Northrop Frye's Notebooks for Anatomy of Critcism 9781442627543

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Collected Works of Northrop Frye VO LUM E 2 3

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for Anatomy of Criticism

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee General Editor Alvin A. Lee Associate Editor Jean O’Grady Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis Paul Gooch Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for Anatomy of Criticism VOLUME 23

Edited by Robert D. Denham

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Robert D. Denham (preface, introduction, annotation) 2007 Printed in Canada isbn 978-0-8020-9362-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 Northrop Frye’s notebooks for Anatomy of criticism / edited by Robert D. Denham. (Collected works of Northrop Frye v. 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8020-9362-2 1. Criticism. 2. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 – Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc. I. Denham, Robert D. II. Title. III. Series. pn81.f757 2007 801c.95

c2007-903006-8

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Once more, for S.D.D. and K.E.D

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Contents

Preface ix Abbreviations and Shortened Forms xiii Introduction xvii Published and Forthcoming Notebooks xxvii Notebook 7 3 Notebook 37 113 Notebook 38 128 Notes for Anatomy of Criticism 157 Notebook 35 159 Notebook 36 205

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Introduction Contents Notebook 18 260 Notebook 30d 300 Notebook 30e 309 Notebook 30f 318 Notebook 30g 321 Notebook 30h 324 Notebook 30i 327 Notebook 30j 330 Notebook 30k 332 Notebook 30l 335 Notebook 30 o-a 341 Notebook 30q 347 Notes 351 Index 413

Preface

This is the seventh and penultimate volume of Frye’s notebooks to appear in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Those unfamiliar with the form and intent of Frye’s notebooks can find those matters discussed at some length in the introductions to the volumes already published: Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (CW, 5–6), The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (CW, 9), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15), and Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on the Renaissance (CW, 20). The notebooks in the present collection were written over the course of more than a dozen years. Frye began writing in Notebook 7 in the late 1940s and the last half of Notebook 18 dates from about 1960 and continues at least two years beyond that. (He began this notebook about the time he had completed the manuscript for Anatomy of Criticism in 1956). Had my co-editor Michael Dolzani and I not decided to keep each notebook as a discrete unit, part of Notebook 18 could well have been included in The “Third Book” Notebooks. In any event, it provides a transition to that volume. Most of the material in the present notebooks, however, was written before 1956 and relates to Anatomy of Criticism. Because some of the notebooks are difficult to date precisely, arranging them according to strict chronology is difficult. Nevertheless, I have let Notebooks 7 and 18 serve as bookends for Notebooks 37, 38, 35, and 36, which is the chronological sequence as best as can be determined. (No significance should be attached to the notebook numbers themselves, which were simply assigned sequentially when I inventoried and catalogued the notebooks in 1992.) Between Notebooks 38 and 35 are Frye’s holograph notes for the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, along

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with a chart, written on the front and back of a luncheon program for Lester B. Pearson’s installation as chancellor of Victoria University. Presumably Frye worked out his chart during the installation service itself on 4 February 1952. Because the notebooks often extend over a period of years and because Frye wrote in more than one notebook during a given time, the dates of the notebooks often overlap. Following the first six notebooks is a group of eleven very brief notebooks, ranging from about 300 to about 3,000 words and bound in manila wrappers with green cloth spines––what Frye called his “sermon books.” He numbered the front cover of seven of these, the number standing for the particular chapter of Anatomy of Criticism as he conceived it at the time—the late 1940s or early 1950s. These eleven notebooks are arranged according to the alphabetical system used to identify the “series 30” notebooks when they were catalogued in 1992. Most of the series 30 notebooks include cancelled drafts of Frye’s lectures, articles, and books––material that has been excluded from the present volume. I have transcribed the notebooks with the intent of reproducing exactly what Frye wrote, retaining his own spellings, capital letters, and punctuation, even when his practice on these matters varies. There are three exceptions: I have regularized his use of double quotation marks with periods and commas, following the usual North American practice, italicized the words and phrases he underlined, and added accents to several Greek words he uses. Frye occasionally used an asterisk to mark the place where he wanted to insert a later comment. These later comments appear at the end of the entry itself, in a paragraph following the entry, at the end of the page, or in a separate paragraph several entries removed from the original asterisk. For ease of reference I have regularized these by putting all of the material marked by an asterisk at the end of the entry containing the original asterisk. Editorial additions are in square brackets. These include paragraph numbers and question marks for words that I have been unable to decipher (question mark only) or that are conjectures (question mark following the inference). I have also used square brackets to expand Frye’s abbreviations that are not immediately obvious, but when an abbreviation appears more than once in an entry, only the first instance is expanded. From time to time Frye uses a symbolic code, explained both in the notes to the present volume and in the introductions to the notebooks already published, to refer to various parts of his lifelong writing

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project. He refers to this project as his ogdoad, the eight parts being Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox, Ignoramus, and Twilight. When Frye uses one of his shorthand symbols, I have given its name in square brackets following the symbol, though again I have not repeated the name if the symbol reappears within a single paragraph. I have replaced Frye’s own square brackets with braces: { }. For Frye’s published works, I have given the citation for both the original publication and, following a solidus, to the page number in the volumes of the Collected Works that have thus far appeared. Thus “FS, 428/414” refers to the page number to the Princeton edition of Fearful Symmetry, and then to the page number in volume 14 of the Collected Works. Acknowledgments With the editing of each volume in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye my debts to Alvin Lee, the general editor, and to the staff at the Northrop Frye Centre, especially Jean O’Grady and Margaret Burgess, continue to accumulate. Those working on the project have evolved into a genuine community over the past decade, and I am grateful to have been a participant in that. I record my debt as well to those who provided information for several of the annotations—Robert Fagles, Homer Goldberg, Gordon Marsh, Florinda Ruiz, and Ronald Schuchard. I express my thanks to Thomas Willard for providing a draft transcription of Notebook 30q, to the National Endowment for the Humanities and Roanoke College for grants that enabled me to work on this project, and to Victoria University, which holds the copyright for the Frye papers.

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Abbreviations and Shortened Forms

Except for FS (Fearful Symmetry), AC (Anatomy of Criticism), N.T. (New Testament), O.T. (Old Testament), and R.C. (Roman Catholic), Frye’s abbreviations are expanded in the text and the names for his ogdoadic project are given the first time they appear in a given entry. The following abbreviations are used in the notes. AC AC2 BG C CP CW D DV EICT

Erdman

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 22. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. Northrop Frye on Canada. Ed. Jean O’Grady and David Staines. CW, 12. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996–. The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1941–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. “The Educated Imagination” and Other Works on Critical Theory, 1933–1963. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. CW, 21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

xiv FI FM

FS FS2 GC GC2 Hughes LN

LS

M&B NB NF NFCL

NFF NFL NFMC NFR NP NR

Abbreviations and Shortened Introduction Forms Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writing’s. Ed. Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani. CW, 25. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Ed. Nicholas Halmi. CW, 14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Ed. Alvin A. Lee. CW, 19. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 5–6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1984. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. CW, 16. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Notebook Northrop Frye Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library Works in Northrop Frye’s own library, the annotated editions of which are now in the Victoria University Library Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. CW, 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. CW, 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 15. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Introduction and Shortened Forms Abbreviations NRL OE RE Richter RW SR TBN

TSE WTC

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Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 20. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. On Education. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988. The Return of Eden: A Study of Milton’s Epics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. The Critical Tradition. Ed. David Richter. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. Reading the World: Selected Writings, 1935–1976. Ed. Robert D. Denham. NewYork: Peter Lang, 1990. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968. Northrop Frye’s “Third Book” Notebooks: The Critical Comedy. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. T.S. Eliot. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965.

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Introduction

The notebooks for Anatomy of Criticism trace Frye’s labyrinthine and often fitful journey to bring that book to completion. Unlike his other major books––Fearful Symmetry, The Great Code, and Words with Power–– the Anatomy was created in part from essays previously written. The first hint we have of Frye’s contemplating the use of material already published is in Notebook 7.99, where he considers beginning the book with his 1949 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” In the “Prefatory Statements” to the Anatomy he lists thirteen other essays, written over a twelve-year period, that he revised, expanded, and incorporated into the Anatomy (vii–viii). He also borrowed material from more than a half-dozen other published essays and reviews and from at least one unpublished paper. The specific appropriations, which represent well over half of the material in the Anatomy, have been explained in some detail in the introduction to the Collected Works edition of Frye’s Anatomy (Collected Works, vol. 22) and need not be repeated here. The struggle Frye underwent to organize these various parts so as to achieve a whole, to fill in the blank spaces, and to develop new material, is a primary feature of the present volume. Much of this process is also recorded in Frye’s diaries from 1950 to 1955 (Collected Works, vol. 8). How Frye used his notebooks when actually writing the Anatomy is not completely certain, but it is clear that he often wrote in the notebooks alongside his book drafts. When he instructs himself, for example, to “transfer all the guck you’ve got in the present 3 to the archetypal section of 2” (NB 36.16), he appears to be referring to drafts of chapters he has already written. He is certainly doing so when he writes, “At present I say in the opening of 3 that the structural forms of ptg. [painting] are analogous only to plane geometry, not identical with them” (NB 36.153).

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Frye sometimes returned to his Anatomy of Criticism notebooks after the book was published. Following entry 187 of Notebook 7, he notes, for example, that he should “look into this note again: 1958,” which is the year following the appearance of the book. In Notebook 7 Frye remarks in several places about Milton’s avoiding the frenzy of premature activity in writing Paradise Lost. Such avoidance involves surrendering the will to the imagination, letting one’s work emerge as if from the unconscious: “Milton fell in with the RenaissanceGoethe conception of art as the natural supernatural growth out of nature, & didn’t try to write it, but just allowed it to write itself” (NB 7.75). The same point could be made about Frye’s Anatomy, which was ten years in the making. The notebooks may sometimes give the impression of a desperate rush toward completion, but Frye realized that Carlyle’s theory of work was wrong and that the most fruitful way to proceed was to adopt Samuel Butler’s theory of the habit and practice of writing and a theory of leisure that would permit his book gradually to emerge. “Earthly leisure,” Frye writes, “is the place where vision is born” (NB 7.81). Sometimes, however, we get the opposite impression. The beginning of Notebook 7, with its focus on Tasso and Aristo, on Dante and Milton, consists of speculations for this anticipated study of the epic. Frye’s plans for the book are pure free-play, but they become at times almost frenetic, as one after another of his ideas for the study follow in rapid succession. He pauses occasionally to engage in a bit of archetype-spotting in Frobenius, Silberer, and Jung. He develops a preliminary five-chapter outline (NB 7.36) and then a more elaborate twelve-chapter one (NB 7.60). Notebook 7, like all of Frye’s notebooks, is discontinuous and often mysteriously opaque, as Frye occasionally recognizes: ‘I wish I knew what the hell I was getting at” (NB 7.97), “I hate writing amorphous notes” (NB 7.115), and, more bluntly, ‘This and the former note are mostly bullshit” (NB 7.189). The notebooks represent the fragments of Frye’s thinking process, and fragmentation in both knowledge and experience was, from Frye’s perspective, one of the chief features of the modern world. He even says in an as yet unpublished review that fragmentation is widely regarded as a deficiency which can and should be corrected: a great deal is said about the dangers of specialization, the loss of communicability, and the necessity of achieving some kind of overall view of our culture, usually through philosophy, religion or history, but it is clear that fragmentation represents better the real genius of our age. We do not really

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believe in the arguments for synthesis: we realize that in these days only the highly specialized thinker is likely to know what he is talking about. What co-ordination we do achieve is epiphanic, to use Joyce’s term: moments of focussed consciousness emerging from something which is itself transient and fragmented.1

Frye calls this “comminution,” literally “a pulverizing” (“comminution” and its cognates appear thirty-seven times in the present notebooks), and he frequently speaks of the comminuted forms as kernels–– parable, aphorism, commandment, oracle, prophecy, proverb, and emblem. Comminution is also associated with sparagmos, and Frye even speaks at one point of the comminuted forms eventually becoming an anatomy (NB 35.70)––the dissection of the total form. But in spite of what he says about not believing in “the arguments for synthesis,” his drive is always toward unifying the disparate, toward making a whole from the parts. So if comminution describes the temper of the age––Eliot’s fragments shored up against his ruins––Frye’s goal is in fact synthesis. In the notebooks he is quite deliberate and self-conscious about what lies before him, and, as with his other writing projects, he ceaselessly turns over one organizing idea after another in order to develop the parts and get them in their proper order. Not far into Notebook 7 Frye writes. “I think FS [Fearful Symmetry] ends my ‘lyric’ period (long choosing & beginning late) and my ‘epic’ one, begun nel mezzo del cammin begins here. The psychological difference is connected with the doctrine of timing, which, as I see more clearly now, is inseparably attached to the Renaissance conception of art & nature” (NB 7.52). By “epic” period Frye is referring to the first of three volumes of a projected study that he would shortly outline in his application for a Guggenheim fellowship (NRL, 3–5). This, as we know from his preface to the Anatomy as well, was to be a study of Spenser and other forms of the Renaissance epic. And Frye was literally nel mezzo del cammin, having completed half of the proverbial three-score and ten in July 1949 when he launched his plans for his next book. In Notebook 7.109, written perhaps in early 1950, Frye begins to speculate on a larger project, of which Spenser is only one part of a study of the epic and the epic only one part of a larger anatomy of forms. The study will begin with what he calls “the axis and the encyclopaedia” of symbolism, a grammar of symbols as found in psychology, theology, occultism, anthropology, and history (the axis), and the nature symbolism gathered from his reading of Hartland, Frobenius, Jung, Frazer,

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Mackenzie, Bayley, and others (the encyclopedia). This will serve as what Frye calls the “Preliminary Statement,” and it will be followed by a study of drama, epic, lyric, and prose. He will eventually get around to Spenser, but in connection with Shakespeare and Milton. All of this will amount to three parts of the ogdoad, Frye’s name for his lifelong, eightpart writing project. The Preliminary Statement will be, to use his curious names for the first three parts, Liberal, the study of drama; epic and lyric will constitute Tragicomedy; and the study of prose forms Anticlimax. Here we have, then, an embryonic form of what would eventually become the Second, Third, and Fourth Essays of the Anatomy. The plan would take another five or six years to complete itself, but it is clear that Frye has begun to pull back simply from a study of Spenser, planning instead a much more expansive theoretical work. He had by this time already published “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1949), which would become the backbone of the Polemical Introduction, and the core of the theory of modes, the First Essay, would appear in 1953 as “Towards a Theory of Cultural History.” In the entries that follow (NB 7.110 ff.) Frye begins to fill in some of the details of this large project. A number of the thematic emphases that make their way into the Anatomy begin to get articulated: the grammar of anagogy, equivocal meaning, the muteness of the arts, criticism as the perception of total form, the analogy between mathematics and literature, the banning of value judgments from criticism, the theory of allegory, literal and polysemous meaning, the Biblical monomyth, cyclical rhythms, forms of comedy and romance, and the framework of narrative (mythos) and meaning (dianoia), among numerous others. Even the notes Frye scribbles on the back of a luncheon program, the fourth unit in the present collection, contain an embryonic form of the opening pages of the theory of modes. By the time Frye gets to Notebook 7.156, the shape of the massive scheme is projected thus: My present conception of my mission is as follows: that my first three books, [Liberal], [Tragicomedy] & [Anticlimax], exist in two forms, inductive & deductive. That the inductive form of is a study of epic, & may take in any number of books (including of course FS) from the Bible to Joyce. The inductive form of is a study of Shakespearean comedy—I don’t know why I have a great variety of compulsions & only one one: the way it grew up, I suppose. The inductive form of would presumably be a study of prose. The deductive is a general discussion of the structure

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of literature and the grammar of criticism. It takes the salient points of structure noted in my previous books & outlines the verbal universe, inserting the essential point of the One Word into the stage represented at present by my colloquium paper [“The Function of Criticism at the present Time”]. It includes the work I’ve done on prose and, presumably, my conception of the Word as the mental structure of society (university & symposium ideas). The deductive (possibly the deductive books are really [Mirage], [Paradox] & [Ignoramus] respectively, though I hesitate to say so) is the mythology of literature & the rhetoric of criticism, an integration of the Word. The deductive is the dialectic of literature & the logic of criticism, expounding metaphysics as a part of the verbal universe & the verbum as the B [logos], or the verbal universe as the logical universe. The present inductive plan is to collect notes for a study of epic, beginning with Spenser & not worrying too much over where it’s going.

Here Frye anticipates that his new “Liberal” (Fearful Symmetry was the original Liberal) will include material from the books he intends to publish on Shakespearean comedy (Tragicomedy) and prose (Anticlimax) (“my previous books”). What he refers to as in this entry, especially in its deductive form, turned out to be Anatomy of Criticism, Tragicomedy and Anticlimax never having materialized in the way they are outlined here. The inductive is essentially the never-realized book on Spenser, which, although not as yet abandoned, has moved from the forefront. Then, following Notebook 7.187, Frye begins to experiment with schemes, complete with diagrams, for his theory of genres, that essay of the Anatomy that caused him the most consternation. By the time he gives a fairly complete outline of the book in Notebook 7.210––which includes what would become the Polemical Introduction and the theories of symbols, archetypes, and genres––Spenser and the epic have almost completely disappeared. And when we get to the last entry in Notebook 7, Frye proposes another scheme, a six-part version of Liberal that will treat mythical narrative in the sacred and secular scriptures, naive romance, epic, sentimental romance, mimetic fiction, and ironic myth. This would modulate into the theory of modes in the First Essay. Notebook 37 begins with expansive plans for the Second and Third Essays, but this is an early notebook, begun in 1949, and the projected topics for these essays are much more ambitious than what Frye eventually produced. Thus, “The general shape of the Second Essay seems to be an elaboration of the four parts of functional analysis: in other words an investigation of philosophy from a hypothetical point of view (ambigu-

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ity), of history (agon of word and nature-reason), of language itself (if not included in philosophy), of the relation of literature to other arts (i.e. of the one universe) and of transcending the one universe. . . . Next comes a functional analysis of literature in relation to history” (NB 37.2, 5). And then: I see dimly a “Third Essay” shaping up, in which the Literature & Thought study has become a straight view of the numerical universe of reason, with music its hypothesis; the Literature & Society one a view of the biologicophysical view of “nature,” with sculpture the hypothesis of biology or natura naturans & painting that of physics or natura naturata, both being contained in architecture, the real form of nature; and a farewell to poetry. Perhaps this is what my chapter, to get back to it, adumbrates. I guess here is the place where I study the musical & pictorial elements in poetry, compare the encyclopaedic forms of symphony, epic, mandala, & suggest something of the mystical use of the one Word (Cabbalism & the Clhandogya [Chandogya]), the one tone (harmony of the spheres) & the one outline (Giotto’s O). In India they’re all spherical (“Aum” is the circumferential noise the mouth makes), & the one number in mathematics would be zero. So sculpture would be a ball, with echo answering balls. The farewell to poetry, if I did it, would be a definitive study of the myth in which all religions are one. This delimiting of horizons is tiresome, but I suppose helps to define the landscape between. (NB 37.6)

This appears to be an expanding rather than a delimiting of horizons. We even get a projected study of comparative religion (NB 7.11), along with notes on Andrew Lang’s study of mythology and religion, and another study on nineteenth-century thought, growing out of Frye’s course in Victorian prose writers. In any event, Frye will travel a long way during the next five or so years before settling on myth as the containing form for the Third Essay. By Notebook 37.31, which was written several years later, he has determined that the Second Essay will spring from the theory of polysemous meaning, and much of the rest of the notebook is given over to exploring the levels of meaning in criticism, though not yet in literature, a topic not addressed until Notebook 38. In Notebook 38.21 Frye reveals that he has a fairly clear view of the overall plan for at least the first half of the book, which he is now calling An Essay on Critical Theory, and he even toys with various forms of a Latin dedication to his wife Helen. Notebook 38 contains as well some

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rather late speculations on genre theory, though they reveal that the anatomy of specific forms did not spring full blown from the head of Jove. Frye struggles especially with his classification of the lyric. In Notebook 38.19 he writes, “I’m leery of classifying, as opposed to clarifying a tradition, & of classifying by subject-matter, unless it conditions the form.” Or again, “I have repeatedly been haunted by a sense that the bases of classification of specific forms were different for each genre, & that I was wrong in trying to assimilate all four to the wheel of archetypes, merely because that worked out so well for drama” (NB 35.5). Eighty entries later he adds, “[T]he lyric may be the paradise of poetry, but it is the Augean stables of poetics” (NB 35.85). Sometime Frye organizes his specific forms of the lyric along a straight horizontal sequence; at other times, they form a cycle with cardinal points, like his schema for the forms of drama. Throughout we find numerous and often elaborate diagrams, charts, and tables, which became a feature of the schematic thinking of the notebooks. In Notebook 35 (ca. 1953) Frye has doubts about the book’s organization, and he continues to float numerous other arrangements (there are dozens of them), including the possibility of a separate book, A Second Essay on Poetics, that would include material on the levels of criticism (NB 35.7). About halfway through Notebook 35 Frye proposes this outline: Polemical Introduction Part One: Table of Literary Elements. Chapter One: Symbols. Chapter Two: Modes. Chapter Three: Archetypes.

Modes Symbols —

Part Two: Episodic Forms. Chapter Four: Specific Forms of Drama. Chapter Five: Specific Forms of Lyric.

Encyc. Forms Genres

Part Three: The Sequence of Continuous Forms. Chapter Six: Scripture, Romance and Epic. Rhet. Chapter Seven: Prose Fiction. Chapter Eight: Satire & the Comminution of Forms. Tentative Conclusion

(NB 35.69)

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In the right-hand column here, which was added in pencil later, we come close to what finally emerged, the separate chapters on encyclopedic forms, genres, and rhetoric (or chapters 4 through 8 in the left-hand column) eventually being collapsed to form the Fourth Essay. In early 1953 Frye issues himself the following memorandum: “by the end of February have a complete draft of the Introduction, Chapter One & Chapter Two typed out. Have Chapter Three done at least as far as the comic myth. By the end of March have a draft of Three, an outline of Four, and a draft of at least a large part of Five. By the end of April have an outline of Six and a draft of the Conclusion. Incidentally, I think I’ll add Conclusion notes to this book. That will leave Four & Six to write, starting May 1. These ‘drafts’ are to be thought of as penultimate, the versions (without footnotes) just before those to be sent to the publisher” (NB 35.148). Sometime later––probably still in 1953––Frye writes: “I think now of six chapters, plus introduction and conclusion. Introduction as now. The cultural history one then becomes the first chapter, not the sixth. I’ve got to have it early, yet the sequence of the others seems fixed. This is, of course: Two—Symbolism; Three—Anagogy; Four— Archetypes; Five—Genres. Then the proper Rhetoric chapter comes as Six—it seems to follow Five naturally: anyway, I found myself drifting into Six when I was trying to write Five. Then the Conclusion follows as I’d originally thought of it, and as a contemporary-thought SpenglerMarx-Thomist-Kierkegaard summary” (NB 36.13). Throughout Notebook 36 Frye continues to dither and doodle about the final shape of the Anatomy, but here he is getting close to it. He eventually combined what he calls the anagogy and archetype chapters into the Third Essay, and the genre and rhetoric chapters into the Fourth Essay, producing the four “chapter” form of the Anatomy, to which he added the Polemical Introduction and Tentative Conclusion. Now I’ve wasted so much time doodling in the past ten years that I hesitate to doodle once more, but actually I do believe that the ten years’ doodle is over, and that ten plus years of productivity ought to succeed. . . . So I shall have to keep writing the essays, as far as possible, one at a time. I know that if I can keep my health & a modicum of leisure I already have it in me to produce twelve essays which will be to literary criticism what the twelve books of Paradise Lost are to poetry. Well, to avoid hybris, let’s make it four books of essays and the four books of Paradise Regained. (NB 36.148)

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All this is preceded by elaborate plans for the next four books, beginning with Liberal all over again. In Notebook 38.59–61 we get a brief draft of an introductory statement. Notebook 38.64 contains a twelve-part outline, which will require only a slight reshuffling and consolidation to arrive at the Anatomy’s final arrangement. We get a projection of this final form in Notebook 38.85, though the order of the last two essays will be eventually reversed from what is outlined here: modes, symbols, genres, myths. A similar projection appears in Notebook 35.16. Our hope that Frye will finally arrived at the containing form remains only a hope. Even he seems to want to cure himself from an almost abnormal effort to get the structure right: “I’m suffering from schematosis,” he remarks (NB 38.9). We follow Frye then, often with great difficulty, along the winding path of false starts, revised plans, and new beginnings––which is typical of all of his notebook writing. Some plans are condensed; others are Byzantine in their complexity. The notebooks do contain here and there brief snatches of drafts (not reproduced in the present volume), but in the absence of draft typescripts we really have no sense, as is also the case with Frye’s other major books, of what transpired between the often repetitive musings found here and the final typescript he sent to Princeton University Press. In Notebook 18.50 Frye writes that Anatomy “was a four-book idea that collapsed into one, & this [his next project], starting as a one-book idea on the same general scale, may expand into four. If not, there isn’t any four, except as books to read.” As explained in the preface, Notebook 18 is a transitional notebook, and it is closer in form to the free play of The “Third Book Notebooks and The Late Notebooks, containing speculations on all manner of topics:: metaphor; the dandy; music, outlines for The WellTempered Critic; an elaborate circle of fifths projection for Liberal, Tragicomedy, and Anticlimax; the Romantic topocosm; plans for lectures on Milton (Centennial Lectures, University of Western Ontario) and Shakespeare (Bampton Lectures, Columbia University), and The WellTempered Critic (Page-Barbour Lectures, University of Virginia), and so on. One idea always triggers another. In one of his great understatements Frye writes, “Analogies to everything spring to mind” (NB 35.9). The series of notebooks numbered 30d and following are much more restricted in scope. Notebook 30d focuses on the theory of modes, though this material is not yet fully differentiated from the theories of

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symbols, myths, and genres. Notebook 30e centres on the theory of symbols (Second Essay), though includes entries toward the end on archetypes. The headnotes to the “30 series” notebooks, which are quite sketchy and difficult to date, give a general indication of which essay in the Anatomy they relate to. “The reason why I confuse myself with such a clutter of notebooks,” Frye tells himself at one point, “is that my ideas for this book don’t fundamentally change, but things like chapter-numbers & arrangements do” (NB 35.143). That is hardly an accurate account of the contours of the Anatomy notebooks, where we see his ideas continually changing, but it does suggest, given the discontinuity of the notebook form, that they are not so much a series of manuscripts to be read as to be consulted, with the aid of the index. For all of their mind-numbing prolixity, they do contain numerous passages of instruction and delight, and throughout the Anatomy notebooks even the smallest details are often evidence, in Stevens’s phrase, of the “large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.”

Published and Forthcoming Notebooks

note: Numbers missing in the sequence means that the notebook material is either too sketchy to be published or that it is draft material for books and essays.

Published Notebooks Notebook or “Notes” Nos. 3 6 7 8 9 10 11a 11b 11c 11d 11e

Volume Title

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (CW, 9) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13)

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Notebook or “Notes” Nos. 11f 11h 12 13a 13b 14a 14b 15 18 19 21 23 24 27 29 30d 30e 30f 30g 30h 30i 30j 30k 30l 30n 30 o-a 30q 31 32 33 34 35

Volume Title

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (CW, 9) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (CW, 9) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 (CW, 9) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23)

Introduction Published and Forthcoming Notebooks Notebook or “Notes” Nos. 36 37 38 41 42a 43 44 45 46 47 48 50 52 53 54-1 54-2 54-3 54-4 54-5 54-6 54-7 54-8 54-9 54-10 54-11 54-12 54-13 54-14 55-1 55-3 55-4 55-5

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Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (CW, 23) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990 (CW, 5–6) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15)

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Notebook or “Notes” Nos. 55-6 56a 58-1 58-2 58-3 58-4 58-5 58-6 58-7 60-1

Volume Title

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20) Northrop Frye’s Notebooks on Renaissance Literature (CW, 20)

Forthcoming Notebooks Notebook or “Notes” Nos. 1 2 4 5 17 20 28 30a 30b 30c 30m 30 o-b 30r 42b

Volume Title

Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25)

Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for Anatomy of Criticism

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Notebook 7

This notebook was written over the course of a decade—between the time Fearful Symmetry was published and the appearance of Anatomy of Criticism. In paragraph 52 Frye refers to beginning nel mezzo del cammin, and there seems to be no reason not to take him literally: he was thirty-five in 1947. The notebook contains a number of references to articles Frye wrote in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Between entries 80 and 81 he entered the date “1948,” so it seems reasonable to assume that the first eighty entries were written in 1947. In paragraph 99 Frye refers to his “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” which was published in October 1949. He continued to write in the notebook for almost a decade: the date “1957” appears before entry 255. Because of the reference to the writing of “The Literary Meaning of ‘Archetype,’” the date of entry 196 is late 1952. Even after Anatomy of Criticism was published Frye returned to this notebook, which he refers to in Notebook 35.52 as his or Liberal book, as the 1958 reference at the end of entry 187 indicates. The notebook is in the NFF, 1991, box 26. It has a brown cloth cover and measures 20.8 x 13.5 cm.

[1] The grammar of Renaissance anagogy has three main sources, Biblical, Classical & national or medieval, and can be expounded as a commentary on Spenser, or even, perhaps, as a tour de force commentary on The Phoenix & the Turtle. Some aspects of such a study are difficult if not impossible to separate from T [Tasso], and the two sets of notes will overlap. Temporarily at least, the centre of gravity in A [Ariosto] is the epic tradition. [2] As such, the complete scheme of the epic is intolerably complicated, for it begins with Virgil recreating Homer, & being in his turn recreated

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by Dante in a creative effort so gigantic that it is difficult to contain it even within the epic tradition. Being a comedy, and a medieval one at that, for the terms tragedy & comedy were not confined to drama then, nor should they be now, he is dramatist as well, & as a dramatist should have a corresponding anatomist. The latter is popularly supposed to be St. Thomas, but Dante himself was a master of the symposium & confession forms, along with the Varronian prose-poetry form, & perhaps, as he includes that form, is a retracting eiron who has pulled all the forms into himself. He haunts [Tragicomedy] and [Anticlimax] about equally, as Goethe haunts [Rencontre] and [Mirage] along with Joyce, both representing the schalk disruption pattern1 which was the one thing Dante couldn’t include, the form of the fourth out of which [Paradox] grows.2 I have a hunch that Dante represents the logic of vision as Shakespeare represents its rhetoric & Blake its grammar. And if so, then Dante is an analogical visionary & stands opposite the Scripture, the “paradox” involved being that the greatest of form-shapers turns out to be the supreme ana-logist or reverser of the Word (Logos). [3] Well, Dante influenced Langland, who in a sense tried to recreate him as he did Virgil, & whose broken failure to do so is profoundly instructive because the thing that broke it was schalk, the attempt to escape from high seriousness & moral virtue, & so construct a real comedy. Langland got as far as satire, but couldn’t break out of the machine, partly because his social criticism was confused by a revolutionary movement, so, like Carlyle, he took refuge in a gospel of work in which the word “work” was left undefined, not pushed to its only real meaning of creative or timed act (Milton’s ability to come to terms with a revolutionary movement clarified this conception of the act for him, & one of my morals may be a political one). Dante & Langland together represent (a) synthesis & analysis in medieval thought (b) the medieval phase of the Italian-English epic. [4] Ariosto is Italian epic in its early Renaissance phase, a phase which may well be one of the intellectual emancipation of the via media of that generation. His parabasis would be some cosmopolitan humanist like Erasmus, neither Protestant nor Catholic, full of a Horatian spirit of comedy that is as clear from natural & rational pollutions as Shakespeare himself. It was left for Spenser to show how the spirit of Ariosto could only be attained in a Protestant atmosphere, or at least one that was clear

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of the machine. This is the Renaissance phase, & the culminating one, Spenser, whose six books are related as my own are,3 being the crest of the argument. [5] Tasso as well as Ariosto influenced Spenser, & Ariosto as well as Tasso influenced Milton, but still the Baroque phase is essentially a Tasso-Milton one. Here the Dante-Langland situation is reversed. In the Middle Ages the Italian machine had such prestige that Langland could only turn around in it like a squirrel. In Dante the spiritual & the temporal ascendancy of Rome are the same thing, his whole argument being based on the AMOR-ROMA palindrome, & Rome & Italy are ideally the same thing. Langland is not yet conscious of an England or London. Ariosto & Spenser are more evenly matched: the Italian poet has a form of freedom derived from the Renaissance & Spenser has its substance, a Protestant society. Spenser is confused too as much by the conservative side of his political outlook (Q5) [The Faerie Queene, bk. 5] as he is clarified by the radical side of it (Q1), & is less successful than Ariosto in getting rid of the whole problem by casting his society in a “faerie” or chivalric form. However, he makes up for this by his greater systematization of allegory, though this again brings him nearer Dante: Ariosto’s allegory is a fitful schalk affair, coming out in bits & pieces, & in a few vague hints about a Logostilla [Logistilla] or teacher of the Word,4 who, if pressed too far, might dissolve in a mist of platitudes. Anyway, Tasso is caught in the machine, & is very unhappy about it. Dante controls the same machine: note the high place he gives to Bernard of Clairvaux, the preacher of crusades. I have elsewhere suggested that this enthusiasm for the crusade is an impurity in Bernard’s vision which he was unable to recognize as an impurity, but which prevented him from seeing God.5 In Tasso the crusade is the main theme: with the breaking of Christendom the agon is the only theme left for a Christian poet, and Tasso knows damn well that the crusade is an analogy of the agon. Milton’s rejection of Arthur is Tasso’s epitaph. [6] Now an ordinary book which attempts to deal with the complete arguments of six major epic poets, & allows too for other elements (Virgil; the way that the shadow of Chaucer falls across the medieval English epic & usurps the influence on Spenser that Langland should have had; the two great romantic traditions of symbolism in Ariosto & Spenser. Romaunt of the Rose & Holy Grail symbolism, apart from all the Court

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of Love business; intervening influences like the Fletchers;6 the extent to which Goethe or Blake or the rcs. [romantics] form the delta of the stream) is apparently an unpractical idea. However, the fact that that’s the whole story can’t be overlooked. I’ll have to see first how far Dante can take it all: I have a hunch based on two things. He says in De Monarchis that the Bible is prior to the Church both in time & in authority [bk. 3, sec. 4], in time because there was no Church when the N.T. was being written (that happens to be wrong in one sense & right in another: wrong because Paul, & a fortiori Jesus, antedates the Gospels; right, because when Jesus gave the keys to Peter the Scriptural meaning is that the Church was born in the moment in which the first men saw that Jesus was God: a historical footnote that Peter later became bishop of Rome & therefore the Roman Church was intended saves us by history & tradition but not the Word). Now when Luther brought this question of the priority of Scripture into the open Trent had to assert the priority of the Church, turning the Church from a dialogue with the Word into a monologue with itself, as Barth says, in a remark that may profoundly affect the argument of [Mirage].7 Now Dante throws the Biblical vision into its ecclesiastical analogy, true enough. But it’s also true that his Paradiso is, as Dunbar says, symbolically ambiguous: true, his whole argument takes place within the order of nature, & therefore of reason, yet his Paradise is simultaneously a spiritual state, vortical to Purgatory, from the point of which Purgatory is analogous & hell non-existent (because bodiless & waiting for judgment).8 Hence he’s constructed one of these bloody optical illusions: one way we see an Aristotelian chain, the other way the Platonic vortex. I realized something of this when I hit the sun,9 which was evidently the place I was supposed to realize it. So is Dante the supreme exponent of the via media, or is he just, as I’ve continually suspected, proof that that goddam church thinks of everything? It would be damned funny if I started out by wondering if Shakespeare were caught in the machine & ended realizing that Dante wasn’t; doubtless that’s too much to expect. In any case Dante certainly was the prisoner of his own symmetry, as the Bible never is, because it’s carried the Varronian disruption over into its structure. [7] I note with a mixture of feelings, among which consternation is certainly not one, that an account of the details of Renaissance iconography is slowly fading out of the foreground. It may slowly reappear in the background of a vast Summa Anagogica perhaps not identical with my set

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of six.10 Unless [Rencontre] is a PT [Phoenix and Turtle] job after all, with the Orc-Druid stuff incorporated in the rewritten [Liberal]; but that buggers a lot of symmetry. [8] I’ve always thought the Defensor Pacis line about the temporal power of the Pope being Antichrist had something,11 but I wonder if temporal power wasn’t the one hope for Protestantism, by making the Pope a Renaissance prince & thus an economic & political competitor of the other princes. Temporal power at least kept Rome anchored in Italy, & brought Italy into being as the roots of Rome, its seven hills, nourishing & supporting it. The overthrow of Italian political power in the 16th c began the reign of the pure Roman Church, standing for a spiritual (but not imgve. [imaginative]) unity of Christendom, an international cancer like its modern Fascist counterparts. The parallel with Classical Rome & Egypt, Rome being Egyptianized as soon as Egypt was annihilated as a cultural entity, is very striking. Since the sack of 1529,12 the vast tower of Babel has been a vast castle in the air; i.e., the ecclesiastical genius for organization persists at Rome, but somehow just isn’t Italian any more, & therefore not Roman. The drying up of its temporal domain to a pinpoint of dogma has aided it immeasurably in transforming itself into the natural & reasonable substitute for the Word of God in modern society. [9] There are two kinds of people who realize that the Church should be the window & not the mirror of the Word, & who regard the autonomy of the Church, which produces the interior reflective monologue, as the silver on the back which makes it opaque. One kind is the Protestant who wants a church service focussed on the sermon or recreating of the Word. The other is the dramatic or epic poet (lyric, as I explain in [Mirage], depends on a convention & autonomous lyric or elegy is based on a dogma of fragmentation) who turns the Church into a window by recreating the Word out of the Church & so dissolving the silver & destroying the anonymity. It’s a hairline argument, but I think I can make it out for Dante, & of course I can for Spenser & Milton. That clears up my “Protestant” incubus: of course a Protestant would be to an epic poet what an artist is to Plato: the imitator of the imitation (I mean that the preacher would be that). The next question is: is drama “purer” than epic? the terrific Will zur Macht aspect of the epic is explainable on other grounds. It’s certainly closer to ritual than epic, because further from

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myth. Hell, I don’t know: chronology as well as Joyce put[s] max] before [Tragicomedy].13

[Anticli-

[10] The place of [Anticlimax] in the Renaissance scheme is that of the articulation of the archetypal myth. [Liberal] isn’t that, because deals with Scripture & the anagogic habit of mind, in which habit we recognize oneness rather than a unity of varieties. So for I must start with Jung, & then go to other psychoanalysts & to Jung’s master in archetypal symbolism, Frobenius. Then Mackenzie, Bayley, & perhaps Blavatsky, for the machinery.14 [11] Jung’s P.U. [Psychology of the Unconscious] & Frobenius15 both deal chiefly with the Orc cycle, which is one of the starting points. First I have to outline the origin & function of the epic, as a coordinated effort to teach the social unit its own traditions, a coordination in which outlines of an archetypal vision inevitably appear. That leads me at once to the philosophical epic or poetic encyclopaedia, such as we find in the pre-Socratics & in Lucretius, & which is an essential element in Dante. The gradual infiltration of this by a prophetic, moral & satiric element, reaching its climax in Langland & the RR [The Romaunt of the Rose], is a separate though of course related question. The central tradition of the epic is the epic of the heroic act, based on that systole-diastole (Goethe) movement of withdrawal & return (Toynbee) or introversion & extroversion (Jung) which is inevitably suggested by the death & resurrection pattern, & which ends with the epiphany of an Orc-Messiah hero & the performance of his assigned task. The Iliad shows this in Achilles; the Odyssey, based on a slightly different principle, uses it as a resolving harmonic chord. In Virgil this theme is linked with what later became the Christian romance theme of the Quest. Xy [Christianity] buggered the Orc-Messiah, so the hero ceases to be godlike or else is caught up in a spiritual warfare like the quest of the Grail. Even in Ariosto the sulk & return motif is central. My point is to link the epic of the heroic act with the Renaissance conception of the hero, the ideal magistrate (note the parody of this in Ariosto). Another factor developed by Xy is the conception of cultural cycle, the rotary movement of the civitas terrena: this is why Beowulf is built on two actions, one of rise & the other of decline. [12] Jung, P.U. I, iv, n. 49: red cloak derives from bloody skins of slain animals & in Mithraism, where it’s the mantle of Helios, is linked with

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the sun.16 Helios was followed by linen-clad retinue. He [Jung] quotes Byron’s Heaven & Earth & says an encircling serpent represents extreme fear of death (later on the wrapping around is a maternal-death symbol) [104–5]. He links rubbing & robbing: jerking off & stealing fire [143], tearing (golden) bough off tree as forbidden or dangerous act. He doesn’t add the volcanic eruption to Orc phallism, though he links it with the various cocking myths of creation [153–4] which may haunt the Exodus “back parts” story [Exodus 33:21–3], though he doesn’t say so. Peter & the Pope (father principle) as continuer of Caesars & analogy of Christ 222 [191–2]. Fish as embryo [192–3]; trinity from male genitals [196–7]. After breaking the autoerotic ring the libido, deprived of direct sexual satisfaction, wanders indefinitely into the unknown (516); hence the importance of the wandering hero {of the romance}, 231 [199]. The companion of the hero, which goes back to Gilgamesh [311–12], is partly a substance-shadow (immortal-mortal) relation, partly a cyclic one (John Baptist & Jesus). Chest floating on water (Beowulf, Apuleius) symbol of birth in amniotic fluid in womb: this last a curious example of the literalism of psychology [229–30]. The embryo is a fish because the sun goes into water at end: fish or water-monster: encircling & entwining of Beulah-mother accounts for trees, serpents, & sea-monsters of the octopus or polypus type [243–4]. Lamia is a sea-monster. Horse (mare, nightmare) has a close connection with mother & sea: I [Indo-European] mare & mere are accidentally similar (283), but Neptune’s horses & the witch riding the broomstick are e.g.’s [244–6]. Jung doesn’t clearly say that the horse is the body that bears, which is the real mother link, & explains the whole “chivalry” complex: the man on horseback in love with a mother mistress. He speaks of the mother carrying the child on 283 [246]. He has an interesting link between a story in Herodotus, Book II, & a symbol of worshippers battling for “a share in the mystery of the raping of the mother” [251–2], which indicates what the end of the Odyssey is all about. Medieval Xy [Christianity] conceived of Trinity as dwelling in Virgin’s womb, 524. Fascinating stuff on the dog as a symbol of rebirth in another Odyssey pattern, 268 [230–1]. He follows Frobenius in regarding the mutilation of the monster17 (Beowulf & Polyphemus) as a castration linked with the defeat of the mother [238], as it is explicitly in Beowulf. The brother of birth & of after birth [(]Freud, 531), or the accepted & rejected brother, is in Horus & Harpocrates, in the “Dioscuri” symbol, & is a Joyce (hence a [Mirage]) pattern as well as an epic one. (For cf. the two-sister theme in Victorian fiction). For the phallic significance of

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the striking rocks see 532 [269] & Frobenius again. Hermaphroditic significance of Grey Sisters with one eye (female phallic) & tooth (male negative phallus: cf. boar’s tooth in Adonis’ balls & the spear-killing motif). [13] Oh, boy, things are shaping up: Jung & Frobenius show that the libido or Luvah cycle is the essential pattern of the Odyssey, so I read the Odyssey along with them, writing my Blake-Jung article,18 & in the meantime tackle Joyce’s Ulysses in relation to the Odyssey: this means underwriting [Mirage], just as the Jung & Frobenius stuff means underwriting [Rencontre], but I can’t help that. I should have [Anticlimax] damn near finished before I do the Guggenheim work at all.19 One essential pattern is that Virgil gives the Odyssey a more definite & even Xn [Christian] form: the hero doesn’t just return home: he builds a city, so the Aeneid is vortical to the Odyssey, which latter is Beulah–Beulah Orc cycle, or island-island progression, Aeneid being the reverse or articulation of libido into (unfortunately the Classical political analogy: cf. my Magna Graecis point about Plato & Pythagoras) heroic act of terrestrial city founding—Rome. This is vortical to the Xn Jerusalem, as Sp. [Spenser] warns, & Prospero who returns to Italy shows that the Aeneas progression is vortical to something—perhaps H8 indicates what it is.20 This may be part of Dante’s point, the Amor-Roma palindrome being the neatest kind of vortical symbol. [14] Anyway, going on with Jung: the ridden animal means merely the unconscious or animal nature: hence its occasional clairvoyance, as with Balaam’s ass. Pegasus, Christ’s ass, Jahweh’s seraph, etc. (308–9). The production of water by a horse striking its foot (treading is phallic) as in Hippocrene, is noted [267–9, 299]. Hence (above) the cloven foot of the devil & the centaur symbol. Horseshoe & resemblance of hind leg to lightning. Frequent wind, fire & light associations, leading to Chariot of Zoas (Quadriga & the opening of the Brihadaranyaka) [270–1]. Psychopompic in the Valkyries [272–3]. Jung doesn’t quite get the “monster” analogy symbol. Arrow is phallic, but the arrows of libidinous urge come from inside & point through, like the penis. However, St. Sebastian is a martyred Orc or libido [273–93]. All this horse business leads to the Trojan horse (wood) as a mother-rebirth symbol [272]. The spurning of love (Gilgamesh) is an incest wish transferred to the mother: the links here with Calypso & the Sirens are pretty clear. {Jung doesn’t mention the stepmother as the terrible mother who replaces the real one.} Biting

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in foot by serpent (Dan; cf. Achilles’ heel) another setting-sun symbol [285–7]. Serpent a negative phallus (Kundalini) [288].21 Importance of the “true name” in aiding libidinous development, 334: Ulysses as Noman. Samson & Delilah 336 [290]. Apparently Robertson’s Evangelical Myths is an important book after all.22 Note the nightmare (horse-mother riding-rider) & Christ being crosslink, also in the witch’s broomstick. Jöhn’s Ross & Reiter.23 Clearing of earth, whether by horse’s hoof or not, has yoni links. A long note (539) on the zodiacal labors of the sun-god Hercules may be useful as showing how Greeks had patterns like the Odyssey one whether there were epics on them or not. Robertson links Xn [Christian] carrying of cross, Mithraic carrying of bull, Samson carrying gates.24 Neither realize that this is Atlas symbolism, analogous or inverted visions of the fall. The Ixion 4-spoked wheel & the Xn cross are better linked, 541. Curious how many Orc-encyclopaedias there are in modern symbolism: Jung, Frazer, Frobenius, Hartland’s Legend of Perseus,25 & all the work on Jesus assimilating him to dying gods & sun myths. And how few Los ones there are—perhaps none. Jung’s old wise man archetype is Blake’s enfeebled vision of Los, hence the sinister overtones of Archimago & the—is it Peleus?—rebirth overtones of Prospero. [15] I suppose I shall read Hiawatha in due course, & can turn to Jung’s commentary on it then.26 The double mother theme (bitch-wolf of Siena, linked with twins) is mentioned 356 [306]. Wrapping in skin of animal makes one gigantic: compensation for the Brobdingnagian (Og & Anak)27 world of child [311–12]. Jung doesn’t quite say that killing the father & possessing the mother makes one identical with an eternal & immortal Son, but he comes near it, 365 [315]. Father (or teacher) of hero often a carpenter, arrowsmith or other “productive” craftsman: Joseph [313]. (Link with old wise teacher archetype developed in the Hindu guru as fatherhood is in R.C. Xy [Roman Catholic Christianity]. Note by the way that in “transference” the patient becomes a child of the doctorfather: hence the demand for the analyst to be analyzed brings apostolic succession into psychoanalysis.) Birth of Christ in cave of stored grain, world of theriomorphic forms & mother power mysteriously inspired [324]. Chest floating over water a more exclusively Orc image: shield son of sheaf28 shows shield (my false teeth are loosening) female phallic & of course mundane shell [325]. “The parallel of death & resurrection is losing & finding,” 377.29 Jesus leaving home at 12 linked with this: whole theme of Quest in it. (Note of course that Aeneas, the founder of the city,

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is the analogy of the Jesus who builds the new Jerusalem—Dido of Carthage & Rahab of Babylon linked.[)] Church as mother & building as tomb of Christ 380 [324] (hence crusade an extroverted cathedral-building). Woodpecker hammering holes in trees 386 [331] (ambiguously phallic). Wagnerian symbolism I must leave for a bit, though it’s important to [Anticlimax] as well as [Rencontre] material, as Wagner leads to the Führer as Aeneas does to the Sol Invictus Caesar. The dragon in the cave is easy [344]: the treasure he guards is libido to be set free (linking with the felix culpa [fortunate fall] aspect of pilfering the forbidden tree—the breaking (jerking) off a golden bough or plucking a flower). Hecate & Lamia as terrible mothers, 404 [345–6]. Sacrifice of food as substitute for the body: (I suppose eating the oxen of the sun [Odyssey, bk. 12] is the inert or incestuous use of libido, the imgve. [imaginative] sacrifice being of course self-sacrifice). Incidentally the link on 410 [350] between the Exodus brazen serpent [Numbers 21:8–9] & the medieval communion chalice with a serpent on it clears up the Spenser Faith business. Also Nietzsche’s snake is correctly interpreted, 414 [355–6]. Food & eating in monster’s belly in Frobenius (Samson’s lion). Anticipations of Silberer on the phallic garden, 549–50.30 Hanging, on tree or otherwise, is suspension, & that’s the symbol of an unfulfilled wish, 553 [360]. God! Etruscan custom of burying dead under shield. [16] Silberer, PMS [Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism]: forest at opening of Dante is a threshold symbol (the medieval incorporation of the dream into the epic & romance & many other types is very important).31 The birth of things from the dismembered Albion-body has several overtones [70–1], not clearly distinguished even by Blake. One body is a life-mother one; another is a monster or animal (horse in Upanishads, which takes us back to the mother again [72]) & so has Leviathan or Behemoth overtones: cf. the alchemic lion. Midgard stuff [71]. But Osiris & in some aspects Albion is the slain father, out of whom is born an improved creation or even the eternal Son, & whose castration means the transfer of creative power (originally swallowed no doubt by the son) [77–81]. Either here or in [Tragicomedy] I have to suggest the origin of all cruelty & torture in the analogy-act, the desire to “do the right thing” physically instead of mentally. Miller & mill are man & woman: Silberer connects mill & mulier: nolere mulierium [grind a woman] in Petronius means fuck. Samson’s mill thus continues the harlot theme. Jede Vermählung eine Vermehlung [“Every marriage is a milling”] [97–

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8]. Trace of this in the antecedents of the Hamlet story. In the parable he comments on the miller means the moral law & the father principle [102]. There’s more about the mill symbol in Mackenzie.32 [17] I think I should start with my old point about the perception of recurrence as the first imaginative act, producing the rhythm of the musical & the pattern of the plastic arts. Recurrence in rhythm leads to the two rhythms in music, double & triple, simple & compound. As the perception of this derives from the cycle, we get light-dark for one rhythm & light-dark-light for the other. The latter is the basis of the Paradise-Fall-Apocalypse scheme of the Bible; the former perhaps tragedy, defined as a truncated Scripture. Dark-light is the comic exodos pattern, dark-light-dark the historical cycle or Beowulf one; Wagner’s too. It will be impossible to put the Scripture exposition into [Liberal], or keep it out of [Anticlimax]. Remember that your opening is expository, not narrative, & you’re not vamping a pseudo-historical accompaniment like the introduction to Is Sex Necessary?33 [18] Frobenius: the Dayaks of Borneo think a funeral feast released the soul of the dead man to go (at sunrise) on the sun’s ship or bird (cf. the prow designs).34 Cf. Yeats’ Shadowy Waters. The Basutos tell of a hero born after a dragon had swallowed mankind, who was swallowed by the monster but cut his way out with a knife & released the other people— pure harrowing of hell symbolism.35 One “setting sun” myth (Maui, in New Zealand) has the dying hero crushed by the thighs of an old woman.36 He explains the ladders of arrows (cf. I think Frazer’s ed. of Apollodorus) as solar rays37 (why then the reverse direction? horizonzenith won’t explain it: cf. the solar-phallic arrow in Blake:38 it’s the speared hanged god, the St. Sebastian). [19] Symbols are not static things, to be identified & separated. It would be absurd to say that the serpent or the rose could be legitimately used for only one thing. Symbols are dynamic & fluid, metamorphosing into one another like leitmotifs, & defining them is like defining a common word like “stick” or39 “part” or the French coup. To get the full range of its meaning one simply has to know the language. This is my second attempt to explain it. In the first, I was criticized for not separating myself from Blake. I started with the assumption that I was addressing people who would be interested in Blake & not in me, & that if I under-

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took to explain Blake my primary duty was to get the hell out of the way so that the reader could see Blake. I do not understand why the statement that the reader cannot see me for Blake is intended as a complaint instead of a compliment.40 What do I matter? The important thing is what is in Blake, not who finds it there.41 I know that criticism is full of self-congratulatory Little Jack Horners, but I have no desire to be one of them. [20] Frobenius: I’m a fool about the ladder of arrows: it’s the whole symbol of a heaven-earth connection we get in the Rapunzel, Jack & Beanstalk & Jacob’s ladder stories (Danae too) & in the great chain of being & ladder of love ideas which go back to Homer & Plato. Hence the use of the cord or string (sign of mourning wound round head), of which the modern electric conducting wire is only a development. Here the linking symbol begins to modulate into the wrapping or coiling symbol: this, & the general wriggling appearance of the snake, explains how the snake can be a solar emblem. Snakes & ladders is a profound game, as the former is regularly a symbol of descent & the latter (or ladder) of ascent. The Kich people on the Nile say that men lived in heaven until they misbehaved & God sent them to earth by a golden cord which was finally pecked through by a blue bird. Here is the ritual significance of hanging, & evidently of flaying (cf. the Aeneid story about enclosing land) according to a Dakota rite. The beanstalk form of the legend links it with the tree of mystery. Of course there could be a link to the lower world too, as in the snake-cave & bear-pit (Beowulf) stories. Frobenius is also quite explicit about the spider: its web parallels the sun’s rays, & it’s an artful dodger in the West African tales, a fallen Urizenic entrapping sun. (he doesn’t see the analogy principle, of course). Death & resurrection in a less vital form recurs in these tales. The point for Frobenius is “the souls follow the sun”: the ensnaring of the spider is linked to the human sacrifices attending the setting sun. The Japanese flag is now cleared up, bless poor old Henry Rowland’s heart.42 A grisly African rite linked with the sun, spiders, & death & resurrection (wonder why cutting hands off recurs too?) is a dance round a pole with strings attached, indicating that the maypole was the rayed sun & the webbed spider—also, as Frobenius doesn’t see, the spreading tree, which links the solar & vegetable cycles. Hence the labyrinth, which also shows how the coiling fits in, & leads all this to the spiral. The rope from below is the navel-string we have to

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break.43 Even Blake has the end of a string that winds into a golden ball at the gate of the heavenly city (hence upwards).44 [21] Frobenius: elaborate Yoruba creation myth I should look at when the time comes:45 it’s vaguely Egyptian in shape, & deals with the archetype in which father & mother, heaven & earth, are fucking & are separated by the son principle, who is first the penis or phallus (cf. the hanging-down of the solar penis in Jung,46 which links with the solar ray-chain symbolism above), & then the rising sun, then a tree, & eventually the air or spirit. One of the stories uses a pestle as a phallic symbol. Frazer is so silly about flood stories he couldn’t be expected to see that the African collapsed-sky story is the same thing.47 [22] As for the theft of fire, many of the stories put the source of fire in the under world, where the sun is at night, so that when the thief of fire returns he is also the rising sun. This not in volcanic countries either. A North-West Indian story has fire come from shooting an arrow in the “navel of the sea,” which is a whirlpool, & an interesting treatment of the maelstrom story.48 Note that for many people the sun rises & sets in the sea, hence an eastern water of life as well as a western dead sea. Frobenius is certainly convinced that the arrow is a solar ray, which means that the sun is a bow or body & the phallus a ray or arrow (cf. horn). A remarkable Navajo eleven-dance-night fertility festival around a solar emblem is described: it takes place in a brushwood enclosure open on four sides, which is frequent, & indicates how the cross grows out of the solar ray. The priest-king in the Congo who personifies the sun-god & keeps fire & is responsible for fertility has to hang himself by a cord instead of dying: here’s the hanged god linked with the suspendedbetween-heaven-&-earth archetype.49 He says use of fire is specifically & universally human—hints it’s the human act. Note of course the phallic fire-drill as dealt with by Jung:50 Frazer has a lot of stuff about sexual symbolism & the need-fire (naked boy & girl).51 The bow is regularly employed, which links arrow, solar (fire) ray & phallus. [23] Curious how close the primitive & civilized forms are: how the terramare culture becomes the Roman camp, & the pile-village in the lake Venice. Also in literature: the shaman in the Dionysiac society who withdraws & returns berserk killing & maiming everyone within reach (B.C.

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[British Columbia] Indians among others) develops into Achilles and Orlando Furioso. [24] Start with the light-dark-light pattern of recurrence & amplify it into a skeleton of the cyclic vision. Fill up the outline with hints, perhaps arrive at a tentative cyclic vision, & then work out the Bible, before or after referring to Ovid & the Indian things. Then the epic tradition proper. One key idea is that Dante & Blake polarize one another: one’s symbolic system is (or appears to be) rooted in science, the other is freed from it. Possibly a Third Reich, but that isn’t really the point, which is the necessity for the rejection of the literal level even from Dante. That’s the real “Liberal” tendency of the book, which now I’ve defined. My only worry now is to avoid splitting [Liberal] into an epic book and an articulation of myth book that would overlap with [Anticlimax]. [25] Sidney’s theory of poetry implies that one course is right & two wrong, the two wrong being the exclusive & inclusive approaches to the integrity of the art. Exclusive gives Poe’s theory of poetry, Cézanne’s of painting, & a lot of music, concentrating on the accidents. In painting there is a prudish fear of content, of an explicit subject, clear in Canada. Inclusiveness leads to the black mass, Wagner & Scriabine, to literary painting & pictorial music. Right way is to use other subjects in e.g. painting, but make a pictorial synthesis of them. Also the difference we feel in saying Spenser is allegorical & Shakespeare isn’t means that Spenser is explicitly a teacher of allegorical language. Note that the inclusive social theory of response is sentimental (Tolstoy) & won’t work; the exclusive one is snobbish (ivory tower) & won’t work either. If Shakespeare is greater than Spenser, it’s not because of his greater range of appeal; if Auden is greater than Edgar Guest, it’s not because his audience is more restricted. [26] The thing that fascinates me about Blake is that Nature “to make a third she joyned the former two,” who are Spenser & Milton.52 I can clarify absolutely the social & political form of the Bible in Milton, & I think I can clarify the rhetorical or symbolic form of it in Spenser. Blake does both, & my epic book is beginning to split. Not that Milton hasn’t got the rhetorical form: he has, but not the elaborations. [27] The Bible presents two states of existence, one unfallen & the other fallen & as they are as different as they can be one must be the opposite

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of the other, the fallen world the reflecting mirror of the unfallen one. Of course our vision of this isn’t complete until we’re in heaven, where we see not the fallen world but hell (use the St. Thomas remark in the old 8 here).53 Hence certain parallels of symbolism: tree of life vs. tree of knowledge (latter a dead tree or cross); garden vs. forest; Jerusalem-city vs. Babylon or Egypt city. But in fallen world the different symbols are discrete: in the unfallen one they’re all one. The unfallen world is a golden city or temple, the distinction disappearing, which is also the body of Jesus, the true temple & the cornerstone of the city. But this body is not our centralized centrifugal body but a circumferential one: the unfallen city or body may be conceived as square or spherical but not as a hierarchy, like the fallen body. Here we see the hierarchic chain of being: in eternity God has pulled the chain into his body. The unfallen city or temple is golden, & hence redeems the mineral world by transforming it into the primate. That’s what alchemy was all about. But at the same time the garden or Edenic aspect of it is redeemed too in the form of the flower-primate or mutifoliate rose. Again, Eden has rivers but no sea: a circulating system of fresh water. Al Jazirah, the Arabic name for Mesopotamia, means the island. The sea is fallen or dead water, the nadir of existence from which life slowly returns, & a city like Venice is an analogy of Jerusalem: so is the island of Britain, but I’ll deal with that later. (The contrasting forms of Rome & Venice, the square terramare castra plan & the village on piles, should be noted. Of course Rome, the analogy of the city on 7 hills in 2 Esdras [2:8–19], is part of the EgyptBabylon complex (Bab-El means gate of God or C.C. [Covering Cherub] of Eden). [)] To get back to the redeemed vegetable world, the tree of life or rose must also be a flaming tree or burning bush, hence the 7branched candlestick, besides being the form of an erect vertebrate & warm-blooded animal. The last element means that the colors of the unfallen world are red & white, the blood & body, the wine & bread. English political connections are clear enough, & the St. George & Resurrection flags are identical. (I must look back to Dante to check on the green, which seems to me partly the unconscious: Marvell evidently thought it so). Red & white, Eros & Venus, are also Court of Love colors. [28] Wilderness, law, bondage, tyranny (Egypt, Babylon, Rome, Tyre), the sea & the monster, the dragon, serpent, Leviathan & the Jonah-swallower are all linked, not in this world, where they’re discrete, but in hell. Eternally man is either united to the body of God or imprisoned within

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the Leviathan. Isaiah’s & Ezekiel’s promise that God will fish up Leviathan & all the fish will stick to his scales is the disappearance of the sea itself.54 Jonah & Jesus’ Harrowing of Hell are the same, except that the Harrowing of Hell is symbolically the same as the Incarnation, of which it is a kind of microcosm. Spring & dawn are not perpetual in this world, but inextricable from winter & night, as are good & evil in the moral world. Note that in Melville Ishmael chases the Leviathan (Paul, Galatians 4).55 [29] Jesus epitomizes the whole story, being the body of a spiritual Israel with a twelvefold organization. His birth is a descent to Egypt: he crosses the Jordan & is baptized; he wanders in the wilderness, passes from law to gospel, & begins his ministry. He preaches on a mountain a commentary on the commandments of Sinai; he demonstrates his power over the sea & causes nets full of fishes to be hauled out of the sea. He is the Joshua who conquers the Promised Land & is lifted up like the brazen serpent in the wilderness. The Harrowing of Hell corresponds to the dispute over Moses, which Milton makes a good deal of in the Cambridge MS.56 All this is old stuff to me, but I put it down here to remind myself of the points involved. His cures involve a separation of man from the Leviathan principle. [30] The pyramid, the mountain, the island, the tower, the upwardmoving flame, are all more or less phallic emblems of an Orc cycle; the pyramid-fire link is in Plato. Pyramid & tower are respectively Egyptian & Mesopotamian. All of these are symbolically hot: the mountains are volcanic, & the land of the pyramids is the furnace of iron. The island as an entity of human form runs from at least the Odyssey to The Tempest, &, of course, Phineas Fletcher, who comes out of the House of Alma.57 The four humors theory is a link with the four circulating rivers of Eden. The R.C. [Roman Catholic] exclusion of blood from the sacrament is the analogy-principle, corresponding to the exclusion of the red & hairy Esau from the Jewish theocracy. [31] I have elsewhere the Shylock & F.Q.6. [The Faerie Queene, bk. 6] links.58 Body without blood is dead or Urizenic white, letter without spirit (because the blood is the life). The banyan tree in P.L. [Paradise Lost, bk. 8, ll. 1101–7] symbolizes the bowed-down animal form in the state of nature. Now of course all these Orc symbols are son symbols, and the

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terrible mother appears in the Bible as Rahab, in Isa 30:7 [RSV] as well as elsewhere. Great Whore Duessa can be explained on a partly Jungian basis. Jung doesn’t say why the Archimago-Una and Prospero-Miranda combinations are archetypal, but the link is suggestive. Note that Faust’s plan to redeem land from the Atlantic [Faust, pt. 2, ll. 10,198–233] & Peer Gynt’s scheme for a second flood carry on the same pattern.59 St. George’s Resurrection flag is also a bloody sword, conventionalized as a cross with an elongated shaft, the two-edged sword of the Word. Yes, the God-Man alone in nothing is the spiritual form of an island, England, Hesperia, Ithaca or Patmos. [32] The pyramid & Babel tower are upward-pointing (starry pointing, as Milton says [On Shakespeare, l. 4]) vortex symbols like Dante’s Purgatory. They fail because we pass through vortex at the top & they aren’t real ladders, hence there’s no real chain of being. The erotic ladder of Spenser’s 4 hymns is also vortical. Milton has Jacob’s ladder, but his point is the crack in the universe, the hell that permits the harrowing, as the imprisoning “body of death” does not. A few Renaissance people may have seen the double gyre of medieval theology > philosophy > (largely symmetrical & fabulous) science passing into the modern science > philosophy > (largely symmetrical & fabulous) theology. If I could find such a man I’d write a book about him. [33] Other vortices: the Charybdis or Maelstrom sucking from Generation down into non-entity; or, coming back the other way from the sea, the cornucopia or female phallic symbol pouring fruits from the place of seed. The former is in Dante’s hell. Then there’s the Orc one I’ve mentioned, which stretches to the upper limit of nature & reason & when frozen becomes Leviathan or the symbol of hierarchy (the rhythm of the pyramid (step) & ziggurat recurs in the tiers). Third, there’s the Paravritti,60 the Beulah-Eden vortex through the ray of fire which opens out into the mystic rose, another female phallic symbol, in Dante one of an inviolate virgin because of the Babel nature of Purgatory. This elusive vortex is satirized as the  j or whirl in Aristophanes’ Clouds.61 Keep your Beulah eggs & fish point for future use; also its 9-month gestation period (mensual [monthly] turning of cycle). [34] Miscellany: the ten horns of the Beast are probably a 7-cycle plus a triple Egypt-Babylon-Rome consolidation. They must be empires be-

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cause of the hound symbolism in Daniel. In the Oedipus pattern, where the mother is actually the one sexually possessed by the son, the father disappearing, keep in mind the Lear pattern, the father-daughter one, which is clear enough in Blake if nowhere else. You have to figure it out for [Tragicomedy] anyway. It’s linked with the fact that in a sense the old king is the daughter-devouring dragon. The mob, the monstrous human body, is an epiphany of Hydra or Leviathan. Rumor or fama, full of tongues, is another Hydra symbol, like the peacock an analogy of the 4 Zoas who are full of eyes. We instinctively speak of tyrannies as “monstrous.” In the burning bush or flaming candlestick tree cf. Orc’s flaming hair, the inner light & candle of the Lord images, & Jesus’ remark about the body being full of light [Matthew 6:22; Luke 11:34] & the candle not to be hidden under a bushel [Matthew 5:15; Mark 4:21; Luke 11:33]. Re. numbers: one gets 28 either by adding 24 & 4 or by multiplying 4 & 7. For Blake it’s important that 24 & 28 make 52. For Chaucer it may be important that 4 humors & 7 planets make 28 temperamental types, along with a 29th narrator who is, so to speak, interlunar. I must track down the moon-on-England reference in Dryden’s AA [Absalom and Achitophel, ll. 216–18] & keep in mind Malory’s association of 28 & the Round Table.62 As I’ve said, there are seven supports or pillars of wisdom, 7 branches of the tree of life, & 7 hills of the unfallen city (2 Esdras) as well as a sevenfold analogy. [35] However, the tree of knowledge is a split tree, & so has 14 branches of good and evil, 7 virtues & 7 vices. This split tree suggests Jachin & Boaz, [1 Kings 7:21; 2 Chronicles 3:17.] Samson’s pillars & Jesus’ flanking crosses. It suggests in short the figure in the doorway, the image of the hanged sun-god in the eastern gate of the oriented Druid temple, the ram horned with gold appearing at the spring equinox. I suppose what I’m trying to do is squeeze a “Principles of Symbolism” into a commentary on Spenser, or at most Spenser & Milton. I have a feeling that my readers will think I’m cheating if I use Blake, & so I tend to avoid him except when it comes to clearing my own mind. But surely I can get a footnote to something in the epic tradition, especially Dante, for every statement I make. [36] Something like this: Part One: Prolegomena. Chapter One: Principles of Symbolism. Chapter Two: Subjective (psychological: use Jung) and Objective (natural) Origins of Symbolism. Chapter Three: Symbol-

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ism in Ritual & Myth Compared. Chapter Four: The Scripture as an Art-Form. Chapter Five: Scripture & Epic. Even that’s pretty compressed. One thing, nobody can stop me from using Yeats’ Beulah stuff or Joyce or even, at any rate in footnotes, Blavatsky & some of the Blake sources. Don’t forget at the outset to define coincidence as merely useless design. When you get to Spenser, remember that his avoidance of Dante & use of Ariosto is very significant. For the reader Dante is, if complex, always obviously & clearly allegorical, & so his allegory is easier to follow than Ariosto’s, where allegory comes out of hints, so that it would be possible to ignore his allegory & not even worry who the hell Logostilla [Logistilla] is.63 But for the allegorical poet Dante is definitive, whereas a certain free play in Ariosto’s allegory makes it possible to recreate him. [37] The figure in the doorway is the analogy of the risen God in the midst of two witnesses (opposite of the two false witnesses of the Passion), the tree of life or Branch of Zechariah (tree of Jesse symbolism in Isaiah), flanked by the two olive trees, identified as Moses & Elijah in Rev. xi [11:4]. In the Transfiguration past law & prophetic future are contained in the present: Peter wants to build three tabernacles, one for each,64 which anticipates his three-fold denial in the dark before cock crows & means that the apostasy of the R.C.Ch. [Roman Catholic Church] is predicted in the Gospel. Surely some Protestant saw this. Peter is after all pater, the Parent power, the Papa. [38] Fish & eggs in Lent, of course, symbolize not only a desire to remain on the Beulah level of experience (Friday, it should be noted, is the day consecrated to the female will), but also symbolize Lent itself, the wilderness wandering of the law, the substantial Beulah machine. Here we have a male within a female, Orc in Tirzah (the egg is clear & the fish, the salmon in the river, is an embryonic symbol). Jesus the fisher king, hauling up Leviathan with the fish sticking to his scales & commanding the sea goes beyond Beulah. The net is the veiling (Atlantis) sea itself. The sea is a chaos symbol partly because it’s a reflecting mirror bound to the moon, a mirror with Medusa’s head in it, Medusa being the terrible mother whose cunt is the Charybdis-Maelstrom. The reflecting mirror from the moon is portrayed in Dante’s Paradiso as a threshing-floor, a harvest symbol mentioned in connection with Araunah in the O.T. [2 Samuel 24:18] & parallel with the wine press.

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[39] Angel is from #, messenger, who in the Classics is Hermes or Mercury. Hermes the thrice-great with his Egyptian origin & his secret doctrines & powers, is the Classical Covering Cherub. In Hebrew ruach usually means evil spirit: the good ones are usually ma’lok, a word suggesting the C.C. [Covering Cherub] analogy melek, king. Cf. the MHH [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell] pattern in Blake. I suppose angel : imagination : : Albion or Israel : Jesus. We look out with titanic powers, & the creature perceived through the eye reflects the vision: we look at the same thing & it becomes its own arsehole, as in Exodus. The angel, the C.C. or Hermes, becomes then an elemental spirit or watching star. The angel of a Church is the Zeitgeist or ether-reservoir of ideas. In vision, the fallen angel or meteor is the Prometheus-Jesus, the descending friend of man; in analogy, he’s the worshipped angel, warned against in Colossians [2:18], Hebrews [1:13–14] & Revelation [19:10, 22:8–9]. The worshipped angel is really the accepted chain of being. The serpent who tempted Adam was the serpentine form of his own intelligence, so the fallen serpent form is the Adamic body. Looked at, the C.C. is a devil-basiliskLeviathan; looked through, he’s an angel of God (melek-ma’lek). Looked at, the Ocean; looked through, Atlantis. Looked at, the concealing form of God who turns out to be the Father-alone or (as in Blake’s Tharmas) “Parent power” principle [The Four Zoas, Night the First, pl. 4, l. 6], the Angelo or regent. Looked through, he’s the spiritual form of the king, the only-begotten Son of God. Looked at, the atomic bomb, the secret power of the thrice-great triple-formed monstrous & hermetic Cerberus; looked through, the furnace or alembic of the three children in which we can see the form of the fourth [Daniel 3:25]. Looked at, the magician with wand & cloak; looked through, the released Prospero whose body is the island. The angelology-chain of being link is pretty clear in the whole Dionysian-Thomistic tradition. [40] Perhaps Spenser can take the rhetorical part of this all right: certainly the cannibal feast in Q6 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 6] means he knew something about the Druid analogy & if the Gardens of Adonis is an accurate Beulah I think I’ll be all right. Just as Aeneas had to abandon Dido to found Rome, so the Court of Love & the erotic or generative cycle of nature has to be transcended, not only to seek a city, but to enter the public virtues of Part II. Spenser & Milton both in different ways, however, run aground on the same point. The natural is the analogy of the revealed in both. O.K. But the real trouble is a spirit of a middle sort,

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suspended between heaven & earth like the hanged god or the Sibyl’s ashes, or like, most significantly, man himself on the chain of being, or the spider-sun sucking up water, the C.C. [Covering Cherub] Angel. [41] This is the legal analogy, or rather the legal intermixture of vision & analogy founded on the fallen body of man. What to do with law? Is the wilderness of Sinai a higher state than Egypt? And if the Jewish law is part of the analogy, what about Christian law, ceremonies & sacraments? If the rebuilt temple & city are the analogy, what about the Christian state? Not only the O.T. but Plato, with his laws & his republic founded on the hierarchical fallen body, are involved in this, & Aristotle rationalizes for the R.C.Ch. [Roman Catholic Church] the conception of the centre of activity as the body of fallen man in which alone the Word could be made flesh. [42] Now if I start on Spenser I can get along fine as far as Book IV. He knows all about the Jung interpretation of Perseus, the old wise man, anima & terrible mother archetypes; he knows what “Generation” means & how to handle the whole Orc cycle up to the freeing of waters at the end of IV. He has no sense of Los, as far as I can see, so my book could go about half way though ch. 8 of the Blake with him & then bog down. For in Book V he tackles the legal analogy & makes a mess of it. However, if the Gardens of Adonis is an accurate Beulah, he’s got the cityvision & hence the epistemological gospel: the deliverance of substance by form. Peter is a substantial rock, Thomism a substantial philosophy; that the pure Gospel deals with form & not the Beulah substance-mattress, the real presence in matter which is mater & materia both, is possibly clearer in Spenser than in Milton’s retraction nonsense. Possibly not, too. [43] Anyway, if Spenser breaks down about p. 246 of FS Milton just gets nicely going there. His clarified view of the prophet gives him his Los, & his doctrine of liberty clears up the legal analogy as thoroughly as Blake. Early Milton has a suppressed & rudimentary St. George in his Arthurian schemes & in the protecting genius aspect of Lycidas; a Guyon in the Comus lady who is legal good paralyzed by being surrounded by moral evil; and a Britomart both there and in his early crusades, notably the divorce tracts. Friendship is the leading poetic theme between Lycidas & the Restoration (ED [Epitaphium Damonis], Manso, the epistolary sonnets,

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etc.). But the real Milton doesn’t begin until justice is swallowed up in liberty. The Restoration extinguishes the Narcissist administrator in Milton that was in even Plato, to say nothing of Goethe. (It really was in Goethe, as Barker’s “political dilemma” chapter shows).65 That takes him over Book V, the legal analogy or Old Testament of which the New, like the paradegma [paradeigma, “pattern,” “model”] in Plato, is the vision or anagogy. This pattern is repeated in the epics of the first & second Adams, which are not about “courtesy” but about grace, the ambiguous graceful courtier & gracious God combined in the epic heroism of Christ. [44] The Los problem is closely connected with what I’m beginning to realize is an important question: the relation I suddenly hit on between individuality & personality, the noumenal self & the persona mask. It’s the application to the artist of the vision-analogy problem, & when I crack it I’ll have cracked something big in Shakespeare, perhaps the key to the whole Prospero business. I think Spenser & Milton may both be epic failures, a gigantic fragmentation of an unwritten Protestant Dante whose St. Thomas philosophical articulation I have to try to establish in [Liberal], or [Anticlimax], or whatever the hell it is. That non-existent epic poet & non-existent philosopher are balanced by a dramatist who really did exist, so that [Tragicomedy] will have a follow-through the others lack, a real Messiah flanked by two ghostly witnesses, one legal & one prophetic. I wish the Dante of the epic analogy, if that’s what he is, didn’t bulk so large in the theoretical scheme: he disrupts the practice too. [45] I suppose I could say that Milton’s fifth or justice period is the Cromwellian period of revolutionary settlement, including repressive measures in Ireland, in which the Protestant cause expands, as in the Piedmont massacre. Even in Q5 the repression of Ireland is revolutionary, or thought of as such, & is carefully & closely linked with the imperial or crusading (Tasso) aspect of Protestantism.66 So Milton’s courtesy period is that of the 1659 pamphlets, a relaxation of dictatorial vengeance with Utopian adumbrations and a call to the rulers to assume their social responsibilities.67 Then the complete sublunary circle passes & he sees the world of mutability below him, not anxious for the “Sabaoth’s sight”68 because we always have our vision from that, not of it. The charitable conception of Christianity reverses the perspective of the ecstatic one. This has something to do with the closing of the persona circle. Note

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that ending with courtesy, a kind of Carlyleism, really does bog Spenser down in the legal analogy. It really looks like two books—a Homeric epic of 24 chapters, certainly; & then there are two more. [46] In the Bible the prophets idealize a nomadic life because that’s the peculiar tradition of the Hebrews, & so fastens on the monolatrous side of Jehovah which can develop into monotheism. Hence pastoral or shepherd ranching life becomes anagogy & the natural cycle of farming the analogy. But this pastoral Utopia or Garden of Eden is a promised land: what nomads actually do in the Near East is wander in a wilderness. Hence farming is part of the legal analogy: it’s the means whereby the desert becomes Eden: tilling the ground after the Fall is a curse, but an inescapable one. Now in the wilderness, where the sun is destruction & the earth atomic, the moon is the focus of worship (hallel)69 and the moon, which goes everywhere the tribe goes, like the ark, & which suggests the 28-fold cycle, becomes a symbolic centre. If the law comes from the top of the mountain, the moon coming to rest on top of the mountain gives one the whole Beulah complex of passing through a sublunary vortex at the apex of Luvah’s prick. This also is a point of repose for the nomad. Moses (doesn’t “Sin” mean moon?)70 probably means that the moon is God’s arsehole & his Pisgah sight of course I have.71 [47] Now: the question of chastity comes in here. The farming cycle is one of fertility: it’s erotic, Generative & dominated by Venus & Adonis symbols. The pastoral life suggests Diana & the remoteness of the female will, & of course the accession of Elizabeth & all the Endymion stuff that went with that reinforced that & clarified the Abel-vs.-Cain aspect of pastoral symbolism. Both aspects are possible in the Court of Love, where the fuck can be either wet or dry, either possession of a mistress or a Petrarch-Sidney frustration. In either case one has to jump over the moon: chastity or Britomart is neither promiscuity (Venus & Amoret) nor virginity (Diana-Belphoebe). On top of the moon there is the view of the city: Amor reversed is Roma, & that leads, or should lead, to the public virtues. [48] I may be criticized for not offering a judgement of value on these poets (= I realize that I may be). But I do not think that contemporary criticism is highly enough organized to know what all the factors of goodness72 or worth in poetry are. I am trying to contribute one of these

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neglected factors, that of integrity of symbolism or intensity of poetic thought (the former being the manifestation of the latter). Once accepted for Milton, my suggestions make many judgements of value now in existence completely irrelevant. Until some objective standards are established in criticism, judgements of values will be primarily hunches, based on intuitive tastes which go out of focus as soon as the critic moves from taste to prejudice, as he must do sooner or later. I believe that, within limits, flexible & liberal objective standards of criticism are possible.73 [49] Another Los factor in Milton is that of timing. Unlike Carlyle, he knows that the impulse to produce which comes with the everlasting yea can’t be lazily defined as work, but must be definitely the creative act. As I say in lectures, & said in fact in FS,74 Milton had the impulse to produce combined with the necessity of waiting for the thing to be done to form, & the strain nearly drove him crazy. The properly timed act is the only creative one, as it is the act in which the observation of oneself & of one’s circumstances coincide, in which the individuality & personality are in alignment. This is as important for Milton (& for Adam, Christ & Samson, but not the Lady in Comus) positively as it is negatively for Hamlet. In here too goes the essential distinction between Milton’s great man & Carlyle’s, the prophet of God & the hero or servant of Caesar, the Cortegiano whose grace has to be redeemed (along Newman lines, by the way). The prophet is not purely an artist, but because the Lord speaks in him he’s an imaginative body & not an ego-centre. The whole conception of epic falls on the appropriate timing of the heroic act, the time being decreed by God, as the Iliad says in about the third line.75 Obstructions are the permitted liberty of inferior gods. Hence potentially even in Homer the egocentric-heroic is the Satanic. [50] Half of Q [The Faerie Queene] is about private & the other half about public virtue. In Xy [Christianity] the forms or [?] of these virtues are respectively chastity & charity. As I’ve said, Milton is preoccupied with chastity in this sense up to his public period (it hangs on through a lot of “domestic liberty” too, & clarifies his charity by buggering his social attachments & discriminations) & then turns to charity. Now Spenser gets his chastity right. He knows it’s founded on an eternal vision but not an ecstatic vision (holiness), & that it can’t be defined in Aristotelian or substantial terms (temperance), but is a word incarnate in flesh, sus-

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pended between heaven & earth, part of the middle way which is not the legal analogy, though it is a liberated law. But in Part Two he flounders over Los, misses the point of Los, &, for all the world as though he were Carlyle, tumbles into the Orc fallacy & emerges with “courtesy” instead of charity for his crucial public virtue. Courtesy is, of course, the pure Luvah analogy of charity. That’s the hurdle Milton successfully gets over. Beulah machinery clatters around his ears too, but not as much as around Spenser’s: it’s almost pathetic to read the Mutability Cantoes & still see the wheel inexorably turning from 3 into 4, & then, like the wheel of fortune, lowering itself into 5. [51] Milton never gets quite clear the detaching of God’s reality from God’s being, the essential Protestant discovery that the essence of perfect being does not involve his existence: it involves raising the category of his reality above that of existence. He never gets off the Beulah substance-mattress. But he does have some idea of the problem involved. True, he will try to approach the Father directly, not grasping Blake’s point that if you try that all you get is the first cause of Deism. True, he adopts the old chain-of-being fallacy: begin with a Father God attached to existence & work your way down to a Son who enters physical existence. But he’s all right really. Note how careful he is to say that God foresees but doesn’t foreordain: he wants to get God away from the startingpoint of the machine of causation. The astronomy in 8 [Paradise Lost, bk. 8] is of course no more “obscurantism” than Satan’s speeches are blasphemy: he wants Adam to seek God in his own humanity & not in nature or any kind of objective (idolatrous) instruction, whether it comes from nature below him on the chain of being or from angels above him. Seen from the other side of the vortex (& you do have to see it there as the Michael vision of fallen perspective shows) even P.L. [Paradise Lost] works out, & as for P.R. [Paradise Regained], where Christ becomes God at the moment when a new centre of balance is established (he doesn’t become God then: it’s only obvious then to Satan or nature that he is God), the miracle of that grows on me all the time. [52] I think FS ends my “lyric” period (long choosing & beginning late)76 and my “epic” one, begun nel mezzo del cammin,77 begins here. The psychological difference is connected with the doctrine of timing, which, as I see more clearly now, is inseparably attached to the Renaissance conception of art & nature. This is one that Goethe adopts, and that Barker

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Fairley’s book78 on him exemplifies. Blake says it, of course, but the antiLockian slant in him made me understand it rather than realize it. It’s part of Bill Fennel’s [Fennell’s] objection to FS.79 The imagination wills, but the will does not cause the imagination to act. The relaxation of will is first necessary to imagination. You don’t try to write books; you let books write themselves. Art is the flowering of nature, the fruit of organic energy, & you don’t either fight nature like Schiller or surrender to it like Wordsworth (opposite of fighting). You just clear out the passages blocking the free activity of Los, which the man of will & action can never do. Mind, the Holy Spirit doesn’t come from nature: that may be Goethe’s mistake;80 it comes through nature. Milton’s easy unpremeditated verse (not spontaneous like Shelley’s skylark), his wanting to be milked, are part of his understanding of Los. I never got the “involuntary” aspect of Blake’s imagination really straight. Somewhere in this abandonment of will or act as a causative force is the true Protestant as opposed to the Scotist-Calvinist conception of God. And of the epic. [53] There are two forms of advance: express-train movement in time along a horizontal chain of being & organic movement from material to form. The former is the inevitability of gradualness, a conservative evolution (or failing that just pure becoming; but in consciousness memory gives it some integration); the latter is conversion rather than conservatism, a revolutionary crystallization of which the archetype is the emergence of consciousness of nature. This revolutionary leap of sudden deliverance is conversion in religion or Paravritti [conversion]; in comedy it’s the laugh. As I’ve said, active or practice-memory is the voluntary basis of imagination in Blake: the memory he condemns is the schizophrenic attempt to face a spectral & subjective environment. And of course you can’t handle Milton without taking in the revolutionary aspect of him. [54] Schopenhauer has the split: all he knows is that the rider isn’t the horse. But the world of idea has to come back and press the world of will into its service. On a Schopenhauerian basis only the “man of destiny” or will, the agent of action without any ideas, can do that. Hence the romantic cult of the hero. The point is you grow out of that, not away from it, & your consciousness has to learn how to control the manic force of the will to power. Ritual is the basis of myth here as elsewhere: the physical ecstasy must become articulate. Nietzsche has some sense of this; proba-

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bly a very confused one. But the physical war in which the military campaign is a branch of hydrostatics, following the curves & contours of nature, can emancipate into Blake’s spiritual war. Plato’s Phaedrus I think is the textbook about how to control manic energy, & he makes it clear that only the prophet-poet can handle it: the manic becomes the mantic. Similarly in the O.T. the prophet comes out of the whirling dervish & articulates the manic will-to-power force of Jehovah. Yet the Parthian-manic, Roman-Caesarian or Anti-Christ, & Athenian-Aristotelian or substantial stages of demonic articulation have to be seen from without. Oh, shut up: you’re just gassing. Never write things down till they crystallize. [55] P.L. [Paradise Lost] & P.R. [Paradise Regained] have a strong element of paradox in them (I am beginning to get glimmerings of a Paradox with a capital P) which is based on the fact that the Classical epic is an analogy of the Christian one, the source of Boileau’s difficulty.81 The heroic in P.L. is the Satanic. Christ is the hero because he alone acts: Adam & Satan appear to act, but really only lose their freedom to act. In P.R. appearances show Christ motionless & Satan in a fever of activity: really, Christ is the centre of all creative effort & Satan represents nothing but inertia & bondage. This contrast is that of the timed or real act & the untimely or unreal act. Another element of paradox is in treating Christ as an external person instead of pure internal individuality. Christ could never have been someone else, even in the Gospels. In P.R. at any rate this difficulty partly disappears. But the real Christ is always within the soul: the Last Judgement takes place in the soul. God doesn’t sit outside men & send people to heaven or hell as sheep or goats [Matthew 25:31–46]; he sits within & the soul by his help throws out its own goats. Similarly with casting out devils, where the correct form is unmistakable. [56] If nature is the fallen human body turned inside out, & if the true form of both is a human spiritual body, which we have to approach through ourselves & not through nature, then wisdom must be partly a growing of the fallen body into the spiritual form of itself. This is the principle of Yogi [or Yoga] with its awakening of Kundalini & so forth. It is also involved in ecstatic or rather disciplinary mysticism such as the Catholics were experimenting with in Milton’s day. In P.R. [Paradise Regained] the epiphany of Christ as the centre of physical or fleshly balance is linked with this: how explicitly it’s hard to say. Privately, Milton’s

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blindness is relevant too. At the climax of P.R., Milton’s incarnation, the central scintilla, the candle of the Lord, bursts into flame in a complete stillness, & then even the storm can’t shake it [bk. 4, ll. 426–38]. [57] I don’t understand how Xy [Christianity] can have immortality at one end of life & not at the other: if eternal existence follows death it must have preceded birth. This was what “predestination” was all about: the feeling of absurdity in the notion of a new soul beginning in time & making its way up to eternity. If Jesus triumphs over death & thereby makes death something fundamentally unreal, he must also make birth unreal: if no consciousness really dies, all consciousness is really unborn. [58] Folklore & ballads is something that should come into focus really in [Tragicomedy], but here I can note that romance is full of Orc quests & that’s why it approaches & develops into the epic. Hind Horn throwing off a beggar’s disguise at a banquet and carrying the bride away from a father-surrogate, belongs to comedy, but indicates the pattern. Scarlet cloaks & gold ornaments turn up pretty often. The critical obscurantism that reacted against the attempt to reduce everything to sun myths in the last century hindered the development of anagogy. [59] The pragmatism that reassures the scientist of the “reality” of what he is doing makes him an incarnation of a causal chain, hence of the Deist God who foreordains but does not foreknow. The inference is that only the visionary can be for Milton the agent of the true God. I wonder how much of the crucial theme of [Anticlimax], the deliverance of consciousness from activity, Schopenhauer perverted to comedy, belongs in [Liberal]. [60] Three parts: Part One, the first two chapters, The Christian Epic; Part Two, chs. 3–7, Spenser; Part Three (motto the first two lines of S.B.’s Latin poem on P.L.),82 chs. 8–12. Milton. Chapter One: Origin & Structure of the Epic. Two: Scripture & Epic. Three: Prospective (Bk. I of Q [The Faerie Queene]). Four: Preparing of the Hero (II of Q). Five: Stabilizing of the Order of Nature (III–IV of Q). Six: Legal Analogy of the Human Communion (V–VI Q). Seven: The Vision of Charity (VI of Q–Mut. Coes. [Mutabilitie Cantos]). Eight: Liberty & Time (early & prose Milton). Nine: Vision & Causation (P.L. [Paradise Lost]). Ten: Prophecy & Heroism

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(P.L.). Eleven: Persona & Individual (P.L.). Twelve: Crisis (P.R.). The last four have the general theme of the Agon of Christ & Satan. Background of the chapters: One, Iliad; Two, Odyssey; Three, Aeneid; Four, Dark Age Epics (Beowulf, Eddas, Chanson de Roland, Arthurian legends, Nibelungenlied); Five, Medieval Romance & Ballad; Six, Ariosto, Tasso, Camoens; Seven, Commedia. Eight, probably Proust; Nine, perhaps Faust; Eleven, perhaps Joyce; Twelve, The Book of Job. Ten could be Wagner. All this takes me a long way into [Rencontre]. Balls. [61] The first two chapters are concerned with my theory of revelation in Scripture as presenting a series of archetypes; Creation, Fall, Agon of Moses, Agon of Joshua, Pathos, Epiphany & Apocalypse. Epic presents the agon; drama, the final pathos-epiphany in its tragic & comic forms. Origin of the epic in the personal poet (poet as persona is an encyclopaedia of anagogy: this persona is rounded off when the epic itself appears, the epic, which preserves its encyclopaedic quality, being the total being into which the persona disappears. This pattern is important for Milton: I think it breaks down somewhere in Spenser. Eight is the crucial chapter for me right now). Hesiodic form of poet preserving social wisdom, & thereby the antipodal symbol (as persona) to the king as the concrete symbol of the larger human body of society. Hence the complicated opposition, though this comes into focus later on, of the prophet & the king, one the watcher & the other the doer or actor (hypocrite or persona). The Los prophet sees the Los-king: the spiritual form of art is a vision of the Messiah. The relation of the Orc-king to this is a Renaissance theme largely; of the Orc-prophet to it, a romantic one. I must work out Virginia Woolf as part of my 8 job.83 [62] Anyway, I have to begin the epic with my cycle point. The twelve traditional parts are probably zodiacal: the fact that the first ed. of P.L. [Paradise Lost] had ten indicates colossal independence of mind on Milton’s part; or maybe it’s a double five-act drama. The 24 books of the Homeric epics are the alphabetical cycle. Anyway, the Hercules twelvelabor cycle of the solar hero means the concealment of a mysterious 13th part, the hero’s own body, which moved through the cyclic night of the labors. The agon of Moses is the journey of the solar hero in the dark underworld, meeting a series of gigantic enemies, the powers of darkness, all of whom are parts of Leviathan. The final dragon-slaying is an epiphany of Leviathan. The hero’s name & ancestry are frequently lost,

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& he finds out who he is when he finds out who the dragon is. The quest, or the hero’s search for the true form of Leviathan, belongs to the agon of Moses, the wandering in the body of Leviathan, i.e., the desert, the forest or the sea. Sinking into this body corresponds to sleep: hence the threshold symbolism & the curious womb-seeking cosiness of dreariness in romance. The womb-seeking brings in the terrible mother, the Rahab, Duessa, Circe-Calypso, or Dido. The regression here suggests the lazy or lunatic hero, Hercules under Omphale, Achilles or Orlando (Coriolanus is the dramatic form of this, & correctly states the Oedipus pattern) who is sulking & is searched for by others, as the sun is coaxed to rise or the Messiah to awake in Isaiah [51:9, 52:1]. [63] The king develops into Israel, the larger human body, in which the national aspect of the epic is contained. The idea of a sequential struggle in a world of linear time & lost direction means a leader with an inscrutable instinct: a hero who can flounder through chaos. (I can see that this book is going to be an intertwining series of leitmotifs, like a Wagner opera). This leader at the head of a column whose back parts the others see is the temporal (note the tergiversation of the priest in the mass) analogy of the watcher in the middle of a community, who in his turn is the personal analogy of the circumference of his vision which is the form of his art, & includes, & in fact is, the spiritual form of his Israel. Note the curse of the perpetual march here, noted by Marvell in Cromwell,84 along with the march itself as the symbol of enslaved movement (a [Rencontre] theme). This is at its height in the crusade, I suppose. [64] Anyway, I can perhaps establish the light-dark-light pattern & the agon of the light-hero with the dark monster at once, referring I think to romance rather than epic, on the theory that explicit art clarifies the dreamier, more relaxed & easy-going forms where symbolic patterns are easier for a poet to see because of their greater ingenuousness: the free play in Ariosto made him more attractive than Dante (who did a definitive job) to Spenser, though the reader finds Dante clear & Ariosto obscure as an allegorist. Get the word Leviathan solidly into the reader’s head, noting that he turns out to be, among other things, time, the dark power moving invisibly from future to past against the movement of life: cf. the primum mobile in Chaucer’s ML Tale.85 Note the movement towards a restatement of Job both in Milton & in Blake. Note too how the king at the centre of a community eliminates the personal or egocentric poet.

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[65] The forest, wilderness & sea all hang together: the ruined or fallen city, the Babylon with its shifting rootless masses is less easy to grasp: yet it’s there from Troy on. I have to work in the historical cycle with the natural one in the way my Toynbee postscript does.86 Beowulf has it, & even Spenser begins with the ruins of Rome: it’s an important part of the legal analogy. [66] I think I have the general plan of the first part fairly clear: the fact that the Leviathan is time gives memory in the sense of a consolidating tradition a heroic role to play against the envious tooth:87 note the conception of chivalry thereby attached to the artist. I think it’s in the third chapter, the commentary on Book I of Q [The Faerie Queene], that I bring in my unification-of-symbols point, which I’m beginning to see is closely connected with the Atlantis-Luvah vortex-mountain symbolism. Dante complementing the Bible in that regard. The Atlantid-Egyptian use of Ariosto comes in, as well as the purgatorial mountain & the point made by Lewis about spiritual reality vs. literal fact.88 Book I states the quest, & so works out the ecstatic vision answering the charitable one of the Mut. Coes [Mutabilitie Cantos]. The Duessa terrible-mother theme or rather the rejection-of-Dido one belongs in Book II rather. [67] As a matter of fact the whole Orc quest in the Bible might be postponed, though some notice of modern prose-criticism Orc epics—Frazer, Jung (his “archetypes” are all in Book I), Frobenius & Hartland89 should emerge fairly early. Also some reading about romances, so that I can do exactly the right thing about St. George & Garter symbolism in 3. But the linking patterns, such as that when the quest of Moses turns into the quest of Joshua at the edge of the wilderness the hero is ejected from the body of Leviathan, & that’s the theme of P.R. [Paradise Regained], have to be established as soon as possible. [68] 4, which is a commentary on Q2 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 2], deals with the choosing of the hero (the word Guyon means against). Hence its theme is the breaking of the net of regression to the mother. As Milton saw, it’s heroic action in a fallen world where good & evil are inextricably mixed. I don’t know: 4 isn’t all clear to me yet, & only the Alma business (note that the human macrocosm would be in Spenser) seems to have much point. The via media is the finding-of-the-quest preparation theme, & hasn’t the march-of-time quality in it that the

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Commedia has. The Commedia as a guided crusade, even a spiritual one, bothers me. [69] But the commentary on Q3 & 4 [The Faerie Queene, bks. 3 and 4] is very important: it deals with the Orc cycle in its Adonis & Tharmas aspect, & has to work out the whole question of Spenser’s Beulah. Also the C of L [Court of Love] convention & the whole Eros-Adonis link: the point is that Spenser, as the Hymnes show, regards sexual love as cyclic and not as a progressive ladder of a Dantesque. Some very careful work will have to be done on the whole cycle here up to the freeing of waters in 4 (that too is an incident in the agon of Moses, by the way), because the crucial importance of chastity as a private virtue makes this surmounting of the erotic Beulah the secondary crisis, and in its way as much so as the P.R. [Paradise Regained] business itself. [70] When St. George climbs the mountain & sees the city, the real dragon is the intervening space, & the subsequent books deal with the plunge back in. Virginia Woolf follows To the Lighthouse with The Waves, & shows a similar progression. I’d like to work her out while doing, say, 8. In any case the climb to the top point of the fallen world is the Beulah crisis at the apex of a vortex. [71] Q5 & 6 [The Faerie Queene, bks. 5 and 6] bring me to the legal analogy, the establishing of the moral law in the wilderness, the consolidating of fallen society on the model of the fallen body (this model has been supplied by Bk. 2: the relation of Q2 to Q5 shows, among other things, the importance of the Orc-hero as king). Plato is one person who is important here: he, like the Indian epics, expands the heroic theme of arete [virtue, heroic excellence] derived from Homer. It’s at this time that my very difficult & very essential “Liberal” point begins. Plato, note, has the artist for his purifying scapegoat, a cyclic twist at the end leading up to an Atlantis myth, & a conception of paradegma [paradeigma, “model,” “pattern”] & the prophetic inspiration of poetry that may—I don’t say it will—push the whole thing toward the vortex indicated by Euthyphro. Spenser’s view like Plato’s is Utopian & revolutionary, the energy of Orc seeing a Urizenic pattern in the future which is the analogy of Golgonooza. Hence the national-unity centripetal theme goes into a centrifugal crusade, as does Tasso’s. This is the modern revolutionary “meaning of treason” in reverse,90 but the revolutionary rebellion of Q1 is of a piece

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with the revolutionary tribunal of Q5. Imperialism is at least against the romantic revolution, which has always afflicted Ireland. [72] The pastoral symbolism of Q6 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 6], though its Atlantid overtones are in Plato, take[s] us back to the O.T. & the idealizing of the unfallen state as a garden. Hence farming is a curse of the fall, & it, with the city that followed it, is a vehicular form leading us back to the effortless patriarchal nomadism of Abel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob (not as Israel), David (not as Israel) , Jesus & the Xn ch. [Christian church]—a nomadism of which the underlying desert tribe is the analogy. Thus pastoral symbolism is exodic & not cyclic like farming symbolism of the Adonis type, which should be carefully distinguished from it. The spontaneous art of heaven is in it. Sidney’s Arcadia[,] as a more gracious & courteous pattern of society than the Utopias which belong to Q5, foreshadows it. Pastoral makes the poet the centre (note Spenser’s “signature” of Q6) but an active centre & not a passive one like the C of L [Court of Love] where he’s inside the body of the mother. [73] Of course by this time I’ll have given all the double-Hegelian triad of private & public virtue. Note carefully that in Machiavelli it’s the appearance of virtue in the prince, in Castiglione the appearance of grace in the courtier, that matters more than the “reality.” Here is a link with revelation as allegory, contrasted with Catholic doctrines of ritual act, that helps to explain why Spenser made so much of the legal analogy. Everything is pure persona. I wish I knew what the hell I meant by that word. It begins with an ego, individual, titanic nihilist within, censored & socially adjusted without, a persona or hypocrite mask. The ego is a centre. The artist’s vision is circumferential, & the inside of it, the side facing the outward sides of people, is the artistic persona. The artist’s individuality outside that is a void. The closing off of the persona I occasionally refer to must be the completing of the circumferential view of society. This is clearly marked in Milton by the Restoration. I don’t think Spenser, thanks to Ireland, ever got it clear. [74] The seventh chapter outlines the Mut. Coes. [Mutabilitie Cantos], their relation to Q [The Faerie Queene] if any, their importance as a restatement of the Beulah crisis, their possible hidden links with an unfinished abortive “liberty & time” theme, & their connections with a hypothetical vision of charity. It would be a stunt if I could prove this, but I’ll have to

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do with bare assertion, likely. The exodos comedy theme & its links here with not only [Tragicomedy] but more especially [Anticlimax]. The vision from God facing the ecstatic vision of Q1, where the persona is turned outward & therefore, though turned outward to God, still egocentric. [75] Chapter 8, the Los chapter, is the payoff. It begins with summarizing the Spenserian progression in Milton up to 1660, as above. Then it puts together several Los ideas I’ve been thinking about. All great imaginative achievements begin by the conquest of the S of U [Spectre of Urthona] by Los: by the surrender of will to imagination. In art, in religion, in the C of L [Court of Love], what really comes off does so by itself, not through will-power. Jung calls the source of imgve. [imaginative] power the unconscious: the Elizabethans called it nature: the two terms can be reconciled. Everything about the composition of P.L. [Paradise Lost] shows that after waiting his whole life for it to ripen, Milton fell in with the Renaissance-Goethe conception of art as the natural supernatural growth out of nature, & didn’t try to write it, but just allowed it to write itself. [76] So the surrender of will to the effortless concretion gives up, as Blake says, linear time for creative time. Maybe I should look at Whitehead. This causes a Paravritti [conversion] which is the same thing as the regaining of liberty. Milton’s arrogance, his idea of the poet-hero jousting with a Leviathan in front of an applauding multitude, his linear desire to meet situations and “advance” arguments, are all S of U [Spectre of Urthona] complexes, & go with a Carlylean conception of a Leviathan-Führer. The contrast with his real doctrine of liberty & his humility in being willing to wait on God’s word is curiously instructive. The Restoration stopped the linear advance, rounded his imgve. [imaginative] circumference, & exploded his persona. [77] At this time the conception of Angst comes in: the titanic individual within fretting at the impact of existential situations has been altered by the Paravritti [conversion] of the persona into an eternal Word focussing down into a point of time. This isn’t so bad as regards Milton: it’s the Israel theme in Milton, the theme in short of national revolution vs. whatever the hell I mean by “Liberal.” I guess 8 is the tie up of my Liberal Arts Club talk91 (sinister irony!) and possibly a microcosm of [Rencon-

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tre] or more likely [Mirage]. The Protestant crusade of the R.C. [Roman Catholic] analogy (it’s also a crusading movement) are both involved. The Marxist line may be a straight analogy of the fact that Xy [Christianity] talks to the redeemed victim & not the elect tyrant, the Publican & not the Pharisee, & can’t get at a man who has his reward & doesn’t feel he’s gypped out of something. It may also in its doctrine of a social Paravritti [conversion] be an analogy of the passing into creative time at the right time. Whatever it is, it’s a damn profound, disturbing & challenging analogy, if it is an analogy. I’ve got to look that in the eye & no fooling, because Milton didn’t run away from revolution like so many liberals: he explored & exhausted revy. [revolutionary] possibilities. He was, & this is very important, a revy. genius. [78] His conception of Christian liberty as gospel & as total liberty is much clearer: only in the civil sphere is he involved with analogical vehicular forms. Divorce is, of course, based on Jesus’ anti–legal commentary on the commandments according to which marriage is “consummated” at death. It also rises from general natural desire to companionship in innocence, where husband & wife are the only man & woman in the world, & so repeat the pattern of Adam & Eve. The Protestant idea of recreating the Word of God is fundamentally sound, though it has dangers, mostly coming from all that CD foolishness,92 & should perhaps be linked with my [Anticlimax] idea of criticism, myth & word as the exodos of poetry, ritual & the moral act. [79] The rest of the book should not be too bad: in fact my main problem will be in giving the three P.L. [Paradise Lost] chapters enough stretto value. 8 may spill over, as its Kierkegaard-Marx-Freud Promethean explosion passing at the right time or creative time takes me through a vortex from the other side of which I look down on the natural machine. That’s the distinction between vision & causation, the refusal to put a Deist God at the head of a sequence, that is a leading theme, perhaps, of 10. The connection of this with the heresy of approaching the Father directly is less important to me just now than its connection with the explosion of the persona, which is really the annihilation of the king or Leviathan principle, killed by being turned inside out. (When you have time check the word “hasim,” hypocrite, defined as one who has given his face to God, in Mohammedanism.) The God who foresees but doesn’t cause, & yet from whom all redemption or spiritual causation proceeds,

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is the creative Word and the watcher: the annihilation of the king creates the prophet. [80] Of course I know that the general theme of 9–12 is the agon of Christ & Satan in the paradoxical form given it by the fallen world, where Christ expresses freedom by not acting & Satan bondage by action. I have to work that out in a post-8 way, which is more complex than I have it. I think of 11 as the chapter in which I give the pure myth of Milton unqualified by the historical censor, or even the theological one: Milton the recreator of the Word pure & simple. 12 is a very neat conclusion: P.R. [Paradise Regained] with the sequence Parthia-Rome-Athens summarizing my Spenser progression & anticipating the whole [Rencontre][Anticlimax]- [Paradox] sequence; then the still centre & the apocalyptic form. 1948 [81] What 8 really turns on is the contrast between the chain & the vortex. The former is the Aristotelian form-matter ladder of being, feudal economy, & sacramental evolution. The latter is revolutionary explosion of the repressed Orc (Freud) proletariat (Marx) & Angst (Kierkegaard). This relationship has already been noted in Dante on p. 3. [par. 6]. All the details of it are by no means clear, but the latter is what P.L.’s [Paradise Lost’s] got that DC [The Divine Comedy] damn well ain’t got, & indicates that DC is pre-1660 before the persona closed off. After all the ability to write P.L. is the consummation of a personal revolution. I must brood on will, pride, & linear time: the S of U [Spectre of Urthona] panic of premature activity. Note that the point about Lycidas is that untimeliness is identified with the natural cycle. Fame emancipates from time: the last infirmity of noble mind is to remain on the plane of linear time.93 Cf. the “spur” of Lycidas with Dante’s sprone.94 Another social point is that work being a curse & a vehicular form, & paradise pure leisure, earthly leisure is the place where vision is born, hence Carlyle was exactly wrong. [82] I think [Liberal] deals with the two vast cycles, of vision & action, which come to a common focus on the point of the right time, the event of revelation or epiphany in which God speaks or appears. This latter is the theme of [Tragicomedy], as the passage through is that of [Anticlimax]. Each book I think demands a Preliminary Statement. That of

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is a general theory of symbolism with the great names of modern thought reverberating in it. First symbolic logic & the semanticists, then expanding into Cassirer. Then the defining of the axis of anthropology, psychology, theology & history & their relations & respective symbolizations. Then the isolating of the archetypes of cycle (epic, ), vortex (drama, ) & crossing (prose, [Anticlimax]). Epic is Word & hearing, God speaking. Drama is epiphany, as the end of the Biblical drama, Job, indicates. Prose is emancipated & systematic vision. Epic deals with Jung, Frazer, Toynbee, Spengler, Barth, Bergson & the masters of the cycle generally. Drama deals with Marx, Freud, Kierkegaard & the students of vortical explosion. Possibly Whitehead’s concretion doctrine is the centre of ; anyway, I have an uncomfortable feeling that mathematical patterns are somehow involved, as they are in Plato. If I can state all this succinctly enough, perhaps this P.S. [Preliminary Statement] can actually be my ch. 1. The theme of the opening is of course the encyclopaedic (in the literal sense of establishing a cycle) nature of symbolism as that which gives the epic its cyclic form. The typical form of this cycle is the Orc quest, of which Q1 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 1] gives an excellent microcosmic example. For the first three chapters I should read all the modern Orc symbolism in Hartland’s Perseus, in Frobenius, Jung’s book on the libido, Frazer,94 etc. etc. [83] Chapter four begins the katabasis & goes into the Beulah or Paradisal limbo of unbaptized infancy & regression to the mother (Bower of Bliss) which is the hero’s preliminary contact with his own childhood, hence the “Verdant” aspect of the B.B. [Bower of Bliss], the parody of Jesus in the lilies by Mirth, & hence too the discovery of individuality which somehow develops out of the coddled Titan of the Tharmas world. Guyon means Orc, more or less. The Nobile Castello of the golden mean which is the opposite of the golden means of Mammon fit together. [84] Blake was very sloppy about memory: straight reversion to the spectres of the past is one thing, but the practice memory he himself insists on is quite another. Granted that memory has to be transformed by the imagination, still the developing of a pattern out of the chaos of memory is essential, & a poet makes a systematic structure out of the sequence of his memories, whether personal (lyric), national & social (epic) or indigenous to the human species (dramatic). In the personal

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memories the typical ones, father & mother for instance, have typical value. Notice the predominance of child & youth images in conventional lyrics: the Court of Love is a vast sublimation of a childlike Oedipus motif. [85] The first three chapters must contain: 1) a theory of symbolism which defines the place of the epic 2) the larger encyclopaedia of symbolism, amassed from contemporary psychology, anthropology & occultism 3) an account of the origin, structure, function & history of the epic form 4) the aspect of the Bible as a super-epic 5) the isolation of the eniautos & solar daimon’s Quest as the central epic idea & its application to Q1 [The Faerie Queen, bk. 1]. 1) goes in 1 or the P.S. [Preliminary Statement] & 4) goes in 3. Perhaps 4) goes in 2 & 3) in 3 before the Quest point, in which case 2) is the rest of 1. That would give a focus in progression of encyclopaedia, scripture & epic. This way the prefatory theory would lead into the encyclopaedic vision rather than the epic proper, Ruskin, Mâle,95 Blavatsky, Frobenius, Jung, Silberer, Macdonald,96 Bayley97— that sort of thing, & maybe 18th c mystagogues. Maybe Q1 & Q2 could go together in 4. Things like Rank’s the myth of the birth of the hero98 are important for 4: St. George & Guyon are both libido or Orc-figures, & Guyon particularly is linked with the drawing round of the magic circle, the achieving of a temenos & building thereon a Nobile Castello, which I have called the closing off of the persona. [86] In 12, the P.R. [Paradise Regained] chapter, [Liberal] passes into [Tragicomedy], & the cycle of the epic reaches the epiphanic gap at which the figure in the doorway becomes visible. P.R. is an epic-drama, & the typical theme of the epic-drama is the passage from law to gospel, the theme of the Book of Job which was P.R.’s model. To pursue the implications of this further has to give way to . is the orthodox chain-book, the revolutionary vortex one. [87] See in Satan’s journey through chaos the spiral movement of a gigantic serpent coming nearer & nearer to crush the egg, swallow the soul, befoul the sacraments, & consummate carnal (moral) knowledge. [88] Jung uses the P.R. [Paradise Regained] theme as the climax of his Integration of Personality book to illustrate the fertilizing quality of “evil,” the m. h. h. [marriage of heaven and hell].99 The good is the enemy of the

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better, as the Pharisees hated Christ, & hence the germ of betterment is evil. This evil, if resisted, enables the resister to remain a Pharisee; if allowed to overcome, brings in chaos & insanity. It must be assimilated, as Christ in the temptation assimilated Caesarism. Something in this inoculation with evil is important in tragedy. (Of course ultimately the evil is analogous, a reflecting mirror of good; but I feel that Mann’s point in Mario,100 that one can avoid the domination of Caesarian hypnotism by neither succumbing nor resisting, is involved too). [89] Spenser’s knights are not of Arthur’s but of the Faerie Queene’s court: her position in the book is that of Penelope, or (almost) Isis in FW [Finnegans Wake]: she sits radiating virtues like the solar spider & eventually draws Arthur up her lair into possession of her. Hence there are 24 knights, 12 hers & princely or ideal virtues, & 12 his or kingly or active ones. That seems to me the approximate sense of the Raleigh letter,101 though it doesn’t fit the existing Q [Faerie Queene]. Anyway, I suspect each Q knight corresponds to an Arthurian one: St. George to Gareth, Guyon, as his name indicates, to Gawain, Britomart to Galahad, Cambel & Triamond to some pair like Balin & Balan, Artegall to I dunno, maybe Launcelot, Calidone perhaps to Tristram, who comes in. The general idea is that Arthur becomes an epiphany at the end: in Eng. hist. he’s been twice a Prince (John & H8 [Henry VIII] being in Shakespeare the first & last of the Saturnalia usurping line), hence a symbol of an unrealized ideal about now to be visualized. (Note that Protestantism springs both times out of the usurper’s loins in Shakespeare: I don’t like that. John looks R.C. [Roman Catholic] in symbolism but I can’t see how H8 is, without a frantically ironic twist necessary for the interpretation which sounds phony. Cymbeline rises up again, as it always does in this connection. Does Cloten represent an insular un-Catholic Protestantism Shakespeare didn’t want, as Iachimo does a counter-Reformation Catholicism he didn’t want either? Why the hell did he write Cymbeline anyway?) Anyway, the point is that in Sp’s symb. [Spenser’s symbolism] the FQ is the Holy Grail. No, Scudamour, who fails to achieve the rescue of Amoret, is Lancelot. Artegall could be Percival. [90] All through English literature there has been a green England, a forest Beulah land of Faerie antipodal to historical England (which is red and white): a Bardo-world of opposite solstices (as in MND [A Midsummer Night’s Dream].102 This is Marvell’s world: it’s often Edenic, because

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of the garden symbolism of Eden proper, & it’s the alchemic green lion out of which the body & blood of the world of opposites comes. Atlantid & Hesperian tones here are, I think, more Renaissance than medieval. It’s antipodal morally as well as seasonally (Robin Hood & the Green Knight), & some suppressed paganism lurks in it. This forest world is that of the F.Q. [Faerie Queene] as opposed to that of Arthur, & the F.Q.’s knights are mainly born in it—Artegall is the exception, as Q5 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 5] has the one purely historical allegory where the green world fades into a brown waste land. [91] Just as Shakespeare took the Gloucester scene from Malbecco [The Faerie Queene, bk. 3, cantos 9–10], so I imagine he took Lady Macbeth’s bloody hands (cf. however Deloney)103 from Q2 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 2].104 Note that Macbeth has a lot about naked newborn babes (Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn),105 as has the theme in Q2. [92] Of course, Dante’s four levels of allegory translate into Sidney’s pattern: once the “literal” is rejected, as it practically is in Spenser, the allegorical & the historical become the same thing. Anagogy is thus a synthesis of moral & historical allegories. Is it being over-symmetrical to say that the Arthur-world, the red & white England, is the historic allegory, & the Faerie or green England the moral one? For Spenser’s green world is not an antipodal Bardo,106 as in the Middle Ages, but a Beulah world of archetypal ideas or forms. [93] The Round Table is the body of Arthur, & I suppose the Garter (which in the allegory would be the F.Q.’s [Faerie Queene’s] garter) has a similar communion-feast-in-one-body significance. Note how purely a green-world figure Falstaff is in MWW [The Merry Wives of Windsor]: a Garter play. I wonder if Falstaff sums up two aspects of a dramatic antipodes which are associated with the two solstices in MND [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] & TN [Twelfth Night]: one the fairy-world of summer, the forest green, the other the carnival world of winter, the festival around the burning tree. [94] ’   5 [ta epe, “poems to be recited”] is distinguished from ’ B [ta mele, “poems to be sung”], yet all epics pretend that they are being sung. An original & final hypothetical song & dance, the opening & closing allegros of unconscious action, contain the cycle, & are imaged both

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in Dante & in the popular conception of eternal heavenly song. The slow movement of tragic art is the awareness of the dichotomy between vision & analogy, & is reflected in the tragic Iliad-P.L. [Paradise Lost] epic as well as tragic drama. The scherzo of comedy is the reflection of the reflection, the catching of Saturn’s reign from its analogy, which latter is the butt or C.C. [Covering Cherub], the sham king. The complete cycle goes through a nadir of fragmentation, descending through epic to drama & through drama to lyric & satura. Satura builds up an ironic semantic synthesis in the ironic encyclopaedia which is incorporated into the complete vision. Comedy in epic goes from the peaceful homecoming theme of the Odyssey through the new-home or city-building theme of the Aeneid to the eternal-home theme of the real Commedia. Even that, except for the vortical reading, is mired in Virgil & the new Rome. This note is the result of a fidgety impulse to stick epic & drama together, & the real epic : agon : : tragedy : pathos : : comedy : epiphany sequence must be preserved. [95] Now I must begin notes on my introduction, which, in spite of the above caution, may become [Liberal], & deal with scriptural & encyclopaedic matters, [Tragicomedy] being both epic & drama. I’ve always wondered what to do about the epic in Shakespeare & the drama in Spenser & Milton. Yet if [Anticlimax] becomes an epic book, my prose notes would go in . [96] What literature is may best be understood by analogies. Mathematics, in its most elementary stages of simple arithmetical & geometrical patterns, is essentially the counting & measuring of physical objects. At this stage it is therefore a commentary on or illustration of the physical world. But sooner or later the mathematician comes to feel that he is not dealing with the physical world as such at all, but with a universe of mathematical reality. To the mathematician qua mathematician, reality becomes a series of interlocking mathematical formulae: the final chapter of Jeans’ Mysterious Universe is a good example of this. Thus the common field of experience which we ordinarily call reality disappears or rather, as its entire nature is mathematical to the mathematician, the difference between the mathematical form & objective content disappears. That is, the mathematician comes to a point where there is no intelligible reality except mathematics, & hence the early conception of a commentary on a (by hypothesis larger) physical world has to go. Here however

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we distinguish between pure & applied mathematics. What we have said is true only of the former. The function or application of mathematics is its continuing relationship to the common field of experience which still exists for other people. Painting similarly begins in the depiction of physical objects & so appears to be a second-hand copy of nature, but before long the painter drops this & sees only pictorial reality, stretching from a Tintoretto Last Judgment to a Cézanne apple. So literature is an autonomous language of mental comprehension that begins by commenting on a “physical world” or “life” or “reality” outside it, & bigger than it, but ends by transforming the whole of this objective existence into a universe of verbal reality. The feeling that all reality is potentially & not actually verbal should not be confused with the feeling that life is infinitely bigger than literature, the latter being the vulgar notion of the former. Verbal reality is at the circumference of the common field of experience, not at its centre. From the point of view of the verbal universe (Eden) the “real” world is a reservoir of potential unborn themes: in other words a place of seed or Beulah. From the point of view of the “real” world, the verbal universe is unreal & imaginary, a Beulah fairyland. This ambiguity is reflected in Shakespearean comedy. [97] There are three worlds: the physical world, the psychic world & the pneumatic or verbal world. I prefer verbal (ultimately it will have to be “logical,” although Ulro has usurped it) to pneumatic because it is wrong to say “in the beginning was the breath or spirit.” The N.T. corrects the O.T. on this point [John 1:1]. From the word one can get to organic law, freedom in discipline (this is part of the Oresteia progression) & from breath only to Aristotle’s first mover. I think this equivalence of verbal & logical is a point in refuting the “logical positivist” position, which claims to be anti-verbal and attains only logically or verbally correct patterns. Anyway, the logical world is the world of one form which I expound from the Bible & related works. From there one can try to descend into the psychic world & make sense of it. This is Beulah, the world of angels, devils, ghosts, spirits in purgatory, unborn spirits, elementals including fairies & automatic potencies like those employed in magic. The problem of exact demarcation between B [Beulah] & G [Generation] is difficult & not mine: I doubt if it can be solved scientifically or mediumistically, by way of G, exposing oneself to automatic impressions of evidence as the scientist & the medium’s friends do

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(the medium himself is only a telephone or dictaphone, apt to scramble messages like the one I saw at the fair[)]. The difficulty about the psychic world is that it can be seen in relation to the logical world, as imaginative, or to G, as “actually existing.” No matter how thoroughly you explore one side or the other, a residual doubt in relation to the other side remains. Perhaps clarifying the logical world will help as much as clarifying the scientific (empiric) one. In this sense “religion” (constructing verbal patterns) & science are both apocalyptic, for Beulah is torn in two in the apocalypse. It is the world of past history & future prophecy as well, & is the apocrypha of both verbal & empirical mythology. Ultimately G, which is also Maya, & U [Ulro] are included in it. Maybe that’s all the Lankavatara is saying:107 maybe I hit a home run in FS after all. Man spirals & gyres in the B-G world, in G during the day, in B in sleep, in G in life, in B in death (Bardo). Above him is the Word, below him the second death. He moves toward an apocalypse in which he is saved from death by the understanding of the Word. In occult terms, spirit & body fight for soul. I wish I knew what the hell I was getting at. [98] I think there is a distinction between racial & tribal consciousness which underlies the distinction between [Liberal] & [Tragicomedy]. One is myth & the other ritual, one temporal & the other spatial, one ancestral & the other communal. Drama is a slightly more awakened consciousness, & leads to the pure awakening of [Anticlimax], the complete individual & human consciousness. [99] The first three [Liberal] papers are: first the semantic opening, with some such title as “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” The one Child asked for for the UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], based on my opening ideas about literature as an autonomous language.108 For it I should read Cassirer & perhaps Wittgenstein. Second, a general introduction to FQ [The Faerie Queene], dealing with my foreshortening idea about the poem. This may expand into a series of papers. Third, the argument of Paradise Regained, the present coda, or rather stretto. [100] Insofar as it is autonomous, a language is disinterested, or, as people say, “useless.” The great creative mind in the language withdraws his interest from the common field of experience. A lyric does not describe experience, or a novel life, except when considered as applied

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literature, or social documents. My old view that science improves & literature does not has to be modified. Taking Spengler’s view of science as a created product in time, science never improves. Taking a sociological view (applied) of literature, literature shows a concentric expansion of social efficacy. That is, evolution & improvement relate to the applied languages, classicism & the integrity & perfection of the model to the pure ones. The part of literature most obviously susceptible to evolution is criticism. Perhaps metaphysics is related to science as art is to criticism, though Whitehead wants to reverse this. Anyway, I feel that the criticism of the humanities is bankrupt, as Newtonian physics was in 1900, & that Frye represents the beginning of a “nuclear” period of criticism. The criticism, whether of physics or poetry, is what does advance. [101] “The boundary between literature & other verbal forms of reality is not settled. Some philosophers hold that metaphysics also is a verbal comprehension of reality. This, if true, would unite metaphysics & literature. The inference that if the content of metaphysics is verbal it must therefore be “emotional” or in some other way unreal is illegitimate.” Thus my notes:109 as I’ve said above [par. 97], the logical positivists try to distinguish the logical from the verbal in order to reject the latter, only to find that logical statements are so only because they are verbally correct. The logos is the word. [102] The physical world exists; the psychic world may or may not exist; the pneumatic or verbal or logical world neither exists nor does not exist. The point at which we begin to realize that mathematics is not a criticism of reality but an autonomous language is the point at which a teacher draws a chalk line on the blackboard & tells us, first, that that is a line, & secondly, that it is not a line. Or, even earlier, the point at which we understand that “three” is not three matches, & yet not not three matches. [103] Aristotle’s physics leads to a prime mover at the circumference of nature. So in different ways do Newton’s & Einstein’s physics: cf. Burtt110 for Newton & for Einstein the crop of what-can-a-man-believe books trying to peep at God through the crack in nature left by Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy. The reason is that this mind is a necessary hypothesis for the consensus of normal minds to which all thinkers appeal. The unconscious assumption on which an individual student of

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physics proceeds is that the whole of physics could be simultaneously comprehended by a finite though unbounded mind. This assumption is often wrongly described as the assumption of the uniformity of nature. Such a mind is not a separate egocentric human being, but a universal creative human being of which our own creative selves are parts. This super-scientific Something may be identified with God by a religion, as Aristotle’s governor was by Thomism, but in itself neither is nor is not God, for it neither exists nor does not exist. The question of existence is irrelevant: integrity & comprehensibility (note the metaphors in this word) are all that matters. (Religions generally insist on the existence of God.) This mind provides an as if basis for communication, as the “normal” mind is so in being organically part of it. Arnold’s culture & Eliot’s tradition are attempts to postulate a circumferential universal mind comprehending the verbal universe which is the mental form of nature. For the autonomous language does not deal with “things” or an extraneous “life,” but sees totality as an interlocking series of mathematical or verbal patterns. The content of literature is the same thing as the form of literature: that’s why I base my approach on standard literary forms. I repudiate my statement in the Yeats article that literature as language is a means for expressing something else. If I made that statement: perhaps I only said that literature is not true because it doesn’t affirm, & doesn’t affirm because it doesn’t deal with existence.111 Hamlet neither exists nor doesn’t exist. [104] Just as physics leads to one unmoved mover, so literature leads to one Word, never spoken & yet containing all words. The opening of the Chandogya Upanishad symbolizes him as “Aum.” It’s Jesus & whatever the Hebrew (memra) is, & the Tetragrammaton.112 [105] All social & moral matters are under the law, & law is a covenant or contract. A social contract may be expanded as a present analysis of the relation of ruler & ruled, or as a fairy tale that happened once upon a time. The latter is the same as the former if we do a bit of translating. Hobbes & Rousseau talk nonsense as long as they talk about an agreement arrived at before anyone was around to check up on their assertions, an agreement of which no trace remains. They talk sense when their contracts take the form of a present analysis of society. The same is true of the O.T. covenant, which is not history but a present analysis of Judaism.

