Author Archives: Michael Happy

Emily Dickinson

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Dickinson at age 17.  There is no authenticated later photo of her.

Today is Emily Dickinson‘s birthday (1830-1886).

Frye in “Emily Dickinson”:

Many, perhaps most, of Emily Dickinson’s readers will simply take their favorite poems from her and leave the rest, with little curiosity about the larger structure of her imagination.  For many, too, the whole bent of her mind will seem irresponsible or morbid.  It is perhaps as well that this should be so.  “It is essential to the sanity of mankind,” the poet remarks, “that each one should think the other crazy.”  There are more serious reasons: a certain perversity, and instinct for looking in the opposite direction from the rest of society, is frequent among creative minds.  When the United States was beginning to develop an entrepreneur capitalism on a scale unprecedented in history, Thoreau retired to Walden to discover the meaning of the word “property,” and found that it meant only what was proper or essential to unfettered human life.  When the Civil War was beginning to force on America the troubled vision of the revolutionary destiny, Emily Dickinson retired to her garden to remain, like Wordsworth’s skylark, within the kindred points of heaven and home.  She will always have readers who will know what she means when she says, “Each of us gives or takes of heaven in corporeal person, for each of has the skill of life” [L388].  More restless minds will not relax from taking thought for the morrow to spend much time with her.  But even some of them may still admire the energy and humour with which she fought her angel until she had forced out of him the crippling blessing of genius. (CW 17, 270)

Quote of the Day: Wikileaks, Assassination Threats and Tyranny

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“Whatever you think of WikiLeaks, they have not been charged with a crime, let alone indicted or convicted. Yet look what has happened to them. They have been removed from the Internet … their funds have been frozen … media figures and politicians have called for their assassination and to be labeled a terrorist organization. What is really going on here is a war over control of the Internet, and whether or not the Internet can actually serve its ultimate purpose—which is to allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions,” – Glenn Greenwald.

All of this is disturbing.  But the most troubling thing about it is the fact that “media figures and politicians” are actually calling for the death of Julian Assange and people associated with him because they are “terrorists.” The situation has quickly become so grotesque that the routine weighing-in of Sarah Palin  (idiotically characterizing the leak as a “treasonous” act, even though Assange is Australian and operates out of Europe) is now the least of our worries.  After the normalization of torture under the Bush administration, it seems that anything goes.

Rounding out our references today to Fearful Symmetry, here’s Frye reminding us about an aspect of the human condition we complacently tend to overlook:

Tyranny is seldom (in the long run, never) imposed on people from without; it is a projection of their own pusillanimity.  Tyranny and mob rule are the same thing. (CW 14, 63)

Or, as Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founders whom Teabaggers like to cite as though they owned the copyright, said at the birth of the American republic: “Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

Edith Sitwell and “Fearful Symmetry”

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On this date in 1964 Edith Sitwell died (born 1887).

Sitwell provided an enthusiastic review of Fearful Symmetry in the Spectator (10 March 1947) where she observed: “To say it is a magnificent, extraordinary book is to praise it as it should be praised, but in doing so one gives little idea of the huge scope of the book and its fiery understanding.”

Here’s Frye in his letter of thanks to Sitwell on January 7, 1948:

Dear Miss Sitwell:

Ever since I read your review of Fearful Symmetry in the Spectator I have been wanting to write you and wondering what to say.  I have finally decided that the best thing to say is thank you.  (Denham, Selected Letters, 24-5)

After the jump, a much longer letter to Sitwell written on April 12th of that same year.  Headnote and footnotes courtesy of Bob Denham.

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Northrop Frye and John Lennon: “War is Over — If You Want It”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01ZT1h-RzKc

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death (1940-1980).

It is a pleasure to commemorate him with local talent — Kori Pop performing “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” filmed just over a week ago by Mitch Fillion of Southern Souls.  This is a sneaks-up-beside-you rendition of the song in a simply conceived but beautiful video.

In “The Quality of Life in the ’70s,” Frye picks up on Lennon’s theme, “War is over — if you want it,” a phrase that appeared on billboards during the Christmas season forty years ago in cities all over the world, including Toronto:

One of the more genuinely attractive aspects of the protest movements of the late 1960s has been the insistence with which they have raised the question of “Why not?”  Some time ago one of the Beatles put up advertisements over Toronto saying “War is over–if you want it.”  It was not perhaps a very successful enterprise, but what it said was true enough.  War is over if we want it, and so is the whole nightmare of human folly and tyranny.  It will probably not be over in the 1970s, but there is nothing in the will of God, the malice of the devil, or the unconsciousness of nature to prevent it from going.  What prevents it are the bogies and demons inside us.  We have been calling these demons up pretty frequently during the past few years of confused and infantile illusions, and they have never failed to respond to our call.  But they have no power except what they get from us, and certainly no power to stop us, if we want it, from making the 1970s an era of grace, dignity, and peace.  (CW 11, 296)

The footnote to this paragraph in the Collected Works reads:

NF is referring to John Lennon’s Christmas 1970 release Happy Christmas (War is Over).  Lennon himself paid for a billboard on Yonge St. that proclaimed this message to the citizens of Toronto.  (CW 11, 376)

Video for “Happy Christmas (War is Over)” after the jump.  Also, the remix by George Martin of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” interpolating “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and “Helter Skelter.”  Really needs to be heard to be appreciated.  Finally, a photo of Lennon with the 19th century circus poster that inspired the song.  Lennon claimed the entire thing came from that poster.  In any event, if you look hard enough Pablo Fanques and the Hendersons will all be there.  (While, of course, Henry the Horse dances the waltz.)

