Book Review
Autopsy of the Anatomy
- Jean O'Grady (Editor)
Interviews with Northrop Frye: Vol. 24 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press (purchase at Amazon.ca)
- Robert D. Denham (Editor) and Michael Dolzani (Editor)
Northrop Frye's Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings: Vol. 25 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press (purchase at Amazon.ca - Robert D. Denhem (Editor)
Northrop Frye's Notebooks for "Anatomy of Criticism": Vol. 23 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press (purchase at Amazon.ca
Reviewed by Graham Nicol Forst
Thanks to the University of Toronto Press and the industry of Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism now stands alone among the key texts of twentieth-century liberal humanism as having available the complete notes leading to its conception and birth.
Reading the Notebooks for "Anatomy of Criticism" is at times fascinating for its glimpses of Frye’s creative processes, yet at other times dull and repetitive as Frye continually reconsiders the "cut" of his "skeleton key" to all literature. Often, too, these notebooks seem, for Frye, very private and visceral-as, for example, when he says he pulled large parts of the Anatomy from his "left armpit" and refers to its publication as "finally excreted" (one can imagine a future PhD thesis on "Frye’s Scatology": his notebooks are replete with it. Even in the notes for his novel, people at prayer are referred to as "leaning forward in the pensive pose of excretion"). The feeling of privacy which accompanies the reading of these notebooks arises from the paternalistic presence of a scolding alter ego telling him to "shut up" and "stop gassing." More often Frye scolds himself, with comments such as "Oh hell! I had it right the first time" or "I suffer from acute schematosis." Frye has been criticized for this "schematosis" frequently, and many of his notes to himself fuel these criticisms, viz., "there are lots of holes here," "I have to shove things in," and "Jesus, I wish I could put things in the right places." The Anatomy in other words, in other words, seems more and more like a bed of Procrustes as it emerges from this awkward carpentry of jumbled data, but it remains after all these years a very well-made bed indeed. (One of the most interesting discoveries from this volume is that the Anatomy finally came together in notes scribbled on the Programme Frye received when he attended Lester Pearson’s installation as Prime Minister!)
ii
A shy man, Frye once said he had "unconsciously arranged [his] life so that nothing had ever happened to [him]." And in the 1200-odd pages of Volume 24 of the Collected Works, which assembles the hundreds of interviews Frye gave over the years, this judgment is confirmed. Throughout the interviews, Frye spoke in formulas, as if designed to deflect personal probing and move towards his role of the "transparent" teacher. Some of his interviewers did try to elicit some prurient insight into his past or personality, and when such a personal insight comes, as when he revealed to Deanne Bogdan the effect on him of his first wife’s death, it’s almost jarring. Frye’s editor here, Jean O’Grady, in her Introduction, calls these rare personal moments "pearls in the oyster of the interview," but I found them the irritant rather than the pearl-I felt embarrassed for Frye at such moments, and tried to look past them for the pearls of wisdom in the formal responses to the interviewers’ questions.
The "fun" of reading these interviews (there are more than a hundred transcribed here) is in watching Frye delicately skirt around stupid questions, often making his timid interviewers actually look good when the question asked clearly revealed the difference in intellect between the interviewers and their subject. On the other hand, when the interviewer is not cowed by Frye, the level of discussion is far deeper as, for example, in the dialogues with Eli Mandel, Bill Moyers, David Cayley and, particularly, Don Harron.
Many of these interviews were conducted during the days of student rebellion in the 60s, and they find Frye sticking to his conservative guns about structure, tradition, convention, discipline, the reading and teaching and perpetuating of the canon, detachment instead of engagement, the archetype as an instrument of continuous creation, revolution as self-immolation, etc. And although much of this becomes repetitive, this volume contains much of the best reading in the Collected Works for a number of reasons: the enormous variety of questions asked, the different perspectives of the interviewers, Frye’s ex tempore articulateness and nimbleness in responding, and the sheer intelligence of the best of the interviews. As well, Frye’s audience here is, of course, quite a different one from that of the Notebooks, where he felt free to expostulate endlessly and mind-numbingly on his Casaubon-like Mythology to End All Mythologies-the "Ogdoad." Also, he rightly saw his audience in these interviews as more general than the readership of his critical work, giving his various positions a clarity and brevity missing particularly in his later work. This is especially true in a wonderful interview he gave for CBC Ideas in 1971 explaining Blake’s cosmos, published here as "Interview # 24."
One thing that emerges from these (chronologically ordered over forty-plus years) interviews is the amazing consistency of Frye’s views from his earliest to his latest utterances, as if he were born with his ideas intact in a kind of Chomskyan Universal Grammar. Unfortunately, however, this "grammar" contained many embarrassingly reactionary views of women, especially "those women’s lib people" as he called feminists. Frye suggests for example that a "girl" shouldn’t have to learn algebra because "her whole life is already geared to marriage and bridge on a Saturday night and shopping in the suburbs." And at another point he reveals his fragile knowledge of human anatomy when he notes that "Nearly every girl in her lower years . . . takes in everything through her gonads. . . ." As well, Frye rarely had anything to say about women or Aboriginal authors. Music too, strangely, considering its centrality in aesthetics and his love for it, is rarely a subject for Frye, and politics is almost never present (Frye was an avowed leftist, yet no one thought to interview him about McCarthy-wouldn’t it have been interesting to hear his views on this American tyrant?).
But perhaps most disappointingly, although these interviews span the whole development of postmodern/poststructural criticism, deconstruction, etc., no one seriously challenged Frye on what became seen as the more and more obsolete structuralist dimension of his work. How would Frye have responded to challenges from serious Derrideans, or new historicists ("horses slurping water" as Frye called them)? Probably very well . . . but it would have been nice to see it happen. (Cayley’s interview timidly broached the dissonance between Frye and deconstruc-tion, but Frye wouldn’t bite.) Also, no one in these interviews tried, at any point, to criticize Frye, or to goad him into responding to print criticisms of his writings, from, for example, Wimsatt or Lentriccia or others.
iii
The title of Volume 25-Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings-sounds as if the book might contain ephemera and unclassifiable writings of little public or scholarly interest. However, aside from the hesitant stabs at fiction, this volume proves to be one of the most interesting of all those produced so far. They range from thoughtful and persuasive unpublished essays on the Victorians (there are especially fascinating and before now unpublished pieces on Carlyle, Mill, and Arnold), to personal reflections, occasional speeches, and eulogies (living to an old age, and as a famous old man and ordained minister to boot, Frye had more than his share of these to give) to clearly minor doodlings. There’s a little more privacy here than elsewhere-even than in his diaries, as, for example, in his opinions about his wife’s new girdle (a "redoubtable fortress") to apparently unrelated speculations on the "garrison mentality" of Canadians.
Although famous for rejecting value judgments in literature, Frye reflected often and at length about his own failed attempts at "creative writing": "I have nothing to say in fiction that other people haven’t said better," he admitted in an interview, and the examples offered in Volume 25 confirm his self-deprecation. The material is made up, mostly, of satires on what Kierkegaard called "Christendom," of fantasies about Greek theophanies with vague humanist morals, and of fragments of a planned novel clearly based on his own experience as an itinerant pastor in the Methodist church. None of this material does justice either to his intellect or his judgment, except his judgment on his own attempts at fiction: "I don’t seem to be fundamentally interested in writing the way novelists write . . . what I write, with all its wit, is still pedantic. . . . It’s crotch-bound." It’s hard to see how the publication of this material could serve Frye’s reputation. Surely the Collected Works would have been better served to publish, even selectively, Frye’s voluminous marginalia, which the project has decided to ignore.
On a negative note, since these volumes aspire to definitiveness, it’s odd that the names of famous poems and world-class authors and organizations continue to be mislabelled and mis-spelled-for example, throughout these three volumes Oscar Wilde’s cognomen "Fingal" is indexed as "Fingall"; Joy Kogawa is referred to as Joy Kagawa; Schubert’s most famous song "Gretchen am Spinnrade" is garbled as "Gretchen am Spinnard," and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet is referred to as Bouvard et Péuchet. Wordsworth is credited with a non-existent poem called "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," and the world-famous German music publishing house Breitkopf comes off as "Beitkopf." In his writings on music Frye is permitted, without editorial comment, to confuse the Dorian and Phrygian modes. And finally, Frye, an ordained minister, is not likely to have said "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," which is not a text found in any translation of the Bible.
iv
Wordsworth spoke about the love of nature leading to the love of man, but Frye was closer to Shelley when he spoke, as he does frequently throughout these volumes, about the love of art leading to the love of man. Challenged by an interviewer to present his final dying words to English teachers, Frye said, "Love literature [because] love is the focusing of the creative power within yourself in order to direct it upon others and to create a new kind of society out of your relation to them."
If such a society were ever to emerge, Northrop Frye would be one of its main architects.
