Category Archives: Birthdays

Walt Whitman

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBX2L_Re5Cc

A wax recording of Whitman in 1890

Today is Walt Whitman‘s birthday (1819 – 1892).

Frye in The Modern Century:

When the Romantic movement began, there was one important primitive influence on it, that of the oral ballads, which began to be collected and classified at that time.  The oral ballad makes a functional use of refrains and other strongly marked patterns of repetition, which correspond to the emphasis on design in the primitive pictorial arts.  The fact that it depended for survival on an oral tradition meant that whatever personal turns of phrase there may originally have been in it were smoothed out, the poem thus acquiring a kind of stripped poetic surface quite unlike that of written poetry.  The literary ballads which imitate these characteristics — the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake’s Mental Traveller, Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci — come about as close as poetry can come to reproducing directly the voice of the creative powers of the mind below consciousness, a voice which is uninhibited and yet curiously impersonal as well.  This was also the “democratic” voice that Whitman attempted to reproduce, and Whitman is the godfather of all the folk singing and other oral developments of our time which cover so large an area of contemporary popular culture.  (CW 11, 54)

Bob Dylan

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“Tangled Up in Blue,” live

Today is Bob Dylan‘s birthday (born 1941).

Frye alluded to Dylan on a number of occasions.  Here in a 1969 interview he cites Dylan to illustrate how popular culture has facilitated the teaching of literary criticism:

I think that in our day the communications gap between seriousness and lightness is breaking down… And I found in my teaching of literature that a person who knows folk singers like Bob Dylan or the Mothers of Invention has far less difficulty with symbols in poetry.  Twenty years ago you had to teach students the language of symbolism which they often just refused to learn.  Nowadays young people know that language.  (CW 24, 110)

And here, ten years later, he responds to the suggestion that it is “ludicrous that people like Bob Dylan are considered poets”:

Oh, I think Bob Dylan is a poet.  I am quite interested in the folk-song idiom as a poetic idiom.  It’s a revival of an oral tradition in poetry which disappeared for centuries.  Poetry got too badly bogged down with books, and I think it’s a very healthy thing when poetry becomes something that can be recited to an audience with a musical background.  (CW 24, 474)

Laurence Olivier

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The “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Olivier’s Hamlet

Today is Laurence Olivier‘s birthday (1907 – 1989).

Frye on New Year’s Eve 1948 records in his diary his impressions of Olivier’s film version of Hamlet:

Went to see the Laurence Olivier Hamlet this afternoon — its eleventh filming, according to the program.  As Olivier directed the film & played Hamlet too, it was still the subjective fallacy, the conception of the play which derives from the accident that Hamlet is a fat actor’s role, not in the least scant of breath.  In any production the actor who takes Hamlet’s part has a lot to say about the production, & his first care is usually to ensure that if any part is cut it won’t be his.  Olivier wasn’t crude about it: he slashed the soliloquies to ribbons & turned it into a play of action.  The subjective fallacy showed up chiefly in his treatment of Ophelia–he manipulated her part to make her just the “anima” of Hamlet, & deliberately cut out her mature intensity of feeling & her sharp sly humor.  Consistently with this he made her death pure accident, thus making all the references to her “doubtful” death in the fifth act entirely pointless.  The foils to Hamlet were also weakened — Laertes of course has a very badly written part, but the stability of Horatio was hardly in evidence & Fortinbras was abolished altogether, along with those dismal robot clowns Rosencrantz & Guildenstern.  On the other hand, the king & queen were fully & excellently treated.

Hamlet is not about Hamlet at all, but about a situation into which Hamlet fits, and all attempts to treat the play as though it were primarily a character study of Hamlet destroy the symmetry of the play.  For one thing, one needs all the rich counterpoint of the Polonius family, which plays the same role in Hamlet that the Gloucester family does in Lear.  We have to see this subplot from its own perspective as well as from Hamlet’s.  Ophelia corresponds to Gertrude, & her attraction toward Hamlet is, from Polonius’ point of view, a desertion to vice, just as Gertrude’s attraction toward Claudius is from Hamlet’s.  The father-daughter hold here is as palpable as the bigger mother-son one.  But more important, Hamlet is not a play about Hamlet’s indecision, but about the ritual element in revenge.  In Hamlet the stimulus to revenge takes the creative form of the play: in Claudius it takes the form of a ritual sword-dance, a Druidical drama punctuated with choruses of toasts & cannon shots.  But the question “why did Hamlet delay?” is no more important to the play than the question “why did Claudius delay?” for Claudius also has shallow excuses and self-analyzing soliloquies.  There is something comic in the elephantine fumbling on both sides, especially in the fourth act.

