye was extremely wary about any claim that either literature or the Bible should be read as a repository of dogma or theological truth. For Frye, Balfour observes, “Literature is fundamentally hypothetical and to treat it otherwise is to disfigure it.” To read the Bible as one of the highest expressions of the human imagination required that Frye bracket or suspend the issue of belief as he upheld the idea that its truth and ethical claims were of a higher order as it spoke to the human spirit embodied by the imagination. Frye’s commitment to literature as having its own relative autonomy does not mean, as Bringhurst superbly shows, that it is any less real. Human beings have created an order of words that is as much a part of our world as any other human product. Bringhurst values

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Introduction 7

the manner in which Frye sought to understand literature as a whole, recognizing that the laws that govern it were worthy of being studied and conceptualized. Frye’s anatomy sought to provide “a map of the Whole of Literature,” but the value of a map does not lie in its attempt to be the same as the territory it represents; instead, the map is valuable in the ways in which it can be corrected, augmented, and changed. Frye’s commitment to a synoptic view of literature as a totality places him among that small company “the great modern cartographers and taxonomists of reality,” figures like Carl Linnaeus, John Dalton, Nikolai Lobachevsky, Bernhard Riemann, and Dmitri Mendeleev, to name a few, who revolutionized their respective fields of inquiry by seeking to map them in their totality. In the 1950s, when the literary theory of the New Critics dominated classrooms, Frye stood alone in his attempt to see literature and its study as a systematic whole. Like the New Critics, Frye was committed to understanding literature as an autonomous expression of human creativity, a distinctive order of words, exhibiting its own integrity and laws. Yet rather than seeking to study poems as worlds unto themselves, Frye extended his vision to encompass all literature. Recognizing that the study of literature required its own autonomy and systematic understanding if it was to engage with literature on its own terms, Frye set out in the Anatomy of Criticism to provide “a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism” (c w , 22:5; a c , 3). The task of literary study was to become a science, that is, to develop its own critical concepts without appeals to modes of explanation that came from other disciplines. Frye’s belief in the importance of literary theory set him apart from most literary critics during the 1950s and ’60s. By the 1970s, with the appearance of a burgeoning number of individual literary theorists intent on developing their own distinctive approaches to literature and with the institutionalization of literary theory in universities, Frye’s call for a universal system of literary knowledge based on the belief in “Literature” as a singular entity comprehended by a singular system of study, “Criticism,” put him at odds with theoretical perspectives that posited a world of many literatures and many literary theories suited to understanding them. In focusing almost exclusively, however, on those aspects of a given literature or theory that are historically or culturally unique, have we not lost sight of the concerns and ideas that

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constitute literary study as a field separate from others in the humanities? As one considers the current crisis in the humanities, Frye stands out as a critic whose work provides not only new insights about literature but a broader reflection on what literary study is and why it matters. Frye’s goal of understanding the metaphoric vocabulary, the mythic archetypes, and the genres and forms that all literatures have in common limited his interest in the social, political, and historical dimensions of literature. Nevertheless, as he remarked in the Critical Path, “seeing literature as a unity in itself does not withdraw it from a social context: on the contrary, it becomes far easier to see what its place in civilization is” (c w , 27:15; c p , 24). Still, as Gordon Teskey suggests in his essay “Prophecy Meets History: Frye’s Blake and Frye’s Milton,” Frye’s idea of history and prophecy are challenged by the possibility that the future may not be a repetition of the past but something radically new. Examining the expansive prophetic vision that Frye developed out of his reading of William Blake, in which all things find their end in “Anagogical Man,” Frye’s version of the City of God, Teskey argues that such a vision was at odds with a commitment to political struggle in history. That is why he believes that Frye’s best criticism is to be found not in Fearful Symmetry or in Anatomy of Criticism, but instead in the later work that engages with the historically inflected prophecies of John Milton, in which a human community struggles with a future that is not like the past. At the heart of Teskey’s critique of Frye is a different understanding of what history is. The idea that history does not repeat itself is at odds with Frye’s commitment to the cyclical histories developed by Giovanni Battista Vico, Oswald Spengler, James George Frazer, and Blake that dominated early twentieth-century anthropology and psychology. Michael Dolzani adopts a more cyclical idea of history in his essay “From the Defeated: Northrop Frye and the Literary Symbol.” Drawing parallels between his own experience of the contemporary world and that of Frye, Dolzani examines the extraordinary impact that Spengler’s The Decline of the West had on Frye’s philosophy of history and culture, beginning with the ninety-page essay on “Romanticism” that Frye wrote as an undergraduate at Victoria College. As Frye remarked at the height of his career, “If The Decline of the West were nothing else, it would still be one of the world’s great Romantic poems” (c w , 11:304). In a broad cultural history informed by Frye and Spengler, Dolzani argues that to be modern

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Introduction 9

is to struggle with the ever-present feeling that human culture is coming to an end. It is, as he suggests, to struggle with Spengler’s vision of decline. In his expansive cultural history, Dolzani describes history as a succession of defeats of revolutionary vision, yet he sees culture as something that is formed in the crucible of these defeats. Passed on from one generation to another, it is, in T.S. Eliot’s words, an inheritance “We have taken from the defeated … A symbol perfected in death.” Dolzani views Frye as a writer who teaches his readers how to struggle against Spengler’s vision of defeat by seeking to recover the creative springs within spiritual man found in literature. Although Frye is frequently criticized for ignoring the political dimensions of literature, he would have countered that such a viewpoint misses the fact that literature and the study of literature are the highest expressions of human freedom. As he observes in the Anatomy of Criticism, “The ethical purpose of a liberal education is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving society as free, classless, and urbane. No such society exists, which is one reason why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination” (a c c w , 22:323; a c , 347). As a Blake scholar, Frye would have had no difficulty recognizing that literature is also a space of unfreedom, as we are all enslaved by “mind-forged manacles.” Yet Frye remained a Romantic in his belief that in order to be free one must first imagine what freedom is, and that literature, as a product of human imagination and desire, can play a central role in enlarging people’s understandings of themselves and the world. Two of the essays in this collection address Frye’s understanding of the relationship between literature and politics. In “Power to the Educated Imagination!: Northrop Frye and the Utopian Impulse,” Robert T. Tally, Jr, draws out the strong parallels between Frye and Herbert Marcuse in their understanding of the role that literature can play in the revolutionary action of imagining an alternative to the present. In a world in which forms of revolt are quickly absorbed and transformed into modes of consumption, Frye’s book The Educated Imagination (1964) provides an important argument for literary study as a way of strengthening our power to imagine better worlds. Following up on Tally’s discussion of the ways in which Frye’s utopian understanding of the imagination compares favourably with the political theory of the Frankfurt School, Garry Sherbert examines the manner in which Fredric Jameson, as he

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developed his theory of the “political unconscious,” drew upon Frye’s elaboration of Vico’s idea of the verum factum, the notion that we can only know what we have created. Whereas Jameson sees narrative and history as processes that ultimately achieve their end in the formation of a revolutionary community, Frye, in his commitment to the singularity of experience and to process, resisted the mythic and narrative completion that creates an aesthetic object or community. Like JeanLuc Nancy, Frye interrupts a myth’s visionary movement toward fusion and identity, only then allowing the community to reveal itself as a possibility, not an actuality. The value and importance of an education in the humanities was a lifelong concern for Frye, and the decision to give the title “Educating the Imagination” to both the conference and this collection reflects this importance. That Frye was a strong proponent and an able critic of the idea of a liberal education is clear from the beginning, most notably in his comments on the liberatory goal of a liberal education in the “Tentative Conclusion” to the Anatomy of Criticism. His confidence in literature’s capacity to liberate were tested during the student movement of the 1960s, which led him to reflect in new ways, as Alexander Dick suggests in his essay “Frye, Derrida, and the University (to Come),” on the relationship between the university, education, and the myths of “concern” and “freedom.” Dick argues that Frye’s post-1968 thoughts on the university bear many important similarities to Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “university without condition” – a “space” of free, imaginative “confession” and hospitality that in several late essays Derrida argued was both the origin of and the solution to the mentalities of “use” and “function” that currently subordinate the humanities within the university. Whereas Dick is interested in Frye’s changing conception of the role of the university in society, Thomas Willard, who was a student of Frye’s, brings his own personal experience to bear upon the discussion of Frye as a teacher and of the intellectual contexts that shaped his ideas about literary symbolism. In “Frye’s Principles of Literary Symbolism: From the Classroom to the Critical Classics,” Willard provides a detailed description of Frye’s graduate course in the Principles of Literary Symbolism, which Frye first gave in 1947 and then, regularly, for the next forty years. For Frye, who came to be identified as the most influential proponent of myth criticism, the task of “criticism as a whole … would begin with, and largely consist

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Introduction 11

of, the systematizing of literary symbolism” (c w , 22:65; a c , 71). Willard’s essay provides not only insight into how Frye’s teaching culminated in the principle concerns shaping the Anatomy of Criticism, but also a valuable portrait of Frye as a university teacher. The essays in this collection show that the great systematizer has something in common with the anti-systematizers. For example, Frye’s unwillingness to examine in any great detail the relationship between literature and its historical and social contexts allowed him to emphasize, like Jacques Derrida, the world on paper of the text itself. Derrida finds the folds within a text and then carefully rips along the fold lines, while Frye unfolds the text until it expands like a map of the world, as Robert Bringhurst recognizes in his essay in this volume. Both Derrida and Frye, however, insistently ask what the world of writing would look like if it could be seen from outside, if we understood it on its own terms. Frye regarded the text as a leaf in a sheaf of leaves through which the astute critic could see a palimpsestic whole. He might be considered an early apostle of intertextuality, but he would never have been content with simply examining intertexts: he was a visionary who asked what the great web of intertextuality would look like if seen whole. His driving vision was not of a world of difference, but of the mythic unity that underlies all literary forms. Frye’s belief that all writers are ultimately engaged in the creation of a single text situates him within the worldview of High Romanticism, not simply that of Blake, but also of Percy Bysshe Shelley, who argued in the Defence of Poetry that all literary works should be recognized “as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.” Frye’s relationship to Romanticism is well known, and there can be little doubt that Fearful Symmetry has been one of the most influential books of criticism in the twentieth century, for it was this book that brought the then littleknown poet William Blake into university classrooms where he became a major voice in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. In A Study of English Romanticism (1968), Frye presented Romanticism as a worldchanging cultural transformation, in which a new self-consciousness toward the fictions or myths that we live by emerged. Two essays in this collection deal with Frye’s relationship to Romanticism, and both find a Frye who was far more engaged with the limitations and dissonances in

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language than we have realized. In “Romanticism and the Beyond of Language: Northrop Frye and the Wordsworthian Imitation of the Point of Epiphany,” Mark Ittensohn provides a detailed discussion of the similarities between William Wordsworth’s and Frye’s understanding of literary epiphanies. Examining Wordsworth’s encounter with the solitary leech-gatherer in “Resolution and Independence” and his discussion of “spots of time” in The Prelude, Ittensohn distinguishes between religious and literary epiphanies, arguing that the latter constitute a highly selfconscious expression of linguistic inadequacy in the gap between the experience of the epiphany and its expression. Literary epiphanies, like Frye’s concept of anagogy, point beyond themselves and in so doing speak of something that exists both in and beyond language. In his essay “Correspondences: Frye, De Man, Romanticism,” Adam Carter provides a unique consideration of the ways in which Frye and Paul de Man questioned the dominant critical belief, most strongly articulated by M.H. Abrams, that the crowning achievement of Romanticism lay in the creation of poetry that sought to achieve a synthesis of subject and object, mind and nature. For different reasons, both critics were dissatisfied with any attempt to identify human existence with nature. For de Man, to be human was to be inseparably bound up with time and change, so any effort to claim a connection with the continuities of the natural world was, for him, inherently a form of false consciousness. For Frye, who followed Blake in his humanistic belief that nature achieved its value only insofar as it was an expression of the human imagination­– “Where man is not, nature is barren” – the task of art was to provide the forms by which nature was made human. Whereas de Man understood the aesthetic disruption of an identification with nature, that is, irony, as a form of truth, Frye understood the existence of an alien nature as the expression of a failure of the imagination. Focusing on Frye’s influential criticism of Canadian literature, Carter suggests that Frye has much more in common with de Man than one might otherwise think, not in his rejection of nature as a representational telos, but instead in his recognition of the degree to which Canadian poetry expresses a “deep terror in regard to nature” (c w , 12:350). Frye the systematizer was not a conservative guarding a crumbling canon. In his return to Classical texts there was nothing of the preservationist. Rather, he sought to tap into the energy of a Shakespeare, Milton,

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Introduction 13

or a Blake and to release that energy anew. Frye belongs with Erich Auerbach, Raymond Williams, and René Girard, whose literary systems, in their very capaciousness, contradiction, inconsistency, and digression, welcome readers to explore literature in new ways. Citations of Frye the systematizer rarely imply discipleship; readers rarely deploy his systems, yet still turn to him for durable and quotable insight and for reliable critical judgment. That Frye’s output over forty years consistently yields rewards is a testament to the genuine, ever-renewed engagement that produced it. In terms of reach and explanatory potential Frye compares favourably with Mikhail Bakhtin. Both concentrate on genre, language, and imagery in order to account for imaginative potential. Both found in a particular author, Blake in Frye’s case, François Rabelais and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Bakhtin’s, the critical traction with which to push forward our understanding of the nature of literature. Where Bakhtin saw the novel as the culmination of literary development from which there is no turning back, Frye, of course, insisted on the fullness of the imagination from the beginning. He imagined readers as Crusoes or Adams, each charged with the task of imagining the world anew, and he considered the Bible to be the origin of the Western literary imagination. Bakhtin celebrated the novel and Frye stressed poetry, and the reputation of the two corresponds to some extent with the relative fates of the novel and poetry in the twentieth century. But to consider them together transcends such specific happenings. At the same time, though Frye shared with his contemporaries the New Critics the reputation of being indifferent to history and social context, unlike them he never considered the literary text in isolation. A key work is The Critical Path, which bears the subtitle An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Written at the end of the turmoil of the late 1960s, it constitutes a defence of poetry in the face of what Frye recognized as increasingly troubling forces in a world already darkened by the sorrows of a second world war. There, without in any way leaving behind his confidence in literature as a coherent body and criticism as its theory, he was prepared to argue that “truth and reality are not directly connected with reasoning or evidence, but are socially established.” Out of this grew his concept of the “myth of concern,” those things a society “does and believes in response to authority” (c w , 27:23; c p , 36). In a

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passage that moves far beyond the dogmatism attributed to him, Frye writes: “Concern, so far as it is a feeling, is very close to anxiety, especially when threatened. The anxiety of coherence is central: normally, voices of doubt or dissent are to be muted at all times, and silenced altogether if there is real danger, as in a war. Of almost equal importance is the anxiety of continuity” (c w , 27:23; c p , 37). The need for continuity produces the conservatism of much social culture. But politically Frye was no conservative; early in his career he edited the left-wing journal Canadian Forum, and his democratic-socialist views never changed. His myth of concern is balanced by the myth of freedom, which gives voice to the “socially critical attitudes, which perceive hypocrisy, corruption, failure to meet standards, gaps between the real and ideal … [and] thus constitutes the ‘liberal’ element in society … those who hold it are unlikely to form a much larger group than a critical, and usually an educated, minority” (c w , 27:29; c p , 45). And, as he grimly realizes, the function of this group can never be central; it has to come to terms with the society of which it is both part and critic. In times of deep conflict it may seem simply parasitic. This “troubling” of the coherence of his system marks a movement in Frye’s thought that continues in one form or another throughout the rest of his life; it is no surprise that his last book, published posthumously, is called The Double Vision. Throughout the essays there is an increasing sense of the ethical weight of Frye’s writing: not that he is in any way prescriptive, but he keeps drawing us to think about how we, as imaginative creatures, need to guard and foster our imaginations. And of course there is the impact of Frye’s own imagination on his readers. An exciting aspect of the essays collected here is their sheer variety. None of them adheres to the dogmatic orthodoxy critics of Frye have accused him of requiring. Rather, he seems to open the doors for critics with very different approaches. Frye did not provide a completed map of the whole of literature, but instead one that could be revised and used for new purposes. In this spirit, Bringhurst points out that Frye’s association of literature with written texts led him to misunderstand what he took to be “primitive” cultures and prevented him from fully appreciating the formal complexity and characteristic features of oral cultures. He thus points to new areas where Frye’s work can be extended. In “‘Our Lady of Pain’: Prolegomena to the Study of She-Tragedy,” Troni Y. Grande adapts Frye’s

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Introduction 15

ideas to gender theory, exploring the ways in which they can provide a  liberatory understanding of late-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-­ century “she-tragedies,” plays in which the tragic predicament is structured upon the gender of the heroine. Grande demonstrates that Frye’s ideas can change how we read these plays, enlarging our grasp of the formal and ethical dimensions of plays in which the death of a beautiful woman has the power to remake the green world. At the heart of Frye’s work is a recognition of both the extraordinary diversity of literary forms and the degree to which they can nevertheless tell a similar story and speak to enduring aspects of human life. In “Chanting Down Babylon: Innocence and Experience in the Contemporary Humanities,” J. Edward Chamberlin provides a synoptic study of the ways in which the songs of the working classes – ballads, folk songs, cowboy songs, and songs of the Depression – use the imagination as a defence against reality. “[A]ll songs are resistance songs,” he writes; all provide a way of bearing witness to the experience of living in a strange land and of “chanting down Babylon.” For Chamberlin, songs are essentially expressions of community; they are linked to ceremonies of belief that seek to create a ground across culture. This is an insight that would have registered deeply with Frye, and with another man committed to using song as a vehicle of imagination, Woody Guthrie. That is why, in expanding the map that this collection of essays seeks to provide, Chamberlin suggests that we should see Guthrie and Frye as providing “bookends for the humanities in the twentieth century.” By happenstance, or a destiny that each would have appreciated, both men were born on July 14, 1912.

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Reading between the Books Northrop Frye and the Cartography of Literature Rob ert B ri n g h u r st

It was nearly four decades ago that I first picked up a book by Northrop Frye, started to read, and felt my mind breaking into a smile. For a book to have this effect, two things have to happen. The book has to sing – that is, it has to be very well written – and it has to speak – that is, it has to open a door to meaning and let in some light. I have picked up a lot of Frye’s books in the forty years since, and the effect has been there every time. But on every one of these occasions there has been something more: sanity, I want to call it. I often quarrel with particular sentences I read in Frye, and I’m occasionally puzzled, but one thing is always clear, and that thing is fundamental. Frye knows the basic fact about literature. He knows that literature is real. It’s as real as rivers and mountains, rocks and trees, moonlight and sunshine, physics and chemistry, music and mathematics, ethics and ontology, life and death. You might think that all real writers would know that literature is real, but many writers now find it stylish to assert that no such thing as reality exists, or that if it does, it is something meaningless and remote from human concerns. Frye himself often suggests (as I would not) that until it is reimagined and reordered by human beings, the world is a senseless, uninhabitable place. Yet there is always in Frye’s work a posture that contradicts all such suggestions. He looks you in the eye all the while he is writing, and he does this without taking his eye off the subject, which is patently not limited to either him or you. The implications of this posture are unmistakable: there is something to attend to; it makes sense; we are related to the sense it makes; and paying it close attention is therefore worth our while.

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You can’t read far in Frye without discovering one other, and even rarer, aspect of his character. He not only knows that literature is real; he also wants to see it whole. (I’m aware that wholeness, like reality, is now a suspect notion in some circles, but this does not seem to me the moment to defend it. If you cannot share, as I do, Frye’s faith that reality exists and  that wholeness is one of its properties, please at least remember that  reality is quite distinct from immutability and wholeness from totalitarianism.) My first discovery in reading Frye made me happy and excited: here was a writer, a fine writer, who wrote literature about literature and who knew in his bones that literature is real! But the second discovery brought me up short: he wants to see it whole! My own ambition (back in the days when I had ambition) was less grand. I just wanted to see all of it: to learn all the languages, read all the books, hear all the stories and meters and rhythms and songs. I had never dreamed of rising much above this, looking down, and seeing it whole. It took me a few minutes, then – or maybe it was years – to register that Frye’s ambition was not just larger than my own but a lot more intelligent, because his was actually plausible, and mine, of course, was not. You can’t see all of literature. There’s just too much, in too many languages – and there has been too much since the Middle Paleolithic. (The human population has increased at least a  thousand-fold, and possibly ten-thousand-fold, since the shift from hunting to agriculture began, but the number of human languages has probably grown smaller.1) Still, if you get to know a number of different portions of the literary universe, and can think your way from one piece to another, the overall shape might indeed form in your mind. By seeing much less than all of it, you might indeed manage to see it whole. You might be able to map it, the way Mercator mapped the globe, and Kepler the solar system. And then you might be able to test your map, and give it to other people to use, and let them make additional corrections and revisions. All this and more is adumbrated in a handsome little sentence in Frye’s first book, Fearful Symmetry: “Seeing is believing, and belief is vision” (c w , 14:35; f s , 28). The visionless view, very common nowadays, goes something like this: “Literature is whatever human beings write and publish, and as humans we are free to publish anything we want.” On this view, there is no map,

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and can’t be any map, because the essential meaning of literature is nothing but this freedom. The more original and unpredictable a work appears to be, the greater its value on this scale. The work may have a private meaning for its author, but even that is of no particular account except as further evidence of infinite personal freedom. The importance of a work – and the only reality it has – then turns out to be a chain of social phenomena. Or as Christopher Norris has put it: “One consequence of recent critical theory is the realization that literary texts have no self-­sufficient or autonomous meaning, no existence apart from their after-life of changing interpretations and values. And the same applies to those critical texts whose meaning and significance are subject to constant shifts and realignments of interest” [italics in original].2 That statement was part of the boilerplate “Editor’s Foreword” appearing in each volume of a series Norris used to edit, entitled Critics of the Twentieth Century. The statement therefore occurs in, of all places, the opening pages of a book about Northrop Frye, published shortly after Frye’s death. Norris was happy to make room in his series for a book about Frye and, in the same affable way, quite happy to introduce the book to its readers by repudiating everything Frye stood for. In the present critical climate, this would just about pass for normal behaviour – but after all, why shouldn’t it? If literature isn’t real, then the people who write it are probably not real either; only your changing perceptions of them are real. In that case, for something amusing to do, we might just as well go around taking potshots at each other. Our goal in doing so will be to get those “constant shifts and realignments” of meaning and significance synchronized to our benefit, and to hold them in that pattern while we can. Our goal, in short, will not be to test the truth or falsity of our assumptions but to accumulate social capital and keep it. The lectocentric or reader-centred view of literature is as durable, as inevitable, and as limited as the geocentric view of the universe. Within certain bounds, it is also, I imagine, just as harmless. Beyond those bounds – where Norris and many others have tried to take it – I view it with alarm, because it celebrates and embodies an anthropocentric, ethnocentric, and autocentric position: a concentric and self-reinforcing set of small-minded perspectives. That seems to me an impoverished way to read and an unhealthy way to live. In a free society, people are free to lead unhealthy lives if they choose, and I am grateful for that freedom. I do

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Frye and the Cartography of Literature 19

not want it curtailed. But I am wary of self-centredness in any public sphere – literary criticism, history, science, politics – for a blatantly unliterary reason: because humans now not only have too much power over each other, they have much more power over the planet and the biosphere than they have ever had before. More power, clearly, than we as a species know what to do with. Literature is real in the same sense that the sun and the planets, stars and galaxies are real. We see it, of course, from where we happen to find ourselves. But we are not obliged to think about it from that position alone. From here, we see the North Star and Arcturus, the Big and Little Dippers, Cassiopeia and Orion. So we give these stars and constellations names and dress them up with stories. You can call this astronomy if you like, but it is a feeble kind of science, as any astronomer will tell you. Those geocentric constellations tell us nothing about the nature and location of the stars, nothing about the structure of the universe, nothing about the size, shape, age, or constitution of interstellar space. The lectocentric view of literature will always be with us, along with the truth it expresses: we are who and where we are, and the view from here is what we see. But that is not the only truth and not the only view. As truths go, as a matter of fact, it seems a trifle old and worn. To describe lectocentricity as “a consequence of recent critical theory” is to suggest, I think, that recent critical theory is intellectually on par with the Flat Earth Society and morally on par with the me-first theory of how to share a chocolate bar or a lifeboat. How exactly does Frye’s view differ from Norris’s? In very much the same way that the astronomer’s view of the galaxy and solar system differs from the geocentric view. His view is not centred on the author, the reader, or the work; it is centred on literature as a whole. This is part of Frye’s preface to the published version of three lectures on Shakespeare that he delivered in London, Ontario, in 1981: One begins by reading or seeing a play like other plays, subject to the conditions and limitations of its own age and to our corresponding limitations in receiving it. One ends with the sense of an exploding force in the mind that keeps destroying all the barriers of cultural prejudice that limit the response to it. In other words, we begin with a notion of what the play might reasonably be assumed to mean, and

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end with realizing that what the play actually does mean is so far beyond this as to be in a different world of understanding altogether. (c w , 28:361–62; Myth of Deliverance, vii–viii)  Social and political histories of the last few centuries are heavy with tales of bloodshed, selfishness, ecological short-sightedness, collective selfdelusion, tyranny, and genocide. They suggest, in short, that Homo sapiens is a problematic species whose accomplishments, great though they may be, can hardly be worth the accelerating cost. Yet intellectual histories of the same stretch of time are thick with landmarks of a very different kind: large erratic boulders of intelligence left behind by thinkers and researchers who revolutionized the fields in which they worked and increased the ability of educated humans to see and think about the world. A few such figures – Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein – are perhaps a little too successful in their intellectual afterlife and have therefore been translated into a realm normally populated by film actors, athletes, entertainers, and a few select composers. We often say that they’ve been deified, but in fact they seem to be serving a lengthy sentence as cartoon characters in hell. Part of the sentence involves their forced employment as patrons of a range of minor industries, from the manufacture of doctoral dissertations to the marketing of coffee mugs and clothing. Down one step from that plateau of giddy and possibly counterproductive fame we meet a number of similar figures, who might, I suppose, be caught at any time in the same celebrity roundup but have escaped arrest thus far. I am thinking of people such as Carl Linnaeus, John Dalton, Nikolai Lobachevsky, Bernhard Riemann, Dmitri Mendeleev, Georg Cantor, Heinrich Wölfflin, Ernest Rutherford, Edward Sapir, and, more recently, Francis Crick and James Watson. These are household names only in relatively educated households, and they account, I suspect, for only modest sales of garments and drinking vessels, but within their professional fields their accomplishments are universally known and almost universally admired. It’s clear that these researchers understood their work as part of a larger effort extending beyond the bounds of their particular professions and individual lifetimes. That understanding is widely shared. Not only their professional successors but educated

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Frye and the Cartography of Literature 21

citizens in general tend to understand themselves as heirs and beneficiaries of scholars such as these – and, by extension, as the beneficiaries of others, names frequently unknown, who shared, or are sharing now, in the same joint effort. I think it’s clear that Frye belongs in the same company, as one of the great modern cartographers and taxonomists of reality. If this view is not, at present, widely shared, I also think I know the reason. It is not so much that some people deny that any reality exists; it is that many people do not now believe that literature is actually part of reality. We do after all call the larger part of literature fiction – or, if it dates back far enough, myth. Doesn’t that mean it’s unreal? If it were unreal, one might reasonably assume that it could not be mapped at all – or that, if it could be, the mapping would not matter. Mapping the unreal would be like tailoring hats and dresses for the Muses or measuring the chimney to make sure that it is big enough for Santa Claus. Yet two of the most famous modern cartographers, in this larger sense of the term, are Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Much of their legacy is in the classification and mapping of human delusions, hallucinations, obsessions, and dreams – and surely delusions and dreams, like fictions and myths, are in some sense unreal. Surely they also exist and are part of our shared experience. Why then is literature a problem? Delusions are real enough to those who suffer them, but real in the wrong sense: they appear to belong to one kind of reality when in fact they belong to another. The undeluded, or those who believe themselves to be so, tend to protect themselves by declaring with some firmness that delusions – that is to say, other people’s delusions – are unreal. This may be a sensible gesture of self-defence under certain conditions, but it is not a helpful category. The unreal, as Parmenides says, is the unthinkable. Those who embrace, or are embraced by, the unreal are rendered incomprehensible. There is little to do then except to lock them in the madhouse and throw away the key. The medicalization of mental disorders has been a slow, uncertain process, replete with delusions and delusionary jargon of its own, but it has enabled most doctors, many patients, and some of the rest of us to see hallucinations and delusions as real in, let us say, the right sense. We learn that they are not, after all, purely random or unnatural or supernatural phenomena, nor are they the handiwork of sorcerers and witches. They cannot be excised with a scalpel, but they can

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be treated. They obey biological laws of cause and effect, and in that respect are like ulcers, fevers, and warts. The theory that poetry is a form of lunacy may be as old as lunacy itself. But even with the tongue-in-cheek encouragement of Theseus and Socrates, John Dryden and Arthur Rimbaud, literature has not been medicalized. I am not suggesting that it should be. I am saying, with Frye, that literature is real – as real as the earth, the body, the mind – and because it is real it can be mapped. It can also – because it is real and has a nature of its own – be wounded or disturbed. If disturbed enough, it may look, as we say, like a moonscape, but that is not its natural or usual condition. It has a biology and an ecology, like the forest, a geography and a geology, like the mountains, a taxonomy and a phylogeny, like the kingdoms Animalia and Plantae. These elementary truths were clarified by Frye just as the character and structure of the atom were clarified by Dalton and by Rutherford, the taxonomy of human language by Sapir, and the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick. Literature, like the mountains and the forest, is a realm in which much is unpredictable, but it is not a domain of the random or “totally free.” It is not a realm where anything can happen even if the poet has been visited by river sprites or gods. Poets are perfectly free to envision a mountain range where water flows uphill, or a forest in which oak leaves sprout from beech trees and finches quack like ducks. But if poets want to make narrative flow uphill, they have to pump it. If they want to make lyric sound like static, they have to chop and dice it. They can’t, by strumming their lyres or uttering spells, entice a language or a story or a song to behave against its nature of its own accord. No map or taxonomy is perfect, but some are highly illuminating and useful. The more useful they are, the more likely they are to need regular maintenance. When we inherit such a gift, the custom is that we add to it where we can, renovate it when required, correct its flaws wherever flaws are found. This is how science is supposed to work, and by and large how it actually does work. Albert Michelson and Edward Morley measure the speed of light and find it unaffected by the motion of the observer. Hendrik Lorentz writes some equations expressing the implications of a constant speed of light. Albert Einstein builds on these equations and produces something more far-reaching: the special theory of relativity. Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac kick the theory around. At the same time, Einstein’s former teacher Hermann Minkowski translates Einstein’s

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Frye and the Cartography of Literature 23

algebra into geometry, shedding new light on the interrelations of time and space. Einstein praises Bohr’s and Dirac’s amplifications but at first rejects Minkowski’s as a cheap mathematical trick. Then he realizes its underlying importance, thanks his teacher belatedly, and reformulates the theory of relativity in much more general terms. While this is going on, other researchers repeat the Michelson-Morley experiment with better equipment, ever-increasing accuracy, and basically identical results. This is a very abbreviated account, omitting the names of many important contributors, but I hope it will serve as an example. A similar story can be told about Charles Darwin and biological evolution, or any other grand chapter in the history of modern science. In the practical realm, such cross-generational collaboration is also frequent in literary scholarship. Sound textual editions, author biographies, translations, and publication histories accumulate over time through the layered efforts of scholars, some of them brilliant, some of them not. The legacy builds, even though egos are occasionally bruised and ideas sometimes perversely misunderstood. But that is not how it is working nowadays in the little overheated room of literary theory. It is true that Frye is famous, as English professors go. He has, for example, been translated often enough and widely enough to acquire both an official and an unofficial Chinese name. (The official one, Fúlái 弗萊, means Not Pigweed; the alternative, rarely heard when party watchdogs are listening, is Fólái 佛萊, which means Pigweed Buddha.) His collected works, including notebooks and some letters, have just been published in thirty volumes. Paperback editions of his books continue to sell in respectable numbers. Few of us, in or out of the academy, can hope to fare so well. But I think this misses the point entirely. I don’t believe it matters what score Frye gets on the scale of celebrity. I do believe it matters whether his fundamental achievement is understood in such a way that others can build on it. Frye saw literature whole, and he made a kind of phylogenetic map of it. I and others have used the map to navigate literatures that Frye had never seen. That in itself is a powerful confirmation that he got something essentially right. The map isn’t perfect – I repeat that no map ever is – but the more it is used and checked, the better it may become. Let us come back, then, to the issue of literature’s wholeness, and contemplate the wholeness and incompleteness of the map. You don’t need

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complete information to make a map, or to see the structure that underlies one. If you do have reams of information before you have a vision to hang it on, you may never see beyond the small details. But you certainly need some information. You need enough data to see a pattern, and you need enough contextual information to ascertain whether the pattern is a structure. The patterns we see in the night sky – the Big Dipper, for instance, and the rotation of the stars around Polaris – are patterns but not structures. The arrangement of the solar system, which you can’t see directly from anywhere on Earth, but which Kepler saw in his mind, is a structure as well as a pattern. Rutherford’s model of the atom, with electrons orbiting protons and neutrons, is again something no one has ever seen except in imagination or a highly unrealistic classroom model, but it too appears to be structurally sound. In the late 1860s, when Dmitri Mendeleev drew the first version of his periodic table of the elements, it was full of empty spaces, but the essential structure was there. In 1871, his improved table had 63 elements, from hydrogen to uranium. He predicted the existence of others and assigned them a place in the structure. Some of the missing elements were discovered almost at once; others were more elusive, but they too were eventually found. The descendants of Mendeleev’s tables hang now on the wall of every chemistry lab in the world. The latest versions have 118 elements and are still quite clearly incomplete – but, in truth, all good maps are, perhaps because reality is too. If literature were studied in the university on the understanding that it has, like the planet, a structure and a shape intrinsically its own, Frye’s map of the whole of literature, or some improved descendant of that map, might be just as useful – and just as totemically representative of the field – as the periodic table is for chemists. Why hasn’t it happened that way? One reason is that Frye never published the map as a map. He wrote the system out in prose as the Anatomy of Criticism. John Ayre and others then deduced and published diagrammatic versions. Frye’s own diagrams – the doodles, as he called them – were not unearthed from his notebooks and published until 2007.3 They could and should be drawn in a fuller and more self-sufficient form – filled in and coloured up, as Mendeleev’s table was by his successors. Other portions of the atlas still slumber in Frye’s prose. The final textual note in the Anatomy, for instance, describes very briefly a Circle of the Arts that might

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Frye and the Cartography of Literature 25

be better represented as a sphere. Frye may indeed have seen it as a globe of which he’d mapped one continent in some detail – and in its turn, like a terrestrial or lunar globe, it is part of a larger system. Maybe one day an enlarged and improved Frygian map of the Whole of Literature will indeed hang on our walls. But that would require more than some good and belated draftsmanship; it would require a general willingness, in the Literature Lab, to accept the basic premise: that literature is real, that it can be mapped, that mapping it might actually be worthwhile. Maps imply not only a kind of genuineness, or reality, but also a level of consensus, a degree of common cause. A few years before Frye’s death, Imre Salusinszky published a series of conversations with contemporary critics. Harold Bloom was among those interviewed, and Bloom spoke of Frye very warmly as “the foremost living student of Western literature.” Directly on the heels of that compliment, Bloom said, “The most fundamental difference between [Frye and me] is that he sees criticism, and literature, as a cooperative venture; I do not. I think that he idealizes … Idealization is very moving; it is also very false” (italics in original).4 That view is just too silly and too juvenile to argue with. So how did it find its way into the university, and how did it lodge, like a cancer, in the body of literary criticism?  In literature as in physics, some of the hardest and most interesting questions are some of the most elementary. In physics, they include such questions as “What is time, and how is it different from space?” and “What is matter, and how is it different from energy, or from mind, or from antimatter?” In literature, there are corresponding questions, such as “What is verse, and how is it different from prose?” and “Besides verse and prose, how many other states of language are there?” No one ever gets a Nobel Prize for working on the literary questions, but the nature of literature is not to blame for that. I was taught in elementary school that all matter in the universe was in one of three states: solid, liquid, or gas. When I reached university, I learned that this three-state view had run out of steam in the eighteenth century, and that most of the matter in the universe – more than 99 percent of it, in fact – was in none of these conditions. Lately it is claimed

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that there are at least five states of matter. Perhaps the number will continue to rise. Another neoclassical view, very easily disproved yet still widely repeated, is that language has just two states, and all human discourse is either verse or prose. One of the best corrective statements I have ever seen on this subject is the article “Verse and Prose,” which Frye wrote for the first edition of Alex Preminger’s Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, published in 1965. Frye was scarcely dead when that brilliant article was displaced by another, equally long but much less intelligent, written for the third edition of 1993 by Terry Brogan, the new co-editor.5 In Frye’s taxonomy, ordinary speech is neither verse nor prose, and verse is closer than prose to ordinary speech, which is why verse developed earlier. Prose is a by-product of writing, not of talking. This is correct as far as it goes. But again, from working with languages and literatures that Frye knew nothing about, I can affirm that a great deal of world literature – great world literature – is in another state yet: unmetered oral narrative, which preceded verse historically and is neither verse nor prose; nor is it ordinary speech. Grocery lists and indices, I think, represent a fifth state of language. Still others may yet be found. Brogan, who was forty years Frye’s junior, was also very well-read, but not in quite the same sense as Frye. Brogan was a bibliographer by trade and had read almost everything ever published in English on the subject of versification. He was an expert on other people’s views of the subject – but not on the subject itself. His own meditation on verse and prose refers repeatedly to Frye’s – that is, it refers to the very authority it was displacing – but for Brogan, Frye’s view was just a view, like any other view: an item to be included in the tabulation, as if the truth could be determined by taking a poll. Elections measure, at best, what people want to be true. You can’t determine the atomic weight of carbon or the diameter of the Earth by holding an election, nor can you ascertain the nature of literature or the nature of verse or prose by conducting a survey of published opinions. One would know this if one knew that literature is real. If you look at a piece of literature as carefully as a good physiologist looks at a muscle or a paleontologist at a bone, you are almost certain to learn something about it. If instead you survey everyone else’s opinion, the range of opinion is all you will know. So, to restate the question: Why, in the Literature

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Lab, is opinion so often all we get? Is it because the technicians in that laboratory think there is nothing more? Or has freedom of opinion become so precious that truth is now unwelcome, for fear it could limit our freedom to think what we please? My own impression is that criticism, in literature and the visual arts alike, is presently very unhealthy in two directions at once. We have a self-elected aristocracy which is in general agreement with Bloom that criticism is all about the individual genius of the interpreter and is therefore a domain in which it is every man and woman for herself. We also have a plethora of critics engaged in slavish citation and quotation, shoring up their every phrase with a reference to someone else’s book, proving by their actions that opinion matters more than fact in literary scholarship. It is almost all galley slaves and admirals: no way to run a navy and no way to sail a ship. But if literature weren’t real, then social solidarity would be the only benchmark. If literature itself is really just a big, haphazard bouquet of poetic and fictional opinions artfully arranged – not something that exists in its own right, like the forest and the ocean and the geologic strata underneath – then the ship is going nowhere and the navy is for show. Opinions of opinions, then, are all we are going to get, and Bloom is right.  Frye was a superb hands-on critic. He had, as Gordon Teskey says, the literary counterpart of perfect pitch. He also had excellent tone and great harmonic and melodic sense. “A book,” he tells us, “like a keyboard [organ or piano keyboard], is a mechanical device for bringing an entire artistic structure under the interpretive control of a single person” (c w , 22:230; a c , 248). Can it be true, as Frye occasionally claimed, that he played the piano as if it were a typewriter? I never heard him play and do not know. But when writing his own books, he routinely played the typewriter as if it were a cello and he were Rostropovich. I am not surprised that many readers – especially other critics – find his direct textual criticism more sensuous and appealing than his theorizing. Perhaps it’s not unfair to liken his one-on-one encounters with particular authors and texts to virtuoso playing and his grand synoptic mapping to orchestration and tuning up. It is, however, not the function of a map to provide great sensual delight or a lifelike representation. A map is not a photograph, a

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painting, or a musical performance; it is a diagram, a schematic, meant to help us locate our own position and find our way around. Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements – a map of the kind I have in mind – is much more like a complex musical scale, or a system of fifths and keys, than it is like a sonata or string quartet. The more a map becomes a work of art in its own right, the more likely it is to become a map of itself, and the less useful it may be as an aid to practical navigation. A good map never contains all possible information, and – to repeat a musical theme – all maps that are maps need perpetual revision. The others need to be filed in the museum of imaginary maps. Imaginary maps are those that violate Alfred Korzybski’s semantic rule, that the map is not the territory. An imaginary map is indeed its own territory and is in some sense therefore never wrong. Frye’s map of the Whole of Literature required a lot of imagination to produce, but it is not imaginary at all. It is, like Mendeleev’s table, a real map of a portion of reality, and therefore needs and deserves some regular maintenance. I’d like to do a few bits of that maintenance now, as a demonstration of what I mean. I will concentrate on the part of the map that deals with oral literature. Frye had no Arabic, but he was keen to read the Koran, in order to compare it against the Bible that he knew so well. The Koran, however, is not a book to read in translation. (Neither is the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, in my opinion, and Frye knew very well how much the Tanakh loses when forced to leave its language behind.) When he discovered that the Koran was, as he said, “untranslatable,” Frye went looking for more context. The script, for all its beauty, would have told him nothing about the book, and he did not waste time on that approach. Instead he got acquainted with what a musician would call the performance tradition. This was the right place to look, and he began to get his bearings. In most Muslim circles, the approved way to engage with the Koran is not in fact to read it – and certainly not to read it critically – but to tell it as one tells a set of beads. That is, to utter it or hear it in its sacred form, through what is called in Arabic tajwīd. This is recitation or rote repetition of the text, with the prescribed intonations and inflections, so that very little room is left for individual emphasis or interpretation. The most powerful form of tajwīd is the musical form, tartīl, or Koranic chant. Seen in this light and heard in this guise, the Koran is a kind of libretto. Mere translation of the words will bring you no closer to this incantatory

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book than it will to Così fan tutte or Die Zauberflöte. Given the language barrier through which he had to work, I find Frye’s remarks on the Koran (mostly in The Great Code and in his Notebooks on the Bible) remarkably perceptive. They sometimes betray his exasperation, but they also reveal his real determination to learn as much as he could about the text without acquiring the language in which it was composed.6 Tartīl or Koranic chant is, as Frye repeatedly says, oracular rather than oral (c w , 21:165; c w , 22:275; a c , 294, etc.).7 This is a vital distinction, missed by many who have written on Arabic literature and on oral culture in general. The Koran is oracular because its oral form, like its written form, is now fixed. We are not permitted to rephrase, condense, expand, or rearrange it. In a truly oral culture, rote memorization plays a minor part. Oral storytellers learn the forms of stories the way a seed learns the form of a tree: so well that they can unfold it again in a new and fertile circumstance, faithful to its lineage yet newborn and unique. They learn a literary language, and they learn it all the way up: not just the lexicon of words, but the lexicon of characters, episodes, scenes, phrases and turns, themes and motifs. They learn the parts of story as well as the parts of speech. Many people from oral cultures who find themselves threatened by the force and power of literacy will claim that theirs is a culture based on verbatim repetition, but this has never proven to be true. Oral cultures are in fact much more interesting than that. As those cultures vanish from the planet, many who study the now fashionable subject of “orality” persist in confusing the issue. A senior researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, who ought to know better, has spoken recently of “stories … faithfully learned and retold by many individuals who serve as cultural photocopy machines.”8 This kind of unhelpful help was available to Frye, who did need some assistance in grasping the nature of oral literature. It is not surprising that in the Anatomy he gives a confusing account of the genre he calls epos and describes it as “recited” (c w , 22:230, 332; a c , 249, 365). In an oral culture, oral narratives are not recited; they are reconceived and recomposed, like jazz tunes, in each and every performance. The native literatures of North America are, with very few exceptions, thoroughly and genuinely oral, and Frye says next to nothing about them. To the best of my knowledge, he never read a single transcription or translation of a genuine Native American text, though it was not from

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lack of interest. He was duped more than once into reviewing bogus “translations” from Haida and Halkomelem.9 And he was led by an engaging but incompetent guide into making quite a few nonsensical blanket statements about “primitive” literatures and societies. It was in 1934 that Frye read James George Frazer’s Golden Bough. This notorious work of pseudo-anthropology was compiled by reading the Greek and Latin poets and prose writers side by side with the Bible, and by circulating questionnaires to British colonial administrators and ­missionaries in the field. Frye himself was an apprentice clergyman in the  summer of 1934, working in and around Shaunavon and Stone, Saskatchewan. Stone, from which he mailed most of his letters, was scarcely populated then and is completely unpopulated now.10 The same might be said of The Golden Bough. It is one of those imaginary maps that cannot be wrong because it is only a map of itself. In a sense, The Golden Bough is Frye’s kind of book: two volumes and 900 pages in its first incarnation of 1890; 1,500 pages in the three-volume second edition of 1900; 5,000 pages in its full glory, the twelve-volume third edition of 1915; and back down to 1,000 in the abridged edition of 1922. It synthesizes an enormous number of stories and reports, interpreting the results as a tale of human progress from the magical to the religious to the scientific point of view, and arguing that the marriage of a sun god who dies every day to an earth goddess who dies every year is central to all the world’s mythologies. As Frye saw it, “The Golden Bough suggested what Christian apologists back to the first century had been suggesting: that at the core of primitive religion, the world over, was a parody of the Christian sacrament” (c w , 21:288; “World Enough,” 99). That is what Frazer and his fieldworkers found because that is what they were looking for. Frazer’s vision, like Frye’s, is grandly synoptic, but unlike Frye’s, it is not based on first-hand knowledge. Frazer’s data are mostly corrupt and his interpretations mostly cockeyed; Frye’s are mostly not. In a piece that he wrote for the CBC in 1958, Frye celebrates Frazer’s work in glowing terms and is gracious about its shortcomings: “I would not say that Frazer was a great thinker. Like Darwin, he got hold of one tremendous intuition and spent his life documenting it, but apart from that he had a rather commonplace mind” (c w , 21:273; “Symbolism of the Unconscious,” 91). That is Frye in diplomatic mode. I was much

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relieved to find the same appraisal phrased more candidly in one of his notebooks: “The big ideas don’t always occur to the biggest people: imagine Frazer, undoubtedly one of the stupidest bastards who ever put pen to paper, getting the Golden Bough inspiration!” (c w , 13:25). Still, Frazer (with some help from Oswald Spengler) had given Frye a voluminous bum steer and a seriously flawed view of “primitive” life and oral culture. This is why, in the Anatomy, Frye trivializes the Maori notion of mana and the Iroquoian notion of orenda as “fluid primitive linguistic conceptions” left over from “a world where energy and matter have not been clearly separated, either in thought or into the verbs and nouns of our own less flexible language-structure” (c w , 22:311; a c , 332). And it is why, in Spiritus Mundi, he says, “In primitive society the communal consciousness is so strong that there hardly seems to be any real individuality, as we know it, at all” (c w , 29:260; Spiritus, 254–5). These statements are sheer fantasy, like the legend “hic sunt dracones” where China ought to be on the Hunt-Lenox globe. They are not Frye’s fantasies exactly, but errors he inherited, largely from Frazer and Spengler. And they are simple errors to fix – though if left unfixed for long enough, they would grow into fatal flaws. There is a wonderful statement in Frye’s essay “Levels of Meaning in Literature,” written in the late 1940s: “The assumption of a single order of words is as fundamental to the poet as the assumption of a single order of nature is to the natural scientist” (c w , 21:101; “Levels,” 260). When we next update Frye’s map, we must try to make it clear that there is more here than simply a comparison. Humans are part of the natural world. An aberrant part, evidently – obsessed nowadays with heavy industrial activity and genetic manipulation, happy to destroy the planet if we can just get rich before it’s gone. But literature is not an industrial product. A paperback edition of Beowulf or the Iliad or the works of the Haida poet Skaay or the Navajo poet Dághaashzhiin (Black Mustache) is indeed an industrial product, but the text within – the order of words within – is no more intrinsically unnatural than a wren’s song or a robin’s nest or a footprint. This is still true when the text within is King Lear or the poems of W.B. Yeats or Wallace Stevens, Margaret Atwood or John Newlove. In the text itself, no plastics or other artificial materials are employed. The words plastic bag and semiconductor, like the words earth and air, are ­simply words; they did not come out of a factory – and, as Frye says,

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“Language in a human mind is not a list of words with their customary meanings attached, but a single interlocking structure” (c w , 21:101–2; “Levels,” 260). The study of literature, like the study of feathers and seashells, or the study of human anatomy, is rightly a branch of biology. Frye was well acquainted with one surviving oral tradition, that of religious testimonial and the sermon, but his reading of oral literature was limited to Neolithic works – the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, the Táin Bó Cúailgne, the Mahābhārata, and so on. And unlike his colleague Marshall McLuhan, who also knew nothing about oral literature, Frye was aware of his limitations and made very few pronouncements on the subject. Yet at least one of his doodles – those scribbled diagrams of the literary universe – makes excellent provision for oral modes in the overall scheme (c w , 23:151). It is highly reminiscent, in this respect, of the prophetic early versions of Mendeleev’s periodic table. Frye was convinced, partly thanks to Frazer, that mythologies always constitute alternative realities. So we find him making statements such as these: “The mythological universe … is a world built in the image of human desires and anxieties and preoccupations and ideals and objects of abhorrence, and it is always, and necessarily, geocentric and anthropocentric, which the actual environment is not” (c w , 27:399; Spiritus, 108–9). Or again, “A mythology is not proto-science: it does not, except incidentally, make statements about the natural environment” (c w , 18:353; Myth and Metaphor, 119).11 And again, “primary mythology is anthropocentric; secondary mythology is ethnocentric” (c w , 18:294; Myth and Metaphor, 23). This may in fact be true for most Neolithic mythologies; it is not true for all. And it is false for many or most preagricultural mythologies – Haida, Navajo, Cree, and Zuni, for example. Typically, in pre-agricultural societies, the mythological universe incorporates at least three realms. In one or more of these, humans are never mentioned and are nowhere to be found. In another, humans are indeed assigned a place, but it is a marginal place, in a mythworld that is centred on the spirit beings or the spirit forms of animals. There is also, typically, a third realm, where humans do occupy the foreground but not in fact the centre. If Frye had read native North American literature, even in the sometimes expurgated and dubious translations that were available in the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s, he would have revelled in it. He’d have seen the richness of the material, the sophistication of the art, and he

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would certainly have seen its relevance to his larger project. What would he have read? John Swanton’s translations from Haida; Franz Boas’s from Kathlamet, Kawaiko, Kutenai, Kwakwala, Nisgha, and Shoalwater Chinook; Edward Sapir’s from Kiksht, Navajo, Nootka, and Ute; Berard Haile’s from Navajo; Leonard Bloomfield’s from Cree; Ruth Bunzel’s from Zuni; Roland Dixon’s from Maidu; Gene Weltfish’s from Pawnee; Knud Rasmussen’s and William Thalbitzer’s from Inuktitut; Cornelius Uhlenbeck’s from Blackfoot, and so on.12 This diet of the real goods would have wiped away the distortions of The Golden Bough and cured Frye forever of the presumption that “primitive” literature is “pre-literary.” Without going deeper – coming to grips with the original texts, or studying the structural analyses of Native American texts that Dell Hymes began to publish in the mid 1960s13 – Frye could not, I think, have incorporated the language of oral narrative into his theory of genres and his taxonomy of speech, verse, and prose. But that again is hardly a fatal flaw. It can be left, as so many things are in science, to the cleanup crew – a group the rest of us should join.  In addition to cleaning up the map, is there anything useful the rest of us could do? It would be nice, it seems to me, to create a Frye Institute, ideally independent of any university, to train readers and teachers in using the map. It would also be nice to create a Frye Foundation, analogous perhaps to the Bollingen Foundation created by Paul Mellon in 1945 and named for the house that Carl Jung built for himself at Bollingen on the Zürichsee. That foundation remained active for a quarter of a century. During that time, it supported the publication of at least two hundred books, awarded some three hundred fellowships, and initiated an important poetry prize. Very little of this activity was linked specifically to Jung. It was a search for new ideas that would enlarge upon, not petrify, his legacy. Clearly no such institute or foundation is going to exist unless it is sponsored by an immensely generous benefactor. There is however a third thing that would help, and it could be done without private money, by any scholar willing to spend the time. That is, writing a history of literary study that would clarify the basic facts of the matter. Among those facts is this one: Northrop Frye is not just a literary critic; he is one of the few thinkers we can reasonably call, and in my opinion ought to call, a philosopher of literature. He practised a profession so rare

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it has no name, even in this age of rampant specialization. We have bryologists, entomologists, proctologists, but no verbal stratagem for admitting that, over the past three thousand years, several people – including Aristotle and Frye – have made a conscientious, systematic study of literature. What should we call them? Not literologists; they didn’t study letters, they studied human vision and imagination as it is manifested in words. And, like Kepler and Copernicus, Darwin and Linnaeus, they showed that what they studied is actually there: it has an order, shape, and structure of its own. What comes out of your mouth is not entirely up to you, because the mind, like the body, has an anatomy. The faculties of language and imagination have a nature because they are part of nature, like ears and eyes. There is resistance to this discovery because of its obvious implications. It means that the worlds we make are, in a deep sense, like the world from which we are made. It means that in literature, as in astronomy, cosmology, biology, and in the grand sweep of geological time, we are not the centre of the universe. We happen to be, for the moment, lucky enough to live here, and lucky enough to read the books we write, but there is a sense in which we didn’t really create them, any more than we create the food we cook or the air we breathe. Nor did our daddy God create them for our benefit. We are merely, like red squirrels and Douglas-fir trees, working parts of the world in which we live. I began this piece with a personal reminiscence, and I hope you will forgive me if I end it the same way. On 25 January 1991, I was on an airplane with the Haida sculptor Bill Reid, or Yaahl Sghwaansing, as he was also known by then. We had been in New York to visit Ted Carpenter, and up the Hudson to Fishkill, where Reid’s largest piece of sculpture was being cast at the Polich foundry, then to Washington, where the piece would later be installed, in the courtyard of Arthur Erickson’s new Canadian embassy building. I had hitched along because I was writing a little book on the mythological underpinnings of the sculpture, and I wanted to see how the old ideas – which to me were essentially literary ideas – were making their way into a new, nonverbal form. Reid and I had done what we needed to do and were on the noon flight from LaGuardia back to Vancouver. A flight attendant handed Bill the Friday New York Times. It was full of war news. The Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, was in full swing. To Bill, the war was essentially a tale of

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overwhelming human stupidity, and thus of little interest. He turned the pages quickly, then stopped abruptly in the middle of the second section. What had caught him was the obituary for Northrop Frye. “Did you know him?” he asked. “Only through his books,” I said. “Did you?” “Heard him speak once,” Bill said. “Pretty smart guy.” Then, as Haida artists often do to mark a shift in their perceptions, he started to sing, very softly, a little song. It wasn’t one I’d heard before. The words were in English, evoking a new spirit-being. Northrop Frye, what a guy, read more books than you or I. For a long time I imagined that Bill had invented this little verse. Perhaps a decade later, when Jean O’Grady published a lecture containing the same twelve words, I learned that it had been a campus ditty at Victoria College when Frye was in his prime.14 How Reid could have learned it I do not know. The only Victoria College he attended was a much less distinguished and long since vanished institution in Victoria, B C . But there he was: one extraordinary mind singing the praises of another, ringing the bell of recognition, evoking the childlike glee that comes to those who manage to fit a few small pieces of the universe together and know that in doing so they have touched what really sustains them. Reid was not in the least disturbed that Frye had never registered the depth and breadth of Haida oral literature, or of any Native American tradition. What mattered was that Frye knew that literature, music, painting, sculpture, wherever you find them, are real – as real as the earth and oceans that hold you up and feed you, as real as the fish and fruit and roots and leaves whose substance you share. Frye is hardly the only person who has read more books than I have. What he did that others have not done was read between the books – which is just as important as reading between the lines. It’s the only way to find out what the library says – the whole library, all of it: the whole order of words, which is one small holographic part of the order of nature.

