Category Archives: Anniversaries

Anne Bronte

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AnneBronte

On this date Anne Bronte — sister of Emily and Charlotte and author of Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — died (1820 – 1849).

Frye refers regularly to Emily and Charlotte but doesn’t seem to refer separately to Anne.  However, he does cite the Bronte sisters in this notebook entry to make a crucial point about realism and romance:

As time goes on, the greater seriousness attached to myths, as the stories that really happened or are “true” in some special way, eventually shifts, as with a writing culture the sense of truth or correspondence grows, to the life the story reflects.  Thus realism acquires the moral dignity that romances never had, and which realism itself inherits from myth.

Thus in the nineteenth century the “history” of fiction goes through those who can, for the purposes of the alleged historian, be treated as realists.  Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Jane Austen, and carefully selected aspects of Dickens form the main skeleton; Wilkie Collins and Bulwer Lytton, even the Brontes, don’t fit quite so well, and Le Fanu, George Macdonald, William Morris, Rider Haggard, for various reasons, don’t fit at all.  Neither do the Alice books.  My thesis is, of course that romance illustrates structure and realism only content, hence a genuine literary history would put the romances in the centre and make realism peripheral.  (CW 15, 202)

John Calvin

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calvin

On this date John Calvin died (1509 – 1564).

Here’s Frye in a student essay, “The Importance of Calvin for Philosophy”:

It is obvious that if we look at Calvin we can see in his view of God a Cartesian feeling for order and permanence, and that if we look at his view of man we see that for him human activity springs from sources deeper than the human will.  The immense energy and uncompromising heroism of Calvinism, its tendency to consolidate in theocratic dictatorships, sufficiently refute the theory that according to it our relation with God should be one of helpless quietism.  As a social force, Calvinism identified itself more explicitly with the bourgeois than with the royal side of the alliance of prince and middle class, in opposition to the Erastians, but as a doctrine both factors are present.  But they are present in antithesis, not synthesis; God and man have too wide a gap between them.  Just as Aquinas had extended the feudal society of his day into heaven and established a hierarchy of angels leading up to God, so in Luther we find an absolute monarch protecting the interests of a democratic body saved through their faith in and obedience to him.  There is something of this in Calvin, but on the whole his scheme disregards the state and the organization of human society, resting on an Augustinian dualism between a city of God, or body of elect, and an excluded world.

As our civilization becomes more mature, it is bound to expand and take in more of its cultural heritage.  A greater eclecticism will no doubt do much to rehabilitate Calvin, but the positive contribution of the thought between Calvin’s time and ours cannot be ignored; nothing less than the full consciousness of the unity of our tradition will be satisfactory for us.  And it seems that the time-philosophy of the last century has a real value in reinforcing Calvin’s doctrine.  Now that evolution has penetrated into our intellectual make-up, we are beginning to sense the working out of a purpose in the organic world, so that the Manichean dualism of a static principle of good existing beside an unregenerate nature, which came into Christian thought with Augustine, is no longer necessary for us.  Of course, as we have said, the purely evolutionary doctrine, that the only truly elect are posterity, and that the ideal is actualized at the end of a historical progression, is full of contradictions and is, when pressed to its logical conclusion, unthinkably repulsive.  But nonetheless we have inherited a feeling which expressed in Christian terminology might be said to be a perception of the creative, developing, redeeming power of the Holy Spirit in the affairs of men, conserving the good, progressing toward the better.  To assume that this exhausts God’s activity is to assume God an imperfect force striving to self-realization, such as we find in the creative evolution religions of such thinkers as Bernard Shaw.  The weakness of such an attitude is that it recognizes no evolutionary lift in human history; it depends ultimately on geology for its religious dogmas and in most cases turns to the idea of the development of a “superman” which, expressed again in Christian terms, amounts practically for a call for an Incarnation, an identification of the evolutionary principle with an historical event.  Nor has it a firm enough grasp of the permanence, pre-existence, and immutability of the phenomenal world, the world as an object of understanding, which the immediate successors of Calvin perhaps overemphasized.  (CW 3, 414-15)

Oscar Wilde

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7pLvAltQFI

Wendy Hiller as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest

On this date in 1895 Oscar Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency with other males” and sentenced to two years hard labor.

Frye in Creation and Recreation:

A year or so ago, after agreeing to help teach an undergraduate course in Shakespeare, I settled down to reread one of my favorite pieces of Shakespeare criticism, Oscar Wilde’s essay on “The Truth of Masks.”  The essay, however, was one in a collected volume of Wilde’s critical essays, and I find it easy to get hooked on Wilde.  His style often makes him sound dated, and yet he is consistently writing from a point of view that is at least half a century later than his actual time.  He is one of our few genuinely prophetic writers, and, as with other prophets, everything he writes seems either to lead up to his tragic confrontation with society or reflect back on it.  Partly because of this, he deliberately restricts his audience.  He sets up a palisade of self-conscious and rather mechanical wit, which not only infuriates those who have no idea what he is talking about but often puts off those who do.  We may get so annoyed at his dandies waving their hands languidly at thick volumes labeled “Plato” or “Aristotle” that we may forget that Wilde could, and did, read Greek, and that his references to Classical authors are usually quite precise.  So before long I was back in the world of the essay called “The Decay of Lying,” now widely regarded to have said a great deal of what modern theories of criticism have been annotating in more garbled language ever since.

