February 17, 2023
This newsletter continues a meditation upon memory—though a specific kind of memory: general and cultural rather than personal, extraverted and intellectual rather than introverted and emotional. Consequently, our treatment of the subject has been historical, beginning in the initial oral phase of society, in which memory was all-important, because nothing could be preserved or passed on by being written down. Cultural memory—that is, the historical, social, and religious information on which a society is founded—was vulnerable and threatened. One break in the generational sequence of transmission and, like a native language, it would be lost forever. While tribal elders, priests, and shamans might also have been guardians of cultural lore, remembering became the chief task of the oral poet.
In the Homeric period, Hesiod’s Theogony was a “mythological epic” as opposed to a heroic one. Constructed like Scripture, it begins with a Greek Creation myth. In fact, the whole poem is a Creation myth. The Greek gods emerge out of chaos and Zeus becomes their ruler, but the rest of the narrative depicts the gods continuing the process of Creation by imposing order through quelling various monstrous beings who represent the chaotic powers of nature. The Olympians fight a ten-year war with the Titans, thrusting them down into Tartarus, the lowest part of the Underworld; Zeus defeats and kills the giant serpent Python, and so on. While Creation in the Theogony is not explicitly by the power of the word as in the Bible, its long catalogues of names produce the effect of summoning up whole orders of being through the incantatory power of naming.
The long catalogues of names in Milton’s Paradise Lost have much the same effect. They are not there to show off Milton’s erudition but to create a reservoir of cultural memories. When we access a memory, it is an act of Creation, perhaps also of resurrection, as the memory springs into being once again from the hidden underworld in which it lay dormant. There is something uncanny about the act of remembering, a creating of something out of nothing, a rebirth of what had seemed dead and vanished. In this way, memory is a primary act of the imagination, not the passive operation of a recording device. When Blake condemned memory as having nothing to do with the imagination, he meant memory in the latter, passive sense.
The end of the Theogony as the triumph of Zeus is a celebration of what in The Productions of Time I called a vision of order. It is a conservative, top-down, hierarchical order, but Hesiod thoroughly approves of it. As usual in conservative myths, anything that challenges that hierarchical order is deemed demonic, especially if it claims creative power in its own right. Hesiod is honest enough to admit that there was one great figure who challenged the gods’ prerogative, the Titan Prometheus. Indeed, he tells the story of Prometheus twice, once in the Theogony and once in his other poem, Works and Days. But in fact he tells it in order to distort its true meaning and discredit it. When Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to the human race, what he was really giving was the fire of imagination and creativity. An extraordinary speech in Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound is explicit about this: fire is a symbol for the endless inventiveness that has produced both civilization and the arts. Institutional Christianity was, like Hesiod, conservative and hierarchical, but in the Renaissance and Romantic periods humanity once again began to claim access to divine creative power, and it did so through meditation on various mythological and archetypal images that “remembered” them in the sense of activating their latent powers.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. In the Middle Ages, theologians like Augustine and Aquinas were interested in memory, but the medieval tendency was to subordinate what was called the “art of memory” to the conservative purpose of enforcing Christian morality. Originally, that “art” had been developed by Classical rhetoricians as a rather curious technique of remembering long speeches. The orator was supposed to memorize the details of a particular piece of architecture, such as a theatre or temple, and in its various rooms or alcoves he would then memorize, in sequence, a series of vivid images that represented the various parts of his speech. It seems a curious and impractical method of memorizing, but apparently worked for those who had strong visual memories. Medieval theology, called Scholasticism, was logical and abstract rather than visual. Under the influence of Aristotelian logic, its form was the outline form of the summa, in which in which material is divided into large sections that sub-divide into smaller and smaller subordinate sections, typically numbered. The idea of a total order developed from a few basic premises was congenial to the Christian worldview, and the great art historian Erwin Panofsky traced its influence on the art and architecture of the great cathedrals in Gothic Art and Scholasticism. But in her wonderful book The Art of Memory, Frances Yates makes the striking claim that Dante’s Divine Comedy is designed as a Christian memory theatre. In it, vivid images of damned and redeemed souls are located in various places, whose object is to “remember” the various sins and virtues in the sense of meditating upon them:
If one thinks of the poem as based on orders of places in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and as a cosmic order of places in which the spheres of Hell are the spheres of heaven in reverse, it begins to appear as a summa of similitudes and exempla, ranged in order and set out upon the universe….The Divine Comedy would thus become the supreme example of the conversion of an abstract summa into a summa of similitudes and examples, with Memory as the converting power, the bridge between the abstraction and the image. (104)
Thinking of the Divine Comedy in this unexpected new context as literary memory theatre leads to a sudden insight. Some weeks ago, this newsletter featured the puppets made by celebrated author Alberto Manguel of characters from the Divine Comedy. Manguel has said that he never thought of his puppets in terms of any kind of dramatic performance. But perhaps what he was enacting was a kind of memory theatre instead, both for viewers and for the puppets’ creator. I can easily imagine the slow and careful carving of a puppet as a form of meditation.
