Vol. 12 No. 14 · 26 July 1990
pages 7-8 | 3196 words
With the wind in our shrouds
Mary Beard
- The Making of ‘The Golden Bough’: The Origin and Growth of an Argument by Robert Fraser
Macmillan, 240 pp, £35.00, July 1990, ISBN 0 333 49631 0
He has changed the world – not as Mussolini has changed it, with coloured shirts and castor oil; not as Lenin has changed it, boldly emptying out the baby of the humanities with the filthy bath of Tsarism; nor as Hitler, with the fanfaronade of physical force. He has changed it by altering the chemical composition of the cultural air that all men breathe.’
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Letters
Vol. 12 No. 15 · 16 August 1990
From Robert Fraser
Mary Beard’s review of my recent study of The Golden Bough (LRB, 26 July) involves a strange reversal of values. The subject of her elegant piece is Frazer’s reception; the subject of my book is his sources. Any consideration of his impact I had meticulously deferred to a related publication, Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination, dealing with many of the authors she lists in her concluding paragraph, to be published under my editorship this autumn. Yet she insists it is by his public appeal alone that Frazer must be judged. The appeal is easily explained. Possessed of a vivid and mellifluous style and a narrative drive rare among analytical writers, Frazer addresses religious anxieties deep in his audience, anxieties even now not confined to addicts of ‘esoteric religion’. He is an agnostic who cannot dispense with religion, a scientist with misgivings about science, a discursive writer with an itch to tell a story. He is a man whose mind incessantly travels, and one of the least complaisant authors in our literature.
In all of this his readers have followed, and continue to follow him. It is not in search of a justification for imperialism that they turn to his pages, since, convinced of the communality of human consciousness, there is little he says that can realistically support it. ‘It would be naive to suppose that Frazer’s theories and arguments had much to do with his popularity,’ says Beard: yet the verdict of the News Chronicle in 1937 – ‘he discovered why you believe what you do’ – suggests that it is precisely at the level of his meaning that Frazer does communicate.
Robert Fraser
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College,
