Notes from Frye's "Elemental Teaching and Elemental Scholarship"

The following notes are from an article Elemenatal Teaching and Elemental Scholarship by Northrop Frye, published in PMLA, Vol. 79, No. 2 (May, 1964), pp. 11-18 and available from JSTOR.

Convention and Styles

"[I]t is the function of convention to set free the power of expressing emotions, not to provide formulas for ready-made emotions, though it may do this for dull writers." (12)

"[F]igures of speech are not the ornaments of language, but the elements of both language and thought." (13)

"The styles employed by journalists and advertisers are highly conventionalized rhetorics, in fact practically trade jargons, and have to be learned as a separate skill, without much direct reference to literature." (13)

"[A] literary education makes it more difficult to come to terms with the barbarizing of speech, or what Finnegan's Wake calls the jinglish janglage." (13)

The Function of Literature

"[I]t is the function of literature to assimilate the natural world to the human world, chiefly through the associations of analogy and identity, the two modes of thought that appear in literature as the simile and the metaphor." (15)

Poetry has an affinity for categories and correspondence: 7 planets, 7 metals, 12 zodiac signs, 12 months, 4 elements, 4 gospels, 4 directions, 4 quarters, etc. these are "structural principals of literature." (15)

Study of Literature and Myth

Students should be familiar with the stories of Biblical and classical mythology before making a "systematic study of mythology." (16)

Stories come in "certain conventional shapes". Frye divides them into four mythoi or generic plots: romantic, comic, tragic and ironic. The tragic and ironic are "divergences, reversal or parodies" of the romantic and comic and should be studied later. (16)

Two "great structures" underlie poetic imagery: the cyclical and the dialectic. In Blake, the dialectical is the two states of mind: innocence and experience. In the Bible, heaven and hell. It is this "dialectical framework that enables literature, without moralizing, to create a moral reality in imaginative experience." (16)

"[L]iterature, considered as a whole, is not the aggregate of all the works of literature that have got written, but an order of words, a coherent field of study which trains the imagination quite as systematically and efficiently as the sciences train the reason." (16-17)

"[M]yths represent the structural principles of literature: they are to literature what geometrical shapes are to painting.... mythology as a whole provides a kind of diagram or blueprint of what literature as a whole is all about, an imaginative survey of the human situation from the beginning to the end, from the height to the depth, of what is imaginatively conceivable." (17)

"[S]tudents of the future should be brought up on ballads, Elizabethan songs, Shakespeare's sonnets, Donne, Blake, Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth's Lucy poems and similar foolproof introductions to poetic experience, so that they would regard vigorous rhythm and metaphorical thought as the simple and direct form of utterance." (17)

"[S]ociety presents us with a social mythology in "shoddy constructs" not "[r]eal society, the total body of what humanity has done and can do" as handed down to us in our literature. (18)

[Frye acknowledges the importance of the mythology and literature of other cultures but advises us to learn the poetic language of our own culture first; if we don't know what a "rose" means in Western literature, how can we fully grasp the meaning and nuances of its corresponding symbol, the lotus, in Eastern culture? In other words, we need to understand the filters of our own context if we hope to see through them to those of another culture.]