University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
But now I really begin to feel that I’m living in a post-Marxist age. I think we’re moving into something like an age of anarchism: the kind of violence and unrest going on now in China, in the city riots (which are not really race riots: race hatred is an effect but not a cause of them) in America, in Nigeria, in Canadian separatism — none of all this can satisfactorily be explained in Marxist terms. Something else is happening.
Entry, Notebook 19 (1964–67), 427, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Anatomy of Criticism
I began the Anatomy of Criticism long ago by remarking that every serious subject, including criticism, seems to go through a kind of inductive metamorphosis, in which what has previously been assumed without discussion turns into the central problem to be discussed.
“Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility” (1990), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
Anatomy of Criticism presents a vision of literature as forming a total schematic order, interconnected by recurring or conventional myths and metaphors, which I call archetypes. The vision has an objective pole: it is based on a study of literary genres and conventions, and on certain elements in Western cultural history. The order of words is there, and it is no good trying to write it off as a hallucination of my own. The fact that literature is based on unifying principles as schematic as those of music is concealed by many things, most of them psychological blocks, but the unity exists, and can be shown and taught to others, including children. But, of course, my version of that vision also has a subjective pole: it is a model only, coloured by my preferences and limited by my ignorance.
“Expanding Eyes” (1975), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
Ancestry
If we are interested in our ancestry, it is natural to trace our direct ancestry first, but we all know that we eventually come to a point at which everyone alive was an ancestral relative.
“Framework and Assumption” (1985), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
… we all belong to something before we are anything.…
The Double Vision (1991), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Angels
If I had been on the hills of Bethlehem in the year one, I do not think I should have heard angels singing because I do not hear them now, & there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped.
Entry, Notebook 11f (1969–70), 5, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
The bird is not a higher form of imagination than we are, but its ability to fly symbolizes one, and men usually assign wings to what they visualize as superior forms of human existence.
“Part Three: The Final Synthesis,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
Angels are spiritual beings because they don’t travel but just epiphanize (when they do) in an interpenetrating space, and all angels by the royal metaphor are One Spirit, a little higher (Ps. 8) than we are.
Entry, Notebook 11e (ca. 1978), 59, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Anglicanism
Incidentally, I hate to seem intolerant, but I do not approve of Anglicanism. There are two possible approaches to Christianity, or any religion — the Protestant or individual approach, and the Catholic or collective one. Anglicanism never made up its mind which it was going to be, and did not much want to, as it is based on the useful but muddle-headed English idea of pleasing everybody.
“NF to HK,” 25 Aug. 1932, The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939 (1996), CW, 1.
Angst
Fear without an object, as a condition of mind prior to being afraid of anything, is called Angst or anxiety, a somewhat narrow term for what may be almost anything between pleasure and pain.
“Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility” (1956), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
Animals
The deaths of animals seem to have an extraordinary resonance in Canadian literature, as though the screams of all the trapped and tortured creatures who built up the Canadian fur trade were still echoing in our minds.
“Canadian Culture Today” (1977), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
I don’t know why I have such a horror of animals. A recurrent nightmare is badly hurting an animal and then stomping it furiously into a battered wreck in a paroxysm of cowardly mercy. And that is to some extent what I’m like. Any intimate contact with any animal I dislike, & their convulsive movements give me panic. If I go to hell, Satan will probably give me a wet bird to hold.
Entry, 24 Jul. 1942, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Anniversaries
The value of centenaries and similar observations is that they call attention, not simply to great men, but to what we do with our great men.
“Blake after Two Centuries” (1957), Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake (2005), CW, 16.
We choose an anniversary like this to get free of time for a moment, when we can remember without being trapped in the past, and expect, plan, or hope without being trapped in the future.
“To Come to Light” (1988), Northrop Frye on Religion (1999), CW, 4.
Answers
I don’t think there are any answers. I think that the answer cheats you out of the right to ask the question and that the function of the answer is to make you formulate a better question.
“The Great Teacher” (1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
When it comes to meeting the threat to identity, a myth of freedom seems very ineffective in comparison with the narcotic charm of a closed myth of concern, with its instant, convinced, and final answers. It takes time to realize that these answers are not only not genuine answers, but that only the questions can be genuine, and all such answers cheat us out of our real birthright, which is the right to ask questions.
The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (1971), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
I think there are all questions and there aren’t any answers.
“The Great Teacher” (1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Anthem, National
I’m thinking of the national anthem, where the French version is doing all sorts of interesting
