Council of Trent

Leave a reply

Pope Pius IV

On this date in 1563 the Council of Trent held its final session.

Frye in The Double Vision:

In many respects the Cold War repeated the later stages of the situation that arose with the Reformation in the sixteenth century.  Then, a revolutionary movement, at first directed mainly toward a reform of abuses in the church, showed signs of expanding and breaking open a tightly-closed structure of authority that claimed exclusive and infallible power in both spiritual and temporal orders.  What was centrally at issue was reformation itself, the conception of a church that could be reformed in principle and not merely through modifying the corruptions that had grown up within it.  The Reformers thought of the church as subject to a higher criterion, namely the Word of God, and as obligated to carry on a continuous dialogue with the Word in a subordinate position to it.

Established authority reacted to this movement as established authority invariably does.  The Council of Trent gives an impression of passing one reactionary resolution after another in a spirit of the blindest panic.  Yet the Council of Trent succeeded in its main objective, which was to persuade Catholics that post-Tridentine Catholicism was not only the legitimate descendant of the pre-Reformation church, but was in fact identical with it.  The logical inference was the claim of a power of veto over the Bible, a position set out in Newman’s Essy on the Development of Christian Doctrine, where a historical dialectic takes supreme command in a way closely parallel to the contructs of Hegel and Marx.  (CW 4, 173-4)

TGIF: “Forbidden Planet”

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y4crGU7dkg

“Miranda” and “Ariel”

Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen (brother of former Deputy Prime Minister Erik Nielsen) died this week.  He was most famous later in his career for his deadpan comic style, beginning in 1980 with Airplane.  But he started out as an aspiring leading man in 1956’s Forbidden Planet.

Frye on at least a couple of occasions refers to the movie as a science fiction adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

A compilation of Nielson comedy clips after the jump.

Continue reading →

Frye on de Sade

2 Replies

Illustration from a Dutch edition of Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue

Further to yesterday’s post, here is a collection of Frye references to de Sade.

It is an elementary axiom in criticism that morally the lion lies down with the lamb. Bunyan and Rochester, Sade and Jane Austen, The Miller’s Tale and The Second Nun’s Tale, are all equally elements of a liberal education, and the only moral criterion to be applied to them is that of decorum. Similarly, the moral attitude taken by the poet in his work derives largely from the structure of that work. Thus the fact that Le Malade Imaginaire is a comedy is the only reason for making Argan’s wife a hypocrite—she must be got rid of to make the play end happily (Anatomy of Criticism, CW 22, 105-6)

Blake says that we live in, if you like, a fallen world, that is, a world of great inequities, of privi­lege, a world of ferocity. He doesn’t have an ideal­ized view of nature like Rousseau. He doesn’t believe in the noble savage. Wordsworth says that nature is our teacher, and the Marquis de Sade says that nature justifies your pleasure in inflicting pain on others. Blake would say that there is a lot more evidence for the Marquis de Sade’s view of nature than for Wordsworth’s. So for Blake what happens is that the child, who is the central figure of the Songs of Innocence, is born believing that the world is made for his benefit, that the world makes human sense. He then grows up and discovers that the world isn’t like this at all. So what happens to his childlike vision? Blake says it gets driven underground, what we would now call the subconscious. There you have the embryonic mythical shape that is worked on later by people like Schopenhauer, Marx, and Freud. (Cayley interview, CW 24, 958)

It is unfortunate that Praz’s influential book concentrates so much on the purely psychological elements of sadism, for sadism is far more important as a sardonic parody of the Rousseauist view of society. According to de Sade, nature teaches us that the greatest good of life is pleasure, and there is no keener pleasure than the inflicting (or, for masochists, who complete the theory, the suffering) of pain. A society of sadistic masters and masochistic slaves would therefore be a “natural” society. There is no evidence that Rousseau’s natural society ever did, could, or will exist: the evidence that it is natural for man to form societies that condemn the majority to misery and humiliation and give a small group the privilege of enjoying their torments is afforded by the whole of human history. The sense that ecstasy and pain are really the same thing is connected with the fact, just mentioned, that for Romantic mythology the greatest experiences of life originate in a world which is also the world of death and destruction. (A Study of English Romanticism, CW 17, 121-2)

