Fryeian State of Mind

I am still working my way through Frye's Words with Power. I have been trying to read this book for over a week and am 10 pages in. I do not know about everyone else but I really like this book. It is dense, hard to read, and incredibly insightful. Mr. Frye would be an amazing person to meet because of how intelligent of a person he must be. When reading his work, I am constantly forced to look up new words or to look up references that he makes to other pieces of great literature. So I challenged myself to try and think like Frye for one reading of the section I am currently working on. I was reading page 150 when trying to see if I could think in a Fryeian State of Mind. I found that I could somewhat think like him but after clmpleting this challenge and looking back at my notes, I felt that I was often stretching between what I was reading and what I was relating the readings to. In particular, I was considering, the cyclical process of all myth. The heroes' journey, the way that the same stories are often repeated, and the way that most stories never seem to have a complete ending (authors seems to leave a tiny loophole in every story in case they want to add to it at a later time). Frye often comments on the cyclical aspect of ladders, myths, and stories. Why are circles and cyclical aspects so important to mythology? I believe that they are important because they allow a person to always be able to find a new moral, a new ending, or a new purpose to the stories in myth. If myths were not cyclical, we would  not be able to adapt them as time goes on so that they relate to the people reading the stories. If we were not able to adapt the story of Joseph, we would not still be telling it to our children in Sunday school thus it has to have a cyclical structure  or else the story would have died eons ago.
It was discussed in class on Thursday that the Bible does not have a cyclical structure but the individual stories within the Bible have cyclical structures. I am forced to disagree and agree with this comment with some stipulations. I agree that all stories within the Bible have a cyclical structure. I disagree in the aspect that the Bible is not cyclical in the sense of foreshadowing how the Isralites will continue to exist. It is not a normal cyclical myth but parts of the Bible just seem to be on repeat, like being slaves in Egypt, but that when it does end it will not start over again. So the image that I get from the Bible is that it is a sprial. It just goes round and round but that it will eventually end. Once Revelation does happen and the world ends, it will all be over for humans but until that unlucky day happens we are on a repetitive spiral of the rest of the Bible.
I do not know if this blog will make sense to anyone else as it hardly makes sense to me but maybe that is the point. When doing my Frye imitation, I realized that to make some things make sense, we have to stretch their meaning to something that we already understand. I understand what a cyclical object and a spiral looks like, so it makes sense to relate somehting I do not understand, such as the Bible, to these objects. This is not a perfect system but Frye quotes Bertrand Russell saying "Every philosopher, in addition to the formal system which he offers to the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be quite unaware. If he is aware of it, he probably realizes that it won't quite do". The above theory is my simple thoery wich I know is imperfect and probably makes no sense to anyone besides me. However, I hope it helps others to realize their own imperfect theories of hte bible.

Moral of Joshua 7: Make sure your family does not sin or else you will be punished for their sins!

In  my journey throughout the Bible, I have reached Joshua. Throughout my readings, I have found many many inconsistencies of what the bible says is appropriate behaviour and how to treat others. However, I have found things that have reassured me. I grew up in a Christian household where  the ideals and sayings from the Bible are often told as morals. About mid-Exodus, I was becoming very discouraged that I would ever finish with my goal to read all the of the Bible. I had grown up hearing about this great God who saved people and tried to do his best at making everyone safe and provide for them everlasting life. Through my readings of the Bible thus far, I found that this God did not exist. This god was jealous, lost his temper easily, and often went back on his word. However, I found the passage that says that one shall not be judged for the sins of the father (or any family member). This was very reassuring for me because I definitely do not want to be judged because of some of my crazy relatives! Everyone has those crazy relatives that you only claim as relatives at family reunions just because your mom makes you! Deuteronomy 25:16 says "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.". As I continued my readings of the Bible and of the Good Book, I finally finished with Exodus and started with Joshua. In Joshua, I came upon the story of the battle of Ai. This story made sense until I reached the part about the thief's family being killed for his actions. This goes completely against what God and the Bible had earlier stated about the sins of the father! How is this fair that one person does the wrong thing but an entire family is punished for it?!? It is not fair, right, or just, which are three of the various titles that God claims for himself. This single passage has managed to make me question why the Bible has been revered as a spiritual book for the last couple thousand of years. I completely see the literary value of the book but am losing sight of the spiritual value. In the past few weeks, we have often discussed how the morals of Biblical stories are very ambiguous if they exist at all, God is a fickle being, and the Israelites are complete idiots in the way they behave! Why do we look up to this book and to this group of people for guidance. In the first few books of the Bible, the Israelite's are often told not to do horrible things, which leads me to think that they are committing these atrocious acts! Why tell someone not to do something if they are not already doing it?
The literary value of the Bible is implicitly clear in every page that one reads whether it has been written by the J or P writer. Every page helps set the stage for future writers by giving them examples of correct procedures to set up repetitive parallel or how to tell an awesome story. I always thought that reading the Bible in its entirety would help me with my spiritual understanding but instead it is strengthening my literary understanding since every piece of literature owes at least a piece of its existence to the Bible.

