Frye and Pattern

Abstract

Frye and Pattern John Ayre (bio) Northrop Frye was surprised in the mid-1940s when a graduate student, poet George Johnston, drew attention to a William Blake quotation about his own contemporaries in art that Frye had somehow missed: "Their art is to lose form; [Blake's] art is to find form, and to keep it" (Keynes 573). Although this was a call for Frye's own life's work, it's obvious from many entries in his diaries and notebooks that for Frye the task of finding and keeping form was a lot easier said than done. Despite the apparent ease of his diagrammatic approach, his formulations were actually hard won and sometimes abandoned before they ever met the light of day. While we well know Frye for his Circle of Stories in Anatomy of Criticism, few know about his attempt to unite literature with the musical concept of the Circle of Fifths. While he did suggest it rather innocuously in the Anatomy, he never confessed that he had actually worked out a complex diagram in a notebook (177; Collected Works 23.298; hereafter CW). For years he wrote voluminous notes on a mandala scheme divided into quadrants, each identified by classical gods Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus, only to discard it. This scheme was the basis of his "Third Book" notebooks, the ninth volume of the Collected Works, but Frye never actually wrote this third book. [End Page 9] Not surprisingly Frye recorded dreams of himself being trapped in confusing or locked-up structures. He even published a story "The Resurgent" in 1940 about the dissolving state of mind of an artist whose painting "sent your eye frantically scurrying all over the canvas in search of that missing clue that would bring the whole scheme together: you got into a panic when you couldn't find it and would start over with the same result. I think that even if a perfectly normal person looked at it long enough it would unsettle his brain" (CW 25.75). This kind of anxiety over form, if not turmoil, stayed with him. Later in life, Frye was haunted by a Melanesian story of passage to death he found in Rachel Levy's book, The Gate of Horn. A soul would approach a cave inhabited by a monster who lay a pattern out in the sand and then destroy half of it. The soul then had to reconstruct the pattern. If he were unable, he was devoured. In other words, one's survival depended on one's recognition of a culturally specific pattern. It was an allegory for Frye's task in life (CW 6.423, 802). Frye was likely the most pattern-oriented critic ever to work in English literature. It was in his bones. In adolescence he devised a scheme for writing eight symphonies and used the same plan for a series of eight novels. Each work had a different modality and purpose. As an undergraduate, he wrote an essay on fictional characters with a diagram of archetypal characters. Frye threw this essay out, but not before his mother copied out a version of the diagram. In his graduate studies in 1933, he included his first diagram with his essay on romanticism (CW 3.21). Not surprisingly, he wrote an essay on Lull's diagrammatic and mathematical approach to religion and philosophy. Lull had devised many schemes, and one seventeenth-century engraving inspired by his thinking shows Sophia (Wisdom) pointing to twenty-seven hieroglyphic keys "supposed to contain the whole of human imagination" (Roob 508). Surprisingly, in the essay on Lull, Frye displayed only modest interest in the arcane ideas he would later explore, "the endless threefold associations with the Trinity, the juggling with seven, and the kabbalistic fourfold symbolism based on the tetragrammaton" (CW 3.230). There were as well astrology, numerology, magic, and alchemy. What Frye seemed to be looking for was a "descent into hell and a rise through purgatory that we find all the mystics who have gone through what is called the dark night of the soul" (CW 3.231). In another essay he noted the one genuine katabasis of the Old Testament as the...