Northrop Frye's Canadian Literary Criticism and Its Influence 9781442697577

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Incorporating Legacies: Decolonizing the Garrison
Part I. The Confluence of the Mythopoeic and the Thematic: Frye and Canada
1.1 The Canadian Poet’s Predicament
1.2 ‘This Northern Mouth’: Ideas of Myth and Regionalism in Modern Canadian Poetry
1.3 Myth, Frye, and Canadian Writers
1.4 Northrop Frye: Canadian Mythographer
1.5 Frye in Place
Part II. Frye’s Influence on the Canadian Literary and Critical Imagination: Challenging the Legacy
2.1 Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet (1) than any Northrop Frye poet (2) than he used to be
2.2 Butterfly in the Bush Garden: ‘Mythopoeic’ Criticism of Contemporary Poetry Written in Canada
2.3 Surviving the Paraphrase
2.4 Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism versus Literary Criticism
2.5 Bushed in the Sacred Wood
Part III. Frye’s Canadian Criticism and the Making of Canadian Literary and Critical Culture
3.1 Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition
3.2 Retrieving the Canadian Critical Tradition as Poetry: Eli Mandel and Northrop Frye
3.3 Against Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye
3.4 Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space
3.5 Frye Recoded: Postmodernity and the Conclusions
3.6 Frye: Canadian Critic/Writer
3.7 ‘A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom’: The Narrative in Northrop Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada
Epilogue
The Northrop Frye Effect
Select Bibliography
Contributors

Citation preview

NORTHROP FRYE’S CANADIAN LITERARY CRITICISM AND ITS INFLUENCE

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Northrop Frye’s Canadian Literary Criticism and Its Influence

Edited by BRANKO GORJUP

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9938-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Northrop Frye’s Canadian literary criticism and its influence / edited by Branko Gorjup. (Frye studies) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-8020-9938-9 1. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 – Influence. 3. Canadian literature – History and criticism. 4. Criticism – Canada. I. Gorjup, Branko II. Series: Frye studies PS8077.1.N67 2009

801′.95092

C2009-901167-0

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the DeGroote Trust for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye at McMaster University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Francesca and Francesco and to the memory of Constance Rooke (1942–2008)

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction Incorporating Legacies: Decolonizing the Garrison branko gorjup

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PART I. The Confluence of the Mythopoeic and the Thematic: Frye and Canada 29 1.1 The Canadian Poet’s Predicament james reaney

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1.2 ‘This Northern Mouth’: Ideas of Myth and Regionalism in Modern Canadian Poetry 44 john riddell 1.3 Myth, Frye, and Canadian Writers d.g. jones

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1.4 Northrop Frye: Canadian Mythographer rosemary sullivan 1.5 Frye in Place 93 francis sparshott

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PART II. Frye’s Influence on the Canadian Literary and Critical Imagination: Challenging the Legacy 109 2.1 Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet (1) than any Northrop Frye poet (2) than he used to be 111 george bowering 2.2 Butterfly in the Bush Garden: ‘Mythopoeic’ Criticism of Contemporary Poetry Written in Canada 122 barbara belyea 2.3 Surviving the Paraphrase 133 frank davey 2.4 Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism versus Literary Criticism 144 barry cameron and michael dixon 2.5 Bushed in the Sacred Wood john moss

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PART III. Frye’s Canadian Criticism and the Making of Canadian Literary and Critical Culture 169 3.1 Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition eli mandel

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3.2 Retrieving the Canadian Critical Tradition as Poetry: Eli Mandel and Northrop Frye 184 margery fee 3.3 Against Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye eleanor cook 3.4 Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space heather murray 3.5 Frye Recoded: Postmodernity and the Conclusions linda hutcheon

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3.6 Frye: Canadian Critic/Writer david staines

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3.7 ‘A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom’: The Narrative in Northrop Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada 260 robert lecker Epilogue

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The Northrop Frye Effect 279 russell morton brown Select Bibliography Contributors

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the help and encouragement of numerous individuals. To Donna Bennett, Russell Brown, Michael Keefer, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Alvin Lee, Dennis Lee, and Constance Rooke I owe a special debt for reading parts of the manuscript, in particular my introduction, and offering me their frank and detailed criticism. I would also like to thank all the contributors for letting me reproduce their work, the very flesh and bone of this book, and for finding the time to respond to my various textual inquiries: all the editorial revisions, when thought necessary, were carried out with the authors’ full approval. My sincere thanks go to Chris Doda who skilfully saw the manuscript through the initial stage of text editing. Part of the introductory essay, ‘Incorporating Legacies: Decolonizing the Garrison,’ began as a paper given at the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival in April 2004, under the title ‘Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics,’ and was subsequently published in the festival proceedings, Verticals of Frye/Les Verticales de Frye, 2005.

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NORTHROP FRYE’S CANADIAN LITERARY CRITICISM AND ITS INFLUENCE

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Introduction Incorporating Legacies: Decolonizing the Garrison branko gorjup

The fact that so much has been written, in the past half-century, on Northrop Frye’s ‘Canadian’1 criticism and on how Frye dealt with what he described as the ‘imaginative continuum’ of Canadian literary sensibility is a reminder of his far-reaching contribution to the initial mapping out of the postcolonial stages of Canadian imaginative culture. As the provocative and engaging essays in this volume show, Frye’s critics have been mirrors that both reflect and refract his critical analysis. They respond to his ascendancy as Canada’s pre-eminent literary critic and theorist, and to his dominant, almost mythical position in what some feared was an alarmingly homogenized cultural environment. Most see Frye as presiding over a nationalist agenda and an obsessive search for Canadian identity. Whether celebrating Frye or expressing anxiety about his influence, his critics are united in the desire for the creation of a decolonized national-cultural space. It was Frye, more than anyone else in this period, who articulated such a space and identified a Canadian ‘garrison mentality’ as one of the colonized mind’s fundamental tropes. Frye’s Canadian criticism, written between 1943 and 1990, included introductions, conclusions, prefaces, essays, articles, reviews, and public addresses. His interest in Canadian literary culture can be seen as early as the late 1930s: as editor of the Canadian Forum, he encouraged young and emerging authors by publishing their works and began to review Canadian books and literary journals. In 1943, with his famous review of A.J.M. Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry, ‘Canada and Its Poetry,’ Frye set out to engage the subject of national literature and

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identity that for more than a century had absorbed the minds of Canadians while seeming to elude suitable definition. In particular, Frye’s annual poetry surveys, written between 1950 and 1960 for the University of Toronto Quarterly’s ‘Letters in Canada,’ launched him as a committed public commentator – a role he would play until his death in 1991 – and as a critic who established, in Eli Mandel’s words, ‘the nationalist and literary contexts within which it would be possible to speak of a Canadian literary tradition.’2 His early critical essays and reviews, culminating in the influential 1965 ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada, explored the formation of a national literary consciousness arising from within the Canadian context, which he metaphorically described as ‘the leviathan of Canadian nature.’ Most of these pieces were collected in The Bush Garden (1971), Divisions on a Ground (1982), and Mythologizing Canada: Essays on the Canadian Literary Imagination (1997). Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), a volume in the University of Toronto Press edition of Frye’s collected works, gathers these, along with Frye’s later essays on the subject. In his Canadian criticism Frye attempted a task not previously undertaken: to systematize and incorporate the disparate notions of Canada, assembling these into patterns of identity. Crediting the imagination with a transformative and re-creative power, Frye based his perceptions on a close investigation of the literary traditions that had emerged within Canada’s shifting cultural context. His evolving attempts to understand and describe Canadian culture disclose a uniquely synthetic mind and insights into cultural differences between Canada’s past and present and between Canada and the United States. Beginning with ‘Canada and Its Poetry’ and ‘The Narrative Tradition in EnglishCanadian Poetry’ (1946), he examined and assessed the achievement of Canadian writing while introducing his conceptual and organizational categories for its criticism. Outlining what he saw as a fundamental discrepancy between two types of literary production in Canada, he identified one, which he associated with the colonial mind, as the ‘prefabricated rhetoric about the challenge of a new land and the energetic optimism demanded to meet it’; this was produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The other, which he associated with the mind in the process of pulling away from the colonial restraints and which he thought captured a more genuine response to the actual character of Canada, he described as a rhetoric of ‘solitude and loneliness, of hostility or indifference of nature’; this was represented largely by the literature that emerged after World War I.

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In the ‘Preface to an Uncollected Anthology’ (1957), and more specifically in his ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada – in which he advanced the idea that Canadian writing needed to be studied ‘as part of Canadian life’ rather than ‘as part of an autonomous world of literature’ – Frye provided a cogent theoretical frame within which Canadian literature could be read and in which Canadian identity could be discussed, both in terms of a distinctive Canadian imagination. This imagination, for Frye, though linked to and defined by its environment, was also struggling to free itself from its interdependency with the physical world and the limitations imposed by its colonial status. The result of its interdependency Frye ‘provisionally’ called a garrison culture, a culture still in its rudimentary stage but with a prospect of transforming itself into something more. These essays and others disclose Frye’s less frequently noted observations about the national context as an unfinished construct, an imaginative project for succeeding generations of Canadians, one whose completion would forever be deferred. As late as 1990 Frye remarked (in the preface to the catalogue Italy in Canada) that the most ‘positive event in Canadian history,’ the Confederation of 1867, while ‘a romantic and imperialistic conception, [but] by no means an ignoble one,’ had ‘a cultural basis … so impoverished that it collapsed very quickly, leaving English Canada to wonder about its real identity for several decades.’ By 1990, Frye thought that Canada had transformed itself to such an extent that the time had come to ‘start creating a second positive event in our history: Reconfederation,’ the basis of which would be cultural and in accord with the present reality, a Canada where every ethnic group ‘requires a tension of cultural loyalties: one to its origin, the other to its Canadian context.’ To this Frye characteristically added, ‘By tension, I don’t mean straining in opposite directions, and by loyalty I mean nothing uncritical. I mean simply a context in both time and space.’3 The subject of Canadian literature and culture in Frye’s work constituted only a relatively small part of his critical writing, and is often referred to as his ‘occasional’ or ‘domestic’ criticism. It has stood somewhat apart from his summa – represented by large theoretical works such as Anatomy of Criticism (1957), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), and Words with Power: Being the Second Study of ‘The Bible and Literature’ (1990) – with their predilection for abstraction, systematization, and universalization. For critics such as James Reaney, Margaret Atwood, D.G. Jones, John Riddell, the early John Moss, Warren

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Tallman, Tom Marshall, Robert Kroetsch, and Margot Northey, Frye’s Canadian works of criticism – because they espouse literature’s nonautonomous status and suggest that the imagination (essentially ‘vegetable’ in character), thrives best in a specific environment – were more useful for their applicability than his grand theory. By adopting them as the starting points for their own critical thinking, these followers of Frye developed their own theoretical frameworks, often later grouped under the general rubric of ‘thematic criticism.’ To other Canadian critics, such as George Bowering, Frank Davey, Dermot McCarthy, W.J. Keith, and the later John Moss, the discrepancy between Frye’s two types of critical inquiry was a reason for debate about his role as Canadian critic. While also arguing that Frye’s conceptions of Canada were misleading, or even dead wrong, what they most objected to was his recommendation that Canadian writing be studied ‘as part of Canadian life’ rather than ‘as part of an autonomous world of literature.’ McCarthy felt this approach located Frye’s Canadian criticism within a critical tradition dating to the middle of the nineteenth century – when Canadian literature’s autonomous status was subordinated to the larger and more important task of nation building.4 This group found Frye’s approach to Canadian writing not only inconsistent with his theoretical stance but protectionist, designed to exempt Canadian authors from the rigorous and universally sanctioned critical standards applied to the world’s great classics. Where Frye’s detractors accused him of being patronizing towards Canadian literary achievement,5 his supporters saw him as an important ally in the quest for a national literature and the creation of a national canon. For them, Frye’s Canadian criticism represented a powerful endorsement of their belief that literature’s distinctive character is realizable only in relation to its context – its geography and its history. At the intersection of these opposing sets of views stand critics such as Eli Mandel, Eleanor Cook, and Linda Hutcheon, who offered a conciliatory attitude, aimed at finding a balanced answer to the question of why Frye allowed such a fault line to develop in his overall critical thinking. How could these apparently conflicting perspectives – one that considers literature as an autonomous and self-generating system and one that sees it as defined by the environment in which it is produced – be reconciled? The present volume captures the tension created by this critical problematic and documents the various attempts at resolving or transcending it. To trace the debates that Frye’s Canadian criticism touched off, it is

Introduction

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helpful to address the predominant assumptions of Canadian critics before Frye. Until the beginning of the 1930s, literary and cultural critics were preoccupied with what Canadian literature – particularly in its ‘national’ dimension – was supposed to do rather than with how it was done.6 It was a well-accepted belief by such nineteenth-century poets and literary commentators as William Kirby, Charles G.D. Roberts, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and Graeme Mercer Adam that the primary task of the poet and the critic was to mediate between the collective imagination and the project of nation building. This strictly serviceable notion prized literature for its didactic, moral, and ennobling purposes – late-Victorian obsessions grafted onto the Canadian colonial mind – and, above all, for its power to articulate the nation’s genius. Thus in his introduction to the 1864 Selections from Canadian Poets, Edward Hartley Dewart, Canada’s first major anthologist, saw ‘national literature’ as possessing ‘an essential element in the formation of national character.’7 In his 1889 introduction to Songs of the Great Dominion, William Douw Lighthall, Canada’s second important anthologist, was even more direct about the functionality of poetry, declaring his selection the result of a conscious effort to include poems that illustrated ‘the country and its life in a distinctive way,’ while omitting those that were ‘subjective and unlocal’ and ‘whose merits lie in perfection of finish.’8 However emphatic Lighthall’s insistence on Canada’s ‘young might, public wealth and heroism,’ his vision, imbued with the imperial spirit of Victorian positivism and idealism, betrayed something of which he and his contemporaries were unaware: the assumption that Canada’s future lay in the conquest of its environment and the exploitation and destruction of nature and of Native cultures. Lighthall did, inadvertently, suggest that in the ‘cheerful’ voices of his anthology a darker and more foreboding tone could be heard when he alluded to the ‘deathsong’ of ‘vanishing races’ as they disappeared, along with the Canadian wilderness, into ‘Arcadias.’ Despite this dark undercurrent, what held sway in the latter part of the nineteenth century was the celebration of the European settler’s nobility, courage, dedication, and ingenuity. Many of Frye’s later essays – such as ‘Culture as Interpenetration’ (1982), ‘National Consciousness in Canadian Culture,’ and ‘Levels of Cultural Identity’ (1989) – probed this nineteenth-century state of mind, noting how the individual writers attempted to internalize their experiences of the land they had set out to conquer. Although the desire for the creation of a national literature continued into the era described in the works in this selection, a significant disturbance occurred on the Canadian literary horizon in the early 1920s

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with the advent of realism and modernism, which redefined many of the assumptions held by the previous generations of Canadian writers and critics. The debunking of romantic and Victorian perceptions of the paradisiacal vision of the Canadian west, rooted in the Cartesian celebration of reason over nature, is well documented in the realist novels and stories of the prairies. Similarly, a newer generation of poets, including A.J.M. Smith, A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, and P.K. Page, rejected the value of a poetry that had been at the service of the nationalists’ agenda and embraced the main tenets of modernism, influenced by the high aestheticism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. They also articulated a view of the Canadian environment as ambiguous and ironic. However, because this Montreal Group drew its primary inspiration from the metaphysical and mythopoeic phase of early European modernism, with its fondness for a sophisticated, craft-conscious, erudite, and emotionally detached poetry, environment was for them of secondary importance.9 This change had a significant effect on the Canadian criticism then coming into being: in particular, it caused a rift between what A.J.M. Smith labelled as opposing literary sensibilities, one predominantly ‘cosmopolitan,’ the other ‘native.’ The nativistic tradition, also known as ‘provincial,’ was associated with the group of poets, including Louis Dudek, John Sutherland, and Raymond Souster, who in the 1940s gathered around the literary journal First Statement. This group, often considered as the ‘second phase’ of Canadian modernism, opposed Smith’s cosmopolitanism, accusing him and his followers of introducing a new colonialism, one that would impose European models on an experience that was strictly North American. This rift between ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘native’ foreshadows the debates of the 1970s, when the supposedly home-grown thematic criticism inspired by Frye’s Canadian works, was opposed by a new wave of ‘cosmopolitanism’ in the form of poststructuralist theorizing. As he later acknowledged in his ‘Preface’ to The Bush Garden, it was while reviewing Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry that Frye’s thinking on the subject of the Canadian literary tradition first came into focus and received a sense of direction. In that review Frye identified a ‘unity of tone’ in Smith’s selection that arose from the ‘material itself,’ a unified tone that confirmed, for the first time, ‘the existence of a definable Canadian genius’ that was ‘neither British nor American but, for all its echoes and imitations and second-hand ideas, peculiarly our own.’ What characterized this tone as ‘peculiarly our own’ were a distinctly Canadian ‘attitude of mind’ and a ‘recognizable Canadian accent’; they

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were products of a Canadian context that had elicited a sense of ‘stark terror’ in response to the ‘frightening loneliness of the huge and thinly settled country.’ In other words, the late-nineteenth-century, idealized perception of nature as benevolent and as created for the sole purpose of meeting man’s needs gave way, in Frye’s reading of Smith’s anthology, to a vision of nature as an incomprehensible and sinister monster that mocked man’s ‘thrifty little heaps of civilized values.’ However, Frye also detected in Smith’s selections a sporadic residue of the Cartesian positivism that for him characterized the American imagination. This is a poetic world view, in which the individual, refusing to be ‘bullied by space and time,’ produced a ‘vision beyond nature’ that affirmed ‘the supremacy of intelligence and humanity over stupid power.’ It was this flux in the representation of the relationship between human beings and the phenomenal world that Frye went on to examine in detail in essays such as the ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada,’ ‘The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry,’ and ‘Haunted by Lack of Ghosts.’ The work in the present volume, although centred on the figure of Frye and his Canadian criticism, makes visible these various related and sometimes diverse discussions about Canada’s literary and critical evolution. As Frye later reminded us in his call for a new cultural Reconfederation, fixing a single identity for its literature or culture in this period (the late nineteen sixties through the nineteen eighties) would have been not only inappropriate but also counterproductive: Canada was just beginning to transform itself into a multicultural and multiracial society. Yet, as Canada struggled through this vertiginous stage of its representational turmoil – with each newcomer dreaming his or her version of the country’s fictional identity – a significant number of Canadian writers and critics, especially those under the spell of cultural nationalism, did feel a strong impulse to revisit the texts of their literary predecessors. They read them not only to acquaint themselves with what had already been said but also to search for a body of writing that might give shape to a national literary canon. Frye was in the forefront of this search, the apotheosis of which was the publication of the Literary History of Canada, the first national collective effort by a group of Canadian scholars to map out a consistent and credible narrative of the nation’s literary past. For the first time, Canadians could consult a comprehensive summary of their verbal universe and the minds that envisioned it. When, in the early seventies, a group of Canadian critics reached a

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short-lived consensus on the possibility of creating an autochthonous and unified critical approach to the study of the Canadian literary imagination, an unprecedented number of major surveys of Canadian writing appeared, including D.G. Jones’s Butterfly on Rock (1970), Margaret Atwood’s Survival (1972), Laurence Ricou’s Vertical Man/ Horizontal World (1973), and John Moss’s Patterns of Isolation in EnglishCanadian Fiction (1974) and Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel (1977). What these authors had in common, to quote Barry Cameron, was a ‘collective interest in country and self’ that explained their ‘dominant critical concern with authority, voice, place, and social position.’ These critics selected in the body of national literature themes that enhanced the meaning and the function of society, the raising of ‘national consciousness in order to render intelligible and justify our living together.’ Although Cameron, like other critics of this period, saw Frye’s Canadian criticism as the ‘inspiration for the general thematic and cultural thrust,’10 Frye never developed a theory of Canadian thematic criticism or articulated the desirability of a thematic approach in the study of Canadian literature. In his extensive discussion on the subject of theme in Anatomy of Criticism, in the section called Thematic Modes, Frye argued that literature in general could be characterized as possessing ‘internal’ and ‘external’ fictions, the former being concerned with a relationship between ‘the hero and his society,’ and the latter between ‘the writer and the writer’s society.’ The primary interest of internal fiction, he said, was in mythos or plot and in ethos, which included both character and setting. External fiction, in contrast, was predisposed to dianoia or ‘thought,’ which Frye translated into ‘theme.’ And literature with this ‘ideal or conceptual interest,’ he suggested, ‘may be called thematic.’ ‘But clearly,’ Frye pointed out, ‘there is no such thing as a fictional or a thematic work of literature’ because ‘the hero, the hero’s society, the poet and the poet’s readers, are always at least potentially present’ in it.11 It is puzzling that few of the works in this collection show their authors exploring Frye’s thinking on the subject of theme, even those who discuss his relationship to the thematic critics. As the essays here show, because critical inquiry is predisposed to contamination and grafting of one sort or another, it reflects the changing international perspectives in theory and practice. Thus, no sooner was a critical consensus created than it was undermined by new literary theories. Post-structuralism and its various by-products – such as postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism12 – reached Canada with near-simultaneity, setting the stage for an intense debate between the

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advocates of the newer and the more traditional approaches to literary criticism.13 One of the prime targets of the newer critical imports was the still-prevalent structuralism. The theoretical assumptions held by the practitioners of thematic criticism overlapped with those championed by the structuralists; and both thematicists and structuralists were judged guilty, in the language of post-structuralist critique, of totalizing procedures and the construction of metanarratives. What post-structuralists particularly disliked was the supposition that every literary work possessed intrinsic order, a pre-existing pattern that could, if ‘discovered,’ regulate production of meaning.14 Many critics in Canada favoured the new post-structuralist approaches to the study of literature, particularly those originating with such prominent theorists as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva. Canada’s postmodernists, feminists, and postcolonialists were drawn to various aspects of post-structuralist theorizing – particularly to the idea that no literary production could be objective or possess intrinsic meaning – and they embraced the idea that the meaning of literature could be derived only from a mediation between the reader and the reader’s environment. This shift in perception was initiated by Derrida’s notion of ‘decentering’ and by Barthes’s declaration that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ – both of which signalled a reconfigured role for the reader in the experience of a literary text. In conjunction with Bakhtin’s much-used concepts of ‘dialogism’ and ‘heteroglossia’ – which insisted that language is by nature dialogic and multivocal – these innovations by Derrida and Barthes appealed to those Canadian critics who wanted to reject the fixity of a work of literature as having one purpose and one meaning. In addition, those who identified themselves as deconstructionists constituted an important voice inside the post-structural theory: using the concept of ‘demystification’ to explore internal incongruities of a given text, they opened literary works up to multiple readings and multiple interpretations, making the reader ‘the locus of competing and often contradictory discourses.’15 In Canadian critical circles, deconstruction became a shorthand descriptor to depict the tension between the old and the new types of criticism; more often than not, it was a thinly disguised battle cry for the radical abolition of what had been already set in place. It demanded that old critical constructs be taken apart – sometimes even before, as with thematic criticism, they were fully tested. In general, this conflicting critical activity introduced a dialectic, what Frye called an ‘alternate current,’ into the

