July 5, 2024
Size matters. No, not that. Well, that too, but it’s much more complicated than all the jokes. We do not get a choice about what kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting for our whole lives. My parents played genetic roulette, and the body I am stuck with is the result of an interplay between Mendelian genetic laws and chance. My ego resists the idea that my identity includes the body. The ego is a natural Cartesian: I think, therefore I am, in which case my body is just a vehicle, no more part of me because I am inside it than my car when I am sitting in it. But I can only maintain that mind-body disjunction temporarily, in certain moods. In truth, we are psychosomatic, psyche and soma inseparably united in a feedback loop, synergetic. Every conscious thought or decision of mine arises from, and is conditioned by, my body, influenced by its energy or tiredness, its health or illness, its muscular capacities and disabilities, its hormones and neurotransmitters, its sharp or incapacitated senses, the whole matrix of physical experience, including large or small physical frame, which not only determines what I can do but conditions how I am responded to socially.
The AI people do not seem to have figured this out yet. They appear to conceive of consciousness as information patterns, therefore as independent of what the hacker antihero of William Gibson’s Neuromancer thinks of as “meat.” But such a consciousness would be solipsistic, doomed to a kind of solitary confinement. Which may be why so many artificial intelligences in science fiction go mad, like HAL in Kubrick’s 2001, or like the world-sized computer named AM in Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” who torments the human race imprisoned within him because it doomed him to a life of consciousness imprisoned like a genie in a bottle. As a matter of fact, genies are traditionally malevolent Tricksters for the same reason of having been bottled up for hundreds of years.
Freud made many enemies with his notorious statement that anatomy is destiny. But what is wrong is not the aphorism itself but the sexist and reductionistic interpretation that is usually attached to it, starting with Freud himself. Destiny can be defined as the factors that qualify and sometimes limit human desire. In common terms, destiny is the hand you have been dealt, and, fair or not, we have no choice but to play that hand. To say there are no limits to the will is delusional, and one of the limits is the particular body I have been born with. To know oneself is to know one’s gifts and afflictions, physical and otherwise, for destiny bestows both. Our experience is conditioned by the body in some subliminal ways we rarely think about. Joseph Campbell, asking what human experiences can be regarded as universal, referred to the observation by Géza Roheim, the psychoanalytic anthropologist, that our sense of space is kinesthetic, derived from our bodily orientation. We think in anthropomorphic terms of up, down, right, and left, and mythology projects this orientation on the macrocosm in the form of the axis mundi, the vertical axis of being, which is sometimes imaged in the form of a cosmic human body. To lose the sense of up and down, as may happen in free fall and deep sea diving, can be a panic-inducing experience. We have temporarily lost the map by which we orient ourselves in the universe. Such disorientation is a return to the original Chaos before the coming of order, before an implicit vertical and horizontal map provided a sense of a place for everything and everything in its place.
The particularities of the body form a complex of signs that are socially interpreted. Hair color may determine how someone, especially of course a woman, is typed. There is a semiotics of nose shapes, eye color, and so on. But a big factor, so to speak, in social judgment is size. Of male endowment and female bust size, to be sure, but the degree to which our experience in the world is mediated in more interesting ways by body size bears thinking about. A man’s experience of being in the world is going to be determined to some extent by his height in ways that are sometimes obvious, sometimes unexpected, sometimes comical. To begin with the obvious, in my long-ago prime I was 5’ 8’’ and was not destined for a career as a professional basketball player. A more subtle limitation: I have short, stubby fingers, and there are certain stretches on a guitar or mandolin fretboard that I simply cannot make. I envy the spider-fingers of some guitarists to no avail, and am forced to find work arounds. Women often have smaller hands, and women guitarists sometimes prefer smaller-bodied guitars.
