Frye Doffs “the Shitty Garment” of Fundamentalism

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Vintage postcard of Aberdeen High School, Moncton

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, died on this date in 1791 (born 1703).

John Ayre in his biography provides this now famous anecdote of the young school boy’s first epiphany.  In Frye’s words, he was

walking along St. George St. to high school and just suddenly the whole shitty and smelly garment (of fundamental teaching I had all my life) just dropped off into the sewers and stayed there. It was like the Bunyan feeling, about the burden of sin falling off his back only with me it was a burden of anxiety. Anything might have touched it off, but I don’t know what specifically did, or if anything did. I just remember that suddenly that that was no longer a part of me and never would again. (44)

Femmes Fatales

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFer3-Aguw

Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946

“It was a blonde.  A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

Kevin Nance has an article on the apparent disappearance of the femme fatale from the movies.  An excerpt:

She’s in trouble, she says, and needs his help. He hesitates a second while his brain tries to work. Whatever her problem is — something about her husband working her over, the sick bastard — she can take care of herself, from the looks of her. But hello, the looks of her: those long legs, those tremulous lips, those wounded eyes. This dame isn’t in trouble, she is trouble, his brain shouts — but those eyes, those eyes. He’s way past listening to his brain. The only sound he can hear is her voice, whispering that she needs him, wants him, can’t live without him. And if his brain turns out to be right, if she ends up dragging him down into depravity, madness and murder, well, tough. If there was ever a thing worth going straight to hell for, she’s it.

Or was. In the restless middle of the 20th century, the femme fatale, the dark queen of film noir, jolted the silver screen with an electric sexuality and lethal cunning it had never seen before. She smoldered, she coveted, she hated, she schemed and, above all, she manipulated the men in her life — alternately offering and withholding the promise of love and a mind-blowing screw, playing the poor saps like puppets as the moment required. Along the way, she provided a group of gifted, intrepid Hollywood actresses a chance to shine in a way few of their rivals ever did or could, which is to say darkly: Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944), Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946) andThe Lady from Shanghai (1947), Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947) — unforgettable performances all, in every case a career zenith.

Frye in Words with Power:

Romantic and later poets are also preoccupied with femme fatale figures: Medusa in Shelley and Salome in Oscar Wilde and elsewhere, the latter holding the severed heard of John the Baptist, dramatize their castrating proclivities.  Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci, which takes its title, though not its theme, from a fairly harmless medieval poem, presents us with an inferno of damned lovers in the setting of a bleak landscape of exhausted fertility.  The dark and gigantic females in Baudelaire assimilate the figure to the vast unconsciousness of the natural environment.

Gerard de Nerval’s poem Horus takes us back to Graves’s mythological context: the goddess Isis, finding herself in bed with an old king, flings away from him and goes to look for a younger partner. As we should expect, the femme fatale is sometimes associated with Eve after the fall: such an association turns up in Valery’s long poem Ebauche d’un serpent (it is also one of the strands in the complex weave of La jeune Parque). Once again, it will not do to write these off as individual psychological quirks of misogyny. (CW 26, 192)

And, because it’s Lou Reed‘s birthday today, his “Femme Fatale” (with The Velvet Underground and Nico) after the jump.

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Thomas Campion

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j78yuRWOts

A real treat: countertenor Alfred Deller sings Campion’s “It fell on a summer’s day”

Thomas Campion died on this date in 1620 (born 1567).

From The Educated Imagination:

Here’s a poem by a contemporary of Shakespeare, Thomas Campion:

When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arriv’d, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen, and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finish’d love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;

Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake:
When thou hast told these honours done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me

This is written in the convention that poets of that age used for love poetry: the poet is always in love with some obdurate and unresponsive mistress, whose neglect of the lover may even cause his madness and death.  It’s pure invention, and it’s a complete waste of time trying to find out about the women in Campion’s life — there can’t possibly be any real experience behind it. Campion was himself a poet and a critic, and a composer who set his poems to his own musical settings. He was also a professional man who started out in law but switched over to medicine, and served for some time in the army. In other words, he was a busy man, who didn’t have much time for getting himself murdered cruel mistresses. The poem uses religious language, but not a religionthat Campion could ever have believed in. At the same time it’s a superbly lovely poem; it’s perfection itself, and if you think that a convention poem can only be just a literary exercise, and that you could write a better poem out of real experience, I’d be doubtful of your success. (CW 21, 451)

Nagged

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFbPz6hMa1c

Here’s the real Stephen Harper addressing “real Canadians” on a completely phony issue

The Conservative attack ads are now non-stop, and it’s many weeks, maybe even months away from an election.  When they aren’t running attack ads, they’re running “government of Canada” ads, which means tens of millions of tax-payer dollars spent to spit-polish the Harper government at our expense. During peak viewing hours, every second commercial break has either one or the other of them in an unending manic-depressive cycle of reassurance and vituperation.

It may be that this strategy will ultimately backfire because the motives are so transparently cynical. You don’t have to be partisan to find it distasteful to be incessantly nagged, poked and tugged at, especially when your own money is paying for the trouble.

I’ve posted the video above before, but it’s worth watching again. No filters. No public relations. No image consultation. Just an undiluted expression of bigotry, fear and resentment. According to Stephen Harper, there are “real Canadians,” and then there’s everyone else — which, minus the minority who voted for him in the last election, is two thirds of the population.

Quotes of the Day: Sullivan and “Anonymous”

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Libertarian conservative columnist for the Sunday Times and The Atlantic, and one of the most-read political bloggers in the world, Andrew Sullivan today:

If your name is Koch, it’s pronounced cock. And if your name is Boehner, it’s pronounced boner. They can always change their names if they want. Until then … I’m calling it like it is.

