httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFTp2O0ywyw
Today is Miles Davis‘s birthday (1926 – 1991).
Above, the Miles Davis quintet performing “All Blues” in 1963.
Miles Davis
1 Reply
Frye on “The Critic as Artist”
Yesterday’s Quote of the Day was from Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist.” Here’s what Frye has to say about it in Creation and Recreation:
In my first chapter I quoted a passage from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist.” This essay builds up an argument that seems to make an exaggerated and quite unrealistic importance out of the reader of literature, the critic being the representative reader. He is paralleled with the artist in a way that seems to give him an equal share at least in what the artist is doing. Here again Wilde is writing from the point of view of a later generation. For many centuries the centre of gravity in literature was the hero, the man whose deeds the poet celebrated. As society slowly changed its shape, the hero modulated to the “character,” and in Wilde’s day it was still the creation of the character, as one sees it so impressively in Shakespeare, Dickens, and Browning, that was the primary mark of poetic power. At the same time the Romantic movement had brought with it a shift of interest from the hero to the poet himself, as not merely the creator of the hero but as the person whose inner life was the real, as distinct from the projected, subject of the poem. There resulted an extraordinary mystique of creativity, in which the artist became somehow a unique if not actually superior species of human being, with qualities of prophet, genius, wise man, and social leader. Wilde realized that in a short time the centre of gravity in literature critical theory would shift again, this time from the poet to the reader. The dividing line in English literature is probably Finnegans Wake, where it is so obvious that the reader has a heroic role to play. (CW 4, 75)
Quote of the Day
Wilde in New York City, 1882
“Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.”
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Oscar Wilde
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7pLvAltQFI
Wendy Hiller as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest
On this date in 1895 Oscar Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency with other males” and sentenced to two years hard labor.
Frye in Creation and Recreation:
A year or so ago, after agreeing to help teach an undergraduate course in Shakespeare, I settled down to reread one of my favorite pieces of Shakespeare criticism, Oscar Wilde’s essay on “The Truth of Masks.” The essay, however, was one in a collected volume of Wilde’s critical essays, and I find it easy to get hooked on Wilde. His style often makes him sound dated, and yet he is consistently writing from a point of view that is at least half a century later than his actual time. He is one of our few genuinely prophetic writers, and, as with other prophets, everything he writes seems either to lead up to his tragic confrontation with society or reflect back on it. Partly because of this, he deliberately restricts his audience. He sets up a palisade of self-conscious and rather mechanical wit, which not only infuriates those who have no idea what he is talking about but often puts off those who do. We may get so annoyed at his dandies waving their hands languidly at thick volumes labeled “Plato” or “Aristotle” that we may forget that Wilde could, and did, read Greek, and that his references to Classical authors are usually quite precise. So before long I was back in the world of the essay called “The Decay of Lying,” now widely regarded to have said a great deal of what modern theories of criticism have been annotating in more garbled language ever since.
The main thesis of this essay is that man does not live directly and nakedly in nature like animals, but within an envelope that he has constructed out of nature, the envelope usually called culture or civilization. When Wordsworth urges his reader to leave his books, go outdoors, and let nature be his teacher, his “nature” is a north temperate zone nature which in nineteenth-century England had become, even in the Lake District, largely a human artifact. One can see the importance, for poets and others, of the remoteness and otherness of nature: the feeling that the eighteenth century expressed in the word “sublime” conveys to us that there is such a thing as creative alienation. The principle laid down by the Italian philosopher Vico of verum factum, that we understand only what we have made ourselves, needs to be refreshed sometimes by the contemplation of something we did not make and do not understand. The difficulty with Wordsworth’s view is in the word “teacher.” A nature which was not primarily a human artifact could teach man nothing except that he was not it. We are taught by our own cultural conditioning, and by that alone. (CW 4, 36-7)
Bob Dylan
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwSZvHqf9qM
“Tangled Up in Blue,” live
Today is Bob Dylan‘s birthday (born 1941).
Frye alluded to Dylan on a number of occasions. Here in a 1969 interview he cites Dylan to illustrate how popular culture has facilitated the teaching of literary criticism:
I think that in our day the communications gap between seriousness and lightness is breaking down… And I found in my teaching of literature that a person who knows folk singers like Bob Dylan or the Mothers of Invention has far less difficulty with symbols in poetry. Twenty years ago you had to teach students the language of symbolism which they often just refused to learn. Nowadays young people know that language. (CW 24, 110)
And here, ten years later, he responds to the suggestion that it is “ludicrous that people like Bob Dylan are considered poets”:
Oh, I think Bob Dylan is a poet. I am quite interested in the folk-song idiom as a poetic idiom. It’s a revival of an oral tradition in poetry which disappeared for centuries. Poetry got too badly bogged down with books, and I think it’s a very healthy thing when poetry becomes something that can be recited to an audience with a musical background. (CW 24, 474)
Quote of the Day
“What did I learn in school? The most valuable thing by far was grammar. English should be analyzed by the structure of an inflected language, preferably Latin: philosophical as well as literary training.”