As for the comical, Randy Newman’s song “Short People” satirizes how short people are, well, looked down upon in society: “Short people got no reason / To live,” says the bigoted persona singing the song. “You got to pick’em up / Just to say hello.” Still, I have always been contented with my small male frame. Its frustrations are minor, such as when searching piles of shirts, looking for the one Small or Medium in huge stacks of XXX Large. (Who buys all those? Sometimes I feel like Gulliver in Brobdingnag). In literature and film if not in life, there is something of the underdog, Aristotle’s eiron, about the small man, as with Charlie Chaplin’s little Tramp, while a large bodied male suggests an alazon or boaster. There is humor in the odd-couple pairing of a big and a little male, as with Fritz Leiber’s sword-and-sorcery duo, the tall, blond Fafhrd and the short, dark Grey Mouser. Leiber created these iconic characters based on himself and his friend Harry Fisher, who was short while Leiber was 6’ 5”. Of course, we all know that there are social rules dictating how, in relationships, men must be taller than women. These can be ignored with a moderate amount of unconventionality: the women I have had relationships with have ranged from 5’ to 6’ (yes, 6’), with several sizes in between. They could be lined up like a set of canisters. But the rules are there, and matter to some people. Except that they keep changing. Right now, Taylor Swift forms a charming couple with football player Travis Kelce, a huge man who, in photographs, looks as if he were quite capable of picking her up to say hello. Yet at the same time there is a new fad for finding attractive certain small, dark “hot rodent men”, such as Dune star Timothée Chalamet. The type is Leiber’s Grey Mouser, right down to the name.
Then there is the matter of somatotypes. In 1945, psychologist William Herbert Sheldon published a book claiming that certain body types correlated with certain temperaments. It was not accepted as science, but made an impression on some intelligent people for the reason that, scientific or no, it is a matter of common observation that body types exist, and that they do in a limited way seem to be associated with personality types. Sheldon distinguished three types. The endomorph is well rounded, so to speak, having a lot of body fat and tending to gain weight. Endomorphs have a personality somewhat resembling the sanguine type in the old theory of four humours: warm, cheerful, outgoing, with a tendency to be lazy. One of the narrators in Robertson Davies’ novel The Rebel Angels (1981) specifically thinks of himself as an endomorph (he’s an academic, so he self-analyzes with erudition), to his chagrin because he regrets the excess weight he is forever unsuccessful at losing. There is reportedly an autobiographical element in the description, since Davies himself had such a body type and difficulty keeping off weight. The mesomorph is the muscular type, naturally athletic, large-framed, naturally assertive and competitive—basically what we’d now call a bro. The ectomorph is thin, the kind that never gains weight no matter how much they eat, intense, introverted, and anxious. Hamlet should be an ectomorph. When his own mother says he is fat, we are surprised. Actually, quite a few critics think that “fat” is either a transcription error or not intended to mean what it now does, but rather just out of shape. The persistence with which the question is pursued derives from the fact that we do associate Hamlet’s high-voltage personality with a thin, wiry frame. I saw an article discussing the issue yet again when lanky Benedict Cumberbatch played Hamlet. Hamlet may have been chugging a few too many beers at Wittenburg, but it is unlikely that Shakespeare meant he is turning into Falstaff—speaking of characters where anatomy and personality type are definitely associated, whatever science says.
Perhaps the movement towards body positivity will allow us to revisit the idea that anatomy is destiny in a more temperate manner. In an essay on her bariatric surgery called “What Fullness Is,” Roxane Gay talks candidly about having to live with a body that seems to want to be fat, even after surgery that makes it impossible. Sometimes she is fine with her body, but:
Sometimes I hate my body, the unruliness of it all. I hate all my limitations. I hate my lack of discipline. I hate how my unhappiness is never enough to truly motivate me to regain control of myself, once and for all. I hate the way I hunger but never find satisfaction. I want and want and want but never allow myself to reach for what I truly want, leaving that want raging desperately beneath the surface of my skin. (327)
Gay’s anatomy has been her destiny, and destiny is not always kind.