September 21, 2010 Class Notes

Everyone is to blog in response to someone else's blog. Choose a blog that makes you think in a different way or from a new point of view. 
Class Notetakers: Kate, Jennifer, Myan, Ashley

Frye: page 121: Alexa's Blog

• most important part of book
• polysemis
• many meanings
• inspired by Dante
• Variety of different levels of literature
• Descriptive:  lowest level
• example given: reporters
• Rhetorical: higher
• language
• Poetic/Metaphoric
• Charismatic
• Bible
• Loss & regaining of identity
• U-shaped Curve
• Center of biblical narrative
• lost & found

Frye: page 149

• Displacement
• Condensation
• "All lit is displaced myth!" Sentence to know from Frye
• readers' job is to un-displace it

Spencer's Blog

• P-attitude
• rules & regulations
• want to know how to live
• geneology, rituals, rules
• J-attitude
• story
• morals are complicated
• example: Joseph and his Brothers
• Moral of story is the story
• Finding moral compromises integrity of story
• moral 
• is not detachable from story
• is ambiguous
• is experienced by the experience of reading

Constitution is the American secular gospel

Hidden Book in Bible by Eliot Friedman

• leaves only J-writer
• grey pages- J writer
• white pages- commentary
• says the J-writer writes until Samuel

Raiders of lost Ark: Biblical commentary on Ark of Covenant

Book of Enoch

• not included in the Bible
• apocryphal but not part of the accepted apocrypha
• According to book
• Enoch went to Heaven
• based on 1 line in the Bible
• "He walked with God" Genesis 5:24
• Also talks about Rebel Angels falling to Earth and having children with humans
• creating giants
• taken out of Genesis 6
• Milton did the same thing in Paradise Lost

Isaiah: Morning Star

• Lilith
• Sucubus=Eve

Redactors: editors of the Bible

Harold Bloom: The Book J

• commentary
• J does not go further than Deuteronomy

Room: Emma Donoghue

• room becomes sacred
• forbidden fruit

Etiology

• explanation of how things got to be the way they are
• examples
• Rainbow as a covenant tells why rainbows exist
• Tower of Babel explains why people speak different languages

Finnigan's Wake is inspired by Isaac

Russell's Blog

• Oral tradition
• when something is spoken it can never be retracted

Joshua and Jesus: pronounced the same just spelled differently

Bible can be seen as a book of military strategy

Judges

• Levites' concubine
• Story of Jeptha
• Inspired Hamlet

Ruth

• Sweet stories
• benign
• wedding ceremonies
• last lines lead into 1 Samuel

1 Samuel

• Election of Saul as King
• Replaced by David as King

The "New" Definitions of Displacement & Condensation

In the past week, I have tried to read Words with Power by Northrop Frye several different times. However, each time I would not get very far without getting completely confounded by what I was reading. After two or three tries, I decided to change my reading strategy. I have always been of the mentality to read through everything and then go back and reread the parts that I do not understand. This way of thinking does not work with Northrop Frye! You cannot read one part of the book without first understanding the parts that were written before it. I have now started rereading it again for the third or fourth time. However, this time I am actually understanding what Frye is talking about. This I believe is an accomplishment within itself because of how dense and full of references Frye's work is. As I sit here reading Words with Power, I keep my dictionary, highlighter, notepad, and computer search engine on hand. I am making a list and looking up every word I do not recognize and every reference I do not know. This may take me  longer to get through Frye but I will get through  it understanding exactly what I read. Upon my close perusal of Words with Power I found a few definitions that I did not previously know and was able to see how they related to the Bible as a literary work and then how they go on to relate to modern culture.
The first new definition that I found intriguing was displacement. There are multiple definitions of displacement. The first being "the state of being displace or the amount or degree to which something is displaced". However, this is not the type of displacement that Frye refers to. He says that displacement in a literary context is "the alteration of a mythical structure in the direction of greater plausibility and accommodation to ordinary experience" (Word with Power page 149 if anyone wants to read it for themselves). This is often thought of in context with the Bible as I have heard people change stories as to make them more believable. One such example is how people were able to live to such great ages. Instead of believing that Abraham really did live to be 175 years old, I have heard people say that years were not measured correctly, global warming has changed the yearly cycle, and etc... This is an example of how people displace literature. This type of displacement takes place today as well. When people hear amazing stories instead of believing the unbelievable with faith, they make up "scientific" reasons, which just a few hundreds years ago would have been unbelievable. This leads me to question why does something have to have greater plausibility and be an ordinary experience to be believed? I do not expect anyone to be able to answer this question. It is just something that I have been pondering since reading this new definition of displacement.
The second definition that Frye discusses is the literary definition of Condensations which "means  the opposite movement, where the similarities and association of ordinary experience become metaphorical identities" (149). This idea was harder for me to grasp than displacement. However, once I was able to fully comprehend the definition and its implications, I was able to think of many many examples of condensation. I think that Frye gave a wonderful example of showing how Blake condensed "Sick Rose". All of aspects of this poem became somehow mythical and had metaphorical identities. A rose was able to represent and the worm represented Genesis Serpent that corrupted the world. The idea of condensation is very intriguing because often I do not look for how ordinary things represent mythological or abstract ideas such as love or Genesis' serpent, unless I am prompted to look for such metaphors or they are obnoxiously obvious. Which according to Frye is the purpose of condensation. "It regularly has the function of reminding us that we are still within a literary orbit" and thus need to be aware of how the orbit of one thing always affects the orbit of another piece of literature, which leads back again to intertextuality.

