Summary outline of Frye's "Creation and Recreation", 1

An outline and summary of Creation and Recreation by Northrup Frye. University of Toronto Press. 1980. Web. 2016. The numbering used below follows paragraph placement in the original text.

 Preface

1. The content is from the Larkin-Stuart Lectures given at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and St. Thomas Church, January 30, 1980 to February 1, 1980.  
2. The material is part of a project concerned with “a study of the narrative and imagery of the Bible and its influence on secular literature.” [probably The Great Code]  

One

1. Creation is a concept.
   There are concepts that are often talked about but not explored; the concept of creation is one of these. Frye means to explore the concept of creation in its “divine and human context.”
   
2. Concepts mean different things to different people at different times.
   Concepts like creation can be surrounded by a “whole complex of ideas and images” from which we pick and choose our definition of the concept. Some of these ideas and images fall into disuse over time, the concept itself, however, is always with us.
   
3. We learn from our culture, not nature.
   Frye claims we are not taught by nature, as Wordsworth tells us, but by “our own cultural conditioning”; as Wilde says in his essay “The Decay of Lying” we do not live in nature but in an envelope of our own devising, an envelope we call “culture or civilization.”
   
4. Culture and nature are our two poles of paranoia.
   Our envelope insulates us from nature and usually mirrors our own concerns; however, occasionally it acts as a window rather than a mirror and we “see through it to an indifferent nature.” These two views, or states of mind, set up two poles of paranoia. At the first, we believe the world is created solely for us; at the second, we are dealing with Heidegger’s “thrown-ness”; where we think we have “through no will of our own,” been thrown into a world and “arbitrarily assigned to a dramatic role which we have been given no script to learn.”
   
5. Mythology is the language of culture, science is a special language.
   Part of our envelope, our culture, is the language of mythology, which supplies “the structure of human creation conveyed in words, with literature at its centre.” This structure is the mirror that reflects our concerns back at us. Science, which requires its own “special language,” develops only when we look through our envelope to nature. The language of myth, when used to scientifically describe nature, is nonsensical.
   
6. Mythology is not a primitive science.
   “[S]cience does not grow out of mythology”; earlier descriptions of mythology as “primitive science” were a means of rationalizing European colonialism. Science cannot replace mythology, which is recreated by the poets of each generation.
   
7. Literature is a mirror.
   Literature (which is located at the centre of mythology) can only be a mirror, never a window, as words can only describe things approximately.
   
8. Frye prefers a mirror that shows us the best we can be rather than the worst.
   Science is based on what we tell each other we see ‘out there’ in the external world. Literature based on this reality tends to tell us “what we no longer want to learn.” It is the “documentary realism” of Zola and Matthew Arnold’s “seeing life steadily and seeing it whole” which Frye calls “an insidious disease of writing.” Frye prefers Wilde’s ‘lying,’ or “turning away from the external world”; he prefers thinking the of the world as a “Valhalla,” a vision of the highest it can be, rather than as an “abattoir,” a vision of the worst it can be.
   
9. Our insights come from Wilde’s liars, not the wise.
   It is not the “steady-state” people, “the wise”, that we turn to for insight but Wilde’s liars, those who have been “smashed up in various ways”: Baudelaire, Holderlin, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Wilde, etc.
   
10. Creation is seeing behind the culturally recognizable.
    Whatever is recognizable in art is “non-creative”; the recognizable, according to Wilde, provides “emotional reassurance.” Creation is the “disturbing insight” into the recognizable.
    
11.  Modern art sees with its "distorted imagination" that our centred space is gone.
    Wilde’s point was that we only see the world though a prism of cultural conventions; creativity only occurs when we see with a “distorted imagination”, when we break the cultural prism. The necessity of this is seen in modern art which tells us “we do not live in a centred space any more, but have to create our own centres.”
    
12. The arts are a form of decreation, they undo divine creation.
    Traditionally, human creation begins with our divine creation but now we equate human creativity with acts that reverse or neutralize ‘the’ creation. “The creation of the arts, turns out to be a kind of decreation.”
    
13. We all inhabit the same lunatic country as the characters in our literature.
    The arts get us past the filters we create with our senses, memories, habits and rituals to the “lunatic country of Don Quixote, Captain Ahab and King Lear”; we understand the moods of these characters so well precisely because we inhabit the same lunatic country as they.
    
14. The creative reader perceives his own past in literature.
    Wilde’s main concern is with the “creative reader;” with the reader’s ability to “perceive his own real past” through the “imaginative vision” of art.
    
15. Mankind’s greatest art was born from the same ground as his greatest cruelties.
    The “great works” of art came out of the same background as the great acts of man’s cruelty and folly. “We cannot abstract some of the works of man from others.” It is an error in perspective to detach culture from history or to confuse one with the other. Our culture and our history spring from the same ground; we cannot have one without the other.
    
16. Culture is our repressed social past.
    Our cultural heritage, not our historical record, is our repressed social past — it is the “dream of art” that recurs in every generation and “those who refuse to confront it … are condemning themselves to die without having been born.”
    