Satire, which runs to fantasy, commonly features both giants and little people, often in conjunction with the theme of the physicality of the human body—a physicality often represented as gross and disgusting, especially in the case of giants. Polyphemus, the giant Cyclops of the Odyssey, is an appetite on legs: he eats Odysseus’s men raw. And yet, a definition of satire could be, “Another perspective is possible.” As Northrop Frye says in Fearful Symmetry in relationship to Blake’s satire:
Satirists often give to life a logical and self-consistent shift of perspective, showing mankind in a telescope as wriggling Lilliputians, in a microscope as stinking Brobdingnagians, or through the eyes of an ass, like Apuleius, or a drunk, like Petronius. In satire like this the reality of sense experience turns out to be merely a series of customary associations. 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. Rabelais’s characters are what Blake called his, “Giant forms,” and they are the horsemen who ride over the earth in the day of the trumpet and alarm, where we, in our sublunary world, see nothing but anguish and death. (200-201)
In other words, perhaps we recoil from the body because our split-off ego is afraid of its gigantic vitality. As D.H. Lawrence and Jung also insisted, we are cut off at the neck, alienated from the deeper energies that we call “nature,” “instinct,” or “the body.” Compared with Blake’s exuberance, Swift’s nauseated reaction to the physical is tortured and, in the end, puzzling. Gulliver’s Travels is a condemnation of humanity’s selfishness and cruelty, but that condemnation is accompanied by an additional condemnation of the human body as, basically, loathsome. The body’s disgusting nature is revealed by blowing it up in size. When Gulliver is among the Lilliputians, it is his own body that is gross, shown through exhaustive discussions of the appalling amount of food Gulliver consumes from the perspective of the Lilliputians—and by the revolting task of disposing of his waste products. The episode that ultimately alienates the Lilliputians so much that Gulliver is forced to leave them is when Gulliver puts out a fire that would have destroyed the palace by the only means he had available: by urinating on it. I admit I can understand why the Queen swears she will not move back into her chambers after that inundation, but the Queen is not just repelled: she is furiously angry. Better the palace be consumed than one act of urination take place. Something irrational is evident here—and evident throughout. What is reprehensible in Gulliver’s Travels is the intelligent viciousness of the Yahoos—but they have ordinary bodies. The giant Brobdingnagians are basically civilized, and the Houyhnhnms are totally admirable despite being horses. It is the mind and not the body that makes people “savage,” and Blake would say that it is the mind’s alienation from the bodily that is the root of Swift’s problem.
The bodies of the Brobdingnagians nauseate Gulliver because their huge size renders their sensory qualities overwhelming. What disgusts most, it would appear, is the female body. The Maids of Honour treat Gulliver not as a man but as a doll:
They would often strip me naked from Top to Toe, and lay me at full length in their Bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted; because, to say the Truth, a very offensive Smell came from their Skins…But, I conceive, that my Sense was more acute in Proportion to my Littleness…. (111)
When they undress in his presence, it is less than titillating:
Their Skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured when I saw them near, with a Mole here and there as broad as a Trencher, and Hairs hanging from it thicker than Pack-threads; to say nothing further concerning the rest of their persons. Neither did they at all scruple while I was by, to discharge what they had drunk, to the Quantity of at least two Hogsheads, in a Vessel that held above three Tuns. The handsomest among these Maids of Honour, a pleasant frolicksome Girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her Nipples; with many other Tricks, wherein the Reader will excuse me for not being over particular. (112)
I am sure that being used as a sexual aid must be somebody’s fantasy somewhere, but it is definitely not Swift’s, who was, to put it mildly, not one for body positivity. Artists of genius, however, are capable of showing the core of universal human neurosis in their private obsessions. Lewis Carroll’s Alice first grows prodigiously and then shrinks, nearly drowning in a pool of her own tears. But behind the satiric fantasy lies the fact that Alice is on the verge of puberty, when young women find their bodies changing in what can be a very disturbing manner. We are all capable on occasion of Swiftian disgust—just ask Hamlet. The problem is not the body, however, but the alienated consciousness that feels trapped in it.
