Wonderful work as always, John. You needn't read the entirety of "The Bush Garden," although Frye's corpus is a cosmos, and you'll never go wrong adventuring in whatever corner of the universe he, like a god, gives light to. However, the final essay in the book, "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada," more or less suffices for his general argument on CanLit—an argument under whose shadow the debate is still shaped. Here's the essay:
(I fear I'm becoming a tedious CanLit whisperer—a subject that scarcely even piques my peripheral interests. If the New Republic once deemed “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” the most boring headline in the world, then “worthwhile CanLit paper” may well be the most boring readerly invitation.)
Thank you, David. I've enjoyed your CanLit whispering, personally, especially the recommendation of Cuenco's grand essay, but I understand your wish not to be reduced to that! I'll read the Frye piece.
I would love to know what you think! Also, as you prepare for next week's inaugural “not not” podcast/founding of a revolutionary agora for the Bohemian Online, you may find interest—even pleasure!—in E.J. Pratt's “The Truant.” Frye referred to it as the greatest poem in Canadian literature, owing much to its indomitable Blakean energies. (The second link is another NF essay discussing, in part, the poem.)
Excellent work. I haven’t read quite enough of Frye and Bloom to be comfortable saying if the Plotinus/Iamblichus connection is right, although it perhaps casts the father of Neoplatonism in too anticosmic of a light. Incidentally on the pagan-catholic point: I find it interesting to contrast that critique with the one I received in the still dimly anti-catholic (nonwithstanding the ubiquity of Irish, Polish and Italian-descended friends) rural New England protestant milieu I was raised in, which was rather more Dostoevskyian in its distrust of the “universal temporal power” claimed by the church over the believer.
Thanks! I must read all those Neoplatonists and gnostics someday, or reread them considering that I did read (but then forgot) some in my college religious studies courses. The Dostoevsky critique of Catholicism, not all that different from the Enlightenment critique he would have scorned in Voltaire or Diderot, isn't wrong. Even Dante, supposedly *the* Catholic poet, insisted before the Reformation that the temporal and spiritual powers had to be divided to save the church. But then to repudiate the spiritual powers thereby loosed into the arts, to see only corruption or decadence or degeneration in the aesthetic temporal-spiritual fusion that is immanence of the numinous in the material artifact or in the very flesh—that is certainly to go too far in the other direction. Dostoevsky was saved from this particular counter-extremism by the Orthodox's own intimate relation to divine beauty, and I love his work for its almost rank physicality, but not every Enlightened and/or Protestant writer was.
Now Blake saw the goddess cult and the totalitarianism as related: the seductive female will inspiring men to subordinate one another for her. But he was also paradoxically nostalgic for medieval order, for the concretized organic spiritual community represented by the Gothic cathedral, and aspired to create something like that with his own work. The flintier Frye—Toronto's not that far from New England—says it was a good thing he failed and became a hero of the independent imagination instead, because if he'd succeeded he would have been the English Wagner inspiring the English Hitler!
Wonderful work as always, John. You needn't read the entirety of "The Bush Garden," although Frye's corpus is a cosmos, and you'll never go wrong adventuring in whatever corner of the universe he, like a god, gives light to. However, the final essay in the book, "Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada," more or less suffices for his general argument on CanLit—an argument under whose shadow the debate is still shaped. Here's the essay:
https://northropfrye-thebushgarden.blogspot.com/2009/02/conclusion-to-literary-history-of.html
(I fear I'm becoming a tedious CanLit whisperer—a subject that scarcely even piques my peripheral interests. If the New Republic once deemed “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” the most boring headline in the world, then “worthwhile CanLit paper” may well be the most boring readerly invitation.)
Thank you, David. I've enjoyed your CanLit whispering, personally, especially the recommendation of Cuenco's grand essay, but I understand your wish not to be reduced to that! I'll read the Frye piece.
I would love to know what you think! Also, as you prepare for next week's inaugural “not not” podcast/founding of a revolutionary agora for the Bohemian Online, you may find interest—even pleasure!—in E.J. Pratt's “The Truant.” Frye referred to it as the greatest poem in Canadian literature, owing much to its indomitable Blakean energies. (The second link is another NF essay discussing, in part, the poem.)
https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/pratt/poem3.htm
https://northropfrye-thebushgarden.blogspot.com/2009/02/preface-to-uncollected-anthology.html
Excellent work. I haven’t read quite enough of Frye and Bloom to be comfortable saying if the Plotinus/Iamblichus connection is right, although it perhaps casts the father of Neoplatonism in too anticosmic of a light. Incidentally on the pagan-catholic point: I find it interesting to contrast that critique with the one I received in the still dimly anti-catholic (nonwithstanding the ubiquity of Irish, Polish and Italian-descended friends) rural New England protestant milieu I was raised in, which was rather more Dostoevskyian in its distrust of the “universal temporal power” claimed by the church over the believer.
Thanks! I must read all those Neoplatonists and gnostics someday, or reread them considering that I did read (but then forgot) some in my college religious studies courses. The Dostoevsky critique of Catholicism, not all that different from the Enlightenment critique he would have scorned in Voltaire or Diderot, isn't wrong. Even Dante, supposedly *the* Catholic poet, insisted before the Reformation that the temporal and spiritual powers had to be divided to save the church. But then to repudiate the spiritual powers thereby loosed into the arts, to see only corruption or decadence or degeneration in the aesthetic temporal-spiritual fusion that is immanence of the numinous in the material artifact or in the very flesh—that is certainly to go too far in the other direction. Dostoevsky was saved from this particular counter-extremism by the Orthodox's own intimate relation to divine beauty, and I love his work for its almost rank physicality, but not every Enlightened and/or Protestant writer was.
Now Blake saw the goddess cult and the totalitarianism as related: the seductive female will inspiring men to subordinate one another for her. But he was also paradoxically nostalgic for medieval order, for the concretized organic spiritual community represented by the Gothic cathedral, and aspired to create something like that with his own work. The flintier Frye—Toronto's not that far from New England—says it was a good thing he failed and became a hero of the independent imagination instead, because if he'd succeeded he would have been the English Wagner inspiring the English Hitler!