Northrop Frye (1912 – 1991)
Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Man is born lost in a forest. If he is obsessesd by the thereness of the forest, he stays lost and goes in circles; if he assumes the forest is not there, he keeps bumping into trees. The wise man looks for the invisible line between the "is" and the "is not" which is the way through. The street in the city, the highway in the desert, the pathway of the planets through the labyrinth of the stars, are parallel forms. (1:111)
A purely individualized myth is an obsession, sometimes a psychosis. A purely socialized myth is an ideology, which sooner or later also becomes obsessive or psychotic. A myth that has either the direct current of transcendence or the alternating current of imagination rises clear of this grisly antithesis. (2:716)
One should have bigger & better conversions everyday, like a mechanized phoenix. (21.495)
Myth does not improve with the growth of society or technology, much less become abolished by them.
In imaginative thought there is no real knowledge of anything but similarities (ultimately identities): knowledge of differences is merely a transition to a new knowledge of similarities.
The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology. (21.101)
You can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word.
The mark of a great writer: who sees his own time, but with a detachment that makes him communicable to other ages. (2:579)
We find rhetorical situations everywhere in life, and only our imaginations can get us out of them.
One of the major activities of art consists in sharpening the edge of platitudes to make them enter the soul as realities.
Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.
I give the impression of elusiveness sometimes, and rightly, because I really do have an inner chamber in my temple I'm not mature enough to open. (2:618)
Writers don't seem to benefit much by the advance of science, although they thrive on superstitions of all kinds.
The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent professional men than I. I had genius. No one else in the field known to me had quite that.
I have never had the sort of experience the mystics talk about, never felt a revelation of reality through or beyond nature, never felt like Adam in Paradise, never felt, in direct experience, that the world is wholly other than it seems...The nearest I have come to such experiences are glimpses of my own creative powers...and these are moments or intervals of inspiration rather than vision. I’m not sure that I want it unless I can have clarity about other things with it. (p. 60–1)
What’s transcendental in Blake is not the statically geometrical, but the sense of arrested energy: the wriggling vines & snakes, flames & the like...It’s an expression of the belief that every object is an event.
If you haven't got an excremental vision you have no business setting up as a major satirist. (2:578-9)
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. (1:73)
A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature.