Category Archives: Anniversaries

Tributes

Frye in 1957, the year he published Anatomy of Criticism

Abbate, Gay. “Frye’s Legacy: Scholarship, Loyalty, Humanity: Lighting a Path for Those Who Follow.” University of Toronto Bulletin 4 February 1991: 6–7.

Abley, Mark. “One of Canada’s Foremost Intellectuals Dead at 78.” Whig‑Standard (24 January 1991): 3.

“Anatomising Literature” The Guardian [London and Manchester] (25 January 1991): 39.

Atwood, Margaret. Canadian Literature 129 (Summer 1991): 242–3.

________. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 4–5. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 7.

________. “The Great Communicator.” Globe and Mail (24 January 1991): C1; rpt. in Journal of Canadian Poetry 6 (1991): 1–3.

________. [Tribute]. Brick 40 (1991): 3.

Barber, David. “The Formidable Scholar.” The Whig-Standard Magazine (2 February 1991): 5. [Based on an interview with A.C. Hamilton.]

Barnes, Bart. “Canadian Literary Critic Northrop Frye Dies at 78.” Washington Post (24 January) 1991: D6.

Barilli, Renato. “Frye, corsi e ricorsi della letteratura.” Corriere della Sera (27 January 1991).

Bemrose, John. “The Great Decoder: Northrop Frye Explored Culture’s Myths.” Maclean’s 104 (4 February 1991): 51–2.

Bevington, David. “Northrop Frye.” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings 137, no.1 (March 1993): 125.

Bissell, Claude T. The Independent [London] (26 January 1991): 12. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 10.

________. “Northrop Frye Remembered.” University of Toronto Magazine 18 (Spring 1991): 10.

________. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 8–9.

Brown, Gord. “Norrie’s Wisdom Lives on in His Writings and Students.” the newspaper [University of Toronto] (30 January 1991): 5.

Buckley, Jerome. “Northrop Frye Remembered by His Students.” Journal of Canadian Poetry 6 (1991): 4.

C., G. “Northrop Frye, dalla Bibbia alla civiltà della parola.” La Stampa (25 January 1991).

C., R. “É morto Frye l’innovatore.” La Nazione (25 January 1991).

Chamberlain, Ted. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 9–10. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 11.

Christian Century 108 (20–27 March 1991): 321.

Cook, Eleanor. “Northrop Frye as Colleague.” Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 18.

Cooley, Dennis. “The Educated Imaginer: Northrop Frye (1912–1991). Border Crossings 2 (April 1991): 78.

Cosway, John. “Changes.” The Sunday Sun [Toronto] (27 January 1991): 109.

“Critic Northrop Frye Dead at 78.” Toronto Star (23 January 1991): 28.

Dahlin, Karina. “ U of T Remembers Its Greatest Humanist.” University of Toronto Bulletin (4 February 1991): 1–2.

Denham, Robert D. “Northrop Frye: 1912–1991.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 24 (Spring 1991): 158–9.

Downey, Donn. “Literary Scholar Regarded as Great Cultural Figure.” Globe and Mail (24 January 1991): D6.

Fabiny, Tibor. “Érdekeltség és szabadság” [“Concern and Freedom”]. Nagyvilág (December 1991).

Fisher, Douglas. “A Frydolator Remembers.” Toronto Sun (25 January 1991): 11.

________. “Frye was Right about Quebec.” The Sunday Sun [Toronto] (27 January 1991): C3.

Fletcher, Angus. “In Memoriam. Northrop Frye (1912–1991).” New Vico Studies 9 (1991): 153–4.

Flint, Peter. “Northrop Frye, 78, Literary Critic, Theorist and Educator, Is Dead.” New York Times (25 January 1991): B14.

Foley, Joan. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 6. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 8.

Forst, Graham. “Remembering Norrie, Critic and Teacher.” Vancouver Sun (26 January 1991): D24.

“Frye, Herman Northrop.” Current Biography 52, no. 3 (March 1991): 60.

“Frye’s Genius Recalled in Tributes.” Toronto Star (24 January 1991): D1.

Fulford, Robert. “Frye’s Soaring Cathedral of Thought.” Globe and Mail (26 January 1991): C16.