There were excellent things in Olivier’s version, though: the winding stair & the general Piranesi setting, Hamlet as the Orc-hero brandishing the torch in Claudius’ face, a grotesque little wooden statue of Christ to which Claudius prays, the use of the cross on the sword-hilt in the Hamlet-Ghost scene, the whole Saturnalia or Balshazzar’s feast aspect of Claudius’ revels.  The camera, by pushing closer to the characters, brings out the horror of tragedy the stage plays often gloss over, & reminds us that tragedy is after all about people getting hurt.  (CW 8, 42-3)

Pete Townsend

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3h–K5928M&feature=fvst

Today is Pete Towsend‘s birthday (born 1945).

When it comes to The Who, there are any number of songs that could be posted (and, damn, it’d be nice to put up just about any track from Who’s Next).  But this early promotional video for an early hit, “I Can’t Explain”, is especially charming (and of extraordinarily good quality).  It’s 1965.  The Beatles are playing concerts to thousands of screaming girls.  The Who, meanwhile, judging by this video, are drawing crowds of unsmiling boys who take their rock ‘n’ roll very seriously.  And that pretty much sums it up.

Sir Arthur Sullivan

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Arthur_Sullivan

Today is Sir Arthur Sullivan‘s birthday (1842 – 1900).

Here is an excerpt from Frye’s student review for Acta Victoriana of the Music Club’s April 1933 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.

But here, in the calm hush and cloister-quiet of Gate House, the artistic conscience of the Music Club rises to defend itself.  If there ever was a time when Pinafore could be well done, it argues, that time has long since passed.  Considered as a whole the farce is clumsy and ill-conceived, besides being unendurably hackneyed, and it simply cannot be sustained on its own momentum.  No human power can prevent that unspeakable finale from dragging painfully to a limping and inept close.  All the standard actors of the Music Club are good for lots of entertainment, says the conscience, but they could do nothing with their parts; they had to kick them off the stage and substitute themselves.  The cast of characters in Pinafore are all stuffed shirts and artificially bulged chemises, O critic, but those who took their places are wholesome happy youngsters who are all friends of yours, and you for one know that the fairy changelings are infinitely more attractive. (CW, 17. 233-4)

Frye’s doubts about the contemporary appeal of Gilbert and Sullivan notwithstanding, after the jump there’s a delightful version of “The Sun, Whose Rays Are All Ablaze” from Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, a wonderful film about the creation of The Mikado.  Yes, and okay, there’s a performance of “Three Little Maids From School” from the same film too.  (If you haven’t already seen this movie, put it on top of your list.)

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Sigmund Freud

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AUSTRIA FREUD ANNIVERSARY

Today is Freud‘s birthday (1856 – 1939).

Frye on psychological analogues of romance in The Secular Scripture:

When we look at social acts as rituals, we become at once aware of their close relation to a good deal of what goes on within the mind.  Anyone reading, say, William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience must be impressed by the extraordinary skill with which many people arrange their lives in the form of romantic or dramatic ritual, in a way which is neither wholly conscious nor wholly unconscious, but a working alliance of the two.  William James takes us into psychology, and with Freud and Jung we move into an area where the analogy to quest romance is even more obvious.  In a later development, Eric Berne’s “transactional” therapy, we are told that we take over “scripts” from our parents which it is our normal tendency to act out as prescribed and invariable rituals, and that all possible forms of such scripts can be found in any good collection of folktales.  Romance often deliberately descends into a world obviously related to the human unconscious, and we are not surprised to find that some romances, George MacDonald’s Phantastes, for example, are psychological quests carried out in inner space.  Such inner space is just as much of a “reality,” in Wallace Stevens’ use of the word, as the Vanity Fair of Thackeray: Vanity Fair itself, after all, is simply a social product of the illusions thrown up by the conflicts within his inner consciousness.  When we look back at the Cistercian developments of Arthurian legend, with their stories of Galalhad the pure and his quest for the Holy Grail, we see that an identity between individual and social quests has always been latent in romance. (58)

Karl Marx

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karl-marx

Today is Karl Marx‘s birthday (1818-1883).

Frye in one of the “Third Book” notebooks:

Marx himself was undoubtedly a great writer in the anatomic tradition: he had the satirist’s truculence, excremental imagery, & inability to finish books.  (This aspect of ironic mythos is the counterpart of the endless form of romance.)  If Norman Brown’s book [Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History] had been obsessed by Marx instead of Freud, & he had added Marx to his studies of Luther & Swift, he’d have written an even more remarkable book.

The point is that literary criticism has to develop canons for — not judging, but — incorporating Marx, Freud, Luther, Paul, Jesus, instead of allowing determinists to make them a standard for critical categories. (CW 9, 80)