Sanity vs Depravity [Updated]

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Because any educated imagination is willingly engaged with the (cough) “real world” — which is really only the awful place where awful things happen to people on the nausea-inducing assumption that it is necessary — it will also bear witness to a truly depraved mind.

Marc Thiessen was on Jon Stewart’s show last night.  Thiessen is a former Bush speech writer, a tireless apologist for torture, and now a “columnist” for the Washington Post, a once great newspaper being run into the fevered swamps of neoconservative paranoia by editor Fred Hiatt.  It is a stomach churning experience to listen to someone like Thiessen and to know he wields power and influence.  But it serves as a reminder of just how wretched a place such a world is — and why.  For the rest of us, it’s got to be about vigilance.  We can start by making a point of knowing what the rogues, the frauds, and the closet sadists are actually up to.

In Canada, the entire unedited interview can be seen here.  In the rest of the world, it can be seen here.

Update: From then-Vice President Henry A. Wallace on “American fascism” in 1942:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

New Additions to the Denham Library

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First, Bob has provided us with his delightful 1985 correspondence in the persona of Frye with two colleagues then teaching at the University of North Carolina, William Harmon and Louis D. Rubin.  It can be read here.

Second, a collection of images of Frye, some photographs (particularly of the young Frye, like the lovely photo above of Helen and Norrie taken in 1937), but mostly caricatures, including those done by the recently deceased David Levine of the New York Review of Books.  You can see them here.

This is a good time to remind you that we are slowly but surely digitizing a collection of Frye audio and video, some of which has never been made public before.  We hope to begin posting it in the spring.

Frye on Verdi

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Further to Saturday Night at the Opera.  We previously posted the finale of Verdi’s Falstaff here.

Scott was a source for the 19th c. opera—Donizetti’s Lucia & Bellini’s Puritani, the latter very loosely adapted from Old Mortality. I think not Verdi, though Verdi drew from a Romantic tradition that Scott did a lot to solidify: Hugo, Dumas, Schiller, etc. Nobody could imagine an opera of that period based on Jane Austen. If I try to rehabilitate Scott as a romancer, I should also try to rehabilitate melodrama. That term is usually used with contempt, & I’ve used it so myself, because of the way it approximates lynching-mob mentality in its hiss-the-villain setup. But there’s a legitimate type of melodrama where characters and plot outrage “probability,” yet seem to live in a logical world. I find Scott very hard to read now, but there are a lot of important critical principles extractable from him. (Late Notebooks, CW 5, 245–6)

Since the closing of the theatres in 1642, [Shakespearean comedy] has survived chiefly in opera. As long as we have Mozart or Verdi or Sullivan to listen to, we can tolerate identical twins and lost heirs and love potions and folk tales: we can even stand a fairy queen if she is under two hundred pounds. But the main tradition of Shakespearean fantasy seems to have drifted from the stage into lyric poetry, an oddly bookish fate for the warbler of native woodnotes. (“Shakespeare’s Comedy of Humours,” CW 10, 142). [This passage was incorporated into both “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” and A Natural Perspective.]

I did not, as I have indicated, see Fantasia, but I gather that the treatment of the Pastoral Symphony was a bit heavy handed compared to the delicate reference to it at the opening of the superb Farmyard Symphony, just before all the animals got to work on the Verdi Miserere. (“Music in the Movies,” CW 11, 110)

ALEXANDER: I’ve been most interested in some of the things you’ve had to say about music this evening. This last operatic excerpt, though, is of a very different sort. It’s the Finale to act 3 of Verdi’s Falstaff. Tell me why this is an appropriate way for us to end.
FRYE: Well, if I were asked who my favourite composer was, the answer would have to be Johann Sebastian Bach. So I suppose I have a particular affection for somebody who can display the acrobatic skill that Bach does in things like The Art of the Fugue. It’s partly for that reason that the greatest single moment in opera for me outside of Mozart is that Finale of Verdi’s Falstaff, the great fugue at the end. (CW 24, 742)

BOGDAN: You subscribed to Étude magazine as a teenager. Was that a Canadian publication?
FRYE: No, it was published in Philadelphia. The editors were all epigones of [Edward] Macdowell, who had been trained in Germany. So I picked up the notion that the only serious music was German music, and that Verdi and Puccini and so forth were just a bunch of organ-grinders. It took me a long time to get over that. (CW 24, 798)

Reposted with Extensive Links: Update From The Frye Festival

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Aberdeen High School, where Frye graduated in 1928, is now Centre Culturel Aberdeen, a place where the francophone community has come together to share in the creation, performance, and exhibition of Acadian art.  It’s a nice irony that what was all English in Moncton in the 1920s is now mostly French.  In Frye’s time there was no French language high school in Moncton, and the French were thrown into the English system.  Several francophones who were students at the time of Frye remember his helping them with their English essays.  “He was an uncommonly soft touch,” John Ayre says (p. 43), “for anyone who genuinely wanted help with assignments. […]  This was a central character trait quite directly connected with his Methodist background: if someone deserving asked for help, he gave it.  It was both a strength and a bedevilment all through his later life.”