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Northrop Frye beyond Belief I a n B a l fo u r

There are numerous things about Northrop Frye that are beyond belief or just about: how he could type fast enough to get a scholarship to move from Moncton to attend university in the big city of Toronto, or how he could read so astonishingly much, make eminently good sense about it, and seem able to keep it all in his head at once, a kind of human hard drive avant la lettre.1 A possibly apocryphal story, but one with the ring of truth, still circulates, recording how, in his freshman year at Victoria College, Frye seemed already so superbly well versed in the vast range of Western literature – all of Shakespeare, all of Dickens, etc. – that his poor roommate, thinking this sort of knowledge and intelligence somehow typical of freshmen, promptly dropped out after a week or so, never to look back. My more serious, thornier topic is the status of belief in literature and in the criticism and scholarship that responds to it. How does this idea – and some related issues of value and desire – take shape in Frye’s work? What and how does he think, explicitly and implicitly, about belief in literature and its criticism? It’s a crucial topic for Frye, not least because he is one of the thinkers who put the understanding of the Bible at the centre of his thinking, in itself and in relation to literature. The Bible is, to be sure, scarcely one text among others when it comes to belief or to the beliefs it may articulate, to say nothing of it as an “object” of belief, as when we say of someone he or she “believes” in the Bible. Early in his career as a teacher, Frye, after having recently shifted gears from a religious and theological training, found that his students were hobbled by a lack of knowledge of the Bible and so he crafted various

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courses on “the English Bible,” “Mythology and Symbolism in the Bible,” and the like. For the most part Frye was concerned to bring into relief the narrative and figurative patterns shaping and riddling the Christian Bible, something that should have been an irreproachable undertaking. Yet this analytic approach, when it eventually surfaced in book form, irked not a few intellectuals, first and foremost among them several “believers.” In this project Frye’s interest in the Christian Bible proceeded from the need to make sense of English and Western literature, so massively infused and informed by the contents and especially the shapes of the parts and the whole of the Bible. Frye’s concern with the Bible and literature – not the Bible as literature, a formula he resisted for consequential reasons – was above all a formal one. What are the shapes of its macroand micro-narratives? What are its recurrent and organizing figures and images? What are the consequences of such configurations? In all of this, “belief ” not only takes a back seat, it all but disappears in the rear-view mirror. Or, indeed, certain beliefs are more or less subtly undermined. Witness this account, from his undergraduate course, of the fall of man, rehearsed apropos the Book of Job to point to the Bible’s contrasting ways of making sense of what should be the same matter: Well, the story of the fall of Adam is a story of a breach of contract which has always made it dear to the heart of theological lawyers, because it provides them with what passes for an explanation of the human situation. Why do we live in a world where we all die, and where we suffer various inconveniences ranging from earthquakes to mosquito bites? The answer in the Book of Genesis is: well, it was like this: many years ago, a hungry girl long past her lunch time reached for an apple on the wrong tree, and as a result, all this has taken place. The answer is insane, it’s psychotic, but then so is most theology … (c w , 13:554) Frye contrasts this admittedly lampooning retelling of the opening of Genesis with its counterpart in the Book of Job, which confronts suffering and injustice but without trying to provide a convincing explanation of why things are the way they are. I imagine it comes as a surprise to people with a sense of Frye as a Christian literary critic, someone trained as a minister in the Methodist Church, to hear him proclaim, to an

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audience of undergraduates no less, that “most theology” is “insane.” Notice he says this of most theology, not the Bible. The claim is distinct from his frequent characterization of metaphor as a form of madness, since metaphor – against all logic – says one thing is another, when it is not, and so stands as a permanent affront to the principle of identity and to reason. (“What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?” as Polonius says.) But metaphor is a positive madness, so to speak. The insanity of “most theology” is a very different matter, insofar as, with respect to the Bible, it sometimes forces disfiguring rational explanations on stories and images that resist – and should resist – them. Frye’s caricature of the Genesis narrative is less a critique of the story itself than of interpretations that would somehow pin all the suffering and death in the world on the single action of one woman – and we know it is no accident that it is a woman who is born second and transgresses first, as the epistles of Paul make clear – eating one forbidden fruit, however absolutely interdicted. From Frye’s point of view, this is a dubious account of origins if there ever was one, a kind of original sin of interpretation. Frye’s attention to formal patterns of narrative and figure in principle entails a dispassionate kind of analysis that should be “beyond belief,” yet that scrupulous sort of attention can be accompanied by a surreptitious undermining of belief or what passes for it. Here is Frye on the fundamental shape of narrative in the Testament formerly known as the “Old”: “The most important single historical fact about the Old Testament is  that the people who produced it were never lucky at the game of empire. Temporal power was in heathen hands; consequently history became reshaped into a future-directed history, in which the overthrow of the heathen empires and the eventual recognition of Israel’s unique historical importance are the main events, though events that are still to come” (c w , 19:101–2). Some of the spirit of this analysis derives from ­eighteenth-century Biblical criticism, much of which tended to argue for human authorship of the Bible, as in Johann Gottfried Herder or Johann Gottfried Eichhorn or the higher criticism of the Bible.2 The source of stories was displaced from the divine to the human and thus unfolded in the realm of human desire, and not simply that of historical fact. Frye’s phrase “never lucky at the game of empire” seems rather provocative to those who believe in God’s providential force by suggesting that the most fundamental of Old Testament narratives derives from a mere

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contingency. All three terms – “luck,” “game,” “empire” – unsettle a complacent trust in some overseer of a salvation history that embodies religious or theological truth, unless we are positing a rather cynical, inscrutable providence. For Frye here, “story” seems to trump and to displace belief. The precarious status of belief in and for Frye’s Christianity is all the more pointed in a passage from the Notebooks around the time of composing The Great Code, his major book on the Bible: I should ask myself squarely: do you intend to make this book, in one aspect, a Christian apologetic for our times? If so, why do you? And would such an intention make the book dishonest? The best answer I can give now is to say that if I can show that Xy [Christianity] is imgvely, [imaginatively] possible today, I can show that any other belief is a choice distinct from that, there being no state without belief & and no one belief inevitable for everybody, much less a necessary alternative belief to Xy. It’s that last I should hold on to. I’m a Xn partly faute de mieux: I see no better faith, & certainly couldn’t invent a better one of my own except out of Xn assumptions. But some of my other principles are: a) the less we believe the better b) nothing should be believed that has to be believed in. (c w , 13:232) Jacques Lacan used to say that “if no religion were true, Christianity, nevertheless, was the religion which came closest to the question of truth.”3 Something of the same attitude or principle – though closer to Christianity – is operative in Frye. He stops short of claiming the sort of truth and the degree of it that usually obtains for what we consider belief. But surely it sounds paradoxical for someone trained as a Christian minister to take the position that “the less we believe the better.” Moreover, it is arguably far more extreme to maintain that “nothing should be believed that has to be believed in.” This last phrase may well be ambiguous. If “has to” means “forced to” then its negative wisdom is almost self-­evident: that would amount to something like Stalinist Christianity. If the dictum, however, means that if something is only possible as an object of belief, and not, say, knowledge, it is not to be believed, then that’s a far more disconcerting proposition, one at odds with most religious beliefs and constituting a permanent tension with them, a tension perhaps signalled, after his admission of his Christian faute-de-mieux

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status, by the phrase “But some of my other principles are …” Elsewhere Frye certainly holds out the possibility and even desirability of maintaining a “true belief ” that is realized in action, the main place where beliefs matter and are in evidence, though there he seems to mean “belief ” as “principle,” not belief in a state of affairs. Frye seems to defend Christianity not as comprising the truest theology but as the best story. The Bible emerges as a fiercely imaginative work where the matter of belief is far less central than is usually the case for professing Christians. Witness these telegraphic jottings to himself from the Notebooks: “How with the Romantic period the source of spiritual authority shifted from reason & dogma to imagination, from the Bible as a source of doctrine to the Bible as myth. What this does to the problem of belief: it shifts it to the reader” (c w , 13:78). Frye sees himself as a willing heir to this dramatic change in the reception of the Bible effected in the Romantic period, of which Blake’s work would be an extreme example, a change whereby the Bible was displaced from its status as repository of dogma and theological truth to become far more of an imaginative book, a work on the cusp of fiction – in a word: mythic, in a non-pejorative sense of that term. This is an insight familiar to Romantic poets and to philosophers of the period but it still proves difficult to swallow for the literal-minded Christian. A literalistic Christian should be a contradiction in terms, since the Bible could not be more insistent, explicitly and implicitly, in urging spiritual or even allegorical reading as a necessary strategy. It is one of the most basic tenets of Saint Paul, arguably the founder of what comes to be known as Christianity. Well before Paul, Jesus spoke in parables as much as anything else. Before him the prophets did likewise. To acknowledge the highly metaphorical character of so much of the Bible is not to claim that the Bible is literature but it at least suggests the affiliation and the need to read the text somewhat in the manner of reading literature. We are familiar with the notion that the experience of literature often demands what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Fairies, monsters, talking animals, suspiciously happy endings: all of these require checking one’s disbelief at the door if one is going to be able to appreciate literature on its own terms. But perhaps literature, and even – it seems for Frye – the Bible, also requires a willing suspension of belief. Frye’s major study of the Bible, called, after a phrase of Blake’s, The Great Code, came across to some as an odd work in part because it seemed so strangely un-Christian. In the wake of its publication, James

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O’Donnell, who was then in the process of becoming a major scholar of Saint Augustine, wrote to the author lamenting the book’s lack of Christian commitment, and Frye responded, “I have tried to explain in the Introduction why the book was as it was. I felt it had to be noncommittal, because it was addressing an uncommitted audience and trying to get them to take an interest in a subject about which, as I know from experience, many people are profoundly suspicious.”4 At one level, The Great Code aspires merely to be a dispassionate account of narrative structures and patterns of imagery for which all questions of the truth of the Bible or one’s belief in it would be bracketed, yet such an account does tend to perturb if not belief then at least some believers. Responding to a query from William Park, an orthodox Catholic professor of literature who questioned Frye’s stance toward the Bible and his putative allegiance to Romanticism, Frye politely explained in a letter: “It is true that I don’t think that literature and belief operate in the same area, and that to base a belief on literature would be a betrayal of both.”5 Frye then bristles at Park’s suspicion of Romanticism as a dubious ideological formation and explains that it is simply a “different structure of metaphors” that can be inflected politically or ideologically in various ways.6 Frye goes on to respond to some charges about being hard on T.S. Eliot and soft on Romanticism: I do have my own beliefs and values, and it seems to me that they are written all over my work with no attempt to hide them or tease the reader. I don’t think that man is God: I think that man is redeemable. The Romantic movement was primarily a historical event, something that happened, and its conception of the relation between the divine and the human as one of participating process is the one that seems to be appropriate to our own time. It is not the final truth, but it appears to be the present vehicle of understanding. If my book on Eliot is “uncharitable” it is because of what seems to me the quixotic in it, the attempts to pretend that the last three centuries shouldn’t have happened. I have no quarrel with his religious views, only with the social and political inferences that he seems to draw from them.7 Although it does seem indeed undeniable that Frye’s values and beliefs are written all over his work, they are importantly not promoted as such.  He once said in an interview “everything I write I consider

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autobiography, although nobody else would,” perhaps consciously having in mind Oscar Wilde’s dictum that the highest form of criticism is autobiographical (c w , 24:316). John Keats thought that Shakespeare led a “life of allegory,” and it seems that Frye’s corpus is shot through, allegorically, with autobiography despite appearances to the contrary. How, one might wonder, are we to understand Frye’s masterwork, Anatomy of Criticism, as autobiographical when it consists largely of the classification of all major genres and modes of Western literature, and a good many minor ones? It’s not all that clear. Still, one does glean from the Collected Works, and indeed this is already in evidence in Fearful Symmetry and the preface to its second edition in 1957, a kind of composite sketch of Frye as a desiring, perhaps believing person, a persona that emerges through his choice of topics, some small asides, and turns of phrase as much as from explicit postures of value and belief. The latter are relatively few and far between, except in the works of social commentary, or they are cast in such a way that the analysis would be intact were those statements simply to be erased. Decades of readers are surely right to find in Frye a demotic, democratic, and Low Church bundle of intellectual passion. The three authors that seem to matter most to him are William Shakespeare, William Blake, and John Milton, the latter two being among the most politically radical in the canon. Those same two are among the most impassioned and thoroughgoing readers of the Bible, as well as subscribers to any number of beliefs bound up in it. Yet here too, even in the poetry of Milton and Blake, “belief,” in Frye’s view, is often either beside the point or only obliquely of concern.8 Frye had argued in the Anatomy of Criticism that: “It is an elementary axiom in criticism that morally the lion lies down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Sade and Jane Austen, The Miller’s Tale and The Second Nun’s Tale, are all equally elements of a liberal education, and the only moral criterion to be applied to them is that of decorum” (c w , 22:105–6; a c , 114). Whereas one might imagine today an essay in the mode of a Slavoj Žižek arguing that, deep down, Austen is something of a Sadist and that in the end all the Marquis de Sade really wished for was to settle down and be happily married, we know what Frye means. It cannot be the primary job of a teacher, scholar, or even a critic to judge in moral terms the ethos of a literary work or its contents: one has to be, up to a point, equally open to works utterly divergent from each other, all across

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the spectrum from the disturbing to the perfectly agreeable. Morality survives here but as decorum, and the passage goes on to make clear that decorum is not a matter of moral fussiness but of what is appropriate in any given example of literary genre: “the moral attitude taken by the poet in his work that Le Malade Imaginaire is a comedy is the only reason for making Argan’s wife a hypocrite – she must be got rid of to make the play end happily” (c w , 22:106; a c , 114). This is to say: the moral criterion in literature is essentially a poetic or aesthetic one. The author writes what he or she writes according to the demands of the text, and especially its genre, not because he or she happens to think some particular woman is good or bad, hypocritical or not, but because some such character and characterization fits the requirements of this or that literary text, not least as an example of its kind or genre. Yet anyone who has read much of Frye knows that, side by side with dispassionate, structural analysis, sometimes an expression of value and judgment can emerge, as if poking its head out from behind an arras. Consider this brief account of Eliot’s political and ideological stances from Frye’s monograph on the poet-­critic’s work (in a passage that takes us back to the earlier objection to  Frye’s stance on Eliot): “Although Eliot’s general position, ‘Classical in literature, royalist in politics, anglo-catholic in religion,’ was not announced until the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes in 1928, it was clear that their opposites, Romanticism, ‘Whiggery,’ and secularism were already in the intellectual doghouse” (c w , 29:181). This is in some sense a perfectly accurate sketch of Eliot’s positions; indeed in part he is just quoting Eliot verbatim but the phrase “in the intellectual doghouse” is not necessarily neutral. It could be just a fine way of formulating a truth about the texture of Eliot’s disdain for those other ideological formations. Frye’s phrase, however, seems also to suggest that there’s something intolerant, intransigent, or stubbornly dismissive about Eliot’s avowed stance. With such phrasing, Frye takes or keeps his distance from a certain aspect of Eliot, even as he may also be accurately characterizing it. It subtly registers Frye’s disdain for Eliot’s disdain, without quite demanding that one take sides. Frye prefers in general to suspend questions of truth, as well as belief and value, in literature, partly because to dwell too much on them is to make a category mistake. “The function of poetry,” Frye maintains, “is to provide a rhetorical analogue to concerned truth” (c w , 27:44; c p 66). It all operates more or less grandly in the mode of the “as if.” That phrase

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one might recognize from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment or from the character Cher in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, preferably both. Kant used the formula to characterize the mode of aesthetic judgment, which masquerades as a logical judgment about the status of a thing but is in fact the projection of a subjective feeling onto the whole of humanity, whose agreement it presumes. The internal proto-proposition “I feel this tulip beautiful” – in Kant preferably a wild one – turns into “this tulip is beautiful,” as if it were an objective fact. “As if ” is not a bad formula for Frye’s conception of literature, even if literature looks for all the world as if it is making claims about just that: the world. But importantly, for Frye, it does not do so in the direct way it sometimes appears to, even in so-called realism or naturalism. Frye shows in the Anatomy of Criticism and in Fables of Identity how, say, the realistic novel of the nineteenth century is in part displaced romance, having taken over any number of motifs, figures, and devices from the older narrative mode and rendered them in a more realistic – or realistic-looking – framework. Indeed, despite poets and writers across all times tending to express a sense of social concern, it would be a mistake to read literary works as direct statements about the social, affirming or advocating this or that political or moral stance. In The Critical Path Frye echoes Sir Philip Sidney’s radical, absolute claim that the poet “nothing affirmeth.” This is an even more paradoxical stance: that the “affirmations” – the hypotheses, the conjectures, even the declarations – of literature are only apparently affirmative. It is as if all of literature were conducted rather in the mode of Beckett, affirming nothing. In the Anatomy of Criticism Frye laments that there is no single good word for the literary work of art and warns the reader that she or he is going to have to put up with jargon such as “hypothetical verbal construct.” In fact Frye did not torment the reader with that phrase unduly, but it behooves us to recall the importance of this character of the literary work as, in Frye’s view, hypothetical, even if it doesn’t necessarily appear to be that. Literature is fundamentally hypothetical and to treat it otherwise is to disfigure it. In the work of the most exemplary, the most literary, or the most dramatic of writers, belief, for Frye, seems beside the point from the word go. In the course of Frye’s study of Shakespearean comedy and romance, we come across this startling proposition: “Shakespeare had no opinions, no values, no philosophy …” (c w , 28:152). How, one asks, could this be

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said of any writer, of anyone, period, much less of Shakespeare? Those with a vested interest in the value of the aesthetic, or in Shakespeare’s plays, might breathe a (temporary) sigh of relief to read Frye’s full sentence: “Shakespeare had no opinions, no values, no philosophy, no principles of anything except dramatic structure.” Though we know mercifully little about Shakespeare’s life and even less about the beliefs he may have held (since his plays feature many voices and never constitute a reliable index of anything he actually thought, and the same holds true even of his sonnets in the first person), it is all but impossible that Frye’s dictum – Shakespeare had no opinions, no values, no philosophy – could be ­literally true. What then might it mean? Maybe something like this: “Shakespeare may well have had beliefs and opinions but they are not incorporated in any pertinent way for his plays or poems.” Might Frye also be saying in his outlandish pronouncement that Shakespeare’s art transcends ideology? Perhaps. But if so, the transcendent rhetoric does not proceed from some sentimental gushing over art as the product of the human spirit. We read in this same study why exactly Shakespeare had such a pure sense of dramatic form: “His chief motive in writing, apparently, was to make money, which is the best motive for writing yet discovered, as it creates exactly the right blend of detachment and concern” (c w , 28:152). It must be hard for some to accept the notion that the prime motive behind many of the greatest dramas ever produced was to make money. Frye’s hypothesis undercuts the loftiness, the spirituality, and, if Kant is to be believed, the very character of art as art, which, for him, is substantially tainted by a relation to commerce. Frye’s provocation, however, is trying to get us to focus on literature as literature, literature as structure, literature as hypothetical verbal construct. We know that Shakespeare, as Keats famously proposed, was as capable of writing in the voice of an Iago as an Imogen, and in Frye’s view something of the same seems to hold true of Shakespeare in political terms. Shakespeare appears to have been interested in the matter of royal succession but its hold for him seems to have had to do with its inherent drama, not who actually succeeds whom in political terms. It must, of course, be empirically true that sometimes a poet says, even in a poem, what she or he believes. But a poet’s actual beliefs are not the source of poetic interest or value. According to Frye, if one turned to the great British or Anglo-American modernists

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for moral or political “guidance or leadership,” one would be sorely misled. As he remarks in The Educated Imagination: “You’d hardly go to Ezra Pound, with his fascism and social credit and Confucianism and antisemitism. Or to Yeats, with his spiritualism and fairies and astrology” (c w , 21:442; e i 7). Time and again Frye cautions us not to be misled by the beliefs of even the greatest authors and, probably more importantly, not to take what appear to be beliefs as just that. This last notion is exemplified in his study of Shakespearean tragedy, a genre of high seriousness, entertaining the weightiest matters of life and death, where one might expect to be able to glean what Shakespeare believes. Yet nothing presented in the plays is a clear representation of “an attitude that we are expected to take” or “a view that coincides with whatever Shakespeare ‘had in mind’” (c w , 28:283). One might say that Shakespeare is a rather different case from Blake or Milton, firm if heterodox believers in Christianity and writers whose voices do not just disappear behind a wide array of dramatis personae as they do in Shakespeare’s plays. But in those writers too, from Frye’s vantage point, it is not the precise content of possible affirmations that matters but the imagination, energy, and shape of those contents. Frye’s beloved William Blake “says” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Sooner murder an Infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” This pronouncement issues from the “Proverbs from Hell” and thus is not directly in Blake’s voice, though “Hell” here is depicted in just about the most positive terms imaginable, and the work teaches us to reconsider how angels might not be all that good and devils not so bad. In his real life Blake did rather well in acting on desires, but he is not seriously advocating, in this work of poetic fiction, quite the hierarchy that the Bible of Hell proposes. Frye’s The Critical Path invokes Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Defence of Poetry as much as it does Sidney’s “A Defence of Poetry” alluded to earlier, and Shelley in that work argues that the moral force of poetry lies in its imaginative force and its indirection. If poetry sets out to teach us moral truths in a direct way, it will fail to do so and fail at being literature. This notion comes from a writer who was expelled from Oxford for a youthful pamphlet “On the Necessity of Atheism,” but who, Mary Shelley reports, throughout his short life indulged in a “constant perusal” of the Bible. The Bible mattered to him enormously as a sublime source of images and stories.

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Shelley is one of those poets who, congenially to Frye, found the power of the Bible to reside in its imaginative force rather than its doctrinal content, even though Shelley did contemplate a work consisting of what he considered the morally upbeat teachings, extracted from so much of the surrounding Biblical material to which he could not so readily assent. Shelley even thought that one of the great things about Jesus was his imagination, and translated passages from Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus on just this matter. One might wonder why Jesus of all people, since he is also a god, would even need an imagination, knowing as he does all pasts, all presents, all futures. But that is what Shelley insists. Not coincidentally he is one of those Romantic poets who, like Blake, thought that the hero of Paradise Lost was Satan, not doctrinally, of course, but, as Frye might say, imaginatively. We have seen to a somewhat surprising extent how literature works to suspend, bracket, or put under erasure matters of belief even when they riddle the surface of so many texts. More unexpected is the sense that the Bible, in Frye’s hands, does much the same, even if it is crucially, as Frye says, the one work of “literature that goes beyond literature” (c w , 18:447). Literature and the Bible turn out to be far less concerned with belief than we suppose, even in the eyes of a “believer” such as Frye, an ordained Christian minister. Frye himself found it difficult to articulate precisely what he was getting at. As he records in his notebooks, “At Montreal I foozled a question about ‘faith’ partly because it was in French. Prometheus suggests rebellion against the gods, not resurrection. I’m trying to arrive at a conception of faith which will permit one to say: ‘Karl Marx believed in the myth of Prometheus’” (c w , 13:251). It is difficult because Frye’s sense of faith and belief go somewhat against the grain, as the objects of faith and belief are no longer simply the objective but unverifiable matters of faith as construed traditionally for the great world religions. It is not at all the case that belief, writ large or small, does not matter: it is rather that in literature matters of belief are recast so as not crucially to depend on whether or not they are true in referential, objective fashion. Literature more fundamentally and tellingly is about desire and it operates in just that mode: desire shapes stories, conjures images, and generally dreams things up. It does not particularly tell the truth except the truth of its own desire: hence Frye’s romance with Romance and the necessary suspension of disbelief and belief.

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Prophecy Meets History Frye’s Blake and Frye’s Milton Gordo n T e skey

This volume draws its title from Northrop Frye’s Massey Lectures, published as The Educated Imagination. The word education means a “leading out” of the isolated individual into a social order, one that at graduation ceremonies is not unreasonably called “the community of educated men and women.” What is missing in that commonplace formulation is the factor of time: we are in community with those who for thousands of years built the culture we inhabit; we are also in community with those who will continue building culture in whatever future there will be for human beings. This is the underlying thought in all Frye’s work: that culture is community in time. It is suggested in the final paragraph of “The Instruments of Mental Production,” where Frye describes the imaginative form of the human community as a secularized Heavenly Jerusalem: “the continuing vision of a continuing city” (c w , 7:278; Stubborn, 21). However, the repetition of the word “continuing” – applied first to the act of seeing, “vision,” and then to its object, “city” – insists on a subject-object relation that suppresses, as mere noise, the temporality of experience in time, the experience we refer to as history. The tendency in Frye’s thinking to suppress history either as development or as radical change is the inheritance of decades of absorption in the highly visual symmetries of William Blake’s prophecies. In one striking example, which comes from the “anagogic phase” of the symbol as set forth in Anatomy of Criticism, Frye envisions the imaginative limit of desire toward which literature ultimately strives as an “infinite man” filling the cosmos and building his cities among the stars (c w , 22:105; a c , 113). The synoptic vision of literature

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set forth in Anatomy of Criticism is a literary map of these cities and an anatomy of the infinite man who builds them. I will argue in this paper that Frye recovered openness to temporal culture, to real change and real events, by working on John Milton, whose poetry engages with the problem of history dynamically instead of with abstract, symbolic powers such as we encounter in the prophecies of Blake. I will also argue that Frye’s encounter with Milton was an obstacle to his completing an undefined but omnivorously historical “Third Book” intended to absorb and surpass the world-famous studies Fearful Symmetry (1947) and Anatomy of Criticism (1957).1 This study proved impossible to write because its conception was determined by habits of reading and thinking acquired from Blake. Some of the best works of criticism Frye wrote were the many essays and lectures he composed in the three decades after Anatomy of Criticism, and of these the most productive were his writings on Milton, because Milton never let him forget about time.  No one would dispute that the prophetic image of a city at the end of time – based on the Heavenly Jerusalem in the final book of the Bible, and of course on Blake’s Jerusalem – was the governing idea in Frye’s long and prolific career in literary criticism and theory. That career was based, as he acknowledged, on medieval Biblical interpretation, especially on the fourth and final level of meaning, the so-called anagogical sense, from the Greek “ανάγειν,” “to lead up, to elevate.”2 One of the earliest critics to take seriously the importance of medieval Biblical exegesis in Frye’s criticism was Fredric Jameson, who redefined the anagogical level of meaning as “the political,” thus allowing for progressive development over time.3 This is as radical a departure from Frye’s way of thinking as it is from anagogy in medieval exegesis. For when we say Frye is “Biblical” it is important to specify the Bible’s extreme, anti-historical last book, Revelation, or The Apocalypse of John, which collapses all prophetic history into a series of tremendous visions that were Blake’s chief inspiration. These culminate in the destruction of the world and its replacement by the “new” and “holy” Jerusalem, “coming down from God out of Heaven” and “having the glory of God” (Revelation 21:2 and 10–11 K J V). The New Jerusalem is a new cosmos, and it lasts for eternity. In keeping

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with the Greek meaning of the word apocalypse, “an unveiling,” the New Jerusalem has always been present behind the veil of history. Eventually, the Christian Church would interpret the New Jerusalem of the Book of Revelation not just as the bride but as the body of Christ, a body containing all believers in the form of the Church. The idea is supported by the phrase Paul employs in the sermon delivered on the Areopagus: “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). It is also supported by Jesus’s several references in John’s gospel to all believers being in him at the Day of the Lord, as he is in them and in the Father: “At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you” (John 14:20).4 In the Book of Revelation, however, there is no suggestion that the Heavenly Jerusalem mystically corresponds with the body of Christ, although this idea would begin to emerge in the second century, in the visions of The Pastor of Hermas. The Roman legal fiction of a collective body of citizens would penetrate the Christian tradition still later, notably in Saint Augustine’s City of God, the second most influential book in the West after the Bible itself. But elsewhere the New Jerusalem continues in its role as the final form of the cosmos. Dante’s Commedia culminates in a vision of the Church Triumphant as the Augustinian civitas, described by Beatrice as “our city,” “nostra città.” The city appears to the poet as a vast “sempiternal rose,” with the saints enthroned in the spaces between its petals, nourished by angels from the fountain of light.5 In Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, when the “new Hierusalem” is shown to the Redcrosse Knight, he sees its “lofty towres” rising “unto the starry sphere” (1.10.56–7), that is, to the fixed stars at the limit of the cosmos. Spenser is more historically responsible at this moment than Dante is in the Paradiso. The Redcrosse Knight says he wants to contemplate the city indefinitely or, better, to die now and go there, neglecting his duty in this world, which is nothing less than to defeat Satan, the origin of evil in history: O let me not (quoth he) then turne againe Backe to the world, whose ioyes so fruitlesse are, But let me heare for aie in peace remaine, Or streight way on that last long voiage fare, That nothing may my present hope empare.

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That may not be, (said he [the hermit Contemplation]) ne maist thou yitt Foregoe that royal maides bequeathed care, Who did her cause into thy hand committ, Till from her cursed foe thou have her freely quitt. (The Faerie Queene 1.10.63) “Let me not … turne againe / Backe to the world”: such a wish captures the tension between the vision of ultimate good, which is outside time, and the duty to strive for justice in this world. This is the scene on which prophecy and history meet. To be sure, Blake had a militant spirit and cared fiercely for justice. But he expressed it apocalyptically as spiritual warfare, unforgettably evoked at the outset of Milton, which preceded his greatest prophecy, Jerusalem: I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant Land. “Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets”6 For Blake, however, building Jerusalem with the sword of prophecy and waking the giant Albion – named after Britain but symbolizing all humanity – happen in the same apocalyptic moment. In Milton it is otherwise. In Areopagitica he assumes the prophetic mantle to see the waking giant of the English nation as a revolutionary event occurring in the present, in 1644. He is convinced that the English will now recover a portion of the liberty that humanity lost at the Fall: “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks. Methinks I see her as an eagle mewing [moulting] her mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam, purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance.”7 To say that Frye’s theory of literature is fundamentally Christian – a “secular scripture,” as he said of romance – is not to criticize it, nor would

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he have disagreed with this characterization. But the Bible, if it is anything, is a historical book, not a synchronic arrangement of symbols. Frye therefore regarded Biblical iconography as a displacement (to use one of his own terms of art) of something more profound and atemporal, something he thought Blake came closer to than did any part of the Bible except Revelation (c w , 22:125–8; a c , 136–8). If we are going to be critical of any aspect of Frye’s theory it will be well to be clear about its fundamentally Blakean rather than its Biblical character. We may then ask what limitations there may be to a theory of literature that draws its underlying unity from the vision of a city that is also a body enclosing the cosmos.  Although Frye’s reputation was established in 1947 with his study of William Blake, Milton came to hold a central place in his work almost immediately after the study of Blake was complete.8 Of course Milton – I mean Milton’s Milton, not Blake’s – was already something of an alien presence in Fearful Symmetry, notably in the awkwardly titled tenth chapter, “Comus Agonistes.” Why did Milton fascinate and trouble Frye, who wanted to be a Blakean through and through but whose lasting effect as a critic may rest finally on what he said about Milton? To answer this question we must start from the standard and quite correct understanding of Milton: that he used traditional Classical and Christian imagery to imagine a future for humanity that is radically different from the past. He wanted to save the world. For Milton, each moment in history, starting just after the Fall, is one of crisis and of possible freedom, as well as of disaster – as in Samson Agonistes. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics, published in 1965, plus two subsequent essays, “The Revelation to Eve” (1969) and “Agon and Logos” (1973), were composed in contingent circumstances under the pressure of time. Their creation involved nothing like the years of agony from which Fearful Symmetry was won or the white heat of inspiration in  which Anatomy of Criticism was composed.9 The latter work, as is explained in its preface, began as an attempt to write a study of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, explicating that great poem’s traditional symbols after having done so for Blake’s idiosyncratic ones (c w , 22:3; a c , vii). A commentary on two-thirds of The Faerie Queene, brilliant and unfocused, remained

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in Frye’s notebooks on Renaissance literature and lies behind the classic article “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene” (1961). As is noted in John Ayre’s biography and in Michael Dolzani’s introduction to the notebooks on Renaissance literature, Frye was attempting through the 1960s to compose the next masterpiece – “The Third Book” I have mentioned – which would put the two previous works into the context of literary history. The Milton work was spun out on the side, when Frye was labouring on this more important project.10 Yet taken together, Frye’s writings on Milton may be counted among the finest critical insights on the poet in the twentieth century. There are far greater scholarly books on Milton, as Frye would have been the first to acknowledge; there are also more influential books. But I feel sure Frye’s Milton book will be read in the future, because it captures what makes Milton unique among epic poets since Homer: his engagement with the problem of liberty – this problem is, in short, how to win liberty and keep it – through the vicissitudes of historical change. Such an engagement with history is largely absent from Blake, for whom the future is never radically different from the past because everything is always already determined, and has happened before, as with the rhetorical question in the poem I have already quoted, from the preface to Milton: “And was Jerusalem builded here, / Among these dark Satanic Mills?”11 As his wife Catherine is reported to have said, she had little of Mr Blake’s company because he was always in eternity.12 It is a brilliant critical remark about a man who was what we would now call a man of the left, and a political radical, not unlike Frye, but for whom the world was never quite solid and real, although a sense of the real is a precondition for engaging with history.13 In Blake’s idea of history, there is change in the system, but the system as whole does not change except to move toward ever-clearer articulations of itself. In eternity, Jerusalem was once built in England, and will be again – and is always a-building. Accordingly, history for Blake is merely an unwinding of eternity into time, or a rewinding of time into eternity: I give you the end of a golden string Only wind it into a ball: It will lead you in at Heavens gate, Built in Jerusalems wall (Jerusalem, plate 77)

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In Fearful Symmetry Frye recognizes this negation of history and greets it with enthusiasm, as in the following not untypical passage: “In eternity all the homes of the soul, the body, the palace, the city, and the garden, are one; and the eternal community of men is also the real presence of a divine body, whose blood is the new wine created from the water of nature” (c w , 14:340–2).  I have suggested that although Frye’s reputation was established with his great study of Blake, and although he remained a passionate Blakean after Fearful Symmetry, Milton’s poetry – and just as important, Milton’s prose – would come to hold a central but antithetical place in his thinking. Frye recognized that Milton could not be squeezed into Blake’s reductive view of history and freedom because, for Milton, history is a real force in its own right, a heteronymous power that cannot be understood according to any immanent symmetries or laws. But how was Milton to make his readers feel that this is so? Set before history begins, Paradise Lost is a diagnostic study of history in its determining origin, just before history begins. Frye sympathized entirely with Milton’s radical commitment to changing the world and liberating human nature so that the future will be different from the past. Yet the theory presented in Anatomy of Criticism and elsewhere suggests that literature is always the same and that the human imagination is always the same. How does this contradiction arise? It arises from an idea Frye adapts from Blake. For Blake, all history is subject to an underlying, coherent, and ultimately organic structure, the giant Albion, who corresponds with the Spiritual Israel, with Atlantis, with the City of God, with the body of Christ, and most importantly with the Heavenly Jerusalem. Frye recurs to this figure throughout Fearful Symmetry as Blake’s most important, organizing conception. Even so, it is surprising to see the figure return in Anatomy of Criticism, in a passage I have already had occasion to mention and now quote at length: In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not the center of its reality… When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes not the container, but the thing contained, and the

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archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way. This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body. (c w , 22:110–11; a c , 119)14 This solitary, cosmic being, whom I shall call “Anagogic Man,” has no environment apart from his own body, for the limits of this body are the limits of the real: “Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way.” There is music, but there are no musicians. There is art, but there are no artists. There is philosophy, but there is no dialogue. There is no one to talk to, and no one to love. Love – which would require at least two bodies instead of one Man, and would include “apt and cheerful conversation”15 – is impossible in this airless and solitary condition. Yet Frye is the wisest writer on sex in Paradise Lost, and the only critic I know of to have observed the firmness of Adam’s defence of physical passion against a disapproving angel. Raphael warns Adam that by “attributing overmuch” (8.566) to Eve’s beauty he risks being “sunk in carnal pleasure” (8.598). Adam replies that his own view of sexual relations is higher “by far” than the angel’s: “Though higher of the genial bed by far / And with mysterious reverence I deem” (8.598–9).16 Of this exchange Frye writes, “When Raphael rebukes Adam, as Adam feels, unjustly, Adam makes a shrewd flanking attack by way of his question about Raphael’s sex life, and on the way mentions in a parenthesis that he is sticking to his own views and is not allowing any angel to bully him out of them” (c w , 16:80). Whatever one may say about the comprehensive system put forth in Anatomy of Criticism, Frye is pitch perfect as a critic, and as I go on through the years reading him on Milton it is this ability to hear such moments in depth that leaves me most in awe of his powers. 

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Anagogic Man diminishes in importance in Frye’s writings as time goes on, but only to be better disguised in such formulations as that literature constitutes a total “order of words,” a phrase that has nothing to do with linguistics and makes less sense than the at least intelligible claim that criticism is a coherent body of knowledge.17 Already in Anatomy of Criticism Anagogic Man is presented more cautiously and much less frequently than in Fearful Symmetry, as merely one part of the larger system, the anagogical phase of the symbol. One may shift among these phases of the symbol, as one shifts among the genres and the modes, with the coolness of a driver changing gears – an image Frye uses when speaking of Spenser “approach[ing] his sublime passages with the nonchalance of a car driver shifting into second gear” (c w , 28:54; “Structure of Imagery,” 69). This reduction of Anagogic Man to a moment in the system is possible if the system is wholly synoptic, as Frye tells us it is in the first sentence of his “Polemical Introduction” to Anatomy of Criticism: “a synoptic view of the scope, theory, principles, and techniques of literary criticism” (c w , 22:5; a c , 3). Yet Anagogic Man encloses the whole system of which he was formerly a part and may even be said to have ingested his environment, starting from within and working outward until all has been devoured and we are left with what Frye calls a “monad.” You cannot see out from within; and you cannot see in from without, because there is no longer any outside from which an external point of view could be taken. Anagogic Man is at once the totality of the system and a part of that totality, like microcosm and macrocosm. But this is an impossibility, as it is impossible for a set to be a member of itself. There is therefore a contradiction at the centre of Frye’s system in his claim to have erected a theory of literature that would comprehend literary history as well, history that shows “what actually happened,” in Leopold von Ranke’s famous phrase. Blake’s visionary indifference to real history, his tendency to convert temporal change into unchanging design, is continually reflected in Frye’s most casual writings, for example, in his review of Bonamy Dobrée’s tome on the eighteenth century, in the Oxford History of English Literature series. The reader senses Frye’s impatience, politely expressed as it is, with literary historical writing in which the mass of fine details fits no poetical scheme, such as the succession of modes set forth in the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism,

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surprisingly titled “Historical Criticism.” The incompatibility of real historical change with schematic design is the reason Frye never wrote the literary historical capstone to Anatomy of Criticism described in the preface to that work, or the still more grandiose project described in his Guggenheim fellowship application (1949). This project evolved, after Anatomy of Criticism, into the “Third Book” on which Frye laboured so long and intensely, as we can now see in his astonishing notebooks.18 Yet this very difference between Frye’s theoretical aspirations and his achievements would contribute to the quality of his criticism on Milton. If Frye had not tried to turn Milton into Blake, and failed to do so, as was inevitable, he would not have written so powerfully on Milton. Frye would write the following in his notebooks: “For a long time I’ve been obsessed by the notion of writing a definitive history of English literature. I’ll never do that, of course; but why should the idea fascinate the author of Anatomy of Criticism?” (c w , 23:295).19 Now we know the answer to this question: “Milton.” Yet Frye did what he could to subdue the character of history in Milton to his own poetic teleology. Here is how Frye puts it at the conclusion of the essay on Paradise Regained, which closes his book on Milton’s epics, The Return of Eden: “To use terms which are not Milton’s but express something of his attitude, the central myth of mankind is the myth of lost identity: the goal of all reason, courage, and vision is the regaining of identity. The recovery of identity is not the feeling that I am myself and not another, but the realization that there is only one man, one mind, and one world, and that all the walls of partition have been broken down forever” (c w , 16:131). Those terms are indeed not Milton’s and express little of the poet’s true ethical stance. Milton always felt he was himself and not another. But if Frye’s words express nothing of Milton’s attitude, they certainly express what Blake thought Milton should have said, and what Frye was trying in this passage to make Milton say.20  There is an amazing scene of geometrical contortionism in Blake’s Milton (1811) – that half-as-long prelude to the greater prophecy, Jerusalem (1821) – which is decisive for Frye’s understanding of Blake and Milton both. This is the scene near the beginning of the work in which the hero, Milton, who has already died and gone to Heaven, courageously

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undertakes a return to our world, leaving the “infinite plane” of eternity to enter through his “vortex” into three-dimensional space and linear time. In three-dimensional space, bodies and minds are opaque, which is to say separate from one another, and time ticks on from one moment to the next. In eternity, by contrast, where time is an expanded present, all minds and bodies are as one, the infinite plane being like that of the fourdimensional ring torus, which in three dimensions looks like a doughnut. On the infinite curvature of this torus a vortex (corresponding with the hole of the doughnut) can develop at any point, or at many points simultaneously, like the numerous holes dug by sand crabs on a beach extending over the horizon. Indeed, each person in eternity, insofar as that person is separate from others, appears as a small vortex stretched between eternity, at the opening top of the vortex, and the world as we know it, which the lower, narrow end of the vortex touches, like the bottom of a tornado. The opening lip at the top of the vortex is continuous with the curvature of the infinite plane, and hence with all other vortices, such that all persons are one. The bottom of the vortex opens out into time and space, where persons are separate one from another. Thus the infinite plane of the torus can contract on itself anywhere, to use Blake’s terminology, spirally descending into our world. Extreme contraction will result in a descent such as Blake describes Milton heroically undertaking, into three-dimensional time and space.21 The “Song of the Bard” has convinced Milton he must make this epic journey to rescue humanity from his own errors, especially his errors about women. Indeed, later in the poem Ololon, the idealized female, must herself spiral down from eternity to Milton’s rescue. The importance of Milton’s descent is indicated by its being represented magnificently on the frontispiece to Milton. As the surface of eternity rolls back and away from the vortex’s plummeting sides, the walls of partition go up and we are no longer one man, one mind, and one world, to use Frye’s language in the essay on Paradise Regained. Blake’s notion is that the curved plane of eternity is the body of the giant Albion, our common human being – the Blakean version of Frye’s Anagogic Man. But in three-dimensional space and linear time we become separate, globular bodies whirling about in isolation from one another. The bodies we observe in the heavens are models of what human bodies are in our ordinary perceptions. (The telescope, which revealed

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the planets to be spherical, was a strong influence on Blake’s vision, and so, in particular, was Sir William Herschel’s discovery of the planet Uranus on 13 March 1781.22) Our limited perceptions are given undeserved authority by Newtonian physical law and Lockean mechanical psychology. For Newton, each object is isolated from every other. For Locke, each mind is imprisoned in itself by the senses, which are the mediating wall between mental ideas and the purely material world. Seen from the Blakean point of view in eternity, however, this world of isolated bodies whirling through emptiness, and of isolated minds floating in matter, is a violent sea of time and space, a sea Milton saw prophetically as chaos. The waves of this sea assail the Rock of Ages – God – but without effect. On this rock the giant Albion – a “form of perfect beauty” – is stretched out in death. (Christ put him there, but that is another part of the story.) The images of sea and rock are from David’s song of thanks for his deliverance (2 Samuel 22:2 and 5–6; Psalm 18). As he descends, Milton hovers over Albion’s bosom and falls into it, or rather he “bends down” into it, because Milton is still a vortex himself and not yet a falling object, although that is what he will appear to be from below, in time and space: “a falling star / Descending perpendicular.” His “bending down” through Albion’s bosom plunges Milton into the chaos of time and space, but he passes straight through it until “what was underneath soon seemd above.” That is, what was formerly seen from above as the sea of time and space is now, seen from below, the stormy heavens overhead. As Milton next passes through the intermediate region of Beulah, Blake’s version of Milton’s Paradise, he becomes a comet or “wintry globe” descending from the zenith in thunder (see Isaiah 14:12). And then, to our surprise, he enters Blake’s foot: The nature of infinity is this! That every thing has its Own Vortex; and when once a traveller thro Eternity Has passed that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind His path, into a globe itself infolding: like a sun: Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty … Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent To the weak traveler containd beneath the moony shade. Thus is the heaven a vortex passd already, and the earth A vortex not yet pass’d by the traveler thro’ Eternity.

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First Milton saw Albion upon the Rock of Ages, Deadly pale outstretched and snowy cold, storm coverd: A Giant form of perfect beauty outstretchd on the rock In solemn death. The Sea of Time and Space thunderd aloud Against the rock, which was inwrapped with weeds of death Hovering over the cold bosom, in its vortex Milton bent down To the bosom of death; what was underneath soon seemd above, A cloudy heaven mingled with stormy seas in loudest ruin; But as a wintry globe descends precipitant thru’ Beulah bursting With thunders loud and terrible: so Miltons shadow fell Precipitant loud thundering into the Sea of Time and Space. Then first I saw him in the Zenith as a falling star Descending perpendicular, swift as the swallow or swift: And on my left foot falling on the tarsus, entered there.23 Frye’s explication of the passage is as follows: Blake says that everything in eternity has what he calls a “vortex” (perhaps rather a vortex-ring), a spiral or cone of existence. When we focus both eyes on one object, say a book, we create an angle of vision opening into our minds with the apex pointing away from us. The book therefore has a vortex of existence opening into its mental reality within our minds. When Milton descends from eternity into time, he finds that he has to pass through the apex of his cone of eternal vision, which is like trying to see a book from the book’s point of view; the Lockean conception of the real book as outside the mind on which the vision of the fallen world is based. This turns [Milton] inside out, and from his new perspective the cone rolls back and away from him in the form of a globe. That is why we are surrounded with a universe of remote globes, and are unable to see that the earth is “one infinite plane.” But in eternity the perceiving mind or body is omnipresent, and hence these globes in eternity are inside that body. (c w , 14:341; f s , 350) In a later passage of Fearful Symmetry Frye describes himself (with intentional comedy) crawling upwards out of the linear narrative of the text, through a crack in the cosmic “mundane shell” – the term is Blake’s

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but is based on Milton’s universe in Paradise Lost – into a higher realm, outside time and space, where consciousness expands and symbolic meaning is revealed. He is going in the opposite direction to Milton in Blake’s account of the poet’s descent into the world. But Frye eschews the sublime. He goes up “anagogically” as to an attic where you can see down into two rooms at once. One room is the beginning of the Bible, the Book of Genesis; the other is the end of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. They are synoptically surveyed at one and the same moment in time. As you experience the Bible in time, however, reading from Genesis to Revelation, the two books are as far apart as conceivably possible, at the beginning and the end of the world. But from the perspective of eternity they can be taken in at a glance, completing a great cycle. The tree of life and water of life from the Garden of Eden in Genesis, which we lost at the Fall, are restored to us in the New Jerusalem. The water of life returns as a river flowing out from beneath the throne of God. The tree of life returns and multiplies to become the trees growing on the banks of this river (Revelation 22:2; Ezekiel 47:12). Yet the Bible does not move in a perfect circle because, as Frye points out, at the end of it we get a whole city to live in and not just a garden – a city with all the cultural advantages of civilization. We have returned to the beginning, but on a higher plane than Eve and Adam’s. Frye then sees the entire structure resolved again into one organism: the body of Anagogic Man (c w , 14:375–8; f s , 386).24 The passage in Fearful Symmetry insensibly modulates from the farcical to the sublime. It may owe something to Satan’s inclusive vision of the universe in Paradise Lost: “Round he surveys and well might where he stood / So high above the circling canopy / Of night’s extended shade” (3.418 and 555–7). The body in question encloses all other bodies, which are distinct from one another only in linear time and in alienating, three-dimensional space. There can be no question that Blake thought this, and Frye thought it too, with many safeguarding qualifications, to be sure. These would be needed for an image so dangerously near to turning into a predatory one, like the vast Biblical sea monster, Leviathan, now filling the sky – so Hamann describes him – as “the prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2).25 Since we are concerned here with one of the greatest literary theorists of the twentieth century, it would be remiss to pass over in silence the

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typical “object” that Frye casually offers as an example of a vortex: “when we focus our eyes on one object, say a book.” We start out seeing this book from the point of view of eternity, where all symbols with their meanings exist together not in the book but in the reader’s mind. The apex of the cone of our attention, the rapidly spinning point of the vortex, is not, as we should expect, in our minds but instead on the surface of the book, touching the printed page at one point and moving along the lines of type. The widening whorl of the vortex expands outward to awaken “[the book’s] mental reality within our minds.” We expected the reverse, with the apex at our eyes and the base in the book we are reading. Perhaps we did so because of the many diagrams we have seen on the mechanics of sight. Common sense tells us that the opening whorl of the vortex is in the book, where meaning expands outward toward other books. That is because our ordinary view of books is that they lead from one to another and another, expanding into a wider realm of wisdom and knowledge. To stand this commonsense view on its head is one of the remarkable effects of reading Frye: the apex of the vortex is always in the book, in literature, not in the mind. In his lectures this was still more so. These were improvised performances in which Frye ranged more freely than he did in print through the zodiac of his own wit, “bending down,” like Blake’s figure of Milton, into isolated instances in texts, drawing these up into the vortex of his mind. For example, flowers associated with mourning and the shedding of blood would be drawn up in profusion from world literature (with help from James Frazer), ending with Yeats’s “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” where the wooden scabbard of Sato’s fivehundred-year-old sword is wrapped in “flowering, silken, old embroidery, “torn / From some court-lady’s dress.” The flowers, of course, since they cover a sword, are the colour of blood, “Heart’s purple,” and so, as Heraclitus says, here too are gods, in this instance the dying and reviving Adonis.26 Frye’s improvisations recalled the great line toward the end of Vala: “The Expanding Eyes of Man beholds [sic] the depths of wondrous worlds.”27 To do otherwise, Frye held, was like “trying to see a book from the book’s point of view,” as if you were down there on the page. Picture it. Having descended to the two-dimensional surface of the page, you are soon further reduced from two dimensions to one: all you can see now

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are the letters to either side of you. (I suppose Frye was influenced in this passage by Edwin A. Abbott’s marvellous 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions.) To read, you have to move sideways in one dimension along the line of type, gathering letters into words and sentences. Reading in our three-dimensional world ends up being onedimensional. It is linear and syntagmatic, not “synoptic,” which is Frye’s term for the proper perspective of literary theory. Of course, one can’t in any literal sense see a book from the book’s point of view. But it is some measure of Frye’s influence that that is what we used to think literary criticism should do.  The latest view of Eden we are given in Paradise Lost comes not at the poem’s conclusion but near the end of Book Eleven. The entire mountain that bears the garden of Paradise on its summit is torn loose by the rising waters of the Flood. Like a charging bull, the waters extend great horns to either side of this mountain as they rush upon it, tearing it loose from its foundations. The mountain is then hurled down the swollen Euphrates to the Persian Gulf: … Then shall this mount Of Paradise by might of waves be moved Out of his place, pushed by the hornèd Flood With all his verdure spoiled and trees adrift Down the great river to the op’ning gulf And there take root an island salt and bare, The haunt of seals and orcs and sea-mews’ clang … (p l 11.829–34) This scene evokes the one-way, asymmetrical character of geographic and historical time. The picture of those “trees adrift” is quietly spectacular, its momentary stillness followed by the plunging line: “Down the great river to the op’ning gulf.” The arrow of time points downstream and cannot be reversed. The rugged grandeur of the scene comes from its acceptance of irreversible loss: the most beautiful place on earth is now the most forsaken. This filthy, desiccated, salt-encrusted spur of rock is what history looks like until we do something about it here, rather than contemplating it from another dimension. I imagine that if the real Milton were

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summoned from eternity to confront Blake in time, he would say, “Let us pass over my mistakes in the past – and yours, too, friend William – and see what we can do about now.” That is the perspective Milton takes in the briefer epic poem he wrote after Paradise Lost: Paradise Regained. This work, which is shorter, more austere, and more challenging, may always be a work for the few. If so, that is a pity, because it takes us into the heart of Milton’s vision, in which one man, Jesus, is alone in the desert, confronted by the greatest intelligence in the world and the negative engine of history: Satan. Unlike Blake’s Albion or Frye’s Anagogic Man, Milton’s Jesus is isolated from others and must deal with Satan on his own.  Milton lost a revolution but survived to write his epics, narrowly escaping execution, which fate some of the men he most admired in his life did not escape. Frye was famous, but after Anatomy of Criticism in 1957 he was not doing the work he wanted to do, and he may have felt in those years of growing fame that he was something of a failure as well, unlikely as that sounds. In any event, Milton and Frye – the poet at the time of writing Paradise Regained, the critic when he was writing about that poem – were both isolated, perhaps lonely men, with some disappointment behind them and plenty of ambition before them, and with the resolve to continue doing what had to be done. That is what Paradise Regained is about: obstinately doing what is right and courageously enduring isolation. We are in this together, but we are not one.

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From the Defeated Northrop Frye and the Literary Symbol Mi cha el Do l z a n i

The major thinker, Frye said more than once, is the one who will not go away, who keeps returning no matter how many times he or she is refuted and supposedly laid to rest. It is a common opinion in the field that Frye has been, however respectfully, laid to rest, that his work will not survive in the long run and will be regarded as having only historical importance. I myself believe that a revival of Frye’s reputation and a renewed collective interest in his writings is possible. But even should that not occur, he did not write all his books and articles and addresses in vain. Frye’s ambitions were as huge as those of his precursor, William Blake. He saw himself as taking part in a struggle to unleash the power latent in words, and to put it to work to change the world, to throw open the doors of perception, to build Jerusalem. It is possible to see him as defeated, in terms of public response, but out of that defeat a body of work was created and passed on. The spirit animating that body is a complex, all-encompassing vision, encyclopedic, as Frye called it, which is at the same time a single form, a world in a grain of sand. It is this single yet infinitely diverse vision that I am calling a “symbol,” Frye’s main critical term before “archetype” temporarily supplanted it in Anatomy of Criticism. Frye’s work, now made accessible in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, will be passed on to subsequent generations. The resurrection of his vision will be individual and inward, whether or not a more public and widespread resurrection comes about. This is the work of Blake’s Los, within and despite the relentless turning of the cycles of history. My own discovery of Frye may serve as an example of such an inward and individual resurrection. In the spring of 1970, the professor of my

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Romantics class, Ted Harakas, handed me Fearful Symmetry and told me I should read it, as Pelham Edgar, in his Romantics class at Victoria College in the University of Toronto, had encouraged Frye to write on Blake. The epiphany that reading, or at least trying to read, Fearful Symmetry produced, whatever personal relevance it had to my nineteenyear-old self, is of larger interest to the degree that it was a response to a sense of social crisis symptomatic of the end of a historical cycle. That same term, I learned of the shooting of four student protesters by the National Guard in Ohio from the radio of a trucker’s cab in which my hippie-haired younger persona was hitchhiking back from the campus of Kent State, a mere forty-five minutes from Baldwin-Wallace College (now Baldwin Wallace University) where I was a student and now teach. While Frye regarded student protesters as basically spoiled brats, the 1969 preface to Fearful Symmetry notes a parallel between the crisis of World War II, to which the book was on one level a response, and a present moment in which “reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem” (c w , 14:7). At this point Frye had just recently published The Modern Century and was to embark on what became The Critical Path, twin responses to the volcanic eruption that was the 1960s. Blake himself had  been responding to the crisis following the collapse of the French Revolution, and, as Blake’s spirit was reborn so thoroughly in Frye that commentators cannot tell where he leaves off and Frye begins, Blake speaks in Milton, the companion poem to Jerusalem, of a definitive epiphany achieved by having Milton’s spirit reborn in him. Milton’s major poetry was also written in the aftermath of a failed revolution, an attempt to hand on a redemptive vision to “fit audience, though few” in a dark time, the spirit reborn within him being that of the Biblical Word itself. My title comes from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” written during the same time as Fearful Symmetry and, like the poetry of Dylan Thomas, on whom I wrote my dissertation, full of the imagery of the Nazi bombs falling on London. Unlike Thomas, a direct descendent of both Milton and Blake, Eliot was a conservative, an anti-revolutionary. Yet the Royalist from Missouri is willing to say that Whatever we inherit from the fortunate We have taken from the defeated

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What they had to leave us – a symbol: A symbol perfected in death.1 Four historical upheavals – Milton’s, Blake’s, Frye’s, my own. Four defeats. Yes, the Allies won World War II, but it was only a temporary chapter in a larger defeat. Milton, Blake, and the generation of the 1960s lived to see their short-lived revolutionary hopes shattered, and tried to build something out of the wreckage. In Frye’s case, what was shattered was not a single revolutionary movement, but the pattern of trying to salvage something out of shattered historical hopes was strong enough for him to associate his writing of Fearful Symmetry in a time of crisis with Blake’s writing of his major Prophecies during a similar crisis. The difference was that Frye’s generation felt that, in its case, the crisis was protracted, beginning when World War I produced a widespread feeling, reflected in modernist literature, that some rough beast was slouching towards Bethlehem. A depression and second world war following within the next twenty years, and a subsequent Cold War that was quite possibly the harbinger of a third and final world war, were seen by Frye and others as moments in an ongoing historical defeat of human revolutionary hopes, the defeat that Oswald Spengler called the decline of the West.2 Yet something was handed on, from defeat to defeat – something that prompts Eliot to say, in the very next lines, echoing the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich, “And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well.” Frye did not begin with Blake’s revolutionary and progressive vision. The Collected Works edition of Frye’s student essays opens with a ninetypage essay on Romanticism entirely possessed by Spengler. The first of its four sections deals with Spengler’s representation of Western culture as having moved through its spring, summer, and autumn, arriving somewhere around the Romantic period at its winter phase of decline and fall. The other three sections, with an encyclopedic erudition astonishing in a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate, analyze philosophy, music, and literature from the Romantic period to Frye’s own time as a final exhaustion of the possibilities of Western thought and art. Romantic and modern art are characterized by a progressive self-consciousness, skepticism, fragmentation, and, most pervasively, pessimism, the latter contrasted with the optimism, born of vital life energy, of what Frye sometimes calls the “creative period.” Insofar as Blake is present at all in the student essays, it

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is as the last great representative of the creative period, looking backward rather than forward. As for the future, Frye ends one essay by saying, “Now that we again have reached a late stage of civilization, let us hope that we will be as fortunate, either in revitalizing our present tradition or in gaining a new one, through the awakened consciousness of the coming in glory of the Son of God” (c w , 3:153). Granted that Frye was turning this essay in to a theology professor, and granted that there are statements of Blake’s that, taken out of context, might equally sound as if they merely advocate a conventionally orthodox Christianity, Frye’s religious and artistic convictions in the 1930s seem a good deal more traditional and conservative than they were to become under the influence of Blake. If Frye and Eliot had met in the 1930s, they would have had to steer clear of political and social conversation: the reactionary opinions of Eliot’s After Strange Gods in 1934 were repellent to the young intellectual who was already a liberal socialist. But they might have found much to agree on in religion and art. The young Frye who wrote the student essays would have agreed with the future author of Four Quartets that the Incarnation is the redemptive fact of human history, the “dove descending” breaking in on the otherwise closed Spenglerian cycles of decline and destruction; the two would also have agreed that music and literature in a creative period are always closely affiliated with religion – hence Frye’s interest in Colin Still’s treatment of Shakespeare’s Tempest (for which Eliot expressed appreciation) as a “mystery play.”3 The height of Western music was reached by Bach; Mozart, while still part of the creative period, is already a “skeptic”; and in Beethoven, Romantic egotism begins its disintegrative assault on form. Despite appearances, Frye never lost his sense of God as a transcendent Other, a creative contrary to the immanent Inner Light identified by Blake with the human imagination, even if his understanding of that Other moved in the course of his life a long way from traditional Christian supernaturalism. It is present in his early interest in Karl Barth; in the rhetoric of his occasional sermons; and it was, so to speak, born again in the mid 1970s, culminating in the dialectic of a transcendent Word and an immanent Spirit in Words with Power. We now know that the hidden gestation of this late birth was the “Third Book” notebooks, whose project can be described in one way as the attempt to put traditional and post-Romantic mythology in a creatively dialectical relationship to each

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other, as opposed to seeing the later as either an improvement upon or a falling away from the earlier. Spengler would have regarded the four cyclical upheavals as progressive only in the negative sense of their being stages in the “going under of the evening land,” to translate literally the German title of The Decline of the West. The first striking thing about his thesis is how implausible it seems from a superficially rational point of view. As his seasonal metaphors suggest, Spengler treats cultures as if they follow a rhythm at least analogous to the life cycle of a biological organism, for which decline and death are inevitable. But it is an organism’s body that ages, wears out, and dies, while a culture, although it has a material substrate, has no living body. It is a network of mental constructs: why should it age or die? Among those mental constructs are the arts, and why should the forms of art ever wear out? Is a C-major chord obsolete, and, if so, are all the compositions that have used it obsolete as well? Even if we were to grant a shelf life to minor works, whose limited achievements are conceivably exhaustible, the popular definition of a “classic” is precisely a work that is in some respects ageless. Homer’s content is dated, but surely, many people feel, the Iliad itself is as alive as it ever was. Yet such commonsense assumptions run up against the judgments of many contemporary critics and artists. Is our sense of artistic and cultural obsolescence merely, then, an illusion instilled in us by capitalism, with its economic need to keep consumers chasing novelty and fashion? Up to a point, Frye agrees that this is true, though, as I will go on to propose, it cannot be the final answer. He opens The Modern Century with a sharp-edged portrait of the totality of contemporary human experience reduced to fashion: “In a world where dynasties rise and fall at much the same rate as women’s hemlines, the dynasty and the hemline look much alike in importance, and get much the same amount of featuring in the news” (c w , 11:10; m c , 20–21). Over the last ten years, William Gibson, a science fiction novelist residing in Canada, has set a brilliant trilogy of novels in a twenty-first-century world in which fashions and trends are no longer Thomas Carlyle’s clothing covering the surface of reality but have become what reality is.4 The arts have become, if anything, even more infected by this extraordinary madness of crowds than other areas of life. “I hear of painters, even in Canada,” Frye notes, “who have frantically changed their styles completely three or four times in a few years, as collectors demanded first

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abstract expressionism, then pop art, then pornography, then hard-edge, selling off their previous purchases as soon as the new vogue took hold” (c w , 11:11; m c , 22). Nor is the ivory tower exempt, as college administrators push the Toyota gospel of continuous improvement whether or not there is anything but “branding” to improve, while professors preach to graduate students of the danger of falling away from the straight and narrow cutting edge into the darkness and gnashing of teeth. The Modern Century identifies this panic about “keeping up” with the shifting phantasmagoria of society as a symptom of what he calls “the alienation of progress” (c w , 11:11; m c , 23), a theme negatively inspired in part by Frye’s visit to Expo 67 in Montreal. But part of the book’s point is that the belief in linear progress toward utopia of the sort that used to inspire expositions and world’s fairs was always an attempt at self-­ hypnotism, an attempt to deny what lay beneath it: an apocalyptic dread that Thomas Pynchon calls “paranoia.” Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold because, as W.B. Yeats already felt, social flux does not signal progress but cultural exhaustion. The title of The Modern Century’s first chapter is “City at the End of Things,” a version of the megalopolis that is Spengler’s symbol for the final phase of culture. And not just Spengler’s: another book that haunts the student essays is Saint Augustine’s City of God, inspired by the sack of Rome in 410 CE at the comparable end point of the Classical cycle. In fact, a group of writers in the fifth century had a role in inventing Frye’s own literary form, that of the anatomy. In the fifth century, as the sun was going down on the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages began to cast their shadow across the evening lands of Europe, men such as Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Boethius, and Isidore of Seville tried to compile and preserve the heritage of Classical learning in encyclopedic works that were like verbal time capsules, fragments shored against their ruin, a treasure hoard of symbols handed on from the defeated. While Blake showed Frye that it was still possible to imagine building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, I think the young Frye tended to think of himself as looking backward, like Blake himself, summing up the “creative period.” In the notebooks, the first three volumes of his projected magnum opus, referred to by Frye as “the ogdoad,” were intended to sum up and hand on the myths and symbols of Western culture up to about 1600; the fourth volume, “Rencontre,” was to be concerned with the post-Romantic breakdown.

