Category Archives: Video

Carl Jung

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOxlZm2AU4o

Today is Carl Jung‘s birthday (1875-1961).

Frye in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: How does your use of the term archetype relate to the way, say, Carl Jung uses it?

Frye: I used the term archetype because it was a traditional term in criticism, though not many people had run across it.  But I didn’t realize at the time that Jung had monopolized the term and that everyone would think I was a Jungian critic because I used it.  I’m dealing with a world that is intermediate between the subjective psychological world and the social world, the objective or natural world.  That is, I don’t think in terms of subject contemplating an object.  I think of a world of metaphor, where the subject and object have fused, the world of myth and metaphor.  The old-fashioned term for it was beauty.  It’s the world where emotion is relevant, where the categories of beauty and ugliness are relevant, where you don’t look for objective truth and you don’t look for subjective turmoil.  What I don’t want to do is to reduce criticism to something subjective and psychological.  Jung’s archetypes are powerful within the soul, and they have very intimate and very fascinating analogies to some of the conventional characters of literature, but Jung’s treatment of literature, I think, is barbaric, and most of the Jungians don’t seem to be much better.  (77)

Saturday Night Video: New York Underground

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

Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs “Maps”

New York, if it hasn’t always been the home of alternative music, seems always to have been home base — the place you’ve got to get to if you want to score.  Los Angeles has reliably turned out commercially viable music for decades.  But New York has just as reliably been the proving ground for the artistically adventurous but commercially tenuous: from the Velvet Underground to Patti Smith to Talking Heads to The Strokes and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs.  And, oh yes, a tatty little punk band from Queens — the borderline-unlistenable Ramones — famously began their tour of Britain on July 4th, 1976 and ignited the culture-shifting punk movement there: almost as though the American Revolution had returned to its roots and left in its wake an entire subculture.

What has always defined the New York underground is the notoriously indefinable attribute of cool, an elusive combination of something and something-or-other.  It is tough and street smart, but has a surprisingly nostalgic streak manifested by poignant tunes with inviting sing-a-long choruses (see, for example, Karen O in the video above, apparently swallowing her grief throughout before spontaneously releasing one lone tear late in the song).  How?  Why?  It’s evidently life in the big city — you take it as it comes, but invariably take it home with you.  The key to it is irony, which, as Frye says, is the point at which we rather unexpectedly return to myth.

It would have made sense to present these songs in chronological order, but in this case it seemed more appropriate to begin in the present and move back to origins, if only to remind ourselves just how clever and variable and consistent the New York underground has always been.

If I may plug just one of these videos, it is Talking Heads’ “And She Was.”  As art school nerds, Talking Heads were as much interested in the visual as the musical, so their videos are always superior.  This particular video is 25 years old, but you’d never know that to see it.  It perfectly captures the whimsy of a song about a suburban housewife who possesses an unexplained ability to fly.

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TGIF: Russell Peters

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw6RgIf6epQ&feature=related

Indian accent

It was hard not to be moved by the testimonials for the Centre for Comparative Literature this past week. Olga Bazilevica, for example, cited the Centre as representing everything she’s come to love about this country: our peaceful diversity, our generous expressions of tolerance.

Nice.

But it’s Friday and this is our comedy slot, so let’s laugh a little at Canada (affectionately, of course) by way of our hottest standup comedian, Russell Peters — the guy who, even though he is of Indian descent, has the name of a WASP banker.

After the jump, Peters on the white Canadian accent, racial mixing, and gay Indians.

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Richard III

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9zIw84dD_Y

From Ian McKellen’s film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III: “Was ever woman in this humour woo’d? / Was ever woman in this humour won? / I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long.” (I. ii. 232-4)

On this date in 1485, Richard III, the last of the Plantagenet line, was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field, which brought the first Tudor king, Henry VII, to the throne.

Frye in the Notebooks on Renaissance Literature:

In the H6 – R3 tetralogy [1, 2, 3 Henry VI; Richard III] it isn’t until R3 emerges from the final play that we feel any dramatic integrity of character standing out from the tapestry.  The reason is that he’s an actor, and a hypcrite or masked character, and he suggests a kind of real life, however reprehensible, which he & the audience at least know about. (CW 20, 240)

. . . R2 is isolated in the opposite way from R3.  The latter is pure de facto & hypocrite; R2 is pure de jure, and is an actor who throws himself into every role suggested to him, most notably that of the betrayed Christ . . . (CW , 241)

The other world exists in Shakespeare, as in Dante, mainly to confirm the social set-up of this one.  Jack Cade, according to Iden, goes to hell; Edward IV goes to heaven.  Hubert is “damned” if he kills the rightful heir Arthur, yet H4 seem to get away with dodging the responsibility for killing R2.  This principle of presenting a wish-fulfilment world as aristocratic is in the romances.  It’s a bugger to try to understand a writer who has no personal attitude.  The king de jure has a magical aura around him: the logic of such a superstition is that a king de facto who has any claim to the throne at all should exterminate everybody with a better one, & will thereby acquire that aura.  R3 thinks he’s done it; this I why I call the principle of legitimacy comic: {the hidden eiron gimmick we’ve forgotten about}. (CW 20, 242)

“The Circus”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J53feA5e5SM

The Circus (1928) seems to be regarded as Chaplin’s “little-seen masterpiece,” so let’s see it.

