Category Archives: Anniversaries

“O Canada”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjiwBwBL4Qo

Classified, “Oh . . . Canada”

On this date in 1880 “O Canada” was first performed, ironically enough, at a Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony in Quebec.

Frye on his famous “garrison mentality” formulation of the Canadian character:

A garrison is a closely knit and beleaguered society, and its moral and social values are unquestionable.  In a perilous enterprise one does not discuss causes or motives: one is either a fighter or a deserter.  Here again we may turn to Pratt, with his infallible instinct for what is central in the Canadian imagination.  The societies in Pratt’s poems are always tense and tight groups engaged in war, rescue, martyrdom, or crisis, and the moral values expressed are simply those of that group.  In such a society the terror is not for the common enemy, even when the enemy is or seems victorious, as in the extermination of the Jesuit missionaries or the crew of Franklin…. The real terror comes with individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group, losing the sense of driving power that the group gives him, aware of a conflict within himself far subtler than the struggle of morality against evil.  It is much easier to multiply garrisons, and when that happens, something anticultural comes into Canadian life, a dominating herd-mind in which nothing original can grow.  The intensity of the sectarian divisiveness of Canadian towns, both religious and political, is an example: what such groups represent, of course, vis-a-vis on another is “two solitudes,” the death of communication and dialogue.  Separatism, whether English or French, is culturally the most sterile of creeds. (“Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada, CW 12, 351)

James Hansen

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James Hansen describing the censorship he was subject to during the Bush years on 60 Minutes

On this date in 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural resources that it was 99% probable global warming had already begun.

He was of course 100% correct.

It’s 22 years later.  Look how little we’ve done to address the problem.  A major contributing cause is corporations like Koch Industries which fund global warming denialism.

John Skelton

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skelton

On this date John Skelton died (1460-1529).

Frye in “Recontre: The General Editor’s Introduction”:

As a result of the change of rhythm, the native four-beat line came into the foreground again.  At the court of Henry VIII, John Skelton developed the “skeltonic” rhythm which has been named after him, a rhythm closer to nursery rhyme, ballad, and popular poetry of all kinds than perhaps any other equally important poet has produced.  One result of this, of a type not uncommon among experimental poets, was that it was not until well on in the twentieth century that he was regarded as an important poet at all.  The English four-beat line was, we said, split in two by a mid-line caesura; hence Old English poetry could be printed as a series to two-beat lines by a slight change in typography.  The skeltonic is rhythmically the Old English half-line revived, although a clanging rhythm has been added:

For though my rhyme be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,

Rudely rain-beaten,

Rusty and moth-eaten,

If ye take well therewith,

It hath in it some pith.  [Colin Clout II. 53-8]

Such a rhythm is logical, if extreme, of accentual tendencies, and is an excellent vehicle for the violent satire and grotesque realism that usually accompanied it in Skelton.  (CW 10, 14)

Oxford

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merton_college_oxford_3059

Merton College, Oxford

On this date in 1214 The University of Oxford received its charter.

Frye attended Merton College (established 1264), completing his studies for an MA in the spring of 1939.  During the summer and fall of 1982 Frye was interviewed by Valerie Schatzker as part of an oral history of the University of Toronto.  Here he talks about his experience at Oxford.

Schaztker: How did [study there] compare with what you remember from the Honour Course [at Victoria College]?

Frye: It was very largely a repetition of what I’d done.  I read more intensively, but, as I said, my real reason for taking it was that I wanted to become fresher in the whole English area.  If you ask about instruction: of course it was tutorial, and my tutor was Edmund Blunden, who was a rather shy, diffident man.  For some bloody reason, which I’ve never figured out, he was pro-Nazi.  I didn’t know who was to blame for that.  But in any case, I seemed to meet fascists everywhere I turned at Oxford, so I was poltically and socially extremely unhappy for that time that I was there.  England’s morale seemed to be the lowest in its history.  If you read Howard K. Smith’s Last Train From Berlin (he’s a CBS announcer, and he was a classmate of mine at Oxford), the first chapter is about his experiences at Merton College and it will give you some idea of what I myself found extremely uncongenial about the place…

It may have been pure accident.  But if I found myself just meeting people casually, I seemed to keep running into fascist groups all the time.  I knew that the Labour group was the largest single group at Oxford, but the general feeling at Merton, certainly, and I think at several other colleges as well, was very much not to my liking…

I wouldn’t say that it was more politially active, but the undercurrents were beginning to swirl around and they were very ugly ones.  There was one man who had gone up to Merton on a scholarship which had been donated by Oswald Mosely [of the British Union of Fascists] and his job was to recruit people as far as he could.  I felt that if England had not been forced into an anti-Hitler position it would have gone in a very sinister direction or at least the intellectual leadership would have done so.

Schatzker: Did you find yourself ostracized?

