Category Archives: Birthdays

Oscar Wilde

Leave a reply

Today  is Oscar Wilde‘s birthday (1854-1900).

Frye was a great admirer of Wilde (see especially Creation and Recreation), and there are any number of quotes that could be cited today, but this one from The Secular Scripture will do:

The beginning of a new kind of criticism is marked by Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, which explains very lucidly that, as life has no shape and literature has, literature is throwing away its one distinctive quality when it tries to imitate life.  It follows for Wilde that what is called realism does not create but can only record things at a subcreative level:

“M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire.  Who cares for the Second Empire now?  It is out of date.  Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of life.”

Wilde was clearly the herald of a new age in literature, which would take another century or so to penetrate the awareness of critics.  He was looking forward to a culture which would use mythical and romantic formulas in its literature with great explicitness, making once more the essential discovery about the human imagination, that it is always a form of “lying,” that is, turning away from the descriptive use of language and the correspondence form of truth.  (45-6)

Virgil

1 Reply

Today is Virgil‘s birthday (70 BCE-19 BCE).

Frye in The Secular Scripture:

This attitude [of identification between authors] has recently revived as a form of existential criticism.  Its method is brilliantly satirized in Borges’ story of Pierre Menard, whose life’s work it was to rewrite a couple of chapters of Don Quixote, not by copying them, but by total identification with Cervantes.  Borges quotes a passage from Cervantes and a passage from Menard which is identical with it to the letter, and urges us to see how much more historical resonance there is in the Menard copy.  The satire shows us clearly that nothing will get around the fact that writer and reader are different entities in time and space, that whenever we read anything, even a letter from a friend, we are translating it into something else.  Dante tells us that he could never have gone through hell and purgatory without the instruction of Virgil.  Virgil, many centuries later, when interviewed by Anatole France in Elysium, complained that Dante had totally misunderstood him.  Without going in quite the same direction that some critics have done, I think it is true that this is how the recreating of the literary tradition often has to proceed: through a process of absorption followed by misunderstanding, that is, establishing a new context.  Thus an alleged misunderstanding of Ovid produced a major development in medieval poetry, and some later romance is bound up with such phrases as “Gothic revival” and “Celtic twilight,” misunderstandings of earlier ages that never existed.  (162-3)

John Lennon: “A Hard Day’s Night”

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtgZvuRaafU&p=3334F2527CB8AFD8&index=1&feature=BF

How it looked and sounded when it all began.  The movie was supposed to be a bit of exploitative ephemera — a quick cash-in before the fad passed, but it never did.  There are undoubtedly many millions of people who still feel the thrill at the sound of that opening chord. . .

Today is John Lennon‘s 70th birthday.

Since this is our regular Saturday Night at the Movies spot, A Hard Day’s Night seems an appropriate way to celebrate.  I’m glad to say that both the video and the sound are of excellent quality.

Frye on the Beatles here.

A couple of earlier Beatles posts here and here.

The rest of the movie after the jump.

Continue reading →

Wallace Stevens

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM7LrsIhWqc

One of Frye’s favorite poems, “The Snowman,” read by the author

Today is Wallace Stevens‘s birthday (1879-1955).

Frye, in various interviews, on the imperfect as paradise:

Wallace Stevens says “the imperfect is our paradise.”  And that means that any paradise you would try to reach would be an anticlimax.  The real paradise is something you can dream of but it’s no longer there.  (CW 24, 882)

When Stevens wrote that, he was writing a poem called Sunday Morning, in which a woman stays home from church and tries to rationalize the fact that she doesn’t want to go to church.  One of the things she comes up with is the feeling that you cannot imagine a complete happiness or complete beauty apart from change, and that in the world as we know it, change ends inevitably in death.  It is true that the imperfect is our paradise, but most religions, including Christianity, say that all change doesn’t have to be a change in the direction of death.  (CW 24, 561)

The same thing happens when in Wallace Stevens I discover the line “the imperfect is our paradise” — here I immediately understand that a paradox is involved between the word “imperfect” in the negative sense, in the sense of “something less than perfect,” and “imperfect” in the sense of openness, of continuity.  That kind of polysemy, I think, is imbedded in the whole conception of figurative language.  The critic cannot deal with literature unless he has at least some idea about the different viewpoints that can be gathered around any critical theme, exemplified, among other ways, by the different referential contexts of the same word. (CW 24, 1085)

Tintoretto

Leave a reply

“Women Making Music” (Date unknown)

Today is Tintoretto‘s birthday (1518-1594).