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[106] Milton’s anti-Episcopal tracts take the Erastian Luther-Calvin line of saying that clergymen have only spiritual authority, usurp temporal authority, & should have the latter transferred to the temporal setup, headed by the king. The regicide tracts clear this up.113 God’s chosen people, which now is England, will naturally tend away from monarchy, as the Jews did. The justification of Cromwell is that of the Judges: a temporary dictatorship to hold God’s chosen people together. Here again, after Milton has followed the curve of Protestant development from Luther & Calvin to Knox & Goodman,114 he finds the O.T. law, which is explicitly revolutionary, more liberal (superficially) than the N.T. Jesus seems indifferent to tyranny & Paul, Romans xi, counsels submission. Paul also says: all power is God. Order in the state, therefore, must be theocratic in origin. Milton has no theoretical objection to monarchy as such (vide Christina of Sweden) but only to idolatry. The king is a natural-born analogy symbol suggestive of a bogus Jesus, what with his crown & the salute. The bishop should be a prophet with spiritual authority; the king should be a magistrate with temporal authority—a bishop-ruler & a king-god (Lord’s anointed is the fake Jesus part: all true kings are supposed to be part of the body of David) are hermaphroditic. The Pope crowning Charlemagne or the Archbishop of Canterbury crowning the King are analogical conspiracies, parodies of the recognition (dramatic cognitio or epiphany) of David by Samuel. [107] Filmer said that Adam was given power & dominion over all creatures, & that all absolute power is hereditary in descent from Adam.115 This idiotic argument contains two truths: that the king is a father symbol & his source of power ultimately patriarchal, and that power is essentially power in time, the victory of history & tradition over the Word. The refutation of this nonsense by Locke articulates the modern belief in democracy from which conservatives, liberals & social democrats all descend.116 Yet Milton is better in a way, for he refutes Filmer on his own ground. Filmer forgets that Adam fell. Unfallen man is born free & equal, in the full dignity of the image of God. Fallen man is naturally an idolater, & idolizes natural power, the incarnation of Leviathan. Man cannot achieve liberty by asserting his unfallen nature, but he can knock down his idols & give God a chance to operate. To give Caesar the things that are Caesar’s [Matthew 22:21; Mark 12:17] implies taking away from him all worship, which belongs to God only, & the prophet is always an eikonoklastes.

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[108] Note the difference between translatable & non-translatable doctrines. The theory of contract is foolish as long as it’s a fairy tale, passing a fiction off as a fact, as Mill says.117 Yet we don’t seem to shelve Hobbes or Rousseau, because, translated from fairy tale in past to analysis in present, their contract theories make sense. So do some theological arguments. Perhaps the whole point is really here: whatever can be translated from past to present terms, like the argument of the Bible, is canonical; whatever cannot be is dead, or at any rate not yet brought to life. I think a translation of the Ptolemaic universe, which is finite but unbounded, is just around the corner, & translations of humor & planetary temperament theories are to come later. The nine orders of angels & other astrological stuff would be still later. The translation of alchemy has already begun. [109] What a book it would be if I could establish the axis118 & the encyclopaedia in [Liberal], leaving the forms of poetry (drama and epic and lyric) for [Tragicomedy] & the forms of prose for [Anticlimax]! would then, after the axis, work out the encyclopaedia & the argument of the Bible, then expound Dante as the total Word caught in the web of nature & reason, to be ambiguously interpreted, then work out Milton as the purified or reformed Word. Oh, my! Then would work out Spenser & Shakespeare together, along with an analysis of the lyric that would isolate the microcosmic or encyclopaedic lyric to start with (a long string stretching from The Dream of the Rood to Eliot & Sitwell, of course, but the focal points would be, probably, Spenser’s Epithalamion, Shakespeare’s Phoenix & the Turtle & Milton’s Lycidas). Then the unifying theme would be the encyclopaedic or microcosmic completeness of F.Q. [The Faerie Queene] as epic-romance, of SA [Samson Agonistes] as tragedy, of WT & T [The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest] as comedy, of Epi, PT & Lyc [Epithalamion, The Phoenix and Turtle, and Lycidas] as lyric. Hence the name of [Tragicomedy], for perhaps epic : tragedy : : romance : comedy; perhaps, even, elegy : tragedy : : ode : comedy. PT, like the late comedies of which the problem comedies are analogies, seems to me the real “tragicomedy.” This introduces a new complication into an already very complicated book: a breakdown of the miscellaneous hodge-podge of “lyric.” [110] I think I’d start this by splitting the ’ B [ta mele, “poems to be sung”] conventional lyric off from the autonomous lyric, as in a [Ren-

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contre] note.119 Then I’d try breaking down the autonomous lyric into a general elegy-ode antithesis, as above. More would have to be done, & perhaps the whole question could be postponed to , as the musical question certainly will be. However that may be, my present scheme would certainly clear up the meaning of “liberal,” & would explain why [Liberal] is a Los & [Tragicomedy] and Orc book. [111] [Anticlimax] would then do the four forms, & extract all the romance business out of [Rencontre]. It would be general prose, not a Renaissance study. It would back into the [Liberal] theme in reverse, going through Joyce & Rabelais to the ironic encyclopaedia. Satire & nihilism are essential to it. It will move through the logical part of the verbal universe, theory (Aristotle & Plato, back to the Logos, so that the three books go round in a circle[)]. Just before I leave the lyric business, the Greek Muses suggest a classification of five kinds of lyric, an elegy (Erato, Eros being also Adonis), an ode (Urania), perhaps including the panegyric, a hymn (Polyhymnia), a musical love lyric (Euterpe) & a dancing musical poem (Terpischore) [Terpsichore]. Note of course that arbitrary shapes like the sonnet are not forms, nor are conventions of subject-matter like the pastoral. None of these seem to include my microcosmic lyric, unless Urania. [112] Dante presents the Word within the Word, the infant Christ in the maternal body, the ladder of degree that goes with Eros the infant. Milton gives the creative iconoclastic Word, the cleanser of the temple, whose place at the pinnacle of degree becomes the centre. But I must read Aristotle very carefully & not fall into cheap antitheses & glib notions about the illegitimacy of a first cause & a Father. The meaning of Dante is partly that hell is really limbo, & that beyond it we go up again. That’s the answer to Jung, who thinks that because his “unconscious” is past or beyond the subconscious it must be deeper. It isn’t, & here’s the clearing up of his distrust of the “superconscious.”120 As for me, my [Rencontre] explores the demonic, & so perhaps [Anticlimax] will be purgatorial, [Paradox] paradisal & [Ignoramus] vortical, thus incorporating another hunch. [Liberal] is much more truly the grammar of vision than if it were epic. [113] The general line of approach is, integritas, consonantia, claritas.121 Nothing else is literary criticism, though it may be literary history, biog-

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raphy, aesthetics or sociology. Thus criticism is the Gestalt perception of the total form. Criticism proceeds from the total form of the individual work to the total form of the form, & so catalogues the categories of the art: lyric, drama, & so forth. That in its turn leads to the form of the total form, or the cyclic vision, the definitive myth. [114] I wonder too if there isn’t a spiritual perception of literature which sees one thing, a mental (intelligent & emotional) perception which sees two things, a tragedy & a comedy, & a bodily or sensible perception which sees five things, four Zoas & a unity. The first is the Word of God; the second seems peculiar to poetry, in which the tragedy-comedy intertwining of good & evil seems essential, & to run right through; the third would then be best illustrated by prose, though I’ve suspected it in the lyric too: perhaps it’s the natural inductive & empiric approach to art, & so most natural in the analytic forms. This relates to an old descentthrough-fragments-&-reintegration hunch I’ve had. [115] The lyric, except perhaps, a) the encyclopaedic lyric, &, b) the elegy-ode on autonomous lyric, may be the analytic or fragmentary form of poetry, often dependent on music or, as in the Varronian satire, prose, & becoming the normal form of poetic expression in a prose age. The epic & the drama are thus the only self-sufficient forms of poetry: perhaps my four forms of fiction are, as I’ve repeatedly thought, really a tragedy-comedy-epic-romance equivalent of the poetic forms or at least double doubles on the Manas or mental plane (I must check the Lankavatara from this point of view), & divide into a “lyrical” miscellany in the same way. But that puts me off the rails. The one, the two & the five will bear thinking about. Perhaps the above is better said: the only self-sufficient forms of poetry are tragedy & comedy, each of which may be sung, said or shown (lyric, epic & drama in Joyce’s progression), 122 depending on whether the reference is individual & fivefold, encyclopaedic & unified, or epiphanic & double. All this will unscramble later: I hate writing amorphous notes. Anyway, the romance is tragic in both prose & poetry; it’s the Mosaic wilderness quest, except that the ark is the Grail, still to seek. [116] Here, then, would be my grammar of anagogy, with the Dante who inverted the word sitting right in the middle of it, & holding together my two present crystallizations of the Bible & Milton. Oh, God, I hope this idea of [Liberal] finally works out.

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[117] Hunch: Meaning, as I say, is equivocal or univocal. Univocal meaning is logical meaning, & is the logical or sensible formulation of the common field of experience. Hence logic is the art of commentary. Equivocal meaning is formal (in literature verbal) meaning, & is that autonomous comprehension of the world where form & content are one. It is integritas & claritas, anterior & posterior to logic. Wittgenstein seems to make a place for equivocal meaning, in a somewhat paradoxical way, but the Carnap people who lump together all non-univocal meaning as “emotional” or “affective” are merely ignorant. They cannot, to begin with, distinguish art from rhetoric. As all meaning is ultimately equivocal, I suspect that logical positivism may be just a game of chess. I don’t believe really that criticism is really a universal translation of art, though I don’t know what else it is at the moment. [118] Anyway, it is extremely unlikely that a “sociological[”] (historical, psychological, etc.) approach to criticism can be anything more than a branch of sociology, etc. I hope to see the day come in universities when departments of sociology will have people specializing in literary problems. They could read anything from Tennyson to the Elsie books123 without really needing any literary training, or more than a perfunctory one: their real training should be done by sociology. A single graduate minor in Eng. Lit. is all the average American shit-shoveller wants. Now of course criticism should take a synoptic view of all relevant problems; that’s part of its job. But in conventional terms a synoptic view implies either omniscience or the affectation of it. The former is impossible & the latter a mental strain. It is enough if the critic knows what he is talking about well enough to articulate his argument & pillage the information he needs from the sources he wants. [119] All the arts are speechless: they say nothing, but merely show it forth. This is obvious in painting & music, & will need a little reassuring blather to demonstrate in literature. Poem qua poem says nothing. The author may be nervous about this & insist on saying something, but this is always an impurity in the art, & can be disregarded or overruled by the critic, whose axiom must be, not that the poet doesn’t know what he’s saying, but that he can’t say what he knows. [120] Lower criticism consists of editing, legitimate source-hunting & biography. (Re the legitimacy of source-hunting: looking up articles on H. Vaughan one will find a vast number on occultism & few if any on the

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Bible. Yet all of Vaughan’s imagery—and I mean all of it—is Biblical, & he never uses an occult reference except where it supplements a Biblical allusion by relating it to what V. imagined was contemporary thought. Occultism is so popular because it looks like a detachable fragment of Wissenschaft about Vaughan. But, first, it won’t be of any use until we develop an attitude to criticism which will get Vaughan in perspective to begin with, &, second, the critic himself can’t do it till he has such a perspective.) Higher criticism is a synthetic mimesis of art, clarifying its integrity by speaking its silence. I could begin an article here with the stuff I have on the Bible. [121] Literary history is a branch of history, not of literature. But, says the student, we must put Shakespeare in a historical context, so he goes & bones up a lot of stuff about the Elizabethan age. The historian will always do it better, & the historian may be pardoned for seeing in Ulysses’ speech on degree [Troilus and Cressida, 1.3.75–137] a reflection of an Elizabethan preoccupation. The literary critic so obsessed by history that he forgets about Shakespeare’s integrity & also judges that the speech is said by Shakespeare peeping through the actor instead of shown forth no longer knows his job: he does not know any more what literary criticism is. Linear time is not a subtle category, & belittles all art, reducing literary history to a narrative interspersed with necessarily inadequate judgements of value. Here go my Molière points & the fact that English literature, the loose aggregate of books written in England or in English by Englishmen, is not a functional form, nor are the centuries of it. Pressure of a competitive society can be just referred to. [122] Bastard higher criticism is, unlike lower criticism, characterized by a kind of desperate tentativeness, the toiler in the bondage of the law awaiting a synthetic Messiah. My point here is, of course, that you can’t do research if you don’t know what you’re looking for. It isn’t true that somebody may use all this stuff some day: he’ll have to do it all over again. Priestley didn’t do Godwin because somebody might find it useful some day.124 Somebody wants to use Godwin right now, somebody being anybody interested in his period. That’s the real strength of lower (or prior) criticism. [123] Biography is not criticism, though often a useful aid to it: one can write a biography of anyone, & a biography of a writer does not become literary because its subject is. The poet, not the man, is the real person of

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literature: if a biography can distinguish them, well & good, but it’s a tour de force. The essential shapelessness of literary history with its abbreviated value-judgements & of most biography should be easy to demonstrate. The form of literary history probably doesn’t exist125—at any rate it has never been discovered. [124] Note the shrinking from allegory in the Endymion articles & from dramatic irony in Shakespeare by the historians (not so much). Allegory & irony are the critic’s main conceptions. (It’s the lack of posterior criticism I worry about, not prior: a lot of useful information is being dug out.) Again, the axioms of lit. crit. are literary: the notion that the critic has to wait until he gets a solid aesthetic, a respectable metaphysic, a coherent theology, or something else that is not literature, is an illusion. The real forms are: the work of art, the total form of the poet’s work (not the man), & the archetype or genre to which the work of art belongs. There is also a total form, but that has to wait. The transition to the positive side of this: why does criticism exist? Because it can talk & art can’t. Works of art are mute facts, like the fact-complexes of the sciences. Also, of course, the poet has no critical authority over his own work. [125] A desire on the part of the artist to say something instead of showing forth something means that the main current of energy in the age is critical. The primary aim of the novelist is to tell a story, a creatively autonomous impulse; if he starts by wanting to demonstrate a point that says something, he is a masquerading critic. Truth is beauty comes as a shock: Keats is talking. Hence Mill’s distinction in his fine essay between the heard & the overheard.126 My job is to disentangle posterior criticism from a mass of other things, including lower criticism, & give it some shape & point. [126] One of the reasons why Middle English is so largely in the hands of philologists is that to read the period & leave out everything written in Latin or Anglo-Norman makes sense only in philology. The Bush type of belittling wit only works with [timid?] poets.127 Lamb refused to call encyclopaedias books,128 & nothing based on linear time is any more a book than an encyclopaedia, because its arrangement is equally arbitrary. [127] My present idea is a work in sonata (concrete) form, the exposition being the argument of the Bible or the definitive Word, the development

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the argument of Dante or the imprisonment of the Word in the Church, the sacerdotal order of nature & reason, & the recapitulation the argument of Milton or the release of the Word. The apostolic-Catholicreformed progression is contained in this: it is not a bigger thing outside it “proved” by the sampling evidence of two poets. The book follows the light-dark-light cyclic pattern, which is involved with the sonata form in any case. [128] The exposition begins with the orchestral prelude, the prologue to a new criticism, the essay I’m trying to write now.129 It relates itself finally to the cyclic form as the matrix of art, collects the sources of symbolism & relates them to Dante’s anagogy, & sets the stage for the next three chapters, the principal subject, secondary subject & closing subject of the exposition. I’m not certain what these are: from here it looks as though they were a concentric expansion of the same theme: i.e., Leviathan : Messiah : : law : gospel : : physical universe : spiritual one. [129] Many hunches about the Bible have to be cleared up here: I need to know the details of the ceremonial code to see how far its symbolism is consolidated. I want to see if the Gospels correspond either to the four documents of the law or the fourfold prophet-priest-king-Messiah (Elijah, Melchizedek-David-Moses) conception of Jesus. John seems to echo the P document,130 for instance, & Matthew is obsessed by the Mosaic conception of Jesus. Also I want to try to absorb the Acts & Paul’s wandering as a new Christian legal wilderness, to prepare the way for Dante. Of course I have my law : gospel : : history : apostolic act : : poetry : epistle : : prophecy : apocalypse point, which I may have to suppress. [130] Dante being development, the simplest way to approach him is to treat him as a song of degrees, & just plod up his four levels one after the other in as many chapters. This links with the prologue, where I work out my Four Zoas theory of criticism. [131] This is an identification of Dante’s four levels with the four sources of critical theory in modern thought (that’s loose, of course). Thus: the work of art is literally a product of its author, & should be examined in terms of the mental archetypes of that author as provided by Freud & Jung. Note carefully that the author is not man but poet, & the archetypes are not psychoanalytic & therapeutic but objectively to be seen in

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the work of art as a microcosm of human or individual experience. As an allegory, the work of art is a symbol of its age, & should be examined in the historical archetypes provided by Spengler (Toynbee doesn’t touch them). The conception of cultural age doesn’t involve the dogmatic statement that cultures are organisms, but that they behave like organisms, & follow organic rhythms. The Spengler-cycle, though Spengler himself doesn’t realize it, gives us the only intelligible meaning of the word “race.” As moral, the work of art is a myth, the articulation of a ritual. The myths of poetry evolve from the sort of ritual investigated by Frazer & the other Classical anthropologists: for the myths of prose, which evolve from the rituals of a parading & dominant class, we need Veblen & the type of “class-conscious” criticism generally associated with Marx. As anagogy, the work of art is an entity or microcosm of the Word of God, a cyclic panorama of universal existence. These four levels are respectively the lyric, epic, dramatic, and scriptural or cyclic levels, & the efficient, material, formal & final causes. They are the four real forms of criticism: the author’s mind, the age, the genre & the unity of the work of art itself as a mirror of universal reality. Biography, history, sociology & I suppose the adoption of non-literary postulates are the four apocryphas. [132] Note that in searching for the literal meaning, the real direction of enquiry isn’t, what does this mean, as though some objective answer were possible, but rather, what did the author mean by this. The answer is in the context, not the dictionary, & the context is the body of writing the poet left. Note too that I reverse ordinary criticism by perceiving the functional forms, & the difference between my four levels & Dante’s shows that reversal of perspective throughout. [133] Suzanne [Susanne] Langer shows how physics started out with the immediate observation of hot, cold, moist, dry, & eventually with the help of mathematics had to reverse the perspective & see physics as functional forms.131 Dante lived in the age of the crude empiricism of ethics, & moral meanings to him were the crude “given” data of good & evil & the like. Anthropology, which Marx & Veblen apply to civilized life, the study of the rituals which spring from class tension, enables us to reverse the ethical perspective & look for the functional forms, which are social myths. Similarly the civilization-unit of Spengler & Toynbee is the functional form of history: Dante, reading Orosius, Boethius & Augustine, got this clearer, maybe. Also his “literal” truth is balls because he’s

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genuflecting toward the Church & talking about the Bible: literal truth in the sense of accurate representation of historical fact is allegory. [134] Criticism by means of functional forms stereoscopes the field & makes great condensation possible. To do a job like this by the conventional canons of inductive or empiric criticism would require a complete mastery of the scholastic apparatus of the Bible, Dante & Milton, a full knowledge of all the relevant cultural fields & an exhaustive survey of the transmutation of their sources. Such a book would never be written, for it would take many centuries of hard labor, and it would never be read, for it would be as long as the Encyclopaedia Britannica & nearly as shapeless. It would also necessitate a great deal of occult information, e.g. about the transmutation of sources in the thought & experience of Dante & Milton which they did not possess themselves. [135] I have a point here I got from Mill’s discussion of his father’s essay on government in the Autobiography. A purely inductive approach is intolerably laborious, yet contemporary criticism seems to be stuck with it.132 I wonder if the length & difficulty of FS was due to the retention of so many of the conventional empirical methods in a desire to be comprehensive at all costs. Certainly the monstrous complicatedness of scholarly criticism is due to it, the tyrannical Leviathan who forces everyone to “specialize” to such an extent that he loses his sense of perspective. It seems to me that Cassirer’s perception of the symbolic form is the same thing as Bacon’s inductive leap, or much the same thing, & that a deductive procedure which verifies functional forms & illustrates them, as opposed to one that merely reasons from dogmas & so rationalizes instead of reasons, manipulates facts instead of showing their meaning. If I get this really clear, it should fix my phobias about erudition derived from conventional scholarship. [136] The point I want to make about Dante is in the front of this book [pars. 2–6]. Spenser, by the way, has been transferred to [Tragicomedy], where he’ll be a lot happier. That makes [Liberal] a pure Tharmas & a pure Orc book. Now if is the one in sonata form, is presumably the slow movement, & one form it could be is a theme with variations. The epic quest is the theme of the books of Spenser & the dramas of Shakespeare are the variations. Spenser & Shakespeare run concurrently, thus: St. George & the history plays; Guyon & New Comedy;

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Britomart & the green world; Friendship & the masque (cf. the Mask of Cupid); Justice & Tragedy; Courtesy & the late comedies. Actually if it’s comedy Justice could go with the problem plays. Maybe there are six kinds of lyrics too: ballad, love lyric, lyric of the green world, musical lyric, elegy & ode (Clio, Erato, Urania, Euterpe, Terpsichore, & Polyhymnia). Maybe there ain’t too. [137] Just an idea to be put in the cooler for later reference: I know that [Rencontre] is to be about music, & I know that I have many things to say about the meaning of musical form that will be revolutionary: the link between the sonata form & the Orc cycle, for instance. I suspect that this analysis could be carried out in a detail that is undreamed of now, & that the relations of music might conceivably do for the future what the logical relations of mathematics have done for physics. I mean the future of criticism in the broadest sense. To be able to do this would certainly not make an anticlimax of . Meanwhile I must watch the significance of my sonata scheme very carefully, & collect & try to organize ideas about music. The quadrivial books may be more Pythagorean than I imagine, & deeply concerned with rhythm & number, or rather rhythm & pattern, for number includes both ideas. Prosody is of course involved too, & prose rhythm, & the other factors of the original “Deuteronomy” notion.133 I say in an article that non-objective painting : mathematics : : abstract : music, the former setting up a set of logical relations & the latter using themes & motifs.134 [138] In that case [Mirage] would work out a hunch I’ve had about Spengler that the Magian cycle was the Classical tomb & the Western womb, hence its cavern. Maybe [Rencontre] will work out the literal or psychological (Jung) level & the allegorical historical (Spengler) one. [Paradox] would try to make sense of a complete Frazer-Marx deathresurrection-myth pattern, & [Ignoramus] would be anagogic. That’s the quadrivium more concretely than I’ve yet put it: possibly too much so.135 [139] I can’t yet go all out for the Bible-Dante-Milton pattern yet, suggestive as it is: I have to do some experimenting with both Dante & Spenser. Meanwhile I can treat the exposition of the Bible and of Milton as fixed points & see what will unite them. I start, then, with the postulate of the one Word, which leads me to the Bible. Then I examine the anagogic

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argument of the Bible in chapters 2–4. A point here to be examined later is: where does the discussion of the encyclopaedia go? As a form it belongs to [Liberal]; as a matrix of poetic forms, especially epic, it belongs in [Tragicomedy]. Well, chapter 5 discusses the four levels of criticism, & 6–9 apply each in turn to the Commedia. 10 is then the synopsis of liberty in Milton; 11 is P.L. [Paradise Lost] & 12 P.R. [Paradise Regained]. That skimps P.L., but I was skimping it somewhat under the Spenser scheme. The latter I have. The possibility of doing a 16-chapter mammoth doing Dante and Spenser doesn’t appeal to me. I wish I could divide my Bible chapters: that’s so far the only unresolved part of the book. [140] Possibly I should postpone writing out the Milton part until I’ve worked out at least the outline of Dante, as I wouldn’t want it to be an anticlimax. The synopsis of liberty is fairly straightforward, but the difficult part is to show how in Dante the anagogy, though of course a vortex of the allegory, is still founded on the analogy, whereas Milton’s hell separates the whole analogy, of Caesar, of nature & reason, & of the church. All these words have to be defined in 5. The literal sense is the integritas, quality in the sense of whatness, the interrelation of words & images, & I think in [Liberal] may be expounded in a kind of narrative of the symbolism (this is easier in an epic than a drama, & still easier in so carefully paced a narrative as Dante’s). Allegorical & moral meanings are either centrifugal or centripetal. The letter is right, & there the centrifugal tendencies are pulled back into an anagogy which restates the literal & vorticizes the other two levels. Centrifugally, these levels form the analogy; centripetally, they form allegory in my sense, which is (because of the vortex) the analogy of anagogy. The allegory, or Roma, conceives the poem as illustrating human life: we turn this inside out when we think of it as a Gothic symbol. The moral, or Amor, conceives it as illustrating human life from the divine perspective: we turn this inside out when we think of it as an encyclopaedic myth. 6 deals with Beatrice-Mary as anima, the sublimated wish-fulfilment, the Mosaic discovery of a spiritual home after the failure & return to Florence—oh, shut up & wait for things to crystallize. I may, if it isn’t too obvious, go back to my 100-paragraphs scheme. [141] The ceremonial & moral law of the Jews become historical & moral allegories respectively (note that “historical,” in Durandus and else-

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where, means literal).136 Ceremony becomes typical of revelation, & morality, though called unchanged, is actually transformed into gospel. Anagogy is the figuration of invisible by visible things: in other words, it is by definition a process of making the physical world analogous. The trick is to expound the Bible in such a way as to show that the fourfold exposition was an inevitable development, & still is. I’m beginning to veer toward Spenser for the development again, & in that case will need a chapter on the Bible within the encyclopaedia & an introduction to poetic forms. [142] Dunbar, who knows all about the four levels, says that the Body of Christ is that of the historical Incarnation literally, that of the mystical Body of the Church allegorically, that of the (individualized) sacramental Body morally, & that of the glorified Body anagogically. She connects these, correctly, with Mars, Jupiter, Saturn & the fixed stars respectively, & also with the personal, historical, moral & anagogic life of Dante.137 [143] Note carefully that as Dante “saw” heaven & hell only in visionary experience, his literal level must be a psychological one, not one of correspondence through memory with external facts, which would be symbolic. This poses a problem in the Bible, where there’s no individual authorship. This literal level is “lyrical” in Joyce’s sense,138 whereas the moral level is dramatic, the individual in relation to the tribe, whereas the intervening historical allegory is of course epic. Incidentally, the Can Grande Epistle leaves no doubt that Dante intended his Commedia primarily as a recreation of the Bible.139 [144] Of course the Bible-Dante-Milton progression is the middle three of a fivefold series: the encyclopaedia of nature behind the Bible; the Bible; Dante the ecclesiastical double-distilled Word; Milton & the release of the Word; Blake, or Goethe, or not impossibly Shakespeare, or the conspectus of modern thought & the release of the primary encyclopaedia. This outside limit I’d thought of as [Paradox], more or less. In the meantime, the encyclopaedia of nature & Spenser are very closely connected. [145] Dunbar, 484, says (very freely paraphrased) that the sun is the focus of symbolism because it gathers into itself the idea of an incarnate god, & the sun is an Orc opposed by the storm-god Urizen.140 This sun-

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storm antithesis is, I suppose, linked with the Tempest C.C. [Covering Cherub] ambiguity of Prospero as both the guardian of Paradise & the raiser of the tempest. Later the Urizenic principle becomes the sky-god, in whose eternal being the Son is manifest. (In the Hindu trinity the third person becomes the storm-god, diva, the destroyer). Sky-god unity alone, she says, leads to polytheism. Note that agricultural people, focussing on the garden, make the sun assimilated to a fertility god: with nomads & city-dwellers (the city is in a sense the return of the nomadic, the ark brought to Jerusalem) the sun becomes Edenic in Blake’s sense. Cf. Cain, nomad & city-builder (Aeneas). [146] Spenser, Milton & in a way Shakespeare are helped to focus on pathos-epiphany partly because of the “Renaissance” (which included Reformation) or rebirth symbol. That’s the political side, the second level or historical allegory. Here again Dante’s keynote is synthesis. The “pagan” elements in it are linked with (partly Dunbar)141 the medieval sense of fertility worship as Druidic or analogous: Satan as satyr, green man vs. Shakespeare’s green world, etc. I’m groping here for my real green-world point & its link with Renaissance drama. [147] In Dante the three levels of allegory are linked with faith (personal), hope (historical) & love (mythical). Faith is personal integration; hope continuous imitation; love communion. Father-Son-Spirit relation too. The general scheme is: faith, hope & love with the earth’s shadow over them (Moon, Mercury, Venus), followed by the primary anagogy of faith in the sun. The ultimate faith, hope & love (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), followed by the anagogy of hope in the fixed stare. Then visionary faith, hope & love (catechisms of Peter, James & John), followed by the Beatific Vision. The three anagogies, taken together, form L’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.142 A lot of this is also in Dunbar.143 [148] Art begins in the perception of rhythm & pattern, & rhythm is derived from the cycle. There are four major cycles in life: the cycle of waking & sleeping (psychological), the cycle of life & death (historical), the cycle of summer & winter (anthropological), the cycle of day & night (theological). These produce in poetry the romance, epic, drama & scripture respectively. The first two are human self-knowledge, & may relate to reason & grace respectively (though the reverse pattern is suggestive); the next two are extroverted, & relate to nature & revelation. Sex, which

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is not cyclic in man but is in plants & to some extent animals, belongs to the 3rd level. Note that level 1 & level 4 correspond. The moon & the sun to the extent that the sun is also a fertility image, go with 3. The stars are in 4. Level 1 is waking man, Cartesian consciousness; level 2 is living man, the existential being. See a [Rencontre] note on the black, red, green & blue of these levels, each with white.144 The blue & gold of 4 appears in the blue-gowned Virgin, the queen of heaven, with the gold star (Sun & Son) on her shoulder. [149] It looks as though I could conceivably expound the encyclopaedia of nature in terms of the four levels of meaning & then proceed to the Bible as consolidating it. If so, the third or Frazerian level, the Druid pattern, ends with the question: anagogy is traditionally the pull by symbolism from the visible to the invisible world; but what is the point of the invisibility of the superior world? Of course anagogy, in which the daylight world including the physical sun becomes the dark world or night of another, reverses the literal world of sleeping & waking. But the point is that the green world, with the Druid analogy at its heart, brings us to the upper limit of Beulah. Now if we say that the world it points to is dark & mysterious, we have two dark worlds, & have to return to Druidism. This is the romantic error, the method of Sartor Resartus. We have to go on with the vortex of waking consciousness into vision instead of sleep (cf. the Upanishads on dream as the opposite of vision),145 in which the perceiver is circumferential as in sleep & not central as in waking. It would be damn funny if Joyce turned out to be the recapitulation. [150] The fact that anagogy is vision related to an invisible world or creative void means that it is the emancipation of vision which makes it autonomous, that is, integrates it to the verbal universe. [151] The so-called mystery of predestination, the realization that it’s not I but the Holy Spirit in me that responds to God, & that the whole drama of regeneration occurs in man but somehow doesn’t include man, so that the whole thing seems to be just a dream in the mind of God—all this is a point I stumbled over at the end of Blake [FS, chap. 11, pt. 5]. The only solution is that one understands this fully only as a part of the divine nature, when the human creature has become unreal. This unreality means an absorption into the past, which no longer exists & is yet a permanent & eternally fixed reality, the beast that is not & yet is [Revela-

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tion 17:8]. The past is the Leviathan of memory, the swallowing monster of past sins. Every yesterday is a dream from which one has awakened, determined to dream no more, until finally one enters tomorrow by an act of conscious will. That’s an incarnation or rebirth in full consciousness when the memory has been changed into its own direct contrary, the practice memory which consolidates & concretizes vision. [152] Literal apprehension of integritas is the same for all works of art. Involved in it however is the consonantia or analysis which leads to claritas or anagogic restatement of literal meaning.146 This analysis is threefold, in fact trivial: grammatical (the syntactic sense of what is said), logical (the representative symbolism of what is shown forth) & rhetorical (the significance of the unification of imagery[)]. In the rationale of literary form, after trying provisionally to separate true from false form, one then arrives at an approximately threefold division of art-forms: poetry, in which the rhythm of rhetoric predominates (metre & rhyme are rhetorical tropes & schemata); prose fiction, in which the rhythm of grammar predominates (the sense of what is said) & discursive prose, works of philosophy & the like, in which the rhythm of logic predominates (the sequence of propositional statements). Somehow or other I have to try to relate this division to the allegorical hierarchy. Certainly the four forms, artefact, symbol, myth & vision, are to be contrasted with the four apocryphas: biography, history, sociology & aesthetics. I have a vague idea that the four levels of poetry are romance-lyric, or perhaps just lyric, epic, tragic (not as drama but as analogical view of life, or Druidism) & comic (similarly). In prose fiction the straight series is romancenovel-cyclic satire-Scripture, but the first two levels have intellectual byforms, confession & anatomy respectively, intermediate to the discursive forms. The latter appear to me to be logic, treatise, dialectic & sutra. [153] The epic ties a knot in time: one begins " "  [hamothen, “from some point”]147 & works back to beginning & end, which approximate the same point. The usual place to start is the analogy or nadir. The Odyssey goes from home to home, but the action begins in Calypso’s isle, which of course is also Ithaca under the suitors’ tyranny. The Aeneid goes from Troy to New Troy, & begins with tempest, C of L [Court of Love] & Carthage symbols. P.L. [Paradise Lost] goes from God to God, & begins in hell. Divine Comedy likewise. This helps to distinguish it from the narrative, which is bound to linear time, & gets its effects through the

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excitement of sheer sequence. The epic qua epic has no tension, but only inevitability. The poetic romance seems to me to be halfway between narrative & epic. Its quest: it has a telos or final cause, a grail leading it to an end. The grail is a female phallic symbol, & sexual completion seems to be its normal goal. Vala remains in the portable ark hidden, as the romance is wilderness wandering, & ends with Joshua or Jesus seizing the ark, tearing off the veil, fucking the hell out of Vala, & transforming her into Jerusalem, which is the only way Jerusalem can be captured, the rising sun pulling the whole dark world up with him so that we are in him & don’t watch him go away up from us & have to come down again. The Jesus who ascended has to come down again. This too came out of a recent lecture: [154] Eden (creator-creature): the recreation of the creature, or actualizing of the God-Man—Commedia. Beulah (lover-beloved): the wedding of king & land, the accomplishing of the quest—Faerie Queene. Generation (subject-object): the founding of the city, or the return home—Odyssey, Aeneid[.] Ulro (ego-enemy): the wrath of the warrior, or the destruction of the city—Iliad. [155] The four levels of meaning are psychological (Urthona), historical (Luvah), mythological (Tharmas) & theological (Urizen). This is erect or unfallen Albion. Our sources for them approximate Jung, Spengler, Frazer & Kierkegaard respectively. [156] My present conception of my mission is as follows: that my first three books, [Liberal], [Tragicomedy] & [Anticlimax], exist in two forms, inductive & deductive. That the inductive form of is a study of epic, & may take in any number of books (including of course FS) from the Bible to Joyce. The inductive form of is a study of Shakespearean comedy—I don’t know why I have a great variety of compulsions & only one one: the way it grew up, I suppose. The inductive form of would presumably be a study of prose. The deductive is a general discussion of the structure of literature and the grammar of criticism. It takes the salient points of structure noted in my previous books148 & outlines the verbal universe, inserting the essential point of the One Word into the stage represented at present by my colloquium paper.149 It includes the work I’ve done on prose and, presumably, my conception of the Word as the mental structure of society (university & symposium ideas).

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The deductive (possibly the deductive books are really [Mirage], [Paradox] & [Ignoramus] respectively, though I hesitate to say so) is the mythology150 of literature & the rhetoric of criticism, an integration of the Word. The deductive is the dialectic of literature & the logic of criticism, expounding metaphysics as a part of the verbal universe & the verbum as the B [logos], or the verbal universe as the logical universe. The present inductive plan is to collect notes for a study of epic, beginning with Spenser & not worrying too much over where it’s going. I have a tentative hunch that a shape similar to the epic itself might emerge, starting in medias res with Spenser, working back to the beginning through ballads & other primitive forms, up through the Bible, & then on to the end with Milton. [157] In Genesis the rhetorical account of the Fall, the story of Adam & Eve, is followed by the same story in historical terms: that’s why Genesis ends with the descent of Israel to Egypt. In Exodus, once Jehovah’s name is established, the historical account implies a corresponding rhetorical conception of exodos. [158] If this works out I might tentatively call [Liberal] “Analogy of the English Epic.” I hesitate to use this overworked word in a sense so different from Blake’s, but in spite of the fact that so many of my notes use the term in the Blakean sense, there are advantages in reverting to the commoner usage.151 The idea would allow me to use as much—or as little—Chaucer & Langland as I liked, & as much Milton as I liked, & draw on the foreign & classical epic ditto. The reason for “analogy” is the proposal for a creative study of analogues as well as sources. To study Spenser one must know his sources: must know that he used Ariosto exhaustively, Dante very little, & Beowulf not at all. But after that there is some value in considering analogues in a general survey of the form or genre, treating the FQ [The Faerie Queene] morphologically as one would a folktale, where derivation & transmission is only a small part of the total problem. So it’s conceivable that the F.Q. [Faerie Queene] commentary might take only the first four chapters, one introductory & three dealing with two books each. The next four would deal with the epic analogy proper: the primitive basis of the epic in ballads, folktales & romances; (5) the incorporation of this into great art (the HomerBeowulf-Kalevala stage)152 (6); the development of the art-epic in Virgil & his successors & the emergence of an epic telos (7). This telos would

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be, in the narrative, the quest; in the imagery, the cosmos; in the meaning, the encyclopaedia. Note how these three remain in the epic from its Homeric beginnings. 8 would then deal with the Bible as an epic: the quest of Christ, the cyclic vision & the verbal universe. The last four chapters would then focus the Biblical epic on Milton. [159] Or this, because I think the in medias res scheme will be difficult to work: 1) Primitive sources of the epic 2) Primitive features of the epic 3) The Scriptural telos of the epic 4) The Christian epic 5) The function of allegory in epic. That’s an arch with a keystone in the middle. Part Two: 6) Introduction to Spenser 7) The solar myth (Bks. I & II) 8) The fertility myth (III, IV & Mut. [Mutabilitie Cantos]) 9) The political myth (V, VI & the breakdown). Then Milton: 10) Conspectus of liberty 11) the agon of Christ & Satan in P.L. [Paradise Lost] 12) the agon of Christ & Satan in P.R. [Paradise Regained]. Motto for Part Three the “liberal” verse from Isaiah,153 I think: Milton wasn’t a liberal but he stands by liberal things. Note how, via the brief epic in P.R., [Liberal] modulates into [Tragicomedy]. [160] The romance consists of a single hero or knight walking into the middle of a series of existential situations: here the in medias res technique appears in simpler form. The knight meets a distressed damsel, rescues her at once with a fight, & then gets her story. In a properly constructed romance the situations should not be just a linear sequence united only by the fact that the same character moves through them: they should be a developing series pointing to the great unifying principle of the hero theme, the quest. In a perfectly constructed romance the series of situations should relate to one another as well as to the hero, thus forming a conspiracy of dark powers in league with his dragon or whatever it is. Thus Spenser. Ariosto has a group of knights, but the underlying Xn [Christian]-Moslem conflict is still there. Thus romance has much the same form as comedy, except for its narrative interest in a sequence of adventures. The Chaucerian tale is quite different from either. [161] Such an affinity accounts partly for the large number of situations in Q [The Faerie Queene], e.g. 2, which show the patterns of Shakespearean comedy: the story of the don, for instance. They come from Ariosto, who also supplies stories for dramas: Phedon’s story has the MAN [Much Ado about Nothing] calumniation scene in it, & so has an early episode in Ariosto which formed a basis for MAN.154

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[162] The Italian critics report that Boiardo intended his poem to be modelled on the Iliad, with the siege of Paris corresponding to the siege of Troy.155 I guessed this pattern in Ariosto, & of course it’s important in Spenser, where the siege of Troy is the Catholic assault on the beleaguered Protestant citadel, its wooden horse the Court of Love. Cf. the last lines of Ariosto & Virgil.156 [163] Re above: Spenser insists less on the marching “way” of the quest than Dante or Bunyan. He mentions it often enough (II, vi, 222)157 & it’s there, but he lets his characters wander more, incorporating the romance theme of searching at random for the quest. I think the straight road goes with a certain literalness in the setting. Both Dante & Spenser begin in the forest of error, but Spenser is willing to stay in the green world. In Spengler’s language, Dante & Bunyan are Egyptian, Spenser Chinese.158 [164] Fairyland to Spenser is England made allegorically sensible, deprived of the asymmetrical existential quality that is so burdensome to the poet. There all the nobility are really noble, born such & predestined such; peasants are born base, can’t ride horses, & belong in the lower strata. (There may be actually a link with predestination: God, whose vision is eternal, sees the world right now in its eternal forms of heaven & hell.) There all beautiful women are really virtuous, even the sirens being ugly when they strip, and there Elizabeth is wondrously virtuous, radiantly beautiful, & unmenstruatingly virginal. In short, fairy land is not only dream land, the world of the pleasure principle: it’s also the world in which the symbolic & allegorical features of social life, Blake’s Druid analogy, appear in their proper forms. Satire merely points out the imperfect coordination between this world & existence: that’s its function. Here’s my Tharmas (Frazer-Marx) point. (Also the hero can always knock the villain off his horse). (hence Tharmas as anatomy as well as pastoral). [165] Chapter one, after making the source-vs-analogue point, should begin on the folktale, ballad, romance, myth & other primitive forms to define the pattern of the libido-hero & the natural cycle. An essential point of the book is that it’s silly to say, as Richard Chase does in his Quest for Myth, that the allegorical tradition is “profoundly misleading.”159 It’s nothing of the kind. As my previous note indicates, a world where the hero always beats the villain is not just a world of pleasure-

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principle wish-fulfilment: it’s also a world where justice is realized, if only poetically. The hero is not only an idealized Thou but an idealized He. (I, not Thou, but I is the poetic fulfilment, Thou the historical, He the moral). Euhemerism is correct if it’s turned around: historical figures are incorporated into the growing encyclopaedic pattern, & in Xy [Christianity] the Bible is supreme euhemerism in epic, pointing to a man in history as its ultimate meaning. This in ch. 4 becomes Dante’s conception of allegory proper, of Christ as the total form of every historical event. [166] I think Spenser’s scheme broke down because you can’t idealize power in history as the right hand of justice. There’s no love of power, but only lust of it: power is the pure energy of the atomic ego, & appears when the capacity for love is lost: its form is the pyramid, not the round table. It’s a matter of common experience today that supporters of power politics are usually unloved, uprooted or otherwise embittered children. That’s a pattern that Milton’s agon of Christ & Satan makes clear. I also have a vague notion that the biological pattern of Aristotle’s thought, his conception of nature & of humanity finding itself in an organism (“state” means point of arrested movement) buggered Spenser somehow. [167] Chapter One should anticipate Three by showing how the potentially encyclopaedic nature of the epic is inherent in the episodic ballads that precede it. Thus Snorri’s Prose Edda adds nothing to the Elder Edda, but merely brings out what was already there. Lönnrot’s recension of Kalevala is an even more striking example. This is conceivable if we assume an imaginative, though unconscious, radiation from the central cyclic point: we don’t have to assume an Ur-Snorri or Ur-Lönnrot behind the ballads. In the first chapter perhaps only the Luvah-Tharmas axis, the psych/& myth/coincidence, needs to be set out. The other axis, between history & God[,] can begin in Two, where I’ll talk about Beowulf & the Christian cyclic philosophy of history, & be completed in Three. Two also deals with Homer & will adumbrate the Three semantic-theologicalverbal climax by starting on the poet as the encyclopaedia of popular wisdom (proverbs) & science, also of incipient moral patterns. In Three, note the connection between the arrangement of ballads & the development of prophetic oracles, notably Isaiah, into a connected sequence. Also, of course, Ezekiel’s use of the Gilgamesh epic.160 I think Four, which will deal with Dante, should set forth the rhetorical encyclopaedia, the doctrine of the One Form. It would be simplest to have One deal

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with the primitive cyclic form, dealing with the Prose Edda, Kalevala, Gilgamesh epic & perhaps Ovid. Then Two would start with Homer & take in the historical cycle via Virgil & the Xn [Christian] developments in Beowulf & elsewhere. [168] The picking out of an external causation, whether material, formal, efficient or final, leads to a relative dialectic, & no study has been more buggered by this kind of thing than myth. The material dialectic is the one that Frazer is continually relapsing into when he gets into one of his nowlet’s-be-sensible moods & explains volcanoes (GB 4) or floods (FOT 1) in terms of local geography.161 The efficient causes are the natural recourse of the descriptive people: man wanted to paint the lily by waking up a nymph, or rather, this fallacy is the primitive-science one. The formal causes are the psychological & the final the allegorical reductions. I start with myth as facts, autonomous complexes, & am not concerned with causation, which is only a way of rationalizing the poverty of all our approaches except the historical one. I wonder if Plato’s necessary-lie theory of myth is profoundly involved with his revolutionary dialectic.162 [169] The connection between primitive & historical epics will be treated analogically, in default (a probably permanent default) of historical connections, which are unnecessary anyway. The Gilgamesh epic has 12 books & a flashback. The Avesta deifies light, not the sun,163 & is followed in this by Milton. In this book we are not concerned with any theories of mythological contract. [170] I now think of Nine as the pay-off chapter rather than Eight, but the problems are the same, & involve Tasso’s glutinous piece of tridentine piety. Tasso divides epic into imitation & allegory. He was haunted all his life by a sense that GL [Gerusalemme liberata] was a failure, & as it clearly wasn’t a poetic failure (failure in imitation, following Aristotle) the allegory must have bothered him.164 The dialectic I follow is that the argument of the Christian epic tends in the following directions: a) mythology being replaced by theology, divine heroes are replaced by divine agents, so that God is the sole source of the action. Tasso’s got that. But b) if the heroic act belongs purely to God, it can only be a creative act or revelation of the Word. Thus the crusade is the analogy of the building or revealing of the New Jerusalem, & so should be split off. Tasso’s scheme is Manichean: Spenser makes his Ismeno into Arch-

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imago, which clears up half the question: Milton puts both Ismeno & Godfrey165 into the character of Satan & clears up the rest. With the rejection of the temptation of Rome, even Parthia, in P.R. [Paradise Regained, bk. 3, ll. 290–385], Tasso blows up. The reference to “in Golgotha him dead[,] who lives in heaven” [Paradise Lost, bk. 3, l. 477] shows how clearly Milton realized the analogical nature of this saga of relics & pilgrimages, & his opening reads like a searching parody of the opening of Tasso. With this c) rhetoric becomes isolated as epideictic: the persuading word (Satan tempting Eve is compared to orators) becomes analogical too, as it can’t be in Tasso, who is full of working words, Godfredian & Ismenian. Note the incorporation of the romance into the Christian epic, its gradual extrusion to the demonic through Tasso & Milton, & the Miltonic return to the Virgilian pattern. [171] The opening should not only raise the question of an analogy in the epic as a whole, but the question of a dialectic process at work within the tradition—it’s really the latter that involves the new way of looking at literature: this picks up my verbal-universe article point166 & in fact the points I began this notebook with. Surely Milton must have been guided by a sense that there was an objective job to be done with the epic in his day, & that his election as a poet meant (involved) finding out what his job was. [172] Re Spenser’s praise of life & pullulation: no woman in the F.Q. [The Faerie Queene] was ever raped without producing issue—generally triplets. However, that’s just a squib. The argument of Book I turns on the nature of the monastery. The Protestant Church is a free & equal community of brothers in society, & is therefore a kind of secular monastery like the one in Rabelais—it has, incidentally, the same motto.167 The Dominican & Franciscan orders were revolutionary movements that didn’t escape from the Church—well, the Dominicans didn’t try, but the Franciscans did, & are now represented by Fradubio,168 as the first three letters of his name show. The real dialectic of the Franciscan movement was worked out by Joachim of Floris, who prophesied a third age of monasticism that would transform the Church, & worked it out from Revelation. Involved here is the redefinition of chastity to disentangle it from celibacy, which we need to make any sort of earthly sense of Joachim’s argument. Hence Fraelissa,169 &, of course, the association of wedded love with Britomart. Luther’s departure from the literal to the spiritual

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monastery when he married was the final revolutionary break. The planting of the broken branch has something to do with the imagery of Milton’s Piedmont sonnet.170 [173] If I open with my present or Kenyon Review theory of meaning on four levels,171 I have a good lead into my central problem of why the final dialectic of epic is a Protestant one. In literary criticism the second level is background research into the centrifugal receptacles of literature, its factual receivers, the event & the idea. The third level is archetypal synthesizing, forming from literature a conspectus of myth. The fourth level is beyond real criticism: here the critic proper gives place to the real reader, who can assimilate literature to the total body of culture. The breakdown of the third level means that allegorical criticism lacks perspective & the bulk of what the critical reader says is just cultured gabble, with the authority behind it at one remove. (Incidentally, isn’t all that stuff about the joining points of grammar, rhetoric & logic first-level criticism?) [174] Now, criticism of the Bible is in exactly the same fix. “Lower” criticism, which includes the whole of so-called “higher” criticism, is allegorical research; the real higher criticism would be a reabsorption of traditional archetypal commentary. Proclamation, or preaching sermons, is the fourth level. In modern liberal Protestantism (I don’t know about Catholicism, but probably the same general principle applies) the sermon level is cultured gabble with no authority behind it except the sort of thing represented by the four-document hypothesis. (I wonder if theology is first-level religious criticism?) [175] The modern situation is the exact reverse of the medieval one: there it was the second level that broke down. It sounds paradoxical to say that the Middle Ages lacked a sense of allegory, but that was precisely what it did lack: the sense of autonomous factual structures in event and idea. The breakdown of the “medieval synthesis” was the release of the autonomy of history & science from the confining fictions of the Church. Colet’s sermons on Paul mark the beginning of true allegory and the Protestant doctrinal allegory of “plain sense,” which, as Protestantism discovered to its cost, meant the triumph of autonomous history & science instead of the Word.172 The medieval church replaced allegory by the substantial real presence of Christ: hence its culture-

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myths were contained at the Beulah third level of the reconciling of contraries, & couldn’t break through to complete proclamation. [176] The relation of hypothesis to fact is very delicate, but it has something to do with the principle of subordination of the a priori that I’ve encountered in Mill.173 The myth eventually contains the fact, but not initially: initially leads to a priori dogmatism. In other words, history & science must proceed as though they were autonomous. It’s in the continual reformation of synthesis that the free Word develops. [177] And this reformation must take place through the hypothetical disciplines of the verbal universe. Once one sees the necessity of the autonomy of the Word, one separates scripture from Church, but this only leads one to Bibliolatry. As Roger Bacon saw, scripture has to expand to include Arnold’s “culture.”174 Bibliolatry must either dissolve into history & science, or be held together by archetypal myths which extend over the hypothetical verbal universe. I don’t believe it possible to make a general hypothesis in the natural sciences that isn’t fundamentally a mathematical hypothesis. It may be impossible to make a general hypothesis in the social sciences (history & law) that isn’t fundamentally a literary one. This way, one gets out of the way of the culture-as-asurrogate-for-religion nonsensical dilemma. [178]175 The association of justice with ferocity in Q5 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 5] is based on panic, & Spenser indicates the sources of panic: the plots against Elizabeth & the rebellion in Ireland, both parts of an international crusade like modern Fascism. The trouble is, first, that we expect better of Spenser, &, unless we’re committed completely to the history of ideas, we can’t be sophisticated about his ferocity as we can about Dante’s. Secondly, we see in the background the agony of Ireland, along with four centuries of post-Spenserian persecution. Thirdly, Spenser’s treatment of the ordinary people seems to show that he thought of them as subhuman. It is his perversity here that is the real problem. [179] Spenser’s vision of justice reaches its fulfilment in a vision of mercy. He has no clear notion of either, but his allegorical dialectic is correct. His justice is that of a nervous intellectual applauding the strong measures taken by men of action against the people he’s afraid of. Hence he regards mercy as a mere weakening of justice, possible only when an

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emergency has relaxed. But mercy isn’t that: mercy is the attempt to see justice in relation to the apocalyptic vision in which evil is illusory. The Gadarene swine [Luke 8:26–39] and the goats of Jesus parable [Matthew 25:31–46] are not people and they are not sent to a place. They are spirits expelled from existence. Perverse as it sounds, this is the real reason for Spenser’s harping on the extermination of the rabble. [180] It occurs to me that if the literal view in Dante is inside-out, the other three must be too. In Mediaeval thought the anagogic level is regarded as descriptive of “the things of eternal glory,”176 not as a selfcontained verbal universe. Similarly the 3rd level consists of prescribed data of good & evil, whereas in modern criticism such data must resolve into social myths. The 2nd level is even trickier. For the mediaeval mind all allegory goes straight into the Church or body of Christ, whereas in modern times the allegorical relation is to autonomous bodies of history and science. Hence the second level is in mediaeval thought centripetal where it ought to be centrifugal, the reverse being true for the other three levels. This is what’s involved in reversing the dialectic of epic from Dante to Milton, from the Word kidnapped by the church to the autonomous Word. [181] I think I may add an appendix on narrative poetry in Canada, using my no-seals & cod idea as well as others. [182] The best line that I see to take with the Mutability Cantos at the moment is to regard them, not only as forming a complete poem, but as a distillation of the seventh book. This latter may well have been, as the printer suggests, a legend of Constancy;177 but I imagine that Spenser would have called it the Legend of Fortitude. He had two more of the pagan virtues to treat, and he was getting to the point at which he would have had to make a full analysis of the nature of the heroic act. The suggestion of Lewis that the cantos form a “core” of an unwritten twelvecanto book is hardly possible:178 there is no trace of any such “core” in the existing six books, for the Gardens of Adonis episode in book three is nothing more than a very rough analogy. I don’t think Spenser ever intended to give more than the essential archetype of this legend of Fortitude, which is that of Paradise Regained and the Book of Job. He had completed a week of his twelve-day festival, and stops with the “Sabbath’s [Sabbaoth’s] sight.”179

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[183] The deductive approach begins with the conceptions of narrative and meaning. Narrative evolves out of ritual & meaning out of epiphanic illumination. The typical product of the former is drama and the latter splits in two. One level becomes the level of law, constituted out of commandment and aphorism: this is the level of reason, as Dante uses “ragione” to mean Justinian [Paradiso, canto 6]. The other is the level of revelation, constituted out of epiphany & parable. Note that these two are a cross of opposed axes within the circle of genres, a fact which may lead to some recasting. It seems to me that the vertical axis is really the central mythical one, as real revelation is not confined to meaning. No, this is really another question, one that comes up in Part Three where I talk about the relation of spiritual authority to determining dialectics. In fact the whole third level shows a similar opposition of troplogical (archetypal) and moral (dialectic) elements. I’ve made a false start here, & will come back to it later. Actually, ritual is the expression of narrative, but not of course a verbal expression: the nearest to that is commandment, the control of mythos or event. [184] Epic probably has to do with progress around the circle of genres, which we don’t see to be a circle until we come to drama. The single quest-epic, which begins at the middle or ironic nadir of the action, the Homer-Virgil-Milton type, is only one kind, though a kind very aware of Scripture, as it moves counter-clockwise to it. The epic which is really a collection of folk tales, like Chaucer’s, seems to be at one end. Near it are myth-collections like Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This last goes straight down a vertical axis from Creation to Caesar. Edging nearer to the quest-epic is Spenser’s attempt to compromise with quest-epic and collection-of-tales forms. [185] Counterpoint in epic is produced by the analogical nature of the heroic myth. In Christian epic Classical stories (fall of Satan as against the revolt of the Titans, etc.) form the usual counterpoint, though not always (e.g. fallen Adam against Samson in P.L. [Paradise Lost] ix). The opening books of the Odyssey show a constant paralleling of the “redeemed” nostos of Odysseus against the “reprobate” one of Agamemnon, the suitors being analogous to Aegisthus, & Penelope in contrast to Clytemnestra. A pun on Odysseus as the “man of wrath” is made early in the first book by Athene:180 but the wrath of the whole council of gods, which Aegisthus incurs, is quite different from the wrath of a single god

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(Poseidon). The storm god, Poseidon or Juno in the Aeneid, is the regressive parental figure. [186] Study the figure of the mother-goddess or Kore, flanked by birds or (as in Mycenae) by lions: it develops into the epic theme of women in a dioscuric relation fighting over her (Iliad to Knight’s Tale: this is in fact the essential “Knight’s Tale”). Modulations of it are the Hesiodic story of Prometheus, Epimetheus & Pandora, where it begins to assume the form of the triangle of modern comedy, the woman hesitating between lover & husband (the Helen development) and choosing the husband for his stupidity, thus vindicating the female will (Candida theme). The woman between man & serpent, or Samson & the Philistines, Milton’s favorite, is the apocalyptic form of this. The male flanked (Jesus in the Trinity; analogy, the three crosses & the figure in the doorway {Samson’s pillars & the sun-god in the Druid cromlech}: note the contrast of the eternal form with the emphasis in the middle & the progressive form where it’s the last) is something else again. Laocoon, of course. The story in the Mahabharata of Sundas & Upasundas is simpler, but linked (Krappe, Science of Folklore, 332) with a dioscurian Titanism (Otos & Ephialtes: cf. the general overtones of “Pelion on Ossa.”181 Note too that in the Odyssey the gigantic episode is doubled (Cyclopes & Lestrygonians)). Here the flanking figures are both opposed to the central one (the god). As for the three women, there again the eternal choice would be for Athene in the middle: the progressive one or “prelude to history” is for the “youngest” (third, beautiful spoiled one of the fairy tales). Analogy of course Fates, Furies, etc.182 [187] The epic poet seems to be bardic, a poet with a priestly function, in a way that no one else is. It seems to be his job to survey encyclopaedically the extra-poetic verbal fields of history, theology, philosophy & law (a clockwise survey). By philosophy I mean the kind of knowledge, or science, that is verbally rather than numerically organized. This gives us history, or knowledge of the past; law (including the social sciences), or knowledge of the present; philosophy or knowledge of the future (the essential social function of science being prophetic in this sense, increasing the predictability of events); and theology or knowledge of eternity. In between these (all of which tend to recede from human significance into abstraction) and poetry we have four hypothetical knowledges, actual to the poet (or treated as such) and poetic to the abstractionist. We have historical hypothesis, or tradition; ethical hypothesis, or life (social

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setting); philosophical hypothesis, or wisdom (the tried & true behavior that brings success, usually courage & cunning) and theological hypothesis, or myth. All these are heroic attributes. The kernel of history is parable; of law, commandment; of philosophy, aphorism; of theology, oracle or prophecy. Each has its shadow. Tradition has the shades in hell, reached by katabasis. Mythology (for God is revealed only within) has the dream of the aggressive & lusting libido. Life has Druidic ritual, and wisdom has fate, or immutable predictability. As I suspected, epic & prose forms have close analogies (romance-history; life-novel; wisdomanatomy & apocalypse-confession). (look into this note again: 1958)183 [188] I must of course carry out a more thorough study of the prose fiction forms. I’ve never thought out the philosophical ramifications of the anatomy-symposium form, nor of the theological bias of the confession form. I’ve missed the significance of my own Augustine-NewmanBrowne examples, and hence didn’t focus the form properly.184 The confession, properly speaking, is a revelation of the Word of God in the heart. It is even in Joyce. What it is in Goethe & Rousseau I dunno: revelation of mask, mostly. [189] Anyway, there’s no doubt that the elements of primitive epic, as we get them for instance in Hesiod, are myth, tradition, proverbial wisdom and society. But I think of society as in the middle, flanked on four sides by gods, traditions, dialectics & individuals. However that may be, the four cardinal points of the verbal universe, religion, philosophy, law & history, narrow down to the four points of the hypothetical verbal universe, myth, wisdom, ethos (personal life) and tradition. These, I think, narrow down still further to the four generic cardinal points of drama (epiphanic opsis), prose, lyric & epic. This and the former note are mostly bullshit. [190] Or rather, drama is the form in which act predominates, the realm of mythos or event. In poetry the central image predominates, in prose, the significance or idea. This is the horizontal axis, moving from heroism to wisdom. When we add the cross-piece to it, we get the Great Doodle,185 which I’m not telling.* The lesser Doodle is the one I start with: its four cardinal points being God, hero, man, & sage, that gives drama, epic (poetry), prose & culture, thus: drama becomes fragmented, & the fragments are the elements of music. Music, via my old article,186 recon-

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structs drama and provides a transition to poetry. Lyric in the ’ B [ta mele, “poems to be sung”] sense is drama-born. Of poetry, the normative form is epic, which fragments into the autonomous lyric, which reconstructs epic (my old “microcosmic” idea) and forms a transition (Blake, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Whitman) to prose fiction. Prose fiction fragments into the elements of scripture, which reconstructs prose on a Biblical basis. I’ve been confusing act (which is centrifugally mimetic) with narrative, & idea with meaning. So we have three forms & three other forms which are not only transitional but isolate the archetypes. * Because I don’t know what it is. Cf. the “Miltonic one” on p. 68 [following par. 193]. [191] The form of the fourth, which is between prose & drama, is culture, which moves from individual realization, the word in the heart,187 to communal movement. These two poles of culture, reading anti-clockwise, are the possession of the Word & the possession of praise; wisdom & genius; myth & ritual. So much for the Lesser Doodle, which looks like this:

prose f. lyric (aut.)

lyric

prose f.

music

praise

music

scripture

drama

drama

epic

culture

wisd. & myth

scripture

genius crit.

epic

depending on which way you look at it: it should be some kind of spiral to show that the “transition” is simply the informing of genres by archetypes. The counter-clockwise progression is from law & group to the circumferential individual, who fulfills the law in the Word & re-enters the community as an act of charity. [192] Next come the six epicyclic doodles, which box the same compass in terms of genre. The drama one I have & the music one I haven’t fin-

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ished. The epic one starts (still counter-clockwise from about 11:30) with the primitive mythical epic (Kalevala, Zendavesta, Prose Edda ur-type), then the chivalric epic (romance), then the heroic epic proper; then the satiric epic, the philosophic epic (the last two, when comic, are victories of cunning & wisdom respectively) and the visionary epic (Prelude type).188 This has still plenty of bugs, but I think I can make it work. More rewarding is the clearing up of brief forms. That of the mythical epic is represented in the Vedic hymn, the Psalm, the Pindaric ode, the paean & Homeric hymn, the poems in the Elder Edda. That of the chivalric epic in the ballad (romance); of the heroic epic, the lay; of the comic-satiric epic, the tale or fabliau, including most beast-fables; of the philosophic epic the short didactic poem (Ode to Duty); of the visionary epic the dithyrambic or rhapsodic vision. These fragments are different from Milton’s “briefepic,” for which we need a separate novellen class. They differ too from the archetypal analysis of poetry in the autonomous “lyric,” which is of four general types: poem, elegy, idyll & dithyramb (no, five: the “satiric” one of Schiller’s classes; and the verse satire is, along with the fabliau & epigram, a fragment of that class). Perhaps, I should speak simply of forms of poetry, mythical, chivalric, and so on, which would be a lot simpler. Also I’ve got three ranks of things to worry about: genres, archetypes, which ordinarily emerge upon fragmentation, & the encyclopaedic arrangement (or simply cyclic) of archetypes in symphonies, epics & scriptures. I don’t know how much of this should come clear just now, but it continues to bother me when it isn’t clear. The obvious affinity between long poems & long prose works, & the capacity of both for generic mixture as distinct from an archetypal isolation in both drama and lyric, is a bother. It wouldn’t be a bother if there were a long continuous centrifugal mimesis of action, but drama isn’t quite that, though it may be in relation to music. Sequences of plays, tetralogies, miracle-play sequences and Shakespearean histories (there it is) are as near as we can get to it. No, I think I’m all right. The centrifugal or sequential side of drama is the autohistory-tragedy one, & it recedes from history. But still there is a difference, and I shouldn’t worry about the mixture of genres in epic, or their failure to mix in drama. They mix in dramatic sequence, ordinarily. [193]

mythical 1. 2. 3. 4.

birth of hero triumph of hero fall of hero dissolution

psychological awakening of libido wish-fulfilment anxiety-nightmare threshold

conscious inspiration achievement defeat relaxing of censor

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epiphany presence of Spirit

presence of Father

eternal “time”

eternal “space”

conceptual time

conceptual space

creation

ascension This seems to be the Milton one

redemption

past

future enlightenment

fall

existence

[194] This, everything foregoing to the contrary notwithstanding, seems to be it as far as the four major forms are concerned. It’s the furthest from my original views, but it’s certainly & inexorably right. Now I have to reconcile it with all the other things that are certainly right too. (Reverse the prs. [process].) [195] Well, that’s enough of that. I never seem to get anywhere with this stuff, & yet I have to go through phases of it periodically. I’m getting it clear that there are two main emphases to my work. One is centripetal & purely critical, & is concerned with enunciating the really new criticism: what I used to call the trivium. Here I have facing me, first, the general principles of this theory, second the application of it to the four forms of epic, drama, prose & lyric (not impossibly, in a transitional study, to the arts as a whole). That’s assuming I’m right in rejecting “scripture” as a genuine fifth form. The other is centrifugal & deals with the historical, philosophical, political & religious ramifications of the theory, concentrating, as far as I see now, on the problem of spiritual authority.

or.

discont.

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cont.

80

wisd.

aut. ly.

fr. ep.

mus. com. ly.

cont. ep. hier.

W.

Ch.

mim. sc. dr.

fc. pr.

pag. scr. pr.

sc.

[cont. = continuous discont. = discontinuous wisd. = wisdom aut. ly. = autonomous lyric com. ly. = community lyric mus. = music Ch. = charm

act dr.

industry

sc. dr. = scenic drama pag. = painting act. dr. = act drama sc. = scenic scr. pr. = scriptural prose fc. pr. = fictional prose

mim. = {mimesis?} hier. = hieratic W. = West cont. ep. = continuous epic fr. ep. = fragmentation epic or. = oracle]

[196] In the foreground is the new theory, of which the parts are as follows. First, a general introduction, as in my UTQ “Function” article.189 Second, an analysis of the four levels of meaning, as in the first KR article.190 Third, an analysis of the four levels of criticism, an article I am doing now.191 Fourth, an outline of the problem of archetypes, as suggested by the “Credo” article.192 From here on it’s vaguer: I don’t just know how much belongs to a complete unit. There should be an analysis of scripture, to do perhaps for Theology Today. There should be an article on the four major genres, outlining their inter-relationship.193 How much

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systematic grammar of symbolism I need to complete this I dunno.194 I’ve never thought of it as a complete book, but as introduction to a detailed treatment of one of the genres. Well, that’s not true: but I don’t quite see how my “First Essay” works out on so small a scale.195 But it sure would be a bombshell if it did. Can it be that I am only just now writing the opening chapter? This criticism article should logically end in a discussion of narrative meaning: that is, structure & symbolism, the precipitates of my literary anthropology & psychology respectively. If I do this I’m all set.196 [197] What’s been eluding me has been the question of a hierarchy of structure corresponding to meaning, say lyrical on the first level, narrative & didactic on the second, dramatic on the third & encyclopedicvisionary on the fourth. I know there’s a false analogy here, but the absence of a “four levels of narrative” schematism is puzzling. If there were one, the whole theory of genres would come clear. [198] The nearest I can get to it at the moment is through a combination of ideas of which one emerged from Coleridge. The path from the first to the second level of meaning is from the centripetal to the centrifugal boundary of literature. One starts with pure association, babble & jargon, which latter is poetic diction or trade slang. Then one crosses the centripetal boundary to the lyric. Then as one approaches the centrifugal, one passes through a series of expanding rhythms, first (I think) drama, then narrative & didactic poetry, then literary prose, then, crossing the centrifugal boundary, descriptive & factual prose. This last can be assimilated to literature only through scripture. [199] The other idea is this: if I look at my circle of dramatic genres, I see four zones in it, epiphany, spectacle, mimesis & irony, the middle two being archetype & allegory. These are the Eden, Beulah, Generation & Ulro forms of art. Art begins in Beulah with the romance, & as it ages goes into realism & Generation. There are two ways of hypothesizing: fantasy, or the use of a let’s pretend world, and selection, & these two give us the middle terms. But fantasy as an end in itself lacks a teleological point: this is anagnorisis or revelation (epiphany), the thing revealed being the infinite form of the innocent world, the form of work. The emergence of this from romance raises romance to scripture, & as the real presence of this world is the central teaching of all religions worth

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anything, we learn about it mostly from religious literature. The arrival at epiphany is the end of the quest, the consummation, a new birth, a marriage & a fertile fuck all identical with the burning of experience. [200] The only other way to resolve a work of art is through irony, which is closer to realism and waking sophistication or experience, as epiphany is to romance. This is the vision of hell, the frustrated quest or stopping of energy, & takes its meaning from epiphany as its negation. All of which is a long jump toward the next step, as it relates scripture, Druidism & the morphology of romance. [201] Perhaps my three levels of criticism paper ought to be supplemented by a fourth or anagogic level of criticism, in which there are no analogies or coincidental resemblances, but everything is united by its archetype. This is association working on the upper scale, & is the real process that goes on in liberal education. Here the things usually propounded as causes or sources, like sun-myths, are seen in their true form as analogues within the archetype. [202] Coleridge’s “primary imagination” is the existential world and literal apprehension, the original act of vision whether of art or of life. “Secondary” is the world of consciousness and the third or archetypal level, the recreation of the original experience.197 That’s his “reason” or Vernuft in the reader. Above that, on the fourth level, is the logos. The second level, the allegorical one, is that of fancy in the poet and understanding (Verstand) in the reader. His criticism of fancy is that it’s overconsciousness and, like the understanding, dependent on memory. (Flanking it would be narrative & dialectic dullness). [203] The real Spenglerian progression seems to me to be scripture > epic > drama > prose > irony > scripture, or god > hero-actor > man > mere man > god. My theories of genres are still a lot hazier than my theories of sub-genres, which after all are pretty clear. [204] In starting with a literary form like a folk tale, one starts with it, as an autonomous fact, centripetally. Attempts to explain them by sources in dreams, myths, rituals & so on are all centrifugal, or allegorizing, fallacies. At the same time a literary critic can associate tales apart from their cultures (as Frazer, who’s literary, does) far more freely than an

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anthropologist. For the archetype is not a theoretical a priori necessity, but simply the generalization inferred in literary criticism from the empirical evidence of formal analogy (analogy is evidence in archetypal criticism). Why are two-brother quests more popular than other themes? As the tale form clarifies, it begins to radiate out to religion & ritual & dreams & the rest, & the nearer it is to a real archetype, the more vaguely suggestive each of the centrifugal fallacies will seem. [205] I should be careful to remember to say that to select a tradition is to select literary facts, in other words to be guided by an a priori premise. Real criticism has to submit the whole of literary experience impartially to examination. [206] Another way of stating the above is: criticism has constantly been bedevilled by the puns on law & rule which make it ethical in the moral instead of the Aristotelian sense. There are laws & rules in poetry to be described by the critic, but the prophetic dialectic which goes on to say: “in future poets ought to do so & so” is a fallacy founded on, & the reason for, the selected or canonical tradition. At present I’m thinking of postponing the criticism article till part three, but I doubt if I can. [207] The chapter on archetypes is pretty clear now. I’m no longer so keen on the seasonal symbol in archetypal narrative, & I have to remember the possibility of a Book of Tharmas, or study of comparative symbolism, breaking off from it. Anyway, the romance is clearing up as the central (I call it the proletarian or declassed) narrative, & my conception of epiphanic, tragic, comic (reversed) & ironic moods is pretty clear. What’s been befogging me is a consistent confusion of archetypal narrative with genres. The theory of genres & the study of lyric are the two weak spots in the book. Archetypes are established in the middle, pleasure & reality, romance & nature, comic & tragic in drama, idyllic & elegiac in lyric. The resolutions of the epiphanic & ironic are then given, the modes compared, & from there I go on to Scripture & Druidic symbols as mutual parodies. [208] “Idyllic” shouldn’t be confined too narrowly. Elsewhere I classify fear as terror, or fear inspired at a distance through sight or sound, horror, or fear linked to bodily contact (horrendus or hair-bristling; close to disgust & nausea) & dread, or unobjectified fear.198 All these can be idyl-

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lically kidnapped by the romance. Pleasing terror gives the adventurous, pleasing horror the uncanny, & pleasing dread the pensive or melancholy. All are ingredients of the awful or wondrous. If one defined pity generally as sympathy or the sense of including the individual in the community (my idea of pathos fits in here), then the romance could be defined as the form in which pity and terror are accepted. I may divide the comic into three sections: ironic, realistic & romantic. Because of my earlier point that comedy casts out pity & ridicule. Aristotelian comedy does, perhaps. [209] Anyway, the ingredients of satire are laughter and indignation. If irony & satire are the same thing—a point I’m not sure of—irony is moral, as tragedy isn’t. (Note that the normal resolution of tragedy, which is based on acceptance of that which is, is serenity, not mournfulness, far less despair.) Laughter and indignation (wrath: here comes my point that wrath is the opposite of irritation) are both concerned with deliverance from the unpleasant. Laughter is irony looked at from Beulah; indignation, irony looked at from Generation. Or something. [210] The shape looks like this at present: 1. The Scope of Criticism (UTQ).199 2. Levels of Meaning (KR).200 3. Levels of Criticism (HR). 4. Theory of Archetypes (KR+).201 5. Theory of Genres (the big weak spot). Part Two, chs. 6–9, deal with the four (as I think) specific forms, epic, drama, prose fiction202 & lyric (the last the minor weak spot). Part Three begins with a conspectus of rhetorical techniques (10), goes on to a conspectus of the history of ideas (literature as the hypothesis of history, philosophy or verbal law) (11) & concludes (11 is the horizontal axis) with the vertical axis, art in relation to the two communities of religion & politics (aligning of Thomist & Marxist ideas) (12). That looks like it. [211] 10 is a new idea, though it’s been on the outside looking in for a hell of a long time. It’s a chapter on how to read, in which I use the stuff that’s been accumulating on my margins ever since my undergraduate days. I’d better ignore the rhetoric books & make my own categories. Begin with unconscious symbolism (e.g. Sundering Flood passage). Include modulation, transfer, ambiguity, stretto or tie-up, contradiction of sense by imagery (Vendryes’ point: an example of it is Coleridge’s one red leaf in Christabel, where the sense says it isn’t moving),203 & onomatopoeia & imitative harmony (with intentional discords) & all the other

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things I note in the course of reading. I think this is the logical place for my image-of-ideas (diagrams) point & certainly for my rhetoric one about, e.g., Mamma Nature in Huxley. Also my James Mill one, perhaps.204 And this may be the place to introduce my music & poetry stuff205 & whatever other ideas I can muster about the relation of poetry to the other arts. I think the arrangement of Part Three is beautifully symmetrical: first to second to third (& fourth) level; ornamental to oratorical to tropological rhetoric. Perhaps 10 rather than 5 is where my wonderful discovery of the difference between poetry or prose goes, after I do discover it. Repetition, the stock-in-trade of new critics (I might say in passing that the “new” criticism is very easy) and archetypal recognition (key signature) (finding the tonic chord) are other factors. This should be one of my best chapters, now that I’ve isolated it. [212] As for 11, this will begin with my point about the Zeitgeist as an allegory of society. Hence three ages, medieval or chain of being, Renaissance-Cartesian or Classical revolution of consciousness, romantic or bateau-ivre type of adjustment to revolutionary situations.206 I have some ideas about the Plotinus-Avatamsaka doctrine of everything as everywhere at once that may clear up.207 The Lankavatara influences seem to have settled down to the conception of art as hypothetical (Maya). That may lead me in 12 to the rejection of description or logical theology in favor of pure Citta matra,208 not Northrop’s “aesthetic continuum,”209 but the kind of “mystical” Maya doctrine I think I can get out of Eckhart, to say nothing of the Jeans-Whitehead-Eddington tradition. Anyway, I’ve got enough ideas to fill Part Three: my UT doctrine that there is no one language unifying the arts210 will probably take me Cittaward to what I used to call the skeptical reserve & now think of as ultimate liberation, the revolt of hypothesis against thesis, the Son against the Father, the discovery that the spiritual forms of creation are verbal fate cast in the “let this be” form. [213] No, the weak spots are 5 & 9 (not impossibly 6), and I’d better go after them first. I think if 5 clears up the other will. My tentative idea for 5 is, first of all, a great wheel of genres, a wheel I know exists because I’ve discovered it in drama and the diameter of it in prose fiction. I think of this wheel as quadrated. The semicircle above is hieratic art, epic and lyric; below is mimetic, prose fiction & drama. The semicircle on the left are the narrative or continuous structures, on the right, frag-

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mented, episodic or epiphanic structures (epiphanic here really means spectacular). What I haven’t got is a full convincing & connected account of this. One thing that buggers it up is the distinction of poetry & prose. After association, a morphoditic mixture, we go on to: a) lyric & symmetrical prose (euphuism, decorated prose of the post-PaterWilde type, things like Earle & so on) b) dramatic & rhetorical prose (a natural combination: cf. the assoc. of drama & De Oratore in the Renaissance & of drama & harangue in Shaw) c) narrative-didactic poetry & prose fiction d) epic & scripture, after which they fragment & merge again in commandment, parable, aphorism & oracle (cf. riddle, proverb, ballet-episode, myth). Note the gradual historical progression from epiphanic & romantic to mimetic & ironic. So that with Wordsworth poetry is narrative-didactic & epic, as close as possible to prose: the rcs. [romantics] don’t answer this: they develop a consciously (sentimental, vs. naive) hieratic. Note that metre, when obtrusive, means that the rhythm of poetry is close to prose, as the poem hung on by the couplet through the age of prose. [214] I’ve said that the romance is the form in which pity & terror are accepted [par. 208]. That means it looks down on Ulro: if it falls in[,] pity & terror change to sentimentality and solemnity. Cf. the atmosphere of the latter 18th c., & note that the elements of terror & pity are isolated then as “sublime & beautiful,” wondrous & idyllic. Pity is the song of innocence or sense of community; terror (pleasing) the sense of cosiness in solitude, surrounded by nature. [215] Chap. 1. should give a blackboard example of a poem having a real variety of interpretations—I think of the Ancient Mariner, where psychological, biographical, theological, moral, literary (treatment of ballad), historical (my ch. 11 point) & probably several others are all possible. The moral is that poetry is a hypothetical structure fertilizing descriptive ones & never absorbed by them. This is better than what I have. (UTQ)211 [216] If there is an epiphanic > romantic > mimetic > ironic historical progression, surely the first two are Schiller’s naive & the last two his sentimental.212 But—no, I’ve got this already: his naive is the epiphanic or rhapsodic, & the other three are respectively idyllic, elegiac & satiric.

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[217] The opposite of the poetic (imagistically, or as I have said & may say again, rhetorically organized) is the prosaic, which is the narrativedialectic, or dialectically organized. It’s not “opposite,” of course, but parallel, but this is only hunch. There isn’t any difference between narrative & propositional prose, as I tried to say in the KR:213 in fact the rhetorical nature of attempts to isolate a propositional rhythm proves the opposite. Whether prose expresses the ethical (we need some word like metaethical) or the metaphysical dialectic, these human & natural flankings of art are the same, the ur-poetic world of consciousness. Both move toward the same compulsion. [218] Reading left to right, we have four phases of dialectic: encyclopaedic forms, where the dialectic is rotary; continuous forms, where it is active; episodic cyclic forms, where it’s active & scenic, & episodic forms, where it’s scenic. These give epic & scripture, prosaic & poetic fiction, dramatic lyric sequences, and individual poems & plays. Or, perhaps, thus: encyclopaedic forms, normally prose (scripture) organized on the comminution of poetry (when poetic, as in Dante, they’re tours de force). Then continuous forms, normally prose, or poetry in which (as Wordsworth said) the rhythm of the poetry approximates that of prose.214 Then spectacular or dramatic forms, ignoring the episodic-cyclic category on the ground that it’s just a way of approximating the encyclopaedic in a different way. I think I know what I mean by this. Then inner-scenic or lyric forms, normally poetic, where prose is also a tour de force. This distinction of lyric & dramatic as reflected and projected scenic is Joyce too,215 but this form makes epic posterior to drama. I think Joyce, or Stephen, confused comedy with commedia anyway. But this way makes it easier to see how my [Anticlimax] reflections about the gospel as a sequence of epiphanies fit in. So, tentatively: 6 is the lyric chapter, the weak one, 7 drama, 8 fiction, 9 the evolution of epic dialectic into Scripture. The principle of epic as the addition & scripture as the comminution of poetic fragments leads to an ambivalent view of genres as cyclic (historical), scripture crumbling into the primitive aphorisms of poetry, & as dialectic or linear. So the speculations I’d thought of as supra-prosaic (Plato [and] the rest) include the epic, as super-prose absorbs poetry. I think I see now how completely a wheel of prose fiction could be superimposed on that of drama. The distinction between the ironic & the systematic anatomy, the latter passing into the confession beyond the East line, is exactly the same. This is clear.

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[219] I think the key to the lyric classification is in what is addressed. With that, the lyric circle emerges. Schiller’s naive & sentimental is a historical distinction, not a generic one. The four zones of the circle are, as before, epiphanic or rhapsodic, idyllic, elegiac & satiric. NNW is the hymn or paean to the god. WNW is the Pindaric ode or hymn to the hero. Passing the narrative or historical axis, WSW is the poem to the loved one, male or female, normally in the elegiac zone. SSW is the ironic descriptive or fictional lyric, addressed to the reader as man, or the mere self of the poet. Then we pass the ethical or social axis into SSE, which is addressed to reason in the reader, the ironic metaphysical. ESE is the more systematic discursive poem, the E axis is into didactic poetry, & the ENE region is that of the romantic or imaginative lyric, addressed to the poetic (neo-heroic) self. NNE is addressed to the apotheosized self, the self as god. Note the general principle that the extroverted is left & introverted right. I think that’s got it: I always felt that all the specific forms had the same shape, but that might foreshorten the 5–9 area a good bit. [220] When the goal of work is defined, minor arts take precedence over major ones. Thus Morris, who is very close to Marx. Behind them both is Plato, who prefers the craftsman’s bed to the painter’s. Note that in Coleridge the recreative secondary imagination defines the goal of work; fancy defines art as play or release from a work associated with drudgery: the primary imagination is activity, the Wille Zur Macht or linear progress of unconditioned will.216 [221] There are two rhythms in literature: one is hieratic or formalistic, & the centripetal or withdrawing elements are predominant: the other is mimetic or contentual (if there is such a word; there undoubtedly isn’t), & the centrifugal or dialectic element is predominant. One is the poetic & the other the prosaic rhythm. Some confusion has arisen from the fact that we have no word for a work of literary art as such: the word poetry has some traditional claims to stand for all great verbal art, but it also means compositions in verse. Hence the attempt, found in Coleridge, to introduce a value-judgement into the definition of poetry, distinguishing real poetry from mere verse & the like.217 The unconscious heightening of the value of verse through this pun has involved an unconscious depreciating of prose, surviving in the overtones of “prosy” & “prosaic.” Anyway, defining a poem in terms of a good poem—poem “worthy the name of poem”—can only result in sonorous blah.

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[222] Anyway, poetry is organized on recurrence, whether of movement (metre) or sound (rhyme, alliteration). All rhetorical schemata are likely to be involved in recurrence. When poetry drops metre it ordinarily becomes oracular, depending on catalogues, parallelism, and other forms of oracular repetition, as in Whitman. Imagism repeats a good deal (Amy Lowell on lilacs)218 or relapses into short oracular epiphanic flashes, accenting the image & resisting all dialectic movement. Note the apparent paradox that continuity in poetry comes from metre: this fits my point that an obvious metre indicates a rapprochement of poetic & prosaic rhythm. The nearer a poet is to association, evocation & incantation (Shelley, Swinburne), the more we say his “ideas” (content aspect) dissolve in fogs of words & intoxicating metre. Form is the temperament or mixture of formalism & content: we may distinguish where we cannot divide, as Coleridge said.219 So we move from lyrics & symmetrical or decorated prose to drama, which may be either poetry or prose depending on other (Spenglerian) factors, to narrative-didactic poetry metrically organized & prose fiction, on to a prose that absorbs (Varronian) poetry or communicates it (Scripture). [223] In Chapter 10 I’m going to say the hell with the rhetorical textbooks & let’s see if we can arrive at a general theory of rhetoric, or of ornamental or hieratic (what I used to call epideictic) rhetoric anyway. The chief things are onomatapoeia (my imitative harmony notes), paronomasia or association in sound, thematic & variated repetition, modulation of imagery, stretto or tie-up, euphemism, the use of surrogates & sort of originof-species movement in all directions from an archetype, my idea of psychoanalyzing a writer’s ideas by reducing them to diagrams or images, or of judging motive through style (James Mill),220 counterpoint and ambiguity. Maybe some of my music and pictorial ideas go here: maybe this is the chapter that finally clears up the poetry and prose stuff. The “one red leaf” passage in Christabel 221 is both contrapuntal (leaf not shaking on tree linked to suddenly paralyzed C[hristabel] with her heart invisibly fluttering) and an example of what I think is occupatio or description though negation (Vendryes’ point that if you say it’s hot because no fresh breezes were blowing you’ve written a cool sentence).222 This is of course also where my “poetic etymology” ideas go. [224] “Delight and instruct” can only be an awkward hendiadys, based on the aggregate theory of literature: the ironic or aesthetic sense of the

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poem withdrawn from the verbal universe gives the idea of “pleasure,” and the consequence of the fallacy that everything constructive or emancipatory in the mind brought about by literature must come from outside literature. Even Coleridge talks about pleasure and of course turned to theology for his instruction. Others turn to the social sciences, history or philosophy. Cf. the Carnap “affective” nonsense.223 [225] Coleridge’s term fancy is inadequate & misleading, because Dreiser’s American Tragedy would be from his point of view fanciful: i.e. a mode of memory playing with fixities & definites.224 The Beulah level of art is fanciful & associative, but it should be distinguished from realism on the Generation level, which, when pure, has the exceedingly rare tragic cadence of inevitability. (Tragic cadences may be simple or perfect, like Philoctetes or the Oresteia, or compound, a stasis of the heroic & ironic.) The waking memory selects, the dream reshapes. Blake’s statement that imagination has nothing to do with memory will hardly do.225 Blake had an excellent memory; & people with excellent memories, like people with excellent digestions, are apt to be insensitive about their luck. [226] Romance accepts pity & terror; realism casts them out; irony watches the working of them in experience & holds them in reserve. Art which is not ironic but the subject of irony (i.e. bad art looked at ironically by the reader) is sentimental & solemn, the degraded or unconscious forms of pity & terror. The conscious assumption of these gives the particular kind of irony called parody or burlesque. Note that the “solemn” is the ritually bound: pity without vision is sentimental. [227] The UTQ outline of ch. 1 is not bad,226 but from the autonomy and specific conceptual framework of criticism the procedure is, first, to art as hypothetical, giving perhaps a variety of interpretations of the AM [The Ancient Mariner] or some such poem to show art’s mathematical relationship to the social sciences, and criticism’s function tying them up. Then to the conception of an order of words by way of the supersession of naive induction, blowing up the aggregate fallacy & the delight and instruct business on the way. Then the chronological fallacy and the adumbration of archetypes, then the Marxist-Thomist idea of art as the infinite goal or work, hypothetical because infinite. Perhaps this belongs in 3, & some of it, notably the no-language-of-infinite-common-sense

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paragraph, may belong to 12. But surely some of the verbal universe, hypothetical human omniscient Knower (not divine or existent)[,] the Aristotle Physics and Jeans (Whitehead?) analogies, may go here, though the main point certainly belongs to 2. At the end I could summarize the present situation as a game of toy soldiers, put in my not-reject-but-seewhat-it-is-doing sentence,227 distinguish systematic & progressive criticism from the history of taste, give parodies of meaningless leisure-class conversation, & in general put together all my polemic points. In particular: “the energy with which this slow battle is being fought (old & new critics) is bound to spread the notion that principles of criticism are involved in it.”228 Acts of faith, & touching faith.229 Criticism as science of course. Rest of book, with its frequently forbidding systematic appearance, addressed those convinced that criticism is more than trick of remaining in a relatively privileged social group. (Won’t do in that form) An enquiry into the assumptions behind the words culture & liberality (liberal education), or liberal arts. If critics would try to set down what seemed to them to be obviously true about literature, rival schools wouldn’t last long. Semantic difficulties (no words). Poetry as disinterested use of words. [228] Romance archetypes: hero vs. villain, heroine230 vs. siren, male & female counsellors (benevolent parental figures) vs. wizards and witches (tyrants & terrible mothers). Hence marriage vs. adultery, education vs. incest, communion vs. cannibalism & vampirism (Geraldine).231 Animal helper (horse in centre) vs. animal enemy (serpent & dragon in centre), way or high road vs. labyrinth (forest, sea, wilderness). Note wrapping, coiling images of snake, maze, lair (veil of mystery before mother or siren), and bandage or swaddling clothes vs. freedom. External present vs. unending cycle (auto-erotic ring or self-swallowing serpent); form vs. monster (leviathan), circumferential vs. central perspective; reality vs. illusion, act vs. accidia or ennui; bee vs. spider (sun vs. sun-snarer or rayed sun), sun of fertility god vs. crucified & hanged god. [229] “Hendiadys”—I doubt if anyone’s literary experience confirms the assumption that a work of art has regularly this kind of bifurcated impact, or that it does two different kinds of things to a reader. One feels rather that a poem or a play brings a single impact, however little of it we may get at first reading or however far it may expand and proliferate in the mind.

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[230] I feel impatient to get at the first part of the book, but the articles it’s based on aren’t all published yet, & I might do better to tackle the weak spots, primarily 5 & 6. [231] The Greek method of classifying genres was by methods of perfor5 mance. Lyric was ’ B [ta mele], or sung poems, epic was the ’   [ta epe] or recited (spoken) poems, and drama was presented or spectacle poems. The genre of dialectic implanted in epic flowered in Ionian prose & the Platonic dialogue, and produced a form of the fourth, not in Aristotle, the poem written. This increased emphasis on dialectic developed in Hebrew & other Asiatic cultures—hieratic or hieroglyphic prose scripture or sacred book, which by the comminution of poetry produced the elements of Scripture. Out of the womb of Scripture were reborn the epiphanic species; rotary or encyclopaedic dialectic in Christian epic, linear or commentary dialectic in prose fiction, presentation (representation) & psalm or Christian dithyramb. Hell, that isn’t what I mean. I mean that epiphanic forms predominate in the MA [Middle Ages], & a naive-to-sentimental cycle starts, down to the epiphanic (MA) > spectacular (Ren.) > mimetic > ironic chute. Note that while epic is certainly a tour de force in Scripture since Christian times, with Christian emphasis on prosaic (descriptive) theology, the rotary (encyclopaedic) quality of its symbolism and its central (centripetal) position between narrative and didactic poetry preserves the poetic quality. [232] To get 5 straight, I have to juggle the following complexes of ideas: 1) lyric, epic, drama, prose as sung, spoken, seen, and written words. 2) Scripture, fiction, drama, & lyric as encyclopaedic, continuous or dialectic, spectacular & tropical forms. Note how relatively easy it would be to impose a circle of n-d [narrative-dramatic] poetry or top of the p.f. [prose fiction] one—this would clear up the satire & anatomy business. Up to a point—the novel is difficult. Historical poem, maybe. 3) The affinities of lyric with music, drama with plastic or visual arts (as well as music). 4) The lyric-subjective-ear-music cluster vs. the drama-objective-eye-spectacle one, with the “epic” in the middle, as Joyce says,232 fiction below and Scripture above. Not that the lyric wasn’t originally public, being musical, but it’s the form capable of the greatest introspection. 5) The progression I already have from association to comminution, lyric to scripture. Maybe on the second level lyric expands to fiction, on the third level to drama, on the fourth to epic & scripture. That’s getting a little

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nearer it, as it keeps my new form of the lyric-n-d-drama progression. Anyway, the odd connection of the lyric with the ironic (withdrawn centripetal verbal hypothesis) keeps turning up, as the centrifugal-mimetic, dramatic-spectacular and epic-scripture epiphanic links all seem well established. This is the next point I have to think about. [233] I should try next to rationalize an old hunch about genres & the four levels of meaning. First is the associative babble in which rhetoric takes a grip of both logic & grammar. This is the introverted, inspired, epiphanic, oracular stage of listening for the word, and its typical form is the lyric. As this “overheard” rhetoric takes a tighter grip on the projected elements, it moves in emphasis from the “sung” to the “spoken,” focuses more on a listener, and develops more techniques of address. As it does so, it bifurcates, in a narrative & a didactic direction, the middle form being fable or fiction, the Wordsworthian norm. This is the second or centrifugal level, in which there is a regular movement toward the prosaic rhythm. (Myth (4) : ritual (3) : : parable (2) : oracle (1)). Thus from oracle descend the three primitive forms of commandment (control of act), aphorism or proverb (control of thought), and parable (control of image). [234] But while it’s clear that there is a progress from lyric to fable, the latter being in the state of poetry assimilated to prose in rhythm and hence controlled by metre until it escapes into & fulfils itself in prose, other things aren’t so clear. One is the relation of the parable or spoken image to the riddle or read image (“read a riddle”). They seem to have associations with prose & poetry respectively, which is the opposite of what one would expect. I don’t know, though; the riddle compels focussing the attention on the image as image, while the parable is a relaxed intermingling of narrative & didactic elements. Perhaps the riddle is to the parable forms what the poetic epic (Dante) is to scriptural ones: the visible rhetorical axis on which the whole hypothetical movement turns. [235] Well, on the third level, the level of doing or quid agas, the word becomes visible as well as audible. The thing that makes drama a drama is not the fact that it’s in prose or poetry (it adopts either at will & we’ve left this distinction behind), but that it’s the Word seen or presented (represented, that is: it’s the ectoplasm of the oracle.) It’s the origin of narrative, hence, like the oracle, a primitive form—the primitive form, if you

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count work songs & the like. Perhaps the Greek ’ B [ta mele] or sung poems were really dramatic rather than oracular, & hence the musical connections of poetry, like the spectacular ones, may belong entirely to this level. I think too that there may be a distinction between singing & chanting (the Yeats drama is chanted & assimilated to lyric & oracle) that may be of importance. The latter is rhythmical emphasis of words, the latter233 an external relation. [236] Chanting is hieratic & esoteric; speaking is mimetic & individual; singing is spectacular & communal. In singing, pitch (oracular emphasis) is subordinated to stress (narrative emphasis). Quantity belongs to chanting. Thus I found in my music paper234 that hieratic poetry (Tennyson & Keats & the rest I take to have a kind of free-verse quantitative pattern) was further from real music than linear & discursive forms. No, it looks as though level 2 was the level of the relation of literature to other verbal disciplines, and level 3 the level of the relation of literature to other hypotheses (arts.) (I suspect that the first level is that of the relation of words to numbers, & of poetry to mathematics, but that’s a Pythagorean & Platonic mystery I can’t look into here.) (Or do I have to? That’s where geometrical rhetoric comes, the divided line & stuff; that’s where poetic etymology of the Cratylus type goes, and it may be that if Ch. 11 is Aristotelian and 12 Christian (Marxist-Thomist anyway), 10 may be Platonic & concerned with Timaeus speculations.) (On the other hand, that low ironic oracular level {irony & oracle both are ambiguous in meaning & the typical oracle of Croesus is a case in point235—all the oracle has to say is know thyself, & Socrates, the master of irony and teacher of Plato, was devoted to the oracle too} has Catholic-mass overtones, and seems to be linked with the winter world of darkness {Church}, sparagmos, or dividing of the body, belief in substance, in a kind of isolating of Druidism. Substance after all is inner reality, hidden in external reality but really present in it. Is that why oracular-lyric poets with strongly ironic temperaments turn to Catholicism?) (Anyway, just as Plato wanted to make art sub-realistic, the shadow within the cave of reality, so these poets keep saying art isn’t a substitute for religion.) (Or perhaps the oracular exists on all four levels: first, private-epiphanic, Plotinus’ flight of alone to alone,236 second, prophecy or contact of hearer & speaker, third, mass-communion in body, fourth, Pentecost. That would be the N.E. corner of the wheel. Note the frequency with which the senses are all attacked at once: drugs, laughing gas, incense & the

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appeal to all five (four anyway) senses in the mass.) (Blake’s Europe has a lot to do with all this.) [237] I wonder if there’s any possibility of four cyclic myths, one for each genre? The parable is a realistic genre: of Jesus’ parables only the sheep & goats [Matthew 25:31–46], which is oracular & apocalyptic, violate[s] any senses of probability. Possibly the (historical) Toynbee movement of withdrawal & return, the Prodigal Son shape, has something to do with the primarily selective approach of the parable or realistic story. The P-S [Prodigal Son] movement is both parallel & in contrast to that of the Incarnation, that fact being linked to the “realistic” epic structure of Paradise Regained. [238] This oracular-lyric business continues to fascinate me. The mysterious links of word and number in prosody (note the word “quantity”), of word and diagram in thought (cf. Yeats’ Vision) survive in superstition as the magical spell or binding word that holds one in a state of ironic bondage. That’s an image of the containing of existence by the Word or fiat of God. So my lyric circle is about right: note that W on the circle is extroverted and E introverted, nature being mentally & man physically communed with—that may help unscramble something. So NNW is paean, dithyramb or hymn to God, WNW ode to hero or mistress (C of L [Court of Love]), WSW love poem to friend or loved one, SSW epistle or satire, SSE paradox or metaphysical poem, ESE fanciful poem, ENE reflective or imaginative, NNE rhapsodic. Epiphanic, idyllic, elegiac and ironic are modes, not genres. Poems to nature are E, even when given a W aspect (Keats’ Ode to Autumn is a nature-poem rather than an Ode to a deity, which is why he didn’t call it an ode).237 Perhaps one can distinguish genre, mode, theme (often a borrowing from another genre) and form (the work of art may have several generic strains in it.) Theme in that case would have archetypal affinities. The importance of the romantic movement is that it worked out the divisions of the E side. The W side had always been: NNW god, WNW hero-mistress, WSW lover-friend, SSW man. The romantics established the other side as SSE reason, ESE fancy, ENE reflective imagination or wisdom, NNE divine imagination. Note that above I’ve mixed genre and species: you can always combine species within a genre. A mixture of genres is simply a change in methods of performance or in the mode of understanding. It looks as though going up the ladder of meaning gives us genres, and going down it gives

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us modes. Only I’m beginning to suspect that the modes are epiphanic, romantic, ironic, and oracular, which, for the moment, buggers up my heaven-hell point. [239] Anyway, there seem to be two foci of romance, one in action, visibility and community, the other in oracle, solitude and mystery. One is the social dream or ritual & the other the individual dream or oracle. The archetypes are much the same: they approach the waking world in fiction & the divine world in scripture. I wish I knew enough mathematics to tackle my own oracular stage properly: I seem to have a fixation on flat circles. Start with the Urthona-nadir below hell of lyric; expand outwards into the waking world in all directions until we reach the Tharmas-circumference of fiction. At the centre of this is the Orc-drama, continuing the lyric archetype & expressing it in visible form. Above, the circumference of fiction changes from mimetic to heroic (epic, polarized by hero & poet) until it reaches the zenith of scripture. That makes the “E” & “W” points imaginary ones on a surface going into a descriptive void. It also clears up the role of epic as narrowing down to a point. Note that the cyclic element in epic often leads to aggregating epics instead of to comminuting epic material. As for the paradox that it’s the centre that’s visible, that just illustrates the difficulties of solid instead of plane geometry. But it still doesn’t clear up the lyric-ironic business. Irony of course is the end of the Orc-Urizen cycle, & romance is its beginning. The nadir of oracle is somewhere else, and its existence polarizes a zenith of fulfilment. I seem to be getting closer again to my KR article,238 in which romance, comedy, tragedy and irony were four phases of rotary movement, speared through by an axis running from epiphany to oracle, Alone to alone.239 If I called them romantic, spectacular, mimetic & ironic I’d be closer to the historical progression (the prevailing genres are epic, drama, fiction & satire.) But the irony-lyric link remains whatever I do. And for all the bullshit in these last four pages, several 5 & 6 things are clearing up. I have a stronger vision of the chute of modes, the ladder of genres, & the wheel of species, especially the last, where the lyric wheel has cleared wonderfully, & now seems to be as it should, the simplest of all. (It isn’t the person addressed, but the person who is the theme that defines the species.[)] And, at the risk of oversimplifying the wheel, I can classify its zones as god & god within (NN), hero & hero within (i.e. counsellor, W & N), loved one & loved one within (anima: look where the Jungian archetypes are), man & man within (shadow?