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maturing Canadian criticism and opened the door to the valuable processes of critical diversification. Because most of the essays presented in this book were written during this transitional period, they gain significance as historical documents: they show the head-on collisions between the forces of monism and pluralism and recount the story of how Canadian critics, while responding to international influences in critical inquiry, kept resisting the more aggressive kind of globalization that threatened to pre-empt their ongoing concern for the creation of a national literature. Except for Russell Brown’s epilogue, published here for the first time, all the essays first appeared in literary journals, conference proceedings, and anthologies of criticism. Although some of these are now difficult to locate, others, such as Frank Davey’s ‘Surviving the Paraphrase,’ are readily available. The advantage of gathering them into a single volume goes beyond simple convenience: seeing them as elements of an interrelated dialogue allows readers to follow the steps taken in the construction of the Canadian critical tradition at a significant moment and to witness the quarrels among the various individuals as well as between groups. The first question then about such a selection is why one writer or essay has been included while another has not. I have chosen selections that contribute to the telling of a story: the emerging importance of Frye’s Canadian criticism and the critics who responded to it. They display a discontinuity of style, theme, intent, cultural posturing, theoretical positioning, and jargon. They cover a span of fifty years and were written by poets, by poets who are also critics, by writers of fiction, and by literary critics. While some essays are more significant than others, collectively they show us how Frye’s view of Canadian literary culture was comprehended, rejected, or misread by his contemporaries. Among other essays that might have been included are Robert McDougall’s ‘The Dodo and the Cruising Auk,’ W.J. Keith’s ‘The Thematic Approach to Canadian Fiction’ (although Frye is mentioned only once, his presence haunts Keith’s argument against thematic criticism), Wilson Clark’s ‘Two Lines in Literary History,’ David Jackel’s ‘Northrop Frye and the Continentalist Tradition,’ and Robert Kroetsch’s ‘Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye.’ Although the order of the selection is mostly chronological, I have occasionally broken with chronology for the sake of continuity, letting one essay lead into the next in a way that makes visible the broadening

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of Frye’s influence from mythopoeic to thematic criticism. As well, the order reflects the fact that some of these essays (such as Frank Davey’s ‘Surviving the Paraphrase’) were read at conferences and made an impact on the community of critics in Canada long before they were published. In Part I, the contributors discuss ways in which Frye’s criticism – both mythopoeic and environmental – offered a potential critical framework within which the investigation of the national literature could be undertaken. In James Reaney’s 1957 piece, ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,’ the reader is introduced to the first sustained response to Frye’s Canadian criticism. Inspired by Frye’s ‘The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry,’ published almost a decade earlier, Reaney lays out a hypothetical scheme – drawn from a selection of Canadian poets – that could provide the kernel of a Canadian literary tradition, an ‘ancestral pattern,’ as he puts it. Reaney also brings into sharp focus two fundamental concerns in Frye’s thinking: the tenuous overlapping of mythopoeic and thematic perspectives, a dialectic that runs beneath the surface of the present volume. What Reaney sets in motion is the future dialogue on the status of Canadian criticism, particularly as it will relate to thematicism. With his list of poets and themes, his ‘sampler’ – ‘a rather grisly’ one, as he colourfully describes it – translates a methodology of thematizing (already in evidence in Frye’s piece) into a practice based on induction and selection. Reaney narrows down a large body of poetic representation to arrive at a coherent view of a pattern that can be shared by ‘the Canadian poet’s most imaginative ancestors and contemporaries.’ This technique of combining native mythology, history, and landscape is predicated on the notion – and here Reaney goes straight to Anatomy of Criticism for clarification – that poetic images move from the ‘things outside personality to a place somewhere inside personality.’ The thing ‘outside’ was a half-empty landscape of spiritual exile. At the beginning of his discussion, Reaney sets up a hypothetical argument illustrating how this Canadian environment can be construed as the shaping principle of the country’s imagination. This argument produces a conclusion that offers the Canadian poet – whose main predicament is lack of a tangible tradition – the outline of ‘an ancestral pattern.’ Though remaining a ‘sampler,’ for Reaney it can be the basis of a distinct Canadian literary sensibility. I have followed Reaney’s essay with John Riddell’s ‘“This Northern

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Mouth”: Ideas of Myth and Regionalism in Modern Canadian Poetry’ (1976). Riddell searches for an answer that could tell us to what extent Canadian poets have achieved identification with their environment and to what degree they have been able to engage with myth as an ‘organizing principle’ in their work. Like Reaney, Riddell departs from Frye’s description of myth as the poet’s internalization of external reality, instead calling the process ‘the inward turning’ of the imagination. According to Riddell, early Canadian poets did not fare well; what they managed to create, as in Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Rising Village’ – was a ‘simplistic regional mythologizing of the well-ordered community.’ Riddell draws once again on Frye, but this time on his notion of the Canadian environment, to argue that this failure was caused by the European settlers’ inability to identify with the external physical world, represented as hostile and implacable. Thus Frye’s ‘garrison’ – in Riddell’s words a ‘life in the clearings’ – can be seen as representing not only a physical but also a ‘psychological retreat’ from nature to culture. Such a retreat was governed by the ‘myth of solidarity.’ Contemporary poets – John Newlove, Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, and Gwendolyn MacEwen – fare better in Riddell’s analysis because they have engaged their environment, not retreated from it, allowing its ‘recurring symbols’ to shape their poetry and pave the way for their identification with the place, so that they would finally be, in Newlove’s words, ‘at home freely.’ Poetic images drawn from ‘a specific and identifiable geography have always, in both individual and racial imaginations, provided an important focus for developing nativistic myth.’ In his conclusion, without entering into the debate that will later emerge, Riddell warns of a split between myth as content and myth as an informing principle in poetry. In the past, the Canadian poet was ‘urged to establish some form of identity through the adaptation of appropriate thematic matter,’ but the poet’s quest – here Riddell quotes Frye – ‘is for form not content.’ Approaching the question from a somewhat different point of view, D.G. Jones, in ‘Myth, Frye, and Canadian Writers’ (1973), presents a similar reading of contemporary Canadian literature (including a number of French-Canadian authors). As in his book-length study Butterfly on Rock (1970), Jones’s emphasis is on the communal function of myth, in which ‘communal’ refers to a shared world, one that includes the entire creation. Although Jones thinks that the divided world is felt more acutely in Canada than elsewhere, his is myth in its broadest sense – derived from Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. The shaping principle

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of the poetic act, myth aids the imagination in its desire to create an integrated view of the world. Struggling with Canada’s divided world, poets such as A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, Gwendolyn MacEwen, and John Newlove have occasionally achieved ‘a large vision of communion’ that shows the collective genius of a whole people. Though Jones’s critical impulse is thematic, this reading of Canadian writing, as in Butterfly on Rock, is particularly mythic in the way Jones finds his expression in Biblical patterns and images. Rosemary Sullivan’s ‘Northrop Frye: Canadian Mythographer’ (1983) can be seen as a continuation of Reaney’s ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament.’ Taking Reaney‘s question ‘Can the critic help the poet?’ Sullivan sets out to find her own answer. Observing that Reaney identifies the critic’s function with that of an ‘anatomist’ who can provide the poet with ‘hints and guesses’ and a ‘grammar of motifs,’ she asks if the role of the critic is ‘to define the cultural gaze.’ In reply, she provides a sharply focused recapitulation of Frye’s critical theory, revisiting both Anatomy of Criticism and Fearful Symmetry because she believes that it was Frye’s archetypal criticism, not his Canadian critical writing, that most profoundly influenced Canadian poets. Sullivan examines Atwood’s early poetry and Surfacing and suggests that Atwood’s work can be meaningfully approached from the point of view of ‘mythological conditioning’ and ‘ironic displacement,’ two concepts central to Frye. In its contemporary manifestation the former pulls towards conformity while the latter pulls away, making the individual aware of the conventions and structures that entrap her. In this pull and counterpull Atwood’s work uses contemporary mythology while ironically displacing it; she is ‘one of the best users’ of this technique, which triggers her ‘ironic gift.’ At the same time, Sullivan’s answer to her initial question takes the form of a disguised warning: too much help from the critic can get the poet overly entangled in literary conventions and patterns, preventing her from distinguishing between the representation of actuality and the actuality itself. Rounding off Part I is Francis Sparshott’s essay ‘Frye in Place’ (1979), which, in its major key, discusses Frye’s humanistic approach to literary criticism, while, in the minor, it touches on his identity. Who is Frye and what cultural forces shaped his imagination? Sparshott’s list of influences is long and varied, from Blake’s writing and Nonconformism to Moncton, Victoria College, and Western civilization (in both its Biblical and classical manifestations). This minor key is relevant to the overall design of the present selection because Sparshott shows us that the

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influences that shaped Frye’s critical theory are deeply present in his views of the Canadian literary imagination. For Sparshott, Frye is a ‘visionary and allegorist,’ a critic whose natural impulse is not to ‘explain what he decides to leave unexplained.’ A mind like Frye’s perceives the world in large patterns that make sense of a culture and that offer – particularly in places like Canada – possible answers to such questions as ‘Where is here?’ For Sparshott, wherever we are is the centre of our imaginative world, and Frye’s having remained all his life in Canada exemplifies this fact. Referring specifically to the ‘Conclusion’ of the Literary History of Canada, he attributes to Frye the creation of a ‘synthetic identity’ for ‘our literature, a construct derived from literary texts that includes the minor parts organized into a larger pattern.’ ‘The world of literature is,’ says Sparshott, ‘envisaged, not asserted,’ and, quoting Frye, ‘it is a body of hypothetical thought and action.’ In other words, one knows where one is – where the ‘here’ is – because one has ‘walked up and down in the hypothetical.’ This is the fruit of literary imagination – a mind free to examine the ‘actual’ because it is ‘entrenched in the possible.’ Part II contains an oppositional discourse presented by such critics as George Bowering, Barbara Belyea, Frank Davey, Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon, and the later John Moss – a critique of what they consider to be Frye’s excessive and negative influence on Canadian writers and critics. In the last two essays in the section, the emphasis shifts towards a more general discussion of the alarming preponderance of thematic criticism in the Canadian literary culture, responsibility for which is implicitly assigned to Frye. These essays as a group provide a counterpoint to Part I, reflecting the emergence of a dialectical tension forming inside Canadian criticism at the time. While it was Louis Dudek who first strongly objected to Frye’s criticism and influence in his review ‘“Frye Again” (But Don’t Miss Souster),’ published in Delta 5 (October 1958), George Bowering’s ‘Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet (1) than any Northrop Frye poet (2) than he used to be’ (1968) remains the first major negative criticism of Frye’s theory of literature and of Frye’s influence on a group of Canadian poets.16 The poets associated with this group – Jay Macpherson, Douglas LePan, and Reaney himself (Reaney’s recent work, Bowering argued, was beginning to depart from Frye’s influence) – are described as out of touch with what was happening in poetry in Canada in the 1960s. The mainstream poets of the period – in Bowering’s view of things, those associated with Contact Press and Tish magazine – shared an af-

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finity with contemporary American poetics, which had been influenced by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. The ‘Frye School’ – the existence of which Frye himself dismissed on several occasions – was objected to by Bowering as being ‘super-conscious and architectural.’ Their fault – Bowering examines in some detail Macpherson’s poetry to illustrate how big a fault it is – was their attempt to impose their own identity on the world of experience. Instead of deliberately setting out to mythologize reality, they should have surrendered to the reality that surrounded them and established communion with it. Their fundamental mistake was to believe, with Frye, that a poem is a selfenclosed system, an autonomous verbal universe, unaffected by any external influences. Barbara Belyea, in ‘Butterfly in the Bush Garden: Mythopoeic Criticism of Contemporary Poetry Written in Canada’ (1976), extends this critique of Frye’s influence by turning to his effect on criticism rather than poetry. Her quarrel is less with Frye than with those who have misread his notion of myth or simplified its application. Frye used myth carefully and consistently throughout his work to mean the structural principle of the poem and not, according to Belyea, as ‘a figurative explanation of natural or historical phenomena.’ Frye’s successors ‘translated Frye’s “fables of identity” into a limited number of truly Canadian themes,’ which then they welded into ‘a coherent, mythic super-poem to which all Canadian writers have contributed.’ Arguing the inadequacy of the thinking found in Reaney, Atwood, and Jones – which defines Canada, with all its internal contradictions, in terms of a national identity – Belyea finds such an approach akin to Marxist critical practice, which reduces the literary character of writing and criticism to sociology and cultural evaluation. Frank Davey’s widely cited essay ‘Surviving the Paraphrase’ (1976) is his controversial critique of Frye’s alleged influence on the thematic approach to the study of literature, which is a ‘testimony to the limitations of Canadian literary criticism’ in general. Davey opens his discussion by lumping Frye together with other ‘anti-evaluative thematic’ critics such as Jones, Atwood, and Moss, whose critical assumptions about literature he finds at best ‘extra-literary’ and at worst ‘anti-literary.’ Their impulse is ‘towards paraphrase – paraphrase of the culture and paraphrase of literature,’ which leads to extracting the ‘paraphrasable content and throw[ing] away the form.’ Davey’s discussion assumes the tone of a dispensation, telling the critics the types of critical inquiry they should adopt in order to rescue Canadian criticism from a dead-

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end situation. Among alternative critical approaches, he suggests the historical, the analytical, the phenomenological, and the archetypal, all of which look at literature in formal not instrumental terms. Even though – as we have seen – Frye is marked out within the thematic group as implicitly responsible for its existence, he is also set outside it when Davey not only approves of Frye’s archetypal criticism as one of the alternatives but also singles him out as an example to follow. His objection to ‘paraphrasable content’ is based on a principle formulated by Frye: ‘the literary structure is always ironic because what it says is always different from what it means.’ Frye’s statement makes clear that the ‘thematicists’ misapplied or ignored the general principles that are central to Frye’s entire body of criticism by selecting only those they found congenial to thematizing. Davey’s essay – first delivered as a public address at the founding meeting of the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures in 1974 – initiates what would soon become a consensual effort among a number of Canadian critics to eradicate the thematic approach. Though Frye is not directly denounced by Davey, his non-evaluative approach to Canadian writing is alluded to as a way of treating Canada’s domestic literary production as an adjunct to literature rather than as literature proper.17 Davey’s discussion not only broadens the scope of the Canadian critical discourse – the centre of which is Frye’s influence on a group of younger critics – but also discloses an apparent ‘fault line’ in Frye’s criticism. Robert Lecker, in ‘Nobody Gets Hurt Bullfighting Canadian-Style: Rereading Frank Davey’s “Surviving the Paraphrase,”’ observes that what Davey did was ‘something new: he gives thematic criticism its name’ and that in that ‘act of naming he identifies and therefore empowers the very ideology he wishes to undercut.’18 Not unlike Davey, Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon, in their ‘Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism versus Literary Criticism’ (1977) – originally published as an introduction to a selection of essays called Minus Canadian19 – disavow criticism that is fixated on theme and readings of literature that set their gaze exclusively on nationality or national identity. They argue that Frye’s observation that Canadian literature should be studied in its social and historical setting – that is, ‘as part of Canadian life’ – could, two decades earlier, be ‘asserted with considerable justification,’ but that what Frye then found an ‘appropriate critical attitude’ is now a ‘dated letter.’ The intervening years had seen a leap in the production of excellent writing in Canada, necessitating not only a shift in critical evaluation but a reorientation,

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from reading for themes to reading for intrinsic literary value. Cameron and Dixon distinguish between the later thematic criticism – with its ‘sociological monotone’ and homogenizing impulses – and Frye’s own position and don’t hold Frye responsible for the present ‘critical anachronism’ so much as his supporters, who, ‘justifiably respectful’ of his ‘unequivocal genius and international reputation as a critical theorist,’ ‘continue to reflect the dated letter of this particular pronouncement and ignore the liberal spirit of his general theory.’ Because John Moss was the author of two book-length studies of Canadian writing – Patterns of Isolation and Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel – that marked him as an ardent practitioner of such criticism in the 1970s, his belated denunciation of thematic criticism in his essay ‘Bushed in the Sacred Wood’ may have come as a surprise to his readers. They may also have wondered why Moss seemed convinced, in 1981, that he was breaking the news that ‘The problems for the critic of Canadian literature today are in good part a legacy of the so-called thematic criticism of our immediate past.’ Like earlier detractors of thematic criticism, Moss is more convincing when he offers a list of limitations the thematicists were up against than when he endeavours to provide a well-defined alternative. Describing the thematic approach as a groundless methodology that fails to observe ‘the distinction between literature and its social and historical contexts,’ he characterizes it as responsible for colonizing the Canadian imagination with ‘wolves in snow, fool-saints and ubiquitous bastards, slumbering giants and victims in a curious display of quasi-sexual positions, all preoccupied with survival, isolation, the body odour of their race, wanderlust, even sex and violence.’ This obsessive thematizing blurs the distinction between first- and second-rate literary production. Of the way thematic criticism often became a social corrective, Moss observes, ‘Without knowing where the “thematic” response originates, nor why it was appropriate to the social, cultural, and even literary needs of its time,’ the thematicists’ ‘call for change amounts to little more than an expression of contempt for our mutual blindness.’ This ‘blindness’ is linked by Moss to Frye’s ‘careless’ generalization about ‘literature and society.’ For Moss, Frye is a ‘false prophet’ who ‘generalizes with as much careless aplomb as the least of his apparent followers,’ but who served in his time ‘a vital purpose’ by ‘lending credibility to the serious consideration of Canadian literature.’ What we need now, Moss exclaims, ‘is someone to turn on the lights.’ Moss’s essay – in part a confessional, in part an attempt by a former

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believer to rearrange the house of memory and realign himself with the newer trends in Canadian literary criticism – serves as a compelling summary of a short-lived period of a literary criticism that was, contrary to Moss’s unease about its continued presence, devalued before it had a chance to mature. The essays in Part III go beyond the previous limits of dispute to engage Frye’s criticism in terms of his larger vision, viewing his apparent inconsistencies as part of his double perception that treats the world as both environment and representation. These critics reconsidered the apparent discrepancy between Frye’s international criticism, with its predilection for abstraction, systematization, and universalization, and his domestic criticism, espousing literature’s mimetic and nonautonomous status, which had begun to seem to some of Frye’s critics to present an irreconcilable contradiction, oppositional more than dialectical. One of the leading voices in that reconsideration was the critic and poet Eli Mandel. Mandel’s ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition’ (1983) is a cautiously argued study that analyses and tests Frye’s theory for its apparent stubborn contradictions. Approaching Frye in terms of process and allowing for a duplicity that can be explained away by ‘reference to his poetic style and method,’20 Mandel not only shows us where and when Frye’s perceptual shifts occur but also reads Frye in terms of a literary and critical tradition that Frye himself helped locate and continued to redefine. Quoting Frye’s statement about the dilemma that faces the critic of Canadian literature who ‘has to settle uneasily somewhere between the Canadian historian and social scientist, who has no comparative value-judgments to worry about, and the ordinary critic, who has nothing else,’21 Mandel locates Frye within an oddly strained relationship between the formal and the instrumental views of literature. Margery Fee’s ‘Retrieving the Canadian Critical Tradition as Poetry: Eli Mandel and Northrop Frye’ (1991) is an illuminating study in the anxiety of critical influence. Fee sees Mandel’s long intellectual relationship with Frye as an expression of his preoccupation with criticism’s elusive character – the need to pin down ‘an unbroken Canadian critical tradition’ in tension with the desire ‘to remain consistent to his particular view of literature.’ Oscillating between environmental and autonomous critical approaches, Mandel, like Frye, opts for a double perspective, or, as Fee describes it, an ‘unabashed declaration of duplicity.’ This duplicity, based on Mandel’s need to have it both ways – to lay out both sides of the argument – makes him believe that it is better

Introduction

21

to ‘bend rather than break with the central Canadian critical tradition.’ Only a poetic criticism can do the bending, can see the possible coexistence of thematic and autotelic approaches. Eleanor Cook, in ‘Against Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye’ (1989), challenges what she believes have been widespread misreadings of Frye’s critical work in terms of monism. Where previous arguments focused on the dialectical gap between Frye’s Canadian criticism and his general theory, perceiving a failure of consistency or coherence, Cook says Frye encouraged a disengaged mental activity that conceived of the ‘works of literature as forming a total verbal order, rather than an aggregate.’ She turns to Anatomy of Criticism – which critics have targeted as a prime example of the structuralists’ obsession with taxonomy – and proclaims it not just an anatomy but also a confession. For Cook, this coupling of two forms – the anatomical that orders the world and the confessional that is one’s life – is positive, not negative. It results in a ‘peculiarly Canadian form’ that engenders – here she quotes Frye – ‘the real dialectics of the spirit.’ Recalling Mandel’s view, she argues that instead of polarizing the mind, Frye’s dialectics liberate the mind into possessing a double vision of the world. Heather Murray’s essay may recall the tone of Davey’s ‘Surviving the Paraphrase,’ but her treatment of Frye and Frye’s influence on Canadian critical thinking in ‘Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space’ is quite different. Like Davey, she exhorts critics to read Canadian literature in a new and more creative manner – to read for ‘contradictions,’ not ‘coherence.’ The starting point of Murray’s discussion is Frye, whom she sees as the person who detected and articulated the split in the Canadian critic’s psyche. For Murray, Frye’s own writing on the subject of the Canadian literary imagination, particularly in the ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada – with its notion of the ‘autonomous world of literature’ on the one hand, and of literature as a product of a specific environment on the other – embodies this split. A great deal of Canadian criticism, according to Murray, has shuttled back and forth between these poles: ‘Frye’s subjective-objective, literary-cultural dilemma, and the re-emergence of the problem of evaluation, begin to seem by this point an uncanny recurrence.’ Murray broadens her perspective to include future possibilities for Canadian critical thinking, from Marxist and feminist analysis to deconstructionist and psychoanalytical theorizing – all of which require a ‘gestalt shift’ – in order to take ‘our critical cues from the literatures before us, to read for contradiction.’

