httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddF7KmosbGI
Some powerful raw footage of a protest getting under way at Sharif University, Tehran, just a few hours ago.
There are reports from the BBC of demonstrations all over Tehran, including Tehran University, Imam Hossein Square and Azadi Square. Chant heard: “Death to the dictator, death to Khamenei.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlrGNZL7CVc
The prosecution and martyrdom of Thomas Cranmer from David Starkey’s documentary series, Monarchy. (Video not embedded: click on the image above and hit the YouTube link.)On the heels of yesterday’s post regarding the execution of Henry VIII’s fifth wife Catherine Howard, her accuser, Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was declared a heretic by Queen Mary on this date in 1556. Catherine Howard’s lady-in-waiting, Jane Boleyn — Anne Boleyn’s sister-in-law who was executed as Catherine’s accomplice in treason — had previously been instrumental in bringing down Queen Anne by affirming her supposed incest with her brother (and Jane’s husband) George. With the execution of Cranmer under Queen Mary, this particular nemesis cycle draws to a bloody close. The person who rides the new cycle upwards is, of course, Anne Boleyn’s daughter, who ascends the throne as Elizabeth I after the premature death of her half-sister Mary. Elizabeth as queen undoes all of Mary’s effort to make England Catholic again — and that effort was the reason for Cranmer’s arrest, conviction and execution as a Protestant heretic in the first place. So yet another mortal cycle spins round.
Here, appropriately enough, is an excerpt from “Romance as Masque,” in which Frye once again addresses the tragic perspective provided by the wheel of fortune in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII:
The hero of Henry VIII is not so much the king as the wheel of fortune. The first turn of the wheel brings down Buckingham, the second turn Wolsey, the third Queen Katherine and others. If we like, we can see a rough justice or even a providence operating: Wolsey’s fall is the nemesis for his treatment of Buckingham, and Queen Katherine, though innocent, has to go in order to get Elizabeth born. For this reason it is unnecessary to apply moral standards to King Henry: whether we think of him resolute or merely ferocious, we cannot be sure if he turns the wheel of fortune or has simply become part of its machinery. Certainly the crucial event of the final scene, the birth of Elizabeth, there is a factor independent of his will, even though he takes credit for it, as befits a king. In this final scene there is a “prophecy” by Cranmer about the future greatness of England under Elizabeth and her successors, which generically is a very masque-like scene, a panegyric of the sort that would have normally accompanied the presence of a reigning monarch in the audience.
The only difficulty is that the scene shows the final triumph of Cranmer and of Anne Boleyn, and the audience knows what soon happened to Anne, as well as to three of her successors, and eventually to Cranmer. It also knows the reign of Elizabeth was preceded by that of Queen Katherine’s daughter, whose existence Henry appears to have forgotten: “Never before / This happy child, did I get any thing,” he says. (CW 18, 144-5)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpAy0pi7TJ8&feature=related
The executions of Catherine Howard and Jane Boleyn, from the television series The Tudors
On this date in 1542 Catherine Howard, the 17 year old fifth wife of Henry VIII, and her lady-in-waiting Jane Boleyn, were executed for Howard’s adultery with courtier Thomas Culpeper.
Frye in A Natural Perspective on Shakespeare’s depiction of the world of Henry VIII as a tragic one associated with the wheel of fortune:
The wheel of fortune is a tragic conception: it is never genuinely a comic one, though a history play may achieve a technically comic conclusion by stopping the wheel turning half way. Thus, Henry V ends with triumphant conquest and a royal marriage, though, as the epilogue reminds us, King Henry died almost immediately and sixty years of unbroken disaster followed. In Henry VIII there are three great falls, those of Buckingham, Wolsey, and Queen Catherine, and three corresponding rises, those of Cromwell, Cranmer, and Anne Boleyn. The play ends with the triumph of the last three, leaving the audience to remember that the wheel went on turning and brought them down too. Henry VIII turns the wheel himself, and is not turned by it, like Richard II, but history never can end as comedy does, except for the polite fiction, found in Cranmer’s prophecy at the end of the play, that the reigning monarch is a Messianic ruler.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B42QACAQVIM&feature=related
Charles Dickens’s birthday passed the other day, so here’s the classic 1948 film version of Oliver Twist, with Alec Guinness as Fagin.
From The Secular Scripture:
There are said to be customs and rituals in ancient Greece that explain the child-exposing convention; but they do not explain why Victorian writers, fifteen centuries later, should be as preoccupied with it as ever. With the archetype, at least: the actual exposure and adoption procedure is found only in stories with a strong folk tale feeling about them, like Silas Marner. Scott and Dickens would often be helpless for plot interest without the motif of mysterious birth: in Dickens a hero’s parents, like those of Oliver Twist, may be triumphantly produced at the end of the story even though they were mere names, playing no part in the story itself. (CW 18, 67)
Immanuel Kant died on this date in 1804 (born 1724).
From The Double Vision:
The greatest of all philosophers who took criticism as his base of operations, Kant, examined three aspects of the critical faculty. First was pure reason, which contemplates the objective world withing the framework of its own categories, and hence see the objective counterpart of itself, the world as it may really be eluding the categories. Second was practical reason, where a conscious being is assumed to be a conscious will, and penetrates farther into the kind of reality we call existential, even into experience relating to God. Third was the aesthetic faculty dealing with the environment within the categories of beauty, a critical operation involving, for Kant, questions of the kind we have just called teleological, relating to purpose and ultimate design.
