httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztoSUhbNntQ
The world’s greatest critic deserves a birthday greeting from the world’s greatest band. They flourished and enjoyed world-wide fame at about the same time. Coincidence?
Frye and Helen: the expression on his face is sweetly suggestive of his impassioned letters to her during the 1930s
Today is Frye’s birthday (1912-1991) and an opportune moment to hear what Frye has to say about himself.
His intermittent diaries between 1942 and 1955 contain just two birthday entries.
From his 1942 diary:
Thirty today. Many good resolutions, most broken already. (CW 8, 6)
From his 1950 diary while staying at Harvard and writing his seminal “Archetypes of Literature“:
Today was my thirty-eighth birthday. Helen & I went down to the Harvard Co-operative Store (they call & pronounce it the “Harvard Coop”) & got me a summer suit & a lot of miscellaneous things, socks & tie & so on . . . On the way back I stopped at a liquor store & asked if if there were any formalities about purchasing liquor. He said the formality consisted only in the possession of cash…
It’s important for me to get along on a concentrated job as soon as possible, because travel, which is said to broaden the mind, only flattens mine. The exposure of my naturally introverted mind to a whole lot of new impressions confuses me, because I’m more at home with ideas, I’m not naturally observant, and what impressions I do get are random & badly selected. Also they’re compared with the more familiar environment back home and, as I don’t know the new environment, the comparison is all out of focus. (ibid., 406)
We get much more of this sort of autobiographical detail in his letters, written between the ages of 19 and 24, to Helen Kemp.
Postmarked 14 June 1932:
The Muse is still stubborn. I have a good idea but no technique. I have a conception for a really good poem, I am pretty sure, but what I put down is as flat and dry as the the Great Sahara. I guess I’m essentially prosaic. I can work myself up into a state of maudlin sentimentality, put down about ten lines of the most villainous doggerel imaginable, and then kick myself and tear the filthy thing up. However, I got out the book of twentieth-century American poetry from the library and that cheered me up. There are bigger fools in the world. (CW 1, 19-20)
Postmarked 25 August 1932:
What I am worried about is my own personal cowardice. I am easily disheartened by failure, badly upset by slights, retiring and sensitive — a sissy, in short. Sissies are very harmless and usually agreeable people, but they are not leaders or fighters. I would make a very graceful shadow boxer, but little more. I haven’t the grit to look the Wedding Guest in the eye. “Put on the armor of God,” said a minister unctuously to me when I told him this. Good advice, but without wishing to seem flippant, I don’t want armour, divine or otherwise — snails and mud-turtles are encased in armour — what I want is a thick skin. (ibid., 63)
11 October 1933:
You say I am necessary to your existence. Does that mean:
a) That I am 135 pounds of mashed turnip; something necessary in the way of companionship — somebody to tell one’s troubles to — somebody who will pet you and spoil you and cuddle up to you when things go wrong?
b) That I am a condiment, bringing a sharp tang and new zest to existence, reminding you of the world, the flesh and the devil, and so humanizing you?
c) That I am a stimulant, helping to correlate your activities, encouraging your talents and spanking you for your weaknesses?
d) Or, that I am a narcotic, a drug, very powerful, to be taken, as you say, in small doses, temporarily relieving you, like a headache powder, from your ethereal worries by plunging you into an orgy of physical excitement which leaves you exhausted and silenced?
e) Or that I am an insufferable bore who stays too late?
f) Or a combination of the above?
You see, being a man, I’m so densely stupid. I haven’t any sort of intuitive tact. I am your typical male — whenever you get depressed I don’t know anything except what I personally want to do — that is, take you in my arms and strike solicitous and protective attitudes. If there’s any crying to be done, I want it done on my shoulder. I want to be present and look helpful whenever you are in difficulties. (ibid., 90)
My friend Tamara Kamermans offers this term to describe scholars who display irrational hostility toward Frye: “Fryechosis.”
Today is Harold Bloom’s birthday (born 1930).
