The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Northrop Frye

life.

      “Canada and Its Poetry” (1943), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      The colonial position of Canada is therefore a frostbite at the roots of the Canadian imagination, and it produces a disease for which I think the best name is prudery.

      “Canada and Its Poetry” (1943), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      Colour

      There is an annual birth and death of colour, out of the black and white, in Canada.

      “CRTC Guru” (1968–69), noting, as well, “You’ll never get a Monet in Canada,” Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.

      Comedy

      The statement “all’s well that ends well” is a statement about the structure of comedy, and is not intended to apply to actual life.

      “A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance; II, Making Nature Afraid” (1963), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.

      The only modern master of ideal comedy to rank with Aristophanes & Shakespeare is Mozart.…

      Entry, 24 Feb. 1952, 136, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.

      Comedy is a structure in which Eros smashes an irrational law.

      Entry, Notebook 54-5 (1976), 1, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.

      The indication of tragedy is one of the most powerful effects that comedy, particularly satiric comedy, can produce. But only the indication is possible: to go further would upset the balance of tone.

      “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” (1936), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.

      A tragic or comic plot is not a straight line: it is a parabola following the shapes of the mouths on the conventional masks. Comedy has a U-shaped plot, with the action sinking into deep and often potentially tragic complications, and then suddenly turning upward into a happy ending. Tragedy has an inverted U, with the action rising in crisis to a peripety and then plunging downward to catastrophe through a series of recognitions, usually of the inevitable consequences of previous acts.

      “Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” (1961), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.

      Man is a creator as an individual; as a member of a society or species, he is a creature. The end of a comedy leaves him creaturely, invited to join a party to celebrate the creation of a new society, from the further fortunes of which he is of course excluded by the ending of the play. The end of a tragedy leaves him alone in a waste and void chaos of experience with a world to remake out of it.

      “Fools of Time: III, Little World of Man: The Tragedy of Isolation” (1966), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.

      Forgiveness and reconciliation come at the end of a comedy because they belong at the end of a comedy, not because Shakespeare “believed” in them. And so the play ends: it doesn’t discuss any issues, solve any problems, expound any theories, or illustrate any doctrines. What it does is show us why comedies exist and why Shakespeare wrote so many of them.

      “Northrop Frye on Shakespeare: VII, Measure for Measure” (1986), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.

      The supreme masters of comedy have rather a hard time of it with critics: because they amuse, one is tempted to patronize them. Besides, the appeal of comedy might perhaps without overstatement be described as more intellectualized than that of tragedy, and comedy usually includes a considered refusal to explore the emotional possibilities which tragedy affords.

      “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” (1936), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.

      There is a continuous dream in life, which is the slave’s life that we live when we are driven by the necessities of money or security or the tactics of conflict. The awareness of the reality of life comes in detached moments of release from this, or in later memories of them.

      “Hart House Rededicated” (1969), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.

      Comic Art

      A good deal of the worry over the ten-year-old’s comic books would be far better expended on making sure that the central educational structure is a sound one.

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

      All humour demands agreement that certain things, such as a picture of a wife beating her husband in a comic strip, are conventionally funny. To introduce a comic strip in which a husband beats his wife would distress the reader, because it would mean learning a new convention.

      “Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.

      At its most naive it is an endless form in which a central character who never develops or ages goes through one adventure after another until the author himself collapses. We see this form in comic strips, where the central characters persist for years in a state of refrigerated deathlessness.

      “Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.

      Soap operas & comic strips are as close to endless art as we can get: their unreality has something to do with the intolerable realism of their form.

      Entry, 24 Feb. 1949, 220, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.

      Commandment

      Commandment says: this do; aphorism says, this understand; parable says, this see; oracle says, this hear. If that’s right, there is a movement from oracle to parable and from commandment to aphorism.

      Entry, Notebook 11f (1969–70), 47, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.

      Commitment

      If the end of commitment is the community, the end of detachment is the individual. This is not an antithesis: the mature individual is mature only because he has reached a kind of social adjustment.

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

      Commonwealth

      The idea of a Commonwealth is a very attractive idea to me, now that it no longer has an imperialistic basis. I think the symbol of royalty as something that nobody can possibly earn but that you can only get by accident is still something that I would buy. Otherwise, the whole of society becomes open to competition.

      “Making the Revolutionary Act Now” (1983), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.

      Communication

      Communication is the force holding together a community; at the centre of community is communion — the icon or concept symbolizing unity.

      Entry, Notebook 11f (1969–70), 109, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.

      The same feeling for strained distance is in many Canadian poets and novelists — certainly in Grove — and can hardly be an accident that the two most important Canadian thinkers to date, Edward Sapir and Harold Innis, have both been largely concerned with problems of communication.

      “Letters in Canada: Poetry” (1953), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.

      The triumph of communication is the death of communication: where communication forms a total environment, there is nothing to be communicated.

      The Modern Century (1967), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.

      Control of communications