October 15, 2021
Today’s newsletter is a celebration. Northrop Frye was arguably the greatest, at least the most influential theorist of the imagination in our time, and Robert D. Denham has just published a massive volume, the capstone of a fifty-year career, providing evidence that the verb should be present tense: Frye still is the most influential literary critic, despite the view in some quarters that he is now obsolete. The Reception of Northrop Frye provides 700 pages of documentation proving that interest in Frye and the utilization of his theories is in fact expanding.
It is an invaluable annotated reference work of reviews, articles, books, and dissertations about Frye or influenced by him. The number of doctoral dissertations about Frye is not only growing but growing exponentially, and interest in his work is international. The fact that so many Chinese scholars, for example, find him useful argues against the all-too-common dismissal of Frye as yet another elitist white male only interested in the European classics. And Frye’s influence is not confined to literary studies: Denham’s annotations show that his theories have proved suggestive in education, historiography, political science, even music theory.
But this is not just a celebration by scholars, for scholars. Frye is one of the rare critics, helped by the felicity of his style, with its clarity, grace, and wit, who can be enjoyed by non-specialists, by anyone who is interested in the theme of the imagination as the home of human life. I know, because I read Fearful Symmetry, his book on the visionary William Blake, when I was 19, and it summoned me to a quest which is still ongoing at the age of 70. In addition to that book, I recommend The Educated Imagination; the essays in Fables of Identity; his short book on Shakespearean comedy and romance, A Natural Perspective; and his book on prose romance (including fantasy and science fiction), The Secular Scripture. More formidable but still accessible is his book on the Bible, The Great Code.
A primary reason Frye has been so useful to so many is that he started from the assumption, set out in his most famous book, Anatomy of Criticism, that literature is like music (Frye was an amateur classical pianist), in which the most complex and sophisticated works are built out of simple forms that can be, and are, taught to children. Yes, the circle of fifths that is the foundation of the Western European tradition may be less relevant outside it, but it is probably safe to say that all music is based on patterns of rhythm, melody, and harmony elaborated by some set of rules and conventions. There is an analogy with physics, in which the entire universe is built of the basic building blocks of atoms and subatomic particles, and with genetics, in which all natural life is born of the recombination of four chemicals in the helix of the DNA molecule.
It may seem odd to non-specialists that this sensible and easily demonstrated proposition has run up against a great deal of resistance in the academic world. The modern temper is deeply ironic, and the predominating mode of literary theory since the Sixties has been radically skeptical and iconoclastic. Form is an illusion, a lie, and the task of both philosophy and literary theory is to deconstruct it, to unmask everything that masquerades as truth. The modern temper is also obsessively ideological: the discipline of cultural studies is based on the premise that there is nothing outside of ideology, of the will to power as it operates in texts. Forms and patterns are never innocent: they are always “violent,” impositions of some power structure on the minds of readers.
This is not the place to argue the point, but deconstructive and ideological iconoclasm are in fact a mode of the imagination itself, of what I call decreation. They become neurotic only to the extent that they become divorced from the contrary imaginative mode of recreation: another good introduction to Frye is his short book Creation and Recreation.
Most of Frye’s influence so far has been on the immediate phenomenal level, so to speak, where he has provided at least a preliminary sketch of what he sometimes called a grammar of forms for literature and mythology. Those forms are not merely aesthetic, nor are they merely ideological. They express what Frye called the primary concerns of the human race: the need for survival and life itself, for freedom, for food and drink and other physical needs, for sex and love. That is why his studies of literature become relevant to historical, social, and political theorists. These newsletters follow Frye’s lead in showing the connection between, say, the imaginative perspective on love and loneliness and the obsessions of Trump followers. But in fact Frye’s most powerful influence on me was from the first on a level deeper than that—not on the level of the archetypes and mythical plot patterns but on the hidden ground from which they emerged, that level of transformative energy that I call the imagination for want of a better term.
