httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0toVknlQrE
Twenty thousand in the streets protesting today as the government cracks down
Syria
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Author Archives: Michael Happy
“The Great Western Butterslide” Revisited
In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills reviews All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age
Here is the first paragraph of Wills’s review:
This book, which was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, comes recommended by some famous Big Thinkers. It is written by well-regarded professors (one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it. The authors set about to solve the problems of a modern secular culture. The greatest problem, as they see it, is a certain anxiety of choosing. In the Middle Ages, everyone shared the same frame of values. One could offend against that frame by sinning, but the sins were clear, their place in the overall scheme of things ratified by consensus. Now that we do not share such a frame of reference, each person must forge his or her own view of the universe in order to make choices that accord with it. But few people have the will or ability to think the universe through from scratch.
Everything old is new again. Frye called this the “butterslide” theory of history, sometimes rendered as “the Great Western Butterslide,” whose roots lay in an idealized conception of the Middle Ages.
Here he is in a 1947 Canadian Forum review of F.S.C Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West:
Hence, for many American thinkers today the gigantic synthesis of religion, philosophy, science and politics achieved in the Middle Ages looms up in front of them like an intellectual Utopia which complements that of their own moral idealism. American magazines and books are thickly strewn with admiring references to Aristotle, St. Thomas, the seven liberal arts and the medieval preservation of personal values; and of deprecatory ones to the cult of self-analysis, the dehumanizing of the individual, and the centrifugal movements in politics and science which came with the Renaissance and sent us skittering down the butterslide of introversion into our present Iron Age. (CW 11, 198)
And here he is at the other end of his career in conversation with David Cayley, providing an alternative to the butterslide view:
Cayley: We stand at what sometimes seems to be the end of a tradition. . . . At one time Spengler was important to you. Later on you satirized him and made jokes about the Great Western Butterslide. Do you accept the idea of decline in Spengler, and do you wonder now what’s next?
Frye: I’m not sure I ever reacted to the word “decline” in Spengler’s work. The vision I got from Spengler was not a vision of decline. It was a vision of maturing to a certain point. The question of cycle always turns up. There is a cycle in Vico, it’s a little different in Spengler, but it’s a cycle again in Toynbee. As I’ve said often, every cycle is a failed spiral. When you get to the end of the cycle, what should be done is to encompass the entire structure up to that point on another level, not just to go back to the beginning, although there’s going to be a certain amount of that. (CW 24, 1034-5)
Taylor/Williams
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_uzs9jK-f4
Elizabeth Taylor died yesterday, and it’s Tennessee Williams’s centenary Saturday. Above is a scene from Suddenly, Last Summer.
Quote of the Day: “They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits”
It looks like the government will be defeated this week on a budget vote and an election called.
We are running a $40 billion deficit this year. This will be cited at some unspecified time to necessitate cuts in social spending. That’s playbook stuff. But the problem is that the Harper government is pushing for a further $6 billion in corporate tax cuts, even though Canada already has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the OECD.
Moreover, the Harper government also intends to purchase $30 billion worth of F-35 jet interceptors, even though they are not suited to either our foreign or domestic military needs. It isn’t, of course, an increasingly besieged public that will benefit by these policies. The Harper government has decided it somehow can’t afford substantial longterm increases in spending for education and health care, but that it can afford tens of billions of dollars worth of corporate welfare for Lockheed-Martin, while also further reducing already low corporate tax rates.
Here are a couple of representative observations from the patron saint of laissez-faire capitalists, Adam Smith, that might surprise some who consider themselves Smith-schooled laissez-faire capitalists:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.
For the record, Smith was for high wages, supported the right of labor to organize, and, as the quotes above suggest, understood very well the plutocratic disposition of unrestrained commercial interests. Corporate tax cuts are not among the laws of nature. They do not even necessarily make for sound economic policy.
As promised in an earlier post, we will be citing Frye extensively on Canadian history, culture and political traditions as the election unfolds.
(Chart from The Ottawa Citizen)
Stendhal
Today is Stendhal‘s birthday (1783-1842).
From “Towards a Theory of Cultural History”:
The chief difference between the comedy of the Renaissance and the realistic period is that the resolution of the latter more frequently involves a social promotion, and, like pathos, tends to be an individual achievement. More sophisticated writers of low mimetic comedy often present the same success story with the moral ambiguities that we have found in Aristophanes. In Balzac or Stendhal a clever and ruthless scoundrel may achieve the same kind of success as the virtuous heroes of Samuel Smiles and Horatio Alger. Thus the comic counterpart of the alazon seems to be the clever, likable, unprincipled picaro of the picaresque novel. (CW 21, 161)
Frye Festival Newsletter
You can read March’s Frye Festival Newsletter here.