Garrido-Gallardo, Miguel Angel. “Northrop Frye (1912–1991).” Revista de Literatura 53 (January–June 1991): 175–7.

Globe and Mail (25 January 1991): D8.

Guarini, Ruggero. “Una vita per due gemelle, bellezza e verità. . . .” Il Messaggero (25 January 1991).

Hamilton, A. C. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 10–11. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 11.

________. “Northrop Frye: 1912–1991.” Quill & Quire 57 (March 1991); rpt. in Journal of Canadian Poetry 6 (1991): 5–7.

Harron, Don. “A Memory of Frye.” Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 19.

Hartley, Brian. “Life in the Resurrection: Remembering Northrop Frye.” Herald (March, 1991).

Hoffman, John. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 2. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 4.

Jensen, Bo Green. “Kritikeren, Northrop Frye, 78 †r.” Weekendavisen [Denmark] (1 February 1991).

Johnston, Alexandra F. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 14–15. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 15.

________. “In Memoriam: Chancellor Northrop Frye.” Victoria College Council, Minutes of the Meeting of 11 February 1991. Typescript. 3 pp.

J[ohnson], P[hil]. “A Tribute to Northrop Frye.” Pietisten 6 (April 1991): 5.

Juneau, Pierre. “The Power of Frye’s Words.” The Financial Post (28 January 1991): 8.

________. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 13–14. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 14.

Kenner, Hugh. “Northrop Frye, R I P.” National Review 43 (25 February 1991): 19.

Kushner, Eva. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 12–13. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 13.

Laux, Cameron. The Independent [London] (30 January 1991): 13.

Lee, Alvin. “Northrop Frye: 1912–1991.” The McMaster Courier (12 February 1991): 5.

________. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 11–12. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 12.

Lee, Hope. “Tribute to Northrop Frye.” Presented on the CBC Sunday Morning Program, 27 January 1991. Typescript, 1 p.

“Literary Critic Dies.” Richmond Times-Dispatch (24 January 1991): B2.

“Literary Critic Rode Subway Daily to Work.” Niagara Falls Review (24 January 1991): 7.

Lombardo, Agostino, Baldo Meo, and Piero Boitani. “Il Pagione [A Tribute to Frye].” Broadcast on Italian Radio—RAI, 19 February 1991, at 4:30 p.m.

McBurney, Ward. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 6–7. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 89–9.

McGibbon, Pauline. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 4. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 6.

McIntyre, John P. “Northrop Frye (1912–91).” America 165, no. 1 (6 July 1991): 14–15.

Marchand, Philip. “Frye Really Believed that Literature Could Save Society.” Toronto Star (24 January 1991): D1.

________. “Premier, Friends Pay Tribute to Northrop Frye.” Toronto Star (30 January 1991): E1, E6.

Meo, Baldo. “Northrop Frye e i nuovi furori della critica letteraria.” l’Unita 25 (January 1991): 19.

Miller, Daniel. “Northrop Frye Remembered by U of T.” the newspaper [University of Toronto] (30 January 1991): 10.

Moriz, Andre. “Northrop Frye Tribute Service Draws 800.” The Varsity [University of Toronto] (31 January 1991): 12.

“La morte in Canada di Frye: critica e società.” Il Gazzettino [Venice] (25 January 1991).

“É morto Northrop Frye teorico della letteratura.” Corriere della Sera (25 January 1991).

“É morto il critico Northrop Frye.” Il Giornale (25 January 1991).

“É morto il critico Northrop Frye.” Il Tempo (25 January 1991).

“É morto a Toronto Northrop Frye risalì al ‘profondo’ dell’opera letteraria.” Gazzetta del Sud (25 January 1991).

“Morto critico litterario canadese Northrop Frye.” ANSA News Agency, Rome (24 January 1991).

Mulhallen, Karen. “In Memoriam, Northrop Frye, 1912–1991, R.I.P.” Descant 21–22 (Winter–Spring 1990–91): 7.

Newsweek (4 February 1991): 76.

“Northrop Frye.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (24 January 1991): 4C.

“Northrop Frye.” The Daily Telegraph (25 January 1991): 19.

O’Malley, Martin. “The Ordinary Side of an Extraordinary Man.” United Church Observer (March 1991): 16.

Nolan, Nicole, and Hilary Williams. “Memorial for Frye.” The Strand [Victoria University] (30 January 1991): 1.

“Northrop Frye.” Times [London] (26 January 1991): 12.

“Northrop Frye 1912–1991.” Toronto Star (1 November 1992): 70.

“Northrop Frye.” Toronto Star (24 January 1991): A26. [Editorial].

Outram, Richard. “In Memory of Northrop Frye.” Globe and Mail (16 February 1991): C16; rpt. in Northrop Frye Newsletter 3, no 2 (Spring 1991): 36.

Pentland, Howard. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 15–17. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 17.

Placido, Beniamino. “É morto Northrop Frye.” La Repubblica (25 January 1991).

Polizoes, Elias. “Northrop Frye’s Legacy Pivotal.” Varsity [University of Toronto] (25 January 1991): 12

Prichard, Robert. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 2–3. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 4.

Rae, Bob. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 3–4. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 5.

Reaney, James. “Northrop Frye: He Educated Our Imagination.” Toronto Star (24 January 1991): A27.

“Remembering Frye.” Globe and Mail (26 January 1991): C10.

Saddlemyer, Ann. University of Toronto Quarterly 61, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 7–8. Appears also in Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 9.

Sewell, Gregory. “Literary Critic Northrop Frye Dead.” Varsity [University of Toronto] (25 January 1991): 1.

Stefani, Claudio. “Il molto reverendo Frye.” Il Resto del Carlino (25 January 1991).

Stone, George Winchester. “Herman Northrop Frye (14 July 1912–23 January 1991).” PMLA 106, no. 3 (May 1991): 564, 566.

Stuewe, Paul. “Northrop Frye, 1912–1991.” Books in Canada 20, no. 2 (March 1991): 9.

Teskey, Gordon. “Eulogy of Northrop Frye.” Annual Dinner of the Milton Society, San Francisco, 28 December 1992. Typescript. 4 pp.

Theall, Donald F. “In Memoriam.” Science Fiction Studies 18, no. 2 (July 1991): 288–90.

Thompson, Clive. “Frye First and Foremost a Great Teacher.” The Strand (30 January 1991): 5.

Time (4 February 1991): 61.

Toronto Star (26 January 1991): D7.

Tredell, Nicholas. “Northrop Frye.” PN Review 17 (May–June 1991): 8.

Vega, María José. “La Literatura como Orden: En la muerte de Northrop Frye.” Revista de Extremadura (Segunda época) 9 (September–December 1992): 71–4.

Warkentin, Germaine. “The Loss of Northrop Frye.” http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v04/0923.html

Weinbrot, Howard. “On Northrop Frye in Minneapolis, 1990. A Memorial.” Johnsonian News Letter 50 (September & December 1991): 39–5.

Apple and Orwell and “1984”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhsWzJo2sN4

On this date in 1984 Apple ran their famous Orwell-inspired ad for the Macintosh computer during the Super Bowl. Yesterday was George Orwell’s birthday, the anniversary for the founding of Apple recently passed, and we’ve already posted this week on journalism, propaganda and advertising, so this is an attention-catching confluence of events. The Apple commercial was notoriously revived for this independently produced Obama ad during the ’08 Democratic primaries.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lsa139XrCsQ

The cleverness and high degree of irony in both of these ads does not seem to get us around Frye’s observation that advertising is “a judicious mix of flattery and threats.” But thank God for the irony, at least, because we’ve also posted this week on the unironic and commercially-funded threats that try to pass for journalism, here and here.

George Orwell

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n4EDKUB9uo&feature=related

From the 1985 film adaptation of 1984: The principle of perpetual war explained (video not embedded: click on the image and hit the YouTube link)

On this date in 1950 George Orwell died (born 1903).

