Talk
Why do I set up such a deafening clatter of inner talk in my mind? Probably for the same reason that villagers gossip and urban people intrigue: to keep myself reassured about the reality of the ordinary world. If I’d shut up and listen I might be able to hear other things. It corresponds to the senses’ filtering out and giving us the reality we can take.
Entry, Notebook 50 (1987–90), 52, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
Talmud
Judaism still finds the Bible’s centre of gravity in the Torah: the Talmud, which in some respects is the Jewish counterpart of the New Testament, takes mainly the form of a commentary on the Torah.
“Typology I,” The Great Code (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (2006), CW, 19.
Taste
Every attempt to exalt taste over knowledge has behind it the feeling that the possessor of taste is certainly a gentleman, while the possessor of knowledge may be only a pedant.
“On Value Judgments” (1968), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
In my experience, that phrase, “I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like,” always turns out to be that what you like is pretty dismal.
“The Great Teacher” (1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
It is entirely impossible to know nothing of art and yet to know what one likes: what one likes is always a measure of what one knows.
“Academy without Walls” (1961), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Yes, and very often you can understand the taste of an age from the least interesting writers.
“Canadian and American Values” 1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2000), CW, 24.
Teach-ins
Teach-ins, for example, are entertainment of a very high quality but they are not a form of education. We cannot have education without incessant repetition and practice, drill, and going over the same things over and over until they become automatic responses.
“The Social Importance of Literature” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Teachers & Teaching
The teacher has to try to transform himself into a kind of transparent medium for whatever he is teaching. If he’s lucky, there may come a point at which the entire classroom is pervaded by the spirit of the subject — of Blake, or Shakespeare, or romance. And then the relationship between teacher and student, which in itself is a somewhat embarrassing relationship, disappears, and you are all united in the same vision.
“Freedom and Concern” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
But if Canada ever becomes as famous in cultural history as the Athens of Socrates, it will be largely because, in spite of indifference or Philistinism or even contempt, he has persisted in the immortal task granted only to teachers, the task of corrupting its youth.
“The Beginning of the Word” (1980), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Certainly the influence of my teachers on me was not directly through anything they taught me, but the impression they gave that the life of a scholar was worth living.
“The Scholar in Society” (1983), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The distance between pupil and teacher diminishes as the former gets older: by the end of high school the teacher should be a fellow student.
“Speech at a Freshman Welcome” (1966), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
They have tried to teach you to compare your society’s ideas with Plato’s, its language with Shakespeare’s, its calculations with Newton’s, its love with the love of the saints.
“Culture and the National Will” (1957),” Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
You can’t be a teacher, or rather, you can’t stand in the role of a teacher (in a university you get little chance to do any real teaching) without being something of an exhibitionist.
“Autobiographical Reflections” (1942–44), 25, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
It’s the job of a teacher of the humanities to keep fighting for the liberalizing of the imagination, to encourage students to confront experience, to explore the shadows and the darkness, to distinguish evil from the portrayal of evil, and to meet the unexpected with tolerance.
“Address on Receiving the Royal Bank Award” (1978), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
But the dedicated teacher realizes that the end of education is to get yourself detached from society without withdrawing from it.
“Canadian and American Values” (1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
If you’re teaching mathematics, you get inspired by mathematics. Nobody gets inspired by some vague notion like teaching as an end in itself.
“There Is Really No Such Thing As Methodology” (1969), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
I have always considered that my teaching and my writing are interconnected and that teaching is a sufficiently dramatic performance to be considered an independent literary form.
“Schools of Criticism (II)” (1990), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
A good deal of the strategy of teaching is rhetorical strategy, choosing words and images with great care in order to evoke the response: “I never thought of it that way before,” or, “Now that you put it that way, I can see it.”
“Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
While many things can bring teacher and students together personally, only one thing can ever equalize them, and that is the authority of the subject being taught. In relation to the subject being taught the teacher is also a student, and so the difference between teacher and students is at a minimum.
“On Teaching Literature” (1972), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
I suspect that no teaching is worth doing unless it has a militant quality to it.
“Canadian Energies: Dialogues on Creativity” (1980), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
For a teacher, patience has to be a substitute for heroism.
Remark quoted in Maclean’s, 5 April 1982.
What both teacher and student are trying to do, I think, is to escape from the intolerable burden of being teachers and students.
“The Ethics of Change: The Role of the University” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
We hold up to all students, whether casual or committed, the ideal of the scholarly life, a life detached yet not withdrawn from the social environment, working constantly, not to create an élite, but to dissolve all élites into the classless society which is the final embodiment of culture.