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A significant feature of Murray’s essay is her diagnosis of thematic criticism. She offers a balanced view of its positive and negative aspects and suggests that it be reappraised. The need for reappraisal arises from its dual function, its striving for coexistence of the local-specific with the universal-archetypal. At its best, thematic criticism ‘was a serious if over-extended and under-equipped attempt to form exactly the sort of criticism called for by Frye in his “Conclusion” – a criticism both literary/aesthetic and social/historical, a criticism attentive to both the text and its culture.’ Taking a new tack, Linda Hutcheon, in ‘Frye Recoded: Postmodernity and the Conclusions’ (1994), asks what happens if we choose ‘to examine Frye’s position from a postmodern perspective’ and proposes that Frye’s two ‘contradictory’ readings of literature – the ‘literary,’ founded on ‘humanist/universalist’ or ‘modernist/internationalist’ principles, and the extra-literary, based on ‘the Canadian contextual specifics’ – can be approached in terms of a typically postmodern tension. What if we assess Canadian writing without applying ‘universal’ standards and ideals? Then we might, she answers, negotiate a radically different perception of Canada which, ‘instead of sounding like a failed nation with a deficient or at least immature culture (according to the model of modernity) … might start to sound postmodernly open and provisional.’ From a postmodern position, the contradictions that irritated some of Frye’s critics, particularly those who have argued from within the modernist frame of reference, are overcome: the modern, binary, either/or world view is displaced by one in which postmodern both/ and thinking prevails. Hutcheon’s essay acknowledges that there is no reason to doubt Frye’s belief in the autonomous status of literature, but she reminds us that Frye also engaged in practical criticism in which the study of society was a natural extension of the study of literature. This position is evident in his essays on the Canadian literary imagination; and culture and critics ‘who have not looked at these writings,’ warns Hutcheon, ‘miss this important tension in his thought.’ In the last two essays in Part III, our attention is directed to viewing Frye’s Canadian criticism as an ‘imaginative’ rather than an analytical construct. In David Staines’s ‘Frye: Canadian Critic/Writer’ (1994) and in Robert Lecker’s ‘“A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom”: The Narrative in Northrop Frye’s “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada’ (1995), we can see that the ideas of earlier writers, who variously pointed out the ‘imaginative’ side of Frye’s criticism – ‘visionary’ and ‘alle-

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gorist’ (Sparshott), ‘poetic’ (Mandel and Fee), and ‘confessional’ (Cook) – have been transformed in studies that stress Frye’s place in the narrative continuum of Canadian writing, recuperating Frye’s Canadian criticism as an integral part of Canadian imaginative literature. For Staines, Frye is a writer who ‘deliberately chose criticism as his creative mode.’ His Canadian criticism may appear secondary to his study of world literature, but it is central to the Canadian literary imagination. The continuum of Frye’s critical narrative is, in fact, most evident in his steady and ever-evolving notions about Canadian culture: ‘Frye the reviewer becomes, therefore, Frye the cultural theorist, the mythmaker and the mapmaker of, and for, his own country.’ What Frye’s Canadian ‘text’ provides us with is a ‘consistent articulation of many of the myths’ that he found in painting and poetry and that have become part of our ‘critical vocabulary, indeed of our very language.’ Lecker’s ‘A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom’ offers a fascinating rereading of Frye’s Canadian criticism. Like Staines, Lecker looks at Frye the narratologist, as well as at Frye the cultural humanist who imaginatively participates in a deliberate act of shaping Canadian literary history. But Lecker takes us farther, beyond Frye’s evolving sense of the narrative, to show us how Frye necessarily becomes involved in his ‘critical creation’ and how this ‘involvement provides a measure’ of his own ‘imaginative development.’ To illustrate shifts in Frye’s thinking about Canada, Lecker analyses the influential ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada, one of Frye’s most complex and most frequently misread Canadian essays. For Lecker, the ‘Conclusion’ is a testimony to Frye’s ‘reading of Canadian literary history as romance, and of himself as the romance’s reader-hero.’ Passing through Lecker’s exegesis of this particular text, we follow the stages of the hero’s quest, which, at its core, was driven by Frye’s participation in the struggle to shape reality. The dual nature of reality creates a tension between the questor’s collective and individual impulses. In Lecker’s reading, the Frye of the ‘Conclusion,’ if not writing in a ‘confessional’ mode (to return to Cook’s description of Frye in Anatomy of Criticism), is at least an autobiographical narrator, outlining the various stages of the critic’s passage through his country’s time and space. For Lecker, the ‘Conclusion’ provides ‘an excellent example of how literary criticism is often the outgrowth of the critic’s private dreams and desires.’ Russell Brown’s ‘The Northrop Frye Effect’ (2007) serves this volume as epilogue. It is divided into three parts, each locating Frye in a specific

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Canadian context – ‘Frye among the Poets,’ ‘Frye among the Critics,’ and ‘Frye the Canadian.’ At the outset, Brown foregrounds Frye’s dual influence as a literary critic and credits him with making the Canadian writers and critics of his generation realize that they could explore the artist’s role in a new, postcolonial environment and feel at home in the larger context of world literature. This discussion of Frye’s double effect on the Canadian literary culture – the possibility of the universal coexisting and interacting with the local – gives focus to the debates in this volume regarding Frye’s conflicting approaches to Canadian and world literatures and provides Brown with a discursive framework within which to explore Frye’s criticism as one large interactive field, where knowledge and insight allow for imaginative freedom. In ‘Frye among the Poets,’ Brown focuses on Reaney’s ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament’ as one of the earliest applications of Frye’s Canadian criticism by a poet to his personal search for identity. Brown recounts how Reaney, after encountering Frye’s essay ‘The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry,’ found himself opened to the possibility of being both inheritor of literature from Canada’s colonial past and remaker. Frye showed Reaney that the literary tradition could be treated as an imaginative construct even from a colonial perspective. What Reaney learned from Frye was that inheritance was not a burden but a gift, which poets were called upon to make their own. Such a remaking also became a significant cultural act because for poets ‘milieu mediated the use they made of that inheritance.’ Brown then turns his attention to Frye’s theoretical work such as Anatomy of Criticism to observe that it also helped an emerging generation of Canadian writers to see themselves as part of an international literary tradition. Alluding to Reaney’s rendering of Frye’s Anatomy as a ‘handbook’ that provided him with ‘a giant critical focus,’ he suggests that Frye’s Anatomy served this function, directly or indirectly, for many writers of the period. In his second section, ‘Frye among the Critics,’ Brown returns to the development of thematic criticism in Canada – tracing its provenance, its flourishing, and its retreat – by noting comparable developments elsewhere. Locating the ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada as the founding moment of Canadian thematicism, he comments on the confusing naming of ‘thematic criticism’ in Canada, which can be traced to Frye’s occasional use of ‘the word theme in his Canadian essays but chiefly to the subtitles of Jones’s and Atwood’s books (A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature and A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature).’ This ill-defined appellation has obscured its close re-

Introduction

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lationship to what in the United States became known as the ‘myth and symbol school,’ founded by Henry Nash Smith, a critic who, like Frye, brought together literary and extra-literary texts as the source material for his analysis of national myth making. Like the Frye-inspired criticism in Canada, myth and symbol criticism in the United States sought to identify a distinctive national literary tradition and national canon. Frye’s cultural criticism, Brown observes, followed naturally from Frye’s ‘revolutionary innovation’ in Fearful Symmetry, which ‘treated the whole of Blake’s work as a single text,’ and from the way Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism expanded that approach by making an ‘assumption of total coherence’ that allowed him to treat individual texts as parts in a larger whole; thus it comes as no surprise that Frye could write as if there were a single text of Canadian literature written by ‘the Canadian imagination.’ In concluding his second section, Brown urges a ‘reconsideration of Frye the Canadian critic’ that would draw on a broader context informed by a fuller reading of Frye, including texts such as The Educated Imagination, The Modern Century, and The Critical Path, and by becoming better informed about ‘the intellectual currents that surrounded and nurtured him.’ In his third section, ‘Frye the Canadian,’ Brown describes how Frye’s ‘profound effect on the perception and the study of Canada’s literary culture’ resulted in part because he came to be seen as quintessentially Canadian. Frye responded to his physical, historical, and cultural environment with extraordinary intuition, validating it by attending to the literature it had produced even while attending to the great canon. The ‘responses collected in this volume,’ concludes Brown, not only make clear Frye’s early and continuing role as a commentator but also show him as someone who ‘helped articulate a Canadian tradition and shaped the Canadian canon.’ His international fame ‘gave salience and added authority to his Canadian criticism at a time when most of his colleagues were not taking Canadian literature seriously because it was thought of as marginal, immature, or endangered.’ His continuing engagement with Canadian literary culture despite his international fame became ‘an affirmation that knowing about Canadian cultural products was no less important than being aware of the great tradition,’ just as the way he remained in Canada made it seem a less marginal place. In a philosophical sense, Brown’s epilogue poses a question that moves us away from and beyond the works in the present selection: to what extent must cultural change include cultural continuity? Can we or should we make a break with the past? Must thematic criticism be considered a historical anachronism, even an anachronistic presence in

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its own time, as it seemed to some critics? The different and often contesting views from the previous discussions intersect, preparing us to undertake a remapped understanding of Frye and to locate his place in Canadian criticism from a contemporary perspective. In sum, the essays brought together in this volume show the shifts in how we think about the imagination and its effects on the construction of literary sensibility, criticism, and culture. None of the authors, even those whose theoretical approaches lean towards formal criticism, could stay uninvolved with the cultural reality within which they wrote, or with Frye’s influence on their perception of that cultural reality. The impact of Frye’s literary and cultural criticism has been far-reaching. It has engendered, as so many contributors acknowledge, a great number of ‘misreadings.’ But was Frye really misread or is it simply that his work has required multiple readings that have evolved over time? In ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition,’ Mandel anticipated the necessity for such multiple readings when he identified an ‘insoluble tension’ in Frye’s Canadian criticism because it embodied the transformative moment when ‘theory descends to practice.’ Along the way, Frye has taken us through history and literature – wedding a Laurentian theory of Canadian history with a romantic myth of a descent to the interior, through cultural history – ranging across folkculture theories of nation to modernist internationalism, through the distinction between romanticism and modernism, quest and antithetical quest, art and anti-art, structure and composition by field. If indeed the question … is the vexed one of influence, it now seems fair to say that the real influence of Frye is to have shown the precise points where local creation becomes part of the civilized discourse he speaks of as criticism and creativity, the world of wonder, the universe of words.22

Frye’s criticism was, paradoxically, a product of the central intellectual currents that shaped modernist thought while, at the same time, disrupting it.

notes 1 Throughout this volume, ‘Canadian’ should be understood chiefly as ‘English Canadian.’

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2 Eli Mandel, ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition,’ in Eleanor Cook, Chaviva Hosek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker, and Julian Patrick, eds, Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 288. 3 Frye, ‘Preface,’ in Italy in Canada (Toronto: Italian Cultural Institute, 1990), iii. Rpt in Frye, Northrop Frye on Canada, Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 12, edited by Jean O’Grady and David Staines (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 659–60. 4 Dermot McCarthy, ‘Early Canadian Literary Histories and the Function of a Canon,’ in Robert Lecker, ed., Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 32. 5 Thus Heather Murray’s amusing characterization of Frye as ‘a wolf in sheepdog’s clothing.’ 6 The exception in the late 1920s and the early 1930s came in Montreal with A.J.M. Smith, who gathered the first English-Canadian modernists around him. Smith’s assessment of Canadian poetry as being ‘altogether too self-conscious of its environment’ (in ‘Wanted: Canadian Criticism,’ published in the Canadian Forum in 1928. Rpt in Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, eds, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada [Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1967], 33) foreshadows the concerns of the later anti-thematicists. 7 Edward Hartley Dewart, Selections from Canadian Poets (Montreal: John Lovell, 1864), xv. 8 William Douw Lighthall, Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), xxxiv. 9 See note 6. 10 Barry Cameron, in W.H. New, ed., Literary History of Canada, Vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 113. 11 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 52–3. 12 From the 1970s on, Canada was awash with new theorizing, particularly in the academies. One of the ‘imports,’ postcolonialism, was distinct in that, not unlike Canadian thematic criticism, it ‘resisted’ theoretical globalization. Postcolonial theorizing, which gained currency in Canadian universities in the 1980s and 1990s, often shared with thematic criticism a fundamental assumption of national differentiation. That is, though postcolonial movements were international (cross-cultural) in origin, their critical orientation was national in approach and strongly resisted universal criteria for evaluation. 13 In her seminal study of contemporary Canadian criticism and literary theory, ‘Structuralism/Post-Structuralism: Language, Reality and Canadian Literature’ (in John Moss, ed., Future Indicatives [Ottawa: University

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14

15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22

Branko Gorjup of Ottawa Press, 1987], 25–51), Barbara Godard discusses the nature of this ‘ongoing dialectics between tradition and imported innovation.’ As a point of departure for her discussion she uses the founding conference of the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures, in 1974, at which ‘the rise of the reader and the plurality of meaning’ were celebrated. That same conference, as Godard observes, gave birth to the institutionalization of Canadian literature, which ‘manifested itself in a rupture within the discipline of English.’ At that same conference this use of ‘Canadian’ was implicitly attacked in Frank Davey’s controversial essay ‘Surviving the Paraphrase’ (included in the present selection), in which the work of Frye, Atwood, Jones, and others was criticized for its insularity and selectivity. Certainly, these methodological assumptions were present in the thematicists’ quest for meaning in a pattern of themes believed to be inherent in a body of national literature, which they asserted could unlock the nation’s distinctive character. Ross C. Murfin and Supryia M. Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (Boston: Bedford Books,1998), 299–300. Bowering has asked that I note that this ‘essay was written a long time ago’ and that, though he does not disavow it, he would ‘disagree with Frye more maturely now.’ The ‘non-evaluative’ aspect of Frye’s criticism was not, in fact, limited to his Canadian criticism but was at the heart of Frye’s definition of the critic’s role. Robert Lecker, Making It Real (Toronto: Anansi, 1995), 215. A special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature. Later critics such as Eleanor Cook, David Staines, and Robert Lecker also read Frye’s criticism as an extension of a poetic impulse. ‘Conclusion’ to Literary History of Canada, in The Bush Garden (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 215–16. Mandel, ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition,’ 294.

PART I The Confluence of the Mythopoeic and the Thematic: Frye and Canada

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1.1 The Canadian Poet’s Predicament james reaney

Sometimes this is called the plight; situation is too mild a word, but I have plight, situation, and predicament in mind when I think of the poet or indeed any artist in Canada.1 I suppose that you can be more and also less self-conscious about this sort of thing. Part of the predicament I am about to describe is that no one seems to know, no one seems to be able to tell you, whether you should be self-conscious or unconscious about the craft of poetry, whether you should really tackle literary criticism as a help or intuitively arrive at the same goal. I will admit that when I was even younger than I am now I thought that literary critics were big bad wolves who ate you up, but I’ve changed my mind about them since. However, here, in this essay I’d like to try out self-consciousness about the whole problem of writing poetry in Canada just to see if it gets you anywhere at all. Another thing I rather worry about is whether it’s any use talking about the poet’s predicament in national terms. It’s sensible if you think living in a certain kind of nation has any shaping effect whatsoever upon that country’s imagination. I happen to think that Canada is a very peculiar and different country; whether its national colour and shape have anything to do with the colour and shape of its poetry is a question that you might as well say yes to, again – just to see what happens. The whole topic has three different aspects, aspects which depend on the vantage point you’re taking. You can stand anywhere in Canada – in the country, the wilderness, or the city; you can stand in the British Museum Reading Room, you can stand in the Toronto Reference Library on College Street. If you look at our native poetic tradition in

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the British Museum, it all seems so pitiful; when you put pen to paper in Canada, say attempt to write a poem in the Reference Library on College Street, the native tradition becomes ancestral, important, and haunting. I would like to spend most of my time looking at this native tradition because it is so important: here is what the poet’s own countrymen have done with words, what sort of thing is it; what sort of help can be expected from it? Of course, first find your native poetic tradition: it has really just recently become available with two intelligent anthologies – A.J.M. Smith’s and Louis Dudek’s2 – and with Northrop Frye’s article in Gants du Ciel on the narrative tradition in Canadian poetry.3 When you read Canadian poetry in anthologies you find that although a good one brings you stuff you would never have found out about, it also brings it to you in a distorting way. Mr Smith’s anthology begins with some very exciting Indian lyrics: ‘Were-bear, why are you not in hell?’ ‘Here in the Hut of the New-born / Fresh from the beak of the Raven …’4 I don’t know how much Hermia Fraser has rearranged these, but the myths hinted at here really made me think as hardly anything else in the book did until I reached Isabella Valancy Crawford and the last half-dozen modern poets leading up to Margaret Avison. The idea expressed in the Indian lyrics that a raven is the spirit of creation seems so right for this country and the way it often looks. In an anthology founded on historical principles the Indian songs are first and primitive. Charles G.D. Roberts’s poems take up a commanding situation in the centre of the book and are called sophisticated. To my mind he barely gets beyond photography; the views of nature he presents are written by a nice melancholy pebble simply lying there on the beach looking at things. But it is to the Indian lyrics that you go if you want something that moulds the shapes of Nature into more sophisticated forms than themselves. Since Mr Smith’s anthology is one of lyrics, or lyric sections, a young poet might easily be excused for thinking that that was the thing to do in Canada. If you cut Canadian poetry a different way, actually impossible so far as an anthology of ordinary length is concerned, but if you could anthologize with narrative poetry in mind, as Northrop Frye suggests in Gants du Ciel, you would almost think you weren’t reading Canadian poetry at all. Isabella Valancy Crawford still comes off quite well, but now she is seen to be part of a slowly improving tradition, not just an unexplained brilliance, which culminates in E.J. Pratt’s work. Using the narrative road, by the time the reader reaches Towards the Last Spike in Canadian poetry he’s arrived at a grasp of Canada artistically

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equal to that of the Indian myths. Wilfrid Watson, when he talks about the British Columbia forest world being a green Leviathan that coughs Emily Carr up on the coasts of Eternity,5 does something to me that I’ve also found consistently present in Indian myths and the narrative poems of Crawford and Pratt. When I read Archibald Lampman’s lyrics I feel as if I worked at the Post Office in Ottawa and on my weekend walks saw many mulleins; when I read Pratt I step into a more exciting world where there are dragons instead of mulleins. Actually both worlds are equally exciting; it’s just that I feel that the kind of poetry represented by Crawford’s and Pratt’s work could stand for more attention from poets here than it has received. Right now I’d like to present you with a miniature gallery of Canadian poetry which is Exhibit A in the predicament case. With one exception I’m not going to say who wrote what because I’d like the reader to have some fun and also I should like him to read the quotations as forming a whole continuous poem: A See now rude spring, his wished for visit pays, And teeming earth an hideous form displays … And next the frog strains forth his croaking throat, And loud proclaims each reptile is afloat. Each poisonous herb assumes its different hue.

This is Standish O’Grady in The Emigrant and I put it in for shock value; the Canadian spring is not this horrible, but neither is it as English pretty as some songsters make out. In short, it is a Thing that no one knows very much about yet. B My Father is the Sun, the Earth my Mother ... It is the wood pewee, That haunts the deepest forest. ’Tis the bird Yokewa gave to solitude for voice – The lonely heart within the lonely heart. C For love has its own Sun – its own peculiar sky, All one great daffodil in which do lie The sun, the moon, the stars – all seen at once And never setting ...