Know thyself—easy to say, but you can spend the greater part of your life learning what questions to ask when you finally confront yourself in the mirror. That is perhaps one of the purposes of age. Frye’s fame has always rested primarily upon his vision of what he called the order of words, which is why for most people Anatomy of Criticism is his central work. This is the aspect of Frye that has been called structuralist. But I began with Frye’s earlier book, Fearful Symmetry, which is less a study of Blake’s mythical patterns than a meditation on the power of imagination to forge patterns (Blake’s symbol of the imagination is the figure of Los, a blacksmith)—and also to dissolve them, symbolized in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the acid of the printing process by which Blake self-published his illuminated books, eating away the surface of error to reveal the true vision beneath it. I do my share of categorizing literary and mythological forms in The Productions of Time, so much so that I had to provide a mandala emblem as a kind of memory theatre to keep track of them. But I am ultimately drawn down to a realm below the forms, to a mystery that underlies not just literature and mythology but human life and death—underlies and perhaps also overarches it, for there are mysteries above and below this our middle earth, and rumors of strange congress between those transcendent and immanent mysteries.
That is why it was fateful that I was drawn into the project of co-editing, with Robert Denham, Frye’s unpublished notebooks, a project that took 15 years of my life. Bob had already secured from Frye, in writing, the right to edit any unpublished material after his death. He invited me in as co-editor when the executors discovered close to 80 notebooks, over 4000 pages, none of which were drafts of published works, although the notebooks were the matrix out of which his published works were born. Yet not in a conventional way. We now know that most of Frye’s published books began as attempts to realize one or another volume of a series of eight works that he called his ogdoad, an ogdoad being a pantheon of eight deities. The eight were actually one gigantic work expressing one all-encompassing—or to use his word, encyclopedic—vision. He never succeeded in writing a single one of them, although he tried for his entire career. Every time he tried, the work would eventually become something else, one of his published works.
So the ogdoad remained in a state of suspended potentiality for his entire writing career of over fifty years. Frye was always fascinated by the concept of Bardo in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the spirit realm between death and rebirth, and it is clear that the ogdoad was a kind of eightfold Bardo realm: my intuition was not far off when I titled my first preliminary essay on the notebook project “The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye’s Notebooks.” It took years to explore that underworld labyrinth, several years just to transcribe all those pages from Frye’s cryptic handwriting. I laugh when I look back at how primitive our means were: Bob was still using floppy discs, and our original software functioned by MS-DOS-style command prompts. And we had no idea what we were reading: it was only much later that we discovered a couple of fragmentary essays (written to whom?) partly explaining the system and its codes, corroborating what we had managed to figure out for ourselves. Each of the eight ogdoad volumes had titles. The first four—Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, and Rencontre—were primary, the other four much more shadowy. Each volume also had a symbol—merely a convenient shorthand, but when we first started transcribing these symbols, we wondered if we were looking at some kind of cryptography. And it was no good dismissing this whole business as mere eccentricity, for it is clear that the famous published work would not have come into being without it.
Although corresponding to none of his published books, the first four volumes of the ogdoad do bear a relationship to the order of words, to literary forms as we empirically observe them in texts: Liberal was to be about myth and epic; Tragicomedy about drama, especially Shakespeare; Anticlimax about literary meaning, the thematic rather than fictional aspect of literature; Rencontre about the revolutionary transformation of traditional mythology that began in Romanticism and continues to our own time. But that somewhat oversimplifies. In a late notebook entry, Frye says that he is beginning to realize that the ogdoad was not something to see but to see by. That is, its eight components are not structures in their own right but a priori pre-structuring elements out of which literary forms and modes arise. They are prior to literary forms, and are what make those forms possible. Tragicomedy was not about drama but about the vision of death and rebirth out of which drama arises. Thus the ogdoad elements are paradoxical, borderline concepts. They lurk beneath the obvious patterns and conventions of literature and myth like ghosts, never quite real and yet refusing to go away. And they beckon downward towards an even deeper mystery. That is exactly the relation of the notebooks to Frye’s published books: they are the books behind the books. I do not know of anything else like this in all of literary criticism, or for that matter anywhere else.
