Log24

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

In Nuce

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:48 am
 

Excerpts from James C. Nohrnberg, "The Master of the Myth of Literature: An Interpenetrative Ogdoad for Northrop Frye," Comparative Literature  Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 58-82

From page 58 —
"… the posthumously revealed Notebooks. A major project of the latter was his 'Ogdoad': two groups of four books each. '[T]he second group of four […] were considered to be Blakean "emanations" or counterparts of the first four,' like 'the "double mirror" structure of The Great Code  and Words with Power : two inter-reflecting parts of four chapters apiece,' Michael Dolzani reports.* "

* P. 22 of Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works , ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky, Frye Studies [series] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). [Abbreviated as RF .]


From page 62 —
"Visionaries like Blake and dramatists like Wagner seem to be working from some larger, mythic blueprint present in nuce  from very early on."

From page 63 —
"Frye's hypothetical books and will-to-totality were obviously fruitful; if the beckoning star was illusory, it nonetheless settled on a real birthplace. The sought-for constructs substituted their scaffolding for a backbone-like confidence in pre-given beliefs; possession of the latter is why Tories like Dr. Johnson and T.S. Eliot could do quite nicely without the constructs. Frye's largely imaginary eightfold roman  may have provided him a personal substitute— or alternative— for both ideology and myth."

From page 69 —
"For Frye the chief element of imaginative or expressive form is the myth, which functions structurally in literature like geometric shapes in painting."

From page 71 —
"The metaphysical skyhook lifting the artist free from unreflective social commitment is often a latent or manifest archetype that his work renews or reworks."

From page 77 —
"Frye's treatises— so little annotated themselves— are the notes writ large; the notes in the Notebooks are treatises writ small. They interpenetrate. Denham quotes 'the masters of the T'ien-tai school of Mahayana Buddhism' as saying '[t]he whole world is contained in a mustard seed' (RF  158, 160), and Frye quotes Keats: 'Every point of thought is the center of an intellectual world' (Study  159; cf. Great Code  167-68 and AC  61). …. [Frye’s] complex books were all generated out of the monadic obiter dicta . His kingdom 'is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden, and it grew' (Luke 13:18-19)."

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Frozen Narrative

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:45 am

A book by Northrop Frye pictured in the previous post
suggests a Log24 search for "The Great Code."

That search yields

See as well Ice 9 and Plan 9.

"Icy white and crystalline"
— Johnny Mercer

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Raiders of the Lost Code

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

From a web page

Breaking the Code of the Archetypal Self:
An Introductory Overview of the Research Discoveries
Leading to Neo-Jungian Structural Psychoanalysis

Dr. Moore will introduce his research and discoveries
with regard to the deep structures of the Self.
Tracing the foundations in the tradition of Jung’s
affirmation of the collective unconscious, Moore
will present his “decoding of the Diamond Body,”
a mapping of the deep structures of the Great Code
of the psyche. . . .

From the same web site

Googling "Jung" + "Diamond Body" shows that
Moore's terminology differs from Jung's.
The octahedron that Moore apparently associates
with his "diamond body" was discussed by Jung
in a different context. See selections from Ch. 14
of Jung's Aion
 "The Structure and Dynamics of the Self."

Dr. Moore appears as well in the murder-suicide story 
of last night's 11:18 PM ET post.

For the relevance of Aion  to "deep structures,"
see Jung + Diamond + Structure in this  journal
and, more specifically, "Deep  Structure."

Friday, February 28, 2014

Score

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:00 pm

"Once a verbal structure is read, and reread
often enough to be possessed, it 'freezes.'
It turns into a unity in which all parts exist at
once, without regard to the specific movement
of the narrative. We may compare it to the study
of a music score, where we can turn to any
part without regard to sequential performance."

— Northrop Frye in The Great Code

Astronaut Dale Gardner, shown retrieving a satellite, reportedly died at 65.

Gardner reportedly died at 65 on February 19.
A post linked to here on that date suggests some
musical remarks.

Code

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 pm
 

From Northrop Frye's The Great Code: The Bible and Literature , Ch. 3: Metaphor I —

"In the preceding chapter we considered words in sequence, where they form narratives and provide the basis for a literary theory of myth. Reading words in sequence, however, is the first of two critical operations. Once a verbal structure is read, and reread often enough to be possessed, it 'freezes.' It turns into a unity in which all parts exist at once, without regard to the specific movement of the narrative. We may compare it to the study of a music score, where we can turn to any part without regard to sequential performance. The term 'structure,' which we have used so often, is a metaphor from architecture, and may be misleading when we are speaking of narrative, which is not a simultaneous structure but a movement in time. The term 'structure' comes into its proper context in the second stage, which is where all discussion of 'spatial form' and kindred critical topics take their origin."

Related material: 

"The Great Code does not end with a triumphant conclusion or the apocalypse that readers may feel is owed them or even with a clear summary of Frye’s position, but instead trails off with a series of verbal winks and nudges. This is not so great a fault as it would be in another book, because long before this it has been obvious that the forward motion of Frye’s exposition was illusory, and that in fact the book was devoted to a constant re-examination of the same basic data from various closely related perspectives: in short, the method of the kaleidoscope. Each shake of the machine produces a new symmetry, each symmetry as beautiful as the last, and none of them in any sense exclusive of the others. And there is always room for one more shake."

— Charles Wheeler, "Professor Frye and the Bible," South Atlantic Quarterly  82 (Spring 1983), pp. 154-164, reprinted in a collection of reviews of the book.
 

For code  in a different sense, but related to the first passage above,
see Diamond Theory Roullete, a webpage by Radamés Ajna.

For "the method of the kaleidoscope" mentioned in the second
passage above, see both the Ajna page and a webpage of my own,
Kaleidoscope Puzzle.

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