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

The following notes are from Part 3 of a 2012 CBC Ideas broadcast, The Ideas of Northrop Frye. Podcast time frames, shown in brackets, are approximate.

The Bible as a mythic framework for the cosmos

[00:25] Once inside a mythological framework, we can't break out of it.

I think my religious background really did shape almost everything, gave me the mythological framework that I was brought up inside of and as I know from experience once you're inside of a mythological framework you can't break out of it. You can alter or adapt it to yourself but it's always there.

 [01:10] The Bible and a redeemable human nature

The Bible is, to me, the body of words through which I can see the world as a cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something redeemable, something with a right to survive. I think if I didn't read the Bible and were confronted with all these dire prophecies about the possibility of the human race disappearing from the planet I would be inclined to say "Well, the sooner the better."

The Bible, Methodism, Doctrine and Experience

[01:59] Language uses man, not vice versa

A lot of people, some very unlikely people, say that they feel that it's language that uses man rather than man that uses language and I have a great deal of attraction for that view partly because central to my whole thinking is "In the beginning was the Word."

 [04:27] Experience, not history, is unique

I think Methodism is an approach to Christianity which puts a very heavy emphasis on the quality of experience, that is one reason why I've always tended to think in of, first, a myth which repeats itself over and over again through time, and then secondly, the experience which is the response to it, nothing that happens in history is unique, everything is part of turning cycles or mythical repetitions. Everything in experience is unique and I think it is because of the emphasis on the uniqueness of experience which I acquired so early that I realized the other  half of this was this mythological pattern...A Catholic approach is very much more doctrinal and you learn the structure of doctrine, you step inside it and that structure of doctrine performs instead of the myth. In Methodism you listen to the stories of the Bible and, as Presbyterians used to say, its the reason why Methodist ministers moved every two years, the structure of doctrine in Methodism was totally exhausted long before then.

 [07:02] Frye thinks we are meant to see and choose our own path and not be led

My attitude, I'm afraid, was always the opposite of Newman's Lead Kindly Light where he says, "I loved to see and choose my path" and called that pride. Well, I always wanted to choose and see my path and was convinced that's what God wanted too. And that if I went on with this "Lead thou me on" routine I'd run into spiritual gravitation and fall over a cliff.

 [08:00] Frye, the Methodist minister

I remember something that I found later, in a Canadian critic, I think it was Elizabeth Walters, where she spoke of the prairies as this sense of immense space with no privacy. And I found that on top of Katie [a horse Frye rode when he was acting minister for a few small Saskatchewan towns] who naturally stimulated one's bladder considerably and realizing that I couldn't get off on that vast stretch of prairies because everybody was out with opera glasses, you see, watching the preacher on top of Katie...That was what people did, they all had spy glasses, they weren't doing it with any maliciousness, their lives were rather devoid of incidence, naturally they liked to see who was going along...That was just a summer, I thought the people were wonderful, again, I realized that this wasn't the thing that I'd be good at.

 [10:00] Frye on his secular attitude

I used to describe myself as a United Church plainclothesman. That is, that I was in effect, somebody who was attached to a church but that the students, most undergraduates are instinctively agnostic and rather rebellious about churches, and about religious institutions generally, and I have always used a very secular attitude, in order to, in effect, win the confidence of people not because I want to catch them in a trap later but precisely because I want them to understand that there isn't any trap.

 Nature, Gods and the Spiritual World

 [11:55] Human nature is both cruel and redeemable

The Bible is, to me, the body of words through which I can see the world as a cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something redeemable, something with a right to survive, otherwise you're left with human nature and physical nature; physical nature doesn't seem to have very much conversation, it's a totally inarticulate world. Human nature is corrupt at the source because it is a grown out of physical nature and it has various ideals and hopes and wishes and concerns but its attempt to realize these things is often abominably cruel and psychotic and I feel there must be something that transcends all this or else...despair. Why keep this miserable object, humanity, alive on this planet for its doing nothing but pollute it.

 [14:25] There are no gods in nature.

