Notes from CBC's "The Ideas of Northrop Frye - Part I"

The following notes are from Part 1 of a 2012 CBC Ideas broadcast, The Ideas of Northrop Frye. Podcast time frames, shown in brackets, are approximate.



[00:30] Frye on the 20th Century

"If I look over the 77 years that I have lived in this ghastly century I don't see anything politically or economically that has not been part of a dissolving phantasmagoria. I see only one thing that has improved in that time and that's science. I see only one thing that has remained stable during that time and that's the arts."

[01:17] ... on himself as a critic

"I think I am a critic who thinks as a poet thinks, in terms of metaphor. I think that's what, if you like, makes me distinctive as a critic. I don't say that there aren't other critics that think metaphorically, but I do and I think that whatever success I have as a critic I have because I can speak the language of metaphor with less of an accent."

[12:00] ... on William Blake's relationship to the Bible

"The Bible to Blake was really the Magna Carta of the human imagination. It was the book that told man that he was free to create and imagine and that the power to create and imagine was ultimately the divine in man. That in Christianity, and of course it is the Christian Bible Blake is talking about, was preeminently the religion which united the divine and the human and consequently opened a path of freedom to man which was infinite."

[13:26] ... on T. S. Eliot and poets in general

"I found, not Fascism in [T.S.] Eliot, Eliot didn't go that far, but he was certainly, in my terms, a reactionary. In books like After Strange Gods which I read when I was quite young and when it first came out and I felt was a betrayal. In a way, it was my sort of becoming aware of my own responsibilities as a critic. I mean, one of my guiding principles has been that a poet can be any kind of damn fool and still be a poet. That because you couldn't trust the poets you had to [chuckle], you had to do it yourself, if you were going to be a critic.

[14:33] ... on Oswald Spengler and his Decline of the West and the key idea of interpenetration

"At Hart House Library, when I was an undergraduate, I picked up Spengler's Decline of the West and was absolutely enraptured with it and ever since then I've been wondering why because Spengler had one of those muzzy, right wing, Teutonic, folkish minds and he was the most stupid bastard I ever picked up but nevertheless I found his book an inspired book. And finally I've more or less figured out, I think, what I got from Spengler. There's a remark in [André] Malraux's Voices of Silence to the effect that Spengler's book started out as a meditation on the destiny of art forms and then expanded from there. And what it expanded into is the key idea which has been been on my mind, the idea of interpenetration which I later found in [Alfred North] Whitehead's Science and the Modern World. The notion that things don't get reconciled but everything is everywhere at once, wherever you are is the centre of everything. And Spengler showed how that operated in history. So I threw out the muzzy Teuton and kept those two intuitions which I felt were going to be very central."

Frye on Blake

 
[18:56] ... on the traditional world view in the Bible and man's destiny

"There's first of all the presence of God, which is always associated with metaphors of up there even though they're known to be nothing but metaphors. Then, there is the state which God intended man to live in, that is the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age, the Paradise, and then there is third, the Fallen world that man fell into with the sin of Adam and Eve and then there is fourth, the Demonic world below the order of nature. So on that scheme there are two levels to the order of nature, the one that God designed and the one that we're living in now. And the destiny of man is to climb out of the Fallen world as nearly as he can, to the state that was originally designed for him. He does this under a structure of authority, sacraments of religion, the practice of morality and education and so forth."

[20:04] ... on poetry, the Romantics, revolutions and Newton

"Poetry has two strikes on it because God made the world and made it better than poets can make poems. Sir Thomas Brown says that nature is the art of God and of course that means that man just sweeps up the shavings, so to speak. The poets didn't take that as seriously as the theologians did, fortunately. But after about 1750 it began to be clearer and clearer that these four levels [heaven, paradise, fallen world, demonic world] were the facade of the structure of authority and with the Romantic movement you get this whole cosmology turned upside down...[clearer after that date] because of the American Revolution, then the French Revolution, then the Industrial Revolution,...the Scientific Revolution, that of course knocked out all the up there metaphors. After [Isaac] Newton's time you couldn't regard the stars as a world of quintessence, as all that was left of the unfallen world. That's why Blake gave Isaac Newton the job of blowing his last trumpet in his poetry."

[21:27] ... Blake turns the Biblical worldview upside down

"For Blake, its the fact that you have to think of God as at the bottom of creation trying to rebuild it and as working through man to that effect. They [the four levels] are still there but they're upside down. Up there is the world of science fiction, of outer space, it's the symbol of alienation. There's nothing there except infinite resources for killing you. And then, below that, comes this very unfair world of ordinary experience where the predators are the aristocrats. And then the world below that is the world of frustrated sexual and social desire, the world of [Karl] Marx's proletariat and of [Sigmund] Freud's repressed consciousness. And then below that again is the creative power of God which works only through man as a conscious being."

[22:58] ... Blake's essential vision

"For Blake, what happens is that the child, who is the central figure of Songs of Innocence, is born believing that the world is made for his benefit, that the world makes human sense. He then grows up and discovers that the world isn't like this at all, so what happens to his child like vision? Blake says it gets driven underground, to what we would now call the subconscious. And there you have the embryonic mythical shape that is worked on later by people like [Arthur] Schopenhauer and Marx and Freud."

Frye on Literary Criticism

[27:42] ... the state of criticism

"The world of criticism was inhabited by a lot of people who were pretty confused about what they were doing and didn't particularly mind that they were confused about it. I was impatient with all the semi-illiterate productions which I'd been compelled to read as secondary sources. I was tired of a historical approach to literature that didn't know any literary history, that simply dealt with ordinary history plus a few dates of writers. It was just a matter of me fed up with a field that seemed to me to have no discipline...