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Cf. my point about Byron & the reader over his shoulder.)240 This last is a real find. [240] I’ve also been toying with the idea of seeing a lyric germ of each genre, narrative & didactic germs for fiction, communally performed lyrics for drama, & microcosmic lyrics like Lycidas, for the fourth level. The last two correspond to your old idea of conventional and autonomous lyric, the former, which needs the social element of music & song attached to it, being dramatic. That complicates lyric classifications, of course. Lyric species are arranged according to where the poet himself is in relation to his theme or person, dramatic according to where the audience is, fiction according to where the reader is, epic according to where the listener is. Hence (I’ll prove it is a hence in due course) lyric species are mortal & interpenetrative, fictional ones voluntarily mixed, dramatic ones relatively fixed, and epic ones (listener means mind of listener, of course) dialectic. (Fictional species radiate in streaks centrifugally; epic ones converge to an epiphanic point.) For autonomous or microcosmic read simply archetypal. Also I’m veering again towards a deductive x > 1 procedure, making the lyric chapter 9. The essential point is that I’m no longer afraid of it, wherever it goes. [241] At present it seems to me that Introduction-Criticism-MeaningGenres-Archetypes is most logical for the exposition. The Meaning chapter should include my “Marxist-Thomist” point about art as the vision of the goal of work. This is third level, the dramatization of accepted myths (the Plato-Marx stuff, I mean.) On the second level art is instruction, & on the first level, withdrawn from instruction, it is play or distraction. The Criticism one of course adds the fourth-level point of infinite association. [242] The connection of the lyric-oracular stage with mathematics is, first of all, in the mysteries of “numbers,” as they used to be called. “Rhythm,” “rhyme,” “tale,” all have mathematical etymologies. This is also the cryptic stage of the mathematical inter-relations of tones, and the liquid architectonics of Beethoven’s notebooks (whatever the “tune” was to be, there was to be a subdominant cadence at bar so-and-so.) It is the painter’s stage of sketches & doodles & diagrams & cryptic cloudy masses of balance & composition. It turns into extroverted mathematics very easily, as soon, in fact, as a pattern emerges into consciousness. Hence the difference between the echolalia of a dream poem & the

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mechanics (perhaps not so mechanical after all) of The Pearl, between Poe’s Raven & his foolish commentary on it.241 [243] The word “essay” is to be understood in its original sense of an incomplete trial or first attempt.242 I offer no definition of poetry, as I have no ear for definitions. Re the addition to the criticism chapter above [par. 241], that’s where I put my “coincidence” point.243 On this level there is no more useless design: the critic is free to make for himself (not to publish) all associations. The point about “essay” probably goes at the end of the paragraph about the critic’s handbook in the HR article.244 [244] The study of Shelley has started a crystallization around the word Eros, which of course just resembles what I already know about Orc. The associations of Eros, or love without revelation, are: the future, dialectic, reforming zeal, fucking, death & the lower Paradise. Shelley’s heroes are Christlike, forgiving and redeeming and ready for martyrdom, but are also erotic: they’re terrific fuckers, & one thinks of Lawrence’s treatment of Christ in The Man Who Died & of Yeats’ Oedipus & Leda & Swan imagery of a new “antithetical” or erotic Christ. The importance of this is in clearing up a) the second or Beulah-comic level of the modes, where the resolution is implicitly apocalyptic, & actually the birth of a new community conceived as the child or product of a marriage, and b) the Eastern quarter of the wheel of species, where I find both the fulfilment of erotic love & the dialectic leading to a future ideal community. (There seems to be seem [some] tension between them: they’re together in Morris, but Communism, Platonic & Marxist, is loveless, & both in Plato & in Nazism the Eros cult tends to sexual perversion. Perhaps only Rabelais gets it right: that, by the way, is the Abbey of Theleme245 or will-fulfilment, which links with Blake’s unborn Thel as well as with its Nietzschean degeneration.) Something very tangled here, but the revolutionary doctrine of voluntary change (Plato, Godwin, Shelley, Marx) has a lot to do with this Thel-Theleme world. In Blake’s Thel the ideal community is presented in Beulah terms as nature in its innocent or benevolent aspect of mutual nourishment. This innocent world is the place of seed and of natural death, where, as in Shelley’s Alastor, one returns to the unborn dream world of desire, or where sleep, dream, death and sexual intercourse all seem to be the same thing. The other side of Eros is of course Adonis.

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[245] Now let’s see what, in summary, stands out. Chapter 1 (UTQ),246 makes four major points. One, criticism is autonomous; two, it relates to other descriptive verbal disciplines, but controls its own relations; three, it’s a comprehensive systematic progressive scientific study; four, it’s based on the conception of an order of words. These four points are expanded in Chapter 2 (HR2)247 to a conception of four levels of criticism. First, rhetorical, divided into biographical & tropical, depending on whether the work of art is in time or not (is taken that way, I mean). Second, dialectic, divided into historical & ethical, Spenglerian & Marxist, wheel of history & the classless society, image of the wheel & spiral that comes later. Third, structural & archetypal, Frazer & Jung, the poetic level proper. Fourth (not in HR)248 a level of pure association where there is no coincidental analogy. (Here may be where my critic-abstracts-fromculture (Frazer a critic rather than an anthropologist) point goes.) Chapter 3 (KR1)249 then starts out on the third level (cf. what later happens with the romance), outlining the levels of meaning and narrative, in that order. I haven’t yet decided whether this is one chapter or two. The former is my regular theory, the latter is my theory of genres: lyric, fiction, drama, epic & scripture. Chapter 4 or 5 then deals with my new theory of modes, epiphanic or apocalyptic, romantic or erotic or comic or spectacular (probably the starting point), mimetic or realistic or tragic, and ironic: vision, dream, waking & nightmare. Then, in what looks like Chapter 5, I develop the modes into the wheel of species: extroverted & introverted ironic (the man & the shadow), e. & i. [extroverted & introverted] mimetic (loved one & anima), e. & i. romantic (hero & counsellor) e. & i. epiphanic (god without & within.) That finishes Part One. For Part Two I have the question of order still to settle. I may find it best to begin, as I have before, with the third level (drama, 6), go on to fiction (7), & then involve the lyric in a complex discussion of epic & scripture (8 and 9). This partly because the species of drama are the most stable. Part Three (note what a beautifully logical sonata form is developing: I may indicate that in the table of contents) is then rhetorical (10, for which I hope before long to establish a diagram), dialectic (11) and a final placing between the social (archetypal) & the religious (anagogic) community (12): Here’s the lyric conspectus:

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to self as god (enthusiasm)

to heroic self or counsellor

to hero (Pindaric, etc.) ode to narrative poem

idyllic or imaginative (ode)

to anima (introverted love lay)

to loved one, male or female

to, or about, the merely human (epistle & vignette

to reason or shaow in self (ironic & metaphysical

to didactic poem

elegiac

satiric

And here, very badly drawn, is the conspectus of genres. (The X should be two V’s, converging at the top & bottom of the drama circle.)

circle of Scripture archetypal zone epic hemisphere

romantic mimetic

circle of drama satiric

zone

fictional hemisphere

circle of lyric

zone zone

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[246] Now the boggy part is mainly in Part Two, and is connected with the difficulty of disentangling this book from The Books of Orc & Tharmas. The Preface (which could end with acknowledgements) might start as follows: I learned from Blake that the central critical problem in any (first-level) study of a poet was to articulate the structure of his imagery, the grammar of his symbolism. Then came the question of form & of the right period, hence my [Liberal] and [Tragicomedy] phase. Then the phase of discovering that the prefatory material I’d been trying to stick onto whichever of the other two I wrote first formed a book of its own. [247] At present the weak point is the archetypal chapter. The trouble is that the whole conception of archetypes isn’t fitted in yet. I have a circle of archetypal personae, and I think I’ve found a circle of images in [Tragicomedy], but I’m still vague about a) a Frazerian Orc dyinggod ritual cycle in drama, and b) a Jungian Los creator-God archetypal spiral in romance. They’re the germs of & [Liberal] respectively, & No, I don’t like it. The right seems right, but Orpheus & Prometheus should be reversed. Ideas of the gigantic, the titanic & the angelic are involved.

Prometheus

god

counsellor

god within

hero

poet

Eros

anima loved one

friend

man Orpheus

reason shadow

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of the two sides of “poetic” as defined in Chapter 2. They may be the extroverted and introverted (anthropo/ & psycho/) sides respectively of something that is one piece. Incidentally, I discovered that in the archetypes were the cardinal points, not the spaces between them, which were species. Shadow & anima & counsellor are on the SE, E & NE radii, & are the guardians of the thresholds between satiric-elegiac, elegiac-idyllic, & idyllic-rhapsodic partitions respectively. Similarly, Eros (with Adonis) is W, Prometheus SW and Orpheus NW. I’ve tried reversing the W-E and SW-NE axes, but this seems better. Orpheus & shadow, NW-SE, is right enough; that’s the axis of angel & devil (Rilke & Rimbaud), Orpheus being the essential angelic concept. But I may yet reverse the others. Anima at E is according to Jung’s order, & Prometheus at SW fits my pattern better, but maybe the latter needs recasting. The Jungian anima is a sister-wife-mistress affair;250 mine is the real mother-daughter. Incidentally, the N-S axis could be Christ & Oedipus. The real lines may be horizontal, thus [see diagram above]: [248] The general outline of the chapter on modes is getting clear: first an analysis of the comic, then of the mimetic or realistic, of which the tragic is a special form. Or, perhaps, the apocalyptic, the explicit statement of what in comedy is implicit: this in any case is third, the ironic fourth. Then the pairing of apocalyptic & ironic imagery, as in KR2.251 It’s this that introduces archetypal images (i.e. of innocence and experience) which are different from the archetypes or the wheel of species. Then comes a subdivision of these archetypes, distinguishing Eden from Beulah innocence, and Generation (law & perhaps purgatory; certainly nature) from Ulro analogy. All this is perhaps not possible without a conspectus of quest, which has perhaps emerged in the genre chapter as the essence of epic, the explicit manifestation of what the narrativemeaning unification is. Yes, that’s where that goes. [249] Chapter 3, on the first two levels of meaning: the difference between allegory & symbol, in this book, is the difference between a structure of centrifugal meaning and the units out of which it is composed. What most people mean by symbolism is what in this book is called the structure of imagery. Hawthorne is more “allegorical” than Trollope, not because he translates more reality into platitudes (the opposite is true) but because he organizes his stories more explicitly

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around a structure of imagery. The vague notion that this somehow makes him more “poetical” has something in it. [250] Somewhere, not impossibly in the Preface: as for the schematic arrangement of the book, that may, as the matters it treats of come to be better understood, disappear like scaffolding. My intention is not to classify, but to (inter-relate &) show what real relations are, clarify traditions and explain affinities. [251] On the first two levels of meaning: centripetally, we associate, not only words but ideas into words (ambiguity or paronomasia), meditate on the range of combinations of a key word (wit in Pope or word in Eliot, as well as nature in Aristotle or idea in Plato), & finally arrive at the larger units (archetypes) of a structure of imagery. The word “structure” implies something static, & archetypes are invisible currents like electricity. The passage from denotative meanings to archetypes is corollary to the passage from blocks of solid matter to a world where matter is the ectoplasm of energy. We didn’t notice how denotative our language was until anthropologists came back with words like mana & taboo & orenda & curious metamorphoses of the missionary’s conception God.252 [252] Such conceptions are not crude, vague, inconsistent or confused; they seem so only to denotatively prejudiced minds. The people who use them get along all right, & are often capable of great subtlety & flexibility in their use. Psychologists also come up with “poetic images” of censor & libido & father & mother figures & the like. This is the kind of thinking poets do, & the history of ideas people are forever finding “inconsistencies” which exist only in terms of their own categories. Archetypes are difficult to handle because they are fluid, but they’re the real sources of communicative power, and once mastered, prove to be the simple & natural way to think, just as Blake’s prophecies are as immediate & primitive as his Songs of Innocence. The moment you comprehend an archetype is the moment in which it passes into something else, & you, though involved once again with the unknown, suddenly feel, not that you have “grasped” or “seized” anything, but that you have been detached from ignorance. There is no possession of anything. Hence those who believe that freedom consists in possessing things feel that archetypes are irrational, mystic, obscure, confused or what not. Such people feel that the world will never be safe for the old blocks-of-matter rationalism until

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poetry has been explained in terms of something that is not poetry. (And criticism is to literary experience what theology is to religion.) [253] This seems to belong on the third level; but it involves the meaning of the word “archetype,” and the only meaning I can give that just now is that of an image which indicates a mode. They are images that indicate the tendency of the whole structure, & are “key images” in the sense that they show one what key one is in. There are three divisions of archetypes, as I see it: the analogy archetypes, contrasting the unfallen & fallen worlds; the modal archetypes, distinguishing Eden & Beulah, Generation & Ulro, &, not impossibly, Beulah & Generation; and third, the specific archetypes, the extroverted and introverted aspects of the four modes which produce the eightfold wheel of species. [254] I’ve noted a phenomenon I call “diabolic modulation,” in which a normally experiential symbol is used in an innocent context.253 Thus the bride is right & the harlot left; but in comedy adultery often means true & marriage commercial love. Similarly the good serpent in Shelley, the idealized band of robbers or bandits or pirates, etc. Diabolism sounds ironic; but I wonder if it isn’t the fundamental principle (a fundamental principle) distinguishing the romantic from the mimetic, as mockromance (Quixote) is mimetic? Something here anyway. 1957 [255] Anatomy of Criticism has finally been excreted, or crystallized, from these hunches, and I’m back where I started again, wondering how to arrange encyclopaedic forms. I’ve been visited by the thought that [Liberal] and [Tragicomedy] & the rest are not books I write at all but books I read, those essential and obvious books of my dreams that are not by me, but recreate the Spengler vision. But if they are to be written, then (as it looks now) the basis of is scripture-romance-epic, & its bases the Bible, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Commedia & Paradise Lost. The basis of then is drama and fiction, the break between romantic and conceptual fiction being the point of the transition to [Anticlimax], which is mainly concerned with the relation between myth and “model” or conceptual thought, a relation which, as it approaches fragmentation & metaphorical identity swings into [Rencontre] or winds up with apocalypse. This may remain four books or shrivel into one.

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[256] As such, [Liberal] is to be distinguished from (a) either FS or AC (b) either of their successors. The first would be a revised collection of my later Blake essays, the second the practical book suggested in the Preface to AC,254 the writing out of my myth course. (This latter might or might not expand in the direction of my “twenty-four preludes” scheme.)255 [257] Coleridge said all philosophers (meaning conceptual critics, like himself) were either Platonists or Aristotelians:256 similarly all fictional critics are either Iliadic or Odyssean. With my strong bias toward comedy & romance, I’ve always been an Odyssean, and have never known what to do with the Iliad in the [Liberal] scheme, what with its dramatic & realistic affinities.257 I begin to feel that it really has a quite subordinate place in , though it may turn out to be the cornerstone of [Tragicomedy]. [258] The Iliad must always have been a shocking poem. Religiously shocking, because of its contemptuous treatment of the gods, as it was to Plato [Republic, 389a–391e]. I suppose it was about the same time that Elijah in Palestine was mocking the priests of Baal with “Perchance he has fallen asleep, or is on a journey,”258 which is precisely what Zeus does in the Iliad. Historically (or chivalrically) shocking because, as the Levy woman says, Homer’s compassion embraces the victor: 259 most of us can sympathize only with losers, hence poets from Virgil to Shakespeare have ennobled the Trojans and vilified the Greeks. Morally shocking, because of the class-conscious bias—even the courteous Hector is reproached by Polydamas for assuming that only the brass can speak.260 Ordinary people are just there to get chopped up by heroes: they have no other function. And the insistence that there is no immortality worth anything darkens the poem as though the Styx instead of Oceanus ran around Achilles’ shield. [259] The Iliad is of course a tragedy in my sense of a legal compact of interlocking gods, man & nature. The gods in battle represent the kind of excess of power that comes from the unification of man with the rest of nature, but in a tragic, & hence destructive, context: Zeus is primarily the God of storm. The last book is the same kind of serene close that comes at the end of the Oresteia: nothing could be less of a happy ending, but the serenity comes from the clarified vision of a world under wrath (not, as in Oresteia, simply under law or  j [dike]).261

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[260] The gods, whatever else they are, are not thinkers: they are actors only, & all of them except Zeus tend to act on impulse. Fate is said to rule the gods, but the thing most closely linked with fate is the poet’s will. Athena & Hera are tragic vices; Zeus is the tragic architectus. His design of letting the Trojans almost win until the death of Patroclus provokes Achilles’ return is a literary design & obeys conventional rules of fictional structure. The only motivation for heroes, in Sarpedon’s great speech, is glory [Iliad, bk. 12, ll. 369–81], but ultimately (i.e. after the present generation) only the poet can bestow glory. Hera & the rest behave like subordinate impulses in the poet’s mind. [261] Gods & men are parallel societies (somewhat as, in a comic setting, the fairy & human societies are in the MND [Midsummer Night’s Dream]). The relation of Agamemnon and Menelaus is parallel to that of Zeus and Poseidon. There’s something about prayers vs. Ate262 I haven’t got yet, but prayers are not commitments of the soul (the gods are tougher about rejecting suppliants than men are allowed to be): even if the gods are opposed, the hero is supposed to stand his ground & fight anyway. The prayer seems to be a recognition of the tragic compact, in contrast to Ate, which is the dizziness of hybris. Hence, while in comedy anagnorisis is social and objective, in tragedy it’s inward and spiritual, self-discovery. Hence again, to recognize the greater power of the gods is also to surpass them (at least as presented in the Iliad) in wisdom & detachment. Again the Son is the Logos: the hero, who is usually a son of the gods, may through self-knowledge attain a profounder knowledge of the gods than the gods apparently have of themselves. [262] All beautiful people in Homer are doomed Adonises: the crushing out of beauty is a constant theme. They’re all allotropic forms of Paris, who started it all. (Paris, like Eros, is an archer, and heroes feel that archers aren’t quite playing the heroic game.) The shield of Achilles, by the way, is the Iliad’s point of epiphany. [263] Paleolithic cave-drawings are explained as planting the embryos of animals & plants in the womb of Mother Earth. That makes society her impregnator, when the role of the male in conception is understood. But the Mediterranean cult of the mother is recurrently that of a virgin mother, not only because virginity is thought to be cyclically renewable, but because her male attendant is a shadowy & obsequious youth. Blake

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was right in seeing in the Court of Love a recrudescence of the old goddess-with-devoted-youth archetype.263 [264] The interlocking social contract of society & nature is a tragic prison, made infinite when the gods are added to it. In the Odyssey only traitors are cruelly punished; in the Inferno the traitors, those who refuse to play the interlocking game, are at the bottom. They’re the ultimate insecurity of tyranny & of the dialectical half-truths of partisan loyalty on which heroism is founded. No god in Homer is what we should call divine in nature: hence either Homer is a superstitious barbarian compared to us or he’s presenting the tragic vision of life. Wherever there’s this tragic vision there’s the sense of God as Zeus, as a tyrannos who is either a usurper or one who has to maintain his power. Cf. the reference to the Titans at the end of the Inferno [canto 34, ll. 30–6], & the uneasy vigilance (“smiling”) of God in Paradise Lost [bk. 5, l. 18]. In the comic vision God is a Kronos or ruler of a Golden Age. Hence the vice-god (Krishna in Mahabharata). [265] When allegory breaks down the logic of narrative gives way, as when in F.Q. Hope, lecturing to St. George, lugs an anchor into the classroom & teaches him to grab it, like an inferior English teacher [The Faerie Queene, I.x.22. One could gather even more grotesque examples from Bunyan, especially P.P. [The Pilgrim’s Progress] 2. When irony breaks down we get the nudge. Nudging is common in religious poetry. When Satan (4) & Adam (10) are allegedly “forced” to exonerate God for their woes in P.L. [Paradise Lost], Milton is nudging the reader: manipulating the argument instead of letting the irony work itself out. Browning nudges unmercifully in Epistle, Cleon & elsewhere. Eliot is usually more clever, as befits his ironic genre, except in The Rock, which is all nudge. Auden in Herod’s speech.264 [266] The Seven Steps of Analogy: 1. Identification with. In mythology most familiar in equations of the Hermes-Mercury type, or those of all synchretistic movements. In fiction common in recognition scenes at the end of romance, when the returning hero is an earlier character. This is the top or epiphanic step, the casting off disguise. 2. Apotheosis, identification as becoming or the end of a process. Strictly the undisplaced comic ending, but also found in all stories of telos, bio-

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graphical & quasi-auto-biographical accounts of young men who attain a certain level above where they started. 3. Parallelism or running analogy: the principle of allegory & of such things as the “tanist” or double, & of contrapuntal plots like the Gloucester-Lear one. The significantly associated object is the typical image. Types like the Classical-Biblical parallels in Milton belong here (Deucalion-Noah, etc.) 4. Manifestation, incarnation, or disguised form of, as the tragic hero of Dionysus. Typical image the emblem. Also O.T. prototype, as Samson of Christ. 5. Parody or contrasting likeness, such as we get in “demonic modulation” or any modification of it, as in the Hephaestus-Mammon parallel in P.L. 1 [bk. 1, ll. 678–92]. Also in heroi-comical situations of the quixotic type, or as in The Rape of the Lock. 6. Differentiation or negative identification: dialectical separating from an original confusion: the theological, or man is not God, archetype. Also the pharmakos type of random selection. Image of the “bounding outline,”265 & of departments: Venus in the Iliad is not a war-goddess. 7. Identifications as: the positive aspect of the former, as when we praise a fiction-writer by saying that none of his characters could be mistaken for another. Image of the entity, “inscape.”266 These seven go round in a circle as the inscape becomes the epiphany. [267] If we ask why the last line of the Iliad267 is so deeply impressive, one reason is that it’s just pure convention. Here there’s a close analogy to music, where the end of the greatest composition may be simply a perfect cadence. [268] The sky as an archetype, & the sky god, is apparently much more primitive than used to be thought, though usually the sky god is a dieu fainéant. The sky as a resonator or catcher of echoes (or prayers) is the origin of the ironic archetype of the House of Fame. [269] In my teaching of “The Uses of Myth” certain arrangements have emerged that may be useful. At Columbia I started with the apocalyptic & demonic worlds & the cyclical world between them,268 finding quite a bit to say about the locus amoenus, as innocent, childlike, idealized past & future, top half of the Eros-Adonis cycle (in Spenser’s GA [Gardens of

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Adonis] there’s a suggestion that it’s the beginning of the downward Adonis movement and the end of the upward Eros one), unborn (as in the Book of Thel), temporary (Eliot’s rose-garden) [East Coker, pt. 1], mental or imaginative (Marvell’s withdrawing mind) [The Garden, st. 6] & the walled-up garden of ancestral memory (Auden).269 [270] One simple point that cleared up was that, just as a p of e [point of epiphany] is the place where one looks up to apocalypse or down to the cycle, so the p of d e [point of demonic epiphany] is a place where one looks down to the demonic or up to the ascending cycle, as in Aeneid VI, which is why it’s prophetic and solstitial. There’s no difficulty about finding the G of A [Gardens of Adonis] here, as in Endymion, as the place of buried seed, or of Blake’s little girl lost, any more than about finding Pyramus & his mulberry in Dante. Incidentally, Yeats’s Vacillation works out beautifully as a dialogue of soul (blazing apocalyptic tree, staring fury like the staring virgin [Two Songs from a Play, l. 1], incorruptible St. Teresa) & self or heart (lush green cycle tree, decaying lion producing the “honey of generation” [Among School Children, st. 5, l. 2], a phrase from Porphyry’s commentary). [271] The ironic or Barleycorn white-goddess cycle270 is polarized against a romantic black-bride one. Tennyson’s Hesperides belongs to the former & Dylan Thomas’s long-legged bait (cf. Wallace Stevens’ paltry nude) to the latter.271 [272] In Milton there are two archetypal shapes. One is the Incarnation, a principle of order & quiet descending, like a bubble going impossibly down in water, through the tumult of chaos. It’s the whole world of reality, yet it’s hard to find, everywhere we look being Satan & chaos. In the Nativity Ode & Comus this is the central image. It’s linked with the hierarchy of music symbol. Harmony of spheres, expressing unchanging being of God, is at the top (Solemn Musick) [At a Solemn Music], Il Penseroso hymns, NO [Nativity Ode, or On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity] angels’ song). Below is the mazy running of the madrigal in L’Allegro & Ad Patrem; below that again the erotic dancing energy of nature in In Adventum Veris [Elegy 5] & the end of ED [Epitaphium Damonis]. With the rout that made the hideous roar & Comus’ revels we’re getting down to the level of sin, & so on to the Dorian mood.

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[273] 1. divine order—Holy Spirit—Urania > harmony of spheres; angels song in NO [Nativity Ode, or On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity] 2. unfallen human order—Good Genius > voice & verse; true Apollonian of Il P [Il Penseroso] anthems a) wanton head of L’Allegro madrigal, or 3. physical order—natural inspiration > vernal frenzy; true Dionysiac 4. chaos & disorder—superstition > rout of Comus & Lycidas; perverted Dionysiac 5. perverted order of sin—oracle > Dorian music of hell; perverted Apollonian [274]

Proper order 1. Divine world 2. Innocent-unfallen < > educated human world 3. Physical world 4. World of sin

Fallen order 1. Tyrant (passion & will) 2. Priest & false prophet 3. Reason & nature 4. Apostle & prophet

[275] The other archetypal shape is that of the Gunpowder Plot, the rebellious explosion, Satan as Promethean inventor of gunpowder. Note that In Quintum Novembris is earlier than Phineas Fletcher.272 It makes a lot of noise, which is why it’s attracted more attention. Blake’s critique is of course a Romantic comment on God as the guarantor of the stars in their courses. [276] The four classical levels got into the course a great deal, & Lycidas, apart from the elaborate cyclical symbolism I always get out of it, also disgorged another point: Divine order Innocent order Physical order Demonic order

Lycidas in heaven Lycidas as Genius

cf. Lady’s chastity cf. Genius of the GA [Gardens of Adonis] {absent friend & empty bier} {absent brothers} Rotting drowned body in ocean Comus & his rout.

[277] The four romantic levels are these: Demonic spaces (Nobodaddy, Jupiter, immanent Will, etc.) World of articulation (natura naturata) World of creative energy (natura naturans)273 Morally ambivalent & potentially demonic source of energy.

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[278] Thus the core of one set is the cycle with Faerie on top & the ordinary world underneath. Of the other it’s the bateau ivre world with intelligence on top & will under it. Query: do I need another semi-polemical introduction? Some fallacies in the archetypal approach beside the historical one: the counting one (if there are a lot of archetypes it’s a good poem), the spotting one, & others. [279] Recasting of [Liberal] in six parts: Alpha, C major: Mythical narrative in a) the Bible b) in general, or what I used to call the Druidic analogy. The undisplaced total myth from creation to apocalypse: perhaps too the agon-pathos-sparagmos-anagnorisis sequence. Beta, A minor: Naive romance. Folktales of the Two Brothers type; Jason-Heracles-Perseus-Theseus quests; the Orc cycle; white goddess & black bride; Eros & Adonis; Grail & other romance quests; St. George & the dragon. The six phases of romance belong here: perhaps they’re a displacement of the sequence above. Gamma, G major: Epic (romantic & mimetic encyclopaedic forms). Homer, Virgil & Milton expanded to Dante & Spenser. The Greek & Christian topocosms; the in medias res device; the principle that sophistication reveals instead of concealing the archetype. Delta, E minor: Sentimental romance, the core of what I always thought of as a (or the) [Rencontre] theme. Goethe & Victor Hugo; Scott, Hawthorne & Melville; minor figures like Morris, Macdonald & perhaps Tolkien; my Surtees idea;274 ghost stories; the difference (if not earlier) between allegory & archetypal-framework. Epsilon, D major: Mimetic fiction. Not an exhaustive study, but concerned with principles of displacement. My notes on Great Expectations (there’d be a fair amount of Dickens in this chapter) and The Egotist would go here. Zeta, B minor: Ironic myth. Chiefly Proust & Joyce, returning by way of FW [Finnegans Wake] to the opening theme. Conrad, Virginia Woolf, & others. This is, of course, the book that’s been smack in front of me for about fifteen years. Awfully penetrating of me to see it. I also have an outline of the new [Tragicomedy] in that notebook,275 & the obvious thing to do is to try to crack the first chapters of the two books together, as they’re so intimately related. If the relation is there that I think may be there things will be pretty simple, but I can hardly expect that. I don’t know how much of the anatomy tradition Z [Zeta] should take in—it’ll have to take

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in some, & the six phases of romance and irony have to go into this book, so that [Tragicomedy] can be reserved for tragedy & comedy. Not impossibly A [Alpha] and E [Epsilon] above will be reversed in order, of course Spenser, even Dante, might be transferred to B [Beta] as a kind of formal cause of naive romance. That would distribute my interests more evenly.

Notebook 37

Internal evidence suggests that Frye began writing in this notebook in 1949, put it aside, and then picked it up again in the mid-1950s. In paragraph 5 he refers to his recent paper on church and society, which was published in 1949. In paragraph 7 he writes, “If I get the Guggenheim . . . .” He received the Guggenheim in 1950. Paragraph 49 appears to contain a reference to his 1954 lectures at Princeton, and the reference to “AC” in paragraph 52 puts the date of that entry sometime after October 1955, when NF had not yet decided on Anatomy of Criticism as a title. The notebook is in the NFF, 1991, box 26. It has “Records” printed on its green and black cloth cover, and it measures 19.7 x 12.5 cm. Frye numbered the first fifteen pages (through paragraph 30). The notebooks also contains drafts of several of Frye’s essays and lectures, and of his book on Eliot, none of which is included here.

[1] I think of this notebook as concerned largely with “Second Essay” material. At the moment I haven’t much idea what the Second Essay will be like beyond a general ambition to make it literally as profound as hell. I suppose it’s the crystallization of my “Deuteronomy” scheme of 1944.1 But the First Essay deals fully with the four levels of meaning and the verbal universe, then proceeds to examine the structure & outlines of that universe as they appear in scripture, epic (which, in the ’   5 [ta epe, “poems to be recited”] sense, includes most of Western “lyric”), drama and the four (or five) forms of prose fiction.2 I thought I could stop roughly where prose fiction, in its “quintessential” form, begins to back into Scripture through a satiric & Varronian encyclopaedia. My Renaissance trilogy on Spenser-Milton (instead of Dante) Shakespeare & Rabelais merely documents the First Essay.

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[2] The general shape of the Second Essay seems to be an elaboration of the four parts of functional analysis: in other words an investigation of philosophy from a hypothetical point of view (ambiguity), of history (agon of word and nature-reason), of language itself (if not included in philosophy), of the relation of literature to other arts (i.e. of the one universe) and of transcending the one universe. [3] First of all, I should begin where the First Essay leaves off; with a further & more searching investigation of the conception of prose fiction. This would examine the dialogue, essay, treatise & thesis forms of metaphysical presentation, & would treat the recurring attempts to isolate the propositional rhythm in the scholastic thesis, the Baconian aphorism, Spinoza’s mathematical form, Wittgenstein, etc., as rhetorical devices. Oriental developments, notably the Sutra & the Upanishad, belong here. Also the way that the rhetorical or hypothetical functional analysis of logic isolates the diagrammatic or figured basis of thought. My preacher with his four elements of chaos, & so on. Also the stuff I have on poetic etymology & the importance of the study of ambiguity in establishing the powers or functions of words and thus in developing a philosophical or synthetic philology in addition to the one we have now, which is purely historical.3 This would probably rehabilitate metaphysics & throw quite a different light on “tautology.” Plato’s Cratylus as indicating a new path.4 [4] As my approach to “philosophy” is so purely linguistic, I don’t see what a separate study of literature & language would reveal. The only thing I find in my notes is a note on the attempt of a new American language to burst out from under the dead weight of conservatism made by the organization of written language; and the social effects of this in producing a humanist élite instead of really indigenous speech. But the real follow-up of the Cratylus lead is in the direction of the Semitic sacred book. I suppose the Koran is just an interlocking set of triliteral roots, & even the Old Testament has a lot of that in it. This neo-cabbalism, as I call it somewhere, would require Greek & Hebrew: I don’t know any Arabic, & I’m damned if I’d learn any just to make this point. Anyway, it’s a follow-up of the vision of verbal ambiguity which FS ended with [FS, 428/414]. [5] Next comes a functional analysis of literature in relation to history. My ideas about this have been developing from the 4k course5 and I

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think I’d better record my 4k impressions as they come to me. My recent paper on “The Church & Society”6 represents a tentative crystallization of my views on the university, actual society, the form or idea of society, the myth of the state in the Republic, Ezekiel & the Utopian tradition, & my views about the relation of the individual to society & the analogy of the society of power to the society of love. The Marxist myth as a parody of the Christian no-room-in-the-inn one needs to be examined. The general idea is that there is such a thing as a total myth of the state. [6] Then I must try to relate literature to the other hypothetical disciplines in order to see just how many universes there are. In passing, I see dimly a “Third Essay” shaping up, in which the Literature & Thought study has become a straight view of the numerical universe of reason, with music its hypothesis; the Literature & Society one a view of the biologico-physical view of “nature,” with sculpture the hypothesis of biology or natura naturans & painting that of physics or natura naturata, both being contained in architecture, the real form of nature; and a farewell to poetry. Perhaps this is what my chapter, to get back to it, adumbrates.7 I guess here is the place where I study the musical & pictorial elements in poetry, compare the encyclopaedic forms of symphony, epic, mandala, & suggest something of the mystical use of the one Word (Cabbalism & the Clhandogya [Chandogya]),8 the one tone (harmony of the spheres) & the one outline (Giotto’s O).9 In India they’re all spherical (“Aum” is the circumferential noise the mouth makes),10 & the one number in mathematics would be zero. So sculpture would be a ball, with echo answering balls. The farewell to poetry, if I did it, would be a definitive study of the myth in which all religions are one. This delimiting of horizons is tiresome, but I suppose helps to define the landscape between. [7] I don’t know how far the second essay involves an examination of the implications of “nature” & the biological slant of Aristotle. I think of it as post- [Anticlimax], and as embracing the essential theses of [Mirage], [Paradox] and [Ignoramus]. has always been a semantic & ambiguous book, a comparative social one with a crowded canvas, & something artificial & awful. also incorporates a lot of the Deuteronomy scheme. So I’m not really straying so far from the left armpit.11 Now [Rencontre] falls spang in the middle, & may handle the whole organic-nature business, via Goethe. Maybe the Blake, in its relation to

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the left armpit, is actually the first part of : the doctrine in its larger historical setting, as it were. Certainly I’ve always thought of as the second part of the Blake. So just as the Blake pulled the First Essay loose with it & supplied thereby a directive for [Liberal], [Tragicomedy] & , so the rest of it should pull loose the Second Essay & the corresponding directions for , & . The Spenserian pattern is still there. I’m not teasing for symmetry: I just want to get things clear. And this, I think, does make Part II clearer than it’s ever been before. I could almost write down the whole job on the back of an exam time-table. Meanwhile, I note that my 4k notes are heading for , which is about where they should be, & may imply a historical progression to Part II. If I get the Guggenheim, I should do the First Essay & is it, blocking out for a possible renewal. I think of—oh, shut up. [8] Nothing new has emerged from the Mill except that majority rule & minority right are the real conservative & the real liberal elements. But as the liberal element here is only a saving remnant, this has to be projected somehow on a political ramp that gives the “liberal” projection some voting power. A plurality of votes for the educated is a scheme sufficiently desperate to show how impossible it is to get the saving remnant anything more than just tolerated autonomy. But I’m a little clearer on what the trouble with Burke is: he presents the theoretical facade of society, but leaves no room for an essential democratic principle: openness, the doctrine that all secret power is suspicious & sinister. The function of a nominalistic iconoclastic mind, like Paine’s, is to exhibit the disharmony between form & modus operandi. When it starts on the form itself it goes wrong. Mill, who makes the nominalist mind the liberal one, almost admits this in his essay on Bentham. I suppose the Thomist mind is as wrong in application to experience as Plato’s Republic is when conceived as an existential ideal. [9] Carlyle is coming clearer: for him conservatism & liberalism are property & work, the passive & active expressions of the integration of the individual with the community. His doctrine of work is intensely Marxist, & so is his emphasis on the priority of instruments of production, of man as a tool-using animal. But his doctrine of property as the Aristotelian (& modern Catholic) propria, the things which at once complete a man’s individuality & unite him to the community, isn’t Marxist, I suppose. The names for the different branches of communism, includ-

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ing Marxism itself, Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Titoism, show how deeply the cult of the leader has permeated Communism in practice. I suppose one could counter with remarks about the Lutheran & Calvinist churches, but they belong to the age of the Renaissance prince. But the Communist leader seems to be a philosopher-ruler, the incarnation of a dialectic, whereas the Fascist leader is rather a historical ruler, the incarnation of an event or Zeitgeist. I note that the historical wing of the second level culminates in Spengler. [10] It may be just the influence of the Tao Te King12 I’ve been reading, but it seems to me that slackness, laissez faire in a general sense, expediency & pragmatism, in short wu wei, is the hallmark of political action.13 Action according to principles, dialectic movement, seems to me necessarily religious in nature and perhaps ecclesiastical in direction. Dialectic political action, political action according to principles rather than opinions, seems to me to lead to stagnation & tyranny; & such action is therefore successful in proportion to its malignancy & destructiveness. Ezekiel, Confucius, Justinian & Manu14 are the other side of the case; or, if not Ezekiel, at any rate Moses. It seems to me too that in modern times the exponent of dialectic political action is Hegel, who achieves his aim by turning ideas into half-ideas in order to sharpen their cutting edge. The obligation to identify oneself with one part of an antithesis is the mark of the beast, the cause of all wars, the death-principle at the heart of all revolutions. [11] I have occasionally felt that there was no such subject as comparative religion, as I’m not sure just what gets compared. But such a subject, if I worked it out & clarified my ideas about it, would presumably be the theme of [Paradox], or [Ignoramus], either of which might be studies in comparative religion. The previous note indicates the direction of assimilating my views about society with a study of the archetypes of history. I think comparative religion would have to start with an isolation of the essential elements in religion, & with a relating of the different levels to different phases of history. Maybe we start, as in Cassirer, following Usener,15 with the occasional epiphanic god, which is individual. Then we get the local god, corresponding to the tribe, & so to the occult element in religion, the one surviving in ghosts, fairies, gnomes, elves, the powers in Paracelsus, devils & demons, the world of magic & spiritualism, of divination & astrology, of automatic writing, poltergeists &

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controls. Totemism is I think the progressive principle of this stage, as it has the social element. The beginnings of rituals & imitative dances belong here too. I don’t want to dismiss the “mezzanine” world of Yeats & Blavatsky as purely unreal:16 some such theory as Bardo might make sense of it, as I’ve always thought.17 [12] Next would come the departmental gods, & finally the pantheon, the age of prophet & oracle followed by that of temple & priest, & marking the growth of society from tribe to nation with an organized ruling class. The first intuitions of monotheism come with the “idea of the holy”18 & magical conceptions of mana & orenda. They’re taboo as the other is totem. The most amiable forms surviving today are the “Renaissance of Wonder”19 romantic emphases on awe & mystery, & uppermiddle class bromides of cosmic consciousness, getting in tune with the infinite & thinking beautiful thoughts. How far real mysticism, Plotinus & Eckhart & Laotse, belong here I don’t know. I’ve always had a hunch that in mysticism there is a recurrent tendency to go directly from the Spirit to the Father & dodge the Logos. Now the Logos, the Word which is the archetype of history & the real or total form of society, is surely the theme of [Paradox], as [Mirage] deals with the Spirit of reason & [Ignoramus] with the mystery of the event of the Father, as their names imply. So mysticism that dodges the Logos is at the point where and join in it. [13] This takes the religious consciousness through nature to a God who combines nature’s power & man’s morals. As no such God exists, He must be only the shadow of human society. Hence the next stage in religion is the life according to law: Egypt, the Jews, Rome & the element of Roman law in Xy [Christianity], Greek conceptions of  j [dike, “justice”] & ! T [arete, “excellence”], Confucian ideas of justice & courtesy (humanity), Plato’s Laws & the Hindu caste system & all the rest of it. The Communist collapse from Marxism, originally an accurate analysis of the fallacy of this stage of religion, into state-worship goes here too, along with Marx’s own analysis of capitalist market-worship (the true Mammon, I suppose). The assimilation of ritual & ceremony to law, so marked in Confucianism, goes here: so do the religions which, like Mohammedism, are essentially responses of ritual to the ghost of the Father. Aristocratic & other techniques: yoga, jiu-jitsu, Castiglione’s cortesia & monastic disciplines, belong perhaps, except for the last, to a pan-

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theon stage—not yoga, though: that can be pure monotheism. This stage ends in the divine Caesar, the incarnation of an event (Nazi leader & Roman general) who becomes the incarnation of a dialectic (Communist leader & Julian the Apostate). [14] This is of course Antichrist, but still it’s the first real effort to come to grips with the Logos. We transcend the divine Caesar (who represents the social birth of a sense of world-empire) by first intensifying our conception of society. This gives us the Church, the monastery, the university, the symposium & finally the one mind who knows, the container of all science, by which we go to the spiritual world of one form which is the true Logos. If this is what [Paradox] is, I could write it now in my sleep: but it’s always been a clear book, in distinction to [Mirage] & [Ignoramus]. I have to draw this all together with my improvement on Spengler: the fact of cultural growths qualified by the transmission in linear time from Classical present-moment to Faustian total world-view by the way of “Magian” cavern which is the womb of the one & the tomb of the other. [15] Something like this table might work out: Typical Individual Role

God

Social Organization

epiphanic, ecstatic, oracular ceremonious, ritualistic achieving communion in sacrifice evangelical & prophetic mandarin-military monastic intellectual

local departmental pantheon one God law Church symposium

tribal 1 national 2 aristocratic 3 imperial 4 world-state 5 expanding church 6 expanding science 7

(cycle starts here) citizen

Logos

kingdom of ends 8

[16] [Paradox] is the book of the Logos; [Mirage] is the book of the Spirit, the study of the different languages of the universe, with some attempt to compare & classify them. That has always been my “Deuteronomy” idea. The language of words, of which conceptual thought, as generally understood, is a minor by-product, forms a correspondingly

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minor part of the book. is thus intensely introverted, & is the extroverted projection of the same thing. That leaves [Ignoramus] as the book of the Father, centred on the “mystical” theme of transcendence. After all, a good deal of the point about the verbal nature of verbal thought will be covered in [Anticlimax]. Well, I don’t know what will actually cover, except that it may explore the conception of “nature,” the one event, a bit farther than history goes. [17] A series of “Studies in Victorian Thought” has been on my mind, and might be something to work on at odd moments. I think of it as a series of five, starting with, perhaps, Mill. If Mill, it would have to include a prefatory study of Burke, perhaps expanding into a general view of his Bentham-Coleridge antithesis. Otherwise I’d have to begin with someone earlier & change the title. The last two would be on Morris & Butler, perhaps in that order, as I’ve generally thought, not impossibly in the reverse order. They would sum up the Marxist & Darwinian, revolutionary & evolutionary, aspects of English thought. The middle two are more of a problem, though the third should certainly be Ruskin, I think. That leaves Newman, Carlyle & Arnold as possible candidates for the second. Temperamentally, I’d prefer Kingsley to any one of them. But of course Newman brings up all kinds of points, though I’d hesitate to risk the balance of tone by writing on someone I fundamentally reject. Carlyle is a bit cruder, & perhaps what I could find to say about him could be included in the Ruskin essay. [18] Of course there doesn’t have to be five: I could do a series called “Makers of Myth” on Ruskin, Morris & perhaps Butler, & work up my Yeats essay for it.20 Or even reprint my prose fiction article21 & follow it with four studies: one on a novelist (God knows who), one on a romancer (Morris) one on an anatomist (Butler) & one that leads up to a confession form (Newman). Anyway Morris turns up in them all, and I must go back to my notes on him.22 [19] The immediate job, however, is to crack open the conspectus of archetypes, which embraces at present the following divisions: 0. Theory of verbal universe. (No notes needed here). 1. Analysis of myth. Druidic encyclopaedia 2. Analysis of folktale & romance. 3. Analysis of scripture.

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4. Analysis of epic: iii) down to the Renaissance iii) Spenser iii) Milton Nos. 0 and a good bit of 1 belong in ch. 3; 1 and 2 are the first part of 4 and crack open 7 (also the archetype parts of 6 & 8); 3 is the last part of 4, and 4 is 5. 5ii and 5iii are for the most part separate articles.23 [20] The myth is a significant verbal form. Just what its centrifugal significance is in itself can seldom be determined: the attempts to determine it constitute the various theories of myth (natural processes, allegories, etc.), all of which are fallacies. The real meaning of a myth is its literary & other verbal potential, its importance as a hypothesis. The important thing for us is the later literary fortunes of a myth. [21] One thing that happens is moral censorship, or, as Victorian critics like Andrew Lang used to say, the puerile, gross or foul primitive myths become refined & purified, made loftier in sentiment.24 This corresponds roughly to judging the bisons of Altamira by the canons of Landseer:25 however, moral “purification” is certainly one factor in the dialectic. It tends to lessen the irrational element & so move it nearer the tragic vision of law & the human (Marxist) goal of the communal vision. [22] Euhemerus’ work is a romance describing a journey to a fabulous island, where he learned his humanistic secret of godhead.26 The parallel with Morris’s Earthly Paradise is extraordinarily close & suggestive. My own view is not that gods were men, but that the development of culture humanizes them. [23] Lang’s book explains on Darwinian lines a process that I should explain as a growing cultural dialectic. Nor should I start from the anachronistic aesthetic premise he does & show how the “irrational” or “lower” myth evolves into the “higher” one.27 Also, I have no theories about the “mental condition” of the savage, but simply accept myths as artefacts, as I should a cave drawing or an Eskimo carving. i, 21628 [24] The passing from dialectic to myth is the passing from idea to image, centrifugal to centripetal emphasis, which gives us the key to the real way to approach the myth.

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[25] The frog (Huron) or toad (Andaman Is.) or serpent (Vritra in India) or spirit of chaos (Tiamat) who holds all the world’s water & is made to laugh (that frog) or is killed (by Indra or Marduk) or otherwise made to disgorge it29 has links with the sacred cattle (Cacus & Geryon stories) who are regularly cloud-myths. The link of rain & the spilling of blood I have. All such monsters (the treasure-guarding dragon is a modulation) are C.C. [Covering Cherub] forms, & hence Tharmatic.30 Their slayer is often a Tharmas too (e.g. Indra): a boastful storm god.31 Note how satire recreates the “puerile” formulas Lang deplores, in the drinking of Gargantua & the pissing of Gulliver. [26] Note the importance of the communal meal in the underworld (Proserpine’s pomegranate) as a symbol of community. [27] Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary, suggested that such animals as the Chimera might be derived from a reminiscence of a league of tribes with different totems.32 I believe the Four Zoas have been interpreted also as the insignia of four of the tribes. [28] Creation myths, flood myths & metamorphosis myths seem to be fundamental. The last is a myth of process: it shows how a thing came to be as it was, so that creation myths are process myths generalized. All etiological tales are metamorphoses. [29] When I was looking through Frobenius I found stories about arrows shot at the sun & the sun tamed (forced to move predictably) by being tied with ropes (Lang, ch. v).33 Everything from Samson to Gulliver is linked with that. [30] Note that the metamorphosis myth is regularly an Albion myth, tracing the descent of a “thing” from a “person.” Evidently Macrobius, i, xx, is an Albion source. Jesus healing the blind man with clay spittle [John 9:6–7] is the N.T. equivalent of the creation of Adam. Note for the intervening stage, men as trees walking [Mark 8:24], Pindar’s treatment of a Physician legend. The creator as an animal (C.C. [Covering Cherub] reminiscence) is common: a boar in Aryan myth. Zulus say men were belched out of a cow, like Jonah, or split out of a stone, as in Ovid.34 There are also myths about fishing land out of water at creation in N.A. [North America].35 The Gold Coast spider-creator36 also belongs to the

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Frobenius complex.37 The island creation story is Indian (Satapatha Brahmana) too.38 [31] Well, once again back to the Second Essay, which I have a much clearer view of now that I’ve united it & precipitated it again from the First. The Second Essay is an essay on the four levels of criticism, the outline of which I’ve already set forth in a paper.39 [32] The first level considers the work of art as a literal product, & is in two parts, depending on whether it’s conceived as in time or not. The two parts give us biographical & tropical criticism respectively. The former, which has its centre of gravity in the Romantic movement, deals with questions of greatness & personal authority, of the creative process as leading up to an aesthetic movement or act in time; of the rhythm of the event as an aspect of art (the so-called heroic or historical aspect); of the “spectroscopic band” of each poet’s symbolism; of the act of will to renounce the will which is connected with Milton’s temptation theme & the Blake conception of Los taking over the S of U [Spectre of Urthona]. Of the Yeats “mask” doctrine. Of the latent epic or “emanation” in each man’s work (discovered through the spectroscopic band). Of many other things I dunno much about. [33] Tropical criticism, as far as I see now, is just a matter of going after the structure of imagery in the poem. Here, however, is where I attack the comparative value-judgement, & show that the desire to rank is motivated by extra-literary considerations. This, of course, is part of the whole literalistic Mallarmé fallacy of thinking that the poem symbolizes a mystery & not its own relation to verbal universe, an attitude bound to lead to external motivations. My criticism of the futility of un-functional structural criticism, or rhetoric without poetics, goes here too. Also, I think this may be the place for my babble & diagram material: though surely some of this has to go into the First. [34] On the second level biographical criticism expands into historical criticism. Here the basis is Spengler & the conception, first, of cultural category (baroque & such terms) and, second, of cultural age, the romantic (especially Ruskin) & Gibbonian variants of this conception. I have most of my ideas here, I think.

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[35] Similarly tropical criticism expands into dialectic criticism, the contemporary & moral complement of historical criticism. The moral or liberal view that takes all art as potentially & immediately useful is this, in contrast to the valueless conservative view that takes all art as data: this is Mill’s intuition, of course. The basis of dialectic criticism appears to be a quasi-Marxist conception of a total, free & classless society. I have a lot of stuff here. [36] Historical criticism expands to anthropological criticism, which has something to do, I think, with a recurrent cycle of genres. It’s based on the Frazer archetype & is an outgrowth of the Spengler idea, but beyond that I’m not certain how to take it from there. The other half of it, a study of archetypal or deep-psychological criticism, connected with Jung, is a little clearer. Anyway, the whole third level shows the ritual-oracle dichotomy very clearly. [37] The fourth level (the Second Essay apparently has seven chapters) is pure anagogy, & deals, not with the hero-god or gigantic-titanic human level, which is third, but with art polarized vertically (the other three are horizontal polarizations) between the two communities, the human one & the real eternal presence. [38] This makes, of course, the middle chapter, on dialectic criticism, the key one, because it defines one community & so adumbrates the other. Here I shall draw heavily on 4k,40 which means a 19th c. basis. I am not aware that the 20th c. has contributed much of importance to the theory of the Second Essay, though it has done much work in documenting the theories by research & experiment. [39] Arnold’s conception of culture, & the general argument about spiritual authority, comes in ch. 4. I notice that Carlyle’s doctrine of the leader is unanswerable as long as one accepts the centripetal state as the final form of human community (it is explicitly repeated by Csm. [Communism] & implicitly by democracy). Carlyle is in the Renaissance prince-courtier tradition, which is a precipitate of the pyramidal structures of the feudal society & the papal church. He thinks pyramidally toward a central figure of general (as opposed to specific) responsibility.

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[40] The Second Essay is the sequel to the Essay on Poetics, continuing the themes of its 5, 6 & conclusion, & dealing mainly with the theory of the relation of literature to conceptual thought. It is, I hope, the last damn book I’ll have to write about an existential subject. [41] Dreams are the soul’s journeys through another world, but like the control & other messages that come through a medium they can only affect our minds in a form conditioned by our minds. I have a strong sense of a different world in my travel dreams, but the details are always reminiscent of the familiar, so far as I recognize or remember them. As in waking life, the mind shuts out or ignores what it can’t take in. [42] “Only connect”41 is the motto of an evangelical mind, whether religious or not. To be passionately interested in connecting shows intense earnestness. “Only disconnect” is the motto of the snobbish, yet connection applies to institutions, religion, law, art, government & education: disconnection applies to the personal life, as in Eliot. [43] Simile or content recognition is continuous; recognition of total shape (anagnorisis) is crucial. Parallel to my whole centrifugal & centripetal theory. [44] The pickup from 2 is that the primary forms are continuous without shape, like the primitive romance (my link?). Secondary ones are the generic ones; in the tertiary forms we see a paradoxical & discontinuous element appearing that indicates an entire reintegration of the literary universe around some other centre. [45] Do I need the table of analogies? A complete table, of course, goes from identity with through likeness to identity as. Something about the shape of the total universe the imgn. [imagination] tries to construct. Sunrise & sunset are just the beginning. Like the dream, it’s a different world, but the mind can’t assimilate anything not familiar. [46] The Utopia & other societies as informing archetypes. Epic, scripture, prose & Utopian forms. [47] Everything is everywhere at once, God damn it.

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[48] Literature and (upper) belief: Richards & meditation.42 Existential absorption of literature. a) Meaning as inside; belief as contained Apotheosis of consumer; critic as judge Personal possession; the dreamer in FW [Finnegans Wake] The cliché: Flaubert’s Dictionary of A.I.43 Homeric epithet & kenning; popular proverb. b) Text & objects of meditation; koan & mantra; Luther on Romans. (Eliot) allusiveness of poetry; Renaissance possession of Classics. ability to quote; versatility of quotation of e.g. [Carroll’s] Alice bits & pieces: discontinuity & paradox: personal recreation. euphuism as average man’s type of culture. reason for whole verbal scene: genres not inherently creative. Free society as criterion of morality. Levels: Jesus & Buddha who don’t write to the rabble-rouser. Physical communion in verse: mental in prose c) Epic & tragedy and encyclopaedic & informing utopia in prose Shared vision: Marxism, Xy [Christianity], etc. Scriptural, encyc. & epic forms (coming down) [49] Re the first lecture:44 sublime process as beautiful product (Longinus on sublime). Sublime includes self–identification (process). Interest in a convention (e.g. [?]) more congenial to the aesthetic, especially in paradoxical forms of it like T.E. Hulme’s. The rhetorical relation expects to instruct & delight. [50] Re. lit & belief: the poet is a craftsman, of no existential personal authority, or very limited: what one meditates on or believes in is the poem in the context of the order of words. [51] Make more of the simplicity point: it’s Longinus, Johnson on Cowley ([unshaken?] except for the application to Donne), Coleridge on fancy (example again is Cowley), Wordsworth, & Arnold in 1853. It means it isn’t a personal but an impersonal quality that we really respond to: pick up under belief in 3.

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[52] How much do you want, in the third lecture, of the imaginative universe? Is that the real theme of 3, & what you have here really 2, the rhythms essay being extruded? The order conspectus-universerhythms would have much logic, & would follow the 2–3–4 of the AC essays.

Notebook 38

This notebook is difficult to date with precision, but because Frye has the main contours of his theory of symbols fairly clearly worked out, the first part appears to date from about 1952 or 1953. But the final essay of the Anatomy that Frye had to work out—the theory of genres—gets fairly extended treatment toward the end of the notebook, and these sections were doubtless written later, perhaps in 1954 or 1955. In Notebook 35 Frye refers to material in the present notebook; at least parts of parts of the former, then, were written later. Several pages of the notebook, following paragraph 82, have been omitted, as they are cancelled drafts of the theory of genres. The notebook is in the NFF, 1991, box 26. It has “Records” printed on its green and black cloth cover, and it measures 19.7 x 12.5 cm.

[1] I think I have now the opening section, on levels of meaning, fairly straight. I know what meanings I attach to literal & descriptive meaning, & I know that the moral & anagogic levels are to be connected with the kinetic or functional & the static aspects respectively. I am not quite clear on just why the descriptive or allegorical level is intermediate between history & philosophy. I have the beginning of it: non-literary structures translate directly into experience: literary structures can only translate into non-literary but still verbal ones, in other words paraphrases. Also, of course, literature has both rhythm & pattern, & so must exist between time (history) and conceptual space (philosophy). But there’s more to it than that. [2] Anyway, the moral or threefold level begins as a structural & ends as a functional, almost an ecological, analysis. Structural analysis splits all

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verbal structures into narrative (rhythm)[,] style (recurrence, I think) and meaning (pattern). Narrative is defined as grammar, style as rhetoric, meaning as logic, leading to new definitions of prose fiction, poetry & didactic fiction or metaphysics. Evidently the Carnap attempt to isolate descriptive logic in philosophy distinct from metaphysics doesn’t work: anyway, if the last section of Wittgenstein means anything, it means that all philosophy disappears into the verbal universe.1 [3] The structural analysis of poetry & the two kinds of prose was the first part of this job to come reasonably clear, and I don’t think I need much more at this point. The general idea is that the question “is it good?” which is asked on this level, can’t be directly answered. Actually, I don’t see why the whole damned structural analysis couldn’t be shoved down entirely to the second level. Surely that’s where it belongs. The question “is it true?” can only be answered by structural analysis. I’ve been perhaps confused unnecessarily by Dante’s equating of moral & tropological. All Dante means is that the third level is synthetic & deals only with rhetorical or literary forms. [4] Anyway, there’s no question but that on the third level narrative, style & meaning expand into their essential historical, poetic & philosophical functions. Every work of art is at the axis of an individual & a conventional path. Hence historically the conventional context of a work of art is expressed by such words as “Baroque,” etc., & leads to a Spenglerian analysis. The personal context is expressed by such words as “bourgeois,” and leads to or incorporates a Marxist analysis. Poetically, the personal context leads to a psychoanalytic Freud or Jung analysis, & the conventional one to an anthropological or Frazerian investigation of the essential myths, Christian & the like, abroad in the writer’s day. It is very important to make the personal analyses relevant primarily to the work produced, not to the poet’s life, which is biography & not criticism. The compulsions on a poet are connected with getting the right things into the poem, not with getting the right things about himself expressed. Examples could come from, say, Handley Cross,2 or something equally unexpected. But nevertheless these compulsions come from insights below the threshold of consciousness. Example of the first two notes in the slow movement of Beethoven’s op. 106. The suggestiveness of the Marx & Freud approaches is in showing that certain features may be significant whether the author “knows” it or not.

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[5] With regard to the philosophical axis (examination in terms of “ideas”), the conventional locus is that of the consciously accepted & expressed patterns. The personal locus relates to semantics, which involves the whole question of “ambiguity,” or the conception of the word as a withdrawn reserved force of meaning rather than an extroverted or demonstrative single meaning. Bound up with this are several linguistic questions which have always interested me: for instance, the question of poetic etymology & the question of the diagrammatic basis of thought. [6] Yes, I think the second-level question is really not “is it true?” but “what does it mean?” a question to be answered only in terms of its integrity: i.e., the question modulates to “how does it hang together?” It’s only in the realm of hypothesis that the untrue statement has meaning. You first understand the verbal structure, then you discover it isn’t factual but hypothetical. Only in the case of allegory does centrifugal meaning appear. This doesn’t mean that non-literary verbal structures are allegories, but that certain centrifugally focussed literary ones translate into non-literary ones, & that process of translation is allegorical. In actual practice however “allegory” generally means translating poetic or rhetorical structures into philosophical or logical ones. Not always, though: Spenser keeps the Sidneian pattern. Maybe I should just say that for the poet the image or form combines the idea and the event. [7] So the question “is it true?” modulates into “what is it?” The moral question, “is it good?” modulates into “what does it do?” & involves a functional analysis. And just as the criterion of truth turns out to be integrity, so the criterion of goodness turns out to be emancipation or liberation. Ultimately, what it emancipates us from is ordinary experience, by introducing us to the golden world, which is the verbal universe.3 This is not escape, for the verbal universe does not avoid but swallows the world of experience. It is, rather, expansion of vision, a comprehension of experience. [8] So far I seem to have two parts, one a synopsis or conspectus of literary criticism and the other an analysis of essential structures. The latter, being epic, scripture, drama & prose, seems to me a bit haphazard. I need lyric.

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[9] One thing which seems to me to be certainly true: apart from the special case of allegory, it is also true that, on the allegorical level, every literary structure is itself an allegory. That is, the image synthesizes the event and the idea, & hence every literary work is an allegory of certain events and certain ideas. We answer the question “is it true?” not by relating the literary structure (oh hell, say poem)—not by relating the poem to non-literary verbal structures, but by relating the latter to it. This is where all the “background” stuff comes in. As an allegory of history, it’s on the locus of the conventional (Spenglerian) & the personal (Marxist) approaches; as an allegory of philosophy, it’s similarly on the locus of a history of ideas & a semantic approach. But this is second-level stuff. No: I was right the first time: the synthetic or structural analysis is the third level. Functional analysis belongs to anagnorisis alone. In the structural analysis, the “actual” events & ideas disappear, & we have the hypothetical events, or narrative, & the hypothetical ideas, or postulated meaning. Both are to be interpreted from a structural analysis of recurrence. What bothers me is the possibility of seeing a middle term on the second level, the poem as an allegory of poetry, which again is on an axis between literary convention & biography, the latter being really psychoanalytic biography. But while I can get from an actual to a hypothetical level, I don’t know how to get from an actual to a hypothetical image. I’m suffering from schematosis. [10] The thing that makes the second level so pallid is the fact that poetry is in the process of selling out to its neighbors. After we reach the anagogic level, poetry begins to think of adding the rest of the verbal universe to its domain. 17th c. prose produced no fiction, because prose writers were too busy conquering the rest of the verbal universe. Similarly history is at its strongest when it has conquered poetry & philosophy, as in Spengler, philosophy when it has conquered poetry & history, as in Plato & in Marx. [11] So on the second level a poem is an allegory of events, or an historical document; an allegory of poetry itself (i.e. within a convention or a tradition, which leads to source-hunting) and an allegory of philosophy, which leads to the “history of ideas” approach. This is conventional criticism, & is concerned entirely with “background,” with relating the poem centrifugally to other things. Note carefully that this so-called

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threefold approach is actually pervaded by the historical one. Why, I don’t at the moment know, except that it examines the poem as a dead thing in the past. All this is very necessary, but it lacks two things: interest & significance. [12] In reaction against this selling out of criticism to “background,” we get the E.K. Brown type of structural analysis.4 This retires from the centrifugal worlds & returns to integritas: it is, in fact, consonantia.5 But the structural analysis has to be completed by a functional analysis in order to establish the moral level. Now you can’t complete the second level without moving up to the third (find out what Korzybsky’s [Korzybski’s] horizontally-placed “structural differential” is all about)6 & you can’t complete the third level, the functional one, without moving into the fourth. [13] Anagogy begins with the postulate of the verbal universe & its corollary, the one word. Aristotle’s physics leads to the conception of one mover at the circumference of the world (i.e. the physical universe). This is an invariable dialectic. To make sense of the shape of any subject, you have to assume an omniscient mind. No one mind comprehends the whole of physics, but the subject wouldn’t hang together unless it were theoretically possible for one mind to comprehend it, all at once. And if there is such a thing as “the whole of” physics, the subject must have an objective unification at its circumference. This universal mind is not God, in any religious sense, for it does not necessarily exist: it is necessary only as a hypothesis completing a human mental structure. But the field is something different from the knower of the field: I haven’t got this clear. But the fact that the guarantor of all our knowledge is a universal mind, of which we can say only a) that we have no reason to suppose that it differs from other human minds except in the amount of knowledge it has, and b) that we have no reason to suppose that it “exists,” certainly makes a lot of sense of the Lankavatara Yogacara doctrine.7 Anyway, the point is that allegorized bodies of knowledge assume an objective single or total form. The musical universe leads to the one chord, the music of the spheres. The historical universe, or the universe of events, leads to the one event, or nature, that which is born, the one thing that is & has happened. The mathematical universe leads to the one number, or as we should say the one equation, which is what Pythagoreanism was all about. The philosophical universe leads to the

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Form of Forms, the One Idea. Similarly, literature, the verbal universe, leads to the One Word. I don’t know yet how many of these universes there are, or how few they can be reduced to. Thus biology leads to one organism. Blake’s Polypus, & Samuel Butler’s known God, the anima mundi who in Browne is the Holy Spirit,8 at the circumference of the biological universe. But that seems to disappear in the physical universe, where the one form is nature, the one organism plus the one environment. Also, where does the difference between the descriptive & the hypothetical disciplines come in? I’ve found only the word & the number. Nonsense: there’s a musical universe, & there should be a pictorial & a sculptural one & an architectural one, though the last three seem to disappear into the One Man who is one building. Certainly it’s important that all social & political questions disappear in the One Man. I suppose they all do. But that’s the knower of the field again. I suspect there are only two descriptive disciplines, the natural & the reasonable, history & philosophy, event & idea, physics & logic. But physics is made up of numbers & logic of words. It looks as though only the hypothetical disciplines put creative life into the descriptive, & so metaphysics is the only creative power in philosophy. I can see that when these links become clearer I’ll be well on my way to the symbolic structure chapter. Chemistry, the analysis of the mixture of elements, lead[s] to one element at the circumference of the universe, in other words quintessence. This, if we identify quintessence with the elixir, which shouldn’t be hard, was the point about alchemy. Many of these one-form structures are superstitions, i.e., premature, but the development of modern sciences is in the direction of their original vision. [14] Everything in reason leads to one knowing mind, & everything in nature to the content of that mind, which is eventually the same thing as its form, or rather, is the manifestation of that form, its epiphany. To say that all things are as they are perceived of Mind itself is not to assert the “existence” of that mind: the mind, being the source of all creative power, is hypothetical. Only the things it perceives “exist.” That’s why all effort to understand the hypothetical disciplines has to drive a wedge between the is & the is not.9 [15] I wonder if sculpture is the hypothesis of biology, the free creation of organic or living forms. I wonder if all the hypothetical disciplines can be related to descriptive ones. My general feeling would be that litera-

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ture is the hypothesis of the social sciences, mathematics of physics & astronomy, architecture of the mechanical sciences, painting perhaps of chemistry or geography—all this is too vague to be any use, but I like the sculpture-biology link. Sculpture does seem to be concerned with natura naturans, as painting with natura naturata, the spread-out world. [16] The verbal universe transcends history, & so it presents all writers as contemporaneous. It transcends philosophy, & so far as I can see at present it is only in the verbal universe that all religions are one. [17] If music leads to one chord, I suppose painting leads to one image. That one image would have to be the archetypal mandala: the spreadout vision of the world of apocalyptic form: a vision of the last judgement surrounding the God-Man in glory. I must read St. Thomas to find out how the hell one postulates a real universal. There seems to be a breakdown of analogy between the mandala, which is a real pictorial form, to painting what scripture is to the verbal universe (and epic to poetry proper?) and the “perfect Diapason”10 or harmony of the spheres, which is not a musical form.11 The musical analogy to the mandala would be the symphony in four movements with a choral Ode to Joy in the finale.12 There’s a difference between the mandala and Giotto’s O,13 between the symphony and the concord, between the Bible and YHWH or Om mani padme hum.14 That’s a point I should remember in connection with the Chlandogya [Chandogya] Upanishad:15 it’s a commentary on a Vedic encyclopedia that shows you that all words are one word, & so is to the Vedas what Cabbalism is to the Bible. According to a set of Chinese pictures Gordon Wood showed me, you have to go into Giotto’s O and out again.16 That’s the Fool, the card numbered zero.17 [18] I wish I hadn’t worked out my prose fiction paper18 on a Zoa diagram, because it confuses me now. Logically, novel & romance ought to be on the historical side of poetry, confession & anatomy of the philosophical side. But that doesn’t work because it doesn’t include als ob metaphysics proper.19 The difference between history & prose fiction is that the narrative of the latter is hypothetical rather than actual. I was hoping I could isolate in philosophy a form of prose fiction in which the dialectic is hypothetical (“metaphysics” proper?) as distinct from epistemology or logic of science, which I suppose are descriptive. That certainly isn’t the anatomy: but still the anatomy can be pro as well as anti-

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philosophical; and doesn’t it shade from satire to Platonic dialogue, from Platonic dialogue to Platonic monologue, and Platonic monologue (still dramatic) to the personal monologue? If so, a prose epic on the confession-anatomy synthesis line should emerge, as it perhaps does in the mystical autobiographies. Similarly a novel-romance one in Quixote: but no, I showed over & over that three & fourfold combinations were frequent. I must get at the prose epic some other way. It seems to me that any form approaches the Scriptural in proportion as it intensifies. Start with the novel, & when you get a good enough one, like Quixote, it swallows the other three forms, includes some poetry, & takes on the outlines of experienced innocence. Start with the lyric, & when you get to Lycidas you have a miniature epic. [19] I wish I had some rudimentary notion of how to go about classifying lyrics: even a fertilizing suggestion about it would be something. The numbers five & six seem to turn up: the Greeks had apparently five Muses (unless Urania, as Paradise Lost suggests, is actually epic, or part of epic [bk. 1, l. 6; bk. 7, ll. 1–4] {the form would be, as usual, historypoetry-philosophy > Clio-Calliope-Urania}) devoted to lyric, and, as it was sung, six modes. I must of course find out more about paean, dithyramb, ode, elegy, rhapsody, & other such terms in their Classical meaning. The love lay (Erato, Lydian mode) seems an isolatable tradition; so does the hymn of praise to god or hero (Polyhymnia, Doric); so does the elegy & Adonis lament (Aeolian, perhaps: I don’t know the Muse). A Terpischorean-rhapsodic or dithyrambic form, Cowley’s version of the Pindaric,20 is conceivable. But none of this carries much conviction to me as yet. The miniature epic, Lycidas, Coy Mistress, Song of the Cold,21 is another matter: so no doubt is my earlier distinction between the conventional lyric set to music & the autonomous lyric, the elegy or ode of which I proposed once to make an anthology. I need to learn more about lyric traditions: what the Rilke elegy, the Keats ode, the Rimbaud illumination, the “imagist” poem & others are all about. I’m leery of classifying, as opposed to clarifying a tradition, & of classifying by subject-matter, unless it conditions the form. Again, the Greek Muses & moods are forms of ’ B [ta mele, “poems to be sung”], whereas modern “autonomous” lyrics are ’   5 [ta epe, “poems to be recited”]. Hence they should be treated, like ballad fragments, as parts of a potential epic, and should be related to the stations of the epic: elegy as pathos, rhapsodic ode as agon or anagnorisis, paean as creation, love lay as

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hieros gamos [sacred marriage], & so on. The fragments of Wordsworth’s Prelude are the clearest examples in English of what in French is explicitly recognized to be the fragmentation of the epic. [20] I must early establish the point that the Cassirer school makes about the symbol:22 it’s a detachable fragment of an environment which is detached for the purpose of fitting into a mental pattern. The distinction between literal & descriptive meaning is thus the difference between the symbol as part of a mental pattern, in which Cassirer apparently finds the essentially human act, & the symbol as sign, which an animal can grasp. The breaking of the navel-string of the symbol is the act of consciousness, the power to construct hypothetically being involved in it.23 [21] I’m undecided whether to call it “An Essay on Critical Theory,” or “A First Essay on Critical Theory.” I think on the whole the former. Then follows the dedication, either “Helenae Uxori” or “Ad Helen am Uxorem”: the former if it’s possible Latin.24 Then the Preface, explaining how this book came to interpose itself between the Blake & a series of Renaissance studies. Then the Introduction, taking from my Quarterly article25 whatever seems to me to be genuinely introductory: pretty well the present article without the verbal universe point. Then four chapters on the four levels of meaning. The first one establishes the distinction between centripetal & centrifugal directions of meaning, the difference between sign & symbol, & the difference between hypothetical & descriptive verbal structures. Also the apprehension of integritas as the preliminary pre-critical act: its Gestalt links. The second (the fact that the poet lies has already been established) deals with conventional or “background” criticism which regards the work of art as a representative symbol of history, poetry & philosophy. Why it’s these categories, & why they’re all pervaded by the historical (genetic, natural or causal approach) I dunno. Maybe I just postpone it. Anyway, I establish, I think, the fact that the historical background is a Cartesian co-ordinate where a term of cultural age, such as Baroque, intersects a particular phase of class conflict. As an allegory of literature, it’s where a convention, with its sources and influences, intersects a life (hence it’s a psychological > mythical approach). The philosophical background is the intersection of an explicit (“history of ideas” approach) formulation of doctrines with a semantic ambiguity given them by the poetic treatment. It’s clear that we need the verbal universe if we’re to complete this process. The Spengler-

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Marx historical axis seems to me to be pretty deeply embedded in the historical universe anyway, & similarly with the philosophical, whereas the middle one obviously is the damn verbal universe, being the JungFrazer axis. I don’t know how deeply I need to go into that—deeply enough, though, to show the shallowness of most “background” criticism. The definitions of allegory & irony goes [go] in this level: the vogue of allegory can be proved superior to the vogue of “background” because it’s dynamic & extends outward from poetry, instead of vice versa. Apart from allegory, the uselessness of paraphrase is a point of some relevance. [22] It seems to me that the real allegorical philosophical axis is the conscious acceptance of certain ideas (conventional) plus a personal dialectic that crosses it at a certain angle. The question of ambiguity & diagram is third-level, and belongs to structural analysis. The third level, then, is the structural analysis of the hypothetical event, or narrative, & the hypothetical meaning, or ambiguity—not dialectic—that’s second-level, & sells out to actual philosophy. Both are explained in terms of the central rhetorical element, the figuration, which now becomes the organizing principle, though without prejudice to my pet scheme of dividing hypothetical verbal structures into narrative prose, poetry & didactic prose. [23] The principle behind structural analysis is recurrence. Recurrence in time produces repetition of symbols: recurrence in pattern, or meaning, produces ambiguity. Essay on Criticism uses “wit” in nine senses.26 Its meaning is thus functional. In structural analysis analogies & illustrations have “real” meaning. (All this is quite clear to me now: I know what the tropological level is, but I still don’t know why it’s moral or kinetic or answers the question “What does it do?”) Philosophy is apt, like 15th c. nominalism, to run aground on distinctions, unravelling the meanings latent in the powers of words. Poetry keeps on rebuilding the powers or functions of words in hypothetical structures. A disjunction of function is marked by a pun, but even a pun (as in Donne’s pun on his own name)27 may still express a power. This functional or connotative meaning of words is inseparable from the centripetal aspect of meaning. It’s familiar enough under the distinction of connotative & denotative meaning, & I need something more specific. My idea about diagrams looks more promising. Also there’s the possibility of developing further

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the grammatical analysis of ideas, such as has been begun with Aristotle’s subject & predicate, along the lines indicated in Plato’s Cratylus.28 I must dig up my notes on poetic etymology, which belong here.29 For one thing, all words seem to have different sets of weights according to what you’re looking for. As Vendryes says “it was a hot day because there was no cool air & no fresh breezes” is a cool sentence: only in a pure meaningpattern does the negative particle outweigh the imagery: in a rhetorical one it doesn’t.30 [24] When Christianity says that religion can be revealed only in Christ, the Word of God, surely one of the things it means is that theology cannot get outside the verbal universe. The Christian rationalism which set in at the beginning led to the conception that theology must necessarily be propositional prose, in contrast not only to the Classical but the Hebraic (and New Testament) view. The real “Reformation” dethroned this and set up again the rhetorical synthesis or definitive myth, the Word of God. It was strangled by the scholastic Counter-Reformations of Trent & Augsburg, but peeps out in Protestant imagination, in Catholic vision from St. John of the Cross to Péguy, & in the testimony of the heretics who got through. This may be second-essay stuff: I haven’t got the dividing line between the two established. Incidentally the development of science was another branch of the scholastic Counter-Reformation, & humanism didn’t help because, like E.K. Brown, it stuck to structural analysis & didn’t clarify its view of function.31 [25] Nevertheless, it’s on the radioactive aspects of “expanding symbols” that the moral & tropological aspects of the third level coincide. Structural analysis becomes functional analysis at the point when the particular symbols of a poem are assimilated to their archetypes. That’s as far as value judgement can be communicated, I think. You can, up to a point, demonstrate the integrity of the rhetoric (a line is beautiful because poetry is also the best sounds in the best order), the profundity of the thought, the rhythm of the narrative, & the “universal significance,” via the archetypes, of the whole. How you do more I don’t see: the actual impact of the poem is literal, & outside criticism: the actual possession of the poem is too. You can make appreciatively smacking noises, exclamations & what not, that indicate an enthusiasm that might be contagious, but all this is a form of elocution, an adjunct of Ion’s performance.32 I must study, for instance, Hazlitt more carefully to see just what can be

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done on this line. But there’s one difference between literature & mathematics that seems to me crucial. I understand what happens in the Meno: I can see that Socrates could pick a boy off the streets at random, demonstrate a Euclidean proposition, & make him see the truth of it.33 I don’t see how anyone could pick out any normal mind at random, read him a Keats ode, & make him see the value of it. Truth in mathematics, though grasped with pure insight, can be grasped without previous acquaintance with the mathematical universe, but value in literature seems normally to depend on the slow acquiring of intuitions about the verbal universe. The test here is pragmatic, in experience, & of course “liberal education” does imply the axiom that something gets liberated: this is my point that “goodness” on the moral level is expansion or emancipation. Also there are flaws in the argument from analogy: the theory of relativity can’t be explained to anyone at random, & poetry loses its appeal to the man at random in proportion as the latter loses the simplicity & primitiveness of response. He could perhaps react to Aeschylus or Homer as easily as to Euclid in their society. Nevertheless, value is an implicit transmission only, & can never be an explicit one. [26] I must work on the historical progression from the medieval doctrine of four levels to the humanist-Protestant conception of the Bible as the rhetoric of God: the place is the More-Tyndale controversy.34 The trouble was, I think, the fact that a functional analysis, the strong point of the anagogic method, is always apt to slip down into the second level & become allegory: and too exhaustive attention to allegory runs into all the dangers of paraphrase. Hence it provokes a reaction toward structural analysis which begins with a “plain sense” doctrine. The danger latent here of confusing “plain sense” with a representative relation to facts & propositions then emerged & buggered the works again. [27] Marshall M’Luhan says that Sidney regarded the prose epic, the Cyropaedia, More’s Utopia, & so on, as the highest form of literary art, & that that was the highbrow attitude as opposed to Spenser’s middlebrow attempt to combine popular romance & sound doctrine. This, naturally, is pretty speculative, but the existence of the conception of a prose epic in Renaissance criticism is something I badly need. Also as providing a link with the other half of rhetoric: oratory, & so of the assimilation of the hero to the prophet via oratory: the existential situation clarified by epiphany being, as in the Incarnation, also a historical “occasion.”

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[28] One point that’s been sticking me is gradually getting unstuck: the third level is a structural analysis in which the recurring themes expand into archetypes, & so become functional. This is simple enough on the mythical level, where, for instance, Lycidas is assimilated to Orpheus as a poet, to Peter as a priest, & to Adonis as a dead (& rising man). But to show how literature presents the archetypes of history is trickier, though I’m beginning to see something of the point. As for philosophy, it seems to me that the particular parts of philosophy known as metaphysics & theology present the archetypes of thought in the only way they can be presented: by the powers or functions of words. Thus understanding these disciplines really proceeds by a technique of meditation. This meditation is a process of understanding the power or functions of such words as “nature,” “phenomenon” & the like. [29] I wonder if I should give Helen [Liberal] and put the Dedicatory Letter to Ned [Pratt] I’ve thought of for [Tragicomedy] into this book. It would in that case be the Preface explaining why I’m writing the damn book: its place midway between the Blake & the Spenser. [30] The question is what the archetypes of history are. They’re not the different phases of cultural age: that belongs to Spengler & the second level; yet they might be things like Vico’s four eras, as they seem to be in FW [Finnegans Wake], or Blake’s birth of Orc, Urizen exploring his dens, & the rest. They’re Platonic too. But I don’t like this. I see the Bible as sucking history into the myth of the Word; but does that mean that the archetypes of the cyclic myth are the archetypes of history too, once we’ve transcended the organic-cycle pattern? If so, the philosophical or propositional archetypes must too. It’s too glib to say that history ends in a philosophy of history & philosophy in a history of philosophy, an Exodus & a Genesis, but there’s some truth in it too. [31] I may have to add a chapter at the end on “Transcending the Verbal Universe,” which I shall say is only for speculative minds interested in the ramifications of the “Principles of Literary Symbolism” (my present idea for the title of the book). If I number the sections to 100, this may be outside the numeration, going to 108, or 128, or 144, or whatever looks good. This, after beginning probably with the simplified hieroglyphics of One Word, (Aum or the Tetragrammaton),35 One Image (circle), & the rest (In fact, this chapter might contain the germs of my Second Essay.)

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would go on to the Eastern (Buddhist & Taoist mainly) developments of the doctrine of a hypothetical universe beyond the antithetical categories. Of this universe as free and unborn (= supernatural). Also the Christian ideas of the revelation through the Word (only that, of course, is pretty well implied already). Of transcending in Christianity the hampering Aristotelian views of nature & essence & existence, & going through to a Christian Yogacara. This would be a “Meeting of East and West” considerably better than Northrop’s melancholy effort to work one out on a logical-positivist fallacy of wedding Western intellect & Eastern “aesthetic” emotion.36 It ends in Wittgenstein’s “silence.”37 [32] The prose chapter may wind up with the prose epic; but somewhere I must consider the Sutra, the aphorism which may be either prose or verse. The narrative most appropriate to this (Sutra) is a sequence of existential situations, as in the parables, or generally the Gospels, where the Word clarifies the situation. Thus after carrying my present anatomy paper38 into the quintessential prose epic, I should move on from intellectualized prose fiction through Plato & the dialogues to the treatise or sermo. Now the treatise, or rhetorical arrangement of propositions in full syllogistic instead of enthymeme or hypothetical forms (see Aristotle’s Rhetoric), is of course a hopelessly miscellaneous class, yet, if I treat it as I do modern lyric, as ’   5 [ta epe, “poems to be recited”], I should get to the epic form somewhere, possibly by way of Plato. But the real move here is to show prose veering toward commentary on Scripture: all Western theology is fundamentally a series of Upanishads on a sacred Veda. By this time I’ve backed into Scripture, & find in the Sutra or aphorism the essential unit of utterance that unites poetry with prose, except, as above, for the narrative, which almost has to be the life of a teacher. I see traces of an analogy pattern: imgve. [imaginative] Scripture vs. the rationalist event-idea combination of the same thing. [33] Phrase for P.R. [Paradise Regained] excreted from the Preface: “the ‘Christian hero,’ who murders & tortures on the pretext that he has a more accurate understanding of the teachings of the Prince of Peace than his victims, seemed to Milton merely to add hypocrisy to ferocity.”39 [34] The logical positivist position is an attempt to isolate the pure proposition as opposed to the merely rationalizing one which is motivated by an “affective” or “emotional” psychological impulse. This [Thus] it con-

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tinues the Cartesian attempt to equate thought with thought on its best behavior. What I want to do is align propositional thought with its true psychological bases. [35] The general shape of [Anticlimax] is apparently: the four forms first, then an attempt to isolate the literary element in propositional prose. This literary element will turn out to be, I think, the “as if” or hypothetical quality in the treatise, which turns the treatise into a dialogue. When I reach the dialogue (and after all Plato is the basis of the anatomy, not Menippus) I’ve got the carry-through from [Tragicomedy]. Bernard Shaw & the Aristophanes-Plato relationship come in here. The point is that the hypothetical element in propositions is oratorical, hence rhetorical, hence literary. After that I go on to the point that prose is the language of myth & poetry of ritual, & that the element of incantation or magic in poetry makes poetry bound to time, as epic & drama are both concerned with the arrival of the moment & with the crucial act. Prose is the pure language of consciousness detached from time:40 this is the reason for the Christian notion of “theology,” that only propositional prose is sacrosanct. But the theological fallacy is the analogy of the real form, which is in the Bible & Upanishads: pure commentary of Word. Theology, which is of course part of the general descriptive fallacy, is a form of causality & is hence linear & temporal. Causality is a form of conceptual rhetoric.41 [36] Causality of course is really continuity, or persistence in time: continuity is a better word than Hume’s “association.” The mystery of discontinuity is one of the upper secrets of prose: it’s connected in the first place with aphorisms. All my work consists in translating involuntarily acquired aphorisms into a pattern of continuity. The former has something to do with listening for a Word, the ear being the involuntary sense, the latter with the spread-out panorama for the eye. [37] I wonder how much of [Anticlimax] has to take in the study of the life of the “great man.” The great man or hero is in the first place an illusion of continuity. [Liberal] is a study of act, & the great man as actor is a ritualist bound to time, seizing the event: the modern Fascist or Carlylean “historical” hero. [Tragicomedy] being concerned with drama, is a study of act & scene, & hence the dramatic hero belongs to tragedy. There is strictly no comic hero: the comic hero is only potential: if any-

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thing a “little guy.” Next comes the Communist or Socratic hero, the incarnation of a dialectic: in the Republic the scene or symposium has swallowed the act, or historical state. The climax is, as aforesaid [par. 32], the gospel or sequence of epiphanies. The god has acquired a transformation-body & so has broken clear from the tyranny of act or continuity. [38] The prose most bound to the act is oratory. I suppose my idea that I usually label “Varronian”—prose able to take poetry or leave it alone— comes in here. The De Oratore & Renaissance attempts to link rhetorical prose & the great man are relevant too. The age of radio, the involuntary time-bound ear, produced the Fascist event-hero: the age of TV is the age of the dramatic act-and-scene hero. The prose epiphanic-gospel is ahead of us. [39] Incidentally, though it’s a second-essay point, the Spenglerian dialectic is astrological in Jung’s sense, based on synchronization.42 [40] I can only think what completes the pattern, or further articulates the pattern, of what I know already: thus my thought, in temporal illusion continuous, actually grows like Catholic dogma in Newman. [41] I think the most fanciful part of my meaning paper43 is my distinction between language & dictionary language, & I must work out an argument, beyond mere association, that centripetal meaning involves a cognitive though not a descriptive element. [42] The ambiguity in the third level for me has always been the ambiguity inherent in rhetoric itself. On the one hand, rhetoric is a persuasive art, and hence moral in Dante’s sense. In Spenser this morality is founded on the myth of chivalry, which is proclaimed by a Renaissance Ciceronian orator who is at once a poet and an interpreter of action. But rhetoric is also a disinterested study of figures and schemata, and it is in this aspect that the third level becomes mystical. The morality is of course a conscious and manipulated projection of the myth, and affords a certain check on it.44 [43] I think now of the first four chapters as dealing more or less with criticism (UTQ),45 meaning (KR1),46 archetype (KR2)47 and scripture (RK lectures)48 respectively. Chaps. 3 & 4 work out the apocalyptic dialectic

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of the vision of heaven in a present & a hell as a rotary illusion. The ass end of it will clear up when my present epic papers, the basis of 5, do. [44] Values in art derive from a) nature or b) the human community. The former are aesthetic & lead to the general concept of beauty, which is, as I’ve said, a conservative element. The latter are moral (centrifugal as the others are centripetal) & have to do with radical expansion. I suppose they’re the two aspects of the third level. Beauty is ironic and esoteric, morality allegorical & explicit. [45] Many “traditional” philosophies, e.g., Barth’s “neo-orthodoxy,” are traditional in verbal structure only, & are revolutionary in their actual handling of the concepts (e.g., hell, predestination, etc.). This illustrates how hypothetical & yet how strong the verbal structure is. [46] In music there’s something profound about the working up of a dramatic narrative structure, rising to an analytic climax in the slow movement, & then a finale that gives the initial impression of comic anticlimax. Mozart’s G m quintet.49 In Beethoven’s 4th piano concerto50 the tetralogy ending in satyr-play structure is clearer. The reason for it in music is easier to see in the classic variation form, where the dramatic climax is usually penultimate & the very last one a “let-down” (Goldberg & Diabelli).51 The variation form is not only cyclic but explicitly circumferential, & has to deny narrative advance. [47] I think my nature & community antithesis is of far-reaching importance, as it sweeps up for one thing the whole form-content one. Also, it’s linked with my original point that the goal of art is the unfallen world in which nature & community coincide. And there are further links in the direction of nature : tragedy : narrative : : community : comedy : meaning. The first chapter, then, could deal with the general centripetal-centrifugal opposition with the establishing of the elements of narrative & meaning along with the first two levels of the latter. [48] Along with this goes the establishing of the limits of possibilities. Thus in painting the panorama represents the outside limit of what painting can effectively do. Similarly with the sculpture of Bernini. I shall of course have to modify my “hypothesis of biology” stuff [pars. 13,

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15], as sculpture can’t do trees & such. Sculpture is an intensely centripetal art, the concentrated vision of texture & formal relations. It shows an affinity with hieroglyphic, with torsos, Henry Moore’s holes & other abbreviated & shorthand statements of formal essentials. Painting is less so, & hence midway between literature & sculpture (sculpture itself being midway between painting and pottery). [49] Fairly soon I need a rationale of the plastic arts, of which architecture, the spatial city & garden, is the encyclopaedic synthesis. The audible arts are the city & garden of the ear. The connecting link between the two is drama in a theatre. The church service of course is different. I sometimes wonder if the verbal structures aren’t all primarily centrifugal & wouldn’t disappear in an achieved unfallen world. This point is raised in Morris & is implicit in the popular conception of heaven. [50] Only in terms of my interpretation of literal & allegorical meaning is it possible to understand why critics have always thought of the values of literature as double: delight and instruct, beauty and truth, intensifying and expanding experience. [51] It would be interesting to write out a fantasy of a real unfallen world, with architecture & the plastic arts all in place, sculptures in the garden, etc. A world of purely hypothetical construction: that’s the link with my Utopia ideas. [52] The garden & the city are of course on different levels of imgve. [imaginative] control of nature: the garden is an arrangement but not a construct. Something similar is found in the relation between the explicit & implicit verbal structures. But architecture isn’t hypothetical. [53] It may be that the real difference between the centripetal & centrifugal is not between natural & moral bases of art so much as between the contemplative (hypothetical) and active (actual) aspects of experience, the focussing & the conquering of the mind. Perhaps the conventional art-vs.-science antithesis is of this kind—in fact it is: I’m speaking only of the centrifugal aspect of a hypothetical structure. Also the formal relations of art seem to have a close affinity with mathematics rather than nature, as the beauty we see in nature is largely mathematical.52

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[54] The notion that the artist is an intellectual, or rather that his productions are always the result of a fully conscious & intelligent will, is the consequence of the power vacuum left in the arts by the breakdown of criticism. Art is a secretion of the human imagination, & it may be conscious or unconscious, intuitive or instinctive, produced by any kind of man. [55] Once we adopt the principle of different levels of meaning, many critical problems become pseudo-problems. The most important group of these is that relating to the artist’s conscious will, as above; others relate to the recognition of archetypes.

pers.

rom.

intell.

conf. intro. extro.

novel

anat.

[This pencil diagram, doubtless inserted at a later time, is Frye’s schema for the four forms of prose fiction in the Fourth Essay. The abbreviations stand for personal, intellectualized, introverted, extroverted, romance, confession, and anatomy.]

[56] It is important that the limits of art seem to lie somewhere between pure dream & pure reality. The wild tales in the first part of the Mabinogion53 approach one extreme of what verbal art can effectively do; unselected & pointless realism approaches the other. The realm of verbal art lies between the purely factual or conscious & the purely fan-

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tastic or unconscious: its realm is the heroic, a term broad enough to include both Yeats & Zola, but still a term with limits. Only the heroic can achieve the task of uniting the archetypal universal with the individual, & so suggesting reality & fantasy at the same time. In the 19th c. a lot of controversy was wasted in efforts to put the true centre of gravity nearer fantasy or nearer reality. These are pseudo-problems. Note however that the parables of Jesus never violate the least canon of possibility. [57] The link between the image & the idea I’ve established as lying in the region of Plato’s divided line, the chain of being, & so on. Now it’s characteristic of a set of images that they consolidate in one image, & of a set of ideas that they interlock. Yet though the one image which is the meaning of a Keats ode is a nightingale or a Grecian urn, it isn’t the pictorial nightingale or urn any more than it would be the abstract idea of autumn or melancholy. It’s the verbal nightingale, the bird as an element in the whole universe, that’s the true image. [58] The passing from the second to the third level is the point at which quid credas becomes quid agas,54 logic dialectic, & conviction a program of action. In Protestantism this is the passing over of the Word of God from the book to the heart. According to Jung it’s a process of personal integration in which the units are personal archetypes, father & mother symbols & the like. I haven’t at the moment got this quite clear, but I’m beginning to. [59] In this book, therefore, we are primarily concerned with the study of the first three of our phases of criticism, & especially with the problem of what kind of total form criticism can see in literature. Such an investigation is to some extent implied by all the learned journals & critical studies now in existence, but they form in their totality only a few scattered & random notes for it. No matter how faithfully all the humanities specialists in the world work, & no matter for how long, the vision of the total form of literature can never possibly emerge by the methods of naive induction, which are simply too cumbersome to deal with the idea. Mathematicians have to deal with numbers so large that, if they were written out in ordinary integers, no serious work could be done with them, as it would take everyone in the world scribbling digits until the next ice age to record them. This would have the advantage of preventing wars, but on the whole mathematicians have thought it better to

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devise a simpler method of representing such numbers, which will make them less awful & more manageable. Such a book as this has therefore to be read with some good will & some sympathy for the kind of thing it is trying to do. It is not addressed to anyone who will get his chief pleasure out of noting its deficiencies, whether they are real deficiencies or merely interruptions of his own train of thought. [60] The notion of “greatness” has always buggered the question of criticism. Talking about literature in terms of men is gossip, not criticism: at most “Virgil,” meaning Virgil’s poetry, is a kind of rhetorical enthymeme. To talk about Shakespeare, Milton & Shelley as people is a waste of time, & to rank them in classes as Arnold does is even worse.55 The man, for the critic, is a more or less arbitrary, though of course useful, category for the aggregate of the work he did. Biography is not criticism. [61] Because “greatness” involves a comparative rather than a positive factor, it works against criticism, which ought to be concerned primarily with genuineness. Some people are too interested in this. Once the shape of criticism is established, criticism will split off sharply from the history of taste. Criticism, being scientific, can only progress; the history of taste can only vacillate. Hence the renewed appreciation of Donne, Blake, Skelton, etc. is criticism: the depreciation of Shelley, Tennyson & Milton is the history of taste. This is not to say that value-judgements will become increasingly favorable all round, because value-judgements will not be confined to such narrow units as poets. No one needs to worry that, for instance, Shelley might fail to be properly depreciated in comparison with greater poets. According to Arnold the disillusionment we suffer by demoting Chaucer & Burns to class two is made up for by our increased admiration of the achievement of Shakespeare & Milton in remaining in class one,56 but, in view of Shakespeare’s puns & Milton’s humor, this seems to me to be nonsense. I am not saying that a critic has no right to draw up his own touchstones & his own class lists, but that all such lists, like the lists of the hundred best novels, are parlor games & not criticism.57 [62] As for history, which has a prestige that gives sanction to biography, that belittles poets by suggesting a certain historical relativism about them. A philosopher deals with ideas, & a philosopher of a mer-

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cantile civilization like Locke will think of ideas as things to be possessed by individuals. Nobody has any at birth, but one accumulates a stock of them, insists on full weight (“clear & distinct ideas”),58 & finally builds a reflective country estate. A philosopher of a warring city-state like Plato will think of ideas as a pre-established community, not to be entered without credentials. It doesn’t follow that there is nothing more to their treatment of ideas than that. Similarly with Huxley & his mother-goddess cult.59 [63] In short, a rhetorical examination of ideas leads to dialectic. The central conception of rhetoric is decorum, & the central conception of decorum is the class basis of utterance (sublime, mean & lowly). To get past that is to arrive at the role of literature in a classless society. [64] Present order: One, Introduction (The Necessity of Poetics); Two, Meaning; Three, Narrative (Genres); Four, Modes; Five, Archetypes; Six, Archetypal Forms (Scripture & Epic); Seven, Archetypal Forms (Drama); Eight, Fictional Forms; Nine, Lyric Forms; Ten, The Rhetoric of Criticism (Biographical & Tropical); Eleven, The Dialectic of Criticism (Historical & Dialectic); Twelve, The Poetics of Criticism. [65] Re Chronology as only identified factor: literature shows a modulating convention no originality has ever in the history of culture violated in the slightest (Establishment of a community of art). Much “historical” criticism merely rationalizes this fact: Wordsworth may have rc. [romantic] or 18th c. elements “stressed,” but the upshot of it is that he lived when he lived. Thus even history proves the necessity of a verbal universe. [66] A point I’m trying to squeeze into 1 & would do better to leave for 10 or 11 is this: The notion of genius as in some way prior to culture is closely allied to, in fact a part of, the Rousseauist doctrine of the priority of the individual to society. The converse idea, that the individual is involuntarily born into a society which preceded his birth & conditions his inheritance[,] seems to me to have the advantage of being closer to the facts it begins with. Similarly, genius is not a mysterious elixir existing in the individual apart from his social context. The individual is born into a cultural order which conditions his utterance at every point, &, to an extent unexplored as yet, determines its quality. This conception of a

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cultural order is one I may develop further. If you’re expressing a preference for Mozart over Brahms, the chances are you’re comparing the cultural order of music in 1780 & 1880. [67] Don’t assume that the ladder of meaning is a progressive subtilizing & rarefaction of understanding. The perspective changes at each level, but no limits should be assigned to the subtlety & intensity of understanding on the “lower” levels: they’re not even relatively superficial. [68] Don’t assume that the genre has anything to do with the archetypes appropriate to that genre. The encounter of Holiness & Error at the beginning of Spenser is in a genre of high mimetic imitating romance, but the archetypes are Druidic, i.e. correspondent to the ironic phase. [69] In general, the archetypes are most appropriate to the upper phases; in the lower ones they are regularly used unconsciously or accidentally. [70] In dealing with the genre, don’t forget either (a) the radical of its presentation (b) the point (important in Aristotle) at which it achieves its social telos. Drama is mimed poetry, the most primitive of all in its radical: but it doesn’t reach its telos until we have a society settled enough to build a theatre. [71] (Introduction). Basing criticism on value judgments tends to stylize one’s experience. Thus (Wimsatt) holism60 ignores the real pleasure you get from fragments: we ignore the pleasure that can exist simultaneously with a low critical valuation of what we read, etc. The circle of induction & deduction has to be kept open. [72] The present scheme is for seven chapters: introduction; theory of symbolism, & then the five types of symbolism in order. The only question is, which order? I’d thought of the deductive anagogy-rhetoric one, but certainly the reverse is possible. The only way to settle it will be to decide exactly what goes into the rhetoric chapter, a point not yet clear. [73] The rhetoric chapter, then, might go somewhat as follows: 1. The Rhetorical Organization of Grammar & Logic. Rhetoric as a) persuasive b) ornamental

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Persuasive as false or utilitarian-standard, corresponding to the “description of emotion” fallacy. Aristotle says rhetoric ought to “correspond” to dialectic: I say it ought to correspond to poetics. (Cf. the rhetoric of music) Babble & doodle: ambiguity & paronomasia; imitative harmony; the diagrammatic basis of thought, extended to the whole conception of spatial figuration; metrical complexes & semantic rhythms. Poetic (continuity of movement) & prosaic (expansion of causality) rhythms The attempt to bypass rhetoric: Elimination of thought: euphuism, the sermon, Swinburne. Elimination of movement: a) propositional rhythm in philosophy b) James Mill & utilitarian prose c) Dissociation: Stein, N.T., jargon Hence by-passing rhetoric becomes utilitarian rhetoric. Conclusion: the poetic is to the descriptive as the mathematical is to the scientific. Epos

Musical

Metrical

Prose

Lyric

[74] 2. The Analogy of Thing and Word Political: the problem of spiritual authority The Dialectic of Defining the “Governor.” Identification of “Governor” as Symbol or Verbal Unit (e.g., king). Religious: Thomist sacrament & Kierkegaardian leap. Middle View Lankavatara Conclusion [75] All this certainly suggests that it’s the final chapter, not the third. The only thing that’s clear to me at present is that the rhetoric chapter has the same relation to satire & dissociative forms that the fourth chapter has to romance. And that’s not really clear.

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[76] The essential fact of the essay is its ironic declining of the systematic treatise-form, as evidenced in its title. It turns away from system & makes a point of selecting the subject which is either too big for anything but casual treatment or superficially & in assertive terms unimportant. Quote Alexander Smith.61 [77] I have a notion that there’s [an] article at the end of 5 that, if it comes loose, may unstick the whole book. It seems most logical to expound the genres in reverse order from rhetoric. In 6 I begin with the ironic-oracular-lyric-liberal level, take in the prose antithesis, go on to recurrent rhythm + h.m. [high mimetic] epos, then deal with dissociation, by-passing convention, into anatomical epiphany. Hence in 5 I should say I’ve already done the federal forms in 4, then start with drama, then go on in the general direction of the h.m. epos, l.m. [low mimetic] fiction, & ironic lyric. The thing that logically should come after lyric is the satiric comminution theme. But how to distinguish that from the other half of the same topic, dissociative rhetoric, is what’s worrying me right now. And the answer, I think, is connected somehow with the question of the buried fourth factor in 1, if there is one. [78] Now in 1 the fiction part is perfectly straight. In theme, the relation of creator to theme is integral for the first three modes, then in l.m. [low mimesis] a tension is set up, & half the creative power retreats to a subjective & “sentimental” romance. In irony this recession reacts still further to myth, & then the two come together in epiphany. So these seem to have a polarization of creator & theme in which those may be, after all, something corresponding to the contrast of tragic & comic resolutions in fiction. I mean a contrast of subjective-introverted and objective-extroverted polarities, as, in fact, you postulate now. I’ve never been satisfied with what I got out of this though. [79] Well, anyway 5 seems to be leading to an antithesis of lyric & satire, greatest integration with greatest disintegration. It can’t go earlier, because its historical centre is late. And [?] of this the four kernels should come––surely they’re the climax of 5.62 And still there’s the problem of a logical reason why those are the four forms they certainly are in fiction. Principle of adhesion, sure. But if everything also is on the wheel, how does fiction get off the bloody wheel? Because it certainly is off it. By way of an examination of the lyric & the transition to the four kernels, I can

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get back on it, but the inner logic of 5 has never been quite clear. Besides, most of your comminution stuff is already in the anatomy business anyway: that’s the other thing that proves it’s late. If it’s also late in 6, it’s because it has a different job to do there. Incidentally, I don’t believe the fourth cardinal point is the oracle: I believe it’s the emblematic vision: the plumbline. Or, for short, the emblem or icon. If so, then the four forms of fiction fit the wheel thus: romance, the movement from emblem to commandment; novel, the movement from cdt. [commandment] to parable; anatomy, the movement from parable to aphorism; confession, the movement from aphorism back to emblem. I’m glad I’ve figured all this out independently of my doodles. Lyric goes back to the wheel, and its four cardinal points turn out to be the four resolving points of fiction. 5 has a detective shape, unlike the other chapters, & that is what it detects, I think. [80] fict. [fiction] dec. [decorum]

ep. [epos] style

dr. [drama] dec.

ly. [lyric] style

[81] The only thing I’ve got out of 1 is that the thematic part has, of course, an extroverted-objective & an introverted-subjective aspect, referring to the poet’s material & mind respectively, the former being nature & society, with its beliefs. The encyclopaedic tendency seems to move from the objective to the subjective (obj. in the organic sacramental material; subj. in rcsm. [Romanticism] & ironic myth) & the satiric or disjunctive tendency goes the other way. Both go across the h.m. [high mimetic], which is theoretically balanced (because, I suppose, the conception of orator permits either). That isn’t much, but it may have some fictional link, if there’s anything in it—I’m not yet sure that there is. Certainly it will have a lot to do with 4, & the first part of it may exist. [82] Five then: The four genres & the two tendencies. {Federal ones done} Drama: auto, history, tragedy, irony, mime, comedy, symposium, two masques & epiphanic point Epos qua episodic form: illustrate in both poetry and prose with a rough diagram (not too damn rough) Fiction: romance, novel, anatomy, confession. Fourfold combination takes us back to scripture. Lyric: hymn, Pindaric ode, panegyric, charm or work song, elegy,63 irony {Oriental} vignette, urbane poem, epigram, para

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Notebook 38 dox poem, riddle & kenning, idyllic ode, rhapsody & dithyramb, epiphanic lyric Four themes of fiction & four cardinal points of lyric defined as cdt. [commandment], aph. [aphorism], par. [parable] & emblem. Elements of scripture.

[83] Note that the fourth archetypal or dissociative rhythm of rhetoric is to be associated, not with a genre, but with the passing over into the existential: hence the tightening up of the recurrent repetition-patterns of the third level. The genre, if any, remains the satura, but this assumes that Scripture & drama are epiphanic to ear & eye. [84] Maybe the fourth level of memory (practice or habit of words, not just memorization) is the stage at which the reader himself becomes creative, & so made ready for the epiphanic forms. While I still accept the principle that the difference between poetry & prose is not generic, it does seem as though poetry (poetic but not metric) had its basis in lyric, prose in fiction, verse or metre in epos. Myths

Modes

Symbols

Genres [85] What I have now is, after the introduction, a chapter on the five historical modes, fictional & thematic, ending with a Spenglerian view of cultural history. Then a chapter on the five forms of symbolism, ending with the stuff in P4 about the spiritual autonomy of culture. Then a chapter on rhetoric and (not or) genres: the four initiatives, the four genres, the specific forms of the genres, and a conclusion on poetry and rhetoric in two parts: one, applied literature; two, my ideas about the informing of verbal structures by metaphor. Then a final chapter on myths, or archetypes; preface on the structural pattern, & the five fields of imagery, the four mythoi, the zodiac (along with whatever anabasis & katabasis patterns seem to fit), & then the conclusion of the whole book.

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[86] This last begins with the threefold pattern of art as between action & thought, history & philosophy, law & science, music & painting, & works out all these implications: in fact it strettoes the whole book, & puts Frye between Frazer & Freud (ritual & dream, society & the individual). Transformation of ritual & dream is involved too. [87] I wish to write [Liberal]. I think of it as being six chapters of 50–60 pages each. I know what they are, or what I think they might be. The general motto for has always been (15 years): possess Homer, Ovid, Virgil, Dante, Spenser & Milton; then do what you like. In the meantime: [88] Introduction & Chapter One: Mythical Narrative & the Bible The normal critical stages of analysis are: the unity of the poem; the unity of the poet’s work; the relation of his work with such sources as he explicitly or implicitly indicates. Possible to carry this a stage farther; to treat literature as an order of words; to see that objective correlatives run in families. Centripetal tendency of literature: possible that Virgil imitated nature; certain that he imitated Homer: priority of convention to experience. Relation of poetry to action & thought shows how poetry seeks the typical & the recurring a) plot b) image. [89] Myth, folktale, etc. is an “abstract” literary artefact. It should not be “interpreted” as any kind of allegory, but compared with other myths. Its “point” is not in the myriads of interpretations possible, but in its archetypal framework. Even in Spenser archetypal analysis can be carried on without any reference to the allegory. A cave drawing may be connected with its culture by an anthropologist, or with other drawings by an art historian. Similarly with a myth, & The Golden Bough is literary criticism. [90] Definition of the sacred book as the revelation through a human oracle of a divine will, hence usually a law book. How myths evolve from this, if I find out. Relation to literature depends on its structure. My point about the shapelessness of the Koran [AC, 56/53], & the consequent lack of a direct literary connexion, vs. the Bible. [91] Starting with the Bible I can arrive easily enough at my old apocalyptic & demonic (bondage & Egypt rather than hell) symbolism. Then the two gigantic “fictions” of law & gospel, reared on an oracular basis,

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one a quest romance & the other an epic study of a personal leader. How this leads into the topocosm of four levels. [92] I suppose I go into Beta by way of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, leading to quest patterns like those of Theseus, Perseus, Heracles & Jason. Factors that I suppose belong here are: the John Baleycorn cycle; the white goddess & the black bride; the journey from Egypt or Carthage; the entry into the walled garden; the mirror & the holding up of the mirror (i.e. central & circumferential perception). The epic chapters would then start out with the Hesiodic topocosm & the shield of Achilles. [93] For Alpha I need more on the Aaronic analogy: details of the ark & its relation to the possessed city; in short, the priestly analogy of the law. [94] I wonder if perhaps Beta isn’t pure ritual cycle; Gamma the cycle in relation to a constructive quest, but still ritual, & then Delta would deal with romance as dream, on its psychological, or circumference-perceiving side. That would give the Blake more prominence, of course. Proust & Joyce are ironic summations of ritual & dream respectively. Perhaps after all the theory of displacement (l.m. [low mimetic]) follows epic (h.m. [high mimetic]). [95] Intro: importance of establishing the poem as object vs. the associative or documentary approach. Marxism as a parody of the latter (Cauldwell [Caudwell] on Rimbaud in 1870).64 No need to labor this, but it does belong. [96] Where we do have allegorical interpretations of myths, the only one to attend to is the one that actually did gain credence in the cultural tradition, like the equivalence of Leah & Rachel with the active & contemplative life.

[Notes for Anatomy of Criticism]

The following holograph notes and chart were written on the front and back of a luncheon program on the occasion of Lester B. Pearson’s installation as chancellor of Victoria University, 4 February 1952. That Frye wrote these notes during the ceremonies seems possible, even likely. What he labels “Chapter Three: Structural Archetypes” is an outline of material that eventually made its way into the Second and Third Essays of the Anatomy. The notes are in the NFF, 1992, box 3, file 7.

Chapter Three: Structural Archetypes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Dreaming and waking. Desire & reality. The world and its human transformation by work. The limited (natural) and the unlimited goals of work. The function of art in hypothesizing & so making infinite the goal of work. Apocalypse interpreted as the transformation of all experience into a dream form. Opposite pole the frustration of action, or the anxiety dream. Hence the logic of the god, usually ironic when not human; heroic when human. The human protagonist or hero: a) as god (mythical phase) over men and nature. b) as hero (romantic phase), human but partly supernatural. c) as leader (high mimetic phase), human [and?] natural but exceptional d) as one of us (low mimetic phase), realistic, descriptive, recognition focus.

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e) as inferior to us (ironic phase). {His status is not moral but in terms of the amount of freedom allowed him}.1 9. Every phase has its anagnorisis or recognition: that’s the tonality or mode which defines the phase. 10. [blank] Symbol clusters: Perseus Hercules Theseus Station

Eden

Beulah-Ulro

Perseus

Hercules

1. Nativity-mangervirgin mother

Ark floating on waves, hiding from father

Story of Danae

birth

2. Baptism-epiphany Acknowledgement by Father. Coming of dove. Recession of flood; repetition of creation

Drawing from water. growing up in adopted by Recognition tokens. adopted father’s Eurystheus Calumniated mother. court Strangling of serpents. Giving of arms.

row with father

3. Ministry. Cleansing of temple & routing of demons. Leaving Mary & meeting Magdalen. Generation of Presence in substance.

Errantry. Separation Gets arms from twelve labors of lady at home from Athene & goes distressed damsel in on quest & kills hands of giants or Gorgon bandits (Venus & Psyche).

kills bandits

4. Crucifixion as spectacle. Mourning mother. Betrayed by disciple.

Agon with dragon and pathos or death in conflict. Fixing of pharmakos. Betrayal by woman (second)

5. God disappeared from world. Archetype of broken body of sacrament

Sparagmos, castration, cannibal feast, burial, searching Isis (first)

6. Escape of the soul-dove from hell. Counterpoint to release of Barabbas & prototype of ascension

Escape of Orpheus, slaughter of of Ulysses from Poly- Phineus’ men phemus. Freeing of tricky slave, Ariel, etc.

abandoning of Ariadne

7. Resurrection. Representation of Presence by Word. Epiphany of Church.

Anagnorisis or recognition on return. Revenge on second woman.

return to Athens

8. Fixing of shadow: baptism of subject, kindling candle of Lord. Union of Christ & Church.

Gamos or union with second female principle, the reborn first one.

9. Apocalypse (repetition or second coming of 1).

Ascent on burning pyre to the stars.

killing of Andromeda’s dragon

—

descent to hell Minotaur quest foreshortened with second death

—

—

marriage

Theseus

betrayal by Deianeira

funeral pyre

—

crowned king

Notebook 35

Many, perhaps most, of the entries in this notebook date from 1952 and early 1953. The material in the notebook following the final entry of what is transcribed here is a series of drafts and revisions of the text of Anatomy of Criticism. The numbers and letters (in black ink) that Frye inserted immediately above most of the entries (in blue ink) appear to have been added sometime later: they apparently refer to various sections and chapters in his outline of the Anatomy at this stage. The notebook is in the NFF, 1991, box 26. It has “Records” printed on its green and black cloth cover, and it measures 19.7 x 12.5 cm.