I’ve noticed while trolling for Frye quotes how interesting it is to see who or what he’ll mention in passing to make a larger point, as he does here with Tintoretto.  It’s always easy to get the measure of Frye’s genius in bulk; but there is a particular pleasure in picking it up in the tiniest detail.  And, in a pleasant bit of serendipity, the larger point of the quote below nicely complements the painting above.

Once we have understood the self-imposed limitations of Elizabethan music and realized that its whole spirit is domestic and intimate, that it is Marvell but never Milton, Vermeer but never Tintoretto, Jane Austen but never Tolstoy, we shall accept it for what it is and not indulge in evolutionary reveries. . . We have dropped [the notion of evolution] in literature: we no longer say that poetry has “improved,” that Dryden found it brick and left it marble, or that Pope or Tennyson or anyone else represents centuries of “development.”  We know now that poetry never improves; it only alters.  But musical criticism, owing to the illiteracy of most musicians, has a way of lagging a century or two behind literary criticism, and while the general outlook of Lives of the Poets is dead, that of Johnson’s friend and contemporary Dr. Burney is still alive.  Hence it is generally accepted that everything in Elizabethan music is a crude and unformed beginning of what later composers progressively improved on. (CW 25, 168)

William Empson

Leave a reply

Today is William Empson‘s birthday (1906-1984).

Frye in one of his notebooks on romance:

Empson’s book on ambiguity suggests, though it doesn’t explore the implications of the suggestion, that the difference between a positive & a negative idea often disappears in poetry: his example is “Drink to me only,’ which contains both the expressed postive & the logical negative of the same idea.  This is connected with something I read in Vendryes’ book on language, though I noticed it myself.  If in poetry you say it’s a hot day because no cool breezes [are] blowing you summon up the image of cool breezes rather than heat.  “Sinless” tends to convey the idea of sin rather than innocence (wonder why there are so many “-less” words in Kubla Khan).  On the other hand you can use this trick to suggest what you wish were there, & dodge overemphasis on heroic moods by descibing things negatively, as Chaucer does with the funeral of Arcite [in The Knight’s Tale].  I thought that all imaginative traditions begin by overcoming the split in the world of subject & object: the Lankavatara Sutra suggests that the real split is between being and not-being, close to Blake’s vision-analogy business, or rather Generation-Ulro, than the cloven fiction proper.  Thus it speaks of those who assert that the bull has horns because they are attached to the notion that the hare has no horns–a profound and witty remark.  Hence this question of positive-negative simultaneity may apply Blake’s doctrine of art to a profounder cleavage in experience that he applies it to.

T.S. Eliot

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqK5zQlCDQ

Eliot reading “The Burial of the Dead” from The Waste Land

Today is T.S. Eliot‘s birthday (1888-1965).  Eliot, besides being one of the primary poets of the age, was also the dominant literary critic in English when Frye was a young man, and had a unique position in Frye’s life and career.  While Frye always admired the poetry, he regarded Eliot’s “reactionary” book After Strange Gods as a “betrayal” which made him aware of his “own responsibilities as a critic” (Northrop Frye in Conversation, 107).

Here’s Frye in his 1963 book, T.S. Eliot, on the poet’s anti-progressive view of history and his anti-Romantic view of literature:

The progressive view of history produced the post-Romantic conception of English literature which Eliot challenged.  According to this, originality in poetry is an aspect of individual freedom in life; hence Shakespeare, who drew individuals so well, and Milton, a Protestant revolutionary, express the real genius of English literature.  The era from Dryden to Johnson was an inferior and prosier age, but the Romantic movement re-established the main tradition, which continued in Britain through Tennyson and Swinburne, and in America through Whitman’s conception of poetry as self-expression.

Eliot’s historical view of English literature is a point-for-point reversal of the progressive one.  The post-Romantic conception of “personality,” failing to distinguish the craftsman from the ordinary personality, assumes that the former is the medium or vehicle of the latter, instead of the other way around.  In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Eliot speaks of the poetic process as “impersonal,” not an expression of personality but an “escape” from it.  The poet’s mind is a place where something happens to words, like a catalyser which accompanies but does not manipulate a chemical action.  In other early essays, though Eliot agrees with Arnold about the immaturity of the Romantic poets, he means by “Romanticism” chiefly the popular post-Romantic residue of their influence which is contemporary with himself.  This Romanticism, he says, “leads his disciples only back upon themselves.”  Romanticism, then, as a creative process emanating from and returning from the ego, occupies the foreground of Eliot’s historical dialectic, the contemporary world at the bottom of the Western mountain, as far as we can get from the “anti-romantic,” “practical sense of realities” in Dante’s Vita nuova. (CW 29, 191)