The Educated Imagination

Todd Lawson is professor of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto

In several, scattered places in his later writings, Frye treats the Koran as a text that deserves to be read very carefully as both literature and “more than literature”.  For example, in The Great Code he points out that those who see in the Koran’s version of the story of Mary and the birth of Jesus a confusion of Biblical material have simply got it wrong and are deaf to the music of typological figuration.

The third Sura of the Koran appears to be identifying Miriam and Mary; Christian commentators on the Koran naturally say this is ridiculous, but from the purely typological point of view from which the Koran is speaking, the identification makes good sense. (GC 172, italics added)

Several similar instances demonstrate Frye’s characteristic perspicacity and even unto a text as foreign in cultural presuppositions, form and content as the Koran. I am studying Frye’s relationship with the Koran through both printed and unpublished works where he either explicitly refers to the text or where his remarks on other texts are equally apposite in the case of the Koran. I am also exploring, with the able and valuable assistance of Rebekah Zwanzig (who actually also discovered this blog), the Frye archive to study his marginalia and notes on related texts, such as English translations of the Koran and of Rumi’s poetry.  Results so far suggest that Frye’s faith in the “sacrament of reading” allowed him to develop a remarkably open, if critical, attitude towards the Koran, something in which he was certainly then – and may still well be – ahead of his time.

My interest in Frye’s Koran began in the early ‘80’s when I was working on a PhD thesis at McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies. My subject was a particularly challenging unpublished manuscript of an Arabic Koran commentary. In taking a break, reading the newly published Great Code, I saw that Frye had solved one of the problems that had been eluding me. His discussion of the above-mentioned typological figuration and its persuasive power and efficacy was in fact a revelation and provided a key I had not found elsewhere. When I started teaching at U of T in 1988 I secretly held the hope that I would one day be able to meet the great man and express to him my gratitude for his unbeknownst help. Of course, I also hoped of thus being able to search further the Frygian experience of the Koran. Alas, this meeting never happened. In fact, and in the context of the present research, a rather ironic signal brought the possibility to a clear, cold end . . . it was the evening of January 23, 1991. In those days I was in the habit of listening to the radio about the Gulf War while I worked in the evening in my office at Robarts Library. The bombing of Baghdad — home and scene of the great efflorescence of Arabo-Islamic learning and culture from the 8^th to the 13^th centuries — had begun five or six days earlier and was commencing apace.  The reports of this massive (and in retrospect perhaps phobic) attack were interrupted on the CBC to announce the passing of Northrop Frye. He had just been there, virtually across the street. Now he was gone. But, it seems, not forever.

Fifteen years later, I decided to have our conversation anyway. Having returned to the University of Toronto from McGill, and encouraged in my general research by a SSHRC award to study the Koran as an example of literary apocalypse, I decided to weave Frye’s very illuminating work into my methodology. In order to be as rigorous as possible about this, I organized two successive, year-long graduate seminars, entitled the Koranic Apocalyptic Imagination, around the above-mentioned later works of Frye, which included the Double Vision. It was as if the students recognized a long lost friend. It is amazing the way these young Islamicists became excited and encouraged by Frye’s remarks about the structure and content of the Bible because they could apply many of them to their own reading of the Koran, a text which for many of the students was certainly more than literature. And they also discovered how it was literature as well.

The current project, bringing into some kind of order the various aspects, apparent contradictions and other problems of a Frygian Koran, is meant to be background for a chapter in the eventual monograph on the Koran as apocalypse, a topic that has thus far attracted an astonishing lack of attention. Why this lack of attention? It is an interesting question, but one which I will forbear from addressing here. I look forward to hearing from scholars who may be interested in or actually working on Northrop Frye’s reading of the Koran and his understanding of Islam. I am grateful to Bob Denham for the extremely helpful postings here on Frye and the Koran and for general encouragement. And I am grateful to Michael Happy for passing along my initial note to the blog to Bob and, of course, for all of his hard work and creativity that has gone into this invaluable website.

Brian Russell Graham, author of the recently published The Necessity of Opposites: The Dialectical Thinking of Northrop Frye, introduces Bob Denham’s latest offering in his “Frye and…” series. This second paper in the series, “Northrop Frye and Giordano Bruno,” is newly posted in the journal. Bob’s earlier paper, “Northrop Frye and Soren Kierkegaard,” can of course be found there too. (Two earlier posts on Bruno can be found here and here.)

When we think of the unity of opposites, at least within a modern context, we automatically think of Hegel, a philosopher with whom Frye engages in his studies on the Bible and literature. But Frye’s early essays and notebooks reveal a fascination with Giordano Bruno’s thoughts on the notion of the coincidentia oppositorum. In this very erudite essay, “Northrop Frye and Giordano Bruno,” Denham, whose work on Frye is always informed by his encyclopedic knowledge of his subject, pinpoints and defines the significance of Bruno for Frye, painstakingly providing us with an entire career’s worth of examples of Frye’s reflections on Bruno’s ideas. Throughout Denham steadily moves towards his conclusion that Frye’s crucial notion of ‘interpenetration’ owes, in part, a debt to the legacy of Bruno.

Brian is a graduate of the University of Glasgow. He has written extensively on Frye and has published a number of reviews of the Collected Works. He is an assistant professor at Aalborg University in Denmark.

My monograph on Frye, The Necessary Unity of Opposites, has just been released by the University of Toronto Press. The study deals with each of the main areas of Frye’s work: Blake’s poetry, secular literature, education and work, politics and Scripture. For Frye, the history of ideas is characterized by sets of opposing values which result in repeated cyclical movements in that history. However, Frye’s thinking, I argue, can be thought of as a dialectical, “suprahistorical,” and – in the secular context – “post-partisan.”

