Category Archives: Anniversaries

Thespis

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYEu8l6Q5RI

The opening of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (ca. 455 BCE), performed in the original Greek

On this date in 534 BCE Thespis of Acaria became the first actor to portray a character onstage.

Frye in “The Language of Poetry” refers James Frazer’s The Golden Bough to the primitive and popular element of ritual in drama:

The work of the Classical scholars who have followed Frazer’s lead has produced a general theory of the spectacular or ritual content of Greek drama. But if the ritual pattern is in the plays, the critic need not take sides in the quite separate historical controversy over the ritual origin of Greek drama. It is on the other hand a matter of simple observation that the action of Iphigenia in Tauris, for example, is concerned with human sacrifice. Ritual, as the content of action, and more particularly of dramatic action, is something continuously latent in the order of words, and is quite independent of direct influence. Rituals of human sacrifice were not common in Victorian England, but the instant Victorian drama becomes primitive and popular, as it does in The Mikado, back comes all Frazer’s apparatus, the king’s son, the mock sacrifice, the analogy with the Sacea, and the rest of it. It comes back because it is still the primitive and popular way of holding an audience’s attention, and the experienced dramatist knows it. (CW 21, 220)

Sir Wilfrid Laurier

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Today is the birthday of Canada’s seventh prime minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier (1841-1919).

Frye in “National Consciousness in Canadian Culture”:

The Canadian sense of the future tends to be apocalyptic: Laurier’s dictum that the twentieth century would belong to Canada was even then implying a most improbable and discontinuous future. The past in Canada, on the other hand, is, like the past of a psychiatric patient, something of a problem to be resolved: it is rather like what the past would be in the United States if it had started with the Civil War instead of the Revolutionary War. (CW 12, 500)

(Note that there is a brief bit of film footage of Laurier giving a speech on the campaign trail in 1911, the first moving image ever taken of a Canadian prime minister. However, I’ve been unable to find it. If anyone knows of a source, please let me know where it is and I’ll post it.)

Gettysburg Address

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The only known photo of Lincoln after giving the Gettysburg address. The speech was so brief that it caught the photographer unawares.

On this date in 1863 Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address.

Frye in The Educated Imagination:

I often think of a passage in Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” The Gettysburg address is a great poem, and poets have been saying ever since Homer’s time that they were just following after the great deeds of the heroes, and that it was the deeds which were important and not what they said about them. So it was right, in a way, it was traditional, and tradition is very important in literature, for Lincoln to say what he did. And yet it really isn’t true. Nobody can remember the names and dates of battles unless they make some appeal to the imagination: that is, unless there is some literary reason for doing so. Everything that happens in time vanishes in time: it’s only the imagination that, like Proust, whom I quoted earlier, can see men as “giants in time.” (CW 21, 482)

G. B. Shaw

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On this date in 1926 George Bernard Shaw refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”

Frye cites another famous Shaw quote in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: Have you ever wondered whether education is wasted on the young?

Frye: It’s like Bernard Shaw says, “Youth is too valuable to be wasted on the young.” You’re rather stuck with it. I think that students at university have many obstacles thrown in their way by the pedantry and misunderstandings of their teachers and so forth, but those are human conflicts. We all have those.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohD-WUrMsjE

The famous scene in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov is questioned by detective Porfiry Petrovich. (From the excellent 2002 BBC adaptation of the novel.)

On this date in 1849 a Russian court sentenced Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence was later commuted to hard labor.

Frye puts Dostoevsky in very good company in this illuminating moment from Creation and Recreation:

Recently a collection of early reviews of mine was published, and on looking over it I was amused to see how preoccupied I had been then with two writers, Spengler and Frazer, who haunted me contantly, though I was well aware all the time I was studying them that they were rather stupid men and often slovenly scholars. But I found them, or rather their central visions, unforgettable, while there are hundreds of books by more intelligent and scrupulous people which I have forgotten having read. Some of them are people who have utterly refuted the claims of Spengler and Frazer to be taken seriously. But the thinker who was annihilated on Tuesday has to be annihilated all over again on Wednesday: the fortress of thought is a Valhalla, not an abattoir.

This is not merely my own perversity: we all find that it is not only, perhaps not even primarily, the balanced and judicious people that we turn to for insight. It is also such people as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Holderlin, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, all of them liars in Wilde’s sense of the word, as Wilde was himself. They were people whose lives got smashed up in various ways, but who rescued fragments from the smash of an intensity that the steady-state people seldom get to hear about. Their vision is penetrating because it is partial and distorted: it is truthful because it is falsified. To the Old Testament’s question, “Where shall wisdom be found?’ [Job 28-12] there is often only the New Testament’s answer: “Well, not among the wise, at any rate” [cf. 1 Corinthians 1:19-20]. (CW 4, 39-40)

William Lyon Mackenzie King

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From left, King, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Canadian Governor-General, the Earl of Athlone

On this date in 1948 William Lyon Mackenzie King, our longest-serving prime minister, was succeeded by Louis St. Laurent.