Natural religion, for him [Blake], was what the Bible calls idolatry; it means finding something numinous in nature, in the physical environment and the Bible says there are no gods in nature, that nature is a fellow creation of man and that while one should love nature you actually get your spiritual vision through human society and then you see nature as it is but all the gods that people have pretended to find in nature are in effect devils and are the projection of the wrong side of man's natural origin.

[15:37] Blake's spiritual world is a physical world, not Plato's world of ideas

He [Blake] meant the capacity to live with one's eyes and ears in what he called a spiritual world, that was not a world of ideas, that was not a Platonic world, it was a physical world in its organized form, he says spirits are organized man. He also says spirits are not cloudy vapours or anything fuzzy, they are organized and minutely articulated beyond anything the physical world could produce. In other words, it was his world of poetry and painting, vision was, for him, the ability to hear and see in that world....This is the world as it really is, not the world as our lazy minds and senses perceive it.

The Bible, literature, mythic thinking and language

[17:57] The Bible is written in a literary language but it is not literature

I didn't want to write a book called The Bible as Literature what I wanted to do was deal with the entire narrative and the imagery of the Bible and the impact it has made as a totality on literature. That was why the word and was extremely important to me [he's talking here of his book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature]...I wanted to make it clear that I was dealing the Bible`s relation to literature and the fact that it was written mostly in literary language and that it was neither an aesthetic literary approach to the Bible nor a doctrinal one.

[21:03] Mythic thinking and language

In ordinary speech we use words to represent things outside the structure of words but as a technique of writing that is a fairly late development because it depends on technology, really. You can't write history until you have historiography and archives and documents and you can't do science until you have machinery for experimentation and you can't write descriptively in any sort of mature fully developed way until you've established these things. Consequently I wouldn't put descriptive language as a continuous form of prose much earlier than about the 17th century...before that, first of all, the logical language developed out of Plato, more particularly out of Aristotle, where the criterion of truth is the integrity of verbal structure rather than its relation to something outside....Mythic thinking is the earliest of all, the most primitive form of thinking, consequently the illusion turns up in every generation that there is something to be outgrown but we always find that if you try to outgrow mythical thinking you only end up by rehabilitating it. And mythical thinking proceeds metaphorically in a world where everything is potentially identifiable with every thing else. Gods, for example, are linguistically metaphors, that is how they start out: you have a sea-god or a sun-god or a war-god or something where two things are being identified with, then a supposed personality...I think its where the use of words begins and I think its where the use of words is likely to end.

God as a process (verb) and not a fixed object (noun)

[23:52] The word comes before the event

There is nothing that we get from Christianity except a body of words and they become transmuted into experiences. You start out with a notion that if you have a body of words, they must point to an event, so that in the beginning God did something and words are the servile mechanisms which tell us what he did but the gospel of John doesn't begin that way, it says the word came first, you've got a body of words and nothing else; you create the event yourself. God said "Let there be light and there was light." The word comes first, the event follows. Verbalizing consciousness precedes the physical existence.

[27:56] "God is not a thing, he's a process fulfilling himself"

My growing interest in the Bible has led me to a growing interest in the way that nouns, the world of things, rather blocks movement, it's partly the screw-up of language because the scientist, for example, is trying to describe processes in space-time and ordinary language has to twist that into events in time and things in space and not going on there. One of the most seminal books that I've read is Buber's I and thou. Buber says we are all born into a world of it's and if we meet other human beings we turn them into it's, everything is a solid block, a thing, this and that and so forth. Consequently when we think of God we think of a grammatical noun and you have to get used to the notion that there is no such thing as God because God is not a thing, he's a process fulfilling himself, that's how he defines himself, "I will be what I will be." Similarly, I'm more and more drawn to thinking in terms of a great twirling of processes and powers rather than a world of blocks and things. A text, for example, is a conflict of powers; a picture is not a thing, it's a focus of forces.