17. Youth looks for freedom in an imaginary future.
    In youth one is more likely to feel that “ordinary human actions” are absurd and to doubt that evil acts are a necessity of “fate, reason or the will of God.” The thoughts here are “linked to the future rather than the past, and with the imaginary [ideal] rather than the imaginative.” There is a “crucial sense” that something must be set free, and it is connected to an historical vision of what man could do, could be — if he could only escape his past.
    
18. The actual and cultural pasts are not the same.
    These feelings lead people to view the actual and cultural past as one.
    
19. Visions of the future are based on the historical past.
    Visions of the future are all founded on analogies to the past, “[A]ll visions of a social future must be rooted in the past, socially conditioned and historically placed.”
    
20. No future can be disconnected from past creative achievements.
    Some want a complete break with the past, others a future that returns to the past but in either case “some rationalizing historical context” is needed to maintain continuity with the past. At that point we find we cannot disconnect from the “tradition of human creative achievement.”
    
21. The future needs a vision that includes past creativity.
    What is needed is the creation of a future society that continues the creativity of the past “in the spite of the past.”
    
22. When society does not resist art, art may be merely decoration.
    “[T]he creative … express[es] what ordinary experience represses.” A lack of social resistance to “the arts” might mark a period in which they have become “merely decorative” and during which they evoke no challenge to repression; they don’t jolt people into a realization of what past experiences they are repressing.
    
23. Art can be solely aesthetic and so be appreciated by both the cruel and the kind.
    In the past, culture and leisure were enjoyed by those on top of the social structure and the working class was to continue as it was without forming a new social future. Today, work and leisure are “different aspects of the same life.” The arts can exist on an aesthetic level where they are beautiful “objects to be admired or valued or possessed” by anyone, and not just by the upper classes. This is why people can love art and be cruel to others.
    
24. If art is concerned with time, it is apt to be aesthetic (decorative).
    The more alienating the work, the more concerned it becomes with time. Leisure breaks the panic of time as the arts and their study “takes their own speed.” Arts on the aesthetic, possessive level, are still preoccupied with time. Frye quotes Walter Pater’s Renaissance about “expanding” the time we have by fitting more into it versus Marcel Duchamp describing the viewing of a painting as a delay; pausing time.
    
25. Creative work envisions the future as one that gives nature a human shape and meaning.
    As work becomes creative it incorporates a vision of a future ideal society. The core of Biblical imagery is a vision of “humanized creation out of nature.” While God in the Bible creates the world (Gen. 1), creates paradise (Gen. 2), destroys paradise (Gen. 3), and destroys the world (Gen. 6) there is a human vision of creation which looks to the future restoration of Israel and the Promised Land. Man is isolated from nature by a culture that is partly due to technical achievements, partly vision. Part of the technical achievement is the transformation of the natural environment into a nature with a human shape and meaning. In the Bible the transformation imagery goes thru phases: paradise, pastoral (flocks and herds), agricultural (harvest and vintage), urban (cities, streets, highways).
    
26. God’s creative acts are the model for our own creativity.
    The “genuine work” of man is “making a human artifact out of nature.” God’s destructive acts provide man’s motivation for his real work while God’s creative acts provide the model.
    
27. The Bible is distinctive in placing nature on the same footing as man.
    All cultures have imagery similar to that in the Bible but the Bible is distinctive in making nature a “fellow creature of man,” having nothing numinous within it requiring worship. Man must look to himself and “verbal revelation” for the “structural principles” of his assigned creative task.
    
28. Our culture tells us nature was made for man to use.
    So far our transformation of nature has not been “a wholly creative operation” mainly as our cultural traditions “insist that nature was provided for the sake of man” to use until it is used up.
    
29. Nature can only be regenerated when man stops destroying himself.
    The view of nature as “an unlimited field of exploitation” is not unique to Western culture but has a peculiar legacy we inherit from the Bible and Christianity: a restored Israel comes with a “regenerated nature” but “this can only happen when man stops the destructive activities within himself.”
    
30. The comic vision in literature is a vision of a future society.
    The Bible says nothing about our cultural past; literary critics must depend on classical texts and secular literature, there the "comic vision" is a "vision of future society."
    
31. A reintegrated past comes to life via art.
    In Shakespeare’s Winter Tales specifically “there is a vision of a happy social future” and also one of a “reintegrated past in which dead things come to life again under the spell of art.”
    
32. Art restores the old.
    All the romances have something of a double resolution with “young people forming the nucleus of a future society” and older people “being restored to their original lives through the arts.”
    
33. Regeneration and renewal occur in the present, not in the past, not in the future.
    In The Tempest, the positive action of “reintegration and renewal” take place in an “expanded present” not the “mere past, where everything vanishes and is annihilated” or “the mere future” where Prospero is “as ineffectual a Duke as ever.”
    
34. The present is the world we keep making.
    The present is a transfiguration of the world we “keep making” not the “reviving of a corpse” or the rebirth of new life from old.