“Teaching the Humanities Today” (1977), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
One can teach only what is teachable, and what the university must teach is the only thing it can teach: the specific disciplines into which genuine knowledge is divided.
The Modern Century (1967), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
I imagine a dramatist, for example, wouldn’t actually believe in the reality of his play until it had been performed. And in a sense I don’t believe anything I say until I hear myself saying it.
“Maintaining Freedom in Paradise” (1982), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Again, I have always tended to distrust conceptions of teaching which regarded it as a personal encounter between teacher and taught. It seems to me that the authority of the subject being taught is supreme over both teacher and student.
“The Critic and the Writer” (1972), Northrop Frye Newsletter, Winter 1991–92.
Teaching Literature
People like myself who teach literature are often referred to as intellectuals because we wear glasses, but actually I think we’d be much more accurately defined as emotionals. We are just as much concerned with trying to simulate a feeling response to literature as a logical one.
“The Only Genuine Revolution” (1968), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The English teacher’s ideal is the exact opposite of “effective communication,” or learning to become audible in the market place. What he has to teach is the verbal expression of truth, beauty, and wisdom: in short, the disinterested use of words.
“The Study of English in Canada” (1957), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The teacher who is not dedicated is a mass man, and he gets a mass product. He teaches largely because he has particular certainties that he wants to implant in the minds of his students. But the dedicated teacher realizes that the end of education is to get yourself detached from society without withdrawing from it. If a man is teaching English literature, for example, he’s in contact with the entire verbal experience of his students. Now nine tenths of that verbal experience is picked up from prejudice and cliché and things the students hears on street corners, on the playgrounds, and from his family and his home, and so forth.
“Canadian and American Values” (1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Teaching literature is impossible; that is why it is difficult.
“Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (1964), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
In a sense one may say that the social ideal of the teacher of literature is a prerevolutionary society, which his teaching helps to recreate. By that I mean a society in which new ideas, new structures of intelligence and imagination, can still have a revolutionary impact.
“The Beginning of the Word” (1980), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
It is therefore impossible to “learn literature”: one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature. Similarly, the difficulty often felt in “teaching literature” arises from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of literature is all that can be directly taught.
“The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
It is becoming more obvious that we do not teach or learn literature, in universities or elsewhere, and that only the criticism of literature can be directly taught and learned.
“The Study of English in Canada” (1957), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Difficulty is all that a teacher can deal with, & the job of a teacher of literature is the thankless one of showing that what looks easy really is difficult.
Entry, Notebook 19 (1964–67), 267, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
It’s clear that the end of literary teaching is not simply the admiration of literature; it’s something more like the transfer of imaginative energy from literature to the student.
“Verticals of Adam,” The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
As for our scholarship and research, what sustained me, as it still does, when I first went into the study of literature, was the feeling that I had the best subject-matter in the world, and a job to do with it that literature could not do by itself.
“Teaching the Humanities Today” (1977), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
How can you teach Milton to a class in heat?
Attributed with respect to teaching English to returned servicemen in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Edmund Carpenter, “Remembering Explorations,” Canadian Notes & Queries, Spring 1993.
Technique
Once technique reaches a certain degree of skill, it turns into something that we may darkly suspect to be fun: fun for the writer to display it, fun for the reader to watch it.
“Conclusion to Literary History of Canada” (1965), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Technology
I often find that, when I read books about the technology available in the near future, the author’s eyes are starry while mine are still glazed.
“Literary and Mechanical Models” (1989), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Technology is the most dramatic aspect of this development: one cannot take off in a jet plane and expect a radically different way of life in the place where the plane lands.
“Canadian Culture Today” (1977), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
The more highly developed the technology, the more introversion it creates in society.
“Convocation Address: University of Bologna” (1989), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
In our world technology has immensely increased the potential strength of both sides; and while the active and creative response to our cultural tradition begins with the power of choice, it must soon move on to develop also some power of resisting its better organized enemies.
“Convocation Address: University of Bologna” (1989), referring to confronting “a mass hatred for human intellect and imagination,” Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
I mentioned the increasing introversion that technology brings with it: the aeroplane is more introverted than the train; the super-highway, where there is a danger of falling asleep, more introverted than the most unfrequented country road. The international airport, completely insulated even from the country it is in, is probably the most eloquent symbol of this, and is parodied in Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001, where the hero lands on the moon, dependent on human processing even for the air he breathes, and finds nothing to do there except to phone his wife back on earth, who is out.
“Canada: New World Without Revolution” (1975), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Technology by itself cannot produce the kind of scientist that it needs for its own development: at any rate, that seems to be the general opinion of those who are qualified to have an opinion on the subject.