The purpose of a Christian memory theatre is twofold, moral and mystical. Morally, the meditation on concrete exempla of virtues and vices is the equivalent of a sermon, enlightening and admonishing. Interestingly, the moral use of memory theatre goes back to Cicero, one of its great Classical advocates. Cicero developed the scheme of the four “cardinal” virtues—prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude—out of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Ethics. Christianity accepted these as natural virtues that even virtuous pagans could possess, and added to them the three "theological virtues" of faith, hope, and love, for a total of seven virtues corresponding to the Seven Deadly Sins. It may seem curious that Cicero classified memory as part of the virtue of prudence. Why prudence, we may ask? And in fact, I used to ask myself, why is prudence even a major virtue? That is because in modern times we have reduced prudence to a mere matter of calculated risk avoidance. But originally prudence was the virtue that governed all the others. Prudence is the use of reason to evaluate a specific case and decide the proper application of any particular virtue. It is the faculty, for instance, that decides when an action is true bravery and when it is mere rashness or pride. Prudence draws upon memories of various examples of bravery in making its judgment, almost like case law.
However, Yates claims there is also what someone like Dante would have called an “anagogic” use of the art of memory and its images:
But the other reason for the use of corporeal similitudes given by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa, besides their use in memory, would also come into play; namely that the Scriptures use poetic metaphors and speak of spiritual things under the similitude of corporeal things. If one were to think of the Dantesque art of memory as a mystical art, attached to a mystical rhetoric, the images of Tullius would turn into poetic metaphors for spiritual things. (104-05)
The meditation on images is deeply part of Catholic tradition, with its rich iconography, as with the Stations of the Cross. It was distrusted by many of the iconoclastic Puritans—but there were Protestants who were less puritanical. Everything Yates says of the Divine Comedy as a kind of memory theatre could also be said of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, whose original scheme envisioned 12 Arthurian knights exemplifying the 12 virtues of Aristotle’s Ethics (somewhat revamped). Each knight faces villains who embody the corresponding vice: Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, is set against Acrasia, who represents unregulated indulgence. Spenser’s visual technique was developed out of what was called the emblem tradition, which was itself a kind of moralizing memory theatre.
Like Hesiod, Dante and Spenser wrote in service of a traditional, hierarchical vision of order. But the Renaissance saw a new, more Promethean and potentially revolutionary development of memory theatre. As we saw last week, the syncretistic mythology that combined Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, alchemy, and astrology into a kind of supplement to Christianity began to use memory theatre techniques of meditation upon images in a more radical way in which remembering was a kind of gnosis or epiphany that brought with it not only revelation but the power latent in mythological images. Thus memory theatre was transformed into magic, and its practitioner became a Magus. The power of the Magus came not from above but from below: his mind turned inward upon itself and plumbed depths far below ordinary consciousness, reaching a deep, inward repository of images sometimes called the Anima Mundi or Spiritus Mundi, the soul or spirit of the world. “World” because, at this depth, the mind becomes one with nature, so that this type of magic was called natural magic. Its danger was the temptation of power, of what Jung called inflation: the magician could be possessed by the very power he sought to command, and puffed up into a kind of megalomania. He would go over to the dark side of the Force. The occultists of the early 20th century, such as Madame Blavatsky and the Order of the Golden Dawn, with whom Yeats was associated, inherited this tradition.