[1] 0 The best organization for Part Two is, after all, I think, simply to follow the ladders of meaning and narrative. Thus 6 would be lyric, spreading out to fiction in 7; 8 would be drama, starting the same process on the archetypal level, and 9 would complete that level by epic & scripture. [2] 0 6, then, would presumably outline a conspectus (or the conspectus if I’ve actually got it) of lyric specific forms, working out the complex of chanted (as opposed to sung) verse, its oracular (positive) and ironic (negative) aspects, and the circle of moods. Then I fan out to the species of narrative and didactic verse, perhaps to a Pisgah-sight of the same general pattern that I’ll use for prose in 7. [3] 6-D As I get further into this, I have to keep my double perspective in mind. Literature as verbal is intermediate to narrative & didactic; as art it’s

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intermediate to music & opsis. Now I think I can toss my music article1 into one pan of this, and a development through metrics to hieroglyphic & imagistic poetry into the other. To work out the relation of this to the other pattern is a problem ahead of me. [4] 6 The distinction between the occasional (or mimetic) and the archetypal is, in the lyric, complicated by the lyric sequence which, from the Psalter through Shakespeare’s sonnets to Rilke, is very close to fragmented epic. [5] 0-D I have repeatedly been haunted by a sense that the bases of classification of specific forms were different for each genre, & that I was wrong in trying to assimilate all four to the wheel of archetypes, merely because that worked out so well for drama. The basis of fiction has clearly something to do with contrapuntal narrative: specific forms are rarely mixed in the episodic drama, & regularly are in fiction. The lyric basis of classification has always been modal. That of epic is affected by a historico-dialectic development of tradition. [6] 0 Meanwhile, I’ve just about decided tentatively on a major strategic regrouping. The exposition has altered its order to Introduction—Meaning—Genre. A fourth chapter on imagery would follow, & perhaps a fifth on modes, but at the moment I don’t see a fifth chapter. (And I may not even need the great wheel of archetypes, my original reason for leaving Genres to 5, until I’m into archetypal specific forms). Then the four specific-form chapters follow: if I’m right, they’d be 5–8 rather than 6–9. [7] 0 Now: suppose I just stop there, & publish it as a complete book? Then the last three (or four, as I’m beginning to think) chapters on the levels of criticism could come out separately as a hundred-page book to be called “A Second Essay on Poetics.” Meanwhile, [Liberal], [Tragicomedy], [Anticlimax] and [Rencontre] could be coming along, in any order, filling up the specific-forms section. Then [Mirage], [Paradox], [Ignoramus], with a possible fourth, could outline the three expository chapters as recapitulated in the four chapters of the Second Essay? Surely this puts all my ideas into a logical & practicable shape: the seven pillars

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separate from both the Blake & the Essay;2 the idea of two essays, & so on. It certainly would be a relief to feel that I was actually getting to the big job. Meanwhile, I should be in a position to acknowledge the Guggenheim & collect another fellowship.3 [8] 6 There are many pitfalls in the lyric chapter, & one of them is the danger of not recognizing that one of the essential characteristics of the ironic mode is the suppression of mood. Hence the “imagistic” poem. [9] 6-S I’ve had ideas about the cycle of language going back to new inflections, and that seems to click with ideas about the revival in poetry of the riddle, or image that describes by encircling: the oblique kenning or ideogram. Note in Beowulf the admiration I’ve long noted for the complex involution of things like inwrought carvings. Note too that in Lycidas the reference to the  of Hyacinthus provides a riddle germ.4 Maybe what I’ve been calling the ironic mood is mimetic, & the literal level is simply reading a riddle. Yet the first half of this won’t work, & the element of puzzle in riddle and oracle as distinct from tale or proposition is ironic. Only it’s actively ironic: a challenge to “wit.” It’s clearest of course in the satiric lyric (metaphysical). Analogies to everything spring to mind. The intervolutions of knots in weaving: the importance of this & its connection with geometrical design, as in Mohammedan carpetry & building. And I do think that my point about the return of inflected structures in American vulgate does belong. On one side, the oracle moves from chanting through singing to narrative; on the other, the riddle moves from kenning through ideogram to idea. One completes itself as commandment & parable, the other as aphorism & prophecy (actual vs. fictional events or ideas). [10] 6 Note that the cri de coeur, or bald statement of emotion, which is generally considered the literal lyric, is literal only in the false sense of minimum symbolic (plain sense) meaning. It’s halfway to mimesis. [11] 4 The critical obsession with source rather than analogy has its root in the Christianity of the West, which derives its religion from history & tradition, instead of through pure analogy of faith, as the Indians derive

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Krishna. The cup, in anagogy the Grail & in analogy the Great Whore’s cunt, or pit of hell, runs traditionally in the West: that is, the Grail of the romances explicitly is the cup of Christ. That makes my job easier in one way; harder, because more limited, in another. [12] 6 (8-9) After my four forms of prose fiction article,5 I can cut just before the “fifth form” stuff and swing over to postulate a similar scheme for narrative & didactic poetry. Then I can go on to my point about the highest form for prose (or perhaps this should be introductory to a separate chapter on scripture). Now of these I can see two plainly. One is the epistle or response to the dialectic element in a historical occasion: St. Paul’s form, the central form of communism (e.g. Lenin) and frequent in crises. Luther was a master of it: so, in a different medium, was Swift; and it has links with the detached epiphanic comments of Jesus in the Gospels. The type of this is the commandment: “What then Should We Do?” is a central question for both Paul & Lenin.6 Some of it may be implied in the De Oratore Renaissance business, & of course it’s Newman’s notion of what the encyclical is, or dogma, anyway. The other is the dialogue in which the teacher informs a pupil’s or disciple’s mind: the form of Plato & the Upanishads. Its type is aphorism. These seem to be due west & east. [13] 8? One of the others may be oracular & emblematic: the form in Hebrew prophecy where a pronouncement arises as an allegorical explanation of a visionary archetype. Amos’ plumb line [Amos 7:7–8] & Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones [Ezekiel 37]. I think it’s pretty central in Nietzsche & in Rimbaud: it’s a form difficult to disentangle from poetry. Note the emblematic structure (Grail, Stone, etc.) of the Charles Williams apocalyptic novels. The Chesterton-Williams form I don’t account for except as a romance-anatomy combination. It has links with the central emblem— white whale, scarlet letter, golden bowl—development of fiction, which I’ve not thoroughly gone into either. It may go back to the “motif” in folktale. Of course the emblem is close to being the archetype as image. [14] 4-D I’m getting more clearly the apocalyptic or epiphanic mode & its Druidical opposite: that’s always been pretty clear. Also the third-level mode as essentially the “pagan” mode of Eros, of love, heroism, Beulah, the future, dialectic & symposium. A mode subordinated to the Agape mode

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in Spenser & the (early) Milton: rampant & released in Shelley. Enthusiasm, millenialism [millennialism], Platonism; Orc symbols like the moon & the boat (ark) on water. The thing I have still to wait for is a clear sense of the Generation mode; the mimetic one, & the place of tragedy as intermediate between the heroic & the ironic. Vision of law and nature, I suppose; but the descent from its beginning in high tragedy to its end in tranche-de-vie naturalism is going to be tough. One thing: I think images of organic unifying like Wordsworth’s Prelude belong to it. It’s an Aristotelian mode. [15] 4-D In other words, there are two primary modes, the romantic (B) [Beulah] and the realistic (G) [Generation]. For the former Platonic enthusiasm is the central conception & for the latter, Aristotelian mimesis. The apocalyptic-Druidic body of images, derived mainly from Christianity, is not a real mode: you can’t close on it. The two primary modes have each an upward & a downward form, making six modes in all. Thus: romantic looking up to apocalyptic (heroic or messianic); straight romantic or erotic; romantic looking down to mimetic (comic); realistic looking up to heroic (tragic); straight mimetic; mimetic looking down to Druidic (ironic). That’s a beginning, anyway. Naturally, the analogy with the six modes of music & the non-modal seventh or Locrian doesn’t hurt this any in my eyes. [16] 4-D Slight modification: the three romantic modes are the heroic, elegiac ([melancholy?] and erotic: I don’t know why except post coitum triste & ante coitum tristior)7 and idyllic. The three mimetic ones are tragic, comic (or satiric: extroverted and exuberant irony) and ironic. That fits the circle better. The exposition, then, would be: II, four levels of meaning & the verbal universe; III, messianic & Druidic archetypes; IV the six modes; V the genres. Actually ch. IV would deal mainly with four modes, elegiac, tragic, idyllic & comic. Note that the mimetic proper, being descriptive, is not a possible cadence for literature. [17] 8. U Re prose fiction: anatomy develops the theme, and perhaps romance the act, novel the setting or situation; confession is development itself. By comic in the above I think I mean really realistic or observable: whatever men do.

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[18] D-10 Now after my chapter on meaning, which postulates the verbal universe or order of words, the necessary hypothesis or literary anagogy (and, perhaps, comes to some conclusion about the Kierkegaard hierarchy & its conception of the anagogic as the leap into the existential, though that sounds like second-essay stuff), I can begin chapter three, now on archetypes, by summarizing the development of an archetypal criticism in literature. [19] 2-D Frazer’s book purports to be anthropology & is really criticism, as its practice of separating the ritual from its cultural context indicates. The Cambridge Classical school,8 expanding into Chambers & Gaster, comes next. Their work is solidly established as lit. crit., not necessarily as source hunting historicism. The necessity of clinging to historical categories means that when the historical links aren’t there, you have to postulate secret ones, & hence arrive at a conspiratorial theory of history; this happened to Jessie Weston & Robert Graves, besides Mme Blavatsky (it’s in Harold Bayley too).9 [20] 2-D We turn to the psychological for some relief from this, & there we get the Jungian school, weakened by a tendency to consider art an allegory of Jungian techniques of psychotherapy. [21] 3-D In Western culture there have been four easily identifiable periods: the age of romance & epiphany (medieval); the age of the archetypal mimetic, the epic & drama (Renaissance to Baroque); the age of the realistic mimetic, chiefly the novel (18th & 19th cs.) and the age of the ironic. The lyric is first “naive” in Schiller’s sense,10 largely a paean, then conventionally elegiac or idyllic (courtly love & pastoral), then descriptively (what it describes is the poet’s emotion) sorrowful or joyous, then the self-contained riddle-lyric of symbolisme that is begotten in irony. [22] S.U. The desiring dream organizes the romance; it informs invisibly the epic & drama; it struggles with the novel; it floats helplessly on top of irony,

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the impotent dream of Emma Bovary, of Lord Jim, of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. [23] 4-7 I need to distinguish the killing of the dragon, which is apocalyptic, from the binding and leading home of the monster: the Cacus myth which signifies recurrence, the release of the water from the monster.11 To the former belong the leviathan of Isaiah [30:7] & Ezekiel [29:3]; to the latter the leviathan of Job [Job 3:8 and Job 41]. The subduing of the Blatant Beast in Spenser is recurrence. Similarly with the friendly and amiable dragon of China. This is comedy, but not epiphany: the captive Don John in Much Ado, the subdued Caliban who is not annihilated or sent to hell; the lost ape. I have never got the tamed monster clear as an archetype of creative (farming) work. [24] B Bibliography to be called: A Selected Reading List of Secondary Sources. Note: the customary caution that this list does not pretend to be exhaustive is too big an understatement here. This is simply a list of books which influenced, may have influenced, or might have influenced my own book, depending on whether I read them & consciously remembered them, read them & unconsciously remembered12 them, or did not read them at all, at least until after anything they could have helped me with had worked out independently. The reason for giving it is to suggest the sort of book that belongs to the category of “Poetics.”13 [25] 3-D So in the third chapter I list the five modes; if they are that: they’re rather types of narrative. First, the messianic, found only in some scriptures or pure myths; second, the romantic or superhuman heroic; third the high mimetic, epic & drama; fourth, low mimetic, bourgeois descriptive realism; fifth, ironic. The true epic has a high mimetic centre of gravity, so to speak, with two magnetic poles, one epiphanic & the other ironic, which become gradually clearer as the dialectic of the form does. [26] 3-D After that, I distinguish the romantic elegiac from the romantic idyllic. The former looks down to the ironic as possible, hence its three kidnapped forms of fear, terror, horror & dread. On this level the only struc-

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ture is romance & the elegiac & idyllic are only moods. On the mimetic level the epic structure contains the moods, but drama splits into two mimetic structures, tragedy & comedy. I’m not wholly satisfied with this, for obvious reasons, but it’ll do for now. [27] 0 Strategic regrouping: the chapter on meaning seems to lead straight into the above approach to structural archetypes. The third chapter, then, deals with, first, mythical patterns, & explains why such things form a part of literary criticism. Second, romance patterns, then mimetic patterns, starting with comedy, & then irony & satire, as my paper.14 With the division of four levels into eight modes (divine, elegiac, tragic, ironic, satiric, comic, idyllic & rhapsodic) I’m ready for Chapter Four, on modal archetypes. There I explain, first, the apocalyptic-anagogic grasp of symbolism, then its Druidic analogy,15 then the modal archetypes of Eros, then those, if there are any, of mimetic forms. The old difficulty of seeing a Generation mode in the imaginative world (Dante left it out of his vision) recurs here: perhaps the real mode is what I call the epic dialectic, which, as I realize now, has its centre in mimesis, & is not so much a mode as an alignment of epiphanic & ironic poles. Hence the stasis in tragedy & the repetition in epic. [28] 0 Anyway, the easiest place to go from here is smack into the drama paper,16 adding, however, the archetypes to the genres. That’ll be chapter five, & I feel that 6 should be the lyric chapter, the subjective counterpart of the focus of community. That, then, would complete the study of discontinuous forms, & the rest of the book (Chapter Seven to the end) would deal with continuous forms. I seem in the process to have eliminated a separate chapter on the theory of genres, which of course may go back in at any time. Continuous forms would occupy at least two & more likely four chapters (narrative-dialectic poetry, with notes incorporating my music paper & its unwritten painting analogue; prose fiction; epic; scripture). If I must have a zodiac, a chapter on rhetoric & another on poetic [poetics?] might do it. [29] S-4 This is just a wild pitch, but I need it: probably Graves is right in thinking that a goddess unification of myths preceded a sky-god one.17 In any

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case we have two areas, an earth-mother below & a sky-father above. At first, creations, in every sense of the term, were thought of as attached to the body of the mother. Mountains, trees, & so on were genetically unborn: they were symbols of Tirzah, the male within the female. Next they became symbols of papa’s prick descending: the oak tree thus changes from an earth cult to a thundergod cult, & similarly with Mt. Sinai in Arabia, at first Hagar, according to St. Paul [Galatians 4:24–5]. The stasis is that they are symbols of the son who is the Word: hence the tree alphabet, the mountain transfiguration (divine law becoming the Sermon on the Mount or Gospel), the church Tower, & the like. [30] 0 Present recasting: Three introductory chapters, one setting out the hypothesis, one on levels of meaning & the verbal universe, one on levels of narrative & the major genres. Then three on archetypes: one on the Orc quest of hero & dragon, one on Beulah symbols, & one on apocalyptic & Druidic moods. Then six on specific forms, order still variable, but possibly drama, lyric, n-d [nondramatic] poetry, fiction, epic, scripture. [31] G.D. [Great Doodle] 4. U Two principles: an archetypal story may reach us disguised by displacement. The motives for displacement are: plausibility (as when Andromeda is saved from the dragon instead of swallowed & disgorged by it), adaptation to another culture (as when the waterfall of the Grettir saga becomes the flat mere of Beowulf); expurgation, and simplification through forgetting. We reconstruct the archetype partly by analogy and partly logically (NOT chronologically) by discarding variables. In other words we do to all literature what is now done to the folktale. The only trouble is that “displacement” is negative: it doesn’t suggest, for instance, the efflorescence of New Comedy from an Oedipus pattern. To reconstruct the “undisplaced” form requires identification, the other principle. As Paul says, Hagar is Mount Sinai [Galatians 4:24–5]. Echo thus becomes identical with the reflection of Narcissus, & the leviathan in the sea with the sea (note that the universal real seems to work Druidically too). A third principle emerges as parallel structure. The same elements are in the stupidest damn Plautine comedy that are in the Athanasian creed, but we should avoid the fallacy of reduction, or translating everything into one level. Tact is largely that. After avoiding it, we can then see the possibility of it, as when Humpty Dumpty becomes

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an apocalyptic symbol of the Fall in FW [Finnegans Wake], or a St. George play a similar thing in Spenser. The thing is just to keep away from the chronological. [32] 3 As the historical progression goes down the levels from mythical to low mimetic, the mysterious becomes the familiar. Words of high romance, like awful, grisly, ghastly & the like, become colloquialisms or the splutter-words of middle-class females; ghosts become thrilling, fairies, at one time malignant demons, are transformed into household pets, & the witch of Puritan Salem becomes the Mother Goose of Victorian Boston. Along with this goes the real progress of making evil tangible & real. [33] 7 The epic chapter should mention the institution of games or mimetic dances by Theseus: cf. Virgil & Homer & Cornford’s Essay in Themis on the Olympics.18 These have the significance of a ritual mimesis of the leader by his followers. The dance is labyrinthine in Theseus & Virgil: cf. the ritual law given to Israel in the wandering mazes of the wilderness. In Xy [Christianity] this is the “this do” [Luke 22:19] or ritual dance around the altar, the recollection of the original quest. [34] 6 The ironic mode may work out to something like this: irony proper at the mythical end; satire in the ethical centre, and wit over on the dianoia side. Hence the connection I’ve always noted between Donne & Schiller’s satiric mode. [35] 6-D I’ve distinguished singing from chanting (or, as Yeats calls it, cantillation)19 in the lyric, but note that the lyric, as craft art, is between music & painting, and hence runs from the singable lyric close to music to the hieroglyphic or pictorial lyric, the extreme of which is in Herbert’s Altar & Easter Wings & in E.E. Cummings. [36] 2-D All art is equally conventional, but we do not notice that fact unless we are unaccustomed to the convention.

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[37] 4 Leonardo da Vinci says art has two subjects: man and man’s hopes.20 [38] 2 Sartor Resartus & the doctrine of intrinsic & extrinsic symbolism21 can be used to document my contrast of image (or motif, as I’m beginning to call it now) and sign. [39] 6-D Re what I’ve just said about Cummings: on the false analogy of natural science, we tend to assume lazily that such work is experimental and is going ahead to something, even though we do know that it has been done before in Herbert. Then we select from tradition & create another fallacy. It would be so much easier to think of Cummings as experimenting in a lateral, not a forward or (if we use the word “decadent”) backward way. [40] 1-D The introduction is getting clearer: at least I’m getting a clearer view of its back parts, like Moses in the mount.22 A good deal of the stuff in my abortive criticism article goes23—well, I need some paragraphs on the fallacy of determinisms, religious, economic (use Caudwell on Rimbaud)24 sociological (what I have) & literary (preceding paragraph). Then go from there to the attack on the selected tradition. [41] 2-D What Crane is after is what in texts of Greek plays is called the hypothesis,25 the informing cause that can be seen either as narrative (mythos) or as theme (dianoia). A hypothesis, as Tristram Shandy says, is an assimilator of facts:26 in (hypothetical) verbal art, symbols. [42] 5. U. Anagnorisis is also anamnesis, the recovery of memory, the picking up of what was before: hence the importance of amnesia in comic plot like Sakuntala, or its equivalent in the passion of Leontes. It’s a parable of the Butler-Bergson instinct-reason-intuition sequence, the reason being the humorous ritual-bound logicality of repeated action. Note that the third stage is the recovery of nature, real nature, that is, as of real reason.

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[43] D-0 The first two chapters (after the introduction) are on contexts & modes respectively, & are pretty clear in my mind, so I hope they’ll come without too much trouble. The third, on archetypes, I have the start of—the apocalyptic-Druidic dialectic—and the Beulah part is coming clearer, thanks to my keeping Morris, Spenser’s GA [Gardens of Adonis] & Shelley together in my mind: the world of desire as a mother-world eventually marrying the son-hero born of her & of the father of Generation, who dies off. I know what I mean—everything I know about archetypes comes from Blake, & yet I’ve been shy of using him. Then I go straight into a tangle of continuous forms: scripture, romance (centring on Dante) & epic, I suppose in that order. I might conceivably do that in a single chapter, although there’s both an Orc & a Los principle involved. Perhaps drama & lyric follow here; I don’t know. Then a chapter on prose fiction and—this is still very vague—one on ironic forms, & problems of rhetoric. Then a conclusion dealing with the positive stuff about criticism: Spengler, Marx & the dialectic of a free society; the problem of spiritual activity; art & religion as hypothesis & thesis—Lankavatara conclusion. [44] D-0 Let’s try it again: Contexts, then modes, in which some distinction between a cyclic-ritual and a dialectic-dream sequence comes out. The former unites structural archetypes (the circle of the quest) and drama, so I should see if the third chapter can unite my KR drama stuff27 with the quest, though the only structural archetype I really have clear is that of comedy. In other words, I have to carry out my original plan of following the KR article with a discussion of dramatic archetypes (structural ones, or ritual patterns). The fourth chapter would, presumably, present a similar analysis of lyrics along a straight horizontal sequence of naive, idyllic, elegiac and satiric, and from these work out the dialectic of modal archetypes—the Druidic-apocalyptic analogy followed by the Beulah archetypes. The only objection to reversing the pattern is an obscure dislike of working from right to left. But I don’t think the analysis of lyrics will work out differently from that of drama, and there are a lot of holes here. [45] 0 Anyway, once I break through all this, I can write [the] end of Part One and start Part Two with scripture (the most energetic effort to unite

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both sets of archetypes) and follow it with romance, culminating in Dante whose poem is a human (romantic) interpretation or reconstruction of Scripture. Then comes epic, with a discussion of PR [Paradise Regained] (and perhaps the Mt. Coes. [Mutabilitie Cantos]) at the end. This is followed by the (prose) fiction chapter, which deals with the breaking of epic synthesis into the four ethical blocks of romance, novel, anatomy & confession. This goes along with the corresponding types of poetry. [46] 0 After that comes a chapter on the comminution of form, which has for its main object a demonstration of how the kernels of Scripture, commandment, parable, aphorism & oracle[,] emerge from the pulverizing of fiction. A lot of stuff has to come together in this chapter, & I’m not at all clear how to unify it. [47] 0 Anyway, until things change, it’s this: Contexts I, Modes II, Structural Archetypes & Drama III, Modal Archetypes & Lyric IV, ScriptureRomance-Epic V, Poetic & Prose Fiction VI, Comminution VII, to which I have some hopes of attaching the conclusion. [48] D However: the real contrast is not so much between cyclic drama & dialectic lyric, which is largely eyewash, as between the circle of episodic forms in drama & lyric, which have little reference to history, & the historical progression of modes, which has a clear relation to the continuous forms (mythical-Scriptural; romantic-Dantesque; h.m. [high mimetic]epic; l.m. [low mimetic]-fiction; ironic-comminution). That almost suggests the radical rearrangement Contexts–Archetypes–The Circle of Drama and Lyric–Modes—the V-VII sequence above. But at present I think I’d do better to keep Modes where it is. [49] 7 Note: (1) the Quest theme, as a quest, can only be handled by a continuous form. Dramatic species may present it in the form of a circle, but I’ve always failed to align the quest, which goes roughly counterclockwise around it, with a clear-cut view of the hero moving through dramatic genres. However, if we return to the old notion of beginning E and taking N as the summer, altering the progression to

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idyllic-spring; epiphanic-summer; elegiac-fall; satiric-winter, we might get it. (2) As a historical cycle that misses the epiphany, the introverted irony of the archetypal masque stands directly opposite the extroverted irony of satire & mime. That may help some. Similarly on the action side the myth of the Dionysiac god is directly opposite the ironic. (3) If you miss the epiphany you hit romance, especially Dante & the medieval humanism that goes with him, & what you miss is the primacy of Scripture or the Word. This as my moral brings me very close to FW [Finnegans Wake]. [50] 0 Anyway, as modes are no closer to the sequence of continuous forms than archetypes are, I may as well keep the order, for the present, of Contexts and Modes–Archetypes–Drama and Lyric–Continuous Sequence— four big blocks. If lyric develops a tendency to show a cycle of the self, as drama does of the hero, I’d be all set, but that’s doubtless too much to hope for. If that does occur, however, Modes must precede it. In any case the moral of the book seems to be clear—too damn clear, but I can’t help it. The thing that sticks is the double meaning of irony as (a) due S, assoc. w. satire & the external view of the frustration of society and (b) NNE, where it fits masque, illumination and (this is the sticker) the ironic mode. In the lyric circle due S is, I think, metaphysical paradox (sparagmos of nature) which may help. [51] G? 9 Stuff that originally filtered into the centrifugal-centripetal meaning business, which seems headed for the comminution chapter: the practice-memory of centrifugal meaning goes back to language, language being defined poetically not as dictionary language but as one’s total verbally expressive potential. Thus language (Mallarmé’s langue or parole) is one pole of literary experience, the potential of the community, the waste and void chaos of unspoken babble that the Word (Mallarmé’s verbe)28 possesses & brings to articulate life, & so unites to the other pole, the literature or order of words which is its firmament. (In poetics we often have to speak poetically) . . . .29 Language is a potential applied existentially to a series of situations—hence the Renaissance orator, & hence the epistle & encyclical (Catholic and Communist) forms. But the poem is epiphanic & an incarnation, the infinite Word-order becoming

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an individual order accessible to man—hence the Muse, inspiration, oracular possession, & the rest of it. (Incidentally I think I’ve got the oracle problem pretty well solved). [52] 9 The comminution chapter, as I see it, begins with the theme of fragmentation. This is in the epic, in satire (satura or hash) from Sterne on, & hence in most fiction, in Rimbaud’s illumination ideas, and finally moves on to Dadaism & other movements of disintegration. This should bring up, I think, the discussion of the origin of art in babble & doodle, as in my KR meaning paper,30 and include the stuff about chanting, oracle, & the diagrammatic (Poe’s Raven) that I have in the [Liberal] book.31 Then I deal with the sparagmos or threshing of art-forms, and the emergence of, I hope & trust, the four kernels of Scripture. I have a much clearer notion of how to trace the evolution of commandment out of romance, via the Shelley-Morris (to Lenin) revolutionary approach to romance as the released proletariat form, the Carlyle-Nietzsche hero theme, and the curious connection in Catholicism of encyclicals & Catholic action as Thomist romantic32 action. The parable may, perhaps, involve the romance-anatomy fiction form with a central symbol, but I dunno.33 The aphorism shouldn’t be too hard, & the oracle34 I have above. Actually the most promising line for the parable is Joyce’s epiphany as applied to his Dubliners. Jesus’ parables are realistic. Also the fact that Jesus said “this do” [Luke 22:19] and started the bloody sacramental system is at present the breach the Catholics can drive into my moral. The hell with that: that’s not hypothetical. Repetition isn’t recollection. [53] 5-2 Where the relation of meaning to idea is that of form to content,35 there’s a rapprochement between the words “form” and “idea” which may remind us, as it has certainly reminded many critics, of Plato. [54] 9 In comminution the descriptive links of the written (low mimetic) word become the juxtaposed links of the hieroglyphic or metaphorical word. But metaphor, as described by Aristotle, leads to the concrete universal, and so out of comminution the sacred book is precipitated. Kafka should bulk large in parable, and Kierkegaard in aphorism: cf. too the [Anticlimax] notes in the other green book.36

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[55] 2-0 Perhaps the arrangement of symbols could be defined as: metaphorical on the literal level (or is it simply ambiguous?), causal on the descriptive, telic on the formal, and so on. [56] 2 Ritual and dream are the content of literature when looked at archetypally. No question of deriving it as origin, but of looking at, e.g. a play to see what its ritual content is. That content (for instance the one abstracted from Greek plays—by Murray et. al.)37 can be demonstrated, not as a ritual in the past (such rituals, when they exist, are only bad plays), but as the present material of the poem. [57] 3 Modes is clearer: there are four ethical poles: the isolated hero (tragic)[,] the incorporated society (comic), the isolated poet (satiric), the incorporated society of the poet (lyric or even apocalyptic). There seems to be a double gyre, the poet moving from anonymous worker to designated listener as hero moves from god to pharmakos, but there may not be— that’s perhaps too neat. This edges closer to the fact that the apocalypticironic axis is what keeps art on the fifth level, as satire is the destruction of moral rigidity by a counter-morality informed by fantasy (hypothesis). [58] 0 But there seems no way out of the inexorable zodiac: Introduction-Context-Modes-Archetypes-Drama-Lyric-Scripture-Romance-Epic-FictionComminution-Conclusion. Amen. Damn. [59] 6-D . . . “light” verse, for verse, like music, generally bears this title when it has the accentuation of a flat-wheeled train.38 [60] 2-3-D Chapter one—or rather two, for I must get used to counting the introduction as a chapter—ends with a brief reference to the two modes that transcend the moral level, the apocalyptic (or more simply creative fantasy, except that without the apocalypse there’s no point in fairies & stuff except as escape) and the high satiric. To explain these we need chapter

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two—I mean three. Three after doing the mythos modes swings over to the satiric and apocalyptic. That raises the difference between satire of the low-norm and Eros or millennial symbolism, which stay on the moral level, and high satire (winter) and apocalypse (spring: I mean summer; Eros is spring, which leaves a close approximation of low-norm satire & tragedy, as I have it in my paper).39 The point is that finishing with apocalypse ought to give me the lead for the chapter on archetypes. This latter is one chapter I haven’t found an end for, unless my counterclockwise cycle really works out, which, if it did, would link archetypes with the circle of dramatic & lyric genres. There are lots of holes here, although there’s a law–satire–invective–melodrama–quasi-tragedy link that may plug one. [61] 2-D Re the role of convention—in the latter stages magazines, with their rigid conventionalizing for an expectant reader, play a major role. [62] 0 What I’m trying to do is, after the archetypes chapter, to show that the dramatic circle is the conspectus of ritual patterns, a synopsis of structural archetypes, & hence really just covers the Orc circle within the apocalyptic-Druidic contrast. That means that the lyric chapter has just damn well got to cover the modal circle, or ellipse, that takes in apocalyptic & Druidic symbols more explicitly, & history & symposium only by growing into n-d [nondramatic] poetry. This brings me back to my original idea of connecting drama with structural or ritual archetypes, & lyric with modal ones originating in the whole sub-conscious process I use the blanket term “dream” for. (That seems to imply that in chapter four I must start with the dramatic or quest-myth, otherwise its exposition will be right to left, the opposite of three and the five-six sequence. I can do that easily enough by picking up the total hero point from the end of 2 & 3.[)] [63] S-7. (3-4) So 3 goes through the sequence or circle of mythoi, and then considers the question of what the artist has to say. This brings up the question of dianoia in its encyclopedic, or total revelation form. I can trace this through Scripture, Dante, Spenser, Blake & Mallarmé in summary. Analogy with Plato’s Republic, (high mimetic) where we’re taken inside

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Socrates’ mind to the pattern of the state. Question of the definition of what’s expelled comes up: hell, church’s hell, exile (note ironic conclusion of FQ [The Faerie Queene] where Spenser the poet is exiled from courtly society, forced on the wheel again after his one tantalizing glimpse of the Queen, so that it’s really a rueful acknowledgement of Plato, or something), Philistinism and Puritanism (Q1) [The Faerie Queene, bk. 1]. I mean by that that the target of satire is the enemy of God, of catholicity (secular and religious), of the centripetal courtly state, of the creative individual, of the craftsman. This is invective; irony is the residual feeling that the enemy is in hypothesis equally poetic (pure satiric morality is assertive & outside art). This leads to Druid symbolism & chapter four. [64] 3-D In the Middle Ages the poet is primarily a Catholic wanderer, an international member of the Church, or guest of an international aristocracy. If he doesn’t wander, he stays & catches books as they drift by, from France or Italy. Chaucer is on the threshold of the Renaissance, but just the same his knight & parson use narrative, & the tales as we have them begin with one & end with the regular encyclopedic serious-satire based on the 7-deadly-sin formula. All his low mimetic techniques are subordinated to that. Similarly, Thersites is the enemy of the heroic aristocracy generally, not a pro-Trojan, and hybris offends the Olympian aristocracy wherever it exists. [65 ] S-9? -3 ex? Satanism in the ironic period is evidently the precipitate of residual or high-norm irony. Or rather, it’s Carlyle’s everlasting no, the preparatory attempt to be individually invulnerable that breaks down (My crack about it goes here). Esseintes is only grooming himself for an evangelical priesthood.40 G.D. [Great Doodle] [66] 3-D-S. The prophet or defender of God has strange powers, like Elisha & the bears [2 Kings 2:24]; we hear legends of Celtic bards who kill with their satire. The preacher (revealer of the Word within the Church, in his negative satiric aspect) may have the romantic powers of the saint or the old wise man of romance, as in various natural cautionary tales. The orator can only point out the sinner in the courtroom (Cicero). The romantic

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points to a man like himself in every respect but creativity (note the romantic emphasis on the organic, genetic, natura naturans as opposed to the mechanistic (machine age) or fixed. The ironist points to a stronger man, like Mann in (I think) Tristan,41 or Orwell (or, of course, to a stronger society). Sweeney in Eliot—oh, I don’t know. [67] 0 I’m beginning to think that after all the scripture-romance-epic is best: organized in one chapter, making ten in all, which, like Paradise Lost, can be expanded to twelve if it hits a second edition.42 I don’t actually know enough about Dante to write an entire chapter on him—or the romance either, for that matter. Also one chapter taking them all in is closer to the way I’ve thought of them, as the main point even of the Bible goes in 4. And the book will be more manageable. [68] 0 So I may as well go back to splitting off my introduction & conclusion, and leave eight major stages or chapters, divided into three parts. Thus: [69] Polemical Introduction

0

Part One: Table of Literary Elements. Chapter One: Symbols. Chapter Two: Modes. Chapter Three: Archetypes.

Modes43 Symbols —

Part Two: Episodic Forms. Chapter Four: Specific Forms of Drama. Chapter Five: Specific Forms of Lyric.

Encyc. [Encyclopedic] Forms Genres

Part Three: The Sequence of Continuous Forms. Chapter Six: Scripture, Romance and Epic. Rhet. [Rhetoric] Chapter Seven: Prose Fiction. Chapter Eight: Satire & the Comminution of Forms. Tentative Conclusion

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[70] S-6-9 Some of the things here are: Eight represents a considerable simplification of the original rather pretentious idea. I think I’ll slur over the four kernels of Scripture (commandment, for instance, is an existential 44 problem, although it has its literary importance in “existentialism,” where the thriller form indicates very clearly its mutation from romance) and base the whole chapter on my satire paper,45 adding what I’ve already figured out about comminution as a sparagmos that eventually becomes an “anatomy” or satiric encyclopedia, via FW [Finnegans Wake]. Another point here is that satire represents the actuality (form) of literature46 breaking down into the potentiality of language, which enables me to work in my babble & doodle point. This chapter is clearing up, along with the way pointing to the “tentative conclusion.” Now if the lyric one will only simplify I’ll be all set. But now FW, with its incorporation of Journal to Stella babble & Tristram Shandy doodle, is beginning to loom up with overwhelming clarity as the climax of my argument of anatomy going from a cutting-up to an encyclopedia, a sparagmos (epiphanic in lyric and fiction) becoming once again a divine body. This idea of the epiphanic is, obvious as it seems, the connecting link of the chapter, & enables me to work in my [Anticlimax] points about the Gospel. I’m beginning to wonder if “this do” [Luke 22:19] isn’t really found, in the Gospel, in the exemplary action of Jesus, the existential situation he walks into the middle of, like the hero of romance in another note of mine [NB 7.160]. No, all the links seem to be there. It’s so important that satire tries to dissolve the exemplary and ideal concretions in literature, and thereby frees from ritual bondage. And that’s the difference between irony, which is a vision of bondage, and satire, which is irony on the march, taking the offensive against bondage. Note that satire extends from a low level of jeering with the herd to a high level of spontaneous Taoist (or Zen) laughter—it follows the curve of laughter in my talk.47 Irony doesn’t laugh: it’s poker-faced. The lynching mob thus takes its place in Eight as the lowest level of satire—pure moral virtue, as Blake would call it:48 pleasure in the observation of pain, not from it, as we have in irony of the 1984 type. Aristophanes’ use of sure-fire laughs at Cleonymus & Cleisthenes [Clouds, ll. 351–5] & Euripides’ mother [Acharnians, ll. 475–9] is very close to this (satire,49 Milton said, should attack only those representative of something big & dangerous)50 immoral form of morality. Thence, satire goes up the ladder of laughter, through the low norm of the experiential & the high norm of the innocent, to participating in the

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laughter of the gods at the fallen state of man (which is sadistic if God & man are not mutually involved). That gives me a Lankavatara quote.51 Note that satire firmly insists on the resurrection of the body, & will have nothing to do with pure souls—here I go back to my remark about Rabelais in FS7.52 Hence the “ass” in Apuleius, Agrippa, St. Francis, the Gospels & the dramatic festival, as a symbol of fallen human nature, the proletarian animal as distinct from animals like horses & hounds that are incurable romantics. [71] 10 Possible peroration: I want to avoid trying to prophesy what art will do, or urge on artists what they should do, which is the moral fallacy. I want to keep to the hypothetical structure of poetry & say what it may do. The victory of the totalitarian state would automatically enslave the artist, but its defeat would not automatically liberate him. What poets do by their own efforts will be psychologically some kind of the imp of the perverse, & socially some kind of the trahison des clercs.53 But one writes only after one has willed to renounce the will, and the wisest poets have always insisted that in the long run all the poetry that is worth listening to has been written by the gods. (But these gods are hypothetical, not existent, like the gods of religion, or non-existent, like the gods in the low mimetic or ironic world. Is it possible to praise God with any music he hasn’t composed himself?). [72] 2-D I suppose it’s in Six that the point that, for the epic poet a least, nature is Homer goes.54 I don’t know, though: maybe it’s part of the discussion of convention. [73] 0 On the literal level the poem is a joke, or ambiguous verbal pattern, & explanations of it are intolerable. Hell with it. [74] 3-4-D (5) The deaths of Ophelia & Desdemona are pathetic: that of Cordelia is tragic, because Cordelia has hamartia in Aristotle’s sense of being a strong character in the wrong place. Note that it’s Lear who becomes weaker & more & more pathetic: this is an interesting & recurrent formula.

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[75] S-I-U. Naive induction, or the atomic view of literature, sees each work of art as in the centre of an indefinitely extending amount of commentary. This very important fact (for the intro.) cancels out my Ancient Mariner point.55 [76] 4-6-D? The four bodies of modal archetypes are: the visionary comic or apocalyptic, the ultimate goal of comedy; the moral comic or innocent-millennial, erotic-idyllic, the ideal goal of comedy; the moral tragic or experiential, the ideal goal of tragedy & the natural or proximate goal of the comic, and the visionary tragic or Druidic, the ultimate goal of tragedy. The innocent, etc., is the natural (elegiac) goal of tragedy. [77] In drama we get into line with epiphany, but in the existential beyond is the mass (substantial) or the Protestant existential Word (principle). We get into line with Druidism, but in the existential beyond is the lynching mob, the gladiatorial contest (trace symbolism), etc. What about the lyric? Is it the mystical vision (St. John of the Cross) at one end and the Marseilleise type of kinetic war-song (Druidic work-song) at the other? [78] 10? Transfer to the Conclusion the point that criticism has a creative role to play in assimilating poems to their archetypal contexts by recognizing their conventions, so literature isn’t just a series of natural accidents of genius, but can develop, like [?], which is also dependent on genius but gets more quickly absorbed by a non-parasitic criticism. [79] S I suppose I should face somewhere the point that a hypothetical form is not only not assertive but not interrogative either in its mood. Dialectic, as we can see in a Platonic dialogue, is written in the interrogative mood, & is adjusted to an imperative. Hypothesis is always subjunctive; in anagogy, perhaps infinitive. [80] D Prose has something to do (a) with the acceptance of convention as opposed to the variable of ironic poetry (b) with a tendency to fictional as

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opposed to dianoia modes (Masefield is a low mimetic-to-ironic fictional poet,—hence he & his narrative forms are unfashionable) (c) with a tendency to the externalized sense of continuous narrative appropriate to the low mimetic. Where does that get me? I thought (a) was a new idea, & maybe it is. [81] 7 Chapter Seven (Epic) will deal among other things with the extrusion of the anabasis & katabasis in Dante, as compared with their subordination in Classical epic. Also the link between that & P.R. [Paradise Regained] which is at the top of the Tower of Purgatory, where Dante doesn’t stay. I’ve gone back to a straight 10-chapter numbering. [82] D In Three I suppose I should pick up Coleridge’s remark about how a sentence in Defoe would have been spoiled by ———— !’s and capitals.56 The over-emphasis on the explicit is a low mimetic danger: irony, or the effect of being unaware to an audience, playing it down, restores the balance of creative tone. Hell with it. [83] S-9-6? Prose again: continuous or causal narrative implies some possibility of mind, a sense of the initiative of the external. But still there’s that James Mill passage, logic used as a rhetorical device, like the isolating of the proposition.57 Maybe I can develop a cycle of poetry & prose for 9, in a series of quotations. There does seem to be a substantial change in the elements somewhere, analogous to the revolution of waking up. [84] 10 The stuff in Two about religion having no standard of judgement for culture goes in the Conclusion: it’s a typical example of my complexing and clustering type of exposition. I think the trope stuff goes there too. [85] 6-D Six: begin with the genre as classified by the radical of presentation. The radical of drama is the word mimed or given a bodily presence. Also a social one: group performance for audience point. The radical of epic is speech, an individual performance by a reciter, still bodily & social, but not social on both sides. Speech runs from cantillation at one end, the

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radical of the lyric, to the written word at the other, the radical of fictional forms. Cantillation is not singing: singing, which demands neutral & conventional words, is an alien form of chant, & one that poets who want words emphasized in their own way usually dislike. At one extreme is the mangling of words in a madrigal, at the other a hieroglyphic mangling represented by (maybe) Cummings—anyway Herbert’s Altar, or a step further than that. The lyric, then, is a self-contained poetic fiction (+ dianoia) and in a measure turns its back on narrative or didactic poetic fictions, which are normally fragments of a possible anagogic form—Wordsworth’s Prelude bits, the Kalevala bits, and so on. Well, not normally, but very often narrative poems belong to a cycle of legends, didactic ones to a corpus of thought. Anyway, the back-turning implies an ironic quality to lyric which means that in an ironic age it becomes the equivalent of poetry itself. Opening sentence: the word “lyric” indicates thousands of beautiful poems in lit—oh hell—the lyric may be the paradise of poetry, but it is the Augean stables of poetics, and the most I can hope is that my suggestions may be of some use to the next interested person. Now the radical of presentation. If a poet writes his poem in dramatic form, he is referring it back to theatrical or visual presentation, however little he may expect or even want to see it performed. The drama shades58 off into epic, or rather into spoken poems, through a reciter or rhapsode. The radical of epic & naive poetic fiction generally is direct speech, and at the naive end of that is cantillation, an undifferentiated mixture of all genres, though only while the audience, actual or hypothetical, responds to him do we have drama. Hence—essential to Five—ballads & songs with refrains are part of dramatic romance, or secular auto—they’re as theatrical as a Corpus Christi pageant, surely. Also my point about drama going from open air to dark illusory underworld shadows goes in Five. Well, eventually ’   5 [ta epe, “poems to be recited”], like the drama, separate from ’ B [ta mele, “poems to be sung”], & more insensibly down to more & more “sentimental” forms. (Say somewhere, I think in Two: I use the terms of Schiller’s Über Naif und sentimentalische Dichtung, in quotation marks, as the word “sentimental” is unsatisfactory in English59 & as usual there seems no equivalent). There comes a point at which the radical of presentation shifts from the spoken to the written word. Prose predominates in this latter period, but if I hadn’t written an article on prose fiction60 that tended to isolate it as a genre I wouldn’t have said the difference of poetry & prose was generic—it isn’t in drama.

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In the theatrical the author is concealed; in the epic the hypothetical characters are concealed;61 in prose fiction they’re both concealed. Spectator, listener, reader, as usual, there’s no one word for the member of a poet’s audience. In the lyric, hard saying as it sounds, the radical of presentation is the concealment of the poet’s audience from the poet. Hence what I call the ironic strain in it, also the fact that the primitive lyric is the oracle. It is to epic as, in prose, prayer is to sermon. Lyric speaks to the Muse; the Muse speaks through epic. Or does it? There can be however a lyric of specific personal address. [86] 6 It seems that in the circle of archetypes the lyric comes first, facing inward centripetally. Outside it is its fictional counterpart, whether narrative or didactic. Otherwise, it corresponds pretty well to the dramatic setup. Thus: archetypal auto—hymn, ode to deity. heroic auto—panegyric, Pindaric ode. heroic tragedy—elegy, ballad (half dramatic); Whitmanic-depressive sequence. ironic tragedy—complaint, love lay of cruel mistress. ironic comedy—satire, epistle, sonnet of direct address (revised: paradox poem). ideal comedy: paradox, metaphysical poem (revised: poem of urbanity). ideal masque—idyllic poem, Keatsian ode (poem of quiet mind retreating toward isolation, thence to terror). archetypal masque—ironic or symboliste lyric. [87] I-D In One say at end: there are ultimately two kinds of critic: those who think the words “law” & “rule” are observable phenomena of literature, & those who think they are moral mandates telling the poet what he should do. Also I think I should look at Richards & write my paragraph on the positive value-judgement as a sensational experience (which is what Richards says it is)62 & therefore outside criticism. There remains a third type, which grows out of experience. One (comparative) is a moral invasion of literature, one is a direct experience inaccessible to criticism, or at any rate to poetics, & one is a by-product. Nature is a poor basis for criticism.

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[88] D Say in seven that Bible has had lit. influence, therefore literary: if literary a critic can examine it; if he can it’s literature, & is as long as he does. Now: [89] 6 The riddle seems to be where the symposium is in drama, due east. Its relatives are the aphorism & the hieroglyphic, both of which fit at the end. Note how the poetry of paradox (which leads up to riddle) tends to grow out of an ironic sense of fallen human nature, & so to become, as with the [?], a poetry of redemption. So maybe the riddle does point to the saving oracle with its know thyself motto, as I’ve frequently thought. About all one can establish in this sort of work is the principle of contiguity—I’d better say that somewhere, perhaps in Five. But the crack about “where would you put so-and-so?” must be transferred to Six, preferably at the beginning. And where would you put, for instance, Herrick? I can’t shove everything into the idyllic section above the riddle. Maybe I’d better work out the cardinal points first. [90] 6 North must evidently be the rhapsody or possessed Dionysiac poem: Rimbaud’s illuminations hover close to it. On one side is the hymn & on the other the type of poem represented by the Eliot Quartets, Sailing to Byzantium, & the Duino Elegies. South must be the poem of self-doubt. But I think the region of ironic comedy is where paradox goes, & the crisp jewel–like lyric, the Herrick-Horace type of thing, is ideal comedy, & leads up to riddle. The mimetic half-circle is more conscious of an audience & the addresses to people are here: to Muses in the “spectacular” semi-circle. Better say at beginning normative nature of lyric in ironic period makes this an ungrateful pigeonholing task, more so than others. [91] 6 In West I’ve always known about the descent from the hero poem to the friend (and mistress) complaint poem, & from there to the satire. The hero becomes the friend I suppose due West, with the Shakespeare sonnets. (Note that we leave paradise with Donne’s Anniversaries & Shakespeare’s PT [The Phoenix and Turtle]: the anabasis there in the SI [Songs of Innocence]). Logically, due West ought to be a musical commandment:

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I’ve usually put Lycidas there, & that sort of thing is close to it all right— it is a musical commandment, being an existential occasion. [92] 6 The point about the lyric chapter is this: if all I can do is just arrange lyrics around the circle, the chapter is just filler, & I would ought [sic] to leave it out (I’m sure there’s a universal grammar somewhere that justifies that construction) if its absence wouldn’t cause too much hostile comment. The real job is rather to make the lyric chapter the last of a sequence of three on the wheel of archetypes, in which I can bring typical archetypes out of the contiguous groupings. Thus Yeats’ tower is NE, Shakespeare’s (and Donne’s) escaping birds SE, and so on. Also Blake’s giant forms may be brought in to some extent: Rahab & Tirzah would, I think, turn up NNE, in Baudelaire & Shelley: fictional counterparts would be the Witch of Atlas, Lamia, Christabel (these sound more WSW, though) and so on. If I can do a presentable job on that, the chapter will be a great triumph & not a sagging bridge between two relatively sound parts. So I think I’d better leave it till the end, as the main span of a Quebec bridge that’ll make the structure if it holds, & will make an ambitious ruin if it falls in the drink. However, I mustn’t get stage fright about it. [93] D-9 But now that I have my ten-chapter structure, I may as well get the relations of it clear. The first chapter contains two things: a theory of poetics and a theory of the study of the humanities. The latter is responded to in the conclusion, & the two halves of this argument are the bookends that hold it up. The former is picked up in Four (theory of the practice, or archetypal conspectus) and Seven (practice of the theory, or analysis of the anagogic tradition). From this descend a structural and a modal theme, which is also carried down a synopsis-archetypal-generic sequence. Two, Five, & Eight are all structural chapters: theory of structure, structural archetypes illustrated by drama, & structural genres63 illustrated by fiction. Or something like that. That leaves Three, Six and Nine as a sequence of modal chapters: again, synopsis, archetypes & genres. I’ve always known that Six & Nine were interconnected, but I see more clearly now that what I call “satire,” or comminution of fictional forms, is to the fiction chapter as the lyric chapter is to the drama one. That’s a point that’s been sticking me: a Charles Williams novel, or even a Virginia Woolf one, is important not as a romance-anatomy combina-

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tion or whatever it is, but as the fragmentation of a structure & the consequent isolation of a mode. And it may be this ultimate isolating of modes that gives the kernels of scripture, while the structure is a “federal” or “imperial” development toward the encyclopedic. [94] 10 (9) Meanwhile, it’s important to transfer to Ten everything that gums up the end of Two, including the religion-no-substitute-for-art point, & cutting of course the crack about young new critics looking for a church. Though the point that the Word doesn’t become flesh in the arts probably stays: the Tower of Babel however probably goes. That leaves the shape of Ten something like this: the dialectic basis runs from cyclic history (Spengler) to classless society (Marx). That isolates the problem of the relation of humanities to civilization, as a force liberating the past and liberalizing the present. Then comes the question of the autonomy of culture as greater than civilization. The poetic basis runs from cyclic ritual (Frazer) to revolutionary & informing dream (Jung, who doesn’t see that “individuation” is only the isolated east side of it, & as long as it is so isolated will be in danger of Blake’s analogy principle, or Nazism, just as Marxism is in considerably greater danger of Communism—because Marx himself was a malignant idiot, & what he was really talking about was democratic revolution).64 Then, with the (Arnold) business of the autonomy of culture as a spiritual authority, a collision with the (Newman) business about a (non-academic) theology as a third force unifying disinterested culture. I imagine I have to reject both the Newman-Thomist analogy & the Kierkegaardian plunge, & get to a Holy-Spirit JoachimEckhartism calling up the spirits of Blake & Bodhidharma. That certainly cuts the anagogic caboose off Two, & I don’t know where my beauty-inDegas goes, maybe at the end of Three, with the rest of the symbolisme stuff.65 Speaking of Joachim, I wonder if he didn’t get it turned round? First an age of the Spirit, of intelligible law informed by prophecy; then this is combined with an existential Word or Son who incorporates this into a historical tradition & institution; and now a third age of an infinite Father, who cannot be revealed except hypothetically as the ultimate form of ourselves. Such a Father would not be a Nobodaddy or Urizenic analogy; neither would the religious organization that attempted to reach him be a natural theology. But it would be a liberal, creative one, not concerned with rationalizing an institution. As I said in that Pieper review: not yet.66 I may begin Ten with a reference to the cartoon of Mr.

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Smith on the radio, & at the end see the Thomist analogy as the top of the Frazerian pinnacle, & the Kierkegaardian plunge at the top of the other. One’s the Dante effortless transportation, the other the end of P.R. [Paradise Regained]. Two peaks of Parnassus. Last sentence may begin: “And while the ultimate meaning of poetry seems to me to be providential, it is a providence that . . .” —well, that foresees, and provides. [95] 2 (D) In archetypal section of Two insert a crack about critics impressed by the ambiguity of rituals & dreams & so making oracular noises about the primordial images of unconscious being. I have some stuff on convention in Betty’s notes I may use, & transfer some of what I have now at the opening of Four back to Two.67 [96] D What I think I should do now is embark on a slightly more relaxed phase of writing Four while blocking out Seven, meanwhile writing the old section of Three when I can. At the next stage from that, the filling in of Five & Eight, I shall be ready for Princeton.68 The advantage of working out Four & Seven together is to decide on points like what Bible & Spenser goes where, what modal archetypes are to be dumped into Six, & the like. The dragon business, too. [97] 4-(D)-7 Well then, in Four I should realize that there are two quests, the quest of the ritual tragic hero, north to south down west, and the quest of the dreaming comic hero, south to north up east. One fights a dragon, dies & is swallowed by him; the other pushes up out of the dragon’s belly into society, or something. They both do that, and the archetypes would be damn closely related, if separable at all. But this business of the double quest, now that I’ve got it, is important. One kills a dragon & dies on a cross; the other builds a Tower & falls off it, like Finnegan, or doesn’t, like Christ in P.R. [Paradise Regained]. This tower image, & the way it holds Babel, Yeats, P.R., the Purgatorio, Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse, & the like, seems to be attracting things. Maybe my old hunch that the Jungian archetypes are progressively discovered going up east will work after all: the old man and the tower seem to click in Il Penseroso, in Shelley’s Prince Athanase, & so on. It’s reversed in Dante, where Beatrice takes over from Virgil, but so is the ritual in the avoidance of the dragon. P.R.

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has the normal sequence, in reverse. The tamed monster, mentioned earlier, goes up, & the interior katabasis I’ve mentioned in the stories of Hercules, Theseus & Perseus & retained in the epic is connected of course with the whole rotation (note the movement from prince to king, individual to social responsibility, as in Beowulf, Spenser, and so on.[)] I don’t like this double quest, as there’s only one Orc cycle in Blake, but it does seem to be there. Note that “individuation” in Jung at the last stage (the Tower) is in one of his books linked with the P.R. situation. Individuation is the worst thing you can do at that point. Yet it seems to be Kierkegaard’s point. Also the double quest could be, as it is in Blake, easily fused into one: there’s no real problem there, except that when they are fused they shut off the apocalypse—the closing of the persona, as I used to call it. [98] D At the beginning of Four expand the conception of displacement a little. Archetypes are displaced in the interests of plausibility, morality (I could use my Andrew Lang crack),69 variation of culture & poet’s interests, & so on: we establish the “real form” of the apocalypse by analogy, as we do a folktale. [99] 4 (D) So Four should establish the analogy, then go on to the single quest (cutting the archetypes, I think), then split it into a double quest & talk about the return of the comic hero through society to the anima-mother & final reconciliation with the father, then a fall & scattering of the Tower. Or something. It may be a simpler chapter than I’ve generally thought of it, if I keep siphoning off stuff into 5, 6 & 7. But maybe the order goes: 1) modal archetypes of the apocalypse & its analogy 2) the single quest 3) modal archetypes of the moral worlds 4) the double quest. [100] 7 Seven begins with the Bible, probably with Job, & explaining the Leviathan conclusion by picking up the whole Leviathan business. Well, actually it might begin with my stuff on lower & higher criticism, with my Isaiah & Song of Songs points. It has been unlucky for Biblical criticism as well as literature that the higher criticism has not been the work of trained critics. Imaginative leap vs. logical gap. Just a short paragraph: I don’t want to labor it & get into trouble. Then I go on to say that after thinking it over (that’ll do for the public)70 I’ve decided to work out, on my own,

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a general theory of the archetypal content of the Bible that I thought would be most useful to poetics. Then the is it literature brush-off. [101] 9 Transfer everything you have on satire, including the low-norm & highnorm stuff, the cult of beauty, truth & morality, & everything else, to the satire chapter. Content yourself in Two with a simple remark that the anything is the negative aspect of the everything, & completes the archetypal dialectic. Two is going to be worse off than the women in Candide: it won’t have any arse at all.71 [102] S-U.3 ex-4 (2) Transfer the “tell-tale article” point to the modal section of Three.72 “The tractor is unlikely to replace the sickle on the Soviet flag as long as an archetype is needed for Communism, just as, in the archetypes of ordinary communication, the sun still rises, ocean liners sail & imminent explosions hang fire.[”]73 Archetypal criticism is easiest when imagery is simple and generalized, as it is in naive romance, where all colors are primary & all emblematic features a haze of forests & flowery meadows. {The sharply demonstrative quality of some romantic, and nearly all ironic, poetry (the definite article, as a recent survey has shown, looms up into great prominence in modern poetry) where all images are specifically indicated} often forces the archetypal critic to assimilate the image to its class before he can see what it means archetypally.74 Two; square brackets Three.75 Jesus, I wish I could put things in the right places to start with. [103] S-4 Somewhere, perhaps in Three, I need to show how archetypes are not only archaic, but become fossilized in time. Just as a concrete metaphor formulation becomes a lazy abstraction, and76 mythical just as “Goodbye” has lost all its “God be with you” overtones, so “go to hell, you damned fool” no longer contains its archetypal meaning, though the whole scapegoat complex is in it. Poets have to reconstruct these things, & fight against fossilizing or “duck-talk.” [104] D Dale Carnegie: don’t tell the reader he should pay close attention here or get this point clear or make sure he’s understood before he goes on. Throw the onus on yourself to make things clear and orderly.77

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[105] 4-D Note that the outer breastworks of Beulah are social & dialectic; then they retreat into erotic fulfilment; then, with Marvell, to individual, or pure dream fulfilment. Here we are getting lonely & terrified because we are moving a little nearer the apocalypse. Comedy moves from the success of a society to the failure of the individual; tragedy in the reverse direction. [106] D Six: the lyric is primarily the expression of the I-Thou relationship. [107] 4-U. S-1D? Convention, or perhaps the cycle itself, affords a liturgical quality to literature: it develops the sacramental habit, the practice of bringing the mind round & round to the same point, that builds the systematic liberal education. [108] 2-D-3ex. The difference between the archetypal & the anagogic perspectives is that in the latter we realize how our conception of “nature” is the figure of speech known as using the container for the thing contained. And when twentieth-century physics begins to have some doubts about nature as the external container of the mind, literature develops new mythical elements and V Woolf & Proust a quasi-mystical effort to build a timeless vision out of the flux of time. This takes us back to Dante, whose purgatory is this world informed by the sacramental habit, which turns inside out at the top. [109] 9 (4-D) This floats around Two, Three & Four, but probably belongs in Nine: where all objects of desire are identified & have the same fulfilment, we have to pass beyond moral categories to reach them, as satire insists on the resurrection of the whole body. We get our apocalypse fed to us in moral terms, & need the help of satire (note the Apuleius-Tempest link of Maya at this point) to break through the institutional facade flanked with one guardian on the right-hand side and another on the wrong. We can see that in the remote past many myths originally most ribald & bawdy have been extensively cleaned up, or, as Victorian anthropologists used to say, etc. Joyce hangs on; Claudel sneaks past & goes round the circle again.

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[110] 4-5 Re Shakespeare’s influence on opera & whatever I have to say about the mother in Figaro or the king’s son in The Mikado: the plots of operas are of particular interest to the student of archetypes (especially comic ones) because they are usually much less inhibited (displaced by plausibility) than stage comedies, and preserve the original archetypal-romance patterns much more clearly. Five material; but it may go in Two. [111] D Three is a Spenglerian & historical chapter, & needs a paragraph at the end explaining that this has to be complemented by a view of literature as all at once contemporary, where the five modes are constantly present aspects of literature. The apocalyptic should be distinguished from the anagogic. The anagogic in my sense is as far as the hypothetical art and implicit structure of art can go: the apocalyptic is its content, or part of its content, but not its form. Yes, religion is the content of the anagogic only to the extent that it’s anagogic. So the apocalypse is the content of the central symbol organization (which is ethical), as the content of mythos is the eventual (if there is such a word) & the content of dianoia the conceptual. As ethos, art is the imitation of infinite man, which has a God-Man at one pole & a devil at the other. [112] S-7? Heaven & hell cannot be presented as form: they are like nature & history. Their existential aspect is not obvious: it can only be asserted, or inferred from the fact that it is content. The religious book does the asserting, & it’s descriptive. Dante’s Inferno is an ironic vision of life as form, & that’s how we read it. As an imaginary description of a place, it is a vulgar superstition, & describing it to scare people is an act of treachery to the human race lower than anything done by Judas, who might conceivably have acted from better motives. These are elementary objections, & the historical answer, that everyone believed this78 in 1300, or had to say they did, is neither true79 nor in any case relevant, as here (ch. 4)80 we are treating all art as contemporary. Because they are elementary, we may assume that criticism can easily answer them; but we may discover that we have not got the answer, only a conviction that the person asking it is naive & that we ourselves have a subtler understanding of the matter. But I imagine that our subtler understanding will turn out to be some variant of the fact that hell is content & not form, & content not as a place

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on the analogy of time & space, but the content of human pain & fear. Thus we have to see it inside man, or human life. It’s inside the order of nature, after all, & apocalyptically that’s inside man. [113] 7 (9) Similarly with the Paradiso: as an account of a world confirming the judgements of this one, with huge barracks labelled for officers only, with random & impulsive acts of generosity given a high rating if they’re done by a big shot—Dante’s morals are barbaric & romantic—it’s pretty dreary & vulgar. But we note (a) that Dante’s poem is explicitly preapocalyptic, awaiting the satiric resurrection of the body and (b) that although everything in Paradise is simultaneous & spiritual, he has to describe it as though it were hierarchic & natural. The content is apocalyptic; the form is anagogic, going up the 33-degree ladder of purgatory again. Separating the apocalyptic from the anagogic, & making the former get the hell out of literature, is a major clearing point. And the two poles of the anagogic are infinite unity81 (Dante) &82 infinite variety (Shakespeare). [114] 4-D Now ch. 4 will be easier to follow. The ironic vision is of hell, but it isn’t the infernal world. But it’s the rock bottom of human life, the cycle that turns around the cross. The anagogic vision is of heaven, but it’s the innocent or desirable cycle of birth & rebirth, the cycle that turns around the tower. They parody each other, up to a point. Next come the archetypal or magic world, and the low mimetic world of law, central & typical. In the middle is the alignment of reason & nature. [115] 9 (3ex.) Two important hunches. One is that there seem to be three general tendencies in poetry: the tendency to unify, which produces the encyclopaedic; the tendency to variate, which produces the episodic, & the tendency to explore the new, which produces the satiric. Drama & lyric vary; epos & occasional prose vary; epic & prose fiction unify; scripture of course unifies; the satiric tendency is to comminution of form. Or something. The other may not work out: it’s the notion that pity & fear are respectively the unifying and comminuting forces. Pity & fear are moral judgements in h.m. [high mimetic], reality and illusion in l.m. [low mimetic], loveliness & the beautiful-ugly in the ironic, & so on. I haven’t

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got this at all clear, but it’s coming. And in 4 I’m going to chuck my visionary-comic and the rest for my new scheme. Well, specific forms are still running in fours: I hope they don’t turn into a quincunx on me. Quincunx. No. [116] 9 (D) I’ve said that the cult of beauty is reactionary. Probably the cult of unity is too. Maybe that’s what pity & fear are on the anagogic level: unity & disunity, vision & satire, Dante & Rabelais. The whole point about satire in my old paper83 was that it bounced off the vision of hell. So it’s the comic spring, more or less. That, with luck, should clear that up. God, one out of eight. But what happens to my other conception of satire that goes in Nine? or is that a general discussion of the archetypal ironic? If so, why? Is it because the anagogic-archetypal-h.m. [high mimetic] sequence in 7 and the l.m. [low mimetic] one in 8 run straight into it? Must be: I’ve always thought so, anyway. Anyway the conception of the archetypal ironic, not tied to those damn historical sequences, is pretty useful, as it means I don’t have to muck around with the is-it-moral-orsatiric stuff any more. Only I don’t know now what the hell to do with that fourth ethical category. Because I’m pretty doubtful that, for instance, the combination of the moral and the comic really gets us the archetypes of Beulah. But it did seem to work out on the prose fiction wheel, so maybe I’ll find some use for it in 8. [117] D I am not using the term “ironic” itself in any sense unfamiliar to the reader, though I am extending the84 implications of the phrase “ironic art.” [118] 4 Spenser has the pure anagogic in I and the top of the purgatorial mountain in VI: maybe I have to distinguish them. That’s a bore, because there isn’t any apocalyptic-type anagogic that works, as far as I can see. Anyway, Error & the cannibal feast in VI are Druidic. The point of V is evidently on the circle of law, though Spenser probably buggers it: maybe he’s trying to put it on reason, opposite II, which is certainly the experiential. Anyway III is Arcadia, though some of the implications of GA [Gardens of Adonis] are higher. Obviously I can’t expect clear zoning laws. IV is higher up—and lower down too likely: the Druidic analogies

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of the hermaphroditic Venus thing are lower than Busirane. The release of waters is springish—I should find names for the zones of Beulah. Utopia, Arcadia, Bardo and whatever the ark-boat complex is. [119] S-4-D Some difficulty here: your circle narrows at the top to a single tower, ladder, rope, mountain or what have you. (It follows that the cross is allotropic with Babel, Sinai & the Rapunzel arrow-ladder business). Yet the forms don’t narrow: they expand to scripture. Oh hell, that’s not a problem: encyclopaedic forms go around the circle, including the encyclopaedic ironic. But, if I keep the apocalyptic outside, how do I manage to call Dante—I suppose it’s archetypal archeXypal?85 He’s anagogic, and yet scripture is anagogic too. I can’t just identify the anagogic with the encyclopaedic. There must be some significance in the fact that there is no book that claims to be written by the devil. This point seems to be connected with something I’ve been losing sight of: the upper limit of Beulah. [120] 9 Five & Six deal with discontinuous forms, Seven & Eight with continuous ones, & the process of building up continuity. That’s variety & unity. With Nine we reach the problem of the impingement of continuity on discontinuity. Result, epiphanic fragmentation and encyclopaedic sparagmos. [121] 9 (6) Nine: the things about satire are: it’s founded in prose & the low mimetic, but it’s a release from the moral censor to the extent of being a counter-censor. Hence a preoccupation with wit & paronomasia which begins from prose (opposite direction from symbolisme) and begins to absorb the poetic. (Hence too the combination of the moral & the fantastic I noted). In Wulfstan there are oratorical tricks close to poetry: from sermons develops the prose-poetry that gets stagnant (though still satiric) in euphuism; invective in Rabelais, Nashe, Burton, & so on until it’s clear, via Sterne & the Journal to Stella, that the satiric is a grinding up of literature into language, the actual into the potential. Thus it works toward exploration and away from the unifying tendencies of anagogy: it works against habit & association (Gertrude Stein & the N.T.); it dissolves existential connections & stereotypes (realism & “beauty”[)];

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democracy of the body and “decency”—link here, which Carlyle didn’t see, with the role of the satiric as the destroyer of worn-out clothes—and the resurrection of the naked body. Anything capable of being laughed at is part of the body of this death. Or something: it still won’t quite come. [122] D If 3, 6 & 9 are modal chapters, as I’ve thought, then 9 may have some relation to history, & so be able to deal with FW [Finnegans Wake], Rimbaud, Nietzsche, & other comminuters. The thing is I just don’t know in what order to arrange lyric [5] – epos [5] – epic [4] – romance [4] – Scripture [4] – satire [3–4] – comminution [4] – prose kernels [5?].86 That’s at least eight things. Hell, nine: I’ve left out prose fiction [5]. Nine things in four chapters. The most logical arrangement at the moment appears to be lyric > epos for 6, scripture-romance-epic for 7, prose kernels & fiction for 8, and satire & comminution for 9, but that leaves a lot of fitting together still to do. And what about 10, that just seems to go back to 1 and 2? And why does drama just sit it out? [123] 9 D (9) It seems as though 6 should be lyric > epos > primitive and Classical epic, down to Virgil. Then 7 can do its job, following Dante with Milton. That’ll give me a few things like Gilgamesh for 6–7 links. Now 7, as I have it, ends with P.R. [Paradise Regained]. So how the fucking hell do I get from there to the prose kernels in 8, unless I just draw a long breath and say harrumph? Maybe I can say that epic runs into a dead end in P.R. and to understand what happens later we have to turn to the writtenradical forms. But even so it’s a break. The 8–9 links are a bit clearer, though there’s a subversive element in prose that is the link between satire & the more conservative, poetic, oracular elements of Scripture. Perhaps prose is the rhythm of exploration, being a break with the ritual bondage (that’s another satiric point) of nature. [124] 10 In Ten don’t play down the “Marxist” element in ethical criticism. Criticism must look at lit. from the point of view of a classless society because society, as a presence, is a class structure, & our rules of rhetoric relate to that class structure. The conception “bourgeois” is as relevant to this as “Baroque” is to the other.

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[125] 9 In Eight (I guess) you have to pick up your old idea about poetry as intermediate between two kinds of prose, historical & aphoristic. I’ve given this an entirely new context (it’s in Nine, surely, where the attempt to isolate an aphoristic rhythm forms part of the satiric comminution because it converts philosophy into rhetoric—oh hell, gras87—so notice the satiric tendencies of (a) the metrical character sketch and the Baconian essay and (b) the general chewing up of propositions into language that makes assertive statements vanish in front of hypothetical ones, makes the literary the verbal universe, and is, I imagine, what Wittgenstein means by silence. [126] 9 Nine: irony comes from identifying reality & appearance in presentation, & allowing the reader to hear the overtones of the other modes, chiefly the romantic one, which,88 being closest to wish-fulfilment, contradicts it most sharply. Militant irony, or satire, comes from a discrepancy between latent apocalyptic & manifest moral content. [127] 4 It seems to me that my babble & doodle study, whether it goes in 6 or 9, ought to at least return to the subject of reduction to myth in archetypal criticism. I can’t put everything in Four, & maybe my Napoleon crack doesn’t really belong there.89 And a demonstration of how archetypal crit. is founded on commentary, with e.g.s from Molière’s Malade Imaginaire & Handley Cross, is floating around unattached. I can’t yet seem to get it into 4. But maybe the whole Spenser stuff belongs in 7, and I should simplify 4: if so, it would go there. And where does whatever I’ve got to say about Keats, or Hawthorne, go? Does it go in 9 as part of the epiphanic breakup of epic? [128] 4 Add false gold to the demonic-epiphany symbols: false Florimell, Timon, Volpone, the miser & hoarder of treasure (father-dragon), Shylock & the casket symb. (Saturn’s gold-lead & the folklore gold-shit ambiguity): gold calf & brazen serpent. [129] S I have no notion where this goes: the relation of the spatial to the conceptual is an old philosophical problem. The attempt to find a term that has

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a relation to time parallel to that of conceptual to space is so far as I know (which is not very far) a much more recent problem, in our day assoc. chiefly w. the name of Bergson. Maybe this goes under the treatment of Rcsm [Romanticism], with its organic biological metaphors & its attempt to catch the existential rhythm as well as that of dialectic language. Everything that’s dynamic & kinetic & organic & creative is likely to be spoken of with approval. A work of art is thought of as an organism, or rather as an organ, the product of a creative life. (This results in a linguistic difficulty still bedevilling the present book, of how to express the fact that although the artist, like the tulip that knows it should blossom in spring & not November, knows what he’s doing, he knows it as a creator knows, not as a critic explains.) [130] 9? I suppose it’s in Nine that I talk about Blake’s Los & Tirzah as, like the primitive mana or orenda, a fluid, primitive, dynamic kind of associative thinking (the question of association seems to be on the whole a Nine rather than a Six one) opposed to static blocky concepts. The point about establishing the powers of words, & perhaps my highbrow-supercilious point, fit here, though the first only by repetition. Or maybe even Ten is concerned with the relation of static thinking (verbal arithmetic) to existential thinking (verbal algebra) where literature can help the social sciences grapple with primitive ideas, in the course of explaining how all assertion eventually shuts up. [131] 10 In Ten bring in Jeans again, and, under “the universe,” say we should avoid the definite article, with its trick of involving us in unnecessary arguments over essence. We use it to avoid what seems an even more confusing pluralism latent in the indefinite article. [132] S In the 1951 (Seattle) arrangement of this book I had a chapter 10 (the scheme then had 12) dealing with principles of archetypal reading— inductive or exemplary criticism taking the edge off all this Olympian deductive stuff. That chapter got crowded out in the rearrangement, and now it’s trying to make a comeback. First I was trying to stick it in at the beginning of 4, before the theory of archetypes was ready; then, like an infant’s libido, it wandered around & finally settled in the arsehole: the beginning of 10, just before the Spengler bit, making the present 10 a tele-

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scoping of the Seattle 10–12. Now I’m beginning to wonder if it doesn’t belong at the end of 6. I have a hunch that if I can’t put it there 7 is going to become 5, as it not impossibly should be anyway. [133] 5 Well, what’s, been bothering me is this. The present 6, after outlining the theory of genres, should then (cutting the part about rhetorical prose, which transfers I think to the beginning of 8) split off episodic from continuous forms & take the former around the wheel. Then comes the question of the development toward the continuous. At present I have this organized as (a) the movement from music to event (b) the movement from picture to idea. Each is in three stages. The (a) one is (i) lyrical assonance (ii) imitative harmony (iii) absorption of instrumental musical rhythm. The (b) one is (i) verbal design (ii) ambiguity (iii) diagrammatic basis of thought. Now, something that’s obviously true & yet has been something I’ve so far had to ignore is: these three stages are the organization of rhetoric on the literal, descriptive, & formal levels respectively. At each stage we are or can be involved with prose too: it isn’t a poetry to prose movement. There isn’t much babble in prose, but there can be, and there’s imitative harmony (Huckleberry Finn)90 & music in it—certainly ambiguity & design too. So, I don’t see what’s to stop one from going on into (a) the absorption of music into ritual and (b) absorption of design into dream. The question is (a) if this really covers my technical ideas about reading archetypes (b) if it really leads from epos to epic. It should have something to do with my ideas about poetic concepts (Orc, etc.) being, like savage ones (mana, orenda) in anthropology & primitive ones (censor, phallic father) in psychology, fluid, electric, direct, dynamic, kinetic—everything except the old static blocks-of-matter rationalism. [134] After all, babble & doodle exist at the beginning of drama too, not only in work songs (which are lyric) but in the commedia dell’arte & minstrel ad libbing. The point is that the process is no longer observable in drama. [135] Then again, there’s the feeling that I haven’t paid enough attention to what it is in the middle that unites narrative & meaning. I talk about metaphor & symbol, but I may not have done enough thinking about style, image, and, above all, character or ethos, the poetic man in the middle who is hero in mythos & poet in dianoia. This man, god, sacra-

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mental or imitative god, hero, friend & mere man, may have something to do with why religion has a Word of God. I keep thinking there’s something smack in the middle of 3 that needs a conclusion tying up with the introduction and, perhaps, leading on with the present 6 material into 4. No, that last won’t work. But it does seem as though 6 went something like this: genres, episodic & continuous genres, wheel of lyric & short epos, the principle of continuity as in rhetoric (which makes the term continuity difficult, as it has a narrative start) or verbal mimesis, rhetoric as literally b. & d. [babble & doodle], descriptively i.h. [imitative harmony] and amb. [ambiguity], formally musical absorption & diagrammatism,91 & archetypally (ah!) the repetition and efflorescence of images. The former is the natural cycle pattern, the latter displacements from an identity. (Repetition of course is of a variable, so it includes modulation and counterpoint). I hope I’m not shaping up a 4–archetypes 5–genres 6– episodic forms arrangement here. But both repetition & efflorescence seem to combine in anagnorisis, the recognition of the end as like the beginning (causal in tragedy, recapitulative in comedy). [136] Six: in establishing powers of words, the poet breaks up the habitual paronomasia on which ordinary thinking rests—nature, state, idea, etc., etc. This is of course a link with the comminution points in Nine. [137] Now: Seven begins with the transition from archetypal to anagogic reading. Narrative poems depend for interest on sheer sequence, meaning poems on sheer coherence. Epics begin in the middle & work back to a beginning and an end which are more or less the same point (same in cyclic; analogical in dialectic, only the nadir opening is the real analogy & the beginning more the upper limit of Beulah). In other words, the principle of anagnorisis is the principle involved: it’s in (mimetic) drama, in epic (Penelope in Odyssey), and in the microcosmic lyric. Note that the drama-epic-lyric sequence of high mimetic is cyclic, & naive drama, myth & naive romance are more spectacular, melodramatic, & dialectic. Again, we pass from archetypal to anagogic when we become aware of a potential encyclopaedic shape in myth, stretching from Creation to Last Judgement. We don’t need an Ur-Snorri behind the Elder Edda. [138] The dragon the hero kills is the past, the beast that was & is not & yet is (cut this from 4: it goes in 7). Leviathan-devouring time, mouth of hell, Maya, static world of assertive thinking. It’s because of things like

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this that I need 7 before I dare finish 4. I wish a 4 archetypes–5 genres–6 anagogic forms–7 episodic forms sequence would stop bothering me. It wouldn’t really make the present 4 any less complicated that way, though. [139] Three deals with mythos & dianoia & with the elements of ethos in it. But except by a rapprochement of comic & moral modes, I haven’t located a central ideal ethos, a man who is (a) heroic (b) social (c) creative. Yet I go on to a central rhetorical organization of mythos & dianoia which goes up the five levels. Now somewhere, and right in there, is the identity of man, God and the Word. The five rhetorical organizations, I think, are: (1) epiphanic and microcosmic (2) empiric and occasional (expanding) (3) cyclic and based on anagnorisis (4) dialectic and heaven-hell visionary (5) apocalyptic, containing Maya. I don’t know if I can go on to align this with an old hunch of mine or not: I mean with the cycles (1) of waking & dreaming (2) of life & death (individual and social-historical) (3) of the year (4) of the sun (5) of the real presence in the void. [140] One thing: Nine seems to have something to do with a united front of the physical world: the first or ironic level, the second or realistic level, and the satiric half of the third or decorous level. Above that is the romanticizing of spiritual substance, the humorless dream. Satire, realism and irony. Perhaps, as I’ve occasionally thought, Dante is the synthesis of everything above this—well, not everything, because scripture, being outside, is below as well as above. The quality I used to call schalk92 is & always has been the theme of Nine. [141] I keep wondering if I can do Four as pure modal archetypes, reserving all structural archetypes for the present Seven. Because many details of FQ1 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 1], such as the identification of Una & the ark, are unintelligible without a Bible commentary. I don’t see how I can separate 4 & 7 so widely. [142] Well, anyway, I couldn’t. So now Four deals with modal archetypes, structural archetypes of epic & romance, & ends with an account of the Bible & the diagram of a cycle between two worlds. Five, the former Seven, then deals with archetypal forms: Dante, Tasso, Milton, the Romantic experiments & the difficulty of a low-mimetic epic, & FW [Finnegans Wake]. Then, the cycle of Twelve phases & Spenser. Six, the

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former Five, applies the wheel of phases to drama; Seven, the former Six, to lyric, epos & occasional prose; Eight, still Eight, to expanding forms, mainly prose fiction. Now, Nine as I see it will have to take the whole development from babble & doodle through to epic, separating the archetypal-dialectic-romance-federalizing-apparent decorum tendency off from the satiric-exploring-resurrection of body one. The meeting of satire & scripture through comminution. That should just fill Nine nicely with what I know, or think I know. February, 1953 [143] The reason why I confuse myself with such a clutter of notebooks is that my ideas for this book don’t fundamentally change, but things like chapter-numbers & arrangements do. It’s different with the Blake: there the general scheme was pretty fixed: I was writing hard the whole time, & the only strategic change was that 73 chapters consolidated into 12. There was, of course, great rearrangement after I had a complete manuscript, of a type I’d rather like to avoid here.93 [144] The rest of this notebook I’d like to devote to ideas for the Introduction & the first two chapters. As those are all practically done, I shan’t need this book much more. [145] Add to Introduction: The quantum theory of criticism, that the reader should confine himself to “getting out” of a poem what the poet “put in,” is critical illiteracy. Understanding a poem in terms of the poet’s intentions is one small part of criticism, but criticism has many, many other things to do. By the way, did I put my KR “premature teleology” point anywhere?94 If not, it goes here. [146] Also, I may want to say, as I’ve thought of saying, that to write such a book as this by the methods of naive induction would be to project a survey of literature that could never be written in one’s [one] man’s lifetime, could never be published, & would never be read. I have proceeded deductively, setting down the essential principles as axioms, & being rigorously selective with examples & illustrations. Even the mass of notes I have collected, infinitesimal as it is beside the mass that might well have been collected, would dismay the most sympathetic reader.

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[147] At the end of one: the question of a cyclic theory of history is not of course in our purview: we are concerned only with literary phenomena. The morals we draw are principles for the remainder of this book, as follows: 1. The correction of provincial standards of criticism. 2. The recognition of counterpoint in mode. 3. The recognition of the fact that every form of literature presents an analogy to myth, as that term is generally understood in religion, so that myth becomes for the literary critic an element of literary form. 4. The recognition of a constant federalizing or encyclopaedic tendency to unite myths in a definitive structure. 1a —the recognition that almost any systematic theory of literature can be exploded by irrefutable new facts. That is, the relations of literature to society are so variable that any theory assuming some constant factor will turn out to be horseshit. Now I just wonder if the whole dissolving-of-existential-conventions business in satire doesn’t belong here? The catch is that the definition of art as hypothetical isn’t enunciated until 2. I originally had this at the end of 2, and maybe that’s where it goes. Because the anagogic section ties up the end of 1, and yet the hypothetical-vs-existential aspect of art introduces a new phase. [148] Memorandum: by the end of February have a complete draft o the Introduction, Chapter One & Chapter Two typed out. Have Chapter Three done at least as far as the comic myth. By the end of March have a draft of Three, an outline of Four, and a draft of at least a large part of Five. By the end of April have an outline of Six and a draft of the Conclusion. Incidentally, I think I’ll add Conclusion notes to this book. That will leave Four & Six to write, starting May 1. These “drafts” are to be thought of as penultimate, the versions (without footnotes) just before those to be sent to the publisher. [149] The conclusion is, in the first place, to be my essay on the plight of the humanities, the philosophy of education, the unity of knowledge, & all the rest of it. As I see it now, there are two main themes: the relation of literature to the other arts & disciplines, and the relation of the hypothetical to the existential: i.e., art & religion. I call it Tentative Conclusion, & begin, possibly, with the New Yorker cartoon.95 [150] The flow of the chapter, so to speak, is Spengler & Marx. The authority of the former emerges from Chapter One, of the latter (no

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doubt) from Two. But of course all the genuine “Marxism” in my book comes straight out of Matthew Arnold. Historical criticism leads to the conception of historical recurrence, of quasi-cultural rhythms in history. Dialectic criticism considers this in the context of a classless society: hence the values of art are above the needs of society. [151] Left & right sides of ritual & dream are antithetical forces that need to be resolved. They are neither Hegelian ideas (i.e. half-truths uniting in a tautology) nor are they Marxist material forces. They are rather materialized ideas, or social forces. Ritual, by itself, tends to automatic repetition: comedy delivers from that. Dialectic, by itself, forms a rational structure that has to be broken up by new facts & experiences: in short by the rhythmic pressure of ritual. I’ve found these forces in the thought of Butler & Morris respectively, as well as in the Fascist & Communist conceptions of the leader. [152] The upshot of balancing the two is spiritual authority, the impartial contemplation of culture. We can’t look primarily for values, because values are social desiderata, & subordinate to culture, though they follow from it. Spiritual authority cannot incarnate itself in anything but a social & inferior institution. There must be a distinguishing, without dividing (Coleridge)96 of theory & practice. Failure to distinguish is, whether Christian or atheistic, totalitarian (Mill). Hence the balance of ritual & dialectic must be kept by neither action nor reason, but by hypothesis. Plato’s closed state is the only alternative. And I think this is where my Bias point about Rousseau’s buried utopia goes.97 You can’t ever incarnate or work towards that: it’s always Morris’s Earthly Paradise, the land of informing myths, though not an old or sick one, as there. [153] And after this, I think, which is really establishing the social or low norm of art, I can suggest the conception of art as being to the verbal sciences what mathematics is to the numerical one. The word is the distinctive feature of the human being, and verbal sciences are those concerned with man, the others with the silent, or wordless, world. I think the point about a final Babel, or plurality of languages, goes here. [154] The second part then deals with the relation of art to religion, of symbolism to belief, of the totally hypothetical to the totally existential. I suppose I should look at Bevan’s book.98 But even if I do transfer a lot of the anagogy stuff from Two, the mere demonstration of the fact that art

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is hypothetical & religion existential is not enough. Here I have a hunch that what corresponds to the Spenglerian dialectic is the Butler-Thomist theory of sacramental analogy in ritual, & what corresponds to the MarxArnold one is the Kierkegaard either/or leap. Newman seems to straddle both—actually the position is the same except for the definition of “church.” But the details of the argument are vague. My general position is that, as the existential belief is a postulated axiom of behavior, it’s actually hypothetical in origin. Again, I have my Tower-of-Babel and plurality of languages point to work out, or work in: I’m not quite satisfied with the formulation of this position in the Yeats article.99 But my final position will certainly be the one I’ve derived from Buddhism & its view of reality. That is, roughly, all theses have antitheses, including all syntheses, & the only true synthesis can only be a hypothesis, the ultimate surrender of all theses, including theses about noumena, the unknown, the unknowable, and the divine. [155] I even think that the Poe business, or pointing out that art is between action & thought, may properly belong here.100 [156] After the Smith joke,101 explain that this is the place to discuss the place of the humanities in culture, & transfer the sentence from the introduction about the despair of explaining what the subject is. [157] Of the two versions of one, keep, of the earlier one, the first page. Keep in mind the linking of chs. one & two, though the place of linking is different (2 instead of 1). Consider the question of keeping “sentimental”; you may well need it in an expanded version of low mimetic. [158] “although the word “s” [“sentimental”] means something else in English, we do not yet have enough critical terms to dispense with it. In q [quotation] marks, then, “s” refers to a late recreation of an earlier mode, as Rmcs’s [Romanticism’s] “s” form of romance.” 102 [159] Why is it that culture has something to do with keeping archetypes unprojected? Projecting them perverts them into Nazism, witch-hunting & the like & it seems to be always wrong to have life imitate literature.

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Internal evidence indicates that most of this notebook was written during 1953. Some of the later entries might come from 1954. In paragraph 7 Frye refers to his article “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy,” which was published in 1953. He indicates that he wants to see High Noon, which was released in 1952, so the notebook was obviously written after that. In paragraph 73 he refers to an article that was published in the Summer 1953 issue of the Yale Review. The numbers that are centred above many of the entries, representing chapter numbers and sections within chapters for Anatomy of Criticism at this stage of its development, and the letters (“I” for Introduction and “C” for Conclusion) appear to have been added later. The meanings of a number of the other abbreviations are uncertain. The notebook is in the NFF, 1991, box 26. It has “Records” printed on its green and black cloth cover, and it measures 19.7 x 12.5 cm.

[1] The structure of the book has now settled into seven chapters. I might get a bit more color in my life if I assigned them to the spectrum, taking out the introduction as indigo, partly because it’s essentially done, & partly because I could never see two shades of blue in the spectrum anyway.1 [2] Well, the second chapter is still on the five levels of symbolism. The opening of it, on the difference between literal & sigmatic meaning, is clear enough, & I think very largely done. The middle section is relatively clear, but I got my original idea about it from listening to Crane’s lectures,2 & a lot of its terms are pretty vague. I’m sure there is an Aristo-

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telian level, corresponding to the high mimetic, in which the images are to events & ideas (or things) as form to content. More study of the Poetics, & especially of Aristotle’s conception of metaphor, is indicated. My hunch that the image on this level is between the example & the precept is sound enough & so is, I think, the general contrast between positive allegorical & negative aesthetic-ironic relations of the image. In the present scheme of this chapter the theory of genres is expounded with the archetypes, yet in the scheme of the book as a whole it (genres) goes in the middle. [3] What in general I want to say about archetypes & anagogy in the second chapter is there now, though it needs expanding and relaxing, especially the anagogy. Additional material will emerge as I write the next two chapters. [4] The anagogy chapter will, I think, begin by picking up the social & individual aspects of symbolism. This is the antithesis of drama & lyric, to be picked up later in genres. The former is anthropological & ritual, & is founded on the cycle of nature. It has a dialectic defining the hero as solar & fertile, & the heroine as lunar & chthonic, & similarly defining the evil principle as old, sterile, wintry and monstrous. That’s one pole: the opposite is the dying god. Well, I can work out the two poles all right. The other aspect is psychological & dream, & is founded on the cycle of libido & ego. Its dialectic is sexual triumph as opposed to virginity under old man & old woman. So they’re closely parallel. {Wonder if the old Damon hunch about Blake & Shakespeare works out in these terms:3 the prophecies are certainly dream poems.} This, with the musical analogy by way of opening flourish, should conclude Part One of the—what is it?—yellow chapter.4 [5] Part Two will generalize the two structures in an apocalyptic-Druidic table of imagery. Then the general theory of displacement, which should be a lot easier now I’ve figured out a beginning for the chapter, and the modifications made by displacement to the states of innocence & experience respectively. This should be followed by a carefully written paragraph or two, as the conclusion to Part Two, showing how many problems clustering around the word “allegory” are pseudo-problems, at least when given the can-this-be considered allegorical-of-X-or-not treatment. But maybe this will have been looked after in the symbolism

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chapter. I’m really thinking of, say, the thing that Robertson got so excited about at the Institute.5 [6] 4 Part Three could then deal with our friend the zodiac, using, perhaps, Spenserian parallels, but not, I think, trying to drag in an analysis of the Bible. That, I’m beginning to think, goes in the green chapter.6 Consequently the third part has to do with the double cycle of the tragic & comic hero, as the confusion about the dialectic romance & the cyclic one has now been partly removed. I still have questions about the zodiac: for one thing, I don’t seem to pick it up again later in the book, and I wonder if I haven’t been badly hypnotized by the success of my drama article.7 But it does help to have this new beginning: I think I’m getting a lead on the ritual synthesis as a Venus-Adonis and the dream one as a CupidPsyche one linked with the phoenix and turtle canonization business. [7] 3 Well, anyway, my present idea for the archetype chapter is to break it in four myths: the spring myth of the comic, the summer myth of the romantic, the autumn myth of the tragic, & the winter myth of the satiric. For comedy I can use my—God, is it only three?—articles.8 For romance I can use a lot of [Rencontre] notes and reflections. Tragedy is something I haven’t thought about very deeply: for one thing the equivalent of what I call the comic needs a rather broader term: heroic, perhaps. It has to do with isolation & being chosen. I must go see a Western movie called High Noon.9 The satiric myth (the ironic is the individual core of the satiric, which is social) can be based on my satire paper10 and other things I’ve thought about like sparagmos & saturna. [8] 5 The genre11 chapter I have all the parts to, but the articulation of it has always been a tough problem. The way it looks to me now is: divide the genres by modes of presentation into drama, epos, scripture & lyric. Do drama & lyric (with perhaps rhetorical prose).12 Then separate the middle two into three tendencies. {First, the encyclopaedic tendency:13 this leads to considering the whole epic tradition: Bible, Dante, Milton.} Second, the fictional tendency: the basis of this is of course my prose fiction paper.14 Third, the dissociative or satiric tendency,15 which arises from the attempt of art to explore & dissolve existential concretions of beauty,

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morality, form & other censors. That makes a long bloody chapter, but I got a lot of ideas, & they have to go somewhere. Besides, I used to think of the chapter as about half the damn book. As it is it covers four chapters of the old scheme. [9] I Then the way will be clear for the history chapter, most of which will be that screed I’ve sent off to Kenyon Review, & can use when they send it back.16 It should be followed by a pep talk about Spengler and the containing forms of cultural history. Cyclic & contrapuntal approaches to characterization. I don’t see so much here at present beyond what I’ve already done, though I originally had other ideas I may recapture or transfer. {Now the red chapter}.17 [10] C The rhetoric18 chapter now looks like the climax, as it’s certainly the end, of the whole book. It’s still in the hunch stage, but some of its main outlines are getting clear. I see two meanings to the word rhetoric. One, it’s an art of persuasion expressed in oratory. Two, it’s the art of disinterested verbal elaboration. One is the opposite of the other, which is why they’ve been traditionally associated. Persuasive rhetoric is, as such, illegitimate in poetics, & enters literature only in (bad) allegory.19 As Aristotle says, it’s the “counterpart” of dialectic [Rhetoric, 1354a], which latter persuades to act on objective truth. This raises the question of how I deal with the “poetry & belief” business. I used to think I had to steer a middle course between the neo-Thomist view (sacramental analogy) and a Kierkegaardian one (analogical either–or leap). Maybe I still do. But in any case I’m out to bust the supremacy of the existential, in a Lankavatara direction, & partly by showing that the first existential effort—predication—is a postulate (derived from grammar, perhaps, although after fighting every kind of determinism, it wouldn’t do to construct one out of my own subject). My ideas about intellectual revolution as an inductive principle go here; the question of spiritual authority, & all the rest of it. But what the hell has all this got to do with the original idea of the chapter, theory of rhetoric? Note that persuasive rhetoric is also hypothetical, in other words it’s what Plato meant by sophistry, & accounts for the argument in Republic X,20 which is based on an identification of poetics & rhetoric, followed by a challenge to poets to write my book. I must read the Sophist more carefully.

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[11] 6 I mean, I also have ideas about the details of rhetoric. My “babble and doodle” points; imitative harmony; metrical complexes; musical & pictorial influences; paronomasia; the diagrammatic basis of thought; techniques of reading archetypes; dissociative rhythms of speech (talking to dogs, etc.). And so on. I’ll straighten this all out eventually, but meanwhile the chapter seems split in two. [12] I’m still bothered about postponing the five modes to Six, just because they’re historical. But maybe the reintroduction of “myth” in a narrow sense can lead to a following explanation that myth as the top mode is the anagogic kernel of the four others, thereby fulfilling my promise in Four of linking up my use of “myth” with other people’s. [13] No, it won’t do: I’ve got to try another reshuffle and, oh God, I hope it’s the last, the last major one anyway. I think now of six chapters, plus introduction and conclusion. Introduction as now. The cultural history one then becomes the first chapter, not the sixth. I’ve got to have it early, yet the sequence of the others seems fixed. This is, of course: Two—Symbolism; Three—Anagogy; Four—Archetypes; Five—Genres. Then the proper Rhetoric chapter comes as Six—it seems to follow Five naturally: anyway, I found myself drifting into Six when I was trying to write Five. Then the Conclusion follows as I’d originally thought of it, and as a contemporary-thought Spengler-Marx-Thomist-Kierkegaard summary. That way, it seems the natural pendant to the rhetoric chapter. The advantage of going back to the idea of a separate Introduction is that the numbers of chapters Two to Five remain the same—no small advantage in my present addled state.21 [14] Well, that clears up, or begins to clear up, a major problem: the problem of what the hell to do with the encyclopaedic analogy of revelation. Now that principle emerges from the first chapter, will be worked out fully in the fourth, blast it,22 and can just be a link in the fifth. That is, I shan’t need anything more on scripture-epic as a genre, and can get Five free to deal with drama, epos (i.e. fiction) and lyric. Even the satire business should have been absorbed, so far as it’s FW [Finnegans Wake] or encyclopaedic satire. Dissociative rhythm is rhetoric: breakup of beauty, morality & other censors is probably Four stuff.23 The only fly in the oint-

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ment is a feeling that the present Six is an anticlimax. But it won’t be if I can really work out my hunches.24 [15] About the only thing I feel like adding to the Introduction is a note on the fallacy of the quantum theory of criticism: that the reader is supposed to “get out” of a poem what the poet has “put in” it.25 [16] Otherwise, I’d better go through 1 & 2 & rewrite 2 to follow 1 instead of preceding it. Transfer all the guck you’ve got in the present 3 to the archetypal section of 2, including the stuff on naive allegory. But of course the question of allegory as archetypal framework stays in 3. And now that 2 follows 1, the references to symbolisme & to the association of the ironic & the literal will be clearer. No, wrong again: archetypal framework goes back to 2. [17] Now. Three & Four have always been hopelessly stuck, & I wonder if this will unstick them. Start Three where I started this notebook, chortling over my wonderful pickup from Frazer & Jung, which seems to have vanished in the reassembling. Clear all of the present rubbage out of the way,26 & shove everything worth keeping back to 2. Then work out the following key points: ritual & dream; recurrence & desire; cyclic & dialectic elements; hero as achiever & hero as lover (Eros-Adonis); desire of society to kill death or malignant individual and desire of individual to swallow society (dream-world as circumferential). At this point I can distinguish structural from modal archetypes, and from there go on to the five archetypal worlds & the theory of displacement. But even before I come to this I should have adumbrated what I certainly have to pick up: the four great myths. The myth of pure dialectic or achieved heroic quest (romance); the myth of pure cycle of frustration (satire); the upward moving individual (comedy) & the downwardmoving one (tragedy). [18] Then I finish Three by outlining the four great myths, beginning with comedy. That one’s in hand: romance should be an exhaustive analysis of the quest-myth, starting with the Hercules-Theseus-Perseus pattern of primitive epics & romances, using parallels as late as the 19th c., & so on. Tragic myth still vague: maybe it’s Frazer’s centre of gravity. Satire will be all right. Then I bring all this together around the Great Doodle & the Zodiac.27 I sacrifice some things here, but the advantages are bigger.

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[19] In that case Four is concerned exclusively with the problem of the encyclopaedic or scriptural form. This being a genre, Four is the proper bridge between archetypes & genres. Incidentally, the Great Doodle & Zodiac can either end Three or begin Four, depending on length. Anyway, Four is the boiling down of all my Epic points. I see really only three parts to it. Part one: the scripture as a literary form; primitive scriptures; the literary form of the Bible. Part Two: four, or rather three, or even two, analogies of revelation: romance, Classical epic, low mimetic encyclopaedic forms, satiric epic of the Rabelais-to-FW [Finnegans Wake] variety. Perhaps the theory of comminution goes here, but at present I don’t think so. Part Three: the dialectic movement of epic from the Bible, Dante; Spenser; Milton to Paradise Regained. [20] That way, Five will have all the tiresome encyclopaedic stuff cleared out of it, and if comminution really does go in Four—or Six—then five will have three main parts: drama, fiction, lyric. I can’t get out of a lyric part. If lyric ends Five, it’ll lead naturally into Six. Six has to deal with the origin of literary form, and one of its main themes is the kernels of prose forms. So it’s not at present impossible that the wheel of rhetorical prose actually belongs in Six.28 And my original hunch that Six is fundamentally a chapter on satire & comminution, if it works out, would at any rate balance Four. Most of my balances get upset sooner or later, though. [21] Well, finally, I think I’ve got the book to where I don’t need to worry about it any more as regards the distribution of material. All I have to worry about now is what, not where. I’m beginning to realize that Three, which is apocalyptic imagery, displacement, & the four myths, can still be called Theory of Anagogy. Four, encyclopaedic forms, is the real Theory of Archetypes. [22] One: Romanticism had a limited sense of evil because it was going back to romance & its absorption of pity & terror into pleasure. [23] Five: Nietzsche said he invented the dithyramb: he certainly shares it with Whitman & Blake29 in the NE. Rilke, with Eliot, is NW. [24] Conclusion: if it is intolerable that the critic should be a parasite, it is equally intolerable that he should be confined to third-rate intellectual processes.

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[25] I think in the Conclusion I need something about the Darwinian structure of art, as a total hypothetical body throwing out dialectical shoots in all directions. [26] 1 Characteristics of the ironic: cutting out invocations30 (O this & that) which imply direct address; cutting the “is” out of metaphor; searching for novelty rather than communicable convention; searching for the natural speech which is not direct address, but the avoidance of the common metrical basis of epos. Herbert Read’s True Voice of Feeling is full of excellent quotations: see p. 133 on Pound.31 The tell-tale articles too.32 [27] 4 4—at the end, a note bringing in the contrapuntal suggestion at the end of 1, showing e.g. the Plautus–Xy [Christianity] link.33 Say one of my aims is to do a Harrowing of Hell of cranks. Also bring out the way the essential fantasy-worlds—of giants, faeries, talking animals34 & the unborn—reappear in satire (Swift, Butler, Fort). [28] 4 4—the wooden horse is a leviathan symbol. [29] 1 (some C) One: my own treatment of modes suggests something of the truth about Plato’s view of poetry. It seems to me that Plato treats poetry as he treats everything else, commenting on every essential aspect of it, without systematizing his views. The Phaedrus deals with poetry as myth, and the poet as inspired oracle. The Ion deals with the romantic mode, with the poet as encyclopaedic & sacramental, & his rhapsode as bound to memory (and inspiration at one remove). The actual context of poetry in Plato’s day was high mimetic, & perhaps I can establish that Symposium deals with this, & that its conclusion about tragedy & comedy somehow fits too.35 In any case the Republic turns on the question of the poet’s relation to the h.m. [high mimetic] state-builder, and raises the issue of mimesis: perhaps the poet is essentially low mimetic, which in the context of Plato’s ideas means the imitation of social reality, itself an imitation of dialectic. It’s a serious question, directly opposed to the thematic aspect of l.m. [low mimetic] (Rscm [Romanticism]), as we can see if we compare Plato & Blake.

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Plato social rank philosophizing guards artisans artists

divided line dialectic intelligence faith illusion

Blake social rank divided line artists imagination artisans faith soldiers enslaved energy philosopher-king Satanic Selfhood

[30] 52 Now, if I could find a treatment of the ironic mode in Plato, other than the “new criticism” techniques of the Cratylus,36 I’d be all set. What about the Protagoras? Note that the literal thematic basis of irony, the poet as craftsman, is affirmed by Aristotle, & it is precisely this that is denied in the Republic. 37 [31] 1 and 3 One: the counterpoint of modes solves the pseudo-problem of the importance of content. The fallacy of judging art by its subject-matter, & the fallacy that subject-matter has no hierarchy of value in itself (Bentham’s principle that pushpin is as good as poetry38 is no more absurd than the principle that, say in painting, the Last Judgement & a dead duck on a table are on exactly the same level as pictorial subjects) are based on ignoring the middle principle, that central subjects may be approached directly, as in myth, or indirectly, as in realism. Three partly. [32] 22 Two: Carlyle’s distinction of intrinsic & extrinsic symbols is one I have to absorb at some point.39 For one thing, apart from bogus mysteries, there are two kinds of genuine ones. There’s the mystery one can annihilate by a solution: the answered problem. This is a matter of extrinsic symbols or indicators: it consists either in discovering the referents of the indicator (the meaning of the cross on a church tower) or in discovering the correct indicators of a phenomenon (a mathematical formulation of a certain kind of physical behavior). The intrinsic symbol is the structure formed by a group of indicators, like a work of art or a personality, & it is a mystery that remains a mystery even when it is known (Fennell says that Tillich says this in the Revelation & Reason part of his Systematics, but I can’t find it),40 like, say, Lear or Macbeth. The thing is that any one set of explanations or interpretations or meanings we provide for a work of art merely establish[es] a set of extrinsic referents. The mystery is an essence

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or noumenon: it can never be directly known, but is intuited.41 Maybe this comes into the end of the Conclusion. Extrinsic symbol : archetype : : intrinsic symbol : work of art. A rumble of associations is not intuitive knowledge.42 [33] 1 and 4 The moral of One has always been that realistic plots are displaced myths. That must be brought out, & put beside its development in Four, which must have a large section on counterpoint in plot. I’ve discovered Humphry Clinker: Smollett has a conventional plot, but no one will suspect him of hankering after esoteric mythical allusiveness. Besides, the “soul” of his book is the last feature of it that any ordinary critic would pay any attention to. That’s what I mean about standing back. Well, katabasis, recognition & a whole set of displaced & projected identities are all there, & it’s an excellent blackboard piece: release of humors too. There is a displaced identity with his father, for instance, as the names show.43 [34] 3? There are only two groups of archetypal critics at present: those who react to archetypal analysis either with “Why should it?” (i.e. have those features) & “Why shouldn’t it?” The possibilities of further developments in crit. lie exclusively with the second group. [35] 5? The text of Shakespeare is primarily addressed neither to the audience nor to readers, but to actors, actual or potential. This fact makes Stoll’s points pseudo-problems.44 [36] 4? When Edmund gives up his goddess nature, he becomes a limp rag doll, a mechanical puppet. Hugh Maclean mentions the possibility of this as a type H6 [Henry VI] hero: the faceless creatures watching pain at the end of BNW [Brave New World] (he said the comic strips, actually).45 [37] 4 Spenser presents a Hegelian pattern in the first 3, & I think also the second three, books. Conventionally, the order of grace must include nature. In Book III & in Comus, the synthesis of grace and nature is con-

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tained at the upper limit of Beulah, chastity, something that’s bigger than Xy [Christianity] without relapsing into paganism. This is a very difficult point to put across, but it’s beginning to look like the key to the interchapter. For the Tempest is there, & perhaps 28–33 of Purg., & the question of what the hell’s at or near the centre of your damn circle has always been there. No, Four: analogy of innocence.46 [38] 25 The five kinds of metaphor fit my scheme pretty well: anagogy is a theory of identity; archetypes in the epic are species-genera relations, as the encyclopaedic form sweeps up the episodic. Genres are based on analogies of proportion in form. (Give more examples of the a of p [analogies of proportion]: in Carlyle, for instance, reality is to appearance as body is to clothes. The combination of the is & the as distinguishes this kind of metaphor from the pure as (simile) and the pure is (identification). Rhetoric is really a theory of juxtaposition. [39] 23 Better introduce the intrinsic-extrinsic stuff in the opening of Two, which is where it belongs. The exact point at which a centripetal structure with intrinsic interest crystallizes from a group of indicators is not easy to find, nor is it necessary to find it. But the object contemplated for its own sake is radically distinct from the object contemplated as sign or indicator, like an image in an R.C. [Roman Catholic] church, which has an indicative or sigmatic use independent of its aesthetic value. I didn’t get this clear in FS. [40] 4? One: Meredith’s Egoist (note the archetype of three women, high, low & Middleton; their baptismal names Constancy, Joy & Radiance)47 is a novel with a coward for hero; but the irony goes deeper; it’s a study of pride or the non-heroic basis of heroism: the aristocrat who is heroic because he doesn’t dare be anything else (La Bruyère).48 [41] C Conclusion: 4k elaborates a complementary pattern:49 1. empiric—pragmatic—inductive—short run conservative—long run liberal—Coleridge & Burke—existential situation—primacy of society— historical

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2. a priori—dogmatic—deductive—short run liberal—long run objective—Bentham & James Mill—theoretical basis—primacy of individual—philosophical. The connection of this with my W & E is clear enough. The interpenetration of deductive withdrawn vision & inductive concrete vision, the interpenetration of hypothesis which is not causation & data, is a principle central to all my thinking: the conception of Romantic & Classical as the Yang & Yin principles of art is a sloppy version of it. [42] 4 The conception of Four as the opening of Part Two, the practical half, is clarifying. It’s getting less a straight treatment of encyclopaedic forms in the five modes, & more an introduction to the art of reading archetypally. I think Humphry Clinker (mythos) & The Egoist (ethos) are good: it shouldn’t be hard to find an equally serviceable dianoia one. [43] 5 Five (drama): there is no generic difference between a morality play & an immorality play: the characters in the crudest Restoration comedies have allegorical names as they have in Bunyan. [44] Somewhere in Four there might be a sliding scale of allegorical names, ranging from Christian through Allworthy & Joseph Andrews through Ebenezer Scrooge through Patterne & George Knightley (Magee) to pure random choice.50 [45] 23 In Two make a bit more fuss over your sliding scale of allegory: the dividing point at the lower half is where the Romantic Coleridge-Goethe distinctions between “symbolism” and “allegory” come in to help rationalize a distrust of allegory & a turning away from it.51 [46] 6 In the discussion of Metaphor in Two put in, on the second level, your point about the “prose conscience” in Whitman producing his “as if.”52 Also the typical kennings of this period tend to equate uneasily a concrete image with an abstract idea: quote “life’s best oil” series from JR Lowell’s Harvard Ode, & find someone stuck on the adjective concrete noun of abstract noun.53 Note the contrast with the more orthodox kenning: the whale-road for sea, with its functional (tropological) overtones,

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& its descendant, the 18th c. “finny tribe” type of thing, which deliberately, as Blake would say, blots and blurs the image,54 (h.m. [high mimetic] proceeding to low. But I think a lot of this is really Six stuff. The importance of “life’s best oil” kind of thing is that these are unconsciously produced rhetorical units, which are therefore more revealing. [47] 25 Honig says—he must have got it from Dunbar—that an explicit parallel was recognized in the MA [Middle Ages] with Aristotle’s causation, thus: literal-material; allegorical-formal (which Aristotle explicitly calls archetypal); moral-efficient (quid agas); anagogic-final.55 This agrees well enough with my scheme. But does my literal involve a withdrawal from causation? That might explain some of its “ironic” qualities. [48] 4 Check the mythical alchemical symbolism in Ruskin: he seems to have a general red king & white queen in his mind deriving from a TruthBeauty skeleton which becomes explicit in Sesame & Lilies. Dougherty! I must make a list of people to whom I am indebted for having supplied them with their ideas.56 [49] C Anyone dealing with a natura naturata, the spread-out world, is a painter: the distinction of primary & secondary qualities is a metaphor drawn from the relation of canvas to painting, or from the pencil–line to the splashing of color. (Note that this is cultural determinism.57 I should say it would be inconsistent to be that, but very easy to do, & then give a whole series: painting-physics; sculpture-biology; music-law, & the like.) Conclusion, in this form. [50] 1 and 4 One: I should qualify the counterpoint passage by saying that the underlying tonality does establish a unity of mood within which the fictional devices chosen have to harmonize. You can easily introduce a ghost in Hamlet, but not one except as a joke into JA [Joseph Andrews] (“out of complaisance for the sk [skepticism] of the reader”).58 Criticism should follow suit. Violations of reality in l.m. [low mimetic] fiction—telepathy in Jane Eyre, spontaneous combustion in Bleak House, Dimmesdale’s A letter in SL [The Scarlet Letter]—can be used in Four, however, to show how strong the impulse of the other modes is.

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[51] 24 In Two you have a brief reference to the possibility of an archetypal scale corresponding to the allegorical one. Develop it from one extreme of pure convention (phrases in ballads)59 down through superficial convention (quote Petrarch’s woes couplet from Sidney)60 through organic convention (Lycidas) to a middle (Shakespeare): thematic-conventional convention (Pound), then down through the ironic stages, such as a self-conscious avoidance of convention (Whitman Lilacs Last61 would make a good contrast with Lycidas), & so on. The point is to show how a prediction of convention has no effect on conventionality, but merely alters the superficies. The place of the copyright law in the two lower modes fits in here.62 [52] 4 (now 3) The displaced analogies are changing a little: 2. analogy of innocence

3. analogy of nature

4. analogy of experience

div.63 God as Father, Mother shepherd

God as monad; gods or angels as aristocracies

God as immanent will or indifference as Shelley’s Jupiter

sp.

fairy palace: magic illumination: ring of chaste fire in DC (Divine Comedy) & FQ 3 [The Faerie Queene, bk. 3]

crown & halo burning burning city (Burnt of heresy demonic Norton), fire of spoils & witchcraft of Poynton

h.

Protected community chastity [?] virtue

king (noble) & priest; C of L [Court of Love] mistress; artisan; pharmakos as traitor

democratic oratoric aggregate

an.

sheep

horse (chivalry) lions & eagles

ass ape Jensen64

veg.

pleasant pastures pear tree of Mansfield65

flag, standard, banner pennon

Ferdinand’s log pile & symb. comb. w. tools (axes)

min.

yellow sands

palace & court; centripetal temple & cathedral

tools & machinery

cl.

moon still waters

royal barge or Argo circling Oceanus

bateau ivre destructive element

冧

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[53] 4 The tea & madeleine scene in Proust is a communion symbol.66 [54] I-4? Add to alchemic symbols the fire & ashes complex: a) all the 17th c. stuff in H More67 (as late as Yeats) about raising a plant from its ashes, or seeing it in its ashes. b) the phoenix & the funeral pyre symb. Generally. c) the resurrection of the soul of the fiery furnace from red dust. d) the alchemical retort. e) the transmutation of earth or shit into fiery gold. [55] I-4 I noticed in I [the Introduction] that leviathan symbols turned into mob or social opinion symbols in ironic contexts. The connecting link is the hydra. See Meredith’s Egoist. [56] 5 Five is simply drama, echoed by lyric; fiction, echoed by epos. Rhetorical prose goes in a footnote; the larger implications of prose forms belong to Six. [57] 4 The Antichrist symbolism surrounding Patterne in the Egoist is not there to make him bad, but to show what is in him, & in us, as RLS [Robert Louis Stevenson] said—hence his name.68 He has a senex or alazon role (a very deep alazon one) & the natural tendency is to absorb what we can of the senex & throw out his humor. This makes the senex correspond to the law, and his absorption, along with the driving out of his humor, not him, as the pharmakos, leads straight to the swallowing of the parents & old winter (the law) in the romance quest. (Note, by the way, that the thing reabsorbed, treasure or swallowed parents, is imgvely. [imaginatively] prior to the quest for it, so that the romance begins in medias res.) The Egoist, like Jonson’s Alchemist, makes a comic point of importance: power corrupts, & tragedy is about powerful people, but in comedy the mystery of corrupted will is implicit: what would these creatures do given the power? Mammon & Patterne are precisely parallel. [58] 1 And don’t forget the Measure for Measure–Middlemarch parallels as an e.g. of h.m. [high mimetic] & l.m. [low mimetic] treatment. I wonder if One

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should end with some introduction to the theme of Four, contrapuntal reading—no, hell, it isn’t counterpoint; it’s just straight transposition. Both ways: 1) reading realistic forms as transposed myths 2) reading highly conventional forms in more sophisticated terms, which is where the above & perhaps the Molière point should go. Yes, that’s what will really sew up one, and the “once for all” intention point can go in the 0 [Introduction]. [59] 1 Tiny point: use of Greek parallels in E. O’Neill is in an ironic context because the characters are “ignoble,” & the parallels themselves are used as myth. [60] 5 Five, lyrics: Marvell’s Garden is about the poet’s body entering the green world, then his mind leaping from correspondence to creation, in which Nature becomes a Maya-principle, & one with the primal mind, or creation before the fall, God alone, & man a pure individual (fall placed with creation of Eve, symbolizing the objective or bodily aspect of the green world). NE, & higher than Keats: it’s a distilled essence of the philosophy of romantic comedy, at about phase 5.* * Is there any remote chance that this might turn out to be NW on the lyric circle? The 3 circle is shaping up like this:

allegro romance

penseroso romance

tragedy of serenity

comedy of romance

tragedy of passion

comedy of humors

irony

satire

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which puts the sage’s withdrawal from the quest into the mind on the opposite side of the epiphanic point. No. [61] 5 The 5 pattern is: apocalyptic-scriptural or encyclopaedic; romantic-epos; h.m. [high mimetic]-dramatic; l.m. [low mimetic]-fiction; ir. [ironic]lyric. Curious how I’ve been fumbling around that. Curious too how only the mimetic forms have come clear so far. But hell, there’s no other way around it. And that will alter the shape of 6. Poetic & semantic rhythm remain as they are, but now I have to distinguish epos or running rhythm from epiphanic-centripetal gazing, which latter is now in the centre & not on top with the Bible. What happens to dissociative rhythm in this shuffle I dunno, yet. Unless my music vs. oratio distinction in running rhythm really means that there are two rhythms here, one obsessive & the other controlled. That could be, but, going back to 5 again, how do I work out a generic theory of epos that doesn’t just repeat what I say about romance in 3? I still see two generic categories, the wheel of drama & lyric & the cross of epos & fiction. [62] 3 Somewhere, maybe in the account of irony in 3, I need my Chih-kai [Chik-hai] Bardo point about the lost moment (Augenblick) leading to inorganic repetition. Then Prufrock’s sense of lacking the strength to force the moment to its crisis,69 Proust’s sense of paradise lost,70 the stammer or hesitant moment in FW [Finnegans Wake],71 all belong to a consistent pattern. (Also the Comus point of the cycle as itself the final enemy.) [63] 6 Regarding the above (at the top [par. 61]) I think my original idea of a narrative rhythm & a meaning pattern in each of the five genres as the basis of 6 may work out. Poetic has babble and doodle; semantic has something analogous, I suppose; dramatic has act and scene; epos has musical and pictorial; scripture has the total narrative of the quest & the total meaning of the apocalypse. Semantic has narrative & meaning in their ordinary senses: maybe I can root some of this out of 2. But still the dissociative rhythm arises as a 3½ (only now it’s 4½) intensification of epos. The imitative harmony & diagrammatic patterns seem to hover somewhere around the semantic level. But dissociation may turn out to be the cyclic movement of literature rolling around from epos back to poetic again when it funks the epiphanic—that’s the FW [Finnegans

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Wake] pattern, anyway. Now if my act & scene business comes clear I should be relatively all set. (And it’s still true that I have a congeries of hunches connecting the dissociative rhythm with the genre of satire, if it is a genre. Dissociation has a lot to do with the ass end (unwritten) of the discussion about prose forms.) [64] 3? Several of my plans have come smack up against a theory of Bardo, & I can’t help wondering if I don’t need at least a literary theory of ghosts, if not of the whole supernatural. I must start with the vampire theme in Wuthering Heights & see if I can attach it to my floating notions about the echo & the preservation of identity in DM [Daisy Miller], & of the returning ghost in Senecan revenge plays as neurotic, blocked & bound to a pattern of recurrence. The ghost theme in Eliot’s Waste Land (waternymphs recalling the bodiless souls of Purgatory) winds up with a quotation from the Spanish Tragedy [ll. 266 ff., 432]. Also the Kurtz business, Kurtz being, like Heathcliffe, a “lost violent” soul [The Hollow Men, ll. 15– 16]. [65] 23 Perhaps in the middle of 2, and after stage 2, you need a paragraph stating that the conception of hypothetical meaning sounds simple but is actually significant for a lot of phenomena. One of these is the infinity of centrifugal responses contained in a verbal pattern, & the consequent necessity of abandoning the “intentional fallacy.”72 (Mystery of the unlimited here.) Another is the fact of ambiguity, that the poet establishes the powers of words within a language (which makes language a more important category than the introduction admits, incidentally). Thus one of the central problems of comparative literature is to decide how far poetry is translatable. “Time” in English has a different set of referents from “temps” in French, yet the Eliot quartets & Le Temps Retrouvé are clearly concerned with analogous problems (here again we have to distinguish the poetic from the “merely verbal” or linguistic, a problem involved with the questions of paronomasia & onomatopoeia in 6[)]. Verbal associations that do not exist in other languages (inferno-inverno [winter] in Dante; God & good in Milton) are usually passed over by poets with strong centrifugal (catholic) interests. Archetypes are at the opposite pole from linguistic puns. (A strong pictorial value in archetypes may loom up as a

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later problem). Eliot’s “About [Against] the Word the unstilled world still whirled” [Ash-Wednesday, pt. 5, l. 8] is a 6 problem, of course. A third is the fact of catharsis: that actual moods are evoked hypothetically, or in terms of actuality raised & cast out. That is[,] tragedy does not raise actual pity & fear, hence it is not sorrowful. (The extent of actual laughing & crying over literature depends on what is in fashion: at present laughter is in & tears out; in late 18th and early 19th c. times the reverse was frequently true). The actual mood of all great art seems to be uniformly exhilaration or exuberance, the sense of the release of creative energy which Blake in the most sensible remark ever made about the arts, identified with beauty.73 (Part of this, including Shakespeare’s tragic mood, goes in the discussion of tragedy in ch. 3). [66] 6 The kind of thing I’m reading about in Cassirer is proving most useful in suggesting links between 1 and 6.74 Thus the mythical phase suggests the whole question of oracular rhetoric as expounded for instance by Heraclitus. It’s different from but closely related to the ambiguous rhetoric of irony (babble & doodle)—the Eliot line quoted above [par. 65] shows the link. If that’s a straight connexion I still don’t see where dissociative rhetoric fits. Maybe I’ve really got, as in 1, five modes and two tendencies, one encyclopaedic (epiphanic rhetoric, with its Varronian & aphoristic overtones, isn’t the same as oracular, quite) and the other episodic to comminutive. There, I always knew there was something on the ass end of 1 that would help clear up comminution. Then graphic formula for 6 is: mode mythical rc. [romantic] h.m. [high mimetic] l.m. [low mimetic] ir. [ironic]

genre encyc [encyclopedic] Scripture epiphanic dissociative epic epos drama fiction lyric paronomasia

[don’t?] [skip?] tendencies with time & space.

