Category Archives: Anniversaries

Lord Byron

His Lordship looking very mad, bad and dangerous to know

Lord Byron made his first address to the House of Lords on this date in 1812.

Frye makes many more substantial references to Byron than this one in an interview with documentary filmmaker Harry Rasky, but the exchange is irresistible for his cheekily ambiguous response to a “prying” question.

Rasky: Was the phrase “history is the nightmare from which we’re all trying to wake up”?

Frye: That’s Joyce in Ulysses. I think Byron said it more neatly when he said that history is the devil’s scripture.

Rasky: I wonder if it would be prying if I said, Does Northrop Frye talk to God?

Frye: Yes.

(CW 24, 871)

Tennessee Williams

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

Blanche meets Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire

Tennessee Williams died on this date in 1983 (born 1911).

Frye in The Educated Imagination cites Williams in his account of recurring archetypes in popular literature:

You notice that popular literature, the kind of stories that are read for relaxation, is always very highly conventionalized. If you pick up a detective story, you may not know until the last page who done it, but you always know before you start reading exactly the kind of thing that’s going to happen. If you read the fiction in women’s magazines, you read the story of Cinderella over and over again. If you read Westerns, you’re reading a development of the pastoral convention, which turns up in writers of all ages, including Shakespeare. It’s the same with characterization. The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. (CW 21, 449)

Thomas Bowdler

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XZ091CEgNU&playnext=1&list=PL5B5F62A809AA1D00

The BBC Animated Shakespeare, The Tempest (part 1)

Physician and self-appointed censor of Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler, died on this date in 1825 (born 1754).

Frye makes a point at his expense in “On Value Judgments”:

Every age, left to itself, is incredibly narrow in its cultural range, and the critic, unless he is a greater genius than the world has yet seen, shares that narrowness in proportion to his confidence in his taste. Suppose we were to read something like this in an essay published, say, in the 1820s: “In reading Shakespeare we often feel how lofty and genuine are the touches of nature by which he refines our perceptions of the heroic and virtuous, and yet how ignobly he condescends to the grovelling passions of the lowest among his audience. We are particularly struck with this in reading the excellent edition by Doctor Bowdler, which for the first time has enabled us to distinguish what is immortal in our great poet from what the taste of his time compelled him to acquiesce in.” End of false quote. We should see at once that that was not a statement about Shakespeare, but a statement about the anxieties of the 1820s. (CW 27, 260-1)

The Communist Manifesto

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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto on this date in 1848.

Frye in “Varieties of Literary Utopias” takes note of the similar dark underlying assumptions of revolutionary American and Marxist views:

The terms of this argument naturally changed after the Industrial Revolution, which introduced the conception of revolutionary process into society. This led to the present division of social attitudes mentioned above, between the Marxist Utopia as distant end and the common American belief in the Utopianizing tendency of the productive process, often taking the form of a belief that Utopian standards of living can be reached in America alone. This belief, though rudely shaken by every disruptive social event at least since the stock market crash of 1929, still inspires an obstinate and resilient confidence. The popular American view and the Communist one, superficially different as they are, have in common the assumption that to increase man’s control over his environment is also to control over his destiny. (CW 27, 209)

Glenn Beck’s wild chalkboard fantasies connecting Obama to the rise of a new Caliphate funded by George Soros may have an indirect relation to reality — but only as a paranoid and inverted projection of the interests he represents. The increasingly hysterical cohort on the right and the dirty Commies it associates with even modestly left-of-centre politics have much in common: a revolutionary outlook that promotes unrestrained industrialism and ruthless exploitation of the environment, resulting in the illusion of mastery which only enhances degraded social conditions. We are currently seeing this in the U.S. as the Republican agenda in Congress and at the state level becomes more obvious: massive unemployment accompanied by the rending of the social safety net and cynical efforts to roll back hard won collective bargaining rights. This is yet another way of obscuring the unprecedented theft of public and private wealth through government-abetted Wall Street scams, and then transferring the blame to undermine the unionized middle class whose share of national wealth has been flat since Reagan/Thatcher. We know about the economic collapse of the old Soviet Union overseen by an insular ruling elite not answerable to the will of the people or the rule of law. What might be the equivalent here? Maybe something like the 2008 collapse of the financial markets engineered by the greed and incompetence of a kleptomaniacal ruling class always in need of bailouts and tax cuts.