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James Reaney D, E … the gossiping grass … the trees to their innermost marrow ... F And hears above the hoarse bough bending wind The hillwolf howling the neighbouring height And bittern booming in the pool below. G For the Grim Idiot at the Gate Is deathless and eternal there. H A storm cloud was marching Vast on the prairie, Scored with livid ropes of hail, Quick with nervous vines of lightning. I Then gorged upon the fibrous jelly Until, finding that six tons lay Like Vulcan’s anvil in his belly … I’ll not join your ballet. J, K Summer’s jasper century … You should bristle like those cylindrical brushes they use to scrub out bottles … L, M This cracked walrus skin that stinks Of the rank sweat of a mermaid’s thighs … The Indians are fighting drunk, The Frenchmen keep the squaws … N, O … tansy from the fertile ground: My sister, heralded by no moan, no sound … I was, I am the Emperor Solomon …

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P A lung-born land, this, scanned by the valvular heart, the field glasses … Q The meaning of the moth, even the smashed moth, the meaning of the moth – Can’t we stab that one angle into the curve of space …

This is something concrete to look at although it’s still too large and in a minute I’ll reduce it to an even smaller size. It’s still a historically arranged slice; alas, I haven’t the courage to let anyone but Time juggle with other people’s poetry, but that helps us observe the changing fashions as the quotations dart along: neoclassical rhymed couplets at the beginning and, at the end, the tendency to be more involved rhythmically and intellectually, jumpy rhythms and witty images. This sampler – rather a grisly one for that tansy near the end grows from the grave of the speaker’s parents and that is why, you see, he says that the tansy is ‘my sister’ – this sampler represents the way the Canadian poet’s most imaginative ancestors and contemporaries saw and see the world; it represents a distinctive vision but it cries out for more development, just as the poet’s innermost self probably cries out for some sort of ancestral pattern to go by. However, stop just a moment to see who the Canadian poet is to whom we propose to give this ancestral singing robe. The twenty or so flourishing poets in Canada at the present time – it is Louis Dudek who has counted them – are not the whole Canadian Poet by any means; they’re far too advanced to be typical. But if you should throw a poetry contest with a prize big enough to attract five hundred poets (and such a one was thrown not so long ago) you might feel that putting them all together you’d arrive at the typical Canadian maker. When you have finished reading the five hundred poems what you find is that about three people have come close to getting the thing, I mean they know how to write poetry professionally. These three generally send in an epic, a small lyric, and a dramatic monologue each just to make the judges’ task easy. After these three you get two hundred metrical smoothies without a metaphor in their bones and then three hundred metrical hobblers; at the very end, some blithe old Boer War pensioner who sends in a slightly tampered-with transcription of ‘God Save the Queen.’ Flying nervously in and out of this mass are three or

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four poems brilliant and eerie and spine-chilling because these are the poems of mad people or human beings on the verge of violent schizophrenia. The surrealism is too authentic; as a matter of fact, in the history of the particular poetry contest I am thinking of the first prize was once given to a poet in a mental hospital. This analysis of the five hundred Canadian poets fills me with gloom because it represents the grass roots poet, poetry reader, and average sensitive citizen in this country and he is just not very literary at all. Thank God there is the basic urge here to write a poem because you can build on that, but in Canada we just don’t turn out large quantities of people who go in for literary sophistication. Then too, with what chagrin you ponder the fact that about as many people in Canada discover how to write poetry with their souls upside down as find out the rightside-up way. Last year there was that little French girl – we read about her in Life – who was locked up in a room and told to write a poem on a set subject; she did and a very complicated rich thing it was. We just don’t tend our children that way in Canada, we push them in the general direction of Marilyn Bell6 rather than Valéry; consequently, the contemporary professional poet in Canada sometimes has the feeling that not as many people are going to understand and enjoy his poetry as should. The audience is there all right, a goodly sized one, but its taste hasn’t been sufficiently organized as yet. Even more vividly this same situation comes up in a sister art, though rather a hieratic and deadly one – I mean the art of chess. Whenever a great master comes to Canada he usually takes on thirty or forty players at once in each chess club that he visits. Usually too he beats everyone because there simply aren’t enough good average players to slow him down; the master tramples over the twenty-eight unorganized players and has as much time as he needs to concentrate upon the few excellent players who might beat him given adequate support. In Yugoslavia, where everyone plays chess with devouring enthusiasm from childhood on, great visiting masters have been known to lose a simultaneous match: simply too many good players facing them. You find in chess – I hate to suggest the analogy but I want something very unromantic – that there is much that can be learnt, all the various openings with their variations, the Sicilian Defence, the Queen’s Gambit, the King’s Indian, and so on. The skilled reading and writing of poetry have their openings and Sicilian Defences too and the more people know them in Canada, the less nervous the native champions are going to be, the better they are going to play. We have already looked at what I consider a very valuable King’s

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Indian Defence by no means sufficiently popular. It is the native tradition I was talking about earlier and here it is again, this time in a more compressed form: Rude Spring My Father is the Sun, the Earth my Mother Love has its own Sun The Grim Idiot at the Gate Bittern Booming Vines of Lightning Fibrous Jelly Cylindrical Brushes Jasper This cracked walrus skin squaws tansy ... my sister I am the Emperor Solomon a lung-born land The meaning of the moth Can’t we stab that one angle into the curve of space …

Now I wonder what this looks like. It sounds like the results of a Ouija Board conversation with Tom O’Bedlam. I chose the original phrases not because they fell into any sort of pattern, only the pattern of liking them. Although I don’t know quite what to do with it I like the mad monster above, for it represents to me what every poet in Canada can hang around his neck if he likes; it’s at least one-third of the predicament. Ever since playing a game called Poetry Poker at John Sutherland’s apartment where you lost two pennies into the jackpot if you didn’t recognize the particular passage of Canadian poetry being read, I’ve felt that not enough people around here see the fun of working or playing with the native tradition. The compressed canto above is a tradition made up of images. If you look at the native tradition as Northrop Frye does in Gants du Ciel you get the following sort of thing, not so different from the imagery tradition as you might think because both move from the things outside personality to a place somewhere inside personality. Therefore: O’Grady’s The Emigrant: the Atlantic voyage to Canada. Goldsmith’s The Rising Village: what its title implies.

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James Reaney Lampman’s At the Long Sault: heroic defence of a new society. Mair’s Tecumseh: Red Man crushed between two opposing white political approaches. Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie: struggle with tough environment – tree falls on Malcolm. Heavysege’s Jephtha’s Daughter: God made this dreadful wilderness. What sort of God is he? Pratt’s Brébeuf and His Brethren: further religious difficulties – Aztecs vs Christ. Marriott’s The Wind Our Enemy; Birney’s David: fight with mean tricky Nature – dust bowl, mountains. Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike: Precambrian shield and mountains – dinosaur-dragons – finally conquered.

All the caterpillar, CPR shapes of these narratives add up to our history with more emphasis on landscape and religion, less on the parliamentary and economic than you usually get in Canadian histories: with more interpretation too than you can legitimately put into a modern history. In ‘La Tradition narrative dans la poésie canadienneanglaise,’ Northrop Frye makes the extremely suggestive comment that our civilization in Canada naturally produced narrative poetry with a strong undertone of melancholy to it because it was, until recently, or perhaps still is, at the same stage as the Anglo-Saxon pioneer culture that produced Beowulf and The Wanderer. Beowulf was probably written in a half-empty land where wilderness was interrupted by settlers’ clearings and Roman ghost towns. The Canadian Grendel or troll-wife, whose recognition and conquest automatically make a story, is that cheery background in the Cornelius Krieghoff paintings – the wastes of snow, the hemlock with the acquisitive curl to its gnarled old root – seen, of course, not so cheerily by the more serious Canadian painters – Emily Carr and Lawren Harris. Narrative poems about the Canadian Grendel are likely, Frye’s article further implies here, to be what best fits the Canadian poet as a genre; that remark certainly provides one key to the problem of what the poet does with the native tradition. I think also that any sensible person would say that what you do with a tradition, after picking out the part of it that seems to go well with you, is follow it. That is, do it over again. I don’t mean turning out facsimiles but related works: let me give a sardonic instance first. When Brébeuf and His Brethren first came out, a friend of mine said that the thing to do now was to write the same story from the Iroquois point

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of view. Before I pass from the problems of the native tradition to those I have labelled British Museum Library ones, I would like to show the reader two serious examples of Canadian poems that cry out for rebirth. Mair’s Tecumseh is, I think, such a work. It would be a worthwhile undertaking just to see if you could make it into a producible play, but it probably needs complete rewriting in order to increase its effectiveness enough. For example, I was surprised that Mair had left out one of the folklore elements in the original story – the flaying of Tecumseh by the American soldiery and the making of his skin into horsewhips. Actually, according to the most accurate accounts, every dead Indian at Moraviantown except Tecumseh was flayed, but that’s the sort of thing a Christopher Marlowe teaches you to overlook in the interest of getting a really satisfying climax to a tragedy. Also, take these lines from Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie: The ceaseless sweep of the tremendous wings Still beat them down and swept their dust abroad … Once more a young dawn stole into her eyes – Again her broad wings stirr’d …7

Here Crawford’s rich prospect of Time’s dying and renewing cycle – it is developed far more intricately than I have been able to indicate – strikes one as being a beautiful core for something, for at least a poem that didn’t have quite such folksy impediments in it as Malcolm and Katie. The passage reminds me of some of the things in Blake, not always the first poet one thinks of when reading Canadian poetry. As a matter of fact Crawford is the only Canadian poet with the exception of Pratt who leaves you with the Wordsworthian sensation of ‘huge and mighty forms, that do not live, / Like living men.’ In her Old Spookses’ Pass, there is the herd of cattle moving about at night in a great dark pupil-like circle, a description that remains with you in a rather shuddery way for some time. The native tradition, then, is something that repays inquiry, repays it as I’ve tried to indicate not only with the acquisition of interesting heirlooms but with imaginative life that can still beget more imaginative life, with some passages even that can change your life. Canada is a country to stay in, and not to stay in. When you start to write a poem in Canada and think of the British Museum Reading

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Room you almost go mad because the great tradition of English literature, the glare of its brilliant modern representatives seems so oppressively and crushingly great. How can I hope to be worthy of the language I write in; I’d better not stay in Canada any longer; I’ve got to go over and join the more powerful angels on the other side of the Atlantic. There’s no doubt at all that if a Canadian poet wants to be terrific he has to assimilate what Yeats, Rilke, Eliot, and all have done, or else. Whether you have to expatriate or not in order to do this is part of the poet’s predicament here; we have as few ruins and ancient cathedrals as Idaho or New York and dozens of Americans – James, Pound, and Eliot – show you the way. At the present time it looks, though, as if it might be more fun to stay in Canada, and if the poet stays he has still another choice to make. That is, he can get his training either in a university or in Bohemia. The first seems to me to be preferable. Bohemian mentors tend to concentrate on the latest – all fresh, all piping hot – Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Patchen, Canto LXXX! What a shock then to learn that Dylan Thomas’s favourite poem was ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.’ I don’t think that the poet necessarily has to go to university; if he can realize outside of it, as he will in it, that Spensers, Miltons, Blakes, and Chaucers show you how to imitate Dylan Thomas (imitate Homer, not his works) not just write pastiches of his poetry – then all right. If you just hole up in Canada and refuse to educate yourself you are going to be provincial. But if you flee the country, cut yourself off from your roots, you may end up not even being that. The solution seems to be that the Canadian poet has to stay in the country and at the same time act as if he weren’t in it. It looks as if I’m saying that the Canadian poet has to be some sort of poltergeist. He probably has to be. What is this country that the poet has both to stay in and to stay out of? We’ve reached the ‘dark subhuman swamp’8 that Margaret Avison speaks of in one of her poems, we’ve reached Canadian civilization and the general envelope of anything and everything Canadian that surrounds a poet here. We have Indians: I’ve already glanced at their poetry, but the other things they’ve accomplished – the rituals, the sculpture, the design, just themselves – have always looked suggestive of development to me. The totem poles and the mounds seem so effortlessly to come out of the look of the country; but our culture, as yet, doesn’t. When you compare Michelangelo’s gigantic statues of Day and Night, Twilight and Dawn, when you compare them with the tense coloured oblongs by which in their ritual sand painting the Indians describe the same eternal truths,

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the difference between the genius of this continent and the genius of Europe becomes evident with a flash.9 And that difference contains the answer to the riddle of being an artist in this country. By the way, you can make literature out of art objects: critics have remarked on the relationship between Finnegans Wake and the Book of Kells, the labyrinthine verbal organization of the one and the eye-dizzying interlacing lines of the other. The Indian material, of course, is almost an embarrassing part of the poet’s situation here because there it is, but just how to work with it still seems something of a mystery. It is something to try. We also have Christians. Perhaps one assumes that Christianity just came over and that’s that, but you get a new version of Christianity in North America that can provide a very useful angle of vision for the artist here. The Irish Church was different from the Roman Church and Joyce made that fact one of the pillars of Finnegan:10 the North American Church, it seems to me, produces a typical development in the new sects of the Protestant Left that grow up here: Holy Rollers, Mormons, Latter Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Interdenominational Sunday Schools – that sort of thing. I can hear someone groaning, ‘He wants us to read the Book of Mormon!’ Well, I don’t know if I do or not, but the part about the golden spectacles and the golden book that an angel leaves under some tree in Ohio or wherever sounds very fine to me. Perhaps what I mean is that you can read the Bible with North American eyes; the religious sects I’ve mentioned show that very, very simple and often wrongheaded people are already doing that. Perhaps it’s time that some sophisticated and rightheaded people tried it too. We have history, both large and small. Both heroic and infuriatingly tame. You get heroic things like Moraviantown or Dieppe side by side with all that beaver fur filling the first chapters of most Canadian histories and the neutral shadow of Mackenzie King. How and why Mackenzie King could have such a wild and fiery ancestor, the William Mackenzie who said, ‘Victoria, on her bloody divan,’ is a bitter paradox that forms a poem just as it stands. The small history – the archives of small-town newspapers – the small history of Canada is usually alive with weird cubistic effects like the list of crimes to be handled at the Assizes side by side with a huge ad for the latest bale of lady’s crinolines direct from Paris. We have Canadian artists and their achievements in fields other than poetry. In painting the shapes and designs in Emily Carr, the crystal clear outlines in the paintings of Edward John Hughes and Alexander Colville suggest similar egg tempera and distortion effects in poetry.

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Some of the designs Frederick Philip Grove made out of life in Canada give, or should give, a poet an electric shock: the old man in Our Daily Bread who wanders around in circles among his sons and daughters until at length he walks two hundred miles across the open prairie to his original farm and dies; all those women with the same name in The Master of the Mill. We have the country itself: I never fail to find books on the physiography of the country exciting, particularly ones about my native province. The moment you start thinking about the history of the land’s shape you start to think of a poem: The build of the region is due to the bedrock. This in turn governed the movement of the glaciers; that is, they advanced through the lowlands or flowed around the uplands.11

The Canadian poet must somehow or other deal with this too, and I don’t think that I can now take the predicament any farther.

notes ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament’ was first published in the University of Toronto Quarterly 26 (April 1957): 284–95. 1 This article concerns itself with English-Canadian poetry. When you read French-Canadian poetry that the skunk is ‘The censer of the cathedral woods’ and that the angels when transporting the Garden of Eden through the air dropped it in the St Lawrence River where it broke up into the Thousand Islands, you realize that to talk about the two kinds of poetry in this kind of article simply presents too many problems. However, some of the problems discussed here must be the problems of the French-Canadian poet, too, so I have let the title stand as it is. 2 I am referring here to A.J.M. Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry, A Critical and Historical Anthology published in 1943 (Toronto: W.J. Gage), which was the subject of Northrop Frye’s seminal review ‘Canada and Its Poetry,’ first published in The Canadian Forum, October 1943, and to Louis Dudek’s and Irving Layton’s anthology Canadian Poems 1850–1952 (Toronto: Contact Press, 1952). 3 Frye, ‘La Tradition narrative dans la poésie canadienne-anglaise,’ Gants du Ciel, No. 11 (1946) (French translation by Guy Sylvestre). English text pub-

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5 6

7

8 9

10

11

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lished as ‘The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry’ in The Bush Garden (Toronto: Anansi, 1971). The lines ‘Were-bear, why are you not in hell?’ and ‘Here in the Hut of the New-born / Fresh from the beak of the Raven …’ are from ‘Song of the Wanderer’ (36) in Hermia Fraser’s rendition of ‘Song of the Haida,’ rpt in A.J M. Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry. Wilfred Watson, ‘Emily Carr,’ rpt in Margaret Atwood’s The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982), 148. In 1954, Marilyn Bell was a sixteen-year-old Canadian heroine. She conquered swimming Lake Ontario, the English Channel, and the Straits of Juan de Fuca. The then Grade 12 Toronto Loretto College student was the most talked-about girl in the land. One would have thought that for her swimming accomplishments and, later, work with handicapped children and other charities, she would be showered with honours. That is not what happened. In fact the only honour bestowed on her was the naming of a park on the shores of Lake Ontario. Isabella Valancy Crawford, Malcolm’s Katie, in Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies, eds, Canadian Poetry (The New Canadian Series, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994), 163. Margaret Avison, ‘The Butterfly,’ in Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry, 436. Both the Haida totem poles and the Inuit carvings and engravings come out of Oriental art, a subjective inner world. European art invented ‘perspective’ to show an objective world. In Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the Irish Church is filled with prophetic monks who centre their souls on an inner spiritual life. The Roman Church goes for externals, administration, the outer materialism. Left-wing gospel sects (starting with Methodism) versus right-wing traditions. L.J. Chapman and D.F. Putnam, The Physiography of Southern Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951).

1.2 ‘This Northern Mouth’: Ideas of Myth and Regionalism in Modern Canadian Poetry john riddell

The investigation of myth is essentially the investigation of mystery. We clothe our traditions, our ancestry, our political genius, the icons of our daily existence in such metaphor, yet we can only vaguely grasp at its true nature. The meaning of myth is derived as much from a process of self-revelation as it is acquired through the fact of birthright. As we critically try to appraise its form, it vanishes before our eyes; we are, in the proverbial sense, like that blind naturalist who, grasping an elephant by its tail, described the animal as ‘a long, thin creature resembling a garden snake’ – more an indication of his (and our) own myopia than the reflection of a critical absolute. Perhaps, in the final analysis, it becomes only a matter of individual, not universal, importance what sort of handhold one feels applies to the beast in question. Elephant or snake, what are the indications that the mythopoeic impulse exists in our contemporary poetry? A central, and perhaps overriding, concern for any artist is to explore the alternatives available to an ordering principle – a framework of mythology, for instance – and to explore such possibilities within the context of a limited, or ‘regionalized,’ world. This search, at least in aspects of the work of such poets as E.J. Pratt, Earl Birney, Al Purdy, and a few others, expresses itself thematically in the aspiration towards various forms of human solidarity, though the metaphorical framework for such philosophizing might be the political, social, or geographical condition. The paradox for the observer, it would appear, is that the demons that drive the poetmythmaker to promote such expressions of humanity, sometimes breed as well a sense of psychological isolation which in effect separates the

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artist from those very human conditions he pretends to observe. It is an abstracted Irving Layton, for instance, who identifies – and properly, we assume – the carnage and inhumanity in his Goyaesque city ‘through [his] improved binoculars,’1 having safely retired behind the assumptive myth that there exist such apocalyptic social conditions, all in one place and happening simultaneously. The vision may be correct in its more universal application, but the energy of the particulars seems drained by the illusory omniscience of the poet’s stance. However, to resume philosophizing about our elephant a bit further. The urge to recreate the central facts of personal existence, even if only metaphorically, seems as necessary and natural to some individuals as the reflexive acts of daily survival are to mankind generally. In saying this, one does not try to confirm the old, and perhaps overly categorical, opposition of contemplative or imaginative man versus active man, for each attempts to justify in his own way the validity of that ‘fiction,’ as Ortega y Gasset once termed it, that we call life. But the need to articulate an ordering principle that controls the re-creation of fact, to make visible, or audible, or tactile the welding of the physical world with the world of idea is primarily the need of mythopoeic man to quantify (desperately, one feels at times) existence in the face of possible negation. It is an act of survival as relevant as any of a purely biological nature. But as the poet contemplates the possibilities of his ‘act of survival,’ of the generation of new myth through the re-creation of fact, the limitations of those possibilities become more obvious. The poet seizes, from the minutiae of his particular reality – and for the Canadian poet it is a ‘regional’ reality in both its specific and wider senses – only those elements necessary to justify what he considers to be an essential correctness of vision. The danger, as in all literatures, is that the product, the myth itself, will be provincial in spirit, restrictive in application, and only accidentally made universal by adaptation to other ‘realities’ in which there are common denominators of experience; a fact that has not, in view of man’s oral and recorded history, stopped him from propagating those necessary illusions. For the Canadian poet – as for the Canadian artist generally – there seems to have been a curious intermixing, indeed, an interdependence of the psychical and biological needs to survive. For the pioneer poet the biological almost inevitably took precedence over the former, and the result, in terms of his creative work, was a sort of formalized description of externality, a clothing of the fact in the established ideas and myths of older cultures, and not an identification with the new and

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‘recurring metaphors’ (to redirect a Northrop Frye observation) that the new environment generated. It is this partial failure of style and partial failure of idea which, as R.E. Rashley notes in his critical commentary on this early period, tended to make ‘the natural style of the poet … unaware of a world which [lay] outside of his cultural experience … Consequently the pioneer’s world [was] a solidly physical one, one … conquered by force … It [was] always outside, a surface which [could] be seen, a crust which [could] be trod; it was never inside.’2 The plausibility of such a criticism becomes readily apparent when one considers the position that the pioneer as poet found himself in as he contemplated that inescapable fact of his environment. Physically, it was a landscape that contained neither the well-trimmed and neatly organized characteristics of a neoclassical culture, nor, figuratively speaking, those of the later wild rose garden that symbolized the romantic ethos. What he did face was beyond description: a seemingly hostile and implacable force, which, like the jungle, was almost impenetrable. No human endeavour seemed to make an impression on such a landscape, and no human myth seemed adequate to contain it. It was, as Lionel Stevenson pointed out rather dramatically, ‘an entity, embodying vast and inconceivable forces, shadowing forth some mighty purpose beyond human comprehension … The poet’s sensitive spirit would be in serious danger of quailing in horror and withdrawing itself to less terrific themes.’3 In the face of such a fact, and given the traditional sensibilities of our early mythopoeic figure, he is forced to misunderstand that natural entity, to mistrust it perhaps, with the exception of that understanding that a sort of localized osmosis might have produced in him. It is a psychological retreat, in a sense, to a form of communal solidarity which does not overwhelm or betray. Assimilation of, and identification with, that external force is supplanted by the ordering principle of ‘life in the clearings’ – the generation of regional myth at the simplest level. Abstraction of the fact of his regional reality, and the identification of the self in that abstraction, is to come later; the necessary precursor to intellectual organization must be, in Rashley’s terms, that ‘first crystallization of physical experience.’4 What are the indications, then, that this ‘act of survival,’ the generation of new myth in terms of reinterpretations of one’s ‘region’ – again, in both its senses – has come to some sort of fruition in our contemporary poetry? In some of Pratt’s work the beginnings of one alternative to the traditional view of the myth-making process can be seen; the secularization of the language of description, or more precisely what

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Northrop Frye termed ‘the scientific extension of the human word.’5 The result of using such different linguistic devices is unsettling at times. A certain disjunction of perspective is needed to understand that it is the mythic proportions of a Bunyanesque figure – the sometimes exaggerated embodiment of the pioneering spirit in the New World – and not those of Herculean or Promethean man, except by incidental comparison, that is being given in Pratt’s description of Van Horne in Towards the Last Spike: Companioned by the shade of Agassiz, He would come home, his pockets stuffed with fossils – Crinoids and fish-teeth – and his tongue jabbering Of the earth’s crust before the birth of life, Prophetic of the days when he would dig Into Laurentian rock. The morse-key tick And tape were things mesmeric – space and time Had found a junction. Electricity And rock, one novel to the coiling hand, The other frozen in the lap of age, Were playthings for the boy, work for the man.6

It is also the myth of social man that is being developed in this period of Canadian poetry, just as it had been done in an earlier era in English and American letters in the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and others. But it is not social man attempting to define himself in the face of what Stevens called the ‘malady of the quotidian’ life that we see in such developing poetry. Rather, it is still man moving out into that vast and impersonal environment, still attempting to consolidate that first physical experience into something identifiable, something that he can be comfortable with if only for the sake of his spiritual survival. What social man does in this context is to proliferate the regional, or communal, myth of solidarity again in the face of that not-as-yet-identified force. But the direction of the myth has changed from that of earlier times; it has become less directly concerned with specific detail, and therefore has become necessarily more complex. The simplistic regional mythologizing of the well-ordered community in Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Rising Village’ has given way to the indefinite image of man’s wish to fill, as F.R. Scott suggests in his poem ‘Laurentian Shield,’ all the emptiness with ‘neighbourhood’ as a means of partially coming to grips with that ‘inarticu-