“Humanities in a New World” (1958), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Telecommunications
About the time transistors appeared, I read a science fiction story in which, in some future nightmare-world, everyone walked around with their ears covered by machines that totally isolated them from the world outside them. A few years later this grisly fantasy became a matter of common observation on our streets.
“Convocation Address: University of Bologna” (1989), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Telepathy
Telepathy and the like, again, may exist in human minds, but it seems to be a poor thing there compared to what the technology of telephones and wireless has been providing for a century.
“Literary and Mechanical Models” (1989), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Television
People who don’t want to read can always stare at television, or they can go down the street with headphones on, living in a different world from the ones they see around them.
“Back to the Garden” (1982), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Television does have a profoundly civilizing aspect in that it compels people to look like people. I think of what an abstract notion I had of Eskimos when I was a student at school, or even college, and how that simply disappeared as soon as one began seeing them on television.
“From Nationalism to Regionalism: The Maturing of Canadian Culture” (1980), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
If we speak of Canada being flooded with American programs, we find that the Canadian viewer is a fish, not somebody who wants to get into a Canadian ark, floating on top.
“From Nationalism to Regionalism: The Maturing of Canadian Culture” (1980), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
It’s television that makes you live in a clock.
“The Scholar in Society” (1983), referring to TV as a linear rather than as a non-linear medium, Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Once we get past the talking head in television, we are instantly in a world of drama, whether we are watching a hockey game or a race riot.
“Violence and Television” (1975), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
I have often spoken of the iconoclastic mood of younger people in our own society, and I think it springs from the same cause: the sense that the present visual foci of American life that television presents, including more especially its commercials, represent a form of idolatry.
“Icons and Iconoclasm” (1970), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Commentaries on a news event like this are generally spoken in a dull, flat associative narrative without a flicker of rhythmical or sound interest in it. With the possible exception of hard-core pornography, I doubt if any arrangement of words is duller than ordinary television commentary.
“Reviews of Television Programs for the Canadian Radio-Television Commission: Reflections on Television … November 1971–March 1972” (1972), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
The television set is a curiously ghostly medium: in our day, if we see ghosts or hear ghostly voices in the air, it means that somebody has left the television on. But the passive viewer’s whole world is equally spectral: he cannot distinguish fact from fiction either on the screen or off it.
“Violence and Television” (1975), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
American civilization has to de-theatricalize itself, I think, from the prison of television.
Entry, Notebook 44 (1986–91), 491, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
What I do know is, first, that television illustrates, more vividly than any other medium, the fact that we participate in society dramatically more than we do conceptually; and, second, that on television the structuring of fact is very similar to the structuring of fiction, both falling into much the same dramatic conventions.
“Violence and Television” (1975), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
In the age of television it is a common experience to attend a public function and then go home to get on television a more comprehensive and comprehensible view of what one has just been engaged in.
“The Renaissance of Books” (1973), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
My hair prickles when I hear advertisers talk of a television set simply as a means of reaching their market. It so seldom occurs to them that a television set might be their market’s way of looking at them, and that the market might conceivably not like what it sees.
“Communications” (1970), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
I think the inherent tendency of television, as of film and radio, is to decrease the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow listeners, and within its widening central area of appeal to find more room for a greater variety of tastes.
“Across the River and Out of the Trees” (1980), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Television is like a telescope, a new method of perception which tells us more, but also makes what it sees look cold, dead, and inconceivably remote.
Entry, Notebook 11f (1969–70), 115, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
It seems to me that television is able, as no medium of communication has ever been able to before, to alter the balance between waking and dreaming life by providing what is so close to an objectified dream world.
“Reviews of Television Programs for the Canadian Radio-Television Commission: Reflections on Television … November 1971–March 1972” (1972), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Tempest, The
In many tales of the Tempest type, the island sinks back into the sea when the magician leaves. But we, going out of the theatre, perhaps have it in our pockets like an apple: perhaps our children can sow the seeds in the sea and bring forth again the island that the world has been searching for since the dawn of history, the island that is both nature and human society restored to their original form, where there is no sovereignty and yet where all of us are kings.
“Northrop Frye on Shakespeare: IX, The Tempest”(1986), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
However we take it, The Tempest is a play not simply to be read or seen or even studied, but possessed.
“Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tempest” (1959), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
I was asked recently why I could never write anything without mentioning Shakespeare’s Tempest. The reason is that I know of no other work of literature that illustrates more clearly the interchange of illusion and reality which is what literature is all about.
“Auguries of Experience” (1987), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Temples
The real temple is the tent.