Hell, I don’t know.

[67] 25 In 2 the relation of the first two levels is the relation of literature to language. The two top levels are in the same relationship, but reversed in order: archetypes are the language, the grammar & dictionary, of litera-

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ture as a whole, & anagogy is recapturing the literal sense in the context of all literature. But many of the distinctions between level one & level three aren’t clear to me yet. [68] 0 In Introduction (0): aesthetics will have to do what ethics has done. At one time any country parson could approach ethics as the contrast of ought (good & bad) with the is, & “good” always turned out to be what was sanctioned by his community75 & “bad” whatever he wasn’t used to.76 The social sciences have changed that:77 they haven’t destroyed “value”: studies of primitive rites de passage have not led us to abolish the ritual of promoting our children from grade 8 to grade 9 in favor of knocking out a front tooth or stinging them with red ants. But it is clear that the values of ethics will have to be established on a somewhat broader inductive basis. It is still considered good form to say “all good art, or all real art, or authentic art, is or does such & such things,” and then proceed to attack the art that isn’t or doesn’t do anything of the kind. I am merely trying to suggest that all such approaches to the arts are a waste of time both to write & to read. (I’d like this to go in the first lecture).78 [69] 6 6—onomatopoeia is only a small part, though a very significant part, of stage 3 rhetoric—of trying to establish a “natural” connection between words & objective reality. Like poetic etymology, it’s “true” enough as rhetoric, & absurd only when objectified as philosophical speculation. [70] C Points in Conclusion: a) when we are dragged backward in time facing the past, the study of the past is the study of what is directly in front of us. (We’re all bound in Plato’s cave facing the wall like Epimetheus, with the stolen divine fire, the candle of the Lord, burning behind us: hence we’re all in the position of Prometheus bound when he’s put under the world—maybe I could start identifying Plato’s mythology by linking Protagoras & Republic.) The past is shadowy, but it’s all that’s there, & those engaged in the study of the past are, as much as if they were on barricades in the streets, fighting for their lives & their liberties. b) I’m being gradually attracted to the view that there are two hypothetical universes, mathematics & myth, & that critics, historians, & non-

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mathematical philosophers are all social or non-quantitative scientists. (In our tradition philosophers are usually either mathematicians or theologians, the latter being objectifiers of myth.) Hence the conclusion of Jeans’ MU [The Mysterious Universe] is complementary to the “leap” of religious faith which asserts the being of the myth. That would make a little more sense out of Northrop’s idea of theoretical & “aesthetic” (i.e. mythical) continuums as West & East respectively.79 In Leibnitz we have a monadology of number; in the Avatamsaka Sutra we have a monadology of myth. Hence my peroration may work out after all. It looks as if I’m just plugging up the old five-foot stepladder again. I somehow feel as thought [though] I ought to assimilate my introduction to that shape if I do my conclusion. And the 1949 article80 damn near had that shape. c) I start, at level 2, with Spengler and (probably) Cassirer, because both begin with a simple listing pluralism: they are content to enumerate their major data. After that, they unify themes by the principle of analogy, Spengler in history, Cassirer in a conceptual present. Now one pole, the mind of man, is very easy to point out for the various “symbolic forms.” The other pole may be guessed at, but it cannot be defined except from within the language of one of the forms. There isn’t any super-language. As with Babel, we may try to reach heaven, but we shall find that what we have in the meantime is a plurality of tongues. [71] 2 I don’t know how much beating up of the intentional fallacy I need to do, but in College English a peanut review of Arnold Stein’s book said he’s discovered many beauties in Milton, of many of which Milton was quite unconscious (meaning of course a sneer) & that got me sore again. It may be only the defense mechanism of a dunce, but it’s still common enough to pass as though it had meaning. First, there’s the interesting analogy between the intention of an artist and that of an organism. We need a critical Samuel Butler to show us that the external or mythical explanations for creative life (God the Father, Nature the Mother, Environment or Zeitgeist the Holy Spirit) are exactly reproduced in provincial, or modal, criticism. “Intention,” like consciousness or will, has to be dealt with in terms of our awareness of the Cartesian difficulties in our language. Now, even if we had the privilege of Gulliver in Luggnagg, and could call up the spirit of, say, Shakespeare, no matter what kind of a “What did you mean by that?” question we put to him, we could only get the

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same damnable iteration of “I meant it to form part of my play.” A discursive writer has an intention of showing or meaning something apart from his writing, & can discuss this additional intention as much as he likes. A poet has no intention except to write the poem (unless he is a bad didactic poet), and anyone who ascribes such additional intentions to him cannot distinguish literary from other verbal structures—the first test of anyone calling himself a literary critic must pass. The poet’s intention has been fully taken care of once we assume that whatever we are dealing with in his poem really belongs there and has meaning: there’s a secondary centrifugal intention to be intelligible. Of course a living writer may discuss a poem as though it were discursive writing, and ascribe to himself, at the time of writing it, subtleties of which he was actually probably quite unconscious. The dunce quoted above assumes, first, that he knows, or can guess, what was going on in Milton’s mind in the 17th c., & second, that Milton was deliberately stuffing a limited81 number of beauties into his poem which he expected his reader to extract again one by one, like Little Jack Horner. [72] 24 It is true of course that it is very difficult, & in the present state of criticism usually very inadvisable, to “read into” a poem an additional meaning. Someday, when we know better how literature as a whole hangs together,82 it may become more justifiable to add meanings to poems, but at present one should, on the whole, leave the practice alone except for obviously inexperienced writers. Anyone who has marked a student’s essay has had to form critical judgements about what the author might or should have said, or has had to read into his author the meanings he may have intended. But obviously nobody should try the same process on Milton. At the same time, the critic is responsible for reading the whole of what is there, & that for the over-age lazy & skipping reader, will always look like “reading in.” Now, Molière, & then the “[senora?]” business, only with Molière make the point that what else may have been going on in Molière’s mind isn’t relevant, & it’s only guesswork on our part anyway. The text is the evidence. [73] 6 6—The Platonic question of the morality of rhetoric is deeply involved. It’s silly to talk about all jargon or gobbledygook as though it were the product of a diseased mind or a depraved will: some of it (the James Mill

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extract)83 is the direct result of sincerity (combined in Js. Mill with a Victorian feeling that it’s good for you if it’s tough). Some of our difficulties are genuine linguistic ones. It has been said (see Blanshard, Yale Review, Summer 1953) that you can’t tell the truth in Macaulay’s style—it would certainly be true of Gibbon.84 Rhetorical antitheses, for instance, are often the built-in desires of a desire to lie, or at least to tell something else than the truth—the uninhibited passion for lying in Communist propaganda is related by contrast. Marx himself is useful for analyzing the motivations underlying the rhetoric of bourgeois ideology—Burke, for instance. Antithesis in Cicero is a built-in device of dilettantism, making platitudes sonorous. Pater, Santayana. And my Stevenson point.85 [74] C C—I’m quite prepared to face the possibility of the drying up of criticism, & so contradicting the very thesis I begin with. If there’s anything in my myth & methesis86 point, it’s literature itself, not criticism, that informs the social sciences. The Oedipus archetype informs Freud’s psychology, not the other way round. The myth is hypothetical in art & is applied to existential situations in life, religious, political & so on. Ideally, I suppose, all myths in anyone’s mind ought to have the same form, as the psychological & political myths are identical in the Republic. But the myth is effective only as a teleological theoria which contains and makes conscious the axioms of action. For instance, someone like a logical positivist who keeps saying that perfectly intelligible statements are “meaningless” has built his intellectual security on the myth of the temenos or marked-off holy ground. In religion the value-judgement “mere myth” or “only a myth” ought to give place to the v-j “only a historical fact.” All reality & all effectiveness is [are] in the myth, as the example of Adam shows. [75] 24 4 In 2 : the archetypal & evolutionary hypotheses were both tried out in biology in the 19th c. It so happened that the latter fitted the facts of biology as the former did not, so it was developed & the other abandoned. With the usual tendency, noted by Bacon, to make universal generalizations from particular cases, it was assumed that the same would be true of the new social sciences that began to develop later. But as art doesn’t improve, & genres are not species, evolutionary metaphors like “development” applied don’t mean anything but change or variety. Also a lot

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of bogus history of an occult or conspiratorial tendency results. So perhaps here is the place for the archetypal method. (Note that conspiratorial or occult is a half-assed archetypal method, archetypes assimilated to evolution.) Thus the Prelude to Mann’s Joseph traces a lot of myths back to Atlantis, but Atlantis is tolerable only as an archetypal conception (so far as we can see); hardly as an evolutionary or chronological one. [76] Re metaphor (25): a philosopher would say that if two things are both identical & different, they would have to be identical in one principle & different in another, as in theology the persons of the Trinity are identical in substance but distinct in personality.87 But such categories do not apply in literature, where the metaphor simply asserts hypothetical identity. This point (22) comes out vividly in the correspondence of Yeats & Sturge Moore over the problem of Ruskin’s hallucinatory cat.88 Naive as the issue involved seems to be, it is central to the difference between poet & thinker. The distinction between an empirical fact & an illusion is not a rational distinction, & cannot be logically proved. The poet simply accepts this: qua poet, he sees no reason for either asserting or denying the existence of any cat, real or Ruskinian. (It is true that Yeats did assert the reality of Ruskin’s cat, but that was only by way of antithesis.) If we are in quest of reality here, the philosopher is compelled, like the mystic, to fall back on a pious, a priori, incommunicable rapt assertion of an axiom of faith. The basis of his life is not the actual difference between fact & illusion, but the psychological or emotional necessity of asserting the differences. The difference between the creative mind on the one hand, and the practical & critical mind on the other (Conclusion) is the difference between pure and applied mythopoeia. [77] 6 Note the rhetoric associating the imaginative with drunkenness & “cold,” “sober,” “dry,” “prudent,” whatsit reason with sobriety. My own book will get the “neat” & “tidy” treatment. [78] C The historian collects mythical structures in the past, the philosopher in the present. I like Spengler & Cassirer because they begin with simple enumerative empiric pluralism: they list their phenomena. If the metaphor really does correspond to the equation, myths are tautological. There are fallacies in trying to objectify or project myth. Theology & rev-

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olutionary politics make their claims, but it’s interesting that they’re both strategically totalitarian, and have no liberal or academic focus. C [79] But myth is still the hypothetical theoria of all social action, the liberalizing & emancipating principle of society, as ritual is the conservative one & dream the anarchic (revolutionary) one. I knew I’d get to a bourgeois or middle-class myth myself sooner or later. Myth is the essential form of Mill’s deductive withdrawal. Oscar Wilde’s remark that life imitates literature is so far only an amusing paradox.89 Someday it will be the cornerstone of the humanities & social sciences alike. Nobody would think it strange if a mathematician, watching the curve of a bird’s flight or the design of frost on a window pane, remarked that life imitates mathematics. And nobody watching men building cities & planting gardens can deny that life imitates myth.90 [80] C Now I have a clearer idea of three categories that seem to be involved in my conclusion: I wonder if they’re involved partly in Three! ritual The Person fraternity aristocracy historic moment pragmatic habit anthropological leader of action Burke-Carlyle-Butler sacramental act nomos praxis chronos death offered to father cycle of gold & green “antithetical” cyclic tragedy Frazer social contract tragic descent

myth dream The Word The Desire liberty equality bourgeoisie proletariat redeeming the time revolutionary moment deductive withdrawal buried vision hypothetic-literary psychological creator leader of dialectic Mill-Arnold Morris-Rousseau imaginative hold repetitive leap nous theoria logos kairos life in the son rebirth of spirit one body jewel-city in mountain* wheel of episodes “primary” dialectic comedy Frye Freud educational contract Utopia intersection of concern comic ascent

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* This theme is identical with the buried treasure guarded by the dragon, & therefore in the dragon, Rousseau’s buried society of nature & reason, alchemy, the sleeping libido in the dark, & so on: it turns out to be the father & mother & food & drink, of course. [81] 0 There are several systems of valuation anyway: that of the history of taste differs from that of criticism, as when we decide that 1660–90 overestimated Cowley.91 Subjective valuation depends on associative & other arbitrary factors, & is quite different from objective: this is where my low value-with-great pleasure goes. Again, I think even in objective valuation there are differences: the feeling that a certain type or period of musical experience is represented by Franck or Scriabine92 generates with it the feeling it is or is not very important to have it represented, whether it is done well or badly.93 The ideal objective value, in short, may differ from the actual one. We all know these things, but aesthetic theory never sufficiently allows for them, but keeps on insisting that experiences that we all know to be quite distinct are absolutely uniform. (The ideal & actual value differ, as when a critic devotes a life work to what he freely admits to be second-rate art, because it illustrates something else. These are among the most important facts of lit. exp. [literary experience], but . . .). Introduction, & the way more or less to patch up that last paragraph. (There must be several dozen critical & aesthetic theories based on the assumption that subjective & objective valuation are ultimately exactly the same thing, although every critic not suffering from advanced paranoia knows that they are quite utterly different.) [82]

4? 2, mostly I don’t know whether this even belongs in the book or not, but it seems to have something to do with the intentional fallacy: if I describe something I’m doing, I can describe it either subjectively or objectively: if I describe something somebody else is doing, I infer the subjective side: if I describe something done at a level below consciousness, the subjective aspect of it can only be described in poetic metaphors. This fact gives a paradoxical quality to, say, Samuel Butler’s speculations on biology. In dealing with the “intention” of a long dead or anonymous poet, what is actually poetic metaphor may pass itself off as a pseudo-fact. (Aren’t all subjective descriptions poetic?)

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[83] 6 The metaphor is the basis of all literary or centripetal writing; the simile is the basis of discursive analogical writing. Hence the simile predominates in prose, and the epic simile shows that we’re within the order of nature. [84] 5? Remember that the thematic section of One contains, in its encyclopaedic aspect, the whole of Four, and, in its episodic aspect, the theory of lyric genres in Five. (I still doubt that I can distinguish epos from fiction). So I mustn’t get too sidetracked. But it looks as though lyric was building up around a wheel all right, as I’ve always thought, but with perhaps a stronger sense of mode. Thus in the mythical mode the critical or germinal episodic form appears to be the oracle, & its four subsidiary forms, the cdt [commandment], par [parable], aph. [aphorism], & prophecy, locate themselves at the W, S, E & N poles of my circle. It’s understood that the episodic & lyric shouldn’t be muddled. [85] 5? Now, the four episodic points seem to be: N. visionary; poet & god; inspiration. E. intellectual; poet & his mind, enlightenment. S. social, poet & society, observation. W. emotional, poet & action; realization of duty or something. N, modulates from oracle94 through May morning vision to the ecstasis or visionary transport of h.m. [high mimetic], the enthusiasm of l.m. [low mimetic], & the illumination (epiphanic proper) in ironic. S. seems to be consistently a parable, realistic in form, establishing the theme of exile (the Prodigal Son > Wanderer > rejected lover > Byronic Ishmael > pharmakos poet) and of neighborliness (Good Samaritan > love poem >95 courtly love or friendship poem > romantic love poem > ironic whatever it is[)]. The Eclogue or pastoral ([?] of neighbors) seems deeply involved. E. is aphoristic, not always easy to distinguish from N, modulating from proverbs & wisdom literature through such things as Deor to the h.m. poetry of “My mind to me a kingdom is”96 & Horatian balance generally, thence to the “Prelude” type of growth, & thence to, I suppose, the Quartet type of meditative elegiac enlightenment. W. seems to go through a lot of the stuff I have for S. And a certain analogy to the comic-tragic pattern may be the germ of an epos-lyric distinction: sort N. paean dithyramb S. parable of neighbors parable of the exile

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W. inspiring command breaking command E. revelation of consciousness elusiveness of consciousness The last two are dismal guesswork. I really don’t know whether I’m talking about episodic modes in One or lyric genres in Five. [86] 1 ex. Excreted from One: “Courtly love, wherever it appears, is an erotic analogy of revelation, & uses the terms of revelation in its own sense. It is in medieval culture too, of course; but courtly love as the climax of a humanistic & oratorical education forms part of a patriotic analogy, not, as in Dante & Petrarch, part of a sacramental one.” I have very little idea what this means. [87] 2 ex. “All art is equally conventionalized, but we hardly notice this unless we are unaccustomed to the convention.[”]97 [88] 1 Perhaps add the intensely iconic Jesuit-Crashaw poetry to the centripetal gaze theme. Herbert takes it more lightly; if you make this point you can cut him out of the naive allegory business. The met. [metaphorical] Pearl has a centrifugal gaze, as have all dream-visions. [89] C Malraux has shown how museums & reproductions of music have created a total body of cultural inheritance.98 The technological achievements which made this possible were started in lit. [literature] with the prtg. [printing] press, & it’s significant that the first use of the prtg. press was to codify the cultural inheritance of the past—the essence of the movement we call humanism. In the process of criticism past works of art don’t just lose their original function: part of the activity of criticism is in the recovery of function. The recovered function may be unrecognizably different from the original function, but it will be there. You can’t have humanism without the idea of Renaissance or rebirth: a gigantic anagnorisis or Kierkegaardian repetition of past culture. [90] 3? There’s still a problem ahead of me of the void or silence in poetry, the thing that is not stated but enclosed, or left to enclose an identity. It has

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something to do a) with the ironic attitude b) with displacement (i.e. the unseen presence of what is displaced). It’s very concentrated in, say, Ecclesiastes, where the cycle is explicit, yet defined apocalyptically as of the void (which is what vanitas vanitatum99 means). Art owes its unity to the process of identifying with, its clarity to the process of identifying as. (It seems to me that one is “sublime” & the other “beautiful”). In the ironic phase we have pure as, & an invisible or implied with, which turns it into myth as soon as the void is recognized. [91] 1 Use masque (royal figure at centre) & Prospero (architectus like Dicaeopolis)100 as forms of high mimetic comedy. Note too that the aesthetic or epiphanic moment in irony comes at random, linking with the pharmakos. [92] 3-I-4 I’m beginning to wonder if 3 isn’t a structural chapter entirely, ending with romance, and if everything I’ve now got in 3, apocalyptic imagery, displacement, & so on, doesn’t belong in a purely thematic 4. Well, there may be a difference between structural & thematic displacement. But it does seem as though my argument is split when apoc. imagery is at the beginning of 3 & a commentary on the Bible is at the beginning of 4. And then I [Roman numeral] would fit more neatly as a pendant to structure (being the episodes of structure) & an introduction into theme (as it contains the themes without the chakras or epiphanic points).101 [93] 4 The habitus, or free man set free by his own discipline, is at the opposite extreme from the ritual-bound humor. Prospero, who’s ready to be set free, is near it; so’s the Lady in Comus; so’s the freed will on Purg.102 In other words, it’s a central analogy of innocence point. [94] 4 Fire in the analogy of experience is, though Promethean, essentially the smith’s fire, Los, the forging of the sword in Wagner, the smith image in Sartre,103 the “Dedalus” image in Joyce. Milton’s gunpowder (plot of R.C.’s [Roman Catholics]) & the crack in the Alchemist as h.m. [high mimetic] anticipations.104 Query: is it a rule that demonic symbols in any mode are often anticipatory of the next mode?

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[95] C The difference between useful-minor & fine-major arts is the difference between work & the vision of work. The latter is liberal, disinterested, speculative, released. It’s above, e.g. theology, which is never disinterested. Theology is not part of culture or liberal education: here Newman is wrong & Arnold right. Well, anyway, the artist is the producer of culture, so he doesn’t necessarily possess it. The possessor is the consumer—the critic in the broadest sense (but see later, where I distinguish consumer & critic). [96] I At end of introduction I say if the reader feels nervous about the mystical numbers & cabbalistic diagrams (the zodiac is about to turn up), I have one suggestion. Symmetrical cosmology produced a not too perfect calendar, & then, ceasing to be scientific or descriptive, became purely poetic. The false symmetries of the Ptolemaic universe & the humors & planets are still poetically important, not as obsolete science, but as living poetry. Still going on in Yeats. Bacon showed an inspired sense of language when he called all this an idol of the theatre, thus placing its centre where it belongs, in the arts.105 So a lot of occultism, too, may be bastard lit. crit. I fought through this with Blake. [97] C Malraux—oh hell, I’ve got this [par. 89]. I’ve probably got this too, but I want to throw the book away. The whole argument (over the social function of art) today is confused by the “existential” views of S.K. [Søren Kierkegaard] (through Auden), which oppose a theatrical or “aesthetic” view of reality to an ethical or active one, & then go through that to repetition. But S.K.’s repetition is really Aristotle’s anagnorisis, and the fallacy of both aesthetic & ethical attitudes is in the common objectification of reality. I’m not talking about idolizing works of art, & S.K. shouldn’t be talking about an external substantial reality as well as existence, or rather, as characteristic of the existential situation. Real existential thinking is hypothetical: that’s the first use of art that goes beyond quid agas. At a certain point all ethical situations become unreal: that’s why casuistry is a dismal & illiberal science. Art trains us in the vision of the unmodified, unimprovised existential situation. Human consciousness is, as Galileo said, a spectator of nature. Now to

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call man a spectator of nature makes nature theatrical, & part of Bacon’s “idol of the theatre” is the view begotten by the notion of final objectivity, the notion that man is detachable from what he contemplates. Bacon’s attack on this makes him a prophet of the existential or social sciences. But the other side of this, the doctrine that man cannot be a spectator of his own life, is one of those lethal half-truths that become fashionable in response to some kind of social or intellectual need. It is precisely this detachment of vision that distinguishes men from the animals, or so Cassirer says.106 [98] C Works of art have original functions which are not primarily aesthetic: to see them as art is a faculty of abstraction made by criticism after a lapse of time. Hence what makes a thing a work of art is not something inherent in its own nature: it’s convention & acceptance. [99] 4 Note the related doctrines of azure (a.o. color) and the void in Mallarmé.107 [100] 1-3 The chain of teleology I found in P.L. [Paradise Lost] 2 works fairly well in the modes. Note the reappearance of that damn double ironic that may bitch up 4: my [myth] — direct knowledge (God himself) rc [romance] — immediate knowledge (Angels) h.m. [high mimesis] — mysterious power (man) l.m. [low mimesis] — instinct (organisms) ir. (irony) — automatism (inorganic world) chance (chaos) [101] C Spengler illustrates the tendency to imitation of lower stages of development, a very important & still unexplored phase of habit, corresponding roughly to camouflage in lower orders. Ritualism in action is the vis inertiae [indisposition to motion] which keeps men doing what they have done: we observe the equinoxes & solstices because the plants do, & we imitate organisms in our historical development for the same reason.

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[102] 23 In the descriptive phase poetry exists between (that’s all you need: don’t get fouled up in the ritual : narrative & dream : significance lobster-pot unless you have to) events & ideas. Here the main line of approach, though called historical, is actually sociological: it takes the poem as a document. On the third level the poem exists between the example & precept of course, but those compare with images only. Poetry in the formal phase exists between history, in the sense of the Weltbildung produced by the great historian, and philosophy in the sense of metaphysics (including ethics and its old sense of an idealized vision of conduct, to get Sidney’s “precept” in).108 In this history & this philosophy, as in the corresponding phase of poetry, nature is the internal content. Note the attacks on both as rhetorical (closer to autonomous literature) and verbally organized, by modern sociologists—positivism belongs to the 2nd level. Note that positivistic literature is intensely moral but, being closer to the ironic, less explicitly didactic than formal literature: it makes its point by representation, not by explicit utterance—the ironic identification as, not with. Hence the transparent plainness insisted on by great low mimetic artists, like Wordsworth or Tolstoy. Sociological events or ideas are described rather than formed: they are represented by a verbal structure, not formed into one. [103] 5 Bouvard et Pecuchet, with its encyclopaedic interest, perfectly comprehensible in my theory of prose genres (anatomy). By the way, if the scheme forces a reversal of 5 then don’t fight it, in spite of all the links now existing between 6 & C [Conclusion]. The reason I think there may be a shift is that 4, as it’s shaping up, looks almost exactly like 1 rewritten: five modes of analogical imagery, then encyclopaedic & perhaps episodic forms. 6 starts at the bottom & goes up, & 5 has a leary resemblance to the present 3. Well, get on with it. [104] 6 I wonder whether in rhetoric there are five levels & two tendencies. The five levels would be subjective oracular, semantic, running, archetypal & objective oracular, the two tendencies centripetal or epiphanic (drama & scripture) & centrifugal or dissociative (satiric or iconoclastic). Iconic & iconoclastic rhythms, the acceptance of trdnl. [traditional] archetypes

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& the discovery of more, are the conservative & radical movements of literature. [105] 2 (6) I think the recurrent imagery business, which I have now in 23, may belong in 21 after all. Note the appearance of antithesis between 21 and 23 in the constant efforts of 21 critics to define poetry as whatever nonpoetry isn’t—an antithesis of discursive statement. But 21 criticism is as verbal as 22, as Crane shows: its difficulty is that it can’t deal with the “whole” (synolon) except as a pervading assumption. It’s simply committed to the fact that literal meaning is ambiguous (Empson) ironic (Brooks & Richards) & textural (Ransom). If so, then 23 is, as it is coming to be in 5, pre-eminently the phase of the dramatic (hence the centrality of tragedy in Aristotle), with the context music & painting as melopoiia and opsis. That introduces as many difficulties as it clears up, but it’s something I’ll have to take account of. Perhaps there’s really a double focus in 23, one dramatic, the other epic in the ideal & allegorical sense. The obvious equation of allegory with 24 I don’t think will work. But maybe my sliding allegorical scale is all I really need, dianoia becoming opsis & mythos melopoiia as it goes downward. Again, as Crane says, 21 critics are preoccupied with the concept “poetry.”109 [106] 2 (C) Don’t assume that the intentional fallacy is always a fallacy, i.e. that you can judge a satire without taking account of a humorous or ironic intention. The answer “but it’s supposed to be that way” is valid for many objections—cf. the New Yorker “large head” problem. 110 It’s a fallacy only when it’s a centrifugal intention—though it’s a creative as well as a critical fallacy, & when it exists in creation it has to be taken account of in criticism—e.g. Adam’s self-accusing speech in Par. Lost. The thing is that intention exists as part of the original function which is recreated but not necessarily reproduced. A poet always intends to produce a work of art; he may also intend to produce a certain kind, genre or tone of art—ironic intention is the most common type. [107] 23 In Aristotle a poem is a mimesis praxeos, & this mimesis praxeos is the mythos. I say that the m.p. is mythos when the poem is thought of as

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moving or as narrative: thought of as theme or meaning, it’s dianoia—a point A. glances at when he says that poetry is more philosophical than history [Poetics, 1451b]. We may ask either “what happens?” or “what’s it about?” [108] 24 The only thing I need add here is that there are three permanent sources of archetypes, one in social ritual, one in the dreaming mind, & one in the conventions of lit. itself. For the first use the scapegoat point. [109] 5 It’s curious & significant that literature always seems to expand through satire and the (ironic) lyric. The kind of thing, say, that Samuel Johnson couldn’t understand to be literature existed then, potentially, in an ironic relation to him. [110] 3 This chapter is clearing up slightly: I get all the object-form business shoved into 23, in the rewritten version of that (now that my original remark about the double meaning of the word form has cleared up), start with the identity-similitude stuff, lead that into an apocalyptic-mythical world of total hypothetical identity, work out apoc. [apocalyptic] & demonic imagery, & then give, briefly (it’s not the whole subject of 4) the rc. [romantic], h.m. [high mimetic] & l.m. [low mimetic] displacements. I’m not yet quite clear whether the double ironic can go into this form or whether I can work out a cycle of four image-groups—I rather doubt it. Anyway, the four myths follow, & 4 is, as I’ve always thought of it, a practical commentary on encyclopaedic forms, in the different modes. That way, episodic forms would form the ass end of 5, which would be the ass end of the book if 5 really turns out to be 6. [111] 23 Aristotle’s conception of praxis needs to be interpreted along the lines of Blake’s “thought is act.”111 For the imitated or poetic praxis is a logical one, containing a discovery or self-confrontation which is evidence that it is also a theme or cyclic movement. Aristotle left the way open for Crane & his school to deduce that in its aspect as imitation of thought (dialectic) poetry is rhetorical & not strictly poetic at all. That’s wrong: as

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long as you’re dealing with words all verbal structures are imitations of thought, & therefore to that extent even dialectic is rhetorical.112 [112] 6 Aspects of the above a) the recurrent attempts in philosophy to isolate the rhythm of the proposition (Aquinas, Spinoza, Bacon, Wittgenstein) always impresses [impress] us as a rhetorical device—nothing in words gets free from rhetoric b) much jargon results from attempts to simulate a rhetoric-free logic (James Mill & consult Kenneth Burke for more) c) logical positivism tends to try to excrete words in favor of numerical relationships d) in the “history of ideas” poetry is studied for propositions buried in the imagery e) verbal communication is “illogical” because what is communicated is nearly always a centripetal myth f) much thinking is done by diagrammatic or other “models” g) all meaning in a verbal context is to some extent variable & ambiguous—I doubt if any syllogism has ever been turned into an enthymeme without acquiring at least four terms on the way h) this is proved by the fact that meditation on the ambiguity of a key word is often the best way to understand a philosopher i) the greatest possible form for prose is neither prose epic nor prose tragedy, but scripture containing poetry. [113] 5 (6) Two centripetal genres, drama & lyric, both between the arts of music & painting (melopoiia & opsis). Two centrifugal genres, epos & fiction, between action & thought. The first two are on the circle, the other two on the cross. Two public genres, epos & drama; two private ones, fiction & lyric. Two mimeses of direct address, epos & fiction; two turned away, drama & lyric. The mode of comminution links lyrical irony & satire; the encyclopaedic mode links the scripture & the liturgy. Fourfold fiction tends to enfold lyric (Varronian satire & the FW [Finnegans Wake] direction); fourfold epos tends to enfold epiphany (scriptural direction). [114] 5-6 No matter how I work it out I seem to keep getting a chakra [wheel] of five rhetorics, going up, and a pattern of fours for genres, though hardly a mandala four. Something like this seems to keep recurring:

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scr.

ep.

fic.

dr.

ep.

ly.

fic.

comm. [scr. = scripture; comm. = communication; dr. = drama; ly = lyric; ep. = epos; fic. = fiction]

but how I get to scripture from epos, when everything in it is essentially fictional or written, I dunno. When I get this cleared up the whole book will clear. Epos crystallizes drama (Aeschylus & Homer); fiction crystallizes lyric. Perhaps the distinction between natural & artificial epic (The Battle of Maldon vs. Vergil) recurs in a similar distinction in scripture[,] & the Bible is a late, almost an Alexandrine document: the theory of a naive Bible is as out of date as the theory of a naive Homer. Epos < naive scr. [scripture] : fiction < artificial scr. [115] 3? Orwell’s 1984 is an Inferno because it assumes that the human lust for sadistic aggression is infinite, which is exactly the assumption one has to make about devils in order to believe in hell.

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[116] C Queen Mary’s art treasures: royal taste is for the elaborate & useless, & is hence a reflection of mediocre popular taste. Illustrates the dialectic between the culture that creates the free & equal society, & the culture that is siphoned off into the “conspicuous waste” of a leisure class. (Not that the Royal Family doesn’t work, but it has the traditions & cultural appurtenances of a leisure class.) [117] 23, etc. I can hardly attach too much importance to the principle that all verbal patterns whatever, including the most logical ones, are an imitation of that psychological process ending in incommunicable comprehension which is known as thought. I wonder what the term for thought, corresponding to praxis, would be. Not dianoia, & I think not logos. Nous or ennoia [conception], maybe. The Logos, as Faust did not see, is an inseparable unity of thought and act. History & poetry are both imitations of action, the latter more philosophical; philosophy & poetry are both imitations of thought, the latter more concrete. Hence what I call rhetoric in chapter 6 is at once grammar, or the verbal imitation of action, and Aristotle’s rhetoric, or the verbal imitation of thought (the antistrophos of dialectic [Rhetoric, 1354a]). Wonder if law, a major component of scripture, is an imitation of equity, as ceremonial law or ritual is an imitation of social action. [118] 4 (3) The conception of [semniotes?] is beginning to take shape. Primitive tribes distinguish serious tales & less serious ones; this distinction appears later as the distinction between myth & legend or folktale. One has to distinguish between an intensive encyclopaedic tendency, which selects & expurgates & builds a canon, from the extensive one that we find in satire & in prose fiction generally. The latter is exploratory of the physical world: hence satire & irony are “obscene,” just as painters are forever poking into women’s bedrooms & toilets (the actual process of changing a menstrual pad or cacking on a pot is, however, considered unpaintable). Hence literature expands through satire & through the genre of fiction (cf. Shaw’s preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet on the “Eliza in her bath” problem in drama).113 Folktales expand the original questarchetype, which is forever collapsing into [semniotes?]. Cf. the Egyptian masturbating god with Jesus’ clay & spittle.114 [Semniotes?] is connected

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with abstraction was well as morality—we often speak of “pure” abstraction, & the purifying of myth is like the purifying of mathematics.115 [119] 3 I’ve finally figured out what the hell I should do about The Two Brothers. Thus far, the story is, more or less, plausible. Then the pursued brother prays to Ra . . . & Ra creates a huge lake & fills it full of crocodiles. Here is a fictional device which is perfectly recognizable as a fictional device, but what it contains is not plausible: it is the kind of thing that happens only in stories, & is hence purely literary design, a stylization like that of contemporary Egyptian drawing.116 Comedy, because of its manipulated ending, has an innate tendency to myth; tragedy to irony & realism. ( ) [120] C My conclusion turns not simply on the Buddhist conclusion, but on another aspect of the same monadology—the alignment, & the apocalyptic identification, of the universe in posse with the universe in esse.117 Boswell’s Hebrides asserts that Monbaddo held this view118—there must have been a lot of it around then, linked with the noble savage, which is another form of mythical abstraction. (The same book represents Johnson as saying that “Leibnitz was as paltry a fellow as I knew.”)119 In 19th c. evolution we get [Herbert] Spencer’s naturalistic restatement of Berkeley’s esse est percipi.120 Whether e est p or not, certainly the being of perception depends on the form we have evolved for perceiving, so here again is a connection of monadology & myth. The concluding sentence of my Princeton lectures121 adumbrates this. So in fact does my word monad. Apocalyptic hypothetical identity of all things in posse is the universe of art & the reservoir of our conceptions of reality. Here again satire is the pioneer, with its relativity of perception. [121] 5 I should have this somewhere else: the essay is an apologetic imperfect form, deliberately choosing slight subjects, dramatizing the writer (Lamb, Thurber) as a tentative Milquetoast. [122] 3 In tragedy enmity is normally presented in terms of hatred, just as love is normally presented in terms of disruptive passion or lust. In other

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words, fall through attachment is the principle of tragedy, & the conception of attachment ought really to clear up the distinction between Aristotle’s hamartia and any “exposed position.” Not that this will work without qualification. But, anyway, pure enmity is the imgve. [imaginative] heightening of experience through confrontation. Enemies fight, but don’t necessarily hate, hatred being to enmity exactly what passion is to love. [123] 3 Better get down to your fourfold cycle before you forget it sprawls across the middle of 3 (incidentally it would [be] better for symmetry if you could introduce some of your Spengler points in 3 or 4 & not jump it on the reader only in C): day

year

water

morning noon afternoon night

spring summer autumn winter

rain fountain river sea

history

}

often linked as “spring”

feudalism city-state nationalism imperialism

Some poems are based entirely on the third, such as Eliot’s Waste Land & Dry Salvages. The Four Quartets read from left to right. What I think you can introduce is a) the principle of historical cycle as a vis inertiae or ritual imitation of a lower state (as all ritual imitates the plants) b) the perception of this in Biblical & early Christian (Orosius, Boethius & the Augustine point) thought—not exact recurrence, but cyclical movement c) its place in Beowulf, in Spenser (Troy cycle), in Shakespeare maybe, as a rotary principle opposed to dialectic d) its modern formulation, sometimes under Spenglerian influence, in the 19th c. three-part rcs. [romantics] (G. Chesterton), in Nietzsche, Yeats, Eliot & Joyce. [124] Hence, when you reach the dialectic-cyclic business at the end of 3, you can explain how much of tragedy consists in falling into a cycle (irony is being in one; comedy is an escape from one; romance is a dialectic quest) & how much the tragic hero accepts this role—Nietzsche’s extraordinary bungling of this notion, which spoils the conclusion of Z [Thus Spake Zarathustra] by returning to the naive idea of identical recurrence, is familiar. It’s possible only in a tragedy-dominated mind or culture, where Apollonian dialectic makes gods free & man in bondage, & Dionysian cycle energizes the bondage. N’s thought is very much of a pat-

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tern here. In the Orient, where deliverance from the wheel of the ego is the central pattern of religion, drama is overwhelmingly comic, so much so that there is hardly any clear conception of tragedy. [125] 4 I think of 4 now as the practical application of 3,122 based not only on the principle of displacement but on the correlative principle of implicit archetypes—that is, I deal boldly with a point that is normally ridiculed by critics who darkly suspect that criticism is just on the point of being too difficult for them. I recognize two encyclopaedic tendencies; intensive or canonical (semniotes) and extensive or fictional-empiric. Maybe there’s an intensive episodic (lyric)123 & an extensive episodic (satiric). If so, that would organize 4. Actually the intensive direction is explicitly archetypal, the extensive one tries to avoid this explicitness, but reveals itself to the critic as implicitly archetypal. [126] 2 (C) There’s a link between my conception of an ultimate plurality of communicable languages and my conception of verbal structures as imitations of thought. Lacking the Eastern techniques of intensifying the thought process itself, we tend to think of verbal patterns as the real form of thought, and of thought itself as a kind of stenographic “inner speech.” The thing is that the activity of consciousness can be trained to express itself in the habitual channels of music, art, work, action, & similar languages, and in words, but never “is” any of those channels. I am, & my awareness of that fact is thought, but once I translate that into words I build a structure on the foundation of “and” and “is,” just as Descartes built his on “therefore.” I must get this to crystallize. Is communion incommunicable? [127] C? There are so many reasons why criticism is not a secondary but a primary structure of thought: it may take only a modicum of talent, practice & skill to write a comedy of Plautus or a Canadian poem: it may take a major genius to examine it in rational terms. Art is the human imitation of evolution in nature: it may range from camouflage to ostentation, but is always explicable. This too must crystallize. It’s connected with the fact that—I’ve lost it. There are naturally a lot of superstitions in the arts, as in all things that a great deal of imgn. [imagination] is focussed on. I

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don’t mean only superstitions about the magical efficiency of art itself, but about the greatness of the artist. This last is compensation for the lack of criticism. Query: did Blake share these superstitions? If not, why did he insist on the necessity of art, thereby seeming to rule out yoga, or the pursuit of undifferentiated wisdom, along with all the things below art? [128] 6? In pictures the “object” of sense experience becomes the “subject” of the painting. It looks as though the structural or formal element in painting were some form of predication that moves in the opposite direction from predication in logic. [129] 0 The object of my essays is to provide a theory of literature which will be as primary a humanistic & liberal pursuit as its practice. [130] 3-4 So the general shape of 3 is introduction on myth & mimesis, metaphor & simile, then apocalyptic, demonic & displaced imagery (the last of two kinds, the three middle modes & the conflict of conscious & unconscious rhetoric), then cyclical rhythms of structure, then the dialectic quest myth, then the four parts of this myth, then a summary of displacement techniques in narrative structure, sweeping up everything I have on this. (The main point, the point of ritual death, is an anticipation of the katabasis theme in 4.) Then 4 will, starting with the Bible, go down the chakra of encyclopaedic form; will then work out a table of episodic forms on the basis of the zodiac, & then may finish with some discussion of communication. Or, as war commentators used to say, it may not. In my new scheme it’s possible that [Anticlimax] may be VII—prose forms II, satire & comminution; VIII the place of literature in verbal structures, IX the definition of culture (I might even feel arrogant enough by that time to call it that).124 That would make a good shape, & 4 will be quite long enough as it is. [131] 23 I think the intentional business will work out easily enough. a) the discursive writer, who writes voluntarily, has a centrifugal intention b) the poet has a centripetal one & so creates a significant form with millions of attachments c) therefore the usual way of distinguishing between con-

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scious & unconscious intention is irrelevant d) the centripetal intention is however conventional & generic. And so on. [132] 3 In the circle of myths, I must work out some more oppositions between romance and irony. Irony-satire is always what is called “obscene,” & hence is the exact opposite of the element in romance which is the release of erotic fantasy. Sadist fantasies (Romantic Agony,125 Spenser’s Amoret & whosit126 in 6—not Seven, though she fits, but the C of L [Court of Love] one—Mirabell, I think, & my William Morris stuff), masochist ones (I think less common, but cf. the C of L) & other erotica (in Freud’s sense of Eros) are found. I’ve just been reading an admirable piece of science fiction: [John Wyndham’s] “The Day of the Triffids.” Catastrophe blinds all the human race except the merest handful of survivors—Flood archetype. Brought on by human folly—Atlantis archetype. (The writer is intelligent enough to note both). Heroine makes her appearance being whipped. Harem (two extra girls) introduced, but censored out. Little girl often picked up—erotic archetype censored out. The flood archetype is the transference of an infantile fantasy: suppose everybody died except me & the people I could boss, or at least play (i.e. work) with. The comfortable good drinks & the world shut out feeling, the sense of holiday, turns up early when they loot a Picadilly flat: I don’t know if this kind of erotica, which turns up in the dismissal of catechumens theme in ghost stories (Turn of the Screw) has a name, but it’s linked with the regression to the family unit which is a part of the Flood archetype. Several important things have to be worked out. Pr. ph. 4.127 [133] 3 I can divide these into a) the flood archetype itself b) the cuddle theme c) the principle of erotic release. It is, of course, silly to scream at the “obscenity” of irony; it is just as silly to head off that stampede by calling the romance “neurotic.” Also seeing the psychological descent of the flood archetype from an infantile fantasy doesn’t explain the archetype, natch. As for cuddle, there are two elements in ritual, festivity & routine. Comedy & romance have much to do with festivity & with a break in routine. I have the ritual & romance link (Eve of St. Agnes, etc.) in 24: I could explain it via Shakespeare’s comedy-titles. Also pop. lit: detective not only often an amateur but often on holiday. Leisure & the Sabbath— goes as far as Henry James. Something here that needs developing: fes-

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tivity & routine on the ritual side corresponds to the libido & ego cycle on the dream one. Anyway the ritual-romance sentence in 24 might well be transferred to 3. But the physical response to romance is so often the womb-search—cuddling into a nice warm bed with a good bloody murder—that sort of thing. And after all the cyclic point of epiphany is mamma’s cunt. I suppose the other is daddy’s arse, as in the Inferno. Former has cornucopia & latter maelstrom & Charybdis links. [134] 3? . . . if I tend to refer to Lorna Doone more frequently than to Anna Karenina, it is for the same reason that a musician trying to explain the principles of cpt. [counterpoint] would be likely to make more use, at first, of Three Blind Mice than of the Kyrie from the B minor Mass. We learn about the structure of comedy from comparing Plautus & P.G. Wodehouse, & thereby seeing the primitive & popular elements in Shakespeare or Jane Austen. [135] 0 Literature, like other complicated subjects, has a theory and a practice: like other marketable products, it has its producers & its consumers. The roles of the theorist of literature, the practitioner of literature, & the consumer of literature, are all distinct, even when they are all found in the same man, & should not be confused. Now the critical reader, as distinct from the critic proper, is the consumer of literature, & the theory of literature ought to be provided for him, because it’s the consumer, not the producer, who possesses the cultural & liberal values of literature (end of 3). [136] 23 Further on intention: in “creative” work consciousness & self-consciousness are much the same thing. There is often a progression within a man’s work from unconsciousness through consciousness to the recovery of unconsciousness in intuition. Note how closely Bergson approximates a philosophical rationalization of the practice of the artist. But then most philosophy rests on its own essential metaphor: the hypothetical identification of thought with the faculty of producing verbal imitations of thought. Anyway, intuition shows itself in inevitability of detail, the feeling that this & nothing else is what belongs here, which for artist & consumer alike is the fulfilment of centripetal intention.

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[137] 1 Expansion in 1: the complicated plot of detective stories is a feature of comedy in all modes, & the quasi-logical explanations at the end normally have the effect of ironic deflation. The mystery & all the impressive trappings of mystery are dispelled & explained away: a would-be superhumanly clever person has been caught in a trap. [138] 4 (or 3?) I don’t know how much of this I can get into a book, but note the impressive archetype of (deuteroserkism?) the orthodox Second Coming of a Bridegroom for a Bride, which in the last century bred the feeling (Nietzsche, Lawrence, Yeats, even Swinburne) that the figure of the Saviour & Redeemer of mankind as a male virgin with a strong mother fixation & a consequent homosexual lean (“beloved disciple” [John 20:2, 21:7, 20]) was incomplete & needed a more normally sexual counterpart. [139] 3+ Note the distinction between historical-existential (or quasi-historical) elements in the Bible & the “poetic” element which contains the dragonslaying. The boundary line is difficult to establish (cf. fishing in the gospels: same type of exploiting of accident as in FW [Finnegans Wake]—I’ve had odd intimations that coincidence in fact is one of the deepest mysteries to—well—fish for. Coincidence in fact means structural & representational elements coming to identical focus. But the real problems here are [Anticlimax] material & belong to the sequence-of-epiphanies stuff. [140] 3 Note in Shakespeare’s TC [Troilus and Cressida] the ironic role of, again, the heroine’s father, who pulls Cressida over to the Greeks. Something of this, with the amnesia business in the Sakuntala, belongs to the 2nd part of the comic mythos. [141] 0 Rules of obligation in criticism, statements containing the predicates must or should, are either pedantries or tautologies, depending on whether they are taken seriously or not. Thus: “all dramatic structures must have unity of action.” The pedant is willing to define unity of action in a specific way, & assert that plays not falling within the definition have no structure. The liberal, more cautious about “ruling out” per-

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fectly coherent plays for a priori reasons, is compelled to define “unity of action” so broadly that he is left with something like “all plays that have dramatic structures must have dramatic structures.” On the other hand, there is no objection to noting the frequency of the unities of time & place in Classical drama as an empirical observation any more than it is to noting Shakespeare’s observance of these unities in The Tempest, & his defiance of them in The Winter’s Tale. [142] 1-3 Jonathan Wild has suggested three main ideas. First, Wild is an ironic pharmakos, treated explicitly as a counterpart to “greatness.” What happens to him ought to happen to all “great” men: Wild is obviously criminal only because society is still too strong for him: he’s a hero, a Caesar or Alexander, in an ironic context. Second, the book is satire & comic rather than tragic irony, because Fielding’s norms are unmistakable: passages that would represent a complete breakdown of the ironic pretense (e.g. the description of Bagshot (p. )128 if they appeared in, say, Flaubert, are in decorum here, where the tone is the militant counterpart of irony,129 the satiric descent of fantasy on a moral canto fermo.130 Third, the Mrs. Heartfree episode, which is typical of romance when the central figure is female & instead of killing dragons she fends off fucks.131 Cf. Spenser’s Florimell & Morris’s Birdalone.132 One might call it the quest of the perilous cunt. Very sharp counterpoint between the realism of JW [Jonathan Wild] & his whorish bride & this corny romanticism in which Mrs. H gets through a dozen assaults unplumbed & returns “unsullied” to her husband. A good deal is said about Providence: Providence & Fortune are the existential projections of comic & tragic forms respectively. [143] 24-3 (1) One leading theme is the superstition of inherent133 qualities. a) The most striking example of this is the belief (I have all this in P4) that, say, a Kwakiutl mask “is” “really” a work of art once the critical outlining of aesthetic territory has taken it in. Criticism alone decides whether to include it or not. b) The belief in certain inevitable or necessary associations in archetypes (the vulgar form of the “universal symbols” theory) is another. There are no inherent associations, but there are some exceedingly obvious ones,134 such as sunshine or cheerfulness, & these become conventional.* Then they shade off into associations which are arbitrary in the sense of being established outside literature (such as the swan’s reputation as a singer, although actually that’s inside literature: I mean

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rather religious or political emblems like Elizabeth I’s red & white complexion.) From there we go to associations that are voluntarily arbitrary, like Yeats’ hound with one red ear.135 c) The superstition of inherent value or quality is trickier, but a corollary of a). The Royal Pavilion at Brighton is, as a private palace, ostentatious; if bought by an American millionaire it would become vulgar; as a public museum it acquires a quality of good-humored exuberance. Something like that, anyway: the low mimetic provincialism of trying to interpret all art in connection with artists, & ironic provincialism of trying to interpret in [it] all in connection with an isolatable aesthetic function or impulse, are harder to avoid than one would think, because the easy alternative is determinism. That is, there’s the determinism of the individual or dream side (romantic fallacy), which puts all art in a causal relation to artists, & so can’t deal with anonymity, the determinism of the social side (Marxist fallacy), which can’t deal with individuality (except as a residue). * And hence become the basis of rhetoric, or conventionalized verbal formulae. The expiscation of rhetorical associations is of course a major theme of 6. [144] 24 (3?) Ritual & dream need more defining as the content of archetypal action. Ritual is human action seen as a pattern of action. It contains two opposed elements: leisure & work; festivity & habitual routine. Through the former (remembering the Sabbath) operating on the latter (cf. the Utopia pattern) we arrive at the conception of liberal work, social activity directed toward the goals envisioned by desire. Dream is a bad word, except in a Buddhist context,** for individual psychic life, which also consists of an antithesis of dream proper (the dictatorship of the libido) and ordinary waking consciousness (the dictatorship of the ego). Through the former (romance as the real proletarian form) operating on the latter (cf. the tragic pattern) we arrive at the conception of vision, individual thought directed toward the goals envisioned by desire. Thus leisure : dream :: routine (social) : habit (individual) :: culture : vision. The Butlerian conception of habit as falling into the unconscious also belongs here, I don’t know just how. 3 (c.n.) ** The Western value-judgement on the “reality” of waking experience makes it more difficult for us to recognize the transforming power of

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dreaming desire in that experience when we meet it in a Shakespearean comedy: the famous speech of Prospero is designed to express the latter [The Tempest, 4.1.146–63]. [145] 24 ex. “—archaic dignity of the primitive. This is a sign that the history of taste has wrecked its will on it, & is ready to hand it over to serious criticism.”136 [146] 1 ex. (cf. p. 41, bottom) [pars. 86–8]. High mimetic brings secular & sacred centripetal gaze focused together, like two eyes brought to bear on one object. Hence things like the C of L [Court of Love] cpt. [counterpoint] to Xy [Christianity] & adoration of Elizabeth as a secular virgin have a peculiar quality about them that we think of as “Renaissance.” Chaucer has it even in the 14th c. Baroque has it out of kilter, usually: one of the reasons for the strain in baroque. [147] C (1-3) Mental activity in man differentiates itself & seeks incarnation in various languages. Each language is an imitation of the activity, which itself has no language, as we can see if we watch the equally purposive mental activity of a child, animal or plant. It is with these languages as Blake said of eyes: we look through them & not with them [The Everlasting Gospel, l. 100]. Hence the superstitions that attach themselves to all forms of such activity: they all become gradually purified of magic, & 19th c. minor poets are still talking in magical terms about rhythm & onomatopoeia. [148] Pr. Tot. [Liberal]: the present 1–3, with the introduction, & a note explaining (in guarded terms) that it really introduces 1–6 at least. I omitted: the book stops with the mythic & a brief peroration including the essential arguments of P4, but not a separate conclusion, tentative or otherwise. [Tragicomedy]: the present 4–6, 4 incorporating the present I as a part of its argument. Probably a brief recapitulatulatory introduction: length, contents & status of conclusion undecided. [Anticlimax]: the present C & P4 notes & arguments expounded into a

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complete 7–9 scheme. 7 (the number) would then be the Spengler-Cassirer and spiritual authority argument, 8 the Platonic myth as hypothesis of the social sciences argument, & 9 the civilization (including religion) vs. culture argument. The “anticlimax” comes in the rejection of existential synthesis as the (not an) idol of the theatre. [Rencontre]: probably a 10–12 with a longer introduction ( being the expanded conclusion) leading to three essays on William Morris, Samuel Butler, & William Butler Yeats. Hegelian in form, the rencontre principle (of which more below) coming out in that shape. 4k material, 137 of course, as it’s always been [Mirage]: a 13–15 concerned with the analogy of the arts, hence the mirage (= Schein), & essentially an encyclopaedia restatement of (as [Paradox] is of and [Ignoramus] of : extraordinary how consistent the double triadic pattern is: I expect the – [Twilight] relation is of cycle to quest-fulfilment). Hence a renumbering with a different & broader title is indicated. Now I’ve wasted so much time doodling in the past ten years that I hesitate to doodle once more, but actually I do believe that the ten years’ doodle is over, and that ten plus years of productivity ought to succeed. Anyway the whole scheme up to , the only part of it that’s ever been really clear, is clear now in what seems its archetypal form, & even the rest analogically clear. The problems of 6 merge insensibly into the problems of , & those again into the 4k problems of . So I shall have to keep writing the essays, as far as possible, one at a time. I know that if I can keep my health & a modicum of leisure I already have it in me to produce twelve essays which will be to literary criticism what the twelve books of Paradise Lost are to poetry. Well, to avoid hybris, let’s make it four books of essays and the four books of Paradise Regained. [149] Pr.-Var. Each body of knowledge of course has its theory & its practice. The social sciences have their practical or dialectically determining aspect in law. The natural sciences have theirs in medicine (subjective or human nature) and engineering. The humanities have theirs in the creative arts. I seem to be hovering around a theory of the withering away of institutional religion, as I don’t see a separate form of the fourth, although perhaps there is a group of speculative sciences with a practical aspect in religion. But religion is so strongly mimetic of the other three that it’s

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hard to grasp its independent reality. The poverty of mendicant orders, for instance, is a mimic or “all found” poverty; it’s not the squalid & humiliating evil of bailiffs in the house, duns in the mailbox, & bugs in the woodwork. The Puritan destroyers of churches took seriously the view that religion is vastly more important than art; but as their zeal has been forgotten & only their hooliganism is remembered, the view itself must have been very doubtful. [150]

Pr.-Var. 8 I am sorry to see the Americans trying to defend the “values” of the humanities on a funky anti-Communist basis, & thereby both misrepresenting Marxism & sentimentalizing their own case. In one aspect “dialectical materialism” is ordinary common sense, that is, all aspects of material force in human life do behave dialectically. Ideas don’t: that’s the Hegelian fallacy that was unfortunately adopted by Marxism. But if a war (collision of material forces) breaks out between England & France everybody in England joins the English side, traitors become the lowest of criminals, the faults of that side & the virtues of the opposing one are never considered, or at least never taken seriously. All ideological clashings are against the nature of ideas: the better idea contains the worse one, as Coleridge said, & a conservative arguing dialectically against liberalism, or vice versa, is employing a special type of distorted rationalization. I can see that the actualized Idea is a synthesis: I can’t see that it forms itself out of a genuine ideological antithesis. I hope this doesn’t have to go into [Liberal], as I haven’t got it all clear.* Pr.- [Anticlimax] [Rencontre] * But I suspect that a main theme of , perhaps , or both, will be that dialectic antitheses of material forces, growing larger & more global at each period of history, shapes [shape] an ideological unity: not so much the universal idea as the idea of the university. Also that true dialectic is catholicity, & that what has been called dialectic since Plato is really rhetoric. This restores metaphysics to its rightful & traditional place as universality of thought. Nobody can follow Socrates in the Republic passing over every qualification of his arguments without feeling that one is watching him put on a rhetorical stunt. At the same time the relation of theoria, the vision of the goal of action, to action itself remains as important as ever, & the Kierkegaardian antithesis of ethical freedom & aes-

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thetic idolatry is as unsatisfactory as ever. The consequence of the Platonic-Hegelian view of dialectic is to make all ideas fundamentally rationalizations of action. Thank goodness these problems don’t start until 6 anyway. [151] 3 Remember that the music analogy at the beginning of I now goes into its proper place in 3.

[152] Pr.- [Liberal] & [Tragicomedy] Well, now that the whole shape of things to come is clearing up, I find myself, with a disconcerting but normal perversity, thinking about in a way that almost seems to consider sticking it on again. I don’t expect I will, but the 3–4 links are still there: I haven’t censored them by inserting two hard covers between them. Now 4 has always been a somewhat miscellaneous-looking chapter, & with this new scheme it’ll get more shape. The general idea seems to be a theory of plot, or at least of structure. The main blocks of material are: a) a section on encyclopaedic structure in the epic tradition, starting with the Bible & continuing through the modes: Dante, Spenser, Milton, Joyce. This was originally, & may yet be, the whole chapter: anyway it exists. b) a section on romance & comedy-romance, dealing with practical criticism not found in the mythoi. Doubtful whether this exists as a separate unit. c) a section on low mimetic fiction and its devices of archetypal displacement. This certainly does exist. d) perhaps the study of the fiction of a single action (drama, lyric, short stories, brief epic) as distinct from continuous fiction. Not sure. e) a conspectus of episodic themes: our old friend the zodiac or I. It exists all right, but is thematic—closer in a sense to lyric than to drama. In fact it may be the real form of the lyric section of 5 that’s been eluding me for so long. f) some remarks about comminution in satire: perhaps going around in a circle to some of my gospel-as-sequence of epiphanies points. Exists, but may not belong in 4. g) whether such a thing as verbal narrative as distinct from rhetoric exists or not I dunno, nor whether it has anything to do with lyrics.

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That’s seven, of which four & perhaps five have some substantial existence. Thus: 1) Scripture-epic encyclopaedic tradition. 2) Fictional tradition, both naive & displaced: comic form (rce. & l.m. fic. [romance & low mimetic fiction] 3) Drama & brief epic (P.R. [Paradise Regained] & Job) convergence on the central point (epiphanic) 4) Thematic tradition: zodiacal (dr. [drama] & lyric): circular. 5) Comminutive tradition: ly & sat. [lyric & satire]: ending on sequence of epiphanies. or this: 1) Encyclopaedic containment. 2) Naive romance: tendency to containment 3) Convergence on epiphanic point: zodiac, dr. br. ep. & ly. [drama, brief epic & lyric] tendency. 4) Sentimental romance (l.m. [low mimetic] fiction): tendency to sequence. 5) Ironic sequential movement. The reason I’m splashing around so being that I want in 4 a logical set-up for 5. And so on. [153] 25? At present I say in the opening of 3 that the structural forms of ptg. [painting] are analogous only to plane geometry, not identical with them. True, no doubt, yet the mathematical analogies to every one of the major arts except literature, where it’s myth, seems highly significant. What is the science of myth, comparable to mathematics? If it isn’t literature itself, I suppose it’s meta ta physika, not the things after physics but the things beside them.138 [154] 25 “The basis of narrative is metaphor, conceived as one thing after another; the basis of meaning is metaphor, conceived as two or more things simultaneously apprehended through identification.” Excreted from 1— it goes in the introduction to metaphor.139 [155] 3 I’ve said that philosophies of fate & providence are existential projections of tragedy & comedy respectively. Take a writer who finds that

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tragic structures are the ones that, for him, come off. He will have characters left standing around the stage making remarks about how futile is human effort, how strong is fate, how ineluctable destiny, & the like. After a while he may get to believe it, or, at any rate, give out with it when he’s asked what his philosophy of life is. Similarly with comic writers & a belief in grace, providence, etc.—cf. the remark on JW [Jonathan Wild] & Heartfree [par. 142]. Hence the different projections that Hardy & Shaw develop out of evolution. It isn’t the other way round because Hardy obviously stands or falls by his literary work, not as a philosopher. [156] 23 Better say that “commentary” is the process of translating the ambiguous & implicit into the discursive & explicit. Here is where your precious Molière point goes,140 & where you can pick up the idea dropped at the end of One about the implications of a plot-structure being more explicitly analyzed in more realistic modes. Interpretations of myths from Plutarch to Frazer are not anachronisms, just commentary, & the infinity of commentary possible with the most highly intensive & abstract form of writing—myth—accounts for some of the sanctity of sacred scriptures. [157] 24 Don’t forget archetypes as basis of cultural understanding (quoting Horse-ass in Parliament) or—something else I’ve already forgotten. Maybe it’s just that reality & stuff are the content of lit. but lit. ain’t itself made outa them. Poems is made outa poems, novels outa novels. Yeats seeking an image, not a book, is just trying to dig deeper into convention, thass [that’s] all. Sonata & fugue forms have no existence outside music, & neither have poetic forms. [158] 3 The existential projection: techniques of evocation produce or project a philosophy of unseen forces (like with dance in S. Langer important).141 Hence Yeats’ Great Mind & de la Mare’s fairies & the Paracelsian elemental spirits in evocative poetry (Comus, The Tempest, MND [A Midsummer Night’s Dream], Il Penseroso: this last poem shows the process of projection: you feel pensive so you read occultism). Well, the tendency of graduate schools in English to turn into Anglo-Catholic catechism

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classes. That’s projection of sacramental symbolism, the technical problem of how to write myth & archetypes. I have a note somewhere I don’t quite believe, that the e.p. [epiphanic point] of myth is sacramentalism, of romance magic (see above), of h.m. [high mimesis] literary Platonism (anyway a philosophy about forms & informing principles), of l.m. [low mimesis] psychologism or the philosophy of organism, of ironic mebbe [maybe] existentialism proper. Also that the l.m. organism business has a lot to do with Rousseau’s sleeping beauty buried under rubble, whatever that means. Well, if both tragedy & comedy produce an ex. pro. [existential projection], so should epi & enc. [epic & encyclopaedic] thematic. The latter would be Wordsworthian pantheism, the former the sort of analogy to physics about “discontinuity” in T.E. Hulme. In fact if one ever read all that Strange Seas of Thought horseshit about Wordsworth as an e.p. [epiphanic point] of his l.m. thematic techniques they might come into focus.142 Nine enfolded spheres. [159] 3? Two worlds, innocence & experience. Thrust of latter into former produces Mut. Coes. [Mutabilitie Cantos], Job & Faust Prologues. Incursion of former into latter produces harmony of spheres music in NO [Nativity Ode], chastity in Comus, contemplation in Il Pen [Il Penseroso], Marvell’s Drop of Dew, Fielding’s Mrs. Heartfree, Spenser’s Florimell, Morris’s Birdalone and the quest of the perilous cunt generally, the pastoral convention & society, & Rousseau’s sleeping beauty again.

[160] 5 (dr. Nts. [drama Notes]) Not much new here, but: cf. Prospero the magician who creates illusion & the Comus who speaks for the illusion of a corrupt world. Those who see with the Lady see invisible presences in the dark. The poet creates an illusion in a reality, & by doing so reveals that his illusion is reality & that sensational reality is illusion. [161] new 5 Wit & profundity belongs probably in rhetoric. [162] Pr. A second clarification sticks on genres & rhetoric, but finally extrudes the whole of 4 except just enough to make a preliminary section on con-

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tinuous genres. A full treatment of 4 is the real 7, which is “Principles of Literary Symbolism,”143 & is a full morphological study of the symbols of the different genres: thus it absorbs the old or brown-book,144 [Liberal], [Tragicomedy] & [Anticlimax] sequence. Curious how 4 has never really belonged to AC:145 it is . So now I have 4 chapters, or 6 with the introduction; and they’re chapters & not essays. [163] 3 Ideas I can’t yet dig out, or rather express: why nature is a cyclical process in the archetypal phase; simile as centrifugally likeness to reality & centripetally a pattern of repetition that produces a) the cyclical symbols themselves b) archetypes, which are recurring images c) the recurrences of rhetoric. Some of this may be (new) 5 stuff. Metaphorical worlds of eternal being. [164] This (green) book— [Liberal], & so the others Blue books— [Tragicomedy] & [Anticlimax] Black books— [Rencontre] and [Paradox]. Get another for [Mirage]. Books of undetermined color for [Ignoramus] and [Twilight]. Brown books: drama supplementing prose fiction " epic " and miscellaneous brown ones 1 — Modes. 2 — Symbols. 3 — Archetypes. Theory of Poetic Structures: I 4 — Encyclopaedic & episodic forms. (Theory of Forms?) II 5 — Genres. IV 6 — Rhetoric (as texture of poetics). I 7 — Poetics and Rhetoric Theory of Poetic Functions II 8 — The Neighbors of Poetics III 9 — Notes toward a Definition of Culture. 10 — Morris: Revolution & Myth 11 — Butler: Habit & Ritual 12 —Yeats: Language & Act

Notebook 36 Theory of Structures I — Modes " " " II — Symbols " " " III — Archetypes " " " IV — Generic Forms " " " V — Genres Theory of Functions I — Rhetoric " " " II — The Context of Criticism " " " III — The Context of Literature " " " IV —

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Internal evidence indicates that this notebook was written during the years 1956 to 1962.1 It was first published in the Northrop Frye Newsletter, 9, no. 1 (Winter 2001–2): 2–28. The notebook, bound in a blue leatherette cover and measuring 17.8 x 11.2 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 24.

[1] In the course of the slow & cumbersome regrouping of my ideas around mythoi instead of genres, an agenda has gradually formed itself once more, in the familiar pattern, one more book having to be numbered zero. Now, my first study looks like a comparative study of myth, one pole the Bible & the other the thematic content of lyric (Yeats, Stevens, etc.). Tentative title: “A Primer of Typology.” My articles on Yeats & Paradise Regained point in this direction.2 [2] The second one is a straight “Morphology of Fiction,” the main part of it an analysis of romance. All my interests in Morris, Hawthorne, Spenser, Poe & the like converge here. The third starts a new line of investigation along the conception of metaphor as constructive element in conceptual thinking. Here all my relatively new hunches about controlling metaphors, models & the like, will go. Finally will come an expansion of metaphor & model into a restatement of myth, this time as a crystallization of all “thought,” in a contemporary context. [3] Here I should like to collect skeleton or master keys, ideas that, although they may be explicitly expressed only in one book, in some measure run through all. Most such ideas are of course already in Structural Poetics.3 This is for new ones.

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[4] SP [Structural Poetics, i.e., AC] left the suggestion that there were at least two mental structures: the verbal universe and the numerical, quantitative, or mathematical universe.4 Now numbers, although they run in a sequence, seem to have a peculiar relation to space: whenever mathematics deals with time it translates it into a spatial dimension. Ever since my undergraduate grapplings with Spengler & Bergson I’ve been told that durée, time as inward experience, was something other than this physical translation of it. [5] It seems possible that verbal structures, as their intimate connexion with emotion & values might suggest, are in fact projections of time, which is therefore not incommunicable or inconceivable, as we’re so often told, but on the contrary the source of all power of articulation. God said let there be light and there was light: the shaping of the thing by the word is the entry of divinity into time. Hence verbal expression in its most highly disciplined, disinterested and concentrated form, which is poetry, becomes rhythmical. [6] But there appear to be two forms of experiencing time. One is the entropy clock, the sense of an irreversible movement toward the increasingly predictable. The other is teleological time, in which the effect always precedes the cause, the cause being final. Here is also the evolutionary rhythm, consciousness following on & eventually mastering existence, “mind” doing the same to “matter,” and human work, the building of the city & the garden, demonstrating the real form of human life. Hence Wiener’s notion that communication, the use in short of the word, overcomes entropy.5 [7] It seems to me that the verbal structures produced by entropy time are the assertive structures based on an externally conceived ontological postulate. That is, they are based on the conception of substance, and, as we can clearly see in Spinoza, they tend to approximate & imitate mathematical structures. Those produced by teleological time are the hypothetical ones based on metaphor, or inner identification. For all metaphor starts in the man-and-boy metaphor: the identity of the inner life:6 I suppose there is also an “entropy space,” which is mechanical, & a teleological space which is mathematical. Or maybe I can just work it out as a contrast between space-oriented time & time as the growth of energy.

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[8] A lot of my similar opposites would fit this: memory & habit or practice-memory; association & thought, etc. I wonder how far one could get taking some philosopher to be totally wrong, as Ramus is reputed to have done with Aristotle. Blake & some other romantics did it with Locke; a lot of people have unconsciously done it with Hobbes; Ryle & others do it with Descartes;7 my present (and doubtless soon passing) phase seems to be doing it with Spinoza.8 [9] I think of either [Liberal] or [Tragicomedy] as concerned partly with topoi, including such ones of my own discovery as the light & dark female, the red & white life & death one,9 and so on. And of [Anticlimax] as concerned not only with a categorization of metaphors, but with some attempt to relate this to rhetorical devices. [10] Engineering metaphors or thought models start of course with fire and the wheel. One gives metaphors of spark, scintilla, energy & the like: most of our organism metaphors take off from it. The wheel is of course the source of all cyclical conceptions of fate, fortune & nature. The pendulum is involved in all Yin & Yang theories like those in Plato’s Politicus; it’s also part of Hegel. But in Hegel, as still more in Marx, we begin to get all the “feedback,” “governor” & other self-regulating metaphors that run through 19th c. thought from Burke to Butler. [11] Internal combustion is in anima mundi & all vitalist metaphors; ball bearings, in myths of individuality; gears in metaphors of compulsion & interaction, & so on. Organism metaphors, as in Spengler, may be reducible to mechanisms. [12] Geometrical metaphors come mainly from the spatial orientation of the body. Ladders, staircases, chains of being & pyramidal hierarchies of steps are all “up lifting” thoughts: divers & miners suggest profundity, depth, & the resurrection of gold & pearls from the dead. “On the other hand,” we have metaphors of parallelism, balance & dual symmetry. Church, army & feudal system are degree-models; metaphors of discontinuity come into the absolute monarch, Providence, & the Cartesian soul. [13] So far everything’s a loose bundle to me. [Anticlimax] or [Rencontre] will be concerned with the role of aesthetic judgement in morals:

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i.e. the number of moral judgements we make that are actually aesthetic ones, chiefly of taste and timing. Also, of course, the use of political leaders as dramatis personae: Eisenhower & Stevenson as the plain man & egghead of low-norm satire; Jimmy Walker as gay blade; Lindbergh as solar hero.10 [14] Then there’s the whole business of the psychic imitation of the physical. The clergyman is a spiritual “healer”; the psychiatrist is up to his chin in metaphorical medicine: psychic equivalents of embolisms (“blocks”) & the like. [15] Arnold’s “marriage with deceased wife’s sister” is a case of secular sacramentalism: the ersatz or substitute act of vision.11 [16] Then there’s the scansion-and-action pattern that comes into Darwin: a holding together of a total potential following by dialectic choice, or movement. This is linked somehow with the figure of the vortex or narrowing cone, as in Dante. It’s in the conditioned-reflex trial & error pattern too. [17] At present the sensible thing to do would be to read criticism and sources of typology, in preparation for the Harvard courses.12 The notes thus collected would become either notes to SP [Structural Poetics] or a separate book, depending on whether SP stays as one or vanishes into another zero ( [Liberal] or pre- ). [18] After that, [Tragicomedy] is clearer: a morphology of fiction starting with (myth)-romance, & going on to mimetic & ironic displacements. It’ll take my scattered notes on Great Expectations, Humphry Clinker, The Egoist, Handley Cross,13 Joyce’s The Dead, as well as my Spenser & Morris & Hawthorne hunches. [19] Then [Anticlimax] could be either or both of two things: a study of metaphor & concept, as above, or a morphology of imagery, focussed on the modern lyric (Yeats, Valery, Maeterlinck, Rilke, Stevens, etc.). Presumably the one that isn’t will be [Rencontre], but I dunno: one of them has my 4k ideas in it.14 I don’t want to start floundering around in tables of contents again, though. If I’d just think of four books as four simultaneous Zoas it might help.

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[20] Anyway, I ought to start with Blake’s distinction between the world man makes & the world he lives in, the worlds of innocence & experience, as aligned with the Copernicus-Newton tradition of a hidden world of primary qualities. Both are constructs, poetic & mathematical. (Note for Milton article: this is the agon of Palamabron & Satan as it affects Milton.)15 [21] One has to distinguish a metaphor from the verbal construct embodying it, the picture from the frame. If I say “X has got a bee in his bonnet about Y,” I am using metaphor. If I say “X has got the notion Y into his head,” I am using the same verbal construct. It is only a construct, but adequate for its purposes & unlikely to lead to misunderstanding, hence “correct.” One might try to compile a list of essential constructs, but I doubt if they would be more than pragmatically essential. The metaphor then is a dramatized construct, an implicit identification made explicit. [22] All literature is literally ironic, which is why humor is so close to the hypothetical. If you don’t mean what you say, you’re either joking or poetizing. [23] I have a notion that a prolonged period of solitude & fasting would produce hallucinations, & that these would be mandalas and such: they would be the essential forms in which “outer” perceptions are organized. Now that I’ve got this down, it’s rather a platitude—as well as a principle already applied to literature in Maud Bodkin’s book16—but still, as Freud says, it’s one thing to know & another to realize. I just wonder if my “hypothesis” idea isn’t the introverted or formalizing core of the representing disciplines. [24] I must expand the conception of dandyism as, essentially, a comic literary convention entering life around the second half of the 19th c. The dandy develops out of the Cléante type of comic moral norm,17 detached from what is seen as a crowd of preoccupied attached obsessed people, all facing in the same direction. The dandy is essentially conservative, because the facing-one-direction people make an assumption of progress, yet his impact is that of a devil’s advocate, reversing the melodramatic maxims in which society believes. Apart from the French developments, Oscar Wilde popularized the attitude, the progenitor of

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which in England is really Matthew Arnold, both in his life & in his comedies. An Ideal Husband has the dandy in one of his proper roles—that of gracioso-hero. His attitude is comic-existential, puncturing the balloons of false idealism. A Woman of No Importance has a far more brilliant dandy, but Wilde, partly through an effort to be “fair” to the other side, partly through a streak of masochism, & partly through sheer laziness, completely foozled the conclusion. Anyway, the dandy attitude survives in the early (twenties) essays of Aldous Huxley, whose epigrams are mainly inverted clichés, in Yeats’ association of dandyism & heroism, in Lytton Strachey, & in the contemporary New Yorker—see its Knickerbocker figure and again the inverted melodrama clichés of its cartoons. 18 G.K. Chesterton is an anti-dandy; Shaw uses the dandy formula of course, but never puts much of himself behind it. I think something of this might get into an essay on Samuel Butler, who isn’t a dandy, but uses one as a norm in WAF [The Way of All Flesh], & is in marked contrast to William Morris, who’s a tough little Cockney drudge, to use Carlyle’s opposite term.19 Catholicism as an intellectual’s refuge has a lot to do with dandyism—Firbank, Waugh, etc. The sexual fantasies of the dandy are masochistic, partly because of the strong homosexual lean of dandyism. This has been there from its beginnings in chivalry & Courtly Love. Its patron saint is of course the Van Dyke portrait of Charles I. Most “longhairs” hanker for some kind of Jacobitism—in the U.S.A. it’s Confederacy. The remarkably skilful use of dandyism by Eliot is a study in itself, especially in his criticism. This is one of those instances in which life imitates literature. [25] Of all mistakes founded on premature value-judgements & bad generic classification, one of the most inept is the attribution of creativity to the genre itself. Thus it is widely assumed that anyone who produces poems or fiction is “creative,” though he may never have written a creative line in his life, & that anyone who produces “non-fiction,” including criticism, is “non-creative,” though his verbal structures may be far profounder in their implications. [26] The fallacy that the poet using discursive material is doing the same kind of job as the philosopher naturally leads to the conclusion that he must do it either worse or better. If worse, poetry is a watereddown popularization of philosophy; if better, philosophy is only the abstract residue of a creative energy properly expressed in poetry. Both

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views are popular & widely held; both are nonsense; both are obstacles to criticism. [27] The present classification must be the right one, because it’s the one that’s been in front of me all the time, concealed by the book now called Anatomy of Criticism.20 Well, then, an interconnected tetralogy. The first volume ( [Liberal]) is still a study of epic, which I think of at present as divided into four main parts. The first part deals with the primary epic, evolving from the undisplaced mythos archetype of romance, through the in medias res discovery form of epic. It concentrates mainly on Homer, and (as I think now) ends with Virgil. Part Two deals with the Bible; Part Three with Dante. That’s three parts on the epic, scripture & sacramental epic or encyclopaedic poem respectively. Part Four deals with the archetypes of romance, as exemplified in Spenser. Minor questions: I don’t know how much Milton has to go in, but some subordinate themes such as pastoral from Theocritus to Lycidas certainly belong.21 So it is a book on Spenser after all, if he’s big enough to take it. And it fixes, more or less, my worries about how to get scripture, epic & romance all into the same book. I no longer think I have to write a hundred pages on every goddam epic ever written. The book is continuous, architectonic, & strongly Protestant in tone, less for theological reasons than because Spenser & Milton are the narrative climax. [28] Then comes a study of drama ( [Tragicomedy]), in which the romances of Shakespeare have a place corresponding to Spenser. It’s just barely possible that this will take the form of a review of my 24 phases,22 & [be] called something like “The Well-Tempered Critic.” But at present I see it as my old morphology of drama scheme, with the same primary emphasis on romantic comedy it’s always had. [29] There follows a study that starts with my 4k notes,23 expands from there through a study of prose [Anticlimax] into an analysis of the role of metaphor (diagram & ambiguities) in conceptual thought. What I used to call the Locke program of reading is its basis.24 [30] Then comes a resuming of the thread of the narrative of literary symbolism that the first book had, only it will be ( [Rencontre]) fundamentally a study in fragmentation & epiphany, running from Blake to the Yeats-Joyce-Stevens generation. William Morris is the connecting

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link with the previous book. I see 3 & 4 as growing out of the fourth essay, & 1 & 2 out of the third.25 [31] After that I may be ready to tackle a general study of aesthetics ( [Mirage]) which will recapture a few fish that have got away. After that I’ll retire and devote myself to [Paradox] & [Ignoramus], & perhaps a book of aphoristic Pensées for [Twilight]. I’ve written very little that I can use for any of this except notes: P.R. [Paradise Regained] is all I have for [Liberal]; my Shakespeare stuff is for [Tragicomedy]; Blake, Yeats, Joyce & Stevens fit [Rencontre]—I’ve done most on that—but there’s no assemblage problem. [32] Aristotle seems to me unique among philosophers, not only in dealing specifically with poetics, but in assuming that such poetics would be an organon of a specific discipline. Other philosophers, when they touch on the arts, deal in questions of general aesthetics which they make a set of analogies to their logical & metaphysical views; hence it is difficult to use the aesthetics of, say, Kant or Hegel without getting involved in a Kantian or Hegelian “position,” which of course is the opposite of what I am here attempting to do. [33] Value-judgements are worn as blinders by conventional critics to prevent themselves from seeing the real facts of literature. Karl Shapiro in Indiana spoke of Jung’s references to Rider Haggard as showing what crude & undeveloped taste in literature Jung had. Maybe Jung’s taste is crude, but Shapiro’s real feeling was that once we start making serious allusions to “inferior” writers, the whole system of valuation which makes Shapiro an interesting & distinctive person will be overthrown.26 [34] Closely connected with this is the bad analogy between reading and eating, which a lot of people have without knowing it. In eating[,] a large amount of the involuntary & automatic goes on: a baby’s pablum builds up the baby’s nervous & muscular energy without consciousness being involved. Taking the analogy seriously gives us the theory of educational magic: the notion that one cannot help improving one’s mind by being exposed to Shakespeare or Dante. The negative side of this is the impulse behind censorship: the analogy of poison, the notion that certain arrangements of words will, like a mushroom full of prussic acid, automatically & involuntarily do harm. There is an educational rhythm to be

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followed, analogous to not giving beef-steak to babies; but knowledge, being conscious, is based on character, & has no automatism. To the true critic there is nothing poisonous, because poison, unlike food, works automatically in the mechanical, not the organic, sense. I haven’t got all this clear yet. [35] My five modes, as I say, are actually seven modes. The top one is existential enlightenment through the oral tradition, transmitted by people like Socrates, Pythagoras, most founders of religions, including Jesus & Buddha in their aspect as human teachers, the gurus of Yoga, bodhisattvas, & others of whom one feels that they do not write. The response to such teaching is the sacramental act. Twentieth-century examples would be Gurdjieff and (in part) Wittgenstein. The bottom one is demagoguery and jargon, & the response to it is the mob rite—lynchings, wars, parades & the like. [36] I can’t help wondering if there isn’t some analogy between my “anagogic” perspective & Kant’s conception of “transcendental aesthetic” as the consciousness of space & time.27 I feel unwilling though to introduce such analogies into what attempts to concern itself with the organon of a specific discipline. [37] In vision there is focussed vision & peripheral vision, visual awareness which is not really seeing, but which expresses itself in a kinaesthetic sense of orientation. Much in the rational tradition is based on the analogy of vision: there is truth or reality on which we focus, a peripheral “posse.” I’ve just been reading a book in the yogi tradition: Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous—which carries this analogy to the limit of completely eliminating the peripheral vision. [38] I wonder how far I could get on the hypothesis that my Eight Classics are not books that I write, but books that I read. In that case they wouldn’t be progressive or initiatory, but simultaneously present. I’m just wondering if my next upward heave isn’t into another “zero” book, that all my books are zeros. And that the next effort has its centre of gravity in [Mirage], and is concerned with the formal principles of at least music, literature & painting. [39] That would considerably foreshorten my present scheme, which appears to be taking the form of a study of the formal principles of liter-

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ature, thus: Part One, Myth, as the formal principle of narrative, applied to a) scripture b) romance c) epic d) mimetic fiction. Part Two, Mandala or Persona or something, having a good deal to do with The Tempest, as the formal principle of drama. Part Three, Model, as the formal principle of non-literary prose. Part Four, Metaphor, as the formal principle of lyric. Then a concluding part on analogous structural principles in the other arts (e.g. sculpture as the hypothesis of biology). And if it doesn’t work out just in that form, at least the principle of boiling down and taking a simultaneous view may be sound. That’s really all that’s new in this hunch. [40] When we say “perhaps idea B in X’s mind is not after all inconsistent with idea A,” what we mean is that it is possible to find a verbal formula that will connect them. [41] There are no heresies in the arts, only failures; and the eager heresyhunting that poets & their disciples go in for tells us only about them. As soon, that is, as we see through the trick on which their writing is based: the illusion of raising one’s standards by limiting one’s sympathies. [42] The binary form in music (A tonic to dominant; B dominant to tonic) is really based on the mirror principle, as the stunt known as “rovescio” makes clear (in e.g. a Haydn minuet). [43] Well, well. Rossini had always been to me the type of the detached artist, who simply quit when he’d made enough to retire, instead of flogging his genius every inch of the way, like a true artist. Now I discover a humorous but oddly touching piano piece called “Marche et reminiscences pour mon dernier voyage.” It’s a funeral march, with a very curious second theme marked “frappons.” Then follows [follow] snatches of all his operas, from Tancred to William Tell, with the funeral march interpenetrating them. At the end the “knocking” theme returns, & as the piece resolves on its tonic there are the notes “on ouvre,” and finally “j’y suis,” then “Requiem.” Maybe Shakespeare, too, cared more than I’ve been assuming. [44] Ordinary social relationships are a mixture of sincerity & hypocrisy: sometimes we mean what we say, sometimes we speak ironically or hypothetically; but in any case personal sincerity switches on & off like an electric light. (One may be sincere in irony, as when a panegyrical obitu-

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ary is felt to be “right,” though nobody regards it as more than an aesthetic conventionalizing of the truth.) Similarly in poetry or discursive writing: the relation of any given passage to personal sincerity is unpredictable. Clergymen, especially Protestant preachers, find it hard to adapt to this: they feel they’re hypocritical if they don’t believe they believe all they say. But nobody but a paranoid does send his personal current through every statement, just as nobody but a hopeless pedant or cynic believes nothing he says. You can’t go on being a hypocrite: that’s an illusory vice for the most part, & a prolific breeder of pharmakoi [scapegoats]. [45] Consider the possibility of starting with a set of “keys,” a Tarot pack or alphabet of forms, arrived at inductively from a series of analyses, as in my myth course.28 The point of epiphany is one; the point of demonic epiphany another, & the cycle a third. Then there are nekyia29 complexes (monster-swallowing; cycle-projecting, etc.), unborn world complexes, & so on. The thing is that I musn’t tackle another book without getting at least the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid & the Commedia firmly into my noodle. [46] The principle of [Liberal] appears to be theory of mythos, based, as above, on the possession of the central epic tradition. It’s apparently a study of the conjunctive principle of literary form. I’ve been dithering about attacking it through my myth course, because of feeling that lyrical analysis leads rather to [Rencontre]. But is apparently a study of what I’ve variously called comminution, fragmentation, & sparagmos: of the element common to the lyric as fragment and the anatomic satire; the ironic core. Anyway, the connecting principle of is still definitive myth, or scripture, & so the scripture-romance-epic sequence belongs, & the conception of displacement connects its dynamic aspect (mythos) with its static or patterned aspect (analogy). [47] The principle of [Tragicomedy] appears to be theory of ethos, based on the possession of the central dramatic tradition. Its central idea is one that is also integral to [Liberal], the point of epiphany. (In the epic tradition this is the shield of Achilles in the Iliad & the sun in Dante; more doubtfully the bow in the Odyssey & the bough in Aeneid.) The overtones & ramifications of the point of epiphany are: Aristotle’s recognition or discovery; the emblem or talismanic object coming to that

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point; the epiclesis30 or transubstantiation point in the mass (the mass having the same relation to the archetypal undisplaced ritual that scripture has to the definitive myth); the conjunction of kairos (š) and the timeless moment (› ), & so on & so on. Involved with it of course are all the dialectic separations of light from dark, reality from shadow or eidolon or mask, & the whole anima-persona set up. (In the Bible the point of epiphany is anywhere in the life of Christ, that being a sequence of definitive epiphanies, particularly the nativity, the baptism or epiphany proper, the overcoming of the Tempter, the transfiguration, the agony in the garden, the death on the cross, the resurrection, the ascension.) [48] I think I should hang on to the “science” thesis, because the scientific is the opposite of the systematic. Systems are crustacean & aren’t built, like bridges, to stand stress & strain; science is organic, with its skeleton inside. Also, once you start thinking of systems, you get trapped into questions of “How can you criticize literature until?” type. Usually this is filled up with “—you study metaphysics (because of the ‘assumptions’ involved), economics (this is Marxist, & not now fashionable), theology, aesthetics, or anything but literature[”]. Most of these assumption-marshlights lead you along a path marked “Quicksand” with the greatest plainness. There is a lot of work to be done in criticism and all “until” questions are mere pretexts for not doing it. If we need a word for this attitude, the word “phenomenological” is a good one, because it’s an even longer word than metaphysical. Actually all metaphysical questions, as the etymology of the word indicates, follow such work & don’t precede it—the same is true of aesthetics, which can’t budge an inch “until” more work is done on the theory of criticism in the different arts. Theology is not a science, but (like occultism) a system; science is incidentally systematic, & there have been no metaphysical discoveries in our time that haven’t (properly) followed scientific discovery. Thomism is the analogy of science: I think Dante’s sun expresses something of this. [49] When I was working on The Tempest I discovered that the Classical art-nature topos cleared a surprising amount of it up. I have a notion that all the mysterious magicians & females & stuff in Romantic fiction (E.T.A. Hoffman, Hawthorne, George Macdonald) would clear up pretty fast too if I’d fish out the kernel of the Romantic version of this topos. Wonder who’d give it to me. Shelley, maybe, though I’ve never

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got much of a grip on Shelley. The gist of it, of course, is (a) art & nature are not pre-existing orders but different expressions of a common hidden creative process (the creative-genetic identification is part of this) (b) this process is below the physical world, not above it (c) hence it’s morally ambivalent. But there’s so much more to it. I take it that this is an essential key to [Anticlimax], if that begins with topoi in literary criticism (4l) & fans out to topoi in commentary (4k) & thence to speculative thought.31 I note that my present scheme starts with mythoi but picks up a specific genre as it goes along—it always has, of course. Also they seem to open out logically from one another. [Tragicomedy] from [Liberal] via the point of epiphany, from via the parabasis metamorphosis I’ve worked out elsewhere,32 [Rencontre] from via comminution & fragmentation. That may mean they’ll foreshorten, naturally. [50] Still, AC was a four-book idea that collapsed into one, & this, starting as a one-book idea on the same general scale, may expand into four. If not, there isn’t any four, except as books to read. [51] There seem to be three strands of tradition in modern poetry. The Mallarmé-Valéry one is hermetically sealed poetic diction; the LaforgeCorbière-Eliot one is a deliberately violent juxtaposing of the hermetic & the naturalistic. The disintegrative tradition that goes through Rimbaud & Jarry seems to me the one that develops in Pound & Wyndham Lewis, & that seems to me art for an invisible bureaucracy, an art without dignity. Only I haven’t the connections clear. [52] Containing topos for Greek epic, taken from Hesiod but applicable to Homer & some Plato (e.g. the Laws): 1. Golden Age (reign of Cronos) 2. Ideal of human justice (Astraea myth). 3. Good Eris: works founded on the natural cycle. 4. Bad Eris: war leading to fate.33 The Iliad deals with 4, with the shield of Achilles giving us 3. (The shield is where the moon could well be in a later topos frame, hence its association with the moon in Paradise Lost I.)34 The same topos, pretty well, is in Plato. Top level of nous, knowledge of, possessed only by the philosopher-king; then dianoia, knowledge about, the enforced will of the just state’s guards; then pistis, works & days of the artisan, then eikasia, or

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the pursuit of shadows. The stuff I’ve got on Zeus as the projection of the poet’s will is the connecting link.35 [53] Containing topos for the Christian period: 1. Order of grace & providence; ministry of angels [Hebrews 1:14]. Often symbolized in natural order by harmony of spheres & “Translunar Paradise.”36 (lower vs. upper heaven). 2. Order of human nature or golden age, lost at the Fall & partially recoverable through law, education, virtue & the like. This is the world of “art” which is also part of nature. 3. Order of physical nature, morally neutral but theologically fallen, hence permeated by death & corruption in 4. 4. Disorder of sin & evil. [54] Containing topos for Romanticism (tentative). 1. World of automatism & mysterious power: Shelley’s Jupiter, Blake’s Urizen, Byron’s Arimanes, Hardy’s Immanent Will.37 2. Conceptual world of nature as structure or system: the aesthetic or contemplative order of nature. 3. World of nature as process & of man as existentially engaged. 4. World of creative power within man & nature: morally ambivalent, hence the Romantic Agony,38 & only epiphanically manifest. (In such a poet as Valéry the theme is invisible to the poet himself, like a Kantian Ding an Sich.[)] [55] I imagine the Greek topos frame works pretty well for Latin too— Virgil’s Eclogues are 2 or 1; the Georgics are 3; the Aeneid is 4 in “theme” & 2 in telos. I really need Gaster’s “topocosm,” only in another context.39 [56] Coming back around that same circle again: [Liberal] Continuous Fictional Forms. [Tragicomedy] Episodic Fictional Forms. [Anticlimax] Continuous Thematic Forms. [Rencontre] Episodic Thematic Forms. [57] [Liberal] would have six main sections, as follows: 1. Mythical Narrative. Two sections, one (probably the second) dealing with the Bible and the other with what I used to call the Druid anal-

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ogy.40 Anyway, it’s the undisplaced quest from creation to apocalypse. Whether it includes the apocalyptic-demonic-cyclical paradigm or not I’m not sure, but it probably does. (Alpha & C major) 2. Naive Romance. The Orc cycle and the quest myths. Two Brothers & other folk-tale patterns; the Jason-Hercules-Perseus-Theseus patterns; the white goddess and the black bride; St. George & the Dragon, the four stages of myth expanded (agon-pathos-sparagmos-anagnorisis). (Beta & A minor) 3. Mimetic & Romantic Encyclopaedic Forms. In other words, the Homer-Virgil-Milton tradition including Dante & Spenser, & expanding in the Gilgamesh direction (the point being that sophistication expresses archetypes & doesn’t conceal them). That far, the book is an expansion of my encyclopaedic-forms section, with epic as the climax. (Gamma & G major) 4. Mimetic Fiction. Deals mainly with displacement. My stuff on the Egoist & so on adapted and expanded. (Epsilon–D) 5. Sentimental Romance. The core of what I used to think was the [Rencontre] theme. Goethe & Victor Hugo as the basis; some side glances at Scott, Hawthorne, Melville & various survivals (Macdonald, Morris, Tolkien). By way of Conrad & Virginia Woolf it merges into (no: this more likely Delta–E m. [minor]) 6. Ironic Myth. Mainly Joyce & Proust, & returning via FW [Finnegans Wake] to the opening theme. I suppose the anatomy tradition is involved—blast that double meaning of fictional. (Zeta–B m).41 [58] Then [Tragicomedy] would be, more or less: 1. The Great Wheel of Epiphanies. The total myth of [Liberal] arranged as a cycle of episodes, and the role of recognition emblems in drama & elsewhere. (Eta–A maj.) 2. The Generic Cycle of Drama, Epos & Lyric. More or less what I have. (Theta–F m. [minor]) 3. The Structure of Comedy, more or less as is. (Iota–E) 4. The Phases of Comedy, in other words the SE & NE quadrants. (Kappa–C m). 5. The Structure of Tragedy, as is (Lambda–B) 6. The Phases of Tragedy (NW & SW quadrants). The romantic & ironic phases would have been covered in . (Mu–G m). A possible title for is The Well-Tempered Critic.

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[59] The next two are of course much vaguer. [Anticlimax] has to do with the relation of metaphor to concept, mechanical & other models of thought, confession & anatomy, the highest form for prose, metaphysics & metahistory, the rhetoric of non-literary prose, the conceptual verbal epic, the existential nature of dialogue as distinct from treatise, Plato as the existential & St. Thomas as the systematic pegs, the gospel or biography of divinity as a discontinuous sequence of epiphanies, the oratorical historical epiphany (Pauline epistle & Leninist pamphlet). The basis would be a total thematic myth parabatically related to the scriptural fictional one. The supreme prose form is probably a commentary on Scripture. [60] [Rencontre] has always been a mysterious book, and the overall scheme seems to imply that it’s about lyric. But everything I actually know about lyric at present—the stuff I begin my course with—is fictional, & belongs in [Tragicomedy] if not in [Liberal]. I think deals with the disintegration of prose and verse into the charm-commandment, the proverb-epigram, the riddle-parable, the oracle-epiphany. It’s a cabbalistic book, & has much to say about Rimbaud, Jarry, Cummings, Smart & other disintegrators. It searches for the koan or text, & at the end returns to Scripture. Its basis again is the great wheel of epiphanies, but conceived thematically rather than fictionally. [61] I could get started on 1–3 of [Liberal] this summer: if I cracked that I could read mimetic fiction & sentimental romance easily enough in the intervals of the academic term. The only tough part of [Tragicomedy] is the first chapter—what’s tough about it is that I ought to have a pretty clear notion of it before I can write . In fact the first chapters of & might well be worked out together. The historical origin of is the sequence of rituals of which the total myth is the connection. [62] I feel now not so much that [Liberal] is a “Protestant” book as that that’s the relation of to [Anticlimax]. Also that lyric is in [Rencontre], the lyric part of [Tragicomedy] being really epos, because fictional. As I said in AC, I never did figure out the distinction between epos & lyric anyway.42 The recognition emblem in any case is a theme. deals with the limits of verbal expression, N & S (the divine teacher who doesn’t write & the demagogue) as well [as] E & W. It’s a book I’ll need some Hebrew for, & a smattering of Oriental culture.

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[63] Wonder how the following would do as a tentative scheme for [Anticlimax]: Nu, F . The relation of myth & metaphor to conceptual language; constructive & descriptive elements of verbal patterns; mechanical & other models of thought. Omicron (or Xi; I always forget which comes first), E  m.43 The approximation of mythoi to “metahistory”; oratory; the function of existential situation-writing (Pauline epistle, Leninist & other pamphlets). Xi (or omicron, as above), D . Metaphysics & Verbal Construct. Doodle & diagram in thought; metaphor & theology; abstracted metaphor of the X-has-the idea-Y-in-his-head type, etc. Pi, B  minor. The confession form of prose fiction & its relation to the “propaedutic” treatise. Rho, A . The oratory form & the dialogue: the lurking existential inner conflict & aloofness in the inner dialogue or discontinuous forms. Sigma, F m. [minor]. The greatest form for prose; the commentary on Scripture or total conceptual myth; gospel as a discontinuous sequence of epiphanies. [64] Now that lyric, or at any rate epos, is in [Tragicomedy], that becomes a much richer, though of course more difficult, book, & less a rewriting of the relevant parts of AC. It tends to make [Rencontre] very mysterious indeed, almost cabbalistic, perhaps a book I’ll need some jet propulsion to write. The occult aspect of it will result from the thematic analysis of the fictional cosmogonies. I think Blake & perhaps Wagner will bulk largely in it (because it’s a jumping off point for [Mirage]). Anyway, I assume it returns to the Bible in the D minor or Omega chapter. [65] At present I’m trying to get hold of [Liberal] by way of “possessing” the epic series, and that tends to make me think of a series of tour de force expositions, say of the Bible in 1, Spenser in 2, Milton in 3, Blake (or if Blake doesn’t fit William Morris or conceivably even Hawthorne) in 4, no choice yet in 5, but maybe Conrad or Woolf, Joyce in 6. But of course everything gets mixed up right away, and this series might be Part Two of the book. [66] Anyway, 1 being based on the Bible, it leads straight to the apocalyptic, demonic, & (or perhaps in 2) cyclical symbols; also the sequence

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of mythical narratives worked out for naive romance by Gaster & Ragland44 & such. Then the narrative sequences like creation-fall; flood; journey from Egypt through labyrinth (which develops an important form of a journey from Carthage, involved with Aeneid, St. Augustine & the Somnium Scipionis [of Cicero], & continuing through Chaucer & The Tempest & The Waste Land); defense of castle & building of house for god (Judges-Kings) and fall of house. [67] Something in the invariable way in which, in the Renaissance, poetry is always described in terms of music: not only is the poet always singing, but even pastoral poetry is piping on a reed. I know there’s nothing new here, but why the complete elimination of speech imagery in so rhetorical an age? [68] I suppose, just as every metaphor turns its back on logic, so in every convention there’s a heart of something irrational, not like life but deliberately cutting across it. The enraged cuckold, the disgraced maiden (Clarissa), the king’s rash promise—in short, all the maddened ethics of fairyland—are in direct conflict with what sensible people in any age would accept as human behavior. If life imitates literature, literature certainly confuses life. [69] I think this point about the irrationality of convention of great importance. Literature contains life by turning its back on it ironically; but to use it as a guide to life is the wildest pedantry. Tragedy is irrational in its catastrophe; comedy in its manipulated happy ending; romance in its unreal setting & characterization; irony in its regimentation of behavior. How many plots, from Hamlet & Othello to Grade Z movies, are motivated by stupidity & lack of ordinary sense? [70] The long epic (Odyssey & Aeneid) breaks in two: so does Lord Jim, & so frequently does Dickens (Little Dorrit; perhaps Bleak House; perhaps David Copperfield). Usually the first part is quest & the second has unity of place; but Little Dorrit reverses the procedure. Is Dickens the man I want for 5? Let’s see: Bible-Spenser-Milton-Blake-Dickens-Joyce. Sounds plausible. The Bible, as we have it, also splits in two: law & gospel are both prophetic fictions, one of a wandering quest & the other of a single personality. No split in Joyce—at least not in FW [Finnegans Wake]—U [Ulysses] follows the Odyssey, but not in proportion.

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[71] Note that allegory is so special a technique that it’s possible to make a full archetypal analysis of FQ [The Faerie Queene] without ever mentioning it. [72] The subject of koans, which I think is a [Rencontre] theme, is of considerable importance. In the theory of education, for instance, we all know how silly it is to get a smattering of a lot of things instead of a knowledge of a few things; but such koans as “balanced,” “all-round man,” and the like, keep pulling us the wrong way. The koans about “keeping up with things” are even worse. These are negative koans, or clichés: positive ones come into, say, Yeats, who picked up one from Mallarmé‚ & one from de Lisle Adam [Auguste Villiers de Lisle-Adam] & have left critics panting to establish “influences” from these writers ever since. The slogans in Dante’s Purgatory, functioning like comicstrip balloons, go here: so do all slogans and more especially mottoes (verbal ecphrasis or whatever it is). Very, very tentative for (just to have something): [73] Tau, E : conspectus of verbal rhythms: associative, recurrent, semantic. What I have in AC unified to make a single analysis of the verbal impact on the body & mind as a unit. Upsilon, C m [minor]: the east & west limits of literature (action & wordless thought). My jargon stuff plus some effort to indicate what the legitimate boundaries of verbal expression are. Phi, B : the north & south limits of literature (from the teacher who doesn’t write to the rabble-rouser). I have a note earlier [pars. 35, 62] on the beginnings of this: koans belong here too. Chi, G m [minor]: The circle of the arts: pure & applied literature: the conspectus of verbal technology, if any. Expansion of my AC footnote45 & the cradle of [Mirage], I suppose. Psi, F: The circumference of verbal expression: hypothetical & existential modes; possession of the Word. The relation of the poetic & the mystical attitudes to words. Omega, D  m [minor]. The comminution of the word: Pataphysique46 & verbal digestion; triliteral roots of the word in Hebrew; Aum & the alphabet. I know very little about this as yet. [74] Such matters as the function of rhetorical lying; advertising, panegyrics, saying the right thing at the right time (time is, to coin a phrase, of

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the essence)—the whole epideictic flummery which is absolutely essential to society—belong in the earlier chapters. Poetry & belief of course run all through; the function of criticism as meditation which underlies the conception of koan & mantra. The kind of dither I got into when I first read the sun cantoes of the Paradiso belongs here too. So does the hint I dropped about the reinterpretation of legal & theological formulas as a branch of criticism in AC.47 [75] Only as yet there doesn’t seem too much room for including what I call “Permanent Problems of Criticism,” except incidentally. [76] My stuff on Milton’s music certainly belongs, & here’s an ancient note I’ve just rescued from five years back: “high katabasis: incarnation or descent of superior spirit: drop of dew {Marvell}, lady in Comus, microcosm imagery. Middle katabasis: death; identification with bleeding flower; metamorphosis, wheel of fortune turning. Low katabasis: descent into hell; no exit; sparagmos. Low anabasis: escape from hell or prison; Cyclops; Mutability; Satan in Eden; rebellion & loosening of chaos {Gunpowder Plot explosion in Milton}; Harrowing of Hell; Jonah & fishing. Middle anabasis: birth of individual or society; marriage; revival or return from absence; piled logs; tower & mt. [mountain] climbing. High anabasis: redemption; sacred marriage; king & beggar maiden; black bride; question. High assimilated to dialectic; middle cyclical; low are the cycle.”48 Puts a few things together, & shows how long the harmony-descending business has been in my mind. [77] Conventions are irrational also in detail: the swan, which can’t sing, made into an emblem of song; the dove as an emblem of chastity, though to the casual observer it does not appear unduly chaste (hence originally associated, with more reason, with Venus). Such teeheeing criticisms as those of Graves about linnets & asphodels are a bit beside the point.49 [78] Poetry, says Aristotle, is more philosophical than history [Poetics, 1451b]. As there is no obvious sense in which Sappho, say, is more philosophical than Thucydides, this remark must be interpreted diagrammatically, as Sidney & others did interpret it. [79] It seems to me that the first Virginia lecture might well be the bulk of the Kenyon one,50 the ex-encyclopaedia article about varieties of

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rhythm,51 & leading up to what I call the second twist on the prose fiction hunch. First, Jourdain was wrong.52 Three fundamental verbal rhythms, associative or ordinary speech, conventionalized as verse (primitive) or logical-prosaic. Poetry not a critical term. Three “pure” rhythms all continuous, then mixtures. a. Prose to verse. Darwin, Gibbon, oratory (Johnson) & euphuism. Last self-parody (shutting reader out by tricks of style) & discontinuous (series of harangues). b. Verse to prose. Couplet (in English) to blank verse with its prose rhythm (Browning) to Hudibrastic knittelvers in Byron & Browning. Here again parody & discontinuity (digression). c. Associational to verse: increase of sound-patterns, dream-verse (Spenser, Poe, Hopkins, Pearl); again paradox & discontinuity (break of Alexandrine in Spenser; theory in Poe; viol–violet-vine [The City in the Sea, l. 23]). d. Verse to association (no, that’s the above; what follows is really c, association to verse). Nursery rhymes, incremental repetition, the catalogue; house that Jack built; lilacs in Amy Lowell;53 Whitman & the linepause. Ossian. e. Prose to association: speech of uneducated or confused (Quickly, Juliet’s nurse, Mrs. Nickleby & Jingle). Literary developments in Sterne & Joyce & Stein—early stage in Shaw. Private world in Dylan Thomas, if that’s the right end; but I think it’s oracular. f. Association to prose. Babble in Smart. Continuous prose democratic; aloofness in aphorism. Leads to sutra or koan (Yeats). Problem of Coleridge. I think this is reversed too. Somewhere about here is the windup of this lecture & the transition to the second lecture, which has the general theme of literature as possession. I haven’t this as clear, but its themes include: Just as rabble-rousers are below verbal expression, so great religious teachers are above it: Jesus & Buddha don’t write, but express themselves in parables & aphorisms; Lao Tze writes the minimum. Sense of engagement in Pauline epistles, Lenin’s manifestoes, prophetic oracles of Bible, where tents of Kedar [Psalm 120:5], Alexander the coppersmith [2 Timothy 4:14], anti-Dühring controversies become of world-wide significance.54 Discontinuity, riddle, paradox, aphorism, sense of existential reserve, are the literary ways of expressing possession. Gospels could only be discontinuous epiphanies (cf. the text, & the proof-text in Bunyan & elsewhere)

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The cultivated man’s power to quote & the fascination of The Waste Land. Aesthetic judgement one in which anxieties are quieted, hence detached & cathartic; but literary experience is not a discrete series of goose pimples (Poe, Clive Bell). Taste (Lamb) vs. anxious judgement (Coleridge, Ruskin, Chesterton). Overcoming of the stock response & the re-engagement process. Archetypes, of course; but that isn’t my main theme. Richards (Pr. Cr. [Practical Criticism]) raises question of what standards are appropriate to meditation?55 His are neo-Stoic, & Eliot had fun with them without meeting the question he raised.56 Note that paradoxical & discontinuous forms express the rhythm of meditation, as distinct from attention. The question of what standards are applicable to meditation or existential valuation are the subject of the third lecture, which apparently begins by establishing my words-into-patterns point. In this connexion the sense of the oracular element in verse as a nexus for meditation (hence the Vita Nuova & St. John of the Cross forms) comes up. Then, in some way I’m not clear about yet, I go into the question of analogy (simile) and identity (metaphor), & arrive at an apocalyptic or total–identification standard for literary judgement. See my doodles for [Anticlimax] & [Rencontre]—I always seem to move my next targets out to the horizon.57 [80] Wonder if my metahistory paper would be of any use for the Harvard myth boys?58 Seems to me I’ve used some of that somewhere. I don’t suppose my ladder of analogy is of any immediate use for 3V.59 Analogy is the principle of wit & of the outward presentation of literature generally; identity is the principle of inner coherence (with) and of existential possession (as). The two important forms are the subjectobject identity, and the individual-universal one. The silly split into a subjective-qualitative-sun rising poetic universe and an objective-measurable-earth revolving scientific one. Also there’s some connexion between allegory & rhetoric (Longinus on Marathon & John Robins on Alfred)60 I haven’t got clear. [81] I must brood about analogy and identity. Analogy is the main technique of wit, and humorous metaphor is essentially unexpected analogy, as I’ve said; but these are given by the writer. There’s something I haven’t

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got clear about transfers from writer to reader. As Valéry says, inspiration refers to the reader, not the writer,61 so does morality. Now there’s something about the changeover from discursive to literary expression (e.g. the change from oratio obliqua to recta)62 that has to do with transferring consonantia, or connective tissue, to the reader. This has been obvious only in modern times with modern theories of discontinuous sequential epiphanies & metaphor by juxtaposition; but it’s always been there: in fact it’s in the conception of ut pictura poesis itself. I think somewhere in here is the clue to literature as possession: the author & reader may have different connective frameworks, but the same epiphanic sequence fits both. It’s also a clue to the whole progression from [Liberal] architectonics to [Rencontre] fragmentation. [82] Also I think for my next Harvard myth paper I should wade straight into displacement.63 Use my Great Expectations hunch, my Uncle Silas–Egoist comparison, maybe Handley Cross,64 & various Hawthorne & Morris hunches—perhaps Scott and Robinson Crusoe as well. Well, I didn’t, though I did start on it. [83] Re the constructive imagination: notice in magic how strong the instinct is to complete a pattern. If you’re summoning a spirit by the seventy-two names of God, it won’t do if you can only remember sixty-five of them. Used in Spenser paper.65 [84] The famous opening sentences of Pride & Prejudice & of Anna Karenina are vestigial conventions deriving from the exemplum convention:66 one can trace it back to the Decameron, where every story is preceded by general statements which the story is supposed to illustrate. Rasselas; the first chapters of the books of Tom Jones, etc. [85] In 19th c. ghost stories note the desperate effort at realism given by anonymity: “Mr. _____ of _____th Street.” Also the telling of the tale to a small circle, which I’ve noted,67 sometimes develops a chorus role out of the hearers, who comment at the end, etc. [86] In the epic the point of return home is often mysterious. In the Odyssey the hero sleeps in the cave of the nymphs & wakes up in Ithaca. In the Inferno the passage through to the other side of the world goes by in half a line. The Argonauts evidently hoisted the Argo somewhere

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around Moscow & portaged it out to the Baltic. Something of waking up from a dream, of course. It’s Freud’s link with the unfathomable: note how Beethoven pretends to lose his way in sonata forms just before the recapitulation; remember Lycidas & the appeal to tradition as the poet returns from wandering: in Xy [Christianity] one dies to return. Conceptual analogues of it should be traced, in Wordsworth’s Prelude & elsewhere. [87] It seems to me that the encyclopaedic poem is something from which epic & drama both descend, an obvious point that’s still been confusing me. For instance, Shakespeare doesn’t appear to know the Aeneid 7–12, but the Metamorphoses was his Bible: he owes more to it than to Terence or Seneca. If so, then the formula for the tetralogy is to start each with the encyclopaedic hypothesis as it incorporates itself in ( [Liberal]) the cosmological poem, thence epic ( [Tragicomedy]) the ritual Thespis sequence, thence auto [Anticlimax] the prose legalistic Scripture, thence sage [Rencontre] the lyric Psalm-Veda sequence, thence ode. Only I must be careful not to say that these “themes” are chronological. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is prior to the Iliad, Calderon prior to Euripides, in my scheme. [88] I stumbled quite by accident on the distinction between metaphorical crucial and realistic continuous recognition in writing the Harvard paper.68 But it’s a very fruitful one. In working out a recognition-inShakespeare-comedy paper I should keep it in mind as well as the mythical and thematic distinction. Yeats’ dialogue of self & soul is really an application of it: the soul wants crucial recognition or a one-for-all identity with reality: the self wants a continuous recognition or realistic happiness. Death symbolizes the former. I wonder if that leads to a distinction between (a) literature as continuous possession (power to quote & allude) (b) literature as epiphanic initiation, where what we are reading exhibits the whole of literature. It looks as though I can’t finish the Virginia series without picking this up.69 [89] Surely in any response to a work of art there comes a split in the personality. Wrong or associative response is pure identification; right or direct response is one in which a specific skill is separated off from the rest of the personality. The separation obviously is not complete, or we’d get schizophrenia. But tragic emotions, for instance, are not real (in the

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sense of identified) emotions: we watch our emotions reacting. A hypothetical self exposed to the work of art, & a cultivated self then examines its pointer readings. Partridge & the second part of Pamela:70 it even can be another person. [90] I thought I had this in: in reading Tolkien, which I did with great & almost uncritical pleasure, it nevertheless struck me, somewhere around Appendix VI, that there was a point at which the imaginative turns into the imaginary.71 [91] I think a sizeable part of my next job has to do with a Bergsonian diagram of the creative process.72 At the bottom is dream, the shaping of experience into wish-fulfilment patterns. Below it are the aberrations of neurosis, the attempts to impose these directly on experience. By dream I mean, as I meant in AC, the entire conflict of wish & reality. Above dream the diagram divides. One side is waking life & work; the other ritual & play. Above work is science, the study of the world as it is; above play is magic, which includes some aspects of art. The two sides combine in art proper, the transformation of the world as it is into the world man wants to live in. Above art is religion, for those who believe it to be existential & substantial. Bugs in this, naturally; but the general outline has something. [92] Persecution, like war, always has to be done over again. When the last witches were being executed Rousseau was born, & that initiated a revival of all the anti-Christian stuff—the divine god as physically present in Fascism, reincarnation in Nietzsche, etc. Yeats & Lady Kyteler.73 Christianity is now reaping what it sowed, I suppose—I dunno. [93] The poet is a licensed liar vis-à-vis history: vis-à-vis thought he is a constructor of thought-patterns. As he thinks typically or recurrently he’s conservative, even atavistic: hence his applications of his constructs, from Cicero & Pompey to Pound & Mussolini, are normally chuckleheaded. After all, they’re only poets. [94] Dryden’s Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy makes a small but useful link: in Sidney poetry combines the historical example & the moral precept: the former is the mythos & the latter the dianoia.74 Now the dianoia is,

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at least in modern literature, normally represented by a symbol or emblem. [95] The Vancouver talk75 started with my usual stuff on nursery rhyme, then established that ordinary speech is associative & not prose, then said that associative babble was the voice of the ego, which is always sub-literary, that this ego-voice is projected in the dead-language, ationation,76 rhythmless impersonal jargon of the lonely crowd. That the impersonal babble is the voice of the collective or aggregate ego, & according to Kierkegaard “essentially demoralizing.” It consists in prodding reflexes of [the] inattentive, & is seen in advertising, then propaganda, then exhortatory jargon of the collective tantrum kind. Half-assed Rousseauism that takes the untrained act to be free, whereas the free act is always disciplined. Real prose as articulate & disciplined speech: this alone is free speech. To speak as a personality assumes that the hearer is one too: hence it creates a community. Or, in fashionable terminology, personal speech is dialogue: babble, egocentric or collective, always monologue. The ordinary prose treatise, as distinct from a work of fiction, is implicit dialogue. [96] The breaking of the current of habit-energy in the individual produces the epiphanic moment or illumination. It also splits off the continuously babbling, grousing, mumbling ego. The voice of this ego was first isolated in literature, I think, by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground, & it’s the staple of Beckett. It enters English poetry in Prufrock. To isolate it means it knows itself, hence the tone of querulous & cynical honesty about itself. [97] I have never understood why the question of “beauty” should have a peculiarly close relationship to the arts; beauty may be predicated of many things that are not works of art. Works of art seem to me to be concerned with a certain kind of structure, or process, found in them but not in other things. Structure if, with the Classical critics, we assert the priority of the hen; process if, with the Romantics, we assert the priority of the egg. [98] In the Great Doodle77 (apocalyptic) the spiritual world is (a) the fireworld of heavenly bodies (b) the lower heaven or sky. Hence it is normally (a) red with the seraphim (b) blue with the cherubim. Blue &

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white mean virginity, red & white love; red white & green is the point of epiphany. [99] The final value-judgement to be made is not on the poem but on the critic. Is he a genuine critic or does he only start on the cultural level of a bazaar letter-writer? In these days of tens of thousands of people engaged in scholarship & criticism, not all can be genuine. And even genuine ones like Leavis can set up wrong conceptions of criticism to mislead others. The genuine critic is traditionally a judge, but illiterate judges make for injustice: if they are not servants of the law they are of little use on a bench. The law in this case can only be scholarship or knowledge of literature: criticism from start to finish is knowledge, not a guide to the love of beauty. [100] I’ve been trying to read Plotinus (in McKenna [MacKenna])78 with little success. I don’t mean I can’t get through him, but he doesn’t give me any ideas. The positivistic streak in me is much stronger than I thought—I keep saying this is shit, although I thought temperamentally I was akin to it. I ain’t. However. If McKenna’s admirable style represents the original, it’s an interesting style: discontinuous, easy-going meditative, question-&-answer rhythm, which is partly addressed to a reader & partly not. It’s an Avatamsaka rhythm too: each tractate is the centre of the system, so that a sufficiently astute disciple could reconstruct the whole system from any one. [101] In the book (it’s beginning to feel like a book) I have to begin with the conception of a verbal universe, & people like Plotinus come into it. Cosmology, it seems to me, always has aesthetic elements built into it: things are so because they must be, it’s right for them to be that way, it fits. These are features that are at first projected as existentially true: as this becomes impossible, they become revealed as speculative rhetoric, as a verbal presentation of knowledge from the circumference, or the vision of the world man wants to live in. But it’s of course a great error to assume that the value of these systems dries up as soon as they lose their scientific potentiality. The Virginia lectures should end about where the book begins.79 [102] Virginia III’s main theme is: distinction of verbal structures between the centrifugal ones pointed to external reality & centripetal

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ones that draw their circumference so as to shut out external reality (madness of metaphor, conventions, etc., as Theseus; internal consistency, as Hippolyta).80 The circumference of the order of words contains all these, & the order of words is the verbal model of civilization & culture. That’s why it includes cosmology, as above. Reality for science is what’s there, & won’t go away. Reality for art’s what’s there compared with the imaginative model. So there is centrifugal alignment in the arts too: that raises the question of higher belief. There’s a private model, constructed of clichés & quotations & koans, to be compared with a total model, & the verbal model intervenes. Reflex verbalism in advertising, cliché, dead language trying to be impersonal—is based on existing society as ultimate reality. The fact that the model human world naturally tends to contain all human categories, including time & space, creates a verbal alliance with religion. [103] If we ask what is the natural way to talk, the answer is what nature is being asked about. Art is man’s nature: free acts are disciplined acts; free speech is cultivated speech. Cultivated speech creates community, because it’s an expression of a genuine personality & assumes that the hearer is one too. From the beginning rhetoric has been divided into three styles, the high, the middle & the low. Cultivated speech is middle style. Low, today, is Mencken’s “vulgate” or American colloquial.81 It should not be studied as a sub-standard speech. It has its own kind of sentence-structure, imagery, humor & vocabulary. It’s not ungrammatical, but in some places it’s anti-grammatical. Some class tension here. Middle speech is grammatical, but should never be judged by its grammar. [104] Now there is also a debased or bastard speech of the unregenerate nature. For some reason, in contrast to England, where speech habits are built into the structure of society, the prejudice against cultivating an accent is so powerful that ordinary speech is largely left to original sin. Examples heard around Victoria compare favorably in vocabulary with the tarts on Jarvis Street, being less monotonously obscene, but the grammar & accent are much the same. Such noises are pure monologue, the voice of the pure ego. Educationally, the most efficient way of curing it is by an appeal to social snobbery, but schools & universities have nothing to do with such things. Pygmalion could not be written here.