Frye in The Educated Imagination:

The essential thing is the power of choice. In wartime this power is greatly curtailed, and we resign ourselves to living by half-truths for the duration. In a totalitarian state the competition in propaganda largely disappears, and consequently the power of imaginative choice is sealed off. In our hatred and fear of war and totalitarian government, one central element is a sense of claustrophobia that the imagination develops when it isn’t allowed to function properly. This is the aspect of tyranny that’s so prominently displayed in George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell even goes so far as to suggest that the only way to make tyranny permanent and unshakable, the only way in other words to create a literal hell on earth, is deliberately to debase our language by turning our speech into an automatic gabble. The fear of being reduced to such a life is a genuine fear, but of course as soon as we express it in hysterical cliches we are in the same state ourselves. As the poet William Blake says in describing something very similar, we become what we behold. (CW 21, 490)

Wannsee Conference

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spu9CaoOSjI

A scene from Conspiracy, HBO’s recreation of the Wannsee Conference from the surviving minutes of the meeting. This scene is a point of demonic epiphany in which Nazi lawyer Wilhelm Stuckart of the Interior Ministry protests the elimination of the Jews as a matter of law, but then goes on to express his disdain for them in terms that illustrate Frye’s point below.

On this date in 1942 the Wannsee Conference took place, in which senior officials of the Nazi regime met to confirm the details of the Final Solution.

Frye in notes 52 :

Are-you-saved-brother extroverts and introverts with their inevitable crises of faith. Pathological extensions take us into the mob, which has to have a scapegoat to project its self-doubts on, like the Jew in Nazi Germany who reminded the Nazis of their own nagging little voices telling them that their racism was shit and they really knew it was shit. “I believe that” is dangerous when we still don’t know who is I or what that is. (CW 6, 597)

Il trovatore

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Mr4d_ixSI

Maria Callas sings “D’amor sull’ali rosee” — on the rosy wings of love — from Il trovatore

On this date in 1853 Verdi’s Il trovatore premiered in Rome.

John Ayre in his biography describes a stopover in Rome during Frye’s 1937 visit to Italy, including an opportunity to take in a Verdi opera:

After the exhilarating taste of Tuscany, Frye was thoroughly dismayed. “History of Roman art: bastard Etruscan, bastard Greek, stolen Greek, bastard Oriental, bastard Northern Italian, bastard copies of bastard Greek, bastard Dutch, and various kinds of eclectic bastardy.” In viewing the “junk piles” — the Thermae, the Vatican, the Laterine — he caught a glimmer in the development of Greek sculpture but most everything disappointed. Even what was good was diminished by irritants. The Vatican obsessively plastered fig leaves on nude sculpture. An Italian mania for “restoring” friezes had even spread to the supposedly inviolable Sistine Chapel. There was opportunity, however, of seeing a more enticing contemporary side of Rome — in its opera and ballet — but on the pretext of disliking Verdi, Frye passed up the chance to see a production of Rigoletto. Although he was still suffering a degree of intolerance (Beethoven good, Verdi bad), there was undeniable considerations of money and his still insistent desire to keep working on Blake. (136)

Frye on Shakespeare and opera in A Natural Perspective:

The only place where the tradition of Shakespearean romantic comedy has survived with any theatrical success, as we should expect, is opera. As long as we have Mozart or Verdi or Sullivan to listen to, we can tolerate identical twins and lost heirs and love potions and folk tales; we can even stand a fairy queen if she is under two hundred pounds. And when we look for the most striking modern parallels to Twelfth Night or The Tempest, we think first of all of Figaro and The Magic Flute. (25)

Communications and Power

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On this date in 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt sent a radio message to King Edward VII in the first transatlantic radio transmission originating in the United States.

Frye on Harold Innis and communication theory in “Across the River and Out of the Trees”:

It is no great credit to me that I entirely missed the significance, at the time, of the later prose work of Harold Innis, which appeared around 1950-52. I found the prose style impenetrable and the subject-matter uncongenial. But, of course, as is widely recognized now, Innis was defining a central issue in the Canadian imagination which ultimately affected the interests of practically everyone concerned with words. Innis had first, as an economist, studied the fur trade and the fishing industry, and had gained from the study a vision of the “Laurentian” centrifugal economic development of the country, with the traders and trappers fanning out from the Great Lakes into the far North. This in turn provided him with the underlying pattern of the primary modes of communication in Canada, the network of railways and canals mentioned above. After that he asked himself the fateful question, “OK, what happens next?” This took him into a panoramic vision of secondary communication through words, as conveyed by papyrus, paper, parchment, clay bricks, manuscripts, books, and newspapers. He saw that verbal communication was an essential instrument of power, and that an ascendant class will naturally try to control and monopolize it. In Empire and Communications, and in the more accessible essays in The Bias of Communication, he sketched the outlines of a philosophy of history, based on the theme of the production and the control of the means of communication, on a scale as comprehensive, at least potentially, as anything since Marx. (CW 12, 558-9)

Gregory Corso

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGPDZD7AK5o

Five poems by Gregory Corso

On this date in 2001 beat poet Gregory Corso died (born 1930).

