The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Northrop Frye
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“Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
… The Great Code tried to show, by realizing that the Bible’s roots are not in doctrine, which is a structure of secondary concern, nor in history, which is the record of it, but in the creative imagination, which from palaeolithic times has been the central force driving humanity from mere survival into life more abundantly.
“Words with Power: Draft Introduction” (before 1990), 6, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
Bible as Source of Symbolism
The Bible to Blake was really the Magna Carta of the human imagination.
“William Blake: Prophet of the New Age” (1987), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
In our culture, the Bible is the work which provides the fundamental mythical context for the metaphorical functions of language, for the stories which we tell ourselves. The Bible helps us to rediscover ourselves, to quest for and discover our individual and collective identities.
“Identity and Myth” (1979), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The Bible is therefore the archetype of Western culture, and the Bible, with its derivatives, provides the basis for most of our major art: for Dante, Milton, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bach, the great cathedrals, and so on.
“Part One: The Argument,” Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947, 2004), CW, 14.
In other words, it’s the myth of the Bible that should be the basis of literary training, its imaginative survey of the human situation which is so broad and comprehensive that everything else finds its place inside it.
“Verticals of Adam,” The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
To grow up in ignorance of what is in the Bible or Homer is as crippling to the imagination as being deprived of the multiplication table.
“The Developing Imagination” (1962), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
A student of English literature who doesn’t know the Bible doesn’t know what is going on in English literature.
“Reconsidering Levels of Meaning” (1979), Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
My chairman said the only thing to do was to draft a course in the English Bible and teach it. He said, “How do you expect to teach Milton to students who don’t know a Philistine from a Pharisee?”
I said, “Perhaps in the kind of society they are going into, that particular distinction won’t be important to them.” But I didn’t often talk like that to my chairman, except in moments of stress, so I drafted the course and I’m still teaching it.
“The Meaning of Recreation: Humanism in Society” (1979), on teaching Milton to undergraduates under department chairman John Robins in the late 1930s, Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
… the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it.
“Verticals of Adam,” The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
Bible as Unity
In our culture the central sacred book is the Christian Bible, which is also probably the most systematically constructed sacred book in the world.
“Fourth Essay: Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
Everything that could possibly go wrong with a book has gone wrong with the Bible at some stage or other in its history. So the Bible, therefore, is a unity which has passed beyond unity.
“Symbolism in the Bible” (1981–82), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
This poetic unity is there: how it got there will doubtless always be something of a mystery. It is not a product of history, or authorship, or editing, or of any such conception as “inspiration,” a word which may assert something but explains nothing. We can only call it a mystery of canonicity, and let it go for the time being, holding in the meantime to our central principle: the Bible is not a work of literature, but its literal meaning is its mythical and metaphorical meaning.
“Spirit and Symbol,” Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (2008), CW, 26.
The curious paradox in the construction of the Bible. It’s all bits & pieces, a mosaic of discontinuous concerned prose; yet it’s a unity too. Inspiration seems to apply to the greatest unity & the greatest editorial diversity. There’s one spirit, obviously, but a vast number of minds. So while the shape & unity of the whole canon is important, we shouldn’t reduce the variety to unity, but see them both as interpenetrating.
Entry, Notebook 21 (1969–76), 259, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
The New Testament has the same paradoxical relation to the Old that a preface has to a book: it’s written later, but belongs logically earlier (“before Abraham was, I am”).
Entry, Notes 54-5 (1976), 41, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
There isn’t a page of the Bible where the editing process is not utterly obvious.
“Symbolism in the Bible” (1981–82), Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (2003), CW, 13.
The Bible is, first of all — to use a word no less accurate for being a fashionable term — a mosaic: a pattern of commandments, aphorisms, epigrams, proverbs, parables, riddles, pericopes, parallel couplets, formulaic phrases, folk tales, oracles, epiphanies, Gattungen, Loggia, bits of occasional verse, marginal glosses, legends, snippets from historical documents, laws, letters, sermons, hymns, ecstatic visions, rituals, fables, genealogical lists, and so on almost indefinitely.
“Language II,” The Great Code (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (2006), CW, 19.
… if the Bible is to be regarded as “inspired” in any sense, sacred or secular, the editing and conflating and redacting and splicing and glossing and expurgating processes all have to be taken as inspired too.
“Language II,” The Great Code (1982), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (2006), CW, 19.
It is historically impossible that the Bible could have achieved such a unity of structure and imagery, over such a variety of periods and authors. But as the unity is there, so much the worse for history.
Entry, Notebook 44 (1986–91), 512, Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2000), CW, 5.
Yes, it’s utterly impossible to understand a word of the New Testament without having the Old.
“The Great Teacher” (1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Bilingualism
I suppose no reasonable Canadian denies the extraordinary advantages of a bilingual culture, despite all the complaints one may hear in English Canada about “shoving all that French down our throats,” though those who use such phrases are unlikely to have much French in their throats.
“Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington” (1989), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Biography
The first and most striking unit of poetry larger than the individual poem is the total work of the man who wrote the poem.