Author Archives: Michael Happy

Frye Alert: Sci Fi Frye

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fryenewdefenders

Frye appeared as a character (above) in Marvel Comics’ The New Defenders in a story called “The Pajusnaya Consignment.”

iO9, a science fiction blog (“We Come from the Future”), cites Frye in a post today: “How many definitions of science fiction are there?”

[Science fiction is] a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency to myth.” — Northrop Frye.

Here’s Frye on “parallel world” science fiction:

I’ve been reading, more or less at random, in science fiction for varieties of the parallel-world conception which seems to me a possible exit from the present up-down mythical universal dilemma.  Reincarnation is now being trumpeted as practically established scientifically; it isn’t, and I still think there’s a fallacy buried in it somewhere, but there’s probably a pattern it fits.  I read the four volumes of Philip Jose Farmer’s “Riverrun” series, but they were a bust.  Now I’m reading Zelazny’s two-volume “Amber” series, which at least has better patter.  They seem to me a development of the Eddison series, where the ideal world is conceived as an archaic one, reminding me of Lawrence’s proposal that if men wanted to fight they should repudiate modern hardware, get into armor and have a good old heroic hack.  Eddison isn’t quite as silly as that sounds, but his fantasy world is simply the old chivalric-romance one back again.  We seem to be in an age of neo-Ariosto. (Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, 254)

G.W.F. Hegel

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Hegel

Today is Hegel‘s birthday (1770-1831).  He is simultaneously one of the most influential, widely cited philosophers and also one of the most daunting.  Frye says in an interview with Imre Salusinszky in Criticism in Society that he enjoyed reading Hegel and was quite moved by the experience.  He doesn’t mention that he first read (and seems to have wholly absorbed) Hegel at the age of 20.  Here are a couple of selections on Hegel from Frye’s student essays written in the early 1930s:

The connection of Hegel with romanticism rests chiefly on Hegel’s own conception of the Zeitgeist as symbolic of the inner unity of the time-problem.  He disliked romanticism because its idealism did not press forward into reality.  His own chief interest, as well as his interest for posterity, centres on the strong impulse to unify and cohere to the spiritual side of life into a conception sufficiently clear to be recognized as the driving force of material.  He wanted the idea to penetrate the innermost interstices of reality; and in this he revolted against romanticism because he attempted what they desired but shirked.  He started out with Schelling, attacking earlier critical philosophers, notably Kant and Fichte, because their approach had destroyed the systematization resultant from the matching of subject with object.  Like the romantics, he was necessarily a subjectivist critic; yet he hated subjectivity because he faced out to the world-as-idea and was bent on its idealistic conquest, a process easily ruined by introspection.  Then he broke with Schelling because of the arbitrary and formalized schemata of that philosopher, which represented to him an immature and hasty jumping at conclusions.  He wanted to realize idealism and idealize reality, and no one can attempt this without in some measure being answerable to the charge, when the approach is made from the ideal side, of having butchered facts to make a theorist’s holiday. (“Romanticism,” CW 3, 41-2)

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Edward III

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBHDEoBWja0

The sword of Edward III

On this date in 1349 Edward III led the English forces to victory over the French in the Battle of Crécy, one of many battles fought during the Hundred Years’ War through the reigns of four English kings — Edward III, Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V — and which ultimately ended in English defeat after Joan of Arc appeared on the scene to rally the French in their cause.

Frye on Blake’s “King Edward the Third”:

“King Edward the Third” is an exercise in the idiom  of Elizabethan drama, just as the songs are, if more successfully, exercises in the corresponding lyrical idiom.  It is a very curious piece.  Apparently, if one believes that England has always been the home of democracy and constitutional government, and France — at least until the Revolution — a hotbed of tyranny and superstition, one can also believe that the Hundred Years’ War was a blow struck solely in the interests of progress.  The English are famous for transforming their economic and political ambitions into moral principles, and to the naive mercantile jingoism of the eighteenth century, which assumed that freedom of action was the same thing as material expansion, there seemed nothing absurd in thinking that the unchecked growth of England’s power involved the emancipation of the world.  At any rate, Akenside, in his Ode to the Country Gentlemen of England, seems to have had a vague idea that war with France is somehow connected with the principles of Freedom, Truth and Reason as well as Glory, and refers to the Hundred Years’ War as a crusade in favor of these principles.  Akenside was a Whig; Thomson and Young, who wrote a good deal to the same effect, were also Whigs, the liberals of their time, and it is not really surprising if the young Blake, looking for a historical example of the fight of freedom against tyranny, should have selected the exploits of Edward III.  A good deal of the poem is simply “Rule Britannia” in blank verse. . . . (Fearful Symmetry, 179-80)

Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsDpznl8eIs

AC/DC, “Highway to Hell” — which is not the same as going to hell in handbasket.  There’s a reason that guitarist Angus Young always wore a school uniform onstage.  At bottom, it’s a myth of deliverance, as the lyrics here make clear: “Look at me / I’m on the way to the Promised Land”

It’s a somewhat  guilty pleasure that I regularly post pop music videos on a Saturday night, but I justify it with, “I’m a Frygian; I cover the waterfront.”  However, all of sudden I’ve got back-up.

Thanks to Bob Denham’s canny selection from the notebooks in Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, there are gems to be found that not only enrich any given moment but leave you wondering if there was anything that Frye didn’t think and write about.

