A recent phenomena relating to the invariably glowing reviews that Jonathan Franzen gets in publications like the New York Times at the expense of “popular fiction,” especially that written by women, reported here and here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhHODhTIvgo&ob=av2e
Rolling Stones, “It’s only Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Top of the Pops, 1974 (It’s still the pre-video age, but this segment is famous for its production, even for a Top of the Pops feature) Previous posts on Frye ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll here and here.
Here is a much more complete collection of Frye’s references to rock & roll.
Literature, as ordinarily conceived, is so small and specialized a part of one’s reading that we forget how much of our total verbal experience is untouched by it. For many a student in grade eight whose verbal experience is centred on television, The Lady of the Lake may be a pretty meaningless collection of words, something that those unaccountable adults, for whatever reasons of their own, think he should read. The way out of this is not to try to choose the kind of literature that can compete with the appeal of television—no such literature exists. But the teacher should understand that teaching literature means dealing with the total verbal experience of students. The points of contact between literary and subliterary experiences should be kept in mind; obviously the same forms of comedy and romance and irony that appear in literature also turn up in television drama or rock ballads. I am not saying that a teacher should be constantly pointing such resemblances out, only that they are occasionally useful. Far more important, however, is the fact that students are being steadily got at by a rival mythology determined to capture their imaginations for its own purposes, armed with far more skill, authority, and prestige than any teacher has. This is why I think students should be encouraged to become aware of the extent to which they are being conditioned by the mass media, as a central part of their literary training. Some of them have reacted with a general hatred and contempt for everything their society produces, but that, of course, is quite as dependent on conditioned reflex as anything it revolts against. Besides, it does not distinguish between genuine and false forms of social mythology. What is absurd about growing up absurd is adjustment mythology, not society itself. (On Teaching Literature, CW 7, 449)
Coming to point (crazy Oedipus) where we can’t afford supremacy of ideology any more: let’s have a war and smash that guy’s ideology. Primary concerns must become primary. (Leads directly to authority of poet, but not in this paper.)
Feeling that this is so led in sixties to revival of ecstatic metaphor: drugs, yoga, Zen, folk singers, rock music (Woodstock) would bring in a new conception of community. Revitalized tribal culture in McLuhan. (CW 6, 599)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmZiViGUsNs&feature=related
The poem recited
On this date Wordsworth wrote the sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802“:
Earth hath not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!
Frye in Words with Power:
But what does Wordsworth’s gentle goddess who never betrayed the heart that loved her have to do with Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” with its ferocious and predatory struggle for survival? Even more, what she have to do with the narrators in the Marquis de Sade, who, after some particularly nauseating orgy of cruelty and violence, appeal with equal confidence to nature to justify their pleasure in such things? Are there two natures, and if so are they separable? It is obvious that Wordsworth’s teacher-nature is an intensely humanized nature, even the Lake country and the Alps being dominated by human artifice. And yet one feels that it would be oversimplifying to call Wordsworth’s nature a mere projection of human emotions on nature, even though there often seems to be more evidence for de Sade’s view of nature than his. (CW 26,213)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHVqxD8PNq8
An excerpt from the screenwriting seminar scene in the brilliant Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, a wonderfully convoluted meditation on the agonizing effort to write something that is somehow beyond formula. If you haven’t seen it, make a point of renting it. Also, Kaufman’s much deeper and darker film about writing as soul-rending existential crisis, Synecdoche, New York.
Further to comments earlier today by Ed Lemond and Jonathan Allan, here are a couple of entries from the notebooks on writing fiction, culled once again from Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned.
On the possibility of “a new fiction formula”:
I have been struggling for some time to think of a new fiction formula, and all my ideas tend to revolve around Rilke’s idea of the poet’s perceiving simultaneously the visible & the invisible world. In practice that means a new type of ghost or supernatural story, possibly approached by way of some science-fiction development. The idea is a vision of another life or another world so powerfully plausible as to make conventionally religious & anti-religion people shake in their shoes. I’ve begun notes on this many times, but threw away my best notebook, written in Seattle, in a London (Ont.) hotel. By “shake in their shoes” I don’t mean threats, but the ecstactic frisson or giggle aroused by plausibility. (92)
On the possibility of writing a “philosphical romance”:
Since the popular success of Tokien and the rise in seriousness of what is called science-fiction, I’ve been attracted to the notion of the philosphical romance. It would have to be entirely “software,” as I don’t know anything about hardware, and I notice most of the hardware is used to transpose the characters to a remote spot in some other galaxy that turns out to be a category of something on earth. So why not stay on earth? The taking off point is the relativity of what the sane waking consicousness sees to other perspectives. These are, chiefly, those of (a) dream (b) madness (c) mythopoeic imagination (d) existence following physical death. If I never write such a book, collecting notes for it could still be a valuable experience in loosening uup the imaginative faculties. The idea is to write what I myself would be most interested in reading. (93)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahe372Rzf0g
The conclusion of the 1939 film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.
