Nazi Book Burning

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Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels oversees a book burning rally in front of the Berlin Opera House. A translation of Goebbles’ speech to the students assembled there after the jump.

On this date in 1933, the Nazis engaged in nationwide public book burnings. The Hitler regime had drawn up lists of scholars and writers unacceptable to the New Order as decadent, materialistic, and representative of “moral decline” and “cultural Bolshevism.”  These included: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Döblin, Erich Maria Remarque, Carl von Ossietzky, Kurt Tucholsky, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Erich Kästner, and Carl Zuckmayer.

Frye in Anatomy:

The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice. (CW 22, 6)

In “The Only Genuine Revolution”:

Historical imagination is a difficult thing to develop, and I’m not surprised that people shrink from trying to do it. But I’m always terrified when I hear the word “relevance” applied to education, because I can never forget that it was one of the jargon terms of the Nazis, and particularly the Nazi youth, around 1933 to 1934. That is, the professors around the universities that were being shouted down and hounded out of the place because they didn’t like Hitler were the people who didn’t understand the relevance of everything that was being studied to the Nazi movement. (CW 24, 167)

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Howard Carter and Tutankhamen

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From the BBC, the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb

Today is the birthday of Howard Carter (1874-1939), an English archaeologist and Egyptologist who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen.

From “The Metaphor of Kingship” section of the lecture series, “Symbolism in the Bible”:

The society that went furthest in identifying the entire society with and as the king was ancient Egypt. If you look at, say, the Tutankhamen collection, you would say to yourself that it would be absolutely incredible that all that labour and expense went into the constructing of the tomb for a pharaoh. We’d never believe it without direct evidence. And yet, when we understand how pervasive royal metaphors are in Egypt — that Pharaoh is not only a king, he is an incarnate god, identical with the god Horus before his death and with the god Osiris after it, and that he was called “the shepherd of his people” — it becomes more conceivable. And unlike the Hebrew practice, he was high priest as well as king. So it is possible that the ordinary Egyptian found an identity for himself within the mystical body of Pharaoh which was of a kind that our mental processes simply cannot recapture. (CW 13, 490)

 

Query Regarding Frye Marginalia in Dante’s “Divine Comedy”

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Nicholas Graham sent us this email a couple of days ago:

Here is one of the many highlights to be found among Frye’s Dante annotations.

I would like to share it with anyone who is able to throw some light on Frye’s distinctions.

I have asked some of my theologian friends to explain Frye’s distinction between “the Maritains & the Barths”. Also I would like to know a little more about each of the types of visions that Frye presents here.

Maybe you could start an annotations corner on your wounderful blog?

You can see Graham’s transcript of the annotation here. Please have a look, and if you have anything to add, leave us a comment.

The answer to Nick’s question is, yes. We will set up a dedicated space for annotations.  We’ll let you know once we get it up and running.,

And, of course, queries of any sort are welcome.  We are always glad to post them.

Here are two responses to Graham’s query.

From Bob Denham:

Isn’t the Maritain/Barth distinction simply that Maritain accepted the analogia entis and Barth rejected it.  See Barth’s Church Dogmatics, vol. 3, pt..2, trans. Knight et al. (Edinburgh: Clark, 1960), 220.  See also Keith L. Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (2010).

I have a brief discussion of Frye and the analogia entis in “Frye and Giordano Bruno,” which has been posted on the Frye blog.  In a “General Note: Blake’s Mysticism,” Fearful Symmetry, CW 14:415–16, Frye contrasts Blake’s analogia visionis with “the more orthodox analogies of faith and being.”

Frye’s aligning the four forms of analogia with Dante’s four levels of meaning is a pretty ingenious schematic.  Of course Frye’s ultimate commitment is to anagogy, where the principle of identity, as opposed to analogy, operates.

From Michael Dolzani:

My knowledge here is highly limited, despite growing up Catholic; I thought analogia was a girl I went to high school with. However, I think Bob is basically right. The Catholic Maritain accepts the analogia entis and is thus trapped in reason; the Protestant Barth rejects it and manages thereby to open a path to the analogia visionis, to vision, via the Logos. I wonder when these notes were written:  this all seems an outbreak of Norrie’s visceral antipathy to Catholicism, which I’ve never really understood.