I think the younger Frye resisted the descent journey into a mystery lying beneath the surface of both literature and reality. He had little use for Romanticism, which was fascinated by Kant’s idea of a noumenal realm, as he called it, underlying the phenomenal world of reason and the senses, thinking of it as a kind of irrationalism. And when he was writing Fearful Symmetry, Nazi and fascist irrationalism was sweeping across the world, partly inspired by a perverted version of German Romanticism. In his earliest notebooks, he dismissed the idea of an uncanny realm under the surface of ordinary reality as the “deification of the void.” He made a not-very-convincing case in Fearful Symmetry that Blake was not really a Romantic but a late-Renaissance poet, and I think his wariness of Jung derived from the fact that Jungian psychology is rooted in the German Romantic tradition, especially Goethe, whose Faust descends to the mysterious realm of the Mothers.
And yet in mid-life, he changed. Having published Anatomy of Criticism in 1957, which made him the most famous critic in the world, in that same year he published an essay with the significant title “New Directions from Old.” But it was only one direction, really: down. The essay’s point is that the shape of modern, post-Romantic mythology is the descent quest. He developed a new interest in Romanticism and began to write about it more favorably. What caused this mid-life turnaround? We now know from the notebooks that after the Anatomy, Frye began trying to write all four of the major ogdoad books at once, in the form of a four-volume work called The Critical Comedy, referring to it in the notebooks as the Third Book: that is, the third major book after Fearful Symmetry and the Anatomy. But the Third Book notebooks lapse into silence around 1972, although material quarried from them appears in the second half of Words with Power, Frye’s second book on the Bible and literature. In other words, the pattern continued to the end of his career: every time he tried to bring the ogdoad into the light of day, what emerged instead was another of his published books. Given that those published works were landmarks, “failure” is not exactly the right word to describe what happened here.
I think the notebooks are invaluable because they are Frye’s descent quest into that borderline region that so fascinates me, a region where ordinary categories and distinctions break down. He is much more boldly, sometimes wildly, speculative in them than he ever dared to be in the published work. In his later years, he was drawn not only to Romanticism but to the kind of uninhibitedly speculative works often labeled “occult,” which he himself amiably titled “kook books,” books that boldly go where no sane critics tread, at least not if they value their reputation. He freely admitted that the authors really were kooks, but felt that in their madness they sometimes saw things that normal critics did not see, in fact very much did not want to see.
But the borderline is inhabited by more than kooks. Some of the greatest works of modern literature push language to its limits in the attempt to provide an experience of the depth at which categories break down—time, space, causality, subject, object, all the categories that create our sense of ordinary reality. James Joyce spent 17 years writing Finnegans Wake in an invented language of puns and other forms of fused and associational language. It is as if Lewis Carroll tried to write a visionary epic using the portmanteau language of “Jabberwocky.” Dylan Thomas, influenced by Joyce, wrote a poem called “Altarwise by owl-light” whose protagonist, the “long world’s gentleman,” is at once divine and human and the cosmic body of the world; who is in any given line of the poem being born, dying, and dead in his tomb; who is also the author, and yet also the reader; and who is language itself, a “walking word,” who is, in short, imagination as the home of the entire universe. Frye never wrote on Thomas, but he was interested: I am shamelessly proud that my final essay for his graduate Literary Symbolism course, an embryonic version of my later doctoral dissertation on Thomas, got an A+ from him, although I blushingly remember it as being badly written.
