Northrop Frye on Myth

Ford Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134830695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Nortrop Frye differed from other theorists of myth in tracing all of the major literary genres--romance, comedy, satire, not just tragedy--to myth and ritual. This volume is the most thorough presentation of his thinking on the subject.

CHAPTER ONE

LIFE AND WORKS

The early life of Northrop Frye resembled what he called “the commonest formula of Canadian fiction (OE, 175). “Childhood and adolescence are passed in a small town,” he said, and adulthood is attained with “the entry into a more complex social contract” (OE, 175). Born July 14, 1912 at Sherbrooke, his family moved to nearby Lennoxville; these towns are just north of Vermont in the province of Quebec. They settled in Moncton when he was eight. Located in the Maritime province of New Brunswick, Moncton is northeast of Maine.

He received only eight years of public schooling. His mother gave him what is now called a “home education.” He was then placed in grade four; high school graduates there left after grade eleven. His family’s economic circumstances declined during his youth so that even the possibility of a college education was in question. His further education was dependent upon a continuing sequence of awards, scholarships, or fellowships. A local business college provided a scholarship for the best high school English Student, so he took some courses before entering the University of Toronto the next year, in 1929. His student years there coincided with the Great Depression; his teaching career began a decade later, in 1939, the year World War II commenced. Toronto, where he taught for over fifty years, provided the setting for most of his professional life. He continued teaching after 1978, when he might have retired, until his death on January 23, 1991, at the age of 78.

Frye enrolled in 1929 at Victoria College, which is one of a federated group of three liberal arts colleges within the University of Toronto. They were differentiated by their religious affiliation. Victoria received students from the recently formed Church of Canada, which included Methodists like Frye, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. Entering students chose a four-year honors program or a three-year pass program. Due to the brevity of his formal schooling, Frye was placed on probation in the easier pass program. The next year he was reassigned to the honors program. The coursework Frye took emphasized philosophy, with a secondary concentration upon English literature.

After his B.A. in 1933, he continued at Emmanuel College for another three years. Emmanuel is connected with Victoria, because both are affiliated with the United Church of Canada. His coursework prepared him for ministry. When he received a second Bachelor’s degree, he was ordained. A fellowship, however, now allowed him two further years of English studies at Merton College, Oxford. In 1937, he married Helen Kemp (a marriage which lasted until her death some fifty years later in 1986). His undergraduate studies at Oxford “covered English literature down to 1830” (SM, 4); these studies had a provision by which they could later count as or be “automatically transmuted into an MA.,” which he received in 1940.¹ When he resumed as Lecturer at Victoria in 1939, he had accumulated three Bachelor’s degrees. As he observed, he was “deflected from everything that could conventionally be described as research” (SM, 3). Frye, as a younger man, viewed his education ironically. His primary schooling was “penal servitude” (WGS, 330), his high school was “primitive” (NFIC, 45), and, upon the completion of his higher education at Oxford, he feit relieved to have “ended the compulsory time-waste period”; he was also glad to have avoided “jumping through the hoops” of graduate school, “and turning Ph.D. cartwheels to amuse [his] eiders.”²

Such remarks became subdued as he advanced through the positions of Assistant (1942), Associate (1947) and full Professor (1948); and with the successive administrative posts of English Department Chair (1952), Principal of his College (1959), University Professor at Toronto (1966), and Chancellor of Victoria and Emmanuel Colleges (1978). He received some of the most distinguished awards available to a Canadian and some three dozen honorary doctorates. Though his life is identifiable through what he called “the layer of personae”—the many public roles he had as teacher, administrator, and international lecturer—it is perhaps more interesting to glimpse him as he was initially trying out different social roles and considering his vocational choices (OE, 211).

He appears to have considered writing, preaching, and teaching as his main options. From an early age, he began thinking of himself as a writer. If one could excavate the past of almost any English teacher, probably some long-buried sheath of poems or batch of stories will eventually be brought up, as has recently been done with Frye. Though he wrote some poems, he focused upon short fiction; six stories appeared in Victoria’s literary magazine and in Canadian Forum between 1936 and 1941.³ His fertile mind continued to conceive of plots, characters, and ideas for novels from about 1935 through the rest of his life. His senior colleague at Victoria, poet E. J. Pratt, advised him to establish his academic reputation and then return to writing (Ayre 1989, 166–69). The one fragmentary novel so far recovered deals with the topics Frye knew well, religion and education, and its main character is a clergyman.

