The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Northrop Frye
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Views” (1980s), 17, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
If I were to be asked what my definition of a classic was, I would say it was a work that won’t go away. It just stands in front of you until you deal with it. It’s the angel that every Jacob has to wrestle with.
“Canadian Energies: Dialogues on Creativity” (1980), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
What we call classics are works of literature that show an ability to communicate with other ages over the widest barriers of time, space, and language.
“The Expanding World of Metaphor” (1984), “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991 (2006), CW, 18.
The original writer is the person who returns to origins. The man who produces the imperishable classic is not a man with a new story but a man who tells one of the world’s great stories again and tells it better.
“Music in My Life” (1985), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
What we call a “classic” in literature is often a literary work so complex that understanding the “structure” becomes an indefinite and tentative sequence of responses.
“The Mythical Approach to Creation” (1985), Northrop Frye on Religion (2000), CW, 4.
Literature revolves around certain classics or models because it is really revolving around certain structural principles which those classics embody.
“The Developing Imagination” (1962), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
This coincides with a feeling we have all had: that the study of mediocre works of art remains a random and peripheral form of critical experience, whereas the profound masterpiece draws us to a point at which we seem to see an enormous number of converging patterns of significance.
“Polemical Introduction” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
Classics, Greek & Roman
… Classical mythology became purely poetic after its oracles had ceased.
“Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” (1957), Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006), CW, 22.
The first thing to be laid on top of a Biblical training, in my opinion, is Classical mythology, which gives us the same kind of imaginative framework, of a more fragmentary kind. Here again there are all sorts of incidental or secondary reasons for the study: the literatures of all modern Western languages are so full of Classical myths that one hardly knows what’s going on without some training in them. But again, the primary reason is the shape of the mythology. The Classical myths give us, much more clearly than the Bible, the main episodes of the central myth of the hero whose mysterious birth, triumph and marriage, death and betrayal and eventual rebirth follow the rhythm of the sun and the seasons.
The Educated Imagination (1963), “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963 (2006), CW, 21.
Clichés
Belief in clichés and catchwords and slogans is an automatic response which saves the time and trouble of thinking, and this kind of misplaced mechanism is sinister and dangerous. So is dealing with the news of the day in the categories of a bad movie, which is an automatic form of retreat from the world, like taking a tranquillizer pill.
“Push-Button Gadgets May Help — But the Teacher Seems Here to Stay” (1960), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education (2001), CW, 7.
Clothes
Glanced over a book on nudism. I don’t see the point myself: I don’t wear clothes out of modesty. I wear them because they have pockets.
Entry, 20 Jul. 1942, 26, The Diaries of Northrop Frye: 1942–1955 (2001), CW, 8.
Coincidence
In ordinary life a coincidence is a piece of design for which we can find no practical use.
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.
Cold War
The influence of Canada on the United States is almost impossible to describe in words: it’s subjective to the verge of being mystical. But simply to have so powerful an insulating force separating it from the Soviet Union had a good deal to do with the fact that the Cold War stayed cold.
“Notes for ‘Levels of Cultural Identity’” (1989), 55, Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007), CW, 25.
The language of American democracy and the language of Russian Marxism, for example, get so self-enclosed and so solipsistic that neither can really get outside itself to reach at the other. That seems to me to be perhaps the greatest central danger society faces today.
“The Only Genuine Revolution” (1969), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
I think that if I believed in anything like reincarnation I would feel that maybe I was commissioned to write Coleridge’s book on the Logos which he kept hugging to his bosom in the form of fifty-seven notebooks that a colleague of mine has tried to edit.
“Archetype and History” (1986), responding to the suggestion that his approach was “probably best called Coleridgean” and referring to the scholar Kathleen Coburn, Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
In continuous prose, even at his best, he is, as Chesterton says of Shaw, long-winded because he is quick-witted: he thinks of all the qualifications of his idea at once, hence his contemporary reputation for murkiness.
“Long Sequacious Notes” (1953), Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (2005), CW, 17.
Collaboration
It has been proved all through the history of drama that the word “collaborator” does not have to be used in its wartime sense of traitor, and that collaboration often, in fact usually, creates a distinct and unified personality.
“A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance: II, Making Nature Afraid” (1963), Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance (2010), CW, 28.
Collage
There is, perhaps, an element of stunt or even a put-on about a good many experimental developments in our time, and yet we are in an age of collage: an age where we’re more or less committed to the unexpected juxtaposition.
“Poets of Canada: 1920 to the Present” (1971), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Colonial Williamsburg
The kind of preservation that we have in Williamsburg and similar large-scale open museums is in a sense almost antihistorical: it shows us, not life in time as a continuous process, but life arrested at a certain point, in a sort of semi-permanent drama. There is nothing wrong with this, but it gives us a cross-section of history, a world confronting us rather than preceding us.
“Canada: New World Without Revolution” (1975), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Colonialism
In culture, as in religion and politics, the homeland is the source of authority, and the first duty of a colonial culture is to respond to it.
“Culture as Interpenetration” (1982), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
Canada may very well be the only genuine colony left in the world. The degree of economic and to some extent political penetration by the United States is of course very great, and the reasons for it are quite obvious.
“Canadian and American Values” (1988), Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
The imperial and the regional