If you study history you're an Historian and History has a discipline, there are certain rules for writing correct history and ways of writing sloppy history that eventually get recognized as such. The same thing is true of philosophy. Criticism, it seemed to me, had no discipline of that kind, it had no sense of its own integrity. I think 'anatomy' was a rather misleading word in some respects because it suggested to a lot of people who wanted to have this suggested that criticism as I conceived it was a retreat from the world. In fact the original Italian translator of the Anatomy [of Criticism] used the word fuori, "outside" you see which is a complete misapprehension, that translation has been revised since then but I didn't think of criticism as in any respect a 'withdrawing from' life or thinking of literature as something that withdrew from life but I thought that criticism was a study in its own right and not simply a parasitic approach to literature....

One of the things I was attacking were the reduction or deterministic criticisms such as the Marxist type and the Freudian type at that time, its pretty well blown up now, but at that time the Thomists of the Roman Catholic type....

[37:25] ... gentleman critic's value judgments vs critical scholarship

I was getting at the conception of the critic as judge, as sitting on the bench with the defendant in front of him squirming. I felt that that was a preposterous ego trip for the critic to attempt and that value judgments are things that people argue about and discuss and talk about endlessly and they do not enter into one's critical experience,...that they can never be demonstrated and what a value judgment manifests is the taste of its time as it's filtered through the individual critic.

The value judgments of most of the serious critics for a century after Shakespeare's death was that Ben Jonson was really a much more serious writer. Value judgments in the late 18th century said that Blake was a lunatic. The great boners of criticism like [Thomas] Rymer's calling Othello a bloody farce and so forth are not the result of a critic's lack of taste, they're the result of his following the conventions of his time....

There was a great misunderstanding because people were brought up to think that being a literary critic was a gentleman's occupation and the gentleman is a person who attaches great importance to his taste, "I like this", "I don't like that"...In rejecting that you move from the gentleman to the scholar. The scholar reads everything in his historical period, good, bad or indifferent. It's all good because its all documentation for his work. He works entirely without explicit value judgments, they may enter into his work at some point or other, but good, bad or indifferent everything which comes under a critics purview or rather a scholar's purview has to be read by the scholar...And very often you can understand the taste of an age from its least interesting writers...[try to] democratize criticism and also try to remove criticism from the area of morality because every value judgment is a moral judgment in disguise and the moral judgment reflects the ideological conditioning of a certain age. The nearest you come to a value judgment, I think, is in words like "classic" or "masterpiece" where you have value terms but what they mean are works of literature that refuse to go away. It was all very well to say for a century that Ben Jonson was a closer follower of nature than Shakespeare and therefore a more serious dramatist but Shakespeare just squatted down on the stage and refused to move and survived even the most grotesque manhandling of his work whereas only two or three of Jonson's plays have really held the stage."

[41:31] ... on life experience, literature, writers and uniqueness in literature

"What I always kept getting were the anxieties "But what about life Prof. Frye?", that sort of thing. I would say "Well literature has swallowed life. Life is inside literature. All you have to do to find out about life is read literature." Oh my, it bothered them. They were bothered by the suggestion that a writer gets what he acquires technically out of other books instead of by empiric observation, they just had to have it that way. So I used to get all kinds of anxieties about my not attending to the uniqueness of a work of art. And I would keep saying that uniqueness was not an object of knowledge. We never know the unique. The unique exists in experience only. It is part of the response to it or literature but it is not part of literature.

 [43:02] ... ideology and art

"Plato was the first of all the people who wanted to take over poetry, hitch it to an ideology, namely his. And all the poets who wouldn't do that would have to leave the republic but according to the laws the others would stay around writing hymns and panegyrics to the greatness of the Platonic idea of the world and that's still true of all ideologies. Artists have always been told that they have no real authority, that they live in a world of lets pretend and just play around with fictions and that their function is to "delight and instruct", as Horace says, and they can learn from their own art how to delight but they can't learn how to instruct unless they study philosophy, theology or politics. And, as a literary critic, I've been fighting that notion all my life."

 [47:58] Frye on his critics, poetic language and myth as a counter culture environment

"Most of my critics do not know that there is such a thing as a poetic language which is not only different from ideological language but puts up a constant fight against it, to liberalize and individualize it. There is not such thing as a pure myth, there is no immaculate conception in mythology. Myth exists only in incarnations but its the ones that are incarnated in works of literature that I'm primarily interested in and what they create is a cultural counter environment to the ones that are, I won't say perverted, but are at any rate, twisted or skewed into ideological patterns of authority....They [my critics] say that [all myths are skewed in some way] because there are pan-ideologists, they can't conceive of any myth that doesn't come in an ideological form but Shakespeare does. Dante and Milton perhaps more obviously reflect the ideologies of their time but their structure is radically a poetic structure which is something different."

 [49:32] ... an argument is always a half-truth

"I detest arguments because you're going to lose any argument from an ideologue because you  can only argue on the basis of a counter ideology and I'm not doing that. I think that the ideologue addresses his public and wants to make a kinetic effect on them, he wants them to get out there and do something and the poet turns his back on his audience and as I begin the Anatomy, I think, with John Stuart Mill's remark that the poet is overheard, not heard, and he doesn't look for a kinetic effect on his audience at all.

The actual technique of argumentative writing is something I avoid as far as possible because when you argue you are selecting points to emphasize and there can never be anything definitively right or wrong about an emphasis, it's simply a choice among possibilities and consequently an argument is always a half-truth. We've known that ever since Hegel and it is a militant way of writing and I'm not interested in militancy. Literature, you see, doesn't argue with itself, that's the principle of [Percy Bysshe] Shelly's Defence of Poetry, that literature cannot argue and that Yeats says you can refute Hegel but not the Song of Sixpence. As I've often said the irrefutable philosopher is not the person who cannot be refuted but the philosopher who is still there after he's been refuted."