Northrop Frye (1912 – 1991)
Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
...there is something about time and space that is not real, and something about us that is. However man may have tumbled into this world of indefinite space, he does not belong to it at all. Real space for him is the eternal here; where we are is always the center of the universe, and the circumference of the universe, just as real time is the 'eternal Now' of our personal experience.
My greater simplicity came from a deeper level than the labyrinth of the brain. (1:61-2)
Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.
We are always in the place of beginning; there is no advance in infinity. (1:281)
The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the human imagination.
I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university...There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
I must have God on my own terms, because God on somebody else’s terms is an idol.
Give me a place to stand, and I will include the world. (19.333)
We read (experience) a text linearly, forgetting most of it while we read; then we study it as a simultaneous unit.
Even the biggest book is fragmentary: to finish anything, you have to cut your losses. Nobody every writes his dream book. (33.54)
The "flow of information," which is mostly misinformation, is actually a presentation of myths. And people are increasingly rejecting the prescribed myths & developing their own counter-myths.
Finnegans Wake is a kind of hypnagogic structure, words reverberating on themselves without pointing to objects...This may be the hallucinatory verbal world within which God speaks. (1:399)
The objective world is only “material”: it’s there, but it could be there in a great many different forms and aspects...Even here there [are] still possibilities: it can’t be just anything. But perhaps extracting a finite schema from the variety of mythologies, literatures, or religions might contribute something to the understanding of what some of these possibilities could be. The individual can’t create his own world, except in art or fantasy: society can only create a myth of concern. What fun if one could get just a peep at what some of the other worlds are that a new humanity could create–no, live in. (p. 287-8)
What if criticism is a science as well as an art? Not a "pure" or "exact" science, of course, but these phrases belong to a nineteenth-century cosmology which is no longer with us.
No human society is too primitive to have some kind of literature. The only thing is that primitive literature hasn't yet become distinguished from other aspects of life: it's still embedded in religion, magic and social ceremonies.
The Great Code was a silly and sloppy book. It was also a work of very great genius. The point is that genius is not enough. A book worthy of God and of Helen [Frye's wife] must do better than that. (1:160)
Education is a set of analogies to a genuinely human existence, of which the arts are the model. Merely human life is of course a demonic analogy or parody of genuinely human life.