Denham Robert D. - Northrop Frye and others : twelve writers who helped shape his thinking

The University of Ottawa Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing list by Heritage Canada through the Canada Book Fund, by the Canada Council for the Arts, and by the University of Ottawa. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Copy editing: Susan James Proofreading: Michael Waldin Typesetting: Counterpunch Inc. Cover design: Lisa Marie Smith Cover image: Orange Impulse (detail) by Jock Macdonald, 1955, oil and graphite on canvas (1971MJ118). Collection of The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Donated by the Ontario Heritage Foundation, 1988; gift of M. F. Feheley

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Denham, Robert D. author

Northrop Frye and others : twelve writers who helped shape his thinking / by Robert D. Denham.

(Canadian literature collection)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-7766-2307-8 (paperback).ISBN 978-0-7766-2309-2 (pdf).
ISBN 978-0-7766-2308-5 (epub)

1. Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991 Criticism and interpretation. 2. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.). 3. Criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Canadian literature collection

University of Ottawa Press, 2015
Printed in Canada by Gauvin Press

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T his collection of essays considers Northrop Fryes criticism in relation to a group of mostly lesser-known figures in the history of Western culture who influenced his thinking in various ways but about whom he never wrote anything extensive. The impetus for the book actually goes back to my editing of Fryes Late Notebooks, when I ran across the rather astonishing proclamation that Henry Reynolds was the greatest critic before Johnson (CW 5: 236). I had studied and taught the history and theory of literary criticism, but I could not recall ever having encountered the name Henry Reynolds either in the histories of criticism or in the anthologies of critical texts. There was, I discovered, a passing reference to Mythomystes in Fearful Symmetry, but if I had ever known about that, I had forgotten it. In any event, with the Collected Works of Frye now in print twenty-nine volumes plus the Index it became possible to track down all of the references to Reynolds in Fryes published as well as his previously unpublished writing. If, I surmised, we were to have before us everything Frye wrote about Reynolds, then perhaps we could begin to understand the attraction Reynolds held for him. The references to Reynolds turned out to be rather meagre (eleven, only six of which were substantive), but they were sufficient for me to draw several conclusions about Fryes interest in Reynolds. So the question that motivated this essay was why Frye would lavish such a superlative upon an obscure seventeenth-century writer about whom we know almost nothing. I obviously had to read Reynoldss Mythomystes. The resulting essay gives a fairly detailed account of that book, and it shows how Reynolds and Frye are linked by their joint interest in allegory, poetic etymology, and something quite akin to Longinian ekstasis.

I then began to contemplate doing a series of essays that I called Frye and X, X standing for other figures I had come to recognize as important in his thinking including such writers as Giordano Bruno, Joachim of Floris, Robert Burton, Sren Kierkegaard, Frances Yates but about whom he had had not written separate books or essays, as he had done in the case of Blake, Shakespeare, More, Milton, Dickinson, Keats, Shelley, Butler, Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Stevens, the Bible, and Spengler, among others. X eventually came to represent a space occupied by twelve writers. Twelve is more or less arbitrary, though perhaps there is some symbolic significance in that number, and we do have it on the authority of Frye that twelve is a sacred number (CW 13: 258). No significance should be attached to the order of the essays, which is simply chronological, though the two classical writers, Aristotle and Longinus, perhaps deserve to be in the lead-off position because of the extent of their influence. Too, their complementary critical positions form a dialectic, the oppositions of which Frye never attempts to resolve, which is what he typically does when confronted with dialectical pairs.

If there were to be a second volume of additional figures whom Frye admired for one reason or another but about whom he wrote nothing sustained, it might well include another dozen or so: Jacob Boehme, Franois Rabelais, Madame Blavatsky, Martin Buber, Jane Ellen Harrison, Mircea Eliade, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, Alfred North Whitehead, G. F. W. Hegel, Niccol Machiavelli, and the Mahayana Sutras (Avatamsaka, Lankavatara).

The essay on Reynolds is, like the other essays, discrete and so intended to stand alone. But as just suggested, it is linked to the Longinus essay, and all of the essays are connected by one or another key topics that emerge from the expositions of each of the twelve chapters. The theory of the coincidence of opposites, for example, which we first meet in Bruno, recurs in the study of both Lewis Carrolls Alice books and Stphane Mallarm. We encounter the spatial projection of ascent and descent along the axis mundi in the chapters on Carroll, Mallarm, Colin Still, Longinus, Joachim of Floris, Kierkegaard, and Yates. The schematic or diagrammatic representation of thought meets us in the chapters on Aristotle, Joachim of Floris, Burton, Yates, and Still. The Hegelian process known as Aufhebung is central to the chapter on Kierkegaard, but the process also enters the discussions of Aristotle, Longinus, and Bruno. Ekstasis, a key term in Longinuss poetics, recurs in the essay on Reynolds. Concern, a key term in the existentialist project, is examined at some length in the chapter on Kierkegaard, but then it reappears in the chapter on Paul Tillich. Discussions of interpenetration, another key term in Fryes poetics, find their way into the essays on Aristotle, Longinus, Joachim of Floris, Kierkegaard, and Mallarm. The movement from oracle to wit, a central though somewhat enigmatic narrative movement in Fryes mind, is examined in the chapter on Mallarm but gets picked up in the chapters on Still and Bruno as well. The sources of Fryes interest in esoterica are extensive, but two of them Reynolds and Yates are treated here. Fryes eight-book project, which he referred to as his ogdoad, is explained most fully in the chapter on Still, but it appears also in the essays on Aristotle, Joachim, Burton, Tillich, and Yates. Fryes so-called HEAP scheme, one of the diagrammatic or spatial projections of his literary cosmos, gets outlined in the essay on Yates, but it gets glanced at in the chapter on Joachim as well. Such repetitions form a kind of network, connecting the themes of one essay to another and often to still others. I refer quite often to Fryes disposition to discover links between things, and this analogical habit of mind enables him to spin the web of connections. One of the clearest examples of the analogical habit of mind is in the essay on Lewis Carroll: fully a third of the entries in the chrestomathy at the end of that essay are based on the simile, Fryes continually likening of a phrase or idea in the Alice books to something else. In any event, the ideas, themes, and critical principles in any given essay are interconnected to those in other essays.