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Frye’s Spenglerianism, moreover, was not an immature youthful enthusiasm, if that is the right word for a conviction that Western culture is in its death throes. Frye’s later essays on Spengler never repudiate the idea that we are in the late stages of our culture, though he certainly repudiated the Nazi-wannabe conclusions Spengler drew from it and postulated another movement in history to which Spengler was perhaps wilfully blind. He did make some attempt to detach from the pessimism, arguing that it is not pessimistic to say that one grows older, and that late stages of culture may gain in wisdom what they lose in youthful vitality. Compare to this the statement in one of the student essays that “in the nineteenth century we have an era as important and interesting as any of the three centuries preceding it, though in all branches of culture it marks an abrupt decline from them” (c w , 3:274). And, later in the same essay, “We have said that the nineteenth century marks an abrupt decline in all the major arts” (c w , 3:297). But while he denies the emotional reaction, he does not deny the fact: in The Modern Century, he speaks of “a long and tired tradition of Western art, which has been refining and sophisticating itself for centuries” (c w , 11:53; m c , 95). We are left with our original question, of why human culture should wear out in time, an observation hardly new with Spengler. There was, of course, his predecessor Giambattista Vico, an influence on Frye at a later point.5 But in fact humanity has been prey to a sense of time wearing out and needing renewal since earliest mythological times. It may well be that the original motive of religious ritual is in fact renewal. Mircea Eliade claims that the Babylonian New Year’s festival was the central celebration of the year because the annual reenacting of the Creation myth renewed not just Babylon but the whole cosmos.6 Stressful and commercialized as they have now become, our holidays were originally intended as a release that resulted in a rejuvenation. The indefatigable James Frazer documents hundreds of myths all over the world in which the sacrifice of the old becomes the birth of the new. And yet, however effectively such myths may have served traditional cultures, something different appears in ancient Greece, a new skepticism that can be seen reflected in Greek tragedy. Tragedy grew up in parallel with the ritual of Dionysus, but, while a dying god is reborn, an epic or dramatic tragic hero is not. Classical culture is framed by the myth of a decline from a Golden Age through successively worsening ages of man, recounted in Hesiod at one

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end of its cycle and Ovid at the other. The speech of Pythagoras that Ovid attaches to the end of the Metamorphoses professes a belief in reincarnation, but the real imaginative power of the speech lies in its powerful evocation of the cycles of time. As for human culture, “I hear that Rome is rising,” Pythagoras murmurs,7 but prudently leaves it for us to make the connection with what he has been talking about, which is how Troy for all its greatness went the way of all the other empires in history. The Roman Empire, casting about for salvation from the nightmare of history, found it in Christianity, and a new cultural cycle was inaugurated which began to show its age in the seventeenth century, the period of Shakespeare’s time-haunted romances and Milton’s time-haunted epic. With the Romantics, the poets’ own awareness of what Harold Bloom calls belatedness becomes explicit. Indeed, Bloom’s own theory is a, well, belated version of an anxiety about modern poetry’s excessive self-­consciousness and imminent exhaustion, which afflicted the German Romantic poets and critics, resulting in, among other things, Schiller’s distinction between naive and sentimental poetry. The emotional energy of Bloom’s writing derives from his vision of a decline of English and American poetry from Milton that proceeds increasingly through the Romantic, Victorian, modernist, and contemporary periods. I do not think much of the idea of an anxiety of influence as an explanation of that diminution, let alone as a general theory of literature, but I think people find it compelling as a reminder of the real anxiety, an anxiety over a decline in which we secretly believe. As Frye said in “Spengler Revisited”: What seems to me most impressive about Spengler is the fact that everybody does accept his main thesis in practice, whatever they think or say they accept. Everybody thinks in terms of a “Western” culture to which Europeans and Americans belong; everybody thinks of that culture as old, not young; everybody realizes that its most striking parallels are with the Roman period of Classical culture; everybody realizes that some crucial change in our way of life took place around Napoleon’s time … The decline, or aging, of the West is as much a part of our mental outlook today as the electron or the dinosaur, and in that sense we are all Spenglerians. (c w , 11:304–5) The final assertion is not refuted by the fact that few people read Spengler any more, for Spengler’s thesis has become part of our mental outlook. It

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is not even refuted by the possibility that Spengler was wrong: Western culture is not convinced by a theory but is gripped by a mood, haunted by a feeling of belatedness, decline, cultural exhaustion of possibilities, and the intuition of being at the end of something, whether the end shapes up to be gradual or apocalyptic. Evidence of this mood – or perhaps moods, as the suspicion of decline may express itself in tones ranging from the elegiac and resigned to the nihilistic and frenzied – spans the divide between high and popular culture, as well as between political and religious liberalism and conservatism. If our culture’s unconscious or half-conscious Spenglerianism is mistaken, that is all the more reason to critique it, so long as critique does not mean dismissal or denial. Frye did feel, even early on, that Spengler was in part mistaken, though only in part. Spengler does not admit any kind of positive influence of one culture on another. Cultural influence is only a disruption or distortion, producing what he calls a pseudomorphosis. But a more comprehensive vision of Western culture would see it as a webwork of recreations. This vision does not contradict the vision of rising and declining cultural gyres: rather, it represents a process hidden within the Spenglerian perpetual motion machine. In the vocabulary of Fearful Symmetry, it is the work of Los immanent within the Orc cycle. This concept of recreation, central to Frye, is a key element missing in Spengler and, in artistic terms, explicitly denied in Bloom, whose anxiety of influence is an ironic parody of it, in which influence produces creativity only at the price of a Faustian bargain of increased self-consciousness and decreased vitality. With Thomas Mann’s modernist composer Adrian Leverkühn in his novel Dr. Faustus, the bargain of modern artistic consciousness becomes literally Faustian – and Spengler, of course, referred to modern European culture as “Faustian.” Recreation is most familiar as a phenomenon within the arts, but Frye’s fullest treatment of the subject, in Creation and Recreation, makes clear that it has broader ramifications. Not just works of art but entire cultures are constructed by the human imagination, and recreation is a phase of the imagination. Classical civilization rebooted itself when a defeated and declining Greek culture passed on its symbols to Rome, which in turn passed them on to Europe, producing the Renaissance. Meanwhile, Christianity had emerged as a recreation of Judaism and recreated the declining Roman Empire into a new kind of Christian culture, which in turn recreated and was recreated by the pagan cultures of Europe,

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especially the Celtic, Germanic, and Scandinavian. America very consciously styled itself a recreation of European culture. As for Canada, I can only say that, if visions are passed on from the defeated, it may be no accident that a country that so often sees its history as a movement from being dominated by Great Britain to being dominated by America passed on to the world the greatest modern visionary in the humanities. If recreation can work horizontally, so to speak, across cultural divides of time and space, it can also function vertically, across the divide of “high” and “low,” or popular, culture. Frye saw the rebirth of romance in the 1960s, and especially of fantasy and science fiction, as a potentially revitalizing primitivism in the genuine sense of the word. He was more tentative about what he saw of the folk music revival, but American ­popular music in a wider perspective, including not only folk but blues, rock, jazz, and the earlier tradition sometimes called the Great American Songbook, has been a kind of recreative explosion. Also, around the time Frye was born, film came into being as a recreation of drama, and America was beginning to produce a popular recreation of the visual arts, the comic strip, which has expanded into the larger form of the graphic novel. I acknowledge in passing that to some people, of course, all this will seem more like evidence of the final decadence of American culture than its revitalization. One may quarrel about particular examples, and regret the lack of time for a fuller analysis, but such a catalogue suggests, even if it does not definitively prove, that recreation is a process working within both culture and the arts to break the closed cycles of Spenglerian determinism. For all that, I would not want to over-idealize recreation. For one thing, I am well aware of the dangers of cultural “appropriation.” But, more to the point, despite what I have perhaps led us to expect, recreation is not a magical elixir of youth for the cure of aging, ailing cultures. At the end of “Spengler Revisited,” Frye does offer some measure of hope: “If the death-to-rebirth transition of Classical to Western culture happened once, something similar could happen again in our day, though the transition would be to something bigger than another culture” (c w , 11:313). Other essays indicate that he foresaw the advent of a global civilization, with the age of superpowers being merely transitional, the beginning of its end signalled perhaps by the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War just two years before his death. This is no longer a

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theory but clearly the direction in which the world is moving. But in the twenty years since Frye’s death, globalization has revealed itself sufficiently as to appear, to put it mildly, not highly encouraging. Leaving aside its political and economic tendencies, from which we are presently suffering, the cultural effect of globalization is to modernize, that is, to Westernize the whole world, and therefore expand the decline of the West to include the decline of the rest. In the arts, the attempt to “Make it new,” in Ezra Pound’s phrase, is itself no longer new but merely another worn-out and predictable formula, as a visit to any gallery of contemporary art or to any concert of contemporary music will prove. For all the good work still being done, there is a widespread feeling that the total reservoir of recreative possibilities is close to depletion, that it is not just one style or another that is worn out but art itself. In essays like “Academy without Walls,” Frye notes, as others have before him, that the modern network of museums, archives, and arts education programs has taken the modern painter or composer to a height, as it were, and shown him or her all the stylistic kingdoms of the arts, saying, “Choose.” The Faustian tendency, though, is not renewal but an increase in self-consciousness that the head-trip variety of postmodernism tries to make into a virtue. The novel is in slightly healthier shape than high-culture music or the visual arts, but only because it can fall back on novelty of subject matter, as the formerly marginalized experiences of various types of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and the like have temporarily refertilized the ground. The other option in the search for renewable resources, that of primitivism in the sense of a return to roots, betrays its own problematic symptoms. The Romantics initiated what Anatomy of Criticism calls the return of irony to myth, producing modern myths and literary fairy tales and other varieties of what Friedrich Schiller called sentimental romance. But, to match its light and dark heroines, sentimental romance comes in light and dark flavours. The Secular Scripture seems deliberately to focus on the light-flavoured, on sophisticated romances that nevertheless attempt to recapture some of the exuberance and charming innocence of naive romance; examples include the rollicking Greek romances and the late romances of William Morris, whom Yeats called the happiest of the poets. But the younger Morris produced a volume of startlingly dark short tales “pessimistic” enough to have served as illustrations for Frye’s

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student essay on Romanticism. While The Secular Scripture seems content to keep to, or at least emphasize, the sunny side of the street – even when dealing with darker materials it retains a brightness of tone – the notebooks on romance from the late 1940s disclose his fascination with the ultraviolet end of the romance spectrum, from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni to the dark tales of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, to The Phantom of the Opera, the silent film version of which thrilled Frye at the age of thirteen. The “Hermes” quadrant of the “Great Doodle” in the “Third Book” project was to be concerned with such narratives, and some of its material was relocated to chapter 7 of Words with Power. The archetype of such stories, as the quadrant’s name suggests, is the katabasis or descent journey to the underworld. The difference between light and dark sentimental romance accounts for the striking difference between the treatment of romance in The Secular Scripture and in the section in the Anatomy on the four forms of prose fiction. My point here is that the shadow side of sentimental romance now dominates contemporary fantasy to the point where the borderland between it and horror at times almost disappears; its Spenglerian proclivities are indicated by the fact that a prominent strain of it is called “urban fantasy,” a kind of megalopolitan Gothic whose forefather is Charles Dickens. Science fiction shows a related contrast. The optimistic quest adventure science fiction descending from the American pulp magazines can be called naive romance because its authors and editors really were naive. But literary science fiction began with H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, whose vision of the end of time is that of Spengler’s last phase expanded into the ultimate destiny of the human race. Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, one of the most powerful visions in all science fiction, extends the twilight domain to the temporal and spatial limits of the universe. The pessimistic strain so dominates contemporary science fiction that I recently found it hard to get through the 650 pages of the standard best-of-the-year anthology. The favorite plotline is “after the apocalypse,” whether the catastrophe is caused by climate change, genetic manipulation spun out of control, or just plain human fractiousness. The mood is contagious, and has spread to the mainstream on the one hand, as in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and to popular culture on the other, as in The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, and other games in which all the players lose all of the time.

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We should no longer postpone the question of the cause of cultural decline, lest we become too paralyzed with depression to continue. In Spengler, time, which is energy and life, decays at length into space and death. This Kantian card-shuffling does not really tell us much; it certainly does not tell us why. Spengler does not seem to know or care why – but Blake does, and this brings us back to the question of a religious perspective again, for the reason is not some inevitable entropy, to use the term for it adopted by Thomas Pynchon, but a false attitude called by Blake “natural religion.” Natural religion has two forms, a sheep’s-­ clothing reasonable form that Blake calls Deism and a hidden-wolf underside of fear and violence he calls Druidism. Natural religion in both its varieties is not true religion at all, but it is what nine-tenths of the human race think is religion, including such opponents of it as Richard Dawkins, who, Blake would say, is right as far as he goes. The following is a description of Deism from “Trends in Modern Culture” in 1952, though the passage is lifted almost verbatim from an unpublished essay, “The Present Condition of the World,” written when the present was 1943 and the condition of the world, as Frye laboured on Fearful Symmetry, was a real Götterdämmerung and not a scene from sentimental romance. In Deism, Reality consists of a moral and a natural world. There is no effective spiritual reality, but the concept “God” is defensible as a hypothesis unifying the other two worlds. Such a “God” could be conceived as the evidence of intelligence and purpose indicated by the order of nature, and therefore as a mysterious sanction for morality. However, the best way to deal with this God is to place him in the background of the struggle of man and nature, holding both coats, so to speak. That leaves morality as the essence of religion, ritual and dogma being symptoms of intellectual decay. It also leaves the human mind as a function of the body, for man has received his body from nature, and his mind is his unique instrument for achieving a harmonious and comfortable adjustment to nature. The meaning of life is in, first of all, the removal of the obstacles presented by nature to human comfort, and, secondly, the removal of the corresponding moral obstacles, hatred, suspicion, and intolerance, presented by human life itself. (c w , 11:255)

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By implication, there is no fundamental difference in life philosophy between decent, well-intentioned Christians and secular humanists except whether you prefer “God” as part of your decorating scheme, for the Deist God is indeed merely decorative. This is not the religion of the right-wing fringe of American Christianity, of Islamic suicide bombers and Ayatollahs, of the heretic-burners and persecutors throughout religious history; these belong to Druidism, which Spengler called “second religiousness,” a hysterical outbreak typical of late cultures. Like Deism, Druidism has a secular form, that of ideological fanaticism, from Leninism to McCarthyism to the Tea Party. When Druidism periodically erupts like an alien out of the chest of Deism, everyone is shocked, but the two are forms of the same identity, and their alternation is the final degenerated form of the contest in Blake between Urizen and Orc or Luvah. But how can Deism be wrong when it is so reasonable? Deism proper emerged from the Enlightenment’s project of dethroning the superstitious version of God, the inscrutable authoritarian tyrant whom Blake calls Nobodaddy, and substituting human reason as the only existing power to make a better world and a better life. When Blake says, “Thou art a Man: God is no more: / Thy own Humanity learn to adore,”8 he might seem to ally himself with this project, but in fact the title of the poem in which these lines occur is “The Everlasting Gospel.” Blake clearly feels that life has a necessary religious dimension, even if Deism is not it. The events of the century since Frye’s birth prove overwhelmingly that man by himself is nothing to adore: he (including she) is, in a phrase Frye was fond of in his late years, a psychotic ape staring in a mirror – or, as Swift called him (or her), a Yahoo. The choice of animal may be unfortunate: baboons may have made for a more accurate metaphor. Moreover, the allegation must be qualified by the observation that there are many decent people who feel no need of religion, who require no help in being rational and compassionate and not acting like psychotic primates. The problem is – but then there is the rest of the baboon band. The decent people are hopelessly outnumbered, and the Spenglerian hamster wheel turns another revolution. In 2008, a scientific writer named Matt Ridley published a book called The Rational Optimist, in which he showed that science and technology have over the last three centuries improved the quality of life and lessened the amount of human suffering more, arguably, than all the world’s religions put together.9 The book’s thesis is that

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technological innovation could make a veritable utopia by the time of Frye’s bicentenary if bureaucracy would stop throwing regulatory obstacles in front of the businesses that fund research and development. Ridley was greatly embarrassed when, just as the book was being published, the bank of whose board he was a member in a consulting capacity had to be bailed out by the British government because the Yahoos running it had lined their pockets through unregulated risky ventures of the kind with which we have become hideously familiar. In many ways, The Rational Optimist is a fine and important book, but its polemics, which are luckily detachable, have been written by a sincere but mistaken Pangloss. If humanity were dominated by reason or even self-interest, it would have founded utopia before Sir Thomas More was dead. If evil were only error, it could be corrected, but, as Paul said, “The evil which I would not, that I do” (Rom. 7:19 KJV). Frye’s conclusion in Fearful Symmetry is as follows: In Deism there is not only the belief that the physical world is the only real one, but also a feeling of satisfaction at remaining within it, a certain enthusiasm about accepting the conditions it imposes. Now it seems reasonable enough to take the world as we find it, trying to be as contented in it as possible, and make others do so. But if it were possible to do this the human race would have settled into Utopian serenity centuries ago. It remains true that the physical world is not good enough for the imagination to accept, and if we do accept it we are left with our Selfhoods, our verminous crawling egos that spend all their time either wronging others or brooding on wrongs done to them. The end of all natural religion, however well-meaning and good-natured, is a corrupt and decadent society rolling downhill to stampeding mass hysteria and maniacal warfare. (c w , 14:73; f s , 67) The problem is not rational error but a corrupted human will, which is part of what Blake means by the Selfhood: we seem to be back to Augustine again. Blake was not willing to throw humanity back upon the nonexistent mercy of Augustine’s inscrutable predestining God, yet what other answer is available? Frye’s faith was that there is a deeper self within and beneath the level of the natural man, and identified with the human imagination. The last two chapters of Words with Power examine this identity in its aspects of a

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wisdom deeper than ordinary reason and a love deeper than ordinary ego-centred desire. But, if it is a deeper human self, if “Thou art That,” in the Sanskrit phrase, at the same time the ego cannot afford to identify itself easily with That, lest it suffer what C.G. Jung calls “inflation.” To an extent, “That” remains what Frye calls a “spiritual other”; the transcendent aspect of the imagination as recreation is the immanent aspect. The spiritual other is, in addition to a greater wisdom and love, also a power capable of breaking into the normal course of human events – like a trickster, as I have written elsewhere10 – of shattering the “mind-forg’d manacles” with which, Blake says, the human race is imprisoned, and, by doing so, enabling human beings to succeed in breaking the material chains of social tyranny. A historian tracing ordinary causality will never locate what “caused” the Arab Spring, which was utterly and evidently impossible – until it happened, and once it began to happen proved irresistible. Tyrant after tyrant has been deposed like Jupiter in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and this remains a fact whether or not the democratic tide has ebbed. I think there is an element of what we can only call “inspiration,” of a mysterious energy suddenly breathed into all genuine revolutionary transformations, whether collective or personal. The source of the “otherness of the spirit” of which Frye spoke in his later work seems to lie in the fact that it is not fully subject to control by the human will. While it is no reason to avoid striving for social justice, it is true that real change can never be merely willed: it is soberly instructive that the famous film about the Nazis was called Triumph of the Will. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the human characters, with one exception, never become aware that a greater power has rearranged their dysfunctional lives into a happy ending in a way that they could never have realized by their own wills and in fact would have frantically resisted. The exception is Bottom, whose pathetically but understandably mangled attempt to articulate his intuition that some transforming power has been at work echoes Paul: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (4.1.209–12). In Paul, what man cannot report is what the Lord has prepared for his faithful. The deeper wisdom, love, and power are aspects of a deeper human identity, but, on a level so deep that it is effectively bottomless, that identity is also the divine in us, what Milton called the Inner Light. The final

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vision of Words with Power is that Word and Spirit, the transcendent aspect of God and the immanent aspect that is also the human imagination or Real Self, as Blake claimed, are on the deepest level one, but more immediately are in a dialectically recreative I-Thou relationship with each other, the ultimate set of Contraries without which is no progression. This means that order and change are not a Negation but Contraries. Anxieties of cultural and artistic exhaustion belong to the natural man, and are perhaps unavoidable insofar as the natural man is unavoidable. For this reason, Spengler’s social vision, along with its psychological counterpart in Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, is as timely as it ever was. But artistic exhaustion and cultural decline are not the final story, even if they cannot be remedied by an act of will. The best we can do, perhaps, is the opposite of willing: to attempt to cooperate with the process that works against both despair and its opposite, the manic hysteria of the “alienation of progress,” and especially against the latter’s frantic pace. The last section of The Modern Century speaks at length of a coming era of increased leisure in a way that seems laughable now. But what is not laughable is its insistence that we keep the whole oppressive system of anxiety, overwork, and high-speed activity in place by submitting to it out of fear and desire for security, and call that submission necessity, maturity, adaptation to the demands of a global economy – when it is really “the body of eternal bondage, the endlessly postponed vision of peace and leisure, the endless intrusion of temporary necessity to thrust us away from real life” (c w , 11:261). It is only in unhurried, unharried leisure that education can take place, and yet there are forces increasingly successful at turning our colleges and universities into assembly lines whose pace each year grows more anxiously exhausting for students, faculty, and administrators alike. The hectic rhythm of academic life reproduces, and is partly produced by, the stressful texture of contemporary life in general, both at work and in the family. We hippies tried to revolt against this rat-race enslavement in the 1960s. We were called childish, immature, and spoiled, partly because we were. But if we fools had persisted in our folly, perhaps we would have become wise. As that wise man D.W. Winnicott saw, to recover the true self buried beneath the inauthentic self is to recover the child who was sacrificed to the neurotic, not the realistic, demands of adulthood.11 The rebirth of the archetypal child, “the Puer,” as Jung liked to call him or her, is why

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Christmas is magical on an imaginative level beneath the hectic neuroses that have possessed it like seven devils. If there is one thing I most admire both about Frye’s type of thinking and his writing style, it is perhaps its playfulness: its leisurely pace, its humour, its refusal to be knocked off balance by all the anxieties the other critics insist he is terribly irresponsible not to be anxious about, its willingness to take seriously a mythical and metaphorical mode of thought despite its demystifying dismissal in an age of ideological total war. Frye woke me up at the age of nineteen from the premature old age of young adult angst. I have sometimes wondered whether our Spenglerian geriatric obsession is not real old age but a kind of cultural adolescent crisis. If we succeed in outgrowing it, we might find ourselves on the threshold, not of old age, but of true maturity for the first time. In terms of his continuing capacity to inspire, to hand on, despite the defeat that happens to us all eventually, the symbol, the world in the grain of sand and eternity in an hour that was the vision he received from his own precursors, Frye is not dead at all. And I think he will get even younger as time goes on.

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Power to the Educated Imagination! Northrop Frye and the Utopian Impulse Ro b ert T . T a l ly J r

The celebration of a Northrop Frye centennial cannot but be bittersweet, given the circumstances surrounding the literary humanities in the twenty-first century. Everywhere, it seems, the areas of scholarly inquiry that Frye cherished are under attack at colleges and universities, by politicians eager to belittle what they consider impractical or irrelevant fields of study, by corporate interests aiming to maximize one sort of profitability, and by underfunded administrations desperate to balance budgets. The discipline to which Frye devoted so much loving labour, comparative literature, has been among those hardest hit by the prevailing movements to restrict or eliminate academic programs in the humanities. The University of Toronto’s 2010 decision to close the Centre for Comparative Literature, of which Frye was founding director, is perhaps symbolic of this larger pattern. Happily, that decision was reversed, at least temporarily, which may be a hopeful sign. In 2011, what Slavoj Žižek has referred to as “the year of dreaming dangerously,”1 an apparently utopian spirit animated a number of protests against perceived social, political, and economic injustices. Arguably, the resistance to the closure of comparative literature programs belongs in the same category with such movements as Occupy Wall Street or student protests in Quebec, California, and elsewhere. For, as Frye’s work makes clear, if only in sometimes subtle ways, the utopian impulse animates the study of literature. In this essay, I want to examine this aspect of Frye’s work by looking at his slender yet powerful 1964 book, The Educated Imagination, in the context of a critique of advanced industrial society associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research, and particularly with Herbert

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Marcuse’s critical theory. A literary theorist perhaps best known for his analysis of the Bible’s “great code” and a Marxist philosopher and sociologist make for admittedly strange bedfellows, and yet both thinkers call attention to the need for a literary and aesthetic education as a means of combatting the alienated, almost mechanistic condition in which members of modern, Western societies find themselves. Although both Frye and Marcuse were addressing the social and spiritual crises of the 1950s and ’60s, their work retains value today. Recent threats to programs in higher education, along with the worldwide financial crisis and the generalized anxieties that have accompanied it, have sparked spirited protests around the globe. In an earlier moment of social upheaval, the May 1968 militants of Paris popularized the slogan “Power to the imagination!,” but in recent years we have seen a waning of precisely this power. The postmodern condition, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, is characterized in part by the diminution of the imagination itself, which is apparent in the inability of even the most hopeful futurists to imagine radical alternatives to the existing social and economic formations. The vocation of literature, in Frye’s elegant argument, is to educate the imagination, and it makes sense that those wishing to impede the utopian impulse of the aesthetic sphere would also hope for a devaluation of comparative literature, the humanities, and liberal arts in general. Present-day struggles thus recall the earlier situation from which Frye, Marcuse, and others launched their own critiques. One hundred years after Frye’s birth and fifty years after The Educated Imagination’s publication, this ostensibly “old-fashioned” critic and criticism find new urgency and relevancy for scholars today. In The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye endeavoured to explain the value of literature and literary study in the modern, scientific, and – to borrow an expression from the Frankfurt School – highly rationalized society of the early 1960s. Containing lectures originally delivered in a series of CBC Radio broadcasts in 1962, this marvellous little book was intended for a broad, non-specialist audience. This is wholly appropriate, since Frye’s overall argument is that literature is not a narrow disciplinary field in which a small group of specialists debate arcane details but a critical practice for anyone and everyone to engage in. Literary study allows one to make sense of the world by establishing new or alternative ways of imagining the world. As Frye puts it, “[l]iterature speaks the language of

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the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination” (c w , 21:484; e i , 134). In Frye’s view, the function of literature is to educate the imagination, which would empower it and, in turn, lead individuals to greater fulfillment and happiness, freeing them from the crass materialism, status-seeking, and sterile technocracies of Western civilization at that time. I consider this to be a fundamentally utopian vision. Indeed, although they come at it from different perspectives and with different ends, Frye’s position complements that of Marcuse, perhaps the greatest utopian thinker of that day. In the writings of both thinkers, the utopian impulse behind art and literature establishes these practices in opposition to the societal status quo. In the early 1960s, both Frye and Marcuse recognized that the ­aesthetic sphere was under threat in what Marcuse labelled the “one-­dimensional” societies of the postwar West,2 not to mention the often crippling repression of literary productions elsewhere, and both expressed concern that the individual’s life in such societies was becoming increasingly meaningless. For Frye and Marcuse, the imagination, nourished and instructed by literature and the arts, operated as a force that opposed the basic banality and drab thoughtlessness of the era’s mainstream culture. Dated as their language sometimes sounds, with phrases like “status-symbols” or “the Establishment” occasionally jarring the ears of a reader thoroughly immersed in an unavoidable consumer culture today, Frye’s and Marcuse’s critiques seem to me rather timely, in this new Gilded Age of conspicuous consumption, astonishing disparities in wealth, globalization of capitalism, and the permeation of mass media into nearly all zones of everyday life. Perhaps it seems overly optimistic to say, but the idea of imagination as a revolutionary force retains value in an era in which real alternatives to the status quo are taken to be not just impossible but unimaginable. In an oft-cited comment, Fredric Jameson has pointed out that “[i]t seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism.” Less well known is Jameson’s indispensable follow-up to this remark: “perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations.”3 In this crucial observation lies the fate of the utopian impulse in the era of globalization, for it must be clear by now that our technological and productive capabilities are already far beyond what the most utopian thinkers of past generations

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envisioned. In other words, it is not for lack of material or manpower that the vision of some radically alternative social formation seems so remote, even inconceivable; rather, according to Jameson’s formulation, it is the weakness of the imagination that appears to be the greatest obstacle to any utopian project. The predominance of a dystopian sensibility may well be a sign of the times, and Lyman Tower Sargent has suggested that “dystopia became the dominant literary form” of the twentieth century.4 In Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Tom Moylan has demonstrated the degree to which “critical dystopias” might also display their own utopian impulse, that is, by highlighting the utopian text’s important negative or critical function, which is to criticize implicitly or explicitly the status quo. But Jameson has also argued that, with respect to both form and content, dystopias are fundamentally unrelated to utopias,5 and in any event the inability to imagine more desirable alternatives may be another way of merely affirming the negativity of actual existing conditions. (Indeed, the classic dystopias of twentieth-century literature – such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour – were very much critiques of the present, or perhaps “near-future,” rather than imaginative projections of a distant, different time.) Hence, if alternatives to the present social configurations are to be envisioned, the imagination itself needs to be empowered, and the utopian impulse of Frye and Marcuse, among others, offers an example of, if not a prescription for, how the educated imagination may function as a critical tool for actual praxis in the twenty-first-century world system. This is not to say that the sufficiently well-read individual will be somehow able to design a feasible utopia. Rather, as I argue below, the individual and collective subjects with empowered imaginations may be better able to interpret, and to change, the actual world in which they live. As Frye makes clear in The Educated Imagination and elsewhere, the sort of work performed by literature already projects us beyond the flaming walls of the world (to borrow a phrase from Lucretius) and into an  alternate, but no doubt still quite real, realm of the imagination: “Literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world man sees; to his home, not his environment” (c w , 21:443; e i , 27). Even the most realistic literature is already utopian in its ability to produce alternative realities. Here I am not referring to utopia as a genre or literary form, which is the subject of Frye’s great 1965 essay “Varieties of Literary

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Utopias” (c w , 27:191–214), although that study artfully demonstrates the ways that the speculative myth-making in the generic mode of utopia helps readers and writers make sense of the limits and possibilities of their own “real world.” The utopian impulse to which I refer is not confined to imagined societies in other spaces or times. It is just as visible in Charles Dickens’s London, Honoré de Balzac’s Paris, Herman Melville’s whaling ship, or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County as in the more traditional utopias embodied in Thomas More’s, Francis Bacon’s, Edward Bellamy’s, or William Morris’s ideal communities. The author of a literary work might be said to project a figurative map or spatial representation of the places, persons, and events depicted, and this literary cartography frequently figures forth what might be considered otherworldly spaces even within the seemingly real world.6 Moreover, one could say that the elements of utopian or fantastic narrative are necessarily present in the attempt to give shape to the world through literary representation. So the utopian functions and effects of literature may reveal themselves in any text. And, not surprisingly, the reader’s own experience of the literary world may take on utopian dimensions not necessarily intended by the author. The utopian impulse, in this sense, forms a sort of subterranean thread linking author to reader and text, which nevertheless emerges and becomes visible in surprising, sometimes unforeseen ways. In Utopia in the Age of Globalization, I argue that utopia is not so much the depiction of an ideal place or a future state outside of the spatiotemporal limits of the present status quo as it is the attempt to map the world itself. In seeing the world from this strange perspective, one discovers a reality that is in many respects more real, something Frye also underscores. Fictional worlds are obviously distinct from the one in which we live. However, it is not merely that the imagination can project an alternative reality or “otherworld” that serves as a critique of the actually existing order. The empowered imagination may be all the more important in its capacity to produce an image of reality itself. As Marcuse puts it: The truth value of the imagination relates not only to the past but also to the future: the forms of freedom and happiness which it invokes claim to deliver the historical reality. In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed on freedom and happiness by the reality

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principle, in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy … Art allied itself with the revolution. Uncompromising adherence to the strict truth value of imagination comprehends reality more fully. That the propositions of the artistic imagination are untrue in terms of the actual organization of the facts belongs to the essence of their truth.7 Note here the reversal of the traditional priority of truth and fiction. From this rejection of the straightforwardly, scientifically factual in favour of a more comprehensive, speculative overview afforded by aesthetic productions, the educated imagination is necessarily critical, in the best sense of the word. The aesthetic dimension, which after all refers to ways of seeing, makes possible vistas that would be otherwise unavailable to the individual. Coming at it from a somewhat different critical tradition, Frye also underscores this point in The Educated Imagination. Although he insists that works of literature maintain their independence and autonomy, remaining obstinately apart from the exigencies of the “real” world, Frye maintains that the “anything goes” realm of the imagination inoculates the careful student of literature from bigotry and closed-mindedness. For instance, to cite one of many relevant examples, Frye notes that the study of literature teaches tolerance: “In our imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them also as possibilities” (c w , 21:464; e i , 77–8). The vistas and vantages made possible through a careful reading of literary texts inform our perspectives as we deal with our own reality, and through this process they can also transform the underlying reality itself. Literature at once offers a critical distance from and a visceral engagement with the real world in which we struggle to make sense of things. Ironically, perhaps, the estrangements of literature enable one to assess critically one’s reality, not in spite of the literary world’s unreality, but precisely because of it. This sort of thinking appears especially timely given recent events, such as the student protests in Canada, in California, and in the United Kingdom, among other places, not to mention the Occupy Wall Street movement, the demonstrations associated with the Arab Spring and its

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reverberations, and the protests against austerity measures throughout Europe, to name but a few among the many sites of resistance around the globe in the past few years. In these we might hear distant echoes of Paris and May 1968, where one of the great slogans of the militants, scrawled as graffiti on the wall or enunciated in a political speech, was “L’imagination au pouvoir!” or “Power to the imagination!” In this utopian vision, the empowered imagination might be given free rein to create hitherto unthought social formations, as well as new personal relations, creative forms, ways of living, and so on. In the heady moments of this or that protest, such utopian possibilities seem very real indeed. From another perspective, however, such a view may seem a bit naive. After all, is Disney not staffed by “Imagineers”? (Perhaps a sign of the corporate “babble” against which Frye posits literary speech, this ghastly portmanteau word was actually coined by aluminum giant A L CO A in the 1940s.) The power of the imagination now seems more suited to technical, industrial, and entertainment-based applications than to social revolutionary activity. A characteristic aspect of triumphant globalization is that even the individual psyche appears to have become so infused with the late-capitalist mode of production that one’s own imagination is merely so much raw material to be manufactured into commodities. When Marcuse could express alarm at the efficiency with which rationalized societies absorbed, transformed, and redirected forms of revolt into products for consumption, he had barely scratched the surface. It is not merely coincidental, then, that vocal leaders in the business community, while championing “efficiency” and “accountability” but also “synergy,” “creative destruction,” “disruptive innovation,” or “strategic dynamism” (to pronounce just a few recent buzzwords), have been among the most full-throated critics of liberal education, of the humanities, and of literature in particular. (To name one recent, highly publicized example, the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia caused a nationwide outcry in 2012 when they attempted to oust the popular president of that school. Among the reported leaders of this effort were a hedge fund manager and a real estate developer, and, according to The Washington Post, the grounds for termination included the president’s unwillingness to eliminate programs like German and classics in what the board considered a timely fashion.) The proponents of this sort of bewildering capitalism seem to see little value in the educated imagination, although they

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may be pleased with the more manageable “skilled” imagination. Tellingly, Frye already noted in The Educated Imagination that the study of literature also militates in favour of free speech as opposed to “the speech of a mob,” which “stands for cliché, ready-made idea and automatic babble, and it leads us inevitably from illusion to hysteria” (c w , 21:491; e i , 148). Frye’s opposition to “the speech of the mob” should not be confused with an elitist denigration of what the Occupy Wall Street protesters called “the 99 percent.” On the contrary, given the context, Frye is actually siding with the aims of the people, broadly conceived, as against those who would attempt to manipulate the people using such “automatic babble.” Frye even names two of the most pernicious sources of such degraded speech: “advertisers” and “politicians at election time” (c w , 21:490; e i , 146). Using Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a clear example, Frye goes on to suggest that under a totalitarian regime “the only way to make tyranny permanent and unshakable … is deliberately to debase our language by turning our speech into an automatic gabble” (c w , 21:490; e i , 147). But, lest he be confused with one who simply repeats the “gabble” of Cold War political rhetoric, Frye immediately notes that an anti-Communism expressed in “hysterical clichés” inevitably reproduces the state it seeks to  criticize. Or, to put it in Orwell’s terms, the double-speak of anti-­ Communists becomes just as bad as that of Big Brother’s administration, and both kinds are inimical to free speech. But Frye is not merely discussing the hysteria of political “babble.” By naming advertisers even before politicians in his discussion of the forces that, wittingly or otherwise, oppose free speech, Frye emphasizes the degree to which the language of commerce so frequently finds itself at odds with humanistic or humane discourse. The disruptive innovators or strategic dynamists of corporate boardrooms are undoubtedly the products as well as the producers of such degraded speech, but in their persistent appeal to a kind of “mob,” Frye understands, they effectively undermine both the truth and reality. In this matter, Frye finds another unlikely ally from the Frankfurt School: Theodor Adorno. In Minima Moralia, Adorno takes issue with the “ordinary language” favored by certain mid-century analytic philosophers, but he also teases out a moral and political effect of such an approach. As Adorno puts it, referring to something akin to “the speech of the mob” in Frye:

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Shoddiness that drifts with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a sign of relevance and contact: people know what they want, because they know what other people want. Regard for the object of expression, rather than for communication, is considered suspicious: ­anything specific, not taken from pre-existent patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. Contemporary logic, which makes so much of its clarity, has naively adopted this perverted notion of everyday speech. Vague expression permits the hearer to imagine whatever suits him and what he already thinks in any case. Rigorous formulation demands unambiguousness, conceptual effort, from which people are deliberately discouraged, and imposes on them in advance of any content a suspension of all received opinions, and thus a separation from oneself that the hearer violently resists. Only what they do not need to know, they consider understandable; only that which is truly alienated, the word molded by commerce, strikes them as trustworthy.8 Adorno is here speaking of the need for philosophy to be expressed in a language not already colonized and commodified by commercial interests, which appeal far more to “the speech of the mob” than to the considered criticism of the thoughtful reader. In Adorno, the estrangement of truly philosophical discourse, its very difference from everyday communication, makes it far more capable of approaching the truth of social life than the ostensibly more familiar, but actually more alienating, language of radio, television, and other segments of the culture industry. In Frye, literature – and particularly a multinational, multilinguistic, comparative literature – offers a similarly liberating estrangement from everyday experience, from the increasingly prepackaged sense of the ordinary in modern industrialized societies. In this, Frye is in the august if somewhat unexpected company of Bertolt Brecht and his “Verfremdungseffekt” and the Russian Formalists with their “ostranenie.” In all of these, the mark of an effectively literary experience is visible in its ability to estrange or defamiliarize the “real world” for the reader, viewer, or auditor. As Viktor Shklovsky put it in one well-known formulation, “[t]he technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of

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perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”9 This by now commonplace understanding of poetic discourse, which distinguishes it from the more prosaic and informational modes of communicating, as a defamiliarization by which one can perceive and linger about the artificiality or constructedness of the work of art, is very much related to Frye’s conception of literary studies as a means of educating the imagination. For, once we encounter the sheer weirdness of literary language, whether in poetry or prose, we find ourselves in a contact zone between real and imagined worlds. The British fantasist and science fiction writer China Miéville has argued that the distinction between fantastic and realistic literature does not really hold. Rather, he distinguishes between “the literature of recognition versus that of estrangement.”10 The latter might include not only works in the genre of fantasy but also works like Moby-Dick, in which the events and characters are technically possible but which is nevertheless exceedingly strange. For Miéville, both sorts of literature could do an effective job, but he finds that “there is something more powerful, ambitious, intriguing and radical” about the fiction of estrangement. Miéville’s discussion is a nuanced variation on an earlier defence of fantasy. Although he is defending the fantasy genre or mode from those very Marxist critics who would dismiss fantasy as escapist or reactionary, Miéville draws upon the Marxist critique of capitalism in making his claim that fantasy offers a better approach than even realism for getting at the truth of the “real world.” After discussing Marx’s own analysis in Capital of the fetishism of the commodity and the hidden social relations embedded in the commodity form, Miéville observes that “‘Real’ life under capitalism is a fantasy: ‘realism,’ narrowly defined, is therefore a ‘realistic’ depiction of ‘an absurdity which is true,’ but no less absurd for that. Narrow ‘realism’ is as partial and ideological as ‘reality’ itself ” (italics in original).11 Further, Miéville insists, the “apparent epistemological radicalism of the fantastic mode’s basic predicate,” namely, that “the impossible is true,” makes it well suited to the task of an oppositional or critical project.12 It should be noted, however, that Miéville quite rightly does not claim that fantasy is itself a revolutionary mode or “acts as a guide to political action.”13 The value of fantasy lies less in its politics – which could lie anywhere on the political spectrum – than in its imaginative encounter with radical alterity itself. As Miéville concludes, “the fantastic

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might be a mode peculiarly suited to and resonant with the forms of modernity … Fantasy is a mode that, in constructing an internally coherent but actually impossible totality – constructed on the basis that the impossible is, for this work, true – mimics the ‘absurdity’ of capitalist modernity.”14 I believe that Miéville’s defence of fantasy or the literature of estrangement, much like Marcuse’s discussion of the utopian impulse in the aesthetic sphere, aligns well with Frye’s understanding of literature and literary studies as modes of educating the imagination. Like these others, Frye recognizes that literature, precisely because it provides this access to an imaginative activity beyond the crude hic et nunc of daily, lived experience in modern Western societies, makes possible an encounter with a world more real than the so-called “real world” of advertisers and politicians. In a sense, then, the worlds disclosed through literary studies are utopian after all. Frye concludes his lectures on the educated imagination with a sort of parable about a contemporary everyman, “an intelligent man [who] has been chasing status symbols his whole life,” but who suddenly discovers that this meaningless world has collapsed around him, for whatever reasons and in whatever ways: “No psychiatrist or clergyman can do him any good, because his state of mind is neither sick nor sinful” (c w , 21:491–2; e i , 150). No, it is his imagination that is impoverished. Now seeking education as a starving man seeks food, he is able to educate his imagination through a study of literature. The man realizes that what he had thought was the only world was really two worlds: “One is around us, the other is a vision inside our minds, born and fostered by the imagination, yet real enough for us to try to make the world we see conform to its shape” (c w , 21:492; e i , 150–1). And, as Frye hastens to make clear, this is not a secondary world in which to escape, but above all the window into a place far more real than the illusory society to which the man was previously limited. The world discovered by the educated imagination is emphatically not illusory, according to Frye: “It is the real world, the real form of human society hidden behind the one we see. It’s the world of what humanity has done, and therefore can do, the world revealed to us in the arts and sciences” (c w , 21:493; e i , 152). With an educated imagination, such a person – and all of us, too – may at last begin to see the real world more clearly, which remains impossible while any of us can

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still manage to get by with weakened or inactive imaginations in a rather limited, therefore unreal, world that is falsely presented to us as the real world by those who would have us employ only the speech of the mob. The slogan of my title, “Power to the Educated Imagination!,” thus reflects a political agenda, a utopian strategy to achieve a life beyond the mind-numbing and banal consumerism affirmed on almost all sides today as our sole raison d’être. This is not to say that existential angst can be entirely dissipated by reading literature or that literary criticism will solve the world’s material problems, of course, but that the educated imagination might offer vistas into possible alternatives to the present situation, in large part by allowing one to see the all-too-real present configuration from fresh perspectives. The crises of the 1960s occasioned in Frye a reconsideration of an earlier moment of twentieth-century madness and, perhaps, an optative or forward-looking glance at the struggles to come. As Michael Dolzani writes elsewhere in this volume, “the 1969 preface to [a new edition of ] Fearful Symmetry notes a parallel between the crisis of World War II, to which the book was on one level a response, and a present moment in which ‘reactionary and radical forces alike are once more in the grip of the nihilistic psychosis that Blake described so powerfully in Jerusalem.’” But in the paragraph quoted by Dolzani, Frye begins by repeating two lines from Blake, about “the central Cities of the Nations, / Where Human Thought is crush’d beneath the iron hand of Power,” and Frye ends by noting that “one of the most hopeful signs [today] is the immensely increased sense of the urgency and immediacy of what Blake had to say” (c w , 14:7; f s , iii). In other words, Frye’s dismay at the existential and cultural crises of the 1960s was tempered somewhat by his conviction that literary study, here figured forth in the poetry of William Blake, might empower the imagination in ways that could enable us to overcome the “nihilistic psychosis” plaguing contemporary society. No less than destructive political ideologies, as Frye had also made clear, the venal commercialism and anti-intellectual popular culture were also mobilized against the freedoms afforded by literary studies through the production of an educated imagination. Frye understood well that, whether felt as an iron hand or as a seductive caress, certain Powers were arrayed against Human Thought. In An Essay on Liberation, published the same year as Frye’s Fearful Symmetry preface, Marcuse acknowledged that the limits upon the

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imagination might be imposed by repressive forces in society or by broader historical constraints or both, but beyond such limits “there is also the space, both physical and mental, for building a realm of freedom which is not that of the present” and “which necessitates an historical break with the past and present.”15 Frye’s own theory and criticism, as well as the incalculable influence Frye has had over the critical and literary works of others, demonstrates that such a break can be descried and experienced through the study of literature. Comparative literature in particular, by extending beyond locale, region, or nation and into a proper world literature, is essential for making sense of, and imagining alternatives to, the somewhat illusory “real world” we occupy. In the purposive act of reading literature, of taking products of the imagination seriously, this utopian project is already begun.

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Verum Factum Frye, Jameson, Nancy, and the Myth of Myth Ga rry S her b e rt

In Words with Power (1990), Frye reflects on the Viconian principle of verum factum, that “what is true for us is what we have made” (c w , 26:82; w p , 82). Frye adds that “What is true for us is a creation in which we have participated, whether we have been in on the making of it or on the responding to it” (c w , 26:82; w p , 82). While Frye respects the past tense of Giambattista Vico’s Latin, “factum” as “what we have made,” what he means to say contradicts the completed action because Frye believes that his readers can participate in the process of making the art. He uses the gerund form, “the making,” to open up the past tense and imply a continuous action of making and responding. What Frye has left unresolved is the question of whether verum factum refers only to a made object or can include a poetics of process. Unfortunately, Frye never explicitly addresses the contradiction between the past participle of the Latin factum, as that which is “made,” and the present participle, such as “making,” to describe the poetics of process. The ambiguity with regard to Vico’s axiom is a significant problem, especially with regard to Frye’s wellknown opposition of the Aristotelian to the Longinian view of literature. What are we to make of this opposition when it is applied by Frye to society in his discussions of myth and culture? In the Aristotelian view, literature is a finished product contemplated as an object from a distance with all emotion removed from its internal fictions through the movement of catharsis, whereas in the Longinian view, literature is an ecstatic process that involves its readers emotionally while moving them beyond the limits of the text toward an authorial persona that has led the reader into “the process of writing a story” (c w , 17:8; “Towards Defining,” 131),

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or thematized the production of the text. At a time when Marxist critics are arguing that “‘society’ is impossible,” or incomplete, because “society never manages to be identical to itself,”1 Frye’s poetics of process appears to anticipate these more recent notions of society not as a static object but as an event, and so he must be read with a greater sense of urgency where our rethinking of society is concerned. Resisting the reduction of society to a completed object in favour of a sociocultural poetics of process that suspends creative activity as an end in itself, for Frye, as we shall see, includes the myth of making a community. In order to situate Frye’s understanding of verum factum, we must compare Frye to others who have thought about the relation between truth and making, or poiēsis, such as Fredric Jameson, who employs Frye’s work for his own unique brand of Marxist interpretation. Although both critics declare themselves to be Viconians, Frye’s work diverges significantly from Jameson in the matter of literature’s social function, so it will be necessary to clarify the differences between them by placing both in a broader philosophical and critical framework. Therefore, we will consider Martin Heidegger and recent thinkers for whom Heidegger’s concepts of truth and making are still current, such as Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, because of the surprising structural analogies between these philosophers and Frye on literature. The dichotomy between process and product suggests the inadequacy of the past participle in verum factum. The completeness of verum factum, which places it in the Aristotelian camp of the objectified work of art, also puts it within the field of what Heidegger refers to as a metaphysics of production, or a productionist metaphysics, in which “to be a being is to be a product.”2 Productionist metaphysics may be defined as a conception in which the artwork is made fully present through the efficient cause of the subject’s work or labour. Heidegger’s critique of productionist metaphysics is compatible with Vico’s axiom, but only if we add a new conception of truth: not as the certainty of what we already know, but as an event that discloses what has been before now unknown. Frye’s later work uses Heidegger to support his Longinian reading of the Biblical text, and the Longinian-Heideggerian reading is relevant here, particularly on the issue of what Frye calls “ecstatic” or “existential metaphor” and its relation to the processes of “social or communal ecstatic states” (c w , 26:83, 85; w p 82, 85).

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It may surprise some to learn that Frye shares his adherence to the principle of verum factum with Marxist critics such as Jameson. Jameson writes, “Western Marxism, indeed, stakes out what may be called a Viconian position, in the spirit of the ‘verum factum’ of the Scienza Nuova; we can only understand what we have made, and therefore we are only in a position to claim knowledge of history but not of Nature itself, which is the doing of God.”3 Jameson is particularly significant for Frye criticism because his book The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) borrows so extensively from Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1976). The greatness of Frye, for Jameson, or what distinguishes Frye from the “garden-variety myth criticism, lies in his willingness to raise the issue of community and to draw basic, essentially social, interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective representation.”4 Unfortunately, Jameson’s use of Frye has been ignored and all but forgotten by Frye critics.5 The greatness of Jameson for Frye criticism is, among other things, Jameson’s anticipation of Frye’s direct negotiation with the issue of literature’s relation with ideology, to say nothing of Frye’s intensifying concern with the relationship between literature and religion. This essay will argue, however, that while Jameson strikes new critical energy into the dormant issue of community in Frye’s work, his appropriation of myth criticism overlooks the literary “interruption of myth” and the very different social consequences that Frye draws from the concept of community and the nature of religion as collective representation. The phrase “interruption of myth,” of course, refers to Jean-Luc Nancy’s seminal article “The Interruption of Myth,” which provides the necessary context to distinguish Frye’s theory of myth and its relation to literature from Jameson’s version of it. The Marxist approach to art in Jameson, for instance, turns the principle of verum factum into yet another instrumentalist version of art, or productionist metaphysics (such as he finds in capitalism’s commodification of art), in order to found a revolutionary community. Frye, on the other hand, ultimately resists making community a product of work that myth founds or that myth brings to completion. Frye, instead, like Nancy, interrupts a myth’s visionary movement toward fusion and identity, only then allowing the community to reveal itself. The subtitle of The Political Unconscious, “Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act,” makes the stakes very clear, but not necessarily in the

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way that Jameson himself would like to admit. It is one thing to praise Frye for “raising the issue of community,” but it is another thing altogether for Jameson to acknowledge his debt to Frye’s theory of narrative (mythos in Greek) to gain access to the socially symbolic act of founding a political community (c w , 19:49; g c , 31). Frye forthrightly states in The Great Code (1982) that “the real interest of myth is to draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community, not to inquire into the operations of nature” (c w , 19:55; g c , 37). Frye refers to the capacity of the narrative act itself, as mythos, to draw a circumference around a community, and not just to the contents of that myth as a narrative that a society needs to know. Jameson commits himself further to Frye when he explicitly connects literature and myth, especially in relation to the “symbolic space” of social unity provided by religion: The religious figures then become the symbolic space in which the collectivity thinks itself and celebrates its own unity; so that it does not seem a very difficult next step, if, with Frye, we see literature as a weaker form of myth or a later stage of ritual, to conclude that in that sense all literature, no matter how weakly, must be informed by what we have called a political unconscious, that all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community. (Political, 70) According to Jameson, the socially symbolic act of narrative represses “real” history unless it captures it in its totality, a totality that is the political unconscious. Narrative represses (political) history when it fragments, and therefore reifies, social relations as things (i.e., commodities), a trait that Jameson ascribes to the modern and the postmodern. Jameson calls into question the viability of literature’s “symbolic space” as a totalizing act when it is considered a “weaker form of myth” or, as the implied comparison suggests, a weaker form of religion. It is, however, precisely on the question of the relation between religion and literature, or literature’s ability to interrupt religious belief, that Frye differs so significantly from Jameson. In his theory of symbols, Frye does say, “In the archetypal phase the work of literary art is a myth” (c w , 22:110; a c , 118). At this phase, an archetypal symbol, such as a rose, is the representative of a class or genus

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of all (poetic) roses. Frye also declares that “The symbol neither is nor is not the reality which it manifests” (c w , 22:327; a c , 351). In Derrida’s terms, “There is no literature without a suspended relation to meaning and reference.”6 Whatever Jameson thinks about literature’s status as a weaker form of myth, the symbol’s suspended relation to meaning and reference already puts Frye at odds with Jameson’s instrumentalist, or ideological, view of literature’s social function, the “symbolic meditation on the destiny of community,” along with its corresponding principle of verum factum. Jameson’s vision of literature within the social totality must always be measured (and hence limited) by the way literature contributes to the advancement of Marxist revolutionary doctrine and its historical teleology, measures that make Marxism, in Frye’s view, a deterministic approach to literature ultimately external to the suspension of literary reference. Marxists, since Marx’s footnote to Vico in Capital, have expressed agreement with Vico’s argument regarding the human origin of history, but Vico’s distinction between historical and natural knowledge quickly causes problems. As Martin Jay, in his valuable summary, suggests, Vico’s principle of knowing what we have made meets a limit in Marx’s ­celebrated remark from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, where he writes, “Men make history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under the circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”7 There is obviously not, in Jay’s words, a “perfect symmetry between cognition and production.” Jay points out that Marx’s metaphor of the nightmare from which we must “awaken” before we can fully and consciously make our own history anticipates to some extent Jameson’s own claim of a political unconscious. Jay expresses another important difficulty with verum factum in that it “suggests that the object of historical knowledge is entirely in the past: what men have made, not what they are making or will make, is verum: the truth.”8 One does not have to be a future-oriented (utopian) Marxist to have a similar interest in converting the verb in Vico’s axiom from a completed to a continuous action, for as Frye himself observes, with a sentiment that he will repeat almost verbatim in Words with Power:

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We think we fall asleep at night into the illusions of dream, and wake up in our bedrooms in the morning facing reality again. But of course everything in the bedroom is a human construct, and whatever humanity has made it can remake. We gradually discover that this principle applies to everything: what is real is what we have made, and what we have not yet made: verum factum, as Vico says. (c w , 16:434; Myth and Metaphor, 286; c w , 26:82; w p , 82) We will return to the illusions of dream and the reality of “what we have not yet made” for Frye’s understanding of literature. Before we continue, we should, nevertheless, point out that Vico scholars such as Max Fisch have gone so far as to translate Vico’s Latin formula to give it a more pragmatic, Greek meaning, the word “pragma” being Greek for “deed.”9 Fisch translates what he considers to be the retrospective verum factum into the more prospective “to alethēs = to pragma,” or in English, “the true is the deed.”10 In fact, the understanding of literature has been transformed by the speech-act theory of the performative utterance, a statement that does something in saying it, or that creates the state of affairs to which it refers and, therefore, contra Vico, does not even refer to a prior state of affairs. Performatives raise the question of truth, but only indirectly, since, unlike descriptive or constative utterances, they are neither true nor false. The problem with performatives, as Derrida points out, is that they not only produce events and give rise to institutions, as Vico would say, they also neutralize the event by trying to control the arrival of its otherness, or to limit exposure to the evental nature of the event. An event must be “unconditional … without sovereignty,” not made or produced by the sovereignty or power of the subject, God, the king, popular sovereignty, or democratic sovereignty.11 Since events are never self-identical, or fully present here and now, to claim that an event happened and that it is still happening is “to be making a case for it” (italics in original).12 Derrida’s effort to place limits on the power of performatives follows from Heidegger’s critique of productionist metaphysics, which invents a new relation between verum and factum, or truth and making. In this new relation to making, we must learn to release ourselves from a utilitarian design on things and allow the truth of a particular being or thing to

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reveal itself on its own terms. In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1953), Heidegger recounts the history of productionist metaphysics beginning with Plato, who first conceived of a thing as enduring in its essence as an idea and then considered its actual existence as secondary and more temporary. For Plato, the eidos, the “outward aspect” or “look” of the thing, determined its form the way a blueprint, or model, defines the appearance of an imperfect copy, or a material object in the sensible world. For Aristotle as well, Frye reminds us, “the poem is a techne or aesthetic artefact” (c w , 22:62; a c , 66), since all things were “formed matter,” formed by a creator, human or divine. Against this metaphysics of production in which “to be” is “to be produced,” Heidegger proposes an alternative, more Longinian view: “Art … is a becoming and happening of truth” (italics in original).13 As Michael Zimmerman puts this opposition in his excellent book on Heidegger, authentic producing is “[n]ot the act of a subject who ‘works’ on something in the sense of causing it to be built[;] art [is] instead the process of enabling things to disclose in accord with their own possibilities.”14 Aiming at Aristotle and Plato, Heidegger sees authentic production as inaugurating a new, postmetaphysical era in the West: “Authentic producing in this new era would be akin to what the Greeks originally meant by technē: a knowing and careful pro-ducing, a drawing forth, a letting be of things.”15 In order to make the work of art an event and not a finished object, Heidegger proposes that the work must clear a free space and become a place where truth can happen without immediately exhausting itself, leaving a reserve of truth unrevealed, or concealed.16 What Heidegger calls a “free relation”17 toward technology is summed up in the German word “Gelassenheit,”18 translated as “releasement,” or “letting be,” a relation that transforms the nature of work and making as “technē,” where technē would become a poetic process of revealing the truth of a thing’s being by bringing it into appearance. Letting something that is not yet present arrive into presence does not cause it to appear but provides an occasion for its appearance. In his paraphrase of Plato’s Symposium, for instance, Heidegger writes, “Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent and goes forward into presencing is poiēsis, bringing forth [Her-vor-Bringen].”19 If, as Heidegger argues, “[f ]reedom now reveals itself as letting beings be,”20 then humans do not have control over the creative, poetic process, but they do have a role as preservers of the event

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of truth: “Just as a work cannot be without being created, but is essentially in need of creators, so what is created cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it.”21 This is where Frye’s paradoxical statement that creation “seems to be an activity whose only intention is to abolish intention” finds its most favourable context. Heidegger suggests, “Another way in which truth occurs is the act that founds the political state,”22 and so we will turn now to Frye and the myth of the founding or the making of a community. Jameson will provide us an opportunity to reflect on the myth of founding a community in relation to Frye’s theory of myth, a theory complemented by the following words of Nancy: “Nothing is more common to the members of a community, in principle, than a myth, or a group of myths. Myth and community are defined by each other, at least in part – but perhaps in totality – and this motivates a reflection on community according to myth.”23 Jameson is very clear that he identifies Marxism with Frye’s theory, or schema, of romance from the Anatomy, one of the four pre-generic mythoi in the third essay of the Anatomy, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths.” Jameson states affirmatively, “The association of Marxism and romance … does not discredit the former so much as it explains the persistence and vitality of the latter, which Frye takes to be the ultimate source and paradigm of all storytelling” (Political, 105). Given Jameson’s methodological “imperative to totalize” (Political, 53), the appeal to the paradigm of all storytelling is attractive indeed. The advantages of Frye’s narrative of romance are particularly evident when Jameson states, in response to problems like the “claims … of the cultural past on a culturally different present” (Political, 18), that “only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism evoked above” (Political, 19). Using capital letters to indicate that he is raising his tone to a higher Longinian register that would make us “spectators of the mighty whole” of history,24 Jameson continues later in the paragraph: “These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme – for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from the realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot” (Political, 19). In other words, the Marxist “collective