I know that the Catholic Church of his youth was extremely reactionary, and that he disliked the potential authoritarianism of the neo-Thomist movement, which he saw as parallel to something like Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic insistence on “orthodoxy,” but Catholicism really seems to have been a sore spot. After all, Aquinas may be dryly Scholastic, but I find Augustine’s obsession with sin, damnation, predestination, and the like as repellent as anything in the Inferno. When Benedict recently abolished half of Limbo (the unbaptized infants), there were a lot of articles talking about the historical background; I don’t know if it’s true that where Aquinas said the souls of unbaptized infants were merely denied heaven, Augustine went further and said that they shared to a degree the punishments of the damned–but it sounds like something he’d say.

In short, Norrie saw the shadow side of Catholicism, but seems to minimize the shadow side of Protestantism. It was the Augustinian tradition of obsession with sin and guilt and the corruption of the human will that led to Luther’s tormented ferocity; to Calvinism’s making predestination practically the whole of the Christian message; to the burning of witches; and, after all, Barth’s theology was itself called “neo-orthodox.” Hardly a line of vision. If you wanted to be unfair in the other direction, you could counterpoise all this against enlightened Catholics like Erasmus and Nicholas Cusanus and Rabelais. Norrie knows all this–in fact, he says some of it in Fearful Symmetry. But when he gets emotional he tends to think only of the bad side of Catholicism and the good side of Protestantism.

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Group of Seven

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Fred Varley, “Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay”

The Art Gallery of Ontario opened its first exhibition featuring the Group of Seven on this date in 1920.

From “Canadian Scene: Explorers and Observers”:

[T]he primary rhythm of Canadian painting has been a forward-thrusting rhythm, a drive which has its origin in Europe, and is therefore conservative and romantic in feeling, strongly attached to the British connection but “federal” in its attitude to Canada, much possessed by the vision of the national motto, a mari usque ad mare. It starts with the documentary painters who, like Paul Kane, have provided such lively and varied glimpses of so many vanished aspects of the country, especially of Indian life. A second wave began with Tom Thomson, continued through the Group of Seven, and has a British Columbia counterpart in Emily Carr. (The romantic side of the movement is reflected in the name “Group of Seven” itself: there were never really more than six, in fact there were effectively only five, but seven is a sacred number, and the group had a strong theosophical bent.) One notices in these paintings how the perspective is so frequently a twisting and scanning perspective, a canoeman’s eye peering around the corner to see what comes next. Thomson in particular uses the conventions of art nouveau to throw up in front of the canvas a fringe of foreground which is rather blurred, because the eye is meant to look past it. It is a perspective that reminds us how much Canada developed as a passage or gateway to somewhere else, being merely an obstruction in itself. Further, a new world is being discovered. There is an immense difference in feeling between north and south Canada, but as north Canada is practically uninhabited, it exists in Canadian painting only through southern eyes. In those eyes it is a “solemn land” as frightening and fantastic as the moon. (CW 12, 423)

TGIF: “Fight for Your Right Revisited”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evA-R9OS-Vo

The Beastie Boys have put together a short film to mark the 25th anniversary of “Fight for Your Right to Party” — a song they admit is awful, even though it became a novelty hit. However, they clambered through the window of opportunity it provided to produce some of the best old school hip hop. It’s easy to be nostalgic for it now: the 70s funk-based samples meant old school was already retro when it was still new school. It also meant that the gritty, grifter’s limbo that is New York City (at least as depicted in movies from the 1970s, like Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets) endured as a cultural whetstone. And then there is the playful cheekiness of the music that’s been missed since the arrival in the mid-90s of ganstas, bling and hos. It was, relatively speaking, a more innocent time.*

(*Not intended to be a factual statement.)

The film is a vanity project, but a pretty impressively executed one, worth seeing just for the cast and the lineup of cameos, including: Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Steve Buscemi, Shannyn Sossamon, Kirsten Dunst, Ted Danson, Rashida Jones, Rainn Wilson, Amy Poehler, Mary Steenburgen, Will Arnett, Adam Scott, Chloe Sevigny, Maya Rudolph, David Cross, and Orlando Bloom.