September 16, 2010 Class Notes

Everyone is supposed to post a random line from Frazer at the top of every blog. Please start putting visuals on blogs
Parable of Good Samaritan

• Not confirmation of what is expected
• the non-expected person helps another

"mysterious mental maneuver"- Sarah's Blog

Jane Eyre

• Villian
• redactor P
• Jane Eyre
• revolts
• more into the J writer
• narrative parts of the Bible 

Northrop Frye's Bible- look @ webpage

• Inspired by 
• Milton
• Blake

Odysseus' Scar

• Mitchell: READ!
• literary style of Bible as represented in Genesis 22
• everything in background in Bible
• everything in foreground in Homer
• tells all details
• Homer vs. Genesis

The Lamb

• book that fills in gaps of Jesus' childhood

Foreskins

• hot topic in class 
• seen as a sort of trophy
• Hill of foreskins
• circumscion 
• sign of covenant between God and Israel

Groom of Blood

Myth

• "to tell the truth which can not be explained in any other way"
• highest from of truth
• mythos=truth
• history=false

Isaac means to laugh

Blood Meridian

• McCarthy
• Sodom/Gomora modernized
• The City of the Plain
• Genesis

September 14, 2010 Class Notes

Groups*
 Mountain 1: Roberto, Kaleb, Bobby, Ben, Angel, Zach S. Mayan
 Garden 1: Kinsey, Aronda, Alexa, Alicia, Spencer, Lisa
 Cave: Julia, George, Nate, Cameron, Laura, Tyler
 Furnace: John Serto, Emily, Katrina, Katelyn, John Orsie, Brittani
 Mountain 2: Jennifer, Rachel, Katie, Debra, Justin, Russel, Leanne
 Garden 2: Ashley, Kyle Crawford, Dan Goodman, Sara, Trish, Zach, Sam
*Sorry if I did not get someone's name or misspelled someone's name!

Frye-
 Themes of ascent-

•      Mountain/Garden
• Going Up
• Example: Jacob's ladders

Themes of descent

• Cave/Furnace
• underworld

Story of Martha and Mary: Needful things: "Only 1 thing is needed"

Falkner: Absolon Absolon

Intertexuality

• Ecclesiastics
• Hemmingway
• Isaiah 63 & Revelation 14:17
• Origins of Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck
• "Do to the enemy as we do to the grapes"
• influenced by Julia   Battle Hymn of the Republic

Infinity of Lists

• Umberto Eco
• lists of everything
• literary imagination drawn towards lists b/c rhythm, incantation, chanting, mantra

Need to know:

•  God
• Adam & Eve
• Serpent
• Cain
• Grain
• J-writer
• Able
• Sheep
• J-writer
• Lamick
• P-writer

