A notice from The Hayward Gallery, London, 28 May 2010:
The British Art Show Prelude
Three of Britain’s most exciting emerging artists–Roger Hiorns, Phoebe Unwin, Mick Peter–the Turner Prize-nominated artist, the painter and the sculptor use Northrop Frye’s model of seasons/genre to explore some issues in contemporary British art. Chaired by Tom Morton and Lisa Lefeuvre, Curators of British Art Show 7.
A wax recording of Whitman in 1890
Today is Walt Whitman‘s birthday (1819 – 1892).
Frye in The Modern Century:
When the Romantic movement began, there was one important primitive influence on it, that of the oral ballads, which began to be collected and classified at that time. The oral ballad makes a functional use of refrains and other strongly marked patterns of repetition, which correspond to the emphasis on design in the primitive pictorial arts. The fact that it depended for survival on an oral tradition meant that whatever personal turns of phrase there may originally have been in it were smoothed out, the poem thus acquiring a kind of stripped poetic surface quite unlike that of written poetry. The literary ballads which imitate these characteristics — the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake’s Mental Traveller, Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci – come about as close as poetry can come to reproducing directly the voice of the creative powers of the mind below consciousness, a voice which is uninhibited and yet curiously impersonal as well. This was also the “democratic” voice that Whitman attempted to reproduce, and Whitman is the godfather of all the folk singing and other oral developments of our time which cover so large an area of contemporary popular culture. (CW 11, 54)
Frye is called on in a 2009 amicus curiae brief in a case against Frederik Coulting by J.D. Salinger, who had asserted that Coulting’s book, 60 Years Later, “infringes [his] copyright rights in . . . the character Holden Caulfield.” (Frye’s remarks on Salinger in an earlier post here.)
In the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
__________________________________
J.D. SALINGER, individually and as trustee of the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust, Plaintiff-Appellee,
v. FREDRIK COLTING, writing under the name John David California, WINDUPBIRD PUBLISHING LTD., NICOTEXT A.B. and ABP, INC., doing business as SCB Distributors, Inc.,
Defendants-Appellants.
On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE PUBLIC CITIZEN, INC.
“That ability to “build freely upon the ideas” in others’ work is essential to First Amendment protection because even the most creative or artistic activity depends on the ability to borrow from what has gone before. “Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.” Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 97 (1957). As Frye put it, we have inherited “a literature which includes Chaucer, much of whose poetry is translated or paraphrased from others; Shakespeare, whose plays sometimes
follow their sources almost verbatim; and Milton, who asked for nothing better than to steal as much as possible out of the Bible” (p. 16 of the brief).
Rupert Everett as Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love
On this date Christopher Marlowe was murdered (1564 – 1593).
Frye on the relation of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Webster in Notebook 9:
In my young days I said that Marlowe’s characters were demigods moving in a social ether, that Webster’s were “cases” of a sick society, & that Shakespeare was the transition from one to the other. Well, it’s true that in DM [The Duchess of Malfi], for example, there is no order-figure because there is no genuine society: there is a Dionysiac health-figure instead, the Duchess herself, & society itself, personated by Ferdinand & the Cardinal, is the action-figure. I think that this is the kind of tragedy adumbrated by Chapman in B d’A [Bussy D'Ambois]. Yet even Tamburlaine is a scourge of God, the destructive nature let loose in a society that has no God. I suppose Shakespeare’s nearest approach to a social tragedy of the Webster kind is really Coriolanus rather than TC [Troilus and Cressida]: Co has no de jure magic because he can’t crystallize any kind of society, as Antony can. (CW 20, 254-5)
To commemorate the anniversary of Christopher Marlowe’s death, which is tomorrow, here’s Derek Jarman’s 1991 film adaptation of Edward II. (This version is of course rendered in the Marlovian mighty line but with Dutch subtitles.)
The rest of the film after the jump.
