Category Archives: Anniversaries

Duns Scotus

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On this date in 1308, the scholastic theologian and philosopher Duns Scotus died.

In October 1936, Frye, newly ensconced at Merton College, Oxford, wrote Helen about the college legend that the ghost of Duns Scotus haunted his room:

Apparently the tradition I think I mentioned, that the ghost of Duns Scotus haunts this room and the one above it as well as the library (which is really an extension of my staircase) is quite well-known and of some standing.  He has a long and cold way to come, as he’s buried in Cologne, but I can see where the legend of his haunting the library would originate: Merton had the best library in England during the Middle Ages and all of Scotus would be here, being the greatest English scholastic and a Merton man.  Then the Reformation came, this library was plundered, the manuscripts torn to pieces and thrown into the quad, and of all authors the one singled out for especial destruction was Scotus.  I asked my scout if he had ever sensed a ghost on this staircase, and he said no, but various people have put on surplices and awakened people by putting cold hands on them.

Mozart: Symphony 36

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI5Yx_zdTMc&p=B7B56535289D7826&playnext=1&index=19

“Linz,” third and fourth movements

On this date in 1783 Mozart’s Symphony 36, “Linz,” premiered in Linz, Austria.

Frye in “Expanding Eyes”:

I am by no means the first critic to regard music as the typical art, the one where the impact of structure is not weakened, as it has been in painting and still is in literature, by false issues derived from representation.  For centuries the theory of music included a good deal of cosmological speculation, and the symmetrical grammar of classical music, with its circle of fifths, its twelve-tone chromatic and seven-tone diatonic scales, its duple and triple rhythms, its concords and cadences and formulaic progressions, makes it something of a mandala of the ear.  We hear the resonance of this mandala of musical possibilities in every piece of music we listen to.  Occasionally we feel that what we are listening to epitomizes, so to speak, our whole musical experience with special clarity: our profoundest response to the B Minor Mass or the Jupiter Symphony is not “this is beautiful music,” but something more like “this is the voice of music”; this is what music is all about.  (CW 27, 407)

“Lady Chatterley’s Lover”

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On this date in 1960 Penguin Books was acquitted of obscenity for publishing D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Frye in “Varieties of Literary Utopias”:

The attempt to see the sexual relationship as something in itself, and not merely as a kind of social relationship, is something that gives a strongly pastoral quality to the work of D.H. Lawrence.  For him the sexual relation is natural in the sense that its closest and immediate affinities with physical environment, the world of animals and plants and walks in the country and sunshine and rain.  The idyllic sense of this world as helping to protect and insulate true love from the noisy city-world of disembodied consciousness runs through all Lawrence’s work from the early White Peacock to the late Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  People complain, Lawrence says, that he wants them to be “savages,” but the gentian flowering on its coarse stem is not savage.  (CW 27, 213)

Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses

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On this date in 1517 Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses on his church door in Wittenberg, beginning the Protestant Reformation in Europe.

Frye in his student essay, “Gains and Losses in the Reformation”:

[Protestantism’s] record, particularly that of the Calvinist branches, is not snow white in this respect, but any rational comparison between Protestant rule in England under Elizabeth or even Edward and Catholic rule under Mary, or between the treatment of Catholic minorities in Scotland and Protestant minorities in Spain, should establish the point.  There is probably no more inherent cruelty in one tradition than the other, nor more sadism in Latins than in Nordics, but Protestant emphasis on the direct responsibility of the soul to God made heresy far less an outrage on society, and its punishment, consequently, less a venting of popular fury on its victims.  The Catholic tradition of apostolic infallibility once denied, the enormity of the crime took on far less cosmic proportions.  Another reason for the somewhat cleaner Protestant record is without doubt the influence of its intellectual and sensitive progenitors among the mystics and the humanists.  Protestantism contains, at its finest, the refusal of a fine mind to be bullied by inferior interpreters of tradition.  Erasmus is a great Protestant in this sense; so is Zwingli; and so is Luther when we admire him most.  (CW 3, 266)

Benito Mussolini

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9gm5xAjT2w

I wish I could have found a better version of this famous clip, or at least one with sound.  But the seventeen seconds of clownish facial expressions here capture perfectly how, their terrifying capacity for evil aside, people like Mussolini are always ludricrous creatures.

On this day in 1922 Benito Mussolini became prime minister of Italy.

Frye in “Two Italian Sketches, 1939” describes ascending to a mountain village in the hope that he might be allowed to “forget about Mussolini for a few hours”:

When we get there we find, however, that the town has been made into a “national monument” and Mussolini’s plug-ugly sourpuss is plastered all over it.  His epigrams, too.  For every conspicuous piece of white wall in Italy is covered with mottoes in black letters from his speeches and obiter dicta–the successor to the obsolete art of fresco-painting.  One of them says, with disarming simplicity, “Mussolini is always right.”  “The olive tree has gentle and soft leaves, but its wood is harsh and rough,” says another more cryptically.  “War is to man what maternity is to woman,” says a third.  “The best way to preserve peace is to prepare for war,” says a fourth, and it looks just as silly in Italian as it does in English.  Another one of the few not of Mussolini’s authorship reads: “Duce! We await your orders.”  Up here they present us with “We shoot straight.” (CW 11, 189)

“Don Giovanni”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shMKaRELm7g

A superb rendition of the finale in a 1990 production at the Metropolitan Opera

On this date in 1787 Mozart’s Don Giovanni premiered in Prague.

