Q.3 Frye writes:
A much more complicated cultural tension 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 Chapter, 23).
For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why 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).
I find Frye to be confusing- he makes his observations and claims but the explanation for such claims seems to be forgotten (at least on paper). Perhaps Frye does this as a means of forcing the reader to engage on a deep and philosophical level with his work, but I simply find his writing to be unconvincing. In Frye’s observation that the “impact of the sophisticated on the primitive” produces “complicated cultural tensions” (from page 221 of The Brush Garden), the “most dramatic example” he gives tells us that Scott wrote poetry about both a “starving squaw” and Debussy’s music. However, there is no further analysis given to this example. Moreover, as this blog question reveals, Frye does not include Scott’s racist and destructive political activities in his writing. For the remainder of this blog post, I will attempt to construct a possible line of reasoning for Frye’s [in]actions.
Frye argues that “if no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting” (216). Let’s apply this to Scott: If Scott didn’t pull us toward the centre of literary experience and away from the Canadian context, we would be aware of his social and historical setting. In other words, if Frye were to write about the complicated political actions of Scott while also writing about Scott’s poetry and literary mind, Frye would exist on the edge of literary experience and make readers more aware of Scott’s social setting. Does this mean then, that Frye can only value literature and the literary experience to its fullest extent if he evaluates it as a closed system, free of social and historical setting of the writer? It appears so.
Let’s reiterate: Frye is claiming that the most dramatic example of the cultural tension produced by the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive is Scott’s poetry. Not Scott’s actions outside of his writing and how his goal to erase “Indian” culture intersects with his poetry, but simply the poetry and writing itself. Frye argues that
the forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature. What the Canadian writer finds in [their] experience and environment may be new but it will be new only as content: the form of [their] expression of it can take shape only from what [they have] read, not from what [they have] experienced (234).
But, is it not true that literature as a form only succeeds based on its content, which is inherently shaped by the social and historical settings and status of the writer and their surroundings?
So, in drawing conclusions from Frye’s theories and his lack of external sociohistorical information about Scott, we can see that Frye’s use of Scott as an example for sophisticated versus primitive cultural tensions would have been even stronger had it existed outside of his theory of literature as a closed system.
Work Cited
Fryer, Northrop. The Bush Garden. Anansi. 1995