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late, arctic’ landscape that ‘stares at the sun in a huge silence / Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.’7 Or, to glance briefly at a comparable example of myth making in modern French-Canadian poetry, Gilles Vigneault’s poem ‘Mon Pays,’ one can see that man has come to a sort of provisional acceptance of that landscape, as does Vigneault ‘père’ in the building of his house ‘Dans la blanche ceremonie / Ou la neige au vent se marie.’ In this case, it is an acceptance by the poet of a form of self-definition which is based upon what seems to be an interdependence of elements of both the human and non-human conditions, and which is again, in view of the mythopoeic urge, necessarily ambiguous: Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays c’est l’hiver Mon jardin ce n’est pas un jardin c’est la plaine Mon chemin ce n’est pas un chemin c’est la neige Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays c’est l’hiver.8

But in some senses such poetry is still full of myth surfaces, fact confronting fact, with only the beginnings of what might be called a spiritual interpenetration perceivable. The language has become more appropriate to the subject matter; certainly, there has been a progression in the synthesizing of ‘place’ and idea since the earliest artistic efforts. Perhaps it is necessary to extend the idea of Margaret Atwood’s ‘victimization’ process in yet another direction such that the final restrictions to the poet’s definition of what he is – in terms of the place that he is in – can be swept away. It is social man, and the myth of social man, that becomes such a ‘victim’; but in so becoming, a rediscovery of the potential within man is possible. Thus, for Milton Acorn, in his poem ‘Pastoral,’ the symbolic quality of that external environment, ‘the pulse of song in a thrush throat,’ is antithetical to the nature of his birthright: ‘I was born into an ambush / Of preachers, propagandists, grafters.’ However, by a willing negation of that social condition a new awareness of the self is possible in ‘that song, and the drop-notes / of a brook truckling thru log-breaks and cedars, / I came to on numb clumsy limbs, / to find outside the beauty inside me.’9 For John Newlove as well as for Acorn self-identification must somehow come from the recurring symbols generated outside man, and it will come spontaneously: it will reside in that ‘unyielding phrase’ which, when its moment is due, will ‘[spring] upon us / out of our own mouths, / unconsidered, overwhelming / in its knowledge, complete – .’10 Such a ‘phrase,’ for Newlove, will have the force of myth,

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and man will see in the continuity of that force his own meanings reflected: the pride, the grand poem of our land, of the earth itself, will come, welcome, and sought for, and found, in a line of running verse, sweating, our pride; ‘The Pride,’ VI

The synthesis of what man has been and what man desires will be, effectively, what man is. In his new knowledge of himself, he will be comfortable at last in his surroundings: we seize on what has happened before, one line only will be enough, a single line and then the sunlit brilliant image suddenly floods us with understanding, shocks our attentions, and all desire stops, stands alone we stand alone, we are no longer lonely but have roots, and the rooted words recur in the mind, mirror, so that we dwell on nothing else, in nothing else, touched, repeating them. at home freely at last, in amazement. ‘The Pride,’ VI

For Newlove the new myth of ‘man at home freely’ is a revelationary development which seeks its validity in the fact that it is an ongoing process. It is a composite of regional, national, and historic drives catalysed by an act of remembrance which, like Sis-i-utl, the double-headed

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snake of Indian legend, strikes backward and forward, the past affecting the future like a ‘foolish act’11 – but a necessary act for the survival of the imagination. In aspects of Al Purdy’s work there are also elements of new myths being created, new assimilations of the outer world by the inner. The outer reality can be specifically regional and partially knowable, as in ‘The Country North of Belleville’ or ‘Wilderness Gothic,’ or more removed and only momentarily recognizable by virtue of its association with, or reflection of, the human lot, as in ‘Trees at the Arctic Circle.’ The method of assimilation is one of ironic juxtaposition of elements; it can be as direct an observation as that given by the poet as he contemplates ‘the country of our defeat’; and yet during the fall plowing a man might stop and stand in a brown valley of the furrows and shade his eyes to watch for the same red patch mixed with gold that appears on the same spot in the hills year after year and grow old plowing and plowing a ten acre field until the convolutions run parallel with his own brain – 12

Or it can be as indirect as the analogy drawn between man’s conscious awareness of his own transitory state and the unconscious act of the arctic ground willow seeking life from death, creating its own act of survival: They have about three months to ensure the species does not die and that’s how they spend their time unbothered by any human opinion just digging in here and now sending their roots down down down And you know it occurs to me about two feet under those roots must touch permafrost

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ice that remains ice forever and they use it for their nourishment use death to remain alive13

Just as for Newlove, the myth of what man is, for Purdy, is based on what man was and what he is becoming. Like a Heideggerian ‘field of Being,’ man moves constantly from the ‘no-longer’ to the ‘not-yet,’ his actions governed by a composite of these two negatives. The quality and quantity of self-identification is a state of being-there, or ‘nowness’ in the surrounding environment, though this identification can be reflected in more than the particulars of any specific region. Thus, in Purdy’s ‘Transient,’ the observer can see that After a while there is no arrival and no departure possible any more you are where you were always going and the shape of home has planted itself in your loins the identity of forests that were always nameless the selfhood of rivers that are changing always the nationality of riding a boxcar through the depression over long green plains and high mountain country with the best and worst of a love that’s not to be spoken14

Or, as in ‘Inuit,’ the idea of what man was becomes the myth informing his present existence, the continual re-creation of the fact of generations of existence bodied forth in the act of present creation: Flying generations leap and converge on this face an old man carving soapstone with the race-soul of The People THE PEOPLE moving somewhere behind his eyes15

Images drawn from a specific and identifiable geography have always, in both the individual and racial imaginations, provided an important focus in developing nativistic myth. In examples of Newlove’s and Purdy’s work we sense the beginnings of a poetic statement of ‘place’ which is less a process of naming and more a definition of feeling. In several of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s poems, a further, mystical

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dimension is added; the particulars of an external reality become softened, subdued, begin to act as a centripetal force directing the mind inward towards some imaginative centre. Thus, in her poem ‘Dark Pines under Water,’ This land like a mirror turns you inward And you become a forest in a furtive lake; The dark pines of your mind reach downward, You dream in the green of your time, Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

But the inward-turning imagination, the ‘explorer’ of the poem, needs something more than just the knowledge of time and memory to fulfil itself; ‘although it is good here, and green; / You had meant to move with a kind of largeness, / You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.’ In spite of the conscious wish for an explanation or definition of the self through this exploring imagination, the dream can only remain a latent one, a potential of the individual that can at best only be ambiguously ‘told’: But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper In an elementary world; There is something down there and you want it told.16

In another MacEwen poem, ‘The Portage,’ the relationship between the external and the internal – the ‘we’ of the poem – is made more specific by references to a usable history, that of the early explorations of the North American continent. However, in a more spiritualized sense, it is also the history of both the individual and national psyche that is being explored during this mythical journey for self-identification: We have travelled far with ourselves and our names have lengthened; we have carried ourselves on our backs, like canoes in a strange portage, over trails, insinuating leaves and trees dethroned like kings, from water-route to water-route

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seeking the edge, the end, the coastlines of this land.

The quest, the movement towards this new mythology of definition, is seemingly impossible. The desire is present, just as it was for the inward-turning imagination of ‘Dark Pines under Water,’ but the spiritual self and the national self remain in a kind of hesitant equilibrium with their acquired knowledge, afraid to move forward and afraid to remain static: … now we fear movement and now we dread stillness … we are in sympathy with the fallen trees; we cannot relate the causes of our grief. We can no more carry our boats ourselves over these insinuating trails.17

This hesitancy in the search for a form of self-definition poses a dilemma for the poet, since it suggests a feeling of negativity that cannot be tolerated. A deliberate over-seriousness in the search might lead to that philosophic morass that is the legacy of the enthusiast; yet a complacent denial of the existence of that ‘act of survival’ seems equally self-defeating. The reason (or reasons) for such hesitation might lie in the heavily underlined irony of the last two lines of Birney’s poem ‘Can. Lit.’ as he comments on the historical facts of our national relationships – an essentially bloodless one: ‘no wounded lying about, no Whitman wanted. / It’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted.’18 But this becomes too glib an explanation in the light of a new awareness of our national and regional precedents, whether historical, cultural, or political, and Birney might be the first to admit that such a context for self-examination as he describes had undergone considerable change. In a more abstract way, the dilemma is perhaps best presented in another MacEwen poem, ‘This Northern Mouth,’ in which the poet depersonalizes herself (‘deregionalizes’ herself might be more apt) to become a composite ‘mouth’ which ineffectually tries to utter the myth of what it – and hence the poet – is: this, my northern mouth speaks at times east, speaks south;

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The speech which will prove the national or regional identity must remain unspoken, or at least only partially articulated, it seems, unless it becomes the conglomerate voice of the whole land, reflected in what Newlove called in ‘The Pride’ the ‘unyielding phrase / in tune with the epoch.’ But the beginnings of a viable mythology are already apparent. While the implications of a developing mythology are perhaps too complex to discuss at length here, it can be stated that the mythopoeic spirit is present, or at least can be tentatively felt, in a good deal of twentieth-century Canadian poetry. The poets only briefly discussed here are representative of a much larger group which, putting aside for the moment individualistic styles and ideologies, also seeks to bring to a focus some as yet amorphous pattern which is themselves, and themselves ‘at home freely’ with their existence. The matrix out of which their mythologies are formed can be as widely varied as the urban or ex-urban setting, the regional or national ethos, or, and as inescapably as in the days of the first poetry, the idea of the ‘giant’ itself, the land. Out of these imaginative re-creations of fact, it may be hoped, will come the fuller history of the individual. As a sort of a counterpoint to the foregoing – and rather subjective – discussion, it would be interesting to examine if only briefly the critical commentary which has dealt with the question of an evolving mythology in Canadian poetry. Inevitably such commentary has revolved around, and developed from, Northrop Frye’s work – which has had both its vocal proponents and sometimes despairing critics. But there are earlier voices, and while some of them do not necessarily describe that need for the Canadian poet as a need to create myth explicitly, at

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least in the theoretical sense that Frye does, the mythopoeic function is implied in their observations. Leo Kennedy, for instance, writing on the literary future of Canada in The Canadian Mercury in 1928, can state that once Canadian literature has recovered from its ‘present affliction of infantile paralysis’ which had been generated by a sort of cultural isolationism in the past, and has applied itself to frank inquiry, something ‘true and enduring’ would be created eventually.20 The creative imagination of the writer (Kennedy speaks of both poets and novelists here) can then ‘approach the task of expression fortified by new ideas and original conceptions; they will learn the lesson of all precursors, discovering in a western grain field, a Québec “maison,” or in a Montreal nightclub, a spirit and a consciousness distinctly Canadian.’ Until a Canadian Whitman arrives who will be fully able to delineate the national consciousness, such writers will continue their work of ‘enlightenment and propagation.’ Kennedy, of course, is speaking as one of the McGill Group, and while the task he outlines for Canadian writers seems to have the missionary overtones of a literary work force sent out to convert the cultural philistines to the true way, the sincerity of the psychological need behind such statements cannot be doubted. The premise on which Kennedy founds his argument is, however, debatable. Until we arrive at that point of being able to create our own ‘consciousness,’ the contemporary writer must seek extra-nationally and extra-culturally those elements of other established – and hence more viable, it is assumed – traditions. It is a point which A.J.M. Smith had also voiced at various times, and is centred in his discussion of what he sees as a necessary ‘eclectic detachment’ in modern Canadian poetry. It is a need for complexity that is manifested in such work, he feels, as it has in all modern poetry: The bewildering multiplicity of scientific, moral, and metaphysical data with which the poet must now come to terms, and the burden of guilt, fancied or real, which the disintegration of values in religion, politics, and morals places on his unsupported shoulders, make it very difficult, if not impossible, for him to be anything but complex, divided, erudite, allusive, and sometimes obscure.21

It is a measure of the Canadian poet’s uniqueness that he can seek, in his semi-isolated position, all the benefits of the established languages and literary conventions of other cultures, taking and adapting from these ‘what is relevant and useful,’ and thus creating a poetry, in ei-

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ther language, with a ‘distinctive quality’ of its own. From a latter-day perspective such approaches to the fostering of new ideas about ourselves seem almost formulaic; we sense that it is a poetry of expediency that is being discussed, in which the passional elements are somehow subsumed by the question of forms. An eclecticism, a detachment, are certainly present; however, it is arguable that they are achieved in the mind of the poet as part of a totally conscious act, for the selective process, whether of form or content, is as much an intuitive one as a rational one. There are the reactions and the counter-reactions. John Sutherland, in his introduction to Other Canadians, would posit the new poetry of reality in the face of a superficial cosmopolitanism and traditionalism. Our critics, he argued, had wasted their energies on trying to emphasize the distinction ‘between poetry and reality, arguing as if the half-truth were infallible when it was only quite true of the poetry in Canada. It is time we began stating the other half-truth – that the poet retains human attributes in spite of being a poet, that his materials are tangible often in spite of appearance, and that he has something to say which frequently has meaning for the ordinary man.’22 It was the poets that had been disregarded by the Smith tradition, the poets of the little magazines such as Preview, Direction, First Statement, and later Northern Review, who would be the precursors of a humanizing process in Canadian poetry, and who would ensure, through an emerging vitalist tradition, a literary future for the country. At a later date, however, the somewhat radical and angry commentary of Other Canadians becomes more subdued. Sutherland, writing on the poetry of the forties in ‘The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry,’ comments rather sardonically on the fact that no sooner had the ‘challenger,’ the new poetic movement, got underway, than it ‘laid its head upon the block and willingly submitted to having it removed,’23 largely as a result of political and social reversals in Canada and the world outside, and because of a certain stagnation in the late forties which was only at that time of writing beginning to disappear. It is a poetry of acceptance that is now being created, and for Sutherland, though this tendency has its admirable qualities, it has ‘not been fully realized enough to produce very striking or at least very extensive results. The question is whether the poet can find a new point of stability, rediscover the basic moral and religious values of our society, and by so doing, achieve these results.’24 But the specific question of the mythopoeic function in poetry, and of its effectiveness as a means of providing new insights into the national

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and regional psyche, is only obliquely referred to in such critical statements. This is perhaps as it should be; there is still the need to understand the accelerated – and still accelerating – physical changes of the twentieth-century experience, and in the face of such rapid transitions the inward-turning imagination can only partially begin the process of identification. The poet becomes, momentarily, a data phenomenologist who can only seize on selected aspects of his ‘isness,’ of the totality of his function as an individual in the context of his social and physical environments. The poet, however, continues to make the effort in spite of the fact that he must work within such limitations. To examine the whole of Northrop Frye’s commentary on the subject of myth would require a book, or books; one can only underline certain important statements which have a particular reference to the ideas suggested earlier in this paper. In the context of its wider application in all literatures, Frye sees mythology as the matrix out of which society’s sense of itself is born. The recurrent images and symbols of such mythologies help to define ‘a society’s religious beliefs, historical traditions, cosmological speculations.’25 In discussing the role of the primitive oral poet as a disseminator of mythologies, Frye comments on the fact that such myths ‘are neither true nor false, because they are not verifiable.’ Such myths merely express metaphorical relationships, not quantitative truth. We assume this condition to be at least as partially true in the contemporary function of myth in literature as in the primitive. The difference between the modern and primitive applications of myth is that the former tends to express his metaphorical relationships in terms of a horizontal and secularized world, rather than in terms of a vertical and tightly controlled world in which Olympian and human conditions are interdependent. Nevertheless, the creation of what Frye calls ‘expressions of concern’ is a mutual condition, and the poet ‘who shapes the myth is thus entrusted with the speaking of the word of concern.’26 Frye indicates that Pratt, in his work, perhaps best demonstrates the beginnings of a new mythopoeic impulse in modern Canadian poetry, for he takes his place at the centre of society where the great myths are formed, the new myths where the hero is man the worker rather than man the conqueror, and where the poet who shapes those myths is shaping also a human reality which is greater than the whole objective world, with all its light years of space, because it includes the infinity of human desire.27

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But there must be a necessary differentiation made between myth as content and myth as informing principle in poetry, Frye believes. In the past the Canadian poet had been particularly urged to establish some form of identity through the adaptation of appropriate thematic matter – ‘but the poet’s quest is for form, not content. The poet who tries to make content the informing principle of his poetry can write only versified rhetoric, and versified rhetoric has a moral but not an imaginative significance; its place is on the social periphery of poetry, not in its articulate center.’ And it is metaphor that is the most important of the ‘shaping principles of poetry … [for] metaphor, in its radical form, is a statement of identity: this is that, A is B.’28 Sooner or later the poet will have, through his use of recurring metaphors, a set of poems which might be called his mythical poems; these, Frye contends, will provide the interpretative bases for his work as a whole. For the Canadian poet, such work will ‘display those distinctive themes that we have been looking for which reveal his reaction to his natural and social environment.’29 These are fundamental concepts that Frye is dealing with, but they raise the obvious question of whether Canadian poetry has achieved that level of literary maturity where the act of myth making is an unconscious, as well as a conscious, act of the imagination. Frye, in his concluding remarks to the Literary History of Canada, believes that it has, but he also recognizes that such an achievement is part and parcel of a necessary ‘imaginative continuum.’ For the Canadian poet, then, as for the Canadian artistic imagination more universally, the only discernible limitations would be the selfimposed ones of an overly conscious artifice in the creation of such an act of identity – of the imaginative ‘act of survival,’ to repeat an earlier description – or to absolve oneself entirely from making the necessary effort. Somewhere in between these extremes, we hope, the Canadian poet will make his way.

notes ‘“This Northern Mouth”: Ideas of Myth and Regionalism in Modern Canadian Poetry’ was first published in Laurentian University Review 8 (Nov. 1975): 65–83. 1 Irving Layton, ‘The Improved Binoculars,’ The Collected Poems of Irving Layton (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 139.

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2 R.E. Rashley, Poetry in Canada: The First Three Steps (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1958), 45–6. 3 Lionel Stevenson, Appraisals of Canadian Literature (Toronto: Macmillan, 1926), 78. 4 Rashley, Poetry, 46. 5 Northrop Frye, ‘Silence in the Sea,’ in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 195. 6 E.J. Pratt, ‘Towards the Last Spike,’ in Selected Poems of E.J. Pratt, edited by P. Buitenhuis (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 19–93. 7 F.R. Scott, ‘Laurentian Shield,’ in Milton Wilson, ed., Poetry between the Wars (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), 91. 8 Gilles Vigneault, ‘Mon Pays,’ in A.J.M. Smith, ed., Modern Canadian Verse (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), 291. 9 Milton Acorn, ‘Pastoral,’ in Eli Mandel, ed., Poets of Contemporary Canada: 1960–1970 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 34. 10 John Newlove, ‘The Pride,’ in Smith, ed., Modern Canadian Verse, 396. 11 Newlove, ‘The Double-Headed Snake,’ in Mandel, ed., Poets of Contemporary Canada, 74. 12 Al Purdy, ‘The Country North of Belleville,’ in Mandel, ed., Poets of Contemporary Canada, 9. 13 Purdy, ‘Trees at the Arctic Circle,’ in Mandel, ed., Poets of Contemporary Canada, 12. 14 Purdy, ‘Transient,’ in G. Geddes and P. Bruce, eds, 15 Canadian Poets (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 30. 15 Purdy, ‘Inuit,’ in Mandel, ed., Poets of Contemporary Canada, 14. 16 Gwendolyn MacEwen, ‘Dark Pines under Water,’ The Shadow-Maker (Toronto: Macmillan, 1969), 50. 17 MacEwen, ‘The Portage,’ Shadow-Maker, 31. 18 Earle Birney, ‘Can. Lit.,’ in Milton Wilson, ed., Poetry of Mid-Century (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964), 37. 19 MacEwen, ‘This Northern Mouth,’ Shadow-Maker, 21. 20 Leo Kennedy, ‘The Future of Canadian Literature,’ rpt in L. Dudek and M. Gnarowski, eds, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (Toronto: Ryerson, 1970), 36 ff. 21 A.J.M. Smith, ‘Introduction’ to The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1965), 11. 22 John Sutherland, ‘New Necessities,’ rpt in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, 54–61. 23 Sutherland, ‘The Past Decade in Canadian Poetry,’ rpt in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, 116–22.

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24 Ibid., 122. 25 Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 33. 26 Frye, ‘Silence,’ Bush Garden, 194. 27 Ibid., 197. 28 Frye, ‘Preface to an Uncollected Anthology,’ rpt in Eli Mandel, ed., Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 194–5. 29 Ibid., 196–7.