In each area of interest, Frye deals with the fact that opposing ideas represent a unity; that is, they are “in agreement” with one another. The nature of the “agreement” is different  in each case: beauty and truth are “in agreement” because they both inhere in Blake’s poetry and, more generally, secular literature; leisure and work are “in agreement” because, complementing one another, both must be incorporated into the life of the individual in society; freedom and equality are “in agreement” because the two are simultaneously achievable in society; belief and vision are “in agreement” because the individual must manifest both in his or her own identity. But, in each case, “agreement,” and therefore unity, characterizes the opposition.

Throughout my study, I contend that it is the thinking of Blake which provides the inspiration for Frye’s dialectical thinking. More specifically, it is Blake’s conceptions of innocence and experience which provide the inspiration for Frye’s characteristic mode of thought.

In part, my study also attempts to explain the appeal of Frye through consideration of the relationship his thinking bears to what I call the ordinary history of ideas, with its political divisions. I conclude my study with a consideration of Frye’s thought in relation to “end-of-history” theses, drawing out the implications of my argument that Frye’s thinking can be described as “suprahistorical.”

A study of Frye as a dialectical thinker. An examination of Frye as a thinker whose ideas can be described as “suprahistorical.” An investigation into the notion that Frye’s thought is “post-partisan.” And a thorough exploration of the nature of Blake’s influence on Frye. In writing The Necessary Unity of Opposites I discovered that these four projects are one in the same, a much-needed fourfold study of Frye, which ideally does justice to each concern.

The Huffington Post published the article on America’s most overrated writers that inspired the National Post’s article previously discussed here at TEI. Having read both articles, I was reminded of a conversation I had with detective fiction grand master Lawrence Block this past Winter.

Block has spent his virtually his entire career (more than sixty books) writing genre fiction, from lesbian porn in his college days to his award-winning series featuring recovering alcoholic PI Matt Scudder. He was the visiting writer here at Mondoville, and as the fan/stalker who did the most to get him here, I escorted him around town, and among other things, we talked about fiction, mainstream and otherwise. He noted that with very few exceptions, almost no one reads the “serious [read mainstream or literary] novelists” of fifty or more years ago. On the other hand, people are still reading and rediscovering the writers of genre fiction, especially science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction (which was, after all, a favorite of Frye’s.) For that matter, people still read Verne and Doyle, long after such contemporary best sellers as E.D.E.N. Southworth have been consigned to the ash heap of doctoral dissertations.

Meanwhile, bestselling fantasist David Eddings observed that when a writer enters the area of the mythic (as distinct from the self-consciously mythologically allusive), he or she “may as well be peddling dope,” and he meant it as a good thing. These genre novels are highly conventionalized, of course; in the same conversation, Block mentioned that Robert B. Parker (who wrote a dissertation using Frye) described himself as  writing Westerns on a frontier that was paved over, and that the Western itself was a romance.

It’s worth noting that the writers both Posts beat up on are mainstream writers, the sort that Joan Hess described as “writing stuff where nothing much happens to people you didn’t like to begin with.” However, if Block’s observation holds up, it’s the Parkers and Blocks that will continue to engage readers decades from now, and perhaps even a century later, and it may well be because their works tapped into the archetypes and myths in a way that the “serious” writers (and the critics) found to be infra dignitatem. Frye would have understood.

“So, what do you do for a living?”

It’s a question that makes me cringe. “I’m a Ph.D. student in comparative literature,” I say. And even though this admission is almost always received positively, I’m still hesitant to tell people.

But now, after two years of study at University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature, I’ve been rethinking this attitude. Why should I be reluctant to tell people what I do? I wouldn’t respond so timidly if I were studying law, or medicine, or engineering. Why should comparative literature – or any discipline in the humanities – be so different?

For many the answer is obvious. Wherever you go, there is a huge demand for doctors, lawyers and engineers. But humanities scholars? What do they contribute? Even though thousands of undergraduate students continue to major in the liberal arts each year, many in society question the value of an education which grants knowledge and critical-thinking skills but little practical vocational training.

Another reason, perhaps, for society’s skepticism toward academics is the archetypical image of the university as an “ivory tower” whose existence has little bearing on the world outside.

After several years spent studying and working in various educational institutions, I’ve come to accept the validity of both these concerns. When I started my undergraduate education at Sarah Lawrence College, a liberal arts school in New York, I knew that I was choosing a rough road. Five years after graduation, many of my old friends are deeply in debt, shuffling from job to job, and still unsure of their place in society.

And after two years of advanced graduate study, in which I occasionally have read opaque, jargon-filled academic articles, I too must question the value of ideas that don’t make it outside of the ivy-covered walls and into the real world.

But all these doubts dissipate whenever I enter a classroom full of undergraduate students.

As a teaching assistant for a class entitled “Ancient and Medieval Literary Modes,” I spent this past year leading 25-person discussions on some of the great works of the literary canon: Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s Inferno, among others. As we discussed such topics as the meaning of honour, the nature of familial love, and the age-old question of what constitutes a good life, I dared to hope that my students’ insights would make their way beyond those classroom walls.

I chose to study the humanities because I wanted answers. I wanted to know why people who seem honest turn out to be liars. Why war, violence and injustice persist in every part of the world. I wanted to know how it is that people have overcome the most terrible conditions to fight for human dignity. And I wanted to know how, in this time of global terrorism, economic crisis, continued human rights violations and environmental destruction, we as individuals are supposed to live.

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