Autopsy of the Anatomy
Robert D. Denham, ed.
Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for "Anatomy of Criticism": Vol. 23 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. U Toronto P $100.00
Jean O’Grady, ed.
Interviews with Northrop Frye: Vol. 24 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. U of Toronto P $185.00.
Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani, eds.
Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings: Vol 25 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. U of Toronto P. $100.00
Reviewed by Graham Nicol Forst
i
Thanks to the University of Toronto Press and the industry of Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism now stands alone among the key texts of twentieth-century liberal humanism as having available the complete notes leading to its conception and birth.
Reading the Notebooks for "Anatomy of Criticism" is at times fascinating for its glimpses of Frye’s creative processes, yet at other times dull and repetitive as Frye continually reconsiders the "cut" of his "skeleton key" to all literature. Often, too, these notebooks seem, for Frye, very private and visceral-as, for example, when he says he pulled large parts of the Anatomy from his "left armpit" and refers to its publication as "finally excreted" (one can imagine a future PhD thesis on "Frye’s Scatology": his notebooks are replete with it. Even in the notes for his novel, people at prayer are referred to as "leaning forward in the pensive pose of excretion"). The feeling of privacy which accompanies the reading of these notebooks arises from the paternalistic presence of a scolding alter ego telling him to "shut up" and "stop gassing." More often Frye scolds himself, with comments such as "Oh hell! I had it right the first time" or "I suffer from acute schematosis." Frye has been criticized for this "schematosis" frequently, and many of his notes to himself fuel these criticisms, viz., "there are lots of holes here," "I have to shove things in," and "Jesus, I wish I could put things in the right places." The Anatomy in other words, in other words, seems more and more like a bed of Procrustes as it emerges from this awkward carpentry of jumbled data, but it remains after all these years a very well-made bed indeed. (One of the most interesting discoveries from this volume is that the Anatomy finally came together in notes scribbled on the Programme Frye received when he attended Lester Pearson’s installation as Prime Minister!)
ii
A shy man, Frye once said he had "unconsciously arranged [his] life so that nothing had ever happened to [him]." And in the 1200-odd pages of Volume 24 of the Collected Works, which assembles the hundreds of interviews Frye gave over the years, this judgment is confirmed. Throughout the interviews, Frye spoke in formulas, as if designed to deflect personal probing and move towards his role of the "transparent" teacher. Some of his interviewers did try to elicit some prurient insight into his past or personality, and when such a personal insight comes, as when he revealed to Deanne Bogdan the effect on him of his first wife’s death, it’s almost jarring. Frye’s editor here, Jean O’Grady, in her Introduction, calls these rare personal moments "pearls in the oyster of the interview," but I found them the irritant rather than the pearl-I felt embarrassed for Frye at such moments, and tried to look past them for the pearls of wisdom in the formal responses to the interviewers’ questions.
The "fun" of reading these interviews (there are more than a hundred transcribed here) is in watching Frye delicately skirt around stupid questions, often making his timid interviewers actually look good when the question asked clearly revealed the difference in intellect between the interviewers and their subject. On the other hand, when the interviewer is not cowed by Frye, the level of discussion is far deeper as, for example, in the dialogues with Eli Mandel, Bill Moyers, David Cayley and, particularly, Don Harron.
Many of these interviews were conducted during the days of student rebellion in the 60s, and they find Frye sticking to his conservative guns about structure, tradition, convention, discipline, the reading and teaching and perpetuating of the canon, detachment instead of engagement, the archetype as an instrument of continuous creation, revolution as self-immolation, etc. And although much of this becomes repetitive, this volume contains much of the best reading in the Collected Works for a number of reasons: the enormous variety of questions asked, the different perspectives of the interviewers, Frye’s ex tempore articulateness and nimbleness in responding, and the sheer intelligence of the best of the interviews. As well, Frye’s audience here is, of course, quite a different one from that of the Notebooks, where he felt free to expostulate endlessly and mind-numbingly on his Casaubon-like Mythology to End All Mythologies-the "Ogdoad." Also, he rightly saw his audience in these interviews as more general than the readership of his critical work, giving his various positions a clarity and brevity missing particularly in his later work. This is especially true in a wonderful interview he gave for CBC Ideas in 1971 explaining Blake’s cosmos, published here as "Interview # 24."