1.3 Myth, Frye, and Canadian Writers d.g. jones

When Robert Kroetsch published The Words of My Roaring in 1966, I thought, the Canadian writer is finally home free. It was the first really exuberant novel to come out of the west. After those laborious novels of Frederick Philip Grove’s in which the heroes struggle to defeat or to ironic self-discovery; after the beautifully realized but wracking winter of the soul from which the hero of Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House emerges, reborn, but barely; after the torturous journeys and almost pyrrhic victories of the women in Margaret Laurence’s novels, Kroetsch’s hero moves with a kind of magnificent inevitability towards his own triumphant self-realization. J.J. Backstrom, undertaker and political candidate, has neither money nor education nor influence. He is running on the coat tails of Bible Bill Aberhart and his evangelical politics. But that has little to do with his success. He lives in his own imagination; like the studhorse man in the later novel he lives in his own myth, larger than life. Aware as anyone of the depression, the drought, the general helplessness of his world to change the situation, he is full of energy. Bitten or badgered as he may be by a nagging wife, by personal and mechanical failures, by his own sense of the impossibility and folly of his contesting the election against the elderly, respected, and repeatedly successful local doctor, he nonetheless shakes these annoyances off as a grizzly might shake off the rain. And with the rain he wins the doctor’s daughter and the doctor’s seat in the legislature as well. Here too we find the first real garden in prairie fiction. And there the great man – ‘I have these big fists,’ he says, ‘I have these perfect teeth’1

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– lies with the moon, the water lilies, the doctor’s daughter. He is Adam in Eden, unused to the place but nevertheless making himself at home. The poet is the nth Adam, wrote A.M. Klein: taking a green inventory in world but scarcely uttered, naming, praising, the flowering fiats in the meadow, the syllabled fur, stars aspirate, the pollen whose sweet collision sounds eternally. For to praise the world – he, solitary man – is breath to him. Until it has been praised, that part has not been. Item by exciting item – air to his lungs, and pressured blood to his heart – they are pulsated, and breathed, until they map, not the world’s, but his own body’s chart!2

So Klein, the city-dweller, despite the ‘daily larcenies of the lung,’3 proclaimed in 1948, nearly ten years before Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. And three years later in The Second Scroll he celebrated the imagination of a whole people, in Israel, recreating the collective poem of language. In 1954, Irving Layton wrote: And me happiest when I compose poems. Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much; yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection. In me nature’s divided things – tree, mould on tree – have their fruition; I am their core. Let them swap, bandy, like a flame swerve. I am their mouth; as a mouth I serve.4

The poet speaks with confidence. As in the case of Klein, it is a confidence rooted in a clear conception of the function and capital importance of the imagination, and one very like Frye’s, that the imagination

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creates, and in the case of the writer, creates through the word, the myth within which men may live in communion with all life, within which all separate lives, nature’s divided things, may find their identity with the whole of life, with the result that they may praise instead of curse the world. Frye did not create this conception. It was anticipated by the writers. As Frye would say, he found it in the literature of the world. But it was particularly anticipated by such writers as the American Wallace Stevens, and, in terms still closer to Frye, by such Canadian writers as Klein and Layton and even Ernest Buckler in The Mountain and the Valley, published in 1952. The basic conception of the poetic imagination given such elaborate articulation in his critical theory is not peculiar or opposed to the main development of Canadian literature or the Canadian writer’s imaginative convictions. Rather, I suggest that it is but one more expression, given detailed articulation in critical or analytical terms, of a more general conviction arrived at by a number of writers and given a special development in Canada at about the same time. It is shared not only by such writers as Jay Macpherson and James Reaney, who may be suspected of being directly influenced by Frye, but also by those who ostensibly see him as an enemy, Layton, for example, and Louis Dudek, whose Atlantis, in its basic image and theme, develops entirely within the same perspective as Frye’s. What could sound more like Frye than these lines? Not an individuality but an identity is what we are. That continues, as it lives in the body in fraternity with things and men. It is the whole reality that is always there; something that we are, that we become, that now we cannot know or share.

Most of our world is fragmentary, but the poet goes on to evoke the vision of a glimmering Atlantis: An architecture of contradictions and inexorable chances reconciled at last, in a single body. Atlantis, alone, he concludes is real.5

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More surprising still is the fact that this conception of the poetic imagination is shared by Canadian writers working in another language and, presumably, another literary tradition. Gabrielle Roy’s allegorical novel La Montagne secrète voices the conviction that it is the artist’s role to make articulate all that is inarticulate, that in him and through his creation nature’s divided things will have their fruition, discover their community with each other, their identity in a single body, that, as a consequence, life may be praised. As the narrator says early in the story: ‘Thus it was that Pierre discovered what was expected of persons like himself (i.e. the artists) – that they should, thanks to them, rejoice and be sustained by hope.’6 Anne Hébert arrived at the same conclusion a few years earlier in a talk published in 1958 with the significant title ‘Poésie: Solitude rompue.’ There she proclaimed, ‘Our country has arrived at the first days of creation; life here is to be discovered and named.’7 And the convictions expressed in that essay provided the basic poetic platform for the Quebec poet throughout the sixties. Whether he said so explicitly or not, the poet became the nth Adam, calling for and taking a green inventory in world but scarcely uttered. One may list a few titles: Yves Préfontaine’s Pays sans parole, Roland Giguère’s Age de la parole, Gatien Lapointe’s Le premier mot, or Hébert’s own poem, ‘Mystère de la parole,’ where she writes: Silence, nothing stirs, nothing speaks, the word breaks, lifts our hearts, seizes the world in a single thunderclap, binds us to its dawn as the rind to the fruit.8

The poem concludes with a kind of prayer that he who has received the office of the word take charge of all the oppressed and disinherited as of a heart grown dark with unrealized life, that both the living and the dead may find their lives justified in a single song between the grasses and the morning light. With this large affirmation of poetic faith, there is a sense in which Canadian writing comes of age. Klein or Layton or Hébert have a clear raison d’être for their activity, and they write with a profound conviction as to the central importance and power of the imagination. No doubt that shrewd chameleon A.J.M. Smith had implied some such idea of a poetry’s worth in News of the Phoenix and A Sort of Ecstasy. Some of F.R. Scott’s poems have an intensely confident élan. E.J. Pratt’s long and

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unfailing career implies such confidence. And the gist of ‘Brébeuf’ and ‘Towards the Last Spike’ is precisely that it is imagination that creates a vision of community and inspires men to realize it. Birney too has an unquenchable vitality and he has a stubborn faith in the imagination of Mrs A. or Everywoman, who saves Vancouver9 from damnation. But he is also a man on the run, sniping at a world in which the individual imagination struggles to survive and frequently loses, and in which the collective imagination is most likely to create a nightmare of destruction. I remember receiving a note one summer in which Layton wrote that he was writing poems like a burst waterspout. He has been doing that for years. If we look back on the poets before him we do not get this impression of exuberant fecundity. Charles G.D. Roberts peters out between a wilful optimism and a spontaneous melancholy. Archibald Lampman dreams, increasingly alone, in the wintry fields. In French, Emile Nelligan begins with a magnificent series of poems inspired by a passionate but hopelessly exclusive ideal and founders on the rocks of the excluded reality; much like the early Duncan Campbell Scott’s Piper of Arll, he sinks in his golden ship in a sea of self-doubt. Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, a truly original talent, turns on himself, denies his joy three times over, and forsakes the creative word for the iron cross of dogmatic faith. P.K. Page struggles against a metallic logos, an impersonal technical and rational order whose perspective must be resisted within as well as without, and for some years she is silent, preferring to map her own body’s chart in a graphic line less prejudiced by analytic reason. As Margaret Avison puts it in her poem ‘Perspective,’ speaking of those who reduce their world to a rational geometry, ‘your fear has me infected.’10 It is the doubt within that is most corrosive: the artist’s suspicion that his audience is indifferent or hostile; worse, his complicity with his audience, with a world suspicious of the wild energies or dreams loosed by the imagination. Some novels seem designed to dramatize our divided mind in regard to imaginative vision. Morley Callaghan’s novels are a record of the defeat of the imagination. And it is the doubt, the indecision of the best as well as the worst, that often ensures its defeat. McAlpine in The Loved and the Lost is an intelligent, highly educated, liberal person. He is even in love with the girl, Peggy Sanderson, whose vision of a more open society nonetheless shocks him. No more than the rest of his world can he trust in an order arising from dreaming desire, in an imagination that couples black and

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white, the church and the leopard. His distrust ensures the destruction of the girl. He abandons her the night she is murdered. George Stewart in Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night is a similar case. He loves the girl Catherine and admires her masculine counterpart, Jerome Martell, but he stands incredulous before their faith in Eros, their capacity to dare disaster. He trembles as they pour themselves out in exuberant activity as if they were themselves the creations and instruments of dreaming desire and the community it would create. Catherine and Jerome live in their own myths. Almost to the end, Stewart remains a student, fascinated by the power of that insubstantial vision which they proceed to make incarnate in their lives. He ends a convert, but we can be pretty certain he will never be among the saints. Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House was entirely preoccupied in dramatizing and exorcising that inner division or self-doubt. When Philip Bentley finally submits to Eros, risks rebirth in an illegitimate child, he ends his complicity, resigns from the church and resolves to be no more and no less than an artist. Yet it is not clearly within the scope of the book to indicate what this means, and the conclusion as it stands does not suggest that the artist will have a particularly large or important role to play, or that the life of the imagination may be of profound influence. Mr Bentley may do no more than open a bookstore in Winnipeg and sketch, which for his own soul’s health and, to a slight degree, for that of the body politic, may be something but not much. Other novels such as W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind or Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice may be seen to touch obliquely on this theme and to be more hopeful. Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook was one book which, in form as in theme, affirmed the central importance of imagination, of vision or myth, in creating a community in a world divided and infected with fear. Yet none of these authors has impressed us by writing like a burst waterspout. These are no doubt questionable and certainly invidious comparisons. Yet thinking back on so much of our writing, noting how even Raymond Souster depreciates his muse, disguising her in the most ordinary, even dumpiest dress, remarking how Dudek seems compelled to document his vision with fragments of conversations and observations on two continents, as if they were droppings from Pegasus, guaranteed evidence of the scientific validity of the vision of Atlantis, we may detect a certain inhibition and doubt, a lack of faith or fear of heights in

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the writer, especially if we turn to a Layton or a Frye or an Hébert for comparison. Layton is probably our first important poet to pour out books, good, bad, or indifferent, with an absolute conviction as to the significance of poetry and the power of the word. He creates and lives in his own myth, most validly in his role of poet in the poems themselves. There he becomes Orpheus, Adam, the dying and rising god, the living word through whom the identity of all nature’s divided things is manifest. He is worshipped and praised, for through him the vision of the community of living things is ever created anew, life is justified, and men may praise, not the god but the world. At best, it is not in himself but in his office as poet, as instrument of the imagination, that Layton finds his authority. As such, it does not matter what sort of scribbler his particular audience may think him to be; he knows that the poet is not irrelevant or powerless, but central to their lives. As he says in ‘The Fertile Muck’: … if in August joiners and bricklayers are thick as flies around us building expensive bungalows for those who do not need them, unless they release me roaring from their moth-proofed cupboards their buyers will have no joy, no ease.

It is he who can extend their rooms for them, enlarge their world. ‘How to dominate reality?’ the poet asks, and replies, ‘Love is one way, imagination another.’11 And, as the final image of the poet sitting with his consort implies, surely they are inseparable. Eros inspires us with the vision of what we would create, and the imagination comprehends that vision along with its opposite. It comprehends the distance between what we are and what we might be, without losing faith in the transforming power of dreaming desire. Its capacity, as Frye would say, is to provide the goals of human work. It is, I suggest, the courage of such convictions that has increasingly sustained a number of writers in this country and contributed to the remarkable literary production of the fifties and sixties. Such convictions are shared by other writers, of course. By Blake, who has contributed a good deal to Frye’s conception of poetry, but also in varying degrees by Rilke, Yeats, or Breton, whom Ferdinand Alquié cites in his rather dry observation:

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I quote Alquié’s remark, because long before anyone in Quebec had ever heard of Frye, the poets and painters were being strongly influenced by the surrealists. That is not an influence shared by writers in English Canada, though it has contributed to a shared conception of the nature and function of poetry. Yet that conception, I suspect, would have developed anyway in Quebec, and it often appears closer in its terms to Frye or Klein or Layton than to Breton or Alquié. Fernand Ouellette describes his coming to be a poet as a spiritual birth, an experience of liberation consequent upon his intimate recognition of the two poles of life, the dark and the light, and of the need to reject a Jansenist or Manichean dualism in favour of a vision that comprehends them both (a central theme in recent Quebec poetry and, as I have tried to suggest elsewhere at some length, in English-Canadian literature as well). Ouellette, writing of how the profound affront of death, as the ultimate privation, is yet comprehended or transformed on the poetic or metaphysical level by an even more devouring hope or expectation, remarks: It’s the awareness of death and of hope which transforms me into a demiurge, and not all the ‘isms,’ such as surrealism.13

Certainly Hébert arrived at her view of poetry through a painful exploration of her own imaginative world, discovering gradually that her personal imprisonment in silence, her sense of isolation and paralysis, was shared by others and was indeed a reflection of a cultural paralysis, a collective vision bequeathed by the past. She came to recognize and reject the past, in the rapacious kings who, in ‘Le tombeau des rois,’ propagate themselves through her; in the wraith-like Michel, who secludes his bride in the closed rooms of the novel Les chambres de bois and cannot bring himself to consummate their marriage; in La grande Claudine, the bitter, puritanical, and fierce jailer to her son, François, who begins the story ‘Le torrent’ by saying, ‘I was a child born dispossessed of the world.’14 For Hébert, rejecting the old vision and going on to articulate a new was again a liberation and a birth into the world. It was a living demonstration of the transforming power of the word. In her 1958 essay on poetry, ‘Poésié: Solitude rompue,’ she writes:

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I believe in the virtue of poetry, in the clarion health of all just speech, lived and articulate. I believe in the solitude broken like bread by poetry.15

Robert Kroetsch was to say essentially the same thing during the interview with Margaret Laurence: ‘In a sense, we haven’t got an identity until someone tells our story. The fiction makes us real.’16 It is much the same conviction that lifts John Newlove out of his usual preoccupations with the experience of isolation, the lack of communication even between lovers, to a large vision of communion that forms the rather magnificent peroration to his poem ‘The Pride.’ There the Indian and the white man, the dead and the living, all will find themselves at home at last, ‘in amazement,’ when the whole of their lives have been grasped and made articulate by the imagination. Then, he says, we shall dwell on nothing else but those rooted words; we shall dwell in nothing else. We shall become the others in our desires, which are their ‘hard-riding desires.’17 That vision may be compared to Layton’s in ‘A Tall Man Executes a Jig,’ where the tall man finally comprehends the living and the dead, the bones of badgers and raccoons, all the generations of life, englobes them, digests them, and becomes one body with the world. Despite Dudek’s irritation at Frye’s emphasis on the Bible as furnishing the most complete grammar of the Western imagination, we may note that many of the terms used by the writers themselves are Biblical, that the more profound religious concepts furnish the language in which they define their experience of poetry and their sense of its significance. Hébert managed to effect an imaginative revolution without cutting herself off entirely from her cultural heritage. She reinterpreted the Christian tradition of her province, giving new stress to the incarnation of the Word, to the figure of Adam making articulate the Word incarnate, naming and praising the world, to the communion of all life realized in and through the word. And this was doubly possible because she could see in the religious experience defined in these theological concepts the analogy to her experience of poetry. The poet is not, she protests, the rival of God; but a witness to His grace. Perhaps she would concur with Coleridge in saying that the imagination is the repetition in the finite mind of the infinite ‘I am.’ Certainly it is difficult in Hébert’s view not to see him as the rival of the priest. However that may be, the function of the writer has taken on some-

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thing of large significance during the past two decades. He is the imaginative man, whose vision reveals and whose articulation makes possible an order and a community. For some in Quebec it may be primarily a community of language and culture. For many it goes well beyond that to mean a community with the land and the sensuous world, the world of action and their own bodily life. And such community is most explicitly evoked in Newlove’s ‘The Pride,’ and, in terms of its absence, in Margaret Atwood’s poems on Susanna Moodie or ‘Backdrop Addresses Cowboy,’ where the indifferent and hostile progress of Western man across North America is seen to have developed an absurd Hollywood parody of a real community. And it is a spiritual failure, as the voice which speaks for the land, for the dead, for the community of life not realized, indicates in the concluding lines, saying, ‘I am the space you desecrate / as you pass through.’18 For finally it is a vision of a universal communion that is implied or explicitly adumbrated in the work itself. Gwendolyn MacEwen may follow strange gods, those figures whom Atwood characterizes as the male muse, and in whom the world and the word become one. But when we are addressed as ‘My friends, my sweet barbarians’ and invited to ‘consume our mysteries,’ though in a world of computers and superhighways and Alexandrian libraries, we are being invited to the same communion meal as Hébert had in mind. MacEwen wishes us ‘bon appétit,’ but she also reminds us not to forget the grace. The world of Breakfast for Barbarians is a world of continuous incarnation and transubstantiation. Consuming we become one body with the world, which is the word incarnate.19 Paul Chamberland’s career seems designed to illustrate Frye’s theory of historical modes and his view that since the nineteenth century we have been moving from a low mimetic through an ironic towards a new mythical mode. Chamberland begins with the inherited tradition of symbolist and surrealist poetry; he moves in The Sign Poster Howls and The Unspeakable through a period of ironic tirades, confessions of pain and outrage reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and other poems: he has now begun to speak like a prophet, in oracular utterances, proclaiming the spiritual truths of the age of Aquarius, announcing the imminent birth of the gods. It is a world of myth in which he writes: I have placed my confidence in the whole of reality in the immense

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joyous and beautiful child bride whose body is riddled with suns20

Chamberland is now the William Blake of Quebec poets, proclaiming the reality of vision, the sanctity of Eros, the infernal divinity of man as God’s accomplice in his incestuous relations with himself. He echoes George Whalley quoting Coleridge to the effect that behind all poetry there lies the conviction that everything has a life of its own and we are all one life. ‘I am the Unique and the Universal’ he writes in his ‘Canticle for the New Age.’ I am the Ancestor, I am Man. In me all men advance towards the light, whose seed since the beginning of time has shone in the gloom: dark egg, divine embryo. I will be Man on the day that all men are born in the divine radiance, that day Heaven and Earth will be forever reconciled

He is also the nth Adam. The writer’s role is now conceived in increasingly hieratic terms. ‘We are waiting,’ he says, ‘for the electronic Vedas, the return of a writing, sacred and absolute.’ Finally, Chamberland affirms the supreme relevance of the creations of the imagination when he writes, ‘We do not write poetry: rather poetry, which is Reality, engenders us.’21 Clearly, with such convictions, the writer need not despair of his raison d’être, even in a mass society. Poetry finds its justification outside the particular talents of the poet or the particular tastes of a cultivated elite. It shapes the myths in which we live; it shapes us. And Frye has argued just that. But why, we might ask, do the poets like Layton attack the critic, often with some venom? Are they not allies? Perhaps Nietzsche, who is one of Layton’s mentors, can suggest an answer. Nietzsche distinguishes between the philosopher who creates values and the philosophical worker whose job it is ‘to determine and formalize some large reservoir of value-judgements, that is of former value-creations.’22 The greatest part of Frye’s work as a critic is of the latter type. His job has been to order and classify, to clarify and explain the type, whether he is talking about the specific forms of literature or the nature and function of the

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creative imagination. The motive of such workers, says Nietzsche, is to make everything that has heretofore happened and been evaluated into a visible, thinkable, comprehensible, and handy pattern; to abbreviate everything that is long, to abbreviate time itself; to overpower the entire past.23 Frye has articulated a critical perspective of such clarity, scope, and persuasiveness that he has succeeded in doing just that. An enormous and admirable task, but not in Nietzsche’s view the primary one, which is to create the future. And that, I suspect, would be in Layton’s view the role of the poet. Something may be said for the creative nature of Frye’s work. Yet we may agree that it is one thing to articulate in discursive terms a conception of poetry and another to prove it on the pulse. And beyond the conception of poetry to find the motive of the poem, the necessity within the vision. Nietzsche’s distinction here suggests his distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian imagination. The Apollonian artist is not unlike the philosophical worker who overpowers, abbreviates, and makes visible an ordered past. His bias is towards spectacle, to fix the world in a vision, large, splendid, richly varied, perhaps, but intelligible to the light of reason. The Dionysian artist plunges into time, risks himself and his world in the flux, dark to all except his desire, to the élan of the dance to which he abandons himself. His is the spirit of music that Nietzsche linked to the birth of tragedy, which gives us the title of Layton’s poem and reveals his bias, whereas Frye’s is surely towards the Apollonian. It is the Dionysian poet Layton cultivates, and whose irregular footprints so horrify those whose rooms he would extend; and in a time of cultural disintegration, when the visible or articulate order is so largely diseased, it is the Dionysian imagination that we may need to cultivate, abandoning ourselves to Eros and the deepest springs of our desire. And that is itself no easy matter when we have been so bombarded by voices telling us what we ought to think we desire. ‘The writer,’ complains Chamberland, ‘has a rapport with the whole of the word presently broadcast’ not a commercial that doesn’t leave me cold. I am battling the lie, the systematic immorality of the establishments. My weapon is rhetoric, I mean the most lucid awareness that can be exercised in language. Let the imagination take power: let it destroy the obsolete codes that fossilize man’s brain.24

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A major preoccupation of the contemporary writer is and probably will be the delineation of diseased desire, an inventory of what in truth he does not desire. But it may be necessary to prove as well Nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘The great epochs of our lives come when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil as our best.’25 I think of a streak of perversity in us, that leads Newlove to frighten himself, time and again, in the night, in the mountains; that leads Susan Musgrave to the ‘Mackenzie River, North,’ the vast emptiness ‘like continents of tooth and stone,’ where there is ‘nothing about for us / but fear / And moving, / always moving, / out of the night / it comes.’26 That led F.R. Scott to celebrate the same river, which ‘turns its back on America.’27 For it is one of the problems of established culture that it has distinguished the world so thoroughly into black and white and attacked so much of life as a darkness, telling us to desire only the light. And the Apollonian vision, the impulse to overpower the past, lends itself only too easily to an excessive and at times almost paranoiac desire for light: the desire to analyse it into a series of rational elements that can then be dealt with systematically by a series of rational techniques, so that man can control life as it were from the outside, rather than participate in it. Then, whatever is dark, if it cannot be eliminated in fact, disappears from the vocabulary and from consciousness. There is a strong messianic cast to the very terms used here so often to define the role of the artist and of the imaginative vision he serves, as if it would deliver us from the dark once and for all. In part no doubt it does, but it must do this continuously, and, more radically, it must deliver the dark itself, not just make it disappear. That is why one must insist on the Dionysian quality of Layton’s imagination that can dominate reality; it must be qualified by the title of the poem in which he speaks of that imagination; it must spring from ‘the fertile muck.’ Ouellette, too, while leery of the primitive connotations of the word ‘myth’ and anxious to insist on the continued value of the most lucid awareness, also insists on the necessity to breathe, as he says, darkness as well as light, on the virtue of the obscene. The obscene, he suggests, is the crudity of sexual hunger, of raw appetite; and any expression of grief or despair that goes beyond certain limits will be considered raw, crude, obscene by society. Yet, definitively, he writes, it is in accepting the excessive hunger of sex, of poetry, of sainthood that one comes to accept oneself, one’s own being. And it is through the power of