Which brings us to Northrop Frye, the greatest myth critic of our time, perhaps of any time. Frye wrote his landmark study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, over the course of a decade, from the mid-30’s to the mid-40’s. In it, he goes to no end of trouble to dissociate Blake from the magical and occult tradition with which Yeats and others had tried to associate him, claiming him instead for a revolutionary rather than authoritarian version of Christianity. It seems to me that he overdid it, probably because he wanted to rehabilitate Blake’s reputation as a major poet, not see him marginalized as an occultist weirdo. Privately, as we now know, his attitude was much more complex. Partly we know this because he dropped his condescending attitude later in his career, and declared his affection and qualified respect for the genre he called “kook books,” which despite their kookiness took archetypal symbolism seriously where “serious” critics dismissed it. But we also know it because of the discovery after Frye’s death of his unpublished notebooks, 77 of them, over 4000 pages of material, none of it drafts. They are Frye’s private workshop, in which we can watch him thinking. Sometimes he was wrestling with the material of what became published books. But a good deal of the time he was revolving around a scheme of eight interconnected books, a magnum opus that he called the ogdoad scheme.
An ogdoad is a pantheon of eight gods, and these works were to be “gods” in the sense of ways of seeing and understanding as exemplified by works of mythology and literature. They are phases of the human imagination, but it would not be wrong to think of them as possible modes of consciousness. As the eye, such is the object, said Blake. Alternatively, much of the time Frye conceived of them spatially, as what he called topoi: places, in the sense of contexts, within which interconnected patterns of imagery reside. Images within places: this is very close to the idea of memory theatre. Each of the volumes had a peculiar name—Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox, Ignoramus, and Twilight. In addition, each volume could be referred to by a character or code-symbol. When Robert Denham and I began transcribing the notebooks and encountered all this apparatus, we were dumbfounded. What in the world was all this? It may seem eccentric, but Frye used this system to think with for something like fifty years, and all his published books emerged, however indirectly, from meditation upon it. Briefly, Liberal was to be a Big Picture book dealing with “encyclopedic forms” like scripture and epic; Tragicomedy was most often a study of drama, especially Shakespeare; Anticlimax was a study of literary meaning and thematic forms; Rencontre dealt with Romanticism and the modern period, with its cultural breakdown.
The ogdoad was really a double quaternity, and the second quaternity of books was always ghostly and eventually faded away. But the first four volumes were an obsession of Frye’s from a time even before he published Fearful Symmetry in 1947, and he only began to admit to himself in the last dozen or so years of his life that they were, as he put it, not something to see but to see by. Like Menelaus trying to get hold of Proteus, every time he tried to write one of the four volumes, it turned into something else, one of his published works. Between 1964 and 1972, he kept a whole series of notebooks towards what he called the Third Book, meaning his third major book after Fearful Symmetry and Anatomy of Criticism. The Third Book evolved into an attempt to write the first four volumes of the ogdoad as a single work in four volumes to be called The Critical Comedy, and the blueprint of that four-volume work was a mandala image, a crossed circle that he playfully called the Great Doodle. But the Third Book project imploded for mysterious reasons, and Frye quarried it for the material of books 5-8 of Words with Power, in the process changing the diagram from a mandala to a vertical axis. One a single page of Words with Power, Frye offhandedly remarks that the four topoi of the vertical axis could be thought of as having presiding spirits: Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus. Four gods that are also four places or contexts of imagery—and the same four gods that had been the quadrants of the Great Doodle. All this is pure memory theatre, ways of remembering and organizing the material of the whole order of words, images associated with places.
I was extraordinarily lucky to have been one of the editors of the Frye notebooks, along with Robert D. Denham. I do not think of the ogdoad scheme as a curiosity or idiosyncratic hobby. Rather, I think of it as analogous to the common “deep structure” that Noam Chomsky sees underlying and informing all human languages. None of Frye’s works are about the ogdoad: yet it pervades them and makes them possible. Frye is unusual only in being conscious of the deep structure that underlies his work. That is, he “remembers” it, in the way that Plato said that all knowledge is but recollection of something we know, but don’t know we know. Readers who are interested in this remarkable phenomenon may consult the perceptive and engaging article “Frye and the Art of Memory,” by Imre Salusinszky. I always thought Imre was one of the finest minds in the community of Frye scholars, and it was a major loss when he left academia for political journalism. The epigraph to Imre’s article is a quotation from the critic Frank Kermode: “I once suggested that really they [Frye’s “systematic arrangements”] are a kind of memory theatre, just mnemonic aids. He wrote me a rather snappy letter saying, ‘Well of course they are: what did you think?’” (39). Which is very funny, but methinks he protests too much. They are memory theatre: they are not “just” mnemonic aids.
