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).

For this blog I would like to offer two sections. In the first section, I offer, to the best of my ability, and academic response the questions posed. In the second section, I offer a much more personal reflection on approaching this material, in general.

 

Part One: Overriding Dissonance

One major theme that is circulating the perimeter of many discussions in this class, as I see it, is the relationship of culture  (literature ,most specifically) and society. In  the West,  the past millennium has seen a general shift towards the breaking down of life into defined boxes that can be dissecting and analyzed. Storytelling ,for instance,  which served an integrated role in earlier societies as a source of communal values, ideals, and worldviews, became a cultural art form that could be analyzed and ultimately consumed as an entity distinct from the whole. The implication of such compartmentalization  is that different aspects to social life can be observed independently and without and relationship. Stories are found in bookstores or theatres, politics in government, morals in the religious institution, so on and so forth.

As I see it, this breaking down of society into its parts is what allows  Northorp Frye the ability to overlook the dissonance in Duncan Scott’s politics and poetry. According to a compartmentalized reality , Scott’s job as a politician, dealing with the day to day struggles of building a strong and unified nation,  and his alternate reality as a writer of poetry occupy two distinct societal spaces that need not be reconciled.

I believe that this mindset is articulated in  Frye’s writing when he  describes the study of literature as occupied with the formation of  “ cultural history”  , as opposed to political or economic history, and that it reflects “the social imagination that explores and settles and develops, and the imagination has its own rhythms of growth as well as its own modes of expression” (Frye 217). In essence, Frye is setting up a landscape to read Scott’s poetry  as an  imaginative (intuitive) expression of experiences living at that time in Canada. Scott’s expression of nostalgic reverence to Indigenous culture in his poetry is thus reflective of the feelings and emotions central to the writing of literature and not his political decisions, which come from a totally different part of his reality and is subject to different set of rules and conditions. Blaming the poet for the politicians actions would be a silly as blaming the foot for the hand that punches. Incidentally, this type of thinking might also be the way Scott himself can reconcile the cognitive dissonance evident in his politics and poetry. He might easily have been able to convince himself that the unique beauty of Indigenous culture is the truth in the poetic sphere while the need for its destruction is truth in the political sphere (no need to ask which truth is of a higher order).

 

Part two: Worlds Apart

I must have  reread the relevant sections of Frye’s essay for the twentieth time before arriving at even a glimmer of comprehension. He is speaking in my mother tongue but yet he is tying up my neural pathways in a complex mash of linguistic tricks and theoretical detours. I am frustrated by the way he makes sweeping conclusions about the development of the Canadian imagination in a language that most of  the country, other than a handful of intellectual elites, could never dream of grasping. I leave his book feeling that the world of creative stories and images, a world I have always felt I belonged, was beyond my reach. Maybe  he is a reflection of his time and the audience to whom he was speaking, in any case the Bush Garden leaves me feeling like I am lost in the jungle.

 

It was strangely fitting that Frye systematically catalogued the Canadian cultural imagination with a price tag attached to each installment. Reflecting a world where imagination is bought and sold next to the bottles of pop and chocolate bars.  Stories are not free to all but are subject to the uncompromising wills of a dangerously unjust economic system.

 

I can’t help but naturally compare this to my experience of story as presented to me in Harry Robinson’s world.  While there were times that Robinson also left me perplexed, it was not because his words were out of  my reach but rather because he was asking me to reach deeper inside myself. Robinson’s oral style made me feel part of an experience or relationship far greater than reader and writer. While Frye made me feel excluded, on the curb awaiting entry in an exclusive club. I know that Frye was essentially a critic and Robinson essentially a storyteller, so the comparison is some what unfair, but the fact remains they both were sharing narratives on the land we call home. I’m also not saying that there wasn’t great wisdom in Frye’s essays, I felt sure there was. But somehow it felt like I was being tested acess to a solitary perch outside of the  action  where I could observe from outside looking in, while Harry was opening doorways to new experience from inside building out.

 

 

Links and Works Cited

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

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory. Ed. Wendy Wickwire. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005

“Indigenous Peoples Worldviews vs Western Worldviews”, Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. ” https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/indigenous-peoples-worldviews-vs-western-worldviews

 

Image

Couse-Baker , Robert. “Cognitive Dissonance”. FlickR. https://www.flickr.com/photos/29233640@N07/16529106045 (Accessed Feb 28, 2019). Open Source