Bloom has said a lot about Frye over the years, not all of it good or even consistent, but today let’s go with this one:
Frye is surely the major literary critic in the English language . . . . a kind of Miltonic figure. He is certainly the largest and most crucial critic in the English language since the divine Walter [Pater] and the divine Oscar [Wilde]; he really is that good.
Cited in Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned (309).
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Frye in a letter to Bloom dated 23 January 1969, responding to Bloom’s still developing theory about the “anxiety of influence”:
You don’t say much about the general direction or scope of your book. If you mean influence in the more literal sense of the transmission of thought and imagery and the like from an earlier poet to later one, I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstances and temperament. But of course it is true that a great poet’s maturity bring with it a growing sense of isolation, of the kind one feels in Yeats’s Last Poems, Stevens’ The Rock, and perhaps even Blake’s Job series. I should very much like to hear more about the book and about your progress with it. (Northrop Frye, Selected Letters, 1934-1991, edited by Robert D. Denham, 101)
Frye in a letter to John E. Grant dated 20 May 1975, responding to Grant’s apprehensions about Bloom’s A Map of Misreading:
I am disappointed with Harold’s book: it seems to me such a perverse application of a quite sound critical principle. You are quite right using the word “anxieties” about him: I’m afraid they’re almost on the point of taking him over. (Selected Letters, 174)
Frye in a letter to Morton D. Paley dated 17 January 1978:
Thanks very much for your offprint of your review of Harold Bloom. I hope it isn’t too arrogant for me to think that I represent Bloom’s chief anxiety of influence; in any case he seems to me to be increasingly isolating himself from the general critical condition, and I find his books progressively less rewarding. (Selected Letters, 201)
Despite this growing misgiving, however, Frye recommended Bloom for the MacArthur Fellowship (otherwise known at the “genius grant”), which Bloom received in 1985. (Selected Letters, 262)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlsF_ZLpNHY
Alice interviewed at the Vancouver International Authors’ Festival in October 2009 on the occasion of the publication of her latest collection of stories, Too Much Happiness.
Today is Alice Munro‘s 79th birthday.
Frye in “Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784-1984”:
….[T]he [Bildungsroman] theme seems to have an unusual intensity for Ontario writers: the best and most skillful of them, including Robertson Davies and Alice Munro, continue to employ a great deal of what is essentially the Stephen Leacock Mariposa theme, however different in tone. Most such books take us from the first to the second birth of the central character. Childhood and adolescence are passed in a small town or village, then a final initiation, often a sexual one, marks the entry into a more complex social contract. (CW 12, 621)
In any case, as we saw, prose in Ontario began with the documentary realism of journals and memoirs, and when fiction developed, that was the tradition it recaptured. Documents, when not government reports, tend to have short units, and the fact may account for the curious ascendancy in Canadian fiction of the novel which consists of sequence of interrelated short stories. This form is the favorite of Alice Munro, and reaches a dazzling technical virtuosity in Lives of Girls and Women. (ibid., 624)
In “‘Condominium Mentality’ in CanLit,” an interview with the University of Toronto Bulletin, February 1990:
O’Brien: Which Canadian writers are you most enthusiastic about?
Frye: The obvious people: Peggy Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Timothy Findlay, Mordecai Richler, . . . especially Alice Munro, who seems to be a twentieth-century Jane Austen. (CW 24, 1037)
Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999) in the New Yorker here.
Today is the birthday of our sixth and shortest-serving Prime Minister (68 days in 1896), Sir Charles Tupper (1821-1915). He was a baronet, and one of the eight of our first nine prime ministers (Sir John MacDonald serving two non-consecutive terms) to be knighted: our second, Alexander McKenzie was the exception, and our ninth, Sir Robert Borden, was the last. The title reveals our close political and cultural ties with the Empire in the early years of the nation, right down to the First World War.
Here’s Frye in a 1984 interview with David Cayley for the CBC Radio program “Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism”:
Frye: Nobody coming from the planet Mars and studying Canadian history would believe that Canadians retained loyalty to the British government through a century of total ineptness, where the British had always preferred American interests to Canadian ones and made it clear that they would have more respect for Canada if it were no longer a colony. But the problem from the Canadian view is, What else are we going to do? Where else are we going to find our identity in the continuity of that tradition?