Shrek=Balak

"In later times Jewish fancy tricked out the story of the flood with many new and often extravagant details designed apparently to satisfy the curiosity or tickle the taste of a degenerate age, which could not rest satisfied with the noble simplicity of the narrative in Genesis."
In the past few weeks, we have often talked about intertexuality between the Bible and literary works that have been influenced by the Bible. Ever since this topic was first discussed in class, I am always subconsciously looking for hidden references to the Bible in my everyday life. And guess what...I find them all over the place. Looking for these hidden meaning, references, or parallels has made reading Plotz, Frye, and the Bible more interesting because it conveys relevance to my everyday life.
One of the funniest examples of intertexuality that I have found so far is from the story of Balak and his donkey. This funny duo seems to be a predecessor to Shrek and Donkey. It seems to me that Balak and his donkey have the same type of bantering wit that Donkey and Shrek have. They also have the same bantering and unwilling relationship with each other. The "masters" Balak and Shrek want nothing to do with their respective donkey except to use them as a tool. Balak uses his "tool" as means of transportation and Shrek uses Donkey as a sort of sidekick during his first adventure. But both donkeys save their counterpart at least one time, if not more times. When reading what Balak's donkey to Balak "Am not I thy ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine  unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee", can't use just imagine modernize that sentence and putting it to Eddie Murphy's voice speaking to Shrek? It is definitely something that Donkey would say after Shrek was being a jerk about something, which did happen quite a bit during all of the movies. I had heard this story several times before reading it myself for this class but never had I connected it to Shrek and Donkey. It makes me wonder what other references to the Bible that I am missing because of my ignorance in actually reading the Bible myself. I often thought of myself as both averagely well versed in Biblical matters, as I attended a private Christian boarding academy for several years. However, I am definitely learning that I may know the stories of the Bible but I do not know how they have affected my life in the literature that I read, the saying that I say, the movies that I watch, and in many more facets of my life.

Class Notes 9/9/2010

Frye: Words of Power- Mountain, Garden, Cave, and Furnace
          -Assigning groups on Tuesday
          -6 groups
Review of Tuesday 9/7/2010
          -Old Testament
                   -Christian Bible
                   -Torah
                   -Books of Moses
          -New Testament
                   -Gospels
                           Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
                                -Biographies of Jesus of Nazareth
Literary Value
   -Receipts
        Scrolling Forward: David M. Levy
                      -Judean/Hebrew respect for oral traditions of Bible
                      -Save from extinction
                      -Important for all 4 religions of the Bible
    -Important because it helps us see the value of all written word
                      -Historical documents need to be approached with the right attitude
                      - Results in more complete understanding
                                  -Bible
                                  -Joe's Parkway Receipt
Spirit of law vs. letter of law (Discussed by St. Paul in the Bible)
     Spirit of law give life
     Letter of law kills
                    -carved in stone
                    -no fluidity

Frye: Entire Bible in 7 words
   1. Creation
   2. Exodus (Revolution)
   3. Law (Torah)
   4. Wisdom                                                  MEMORIZE
   5. Prophecy                              Come up with acronym by Tuesday!
   6. Gospel
   7. Apocalypse (Revelations)  

Plotz: We impose meaning from the Bible to serve ourselves
                -unlikely the meanings that were meant to be taken from the Bible
         -Bible
                -collage that is not a coherent whole according to Plotz
                -coherent whole but not likely in the way most people understand it to be; literary people                                        
                  understand this
Documentary Hypothesis (Wikipedia)
     JEDPR
         -J- (Yahwist) superior storyteller, Court of Solomon, told the stories of Jacob, Genesis
                 -Version of Genesis
                       -God is on Earth
                       -Adamah: means out of the ground; how Adam got his name
               -created anxiety of influence; Shakespeare
         -E- Elohist- writer- Prophesies, dreams, & visions (Sacrifice of Isaac)
         -D-Dueteronomists- wrote most of Deuteronomy- added centuries later- said Moses had spoken it -        
               gives authority
        -P- Priestly- focuses on generation, genealogy, numerations, rituals
        -R- Redactor- editor
Life of Brian
       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjz16xjeBAA&feature=related
Texts of Genesis
       -table of different account of creation
       -lacuna- gaps
       -http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/genesis_texts.html

"Because I Said So"