Entry, Notebook 50 (1987–90), 52, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
People don’t realize that I’m building temples to — well, “the gods” will do. There’s an outer court for casual tourists, an inner court for those who want to stay for communion (incidentally, the rewards of doing so are very considerable). But I’ve left a space where neither they nor I belong.
Entry, Notebook 44 (1986–91), 93, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
Terror
The real terror comes when the individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, and losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware of a conflict within himself far subtler than the struggle of morality against evil.…
Preface, The Bush Garden (1971), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
The outstanding achievement of Canadian poetry is in the evocation of stark terror. Not a coward’s terror, of course; but a controlled vision of the causes of cowardice. The immediate source of this is obviously the frightening loneliness of a huge and thinly-settled country.
“Canada and Its Poetry” (1943), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Terrorism
There is hardly a corner of modern thought where we do not find some image of a beleaguered custodian of conscious values trying to fend off something unconscious which is too strong to be defeated. It seems the appropriate cultural pattern for a period in which the tiny peninsula of Western Europe was encircling the world.… If this age really does see the decisive struggle of liberty and terrorism for the fate of the world, the pattern of thought will make the necessary change — unless terrorism wins, in which case there will be no pattern at all.
“Trends in Modern Culture” (1952), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Texts
The text is the presence. I know this sounds a little like “the medium is the message,” but at least it gets over the Derrida hurdle of a written word deferring to an oral word deferring to a pre-verbal situation of events.
Entry, Notes 52 (1982–90), 23, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
The ultimate aim of critic, teacher, and editor alike is to become a transparent medium for whatever one criticizes, teaches, or edits.
“Welcoming Remarks to Conference on Editorial Problems, 1967” (1967), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
Theatre
We are presented with an illusion which we always have to remember is an illusion. But it is also as close to reality as we are ever going to get.
“The Art of Bunraku” (1981), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The reality-illusion distinction clearly does not work for plays: the illusion is the reality.
“The Bridge of Language” (1981), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
If you ask where the reality is, the nearest you come to an answer is that it is the mood generated in the audience by the play. So that the experience of entering a theatre turns your ordinary experience of reality and illusion inside out by presenting you with an objective illusion and a subjective reality.
“Symbolism in the Bible” (1981–82), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Theology
Theology, to me, meant mostly The Golden Bough, just as to Pratt it meant things like Emergent Evolution.
“Autobiographical Notes III: The Critic and the Writer” (1972), 3, comparing and contrasting his views as a young teacher with those of his older colleague the poet E.J. Pratt, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
In theology the deductive tendency has completely taken over, as there can hardly be such a thing as empirical theology.
“New Directions from Old” (1960), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
All theology is designed to persuade people to go to church, but I’m rather obstinate about not going to church, even when I do nothing better — and it’s very easy for me to do better.
Entry, 8 Jan. 1950, 25, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
There is no such thing as academic theology: all theology is part of the strategy of a church, and has the rationalizing of that church’s claims as one of its primary interests.
“Josef Pieper, ‘Leisure: The Basis of Culture’” (1950s), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Theology, Liberation
They talk about liberation theology. We’ve spent centuries realizing that order and authority are not as necessary as panic and selfishness thought they were: spiritual authority, which is order without authority, is all we need.
Entry, Notes 53 (1989–90), 40, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
Theory
In a book I published 25 years ago, AC [Anatomy of Criticism], I spoke of it as “pure critical theory.” This is one of the sentences I regret having written, in view of what critical theory has come to look like since then.
“Notes for Criticism and Environment (2),” (1981), 14, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
Thinkers
It’s the ability to see what’s straight in front of his nose that marks the thinker of first-rate importance.
“Oswald Spengler” (1955), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
But the thinker who was annihilated on Tuesday has to be annihilated all over again on Wednesday: the fortress of thought is a Valhalla, not an abattoir.
Creation and Recreation (1980), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Thinking
But thinking, again, is like piano-playing: how well we do it depends primarily on how much of it we have progressively and systematically done already, and at all times the content of thinking is knowledge.
“Some Reflections on Life and Habit” (1988), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
We can’t use our minds at full capacity unless we have some idea of how much of what we think we’re thinking is really thought, and how much is just familiar words running along their own familiar tracks.
“Verticals of Adam,” The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
In fact we, as individuals or egos, can hardly be said to think at all: we link our minds to an objective body of thought, follow its facts and processes, and finally, if the links are strong enough, our minds become a place where something new in the body of thought comes to light.
“Humanities in a New World” (1958), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
It is, admittedly, discouraging for a student to find that he has reached university and is still totally unable to say what he thinks. It is even more discouraging to realize that the real trouble is that he cannot think, thinking being a by-product of the skill developed in the practice of language.