The symbol of the artist as criminal, however, goes much deeper. I spoke of the way in which optimistic theories of progress and revolution had grown out of Rousseau’s conception of a society of nature and reason buried under the injustices of civilization and awaiting release. But, around the same time, the Marquis de Sade was expounding a very different view of the natural society. According to this, nature teaches us that pleasure is the highest good in life, and the keenest form of pleasure consists in inflicting or suffering pain. Hence the real natural society would not be the reign of equality and reason prophesied by Rousseau: it would be a society in which those who liked tormenting others were set free to do so. So far as evidence is relevant, there is more evidence for de Sade’s theory of natural society than there is for Rousseau’s.  (The Modern Century, CW 11, 46-7)

I’ve said too that de Sade is just as right about “nature” as Wordsworth is: he simply points to its predatory & parasitic side. But no animal acts with the malice that man does: that’s a product of consciousness. (Late Notebooks, CW 5, 56)

Continue reading →

Frye Alert: The Archetypal Archive

1 Reply

Image from Neil Gaiman’sSandman 15

Gene Phillips of The Archetypal Archive has a post up today, “The Empiricist of Dreams,” that makes extensive reference to Frye.

A sample:

The battle between Freudian reductionism and Jungian amplification has been fought on other fronts, as when Northrop Frye describes the “distinction between two views of literature that has run all through the history of criticism. These two views are the aesthetic and the creative, the Aristotelian and the Longinian, the view of literature as product and the view of literature as process.”—Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 66.

Frye probably borrowed the terms “product and process” from the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, while his opposition of Aristotle and Longinus may remind some readers of this blog of a similar opposition by R.A. Habib, which I reprinted in The Sphere of Longinus. I frankly don’t like Frye’s terms “aesthetic” and “creative,” which Frye himself doesn’t use often, either in the Anatomy or elsewhere. I much prefer the opposition he makes in another essay, quoted here, between a story’s “narrative values” and its “significant values.” In contradistinction to what Frye writes in this section of the Anatomy, I would say that while I agree that Aristotle is indeed more aligned to the view of literature as product, this goes hand-in-hand with a tendency to see literature as a means of transmitting “significant values.” Thus literature is just one step up from rhetoric, in that its purpose is to convey those values through a fictional façade, much as Freud would’ve believed that a dream’s purpose was to convey the psychological truths of sexual repression. In contrast, though Longinus wasn’t without his own concern for “significant values,” on the whole he seems more concerned with pure “narrative values” when he speaks of how poetry’s effects bring forth the internal ecstasy he calls “the sublime.” This in turn squares up with Jung’s tendency to value dream-fantasies for their own communicative power, not as representations of something else.

Marquis de Sade

Leave a reply

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRfIj59AqBo

A clip from Peter Brooks’s 1967 film adaptation of Marat/Sade: “He should destroy with passion. Like a man.”

On this date in 1814 the Marquis de Sade died (born 1740).

Frye in Notebook 27:

de Sade is just as right about “nature” as Wordsworth is: he simply points to its predatory side.  But no animal acts with the malice that man does: that’s the product of consciousness. (CW 5, 56)

How Student Activism Saved the Centre for Comparative Literature

Leave a reply

Here’s the article from rabble.ca.

A sample:

Some key components of the students’ and faculty’s campaigns included petitions, letter-writing campaigns, protests and discussions at town hall meetings with the Dean. As time went on, the chances of the programs’ survival gradually increased.

“I think that one of the first key moments in our fight was when our story was reported on [the front page of The Globe and Mail], Stapleton says. “That was the first moment when it became clear people outside of the university cared about this situation — to see any issue on the front page really gives support to what we’re doing.”

Varsity: “Profs allege donor influence”

1 Reply

Further to my earlier post, here’s an article in Monday’s U of T Varsity, “Profs allege donor influence.”

The lede:

Two U of T professors say philanthropists are determining the university’s priorities, and not the faculty and students. Professors Paul Hamel and John Valleau believe there is a possibility that university benefactors could even shape academic work.

“We’re finding that philanthropy is driving the priorities of the university,” said Hamel. “They’re being set by administration, independent of what the faculty or the academy determines should be the priorities.”