Frye in “The Eternal Tramp” (1947):

Chaplin’s tramp is an American dramatic type, and Rip Van Winkle and Huck Finn are among his ancestors.  The tramp is a social misfit, not only because he is too small and awkward to engage in a muscular extroverted scramble, but because he does see the point of what society is doing or to what purpose it is it is expending all that energy.  He is not a parasite for he possesses some occult secret of inner freedom, and he is not a bum, for he will work hard enough, and still harder if a suitable motive turns up.  Such a motive occurs when he discovers someone still weaker than himself, an abandoned baby or a blind girl (students of Jung will recognize the “anima” in Chaplin), and then his tenderness drives him to extraordinary spasms of breadwinning.  But even his normal operations are grotesque enough, for in the very earnestness with which he tries so hard to play society’s game it is clear that he has got it all wrong, and when he is spurred to further efforts the grotesqueness reaches a kind of perverse inspiration.  The political overtones of this are purely anarchist — I have never understood the connecting of Communism with Chaplin — the anarchism of Jefferson and Thoreau which sees society as a community of personal relationships and not as a mechanical abstraction called a “state.”  But even so the tramp is isolated by his own capacity for freedom, and he has nothing to do with the typical “little guy” that every fool in the country has been slobbering over since Pearl Harbor.  (CW 11, 117)

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Jacques Derrida

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dj1BuNmhjAY

An interview with Derrida on love and being. (This video cannot be embedded; click on the image, and then hit the YouTube link that appears.)

Today is Derrida‘s birthday (1930 – 2004).  Here is a selection of Frye’s references to Derrida in various interviews.  (Imre Salusinszky’s interview with Derrida in Criticism in Society here.)

In a 1979 interview, “The Critical Path”:

Herman-Sekulic: What, in your opinion, are the major trends in the theory of literature today?  In what direction is literary criticism heading now?

Frye: I think that the word “direction” is over-optimistic.  I think there is a good deal of mining and blowing up being done, and that after the dust settles the context of a foundation may become visible.  I think Lacan’s conception of the subconscious as linguistically structured is worth following up; so is Derrida’s conception of metaphysical presence; and there are many things that interest me in the work of the new Marxist critics who have got away from the old notion that ideology is something that only non-Marxists have.  But I am not capable of making a unifying theory out of this mess, and I doubt if anyone else is either. (CW 24, 481)

In a 1985 interview, “Criticism in Society”:

Salusinszky: If Bloom has, to some extent, challenged the Christian direction of English literary studies, it is Derrida who has challenged the persistent Platonism that one can also see running through English literary studies.  Criticism has always tended to think of any great literary work as possessing unity, with some sort of closure, and as being, in some sense seminal.  Now Derrida seems to have opened up a whole range of new possibilities, where instead of closure and insemination he has his concepts of dissemination, of trace, of displacement.  Derrida, however, is a philosopher, and I wonder if you regard his present influence as merely one of those enclosure movements which you describe in the Anatomy, as coming from outside and wanting to take it over.

Frye: It certainly seems to be the way his influence has operated, yes, but I don’t think it’s entirely fair to Derrida that it has operated that way.  I think he’s genuinely interested in opening up, as you’ve just said, new possibilities in criticism.  The thing is that I don’t see why the sense of an ending and the sense of wholeness and unity, and the kinds of things he’s talking about, should be mutually exclusive.  I don’t see why you have to have an either / or situation.  It’s like those optical puzzles you look at, which change their relationship when you’re looking at them.  (CW 24, 756-7)

In a 1986 interview, “On the Media”:

Interviewer: What about McLuhan’s distinction between the visual and aural societies?

Frye: It’s very difficult to avoid metaphors.  If, for example, you’re reading something, you frequently use metaphors of the ear.  And that’s what critics like Jacques Derrida are attacking: the convention that somebody is speaking, But, still, when you’re following a narrative, you are in a sense listening.  And then at the end you get a sort of Gestalt: you “see” what it means.  When somebody tells a joke, he leads in by saying, “Have you heard this one?” and then, if he’s lucky, by the end you see what he means.  But these are just metaphors.  The hearing is something associated with sequence and time; the seeing is something associated with the simultaneous and the spatial.  (CW 24, 768)

In a 1987 interview, “Frye, Literary Critic”:

Innocenti: Some new trends in criticism, such as deconstruction, deny that we can reach the meaning of a literary work or even that there is a meaning.  All efforts to interpret are ways to proliferate structures and senses in an infinite chain of nuances and differences.  In my opinion, this sceptical position reduces all criticism to a solipsistic and narcissistic exercise.  In your opinion, do literature and criticism possess a sense that might be saved from nihilism?

Frye: The deconstructionists will have to speak for themselves, but I think the “anything goes” stage is headed for the dustbin already.  Derrida himself has a “construal” basis of interpretation that he starts from, and I think his followers will soon discover that there is a finite number of “supplements” that can be based on that.  In another decade they should have rediscovered the polysemous scheme of Dante, or something very like it.  (CW 24, 827-8)

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