Table Of ContentSIR JAMES FRAZER AND THE LITERARY
IMAGINATION
Also by Robert Fraser
THE MAKING OF THE GOLDEN BOUGH
WEST AFRICAN POETRY: A CRITICAL HISTORY
THIS ISLAND PLACE
THE NOVELS OF A YI KWEI ARMAH
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF GEORGE BARKER (editor)
Fiction
THE HORNED APE
For the theatre
THE PARISIAN PAINTER
THE LADY OF THE LAND
GOD'S GOOD ENGLISHMAN
SOMETHING IN THE AIR
JANUARY AND MAY
GESUALDO
The Golden Bough (1834) by J. M. W. Turner, described in Frazer's opening paragraph.
From 1847 to 1929 this hung in the National Gallery in London. It was then transferred to
the Tate Gallery, where it now hangs.
SIR JAMES FRAZER
AND THE LITERARY
IMAGINATION
ESSAYS IN AFFINITY AND INFLUENCE
Edited by
ROBERT FRASER
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-20922-4 ISBN 978-1-349-20920-0 (eBook)
DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-20920-0
Editorial matter and selection © Robert Fraser 1990
Chapter XIV© A. S. Byatt 1990
Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1990
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-48683-2
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1991
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sir James Frazer and the literary imagination: essays in affinity and
influence I edited by Robert Fraser.
p. em.
1. English literature-20th century-History and criticism.
2. Mythology in literature. 3. English literature-19th century
History and criticism. 4. Literature and anthropology-Great
Britain-History. 5. Religion, Primitive, in literature.
6. Frazer, James George, Sir, 1854--1941-lnfluence. 7. Frazer,
James George, Sir, 1854--1941, Golden Bough. 8. American
literature-History and criticism. I. Fraser, Robert, 1947-
PR478.M96S57 1991
820. 9' 15--dc20 90-8880
CIP
PREFACE
"READ The Golden Bough!" Thus Grant Allen, novelist and amateur
ethnographer, to his friend and fellow folklorist Edward Clodd in 18go.
The book which Allen thus pithily commended, by one J. G. Frazer MA,
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, had been published on 1 June,
and soon Clodd was its warmest advocate. On 18 December, Thomas
Hardy entered in his pocket book,
Mr E. Clodd this morning gives an excellent neat answer to my
question why the superstitions of a remote Asiatic and a Dorset
labourer are the same. "The attitude of man" he says "at corresponding
levels of culture, before like phenomena, is pretty much the same,
your Dorset peasant representing the persistence of the barbaric idea
which confuses persons and things, and founds wide generalisations
on the slenderest analogies."
This confusion between persons and things was of course a cornerstone
of Frazer's analysis of magic. In the very first chapter of The Golden
Bough, while describing the superstitions of his Asiatic and other subjects,
he had observed, "If it is wished to kill a person, an image of him is
made and then destroyed." Now, twelve years earlier Hardy had written
The Return of the Native, in which Eustacia Vye drowns after being
melted down in effigy. No wonder he was intrigued, or that Clodd's
reply delighted him. Paganism was alive and well in Wessex, and it was
not only the farmers who were affected. Six years later in Jude the
Obscure, Hardy was to describe how Sue Bridehead, in her agnostic
phase, purchased statuettes ofVenus and Apollo from an itinerant hawker
and set them up in her lodgings on each side of the crucifix, telling her
Anglo-Catholic landlady that they were Mary Magdalene and Peter. Could
religious syncretism, could spiritual duplicity, go further?
Clodd, meanwhile, had not been idle. Having educated Hardy, he
turned his attention to a younger acquaintance, with whom he was soon
discussing myth and folklore. This acquaintance was W. B. Yeats,
v
vi PREFACE
interested less in Dorset farmers than in the Irish peasantry, whose
legends he was busily transforming into a national mythology. Clodd lent
him books, one of which was probably The Golden Bough. Yeats
communicated his enthusiasm for the work to J. M. Synge, who took
copious notes on Frazer's text. When the Second Edition appeared in
1900, Joseph Conrad read extracts in the Fortnightly Review, a copy of
which he shared with H. G. Wells. Soon we find Lawrence quoting the
Second Edition, and with the Third of 1906-15 the floodgates open
wide. Eliot calls Frazer "unquestionably the greatest master"; Wyndham
Lewis reads The Scapegoat and concocts his own Childermass. In 1930
Ludwig Wittgenstein borrows the Abridged Edition and aphorises a set
of passionate disagreements in his notebooks, determining to begin his
work-in-progress with a consideration of magic. "Ever read The Golden
Bough?" a drunken character asks Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler's
The Long Goodhye of 1953. "No, too long for you. Shorter version,
though. Ought to read it. Proves our sexual habits are pure convention."