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[105] I have occasionally wondered why I couldn’t keep diaries. The answer is that I’m too busy with other writing—the only times I succeeded in keeping a diary more than a week or two were in doldrum periods of writing.82 Now I’m so full of commissions & deadlines I can’t even keep notebooks. [106] What’s more, I can’t even read anything except bloods. In Michael Innes I notice the device of deliberate over-designing, a parody for sophisticated readers of the absurdities of schoolboy romances.83 It’s a structural analogue to deliberate doggerel. Wonder if I could work out a structural parallel to the second Page-Barbour?84 [107] The first Milton lecture85 will deal with the [Liberal] epic theme. I’ve always clearly recognized two things: the fact that the narrative structure of P.L. [Paradise Lost] follows the Odyssey-Aeneid one & not the Iliad one, and the fact that the scriptural form of the Bible & Ovid’s Metamorphoses is distinguishable as an encyclopaedic form. Now Dante’s form is the thematic stasis of the Bible, being a Last Judgement apocalypse. If I could see the Iliad form as the thematic stasis of the OdysseyAeneid one I’d be through that. That’s probably too much to expect. Spenser clearly felt that FQ [The Faerie Queene] was a thematic stasis of Ariosto: figure of Prince. If the Iliad did have any such role, it ought to dramatize the four levels of Cronos, Astraea, shield of Achilles & jars of Zeus. It does, of course, up to a point; but it’s not self-conscious as a thematic stasis normally is. [108] I stumbled on something in the Masseys that may be important. The creative subconscious is potentially communicable, and so it’s different from the Freudian subconscious. It’s social & not individual—it has links with Jung’s collective unconscious, but I don’t know what they are.86 Finnegans Wake, anyway, is about that subconscious. Reading Margaret Murray’s books on witchcraft,87 one can’t believe any part of her argument that assumes an actual religious organization, but that some subconscious demonic parody of Xy [Christianity] was extracted from all those poor creatures under torture is quite obvious, and its consistency doesn’t surprise me: it’s the same kind of thing primitive tribes produce, often by self-administered torture. The witch-finder himself was a psychopath, or soon became one by sticking pins all over naked women, and so they were linked in a communal dream.

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[109] I’m beginning to realize that my principle of scholarship having the power of veto over taste really means that instruction is primary in literature, & entertainment secondary.88 This is of course what’s assumed in our feeling that “escape” literature is substandard. Instruction of course is not illustrating moral precepts, but expanding the power of vision: the Romantic shift of dianoia from allegory to archetypal framework not only put the arts in the centre, but by doing so made them primarily instructive. [110] I’ve said that in Arnold a church is judged primarily by the quality of its worldliness. In the great variety of “denominations” today, there’s of course no question but what they all have to be tolerated. To view them all with equal respect would be nonsense: some of them are bloody stupid, & their adherents can only be classified as either dupes or dopes. The most normal standard to take is an educational one. Every religion is a sort of golfer’s handicap: the question is, how much intellectual honesty can one attain in spite of it? My own religious attitude is based on a negative answer to the question: is it possible to attain greater intellectual honesty without any religious handicap? Every religion is damn silly in some respect or other, being a product as well as a discovery of original sin. But no attitude could be completely sensible unless some form of religious intuition could come true. [111] In connection with what I say about literature swallowing life,89 note how Dante, Spenser & Milton all eliminate the third level of experience. Paradise, heaven & hell in Milton; Paradiso, Purgatorio & Inferno in Dante; Faerie (2nd level) in Spenser with glints of heaven & hell, but no direct confrontation with experience. It doesn’t fit epic. [112] The next two major jobs I have to do are a series of lectures on Milton & another series, probably on Shakespeare.90 I wonder if I could make them, not the definitive forms, but the growing points, of [Liberal] & [Tragicomedy] respectively. The point is that I can’t do any large group of these books (if, as I say, I am to write them instead of reading them) until they are simultaneously clear in my mind. The ultimate wouldn’t have to be about Milton, but it would have to have Milton as a supporting caryatid, so to speak. Meanwhile I need to bring an immense amount of fiction-reading into focus, & I’m thinking of starting with Balzac.91 I’ve always had blocks about fiction, and one of the worst

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is reading a novel, bursting with ideas about it, & then being too lazy to record the ideas. The Balzac-Stendhal-Flaubert block of ignorance in my knowledge of literature badly needs to be removed. [113] My topocosm for the Greeks, 1 Olympian symposium, 2 golden age 3 good Eris or the shield of Achilles 4 bad Eris or fate is Apollonian. It doesn’t incorporate the Dionysiac really, though of course 3 could be Dionysiac—Dicaeopolis in The Acharnians [of Aristophanes], who’s certainly on 3 with mirrors of 2, celebrates the feast of Dionysus. But I wonder if Euripides (Bacchae) doesn’t represent the same kind of reversal that Romanticism makes with us? [114] Rephrasing of the Romantic topocosm: 1. The Frankenstein-Arimanes-Urizen-Jupiter-Immanent Will world,92 sometimes “up there” & associated with the sky, sometimes simply “out there,” Kafka’s penal colony & Orwell’s 1984 world, man caught in his own trap. 2. The world of experience, in a subject-object relationship. Often extended to include the given world, the traditional heritage we’re handed, Burke’s continuous world, the existing structure that conservatives want to keep & radicals destroy. 3. The world of power underneath, the ocean under the ark or bateau ivre. Often an innocent world, the sleeping beauty of nature & reason in Rousseau, Blake’s Orc & buried Beulah, Shelley’s Mother Earth & Asia. From Schopenhauer on it becomes increasingly inscrutable: menacing to conservatives & redeeming to revolutionaries; the world as will, Darwin’s evolution, Kierkegaard’s dread, Freud’s libido-id, Marx’s proletariat. 4. Mt. Ararat, Golgonooza, the garden within or under the sea, the classless society, the working compromise of evolution & ethics, & so on. Often demonic or morally ambivalent. [115] Irony, in the sense of the eiron’s self-deprecation, is the very essence of courtesy. Making oneself small by certain gestures, such as bowing, are central in social ritual. Attaching minimum value to what one has & maximum value to what someone else has is central in social activity. Religious & moral codes insist on pursuing this into one’s habits of thought. You may be great or good; I know I am neither. Modesty is infinitely more than a pose or a convention: as what Eliot calls humil-

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ity,93 it’s a pre-requisite of both virtue & knowledge. The general principle seems to be: what is presented has the maximum oracular significance to be attached to it, because something may be learned there, like nature in Baudelaire’s Correspondences. What is possessed has the minimum significance, because there is always something to be learned or added. [116] What’s presented may be a work of art, which must be approached as though it were as great as possible, according to my own anagogic principles. The resolution of presentation & possession is identification, where one self is one with something bigger & the possessing or egocentric self cast out. What you identify with possesses you, and operates as an informing principle in your mind. Now if what’s presented is, say, a poem written centuries ago in a different cultural context, what’s the problem? Historical criticism, establishing as nearly as possible what it meant then, devalues its oracular significance. This devaluing has something to do with the fact that sacred books, approached historically, turn out to be fakes. Arthur Waley says the Analects of Confucius contain few & very probably no authentic sayings of Confucius: it’s a statement of what early Confucians believed.94 The Gospels dissolve into a mass of early Christian adagia: everything in Homer or the Mahabharata that’s most important for belief is interpolated: the Mosaic code is stuck into a period of history centuries too early. [117] To translate it into an informing principle is inevitably to distort its historical context: there’s no way out of that. From here it looks as though there were two ways of doing this: I may call them the church way & the scripture way. The church man has a structure of ideas derived from the institution he’s attached to, and he translates everything into conformity with the structure. The scripture man tries to keep the “dialogue” open: he respects an oracular residue that pulls him beyond the structure. The closed & the open way are perhaps better, though they imply comparison of value. I’m returning here to the remark in the Anatomy about criticism being part of a general activity of keeping verbal structures intact while transforming their meaning.95 [118] Some connexion too with our old friend in Proust, that the only paradises are lost ones. Golden ages have to be in a mythical past: they can only be presented when they’re past, & only when presented can

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they be oracular. What’s in process belongs to the eiron vision, & this is also true of what’s historically revealed to have been in process once. In that sense, whatever’s oracular has to be mysterious. Something here very central & simple I haven’t got yet. What is idealized is either ancient or potential (the quality in children or in young people who die full of promise). The potential is perhaps an image of the unborn. [119] The “church” man in politics is a supporter of de jure, a legitimist: the “scripture” man has a greater respect for the de facto. Conservative & radical distinction at bottom, I suppose. For one, the informing principle is also conforming, or sacramental; for the other, it’s a liberating one. [120] I don’t know whether this is connected or not: in Blake & Yeats there’s a good deal said about the growth, generation, death, disappearance & rebirth of units or elements of the imagination, that is, image or idea-clusters. The question is whether the individual human life is also conceivable as an imaginative element, & whether the theme of death & rebirth, disappearance as psychological event & immortality in art, can be extended to statements of belief about an afterlife. In Blake Thel’s unborn world & what’s said about the death & clothing of “spectres” in Milton & elsewhere96 are explicable as referring to the creation of art, but look as though they contained ideas about reincarnation too, & the role of Milton in Milton supports this. In Yeats “Byzantium” appears to be entirely about the generation of images, but the connexion of its themes with “All Soul’s Night,” “News from the Delphic Oracle” & “Sailing to Byzantium” make[s] the other dimension clear (or more confused, depending on the point of view). [121] What do poets “say”? They say that everything is everywhere at once. They say that all nature is alive. They say that creation is dialectic, separating heaven & hell. They say that the material world neither is nor isn’t, but disappears. They say that the created world neither is nor isn’t, but appears. They say that the containing form of real experience is myth. They say that time & space are disappearing categories. They say that men are Man, as gods are God. (Copied from another notebook:97 I’m not sure of it.)

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[122] Well, now, what do I do about the Bampton Lectures?98 I’d thought of a series on Shakespeare, or a series on the English Romantics. But there’s a lot to be said for just going on with critical theory, extending & developing various recent things I’ve done. I think of a set on the four gates of critical theory: roughly on the relation of literature to religion, education, action & belief—no, I mean the other arts. Something like “Contexts of Critical Theory,” subtitled the context of belief, the context of thought, the context of action, the context of culture. Or relations: better to try to avoid metaphor in titles. [123] Religion & belief: my false gods point; science & polytheism; existential & hypothetical. Why are sacred books historical frauds? The shape of the Bible; the contract; the argument of Job. My Avatamsaka hunch (Whitehead’s simple location).99 I think this should perhaps be the last one. Newman. [124] Culture & the other arts: probably the first one, & an attempt to put the next twist on my Arts Conference speeches, the Rochester paper, & my old David Milne paper.100 I have a notion that Klee is going to bulk pretty large in it. Sculpture as the hypothesis of biology, & so forth. Ruskin & Arnold. [125] Action or praxis: further on my history points: ritual & myth; vertical & horizontal perspectives; convention as blocking off the latter; imaginative heavens & hells. Rhythmical pacing & participating in narrative: study of pacing vs. structure in Jonsonian drama. Carlyle. [126] Theoria: my education points about building up an imaginative vision: free speech & rhetoric; the relation of poetic to discursive thought; metaphor as structure of thought; the existential unit or proverb; the idea of the university; freedom of thought & expansion of its body. Mill. [127] I’ve just been reading a thriller of Ian Fleming’s, and am astonished at the stockness of the material, combined as it is with a certain sophistication in handling concrete detail. Hero and heroine kidnapped by fiendish villains, who instead of killing them at once leave them alone & allow them to escape. Villain takes advantage of the situation to

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recount his life story as a cognitio; heroine threatened with torture, taking the form of displaced rape. For some strange reason the word “thighs” didn’t appear, as it almost always does in that place in thrillers. Many years ago Edmund Wilson, in a New Yorker review, connected the Houdini situation with the dying & reviving god.101 [128] The obvious thing to do with the Bamptons is to start on the six parts of [Liberal] as outlined on p. 24 [par. 57]. My formula for this has always been: possess Homer, Virgil, Dante & Milton & then do as you like. But whenever I start on this programme I find that the notion of reading in sequence has something wrong with it. I can’t wait until I’ve read through Balzac to come to the main principles of Euripides, nor Euripides till I’ve done something with, say, Novalis. I know this is silly, but I keep coming back to the sense that & the rest are bodies of reading & not of writing: that they all interlock in such a way that my real writing problem is to keep on doing what I did in the Anatomy: find the axioms of critical procedure involved in the interlocking. I hope that doesn’t just mean a series of anatomies: I’d like to make my third book as different from AC as AC was from FS. [129] The actual relationship of the first four seem [seems] to be: naive continuous (scripture & epic) = [Liberal]; naive discontinuous (drama & narrative lyric) = [Tragicomedy]; sentimental continuous (fiction & irony & late romance) = [Anticlimax]; sentimental discontinuous (late lyric & fragmented forms) = [Rencontre]. I’ve been trying to work out the next four as thematic equivalents, without much success. [130] The distinction between fictional & thematic literature is one of the most useful things in the AC. My Daedalus paper102 is also one of my best papers. It seems to me that the dream & the reverie is [are] also part of the distinction, the reverie or meditation being essentially nearer to consciousness, also revolving around a central point. [131] The romance patterns in Shakespeare that he has in common with the Grail romances are, or rather include, the substituted bride (Lancelot & Elaine) & of course the chess game. I’m as much in the dark as ever about the latter, as the bride is in the former (Rachel & Leah): I started off with it, & it still tantalizes. Note that Eliot’s Middleton references are better than I suggest, especially the WW [Women Beware Women] one:103

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they’re part of the ironic pattern, as The Tempest & Grail ones are the romance ones they parody. [132] 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 the Anatomy of Criticism? Could it be that there’s a possibility of writing a history, based on but not confined to English, that would have the form of an incredibly complicated fugal structure? Themes from Irish myth going through Grail romance, Tempest, Comus, to Eliot & Yeats & Joyce. Biblical typology organizing the whole damn scheme? [Liberal] as medieval epic-romance period, ending with Spenser & Milton; [Tragicomedy] as drama centred on Shakespeare; [Anticlimax] as prose & 18th–19th c. centered; [Rencontre] as from Blake on? Now could I just die & get reincarnated in somebody like me & take about eighty years off to do the job? [133] All religions constitute an intellectual handicap: the worth of a religion depends on the intellectual honesty it permits. It’s silly to respect all religions: Anglo-Israelitism, for example, is pure shit, and cannot be accepted without destroying one’s whole sense of reality. The Mormons, the Christian Scientists, the fundamentalists, increase the handicap to the point of crippling the brain. Some handicap, probably, one must have: to accept a crippling one in any field (e.g. that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare boys) is neurotic. [134] This is part of what clearly ought to be my next job: a study of the mythical (metaphorical & symbolic) presentation of reality, hence of the external relations of criticism. First, myth & religion: why sacred books are historical frauds: the cyclical myth. Second, myth & political thought, where creation-fall & apocalypse become the social contract & Utopia myths. Where I go from there I’m not sure. [135] I’ve been listening to my rococo record collection. In the 17th–18th cs. the central theme seems to be the conflict of creation & chaos, the virgin leading the monster, the enthroned sun against storm & tempest. Chaos imagery is chromatic, with the minor on its side. Haydn’s Creation has the chaos-prelude & the diatonic “Heavens Are Telling” I’ve noted. The Tempest variant is in Bach’s Aeolus cantata; & of course the same archetype makes Orpheus central. Kuhnau on David lashing Saul.104

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Maybe the Beethoven 9th, beginning in tohu wa bohu [chaos and disorder] and ending in the diatonic. Ode to Joy is the summing up of this development. Probably a second development starts with Mozart & runs through to about Mahler, but I don’t know what it is. Haydn is a genius of the idyllic unfallen world: it can’t be just accident that the Creation & the Seasons sum him up. Incidentally, the spinning song in the latter is amazingly sinister: the spinning wheel of the fates. The words superficially cosy & domestic, have Vala overtones he caught, though there’s no passion or fatality as in Schubert’s Goethe song.105 [136] One very obvious point that still ought to be thought about is the imagination’s magnifying of expressed emotion. If disaster & death strike in real life, self-preservation minimizes their impact: tragedy yells bloody murder, & helps to create a more terrifying world. It has a morally beneficial impact, like conscience, by making cowards of us all. Similarly with role of contemporary irony in creating a hateful, hideous, obscene world. [137] One of the most important of literary virtues consists in the art of concealing an author’s personal vices. For the revelation of vice is direct address, & so boring. I don’t mind the erotic fantasies in William Morris’ romances, but the masochistic fantasies of Swinburne bore me & bother me, in that order, because Swinburne is just jerking off. However, lechery is, next to gluttony, the easiest vice to conceal. The hardest one, I think, is envy. Wyndham Lewis bores me because his motive for writing is envious. Perhaps it isn’t concealment but sublimation that’s the essential. Pope doesn’t conceal spite, for instance. [138] Don Juan & Faust go to hell for the excessive pursuit of love and knowledge. Why do both themes tend to become farcical and popular? [139] Reincarnation & Christianity: they say that in a bullfight the bull learns so fast that he must be killed in the end, because no toreador would have a chance against a bull in his second fight. This seems to me a parable of human life. The horror of the wheel of existence is in the discontinuity of memory it postulates. There is a place for higher kinds of rebirth (e.g. the Bodhisattva) but even that must be qualified. The gospel says man must be reborn, metaphysically, psychologically, or whatever (water & the spirit is cryptic enough).106 If Jesus knew this to be essential

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he must have been reborn himself. The Eastern doctrine of karma says “man is born into the world he has made.” In traditional Xy [Christianity] that is true only of Jesus, who made the world & was reborn into it. So we can achieve only through him a process in which rebirth & resurrection are the same thing. [140] Something I haven’t got yet that comes into Proust & the Eliot quartets: subjective continuity (giants in time) and objective discontinuity. The unknown god (e.g. of Samuel Butler) is continuous: the known god discontinuous & epiphanic. This seems to be a Kantian formulation. It connects with my two Romanticism points: the continuous vehicular form and the epiphanic fragment of illumination. [141] Tillich distinguishes what he calls “inducting” education from humanistic or technical.107 He means initiatory, learning the secrets of the tribe, social & religious. I should have thought of this earlier: it’s knowledge of social, or rather, cultural, mythology, and is centripetal in shape, building up, as it did in the Middle Ages, when, as Tillich says, all education was inducting, to a summa form. Humanism, in contrast, is personal-centered and follows the centrifugal tendency to specialize. My own AC is a contribution to cultural mythology, I suppose, as a defence against what I call social mythology. Such initiation in our day is not an end but the beginning: the “core curriculum,” democratic in motivation as against Marxism, that ought to be learned by the end of high school. [142] In the course of being Principal108 I’ve often thought about the curious affinity between high intelligence and a curious kind of social immaturity. It’s the quality that makes the “intellectual” so often socially irresponsible. Partly introversion, partly living in an over-simplified Euclidean universe. This latter gives the immaturity a curious ferocity— Blake was right in associating cruelty and abstraction, the preference of mechanical extensions of the body to the body. It comes out in me in the panic of travel worries: when I change place I want to withdraw completely. Other things too, of course: I’m no exception to my own rule. My students are mostly extroverted, more mature than I socially: I worry about their intellectual immaturity, but admire the same combination in the “practical man.” One confusing feature of it is that good taste is so often a social rather than an intellectual maturity.

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[143] Intelligent and sensitive people who have been through, say, a war seldom talk about it much. If you’ve shared the experience you don’t need to be told about it, and if you haven’t telling of it somehow subtly makes the experience untrue. This, apparently, is because the basis of conversation is casual & associative. Writing about it brings in a mythical shaping form that makes it true. Yet this truth often goes with a departure from fact. In writing you’d say “June 18 dawned foggy and cold” and still feel you were about to tell the truth, whereas you’d hesitate to say that in conversation, because it was neither foggy nor cold on June 18 and you weren’t up until long past sunrise. [144] Further on continuous & episodic forms: continuity & consistency in habit makes [make] for dignity. The undignified can be convinced the world will end tomorrow without remembering that they were convinced of the same thing ten years ago. Communism has no human dignity because it requires the sacrifice of the memory, which is what holds consistency together. Living according to a party line of any kind surrenders continuity to something else. There is a genuine surrender of the memory, but it’s to a consistent imaginative pattern. Truth of fact becomes truth of informing myth, as above. I’m circling around something here, but don’t know yet what it is. It’s connected with the form of the Gospels and the fact that the unknown Father-God there is continuous and revelation through the Son episodic. No: it’s the Spirit that’s continuous: we don’t know what the Father is, or at least he eludes that dichotomy. [145] Belief is a highly integrated & concentrated state of mind. William James speaks of a will to believe which is mostly phony. In Christian terms, belief is a matter of grace rather than will. Clergymen are naturally prone to believe that they ought to believe. Many of them can’t manage belief, & have to settle for anxieties. One can hardly discern the beliefs of Protestantism through the thick cloud of anxiety-mongering about the “liquor traffic,” or the beliefs of Catholicism through anxieties about contraceptives & meat on Fridays. Well, would you let them get into pulpits with nothing to say? As a matter of fact Jesus recommends precisely that [Matthew 10:19–20], & guarantees their inspiration, given a highly disciplined state of mind in which one has, like Mary as against Martha, got rid of importunate anxieties. As for the man who said “Help

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thou my unbelief” [Mark 9:24], what he was expressing was doubt about the validity of his doubts: a state of mind that might be called virtuous hypocrisy. [146] I was disappointed, years ago, when the Supreme Court of Canada was established in place of the British one. The myth involved was the analogical one: a colony is a child, a sovereign nation an adult: puberty comes with taking one’s own powers. I wish Canada had junked this dismal cliché and been the first nation to vest supreme legislative powers in another nation: the kind of super-national conception that the Commonwealth of Nations permits. [147] I suppose I’ll be asked to do the Weil lectures109 someday: if not, I’ll certainly be concerned with problems of religious articulation. Why, for instance, is prayer so unreliable a method of getting something for nothing? Because, primarily, our child’s view that God is an omnipotent being out there, floating free in space, is inadequate: God works within human life and under “fallen” human conditions. That’s why the Gospel, not the Book of Genesis, is the Christian centre. But then why do the Gospels feature miracles? I know the symbolic answers: the only real miracle is not a “sign” but the transformation of the believer, but I’m groping for other kinds of answers. [148] The sound of children playing is a cliché of innocent happiness. I have listened to it, and what I hear is mainly aggressiveness and hysteria. Living with children is recognized to be purgatorial, differing from hell only in having some sort of end. This is assumed to be an inscrutable but unbreakable law of nature, but I wonder if it is. I think children are aggressive & hysterical because they’re in an aggressive & hysterical society, & would be serene and dignified if society was. [149] Compare the song of birds, which also is sexually aggressive & which we interpret as innocence, tweet rhyming with sweet. Both are aspects of homo ludens, an aggressiveness with a shift of perspective seeing it as exuberance or free play. It’s like vanity in man—or woman— which has an oddly disarming & innocent quality to it even though it’s an aspect of pride.

Notebook 30d

This is an early Anatomy of Criticism notebook, one in which Frye focuses on the theory of modes while trying to work out the relation of his five modes to the other parts of the theory, especially to the chapters on meaning, the quest myth, and genres (which eventually became the Second, Third, and Fourth Essays of the book). The reference to an “unfinished paper on the modes” in paragraph 14 means that that the notebook was written before the publication of that paper in 1953. Frye wrote “III.” on the recto of the front cover. After paragraph 31 is a nine-page draft (not included here but doubtless the “unfinished paper” mentioned in paragraph 14) of the beginning of his theory of modes. Then, on the last page of the notebook, are the two lists in paragraph 32, followed by the cyclical comic and tragic diagram. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] The “elements” of literary experience are myths or archetypes. It might be convenient if we could distinguish these words, using myths for typical, informing or recurrent narrative structures (“ritual patterns”) and archetypes for units of meaning (recurrent images, chiefly, or imageclusters or image-themes, with a few conceptual archetypes or subjects of meditation, where we are veering toward philosophy, or at least metaphysics). But it might be difficult to establish this, so I’m tentatively using “structural archetypes” for narrative elements and “modal archetypes” for meaning ones. [2] Structural archetypes (myths) are thematic movements. We’ve seen that it’s best to use the word “narrative” for the linear movement of poetry and hence “plot” could be used to mean the sequence of gross

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(thematic) events. Plot is Aristotle’s mythos, which is why I think it should be called “myth” in English, and which Aristotle said was the soul of literature.1 Like everything else highly approved of by Aristotle, it has a subject and a predicate. A plot consist of somebody doing something. Or rather, at least in tragedy which is the norm of art for Aristotle, something happens to somebody: here the subject is involved in the predicate: what happens or is is that which happens or is [sic]. That’s the supremacy of the event in tragedy, the mythos-soul. Note the link between “gross events” or plot-mythos of narrative, and archetype or gross typical image. (The Aristotelian mimetic is archetypal.)2 [3] To take another breath: plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody is known as the hero, or central character. The something he does is presumably what sort of thing he can do. Hence one may classify heroes according to their power to act, and the themes according to whether this power is completed or frustrated. Thus: [4] 1. If superior in kind both to other men & to nature (superhuman and supernatural), the hero may be called a divine being, and the plot is mythical in the narrower sense of being a story about a god. Such stories have an integral place in literature, but are usually found outside the normal literary forms. [5] 2. If superior in degree to men and nature, so that he has ultrahuman rather than strictly transcendent powers, the hero is the typical hero of romance, whose physical prowess & endurance, sword & horse, & so on, are in the realm of magic & enchantment, as are the dragons & ogres and witches he fights against. Romantic art shows the victory of the dream or pleasure-principle at its intensest.3 [6] 3. If superior socially to men but on the whole within the order of nature, so that he has superior powers of command, articulateness and passion, the hero is a leader, a prince, king, counsellor, captain of armies, & the like. This is the hero of high mimetic art, of the plays of Shakespeare & of tragedy generally. [7] 4. If a man like ourselves, so that we feel primarily his common humanity, the hero is one of us, & is the hero of the low mimetic art of prose fiction from Defoe to Trollope. Here the difficulty in retaining the

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word “hero,” which has its centre of gravity in 2 and 3, occasionally strikes an author, as in the subtitle of Vanity Fair.4 (High & low are diagrammatic expressions only, like high & low Anglican.) [8] 5. If a man in a position of less power than ourselves, so that we pity his frustration, we have the hero of irony. As readers differ in their own extents of power, what is 4 to one will be 5 to another, as the “proletarian novel,” intended as low mimetic in an ironic context, was primarily ironic to the bourgeoisie who read it.5 [9] There has been an approximate movement down the scale historically: Western culture began in scripture, mythology, mythopoeic poetry like the Elder Edda and patristic scriptural commentary. The Middle Ages brought in romance. Renaissance & Baroque, in the prince-courtier society of that time, were high mimetic; the low mimetic ran from 1700 to about 1830 with the extreme realists, Balzac & Flaubert, ushering in an age of irony.6 There are many exceptions to this, like the romantic movement (less an exception than it looks, actually), and no sharp boundaries. To object that one might7 find irony in romance or high mimesis is like objecting that a symphony in F major has long passages, even entire movements, in another key. But there is a unity of mood that makes it easy to introduce a ghost in Hamlet, hard to introduce one in Jane Austen or Trollope.8 (though even in H, it’s a symbol of fate) [10] Heroes are classified comically by their power to act, tragically by the situation in which they are when acted on. Hence there should be five types of quest, & five types of situation. Situation of fallen angels in hell, of betrayed heroes, of tragic heroes, of pathetic ones, of frustrated ones. If that’s self-explanatory I can confine myself to quests. [11] We may further divide each mode (as I call it) into two sub-modes. What does the hero do? He does what he can do, what fulfils his nature to do, and we may feel that he has succeeded or failed. In the latter case, we may often feel that he has not done anything at all, but has been done to or by. These ideas are very approximate, and I may refine on [sic] them later. [12] 1. Myths of gods are either Apollonian or Dionysiac. The former produces [produce] paean and psalm, hymn and Veda, panegyric and

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praise. The superiority of the god to his worshippers is thus emphasized, and the lurking irony of Homer’s “the gods alone are free” is never far away.9 Dionysus is the body in whom we are: his art is rhapsodic, dithyrambic, ecstatic, enthusiastic. The later difference of Classical & Romantic is a pale reflection of this. [13] 2. Romances are either elegiac or idyllic—that is to say, they run from one to the other. These are approximately the sublime and beautiful areas of eighteenth-century romance. The elegiac, tending downward as it does toward the Druidic, is the relaxed form of the grave contemplative reflectiveness of Apollonian art. It sees the shadow of the god, & has the humorless significance of the dream. It loves darkness better than light, and tingles with fear: the real pain & evil of Druidism is treated as possibility, & so it kidnaps the fear which is the sense of possible pain. It transforms terror (fear at a distance) into adventure, horror (fear at contact) into mystery (occultism and the like), dread (fear as a primary datum without an object) into pensiveness.10 The idyllic, of which the central form is the pastoral, is the corresponding L’Allegro mood. (Note a possible alignment: Apollonian-phlegmatic; Dionysiac-choleric; elegiac-melancholy; idyllic[-]sanguine. The humors were believed in when these forms were dominant. Water, fire, earth & air (the two elements man can’t live in & those he can). Beulah is earth & air, with water a spring; Eden passes the ordeal of water & fire.[)] [14] 3. The high mimetic runs from the tragic to the comic. (Note the difference between tragic & comic as modes, & tragedy & comedy as forms. But I’m not sure that my unfinished paper on the modes doesn’t apply to the forms.)11 This is familiar ground, except for the distinction between Shakespearean comedy (halfway between idyllic & high mimetic) and Jonsonian (much lower down). [15] 4. The poles of the low mimetic have never been given names. They are, of course, the domestic tragic and the domestic comic. The best word for the former is the pathetic, for the cadence of the low mimetic that corresponds to tragedy is something like the death of Clarissa. And pathos I have defined as the exclusion of an individual from a community. The other pole I can’t find a name for: it’s domestic, realistic, cosy, lucky, and socially stabilizing. I’d call it festal if that weren’t equally a high mimetic term. The individual gets into the community.12

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[16] 5. On the fifth level I distinguish irony from satire. The former is introverted, bitter, humorless, the accidia of the sick soul. The latter is extroverted, exuberant, high-spirited, & has the qualities of invective. I think I can rearrange my satire paper13 around this. So the moods go from the sublime (upper left) to the ridiculous (lower right). They’re still moods or modes, though, not structures. I haven’t accounted for melodrama and farce: perhaps, being sensational rather than verbal, they’re peculiar to drama. No they’re not. [17] That’s pretty clear sailing: the second half of this has to establish the myth as a story. On the first level it tends to come into a focus on the quest of the god-man, which has the regular progression one can find in Frazer, Harrison, Murray, Cornford and Gaster, apart from Graves & the others. In other words the progress of the eniautos-daimon or Orc hero to divinity (stellification: he moves from mamma to become one with his papa).14 (Note that I go through the right-hand sequence first.) This is followed by its romantic analogue: here I deal with the archetypal (i.e. divine) approximations of the romantic hero to the original sun-god, & perhaps work out a Spenser commentary. The centre of this is the symbol of pastoral or idyl. Next comes the high mimetic analogue, where I deal with Shakespeare, perhaps beginning with the low mimetic one in Plautus and New Comedy. I may be able to get a satiric one out of Rabelais and Quixote. Then I’ll have to deal with Apollonian, elegiac, tragic, pathetic & ironic aspects of all this. Sounds like a hell of a long chapter, but it may fold up. The quest-myth is a romantic spring, a divine or apotheosized summer, a mimetic fall & an ironic winter (sparagmos: a theme picked up later in 6 when I deal with the modern lyric born of irony & informed by a sacramental analogy.) [18] If I can’t get my structure out of Rabelais & Cervantes I certainly can out of Finnegans Wake. But what I seem to be doing here is anticipating the structural-archetype half (or third, if I do another section on specific modal archetypes) of my later chapter. [19] The detective story is the conventionalized form of pathos, as it’s a form of choosing a victim to be excluded from society more or less by lot.15 The western is of course the modern pastoral: simplified society, gone yet not gone, erotic, specious, quizzical in its attitude to the Cainsociety. Or rather, the detective story is ironic, & a central ironic form.

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[20] Now the main difficulties with this chapter are: where to break it off from chap. IV, which deals with the main episodes of the heroic quest. That’s important, because, as I think now, ch. IV starts Part Two of the book. The second difficulty is: should the second half of this chapter deal, as I’ve recurrently thought, with the theory of genres? [21] First of all, the ironic genres (if they are genres) have expanded in my mind. What I used to think was a lyric acorn surrounded by a lot of naturalistic soil has now moved over to the right or dianoia side. The symboliste lyric, that it, the symbolism of which turns on sparagmos or sacramental Word. On the mythos side is the existential thriller, the affinities of which are primarily (as is increasingly obvious) with drama. In the middle is the ironic parable, the form of Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and perhaps Gide (Charles Williams would go here if he had any irony), where the main symbols again are either sparagmos or metamorphosis. The epic is represented of course by Joyce, especially FW [Finnegans Wake]: Proust is never the low mimetic, being retrospective & much concerned with pathos or rejection (cf. however the “Dyoublong” aspect of FW)16 & with social climbing. There’s something that doesn’t fit here: where is satire, in my sense of extroverted irony? I wonder if that, rather than the melodramatic Pamela-Cinderella success story, isn’t the counterpart of pathos. Because the last century was a great age of irony, but not of satire: great satire belongs mainly to the mimetic period. It looks as though the comic resolution of irony were individual creativity. In V Woolf, Proust, etc., life is a struggle to articulate continually strangled by time, & only when one defeats time by art is there a comic triumph. The overwhelmingly Catholic tone of irony— the Graham Greene thriller, the Marvian (?) parable,17 & the symboliste lyric—I can explain on other grounds: as anti-mimetic, it reverts to its medieval grandfather. Several things are stuck together here: a mixture of truth and falsehood. [22] Romance accepts pity and terror, here defined as the moral reactions toward good & evil (note that all art tends to exclude unconditional moral judgements, which are possible only to the lynching mob). That is, it contains or incorporates them. The high mimetic raises them to cast them out (catharsis); the ironic holds them in suspense; only in the low mimetic are we at all close to really accepting them. There, I think, sympathy and ridicule are involved.

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[23] Start again: this chapter begins, as I have it, with the chute of modes, divides them, as I have it, each into a double (or possibly a triple) theme. Somehow or other, from there I get to some synoptic view of genres, & with that I get the shape of my Part Two. Two big questions loom up: [24] 1. Should this really, now that I’ve got the balls of it, precede the chapter on meaning? The greater psychological convenience of thinking from the left to the right of my own diagrams has come up before. Besides, the meaning chapter has to go up, & end with anagogy, which affords much better introductory material to the chapter on archetypes. So if the present V & VI do fold up into one chapter (they may not) I have, after the introduction: ii. Down the levels of narrative. iii. Up the levels of meaning. iv. Down the mythoi of the quest. v. Up the dialectic or dianoiai [sic] of the quest. [25] Should I not worry about working out a general theory of genres, & just take the obvious Greek division as I find it, adding prose fiction, not as a separate form, but as a fourth dimension and second axis of epic, running from fiction below to scripture above?18 In that event a general theory of genres could be the last chapter, in place of the present scripture one. [26] Here’s the alignment of narrative & meaning: Dion.

mythical

{ {

anagogic

Apollo

phil. [philosophy] of gods (theology)

bet. Fr [between Father] & Spirit

Transcendence

bet. wit & oracle

Containment

idyllic tropological phil. of nobles (chivalry)

romantic

elegiac

{ {

comic

high mimetic

moral

(ideals) phil of hist. (nationalism) bet. law and morality Catharsis

descriptive

phil. of society

literal

phil. of art

tragic

successful

low mimetic

(facts) bet. event & ideas

Possession

pathetic

creative

ironic

{

frustrated

bet. music & ptg. [painting]

Contemplation

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[27] Note that archetypal meaning has split into tropological and moral—all my fours are turning into fives.19 The last column is the relation to pity & terror, and sympathy & ridicule. Note the link of law with the tragic—that may be useful. And as the ladder of meaning is in conceptual space, I should play down the historical slant there. [28] With the theory of genres, I haven’t got much further than to distinguish two immediate genres: drama (presented by group) and lyric (the radical of which is presentation by an individual), as well as two mediate ones, continuous poetry & continuous prose. This last is not very helpful & may be all wrong anyway, as the distinction between poetry & prose isn’t particularly generic in drama, & so isn’t likely to be anywhere.20 The real distinction is more likely to be, as I’ve always had it, between empiric mediate forms (n-d [non-dramatic] poetry & prose fiction) & archetypal mediate forms (epic & scripture). [29] The historical slant, I should say, is not only approximate but is entirely without prejudice to the freedom of any writer to do whatever he pleases at any time. This freedom becomes greater as time goes on— perhaps the exploration of the new is more of a key. [30] It seems to me that this chapter, concerned as it is with the fifteen thematic elements of literature, should have as little as possible to do with the quest theme.21 It has, of course, nothing to do with genres either. Part One: Table of Literary Elements Chapter One. Levels of Imitation. The difficulty about the word poetry.22 Narrative as literally Rhythm & pattern in the arts.23 Narrative as literally rhythm; meaning as literally pattern. The representational attitude (not a fallacy, as I used to think, because too much real literature adopts it) thinks of representations of outside “life” and “ideas.”24 Actually we need three rather than two terms, because there is also imitation in Aristotle’s sense of internal relation or incorporation of action & thoughts. Narrative and plot (mythos); meaning and thought (dianoia). (Idea of imitation of thought perhaps new. It has overtones of a Platonic identity of form and idea which accounts for the strong Platonic overtones of nearly all levels of dianoia. I haven’t worked this all out yet.) [31]

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Mythos & dianoia are the same thing, looked at as rhythm & pattern.25 Each has an individual and a social ethical pole.26 They may vary from the impersonality of Homer to the subjectivity of a lyric.27 Note that the Aristotelian level of mimesis is the archetypal one. [32] encyclopaedic short romance — Arabian Nights cycle " " novel (story) — Dubliners type " " confession — Montaigne type " " anatomy — Character book fear at a distance or terror becomes adventure fear at contact or horror becomes marvel fear without an object or dread becomes melancholy pity at a distance, or concern, becomes rescue pity at contact, or tenderness, becomes dreaminess pity without an object, or wonder, becomes fantasy28 accepted gods

myth

redeemed society

visionary comic

t

rc.

r a g i

providential guarded world

moral comic

c

(natural tragedy)

(innocence)

pastoral millennium (ideal comedy)

h.m. moral tragic

(natural comedy)

ir. [rc. = romance

(ideal tragedy)

vision of hamartia

(experience)

low norm satire

visionary comic ultimate tragedy

h.m. = high mimetic

l.m. = low mimetic

co

l.m.

mi

c

acceptance of reality

high norm satire ir. = irony]

Notebook 30e

This brief notebook, written after February 1952, is devoted to Frye’s reflections on what became his theory of symbols in the Second Essay of Anatomy of Criticism. It also includes a draft of Frye’s essay “The Instruments of Mental Production” (StS, 3–21), as well as a draft of chapter 1 of FT, neither of which is reproduced here. Frye wrote “II.” on the recto of the front cover, and the diagram on p. 310 comes from the verso of the front cover. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] One of the most familiar facts of literary experience is that one’s understanding deepens as well as expands. We not only learn more by reading new poems; we increase the kind of understanding we have of poems we have already read. It follows, or should follow, that there are different levels of meaning in such poems. This reminds us of medieval criticism, when a precise scheme of four levels of meaning was imported from theology. The medieval scheme is usually described as an antiquated freak of pedantry, or some such denigratory phrase, & I now realize that when I read a modern book of criticism & see a phrase like this in it, it is a sign of something that will probably be more useful to me than the book that thus refers to it, [and] that I should abandon the book I am reading and go in search of it. [2] I am convinced that there are different levels of meaning, that four is probably the most useful dividing, or rather distinguishing, number (for, as Coleridge remarked, we may often distinguish where we cannot divide).1 But while I feel that the medieval conception of literal, allegori-

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victory of Eros & Prospero

Apollonian

my. epiphany

dying god

rce.

triumph

clegy

tragedy

comedy

pathos

aggression

pharmakos melodrama

oratory

courtly love

genetic mythopoeia ridicule

paradox

COMEDY

TRAGEDY

h.m

l.m.

illusion & symbolisme

epiphany & illusion

SATIRE

erotic dialectic vs. paradox

supremacy of poet

total isolation

ir.

cal, moral & anagogic levels of meaning is essential to modern poetics, I also feel that some of these terms need redefining. I also feel that the obvious place to start looking for a theory of literary meaning is in literature. Hence I also abandon the modern tendency to regard the problem of meaning in literature as an offshoot of the contemporary logical interest in semantics, & wade into the subject oblivious to current fashions in philosophy. [3] Whenever we read anything we find our attention simultaneously travelling in two opposite directions. . . . {Now at present I don’t know that I need to write out all over again for the fourth time (Philosophy

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paper, KR article, & Yale article2 all having dealt with it), my view on the difference between literal & descriptive meaning.[}] This part would include: a literary redefinition of the terms narrative & meaning as rhythm & pattern respectively of a verbal structure. A consequent redefinition of symbol as the unit of verbal structure. The place of literature as, on the literal level, midway between music and painting as an art. Symbol is roughly the equivalent of motif in music as word is of note. Symbol, which is expansive (phrase, clause, idea or even narrative theme)[,] is a better term than word for this reason. Centripetal & centrifugal lines of meaning, one into the present structure, the other into the past memory. (Note here, before I forget, that this memory is language, language being defined poetically not as dictionary language but as one’s total verbally expressive potential. Thus language (Mallarmé’s “langage” or “parole”) is one pole of literary experience, the potential of the community, the waste & void chaos of unspoken babble that the Word (Mallarmé’s Verbe) passes over & brings to articulate life, & so unites to the other pole, the literature or order of words which is its firmament.3 Note the ambiguity of “poetically”; I should not try to eliminate poetic (which means largely religious) metaphors. What the hell is a metaphor?). Well anyway, in the centripetal movement symbols are simply inter-related; they aren’t separately symbols “of” different things. (Note another thing that’s shaping up here: language is a potential applied existentially to a series of situations: we speak in certain contexts just as Paul writes an epistle or a Pope (Catholic or Communist) an encyclical, & use our language for such life-situations. Hence the importance the Renaissance gave the orator. But the poem is surely rather the divine epiphany manifesting itself, the total order of words becoming an individual order. Hence the Muse, inspiration, oracular excitement, & the rest. But that has to wait a bit.) Prepositions and conjunctions are wholly centripetal: the dictionary cannot define them or say anything about them to a person who does not already understand them. Hence, paradoxical as it sounds, they flourish in descriptive writing. In descriptive writing the aim is to make words reproduce things: descriptive writing is thus essentially & finally true, false or tautological. It is the aspect of literature that literature shares with everything else in words. In descriptive writing we minimize figuration, ambiguity and immediate juxtaposition (hence the importance of pure connectives), and the tendency for descriptive habits of thought to develop analytic languages is very marked. Humanism has always stressed the importance of

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inflected languages, & distrusted the poetic carrying capacity of the modern ones. Problems of a return of inflections in modern speech from the vulgate to obscure (because metaphorical or immediately juxtaposed) highbrow poetry. [4] Summary: the symbol as an image is centripetal; the symbol as sign is centrifugal; centripetal meaning is literal meaning; centrifugal or descriptive meaning is always symbolic in the sense of sigmatic. This involves a reconsideration of two words: image and allegory. The true image is not a sign or verbal reproduction of anything—that, like the ordinary meanings given to narrative & meaning, is part of the representational fallacy. It’s the verbal use of a sign, & hence is my unit of a verbal structure, it being understood that pure connectives with no sign value are not usually called images. It’s representational also to think of images as mirrors, second-hand mimeses, & so on. God, I wish I could finish scribbling this crap. Allegory is the name given to a deliberate & systematic attempt on the poet’s part to indicate a pattern of centrifugal meaning. For historical reasons this is largely ethical meaning. But on the second level poetry is related to everything else in words, namely history on one side & philosophy on the other. Here its narrative & meaning relate to events & ideas. On this level we discover the significance of the fact that the poet can lie: that poetry is hypothetical & not assertive. It is to other verbal structures what mathematics is to other numerical ones. Its data neither exist nor do not exist. Fallacy of taking literal to mean “minimum descriptive” is perhaps the fundamental fallacy of all criticism. Thus, the sperm of art is thought to be the lyric cris de coeur or description of simple emotion. This fallacy is derived from the Christian one of renaming myth: literal in Dante means historical, as a genuflection to the notion that only the theological, or descriptive-assertive-propositional, could be authoritative development from a body of obviously imaginative revelation. Hence the fact that words denoting literary structure, fable, fiction & myth, have taken on a secondary coloring of untruth. [5] This chapter: 1. What I have on literal & descriptive meaning. 2. What I worked out, through the Carpenter discussion,4 about the communicating power of archetypes, as common or universal wordpowers carrying a variety of sign & image meanings.

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3. The discussion of the totality of literature, vs. language: a) Dreaming & waking; desire & reality. b) Transformation through work into human form (of desire). c) Limited (natural) & unlimited goals of work: the Plato-Marx fallacy. d) Art as infinite hypothesis. e) The moon & the sun (or does this have to wait for the next chapter?) e1) Transformation of vision vs. anxiety-dream. 4. Perhaps an epilogue on a preliminary empiric survey of what little literature I know, gathered as a sample of an expanding force. The literary use of Frazer and Jung. This may well fit more logically here than on [in] the introduction. I don’t see how I can defend the archetypal view of literature against new & old critics until the reader has some notion of what an archetype is. [6] Now when it comes to defining or working out the third or archetypal level I still have a lot of new ideas. First of all, it’s poetry as the focus of a community, & on this level poetry is between (not music & painting, 1st level; not history & philosophy, 2nd level, but) ritual and oracle. In other words, archetype is myth. Therefore, by God, the three archetypal forms are drama (ritual), epic (myth) and lyric (oracle). They don’t begin in romance, as I used to think: their central point is the leader, the high mimetic, the diameter across the middle running from hero (history) to teacher (philosophy)—only what happens to the anima? Anyway, this gives some color to my present arrangement. (Note that in P.R. [Paradise Regained] the hero is withdrawn from history & the teacher from philosophy, & that they are also withdrawn from their communities. The same thing happens to Prospero in The Tempest.) [7] The archetypal level can perhaps best be handled by dividing it into the two parts suggested by the two words tropological & moral. In studying poems we become aware that it won’t do just to see a symbol as an image in a poem & let it go at that. Auden’s Enchaféd Flood. Images spread from one poet to another, and not just because of their sign value. They seem to have a larger significance within poetry. Hence the question of the total communicability of poetry arises. That’s what tropological means. In this process we are aware of some generalization: hence the prejudice it arouses in people looking for texture. This corresponds to the notion that drama is an impure art, that epic is obsolete &

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that lyric is only indirectly communicable. The main ideas from here on are the value of tradition & convention in showing the existence of a total order of words modified & adapted (in opposition to the ex nihilo theory) and the function of art in visualizing an infinite goal of humanizing the environment (in opposition to the Plato-Marx craft-art theory). Before we attack Plato we should stop to see if we have yet refuted his argument. [8] Fourth Level Art in context of civilization, which is the process of transforming nature in terms of desire. Art as technique of cn. [communication], cble [communicable] in terms of desire. Desiring action (action significant of desire) is magic of ritual; thought in dream. Avoiding anthro/ & psych/ determinism: Frazer & Jung. Aspiration vs. anxiety: the garden means weeds, pests, tares. [9] (Third Level) Insert: Renaissance writers are as sure they follow nature & are realists as later ones, but their history (e.g.) is selected not as a field of external study, but as an example; hence it (the historical subject) is treated in an ideal way. (In the exemplification of precept the two schools are much closer.) (But even there the precept is an ideal or moral one usually, not an induction.) Also I think Crane may be wrong,5 and that the conception of convention (anti–ex nihilo approach) is involved even here, though it is true that the question it raises can only be solved at the fourth level. [10]

Fifth Level

Anagogic level bound up in religion. Hooker and Blake on infinity of desire,6 the technological fallacy in Plato & Marx:7 the conceivable, not the real, the limit. Apocalyptic goal or total human world. This is (a) the total field of events as the body of a man (b) the total possession of knowledge of this. Neither exists or does not exist. (The direct content of a & b is religion, which is no substitute for art.)

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Art as verbal universe or order of words which is one word.8 Symbol as monad. Hypothetical nature of this: analogy with mathematics. Ironic or satiric (ironic in the self-deprecating quizzical sense) nature of hypothesis. Liberal education as a liberation: (a) of thought (spiritual authority) (b) of action (courtesy). {The fourth level (moral) concludes with a residual antithesis between the poet and his community which only the fifth level can resolve}. The goal is of a central human [?] employed by poetry on its way from moral to apocalyptic levels Lift stuff from UTQ article.9 Between the existential & intelligible worlds (the imgve. [imaginative] world, which has a monopoly of language, is.) Note that if the modes of describing the intelligible world are rejected as tautological, the intelligible world becomes a world of complete silence (Wittgenstein). As for the existential, the sense of its demonic (Angst: fear of life as the other is of death) quality runs all the way down to the [nomadic?] on the literal level (Tolstoy, Mann, Mozart in Kierkegaard). [11] Modes The encyclopaedic or apocalyptic level can be attained by: stage one: myth & scripture stage two: encyclopaedic doctrine stage three: union of example & precept in love stage four: individual mythopoeia stage five: sacramental analogy or epiphany

Bible Dante Spenser? Blake Mallarmé

[12] Satire can be attained by: one: prophecy & mockery of the gods (cf. Xenophanes)10 two: exilic or wandering minstrel (Goliardic) satire (cf. however the encyclopaedic nat. sat. [natural satire?] three: confronting the indecorous with decorum. four: study of whatever men do (empiric) five: observation of bondage (experimental) (I don’t know: there’s always a difference between satire from the isolated artist, & satire from within the conventions. The prophet mocks: the bard destroys by magic. The Goliardic exile is against the priestly satirist, the Aretino blackmailer against the decorous satirist,11 the radical

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against the reactionary, the ironist Ishmael against the whatever it is. In other words, there’s tragic ironic satire. Don’t tell me there’s a similar contrast in dianoia: I couldn’t bear it. That may be the low & high norm business I talk about: I dunno. Anyway, comic satire in this sense has a lot to do with the “invective” of my early article.12 Satire is essentially a hypothetical morality, which may attack or defend a conventional norm. Oh, bugger. But then again comic satire may be mythos-organized. No it isn’t. You’ll just have to stick to the two norms. Now I wonder if there’s a low & high norm in apocalypse too, & if any Eros & Agape point fits it. Something here, I think. So it’s only high satire that busts the 4th level, and only Agape that busts technology. [13] Archetypes The concrete universal or identification of forms is the total heroic Word. Basis of symbolism in the apocalypse: the Body of Man (God) The formation of Druidic symbols. (mere [?] in isolation) Faerie Queene I. (and perhaps II). The Man as hero of action (the quest theme) The Child & the Mother: Oedipus quest. The structure of comedy and the comic romance. the green world in Marvell, Shakespeare, & Spenser’s GA [Gardens of Adonis]. the bride as the reborn mother. the obstacle as the father whose obstacle is ultimately Maya. Sun and Moon as larger eyes or symbols of (objective?) vision. Solar & vegetable (= lunar?) cycles. Cycle of dream & waking. (I don’t know where to end the chapter) (Unity of the poet and hero perhaps in the total body of the revealed Father[)] [14] resurrection rebirth victory life to death circle

Archetypes of man as God (apocalyptic) Archetypes of man humanizing nature (romantic)13 Archetypes of man forming society (comic) Archetypes of society (realistic) old man (Archimago) Archetypes of man as isolated being (Druidic). dragon

Albion Los Orc Urizen Satan

[15] The whole range is possible only to continuous forms; episodic ones follow the circle of the inner three. But lyric shouldn’t. Maybe that’s the

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difference between 5 & 6—lyric has a larger circle, & so connects 5 & the sequence 7–9. After all the drama has a social centre, a present audience. [16] A. Structural types of internal characters (tragic-comic). Element of mythos, of fiction, fable, plot or story. Connections with ritual, & illustrated by drama. Total general theory of internal character stories is that of a synopsis of a hero’s quest. And so on from here. To be illustrated in the next chapter. [17] B. Modal types of external characters (encyclopaedic-satiric). Element of meaning, of argument or revelation. Connections with the world of archetypal thought—dream, vision, oracle, relaxed creation. Total general theory of this is that of all symbols as identified as a man [sic].

Notebook 30f

This brief notebook treats chiefly material developed in the Third Essay of the Anatomy. Frye wrote “IV.” on the recto of the front cover. Bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., the notebook is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] I have a vague notion that, just as 3 & 5 (narrative structures & drama) are intricately connected, so this chapter is intricately connected with 6, the chapter on lyrics, and that, like two halves of a walnut, they’ll both come out when I crack their common shell. [2] The only hunch I have to go on is this: there seem to be at least three ways of grouping images, apocalyptically, erotically and Druidically, and there may be a fourth, mimetically or naturally. This seems to point to three or four image-patterns that inform lyrics as the narrative ones do drama. All four seem to be cycles: the apocalyptic one is the “repetition” of reality in one presence; the erotic one is the cycle of death and revival; the mimetic one, if it exists, would be the tragic-natural-legal cycle of time, and the Druidic one is the cycle of pain. Eternity, creative time, recurrent time and endless time. That’s fine: whether that will illuminate the Shakespeare Sonnets or the Keats Odes or the Rilke Elegies remains to be seen. Anyway: [3] The apocalyptic perception has two main aspects: it sees all things as identical, and it equates the class with the individual. How far this second corresponds to or implies a Thomist real universal is something I don’t know. Things are identical as a man of thirty is identical with himself at three, though nothing in time, space or substance corresponds—or form either, for that matter. Two substances in the same person. Thus:

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divine ⎯ God-Man

human

animal

{

heroic ⎯ Master or Bridegroom

{

domesticated animals

vegetable

erotic ⎯ Bride social ⎯ community as body > friend one Lamb > flock of sheep, etc. > and birds

{

> Body and Blood one Dove

garden > one tree of life or one rose park

mineral

{ city > temple

liquid

{ river of life.

}

jewel in lotus Bread & Wine burning tree

> one stone or jewel

geometrical images

(There should be a crystal dew drop).

Note that this identity has nothing to do with metaphor, which is a form based on double analogy (this is to that as this is to that). Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia. Bread is body and wine is blood. Note how logically these develop from the conception of work as the realization of a dream: the city, the garden, the farm, the community. In the [?]. [4] I don’t know what I intended to write here,1 but my views of what’s to be in this chapter are changing. I think now of three chapters on archetypes, IV, V and VI. IV, this one, follows the Orc chapter in FS: it’s about the hero’s quest, its cycle & its stages. V then deals, like 8 in FS, with Beulah symbols; strictly with the dialectic of the emanation, fate in Ulro (ironic), object of nature in G [Generation] (mimetic), beloved (ranging from the ordinary fuckee to Beatrice) in Beulah and absorption with the Father in the apocalypse. The last stages are from anima to counsellor, as in the lyric wheel, with the dialectic gradually clearing through a double perversion: first the Platonic one of homosexual love, second the Christian one of a virgin as the ultimately beloved. Blake missed the first one. VI, then, does what I ascribe to IV up to this paragraph. [5] So what I do here is: first, the myth of the hero and its stages; second, the romance of the hero, if that’s a second form; third, the argument of comedy; fourth, the argument of satire. In one the quest ends apocalyp-

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tically, in two erotically, in three socially, in four individually. What I do is take my argument of comedy thesis,2 expand it to bring out the more romantic aspects of it (via Menander) & from there work up to the mythical: hence the parallelism of a Plautus play & the argument of the Athanasian creed, for example. NW – auto & romance SW – tragic satire novel SE – comic satire anat. [anatomy] NE – individual comic conf. [confession]

individual

comic

tragic social

tragic ind. [individual]

comic soc. [social]

individual social

axis of thought

axis of action

Notebook 30g

This brief notebook contains themes developed in the Fourth Essay of the Anatomy. Frye wrote “Six.” on the recto of the front cover. The entries transcribed here are followed by a series of cancelled drafts for Frye’s essays and chapters of books. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] The lyric is predominantly the genre of the personalized I–Thou relationship. The Thou may be inside the I, & often is: it is never one of a large group of “you.” The paradox of “overhearing” means that we are absorbed one by one into the poet’s mind: we are not impersonally addressed as an audience.1 [2] The radical of presentation in the lyric is chanting or cantillation (as Yeats called it),2 a marking of the rhythm and pattern of words. It exists at every period of art, but reaches its greatest period of flowering in the ironic mode. Compare drama, which flowers in the high mimetic period of a centripetal society and a settled theatre. I’m not quite sure how to express this point and avoid the value-judgement that seems implied: it becomes normative somehow. [3] Well, chanting is the emphasizing of words as words: it isn’t singing. In singing, at any rate in modern music, the words are taken over by the very different & more repetitive rhythm of music. Here the words, to be “singable,” have to be neutral & conventional. One can arrange lyrics in sequence from the madrigal (sparagmos of words) through the air and the progressive reformations of music to recitativo, plain chant, & finally

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cantillation. On the other side it stretches over toward the hieroglyphic or pictorial indications of verbal pattern. The typographical devices to make a poem look poetical belong here, though they’re not peculiar to lyric: the capitalized lines, the placing of rhymes, the emphasizing of the shorter more oracular rhythms of poetry by the fact that the lines don’t run continuously down the page (Bentham),3 and so on. Here poetry is, so to speak, “overseen.” Again there’s a sequence: from this to the emblem (which is still controlled by poetry) to the hieroglyphic (Herbert & Cummings: find a different word) to the type of imagism where we have a series of captions to unseen drawings or photographs. I think the paragraph you have about Joyce & Cummings could come out of 2 or wherever it is & go here.)4 [4] Then the wheel of lyric, as follows: start north by west. Only I think it would be easier, & perhaps more logical, if you started by explaining that practically all shorter poems are either lyric or epos, that the latter are characterized (a) by a mimesis of direct speech (b) by developing narrative & dramatic interests (c) by being related, usually as fragments (quite distinct from a sequence of lyrics) to an epic cycle. That means this order: 1. What a lyric is. 2. Lyric vs. epos. 3. Babble: musical > narrative 4. Doodle: pictorial > didactic 5. Wheel of lyric & epos, with cardinal points of each. 6. The encyclopaedic tendency of epos to become epic. 7. Transition to 7. [5] Now I have still to find out whether the more modal and thematic interests of the lyric, as compared to drama, will bring the wheel of archetypes close enough to the centre for me to do something like this: wheel of lyric & epos, then the tendency of epos to become epic, as I have it; then the split of fictional & thematic aspects of epos. In fiction we have a logical conclusion in the idea of an encyclopaedic collection of folk tales or other traditional forms. This is Ovid, Chaucer, Lydgate, Southey, Morris—and Spenser. Then I could transfer what I have from 4 & end 6 with Spenser. That would give a 5 > Shakespeare, 6 > Spenser, 7 > Milton, 8 > ?, 9 > Joyce progression (or better 8 > Joyce, 9 > Yeats if you can). I feel very doubtful about this, but then I never did explore the idea that

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came to me while I was writing 5, of a wheel of genres followed by an inner wheel of archetypes. Only Spenser isn’t a wheel, he’s a ladder, being epic, and Shakespeare is likely to stay wheely. [6] I don’t know: I think the wheel of occasional prose forms must belong here.

Notebook 30h

These are notes on what Frye conceived at one point as a separate chapter (he wrote “Seven.” on the recto of the front cover) on scripture as an encyclopedic epic. Part of the material here, as sketchy as it is, became incorporated into the section on “Thematic Modes” in the First Essay of Anatomy of Criticism and part into the Fourth Essay. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] This chapter has the following main shape: it begins by noting how fragments of epos link together to form cycles of heroic action, & fragments of didactic verse similarly take on quasi-philosophical patterns. Examples range from Wordsworth to the Kalevala.1 Then the conception of a definitive or encyclopaedic epic, the anagogic conception of poetry, arises. Example of this in the Gilgamesh epic. Then the completion of the process in scripture. Indian epics. [2] Finally, the Bible as a structural myth, starting I think with Job. I’ll give the outlines of this section later. [3] Now: two main approaches to the Biblical pattern are possible. One is archetypal, romantic & sacramental, & takes the sacramental life as a continuous imitation of Christ. This dialectic goes up from the Odyssey through the Aeneid to Dante. The other sees rebirth not as a figura but as a semi-parody of the dialectic quest, which has a kind of antithesis to grace in it (God, I must be careful not to slide into Woodhouse’s dichotomies here).2 This is the line that Milton picked up from (I think) the

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Iliad. In Dante the central figure is a saved man and a lost God; in Milton we have a saving God & a lost man. Well, that’s jingle. But still the connection between the Thomist & the Kierkegaardian dialectic often is pretty close. The Milton-Kierkegaard line takes the analogy of nature as not sacramental but more like that of a mirror to the world it reflects. I must find an adjective based on the word mirror, or shadow (better perhaps, because Catholic substance is Protestant shadow). The plunge through the crystal walls of the mirror into the real world is what Kierkegaard apparently means by repetition. [4] The Odyssey begins with Ulysses in the far west under the domain of Calypso, the hiding horizon. Then, like the sun at night, he moves through a wild of dangerous monsters, including a blind giant, to gain the bride which is his old one restored. [5] Rc. [Romantic] or [mirrorized?] analogy of revelation: Virgil made himself the Roman Hesiod before the Roman Homer. (I don’t know if I can get away with making Virgil scriptural). [6] In O.T. history we have a narrative flanked by historical significance on one side & moral sig. on the other. Hence Creation : LJ [Last Judgement] : : Exodus : Day of Jahweh. [7] The two poles of the cycle are creation and flood. Creation begins (a) in deliverance from flood {Mesopotamia} (b) in [coming?] of river of life into dry world {Egyptian}. [8] The serpent is an element in the leviathan because his shedding of his skin makes him the central (land) symbol of the natural cycle, death and rebirth. Maybe the knowledge of good & evil is the knowledge of rebirth, which is the same as the knowledge of inevitable death. [9] The victor in the Bible is an eternal Son in whom the spirit of the Father returns. Tie-up of the comedy theme of the acceptance of the old wise man (Tempest). [10] The identification of the dragon-killer and the Word of God is the containing form of the identification of the objective & subjective hero of poetry.

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[11] With the elimination of the theme of the natural recurrence there is an elimination of the transfer of power to a successor, so that the whole Son passes directly into the body of his community: the act is completed once and for all. Hence the anointing and unction symbols {also the idea of apostolic succession} have no place in the myth, nor anything else based on the idea of a continuing history. [12] Natural religion alone is hardly capable of suggesting any other doctrine than reincarnation. [13] In P.R. [Paradise Regained] Christ refuses the illusions which Satan interprets as acts. An act in Satan’s sense is motivated, hence it is an effect following a cause; hence it is a fated thing within the circle of causality or wheel of fortune. Satan doesn’t tempt him with women, but he does show him the spread-out body of Babylon, apocalyptically identical with the harlot. [14] Apocalypse — anagogic reality Creation — sacramental analogy Life — secular analogy Flood — mirror analogy Hell — demonic analogy3

Notebook 30i

Frye wrote “Nine.” on the recto of the front cover of this notebook, representing a section or chapter number, which at this point was devoted to his study of genres. Following the entries here is a draft paragraph of Frye’s review of Robert Graves, Collected Poems. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] One major theme is the return of literature to language. The polarizing & comminution of form, imagery, conventions of beauty, morality & plausibility, the fragmentation of epic & the epiphanization of lyric, the deliberate attempts to push past consciousness that begin with Rcsm [Romanticism] & end (perhaps) with Dadaism & surrealism, the attempt to express the inexpressible & unscrew the inscrutable, the attempt to break down the habitual or customary associations—all this means the return to babble & doodle. Hence the importance of the Journal to Stella & Tristram Shandy in FW [Finnegans Wake], also nursery rhymes & popular songs. The Smart stuff in Six links with the theory of poetic wit in Four:1 when we get back to b. & d. [babble & doodle], an apoc. [apocalyptic] content pushes through the habit & custom of literature, & so prophecy, oracle & scripture are reborn. Gertrude Stein & the First Epistle of John.2 One thing that occurs to me is that in assertive writing, where you try to avoid rhetoric, you get to exactly the same kind of gargle—here’s where I could use my James Mill quote.3 I still wonder if my hunch that logical positivism is simply anti-rhetorical, a new Puritanism that tries to eliminate the figura, is right—that is, if I’m right that it’s tied up in the paradox that a statement can’t be factually correct unless it’s verbally correct. Note that Gertrude [Stein] got her prolixity straight

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from the idiom of colloquial speech. I haven’t quite got the link with the other major theme of the resurrection of the body, but it’s coming. [2] Deliverance from the bondage of ritual is characteristic of (a.) prose in contrast to metre (b.) exploration vs. convention and form (c.) anagogic scripture vs. point of epiphany (d.) satire vs. demonic epiphany. Prose fiction forms are expansive—they tend to swallow the other forms, then to swallow descriptive or assertive writing (history in the novel, philosophy in the anatomy)—then to swallow the rhetoric of poetry in a general comminution. Then they reach language and a verbal, as distinguished from a literary, universe. [3] I suppose the reason I’ve thought of 6 & 9 together is that 9 seems to pick up from 8 and resume the argument for prose that 6 works out for lyric > epos. There, I take narrative from music to events; meaning from picture to idea. That’s poetry, which goes to the point of epiphany and then around the circle, still contained in the archetypal world of ritual & the dream. Now the principle of episodic variety proceeding to a unity, or total hypothesis, is what’s here. In prose we have a rhythm of exploration: here my old question: what’s the highest form of prose? recurs. Epic & tragedy are class-bound, for one thing—it’s not everything, but it’s significant. In the general reduction of literature to language in satire there’s implied a certain verbalization of thought—or of everything expressible in words. Now it’s not impossible that the Spengler & l-p [late phase] arguments4 belong to this part—in other words, 9. But at that rate there’d be only 9 chapters, except for a note on the Tower of Babble [sic].5 (That hadn’t occurred to me before.) (Labyrinth of Daedal[us]). A lot of things here are slowly beginning to clear up: I think I’m right to tackle it now. If epic & tragedy are class-bound & romance proletarian, does prose satire have to turn hieratic? [4] Now I don’t put quite so much stock in the episodic kernels of the four form forming. Say Charles Williams in the romance (magic symbol or spell: it may be a prose-lyric association), Kafka (e.g. Penal Colony) in the parable, Rimbaud or Nietzsche (there’s the prose-lyric again) in the aphorism, God knows what in the oracle: maybe the MHH [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]. [5] Expansive vs. episodic aspects of prose fiction vs. epos

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Rhythm of prose, which can be extra-literary, is exploratory. Escape from ritual in the rhythm of prose a link with satire. Exploratory elements in art: hypothetical vs. existential concretion. a) against beauty (realism) b) against morality c) against form (satura) d) against unity (language or reduction to babble). Conventional quality in poetry linked to class ascendancy & moral expurgation. a) in society: the excretions of women. b) in religion: the back parts of God. (What I’m not getting here is the link with the ironic-epiphanic-lyric side.) In irony wish-fulfilment floats helplessly on top: hence revy. [revolutionary] prose satire can’t stick to irony. (Hence frequency of romance-anatomy combination?).

Notebook 30j

Frye wrote “Ten.” on the recto of the front cover of this brief notebook, referring to the tenth chapter in his outline at the time for Anatomy of Criticism. Following the first three paragraphs transcribed here are drafts of Frye’s preface to Peter Fisher, The Valley of Vision (M&B, 313–15), and one of his poetry reviews for the University of Toronto Quarterly (C, 91–229). These are followed by entry 4 below. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] Apart from the main outline of this chapter, to be given later, the things I want to discuss include: [2] The point raised in the Yeats essay about poetry as a language expressing no truth.1 Hence in one sense (the sense in which I began the book) it isn’t a language at all; it doesn’t speak, but shows forth. In another it’s the final language, as it continues to show forth after the speaking languages fall silent. The fact that there are many arts means a plurality of languages; as in Babel, there’s no other result of trying to reach heaven. What relation has this silent showing-forth with the positive value-judgement, & what about the “Catholic” objection that the subjective element in the recognition of authority is just an apotheosis of private judgement?2 [3] I think the logical way to back in is deductively, via the myth course.3 One starts with an alphabet of archetypes & then puts them together to form plot-words. If I know what I mean. How much of it goes through drama? Drama is such a perfect workshop of plot ideas, & has been so

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recognized since Aristotle. It isn’t fundamentally ethos: that’s more the romance-novel part of prose fiction, if anything. [4] Three areas: teaching; criticism; creation teaching: why jargon? expression of moral attitude inseparable mixture of moral & aesthetic judgements. desire for the impersonal & for conformity. jargon not technical terms but clichés like ivory tower. cannot learn English except through literature. cannot study it except in academic freedom. creation: not totally the function of the university, but most English poets (Cambridge!) graduates. faculty psychology & the notion of genius succeeded by naive pseudo-science (Valéry) still dependent or academic freedom: Pound, Miller, Chaplin scientists no monopoly of social irresponsibility. art vs. science: Longinus, Bacon. science : world as is : : art : world man wants to live in. fortunately poet has little choice about how he writes.

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These notes focus on material that eventually made its way into the Fourth Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, especially the Introduction to that essay and the section on “The Rhetoric of Nonliterary Prose.” The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] The prevalence of metrical features in prose makes a difficulty, one of the recurrent difficulties of prose oratory, of the kind expressed in the remark that you can’t tell the truth in Macaulay’s style.1 Antithesis & similar features (alliterative pairs in Swinburne) over-simplify & conventionalize the thought beyond the flexibility of real thought. To achieve the latter you need to isolate the rhythm of prose, as was done from the Senecan amble through to Dryden.2 The attempt to isolate the propositional rhythm, which leaves out the process of thought, also conventionalizes, & so looks like a rhetorical device, more even than Plato. [2] The opposition of rhetoric & logic, especially in negative statements, indicates the greater weight of decorum in rhetoric. Nobody ever, confronted with “I hain’t got no money,” counted the negatives, found an even number, & took the speaker to mean that he did have money. {Logically, one should count the negatives & call the statement affirmative if there is an even number, but probably no one in the history of communication ever took “I hain’t got no money” to mean that the speaker did have money.} Similarly with the Vendryes point & the opening of Gerontion.3 Hegelian tendency in rhetoric.

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[3] I still wonder about having this chapter precede genres. If it does, then the oratio-ratio business will not come at the end of the book: what would have to come would be the sequence: lyrical wheel–comminution–return to the cycle of prose & greatest form for prose— [Anticlimax] notes on the sequence of epiphanies. If I can bring this off I’m all set. Anyway seems to me the oracle-wit antithesis in lyric, leading to intoxication on the one hand (rhythmical obsession in Swinburne) & laughter on the other (sudden detachment from obsession & epigram) is pretty central to the genres chapter. [4] Ritual & myth Explain ritual of sacrifice. Human > animal City & garden cycles Messiah as king in glory: epiphany. Messiah as leviathan-killing hero. Leviathan as: surrounding tyrants; waste land; death Messiah as priest: Melchizedek symbol. Messiah as prophet: Moses & Elijah Messiah as negative king or penitential David Messiah as negative hero: Jonah & dying god symbolism Messiah as negative prophet or suffering servant Messiah as negative priest or sacrificial victim [5] Rhetorical chapter begins with associating grammar & logic with narrative & meaning—actually it begins with Aristotle & Pound on the context of lexis as the relation with other arts. Note that in the other group ethe was in the centre, & ethe means decorum, the centralizing principle of rhetoric, between the initiative of recurrence & the initiative of association. Or something.4 [6] Mythos side = ear; dianoia side = eye; mythos side = act; dianoia side = thought. Hence hypnotism, intoxication, oracle, obsession, tantrum & so on are all left; the Zen iron-bar Stein-N.T. dissociative wit things are right. Cdt [Commandment] & oracle are W & N, aph [aphorism] & par [parable] E & S. Acting & hearing vs. thinking & seeing. In the middle is ethe vs. lexis: the imitated person vs. the imitated speech. [7] Rhetoric is only the antistrophos of classical dialectic,5 but it resembles the Hegelian dialectic in making a positive use of negative propositions.

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Discursive statements turn on the crucial distinction of affirmation & denial, & are tested as true or false. Rhetorical negations always have some positive value. [8] I wonder whether the argument after the end of two shouldn’t be: Chapter Three: Theory of Genres. Rhetoric & poetics; the four initiatives; the four main genres; fiction (epos); drama (lyric); scriptural epic forms (in brief), pure & applied literature; the informing of ratio by oratio. Chapter Four: Theory of Myths. Apocalyptic & other fields of imagery; the four mythoi; the zodiac; the structure of scriptural & epic forms.

Notebook 30l

This notebook contains an outline of five chapters of an early version of Anatomy of Criticism. The chapter numbers here (entries 1, 4, 6, 13, and 15) were originally “two” through “six,” but at some point Frye marked through these numbers and changed them to “three” through “seven.” Paragraphs 15 and 16 are separated in the notebook by four pages of cancelled drafts, and the remainder of the notebook consists of cancelled drafts of Anatomy material and a talk on Auden. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

A Tree of Many One1

[1] Chapter Three: Theory of Anagogy Apocalyptic Perspective: Structural & Modal Archetypes: The Five Anagogic Worlds. Modal Archetypes of the Apocalypse Druidic Archetypes. Theory of Displacement: Moral Plausible.

{

As Community Communication The Body & the Word The Hero & the [?] Image. Fictional Theme Concrete Universal

Displacement and Efflorescence: The Archetypal Framework Structural Archetypes: Dialectic (Romance) Cyclic (Epic) The Diagram of Dante, Milton, Joyce & Yeats (Spenser) The Cycle of Episodes.

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The Structure of the Bible. Bibel [sic] o Compared with other Scriptures o As source of Dante & Spenser (this can now be postponed) [2] Why not plunge as quickly as possible into the apocalypse, then extract the Druidic, then introduce the conception of displacement along with the other two worlds? That way is less snafu, I think. Maybe you can say the apocalyptic is all inside the hero’s body: the innocent world sees the dialectic of the hero, the existential world the cycle of him, the Druidic world the pure cycle. The complete vanishing of the level of the leader bothers me: it must belong. It’s linked with the fact that I don’t know much about the myth of the hero. The leader is de jure a continuous historical focus, de facto a revolutionary ideated one. The level of leadership is the level of allegory, as poetry between the example & the precept is heroic-centred poetry. Again, the connection of allegory with educational and sensational appeals both fit the hero as the philosopherruler and the centripetal focus.2 He’s everybody’s objective correlative. [3] An Introduction to Shakespeare ( [Tragicomedy] if EP [An Essay on Poetics] is [Liberal]) An Introduction to English Literature. The Prophecies of William Blake. An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Thought. ( [Anticlimax] or [Rencontre]) Three Nineteenth-Century Thinkers. Humanism & Education. (not improbably ) Essay on Poetics ( or ) [4] Chapter Four: Theory of Archetypes Introduction (not long, if most of the allegory stuff is shoved into 1) The Comic Myth: use all the stuff I have, including Spenser, iii & vi. The Romantic Myth: use all the [Rencontre] stuff. The Heroic Myth: I haven’t quite got this clear: the stuff on epic probably goes in from the present 4 The Ironic Myth: Begin with the satire paper and the Manitoba one & follow with Druidic stuff from previous chapter. Or should it be the satiric myth, to avoid confusion with the modes? Satire is after all a vindication of the low-norm existential, in part. Yes, I think it’s the satire myth. That should help alter that business.

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[5] That the same man could write tragedy and comedy.3 [6] Chapter Five: Theory of Genres. Introduction on Methods of Presentation. The Four Methods & the Genres. Specific Forms of Drama. Specific Forms of Lyric (and Rhetorical Prose, which in a sense also conceals its audience). Specific Forms of Epos: Poetic Prose Fiction. The Tendency toward the Encyclopaedic Form. The Tendency toward Comminution. [7] I’ve never been clear about the relation of the epic to all this, and at present I have it in 6. [8] Horizontal axis: Drama, Epos, Rhetorical Prose, Lyric Vertical axis: Encyclopaedic forms, Epic, Fictional Forms, Satire Scripture Epic (& Dantesque rce [romance]) Drama — Epos4 — Lyric Fiction Satire Rhet. prose goes with epos. The diff. bet. verse & prose is never generic. [9] One thing that’s been bitching up the whole argument of the book from the very beginning (Seattle days anyway)5 is this:

archetypal formal descriptive

narrative

meaning

ritual example history

dream precept philosophy

338 " literal creative level

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science painting wit (i.e. escape from ritual)

[10] I can’t think of anything to fit that except one of Yeats’s damn twisting gyres. I suppose there may be a contrast between private & public aspects of r. [ritual] & d. [dream], but I dunno. Anyway, it looks like two sets of myth, and private myth has nothing that I can see to do with demonic vision. [11] anagogic private

one act desire

one word habit

[12] Still, it might have: these private worlds are prisons of desire & habit. It sounds like a damn difficult & bloody thing to explain: at the moment all it suggests is more stuff on habit for 6 (I mean introducing the conception of habit into 6). Apparently desire is for one act, & is projected towards it: the other half suggests my “habit of words” point. Anyway, the whole thing may be bullshit anyway: maybe incantation is escape from habit after all (charm, work song), & wit from dream, as Freud. Unless a compelling reason forces me to adopt the above, I better ignore it. [13] Chapter Six: Theory of Cultural History The Five Modes. Fictional Modes: Tragic Fictional Modes: Comic Thematic Modes: The Role of the Poet Thematic Modes: Analogies of Revelation: Scripture Romance (Dante) Epic (Homer to Milton) The Broken Synthesis (> Proust, etc.) The Epiphanic (Joyce) Spenglerian Dialectic Containing Cultural Categories. CCC Classless Dialectic Humanism & Spiritual Authority

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(I don’t know whether the Thomist-Kierkegaard point goes here or not) I’m trying to duck out of a conclusion. The only mention you need make of Dante is here.6 [14] 1. The typical structure of New Comedy: the two societies. 2. Erotic & social resolution: see the three forms of anagogy. 3. Oedipean situation & its modulations. 4. Displacement of the heroic as the reborn mother. 5. The ternary form of rc. [romantic] comedy: the middle term as [?] [15] Chapter Seven: Theory of Rhetoric The Trivium Literature: the Rhetorical Organization of Grammar & Logic (1) Babble & Doodle (2) Imitative harmony & diagrammatic thought (3) Ambiguous and Dissociative (Mill-Stein) writing. (4–5) Poetry and Prose. The Habit of Words. The Direct Union of Grammar & Logic. Literature as the Hypothesis of the Verbal Disciplines. Lit as Hypo of V.D. Dissociative writing goes with my point about the isolation of the propositional rhythm in philosophy. Habit: Unconscious knowledge (Butler) is not mechanical knowledge, and what we’re not interested in, such as thinking, we try to do mechanically.7 [16] Chapter Four The more I think of this chapter, the more it looks as though the five modes of 1 were going to organize it. I wish I could find something to bridge the l.m. [low mimetic] gap, but maybe I just haven’t thought about it enough. There seems to be something missing between P.R. [Paradise Regained] and VW’s [Virginia Woolf’s] lighthouse. [17] The point about the democratization of the artist’s authority goes in 1 anyway: I think my main job here is just to show how myth—the same myth—recurs somehow in all five modes. Thus all the links between the Book of Job, the argument of the Bible and its repetition in

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Book I of Spenser, the pinnacle theme that runs from the Interchapter right through to P.R. [Paradise Regained], and so on, are the main stuff. It’s a straight enough job, I think, though it may take some more Dante reading.

Notebook 30o-a

This notebook contains, in addition to the entries reproduced here, drafts of Frye’s 1945 essay on liberal education (WE, 40–9) and of his 1947 review of F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West (NFMC, 197–200). It also contains six paragraphs of speculations about a cosmic Bardo novel (FM, 150– 2), the writing of which Frye had entertained during his early years. In the absence of other clues for dating this notebook, it is not unreasonable to assume that it comes from the 1940s. Even though Frye has a two-part outline of archetypes in entry 8, the notebook contains no explicit indication that he has yet decided to write Anatomy of Criticism. Still, almost all of the following entries have a bearing on that book. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25.

[1] As one of the fundamental principles of comedy is the opposition of one form or idea of society to another, the principle I have loosely described as a Saturnalia, which is only one example of a minor type of it, the first thing to do, & maybe the last, is to draw an ordered & progressive catalogue of such oppositions, seeing where it focusses. I think the Utopia & mock-Utopia is the focus, because the former is really heaven & the latter the fallen world. There we go from Plato’s fragmentary glimpse of an Atlantean Golden Age to Huxley’s final twist of fallen man creating fallen man. The delicate combination of irony & idealism in the best ones (More, Montaigne, Morris) is perhaps the subtlest riddle to read. Without striving for order, then, comedy social oppositions are as follows: 1) The simultaneous presentation of an ideal & an actual society, indi-

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vidualized—the Plain Dealer formula. Thus Dicaeopolis, with his name, in Acharnians.1 There is usually the fiction of associating the ideal society both with greater simplicity & with greater logic, on the assumption that a simple society would be a logical one. Hence the ideal society is often given an association with savage or primitive tribes: L’Ingenu. Or The Bigelow [Biglow] Papers type of idealized simple-logic within a civilized society—this is nearer the Aristophanes formula.2 Or the religious perspective on the world: rare, but cf. Shaw’s St. Joan. Wonder why it’s rare? Is this where Bunyan would fit? Or the scientific perspective: the relation of the narrator to history in Wells’ Tono-Bungay. Or old tired ways vs. Now-a-days and New Gyse: Aristophanes again, etc. Or, conversely, youth achieving an imgve. [imaginative] unity out of experience, as in Proust & Joyce’s Portrait. This last, not necessarily youth, is the real “stream of consciousness” pattern. Or a Utopia constructed within the story, as in [Lawrence’s] The Plumed Serpent. Individual forms of this turn on a normal perceiver, a Horatio or Cléante, who projects an idealized audience.3 2) The Saturnalia proper, or inversion of normal social values. The commonest & most effective form of this is the danse macabre, or opposition of social anomalies to a hypothetical equality & justice of another world symbolized by the impartiality of death. The ghost story in most of its aspects belongs here: it presents social conceptions of reality with an upsetting challenge. In the ingenious twist given by Mrs. Oliphant to the Feast of the Dead myth (The Beleaguered City) this is clearest. Also de la Mare’s Return. Or symposiums where a group of people withdraw from the world to create their own commonwealth, as in Boccaccio, or of course Plato: the usual dialogue setting. The Republic therefore combines, in its setting & dialogue respectively, these two forms, as does The Courtier, which is an individualized Republic. The South Wind type of artificial society or a carefully chosen social unit like that of Antic Hay belongs to the same type of thing.4 (Note that the ideal world may be handled satirically, as in Madame Bovary). 3) Diabolism, the clash or inversion of moral standards, or ideal of good & evil. Frequent in the rc. [romantic] agony, & impossible to separate sharply from the moral forms of class 1. Congenial to certain types of revolutionary literature. [3] There are three forms of prose satire: the form that is a development of comedy (novel); the form that is a development of epic (super-novel &

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anatomy) and the form that is a development of tragedy (tale, romance, & the kind of satire that’s the seamy side of tragedy[)]. [4] Varronian verse interludes Inlaid tales & unity of time Sparagmos suggestion in 1001. Mutilation aetiology as common as metamorphosis in Ovid. Burton: male club atmosphere.5 19th c. rationalism. Tale of ear: cf. Decameron. Poe on Red Death & Sch. [Scheherazade] takeoff Syncopation of narrative in Sch’s breakoffs. Shahryer is a pre-Arabic conqueror & Persian king, a Sassanides.6 A Copernican view of prose fiction. Rabelais, Joyce, Montaigne The theory of comedy. Shakespeare, the novelists. Tragicomedy The language of Renaissance Allegory, Spenser, Shakespeare Anticlimax Unity of Modern Thought: Joyce Rencontre American literature & rc. symb. [romantic symbolism]: James, Proust Rencontre Music & imitative harmony [5] 1. Start by investigating Elizabethan ideas of a) history b) geography. For history, of course the Geoffrey tradition first & the derivation from the matter of Troy. Medieval developments about the matter of Troy & the Arthur-Grail business. St. George & the Garter symbolism. Hector Boece & the legends of Scotland.7 The Shakespeare canon: Troilus, Cymbeline. The rose symbolism & the overtones of red & white. Sacramental union in Britain. The civil war & its moral: the theme of the divided kingdom. Gorboduc, Lear. Eng.-Scot.-Wales.8 Belief in an Atlantic kingdom of the moon. Endymion mythology in Peele, Greene, & Lyly. Mythology in Holinshed, etc.: Albion as son of Neptune, etc. Saxonism: the Ivanhoe myth. King John, the foreign prince theme. Polyolbion & other summaries.9

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344 Possibility of anti-Roman British Church mythology.

For geography, anything from Mandeville to Hakluyt & Purchas.10 Symbolic associations relating to Africa & Arabia. Prester John11 & the Messiah. Symbolic geography in the Bible: King Solomon & the stuff in Purchas. Mythology of the Atlantis isles, from the Odyssey to the Tempest. Associations regarding the north & England’s connection with it: Lapland witches, etc. Natural history from Pliny down: the prominence of bestiary imagery in euphuism. The marvels of Britain & the folk-lore about them. Trevisa to Drayton & Fuller.12 [6] 2. Then go on to Elizabethan comprehension of a) Classical b) national legend, myth, ritual & allegory. The interpretation of Biblical symbolism: St. Augustine. R.C.’s [Roman Catholics] as Antichrist. Homer & Virgil: Natalis Comes13 & all that stuff. Chapman. 6th Book of Aeneid (look also at the 18th c. Warburton-Gibbon stuff). What they knew: Henry Reynolds, Selden & so on.14 Classical & Biblical imagery. Linking of Classical & national ritual: Herrick. Negatively, the Puritans: Googe.15 Use of earlier ritual in comedy.16 [7] mime prelude dithyramb

tragedy romance elegy

comedy commedia paean

symposium diatribe & treatise satire17

[8] Part One: Conspectus of Archetypes Part Two: Archetypes as Informing Principles of Art a) three forms of word as event, image & idea b) this makes drama, poetry & prose c) the forms of drama d) the forms of epic e) the kernels of poetry18

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[9] ritual as act; myth as consciousness of act. myth provides a verbal containing form of the ritual. but ritual is not haphazard: its synchronization with time. comes to rest on cycle of nature. hence myth also assumes a cyclic form. general outlines of myth as summer-winter antithesis. two forms (tragic & comic) of resolution: see if you can get four. the four cycles of nature and the dovetailing of sun & dream sequence. this should establish pretty well the narrative archetypes. now for the heaven-and-hell dialectic. secondary narrative archetypes derived from theme of conflict. progressive & regressive symbols.

[10] Drama (the thing done) tragedy comedy symposium monologue

Poetry (the thing said) epic of wrath Iliad

sacrifice carnival communion mime

Ritual (the persons doing)

elegy

epic of spirit of spirit of redemption understanding fulfilment

romance novel

anatomy

confession

Dante

paean

satire

dithyramb

Song (the persons saying)

Scripture (the thing thought) law

Prose (the thing written)

history

philosophy

criticism

commandment parable aphorism oracle

Prophecy (the persons thinking)19

tale

story

dialogue

pensée

Myth (the persons writing)

Notebook 30q

The bulk of this notebook contains drafts of the introduction to the Rinehart Milton (1951) that Frye edited (M&B, 3–23), and a review of Joseph Pieper’s book on leisure.1 It contains as well a brief outline of the book on Spenser that Frye planned to write before the Anatomy pushed it aside. The notebook dates, therefore, from the early 1950s. What follows are extracts from the beginning of the notebook (entries 1–3) and a chart of the cycle of Christ (entry 4) from the end of the notebook. The book titles in the first entry form a reading list Frye set for himself in preparing to write the Anatomy: he wrote “Exodus Bibliography” on the recto of the front cover, Exodus standing for the second of the five critical studies that he sketched out for himself at one point (later than his ogdoadic scheme) and to which he gave the name Pentateuch. The notebook, bound in manila paper wrappers with a green cloth spine and measuring 21.8 x 13.8 cm., is in the NFF, 1991, box 25. Thomas Willard assisted with the transcription of this notebook.

[1] Frazer: The Golden Bough2 Freud: Basic Writings3 Jung: Psychology of the Unconscious4 Spengler: The Decline of the West5 Bergson: Creative Evolution6 Toynbee: A Study of History7 Chambers, E.K.:The Medieval Stage8 The Elizabethan Stage9 William Shakespeare10 Young: The Drama of the Medieval Church11 Cornford: Origins of Attic Comedy12

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Harrison: Themis;13 Ancient Art & Ritual14 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion15 Murray, Gilbert:The Rise of the Greek Epic16 Aeschylus17 The Classical Tradition in Poetry,18 L 2719 Aristophanes20 Grube: Euripides 21 Plato22 Jung: Psychological Types, Eng. tr. L 23, Kegan Paul 23 B.S. Phillpotts: The Elder Edda & Ancient Scandinavian Drama, C.U.P.24 20 V. Grønbech: The Culture of the Teutons,25 Eng. tr. L 31 Bridges: The Testament of Beauty 26 Ker, W.P.: Epic & Romance27 The Dark Ages28 Cauldwell [Caudwell], Christopher: Illusion & Reality29 Studies in a Dying Culture30 de Rougement: L’Amour et l’Occident31 Olrik: Viking Civilization,32 L 30 Kendrick: History of the Vikings,33 L 30 Chadwick: Heroic Age H.34 Cult of Odin,35 L 99 Origin of English Nation, C.U.P.36 24 (v.) Welsford: The Court Masque37 The Fool38 Greg: Pastoral Poetry & Pastoral Drama39 Baskerville: The Elizabethan Jig40 Nichols: Progresses & Processions of Queen Elizabeth41 Shakespeare’s England42 [2] 1 Introduction 2 Handbook 3 Narrative 1: Comic Romance 4 Imagery 1: Heaven & Hell 5 Structure 1: Kernels & Mirror 6 Language 1: Myth & Metaphor 7 Narrative 2: Creation, etc. Myths 8 Imagery 2: Ear and Eye 9 Structure 2: Kernels [Penates?]

Fire & Earth Air & Water Moon Mercury Venus Sun Mars Jupiter Saturn

Aquarius Pisces Aries Taurus Gemini Cancer Leo Virgo Libra

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10 Language 2: Accommodation Ur. [Uranus] Scorpio 11 " ": Incarnation & Resurrection Nep. [Neptune] Sagittarius 12 " ": Recovery of Myth Pl. [Pluto] Capricorn [3]

Organon for Advanced Criticism

1. Most subjects at first suffer from a naive induction, then make the Baconian leap & discover their real forms. After this, discovery becomes an articulating of insights. E.g. of mathematics in physics. It occurs to me that lit. crit. suffers from naive induction of this sort. 2. The reason is that its forms (the poet as man, “life,” English literature, & a vague haze of metaphysics-centred “reality”) are not real forms. Effort here to discover the real forms. {That means I have to treat genre.} Premature value judgements. {The relation bet. math. & phys. [physics] should be that between poetry, a disinterested set of verbal relationships, & every discursive form of lit. expression, especially crit. That’s another reason why the crit. of poetry is based on poetry & its meaning. But I can’t say this until I’ve postulated a verbal universe}. 3. E.g.’s of maths. [mathematics] and ptg. [painting] indicate that poetry, when pure or disinterested, exists in a verbal universe. Discursive poetry, like applied math, and illustrative ptg., is [cy.?] on outside “life,” “world,” or “reality.” 4. The relation of any form of comprehension to the “reality” outside it is always, & necessarily, symbolical (Wittgenstein). Thus literal meaning is not sense or representation. Two fallacies in literal meaning are: that literal is symbolic (a picture of a dog is literally a picture, not a dog), & that literal is grammatical (which in poetry means that the greater equals the less, & in prose means nothing because, as form & meaning are the same, the literal meaning is simply itself. Thus literal meaning is the integritas, the unity, the quality in the sense of whatness. Joyce’s i-c-c [integritas, consonantia, claritas] progression as that of criticism.43 5. Literal meaning is psychological meaning because no distinction between conscious & unconscious exists. [4] N: place in heaven NW: physical birth (Xmas) W: recognition (Epiphany) SW: death (Good Friday)

350 S: disappearance (Saturday) SE: resurrection (Easter) E: first epiphany after r. [resurrection] NE: ascension N: return: second coming as total vision of quest.

Notebook 30q

Notes

Introduction 1 Review of Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, in FM, 363–8. Notebook 7 1 In the next entry NF defines schalk as “the attempt to escape from high seriousness & moral virtue.” See also par. 5, below, and NB 35.140. The escape, for NF, involves a movement toward comedy, even into irony. He takes the label from the German noun for knave or mischievous person. 2 The codes here, and their names in brackets, refer to an eight-book vision that NF used as a kind of road map for his life’s work. As with all of his organizing patterns, the ogdoad, as he called it, was never a rigid outline, but it did correspond to the chief divisions in his conceptual universe over the years. Throughout the notebooks he repeatedly mentions the eight books he planned to write, which he called Liberal, Anticlimax, Tragicomedy, Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox, Ignoramus, and Twilight. For a fuller explanation of the ogdoad, see LN, xli–xlv, and Michael Dolzani, “The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye’s Notebooks,” in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 19–38. 3 That is, NF’s own eight-part writing plan—his ogdoad. 4 Logistilla is the good fairy and impersonator of reason in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. 5 NF makes this point in a notebook from the mid-1960s (TBN, 61), and he refers to Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the crusades in DV (NFR, 233),

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6

7

8

9 10 11

12 13

Notes to pages 6–8

but the reference to “elsewhere” as something NF wrote before the time of the present notebook is uncertain. Giles Fletcher, the Younger (1585–1623), and Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650), sons of Giles Fletcher, the Elder (1546–1611). NF may also have in mind the romantic comedies of John Fletcher (1579–1625), the nephew of Giles Fletcher, the Elder. “All exegesis may become predominantly an imposition instead of an exposition, and to that extent deteriorate into a dialogue of the Church with herself” (Karl Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God, in Church Dogmatics, vol.1, pt. 1, “The Doctrine of the Word of God” [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1963, orig. pub. 1936], 119). H. Flanders Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought and Its Consummation in the Divine Comedy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1929), chaps. 2–3. That is, the light of the sun of revelation incarnate in Beatrice’s eyes. Again, the first six parts of NF’s ogdoad: Liberal, Anticlimax, Tragicomedy, Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox. “The recent Roman popes do not defend her who is the spouse of Christ, that is, the Catholic faith and the multitude of the believers, but offend her; they do not preserve her beauty, that is, the unity of the faith, but defile it; since by sowing tares and schisms they are tearing her limb from limb, and since they do not receive the true companions of Christ, poverty and humility, but shut them out entirely, they show themselves not servants but enemies of the husband” (Defensor Pacis, in The Library of Original Sources, ed. Oliver J. Thatcher [Milwaukee, Wis.: University Research Extension, 1907], 5:430). The Defensor Pacis was a religious and political work authored by Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, masters at the University of Paris, in 1324. Its ostensible purpose was to restore the peace between Pope John XXII and Louis of Bavaria, king of the Roman Empire, but what the two philosophers actually intended was to overthrow the church hierarchy and to have the Pope submit to the secular government. NF means 1527, the year that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, sacked Rome and brought about an end to the Renaissance. That is, the progress of art as defined by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man moves from lyric to epic to drama: “The image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. The forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and others; the dramatic form,

Notes to pages 8–11

14

15

16

17 18

19

20 21

22

23 24

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the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others” ([New York: Viking, 1964], 213–14). Kenneth R.H. MacKenzie, The Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia of History, Rites, Symbolism, and Biography (London: J. Hogg, 1877); Harold Bayley, The Lost Language of Symbolism: An Inquiry into the Origin of Certain Letters, Words, Names, Fairy-Tales, Folklore, and Mythologies (London: Ernest Benn, 1968; orig. pub. 1912); H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy (Pasadena, Calif.: Theosophical University Press, 1970; orig. pub. 1888). Leo Frobenius, The Childhood of Man (London: Seeley, 1909). NF’s annotated copy, which he did not own at the time he wrote the present notebook, is the Meridian edition (New York, 1960). This is the edition cited below. C.G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 98. Subsequent references to this edition of the book are marked within brackets in NF’s text. NF’s own page references, which sometimes refer to the endnote pages, are to the 1916 edition (New York: Moffat, Yard). NF subsequently acquired the 1963 edition (New York: Dodd, Mead), which he annotated. On the various tales of the mutilation of the monster in Frobenius, see The Childhood of Man, 272–89. The reference is uncertain. NF did examine certain Blake and Jung parallels in “Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype,” English Institute Essays, 1950, ed. Alan S. Downer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 170–96, but that article was written after the present entry, which appears to date from 1947 or 1948. NF was not awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship until 1950 (for the 1950–51 academic year at Harvard). The reference here is to his anticipation of applying for and receiving a Guggenheim. NF’s reference is uncertain, but he may be referring to Henry VIII’s equivocatings and eventual break with Rome. Kundalini, which Jung does not mention, means literally “snake” or “serpent.” In Hinduism it represents the sleeping spiritual force in every human being, coiled at the base of the spine. This is the third part of a book Jung cites throughout Psychology of the Unconscious—J.M. Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, translated as Die Evangelien-mythen (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1910). Jung gives the title in English, but he cites the German edition. Max Jöhns, Ross und Reiter in Leben und Sprache: Glauben und Geschichte der Deutschen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Grunow, 1872). This summary note about Hercules and Samson comes from Jung’s own

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25 26 27

28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Notes to pages 11–15

summary of Robertson’s “Evangelical Myths” (Psychology of the Unconscious, 291–2). Edwin Sidney Hartland, The Legend of Perseus: A Study of Tradition in Story, Custom and Belief (London: D. Nutt, 1894). Chap. 7 of Psychology of the Unconscious. NF inserts the two giants here: they are not in Jung. Og was the giant king of Bashan conquered by the Israelites; see Deuteronomy 3:1–13. Anak was the assumed ancestor of the Anakim, a race of giants in the Bible; see Numbers 13:22, 28, 33; Deuteronomy 1:28, 9:2. “Scyld, son of Sceaf” (Beowulf, l. 4). According to the myth, a mysterious ship brought the Spear-Danes a saviour, Scyld, who was apparently of divine origin. At the baby’s head lay a sheaf, symbol of fertility and prosperity. “The parallel for the motive of death and resurrection is the motive of losing and finding” (Psychology of the Unconscious, 322). Herbert Silberer, Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism, trans. Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1917), 95–6. An annotated copy is in the NFL. The page numbers in square brackets in this entry are to the Dover republication of Silberer’s Problems of Mysticism, which was given the new title Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts (New York: Dover, 1971). The parable Silberer reproduces in pt. 1, which serves as material for his psychological and symbolic commentary, begins with the main character strolling through a forest and lamenting his ill fate. See n. 14, above. James Thurber and E.B. White, Is Sex Necessary? or Why You Feel the Way You Do (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929). Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, 258–71. Ibid., 284–5. Ibid., 273. Ibid., 316–29. The image is found throughout Blake, especially in The Four Zoas and Jerusalem. Above “or” NF wrote, “line.” NF is referring to some of the reviews of FS. The point about the Frye–Blake identity was made, for example, by Lloyd Frankenberg in “Forms of Freedom,” Saturday Review of Literature, 30 (19 July 1947): 19; and Marshall McLuhan in “Inside Blake and Hollywood,” Sewanee Review, 55 (October– December 1947): 710–13. Above this line NF wrote, “what professor has finally had the sense to see.” The reference is uncertain. Henry Rowland was NF’s classmate at Victoria College. NF’s jottings in this entry are a selection of images and stories in Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, 21–3.

Notes to pages 15–20

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44 “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, pl. 77, ll. 1–4; Erdman, 231). 45 Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, 373–85. 46 Psychology of the Unconscious, 95–6. 47 Sir James Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (pt. 1, vol. 1 of The Golden Bough) (London: Macmillan, 1932), 302–3. 48 Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, 395–6. 49 For both the Navajo and Congo material, see Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, chap. 26. 50 Frobenius, The Childhood of Man, chap. 27; Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, 146–7. 51 Sir James Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (pt. 1, vol. 2 of The Golden Bough) (London: Macmillan, 1926), 227–52. 52 “Three poets, in three distant ages born, / Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. / The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, / The next in majesty, in both the last: / The force of Nature could no farther go; / To make a third, she joined the former two” (John Dryden, Epigram on Milton). 53 The reference is to chap. 8 in NF’s present conception of AC. He refers to it later (par. 75) as “the Los chapter.” The Aquinas reference, which is not in AC, is uncertain, but in NB 38.17 NF writes that he “must read St. Thomas to find out how the hell one postulates a real universal.” 54 Isaiah 27:1; Ezekiel 29:4–5. See GC, 189–90/211. 55 See GC, 164/185. 56 NF is referring to the Facsimile of the Manuscript of Milton’s Minor Poems Preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, ed. William Aldis Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899). In the most detailed of the several plans that Milton sets forth for the “tragedy” of Paradise Lost, the prologue is by Moses. 57 The reference is to Fletcher’s The Purple Island, or The Isle of Man (1633), an allegory of the human body and mind. 58 See NB 35.128, and NRL, 100, 150. 59 Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, trans. Peter Watts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 127–8 (act 4). 60 Paravritti = turning or conversion; in Sanskrit, literally “highest wave of thought.” 61 The reference is to aitherios Dinos, the “ethereal vortex” or “heavenly whirl” in Aristophanes, The Clouds (Eleven Comedies [New York: Horace Liveright, 1930]), 320 (l. 380 in the Greek text). The satire comes from Socrates’ pulling Strepsiades’ leg about the cause of thunder. He is doubtless also punning on Dinos and Dios (Zeus). 62 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (London: Macmillan, 1903), 1:81.

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63 64 65

66 67

68

69 70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77 78 79 80

Notes to pages 21–8

Twenty and twenty-four are by far the most prominently repeated numbers in Le Morte Darthur. See n. 4, above. That is, for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. See Matthew 17:4; Mark 9:5; Luke 9:33. Barker Fairley, A Study of Goethe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947). An annotated copy is in the NFL. Fairley, head of the German department at University College, University of Toronto, was a friend of NF’s. The reference is to The Faerie Queene, bk. 5, which at the level of historical allegory focuses on the problem of justice for Ireland. A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659) and Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (1659). A Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth was published the following year. “For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight: / But thence-forth all shall rest eternally / With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: / O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabbaoths sight” (The Faerie Queene, VII, viii.2.6–9: the final lines of the last stanza of Spenser’s poem). From the Hebrew word for “praise”; in the Rabbinic writings hallel was used as the title for a song of praise. Sin was the Akkadian god of the moon. See AC, 204/190. Above “goodness” NF wrote, “value.” See AC, 18–28/19–29. “Milton knew from his Cambridge days at least that he was someday to write a great epic of the eternal world, and hence for many years he was under the contradictory impulses of accomplishing his divine mission and of postponing it until he was fully capable of it. Some of his irascibility during that period may be accounted for by the mental strain arising from this paradox of frustration” (FS, 338/330). “The will of Zeus was accomplished / since that time when there first stood in division of conflict / Atreus’ son the lord of men and brilliant Achilleus. / What god was it then set them together in bitter collision?” (Iliad, bk. 2, ll. 5–8; trans. Lattimore). “Since first this Subject for Heroic Song / Pleas’d me long choosing, and beginning late” (Paradise Lost, bk. 9, ll. 25–6). “In the middle of the journey”—the opening words of Dante’s Inferno. See n. 65, above. William O. Fennell, a 1939 graduate of Victoria College, taught systematic theology at Emmanuel College. He later became principal of Emmanuel. A reference apparently to the Erdgeist in Goethe’s Faust, the Spirit of the Earth, the earthly or natural clothing of the Eternal that can reveal the invisible to human eyes.

Notes to pages 29–38

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81 Bolieau thought the Christian story was not the proper subject for the epic. See The Art of Poetry, ll. 620–36. 82 “Qui legis Amissam Paradisum, grandia magni / Carmina Miltoni, quid nissi cuncta legis?” (“When you read Paradise Lost, the sublime poem of the great Milton, what do you read but the story of all things?”) (Samuel Barrow, In Paradisum Amissam, ll. 1–2). The poem was prefaced to the second edition of Paradise Lost. For NF’s commentary on the lines, see RE, 4; M&B, 37. 83 See n. 53, above, and par. 75, below. 84 “But thou the Wars and Fortunes Son / March indefatigably on; / And for the last effect / Still keep thy Sword erect” (Andrew Marvell, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, ll. 113–16). 85 “O firste moevyng! Crueel firmament, / With thy diurnal sweigh that crowdest ay / And hurlest al from est til occident / That naturelly wolde holde another way, / Thy crowdyng set the hevene in swich array / At the bigynnyng of this fiers viage, / That cruel Mars hath slayn this mariage” (Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale, ll. 295–301). 86 The postscript NF added to a communication he sent to the United Church of Canada’s Commission on Culture. See NFR, 387n. 3. 87 The phrase is Wordsworth’s: “Forbear to deem the Chronicler unwise, / Ungentle, or untouched by seemly ruth, / Who, gathering up all that Time’s envious tooth / Has spared of sound and grave realities” (Plea for the Historian, pt. 6 of Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837, ll. 1–4). 88 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 44–5. 89 Which of Edwin Sidney Hartland’s numerous works NF has in mind is uncertain, but they would include The Legend of Perseus (1894), mentioned in par. 82, below, and perhaps as well his Primitive Society (1921), The Science of Fairy Tales (1891), and Ritual and Belief (1914). 90 The allusion is to Dame Rebecca West’s classic study of the impulse of treachery and betrayal in World War II, The Meaning of Treason (New York: Viking Press, 1947). 91 NF addressed the Liberal Arts Club at Victoria College on more than one occasion (see, e.g., D, 750n. 82), but there appears to be no record of this talk. 92 That is, Milton’s Christian Doctrine, one of his Latin prose writings, not published until 1825. 93 “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days” (Milton, Lycidas, ll. 70–2). Dante uses the word sprona (spur) and its cognates throughout his Divine Comedy. See Inferno, canto 3, l. 125; canto 12, l. 50; Purgatorio, canto 4, l. 49; canto 6, l. 95; canto 11, l. 21, canto 20, l. 119; canto 29, l. 39; and Paradiso, canto 17, l. 106. NF comments on Dante’s use of the word in RT, 395, and LN, 1:15.

