Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Northrop Frye, among other literary critics, was beginning to move away from a definition of “Canada” and “Canadian” on the terms of the past and of (culturally- or geo-politically-) colonial powers.  [This echoes, in substance more than impetus, Thomas King’s rejection of defining indigeneity in relation to pre-colonial, colonial and/or post-colonial – that is, in terms of (or on the terms of) contact, Europeans, colonialism, oppression etc. (King 2004)].  Frye and others sought to identify that which makes Canadians, as evidenced in literature and other cultural manifestations, distinct (CanLit Guides, 2013).  Using Frye’s own language, we may more accurately say that Frye himself was at the time a “maturing” Canadian writer in the 1950s and 1960s, engaged in the construction of a Canadian identity as opposed to the assertion of that identity, requiring consideration of self-conflict as opposed to external conflict (Frye, 233).

Mature literature, the kind that can serve to identify, define and reinforce culture, is for Frye an autonomous medium, closed to particular historical or social experience but guided by mythical structures within which those particularities may be given expression, or form (Frye, 233-234).  The literary critic seeks to mark off those areas of autonomy, free from time and place, to separate literature from the daily life (216), and hold them up, or implant them, as true forms of a culture, and by extension, of a people.  [The connections between Frye’s endeavour and the work of Salish Xá:ls should not go unnoticed].

It is for this reason that in discussing one of the defining tensions in Canadian literature – between the primitive and the civilized, as evidenced in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott – Frye is unmoved by and unconcerned with both the inherent contradictions between Scott’s romantic poetics and imperial policies, and the obvious destructiveness of those policies on Indigenous peoples in Canada.  For Frye, Scott could only situate his experiences, give them expression and form, in terms of his own prevailing literary traditions – in this case, in the absence of a mature mythical literary tradition, one based on history.  It is this tradition, as yet immature but nevertheless giving voice to a fledgling Canadian cultural identity, which is important to Frye – not the historical or social setting from which it came (and from which come those contradictions, conflicts and destructiveness).  Cutting literature off from its place and time, drawing impenetrable circles around culture and Canadian, is the epitome of Western approaches to knowledge and understanding, marking out a space that defines x almost exclusively in contradistinction to y.  He is looking inward to the self-conflict (we might conceive of the self as that which is inside the arbitrary circle), and ignores the external conflicts (between peoples) that are so destructive.

Frye’s endeavour is to define, by constructing.  This is an effort to control, and to control for, in the very scientific meaning of controlling for variables, those elements that can unsettle.  This is also destructive, as any border/boundary (say, that of a circle) necessarily breaks down the whole into smaller pieces, and cuts off that which is outside the circle from the inside.  But more so, the act of classifying, categorizing and naming – which the drawing of a circle around a particular space, and not around another space, accomplishes – is an important power dynamic [accessible through UBC library account].  To draw circles around Canadian, and to exclude external conflict, is to wield incredible power to erase important historical and social realities and considerations.

CanLit Guides.  “Nationalism, 1950s-1970s: cultural nationalism, the Massey Commission and thematic criticism.” Canadian Literature.  13 August 2013.  Web.  07 March 2014.

Clayton, Daniel.  “On the Colonial Genealogy of George Vancouver’s Chart of the North-West Coast of North America.”  Cultural Geographies. 2000, 7(4):371.

Frye, Northrup.  The Bush Garden: essays on the Canadian imagination.  Toronto: Anansi: 2011.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” in Unhomely States: theorizing English-Canadian Post-colonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183-186.

McAllister, Jamie.  “The Mark of Xá:ls.”  What’s the Story: Literature and Canada.  n.p., 21 February 2014.  Web.  07 March 2014.