The story is set in 1986, and the Beasties are played by Seth Rogen, Elijah Wood and Danny McBride. After a day of casual vandalism and dedicated drinking, they meet up with their future selves, played by John C. Reilly, Jack Black and Will Ferrell. Things happen. There’s a showdown. A dance mat is cumbersomely rolled out. The real Beasties turn up as cops to put the beat down on the entire assembly.

After the jump, a great video that captures old school rap just as it was about to be superseded altogether, 1994’s “Root Down.” You’ll probably want to see it, if only for the vintage breakdancing and graffiti.

The Beastie Boys’ new album, The Hot Sauce Committee Part 2, was released on Tuesday.

Finally, the literary antecedent to rap is “flyting,” which Frye regularly refers to. In “Music in Poetry,” he characterizes it as a poet’s “instinct to use his technical resources in cursing somebody,” in which “a very intricate rhyming and metrical scheme is completely subordinated to the pounding accent.” That covers it nicely.

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Sigmund Freud

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From an interview with the BBC in December 1938

Hard upon the birthdays yesterday of Kierkegaard and Marx, today is Sigmund Freud‘s birthday (1856-1939): another passenger in “the drunken boat”:

From “The Drunken Boat”:

The major constructs which our own culture has inherited from its Romantic ancestry are also of the “drunken boat” shape, but represent a later and a different form of it from the “vehicular form” described above. Here the boat is usually in the position of Noah’s ark, a fragile container of sensitive and imaginative values threatened by a chaotic and unconscious power below it. In Schopenhauer, the world as idea rides precariously atop a “world as will” which engulfs practically the whole of existence in its moral indifference. In Darwin, who readily combines with Schopenhauer, as the later work of Hardy illustrates, consciousness and mortality are accidental sports from a ruthlessly competitive evolutionary force. In Freud, who has noted the resemblance of his mythical structure to Schopenhauer’s, the conscious ego struggles to keep afloat on a sea of libidinous impulse. In Kierkegaard, all the “higher” impulses of fallen man pitch and roll on the surface of a huge and shapeless “dread.” In some versions of this construct the antithesis of the symbol of consciousness and the destructive element in which it is immersed can be overcome or transcended: there is an Atlantis under the sea which becomes an Ararat for the beleaguered boat to rest on. (CW 17, 89)

Quote of the Day 2

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Further to Bob’s earlier Frye quote, here’s Rick Salutin in today’s Toronto Star:

We now live in a permanent state you could call the tyranny of the minority. You could also call it the tragedy of the majority. We’ll have had 10 years of a government desired by 40 per cent of the voters, while 60 per cent, who largely agree on what they’d like, will get zero representation. Everyone played by the rules of the game, but it’s a stretch to call that game democracy.

Kierkegaard, Marx, and the “Drunken Boat”

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An excerpt from the BBC documentary, Sea of Faith, which contrasts Marx and Kierkegaard

Two birthdays today: Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) and Karl Marx (1818-1883).  (Bob Denham’s recent article on Frye and Kierkegaard can be found in the journal here.)

Despite their fundamental ideological differences, Kierkegaard and Marx share a common mythological root, which Frye describes in A Study of English Romanticism:

[F]or a more conservatively pessimistic Romantic, such as Schopenhauer, it is easier to think of the structure of civilization, or the state of experience, as on top of a subhuman and submoral “world as will,” an ark or bateau ivre carrying the cargo of human values and tossing on a stormy and threatening sea. This figure becomes the prevailing one later in the nineteenth century, both for the revolutionary optimists, with Marx at their head, who see the traditional privileges of a ruling class threatened with destruction from below, and for more sombre thinkers — Schopenhauer himself, Freud, Kiekegaard — all of whom think of the values of intelligence and imagination as above, but very precariously above, a dark, menacing and subhuman power — Schopenhauer’s world as will, Freud’s id, Kierkegaard’s dread. For al of these, the boat and sea image is an appropriate one, and this structure in particular shows us how the Romantic mythological schema, unlike its predecessor, enables poets and philosophers to express a man-centred revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary, attitude to society. (CW 17, 113-14)

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