Northrop Frye - Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for Anatomy of Critcism

Collected Works of Northrop Frye

VOLUME 23

Northrop Fryes Notebooks for
Anatomy of Criticism

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee

General Editor
Alvin A. Lee

Associate Editor
Jean OGrady

Editors
Joseph Adamson
Robert D. Denham
Michael Dolzani
A.C. Hamilton
David Staines

Advisers
Robert Brandeis
Paul Gooch
Eva Kushner
Jane Millgate
Ron Schoeffel
Clara Thomas
Jane Widdicombe

Edited by
Robert D. Denham

Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Robert D. Denham
(preface, introduction, annotation) 2007

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9362-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Frye, Northrop, 19121991
Northrop Fryes notebooks for Anatomy of criticism / edited by Robert
D. Denham.

(Collected works of Northrop Frye v. 23)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9362-2

1. Criticism. 2. Frye, Northrop, 19121991 Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
I. Denham, Robert D. II. Title. III. Series.

PN 81. F 757 2007 801.95 C2007-903006-8

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Once more, for S.D.D. and K.E.D

This is the seventh and penultimate volume of Fryes notebooks to appear in the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Those unfamiliar with the form and intent of Fryes notebooks can find those matters discussed at some length in the introductions to the volumes already published: Northrop Fryes Late Notebooks, 19821990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (CW, 56), The Third Book Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 19641972: The Critical Comedy (CW, 9), Northrop Fryes Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (CW, 13), Northrop Fryes Notebooks on Romance (CW, 15), and Northrop Fryes Notebooks on the Renaissance (CW, 20). The notebooks in the present collection were written over the course of more than a dozen years. Frye began writing in Notebook 7 in the late 1940s and the last half of Notebook 18 dates from about 1960 and continues at least two years beyond that. (He began this notebook about the time he had completed the manuscript for Anatomy of Criticism in 1956). Had my co-editor Michael Dolzani and I not decided to keep each notebook as a discrete unit, part of Notebook 18 could well have been included in The Third Book Notebooks. In any event, it provides a transition to that volume. Most of the material in the present notebooks, however, was written before 1956 and relates to Anatomy of Criticism.

Because some of the notebooks are difficult to date precisely, arranging them according to strict chronology is difficult. Nevertheless, I have let Notebooks 7 and 18 serve as bookends for Notebooks 37, 38, 35, and 36, which is the chronological sequence as best as can be determined. (No significance should be attached to the notebook numbers themselves, which were simply assigned sequentially when I inventoried and catalogued the notebooks in 1992.) Between Notebooks 38 and 35 are Fryes holograph notes for the Third Essay of Anatomy of Criticism, along with a chart, written on the front and back of a luncheon program for Lester B. Pearsons installation as chancellor of Victoria University. Presumably Frye worked out his chart during the installation service itself on 4 February 1952. Because the notebooks often extend over a period of years and because Frye wrote in more than one notebook during a given time, the dates of the notebooks often overlap. Following the first six notebooks is a group of eleven very brief notebooks, ranging from about 300 to about 3,000 words and bound in manila wrappers with green cloth spineswhat Frye called his sermon books. He numbered the front cover of seven of these, the number standing for the particular chapter of Anatomy of Criticism as he conceived it at the timethe late 1940s or early 1950s. These eleven notebooks are arranged according to the alphabetical system used to identify the series 30 notebooks when they were catalogued in 1992. Most of the series 30 notebooks include cancelled drafts of Fryes lectures, articles, and booksmaterial that has been excluded from the present volume.

I have transcribed the notebooks with the intent of reproducing exactly what Frye wrote, retaining his own spellings, capital letters, and punctuation, even when his practice on these matters varies. There are three exceptions: I have regularized his use of double quotation marks with periods and commas, following the usual North American practice, italicized the words and phrases he underlined, and added accents to several Greek words he uses.

Frye occasionally used an asterisk to mark the place where he wanted to insert a later comment. These later comments appear at the end of the entry itself, in a paragraph following the entry, at the end of the page, or in a separate paragraph several entries removed from the original asterisk. For ease of reference I have regularized these by putting all of the material marked by an asterisk at the end of the entry containing the original asterisk.

Editorial additions are in square brackets. These include paragraph numbers and question marks for words that I have been unable to decipher (question mark only) or that are conjectures (question mark following the inference). I have also used square brackets to expand Fryes abbreviations that are not immediately obvious, but when an abbreviation appears more than once in an entry, only the first instance is expanded. From time to time Frye uses a symbolic code, explained both in the notes to the present volume and in the introductions to the notebooks already published, to refer to various parts of his lifelong writing project. He refers to this project as his ogdoad, the eight parts being Liberal, Tragicomedy, Anticlimax, Rencontre, Mirage, Paradox, Ignoramus, and Twilight. When Frye uses one of his shorthand symbols, I have given its name in square brackets following the symbol, though again I have not repeated the name if the symbol reappears within a single paragraph.

I have replaced Fryes own square brackets with braces: { }. For Fryes published works, I have given the citation for both the original publication and, following a solidus, to the page number in the volumes of the Collected Works that have thus far appeared. Thus FS, 428/414 refers to the page number to the Princeton edition of