difference between mathematics and music.
“The Pursuit of Form” (1948), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
I remember some Clyfford Stills I saw in Buffalo: wonderful pictures, but they wouldn’t endure anything else in the same room except another Clyfford Still. (I was told later that Still was personally almost a psychotic, and of course I disapprove of putting that fact into a casual relation to the pictures, but the effect of the picture is unmistakable.)
Entry, Notebook 12 (1968–70), 279, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Absurdity
Whatever gives form and pattern to fiction, whatever technical skill keeps us turning the pages to get to the end, is absurd, and contradicts our sense of reality.
“Dickens and the Comedy of Humours” (1967), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
The word “absurd” refers primarily to the disappearance of the sense of continuity in our day.… The sense of absurdity comes from time, not space; from the feeling that life is not a continuous absorption of experiences into a steadily growing individuality, but a discontinuous series of encounters between moods and situations which keep bringing us back to the same point.
“The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Just as the poetic metaphor is always a logical absurdity, so every inherited convention of plot in literature is more or less mad.
“Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” (1961), The Educated Imagination (1963),“The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
Acadia
The notion of a distinguished Canadian novelist coming from such a place as Bouctouche would have struck us as queer indeed.
“Autobiographical Reflections: Speech at Moncton’s Centennial Celebration” (1990), Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25. The reference is to Acadian novelist and playwright Antonine Maillet.
Accountants
Perhaps we have used honesty and balance sheets as a substitute for brilliance and riches. Americans like to make money; Canadians like to audit it. I don’t know of any other country where the accountant enjoys a higher social and moral status.
“View of Canada” (1976), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Achievement
Every creative achievement is an invention, and to invent something is, subjectively, to construct it, and, objectively, to find it.
“The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange” (1984), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Acid Rain
But the new response to the patterns of history seems to have made itself felt, along with a growing sense that we can no longer afford leaders who think that acid rain is something one gets by eating grapefruit.
“Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington” (1989), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12. This remark is an indirect reference to the ecological views of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Actions
Inconsistency of action, being a coward one day & a hero the next, can never be patched up, though again on a verbal plane it may be “accounted for.”
Entry, Notebook 24 (1970–72), 74, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
I have often noticed that a man’s beliefs are not revealed by any profession of faith, however sincere, but by what his actions show that he believes.
“The Dialectic of Belief and Vision” (1985), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
In a temptation somebody is being persuaded to do something that looks like an act, but which is really the loss of the power to act. Consequently, the abstaining from this kind of pseudo-activity is often the sign that one possesses a genuine power of action.
The Return of Eden (1965), Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake (2005), CW, 16.
Activism
Social concern does have its own case: environmental pollution, the energy crisis, the atom bomb, all show that a purely laissez-faire attitude to the development of science is pernicious.
“Introduction to Art and Reality” (1986), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
As I used to tell my American friends at the time, Canadian activists have an outlet that your students don’t have, namely the American Embassy. If all else fails they can go down and demonstrate there.
“Towards an Oral History of the University of Toronto” (1982), referring to student activism in the 1960s, Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Adolescence
In the 1920s the cult of adolescence extended into the university, where the typical undergraduate was supposed to be a case of arrested development in a coonskin coat.
“The View from Here” (1980), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
This conception of the adolescent can hardly have any basis in biology: it is a deliberate creation of industrial society, and one wonders why such a creation was made.… I would like to make it clear that when I use the word “adolescent,” I do not refer primarily to young people, but to a social neurosis which has been projected on young people.
“The Definition of a University” (1970), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
I say creation because I think the adolescent is a deliberate creation of an adult society, and that we have done with young people what Victorian society did with women: on the pretext of coddling and protecting them, we have subordinated them and kept them out of any real social role or influence, and we have done this because they represent a kind of projection of our own anxiety.
“Education and the Rejection of Reality” (1971), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
I always thought of adolescence as something to grow away from.
“Beginnings” (1981), interview by Susan Gabori, Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Adonis
Jesus and Adonis are both dying gods; they have very similar imagery and very similar rituals attached to them; but Jesus is a person and Adonis is not.
“The Meaning of Recreation: Humanism in Society” (1979), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Adults
Or we may even find ourselves reading the opposite meaning into what is said: if we pass a