“The View from Here” (1980), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
It is a university if it trains its students to think freely, but thinking, as distinct from musing or speculating, is a power of decision based on habit.
“The Study of English in Canada” (1957), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Intense thinking is a byproduct of an active life: surely it dries up when it becomes an end in itself, like happiness.
Entry, 28 Jun. 1950, 447, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Thinking, of course, is not something I do: it’s something that happens where I am. It gets done in spite of what I do: everything I “do” is mental automatism, running along prefabricated tracks that look like a map of the London subways.
Entry, Notebook 12 (1968–70), 280, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Thought itself is one of the primary forms of human energy, and in its use is all the exhilaration of power.
“By Liberal Things” (1959), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
There are no wordless thoughts.
The Well-Tempered Critic (1963), The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
Thomson, Tom
Griffins and gorgons have no place in Thomson certainly, but the incubus is there, in the twisted stumps and sprawling rocks, the strident colouring, the scarecrow evergreens. In several pictures one has the feeling of something not quite emerging which is all the more sinister for its concealment.
“Canadian and Colonial Painting” (1941), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
When the Canadian sphinx brought her riddle of unvisualized land to Thomson it did not occur to him to hide under the bedclothes, though she did not promise him money, fame, happiness, or even self-confidence, and when she was through with him she scattered his bones in the wilderness.
“Canadian and Colonial Painting” (1941), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Thriller Fiction
The thriller is quite a suggestive form actually: it’s the opposite of the detective story, where we get the smug primitive identification with the group & see the individual marked down by a process of hocus pocus. In the thriller we’re identified rather with the fugitive from society. The archetype of all thrillers is The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the refugee from the city of destruction is hounded on by a nameless fear, & has to do battle with various members of its police force like Apollyon.
Entry, 8 May 1950, 329, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.
“First Essay: Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
Tibet
Perhaps the Chinese conquest of Tibet will diffuse the Tantric light over the world, as the Turkish conquests of the Roman Empire spread Greek over Europe.
Entry, Notebook 24 (1970–72), 200, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Time
There is no time to be lost, once one has found it again.
“Northrop Frye on Shakespeare: VIII, Shakespeare’s Romances: The Winter’s Tale” (1986), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
Gospel and apocalypse speak of a present that no longer finds its meaning in the future, as the New Testament’s view of the Old Testament, but is a present moment around which past and future revolve.
“Language II,” The Great Code (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (2006), CW, 19.
As I’ve said before, punctuality is the thief of time.
Entry, 4 Feb. 1952, 90, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Time is the fundamental category by which we perceive everything: we perceive nothing that is real except in time. And yet time as we ordinarily experience it consists of three unrealities, a past that doesn’t exist any longer, a future that doesn’t exist yet, and a present that never quite exists at all. So we get our fundamental reality out of a threefold illusion.
“Symbolism in the Bible” (1981–82), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
As our personal future narrows, we become more aware of another dimension of time entirely, and may even catch glimpses of the powers and forces of a far greater creative design.
On the subject of time, in 1978, as recalled by Albert C. Hamilton, Memorial Issue, Vic Report, Spring 1991.
Every moment is a present continuous with past & future … and a discontinuous instant of potential resurrection.
Entry, Notebook 21 (1969–76), 422, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
The past & the future are the two great enemies, of tyranny & mystery respectively, yet so much in them is essential that the problem of breaking off from them is not so easy.
Entry, Notebook 3 (1946–48), 27, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
If I ever get a big enough office, I shall have the hundred plates of my Jerusalem reproduction framed and hung around the walls, so that the frontispiece will have the second plate on one side and the last plate on the other. This will be Jerusalem presented as Blake thought of it, symbolizing the state of mind in which the poet himself could say, “I see the Past, Present & Future existing all at once / Before me.”
“The Road of Excess” (1970), Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake (2005), CW, 16.
The world is usually called “timeless,” which is a beggary of language: there ought to be some such word as “timeful” to express a present moment that includes immense vistas of past and future.
Entry, Notes 53 (1989–90), 267, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
In time we all face the past, and are dragged backwards into the future. Nobody knows the future: it isn’t there to be known. The past is what we know, and it is all that we know.
“The Quality of Life in the ’70s” (1971), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Similarly, the three dimensions of time are the past, present and future, the no longer, the never quite, and the not yet. None of these dimensions exists. Space is the fourth dimension of time, the dimension in which things manifest themselves or come into existence.
Entry, Notes 54-5 (1976), 4, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
In the bath this morning I noticed what play I make with my wristwatch and spectacles, the two fragile machines which link me to time and space.
