Gertrude Stein

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picasso-gertrude stein

Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1905-6.  When someone noted that the portrait did not look like her, Picasso reportedly replied, “Yes, but it will.”

On this date Gertude Stein died (1874-1946).

Frye in one of the “Third Book” notebooks:

Ultimately there is a moral conflict between the art that shocks & outrages us & the mass media that tries to accustomize us & desensitize us.  I’ve often spoken of Gertrude Stein as a practitioner of an associative style, but there’s every difference between that & the Dick & Jane readers with their phony pumped-up excitement (“Run, Jim, Run”) which educate for the reading of advertising, with its exclamatory exhortations.  The slogan is the demonic opposite of the koan or text, or formulaic pattern.  (CW 9, 120)

Frye Alert: Who is Professor Mondo?!

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The little we know is intriguing.  He is, in his own words, a “dad, husband, mostly free individual, medievalist, writer, and drummer.”  He very reassuringly quotes Chaucer: “Gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”   Even more reassuringly, he’s a fan of Frye.  His blog’s banner rather enigmatically features this quote from the superior 80’s teen comedy Better off Dead: “Once a champion, now a study of moppishness.”  Like the movie’s protagonist, played by John Cusack, the professor may be a quasi-tragic figure, who by necessity moves furtively and unappreciated through the hushed halls of academe. Most of this, of course, is irresponsible speculation.

You can find the good professor here.  His lead post today is “How Twigs Get Bent: Northrop Frye,” which talks about his growing interest in Frye both as a medievalist and as a fan of detective fiction.  He also mentions discovering our website.  I’ve bookmarked him and intend to read him daily.  I hope you’ll do the same.

Centre for Comparative Literature: Oh, for Five Thousand Tongues to Sing!

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Please sign the petition in support of the Centre for Comparative Literature here.

One of my favourite hymns as a child was “Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing!”  Today, I am basking in the glory of not just a thousand tongues, but more than five thousand of them singing in defence of Northrop Frye’s Centre for Comparative Literature.

We’ve had an overwhelming response to our petition: within a week of posting it, we have received over than fifty-five hundred signatures are steadily working our way now toward six thousand.  The emails continue to pour in and fill the inboxes of President David Naylor, Provost Cheryl Misak, and Dean Meric Gertler.  Both the petiton and the emails have allowed our appeal to be heard over and over again, and I ask that you to continue to write in and to encourage others  to sign the petition — and, of course, to follow developments on this wonderful blog.

The petition itself is an incredible vote of confidence.  As I said earlier this week, so far there are only twelve votes of non-confidence, represented by the officials who are overseeing the proposed closure of the Centre.  The five thousand-plus votes of confidence, meanwhile, come from some of the most important names in the field, from writers, from the international reading public, and, of course, from readers of our blog.

Here now are some of names of those who have signed the petition.  When I first posted about the petition the following prominent names quickly appeared: Ian Balfour, Svetlana Boym, Rey Chow, Jonathan Culler, Jonathan Hart, Nicholas Halmi, Linda Hutcheon, Andreas Huyssen, Ania Loomba, Franco Moretti, Tilottama Rajan, Germaine Warkentin.  In recent days, we have seen people like Margaret Atwood,  Harold Bloom, Robert D. Denham, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Darko Suvin, Judith Butler, Ngugi wa Thing’o, Avital Ronnel, Balibar Etienne, Mary Louise Pratt, Cathy Caruth, Michael Taussig, Michael Hardt, Françoise Lionnet, Angela Esterhammer, George Yudice, Shu-mei Shih, Wai Chee Dimock, Jacques Lazra, Eric Santner, Stanley Fish, Natalie Zemon Davis, Dominick LaCapra, Sander L. Gilman join the list.

If you haven’t yet signed the petition, please consider doing so to add your name to this growing chorus of supporters.  With your support, the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto will prevail.

This is not the first time that Comparative Literature at Toronto has faced a threat. Northrop Frye in an extended 1982 interview (“Towards an Oral History of the U of T) recalls: “The disadvantage is that the comparative literature department has been rather left out in the cold.  Toronto dragged its feet on comparative literature for so long that [Ernest] Sirluck finally – I won’t say got around to organizing it because it was one of his priorities from the beginning – but when he did start to organize it, the medieval and Renaissance fields were preempted by those institutes, so that all the comparative literature department could take was Romantics and moderns and the theory of criticism” (CW 24,623).

