Dear Readers and Subscribers,
The Notes to Literature Reading Series is back! In slightly adjusted form. In the run-up to September’s Ancient Greek Literature and Thought Seminar, I’ll send out bi-weekly posts featuring a primary extract (usually something I’ve been reading recently), together with a critical excerpt or concept that I think provides a good accompaniment. These may or may not be related to September's seminar. But they are all related to the seminar series.
This week our critical theme is the Apocalyptic, as theorised by Northrop Frye. Frye's ideas on the Apocalyptic develop in relation and in contradistinction to the Demonic: two archetypal literary modes he presents as central to the Western literary tradition. Both elude any real definition. They are, rather, schema: inherited structures of imagery and poetic thought. I’ve included a few suggestive paragraphs from The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Hopefully they are of some use. They should furnish you with an understanding of the apocalyptic, in terms of imagery, tone, theme, that is quite distinct from the common notion of catastrophic destruction. Should we want something to hold onto (in Frye's lucid but often labyrinthine prose), one line stands out: the apocalyptic is “a world of total metaphor, in which everything is potentially identical with everything else, as though it were all inside a single infinite body.” Its primary biblical source is the Book of Revelation.
The primary extract is very short. I’ve it taken from Thomas Bernhard’s first novel, Frost (1963), which presents the relationship between a young doctor and an eccentric painter as it unfolds somewhere in the Salzburg Slate Alps of Austria. The young man is undercover, sent to the region by the painter’s elder brother with instructions to report back on the former's well-being. In the extract, we find a very clear and conscious treatment of apocalyptic imagery and thought, with a distinct “modulation” of the demonic at the end. More broadly, it's a lyrical, anti-pastoral novel, that draws extensively upon the prophetic tradition — tonally closer to the Book of Ezekiel (particularly its first part) than the book of Revelations. Among other enjoyable strains, there's a demonic parody of the bildungsroman, caught and growing within an existential satire, by turns withering and hilarious. I recommend it for days in which you wish to stay in bed.
The Painter's Dream:
An odd dream, not one of the desperate dreams I usually have. The landscape of my dream kept changing, from white to green to gray to black, probably each time in the space of seconds. Nothing had the color we would have expected it to have. For instance the sky was green, the snow was black, the trees were blue… the meadows were as white as snow… It reminded me of certain contemporary paintings, even though the painters aren’t as radical, the painters are by no means as radical as my dream… it was really one of my most radical dreams. And so drastic, the landscape… the trees lofty, growing into endlessness, the pastures hard, the grass so hard that when the wind blew, it created a loud music, a music that seemed to be assembled from all sorts of different periods and styles. Suddenly, I was sitting in this landscape, in a meadow. The odd thing was that the people were the same colours as the landscape. I was the color of the meadow, then that of the sky, then the color of a tree, and finally I was the color of the mountains. And I was always all of the colours. My laughter caused a great commotion in the landscape. I don’t know why. This pretty irregular landscape, you know, it was as animated as any I’ve ever seen. A landscape of people. Because the people took on the colours of the landscape as I did myself, the only way of recognising them was by their voices, and it was only by my voice that they knew me. Such differentiated voices, you know, incredibly differentiated voices! Suddenly something horrible happened… my head swelled up, to such a degree that the landscape grew darker, and the people broke out in wailing, such terrible wailing as I have never heard. Wailing that was somehow commensurate with the landscape. I can’t say why. Since my head was suddenly so big and heavy, it started rolling down from the hill where I had been standing, down across the white pastures, the black snow — all the seasons here seemed to be simultaneous! — and crushed many of the blue trees and the people. I could hear that. Suddenly I noticed that everything in my wake was dead. Withered, crushed, dead. My big head lay in a dead wasteland. In darkness. It lay in that darkness until I awoke. How is it that my dream took such a horrible turn?” He asked me. The painter took his Pascal out of his left jacket pocket, and stowed it in his right. “It’s uncanny,” he said.
—— Thomas Bernhard, Frost (1963)
Northrop Frye on the Apocalyptic:
By an apocalypse I mean primarily the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body which, if not human, is closer to being human than to being inanimate. “The desire of Man being Infinite,” said Blake, “the possession is Infinite & himself Infinite.” If Blake is thought a prejudiced witness on this point, we may cite Hooker: “That there is somewhat higher than either of these two (sensual and intellectual perfection), no other proof doth need than the very process of man’s desire, which being natural should be frustrate, if there were not some farther thing wherein it might rest at the length contented, which in the former it cannot do.”
The study of literature takes us toward seeing poetry as the imitation of infinite social action and infinite human thought, the mind of a man who is all men, the universal creative word which is all words. About this man and word we can, speaking as critics, say only one thing ontologically: we have no reason to suppose either that they exist or that they do not exist. We can call them divine if by divine we mean the unlimited or projected human. But the critic, qua critic, has nothing to say for or against the affirmations that a religion makes out of these conceptions.
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We have, then, three organizations of myths and archetypal symbols in literature. First, there is undisplaced myth, generally concerned with gods or demons, which takes the form of two contrasting worlds of total metaphorical identification, one desirable and the other undesirable. These worlds are often identified with the existential heavens and hells of the religions contemporary with such literature. These two forms of metaphorical organization we call the apocalyptic and the demonic respectively. Second, we have the general tendency we have called romantic, the tendency to suggest implicit mythical patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience. Third, we have the tendency of “realism” (my distaste for this inept term is reflected in the quotation marks) to throw the emphasis on content and representation rather than on the shape of the story. Ironic literature begins with realism and tends toward myth, its mythical patterns being as a rule more suggestive of the demonic than of the apocalyptic, though sometimes it simply continues the romantic tradition of stylization. Hawthorne, Poe, Conrad, Hardy, and Virginia Woolf all provide examples.
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We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth, an abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic design, unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience. In terms of narrative, myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire. The gods enjoy beautiful women, fight one another with prodigious strength, comfort and assist man, or else watch his miseries from the height of their immortal freedom. The fact that myth operates at the top level of human desire does not mean that it necessarily presents its world as attained or attainable by human beings. In terms of meaning or dianoia, myth is the same world looked at as an area or field of activity, bearing in mind our principle that the meaning or pattern of poetry is a structure of imagery with conceptual implications.
The world of mythical imagery is usually represented by the conception of heaven or paradise in religion, and it is apocalyptic, in the sense of that word already explained, a world of total metaphor, in which everything is potentially identical with everything else, as though it were all inside a single infinite body.
-- The Anatomy of Criticism (1957)
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