One thing that emerges from these (chronologically ordered over forty-plus years) interviews is the amazing consistency of Frye’s views from his earliest to his latest utterances, as if he were born with his ideas intact in a kind of Chomskyan Universal Grammar. Unfortunately, however, this "grammar" contained many embarrassingly reactionary views of women, especially "those women’s lib people" as he called feminists. Frye suggests for example that a "girl" shouldn’t have to learn algebra because "her whole life is already geared to marriage and bridge on a Saturday night and shopping in the suburbs." And at another point he reveals his fragile knowledge of human anatomy when he notes that "Nearly every girl in her lower years . . . takes in everything through her gonads. . . ." As well, Frye rarely had anything to say about women or Aboriginal authors. Music too, strangely, considering its centrality in aesthetics and his love for it, is rarely a subject for Frye, and politics is almost never present (Frye was an avowed leftist, yet no one thought to interview him about McCarthy-wouldn’t it have been interesting to hear his views on this American tyrant?).
But perhaps most disappointingly, although these interviews span the whole development of postmodern/poststructural criticism, deconstruction, etc., no one seriously challenged Frye on what became seen as the more and more obsolete structuralist dimension of his work. How would Frye have responded to challenges from serious Derrideans, or new historicists ("horses slurping water" as Frye called them)? Probably very well . . . but it would have been nice to see it happen. (Cayley’s interview timidly broached the dissonance between Frye and deconstruc-tion, but Frye wouldn’t bite.) Also, no one in these interviews tried, at any point, to criticize Frye, or to goad him into responding to print criticisms of his writings, from, for example, Wimsatt or Lentriccia or others.
iii
The title of Volume 25-Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings-sounds as if the book might contain ephemera and unclassifiable writings of little public or scholarly interest. However, aside from the hesitant stabs at fiction, this volume proves to be one of the most interesting of all those produced so far. They range from thoughtful and persuasive unpublished essays on the Victorians (there are especially fascinating and before now unpublished pieces on Carlyle, Mill, and Arnold), to personal reflections, occasional speeches, and eulogies (living to an old age, and as a famous old man and ordained minister to boot, Frye had more than his share of these to give) to clearly minor doodlings. There’s a little more privacy here than elsewhere-even than in his diaries, as, for example, in his opinions about his wife’s new girdle (a "redoubtable fortress") to apparently unrelated speculations on the "garrison mentality" of Canadians.
Although famous for rejecting value judgments in literature, Frye reflected often and at length about his own failed attempts at "creative writing": "I have nothing to say in fiction that other people haven’t said better," he admitted in an interview, and the examples offered in Volume 25 confirm his self-deprecation. The material is made up, mostly, of satires on what Kierkegaard called "Christendom," of fantasies about Greek theophanies with vague humanist morals, and of fragments of a planned novel clearly based on his own experience as an itinerant pastor in the Methodist church. None of this material does justice either to his intellect or his judgment, except his judgment on his own attempts at fiction: "I don’t seem to be fundamentally interested in writing the way novelists write . . . what I write, with all its wit, is still pedantic. . . . It’s crotch-bound." It’s hard to see how the publication of this material could serve Frye’s reputation. Surely the Collected Works would have been better served to publish, even selectively, Frye’s voluminous marginalia, which the project has decided to ignore.
On a negative note, since these volumes aspire to definitiveness, it’s odd that the names of famous poems and world-class authors and organizations continue to be mislabelled and mis-spelled-for example, throughout these three volumes Oscar Wilde’s cognomen "Fingal" is indexed as "Fingall"; Joy Kogawa is referred to as Joy Kagawa; Schubert’s most famous song "Gretchen am Spinnrade" is garbled as "Gretchen am Spinnard," and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet is referred to as Bouvard et Péuchet. Wordsworth is credited with a non-existent poem called "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," and the world-famous German music publishing house Breitkopf comes off as "Beitkopf." In his writings on music Frye is permitted, without editorial comment, to confuse the Dorian and Phrygian modes. And finally, Frye, an ordained minister, is not likely to have said "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," which is not a text found in any translation of the Bible.
iv
Wordsworth spoke about the love of nature leading to the love of man, but Frye was closer to Shelley when he spoke, as he does frequently throughout these volumes, about the love of art leading to the love of man. Challenged by an interviewer to present his final dying words to English teachers, Frye said, "Love literature [because] love is the focusing of the creative power within yourself in order to direct it upon others and to create a new kind of society out of your relation to them."
If such a society were ever to emerge, Northrop Frye would be one of its main architects.
Autopsy of the Anatomy
Robert D. Denham, ed.
Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for "Anatomy of Criticism": Vol. 23 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. U Toronto P $100.00
Jean O’Grady, ed.
