I would like to begin this blog assignment by saying that I have found some of Northrop Frye’s ideas to be relatively challenging. After multiple re-readings I’m still not entirely sure if I’m grasping his theories completely. This being said, please comment if you feel my response to be out of line with Frye’s ideas. I think he has some very interesting things to say and would love your feedback.

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).

This is a response to a question concerning a topic that I have debated endlessly. It is a question regarding personal ethics in the consumption of art. In my own tastes, a few examples of Duncan Campbell Scott-like cases, artists who have done despicable, inexcusable things but have also made considerable works of art, include the likes of film director Roman Polanski and black metal musician Burzum. Similarly, John Ford, easily one of the most influential directors in film history, depicts Native Americans in such a backwards way that it threatens to compromise the integrity of the work as a whole. Can we ignore the implications of these artists’ personal lives on their works? Should we?

We need to look at what Northrop Frye sees as important to understand why he can divorce Scott’s political persona from his literary one. It seems that, for Frye, a great work of literature ”pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself” (216). Frye uses the word “autonomous” a couple of times in this chapter (216, 234) regarding the “world of literature.” Frye would seemingly have literature pull us completely into the realm of imagination. Frye looks at “cultural history” and the “social imagination” (221) so he is less focused on retelling of events than of how Canadian writers transmute history into art. This creates a nice little safe space in which the reader or critic is not forced to deal with heinous wrongdoings directly.

“The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature” (Frye 234). Content is secondary for Frye, what concerns him is the potential development of distinctly Canadian “forms” of expression. Frye has little interest in those writers who would “pour the new wine of content into the old bottles of form” (234). So Frye celebrates Scott’s juxtaposition of the “sophisticated” and the “primitive” (221) because he saw it as a form long out of use (since Anglo-Saxon times, apparently); we should hope that Frye would have been just as delighted with a different example of this juxtaposition (even though Chamberlin has taught us that this is a false dichotomy anyhow). Also, the two sides of this binary are fictional, coming from “within literature itself;” “Indians… were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions” (235) as opposed to human subjects with a basis in reality. Scott’s Native subject is a fictional one, an archetype whose overuse precludes a more critical look at its use. To acknowledge the much more disturbing juxtaposition, that Scott romanticized the “vanishing Indian” while actively promoting their disappearance would mean judging the literature based on something outside of itself, which Frye has little interest in. Too often, Canadian writers had something to say, but no new way of saying it; good, innovative literature, Frye argues (citing James Joyce and Marcel Proust as examples) is spawned from “profound literary scholarship” (234). A writer must be acquainted with the tradition they are working within in order to decide how to tastefully depart from or adhere to it. Again, we see Frye privileging form over content; Frye wants to know how a national literature prolongs itself and mutates and less how it interacts with the concerns of the day.

Having read some of Scott’s poems to further acquaint myself with his style, I find that their lack of artistic merit does not really justify any sort of defence based on aesthetic quality. I don’t like them. Frye would say that this doesn’t matter. The task of the critic is not strictly an “evaluative” one, but rather to “broaden the inductive basis on which… writers on Canadian literature [make] generalizations” (215). The critic’s duty is not to judge, but to define. This means that all of a nation’s works of art are engaged in a sort of conversation, and just because we like or dislike the work or find its contents or author reprehensible, does not make that voice louder or softer.

(Again, I can’t say that I’m totally with Frye on this. I would opt for a more case by case evaluation over Frye’s broad guidelines for the separation of art from artist)

Campbell, Duncan Scott. “The Half-Breed Girl.” Department of English, University of Toronto. Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries, 2003. Web. 26 Jun, 2015.

D’Angelo, Mike. “Tarantino was onto something when he took that shot at John Ford.” AV Club. Onion Inc., 26 Jun, 2015. Web. 26 Jun, 2015.

Day, Matthew. “Roman Polanski US extradition case adjourned by Polish court.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group Limited 22 May 2015. Web. 26 Jun, 2015.

Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print. 215-253.

Michaels, Sean. “Kristian ‘Varg’ Vikernes guilty of inciting racial hatred, French court rules.” The Guardian. The Guardian 9 July, 2014. Web. 26 Jun, 2015.