Frye: No, I didn’t.  That’s too strong a word.  I didn’t find myself ostrasized.  And of course there were very intense left-wing people both in Merton College and elsewhere.  Howard Smith was one, and another was a tough egg from Yorkshire who came home drunk to his room and found four or five Fascists roughing it up.  So his head cleared and he went into action and pretty soon the air was thick with Fascists flying out of windows. (CW 24, 599-600)

New Democratic Party

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TOMMY DOUGLAS

Tommy Douglas (former CCF Premier of Saskatchewan and father of Medicare) becomes the NDP’s first leader, holding the post until 1971

On this date in 1961 the New Democratic Party was formed with the merger of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress.

Frye on Canadian Socialism in his “Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington,” September 14, 1989:

….Canada has had, for the last fifty years, a Socialist (or more accurately Social Democratic) party which is normally supported by twenty-five to thirty percent of the electorate, and has been widely respected through most of its history, for its devotion to principle.  Nothing of proportional size or influence has emerged among socialists in the United States.  When the CCF, the first form of this party, was founded in the 1930s, its most obvious feature went largely unnoticed.  That feature was that it was following a British rather than an American tendency, trying to assimilate the Canadian political structure to the British Conservative-Labour pattern.  The present New Democratic Party, however, never seems to get beyond a certain percentage of support, not enough to come to federal power.  Principles make voters nervous, and yet any departure from them towards expediency makes them suspicious.  (CW 12, 643-4)

CBC Radio archives on Tommy Douglas and the NDP here.

CBC Television memorial for Tommy Douglas here.

Bloomsday

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The last lines of Ulysses.  Molly Bloom: “Yes”

June 16th, 1904, is the day the events of James Joyce’s Ulysses occur: Bloomsday.  It is also the day that Joyce and his future wife, Nora Barnacle, had their first, well, date.  Christopher Hitchens has called Ulysses the greatest literary work ever inspired by a handjob.

Frye puts it this way:

An association is implied between Stephen and Icarus, and in some respects Ulysses is a version of the fall of Icarus.  Stephen, an intellectual of the type usually described as in the clouds or up in the air, comes back to Dublin and in his contact with Bloom meets a new kind of father, neither his spiritual nor his physical father but Everyman, the man of earth and common humanity, who is yet isolated enough from his society to be individual too, an Israel as well as an Adam.  Stephen approaches this communion with a certain amount of shuddering and distate, but the descent to the earth is clearly necessary for him.  Traditionally, however, the earth is Mother Earth, and what we are left with is a female monologue of a being at once maternal, marital, and meretricious, who enfolds a vast number of lovers, including Bloom and possibly Stephen, and yet is narcist too, in a state of self-absorption which absorbs the lover.  Marion Bloom is a Penelope who embraces all her suitors as well as her husband, and whose sexual versatility seems much the same thing as the weaving of her never-finished web–the web being also one of Blake’s symbols for female sexuality.  The drowsy spinning of the earth, absorbed in its own cyclical movement, constantly affirming but never forming, is what Marion sinks into, taking the whole book with her.  (“Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake,” CW 29, 110)

Magna Carta

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The earliest surviving film adaptation of Shakespeare, an 1899 British production of King John.  (This clip cannot be embedded: hit the arrow and then hit the YouTube link that appears.)

On this date in 1215 King John of England put his seal on Magna Carta.

Shakespeare, of course, wrote a play about King John that makes no mention of Magna Carta.  Happily, Frye has a point or two to make about Shakespeare by way of King John.

The action of King John has proceeded only for a few lines when the king says:

Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France;
For ere thou can’st report I will be there,
The thunder of my cannon shall be heard.

King John, of course, had no cannon.  It is habitual for us to say the audience would never notice.  Audiences in fact have rather a quick ear for such things.  Or we may say that Shakespeare was in a hurry, and was unwilling to spoil his record of never blotting a line.  The assumption that Shakespeare was a hasty and slapdash writer has often been made, by hasty and slapdash critics, but has never proved fruitful.  If we say that Shakespeare had more important things on his mind, we come closer to the truth: certainly the fine image of the thunderstorm is more important than fidelity to the date of the introduction of gunpowder.  But it is better to think of such anachronism positively and functionally, as helping to univeralize an historical period, as representing a typical rather than a particular event.  The past is blended with the present, and event and audience are linked in the same community. (A Natural Perspective, 20)

Jorge Luis Borges

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Interview with Borges (Spanish with English subtitles)

On this date Borges died (1899 – 1986).

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: I believe some of your literary productions as an undergraduate were satires.  You were attracted to this form of [Menippean] satire?

Frye: I was always attracted to that form, because at that time certainly, I knew more about ideas than I did about people.  If someone like Borges had been known to me at the time, I would have tried to pick up that kind of tradition, I think. (Northrop Frye in Conversation, 71)

Globe Theatre

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Trailer for a production of Romeo and Juliet at the restored Globe

On this day in 1997 the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre was opened.

Well, it’s not exactly a secret, but still…

The conception of all the world as a stage & of the playhouses as a microcosm of the world is indicated in the name, motto & architecture of the “Globe” theatre.  (CW 20, 106)

The motto of the Globe was “Totus mundus agit histrionem” — the whole world is a playhouse.