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struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from the realm of Necessity” depends, ultimately, on Frye’s narrative theory, or myth of romance. Jameson proceeds from here to quote The Communist Manifesto, and adds even greater seriousness to his claim in this passage by quoting Capital in a note. He then announces, climactically, the theme of the book, namely, that it is this very narrative totality of history that constitutes the political unconscious itself: “It is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of the political unconscious finds its function and its necessity” (Political, 20). Strange as it may appear, just at the point that Jameson is “detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative” of the myth of romance in history, Frye interrupts. Jameson’s endorsement of Frye rises to its full height when he quotes the description of the archetypal phase of the symbol because the “concepts of desire and society make their full appearance.” Jameson gives the following passage from the Anatomy: The archetypal critic studies the poem as part of poetry, and poetry as part of the total human imitation of nature that we call civilization. Civilization is not merely an imitation of nature, but the process of making a total form out of nature, and it is impelled by the force we have just called desire … [Desire] is neither limited to nor satisfied by objects, but is the energy that leads human society to develop its own form. Desire in this sense is the social aspect of what we met on the literal level as emotion, an impulse towards expression which would have remained amorphous if the process had not liberated it by providing the form of its expression [or in other words, the Second or Formal Phase]. The form of desire, similarly, is liberated and made apparent by civilization. The efficient cause of civilization is work, and poetry in its social aspect has the function of expressing, as a verbal hypothesis, a vision of the goal of human work and the forms of desire.25 Frye’s reference to the Aristotelian notion of work as the “efficient cause” of civilization signals the inclusion, however attenuated, of the poetics of product and not the full expression of poetry’s power available in a poetics of process that is “not satisfied with objects.” For a Marxist armed with concepts like the “alienation of labour” and the degradations of the

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capitalist “mode of production,” however, the archetypal “vision of the goals of human work” would be a welcome sight. Jameson finds, for example, that the reduction of art to the commodity form infiltrates canonical writers like Joseph Conrad, whose “stylistic production as an aestheticizing strategy” (italics in original) seeks no more than to “recode or rewrite the world and its own data in terms of perception as a semiautonomous activity” (Political, 230). Put more bluntly, the “stylistic production” of impressionism in Conrad’s writing bears witness to the loss of a fuller human experience of the world and its reduction “into the realm of the image, thereby transforming it into an art-commodity” (Political, 230). Jameson claims that the term “aestheticizing strategy” is not “meant as a moral or political castigation” (Political, 230), but the term is an integral part of the more general Marxist myth of a unified community lost to the ravages of capitalism. The loss of social unity brought about by the capitalist system’s division of labour leads to the fragmentation of the psyche and the senses, ultimately turning Conrad’s impressionistic style into a meaningless “exercise of perception and the perceptual recombination of sense data as an end in itself ” (Political, 230). The Marxist narrative of lost social unity is precisely what Nancy exposes as a myth in his book The Inoperative Community. Here the word “myth” can be taken in the negative sense of “not really true,” or as not having its truth as a story within itself. Opposed to the traditional meaning of “myth” as the focus of social authority for a community, the more modern, negative meaning develops when the story has been subjected to the truth of correspondence, as in historical writing, when the story is measured against the truth or reality outside language (Frye, g c c w , 19:64; g c , 46). The book begins much as Jameson’s book begins, with a reference to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous pronouncement in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) that Marxism, or “communism is ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time.’”26 Jameson’s preface refers to this quotation from Sartre without mentioning his name, but with the purpose of placing Marxism in a privileged transcendental position with respect to all other literary critical methods: “Marxism is here conceived as that ‘untranscendable horizon’ that subsumes other apparently antagonistic or incommensurable critical operations, assigning them an undoubted sectoral validity within itself, and thus at once canceling and preserving them” (Political, 10). Yet has Jameson transcended Frye’s critical method

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if the social totality is made available only through the myth of romance? Samuel Weber and Geoffrey Bennington have criticized this transcendentalizing move of Marxism in their reviews of The Political Unconscious by saying, in effect, that Marxism, try as it may, cannot escape what Derrida calls the “quotation market,”27 or the theoretical marketplace where every theory has to compete with all the others for hegemony.28 Jameson, with supreme confidence, proposes to subsume all other critical methods within Marxism itself through the dialectical method, “thus at once cancelling and preserving them,” the very definition of the Hegelian dialectical process of Aufhebung. He meets surprising resistance from Frye himself, however, through the non-dialectical dialecticism of Frye’s anagogic phase of the symbol (the “neither … nor” of the symbol) (c w , 327; a c , 351). The neither-nor of the symbol does not take sides and thus “deconstructs” many of the oppositions that drive Jameson’s text, such as that between history and literature, religion and literature, the singular (bourgeois subject) and the collective, a unified and a fragmented psyche, capitalism and communism (since both assume a metaphysics of production), as well as the myth of making community and the interruption of myth.29 Nancy challenges Sartre’s famous remark, saying that “we must allow that communism can no longer be the unsurpassable horizon of our time,” not merely because a new horizon has formed “around the disappearance, the impossibility, or the condemnation of communism,” but also because “the horizons themselves must be challenged” (Inoperative, 8). The horizons must be challenged because it is no longer a question of the loss of communitarian intimacy, as Rousseau thought, nor is community, as Christianity desires, to be understood any longer “as communion, and communion takes place, in its principle as in its ends, at the heart of the mystical body of Christ” (Inoperative, 10). Nancy proposes, surprisingly, that “What this community has ‘lost’ – the immanence and the intimacy of a communion – is lost only in the sense that such a ‘loss’ is constitutive of ‘community’ itself ” (Inoperative, 12). A recurring theme in the history of social thought is the loss of the intimate social bonds in small communities (in German, Gemeinschaft) to the dispersion and dissolution of the forces in modern society (Gesellschaft). Nancy rejects this loss as myth in the negative sense, saying that “Society was not built on the ruins of a community.” Rather, community is “what happens to us … in the wake of

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society” (Inoperative, 11). It may be equally surprising to some that Frye is not far from Nancy’s position, for Frye says, “The Bible is a divine comedy, with society gathered into one body at the end; the secular scripture is a human romance, and its ideal seems to be different” (c w , 18:112; s s , 172). Anticipating to some extent Nancy’s argument that the experience of community is the experience of its loss, Frye contends that what the narrative of romance teaches us is that “All societies, including the City of God, are free only to the extent that they arrange the conditions of freedom for the individual, because the individual alone can experience freedom” (c w , 18:112; s s , 172). Whatever one acquires from the unconscious social conditioning of our social mythologies, Frye believes that the experience of society as the loss of a unified, self-identical, communal body must be “transcended,” transcendence being “an individual recreation of that mythology, a transforming of it from accepted social values into the axioms of one’s own activity” (c w , 18:111; s s , 170). Frye is betraying a democratic political position in his theory of romance that undermines any Marxist movement toward the collective “species being” at the expense of the singular being. If he does not come right out and say that loss is constitutive of society, Frye does say more than once that “the inherently revolutionary quality in romance begins to emerge from all the nostalgia about a vanished past” (c w , 18:116–17; s s , 178; c w , 22:173; a c , 186). The loss of community in romance is really a loss of belief in one’s social conditioning, or social mythology, since, Frye states, “A belief … is essentially a statement of a desire to attach oneself to, or live in or among, a specific kind of community” (c w , 18:111; s s , 170). The pragmatic sense of verum factum implied here is expressed more explicitly in The Modern Century, where Frye separates theoretical belief from practical belief. Theoretical belief is what one professes to believe, whereas practical belief is what one’s actions and attitudes show one believes. Frye goes on to say that a “closed mythology is a statement of what is believed to be true and of what is going to made true by a certain course of action” (c w , 11:66; m c , 116). Marxism is the exemplary case of a closed mythology which sets up a crucial contrast between Frye and Marxism in relation to verum factum, or “what is going to be made true” in terms of community. Frye chooses Don Quixote as the figure for the “romantic revolutionary vision” because he “tries to actualize in his life the romances he has been reading” (c w ,

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18:117; s s , 178). Romance here, is the secular scripture of literary myth, not myth proper. The distinction between myth that carries social authority for a community, like a religious text, and the modern meaning of myth as something “‘not really true’” (c w , 18:16; s s , 18) or something that happens only in stories, makes literature, in Nancy’s phrase, the “myth of myth.”30 Nancy conveys the paradoxical relation between literature and myth, saying that mythic thought is “nothing other than the thought of a founding fiction, or a foundation by fiction” (“Myth Inter­ rupted,” 53; italics in original). The paradox also expresses the central theme of Nancy’s essay that the myth of myth interrupts because it “harbors simultaneously … a disabused irony (‘foundation is a fiction’) and an onto-poetico-logical affirmation (‘fiction is a foundation’)” (“Myth Interrupted,” 55). Nancy, and Frye it turns out, resist the immediacy and self-presence of community because of the historical disasters wrought, for example, by fascism’s obsession with communion, a communion where society gathers into an exclusionary figure of totality, or an identity unified by the purity of an essence, such as nation, soil, or blood. Nancy also criticizes Marxism for “mything humanity, humanity acceding to itself ” (“Myth Interrupted,” 51). Nancy, who will now quote Marx, argues that “The myth of communion, like communism – ‘as the real appropriation of human essence by man for man, man’s total return to himself as social man’ – is myth.”31 Nancy refers, moreover, to Georges Bataille, who charges communism with betraying itself for “having taken man as its end, meaning the production of man and man as producer” (Inoperative, 16), which is to say, for restricting human possibility through a reductive definition of man as a producer. Bataille helps Nancy develop the contrast between the definition of the human as producer and as sovereign. Sovereignty exceeds the limit of work with the excess energy of play, risks life at the limit of death, and risks language at the limit of meaning. Sovereignty for Bataille is not a restricted economy of exchange value, giving and taking, or working for reward, but a general economy of useless expenditure, of giving without any thought of return through “sovereign” acts that risk uncovering our limits, such as sacrifice, giftgiving, play, and art. One can still produce and make, but without the servile act of subordinating the activity to meaning, an end, or purpose. Nancy extends this principle of expenditure to what he refers to as “communauté désoeuvrée,” an “inoperative” or “unworked community,” in

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order to interrupt the fascist, and Marxist, tendency to put community to work by creating an essentialized, pure social identity out of an organic totality that suppresses difference. Nancy achieves this inoperative community by proposing that community gathers itself around the absence of death, and other limits, such as the differences that we as singular beings share with one another. Derrida sums up the gaps in an inoperative community succinctly when he describes community as “sharing of what is not shared: we know in common that we have nothing in common.”32 More could be said about the uneasy agreement between Frye and Jameson in their attitudes toward romance narrative and its polarizing tendency, in psychological terms, to focus on the contrast between the “reality principle” of the waking world in realism and the wish-­fulfillment world of dream in romance. These two poles manifest themselves in Jameson’s critical method as the conflict between the “positive hermeneutic” of Frye’s theory of romance, which tends to “filter out historical difference,” and the “negative hermeneutic” of Marxism, which “sharpens our sense of historical difference” (Political, 130). Jameson himself acknowledges that he cannot accept traditional Marxism’s assumption that realism is the best way to gain theoretical, or visual, access to the social totality. He states, for example, that “even from the standpoint of an ideal of realism (traditionally in one form or another the central model of Marxist aesthetics as a narrative discourse which unites the experience of daily life with a properly cognitive, mapping, or well nigh ‘scientific’ perspective) this apparently contradictory valorization of romance has much to be said for it” (Political, 104). This early reference to “cognitive mapping”33 is Jameson’s term for attaining a totalizing vision of society that only Marxism can offer. Cognitive mapping hints at an easily missed but crucial difference between Jameson and Frye, for what is cognitive mapping if not the anagogic symbol that Frye defines in his glossary to the Anatomy as “relating to literature as a total order of words” (c w , 22:331; a c , 365)? Jameson translates cognitive mapping into the Althusserian definition of ideology, with its strong Lacanian influence, that is a “representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.”34 Obviously the imaginary relationship to the real conditions of existence makes the cognitive map a mediation between the individual and the social totality, but the map as map is no less a reification of the

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real social conditions, the very thing Jameson spends all his intellectual energy trying to avoid. If Jameson accepts Frye’s romance as “freedom from that reality principle” (Political, 194) to which realistic representation is held hostage by late capitalism, then surely he wants to exceed the social totality that the cognitive map so inevitably reifies by embracing the boundless desire of the anagogic symbol. No matter how many times Frye refers to a totality, whether it be of ritual, the Logos, or culture, or even when he, as critic, speaks, like the poet, “from the circumference instead of from the center of reality” (c w , 22:113; a c , 122), a totality appears only after it has been transcended, or so Derrida says.35 Frye quotes William Blake about the “The desire of man being infinite” (c w , 22:111; a c , 119), and Derrida would agree with both, saying, “Desire is equal only to excess. No totality will ever encompass it.”36 One wonders why Jameson does not avail himself of Frye’s anagogic symbol in order to attain the synoptic view it provides. Jameson very pointedly rejects the anagogic symbol as the final phase or last “horizon,” because of the “terminological uncertainties” that arise from Frye’s reversing the last two levels, the moral and the anagogic, in the medieval system of the four levels of scripture. These terminological uncertainties “stand as something like an implicit self-critique” (Political, 73), in Jameson’s view, but upon examination, this criticism is not well founded. In the medieval system, the third level, “that of the individual soul is designated as the moral level, while it is the fourth or last level – which embraces the whole history of the human race and the last judgment – that is termed the anagogical one” (Political, 74). Jameson continues, arguing that Frye’s terminological shift is an “ideological move, in which political and collective imagery is transformed into a mere relay in some ultimately privatizing celebration of the category of individual experience” (Political, 74). To limit the anagogic phase to a “privatizing celebration of the category of individual experience” misreads the development of the theory of symbols toward the apocalyptic. Frye comments, “Anagogically, then, poetry unites total ritual, or unlimited social action, with total dream, or unlimited individual thought” (c w , 22:111; a c , 120). Frye retains collective behaviour in the repeated action of ritual, but ritual with a magical control over nature, for the “magical element in ritual is clearly toward a universe in which a stupid and indifferent nature is no longer the container of human society, but is contained by that society, and must rain

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and shine at the pleasure of man” (c w , 22:111; a c , 120). It would, likewise, be wrong to dismiss “total dream, or unlimited individual thought” as contrary to the social since at this level the anagogic symbol is, in Heideggerian terms, “ecstatic,” an identification of two things. The ecstatic metaphor means “standing outside oneself: a state in which the real self, whatever reality is and whatever the self is in this context, enters a different order of things from that of the now dispossessed ego” (c w , 26:83; w p , 82). Far from celebrating the privatized category of individual experience, Frye is trying, in Dante’s medieval description of the anagogic, to go beyond or “above the senses”37 to describe the indescribable loss of selfhood as the ecstatic being “outside oneself,” an exposure of one’s limit to other singular beings in the community. If community happens as the interruption of, or lack of, shared identity, then it cannot be a fusion into the substance of an individual or a common, collective subject. As Nancy puts it, contrary to the collective subject of Marxist ideology, “ecstasy has no ‘subject,’ – but one must say that ecstasy (community) happens to the singular being” (Inoperative, 7; italics in original). There is a particular sense in which Frye interrupts work as the “efficient cause of civilization” so that community is allowed to manifest itself on its own terms and not as the product of the work of some instrumentalist ideology. Nancy’s language, in an uncanny moment, aligns with Frye’s when Nancy writes, “But literature’s revelation, unlike myth’s, does not reveal a completed reality, nor the reality of a completion. It does not reveal, in a general way, some thing – it reveals rather the unrevealable: namely, that it is itself, as a work that reveals and gives access to a vision and to the communion of a vision, essentially interrupted” (“Myth Interrupted,” 63). In Frye’s terms, “Apocalypse means revelation, and when art becomes apocalyptic, it reveals” (c w , 22:116; a c , 125). Literature may borrow the content of its revelation from religion, but Frye interrupts the attempt (by Jameson, for example) to make religion the ultimate and exemplary symbolic space where the collective thinks itself and celebrates its own unity. Literature “reveals … the unrevealable” community, or being outside oneself, in a way that does not belong to the tradition of religion. Frye therefore expands the anagogic symbol to include, in collective terms, culture as an independent source of social experience, to which Jameson, given his interest in culture, might have paid attention. If what is made is what is true, then Frye is asking implicitly, what

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is more true for us than culture itself, the experience of something we make but which at the same time makes us? Frye writes that “[c]ulture interposes, between the ordinary and the religious life, a total vision of possibilities, and insists on its totality – for whatever is excluded from culture by religion will get its revenge somehow” (c w , 22:118; a c , 127). Frye concludes the theory of symbols with the words “Between religion’s ‘this is’ and poetry’s ‘but suppose this is,’ there is always some kind of tension, until the possible and the actual meet at infinity” (c w , 22:119; a c , 127–8). The “tension” here may be a kind of anti-Aristotelian thought of Frye’s not unlike the correction of Aristotle in Heidegger’s remark, “Higher than actuality stands possibility.”38 Both Frye and Heidegger refuse to limit human being to the actual in favour of the possible, or to limit poetic production to its products. We too must conclude with the tension between actuality and possibility, but now with a focus on the notion of community itself which Jameson denies in the anagogic symbol. Just as Frye has argued that freedom is experienced only by the individual, and thus has made impossible any fusion of the social totality into one organic whole, Nancy has argued that “the totality of community resisting its own setting to work – is a whole of articulated singularities” (Inoperative, 76). To be articulated is, like the human joints, to be joined and separated at the same time as singular beings. For Nancy, human beings touch each other without fusing together, leaving them as incomplete singular beings but exposed to one another. “Community is revealed in the death of others” (Inoperative, 15), but it is in the experience of death that the self discovers itself as dislocated ecstatically: “I do not rediscover myself, nor do I recognize myself in the other: I experience alterity in the other together with the alteration that ‘in me’ sets my singularity outside me and infinitely delimits it” (Inoperative, 33–4; italics in original). This ecstatic experience, like the anagogic symbol, “infinitely delimits” the singular and the multiple in the myth of community, and yet this impossible community is real. Derrida, for example, observes that the impossible is not the modal opposite of the possible, but the interruption of the possible in its sameness: “This impossible is not privative. It is not the inaccessible, and it is not what I can indefinitely defer: it announces itself; it precedes me, swoops down upon me and seizes me here and now in a nonvirtualizable way, in actuality and not in potentiality … It is what is most undeniably

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real.”39 The basis of the positive hermeneutic that attracts Jameson to Frye is this belief in the impossible. Such an impossible community is not an actuality or a presence, which is why culture (and literature) resists this social form of “intellectual idolatry” by interrupting the myth of community with “a total vision of possibilities, and insists on its totality” (c w , 22:118; a c , 127). This faith in the impossible community deepens our understanding of what Frye means by the created reality of verum factum: There are two kinds of illusion: the negative illusion that merely fails to be an objective reality, and the positive illusion which is a potential, a something hoped for that can be actualized by a creative effort. Freud spoke of “the future of an illusion” in connection with religion, meaning that religion was a negative illusion. If the illusion of religion is positive, he was right in a way he did not intend. Nothing except a positive illusion can possibly have a future. Reality is something that obviously changes only on its own terms: as far as we are concerned, its future has already occurred. To realize an illusion is to abolish its future and turn it into a presence. (c w , 26:121; w p , 131) The ideas expressed by Frye in this passage are very familiar to readers of Derrida, particularly the paradoxical notion that a positive illusion, like the impossible community, is something hoped for that can be “actualized by creative effort.” But the other paradox is the one that escapes the fixity of ontology as something that is self-identically present. If a positive illusion is to have a future, it must never be present, for to “realize an illusion is to abolish its future and turn it into a presence.” The implication here is that verum factum, or created reality, means that actuality is not the opposite of a possible, virtual, constructed reality and never takes place in the present as a form of presence. To put it in language closer to Frye’s, verum factum is never a self-sufficient product, but always already a process that is never complete, having just begun to arrive.

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Frye, Derrida, and the University (to Come) A l exa n der D ic k

In his early writings on education, Northrop Frye defined the university as an entity that preserves and promotes the traditions, beliefs, and ideals of the past to help students conceive the future. The university, that is, fosters a sense of what might have been rather than simply what was. It is thus as much a temporal entity, a kind of past-future-perfect, as a spatial one. Indeed, for Frye, temporal complexity was a pedagogical imperative. Already in “A Liberal Education” (1945), Frye was urging teachers to encourage “neurotic maladjustment” in their students, making them skeptical of mass media by exposing them to the utopian possibilities imagined by earlier writers (c w , 7:49). “The ethical purpose of a liberal education,” Frye urged in the “Tentative Conclusion” to Anatomy of Criticism, “is to liberate, which can only mean to make one capable of conceiving of society as free, classless, and urbane.” Of course, “no such society exists,” and this is “why a liberal education must be deeply concerned with works of imagination” (c w , 22:323; a c , 347). Frye was at this time candid, even defensive, about the conservative foundation of the liberal agenda. “The university,” Frye wrote in the last sentence of “The Critical Discipline” (1960), “can best fulfill its revolutionary function by digging in its heels and doing its traditional job in its traditionally retrograde, obscurantist, and reactionary way. It must continue to confront society with the imaginations of great poets, the visions of great thinkers, the discipline of scientific method, and the wisdom of the ages” (c w , 7:115). University liberates students, Frye says, by making them part of a history greater than themselves.1

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Scholars of Frye’s education theory are right to note the continuity between his early defence of liberal education and his later reflections on the university.2 Frye never abandoned his belief in the power of the university, and especially literature within the university, to cultivate young minds and imaginations. But they are also right to appreciate that this faith was frequently tested, and never more troublingly so than during the student uprisings of the 1960s. The protests shook Frye’s confidence in the balance between tradition and progress and compelled him to see the university as a fragile and uncertain entity. In several addresses and essays written in the immediate wake of the uprisings, Frye noted that “hysteria” and “anxiety” in society, and especially in the student body, were challenging and even overwhelming the ethical authority of liberal education. Distrust and disaffection, Frye thought, were replacing the maladjusted neurotic’s faith in culture. And this alienation was pushing students to see themselves as a collective body opposed to rather than part of the university. It frustrated Frye that this new student body was so desperately blind, simultaneously desiring change and unable to see the damages that change can bring. Frye also predicted that the protests would be short-lived – and they were. But there is no question that they represent an epoch in his educational thinking. Yet what has not been fully grasped, I think, is how Frye merged his analysis of the student movement with developing ideas about literature. Frequently in his later writings Frye’s thoughts about the university, education, and protest come into contact with concepts of metaphor, apocalypse, and the myths of “concern” and “freedom,” and it is in these moments of contact that Frye grapples with some of the difficult questions about what makes universities work and change. My purpose in this paper is to trace the connections between Frye’s later reflections on the university, primarily those written in the wake of the student protests in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and his developing thoughts about metaphor and myth. I also want to argue that Frye’s post-1968 thoughts on the university bear some important similarities to Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “university without condition” – a “space” of free, imaginative “confession” and hospitality that in several late essays Derrida argued was both the origin of and the solution to the mentalities of “use” and “function” subordinating the humanities within the university. Like Frye,

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Derrida had extensive experience as an administrator and teacher, and this experience strongly influenced his understanding of pedagogy as a difficult process. Derrida’s “university without condition” has both inspired and troubled commentators, as we will see, because its freedom is oriented toward an indeterminate future, that is, in a paradox consistent with deconstructive method, its unconditionality can only be articulated, in a grammatical sense, conditionally.3 In his own phrase, Derrida’s university is “à venir,” “to come,” meaning that the university is always in the process of making itself without a clear idea of what that “self ” is. It is precisely this indeterminate future of the university “to come” that I see in the late Frye. Frye’s and Derrida’s respective reflections on the indeterminacy of the university “to come” powerfully intersect and, together, these reflections might help us to rethink some of the current crises and uprisings that universities face today. Regardless of the fact that Frye did not appreciate Derrida’s enigmatic style and disapproved of his thesis about the priority of writing over speech, the two thinkers have much in common. That the structure of human consciousness is not simply linguistic but metaphorical, that arguments for pure reason are to be distrusted, that the text is the proper object of critical and philosophical investigation – these are some of the premises that Frye and Derrida have been said to share.4 Unlike Derrida, who was initially skeptical of claims for spirit, imaginative or religious, Frye was committed to the idea that literary, philosophical, and religious texts could channel transcendental experience, though that experience was of human rather than of divine origin. Yet Frye, like Derrida, was not afraid to challenge the preconceived truisms of critical and social thought, especially when they impinged on intellectual freedom. For his part, Derrida began in the late 1980s to consider and even uphold the dignity of religion, culture, politics, and education that Frye had long endorsed in his critical writings. Frye did not live long enough to witness the full flowering of Derrida’s “ethical turn.” Had he done so, he might have found some vindication in Derrida’s later writings, especially their championing of the humanities as a sacred zone in which people can reflect on spirituality, education, and society.5 But the most significant turning point in both Frye’s and Derrida’s thinking about the university came earlier, with the student uprisings of 1968.6 Paris was the epicentre of the uprising, not only because the

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demonstrations there were larger and more violent than elsewhere but also because the issues at stake were more directly related to pedagogy and curriculum than to civil rights and the Vietnam War. In 1966, the conservative French government headed by Maurice Couve de Murville announced that it would be introducing a series of radical reforms to the University of Paris, reducing its traditional stress on philosophy and Classics and emphasizing science and technology, as well as limiting enrolment to specially selected students. Opposition to these reforms grew through the following year, especially from more radical members of the philosophy departments, in response to which the government proposed closing the most politically active campus at Nanterre. In late April, several students at the Sorbonne were hauled before a disciplinary tribunal for staging an anti–Vietnam War rally. On 3 May, a massive rally was held at the Sorbonne, and by 10 May students all over the country were in full protest mode. Catching the wave of unrest, militant trade unionists began preparing for a general strike. But while the students and workers felt a good deal of sympathy for each other’s causes, the events of 1968 were less a class action than a carnivalesque repudiation of tradition and custom inspired in large part by the anti-establishment energies of philosophical Marxism taught by many of France’s younger generation of thinkers. Although the 1967 trilogy that launched his career and gave form to the intensely critical, anti-establishment disposition of deconstruction has been thought popularly to have inspired the students,7 Derrida was actually quite ambivalent about the protests. As his biographer Benoît Peeters explains, Derrida did not endorse the protests’ supposedly political motivation; he had already given up his membership in the French Communist Party before the demonstrations began.8 In later interviews, Derrida reported that he was not inclined to stand “on the barricades.” Nevertheless, he was present at several of the movements’ early protests and organized a general meeting of faculty and students at the École Normale Supérieure where he was director at the time.9 After the protests, Derrida became involved in the foundation of an eighth campus (Paris VIII) of the University of Paris at Vincennes, on the city’s outskirts. Vincennes was the brainchild of Edgar Faure, the moderate minister for education in the otherwise reactionary Murville administration, who imagined it as a new kind of university where “the education given would

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be flexible and interdisciplinary” and where “professors competent within their fields could be recruited even without the qualifications traditionally required.”10 Raymond Las Vergnas, the dean of the Sorbonne, and the feminist critic Hélène Cixous asked Derrida to advise on recruiting philosophers. Because of speaking and teaching engagements in Britain and the United States, Derrida was unable to help as much as he wanted to. Eventually, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze assembled a largely radical contingent of disenchanted philosophers from the other branches of the University of Paris who, by the end of the summer, found themselves hurling rocks at police from the roof of their new campus. In 1980, Paris VIII was moved en masse to the Rue Saint-Denis nearer central Paris. Nevertheless, the idea of a more open institution in which students play an active role had become a reality and would, in the following decades, prove to be an inspiration to philosophers and educators throughout Europe. Frye’s experiences with the student movement, like Derrida’s, were both indirect and close. In Canada and the United States in the late 1960s, motivated in large part by the collective activism of the civil rights and anti-war movements, students called for changes to the university curriculum to allow them more say in the scope and direction of their studies and to open the schools to new approaches and ideas. Although his lectures and addresses at the time show him to have been uneasy with the students’ behaviour, he was by no means entirely unsympathetic to their predicament.11 Frye witnessed the most fervent protests at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a visiting professor in 1969. In his convocation address at the University of Western Ontario delivered on 29 May, mere days after his return to Canada, Frye recounted the story of the “People’s Park” at Berkeley: a wing of the Black Panthers had claimed a small lot “owned by the university” to use as a communal gathering and teaching space. When the university, fearing that it would become a bulwark for the protest movement as a whole, reclaimed the lot, many Berkeley students, already supportive of the civil rights and anti-war movements, staged a protest at the park. In a fit of aggressive pique, the state governor, Ronald Reagan, ordered the police to stop the protest, which they did immediately and violently. Frye, of course, was horrified at the government’s reaction and expressed, in this and other

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addresses, his basic sympathy for the students’ distrust of such crude abuses of authority. Frye then proposed that the students had come to see themselves as a body divided between a “primitive state, the state of concern and anxiety” rooted in the individual’s need to belong to a community of those like him, and “truth and reality,” which is based on “logic, evidence, verification, and the recognizing of imaginative power in the arts.” The university, Frye suggested, is the “keystone” of this latter idea. But “because the university is a community as well, it shares to the full [the] sense of social concern” that can erupt when a student faces a moral impasse, like a war he hates but in which he is compelled to participate (c w , 7:385). In such situations, the student’s feeling that he really belongs to a “primitive” and anxious community takes over and threatens reason and logic, which the university embodies. The result of such anxieties is distrust: the forces of logic and order think all expressions of frustration or anxiety are threats, while those who are anxious see all expressions of order as suppression. In this address, and in many others that he made in 1969 and later, Frye insisted that this anxiety in itself could do far more harm than good, for it was a social movement without a clear understanding of reality and thus akin to totalitarianism. Yet Frye knew, as the egregious behaviour of the police at Berkeley made clear, that the students’ distrust is often justifiable. Like Derrida, then, Frye saw quite early in the protest movement that the students’ anxiety was not just a distraction from regular study but a crucial part of their development. What they needed to learn, then, was how to reflect as much as act on that anxiety as a way to participate in their own pedagogical formation. Students often appear in Frye not only as a “collective” (as they claimed they were in 1968), but also as a kind of body. For instance, looking back on his rather cantankerous 1970 essay “The University and Personal Life” in his 1976 “Preface” to Spiritus Mundi (where it was republished), Frye mused that he “had little sympathy with the kind of activism then going on, however much I had with its antagonism to the Vietnam war and to racism. I felt that the movement was fundamentally sick, so sick that it could really do nothing but die. It did very soon die, but its existence manifested something that seems to me still very much alive … the crisis of distinguishing the mythological from the empirical consciousness”

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(preface to Spiritus Mundi, viii). In later reflections, the double body of the students that he had begun to rethink in the late 1960s became a recurrent figure. At several points it overlapped with aspects of his broader literary theory, most notably the image of the universal or infinite man and of the Biblical apocalypse. In several late notebook entries, Frye mused that while the student should always think of himself as part of a greater whole – a tradition or institution – it was only through his reformulation of that tradition as “part” of himself that it could have any social bearing. “The undergraduate of a university,” Frye mused, “is a part of a whole; the alumnus is a whole of which his university experience is part. Closer to the Christ paradox of Paul is Adam & Eve before the fall, when they were part of Eden; for regenerate man Eden is a state of mind within him” (c w , 5:109). Much as the student protests in the 1960s harkened back to an imaginary Edenic state, so the alumnus thinks of his higher education as “a state of mind” he experienced in his past life and which is thus “within” memory. In another entry, Frye expressed the problematic of parts and wholes in terms of interpretation: The interchange of whole and part … is an extension of what is called in criticism the hermeneutic circle. How do we understand the wholeness of a work of art? By studying the parts. But how do we understand the significance of the parts? By studying the whole. There is a vogue now for depreciating holism, but it is an indispensable metaphor: if we want education we also want a “university,” despite the miscellany of activities; if we look at the stars, we want to feel that we live in a “universe” despite the discouraging number of galaxies. Apart from that, “we are all members of one body” is the extension of holism from literature into life. There can be no sense of exhilaration, no expansion of the spirit, without wholeness. (c w , 5:218) The irony of this wholeness lies in the fact that it does not necessarily exist, from the students’ point of view, except as a “sense” of something we desire. Both Frye’s and Derrida’s mature thinking on the nature of the university derives from the realization after 1968 that the university is something students create rather than something to which they belong.

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Derrida developed this new idea in essays, lectures, and memoranda written for the Groupe de Recherches sur l’Ensignement Philosophique (GRE PH ) in the 1970s and ’80s and collected in 1990 as Du Droit à la Philosophie.12 G REPH formed in 1975 in the wake of the so-called Haby reforms to French secondary education, which once again proposed replacing the traditional philosophical curriculum of French schools with a more utilitarian program emphasizing science and technology. In 1979, Derrida helped organize an Estates General of France’s philosophers with contributing representatives from many educational institutions, which recalibrated an alternative curriculum to the one proposed by the Haby reforms, though it also abandoned much of the traditional restrictions of the old system. To a great extent, the protest worked. Although the newly elected president, François Mitterand, did not rescind the Haby reforms when he assumed office in 1981, he did publish a letter to GR E P H in Le Monde (28 May 1981) pledging that “the teaching of philosophy could be preserved and developed”13 following on proposals made during the election to extend the teaching of philosophy into the mainstream of French education. At Mitterand’s behest, Derrida and the other members of GRE PH set about to expand their proposals for a new philosophical curriculum, which became the foundation of a Collège International de Philosophie.14 In his contributions to these proposals, Derrida made two fundamental points clear. First, rather than subject itself to any specific disciplinary agenda or social policy, philosophy should be understood as widely as possible to include many established disciplines and political perspectives and to provide the means to understand and interpret how these intersect and conflict. Indeed, the “conflictuality” of the disciplines is vital to Derrida’s understanding of philosophy’s object of study, for it is only in the relative freedom and diversity of science, religion, politics, and art that their true points of contact, no matter how paradoxical, can be understood. Second, Derrida stressed the crucial importance of “performance” to the new philosophical curriculum. By this he did not mean simply that drama, film, poetry, dance, and other performing arts were to be included under the college’s inter-scientific auspices. Performance did not simply mean competence or application. For Derrida, “performativity” signalled “possibility and exigency,” which he insisted should be “recognized by rights as one of the essential marks” of the new curriculum.15

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Invoking J.L. Austin’s distinction between “constative” and “performative” utterances (a distinction Derrida had been using broadly since the mid 1970s), that is, between the referential and active functions of ­language, Derrida suggested that education is an “event” rather than an institution or object. His point in underlining this aspect of philosophical study was to insist that philosophy must participate in the historical transformations and potential revolutions of which it is a part. Philosophy must perform and see itself perform in order to be effective. The new university, for Derrida, embodied the active and imaginative dimension of language that humanistic education had formerly neglected. “For the first time,” Derrida suggests, “an institution will expressly take up a dimension of language that had been excluded or denied … and the very creation of such an institutional space will already be an unprecedented inaugural ‘performative’ with (we will never hide this) all the risks that a ‘blow’ [coup] of this type can entail.”16 Just as Derrida thought of education as a performative event rather than merely a set of constative truths, so too did Frye come to see the university not only as an imaginative but also as a metaphorical entity. As we’ve seen, Frye often thought of the university in symbolic terms, as a “universe,” as a type of Eden, or more simply as a “whole” that is also a part. In his remarks on Berkeley, Frye noted that the “‘people’s park’ came to fill the empty space in the militant noddle that a genuine education would have filled with the garden of Eden and the murder of Abel” (c w , 7:386). But more importantly, in his later writings Frye came to see the university as an evolving entity, constantly reimagined and renewed by teachers’ and students’ mutual, and sometimes antagonistic, beliefs about what it is and what it is for. It is in this way that Frye’s idea of the university is crucially tied to his understanding of metaphor as a process of iteration. Metaphor, Frye would note in Words with Power, especially that variety of metaphor he called anagogic, is rooted in the divisive process of repetition. A metaphor is a repetition or iteration of something (A is B) that is secretly yet also defiantly a repudiation of iterability (A is not B – especially to those, as Frye says, who are attuned to the obvious fact that A and B are not the same). But with anagogic metaphor, the A element is so complete that every B element it is said to be is also part of it, and which it therefore exceeds (c w , 26:74–5; w p , 71–2). Thus, when the student sees her university experiences as a “whole state of mind” that is part

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of her memories, she is projecting an idea of a whole that is and is not the same as the actual institution that has created her, the communal “whole” that she wants it to be and the assemblage of laws, principles, reflections, and protocols that have guided her education. It is by way of metaphor that Frye’s thoughts on language and education engage closely with Derrida’s. As Garry Sherbert has noted, “Derrida and Frye maintain that repetition does not merely look backwards, repeating the same, but also opens itself to the future by repeating differently each time, no matter how minimal the difference may be.”17 What Derrida calls “prosthetic iterability” is a form of repetition that, as Sherbert says, “divides itself in order to add something new.” In The Great Code Frye used this formulation of metaphor to describe the apocalypse: at the end of Revelation the universe completes itself, only to invite the reader to make that complete entity anew, which is in turn possible only through the teachings of the entire Bible (c w , 19:157–8; gc, 137–8).18 Frye’s post-1968 university might thus be thought of not as liberal but as apocalyptic. Frye made this point explicit in his 1976 Presidential Address to the Modern Language Association. In spite of its various subspecialties and period divisions, Frye said, criticism retains two defining dispositions that operate in dialectical tension. On one hand, criticism has a “conservative” impulse to protect all that is good and continuous – “culture” in the Arnoldian sense – for the sake of both students and their teachers. On the other hand, criticism also has a “radical,” forward-looking trust in the abilities of creative, young minds to break new ground and forge new myths (c w , 7:492). Frye posits a “Biblical context” for this temporal paradox, the dialectically charged concepts of “wisdom” and “prophecy.” In practice, however, “there is a point at which they meet and become the same thing, the point where there is no longer any wise man or any prophet, but simply the word itself, a power of speech articulating itself independently of the speaker’s ego” (cw, 7:492–3). Frye then makes the more characteristically Derridean move of citing Heidegger “in his later essays where he calls language the master and not the servant” (cw, 7:493). Metaphor, in other words, is the indeterminate force that drives education. In the latter part of his career, Frye did not abandon his faith in the importance of the humanities or the significance of the past to the future. He continued to insist in addresses and lectures through the 1970s and

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’80s that the purpose of university education is to expose students to the “reality behind the transient appearance presented in our morning newspapers and television” (c w , 7:505). Indeed, after 1968, Frye’s essentially conservative commitment to “mythical” truth became more strident than it had been in the 1940s and ’50s. Students, he said in “The Teacher’s Source of Authority,” must do their part to ensure the validity of the “educational contract” that more than any social contract governs their relation to reality (c w , 7:505–6). Yet, just as Derrida’s university embraces a performative dynamic, so in calling education a “contract” Frye acknowledges its proleptic or conditional nature. The purpose of the educational contract, like the liberal education that Frye advocated previously, is to curtail and discipline students’ anxieties about the world that come largely from their difficulties interpreting the meanings of all the metaphors and signs that they see around them. By virtue of his “authority” the teacher can promise the students that he will show them how to make sense of the world. But this authority also derives from an “anxiety of continuance,” their desire “never to meet a situation in which there is dialectical conflict” (c w , 7:531). Teachers must accept that their role is not to cultivate “uniformity” but to encourage “unity, which,” like metaphor, “can include dissension, conflicting ideas, and opposition” (c w , 7:429). The text that most explicitly links Frye’s theories of interpretation and of education is The Critical Path. The central premise of this work is that modern society advances through the clash between two competing myths: “the myth of concern” and “the myth of freedom.” Drawing from Giambattista Vico, Frye describes the myth of concern as the “encyclopedic” expression of a culture’s collective beliefs, including “its past, present, and future.” This myth is not a coherent belief system, though it is akin to religion especially in its internal contradictions and points of ­dissent. “Concern,” Frye explains, “so far as it is a feeling, is very close to anxiety” (c w , 28:23; c p , 37), and it is this anxiety that compels the expression of concern in poetry, which remained the primary vehicle of social thought until the early modern period. At that point, with the rise of science and commerce, anxiety began to be channelled into a new course, prose, the function of which was to express the individual’s comprehension of reality and his independence from custom. And since society could no longer be said to have direct control over these individuals,

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arbiters of this myth of freedom had to demote poetry to a subordinate function, as the expression of sexual desire or military bravado. Thus, Sir Philip Sidney wanted poetry to have a social function, even though, Frye explains, for Sidney poetry could never be used as a vehicle for public debate or information in the way that philosophy and other discourses of reason could (c w , 28:44; c p , 66). But with the Romantics the tide shifted again. Percy Bysshe Shelley understood that reason was more valuable than utility as a foundation for critical thought, but, according to Frye, Shelley regarded the imagination as having the greatest claim to priority because it was the subject’s imagination that drove the visionary and thus active engine of thought rather than merely guided its passive observational functions. Poetry, Frye explains, was for Shelley “in its totality … society’s real myth of concern,” a way of turning, through imaginative expression, doubts and anxieties about the world into vehicles of social change without the pretense of being referentially true (c w , 28:64; c p , 95). In his reading of Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, Frye argues that Shelley’s mission was precisely to invert the “hierarchy of values” that, since Plato and, most evidently, Sidney, assumed that the philosophical discourses of reason and utility were logically more truthful and thus more useful than poetry or literature. Shelley’s Defence imagines a poetics that is decidedly skeptical, if not oppositional, to a progressivist or utilitarian outlook. In Frye’s formulation, Shelley appears in some respects to embody the revolutionary surge of the student protests, but he also becomes the embodiment of the students’ potential as agents of legitimate progress rather than directionless violence. For Frye, the Romantic revolution turns reason back to its metaphorical foundation.19 It thus remakes or renews the university rather than simply upholding it or tearing it down. The critic’s responsibility, Frye insists, is to rethink that revolution in his own time, to turn education on its head, so that its mythical, that is, total and imaginative, foundation is revealed as its primary medium. The critic must understand the various disciplines that poetry also subordinates, because, being no less true than before, they are also instances of that fundamental mythology: “The modern critic is therefore a student of mythology, and his total subject embraces not merely literature, but the areas of concern which the mythical language of construction and belief enters and informs. These areas constitute the mythological subjects, and they include large parts of

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religion, philosophy, theory, and the social sciences” (c w 28:67; c p , 98; emphasis added). Insofar as the disciplines exceed the totality of their constituent interests, however, they also require a broader field of vision beyond instrumental reason. As Deborah Elise White has shown, the excessiveness of the university is also a central concern in Derrida’s essays on that subject, especially in the way that he finds in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Conflict of the Faculties a revolutionary impulse similar to the one Frye finds in Shelley’s Defence.20 In “The Principle of Reason,” first written as the inaugural lecture of his tenure as Andrew D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University, Derrida uses Cornell’s distinctive landscape, in particular the bridge that spans its gorge, as a figure for the way that education tends to limit or restrain the abyss it must confront in its quest for real and expansive knowledge. The figure leads Derrida to Kant’s notion of the sublime in much the same way that Frye articulates the paradox of metaphor – as the impossible excess that in its negativity (its destruction or deconstruction of the real) opens the way for new explorations of real meaning. Hence, White shows, Derrida’s meditations on the university build on Kantian aesthetic principles just as Kant’s own formulation of the sublime builds on “the incommensurability of imagination and reason and, thus, too, of nature and freedom, or of knowledge and ethics.”21 The sublime university is the end of the literality of reason leading to the opening of new forms of radically dialectical consciousness. As Derrida notes, Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties is an irreconcilable contradiction between the need to “pronounce the law” (italics in original) we would imagine, sincerely, and the need to acknowledge “a prior, if not pre-prior difficulty, one that today we would sense even more keenly than he … this difficulty derives from the definition of a certain outside that maintains with its inside a relation of resemblance, participation, and parasitism that can give rise to an abuse of power, an excess that is strictly political.”22 These are, Derrida continues, the spaces of academic reflection or repetition in which the institution itself is a question rather than merely a setting, the point at which the university becomes its own metaphor, realized in the arena of speculative discourse rather than embodied in its own institutional iterations.23 This is fundamentally what Derrida means by the “university to come,” not a physical or institutional space for curtailing or disciplining dissent but rather a sacred zone that, in its

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insouciant desire to encompass everything, becomes the place in which all the discrete components of that whole break down. It is in these moments of figurative speculation that the discourse of the university hesitates in the zone between the “is” and “is not” that Frye argues is constitutive of metaphor, indeed, constitutes metaphor’s essential sublimity. As in Derrida, it is the way in which the “margins of the university” reflect back on it, to destroy and renew it, that opens the university, in Frye’s view, to its full potential. The moments of hesitation that both Frye and Derrida encourage in the critical response to metaphor constitute at a micro level the kind of pedagogical engagement that they encourage at the macro level of the university. Yet this hesitation also marks an aporia in their respective ­pedagogies. To a great extent, Frye’s and Derrida’s arguments about the distinctiveness or freedom of humanistic investigation constitute a freedom-from (institutional or corporate manipulation) rather than a freedomto actively cultivate a certain kind of student or program. Derrida did not advocate that Cornell students jump off bridges, though he seems at points to be reminding them of their right to do so. It may well be that neither he nor Frye could introduce such programmatic measures into their respective arguments, which are far more about principles than they are about practice. Still, as Ian Balfour has recently pointed out, the “rhetoric of paradox” that energized Frye’s writings and pedagogy, his tendency to “go against the grain” even when he was speaking in defence of established customs and institutions, puts into practice what is in principle defined in his theory of metaphor, an openness to discussion and debate that, as Balfour puts it, “radiate[s] outward” from text to audience to culture.24 Seen together, then, Frye and Derrida model the very dialectical character that they both believed the university could and should have. The principle at stake in Derrida’s university is not freedom but “openness” – openness to difference, to exchange, to the other. Openness is also an important concept in Frye’s educational writing. Openness is the foundation for the interpretation of metaphor: we must see clearly that A is both B and not B in order for the full dialectical potential of metaphor to be apparent. In The Critical Path, openness is the guiding factor in the social work of literature, exposing different points of view (political or disciplinary) to each other and confronting society with its imaginative foundation:

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A society with an open mythology has to recognize the autonomy of scholarship, along with its necessary pluralism and specialization, and recognize also that scholarship contains a power of veto over any aspect of any concerned mythology, as it may at any time provide ­evidence that contradicts widely held tenets. Again, as noted, it has to release the language of concern itself, allowing the creative imagination in its artists to follow whatever paths the conventions of the arts in their time suggest. Literature, left to itself, follows the encyclopedic pattern of concern, and covers the entire range of imaginative possibilities, although of course every age stresses some conventions more than others. It has also to recognize that a power structure or establishment, at any given moment, does not manifest the real form of that society, but only its transient appearance; hence all genuine effort at social change aims, not at creating “another society,” or even a “new society,” but at releasing the real form of the society it is in. (c w , 28:107; c p , 155–6) What that “real form” consists in is not for Frye, as for Derrida, a positive construction but rather a dynamic of friction that can be manifest between disciplines only in their dialectical or archeological arrangement, as we saw above with metaphor. This is why it is so important to Frye that students do not limit themselves to disciplinary or faculty specialties, even as, at the same time, each discipline must conceive of itself as distinct. In short, “openness” and “unconditionality” represent two versions of a new idea of how a university operates in practice. Here is Derrida in “The University Without Condition” making an unapologetic and direct appeal for academic freedom against the forces of state or corporate interest that will, he notes at length, inevitably try to coopt it: “This university demands and ought to be granted in principle, besides what is called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even, going still further, the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning the truth” (italics in original).25 At the very end of “The Definition of a University,” first written in 1970, Frye makes the same case. Politicians and journalists, he notes,

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have in common the belief that “academic freedom” is an outmoded concept, dating from a time before “society” realized how easily it could destroy everything it had of any value. The university has to fight all such attacks, and in fighting them it becomes clear that the intellectual virtues of the university are also moral ones, that experiment and reason and imagination cannot be maintained without wisdom, without charity, without prudence, without courage; without infinite sympathy for genuine idealism and infinite patience with stupidity, ignorance, and malice. Actually academic freedom is the only form of freedom, in the long run, of which humanity is capable, and it cannot be obtained unless the university itself is free. (c w , 7:421) Just as academic freedom is a synecdoche for the broader “public” and “moral” freedom – the freedom of truth and imagination – that Derrida and Frye want the university to embrace, so the university project is unconditioned by the demands of state and corporate interests. The problem is that for both Frye and Derrida the university’s freedom leaves it open to precisely the charismatic forces that propel state, corporate, or popular demagoguery in the first place. The “openness” that both Frye and Derrida adopt is of course an ideologically loaded one. It has strong echoes of the “open society” that Karl Popper and other Cold War–era thinkers advocated as the alternative to totalitarianism; to be sure, Frye’s early writings on “liberal education” and some of the later polemical essays fit into this category as well. The term is also redolent of the kind of “openness” currently being projected by devotees of the corporate university, eschewing faculties and campuses, welcoming all paying customers, and teaching through Massive Open Online Courses. Indeed, the use of the word “open” in this educational context has inspired a good deal of critique, especially of Derrida. In an important article, Richard Terdiman argues that this idea of openness is the “weakest element” in Derrida’s “The University Without Condition.”26 Rather than articulate the conditions under which universities are free, Derrida imagines the university coming into being through a future “event” without “any justification for the unconditionality of university privilege” that such an event would make manifest. Within Derrida’s university without condition is the trace of the “state of exception” that Giorgio

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Agamben sees in all under-rationalized articulations of privilege, including those of freedom, over and above the process of democratic understanding and dissent.27 In contrast to Terdiman, Tilottama Rajan finds in Derrida’s university a new role for the humanities as “the potential, never graspable as a positive intuition, to think outside the determinate conditions necessary for thinking.”28 The university without condition, she urges, is less a name for academic freedom than the iterative openness of the disciplines to their philosophical and political critique. A similar case can be made for the central importance of language and comparative literary studies. In opening the university to the fundamental diversity of global cultures, these disciplines represent, as Srinivas Aravamudan suggests, “the space of argument, contestation, and the provisional reconsolidation of subjects, cultures, languages, and literatures” (emphasis added). More than simply reflecting on the university at the margins of its institutionality, the comparative work of analysis and translation “ensures a shuttling back and forth … a keen attention to the regulatory definition of foreign and symbolic languages within the humanities and the institution of the university.”29 What Aravamudan has in mind here is Derrida’s notion of hospitality, in which the contested arena of cosmopolitan exchange becomes the condition of possibility for society itself. I think we can see many of these ideas in Frye as well. The result of the interdisciplinary and comparative work Aravamudan recommends is that the student achieves the state of “neurotic maladjustment” that in his early essays Frye had imagined a liberal education would generate. But in his later work this state of maladjustment is also the state of the university itself. Neurotic, anxious, fomenting its own forms of dissent, the university would achieve something akin to religion or literature – not dogmatically but iteratively or metaphorically. Of course, as Frye was hardly the first to acknowledge, there will be resistance to this – and not without good reason. “It would be a grave error to associate this kind of resistance only with the immature or the easily frightened,” Frye says in The Critical Path. “We all have such fears, and can look at them in perspective only from a later historical age, when battles previously fought have since been won, or at least stopped.” Still, he goes on, “it is clearly one of the responsibilities of educated people to show by example that

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beliefs may be held and examined at the same time” (c w , 28:74; c p , 109). These examples are themselves iterations, metaphors of a continual process of deconstruction and renewal to which, since the Romantic period, the university has been open, not “free” or opportunistic but rather at hand for criticism and available to concern. The openness of concern makes the university possible, for there is nothing that is not the concern of concern, and similarly there is nothing that can be excluded from free inquiry and the truth of correspondence. Concern and freedom both occupy the whole of the same universe; they interpenetrate, and it is no good trying to set up boundary stones. Some, of course, meet the collision of concern and freedom from the opposite side, with a naive rationalism which expects that before long all myths of concern will be outgrown and only the appeal to reason and evidence and experiment will be taken seriously … I consider such a view entirely impossible. The growth of non-mythical knowledge tends to eliminate the incredible from belief, and helps to shape the myth of concern according to the outlines of what experience finds possible and vision desirable. But the growth of knowledge cannot in itself provide us with the social vision which will suggest what we should do with our knowledge. (c w , 28:74–5; c p , 109–10) The indeterminable quality of higher education, both Frye and Derrida urge, is essential. Appreciating that indeterminacy is the purpose of the hesitation or maladjustment that the student feels when confronting the languages, myths, and metaphors that make his or her deepest concerns. Frye’s and Derrida’s respective ideas of the university demand that the university is always historical, for it is only in its indeterminate historicity that it is truly itself.

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Frye’s Principles of Literary Symbolism From the Classroom to the Critical Classics Thoma s Wi l l a rd

Literary symbolism has lost much of the panache it once had in critical circles, as has the word “symbolism” itself. Indeed, a corpus search of books printed in English during the last century shows that the word and term had trajectories very like that of Northrop Frye’s career – a sharp uptick after 1940, a peak during the years following the 1957 publication of Anatomy of Criticism, and a similar drop-off after 1990.1 The term appeared half a dozen times in the Anatomy, where Frye’s definition stated that “Criticism as a whole … would begin with, and largely consist of, the systematizing of literary symbolism” (c w , 22:65; a c , 71). Frye did not coin the phrase, which gained currency in the late nineteenth century. He rarely used it again after the Anatomy, though he of course used the word “symbolism” often enough – as often in Words with Power (1989) as in Fearful Symmetry (1947). He certainly had no interest in creating a critical school of literary symbolism or anything else; he simply sought to clarify and coordinate the criticism that was already underway. After the publication of Fearful Symmetry, in 1947, Frye created a graduate course titled Principles of Literary Symbolism as he tried to extend William Blake’s visionary method to the whole of literature.2 The new course grew directly out of his graduate course on Edmund Spenser, after a minority of students protested that they wanted more than the occasional reference to The Faerie Queene.3 He regularly taught the year-long course over the next forty years, with breaks to offer courses in Blake or John Milton or myth criticism. He also took the course on the road, offering compressed versions at universities like Washington (1952), Princeton (1954), Berkeley (1969), Oxford (1970), and Harvard (1975).4

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Even more than his course in the symbolism of the Bible, which developed out of a one-credit-hour course in Biblical appreciation and was transformed into a three-credit-hour course in the mythological framework of Western culture,5 it was truly his course. The present essay, dedicated to the legacy of this great teacher, will first consider some possible origins of Frye’s principles and his course in the principles of literary symbolism. It will then review the key principles as he introduced them in the classroom, more than forty years ago. Finally, using a word that Frye hated, it will discuss the “relevance” of those principles for literary pedagogy and critical reading today.

The Origins of Literary Symbolism To understand the educational setting that Frye entered in the autumn term of 1929 and called home for the rest of his life, it helps to know something about the evolving arrangements at the University of Toronto. When Frye arrived in Toronto, there were two kinds of undergraduate degree: a three-year “general” degree and a four-year “specialist” degree. The three-year degree was similar to the four-year degree at American colleges because the province of Ontario had added a college-preparatory grade thirteen to the secondary school curriculum in 1921, while the fouryear degree gave students the equivalent of a master’s degree in their specialties. The four-year program was known as an “honour course” because it was a prescribed course of study, with reading requirements for each year detailed in the university’s annual “calendar.”6 Students in all four colleges within the university’s “federated” system, modelled on Canada’s federation of provinces, took the same undergraduate courses, but from faculty in their own colleges. Of course, students could seek out teachers in colleges other than their own, as Frye sought out the Shakespearean scholar G. Wilson Knight at Trinity College; or they could attend lectures at another college, as the poet James Reaney later did, coming over from University College after friends told him about Frye. The system was demanding of professors, who might be instructing students in three or four different undergraduate courses while teaching a graduate seminar. But it was very attractive to Frye as an undergraduate. The twodegree arrangement persisted into the 1960s, but did not survive the radical reforms of that decade. The honour course was denounced as an

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elitist relic that gave students no freedom of choice. Following the report of a university-wide commission chaired by the political economist C.B. Macpherson, the special honour courses across departments and colleges were abandoned, in what Frye called a misguided attempt to be progressive.7 Because Frye came from New Brunswick, with only a grade eleven education, he was first placed as a probationary student in the general bachelor’s degree program, with English language and literature as his major. After earning high marks in the first year, he applied for admission to the honour course in philosophy and English, in which students read parallel works of philosophy and literature from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, with more recent work “bootlegged” in as teachers saw fit. The sequence was created by the brilliant and versatile G.S. Brett, who had taught philosophy at Trinity College since his arrival in Canada in 1908 and continued there until his death thirty-six years later.8 Frye wrote of Brett as “a philosopher of vast erudition” who was also the founding editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly, in 1931.9 Even before he took Brett’s fourth-year course in modern philosophy, Frye knew the man’s considerable reputation. Brett had written the standard history of psychology (a discipline then covered in the Philosophy Department at Toronto and most other universities), surveying the field from Aristotle to Sigmund Freud in three thick volumes.10 He had also published textbooks of ethics and ancient philosophy and a collection of representative poetry.11 This last book appeared in England four years before Toronto’s first full-time English professor, William J. Alexander, produced the first edition of Representative Poetry, a long-lived Toronto poetry text, on which Frye would serve as a research assistant and then as an editor.12 Brett was known as a philosophical pluralist who taught symbolic logic but had never met a system of which he altogether approved. He was also known to introduce new books into his lectures, and he may well have introduced Frye to Alfred North Whitehead’s lectures, including Science and the Modern World (1925) and Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927).13 The longest of Frye’s surviving undergraduate essays – a Spenglerian study of Romanticism that runs to more than thirty thousand words – was written for Brett’s fourth-year course. Not yet out of his teens, the precocious student sounded remarkably self-assured when he wrote about

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“the romantic view of time made individual instead of synthetic and symbolic” (c w , 3:76). He even seemed to know what he meant. Nevertheless, he was far closer to his mature voice in an essay on religion, music, and drama that he wrote three years later, toward the end of his theology studies at Victoria College’s sister institution, Emmanuel College. After discussing the value of James George Frazer and Freud to literary study, he added: “Psychology and anthropology both tend toward an examination of the unconscious activities of man, and where they converge is generally on this point of the unconscious language of symbolism and particularly on the relation of religion and art” (c w , 3:326). He came close here to the formulation he would later articulate in the final chapter of Fearful Symmetry: “In our day psychology and anthropology have worked great changes in our study of literature …, and many of the symbols studied in the subconscious, the primitive and the hieratic minds are expanding into patterns of great comprehensiveness, the relevance of which to literary symbolism is not open to question” (c w , 14:410; f s , 424). Indeed, he had only to tweak the statement slightly in the Anatomy: “As the archetypal critic is concerned with ritual and dream, it is likely that he would find much of interest in the work done by contemporary anthropology in ritual, and by contemporary psychology in dreams” (c w , 22:101; a c , 108). Meanwhile, with his interest in Blake, Frye was bound to write about symbolism. Ever since the first complete edition of Blake’s poetry, prepared by W.B. Yeats with a long introduction to “The Symbolic System” and “The Necessity of Symbolism,”14 critics had focused on the problem. Although Algernon Charles Swinburne touched on it briefly in the first book-length study of Blake,15 new books by authors like the British Museum’s Richard Garnett showed the strong influence of the Yeats ­edition.16 Blake himself did not use the word “symbolism” or its cognates – he wrote instead of allegory, specifically of “Allegory address’d to the Intellectual powers”17 – but Frye deftly used the comment to get at Blake’s “conception of symbolism” (c w , 14:16; f s , 10). He might have noted that Blake’s older contemporary Richard Payne Knight equated “poetical and allegorical fable” with “symbolical and mystical writing” in a book that Blake could have known.18 There was good precedent, then, for using the word “symbolism” with respect to Blake’s poetry, as Yeats had done. After commenting on the symbolism of different poems, Frye

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proceeded to the concluding chapter, which offered his vision of a criticism that focused on literary symbolism. Frye’s student papers show that he was reading a good deal of contemporary criticism while taking graduate courses at Toronto, and bringing references into papers he wrote for his theology professors. In addition to Frazer and Freud, Frye quoted T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis and mentioned Gilbert Murray, Maud Bodkin, and the poet-philosopher I.A. Richards (c w , 3:136, 190). Murray’s study of ritual elements in Greek drama gave him further appreciation for Frazer’s study of vegetation cults. Bodkin’s pioneering book on Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, which he read “with interest” only months after its publication in 1934, alerted him to a development in criticism that would continue for the next quartercentury, though he worried that it made literature subordinate to psychology, notably Jungian psychology (c w , 27:9; c p , 34). However, it was Richards’s first venture into what he termed “the chaos of critical theories,” first published in 1924, that arguably had the strongest influence, albeit a largely negative one. Its title was Principles of Literary Criticism. Although Frye’s Anatomy makes no direct reference to Richards, its “Polemical Introduction” responds directly to Richards’s principles and the New Criticism that embraced them. Richards asserted: “The two pillars on which a theory of literary criticism must rest are an account of value and an account of communication.”19 An aesthetician and semanticist by training, he devoted whole chapters to “The Critic’s Concern with Value,” “Value as an Ultimate Idea,” and “A Psychological Theory of Value.” Meanwhile, in writing on “Judgment and Divergent Readings,” he treated ambiguity as a fault that lay with the writer, the reader, or both. Almost inevitably, Blake came under discussion in that chapter. With his interest in what made for “badness” or “permanence” in poetry, Richards seemed to be in the nineteenth-century tradition of essays on “literary taste.”20 In that respect, he was closer to the belletristic tradition out of which the first university courses in English had grown than to the kind of literary analysis that Frye considered more objective. Richards showed his modern side with the companion volume Practical Criticism, announced in the preface to the 1928 reissue of Principles. He described the new project as an attempt to span the gulf between “the possession of ideas” about literature and “their application.” In the experiment, able students were asked to read “extremely good and extremely

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bad poems [which] were put unsigned [i.e., unattributed] before them.”21 It turned out that students were too often victims of the old “faults and beauties” approach to literary history, which taught what Richards called “stock-responses.” For such readers, “the place of the free direct play of experience is taken by the deliberate organization of attitudes, a clumsy and crude substitute.”22 Here, while discussing “badness in poetry,” Richards comes close to Frye, for he notes that readers instinctively draw on such conventional associations as the four seasons. He also paraphrases, as Frye would later, “Matthew Arnold’s precept of letting the mind play freely around a subject” (c w , 22:5; a c , 3).23 Richards and Frye disagreed about cultural conventions in works of literature. Richards thought they encouraged stock responses, while Frye thought they promoted more nuanced readings when readers understood the relation of conventional identifications to a culture’s mythology. However, both saw that informed criticism grew out of direct experience with works of literature. Both saw the usefulness of “representative” poems in the tradition of Brett and Alexander. Only Richards seemed to select poems that represented the sorts of literary merit that he called “goodness” or “badness,” whereas Frye saw the possibilities of gathering poems that represented a social or artistic convention – thus Frye’s gatherings of “Elizabethan Eros Poems” and the like in handouts for students.