Meanwhile, the online hacking collective, Anonymous, is targeting the Koch-sponsered Americans for Prosperity.  Their press release reads in part:

Koch Industries, and oligarchs like them, have most recently started to manipulate the political agenda in Wisconsin. Governor Walker’s union-busting budget plan contains a clause that went nearly un-noticed. This clause would allow the sale of publicly owned utility plants in Wisconsin to private parties (specifically, Koch Industries) at any price, no matter how low, without a public bidding process. The Koch’s have helped to fuel the unrest in Wisconsin and the drive behind the bill to eliminate the collective bargaining power of unions in a bid to gain a monopoly over the state’s power supplies.

The Koch brothers have made a science of fabricating ‘grassroots’ organizations and advertising campaigns to support them in an attempt to sway voters based on their falsehoods. Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United are just a few of these organizations. In a world where corporate money has become the lifeblood of political influence, the labor unions are one of the few ways citizens have to fight against corporate greed. Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system. For these reasons, we feel that the Koch brothers threaten the United States democratic system and, by extension, all freedom-loving individuals everywhere. As such, we have no choice but to spread the word of the Koch brothers’ political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness.

Story here.

Frye on Democracy, Laissez-Faire and Oligarchy

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“Democracy should work as a force for the underprivileged.” Northrop Frye, interview in The Telegram, 25 March 1950

On a couple of occasions I’ve received comments about the political direction the blog takes on current events, typically in the form of “What does this have to do with Frye?” (I get the same thing when it comes to popular culture.) My response has been that Frye was always critically engaged with the world around him, most conspicuously during his decades-long stint at The Canadian Forum. His politics were unambiguously to the left (he was in fact a lifelong social democrat), and his observations on political matters are frank and detailed. Although some people might not like it, he lived long enough to make pungent remarks about two prominent North American conservatives of the 1980s: Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney. It’s not difficult to imagine what he might have said about George Bush and Stephen Harper.

I am comfortable, therefore, to post critiques of the political right in the liberal spirit Frye embodied, and I am always on the lookout for passages from the collected works consistent with the opinions expressed here. This is particularly true regarding the behavior of an increasingly aggressive economic elite that for the past thirty years has begrudged the poor the assistance they require while stripping the middle class of a fair share of the wealth they generate. In the 1940s, Frye readily characterized such trends as the emergence of a North American brand of fascism. There isn’t any good reason we should hesitate to do so now. It is a direct threat to democracy, which Frye seemed to think of as a secular form of salvation. It is also a nullification of the primary concerns he regarded as the full expression of both corporeal and spiritual life. If there’s any lingering doubt about this, below is another quote to add to the collection already compiled here over the last few months, this time from “Trends in Modern Culture.” As always, Frye sets the standard for feet-on-the-ground idealism: the recognition of and the working toward the better world we could create if only we had the courage to push this one aside.

As the conception of democracy has matured, it has separated itself from its vague background of Utopian optimism.  Many Americans still believe that laissez-faire is the economic aspect of democracy, but there is a growing realization that laissez-faire by itself does not lead to democracy, but to oligarchy, and thence to managerial dictatorship. Laissez-faire by itself is antidemocratic: all progress in the conditions of the working classes has been wrung from it in a kind of cold civil war. . . . (CW 11, 251)

Zero Mostel and Tricky Slaves

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPds0-hZ1tM

New Comedy in a nutshell — including a brother and sister kidnapped in infancy by pirates — from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.  This clip includes Mostel as Pseudolus (right), Jack Gilford as Hysterium (left) and Buster Keaton (centre) as Erroneous.  (Michael Hordern makes a brief appearance as Senex.)

Today is the great comic actor Zero Mostel‘s birthday (1915-1977). His performance as Pseudolus in Richard Lester’s 1966 film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum nicely represents the eiron character Frye in Anatomy calls the “tricky slave.” Then again, the plot of A Funny Thing is a playbook for the formulaic conventions of New Comedy, to the extent that two of the characters bear the names of the types Frye identifies them by: Senex and Miles Gloriosus.

From the “The Mythos of Spring” section of “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths”:

Another central eiron figure is the type entrusted with hatching the schemes which bring about the hero’s victory.  This character in Roman comedy is almost always a tricky slave (dolosus servus). . . . The vice, to give him that name, is very useful to a comic dramatist because he acts from pure love of mischief, and he can set a comic action going with the minimum of motivation. . . One of the tricky slaves in Plautus, in a soliloquy, boasts that he is the architectus of the comic action: such a character carries out the will of the author to reach a happy ending.  He is in fact the spirit of comedy itself. . . . (CW 22, 161)

This Week in Climate Change Denial

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c90nab5i-TQ

What the ice cores tell us, and how the deniers distort it.

Koch brothers’ effort to interfere in Canadian renewable energy initiatives here. (Their ubiquity is known as the “Kochtopus.”)

Greenpeace’s detailed 2010 report on their funding of global warming denial here.

The New Yorker‘s investigative report, including their ties to the Tea Party here.

Lord Byron

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His Lordship looking very mad, bad and dangerous to know

Lord Byron made his first address to the House of Lords on this date in 1812.

Frye makes many more substantial references to Byron than this one in an interview with documentary filmmaker Harry Rasky, but the exchange is irresistible for his cheekily ambiguous response to a “prying” question.

Rasky: Was the phrase “history is the nightmare from which we’re all trying to wake up”?

Frye: That’s Joyce in Ulysses.  I think Byron said it more neatly when he said that history is the devil’s scripture.

Rasky: I wonder if it would be prying if I said, Does Northrop Frye talk to God?

Frye: Yes.

(CW 24, 871)