The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Northrop Frye
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intention to the creative powers beneath consciousness, and we do not get closer to the author’s meaning by getting closer to the book’s meaning. The greater the book, the more obvious it is that the author’s consciousness merely held the nozzle of the hose, so to speak.
“Don Quixote” (1949), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
The formal principles of the arts are concealed inside us somewhere.
Entry, Notebook 20 (after 1965), 15, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
It is important that the limits of art seem to lie somewhere between pure dream & pure reality.
Entry, Notebook 38 (1952–55), 56, Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism” (2007), CW, 23.
Through such an analysis we may come to realize that the two essential facts about a work of art, that it is contemporary with its own time and that it is contemporary with ours, are not opposed but complementary facts.
“First Essay: Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
It speaks with authority, but not the familiar authority of parental or social conditioning: there will always be, I expect, some mystery about the real source of its authority.
“The View from Here” (1980), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Art proves the inadequacy of abstract and rational ideas by the rule that examples and illustrations are more powerful than doctrines or precepts.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
The function of art is to awaken faith by making us aware of the imaginative world concealed within us.
Entry, Notebook 21 (1969–76), 572, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
And the greater the work of art, the more completely it reveals the gigantic myth which is the vision of this world as God sees it, the outlines of that vision being creation, fall, redemption, and apocalypse.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
In short, works of art constituted for him what they have always been since Palaeolithic times, a focus of meditation, a means of concentrating consciousness.
“The View from Here” (1980), referring to William Blake, Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
All art, even the greatest, is flawed, and our total response to it is bound to include a certain critical detachment.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
The total form of art, so to speak, is a world whose content is nature but whose form is human; hence when it “imitates” nature it assimilates nature to human forms.
“Myth, Fiction, and Displacement” (1961), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
The sources of art are enthusiasm and inspiration: if society mocks and derides these, it is society that is mad, not the artist, no matter what excesses the latter may commit.…
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world.
Entry, Notebook 27 (1986), 399, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
Art, according to Plato, is a dream for awakened minds, a work of imagination withdrawn from ordinary life, dominated by the same forces that dominate the dream, and yet giving us a perspective and dimension on reality that we don’t get from any other approach to reality.
“The Keys to Dreamland,” The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
We have as great art as humanity can ever produce with us now.
“Humanities in a New World” (1958), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
In art we learn as the child learns, through the concrete illustration of stories and pictures, and without that childlike desire to listen to stories and see pictures art could not exist.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
It is difficult to see things that move quickly and are far away: in the world of time and space, therefore, all things are more or less blurred. Art sees its images as permanent living forms outside time and space.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
You can’t “substitute art for religion” without making art include religion, & so recovering it from the individual or ego-centric sphere. That’s really what I’m trying to do.
Entry, Notebook 3 (1946–48), 128, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
Commercial art is not only monotonous but also prudish, ready to give way to any kind of pressure in order to please every kind of superstition and immaturity.
“The Church and Modern Culture” (1950), Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003), CW, 11.
… the idea I got from Pynchon: that art is a form of creative paranoia, which counteracts the real paranoia that starts wars and buggers nature.
Entry, Notebook 44 (1986–91), 114, referring to the novelist Thomas Pynchon, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
I’ve been saying that art drives a wedge between being & not-being. Wonder if it also drives a wedge between life & death. By death I mean not simple extinction, but shadow-life, Hades, the world we perhaps enter in dreams.
Entry, Notebook 19 (1964–67), 2, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Art, then, owes its existence to man’s dissatisfaction with nature and his desire to transform the physical world into a human one.
“Humanities in a New World” (1958), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
What does improve in the arts is the comprehension of them, and the refining of society which results from it.
“Tentative Conclusion” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
Art is not an escape from reality but a vision of the world in its human form.
“The Primary Necessities of Existence” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
A work of art is an effort at imaginative communication: if it succeeds in being that, it becomes the focus of a community. The critic is there, not so much to explain the poet, as to translate literature into a continuous dialogue with society.
“The Responsibilities of the Critic” (1976), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
Art, Canadian
I am a Canadian intellectual, and therefore (in Canada it is a therefore) I am a cultural regionalist, but the extent to which Canadian culture can grow out of the Canadian soil I realize in advance to be an exceedingly limited one.
“Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts” (1966), “The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975 (2009), CW, 27.
Still,