Interviews with Northrop Frye: Vol. 24 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. U of Toronto P $185.00.
Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani, eds.
Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings: Vol 25 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye. U of Toronto P. $100.00
Reviewed by Graham Nicol Forst
i
Thanks to the University of Toronto Press and the industry of Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism now stands alone among the key texts of twentieth-century liberal humanism as having available the complete notes leading to its conception and birth.
Reading the Notebooks for "Anatomy of Criticism" is at times fascinating for its glimpses of Frye’s creative processes, yet at other times dull and repetitive as Frye continually reconsiders the "cut" of his "skeleton key" to all literature. Often, too, these notebooks seem, for Frye, very private and visceral-as, for example, when he says he pulled large parts of the Anatomy from his "left armpit" and refers to its publication as "finally excreted" (one can imagine a future PhD thesis on "Frye’s Scatology": his notebooks are replete with it. Even in the notes for his novel, people at prayer are referred to as "leaning forward in the pensive pose of excretion"). The feeling of privacy which accompanies the reading of these notebooks arises from the paternalistic presence of a scolding alter ego telling him to "shut up" and "stop gassing." More often Frye scolds himself, with comments such as "Oh hell! I had it right the first time" or "I suffer from acute schematosis." Frye has been criticized for this "schematosis" frequently, and many of his notes to himself fuel these criticisms, viz., "there are lots of holes here," "I have to shove things in," and "Jesus, I wish I could put things in the right places." The Anatomy in other words, in other words, seems more and more like a bed of Procrustes as it emerges from this awkward carpentry of jumbled data, but it remains after all these years a very well-made bed indeed. (One of the most interesting discoveries from this volume is that the Anatomy finally came together in notes scribbled on the Programme Frye received when he attended Lester Pearson’s installation as Prime Minister!)
ii
A shy man, Frye once said he had "unconsciously arranged [his] life so that nothing had ever happened to [him]." And in the 1200-odd pages of Volume 24 of the Collected Works, which assembles the hundreds of interviews Frye gave over the years, this judgment is confirmed. Throughout the interviews, Frye spoke in formulas, as if designed to deflect personal probing and move towards his role of the "transparent" teacher. Some of his interviewers did try to elicit some prurient insight into his past or personality, and when such a personal insight comes, as when he revealed to Deanne Bogdan the effect on him of his first wife’s death, it’s almost jarring. Frye’s editor here, Jean O’Grady, in her Introduction, calls these rare personal moments "pearls in the oyster of the interview," but I found them the irritant rather than the pearl-I felt embarrassed for Frye at such moments, and tried to look past them for the pearls of wisdom in the formal responses to the interviewers’ questions.
The "fun" of reading these interviews (there are more than a hundred transcribed here) is in watching Frye delicately skirt around stupid questions, often making his timid interviewers actually look good when the question asked clearly revealed the difference in intellect between the interviewers and their subject. On the other hand, when the interviewer is not cowed by Frye, the level of discussion is far deeper as, for example, in the dialogues with Eli Mandel, Bill Moyers, David Cayley and, particularly, Don Harron.
Many of these interviews were conducted during the days of student rebellion in the 60s, and they find Frye sticking to his conservative guns about structure, tradition, convention, discipline, the reading and teaching and perpetuating of the canon, detachment instead of engagement, the archetype as an instrument of continuous creation, revolution as self-immolation, etc. And although much of this becomes repetitive, this volume contains much of the best reading in the Collected Works for a number of reasons: the enormous variety of questions asked, the different perspectives of the interviewers, Frye’s ex tempore articulateness and nimbleness in responding, and the sheer intelligence of the best of the interviews. As well, Frye’s audience here is, of course, quite a different one from that of the Notebooks, where he felt free to expostulate endlessly and mind-numbingly on his Casaubon-like Mythology to End All Mythologies-the "Ogdoad." Also, he rightly saw his audience in these interviews as more general than the readership of his critical work, giving his various positions a clarity and brevity missing particularly in his later work. This is especially true in a wonderful interview he gave for CBC Ideas in 1971 explaining Blake’s cosmos, published here as "Interview # 24."