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‘crudité’ that one advances, he insists, towards God, the infinite, the eternal, towards love, towards the great hope, ‘le grand désir.’28 The way to the stars is through the fertile muck. Thus, though the Canadian writer may have arrived at an assured and profound sense of the writer’s office, with no need to justify the fictions he creates as no more than irrelevant ‘fictions,’ he is still in no position to whip off an apocalyptic vision of the communion of saints, and he may still feel compelled to do battle against the powerful but possibly seductive light of a Frye. For the artist is almost as much in the dark as ever. He must look deep to discover the real springs of his desire, and he must prove its rhythms in his pulse, beginning with the first word and the second, one by one, one after the other. He must test the false desire against those same rhythms. It may lead Chamberland at this moment to proclaim: ‘The Milky Way leaps with the inordinate joy of God.’29 It may lead equally to Dale Zieroth’s, ‘Times are when we’re / no longer sure of the things / we wanted to say,’ or ‘My life fragments too easily, things / have no core, break up, / sometimes end. / I am not tough,’30 lines seemingly flat, but with curious rhythms, carrying conviction. Or Dennis Lee’s ‘Glad for the Wrong Reasons,’ in which after a nightmare of absence, with the glad racket of garbage cans and the familiar features of his domestic life, he can say, ‘Jesus, there is / something about our lives that / doesn’t make sense ...’31 Or the devastating opening lines of Susan Musgrave’s ‘Once More’: We sit by the river you, drunk already, and I your day’s feed.32

It is perhaps a negative conviction, but it is a conviction. Musgrave may discover that her most earnest desire is for death or madness: she begins a poem called ‘Celebration’: Being someone’s last woman and the only passenger of the day I rode out after madness ...33

Yet given Musgrave’s world, her desire for death may be honest, her desire for madness a desire for sanity. In that obscenity she may find a

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Dionysian music, the birth of tragedy. ‘To be born,’ says Ouellette, ‘is to have a sharpened awareness of the two poles of life and to feel the tragic in our very being.’34 ‘We begin to live,’ said Yeats, ‘when we begin to conceive of life as tragedy.’35 Yet Layton’s ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ concludes with the poet: noting how seasonably leaf and blossom uncurl and living things arrange their death while someone from afar off blows birthday candles for the world36

There is always the point in any society when it is no longer appropriate to rage against the dying of the light. Our mutability is a token of our community with life as a whole. The local tragedy opens into the divine comedy. Frye could speak to that, but let me repeat Ouellette: ‘It is the awareness of death and hope which transforms me into a demiurge and not all the “isms”...’37 The more extravagant the vision of a radiant community the more it is necessary to recall the opacity of the individual fate, the fertile obscenity of death. Thus Ouellette insists upon remembering the deaths at Hiroshima, the deaths on the highway, the death of the man carried out of the barber shop, your death, my death, his own. Therefore Layton, crying his visionary conviction, there is no such thing as death, there is no death anywhere in the land, brings his hand down on the butterfly on the rock – not because he takes a sadistic delight in breaking butterflies, but because he must assert two realities at once: one life and the many unique, mortal lives. There is no divine comedy except through the individual tragedies. Any other proposition would be false. During the past generation Canadian writing both in theory and in practice, both in French and in English, has discovered an assurance, a range and depth, a boldness, that suggests it is entirely at home in the world of the imagination. The news of the phoenix no longer comes to us in rumours, from abroad. The Canadian writer can now live in that fire. Yet he is also aware of the dark that makes the light flame. He is prepared to fly, but he is also aware of the gravity that will ensure that his imaginative flight does not become weightless, an endless drift in free fall. Therefore it is not plain sailing. He has no guaranteed technique. It is with a paradoxical assurance he proceeds. I am reminded of the strange phrase of Giguère. Poetry is an obsidian

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lamp: ‘La poésie est une lampe d’obsidienne.’38 I am also reminded of MacEwen, whose ‘Shadow-Maker’ may provide a conclusion to these remarks. I have come to possess your darkness, only this. My legs surround your black, wrestle it As the flames of day wrestle night And everywhere you paint the necessary shadows On my flesh and darken the fibers of my nerve; Without these shadows I would be In air one wave of ruinous light And night with many mouths would close Around my infinite and sterile curve. Shadow-maker create me everywhere Dark spaces (your face is my chosen abyss), For I said I have come to possess your darkness, Only this.39

notes ‘Myth, Frye, and Canadian Writers’ was first published in Canadian Literature 55 (Winter 1973): 7–22. Revised by the author in 2000. 1 Robert Kroetsch, The Words of My Roaring (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1966) – a summary quotation: everything about Backstrom is big, but for teeth see 9, 57, 111, or hands and fists see 133, 144, 146, 162. 2 A.M. Klein, ‘Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,’ The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein, edited by Miriam Waddington (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974), 334–5. 3 Ibid., 335. 4 Irving Layton, ‘The Birth of Tragedy,’ Collected Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965), 64. 5 Louis Dudek, Atlantis (Montreal: Delta, 1967), 139 and 150. (Note, however, at the end we read that ‘the sea is also real.’) 6 Gabrielle Roy, The Hidden Mountain (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962), 44. 7 Anne Hébert, Poèmes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960), 67. 8 Ibid.

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9 Earle Birney, ‘The Damnation of Vancouver,’ Selected Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 161–212. 10 Margaret Avison, Selected Poems (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), 4. 11 Irving Layton, ‘The Fertile Muck,’ Collected Poems, 135. 12 Ferdinand Alquié, Philosophie du surréalisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), 170. 13 Fernand Ouellette, ‘La poésie dans ma vie,’ Les actes retrouvés (Montreal: Editions de l’Homme, 1970), 23–4. Also, ‘Poetry in My Life,’ in Ellipse, No. 10 (1972): 54. 14 Hébert, Le torrent (Montreal: Editions de l’Homme, 1965), 9. 15 Hébert, Poémes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1960), 71. 16 Kroetsch, ‘A Conversation with Margaret Laurence,’ in Robert Kroetsch, ed., Creation (Toronto and Chicago: New Press, 1970), 63. 17 John Newlove, ‘The Pride,’ Black Night Window (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 111. 18 Margaret Atwood, ‘Backdrop Addresses Cowboy,’ The Animals in That Country (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1968), 51. 19 Gwendolyn MacEwen, ‘Breakfast for Barbarians,’ A Breakfast for Barbarians (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1966), 1. 20 Paul Chamberland, Demain les dieux naîtront (Montreal: Editions de l’Hexagone, 1974), 60. 21 Ibid., 190. 22 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955; Gateway Edition, Seventh Printing), 134. 23 Ibid., 135 24 Chamberland, Demain les dieux naîtront, 112. 25 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 80. 26 Susan Musgrave, Songs of the Sea-Witch (Vancouver: Sono Nis Press, 1970), 20. 27 F.R. Scott, ‘Mackenzie River,’ Signature (Vancouver: Klanak Press, 1964), 28. 28 Ouellette, Les actes retrouvés, 20–1. English translation in Ellipse No. 10 (1972): 51–2. 29 Chamberland, see Ellipse No. 8/9, 60–1. 30 Dale Zieroth, ‘Poem (for Marge),’ ‘I’m Not Ready for This Morning,’ Clearing: Poems from a Journey (Toronto: Anansi, 1973), 13 and 15. 31 Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies and Other Poems (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), 10. 32 Musgrave, Songs of the Sea-Witch, 44. 33 Ibid., 56. 34 Ouellette, Les actes retrouvés, 14. (The material in quotations is a summary variation on two sentences in the original text: ‘Naître c’est sentir le trag-

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D.G. Jones ique de son être ... Et notre conscience est d’autant plus aigue et plus vive, notre sensibilité est d’autant plus profonde que les deux pôles sont distants l’un de l’autre.’ English translation in Ellipse No. 10 [1972]: 47.) W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London and NewYork: Macmillan, 1955), 189. Layton, Collected Poems, 65. Ouellette, Les actes retrouvés. See note 13. Roland Giguère, ‘Notes sur la poésie,’ in Guy Robert, ed., Littérature du Québec, Vol. 1 (Montreal: Déom, 1964), 103. MacEwen, The Shadow-Maker, 80.

1.4 Northrop Frye: Canadian Mythographer rosemary sullivan

Literary criticism involves an act of recognition in that the critic engages in a retrospective ordering of the tradition. But it is also interesting to think of the undertaking as a reconnaissance in which the critic precedes the writer, creating a particular stance or defining a cultural dilemma. Richard Howard in Alone with America speaks of his generation of poets being ‘preceded – trained, turned loose – by a generation of great critics of poetry.’1 There have been good Canadian critics, but most often their concern has been less with style or poetics than with the complex and necessary problems of self-regard and the relationship between cultural context and identity. Northrop Frye is a major exception. For the most part his best criticism has not been directed towards Canadian writers and their particular problems, although his ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada and his University of Toronto Quarterly essays have had considerable impact. Yet his theory of archetypal criticism has influenced the writings of many Canadian poets, particularly those who have been his students, including James Reaney, Margaret Atwood, Jay Macpherson, and Dennis Lee. It is interesting to think of the ways in which Frye is Canadian, and it is important to ask what the Canadian poet has learned from Frye, for much that defines contemporary Canadian writing has been influenced by his critical guidance. And a further theoretical question lies behind these queries: what can the poet safely take from the critic? In 1957, James Reaney defined the Canadian poet’s predicament. The problem is ‘whether you should be self-conscious or unconscious about the craft of poetry, whether you should really tackle literary criticism as

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a help or intuitively arrive at the same goal.’2 Further, Reaney wonders whether this predicament of not knowing where to begin should be seen in national terms as a particularly Canadian dilemma. The words echo with the isolation of the Canadian poet of twenty years ago writing without a sense of his tradition. As Bernard Shaw has said, ‘If you cannot believe in the greatness of your own age and inheritance you will fall into confusion of mind and contrariety of spirit.’ Can the critic help the poet? Reaney pleads. He then proceeds to take the barest of hints from Frye to give shape and eloquence to a Canadian poetic tradition. He wishes for an ancestral pattern and so he finds in Frye’s comments references to a narrative epic tradition (later to be called documentary narrative) which seeks to make use of native mythology, landscape, and local history (including the Bible read in a Canadian way). For Reaney the critic seems to function as an anatomist, providing hints and guesses that can serve the poet. Is the critic then an encyclopedist, providing a grammar of motifs? Is his function to define the cultural gaze? With this in mind we can turn to Frye. It is most helpful to begin with a résumé of his theories. Frye’s criticism is morphological – it is the study of the system of forms of literary symbolism. It presents itself as a scientific system, with the same claims to objectivity and a synoptic vision as, say, linguistics. Studying most Western literature, Frye seeks to pick out the ‘genera and species’ of the products of the imagination and inductively to formulate the ‘broad laws of literary experience.’ Just as there is an ‘order of nature,’ there is an ‘order of words,’ an order of the imagination.3 He seems to say that the literary universe is an organic and closed or self-contained form of symbolic units (he occasionally uses the word ‘monads’) which the poet works through in infinite combinations and permutations. The critic’s function is to systematize and make known this grammar of motifs. The development of literature is evolutionary. Each new generation of poets (with the critic’s help) becomes increasingly aware of his antecedents and must accommodate their structures – Eliot’s amoebic tradition altering shape with each new ingestion. Frye’s system is encyclopedic and inclusive; there is nothing that cannot be accounted for, and it provides a sense of the evolution of literary forms in that it can explain the popularity of certain literary modes at particular periods. At the core of Frye’s system is his notion that all literature is conventional, which simply means that while a poem is unique, a ‘techne or artifact,’ with its own language and imagery and experience, it is also

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one of a class of similar forms (AC, 95). The critic, for his part, must study that aspect of symbolism that links poem with poem, and almost every poet will train himself instinctively in his tradition. In short, Frye’s purpose is system building. A work of literature is to his system as a beautiful body is to an anatomy chart. We can feel that his genera and species and his broad laws are reductive and suspect him of a violation of the imagination, but that is to miss the point. Frye offers the writer an anatomy. Is it useful? As Frye identified the problem, literary criticism as a totally intelligible body of knowledge has needed a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis (like the theory of evolution in biology) when it asks what sort of total form can be seen in literature (AC, 16). Proceeding inductively from the data, Frye notes, at the level of the individual work the private mythology, the peculiar formation of symbols which may be quite unconscious in a writer’s work; then the archetypal or recurrent symbols; then the relatively restricted or simple group of formulas in literature that betray its roots in ritual, myth, or folklore. Frye says that the themes and characters and stories that you encounter in literature belong to one big interlocking family and that there is a single mythical story: ‘the story of the loss and regaining of identity is the framework of all literature.’4 This central myth is rooted in the core of the human psyche, since it repeats a crucial pattern recorded in the individual mind and supposedly in the experience of the race: the severance of the I and not-I. This is the fall. This rhythm defines the hypothetical evolution of human experience as mind is gradually withdrawn from nature and man stands over and against an objective world. Man of course struggles against his alienation from nature and seeks to regain ‘identity,’ as Frye puts it, to transform the world into the form of human desire, and this questing accounts for the impulse to all stories: myth (resurrection), romance (adventure), tragedy (death), comedy (marriage), irony (the failure of integration). There are two sources of conventional or archetypal symbolism in Western literature – the sacred and the secular scriptures. Both offer integrated, if distinct, visions of the world. The sacred scripture, typified in the Bible, describes a ‘vast mythological universe, stretching in time from creation to apocalypse, and in metaphorical space from heaven to hell.’5 The secular scripture embodied in the conventions of romance, describes man’s vision of his own life as a quest in a world that is alternately demonic and idyllic (in literature we look up or down – wish fulfilment or anxiety) (EI, 40). A distinction is drawn between the revealed scriptures

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and the created scriptures – the spiritually real (something uncreated) and the humanly imaginative. When one has assimilated Frye’s protomyth, one ends up saying, well yes, of course, and marvelling at the way in which the system of Modes, Symbols, Myths, and Genres derived from the theory offer a kind of working grammar. But what, one wonders, is behind the system. One wishes to know the interpretive commitment out of which this order comes. To determine this, I think one should go back to Fearful Symmetry, which is perhaps Frye’s best book. In Fearful Symmetry, Frye writes that ‘the wise man has a pattern or image of reality in his mind into which everything he knows fits, and into which everything he does not know could fit.’6 (Anyone who believes this has essentially reformational ambitions.) And what is this pattern or image of reality for Frye? It is the scripture read according to Blake. Frye has indicated that his critical ideas are derived from Blake, and Fearful Symmetry contains his later work in embryo. Blake was the perfect study for Frye because his work offered Frye two things: (a) an apocalyptic vision of the imagination, (b) an ethical cosmology based on literary symbolism and Biblical typology. In his 1969 preface to Fearful Symmetry, Frye states that Blake saw the essential ‘mental fight’ of human life as the revolt of desire and energy against repression. The central symbol of his cosmology is Ezekiel’s ‘vision of the chariot of God with its “wheels within wheels,” ... a revolutionary vision of the universe transformed by the creative imagination into a human shape.’ The story Blake records is that of Man as fallen and redeemed; in other words the protomyth at the centre of Frye’s own system. The fall is the relapse from active energy into passivity where man sees the universe as objective and other and God as apart from himself. It was the fall of man’s mind that involved a corresponding fall in the physical universe. Redemption is the recovery of the full imaginative universe where all is seen as symbol and sign. True theology is prophecy. Fallen man must seek ‘spontaneous and gigantic vision’ (FS, 168). This could sound like any romantic or even Nietzschean account of human experience except for its ethical component – Christ, the image of forgiveness. God as the Poetic Genius, ‘the giver and incubator of life,’ is identified with the Universal Man who is the unified form of our scattered imaginations, the larger organism to which we belong though we are locked into our separate opaque bodies (FS, 44); the compelling Logos who ‘continually recreates an unconscious floundering universe into something with beauty and intelligence’ (FS, 52). The image-form-

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ing imagination creates a paradisal garden out of the wilderness of nature. This seems to be a received, a revealed version. Man’s compulsion to create has a rationale. Of course it is risky to identify Frye with Frye’s interpretation of Blake, but there is considerable overlap in the vision of the transforming imagination, as can be seen from Frye’s later writings. It is appropriate to say that Frye begins in Blake and comes the full circle of his system in his analysis of the secular scripture. Here he says we are moving into a third imaginative order: from tragedy (the classical period), through comedy (the Christian period), to romance (SeS, 91). Paraphrasing Wallace Stevens, Frye says that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written but the great poem of earth has still to be written. Romance is the great poem of earth in that it records ‘the creative power in man that is returning to its original awareness … we are all creators’ (SeS, 157); going back again and again ‘into the world of love and war, of suffering and humiliation, of nausea and self-contempt’ (SeS, 176) in order to create his own freedom by transforming himself. ‘The crowning act of self-identity [is] the contemplating of what has been made, including what one has recreated by possessing the canon of man’s word as well as God’s’ (SeS, 188). Literature, in its anagogic phase, is the total dream of man where the subject ‘is not reality but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic’ (AC, 119), and poetry is total ritual, total dream, in which the dianoia is the logos and the ethos is universal or divine man. Frye sees literature as the composite of the created and revealed Logos, and his system cannot be fully appreciated except against this backdrop. This is an important point. Frye’s mythological system is referential. It is committed to a vision of the world rooted in the protomyth I have described. As such it is an eloquent modern testament to imagination; is, in fact, romantic and idealistic. But following Frye without this interpretative commitment (which he himself seems to feel need not be directly acknowledged), the writer is almost inevitably forced into an ironic stance, using mythology only to point ironically to a sense of lost meaning, and to berate the literalness of modern culture; at root, in other words, the modernist myth of nostalgia for a lost unity. Often when a writer uses Frye, there can be an element of game playing, and the notion of archetypes comes dangerously close to the magician’s bag of tricks. The whole question of the ideological commitment of the writer is interesting here. Every writer reaches the point where he wishes to move

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beyond the writing of individual works and seeks a coherent system of commitment, an imaginative form of belief that can be anything from a religion to a political ideology to aestheticism. From Frye he can learn a major commitment – that all discourse is mythic. But then, what does this mean? Myth, in this sense, is simple story, the structural organizing principle of literary form. But to have any meaning, myths must be referential. They must be based on belief. If literature is a closed universe of signs as Frye says, then the writer is trapped in a refracted world, a world of reflecting mirrors where echoes and correspondences become ends in themselves and the whole question of truth is irrelevant. To illustrate, one can turn to Anatomy of Criticism for an explanation of Frye’s intention. In the conclusion to that work, in order to demonstrate the pervasiveness of myth, he writes, Rousseau says that the original society of nature and reason has been overlaid by the corruption of civilization, and that a sufficiently courageous revolutionary act could reestablish it. It is nothing either for or against this argument to say that it is informed by the myth of the sleeping beauty. But we cannot agree or disagree with Rousseau until we fully understand what he does say, and while of course we can understand him well enough without extracting the myth, there is much to be gained from extracting the myth if the myth is in fact, as we are suggesting here, the source of the coherence of his argument. Such a view of the relation of myth to argument would take us close to Plato, for whom the ultimate acts of apprehension were either mathematical or mythical. (AC, 354)

The danger here is that one stops with the myth: revitalizing original man equals waking sleeping beauty; as if the myth were potent in itself and not as susceptible as all language to becoming a grammar of clichés when divorced from original meaning. The writer cannot simply use displaced myths as structural bones for the building of stories as with Meccano blocks. Rather the solution is to recover the human stance implicit in myth, to recover the mind for which myth is a living instinctual grammar. Frye makes structure conscious, and the risk is overconsciousness. One problem may be that, despite his evolutionist theories of literature, Frye seems to eliminate history so that all literature is ‘eternally present,’ a system of correspondences, echoes, and interlocking references divorced from the murky reality of individual psychology and socio-political context. This leads to a further point. Frye’s notion of art as a closed system – art made from other art – seems

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not to give sufficient acknowledgment to those moments in literature (often the most moving) when art buckles, when form and language are inadequate to recalcitrant life forces. How then can the poet use Frye’s system? Or better, how has he used it? Obviously there are numerous insights one can derive from Frye. I have chosen to focus on specific poetic strategies and explore them through the work of those poets who best illustrate the point. One of Frye’s unique gifts as a critic is his understanding of popular culture and his use of the vernacular. From books like The Modern Century, one can say that he has used his morphology or system of signs drawn from literature to propose a theory of mythological conditioning in culture. With this insight and the theory of ironic displacement of myth, one can begin to understand the sensibility informing much of Margaret Atwood’ s work. At the root of all Frye’s thinking is the idea that everything from the understanding of literature to the journey towards one’s own identity has a ‘great deal to do with escaping from the alleged “reality” of what one is reading or looking at, and recognizing the convention behind it.’ It is possible to see that society makes ‘special and nonliterary use of myth, which causes it to form a mythology and eventually a mythological universe’ (SeS, 166). The level is that of cliché mythology that soaks into us from earliest childhood; this is a kind of mythological conditioning, which indoctrinates the individual into social conformity. Frye also provides a theory of narrative. In literature, the mythos is the narrative, and the units are metaphors, while the formulaic unit of phrase or story Frye calls archetype. ‘In the course of struggling with a world which is separate from itself, the imagination has to adapt its formulaic units to the demands of the world, to produce what Aristotle calls the probable impossibility’ (SeS, 36). This technique Frye calls displacement. It would involve taking a Grimm fairy tale, a classical myth, or the Sigurd saga and turning it into a plausible story in which every detail of the original would be accounted for. The product is closely related to parody. Atwood has always had an uncanny capacity to put her finger on the cultural pulse, and it comes from this perception of the mythological substructure of popular culture. To this she brings a remarkable gift for startling and precise imagery. She has thus found a vocabulary (such words as ‘underground,’ ‘circle game,’ ‘power politics’) and a way of articulating the conventional (in Frye’s sense) aspect of social relationships that is the major theme of her writing.