For example, under the entry “Literary Education,” the issue of popular culture, including rock ‘n’ roll, makes an unexpected appearance:

Twenty-five years ago, when I started expounding my views, I met with the most strenuous resistance from my students; today I have the feeling of battering down an open door. . . Educators seem to be as silly & ignorant as ever. . . . [But] young people educate themselves today, partly through films and television, media that are capable of great symbolic concentration, partly through listening to folk singers and rock & roll & music that introduces them to what is, for all its obvious limitations, a more normal poetic idiom.  As a result mythical  habits of thought seem natural to them.  (169)

For what it’s worth, that’s what I see among my students.  Even though they’ve been cheated at every level by underfunded education (and face years of indentured servitude while they work off the debt incurred by the post-secondary education we tell them is mandatory), they are still quite enlightened and decent individuals whose sense of social concern and duty seems to exceed that of their parents and grandparents.  It’s got to be coming from somewhere, and it appears to be derived from a popular culture that, “for all its obvious limitations,” is still managing to put them in a much more liberal state of mind and expectation.

The kind of artists who represent that trend here.

Conrad Black

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conrad_black

His Lordship and Lady Black

Today is Conrad Black‘s birthday (born 1944).  Once a Canadian press baron, he gave up his Canadian citizenship to become a Peer of the Realm, Lord Black of Crossharbour.

As a boy he was thrown out of Upper Canada College for stealing and cheating.  As an adult he was thrown into U.S. federal prison for cheating and stealing.  He is currently out on bail pending an appeal of his convictions for fraud and obstruction of justice.  John Ralston Saul has observed of him:

Lord Black was never a real “capitalist” because he never created wealth, only dismantled wealth. His career has been largely about stripping corporations. Destroying them.

Frye on aristocrats and proletariats in Denham’s Frye Unbuttoned:

Aristocrats get everything in this life: consequently they are fatalists & accept a Hades shadow-world.  Cults of immortality are proletariat. (15)

Having been stripped of most of his assets — and a convert to the view that the American justice system is brutal and unjust, while also wondering aloud what that system must do to people without his means — it will be interesting to see if Lord Black might again become Citizen Black, this time with a more proletariat than aristocratic view of things.

Video of the Day: Fox News as “Terrorist Command Center,” Cont’d

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fox_mosque_stewart

The corporate love that dare not speak its name.

Saudi Prince is second largest share-holder in Fox News parent company, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp; Saudi Prince and co-owner of Fox News is accused by Fox News of being a terrorist sympathizer and secret funder of the Ground Zero “Terror Mosque”; Saudi Prince and co-owner of Fox News is alluded to as terror-sympathizing secret funder of Ground Zero “Terror Mosque” without actually being identified by Fox News either by name or as co-owner of Fox News.

Oceania is at war with Eurasia; Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia . . .

Video here.

Yeehaw! Still More Craziness from Texas Republicans in the House of Representatives

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

Gohmert’s Pile: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R – Texas) on the floor of the House of Representatives explaining the danger of “terror babies.”  That’s right. Muslim. Terror. Babies.

A month ago it was Rep. Joe Burton (R – Texas) apologizing to BP CEO Tony Hayward for the alleged “shakedown” his company received from the White House.  Or – more accurately – a negotiated fund to be held in trust to compensate those who have lost their livelihood by way of a massive oil leak from a BP deep drilling site that has destroyed the Gulf fishing industry.  Corporations, after all, according to people like Barton, are not to be held accountable for their behavior.  That’s only for suckers who actually pay taxes at a rate commensurate with income but can expect either non-existent or inadequate social services in return.  Nausea-inducing video here.

A couple of weeks ago it was Rep. Kevin Brady (R – Texas) declaring that the 9/11 heroes who ran into burning buildings and then dug through the toxic rubble at ground zero looking for survivors, did so to save lives, not to raise the taxes required to fund their subsequent chronic illnesses. “You’re an asshole!” explained Jon Stewart. Video here.

This past week it’s been “terror babies,” offered in a kind of Dadaist display of extra crunchy nuttiness by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R – Texas).  That term, once again, ladies and gentlemen, is terror babies.  Here’s how it (cough) “works”: Muslim women “drop and leave” an “anchor baby” (still more made up terminology provided by Republicans and then hysterically disseminated by Fox News) who qualifies as an American citizen so that he can grow up to become a suicide bomber 15 or 20 years hence. No, you do not misunderstand.  That’s really what he means.

After the jump, a much more plausible source of domestic terror.

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Anti-Semitism

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massacre

“The Massacre of Jews at Strasbourg” in 1349 by Edward Beyer

Today is the anniversary of two vicious acts of anti-semitism in a long and horrific history of such acts.

In 1349 six thousand Jews in Mainz were massacred after being blamed for the Black Death.

In  1391 Jews were massacred in Palma de Mallorca.

Frye in The Great Code:

Anti-Semitism is a long-standing corruption of Christianity, and one of the more rationalized pretexts for it is the notion that the legalism condemned in the New Testament is to be identified with Judaism.  But this is a very dubious interpretation of even the most polemical parts of the New Testament, and is not found at all in the teaching of Jesus.  Jesus always attacks a quite specific elite or pseudo-elite of priests, scribes, lawyers, Pharisess, Sadduces, and other “blind guides” (Matthew 23:24), but not the precepts of the religion he was brought up in himself.  What Jesus condemned in Pharisaism is as common in Christianity as in any other religion.  The attack on legalism is in quite a different context: it means accepting the standards of society, and society will always sooner or later line up with Pilate against the prophet. (133)