3.1: Northrop Frye vs. Duncan Campbell Scott (Question 3)

“[T]he imaginative writer is finding his identity within the world of literature itself” –Northrop Frye (240)

As Linda Hutcheon writes in the introduction in The Bush Garden, between 1950 and 1970, there was substantial progress in the quantity and quality of Canadian literature and Canadian criticism, and additionally, also a large difference in that knowledge about literature and criticism (Frye xiii). One significant player during this development is Northrop Frye, who was a writer, critic, teacher, and editor. According to Hutcheon, he had a “fine sense of his audiences—both the one he knew and the one he wanted to create, in Canada, for poetry” (Frye xii). Frye had a very specific approach to his criticism, and also was known for his openness about his method of review and evaluation, and for his “generosity and a respect for the act of creation” of writers (Frye ix).

As noted by Hutcheon, Frye has been a public voice and activist in the protest of the “stereotyping of Native peoples”, and in “Canada’s history of destroying, not preserving, indigenous cultures” (xvii). As Frye himself states, “Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteeth-century literary conventions” (236). With Frye’s active commentary on the cultural and racial tensions in Canada at that time, it is no surprise that he brought the political position and cultural representations in the works of a particular Canadian poet and prose writer to the attention of his readers.

Duncan Campbell Scott was a prominent literary figure in Canada in the late 19^th and early 20^th century. He wrote poetry, and prose fiction, but as Frye highlights, Scott was also, albeit less well known as, the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, which enacted policies that assimilated First Nations people in Canada at that time. Frye also noted that Scott’s works possesses a “complicated cultural tension [that] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive”, as he “writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Debussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan” (Frye 221). By bringing attention to and connecting the themes and subjects in Scott’s literary works with Scott’s political inclinations and power, Frye is creating a connection between a writer’s own experiences, and a writer’s subjects and objects in their writing, an approach to literature with which Frye himself actually disagrees.

As Frye exemplifies, Canadian literature, in contrast to British and American literature, has always been the treated and consumed with inherent ties to Canadian history, culture, and environment. Frye states that this “historical bias”, which existed for writers, readers, critics, and editors alike, has caused the improbability for any Canadian writers’ literary work to be experienced independent of its social, historical context, and associations (233).

If Frye questions the truthfulness of “the notion that the literature one admires must have been nourished by something admirable in the social environment is persistent”, what was the critic’s intention in highlighting the cultural collision in Scott’s works, and his political role in the assimilation of Native people (218)? As evident in other parts of his essay, the notable critic is adamant about the idea that a writer’s life experiences contribute less for his/her writing than most would like to believe. As Frye illustrates, while Canadian writers are compelled (whether subconsciously or by editors and publishers) to use “distinctively Canadian themes”, the Canadian setting would not be more than a novelty, as the real life experience of a writer is ultimately less influential to his/her writing than his/her reading experience, and literary development (234). As Frye humorously notes (I read this as one of his “quiet humour” (xi)), if a writer’s literary life is based on his real life experiences, he/she would eventually run out of things to write about (236). Frye believes strongly that the forms of literature is an “autonomous” being, in that they can only exist within literature itself (234). This resolute attitude towards literature, and writing is what makes is Frye’s observations about Scott’s background so peculiar, and “irrelevant” (Paterson).

So does the responsibility lie sole in the writers, publishers/editors, or readers for a literary work of a Canadian poet or writer to be freed from the writer’s social, political, cultural, biological background? Is it possible for this “Canadian” consciousness and/or imagination, which are embedded in the writers’ and readers’ minds, to be isolated to any degree, if at all?

-Kayi

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. West Concord: House of Anansi Press. 1995. Print.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 23:1.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genre 98A May 2014. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 July 2014. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl47098amay2014/unit-3/lesson-3-1/>.