The Central Principles Frye described his course on Principles of Literary Symbolism as having gone through two distinct phases. While he was working on the Anatomy, the course was more theoretical. Students, like the poet and playwright James Reaney (PhD 1958), remembered hearing Frye talk about details of high and low mimetic narrative and the different phases of comedy and tragedy, but spending little time on any one text. After publication of the Anatomy, the course underwent what Frye called a metamorphosis,24 as the emphasis shifted to the practical criticism mentioned in the Anatomy’s foreword. As Frye began to plan a “Third Book,” his attention shifted to poems that represented the different seasonal myths described in the Anatomy’s essay on archetypal criticism (c w , vol. 9). Students of both generations had the experience of reading the Anatomy after taking the course and coming across sentences they were certain they had heard him

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speak verbatim. Frye took to denying the popular report that students would hear the book from his lips. He insisted the course would cover subjects to be found in no book, and hinted that they just might show up in a new book of his. One such book, which he dropped hints about before leaving to spend Easter term at Merton College, in Oxford, would have made connections between Shakespeare’s Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Regained, and Blake’s Milton. For the metamorphosed course, Frye wrote a description that appeared thereafter in the annual catalogue of the College of Graduate Studies: “Principles of Literary Symbolism. This is a course in practical criticism, based on a number of texts, mainly from English literature, and featuring mainly the Renaissance, Romantic, and Modern periods. The course attempts to establish certain typical patterns or clusters of imagery in poetry and to provide a kind of introduction to the grammar of literary symbolism.” The course began with an overview of Frye’s principles and moved on to treat the principles as revealed in representative texts. Some principles will be more familiar than others, but they interlocked in ways I shall try to suggest, and their overall value for criticism and pedagogy is no doubt greater than that of any single one. As I heard them presented, the main principles came in pairs. The first pair included the principles of myth and metaphor, which lie behind all literary narrative and imagery. As Frye liked to note, myth and metaphor exist in a dialectical relationship to each other, myths being metaphors in time while metaphors are myths in space. He noted that the word “myth” had several meanings: it could refer to a self-contained narrative (Greek mythos and Latin fabula), to a story about gods or heroes that contains information a culture needs to know about itself, or to the aspect of all narrative that connects one story with another. The myths of a culture stick together to form a mythology, just as the images in those myths form the imagery of a mythological universe. Frye’s course would concern the implications of the word “mythology,” including the imaginative framework that a mythology provides for a culture. The tendency of myths and mythic images to form mythologies and imaginative worlds leads to the important principle of coherence: “the assumption of total coherence” that he called the starting point of any inductive science (c w , 22:17; a c , 16). This was the principle embraced by Frazer in anthropology and by the other great comparatists in religion

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and philology – the principle summed up in Ferdinand de Saussure’s dictum tout se tient.25 Everything touches on everything else, and not only in the natural languages that philologists study but in poetry itself, where myths and images create a universal language. What makes the myths and images cohere is the related principle of archetype. Certain recurring myths and images have a quality that Frye terms archetypal: when we encounter a literary archetype, in one form or another, we naturally think about other times we have seen it, other works where it has appeared.26 The final pair of principles helped to explain the relation of different texts when they are seen as parts of the larger construct that Frye called “literature as a whole” (c w , 22:88, 92, 93; a c , 91, 96, 100) and, more eloquently, “a single visionary conception which the mind of man is trying to express” (c w , 14:410; f s , 424). According to the principles of context and convention, or genre, a poem has its context within literature. The context is identified not only by its language and date, but by the literary conventions the poet uses. Conventions are sometimes formalized as distinct literary types or genres such as satire and romance, and sometimes associated with a specific narrative style such as Gothic or picaresque. Taken together, these six principles – of myth and metaphor, coherence and archetype, context and convention or genre – show that Frye was more than a theorizing myth critic. The principles tend to balance one another. While the principle of coherence may encourage one to speculate about a specific myth in literature, or even the myth of literature itself, the principle of context drives one back to the individual literary work and its treatment of the myth. Frye learned the coherence principle from Blake, who wrote: “Every Poem must necessarily be a perfect Unity.”27 He quoted the statement at the start of Fearful Symmetry (c w , 14:17; f s , 10) and took it as a kind of critical axiom, which he simply extended to “literature as a whole.” Blake was referring to “the Classics” and to unity “as much in the Part as in the Whole.” He was not of course saying that there are no un-unified texts in the Classical canon, but rather that one should begin reading a literary classic with the assumption that it coheres. He was voicing the equivalent of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “golden rule” of criticism: “until you understand a writer’s ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding”

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(italics in original).28 Frye quoted Blake’s remark and interpreted it to say that “the meaning and the form of a poem are the same thing” (c w , 14:17; f s , 10). This, he said, was “an axiom of all sound criticism,” and he applied it broadly, not only to a given poem by Blake or even to all of Blake’s poems, but to every imaginative work that Blake read, from the Bible to the Prose Edda. Such was the “complete revolution in one’s own reading of all poetry” that Frye learned from Blake (c w , 14:18; f s , 11). This revolution led to all of Frye’s further criticism, from the Anatomy to his studies of the Bible and literature. This way of reading left some students unimpressed. The comparatist Herbert Lindenberger, who took an early version of Frye’s graduate symbolism course at the University of Washington in 1952, recalled in his presidential address to the Modern Language Association that he felt frustrated: “‘All literature, you see, says the same thing,’ Frye would ­conclude victoriously after a series of such rambles [from one work to another without regard to chronology or local setting], and I would carp back asking precisely what message all literature was supposed to be giving us.”29 By the time he addressed the convention, Lindenberger of course realized that Frye’s teaching style was unique and valuable – as valuable as that of older professors who had more influence on his own teaching style. Frye’s efforts to create a comprehensive theory of symbols met with similar resistance. René Wellek, sometimes called the father of comparative literature in North America, remarked that Frye carried “the symbolist interpretation” to “heights of ingenuity” and to a “grandiose conception of literature without periods and styles.” Hoping to reserve the word “symbolism” for the period between Romanticism and Modernism, Wellek grumbled that it was not very useful when found “in all literatures, of all ages.”30 Similarly, an encyclopedia article on “the symbol” noted that Frye’s symbols covered everything and nothing – everything because he ultimately identified five varieties in the Anatomy, yet nothing because they fell outside ordinary reality, being located in the hypothetical world of literature.31 Meanwhile, the younger comparatist Paul de Man seems to have disagreed with Frye’s treatment of French Symbolism in an early version of the theory. In a posthumously published essay, de Man suggested that there were not three kinds of symbolism, as Frye claimed (c w , 21:136–45; “Three Meanings”), but only two.

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He quietly corrected Frye’s educated guess about Stéphane Mallarmé’s symbolism, suggesting that Mallarmé’s symbols did not show the clarity of his Catholic faith but rather a continual metamorphosis. Though still a doctoral student, he was already sounding his theme that “consciousness progresses by means of a succession of failures.”32 Frye did not usually reply to his critics or speak about their differences. However, he gave students a good model for assessing the differences between critics. In a chalkboard diagram that appeared early in the course, he illustrated the centrifugal and centripetal elements in reading.33 In the diagram, there were two circles, representing the written word, on the right, and the external world, on the left. There were lines connecting the first circle to the second, showing how non-literary writing referred mainly to external phenomena (the centrifugal). Meanwhile, lines connecting different areas of the first circle showed how words refer to other words, especially in works of literature (the centripetal). Frye insisted that both activities occur simultaneously whenever we read, but that the centripetal element dominates when we are reading works of literature. Even then, there is a foreword movement to grasp the literal meaning – what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “overthought” – and a simultaneous movement to grasp the structure of the imagery – Hopkins’s “underthought” (c w , 26:63; w p , 57 and note). With reference to this diagram, we can see that Lindenberger and de Man would have liked Frye to spend less time with connections within the first circle and more time on one or two points, that is to say, on specific texts. Meanwhile, Wellek and the encyclopedist writing on “the symbol” would have liked him to make fewer connections within the first circle and more between the two circles, that is, fewer connections among texts and symbols from various periods and more to the realities of the author’s time. On one hand, the archetypal approach is said to miss the uniqueness of the individual work of literature because it concentrates on what the poem has in common with other works and with the rest of literature. On the other hand, it could be said to miss much that the work owes, not just to literary tradition but to works written at the same time or in the same place, and also misses what the work owes to the society in and for which it was written. The two objections often converge, most notably, perhaps, in responses to Frye’s essays on Canadian literature.34 The common complaint is reductionism, and this argument has gained

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force with the rise of post-structuralism and cultural studies. Frye’s late notebooks show that he tried to understand the objections, but also suggest that the difference between his supposed structuralism and successors like deconstruction was really temperamental. For him, the critic’s glass was always half full. He could never accept the un-Blakean proposition that every poem is necessarily an imperfect disunity.

Reading With and After Frye Frye introduced the graduate course on symbolism as a study of literary criticism rather than of literature itself. Just as other graduate students studied pharmacy rather than pills and biology rather than life, graduate English students would be studying data about literature. The purpose of such study was to enable them to have more satisfactory experiences of reading literature, for reading was a private matter and always involved the reader’s state of mind at the time as well as the text itself. If one read Hamlet with a hangover, or, as I once did, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” on a small boat in choppy water, one would have a queasy experience of it. Really satisfying experiences of reading occur all too seldom, Frye said, but when they do it usually happens because the reader brings the necessary background. This background includes the basic information that Frye called criticism. Literary criticism was scientific to the extent that it went beyond the individual experience of a poem or novel to the processes that all readers go through. What the literary critic did, Frye thus assumed, was exactly what he did as a teacher: serve as a model reader and help students see how they could organize the data gained from their reading. Thus he could proceed line by line through a poem like “Fern Hill” or “The Garden,” asking students to note echoes and allusions. With what seemed to him the more obvious references, to the Bible perhaps or Shakespeare, he would fire off a question and wait until someone finally raised a hand; he referred to this potentially terrifying way of engaging students as “evangelical teaching.”35 After reading through the poem and gathering connections to other poems, he would suggest larger structures such as a “Logos vision.” In the process, he would engage students first in the close reading of poetry, with attention to the poem’s rhythms and structures, and then in the archetypal analysis of the poem’s place in literature, notably

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literature concerned with the ascent to an Edenic or Apocalyptic vision. Students would experience the exhilaration, or perhaps the frustration, of reading with Frye. (Only with longer poems like Eliot’s Waste Land and Four Quartets, often taught at the beginning of the course, would he announce readings in advance; more commonly, he would distribute duplicated typescripts and read aloud from them.) Students would be prepared for more satisfactory experiences reading the poems on their own, after Frye had led them through the territory. Their reading might be more satisfying if they applied the principles taught in the course and sought coherence of form and thought. Frye did not think of himself as a reader-response critic, and no doubt for good reason. Literary criticism as he knew it had evolved from the impressionistic writing of nineteenth-century authors, who tended to say more than they realized about their own prejudices. Although critics wrote about the reader’s experience – Richards, for example, and William Empson and especially Bodkin – personal opinions about one’s reading of a book were largely left for reviewers in the press.36 With the advent of reader-response criticism in the 1960s, Frye feared that its emphasis on socially and psychologically constructed meaning heralded a return to the “determinisms” that he thought had no place in criticism (c w , 22:8; a c , 6), perhaps even a return to the sort of commentary he had once likened to “a picnic to which the author brings the words and the reader the meaning” (c w , 14:414; f s , 247). This was more than he could bear, for the words in a text do have meaning. He thought that a poem could be meaningful in at least as many ways as it had readers, but still have a basic meaning on which educated readers could agree. Here Frye parted ways with Stanley Fish, for one. “[T]here is certainly going to be a text in my class,” Frye wrote in the notebook he was keeping at the time of his death: “Texts, starting with the Bible, expand in meaning because they mean first of all what they say, & because they mean that they can mean infinitely more. We’ve never believed that poets really do mean (start with meaning) what they say” (c w , 5:383). The “more” is essential. The meaning of a text is not fixed but expansive. The really satisfactory experience is the one in which the reader adds to the text’s literal meaning. Whereas Frye wanted to overcome the divide between teacher and student by creating a common vision, Fish proposed that the authority in

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the class would reside neither with the text, as Frye would have it, nor with the author or the individual writer, but with the “interpretive community.”37 Frye might have added that there would always be an author in his class, at least when he was teaching classes in English literature rather than the Bible. Not only did he accept the author’s auctoritas; he implicitly accepted Henry James’s dictum, as developed, for example, by Wayne Booth, that authors create their readers, and certainly tell them how to go about reading their books.38 Even Milton has a clear role for the reader in Paradise Lost.39 In a public lecture, Frye remarked that “discerning critics” have long recognized “the reader, simply as human being, as the real focus of Milton’s poem and the final aim of all his ‘justifying’ of the ways of God” (c w , 4:75; Creation, 63). Of course, Frye does not see the difficulties that Fish does here, and his approach to the poem is closer to that of the formalists than of the reader-response critics. However, he sees the text as being open to interpretation and thus to “more meaning.” For him, the author was the authority in the class, be it on Milton or modern poetry, and the effective meeting led up to a vision in which the teacher and student were united.40 Though it might seem an abuse of accepted terminology to call Frye a reader-response critic avant la lettre, there can be no doubt that the reader is the hero of the “central myth” that he said he kept rewriting (c w , 27:6; c p , 9). Look at the final paragraph in Fearful Symmetry and the close of its penultimate sentence: “we have wound up all of his golden string and we are standing in front of his gate” (c w , 14:414; f s , 428). The reference is to a quatrain in Blake’s Jerusalem: I give you the end of a golden string,     Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate     Built in Jerusalem’s wall.41 Blake has given the string to “you,” his reader, and we, as Frye’s reader, have wound it up with him and come to the gate of Heaven. Frye has already promised that the string will lead us to “a lost art of reading poetry” (c w , 14:19; f s , 11). If we have followed him through Isaiah’s “valley of vision,” as re-envisioned by Blake, we have come to the end of heroic quest and are ready for a new one beyond the gate that remains to be opened.

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Look also at the last paragraph in Anatomy of Criticism. Frye refers there to Joyce, another great mythological thinker and, in his youth, a reader of Blake’s prophetic books. Frye returns to Finnegans Wake, which he has called “the chief ironic epic of our time.” Part of the irony, he has told us, is that the epic has no likely hero to complete the quest – at least until “it dawns on us that it is the reader who achieves the quest” (c w , 22:303; a c , 323–4). Moreover, he tells us, this reader is the critic – specifically the critic who holds the “keys” that Joyce, on the final page, insists have been “Given!”42 The critic’s job is positively mythological, as Frye sees it: “reforging the broken links between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept” (c w , 22:330; a c , 354). We may well ask at what point the reader becomes a critic, and the answer may be surprising. It is not the point at which the reader earns a doctorate in literature or passes an examination. It is rather the point at which he or she passes on to a higher order of reading. The critic is still a reader, as the teacher remains a student of the material being taught. But the critic’s reading experience has educated her or him to the point of being able to see more in the text and say more about it. Frye’s approach to reading coincides curiously with that of Virginia Woolf, who distinguished two steps in the reading of a book: to receive impressions as one turns the pages, but then to compare the book with others of its kind once one has finished and the book reappears, floating “to the top of the mind as a whole.”43 For her, as for Frye, the real work of reading began when the work could be conceived as a simultaneous whole. He thought his literary symbolism course was most valuable for students just setting out on their graduate studies – students taking specialized seminars while preparing to be examined on long lists of texts. The course, like the Anatomy and other writings that came out of it,44 aimed to produce readers who could handle the language of myth and metaphor with some facility. For that reason, I think the answer to young Lindenberger’s question about “what message all literature was supposed to be giving” is that it concerns the expanded vision of human experience to be discovered, indeed experienced, in works of literature. I suggest further that Frye’s closing remark to professors reading the Anatomy – concerning “the social and practical result of their labors” – is that the main result is not learned books and articles so much as readers with well-educated imaginations.

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Coda: A Wicked Pack Frye usually had a handout for students at the first class meeting. In early years it was a list of readings, ranked from “major” to “background” and “supplementary” texts. In my day, not long after the publication of his bibliography of “Myth and Myth Criticism,” he distributed photostatic copies of that still-useful list (“Literature and Myth”). As he moved down the centre aisle, distributing handouts, he joked that someday he would compile a Tarot pack of cards with the whole of literary symbolism, so that he would no longer have to teach the course. I have sometimes wondered what it would have looked like. The William Blake Tarot, created after Frye’s death, seems inadequate, as it reduces the suits to abstractions like art and science.45 I have fancied that the Northrop Frye Tarot would be more likely to feature the four seasons, perhaps using branches, buds, flowers, and fruit to represent Winter, Spring, Summer, and Autumn. I also fancy that the Fool would have a book in the bundle he sometimes carries on his back. For with Frye, as with Blake,46 the reader becomes what he or she beholds, Magician or High Priestess, and emerges as the higher self that sees and embodies the world.

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Romanticism and the Beyond of Language Northrop Frye and the Wordsworthian Imitation of the Point of Epiphany Ma rk I t t en so h n

William Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” is one of the most telling expressions of the poetics of epiphany in British Romanticism. When the poem’s despondent speaker encounters a lone leech-gatherer on a high moor, it triggers in him an intense moment of dreamlike vision: The Old Man still stood talking by my side; But now his voice to me was like a stream Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide: And the whole Body of the man did seem Like one whom I had met with in a dream.1 At the end of the poem, this tension is released into a deeper insight of which the leech-gatherer serves as a symbol: “‘God,’ said I, ‘be my help and stay secure; / I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor’” (146–7). In its insistence on the inverted magni­tude between cause and effect, Wordsworth’s poem intimates its involvement with the representational practice of the literary epiphany: the description of an encounter with an everyday occurrence that triggers an exceptional, and often explicitly disproportionate, psychological revelation. The appropriation of the term from Classical poiesis and Christian doctrine to literary texts is, as is commonly known, indebted to James Joyce, in whose oeuvre the word typically refers to moments of instantaneous illumination and to  trivial incidents triggering “… sudden spiritual manifestation[s].”2 Though Wordsworth never specifically employs the term “epiphany” to refer to mo­ments of secular revelation, his frequent poetic explorations

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and descriptions of occurrences of instantaneous insight more than warrant the asynchronous application of the term. Indeed, numerous commentators on both Romanticism and the literary epiphany have suggested that the de­scription of visionary revelation in Wordsworth’s poetry can be read as the spiritual and ar­tistic forebear of the secular flashes of understanding that Joyce would come to refer to as epi­phanic.3 This similarity has urged most modern commentators to read Romantic and espe­cially Wordsworthian representations of epiphanies as predecessors of such mo­ments in modern literature, and to project a straightforward line of development from Romanticism to Modernism, without spending too much time on exploring the signifi­cance of epiphanies in Wordsworth, at least not beyond some cursory references to the timeworn definition of Romanticism as the age of genius, subjective inspiration, and secular vision.4 The stylistic specificity of epiphanies in Wordsworth’s poetics, however, calls for a finer understanding of the particularities involved in their specific representational tech­nique, especially because, in their self-reflexive negation of linguistic expression, they propagate a key transformation in the history of the literary representation of epiphanic moments. In two of Wordsworth’s most famous works, “Resolution and Indepen­ dence” and The Prelude, epiphanies constitute a textual form that is at once fully lodged within the lan­guage medium and at the same time articulates an anxiety concerning the possibilities of a linguistic expression. Wordsworthian epiphanies constitute a specific type of writing that draws attention to language’s own limits by placing the closure of revelation explic­itly beyond the available practices of linguistic representation. By means of this technique, Wordsworth’s epiphanic texts perform themselves not only as spatially and temporally displaced (nature vs. metropolitan culture, posterity vs. ephemerality) but also as lin­ guistically deferred. The result is a dense and intricate language-game of lights and shadows that not only draws attention to the linguistic pitfalls involved in Wordsworth’s visionary poetics but also professes that one of the most telling stepping stones in the history of epiphanic representation revolved around notions of language critique. The fact that this moment occurs in the poetics of one of the most genuinely romantic Romantics is no coincidence. Over the last decades, critics of the Romantic period have compellingly shown not only how

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much the theme of linguistic inadequacy mattered to Romantic poets but also how vital this fact has become in reference to evolving scholarly perceptions of Romantic texts.5 In his 1976 essay “Romanticism and the Self-Annihilation of Language,” Robert F. Gleckner refers to this concern as the central paradox in Romantic poetry: language as a means of selfexpression as well as the ultimate discomfort and imposition to this very goal.6 What contemporary critics have seldom taken into account, though, is the relevance of the epiphany as a particularly sa­lient Romantic and especially Wordsworthian tool for a performative writing-down of such a two-sided linguistic self-reflection. The absence of this critical paradigm in early twenty-first-century Romantic studies is surprising, not in the least because the connec­tion between epiphany and linguistic inadequacy constituted one of the major cornerstones in the critical vision of one of most influential literary critics of the twentieth century: Northrop Frye. It was Frye who, approximately fifty years ago, first acknowledged the epiphany’s strong relevance to Romantic studies, especially with regard to Wordsworth’s oeuvre, and who outlined the salient productivity of reading epiphanic revelations in Romantic discourse with regard to facets of linguistic inadequacy. Consequently, as is so often the case, we need to go back in order to go forward. It is in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and his A Study of English Romanticism that we find often-­ overlooked, yet exceptionally guiding insights into where the Romantic epiphany and the “problem” of language intersect. The knowledge gained from such a momentary change of direction, however, may seem at first obscured by Frye’s typical scholarly style, thematically broad and rhetorically sweeping: Frye’s work on the epiphany assumes that its reader is largely familiar with the epiphany in literary history, and in Wordsworthian poetics, and it is only to a student of both that his quick and often implicit insights make sense. Considering Frye’s tendency to write for himself, rather than for an “uninformed” reader, it is helpful to initially outline the underlying parameters accord­ing to which Frye’s reading of secular revelation in Romantic poetry is conceptualized.  Frye builds his insights on a suggested distinction between the epiphany in traditional religious discourse and its essentially dissimilar counterpart in modern literary poetics. About thirty years after Frye, Ashton Nichols

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developed this point into a more coherent theory and published the result under the title The Poetics of Epiphany.7 In his study, Nichols accords Romantic poetry a central role in the development from religious to modern epiphany by arguing that the literary epiphany emerges in its new and thus ultimately Joycean form in and through Romanticism. For Nichols, the epiphany in Ro­mantic poetry breaks with its religious predecessor in that it is increasingly employed in a way that postpones its resolution and turns the epiphany back on itself. The modern epiphany, Nichols argues, places the textual focus on the specific experience of the epi­phanic insight, instead of on the visionary conclusion derived from it: “The literary epiph­any leaves open the ultimate meaning of the experience.”8 This difference can easily be highlighted by juxtaposing two core texts of each epiphanic strand. When Saint Augustine in his Confessions is struck upon perusing the Bible by “a light as it were of confidence,” which banishes “all the darkness of doubting,” he knows that it is God who has made him see and understand: “For so thou convertedst me unto thy­self, as that I sought now no more after a wife, nor any other hope in this world.”9 The eponymous protagonist of Joyce’s fragment Stephen Hero, on the other hand, in noticing one morning the clock on the Ballast Office in Dublin, undergoes a more puz­zling experience. When Stephen describes his visionary moment, he is forced to resort to vagueness: “[W]e recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance … The object achieves its epiphany.”10 It is telling that the epiphanic “whatness,” also referred to by Stephen as “quidditas,” takes its name from an interrogative pronoun. The question “what is this whatness?” seems to constitute the very basis of the Joycean, and thus the modern, moment of epiphany. When Sharon Kim notes that Joyce critics often broadly disagree as to the content of individual epiphanies in the author’s works, she highlights one of the core characteristics of the modern epiphany proper: the continual juxtaposition of and consequent undecidability between “sublimity” and “fraud.”11 Nichols suggests that this structural realignment makes the modern epiphany at once more haunting and more rewarding: “The visible reveals something invisible, but the status of the invisible component is left unstated. Its mystery becomes part of the value of the experience” (Poetics, 21; italics in original). For Nichols, the transfor­mation is a liberating movement, displacing the theophany of traditional epiphanic

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dis­course through a reevaluation of and renewed emphasis on a powerful subjectivism in the shaping of visionary experience. Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” can be read as an exemplary instance of the characteristics of the epiphany’s modern literary form. When, at the end of the poem, the tension built up through the speaker’s interaction with the leech-gatherer is eventually released, the text turns cryptic. From the leech-gatherer’s words, the speaker seems to re­ceive neither vision nor insight, neither resolution nor independence, but simply a straightforward answer to his repeated questioning. And yet, as the rhetorical force of the last stanza demonstrates, the poem’s structure is anything but anticlimactic. How, then, is this paradox to be resolved? Nichols suggests that Wordsworth’s text needs to be read as an instance of literary epiphany: “The revelation of the leech-gatherer ­cannot be specifically articulated; it can only be felt … Beyond the memorable image of the old man there remains only the feeling of the importance of the experience, the recog­nition that, for months, years, even decades, the mind will return to ‘think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!’” (79). It can be suggested, following Nichols, that in Wordsworth’s poem the certainty of the speaker’s vision is, indeed, as explicitly revealed as is its seeming emptiness. Here, metaphysical knowledge rubs against physical experience in a movement that lets the absence of the former question the presence of the latter without managing to dispel it completely. The speaker’s eventual readiness to laugh himself to scorn may mark a concession of the illusion behind his hyperbolic conflation of the leech-­gatherer with a hermit-prophet or rural sage, while at the same time the release of affect cannot help but suggest an attainment of liberating insight through the confrontation with “so firm a mind” (“Resolution and Independence,”145). Wordsworth’s poem manages to hold the haunting effect of disequilibrium between occurrence and consequence, and between form and content of revelation, cunningly in suspension. As such, “Resolution and Independence” resonates strongly with Nichols’s reading of the lit­erary epiphany: “[t]he modern literary epiphany … offers a new form of meaning in which the moment of inspiration is absolute and determinate, while the sig­nificance provided by the epiphany is relative and indeterminate” (Poetics, 4). The speaker’s de­scription of visionary insight positions the experience proper – the poetic subject’s en­counter with the occurrence of the moment – over its specific interpretation. The

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place and figure of God, though invoked, is curiously voided, and the gap is left in place through the individual’s emphasis on description over explanation. God might offer a “help and stay secure” (“Resolution and Independence,” 146), but, as the speaker knows, the attained epiphanic vision does not have a readable and transferable “­content” of its own. It achieves its expression only through the renewed subjective encounter with the moment of experience in the speaker’s remembrance: “I’ll think of the leech-gatherer” (“Resolution and Independence,” 147; emphasis added). Though Nichols’s take on the development from religious epiphany in conversion narratives to the literary epiphany in Romantic poetry aids in conceiving the ways in which Wordsworth’s poetics reconceptualize traditional discourses of visionary insight, Nichols’s study underestimates the factor of unreadability on which this perception is based. His suggestion that the literary epiphany “does not try to point beyond lan­guage as much as it reveals the ways in which language can manifest the essence of experience” (ibid.) seems oddly self-limiting. After all, in stressing that the literary epiphany “emphasizes the perception of significance rather than the interpreted meaning of the significant moment” (Poetics, 33), Nichols’s redefinition of the moment of visionary insight implies that the modern epiphany favours linguistic description over linguistic explanation. If the literary epiphany values the experience over its meaning, then the text depicting this type of epiphany can never quite equal it. In other words, the literary epiphany blocks the grammatical or logical organization of language at the cost of an enforced psychological focus, which is, however, characterized by its absence from the field of linguistic signifi­cation. The result might best be described as a kind of language misfire. The modern epiphany falls flat before its own conclusion, yet it does so only after having already found some form of initial expression. The result is a highly self-conscious expression of linguistic inadequacy. Whereas Saint Augustine is able to unmistakably proclaim “how every­thing is done” to both his companion Alypius and to his own mother,12 Joyce’s Stephen Hero struggles in his attempt to explain his experience to Cranly by pointing at the clock. The modern epiphany is thus directly involved in questions of linguistic inade­quacy, and it is this differentiation between a “sayable” epiphany and an “unsayable” one that becomes one of the main features in Wordsworth’s treatment of epiphanic mo­ments.

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To clarify this point, it is again helpful to juxtapose the traditional with the modern epiphany. In Christian doctrine, the Feast of the Epiphany refers to the twelfth night of Christmas that marks the revelation of Christ to the Magi.13 Similar to Augustine’s conversion narrative, the encounter of the Magi with Jesus as described in the Gospel of Matthew explicitly stresses the possibility of the moment’s linguistic transfer­ence. After the three wise men have found and acknowledged Jesus as the “King of Jews,” instantly realizing both the presence and the significance of the event (Authorized [King James] Version, Matt. 2:2–11), they set out to return to Herod, King of Jerusalem, to inform him about the exact location of the birth, as they had promised to do. Here, God inter­venes and orders them to refrain from doing so – in other words, not to put into words what they had witnessed (Matt. 2:12). God’s intervention at this point makes it clear that the Bible de­picts the epiphany of Christ’s birth as neither unreadable nor inexpressible, but as lin­guistically transmittable, for better or for worse.14 The linguistic representation of an epi­phanic insight that the New ­Testament envisions becomes the most radically questioned element in the secularization of the epiphanic moment in Wordsworth. In “Resolution and Independence,” the speaker’s continual questioning of the leech-gatherer and the latter’s thrice-repeated answer already suggests that linguistic exchange between the two figures in the poem is somehow out of joint. More strikingly, though, the speaker’s epiphanic vision, twice triggered by the leech-gatherer’s reply, is depicted not only as unreadable but also as silent, wordless. While the speaker’s first illumination dissolves linguistic order into disorder – “nor word from word could I divide” (108) – the second epiphanic moment does away with language altogether: “In my mind’s eye I seemed to see him pace / About the weary moors continually, / Wandering about alone and silently” (129– 31, emphasis added). Here, the speaker’s insight is contingent upon linguistic disso­lution. We can easily connect this point to the above-noted emptiness of the speaker’s vision. The poem’s protagonist seems to suggest implicitly that he is unable to express the epiphany’s exact content because the vision itself goes beyond linguistic expres­sion. His epiphanic insight, though triggered by the leech-gatherer’s linguistic stability – “Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach / Of ordinary men” (102–3) – can­not be transferred to the Wordsworthian speaker, who is

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haunted by the transience of words, metonymically suggested by his lament for Chatterton and Burns, and whose self-reflection on the visionary moment (the poem proper) turns unreadability into the very marker for epiphanic vision. Linguistic ineffability as a sign of visionary insight is the constitutive feature of the Wordsworthian epiphany.15 This is true not only with respect to “Resolution and Inde­ pendence,” but also in relation to Wordsworth’s more autobiographical epic The Prelude. As already noted, Wordsworth himself never employs the term “epiphany.” Instead, when he refers to moments of secular revelation in The Prelude, he uses the term “spots of time.”16 During his expansion of the initial Two-Part Prelude into its longer sequels, the thirteen-book version of 1805 as well as the fourteen-book revision of 1850, Wordsworth shifted the most prominent “spots of time” passage among various books.17 Yet despite wide-ranging revisions, the illustrative example added to the “spots transition” remains consistent: an anecdote concerning seven-year-old Wordsworth’s ride with James, his getting lost, and his ultimate encounter with a murderer’s place of execution, a “naked Pool that lay beneath the hills / The Beacon on its summit” (12.249–50), as well as “[a] Girl who bore a Pitcher on her head / And seemed with dif­fi cult steps to force her way / Against the blowing wind” (12. 251–3). For the young speaker, this experience always triggers an epiphanic vision: It was in truth An ordinary sight; but I should need Colours and words that are unknown to man To paint the visionary dreariness Which, while I looked all round for my lost Guide, Invested Moorland waste and naked Pool, The Beacon crowning the lone eminence, The Female and her garments vexed and tossed By the strong wind. (12.253–61) Interestingly enough, the succession of elements leading to the epiphany in The Prelude’s ‘spots of time’ sequence is strikingly reminiscent of that in “Resolution and Inde­pendence”: the recollection of the death of poets in the former is an encounter with a murderer’s place of death in the

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latter, a moorland and a pond turn into a moor­land and a pool, and a solitary leech-gatherer turns into a solitary girl.18 Ultimately, the most striking parallel between the texts is offered by the epiphany proper’s relation to linguistic expression. The Prelude’s exemplary “spot of time” is depicted as resisting linguistic representation. The speaker would require language “… unknown to man” to achieve expression of the epiphanic “spot.” Once again, Wordsworth connects epiphanic insight to ineffability. The visionary moment of insight through a confrontation of the everyday is in both The Prelude and “Resolution and Independence” an unsayable thing. A sequence of ordinary sights may trigger a moment of epiphanic illumination, but the moment’s ultimate meaning lies beyond linguistic representation. As such, Wordsworth’s poetic epiphanies open up a fissure in the traditional conceptualiza­tion of epiphanic illumination that forces the reader to make a crucial distinction between the epiphany as an experience and the epiphany as a textual record of that experience. Herbert F. Tucker notes that “[e]piphany … names something lived through, yet also something written down.”19 In Wordsworth’s case, the equilibrium between experi­ence and description that traditional Christian discourse seems to uphold is frag­mented through the written epiphany’s immersion in literary poetics: its linguistic representation is shown to fall flat before the “epiphany as experience” can come into full sig­nification through linguistic means. The resulting self-reflexive comment on linguistic in­adequacy is one that exploits the traditional epiphany’s visionary connotations in order to rob the linguistic medium of revelatory hue at the very moment of its being suggested. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye describes such Wordsworthian epiphanies as “imitations in experience” of the “point of epiphany.” Frye’s formulation is as sugges­tive as it is vague. As the next section will explain, however, Frye’s reading of epipha­nies, both in his own experience as a critic and reader and in his treatment of Romantic literature, contributes vitally to an understanding of the connections between Wordsworthian poetics, epiphanic revelation, and linguistic impossibility.  In the Anatomy of Criticism, Frye constructs a “doubling” of epiphanies. They occur for him both as a theme on the level of myths (referred to as

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“the point of epiphany”) and in critical practice, and thus on the level of the reader/critic. In both cases, the epiphany is characterized by its close association with speechlessness and linguistic in­effability. In the second essay in the Anatomy of Criticism, the “Theory of Symbols,” Frye ends his discussion with the anagogic phase of criticism: “the heart of his critical vision,” as one Frye commentator has put it.20 In anagogical criticism, the symbol be­comes a monad: “all symbols being united in a single infinite and external verbal symbol which is, as dianoia, the Logos, and, as mythos, total creative act” (c w , 22:112; a c , 121). Frye goes on to stress that it is this conception that Joyce expresses, in terms of sub­ject matter, as “epiphany” (c w , 22:112–13; a c , 121). In other words, monad and epiphany are for Frye points of intersection. They both denote a moment that creates totality: “Anagogi­cally, then, poetry unites total ritual, or unlimited social action, with total dream, or unlim­ited individual thought. Its universe is infinite and boundless hypothesis” (c w , 22:111–12; a c , 120). In his essay entitled “Criticism, Visible and Invisible,” Frye links monad and epiphany even more closely. As A.C. Hamilton observes, Frye employs Joyce’s term claritas, the epi­phanic end point, so to speak, of a process of understanding, to denote the end point of the critical process: “Poet and critic alike struggle to unify and to relate; the critic, in particu­lar, struggles to demonstrate the unity of the work of literature he is studying and to relate it to its context in literature. There remains the pe­culiar claritas or intensity, which cannot be demonstrated in either liter­ature or criticism, though all literature and criticism point toward it” (c w , 27:161; “Criticism,” 12). Claritas, as Hamilton observes, relates here to the anagogic phase “in which one’s response to the work becomes an imaginative experience, a matter of seeing rather than understanding.”21 The semantics of visuality and spatiality employed by Frye and Hamilton are telling of the way in which the epiphany/monad is conceptualized in Frye’s work. The monad reveals a unity that is being pointed toward, that is seen but not under­stood. In other words, the anagogical phase is haunted by a final absence, a revelation that “does not describe or represent a separate content of revelation” but that reveals only “on its own terms, and in its own forms” (c w , 22:116; a c , 125). Frye goes on to emphasize that any concrete meaning of an epiphanic sense of poetic unity is necessarily an arbitrary process that can never account for the full signifi­cance of the actual experience. For Frye, any

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attempt at expressing a precise content of a monad in the anagogical phase can only be based on a system of meaning that is hypothesized onto the moment from without, not derived from the experience itself. The example used in this case is that of religion. Frye argues that poets choose religion to imbue their visionary experiences with sense, be­cause it gives their imagination more scope than atheism would – more infinity than a dogmatic denial of imaginative infinity. Yet religion, Frye stresses, is a human and thus a limiting model of explanation. Criticism, in order to stay true to itself, cannot be based on religious models, but must accept the existence of something transcendent, without attempting to define it. In terms of literature, Frye translates this process into the following: “If Christianity wishes to identify the infinite Word and Man of the literary universe with the Word of God, the person of Christ, the historical Jesus, the Bible or church dogma, these identifications may be ac­cepted by any poet or critic … but they can never be accepted by poetry as a whole, or by criticism as a whole” (c w , 22:117; a c , 126). It follows that “the order of words,” which for Frye figures as the total construct of the lit­erary universe, is, after the disposal of religion as an arbitrary centre or system of refer­ence, approached by literary criticism in the anagogical phase only ever as a move to­ward, never as an arrival at. The universal man and the universal word that the monad ultimately addresses, and that the epiphany on the level of the critic is sup­posed to reveal, are assumed or supposed, but never expressed. As Frye concludes: “The conception of a total Word is the postulate that there is such a thing as an order of words, and that the criticism which studies it makes or could make, complete sense” (c w , 22:117; a c , 126). Frye’s use of the word “could” is telling. He implicitly links this argument back to claritas: to the moment of intensity that is being pointed at, but that can never be fully demonstrated. For Frye, monad and claritas conceptualize the epiphany on the level of the reader or literary scholar. He never explicitly links monad to epiphanies in Romanticism or Romantic poetry. Yet, as Imre Salusinszky has persuasively argued, Frye as a critic might himself belong most truly within the history of Romanticism. For Salusinszky, Frye is an extender of  Romanticism, a Neo-Romantic, who continues and develops the Romantic project.22 As such, we may attempt to read his take on the epiphany as more or less related to a romantic perception of the very same phenomenon. Indeed, as Salusinszky stresses, it is dianoia, yet

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another close neighbor of the epiphany, that connects Frye most closely to Wordsworth: “the flash of instantaneous comprehension unlimited by  time – which is how Frye talks about dianoia – is precisely the Wordsworthian epiphanic moment; the moment in which time, the body, and the ego are all laid asleep, and we see into the life of things.”23 What connects them too, though Salusinszky does not specifically mention this, is the realization that this moment of unlim­ited insight is linguistically ineffable. As such, we might suggest that in his reading of epiphanies, Frye as a critic assumes the guise of the Wordsworthian speaker in “Resolution and Independence” or The Prelude. In all three cases, the epiphany is a “leading up to,” an anagogy, that does not express a specific visionary insight but only states that such a thing exists. The difficulty critics encounter when trying to characterize Frye’s personal epiphanies may have much to do with this. When Frye talked about his personal vision­ary experiences, the description of the moment – its place, time, and circumstances – seemed always more readily available to him than the particular meaning of the experi­ence. Generally speaking, Frye’s personal epiphanies most often concerned solutions to central obstacles in his critical theorizing, and they apparently brought about sudden crystallizations in his thinking. He often described them as moments of completeness: “of things fitting together.”24 Robert D. Denham suggests that Frye had ex­perienced about half a dozen of such moments during his lifetime: one in Edmonton in 1932 upon reading Spengler, one (or maybe two) when writing a paper on Blake in Toronto in 1933, one in Seattle during the summer of 1951, and one again in Toronto on St. Clair Avenue in either 1950 or 1953.25 When describing his Edmonton and Blake epipha­ nies, Frye stressed their revelatory character – “a vision of coherence”26 – but noted that he could not actually say what they were revelations of. Upon being asked by an interviewer concerning his first Blake epiphany, “What actually happened that night?” Frye was forced to acknowledge, “I don’t know that I can say what it was” (emphasis added).27 These epiphanies, though described by Frye in a letter to Pelham Edgar as “glimpses of something bigger and more exciting than [he] had ever before realized in the world of the mind,”28 remained to him hauntingly inexpressible. Denham points out that Frye’s Seattle and St. Clair epiphanies differ somewhat from the others in that they had a specific content of revela­ tion.29 Describing them retrospectively, Frye noted: “In the summer of

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1951, in Seattle, I had an illumination about the passing from the oracular into the witty: a few years later, on St. Clair Ave. I had another about the passing from poetry through drama into prose. They were essentially the same illumination, perhaps: the movement from the esoteric to kerygma” (c w , 6:621). In Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary, Denham offers a revealing reading of these two later epiphanies and their specific content.30 Ultimately, however, he too acknowl­edges that “[p]recisely what happened … and why it happened will no doubt remain mysteries.”31 Even Denham’s thought-provoking and sage reading of Frye’s mytho­logical methodology cannot completely dispel the feeling that Frye’s epiphanies, even the ones that seem to have revolved around a specific content, were somewhat hollow. Then again, as Joseph Adamson argues, the Seattle and St. Clair epiphanies might have re­vealed to Frye nothing else than the very existence of the epiphany in his mandala-like structure of the literary cosmos: “[H]is Seattle epiphany concerning the transition at the southernmost point of the great doodle is, as it were, an epiphany of epiphany, a revela­tion of revelation …”32 In other words, Frye’s content-epiphanies might mark his recognition of the very presence of the epiphanic moment in his theory of literature, and thus again make clear that epiphanies cannot reveal, at least not linguistically, or rather that what they reveal is merely their own presence. The content of “Seattle” and “St. Clair” seems to be that “Edmonton” and “Toronto” exist. Adamson’s reading of Frye’s “content-epiphanies” marks Frye as a profound performer in what this article has so far read as the secularization of the epiphany from Romanticism onwards: a move from content to experience. In his reading of Frye’s personal epiphanies, Denham also implicitly realizes that Frye’s revelations are of this character. He calls the Seattle and the St. Clair epiphanies mysterious, but states that “there is no difficulty in accept­ing Frye’s judgment that the intuition was a breakthrough.”33 Here, Frye emerges indeed as a Neo-Romantic. Like the speakers in “Resolution and In­dependence” and The Prelude, he is able to profess unmistakably in words that the experience of an epiphany has taken place, at the same time as he displaces the revela­tion’s specific content by highlighting the limits of linguistic representation. Of course Frye was not only a persuasive Neo-Romantic but also a  ­profound  scholar of Romanticism: an astute and insightful observer of  Romantic literature in gen­eral, and of Wordsworthian poetics in

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particular. In his role as a critic of Romanticism, Frye positions the epiphany not only as a visionary moment on the level of the inter­preter but also as a central motif in Romantic poetics. In his description of the epiphany as a textual feature in Romantic literature, Frye stresses how important inexpressibility of meaning becomes for the Romantic epiphanic moment. On the level of literary myth, the epiphany occurs for Frye as the “point of the epiphany” and as the “imitation in expe­rience” of that very point. The point of epiphany is for Frye the “symbolic presentation of the point at which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment” (c w , 22:189; ac , 203). It is a moment of connection between the human and the divine, usually depicted in literature by spaces of vertical expansion. Frye’s ex­amples include passages from the Bible, and from Edmund Spenser and John Milton, as well as from fairy and folk tales. Here, the revelation achieved by the epiphany is direct and theophanic. However, examples from post-Romantic texts are treated by Frye with an added qualification. In works such as Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse or W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” Frye stresses that epiphanies revolve around an ironic reversal, a turn toward more credibil­ ity (c w , 22:192; ac , 206). This historical change in the representation of epiphanies is picked up later in the Anatomy when Frye introduces the concept of the “imitation” of the point of epiphany, a term referring exactly to this altered sense of epiphanies in writing. The most prominent example Frye uses in this context is from the poetry of Wordsworth (c w , 22:280; ac , 299). The imitation, as Frye finds it in Wordsworth, is an expression of serenity, which nevertheless remains in the state of experience, and thus in the cyclical world, without being in alignment with an apocalyptic counterpart, though it imitates its connection. Frye concludes that the imitation of the point of epiphany “attempts to communicate to the reader a private and secret possession” (c w , 22:280; ac , 300; emphasis added). This leads him to introduce the riddle, since the private and secret possession of the epiphany’s imitation is never de­scribed but always circumscribed: “a circle of words drawn around it” (c w , 22:280; ac , 300). While Frye does not specifically link the change from the point of the epiphany to the im­itation of the point of epiphany to Romantic poiesis, one can certainly suggest that his mention of Wordsworth as a sole illustrative example is already a strong indicator of this link. In addition to

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this association, the reversal of the imitation’s upward movement, as well as its connection to secrecy (as a riddle), call up Frye’s more general notion of Romanticism, as outlined in his concept of “the Romantic Myth.” In his Study of Romanticism, Frye defines the Romantic Myth as the moment when man’s quest for at­tainment of his or her ultimate identity reversed the traditionally metaphorical upwards movement, and was increasingly configured as an inward and downward motion, to­ward a hidden basis (c w , 17:114). The motion is characterized by obscurity and darkness, inverting the reference to the ascension of Christ into demonic visions.34 In this sense, the imitation of the point of epiphany, in which the apocalyptic is displaced in favour of a se­cret, human possession, is not only language play but figures for Frye as an existential mystery that characterizes on a radical level all Romantic literary discourse. Frye’s reading of the epiphany on the level of the critic – in scholarly practice – and on the level of a motif in literary texts – the point and its imitation – reveals to us crucial links between epiphanic moments in Wordsworth, as well as their close connection to facets of linguistic inadequacy. Frye reminds us that the Romantic epiphany is inherently connected to mystery, to riddle. It is a moment of tension, whose meaning cannot be revealed, only hypothesized onto it from outside. It expresses an end to which language can lead, but which it ultimately never reaches. In this regard, Frye’s suggestion that Wordsworth’s descrip­tions of visionary illuminations are to be read as imitations rather than intimations is bril­liantly insightful. In shifting the content of epiphanic revelation into a linguistic “beyond,” Wordsworth’s poetry locates a visionary space of the post- or counter-linguistic through linguistic means, and in doing so, stresses the second-rate character of semiotic repre­sentation. Frye’s point concerning the secular (imitative) epiphany’s linguistic block, its form as an “attempt at communication,” its role as a “circle of words” outlining the shape of the centre yet unable to pierce it, greatly illuminates Wordsworth’s epiphanic descriptions. One could go one step further and connect Frye’s reading of Wordsworth to the ongoing redefinition of the Romantic Age as an age of print prolifera­tion, characterized by a veritable overflow of books and writing.35 Since Wordsworth’s linguistic representations of epiphanies are essentially expressions of inexpressibility, his poetic productions

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proclaim an awareness of language’s limited useful­ness in describing secular illuminations, and as such, they might be taken to highlight an explicit qualitative difference with respect to an increasingly bookish definition of culture. By writing about visionary moments in a way which highlights that the very medium of representation is unable to reveal the exact signification of the original illumination, Wordsworth’s epiphanic poetics offer a counterpoint to the increasing proliferation of linguistic resources in the Romantic age. In “Resolution and Independence” and The Prelude, Wordsworth imitates epiphanic vision, and through this process, carefully undermines the trust of a “read­ing age”36 in the limitless possibilities of linguistic competence. By explicitly writing unreadability, Wordsworth’s epiphanic poetics forestall what Piper has called the book’s “cosmological identity” in the Romantic period: the sense that written texts were “everywhere and could contain everything.”37 In Wordsworth, the poetic representation of epiphanies suggests that indeed not everything is sayable through written texts, and that the thrust of linguistic production often goes hand in hand with its spectral and linguistically barred “other”: the essentially unwritten space where true visionary in­sight is attained. Frye’s thorough and often very personal insight and conceptualization of epiphanic visions calls for an expansion of contemporary research from beyond the grave. It asks us not only to broaden our conception of the literary epiphany, but also to pay close atten­tion to its strong connection with Romanticism: Frye urges us to tackle the fact that Romantic poetry not only expresses visionary insights, but that it also uses them to radically question the adequacy of language through the emphasis on experience over meaning in a changing literary environment. The renewed salience and startling accuracy with which Frye’s insight illuminates our contemporary understanding of both Wordsworthian poetics and Romanticism more generally is evidence that the green binding and the golden letters of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye are still far from losing their intellectual lustre. All in all, the inadequacy of language to convey visionary insight was for Frye the cornerstone of his own critical vision: “The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows” (c w , 22:7; a c , 5). For Frye, linguistic ineffability ultimately constituted a core property of the meaning of literature itself. And this is why literary

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studies, and specifically the study of Romanticism, must continue to listen to Frye. He tells us that all the arts are dumb. But he also tells us, through his critical perception of the epiphany, that realizing what the arts cannot say may be as important as finding out what they do say.

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Correspondences Frye, De Man, Romanticism A da m Ca rt e r

Northrop Frye and Paul de Man have sometimes figured as nodal points for competing understandings of the nature, function, and value of ­literature, criticism, and theory, with Frye representing the values of a humanist tradition and de Man that tradition’s wholesale deconstruction. Thoughtful commentators such as Patricia Parker and Ian Balfour, however, perhaps because they are former students of both Frye and de Man, have demonstrated how productive it can be to think through more carefully the interrelations, as well as the more often commented upon differences, between these two theorists.1 Toward this end we need to consider an aspect of Northrop Frye’s understanding of Romanticism in relation to Paul de Man’s. I approach this goal through the seemingly unusual step of considering, in addition to Frye and de Man’s reflections on more canonical British and European Romanticism, some of Frye’s comments on the Romantic lyric in the context of this poetic form’s manifestations in the Canadian “Confederation poets,” that is, certain poets of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. I do so out of a conviction that Frye’s Canadian criticism is integral to understanding his literary theory as a whole. The comparison between Frye and de Man on the Romantic lyric elucidates, I believe, a seldom commented upon similarity between them: namely, the ways in which both theorists trouble and question the attainment of a synthesis of subject and object, mind and nature, in the Romantic lyric – an attainment that critics like M.H. Abrams conceived of as a central goal of the poetry of this period and, in the best of it at least, its crowning achievement. Thus, somewhat paradoxically but perhaps appropriately, a correspondence between Frye and de Man lies in a

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shared sense of dissonance. However, each theorist’s understanding of the underlying reason for such a lack of correspondence, as well as the value that each places upon it, is distinctly different, and the differences provide insight into the ends of literature as each understands it.  Frye’s stature as the most influential literary theorist to arise after the New Criticism made him a target for deconstructive critics in the later 1970s and ’80s, as did assertions such as the following well known one from Anatomy of Criticism: Criticism as knowledge, the criticism which is compelled to keep on talking about the subject, recognizes the fact that there is a center of the order of words. Unless there is such a center, there is nothing to prevent the analogies supplied by convention and genre from being an endless series of free associations, perhaps suggestive, perhaps even tantalizing, but never creating a real structure. The study of archetypes is the study of literary symbols as parts of a whole. If there are such things as archetypes at all, then, we have to take yet another step, and conceive the possibility of a self-contained literary universe. Either archetypal criticism is a will-o’-the-wisp, an endless labyrinth without an outlet, or we have to assume that literature is a total form, and not simply the name given to the aggregate of existing literary works. (c w , 22:109; a c , 117–18) For deconstructionists the passage perfectly captures the sorts of aporias that Derrida in his earlier writings focused upon in the “logocentric” thought characterizing “Western metaphysics.” It simultaneously articulates both the desire for a centre, an ordered structure, and a dark anxiety that language may provide only “an endless labyrinth without an outlet.” The centred “order of words” versus the “endless labyrinth” suggests a stark opposition, with Frye’s archetypal criticism and deconstruction on either side. Yet neither Frye’s nor de Man’s work encourages such polemical opposition. Because he was himself displaced from the centre of literary criticism by deconstruction, which for a while occupied that centre, Frye grapples passingly in his later books and unpublished writings with the implications of deconstruction for his thought, although typically he

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remarks upon Derrida rather than de Man. This is itself a bit curious, for while Derrida’s writings are virtually synonymous with deconstruction, de Man’s writings are no less so and are more directly related to the literary theory and criticism that centrally occupied Frye throughout his career. Moreover, de Man’s theory and criticism touches centrally on Romanticism, which holds an additionally privileged place in Frye’s thought. Eventually, however, as I consider toward the end of this paper, Frye comes to engage de Man directly in a review of The Rhetoric of Romanticism, de Man’s last book, published posthumously in 1984. In what must have come as a surprise to informed readers of the Times Literary Supplement in 1986 as the “culture wars” continued to rage (a surprise it doubtless pleased Frye to deliver), the review demonstrates considerable insight into, as well as sympathy with, some of the major themes in de Man’s writings both early and late. Such sympathy provides evidence for the commonalities between them that I will develop. Contrastingly, nowhere to my knowledge does de Man directly engage Frye’s thought in a sustained manner – a couple of paragraphs in “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism” are devoted to Frye’s “misunderstanding of intentional language,” but that is about it.2 This too is somewhat surprising given that a good number of de Man’s essays were devoted to, quoting the subtitle of his 1971 collection Blindness and Insight, “the rhetoric of contemporary criticism,” and given the stature Frye enjoyed in the years preceding that work’s publication. A passing reference to Frye in De Man’s review of Harold Bloom’s 1973 study Anxiety of Influence is, however, pertinent. De Man praises Bloom for being “in his use of the catchall term ‘imagination’ … philosophically shrewder and, in some respects, better informed than all the other historians and theoreticians of English romanticism, including Frye, Abrams, [Earl] Wasserman and others” (Blindness, 269). Unlike these others, Bloom has always implicitly understood that, all appearances to the contrary, the romantic imagination is not to be understood in a dialectical interplay with the presumably antithetical category of “nature.” This inside-outside, subject-object dichotomy has driven a fatal wedge between the accepted interpretation of the romantic poets and their actual statement, a statement that is certainly difficult and ambiguous, but not in the manner in which it is usually rendered. (Ibid.)