For Kant, however, the formula of beauty in the natural world at least was “purposiveness without purpose.” The crystallizing of snowflakes is beautiful because it suggests design and intention and yet eludes these things. To suggest that the design of a snowflake has been produced by a designer, whether Nature or God, suggests also that somebody or something has worked to produce it: such a suggestion limits it beauty by cutting of the sense of a spontaneous bursting into symmetry. “Fire delights in form,” says Blake, and Wallace Stevens adds that we trust the world only when we have no sense of a concealed creator. (CW 4, 191)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z06GVWJgTWU&feature=player_embedded
Tahrir Square celebrations, today
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_0SpjmRAfU
The Shah leaves Iran on February 11th 1979
On this date in 1979 the Iranian revolution established a theocracy under the supreme leadership of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.
From one of the late notebooks:
History redeems: there’s a process within history that isn’t at all what Marxism calls the historical process, but relates to the cultural tradition. People denounced or martyred as horrible heretics in the hysteria of their times later become objects of great cultural interest. The twenty-first century will find The Satanic Verses a document of great interest to scholars and critics, but the Ayatollah will be of no interest to anybody except as one more nightmare of bigotry that history has produced in such profusion. One would hope that eventually the stupid human race would get the point. God doesn’t create post-mortem hells even for people devoting their lives to cruelty and tyranny, but if he did the Ayatollah would certainly be howling in one of them forever. (CW 6, 644)
Cairo, today
Probably anybody who’s interested at all is fully up to date on developments in Egypt — Mubarak may be out tonight, and there’s talk of a quiet, behind the scenes military coup sympathetic to the will of the people. It’s very gratifying that this popular uprising was not extinguished like the one in Iran. But, of course, it does raise the issue of what comes next, and here perhaps is where our real fretting begins. We hope for the best for the Egyptian people, whose courage this last week especially has seemed almost superhuman. And this kind of thing is certainly consistent with Frye’s vision of revolution informed by primary concern. We can, occasionally, do what needs to be done in the name of the things that are otherwise least likely to be named. But, as Frye wryly notes in The Double Vision, “Hope springs eternal, unfortunately it usually springs prematurely.” Vigilance matters now. From this point on, merely hoping won’t make it so.
(Photo from The Hindu)
The Centre for Comparative Literature is proud to present two lectures by Northrop Frye Professor in Comparative Literature for 2010-2011, Carol Mavor: Wednesday March 9 and Thursday March 10, 5:30, Jackman Humanities 100.
Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, England. Mavor is the author of four books: Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (Duke UP, 2007), Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess, Hawarden (Duke UP, 1999), and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Duke UP, 1995) and Black and Blue: The Bruising of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amour, is forthcoming from Duke UP (2011). Her essays have appeared in Cabinet Magazine, Art History, Photography and Culture, Photographies, as well as edited volumes, including Geoffrey Batchen’s Photography Degree Zero and Mary Sheriff’s Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art. Her most recent published essay is on the French child-poet Minou Drouet.
Mavor’s writing has been widely reviewed in publications in the U.S. and U.K., including the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice. She has lectured broadly in the US and the UK, including The Photographers’ Gallery (London), University of Cambridge, Duke University and the Royal College of Art. For 2010-2011, Mavor was named the Northrop Frye Chair in Literary Theory at University of Toronto. Currently, Mavor is completing Blue Mythologies: A Study of the Hue of Blue (forthcoming from Reaktion in 2012).
Blue Mythologies is a visual, literary and cultural study of the color blue. Blue is a particularly duplicitous colour. For example, blue is often associated with opposites or near opposites: like joy and depression; or the sea and the sky; or infinite life and death. Mavor’s approach is semiological, as prescribed by Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1953). “Mythology,” because it is truth disguised as fiction and fiction disguised as truth, is, by definition, as duplicitous as blue. The subjects are mostly Anglo-European and include a full range of blues: Chantal Akerman’s 2000 film La Captive; the Aran islands off the coast of Western Ireland; cyanotypes and blue Polaroids; the Australian Satin Bowerbrid; Agnes Varda’s 1965 film Le Bonheur; Roger Hiorns Seizure, the 2006 installation of copper-sulfite crystals grown to cover an entire London bed-sit; Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1993 film Blue; Werther’s Goethe (1774), Novalis’s Henry von Ofterdingen (ca. 1799-80) and Bernardin’s Paul et Virginia (1787). Nevertheless, the research includes blue in non-Western contexts: for example, Krishna’s blue skin in eighteenth-century Jodhpur painting or the powder-blue burqas in Samira Makhmalbaf’s 2003 film, At Five in the Afternoon.
Lynn Beavis, the director of the Richmond Art Gallery, cites Frye’s “Academy Without Walls” in a recent column in the Richmond News.
An excerpt:
On my office wall I keep a quote from the great literary theorist Northrop Frye. It reads in part: “…the arts have something to teach beyond themselves, a way of seeing and hearing that nothing else can give, a way of living in society in which the imagination takes its proper central place.
“Just as the sciences show us the physical world of nature, so the arts show us the human world that man is trying to build out of nature. And, without moralizing, the arts gradually lead us to separate the vision of the world we want to live in from the world that we hate and reject…”
I always return to this quote when I feel dispirited about the work I do, as it reminds me of the broader principle and the experiential wealth I have inherited through my exposure to the arts. Arts, culture and heritage are often viewed in terms of the “nice to have, but not essential” category, particularly when it comes to the matter of funding, but as Frye reminds us, the arts have a much more significant and intrinsic meaning that is often overlooked in the bottom-line mentality.
Because the arts engage us on both an emotion and intellectual level, we learn more about ourselves — our motivations, prejudices, assumptions — and through the self-examination it provokes, we learn to take a new view on the world.