The Role of Metaphor in the Good Life:
Northrop Frye, Cynthia Ozick
(Seminar for Humanities 101, Richard Keshen, Cape Breton University, March 4/2015)
A) Northrop Frye (1912-1991)
Born in Quebec, but grew up in Moncton. Went to University in Toronto, and taught his whole life at the University of Toronto. Connection to United Church and to the NDP. In spite of his large reputation, he resisted the pull of the United States’ Ivy League universities. Shared a culture with his students, he said, and this meant a great deal to him, and made him a better teacher. Attachment to Canadian Landscape, literature and painting. He “felt at home” in Canada. Sat on a number of important public commissions.
The Main Issue
(Passages from Frye’s book The Double Vision)
“Human beings are concerned beings, and it seems to me that there are two kinds of concern: primary and secondary. Primary concerns are such things as food, sex, property [i.e. “ownership” of what we produce or create], and freedom of movement; concerns we share with other animals on a physical level. Secondary concerns include our political, religious, and other ideological loyalties.” [that is, the broad theories we hold as communities, and which often distinguish one community from the other].
“All through history ideological concerns have taken precedence over primary ones. We want to live and love, but we go to war; we want freedom but depend on the exploiting of other people, of the environment, even of ourselves. In the twentieth century, with a pollution that threatens the air we breathe, and water to drink, it is obvious we cannot afford the supremacy of the ideological concerns any more.
“That is, primary concerns, for conscious human beings, must have a spiritual as well as a physical dimension. Freedom of movement is not simply the freedom to take a plane to Vancouver, it must include freedom of thought and criticism. Similarly, property should extend to scientific discovery and the production of poetry and music, sex should be a matter of love and companionship and not a frenetic rutting in rubber; food and drink should become a focus of the sharing of goods within a community.”
Note in the above paragraph, Frye’s (partial) definition of “spiritual”.
To understand the spiritual fully we need, according to Frye, the double vision. The double vision lies in imaginative construction. The most important part of the imagination is figurative language, in particular metaphor and myth. Figurative language contrasts with literal language. There is the “objective” world, the world of common sense and of science. But humans are not satisfied with that world:
“The world you want to live in is a human world, not an objective one. It’s not an environment but a home; it’s not the world you see but the world you build out of what you see” (from The Educated Imagination).
William Wordsworth points to the single vision in the following lines:
A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more
William Blake:
….My God us keep
From single vision and Newton’s sleep
Examples of metaphor: Juliet is the sun (Shakespeare); “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing”. (Bible)
“…so metaphor with the “is” predicate says explicitly ‘A is B’ (e.g. Juliet is the sun) and at the same time conveys explicitly the sense ‘A is quite obviously not B’’, and nobody but a fool would believe that Juliet and the sun are identical or that you are identical to a branch” (from Frye’s book Words with Power).
“Just as myth is counter-historical and counter-empirical (not anti-historical or anti-empirical),
so metaphor is counter-logical and counter-empirical” [and not anti-logical or anti-empirical]
(from the Words with Power).
“The continuous paradox of experience: everything one meets or experiences is both part of oneself and not part of oneself.” Another way F. might have put this is that everything one meets or experiences is both identical with oneself and not identical with one oneself.
“…underneath the complexity of human life, the uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us”. (56)
We surmount the gap between nature and ourselves through imaginative construction—by opening ourselves up to metaphor and myth, what Frye calls “interpenetration”.
Examples of metaphorical language that conveys interpenetration, in which we are both identical to what is outside of us and at the same time distinct from that which we are identical to.
From J. J. Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Penguin, 1979, p.90
“Emerging from a long and happy reverie, seeing myself surrounded by greenery, flowers and birds, and letting my eyes wander over the picturesque far-off shores which enclosed a vast stretch of clear and crystalline water, I fused my imaginings with these charming sights, and finding myself in the end gradually brought back to myself and my surroundings, I could not draw a line between fiction and reality….”
