Category Archives: Anniversaries

Samuel Beckett

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8C4HL2LyWU&feature=related

An excerpt from Not I, featuring the lips, teeth and tongue of Beckett collaborator Billie Whitelaw: “Words were coming.  Imagine!  Words were coming.”

On this date in 1989 Samuel Beckett died (born 1906).

Frye in “The Nightmare Life in Death,” his review of Beckett’s trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, published in Hudson Review in 1960:

Many curiously significant remarks are made about silence in the trilogy.  Molloy, for example, says: “about me all goes really silent, from time to time, whereas for the righteous the tumult of the world never stops.”  The Unnamable says: “This voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent to what it says, too old perhaps and too abased ever to succeed in saying the words that would be its last, knowing itself useless and its uselessness in vain, not listening to itself but to the silence that it breaks.”  Only when one is sufficiently detached from this compulsory babble to realize that one is uttering it can one achieve any genuine serenity, or the silence which is its habitat.  “To restore silence is the role of objects,” says Molloy, but this is not Beckett’s final paradox.  His final paradox is the conception of the imaginative process which underlies and informs his remarkable achievement.  In a world given over to obsessive utterance, a world of television and radio and shouting dictators and tape recorders and beeping space ships, to restore silence is the role of serious writing.  (CW 29, 167)

After the jump, a recent version of Play, featuring the heads of Juliet Stevenson, Alan Rickman and Kristin Scott Thomas.

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Christians and Muslims

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This date represents a couple of significant anniversaries in the history of Christian-Muslim relations.

In 1192 Richard the Lion-Heart was captured and imprisoned by Leopold V of Austria after signing a treaty with Saladin ending the Third crusade.

And in 1522 Suleiman the Magnificent accepted the surrender of the surviving Knights of Rhodes, who were allowed to evacuate, eventually settling on Malta to become the Knights of Malta.

Frye in “Substance and Evidence”:

And just as hope is the beginning of faith, so love is the end of it.  Let us think, for example, of a Christian and a Muslim, facing each other in one of the Crusades.  Neither of them knows the first thing about the other man’s religion, but they’re both convinced that it is utterly and damnably wrong; they are even prepared to die for that conviction.  There must be something the matter with a faith that expresses itself as a desire to kill somebody who doesn’t share it.  A profoundly Christian writer, Jonathan Swift, remarked that men have just enough religion to make them hate, but not enough to make them love one another.  To which we may add that those who have no religion don’t seem to hate any the less on that account.  The general principle here is that whatever reflects any credit on humanity is always attached to something else that’s silly or vicious.  As Jesus ben Sirach, the author of Ecclesiastes, says: “What race is worthy of honour?  The human race.  What race is unworthy of honour?  The human race.” [10:19, RSV] (CW 4, 324)

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)

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)

Marquis de Sade

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A clip from Peter Brooks’s 1967 film adaptation of Marat/Sade: “He should destroy with passion. Like a man.”

On this date in 1814 the Marquis de Sade died (born 1740).

Frye in Notebook 27:

de Sade is just as right about “nature” as Wordsworth is: he simply points to its predatory side.  But no animal acts with the malice that man does: that’s the product of consciousness. (CW 5, 56)

Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway

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“A man who is clearly an idiot”

On this date in 1582 William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway put up a bond for their pending marriage.

Frye in The Educated Imagination reminds us once again not to indulge in biographical fallacy:

We know nothing about Shakespeare except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.  We relate the poems and plays and novels we read and see, not to the men who wrote them, nor even directly to ourselves; we relate them to each other.  Literature is the world that we try to build up and enter at the same time.  (42)

Carrie Nation

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Carrie Nation: She’s wielding a hatchet for a reason

Today is the birthday of intemperate temperance advocate Carrie Nation (1846-1911).

Here is Frye on what turned out to be the tail end of the temperance movement in an editorial, “So Many Lost Weekends,” published in the March 1947 issue of The Canadian Forum.  (A twofer: Frye gets in a good dig at “monopoly capitalism” along the way.)

The latest gathering of the Ontario Temperance Federation, which coincided with the lifting of the liquor ration, included an abortive proposal to form a temperance party.  It is with genuine concern that one sees the public utterances of Protestant churches increasingly identified with the impression that their churches regard the “liquor traffic” as of far greater importance than any theological doctrine, any other social question, or any other moral weakness.  We say weakness, for the refusal to make any moral distinction between drinking and drunkenness constitutes a grave social problem; but unfortunately the effect of losing all sense of proportion about it is to make it seem almost trivial.  And it can hardly be denied either that many clergymen have completely lost their sense of proportion about drinking, and have transformed a real issue into a superstitious taboo which is injurious to religion (it has, for example, alienated a large number from the churches whose support could have been had for the asking), which has no intelligible relationship to politics, and which is steadily losing all connection with doing good.

Many temperance advocates are only church politicians, but many are men with long and honourable careers in the support of liberal and socialist causes — a fact which is reflected in a certain realism with which they associate the drinking problem with profits and private enterprise.  One is all the more surprised, therefore, to find them falling into the common reformers’ error of mistaking the effect for the cause.  People take to drink because of psychological maladjustments or economic insecurity.  The former any serious religion would regard as falling with the province of the “cure of souls”; the latter is an evil which nothing but an intelligently planned socialist movement can really cure.  Socialists ask for the support of the Christian churches on the ground that the present system of monopoly capitalism is immoral as well as inefficient; and to divert all of one’s reforming energies from the central problem of insecurity to one of its by-products is, as drunkenness is, like pulling a leaf from a tree and expecting the tree to wither away.  (CW 4, 246-7)

Joan of Arc

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqMBHWmTcC8

The first part of a restored version of a previously lost 1927 film, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

On this date in 1429 Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieged La Charité.

Frye on prophesy in The Great Code:

In the post-Biblical period both Christianity and Rabbinical Judaism seem to have accepted the principle that the age of prophecy had ceased, and to have accepted it with a good deal of relief.  Medieval Europe had a High King and a High Priest, an Emperor and a Pope, but the distinctively prophetic third force was not recognized.  The exceptions prove the rule.  The career of Savonarola is again one of martyrdom, and the same is true of Joan of Arc, who illustrates the inability of a hierarchical society to distinguish a Deborah from a Witch of Endor.  (CW 19, 148)