Ulysses
I read Ulysses before most Canadian students did, because another Victoria professor smuggled in a copy for me from the States after the ban was lifted there.
“Autopsy on an Old Grad’s Grievance” (1961), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Unconscious
The mystique of the unconscious has bedevilled myth critics. If you find fragments of a huge myth in primitive times, the process that put it all together is most likely to be in Shakespeare or Wagner or someone producing a waking dream for conscious minds.…
Entry, Notebook 44 (1986–91), 136, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
Undergraduates
Undergraduates are parts of which the university is the whole; after graduation they are individuals again, and their university experiences have become a part of them.
“To Come to Light” (1988), Northrop Frye on Religion (1999), CW, 4.
Understanding
We project things we don’t understand on God, and hope that he does.
Entry, Notebook 30c: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (after 1979), 4, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
… all understanding is in a sense metaphorical understanding.
“The Transferability of Literary Concepts” (1955), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
Unemployment
Perhaps we could develop social services to the point where all the people thrown out of work by automation could be made into a new aristocracy, with nothing to do except go on luxury cruises.
“Leisure and Boredom” (1963), Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989: Unpublished Papers (2002), CW, 10.
Unidentified Flying Objects
Just as you have movies like Star Wars that talk about distant galaxies as being united by beings that look remarkably like Hollywood actors, so you have myths about unidentified flying objects that, again, tend to indicate that there is something way out there which is like ourselves.
“Between Paradise and Apocalypse” (1978), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Uniqueness
First, uniqueness is not in itself worth studying, the world’s worst poem being as unique as the best; second, uniqueness is unknowable. We cannot know the literary work except in terms of what is typical.
Entry, Notebook 11f (1969–70), 236, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
United Church
Protestantism is done for here, unless it listens to a few prophets. I don’t want a Church of any kind, but if, say, a student of mine were quavering over conversion to Catholicism, I’d like to be able to point to something better than a committee of temperance cranks, which is about all the United Church is now.
Entry, 3 Jan. 1949, 27, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Personally, I rather like the United Church because it contains a sort of church-destroying principle within itself, having already destroyed three.
Entry, 29 Jan. 1949, 133, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
This is an inevitable product of Canadianism — its counterpart would be inconceivable in the U.S.A. — and it is representative of all that Canada means in history — in its good-nature, in its tolerance, in its conscientiousness, in its vague and sentimental combination of Socialism, Imperialism and Nationalism all at once — a very appealing mixture, unpalatable though each individual constituent may be — above all in its determination to apply old traditions to new surroundings which makes Canada sturdier than England and more coherent in its perspective than the United States.
“NF to HK,” 25 Aug. 1932, The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939 (1996), CW, 1.
United Nations
The conception of United Civilizations, like the conception of United Nations, is pretty, but it isn’t the real thing.
“Toynbee and Spengler” (1947), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
United States of America
In the beginning the Americans created America, and America is the beginning of the world. That is, it is the oldest country in the world: no other nation’s history goes back so far with less social metamorphosis. Through all the anxieties and doubts of recent years one can still hear the confident tones of its Book of Genesis: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
“Conclusion to Literary History of Canada” (1965), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, with their imperturbable common sense, are thought of, in the popular consciousness, more as deceased contemporaries than as ancestors living among different cultural referents. The past is thus assimilated to the present.…
“Conclusion to Literary History of Canada” (1965), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
The thirteen colonies revolted in the eighteenth century, but they fought a Civil War a century later over the issue of whether there should be any further revolutions or separations.
“Symbolism in the Bible” (1981–82), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
If we are looking for imaginative exuberance in American life, we shall find it not in its fiction but in its advertising; not in Broadway drama but in Broadway skyscrapers; not in the good movies but in the vista-visioned and technicoloured silly ones.