[30:55] All ideologies are donkey's carrots

The Christian Bible consists of the Old Testament and the New Testament and the relation between them is, from the Christian point of view, that everything that happens in the Old Testament is a type of something that happens in the New Testament and so you get this tennis game view of evidence, how do you know that the Old Testament is true? because it's fulfilled in the New Testament. How do you know that the New Testament is true? because it fulfills the prophecies of the Old Testament and after the resurrection we're told that the disciples confronted the risen Jesus and said that we find this resurrection very hard to understand and he simply said search the scriptures and you'll find that the messiah has to rise from the dead and that's the only evidence that the writer's of the cosmos are interest in, they are not biographers. The one criteria they subject themselves to is that what happens to Jesus in their account must fit what the Old Testament said would happen to the messiah. Typology is really a view of history which says that history is going somewhere and meaning something....all our ideologists today are typological in the sense that they're all donkey's carrots, that is they pull you forward, that is to something that's to be fulfilled.

God, the Word and Faith

[33:01] The world is always killing God but God can't die

The difference between the Biblical religion and say the oriental religions is that in Buddhism you have a compassionate Buddha and in Jesus you have a  compassionate Jesus but he's also the Jesus that confronts and condemns the world, it's a more militant conception, there is more thrown on the will and less thrown on enlightenment. That is the crucifixion of Jesus is something that goes on every day, it goes on in El Salvador, it goes on in Vietnam, it goes on here, and that condemnation of the world by the fact that it tries to kill God, is always trying to kill God, is what seems to be distinctive in the Biblical religions...Well I call it [Biblical tradition] revolutionary because the Old Testament comes out of a people that was never very good at the game of empire, it was always on the underside, the side oppressed and placed in bondage by more powerful kingdoms like Egypt and Assyria and Babylonia. So the central thing in the Old Testament is the liberation of an enslaved people, in other words the Exodus and that goes on repeating from the return from Babylon and in the New Testament it is again a struggle between Christ and the World, in which the world wins to the extent that Christ is crucified and dies was buried. Of course the central thing is resurrection, God can't die.

 [35:07] The Word as the command of God

The metaphor of the ear, the voice of God speaking, suggests an invisible God that nevertheless enters into you and becomes a part of you and the eye always retains a sense of the objective thing over there. In a polytheistic religion like the Greek one you have to have visual symbols like statues in order to distinguish one god from another but if you don't have the problem of distinguishing among gods, there's only one, then its a reduction of that God to see him as an object...

It [the word] has often taken the form of a command. The word of command in ordinary society is the word of authority which is in the whole area of ideology and rhetoric and that kind of word of command has to be absolutely at a minimum, it can't have any comment attached to it. Soldiers won't hang themselves on barbed wire in response to a subordinate clause, and if there's any commentary necessary it's the Sgt. Major's job to explain what it is, not the officers. Now that is a metaphor, it's an analogy of the kind of command that comes from the other side of the imagination that has been called kerygmatic [the "vehicle of revelation"], the proclamation from God. And that is not so much a command as a statement of what your own potentiality is and of the direction in which you have to go to  attain it but its a command that leaves your will free whether you follow it or not.

 [37:54] Faith is the experience of hope or illusion realized

Faith is, according to the New Testament, the hypostasis of hope, and the...proof or evidence of the unseen. I would translate that at least approximately, as meaning that faith is the reality of hope and the reality of illusion...For most people it [illusion] is the schoolboy's definition of faith: to believe in what you know ain't so. I have no use for that kind of faith, I don't think the New Testament does either.  Faith can only be achieved through experience. Say the Wright brothers start to wonder if a heavier than air machine can actually get off the ground, everybody says that's impossible, that's an illusion; they get the damn thing off the ground, that's faith. It's not an objective body of propositions because the author of Hebrews, after he's given his definitions of faith, goes on and gives examples from the Old Testament. He says "by faith, these people did certain things." They weren't talking about the trinity or three person's in one substance or anybody who doesn't believe in the substance or difference of the person's, etc. etc. If the gospel says that faith can remove mountains it's no good just saying I have faith that that mountain shall not be there the next minute, of course it stays there. So, obviously, you have to keep on  working at your conception of faith until it becomes more precise and heads in the direction of realization. The important thing is that it does work 'cause its a process of turning into reality what has been either a matter of hope or a matter of illusion.

