Nella Cotrupi: “Crucified Woman Reborn” Conference Roundup

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Triptych of the crucified woman 5

Tryptich by Sophie Jungries

A few personal responses to the talks I attended at the “Crucified Woman Reborn” conference, Emmanuel College, May 14 and 15, 2010

Doris Jean Dyke was the opening keynote speaker at the conference. Doris was the first woman professor at Emmanuel College, and the author of the book, Crucified Woman. This book tells the story of how Almuth Lutkenhaus’ sculpture came to Emmanuel College, and the theological debates it set off.

In her viola-timbred voice, Doris gave a moving talk that included many examples of women associated with the cross, including an eye-opening reference to Hagar of the old testament, as one of the earliest examples of domestic abuse.  Another reference that I found intriguing was to Chaim Potok’s novel, My Name is Asher Lev.  Here the young orthodox Jewish artist paints his mother as crucified and captive, the very ground of the “war” between himself and his father. Asher, an observant Jew, created this painting of a crucifixion because, he says, “there was no aesthetic mold in his own religion into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish.”

Photojournalist Rita Leistner later took us through haunting, disturbing photographic images, some of them taken by her and some by other women photojournalists. These photos included images of abandoned mental patients and self-immolated child brides in Iraq, as well as images of Jewish women protesting their exclusion from prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. I thought again about the many ways that women continue to be crucified in our world today.

I take comfort in looking back to the opening ceremony in the sculpture garden, with the wind moving the branches of the silver birches so that they formed a swaying shawl around Lutkenhaus’s statue. Marjory Noganosh and Dorothy Peters opened the conference and gave thanks for the many blessings we enjoy, symbolized by of a bowl of water and a bowl of red, heart-shaped berries. I realize, once again, that we are learning many lessons about living in peace, not just with each other, but with the entire cosmos, from the gentle teachings and wisdom of this country’s first people.

Second Day of the “Crucified Woman Reborn” conference, May 15, 2010

The dance in the garden – humor and satire; rhythm and colour. In the final act, a many coloured prayer shawl is placed on the shoulders of the lady statue.

Marjory’s opening talk: It’s not about throwing everything away from our own traditions – keep, safeguard what works. This resonated with Pat Capponi’s comments about her advice to her activist apprentices that they need not scrape the bottom of their emotional well of painful life experiences to find the resources for the activist work they are being trained to do on poverty and mental health issues. Just skim the surface of the deep well – that is enough. Measure and moderation as a response in the face of extreme need for social action – this is very interesting.

Sophie Jungreis: I note the very visceral nature of the paintings and the sculpture – like Rita’s photos, not pretty. Here we go into the deep recesses of the psyche to explore the roots of pain, and of healing. See Sophie’s reference to the lines in the blessings of Jacob to Joseph: (Gen. 49:25): “Blessing of the deep that couches beneath / blessings of the breast and of the womb.”

Frye Alert

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PSFK Management (l-r): Jeff Weiner (Business Development), Dan Gould (Content), Hedyeh Parsia (Events & Operations), Piers Fawkes (Founder & CEO), Scott Lachut (Consultancy)
PSFK Management, left to right: Jeff Weiner (Business Development),
Dan Gould (Content), Hedyeh Parsia (Events & Operations), Piers Fawkes
(Founder & CEO), Scott Lachut (Consultancy)

PSFK is a New York City based trends research and innovation company that publishes a daily news site, provides trends research and innovation consultancy, manages a network of freelance experts and hosts idea-generating events. We aim to inspire our readers, our clients and our guests to make things better – whether that’s better products, better services, better lives or a better world.

— From the PSFK Website

I’m not sure exactly what most of that entails, but I do know that PSFK put up a long post yesterday — “Four Storytelling Genres of Brand Re-Invention” — adapting Frye’s theory of myths wholesale (although they probably should have valued it retail).  A sample:

The literary critic Herman Northrop Frye explored the typology of narrative genres. He emerged with a core set, you might call the Four Seasons; Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Irony. These archetypal genres play an important role in the history of literary traditions, media, and the cultural psyche. Frye argued that most stories about the human experience fall into one of these four general buckets. There’s some great insight to draw on when it comes to the process of re-invention.

1. ROMANCE represents a “back to origin” story thru re-commitment to core values and re-interpretation of the past.

This is a very popular genre that guides many if not most brand re-inventions. The Obama political campaign was based on these principles. While the message was built on change, it was always in the context of fulfilling our ancient promise and manifest destiny as a nation. Those famous Moleskine notebooks is equally a story of an almost defunct brand with legendary origins, brought back from obscurity and re-packaged for the new context of culture creatives.