“Preface to an Uncollected Anthology” (1956), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
I do not see how America can find its identity, much less avoid chaos, unless a massive citizens’ resistance develops which is opposed to exploitation and imperialism on the one hand, and to jack-booted radicalism on the other. It would not be a new movement, but simply the will of the people, the people as a genuine society strong enough to contain and dissolve all mobs.
“America: True or False?” (1969), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
United States & Canada
The United States became articulate in the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, and it’s had a fixation on the eighteenth century ever since. The Constitution begins by saying, “We hold these facts to be self-evident.” Canada is a country where nothing has ever been self-evident and it didn’t have an eighteenth century at all. The English and the French spent the eighteen century battering down each other’s forts. Canada took shape in the Baroque, aggressive seventeenth century and took new shape in the Romantic, aggressive nineteenth.
“Canadian Voices” (1975), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Perhaps it is not too presumptuous to say, although few non-Canadians would understand what was meant, that the American way of life is slowly becoming Canadianized.
“Conclusion to Literary History of Canada” (1965), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Unity
The need to unify, we suggested, is an indication of the finiteness of the human mind, unity and the finite being aspects of the same thing.
“Language II,” The Great Code (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (2006), CW, 19.
Unity means something which can comprise a great variety of opinions and views. Unity means something which can include dissension, conflicting ideas and opposition. Uniformity means everybody thinking alike or saying that they think alike.
“Education and the Rejection of Reality” (1971), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Universals
The universal we reach ought to include within it the individuality with which we started: it should be a supreme Self which gives each self its identity.
“T.S. Eliot” (1963), Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature (2010), CW, 29.
Universe
To the imagination, the universe has always presented the appearance of a middle world, with a second world above it and a third one below it.
“First Variation: The Mountain,” Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (2008), CW, 26.
I have spoken of a vision of literature, because I think that there is a literary universe, which, like every other universe, is unbounded and finite. The variety of individual literary works may be infinite; the total body of what can be produced as literature is not.
“Auguries of Experience” (1987), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.
“Introduction,” The Great Code (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (2006), CW, 19.
The mythological universe is not an ordered hierarchy but an interpenetrating world, where every unit of verbal experience is a monad reflecting all the others.
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.
The etymology of “universe” suggests that everything turns around a centre, that centre being the personal centre that calls it a universe.
Entry, Notebook 50 (1987–90), 86, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
In the universe of nature, there is no such thing as up or down; in the mythological universe, there is nothing else.
“Symbolism in the Bible” (1981–82), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Universities
The universities alone preserve the secret of what is really happening.
“On Education III” (mid-1970s), 17, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
The hub of the university has always been, and must remain, a community where life can be experienced with greater intensity than anywhere else. The everyday world which comes to us through newspapers and television is not real life but a dissolving phantasmagoria.
“The Primary Necessities of Existence” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
One of the things the university stands for is to give its students some sense of historical imagination, and to convince them that a culture without a memory is senile, just as an individual without a memory is.
“Back to the Garden” (1982), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The university is where you go to learn about an authority that is not externally applied. It doesn’t tell you to do this or that.
“Northrop Frye in Conversation” (1989), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
In particular, the university seems to me to come closer than any other human institution to defining the community of spiritual authority.
“The Problem of Spiritual Authority in the Nineteenth Century” (1964), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
Well, I think that the university stands for a certain attitude to society, which is an attitude of detachment without withdrawal.
“The Scholar in Society” (1983), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The university, then, is the source of free authority in society, not as an institution, but as a place where the appeal to reason, experiment, evidence, and imagination is continuously going on.
“The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract” (1968), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The university informs the world, and is not informed by it.
“The Study of English in Canada” (1957), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
It is logical to link the university and culture: in fact it could almost be said that the university today is to culture what the church is to religion: the social institution that makes it possible. It teaches the culture of the past, and it tries to build up an educated public for the culture of the present.
“Culture and the National Will” (1957), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
The university is thus a kind of social laboratory in which the most revolutionary conceptions may be valuable, not necessarily as programmes for action, but as insights into the structure of society, nature, or the human mind.