Frye in “A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres”:

The verbal action of Figaro is comic and that of Don Giovanni tragic, but in both cases the audience is exalted by the music above the reach of tragedy and comedy, and, though as profoundly moved as ever, is not emotionally involved with the discovery of plot or characters.  It looks at the downfall of Don Juan as spectacular entertainment, much as the gods are supposed to look at the downfall of Ajax or Darius. (CW 21, 115)

Francis Bacon

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“Self Portrait,” 1976

Today is painter Francis Bacon‘s birthday (1909-1992).

Frye in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”:

It is vulgar for the critic to think of literature as a tiny palace of art looking out upon an inconceivably gigantic “life.”  “Life” should be for the critic only the seed-plot of literature, a vast mass of potential literary forms, only a few of which will grow up into the greater world of the verbal universe.  Similar universes exist for all the arts.  “We make to ourselves pictures of facts,” say Wittgenstein, but by pictures he means representative illustrations, which are not pictures.  Pictures as pictures are themselves facts, and exist only in a pictorial universe.  It is easy enough to say that while the stars in their courses may form the subject of a poem, they will remain the stars in their courses, forever outside poetry.  But this is pure regression to the common field of experience, and nothing more; for the more strenuously we try to conceive the stars in their courses in non-literary ways, the more assuredly we shall fall into the idioms and conventions of some other mental universe.  The conception of a constant external reality acts as a kind of censor principle in the arts.  Painting has been much bedevilled by it, and much of the freakishness of modern painting is clearly due to the energy of its revolt against the representational fallacy.  (CW 21, 73-4)

Geoffrey Chaucer

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

On this date Geoffrey Chaucer died (c. 1342-1400).

From Frye’s student paper, “A Reconsideration of Chaucer” (written and revised ca. 1936-1938):

We shall come to this question of Chaucer’s religious attitude again: all we are concerned with just now is the fact that the half-century between the Black Death and the death of Chaucer is a cultural unity as much as the baroque, rococo, or Victorian periods are.  The inner conflicts are intense, but they are a sign of vitality, and from one very significant point of view the resemblances are more profound and significant than the differences.  It is an error of fact to call Langland a Lollard or a sympathizer with John Ball; but it is not an error of interpretation to see underlying connections among all three.  Such a method of approach to any age in history is concerned above all to examine that age as far as humanly possible in terms of its own standards.  We have had enough, for example, of the critic who ascribes to Chaucer a sneaking sympathy with the ideas of Voltaire because the critic himself is revolting agains a Yahwistic mother.  Even more responsible criticism is apt to assume an impossible antithesis between “medieval” and “modern” attitudes, in which case it is not difficult to prove that Chaucer was “essentially” either.  Chaucer is not “essentially” anything but Chaucer, however, and Chaucer lived in the age of Wycliffe and Langland.  At the same time it is undoubtedly true that he is a uniquely cosmopolitan figure.  He drew both from the humanistic Italy of Petrarch and Boccaccio and from the still feudal and medieval France of Jean de Meung.  The cultural unity of fourteenth-century England is expressed very well by Langland and Wycliffe; but if we want to see this period in its relation to European culture as a whole we have to turn to Chaucer. (CW 3, 435)

Jean-Paul Sartre

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lFLO16TRPQ&feature=related

A Sartre and de Beauvoir screener from the 1950s.

On this date in 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he refused.

Frye in notebook 12 offers a qualified estimation of Sartre as the last of the “great thinkers” (elsewhere he calls him “an intellectual juvenile delinquent”):

I had the usual childish fantasies, when very young, of wanting to be a “great man” — fantasies that in our day only Churchill had realized.  But Churchill’s greatness was archaic: his funeral really buried that whole conception of greatness as a goal of ambition.  Then I had fantasies of wanting to be a great composer & a great novelist–both obsolete conceptions today.  The novel is breaking up into other forms & is no longer central as it was in the 19th c: the great composers ended with Bartok, and Boulez & Varese & Cage are not “great composers,” they’re something else.  When I settled into my real line I naturally wanted to be “great” there too: but maybe greatness is obsolete.  In the 19th century one wants to read Hegel & Marx & Kierkegaard & Nietzsche; are there really any 20th c. equivalents of that kind of “great thinker”?  Maybe Sartre.  But something about greatness ended around 1940.  We’re doing different things now.  Marshall McLuhan is a typical example: a reputation as a great thinker that doesn’t think at all.  (CW 9, 146)