Category Archives: Anniversaries

Shelley’s Atheism

A page from Shelley’s pamphlet

Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for atheism two hundred years ago today after publishing his pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism.

Frye discusses with David Cayley Shelley’s “atheistic” cosmology compared to Blake’s Biblically-based one:

Cayley: How does Blake relate to the Romantic movement?

Frye: I think Blake wraps up the whole Romantic movement inside himself, although nobody else knew it. You can find a good deal of the upside-down universe in all of the other Romantics, most completely, I think, in Shelley, where a poem like Prometheus Unbound everything that’s “up there,” namely Jupiter, is tyrannical, and everything that’s down in caves is liberating.

Cayley: But Shelley takes this in a more atheistical direction than Blake does.

Frye: Shelley doesn’t derive primarily from the Biblical tradition in the way that Blake does. Blake is always thinking in terms of the Biblical revolutions, the Exodus in the Old Testament and the Resurrection in the New Testament.

Cayley: In other words, Blake has a given structure of imagery from the Bible that he works with, and that distinguishes him from the other Romantics.

Frye: It certainly distinguishes his emphasis from Shelley. (CW 24, 959)

Ovid

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

From the BBC, Act V of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, featuring the artfully butchered rendition of Ovid’s “Pyramus and Thisbe.” (The conclusion after the jump.)

Today is Ovid‘s birthday (43 BC – 17 AD).

Frye in The Double Vision picks up on the divergence of Classical mythology and Christian mythology at the dawn of the Christian age:

Later centuries were fascinated by the contrast between the temporal ruler of the world, Augustus Caesar, and its spiritual ruler, Jesus, who was born during Augustus’ reign. Contemporary with Jesus we have the whole mythological side of Classical culture summed up by two great masterworks, Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid provides a kind of encyclopedia of mythology in which the central theme is metamorphosis, the incessant dissolving and reshaping of forms of life. Toward the end of his long poem, he brings in the philosopher Pythagoras to expound a gloomy philosophy based on the same theme. The Metamorphoses starts with creation and deluge myths, and Pythagoras sees at the end of time a running down of the world into a kind of entropy, or chaos come again. But there are also eulogies of the Caesars, particularly Julius, as the only symbols of what can transcend metamorphosis. In Virgil, similarly, the myth of Rome was founded by Trojan refugees expands into a vision of history in which the Roman Empire represents a kind of goal or telos of the historical process. (CW 4, 216-17)

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Apartheid

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s8xkjG8bx4

BBC report on the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in February 1990

South Africans voted in a national referendum to end apartheid on this date in 1992.

Frye in one of the late notebooks links apartheid to the pernicious synthesis of religion and political doctrine:

The worst governments are those with double ideologies, where a political doctrine is backed by a religious one, as in Iran. Israel is better, but I’d hate to have to live even there. But South Africa’s apartheid is buttressed by a remarkably dismal Dutch Reformed creed, and fifty years ago the word “Christian” in the name of a political party meant “Roman Catholic Fascist.” (CW 6, 91)

St. Patrick’s Day

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

The Pogues, “Streams of Whiskey”

On the soberer side of St. Patrick’s Day (that is, any time before about 4 pm), Frye in The Great Code cites St. Patrick’s illustration of the Trinity to make a point about metaphor and doctrine:

The sense in Christianity as a faith beyond reason, which must continue to affirm even after reason gives up, is closely connected with the linguistic fact that many of the central doctrines of Christianity can be grammatically expressed only in the form metaphor. Thus, Christ is God and man; in the Trinity three persons are one; in the Real Presence the body and blood are bread and wine. When these doctrines are rationalized as conceptions of a spiritual substance and the like, the metaphor is translated in metonymic language and “explained.” But there is a strong smell of intellectual mortality about such explanations, and sooner or later they fade away and the original metaphor reappears, as intransigent as ever. At that point we are back to the world where St. Patrick illustrates the doctrine of the Trinity with a shamrock, a use of concrete paradox that enlightens the mind by paralyzing the discursive reason, like the koan of Zen Buddhism. The doctrines may be “more” than metaphors; the point is that they can be stated only in a metaphorical this-is-that form. (CW 19, 73)

Slainte.

Ides of March

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The assassination of Julius Caesar in HBO’s Rome — ugly, the way these things always are

Frye in one of the notebooks on Renaissance literature:

The liberal who sits & hopes that somebody will assassinate Hitler of McCarthy or Huey Long is Brutus without Brutus’ courage & responsibility. He thinks of such people as destroying human relations by engrossing power. That is, essential social relations to him are the personal ones: he has no tragic conception of society. Antony, with his ruthlessness, his use of others (Lepidus) as “property,” his contemptible rhetorical tricks & his exploiting of Caesar’s will is still able to consolidate a society. He never makes a human contact: his loyalty to Caesar is the exception that proves the rule. . . Caesar does make personal contacts, & makes himself impersonal by an effort of will: as is said, the way to flatter him is to tell him he can’t be flattered. (CW 20, 268-9)

The Mikado

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The closing sequence of Mike Leigh’s masterpiece, Topsy-Turvy, about the writing, development and first performance of The Mikado, including the beautiful “The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze”

Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado premiered on this date in 1885.

