Explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye. 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 Bush Garden, renowned Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye argues that great literature is independent of social-historical context. “The forms of literature,” writes Frye, “are autonomous: they exist within literature itself and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature” (Frye 234). The failure of Canadian writers to recognize that literature is a closed system is precisely the reason why the nation has yet to produce a classic thus far. However, the inability of Canadian author to pull us “toward the center of literary experience itself” does have its merits: in this lacuna, readers become aware of the author’s social and historical setting.

What, precisely, are the qualities of the “Canadian” context? Noting the predominant focus on Canadian life in Canadian literature, Frye posits that the Canadian imagination records that which it has reacted to—nature. This environment is a barren and unoccupied wasteland—“terrifyingly cold, empty, and vast” (245)—and it has left an indelible mark on the Canadian imagination. “One wonders,” writes the theorist in his discussion of the frontier, “if any other national consciousness has had so large an amount of the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested so built into it” (222). The Canadian landscape has come to represent for him that which is unknowable and morally inexplicable; Canada’s “obliterated environment” represents for him “the riddle of unconsciousness” (245), the epitome of which is death.

What I found most disturbing about The Bush Garden was that Frye, a centuries after settlers like Susanna Moore, continues to imagine Canada as a terra nullis. “Canada,” he writes, “with its empty spaces, its largely unknown lakes and rivers and islands… has had this peculiar problem of an obliterated environment throughout most of its history” (xxiii). The irony, of course, is that Canada suffers not so much from an effaced environment but from an erased history. By imagining Canada as “empty, unknown, obliterated,” Frye discounts that the fact this land has been populated, named, and cultivated by the First Nations for thousands of years.

Rather than asserting equal claim to the land, Frye’s Indian occupies a primitive role in his theory of “conscious mythology” (234). Presenting perhaps the English literary equivalent to stadial history, Frye proposes,

As society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts… become habits of metaphorical thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images.” (234-5)

Indians occupy that first step, possessing “a mythology that included all the main elements of our [the Canadian’s] own” but remained incompatible with Canadian culture (235). Note that by using the first person plural possessive “our,” Frye assumes a division between Indian and reader. With one fell stroke of his pen, he writes them out of any role within contemporary Canadian society and relegates them to “literary conventions of the nineteenth century” (235). Instead of seeing E. Pauline Johnson as a Native writer who sought to inculcate intercultural understanding through her poetry and performances (fun fact: Johnson’s performance costume is housed at the Museum of Vancouver), Frye dismisses the popularity of native writers as demonstrative of “the kind of rapport with nature” symbolized by the Indian that is central to pastoral myth (240). And we must remember that Frye doesn’t see much in nature, quite literally.

Returning to the question posed by Dr. Paterson, Scott’s purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures would be irrelevant to Frye because literature exists autonomously. There is nothing incompatible between mourning a vanishing people and actively instigating cultural genocide because great books are undetermined by the socio-historical environments in which they are spawned. Furthermore, Frye has no room in his theories to include the Native consciousness or legacy in the Canadian imagination. Grey Owl and Pauline Johnson were but brief and peripheral moments in Canadian literary history. (Did you know that Grey Owl was British?). Frye’s Indian is fictive—an object of literary criticism, mythic—a relic of the past, and archaic—excluded from the present and future reality of Canada.

Northrop Frye was a trailblazer of the 1960’s cultural nationalist movement—a movement focused on rejecting Canada’s ties to Britain and America, determined to free itself of the “colonial mind-set.” Dr. Patterson’s explanation of the dual nature of colonial identity is relevant here:

The settler-colonist than, is seen as occupying a space between the colonial powers and the Indigenous peoples… The dual identity… then is the settler-invader who dispossess the Indigenous peoples under the authority of colonial powers, and the settler-colonist who resists the authority of colonial powers in their dreams and efforts to build a nation that they could call home. (Patterson)

Canadians during the 1960’s failed to recognize that they retained a history of both colonized and colonizer. In fact, even as great thinkers like Frye tried to extricate themselves from colonial narratives, they ended up perpetuating a colonizing paradigm.

To end, I’d like to leave you with two thoughts: Firstly, is it not ironic that Northrop Frye, for all his preaching about great literature being independent of social-historical context, is famed precisely for his literary work in locating the Canadian imagination? Secondly, Frye may actually be correct in thinking of literature as “a conscious mythology,” for indeed, The Bush Garden itself is a prime example of how literature continues to perpetuate and solidify myths within a society. White man, whether asserting his right of place on the literary stage or political map, continues to displace the Native.

“17 Funny Snow Images That Will Keep You Warm with Laughter While the Blizzard Keeps Piling It Up.” Independent Journal Review. 2015. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

CanLit Guides. “Poetry and Racialization.” Canadian Literature. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

“Grey Owl: Trapper, Conservationist, Author, Fraud.” CBC Archives. CBC/Radio Canada, 2013. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Patterson, Erika. “Lesson 2.3.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

“Pauline Johnson’s Performance Costume.” Museum of Vancouver. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.