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As I will establish, de Man is not entirely mistaken in grouping Frye among those critics who placed the subject-object dialectic at the centre of Romanticism. Nonetheless, to throw Frye indiscriminately into this group is to pass over his considerable reservations about achieving a synthesis within such a dialectic, particularly as it appears in the Romantic lyric privileged by Abrams, Wasserman, and others. De Man thus simultaneously misses the central commonality between himself and Frye. Furthermore, de Man’s comments are blind to the extent to which Bloom’s understanding of a visionary imagination that does not seek its mirroring correspondence in nature is most strongly influenced by Frye, particularly the latter’s reading of Blake, whom Frye perceived as distinct from the Romantics in this key respect. In “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” an essay originally published in 1963, Abrams sought to characterize the form and content of what he regarded as the greatest poetic achievements of the Romantic period: lyrics such as William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” to name but a few of the most prevalent and powerful. In terms of literary history, a key question such an investigation confronted was how such poetry could be differentiated from the topographical poetry of the eighteenth century, which so clearly influenced it but from which it seemed powerfully distinct. The answer Abrams influentially proposes is that these poems, while topographical to an extent, are characterized to a greater and more self-conscious degree by a dialectic between the perceiving subject and the object the speaker is contemplating, frequently a natural landscape. Reacting against the dualism of mind and nature inherited from the enlightenment, Abrams suggests that, “the central enterprise common to many post-Kantian German philosophers and poets, as well as to Coleridge and Wordsworth, was to join together the “subject” and “object” that modern intellection had put asunder, and thus to revivify a dead nature, restore its concreteness, significance, and human values and re-domiciliate man in a world which had become alien to him.”3 He finds much of his evidence for such a goal in Coleridge, as when, in “On Poesy or Art,” Coleridge writes that the “mystery of genius in the Fine Arts is so to place the images [of nature] … as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflexions to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal

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external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.”4 One effect of such a viewpoint is that the simultaneously descriptive and meditative lyric wherein such a dialectic can be most centrally represented comes to be understood as the highest achievement of Romantic literature. Abrams was by no means alone in developing the viewpoint that the synthesis, or interpenetration, of subject and object, mind and nature, was the essential goal of the Romantics and marked their highest achievements. Prominent mid-twentieth-century literary scholars such as Wasserman, William Wimsatt, and René Wellek all contributed to what would become for a time the dominant thesis concerning the most centrally important insight of the Romantics.5 Paul de Man, however, most notably in his 1969 essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” influentially interrogates such received wisdom. De Man certainly recognizes that a desire for a unity of mind and nature is sometimes present within Romanticism, but objects that “Abrams makes it seem at times as if the romantic theory of imagination did away with analogy altogether and that Coleridge in particular replaced it by a genuine and working monism” (Blindness, 195). De Man regards such a desire as a delusory and inauthentic yearning of human consciousness for the stability of natural things. In their moments of most profound insight, the Romantics, rather, renounce the desire for correspondence with the natural world in recognizing human being’s separateness, or essential difference from, nature. For de Man, at this stage of his thought at least, influenced strongly by Martin Heidegger, the recognition of such a difference lies in the awareness of temporality that is so fundamental to human consciousness. Such awareness de Man represents as difficult, even painful, as it is a consciousness of impermanence and death. We may long for the stability we perceive in nature but must renounce such longing, as it is based upon a false identification. Paradoxically, the identification is itself tantamount to a death wish. As Wordsworth intuits in “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” a poem central to de Man’s analysis, to achieve genuinely the permanence of nature and to be at one with it, to be literally “a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years,” is to be dead, much like the image of the loved one’s buried corpse that closes the poem: “Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, / With rocks, and stones, and trees.”6 Influenced by Heidegger’s “destruction” of Western philosophy’s ­subject-object model of epistemology in Division One of Being and

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Time,7 de Man suggests that the subject-object dialectic occludes the most profound insight the Romantics achieve. Much as Heidegger argues that subject-object epistemology is the wrong way to approach philosophy, De Man argues that it is the wrong way to approach Romanticism, or is at least an approach subject to more blindness than insight: “For, if the dialectic between subject and object does not designate the main romantic experience, but only one passing moment in a dialectic, and a negative moment at that, since it represents a temptation that has to be overcome, then the entire historical and philosophical pattern changes a great deal” (Blindness, 204–5). The Romantics, rather, should be understood in their moments of most profound insight as authentically recognizing the temporality of human being and renouncing the desire to coincide with nature. In his figural, or tropological, analysis, which begins to become more central with this landmark essay, such a recognition amounts to replacing the predominance of symbol and metaphor in Romanticism, tropes that assert an unbroken continuity between sign and referent, with allegory and irony. The latter tropes de Man argues are constitutively temporal insofar as they foreground the non-coincidence of signifier and signified as well as sign and being. Assertions of an unbroken unity of mind, language, and nature, which he critically analyzed in the dominant Anglo-American reception of Romanticism, formed part of what he eventually characterized and critiqued as an “aesthetic ideology,” which in its assertion of a seamless totality he viewed as dangerously complicit with authoritarian politics. The self-consciousness of humanity’s difference from nature, which corrects the delusion of one being intimately unified with the other, could not itself, de Man insisted, be successfully recuperated for some wider project of human freedom. De Man does not wish, in a Cartesian fashion that also has lengthy roots in Christian thought,8 to argue for the superiority of mind over nature, but rather for its fundamental difference. Any project that made the human’s consciousness of difference from the natural world the grounds of a mastery and control of that world would be another humanism of the sort that de Man (taking up Heidegger’s argument) critiques in Sartre, and it would be itself another version of an aesthetic ideology. Thus consciousness, de Man insists, can achieve no such positive freedom from its world. It is fated to fall into the error of identifying itself with natural things, only to have such an error

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corrected, and then to fall into it again. Such a vertiginous, non-synthetic dialectic de Man theorizes as the essential movement of irony, which is itself (in one of the larger surprises the essay offers) viewed to be essential to Romanticism. The essay is regarded as a landmark in Romantic studies, and in contemporary criticism more generally, because it was for a time so influential in shifting the received understanding of the “historical and philosophical pattern” (Blindness, 205) underlying Romantic poetry and the thought of the period more generally. Additionally, if the subject-object dialectic that Abrams and others placed at the centre of Romanticism privileged the lyric, in de Man’s displacement of such a problematic the lyric no longer maintains such a position. His own counterarguments for the central insights of the Romantics draw from, among other texts, a prose passage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, an essay of Charles Baudelaire’s, as well as fragments and an essay by Friedrich Schlegel. One of Wordsworth’s “Lucy poems” is, as noted above, key to the analysis, but it hardly fits the model of the interpenetrating descriptive and meditative form Abrams and others privileged.  Frye’s A Study of English Romanticism, published in 1968, provides his most comprehensive effort to theorize the essential features and insights of the period. The study is a thought-provoking reflection on the variation the period provides to the mythological framework that Western culture continuingly inherits and adapts. In the study, Frye argues that Romanticism marks a major shift in this mythological framework, the most profound since the Christian era and one that is still very much with us. The most central aspect of such a shift, he suggests, is that from Blake onwards the Romantics cease to see the deity as a creator separate from man. Two beliefs developing from such an understanding are ­particularly central: first, a belief in the numinous power of nature as symbolized in Eros, Dionysus, and Mother Nature; and second, a revolutionary attitude toward society, religion, and personal life. Although the first of these beliefs has implications that feed into the second, it is with the first that I am centrally concerned in this essay as I attempt to situate Frye’s understanding of Romanticism within the polarity established by Abrams and de Man. Romantic mythology replaces the unfallen state of Christian mythology with, Frye writes,

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a sense of an original identity between the individual man and nature which has been lost. It may have been something lost in childhood, as in Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality, or it may be something hazier like a racial or collective memory, but it haunts the mind with the same sense of dispossession that the original Eden myth did. The context of what corresponds to the “fall,” or the myth of alienation, changes accordingly. Man has “fallen,” not so much into sin as into the original sin of self-consciousness, into his present subject-object relation to nature, where, because his consciousness is what separates him from nature, the primary conscious feeling is one of separation. The alienated man cut off from nature by his consciousness is the Romantic equivalent of post-Edenic Adam. He is forcefully presented in Coleridge’s figure of the Ancient Mariner, compelled recurrently to tell a story whose moral is reintegration with nature. The Romantic redemption myth then becomes a recovery of the original identity. (c w , 17:103) Unlike de Man, then, Frye clearly accepts the view, articulated by Abrams and others, that the subject-object division, and the attempt to overcome it, are central to Romanticism. He approaches closer to de Man’s views, however, in the critical standpoint he takes toward such a desire, a standpoint that relies on an at least partially parallel understanding that the human is in important respects unnatural and that the identification with the natural world is always a potentially dangerous delusion. Frye articulates such a viewpoint early on in Fearful Symmetry, and it is scattered throughout in some suggestive comments on Canada’s Confederation poets in his lesser-known work on Canadian literature and culture. The retrospective term “Confederation poets” is applied to a group of writers born in the 1860s, the decade of Canada’s confederation (1867), when three former British colonies joined to become four provinces within the Dominion of Canada. These poets began to come to maturity as active writers in the early 1880s and were active throughout the 1890s (and in a couple of cases for much longer). They are generally regarded as the first self-consciously Canadian group of poets. Figures centrally associated with this group are Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, Archibald Lampman, William Wilfred Campbell, and E. Pauline Johnson.9 Isabella Valancy Crawford, although more than a

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decade older than the others, is another Canadian poet of the period who garnered attention from later critics, notably from Frye, who found her long narrative poem Malcom’s Katie (1884) to be a more powerful work than much of the rest of what was produced in Canada in these decades. I consider Frye’s reflections on this generation of poets below, but first I  need to establish how he perceives in William Blake a rejection of the correspondence of mind and nature that parallels his comments on these later Canadian writers. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye situates Blake’s thought in opposition to the primitivism that represents an important intellectual and cultural trend developing through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – broadly, the idea that civilization has corrupted the natural human being, a being who is naturally good and who finds his or her truest home in a more primitive, or natural, environment. The critique of primitivism in Frye’s reading of Blake also extends into a critique of Romanticism, which Frye sees as taking up aspects of primitivism and placing it at the centre of its thought. This understanding of Romanticism he centrally associates with Wordsworth, who, in Frye’s view, asserts both the immanence of divinity within nature and a mirroring correspondence between mind and nature. Frye outwardly rejects on Blake’s behalf the idea that nature contains the immanence of the divine communicated to us through obscure signs. In Blake there is not “any idea of finding in nature external hints or suggestion of God” (f s c w , 14:45; f s , 39). By way of establishing the Wordsworthian concept of the correspondence of mind and nature, Frye quotes Wordsworth’s preface to The Excursion: “How exquisitely the  individual Mind / … to the external World / Is fitted: – and how exquisitely, too – … The external World is fitted to the Mind.” By way of establishing Blake’s critique of Wordsworth’s faith in the correspondence of mind and nature, Frye quotes Blake’s marginalia to the passage from Wordsworth: “You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & ­fitted” (c w , 14:46; f s , 39). Such notions of correspondence fail to recognize, Frye holds, that “all such intuitions are implanted by the mind on nature” (c w , 14:45; f s , 39) and in this respect, as with primitivism, misrecognize humanity’s separation from nature. In emphasizing this point Frye’s language is peculiarly coloured: “Nature is miserably cruel, wasteful, purposeless, chaotic, and half dead. It has no intelligence, no kindness, no love, and no innocence”

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(c w , 14:46; f s , 39). To my ears Frye’s language here echoes Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, which Frye, after all, takes as his title for Chapter Three of Fearful Symmetry. “‘According to nature’ you want to live? O you noble Stoics what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power – how could you live according to this indifference?”10 Frye’s language is also strongly reminiscent of the terms he used throughout his Canadian criticism to characterize a supposedly more specifically Canadian nature. One could quote numerous passages from the Canadian criticism to establish the parallel view of nature. To take but one example, in his 1952 “Letters in Canada” poetry review article for the University of Toronto Quarterly, Frye suggests that E.J. Pratt’s poetry “has been a kind of summing up of the first phase of Canadian poetic imagination. In that phase Canada appeared in a flat Mercator projection with a nightmarish Greenland, as a country of isolation and terror, and of the overwhelming of human values by an indifferent and wasteful nature” (c w , 12:103). Frye, with justification, understands the Canadian poets of the Confederation era, most notably Roberts, Carman, Lampman, and Scott, to be the chief inheritors of Romantic literary forms and a Romantic view of a correspondence between the human and natural worlds. “All four” of these writers, Frye asserts in a passage I consider more fully below, “are Romantic and subjective poets, at best when confronting nature” (c w , 12:280).11 Some of the best known poems of the period follow the model set out by Abrams in noting the conventions of the “greater Romantic lyric” wherein a poet occupies a determinate position, a landscape or other natural scene is depicted, and an interpenetrating dialectic between the observing subject and the outward scene ensues. Roberts’s “Tantramar Revisited” is perhaps the best known of Canadian poems of the period and most closely evokes Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” but other frequently anthologized poems, such as Scott’s “The Height of Land,” Lampman’s “Heat,” and Carman’s “Low Tide on the Grand Pré,” also work within the conventions of the form. As in Blake’s critique of Wordsworth, Frye regards the sought-for unity of mind and nature as destined to fail, although interestingly in the Canadian context Frye frequently emphasizes a different kind of

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problem. In his Canadian criticism he perceives the lack of correspondence not so much in theoretical terms as a misrecognition of the very nature of the relation between mind and nature. He emphasizes, rather, that such a dissonance arises from the extraordinarily harsh Canadian environment that makes such a harmony much more difficult to achieve, at least in terms of the imaginative forms inherited from Europe. Frye writes in his 1956 essay “Preface to an Uncollected Anthology”: “The Wordsworth who saw nature as exquisitely fitted to the human mind would be lost in Canada, where what the poets see is a violent collision of two forces [mind and nature], both monstrous” (c w , 12:256). In his 1965 “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada, his most sustained reflection on the Canadian literary tradition, he writes that “I have long been impressed in Canadian poetry by a tone of deep terror in regard to nature” (c w , 12:350). Frye had indeed been suggesting, since his 1943 review article “Canada and Its Poetry,” that the most characteristic and authentic imaginative response to the Canadian environment contained in literature was the expression of such terror. Along with Frye’s related concept of the “garrison mentality,” his terror thesis became one of the two most influential and controversial viewpoints to emerge from his writings on Canada. Such a terror is not, as he elaborated in the earlier work, a coward’s terror, of course; but a controlled vision of the causes of cowardice. The immediate source of this is obviously the frightening loneliness of a huge and thinly settled country. When all the intelligence, morality, reverence, and simian cunning of man confronts a sphinx-like riddle of the indefinite like the Canadian winter, the man seems as helpless as a trapped mink and as lonely as a loon. His thrifty little heaps of civilized values look pitiful beside nature’s ­apparently meaningless power to waste and destroy on a superhuman scale, and such a nature suggests an equally ruthless and subconscious God, or else no God. (c w , 12:34) Thus Frye perceives the articulations of the Canadian imagination in its literary tradition, in the late-nineteenth-century nature poetry influenced by Romanticism as well as in its earlier and later literature, to be expressions of a stark division between the human and the natural worlds. As

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I  consider below, Frye perceived such a division as a shortcoming of this literature, a failure to imaginatively envision a meaningful identity between humanity and nature. It was a deficiency, however, that was understandable, even inevitable for a time, given the challenges such a  unifying vision encountered due to the severity of the climate, the immensity of the geography, and the sheer difference the environment presented to colonial mindsets inherited from Europe. Furthermore, despite regarding such terrified expressions of alienation from the environment as imaginative shortcomings, Frye singles them out as the most powerful and authentic moments in the Canadian cultural tradition to date, far superior, for example, to persistent efforts to ignore the harsh realities of the environment by making it conform to “sentimental or socially stereotyped forms [of the pastoral]” (c w , 12:363) that falsely assert an identity between the human and natural worlds. For him, these efforts are the literary parallel of the late-nineteenth-, earlytwentieth-century Canadian painter Horatio Walker’s project of slotting the Canadian landscape into what Frye characterized in a 1941 article as the “predigested picturesque” (c w , 12:16). Such assertions of harmony lack authenticity and are associated with a rhetorical, ideological work that placates its audience by lulling them away from a realization that their environment remains imaginatively undigested or unvisualized. By contrast, Frye in this same article asserts the power of Tom Thomson’s paintings of the Canadian landscape, where what he finds “essential … is the imaginative instability, the emotional unrest and dissatisfaction one feels about a country which has not been lived in: the tension between the mind and a surrounding not integrated with it” (c w , 12:15). Thus, to an important degree, Frye, like de Man, validates those moments in a literary tradition wherein the disunity between the human consciousness and the natural environment is recognized and authentically expressed. Frye, for example, suggestively remarks that the poets of the Confederation period “like nearly all good Canadian poets have much less simple poetic natures than they appear to have at first glance” (c w , 12:57). Speaking of this generation more generally, Frye remarks that “Roberts, Wilfred Campbell, Wilson MacDonald, and Bliss Carman are all Romantics whose ordinary tone is nostalgic, but who seem most deeply convincing when they are darkest in tone, most preoccupied with pain, loss, loneliness, or waste” (c w , 12:264). The source of these more

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tragic themes of isolation and fragmentation, as opposed to the comic identity of self and world, is the natural environment in Canada from which the poets and their society, whether or not they are conscious of it,  feel alienated, even terrified. Anticipating criticism of later decades attuned to the “double voice” in literary texts, Frye suggests that poets such as Lampman and Crawford presented in their poetry an outward, publicly acceptable “framework” (c w , 12:57) within which subtexts exist that subvert such a frame. “The ‘framework’ of Lampman, for instance, is that of a placid Romantic nature poet beating the track of Wordsworth and Keats. But there are also in Lampman many very different characteristics. He has, for instance, a spiritual loneliness, a repugnance to organized social life, which goes far beyond mere discontent with his provincial environment” (c w , 12:57). In Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, the outward framework is an imperialist rhetoric of progress achieved in part through the transformation of the land into agricultural capital, but this rhetoric is undercut by the irony of a tree falling on the hero’s head just after he has indignantly denied a speech on “the eventual downfall of all cycles of civilization” (c w , 12:260). “If we are to read Canadian poetry sympathetically,” Frye concludes, “we must often keep an eye out for such disturbers of poetic convention” (ibid.). He likewise suggests that it is “common for a Canadian poet to solve his problem of form by some kind of erudite parody, using that term, as many critics now do, to mean adaptation in general rather than simply a lampoon” (c w , 12:266).12 The disjunction between form and content that Frye notes and appreciates in the Canadian literary tradition, especially when it appears to be self-consciously recognized and played with by the poet, is a related aspect of the more general disunity of mind and nature that he explores throughout this tradition. Furthermore, the assertion of a fundamental separation between humanity and nature is consistent with Frye’s theoretical views, from Fearful Symmetry to The Double Vision, his last, posthumously published book. Even though (as I show next) all culture must strive to envision an imaginative identity with the world around it,  “underneath all the complexity of human life,” Frye argues in The Educated Imagination, “that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us” (c w , 21:455; e i , 56). Thus Frye, although he shares neither de Man’s earlier problematic of temporality, nor his later one of the “materiality of language” and its

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“disfigurations,” also applies critical pressure to the synthesis of subject and object in the Romantic lyric. An important commonality between the two theorists in this respect is their mutual rejection of the assumption that the mind finds its correspondence in nature. Furthermore, both theorists remain productively aware of the possible ideological entrapments of rhetorical assertions of a synthesis of subject and object. In his “Conclusion” to the first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1965), for example, Frye treats at some length the persistence in the Canadian literary tradition of a debased pastoral myth that asserts an ideal unity of humanity and nature. Frye associates the myth with forms of political persuasion, specifically the imperialist movement (c w , 12:364). For Frye, however, the synthesis of subject and object, of humanity and nature, remains fundamental to his theory of the purpose of literature and culture in general. That the “imagination destroys the antithesis between subject and object” (c w , 16:361) runs as a leitmotif from his early work onwards, receiving fairly detailed elaborations in a mid-period work like The Educated Imagination, up to The Double Vision, where he enthusiastically aligns his theory of culture with Hegel’s dialectic: that tremendous philosophical masterpiece, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, turns on two principles that are relevant here. First is Hegel’s introductory principle, “The true substance is subject.” That is, the gap between a conscious perceiving subject and a largely unconscious objective world confronts us at the beginning of experience. All progress in knowledge, in fact in consciousness itself, consists in bridging the gap and abolishing both the separated subject and the separated object. (c w , 4:194; Double Vision, 36) The desired fusion of subject and object makes appearances as well in the essays on Canadian literature and culture, particularly in the “Conclusion” to the 1965 edition of Literary History of Canada (c w , 12:357–8), one of his more central statements on Canadian culture and identity. Unlike de Man’s, then, the “fusing of subject and object” (c w , 12:287) is central to Frye’s literary and cultural theory, and while, as I’ve noted, he elsewhere praises the expression of the disunity of mind and nature as powerful and authentic moments in the Canadian literary tradition, the lack of such a synthesis in the Canadian poets who most closely inherit

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and adopt the Romantic lyric is ultimately seen by Frye as a limitation in this poetic form. Frye provides some of his most illuminating comments on the Romantic lyric in the Canadian tradition in a little-known essay from 1958 simply entitled “Poetry,” written as an entry for a volume entitled The Arts in Canada: A Stock-taking at Mid-Century. Describing the work of Roberts, Lampman, Scott, and Carman as, for better or worse, the “cornerstone of Canadian poetry” (c w , 12:280), Frye characterizes their poetry in a passage I’ve referred to already but is now worth quoting at some length, as it indicates clearly what he saw the Romantic lyric attempting to do, as well as its deficiencies and its tenacious persistence. All four are Romantic and subjective poets, at best when confronting nature in solitude, in moods of nostalgia, reverie, observation, or extra-sensory awareness. Their sensibility is emotional in origin, and they attain conceptual precision by means of emotional precision. Lampman, who had the keenest mind of the group, often does this; Carman and Roberts, trying with emotional sensibility to reach something beyond it, are apt to let their sensibility go out of focus into a woozy inspirationalism. This subjective and lyrical sensibility, sharp and clear in its emotional foreground but inclined to get vague around its conceptual fringes, is deeply rooted in the Canadian tradition. Most of its characteristics reappear in the Group of Seven painters, in Tom Thomson and Emily Carr, with their odd mixture of art nouveau and cosmic consciousness. (c w , 12:280–1) T.S. Eliot’s influential notion of a “dissociation of sensibility” in postseventeenth-century poetry, and in the Romantics particularly, seems here to inform Frye’s critique of these poets of the Confederation era. They aimed to achieve “conceptual precision by means of emotional precision” but too rarely succeeded; the overflowing feelings lead too often to fuzzy thoughts. A more compelling point Frye makes, however, is to suggest that the lyric’s starting point in, or presupposition of, an isolated subjectivity is a key to its deficiency. At a later stage of the discussion that more clearly yet emphasizes the difficulties he perceives in the form, Frye suggests that “The Romantic lyrical poets are normally detached from their environment: they observe and describe what they see, and they observe and describe the emotion with which they see it” (c w , 12:287).

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With the repeated phrase “observe and describe” as well as the repeated references to sight, Frye suggests both that such poetry is limited to empirical observation and that it is thus deficient in imaginative vision. It employs an essentially non-poetic, merely descriptive form of language. The difficulty lies, in part, in the poet’s detachment from the environment, what Frye characterizes as “the Romantic duality of mind and nature” (c w , 12:290). De Man, as I have suggested, recognizes a similar duality but praises its self-consciousness as a powerful insight the Romantics achieve. For Frye, however, the goal of art remains to overcome such dualism. In the 1958 essay “Poetry,” Frye identifies the Romantic lyric as one of the most persistent forms in the Canadian literary tradition, one that recurs even in later poets, like A.J.M. Smith, who understood their poetry to be a deliberate, self-conscious rejection of such a form (c w , 12:286). At the same time, he characterizes a generally newer but increasingly important tradition, which he here describes as the “academic tradition” (c w , 12:286). By “academic” Frye does not mean a poetry that is detached from social concerns and/or densely esoteric, although he recognized that it was subject to such charges. He means, rather, something close to what he will elsewhere characterize as “mythopoeic”: a poetry that grows out of an awareness of the literary tradition, literary convention, and literature’s own sources in, as Frye theorized, ritual and myth. Such poetry represents “a concentrating on the significant moods and symbols in which poet and environment are identified” (c w , 12:287; emphasis added). In such poetry, “something looms out of the poet’s environment with the mysterious urgency of a myth, a symbol, an epiphanic moment, an evocative mood, or whatever we like to call the sudden fusing of subject and object” (c w , 12:287; emphasis added). Thus the synthesis of subject and object can be attained, at least imaginatively, but it takes another kind of literature to achieve such a goal. Despite such a difference, however, a further commonality between Frye and de Man is that, in their respective understandings of Romanticism, the lyric holds no peculiarly privileged place, as it came to do with Abrams and others. Frye suggests that the critic might find “much to interest him in poetry of less limited objectives than the Romantic lyric” and that “Romanticism was almost incidentally a lyrical development: the bulk of it consisted of narrative, didactic, or dramatic poems, the last

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group seldom intended for acting” (c w , 12:281). Perhaps because of his early study of Blake, as well as his friendship with E.J. Pratt, Frye found such narrative poetry more powerful in the Canadian tradition. His Study of English Romanticism furthermore provides no sustained consideration of the naturalistic Romantic lyric but looks rather at longer mythopoeic works: Thomas Lovell Beddoe’s Death’s Jest Book, a play, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, a lyric drama, and John Keats’s Endymion, a verse romance.  Thus, while de Man and Frye share a critique of the synthesis of subject and object supposedly achieved in the best of the Romantic lyrics, de Man critiques such synthesis in principle, rejecting the very goal as a dangerous delusion. Frye contrastingly retains the goal of synthesis but contends that a mythopoeic literature more successfully achieves it. Nonetheless, despite retaining such a unity as an ideal, Frye throughout his writings places considerable critical pressure on the possibility of achieving it. I suggested at the outset that de Man, to my knowledge, provides no sustained engagement with Frye’s writings. If he were to have engaged with them, one suspects he might have judged them another species of “aesthetic ideology,” one that, as he wrote in “The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism,” exhibited “the foremost characteristic of contemporary criticism … the tendency to expect a reconciliation from poetry; to see in it a possibility of filling the gap that cleaves Being … a hope shared, in very different forms, by different critical approaches: the positivist formalist, the Marxist, the salvational, and the criticism of substance” (Blindness, 245). De Man, however, was an astute and attentive reader, and had he chosen to engage Frye’s criticism in some detail he might well have noted – if only as the momentary insights piercing through the overarching blindness – moments in Frye’s writings when he self-­ consciously troubles the overall imaginative identity of humanity and nature that he continued to posit as the goal of culture. Frye’s most sustained engagement with de Man, mentioned at the beginning, comes in his 1986 review in the Times Literary Supplement of the latter’s posthumously published The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Despite some signs of aggravation – bemoaning, for example, “so many perverse

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readings of Yeats” (c w , 17:223) – it is a characteristically generous and sympathetic, as well as an uncharacteristically attentive, review. (Frye’s biographer John Ayre notes Frye’s habit of publishing reviews that hardly touch on the book ostensibly being assessed, but that is not the case here.) In the second paragraph, characterizing the overall concerns of this collection of essays, Frye touches centrally on what I have explored in this essay and indicates his own sympathy with the viewpoint: What we have is a set of variations on a protean theme, the theme being an antithetical dialectic – symbol and allegory, image and emblem, anthropomorphism and figuration, aesthetics and violence – which exists in every area of Romanticism, but never really becomes anything more than an antithesis, either in the romantic period or in ours. The sixteenth-century Anabaptist Hans Denck remarked that “Whoever leaves an antithesis without resolving it lacks the ground of truth.” Brave words, but they are the words of a theologian who must put all things under his feet. It is a tribute to de Man’s integrity that, writing in a century that has failed to resolve any of its most formidable antitheses, he leaves things that way. (c w , 17:219) In drawing toward the end of the review he compares the book to its predecessor Blindness and Insight – “a much more theoretical book” – and states with similar sympathy: Some readers felt that it was also a rather negative book, setting out all the things that words can’t and shouldn’t be expected to do, and giving the effect of a ceaseless driving around a strange city in a tangle of one-way streets and unmarked dead ends. I don’t feel this: I feel that it is concerned to show that the conflict of ideologies in Romanticism I spoke of springs from a sense that the old subjectobject paradigm of experience did not work any more, at any rate in anything approximating literature. (c w , 17:225) Yet for all this ample recognition of such a dialectic’s failure, why does Frye insist on retaining it as an ideal? Perhaps the simultaneous recognition of its failure and its necessity is an aspect of the double vision Frye proposes in this text, as he does throughout his many writings.

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Although he never names it as such, De Man privileges what Frye would have characterized as an essentially tragic vision as the most profound insight of the Romantics – tragic insofar as it affirms isolation, fragmentation, and consciousness of death. Frye, as I have noted, likewise asserts that the Canadian poets most closely allied with the Romantic tradition are “most deeply convincing when they are darkest in tone, most preoccupied with pain, loss, loneliness, or waste” (c w , 12:264). Furthermore, Frye also sees the identification with nature in such poetry, and elsewhere in the Canadian literary tradition, as being, at its most convincing, tantamount to a death wish. Anticipating the later deconstructive readings of Keats, he characterizes such identification as a “cold pastoral” (c w , 12:366). Frye, however, perceives this tragic perspective as only a limited achievement of the literary imagination, not, as de Man suggests, the most profound insight it is capable of attaining. For Frye, the tragic and ironic visions, as necessary as they are, are on the downward slide into autumn and winter and must be supplanted with the upward-surging, life-affirming spring and summer of comedy and romance. Frye may praise a tragic tone in Canadian literature as having been the most convincing one achieved to date, insofar as it rejects an overly hasty, merely rhetorical reconciliation of subject and object and expresses a more authentic recognition of alienation, yet he looks forward to the vision that will move beyond the tragic mode, and he praises what traces of it he sees in the tradition. It needs also to be emphasized that the synthesis of subject and object, the integration of humanity and nature, that Frye retains as an ideal remains a self-consciously hypothetical, imaginative vision articulated by a society’s arts and culture. The vision enjoys a certain autonomy from the actual world even as it exists as a source of hope and inspiration for that world. Although no conservative, Frye could be as cautionary as any deconstructionist on the potentially misguided nature of attempts to impose such a vision on the world, as evident, for example, in his discussion in The Secular Scripture of the sorts of “kidnapped romances” that implicitly inform nationalist ideologies as well as the dominance of a particular class in society (c w , 18:41, 109; s s , 8, 168). In grappling with deconstruction, as Frye does in his later notebooks of the 1980s into the 1990s, he fully admits the potential violence of totalizing figural language of the sort that concerned Derrida and, even more centrally, de Man.

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“What [Derrida] should be attacking,” he noted, “is the dogmatic formulation that eliminates its own opposite: that’s the symbol or metaphor that can kill a man, and has killed thousands. It’s always self-enclosed and opaque; no kerygma ever gets through it” (c w , 6:647). Furthermore, the integrative vision championed by Frye is not the “genuine working monism” of which de Man and other deconstructive critics of totality warn. Unity is not uniformity, as Frye continually emphasizes in his Canadian criticism (c w , 12:416, 495) and elsewhere. In Fearful Symmetry, writing very centrally of art’s highest integrative, imaginative vision, he likewise asserts: “The City of God is built not out of continuous but out of contiguous stones, and social order is a unity of varieties, like the work of art, not the dead and frozen unity of unintelligent assent which all tyranny attempts to reach” (c w , 14:163; f s , 159). It is beyond the scope of this essay to bring Frye’s and de Man’s thinking about humanity’s separateness from nature into dialogue with the “eco-criticism” or “Green Romanticism” that has been an important ­current in Romantic studies of the last two decades or so, and which, as  in Jonathan Bate’s influential Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, tends to reject rarified epistemological problems concerning mind and nature. He argues, rather, for a return to what he views as the more direct, powerful, and never more timely message from Wordsworth and others of the interconnectedness of all beings and things. If one were to pursue such a line of inquiry, however, compelling arguments are articulated by the French philosopher Luc Ferry in his critique of the “deep ecology” movement. Ferry argues that what he promotes as a “democratic ecology” must bear in mind the extent to which humanity is “anti-natural,” not by way of ignoring the very pressing demands of the environment upon us but as the only way of coming to an ethical relationship that recognizes responsibility toward it. He argues for an eco-politics that would situate itself between, on the one hand, an anthropocentric Cartesianism that views consciousness as cut off from nature and views animals as mere machines, and, on the other hand, a “deep ecological” position that strives for an (impossible) non-­ anthropocentric viewpoint that accords a kind of absolute priority to nature. Such a position, he proposes, might be maintained in the hypothetical, and essentially aesthetic, relationship of “as if ” in humanity’s sense of identification with the world.

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The meaning of this “as if ” must be clarified: it is the indication that the value judgment with respect to animals and to their eventual rights is neither entirely “naturalistic” (as in deep ecology) or entirely “anthropocentrist” (as in Cartesianism and, in certain respects still, Kantianism). For it is nature itself that signals toward ideas that are dear to us and not we who project them onto it … Hence the feeling that nature does possess the intrinsic value upon which deep ecologists rely to legitimize their antihumanism. But from another angle, and this is what they are missing, it is the ideas evoked by nature that bestow value upon it. Without them, we would not accord the slightest value to the objective world. What is more, because nature flies in the face of such ideas, because it also produces violence and death, we instantly rescind the high appraisal we made of it a moment earlier when it seemed beautiful and harmonious, or even, in the form of an animal, intelligent and affectionate.13 While de Man and Frye concur on humanity being, in a sense, “antinatural,” de Man would doubtless reject Ferry’s efforts to locate the grounds of ethical behaviour in an aesthetic response, identifying it as another species of the aesthetic ideology of the sort he critiques, for example, in Friedrich Schiller’s misguided application of Kant’s aesthetics to a cultural program aimed at creating a harmonious social order.14 Ferry’s sketch of the possibility of doing just this, however, seems to mesh particularly well with Frye’s self-consciously hypothetical identity between humanity and nature. Moreover, Ferry’s position may provide a way of comprehending an open-ended, non-synthetic dialectic in Frye’s thought between affirming the recapturing of a lost identity with nature as the central goal of culture and yet, contrastingly, avowing humanity’s fundamental separateness from this nature. Again, as Frye suggests, however successfully a culture envisions an identity between itself and its world, “that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us” (c w , 21:455; e i , 56).

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“Our Lady of Pain” Prolegomena to the Study of She-Tragedy T ro n i Y . G r a n d e

A feminist critic concerned with the problem of how women and sacrifice have become so persistently linked in Western culture might well be drawn to “she-tragedy,” a kind of drama that flourished in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in which the protagonist’s female gender becomes a key feature of the tragic predicament. That same critic, wanting not merely to reinscribe the story of women’s sacrificial death but rather to accommodate another ending, a narrative of redemption and rebirth, might also be drawn to Northrop Frye, whose work on tragedy and romance explicitly links irony and heroism, sacrifice and redemption. In a more far-reaching way than existing criticism on shetragedy, Frye’s commentary on the figure of the heroine in tragedy and romance can help to generate a structural framework for a broader tradition of she-tragedy, which would extend from Classical drama through the eighteenth century and into contemporary drama. At the same time, a feminist intervention into she-tragedy, while drawing on Frye’s insights, must remain alert to the ways in which the myth of the suffering woman in Western culture performs its own ideological work on the bodies of women. Frye has much to teach feminist criticism in terms of tragic theory, but feminism also has something to add to Frye. Though Frye himself never registered the presence of she-tragedy as such, a mythological vision like Frye’s, however out of fashion it is for the diachronic preoccupations of our postmodern age, can help us see with greater scope and clarity the argument, conventions, and ethical force of the story of the fallen woman whose beautiful death has the power to remake the green world. This

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paper (part of a longer book-length study) offers only a preliminary exploration of what could be seen as the broader tradition of she-tragedy, in which sacrifice and the feminine become forcefully yoked together. Frye’s treatments of tragedy and romance in Anatomy of Criticism and Fools of Time, as well as his chapter “Our Lady of Pain” in The Secular Scripture, when mapped onto she-tragedy can have the liberatory effect that feminist analysis may in fact be seeking. Frye nevertheless presents limitations for a feminist critic. Some might even object that using Frye to develop a feminist typology of a femalecentred subgenre of tragedy is hardly in keeping with Frye’s own vision as a critic. On all occasions Frye was unapologetic and bold in defending an inclusive mythological vision against the vagaries and exclusions of separatist ideological camps – and feminism was one such ideology that Frye denigrated for its failure to recognize the “communism of convention” (c w , 22:90; a c , 98). Frye insisted on the inclusive vision of “man,” by which he meant humankind, united above all by the democratizing influence of universal primary concerns, and he set aside any consideration of gender when he theorized the “single universal body” of poetry (c w , 22:116; a c , 125). Is gender thus a distraction for Frye, or for the study of mythology in the wake of Frye’s theories? Or is Frye’s work fundamentally sexist – as Deanne Bogdan, Phyllis Galloway, and even Margaret Burgess have argued1 – promoting an androcentric vision that deliberately excludes women and/or the feminine? (And are followers of Frye, as a disgruntled feminist colleague grumbled to me once, doomed to be part of an “old boys’ club”?) Goddess forbid! The thorny issue of Frye’s relation to feminism and to women should be understood both historically and biographically. In the first sustained treatment of Frye and feminism, my 2009 essay on the significance of the “silent Beatrice” in Frye’s corpus, I tried to show that Frye’s mythological framework at times uneasily incorporates the element of woman, though women do keep interrupting his myth-making process.2 On one level, Frye remains true to his aim to support an inclusive vision of humanity, through his dogged insistence on the priority of mythology over ideology. But Frye also asserts that myth has a social function, as a vehicle for communicating transhistorical humanist values, for myth conveys the primary concerns (universal human needs) for food and drink, sex, property, and liberty of movement (c w , 26:51, 165; w p , 51, 260). As we turn

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our attention from Frye’s corpus to the tradition of she-tragedy, what becomes clear is that she-tragedy as myth is generated by the primary concern for women’s freedom, in its demand for social justice and its revelation of man’s injustice to woman. What Frye does not recognize, though, and what she-tragedy makes clear, is that there is a fundamental difference in women’s situatedness in the face of primary concerns, because of the cultural disposition of the sexed body.  Often understood as a subgenre of tragedy, she-tragedy was named in 1714 by Nicholas Rowe, who refined the pathetic mode in his own shetragedies: The Fair Penitent (1703), The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714), and The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray (1715). Rowe had inherited the focus on a pitiable woman from the plays of his predecessors, such as Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens (1677), Thomas Otway’s The Orphan (1680), John Banks’s Virtue Betrayed, or Anna Bullen (1682), and Thomas Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage (1694). She-tragedy uses the suffering and death of the fallen woman to evoke an exaggerated response of pathos, and, in the hands of Rowe, ultimately to inculcate a heightened sense of social justice and charity in the audience. The sacrifice of the she-tragedy heroine thus does have a social function, for it is meant at least partly as a critique of the existing gender order. Several feminist critics have studied the ways in which she-tragedy registers the historical changes taking place in the eighteenth century and maps them onto the body of the suffering woman. The most important change is, of course, the appearance of the actress on the Restoration stage. When Charles II, in 1660, permitted that the “women’s parts … may be performed by women,”3 women achieved a newfound importance in the theatre, so much so that by 1680 Nathaniel Lee could declare, in the prologue to Lucius Junius Brutus, “Women shall rule the boxes and the pit.” Elizabeth Howe has shown that she-tragedy owed its success to the talents of moving female performers like Elizabeth Barry,4 who defined the genre’s focus “on pure and suffering women.”5 For Laura Brown, she-tragedy – “this simple-minded drama of despair and hysterics” – displays the fetishistic commodification of women and thereby leads to “the feminization of mercantile capitalist ideology.”6 Brown’s political reading links the she-tragedy protagonist to “the economic

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insignificance of women in the major social transition of the age”; Brown sees “the new female prototype” as “passive, defenseless, and impotent,” with “no economic role, no social status, no inherent valuation” – in short, “socially and economically … an empty vessel.”7 Jean I. Marsden likewise argues that “the existence of she-tragedy heroines is defined by suffering not by agency.”8 Marsden uses Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze to argue that in she-tragedy “control of a woman’s sexuality is marked by control of the gaze,” which is eroticized for the titillation, the misogynistic scopophilia, of the audience.9 Despite the critical emphasis on a woman’s victimization in she-­ tragedy, it could be argued that with the appearance of powerful actresses women did rule the Restoration stage in a new way, enjoying an increase in social “valuation,” particularly with the rise of a newly prominent female spectator. Felicity Nussbaum explains that “real women, albeit women impersonating characters, shaped these forms of female subjectivity beyond mere suffering heroines” and generated “social meanings far in excess of their roles” (italics in original).10 More importantly, as I outline in the following analysis of Rowe’s and Otway’s plays, she-tragedy as tragedy goes beyond a portrayal of absolutely “defenceless” protagonists who are “pure” in their suffering, or unvarying objects of a male gaze. Rowe did much to delimit the genre, owing to the fact that the only recorded use of the term “she-tragedy” before the twentieth century appears in the Epilogue to The Tragedy of Jane Shore. The actress who played Jane, Anne Oldfield, addressed both the women and men in the audience, asking, “What can we say your pardon to obtain?” At issue is the blatant sinning of “poor Jane,” the infamous “harlot” who left her husband for King Edward IV and, upon Edward’s death, is stripped of her privileges and forced to do public penance. Jane boldly meets the call to repentance, and like a martyr is purified through suffering, appearing in act 5 as what Frye would regard as a type of Christ who must endure “taunting and reviling” crowds that “hurl” at her “the filth from out the common ways” – the excrement of the public ditches or sewers – and are forbidden by law to offer her even a morsel of food or drink.11 The typological approach favoured by Frye works particularly well in the analysis of she-tragedy because the heroine ultimately functions in the final acts of the play as a redemptive, atoning, and quasi-mystical figure, like the tragic heroes described by Frye as “wrapped in the mystery of their

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communion with that something beyond which we can only see through them, and which is the source of their strength and their fate alike” (c w , 22:193–4; a c , 208). However, the abjection of the she-tragedy heroine, a persistent marker of the genre, mitigates the sense of heroism in the plays, turning them toward the ironic phase of tragedy. As Frye states, “the ironic perspective in tragedy is attained by putting the characters in a state of lower freedom than the audience” (c w , 22:206; a c , 221). The she-tragedy heroine’s desires are so frequently frustrated that the audience often has the sense of looking down on her. Rowe’s Jane Shore, for example, acknowledges that she deserves the “reproach” (2.202) of her persecutors, since they merely, as she says, “treat me as the abject thing I have been” (2.207). She detests her “wretched self ” and curses her “past polluted life” (2.210–11). Even the full forgiveness of Jane’s wronged husband, Shore, cannot avert the disaster at play’s end. Jane dies in a paroxysm of grief, pleading for mercy, and act 5 ends on a cautionary note, stressing its keynote of “[n]o common vengeance,” along with its moral: “Let those who view this sad example know / What fate attends the broken marriage vow” (5.435–6). Despite what Frye would call this “vision of law” (c w , 22:194; ac , 208), Rowe sets a redemptive purpose glowing under the embers of Jane Shore’s death, and urges the audience to take pity on Jane’s dying cry: “Forgive me! – but forgive me!” (5.414). Having performed Jane’s agonies, Oldfield in the Epilogue insists on Jane’s atonement: “She never once denied” her crime (line 8), but “has dearly paid the sinful score” (line 37). And Rowe has Oldfield take the instructiveness of this tragedy one step further. The actress urges the audience to recognize the double standard of eighteenthcentury society, which sets men as “lords and masters” (line 19) above “the modest matrons” and “virtuous wives, / Who lead with horrid husbands decent lives” (lines 1–2). Oldfield, herself an actress with a notorious reputation for “modern sexual attitudes” and behaviour,12 urges the audience to recognize the many “ways of wickedness” in society: Nor should our mourning madam weep alone, There are more ways of wickedness than one. If the reforming stage should fall to shaming Ill-nature, pride, hypocrisy, and gaming,

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The poets frequently might move compassion And with she-tragedies o’errun the nation. Then judge the fair offender, with good nature; And let your fellow-feeling curb your satire. (Epilogue, lines 24–31) If Rowe’s audience can turn their eyes inward and perceive their own guilt for other sins that generate the woes of so many mourning madams, Rowe can unlock the floodgates of “compassion” or “fellow-feeling” through the proliferation of “she-tragedies” on the English stage, and Jane Shore can virtually bring about society’s reformation. In the end, the “fair offender” becomes a type of the woman taken in adultery, and the play’s lesson parallels Jesus’s words: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (Authorized [King James] Version, John 8:7). Rowe thus shapes the popular Jane Shore narrative through the use of the “forgiven harlot” archetype, best outlined by Frye in The Great Code (c w , 19:160–1; g c , 141–2). This same “forgiven harlot” story or plot structure informs Rowe’s earlier she-tragedy, The Fair Penitent (1703), in which he similarly moralizes the fall of his seductive but ultimately repentant heroine Calista. As the play opens, Calista has already been bewhored (to use Shakespeare’s memorable word from Othello [4.2.121]). She has been secretly seduced – “undone”13 – by the libertine Lothario and cannot embrace Altamont or the marriage that her father wills. The foil to Calista’s wickedness and a worthier model for uncomplicated womanhood is Altamont’s sister, the chaste and sacrificial Lavinia, who never wavers from cloying loyalty to her husband, Horatio. As Calista’s true fallen state – her “inbred, deep pollution” (5.158) – emerges, she becomes the same kind of pitiable abject as Jane Shore. Calista, too, fits Frye’s outline of the ironic mode of tragedy, as she is made to pay for her sins with bodily affliction, internalized shame, and a morbid descent into a self-willed death, with all the attendant emphasis on pathos. Yet the lesson of the play still points ambiguously in alternative moral directions, reminding us of Frye’s cautions against simplistic or reductive readings of tragedy (c w , 22:195–7; a c , 209–11). The play warns against men’s depravity (1.239–41) but also against women’s weakness, and its message is implicitly directed at the women in the audience: to beware the wiles of debauchers (the lotharios that the eponym precisely signifies). At the same time, the misogynistic speeches in the play, prompted

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by Calista’s betrayal of Altamont and her father (e.g., 1.114–25, 2.1.164– 72), position women not as victims but as destroyers of men. Nonetheless, Rowe goes to extravagant lengths to depict Calista’s final penitence. The setting reveals the imagery of “the charnel and the tomb” (5.10): a “room hung with black: … Lothario’s body on a bier; … a table with a skull and other bones” (5.s.d.). The “loose and disordered” appearance of Calista herself points to her morbid inner state (5.88). The audience is exhorted to feel pity for the “fair penitent,” as she bends her “proud, disdainful heart” (5.186) toward both Altamont and her father, who forgive her disgrace while they themselves are dealt death blows. The lesson of forgiveness is underscored in the Epilogue, where Anne Bracegirdle, the actress who played the naive Lavinia, miraculously gains a revolutionary voice. Mrs Bracegirdle faults not the “cuckold-making tribe” of “eloping wives” (Epilogue 25, 5), as Lavinia did, but instead, like Calista, censures tyrant husbands who “are obeyed / By force of laws which for themselves they made” (Epilogue 6–7). Rowe thus thrusts on men the ultimate responsibility for transforming society: “If you would e’er bring constancy in fashion, / You men must first begin the reformation” (Epilogue 27–8). Rowe’s plays therefore do spotlight the suffering of the heroine, but at the same time they oscillate between pathos (the narrative pull of the myth) and moral judgment (the social context or ideology). Rowe’s brand of tragedy, even with its gendered emphasis on female sacrifice, participates in the ambiguity of the genre, as Frye formulates it: “Tragedy … seems to elude the antithesis of moral responsibility and arbitrary fate, just as it eludes the antithesis of good and evil” (c w , 22:197; a c , 211). Given this general moral ambiguity, it is not surprising that critical reactions to Rowe’s Calista have been divided.14 Calista has been read both as a submissive victim who ultimately succumbs to her expected patriarchal role, and as a subversive rebel against the system that enslaves her. Rowe’s Tragedy of Jane Shore prompted a similarly ambiguous response from spectators and critics.15 Though critics have to some degree recognized the ambiguity of the she-tragedy heroine,16 the common reading of shetragedy still tends to reconcile these oppositions and flatten out the paradoxes of the heroine, as when Jayne Elizabeth Lewis argues, “Fulfilling Lee’s prediction that ‘women shall rule the stage,’ a she-tragedy heroine was likely to ‘rule’ less through the assertion of her own will than through a moving demonstration of her own distress and vulnerability.”17

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But the feminist critic cannot efface the heroine’s will, for it is her gesture of defiance (however ill fated in the world of the play) that instigates the she-tragedy. Even in early she-tragedies such as The Orphan, considered less moral than the direction taken by Rowe’s later she-tragedies, we can see that the woman chooses, exercising as a tragic agent what Aristotle terms proairesis, which Frye translates as “free choice of an end” or “a use of freedom to lose freedom” (c w , 22:196, 198; a c , 210, 212). This choice becomes imbricated in a rebellion against patriarchy (fathers, sons, husbands, brothers) – no matter how innocent the heroine might appear. Otway’s The Orphan likewise complicates our notion of the heroine’s exercise of proairesis, counterbalancing pathos with judgment. In The Orphan, the woman’s choice of marriage partner – motivated by what Frye might call the primary concern of sex and love – and her subsequent sexual (though “technical”) crime of adultery are at the centre of the tragic crisis. The orphan Monimia is, like Jane Shore and Calista, the object of male rivalry, in this instance between two twin brothers, Castalio and Polydore. Nonetheless, the fatal choice of the play rests with Monimia, who, like Rowe’s Jane and Calista, attempts to captain her own sexuality. The chain of tragic circumstances is forged by Monimia when she prefers Castalio over Polydore, against the express wishes of her brother Chamont,18 and marries the elder twin in secret. Although Monimia is an orphan, with no father’s will that must be opposed, her brother Chamont is a stand-in for that patriarchal will. The first two acts of the play deliberately pause over Monimia’s assertion of her own will, even as they complicate the notions of consent and coercion. Up to the point of having made her decision, Monimia is, like the tragic hero described by Frye, poised on the edge of a cliff. Once she “deliberately jumps off a precipice” (c w , 22:198; a c , 212), she hurtles down by means of the gravitational pull of tragedy, into a vortex of rape, confusion, and death. Monimia, like Jane and Calista, sees herself as “pollution” (5.470) and wills her own death. After pledging her undying love to Castalio, she takes poison, “a healing draught” (5.441), and dies. The play ends with several pronouncements of blame, not just by Monimia but by the brothers Castalio and Polydore, who have fought, bonded, and died over their mimetic devotion to Monimia; and the concluding couplet of the play, far from being “pure affect,”19 is a kind of moral tag (albeit fatalistic), which echoes Euripides’ play The Phoenician

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Women: “’Tis thus that Heaven its empire does maintain; / It may afflict, but man must not complain” (5.542–3).20 Otway’s heroine could be said to exemplify what Frye calls “the suppliant, the character, often female, who presents a picture of unmitigated helplessness and destitution” (c w , 22:202; a c , 217). But if the suppliant is the key to the production of pathos, as Frye explains, the feelings evoked by the suppliant are not just tender pity, but fear: pathos, though it seems a gentler and more relaxed mood than tragedy, is even more terrifying. Its basis is the exclusion of an individual from a group; hence it attacks the deepest fear in ourselves that we possess – a fear much deeper than the relatively cosy and sociable bogey of hell. In the figure of the suppliant pity and terror are brought to the highest possible pitch of intensity, and the awful ­consequence of rejecting the suppliant for all concerned is a central theme of Greek tragedy. Suppliant figures are often women threatened with death or rape, or children, like Prince Arthur in King John. The fragility of Shakespeare’s Ophelia marks an affinity with the suppliant type. (c w , 22:202–3; a c , 217) Taking our hint from Frye’s apt reference to Ophelia – for what is Ophelia’s story in Hamlet but an inset she-tragedy episode? – we might say that the pathos created by the she-tragedy heroine arises from the exclusionary threat of the woman expelled from patriarchy. At least in the moment when the spectator experiences this threat on the side of the excluded woman, the emotional experience would not be pleasure but, as Frye says, “terrifying” pain. A fuller feminist investigation of she-tragedy would need to interrogate the masculinist notion that female spectators respond, or should respond, with misogynistic “vicarious pleasure”21 toward the heroine’s pain. Though tragedy is only a representation or “mimesis of sacrifice” (c w , 22:200; a c , 214), the female spectator could feel a terrifying and horrifying identification with the suffering, violated woman, particularly when witnessing that woman’s mistreatment in front of her at the hands of men. The identification would be intensified if the spectator were in a lower position of power, or having what Deanne Bogdan calls “feeling, power, and location problems” in response to the play.22 In fact, Rowe’s

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challenge to female spectators, in the prologue to his third and final shetragedy, The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray (1715), is precisely that they emulate his heroine – “copy out the Dame”23 – and empathize with her pain – feel “soft pity” and shed “silent Tears for suff’ring Virtue.”24 This is a far cry from feeling misogynistic “vicarious pleasure,” or any delight at her demise. If generic criticism of she-tragedy is not to be entirely prescriptive, there ought to be a way to account for tragic representations of women who suffer not wholly passively, but also heroically, and whose violent ordeals and exclusions from society evoke not just titillating or “voyeuristic pleasure” but pain and complicated moral judgment. Rowe’s Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray provides another test for assumptions about the genre. According to Marsden, as a she-tragedy, Rowe’s representation of Lady Gray’s suffering was a failure with its eighteenth-century audience because Rowe does not make a fallen (sexualized) woman out of Lady Jane, the nine-days’ queen who at the age of sixteen was deposed and executed for her Protestant faith by the Catholic forces of Queen Mary I. The efforts of Rowe to shape Jane as an asexual Protestant martyr change what Marsden calls “the seemingly ready-made template of the suffering heroine,” and lead to Rowe’s “erasure of female desire and overt sexuality.”25 But if we place Lady Jane as she-tragedy heroine against the vision of possibilities represented by the spectacular subjection of women in the broader tradition of tragedy, we see that she is as much a transgressor against institutionalized power as her sexualized counterparts in the genre. She does not have to be titillating or consistently eroticized to become what Rowe makes her, “A Heroine, a Martyr, and a Queen.”26 Rowe points out “how like a Saint she ended.”27 When Gardiner, the Catholic priest, refers to “the maudlin gazers” that he prevents from seeing Lady Jane’s execution, Rowe may well be activating the etymological sense of maudlin as Magdalene (British pronunciation may in fact activate an aural pun). A literary allusion, and a structural analogy, to Mary Magdalene, the archetypal sinner-saint whose sexuality is ultimately effaced by her conflation with the Virgin Mary and Christ,28 would be entirely appropriate in Lady Jane Gray. Like Mary Magdalene, Rowe’s Calista and Jane Shore, and Otway’s Monimia, Lady Jane ultimately works to abandon her carnal nature and die in a saintly manner. Indeed, the “erasure of female desire and overt sexuality” that Marsden rightly

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notices in Lady Jane is a well-documented facet of depictions of the female saint in the hagiographic tradition that underpins the saint’s play, as Karen Bamford has shown.29 The outlines of the legendary “virgin martyrs” figure centrally in representations of the “latter-day saints” who are Lady Jane’s Jacobean precursors.30 We may adapt Frye’s warning, “[I]t makes no difference to the structure of tragedy if its hero is a good man or a bad man” (c w , 28:87), to the context of she-tragedy: it makes no difference to the structure of shetragedy if its heroine is a good (chaste) woman or a bad (sexualized) woman. Even before women mount the English stage, dramatic representations of the suffering heroine (whether chaste or unchaste) are key to the establishment of tragedy, and evoke pity and fear in their own right. Is the “notoriously lachrymose sensibility” of the eighteenth century over a she-tragedy heroine like Jane Shore31 not prefigured in Euripides’ Hecuba, or in Shakespeare’s, as Hamlet reflects on Hecuba’s tearful passions (cf. Hamlet, 2.2.486–501)? As Tanya Pollard has shown, the “attractions” of Greek tragedy, both in its day and in the sixteenth century, “were identified especially with the emotional intensity generated by suffering women.”32 Critics have largely neglected this line of influence, reaching from Classical and early modern drama to the post-Restoration depictions of the tragic heroine, although Vaska Tumir, correcting the view that she-tragedy is an entirely new dramatic form that breaks from heroic tragedy, gives a good starting list of prominent pre-Restoration “pathetic heroines”: Virginia in both the early moral tragedy Appius and Virginia and in [John] Webster’s Jacobean version; Shakespeare’s violated and maimed Lavinia, daughter to Titus, and his pathetically silenced Desdemona; Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, almost as ambiguous in her own way as Rowe’s Calista would later be; John Marston’s Sophonisba, perpetually exposed in her bridal nightgown to would-be rapists, and last seen comforting her murderer-husband; [Francis] Beaumont and [John] Fletcher’s Aspatia, whose pathetic outpourings of grief punctuate The Maid’s Tragedy, one of Otway’s sources for The Orphan; and the fallen Beaumelle, Rowe’s model for Calista, who stoically accepts and applauds her death sentence, and kisses her executioner-husband in [Philip] Massinger and [Nathaniel] Field’s The Fatal Dowry.33

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A fuller study of she-tragedy needs to take up Tumir’s hint, and study the relations between these and other plays featuring powerful female scapegoat figures. Critics have passed up the opportunity to examine what Frye would term the archetypal power of The Fair Penitent, and its historical importance as a conveyor of primary concerns, in feminist terms. For example, Marsden argues, “By no stretch of imagination can Massinger and Field’s play [The Fatal Dowry] be considered a she-tragedy. Not only does it  ­contain no pathos, but its main female figure, Beaumelle, is openly desirous and eager to commit adultery.”34 Calista, however, is “openly desirous” for Lothario, as Jane Shore was for King Edward. Rowe’s heroines in their relation to their source narratives open up onto a fuller vision of possibilities in the underlying framework of she-tragedy. As it happens, The Fatal Dowry uses the same conventional scene of repentance as Rowe’s Jane Shore and The Fair Penitent (and, we might add, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling). Beaumelle sounds remarkably like those penitent fallen women as she pleads with her husband Charalois to forgive her, and she even alludes to the sanctified histories of the female saints.35 Charalois, despite the fact that he is steeling himself to kill his adulterous wife, cannot help but cry, “How pity steales upon me!” (4.4.82). Thus, especially when viewing the play in performance, one might need to qualify the statement that Beaumelle does not “display ‘distress,’” or that Charalois is “never sentimental.”36 Beaumelle’s dignified acceptance of her fate before Charalois kills her as her judge and executioner does tug at the audience’s heartstrings: While I was good, I was a part of you, And of two, by the vertuous harmony Of our faire minds, made one: but since I wandred In the forbidden Labyrinth of lust, What was inseparable, is by me divided. (4.4.57–61) Here Beaumelle expresses the same pain over loss of paradise (4.4.57–64) that Frye says the tragic hero utters in the moment of anagnorisis (c w , 22:198; a c , 212). Beaumelle even verges on the heroic, suggesting affinities with, rather than absolute division from, Calista. As Marsden herself recognizes, “the basic outlines of Massinger and Field’s plot” are the same as Rowe’s.37

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Articulating the deep structure (not the variable social facts) of shetragedy can aid us in drawing a broader net, and catching something of the feminist possibilities together with the misogynist limitations inherent in the genre. To reconfigure the reading of she-tragedy, as I have attempted to do in my analysis of The Tragedy of Jane Shore, The Fair Penitent, and The Orphan, we can say that plays designated as she-­ tragedies will share a plot structure, an organizing principle, in which resistance as well as submission inheres, and in which the woman’s will instigates the trouble. We may call this conventionalized structure, in homage to Frye (“Argument of Comedy,” in c w , 28:3–13), the argument of she-tragedy. In a society ruled by men, a woman transgresses, in sexual terms deviating from patriarchal control: that is, she acts as an agent, while being forced into place as a token of exchange between men. The woman’s transgression, her attempt to appropriate the law, is the clearest, most (re)iterated fact in the literary universe of the play, and is underscored by allusions to past tragic heroines. Because of her error, she becomes the object of violence and mistreatment. She rebels against the patriarchal order by willing her own death. To some extent she is sanctified by her tragic experience, and yet as pharmakos she becomes polluted and must be expelled from the social body. Subsequently, her subversive energy appears to be contained within the parameters of the play (until the Epilogue or the end of the play hints at releasing this dangerous energy again), and she becomes a model for other would-be penitents as well as a reminder of the need for a more just society. The she-tragedy heroine partakes of both tragedy and romance. She enacts a gendered ritual of the dying god whose sacrifice effects a kind of social redemption, and whose dying (the end of tragedy) therefore turns out to be merely one phase in the cycle of death and resurrection (the end of romance) (c w , 22:170; a c , 183; cf. Grande and Sherbert, in c w , 28:xlii–xliii). Frye’s U-shaped pattern of deliverance, in other words, underpins the sacrifice of the she-tragedy heroine. This pattern, for the purposes of she-tragedy, is best exemplified in the Demeter-Persephone myth, though its more culturally influential analogue is of course the myth of the dying and resurrected Christ. Demeter (or Ceres, her Roman counterpart) is the goddess of the harvest, whose daughter Persephone (in Roman, Proserpine or Proserpina) is abducted (literally, “raped” or seized) by Hades, god of the underworld. Frye allegorizes the myth, ­hinting at its potential displacements in she-tragedy narratives: “When