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Frye: I tend to think more and more as I get older that the only social identity that’s really worth preserving is a cultural identity. And Canada seems to me to have achieved that, so I don’t join with other people in lamenting the loss of a political identity.
*
Frye: I think that culture has a different sort of rhythm from political and economic developments which tend to centralization, and that the centralization process has gone so far in the great world powers that the conception of the nation is really obsolete now. What we have instead among the great powers are enormous consolidations of social units, and cultural tendencies are tendencies in a decentralizing direction. If you talk about American literature, for example, you have to add up Mississippi literature and New England literature, Mid-Western, Californian, and so on. And the theme of cultural identity immediately transfers you to a postnational setting.
*
Frye: Regional culture, as I see it, is a culture in which the writer has struck roots in his immediate environment. There’s always something vegetable about the creative imagination, and you can’t transplant James Joyce and Alice Munro to the middle of Brazil and expect them to product the same kind of works. They’d become different cultural vegetables in that case. With the poets of the [Sir] Charles G.D. Roberts generation, there was really very little sense of region. The Confederation Ode of Roberts is inspired by a map, it is not inspired by people. I think we’re in a period of history now where we’re just beginning to realize that, as one book says, “small is beautiful,” that is, there is a tendency to decentralize and a feeling that the great world powers have grown to the point where they’re not really workable any more. They’re become increasingly dinosauric in their functioning. And with that, the sense of a cultural or regional identity begins to emerge as a genuinely human identity. (CW 24, 273-5)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2eWKH-F4Y
Salman Rushdie on The Hour with George Stromboulopoulos
Today is Salman Rushdie‘s birthday (born 1947). Rushdie, of course, was subjected to a death sentence by the Iranian Supreme Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14th, 1989 for his novel The Satanic Verses. Frye makes reference to it in his last posthumously published work, The Double Vision.
I am, of course, isolating only one element in Christianity, but cruelty, terror, intolerance, and hatred within any religion always mean that God has been replaced by the devil, and such things are always accompanied by a false kind of literalism. At present some other religions, notably Islam, are even less reassuring than our own. As Marxist and American imperialisms decline, the Muslim world is emerging as the chief threat to world peace, and the spark-plug of its intransigence, so to speak, is its fundamentalism or false literalism of belief. The same principle of demonic perversion applies here: when Khomeini gave the order to have Salman Rushdie murdered, he was turning the whole of the Koran into Satanic verses. In our own culture, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a future New England in which a reactionary religious movement has brought back the hysteria, bigotry, and sexual sadism of seventeenth-century Puritanism. Such a development may seem unlikely just now, but the potential is all there. (CW 4, 177-8)
Twenty years later, the potential only seems more potent.
On this date the great Canadian parliamentarian Stanley Knowles was born (1908 – 1997). He represented the riding of Winnipeg North Centre for the CCF from 1942 to 1958, and again for the NDP from 1962 to 1984. Upon his retirement he was given the unprecedented distinction of being made an honorary table officer of the House of Commons by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
Given back-to-back CCF/NDP anniversaries, this is a good time to cite Frye on his view of socialism as the C.C.F. emerged as a national political movement.
