The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Northrop Frye

Cover

      Introduction

      There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference.

      Northrop Frye came to that conclusion after a detailed study of the imaginative achievements of Canada’s writers from the earliest period to 1965 when that sentence from his study first appeared in print. Over the decades since then, the statement has come to be regarded as a benchmark of individual and national literary achievement. It might or might not have been true at the time; it may or may not be true today. Its singular deficiency is that it fails to take into account the phenomenal cultural achievement of Northrop Frye himself.

      When we think of the world’s major writers, we tend to think of creative writers of poetry and fiction, and only then of the writers of dramas, essays, biographies, and memoirs. Only as an afterthought does it occur to us to include writers of criticism — literary, philosophical, social, cultural. Even with the admission of theoreticians and critics to the ranks of “creative writers,” they are seen to be there “on sufferance,” as lurkers rather than as full participants. Yet our understanding of the world and our appreciation of its literary heritage would be greatly diminished if we relegated theory and criticism to “also-ran” status. Robertson Davies, himself a novelist, essayist, and dramatist, was also a trenchant critic; he once observed that no one had ever erected a statue to a critic. For reasons of sentiment and patriotism, statues are regularly raised to honour popular (or once-popular) artists. Indeed, it has been claimed that there are more memorials to “the immortal memory” of Robert Burns in Canadian cities than there are in his native Scotland. But has any author of criticism ever been honoured with a single statue or public memorial in Scotland or Canada?

      There is, however, no need to raise another monument to recall the achievement of Northrop Frye. His thirty-volume Collected Works, the effort of a lifetime and the twenty-year labour of dozens of scholars, is itself a considerable achievement, and a suitable memorial in keeping with the seriousness of a man of exceptional modesty (though there was nothing modest at all about his aims and objectives as a critic!). His presence is recalled in the naming of Northrop Frye Hall, which rises close by the E.J. Pratt Library on the campus of Victoria College, University of Toronto. Well it marks his association with that venerable educational institution from the year 1929, when at the age of seventeen he enrolled as an undergraduate, to the year of his death at the age of seventy-nine in 1991, when he served still as chancellor emeritus and university professor.

      His courses on the symbolism of the Bible and on modern poetry, as well as those on Milton, Spenser, and the Renaissance, not to mention Blake, were hugely popular. It used to be said that students entered first year at Vic as believers in the existence of God; they lost their religious faith in second year; but they regained their faith in third year, when they realized that Northrop Frye was God! As well, for a heady period in the 1970s, Frye achieved renown as the world’s most widely quoted contemporary scholar in the field of the humanities. In sum, he may well be the single Canadian author who offers his readers the opportunity to “grow up inside their work without being aware of a circumference.”

      The present book is a compilation of more than 3,600 quotations taken from the writings of Northrop Frye, writings both published and unpublished during his lifetime, selected to illuminate topics that were of special concern to him and are subjects of general interest to the reader today, whether scholar, student, or browser. The quotations appear under alphabetically arranged headings — approximately1,140 of them, from A to Z — so that the reader may easily have at his or her fingertips the insights of one of the world’s leading literary critics. The present work might be described as both encyclopaedic and episodic; Frye, in his own terms, would characterize it as both diachronic and synchronic.

      To give some instances, included are entries on specific subjects — Accountants, Advertising, Atlantic Seaboard, Americanization — as well as on general subjects — Abstract Expressionism, Absurdity, Allegory, Art — to limit the inquiry to the first letter of the alphabet. Attempts have been made to select passages for inclusion that are short, self-contained, and significant. In describing a passage as “significant,” what is meant is that the quoted matter is interesting in its own right or important in the eyes of the world.

      The purpose of this dictionary of quotations is “to delight and instruct,” to recall a touchstone remark: delight the specialist user with unexpected insights and instruct the novice reader with variations on received opinions. Both the specialist and the browser alike might express surprise at the author’s erudition — particularly the immense range of works that Frye makes reference to in his studies, a range that displays his familiarity with both the serious literature of the past and the popular writing of the day (not that he would endorse those terms). In compiling these passages, I was always surprised at how much he had read and had noted. I was struck by the truth of David Staines’s observation: “In whatever direction you happen to be going, you always meet Frye on his way back.”

      Frye took pains to employ a prose style that is plain and unadorned, seemingly artless. The word “seemingly” is important, because the adverb disguises the fact that the prose is versatile and enduring. Although some of these passages were written almost eighty years ago, it seems they have hardly aged at all.

      This quoted matter is taken from a great range of sources over the decades: convocation and commencement addresses, scholarly presentations and speeches, interviews and reviews, essays and chapters of books. With a handful of exceptions, all of the passages are reproduced from the volumes of the Collected Works. (The temptation to include descriptions of Frye, often quite insightful and amusing ones, was resisted.) There are no quotations from his correspondence (except for some passages from the two volumes of the letters that he wrote to his wife Helen); no bon mots of the obiter dicta variety; and no marginalia from the 2,053 books from his own library that form part of the Frye Collection at the E.J. Pratt Library. (Scholars will find these sources to be worth exploring.) Yet there is “god’s plenty” in what is included.

      Gifted both as theoretician and as aphorist, Frye evolved grand schemes (one thinks of the Five Fictional Modes or the Four Forms of Prose Fiction, et cetera), and at the same time, he coined vivid expressions with droll wit and odd humour to “bring home” his schemes. (A favourite aphorism is irresistible: “Literature is conscious mythology.”) As Alberto Manguel has noted, his writings are “rich with tempting asides.” It seems his essays grew out of such “kernels” of thought. Indeed, he once explained, “The way I begin a book is to write detached aphorisms in a notebook, and 95 percent of the work I do in completing a book is to fit these detached aphorisms together into a continuous narrative line.” Later, he added, “Most of my writings consist of an attempt to translate aphorisms into continuous prose.”

      The author returned time and again to the theme of the Order of Words, and pains have been taken here to follow the order of Frye’s own words. Full sentences have been favoured, so there are few quotations with internal deletions. The ellipses that do sometimes intrude signify that the self-contained quotation does appear in the context of a longer passage that is simply too detailed or digressive to reprint.

      As a popular speaker and commentator, with an exceptionally active academic, administrative, and writing career, Frye was called upon to deliver hundreds of addresses, presentations, talks, commentaries, and interviews. He completed over three hundred articles and reviews, published twenty-three books, and over the decades accepted thirty-one honourary degrees. It is not surprising that in addressing so many audiences and such a range of listeners and readers he availed himself of such opportunities to repeat many of his principal notions and fundamental formulations — Order of Words, Primary and Secondary Concerns, the veto over Value Judgments, the importance of Imagination, the autonomy of Literature, et cetera. So, repetition is characteristic of his oeuvre. It is not “vain repetition” but “elegant variation” — or, indeed, “theme and variation” — not unlike the thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird,