The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Northrop Frye

comes from teachers who want to stop being teachers.

      Entry, Notebook 50 (1987–90), 493, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.

      The source of actual or “temporal” authority in society is seldom hard to locate. It is always in the near vicinity of whatever one pays one’s taxes to.

      “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century” (1964), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.

      The authority of the logical argument, the repeatable experiment, the established fact, the compelling work of art, is the only authority that exacts no bows or salutes. It is not sacrosanct, for what is true today may be inadequately true tomorrow, but it is what holds society together for today.

      “The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.

      We have seen that spiritual authority begins in the recognition of truth, and truth usually has about it some quality of the objective, something presented to us.

      “The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century” (1964), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.

      There is only one real authority in society, and that is the authority of the arts and sciences, the authority of logical reasoning, uncooked evidence, repeatable experiments, verifiable scholarship, precise and disciplined creative imagination.

      “Universities and the Deluge of Cant” (1972), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.

      No human being or human institution is fit to be trusted with any temporal authority that is not subject to cancellation by some other authority.

      The Double Vision (1991), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.

      … authority in the sciences is thus impersonal, and comes from the subject itself; authority in the arts is personal, and derives from individual genius. We still need loyalty to something with enough authority to form a community, but it must be a free authority, something that fulfils and does not diminish the individual. Such an authority can ultimately only be the kind of authority that education embodies.

      “The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.

      The authority of the logical argument, the repeatable experiment, the compelling imagination, is the final authority in society, and it is an authority that demands no submission, no subordinating, no lessening of dignity. As this authority is the same thing as freedom, the university is also the only place in society where freedom is defined.

      “A Revolution Betrayed: Freedom and Necessity in Education” (1970), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.

      Authorship

      A few novelists, most of them bad ones, may eke out a small living by writing, or even hit a best-seller jackpot; but a poet would have to be spectacularly bad before he could live on his poetry.

      “Culture and the National Will” (1957), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      Autobiography

      Autobiography is, like blank verse, very easy to write and very hard to write well.

      “Herbert Read’s The Innocent Eye” (1947), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.

      Thus an autobiography coming into a library would be classified as nonfiction if the librarian believed the author, and as fiction if she thought he was lying. It is difficult to see what use such a distinction can be to a literary critic.

      “Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.

      Automobile

      Washington was a city designed for automobiles rather than pedestrians long before there were any automobiles: Los Angeles, a city never designed at all, seems to have broken through the control even of the automobile. It was, after all, named after angels, who traditionally do not travel through space but simply manifest themselves elsewhere.

      “Canada: New World Without Revolution” (1975), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      Aviation

      Technology is the most dramatic aspect of this development: one cannot take off in a jet plane and expect a radically different way of life in the place where the plane lands.

      “Canadian Culture Today” (1977), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      Technology can improve the efficiency of aeroplanes to a degree that outstrips the wildest dreams with which it began. But no sooner has it done so than the airline companies go broke, airports get clogged up, citizens complain about sonic-boom noise, and terrorists develop a taste for free rides to Cuba.

      “The Quality of Life in the ’70s” (1971), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.

      What’s produced the aeroplane is not so much a desire to fly as a rebellion against the tyranny of time and space. And that’s a process that can never stop, no matter how high our Titovs and Glenns may go.

      “The Motive for Metaphor,” The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.

      Elsewhere the plane may mean a loosening of bonds, a way of escape; in Canada it is a means of tightening the country into a recognizable shape.

      “View of Canada” (1976), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      … it’s the airplane, I think, that has made one crucial difference to the Canadian consciousness. The airplane supplied a perspective that began to pull the country together.…

      “View of Canada” (1976), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      The airplane is a recent invention, but the vision that produced it was already ancient in the arts when Daedalus flew out of the labyrinth and Jehovah rode the sky on the wings of a seraph.

      “The Imaginative and the Imaginary” (1962), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.

      Awards

      Our real judgments, therefore, are positive, not comparative or superlative.

      “Governor General’s Awards (I)” (1963), on being a judge, Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      But the real importance of the awards, and the justification for associating them with so distinguished an office, is not that they pick the “best” books, but that they indicate a specific interest on the part of the nation in the production of good ones.

      “Speech on Acceptance of the Governor General’s Award for Northrop Frye on Shakespeare” (1987), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.

      Lobbying for a writer to get a prize which, if she won it, would become worthless because she won it doesn’t strike me as a very dignified occupation.

      Entry, 23 Jan. 1952, 58, on refusing to join a recommendation that Mazo de la Roche be considered for a Nobel Prize, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.

      We are not conferring a distinction on them; we are merely pointing out the distinction they themselves have achieved.

      “Governor General’s Awards (I)” (1963), speaking as a judge, Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      Axis mundi

      About the axis mundi, we can say two things, first, that it is not there, and second, that it won’t go away.

      “The Koiné of Myth: Myth as a Universally Intelligible Language” (1984), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.

      Ayatollah