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Proserpine is seized by a demon lover and carried off into a world of death, she touches the food of death, to the extent of eating some pomegranate seeds. Here the communion image of food replaces the sexual one: eating the seeds is a sacrificial act in which what is sacrificed is symbolically her virginity” (c w , 18:59; s s , 86–7). The daughter as virginal sacrifice, and the mother as mourning earth-goddess, both enter into she-tragedy as two sides of the heroine’s archetypal face. Indeed, the authoritative scholar of mythology Jane-Ellen Harrison points out that Demeter and Persephone are two aspects of the same Earth-goddess.38 In keeping with Frye’s outline in the first essay of Anatomy of Criticism (c w , 22:33–40; a c , 35–43), a systematic historical account of fictional modes in she-tragedy would begin with Demeter and Persephone, the undisplaced version of the myth, followed by its various displacements, from romance through the high mimetic, the low mimetic, and irony, depending on the hero(ine)’s varying power of action over society (“other men”) and over the environment. She-tragedy proper (the post-­Restoration version of the myth of the sacrificial female) belongs to the low-mimetic phase, since Rowe, like his contemporaries, depicts “[a] melancholy tale of private woes” (Fair Penitent, Prologue 16). As Frye points out, “The best word for low mimetic or domestic tragedy is, perhaps, pathos,” and “the central figure of pathos is often a woman or a child” (c w , 22:36; a c , 38). Frye’s insight that “we have a whole procession of pathetic female sacrifices in English low mimetic fiction from Clarissa Harlowe to [Thomas] Hardy’s Tess and [Henry] James’s Daisy Miller” (c w , 22:36; a c , 38) reminds us that the she-tragedy narrative can be displaced in other fictional, not just dramatic, modes, such as opera, the novel, and film. Frye’s reflections on the tragic heroine serve as a useful point of departure, allowing us to move backwards historically from the low-mimetic productions of she-tragedy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to the high-mimetic she-tragedies of the Jacobeans and Elizabethans, and then to their influential romantic predecessors in medieval drama (especially the saint’s play) and Classical drama, where we are beginning to glimpse the stark outlines of the undisplaced myth. How does the tragic tradition keep circling around the mourning mother and/or the sacrificial virgin? Just how provocative and rich this question is for feminist analysis may be suggested by some of the more obvious examples of the symbolic mother figure – the Duchess of Malfi,

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Anne Frankford (A Woman Killed with Kindness), Gertrude, Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, the Woman Taken in Adultery, Phaedra, Jocasta, Medea, Alcestis – and of the sacrificial-virgin figure – Beatrice-Joanna (The Changeling), Ophelia, Desdemona, Virginia (Appius and Virginia), Antigone, Iphigenia, Andromeda. The two Demeter and Persephone figures may be separated or fused as she-tragedy takes shape in different historical moments, with particular ideological inflections. Frye’s proposition that tragedy is implicit or incomplete comedy – as an episode in the unifying “total quest myth” underpinning literature (c w , 22:200; a c , 215) – further clarifies issues and affinities in classifying she-tragedy. For instance, William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride, though an acknowledged she-tragedy, does not end with the death of the pathetic heroine Almeria. Rather, she becomes what Frye would call a “sacrificial snatched-away victim” (c w , 18:55; s s , 81), as her lost husband Alphonso (disguised as Osmyn) magically returns to her in what she tearfully praises as a “miracle.” Frye persuasively explains how the sacrifice of the woman can turn in two directions: “The human sacrifice, usually of a virginal female, is astonishingly persistent as the crucial episode in romance”; while “as a rule the heroine avoids this fate, … [s]ometimes, of course, the heroine has to go through with her sacrificial role” (c w , 18:55; s s , 81–2). Congreve brings his audience to the very brink of tragedy, but then rescues Almeria and Alphonso, his primary couple, and Alphonso’s concluding words leave the audience with a decidedly Christian view of the divine comedy: “For blessings ever wait on virtuous deeds; / And though a late, a sure reward succeeds.” In “Our Lady of Pain,” Frye calls this “the Proserpine solution,” a way out of the tragic ending by marrying off the bride (though she must return to hell for half the year). The lost and redeemed daughter is “the archetype for all romantic virgins who marry and live ‘happily’ ever after” (c w , 18:59; s s , 87). However, Frye adds ironically, “It is possible that some of these heroines, if their happy postnarrative lives were more fully investigated, would be found, like Proserpine, to be spending at least half their time in hell” (c w , 18:59; s s , 87). Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, with its happy ending through the “resurrection” of Hermione, could be seen to be making double use of the Proserpine solution, since both Hermione (the Demeter figure) and her daughter Perdita (the Persephone figure) function as the sacrificial females who are symbolically rescued

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from the underworld. The play, though deemed a romance, is closely allied to she-tragedy in its heroic phase. Frye refers to “the tragedy of Hermione” (c w , 22:204; a c , 219), and groups The Winter’s Tale with a “whole series of tragedies based on a Griselda figure,” including Seneca’s Octavia and Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (c w , 22:204; a c , 219). In expanded form, the story of “the calumniated woman, often a mother the legitimacy of whose child is suspected” (c w , 22:204; a c , 219), ends in rebirth, as it does for Hermione. In the third essay of Anatomy, while exploring the symbolic phases of tragedy, Frye links both Euripides’ Alcestis and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi to this group of plays about the calumniated woman, in which the protagonist is courageous and innocent, and displays “the greatest possible dignity in contrast to the other characters” (c w , 22:204; a c , 219). Alcestis, as Frye says, corresponds to this phase of tragedy because we can read Alcestis as having been “violated by Death” and then having “her fidelity vindicated by being restored to life” (c w , 22:204; a c , 219). Focusing on the redemption of the female sacrificial figure may aid in  reaching a more balanced or liberating view of her victimization. Overemphasizing the moments of pathos in she-tragedy leads to a skewing of the tragic vision in the direction of irony (a phase in which the protagonist loses her power of action to such an extent that she becomes inarticulate and utterly “defenceless”). On the contrary, at the end of shetragedy, the heroine is still standing, speaking in the subject position of “I,” however abjected and compromised her subjectivity has come to be seen. In Fools of Time, Frye offers a necessary corrective to the tendency to conflate the ironic vision in tragedy with the overall tragic vision: Being in time is not the whole of the tragic vision: it is, in itself, the ironic vision. Because it is the basis of the tragic vision, the ironic and the tragic are often confused or identified … What makes tragedy tragic, and not simply ironic, is the presence in it of a counter-movement of being that we call the heroic, a capacity for action or passion, for doing or suffering, which is above ordinary human experience. This heroic energy, glorified by itself as something invincible which bursts the boundaries of normal experience, is the basis of romance. (c w , 28:252)

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In she-tragedy, then, the heroic energy thrown up against the tyranny of time and the inexorability of the law links the genre to romance. Shetragedy includes resistance, by means of the heroine’s proairesis, her show of agency, just as surely as in Frye’s formulation the novels of Jane Austen include “resistance” – “an element of social protest” inherent in the romance structure rather than in any intention on Austen’s part (c w , 18:52; s s , 76–7). Frye helps us further understand the connection between she-tragedy and romance when he connects the myth of deliverance (the structuring principle of romance) to the redemptive power of the sacrificial female figure. The two major structural principles in fiction correspond to the two contrasting heroines of romance: “the virgin who marries at the end of the story … represents the structural principle of the cycle and of accommodation to it,” whereas “[t]he virgin who is sacrificed, or escapes sacrifice and remains a virgin, similarly symbolizes the other principle, the separation or polarizing of the action into two worlds, one desirable and the other detestable” (c w , 18:56; s s , 83). The romantic convention of a pair of contrasting heroines becomes a convention of she-tragedy (Monimia and Serina in The Orphan; Jane and Alicia in Jane Shore; Calista and Lavinia in The Fair Penitent; Almeria and Zara in The Mourning Bride). In between these two poles, we can consider discrete examples of the heroine with a thousand faces. The stories of Jane Shore, Calista, Monimia, Lady Jane, and Almeria are not isolated, new instances of a focus on female suffering. Rather, through their narratives these pathetic heroines reach back to a thorny history of representations of the sacrificed and sacrificing woman in patriarchal culture. In “Our Lady of Pain,” Frye insists on the power of this suffering woman as the power of a “woman of action.” And suffering, he reminds us, is a feminine action, a power reflected in the “ethos of the Christian myth,” though “not derived from it” (c w , 18:60; s s , 88). Frye implicitly warns us to preserve the heroic energy of the heroine, for he faults playwrights who are guilty of “rationalizing” the titanic power of the heroine, playwrights like George Bernard Shaw, for example. Shaw’s “lady of pain” is Saint Joan, the sacrificial virgin whose infinite energy Shaw turns in a mundane and ideological direction: “Shaw portrays [Saint Joan] as belonging, not so much to a higher world as to a future one, a world of

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nationalism and Protestantism” (c w , 18:56; s s , 82). For Frye, this is a “pedantic and misleading treatment” of Joan (c w , 18:56; s s , 82) because it obscures the mythology of the virgin sacrifice – explicitly linked by Frye to “a vision of human integrity” and to “a redemptive quality” suggested either by the heroine’s “innocence and goodness, or, in other contexts, by her astuteness in management and intrigue” (c w , 18:59; s s , 87). A transhistorical feminist intervention into she-tragedy will need to explore more fully to what extent woman can be considered a subject, and to what extent shifting notions of subjectivity in different historical periods intersect with the tragic predicaments of women. For example, Catherine Belsey has argued, in the context of early modern tragedy, that women’s “subject-positions are radically discontinuous,” and that, because “the autonomous subject of liberal humanism [Man] was in the making, women had no single or stable place from which to define themselves as independent beings. In this sense they both were and were not subjects.”39 The prescient use of the term “abject,” in the mouths of Rowe’s Jane Shore and Otway’s Monimia, might lend itself particularly well to an interrogation of woman’s shifting subjectivity, for the female scapegoat as abject (neither subject nor object), when expelled from the social body, releases what Julia Kristeva has called the “powers of horror,” and “simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject”40 – that very “autonomous subject of liberal humanism” interrogated by Belsey. The label of “heroine” can in fact do a kind of recuperative work for the history of this autonomous subject, ravelling up the sleeve of liberal humanism. On the contrary, the power of the “heroine” to undo social codes and divisions is consistent with the pharmakos as described by Jacques Derrida: she is the pharmakon (both poison and medicine) and the pharmakeus (the bewitching sorceress). The she-tragedy heroine as pharmakos thus rides the line between resistance and submission, heroism and irony, romance and tragedy. Further analysis and feminist exploration are needed to investigate how the concepts of proairesis, freedom, and agency play out in she-­ tragedy. Is woman set up for a fall in a way that man is not, in (she-) tragedy? After all, in Calista’s final scene, when her father asks her why she “turn[ed] to folly,” she says, “It was because I loved, and was a woman” (5.73). Given the plays’ persistent allusions to the Fall and the strong influence of Paradise Lost in the period, one wonders whether, particularly at the historical moment of she-tragedy proper, Eve is not, in

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relation to Adam, always already guilty. The statement by Milton’s God, “I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood though free to fall” (Paradise Lost 3.98–9) – which Frye takes as a gloss on “the archetypal myth of tragedy” (c w , 22:197; a c , 211) – uses staunchly exclusive language. Milton’s Adam, as “Man,” certainly has a higher calling than does Eve (“He for God only, she for God in him” [4.299]). How can a feminist critic then adapt Frye’s brilliant point that “the real basis of the relation of Milton’s God to Adam is the relation of the tragic poet to his hero” (c w , 22:197; a c , 211), undercut as this point is by Frye’s doubly exclusive language? Both the tragic poet and the tragic hero are conceived of as male, and the possibility of feminizing that relation does not fully materialize in Frye’s theorization of tragedy. Frye points out that tragedy narrows the “free act” of proairesis into a process of causation, so that the hero at the end of tragedy experiences the counterpart of comedy’s discovery or anagnorisis, namely, “the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken” (c w , 22:198; a c , 212). As Frye brilliantly posits, “If the hero was not sufficient to have stood, the mode is purely ironic; if he was not free to fall, the mode is purely romantic” (c w , 22:197; a c , 211). Whether or not the historical moment admits the possibility that woman is as free to fall as “Man,” feminist criticism would do itself a disservice if it could not at least set the playworld against an imagined or hypothetical world in which the life of women, that is, the act of choosing for any woman, might be as “comparatively free” as the life of Frye’s generic “he” (c w , 22:198; a c , 212). While hinting that the body of the woman is paramount to the working out of tragic sacrifice – “there is something maternal about the green world” (c w , 28:11) – Frye does not pause to consider the gendered difference that her represented body makes. A feminist reading cannot fail to notice that when the central character in the heroic or ironic phase of tragedy is a woman, her tragic predicament is defined by her body – her status as a mother, a virgin, a wife, an adulteress – in a way that the male hero’s generally is not. The tradition of tragedy marks the body of the heroine before and after the flowering of she-tragedy in the hands of Otway, Rowe, and company. To collapse the difference between the tragic heroine and the male tragic hero, or to refuse to pay attention to the embodied difference of the tragic heroine in the broader trajectory of

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she-tragedy, would be to ignore the sexed dimension of the body as a motivator of primary concerns, along with the ritual dimension of drama itself. Women’s bodies do make a difference in tragedy, both in terms of performance, as Brown and Marsden have so valuably shown, and in terms of articulating primary concerns that resonate urgently in the circumscribed lives of women under patriarchy. Rape and sexual violence were commonly represented violations of women’s bodies on the earlymodern stage,41 and the post-Restoration one.42 But sexual violence is  also a fact and a potentiality in women’s everyday existence. If, as Catherine MacKinnon writes, “To be rapable, a position which is social, not biological, defines what a woman is,”43 female spectators will necessarily respond differently to the threat of female violation when they see it on stage. A fuller feminist reading of the she-tragedy heroine would want to take on Frye’s rather cavalier dismissal of the difference between male and female virgins in his “Our Lady of Pain” chapter (c w , 18:49–50; s s , 73–4). The semiotic difference of the tragic heroine from the male tragic hero is in fact crucial to the affects at which tragedy aims, even before women mount the stage during the Restoration. Drama is an intensely social medium, which challenges attempts, like Frye’s, to separate mythos, or story, from its social function. For not only does drama hold the mirror up to nature, delivering a mimesis (an artistic recreation) of society in the fictional playworld, but the emotional impact of drama is also social, directed at the audience, or the society on the other side of the stage. Examining she-tragedy as a “technology of gender,” in Teresa de Lauretis’s terms, underscores the social, or ideological, function of this dramatic mode still further (cf. Marsden, Fatal Desire, 13). Frye’s attempt to separate ideology, or secondary concerns determined by the “social contract,” from primary concerns becomes vexed in the domain of she-tragedy, where the heroine and the female spectator are denied the same fundamental human rights as men in power (the right to determine love and sexuality, to own property, to enjoy freedom of movement in society). In Jane Shore, even the primary concern for food and drink is denied the heroine. Yet the potential resistance of the heroine to her tragic situation and to control of her body makes her a potential champion of human rights. Indeed, Rowe’s Calista struck a chord with the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as her husband William Godwin reported: “She regarded her sex, in the language of Calista, as ‘In every state of life the

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slaves of men.’”44 The reference is to the famous speech by Calista in The Fair Penitent, which decries women’s loss of primary freedoms: “How hard is the condition of our sex, / Through ev’ry state of life the slaves of man!” (3.39–52). A similar set speech condemning the injustices of the gender order can be found in the mouths of Rowe’s Jane Shore (1.2.180– 93), Otway’s Monimia (2.373–80), the strong women in Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies, such as Beatrice-Joanna (2.2.107–9), and as far back as Classical heroines such as Euripides’ Medea. The most paradigmatic of these feminist speeches, for Rowe and his age, is perhaps Emilia’s impassioned speech to Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello, which criticizes the double-standard that allows husbands freedom and subordinates wives to their control: “Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell, / And have their palates both for sweet and sour / As husbands have” (4.3.92–5). Shakespeare’s appeal to women’s embodied experience of inequality here suggests that the emphasis of tragedy centred on the woman lands squarely on primary concerns. With the aid of Frye’s comprehensive structural framework of mythology, she-tragedy opens from the narrow ideological retellings of female sacrifice in the eighteenth century on to a liberating vision of heroic potential, where the transhistorical she-tragedy heroine becomes the feminine principle of redemption that holds the promise of another kind of “double vision,” perhaps even another apocalypse in Frye’s universe – a mirror of woman’s “revelation to man.” Though she-tragedy lays bare the literary and cultural scapegoating of women, a feminist reading of shetragedy must work to undo this scapegoating. The woman’s body is marked in the semiotic system of she-tragedy, in a way that Frye paradoxically both notices and ignores; and it is this very difference of the female as feminine that precipitates the tragic downfall. However, it is important to recognize that she-tragedy does more than stage the victimization of a passive woman. In moving woman toward heroic status as a suffering agent, and in foregrounding the tragic force of the gender order that produces woman as scapegoat, she-tragedy becomes a prototypical feminist instrument for social change. We arrive, then, by way of ending, at a new definition of she-tragedy, to undergird a fuller feminist intervention: she-tragedy is the cultural (re)iteration of the myth of the sacrificial woman, ritually reenacted as a verbal structure, which achieves its revolutionary potential by placing the primary concerns of the woman centre stage.

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Chanting Down Babylon Innocence and Experience in the Contemporary Humanities J . Edwa rd Cha m b e r l in

I came to the University of Toronto and Northrop Frye because of the songs of William Blake, to work on the poems of Wallace Stevens. In the wisest of ways, Frye kept me from coming to conclusions about either. So I thought the best way I could pay tribute to his enduring legacy, one hundred years after his birth, might be to open up some questions that I began thinking about nearly fifty years ago – often in conversations with Frye – about songs, their relationship to the health of the humanities, and to the hopes we have both for the humanities and for ourselves. Frye persuaded me – and I took some persuading – that talking and writing about stories and songs was worth doing. It’s not entirely obvious – after all, story and song invite surrender rather than scrutiny, and they routinely take us to a place where analysis is renounced while belief is embraced. Still, religious traditions around the world have made a practice and often a profession out of commenting on sacred texts, and secular traditions have followed suit within their own canonical categories; and it is no surprise that a United Church minister such as Northrop Frye should have dedicated himself to the task as a kind of pastoral duty. That said, he was always sending us back, as he himself constantly went back, to the texts and performances themselves – and in my case, befitting his sense of obligation in the humanities, to work with the Aboriginal communities who were performing and presenting their land claims in the stories and songs that constitute their national literatures, telling who they were and where they belonged in the same way, as Frye recognized, that Canadian literature was doing for the rest of us. And Frye’s analytic mapping of literature, to take up Robert Bringhurst’s fine image, became

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for me not so much a guide to navigation as a way of identifying the ceremonies of belief appropriate to particular genres and styles, and of identifying the common ground that they represent across culture.  By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Zion. As for our harps, we hanged them up upon the trees that are therein; For they that led us away captive required of us a song, and melody in our heaviness … How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?1 Come we go burn down Babylon one more time … Come we go chant down Babylon one more time … For them soft! Yes, them soft! … And how I know – and how I know – and that’s how I know: … With music, mek we chant down Babylon. My title, clearly, comes both from the Bible and from Bob Marley, whose song­“Chant Down Babylon” takes up the burden of Psalm 137 and transforms it into a celebration of the power of song. Music is the key, he chants, and not just any music but Jah’s music, the Lord’s song in Burru drumming (with Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari), in the rhythms and melodies of mento and ska, in rocksteady (in which The Melodians sang “The Rivers of Babylon,” which has become an anthem for many Rastafarians), and, for Marley, in reggae. Siting up the presence of slavery in the continuing exile of his people from Africa, but dismissing the violence called for in the concluding lines of the psalm – “O daughter of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones” – he prophesies that since Babylon is soft, with the corruptions of material comfort, chanting will destroy it. “Fulfilling the book,” as Marley sings in his “Redemption Song.” And how do I know all this? he asks. That’s how, he answers. Robert Schumann answered a question about the meaning of a composition by playing it again.2 William Blake responded to a question (in “The Tyger”) about the fearful symmetry of creation by piling on more questions. Marley turns to the rituals of riddle and charm, the sponsor of song, to chant down Babylon. And Frye turned to myth – fables of identity – at

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the heart of story and song. It is an ancient turn, given romantic form in an allegory by Percy Bysshe Shelley about love that was, as Frye would say, deeper than – or deep within – desire. Some say, when nights are dry and clear, And the death dews sleep on the morass, Sweet whispers are heard by the traveller Which makes night day: And a silver shape like his early love doth pass Upborne by her wild and glittering hair, And when he awakes on the fragrant grass, He finds night day.3 “One Love,” Marley would chant, an unlikely seeming song given the fierce Old Testament convictions of Rastafari, but a song that turns death into life, and darkness into light, the song of the Lord of Love – the phrase is that of the stern elder who brought Marley into Rastafari, Mortimo Planno (known as Ras Kumi).4 But Ras Kumi and Bob Marley knew that strangeness was at the heart of any song. And of chant especially, with its characteristic repetitions, heard in chants as varied as Yaqui deer songs and Navajo horse songs with their catalogues of subtly differentiated exhortations, in the poetic rhythms of Edgar Allan Poe and T.S. Eliot, and in the plainsong of “Kyrie Eleison” (“Lord have mercy”), which Suzanne Langer – Frye’s sometime sparring partner – celebrated as the exemplar of song,5 rendering words as “things, active and efficient,” verbal action rather than visual representation, “part of the passion” in William Wordsworth’s phrasing from his prefaces to the Lyrical Ballads. Language that brings something into being, the way constitutions and covenants bring nations into being, or creeds make belief. The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used to talk about what he called the “weirdness coefficient” of magic.6 Call it what you will, song can be especially weird. It is weird, for instance, how a sad song can bring comfort, sometimes by making us cry … which, oddly enough, a happy song can do too. I want to pick up this paradox by turning to one of the times of crisis that (as Michael Dolzani has eloquently recognized) deeply affected Frye – the Depression and dust storms of the 1930s on the great

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plains and prairies of the Americas, something of which he witnessed in 1934 when, as a student minister in the United Church that summer, he served congregations in rural Saskatchewan, and which certainly reinforced the radical foundations of his democratic socialism. During that time, when people across Canada and the United States were losing their farms and their families, they listened to the radio. And the songs that gave them courage to live another day were often very sad songs, songs well acquainted with the grief many of them were experiencing, songs such as “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” recorded by Emry Arthur in 1928, famously sung later by Ralph Stanley, and well known these days as a musical theme in the movie about Odysseus in Appalachia called O Brother, Where Art Thou? (its title is from Preston Sturges’s Depression-era comedy Sullivan’s Travels). It’s a song with cheerful lines like “For six long years I’ve been in trouble, / No pleasure here on earth I found, / For in this world I’m bound to ramble, / I have no friends to help me now”; and although it does hold out a kind of consolation – “I’ll meet you on God’s golden shore” – its ultimate appeal when it first became popular was the way in which it seemed to defy the despair that was gripping everyone, struggling in a land that had become as strange to them as the singer’s fair-weather friends, or as Babylon was to the Israelites. Or they listened to Jimmie Rodgers singing, in the face of deadly ­disease as well as brutal depression, one of the blues songs in black and white that caught the imagination of his generation. Bob Marley later took some of his melodic lines from Jimmie Rodgers, and it was said that during the dirty thirties the typical weekly shopping list for a southern family on the edge of destitution was a pound of butter, a slab of bacon, a sack of flour, and a new Jimmie Rodgers record. When I rained down sorrow, It rained all over me … I’m fighting like a lion, Looks like I’m going to lose ’Cause there ain’t nobody Ever whipped the T.B. Blues Or maybe it was Hank Williams, asking,

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Did you ever see a robin weep When leaves begin to die? Like me he’s lost the will to live I’m so lonesome I could cry. Although all of these are from a particular folk and popular music tradition, there are versions of such songs everywhere, all over the world and from time immemorial. Songs that pick you up on your way down, that put you back together by telling you what it’s like to be broken apart, that make you feel better by making you feel bad. Songs that mirror the magic of Charlie Chaplin making “a grail of laughter of an empty ash can,” in the poet Hart Crane’s words.7 Songs like “Irene, Goodnight,” written and sung by the great Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. Sometimes I live in the country. Sometimes I live in town. Sometimes I take a great notion To jump into the river and drown. Such songs surrender to mystery, to forces beyond human understanding, rather than promise mastery. And they highlight the contradictions of literature and life, the ones that Blake illustrated and Frye illuminated. The anthropologist Michael Asch, who taught for years at the University of Alberta, tells a story that takes this in another direction. Michael’s father was Moses Asch, the founder of Folkways Records who recorded many of the great singers and songwriters of the twentieth century from all over the world, a legacy of song and spoken word for which Michael arranged the inspired stewardship of Smithsonian Folkways Records after his father died. He recalled for me a kitchen-table conversation at their New York house between Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. Dylan was playing a new song he had just written, with a series of impossible questions reminiscent of William Blake, and a memorable refrain: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.” Seeger, notorious both for his patience and his impatience, immediately took issue with the sentiment, arguing that the answer was to be found in the hearts of men and women, not blowing in the wind.

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Was this a conflict between innocence and experience? Or between fate and freedom, written for modern times? Or between reality and the imagination, the staple of stories and song? And do we need to take sides? Perhaps … because although none of these contraries is exclusively poetic or philosophic, all are deeply political. And yet – this is the conclusion both Seeger and Dylan reached in their songwriting, if not around the kitchen table – each mirrors the other. We only know reality through our imaginations, as Oscar Wilde argued, convincing Northrop Frye.8 A good song is both a walk in the storm and a shelter from it. Freedom may be just another word for nothing left to lose, as Kris Kristofferson wrote and Janis Joplin sang (in “Me and Bobby McGee”), but that can mean simply waiting until fate makes its play. A great code can be either something to be interpreted, like scripture or song or certain natural phenomena, or something to be obeyed, like a genetic code or a binding covenant or the weather. And a blowing wind can be a lot like a breath of inspiration, or the immanent spirit. That said, the exchange between Seeger and Dylan reminds us of a fundamental question at the root of language and literature. In what sense, and in what way, do we believe a song or a story? By chance, or by choice? Where does their power to change the way we think and feel come from? Inside or outside ourselves? Can we chant down Babylon alone, or must it be in congregation or community? We go on believing a story after it is finished;9 but not so, or at least not in the same way, with a song, which is believable only if, as, and when it is sung. Just think of the seriousness with which we sing – and for a moment perhaps believe – our national anthems … gone in an instant when the game starts. Or a religious creed, which we chant in the company of others, as though we need communal support to sustain our belief in its strange words, which in some religious traditions are even in languages we don’t understand. Let me return for a moment to my title, and a story about Lead Belly, chanting down Babylon from the Texas jail to which he had been led away captive. He secured an early release – so the story goes – by singing to the governor of Texas, Pat Neff. Asked by a newspaper reporter what inspired him to sing to attract the attention of Governor Neff, Lead Belly said he thought of the Biblical Paul and Silas in prison …

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how they both sang and prayed at the midnight hour … and how the earth trembled and the walls of the prison shook, the locks on the cell doors fell and they walked out free. Lead Belly visioned – those were his words – the Biblical miracle and it seemed as if the very locks on the prison cell were dropping. But they weren’t. Then he sang a song he had composed himself. He waited until Governor Neff made his regular visit to the prison and then serenaded the Texas chief executive with the lines, “If I had you, Hon. Governor Neff, where you got me, I’d wake up in the morning and set you free.”10 Making night day. I should add that there is evidence that this account is at least partly true; and what more can we ask of any good story? People want to believe it, and that in itself says something. And while I know that I am preaching to the converted about the power of songs, and about the source of some of their inspiration in the Bible, perhaps readers may be a little uneasy about these kinds of songs. In partial response, I turn to historian Donald Akenson, who notes that in his profession the founding fathers have generally been Classical figures such as Herodotus and Thucydides, mirroring the dominance of Classical languages and literatures in the humanities. “The classics,” Akenson writes in his book God’s People, “were [to historians] so much classier as intellectual antecedents than were the texts that had their origin in the oral traditions of a group of Semitic nomads from the back of beyond.”11 These, of course, were the traditions of the wandering balladeers who composed the Old Testament, the gossipers and gospelers of the peasant villages of Galilee, which brings the psalms more comfortably into the company of rural folk songs and reggae riddims. And Frye, who began his academic career at Victoria College under the mentorship of J.D. Robins (as well as Pelham Edgar and E.J. Pratt), took from them – especially from Robins and Pratt – an abiding interest in the traditions of ballad and folk song as both individual and communal creations, a point he emphasized in his 1954 review of the landmark publication Folk Songs of Canada, edited by Edith Fowke and Richard Johnston.12 I have other academic precedents on my side when it comes to Lead Belly. In 1934, he performed with folklorist John Lomax in what was advertised as a “smoker-cum-sing-a-long” at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia. And that wasn’t the first

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time the MLA had welcomed the performance of folk songs. Twenty-five years earlier at the 1909 MLA annual meeting in New York, John Lomax had presented a paper on cowboy songs, singing some of the selections that were to appear in his landmark book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, published the following year with an introduction by President Theodore Roosevelt. Lomax had just finished graduate studies at Harvard under the supervision of G.L. Kittredge, successor to the distinguished scholar Francis James Child, editor of the famous collection English and Scottish Popular Ballads – often referred to as the Child Ballads. One of Lomax’s startling revelations in his presentation and his book, lost sight of for most of the last century until recovered recently by contemporary western folklorists, was that some of the most popular of these ballads – such as the iconic “Riding Old Paint, I’m Leaving Cheyenne,” which was the last song played at dances in the west when I was growing up – were composed by African Americans.13 In the case of “Riding Old Paint,” it was a man named Charley Willis. It is now estimated that African Americans made up roughly a quarter – that’s right, 25 percent – of the cowboys on the frontier in the last decades of the nineteenth century, chanting down the restless cattle on those long and, given the constant risk of stampedes when the weather turned, dangerous trail drives. The picture – the myth – of the western plains and prairies, and indeed of settlement of the Americas, needs adjusting … and those songs may finally make that happen. Which will in turn make other things happen, chanting down another Babylon. The songs of this tradition had a couple of other features. One was the way in which, whether about cowboys or sailors or loggers or miners, the casual tone of the ballads defied the everyday dangers of those occupations, confusing intensity and nonchalance in what T.S. Eliot once described as the signature of a good poem.14 Many of these songs were also shared among different livelihoods, with lyrics changing only slightly from one trade to another. So a “Lumberman’s Lament” from New Brunswick turns into “A Cowboy’s Life” in Alberta, both of them chronicling a weary, dreary, and dangerous life, while the Scots deportation song “Caledon-i-o” becomes “Canada-i-o” when some loggers working far away from home get hold of it, and the song then migrates south to tell of troubles on the “Trail of the Buffalo.”15 This tradition of song was defiantly communal, picking up traditions of the ballad stretching back into the mists of time, and it resolutely

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resisted the concerns about property rights and appropriations of voice that preoccupy us these days. This was more than making a virtue of necessity, though policing such matters was virtually impossible until recently, except within specific linguistic, cultural, or religious communities. But there was a principle involved. I once heard Pete Seeger say that when he was challenged about the fact that he was not Aboriginal or African or Asian, and he had never been poor or picked cotton or ridden the range or collected peat for a turf fire, so how could he sing songs about these people and their lives, he always answered like this: “I just heard a wonderful song, and I thought you might like to hear it.” Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism depends on the same principle, reiterated (in the face of considerable antagonism) by Robert Bringhurst when he published his A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and their World. Folklore, and the ballads and folk songs that it embraced, were still very much part of literature departments back at the turn of the twentieth century – Child became the first professor of English at Harvard in 1876, followed by Kittredge, and together they shaped its new Department of Modern Languages (whence the MLA) – as modern literature negotiated its way clear of Classical curricula, and connections across cultures and disciplines were more casual and perhaps more convincing than they are today. Scholars such as Child and Kittredge and Lomax – and the Northrop Frye I knew – would have had little hesitation about putting the ballads I have mentioned into the company of, say, the sea chanty imagined by Andrew Marvell, supposedly sung by seventeenth-century Puritan refugees on their way to the island of Bermuda, giving thanks to their Lord for what they pray will be a safe passage over a strange sea. What should we do but sing his praise That led us through the wat’ry maze Unto an isle so long unknown,  And yet far kinder than our own? … He hangs in shades the orange bright Like golden lamps in a green night … Thus sang they in the English boat  A holy and a cheerful note:  And all the way, to guide their chime,  With falling oars they kept the time.16

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Were these real people? The question brings to my mind an anecdote from Jonathan Foer, compiler of the New American Haggadah – the traditional guide book for the stories, ceremonies, and songs of the Jewish Seder. Asked by his son “Is Moses a real person?” he replied “I don’t know … but we’re related to him.”17 So while we don’t know about Marvell’s seafarers, refugees ever since are related to them, boat people chanting the melodies of righteousness in the rhythms of rowing. The humanities have been returning to the question “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” with some urgency over the past fifty years, wondering how anyone can write poetry after the Holocaust or whether postcolonial peoples can sing their songs or tell their stories in the languages and liturgies of colonial heritage. But over and over again they do just that, the subaltern speaking with a clarity that the clever critic doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge, while survivors of dislocation and dispossession offer impossibly eloquent testimonies to their exile in Babylon. As Blake said, and Frye celebrated, all it takes is imaginative energy; and speaking or listening, writing or reading, that takes all of each of us.  Sometimes, however, burning down Babylon seems the best bet. Listen to the poet Philip Levine, telling of his time working at Chevrolet Gear and Axle, a factory near Detroit, where he grew up. I was a humiliated wage slave employed by a vast corporation I loathed. The job I worked at each night was difficult, boring, and stupefying, for there in the forge room the noise was oceanic and the heat in our faces ferocious. And the work was dangerous; one older man I worked with lost both hands to a defective drop forge, and within a few hours – after a cursory inspection – the machine was back in operation being tended by another man equally liable to give his body for General Motors.… Since I worked only eight hours a day and slept only five or six in the morning, I had plenty of time to attack my poems. My inspiration at the time was Keats … Unquestionably his life had been far harder than mine, and yet he had made immortal poetry out of it. Of course, he had the advantage of being a genius, and another advantage too: he had inherited a tradition that by age twenty three he knew intimately, one that showed

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him how to achieve Beauty. He also knew something I wouldn’t learn for years: that beauty mattered, that it could transform our experience into something worthy, that like love it could redeem our lives. I wanted fire and I wanted gunfire. I wanted to burn down Chevrolet and waste the government of the United States. Then, Levine finds a poet, in a library – and here, with respect to all librarians, I remember the late Richard Landon, director of the Fisher Rare Book Library, a farm boy from the Okanagan and a friend to many of us. “Standing in the stacks of Wayne State University library,” Levine recollects, “I read my life in [these] words.” I denounce everyone who ignores the other half, the half that can’t be redeemed, who lift their mountains of cement where the hearts beat inside forgotten little animals and where all of us will fall in the last feast of pneumatic drills … A wooden wind from the south, slanting through the black mire, spits on the broken boats and drives tacks into shoulders. A south wind that carries tusks, sunflowers, alphabets, and a battery with drowned wasps … This was the song of a young Andalusían named Federico García Lorca, known to Levine at the time only as the writer of lovely, exotic gypsy ­lyrics. But here Lorca was writing of his first visit to New York, when he had cried, “I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” Later, taken by a friend to view Wall Street at midnight – a timely image these days – he had cried, “I do understand” … just as Wordsworth finally understood – Rastafarians would say “overstood” – the meaning of his encounter with the old leech-gatherer. Lorca’s encounter with New York and the poetry it sponsored gave Levine both the courage and (after another thirteen years’ work) the craft to write, as he puts it, a poetry of violence

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“held in abeyance and enclosed in … a musical form”: in Levine’s case, this was the violence of the Detroit race riots in the 1960s expressed in the chanting rhythms of his poem “They Feed They Lion.” Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candour of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow …18 The Babylon of capitalism that Levine and Lorca “overstood,” like Marley’s Babylon with its grim legacy of slavery, is not simply the place identified in the Old Testament, kin to heathen Egypt and Rome and the centre of comfortable commerce described in the book of Revelation (recounted by Frye in The Great Code and, to a lesser extent, Anatomy of Criticism and Words with Power). It is a Babylon of the imagination, signalled by a separation from everything that gives mental and spiritual as well as physical nourishment, and it underlies the argument in all of Frye’s writing. It may even be the prison house of language, which Wordsworth described (in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”) as closing upon the growing child. It constitutes not just a form of captivity and exile, but a coruscating uncertainty about what it is we are exiled from … with the question “Where is home?” conflating “Where is here?” – Frye’s Canadian calling card, from his “Conclusion” to Literary History of Canada (c w , 12:339–72) – with “Where is there?” Is this a riddle, or a marriage of heaven and hell? “We live in a place / that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves / And hard it is in spite of blazoned days” writes Wallace Stevens in “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction.” That’s the bad news. The good news is, in the words of Stevens that follow, “From this the poem springs.” As do the songs of Babylonian exile. Which means that for many, and certainly for a United Church minister such as Northrop Frye, or the daughter of a Methodist minister such as Kathleen Coburn – distinguished editor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Frye’s long-time colleague at Victoria College, who died the same year he did – the condition of exile is the condition of the fallen world, where we are simultaneously imprisoned by the limits of our imagination

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and overwhelmed by its infinite capacity for wonder and dread. The only freedom from this condition, with its invidious choice between being marooned on an island or drowning in the sea, is through what Blake – looking to the new Jerusalem – called a mental fight against Babylonian systems. The problem, as always, is identifying them. For Blake, and for Frye, they are the dark Satanic mills of institutions and ideologies that bewilder and benight rather than empower and illuminate us. “Shitstems,” Peter Tosh called them, with Rastafarian wit and wisdom. “Shitstems” of thought and feeling that insist on themselves, compelling us to accept the terms of their temporary categories, hypnotizing us into the delusion that their elements are permanent, their priorities immutable, the choices they present to us both urgent and irrevocable. When we submit to them, we move closer and closer to what Henry David Thoreau described as a life of quiet desperation, in which we are always under pressure to react to what is happening outside ourselves, or elsewhere. That’s if we are lucky. If we are unlucky we become violent, ready to burn down Babylon; or we go mad; or we surrender to the first thing that offers us survival of any sort, or any sort of power. It is only through what Stevens called the pressure of the imagination that we can resist this overwhelming pressure of reality.19 None but ourselves can free our minds, sang Marley, echoing the words of the Jamaican prophet Marcus Garvey (from a speech he gave at Liberty Hall in Nova Scotia in 1937).20 In this sense, all songs are resistance songs. Much more than simple protests, they cross boundaries without losing a sense of place, creating a centre of belief from which we can move out to live in the world of events. When the Doukhobors of  south central British Columbia came to Canada from Russia, they brought with them a spirit of defiance, distrusting authority not because it was particularly oppressive here but because it was generally secular – heathen, like Babylon. In ritual purging, some would regularly burn all their possessions, including their houses; but they knew that chanting down Babylon was both more righteous and more radical. The singing of psalms is like honey, they said, adding that if they were ever to stop singing they would cease being a people.21 There’s a story told in Ireland about an ancient debate in which the legendary Finn asked his companions about the finest music in the world. First his son Oisin proposed the call of the cuckoo singing from the highest hedge bush; then Oscar, their comrade-in-arms, suggested the ring of

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a spear on a shield; and soon the others in the group joined in: the belling of a stag across the water; the baying of a pack of dogs in the distance; the song of a lark in the morning; the laughter of a happy girl; the whisper of one making love. Then Finn himself was asked. “The music of what happens,” answered the great chief. “That is the finest music in the world.”22 That is the music I have been talking about. It is also, of course, Edmund Spenser’s music and William Shakespeare’s, John Milton’s and William’s Blake’s, Emily Dickinson’s and William Butler Yeats’s and Wallace Stevens’s, all of them poets featured in one of my favourite books of Frye’s, the collection of essays titled Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. It was dedicated to another singer of the signs of the times,23 his colleague E.J. Pratt, whose imagination transformed his own time of economic depression and war into song that shaped a distinctly Canadian identity. So I come to this with my canon loaded; but this evening I want to add another name. “I hate a song that makes you feel like you are not any good,” said the notable twentieth-century folk singer and songwriter I have in mind. He came into this fallen world on exactly the same day as Frye – July 14, 1912. They never met, but they shared a love of hymn tunes and spiritual homilies, taking up the music of what happens with a sense of mission that was unmistakable, and a sense of humour that was unexpected. “Trouble ain’t worth nothing, so I won’t charge nothing to fix it,” this songwriter announced at the beginning of his autobiography, titled Bound for Glory. Unlike Frye, he wasn’t fond of school; but he did love the typing class and  became an exceptionally good typist, just as Frye did, spending countless hours on the typewriter, and working with a discipline that astonished his friends and exhausted his family. He was also gifted at drawing and painting; but he was best known for the thousands of songs he wrote, hundreds of them still sung to this day, and a half dozen of them among the best known in the English-speaking Americas. He was born – on that memorable day one hundred years ago – in a town far from Sherbrooke, Quebec (Frye’s birthplace), called Okemah, way down yonder in the Indian nation that Huck Finn lit out for to escape the civilizing daughter of Babylon called Aunt Sally, a territory that just five years earlier had become the state of Oklahoma. The names he was given – Woodrow Wilson – were as serious as Herman Northrop, and as filled with parental hopes of success; both their fathers ran small businesses.

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But those names, like the businesses, were soon cut down to size, and they became Woody Guthrie and Norrie Frye. They were like nobody else; and (in my opinion) they are, in their quite different ways, bookends for the humanities in the twentieth century, confusing innocence and experience so completely that it becomes impossible to tell which is which.24 Guthrie was a driven man, called upon by forces he only partly understood to bear witness to his time and place and people, chanting down Babylon in ballads. He did so with extraordinary energy, and a songwriter’s rare economy. Witness John Steinbeck, writing to Guthrie with sardonic affection after he heard his “Ballad of Tom Joad,” the hero of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath: “Dear Woody … You little bastard. How could you say in a dozen verses what it took me an entire novel to write?” Both of them knew he couldn’t. And that he just had. (Guthrie – who had a well-crafted prose style – later wrote his own novel about life in the Dust Bowl, titled House of Earth. It was published in 2013, edited and with an introduction by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp.) All his life, and like Norrie Frye, Woody Guthrie was a teacher. They both had an instinct for archetypes, and an urge to translate them into local currency; and there was an awkwardness, a naiveté, about Guthrie’s folk songs that was not so far from that of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. So Jesus Christ, in one of Guthrie’s songs, becomes a hardworking man who travelled through the land, counselling the bankers and the preachers and the sheriffs and the teachers to help the poor and the downtrodden. In another, he celebrates the orchards of peaches and prunes, the beets in the ground and the grapes on the vine, that the exile migrant workers have made fruitful, following the Biblical injunction to turn dry desert ground into “Pastures of Plenty,” which became the title of Guthrie’s song. Caught with some folks in a Texas dust storm in the drylands of the Great Depression, he described how “we watched the dust storm come up like the red sea closing on the Israel children. When that thing hit we all run into the house. Dust so thick it was black, the overhead light bulb looked like a cigarette. Those who were religious thought it was the end, someone in the group said, ‘So long, it’s been good to know you.’”25 And yet another song came into being. Shortly after John Lomax and his son Alan put together an album of what they called Cowboy Songs, Ballads and Cattle Calls for the Library of Congress, Moses Asch recorded Guthrie

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and Cisco Houston in his studio in New York. Guthrie described the sessions: “We tried hilltop and sunny mountain harmonies and wilder yells and whoops of the dead sea deserts, and all of the swampy southland and buggy mud bottom sounds that we could make.” I think William Blake would have understood that instinct; and if he did, Frye would have too. Woody Guthrie seemed to be at home everywhere, and nowhere. He was a wanderer in his life, a homebody in his work. Norrie Frye might seem to be the opposite; but to take a line from his fellow Maritimer Hank Snow, he’d been everywhere in his imagination;26 and as his Notebooks demonstrate, that could be hard travelling. And for all of Guthrie’s travelling throughout the United States, the central theme of his work had to do with home. Taking some of the lines of his song “I ain’t got no home in this world anymore” from a gospel tune sung by the Carter Family, Guthrie said: “this old song to start out with was a religious piece … but I seen there was another side to the picture. Reason why you can’t feel at home in this world anymore is mostly because you ain’t got no home to feel at.” Exiled in a strange land. Frye understood that better than almost anyone writing about literature in the twentieth century. So it is fitting that Guthrie’s best known song, “This land is your land,” had to do with home. Its tune is from the Carter Family’s gospel hymn “When the World’s on Fire,” and it was written at the end of the Depression years, supposedly in exasperation with – or as Guthrie, said simply bored by – Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” I used to have trouble with the song, because it seemed to ignore the first peoples of the land, but I didn’t know its original verses, one of which goes like this: As I went walking I saw a sign there And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.” But on the other side it didn’t say nothing, That side was made for you and me. For people unsure of who they were and where they belonged, “This Land Is Your Land” sang them home. Just as a hymn composed in 1897 by a teacher at a Methodist mission in South Africa, and set to the Welsh hymn tune “Aberystwyth,” gave those exiled in their homeland by the “shitstem” that was apartheid a way to sing themselves home. “Lord Bless

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Africa” it translates from !Xhosa. The Lord’s song in a strange land, and the anthem of southern African liberation: “Nkosi Sikelel i’Afrika.” However we calibrate such things, the music of Woody Guthrie and his friends and fellow travellers, and their successors, made a difference. From the singers of civil rights to the chroniclers of migrant labour, from Les Rice’s “The Banks Are Made of Marble” to Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl’s “The Springhill Mine Disaster,” with its haunting lyrics “we’re out of light and water and bread / So we’ll live on song and hope instead,” and from Joni Mitchell and Buffy Sainte-Marie to Stan Rogers and Ron Hynes, the music of what happens played – and still plays – to audiences that could at least begin to understand, as Lorca and Levine began to understand, and could sing out new songs of “overstanding” to chant down Babylon.  Frye began The Educated Imagination (1963), his classic account of the relationship between literature and life and our exile in Wallace Stevens’s “place that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves” by asking us to suppose that we are shipwrecked on a South Sea island. The first thing you do is to take a long look at the world around you, a world of sky and sea and earth and stars and trees and hills. You see this world as objective, as something set over against you and not yourself or related to you in any way … you soon realize that there’s a difference between the world you’re living in and the world you want to live in. The world you want to live in is … not an environment but a home; it’s not the world you see but the world you build out of what you see. You go to work to build a shelter or plant a garden … transform[ing] the island into something with a human shape. (c w , 21:438–40; e i , 16–20) We can never be sure about that shape, but this uncertainty, this unease, generates the wonder and the dread upon which the imagination depends. For the particular island in the South Seas that Frye imagines is surrounded not only by the wildness of the natural world, waiting to be domesticated, but also by the trackless sea, both wonderful and dreadful.

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“There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence of the sea. No cries announcing birth. No sounds declaring death,” wrote the Newfoundlander (and Frye’s close friend) E.J. Pratt.27 Which makes the sea around us – to take the title of Rachel Carson’s memorable book, published in 1951 – the ultimate wilderness, alien and indifferent, beyond not only property systems but all systems of human devising; and makes the choice I mentioned earlier, between being marooned on an island and drowning in the sea, the ultimate sign of the human condition. Frye’s image of a South Sea island has an obvious literary heritage, with one of its most famous expressions being in a poem by the eighteenthcentury poet William Cowper titled “Verses, supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk.” Selkirk had been marooned on an island off the coast of Chile in 1704; but – at least in Cowper’s rendering – he has an educated imagination, with Biblical dispensations ready at hand. “I am monarch of all I survey,” the poem begins, “My right there is none to dispute; / From the centre all round to the sea, / I am lord of the fowl and the brute.” Selkirk’s story, told by the captain of the ship (Woodes Rogers) that picked him up, was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719); but the popularity of Cowper’s poem, written over sixty years later, went far beyond literary circles, and in its day it was almost as well known as the song “Amazing Grace” is in ours. And there was a connection. Cowper’s name may have faded in some circles, but in his lifetime he was very well known. No less a literary critic than Coleridge called him “the best modern poet”; and Cowper became a household name because of his collaboration with the Reverend John Newton in writing a series of several hundred hymns to go along with weekly sermons in the little village of Olney in England, where they lived. One of them was Cowper’s celebrated hymn “God moves in a mysterious way, / His wonders to perform”; another, by the former sailor and slaver John Newton, was “Amazing Grace.” It was a hymn that eventually set the all-time record for crossover hits, and for chanting down the Babylons of personal as well as public crisis. Which is appropriate since, as Frye insisted, we will always be outcasts and castaways, trying to imagine a human world in which we are at home even as we contemplate a natural world in which we see ourselves – with our curiously human self-consciousness – as strangers, educating our

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imaginations by institutionalizing them, surrounding ourselves with systems – “shitstems” – of our own devising, marooning ourselves at home. Turning our island into a garrison. Frye was uncertain whether schools and universities were places where we could break out of these garrisons and chant down these Babylonian systems, just as he was uncertain about breaking out of the prison house of our languages, whose unique architectures were illustrated by linguists and anthropologists of Frye’s generation. He knew from experience that a university, like Babylon, could become quite comfortable, which discouraged the Methodist in him; but he also knew that it was sometimes “full of doleful creatures, and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there” … which, encouragingly, was how the prophet Isaiah described Babylon when it was in ruins. In any case, and like his beloved William Blake, Frye was less interested in surveying the wreckage of the old Babylon than in laying the foundations of a new Jerusalem; and insofar as we share this ambition, the humanities will always have work to do. How we do it will – also always – remain to be discovered, or invented. Institutions of education have displayed an infuriating variety of forms and functions over the long run of human history, filling empty vessels or drawing out innate capacities, stimulating free expression or encouraging restraint, raising a consciousness of kinship or breaking down the barriers of race and class, intensifying our attachment to particular places or celebrating universal ideals. The humanities may be able negotiate between these, but only if it remains conscious of its own imperial ambitions. Otherwise, it will end up sounding like Alexander Selkirk, the monarch of all it surveys, an intellectual Nobodaddy. It has happened before, as Blake knew well, and Frye understood better than most of us. Which means that we must encourage the kind of humility in the humanities that Frye’s work, for all its magisterial poses, constantly encouraged, reminding us of the covenant in wonder that is at the heart of our relation to story and song. In this spirit, I want to close by highlighting the notions of innocence and experience which are inseparable from the cultural contrariness I have been promoting, recalling a story told by Sir John Lubbock. He was a remarkable character, a nineteenth-century English politician who saw more important legislation through the British Houses of Parliament than anyone of his generation (including the creation of bank holidays,

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the first non-religious statutory vacations in Great Britain since the Middle Ages, which were affectionately called St. Lubbock’s Days by a grateful public). He was also a notable scientist, the founder of the discipline of prehistoric archeology who coined the terms “neolithic” and “paleolithic,” and a naturalist who was the world’s leading authority on ants, bees, and wasps, routinely cited by his friend Charles Darwin. He left the Babylonian school system of Victorian England, Thomas Gradgrind’s domain, at the age of fourteen to go to work in his father’s business, but he later became both Vice-Chancellor of the University of London and Principal of the Working Men’s College (which, I hasten to add, also admitted women). And he was the inspiration behind what were known as Sir John Lubbock’s Hundred Books, a selection of great books published by George Routledge in sturdy inexpensive editions in the 1890s and the basis for the “great books” programs that began at the turn of the twentieth century in colleges and universities across North America (except that Lubbock’s list had more titles from different languages and cultures than most core curriculum programs do today, with the Koran and the Bible alongside Confucius and Sakoontala and the Persian poet Firdausi). So Lubbock might have been excused for being impressed with his own knowledge of things. But he was almost completely independent of the institutional systems in which he worked and played, and he loved to tell stories that exposed the limits of his understanding. One of my favourites goes like this. One day, walking in a Norwich field, he met an old man standing next to a pile of stones, and struck up a conversation. “Do you know how these stones were made?” Lubbock asked, expecting to instruct the simple soul. “Why, sir, I ’spect they growed, same as ’taturs,” answered the man. “Well,” rejoined Lubbock, a lifetime of association with the greatest natural and physical scientists at the ready, “but if they lay there for fifty years, they would not get any bigger.” “No, sir, of course they wouldn’t,” replied the countryman. “Same as ’taturs. Take ’taturs out of the ground and they stops growin.’”28 “I could have laughed myself to scorn to find / In that decrepit man  so  firm a mind,” says Wordsworth after his encounter with the

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leech-gatherer on the northern moor, reflecting that he seemed “like a man from some far region sent, / To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.” The humanities need to be ready for such admonishments. My distinguished colleague Len Findlay, a Scots Covenanter like the leech-gatherer, tells me that when he types “sacred” it usually comes up as “scared.” Our imaginations need to be educated, Frye said; but they also need to be fostered, as Wordsworth’s and Frye’s and Blake’s and Guthrie’s were, by beauty and by fear. After listening to the Tagish (Yukon First Nation) elder Angela Sydney talk about how Crow made the world, storyteller Dan Yashinsky asks what it would be like to live in a world brought into being by a cosmic force named after a chattering, thieving bird that you see every day.29 It’s a nice question, because it invites the kind of unease that I have been talking about, and because the story of the trickster crow is no scarier, surely, than living in a world shaped by the fearful symmetry of tigers and lambs, where sad songs make us happy, and where our favourite trick is to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar.  A friend of mine, Gary Holthaus, tells a story about his grandfather’s milking stool. It had only one leg, not uncommon in the farming world, and looked awkward and broken when it lay on the ground in the cowshed between milkings. Until his grandfather came and sat on it. Then the three of them – his grandfather, the cow, and the milking stool – took on a graceful balance, shifting this way and that to accommodate each other and the work that had to be done. I like to think – and I am pretty sure that Northrop Frye would insist, with his patented polemical energy – that the humanities, even when lying there looking broken and awkward, can also take on a graceful balance when we are at its work, moving with our subjects, doing what is to be done, becoming what we are meant to be, held up by a precarious faith in our imaginative equivalent of that one-legged milking stool.

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Notes

Ro bert Bri ng hurst: Readi n g b e t we e n th e B o o k s   1 The best summary of this under-studied issue is still, I think, a lecture delivered by Michael Krauss in Chicago in April 1996. It is published as “Linguistics and Biology: Threatened Linguistic and Biological Diversity Compared,” in c l s 32: Parasession on Theory and Data in Linguistics. Taking as his reference point “the eve of the Neolithic invention of food production, widely about 10,000 years ago,” Krauss estimates the human population at 5 to 10 million and the number of human languages at 5,000 to 20,000 (71).   2 Norris, “Editor’s Foreword.”   3 Ayre, “Northrop Frye and the Chart of Symbolism.” This was preceded by Ayre’s important essay “Frye’s Geometry of Thought: Building the Great Wheel.” Typeset versions of the diagrams Frye himself drew while writing the Anatomy are published in c w , vol. 23.   4 Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, 58.   5 The third edition (1993) of the Princeton Encyclopedia is not labelled as such, but New is added to the title. Frye is mentioned countless times in its 1,400 pages, but none of the nearly 2,000 articles is written by him. His celebrated article on allegory, which the original editors especially prized, is replaced by one written by Jon Whitman. Frye’s especially important “Verse and Prose” entry from the first and second editions is reprinted in c w , 27:178–90. It grows in part out of a lecture he gave at Kenyon College in 1959 entitled “Literature as Possession” (c w , 21:295–306).   6 Frye’s published statements on the Koran have been conveniently assembled by Robert Denham at the Fryeblog website: “Frye on Islam and the

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Koran,” ed. Robert Denham, Fryeblog, The Educated Imagination: A Website Dedicated to Northrop Frye, http://fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/frye-onthe-koran-and-islam; http://fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/frye-on-islam-andthe-koran-from-the-collected-works-ii-cw/.   7 Frye also mentions the oracularity of the Koran in “Verse and Prose” (see note 5).   8 Nick Enfield, “Credit Tests,” Times Literary Supplement, 5629, February 18, 2011, 13.   9 The bogus translations from Haida were the work of Hermia Harris Fraser (1902–1995). Frye encountered them first in A.J.M. Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry, then in Fraser’s own The Arrow-Maker’s Daughter and Other Haida Chants. The bogus translations from Halkomelem (full of badly spelled but quite genuine Halkomelem words) were the work of Eloise Street (1893–1975) and are found in her Sepass Poems. Many of Street’s confections were first published in The Native Voice (Vancouver) and Smoke Signals (New York) – periodicals edited, published, and read by Native people. Fraser and Street were continuing a tradition followed earlier by Constance Lindsay Skinner (1877–1939), whose fake translations from Haida, Kwak’wala, Tsimshian, and Nuxalk had deceived a number of editors, including Harriet Monroe, George Cronyn, and Ralph Gustafson. In Cronyn’s The Path on the Rainbow, several of Skinner’s inventions sit side by side with genuine translations by John Swanton from Haida and Tlingit and by Franz Boas from Tsimshian and Kwak’wala. Gustafson’s first Anthology of Canadian Poetry for Penguin (1942) opens with two of the same surrogates. They were removed in the second edition, and Gustafson never again attempted to include indigenous work in his Penguin anthologies. Frye’s appraisals of Fraser and Street are partially reprinted in The Bush Garden (45, 178), and more fully in c w , 12:138, 180, 270, 487. I am grateful to Sean Kane and to Robert Lecker for several of these references. 10 I’m grateful to my friend Seán Virgo, of Eastend, Saskatchewan, for checking in September 2012 to confirm that this was so. 11 Compare c w , 27:399; Spiritus, 108. 12 At Michael Dolzani’s suggestion, and in the hope that Frye scholars may find it useful, I include here a synopsis of Frye’s relations with two of these figures: Boas and Sapir. Because he annotated a copy, we know that Frye read Boas’s Primitive Art (1927). He does not appear to have read much

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further, and Boas goes unmentioned in Frye’s work. In 1953, however, in his annual “Letters in Canada” roundup, Frye describes Sapir and Harold Innis as “the two most important Canadian thinkers to date” (c w , 12:103; Bush Garden, 10). That is not an appraisal to take lightly.   Innis was recently dead when Frye saluted him in this way. But why, in 1953, did Frye couple him with Sapir, who died in 1939? Frye had never met Sapir and had never mentioned him in print before. The belated compliment means, I think, that Frye had just encountered the rich, fat, and posthumous Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. That book may have led Frye back to other things, including Sapir’s important work Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech.   Sapir was not in fact a Canadian, but he had worked in Canada from 1910 to 1925 as head of the Anthropological Division of the Geological Survey. His 1949 Selected Writings includes, among many other things, the first publication in English of his essay “The Psychological Reality of the Phoneme” (first published in French in 1933). That paper is a major landmark in linguistics. It was also an answer to one of Frye’s dreams.   The most recent Frye publication known to me is “Intoxicated with Words: The Colours of Rhetoric,” University of Toronto Quarterly 81, no. 1 (2012): 95–110. This engaging essay was discovered by Robert Denham in one of Frye’s notebooks after the Collected Works had closed. Denham suggests – rightly, I think – that it was composed in the 1940s. Frye laments in this essay that there is “at present no psychology of phonetics.” Actually there was, but Frye had not yet seen it. The psychological dimension of phonetics is what linguists call phonemics, and the distinction between phonemics and phonetics owes almost everything to Sapir. “The Psychological Reality of the Phoneme” is one good reason – though not the only one – why Frye would have been startled and impressed by Sapir’s Selected Writings. 13 These studies appeared initially in specialist journals and were not collected into book form before 1981. They are conveniently available now in Hymes’s “In Vain I Tried to Tell You” and Now I Know Only So Far. There were, however, earlier studies of great value, including Paul Radin’s Literary Aspects of North American Mythology and Melville Jacobs’s The Content and Style of an Oral Literature. 14 O’Grady, “Northrop Frye at Home and Abroad,” 22. The lecture is also published online at http://www.jeanogrady.ca/frye/ideas.html.

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Ian Balf our: Northrop F rye b eyo n d B e l ie f   1 On Frye’s very speedy typing and how it helped finance his move from Moncton to attend university in Toronto, see Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography, 51.   2 Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, especially the introduction and chapter 1.   3 Quoted in Badiou, Being and Event, 212. The remark occurs in the section on Pascal.   4 Frye to James J. O’Donnell, July 27, 1982, in Northrop Frye: Selected Letters, 234–5.   5 Frye to William Park, December 3, 1976, in Northrop Frye: Selected Letters, 194–5.   6 Ibid., 195. The fuller passage reads: “The Bible is the only place in our tradition where one can get a view of literature that goes beyond literature.”   7 Ibid.   8 It makes sense that Frye’s writings on Milton and Blake (aside from the separate volume, Fearful Symmetry) would be grouped together in vol. 16 of the Collected Works. See Angela Esterhammer’s introduction to this volume, especially xix.

G ordon Tesk ey: Prophec y Me e ts H is to ry   1 The “Third Book” is Notebook 19 (1964–72), published as Volume 9 of c w . For the critique of symmetry I am indebted to Sean Kane’s Spenser’s Moral Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), especially chapter 2, “The Paradoxes of Idealism,” 53–83. The subject of this essay was suggested to me by what I happen to have read on the problem of time symmetry (T-Symmetry). Symmetry, or reversibility, is a deep property of the physical laws with which we describe the universe. But as the Second Law of Thermodynamics indicates, such symmetry is inconsistent with the observable universe, where time goes in one direction and cannot be reversed. I first heard of this problem and others concerning physical law in a lecture by the master of Massey College, Patterson Hume, to whose memory this essay is dedicated.   2 The four senses of Scripture were codified around 1330 by Nicholas of Lyra in the introduction to his massive Biblical commentary: the literal, the

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allegorical (referring to Christ), the moral, and the anagogical, this last referring to “those things which are to be hoped for in the state of blessedness to come” (“ea quae sunt speranda in beatitudine futura”). Nicholas chooses the word Hierusalem on which to exemplify his method in the famous mnemonic verses, “the literal teaches the things done; the allegorical what you should believe; the moral what you should do; the anagogical where you are going” (“Litera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia”). Patrologia Latina, vol. 113, 28 C–D. See De Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 1.155.   3 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 31.   4 That being in Heaven was the state not only of being in Jerusalem but of being in the body of Christ was not ratified as doctrine until the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 31; and Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 1.155–6.   5 Paradiso, canto 30, lines 124 and 130. La Divine Commedia, vol. 3.   6 Milton, plate 2, in William Blake’s Writings, 1:318, lines 13–16; Numbers 11:29.   7 Complete Prose Works, 2.558–9. I have regularized spelling and punctuation.   8 Frye edited a selection of Milton’s poetry and prose in 1951, shortly after Fearful Symmetry: “Paradise Lost” and Selected Poetry and Prose. The notes and introduction show immersion in all Milton’s works at this time.   9 The book and the two essays are republished in c w , vol. 16, with bibliographical information by Angela Esterhammer. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965) was based on four lectures given at Huron College, University of Western Ontario, in 1963. The fifth essay, “Revolt in the Desert,” was originally published in Modern Philology 53 (1956): 227–38. In the lectures at Huron College, Frye spoke from point-form notes on index cards. His secretary Jane Widdicombe (as she told me) typed the lectures from a tape recording that arrived unexpectedly in the mail. “The Revelation to Eve” was published in Paradise Lost: A Tercentenary Tribute, ed. Balachandra Rajan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 18–47. The papers in that ­volume were given at the University of Western Ontario in 1967 to commemorate the first edition of Paradise Lost (1667). “Agon and Logos” was published in The Prison and the Pinnacle: Papers to Commemorate the Tercentenary of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 135–63. The papers were given at the University of

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Western Ontario on the tercentenary of the single volume in which Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were published (1671). In short, most of Frye’s writing on Milton was done under the pressure of time for some occasion. 10 John Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography, 264–5; Michael Dolzani, “Introduction,” in c w , 20: xxii–xxiii. “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” University of Toronto Quarterly 30 (1961): 109–27. I give a somewhat more complicated picture of the genesis of the Spenser article in a review of c w 20 in University of Toronto Quarterly 77 (2008): 368–9. 11 William Blake’s Writings, 1:318, lines 7–8. 12 “She told me seriously one day, ‘I have very little of Mr. Blake’s company; he is always in Paradise.’” Note she said it seriously: she believed Blake was always there. The remark was addressed to the art student Seymour Kirkup, who repeated it to Lord Houghton, 25 March 1870. Cited in G.E. Bentley, Jr, The Stranger from Paradise, 336. See Bentley, Blake Records, 221. 13 For Blake’s radical politics, see E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast, and David Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire; for Frye’s valuable review of Erdman, see c w , 16:237–8. 14 Cf. c w , 22:104–5; a c , 112–13. See A.C. Hamilton, Northrop Frye, 114–15. See also Creation and Recreation, The Larkin-Stuart Lectures (in c w , 4:35– 82), where the image of a giant human body-mind filling the cosmos is recast as that of a coral insect “with enough consciousness and vision to be able to see the island it has been helping to create” (c w , 4:51; Creation, 25). See also c w , 4:80–2; Creation, 72–3. 15 Milton, “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 2:235. 16 Book and line numbers for further references to Paradise Lost cited in text (as p l ). 17 See c w , 22:17–18; a c , 16. 18 For the Guggenheim Fellowship Application, see c w , 20:3–5. For the “Third Book,” see Michael Dolzani’s introduction to vol. 20 of c w , xlv. For Frye’s still more ambitious plan to write what he facetiously called an “ogdoad,” an eight-volume synthesis of everything, see Dolzani, c w , 20: ix, xxiii. 19 The passage was written probably before 1963. (Personal communication, Robert D. Denham, May 13, 2013.) See c w , 9:369n217.

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20 An argument could be made in Frye’s favour from Areopagitica, in which Milton speaks of the search for truth in this world being contiguous, like the stones of the Jerusalem temple, but continuous in the next world, like the body of Christ. “When every stone is laid artfully together, it cannot be united into a continuity, it can but be contiguous in this world.” Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, 2.555. Cf. p. 549 for the image of the disarticulated body of the Egyptian god Osiris gathered up by Isis, one of Milton’s memorable figures for the search for truth. But note that these images refer to the unity of truth, not to the unity of Christians and not to their unity in Christ. 21 See Andrew M. Cooper, William Blake and the Productions of Time (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2013), 242–3, for discussion of the four-dimensional ring torus. Also, 223n., where Cooper cites the influence on Blake of the article “Dimension” in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–72). As Cooper notes, another source of inspiration for Blake may be the seventeenth-century Platonist Henry More’s Enchiridion metaphysicum (1671). 22 Mark Lussier, “Scientific Objects,” 120–3. 23 Blake, Milton, plate 14. I am indebted to Armand Himy, “Une Quète de soi: Milton,” 190–2, for Milton’s descent into time and space – through the Shadow, the Polypus, the “tourbillion” or vortex, and the heart of the sleeping Albion – and his entry into the “tarsus” of Blake’s left foot – tarsus recalling Saint Paul, who was from Tarsus, in Asia Minor. 24 Cf. c w , 14:334 and 410–11 passim. 25 See Robert Alan Sparling, Johann Georg Hamann, 179, 202, and 302n10. For interpretation of Biblical figures in bono et in malo, see Carol V. Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 23–8; and Stephen A. Barney, “Visible Allegory: the Distinctiones Abel of Peter the Chanter,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, Harvard English Studies 9, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 87–107. 26 “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” lines 13–14 and 28, in The Collected Works of William Butler Yeats, vol. 2, The Poems, ed. Richard Finneran, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1997), 239. 27 Vala, or The Four Zoas, manuscript p. 138, line 25, William Blake’s Writings 2:1291.

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Mi cha el Dolz a ni : F rom th e D e f e ate d   1 Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems, section III, no line numbers.   2 Spengler, The Decline of the West.   3 Still, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play.   4 The trilogy consists of Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010).   5 For an account of the supplementing of Spengler’s influence with Vico’s in Frye’s later work, see Cotrupi, Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process.   6 The observation appears in a number of his works, but see Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, 54–6.   7 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries, 378, no line numbers.   8 Blake, “The Everlasting Gospel,” in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 511, lines 75–6.   9 Ridley, The Rational Optimist.  10 See Dolzani, “The Ashes of Stars,” 312–28.  11 See for example Winnicott, “The Concept of the False Self,” 65–70.

Robert T. Tally J r : Power to the Educated Imagin atio n !  1 Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously.   2 See Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.   3 Jameson, Seeds of Time, xii.   4 Sargent, Utopianism, 29.   5 See Jameson, Seeds of Time, 55–7.   6 See Tally, Spatiality, 146–54.   7 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 148–9.   8 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 101, translation modified.   9 Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 11.  10 Miéville, quoted in Sarah Crown, “What the Booker Prize Really Excludes,” The Guardian, Monday, October 17, 2011, n. pag. http://www. guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/oct/17/science-fiction-chinamieville.  11 Miéville, “Editorial Introduction,” 42.  12 Ibid., 42–3.

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 13 Ibid., 46.  14 Ibid., 42.  15 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, viii.

G a rry Sherbert: Ve r um Factum   1 Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 113, 114.   2 Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 152.   3 Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 7.   4 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 69. Page numbers for further references to The Political Unconscious cited in text (Political).   5 Discussions of Frye and Jameson, though sometimes helpful, are often incidental and made in passing. See for example Robert David Stacey’s article “History, Tradition, and the Work of Pastoral: Frye’s ‘Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada,’” 86, 88. See also Jonathan Hart’s brief analysis of the Frye-Jameson relationship in terms of the difference between myth and ideology, in Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination, 199.   6 Derrida, Acts of Literature, 48.   7 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, quoted in Jay, Marxism and Totality, 36.   8 Jay, Marxism and Totality, 35–6.   9 Oxford English Dictionary.  10 Fisch, “Vico and Pragmatism,” 424.  11 Derrida, “Performative Powerlessness,” 467–8.  12 Lucy, A Derrida Dictionary, 33.  13 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 196.  14 Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, xx.  15 Ibid., xvi.  16 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 196.  17 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 311.  18 Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 54n.  19 Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 317. 20 Heidegger, Basic Writings, 125. 21 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 191. 22 Ibid., 186. 23 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 42. Page numbers for further references to The Inoperative Community cited in text (Inoperative). 24 Longinus, “On the Sublime,” 97.

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25 Frye, c w , 22:98; a c , 105–6, quoted in Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 71–2. 26 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 822, quoted in Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 1. 27 Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms,” 74. 28 Weber, “Capitalizing History,” 21–2; Bennington, Legislations, 76. 29 For the undecidable structure of the neither-nor in the tradition of deconstruction, the reader may begin with the concept of “the neuter” in Maurice Blanchot’s The Step Not Beyond, 77 and 108–9. Dying, for instance, is neither life, nor death. Derrida develops and goes beyond Blanchot’s neutrality, which is meant to undo binaries, even the Hegelian dialectic of opposites, in his essay “Pas,” translated as “Pace Not(s),” and especially in “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” 144. For Derrida, the neither-nor structure is one form of a non-negative negation that “denegates,” or “un-negates,” putting two terms, normally defined as separate and simple opposites, back into a relation of exchange. A ghost, for example, is neither dead, nor alive. 30 Nancy, “Myth Interrupted,” 48. Page numbers for further references to “Myth Interrupted” cited in text. 31 Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” 84, quoted in Nancy, “Myth Interrupted,” 51. 32 Derrida and Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, 58. 33 Jameson, Postmodernism, 51. 34 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 152, quoted in Jameson, Postmodernism, 51. 35 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 117. 36 Ibid., 93. 37 Dante Alighieri, The Banquet, 121. 38 Heidegger, Being and Time, 63. 39 Derrida, Rogues, 84.

Alexander Dick : Frye, Derri da , a nd the Unive r s it y to Co me   1 Frye means “culture” in the Arnoldian sense: the “good” of history and the world which we “strive” to make a part of ourselves. Frye cites Arnold

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frequently in his early writings on education, but these citations taper off significantly during the 1970s. For more on Frye and Arnold, see Perkin, “Northrop Frye and Matthew Arnold.”   2 See Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French’s introduction to Writings on Education, in c w , 7:xxxi–xxxiv; Denham, “Common Cause”; Dubois, Northrop Frye in Context, 37–58; Hart, Northrop Frye: the Theoretical Imagination, 162–88; and Jean Wilson, “Remedial Metaphor.”   3 For the “university without condition,” see the essay “The University Without Condition” in Without Alibi, 202–37.   4 For Frye’s mixed opinion of Derrida, see Words with Power (c w , 26:72; w p , 68–9) and Late Notebooks (c w , vols 5–6 passim). For analyses of the similarities in their thought, see Girard, “Lévi-Strauss, Frye, Derrida”; Happy, “The Reality of the Created”; Hutcheon, “Frye Recoded”; and Sherbert, “Frye’s Double Vision.”   5 It is also the case that both thinkers thought of themselves in the main as outsiders in relation to the academic establishments in which they worked. As his recent biographer, Benoît Peeters, recounts, Derrida’s relationship with the philosophical establishment was never good: he failed to enter the École Normale Supérieure twice and did not attain his full professorial qualifications until the 1980s. With his background in Methodist theology and without a PhD, Frye likewise never felt altogether comfortable with the hyper-professionalism and theoretical jargon now common to English departments. But neither Derrida’s nor Frye’s respective early discomfort with the academic establishment can account for the intensity and occasional difficulty of their thoughts on education in their later careers.   6 My admittedly cursory account of the student protests comes from Benoît Peeters’s Derrida: A Biography, 192–200, and Bill Readings’s The University in Ruins, 135–49. The student revolts in Europe and America were part of a global campaign inspired by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. See recent studies by Bradley, Harlem vs. Columbia University; and Fink et al., 1968: The World Transformed.   7 See, for instance, Terry Eagleton, “Don’t Deride Derrida,” The Guardian, Friday, October 12, 2004.   8 Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, 195.   9 Ibid., 196–7.  10 Ibid., 199.

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Notes to pages 118–30

 11 John Ayre remarks that the counterculture placed a great deal of stock in the very myths of revolution and renewal that Frye had been teaching. It is highly ironic, then, that Frye himself was more than a little skeptical of the whole movement. Several outspoken protestors (though none from Victoria College), in turn, labelled him an academic dinosaur (Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography, 323–4). 12 Jan Plug (and others) translated most of this work into English as Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? (2002) and Eyes of the University (2004). 13 François Mitterand, translated by Plug in Derrida, Eyes of the University, 194. 14 The Collège International de Philosophie was founded in 1983 with Derrida serving as its first president. Information on the college’s current mandate can be found at www.ciph.org. 15 Derrida, Eyes of the University, 208. 16 Ibid. 17 Sherbert, “Frye’s Double Vision,” 67. 18 The whole-part distinction appears here as two apocalypses: a “panoramic” apocalypse, which is the vision of Revelation that concludes the Bible, and a “second” apocalypse, in which the reader-subject completes himself. Yet, as Frye goes on, that completeness is only posited, or rather promised, by the text of the Bible. 19 Frye published his most extensive essay on Shelley, “Prometheus: The Romantic Revolutionary,” as chapter 3 of A Study of English Romanticism (New York: Random House, 1968) from a set of lectures he delivered at Case Western University in 1966. The second edition of Fearful Symmetry appeared in 1969. Frye was, in other words, thinking about Shelley and the Romantics as the student protest movement was getting under way. 20 White, “Menace of Philosophy,” par. 9–15. 21 Ibid., par. 13. 22 Derrida, Eyes of the University, 93. 23 Ibid., 92–3. 24 Balfour, “Paradox and Provocation,” 51, 59. 25 Derrida, Without Alibi, 202. 26 Terdiman, “Determining the Undetermined,” 431. 27 Agamben, State of Exception, 40. 28 Rajan, “Derrida, Foucault, and the University,” 146. 29 Aravamudan, “The Character of a University,” 52.

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Thomas Wi ll a rd: F rye’s Pr incip l e s of Li tera ry Sy mb o l is m   1 Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed August 1, 2012, http://books. google.com/ngrams.   2 See f s c w , 14:410–11; f s , 424, where Frye suggests that Blake’s visionary method could coordinate work in the social sciences. Also see the discussion of this claim in Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, 68–150.   3 See the remarks of Gordon Wood in Denham, ed., Remembering Northrop Frye, 95.   4 For details on these visits, see Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography.   5 REL 230. Co-taught in the 1970s with the late Jay Macpherson. Their collaboration is reflected in Frye and Macpherson, Biblical and Classical Myths.   6 Reading requirements for the honour course in English Language Literature for the years 1921–22 and 1946–47 are given in Harris, English Studies, 59 and 86, respectively.   7 “Foreword,” in Harris, English Studies, ix–xii, and republished in c w , 7:595–8. Harris, English Studies, remains the best guide to Toronto’s English courses, in addition to the regular academic calendars and course catalogues. Frye wrote the foreword and there discussed the fate of the old Honour courses.   8 See the chapter on Brett in Slater, Minerva’s Aviary, 233–77.   9 Frye, “Across the River and out of the Trees,” reprinted in c w , 12: 548.  10 Brett, A History of Psychology.  11 Brett, ed., Representative English Poems.  12 Frye’s contributions as a research assistant are apparent, for example, in the notes on Blake in the 1935 edition (1:934–6). Representative Poetry eventually ceased publication, but remains alive as a very substantial and up-todate poetry website: http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/. Thirty of Frye’s notes on Blake can easily be found on the website (accessed January 14, 2015).  13 Frye owned and annotated the 1955 reprint of Whitehead’s Symbolism; Frye book no. 702 in the E.J. Pratt Library, Victoria University in the University of Toronto.  14 Blake, The Works of William Blake, 1:235–420, 235–45.  15 Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Essay, 196, 284.  16 Garnett, William Blake: Painter and Poet, 34.

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17 Blake, The Complete Writings, 825. 18 Knight, An Inquiry, 28; for a good study of Knight, see Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment, 1–16. 19 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 25. 20 See, for example, Sanden, On the Elements of Literary Taste. 21 Richards, preface to Principles of Literary Criticism, 5. 22 Richards, Practical Criticism, 202. 23 See Arnold, “The Function of Criticism,” 21–2. 24 Conversation with the author, July 1982. Frye anticipated a similar transformation of his undergraduate Bible lectures, following the recent publication of The Great Code. 25 The oft-quoted phrase, explaining why any and all language must be treated as une système où tout se tient, does not appear in Saussure’s published lectures (Cours de linguistique générale), but was preserved and made famous by a student, in the preface to a work dedicated to Saussure (Meillet, Introduction à l’étude, x). 26 Willard, “Archetypes of the Imagination.” 27 Blake, The Complete Writings, 778. 28 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 323, chap. 12. 29 Lindenberger, “Teaching and the Making of Knowledge,” 275; see Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography, 231–2. 30 Wellek, “The Term and Concept,” 257, 269. 31 F[riedman], “Symbol,” 1251. 32 Frye, c w , 21:140–2; “Three Meanings,” 15–16; de Man, “The Double Aspect of Symbolism,” 13. De Man’s editor dates the essay to his graduate study in the period of 1954–56. When Frye wrote the symbolism essay, he confessed that he was “only guessing what Mallarmé means” (c w , 8:465). 33 These “two modes of understanding” are discussed in Anatomy (c w , 22:67–8; a c , 73–4) and diagrammed in The Great Code (c w , 19:75; g c , 57). Frye sometimes referred to these modes as the original insight behind the Anatomy. 34 See, for example, Steuwe, Clearing the Ground. 35 See the remarks of his former colleague David Hoeniger in Denham, ed., Remembering Northrop Frye, 153. 36 I doubt that Frye knew the pioneering work of his older contemporary Louise Rosenblatt (see Literature as Exploration). He might have

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appreciated her pragmatic approach, which was influenced by her Columbia University colleague John Dewey. 37 Fish, Is There a Text?, 13–14. 38 Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. 39 Fish, Surprised by Sin. 40 Willard, “The Visionary Education.” 41 Blake, The Complete Writings, 716. 42 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 628. 43 Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” 290. 44 The second half of Words with Power grew directly from the practical criticism in the graduate symbolism course (c w , 26:127–265; w p , 139–313). 45 Buryn and Greer, The William Blake Tarot. 46 Blake, The Complete Writings, 661, plate 34.

M ark I t tensohn: Romanti cis m a nd th e B eyo n d of Lang uage   1 Wordsworth, “Resolution and Independence,” lines 113–17. Line numbers for further references to “Resolution and Independence” cited in text.   2 Joyce, Stephen Hero, 211.   3 Most, if not all, modern studies on the literary epiphany agree on this point. See Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel; Bidney, Patterns of Epiphany; Hartman, “Towards Literary History”; Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel; Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience; and Langbaum’s more recent article, “The Epiphanic Mode”; as well as Tucker, “Epiphany and Browning.”   4 See, for example, Langbaum, “The Epiphanic Mode.”   5 See Beer, Romanticism, Revolution and Language (a chapter of which is ­tellingly entitled “Politics, sensibility and the quest for the adequacy of ­language”); Elfenbein, Romanticism and the Rise of English; Keach, “Romanticism and Language”; Marggraf Turley, The Politics of Language.   6 Gleckner, “Romanticism and the Self-Annihilation of Language,” 173–4.   7 Based on Nichols, I will employ the terms “literary epiphany” and “modern epiphany” interchangeably.   8 Nichols, Poetics of Epiphany, 21. Page numbers for further references to Poetics of Epiphany cited in text (Poetics).

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  9 Augustine, St. Augustine’s Confessions, 1:465, 465, 467.  10 Joyce, Stephen Hero, 213.  11 Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 9.  12 Augustine, St. Augustine’s Confessions, 1:467.  13 Tucker, “Epiphany and Browning,” 1211.  14 In the Gospel of Luke, the only other gospel to address Jesus’s birth as a moment of epiphany, the linguistic transference of the Christian vision is similarly stressed: “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them, and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling-clothes, lying in a manger’ … And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in the manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child” (Luke 2:8–17). I am aware that negative theology questions this view to some degree. For a discussion of epiphany in negative theology, see Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel.  15 This is a feature that the representation of the epiphany in Wordsworth shares with the sublime. For a discussion of the ineffability of the sublime, see, for example, Shaw, The Sublime, 99–104; or Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime.  16 As Nichols and others have argued, the overlap between the two concepts is surprisingly broad and definitely allows for the conflation of the two terms.  17 The passage is located at 12.225–61 in the 1850 Prelude. Further references cited in text are to book and line numbers from the 1850 Prelude.  18 For a discussion of how the depiction of epiphanies in literary texts follows specific patterns, see Bidney, Patterns of Epiphany.  19 Tucker, “Epiphany and Browning,” 1208. 20 Hart, Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination, 72. 21 Hamilton, Northrop Frye, 115. 22 Salusinszky, “Frye and Romanticism,” 58. 23 Ibid., 71. 24 Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation, 48.

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25 Russell Perkin adds another such moment based on an account in John Ayre’s biography which describes Frye as being “hit by” the idea of the Orc-Urizen cyle in the Four Zoas “while sitting in the bored husband’s seat in a woman’s wear shop on Yonge St. just below Bloor” (Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography, 177). For Denham’s list, see Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary, 20. 26 Cayley, Northrop Frye in Conversation, 48. 27 Ibid., emphasis added. 28 Frye to Pelham Edgar, August 9, 1948, in Northrop Frye: Selected Letters, 37. 29 Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary, 95–6. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 94. 32 Joseph Adamson, comment on “Frye’s Epiphanies,” by Robert Denham, Fryeblog, The Educated Imagination: A Website Dedicated to Northrop Frye, https://fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/2009/08/31/fryes-epiphanies/. 33 Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary, 94. 34 An example for Frye is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” In Coleridge’s poem, the speaker’s inability to speak of the visionary song is characteristic of this state of identity, in which the hidden and inner parts of the mind take over for the place and presence of the divine (c w , 17:114). 35 As Piper notes, “Romanticism is what happens when there are suddenly a great deal more books to read, when indeed there are too many books to read,” Dreaming in Books, 12. 36 John Stuart Mill, quoted in Keen, ed., Revolutions in Romantic Literature, xvi. 37 Piper, Dreaming in Books, 5.

Ada m Ca rter: Corre s p o nd e n ce s   1 Ian Balfour’s Northrop Frye reflects in various places on parallels between Frye’s thought and de Man’s. In “What’s a Meta Phor?” Patricia Parker explores “the connection as well as the divergence between Frye and de Man on the copular “identity” of metaphor” (115).   2 De Man, Blindness and Insight, 26. Page numbers for further references to Blindness and Insight cited in text (Blindness).   3 Abrams, “Structure and Style,” 96.   4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On Poesy or Art,” quoted in Abrams, “Structure and Style,” 100.

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Notes to pages 168–86

  5 See William Wimsatt, “The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery”; Earl Wasserman, “The English Romantics”; and René Wellek, “Romanticism Re-examined.”   6 William Wordsworth, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” lines 3–4 and 7–8, quoted in De Man, Blindness, 223–4.   7 See Hubert Dreyfus’s Being-in-the-World for a lucid explication of Heidegger’s critique of the subject-object model of epistemology.   8 See Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis, especially chapter 9, “Prometheus and Orpheus” (91–8).   9 The most comprehensive, authoritative study of the poetry of the period is D.M.R. Bentley’s The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880–1897.  10 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 205.  11 Bentley, while not discounting the social, cultural influences of a late-­ Victorian colonial society on these poets, likewise affirms the strong influence of British Romanticism on the form and content of their work (18 and passim).  12 As a sidebar I note how surprising it is to see such a definition of parody articulated in 1956, and rather casually as increasingly common critical currency, given that it is so close to the definition of parody Linda Hutcheon would (re)introduce as relatively new almost three decades later.  13 Ferry, The New Ecological Order, 141.  14 De Man, Aesthetic Ideology, 129–64.

Troni Y. G rande: “ Our L a d y o f Pa in”   1 In “Sexism and the Senior English Literature Curriculum,” Galloway charges Frye with sexism because the “fundamental androcentricity of his position excludes half of humankind” (26). Bogdan has a more ambivalent relationship and a closer engagement with Frye’s work in her book Re-Educating the Imagination, but in “The (Re)Educated Imagination,” Bogdan still faults Frye’s theory of the educated imagination for its exclusion of the embodied woman (92), and for its “hierarchical and androcentric” ordering of literary response (88). A similar feminist critique is mounted by Burgess in “From Archetype to Antitype”: she argues that Frye’s dismissal of the role of goddesses in prebiblical typology ultimately provides evidence of a “cloven patriarchal mind-set,” and that Frye’s use of “sexual symbolism … is founded in the rampantly misogynist thinking

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evident in some quarters at the dawn of the Christian era.” For a fuller answer to these charges of sexism against Frye, see my article “The Interruption of Myth in Northrop Frye.”   2 Grande, “The Interruption of Myth.”   3 Thomas and Hare, comp., Restoration and Georgian England, 18.   4 Howe, The First English Actresses, 108–28.   5 Ibid., 108.   6 Brown, Ends of Empire, 102.   7 Brown, “The Defenseless Woman,” 443.   8 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 79.   9 Ibid., 65.  10 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 72–3.  11 Rowe, Tragedy of Jane Shore, 5.120. Further references to act and line numbers from Tragedy of Jane Shore cited in text.  12 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 107.  13 Rowe, The Fair Penitent, 2.1.68, 5.115. Further references to act, scene (if required), and line numbers from The Fair Penitent cited in text.  14 Jenkins, Nicholas Rowe, 66–7; Crafton, Transgressive Theatricality, 23.  15 Jenkins, Nicholas Rowe, 116.  16 Brown, Ends of Empire, 100; Marsden, Fatal Desire, 64.  17 Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 33.  18 Otway, The Orphan, 2.290–6. Further references to act and line numbers from The Orphan cited in text.  19 Brown, Ends of Empire, 77. 20 Compare Euripides’ Oedipus in Phoenissae [The Phoenician Women], lines 1761–3: “But why do I make this moan and useless lamentation? As a mortal, I must bear the constraint that the gods decree.” The comparison between Otway and Euripides has been made before, notably by Richard Garnett in The Age of Dryden, who calls Otway “the English Euripides”: Garnett claims that Otway “proved his superiority to all contemporary dramatists by his tragedy of The Orphan, in which he first displayed the pathos by which he has merited the character of the English Euripides” (102). 21 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 70. 22 Bogdan, Re-Educating the Imagination, 140–60. 23 Rowe, Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray, Prologue, line 15. 24 Ibid., Prologue, lines 8–9. 25 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 183, 184.

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Notes to pages 194–208

26 Rowe, Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray, Prologue, line 2. 27 Ibid., 5.26. 28 Coletti, Mary Magdalene, 152. 29 Bamford, Sexual Violence, 25–32. 30 Ibid., 36, 33. 31 Helgerson, “Weeping for Jane Shore,” 452. 32 Pollard, “What’s Hecuba to Shakespeare?” 1065–6. 33 Tumir, “She-Tragedy and Its Men,” 414. 34 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 152. 35 Massinger and Field, The Fatal Dowry, 4.4.73–81. Further references to act, scene, and line numbers from The Fatal Dowry cited in text. 36 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 153. 37 Ibid. 38 Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 272. 39 Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, 164, 150. 40 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5. 41 Bamford, Sexual Violence, 61. 42 Marsden, Fatal Desire, 73–5. 43 MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method,” 651. 44 Godwin, Memoirs of the Author, 74, quoted in Brett Wilson, A Race of Female Patriots, 46–7. Lisa Plummer Crafton has convincingly shown Calista’s importance in Mary Wollstonecraft’s work. For example, the female protagonist in Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1797), Crafton argues, is modelled on Rowe’s Calista, especially as that character was sympathetically portrayed by the famous actress Sarah Siddons in the November 1796 production of the play (Transgressive Theatricality, 23).

J . E dward Cha mberli n: Cha n tin g D own B a by lo n   1 Text is from the Book of Common Prayer compiled by Thomas Cranmer (1549), with translations of the Psalms by Myles Coverdale.   2 This story is told by George Steiner in Real Presences, 20.   3 Shelley, “The Two Spirits: An Allegory.”   4 Ras Kumi wrote a history of Rastafari titled The Earth Most Strangest Man, which was transcribed from the handwritten original by Lambros Comitas, then with the Research Institute for the Study of Man in New York, and

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247

given back to Ras Kumi in a ceremony at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica in 1997. The full text has circulated in the Rastafarian community, but not far beyond. I published excerpts (with Ras Kumi’s permission) in an issue of Index on Censorship that I co-edited, titled “Tribes: Battle for Land and Language” (28, no. 4 [July–August 1999], 112–19).   5 Langer, Feeling and Form, 149–65.   6 Malinowski, “The Language of Magic,” 72–90.   7 Crane, “Chaplinesque,” 11.   8 Frye was much influenced by Wilde, referring to him surprisingly seldom but paying lengthy tribute in his Larkin-Stuart Lectures, titled Creation and Recreation, at the University of Toronto in 1980 (republished in c w , 4:35–82).   9 In his book Did The Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Paul Veyne proposes that “there are societies where, once the book is closed, the reader goes on believing; there are others where he does not” (22).  10 The quotation is from an interview by Kenton Jackson in the Philadelphia Independent, quoted in Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (133), and referred to in an Internet article, “Leadbelly and the Lomaxes,” Cultural Equity, researched and written by Ellen Harold and Don Fleming for the Association for Cultural Equity, (http://www. culturalequity.org/currents/ce_currents_leadbelly_faqs.php).  11 Akenson, God’s Peoples, 30–1.  12 Reprinted in The Bush Garden, and in c w , 12:238–42.  13 The most authoritative source for this is Hal Cannon (founder of the Western Folklife Center and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada) and a radio program he put together titled Who Were the Cowboys Behind “Cowboy Songs”?, first broadcast on National Public Radio on December 10, 2010.  14 In his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” among many other places.  15 Several of these genealogies are from Alan Lomax’s The Folk Songs of North America, 103–4, 355, 360.  16 Andrew Marvell, “Bermudas.”  17 Jonathan Safran Foer, “Why a Haggadah?” New York Times Sunday Review, April 1, 2012.  18 Levine, The Bread of Time, 140–6.  19 Stevens, “The Noble Rider.”

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248

Notes to pages 218–26

20 For a full account of this connection by the leading Garvey scholar in the Americas, see Robert A. Hill, “Redemption Works.” 21 Peacock, Songs of the Doukhobors, 20–1. 22 Stephens, Irish Fairy Tales, 62. 23 This phrase comes from Ras Kumi’s The Earth Most Strangest Man (see note 4 above), where he reminds us, “As it is written in the Psalms of David, to Every Song is a Sign and I an I always Sing the Songs of the Signs of the Time,” n.p. 24 My commentary on Woody Guthrie draws from Woody at 100, published by Smithsonian Folkways (2012), produced and annotated by Jeff Place and Robert Santelli, with essays (by Santelli) on Guthrie’s life and times and (by Place) on his music, including a contribution by Peter Lachapelle, notes by Guy Logsdon on Guthrie’s recording sessions, extensive illustrations (of manuscripts, letters, photographs, posters, jacket covers, as well as drawings and painting by Guthrie), and detailed liner notes to the three CDs included in the volume. Some comments also come from a lifetime of listening to Guthrie and his fellow travellers. 25 From Woody at 100. 26 The reference is to “I’ve Been Everywhere,” originally written by the Australian Geoff Mack and adapted with North American place names by Snow in 1962. 27 Pratt, “Silences,” 3. 28 Hutchinson, Life of Sir John Lubbock, 2:213–14. 29 Dan Yashinsky tells about Crow, and the stories of Angela Sydney, in Suddenly They Heard Footsteps, 83–6.

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Contributors

Ian balfour is professor of English at York University. He is the author of Northrop Frye and The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy. He edited with the filmmaker Atom Egoyan Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film, with Eduardo Cadava a double-issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on human rights, and was sole editor of Late Derrida for SAQ. He has taught at Cornell University as the M.H. Abrams Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and held ­visiting professorships at Williams College, Rice University, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, among others. He is currently finishing up a book on the sublime and has two side projects, one on cover songs and another on titles. Al an Bewell is professor of English at the University of Toronto. His primary interest is in employing postcolonial theory and environmental history to the study of the literature, science, and medicine of the Romantic period. Bewell is the author of Wordsworth and the Enlightenment (1989) and Romanticism and Colonial Disease (1999), and has edited the collection Medicine and the West Indian Slave Trade (1999). He is currently completing a book on the impact of colonial natural history on British Romantic poetry entitled Natures in Translation. Alan Bewell is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Robert Bringhurst is the author of some thirty books of poetry and prose. His Selected Poems is published in London by Jonathan Cape and in Canada by Gaspereau Press. His works of literary criticism include The Tree of Meaning (2006) and Everywhere Being Is Dancing (2007). Bringhurst is a pioneer in the field of Native American literary studies, working exclusively with texts that are orally composed and transcribed in indigenous languages.

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In this regard, he is best known for his book A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999). In 2013, Robert Bringhurst was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada. Adam Carter is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Lethbridge. He specializes in critical theory and the history of criticism with related interests in Romanticism and Canadian literature. J. Edward Chamberlin is professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. He was senior research associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and is an officer of the Order of Canada. His books include The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes Towards Native Americans (1975), Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour: The Age of Oscar Wilde (1977), Come Back To Me My Language: Poetry and the West Indies (1993), If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground (2003), and Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations (2006). He now lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia. Alexander Dick is associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790–1830 (Palgrave 2013) and of many articles and chapters on eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century British literature, philosophy, and political economy, as well as on literary theory and education. Michael Dolz ani is professor of English at Baldwin Wallace University in Ohio. He was Northrop Frye’s research assistant for eleven years, and later edited three volumes of Frye’s notebooks for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, co-editing a fourth with Robert D. Denham. He also edited Words with Power, volume 26 of the Collected Works. Troni Y. Grande is an associate professor and head of the English Department at the University of Regina, where she teaches Shakespeare, early modern and eighteenth-century drama, and feminist theory. She coedited (with Garry Sherbert) volume 28 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye: Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), and authored Marlovian Tragedy: The Play of Dilation (1999). Grande holds a certificate in creative writing (fiction) from the Humber School for Writers, serves on the Board of Sage Hill Writing Experience, and was delighted to publish a poem in the special Frye anniversary edition of ellipse. Mark It tensohn is a PhD student at the University of Zurich. His dissertation, under the supervision of Professor Angela Esterhammer (Toronto)

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and Professor Allen Reddick (Zurich), researches the self-reflexive poetics of the frame tale in the late Romantic period. Ittensohn has been awarded research fellowships by the University of Zurich as well as by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and he currently serves on the editorial board for Variations, a journal for comparative literature published by Peter Lang. Neil ten Kortenaar, a former student of Frye’s, is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (2004) and of Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy (2011). Garry Sherbert is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Regina. He is the author of Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit (1996). He is co-editor of Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays in Canadian Culture (2006) and (with Troni Y. Grande) of Volume 28 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye: Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Reniassance (2010). He is also co-author and co-editor of In the Name of Friendship: Deguy, Derrida, and the Salut (forthcoming). Robert T. Tally Jr is an associate professor of English at Texas State University. His recent books include Fredric Jameson: The Project of Dialectical Criticism (2014); Poe and the Subversion of American Literature (2014); Spatiality (The New Critical Idiom) (2013); Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013). As editor, his works include: Geocritical Explorations (2011); Literary Cartographies (2014); and The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said (2015). Tally serves as the general editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Gordon Teskey is professor of English at Harvard University, and is the editor of the Norton critical edition of Paradise Lost (2005). He is the author of Allegory and Violence (1996); Delirious Milton (2006); and The Poetry of John Milton (forthcoming, spring 2015). He took his PhD at the University of Toronto, where he attended Frye’s lectures. Germaine Warkentin is professor emeritus of English at the University of Toronto, and was a junior colleague of Northrop Frye’s at Victoria College. She works on early modern and Canadian literature, with a special interest in the material culture of the book. Among her publications is a two-volume critical edition (2012, 2014) of the writings of the seventeenth-century explorer of Canada, Pierre-Esprit Radisson. Warkentin edited volume 21 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye: The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), and with Linda Hutcheon

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­co-edited the University of Toronto Quarterly’s special issue “The Future of Northrop Frye: Centennial Perspectives.” Germaine Warkentin is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Thomas Will ard studied at the University of Toronto from 1971 to 1978, writing a PhD thesis in seventeenth-century literature under Northrop Frye’s supervision. Since then he has taught English and Religious Studies at the University of Arizona. In addition to studies of Western esotericism, including an edition of the alchemical works of Jean d’Espagne (1999), Willard has contributed to half a dozen books of essays on Northrop Frye, as well as to Centre and Labyrinth, the festschrift presented to Frye on his seventieth birthday.

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Index

Abbott, Edwin A., 63; Flatland: A Romance in Many Dimensions, 63 Abrams, M.H., 12, 164, 166–8, 170–1, 173, 179 Adamson, Joseph, 159 Adorno, Theodor, 90–1 Agamben, Giorgio, 129–30 Akenson, Donald, 212 Alexander, William J., 134, 137 anagogy, 12, 49, 54, 158; anagogical sense, 49; Anagogic Man, 8, 48, 55–6, 58, 61, 64; anagogic phase, 48, 54, 56, 106, 156–7; anagogic symbol, 109–12, 122 aporia, 127, 165 Arabic, 28, 29 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 130 archetype, 65, 76, 139, 196, 199, 220; archetypal child, 81; archetypal criticism, 103, 135, 137, 142, 165; archetypal phase, 99, 104; of forgiven harlot, 190; forms of, 175, 139, 199; mythic, 8, 139, 203; of sinner-saint, 194; symbol, 55, 63, 99, 165 Aristotle, 34, 102, 112, 134, 192; Aristotelian view of literature, 96

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Arnold, Matthew, 123, 137 Arthur, Emry, 209 Asch, Michael, 210 Asch, Moses, 210, 220 Atlantis, 54 Atwood, Margaret, 31 Auerbach, Erich, 13 Augustine, Saint, 41, 152–3; City of God, 8, 50, 54, 70, 79, 107; Confessions, 150 Austen, Jane, 42, 201 Austin, J.L., 122 Ayre, John, 24, 53, 181 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 68 Bacon, Francis, 87 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13 Balfour, Ian, 127, 164 Balzac, Honoré de, 87 Bamford, Karen, 195 Banks, John, 187 Barry, Elizabeth, 187 Barth, Karl, 68 Bataille, Georges, 108 Bate, Jonathan, 183; Romantic Ecology, 183 Baudelaire, Charles, 170

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272 Index

Beckett, Samuel, 44 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 180 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 68 Bellamy, Edward, 87 Belsey, Catherine, 202 Benjamin, Walter, 6 Bennington, Geoffrey, 106 Beowulf, 31–2 Berlin, Irving, 221 Bible, 4, 6, 13, 28, 30, 36, 38–40, 46, 49–52, 66, 84, 123, 133, 142, 150, 157, 160, 212; Ascension, 161; Babylon, 71, 207, 209, 211, 215, 217–18, 224; Bethlehem, 67; Biblical Adam, 13, 37, 55, 203; Genesis, 37–8, 61; Gospel of Matthew, 153; Incarna­tion, 68; Leviathan, 61; as literary text, 97; Old Testament, 38, 212, 217; Revelation, 50–2, 61. See also Jesus; Satan Blake, William, 3, 4, 8–9, 11–13, 40, 42, 46, 48–53, 57–9, 62, 64, 65–7, 70, 76, 78–81, 94, 110, 135–6, 139– 40, 146, 158, 167, 170, 172, 206, 210, 215, 218–19, 221, 226, 229; Albion, 51, 54, 58–60, 64; Jerusalem, 49, 51, 57, 66, 94, 144; Los, 65, 73; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 46; Milton, 51, 53, 58, 60, 62, 66, 138; Songs of Innocence and Experience, 220 Bloom, Harold, 25, 27, 72–3, 166–7 Bodkin, Maud, 136, 143 Boethius, 70 Bogdan, Deanne, 186, 193 Bohr, Niels, 22–3 Booth, Wayne, 144 Brecht, Bertolt, 91 Brett, G.S., 134, 137

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Bringhurst, Robert, 5–6, 11, 14, 206; A Story as Sharp as a Knife, 214 Brogan, Terry, 26 Brown, Laura, 187–8, 204 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 76; Zanoni, 76 Bunyan, John, 42 Burgess, Margaret, 186 Campbell, William Wilfred, 171, 175 Canadian literature, 3, 12, 14, 141, 164, 171–80, 182–3, 206 Cantor, Georg, 20 Capella, Martianus, 70 capitalism, 69, 85, 89, 106, 217; Babylon of, 217; and capitalist modernity, 93; and the commodification of art, 98; globalization of, 85; ideology of, 187; Marxist critique of, 92; modes of production under, 105; ravages of, 105 Carlyle, Thomas, 69 Carman, Bliss, 171, 173, 175, 178 Carr, Emily, 178 Carson, Rachel, 223 Chaplin, Charlie, 210 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 42; The Miller’s Tale, 42; The Second Nun’s Tale, 42 Child, Francis James, 213–14 Christianity, 30, 37, 39–41, 46–7, 50–2, 67–8, 72–3, 78, 106, 147, 153, 155, 157, 169–70, 199, 201 Cixous, Hélène, 118 Coburn, Kathleen, 217 Cold War, 67, 74, 90, 129 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 40, 139, 167–8, 171, 217, 223 comedy, 43, 60, 182, 203; comic identity, 176; divine, 107, 199; phases of, 137; Shakespearean, 44

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Index 273

community, 98–9, 211; destiny of, 100; eternal, 54; expressions of, 15; inoperative, 109; loss of, 107; myth and, 97, 103, 105–6, 112–13; revolutionary, 10; self-presence of, 108; in time, 48; university, 119 Confucianism, 46, 225 Congreve, William, 199; The Mourning Bride, 199 Conrad, Joseph, 105 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 34 Cowper, William, 223 Crane, Hart, 210 Crawford, Isabella Valancy, 171, 176 Crick, Francis, 20, 22 Dante, 50, 111 Darwin, Charles, 20, 23, 30, 34, 225 Dawkins, Richard, 77 Defoe, Daniel, 223; Robinson Crusoe, 13, 223 Deism, 77–9 de Lauretis, Teresa, 204 Deleuze, Gilles, 118 de Man, Paul, 12, 140–1, 164–71, 175– 7, 179–84; Blindness and Insight, 166, 181; The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 166, 180 Demeter, 197–9. See also Proserpine Denck, Hans, 181 Denham, Robert D., 158–9 Derrida, Jacques, 10–11, 97, 100–1, 106, 109–10, 113, 116–23, 126–31, 166, 182, 202 Dickens, Charles, 36, 76, 87 Dickinson, Emily, 219 Dirac, Paul, 22–3 Dobrée, Bonamy, 56 Dolzani, Michael, 8, 9, 53, 94, 208 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 13

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Dryden, John, 22 Dylan, Bob, 210–11 Edgar, Pelham, 66, 158, 212 education, 20, 48; administration of, 70; aesthetic, 75, 84; of the imagination, 84–6, 88–9, 93–4, 223, 226; liberal, 89, 115; revolutionary function of, 114; university, 83–4, 114 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 38 Einstein, Albert, 20, 22–3 Eliade, Mircea, 71 Eliot, T.S., 9, 41, 43, 136, 178, 208, 213; After Strange Gods, 68; Four Quartets, 66–8, 143; The Wasteland, 143 Empson, William, 143 epic, 53, 57, 58, 68, 71–2; ironic, 145 epiphany, 12, 66, 147–9, 151–2, 155, 158, 160, 162, 179 Euripides, 195, 205; Alcestis, 200; The Phoenician Women, 192 false consciousness, 12 Faulkner, William, 87 Faure, Edgar, 117 feminine principle, 186, 205; feminine action, 201 feminism, 185–6, 192, 198, 205; feminist criticism, 185, 192, 198 Ferry, Luc, 183–4 Findlay, Len, 226 Fisch, Max, 101 Fish, Stanley, 143–4 Foer, Jonathan, 215 Foucault, Michel, 118 Fowke, Edith, 212 Frankfurt School, 9, 83–4, 90 Frazer, James George, 8, 30–2, 62, 71, 135–6, 138

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274 Index

French Revolution, 66 Freud, Sigmund, 20–1, 113, 134–6; Civilization and Its Discontents, 81 Frye, Northrop: Anatomy of Criticism, 3–5, 7–11, 24, 29, 31–2, 34, 42, 44, 48–9, 52, 54–7, 64–5, 75–6, 98, 103–4, 109, 114, 132, 136– 7, 140, 145, 149, 155–6, 160, 165, 186, 198, 200, 214; The Arts in Canada, 178; Collected Works, 65, 67, 162; Creation and Recreation, 73; The Critical Path, 3, 8, 13, 44, 46, 66, 124, 128, 130; Double Vision, 176–7; The Educated Imagination, 3, 4, 9, 46, 48, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 93–4, 176–7, 222; Fables of Identity, 219; Fearful Symmetry, 3–4, 8, 11, 17, 42, 49, 52, 54, 56, 60–1, 66–7, 73, 77, 79, 94, 132, 135, 139, 144, 171–3, 176, 183; Fools of Time, 186, 200; The Great Code, 4, 29, 39–41, 99, 123, 190, 217; A Literary History of Canada, 217; The Modern Century, 66, 69–71, 81, 107; The Return of Eden, 52, 57; The Secular Scripture, 75–6, 98, 182, 186; Spiritus Mundi, 119– 20; A Study of English Romanticism, 149, 161, 170, 180; Words with Power, 68, 76, 79, 81, 96, 100, 122, 132, 217 Galloway, Phyllis, 186 Garnett, Richard, 135 Garvey, Marcus, 218 gender, 15, 75, 185–7, 191, 197, 203–5 Gibson, William, 69 Girard, René, 13 Gleckner, Robert F., 149 Godwin, William, 204

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Guthrie, Woody, 15, 220–2; House of Earth, 220 Hamilton, A.C., 156 Hardy, Thomas, 198; Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 200 Harlowe, Clarissa (fictional character), 198 Harrison, Jane-Ellen, 198 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 76 Hegel, G.W.F., 177; Hegelian dialectic, 106; Phenomenology of Spirit, 177 Heidegger, Martin, 97, 101–3, 111–12, 123, 168–9 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 38 Herodotus, 212 Herschel, William, 59 Hesiod, 71 Homer, 53; The Iliad, 31–2, 69 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 141 Houston, Cisco, 221 Howe, Elizabeth, 187 humanities, 10, 74, 83–4, 89, 115–16, 206, 224 Huxley, Aldous, 86; Brave New World, 86 Hynes, Ron, 222 intertextuality, 11 irony, 5, 75, 120, 169–70, 176, 198, 200; epic and, 145; as form of truth, 12; heroism and, 185, 202; ironic parody, 73, 75; myth and, 108 Isidore of Seville, 70 Israel, 38, 54, 209, 220 James, Henry, 144, 198 Jameson, Fredric, 9–10, 49, 84–6, 97–100, 103–7, 109, 111, 113 Jay, Martin, 100

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Jesus, 40, 47, 59, 157, 220; body of Christ, 54; Christ type, 188 Johnson, E. Pauline, 171 Johnston, Richard, 212 Joplin, Janis, 211 Joyce, James, 147–8, 152, 156; Finnegans Wake, 145; Stephen Hero, 150 Judaism, 73 Julian of Norwich, 67 Jung, Carl, 21, 33, 80–1; Jungian psychology, 136 Kant, Immanuel, 44–5, 77, 126; Critique of Judgment, 126; Kantian aesthetics, 184 katabasis, 76 Keats, John, 42, 45, 176, 182, 215; Endymion, 180 Kepler, Johannes, 17, 24, 34 Kim, Sharon, 150 Kittredge, G.L., 213–14 Knight, G. Wilson, 133 Knight, Richard Payne, 135 Koran, 28–9, 225 Korzybski, Alfred, 28 Kristeva, Julia, 202 Kristofferson, Kris, 211 Kumi, Ras. See Planno, Mortimo Lacan, Jacques, 39 Lampman, Archibald, 171, 173, 176, 178 Landon, Richard, 216 Langer, Suzanne, 208 language: imaginative power of, 72; at the limit of meaning, 108; linguistic signification, 152; materiality of, 176–7; metaphorical, 69, 115, 122–3, 127, 138; performative utterance, 101, 122

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Las Vergnas, Raymond, 118 Lead Belly, 211–12 lectocentrism, 18–19 Ledbetter, Huddie. See Lead Belly Lee, Nathaniel, 187 Levine, Philip, 215–17, 222 Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth, 191 Lewis, Wyndham, 136 Lindenberger, Herbert, 140–1, 145 Linnaeus, Carl, 7, 20, 34 literature: as cartography, 5, 7, 11, 14, 17, 21–5, 27–8, 30, 33, 49, 109–10, 186–7, 206; Elizabethan, 137, 198, 205; fantasy, 74, 76, 92; oracular, 29; primitivism in, 74–5, 172; Victorian, 72, 225. See also romance; science fiction Lobachevsky, Nikolai, 7, 20, 22 Locke, John, 59–60 Lomax, John, 212, 214; Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, 213, 220 Lorca, Federico García, 216–17, 222 Lorentz, Hendrik, 22 Lubbock, John, 224–5 Lucretius, 86 MacColl, Ewan, 222 MacDonald, Wilson, 175 MacKinnon, Catherine, 204 Macpherson, C.B., 134 Macrobius, 70 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 208 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 141 mana, 31 Mann, Thomas, 73; Dr. Faustus, 73 Marcuse, Herbert, 9, 83–7, 89, 93; Essay on Liberation, 94 Marley, Bob, 207, 209, 218 Marsden, Jean I., 188, 194, 196, 204 Marvell, Andrew, 214

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276 Index

Marx, Karl, 47, 84; Capital, 92, 104; The Communist Manifesto, 104; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, 100; Marxism, 103, 106–9, 111–12; Marxist critique, 97–8, 103, 109, 117, 180 McCarthy, Cormac, 76 McLuhan, Marshall, 32 Mellon, Paul, 33 Melville, Herman, 76, 87 Mendeleev, Dmitri, 7, 20, 24, 28, 32 Michelson, Albert, 22–3 Miéville, China, 92–3 Milton, John, 3, 6, 12, 42, 46, 49, 52–4, 57–8, 61–3, 66, 72, 80, 132, 160, 203, 219; Paradise Lost, 47, 54–5, 61, 63–4, 144; Paradise Regained, 57–8, 64, 138 Minkowski, Hermann, 23 Mitchell, Joni, 222 Mittérand, François, 121 More, Thomas, 79, 87 Morley, Edward, 22–3 Morris, William, 75, 87 Moylan, Tom, 86; Scraps of the Untainted Sky, 86 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 68 Murray, Gilbert, 136 Murville, Maurice Couve de, 117 Muslim, 28 myth, 139, 155, 179, 207; of concern, 13–14, 115, 124; and criticism, 10, 98; of deliverance, 201; forms of, 8, 82, 127; modern, 75; mythological archetypes, 8; mythological subjects, 125; mythological time, 71; mythological universe, 32, 138; mythological vision, 186; mythos, 99, 156, 204; open mythology, 129; pastoral, 177; post-Romantic, 68;

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of redemption, 171; of romance, 106, 170; social function of, 186; speculative making of (mythopoesis), 87, 179–80; theories of, 98–9, 103, 119; truth and, 124 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 10, 97–8, 106–9, 111– 12; The Inoperative Community, 105 New Criticism, 7, 13, 136, 165 New Jerusalem, 49–50, 54, 61, 218, 224 Newlove, John, 31 Newton, Isaac, 59; Newtonian physics, 59 Newton, John, 223 Nichols, Ashton, 149–52 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 173; Beyond Good and Evil, 173 Norris, Christopher, 18–19 Nussbaum, Felicity, 188 Occupy Wall Street, 83, 88, 90 O’Donnell, James, 40–1 oral culture, 14, 26, 28–9, 31–3, 35, 212 orenda, 31 Orwell, George, 86, 90; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 86, 90 Otway, Thomas, 187–8, 192, 194, 202–4 Ovid, 72 Park, William, 41 Parmenides, 21 Paul, Saint, 40, 50, 79–80, 120, 211 Peeters, Benoît, 117 Piper, Andrew, 162 Planck, Max, 29 Planno, Mortimo, 208 Plato, 102 Poe, Edgar Allan, 76, 208 politics: of dissent, 126, 130; eco-­ politics, 183–4; reactionary, 66, 68,

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92; revolutionary, 66–7, 89–90, 98, 126; student movement protests, 118, 125 Pollard, Tanya, 195 Popper, Karl, 129 Pound, Ezra, 46, 75 Pratt, E.J., 173, 180, 212, 219, 223 Preminger, Alex, 26 Prometheus, 47 Proserpine, 187, 197–9 pseudomorphosis, 73 Pynchon, Thomas, 70, 77 Quixote, Don (fictional character), 107 Rabelais, François, 13 Rajan, Tilottama, 130 Ranke, Leopold von, 56 Reagan, Ronald, 118 Reaney, James, 137 Rice, Les, 222 Richards, I.A., 136–7, 143 Ridley, Matt, 78–9; The Rational Optimist, 78–9 Riemann, Bernhard, 7, 20 Rimbaud, Arthur, 22 Robbins, J.D., 212 Roberts, Charles G.D., 171, 173, 175, 178 Rodgers, Jimmie, 209 Rogers, Stan, 222 romance, 3, 5, 44, 47, 51, 72, 74–6, 103–4, 106–10, 139, 180, 182, 185–6, 197–202 Roman Empire, 70, 72–3 Romanticism, 8–9, 11–12, 40, 43, 46, 67–8, 72, 75, 125, 131, 134, 140, 147–9, 157, 159–60, 162, 164, 168, 170, 172, 174, 181 Roosevelt, Theodore, 213

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 106, 170 Rowe, Nicholas, 187–96, 198, 202–5 Rowley, William, 196; The Changeling, 196 Rutherford, Ernest, 20, 22, 24 Sade, Marquis de, 42 Sainte-Marie, Buffy, 222 Salusinszky, Imre, 25, 157–8 Sapir, Edward, 20, 22, 33 Sargent, Lyman Tower, 86 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 105–6, 169 Satan, 47, 50, 61, 64 Schiller, Friedrich, 72, 75, 184 Schlegel, Friedrich, 170 Schumann, Robert, 207 science fiction, 74, 76 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 171, 173, 178 Seeger, Peggy, 222 Seeger, Pete, 210–11, 214 Selkirk, Alexander, 223–4 Seneca, 200; Octavia, 200 Shakespeare, William, 3, 6, 12, 19, 36, 42, 44, 45, 46, 72, 142, 195, 219; Hamlet, 193; King Lear, 31; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 80; Othello, 190, 205; The Tempest, 68, 138; A Winter’s Tale, 199 Shaw, George Bernard, 201 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11, 46, 125, 167, 208; A Defense of Poetry, 125; Prometheus Unbound, 80, 180 Sherbert, Garry, 9, 123 Shklovsky, Viktor, 91 Sidney, Philip, 44, 46, 125 Smith, A.J.M., 179 Snow, Hank, 221 Socrates, 22 Southerne, Thomas, 187 speech-act, theory of, 101, 122

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Spengler, Oswald, 8–9, 31, 67, 69–70, 72–4, 76–8, 81 Spenser, Edmund, 50, 52, 56, 160, 219; The Faerie Queen, 132 Spinoza, Baruch, 47 Stanley, Ralph, 209 Stapledon, Olaf, 76; Star Maker, 76 Steinbeck, John, 220 Stevens, Wallace, 31, 206, 217–19, 222 Still, Colin, 68 Sturges, Preston, 209; Sullivan’s Travels, 209 Swift, Jonathan, 78 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 135 symbolism, 65, 66, 70, 73, 82, 100, 106; Frye’s theory of, 140; theories of, 99, 132, 137, 169. See also anagogy: anagogic phase synoptic form, 7, 15, 27, 30, 48, 56, 61, 63 Terdiman, Richard, 129–30 Teskey, Gordon, 27 Theseus, 22 Thomas, Dylan, 66 Thomson, Tom, 175, 178 Thoreau, Henry David, 218 Thucydides, 212 Tosh, Peter, 218 tragedy, 60, 71, 137, 185, 191, 199– 200, 202–4; Greek, 193; sacrifice in, 203; tragic hero and heroine, 189, 192, 195, 197, 203 Tucker, Herbert F., 155 Tumir, Vaska, 195–6 United Church, 4, 206, 209, 217 utopia; 70, 79, 83–4, 86–7, 100; utopian strategy, 93–5; utopian vision, 85, 89

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Vico, Giambattista, 8, 10, 71, 96–7, 100–1, 124 Victoria College, 8, 35, 36, 66, 212, 217 Walker, Horatio, 175 Wasserman, Earl, 166–8 Watson, James, 20, 22 Weber, Samuel, 106 Webster, John, 195, 200; Appius and Virginia, 195; The Duchess of Malfi, 200 Wellek, René, 140–1, 168 Wells, H.G., 76; The Time Machine, 76 White, Deborah Elise, 126 Whitehead, Alfred North, 134 Wilde, Oscar, 42, 211 Williams, Hank, 209 Williams, Raymond, 13 Willis, Charley, 213 Wimsatt, William, 168 Winnicott, D.W., 81 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 20 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 204 Woolf, Virginia, 145; To the Lighthouse, 160 Wordsworth, William, 12, 147–8, 151–2, 160–2, 167–8, 172–4, 176, 216–17, 225–6; Lyrical Ballads, 208; Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 171; The Prelude, 140, 154–5, 158–9 Yeats, William Butler, 31, 46, 62, 70, 75, 135, 160, 181, 219 Zimmerman, Michael, 102 Žižek, Slavoj, 42, 83

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