Perhaps Beck might trace this out on his blackboard. It’s completely doable.

Pluto

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This image of the rotation of Pluto is generated from images captured by the Hubble Telescope

Pluto was discovered on this date in 1930.

From Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned:

I’ve noticed a curious form of e.s.p in me: whenever I dream of writing something in fiction somebody else who really does write get the idea instead. This has happened to me so often that it was no surprise to me after thinking about a historical novel situated in Trebizond, to find that Rose Macaulay had the same idea. (In my childhood I dreamed of becoming a great astronomer & discovering a new planet beyond Neptune that I was going to call Pluto.) (84)

Giordano Bruno

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Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake as a heretic on this date in 1600 (born 1548).

From Words with Power:

We have glanced at the way in which ideological language supports the anxieties of social authority, and of how other types of verbal authority nonetheless establish themselves, for example in science. In the collisions of Galileo and Bruno with the religious functionaries of their time, we recognize that a scientist has a commitment to his science as well as to his society, and that in certain crises he has an obligation to remain loyal to his science, even if silenced or martyred. This may be a simple moral issue of holding on to facts and evidence in the face of reactionary illusion, but it may be something subtler than that. In Galileo’s day the evidence for a heliocentric solar system was not yet conclusive: the geocentric theory seemed still reasonable, and Galileo was really making what is called a leap of faith. This term is used in religious writing, but not every leap of faith is a religious one. As for Bruno, his leaps are so vast and various that even specialists on him find him hard to keep up with. But then Isaac Newton presents an almost equally disconcerting picture when the whole of his output and range of interests is considered.

The authority of science, in other words, expands into a wider and compelling authority of social and intellectual freedom. This will always be relevant as long as the scientist remains a human being whose work has a personal context as well as a scientific one, involved with the ideology even when he challenges certain accepted forms of it. In our day, highly technological society may conscript some scientists into working for its interests, whereupon others will realize that the basis of their commitment to science is a conviction that science exists for the benefit of humanity, not for the promotion of tyranny and terror. (CW 26, 47-8)

Thomas Cranmer

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlrGNZL7CVc

The prosecution and martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer from David Starkey’s documentary series, Monarchy. (Video not embedded: click on the image above and hit the YouTube link.)

On the heels of yesterday’s post regarding the execution of Henry VIII’s fifth wife Catherine Howard, her accuser, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was declared a heretic by Queen Mary on this date in 1556. Catherine Howard’s lady-in-waiting, Jane Boleyn — Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law who was executed as Catherine’s accomplice in treason — had previously been instrumental in bringing down Queen Anne by affirming her supposed incest with her brother (and Jane’s husband) George. With the execution of Cranmer under Queen Mary, this particular nemesis cycle draws to a bloody close. The person who rides the new cycle upwards is, of course, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, who ascends the throne as Elizabeth I after the premature death of her half-sister Mary. Elizabeth as queen undoes all of Mary’s effort to make England Catholic again — and that effort was the reason for Cranmer’s arrest, conviction and execution as a Protestant heretic in the first place. So yet another mortal cycle spins round.

Here, appropriately enough, is an excerpt from “Romance as Masque,” in which Frye once again addresses the tragic perspective provided by the wheel of fortune in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII:

The hero of Henry VIII is not so much the king as the wheel of fortune. The first turn of the wheel brings down Buckingham, the second turn Wolsey, the third Queen Katherine and others. If we like, we can see a rough justice or even a providence operating: Wolsey’s fall is the nemesis for his treatment of Buckingham, and Queen Katherine, though innocent, has to go in order to get Elizabeth born. For this reason it is unnecessary to apply moral standards to King Henry: whether we think of him resolute or merely ferocious, we cannot be sure if he turns the wheel of fortune or has simply become part of its machinery. Certainly the crucial event of the final scene, the birth of Elizabeth, there is a factor independent of his will, even though he takes credit for it, as befits a king. In this final scene there is a “prophecy” by Cranmer about the future greatness of England under Elizabeth and her successors, which generically is a very masque-like scene, a panegyric of the sort that would have normally accompanied the presence of a reigning monarch in the audience.

