Monthly Archives: June 2010

New Democratic Party

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TOMMY DOUGLAS

Tommy Douglas (former CCF Premier of Saskatchewan and father of Medicare) becomes the NDP’s first leader, holding the post until 1971

On this date in 1961 the New Democratic Party was formed with the merger of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress.

Frye on Canadian Socialism in his “Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington,” September 14, 1989:

….Canada has had, for the last fifty years, a Socialist (or more accurately Social Democratic) party which is normally supported by twenty-five to thirty percent of the electorate, and has been widely respected through most of its history, for its devotion to principle.  Nothing of proportional size or influence has emerged among socialists in the United States.  When the CCF, the first form of this party, was founded in the 1930s, its most obvious feature went largely unnoticed.  That feature was that it was following a British rather than an American tendency, trying to assimilate the Canadian political structure to the British Conservative-Labour pattern.  The present New Democratic Party, however, never seems to get beyond a certain percentage of support, not enough to come to federal power.  Principles make voters nervous, and yet any departure from them towards expediency makes them suspicious.  (CW 12, 643-4)

CBC Radio archives on Tommy Douglas and the NDP here.

CBC Television memorial for Tommy Douglas here.

Bloomsday

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGfjiT0IRxo

The last lines of Ulysses.  Molly Bloom: “Yes”

June 16th, 1904, is the day the events of James Joyce’s Ulysses occur: Bloomsday.  It is also the day that Joyce and his future wife, Nora Barnacle, had their first, well, date.  Christopher Hitchens has called Ulysses the greatest literary work ever inspired by a handjob.

Frye puts it this way:

An association is implied between Stephen and Icarus, and in some respects Ulysses is a version of the fall of Icarus.  Stephen, an intellectual of the type usually described as in the clouds or up in the air, comes back to Dublin and in his contact with Bloom meets a new kind of father, neither his spiritual nor his physical father but Everyman, the man of earth and common humanity, who is yet isolated enough from his society to be individual too, an Israel as well as an Adam.  Stephen approaches this communion with a certain amount of shuddering and distate, but the descent to the earth is clearly necessary for him.  Traditionally, however, the earth is Mother Earth, and what we are left with is a female monologue of a being at once maternal, marital, and meretricious, who enfolds a vast number of lovers, including Bloom and possibly Stephen, and yet is narcist too, in a state of self-absorption which absorbs the lover.  Marion Bloom is a Penelope who embraces all her suitors as well as her husband, and whose sexual versatility seems much the same thing as the weaving of her never-finished web–the web being also one of Blake’s symbols for female sexuality.  The drowsy spinning of the earth, absorbed in its own cyclical movement, constantly affirming but never forming, is what Marion sinks into, taking the whole book with her.  (“Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake,” CW 29, 110)

The Function of Criticism at the Present Time?

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walrus

The July/August issue of the Walrus has a piece called “The Long Decline” by André Alexis.  In it, he argues that there’s been a marked degeneration of criticism in popular fora.  He suggests, strikingly, that Frye’s work was one of the principal “catalysts” against which critics reacted to move away from taxonomy to  personal opinions and something more akin to the stock market of authors’ worth.  The attack  Alexis makes is in some ways predictable — there has been a marked decline in both the quantity and the quality of mainstream book reviewing — and in other ways fascinating.  Among other questions Alexis raises, we might ask is John Metcalf really the primary culprit in the changes in Canadian criticism?  Is James Wood’s How Fiction Works a way forward out of a criticism too limited to individual assessments of worth?  Has Alexis captured something of what the anti-Frye reaction is all about?  I think this piece might stimulate our own debate.

Magna Carta

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr7T4Jn8WgQ

The earliest surviving film adaptation of Shakespeare, an 1899 British production of King John.  (This clip cannot be embedded: hit the arrow and then hit the YouTube link that appears.)

On this date in 1215 King John of England put his seal on Magna Carta.

Shakespeare, of course, wrote a play about King John that makes no mention of Magna Carta.  Happily, Frye has a point or two to make about Shakespeare by way of King John.

The action of King John has proceeded only for a few lines when the king says:

Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France;
For ere thou can’st report I will be there,
The thunder of my cannon shall be heard.

King John, of course, had no cannon.  It is habitual for us to say the audience would never notice.  Audiences in fact have rather a quick ear for such things.  Or we may say that Shakespeare was in a hurry, and was unwilling to spoil his record of never blotting a line.  The assumption that Shakespeare was a hasty and slapdash writer has often been made, by hasty and slapdash critics, but has never proved fruitful.  If we say that Shakespeare had more important things on his mind, we come closer to the truth: certainly the fine image of the thunderstorm is more important than fidelity to the date of the introduction of gunpowder.  But it is better to think of such anachronism positively and functionally, as helping to univeralize an historical period, as representing a typical rather than a particular event.  The past is blended with the present, and event and audience are linked in the same community. (A Natural Perspective, 20)

Jorge Luis Borges

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo2Eo-G-1sE

Interview with Borges (Spanish with English subtitles)

On this date Borges died (1899 – 1986).

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: I believe some of your literary productions as an undergraduate were satires.  You were attracted to this form of [Menippean] satire?

Frye: I was always attracted to that form, because at that time certainly, I knew more about ideas than I did about people.  If someone like Borges had been known to me at the time, I would have tried to pick up that kind of tradition, I think. (Northrop Frye in Conversation, 71)