Another great example is that of Apple. Just last week Apple replaced Microsoft as the largest market cap tech company in the world. Yet back in 1997, Apple was in a different place. When Steve Jobs returned, it was on the brink of bankruptcy, and a strong acquisition target. Jobs re-ignited the fire – by reminding people of the company’s DNA and its legacy for free-spirited ingenuity. Its no small coincidence, that equally in 1997 Apple launched its groundbreaking Think Different campaign. It announced first to itself and then the world, that it remembered who it really was.

2. TRAGEDY is the classic redemption storyline.

We love it when our heroes fall from grace only to get back up for another chapter. It’s how Donald Trump and Martha Stewart got a second chance and each became ever bigger global brands. And it’s what both Toyota and Tiger Woods are now desperately praying they can accomplish.

Domino’s Pizza is an example of a big brand success to give us hope. The brand hit rock bottom last year after two employees posted a Youtube video with distasteful food pranks played on unsuspecting customers. The scandal that ensued but Domino’s in the brand reputation hot seat.

Fast forward to the spring 2010. Domino’s current campaign is a mea culpa to the world. In the ads, executives acknowledge how they lost touch with the quality and taste of their product. In turn, they listened soberly to customer complaints and have re-formulated their pizza into something they can be proud of. They’ve also created a marketing campaign with incentives for people to come back and give them a chance. Two medium pizzas for just $5.99 each! I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

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“The Perennial Philosophy”

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perennialphilosophy

One of Frye’s primary sources for mystical texts was Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy, where he found his “oft-thought good ideas well-expressed as well as [his] bad ones” (CW 13, 24).  The philosophia perennis, a phrase popularized by Leibnitz, was for Huxley the timeless and universal ground of all Being––what he calls “the divine Reality.”  Metaphysically, the divine Reality underlies everything in the world, including human minds.  Psychologically, it is the same thing as the soul.  Ethically, the ultimate end of the human enterprise is to be found in the immanent and transcendent ground of Being.  Huxley proposes that this ground of Being in all religions is one and the same and that it constitutes the essential core of each religion.  His book, which Frye read shortly after it was published in 1945 (New York: Harper), is an anthology of selections from the tradition of the philosophia perennis, sandwiched between Huxley’s commentary. What follows are Frye’s notebook entries that refer to the perennial philosophy.  For an account of Frye’s reading of Huxley, see Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World, pp. 176–80.

 

Thus, without losing its specific historical orientation through Judaism and Christianity, the Bible is an archetypal model of a perennial philosophy or everlasting gospel.  At least, that’s what I’d call it if I were writing a book on religion.  We really do move from creation to recreation. (CW 5, 28)

I have an old note about eros and logos, creation by desire and creation by the Word.  It may be linked with another which quotes Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy as saying that the soul is female and the spirit male.  Note that the new heaven and the new earth is the real Tao, yang & yin in perfect balance. (CW 5, 10)

Wisdom in the Bible is an outgrowth of Torah, instruction, the completion of the knowledge of good and evil in its genuine form.  Biblical wisdom is not just wisdom, not the wisdom of Egypt or Sumeria, any more than its Yahweh is Ptah or Enki.  It has affinities, of course, but not to the point of blurring its identity.  That’s why Hebrew wisdom develops dialectically into prophecy, which again is Biblical prophecy, not Zoroaster or Tiresias prophecy.  All religions are one, not alike: a metaphorical unity of different things, not a bundle of similarities.  In that sense there is no “perennial philosophy”: that’s a collection, at best, of denatured techniques of concentration.  As doctrine, it’s platitude: moral maxims that have no application.  What there is, luckily, is a perennial struggle. (CW 5, 110)

In the third lecture I want to proceed from the gospel to the Everlasting Gospel, and yet without going in the theosophic direction of reconciliation or smile-of-a-fool harmony.  The synoptics make Jesus distinguish himself from the Father, as not yet more than a prophet: it’s in the “spiritual” gospel of John that he proclaims his own divinity.  (That’s approximately true, though one has to fuss and fuddle in writing it out.)  Yet John is more specifically and pointedly “Christian” than the synoptics: the direction is from one spokesman of the perennial philosophy and a unique incarnation starting a unique event.  Buddhism and the like interpenetrate with the Everlasting Gospel: they are to be reconciled with it.  I don’t quite yet know what I mean. (CW 6, 618–19)

Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy is a book I must keep in touch with: my point about the soul as female & the spirit as male (p. 174) is there in full force. (CW 13, 360)

The second stage is the mind’s withdrawal from creation into the death-consciousness of contemplation and observation.  God here becomes a first cause and (as in St. Thomas) a clearing-house of absolute terms—essence, being omni- this and that.  Here everything is focussed on the judgement that accompanies death, which in turn is the inevitable consequence of an act of creation, a making of the world.  As it proceeds, its one God becomes less personal, & the stage ends in “Thou art That” mysticism, the so-called perennial philosophy.  It starts with a personal Creator & ends in a “hid divinity,” a God beyond God. (CW 13, 100)

The third, as I now see, is an essay on the typology of the Bible leading up to the question of what comparative religion compares, or, what does religion as a whole say, when considered, not as religio or social observance, or as symbolism, which doesn’t say anything, but as doctrine, in the sense of an imaginative vision which is also existential and committed?  I don’t believe in a “perennial philosophy,” but there is something here. (CW 13, 110)

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Stan Rogers

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“Barrett’s Privateers”

On this date Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers died in a fire on an Air Canada flight (1948 – 1983).  Stan lived in my hometown of Dundas, Ontario, but he really belonged to the Maritimes.  I was once in a Prince Edward Island pub where a crowd of about 50 people broke into “Barrett’s Privateers“, stamping their feet to keep the time, and sang every damn verse.

“Now I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier / The last of Barrett’s Privateers”

“A New Handbook of Literary Terms”

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From the preface to A New Handbook of Literary Terms by David Mikics (Yale University Press, 2007)

An ideal bibliography should include older, respected works that continue to shape our sense of what criticism can to. Auerbach’s Mimesis, first published in Switzerland in 1946, is still the indispensable book on realism. Mimesis is referred to repeatedly here, as is Northrop Frye’s definitive Anatomy of Criticism (1957), the best treatment of genre. Frye, like Auerbach, opened up a whole new world for criticism with his book, which continues to be central to literary study fifty years after it was written. A student who wants a sure grounding in literary history, and at the same time an exhilarating experience of criticism at the height of his powers, would do well to read Mimesis and Anatomy of Criticism—along with other synoptic and original works like James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of the Faerie Queene, Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company, Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, Geoffrey Hartman’s Beyond Formalism, Martin Price’s To the Palace of Wisdom, Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness, Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, Irving Howe’s Politics and the Novel, Ronald Paulson’s Satire and the Novel, Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image, and William Empson’s Some Versions of the Pastoral. Curtius’ European Literature the Latin Middle Ages remains the essential guide to the topoi that engage medieval and Renaissance literature. These fourteen books, some of them published as long ago as the 1930s (Empson), provide the background and assumptions for much later work. Some more recent volumes, like Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel, share the ambitions and innovative character of those I have just listed. The Handbook takes care not to slight younger critics—there are quite a few references from the new, twenty-first century—but I have emphasized those books that have already stood the test of time.

“Les Fleurs du Mal”

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“Hymne à la beauté”

On this date in 1857 Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was first published.

In this excerpt from “The Literary Meaning of ‘Archetype'”, Baudelaire only gets a passing mention, but his work is nevertheless associated with a constellation of archetypes.

This aspect of symbolism is what I mean by archetypal symbolism.  I should tentatively define an archetype, then, as a symbol, that is, a unit of a work of literary art, which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience.  The archetype is thus primarily  the communicable symbol, and archetypal criticism is particularly concerned with literature as a social fact and as a technique of communication.  By the study of conventions and genres, it attempts to fit poems into a body of poetry as a whole.  It is the only method of criticism known to me in which it is really necessary to assume that there is such a subject as comparative literature.

Or even, we may say, that there is such a subject of literature at all.  The repetition of certain common images of physical nature like the sea or the forest in a large number of poems cannot in itself be called even “coincidence”, which is the name we give to a piece of design when we cannot find a use for it.  But it does indicate a certain unity in the nature that poetry imitates.  And when pastoral images are deliberately employed in Lycidas, for instance, merely because they are conventional, we can see that the convention makes us assimilate these images to other parts of literature.  We think first of its descent from the ritual of the Adonis lament down through Theocritus, Virgil, and the whole pastoral tradition to The Shepheardes Calendar, then of the intricate pastoral symbolism of the Bible and the Christian Church, then of the extensions of pastoral symbolism into Sidney’s Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s forest comedies, and so on, then of the post-Miltonic development of pastoral elegy in Shelley, Arnold and Whitman.  We can get a whole liberal education simply by picking up one conventional poem and following its archetypes as they stretch out into the rest of literature.  Expanding images into conventional archetypes is a process that takes place unconsciously in all our reading.  A symbol like the sea or the paradisal garden cannot remain within Conrad or Green Mansions; it is bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole.  The ancient mariner’s albatross links us to Baudelaire and his ship to Rimbaud’s bateau ivre; Yeats’s tower and winding stair blend into Dante’s Purgatory, like their more explicitly allusive counterparts in Eliot; and Moby Dick merges into the leviathan of Job.  There is only one hypothesis that will prevent this linking of archetypes in our reading from being simply free association.  That is the hypothesis that literature is a total form, and not simply the name given to the aggregate of existing literary works.  In other words, we have to think, not only of a single poem imitating nature, but of an order of nature as whole being imitated by a corresponding order of words.  (CW 10, 184-5)

