3.5 Canada’s Colonial Imagination
by admin
3 ] Frye writes:
A much more complicated cultural tension [more than two languages] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice a versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Dubussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In English literature we have to go back to Anglo-Saxon times to encounter so incongruous a collision of cultures (Bush Garden 221).
It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott’s work, or tension between “primitive and civilized” representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the “vanishing Indians” and wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people – as a distinct people, is never brought to light. In 1924, in his role as the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, Scott wrote:
The policy of the Dominion has always been to protect Indians, to guard their identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods, which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population (In Chater, 23).
For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).
In the closing chapter of Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination a summation of themes central to Canadian literature is delivered. Frye places particular emphasis on his belief that is the fact that Canadian writing is often “literary” only incidentally, and it is, instead, an national awareness of history which we should associate more closely with the shaping of Canadian literature. He states:
“If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting… [Canadian literature] is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature” (216).
Frye is of the opinion that the historical conditions of Canadian life, and a corresponding desire to depict those conditions, have proved to be one of the strongest influences upon the imagination of Canadian writers. He emphasizes that this central developmental connection, between the Canadian imagination and the Canadian relationship with the land, is inherently colonial, saying:
“like other forms of history… [cultural history] has its own themes of exploration, settlement, and development, but these themes relate to a social imagination that explores and settles and develops” (217).
Here, Frye seems to indicate a fundamentally mimetic quality in Canadian literature, in so far as the Canadian imagination and its literary expression has the capacity to figuratively mirror, in art, the romantic idealization and exploitative violations of physical colonization. It is this mimetic colonial quality, so central to Canadian literature, which renders the poetic hypocrisy of D.C. Scott irrelevant in the context of Frye’s conclusion.
From the broader perspective of a critical analysis of colonial violations within Canada it certainly is not irrelevant to note that Scott idealized and exploited the facets of a culture he simultaneously helped destroy. However, in this specific context of The Bush Garden‘s closing chapter Scott is referenced as a literary exemplar of the collision between colonial and First Nations peoples, his hypocrisy not simply as a beaurocrat but as an artist is a prefect illustration of the close connection between Canadian literature and the country’s colonial past. What Frye seeks to underscore at this specific juncture in his book is the way in which Scott’s poetry idealizes, exploits, and ultimately overwrites the reality of First Nations lived experience in much the same way as colonial settlements were built atop lands forcibly plundered and taken from the First Nations inhabitants.
Works Cited:
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.
Hello,
I am impressed with your succinct argument about the mimetic colonial quality of Canadian Literature being the reason for Frye finding the hypocrisy of DC Scott’s poetry irrelevant. I also enjoy the metaphors you have used within your writing. I wonder, do you think Frye’s ethnocentric critique has been a motivator for Aboriginal writers, like Thomas King, to produce distinctively post-colonial focused writing?
Best,
Alison
Hey there,
That’s a great question. I’m not sure if I would label Frye’s writing ethnocentric, but I do think that his discussion of Canada and Canadian literature, so heavily cantered on the notion of connection to the land, represents a broader attitude with which King may be frustrated. I get the impression that King is exasperated by the colonial tendency to automatically associate First Nations peoples and the land, in a way that is formulaic, predictable, and near-sighted. Though King does discuss the presence of the land, I feel that he also tries to tell stories about average people, particularly First Nations people, who have no such quasi-mystical link to their geography, in order to work against stereotypes that pervade assumptions about Canadian and First Nations lived experience.