Entry, Notebook 42b: Notes I (1942–44), 54, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
Tips
Any of you who have handed a tip to a taxi driver have probably felt that you are engaged in a social ritual which is both embarrassing to you and humiliating to the taxi driver. The reason is that what you do when you hand the tip over is to dramatize a social situation, the relationship of a gentleman to a flunky which society is trying to outgrow.
“Preserving Human Values” (1961), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Titanic
I’m interested in the Titanic sinking because it was the first tangible sign that European civilization had lost its grip on reality and was about to throw away its cultural leadership of the world.
Entry, Notebook 50 (1987–90), 208, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
Tolerance
One applauds the tolerance, except that the public is so seldom tolerant about anything unless it is indifferent to it as well. A world where the arts are totally tolerated might easily become a world in which they were merely decorative, and evoked no sense of challenge to repression at all.
Creation and Recreation (1980), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
That is, tolerance is fundamentally a matter of deciding how much deviation is consistent with the safety of the myth.
“Criticism and Society” (1966–76), referring to systems like Christianity and Marxism, Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Tolerance means carelessness, & carelessness is not possible outside the Orient — well, it’s vanished there too.
Entry, 30 Apr. 1950, 309, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Where art and scholarship are autonomous, tolerance is a positive and creative force, the unity of detachment and concern.
“The Instruments of Mental Production” (1966), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Tolkien, J.R.R.
I succumbed to the charm of Tolkien, like everyone else, but one Lord of the Rings is enough. I read Fowles’ Magus with the highest expectations, but finished it thinking he didn’t know what the hell he was doing.
“New Fictional Formulas: Notebook 28” (after 1965), 6, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
Torah
Wisdom in the Bible is an outgrowth of Torah, instruction, the completion of the knowledge of good and evil in its genuine form.
Entry, Notebook 44 (1986–91), 48, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
Toronto
Coming to a bigger city was an essential part of one’s cultural education, even granting that Toronto was something of a hick town then compared to what is available in it now.
“The View from Here” (1980), referring to changes in the student population, Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
If Toronto is a world-class city, it is not because it bids for the Olympics or builds follies like the Skydome, but because of the tolerated variety of the people in its streets.
“The Cultural Development of Canada” (1990), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Toronto is an excellent town to mind one’s business in.
Quoted by Pelham Edgar in Across My Path (1952).
At that time, Toronto was a very homogeneous town; the names of Victoria students read like a Belfast phone book, and the public food was as bad as it is in most right-thinking Anglo-Saxon communities.
“The View from Here” (1980), discussing the city in the 1930s, Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
I don’t know of another city that deserves being cursed and kicked more than Toronto, nor of any city that is so well worth it.
“NF to HK,” 11 Sep. 1932, The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939 (1996), CW, 1.
Torture
This connects with one of my favourite superstitions: that in order to rationalize the utterly pointless & hideous tortures men have inflicted on each other, one has to think, not of reincarnation, but of one man getting the total variety of all possible experiences, of hell as well as of heaven.
Entry, Notebook 24 (1970–72), 90, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Funny about the Indian: I think it was because he tortured his enemies with such enthusiasm that we didn’t torture him. Also he never became a real proletariat, but attempted as far as he could to maintain his aristocratic-nomad position, living in “reservations” like the medieval game forests.
Entry, Notebook 3 (1946–48), 102, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Totalitarianism
To attach culture to the centralizing movements of politics and economics produces a cultural totalitarianism, an empty, pompous, officially certified pseudo-art. To attach a political or economic movement to a decentralizing cultural one produces a kind of neo-fascist separatism.
“The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris” (1982), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
For the totalitarian impulse is the primitive impulse, the longing to return to the narcotic peace of society’s version of truth and reality, where we no longer have to cope with the conflicts of intellectual freedom and social concern.
“The Day of Intellectual Battle: Reflections on Student Unrest” (1969), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Toynbee, Arnold J.
A Study of History presents an enormous mass of historical material strung along a thin line of argument often represented only by a single word, generally in Greek.
“Toynbee and Spengler” (1947), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Tradition
Tradition gives meaning to time, and a localized culture surrounds a part of nature and makes it “here.”
“T.S. Eliot” (1963), Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature (2010), CW, 29.
This suggests that the history inside literature is, for the critic, a force immensely more powerful and important than the history outside literature, and that we have to know the history of literature, which is a real history with its own shape and not merely a string of dates, before we can make any sense out of the relation of literature to nonliterary history.
“Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism” (1969), noting the role of conventions in literature, Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
I can think of no social movement designed to preserve a tradition which succeeded in actually preserving that tradition, and I can think of no revolutionary movement designed to bring about a different future that has not been entirely mistaken about what that future was to be.
