{"id":46,"date":"2016-07-08T12:50:14","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T19:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/?p=46"},"modified":"2016-08-26T11:49:07","modified_gmt":"2016-08-26T18:49:07","slug":"lesson-3-1-assignment-3-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/lesson-3-1-assignment-3-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Frye & Scott [Lesson 3.1 Assignment 3.2]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Q.3 Frye writes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/em> 221).<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott\u2019s work, or tension between \u201cprimitive and civilized\u201d representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the \u201cvanishing Indians\u201d and<\/em> wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people \u2013 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:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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).<\/strong><\/p>\n

For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why Scott\u2019s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people\u2019s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye\u2019s discussion on the problem of \u201chistorical bias\u201d (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 \u20135).<\/strong><\/p>\n

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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In Frye\u2019s observation that the \u201cimpact of the sophisticated on the primitive\u201d produces \u201ccomplicated cultural tensions\u201d (from page 221 of The Brush Garden<\/em>), the \u201cmost dramatic example\u201d he gives tells us that Scott wrote poetry about both a \u201cstarving squaw\u201d and Debussy\u2019s music.\u00a0 However, there is no further analysis given to this example.\u00a0 Moreover, as this blog question reveals, Frye does not include Scott\u2019s racist and destructive political activities in his writing.\u00a0 For the remainder of this blog post, I will attempt to construct a possible line of reasoning for Frye\u2019s [in]actions.<\/p>\n

Frye argues that \u201cif 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\u201d (216).\u00a0 Let\u2019s apply this to Scott:\u00a0 If Scott didn\u2019t pull us toward the centre of literary experience and away from the Canadian context, we would be aware of his social and historical setting.\u00a0 In other words, if Frye were to write about the complicated political actions of Scott while also writing about Scott\u2019s poetry and literary mind, Frye would exist on the edge of literary experience and make readers more aware of Scott\u2019s social setting.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 It appears so.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s 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\u2019s poetry.\u00a0 Not Scott\u2019s actions outside of his writing and how his goal to erase \u201cIndian\u201d culture intersects with his poetry, but simply the poetry and writing itself.\u00a0 Frye argues that<\/p>\n

the forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

So, in drawing conclusions from Frye\u2019s theories and his lack of external sociohistorical information about Scott, we can see that Frye\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Work Cited<\/p>\n

Fryer, Northrop. The Bush Garden<\/em>. Anansi. 1995<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[305210],"tags":[812978,1669539,1669538,1669535,131,286725],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-3","tag-canadian-literature","tag-content-or-form","tag-cultural-tensions","tag-frye","tag-literature","tag-scott"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions\/56"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kemp470\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}