Category Archives: Anniversaries

Galileo

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Galileo’s discovery of the heliocentric solar system

On this date in 1610 Galileo observed for the first time three of the largest moons of Jupiter.

Frye in “The Times of the Signs”:

[T]he only person outside of the Bible who is repeatedly and pointedly alluded to in Paradise Lost is Galileo, whose telescope is brought in several times, in rather curious contexts.  Milton is well aware of the view of the universe that Galileo held (he had met Galileo in Italy), and sometimes, in discussing the movements of the heavenly bodies, he puts the Ptolemaic and the Copernican explanations beside each other without committing himself.  But it is clear that the older model has more of his sympathy, and from what we have said we can see why: the Ptolemaic universe, however rationalized, is a mythological and therefore essentially a poetic construction, hence it makes poetic sense.  Galileo’s world is much more difficult for a poet to visualize.  (CW 27, 340-1)

Fabian Society

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On this date in 1884 the Fabian Society was founded.

Frye on the influence of the Fabian Society on G. B. Shaw in “The Writer as Prophet”:

At first, of course, Shaw was handicapped by his lack of knowledge of life: when he started in, he really didn’t know anything except the fact that he wanted to write.  He educated himself, partly by reading in the British Museum, partly by going out in the evenings to all sorts of debating societies and discussion groups.  In the course of this he decided that the only way to get any concrete knowledge of the world he lived in was to study economics.  He read Karl Marx and became a socialist, though never a Marxist.  In May 1884, he dropped in on a tiny discussion group, five months old, called the Fabian Society, which proposed to bring socialism to England by constitutional means.  The minutes for that evening record that the meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Mr. Bernard Shaw.  The note is in Shaw’s handwriting.  Shaw liked the Fabian Society, because its members didn’t take themselves quite as seriously as some of the others, and he persuaded a young friend of his named Sidney Webb to join it.  Sidney Webb brought in others, including the brilliant woman who became Beatrice Webb, and the Fabian Society started one of the greatest political movements of modern times, a movement which has already changed the history of the world and is by no means finished yet.  It was through the working of the Fabian Society that Shaw learned enough about modern life to become a great dramatist.  For years he slugged away writing pamphlets and making speeches, serving on vestry boards and municipal councils; and when he began to write plays about the conditions of life in Victorian society, he knew what he was talking about.  (CW 10, 177)

Apple

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The death of HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

On this date in 1977 Apple Computers was incorporated.

Frye in Notes 54.2:

I’ve been reading a book about computers, full of very muddled arguments about whether a machine can be said to think or have intelligence.  The difference between a mechanism and an organism is not one of intelligence but of will.  An automobile can run faster than a human being can, but in itself has no will to do so: it will sit rusting in a garage indefinitely without the slightest sign of impatience.  There’s no reason why man should not develop machines that can reproduce every activity of the human brain on a vastly higher level of speed and efficiency.  But nobody has yet come up with a computer that wanted to do these things on its own: as will, so far, every machine is an expression of the will of its makers.  In the Clarke-Kubrick movie 2001, the computer Hal suddenly develops an autonomous will, a power of using its intelligence for its own ends.  That makes Hal a nightmare, of course, but it also makes him a fellow-creature: he’s now a he and not an it, and the depiction of his gradual destruction had a genuine pathos.  (CW 6, 682)

Isaac Asimov

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Asimov’s “Science and Beauty,” first published in the Washington Post in 1979

Today is Isaac Asimov‘s birthday (1920-1992).

