Today is Freud‘s birthday (1856 – 1939).

Frye on psychological analogues of romance in The Secular Scripture:

When we look at social acts as rituals, we become at once aware of their close relation to a good deal of what goes on within the mind.  Anyone reading, say, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience must be impressed by the extraordinary skill with which many people arrange their lives in the form of romantic or dramatic ritual, in a way which is neither wholly conscious nor wholly unconscious, but a working alliance of the two.  William James takes us into psychology, and with Freud and Jung we move into an area where the analogy to quest romance is even more obvious.  In a later development, Eric Berne’s “transactional” therapy, we are told that we take over “scripts” from our parents which it is our normal tendency to act out as prescribed and invariable rituals, and that all possible forms of such scripts can be found in any good collection of folktales.  Romance often deliberately descends into a world obviously related to the human unconscious, and we are not surprised to find that some romances, George MacDonald’s Phantastes, for example, are psychological quests carried out in inner space.  Such inner space is just as much of a “reality,” in Wallace Stevens’ use of the word, as the Vanity Fair of Thackeray: Vanity Fair itself, after all, is simply a social product of the illusions thrown up by the conflicts within his inner consciousness.  When we look back at the Cistercian developments of Arthurian legend, with their stories of Galalhad the pure and his quest for the Holy Grail, we see that an identity between individual and social quests has always been latent in romance. (58)

Today is Karl Marx‘s birthday (1818-1883).

Frye in one of the “Third Book” notebooks:

Marx himself was undoubtedly a great writer in the anatomic tradition: he had the satirist’s truculence, excremental imagery, & inability to finish books.  (This aspect of ironic mythos is the counterpart of the endless form of romance.)  If Norman Brown’s book [Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History] had been obsessed by Marx instead of Freud, & he had added Marx to his studies of Luther & Swift, he’d have written an even more remarkable book.

The point is that literary criticism has to develop canons for — not judging, but — incorporating Marx, Freud, Luther, Paul, Jesus, instead of allowing determinists to make them a standard for critical categories. (CW 9, 80)

Today is Marchiavelli‘s birthday (1469 – 1527).

Frye in Fools of Time:

In Shakespeare’s day there was no permanently successful example of popular sovereignty.  Machiavelli had drawn the conclusion that there are two forms of government: popular governments, which were unstable, and what we should call dictatorships, the stability of which depended upon the cunning and force of the prince.  This analysis, of course, horrified the idealists of the sixteenth century who were trying to rationalize the government of the prince with arguments about the “general good”, and so Machiavelli became, by way of attacks on him, a conventional bogey of Elizabethan drama.  From the view of tragic structure, what Machiavelli was doing was destroying the integrity of tragedy by obliterating the difference between the order-figure and the rebel-figure.  Machiavelli comes to speak in the prologue of The Jew of Malta, and there he asks: “What right had Caesar to the Empire?” — in itself surely a fair enough question, and which expresses the central question in the tragedy of order. (Fools of Time, 20)