“Convocation Address, Franklin and Marshall” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Tradition is as important now as it ever was, but it is less exclusive: the vast shadow of a total human consensus in the imagination is beginning to take shape behind it.
“Elementary Teaching and Elemental Scholarship” (1963), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Poetry does not improve or progress with the times; it produces classics and continues to rewrite its classics with the same mental attitudes. The first principle of “tradition and change in the theory of criticism,” then, is that in criticism all change takes the form of a recovery of some neglected aspect of tradition.
“Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism” (1969), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Perhaps church and university, like moral principles, should change slowly, should keep something archaic about them, something of a voice from another world.
“Baccalaureate Sermon” (1967), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Tragedy
But, of course, tragedy is not perverse: it has its own rightness. It might be described, though, as a kind of comedy turned inside out.
“Northrop Frye on Shakespeare: I, Romeo and Juliet” (1986), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
Tragedy forces on us a response of acceptance: we have to say, “Yes, this kind of thing is human life too.” But by making that response we’ve accepted something much deeper: that what is defined or made finite by words becomes infinite through the power of words.
“Northrop Frye on Shakespeare: V, King Lear” (1986), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
It takes the greatest rhetoric of the greatest poets to bring us a vision of the tragic heroic, and such rhetoric doesn’t make us miserable but exhilarated, not crushed but enlarged in spirit.
“Northrop Frye on Shakespeare: I, Romeo and Juliet” (1986), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
I don’t think it’s an accident that the two developments of tragedy coincide roughly with the two great developments of science, Renaissance science and Ionian science.
“On Evil” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Tragedy is at the heart of Classical civilization, comedy at the heart of the Christian one.
The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1975), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Tragedy is a paradoxical combination of a fearful sense of rightness (the hero must fall) and a pitying sense of wrongness (it is too bad that he falls).
“Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
Without tragedy, all literary fictions might be plausibly explained as expressions of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of repugnance: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested quality in literary experience.
“Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
I wouldn’t say that people can’t write tragedy in the twentieth century. I would say merely that it’s not a central form of expression.
“On Evil” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Trahison des clercs
The trahison des clercs occurs when intellectuals give way to their constant itch to be socially important, to help turn the wheel of history.
Entry, Notes 52 (1982–90), 677, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
Transfiguration
The Transfiguration is the real Resurrection, just as the Resurrection is the real Ascension.
Entry, Notebook 23 (early 1980s), 75, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Transformation
… a transformation of consciousness and a transformation of language can never be separated.
“Language II,” The Great Code (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (2006), CW, 19.
Literary education seems to assume a kind of definitive response which in practice never occurs. A definitive response to a performance of King Lear would blow our minds, effect an unimaginable transformation in our whole sense of reality.
“Criticism as Education” (1979), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Translation
No translation of anything worth reading is of any real value except as a crib to the original, and so translations for the general reader ought to be as literal as possible.
“The Classics and the Man of Letters” (1964), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Of course the translation of any poem worth translating should be as literal as the language will allow, but it should be a literal rendering of the real and not of the superficial meaning.
“Dialogue on Translation” (1970), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
But the fact that it can be translated means that a poem is capable of growth: growth in time, growth in space, growth in culture, growth in language; and criticism is its growth.
“Tradition and Change in the Theory of Criticism” (1969), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Trash
One can only study verbal trash in a spirit of profound detachment, seeing it not as the latest thing in literary fashion but as part of a continuing process.
“Comment” (1961), Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature (2010), CW, 29.
Travel
A technological revolution makes the world more uniform: one cannot take off in a jet plane and expect a radically different way of life in the place where the plane lands.
“The Meeting of Past and Future in William Morris” (1982), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
It seems to me that the notion of “travel” in either time or space, the central assumption of science fiction, is a false metaphor derived from the quest-theme of literature.
Entry, Notes 52 (1982–90), 982, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
It is a type of irony familiar in the modern world that in most respects it is easier to get from Toronto to Moscow or Tokyo than to get to Moosonee, at the other end of the province.
“Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784–1984” (1984), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Treason
In our day the word “treason,” almost without our realizing it, has joined the word “heresy” as a word that could once intimidate, but is now only a Hallowe’en mask.
“The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Trinity
Power, wisdom and love are three persons in one substance.
Entry, Notes 53 (1989–90), 34, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
A God who is traditionally three persons in one substance confronts man, who is three substances in one person.
Entry, Notebook 15 (1970s), 6, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Tristram Shandy
Tristram Shandy was my favourite novel at the age of sixteen, though I didn’t know why. I know now: it’s the story of an author trying to get born.