The body is of a certain size in proportion to the universe around it, and its senses are limited to the human-sized environment in which it dwells. Both that which is much larger and farther away and what is much smaller are undetectable to the naked eye. What this means is that whatever is much larger or much smaller than the default setting of our senses is another reality, invisible in ordinary experience. But those hidden worlds can be revealed with lenses. What happened in the 17th and 18th centuries was that scientists began to reveal what were essentially other realities through the use of the telescope and microscope, and eventually those new realities began to capture the public imagination. It is a well known story how the bounded and human-proportioned Ptolemaic cosmos of the Middle Ages gave way, through the observations of Galileo and others, to the vision of an infinite universe that was already frightening Pascal in the 17th century, when he wrote that “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” In 1963, Roger Corman made a science fiction B movie that deeply affected me when I was young, although I actually only knew the comic book adaptation. But that was enough. A scientist develops eye drops to enable the eye to see beyond its limits, and tests them on himself. The plot of the movie consists of the gradual expansion of his vision, as he first can see through clothes, bodies, buildings, and so on until by the end of the film he can see to the ends of the universe. By that point, he is in a revivalist’s tent, telling people he can see a gigantic eye at the end of the universe looking back at us. The revivalist suggests that, if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and the scientist takes the suggestion. In Danse Macabre, his book on horror, Stephen King says that an even more terrifying ending would be the scientist screaming, “I can still see!”
But agoraphobic terror in the face of an inconceivably vast cosmos was only one response, and has been counterbalanced by a sense of wonder about “new worlds and new civilizations” hitherto invisible. The fact that each expansion or contraction of vision by an order of magnitude brings a new reality into being was brilliantly dramatized in a short film by Charles and Ray Eames in 1977 called Powers of Ten. Beginning with a couple on a picnic blanket, the camera expands the view by one power of ten every ten seconds, so that what comes into view is the park the couple are in, the city of Chicago, and so on up to a circumference of 100 million light years. Then the view begins shrinking at the same rate, reaches the couple, and continues to delve into microscopic magnitudes until it reaches the level of quarks within an atom. It’s less than 10 minutes long, breathtaking, and watchable on YouTube.
The excitement over the new worlds disclosed by the telescope is an oft-told tale. Like other intellectuals, Milton was fascinated not only by the new worlds but by the possibility of other species on them, a fascination that registers in Paradise Lost as Satan voyages from hell to earth. But there was an equal fascination with the microscope, as recounted by Marjorie Hope Nicholson in an essay called “The Microscope and English Imagination” in 1935. Microscopes were more affordable and accessible than telescopes, and were considered more “feminine” due to their small size, so they became something of a social craze in the 17th century. A wonderful woman writer and intellectual named Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) satirized what she regarded as some of the excesses of the new enthusiasm. Her utopian satire The Blazing World is a good corrective to the idea that women of that time confined their own range of vision to the narrow compass of social relations and love, like Fanny Burney and Jane Austen. As the Norton Anthology of English Literature puts it, “she pushed back against many scientific premises then current, including the idea that ‘optic glasses’---both telescopes and the microscopes celebrated in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665)—enabled a closer approach to the truth of things. ‘Sense,’ she writes in Observations, is more apt to be deluded than reason’” (847). In other words, she was ahead of her time in understanding the overconfidence of naïve empiricism. She has a sonnet titled “Of Many Worlds in This World” that begins, “Just like unto a nest of boxes found / Degrees of size within each box are found. So in this world, may many worlds more be” (847). It ends speaking of millions of atoms in the head of a pin: “And if thus small, then ladies may well wear / A world of worlds as pendants in each ear” (847).
