On this date Jonathan Swift died (1667-1745).
Frye in “On Special Occasions”:
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 at all don’t seem to hate any less on that account. (CW 4, 324)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryIK9TLAoAs
The finale of the film adaptation of the novel. Pardon the occasionally laughable special effects: it was 1956.
On this date in 1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was first published.
Frye makes a fair number of references to the novel, but this one in Anatomy is particularly resonant because it relates the archetype to its entire mythical family and suggests what this might mean both to the reader and to the writer who engages it:
If we do not accept the archetypal or conventional element in the imagery that links one poem to another, it is impossible to get any systematic mental training out of the reading of literature alone. But if we add to our desire to know literature a desire to know how we know it, we shall find that expanding images into conventional archetypes of literature is a process that takes place unconsciously in all our reading. A symbol of the sea or heath cannot remain within Conrad or Hardy: it is bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole. Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville’s novel: he is absorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward. And what is true for the reader is a fortiori true of the poet, who learns very quickly that there is no singing school for his soul except the study of the monuments of its own magnificent. (CW 22, 93)
Death of Harold (centre), Bayeux Tapestry
On this date in 1066 William the Conqueror defeated Harold II in the Battle of Hastings to become King of England.
Okay, yes, it’s a stretch — and the reference is only incidental — but I’ll use any excuse to cite Frye where he is most accessible on the unique authority of literature. And it’s remarkable, isn’t it, how often we come across extraordinarily lucid passages like this one from The Educated Imagination:
We can understand though how the poet got his reputation as a kind of licensed liar. The word poet itself means liar in some languages, and the words we use in literary criticism, fable, fiction, myth, have all come to mean something we can’t believe. Some parents in Victorian times wouldn’t let their children read novels because they weren’t “true.” But not many reasonable people today would deny that the poet is entitled to change whatever he likes when he uses a theme from history or real life. The reason why was explained long ago by Aristotle. The historian makes specific and particular statements as: “The battle of Hastings was fought in 1066.” Consequently he’s judged by the truth or falsehood of what he says — either there was such a battle or there wasn’t, and if there was he’s got the date either right or wrong. But the poet, Aristotle says, never makes any real statements at all, certainly no particular or specific ones. The poet’s job is not to tell you what happened, but what happens: not what did take place, but the kind of thing that always takes place. (35)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aboZctrHfK8
From the film adaptation: “the answer to life, the universe, everything”
On this date in 1979 Douglas Adams published The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which eventually became the first of a six-part “trilogy.” This particular work will require two separate entries: one on science fiction and the other on satire.
Frye on science fiction in “The Bridge of Language”:
The same principle applies to science fiction, which is a form of romance, continuing the formulas of fantasy, Utopian vision, Utopian satire, philosophical fiction, adventure story, and myth that have been part of the structure of literature from the beginning. What the hero of a science fiction story finds on a planet of Arcturus, however elaborate and plausible the hardware that got him there, is still essentially what heroes of earlier romances found in lost civilizations in Africa or Asia. The conventions of literature have to take over at some point, and what we see, in science fiction no less than in Homer and Dante, is, in the title of a seventeenth-century satire set on the moon, mundus alter et adem, another world, but the same world. (CW 11, 320-1)
On “satire of the low norm” in Anatomy, which explains, among other things, why the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself is famously inscribed with the words “DON’T PANIC!”:
[The satire of the low norm] takes for granted a world which is full of anomalies, injustices, follies, and crimes, and yet is permanent and undisplaceable. Its principle is that anyone who wishes to keep his balance in such a world must learn first to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. . . The [hero] of the low norm takes an attitude of flexible pragmatism; he assumes that society will, if given any chance, behave more or less like Caliban’s Setebos in Browning’s poem, and he conducts himself accordingly. On all doubtful points of behaviour convention is his deepest conviction. (CW 22, 211)
“Dent. Arthur Dent.”
“To Come to Light” is a Thanksgiving sermon Frye delivered on October 5th, 1986 to mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of Victoria College.
A sample:
In moments of despair or bereavement or horror, we find ourselves staring blankly into an unresponding emptiness, utterly frustrated by its indifference. We come from the unknown at birth, and we rejoin it at death with all our questions about it unanswered. Sometimes we wonder whether humanity is capable of living in any world at all where consciousness is really a function of life. In a century of nuclear bombs and a pollution that threatens even the supply of air to breath and water to drink, the human race seems like a kind of crazy Oedipus, obsessed by the desire to kill his father God and rape his mother Nature. . .
