Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore, [183]

At least, that’s what I think every morning I pass his
bronze statue on a park bench along with his books,
in the middle of the campus.

NWG

NWG

I have found the notebooks, particularly the Notebooks on romance, to be very helpful in helping to understand Frye. I am thus quite grateful that Professor Denham spent the fifteen years transcribing them.

On Anatomy, I think this is part of the problem, and yes, it is important to move beyond Anatomy.

On Genius — I’m not sure what to make of the statement. What is troubling, I suppose, is that he “alone had genius.” There is something quite different about the private Frye, which stands to reason. And it is quite possible that Frye did understand himself as a genius, but I think there are important questions about other geniuses, for surely there were others. And others, I imagine, have attempted to answer questions about the nature of literature and its social function. (It is a shame that I won’t be able to take the course on Frye that was discussed here on the blog.)

I’m not entirely certain that theorists of identity politics intend to write a theory of literature. I think the idea is about an intervention, a move to point out things that might be missed. My worry, and maybe I’m misreading Frye, is that this sort of “theory of literature” lends itself to canon building when misread in the Bloomian sense, a swerve; Bloom is, of course, the chief example of what happens when a critic misreads Frye. (I think there is a letter somewhere in which Frye laments Bloom’s having taken his use of canon and turned it into something else.)

I am still reading through the notebooks and the Frye Canon, so I still have plenty to learn about and from Frye.

Sadly, I will miss the conference at U of T where I imagine much will be said in light of the unpublished work.

Many images of Frye emerge from the notebooks but it will take a long time, I think, to discover them all. There will be many more “troubling” passages as well, and there will be numerous passages that reveal that Frye is very much aware of critics motivated by identity politics and the “changed academy.” It took me fifteen years to transcribe the previously unpublished material I was assigned to edit, and there are large portions of it that remain mystifying. But we will not have a very good grasp of Frye as a critic if we remain locked in the world of Anatomy of Criticism. There are whole areas of Frye’s though that remain to be discovered in what is now the newest part of the Frye canon. That is something, it seems to me, we need to celebrate. There are new voyages for us to launch, just as there were for Tennyson’s Ulysses

The latter, I suppose, would be another of those troubling statements you refer to. It might well be to someone without a sense of humor. And Harold Bloom is certainly lacking in that, which is one reason he is so provoked by Frye’s statement for the day of his death. Vanity brings with it “l’esprit du sérieux.”

As for your own argument here, I don’t feel you can quote Bob Denham’s lucid gloss on this paragraph in the notebooks and then, without even engaging it, simply revert to your claim that the statement is troubling, when you have just cited someone who has clarified its provocative and paradoxical nature. Do you agree with Bob’s gloss or not? And if not, why not? What is so troubling about Frye’s statement that he possessed genius? He did. And I think it can be argued that he did in a way that Burke, Empson, Knight, Curtius, or Bloom did not. None of these critics and theorists have even adequately answered (much less asked) the basic question about literature: what is it and what is its social function?

By the way, one version of the collection of essays you call for has already been written: Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works, by Imre Salusinszky and David V. Boyd. Bob’s point is well taken: any assessment of Frye’s work, if it is to meet the standards of intellectual integrity, demands a comprehensive engagement with his complete writings, and this is something that is woefully lacking in the U of T Quarterly’s special issue on Frye.

Regardless, Professor Denham writes: “[Germaine Warkentin and Linda Hutcheon] hasten to observe that this rich record includes the previously unpublished writing which, with the launching of the Collected Works of Frye project, began to become available in 1996. The new material more than doubled the Frye canon, the Collected Works having brought to light almost ten thousand pages of previously unpublished writing, constituting now some 58% of the total Frye canon.”

I think we can agree that the new material is important material, but a question that we ought to consider: how does one engage with these materials? I am wondering if perhaps it is time to put together a volume on Frye in light of his private writings. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye have now been completed (I just received my copy of the Index in last week’s mail), and perhaps now, we can begin to (re)evaluate Frye. The Frye that appears in many of these private writings is a difficult and complex Frye. A Frye that has troubled many of his readers. Harold Bloom, for instance, laments: “The publication of Northrop Frye’s Notebooks trouble some of his old admirers, myself included. One unfortunate passage gave us Frye’s affirmation that he alone, of all modern critics, possessed genius. I think of Kenneth Burke and of William Empson; were they less gifted than Frye? Or were George Wilson Knight or Ernst Robert Curtius less original and creative than the Canadian master?” (vii) Admittedly, this passage — Bloom’s and Frye’s — has been quoted often enough, Professor Denham explains Frye’s quotation: “Denying that he has any special technical knowledge while at the same time claiming something greater than that, Frye here links himself with the paradoxes of Socrates’ apology. Frye wrote very little without the double vision in mind, and one can sense in the coda both the impishness of the Socratic ironist, jolting us with the unexpected, and the truth contained in the literal meaning of the word ‘genius,’ reminding us of what finally motivated this architect of the spiritual world” (6.725). The Statement for the Day of My Death, however, remains a troubling passage.

I admit that I will never have the understanding of Frye that Professor Denham has (indeed, I will likely never have the knowledge that many contributors on this blog have, I think here of Professors Adamson, Happy, Dolzani, and others), but if we are to study the entire corpus of Frye’s work, I suppose we will have to confront these difficult passages.

To study Frye now will require much more than just attending to difficult or troubling passages; instead, we must now read Frye in relation to a changed academy. In the Globe and Mail, we read:

“What was missing from Frye’s criticism throughout his career, and what may be the source of the dismissiveness his name engenders today, was an awareness of works beyond the central English canon. He did not foresee how multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism or even queer theory would change the way we read literature, and his perception of the mythic structures and archetypes inherent in the Western tradition gave little scope to the broad and almost universal mythos that would express itself in the form of aboriginal literature.” (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/northrop-frye-at-100-does-he-still-matter/article4414845/)

The Collected Works of Northrop Frye is an impressive collection of writings, writings that will undoubtedly allow for and encourage new readings of Frygian thought. These new readings, I imagine, will necessarily have to engage with the changed academy, and thus, will have to answer to the interventions of “multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism, or even queer theory.” Do the archetypes of Frye genuinely exist across literature? Does Frye’s theory of literature function when removed from the English tradition? How might Frye be useful to literary scholars today, scholars who have been trained in “multiculturalism, post-colonialism, feminism, and even queer theory”? And how might the “new material [that] more than doubled the Frye canon” help us in understanding Frye’s place in literary studies today?