The sense of wonder about microcosmic worlds continued into the 19th and 20th centuries. A scientist develops a super-microscope in Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858) and falls in love at a distance with a microscopic woman. The scientist in Ray Cummings’ The Girl in the Golden Atom (1922) is not content with a long-distance relationship and actually travels to the world of the woman he falls in love with. By Cummings’ time, the solar-system model of the atom was available to inspire a feeling of “as above, so below.” In the 1960’s, both Marvel and DC Comics had their microscopic heroes. Ant-Man is still with us, courtesy of the Marvel movies. But I was always more captivated by DC’s character the Atom, because he did not stop at the size where he could command an army of ants but could keep shrinking to a sub-atomic level. In the same era, Richard Matheson’s novel The Shrinking Man (1956) was made into yet another B movie (The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957), but is actually a rather dark satire concerning male insecurities about size. Men are supposed to be taller than women as a symbol of dominance, but the protagonist shrinks to the point at which his wife dwarfs him. His slow, steady shrinking becomes a kind of ritual humiliation, as he is estranged from her and other people, then gradually has to cower in fear from his cat, and later from a spider. At the end of the book, social satire gives way to a microscopic counterpart of cosmic agoraphobia, as the protagonist realizes he is shrinking beyond the boundaries of human perception. On the final page, he accepts his fate, but hopes that, because nature exists on many levels, he will somehow survive.
Folktales have mini-people like Tom Thumb and giants like Paul Bunyan and the giant of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” where Jack is the little guy who outwits the big dumb oaf. The Biblical Leviathan is so titanic that, in the Book of Job, only God can hook him. The contemporary fantasist Lucius Shepard has an extraordinary sequence of short stories about the dragon Griaule, who is a mile long and 750 feet high. Griaule has lain dormant so long that the landscape has begun to grow over him, yet his mind is still active and capable of reaching out to affect people in the vicinity. In "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule," an artist proposes to slay the dragon with a unique weapon: art. He will paint a mural on the dragon with lead paint that will sink in and kill him. In “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” the girl of the title explores a whole world inside the dragon, whose mental powers seem to make him godlike, knowing all and controlling all from a distance. Griaule is perhaps midway towards becoming a member of a mythological class of gods or monsters whose bodies are coterminous with the cosmos itself. Sometimes, as with the female Tiamat in the Babylonian Creation myth and the Norse ice-giant Ymir, the monster is slain and the world is made out of its body. The more undisplaced the mythology, the greater the intimation that the demonic spirit of the universe actually is the body of this fallen world: we are inside it, as Jonah was inside his “big fish.” We have been swallowed as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother was swallowed by the wolf. In medieval pictures of the Harrowing of Hell, the mouth of hell is commonly the sharp-toothed mouth of a demonic creature, from which Christ is leading a body of people.
The hero fights and defeats the dragon. But if the dragon is the body of the fallen universe, what does liberation consist of? Such a liberation from “the body of this death” implies a resurrection into another kind of body, a “mystical body,” as the New Testament calls it, which is both cosmic and collective—it is the body of the liberating god itself, into which we are all gathered as one. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye calls this highest level of imaginative and spiritual vision by its name in the Middle Ages, the anagogic:
When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man who builds his cities out of the Milky Way. This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and apocalyptic. By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate. (119)
Frye’s immediate source for the vision of an infinite human body is Blake’s Albion. Blake in turn influenced Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which is the dream of such a cosmic self, and many of the poems of Dylan Thomas. In his famous essay, “Nature,” Emerson claims that an “Orphic poet” sang this to him:
Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees, that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally
This gigantic body is anything but a modern literary notion. In “The Process of Individuation,” Marie-Louise von Franz speaks of Jung’s concept of the ultimate form of psychic identity that he calls the Self: “it manifests itself as a gigantic, symbolic human being who embraces and contains the whole cosmos” (211). She goes on to trace some of this anagogic vision’s ancient lineage:
It is no wonder that this figure of the Cosmic Man appears in so many myths and religious teachings…He appears as Adam, as the Persian Gayomart, or as the Hindu Purusha. This figure may even be described as the basic principle of the whole world. The ancient Chinese, for instance, thought that before anything whatever was created, there was a colossal divine man called P’an Ku who gave heaven and earth their form….When he died, he fell apart, and from his body the five holy mountains of China sprang into existence. (211-13)
In our Western civilization the Cosmic Man has been identified to a great extent with Christ, and in the East with Krishna or with Buddha. In the Old Testament this same figure turns up as the “Son of Man” and in later Jewish mysticism is called Adam Kadmon. Certain religious movements of late antiquity simply call him Anthropos (the Greek word for man). (215)
But to be overly impressed by hugeness is a way of suffering from what Jung called inflation. Spiritual selves can be what size they wish. Even evil spiritual selves: Milton’s devils shrink themselves in order to fit inside their new-built palace. Jesus said that the kingdom is a mustard seed that grows to become a vast tree, yet the seed and the tree are one. The spiritual identity is a universal circumference in which we live and move and have our being, but it is at the same time a deep center, and that center is everywhere, hidden in the grain of sand, in the stone that the builders reject. Perhaps the protagonist of The Shrinking Man will, in the end, find himself standing on that firm center that is no center.