From Jane Goodal, In the Shadow of Man, Collins, 1971, 240-241
“The soft pressure of his fingers spoke to me not through my intellect but through a more
primitive emotional channel: the barrier of untold centuries which has grown up during the
separate evolution of human and chimpanzee was, for those few seconds, broken down”
Mary E. Frye:
Do not Weep for Me
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow,
…………………
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain.
……………….
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I did not die.
(The above poem is commonly read at funerals these days. Though the sentiments can be moving in the context of a funeral, I myself am not particularly keen on it –as a poem.)
17th Century poet Thomas Browne: “United Souls are not satisfied with embraces, but desire to be truly each other”.
B) Cynthia Ozick: American novelist and essayist; born, 1928—still writing
Essay: “Memory and Metaphor” in book of essays by the same title
270: “I want to argue that metaphor is one of the chief agents of our moral nature, and that the more serious we are in life, the less we can do without it.
“The Greeks were not only not universalists; they scorned the idea. They were proud of despising the stranger. They had no pity for the stranger. They were proud of hating their enemies. As a society they never undertook to imagine what it was to be the Other; the outsider, the alien, the slave, the oppressed, the sufferer, the outcast, the opponent, the barbarian who owns feelings and deserves rights. And that is because they did not, as a society, cultivate memory, or search out any historical metaphor to contain memory.”
“Four hundred years of bondage in Egypt, rendered as metaphoric memory, can be spoken in a moment, in a single sentence. What his sentence is, we know we have built every idea of moral civilization on it…It follows 16 verses behind “Love thy neighbor as thyself”, but majestic as that [the Golden Rule] is, it is not the most majestic, because its subject is not the most recalcitrant. Our neighbor is usually of our own tribe, and looks like us and talks like us.”
“Leviticus 19, verse 14: The stranger that sojourned with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
The foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34 The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.
17 Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge. 18 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there. That is why I command you to do this.
19 When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. 20 When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. 21 When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. 22 Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this.
Ozick; [Through metaphor and myth] “ we strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of strangers”—the doctor can imagine the patient. Those who have no pain can imagine those who suffer. Those at the centre can imagine what it is to be outside. The strong can imagine the weak. Illuminated lives can imagine the dark.
“Out of that slavery a new thing was made. It should not be called a “philosophy”, because philosophy was Greek, and this was an envisioning the Greeks had always avoided, or else had never wished to invent, or else had been unable to invent. I have all along been calling this new thing “metaphor”. It came about because thirty generations of slavery in Egypt were never forgotten—though not a form of grudge-holding. A distinction should be drawn between grudge-holding and memory; they are never the same. As for grudge-holding, it was forbidden…. The helping hand, says Exodus, reaches out to your enemy… The Egyptians were cruel enemies and crueler oppressors; the ex-slaves will not forget—not out of spite for the wrongdoers, but as a means to understand what it is to be an outcast, a foreigner, an alien of any kind. By turning the concrete memory of slavery into a universalizing metaphor of reciprocity, the ex-slaves discover a way to convert imagination into a serious moral instrument.”
Back to Frye:
For Frye a myth is a story or narrative that is important to a community. The key myth for Western culture is the Bible. The Bible tells the story of a journey that starts with alienation of humans from nature (Garden of Eden) and, later, continues with the alienation of humans from humans (e.g. the tower of Babel, the killing of Abel by Cain, the crucifixion), and ends with the redemption of humans, whereby they achieve unity with nature and with other humans. The Bible is a work of imagination, according to Frye, which humans can absorb through ritual and through repeating its stories within a community. Whether it is factually true or not, according to Frye, is irrelevant. In fact, it is dangerous to insist that the Bible must be interpreted literally, because insisting that the Bible is literally (factually) true is a great source of intolerance.
The Big Question that arises out of Frye’s work:
The Bible story was for Western culture a universal myth to live by, in Frye’s terms. But the absorption of the Bible is far from universal in our age, and it’s impossible to believe it will ever achieve universal acceptance again. Can humans pursue our primary concerns, our unity with nature and other sentient beings, without a common “myth to live by” or metaphors, integrated into these myths, that transform us, pull us out of egoism, and lead us to care for “the Other”, whether the Other be the stranger, other species of animals, or nature per se?