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Notes to pages 38–45

94 All of which are books NF has already referred to in this notebook: Hartland, The Legend of Perseus; Frobenius, The Childhood of Man; Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious; and Frazer, The Golden Bough. 95 Émile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (New York: Harper, 1958; orig. pub. in 1913 as L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France). The annotated edition of this book in NF’s library dates from 1972. 96 George Macdonald, Phantastes (1858). 97 See n. 14, above. 98 Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (New York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Pub. Co., 1914). NF’s annotated edition dates from 1959, after the writing of the present notebook. 99 Carl G. Jung, “The Development of Personality,” in The Integration of Personality, trans. Stanley Dell (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), 281–305. 100 Thomas Mann, Mario the Magician (1930). 101 That is, the letter Spenser addressed to Sir Walter Raleigh explaining his intention to write twelve books on “priuate morall vertues” and twelve more on “polliticke vertues” (Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978], 15–16). 102 In The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the bardo is the in-between state following death that connects individuals with their rebirth. For NF’s lifelong fascination with bardo, see my Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 136–42. 103 A scene in Thomas Deloney’s Thomas of Reading, in which the host and hostess of a tavern bolster their courage before murdering Thomas Cole, has been seen as an analogue to Macbeth. 104 In the blood-soaked conclusion to bk. 2, canto 1, and the beginning of bk. 2, canto 2 of The Faerie Queene, Guyon and Palmer are unable to clean the blood from Ruddymane, who has dabbled his hands in the blood of his dying mother Amavia. 105 The reference is to Cleanth Brooks’s study of Shakespeare’s imagery, “The Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness,” in The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 22–49. 106 See n. 102, above. 107 Maya = literally, in Sanskrit, “illusion, deception, appearance”; in Hinduism, the universal principle of Vedanta; the basis of mind and matter, which veils our vision so that we see only diversity; maya, however, is inseparably united with brahman, the principle of absolute unity. The Lankavatara Sutra, one of the nine principal texts of Mahayana Buddhism, was an important source for the Yogacara school, for which everything that is experienced is “mind only.” It was one of NF’s chief sources for his understanding of Mahayana Buddhism.

Notes to pages 45–50

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108 Philip Child, Chancellor’s Professor of English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, was a member of the editorial committee of the University of Toronto Quarterly. NF’s essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” which was incorporated into the Polemical Introduction of AC, was published in the University of Toronto Quarterly, 19 (October 1949): 1–16; rpt. in EICT, 60–76. The other members of the committee were A.S.P. Woodhouse, E.K. Brown, Alexander Brady, and J.R. MacGillivray. 109 If these notes refer to matters in the previous sentence, they have not survived. 110 Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundation of Modern Physical Science, rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1932). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 111 NF is referring to his statements about language in the first paragraph of “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 17 (October 1947): 1–17; rpt. in FI, 218–37. The second of NF’s recollections is closer to what he wrote than the first. 112 Memra = “word” in Aramaic. The Targums (the authoritative Aramaic paraphrases of the books of the Tenach) often substitute “The Word [Memra] of YHWH” for YHWH. Memra is often understood as the creative work of God, or the agent by which God created the world. For “Aum,” see AC, 126/117. 113 Milton’s anti-episcopal tracts of 1641–42, the arguments of which NF summarizes in this entry, were Of Reformation, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Animadversions, Reason of Church Government, and Apology for “Smectymnuus.” His regicide tracts of 1649 were Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes. 114 Christopher Goodman, co-pastor of the English congregation in Geneva with John Knox. 115 The doctrine of the divine and absolute right of the king had been put forward by Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha (1680). 116 John Locke had argued against Filmer’s views on the monarchy in the first of his Two Treatises on Government (1690). 117 “To escape from the other difficulties, a favourite contrivance has been the fiction of a contract, whereby at some unknown period all the members of society engaged to obey the laws, and consented to be punished for any disobedience to them; thereby giving to their legislators the right, which it is assumed they would not otherwise have had, of punishing them, either for their own good or for that of society” (John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969], 252–5). 118 That is, “the axis of anthropology, psychology, theology & history & their relations & respective symbolizations” (par. 82, above). 119 NF makes the distinction in NB 38.19. 120 See C.G. Jung, “The Meaning of Individuation,” in The Integration of the Personality, 3–29.

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Notes to pages 50–8

121 The terms that Aquinas uses to define the three qualities of art and the three stages of aesthetic apprehension in the Summa Theologica, 1, Q. 39, art. 8. Stephen Dedalus uses the three terms in outlining his own aesthetic position in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), pt. 4. 122 See n. 13, above. 123 A series of extraordinarily popular books by Martha Finley (1828–1909) that follow Elsie Dinsmore from childhood into old age. 124 The reference is to the edition by NF’s colleague F.E.L. Priestley of William Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness. Ph.D. thesis 1940. Pub. in 3 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1946). 125 NF put a transposition symbol above “exist,” but what he wanted to transpose is not clear. 126 “Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard” (John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 348. “The artist, as John Stuart Mill saw in a flash of critical insight, is not heard but overheard” (AC, 5/7). 127 A reference apparently to Douglas Bush’s “Travesties of Classical Themes and Poems,” chap. 15 in Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932; rev. ed, 1963), an annotated copy of which is in the NFL. NF could have in mind as well chap. 1 of Bush’s Mythology and the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937). 128 Charles Lamb, “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” in Last Essays of Elia (1833), par. 4. 129 This is almost certainly “Levels of Meaning in Literature,” Kenyon Review, 12 (Spring 1950): 246–62; rpt. in EICT, 90–103. 130 That is, the opening verse of the Gospel of John seems to echo the Priestly account of creation in Genesis 1. 131 See chap. 1 of Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957). 132 John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, 165, 167. 133 Deuteronomy was the fifth of NF’s eight-part writing project, which he called the ogdoad. In the 1940s he referred to the first five parts as the Pentateuch. This expansive project took various forms over the years, and the contents of each part continued to evolve, but here is one of his accounts of it in the 1940s: “Suddenly, & simultaneously with the final & complete

Notes to pages 58–60

134 135 136

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conversion to criticism, my old adolescent dream of eight masterpieces rose up again and hit me finally and irresistibly. Blake became Liberal, the study of drama Tragicomedy, the philosophical book, now a study of prose fiction, became Anticlimax, Numbers became Rencontre, Deuteronomy Mirage, & three others took nebulous shape. For several years I dithered, doodled, dawdled, dreamed & dallied. It was silly to let an adolescent pipe-dream haunt me like that: on the other hand, it did correspond to some major divisions in my actual thinking. So I kept on with it. When I finished the Blake, it became zero instead of one, & its place was taken by a study of epic. In my notes the initial letters of the eight books were cut down to hieratic forms” (“Autobiographical Notes II: Outline of the Ogdoad,” in FM, 27–30. In a notebook from the mid- to late 1940s, he describes it this way: “Deuteronomy is a book I may never get around to writing: the first four are complete in themselves anyway, taking the Blake as the Los book. I visualize it as an escape from the Spengler-Frazer historical wheel into a world of pure appreciation—my method of approach doesn’t, after all, help to decide the difference between a good & a bad poem, nor does it get away from a cyclic perspective that after four books may prove oppressive. I picture it as the work of a man on the point of retiring who has calmly taken time off to learn Sanskrit & Chinese. Here, if anywhere, I want to follow up the ‘rhetoric’ business in Leviticus & examine the whole problem of the relation of the state of a language to the genius of the person who uses it” (NR, 14). “The Pursuit of Form,” Canadian Art, 6 (Christmas 1948): 54–7; rpt. in RW, 43–6, and in C, 85–7. The quadrivium being parts four through seven of the ogdoad: Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox, and Ignoramus. The allegorical theories of William Durandus are found in his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (1296), an encyclopedic classic on medieval liturgy. It seems likely that Dante used the Rationale. See Joseph P. Williman, “Dante and Durandus: The Liturgical Cincture,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 18 (1971): 293–306. H. Flanders Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought, 47–85. See n. 13, above. In his letter to Can Grande della Scalla, Dante explained his theory of polysemous meaning in these terms: “To elucidate, then, what we have to say, be it known that the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary it may be called polysemous, that is to say, ‘of more senses than one’; for it is one sense which we get through the letter, and another which we get through the thing the letter signifies; and the first is called literal, but the second allegorical or mystic. And this mode of treatment, for its better manifestation, may be considered in this verse: ‘When Israel came out of Egypt,

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Notes to pages 60–4 and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech, Judaea became his sanctification, Israel his power’ [Psalm 114:1–2]. For if we inspect the letter alone the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses is presented to us; if the allegory, our redemption wrought by Christ; if the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace is presented to us; if the anagogical, the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory is presented to us. And although these mystic senses have each their special denominations, they may all in general be called allegorical, since they differ from the literal and historical; for allegory is derived from alleon, in Greek, which means the same as the Latin alienum or diversum” (Epistola 10, ca. 1318, in The Great Critics, ed. James Harry Smith and Edd Winfield Parks, 3rd ed. [New York: Norton, 1951], 145–6). Dunbar remarks that “few Christians are conscious of the solar implications of their religion, not merely as origin away from which it has developed, but as the unifying power that has ordered its ritual and made possible its most philosophical conceptions” (Symbolism in Medieval Thought, 484). See Dunbar’s “Materials of Symbolism as They Vary in the Traditions of Agricultural and Nomadic Peoples,” appendix 3, in Symbolism in Medieval Thought, 484–9. “Love which moves the sun and the other stars”—the final line of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Paradiso, canto 33, l. 145). NF is drawing primarily on chaps. 2 and 3 of Dunbar, Symbolism in Medieval Thought. The “Rencontre note” does not exist in the extant notebooks. But cf. this passage from NB 18, written almost a decade later: “In the Great Doodle (apocalyptic) the spiritual world is (a) the fire-world of heavenly bodies (b) the lower heaven or sky. Hence it is normally (a) red with the seraphim (b) blue with the cherubim. Blue & white mean virginity, red & white love; red white & green is the point of epiphany” (par. 98). Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, in The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, trans. Robert Ernest Hume, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 134–9. “Aquinas says: ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur, integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance”—the words of Stephen Dedalus, speaking to Lynch, in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 212. In NB 44.36, NF translates hamothen as “middle,” that is, in medias res (LN, 1:108). Homer uses the word at the beginning of the Odyssey, asking the Muse to begin his story “from some point” (bk. 1, l. 10). At the time of this entry, written in 1949, NF had completed, of course, only one book, FS. He is anticipating that his new “Liberal” will include material from the books he intends to publish on Shakespearean comedy (Tragicom-

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edy) and prose (Anticlimax). What NF refers to as in this entry, especially in its deductive form, turned out to be AC, Tragicomedy and Anticlimax never having materialized in the form NF outlines here. The inductive is essentially the never-realized book on Spenser. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see n. 109, above). NF presented the paper at a humanities colloquium at the University of Toronto on 28 February 1949. Above “mythology” NF wrote, “imagery.” For Blake, “analogy” meant false allegory or an inverted form of the imaginative world. He uses the word only twice—in Jerusalem, pl. 49, l. 58, and pl. 85, l. 7. For NF ’s interpretation of the word, see FS, 382–8/371–7, 394–401/ 383–90. The Kalevala is the national epic of Finland, containing the mythology and folklore collected by Elias Lönnrot and published in 1835. An annotated edition of the epic is in the NFL, though NF did not own this edition at the time he wrote the present notebook. “But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand” (Isaiah 32:8). Ariosto’s tale of Ariodante and Ginevra is the primary source for the Phedon-Claribell episode in bk. 2 of The Faerie Queene. The versions of the story by Ariosto and Spenser are among probable subtexts for the Hero-Claudio plot in Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) was an original continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1483), which combined elements of the Arthurian and Carolingian romance and rejuvenated the chivalric epic. An annotated copy of the Rose translation (London: George Bell, 1905–7) is in the NFL. “He [Aeneas] sank his blade in fury in Turnus’ chest. / Then all the body slackened in death’s chill, / And with a groan for that indignity / His spirit fled into the gloom below” (Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald [New York: Vintage, 1990], 402). “Released from its body, now ice-cold, the angry spirit [of Rodomont] which, among the living, had been so proud and insolent, fled cursing down to the dismal shores of Acheron” (Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman [London: Oxford University Press, 1974], 573). “Me litle needed from my right way to haue straid.” For Oswald Spengler the prime symbol for the destiny-idea of Egyptian culture was in the wandering path of Chinese culture, where the landscape became the material of architecture. See The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1926), 1:188–90. An annotated copy of the 1932 edition is in the NFL. Richard Chase, The Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

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Notes to pages 68–71 Press, 1949), 3. Chase goes on to speak of the positive values of the allegorical method: “it asserted that myths must be taken seriously and it pleaded the continuity of history” (3). See Ezekiel 31, where the Cedar of Lebanon is a symbolic world-tree. This is parallel to “the towering Cedar whose top scrapes the sky” in The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 5, l. 328 (trans. Kovacs). Sir James Frazer Attis Adonis Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1914), 1:216–22—Attis Adonis Osiris was part 4 (vols. 5–6) of the twelve-volume, third edition of The Golden Bough (1906–15); and Folk-lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend, and Law, abridged ed. (New York: Avenel Books, 1988), 138–43. Annotated copies of both are in the NFL. The reference is to Plato’s “myth of the metals,” which involves getting the citizens to accept serious inequalities. The citizens who emerge from the earth are to be told that they were fashioned by a god who established a class structure: gold for the rulers, silver for the helpers, and iron and brass for the farmers and craftsmen (Republic, 3.414c–415e). This is the lie necessary to maintain the hierarchy in the social order. See especially the frequent references to light in the Yasna, the sacred liturgy and hymns of Zarathustra, which form the first part of the Avesta. Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) (1581) is a blend of historical events (imitation) and imaginary romantic and idyllic episodes (allegory). In 1592 he attempted a revision of his epic, entitled Gerusalemme conquistata, but it was unsuccessful. Ismeno is the sorcerer in bks. 2 and 13 of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. Godfrey is the leader of the crusade to Jerusalem. That is, the point NF makes in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see n. 108, above), that the function of criticism is to study systematically the verbal universe of literature. “Do what you will,” the single rule of the Abbey of Thélème, in Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 1, chap. 57. The knight betrayed by Duessa and transformed into a tree in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, bk. 1, canto 2. Fradubio’s lovely lady whom Duessa changes into an ugly hag in The Faerie Queene, bk. 1, canto 2. “Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow / O’er all th’Italian fields where still doth sway / The triple Tyrant” (On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, Sonnet 18, ll. 10–12). “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (see n. 129, above). NF incorporated this article into the Second Essay of AC. See John Colet, “An Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans” (1873) and “An Exposition of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians” (1874).

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173 See John Stuart Mill, Autobiography (1873), chaps. 5 and 6. 174 See, e.g., Bacon’s plans for educational reform, including the study of Greek and Hebrew, philosophy, and the Church fathers, in Compendium Studii Philosophiae (London: Royal Society, 1859), 425 ff.; rpt. in G.G. Coulton, Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 2:59–62. 175 Pars. 178–82 are in Helen Frye’s handwriting. She may have taken dictation because NF was unable to write: in September 1950 he had broken his right arm in an automobile accident while on a trip to Princeton with Philip Wheelwright (see Ayre, 226). These notebook entries, then, were perhaps written during the closing months of 1950. NF’s diary for 1951, which he begins on 1 January, is in his own hand. 176 “The fourth sense is called anagogical, that is to say, beyond the senses; and this occurs when a scripture is expounded in a spiritual sense which, although it is true also in the literal sense, signifies by means of the things signified a part of the supernal things of eternal glory, as may be seen in the song of the Prophet which says that when the people of Israel went out of Egypt, Judea was made whole and free” (Dante, Convivio, bk. 2, chap. 1, par. 4, trans. Richard Lansing). Dante is referring to Psalm 113 (In exitu Israel de Egypto). He uses this same psalm in his Letter to Can Grande to illustrate the various levels of allegory, and the souls of the saved sing this psalm when they enter Purgatory. 177 The printer of Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, Matthew Lownes, inserted this clause at the beginning of canto 6: “Which, for both forme and matter, appeare to be parcell of some following booke of The Faerie Queene, under the legend of Constancie” (1609 folio ed.) 178 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, 353. 179 See n. 68, above. 180 The pun comes at the very end of Athene’s first speech to Zeus. On the association between Odysseus’s name and the Greek verb odussomai (to feel anger toward), see Robert Fagles’s note in Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Fagles (New York: Viking Press, 1996), 514. 181 Alexander Haggerty Krappe, The Science of Folklore (London: Methuen, 1930), 332–3. Otos and Ephialtes, the Aloadae, grew up to be giants and intended to storm heaven by piling mountain on mountain (Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa), but were killed by Apollo before they could effect their scheme (Odyssey, bk. 11, ll. 310 ff.). They, like Sundas and Upasundas, were twins. 182 For a later diagram of the “Knight’s Tale” structure, see LN, 2:711. 183 Because of the date here, it is clear that NF has gone back to examine the entry some six or seven years following the writing of it. 184 NF is referring to things missing from his treatment of fiction in “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction,” Hudson Review, 2 (Winter 1950): 582–95; rpt. in EICT, 77–89.

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185 The Great Doodle is primarily his symbolic shorthand for the monomyth. NF later conceived of the Great Doodle as “the cyclical quest of the hero” (TBN, 214) or “the underlying form of all epics” (TBN, 241). But as he began to move away from strictly literary terms toward both religious language and the language of Greek myth and philosophy, another pattern developed, one with an east–west axis of Nous–Nomos and a north–south axis of Logos–Thanatos. At this point the Great Doodle took on an added significance, becoming a symbolic shorthand for what he called the narrative form of the Logos vision: “the circular journey of the Logos from the Father to the Spirit” (TBN, 260) or “the total cyclical journey of the incarnate Logos” (TBN, 201). But the Great Doodle is never merely a cycle. Its shape requires also the vertical axis mundi and the horizontal axis separating the world of innocence and experience. These, with their numerous variations, produce the four quadrants that are omnipresent in NF’s diagrammatic way of thinking. Here he refers to the quadrants as part of the Lesser Doodle, meaning only that the quadrants themselves are insufficient to establish the larger geometric design of the Great Doodle. 186 “Music and the Savage Breast,” Canadian Forum, 18 (April 1938): 451–3; rpt. in RW, 14–18, and NFMC, 88–91. 187 NF’s familiar allusion to Milton: “God hath now sent his living Oracle / Into the World, to teach his final will, / And sends his Spirit of Truth henceforth to dwell / In pious Hearts, an inward Oracle / To all truth requisite for men to know” (Paradise Regained, bk. 1, ll. 460–4). Cf. “There is no power but of God, saith Paul, Rom. 13, as much as to say, God put it into man’s heart to find out that way at first for common peace and preservation, approving the exercise thereof” (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Hughes, 758–9). 188 That is, as in Wordsworth’s Prelude. 189 See n. 108, above. 190 See n. 129, above. 191 This is almost certainly NF’s paper “The Literary Meaning of ‘Archetype,’” presented in December 1952 at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. The manuscript of this paper shows that NF did revise it, apparently with the intent of submitting it to the Kenyon Review, the major outlet for the essays that were eventually incorporated into AC. But the article was not published at the time. It appears now in LS, 182–9. 192 “The Archetypes of Literature,” Kenyon Review, 13 (Winter 1951): 92–110; rpt. in FI, 7–20, and EICT, 120–35. 193 NF never produced either this article or one on the analysis of scripture. 194 NF did write an article “Three Meanings of Symbolism” for Yale French Studies, no. 9 (1952): 11–19, rpt. in EICT, 136–45, which was incorporated into the Second Essay of AC.

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195 The theory of symbols turned out to be the Second Essay. NF has not yet begun to develop the theory of modes in the First Essay. 196 NF did conclude his article in exactly this way. 197 Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s views on the primary and secondary imagination are outlined in chap. 13 of his Biographia Literaria, ed. Nigel Leask (London: Dent, 1997; orig. pub. 1833), 175. 198 See NB 30d.13, 32. 199 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see n. 108, above). 200 “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (see n. 129, above). 201 “The Archetypes of Literature” (see n. 192, above). The plus sign may refer to “The Literary Meaning of ‘Archetype’” (see n. 191, above). 202 Above “epic,” NF wrote “n.w.,” standing for the position of epic in the northwest quadrant of the cycle of specific forms. Above “drama” NF wrote, “KR–EC.” “KR” stands for “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres,” Kenyon Review, 13 (Autumn 1951): 543–62, rpt. in EICT, 104–19. “EC” may refer to Essays in Criticism, though NF was never published in that quarterly. Above “prose fiction” NF wrote, “HR,” which represents “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (see n. 184, above). 203 “A contemporary poet who wished to describe a garden under an oppressive midday summer sun wrote the following: Et d’entre les rameaux que ne meut nul essor D’ailes et que pas une brise ne balance, Dardent de grands rayons comme des glaives d’or. . . . These French lines are well calculated to give the impression of the beating of a bird’s wings or the swaying of the breeze, and the use of the negative in no way blots out this impression from the reader’s mind” (J. Vendryes, Language: A Linguistic Introduction to History [New York: Knopf, 1925], 134–5). The example from Coleridge: “There is not wind enough to twirl / The one red leaf, the last of its clan, / That dances as often as dance it can” (Christabel, pt. 1, ll. 49–51). 204 NF quotes a long passage from Mill’s essay in AC, 330/309, which he uses to illustrate that Mill’s style, based on “the cold logic of reason,” reveals a motive of tough-mindedness and intellectual honesty. 205 That is, the ideas developed in NF’s early essay, “Music in Poetry,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 11 (January 1942): 167–79, which he did include in the Fourth Essay; rpt. in EICT, 9–22. 206 “I have elsewhere spoken of the curious ‘drunken boat’ construct in nineteenth-century thought, where the world of experience seems to float precariously on something immensely powerful that both supports it and threatens it. Examples are the world as will in Schopenhauer, the world of unconscious impulse in Freud, the world of the excluded proletariat in Marx, the world of evolutionary development in Darwin and the social

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Notes to page 85 applications of Darwinism. In some of these constructs the lower world contains only monsters of the deep; in others there is a submarine Atlantis to be reached” (MM, 56; SeSCT, 264). The bateau ivre, then, is NF’s shorthand for all the romantic revolutionaries who thought of civilization as “an ark or bateau ivre carrying the cargo of human values and tossing on a stormy or threatening sea” (SR, 32; ENC, 113). Bateau ivre comes from Rimbaud’s poem of that title. NF later calls this doctrine “interpenetration.” NF’s knowledge of the Avatamsaka Sutra came largely from the selections in D.T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1949), from Suzuki’s own commentary, and from discussions with Peter Fisher, one of NF’s students. NF was perhaps familiar as well with the commentary on the Avatamsaka Sutra in Suzuki, Studies in the Lankavatara Sutra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930). The locus classicus of interpenetration for NF was in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World: “In a certain sense everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world” ([Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938], 114). In the margin beside the passage in his own edition of Whitehead’s book, NF wrote: “this doctrine of the universal mirror is a point for me, I think. The passage is almost identical to Plotinus, V, 8.” The Plotinus reference could be to one of several statements in the Enneads, 5.8.4. Plotinus says, for example, “Every being [in the divine realm] is lucid to every other, in breadth and depth; light runs through light. And each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, and all is all and each all, and infinite the glory.” Or again, “In our realm all is part rising from part and nothing can be more than partial; but There [in the divine realm] each being is an eternal product and is at once a whole and an individual manifesting as part but, to the keen vision There, known for the whole it is” (The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 2nd ed. [New York: Pantheon, n.d.], 425). In the Yogacara school of Buddhism, the universe is nothing but citta, pure consciousness or ultimate reality. NF defines cittamatra as “the doctrine of Mind-only” in NB3.111 (RT, 46). In The Meeting of East and West (New York: Macmillan, 1946), F.S.C. Northrop distinguishes between the unity of Eastern thought, which he refers to as “aesthetic,” or the immediate apprehension of experience as a whole, and the unity of Western thought, which he calls “theoretic,” or the construction made from experience that makes it intelligible. NF reviewed Northrop’s book in Canadian Forum, 26 (March 1947): 281–2; rpt. in NFCL, 107–10, and NFMC, 197–200. “[J]ust as mathematics exists in a mathematical universe which is at the circumference of the common field of experience, so literature exists in a verbal

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universe, which is not a commentary on life or reality, but contains life and reality in a system of verbal relationships. This conception of a verbal universe, in which life and reality are inside literature, and not outside it and being described or represented or approached or symbolized by it, seems to me the first postulate of a properly organized criticism” (“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” 13–14; see n. 108, above). The idea gets repeated in a slightly different form in the concluding paragraphs of the Tentative Conclusion. That is, better than what NF has in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see n. 108, above). See Friedrich von Schiller, On Naive and Sentimental Poetry (1795–96). Schiller distinguishes the “naive” poetic temperament from the “sentimental” one. Naive poets are childlike nature itself, and they tend to write in the classic genres of epic, tragedy, and comedy. Sentimental poets, on the other hand, love nature as something they lack; they tend to write satire or elegy. NF uses “naive” to refer to primitive and popular literary forms; “sentimental,” to later and more sophisticated developments. See AC, 35/33. “Levels of Meaning in Literature,” 252; see n. 129, above. “ . . . not only the language of a very large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise . . . some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well written” (“Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Richter, 306). See n. 13, above. For Coleridge’s remarks on the secondary imagination and the fancy, see his Biographia Literaria, 175. Biographia Literaria, 182–3. “Lilacs, / False blue, / White, / Purple, / Colour of lilac”—the opening lines of Lowell’s Lilacs (1925), which are repeated twice. “The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division” (Biographia Literaria, 181). See n. 204, above. See n. 203, above. See n. 203, above. The reference is to the attack by Rudolf Carnap, a member of the Vienna School, on all statements, including affective and metaphysical ones, that could be neither verified nor falsified by experience. “Fancy . . . had no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space” (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 175).

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225 “Annotations to Wordsworth’s Poems” (Erdman, 666). 226 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see n. 108, above). 227 “I am not, therefore, saying that literary criticism at present must be doing the wrong thing and ought to be doing something else. I am saying that it should be possible to get a comprehensive view of what it actually is doing” (AC, 12/13). 228 NF did not include this sentence in AC. 229 See AC, 10/12. 230 Above “heroine” NF wrote, “anima.” 231 Geraldine = the evil supernatural creature who disguises herself as Geraldine in Coleridge’s Christabel. 232 See n. 13, above. 233 NF evidently meant to write “former.” 234 “Music in Poetry” (see n. 205, above). 235 Croesus was deceived by the Delphic oracle to the effect that he would defeat a great empire if he marched against the Persians; he only later learned that the oracle was referring to his own empire. 236 “We first invoke God Himself, not in loud word but in that way of prayer which is always within our power, leaning in soul towards Him by aspiration, alone towards the alone” (Plotinus, Enneads, “The Fifth Ennead,” first tractate, par. 6, trans. McKenna and Page). 237 Keats’s title is simply To Autumn. 238 “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” (see n. 202, above). 239 See n. 236, above. 240 The point, which NF does not make in his other notebooks or in AC, is uncertain. At the beginning of NB 30r, NF lists without comment Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Reader over Your Shoulder (London: Cape, 1943), a handbook for writing prose. 241 The commentary is in Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846). 242 See AC, 3/5. 243 “The repetition of certain common images of physical nature like the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be called even ‘coincidence,’ which is the name we give to a piece of design when we cannot find a use for it” (AC, 99/92). 244 NF seems to be referring to “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (see n. 184, above), but the point about “a handbook” is not in this article. It is found rather in AC, p. 12/14, the original version of which was the University of Toronto Quarterly article, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see n. 108, above). 245 Rabelais’s antimonastic Utopia where well-born and well-educated men and women live in harmonious freedom, doing what they will (Gargantua and Pantagruel, bk. 1, chaps. 52–7).

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246 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see n. 108, above). 247 NF means “KR” rather than “HR” [Hudson Review]: the article referred to is “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (see n. 129, above). 248 See previous note. 249 “The Archetypes of Literature” (see n. 192, above). 250 See Jung, “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in The Integration of Personality, 52– 95. 251 “The Archetypes of Literature” (see n. 192, above). 252 See AC, 332/311. 253 See AC, 156/144. 254 See AC, vii/3. 255 This is a reference to one of NF’s plans for his study of drama (Tragicomedy). In NB 11f.277 he refers to “the 24–Preludes scheme in the blue book” (RT, 136). The blue notebook is NB 18. Although NF does not actually use the word “prelude” in that notebook, it is clear from what he writes in pars. 28 and 58 that he contemplates organizing Tragicomedy on a twenty-four part pattern. In the former paragraph he refers to Tragicomedy as being “a review of my 24 phases,” and in the latter he sketches a six-part outline, each part of which has four quadrants. In both paragraphs NF proposes “The Well-Tempered Critic” as a possible title for this study, playing on The WellTempered Clavier, the title Bach gave to his twenty-four preludes and fugues. NF also refers to his twenty-four prelude scheme in NB 19.372 (TBN, 85) and in NB 24.226 (TBN, 329), where the twenty-four preludes appear to be a plan for structuring a work of fiction he intends to write (“my one fiction idea”). 256 “Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian” (Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2 July 1830). 257 “All literary critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance” (NP, 1). 258 “Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked” [1 Kings 18:27, AV]. 259 Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Sword from the Rock (London: Faber & Faber, 1953), 191. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 260 Iliad, bk. 18, ll. 287–368, in the Fagles translation. Here and in the next two sentences NF is drawing on Levy, The Sword from the Rock, 190–2. 261 “The last book of the Iliad is no epilogue, for it is essential to the poem’s structure, the inward recognition and transformation which descended to drama: the resolution of the Wrath of Achilles into tranquility” (Levy, The Sword from the Rock, 192).

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Notes to pages 106–14

262 See Iliad, bk. 19, ll. 90 ff., where Ate, the personification of moral blindness or infatuation, is the subject of an elaborate allegory. 263 See FS, 75–6/82, 154–5/158. 264 That is, Herod as depicted in Auden’s For the Time Being, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1976), 301–4. 265 “How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements?” (William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue, Erdman, 550). 266 “Inscape” was Hopkins’s term for the individual design or quality that differentiates one thing from another; it is embodied in poetic forms that issue from the poet’s observation and introspection. The companion term “instress” was the power to recognize an object’s inscape. 267 “And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses” (trans. Fagles). 268 NF is evidently referring to a lecture or lectures he gave when teaching in the 1958 summer session at Columbia University. 269 NF is pointing to the general theme of the psychological and political repression of the divine in W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being (1944). See NB 10.111 (NR, 292). 270 That is, the Adonis cycle of the birth, agon, and sparagmos of the hero as it is outlined primarily in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. A version of the myth is found in Robert Burns’s ballad John Barleycorn, in which Barleycorn is killed and torn to pieces by his enemies and is then transmuted into a spirit that can be acquired by the drinking of his blood. 271 See Dylan Thomas, Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait, and Wallace Stevens, The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage (1923). 272 In Quintum Novembris (Guy Fawkes Day) was written in 1625, when Milton was only seventeen. Phineas Fletcher’s Apolyonists, a poem on the Gunpowder Plot, did not appear until two years later. 273 Natura naturata is physical nature or nature as a cosmic structure or system; natura naturans is biological nature as a fertile, reproductive power. 274 The reference is to the symbolism of hunting in Robert Surtees’ novel Handley Cross (1843). NF examines this symbolism in NB 41 (NR, 87–9). 275 NB 18.58. Notebook 37 1 See NB 7, n. 133. 2 In this early plan for AC what NF refers to as the First Essay includes primarily material that eventually made its way into the Second and Fourth Essays. 3 NF is referring to the notes he wrote in NB 30n.1–19.

Notes to pages 114–18

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4 That is, the path of verbal associations, puns, ambiguity, paronomasia, and the like—the ironic techniques stressed by the New Critics. See AC, 65–6/61, and NB30n.1 (NR, 56). 5 NF’s course in Nineteenth-Century Thought—on Burke, Newman, James Mill, J.S. Mill, Carlyle, Ruskin, Huxley, Arnold, and Butler. 6 “The Church: Its Relation to Society,” The Living Church, ed. Harold Vaughan (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1949), 152–72; rpt. in RW, 203–19, and NFR, 253–67. 7 Here NF cancelled the following sentence: “Anyway, this is presumably the place where I adumbrate something of this.” 8 The Chandogya Upanishad, the second oldest of the Upanishads, presenting the fundamental principles of Vedanta and containing the famous precept Tvat tvam asi (Thou art That), “the absolute is in essence one with yourself.” 9 The story is told by Giorgio Vasari that Giotto drew a perfect circle in a single stroke and without the aid of a compass for an emissary of Pope Benedict XI, who was so impressed he called him to work in Rome. 10 See NB 7.104. 11 The reference is uncertain, but it seems to be associated with the cyclic design of NF’s ogdoad. If NF is following the vision of creation by Urizen in Blake’s Milton, where in the seventh age of creation Urizen’s left arm is extended to the south, then NF would be referring to some point on the vertical axis below the centre of the cycle. Perhaps he is simply alluding to the birth of his own ogdoadic cycle: in the Germanic creation myth the first man and woman were born from the sweat of the left armpit of Ymir, the forefather of all giants, while he was asleep. 12 Or Tao-te ching (The Book of the Way and Its Power), a work attributed to Lao-tzu which serves as the philosophical and religious basis of Taoism. 13 Wu wei (literally “nondoing” in Chinese) refers to unmotivated, nonintentional action; the idea comes from the Tao-te ching, where it represents the attitude of the Taoist saint. 14 In Hindu legend, Manu is said to be the author of the Laws of Manu, the chief work of Brahman doctrine in the post-Vedic period; the Laws were written in Sanskrit ca. 200 b.c.e. to c.e. 100, but date from a much earlier period. 15 Hermann Usener (1834–1905), the author of Mythologie (1904), among numerous other works in philosophy, rhetoric, literature, and comparative religion. Ernst Cassirer quotes Usener approvingly in Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (New York: Harper, 1946), 13–21. 16 On the Yeatsian “mezzanine world,” see NF’s “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism” (FI, 228–9). In the same essay NF refers to Madame Blavatsky as a morphologist of symbolism (221). 17 On bardo, see NB 7, n. 102. 18 The phrase is the English translation of Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (1917).

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Notes to pages 118–23

19 This source of the phrase is uncertain. Theodore Watt-Duncan used it in the title of a book published in 1916 (London: Herbert Jenkins). Lawrence Ferlinghetti popularized it in the last line of I Am Waiting, though that poem was not published until 1958. 20 The essay cited in n. 16, above, first published in the University of Toronto Quarterly, 17 (October 1947): 1–17; rpt. in FI, 218–37. 21 “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (see NB 7, n. 184). 22 Most likely the extensive notes on Morris in NB 31. 23 The first numbers in these sequences refer to the numbers in the outline here, and the second numbers to chapters within the manuscript NF is working on. 24 This opinion runs throughout Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion (New York: Longmans, Green, 1899). 25 Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802–73), an English painter, especially of animals, noted for his proper craftsmanship and formal exactitude. 26 Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:18. Euhemerus (fl. ca. 300 b.c.e.), the Cyrenaic philosopher, was famous for a theory of mythology embodied in his philosophical romance, Sacred History, a work of which only fragments remain. Euhemerism is the theory that the gods originated from the elaboration of traditions of distinguished historical persons. 27 Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:39–47. 28 Although this appears to be a reference to Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion, “1, 216” is not a citation for material in the present entry: p. 216 of Lang’s first volume is devoted to Vedic divinities and sacrifices. 29 NF draws the examples here from Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:42–6. 30 The Covering Cherub is for Blake the source of all error, including the false dogmas of the Church. He is, as NF says in FS, “the power of the fallen human Selfhood who keeps man out of Paradise” and so “is ultimately what the Spectre of Tharmas is” (282/278). 31 Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 2:172. 32 Ibid., 1:74–5. 33 Ibid. The example comes from a Samoan myth. See Leo Frobenius, The Childhood of Man (New York: Meridian, 1960), 316–29. 34 Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:174. 35 Ibid., 1:184. 36 Ibid., 1:183. 37 The Childhood of Man, chap. 23. 38 Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:241. The Satapatha Brahmana is a prose commentary on the verses of Vedic texts. 39 “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (see NB 7, n. 129). Beginning with this entry NF stopped numbering the notebook pages. The previous entry is on

Notes to pages 124–33

40 41 42 43 44

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numbered p. 15, and NF left seven blank lines following the entry. He appears, therefore, to have begun par. 31 sometime later. See n. 5, above. The epigraph for E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910). The reference is to I.A. Richards’s discussion of the relation between poetry and belief in chap. 6 of Poetry and Sciences (1926) and elsewhere. Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (Eng. trans. 1954), a collection of trite sayings that Flaubert recorded throughout his life. This is likely a reference to the lectures NF gave at Princeton in 1954. See NB 35, n. 68. The rest of the entries in the present notebook appear to be devoted to the Princeton lectures. Entries 42–8 may be as well: they begin a new page and are written, unlike the rest of the notebook, in pencil. Notebook 38

1 “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1933], 189. This is the concluding entry of the Tractatus, and the only entry in sec. 7. NF may be referring to the so-called “mystical” conclusion to the Tractatus, secs. 6.4–6.54. 2 A novel by Robert Smith Surtees. See NB 7, n. 274. 3 The reference is to Sir Philip Sidney’s statement in the first part of An Apology for Poetry (1583; pub 1595): “Her [nature’s] world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.” 4 A reference, apparently, to E.K. Brown’s Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950). Brown was a member of the English department at University College, University of Toronto, 1929–35, 1937–41. Rhythm in the Novel was the published version of his 1949 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto. 5 See NB 7, n. 146. 6 “Structural differential” is Alfred Korzybski’s phrase for the difference between Aristotelian, Euclidean, and Newtonian semantic structures, on the one hand, and non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian semantic structures on the other. See his “On the Structural Differential,” in Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 3rd ed. (Lakeville, Conn.: International Non-Aristotelian Library, 1948), 386–411. 7 See NB 7, n. 107. 8 The “mighty Polypus,” symbolizing for Blake human society and its religion, particularly Druidic religion, appears throughout The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem; Samuel Butler, “Conscious and Unconscious Knowers—Law and Grace,” in Life and Habit (London: Jonathan Cape, 1910), 20–42 (chap. 2); Sir

376

9

10 11

12 13 14

15 16

17 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

Notes to pages 133–6

Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, in The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 99–100. Lurking beneath this paragraph is an allusion to one of NF’s oft-repeated references to Spenser: “For of the soul the body form doth take: / For soul is form, and doth the body make” (An Hymn in Honour of Beauty, ll. 132–3). John Milton, At a Solemn Music, l. 23. Although the syntax of this sentence goes awry, the meaning NF intended seems to be this: the analogy between the mandala and painting and between scripture and the verbal universe is not like the analogy between spiritual harmony (diapason) and music. The final chorus in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125. See NB 37, n. 9. YHWH is the tetragrammaton, or the four letters used to designate the name Yahweh. Om mani padme hum, literally, in Sanskrit, “OM, jewel in the lotus, hum,” is the oldest and most important mantra in Tibetan Buddhism. See NB 37, n. 8. Gordon Wood had shown NF ten ox-herding pictures from D.T. Suzuki’s Essays in Zen Buddhism, 1st ser. (London: Rider, 1949; orig. pub. 1927). The pictures tell a story of a young ox-herd who has lost his ox, eventually finds and tethers it, and then leads it home. The eighth picture, however, is a blank circle, representing, according to Wood, “perfect serenity and awareness, and the perfected intense power of the enlightened mind.” The last two pictures depict the return to the world again (Gordon Wood to Robert D. Denham, 12 March 1996). One of the cards in the Tarot pack. “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (see NB 7, n. 184). That is, the view that metaphysics is an “as if” construct; NF’s source here is Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911; Eng. trans., 1924), in which Vaihinger argues that since we can never know reality, we construct theories of science, philosophy, and religion and assume that these fictions correspond to what actually exists. See, e.g., Abraham Cowley’s The Extasie, one of Cowley’s imitations of Pindar. Poems by Milton, Marvell, and Edith Sitwell, respectively. NF appears to have written “symbols it’s,” but the singular form of the word and a colon seem called for. In Cassirer’s theory of symbolism, as developed in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923; Eng. trans. 1953), the symbol takes its content from the objective world and its form from the categories of human consciousness. NF reviewed vol. 1 of Cassirer’s book in the Hudson Review, 7 (Summer 1954): 228–35; rpt. in NFCL, 67–75, and EICT, 189–96. “To my wife Helen.” For the dedication of AC, NF opted for the dative case.

Notes to pages 136–42

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25 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see NB 7, n. 108). 26 The word “wit” appears forty-six times in Pope’s Essay on Criticism. William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks isolate fourteen different senses in which Pope uses the word in the Essay (Literary Criticism: A Short History [New York: Knopf, 1959], 240). 27 NF is referring to the widely known story about John Donne that was recorded in Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne (1640): after his dismissal as secretary to the Lord Keeper, so the story goes, Donne wrote to tell his wife Anne about the dismissal, and following the subscription of his name he wrote, “John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.” For the argument that the story probably had no basis in fact, see R.C. Bald, “Historical Doubts Respecting Walton’s Life of Donne,” in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, Presented to A.S.P. Woodhouse, 1964, ed. Millar MacLure and F.W. Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), 76–8. 28 The chief part of Plato’s dialogue is devoted to Socrates’ speculations, often ironic, about the origins of Greek words. 29 NF is referring to the notes on etymology he made in NB 30n (NR, 56–62). 30 See NB 7, n. 203. 31 An apparent reference to E.K. Brown’s Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1950), a study that restricts itself to “isolating a single element or group of elements in the novel” (7). 32 That is, in Plato’s Ion, the performance of the inspired rhapsode through whom the gods speak. 33 In the Meno, Socrates attempts to prove that we can remember what we knew in our former lives by having one of Meno’s slaves, an uneducated young man, reason about geometry without help from anyone. 34 In the 1520s More was drawn into the defence of the Catholic rule, writing a Response to Luther (1523), and from then on he became obsessed with the battle against reform. When Tyndale published his English translation of the New Testament in 1526, More unleashed a series of attacks, including the massive Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532–33). 35 See n. 14, above; see also NB 7.104 and n. 112. 36 The reference is to F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West (New York: Macmillan, 1946). NF reviewed the book in the Canadian Forum, 26 (March 1947): 281–2; rpt. in NFCL, 107– 10, and NFMC, 197–200. 37 See n. 1, above. 38 “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction,” Manitoba Arts Review, 3 (Spring 1942): 35–47; rpt. in EICT, 23–38. 39 Whatever version of the preface this came from is not extant. 40 Above the line here NF wrote in pencil, “Cartesian vs. existential assn. & incantation.” 41 This sentence—in pencil—was apparently added later.

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Notes to pages 143–52

42 That is, Jung’s sense that the events of nature are analogies or projections of unconscious psychic processes. See The Integration of Personality, 55, 213. 43 See NB 7, n. 129. 44 This paragraph is in Helen Frye’s handwriting. 45 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see NB 7, n. 108). 46 “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (see NB 7, n. 129). 47 “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” (see NB 7, n. 202). The “2” refers to the second article NF published in the Kenyon Review, the first being “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (see par. 41 and NB 7, n. 129). 48 The lectures for NF’s Religious Knowledge course. 49 String Quintet in G minor (1787), op. 516. 50 Concerto in G major, op. 58. 51 Bach’s thirty variations for the harpsichord and Beethoven’s thirty-three variations for the piano. 52 NF wrote “partly geometrical” in pencil above the last two words of the sentence. 53 A collection of medieval Welsh romances, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, 1838–49. 54 The phrases are from the jingle about polysemous meaning attributed to Augustine of Denmark (354–430): “Litera gesta docet, / Quid credas allegoria, / Moralis quid agas, / Quo tendas anagogia” (The letter teaches what was done, allegory what to believe, morals teach how to act, anagogy where you will go). 55 Arnold engages in such ranking in “The Study of Poetry” (1880). 56 See Arnold’s “The Study of Poetry” (1880). 57 Above “like” in the last sentence NF wrote “whether,” and above the last part of the sentence he wrote “or great books, with a list of all the poets who happen to be Englishmen who may be regarded as truly great.” 58 In his Fourth Meditation Descartes maintains, in the face of our awareness that data supplied by the senses are often obscure and confused, that we can avoid error if we confine ourselves to the clear and distinct perceptions of the pure intellect. See also Spinoza, Ethics, pt. 5, proposition 4. 59 See Francis Huxley, The Way of the Sacred (New York: Dell, 1974), chap. 3. 60 A reference to the general theory of poetic unity developed by William K. Wimsatt, Jr., in The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954) and elsewhere. 61 NF intends to quote from Smith, “On the Writing of Essays,” in Dreamthorp, with Selections from “Last Leaves” (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), 19– 40, but which passage he plans to quote is uncertain. An annotated copy of the book is in the NFL. 62 NF uses the word “kernel” to refer to the seeds or distilled essences of more expansive forms. He often refers to the seeds as kernels of Scripture or of con-

Notes to pages 153–64

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cerned prose. The microcosmic kernels are often listed as oracle, commandment, parable, aphorism, and (occasionally) epiphany, and NF sometimes conceives of the kernels as what he calls comminuted forms, fragments that develop into law (from commandment), prophecy (from oracle), wisdom (from aphorism), history or story (from parable), and theophany (from epiphany). In the section on the lyric in this notebook, the kernels are commandment, aphorism, parable, and emblem. There are other variations: aphorism is sometimes called proverb, for example, and occasionally pericope and dialogue are called kernels. 63 Above “elegy” NF wrote, “Gk. anth. [Greek anthology]. 64 See Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study in the Sources of Poetry (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1946), 109, 121–2. Notes for Anatomy of Criticism 1 The material in this entry is an outline of the first section of NF’s theory of modes in AC, which was in turn adapted from his essay “Towards a Theory of Cultural History,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 22 (July 1953): 325–41; rpt. in EICT, 150–68. Notebook 35 1 See NB 7, n. 205. 2 That is, FS and AC would not now be included in the first seven parts of the Ogdoad—Liberal through Ignoramus. 3 NF had received a Guggenheim fellowship for the 1950–51 academic year, which he spent at Harvard. 4 The reference is to the “sanguine flower inscribed with woe” (Lycidas, l. 106). Milton describes the mantle and bonnet of Camus, which have marks of woe on their edges like the “AI AI” (Greek exclamations of grief) found on the hyacinth, the “sanguine flower” that sprang from the blood of Hyacinthus when he was accidentally killed by Apollo. 5 “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction,” (see NB 7, n. 184). 6 NF apparently has in mind Paul’s account of his actions in Romans 7:15–20, though the interrogative mood is scattered throughout the epistle. For Lenin, see V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902). 7 post coitum omne animal triste est (after sexual intercourse every animal is sad). The phrase does not occur in Classical Latin but derives from Aristotle, Problems, 877b, and Pliny, Natural History, 10.83. 8 That is, Sir James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Francis M. Cornford. Gilbert Murray, though at Oxford, is often linked with the Cambridge anthropologists.

380

Notes to pages 164–9

9 In her investigation of the grail legend Jessie L. Weston found that its mysteries were rooted in a series of hermetic, mystical, and Gnostic texts (From Ritual to Romance [1920]). Robert Graves maintained that the infinitely variable theme of the white goddess and her son is based upon secret magical formulas (The White Goddess [1948]). In Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888) Madame Blavatsky developed her theories of occultism, which derived in part from various kinds of secret societies rooted in eighteenth-century esotericism. In The Lost Language of Symbolism (1912) Harold Bayley argued that emblems used in the Middle Ages as trademarks and decorative devices were actually thought-fossils or thought-crystals which enshrined the aspirations and traditions of numerous mystic sects. In The Tragedy of Sir Francis Bacon (1902) Bayley maintained that Bacon’s New Atlantis is not a Utopian dream, but a thinly disguised account of an actual secret society with which Bacon was closely associated and that the object of this fraternity of learned men, known as the Rosicrucians, was the advancement of learning. 10 See NB 7, n. 212. 11 Cacus was the fire-breathing monster killed by Heracles. 12 NF wrote “used” above both instances of “remembered” in this sentence. 13 NF decided not to include the bibliography. 14 “The Nature of Satire,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 14 (October 1944): 75– 89; incorporated into AC, 223–39/208–23. Rpt. in EICT, 39–57. 15 By “Druid analogy” NF means the religious myths and rituals of natural religion in its most primitive forms. In NB 21.311, NF calls the Druid analogy the “key to all mythologies,” its components including “Atlantis, reincarnation, cyclical symbolism” (RT, 198). In NB 11b.35 he calls it the “pagan synthesis” (RT, 354). For NF an analogy is never a genuine form. 16 “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” (see NB 7, n. 202). 17 The thesis is advanced by Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948). 18 F.M. Cornford, “The Origin of the Olympic Games,” in Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), 212–59. 19 Yeats actually never used the word itself and strongly denied having used it when accused of having done so by the editor of the Saturday Review in March 1901. See Yeats’s letter and the accompanying note in The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. John Kelley and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3:51. 20 “A good painter has to paint two principal things, that is to say, man and the intention of his mind” (Leonardo on Painting, ed. Martin Kemp, trans. Margaret Walker [New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1989], 144). 21 For Carlyle’s distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic symbols, see “Symbols,” chap. 3, bk. 3 of Sartor Resartus, ed. Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor

Notes to pages 169–76

22

23 24 25

26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 165–71. See AC, 88/81. NF later expands on Carlyle’s views in MM, 31; EICT, 330. The reference is to Yahweh’s remark to Moses in Exodus 33:23: “And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen.” Which criticism article was aborted is uncertain. See NB 38, n. 64. The reference is to R.S. Crane’s idea of poetic form in The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953). This book derived from Crane’s Alexander lectures at the University of Toronto, several of which NF heard in January and February 1952. He reviewed the book under the title “Content with the Form” in the University of Toronto Quarterly, 24 (October 1954): 92–7; rpt. in RW, 131–6, and EICT, 197–202. “It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use” (Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 3rd ed. [London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1760], 175 (vol. 2, chap. 19). “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” (see NB 7, n. 202). See the preface that Mallarmé offered to write for René Ghil’s Traite du Verbe, in Œuvres Complètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 857–8. NF’s ellipsis. See NB 7, n. 129. NB 7.235–6, 238. Above “romantic” NF wrote, “sacramental.” Above “but I dunno” NF wrote, “I don’t think so.” Above “oracle” NF wrote, “emblem.” Above “form to content” NF wrote, “content to form.” NB 38.35–7. See Gilbert Murray, “An Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy,” in Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1962; orig. pub. 1927), 341–63; “et al.” refers no doubt to F.M. Cornford and to Harrison herself. NF’s ellipsis. “The Archetypes of Literature” (see NB 7, n. 192). In Sartor Resartus Carlyle uses the phrase “everlasting no” to characterize the attitude of religious unbelief, the contrary of the “everlasting yea” (cf. NB 7.49). Des Esseintes is an aesthete who attempts to escape Paris and, along with it, the vulgarity of modern life in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours (1884). See AC, 185–6/173.

382 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52

53

Notes to pages 177–9

The reference is to Thomas Mann’s novella Tristan (1903). Milton published the first edition of Paradise Lost in ten books. The items in this column were added later. Above “commandment . . . existential” NF wrote, “it’s the hypothetical law or contract.” “The Nature of Satire” (see n. 14, above). NF has inserted above the line that follows “of literature,” which begins a new page in the notebook, “9(6).” Which talk NF refers to is uncertain. Blake uses the phrase “moral virtue” ten times in Jerusalem and a half-dozen times in his other works. Above the line beginning with “(satire,” which starts a new page, NF wrote: “9-3 This is Three stuff. 1-3.” NF quotes the passage in AC, 228/213: “Milton says, ‘for a Satyr as it was born out of a Tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage, to strike high, and adventure dangerously at the most eminent vices among the greatest persons’” (John Milton, An Apology against a Pamphlet Call’d A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant against Smectymnuus, etc. [1642], in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. [New Haven: Yale, 1953], 1:916). What NF refers to as the “Lankavatara quote” and elsewhere as the “Lankavatara conclusion” (NB 35.43, NB 38.74) or “release” (NR, 73) has to do with laughter as the manifestation of a sudden spiritual transformation. In the Lankavatara Sutra we are told that in his transcendental state of consciousness the Buddha laughed “the loudest laugh,” and in his marginal annotation of this passage NF notes that “the laugh expresses a sudden release of Paravritti” (The Lankavatara Sutra: A Mahayana Text, trans. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki [London: George Routledge & Sons, 1932], 14. NF also associates the Lankavatara with the conception of art as hypothetical (Maya) (NB 7.212). “And in Rabelais, where huge creatures rear up and tear themselves out of Paris and Touraine, bellowing for drink and women, combing cannon balls out of their hair, eating six pilgrims in a salad, excreting like dinosaurs and copulating like the ancient sons of God who made free with the daughters of men, we come perhaps closest of all to what Blake meant by the resurrection of the body” (FS, 200–1/201–2). The phrase “imp of the perverse” comes from the title of an 1850 short story by Edgar Allan Poe, which is about the counterpart of human creativity—the radical human impulse toward evil. Trahison des clerks is the title of a 1927 book by Julien Benda, who describes the attitude of some intellectuals between the world wars as a trahison, meaning that they had betrayed the causes of justice and truth because it would have been inconvenient to defend them.

Notes to pages 179–88

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54 The allusion is to Pope’s line about Virgil: “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same” (Essay on Criticism, l. 135). See NF’s extended commentary on the line in “Nature and Homer,” FI, 39–51; rpt. in EICT, 254–66. 55 See NB 7.215. 56 Coleridge wrote in the margin of his copy of Robinson Crusoe that a particular passage was “worthy of Shakespeare; and yet the simple semi-colon after it, the instant passing on without the least pause of reflex consciousness, is more exquisite & masterlike than the Touch itself. A meaner writer, a Marmontel, would have put an !—after ‘away,’ and have commenced a fresh Paragraph” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marginalia, ed. George Whalley [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984], 2:160–1). 57 NF quotes the passage from Mill’s Essay on Government in AC, 330/309. 58 Above the line beginning with “off into,” which starts a new page, NF wrote, “D-5.” 59 Above this line NF wrote, “misleading means something else. I do not know of a good English.” On Schiller, see AC, 35/33. 60 See NB 7, n. 184. 61 Above this line NF wrote, “the author is still theoretically present when represented by a rhapsode.” 62 I.A. Richards, “Value as an Ultimate Idea” and “A Psychological Theory of Value,” chaps. 6 and 7 in Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965; orig. pub. 1925). 63 NF inserted a question mark above “genres.” 64 Above “talking . . . democratic” NF wrote, “use some Dewey here.” 65 Above “with . . . stuff” NF wrote, “or Nine, with the resurrection of the body.” 66 A review of Joseph Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, which NF wrote for an American journal but which was unpublished at the time because, as NF says in a letter more than thirty years later “they decided that it wasn’t the kind of book they wanted discussed in their columns” (NF to David Cook, 17 October 1985). The review was published in LS, 325–9. 67 That is, notes taken by Betty Mihalko, a former student and stenographer, whom NF had hired to take dictation, beginning in 1949. See Ayre, 219. These notes appear not to have survived. Above “transfer . . . back” NF wrote, “such as the stuff about the archaic nature of the archetype.” 68 NF had been invited by E.D.H. Johnson of the Special Programs in Humanities at Princeton to give a new series of lectures, known as the Class of 1932 Lectures. NF presented four lectures at Princeton in 1954: “The Critic and His Public,” “Symbols of Fact and Fiction,” “The Language of Poetry,” and “Myth and Society” (Ayre, 244). In his Preface to AC, NF notes that much of the substance of the book came from his Princeton lectures. 69 For the “Andrew Lang crack,” see NB 37.21.

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Notes to pages 188–201

70 Evidently a reference to the public lectures at Princeton. 71 See Voltaire, Candide, chap. 12, for the account of the Janissaries, who, in order to prevent starvation, cut off, for their repast, one of the buttocks of each of their enslaved women. The women, thankfully, were later cured by French surgeons. 72 “One study has even demonstrated a substantial increase in the use of the definite article in the ironic mode, a use said to be linked with the implicit sense of an initiated group aware of a real meaning behind an ironically baffling exterior” (AC, 61/58). The reference is to Sir George Rostrevor Hamilton, The Tell-Tale Article (London: Heinemann, 1949). 73 See AC, 108/100, where the passage got reworded. 74 Above “means archetypally” NF wrote, “(give example, perhaps Conrad).” 75 NF enclosed some material in the previous sentence in square bracket (here braces). He seems to intend for that material to go in section three, rather than two. 76 The syntax goes awry at this point, where NF struck through “so a” and replaced it with “and.” 77 NF is apparently giving himself a bit of advice gleaned from Dale Carnegie’s best-selling self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937). 78 Above “this” NF wrote, “such a thing.” 79 Above “is neither true” NF wrote, “not true enough.” 80 Above the line here NF wrote, “to our effort to treat.” 81 Above “infinite unity” NF wrote, “[range?] either in.” 82 Above “&” NF wrote, “or.” 83 “The Nature of Satire” (see n. 14, above). 84 Above “the” NF wrote, “some of its.” 85 Xy = Christianity. Thus, literally, “archeChristianitypal” or perhaps “archeChristypal.” 86 The numbers in square brackets in this entry were written above the line. Each number corresponds to the word preceding it. The question mark following “5” above “prose kernels” is NF’s. 87 This appears to be NF’s comment on the overly inflated nature of his classification. 88 Above “one, which” NF has written, “floating on top.” 89 See AC, 110/102. 90 See AC, 259/241. 91 Above “musical . . . diagrammaticism” NF wrote, “which is quantitative pitchbeat in Classical poetry.” 92 See NB 7, n. 1. 93 NF cancelled this entry, as well as these subsequent entries: 144–6, 148, 155–8, 160–6, 174. 94 That is, the point NF made about premature teleology in “The Archetypes

Notes to pages 202–7

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96 97

98 99 100

101 102

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of Literature” (see NB 7, n. 192): “The assertion that the critic should not look for more in a poem than the poet may safely be assumed to have been conscious of putting there is a common form of what may be called the fallacy of premature teleology. It corresponds to the assertion that a natural phenomenon is as it is because Providence in its inscrutable wisdom made it so” (FI, 10; EICT, 124). NF did insert the point in AC 17–18/19. “A cartoon in a New Yorker of some years back hit off this last problem beautifully: it depicted a sculptor gazing at a statue he had just made and remarking to a friend: ‘Yes, the head is too large. When I put it in exhibition I shall call it The Woman with the Large Head”’ (AC, 87/80). See NB 7, n. 219. “Democracy has for long been influenced by Rousseau’s theory of a natural society buried under history, but we have moved a long way from Rousseau’s primitivism and its assumption that man’s lost birthright is his own nature. Man’s nature, as we can see now, is expressed in his institutions: it is not his nature but his destiny that may be good” (“The Analogy of Democracy,” RW, 221; NFR, 271. This article was originally published in Bias, 1 [February 1952]: 2–6; rpt. in NFR, 270–7). Edwyn Bevan, Symbolism and Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1938). See NB 7, n. 111. NF is referring to the distinctions Edgar Allan Poe, using similar terms, makes in the “The Poetic Principle,” in Critical Theory since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 577. NF uses the Poe triad at the beginning of the Fourth Essay of AC. A reference apparently to something from Alexander Smith. Cf. NB 38.76. See AC, 35/33. Notebook 36

1 This and the following two paragraphs have been cancelled. For his Late Notebooks NF organized his drafts into different coloured folders. Here the plan seems to be only a mnemonic device. 2 See NB 35, n. 25. 3 S. Foster Damon, William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 206–7; see also Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, rev. ed. (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988), 331, 370. 4 “Yellow” is written above “orange,” which has been cancelled. 5 The reference is to D.W. Robertson, Jr. NF is apparently referring to Robertson’s reaction at the 1950 meeting of the English Institute, where NF presented a paper on “Blake’s Treatment of the Archetype.” 6 Here NF wrote “green” above “genre,” which has been cancelled.

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Notes to pages 207–10

7 “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres” (see NB 7, n. 202). This article was incorporated into the Fourth Essay of AC. 8 “The Argument of Comedy,” English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.W. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58–73; “Comic Myth in Shakespeare,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd ser., 46, sec. 2 (June 1952): 47–58; “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 4 (July 1953): 271–7. 9 A 1952 United Artists film, starring Gary Cooper. 10 “The Nature of Satire” (see NB 35, n. 14). 11 Above “genre” NF wrote “blue,” which is different from his identification of genre with green in par. 6. 12 Above the parenthetical phrase NF has written, “put in footnote.” 13 Above “encyclopaedic” NF wrote, “now green.” 14 “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (see NB 7, n. 184). 15 Above this phrase NF wrote, “not settled: perhaps purple.” 16 This is almost certainly “The Archetypes of Literature” (see NB 7, n. 192). NF did not retain a copy of the revision he had sent to the editor, John Crowe Ransom. See Ayre, 227. 17 The bracketed phrase appears to have been added later. 18 Above “rhetoric” NF wrote, “purple.” 19 In the top margin NF made the following addition, connecting it by a line to the word “allegory”: “The point about the unpoetic dianoia of naive allegory (Loves of the Plants, Art of Preserving Health) vs. cosmological (Lucretius) may go here. (It most logically goes in I, as part of the introduction.)” The two naive allegories are Erasmus Darwin’s The Loves of the Plants (1789), a long poem embodying Linnaeus’s botanical system, and John Armstrong’s The Art of Preserving Health (1744), a didactic poem in blank verse. Both poets were physicians. 20 The argument against permitting poets in the republic because their work is only an imitation of an imitation of the world of the Idea and because they are emotional rabble-rousers. 21 Here NF is moving close to the final form of AC. He eventually combined what he calls the anagogy and archetype chapters into the Third Essay, and the genre and rhetoric chapters into the Fourth Essay, producing the four“chapter” form of AC, to which he added the Polemical Introduction and Tentative Conclusion. 22 NF had written “third,” marked through it, and wrote, “fourth,” plus the expletive, above the line. 23 In another pen NF added above the line here, doubtless at a later time, “Why? Conclusion stuff.” 24 This and the following two entries have been cancelled. 25 For the “quantum theory of criticism,” see NB 35.145 and n. 94. Above

Notes to pages 210–14

26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41

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the first line of this entry NF later added, “Where is this? Maybe it’s there.” “Rubbage” is apparently NF’s own portmanteau word. The Great Doodle and the Zodiac were names NF gave to the spatial organization of literary structure. Their basis was a hierarchical diagram imposed on a dialectical and cyclical one. Although NF never actually represented the Great Doodle in its complete form, almost all of the diagrams he did draw were a part of this meta-scheme. Here NF associates the Great Doodle and the Zodiac with the anagogy and archetype chapters (eventually the Third Essay of AC). For more on the Great Doodle, see NB 7, n. 185. Above “wheel of rhetorical prose” NF inserted, “Yes, I think so, on the 3rd level.” “I am the inventor of the dithyramb” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, sec. 7, par. 1). NF put a question mark above “Blake.” Above “invocations” NF wrote, “apostrophes.” Herbert Read quotes a passage about Chinese word-symbols in Pound from Harold H. Watts, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (The True Voice of Feeling: Studies in English Romantic Poetry [New York: Pantheon, 1953], 133). See NB 35, n. 72. See AC, 163–5/151–4, 178/165–6. Above “talking animals” NF wrote, “Apuleius-Swift.” In the top margin, with a line pointing to this sentence, NF wrote, “note the presence in both Phaedrus & Symp. [Symposium] of the natural analogy of the oracle, the whole point too of his h.m. [high mimetic] politics. This has a link with your grandfather point.” Above “Cratylus,” NF wrote, “7th Epistle.” See AC, 65–6/61. “Quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry” (Jeremy Benthan, qtd. by John Stuart Mill in the Westminster Review (1838). See NB 35, n. 21. The passage that William O. Fennell referred to does appear in “Reason and Revelation,” pt. 1 of vol. 1 of Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951): “Whatever is essentially mysterious cannot lose its mysteriousness even when it is revealed. Otherwise something which only seemed to be mysterious would be revealed, and not that which is essentially mysterious” (109). Fennell, a 1939 graduate of Victoria College, taught systematic theology at Emmanuel College. He later became principal of Emmanuel. In the top margin NF has the following note with a line pointing to the end of the present sentence: “reform: This mystery comes, not from anything unknown or unknowable in the poem, but from something unlimited in it. T.E. Hulme’s theory of the drying up of wonder is balls.”

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Notes to pages 214–17

42 See AC, 88/81, 92/85. 43 See AC, 179/166. 44 The Shakespearean critic E.E. Stoll maintained that Shakespeare’s plays reflect the actualities of history and that many critics are confused by dramatic conventions and conventional characters in the plays. 45 NF is evidently reporting something said in conversation. The remark appears not to be in any of Maclean’s books or essays. 46 See AC, 151/140. 47 Sir Willoughby Patterne, the conceited hero of Meredith’s novel, first pursues Constantia Durham, then Laetitia Dale, and finally Clara Middleton. 48 The reference is to Jean de La Bruyère’s Characters, or Manner of the Age (1688), a collection of satirical character portraits of men and women of his time. 49 For “4k,” see NB 37, n. 5. 50 Characters in, respectively, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (Allworthy and Andrews), Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, George Meredith’s The Egoist, and Jane Austen’s Emma. 51 See AC, 89–90/82–3. 52 “In Whitman’s poem Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, we find shadows ‘twining and twisting as if they were alive,’ and the moon swollen ‘as if with tears.’ As there is no poetic reason why shadows should not be alive or the moon tearful, we may perhaps see in the cautious ‘as if’ the working of a low mimetic discursive prose conscience” (AC, 123–4/115). 53 NF is referring to the conventional practice of using an abstract noun in the possessive case followed by an adjective and a concrete noun, as in “fortune’s lowest valley,” or, to use NF’s example from James Russell Lowell’s Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration, July 21, 1865, “life’s best oil” (l. 42). Lowell uses a whole series of such constructions in his ode. See AC, 280–1/ 262–3, for an expansion of the points in this entry. 54 “This picture was done many years ago, and was one of the first Mr. B. ever did in Fresco; fortunately or rather providentially he left it unblotted and unblurred, although molested continually by blotting and blurring demons” (A Descriptive Catalogue, Erdman, 546). 55 During his Guggenheim year at Harvard (1950–51) NF got to know Edwin Honig, who was an instructor in the English department. In fact, they shared carrel 227 in the Lamont Library, and the Fryes and the Honigs socialized on occasion. It is possible that Honig told NF about the parallel between the medieval levels of interpretation and Aristotle’s four causes during this time. Honig does refer to the four causes in his book on allegory (Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press], 174), though not quite in the context NF refers to, but that book was not published until 1959, several years after the time of the present notebook. As for NF’s speculation about the source of Honig’s comment, H. Flanders Dunbar

Notes to pages 217–22

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57

58

59 60

61 62 63

64 65 66 67 68

69 70

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points to no parallel between Aristotle’s four causes and the medieval theory of four levels of meaning in her Symbolism in Medieval Thought (1929). The reference is to Charles T. Dougherty, who wrote a dissertation on “Ruskin’s Theory of Art and Morals,” directed by A.S.P. Woodhouse, University of Toronto, 1953. At the top of the page, with a line pointing to “cultural determinism,” NF wrote, “Note that avoiding determinism brings one back to straight analogy. Spengler useful for having stressed analogy but not determinism.” “But there are other facts not of such consequence nor so necessary, which, though ever so well attested, may nevertheless be sacrificed to oblivion in complacence to the scepticism of the reader. Such is that memorable story of the ghost of George Villiers” (Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, bk. 8, chap. 1, par. 8). See AC, 50/47. Above the parenthetical phrase NF wrote, “Chaucer.” “Ye that do dictionary’s method bring / Into your rimes, running in rattling rows; / You that poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes / With new-born sighs and denizen’d wit do sing: / You take wrong ways” (Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet 15, ll. 5–9). That is, Whitman’s elegy on Lincoln, When Lilacs Last at the Dooryard Bloomed. See AC, 101–4/93–6. The abbreviations in the left-hand column are the seven stages in NF’s version of the chain of being: divine, spiritual (world of spirit), human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and cyclical (or what NF usually refers to as the wateryworld archetypes). The reference to Jensen, which appears to be a later addition, is uncertain. See Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss,” in Bliss and Other Stories (1920). See AC, 321/301. Henry More (1614–87), one of the Cambridge Platonists and a lifelong fellow of Christ’s College. Stevenson was convinced that he was the basis of Meredith’s Sir Willoughby Patterne. Meredith replied to the suggestion, “No, no, my dear fellow, I’ve taken him from all of us, but principally from myself.” “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ll. 79–80). At his lowest ebb in Remembrance of Things Past, Proust’s narrator Marcel comes to feel that all the beauty and meaning he has ever won, and even the sense of time, is now lost. This seems to be a reference to the incessant babble of the individual mind in Finnegans Wake, though it may refer to the stammerings of the hundred-letter thunderclaps, beginning on the first page of the novel, that form a “hesitant moment” before the cycle of history begins again. See W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in

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75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88

89

90 91

Notes to pages 223–30

The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Frankfort: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 3–20. The fallacy refers to a critic’s confusing the meaning of a poem with its genesis, determined from the poet’s biography. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that the poet’s intent is not possible to retrieve, nor is it desirable in interpreting poetic works. “Exuberance is beauty” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 10, l. 64 [Erdman, 38]). If these entries are as late as 1953–54, the book by Ernst Cassirer might well have been The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1 of which NF reviewed for the Hudson Review, 7 (Summer 1954): 228–35; rpt. in NFCL, 67–75. Above “was . . . community” NF wrote, “what the author of the book was accustomed to & found.” Above “he wasn’t used to” NF wrote, “lay outside this.” Above “have . . . that” NF wrote, “spoiled this age of innocence.” See NB 35, n. 68. The reference is to the argument advanced by F.S.C. Northrop in The Meeting of East and West, a book NF reviewed in the Canadian Forum, 28 (March 1947): 281–2; rpt. in NFCL, 107–10, and NFMC, 197–200. Northrop maintained that Eastern thought was characterized by an immediate apprehension of experience, which he called the “aesthetic”; Western thought, by the theoretical construction of experience, which he called the “theoretic.” “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see NB 7, n. 108). Above “limited” NF wrote, “specific.” Above “whole hangs together” NF wrote, “It’s like fixing a horoscope.” See NB 7, n. 204. Brand Blanshard, “Philosophical Style,” Yale Review, 42 (Summer 1953): 547– 78. This is perhaps a reference to NF’s remark regarding “the use of political leaders as dramatis personae: Eisenhower & Stevenson as the plain man & egghead of low-norm satire; Jimmy Walker as gay blade; Lindbergh as solar hero” (NB 18.13). That is, the application of mathematics as a model for something else. Above “personality” NF wrote, “as persons.” See W.B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence, 1901–1937, ed. Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), passim. Ruskin’s cat first makes an appearance in the correspondence in January 1926, setting off a discussion about “real experience” and sense data. See also AC, 93/86. “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life” (Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968], 182). Above “myth” NF wrote, “vision.” Above the line here NF wrote, “and underestimated thereafter.”

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92 Above the line here NF wrote, “choose a lit ex. [literary example]: say Dyer or Grainger.” George Dyer (1775–1841) was a minor poet and friend of Charles Lamb. James Grainger (1721?–66) is mostly remembered for his didactic poem Sugar-Cane. 93 Above the last clause here NF wrote, “as representation of type, apart from value.” 94 Above “oracle” NF wrote, “prophecy.” 95 Above the line here NF wrote, “comedy theme of integration.” 96 The title (and first line) of a poem by Sir Edward Dyer (1543–1607). 97 The quotation is in AC, 96/89. 98 André Malraux, Museum without Walls (N.Y.: Pantheon, 1949; orig. pub. as Le Musée imaginaire, vol. 1 of Psychologie de l’art [1947]). 99 Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas (Ecclesiatstes 1:2, from the Vulgate) (“Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity”). 100 The character in Aristophanes’ Acharnians who, denounced as a traitor by his fellow citizens and forced to plead for his life, turns to the tragic poet Euripides, who lends him a whole assortment of tragic stage effects. Thus, he becomes an architectus, the “constructor of the play”—an eiron, in NF’s sense. See AC, 174/161. 101 That is, all the points on NF’s circle other than those at the top (point of epiphany) and bottom (point of demonic epiphany). “I” here seems to refer not to the introduction but to NF’s theory of modes, which turned out to be “1,” or the First Essay. 102 That is, the position of Dante after he has passed the seventh cornice on Mount Purgatory into the Earthly Paradise. 103 “This bronze. Yes, now’s the moment; I’m looking at this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I’m in hell. I tell you, everything’s been thought out beforehand. They knew I’d stand at the fireplace stroking this thing of bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torturechambers, the fire and brimstone, the ‘burning marl.’ Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. HELL IS—OTHER PEOPLE!” (Garcin’s reply to Inez at the conclusion of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit). 104 Which crack NF is referring to is uncertain. He may have in mind the conclusion of Jonson’s “Argument”: Much company they draw, and much abuse / In casting Figures, telling Fortunes, Newes, / Selling of Flyes, flat Bawdry, with the Stone: / Till It, and They, and All in fume are gone”; or perhaps he is referring to Face’s rejoinder to Subtle in act 1, sc. 1: “When all your Alchemye, and your Algebra, / Your Mineralls, Vegetalls, and Animalls, / Your Coniuring, Cosning, and your dosen of Trades / Could not relieue your corps, with so much linnen / Would make you tinder, but to

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Notes to pages 234–42 see a fire; / I gave you count’nance, credit for your Coales, / Your Stilles, your Glasses, your Materialls, / Built you a Fornace, drew you Customers, / Aduanc’d all your blacke Arts; lent you, beside, / A house to practise in” (Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 1.1). The idols of the theatre, in Francis Bacon’s account of four errors of judgment in Novum Organum, are fallacies produced by philosophical systems. Ernst Cassirer, “From Animal Reactions to Human Responses,” in An Essay on Man (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1944), 27–41. Azure in Mallarmé’s poems symbolizes the absolute that is both perfection and nothingness. See, for example, his L’Azur, Le Guignon, and Renouveau. See also his letter (March 1864) to Henri Cazalis, in Correspondence de Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. Henri Mondor and Jean-Pierre Richard (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1969), 1:103–5. The reference of “a.o.” is uncertain: perhaps NF means the “alpha-omega” colour, the “az” of “azure” representing the first and last. For Sir Philip Sidney, the historian works by example, the philosopher by precept. Poetry combines both. See An Apology for Poetry, in Richter, 140–1. See NB 35, n. 25. See NB 35, n. 95. William Blake, Annotations to Bacon’s Essays, Moral, Economical, and Political (Erdman, 623). The position of R.S. Crane and the other neo-Aristotelians was that for Aristotle poetry had to do with making and the other sciences with knowing (e.g., metaphysics, dialectic) or doing (politics, ethics). They did grant, however, that some imitative art can be didactic rather than mimetic. Here NF wants to combine all verbal structures, whereas Aristotle was careful to separate them according to their ends or final causes. The issue Shaw examines is the difference between impropriety in books and in plays. He reports that Sir William Gilbert remarked, “I should say there is a very wide distinction between what is read and what is seen. In a novel one may read that ‘Eliza stripped off her dressing-gown and stepped into her bath’ without any harm; but I think that if it were presented on stage it would be shocking.” Shaw proceeds to demolish the illustration as an argument for censorship on stage (Preface, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet [New York: Brentano’s, 1928], 69). Jesus heals a blind man by making mud from clay and spittle and spreading it on the man’s eyes (John 9:6). In one of the Egyptian creation myths the gods are said to have been created when the demiurge spat; in others when he masturbated. See “Egyptian Mythology,” in Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York: Prometheus Press, 1960), 11. Semniotes appears to be NF’s coinage, derived from   "  or   " “serious, worthy of respect, solemn, dignified, sacred.” On the Egyptian myth, see AC, 156/144.

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116 On the Egyptian tale of the two brothers, see AC, 135/124–5. 117 in posse = in the condition of being possible, as opposed to in esse (in existence). 118 Boswell’s Journal, or Tour of the Hebrides, ed. Frederick A. Pottle and Charles H. Bennett (New York: Literary Guild, 1936), 28. 119 Boswell’s Journal, or Tour of the Hebrides, 256. 120 The phrase appears throughout Berkeley’s writings. See, e.g., The Works of George Berkeley, ed. A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop (London: Thomas Nelson, 1953), 1:53. 121 See NB 35, n. 68. 122 Above “3” NF wrote, “or 1.” 123 Above “lyric” NF wrote, “dramatic too, in Gk. [Greek].” 124 Here NF is casting a glance at T.S. Eliot’s Notes toward the Definition of Culture (1948). 125 Cf. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (1933; 2nd ed. of English trans., 1970). 126 Scudamour, her lover. See AC, 200/186. 127 NF’s abbreviation may mean “perhaps phase 4,” one of the phases in his circle of mythoi in the Third Essay of AC. 128 NF neglected to put in the page number. The description of Bagshot is in the first paragraph of chapter 12 of Jonathan Wild. 129 See AC, 223–4/208–9. 130 Canto fermo = fixed song, i.e., the given melody borrowed from religious or secular sources which composers in the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries used as a basis of works by setting other melodies in counterpoint against it. 131 The wife of Thomas Heartfree; she is described by Fielding’s narrator as “a mean-spirited, poor, domestic, low-bred animal, who confined herself mostly to the care of her family, placed her happiness in her husband and her children, [and] followed no expensive fashions or diversions” (Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild, ed. David Nokes [London: Penguin, 1987], 84–5). 132 Florimell is the lovely and gentle lady in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene who is pursued by many evil men and gods before she is wed to Marinell. Birdalone is the heroine of William Morris’s late romance, The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897); an archetype of the captive virgin, she eventually turns her charms on Arthur. 133 In the top margin, and with a line pointing to “inherent,” NF wrote, “Introd. rounding out the aesthetics [P?] ?” 134 Above the line here NF wrote, “or fixed in convention like the cross.” 135 William Butler Yeats, He Longs for the Change that Has Come upon Him and His Beloved, and Longs for the End of the World, l. 2. See also The Wanderings of Oisin, in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 355. 136 NF is quoting from a draft of a passage that eventually appeared in AC this

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137 138 139 140 141 142

143 144 145

Notes to pages 252–60 way: “Popular art is normally decried as vulgar by the cultivated people of its time; then it loses favour with its original audience as a new generation grows up; then it begins to merge into the softer lighting of ‘quaint,’ and cultivated people become interested in it, and finally it begins to take on the archaic dignity of the primitive. This sense of the archaic recurs whenever we find great art using popular forms, as Shakespeare does in his last period, or as the Bible does when it ends in a fairy tale about a damsel in distress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city glittering with jewels” (108/100). See NB 37, n. 5 meta ta physika = “after the things of nature,” referring to an idea, doctrine, or posited reality outside The sentence did not make it into AC. See AC, 112/104, which is apparently the point NF has in mind. An apparent reference to Susanne Langer’s idea that dance is “virtual image.” “I could behold / The antechapel where the statue stood / Of Newton with his prism and silent face, / The marble index of a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone” (Prelude, bk. 3, ll. 59–63). The title of one of NF’s graduate courses. Most likely NB 19, published in TBN. The use of “AC” here suggests that NF returned to this entry after Anatomy of Criticism had been chosen as a title, thus indicating a time later than 1953– 54, the date proposed in the headnote for the composition of NB 36. The explanation seems to be that NF returned to the present entry in 1956. What he originally wrote was, “Curious how 4 has never really belonged to [Liberal]. So now I have 5 chapters.” He then struck through and wrote above it, “AC: it is .” He also struck through “5” and wrote “4” above it. It seems likely, therefore, that NF made these changes two or three years after he wrote the original entry—at a time when the organization of the book into four essays had been determined and its title chosen. Notebook 18

1 The reference to the essay on Paradise Regained in the first paragraph sets the beginning of this notebook no earlier than 1956. References toward the end of the notebook to several series of lectures NF gave and to papers he wrote in the early 1960s indicate that the notebook entries conclude in 1962 or perhaps early 1963. 2 “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism” (see NB 7, n. 111); “The Typology of Paradise Regained,” Modern Philology, 53 (May 1956): 227–38; a revised version of the paper was incorporated into RE, 118–43; rpt. in M&B, 114–31. In com-

Notes to pages 260–4

3 4 5

6

7

8

9 10

11

12

13

14 15

395

menting on his ogdoad scheme, NF often refers to renumbering his completed projects as zero. For example, FS, originally symbolized by (for Liberal) became 0 once it was completed, AC then becoming . See NB 7, nn. 2, 134. “Structural Poetics” was one of the early titles NF proposed for AC. See the Tentative Conclusion of AC. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (New York: M.I.T. Press and John Wiley & Sons, 1961). On entropy, see pp. 11, 56–7, 62, 64. “A grown man feels identical with himself at the age of seven, although the two manifestations of this identity, the man and the boy, have very little in common as regards similarity or likeness. In form, matter, personality, time, and space, man and boy are quite unlike. This is the only type of image I can think of that illustrates the process of identifying two independent forms” (AC, 124–5/116). “At every stage of our ‘Becoming’ cycle from childhood to old age we are conscious, not only of a continuum of identity, but of a certain permanent form or character which makes us equally ourselves in all stages” (FS, 247/246). Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind (1949) is an attack on Cartesian dualism, which he calls “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine,” the Ghost being the mind and the Machine the body. NF believes that Spinoza’s attempt to reduce propositions to a quasi-mathematical form free of rhetorical devices is itself a rhetorical device. See NB 36.112, NB 37.3, and AC, 329/308. See AC, 195–6/182. Adlai Stevenson was defeated twice by Dwight D. Eisenhower for the U.S. presidency (1952 and 1956). Jimmy Walker was the dapper mayor of New York City from1926 to 1932. Charles Lindberg was the celebrated pilot who made the first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. The reference is to the position Arnold took in Culture and Anarchy toward a bill introduced into Parliament in 1866 over whether a man would be permitted to marry his deceased wife’s sister. See CP, 118. NF had been invited to teach courses on the history of criticism and on literature and myth at Harvard during the spring term of 1957. On the response to these courses, see Ayre, 256–8. For NF’s notes on Surtees’ Handley Cross, see NB 41 (NR, 87–9). On Humphry Clinker and The Egoist, see NB 36.33, 42. The notes on Great Expectations, mentioned also in NB 7.279, do not appear in the extant notebooks. See NB 37, n. 5. The article was published as “Notes for a Commentary on Milton,” in The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (London: Gollancz, 1957), 99– 137. On Palamabron and Satan, see pp. 130–5.

396

Notes to pages 264–72

16 Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934). 17 Cléante is the level-headed brother-in-law of Orgon in Tartuffe (1664). See AC, 176/164. 18 On the dandy, see NF’s note in AC, 360/396–7n. 66. 19 Carlyle opposes the dandy to the drudge in Sartor Resartus, bk. 3, chap. 10. 20 NF changed the title from Structural Poetics to Anatomy of Criticism after he received word from the editorial board at Princeton University Press that the former was “not altogether satisfactory” (Benjamin F. Houston to NF, 14 October 1955, a letter in the NFF, 1988, box 61, file 3). 21 See AC, 99/92. 22 That is, the twenty-four phases of the mythoi in AC, 177–86/165–73, 198–203/ 184–9, 219–23/204–8, and 225–39/210–23. 23 See NB 37, n. 5. 24 The “Locke reading program,” mentioned a number of times in the notebooks, was a plan NF developed to read a variety of nineteenth-century thinkers not a part of his course in nineteenth-century thought. He speaks several times of reading “back” from those writers to John Locke. The outline of this reading plan was, as NF describes it in one notebook, quite ambitious: it was to include works of philosophy, metaphysics, psychology, theology, occultism, political theory, economics, law, military history, other works of history and the philosophy of history, the development of symbolism in the arts, comparative religion, biology, anthropology, mathematics, chemistry, and anagogy (NR, 135). On the Locke reading program, see also NB 17b.1 (NFF, 1991, box 24); TBN, 19, 64, 66; NR, 4, 19, 124, 127–8. 25 That is, the projected books on prose and lyric will derive from the theory of genres in AC; those on epic and drama, from the theory of myths. 26 NF had given a lecture at Indiana School of Letters, Indiana University, in July 1956 on “Literature as a Mode of Thought” (Ayre, 256). Karl Shapiro, along with Richard Ellmann and Richard Chase, also lectured at the 1956 session of the School of Letters. 27 See NF’s note in AC, 359/388n. 59. 28 NF is referring to his course on “Symbolism in the Bible,” later renamed “The Mythological Framework of Western Culture” and taught in collaboration with a second instructor who focused more intensively on parallels between Biblical and Classical and Near Eastern mythology. 29 nekyia = descent to the underworld, as in bk. 11 of the Odyssey. 30 epiclesis = invocation; in the Christian eucharistic prayer, it is a special invocation to the Holy Spirit. 31 4l was NF’s course in “The History of English Literary Criticism”; 4k, his course in “Nineteenth-Century Thought.” Both were Honour courses. 32 NF comments on the parabasis metamorphosis throughout NB 8, but see especially pars. 149–50 (NRL, 153–4).

Notes to pages 272–6

397

33 Astraea, the daughter of Zeus and Themis, was the goddess of justice; Eris, the goddess of discord. Her throwing of the golden apple at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus brought on the Trojan War. 34 Vulcan fashions a full moon on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, bk. 19, ll. 430 ff. Milton likens Satan’s shield to the moon in Paradise Lost, bk. 1, ll. 284–91. 35 See NB 7.260. 36 The phrase is from William Butler Yeats, The Tower, p. 3, l. 36. 37 Jupiter is the god of natural religion, necessity, and law in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820); Urizen—one of Blake’s Four Zoas—is force of “reason,” limitation, and vengeance in Blake’s Prophecies; Arimanes, the principle of evil in ancient Persian religion, appears as a character in Byron’s Manfred (1817); the Immanent Will, which appears in Hardy’s The Dynasts (1903–8) and elsewhere, is the blind and indifferent force that determines the fate of, and generally blights, human life. 38 Mario Praz popularized the phrase “Romantic agony” in his book of that title on the Romantic erotic sensibility (1931; Eng. trans. 1956). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 39 See Theodore Gaster, Thespis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), passim. Gaster defines “topocosm” as all of the animate and inanimate elements that characterize the atmosphere of a given locality (p. 24). NF adapts “topocosm” for his own purposes in “New Directions from Old,” in FI, 63–6 (EICT, 318–21). 40 See NB 35, n. 15. 41 To the left of the first five numbered sections of this entry, NF inserted in very small script, respectively, the abbreviations “r.,” “pr.,” “gr,” “y,” and “or.” These stand for red, purple, green, yellow, and orange, and are associated with the musical keys in parentheses at the end of each numbered section. The colour associated with each musical key was for NF purely arbitrary, deriving, as he writes in RT, 176, from the colours of wooden blocks he had as a child. The present entry begins NF’s use of the musical “circle of fifths” for outlining twenty-four parts in the first three divisions of his ogdoad: Liberal, Tragicomedy, and Anticlimax. The outline continues in pars. 58, 63, and 73. The “circle of fifths” schema can be represented by the diagram on the following page. 42 “An extremely complicated problem, the problem of the intervening generic stages between lyric and epos, has had to be omitted from this discussion” (AC, 363/409n. 77). In AC, NF combines his account of the specific thematic forms of lyric and epos in a single section of his theory of genres (293–303/ 274–83. 43 NF did reverse the order of the Greek alphabet here; xi and omicron are in their proper sequence in the diagram that follows. Everywhere else in his

398

Notes to pages 277–9 Circle of Fifths

Psi: Key of F Circumference of verbal expression; hypothetical & existential modes; possession of the Word Phi: Key of Bb North & south limits of literature; koans; teachers who don‘t write

Alpha: Key of C Mythical narrative. Undisplaced quest from Creation to Apocalypse. (1) Bible (2) Druid analogy

Omega: Key of D Comminution of Word

Beta: Key of A Naïve romance: Orc cycle Delta: Key of E & quest Sentimental romance: myths Goethe, Hugo, Scott, Hawthorne, Melville, Morris, Tolkien

Chi: Key of G Circle of arts; pure & applied literature; conspectus of verbal technology Xi: Key of Eb Approximation of myth to metahistory; existential writing

Upsilon: Key of C East & west limits of literature: action and thought

Gamma: Key of G Mimetic & romantic encyclopaedic forms: Homer, Virgil, Milton, Dante, Spenser

Epsilon: Key of D Mimetic fiction: displacement

Zeta: Key of B Ironic myth: Joyce, Proust

AL

ER

LIB

ANTICLIMAX

Sigma: Key of F Commentary on scripture; total conceptual myth; gospel as discontinuous epiphanies

Theta: Key of F# Generic cycle of drama, epos, lyric

TR

AG

IC

CO

Eta: Key of A Great Wheel of Epiphanies: Cycle of episodes of “Liberal”

ME

DY

Kappa: Key of C# Phases of comedy Iota: Key of E Pi: Key of Bb Structure of comedy Confession and its relation to Mu: Key of G# “propaedeutic” Phases of Tau Key of Eb treatise tragedy Conspectus of verbal rhythms Omicron: Key of Db Lambda: Key of B metaphysics and verbal Structure of tragedy constructs; diagrammatic Nu Key of F# thought Relation of myth & metaphor to conceptual language; verbal patterns; models of thought

Rho: Key of Ab Oratory & dialogue; aloofness in discontinuous forms

44 45

46 47 48 49

outline of the “circle of fifths,” NF uses “m.” as an abbreviation for “minor.” But as there is no E  minor in the “circle of fifths,” NF intends in this case for “m.” to represent “major.” Lord FitzRoy Richard Somerset Raglan, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama (London: Methuen, 1936). For Gaster, see n. 39, above. “The arts might be more clearly understood if they were thought of as forming a circle, stretching from music through literature, painting, and sculpture to architecture, with mathematics, the missing art, occupying the vacant space between architecture and music” (AC, 364/412–13n. 11). Pataphysics is the study of physics beyond metaphysics or the science of imaginary solutions. See AC, 353–4/329. TBN, 251. NF also transcribes what he calls his “old note.” The source of the original note is not one of the extant notebooks. In The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 1922–1949 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), Robert Graves criticizes those whose view of

Notes to pages 279–81

50

51

52

53 54

55 56 57 58

399

poetry is based on “sentimental misapprehensions” about such popular “poetical words” as “linnet” and “asphodel.” See, especially, pp. x–xi, 187–8, and 327–9. The “first Virginia lecture” was first of the three Page-Barbour Lectures that NF gave at the University of Virginia in March 1963, published as WTC. The “Kenyon one” was “Literature as Possession,” presented as one of the President’s Lectures at Kenyon College, 23 November 1959, and published in the Kenyon Alumni Bulletin, January–March 1960, 5–9; rpt. in EICT, 295–306. The talk focused on the three kinds of verbal rhythm—those of prose, verse, and ordinary speech. This is evidently an encyclopedia article that remained unpublished. The article may have later developed into his essay on “Verse and Prose,” which NF contributed to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 885–90; in the essay NF examines the three rhythms in language: discursive, metrical, and associative. “One of the most reliable jokes in literature concerns the delight of M. Jourdain, in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, at discovering that he had been speaking prose all his life. But M. Jourdain had not been speaking prose all his life, and prose is not the language of ordinary speech” (WTC, 17–18; EICT, 340). See also AC, 265/247. See NB 7, n. 218. The reference is to the controversy spurred by views of the German Social Democrat Eugen Dühring. In 1876, Engels wrote Marx, saying there was cause to initiate a campaign against the spread of Dühring’s views. Marx replied, saying Dühring himself should be sharply criticized, which Engels did, putting aside his other work and producing two years later his AntiDühring. I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929), chap. 7. See “Note to Section II,” which Eliot appended to his essay “Dante” (Selected Essays, new ed. [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950], 229–31). This entry contains an outline of material NF developed in WTC. The reference to Harvard suggests two possibilities for this paper. The first is “New Directions from Old,” which NF submitted in 1959 at the request of Henry A. Murray of Harvard University for a volume of essays on myth he was editing (Myth and Mythmaking [New York: George Braziller, 1960], 115– 31; rpt. in FI, 52–66, and in EICT, 307–21). In this case, the “Harvard myth boys” would include Harvard professors Murray, Clyde Kluckhohn, Harry Levin, and Jerome Bruner, who had contributed essays to the forerunner of the book, a special issue of Daedalus (Spring 1959), entitled “Myth and Mythmaking.” Murray was seeking to enlarge the book by soliciting additional

400

59 60

61

62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69 70

Notes to pages 281–4

essays. But the paper NF refers to may have been “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement,” which he presented in April at a symposium at Harvard on “Myth Today,” sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This paper was published in Daedalus, 90 (Summer 1961): 587–605; rpt. in Fl, 21–38, and EICT, 401–19. That is, the third of the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. See Longinus’s account of adjuration or apostrophe in chap. 16 of On the Sublime. The reference to John Robins is uncertain, though, as Robins was a medievalist, it may be to something he had said about the importance of the prose translations of Alfred the Great (848–99). Robins had been NF’s teacher at VC, where he taught from 1926 until 1952. “But inspiration belongs to and is meant for the reader” (Paul Valéry, “Remarks on Poetry,” in The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot [New York: Pantheon, 1958], 215). oratio oblique = indirect speech; oratio recta = direct speech. See n. 58, above. See n. 13, above. The last sentence in both this and the previous entry NF added later. “I didn’t, though I did start on it” means NF has come back to the entry after some period of time. “Used in Spenser paper,” which is written with a different pen, is also a subsequent addition. NF did write in his Spenser paper, “If a spirit is being conjured by the seventy-two names of God as set forth in the Schemhamphoras, it will not do if the magician can remember only seventyone of them” (“The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” FI, 87). “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Pride and Prejudice). “All happy families resemble each other, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina). See AC, 202/188. See NF’s summary statement in “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement,” FI, 37–8 (EICT, 418–19). NF does pick these themes up, though not quite in these terms, in the concluding pages of WTC. Partridge is the schoolmaster who travels with the hero in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Part II, Pamela is represented as the perfect wife—one who reforms her husband, adores her children, and helps the wicked repent. Homer Goldberg points out that “the specific reference to Partridge is to an episode near the end of Tom Jones (bk. 16, chap. 5) in which the naive schoolmaster reacts to the ghost, Gertrude, and Claudius with the same emotions as does Garrick’s Hamlet, to the amusement of Tom and others in the audience, an instance of Frye’s ‘Wrong or associative response . . . [of] pure identification.’ Tom, who goes to the

Notes to pages 284–8

71 72

73 74

75 76 77 78 79

80

81

82

83

84

401

play expecting to be amused by Partridge’s following the ‘simple dictates of nature, unimproved indeed, but likewise unadulterated by art,’ is Frye’s ‘cultivated self’ that examines the other self’s reading” (Homer Goldberg to Robert D. Denham, 21 May 2002). NF uses “pointer reading” in the sense of the physicist—a reading determined by some measurement apparatus: an unmediated, first reading. On this distinction, see NF’s “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” FI, 151– 67; rpt. in EICT, 420–35. In his Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson argued that evolution is impelled by an élan vital that allows life to overcome the entropic downward drift of matter. NF apparently wants to adapt Bergson’s model to the various creative levels of the psyche. Dame Alice Kyteler, the executed witch of medieval Kilkenny. See Yeats’s Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, pt. 6, ll. 17–18. Dryden repeats Sidney’s point in An Apology for Poetry, though without attribution: “Philosophy instructs, but it performs its work by precept; which is not delightful, or not so delightful as example” (“Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” in Essays of John Dryden, ed. W.P. Ker [New York: Russell & Russell, 1961], 1:209). See NB 36, n. 108. The manuscript of NF’s “Vancouver talk,” if there was one, has not survived. That is, the unpleasant jangle that comes from the quick succession of such affixes, as in “Canadian Association of Adult Education.” See NB 7, n. 186, and NB 36, n. 27. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon, 1957). An annotated copy is in the NFL. The two books that NF was working on at the time were The Well-Tempered Critic (the “Virginia lectures,” delivered in 1961) and The Educated Imagination (the Massey Lectures, delivered in 1962). In this entry “the book” refers to The Educated Imagination. NF is referring to the differing views on the nature of the imagination advanced by Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 5, sc. 1. The reference is to the vigorous defence of colloquial American usage in The American Language (1919). NF owned a copy of the 4th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1936). NF did keep seven diaries over the course of fourteen years—1942–55. The longest was for a period slightly longer than eight months. See Diaries (CW, 8). Ten of Michael Innes’s detective novels are in the NFL, one of which, Lament for a Maker, was published before the time of the present notebook. Innes is a pseudonym for J.I.M. Stewart, the Scots novelist and literary critic. That is, the second of the Page-Barbour lectures. See n. 50, above.

402

Notes to pages 288–93

85 That is, the first of the Centennial Lectures that NF presented at Huron College, University of Western Ontario, in March 1963. The lectures were published two years later as RE. 86 “Ordinary life forms a community, and literature is among other things an art of communication, so it forms a community too. In ordinary life we fall into a private and separate subconscious every night, where we reshape the world according to a private and separate imagination. Underneath literature there’s another kind of subconscious, which is social and not private, a need for forming a community around certain symbols. . . . This is the mythmaking power of the human mind, which throws up and dissolves one civilization after another” (EI, 102–3; EICT, 473). EI was originally presented as the CBC Massey Lectures. 87 Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), and The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921). An annotated copy of the first is in the NFL. 88 See AC, 8–10/9–12. 89 “The writer is neither a watcher nor a dreamer. Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn’t escape or withdraw from life either: it swallows it. And the imagination won’t stop until it’s swallowed everything” (EI, 80; EICT, 465). 90 For the Milton lectures, see n. 85, above. NF’s Shakespeare series turned out to be the Bampton Lectures, presented in November 1963 at Columbia, published as NP. 91 NF owned the first complete translation of Balzac into English (25 vols.), but the notebooks, as well as NF’s published work, give little indication that he was able to launch into an extensive reading of Balzac. He had read Droll Stories in the 1960s, and there are occasional references to Séraphita, Père Goriot, and the short story “Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu” in NBs 30n.5; 33.56; 34.50 and Notes 58-4.29 (NR, 57–8, 80, 41, 351); 43.165; (NRL, 74); LN, 215, 222–3, 224. An annotated copy of The Wild Ass’s Skin is in the NFL. 92 See n. 36, above. 93 Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), 50–1. 94 Arthur Waley, Introduction to The Analects of Confucius, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Vintage, n.d.; © by George Allen and Unwin, 1938), 24. 95 See AC, 74–5/68–9. 96 See William Blake, Milton, pl. 18, l. 20, and The Four Zoas, Night the Eighth, p. 113, ll. 8–21 (Erdman, 111, 376–7). 97 This notebook did not survive. 98 See n. 90, above. 99 “In a certain sense everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world” (Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World [New York: New American Library, 1948], 93). This passage was one

Notes to pages 293–301

100

101

102 103

104 105 106 107 108 109

403

of the key sources of NF’s idea of interpenetration, which for him was similar to the expression of that idea as he found it in the Avatamsaka Sutra. One of NF’s art conference speeches was “Academy without Walls,” a talk he presented at the Canadian Conference of the Arts, May 1961. It was published in Canadian Art, 18 (September–October 1961): 296–8; rpt. in RW, 46– 54, OE, 38–45, and in NFMC, 126–33. The other art conference speech is uncertain, as is the Rochester paper. The Milne paper is “David Milne: An Appreciation,” Here and Now, 1, no. 2 (May 1948): 47–8; rpt. in BG, 203–6, and C, 71–4. “And the magician who escapes from the box: what is he but Adonis and Attis and all the rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise? This is quite plain in the case of Houdini” (Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties [New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950], 151). Wilson’s review appeared in New Yorker, 11 March 1944. Which Ian Fleming thriller NF is reading is uncertain: the plot summary could describe any number of the James Bond stories. “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” (see n. 58, above). The reference is to Eliot’s own note to Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women in The Waste Land, pt. 2, l. 138. NF does not “suggest” anything about Eliot on Middleton in AC. He is apparently referring to a comment he made in TSE, which he wrote about the time of this notebook: “Eliot’s note on his title for this section refers to two plays of Middleton and does not mention The Tempest, but we cannot always trust Eliot’s notes” (69). Eliot actually does not have a note on the title, and he refers only to Women Beware Women in his Middleton note. Johann Kuhnau (1660–1722), Biblical Sonata 2 in G minor (1700) (Der Streit zwischen David und Goliath). This is either Gretchen am Spinnard (1814) or Erlkönig (1815). The allusion is to John 3:5. Paul Tillich, “A Theology of Education,” in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 146–57. NF served as principal of Victoria College from 1959 to 1967. A series of lectures sponsored by the Frank L. Weil Institute for Studies in Religion and the Humanities at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio. NF never presented the Weil lectures, though his colleague A.S.P. Woodhouse did. Notebook 30d

1 Aristotle actually said that plot was the soul of tragedy (Poetics, 1450b). 2 The last two sentences of this entry, written with a ballpoint pen, were a later addition.

404

Notes to pages 301–7

3 In the top margin of the page, with an arrow pointing to the beginning of this entry, NF wrote, “a) mythical & rc. [romantic] inseparable in Greece b) Xy [Christianity] liberated the dream form. c) rc. knight errant and the (miraculous & marvellous) saint’s life. (latter goes to Sp. [Spenser] & P.R. [Paradise Regained] too).” 4 The subtitle is “A Novel without a Hero.” 5 For the five-part classification of heroes in pars. 4–8, see AC, 33–4/31–2. 6 See AC, 34–5/32. 7 Above “might” NF wrote, “may.” 8 On the issue of ghosts, see AC, 50/47. 9 Iliad, bk. 24, ll. 614 ff. See also Odyssey, bk. 6, ll. 45 ff. 10 See AC, 37/35. 11 This is evidently a reference to “Towards a Theory of Cultural History,” which became the backbone of the First Essay of AC; it was published in the University of Toronto Quarterly, 22 (July 1953): 325–41; rpt. in EICT, 150–68. 12 See AC, 38–9/36–7. 13 “The Nature of Satire” (see NB 35, n. 14). NF did incorporate this paper into AC, but it became a part of his theory of myths, rather than his theory of modes. 14 See AC, 192/179, and the fourth note on p. 361/399n. 87. For the many forms of the eniautos-hero, see Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (London: Merlin Press, 1977), chaps. 6 and 8. An annotated copy is in the NFL. 15 See AC, 46/43–4. 16 In reviewing medieval history for evidence of the archetypal presence of Finnegan, Joyce uses “Dyoublong” as a pun on “Dublin” (Finnegans Wake [New York: Viking, 1959], 13). 17 NF is apparently questioning whether “Marvian” is the proper adjective to describe parables about Mary. 18 See AC, 248/229–30. 19 NF did end up with a series of five categories in his “meaning” chapter, the Second Essay of AC. 20 NF did use the “radical of presentation” as one of two principal criteria to distinguish the four genres in the Fourth Essay of AC, the other principle being “rhythm.” 21 The reference here is to NF’s theory of modes in the First Essay of AC, which turned out to have ten, rather than fifteen, thematic modes—five tragic and five comic modes. The triple theme, which NF mentions in par. 23, would evidently have included five ironic modes. 22 See AC, 13/14. 23 For this idea, a variation of which appears in the next line, see AC, 77/71. 24 For this view of imitation and its extensions in the next three entries, see AC, 82–3/76.

Notes to pages 308–19 25 26 27 28

405

See AC, 83/76. See AC, 54–5/51–2. See AC, 52–3/49–50. See n. 10, above. Notebook 30e

1 See NB 7, n. 219. 2 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (see NB 7, n. 108); “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (see NB 7, n. 129); “Three Meanings of Symbolism” (see NB 7, n. 194). The ellipsis is NF’s. 3 See NB 35, n. 28. 4 On 21 February 1952 NF debated Edmund Carpenter of the anthropology department of the University of Toronto. About the discussion that followed their debate, see D, 518. 5 See NB 35, n. 25. 6 “That there is somewhat higher than either of these two [sensual and intellectual perfection], no other proof doth need than the very process of man’s desire, which being natural should be frustrate, if there were not some farther thing wherein it might rest at the length contented, which in the former it cannot do” (Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity [London: Dent, 1907], 1:205). “The desire of Man being Infinite the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite” (William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion, 2nd version, VII [Erdman, 3]). NF quotes both passages in AC, 119/111. 7 See AC, 113/105. 8 Above “one word” NF wrote “Aum,” the sacred word at the beginning of the Chandogya Upanishad. See AC, 126/117. 9 “Towards a Theory of Cultural History” (see NB 30d, n. 11). 10 Xenophanes of Colophon (6th century b.c.e.) in criticizing Homer and Hesiod denied that the gods act dishonourably or that they are anthropomorphic. 11 Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), friend of Titian, wrote abusive works for hire. Because he grew wealthy on gifts from kings and nobles who feared his satires, his attacks on the powerful often amounted to blackmail. 12 “The Nature of Satire” (see NB 35, n. 14). NF incorporated this article, with major revisions, into AC, 223–39/208–23. 13 Above “romantic” NF wrote, “wise old man.” Notebook 30f 1 The word “here” may refer to what NF wrote at the very end of the previous paragraph, which is actually not even a complete word: it appears to begin with “un” and then trails off into something indecipherable.

406

Notes to pages 320–30

2 That is, the thesis advanced in NF’s “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58–78. NF did incorporate this article into the Third Essay of AC. Notebook 30g 1 See NB 7, n. 126. 2 See NB 35, n. 19. 3 “Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it” (Jeremy Bentham, as qtd. in Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill [New York: Macmillan, 1954], 17). See AC, 263/246. 4 On the development of the ideas in this entry, see AC, 273–4/255–6, 278/260. Notebook 30h 1 See AC, 56/53. 2 The reference is to the opposition between the order of nature and the order of grace that NF’s colleague A.S.P. Woodhouse used in his study of Puritanism. See Woodhouse, Introduction to Puritanism and Liberty, Being the Army Debates (1647–9) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 35–60. 3 This chart, in pencil, appears to have been added later. Notebook 30i 1 The reference is to the uncontrolled associative process in Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. See AC, 276/258. 2 See AC, 329/308–9, where NF compares the dissociative rhetoric of 1 John 1:1–3 to the style of Gertrude Stein. 3 See NB 7, n. 204. 4 The reference is to Spengler’s notion of the twentieth century as a “late phase” of Western culture, similar to the Roman phase of Classical culture. See AC, 343/319. 5 This is evidently a reference to the point about the plurality of languages NF makes in the penultimate paragraph of AC. Notebook 30j 1 See par. 1 of “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” FI, 218. 2 NF treats the themes in this entry in the penultimate paragraph of AC.

Notes to pages 330–9

407

3 See NB 18, n. 28. Notebook 30k 1 See AC, 265/247. 2 The “Senecan amble” or Attic prose was “the revolt in the direction of a natural speaking style against the formal half-metrical rhetoric of the Ciceronians” (AC, 264/247). NF takes the phrase from the title of a book by George Williamson. 3 See AC, 351–2/327. On the Vendryes point, see NB 7.223 and n. 203. 4 See AC, 243–4/225–6. NF is referring to his use of Aristotle’s six qualitative parts of tragedy. In the Fourth Essay, NF begins with lexis, melos, and opsis to provide one context for his study of genres. By “the other group,” he means Aristotle’s mythos, ethos, and dianoia, which he has adapted for his own purposes for the earlier sections of AC. 5 The allusion is to the opening line of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where rhetoric is said to be the antistrophos, or answering chorus, of dialectic. Notebook 30l 1 “—But there’s a Tree, of many, one, / A single Field which I have looked upon, / Both of them speak of something that is gone” (William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, ll. 51–3). NF wrote the phrase at the very top of the page, probably at a later time. 2 NF apparently should have written: “connection . . . fits both the hero as the philosopher-ruler and the centripetal focus.” 3 This entry, which appears to have been added at a later time, is in the top margin. 4 To the right of this line NF wrote “or Epic,” with a line pointing to “Epos.” 5 That is, the summer of 1951, when NF was teaching at the University of Washington. “In the summer of 1951, in Seattle,” NF writes, “I had an illumination about the passing from the oracular into the witty: a few years later [in actuality, a year earlier, New Year’s Day, 1950], 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” (LN, 2:621). 6 Beside the entries on the modes, NF has put a large “1” in the right margin; beside the section on thematic modes (“Scripture” through “The Epiphanic”) a large “4”; and beside “Spenglerian Dialectic” through “Humanism & Spiritual Authority,” a large “C.” These are later additions, indicating the subsequent placement of this material into chaps. 1 and 4 and the conclusion.

408

Notes to pages 339–44

7 In the top margin of this page, above the present entry, NF wrote, “Eros,” and then to the right of that word, the following list: Rhet. [Rhetoric] Log. [Logic] Hist. [History] Gr. [Grammar] Notebook 30o–a 1 See NB 36, n. 100. The name Dicaeopolis is significant in that it means righteous city or citizen. See AC, 182/169. 2 L’Ingénu (1767), a philosophical tale by Voltaire; The Biglow Papers (1848, 1867), two series of popular satirical verses, written in Yankee dialect, by James Russell Lowell. 3 Horatio, Hamlet’s faithful friend, and Cléante, the brother-in-law of Orgon in Molière’s Tartuffe, both represent a kind of moral norm. 4 Annotated copies of Norman Douglas, South Wind (London: Penguin, 1935; orig. pub. 1917) and Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (New York: Modern Library, 1932; orig. pub. 1923) are in the NFL. 5 The reference is to Sir Richard Burton, whose version of The Thousand and One Nights (1885–88) is the best-known English translation. 6 Shahryer is the King to whom Scheherazade tells her stories in The Thousand and One Nights. Sassanides was the name of the Persian dynasty, founded by Artaxerxes, which lasted from the fall of the Parthians in c.e. 226 until the invasion of the Arabs in the seventh century c.e. The empire stretched from the Indus to the Nile, from Yemen to the Caucasus. 7 Boece (1465–1536) was a chronicler and one of the founders of the University of Aberdeen; his Scotorum Historiae in seventeen books was published in Paris in 1527. 8 Above the line here NF wrote, “Teut-Celt-Norm [Teutonic-Celtic-Norman].” 9 The Poly-Olbion (1613–22), Michael Drayton’s topographical poem on England, is interspersed with legends, fragments of history, catalogues of saints, and the like. 10 Sir John Mandeville was the ostensible author of travel books bearing his name; the forgeries, written in French, recorded various journeys he purportedly took to the East. Richard Hakluyt (ca. 1522–1616) and Samuel Purchas (ca. 1575–1626) devoted themselves to collecting and publishing accounts of English explorations. Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625) is partially based on a manuscript left by Hakluyt. 11 Legendary Christian monarch of a vast, wealthy empire in Asia or Africa; the legend about Prester John first appeared in the latter part of the twelfth century. 12 John de Trevisa (1326–1402), translator of Ranulf Hidgen’s Polychronicon and

Notes to pages 344–7

13

14

15 16 17 18 19

409

other works; Michael Drayton (1563–1631), author of Poly-Olbion (see n. 9, above) and vast amounts of other verse, historical and religious; Thomas Fuller (1608–61), author of numerous historical works, the best-known being The Worthies of England (1662). Natalis Comes’ Mythologiae (1551) was the most popular of the Renaissance mythographic manuals; it went through nineteen editions in the seventy-five years following its first appearance. Henry Reynolds (fl. 1627–32), friend of Michael Drayton and author of Mythomystes (1632), which systematically applied Neoplatonism to the interpretation of poetry; John Selden (1584–1654), eminent lawyer who won fame as an Orientalist. Robert Herrick (1591–1674), English poet; Barnabe Googe (1540–94), English poet and translator. Here follows NF’s draft for his essay on liberal education (see headnote). This chart appears in the top margin of p. 15 of the notebook, above the conclusion to the draft of his essay on liberal education. Here follow NF’s speculations on the Bardo novel (see headnote). Here follow a series of examination questions for NF’s course in nineteenthcentury thought and his review of F.S.C. Northrop’s book (see headnote). Notebook 30q

1 See NB 35, n. 66. 2 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 12 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1890–1915). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 3 The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans. A.A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, 1935). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 4 C.G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1916). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 5 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1926, 1928). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 6 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Holt, 1911). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 7 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–61). 8 E.K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903). 9 E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923). 10 E.K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: 11 Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933).

410

Notes to pages 347–8

12 Francis M. Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 13 Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 14 Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (New York: Holt, 1913). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 15 Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908). 16 Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic: Being a Course of Lectures Delivered at Harvard University, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). 17 Gilbert Murray, Aeschylus: The Creator of Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). 18 Gilbert Murray, The Classical Tradition in Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927). 19 The meaning of this and the subsequent “L” notations is uncertain. They may refer to items on what NF called his “Locke reading program,” though the references to that in the notebooks are ordinarily in a nineteenth-century context. 20 Gilbert Murray, Aristophanes: A Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1933). 21 G.M.A. Grube, The Drama of Euripides (London: Methuen, 1941). 22 G.M.A. Grube, Plato’s Thought (London: Methuen, 1935). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 23 C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, trans. H.G. Baynes (London: Kegan Paul, 1923). 24 Bertha Surtees Phillpotts, The Elder Edda & Ancient Scandinavian Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). 25 V.P. Grønbech, The Culture of the Teutons (London: H. Milford; Oxford University Press, 1931). 26 Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty: A Poem in Four Books (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930). An annotated copy of Bridge’s Poetical Works, containing The Testament of Beauty, is in the NFL. 27 W.P. Ker, Epic and Romance: Essays on Medieval Literature, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1908). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 28 W.P. Ker, The Dark Ages (London: Nelson, 1904). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 29 Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (New York: International Publishers, 1947). 30 Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1938). 31 Denis de Rougemont, L’Amour et l’Occident (Paris: Plon, 1947).