Johann Sebastian Bach
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5Mv3T3ANjY
Glenn Gould playing Fugue of Praeludium No.22 in B flat minor (BWV 891) from “The Well-Tempered Clavier”
Today is Bach‘s birthday (1685-1750).
Frye in “The Teacher’s Source of Authority”:
It is only when we get to the point of having some sense of having the total subject in our minds that we begin to recognize a source of authority beyond that, of the poet or the creative artist whose work we are studying. If we are listening to music, let us say, on the level of Bach or Mozart, the response keeps shifting from the personal to the impersonal. On the one hand we feel this is Bach, that it couldn’t possibly be anyone else. On the other hand, there are moments when Bach disappears, and what we feel is; this is the voice of music itself; this is what music was created to say. At that level, we are not so much hearing the music as recognizing it. (CW 7, 503)
Bob Denham’s “Frye and…” Series
We are pleased to announce that our journal will be publishing a series of essays by Bob Denham on Frye and some of the great thinkers whose influence on his work has not yet been fully surveyed.
Bob’s first essay is “Northrop Frye and Soren Kiekegard,” which will be posted tomorrow with an introduction by Joe Adamson.
To follow are “Northrop Frye and Aristotle,” “Northrop Frye and Longinus,” and “Northrop Frye and Giordano Bruno.” You can be sure that we’ll let you know when they go up.
Here is the opening paragraph of “Frye and Kierkegaard”:
The roots of Frye’s expansive vision of culture have often been remarked. Blake and the Bible are obviously central to the development of his ideas, and much has been written about Frye’s debts to both. Much has been written as well about other significant influences on Frye: Nella Cotrupi’s book on Frye and Vico, Glen Gill’s study of Frye and twentieth‑century mythographers (Eliade, Jung, and others), Ford Russell’s account of the influence of Spengler, Frazer, and Cassirer on Frye, and Sára Tóth on Frye and Buber. No one, however, has considered the ways that Kierkegaard influenced Frye’s thought. As the impact of Kierkegaard on Frye is relatively substantial, the purpose of this essay is to examine Frye’s use of Kierkegaard.[1] Direct influence is sometimes difficult to demonstrate, but parallels between and similar ideas held by the two can be instructive. Kierkegaard helps to define, illustrate, and develop Frye’s thought. Along the way, we will also glance at Frye’s critique of certain Kierkegaardian ideas.
Ovid
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnOzDfCOXFc
From the BBC, Act V of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring the artfully butchered rendition of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe.” (The conclusion after the jump.)
Today is Ovid‘s birthday (43 BC – 17 AD).
Frye in The Double Vision picks up on the divergence of Classical mythology and Christian mythology at the dawn of the Christian age:
Later centuries were fascinated by the contrast between the temporal ruler of the world, Augustus Caesar, and its spiritual ruler, Jesus, who was born during Augustus’ reign. Contemporary with Jesus we have the whole mythological side of Classical culture summed up by two great masterworks, Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid provides a kind of encyclopedia of mythology in which the central theme is metamorphosis, the incessant dissolving and reshaping of forms of life. Toward the end of his long poem, he brings in the philosopher Pythagoras to expound a gloomy philosophy based on the same theme. The Metamorphoses starts with creation and deluge myths, and Pythagoras sees at the end of time a running down of the world into a kind of entropy, or chaos come again. But there are also eulogies of the Caesars, particularly Julius, as the only symbols of what can transcend metamorphosis. In Virgil, similarly, the myth of Rome was founded by Trojan refugees expands into a vision of history in which the Roman Empire represents a kind of goal or telos of the historical process. (CW 4, 216-17)
Frye at the Movies: Buster Keaton
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02NDopFGnvQ
Buster Keaton in Cops, from 1922 (complete movie)
Frye in “Canada and Culture”:
I remember seeing a movie, colored and talking, which was a comedy, and being bored by it: but at the beginning there was a reference to the early knockabout silent comedies of the pie-throwing kind, with a brief illustration, and I laughed until I nearly fell out of my seat. (CW 25, 197)
The movie he refers to may be 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, a musical set at the dawn of the age of the talkies that opens with a spoof of the silent movies being replaced by the new technology.
Frye makes passing reference to Buster Keaton — as well as to Larry Semon, Harold Lloyd and Mack Sennett — whose movies he would have seen as a child. The Keaton two-reeler above was very likely one of them.