Frye’s descent journey also took him back to Blake, who was an influence on both Joyce and Thomas. In Blake’s long poems, both narrative and characters are in constant and confusing metamorphosis, and the atmosphere is sublimely weird. After all, Blake had himself been relegated to “kook” status for a century and a quarter: it was Frye who established him as a major poet. Another poet of the borderline was Rimbaud, whose poem Le Bateau Ivre is alluded to in Frye’s “The Drunken Boat: A Study of the Revolutionary Element in Romanticism.” In all these writers, language is pushed to its far frontier, where its ordinary structures break down into what Frye called “riddle” and “charm”: riddle signifying a series of paradoxes to the intellect, charm signifying an oracular, incantatory use of language that points downward towards the unconscious rather than pointing towards the daylight world of ideas and objects—language that is magical rather than utilitarian. What is beyond the final frontier is the mystery, whose event horizon guards what is beyond language. As Demogorgon, a denizen of that abysmal Unground announces in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, “The deep truth is imageless.”
However, while the descent quest may be the inevitable myth of our time, the ascent myth of traditional mythology, including Christianity, had its own vision of a reality beyond the ability of ordinary consciousness and ordinary language to comprehend, except that it was at the top of the vertical axis of being rather than at the bottom. When Dante has traveled upward through the nine spheres of heaven in the Paradiso, he enters the Empyrean, which is not a tenth sphere but rather a new form of consciousness that turns the universe of time and space inside out: it is Creation experienced by the mind of God, for whom all places are one, and for whom past, present, and future are co-present in an Eternal Now. Beyond that is God in himself, who is beyond representation, signified by three circles that are at the same time one. Dante, like many of the more daring and imaginative Christian writers and artists in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, was influenced by Neoplatonism, which posited a god who is an unknowable One but who makes himself imperfectly known to human beings as a Logos or Word. But the visionary Christian writers were always in danger of being suppressed as heretical, to the point where today many people are unaware of Christianity as a sublime vision. To many skeptics, Christianity is either a personal security system or an institutional power structure with a very bad record of authoritarianism. However, Frye’s two late works on the Bible are based on the assumption that, as Heraclitus and T.S. Eliot both said, the way up and the way down are one, that the mystery at the zenith and the mystery at the nadir of the vertical axis of being are ultimately the same mystery seen from two different perspectives. Thus the Bible contains both the ascent and descent journeys as an identity-in-difference, and is a potential key to both of them. We may note in passing, though, that Frye was by no means narrowly ethnocentric: the notebooks reveal his intense interest in and considerable knowledge of Eastern writings that contain analogous meditations on the borderline condition, such as the Lankavatara Sutra. We may also note that the best guide to the visionary side of Frye is Robert D. Denham’s Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World.
But what good is all this cosmic elevator-riding when in fact we are stuck here inescapably on this middle earth, personally unable to escape the human condition, which is alienation, anxiety, suffering, aging, and death; socially unable to awaken from the nightmare that is history, which in fact seems to become more nightmarish all the time? Isn’t all this hankering after sublime visions just the narcissism of an ego terrified of its own mortality? I can only answer for myself. To get swallowed up in the borderline experience is to become merely one more kook. On the other hand, to dismiss it in the name of the “reality principle” is to abandon all hope, because the reality we are trapped in is ultimately uninhabitable and nihilistic, unless you happen to be lucky and privileged—but most of the world is not. “Realists” are like Milton’s devils in Paradise Lost, trying to convince themselves that with a little interior decorating and a positive attitude, they can make an ever-so-humble home out of hell. The borderline condition is not a place to escape to: it is the location of a power that can decreate and recreate the world, the power of the imagination. My progressive politics are based on the hope that this power is capable of remaking the world—the entire world, reality itself, including our desperately afflicted and dysfunctional minds and hearts.
References
Robert D. Denham, The Reception of Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press, 2021.
Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World, University of Virginia Press, 2004.
Michael Dolzani, “The Book of the Dead: A Skeleton Key to Northrop Frye’s Notebooks,” in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, edited by David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, University of Toronto Press, 1999.