The main thesis of this essay is that man does not live directly and nakedly in nature like animals, but within an envelope that he has constructed out of nature, the envelope usually called culture or civilization.  When Wordsworth urges his reader to leave his books, go outdoors, and let nature be his teacher, his “nature” is a north temperate zone nature which in nineteenth-century England had become, even in the Lake District, largely a human artifact.  One can see the importance, for poets and others, of the remoteness and otherness of nature: the feeling that the eighteenth century expressed in the word “sublime” conveys to us that there is such a thing as creative alienation.  The principle laid down by the Italian philosopher Vico of verum factum, that we understand only what we have made ourselves, needs to be refreshed sometimes by the contemplation of something we did not make and do not understand.  The difficulty with Wordsworth’s view is in the word “teacher.”  A nature which was not primarily a human artifact could teach man nothing except that he was not it.  We are taught by our own cultural conditioning, and by that alone.  (CW 4, 36-7)

John Gielgud

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

On this date John Gielgud died (1904 – 2000).

In a letter to Frye in January 1935, Helen Kemp mentions having seen Gielgud’s Hamlet in London, a celebrated production which he also directed.  There is, of course, no recording of that performance, but the clip above is still very fitting: the elderly Gielgud in his last leading film role delivering Prospero’s Epilogue from The Tempest, featured in Peter Greenaway’s adaptation of the play, Prospero’s Books.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

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SonnetsQuarto001356

On this date in 1609 Shakespeare’s sonnets were published for the first time.

Frye in “How True a Twain”:

What one misses in Shakespeare’s sonnets, perhaps, is what we find so abundantly in the plays that it seems to be Shakespeare’s outstanding characteristic.  This is the sense of human proportion of the concrete situation in which all passion is, however tragically, farcically, or romantically, spent.  If the sonnets were new to us, we should expect Shakespeare to remain on the human middle ground of Sonnets 21 and 130; neither the quasi-religious language of 146 nor the prophetic vision of 129 seems typical of him.  Here again we must think of the traditions of the genre he was using.  The human middle ground is the area of Ovid, but the courtly love tradition, founded as it was on a “moralized” adaptation of Ovid, was committed to a psychological quest that sought to explore the utmost limits of consciousness and desire.  It is this tradition of which Shakespeare’s sonnets are the definitive summing-up.  They are a poetic realization of the whole range of love in the Western world, from the idealism of Petrarch to the ironic frustration of Proust.  If his great predecessor tells us all we need to know of the art of love, Shakespeare has told us more than we can ever fully understand of its nature.  He may not have unlocked his heart in the sonnets, but the sonnets can unlock doors in our minds, and show us that poetry can be something more than a mighty maze of walks without a plan.  From the plays alone we get an impression of an inscrutable Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold’s sphinx, who poses riddles and will not answer them, who merely smiles and sits still.  It is a call to mental adventure to find in the sonnets the authority of Shakespeare behind the conception of poetry as a marriage of Eros and Psyche, an identity of a genius that outlives time and a soul that feeds on death. (Fables of Identity, 105-6)

Bryan Ferry‘s musical adaptation of Sonnet 18 after the jump.

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Django Reinhardt

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iJ7bs4mTUY

On this date the legendary gypsy jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, died (1910 – 1953).

Reinhardt could only play with the first two fingers on his left hand, the other two having been crippled in a fire.  And yet, as you’ll see and hear in the clip above, he could do more with those two fingers than most people can do with all four.

Emily Dickinson

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emily-dickinson

On this date Emily Dickinson died (1830 – 1886).

Frye in his essay “Emily Dickinson”:

Like Blake, with whom she has been compared ever since Higginson’s preface of the 1890 volume, Emily Dickinson shows us two contrary states of the human soul, a vision of innocence and a vision of “experience”, or ordinary life.  One is a vision of “Presence,” the other of “Place”; in one the primary fact of life is partnership, in the other it is parting.  Thus she may say, depending on the context, both “Were Departure Separation, there would be neither Nature nor Art, for there would be no World” and “Parting is all we know of heaven, / And all we need of hell.” (CW 17, 266)

An adaptation of “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” after the jump.

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Oswald Spengler

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On this date Oswald Spengler died (1880 – 1936).

Frye’s “Spengler Revisted” can be found here.

Frye in one of the late notebooks:

Spengler: I never did buy his “decline” thesis, which I realized from the beginning was Teutonic horseshit, closely related to the Nazi hatred for all forms of human culture.  (Well, not just Nazi; Stalin had just as much of it.)  No, as I’ve said, what struck me was, first, the sense of the interpenetration of historical phenomena, a conception of history in which every phenomenon symbolizes every other phenomenon.

Along with that came the conception of a culture in which works of culture show a progressively aging process.  You have pure tradition in primitive societies, where conventions just repeat over and over, and you have a culture in which tradition accruse a self-consciousness in regard to itself, so that it must be where it is: i.e. Beethoven could only have come between Mozart and Wagner.  This growth of self-awareness in tradition is recapitulated in the life of the poet or artist, which gives biography a genuine function in criticism. (CW, 6, 649)

Ninth Symphony

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“Ode to Joy” finale conducted by Leonard Bernstein

On this date in 1824 Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony premiered in Vienna.

Frye in a letter to Helen Kemp, April 18th, 1934:

I heard the ninth symphony last night.  There was some Wagner ahead of it that didn’t amount to much.  I enjoyed the symphony, though that Ode to Joy bothered me as usual.  I would like to hear the 9th as the only thing on the programme, with the Ode sung in some language I don’t understand.  The translation was execrable.  The singing was all right, or would have been if it had been possible to sing that infernal orgy at all — most of it is simply sopranos screaming on an A flat, a sound which fairly pulls my own vocal chords apart in pure sympathy.  The symphony itself is prolix — suprisingly so, I think, but the general effect is tremendously exhilarating and disturbing.  Exhilarating because of the size of the attempt, disturbing because the attempt is strained and in the last analysis unsuccessful.  The symphony, big as it is, is only a torso of a complete subjective component of musical form.  (CW 1, 201)