Frye in “World Enough Without Time”:

The “beat” writers are trying to identify the genuine proletariat, the body of those who are excluded from the benefits of society and have sense enough to realize it. For such a proletariat the road to freedom is not through organizing a revolution to seize power from the squares and become squares in their turn, but through breaking the current of social energy by drifting, bumming, playing jazz, taking dope, or what not, and entering the world of the pure present through the break. The beat philosophy may be wrong — that is, it may be crazy itself instead of merely making use of craziness — but its symbolism is a contemporary cultural force to be reckoned with. (CW 21, 292)

More Frye on Alger

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It is of course true that a great deal of trash which passes as literature, or at least as entertaining reading, also articulates social myths with great clarity. I read many of the novels of Horatio Alger at an early age, and as I have a good verbal memory, a journey round my skull would unearth a great many pages of some of the most pedestrian prose on record. I wish very much that a surgical operation could remove it and substitute something better, but still Alger probably did me no permanent damage, as I was never inspired to adopt the virtues of his heroes, and this leads me to hope that the children of today may emerge similarly unscathed from their similar experiences. (“The Developing Imagination”)

The chief difference between the comedy of the Renaissance and of the realistic period is that the resolution of the latter more frequently involves a social promotion, and, like pathos, tends to be an individual achievement. More sophisticated writers of low mimetic comedy often present the same success story with the moral ambiguities that we have found in Aristophanes. In Balzac or Stendhal a clever and ruthless scoundrel may achieve the same kind of success as the virtuous heroes of Samuel Smiles and Horatio Alger. Thus the comic counterpart of the alazon seems to be the clever, likable, unprincipled picaro of the picaresque novel. (“Towards a Theory of Cultural History”; also in Anatomy of Criticism)

Many people still alive can remember Horatio Alger from their childhood. In Alger there was invariably a boy as hero who started with nothing but the industrious apprentice virtues, and wound up at the end of the story in a steady job earning five dollars a week with a good chance of a raise. Sometimes, if the not very resourceful Alger were hard up for a plot, he attained this by sheer luck, but it was understood that luck comes to the deserving, not to the lucky. Yet already in Alger we are beginning to realize that such fiction can hardly survive the class that produced it, and that that class is on its way out. The kind of entrepreneur capitalism that it helped to rationalize was dead by the First World War, and the fiction died with it. It lingered in the 1920s in the infantilism of Henry Ford and the kind of popular fiction represented by the Saturday Evening Post, and in such moral stampedes as the one that passed the Eighteenth Amendment. But of course the fact that it survived only in such ways showed that it had disappeared into what literary critics call a pastoral myth. Even yet, whenever some people get to the point of emotional confusion at which the feeling “things are not as good as they ought to be” turns into “things are not as good as they used to be,” back comes this fictional image of thrift, hard work, simple living, manly independence, and the like, as the real values of democracy that we have lost and must recapture if, etc. the rest of the sentence depends on whatever is alarming the writer most at the moment. (Introduction to The Stepsure Letters)

In a more recent play, Amadeus, the composer Salieri pleads with God to give him the reward of genius in return for a devout life. God ignores this plea and bestows all the genius on a grubby creep named Mozart. At the bottom of Salieri’s mind was a notion that God would have bourgeois literary tastes, that the central bourgeois fable of the industrious and idle apprentice would be a favourite with him, and that he could always be counted on to enter into a dramatic situation that illustrated it. A glance at the Book of Job might have shown him that the divine mind was not confined in its choice of plots to the formulas of Horatio Alger, but such assumptions die hard, especially when they are not realized to be assumptions. (“The Stage is All the World”)

Even in Shakespearean romance distinctions of rank are rigidly maintained at the end. Bourgeois heroes tend to be on the industrious‑apprentice model, shown in its most primitive form in the boys who arrive at the last pages of Horatio Alger working for five dollars a week with a good chance of a raise. Detective stories often feature an elegant upper-class amateur who is ever so much smarter than the merely professional police; the movies and fiction magazines of two generations ago dealt a good deal with the fabulously rich, the sex novels of our day with lovers capable of prodigies of synchronized orgasm. Here again genuine realism finds its function in parody, as, for instance, The Great Gatsby parodies the “success story,” the romantic convention contemporary with it. (The Secular Scripture)