Frye Alert

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A notice from The Hayward Gallery, London, 28 May 2010:

The British Art Show Prelude
Three of Britain’s most exciting emerging artists–Roger Hiorns, Phoebe Unwin, Mick Peter–the Turner Prize-nominated artist, the painter and the sculptor use Northrop Frye’s model of seasons/genre to explore some issues in contemporary British art. Chaired by Tom Morton and Lisa Lefeuvre, Curators of British Art Show 7.

Walt Whitman

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A wax recording of Whitman in 1890

Today is Walt Whitman‘s birthday (1819 – 1892).

Frye in The Modern Century:

When the Romantic movement began, there was one important primitive influence on it, that of the oral ballads, which began to be collected and classified at that time.  The oral ballad makes a functional use of refrains and other strongly marked patterns of repetition, which correspond to the emphasis on design in the primitive pictorial arts.  The fact that it depended for survival on an oral tradition meant that whatever personal turns of phrase there may originally have been in it were smoothed out, the poem thus acquiring a kind of stripped poetic surface quite unlike that of written poetry.  The literary ballads which imitate these characteristics — the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake’s Mental Traveller, Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci — come about as close as poetry can come to reproducing directly the voice of the creative powers of the mind below consciousness, a voice which is uninhibited and yet curiously impersonal as well.  This was also the “democratic” voice that Whitman attempted to reproduce, and Whitman is the godfather of all the folk singing and other oral developments of our time which cover so large an area of contemporary popular culture.  (CW 11, 54)

Frye in Court

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60yearslater

Frye is called on in a 2009 amicus curiae brief in a case against Frederik Coulting by J.D. Salinger, who had asserted that Coulting’s book, 60 Years Later, “infringes [his] copyright rights in . . . the character Holden Caulfield.”  (Frye’s remarks on Salinger in an earlier post here.)

In the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit

__________________________________

J.D. SALINGER, individually and as trustee of the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v. FREDRIK COLTING, writing under the name John David California, WINDUPBIRD PUBLISHING LTD., NICOTEXT A.B. and ABP, INC., doing business as SCB Distributors, Inc.,

Defendants-Appellants.

On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York

BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE PUBLIC CITIZEN, INC.

“That ability to “build freely upon the ideas” in others’ work is essential to First Amendment protection because even the most creative or artistic activity depends on the ability to borrow from what has gone before.  “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.” Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 97 (1957). As Frye put it, we have inherited “a literature which includes Chaucer, much of whose poetry is translated or paraphrased from others; Shakespeare, whose plays sometimes

follow their sources almost verbatim; and Milton, who asked for nothing better than to steal as much as possible out of the Bible” (p. 16 of the brief).

Christopher Marlowe

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Rupert Everett as Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love

On this date Christopher Marlowe was murdered (1564 – 1593).

Frye on the relation of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Webster in Notebook 9:

In my young days I said that Marlowe’s characters were demigods moving in a social ether, that Webster’s were “cases” of a sick society, & that Shakespeare was the transition from one to the other.  Well, it’s true that in DM [The Duchess of Malfi], for example, there is no order-figure because there is no genuine society: there is a Dionysiac health-figure instead, the Duchess herself, & society itself, personated by Ferdinand & the Cardinal, is the action-figure.  I think that this is the kind of tragedy adumbrated by Chapman in B d’A [Bussy D’Ambois].  Yet even Tamburlaine is a scourge of God, the destructive nature let loose in a society that has no God.  I suppose Shakespeare’s nearest approach to a social tragedy of the Webster kind is really Coriolanus rather than TC [Troilus and Cressida]: Co has no de jure magic because he can’t crystallize any kind of society, as Antony can. (CW 20, 254-5)