As the battle of the sexes is joined during the Ritual Dances in Act III of
Michael Tippett's opera The Midmmmer Marriage (1946-52), the chorus
declaims, "Fire! St John's Fire!" - a reference surely to Frazer on
midsummer conflagrations. One of A. S. Byatt's mother's most cherished
possessions was Leaves from "The Golden Bough" (1924), "culled by
Lady Frazer" and illustrated by H. M. Brock, which in due course she
bequeathed to her daughter, along with a lasting enthusiasm. One could,
one feels, go on for ever.
Frazer's influence has been charted before, notably in John Vickery's
The Literary Impact of "The Golden Bough" (1973). But few have
registered how deep that influence has been, or how variegated in kind.
It has now exercised its peculiar spell over the literary world for a full
century. To mark the event, Macmillan, Frazer's own publishers, are
issuing this collection, together with a study entitled The Making of "The
Golden Bough": The Origins and Growth ofa n Argument. Together they
compose a head of Janus, one face looking back to key figures and
influences in Frazer's past, the other forwards to the writers and thinkers
he in his tum influenced.
Frazer's story begins back in the Glasgow of the 185os, where he grew
up and later absorbed a distinctively Scottish intellectual tradition before
moving to Cambridge in 1874. For that story, readers are directed to
Robert Ackerman's f. G. Frazer: The Life and Work of 1987. For the
long process of intellectual ingestion that led to the writing of Frazer's
greatest work, they should tum to The Making of "The Golden Bough".
The object of the present book is twofold: to ascertain how much Frazer
PREFACE vii
shared with his contemporaries, how far he drew on a climate of ideas
and sensibility common to his time; and to trace the variegated trammels
of his influence from the tum of the century to the present day. Lionel
Trilling once said that The Golden Bough should be the starting-point
for any study of modem literature. This collection will have fulfilled its
purpose if it manages to demonstrate just how emphatically that is the
case.
The book has been some three years in the planning, and is based for
the most part on a series of inter-collegiate lectures delivered in the
Senate House, University of London, in the Michaelmas term of 1988
under the auspices of the English Board of Studies. Acknowledgements
are due to Trinity College, Cambridge, for accommodating a day
conference on Frazer's work which effectively served as a catalyst for
the whole enterprise; to the English Department of Royal Holloway and
Bedford New College, London, for granting me an Honorary Research
Associateship, during my tenure of which the college became in large
measure my own Trinity; to the British School at Rome for their
hospitality and the use of their matchless library; and to the staff of the
Wren Library, at Trinity, and the British Library in London for their
unfailing courtesy and support. The publishers and I would like to thank
Saul Bellow and Viking Penguin for permission to quote from Henderson
the Rain King; the trustees of the Tate Gallery for permission to reproduce
Turner's painting The Golden Bough; Edward Arnold, publishers of
F. M. Comford's The Origin of Attic Comedy, for allowing us to
reproduce the title-page of that book; and the Wyndham Lewis Memorial
Trust and the libraries of the State University of New York at Stony
Brook and Buffalo (Poetry/Rare Books Collections) and Cornell Univer
sity, Ithaca, NY (Department of Rare Books), for permission to reproduce
Wyndham Lewis's water-colour drawing Eleusis: Demeter and Persephone
(1912) and the cover-design for BLAST, no. 2 (July 1915), and to quote
from the Childermass manuscripts (all copyright the estate of Mrs G. A.
Wyndham Lewis). I am grateful to Dr David Margolis for the Wyndham
Lewis photographs and to Graham Eyre for his editorial work on the
manuscript. I would also like to tender my personal thanks to my wife
and son for living with me during periods when I was thinking about the
great Sir James, and not about the dinner.
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College RoBERT FRASER
University of London