The current issue of Maclean’s [Sept. 1, 1934] has a very interesting catechism in it on Canadian problems and so forth that is supposed, after being related to a score, to show whether you are of a Conservative, Liberal, or C.C.F temperament. It’s pretty ingenious, and interested me chiefly because it placed me, with perfect accuracy. On the fence with the Liberal and C.C.F. battalions, exactly where a follower of Spengler and Mantalini ought to be. I think, with the C.C.F., that capitalism is crashing around our ears, and that any attempt to build it up again will bring it down with a bigger crash. I think with the Liberals that Socialism, as it is bound to develop historically, is an impracticable remedy, not because it is impracticable — it is inevitable — but because it is not a remedy. I think with the C.C.F. that a co-operative state is necessary to preserve us from chaos. I think with the Liberals that it is impossible to administer that state at present. I think with the C.C.F. that man is unable, in a laissez faire system, to avoid running after false gods and destroying himself. I think with the Liberals that it is only by individual freedom and individual democratic development that any progress can be made. In short, any “way out” must of necessity be miraculous. We can save ourselves only through an established co-operative church, and if the church ever wakes up to that fact, that will constitute enough of a miracle to get us the rest of the way. (Frye-Kemp Correspondence, CW 1, 155-6)
And here’s Frye fifty years later in Creation and Recreation on Wilde’s “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”:
Wilde attempted to deal with this aspect of creation too, in his essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” He remarks there that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” By “socialism,” however, Wilde means apparently only distributing wealth and opportunity more evenly, so that all people can become pure individualists, and hence, to some degree, artists. He says that in his ideal world the state is to produce the useful, and the individual or artist the beautiful. But beauty, like nature and reality, is merely another of those reassuring words indicating a good deal of ready-made social acceptance. Wilde is preoccupied in this essay by his contempt for censorship, and is optimistic that what he calls socialism would bring about the end of the tyranny of an ignorant and mischievous public opinion. This has not been our experience with socialism or any other system since Wilde’s time, and his prophetic vision in this essay seems to have gone out of focus. But, as usual, his sense of context is very accurate: he identifies the two aspects of our subject, the creation of a future society and the continuing of the creativity of the past in spite of the past. As he says: “the past is what man should not have been; the present is what man ought not to be; the future is what artists are.” (CW 4, 44-5)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2FT4_UUa4I
Today is Yeats‘s birthday (1865 – 1939).
Frye in “The Top of the Tower: The Imagery of Yeats”:
In Byzantium the imagery is again Heraclitean and alchemical, the vision of Sailing to Byzantium seen from within as a process. We start out in the sea, the beginning and the end of life, and move from the “fury and mire” of human passion upwards to the “changeless metal.” This is the movement of discarnation, opposite to the birth-to-death movement of incarnation, in which the spiral wrappings of the dead mummy are unwound, a movement that takes us beyond the world that is “by the moon embittered,” and where the gong never ceases to strike. Perhaps, then, the intuition of so many poets, including Dante, that this journey of the soul is also connected with another life after ordinary death has something to be said for it. If man has invented death, as Yeats says, he can recover what he has projected, and find his home in the “translunar Paradise” which he himself can make, and has made.
The poet of the Byzantium poems has gone far beyond the mystery of the fifteenth phase of A Vision, presented there as something forever beyond human capacities. The fifteenth phase is guarded, we are told, by Christ and Buddha. Christ descended into the bottom of the cyclical world–made himself of no account, as Paul says–then rose out of it, with a great company following. Buddha meditated on the deliverance of man from his own Narcissus image, “mirror on mirror mirrored,” the genuine Hercules in heaven liberated from its shadow in Hades. Just as in Eliot’s Burnt Norton the summit of vision and the depth of annihilation are the same point, the still point of the turning world, so in Yeats the top of the tower is both the rag-and-bone shop of the heart and the translunar Paradise that the heart alone has created. (The Stubborn Structure, 276-7)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvi4iA3PnKE
Kim Deal and the Pixies, “Here Comes Your Man”
Today is the birthday of the Deal sisters, Kim and Kelley (born 1961). Yes, yes, this is strictly a personal indulgence. But if relevance is required, here’s Frye in a 1978 interview responding to a question about the relationship between scholarship and popular culture.
I think that what interest I have in popular culture has largely grown out of my teaching interest. That is, I have always said that if you’re faced with a reluctant ten-year-old in a classroom and you’re trying to teach him literature and he prefers something he saw on TV the night before, the way to approach him is not to say, “Well this is good for you and that’s bad for you,” but to say, “Look, there are certain resemblances in structure between what I’m trying to give you and what you just saw.” I think that pedagogically that’s reasonably sound. That’s really where my interest in popular culture comes from–the fact that it records the same conventions and genres as serious literature, which of course keeps continually growing out of popular roots, just as Shakespeare grew out of the popular theatre. (CW 24, 422-3)