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Charms and Riddles in the Mennonite Barnyard

1993; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1993.0034

1913-4835

Magdalene Redekop,

Short Stories in Global Literature

CHARMS AND RIDDLES IN THE MENNONITE BARNYARD M A G D A L E N E R E D E K O P University of Toronto I n “Charms and Riddles,” Northrop Frye defines “literature, with its com­ bination of rhythm and imagery” as being “intermediate between the musical and the pictorial arts” (Frye 1976, 124). If I concentrate here on the musical aspect, it is not only because my own mother tongue — the Plautdietsch or Low German once spoken by Mennonites — connects me to an oral culture. It is also because my personal debt to Northrop Frye has to do with the ways in which his work helps me to construct bridges from that almost lost oral culture to the texts that I teach here. But where is here? It’s a riddling question that Frye long ago isolated as central to the Canadian experience. It acquired new resonance for me while preparing my thoughts on Mennonite rhymes. In October of 1992 “here” was Victoria College and my audience was made up of scholars thinking about “The Legacy of Northrop Frye.” A month later “here” was the University of Winnipeg and my mixed audience made me intensely conscious of being near the place where I grew up. I note that many of Frye’s articles were speeches given to specific audiences and that he had an exquisitely precise sense of place and occasion. “Charms and Riddles,” for example, was written for the New England Stylistics Club. I don’t know anything about that club and I intend no disrespect when I say that Frye seems to assume a kind of innocence in his audience. The sinister features of charm are not ignored but in this talk they are somehow subsumed by the sheer pleasure of “style.” It was a pleasure that Frye obviously shared. Although he had gone more or less deaf in one ear, he had “an excellent ear.” Once when he came to talk to one of my classes, he told my students that he considered it a mark of great poetry that you find yourself having memorized it without being conscious of doing so. I think he used T.S. Eliot as an example. It would be easy to quibble with that definition — either by noting Frye’s exceptional memory or by observing that the same goes for doggerel. What the comment does, however, is to illustrate the importance of oral memory to Frye’s readings. He spent his last years producing big printed books on the Bible, but what I sense always in his work is the power of the Bible as an oral experience and as something known by heart. When he made opening comments at the 1982 conference on lyric poetry at the University of Toronto, it was the musical aspect of E n g l is h St u d i e s in C a n a d a , 19, 2, June 1993 lyric that held his attention. He noted how lyric “so often retreats from sense into sound, from reason into rhyme, from syntax into echo, assonance, refrain, even nonsense syllables” (Frye 1985, 34). My first experience of Frye’s influence when I arrived at Victoria College was to read Blake with him. The metaphor of childhood remains at the centre of my thinking, but my experience of his legacy goes beyond abstrac­ tions. Like many other Canadian writers, I got from him the sense of having been given permission to pay attention to the particulars of my own child­ hood place. It is partly because of Frye that I have felt free to choose the barnyard as my topos and it is Frye who makes it possible to explore the barnyard without turning a blind eye to the church. In Manitoba, I was acutely aware of being near the various plain rural churches in which my father preached. He always came back to do the chores in the same barn — a building long since torn down. My father preached in High German; we spoke Low German at home; we were taught in English at school. These clear demarcations have left me with a strong sense of place as it...