Category Archives: Popular Culture

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCM4JiJ6B2I

Lewis Carroll’s books of fantasy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, were important to Frye, and he mentions them frequently in the Notebooks.  In the Anatomy of Criticism he says that “the Alice books are perfect Menippean satires, and so is [Charles Kingsley’s] The Water-Babies” (Anatomy 310).  Elsewhere, he identifies a quality “of slightly nutty fantasy which has been the characteristic of Oxford from time immemorial” that links works such as The Anatomy of Melancholy, Alice in Wonderland, and the works of the Inklings (C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams) – the latter products of the Oxford in which Frye himself studied (“The Critic and the Writer,” Collected Works 7:470-71).

Tim Burton’s new film Alice in Wonderland is more of an epic adventure than a Menippean satire, and interestingly enough it combines elements from the two Alice books with elements of The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia stories, and perhaps one or two from The Wizard of Oz.  The result is a successful and charming film whose ethos is quite different from the bizarre world created by Lewis Carroll.

The opening of the film effectively represents the famous descent which was the subject of some discussion on the blog last year; thereafter, the story becomes a quest narrative and a struggle against evil.  Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp are excellent as the Red Queen and the Mad Hatter.  It is a visually stunning film, in Frye’s terminology a triumph of opsis.

TGIF: The Room

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpfPmvG6CHI&NR=1

“You’re right.  The computer business is too competitive.”

The Room.  A movie so astonishingly bad that it’s become a cult classic.  It’s Douglas Sirk by way of Ed Wood.  No, that’s not being clever.  That’s really what it’s like.

The writer, producer, director and star is the now legendary Tommy Wiseau, the Orson Welles of bad movie making.  The Room is the movie David Lynch would make if he somehow didn’t know he was David Lynch.  Irony may return to myth.  But this evidently is what irony can pass through along the way — a place where the audience not only knows more than the characters, it knows more than the creator.  Just.  Wow.

After the jump, a couple of very brief clips (7 seconds, 21 seconds) that capture some of the movie’s most celebrated moments.  And then, after that, if you can bear it, a scene of such grand guignol melodrama that it, well, deconstructs itself.

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The Kugelmass Effect

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The May 2nd, 1977 issue of The New Yorker, in which “The Kugelmass Episode” first appeared.

Responding to comments by Joe Adamson, Clayton Chrusch, and Matthew Griffin

Bob Denham points out that in the latter part of his career Frye virtually ceased using the word “archetype.”  But, thanks at least to Anatomy of Criticism, it is a term that will always be associated with him — that third essay, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” will likely remain a centerpiece, re-read and contemplated anew (not to mention misread and summarily dismissed) apart from everything else.  But, of course, Frye is not really a modular thinker: you can’t take a small piece of him and say, “This is it in a nutshell.”  The best you can do is to identify some aspect of Frye and extrapolate the rest of his critical outlook from it.  (A. C. Hamilton, for example, claims that he can reconstruct all of Frye from a single phrase, the way a paleontologist might reconstruct an entire dinosaur from a bone fragment.)

This discussion thread began with the young Frye’s love of The New Yorker, so it’s nice bit of symmetry that we can return to the May 2nd, 1977 issue to round it out.  In that issue, Woody Allen published what may be one of his best short stories, “The Kugelmass Episode” (the full text of which can be read here).  In it, a humanities professor at CUNY named Kugelmass with an infatuation for Emma Bovary discovers a magician who can transport him into the novel where he becomes one of Emma’s lovers, and then snatches her away to attend the Academy Awards ceremony wearing a chic Ralph Lauren pantsuit (it’s 1977, remember).  In a cutaway sequence, the scene briefly shifts:

“I cannot get my mind around this,” a Stanford professor said.  “First a strange character named Kugelmass, and now she’s gone from the book.  Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new.”

That sense of finding “something new” in a work read “a thousand times” we might call the “Kugelmass effect.”  It is suggestive of the fact that archetypes are constant but not reductive or static.  They are expansively associative and ultimately unfold a vision of the world that, as Frye points out, is always “new” — however many times it has been rendered — because it has never been realized.  It is what makes works of art “innocent” (as he puts in in The Educated Imagination), despite the cruel and unjust social conditions that produced them.  It’s why we cannot read a work of literature just once and exhaust its imaginative possibilities.  And it is surely why writers can and do (whether consciously or unconsciously, whether they freely admit to it or vehemently deny it) employ archetypes and still render them unique to the particular circumstances of the work at hand.