“Notes for ‘Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility’” (1989), 44, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
Trojan War
Even if there was a Trojan war, everything Homer says about it is legend, not history.
Entry, Notebook 21 (1969–76), 366, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Truisms
The truism, the sententious axiom, the proverb, the topos or rhetorical commonplace, the irresistibly quotable phrase — such things are the very life-blood of poetry.
“New Directions from Old” (1960), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
Truisms are never true: the verbal expression of truth has to be sharply pointed to skewer an experience in the reader; but of course it doesn’t directly communicate experience. Nor does it necessarily represent anything more than a potential one.
Entry, Notebook 19 (1964–67), 290, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Truth
The negative form of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, which means something like “unforgetting,” suggests that at a certain point searching for the unknown gives way to trying to remove the impediments to seeing what is already there.
“Introduction” (1990), Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (2008), CW, 26.
The anxiety of society, when it urges the authority of a myth and the necessity of believing it, seems to be less to proclaim its truth than to prevent anyone from questioning it. It aims at consent, including the consent of silence, rather than conviction.
The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1975), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Truth, like the classic in literature, is whatever won’t go away, and keeps returning to confront us.
Entry, Notes 53 (1989–90), 213, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
Truth is always a beginning; it can never be the end of anything in this world, for there is no end it can come to except the mind in which it began.
“By Liberal Things” (1959), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
I sometimes think I am looking for the truth, in the sense of tremendous insights or intuitions that will illuminate the meaning of life — and of death. But of course I’m not: all I’m looking for is verbal formulations, to fit somewhere in some damn paper.
Entry, Notebook 19 (1964–67), 290, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
And the more we know, the less inclined we are to use metaphors about seizing or grasping or possessing truth. The truth that makes one free must be shared: it cannot be owned.
“To Come to Light” (1988), Northrop Frye on Religion (1999), CW, 4.
Truth of correspondence is really a technique of measurement, where the standard or criterion of measurement is outside the verbal structure.
“The Mythical Approach to Creation” (1985), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Greek critics distinguished verbal structures as true, false, and plastic, or more accurately plasmatic, the presenting of things as they conceivably could be.
The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1975), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Twins
If twins were really identical they would be the same person.
“Second Essay: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
Two Cultures
The editor of Shakespeare and the chemist live in different scholarly worlds, and proposals to make the humanist memorize the second law of thermodynamics and the scientist a speech from Macbeth will not bring them together. What brings them together is social, not intellectual, the fact that they are both citizens of their society with a common stake in that society.
“The Instruments of Mental Production” (1966), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Typology
Typology is a figure of speech that moves in time: the type exists in the past and the antitype in the present, or the type exists in the present and the antitype in the future.
“Typology I,” The Great Code (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (2006), CW, 19.
How do you know the Old Testament is true? Because it’s fulfilled in the New Testament. How do you know that the New Testament is true? Because it fulfils the prophecies of the Old Testament.
“Northrop Frye in Conversation” (1989), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
… there’s hardly a passage in the New Testament — I suspect that there is not a single passage in the New Testament — that is not related in this type-antitype manner to something in the Old Testament.
“Symbolism in the Bible” (1981–82), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
It means that the Biblical religions have a diachronic mythology, to use that term, which moves in time and has an historical dimension, whereas the pagan mythologies are synchronic: they deal with elements in nature that recur cyclically but are the same thing every time.
“The Meaning of Recreation: Humanism in Society” (1979), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
To use fairly familiar terms in a slightly different context, Biblical mythology is diachronic, pagan mythology synchronic.
Creation and Recreation (1980), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
The archetype of all that is in the Bible, at least in the Christian Bible, where the [N]ew Testament’s conception of the Old is, from the point of view of Judaism, a preposterous and perverse misunderstanding.
“The Meaning of Recreation: Humanism in Society” (1979), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Tyranny
The kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication.
“The Primary Necessities of Existence” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The unconditioned will even of a majority could bring about as great a tyranny as the unconditioned will of a single ruler.
“The Ideal of Democracy” (1950), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
Tyrants
It is significant that our symbolic term for a tyrant is “dictator”: that is, an uninterrupted speaker.
“Communications” (1970), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
The Kurtz of Heart of Darkness is a particularly notable example, as he is the prototype of all the tyrant figures who have made the twentieth century perhaps the ghastliest in history.
“Fourth Variation: The Furnace,” discussing the theme of “the placing of evil in a position of supreme social power,” Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (1990), CW, 26.
The tyrant is the man who narrows the scope of life, in other words creates a hell out of human life, agent of an anti-resurrection.
Entry, Notebook 44 (1986–91), 217, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.