The possibility of ministry seems to have been his mother’s idea. Frye thought her religious training and desire for him to enter ministry was “very much dominated by her father,” a Methodist preacher (WGS, 329). She envisioned him as a “symbol of her father,” and “dragged” him off for talks with an “appalling series of parsons” (NFN 5 [Summer 1993], 26). Their conversations centered on his aptitude for ministry. Perhaps he felt unfit for the administrative leadership, the initiative expected in establishing and maintaining multiple programmatic activities in areas such as Christian education, evangelism, and stewardship. He may also have felt uncomfortable with the intimacy pastoral care requires. Yet he was perhaps attracted to the core activity of preaching or proclamation.

There was, he said, a “strong evangelical religious streak in the family,” which he inherited through his mother from her father, who had been a circuit rider (WGS, 328). Frye describes his grandfather’s duties with a sense of pathos, perhaps identifying him with the figure he himself might have become. The grandfather thought that the rural outpost that he was “assigned by his bishop” was the place “that God had called him to, and he didn’t realize that he was [denominationally] in with a bunch of pushing entrepreneurs who were grabbing all the soft spots in the bigger cities” (NFIC, 41).

Methodism seems to us merely another species of mainline Protestantism. David Cayley, however, designates the Methodism Frye was brought up in as “radical” Protestantism, by which he means that it drew its “inspiration directly from the Bible without priestly, liturgical or doctrinal intermediations” (NFIC, 3). He also deems it “authoritarian,” though it is more likely anti-authoritarian,” and populist.

Through at least the age of twenty-one, Frye planned to enter the ministry. He announced his decision to his family (WGS, 330) and defended it as a career choice to his fiancee (NFN 6 [Fall 1994], 8). While he feit ministry would allow him to exercise his desire to be a writer, he expressed doubts about the possibility of teaching. Preaching and teaching are, he told his fiancee, two possible “Fates” who are pulling in opposite directions” and leaving Frye uncertain “which one is God” (NFN 6 [Fall 1994], 9). A “professor,” according to his metaphor, is an “orchid,” or “highly cultivated” plant, since it has “no roots in the ground” and is “eut off from life” (NFN 6 [Fall 1994], 8). Frye at twenty-one has the undergraduate’s normal suspicion that research and specialization are divorced from the “community of live people” (NFN 6 [Fall 1994], 8).

What he came to regard as the decisive episode that propelled him towards his profession occurred one icy February evening in 1934.⁴ He was working on an assigned paper the night before it was due, as most students do. Seated in an all-night cafeteria, and probably with the help of many cups of coffee, sometime well after midnight, a revelatory insight occurred to him. The task was on Blake’s poem Milton. He set out to compare the poets. His initial assumption was that the poets were “connected by their use of the Bible”; the eventual insight was the discovery that a “mythological framework” contained both poets (SM, 17). One might say that the question of “the historical period” to which the poets belonged had impeded Frye and is inherently perplexing. Milton is one of the last Renaissance poets living into the Restoration era; he himself perhaps coneeived of himself as the last, best writer of the Reformation. Blake is a first-generation Romantic poet but can be placed in the Company of later eighteenth-century poets, as Frye suggests in an essay on this period, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” (FI, 130–37). Frye seems to have departed from such historical categories and arrived at a transhistorical, or “mythological,” superhighway that Starts from the Bible and runs straight through such intensely Biblical poets as Milton and Blake. The real point, which made it a revelatory experience for Frye, was that he experienced himself entering imaginatively into the Biblical landscape. His description of the experience, that it was “a vision of coherence,” that in the middle of the night “suddenly the universe just broke open,” and that he was never “the same man again,” lends itself to a variety of interpretations (NFN, 3 [Winter 1990–91], 5). It can serve as a self-image for Frye as the “great twentieth-century reader” rather than as “a poet like Milton or a ... visionary like Blake” (NFN 5 [Summer 1993], 27). His reading experience, in our present context is a “chance happening” that was “transformed into a destiny by means of a choice” to write what became the book on Blake thirteen years later, a choice constantly renewed in subsequent books (Paul Ricoeur, OAA, 25).