My own contribution to the discussion of Frye and the patterns of the imagination, appropriately enough, begins with a memory, that of my first published work, a short essay on Frye published in a festschrift volume on the occasion of Frye’s 70th birthday. In it, I took issue with the common dismissal of Frye as an extreme formalist who wants to put all of literature into neat little boxes, as a way of controlling the messiness of actual literary experience. Frye ignores all the differences, was the common view, as if to say that there is really no such category as “robin” because that ignores all the differences among individual robins. But of course there are differences among robins, and among all things. In the end, nothing is identically similar to anything else. From a skeptical point of view, there is no unity, only difference. “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” said Wallace Stevens in his whimsical way.
I did not dispute, up to a point, the view of Frye as a formalist, though I would say that his critics are tone-deaf: the multiplying of categories within categories, patterns within patterns, in Anatomy of Criticism is exuberant, not anxious; the tone witty and relaxed, not authoritarian and controlling. The mood is one of serious play. But my point was that Frye’s critical vision is not single but double. Seen from one angle, he is indeed a late Romantic mythmaker, forging his fearful symmetries like Blake’s Los. But his formal and idealist side has a Blakean Contrary: Frye belongs equally to the tradition of intellectual satire. To say this is to apply to Frye himself what he said of Blake, for the natural entry into Blake’s work is the satiric Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye goes so far as to say, “one may wonder whether satire was not his real medium, whether in the long run he was not of the race of Rabelais and Apuleius, a metaphysical satirist inclined to fantasy rather than symbolism” (Fearful Symmetry, 195).
And what is satire? It is the upthrusting of a Promethean energy from below that breaks through forms, shatters all visions of order, not nihilistically but because all visions of order are inadequate and will turn into prisons, into what Blake called “mind forg’d manacles,” if they are not opposed by a counterforce that prevents them from being literalized, reified, hypostatized, projected, turned into a coercive system by the will to power. Eventually, I found my own word for the Contrary to the form-making imagination: decreation. If pattern-making is a form of memory, perhaps we could say that decreation is a necessary power of forgetting. Forgetting is a kind of loss, but there are aspects of life, aspects of ourselves, that we dearly want to lose. “Forget it” can be a wonderful phrase. It’s all right; don’t worry about it; let that concern vanish and leave not a wrack behind—for, yes, Prospero’s great speech in The Tempest about the vanishing of all things, even the great globe itself, punning on the name of the Globe Theatre (which Frances Yates thinks was organized on a theatre-of-memory plan), is a decreative vision. Prospero is a melancholic, but there can be such a thing as redemptive decreation. How we envy the ability of children to forget what has upset them and smile while the tears are still on their faces. Blake’s epic The Four Zoas and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake both present this fallen world as, in the words of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. But when we do wake, we say: it was only a dream. And five minutes later, we forget the dream.
Frye’s first important critical essay, “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction,” defined the genre with which Frye identified his own work. It was published in 1942, which happens to be the date of the earliest notebook containing meditation on the ogdoad scheme, although parts of it go back even further, to a student essay titled “An Enquiry into the Art Forms of Prose Fiction” dating from 1935-39. A good deal of the published article was incorporated into Anatomy of Criticism in two different places, but the original is perhaps the superior version, a tour de force whose erudition and wit are equally dazzling, itself an example of the genre it is expounding. The fictional or narrative form of prose satire is sometimes called Menippean satire, after the Greek Menippus, whose works are lost. In Classical literature, Menippean satires include Lucian of Samosota’s True History, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, and Petronius’s Satyricon (made into a film by Fellini). In later literature, there is Rabelais, Don Quixote, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide. The Menippean satire merges with the novel in Tristram Shandy, Moby Dick, Ulysses, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Frye repeatedly makes the point that it is illuminating to see these works as part of a unified tradition rather than as idiosyncratic experiments in prose style.
