Author Archives: Michael Happy

Elizabeth Bishop

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnR1x64WOjQ

Elizabeth Bishop reading “The Fish”

Today is Elizabeth Bishop‘s birthday (1911-1979).

I am lucky enough to have been in her childhood home in Great Village, Nova Scotia, and her mountainside villa in Ouro Preto, Brazil.  In both instances, her bedroom was the smallest room in the house.

Frye never wrote about Bishop. (See Bob Denham’s correction in the post above.)  But he did meet her at Harvard in 1975, when she was writer-in-residence and he was the Charles Eliot Norton lecturer (those lectures later became The Secular Scripture).  According to John Ayre, they were seated together at dinner one night and “swapped tales” of their Maritime upbringing, she in Nova Scotia and he in New Brunswick. (Northrop Frye: A Biography, 347)

After the jump, “First Death in Nova Scotia.”

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Charles Dickens

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXyo68s-f1E

The opening sequence of David Lean’s film adaptation of Great Expectations

Today is Charles Dickens‘s birthday (1812-1870).

Frye’s plangent account of the creative absurdity of literature in “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours” — this is an extraordinary paragraph, even for him:

I used the word “absurd” earlier about Dickens’s melodramatic plots, suggesting that they were creatively and not incompetently absurd.  In our day the word “absurd” usually refers to the absence of purpose or meaning in life and experience, the so-called metaphysical absurd.  But for literary criticism the formulating of the theory of the absurd should not be left entirely to disillusioned theologians.  In literature it is design, the forming and shaping power, that is absurd.  Real life does not start nor stop; it never ties up loose ends; it never manifests meaning or purpose except by blind accident; it is never comic or tragic, ironic or romantic, or anything else that has shape.  Whatever gives form and pattern to fiction, whatever technical skill keeps us turning the pages to get to the end, is absurd, and contradicts our sense of reality.  The great Victorian realists subordinate their story-telling skill to their representative skill.  Theirs is a dignified, leisurely vehicle that gives us time to look at the scenery.  They have formed our stock responses to fiction, so that even when travelling at the much higher speed of drama, romance, or epic we still keep trying to focus our eyes on the incidental and transient.  Most of us feel that there is something else in Dickens, something elemental, yet unconnected with either realistic clarity or philosophical profundity.  What it is connected with is a kind of story that fully gratifies the hope expressed, according to Lewis Carroll, by the original Alice, that “there will be some nonsense in it.”  The silliest character in Nicholas Nickleby is the hero’s mother, a romancer who keeps dreaming of impossible happy endings for her children.  But the story itself follows her specifications and not those of the sensible people.  The obstructing humours in Dickens are absurd because they have overdesigned their lives.  But the kind of design that they parody is produced by another kind of energy, and one which insists, absurdly and irresistibly, that what is must never take precedence over what ought to be.  (CW 17, 307-8)

How Many Groundhog Days?

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZbtAFq7dP8

One Groundhog Day after another

Frye in The Double Vision:

There are two kinds of repetition: one is inorganic, a matter of merely doing the same thing over and over; the other is habit or practice repetition that leads to the acquiring of a skill, like practicing a sport or musical instrument.  Inorganic repetition is precisely what the word “superstition” means: binding oneself to a continuing process that is mere compulsiveness, often accompanied by a vague fear that something will happen if we stop. (CW 4, 208)

For those of you who need to know how many groundhog days Phil Connors must endure before developing a liberating “habit or practice repetition,” here is the breakdown.  The number, whatever you think it might be, is pretty staggering — and it is very ingeniously calculated.

Bob Marley

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzkG6Xu6lUE&feature=fvwrel

A gorgeous live version of “No Woman, No Cry” fom the Legend album.  Still gives me chills to hear the audience singing from the opening bar before Bob even gets started.

Today is Bob Marley‘s birthday (1945-1981).  His deeply peaceful instincts, inspired by a full commitment to Rastafari, seemed to match his musical genius:

I don’t have prejudice against meself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don’t dip on nobody’s side. Me don’t dip on the black man’s side nor the white man’s side. Me dip on God’s side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.

Frye on peace and choosing life in conversation with David Cayley:

We’ve gone though history thinking of peace as meaning that the war has stopped, and consequently, a lot of people, when you use a word like “peace,” say, “Well, the world of peace sounds awfully dull.  There’d be nothing to do if there’s nothing to fight about.” What I go for is “Blake’s I will not cease from mental fight / Till we have built Jerusalem.”  God says in Deuteronomy, “I have set before you life and death . . . therefore choose life.” [30:19].  Well, nobody, with all respect to God, could possibly say that that was a logical “therefore.” A lot of people choose life choose it only because they have got into the habit of living.  They find it easier to do that than to break clear of it.  Others will choose life, but when life becomes an act of choice, then there’s the question of what you’re goint to do with it, what direction you’re to go in.  (CW 24, 1001-2)


Saturday Night at the Movies: “Ulysses”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEuj4kOCmc

James Joyce’s birthday and the anniversary of the first publication of Ulysses just passed.  Here’s the 1967 film adaptation of the novel that was censored, reviled and made undistributable by an X rating; it was not even approved for general release in Ireland until 2000.  That lack of wide distribution means that this is an absolutely pristine print, the images as crisp as they were forty years ago — a reminder of how lost is the art of black and white film making.

Frye in “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake”:

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 an individual too, an Israel as well as an Adam.  Stephen approaches  this communion with a certain amount of shuddering and distaste, 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.  (CW 29, 110)

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Thomas Carlyle

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Thomas Carlyle died on this date in 1881 (born 1795).

Frye in “New Directions from Old” cites Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in order to make the point that literature does not present “ideas” by way of logic, but a mimesis of ideas by way of metaphor:

Literary criticism finds a good deal of difficulty in dealing with such works as Sartor Resartus takes the structure of German Romantic philosophy and extracts from it a central metaphor in which the phenomenal is to the noumenal world as clothing is to the naked body: something which conceals it, and yet, by enabling it to appear in public, paradoxically reveals it as well.

The “ideas” the poets use, therefore, are not actual propositions, but thought-forms or conceptual myths, usually dealing with images rather than abstractions, and hence normally unified by metaphor, or image phrasing, rather than by logic.  (CW 21, 121-13)