Frye in one of those extraordinary lucid moments that send a shiver up the spine:

The element of play is the barrier that separates art from savagery, and playing at human sacrifice seems to be an important theme of ironic comedy. Even in laughter itself some kind of deliverance from the unpleasant, even the horrible, seems to be important. We notice this particularly in all forms of art in which a large number of auditors are simultaneously present, as in drama and, still more obviously, in games. We notice too that playing at sacrifice has nothing to do with any historical descent from sacrificial ritual, such as been suggested for Old Comedy. All the features of such ritual, the king’s son, the mimic death, the executioner, the substituted victim, are far more explicit in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado than they are in Aristophanes. (CW 21, 162)

“Three Little Maids from School” after the jump.

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Frye on McCarthyism: “The big lie as a normal political weapon”

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Edward R. Murrow’s closing remarks in his report on McCarthy, which was instrumental in ending the hysteria

CBS broadcast its See It Now piece, “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” on this date in 1954.

From The Modern Century:

The collapse of Communist sympathies in American culture was not the result of McCarthyism and other witch-hunts, which were not a cause but an effect of that collapse. The object of the witch-hunt is the witch, that is, a helpless old woman whose dangerousness is assumed to rationalize quite different interests and pleasures. Similarly the Communist issue in McCarthyism was a red herring for a democratic development of the big lie as a normal political weapon: if internal Communism had been a genuine danger the struggle against it would have taken a genuine form. (CW 11, 42)

Frye Doffs “the Shitty Garment” of Fundamentalism

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Vintage postcard of Aberdeen High School, Moncton

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, died on this date in 1791 (born 1703).

John Ayre in his biography provides this now famous anecdote of the young school boy’s first epiphany. In Frye’s words, he was

walking along St. George St. to high school and just suddenly the whole shitty and smelly garment (of fundamental teaching I had all my life) just dropped off into the sewers and stayed there. It was like the Bunyan feeling, about the burden of sin falling off his back only with me it was a burden of anxiety. Anything might have touched it off, but I don’t know what specifically did, or if anything did. I just remember that suddenly that that was no longer a part of me and never would again. (44)

Thomas Campion

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j78yuRWOts

A real treat: countertenor Alfred Deller sings Campion’s “It fell on a summer’s day”

Thomas Campion died on this date in 1620 (born 1567).

From The Educated Imagination:

Here’s a poem by a contemporary of Shakespeare, Thomas Campion:

When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arriv’d, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finish’d love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;

Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake:
When thou hast told these honours done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me

This is written in the convention that poets of that age used for love poetry: the poet is always in love with some obdurate and unresponsive mistress, whose neglect of the lover may even cause his madness and death. It’s pure invention, and it’s a complete waste of time trying to find out about the women in Campion’s life — there can’t possibly be any real experience behind it. Campion was himself a poet and a critic, and a composer who set his poems to his own musical settings. He was also a professional man who started out in law but switched over to medicine, and served for some time in the army. In other words, he was a busy man, who didn’t have much time for getting himself murdered cruel mistresses. The poem uses religious language, but not a religionthat Campion could ever have believed in. At the same time it’s a superbly lovely poem; it’s perfection itself, and if you think that a convention poem can only be just a literary exercise, and that you could write a better poem out of real experience, I’d be doubtful of your success. (CW 21, 451)

Zero Mostel and Tricky Slaves

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPds0-hZ1tM

New Comedy in a nutshell — including a brother and sister kidnapped in infancy by pirates — from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. This clip includes Mostel as Pseudolus (right), Jack Gilford as Hysterium (left) and Buster Keaton (centre) as Erroneous. (Michael Hordern makes a brief appearance as Senex.)

Today is the great comic actor Zero Mostel‘s birthday (1915-1977). His performance as Pseudolus in Richard Lester’s 1966 film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum nicely represents the eiron character Frye in Anatomy calls the “tricky slave.” Then again, the plot of A Funny Thing is a playbook for the formulaic conventions of New Comedy, to the extent that two of the characters bear the names of the types Frye identifies them by: Senex and Miles Gloriosus.

From the “The Mythos of Spring” section of “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths”:

Another central eiron figure is the type entrusted with hatching the schemes which bring about the hero’s victory. This character in Roman comedy is almost always a tricky slave (dolosus servus). . . . The vice, to give him that name, is very useful to a comic dramatist because he acts from pure love of mischief, and he can set a comic action going with the minimum of motivation. . . One of the tricky slaves in Plautus, in a soliloquy, boasts that he is the architectus of the comic action: such a character carries out the will of the author to reach a happy ending. He is in fact the spirit of comedy itself. . . . (CW 22, 161)