Northrop Frye, “Autobiographical Notes”
Frye and G. Wilson Knight
G. Wilson Knight (1897-1985) was professor of English at Trinity College, University of Toronto, in the 1930s; he returned to Britain in 1941, where he taught at the University of Leeds until 1962; his main interest was Shakespeare, many of whose plays he produced and acted in; his best‑known book, Wheel of Fire, was published in 1930. What follows are the references to Knight in Frye’s writing:
1. There’s a series of New Directions studies on “Makers of Modern Literature,” by Harry Levin on Joyce, very well reviewed, & now one by David Daiches on Woolf, said to be not so good. Wilson Knight is producing another book, this time on Milton.[1] A new Simenon translated, two stories again. He’s so good that his stories don’t even depend for their interest on the puzzle. [Diaries]
2. Well, Crane’s third lecture was a little easier to follow: more names and historical connections. But his relativism and pluralism are breaking down into an Aristotle (and Crane) contra mundum attitude. Everybody’s in the other camp—the camp where poetry is treated as a form of discourse. Now I’ve lost Aristotle: I don’t understand how he’s distinguishable from this. Anyway, the discourse people include the Latin rhetoricians, the medieval people, the critics of the Renaissance who thought they were Aristotelians but weren’t, the romantics, and the romantic tradition extending to the new critics & the myth critics. The last group includes Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Francis Ferguson, Wilson Knight, and me. [Diaries]
3. King Lear attempts to achieve heroic dignity through his position as a king and father, and finds it instead in his suffering humanity: hence it is in King Lear that we find what has been called the “comedy of the grotesque,”[2] the ironic parody of the tragic situation, most elaborately developed. [Anatomy of Criticism, 237]
4. But he was quickly bored if the conversation ran down in gossip or trivialities. The personnel at his parties naturally changed over the course of years, but from Bertram Brooker and Wilson Knight in the 1930s to Marshall McLuhan and Douglas Grant in the 1960s, he never wavered in his affection for friends who could talk, and talk with spirit, content, and something to say. [“Ned Pratt: The Personal Legend”]
5. There were many little magazines and attempts at experimental theatre (I can’t answer for the dance groups, of which as I remember there were several), but they fought hard and died quickly—all but the unique and miraculous Canadian Forum, which a dozen university staff members, then as now, worked hard to keep going and up to standard. A few rumours also seeped through from other colleges, of how Wilson Knight at Trinity had revolutionized the study of Shakespeare, of how Gilbert Norwood had written of Classical drama with a sophisticated knowledge of the modern stage, of Charles Cochrane’s mighty struggle with Christianity and Classical Culture. [“Autopsy of a Old Grad’s Grievance,” in Northrop Frye on Education]
6. Surrey, however, established a new pentameter line for his century. Its prestige captured Spenser, who had begun with accentual experiments and contrapuntal singing-matches, but for his epic moved away from musical rhythms, as Milton moved toward them. Shakespeare, however, and most Elizabethan drama with him, grew steadily swifter in movement, breaking out of the line into galloping recitativos, with the diction becoming sharper and more dissonant, the imagery grimmer and more sombre, the thought more tangled and obscure—in short, more musical in every way. The use of music by Shakespeare, however, is outside our scope: his musical accompaniments and imagery have been dealt with, notably by Granville Barker and Wilson Knight, but such features as the contrapuntal construction of King Lear have yet to be analysed. [“Music in Poetry”]
7. This inductive movement towards the archetype is a process of backing up, as it were, from structural analysis, as we back up from a painting if we want to see composition instead of brushwork. In the foreground of the grave-digger scene in Hamlet, for instance, is an intricate verbal texture, ranging from the puns of the first clown to the danse macabre of the Yorick soliloquy, which we study in the printed text. One step back, and we are in the Wilson Knight and Spurgeon group of critics, listening to the steady rain of images of corruption and decay. [“Archetypes of Literature”]
8. The inductive studies of the recurring imagery of King Lear by Wilson Knight and Caroline Spurgeon have, for me at least, gone a long way to illuminate this meaning, and I think a careful comparison of the different contexts in which such words as “nature” and “nothing” appear would do a good deal more. [Review of Critics and Criticism]
Texts for a Fire Sermon
A bobbin, vortex, whirling gyre,
The tongues ascend, a silent choir,
A phoenix trope for pure desire.
The painter sees as flames aspire
The anagram of Frye is Fyre.