The back and forth, the up and down, the ‘creative tension’, between francophone and anglophone communities is what mainly sets Moncton apart.  When Frye returned to Moncton in November, 1990, a few months before his death, to give a talk at L’Université de Moncton, he was so pleased to see that Moncton was now home to an institution of higher education of such quality.  The auditorium at Edifice Jeanne-de-Valois was completely packed with people thrilled to see the great man’s return.  When someone in the audience, hoping to create some linguistic tension of his own, asked Frye if he understood French, Frye replied that he had trouble understanding any language his hearing was so bad.  Thus he sidestepped the language issue, which was an issue, perhaps, for just this one person.

Because Moncton is a bilingual city, it’s natural that the Frye Festival, set in Moncton, is bilingual.  From the beginning the festival has made every effort to bridge the gap between the language communities.  It’s an ever-narrowing gap, with more and more Anglophones learning French and respecting the French fact and most Francophones, while fighting threats to language and culture, perfectly at ease speaking English.  Interpenetration has been built into our festival from the beginning.  We live and breathe Frye at that level, and practice his approach to conflict.

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New Additions to the Journal and the Library

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Our collection of papers in the journal continues to grow.  We have just added Johanne Aitken’s “Making Human Sense: The Changing Influence of Northrop Frye’s Literary Theory Upon the Literary Experience of Children”.  We have also added to the library a lecture by Bob Denham delivered at Western Washington University in 2003, “Frye and Practical Criticism: Against the Grain”.

TGIF: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [Updated!]

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Keira Knightley and Dame Judi Dench.  For real!  Extended preview:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_gh-maRlw8&feature=fvw

See the movie, read the book!

Video promo for the book after the jump.

Update: Jonathan Allen reports that he’s currently working on a paper on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  We look forward to reading it.

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The Kugelmass Effect

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The May 2nd, 1977 issue of The New Yorker, in which “The Kugelmass Episode” first appeared.

Responding to comments by Joe Adamson, Clayton Chrusch, and Matthew Griffin

Bob Denham points out that in the latter part of his career Frye virtually ceased using the word “archetype.”  But, thanks at least to Anatomy of Criticism, it is a term that will always be associated with him — that third essay, “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths” will likely remain a centerpiece, re-read and contemplated anew (not to mention misread and summarily dismissed) apart from everything else.  But, of course, Frye is not really a modular thinker: you can’t take a small piece of him and say, “This is it in a nutshell.”  The best you can do is to identify some aspect of Frye and extrapolate the rest of his critical outlook from it.  (A. C. Hamilton, for example, claims that he can reconstruct all of Frye from a single phrase, the way a paleontologist might reconstruct an entire dinosaur from a bone fragment.)

This discussion thread began with the young Frye’s love of The New Yorker, so it’s nice bit of symmetry that we can return to the May 2nd, 1977 issue to round it out.  In that issue, Woody Allen published what may be one of his best short stories, “The Kugelmass Episode” (the full text of which can be read here).  In it, a humanities professor at CUNY named Kugelmass with an infatuation for Emma Bovary discovers a magician who can transport him into the novel where he becomes one of Emma’s lovers, and then snatches her away to attend the Academy Awards ceremony wearing a chic Ralph Lauren pantsuit (it’s 1977, remember).  In a cutaway sequence, the scene briefly shifts:

“I cannot get my mind around this,” a Stanford professor said.  “First a strange character named Kugelmass, and now she’s gone from the book.  Well, I guess the mark of a classic is that you can reread it a thousand times and always find something new.”

That sense of finding “something new” in a work read “a thousand times” we might call the “Kugelmass effect.”  It is suggestive of the fact that archetypes are constant but not reductive or static.  They are expansively associative and ultimately unfold a vision of the world that, as Frye points out, is always “new” — however many times it has been rendered — because it has never been realized.  It is what makes works of art “innocent” (as he puts in in The Educated Imagination), despite the cruel and unjust social conditions that produced them.  It’s why we cannot read a work of literature just once and exhaust its imaginative possibilities.  And it is surely why writers can and do (whether consciously or unconsciously, whether they freely admit to it or vehemently deny it) employ archetypes and still render them unique to the particular circumstances of the work at hand.

In Words with Power Frye explicitly identifies the literary experience as “visionary” and “prophetic.”  But he’d always argued as much.  To see the world in a grain of sand is to see everything in what is otherwise almost nothing, and to see it recreated in what is otherwise mundane.  It is “primary concern” raised to the level of the “concrete universal” — everywhere, all at once, and all of the time.

Vivaldi: Spring

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4kTei0XrCs

Today is Vivaldi‘s 332nd birthday.  Yes, it may be one of the most overplayed pieces of music ever (most especially in independently operated bookstores!), but there’s a reason for that.  This version is delightful and full of surprises, even for those who think they’ve heard the thing one time too many.