In Words with Power Frye explicitly identifies the literary experience as “visionary” and “prophetic.”  But he’d always argued as much.  To see the world in a grain of sand is to see everything in what is otherwise almost nothing, and to see it recreated in what is otherwise mundane.  It is “primary concern” raised to the level of the “concrete universal” — everywhere, all at once, and all of the time.

Frye on the New Yorker

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For the article that Michael Happy surely intends to write about Frye’s love affair with The New Yorker, here are the references—at least most of them—plus a few from Helen.

I have been rather handicapped by the lack of money, but that doesn’t matter so much this first term. But if you really want to do something for me, my own self‑sacrificing little girl—WHEN THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO COME THROUGH WITH SOME NEW YORKERS? (Frye‑Kemp Correspondence, CW, 2, 620-1)

To switch the subject to civilization for the moment. Thank you very very much for the New Yorkers. You are a sweet little girl. It was just pure nerves that made me bark for them in my last letter [above]. The idea that you might have forgotten to buy them owing to pressure of work or something nearly made me collapse. I spent a marvellous weekend with them. It was just as well they came when they did, as the boots took my shoes Saturday morning to repair them and didn’t return them till Sunday morning—I had to go to Hall in my tennis shoes. (ibid., 630)

The poet may change his mind or mood; he may have intended one thing and done another, and then rationalized what he did. (A cartoon in a New Yorker of some years back hit off this last problem beautifully: it depicted a sculptor gazing at a statue he had just made and remarking to a friend: “Yes, the head is too large. When I put it in exhibition I shall call it ‘The Woman with the Large Head.’”) (Anatomy of Criticism, 87)

The dandy attitude survives in the early (twenties) essays of Aldous Huxley, whose epigrams are mainly inverted clichés, in Yeats’ association of dandyism & heroism, in Lytton Strachey, & in the contemporary New Yorker—see its Knickerbocker figure and again the inverted melodrama clichés of its cartoons. (Notebooks for Anatomy of Criticism, CW 23, 265)

Many years ago Edmund Wilson, in a New Yorker review, connected the Houdini situation with the dying & reviving god. [“And the magician who escapes from the box: what is he but Adonis and Attis and all the rest of the corn gods that are buried and rise?  This is quite plain in the case of Houdini” (Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), 151.  Wilson’s review appeared in New Yorker, 11 March 1944.]  (ibid., 294)

As I see it now, there are two main themes: the relation of literature to the other arts & disciplines, and the relation of the hypothetical to the existential: i.e., art & religion.  I call it Tentative Conclusion, & begin, possibly, with the New Yorker cartoon. [The “head is too large” cartoon, referred to above].  (ibid., 202)

Don’t assume that the intentional fallacy is always a fallacy, i.e. that you can judge a satire without taking account of a humorous or ironic intention.  The answer “but it’s supposed to be that way” is valid for many objections—cf. the New Yorker “large head” problem. [The “head is too large” cartoon, referred to above].  (ibid., 237)

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Frye and The New Yorker

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The first biographical nugget about Frye I ever knew about was probably his status as a youthful typing champion — maybe not all that surprising for a brilliant young scholar-to-be who also played the piano.  But the first biographical detail that ever caught my attention was his love of The New Yorker.  It must be because I’d discovered the magazine for myself and had already developed a sort of suburban-teen / older-woman crush on it.  It’s true that The New Yorker was not then the titan it had once been and has probably only diminished in influence since.  (Although it continues to have a natural affinity for Canadian-based intellect and talent: Alice Munro has published in the magazine for more than 30 years, and Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik have become stars in their own right under bylines there.)  I continue to treasure this somewhat incongruous biographical factoid because there are days that I look at the blog and hope — however modestly, however faintly — that we at least strive to approximate the mood and tone of The New Yorker at its best: intelligent, well-read, engaged in the world as it is found while aspiring to improve it, and to do so with a knowing humor that is always pertinent to everything else we intend to do.

John Ayre’s biography has a few mentions of Frye’s affection for the magazine in his younger years, and observes of Frye’s impatience to receive back issues by mail during his 1936 stay at Oxford:

Given Frye’s seemingly bottomless taste for estoteric works, this voracious desire for copies of America’s quintessential upper-middle-class weekly with its cartoons and satire by Thurber and White appeared mysterious.  But within the context of his misery at Oxford, it represented a life-line to an urbane North American perspective which Frye desperately needed. (133)

During a subsequent trip to Italy with Helen and Mike Joseph referred to in a previous post by Bob Denham, Frye likewise retreats at one point to “bury himself in the ten copies of The New Yorker he brought along” (153).