The only difficulty is that the scene shows the final triumph of Cranmer and of Anne Boleyn, and the audience knows what soon happened to Anne, as well as to three of her successors, and eventually to Cranmer. It also knows the reign of Elizabeth was preceded by that of Queen Katherine’s daughter, whose existence Henry appears to have forgotten: “Never before / This happy child, did I get any thing,” he says. (CW 18, 144-5)

Catherine Howard and Jane Boleyn

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The executions of Catherine Howard and Jane Boleyn, from the television series The Tudors

On this date in 1542 Catherine Howard, the 17 year old fifth wife of Henry VIII, and her lady-in-waiting Jane Boleyn, were executed for Howard’s adultery with courtier Thomas Culpeper.

Frye in A Natural Perspective on Shakespeare’s depiction of the world of Henry VIII as a tragic one associated with the wheel of fortune:

The wheel of fortune is a tragic conception: it is never genuinely a comic one, though a history play may achieve a technically comic conclusion by stopping the wheel turning half way. Thus, Henry V ends with triumphant conquest and a royal marriage, though, as the epilogue reminds us, King Henry died almost immediately and sixty years of unbroken disaster followed. In Henry VIII there are three great falls, those of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Queen Catherine, and three corresponding rises, those of Cromwell, Cranmer, and Anne Boleyn. The play ends with the triumph of the last three, leaving the audience to remember that the wheel went on turning and brought them down too. Henry VIII turns the wheel himself, and is not turned by it, like Richard II, but history never can end as comedy does, except for the polite fiction, found in Cranmer’s prophecy at the end of the play, that the reigning monarch is a Messianic ruler.

Immanuel Kant

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Immanuel Kant died on this date in 1804 (born 1724).

From The Double Vision:

The greatest of all philosophers who took criticism as his base of operations, Kant, examined three aspects of the critical faculty. First was pure reason, which contemplates the objective world withing the framework of its own categories, and hence see the objective counterpart of itself, the world as it may really be eluding the categories. Second was practical reason, where a conscious being is assumed to be a conscious will, and penetrates farther into the kind of reality we call existential, even into experience relating to God. Third was the aesthetic faculty dealing with the environment within the categories of beauty, a critical operation involving, for Kant, questions of the kind we have just called teleological, relating to purpose and ultimate design.

For Kant, however, the formula of beauty in the natural world at least was “purposiveness without purpose.” The crystallizing of snowflakes is beautiful because it suggests design and intention and yet eludes these things. To suggest that the design of a snowflake has been produced by a designer, whether Nature or God, suggests also that somebody or something has worked to produce it: such a suggestion limits it beauty by cutting of the sense of a spontaneous bursting into symmetry. “Fire delights in form,” says Blake, and Wallace Stevens adds that we trust the world only when we have no sense of a concealed creator. (CW 4, 191)

Islamic Republic of Iran

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_0SpjmRAfU

The Shah leaves Iran on February 11th 1979

On this date in 1979 the Iranian revolution established a theocracy under the supreme leadership of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.

From one of the late notebooks:

History redeems: there’s a process within history that isn’t at all what Marxism calls the historical process, but relates to the cultural tradition. People denounced or martyred as horrible heretics in the hysteria of their times later become objects of great cultural interest. The twenty-first century will find The Satanic Verses a document of great interest to scholars and critics, but the Ayatollah will be of no interest to anybody except as one more nightmare of bigotry that history has produced in such profusion. One would hope that eventually the stupid human race would get the point. God doesn’t create post-mortem hells even for people devoting their lives to cruelty and tyranny, but if he did the Ayatollah would certainly be howling in one of them forever. (CW 6, 644)