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Cicero

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R73nvRPNSHA

The death of Cicero in the HBO series Rome, which (the pathos of this scene aside) pretty much portrays him as Frye suggests below.

On this date in 43 BCE the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero was assassinated.

Frye in notes 52:

Anyway, wherever it goes, the first chapter [of Words with Power] is beginning to involve some consideration of the social conditioning of writers as reflected in their prose styles.  I notice how completely we are committed today to what I see as the direct descendant of the “prophetic”: to writers of piercing if often partial insight.  For anyone who values, for example, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, for whatever reason, such an author as Cicero is the pits: he’s nothing but a ragbag of platitudes and cliches.  Yet Cicero represented the summit of style, good taste and authority down to the 18th c., because he was the spokesman of the acknowledged social structure.  I find this Ciceronian majesterial style still in Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon in the 18th c.: they would have seldom agreed with each other, but they have in common a sense of speaking out of the centre of social rationality. (CW 6, 470)

Osbert Sitwell

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Osbert with his sister Edith

Today is Osbert Sitwell‘s birthday (1892-1969).  Sitwell’s sister, Edith, provided a warm review of Fearful Symmetry in the Spectator (10 October 1947).

Here’s Frye’s diary entry for January 4, 1949:

Lunch with Osbert Sitwell at the University Club–Lionel Massey gave the party, & Doug LePan & Paul Arthur & a man I didn’t know were there.  Sitwell was a high-coloured solid-looking aristocrat with iron-grey hair, who until he opened his mouth could have been either a cultivated man or a barbarian.  Wonderful lunch–oysters & a fine dry red Portuguese wine.  The conversation was commonplaces, though highly cultivated commonplaces.  He is deeply impressed by my book–says he’s recommended it to a lot of people including the painter John Piper.  Edith [Sitwell] is at the St. Regis on East 50th St, New York.  He’s Jung’s sensation type, not a thinker primarily.  (CW 8, 62)

Christina Rossetti

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PAABJ0hH84

Rossetti’s “When I am Dead, My Dearest”

Today is Christina Rossetti‘s birthday (1830-1894).

Frye in “The Bride from the Strange Land,” his essay about the Book of Ruth:

In English literature the best known allusion to Ruth is Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, where the poet says that the nightingale’s song may have pierced “Through the heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, / She stood in tears among the alien corn” [stanza 7].  It is a beautiful but curious reference: as we say, Keats certainly knew the Book of Ruth, but there no hint in it that Ruth was ever homesick for Moab or that she regarded the corn fields around her as in any sense alien: after all, her late father-in-law still owned some of them.  The tendency to sentimentalize the story recurs  in a sonnet by Christina Rossetti, called Autumn Violets, which has as its last line “a grateful Ruth tho’ gleaning scanty corn.”  This is not, it is true, a direct reference to the Biblical book, but we may note that actually, thanks to Boaz’ patronage, Ruth did fairly well out of her gleaning.  I make these somewhat pedantic comments because I suspect that one reason for the comparative neglect of the Book of Ruth by later writers is the irrepressible cheerfulness of the story, which is all about completely normal people fully understanding one another, and leaves the literary imagination with very little to do.  That said, we could justify the Keats allusion by observing that Ruth does not give the impression of being merely a mindless puppet of Providence, and may well have had darker and deeper feelings than the narrative presents.  (CW 4, 112-13)

Saturday Night at the Movies: “Marat/Sade”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aur-t-RtOJM

The anniversary of the death of the Marquis de Sade passed a few days ago, so tonight it’s Peter Brooks’s film adaptation of Marat/Sade.

Frye in “The Drunken Boat”:

We said earlier that a Romantic poet’s political views would depend partly on whether he saw his inner society as concealed by or as manifested by actual society.  A Romantic poet’s moral attitude depends on a similar ambivalence in the conception of nature.  Nature to Wordsworth is a mother-goddess who teaches the soul serenity and joy, and never betrays the heart that loves her; to the Marquis de Sade nature is the source of all perverse pleasures that an earlier age had classified as “unnatural.”  For Wordsworth the reality of Nature is manifested by the reflection of moral values; for de Sade the reality is concealed by that reflection.  (CW 17, 88)

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Council of Trent

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Pope Pius IV

On this date in 1563 the Council of Trent held its final session.

Frye in The Double Vision:

In many respects the Cold War repeated the later stages of the situation that arose with the Reformation in the sixteenth century.  Then, a revolutionary movement, at first directed mainly toward a reform of abuses in the church, showed signs of expanding and breaking open a tightly-closed structure of authority that claimed exclusive and infallible power in both spiritual and temporal orders.  What was centrally at issue was reformation itself, the conception of a church that could be reformed in principle and not merely through modifying the corruptions that had grown up within it.  The Reformers thought of the church as subject to a higher criterion, namely the Word of God, and as obligated to carry on a continuous dialogue with the Word in a subordinate position to it.

Established authority reacted to this movement as established authority invariably does.  The Council of Trent gives an impression of passing one reactionary resolution after another in a spirit of the blindest panic.  Yet the Council of Trent succeeded in its main objective, which was to persuade Catholics that post-Tridentine Catholicism was not only the legitimate descendant of the pre-Reformation church, but was in fact identical with it.  The logical inference was the claim of a power of veto over the Bible, a position set out in Newman’s Essy on the Development of Christian Doctrine, where a historical dialectic takes supreme command in a way closely parallel to the contructs of Hegel and Marx.  (CW 4, 173-4)