 The Book of Job

[42:40] Blake's Book of Job

Blake looks at Job as a kind of spiritualized version of the story of the Fall in Genesis, that is, he starts with Job doing his moral duty and therefore not being quite on the upper limit of what human beings can achieve so he falls into Satan's world. Satan is young and vigorous, God is old and imbecile, and Satan takes over and dominates the world until Job goes through the vision of the morning stars singing together (plate 14) and the vision of Behemoth and Leviathan (plate 15) and the new creation and consequently the renewed God who is, among other things, the divinity in Job himself, takes over...It seems to me that Job begins with, as I say, a spiritual a form of Genesis and each with a spiritual form of the apocalypse. It's  a revelation and in the middle comes this vertical contact between God and man which the New Testament has a different version of; it sees that contact as existing in Jesus but imaginatively and mythically its in the Book of Job...

The reading which I disagree with makes God a bully who forces Job into agreeing with the justice of his ways. He is the objective God who is sitting up there in the sky and is linguistically a noun, that is he's an object that never changes and all he does is to say look what I did in the remote past, I created this wonderful world. As I see it, the opening of the story with Satan in God's court depicts God as shifting the centre of action to Satan, who brings about all the disasters. Job, then, is driven to assert the dignity of human beings; if I've done so and so then its alright but I haven't therefore there's a problem. At that point God moves in on it and the new creation which he displays to Job isn't the old creation again but it's something in which Job now participates; it's something that engages Job as an actor, as an experience. That means that God himself has become a principal of action and experience; he's transformed himself from a noun in Job's mind to a verb in Job's spiritual body.

Literature, Experience, and Space-time

[46:27] Literature as imaginative vision; as revelation

The only either/or dialectic that I'm interested in is the apocalyptic one which moves toward the separation of a world of life from a world of death. Not a separation of the good from the evil, I don't believe in that. In ordinary life the good/evil distinctions are hopelessly tangled. Jesus has another parable of the wheat and the tares in which he says there's no use trying to weed out the weeds from the grain in this world and when you make choices, when you make decisions, you're always moving towards an apocalyptic risk of something that doesn't die and throwing off the body of death that you want to be delivered from so that the final separation of the life and death has to be in the form of an imaginative vision which is what literature expresses and what the critic tries to explore.

[47:56] Literature and man's primary concerns

Man is a concerned being, I think that's one way of defining the conscious animal, and as I went on I tended to see a distinction between the primary concerns of man as an animal that has food and sex and property and freedom of movement and secondary concerns which are religious belief, political loyalties and everything ideological and it seems to me that literature has a profound and primary connection with primary concerns and that that is what distinguishes it from ideology and rhetoric of all kinds. You can learn a great deal about the ideological or religious structure of the society from a novel like Flaubert's or Zola's or Tolstoy's but in the work of fiction they have to be subordinated to making love and making a living and getting on with your life, the questions of survival and if there's one thing clear about the late 20th century, it is that it's an age where primary concerns have got to become primary or else. I mean food and sex and freedom of movement and property in the sense of what is proper to individuality are the primary concerns. We must come to to terms with these.

[49:55] Experience and space-time

The present doesn't exist in ordinary experience, it's always "never quite" and it keeps vanishing between the past and the future. The Bible, while it doesn't raise so abstract an argument nevertheless makes it clear that reality is a matter of a real present, a now which exists, and a real presence, a real here in space, as in space things are just as alienated as they are in time. Now is the centre of time but there's no such time as now ordinarily. Here is the centre of space but there's no such place as here, it's always a there even if you're pointing to your own backbone and to me the words eternal and infinite do not mean time and space going on and on without ever stopping; they mean the reality of now and the reality of here.

[51:24] Bible as an important part of our cultural heritage

I think that forgetting the Bible is on par with forgetting the rest of our cultural heritage and I've always, of course, maintained that when you lose your memory you become senile, that's just as true of a society as it is of an individual.... There's a lot of senility about.