There is, however, also a non-narrative, thematic form of prose satire to which Frye gave the name of anatomy, after one of its greatest examples, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (first edition, 1621). The most salient feature of the anatomy is that plot and characters are replaced with an interplay of facts and ideas:
The Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an avalanche of their own jargon. A species, or rather sub‑species, of the form is the kind of encyclopaedic farrago represented by Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists and Macrobius’ Saturnalia, where people sit at a banquet and pour out a vast mass of erudition on every subject that might conceivably come up in a conversation. The display of erudition had probably been associated with the Menippean tradition by Varro, who was enough of a polymath to make Quintilian, if not stare and gasp, at any rate call him vir Romanorum eruditissimus. The tendency to expand into an encyclopaedic farrago is clearly marked in Rabelais, notably in the great catalogues of torcheculs and epithets of codpieces and methods of divination. (Anatomy of Criticism, 291)
The common reader who has never even heard of any of these writers except perhaps Rabelais may infer that the anatomy is a kind of elitist genre, but I am not so sure. In the course of my lifetime “creative nonfiction” has been added to the list of literary categories, along with the traditional poetry, fiction, and drama. A typology of contemporary creative nonfiction might arrange it on a scale ranging from authors where the accent, so to speak, is on the “creative,” such as Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, and Jorge Luis Borges, to others where the accent is on the “nonfiction.” In fact, as the bestseller lists show, the public has quite an appetite for nonfiction treatments of intellectual subjects, ranging from astronomy and mathematics (Stephen Hawking) to evolutionary biology (Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins) to linguistics (Steven Pinker, David Crystal, Mark Abley) to history (Jacques Barzun, Heather Cox Richardson) to literature (Frye himself, the later works of Harold Bloom). There are also digital anatomies, including the Cosmos TV series, TED talks, and any number of podcasts. While there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism in American culture, there is at the same time a hunger for intellect that runs back into the 19th century in the works of Emerson and Thoreau, the Lyceum movement, the Chautauqua Institute, and the like.
But the anatomy is at once encyclopedic and at the same time subversive of the encyclopedic ideal—indeed, of any intellectual order:
All philosophies of life abstract from life; and an abstraction implies the leaving out of inconvenient data. The satirist will bring up those inconvenient data, sometimes in the form of alternative theories which cancel one another out to equal zero. (“Prose Fiction, 27)
Frye states the wider implications of this practice:
But the Menippean satire will not be wholly a satire on philosophy either, though it will include that. It will represent rather the collision between a selection of standards from experience and the feeling that experience is bigger than any set of beliefs about it. (“Prose Fiction,” 27)
If this sounds as if Frye were foreshadowing Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, or rather non-philosophy, of deconstruction, the suspicion is justified:
This insistence on the comparative naiveté of systematic thought implies a thoroughgoing intellectual nihilism which should not be limited or cheapened by such ready-made epithets as “sceptical” or “cynical.” (Prose Fiction , 28)
Religion’s pretensions to absolute knowledge are if anything even more vulnerable than philosophy to the anatomy’s decreative Tricksterism:
Here again “sceptic” is irrelevant: here again, however, is the hint that any religion, like any philosophy, is a temporary and premature synthesis of experience. (“Prose Fiction, 30)
Lacking any absolute ground, we may fall back on “common sense”:
But while common sense is perhaps as close to a norm as the Menippean satirist suggests, it too has certain implied dogmas, notably that the data of sense experience are reliable and consistent, and that our customary associations with things form a solid basis for interpreting the present and predicting the future….That is why he so often gives to ordinary life a logical and self-consistent shift of perspective. He will show us society suddenly in a telescope as posturing and dignified pygmies, or in a microscope as hideous and reeking giants, or he will change his hero into an ass and show us how humanity looks from an ass’s point of view (not well)… (“Prose Fiction, 31)
The upshot of all this is one of my favorite passages in all of Frye, transplanted with a few changes from the “Prose Fiction” article into the Anatomy:
In the riotous chaos of Rabelais, Petronius, and Apuleius the Menippean satire plunges through to its final victory over common sense. When we have finished with their weirdly logical fantasies of debauch, dream, and delirium we wake up wondering if waking itself is not an abnormal mental state. Or perhaps Paracelsus’s suggestion is right that the things seen in delirium tremens are really there, like stars in daytime. Occasionally we are dropped hints of baffling and exasperating allegory, like the Cupid and Psyche story, elusive as a grin without a cat, or we are promised a final oracle. But Lucius becomes initiated and slips out of our grasp, whether he lied or told the truth, as Augustine says with a touch of exasperation. Rabelais leaves us alone in the dark clutching a bottle; Joyce’s HCE struggles for pages toward wakening, but just as we seem on the verge of grasping something tangible we are swung around to the first page of the book again. The Satyricon is a torn fragment from what seems like a history of some monstrous Atlantean race that vanished in the sea, still drunk. (Anatomy of Criticism, 220)
So much for Frye the obsessive compulsive categorizer nervously trying to force both literature and life until they fit into and can be controlled by reductive conceptual boxes. I confess that I tried to capture some of the joyous exuberance of this passage in the final pages of The Productions of Time.