But what relationship does this anagogic rhapsody have to our ordinary selves, trapped in the anatomy that is our destiny? Isn’t this a wish fulfilment fantasy, imagining that this too, too solid flesh can float away on imagination’s helium balloons like the old man in Pixar’s Up? Mind you, Dante does just that: floats upward from the Garden of Eden because his body has been “transhumanized.” The early Christians thought they would be transhumanized next Tuesday, but here we are, 2000 years later, still pushing around our earthly bodies as Sisyphus pushed his rock. The following is a tentative suggestion, beginning from the Eastern practice of yoga. There are so many varieties of yoga that one wonders whether they should even be grouped under the same name. Some definitions of yoga, to a layperson, make it sound like a method of meditation, a mental discipline. Others make it sound like a program of exercise: this hatha yoga approach is most evident in popularized Western versions. My understanding is that yoga is not just a meditation but a practice, and the purpose of that practice is the transformation of mind through the transformation of the body. In other words, it is based on the assumption that mind and body are synergetic. Classical yoga has an association with the Samkhya philosophy, but is more than a philosophy. It is, to use a Western term, a way. The starting point in an investigation of yoga is the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which begin with the famous sentence that the purpose of yoga is the stilling of the mind-stuff, the calming of the troubled pool until its stillness may reflect reality—a beautiful, non-coercive metaphor for bringing order out of chaos, a psychological Creation myth. But the achievement of that serenity involves breathing exercises and other means of transforming the body by transforming one’s integration with it.
One of the most fascinating of Northrop Frye’s unpublished notebooks is Notebook 3 from the 1940’s. Frye during that period was investigating Eastern thought, and the investigation was not just intellectual but rather, at points, startlingly personal, even confessional. After just spending a decade writing about Blake’s faith in the recreative power of the imagination, he seems determined not to become an academic who merely writes about transformation from a detached intellectual distance. After mulling over Patanjali to some extent, Frye announces that he will “make an attempt to codify a program of spiritual life for myself according to the eight stages of yoga” (32), by which he means Patanjali’s “eight limbs of yoga.” He begins with a self-disgusted inventory of all his faults, deriving them from his physical limitations: “A weak body & a hypertrophied development of it (I am an intellectual chiefly because I was born cerebrotonic) led me through an adolescence into a state of chronic irritability, a neurotic fear of being bullied by vulgarity, and a deeply-rooted ‘sissy’ complex” (33). There are two pages of this, castigating himself for bad physical habits, from which even such things as social anxiety derive: “A habitual relaxation of the body, untwisting feet, relaxing shoulders, regularizing breathing…[controlling] the nervous jerking rhythms of speech, walking (including a good deal of scampering) & various nose & teeth-pickings, seems indicated” (34). It could be called a self-portrait of the critic as a young Yahoo, a regression to the kind of self-conscious insecurity that afflicted most of us in adolescence. Not to create a wrong impression: this is a mood, not Frye’s normal state, and there is nothing else like it in 4000 pages of notebooks. Moreover, it is intended to be not mere masochism but a program for self-improvement. The road to the Cosmic Man begins where Yeats said it began, in “the rag and bone shop of the heart.” Still, the idea of yogic discipline implies something important: that “anatomy is destiny” does not mean predestination. We begin with what we have been given, for better and worse, but there are means of transforming that given, of spiritualizing the body, which is also to transform the mind, since the two are one.