As for the theft of fire, many of the stories put the source of fire in the under world, where the sun is at night, so that when the thief of fire returns he is also the rising sun. [Notebook 7.22]
There’s the Paravritti, the Beulah-Eden vortex through the ray of fire which opens out into the mystic rose. [Notebook 7.33]
Engineering metaphors or thought models start of course with fire and the wheel. One gives metaphors of spark, scintilla, energy & the like: most of our organism metaphors take off from it. [Notebook 18.10]
In the Great Doodle (apocalyptic) the spiritual world is (a) the fire-world of heavenly bodies (b) the lower heaven or sky. Hence it is normally (a) red with the seraphim (b) blue with the cherubim. Blue & white mean virginity, red & white love; red white & green is the point of epiphany. [Notebook 18.98]
Whenever Eros got into the Xn trdn. [Christian tradition] (Inge has it in his book on mysticism) Eros (not Cupid) is certainly a Gentile type of Christ, and Prometheus of the Spirit. Fire seems right; it’s what the gyre kindles. Try to think about Abraham’s furnace; fire descending to the altar (less Elijah than Chronicles), the three “children” (magi?) in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace [Daniel 3]. Blake certainly thought Los’s furnaces had something. Smart on Abraham’s. Speaking of magi, they should have been women, as they’re antitypes of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to Solomon. [Notebook 27.147]
Man is asleep and fantasizing in the ladder, garden and seed worlds. His central activity there is quest, the projection of Word into Deed that enables him to go on sleeping. In the fire world he’s compelled to wake up, hence the first thing he does is withdraw the quest. [Notebook 27.188]
What the released flame of Prometheus illuminates is, among other things, the true ladder as the four phases of meaning. The flame, by the way, has to include the occult link between the living fire & the warm-blooded organism I mentioned in GC [The Great Code, 161-2]. [Notebook 27.190]
The fire-chapter should include, first of all, Little Gidding and the two Byzantium poems. SB [Sailing to Byzantium] is a panoramic apocalypse: every state of the chain of being appears on fire as nature is destroyed & the artifice of eternity replaces it. Byzantium burns from the inside. Note how intensely Heraclitean both Eliot & Yeats get when they enter the fire. [Notebook 27.250]
What’s the Biblical setup? I think it’s polarized between the first coming of Christ in water and his second coming in fire. [Notebook 27.259]
To go from the ladder-garden world to the ark-flame one, think of going from Ash-Wednesday to the Quartets, from The Tower to A Vision (if only Yeats had got the vision!). Note that I was first attracted to archetypal criticism by Colin Still’s book on The Tempest, with its central conception of the ladder of elements, a conception going back to the pre-Socratics. Heraclitus says there’s an exchange of “fire” and of “all things,” as there is of “gold” for “wares.” That’s something to chew on. [Notebook 27.263]
Saturday Night Video: Hamlets
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8VOZLjQbvQ
With both John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier in mind, here is a selection of Hamlets. Above, David Tennant in the recent Royal Shakespeare Company production.
Laurence Olivier
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ks-NbCHUns
The “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Olivier’s Hamlet
Today is Laurence Olivier‘s birthday (1907 – 1989).
Frye on New Year’s Eve 1948 records in his diary his impressions of Olivier’s film version of Hamlet:
Went to see the Laurence Olivier Hamlet this afternoon — its eleventh filming, according to the program. As Olivier directed the film & played Hamlet too, it was still the subjective fallacy, the conception of the play which derives from the accident that Hamlet is a fat actor’s role, not in the least scant of breath. In any production the actor who takes Hamlet’s part has a lot to say about the production, & his first care is usually to ensure that if any part is cut it won’t be his. Olivier wasn’t crude about it: he slashed the soliloquies to ribbons & turned it into a play of action. The subjective fallacy showed up chiefly in his treatment of Ophelia–he manipulated her part to make her just the “anima” of Hamlet, & deliberately cut out her mature intensity of feeling & her sharp sly humor. Consistently with this he made her death pure accident, thus making all the references to her “doubtful” death in the fifth act entirely pointless. The foils to Hamlet were also weakened — Laertes of course has a very badly written part, but the stability of Horatio was hardly in evidence & Fortinbras was abolished altogether, along with those dismal robot clowns Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. On the other hand, the king & queen were fully & excellently treated.
Hamlet is not about Hamlet at all, but about a situation into which Hamlet fits, and all attempts to treat the play as though it were primarily a character study of Hamlet destroy the symmetry of the play. For one thing, one needs all the rich counterpoint of the Polonius family, which plays the same role in Hamlet that the Gloucester family does in Lear. We have to see this subplot from its own perspective as well as from Hamlet’s. Ophelia corresponds to Gertrude, & her attraction toward Hamlet is, from Polonius’ point of view, a desertion to vice, just as Gertrude’s attraction toward Claudius is from Hamlet’s. The father-daughter hold here is as palpable as the bigger mother-son one. But more important, Hamlet is not a play about Hamlet’s indecision, but about the ritual element in revenge. In Hamlet the stimulus to revenge takes the creative form of the play: in Claudius it takes the form of a ritual sword-dance, a Druidical drama punctuated with choruses of toasts & cannon shots. But the question “why did Hamlet delay?” is no more important to the play than the question “why did Claudius delay?” for Claudius also has shallow excuses and self-analyzing soliloquies. There is something comic in the elephantine fumbling on both sides, especially in the fourth act.
There were excellent things in Olivier’s version, though: the winding stair & the general Piranesi setting, Hamlet as the Orc-hero brandishing the torch in Claudius’ face, a grotesque little wooden statue of Christ to which Claudius prays, the use of the cross on the sword-hilt in the Hamlet-Ghost scene, the whole Saturnalia or Balshazzar’s feast aspect of Claudius’ revels. The camera, by pushing closer to the characters, brings out the horror of tragedy the stage plays often gloss over, & reminds us that tragedy is after all about people getting hurt. (CW 8, 42-3)