“The Critical Discipline” (1960), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
I have never lost the sense that the university is very near the centre of the idea of human community, and that our society stands or falls with it.
“Reminiscences” (1977), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The university is a community in which the intellect and the imagination have a continuously functional place, and so gives us a sense of what human life could be like if these qualities were always functional in it.
“The View from Here” (1980), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
A big modern university could almost be defined as whatever group of professional schools in one town happens to be held together by a faculty of arts.
“Humanities in a New World” (1958), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The university is the powerhouse of civilization, and the centre of the university has to correspond to the actual centres of human knowledge.
“Humanities in a New World” (1958), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The university preserves the memory of mankind, of mature man as distinct from the childishness immersed in the dissolving present or the senility immersed in the past.
“By Liberal Things” (1959), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The university can best fulfil its revolutionary function by digging in its heels and doing its traditional job in its traditionally retrograde, obscurantist, and reactionary way.
“The Critical Discipline” (1960), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The university is perhaps the most coherent institution that I can think of in society, partly because it, in a sense, pretends to less than either religion or law.
“The Scholar in Society” (1983), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Wherever there is respect for the artist’s vision, the scientist’s detachment, the teacher’s learning and patience, the child’s questioning, there the university is at work in the world.
“By Liberal Things” (1959), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The university is the other pole of society: it represents the freedom which is the only genuine product of social concern.
“Convocation Address, York University” (1969), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
One doesn’t realize the immense social prestige of the university until one gets a little outside it.
Entry, 5 Sep. 1942, 97, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Universities & Students
Society consists largely of adolescents and arrested adolescents, and departments of education who have to arrange high-school curricula are well aware of the fact. As a rule a student has to get to university before he can make contact with the culture of his own time.
“Culture and the National Will” (1957), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
In moments of depression one feels that the majority of university students have already been conditioned beyond the point at which the university can affect them at all.
“The Critical Discipline” (1960), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
I think the university will never do its job in society until a great mass of people of all ages, from thirty to ninety, feel they can come and get their lives revitalized. The process is somewhat like a religious retreat, except that it would be a much more permanent thing because being involved in some form of cultural activity is what really makes one a human being.
“The Primary Necessities of Existence” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Undergraduates usually speak of the university as “school,” and expect to be taught, but it is part of the function of a university to disappoint them, to insist on treating them as adults.
“The Study of English in Canada” (1957), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
In such a society it would be appropriate that universities should no longer be almost wholly concerned, as teaching institutions, with young people in the few lucid intervals that occur during four years of the mating season, but would make a place also for adults who could keep dropping into the university at various periods of their lives as an intellectual retreat.
“The Instruments of Mental Production” (1966), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The powers of the awakened mind are not children’s toys, and the university cannot guarantee that anything it offers will be harmless.
“By Liberal Things” (1959), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
A university cannot be first-rate unless intellect, passion for ideas, long hours of work, and devotion to one’s course are socially acceptable to the student body. If the vulgar attitudes to the longhair or the bookworm are repeated there, we have no university, but only a fresh air camp for the overprivileged.
Principal’s Installation Address” (1959), “By Liberal Things” (1959), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
I’ve always been impressed by the loyalty and affection of so large a proportion of the alumni to the place where they took their first degree.
“The Scholar in Society” (1983), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The larger university is one you can never leave.
“To the Class of ’62 at Queen’s” (1962), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The student entering the university is the one who is embarking on an encounter with real life. He is descending into the engine room of society, seeing the machinery of the human intellect and the human imagination driving all the great power structures around him. In studying the liberal arts, he studies the permanent form of human society and begins to understand where the causes are that make society change so rapidly and seem so unpredictable.
“The Primary Necessities of Existence” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Life is lived here in a way which makes such words as culture and civilization mean something. So it’s easier to see what human life could be like if intelligence and awareness were constantly being used.