Now, in 2010, U of T is once again dragging its feet, and now is the time to join us in protesting the ill-advised recommendations of the Strategic Planning Committee at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts and Science.  So, as always, please sign the petition and please forward this information to your colleagues, friends, and family.  Together we can save Northrop Frye’s Centre for Comparative Literature and, together, in two years, we can celebrate the centenary of Northrop Frye birth at the very Centre he created.

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)

Video of the Day: Andy Warhol Eats a Hamburger

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaf6zF-FJBk

But is it art?

Yes.

And if you have any doubt about that, go to YouTube and have a look at the outraged comments of some of the viewers.  If they’re this angry over something so innocuous and mundane — and a number of them are very angry — then something meaningfully disturbing is happening here.  A sample: “I mean WTF?!?” and “This is the ugliest thing I have ever seen” (which is not, of course, beside the point).

Frye makes just a couple of references to Andy Warhol, and they are made, interestingly enough, to illustrate a larger and more important point he is trying to get across to his readers.

Here he is in Words with Power, for example, with reference to ecstatic metaphor:

This is an intensification of the imagery that imitates the descriptive mode, an emphasis on the “thingness” of the objective world, which we find in, for example, Beckett’s Watt and Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes, and in William Carlos Williams’s insistence on “not ideas about things but the thing itself,” also the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens.  In various forms of painting, such as the pop art of Andy Warhol and in the popularity of Zen Buddhism, with its technique of training one to see, not another world but the same world with a new intensity, there are parallel developments.

And with that in mind, here’s one more comment from a viewer at YouTube:

Honestly, sometimes I think these artistic so-called geniuses just do whatever the fuck passes through their heads and then try to pass it off as hip and edgy. But at the end of the day, kids, it’s just a guy eating a hamburger.

Well, the “end of the day” could also just be the darkness before the dawn, if we insist upon resorting to those kinds of cliches.  For example, after the jump you’ll find six minutes of Warhol’s eight hour film Empire.  (And, by a remarkable coincidence, tonight is the 46th anniversary of its filming.)

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Samuel Coleridge

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On this date Samuel Coleridge died (1772-1834).

Frye in “Rencontre: the General Editor’s Introduction”

Coleridge took over from Spinoza the distinction between natura naturata, nature as structure or system, and natura naturans, nature as creative process, and all his philosophy turns on the superiority and priority of the latter.  The importance of this for literature is mainly in the new status given to the poet, or the artist or creative person generally, as a result.  As long as it is assumed, in Sir Thomas Browne’s phrase, “Nature is the art of God,” the poet cannot be more than an imitator of nature at one remove, and of God at two removes.  Man’s creative power is at best a faint shadow of the power that made the realities of the world.  But for Coleridge, and increasingly for Romantic writers, man’s creative power does not imitate a structure of things out there, but participates in the organic structure of nature.  The poet creates, first, because he is alive and participates in the being of God (primary imagination), and second, because creation is the highest effort of conscious life. (CW , 121) L&S

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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Frye Alert

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John Geddes in yesterday’s online edition of Maclean’s reviews a list of some of the best political books to come out of Canada, and then, out of left field, adds a book he thinks is missing:

Still, casting an eye over their catalogue, I’m reminded of how often the most penetrating political insights are found in books that we would not put on the politics shelf. I’m sure examples would spring to any reader’s mind. For me, Northrop Frye’s slim The Modern Century, published in 1967 to coincide with Canada’s centennial, is the prime case of a book that made me think differently about politics, even though it’s not about parties or elections or leaders.

Frye writes about how hard it is—given our age’s incessant soundtrack of commercial and political spin, ad copy, PR hype  and on-message blather—to keep from being bludgeoned into a passive stupor. Resisting everything in the air makes a person feel anti-social. “When propaganda cuts off all other sources of information,” he observes, “rejecting it, for a concerned and responsible citizen, would not only isolate him from his social world, but isolate him so completely as to destroy his self-respect.”

Thinking too much is stigmatized as snobbery. Let’s say you read up on global warming and conclude that a carbon tax is the way to go; The Modern Century prepares you to be dismissed as an out-of-touch elitist. “Democracy is a mixture of majority rule and minority right,” says Frye, “and the minority which most clearly has a right is the minority of those who try to resist a passive response, and thereby risk the resentment of those who regard them as trying to be undemocratically superior.”

A truly active, original response is almost always attacked. On the other hand, a phony sense of urgency is encouraged. We’re bombarded with messages pretending to be important, like so many emails flagged with red exclamation marks.