Question: 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?
In The Bush Garden, Frye’s literary system helps us understand his overlooking of Scott’s actual dealings with the indigenous peoples of Canada’s culture: “The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature” (234). Literature existed in and of itself for Northrop Frye, dividing cultural writing into the literary and non-literary. It is unsurprising that Frye references the works of Proust and Eliot as classics of literary experimentation because of their positions on the high-modernist pantheon, driven by the New Critics who championed the belief that the work of literature contained its art in itself and the conditions around its production were irrelevant (234). Even more telling is the ethnicity of Proust, French, and Eliot, English which tie in nicely with Daniel Coleman’s “White Civility.” Only speculating, I can already see how a filter could be built by Frye on the foundations of a Western literary tradition that appropriates mythologies (Greek & Roman) while simultaneously distancing itself from ideas of historical, social, and political conditions. Such ignorance of conditions, combined with implicit ethnic literary superiority, can explain Frye’s dismissal of Duncan Campbell Scott’s actual or “non-literary” dealings with First Nations people.
Frye reinforces the idea of appropriating mythologies himself: “We have been shown how the Indians began with a mythology which included all the main elements of our own. It was, of course, impossible for Canadians to establish any real continuity with it” (235). Canadians here, notably distinct from the Indians, cannot use the First Nations’ mythologies for the production of literature. Frye raises up a grammatical divide between Canadians and Indians and decides that the latter offered only impossibility “for” the former. Such impossibility defined Scott’s own interactions with First Nations people, noted by D.M.R. Bentley as his “repeated poetic engagement with Native cultures” haunted by “his fear of their potential to compromise and disrupt the culture of which he was a part and an exponent” (767). In the autonomous sphere of literature, the myths Scott appropriated for his own poetics allowed him creativity. But when the actual people who created these myths must be considered, Scott has to confront fear of losing his sense of civilization, his sense of White civility.
In the realm of literature, Frye has no quarrel with Scott engaging with the mythologies of the indigenous people as in a sealed form they were merely a part of the content, a part of the setting from which the writer draws experience (Frye 234). For Frye, good literature wasn’t about setting: “it would be an obvious fallacy to claim that the setting provided anything more than novelty” (234). Furthering the literary usefulness of Indians, Frye continues: “Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions,” demonstrating how the self-sealed literary realm could, in a crude way, play with the Indians while never having to consider their real, non-literary presence (235).
Michael Asch uses the terms “imaginary” and “mythological” to comment on the same effect Frye observes in Canadian literature: “[Canada was] an imaginary world occupied before our arrival by mythological creatures who, though human in many respects, were not yet sufficiently advanced to have constituted political society” (33). Asch seeks to point out how such a perspective was dismissive, but I believe Scott’s literary representations, when confronted by his policy-making decisions, confirm the perspective as true. Canlit defines the ideology of White civility, the ideology behind Scott’s poetry as: “Settler-colonial” culture which is “built on justifying racism and colonialism while, at the same time, denying its existence and legacy.” Frye’s ignorance of Scott’s active destruction of indigenous culture can be seen as stemming from his isolated literary model where the indigenous people and their culture are merely “novelties” to be used for literary motives while their non-literary actualities are to be denied.
Frye’s conviction that there has never been a great piece of Canadian literature on the one hand is depressing as it shows how indigenous culture couldn’t even be used for literary greatness, yet on the other gives evidence that such appropriation “for” Canadians will never create great literature.
Work Cited:
Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Politcal Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.
Bentley, D. M. R. “Shadows In The Soul: Racial Haunting In The Poetry Of Duncan Campbell Scott.” University Of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal Of The Humanities 75.2 (2006): 752-770. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.
CanLit Guides. “Reading and Writing in Canada, A Classroom Guide to Nationalism.” Canadian Literature. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.