Notes to pages 348–9

411

32 Axel Olrik, Viking Civilization, trans. Jacob Wittmer Hartmann and Hanna Astrup Larsen (New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation; W.W. Norton, 1930). 33 T.D. Kendrick, A History of the Vikings (New York: Scribner’s, 1930). 34 H. Munro Chadwick, The Heroic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 35 H. Munro Chadwick, The Cult of Othin: An Essay in the Ancient Religion of the North (London: Clay, 1899). 36 H. Munro Chadwick, The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907). 37 Enid Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927). 38 Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936). An annotated copy is in the NFL. 39 W.W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama: A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in England (London: A.H. Bullen, 1906). 40 Charles Read Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929). 41 John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London: Printed by and for the editor, 1788). 42 William Winter, Shakespeare’s England (Boston: Joseph Knight, 1892). 43 See NB 7, n. 121.

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Index

Abel, 35 Abraham, 35 Achilles, 16, 32; shield of, 290 Act, 142–3, 241; creative, 4, 26; free, 285, 287; heroic, 8, 26, 324; Milton on, 26, 28, 29 Action, 293 Acts of the Apostles, 55 Adam, 48, 227; creation of, 122; and Eve, 37, 65; and the serpent, 22 Adonis, 10, 25, 106, 140; and Eros, 98, 101, 108–9, 111; gardens of, 109; lament, 135; and Venus, 207 Aeneas, 11–12, 22, 61 Aeschylus (ca. 525–ca. 456 B.C.E.), 139, 240; Oresteia, 44, 90, 105 Aesthetics, 271 Africa, 344 Agape, 162; and Eros, 316 Agon, 5, 31, 32 Agrippa, Cornelius (1486–1535), ass figure in, 179 Alazon, 219 Albion (Blake character), 12, 64, 316, 343; and Jesus, 22; and metamorphosis myths, 122 Alchemy, 17, 49, 133, 219, 230 Alexander the Great (356–323 b.c.e.), 249

Allegory, 21, 81, 107, 130–1, 137, 206, 278, 312; and anagogy, 42; and archetype, 210, 218; and criticism, 54, 71, 137; and fictional names, 216; as level of meaning, 42, 128; and rhetoric, 208, 281; in Spenser, 5, 16, 67, 107; vs. symbolism, 102, 216 Ambiguity, 103, 114, 130, 136–7, 143, 222. See also Paronomasia America. See United States of America Amos (prophet), and oracular form, 162 Anabasis, 181, 184; levels of, 279 Anagnorisis (cognitio, recognition), 81, 106, 125, 131, 135, 158, 199, 200, 232, 234; and memory, 169 Anagogy/Anagogics, 30, 60, 62, 132, 180, 206, 215; and allegory, 42; vs. archetype, 190, 199, 206, 224; grammar of, 51; as level of meaning, 63, 164, 268, 314; in the Renaissance, 3; theory of, 211, 335 Anak, and Og, 11 Analogy, 65, 270, 281; Blake’s conception of, 65; and metaphor, 281, 319; table of, 107–8, 125, 218 Anatomy (form), 67, 134–5, 328; and

414 encyclopedic form, 178, 308; in Plato, 142; and romance, 163, 173, 185, 239 Andromeda, 167 Anglicanism, anti-Roman mythology in, 344 Anglo-Israelitism, 295 Angst, 36, 38; and existentialism, 315 Anima, 101, 133, 313 Animal, creator as, 122 Antichrist, 119, 219; the Pope as, 7; Roman Catholic Church as, 344 Aphorism(s), 76, 93, 141, 142, 161, 162, 171, 184, 231; Kierkegaard and, 173; and law, 74; Nietzsche and, 328; and possession, 280. See also Fragmentation; Kernels Apocalypse, 45, 157, 174–5, 188, 190, 316, 326; and creation, 295; and Druid analogy, 170, 206, 274, 336; as image pattern, 318; as mode, 162, 174–5, 336 Apocalyptic imagery. See under Bible, imagery of Apocryphas, four, 56, 63 Apollo, 290; and Dionysus, 110, 243, 302–3 Apuleius, Lucius (ca. c.e. 125–ca. 180), 9, 190; ass figure in, 179 Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225–74), 4, 17, 24, 275, 239; universal real in, 134. See also Thomism Arabia, 344 Arabian Nights, 308, 343 Ararat, Mount, 290 Araunah, 21 Archetypal criticism, 54, 55, 71, 82–3, 124, 164, 180, 189, 196, 228, 244, 313; critics resistant to, 214, 313 Archetype(s), 8–16 passim, 78, 81, 101–4, 140, 146, 167, 172, 187–91, 204, 206–11 passim, 222, 223, 249–

Index 50, 256, 312–13, 316–17, 330, 344; and allegory, 210, 218; vs. anagogy, 190, 199, 206, 224; conspectus of, 120; of history, 117, 140; how to read, 197–8, 216; Jungian, 8–12, 96, 147, 187; modal and structural, 157– 8, 166, 170–1, 175, 180, 185, 187, 188, 200, 210, 300–1, 304; and myth, 72, 196, 257, 300; and romance, 91; and symbols, 138; three sources of, 238; wheel of, 160, 183, 185, 322–3. See also Archetypal criticism; Jung, Carl Gustav; individual authors’ names Architecture, 115, 133, 134, 145 Aretino, Pietro (1492–1557), and satire, 315 Ariosto, Ludovico (1474–1533), 8, 31, 33, 66, 67, 288; allegory in, 21; and epic tradition, 3–5; and Spenser, 21, 32, 65; Orlando Furioso (1532), 5, 16, 67 Aristophanes (ca. 448–ca. 388 b.c.e.), 142, 342; The Acharnians (425 b.c.e.), 178, 233, 290, 342; The Clouds (423 B.C.E.), 19, 178 Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), 47, 83, 138, 150, 163, 213, 217, 262; on anagorisis, 234, 270; Aristotelian chain, see Chain of Being; on chastity, 26; on comedy, 84; on drama, 331; first mover in, 44, 50; hamartia in, 179, 243; imitation in, 69, 307; on metaphor, 173; on mimesis, 301, 308; on nature, 68, 103, 115, 141; vs. Plato, 105; praxis in, 238; on property, 116; and Roman Catholic Church, 23; on tragedy, 237; Physics, 46, 91, 132; Poetics, 92, 205–6, 237–8, 267, 279, 301, 333; Rhetoric, 141, 151, 208, 241, 333 Arnold, Matthew (1822–88), 120, 126, 203, 229, 263, 293; on the church,

Index 289; on culture, 47, 72, 124, 186, 234; dandyism in, 265; dialectic in, 204; value judgments in, 148 Arthur, King, 5 Arthurian legends, 31; in Spenser, 41–2 Artist, and will, 146 Art(s), 51–4, 61, 129, 144–6, 169, 191, 233, 244–5, 269, 283–4, 315; and beauty, 144, 285; and evolutionary hypotheses, 46, 212, 227; function of, 144, 234, 235; and mathematics, 90, 145, 203, 255; morality in, 305; and nature, 27–8, 271–3, 287; and religion, 203–4, 314; vs. science, 145, 287, 331; as speechless, 52, 54; value of, 124, 144–5 Association, 280, 333 Astrea, 272 Athanasian Creed, 167, 319 Athena, 22, 75, 228, 246, 341 Atlantis, 344 Atlas symbolism, 11 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907–73), 16, 234; irony in, 107; The Enchafèd Flood (1950), 313; For the Time Being (1944), 107, 109 & n. 269 Augsburg, Diet of, 138 Augustine, St. (c.e. 354–430), 56, 76, 277, 344; and cyclical history, 243 Austen, Jane (1775–1817), 302; structure of comedy in, 247; Emma (1816), 216; Pride and Prejudice (1813), 282 Avatamsaka Sutra, 85, 225, 286, 293 Avesta, 69 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus (ca. c.e. 480–524), 56 Babble, 81, 93, 172, 311; associative, 93, 285; and doodle, 151, 173, 196, 198, 199, 322, 327

415 Babel, tower of, 186, 187, 194, 203, 204, 225, 330 Babylon, as symbol, 17, 19, 33 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750): Aeolus Cantata (Cantata 205), 295; Goldberg Variations (1741), 144; Mass in B minor (1749), 247 Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans and Baron Verulam (1561–1626), 114, 196, 234–5, 239, 331; inductive leap in, 57, 227, 349 Bacon, Roger (ca. 1214–92), on educational reform, 72 Balaam’s ass, 10 Ballad, 182; relation to epic, 68 Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1856), 289– 90, 294; and irony, 302 Bardo, 41, 42, 118, 194, 221, 222 Baroque age, 164, 251; epic in, 5; high mimetic in, 302 Barrow, Samuel (1625–82): In Paradisium Amissam, 30 & n. 82 Barth, Karl (1886–1968), 6, 39, 144 Baskervill, Charles Read (1872–1935): The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama (1929), 348 Bateau ivre, 85, 111, 218, 290 Battle of Maldon, The, 240 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821–67), 185; Correspondances (1857), 291 Bayley, Harold, 8, 164; The Lost Language of Symbolism (1912), 8 & n. 14, 40 Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de (1732–99): The Guilty Mother (1792), 191 Beauty, 144, 193; in art, 285; and truth, 145 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–89), 285 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827), 283; his notebooks, 97; Diabelli

416 Waltz Variations (op. 120), 144; Hammerklavier (op. 106) (1819), 129; Piano Concerto No. 4 in G (op. 58) (1807), 144; Symphony No. 9 (op. 125, Choral Symphony) (1827), 134, 296 Behemoth, 12 Belief, 293, 298 Bell, (Arthur) Clive Howard (1881– 1964), 281 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832), 116, 120, 216; on poetry, 213, 322 Beowulf, 8, 9, 13, 14, 31, 33, 65, 68, 161, 167, 188; and cyclical history, 243 Bergson, Henri (1859–1941), 39, 169, 197, 247, 261; Creative Evolution (1907), 284, 347 Berkeley, George (1685–1753), esse est percipi, 242 Bernard of Clairvaux, St. (1090–1153), 5 Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo (1598– 1680), 144 Beulah, 21, 42, 62, 64, 81, 158, 170, 190, 193, 194, 303; and Eden, 19, 41, 102, 104; and Generation, 44–5, 90, 104, 163; and irony, 84; in Milton, 27; in Spenser, 22, 23, 34, 35, 64 Bevan, Edwyn Robert (1870–1943): Symbolism and Belief (1938), 203 Bible, 6, 49, 51, 54–5, 57–60 passim, 134, 139, 142, 155, 240, 271, 276, 325, 339; and criticism, 71, 188; cyclical movement in, 243; and Dante, 288; as epic, 40, 64, 65, 66, 68, 104, 207, 254, 266, 277; fallen and unfallen worlds in, 16–17; and history, 140, 248; as literary, 184, 211; in Milton, 16; and myth, 111, 260, 324; shape of, 13, 245, 288, 293, 336; in Spenser, 16, 339–40; symbolism of, 17, 25, 55, 155–6, 344

Index Bibliolatry, Protestant, 72 Biography, and criticism, 53–4, 129, 131, 148 Biology, 133, 134; archetypal and evolutionary hypotheses in, 227; and sculpture, 133–4, 144–5, 217, 293 Blackmore, Richard Doddridge (1825–1900): Lorna Doone (1869), 247 Blake, William (1757–1827), 4, 13–14, 20–3 passim, 29, 60, 61, 101, 115–16, 136, 140, 148, 156, 175, 178, 186, 206, 211, 217, 266, 295, 297, 315, 319, 336; archetypes in, 170, 185; on art, 223, 245; and Court of Love, 106–7; on deism, 27; on desire, 314; Druid analogy in, 67; in epic tradition, 6, 16, 77, 276, 277; imagination in, 28, 292; innocence and experience in, 264; Job in, 32; on Locke, 262; on memory, 39, 90; numbers in, 20; and Plato, 212; Polypus in, 133; relation to Spenser and Milton, 16; sun symbolism in, 13, 15; Thel in, 98, 109, 292; “thought is act,” 238; on time, 37 – works: Everlasting Gospel, The, 251; Europe (1794), 95; The Four Zoas (ca. 1796–1807), 10, 20, 22, 51, 64; Jerusalem (Prophecy, 1804–20), 15; The Little Girl Lost (1789, 1794), 109; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), 22, 40, 328; Milton (1804–8), 110, 264, 292; Prophecies, 103; Songs of Innocence (1789), 103, 184. See also Albion; Los; Luvah; Nobodaddy; Orc; Tharmas; Tirzah; Ulro; Urizen; Urthona Blanshard, Brand (1892–1987): On Philosophical Style (1953), 227 Blavatsky, Madame, née Helena

Index Petrovna Hahn (1831–91), 8, 21, 40, 164; mezzanine world in, 118 Boaz, and Jachin, 20 Boccaccio, Giovanni (1313–75): Decameron (1358), 282, 342, 343 Bodhidharma, 186 Bodhisattva(s), 296; do not write, 268 Bodkin, Maud (1875–1967): Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934), 264 Boece, Hector (1465–1536): Scotorum Historiae (1527), 343 Boethius Anicius Manlius Severinus (ca. c.e. 480–524), and cyclical history, 243 Boiardo, Matteo Maria (1434–94): Orlando innamorato (1483), 67 Boileau (-Despreaux), Nicolas (1636– 1711), 29 Bondage, 178 Boswell, James (1740–95): Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), 242 Brahms, Johannes (1833–97), 150 Bridges, Robert (1844–1930): Testament of Beauty (1929), 348 Britain, as analogy of Jerusalem, 17 Brontë, Charlotte (1816–55): Jane Eyre (1847), 217 Brontë, Emily (1818–48): Wuthering Heights (1837), 222 Brooks, Cleanth (1906–94), 237; on Macbeth, 42 Brown, E(dward) K(illoran) (1905– 51): Holy Spirit in, 133; on structural analysis, 132, 138 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–82), 76 Browning, Robert (1812–89), 280; irony in, 107; Cleon (1855), 107; Epistle of Karshish (1855), 107 Buddha (Prince Gautama Siddhartha) (ca. 563–ca. 483 b.c.e.), did not write, 126, 268, 280

417 Buddhism, 141, 204, 242; dream in, 250 Bunyan, John (1628–88), 67, 280, 342; The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84), 107, 216 Burke, Edmund (1729–97), 120, 215, 227, 229, 262; Bentham–Coleridge antithesis in, 120; continuous world in, 290; trouble with his philosophy, 116 Burke, Kenneth (1897–1993), on rhetoric, 239 Burlesque, 90 Burns, Robert (1759–96), 148; John Barleycorn (1787), 109, 156 Burton, Robert (1577–1640), 194 Burton, Sir Richard Francis (1821–90): trans., The Thousand and One Nights (1885–88), 343 Burtt, Edwin Arthur (1892–1989), on Newton and Einstein, 46 Bush, Douglas (1896–1983), 54 Butler, Samuel (1835–1902), 120, 169, 212, 252, 262; on biology, 230; dandyism in, 265; on known and unknown God, 133, 225, 297; on habit, 250; ritual in, 203, 204, 229; on unconscious knowledge, 339; on writing, xviii; The Way of All Flesh (1903), 265 Byron, George Gordon (Baron Byron of Rochdale) (1788–1824), 280; Arimanes in, 273, 290; Ishmael in, 231; and reader over his shoulder, 97; Heaven and Earth (1821), 9 Caesar (generic), 9, 26, 59, 74, 249; divine, 119 Cain, 61, 304; and Abel, 25 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro (1600– 81), 283 Calliope, 135

418 Calvin, John (1509–64), 48 Calvinism, 28; cult of the leader in, 117 Cambridge University, 164, 331 Camoëns (Camões, Luis de) (1524– 80), 31 Canada: painting in, 16; poetry in, 73; relation to Britain, 299 Cantillation 321, 322. See also Chanting Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), 25, 27, 36, 116, 120, 124, 195, 215, 229, 293; on everlasting no, 176; hero or great man in, 26, 142, 173; on intrinsic and extrinsic symbols, 169, 213; and Marxism, 116; on work, xviii, 4, 26, 38, 116; Sartor Resartus (1833– 34), 62, 169, 265 Carnap, Rudolf (1891–1970), 52; on affective statements, 90; descriptive logic in, 129 Carnegie, Dale (1888–1955): How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), 189 Carpenter, Edmund Snow (b. 1922), NF’s debate with, 312 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832–98): Alice books, 126 Cartesianism, 62, 85, 136, 142, 225, 262. See also Descartes Carthage, as symbol, 156, 277 Cassirer, Ernst (1874–1945), 39, 45, 117, 223, 225, 228, 252; on symbol, 57, 136; An Essay on Man (1944), 235 Castiglione, Baldassarre, Conte di Novilava (1478–1529), 118; The Courtier (1528), 26, 35, 342 Catharsis, 223, 305 Catholicism, 71, 94–5, 116, 138, 172–3, 298, 311, 325; and dandyism, 265;

Index and irony, 94, 305; and mysticism, 29; ritual in, 35 Caudwell (St. John Sprigg), Christopher (1907–37): on Rimbaud, 156, 169; Illusion and Reality (1937), 348; Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), 348 Causality, 142; and continuity, 142 Cave drawings, Palaeolithic, 106 Centrifugal vs. centripetal: education, 297; genres, 239; intention, 245–7, 286–7; meaning, 59, 73, 81–3, 88, 93, 102–3, 121, 125, 136, 144–5, 172, 311–12 Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616): and satire, 304; Don Quixote (1605– 15), 104, 108, 135 Cézanne, Paul (1839–1906), 44; his theory of painting, 16 Chadwick, H(ector) Munro (1870– 1947): The Cult of Othin (1899), 348; The Heroic Age (1926), 348; The Origin of the English Nation (1907), 348 Chain of being, 6, 14, 17, 19, 22–3, 27, 28, 38, 50, 85, 147, 262; and vortex, 38, 40 Chambers, Sir Edmund Kerchever (1866–1954): The Elizabethan Stage (1923), 347; The Mediaeval Stage (1903), 347; William Shakespeare (1930), 347 Chambers, R(aymond) W(ilson) (1874–1942), and literary criticism, 164 Chanson de Roland, 31 Chanting, 321; and cantillation, 181– 2; vs. singing, 94, 168, 182, 321 Chaplin, Sir Charles (Charlie) Spencer (1889–1977), 331 Chapman, George (ca. 1559–1634), 344 Charlemagne (ca. 742–814), 48

Index Charles I (1600–49), as dandy, 265 Charybdis, 247 Chase, Richard: The Quest for Myth (1949), 67 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345–1400), 5, 65, 66, 74, 148, 277, 322; has flavour of the Renaissance, 251; on the number 28, 20; Canterbury Tales, 176; The House of Fame, 108; The Knight’s Tale, 75; The Man of Law’s Tale, 32 Chemistry, 133 Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (1874– 1936), 281; as an anti-dandy, 265; and cyclical history, 243 Child, Philip Albert Gillette (1898– 1978), 45 Chimera, 122 Chivalry, 9, 33 Christ, 9, 11, 12, 29, 41, 66, 71, 108, 138, 324; body of, 17, 60, 73; as erotic, 98; as history, 68; and Oedipus, 101. See also Jesus; Messiah Christianity, 8, 26, 37, 68, 69, 94, 126, 142, 163, 203, 212, 284, 319; concept of belief in, 298; and Court of Love, 251; and cyclical history; 68, 69, 243; death in, 283; vs. Eastern religions, 161; epic in, 92, 273; and immortality, 30; and law, 23, 118; and Marxism, 115; and myth, 312; and reincarnation, 296; ritual in, 168; and witchcraft, 288; and the Word, 138, 141 Christian Science, 295 Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626– 89), 48 Chronicles, Books of, 20 Church, 12, 35, 55, 57, 59, 70, 71, 72, 73, 119, 176, 204; body of, 60; and distortion of history, 291, 292; priority of, 6; and the Word, 7, 73

419 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 b.c.e.), 143, 227, 284; De Oratore, 86, 143, 162, 176; Somnium Scipionis, 277 Cinderella, 305 Circle of fifths, 273–6 & n. 41, 278 City imagery, 17, 33, 61, 156, 319; and garden imagery, 145, 261 Claritas, 50, 52, 63, 349 Class: and individual, 318; social, 149 Classical Age/Classicism, 7, 135, 344; art–nature topos in, 271; drama of, 249; epic in, 74, 273; genre theory in, 306; and the Renaissance, 126; vs. Romanticism, 216, 285, 303. See also Greece; Rome; Egypt Claudel, Paul (1868–1955), 190 Clichés, 278, 287 Clio, 135 Coincidence, 21, 248 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772– 1834), 81, 120, 203, 215, 280, 281; on Defoe, 181; on fancy, 90, 126; on ideas, 253; on imagination, 82, 88; on philosophers, 105; on pleasure, 90; symbolism vs. allegory in, 216; Biographia Literaria (1817), 88, 309; Christabel (1797–98), 84, 89, 91, 185; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), 86, 90, 180 Colet, John (ca. 1467–1519), sermons on Paul, 71 College English (periodical), 225 Colossians, Epistle to the, 22 Columbia University: NF lectures at (Bampton lectures), xxv, 289, 293, 294; NF teaches at, 108 Comedy, 4, 28, 36, 43, 84, 101, 165, 203, 207, 210, 243, 246, 248, 257, 277, 344; anagnorisis in, 106; dandyism in, 264–5; goal of, 180; hero in, 118, 142, 187, 302; and irony, 184; and myth, 242; New, 67, 75, 304, 339;

420 and romance, 30, 66, 220, 246, 316; social opposition in, 341; structure of, 247, 316; and tragedy, 51, 144, 152, 166, 190, 199, 212, 231, 249, 255, 303, 337 Comes, Natalis (Natale Conti) (1520– 82), 344 Commandment, 74, 76, 93, 161, 171, 178, 231, 333; and romance, 173 Commedia dell’arte, 198 Comminution, xix, 153, 171, 172–3, 195, 199, 211, 223, 270, 327, 328; and lyric, 255, 272; of poetry, 87, 92; and satire, 152, 173, 178, 185, 196, 201, 239, 254, 255, 272; and unification, 192. See also Fragmentation; Disintegration; Disunity; Sparagmos Communism, 98, 124, 227, 253, 298; cult of the leader in, 116–17, 119, 203; and epistle/encyclical form, 162, 172, 311; hero in, 143; and Marxism, 118, 186. See also Marxism Community, 311, 313, 315; and the individual, 303; and nature, 144 Comparative literature, 222 Confession, 76, 134–5, 163, 171; and encyclopedic form, 308 Confucianism, 291; law in, 118 Confucius (K’ung Fu–tzu) (551–479 b.c.e.), 117; Analects, 291 Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924), 111, 274, 276; Lord Jim (1900), 165, 277 Conservatism, vs. Liberalism, 116 Consonantia, 50, 63, 132, 349 Continuity, 142–3, 298; vs. discontinuity, 297 Convention, 131, 168, 175, 190, 218, 232, 238, 314, 328; irrationality of, 277, 279, 287 Conversation, 298 Copernicus, Nicolas (1473–1543), 264, 343

Index Corbière, Tristan (1845–75), 272 Cornford, F(rancis) M(acdonald) (1874–1943), 304; on the Olympics, 168; The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914), 347 Cosmology, 286, 287 Council of Trent, 6 Counterpoint, 213, 214, 217, 220 Counter-reformation, 138 Court of Love symbolism, 17, 22, 25, 36, 40, 95, 107, 164, 232, 246, 265; as counterpoint to Christianity, 251; and epic, 5–6; in Spenser, 34, 35, 67. See also Chivalry Covering Cherub, 17, 22–3, 43, 61, 122 Cowley, Abraham (1618–67), 126, 135, 230 Crane, R(onald) S(almon) (1886– 1967), 205, 237–8; The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953), 169, 314 Crashaw, Richard (1612–49), 232 Creation, 295, 325, 326, 331; myths, 122; will in, 179 Creative process, 28 Criticism (literary), 14, 46, 50–9 passim, 90–1, 99, 104, 105, 161, 227, 232, 244, 349; anthropological/ sociological, 52, 124; archetypal, see Archetypal criticism; and the Bible, 188–9; biographical, 123, 129; centrifugal, 131–2; contemporary, 73, 226, 309; as creative, 265; critic vs. critical reader, 247; higher, 53–4, 71, 188; historical, 123–4, 148–9, 164, 203, 291; levels of, 55–6, 60, 71, 99, 123–4, 156; lower, 52–4, 71, 188; Marxist, 124, 129, 131, 195; myth, 129; psychological, 129, 164; quantum theory of, 201, 210; rules in, 183, 248; tropical, 123–4; value judgments in, 25–6, 53–4, 123, 129,

Index 138–9, 145, 148, 150, 213, 230, 249, 267–8, 286 Croesus, oracle of, 94 Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), and Milton, 24, 48 Cronos, 272 Cross, as symbol, 187 Crusade(s), 5, 69 Cuddle, 246–7 Culture: Arnold on, 186; autonomy of, 186 Cummings, E(dward) E(stlin) (1894– 1962), 168, 169, 182, 275, 322 Cupid, and Psyche, 207 Cycle(s), 31, 61–2, 156, 200, 318; historical, 243; of libido and ego, 206; life and death, 192, 200; of nature, 206; of the seasons, 171–2, 200, 207; of the sun, 200; of waking and dreaming, 200; white goddess and black bride, 109 Dadaism, 173, 327 Daedalus, 328 Damon, S(amuel) Foster (1893–1971), on Blake and Shakespeare, 206 Dandyism, 264–5 Daniel, Book of, 20, 22 Danse macabre, 342 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 7, 8, 12, 20, 21, 33, 34, 43, 55–61 passim, 67, 68, 72–4, 87, 93, 109, 111, 113, 143, 155, 166, 170–2, 175, 177, 187, 193–5, 200, 222, 232, 267, 274, 289, 294, 315, 324, 335–40 passim; and allegory, 21, 42, 59–61, 68; Amor-Roma in, 5, 10, 25, 59; anabasis and katabasis in, 181; and Beatrice, 187, 319; and the Bible, 288; and epic tradition, 4–6, 16, 207, 211, 254, 266; God in, 325; green world in, 17; Hell in, 19; literal and historical in, 312; levels of

421 meaning in, 42, 55–7, 59, 129; and Milton, 24; Purgatory in, 6, 19, 190; and Sidney, 42; and Spenser, 24, 32, 65; sun in, 6, 270, 271; and Virgil, 187; vortex in, 263; as the Word, 49– 51; Convivio, 73 & n. 176; De Monarchia, 6; The Divine Comedy, 31, 34, 38, 43, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 104, 218, 270, 289; Inferno, 107, 191, 240, 247, 282; letter to Can Grande, 60; Paradiso, 6, 21, 74, 192, 279; Purgatorio, 187, 215, 233, 278; Vita Nuova, 281 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82), 263, 280; art as Darwinian, 212; evolution in, 290 Darwinism, 121; relation to English thought, 120 David, King (1000–965/961 b.c.e.), 35, 48, 55, 333 Da Vinci, Leonardo (1452–1519), on art, 169 Defoe, Daniel (1660–1731), 181, 301; Robinson Crusoe (1719), 282 Degas, Edgar (1834–1917), on beauty, 186 Deism, 27, 30, 37 De la Mare, Walter (1873–1956): fairies in, 256; The Return (1910), 342 Delight and instruction, 89–90, 145, 289 Deloney, Thomas (ca. 1550–1600), 42 Democracy, 124 Deor, 231 Descartes, René (1596–1650), 62, 244, 262. See also Cartesianism Descriptive writing, 311 Desire, and habit, 338 Detective fiction, 248, 304 Devil(s), 194 Dialectic, 69–71, 92, 98, 137, 180, 253– 4, 324–5; criticism, 203–4; four phases of, 87; incarnation of, 119,

422 143; and myth, 69, 121; and political action, 117; and rhetoric, 149, 208, 238–9, 253 Diana, 25 Dianoia, 175, 181, 216, 237–8, 241, 289, 306, 316; and mythos, 169, 191, 198, 200, 284, 305, 307–8, 333 Dickens, Charles (1812–70), 277; Bleak House (1852–53), 217, 277; A Christmas Carol (1843), 216; David Copperfield (1850), 277; Great Expectations (1860–61), 111, 263, 282; Little Dorrit (1855–57), 277; Nicholas Nickleby (1839), 280; The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), 280 Dido, 22, 32; and Rahab, 12 Dionysus, 108, 172, 184, 290; and Apollo, 110, 243, 302–3 Discontinuity, 280; vs. continuity, 297 Discursive writing, 63 Dithyramb, 211 Dog symbolism, 9 Dominican order, 70 Don Juan, 296 Donne, John (1572–1631), 126, 137, 148; archetypes in, 185; satiric mode in, 168; and Schiller, 168; Anniversaries (1611–12), 184 Doodle. See Babble, and doodle Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81): Notes from Underground (1864), 285 Dougherty, Charles T., NF’s indebtedness to, 217 Douglas, (George) Norman (1868– 1952): South Wind (1917), 342 Dragon: myths of killing, 165, 187, 199, 248, 249, 325; as past, 199; symbolism, 230 Drama, 45, 76, 78, 150, 180, 181–4, 318, 321; circle of, 171, 172, 175, 221; and cycle of seasons, 171–2; dream in,

Index 164; and epic, 7, 43, 51, 142; and epos, 239; and lyric, 87, 92–3, 97, 170, 171, 175, 206, 221, 239, 307; and myth, 7–8; plot in, 330; and ritual, 7; time in, 142; tragedy and comedy in, 166. See also Comedy; Tragedy Drayton, Michael (1563–1631), 344; Poly-Olbion (1612–22), 343 Dream of the Rood, The, 49 Dream(s), 125, 284, 294, 319; desiring, 164–5; in the Middle Ages, 12; and narrative, 236; private and public, 338; and ritual, 155–6, 174, 198, 207, 229, 238, 250, 284, 313, 314, 328, 338; in romance, 96, 303; and waking, 157, 313 Dreiser, Theodore Herman Albert (1871–1945): American Tragedy (1925), 90 Druid analogy, 62, 111, 166, 170, 193, 273–4; in Blake, 67; in Spenser, 22, 193 Druids and Druidism, 75–6, 82, 94, 162–3, 180, 303, 336; symbolism, 83, 175, 176, 206, 316, 318 Dryden, John (1631–1700), 332; on Milton, 16; Absalom and Achitophel (1681), 20; “Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy,” 284 Dunbar, Helen Flanders (1902–59), 217; Symbolism in Medieval Thought and Its Consummation in the Divine Comedy (1929), 6, 60, 61 Durandus, William (Guillaume Durand) (ca. 1230–96), 59 Düring, Eugen Karl (1833–1921), 280 Dyer, Sir Edward (1543–1607): My Mind to me a Kingdom is, 231 Dying-god symbolism, 333 Earle, John (ca. 1601–65), 86 Earth-mother goddess, 167

Index Eastern religions, vs. Christianity, 161. See also Buddhism; Hinduism; Taoism; Yoga Ecclesiastes, Book of, 233 Echo, and Narcissus, 167 Eckhart, Meister (Johannes Eckhart) (ca. 1260–1327), 118, 186; and mystical doctrine, 85 Economics, 271 Eddas, 31, 68, 69, 78. See also Elder Edda; Prose Edda Eddington, Sir Arthur Stanley (1882– 1944), 85 Eden, 17, 18, 25, 64, 81, 158, 303; and Beulah, 19, 41, 102, 104 Education, 125, 293; centripetal vs. centrifugal, 297; liberal, 91, 139, 190, 315 Ego, 247, 250, 285 Egypt, ancient, 7, 118, 325; exodus from, 277; as symbol, 17, 19, 156 Eighteenth century, 164; romance in, 303 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), 46, 139 Eiron (role), 290, 292; retracting, 4 Eisenhower, Dwight David (1890– 1969), 263 Elaine, 294 Elder Edda, 199, 302 Elegy, 7, 135 Elijah, 21, 55, 333; and priests of Baal, 105 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819–80): Middlemarch (1871), 219 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888–1965), xix, 49, 126, 211, 272, 295; and cyclical history, 243; dandyism in, 265; disconnection in, 125; irony in, 107; and meditation, 281; Middleton references in, 294; on humility, 290–1; and tradition, 47; the Word in, 103; Ash-Wednesday (1930), 223; Burnt

423 Norton (1935), 218; The Dry Salvages (1941), 243; East Coker (1940), 109; Four Quartets (1935–42), 184, 222, 243, 297; Gerontion (1920), 332; The Hollow Men (1925), 222; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), 221, 285; The Rock (1934), 107; Sweeney Agonistes (1932), 177; The Waste Land (1922), 222, 243, 277, 281 Elisha, 176 Elizabeth I (1533–1603), 25, 67, 251; as archetype, 250; plots against, 72 Elizabethan age, 343; and Classical age, 344; and nationalism, 344; nature in, 36 Emblem(s), 162, 322 Empson, William (1906–84), 237 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 57 Encyclopedic form, 186, 192, 194, 211, 215, 283, 288, 308; and existentialism, 257 Encyclopedic tendency, 153, 207, 223, 244 Endymion, 25, 343 Engels, Friedrich (1820–95): AntiDühring (1878), 280 England, 344; civil war in, 343; green world vs. historical world of, 41–2; and monarchy, 48; speech habits in, 287; in Spenser, 67 Epic, 7, 42–3, 68–70, 74, 76–9, 87, 96–7, 199, 266; Christian, 29, 69–70, 74, 92; as class-bound, 328; classical, 29, 181; dream in, 164; and existentialism, 257; fragmentation in, 173, 327; function of, 8; heroic act in, 8, 26; point of return in, 282; and Protestantism, 71; quest and unity in, 74, 277; and romance, 30; and satire, 342; time in, 63–4, 142; topos of, 272–3; tradition, 3–6, 207, 254, 270 Epiclesis. See Eucharist

424 Epimetheus, 75 Epiphany(ies), 74, 81–2, 139, 152, 172, 180, 239, 311, 315; point of, 109, 270–1, 272, 286, 328; wheel of, 274, 275 Episodic form, 192, 215, 231, 244 Episodic tendency, 223 Epistle form, 162, 172 Epos, 192, 198, 221, 239, 324; and drama, 239; and fiction, 221, 239; and lyric, 231, 275, 276, 322 Erasmus, Desiderius (ca. 1466–1536), 4 Erato, 135 Eris, good and bad, 272, 290 Eros, 17, 98, 106, 175; and Adonis, 98, 101, 108–9, 111; and agape, 316; Freud’s sense of, 246; as mode, 162, 166 Erotic, the, 318 Esau, 18 Esdras, Second Book of, 17 Essay form, 242 Essence, and existence, 141 Ethics, and aesthetics, 224 Ethos, 198, 200, 216, 270 Etymology, poetic, 89, 94, 114, 130, 138, 224 Eucharist, 271 Euclid (fl. 300 b.c.e.), 139, 297 Euhemerus (fl. ca. 316 b.c.e.), 68, 121 Euripides (ca. 480–406 b.c.e.), 283, 294; Bacchae, 290 Eve: and Adam, 37, 65; and the fall, 220 Existence, 47; and essence, 141; wheel of, 296 Existentialism, 178, 204, 208, 234, 257, 275, 280, 305; and angst, 315 Exodus, Book of, 9, 22, 65, 140; serpent symbolism in, 12 Ezekiel, Book of, 18, 117; and Gil-

Index gamesh epic, 68; Leviathan in, 165; myth of the state in, 115 Fable, 312 Fairley, Barker (1887–1986): A Study of Goethe (1947), 24, 27–8 Fall, the, 11, 25, 35, 65, 220, 273, 295 Farce, 304 Farming cycle, 25, 35 Fascism, 72, 284; cult of the leader in, 117, 203; hero in, 142 Fate, and providence, 255 Fates, 75 Father, 11, 12, 325; infinite, 186; in mysticism, 118 Faust, 119, 241, 296 Fear, 83–4, 303 Fennell, William Oscar (b. 1916), 213; objection to FS, 28 Fiction, 160, 185, 207, 312; and epos, 221, 239; four forms of, 152–3; and lyric, 239; wheel of, 153 Fielding, Henry (1707–54): Joseph Andrews (1742), 216, 217; The History of Tom Jones (1749), 217, 282, 284; The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great (1743), 249, 256, 257 Filmer, Sir Robert (ca. 1590–1653), on Adam, 48 Finley, Martha (1828–1909): Elsie books, 52 Firbank, (Arthur Annesley) Ronald (1886–1926), dandyism in, 265 Fire symbolism, 233, 262 Fish symbolism, 9, 21 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–80), 249, 290; and irony, 302; Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), 236; Dictionary of Accepted Ideas (trans. 1954), 126; Madame Bovary (1857), 165, 342 Fleming, Ian Lancaster (1908–64), 293

Index Fletcher, Giles, the Younger (ca. 1585– 1623), 6 Fletcher, John (1579–1625), 6 Fletcher, Phineas (1582–1660), 6, 110; The Purple Island, or The Isle of Man (1633), 18 Flood, 246, 325, 326; myths of, 122 Folk tales: as archetypal, 155; vs. myth, 241 Form, 63, 125; and content, 191; continuous vs. episodic, 215, 298; and modes, 303; total, 132–4, 142 Fort, Charles (1874–1932), 212 Fortune, and providence, 249 Fragmentation, xviii–xix, 7, 173, 270, 282. See also Comminution; Sparagmos Franciscan order, 70 Francis of Assisi, St. (1182–1226), ass figure in, 179 Franck, César Auguste (1822–90), 230 Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941), 13, 33, 39, 56, 58, 62, 64, 67, 155, 186, 210, 229, 304; archetypes in, 15, 124; and literary criticism, 82, 99, 129, 137, 164, 313, 314; and myth, 256; on Orc symbolism, 11, 33, 39, 101; Folklore in the Old Testament (1918), 69; The Golden Bough (1907–15), 39, 69, 155, 164, 347 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 9, 37, 38, 39, 155, 229, 264, 283, 338; archetypes in, 55; and literary criticism, 129; Eros in, 246; libido-id in, 290; Oedipus complex in, 227; subconscious in, 288; The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (trans. 1935), 347 Frobenius, Leo (1873–1938), 33, 40; creation myths in, 123; symbolism in, 122; The Childhood of Man (1901), 8–15 passim, 39 Frye, (Herman) Northrop (1912–91),

425

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–

229; relation to Frazer and Freud, 155; on Shakespeare, 207; views on religion, 289 self-analysis: his criticism, 27, 46, 105, 307; can’t keep diaries, 288; his dreams, 125; his health, 252; need for detective stories, 288; his social immaturity, 297; on writing, 189, 201 as teacher: uses of myth, 108; student’s social and intellectual maturity, 297 projected works: on the Bible, 54–5, 295; on myth, 105, 115, 120, 260, 295; book of pensées, 267; as books to read not write, 104, 268, 272, 289, 294; in sonata form, 54–5, 57–8; on Victorian thought, 120 ogdoad, xx–xxi, 38–9, 50, 104, 160, 258, 268–9; Alpha, 112, 156; Anticlimax, xxv, 8, 10, 30, 36–9, 142, 245, 262–3, 275; Beta, 156; Delta, 156; Deuteronomy (Mirage, Paradox, Ignoramus, Twilight), 58, 65, 113, 115–16, 119; Epsilon, 112; Gamma, 156; Ignoramus, 50, 58, 117–20; Liberal, xxv, 8, 34, 36, 38, 64–6, 111, 142, 155, 273–4; Mirage, 58, 118–20, 252, 268; Paradox, 117–20; Rencontre, 32, 58, 111, 115–16, 252, 262–3, 343; Tetralogy (Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, Rencontre), 4, 6–8, 10, 24, 49–50, 64, 115–16, 251–4, 258, 266, 272–83 passim, 294–5, 336, 343; Tragicomedy, xxv, 8, 38, 64–6, 142, 263, 270, 274, 343; Zeta, 111 works: AC, see below; “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction” (1942), 141, 336; “The Argument of Comedy” (1949), 207, 319; “The Church: Its Relation to Society” (1949), 115; “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres”

426 (1951), 166, 170, 207; “David Milne: An Appreciation” (1948), 293; Fearful Symmetry (1947), xvii, 13, 23, 26, 27, 45, 57, 62, 64, 105, 114, 161, 179, 201, 215, 234, 266, 294, 319; “The Four Forms of Prose Fiction” (1950), 120, 134, 162, 182, 207; “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1949), xvii, xx, 45, 64, 70, 80, 90, 225; The Great Code (1981), xvii; “Levels of Meaning in Literature” (1950), 71, 80, 123, 143; “Myth, Fiction and Displacement” (1961), 281–3 & n. 58, 294; “The Nature of Satire” (1944), 178, 193, 207, 304, 316, 336;“Notes for a Commentary on Milton” (1957), 264; “Towards a Theory of Cultural History” (1953), xx, 303; “The Typology of Paradise Regained” (1956), 260; The WellTempered Critic (1963), xxv, 266, 274, 283; Words with Power (1990), xvii; “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism” (1949), 47, 120, 204, 260, 330 – Anatomy of Criticism (1957), 104, 105, 127, 147, 161, 260–1, 263, 266–7, 272, 275–9, 291, 294, 295; bibliography for, 165, 347–8; chapter structure, 177, 181, 185, 197, 205; colour scheme for, 205–8; Conclusion, 180, 202, 211–12, 214–17, 224, 225, 228, 229, 242; dedication to, 136, 140; early outlines of, xx–xxv, 16, 20–1, 30–40, 67–71, 80–1, 83–7, 90–3, 97– 103, 113–16, 121, 123–5, 136, 140–4, 149–56, 159–63, 165–7, 170–7, 181– 224 passim, 231, 233, 236–8, 245, 251–5, 258, 305–7, 318, 319, 322, 328, 333–40 passim, 348–9; First Essay, 113, 116, 123, 144; Introduction, 39, 40, 43, 55, 90, 140, 169, 201, 210, 219,

Index 224, 225; notebooks for, xvii–xix; and ogdoad, xx–xxi; 100 paragraph scheme, 59, 140; Second Essay, 113– 15, 123–5, 138, 143, 306; Third Essay, 115, 157–8; title of, 136, 140; zodiac form of, 166, 174 Fuller, Thomas (1608–61), 344 Fundamentalism, 295 Furies, 75 Galatians, Epistle to, 18, 167 Galileo (Galileo Galilei) (1564–1642), on human consciousness, 234 Garden imagery, 42, 156, 319; and city imagery, 145, 261 Garter symbolism, 42 Gaster, Theodor H. (1906–92), 273, 304; and literary criticism, 164; Thespis (1950), 277, 283 Generation (state in Blake), 19, 64, 81, 170, 319; and Beulah, 44–5, 90, 104, 163; and irony, 84; as mode, 163, 166; and Spenser, 23; and Ulro, 102, 104 Genesis, Book of, 55, 65, 140, 299 Genius, 149, 180 Genre(s), 77, 78, 152, 160, 181–3, 305; and analogies of proportion, 215; and archetype, 150; categories of, 92, 153–4, 221, 239; centripetal vs. centrifugal, 239; circle of, 74, 85, 95, 124, 323; and literary criticism, 54; vs. mythoi, 260; theory of, 80–3, 93, 95–6, 99, 100, 166, 206–7, 221, 305–7, 337 Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1100–54), on Elizabethan history, 343 Geography, 344 George, St.: and the dragon, 111, 274; flag of, 17, 19; and garter symbolism, 33, 343 Ghost(s), 222

Index Ghost stories, 246, 282, 342 Gibbon, Edward (1737–94), 123, 280, 344; style of, 227 Gide, André Paul Guillaume (1869– 1951), and irony, 305 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836– 1911), 8, 284; and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900): The Mikado (1885), 191 Gilgamesh, 9, 10, 195, 274 Gilgamesh, 68, 69, 324 Giotto (di Bondone) (ca. 1266–1337), his “O,” 115, 134 God, 5, 28, 37, 46–8, 62, 68–9, 76, 103, 107, 139, 176, 198–200, 218, 220, 292; as body of man, 316; and chain of being, 17; in comedy, 107; and creation, 179, 261; deist, 30, 37; essence of vs. existence of, 27; as father, 22, 225, 298; god-man, 17, 19, 64, 134, 191, 304; Jesus as, 6; in Milton, 30; as omnipotent, 299; and predestination, 67; and revelation, 298; as ruler of golden age, 107; as sadistic, 179; seventy-two names of, 282; speaks, 38, 39; unknown, 297; works within human life, 29, 299 God(s), 107, 117–18, 179, 301, 315; and heroes, 106; myths of, 302; NF’s view on, 121; superiority to worshippers, 303 Godwin, William (1756–1836), 53, 98 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749– 1832), 6, 8, 24, 60, 76, 111, 115, 274; on art, 27, 36; projected work on, 4; and Schubert, 296; symbolism vs. allegory in, 216; Faust (1808–32), 19, 31, 257 Golden Age, 107, 272, 273, 290, 291, 341 Golgonooza, 290 Goodman, Godfrey (1586–1655), 48

427 Good Samaritan, 231 Googe, Barnabe (1540–94), and national ritual, 344 Gospel(s), 21, 23, 29, 141, 162, 178, 291, 299; ass figure in, 179; form of, 280, 298; and law, 55, 155, 167, 277; rebirth in, 296 Grace, 214 Grail legends/symbolism, 5, 8, 41, 64, 111, 162, 294–5 Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895– 1985), 164, 304; earth-mother goddess in, 166; The Common Asphodel (1949), 279; The White Goddess (1948), 109 Great Britain, 344 Great Doodle, 62 & n. 144, 76–80, 167, 176, 210, 285 Great Whore. See Whore of Babylon Greece (ancient), 11, 105, 135; law in, 118; topocosm of, 273, 290 – literature: drama, 169, 174; epic, 272, 273; genre theory in, 92, 306 Greene, Graham (1904–91), and irony, 305 Greene, Robert (1558–92), Endymion symbolism in, 343 Green world, 17, 41–2, 62, 220, 316; in Shakespeare, 61, 316; in Spenser, 42, 67, 316 Greg, Sir W(alter) W(ilson) (1875– 1959): Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (1906), 348 Grettir’s Saga (ca. 1325), 167 Grønbech V(ilhelm) P(eter) (1873– 1948): The Culture of the Teutons (1931), 348 Grube, G(eorge) M(aximillian) A(nthony) (1899–1982): The Drama of Euripides (1941), 348; Plato’s Thought (1935), 348 Guest, Edgar (1881–1959), 16

428 Guggenheim fellowship, 116, 161; NF applies for, xix; NF’s work for, 10 Gunpowder Plot, 233, 279 Gurdjieff, Georges Ivanovitch (1872– 1949), 268 Habit, and desire, 338 Hagar, 167; as Mt. Sinai, 319 Haggard, Sir Henry Rider (1856– 1925), 267 Hakluyt, Richard (ca. 1552–1616), and geography, 344 Hamilton, Sir George Rostrevor (1888–1967): The Tell-Tale Article (1949), 189, 212 Hanged-god symbolism, 12–15, 20, 23, 91 Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928): and evolution, 256; on Immanent Will, 273, 290 Harpocrates, and Horus, 9 Harrison, Jane Ellen (1850–1928), 304; Ancient Art and Ritual (1913), 348; Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), 348; Themis (1912), 348 Harrowing of Hell. See Jesus; Hell, harrowing of Hartland, Edwin Sidney (1848–1927), 33; The Legend of Perseus (1894–96), 11, 39 Harvard University, NF lectures at, 263, 281 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64), 111, 196, 260, 263, 271, 274, 276, 282; and allegory, 102; The Scarlet Letter (1850), 162, 217 Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732–1809), 269, 296; The Creation (1798), 295; Die Jahreszeiten (The Seasons), 296 Hazlitt, William (1778–1830), 138 Heaven, and Hell, 191, 192, 292

Index Hebrews, Epistle to the, 22, 273 Hebrews (people), 25. See also Jews Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), 35, 203, 214, 252, 262, 267; dialectic, 117, 253, 333 Heisenberg, Wernel Karl (1901–76), principle of indeterminacy, 46 Helen, 75 Helios, 8 Hell, 326; harrowing of, 13, 18, 19, 212, 279; and Heaven, 191, 192, 292 Hendiadys, 91 Henry VIII (1491–1547), 10 Heraclitus (ca. 540–ca. 480 B.C.E.), 223 Herbert, George (1593–1633), 232, 322; Altar, 168, 169, 182; Easter Wings, 168, 169 Hercules (or Heracles), 11, 111, 156, 158, 188, 210, 274; twelve labours of, 31 Hermes, 22. See also Mercury Herodotus (ca. 485–425 B.C.E.), 9 Hero(es), 31–3, 67–8, 106, 142–3, 184, 319, 336; comic and tragic, 188, 302; five-part classification of, 157, 301– 2; as god, 174; in Milton, 29; objective and subjective, 325; as pharmakos, 174; in romance, 66, 304; in Romanticism, 28; in Shakespeare, 301; solar, 206; wandering, 9 Heroine, lunar, 206 Herrick, Robert (1591–1674), 184; national ritual in, 344 Hesiod (8th c. B.C.E.), 31, 75, 76, 156, 272, 325 High mimetic (mode), 157, 192, 199, 206, 212, 219, 251, 257, 301, 305; hero in, 301, pity and terror in, 305; tragedy and comedy in, 303 High Noon (film) (1952), 207 Hind Horn, 30

Index Hinduism, 61; caste system in, 118; guru figure in, 11 Historical criticism. See Criticism, historical History, 68, 71–2, 75, 76, 114, 128–40 passim, 148–9, 241, 312, 313, 328; archetypes of, 117, 140; cyclical, 243; and literature, 53–4; and philosophy, 155, 228, 236 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), 47, 49, 262 Hoffmann, E(rnst) T(heodor) A(madeus) (1776–1822), 271 Holinshed, Raphael (d. ca. 1580), 343 Holy Spirit, 28, 62, 133, 225, 298; in mysticism, 118 Homer (8th c. B.C.E.), 34, 68, 78, 126, 139, 155, 168, 240, 272, 274, 291, 294, 344; beauty in, 106; and epic tradition, 3, 65, 74, 111, 266, 338; gods in, 107, 303; as impersonal, 308; ladder symbolism in, 14; and nature, 179; and Virgil, 325; Iliad, 8, 26, 31, 43, 64, 67, 75, 105–6, 108, 270, 272, 283, 288, 303, 325; Odyssey, 8, 9–12, 18, 31, 43, 63, 64, 74, 104, 105, 107, 199, 270, 277, 282, 288, 324, 325, 344 Homo ludens, 299 Honig, Edwin (b. 1919), on Aristotle, 217 Hooker, Richard (1553/54–1600), on desire, 314 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–89), 280 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 B.C.E.), 4, 184, 231 Horse symbolism, 9–12, 91 Horus, and Harpocrates, 9 Hugo, Victor Marie (1802–85), 111, 274 Hulme, T(homas) E(rnest) (1883– 1917), 126; discontinuity in, 257

429 Humanism, 232, 297; and languages, 311–12 Humanities, the, and art, 252 Hume, David (1711–76), association in, 142 Humours (four), 18, 234, 303 Huron College, NF lectures at, 288, 289 Huxley, Aldous Leonard (1894–1963), 149, 341; dandyism in, 265; nature in, 85; Antic Hay (1923), 342; Brave New World (1932), 214 Hybris, 176 Hydra symbolism, 20 Hymn, 302 Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906): Peer Gynt (1867), 19 Idealism, and irony, 341–2 Identification, 291 Identity, 318–19 Idyll, 304 Illumination, moment of, 285. See also Epiphany Image(s), 198, 206, 312; four patterns of, 318; structure of, 102–3 Imagination, 292; and art, 146; and creation, 28, 36; and emotion, 296; vs. imaginary, 284; and memory, 39; and will, 28, 36 Imagism, 89, 322 Imperialism, 35 Incarnation, 60, 95, 139; and harrowing of Hell, 18. See also Jesus India: epic in, 324; “one word” in, 115 Individual: and class, 318; and community, 303 Innes, Michael (J.I.M. Stewart) (1906– 94), 288 Integritas, 50, 52, 59, 63, 132, 136, 349 Intellectual(s), and social immaturity, 297

430 Intention, centripetal and centrifugal, 245–7, 286–7 Intentional fallacy, 222, 225–6, 230, 237 Ireland, 35; and Milton, 24; rebellion in, 72; and Spenser, 35 Irony, 81, 82, 107, 172, 176, 181, 200, 213, 233, 264, 269, 296; as courtesy, 290; and criticism, 54; and idealism, 341–2; NF’s definition of, 193; as obscene, 241, 246; and satire, 84, 178, 196, 239, 304, 305 Irony (mode), 96, 152, 161, 163, 192, 243, 321; characteristics of, 212; dream in, 164; hero in, 158, 302; as irrational, 277; and lyric, 93, 96, 304, 305; pity and terror in, 90; rhetoric of, 223; and romance, 196, 246 Isaac, 35 Isaiah, 18, 21, 68, 188; Book of, 19, 32, 66 Ishmael, 316 Islam, 38, 118; geometrical design of art in, 161 Israel (Biblical): Jesus as, 18, 22; law in, 168; spiritual, as humanity, 32 Italy, 7 Jachin and Boaz, 20 Jacob, 35 Jacobitism, 265 James, Henry (1843–1916), 246, 343; Daisy Miller (1879), 222; The Golden Bowl (1904), 162; The Spoils of Poynton (1897), 218; The Turn of the Screw (1898), 246 James, William (1842–1910), on belief, 298 James the Great, St. (Apostle), 61 Jarry, Alfred (1873–1907), 272, 275 Jason, 111, 156, 274 Jeans, Sir James Hopwood (1877–

Index 1946), 85, 91, 197; The Mysterious Universe (1930), 43, 225 Jehovah, 65 Jerusalem: New, 12, 69; as symbol, 10, 17, 61, 64 Jesus, 6, 9, 11–12, 20–1, 30, 35, 37, 55, 64, 73, 75; agon with Satan, 31, 38; and Albion, 22; clay and spittle, 241; did not write, 126, 268, 280; as dying god, 11; in the Gospels, 178; and harrowing of Hell, 18; as homosexual, 248; as Israel, 18, 22; life of, 271; and metamorphosis myths, 122; parables of, 95, 147, 173; as Prometheus figure, 22; promises inspiration, 298; and rebirth, 296–7; “this do,” 162, 168, 173, 178; and tyranny, 48; as the Word, 47 Jews, and monarchy, 48 Joachim of Fiore (or Floris) (ca. 1135– 1202), 70, 186 Job, 188, 255, 324; in Blake, 32; in Milton, 32 – Book of, 31, 39, 40, 73, 257, 293, 339; Leviathan in, 165, 188 John, St., 55, 61 – Gospel of, 122, 248, 327 John of the Cross, St., 138, 180, 281 Jöhns, Max: Ross und Reiter in Leben und Sprache (1872), 11 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), 238, 280; on Cowley, 126; on Leibni(t)z, 242; Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), 282 John the Baptist, 9 Jonah, 122, 279, 333; and harrowing of Hell, 18 Jonson, Ben (1572–1637), 293; and Shakespeare, 303; The Alchemist (1610), 219, 233; Volpone (1605), 196 Joseph (father of Jesus), 11

Index Joshua, 64; and Jesus, 18; quest of, 33 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius (1882–1941), 9, 21, 31, 50, 62, 64, 156, 190, 266, 274, 280, 295, 322, 335, 343; confession in, 76; and cyclical history, 243; Dedalus image in, 233; and epic tradition, 254, 276, 277; on epiphany, xix, 338; and irony, 305; on lyric–epic–drama progression, 51, 60; projected work on, 4; Dubliners (1914), 173, 263, 308; Finnegans Wake (1939), 41, 111, 126, 140, 168, 172, 178, 187, 195, 200, 209, 211, 221–2, 239, 248, 274, 277, 288, 304, 305, 327; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), 8, 87, 92, 342, 349; Ulysses (1922), 10, 277 Judaism, 47; and law, 23, 118 Judas Iscariot, 191 Judges, Book of, 48, 277 Julian the Apostate (Flavius Claudius Julianus) (ca. 331–63), 119 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961), 10, 19, 20, 33, 39, 40, 58, 64, 99, 101, 143, 186, 210, 267; archetypes in, 8–12, 55, 96, 124, 147, 187; collective unconscious, 36, 50, 288; on Hiawatha, 11; individuation in, 188; and literary criticism, 129, 137, 164, 313, 314; Oedipus pattern in, 11; and Spenser, 23; The Integration of the Personality (1940), 40; Psychological Types (trans. 1923), 348; Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), 8–15 passim, 39, 347 Justinian I (Flavius Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus) (ca. 482–565), 117 Kabbalah, 114, 115, 134, 234; Rencontre as a Kabbalistic book, 275, 276 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924), 173; and

431 irony, 305; In the Penal Colony (1919), 290, 328 Kairos, 271 Kalevala, 65, 68, 69, 78, 182, 324 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 267, 297; Ding an sich, 273; transcendental aesthetic in, 268 Karma, 297 Katabasis, 39, 76, 181, 188, 214, 245; levels of, 279 Keats, John (1795–1821), 94, 135, 139, 183, 196, 220; Endymion (1818), 54, 109; Lamia (1820), 85; Ode on a Grecian Urn (1820), 54, 145, 147; odes, 318; Ode to a Nightingale (1820), 147; Ode to Autumn (1820), 95 Kendrick, Sir T(homas) D(owning) (1895–1979): A History of the Vikings (1930), 348 Ker, W(illiam) P(aton) (1855–1923): The Dark Ages (1904), 348; Epic and Romance (1908), 348 Kernels, four, 76, 152–3, 171, 328 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55), 37, 38, 39, 64, 151, 173, 188, 209, 253, 339; dialectic in, 325; dread in, 290; on the ego, 285; existential views of, 234; leap in, 164, 186, 204, 208; and Mozart, 315; repetition in, 232, 325 Kings, Books of, 20, 176, 277 Kingsley, Charles (1819–75), 120 Klee, Paul (1879–1940), 293 Knox, John (ca. 1513–72), 48 Koan(s), 278–9, 280, 287 Koran, 114, 155 Kore, 75 Korzybski, Alfred (1879–1950), on the structural differential, 132 Krappe, Alexander Haggerty (1894– 1947): The Science of Folklore (1930), 75 Krishna, 107, 162

432 Kronos, 107 Kuhnau, Johann (1660–1722): Biblical Sonata 2 in G minor (1700), 295 Kyd, Thomas (1558–94): The Spanish Tragedy (1592), 222 La Bruyère, Jean de (1645–96): Characters, or Manner of the Age (1688), 215 & n. 48 Ladder metaphors, 14, 194, 262. See also Chain of Being Lafitau, Joseph-François (1681–1746), 122 Laforgue, Jules (1860–87), 272 Lamb, Charles (1775–1834), 242, 281; “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” 54 Lancelot, 294 Landseer, Sir Edwin Henry (1802–73), 121 Lang, Andrew (1844–1912), 188; Myth, Ritual and Religion (1899), 121–3 passim Langer, Susanne K. (1895–1985), 256; on physics, 56 Langland, William (ca. 1330–ca. 1400), 8, 65; and the epic tradition, 4–5 Language, 114, 172, 222, 311–12; autonomous, 45–7; as denotative, 103; descriptive phase, 236, 311; and literature, 114, 223–4, 313, 327– 8; plurality of, 244, 251, 330; and social class, 287; and thought, 244, 251 Lankavatara Sutra, 45, 51, 85, 132, 151, 170, 179, 208 Lao-Tzu (6th c. B.C.E.), 118, 280 Latin, epic in, 273 Laughter, 84, 178–9, 333 Law, 47, 75, 76, 102, 121, 192, 219, 241, 273; circle of, 193; connection in,

Index 125; and music, 217; ritual in, 118; and science, 155; and social sciences, 252; and tragedy, 307 – Biblical, 55, 59, 74, 118, 155, 156, 277; and legal analogy, 23, 25, 33, 34, 35 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885– 1930): Second Coming in, 248; The Man Who Died (1928), 98; The Plumed Serpent (1926), 342 Leadership, 336; cult of the leader, 116–17, 203 Leah, 156, 294 Leavis, F(rank) R(aymond) (1895– 1978), 286 LeFanu, J(oseph) Sheridan (1814–73): Uncle Silas (1864), 282 Leibni(t)z, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646– 1716): Johnson on, 242; monadology of number in, 225 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924), 117, 173, 280; and epistle form, 162; pamphlets of, 275, 276 Lesser doodle, 76–80 Leviathan, 36, 37, 48, 167, 188, 199, 333; and irony, 219; symbolism, 12, 17–22 passim, 31–3, 91, 156, 212, 325; as time, 33, 63 Levy, Gertrude Rachel (1883–1966): The Sword and the Rock (1953), 105 & n. 261 Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (1898–1963): on the Mutability Cantos, 73; reality vs. fact in, 33 Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (1882– 1957), 272; NF bored by, 296 Liberalism, vs. Conservatism, 116 Libido, 9–12, 76, 206, 230, 247, 250, 290 Life, 326; and literature, 204, 277, 289 Lindbergh, Charles (1902–74), 263 Literal meaning, 128

Index Literary Symbolism, NF’s graduate course in, 270, 330 Literature, 159, 247, 293, 307, 311; archetypes and anagogy in, 223–4; and class, 149; delight and instruction in, 89–90, 145, 289; does not improve, 46; and epiphany, 283; functional analysis of, 130–2; and history, 53–4, 114; as ironic, 264; and language, 45, 114, 223–4, 313, 327–8; and life, 204, 277, 289; and mathematics, 43–4, 139, 147, 151; vs. philosophy, 228–9; as possession, 280–3; rhythms in, 88; and science, 46–7, 271; and social sciences, 133–4; as speechless, 52; structural analysis of, 128–32 passim Locke, John (1632–1704), 28, 48, 149, 262, 266 Logic, 106, 133; vs. rhetoric, 332 Logos, 4, 46, 50, 82, 106, 118–19, 241. See also Word, the Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–82): The Song of Hiawatha (1855), 11 Longinus (1st c. C.E.?), 331; on the sublime, 126, 281 Lönnrot, Elias (1802–84): Kalevala, 68 Los (Blake character), 11, 23–4, 31, 36, 101, 123, 170, 197, 233, 316; and creative process, 28; in Milton, 23, 26, 28; and Shakespeare, 24; in Spenser, 23, 27 Love lay, 135, 136 Lowell, Amy Lawrence (1874–1925): Lilacs (1925), 89, 280 Lowell, James Russell (1819–91): The Biglow Papers (1848), 342; Harvard ode, 216 Low mimetic (mode), 152, 168, 181, 193, 204, 212, 219, 231, 255, 257, 304, 305; epic in, 200; hero in, 157, 301;

433 and satire, 194; tragedy and comedy in, 303; violations of reality in, 192, 217 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (ca. 94 (99?) –55 B.C.E.), 8 Luke, Gospel of, 20, 73, 168, 173, 178 Luther, Martin (1483–1546), 6, 48, 70; and epistle form, 162; on Romans, 126 Lutheranism, cult of the leader in, 117 Luvah (Blake character), 25, 27, 68; cycle, 10. See also Libido Lydgate, John (ca. 1370–ca. 1451), 322 Lyly, John (ca. 1554–1606): Endymion (1591), 343 Lyric, 49–51, 76–81 passim, 92–4, 96– 7, 152–5, 168, 180–5 passim, 190, 220, 263, 275, 313, 321–2, 327, 333; and archetypes, 175; circle, 88, 95– 7, 172, 175, 185, 220, 231, 316–18, 322; and comminution, 7, 92, 255, 270; conspectus of, 159; and drama, 87, 92–3, 170–1, 192, 199, 206, 221, 239, 307; and epos, 231, 275, 276, 322; and fiction, 239; forms, 50, 58, 135, 159–61, 164; and irony, 93, 96, 304, 305; and metaphor, 269; and myth, 260; and satire, 152, 161, 238; subjectivity of, 308; symboliste, 305 Mabinogion, 146 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Baron (1800–59), style of, 227, 332 Macdonald, George (1824–1905), 111, 271, 274; Phantastes (1858), 40 & n. 96 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527): The Prince (1532), 35 Mackenzie, Kenneth R.H. (1833–86), 8; mill symbolism in, 13 McKenna, Stephen (1872–1934), 286

434 Maclean, Hugh N. (1919–97); on Shakespeare, 214 McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (1911– 80), 139 Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius (5th c. C.E.), 122 Madrigal, 182 Maeterlinck, Count Maurice-Polydore-Marie-Bernard (1862–1949), 263 Magic, 284 Mahabharata, 75, 107, 291 Mahler, Gustav (1860–1911), 296 Mâle, Emile (1862–1954): The Gothic Image, 40 & n. 85 Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842–98), 175, 272, 278, 315; langue and parole in, 172, 311; on symbolism, 123; void in, 235 Malory, Sir Thomas (d. 1471), and the number 28, 20 Malraux, André (1901–76), 234; Museum without Walls (1949), 232 Mammon, 39, 118 Man, 292; fallen and unfallen, 48; and God, 17, 64, 316; as hero, 316 Mandala(s), 134, 264, 269 Mandeville, Sir John (14th c.), and geography, 344 Mann, Thomas (1875–1955), 315; Joseph and His Brothers (1933–43), 228; Mario and the Magician (1929), 41; Tristan (1902), 177 Mansfield, Katherine (1888–1923), pear tree in, 218 Mark, Gospel of, 20, 122, 298 Marsilius of Padua (ca. 1280–1342), and John of Jandun (ca. 1286–1328): Defensor pacis, 7 Martha, and Mary, 298 Marvell, Andrew (1621–78): dream fulfilment in, 190; green world in,

Index 17, 41, 316; The Garden (1681), 109, 220; An Horation Ode upon Cromwell’s Return (1681), 32; On a Drop of Dew (1681), 257, 279; To His Coy Mistress (1681), 135 Marx, Karl (1818–83), 39, 56, 58, 67, 88, 118, 131, 186, 202, 209; dialectic in, 98, 204, 262; proletariat in, 38, 290; and rhetoric, 227; on work, 90, 97, 313 Marxism, 37, 84, 116–17, 118, 121, 156, 203, 297; in Carlyle, 116; and Christianity, 94, 115, 126; and Communism, 118, 186, 253; in English thought, 120; fallacy of, 250; and literary criticism, 99, 124, 129, 131, 137, 170, 271 Mary, and Martha, 298 Mary, Queen (1516–58), 241 Mary, Virgin, 305 Masefield, John (1878–1967), 181 Mathematics, 58, 97, 134, 349; and art, 90, 145, 203, 255; as autonomous language, 46; as hypothetical universe, 132, 224–5, 261, 315; and literature, 43–4, 139, 147, 151; and poetry, 94, 312; time and space in, 261; and the Word, 115 Matthew, Gospel of, 20, 29, 55, 73, 95, 298 Maya, 85, 190, 199, 200, 220, 316 Meaning, 74, 77, 300, 306; centrifugal, 130, 222; centrifugal vs. centripetal, 59, 73, 81–3, 88, 93, 102–3, 121, 125, 136, 144–5, 172, 311–12; centripetal, 137, 143; connotative and denotative, 137; equivocal or univocal, 52; hypothetical, 222; levels of, 62, 64, 93, 102–4, 113, 128–32, 136, 144–7, 150, 166, 306, 309–15 passim; literal and descriptive, 128, 136, 145, 311, 349; and metaphor, 255; and narra-

Index tive, 144, 198, 199, 221, 307, 311, 312, 333; tropological level of, 137 Meditation, 281 Medusa, 21 Melchizedek, 55, 333 Melodrama, 304 Melopoeia, 237, 239 Melville, Herman (1819–91), 111, 274; Moby Dick (1851), 18, 162 Memory, 169, 298, 311; and art, 39; Blake on, 39 Menander (ca. 343–291 B.C.E.), 319 Mencken, H(enry) L(ouis) (1880– 1956), on American language, 287 Menippus (fl. 250 B.C.E.), 142 Mercury, 22. See also Hermes Meredith, George (1828–1909): The Egoist (1879), 111, 215, 216, 219, 263, 274, 282 Mesopotamia, 17; flood myths in, 325 Messiah, 333, 344. See also Christ; Jesus Metamorphosis, 122, 305 Metaphor, 173, 216, 228, 231, 255, 261–3, 264, 293; and analogy, 281, 319; five kinds of, 215; irrationality of, 277, 287; and lyric, 269; and rhetoric, 262 Metaphysics, 46, 129, 133, 134, 140, 253, 271, 300 Metre, 86, 89 Middle Ages, 85, 92, 164; allegory in, 71, 73; anagogy in, 73; Arthur–Grail stories in, 343; the Church in, 71; criticism in, 309; dream in, 12; education in, 297; epic in, 4–5; four levels of meaning in, 309–10; green world in, 42; influence of Aristotle in, 217; poet in, 176; romance in, 302; Trinity in, 9; Troy in, 343 Middle English, 54

435 Middleton, Thomas (1580–1637): Women Beware Women (1657), 294 Mihalko, Betty, 187 Mill, James (1773–1836), 85, 89, 151, 216, 327; on rhetoric, 181, 239; Essay on Government (1829), 226–7 Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), 72, 116, 120, 203, 229, 293, 339; on art, 124; contract in, 49; deductive withdrawal in, 229; on poetry, 54, 321; Autobiography and Literary Essays, 57; Essay on Bentham (1838), 116 Mill symbol, 12 Milton, John (1608–74), 16, 20, 30–43 passim, 57, 61, 108, 113, 123, 155, 195, 200, 264, 274, 279, 289, 294, 295, 322, 324, 335; on the act, 26, 28, 29; and AC, 22–7 passim; Bible–Dante– Milton progression, 58, 60, 65, 73; and Blake, 16; his blindness, 29; chastity and charity in, 26–7; Christ and Satan in, 29, 68; on divorce, 23, 37; and epic tradition, 4–5, 65–6, 69, 73–4, 78, 111, 121, 207, 211, 254, 276–7, 338; Eros in, 162–3; God in, 27, 30, 222, 325; and Gunpowder Plot, 110, 233, 279; hero or great man in, 26, 29; and intention, 226; irony in, 107; on liberty, 23; Los in, 23, 26, 28; on Moses, 18; persona in, 31; and Protestantism, 48; and the Restoration, 24, 35–6; and revolution, 24, 28, 37; on satire, 178; and Spenser, 16, 22, 23; and value judgments, 26, 148; and the Word, 7, 49– 51, 55 – works: Ad Patrem (1645), 109; antiEpiscopal tracts, 48; At a Solemn Music (1645), 109, 134; Christian Doctrine (pub. 1825), 37; Comus (1637), 23, 26, 109, 132, 214, 221, 233, 256, 257, 279, 295; Epitaphium

436 Damonis (1639), 23, 109; Fifth Elegy (1645), 109; Il Penseroso (1631), 109, 110, 187, 256, 257; In Quintum Novembris (1645), 110; L’Allegro (1645), 109, 303; Lycidas (1638), 23, 38, 49, 97, 109, 110, 135, 140, 161, 185, 218, 266, 283; Mansus (1645), 23; Nativity Ode (On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity) (1645), 109, 110, 257; On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (1655), 71; Paradise Lost, see below; Paradise Regained, see below; regicide tracts, 48; Samson Agonistes (1671), 26, 49, 75, 122; On Shakespeare (1631), 19 – Paradise Lost (1667), xviii, 26, 27, 30– 1, 36–8, 40, 59, 70, 104, 108, 135, 177, 235, 252, 272; Adam in, 48, 74, 237; Christ and Satan in, 29, 66, 107; Orc symbolism in, 18; paradox in, 29; structure of, 63, 288 – Paradise Regained (1671), 27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 45, 59, 70, 73, 95, 141, 171, 181, 187, 195, 211, 252, 255, 260, 267, 339–40; Christ and Satan in, 29, 66, 326; hero in, 313 Mime, 172 Mimesis, 161, 166, 212 Mind, universal, 132–3 Minstrelsy, 198 Miracles, 299 Mithraism, 8 Modes, 104, 171, 172, 174–5, 185–6, 303; apocalyptic and anagogic, 191– 4; chute of, 306; counterpoint of, 213; eight, 166; fictional, 180–1; five, 154, 165, 191, 209, 223, 268, 338, 339; four, 152; of presentation, 207; romantic vs. realistic, 163; theory of, 95–6, 99, 101, 162–3, 212, 301–4, 315 Mohammedanism. See Islam

Index Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 53, 220, 226, 256; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), 280; Le Malade imaginaire (1673), 196; Tartuffe (1664), 264, 342 Monads, 242, 315 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord (1714–99), 242 Monotheism, 118 Monster symbolism, 165. See also Leviathan Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533– 92), 308, 341, 343 Moon symbolism, 25; and sun symbolism, 316 Moore, Henry Spencer (1898–1986), 145 Moore, Thomas Sturge (1870–1944), on Ruskin’s cat, 228 Moral level of meaning, 128, 130, 313, 315 More, Henry (1614–87), fire symbolism in, 219 More, Sir Thomas, St. (1478–1535), 139, 341; Utopia (1516), 139 Mormons, 295 Morris, William (1834–96), 203, 229, 252, 265, 266, 276, 282, 322, 341; dialectic in, 98, 203; eroticism in, 170, 246, 296; and romance, 111, 173, 260, 263, 274; on unfallen world, 145; on work, 88; The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), 121, 203; The Sundering Flood (1897), 84; The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), 249, 257 Moscow, 283 Moses, 18, 21, 25, 55, 117, 169, 333; agon of, 31–2, 34; Mosaic code, 291; quest of, 33 Mother figure(s), 9–12, 75; cult of the, 106; virgin, 106 Mother Goose, 168

Index Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756– 91), 150, 296, 315; Quintet in G minor, 144 Murray, (George) Gilbert Aimé (1866–1957), 174, 304; Aeschylus: The Creator of Tragedy (1940), 348; Aristophanes: A Study (1933), 348; The Classical Tradition in Poetry (1927), 348; The Rise of the Greek Epic (1924), 348 Murray, Margaret Alice (1863–1963): The God of the Witches (1952), 288; Witch-Culture in Western Europe (1921), 288 Muse, 115, 135, 183, 311 Music, 52, 58, 76–8, 92–4, 132–4, 160, 198, 237, 239, 311; and law, 217; modes of, 163; narrative structure in, 144; and painting, 155, 168, 313; and poetry, 277; of the spheres, 115, 132, 134, 257, 273 Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945), 284 Mysticism, 118; and Catholicism, 29 Myth (mode), 168, 199, 209; hero in, 301 Myth(s), 76, 121–3, 155–6, 190, 224–9 passim, 233, 256, 292, 304, 315, 339, 345; Apollonian and Dionysiac, 302; and archetypes, 72, 196, 257, 300; as artefact, 121; and Christianity, 312; cycles of, 95, 207, 246, 295; definitive, 270–1; and dialectic, 69, 121; and drama, 7–8; encyclopedic shape of, 199; vs. folk tales, 241; four, 210, 211, 274; and monadology, 242; and mythos, 301; and narrative, 269; and political thought, 295; private and public, 338; projected work on, 260; vs. realism, 213, 214; and religion, 295; and ritual, 28, 45, 142; science of, 255 Mythology, 69, 302

437 Mythoi, 272, 306; circle of, 175; vs. genres, 260 Mythopoeia, 315; pure and applied, 228 Mythos, 74, 216, 237–8, 266, 301, 316; comic, 248; and dianoia, 169, 191, 198, 200, 284, 305, 307–8, 333; theory of, 270 Names, allegorical, 216 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (1769–1821), 196 Narcissus, and Echo, 167 Narrative, 74, 77, 128–9, 181, 300–1, 306; and drama, 318; and dream, 236; levels of, 306; and meaning, 144, 198, 199, 221, 307, 311, 312, 333; and metaphor, 255; and myth, 269; time in, 63–4 Nashe, Thomas (1567–1601), 194 Nature, 102, 115, 118, 120, 133, 190, 225, 273; and art, 27–8, 271–2; and community, 144; cycle of, 206, 258, 325, 345; fallen, 29; and grace, 214; as maya principle, 220; as a mirror, 325; as natura naturata or natura naturans, 110, 115, 134, 217; and society, 153 Nazism, 186, 204; Eros in, 98; leader in, 119 Neptune, 9, 343 New Criticism, 79, 85, 186, 213 Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801–90), 26, 76, 120, 162, 293; Catholic dogma in, 143; “church” in, 204; on theology, 186, 234 New Testament, 6, 138, 151, 194, 333; and Old Testament, 24, 44, 48 Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), 46, 264 New Yorker, The, 202, 237, 294; dandyism in, 265 Nichols, John (1745–1826): The

438 Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (1788), 348 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844– 1900), 77, 98, 195, 328; and cyclical history, 243, 248; and dithyramb, 211; great man in, 173; and oracular form, 162; reincarnation in, 284; serpent symbolism in, 12; Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–92), 243; Wille zur Macht (1901), 28–9, 88 Nineteenth century, 164; criticism in, 147; dandyism in, 264–5; ghost stories in, 282; NF’s course on (“4k”), 114–16, 124, 215, 252, 263, 266, 272, 336 Nobodaddy (Blake character), 110, 186 Nomads, 35, 61 North America, creation myths of, 122 Northrop, F.S.C. (1894–1992): on aesthetic continuum, 85; The Meeting of East and West (1946), 141, 225 Norton, Thomas (1532–84), and Thomas Sackville (1536–1608): Gorboduc (1565), 343 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) (1772–1802), 294 Novel, 134, 171, 328, 342; dream in, 164; and encyclopedic form, 308; proletarian, 302 Nursery rhymes, 280, 285, 327 Occultism, 52–3, 117, 228, 256, 303; and literary criticism, 234 Oedipus, and Christ, 101 Oedipus complex, 20, 32, 40, 167, 316, 339; in Freud, 227; in Jung, 11; in Yeats, 98 Og, and Anak, 11 Oliphant, Margaret (1828–97): A Beleaguered City (1880), 342

Index Olrik, Axel (1864–1917): Viking Civilization (1930), 348 Olympics, and ritual, 168 One man figure, 133 O’Neill, Eugene (1888–1953), 220 Onomatopoeia, 89, 222, 251; and rhetoric, 224 Opera, and archetypal criticism, 191 Opsis, 160, 237, 239 Oracle(s), 76, 93, 161, 162, 171, 231, 313, 327, 328, 333; in romance, 96 Oratory, 332; and the act, 143 Orc (Blake character), 31, 38, 60, 98, 140, 170, 290, 316; hero, 304; as Messiah, 8; quest, 30, 33; symbolism, 9, 11, 18, 20, 39, 163; in Tirzah, 21; vortex, 19 – cycle, 8, 10, 18, 34, 96, 111, 175, 274; in Blake, 188; and sonata form, 58; in Spenser, 23, 27 Orient, 244 Orosius (fl. ca. 5th c. C.E.), 56; and cyclical history, 243 Orpheus, 101, 140, 295 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903–50), 177; 1984 (1949), 178, 240, 290 Osiris, 12 Ossian (James Macpherson) (1736– 96), 280 Old Testament, 29, 35, 114; as analysis of Judaism, 47; history and morality in, 325; and law, 23; and New Testament, 23, 24, 44, 48 Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937): The [Idea of the] Holy (1917 in German; trans. 1923), 118 & n. 18 Ouspensky, Peter Demianovich (1878–1947): In Search of the Miraculous (1947), 268 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43

Index b.c.e.–c.e. 17), 16, 69, 122, 155, 322, 343; Metamorphoses, 74, 283, 288 Paean, 135, 302 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809), 116 Painting, 16, 44, 52, 134, 144, 245, 349; and geometry, 255; and music, 155, 168, 237, 239, 311, 313; and physics, 115, 217 Pandora, 75 Panegyric, 302 Parabasis, 272 Parable(s), 74, 76, 93, 161, 171, 173, 231, 328, 333; as a realistic genre, 95; and riddle, 93 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim) (1493–1541), 117, 256 Paradox, 29, 184, 280 Paravritti (in Lankavatara Sutra), 19, 28, 36, 37 Paris, 106 Parody, 90 Paronomasia, 89, 103, 194, 199, 209, 222 Pastoral, 67, 303, 304; symbolism, 25, 35 Pater, Walter Horatio (1839–94), 86, 227 Pathos, 303, 304, 305 Pattern, 128, 129, 130; and recurrence, 13; and rhythm, 58, 61, 221, 307–8, 311 Paul, St., 6, 48, 55, 71, 167; Epistles of, 18, 162, 280, 275, 276, 311 Pearl (ca. 1400), 98, 232, 280 Peele, George (ca. 1556–96), Endymion symbolism in, 343 Pegasus, and Hippocrene, 10 Péguy, Charles (1873–1914), 138 Peleus, 11 Penelope, 41

439 Perseus, 111, 156, 158, 188, 210, 274; Jung on, 23 Persona, 31, 35–7, 40, 188 Peter, St., 6, 9, 21, 23, 61, 140 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304– 74), 25, 218; courtly love in, 232 Petronius, 12 Phallic symbolism, 9–15 passim, 18 Pharisees, 41 Pharmakos figure, 108, 174, 219, 231, 233, 238, 249, 270; as traitor, 218 Phillpotts, Dame Bertha Surtees (1877–1932): The Elder Edda and Ancient Scandinavian Drama (1920), 348 Philosophy, 75–6, 128–40 passim, 148–9, 241, 300, 312, 313, 328; and the arts, 267; and history, 155, 228, 236; vs. literature, 228–9; NF’s linguistic approach to, 114; and social science, 224; and poetry, 265 Phoenix symbolism, 219 Physics, 46–7, 56, 132–4, 190, 349; and painting, 115, 217 Piedmont massacre, 24 Pindar (ca. 522 B.C.E.–ca. 440 B.C.E.), 78, 135; physician legend in, 122 Pisgah, 25 Pity, and terror, 90, 192, 193, 211, 223, 305, 307, 308 Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 B.C.E.), 7, 10, 18, 24, 39, 50, 87, 94, 105, 131, 140, 141, 142, 149, 176; and Blake, 212; his cave allegory, 94, 224; closed state in, 203; dialectic in, 98, 253; and dialogue form, 92, 135, 141, 162, 180; divided line in, 147; as existential, 275; form and idea in, 103, 173, 307; Golden Age in, 341; and Iliad, 105; ladder symbolism in, 14; on law, 23, 34; monologue form in, 135; on myth, 69, 252; Platonic love, 319; on

440 poetry, 212; on rhetoric, 226, 332; vortex in, 6; on work, 88, 97, 313; Cratylus, 94, 114, 138, 213; Euthyphro, 34; Ion, 138, 212; Laws, 118, 272; Meno, 139; Phaedrus, 29, 212; Protagoras, 213, 224; Republic, 23, 105, 115, 116, 143, 175, 208, 212, 213, 224, 227, 253, 272–3, 342; Sophist, 208; Statesman, 262; Symposium, 212; Timaeus, 94 Platonism, 163, 257 Plautus, Titus Maccius (ca. 250–184 B.C.E.), 167, 244, 304, 319; and Christianity, 212; structure of comedy in, 247 Play, 284 Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus) (C.E. 23–79), 344 Plot, 300–1, 307 Plotinus (ca. C.E. 205–70), 85, 118; Enneads, 236, 286 Plutarch (ca. C.E. 46–ca. 120), and myth, 256 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), 260, 280, 281; on art, 204; his theory of poetry, 16; The City in the Sea (1845), 280; “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842), 343; The Raven (1845), 98, 173 Poetry, 51, 63, 76–81 passim, 91, 131, 134, 137, 155, 179, 241, 261, 312– 15, 349; and belief, 208; difficulty of the term, 307; as divine, 311; and drama, 150; four levels of, 63; general tendencies in, 192; as language, 330; and ritual, 142; and mathematics, 94, 312; modern, 272; and music, 277; mythopoeic, 302; myths of, 56; narrative and didactic, 159, 162, 182, 183; and philosophy, 265; and prose, 86–9, 93, 141–3, 151, 154, 182–3, 194, 196, 307; sincerity in,

Index 270; symbolism in, 313; value of, 138–9; visual presentation of, 322; void in, 232–3; wheel of, 181, 184 Poet(s), 198, 292; as craftsman, 126; epic, 75, 179; as liar, 284, 312; and the Word, 7 Politics, and myth, 295 Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeus Magnus) (106–48 B.C.E.), 284 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744): spite in, 296; wit in, 103; Essay on Criticism (1711), 137; Rape of the Lock (1712), 108 Pope, the, 9, 48; as Antichrist, 7; and encyclical form, 311 Porphyry (ca. 234–ca. 305), 109 Positivism, 236, 239 Possession, and presentation, 291 Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885–1972), 212, 272, 284, 331, 333; and convention, 218 Praxis, 241 Prayer, 299 Praz, Mario (1896–1982): The Romantic Agony (1930; trans. 1933), 246, 273 Predestination, 30, 62, 67 Presentation, and possession, 291 Presocratics, 8 Prester John, 344 Priestley, F(rancis) E(thelbert) L(ouis) (1905–88), on Godwin, 53 Princeton University, NF lectures at, 187, 188, 224 & n. 78, 242 Printing press, 232 Prodigal Son, 95, 231 Prometheus, 37, 75, 101, 224, 233; as Christ figure, 22 Prophecy, 76, 161, 162, 231, 327, 346 Prose, 39, 51, 63, 180–1, 198; continuous, 280; encyclopedic tendency in, 241; fiction, 113, 114, 134–5, 306; forms, 76–81 passim, 113, 114, 141–

Index 3, 239, 328; and myth, 56, 142; and poetry, 86–9, 93, 141–3, 151, 154, 182–3, 194, 196, 307; rhythm of, 280, 332; and satire, 194–5; wheel of, 181, 193. See also Fiction Prose Edda, 68 Proserpine, 122 Prosody, 58 Protestantism, 28, 70, 138, 270, 298, 325; the Bible in, 139; and epic, 4–5, 71; essence vs. existence in, 27; expansion of, 24; and Roman Catholicism, 37; temporal power in, 7; and Shakespeare, 41; and the Word, 7, 37, 147, 180 Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), 31, 111, 156, 190, 274, 291, 297, 305, 338, 342, 343; Remembrance of Things Past (À la Recherche du temps perdu) (1913– 27), 219, 221, 222 Providence, 262; and fate, 249, 255 Psalms, Book of, 160, 302; Psalm no. 120, 280 Psyche, and Cupid, 207 Psychoanalysis, 11 Psychology, 103, and literary criticism, 164 Ptolemaic universe, 49, 234 Puns, 137, 222 Purchas, Samuel (1577–1626), and geography, 344 Purgatory, 102 Puritanism, 253, 327; and national ritual, 344 Pythagoras (6th c. B.C.E.), 10, 58, 94, 132, 268 Quest, 66, 156, 171, 188, 241, 277, 304– 6, 316, 317; in Christianity, 8; cycle, 170, 319; double, 187–8; five types of, 302; tragic and comic, 187 Quid agas, 93, 147, 234

441 Quid credas, 147 Ra, 242 Rabelais, François (ca. 1494–1553), 50, 70, 113, 179, 193, 194, 211, 343; and satire, 304; Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–35), 98, 122 Rachel, 156, 294 Radical of presentation, 181–3, 307; in lyric, 321 Raglan, Fitzroy Richard Somerset, Baron (1885–1964), on romance, 277 Rahab, 19, 32, 185; and Dido, 12 Ramus, Petrus (1515–72), on Aristotle, 262 Rank, Otto (1884–1939): The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909; trans. 1914), 40 Ransom, John Crowe (1888–1974), 237 Rapunzel, 194 Read, Sir Herbert (1893–1968): The True Voice of Feeling (1953), 212 Reader, and writer, 282 Realism, 81, 82, 163, 200; and low mimetic mode, 302; vs. myth, 213, 214; pity and terror in, 90 Recognition, 283. See also Anagnorisis Recurrence, 13, 89, 131, 137, 165, 203, 333; natural, 326 Reformation, 61, 138. See also Protestantism Reincarnation, 326; and Christianity, 296 Religion, 45, 117–18, 181, 186, 284, 287, 293, 299, 314; and art, 203–4, 314; comparative, 117; connection in, 125; decline of institutional, 252; as handicap, 289, 295; and myth, 227, 295; natural, 326; occultism in, 117; value judgments in, 227 Religious Knowledge, NF’s course in. See Symbolism in the Bible

442 Renaissance, 31, 61, 85, 92, 117, 124, 136, 164, 251; anagogy in, 3; art and nature in, 27, 36; conception of history in, 314; criticism in, 139; epic in, 4–5, 139; great man or hero in, 8, 143; and green world, 42; and high mimetic mode, 302; and humanism, 232; orator in, 143, 172, 311; philosophy in, 19; poetry in, 277; science in, 19; theology in, 19; treatment of the Classics in, 126 Repetition, 199 Representational fallacy, 312 Restoration, 38; comedy, 216; and Milton, 24 Revelation, 74; Book of, 21, 22, 70 Reynolds, Henry (fl. 1627–32), 344 Rhetoric, 93, 149–52, 154, 198, 199, 209, 215, 224, 241, 250, 257–8, 333–4; and allegory, 208, 281; ambiguity in, 143; and dialectic, 208, 253; five levels of, 200, 236, 239; vs. logic, 332; and metaphor, 262; styles of, 287; theory of, 89, 339; two tendencies of, 236; wheel of, 239 Rhyme, relation to mathematics, 97 Rhythm, 128, 221, 251, 280, 332; associative, 280; and mathematics, 97; and pattern, 58, 61, 221, 307–8, 311; in prose, 280; and recurrence, 13; in verse, 280 Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong) (1893– 1979), 237; on mediation, 126; on value judgments in literature, 183; Practical Criticism (1929), 281 Richardson, Samuel (1689–1761): Clarissa (1747–48), 277, 303; Pamela (1740–41), 284, 305 Riddle(s), 161, 184, 280; and parable, 93 Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926), 101,

Index 135, 160, 211, 263; Duino Elegies (1922), 184, 318 Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur (1854–91), 77, 101, 135, 156, 169, 195, 272, 275, 328; and oracular form, 162; Illuminations (1886), 173, 184 Ritual, 74, 168, 203–4, 235–6, 344–5; bondage of, 328; and drama, 7; and dream, 155–6, 174, 198, 207, 229, 238, 250, 284, 313, 314, 328, 338; festivity and routine in, 246–7, 250; and myth, 28, 45, 142, 271; private and public, 338; and romance, 96, 246–7 Robertson, D(urant) W(aite), Jr. (1914–92), 207 Robertson, J(ohn) M(ackinnon) (1856– 1933), 11 Robin Hood, 42 Robins, John Daniel (1884–1952), 281 Rococo, 295 Roman Catholic Church, 6, 7, 18, 23; as Antichrist, 344; apostasy of, 21; and comedy, 30, 216; father figure in, 11; images in, 215; and Protestantism, 37; and Shakespeare, 41 Romance, 32, 64, 66, 134, 176–8, 207, 249, 266, 302; archetypes in, 91, 189; dream in, 164, 301, 303; elegiac and idyllic in, 165–6, 303; festivity and routine in, 246; four levels of, 110; Grail in, 294–5; as irrational, 277; natura naturans in, 177; pity and terror in, 84, 86, 90, 303, 305; as a proletarian form, 83, 173, 328, 250; quest in, 30, 219; and ritual, 96, 246; and Romanticism, 204, 211 Romance (mode), 61, 96, 163, 164, 168, 172, 199, 207, 212, 257, 313; and anatomy, 185, 239; and comedy, 66, 220; and commandment, 173; and

Index encyclopedic form, 308; and epic, 30, 70; hero in, 157, 301, 304; and irony, 196, 246; quest in, 210, 243 Romans, Epistle to the, 48 Romantic movement/Romanticism, 6, 85, 86, 95, 153, 197, 200, 212, 290, 297, 302, 327; allegory and archetype in, 216, 289; and Classicism, 216, 285, 303; criticism in, 123; and cyclical history, 243; diabolism in, 342; epic in, 273; fallacy of, 250; God in, 110; hero in, 28; on Locke, 262; NF lectures on, 293; Orc in, 31; pity and terror in, 211; and romance, 204, 211; topocosm of, 271–2, 290 Romaunt of the Rose, 5, 8 Rome, ancient, 7; founding of, 10; law in, 118; as symbol, 17, 19; vs. Venice, 15, 17 Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio (1792– 1868), 269 Rougemont, Denis de (1906–85): Love in the Western World (1939), 348 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712–78), 47, 49, 76, 229; and the act, 285; and Christianity, 284; on the individual, 149; nature and reason in, 230; sleeping beauty in, 257, 290; Utopia in, 203 Rovescio structure, 269 Rowland, Henry Edgar (Hank) (b. 1910), 14 Ruskin, John (1819–1900), 40, 120, 123, 281, 293; alchemical symbolism in, 217; hallucinatory cat in, 228; Sesame and Lilies (1865), 217 Ryle, Gilbert (1900–76), on Descartes, 262 Sabbath, 250 Sakuntala, 169; amnesia in, 248

443 Samson, 20, 75; and Delilah, 11; and the lion, 12; as type of Christ, 108 Samuel, 48; Book of, 21 Santayana, George (1863–1952), 227 Sappho (ca. 630–570 B.C.E.), 279 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80): No Exit (1943), 233 Satan (or Lucifer), 61, 74, 316; agon with Jesus, 38; Satanism, 176 Satire, 67, 78, 135, 172, 174–9, 190, 192–6, 210, 315–16, 328, 336, 342–3; and comedy, 316, 342; comminution/fragmentation in, 173, 185, 211, 239, 254, 255; and dissociative rhythm, 207–8, 222; encyclopedic tendency in, 241; and epic, 342; fantasy worlds in, 212; and irony, 84, 168, 207, 239, 304, 305; and lyric, 152, 161, 238, 270; as obscene, 122, 241, 246; and tragedy, 316, 343 Satura (fragmentation), 43, 207 Saturn, 196 Saturnalia, 341–2 Satyr play, 144 Scapegoat, 34, 189, 238. See also Pharmakos Schalk, 4, 5, 200 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759–1805), 28; and Donne, 168; on naive and sentimental poetry, 86, 88, 164, 182, 204; and satire, 78, 168 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), 30, 290; on will, 28 Schubert, Franz (1797–1828), and Goethe, 296 Science, 45, 71–2, 138, 284; vs. art, 145, 287, 331; and law, 155; vs. literature, 46–7; reality in, 287 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), 111, 274, 282

444 Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich (1872–1915), 16, 230 Scripture: archetypes in, 31; and comminution, 87, 178, 186; and distortion of history, 291, 292; and Druidic symbols, 83; as highest form of prose, 162, 275, 239; and tragedy, 13. See Bible; Gospel; New Testament Sculpture, 133; and biology, 115, 133– 4, 144–5, 217, 293 Sea imagery, 9, 17–19, 21, 33 Seattle, NF’s epiphany in, 337 Sebastian, St. (d. ca. C.E. 288), 10, 13 Second Coming, 248 Selden, John (1584–1654), 344 Semantics, 130, 310 Semniotes, 241, 244 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, the Younger (ca. 4 B.C.E.–C.E. 65), 283, 332; ghosts in, 222 Senex figures, 219 Sermon on the Mount, 167 Serpent symbolism, 9, 11–14, 22, 91, 122, 325 Seventeenth century, prose in, 131 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), 4, 6, 43, 57, 60, 61, 113, 148, 192, 206, 267, 269, 289, 295, 304, 322, 336, 343; as addressed to actors, 214; archetypes in, 185; comedies of, 44, 58, 64, 66, 246, 247, 251, 303; and convention, 218; and cyclical history, 243; debate over authorship, 295; green world in, 61, 316; hero in, 301; and historical criticism, 53; history plays of, 57, 78; influences of, 283; intention in, 225; irony in, 54; and Jonson, 303; and Los, 24; and opera, 191; and Protestantism, 41; NF lectures on, 267, 293, 294; and Roman Catholicism, 41; romances

Index of, 266, 294; and Spenser, 16, 49; tragic mood in, 223; unity of time and place in, 249 – works: Coriolanus (1623), 32; Cymbeline (1623), 41, 343; Hamlet (1603), 13, 26, 47, 179, 217, 277, 302, 342; Henry IV plays (1598; 1600), 280; Henry V (1600), 280; Henry VI plays (1623), 214; Henry VIII (1623), 41; King John (1623), 41, 343; King Lear (1608), 20, 42, 108, 179, 213, 214, 343; Macbeth (1623), 42, 213; Measure for Measure (1623), 22, 219; The Merchant of Venice (1600), 18, 196; The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), 42; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), 41, 42, 106, 256, 287; Much Ado about Nothing (1600), 66, 165; Othello (1622), 179, 277; The Phoenix and Turtle (1601), 3, 7, 49, 184, 207; Romeo and Juliet (1597), 280; Sonnets (1609), 160, 184, 318; The Tempest (1623), 10, 11, 18, 19, 22, 24, 49, 61, 165, 190, 215, 218, 233, 249, 251, 256, 257, 269, 271, 277, 295, 313, 325, 344; Timon of Athens (1623), 196; Troilus and Cressida (1609), 53, 105, 248, 343; Twelfth Night (1623), 42; The Winter’s Tale (1623), 49, 169, 249 Shaman figure, 15 Shapiro Karl (1913–2000), on Jung, 267 Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), 86, 142, 280; dandyism in, 265; and evolution, 256; Candida (1898), 75; Pygmalion (1913), 287; Saint Joan (1924), 342; The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), 241 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797– 1851): Frankenstein (1818), 290 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), 89, 98, 148, 170, 173, 185, 271–2,

Index Eros in, 163; Jupiter in, 218, 273, 290; Mother Earth in, 290; serpent imagery in, 104; Alastor (1816), 98; Prince Athanase (1824), 187; To a Skylark (1820), 28; The Witch of Atlas (1824), 185 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–86), 25, 130, 139, 279; and Dante, 42; theory of poetry, 16; Apology for Poetry (A Defence of Poetry) (1595), 130 & n. 3, 236, 284; Arcadia (1590), 35; Astrophel and Stella (1591), 218 Silberer, Herbert (1882–1922), 40; Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism (1917), 12–13 Simile, 125, 231, 258 Sinai, Mount, 167, 194; as Hagar, 319 Singing, vs. chanting, 94, 168, 182, 321 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 42 Sitwell, Dame Edith Louisa (1887– 1964), 49; The Song of the Cold (1948), 135 Skelton, John (ca. 1460–1529), 148 Sky-father god, 61, 108, 167 Smart, Christopher (1722–71), 275; babble in, 280; Jubilate Agno, 327 & n. 1 Smith, Alexander (1830–67), 152, 204 Smollett, Tobias George (1721–71): The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), 214, 216, 263 Social sciences, 227; evolutionary hypotheses in, 227; and law, 252; and literature, 133–4; and nature, 153 Sociology, 52 Socrates (469–399 B.C.E.), 94, 139, 176, 253, 268; hero in, 143 Solomon, 344 Sonata form, 256; and Orc cycle, 58 Son figure, 11, 12, 61, 325; existential,

445 186; and Logos, 106; revelation through, 298 Song of Songs, 188 Sophocles (ca. 496–405 B.C.E.): Philoctetes, 90 Southey, Robert (1774–1843), 322 Soviet Union, flag of, 189 Space, and time, 45, 197, 261, 268, 287, 292 Sparagmos, 94, 173, 178, 194, 207, 270, 279, 304, 305, 321, 343. See also Comminution; Fragmentation Species, wheel of, 96, 98, 99, 102, 104 Speech: associative, 285; free, 285, 287, 293 Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903), on evolution, 242 Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936), 39, 58, 64, 82, 89, 104, 119, 197, 202, 209, 243, 252, 262, 328; dialectic in, 99, 143, 204, 338; empiric pluralism in, 225, 228; on history, 56, 117, 140, 154, 186, 191, 208, 243; imitation in, 235; and literary criticism, 123–4, 129, 131, 136, 170; science in, 46; time in, 261; The Decline of the West (1918), 67, 347 Spinoza, Baruch de (1632–77), 114, 239, 262; verbal and mathematical structures in, 261; Ethics (1677), 149 & n. 58 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552–99), 3, 10, 20, 30–43 passim, 57–8, 65–74, passim, 113, 116, 139, 140, 155, 175, 187, 196, 207, 280, 289, 315, 322, 335, 336, 343; allegory in, 5, 16, 21, 67, 107, 130; and AC, 22–5; archetypes in, 155; and Ariosto, 21, 32, 65; and Arthurian legends, 41–2; Beulah in, 22, 23, 34, 35, 64; and the Bible, 16, 200; and Blake, 16; chastity and charity in, 26–7; chivalry in, 143;

446 and cyclical history, 243; and Dante, 21, 32, 65; Druid analogy in, 193; on England, 67; and epic tradition, 4–5, 111, 121, 188, 211, 254, 276, 277, 295; Eros in, 163; on faith, 12; Gardens of Adonis in, 22, 23, 109, 170, 193, 316; green world in, 42, 67, 316; Heaven and Hell in, 289; influence of Ireland on, 35, 72; and Jung, 23; letter to Raleigh, 41; Los in, 23, 27; and Milton, 16, 22, 23; Orc fallacy in, 27; persona in, 31; quest in, 67; and romance tradition, 260, 263, 266, 274, 304; and Shakespeare, 16, 49; vision of justice in, 72–3; and the Word, 7 – works: Epithalamion (1595), 49; Faerie Queene (1590–96), 5, 11, 18–19, 22–6, 30, 32–5, 45, 49, 57, 64–74 passim, 107, 150, 165, 168, 176, 193, 196, 200, 214, 218, 246, 249, 257, 278, 288, 289, 316, 340; Hymnes, 19, 34; Mutability Cantos (1599), 27, 30, 33, 35, 66, 73, 171, 257 Spirit, Holy. See Holy Spirit Stalinism, 117 Stallknecht, Newton Phelps (1906– 81): Strange Seas of Thought (1945), 257 State, myth of the, 115 Stein, Arnold (1915–2002), on Milton, 225 Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), 151, 194, 280, 327, 328, 333, 339 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783– 1842), 290 Sterne, Laurence (1713–68), 173, 194, 280; Tristram Shandy (1759–65), 169, 178, 327 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), xxvi, 260, 263, 266; The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage (1919), 109

Index Stevenson Adlai Ewing (1900–65), 227, 263 Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–94), 219 Stoll, Elmer Edgar (1874–1959), on Shakespeare, 214 Strachey, Lytton (1880–1932), dandyism in, 265 Structure, 185–6; structural analysis, 137–40 Style, 128–9, 198 Subconscious, creative, 288. See also Unconscious Subjectivity, vs. objectivity, 297 Sublime, 126 Sun symbolism, 11, 13–15, 25, 60–1, 91, 304; and moon symbolism, 316; in Rococo, 295 Surrealism, 327 Surtees, Robert Smith (1805–64), 111; Handley Cross (1843), 129, 196, 263, 282 Sutra, 114, 141, 280 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), 212; and epistle form, 162; Gulliver’s Travels (1726), 11, 122, 225; Journal to Stella (1710–13), 178, 194, 327 Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837– 1909), 89, 151, 332, 333; masochism in, 296; Second Coming in, 248 Symbolism, 102, 266, 316; vs. allegory, 102, 216; relation to belief, 203; five levels of, 205; NF’s course in, see Literary Symbolism; Symbolism in the Bible; social and individual aspects of, 206; theory of, 39–40 Symbolism in the Bible (NF’s course in), 143 Symbolisme, 164, 186, 194, 210, 305 Symbol(s), 13, 136, 198, 311–12, 313, 315, 317; and archetypes, 138 Symposium, 162

Index Taoism, 117, 141, 178 Tasso, Torquato (1544–95), 24, 31, 34, 200; and epic, 3–5, 69–70; Gerusalemme liberata, 69–70 Teaching, 331 Tempest imagery, 60–1; in Rococo, 295 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809–92), 52, 94, 148; Hesperides (1833), 109 Terence, Publius Terentius Afer (ca. 190–159 B.C.E.), 283 Teresa, of Ávila, St. (1515–82), 109 Terror, 83–4, 303; and pity, 90, 305, 307. See also Fear Tetragrammaton, 47, 134, 140 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63): Vanity Fair (1847), 302 Tharmas (Blake character), 22, 39, 67, 68, 96, 122 Theocritus (fl. 270 B.C.E.), and romance tradition, 266 Theology, 69, 75, 76, 140, 142, 228, 234, 271, 309; Christian vs. Classical, 138; Christian vs. Hebraic, 138; Newman on, 186 Theology Today (periodical), 80 Thersites, 176 Theseus, 111, 156, 158, 188, 210, 274; and dance, 168 Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914–53), 280; Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait (1941), 109 Thomism, 23, 47, 94, 116, 151, 173, 186, 209, 271; dialectic in, 325, Neo-, 208; ritual in, 204; universal real in, 318; work in, 90, 97 Thought, 241; and language, 244, 251 Thucydides (ca. 469–ca. 400 B.C.E.), 279 Thurber, James Grover (1894–1961), 242; Is Sex Necessary? (1929), 13 Tillich, Paul Johannes (1886–1965): on

447 education, 297; Systematic Theology (1951, 1957, 1963), 213 Time, 142–3, 318; experience of, 261; and space, 45, 197, 261, 268, 287, 292 Timothy, Epistles of, 280 Tirzah (Blake character), 167, 185, 197 Titans, 74 Titoism, 117 Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) (1892–1973), 111, 274, 284 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich (1828–1910), 16, 236, 315; Anna Karenina (1875–77), 247, 282 Topoi, 262, 272 Tower symbolism, 187, 188 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889–1975), 8, 39, 56, 95; A Study of History (1934–54), 347 Tragedy, 4, 43, 84, 163, 175, 207, 210, 242–4, 250, 296, 303; anagnorisis in, 106; catharsis in, 223; as classbound, 328; and comedy, 51, 144, 152, 166, 190, 199, 212, 231, 249, 255, 337; and existentialism, 257; as form, 303; goal of, 180; hero in, 142, 301, 302; and irony, 242; as irrational, 277; and law, 307; plot in, 301; quest in, 187; and satire, 343; and scripture, 13 Transfiguration, 21 Transubstantiation, 271 Treatise, 285 Tree: of knowledge, 20; of life, 17, 20–1 Trent, Council of, 138 Trevisa, John de (1326–1402), 344 Trinity, 75, 228 Trollope, Anthony (1815–82), 301, 302; and allegory, 102 Tropological, as a level of meaning, 313

448 Trotskyism, 117 Troy, 33, 343; Trojans, 105 Truth, and beauty, 145 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835–1910): The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 198 Two Brothers, archetype of, 111, 274 Two Brothers (ballad), 242 Tyndale, William (ca. 1495–1536), controversy with More, 139 Ulro, 44, 81, 86, 158, 319; and Generation, 102, 104 Unification, and comminution, 192 United States of America: and Communism, 253; dandyism in, 265; Humanities in, 253; vulgate in, 114, 161, 287 University of Toronto Quarterly, 45 Upanishads, 12, 62, 114, 142; dialogue in, 162; Brihadaranyaka, 10; Chandogya, 47, 115, 134 Urania, 135 Urizen (Blake character), 60, 96, 140, 186, 273, 290, 316 Urthona (Blake character), 36, 96; Spectre of, 123 Usener, Hermann (1834–1905), 117 Utopia(s), 125, 194, 250, 295; and mock Utopia, 341; myth of the state in, 115 Vala (Blake character), 64, 296 Valéry, Paul (1871–1945), 263, 272, 273, 331; on inspiration, 282 Value judgments, 88, 203, 224, 265, 289; subjective vs. objective, 230 Vancouver, NF lectures in, 285 Van Dyke, Anton (Sir Anthony) (1599–1641), portrait of Charles I, 265 Varro, Marcus Terentius (116–27

Index b.c.e.), 51, 89, 113, 143, 223, 239, 343; and epic tradition, 4, 6 Vaughan, Henry (1622–95), 52 Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929), 56 Vedas, 78, 134, 302 Vendryes, Joseph Jean Baptiste Marie (1875–1960), 89, 138, 203, 332 Venice: as analogy of Jerusalem, 17; vs. Rome, 15, 17 Venus, 17, 25, 194, 279; and Adonis, 207 Verbal structures: centrifugal vs. centripetal, 286–7; time and space in, 261 Verbal universe, 76, 129, 130, 131, 134, 136, 138, 139, 261, 286, 315, 328, 349 Verse: didactic, 324; rhythm in, 280 Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744), 140 Victoria College: NF principal of, 297; speech habits at, 287 Victorian Age, myth in, 121 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Comte Auguste (1840–89), 278 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70– 19 B.C.E.), 8, 69, 70, 74, 111, 148, 155, 168, 187, 195, 240, 274, 294, 344; and epic tradition, 3, 4, 5, 65, 266, 325; Greeks and Trojans in, 105; Aeneid, 10, 14, 31, 43, 63, 64, 67, 75, 104, 109, 270, 273, 277, 283, 288, 324, 344; Eclogues, 273; Georgics, 273 Virginia, NF lectures at (Page-Barbour lectures), xxv, 279, 281, 283, 286, 288 Vision: deductive and inductive, 216; focused and peripheral, 268 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de (1694–1778): Candide (1759), 189; L’Ingénu (1767), 342 Vortex, 6, 10, 19, 33, 34, 263; and chain, 38, 40

Index Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard (1813– 83), 13, 16, 31, 32, 276; and Nazism, 12; symbolism in, 12, 233; Ring des Niebelungen (1876), 31 Waley, Arthur (1889–1969), on Confucius, 291 Walker, Jimmy (James J.) (1881–1946), 263 Warburton, Bishop William (1698– 1779), 344 Waugh, Evelyn Arthur St. John (1903–66), dandyism in, 265 Web symbolism, 14, 91 Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866– 1946): Tono Bungay (1908), 342 Welsford, Enid (1892–1981): The Court Masque (1927), 348; The Fool (1936), 348 West, Dame Rebecca (Cicely Isabel Fairfield) (1892–1983): The Meaning of Treason (1947), 34 & n. 90 Western, University of, NF lectures at, xxv Western(s), as modern pastoral, 304 Weston, Jessie L. (1850–1928), 164 White goddess, and black bride, 109, 111, 156 Whitehead, Alfred North (1861– 1947), 36, 39, 46, 85, 91; Science and the Modern World (1925), 293 Whitman, Walt (1819–92), 77, 89, 183, 211, 280; “as if” in, 216; When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloomed (1865–66), 218 Whore of Babylon, 162 Wiener, Norbert (1894–1964), on communication and entropy, 261 Wilde, Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills (1854–1900), 86; dandyism in, 264–5; life imitates literature, 229; An Ideal Husband (1895), 265; A Woman of No Importance (1893), 265

449 Wilderness imagery, 33–4 Will, 123; and creation, 28, 36, 146, 179; and imagination, 28, 36 Williams, Charles Walter Stansby (1886–1945), 185, 328; and irony, 305; structure of his novels, 162 Williams, Tennessee (1911–83): A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), 165 Williamson, George (1898–1968), Senecan amble, 332 Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972), on Houdini, 294 Wimsatt, William K. (1907–75), theory of poetic unity in, 150 Winter, William (1836–1917): Shakespeare’s England (1892), 348 Witchcraft, 288 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Joseph Johann (1889–1951), 45, 52, 114, 129, 239, 268, 349; silence in, 141, 196, 315 Wodehouse, P.G. (Sir Pelham Grenville) (1881–1975), structure of comedy in, 247 Wood, Gordon Walter, 134 Woodhouse, A(rthur) S(utherland) P(igott) (1895–1964): Puritanism and Liberty, 324 & n. 2 Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882– 1941), 11, 31, 185, 190, 274, 276; and irony, 305; To the Lighthouse (1927), 34, 187, 339; The Waves (1931), 34 Word, the, 4–7, 19, 36–9, 44–51, 54–6, 58, 64–5, 71–2, 77, 93, 95, 118, 132–3, 142, 147, 172, 176, 180, 199, 200, 261, 278, 311, 316, 325; and the arts, 186; and the Church, 73; and confession, 76; Dante as, 60; existential, 186; made flesh, 23, 167; Milton as, 60; mystical use of, 115, 140–1, 315; revelation of, 69, 138. See also Logos Wordsworth, William (1770–1850), 28, 86, 93, 126, 236, 257, 324; poetry

450 and prose in, 87; relation to the Romantics, 149; Ode on Intimations of Immortality (1807), 335 & n. 1; Ode to Duty, 78; Plea for the Historian, 33 & n. 87; The Prelude (1805, 1850), 78, 136, 163, 182, 231, 283 Work, 4, 26, 38, 81, 116, 157, 234, 284, 313, 319; consciousness in, 247; goal of, 88, 90, 97; liberal, 250 World(s): fallen vs. unfallen, 16–17; three, 44, 46 Writer, and reader, 282 Wulfstan II, Archbishop of York (d. 1023), 194 Wyndham, John (John Wyndham Harris) (1903–69): Day of the Triffids (1951), 246 Xenophanes of Colophon (ca. 570–ca. 475 b.c.e.), 315 Xenophon (ca. 435–354 b.c.e.): Cyropaedia, 139 Yahweh, 134 Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), 147, 252, 256, 260, 263, 266, 280, 284, 295, 322, 335; archetypes in, 185, 187, 219, 250; Beulah in, 21; on cantillation, 168, 321; clichés in, 278;

Index and cyclical history, 243, 248; dandyism in, 265; death and rebirth in, 292; and drama, 94; great mind in, 256; imagination in, 292; “mask” doctrine in, 123; mezzanine world in, 118; Oedipus in, 98; Ptolemaic universe in, 234; and Ruskin’s cat, 228; theory of gyres, 338 – works: All Souls’ Night (1928), 292; Among School Children (1927), 109; Byzantium (1932), 292; A Dialogue of Self and Soul (1933), 283; Leda and the Swan (1924), 98; News for the Delphic Oracle (1939), 292; Sailing to Byzantium (1928), 184, 292; The Shadowy Waters (1900), 13; The Tower (1928), 273 & n. 36; Vacillation (1932), 109; A Vision (1937), 95 Yoga, 29, 118, 119, 245, 268 Young, Karl (1879–1943): The Drama of the Medieval Church (1933), 347 Zeitgeist, 225 Zen, 178 Zeus, 107, 273 Zoas, four, 122; chariot of, 10 Zodiac, 31, 207, 210, 234, 245, 254, 255, 348–9 Zola, Émile (1840–1902), 147