One thing that emerges from these (chronologically ordered over forty-plus years) interviews is the amazing consistency of Frye’s views from his earliest to his latest utterances, as if he were born with his ideas intact in a kind of Chomskyan Universal Grammar. Unfortunately, however, this "grammar" contained many embarrassingly reactionary views of women, especially "those women’s lib people" as he called feminists. Frye suggests for example that a "girl" shouldn’t have to learn algebra because "her whole life is already geared to marriage and bridge on a Saturday night and shopping in the suburbs." And at another point he reveals his fragile knowledge of human anatomy when he notes that "Nearly every girl in her lower years . . . takes in everything through her gonads. . . ." As well, Frye rarely had anything to say about women or Aboriginal authors. Music too, strangely, considering its centrality in aesthetics and his love for it, is rarely a subject for Frye, and politics is almost never present (Frye was an avowed leftist, yet no one thought to interview him about McCarthy-wouldn’t it have been interesting to hear his views on this American tyrant?).
But perhaps most disappointingly, although these interviews span the whole development of postmodern/poststructural criticism, deconstruction, etc., no one seriously challenged Frye on what became seen as the more and more obsolete structuralist dimension of his work. How would Frye have responded to challenges from serious Derrideans, or new historicists ("horses slurping water" as Frye called them)? Probably very well . . . but it would have been nice to see it happen. (Cayley’s interview timidly broached the dissonance between Frye and deconstruc-tion, but Frye wouldn’t bite.) Also, no one in these interviews tried, at any point, to criticize Frye, or to goad him into responding to print criticisms of his writings, from, for example, Wimsatt or Lentriccia or others.
iii
The title of Volume 25-Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings-sounds as if the book might contain ephemera and unclassifiable writings of little public or scholarly interest. However, aside from the hesitant stabs at fiction, this volume proves to be one of the most interesting of all those produced so far. They range from thoughtful and persuasive unpublished essays on the Victorians (there are especially fascinating and before now unpublished pieces on Carlyle, Mill, and Arnold), to personal reflections, occasional speeches, and eulogies (living to an old age, and as a famous old man and ordained minister to boot, Frye had more than his share of these to give) to clearly minor doodlings. There’s a little more privacy here than elsewhere-even than in his diaries, as, for example, in his opinions about his wife’s new girdle (a "redoubtable fortress") to apparently unrelated speculations on the "garrison mentality" of Canadians.
Although famous for rejecting value judgments in literature, Frye reflected often and at length about his own failed attempts at "creative writing": "I have nothing to say in fiction that other people haven’t said better," he admitted in an interview, and the examples offered in Volume 25 confirm his self-deprecation. The material is made up, mostly, of satires on what Kierkegaard called "Christendom," of fantasies about Greek theophanies with vague humanist morals, and of fragments of a planned novel clearly based on his own experience as an itinerant pastor in the Methodist church. None of this material does justice either to his intellect or his judgment, except his judgment on his own attempts at fiction: "I don’t seem to be fundamentally interested in writing the way novelists write . . . what I write, with all its wit, is still pedantic. . . . It’s crotch-bound." It’s hard to see how the publication of this material could serve Frye’s reputation. Surely the Collected Works would have been better served to publish, even selectively, Frye’s voluminous marginalia, which the project has decided to ignore.
On a negative note, since these volumes aspire to definitiveness, it’s odd that the names of famous poems and world-class authors and organizations continue to be mislabelled and mis-spelled-for example, throughout these three volumes Oscar Wilde’s cognomen "Fingal" is indexed as "Fingall"; Joy Kogawa is referred to as Joy Kagawa; Schubert’s most famous song "Gretchen am Spinnrade" is garbled as "Gretchen am Spinnard," and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet is referred to as Bouvard et Péuchet. Wordsworth is credited with a non-existent poem called "Ode on Intimations of Immortality," and the world-famous German music publishing house Breitkopf comes off as "Beitkopf." In his writings on music Frye is permitted, without editorial comment, to confuse the Dorian and Phrygian modes. And finally, Frye, an ordained minister, is not likely to have said "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you," which is not a text found in any translation of the Bible.
iv
Wordsworth spoke about the love of nature leading to the love of man, but Frye was closer to Shelley when he spoke, as he does frequently throughout these volumes, about the love of art leading to the love of man. Challenged by an interviewer to present his final dying words to English teachers, Frye said, "Love literature [because] love is the focusing of the creative power within yourself in order to direct it upon others and to create a new kind of society out of your relation to them."
If such a society were ever to emerge, Northrop Frye would be one of its main architects.
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MLA: Forst, Graham Nicol. Autopsy of the Anatomy. canlit.ca. Canadian Literature, 8 Dec. 2011. Web. 26 May 2013.
This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #203 (Winter 2009), Home, Memory, Self. (pg. 141 - 144)
***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.