Frye in “Introduction to Design for Learning“:

Mathematics is often said to be the language of science, but it is a secondary language: all elementary understanding is verbal, and most of the understanding of it at any level continues to be so.  The verbal understanding of science, at least on the elementary level, is quite as much imaginative, quite as dependent on metaphor and analogy, as it is descriptive.  Here is a passage from The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science, by Isaac Asimov, which illustrates how metaphorical a writer must become when he has to explain science to scientific illiterates: “Cosmic rays bombarding atoms in the earth’s upper atmosphere knock out neutrons when they shatter the atoms; some of these neutrons bounce out of the atmosphere into space; they then decay into protons, and the charged protons are trapped by magnetic lines of force of the earth.”  This functional use of metaphor is one of the many reasons why no programme of study in English, however utilitarian its aims, can ever lose contact with English as literature.  (CW 7, 134)

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

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Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as president and announces the dissolution of the U.S.S.R

On this date in 1991 the U.S.S.R. was officially dissolved, having lasted 69 years and one day.

Frye in The Double Vision:

History moves in a cyclical rhythm which never forms a complete closed cycle.  A new movement begins, works itself out to exhaustion, and something of the original state then reappears, though in a quite new context presenting new conditions.  I have lived through at least one major historical cycle of this kind: its main outlines are familiar to you, but the inferences I have drawn from it may be less so.  When I arrived at Victoria College as a freshman in September 1929, North America was not only prosperous but in a nearly hysterical state of self-congratulation.  It was widely predicted that the end of poverty and the levelling out of social inequalities were practically within reach.  In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, the reports were mainly of misery and despair.  The inference of general public opinion on this side of the Atlantic was clear: capitalism worked and Marxism didn’t.

Next month came the stock market crash, and there was no more talk of a capitalist Utopia.  By the mid-1930s the climate of opinion had totally reversed, at least in the student circles I was attached to.  Then it was generally accepted dogma that capitalism had had its day and was certain to evolve very soon, with or without a revolution, into socialism, socialism being assumed to be both a more efficient and a morally superior system.  The persistence of this view helped to consolidate my own growing feeling that myths are the functional units of human society, even when they are absurd myths.  The myth in this case was the ancient George and dragon one: Fascism was the dragon, democracy was the maiden to be rescued, and despite the massacres, the deliberately planned famines, the mass uprooting of peoples, the grabbing of neighbouring territories, and the concentration camps, Stalin simply had  to fit into the role of rescuing knight.  This was by no means a unanimous feeling — among Communists themselves there was a bitterly anti-Stalin Trotskyite group — but it extended over a good part of the left of centre.

That cycle has completed itself, and once again people in the West are saying, as they said sixty years ago, that it has been proved that capitalism works and that Marxism does not.  With the decline of belief in Marxism, apart from an intellectual minority in the West that doesn’t have to live with it, the original Marxist vision is often annexed by the opposite camp.  Going back to the competitive economy that Marx denounced, we are often told, will mean a new life for the human race, perhaps even the ultimate goal that Marx himself promised: an end to exploitation and class struggle.  Hope springs eternal: unfortunately it usually springs prematurely.  (CW 4, 167-8)

U.S.S.R

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Lenin’s declaration of the Soviet Union

On this date in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed.

Here’s Frye in “On the Nineteenth Century”:

Marx thought of Communism as a natural evolution out of capitalism: when capitalism had reached a certain stage of deadlock through its inherent contradictions, a guided revolutionary movement would shift control of production from a few exploiters to the workers.  This evolutionary development did not occur: Communism was established in an essentially pre-industrial country, and became simply the adversary of capitalism, not its successor.  (CW 17, 318)

Thomas Becket

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Master Francke’s Martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, c. 1424

On this date in 1179 Thomas Becket was murdered (born 1118).

Frye on T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral:

In Murder in the Cathedral the dialectical and purgatorial aspect of the Christian “comic” action is at its clearest.  The foreground action is a tragedy in which the hero knows that “. . . all things / Proceed to a joyful communion.”  Of the four worlds [heaven, upper level of nature, lower level of nature, hell], there is no place for the rose garden: we begin in experience, represented by the chorus.  The chorus becomes increasingly aware that experience is the doorway to hell, and as the murderers move closer the women of Canterbury are haunted by images of beasts of prey, filth, and corruption, ending in the cry: “The Lords of Hell are here.”  Meanwhile Beckett is immediately involved in a sequence of temptations.  The chorus describes him as “unaffrayed among the shades,” he he says himself, in language realling the Purgatory line “Treating shadows as a solid thing”: “. . . the substance of our first act / Will be shadows, and the strife with shadows.”