Tradition distinguished several general types of yoga: hatha yoga, the yoga of wellness, consisting of exercises and breathing techniques; bhakti yoga, the yoga of ritual and worship; jnana yoga, the yoga of meditation and what in the West would be called gnosis. In a significant passage, Frye moves beyond the beginner-level concerns of his version of hatha yoga to the goal that a healthy mind in a healthy body is leading to: “There doesn’t seem to be a recognized yoga of art, not that it matters, for there is one anyway….Suppose I call it Sutra-yoga. Sutra, like strophe & verse, means the turn, the vortical twist of the mind in the imagined form. Sutra-Yoga, then, is identical with what I have been calling anagogy, and I have to discover its principles—in a sense have already done so” (21). My favorite anecdote about Joseph Campbell is that, when asked what form of meditation he engaged in, replied, “I underline sentences.” Sutra-Yoga might begin with the observation that a work of literature is physical—even on a Kindle it has a body, the words of the text. And that body is as mysterious and paradoxical a thing as our physical bodies. One of the many meanings in the title of John Crowley’s brilliant fantasy Little, Big is that a book is, like the TARDIS of Dr. Who, larger on the inside than the outside. It contains a whole world. There are tiny forms of literature: the haiku, the aphorism, the oracle, the pericope that is the self-contained unit of the Gospels. In the notebooks, Frye imagined all his life that his final work, called Twilight, would be written entirely in aphorisms. He never wrote it, but Robert Denham and I, in editing the notebooks, with their discontinuous paragraph form, felt we were perhaps providing an equivalent. On the other hand (note the bodily metaphor), there is what Frye called the “encyclopedic” form, the enormous work that tries to include everything, like Noah’s Ark. The Bible itself is one such work, and yet it can be read in such a way that any given verse is a microcosm of meaning, capable of inspiring a sermon, or a life decision. The sonnet is the most successful short form in lyric poetry, partly because of its compact yet organized internal structure but at the same time because sonnets may form sequences, and a sonnet sequence is a house with many mansions, compound like the eye of a fly.
In the Second Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, Frye showed that the various forms of critical reading were not in conflict but were complementary and “synoptic.” Looking at the same object, they seemed to conflict but in reality varied according to the size of their lenses. The close readings of New Criticism operated on the micro level; social and psychological commentary on the median level of realistic narrative; formalism on the level of larger genres like “comedy”; and archetypal and anagogic criticism on the fully circumferential level. Like the order of nature, the order of words has its levels. The imagination dilates and contracts like an eye, which is why this newsletter bears its title, stolen from Blake: “The expanding eyes of Man behold the depths of wondrous worlds.” In one way, we are trapped in our limited body, with its limited perspective, living one limited life on this middle earth. But those who have learned the love of reading know that this is not the whole story.
References
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, 1957. Also Volume 22 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Robert D. Denham. University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, 1947. Also Volume 14 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Frye, Northrop. “Notebook 3.” In Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Edited by Robert D. Denham. University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Gay, Roxane. “What Fullness Is.” In The Norton Reader. 16th Edition. General Editor, Melissa Goldthwaite. Norton, 2024. 326-34.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Shorter 11th Edition. General Editor, Stephen Greenblatt. Volume 1: The Middle Ages through the Eighteenth Century. Editor, Marian Johnson. Norton, 2024.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. In Jonathan Swift: A Selection of His Works. Edited by Philip Pinkus. College Classics in English. Odyssey Press, 1965.
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. “The Process of Individuation.” In Man and His Symbols. Editors, C.J. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz. Dell, 1964, 1968.