“The Chancellor’s Message” (1979), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The life of an undergraduate student is a very difficult one, because university students are socially and physically adults, while intellectually they are children. It is because they are willing to admit the immaturity of their minds that they come to college.
“Education — Protection against Futility” (1964), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
As you leave the University of British Columbia, what you are being invited to join is the lower-case university, the university of the world, as I should call it, which represents the social values that this institution exists for.
“Convocation Address, University of British Columbia” (1963), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Universities, Canadian
Without the universities, Canada would simply become again what it was at first: the hewer of wood and drawer of water for Americans.
“Making the Revolutionary Act Now” (1983), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
If Canadian universities are underfunded so badly that they can no longer function effectively, Canada would disappear overnight from modern history and become again what it was at first, a blank area of natural resources to be exploited by more advanced countries. This is not empty rhetoric: it is a verifiable fact, though I should not care to become known as the person who verified it.
“The Authority of Learning” (1984), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
And just as Canadians discovered, long before our neighbours did, that it was possible to elect a Roman Catholic to the highest office without becoming annexed to the Vatican, so we have discovered that it is possible for universities to receive federal aid without having to teach their courses from government directives.
“John George Diefenbaker” (1961), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
University of Toronto
And when I was inaugurated as Chancellor of Victoria I said there were two things that made Toronto a world-class university: one was the Honour Course and the other was the federated college system, and we’ve destroyed both. But that speech was never reprinted anywhere.
“Towards an Oral History of the University of Toronto” (1982), referring to four-year rather than three-year courses, etc., Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
When the Honour Course was scrapped in a fit of hysteria in the 1960s it was an irrevocable disaster, and Toronto will never be in the foreseeable future as distinguished a university in its arts and science teaching as it was then.
“A Fearful Symmetry” (1981), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
I remain obstinately of the opinion that the Honour Course, with all its rigidity and built-in administrative absurdities, gave the best undergraduate training available on the North American continent, and the best teacher training for the instructor as well.
“The Beginning of the Word” (1980), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
The university belongs to its society, and the notion of autonomy of the university is an illusion. It is an illusion which it would be hard to maintain on the campus of the University of Toronto, situated as it is between the Parliament Buildings on one side and the educational Pentagon on the other, like Samson between the pillars of a Philistine temple.
“The Definition of a University” (1970), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Uranium
The people who make fortunes out of uranium stocks owe their wealth and social prestige to an absent-minded professor, badly in need of a haircut, who scribbled down e=mc2 on a piece of paper fifty years ago.
“Humanities in a New World” (1958), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Utopia
In a world like ours a limited Utopia in a restricted or enclosed space is an empty fantasy: Utopia must be a world-wide transformation of the whole social order or it is nothing.
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 asked the two stock questions about the book and got the two stock answers. How many would rather live in Utopia than in Henry VIII’s England? Every one. How many would rather live in Utopia than in twentieth-century Canada? Not one. That established the essential points about the book, first, that Utopias present a more coherent form of social life than history does, and second, that no normal human being wants to live in anyone else’s Utopia.
“Natural and Revealed Communities” (1987), teaching Thomas More’s work Utopia in the 1930s, Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
The Utopia, the effort at social imagination, is an area in which specialized disciplines can meet and interpenetrate with a mutual respect for each other, concerned with clarifying their common social context.
“Varieties of Literary Utopias” (1965), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
The real Utopia is an individual goal, of which the disciplined society is an allegory. The end of commitment and engagement is the community: the logical end of detachment is the individual.
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.
The question, “Where is Utopia?” is the same as the question, “Where is nowhere?” and the only answer to that question is “Here.”
“Varieties of Literary Utopias” (1965), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
… probably it’s the germ of Utopia: nowhere becoming everywhere.
Entry, Notebook 46 (1980s–90), 37, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 6.
The Utopia is a vision of the rational form of society, & it is best seen, not as an end, but as an informing principle. It’s the objective aspect of what in subjective terms is ideal education.
Entry, Notebook 19 (1964–67), 88, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.