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).

 

“It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some riddle as ‘Where is here?’”
-Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (222)

In his seminal critique of Canadian literature, The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye makes a number of bold, broad, divisive, and, quite frequently, head-scratch-worthy claims. One of his more conventional yet pertinent assertions, however, is viewing “Literature [as] conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling” (234). Indeed, Frye speaks extensively of the ethereal, elusive condition of being Canadian, and how our literary output conveys a cavernous yearning to collectively, culturally self-identify, and how it serves as “an indispensable aid to the knowledge of Canada. It records what the Canadian imagination has reacted to, and it tells us things about this environment that nothing else will tell us” (217).

Northrop Frye, looking 100% the way his work reads. 

And yet, somewhat paradoxically, Frye seems to be harbouring a consistent snide disdain for art unduly derived from personal experience, finding it somehow antithetical to originality or artistry in form. He critiques most Canadian writing as leaning excessively on their own experiences as Canadian, stipulating “There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference. […] If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context towards the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting” (216, emphasis mine).

As such, following this model of criticism (a transparently problematic one; but let’s hear him out), Frye seems to engage with the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent-General of the Department of Indian Affairs, in a contextually compartmentalized fashion, likely only citing Scott’s governmental title as an afterthought, rather than for its contextual impact on Scott’s poetic output. Viewed in a contemporary context, Scott’s elegaic, fawning language in writing about Indigenous Canadians, as cited by Frye, seems almost harmfully at odds with the harsher, overtly harmful reality of his instituted policies in the Department of Indian Affairs – this is the man, after all, who coined the phrase “Indian problem” (qtd. in Kariya 195), after all. Still, for Frye, Scott’s managing to, on the surface, delineate and distinguish between his more overtly harmful political policies and his more effusive poetic language in terms of engaging with Indigenous Canadians, would likely be considered as a positive.

This is not to say that Frye is necessarily in favour of the mistreatment of Indigenous Canadians (although, given that many of his ideological stances are as rigid and archaic as his language – “Canada began as an obstacle, blocking the way to the treasures of the east” [219]? Yeesh – who’s to say…), so much as in favour of a writer who, on the surface, seems able to bifurcate his ‘intrinsic’ art from lived experience as a Canadian (the aforementioned ‘circumference’) and the intrinsic experience of his poetic language. Frye appears more interested in the perceived dissonance between high and low culture in Scott’s literary output than any sociopolitical ramifications or contradictions in Scott’s life. For, Frye might protest, how could we possibly demean someone’s artistic output just because of atrocities committed in their personal life? This is a theorist who would have been eaten alive in the era of ‘Me Too…’

However, I’d actually argue that, despite this seeming schism between Scott’s poetry and politics, they actually work in tandem with each other towards accomplishing the same, equally devastating, objective. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, Scott’s primary ideological project was trying to get rid of “the Indian problem.”  Here, I’d argue that his means of doing so was multifaceted: by rooting Indigenous Canadians as a thing of the past by ideologically rebranding them as archaic (or “primitive,” as Frye’s terminology has it) in his poetry, while instituting governmental policies of more tangible cultural erasure, Scott’s political and artistic objectives intertwine to a common goal of erasure and eradication. In Frye’s terminology, Scott is attempting to institute his own kind of “conscious mythology,” ideologically coding Indigenous Canadians as a people firmly rooted in the past, playing into stereotypes of them being on the cusp of extinction (King, The Truth About Stories 33), and, more than anything, as antithetical to his vision of a modern Canada  (which, far from coincidentally, conflates with the greater degree of contemporary ‘sophistication’ and ‘civility’ Frye finds in Scott’s other poetry).

Ultimately, not only has Frye’s rigid definition of intrinsic artistic integrity and the myth of originality been debunked by thinkers such as Mark Twain years before Frye’s writing, but his snide dismissal of Canadian context and content lending validity to artistic output is as short-sighted as it is dangerous. Dangerous in the sense of allowing the hypocrisy of allowing harmful figures such as Duncan Campbell Scott to further ideological objectives such as systematically eradicating the cultural presence of Indigenous Canadians through a tactical disconnect between artistic and political maneuvers, assuredly – but also dangerous in its dismissal of larger critical interrogation of what it truly means to be Canadian, and how we can adequately understand Canadian literature. A budding artist following Frye’s mould of critique would make a concentrated effort to strive for more intrinsic, universal storytelling, leaving out the “circumference” of Canadian context, but this would fly in the face of trends Frye identifies as integral to Canadian artistry.

If, indeed, Canadian literature is “an indispensable aid to the knowledge of Canada,” then it seems almost pointedly paradoxical not to claim that an understanding of Canada is integral to an appreciation of Canadian literature – and, indeed, what flourishes of navigating and interrogating Canadian sociopolitical context can help breed new understandings of both Canadian context and new heights of Canadian artistic output. I’d argue that the main function of art is to better elucidate and contextualize life – so, by that definition, what kind of art could we have that pointedly refuses to let life in? I think a lot of our earlier discussions of Indigenous First Stories and oral tradition, and the multifaceted functions they fulfilled as spiritual benchmarks, local history, sociopolitical doctrine, pop culture, and more. In essence, most First Nations and Indigenous storytelling is a wholly holistic means of accenting and contextualizing life and culture – and, in doing so, it seems predicated on the exact opposite ethos to what Frye privileges. Maybe I just answered my own rhetorical question on whether or not Frye would be an ally or pointedly the opposite to Indigenous Canadians…

As such, my closing question is this: Do you think there ever was such a thing as Frye’s notion of ‘intrinsic’ writing in a vacuum – a callback, perhaps, to the centuries old philosophy of Matthew Arnoldian “sweetness and light”?  Do you think that Frye’s proposed metrics of artistic integrity can fly in an increasingly globalized contemporary world? If, as Mark Twain proposes, there was never really such thing as an original idea in the way that Frye seems to be proposing, how can we better translate the specific cultural circumstances of a country, culture, or people  – particularly, in the context of our course, the stories, culture, and experience of Indigenous and First Nations Canadians, such as Thomas King’s notion of “interfusional” storytelling (“Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” 186-187) – in a way that retains their specific, authentic cultural footnote, but remains accessible to a global audience? How best can we share their stories in a way that will ultimately benefit the storytellers? Perhaps navigating these potentially rhetorical questions will provide a better answer to Frye’s snippy take on what he considers (and I think our course unironically supports) the ultimate Canadian conundrum: “Where is here?”

-KH

 

WORKS CITED

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Web. Accessed on February 27th, 2019.

Frye, Northop. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.” The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1971. 215-253. Print.

Hatch, Kevin. “Orality, Curtain Lights (or: Build Your Own Artificial Authenticity! Some Assembly Required).” ENGL 470 99C Blog. Accessed on February 18, 2019.

Kariya, Paul. “The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development: The culture-building process within an institution.” Place/Culture/Representation. Eds. James S. Duncan and David Ley. London: Routledge, 1993. 187-204. Web. Accessed on December 9, 2018.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga: Broadview Press, 2004. 183-190. Print.

—. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of Anansi Press Inc, 2003.

“Mark Twain on Plagiarism and Originality.” Unicheck. Web. Accessed on February 27th, 2019.