Frye, in a 1981 interview with Maureen Harris, places King in the pattern of Canadian politics:

Canada has always had its famous problem of identity and a problem of diffidence. The result is that it’s not a nation that places much trust in heroic leaders. The attitude to Mackenzie King in every election was, “Oh my God, do we have to go out and vote for that guy again?” — but they always did. Then, when Trudeau came along. . .I’ve been very convinced that the enormous outburst of creative activity in English Canada from about 1960 on was the result of the previous Quiet Revolution in Quebec; it was a response to the fact that French Canada had developed and was conscious of an identity of its own. I think people in 1968 saw Trudeau as the person who united these two forms of consciousness. But no golden age lasts, and the Canadian habit, like the habits of any country, will reassert itself sooner or later. So now we’re back at the stage of, “Oh my God, do we have to go out and vote for that guy again?” (CW 24, 516)

Robert Louis Stevenson

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Today is Robert Louis Stevenson‘s birthday (1850-1894). Even Google is celebrating, as you can see from its Treasure Island-themed link icon (above).

Frye in “Third Variation: The Cave” in Words with Power:

In most descent mythis there is some formidable enemy — Minotaur or dragon or demon like Asmodeus — to be fought and overcome, and frequently this enemy is blocking the goal of the descent. The goal is often, in popular romance especially, a treasure of gold or jewels, as in Treasure Island or Tom Sawyer or Poe’s Gold Bug. . . The type of society that searches for such treasure is an instensely selective one. In popular literature the searchers may be boys or antisocial groups (pirates and the like) that boys find it easy to identify with. The standards of admission often reverse those of more conventional societies. . . Often the dragon-guarded hoard is a metaphor for some form of wisdom or fertility that is the real object of descent. (CW 26, 203)

Armistice: An Eyewitness Account

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The inside cover of Gordon Agnew’s diary

Here is about as moving an eyewitness account from the front on November 11th, 1918 as you’re likely to come across. It’s from the diary of Gordon Agnew, a Gunner with the 25th Battery, 2nd Division, Canadian Expeditionary Force. After the jump is a beautifully rendered account of that day which very few people before now have had the opportunity to read. The entry for November 11th begins at the bottom of the first page.

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Remembrance Day

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18vw5vbz_Gs

The lament playing over this footage from the First World War is “Sgt. MacKenzie” by Joseph Kilna MacKenzie

Here’s Frye in “Hart House Rededicated,” delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Hart House, University of Toronto, November 11th, 1969. As so often happens with Frye on public occasions, somehow everything comes together with a resonance that is immediately recognizable. In this instance, the elements are the anniversary of Hart House, Remembrance Day, and our hard won — and too easily lost — sense of community.

Since 1919, a memorial service at the tower, along with an editorial in the Varsity attacking its hypocrisy and crypto-militarism, has been an annual event of campus life. Certainly I would not myself participate in such a service if I thought that its purpose was to strengthen our wills to fight another war, instead of to fight against the coming of another war. That being understood, I think there is a place for the memorial service, apart from the personal reason that many students of mine have their names inscribed on the tower. It reminds us of something inescapable in the human situation. Man is a creature of communities, and communities enrich themselves by what they include: the university enriches itself by breaking down the middle-class fences and reaching out to less privileged social areas; the city enriches itself by the variety of ethnical groups it has taken in. But while communities enrich themselves by what they include, they define themselves by what they exclude. The more intensely a community feels its identity as a community, the more intensely it feels its difference from what is across its boundary. In a strong sense of community there is thus always an element that may become hostile and aggressive.

It is significant that our memorial service commemorates two wars, both fought against the same country. In all wars, including all revolutions, the enemy becomes an imaginary abstraction of evil. Some German who never heard of us becomes a “Hun”; some demonstrator who is really protesting against his mother becomes a “Communist”; some policeman with a wife and a family to support becomes a “fascist pig.” We know that we are lying when we do this sort of thing, but we say it is tactically necessary and go on doing it. But because it is lying, it cannot create or accomplish anything, and so all wars, including all revolutions, take us back to square one of frustrated aggression in which they began. (CW 7, 397)

Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy”

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On this date in 1619 Rene Descartes had the dreams that inspired Meditations on First Philosophy.

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: You begin Fearful Symmetry with Blake’s theory of knowledge and his attack on the unholy trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, who often appear together in his writings as a sort of three-headed monster. What did he have against them?

Frye: They all represent what most people now attach to Descartes. That is, a theory of a conscious ego which is an observer of the world but not a participant in it and consequently regards the world as something to be dominated and mastered. That is, his real hatred of what he calls Bacon, Newton, and Locke is based on what is ultimately a political feeling, that this kind of thing leads to the exploitation of nature and, as an inevitable by-product, the exploitation of other people. (CW 24, 927-8)