Further to Professor Mondo’s earlier post, here is one of a number of Frye’s observations in the notebooks on the detective story, via Bob Denham’s Northrop Frye Unbuttoned.
I don’t think that I have either a highbrow or a lowbrow pose about detective stories, but I don’t really quite understand why I like reading them. I read them partly for the sake of the overtones. I’m not a connoisseur of them: I can never guess what the hell’s up when the detective pulls out a watch and shouts: “My God, we may yet be in time!”, shoves the narrator and half the country’s police force into a taxi, dashes madly across town and finds the girl I’d placidly thought was the heroine all equipped with a blunt instrument & an animal snarl. I’m always led by the nose up the garden path in search of a false clue, and I never notice inconsistencies. And I always get let down when I find out who dun it. As I say, I like overtones. A good style, some traces of wit & characterization, a sense of atmosphere, and a lot of the professional intricacies of the game can go to hell. Yet I want a good novel in that particular convention & no other. The answer is, I think, that I’m naturally a slow & reflective reader, & make copious marginalia. In the detective story I live for a moment in the pure present: I’m passively pulled along from stimulus to stimulus, and, ignorant & idle as that doubtless is, I’m fascinated by it. Yet I seldom finish with disappointment. (67)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZtEsLMy5uQ
History Channel documentary on the French Revolution, above
Today in 1792 the September Massacres of the French Revolution began as part of the escalating mob violence that had increased all summer. By the time it was done, half the prison population of Paris had been executed. The clergy in particular was prone to sporadic attacks, with a number of Catholic bishops murdered.
For Frye, this violent political shift represented a radical shift in the social mythology of authority:
The cosmos of authority lingered until the eighteenth century, although of its two pillars, the chain of being and the Ptolemaic universe, the latter was in ruins by Isaac Newton’s time. The chain of being was still in place for Pope early in the eighteenth century, but Voltaire was very doubtful about the echelle de l’infiniti, which he recognized to be a facade for the authority of the status quo. And under the hammer blows of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, the ladder as the spatial metaphor for the axis mundi, and as a cosmic vision guaranteeing the birthright of established authority, finally disappeared. (CW 4, 124)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE6at2IEUOU
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc0mxOXbWIU&feature=player_embedded#!
This video went crazily viral last week: 3 million YouTube hits and counting. The New York Times produced an article about writing an article about it without using the word “fuck.” (And that’s what’s wrong with the New York Times.)
It’s late summer and the time for this sort of thing — remember “The Thong Song“?
Except that for a seasonal novelty this really is a catchy little tune whose title just happens to be “Fuck You” (oh, and with this irresistible refrain: “Fuck you / And, uh, fuck her too”). It’s bright and bouncy in the Motown style (like the Jackson 5’s “ABC“) only with streetwise lyrics. By the end you may be singing along — or at least humming it under your breath sometime this afternoon.
The Huffington Post published the article on America’s most overrated writers that inspired the National Post’s article previously discussed here at TEI. Having read both articles, I was reminded of a conversation I had with detective fiction grand master Lawrence Block this past Winter.
Block has spent his virtually his entire career (more than sixty books) writing genre fiction, from lesbian porn in his college days to his award-winning series featuring recovering alcoholic PI Matt Scudder. He was the visiting writer here at Mondoville, and as the fan/stalker who did the most to get him here, I escorted him around town, and among other things, we talked about fiction, mainstream and otherwise. He noted that with very few exceptions, almost no one reads the “serious [read mainstream or literary] novelists” of fifty or more years ago. On the other hand, people are still reading and rediscovering the writers of genre fiction, especially science fiction, fantasy, and detective fiction (which was, after all, a favorite of Frye’s.) For that matter, people still read Verne and Doyle, long after such contemporary best sellers as E.D.E.N. Southworth have been consigned to the ash heap of doctoral dissertations.
Meanwhile, bestselling fantasist David Eddings observed that when a writer enters the area of the mythic (as distinct from the self-consciously mythologically allusive), he or she “may as well be peddling dope,” and he meant it as a good thing. These genre novels are highly conventionalized, of course; in the same conversation, Block mentioned that Robert B. Parker (who wrote a dissertation using Frye) described himself as writing Westerns on a frontier that was paved over, and that the Western itself was a romance.
It’s worth noting that the writers both Posts beat up on are mainstream writers, the sort that Joan Hess described as “writing stuff where nothing much happens to people you didn’t like to begin with.” However, if Block’s observation holds up, it’s the Parkers and Blocks that will continue to engage readers decades from now, and perhaps even a century later, and it may well be because their works tapped into the archetypes and myths in a way that the “serious” writers (and the critics) found to be infra dignitatem. Frye would have understood.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5qalNX5G94
Elaine in the episode of Seinfeld where she hates The English Patient but must see it multiple times.
In case you missed it, here’s the National Post’s ten most overrated Canadian authors (yes, Michael Ondaatje is in there).
For entertainment purposes only.
To be fair, Michael Ondaatje’s lovely poem, “The Cinnamon Peeler” (with video), after the jump.