It is helpful to add to our sketch of his life and vocation a survey of some of the books he encountered when young. His adage about the Bible is applicable to his own exposure to it through his mother. The Bible “should be taught so early and so thoroughly,” he said, “that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything else that cornes along can settle on it” (El, 110). A family picture his biographer mentions displays Frye clutching to himself a copy of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a work that places its hero, “Christian,” on a Biblical path leading him through the secular world around him. Frye recalled that “several shelves” of the family’s library were “portly theological volumes” previously belonging to his clergyman grandfather (SM, 48). Another “whole shelf” consisted of “children’s adaptations of the classics” (NFIC, 41). Sets of the works of Dickens and Scott and works by other novelists were in the family collection, which was not added to after 1910, presumably because they could not afford further acquisitions. An aunt, however, brought them a few books by Wells, Ibsen, and Shaw, and he read more of their works at the public library (WGS, 328). One of his high school English texts was a collection of seventeenth-century lyrical poetry. His exposure to the early Milton and to Donne may account for their presence on a list of favorite writers which he compiled toward the end of his stay at Victoria: “Donne, Milton, Bunyan, Swift, Blake, Dickens, Browning, and Shaw” (NFN 6 [Fall 1994], 24). This evaluative canon of his “heroisms in literature” can be expanded to include the “culture heroes of his Student days,” anthropologist James Frazer and metahistorian Oswald Spengler (SM, 111). He found Frazer’s Golden Bough “hidden behind” the circulation desk of the Moncton Public Library because he had a job there when it opened in his mid-teens (Ayre, 124). He “picked up Spengler’s Decline of the West” as an undergraduate at Victoria (NFIC, 61).

The salient feature of his entire higher education is the layered sequence of his readings of the works that were then considered to constitute the English literary tradition. The honors program had been devised by a philosophy teacher on Victoria’s faculty. The “curriculum” he prescribed had “set courses and authors for each year, so that a Student would progress through four hundred years of English literature and European [philosophical] thought” during his four years (Denham 1991, 17). While training for ministry at Emmanuel, Frye claimed he “perhaps spent more time doing English literature than theology” and that his interest in theology was displaced by his interest in Frazer’s Golden Bough. While at Emmanuel, he took some graduate courses over at Victoria, and was more fascinated by Frazerian applications to the Bible and literature than by his theology courses. The two years at Oxford comprised a “hard program of reading” which covered English literature” from its beginnings “down to 1930” (SM, 4). Moreover, his early teaching duties reinforced his comprehensive readings. Initially assigned courses in four different periods, he soon found himself teaching “everything in English literature from Chaucer on.” Though his work on Blake’s book was arrested by his “preparing for his lectures,” they may have implicitly entered into his depiction of Blake as a typical expression of the English literary tradition from Chaucer down to Blake (NFIC, 51).

Our portrait of the literary critic as a young man requires a glimpse of him as person. As an adolescent, he appeared to a peer at Moncton as a “tall, thin youth” with “wildly blowing reddish hair,” which epitomized his “artistic eccentricity” (WGS, 334), though he was in fact of medium stature with blond hair. He seemed remote, bent on some special purpose, with “his books stacked under an arm,” absorbed in his own thoughts, and looking “straight ahead and determined” (WGS, 334). When Frye, in later years, heard this account of him, he called it a “fairly sharp perception” (WGS, 334). It helps suggest the “extraordinary aloofness” by which analytical psychologist Carl Jung designates the person who is introverted and intuitive.⁵ A characteristic calling for this kind of person is that of artist and writer, who are themselves, at least in our extended Romantic era, the modern descendants of the Biblical prophets. In choosing to study Blake, Frye selected what Jung would call a “type” of personality he himself had.

Writer Richard Kostelanetz, who interviewed Frye when he was in his early sixties, supplies a character sketch (432). He was “medium in height and build.” His hair, which remained wavy, had become gray. His forehead was “relatively unlined.” He wore “wire-framed, rimless glasses.” The face seems “relatively unlined” to Kostelanetz, with “soft jowls” around the thin lips. “His mouth opens only slightly when he speaks” and his speech is uttered in a relatively monotone voice. His manner seemed “reserved” and “a bit inscrutable”; Frye used the word “reclusive” in reference to his lifestyle.

Another writer said the impression made upon her by his lecture room style was that of “a magicia...