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).

Perhaps my reading of Frye’s “Conclusion” to his literary history is simplistic but I feel like Frye didn’t connect the dots between Duncan Campbell Scott’s romantic poetry and his destructive impositions because Frye himself didn’t consider indigenous people nor their cultural traditions to be of intellectual value. Frye focuses his attention on the idea of creating a literary authority in the hopes of fostering “a cultural community” (215). He focuses his attention on the creation of a decidedly Western non-Western literary milieu; in other words, he focuses on creating a “Canadian” version of European readership as something new to experience. This is emphasized by the satirical discussion of available awards for new Canadian authors, almost as if Frye wishes to entice Canadians to take up writing in an effort to fill up the blank pages of Canadian literature to sell a product to readers, even if it is “asserting that it is much better than it actually is” (215).

Canada has two languages and two literatures, and every statement made in a book like this about “Canadian literature” employs the figure of speech known as synecdoche, putting a part for the whole. Every such statement implies a parallel or contrasting statement about French-Canadian literature. The advantages of having a national culture based on two languages are in some respects very great, but of course they are for the most part potential. The difficulties, if more superficial, are also more actual and more obvious. (Frye 216)

Frye’s authoritative voice explaining the division of two languages and therefore two literatures also emphasize his lack of recognition of other possible cultural sources of value. Here Frye doesn’t even recognize the fact that there were people on the land in North America before the two “Canadian” cultures arrived. For this simple reason I think Frye neglects the problematic writings of Scott, who likewise imagined that the Indians were vanishing and leaving a wealth of land ready for European intellectual taking.

A deeper connection for my instinctual assessment lies perhaps in the terminology we discussed in an earlier lesson of this course. In lesson 2.2 I wrote about the subject of literature vs. orality being grounded in different traditions of story sharing (sorry for linking to myself). I considered how literature and the act of reading and writing is a traditionally European activity, and that it is different from oral story-telling because there is no physical and static record of the tale. I suppose if we want to get really technical, when Frye was writing in the 1960s, there were only two literatures being written — those of the English and French speakers. So I suppose that one could say that Scott and Frye with their assumptions that the Indians were a dying sector of the population and the survivors would adopt the “Dominion[‘s]” way of life didn’t realize that the “primitive” society that was apparently disappearing were not willingly disappearing, and that when Frye was trying to nail down the specifics of “Canadian Literature” he assumed that there would only be English and French writers available for contributions.

References

Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” Northrop Frye — The Bush Garden. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. <http://northropfrye-thebushgarden.blogspot.ca/2009/02/conclusion-to-literary-history-of.html>.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 3.1.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres. UBC Blogs,. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl470/unit-3/lesson-3-1/>.

• Duncan Campbell Scott
• Literature
• Northrop Frye