  In class on Tuesday, one of the topics that were discussed (and there were quite a few) was the topic of everyday sayings that have biblical origins. I cannot remember exactly what the examples were that were discussed but in the middle of Dr. Sexson's lecture one just popped into my head. Every child has heard their parents tell them to do something then when the child asked "why?", parents always answer "BECAUSE I SAID SO!". This reminded me of God telling the Israelites to do something and the reasoning given to do it is "I am the Lord your God". God's edicts to the Israelites has significant parallels to the analogy of parents' ordering their children. This seems to signify to me that often people of lesser power are just supposed to obey without question those of more power. This goes against the grain, in the sense that from childhood on we are told to always question everything and to figure things out for ourselves. So do we listen to our parents/elders when they tell us to always ask questions or do we listen to the the commands to do as we are told? This dilemma extends way beyond childhood. The part of the lecture that jogged this brain wave was when Dr. Sexton was telling us about the assignment that was coming up in a few weeks and asked if we thought his plans sound sufficient. However, before even giving the class an opportunity to consider, he told us not to worry about he decided that was how he was going to do it and that's the way it is going to be (my wording may not be absolutely correct but you get the gist of the conversation). I am not trying to question that he has the right to plan the course however he wants to do it. Personally I think that the project sounds interesting but that is not the point that I am trying to make. The two things that I want people to take from this     blog is that it is often hard to know if we are supposed to ask questions or not and that this dilemma has origins from the very beginning of the Bible.
  Plotz also commented on God's use of the phrase "I am the Lord" as a way to establish dominance over the people of Israel. He related it to a much bigger scale than I did however. He related God's dominance to the power of governments and God's edicts to a sort of Constitution. If the people did not follow these edicts, God would enforce punishment; just like the government will enforce punishments against people who break laws; just like Professor Sexson will fail someone if they do not do the assignment as he specifies; and just like a parent would punish a child who did not do as they were told. This establishes that obviously we need these types of edicts and rules if they have been around since the beginning of time but it does not help to explain at what times the followers are supposed to question the leaders without inciting further punishments. What if Moses had questioned God after every order He gave on Mount Sinai? God probably would have lost patience and punished him as He punished countless others for not following directions correctly.
  After considering this train of thought extensively over the past few days, I am no closer to figuring out when followers are supposed to question leaders. I have however started to look for biblical origins for more and more sayings and traditions in my everyday life. This has lead me to become more aware of my actions and to question why I or people around me do or say things in a certain way. Most of the things that I have examined do have biblical origins and it will be interesting to see what other things I find to relate to the Bible as the semester goes on and I continue in my quest to finish reading the Bible by the end of the semester.

Genesis 1 Vs. Genesis 2: Who will win in the fight to be the correct account of Creation?

   One of the my most memorable classes of Freshman Bible at my private christian high school was the class that we discussed Genesis 1 and 2. Which version is correct is what our teacher told us to answer. After over an hour of 17 high school freshmen arguing, we were no closer to finding an answer than any scholar has ever been. After rereading these books for the first time in over six years, I still have no definitive answer. I do know that there are many similarities and differences between the book. The most glaring difference that jumps out at me is the way that woman is portrayed and her role in Adam's life. In G1, she is an equal and made at the same time as Adam. In G2, woman is an after thought created to help Adam. Just this one difference makes me know that G1 & G2 were written by two very different people. I find it hard to believe that the same person could have written so different of versions of creation. One point that does point in the favor of there being only one writer for Genesis is that it is often hard to tell where one book should truly end. For example, Genesis 1 actually ends at Genesis 2:5. This problem will continue throughout most of the Bible, at least in my experience with it. 

    A point of interest that I noticed in Genesis 1 is that in line 26 God refers to himself in the plural tense. No where else in that book does her refer to himself in the plural tense. 

   Side-note:Lately I have been fascinated with Greek mythology. I am currently rereading the Iliad in my spare time. That led me to notice in Genesis 2:11, that the name of the first river is Pison, which is similar to Poseidon. This may be stretching things a bit but it was the first thing that jumped to my mind when I read this verse so I thought it was worth noting even though it is very off topic. 

Leviticus Leads to Confusion

So I am half way through Leviticus now and am totally confused on several different points.
1st point of confusion: Aaron. First he is a prophet but doesn't really do anything except what Moses tells him to do. I understand his part in the story at that point but then as soon as Moses goes up to Mount Sinai, Aaron is the one to build the golden calf! How can he go from being a leader for God to being the leading person in building the calf?! What confounds me even farther is that instead of killing Aaron like I expected God makes him a priest as well as all of his sons. This seems so different than the God that was shown throughout Exodus. In that Book, God was causing all sorts of pain to anyone who did not do as he said. Then later in Leviticus He kills Aaron's sons for using incense on the fire. That seems like a much smaller crime that leading all of the Isralites into worshipping a golden calf.

2nd point of confusion: What does "until the even" mean? It is repeated often through out the first half of Leviticus but I could not figure out what it meant for sure. Does it mean for ever?

3rd point of confusion: Why is childbirth considered to be unclean? After childbirth women were forced to go into isolation for a certain amount of time which depend on if they gave birth to a girl or boy. It just seems that it would be very weird that such a natural and necessary thing as childbirth be considered on the same level as having leprosy. Is it a continuation of the punishment of Eve? Is being considered unclean a sort of penance for Eve's sin? Personally if that is true, I would think that 9 months would be long enough of a punishment. If a woman gave birth to a girl she would be considered to be unclean for another 12 weeks?