The impression of a mindless universe is one that we get from certain aspects of nature. As long as we feel alone with a world of natural objects, where everything is an “it,” whatever is conscious will be an ego or “I,” and human society a collection of egos. Nature, not being conscious, doesn’t care whether we have any knowledge or not: we, so far as we are merely egos, care about knowledge only as a way of getting one step ahead of the next person. Such a society is what the Bible means by the Tower of Babel: a world where people either do not understand us or are simply distorted echoes of ourselves. Nations in this kind of world become hysterically hostile, piling up weapons with a kind of lethargic panic, yet half fascinated too by the thought of the destruction they would cause. The arts and sciences do what they can to make better sense of things, but a Tower of Babel society can use art and science only for exploitation, whether of other human beings or of nature. (CW 4, 364)
We can start by being thankful that we’ve not yet become self-destructive enough to play this terrible scenario through. And we might also be thankful that those growing up just behind us may prove to be wiser than we have been; that they may know Thanksgiving is not just another occasion to indulge ourselves, and recognize as we have not how rare is our blessing and how complete is our responsibility to it.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPkBmoMfp1I
Welles as Othello at the end of his tether: “nothing extenuate”
On this date in 1985 Orson Welles died (born 1915).
Frye’s attitude toward Orson Welles seems to have been somewhat iffy. He alludes to Welles on a few occasions, but they are not especially friendly. Frye and Welles were exact contemporaries (Frye born in 1912 and Welles in 1915), but Welles appears to have got under Frye’s skin as a callow interpreter of Shakespeare — a “boy genius” who perhaps earned the title prematurely.
Frye in Fools of Time:
In my own graduate-student days during the nineteen-thirties, there appeared an Orson Welles adaptation of Julius Caesar which required the hero to wear a fascist uniform and pop his eyes like Mussolini, and among students there was a good deal of discussion about whether Shakespeare’s portrayal of, say, Coriolanus showed “fascist tendencies” or not. But fascism is a disease of democracy: the fascist leader is a demagogue, and a demagogue is precisely what Coriolanus is not. (18)
On this date in 1845, John Henry Cardinal Newman, was received into the Catholic Church.
Frye in The Secular Scripture:
Similarly, Christianity possessed a body of true myth or revelation, most of it in the Bible. This was distinguished from unauthorized myth by having a large body of conceptual writing attached to it, the doctrinal system of Christian theology. As with Plato, the Christian has to pass through the doctrinal system before he can understand the myths of the Bible. In the nineteenth century Cardinal Newman remarked that the function of scripture was not to teach doctrine but to prove it: this axiom shows how completely the structure of the Bible had been translated into a conceptual system which both replaced and enclosed it. Even the fact that the original data were for the most part stories, as far as their structure is concerned, often came to be resented or even denied. Whatever resisted the translating operation had to be bracketed as a mystery of faith, into which it was as well not to look to closely. (CW 18, 17)
Andrew Sullivan, who is Catholic and gay, has been an unwavering critic of the Ratzinger retinue in the Vatican, both for its decades-long criminal complicity in child rape and for its ruthless purge of gay clergy. Sullivan recently put up a very moving post about Catholicism and homosexuality, in which he cites Cardinal Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins as instances of the Church’s hypocrisy on homosexuality, and as proof that a priest can be gay and a superlative Catholic. You can read the post, “Homosexuals as ‘Victim Souls'”, here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVGoY9gom50&feature=related
Howl (part 1)
On this date in 1955 Allen Ginsburg read his poem Howl in public for the first time in San Francisco.
Frye in “The Renaissance of Books”:
The great poets of the first half of this century — Eliot, Yeats, Pound — had the somewhat aloof authority conferred by their erudition, even though they often felt the pull of the desire to be genuinely popular. We have the Eliot of Sanskrit quotations and the Eliot of practical cats; we have the Yeats of Rosicrucian symbolism and the Yeats of the luminously simple ballads of the Last Poems. Allen Ginsburg’s Howl is usually taken as the turning point towards a neo-Romantic poetry which has been popular in a way hardly known to previous generations. Much of this poetry has turned back to the primitive oral tradition of folk song, with the formulaic units, topical allusions, musical accompaniment, and public presentation that go with the tradition. (CW 11, 145-6)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwdUa6fV62s&feature=related
“They Flee from Me”
On this date Sir Thomas Wyatt died (1503-1549).
Frye in Rencontre: “The General Editor’s Introduction”:
It used to be said of Wyatt, being older and further down on the evolutionary scale, was a cruder pioneer than Surrey, who the same kind of thing much better. This view of them resulted from a historical accident. They both belonged to the courtly class of amateur poets who did not publish their poetry, and were first introduced in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), on the eve of Elizabeth’s reign. By that time the new conservatism was in full swing, and the editor of Tottel made many alterations in Wyatt’s work to bring it inl line with Surrey’s, under the impression, so common among editors, that he was improving it. Fortunately Wyatt’s manuscripts have survived, and we can see from them that he is a poet of older radicalism of Skelton and Dunbar as well as the of the new age, and one of the finest experimental poets of any age:
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themself in danger
To take bread at my hand: and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.[They Flee from Me, ll. 1-7] (CW 10, 17-18)