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\u201cThe whole appeal of Sherlock Holmes,\u201d Frye writes, \u201cwas connected with his ability to notice ordinary details. Here again is the dialectic between the all-seeing eye of God & of the spy of the state with his ‘telescreen.'” In Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> Frye links the telescreen with the \u201chumiliation of being watched by a hostile or derisive eye,\u201d a theme in the tragedies of such figures as Prometheus and Milton\u2019s Samson.<\/p>\n I\u2019m reminded of two stories from Frye\u2019s early life, one more or less innocent, the other malicious.<\/p>\n When he was a student circuit rider on the Saskatchewan prairies, he reported that whenever his horse Katy \u201cbroke into a trot you had to stand straight up in the stirrups and let the saddle come up and caress your backside at intervals. I remember something that I found later in a Canadian critic, I think it was Elizabeth Waterson, who spoke of the prairies as the sense of immense space with no privacy. And I found that on top of Katy, who naturally stimulated one\u2019s bladder very considerably. I realized that I couldn\u2019t get off in that vast stretch of prairie because everybody was out with opera glasses, you see, watching the preacher on top of Katy. That was what people did. They all had spy glasses. They weren\u2019t doing it with any malicious sense. It was just that their lives were rather devoid of incident, and naturally they liked to see who was going along. It wasn\u2019t their fault.\u201d<\/p>\n And now the sinister tale, recorded by Frye in one of his diaries:<\/p>\n \u201cI often wonder about intuitive racial-stereotype thinking: a lot of it\u2019s balls. For instance, there\u2019s a big good-natured German in Moncton called Lichtenberg who had been a peaceful, thrifty, industrious contractor there for thirty years. For two wars the local Gestapo have cut their teeth on him: when the news is bad or they get tired of reading spy stories they\u2019d go up and practise on him. Recently the Gestapo combed his whole house over, in response to some silly anonymous \u2018tip,\u2019 & one of them found two large knobs in a dark closet. \u2018Aha!\u2019 he said, stepped into the closet & gave one a twist, thinking of course it was a private transmitter set. It was an extra shower he\u2019d installed. Incidentally, he\u2019s a naturalized Canadian citizen, but married before that, so his wife, who belongs to one of the oldest Maritime families, is an enemy alien. Well, Dad\u2019s friendship for Lichtenberg has come in for much unfavorable comment in that stinking little kraal Moncton, & the stinkers point out gleefully that \u2018Frye\u2019 is really a German name, & that I look just like a German. It\u2019s a beautiful theory, only it just happens to be wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cThe whole appeal of Sherlock Holmes,\u201d Frye writes, \u201cwas connected with his ability to notice ordinary details. Here again is the dialectic between the all-seeing eye of God & of the spy of the state with his ‘telescreen.’” In Anatomy of Criticism Frye links the telescreen with the \u201chumiliation of being watched by a hostile […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12,16,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biography","category-bob-denham","category-memoir"],"yoast_head":"\n