The first tempter, “Leave-well-alone,” presents a temptation that Becket has gone too far to yield to even if he were capable of it.  Its object however is not to persude him to desert, but merely to remain in his mind as a source of distraction, confusing him in crucial moments: “Voices under sleep, waking a dead world, / So that the mind may not be whole in the present.”  Temptations of compromise and of intrigue follow, but the dangerous temptation is an unexpected fourth one to “do the right deed for the wrong reason”: to preserve in integrity and die a glorious martyr’s death.  This temptation is really an act of grace, something that Beckett would never even have encountered by himself, much less overcome.  The fact that the fourth tempter, as he leaves, repeats, word for word, Becket’s opening speech in the play, indicates that Becket at this point has “assumed a double part,” separating his real immortal self from the unpurified part of himself.  Both this theme and the theme of something apparently demonic turning out to be an agent of grace are frequent in other plays.  (CW 29, 243-4)

Theodore Dreiser

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Dreiser’s article “The Factory” (1910)

On this date in 1945 Theodore Dreiser died (born 1871).

Frye in “Design as a Creative Principle in the Arts”:

The tendency of of contemporary poets, and many novelists and dramatists as well, to be attracted toward myth and metaphor, rather than toward a realistic emphasis on content, is thus a cultural tendency parallel to the emphasis on abstract design in the visual arts.  It exhibits also the same paradox, or seeming paradox: it is usually a highly sophisticated, even erudite and academic, approach to the art, yet the features of the art which are most interesting to it are primitive and popular features.  Dylan Thomas seems more complex and and baffling than Theodore Dreiser, yet it is easier for me to imagine Dylan Thomas genuinely popular than to imagine Dreiser, for all his obvious and considerable merits, genuinely popular.  This is not to suggest a preference between two utterly incomparable things, but to suggest that writers who concentrate on literary design rather than content, despite their superficial difficulties, are the writers most likely to reach the widest public most quickly.  The principles of literary design are also the readiest means by which literature can be effectively taught, at any level from kindergarten to graduate school.  And as myth and metaphor are habits of mind and not merely artificial devices, such teaching should lead us, not simply to admire works of literature more, but to transfer something something of their imaginative energy to our own lives.  It is that transfer of imaginative energy which is the aim of all education in the arts, and to the possibility of which the arts themselves bear witness.  (CW 27, 236-7)

Charles Lamb

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Chapter 1 of Rosamund Grey

On this date in 1834 Charles Lamb died (born 1775).

From The Well-Tempered Critic:

A critic may have precise and candid taste and yet be largely innocent of theory.  Charles Lamb was such a critic, and one feels even that his lack of theory was an advantage to him.  Coleridge, on the contrary, was one of the greatest critical theorists, and yet had much less of Lamb’s ability to respond directly to poetry without being confused by moral, religious, and political anxieties. (CW 21, 381)

Harold Pinter

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A scene from The Homecoming with Vivian Merchant and Ian Holm

On this date in 2008 Harold Pinter died (born 1930).

Frye cites Pinter to make a point about about genre and cultural priorites in The Modern Century:

Some arts, like music and drama, are ensemble  performances for audiences; others, like the novel and the easel painting, are individualized.  In an intensely individualized era like the Victorian age, the novel goes up and the drama goes down.  Up until quite recently, the creative person, say in literature, was typically one who “wanted to write,” and what he wanted to write was usually poetry or fiction.  He might dream of rivalling Shakespeare, but he would be unlikely to want Shakespeare’s job as a busy actor-manager in a profit-sharing corporation.  It looks as though creative interests were shifting again to the dramatic: it is Pinter and Albee and Beckett on the stage, Bergman and Fellini and others in film, who seem to be making cultural history today, as the novelists were making it a century ago.  (CW 11, 56)