I have a feeling—probably it’s just one of those would-be profound feelings that it’s comfortable to have—that I cannot really get at the centre of a problem unless something in it goes back to childhood impressions. Thus my New Comedy ideas, the core of everything I did after Blake, probably go back to my [Horatio] Alger reading, and now I think the clue to this labyrinth is the sentimental romance of the l9th century, the roots of which are in Scott. While I lived on Bathurst St. I was constantly reading ghost stories with similar patterns in mind, & Poe & Hawthorne have always been favorites. Underground caves; the Phantom of the Opera, & the like, are all part of the Urthona penseroso pattern. (“Third Book” Notebooks)

One doesn’t realize the immense social prestige of the university until one gets a little outside it. Speaking of them [Bobby Morrison & Beattie], I wonder if the dry rot at the basis of their lives is significant of an economic change in which the bustling, successful, money-making, super-selling young man is no longer a pure clear-eyed Alger hero but an embittered souse. (Diaries, 5 September 1942)

Crossing the Rubicon

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“Julius Caesar and the Crossing of the Rubicon,” Francesco Granacci, 1494

On this date in 49 BC, returning general Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon into Rome with his army, signalling the start of civil war.

Here’s Frye in Fools of Time with some observations on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar relevant to the issues of social order, social authority and their relation to demagoguery, which we’ve been considering the last couple of days. Money quote: “The good leader individualizes his followers; the tyrant or bad leader intensifies mass energy into a mob.”

This [Elizabethan] view of social order, with its stress on the limited, the finite, and the individual, corresponds, as indicated above, to Nietzsche’s Apollonian vision in Greek culture. That makes it hard for us to understand it. We ourselves live in a Dionysian society, with mass movements sweeping across it, leaders rising and falling, and constantly taking the risk of being dissolved into a featureless tyranny where all sense of the individual disappears. We even live on a Dionysian earth, staggering drunkenly around the sun. The treatment of the citizens in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus puzzles us: we are apt to feel that Shakespeare’s attitude is anti-democratic. 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. The demagogues in that play are the tribunes whom the people have chosen as their own managers. The people in Shakespeare constitute a “Dionysian” energy in society: that is, they represent nothing but a potentiality of response to leadership. We are apt to assume, like Brutus, that leadership and freedom threaten one another, but, for us as for Shakespeare, there is no freedom without the sense of the individual, and in the tragic vision, at least, the leader or hero is the primary and original individual. The good leader individualizes his followers; the tyrant or bad leader intensifies mass energy into a mob. Shakespeare has grasped the ambiguous nature of Dionysus in a way that Nietzsche (like D.H. Lawrence later) misses. In no period of history does Dionysus have anything to do with freedom; his function is to release us from the burden of freedom. The last thing that the mob says in both Julius Caesar and Coriolanus is pure Dionysus: “Tear him to pieces.” (18-19)

Thomas Paine

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On this date in 1776 Thomas Paine published Common Sense, which arguably turned the American Rebellion into the American Revolution.

Here’s Frye in a letter to Helen in July 1932:

Now the United States is a big thing to criticize, but it has the advantage of having so many aspects that it is hardly possible to make a criticism of it which is not more or less true. But a statement which is more or less true, like “Germans are more intelligent than Frenchmen,” or “women are more moral than men,” is meaningless and a waste of wind, and of what is of considerably more value, time. That is the objection I have to Dreiser, and, on principle, to Lewis. No man has adequate cultural equipment to satirize the U.S. according to it, so that all he can do is imitate, or simply set the standardization of the Babbitts beside his own cultural standardization. There is too much eighteenth-century sentimentality and sloppy thinking in American culture anyway, and the path from Thomas Paine to Elmer Gantry runs straight and smooth. (CW 1, 41)

And from Elmer Gantry to creatures like Sharron Angle and Sarah Palin who believe that the second amendment supercedes the first — especially when advocates for the first amendment aren’t particularly eager enthusiasts of the second.