Let me suggest that the most famous Renaissance proponent of memory theatre, Giordano Bruno, as depicted by Frances Yates in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and novelistically by John Crowley in his ambitious fantasy the Aegypt tetralogy, was also a satirist. Yes, his books are full of mandala-style diagrams, but he was also a Promethean Trickster who blew up the Ptolemaic model of the universe and sent the stars flying in all directions. Crowley aptly dramatizes the arrogant egotism that led him to his death, but Bruno—who plays a symbolic role in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—was not just a demolition artist. He knew that the old Ptolemaic model of the cosmos was both reductive and worn out. But let me propose that what he intuitively sought to replace it with was not the universe of mechanistic, materialistic science, endlessly and mindlessly expanding on its way to a final entropy. I think he sensed that the real order, however paradoxical and ungraspable by ordinary reason, was something more like what Frye calls interpenetration—everything everywhere all at once.
Frye himself was looking for a form of organization that avoided the reductiveness of the monolithic summa. Because it would be founded upon the creative tension of Contraries, such a non-reductive principle of order would be not monologic but dialogic. It is significant that Bahktin, the Russian critic who put forth this view, developed it out of a study of Rabelaisian satire. A true dialogue is a back-and-forth between equal partners, which is the root meaning of our word “conversation.” Plato had his authoritarian tendencies, but it was his genius to see philosophy as arising from dialogue, and not formal dialogue either but social dialogue among friends, sometimes in a party setting, as in the Symposium, which is interrupted by a drunken Alcibiades talking about trying to get Socrates into bed in a hilarious scene that is pure Menippean satire. Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, a novel-anatomy hybrid about true and false knowledge, has a wonderful chapter consisting entirely of the high-spirited dinner conversation among a small group of scholars and intellectuals at a modern university. It is modeled on a chapter in Rabelais titled How they chirped over their cups. Behind Davies stands his precursor, the master of witty intellectual dialogue, George Bernard Shaw, who influenced Frye more than Frye usually let on, and whom I already idolized in high school before I knew Frye. The poetic epic of James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover, which mentions Frye on its first page, is a series of witty dialogues between the living and the dead, conducted over a Ouija board.
We have made “dialogue” into the phoniest of buzz words. But Words with Power suggests that the Bible itself is the site of a dialogue that he calls the dialectic of Word and Spirit. It is a conversation between God and humanity. The Word, a creative power of formal order, the Logos, descends; the Spirit, the inward creative power of humanity, identified by the Romantics as the imagination, responds and ascends, driven by desire. Vision rises and descends as on Jacob’s ladder, the axis mundi. Frye speaks of this dialectic of Word and Spirit again in the conclusion to Creation and Recreation:
The terms “Word” and “Spirit,” then, may be understood in their traditional context as divine persons able and willing to redeem mankind. They may also be understood as qualities of self-transcendence within man himself, capable of pulling him out of the psychosis that every news bulletin brings us so much evidence for. I am suggesting that these two modes of understanding are not contradictory or mutually exclusive, but dialectically identical. (80)
It is this dialectical identity in which God and the imagination are one that we have forgotten. Trying to remember such a paradoxical identity is the deepest goal of the art of memory. If we succeeded, we would say, as in a passage that Frye quotes from Blake’s Four Zoas, “How is it that all things are chang’d, even as in ancient time?”
References
Frye, Northrop. “The Anatomy in Prose Fiction.” In ‘The Educated Imagination’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933-1963. Edited by Germaine Warkentin. Volume 21 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006. 23-38.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Volume 22 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Frye, Northrop. Creation and Recreation. In Northrop Frye on Religion. Edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Volume 4 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. Volume 14 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 2004.
Frye, Northrop. “An Enquiry into the Art Forms of Prose Fiction.” In Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 1932-1938. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Volume 3 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 1997. 383-400.
Salusinszky, Imre. “Frye and the Art of Memory.” In Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works. Edited by David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky. University of Toronto Press, 1999. 39-54.
Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Penguin, 1966.