To be surprised by this is perhaps like being surprised by (as Joe Adamson, Borat-like, cleverly puts it) “sexy Frye”.  It is always gratifying to be reassured that Frye was not a plaster saint, that he was fully aware of the world and the way it unfurls and rolls up its passing fancies.  Frye’s occasional and fleeting references to phenomena like the punk rock of the late 70s and early 80s retain the freshness of their immediate context that many contemporary cultural critics cannot adequately capture.  Those references don’t date; they responsibly characterize the temper of the time in a way only a real understanding of them could.  That is, not too much emphasis, but rendered with a casualness that appreciates both that it is happening and that it too is part of a much larger pattern we are always struggling to become aware of — like (to refer to an analogy Frye uses on at least a couple of occasions) coral suddenly endowed with a vision of the reef of which they are a part.  It’s as though Frye’s love of music always rendered him pitch perfect when it comes to what might otherwise be regarded as cultural ephemera.  As individuals — and even as organized masses — we leave little of anything behind, however much urgency we invest in it.  But that little seems to be more than enough if we are willing to see the world in a grain of sand.

And so Frye’s youthful love of The New Yorker contradicts any assumption that he was an abstracted intellectual interested only in ideal forms.  One of my first profs gave props to Frye as a genius while suggesting that he cannot deal with the unique work of literature that is actually there for us to read.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.  Frye never retreats from this world; like the literature he loved so much, he engages the world to confront it, to stir us into awareness that it is a terrible place but that it never need be, to remind us that the worst — like the best — returns to laughter.

Salinger’s Concrete Universal

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Value judgments are a lie
Find the patterns that apply
Squeeze out Hamlet, let it dry
Presto! Catcher in the Rye.

[A poem that circulated among Victoria College students in the 1980s.]

Salinger’s book is my favourite, a work that explained to me my feelings of alienation while growing up as a C.B.C. (Canadian Born Chinese) split between two worlds, Chinese and Canadian, and wanting to be accepted by both. Perhaps that’s one reason why early on I loved English Literature so much: it was a way to be accepted by the ascendant class in Toronto during the 1970s. How much more Canadian can I be if I studied the literature?

Too bad racists are philistines. But I digress.

Frye helped explain my love of The Catcher in the Rye: The Concrete Universal. By being so specific, the novel speaks universally, beyond the limits of its time and place and setting.

It is a work situated somewhere in phase 1 of Satire/Comedy, which may also explain the universal power of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Frye helped me see that the latter is the mythical opposite of Catcher, a full blown Quest Romance/phase 2 Satire. Both protagonists skip school. Both travel through a big city. Both have dates. Both have a kid sister integral to the resolution. The difference is in the power of the main character when confronted by society. Ferris is one with his society. Holden is not, until the very end — the last line, in fact. Those who say Catcher is a depressing book are guilty of a substantial misreading. It has saved me on several occasions.

Thank you J.D. Salinger.  And, as always, thank you Northrop Frye.

Friday Night Dance Party

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leohcvmf8kM

It’s January.  January.  The worst month of the year, which is then followed by the second worst month of the year — February.

Oy.  That’s a tough go.

At times like these we need cheer wherever we can find it.  We’ve usually put the weekends aside for Frye-related videos of some sort, but dark times call for, oh, I dunno, a Hawaiian themed party with Twister, drinking games and tequila body shots!

And just who would you want providing the music for such a party?  Why, only a self-described “tacky little dance band from Athens, Georgia” is who!  The one and only B52s.

The video above represents the apex of their commercial success, and the message, appropriately enough, is love.

For those who prefer their B52s a little less cute and cuddly, who remember how genuinely weird they were when they first broke onto the scene, there are some goodies for you after the jump.  Selected for maximum Frye-relevancy.

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Robert B. Parker, 1932 – 2010

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parker
Another sad death to report is that of Robert B. Parker, creator of the Boston private detective Spenser (whose first name was never given, but who said that his last name was spelled with an ’s’, “like the poet.”) It’s appropriate to pay tribute to Parker on this blog, both because Frye liked reading detective stories, and because Parker had a PhD in English from Northeastern. Several of his novels feature academic satire. He died at his desk, a writer to the last moment.

Steven Axelrod’s tribute at Salon.com (”How the crime novelist taught me to stand up for myself and taught my son about the carnal pleasures of reading”) can be found  here.  Axelrod’s piece is noteworthy for the way it suggests the liberating possibilities inherent in popular fiction.