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At her best Atwood is a gifted poet. There is something of the scalpel in her irony, and indeed what she is doing is exposing the level of sentimentality in conditioned attitudes. One of her best books is The Circle Game, in which the title poem plays with the idea of cultural games and the single image of the circle game becomes polysemous: a psychological, cultural, and mythological symbol. In that poem, children are playing ring-around-the-rosy in what seems a whimsical game, but as the poetic image dissolves into symbol, the game becomes a tranced ritual of exclusion; the children are circumscribing reality, laying foundations for those garrisons of the mind that structure adult perceptions. The children are juxtaposed to lovers who are playing the circle game, withdrawing into a private fantasy or projecting a private reality. The circle game is a game involving barriers. The players set up artificial enclosures, fortresses, to guard a familiar world and exclude alien or inconvenient emissaries from other worlds. And since the circle game is a game of ritual exclusion, it can be played with psychological barriers, with language and with cultural myths. Atwood, of course, rejects the theory that language is the only key to the articulation and conduct of the mind, or the only instrument of knowledge. In cultural terms, the circle game defines the garrison mentality that preoccupies Atwood, and the modern contempt for the natural world. The circle game sets up a counter-impulse throughout her work – an impulse to break out of the circle. This means unleashing the anarchic impulse to crack open all form, formula, and language: I want to break These bones, your prisoning rhythms (winter, summer) all the glass cases, erase all maps, crack the protecting eggshell of your turning singing children: I want the circle broken.7

As Atwood’s work illustrates, a young poet who has been influenced by Frye, not directly but rather by osmosis, learns a synthetic energy, a

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perception of the literary construct that can give depth and texture to writing. Atwood knows about the mythic displacement, and she is one of the best users of the technique since it seems to trigger her ironic gift (i.e., her rewriting of the Odyssey from the woman’s perspective; her recasting of superman; Lady Oracle). Her most successful use of mythologically displaced structure is in Surfacing. There are two controlling metaphors that order the book: the wilderness as bush garden, and the myth of cyclical rebirth. Working from this thesis of the disjunction between self and objective nature, and the struggle of the transforming imagination to humanize nature to the forms of human desire, Frye has found an original Canadian metaphor – the bush garden. We Canadians stand over and apart from an alien wilderness seeking to impose an imperialistic and false order upon it – the famous garrison mentality. That man misperceives and therefore violates nature’s organic order is implicit in the myth. Atwood has learned from this formulation as is clear from poems like ‘Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer’ and the Susanna Moodie cycle. Surfacing takes a character into the Canadian wilderness who must destroy the false mechanistic forms of human order imposed on nature – ‘all the fenced-in gardens,’ et cetera. But there is a rebellion against Frye’s notion of literature as a closed universe, a distrust of its profound anthropocentrism. The character seeks to de-create, to reach a kind of Ground Zero where nature might be seen in its original idea, and the transforming powers of the humanizing imagination are profoundly mistrusted – everything stamped, named, imposed upon by metaphor. The character goes through a process of rebirth. In the diving scene she begins to unlayer all the buried guilts which have trapped her psyche and then, in a mystical moment of identity with nature – ‘I lean against a tree, I am a tree leaning’8 – she seems to experience a new apprehension of nature that is rooted in an Indian mythological vision. But Atwood rejects the apocalyptic/demonic imagery of her novel and the seduction of the orphic mode. The novel ends in an ironic stance. This has been language. And, of course, no other resolution would have been possible since the novel has been written at the level of intellectual ideograph; it has been diagrammatic rather than visionary. The novel is finally a gothic reconstruction of a displaced myth. And, of course, the stance is justifiable in one sense, yet the reader is left with the feeling that the potential of the novel is unrealized. Is there no way in which the myths can be true? Jay Macpherson’s The Boatman,9 dedicated to Northrop Frye, is a

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remarkable example of a book that echoes Frye’s vision. It is mythologically structured in six parts. The first, ‘Poor Child,’ reminiscent of Blake, describes the psychological fall and effort to return to the insatiate womb. The section ‘O Earth Return’ (the title is from Blake’s Songs of Experience) describes the Earth as fallen woman (Frye’s fallen nature in female form) – Eve, Sibylla, Euroynome, Sheba. ‘The Ploughman in Darkness’ (also from Blake) repeats the same theme – the failure of love. The next section describes corresponding male figures: the shepherd (Endymion), Adonis, Adam, Merlin, Cain and Abel, David. Blake’s theory of innocence and experience provides an informing structure, implying that a renewed world might be achieved if only the imagination could ignite the will. The last section, ‘The Boatman,’ easily the best, reworks the motif of Noah and his Ark in a very ‘Fryian’ fashion – the speaker is the Ark talking to Noah. Frye has written a review of this book in which he explains the section in a somewhat idiosyncratic way. As Eve was once in Adam, and the creation is inside its creator, so the Ark is inside Noah. The Ark is obviously for Frye the Body of Nature as Leviathan or Death.10 What makes this book work is not its mythological structure but its emotional integrity. Most of the poems are elegiac love poems, and there is a sober undertone of anguished loss that is to be felt throughout. The mythological structure gives it an intelligible order. It is as if the poem begins in the emotion and finds the mythological motifs an appropriate signature. What most intrigues is the sensibility of the speaker in a fallen world trying to will her own renewal. If there is any problem to these poems it is implicit in the problem of Frye’s directive to write from literature. These poems are limited to the conventions they employ. There is a feeling of a closed system here, as if one’s attention were deflected from the poet’s anguish; as if the poems record from a distance things we know, and the poet is withdrawn into a mythological world that reflects this one in a glass globe. We stare, curiously moved by the delicacy and poignancy of this defence. This leads one to suspect that a self-contained, highly stylized technique is the consequence of adherence to Frye. Finally, we asked a question at the beginning, which has gone unanswered. In what way is Frye Canadian, because surely this has been crucial to the poets? His ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada (1965) and his ‘Letters in Canada’ (1950–9), in the University of Toronto Quarterly, must have seemed like a centre of meaning in a miasma of confusion – a critic of international status seeking to identify a Cana-

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dian ethos, from the only perspective that could be genuine, that of one who feels he is home. The period of Canadian literary nationalism in the late sixties which saw the formation of Anansi Press took its ideological stance from two sources: the Canadian writings of Frye and George Grant’s Lament for a Nation. For Frye is a nationalist, in the lowkey sense of that term – one who speaks from a commitment to this place. What was the poet to learn from the ‘Conclusion’? First, that speculation about Canadian identity is exciting and exacting: the Identity, ‘Who Am I?’ begins with the question ‘Where Is Here?’ What has been Frye’s response? He has defined Canadian mentality as a garrison mentality, a mentality of defeat, denial, and withdrawal. Canadian writers are obsessed with the theme of strangled articulateness. There is a deep terror in regard to nature (its vast unconsciousness); the sense of being imprisoned in the belly of a mindless emptiness is at its most uncompromising in Canada. The Canadian tone is nostalgic, elegiac, plangent – the inevitable tone of an egocentric consciousness locked into a demythologized environment. This might seem so many impressionistic interpretations drawn from a particularly morbid perspective were it not based on a theoretical evaluation of the intellectual climate of Canadian settlement. Frye believes that seventeenth-century Europe brought three cultural imports to the New World of North America: (1) the revolutionary monotheism of Christianity, (2) the baroque sense of the power of mathematics, (3) the Cartesian egocentric consciousness – the feeling that man’s essential humanity was in his power of reasoning and that the nature outside human consciousness was pure extension – an attitude that led to a turning away from nature so complete that it became a kind of idolatry in reverse.11 The idea of being Cartesian ghosts caught in the machine we have assumed nature to be is a modern dilemma which has received stark definition in Canada. ‘Has any other national consciousness,’ Frye queries, ‘so large an amount of the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested built into it?’ (BG, 220). Canadians look at each other as objects, as obstacles. Certainly the poets have responded to this notion of the Cartesian disjunction of nature and consciousness (Dennis Lee’s Savage Fields). Why should it be such an exciting idea? Because it seems to explain why nature in Canada is territory and not home. And it seems to provide a strategy for homecoming. And what is this? Frye’s solution is mythology – to create a primitive indigenous mythological imagination, ‘forming within the self an

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imaginative counterpart of what is outside it’ (CI, 40); Atwood’s idea in The Journals of Susanna Moodie – ‘to have wolf eyes.’ Yet we can question how really helpful this insight is. When Frye elaborates on his idea of an indigenous mythology, he explains that the Canadian wilderness has been humanized by Indian mythology, and the modern writer can reclaim that grammar for his own work. But it seems to me that the fallacy here is one of direction. Intensely seen, image becomes symbol and the process is one of projection. The reverse process, where a symbolic structure is ingested to shape a psychic reality, always risks distortions and unearned intensities. Through the former process, you have a Whitman with his long catalogues of celebration of the American landscape raised to a mythological level. Through the latter you have the phenomenon of ‘Gone Indian,’ where a mythological structure is superimposed and falsifies experience. But the influence of Frye’s thesis of Canadian identity is best illustrated through Margaret Atwood’s Survival. It seems to me obvious that any young poet thoughtful about his culture would have taken Frye’s theory of the ‘epic’ seriously. In Fearful Symmetry, he describes the function of the epic as primarily to teach the nation its own tradition, which is indeed not national or religious but mythopoeic; the poet is to construct the pantheon of the essential Giant Forms of his culture (FS, 316). He is to demonstrate how the legends fit into a pattern so that the nation can develop a set of historical conventions for artists to use. This is obviously Atwood’s ambition in Survival. By an inductive study of Canadian literature, she sets out to distinguish the species from all other literatures. She writes a map of the territory, a geography of the collective mind. The thesis is familiar. The idea that holds the country together and helps the people to cooperate for common ends is Survival; the mentality this induces is a victim psyche, the will to lose. The literature participates in this confusion in that its archetypes are negative. Nature is a monster, animals are victims, artists are paralysed. I do not mean to parody Atwood, since her work is polemical rather than analytical, a cultural manifesto against colonialism. And it has been taken too soberly since much of it is invested with Atwood’s fine humour. But even though the mythic idea of Survival has the compelling power of belief it is not a true analysis. Such a statement is ‘clearly oversimplified and rhetorical rather than factual … designed to give us some perspective on the shape of a big subject, not to tell us the truth about it.’12 Actually the last sentence is a quotation from Northrop Frye

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commenting on his own generalizations about Shakespearean comedy in his study A Natural Perspective. It identifies a distinction he is willing to make between metaphorical statements that are not refutable and factual statements. But cultural identity worked out at the level of metaphor rather than historical and cultural analysis is profoundly unsatisfying. Intellectual history is a complex subject, and thematic criticism that makes no use of historical documentation, or a comparative methodology, can only be subjective and rhetorical. The analysis is at the level of dream archetype, depending on an explicit analogy between writer and culture, such that a shared mind, imbued at some level with informing images, is assumed. Perhaps there is such a thing as a cultural gaze, but if so, generalizations have to be carefully posed. Finally, one of the problems of archetypal analogies is the problem of too great facility. The more the writer thinks in conventions or patterns in an orderly verbal universe, the less susceptible he is to thinking outside his system. It would indeed be a very great irony if Northrop Frye had succeeded in transferring the supposed Canadian garrison mentality to a larger context where the whole of literary criticism becomes self-enclosed, a circle game.

notes ‘Northrop Frye: Canadian Mythographer’ was first published in the Journal of Commonwealth Literatures 18, 1 (1983): 1–13. 1 Richard Howard, Alone with America: The Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), xiii. 2 James Reaney, ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 26 (April 1957): 284–95. 3 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 14–17; hereafter cited in the text as AC, with pagination. 4 Frye, The Educated Imagination (Toronto: CBC Publications, 1963), 21; hereafter cited in the text as EI, with pagination. 5 Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 14; hereafter cited in the text as SeS, with pagination. 6 Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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Rosemary Sullivan University Press, 1947; 1969), 87; hereafter cited in the text as FS, with pagination. Margaret Atwood, The Circle Game (Toronto: Anansi, 1966), 44. Atwood, Surfacing (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 181. Jay Macpherson, Poems Twice Told: The Boatman and Welcoming Disaster (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981). Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 72; hereafter cited in the text as BG, with pagination. Frye, ‘Haunted by Lack of Ghosts: Some Patterns in the Imagery of Canadian Poetry,’ in David Staines, ed., The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); hereafter cited in the text as CI, with pagination. Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 1.

1.5 Frye in Place francis sparshott

Invited to consider the place of Northrop Frye in Canadian intellectual history, one is dumbfounded. Canadian what? The lesson that cries to mostly deaf ears from Donald Creighton’s Empire of the St Lawrence is that Canada was not until very lately a civilized nation at all, its literate orders being represented by a gaggle of drunken or teetotal traders. Carl F. Klinck’s history of Canadian literature likewise shows that we have had little to learn from each other. Again, essays in the history of Canadian philosophy have as yet brought to light, in addition to changing fashions in imports, only one native tradition (a tradition after which some of us still hanker), that of the tweedy or seedy exponent of this or that European line whose presence adds tone to the teaparties or hospital boards of provincial capitals. It is not that Canada is a ‘new’ or ‘young’ country, appellations that Northrop Frye among others has mocked. It is rather that the topsoil is thin. One year you clear the brush, one year you raise a crop, one year the stone shows through, next year the tax sale. ‘Where is here?’ is the question in which Frye has definitively posed the predicament of orientation in the home of the blackfly.1 Frye’s literary theorizing, as we will see, has given a sort of answer. But the shallowness of the soil remains unnerving. The significance of Frye in literary studies in the English-speaking world is plain enough. Briefly, he redeemed critical theory from the neglect earned for it by the philosophical imbecility of the ‘new criticism,’ a movement made possible by a determined refusal to consider its own presuppositions. Of course the new critics had no monopoly: there had been the Chicago Aristotelians, adept at packaging things so

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that they would not rattle; René Wellek, who had learned from history everything except that a theory has to mean something; the astringent humanism or prissy sentimentalism of F.R. Leavis; and many more. But criticism in their practice had evidently not been a discipline. What Frye provided was an approach to literary studies that insisted on first principles. Even those who thought him a wrong-headed corrupter of consciousness had either to provide alternative principles or stand convicted of intellectual frivolity. For the decade after his Anatomy of Criticism appeared in 1957 it was not unreasonable to see in him the one indispensable figure in literary studies in the English-speaking world. In the last decade, he has been eclipsed by this or that form of structuralism. But he should not have been. He anticipated what is most crucial in those movements: the insistence that literary works are preceded by myths or codes that shape their meanings, and the realization that an author has only limited freedom because his medium (Jacques Derrida’s writing) imposes meanings on which he can only perform variations and with which he must cooperate. But Frye adds what Roland Barthes, for one, misses: a vision of literature as itself one code (or code of codes), a system of understanding. In effect, Frye thinks of literature as writing that has a certain fixed place in culture, and in relation to this or that set of features by which all other kinds of formal discourse must be defined. For lack of such articulation almost all Frye’s predecessors and contemporaries seem by comparison naive or silly. This strategic superiority, together with the odium theologicum aroused by the associated tactics, is one of the things that has made Frye a target of widespread and intense hostility. In the context of Canadian culture generally, the primary significance of Frye is that he is, without doubt or qualification, a world figure.2 There are not many. Mordecai Richler coined the phrase ‘world-famous all across Canada’ to pick out that uneasy hankering for centrality to which denizens of peripheral nations may succumb. As one reads the memoirs of Pelham Edgar (a figure, and a text, crucial for Frigiologists),3 one is struck by his obtrusive modesty: it never occurs to Edgar that his own thought and work should take an equal place with that of British or American scholars of comparable gifts and attainments. This complacent assumption of inferiority, that those who make the intellectual running are necessarily elsewhere (so that, for instance, a Canadian university professor is primarily a teacher, because the research is already being done somewhere more central), an assumption that has amused or infuriated immigrant savants for a century, cannot survive

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a few Fryes who will calmly assume, and make the world agree, that where they sit is the head of the table.4 It matters to all of us that Frye has taken it for granted that Victoria College, Toronto, is a quite natural place for a world figure to be. Frye’s more specific significance within the world of Canadian letters has taken two forms. Directly, his annual surveys of Canadian poetry from 1950 to 1959 set a standard of interpretive insight, pithy judgment, and impartial responsibility that according to some observers established a new level of poetry reviewing in a country where self-indulgent incompetence has been the rule for reviewers;5 and his ‘Conclusion’ to Klinck’s Literary History of Canada did what could be done in a masterly overview to establish for our literature a synthetic identity.6 Less directly, by the example of his insight and by his insistence on the inner coherence of literatures he provided a younger generations of critics (D.G. Jones, Margaret Atwood) with the inspiration to trace new patterns in the national heritage and encouraged some poets (James Reaney, Jay Macpherson, Atwood again) to speak with a firmer voice by staking definite claims in what he helped them to see as a total imaginative world.7 One must not forget that Frye has played an energetic public part in the life of his country, in work for the Canadian Forum and the suitably short-lived Here and Now (where he was an early celebrator of the still underestimated genius of David Milne), in shadowy bodies like the CRTC and the Canada Council, and in the CCF,8 as well as serving in his own college not only as teacher but as principal (for seven years) and now as chancellor of Victoria University. What came of all that I really cannot say. Some of his causes seem to have been lost (such as the highly structured undergraduate courses in the humanities),9 others for all I know may have been won; but public affairs and administration are infected with transience that affects all alike. Meanwhile, whatever failed did not fail for want of him: his practical commitments have been continuous and surprisingly extensive, and Canada’s most eminent humanist stands as an intransigent reminder that by liberal things we shall be judged. Professionally, Frye has been an educator at least as much as a writer, and his writing has been without exception didactic, an adjunct to and part of his teaching activity.10 In the university context, his ideal has been conspicuously British rather than American, the emphasis not on the PhD but on the intensive undergraduate course such as he himself experienced in the Scottish-based University of Toronto:11 a strict

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schooling of the imagination, as opposed to vocational training for pedants on the one hand and a cafeteria for the curious on the other.12 This strong orientation is strangely at odds with his career as international figure and theorist, which has been unmistakably American: it is in the MLA and the American graduate schools that the theorist in Frye has shone most brightly. To the British he has seemed an oddity, almost a joke if one could laugh off such power and intelligence. The theoretical stance of the Anatomy of Criticism is of a piece with its author’s educational beliefs, and corresponds to the longstanding and legendary polarity at Toronto between A.S.P. Woodhouse and Frye, between University College and Victoria College.13 On the one hand, the honing of scholarship and the academic imperialism of the graduate school; on the other, the cultivation of culture and missionary enterprise.14 Pelham Edgar, that exemplary figure, was professor of French as well as of English; and Robins and E.J. Pratt, the other leading figures of the Victoria College English Department as Frye first knew it, were both men in whom scholarship was contained in a larger life of the mind. Frye will have been taken on at Victoria, not so much as an expert in this or that, but as a contributor to a civilizing enterprise.15 Strangely, one might have thought, for such a shy mandarin, Frye at a Couchiching Conference was in his element.16 Millar MacLure has discerned in Frye the Methodist circuit rider, carrying the gospel to the people.17 The image is exact. There is a literal truth to it. Some of the sentences from Fearful Symmetry, his first and seminal book, come from the time when he was a missionary in Saskatchewan, with the Keynes one-volume Blake in one saddlebag – and, one would like to think, a Bible in the other, to keep the balance true.18 One must not overlook in Frye the ordained minister of the United Church, ‘on permanent leave from the Maritime Conference.’ Not only is the preacher’s tone virtually omnipresent,19 but his expositions of literary theory have a way of culminating at the ‘anagogic’ level in an imperfectly argued apotheosis in which the imaginative universe turns out to be somewhat contained in the body of a God-Man. The transition to this figure, perhaps more Swedenborgian than orthodoxly Christian, is seldom clear and sometimes quite bewildering,20 but it is obviously central to the impulse of his writing. But that is not to say that literature yields its autonomy to theology. The religious atmosphere is that of American Protestantism of the thirties, in which a generalized earnestness replaces doctrine and faith. Religion is reduced to literature – though ‘reduced’ is not a word Frye would permit. Frye’s thought in

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this area is deeply equivocal, a fact that comes out sharply in his insistence on the Bible, which he thinks everyone should learn when very young: on the one hand, the overt reason for this insistence is partly that European literature takes its mythic form thence, but above all the Good Book actually presents a uniquely complete and all-embracing myth of mankind from Creation to Apocalypse, taking in everything else on the way;21 on the other hand, this claim of universality is surely one that no one would think of making for whom the Bible was not already a uniquely sacred book.22 Frye has claimed that he has always written from a Canadian centre.23 But he has also said that one’s trafficking with literary masterworks should not reflect any local standpoint.24 The terms of reference and allusion in his general writing on literature are in fact for the most part not Canadian but generally North American, and often quite specifically United States25 – an unmistakable tone that may have contributed to that extraordinary hostility with which he is regarded by many self-styled patriots who have neither illuminated nor worked for their country a tenth as much as he.26 Where is Frye’s Canadian centre? Where is his ‘here’? His Canada is essentially Sherbrooke, Moncton, Toronto – that is, pan-eastern. It is the land of the U.E.L. ‘Historically,’ says Frye, ‘a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.’27 It is a Canada from which West and North are emotionally absent. Though he is intellectually aware of (and able to capture in brilliant phrases) the radical diversity of Canadian situations,28 the Canada that is real for him represents a very specific view and approach. It is what happens if you go up the St Lawrence and turn right.29 At the centre of this experience lies the pilgrimage from Moncton to Toronto.30 Another Maritimer who has made this passage has told me of an old myth in which a South Ontario cultural heartland figures as a kind of Shangri-La, and for all I know he could be right. Victoria College has proved to be, in a peculiar way, the end of the line for Frye, the pot of ice cream at the end of the rainbow. Pelham Edgar remarked that Frye ‘will be a difficult man to hold, but I can also say that it will take an immensely powerful tug to dislodge him’;31 and he has certainly been one of those scholars, like Kant in Koenigsberg, whose removal from one particular spot would seem like a violation of the natural order. The ‘lonely time growing up’ in Moncton is significant, too.32 For all its potatoes, New Brunswick is agriculturally rather low-keyed, and Frye’s persistent image of tamed earth is neither farm nor vineyard, but

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garden. He writes always as a townsman through and through, and is almost unique among major Canadian writers as showing no sense of land. It is odd that this should be so, since his theory of literary form stresses the cycle of the seasons; but what that cycle has meant to so many of the writers he considers, by way of changing relations to the earth, seems to touch no chord in him. The lack gives his writing, for all its stylish suppleness, its gaiety and wit, its humane seriousness, a certain strange deadness at the centre. Frye’s career starts, so the legend tells, with his discovery of Blake in the public library at Moncton – ‘Of all places!’ says one commentator. No comment could be less apposite. Frye’s theory is based on the truth that you can read Blake in Moncton just as well as you can read him anywhere else. Every writer inhabits and writes for two worlds: the imaginative world in which everyone shares, and the practical world of the ‘myths of concern’ that are soon forgotten.33 For every reader at every time, says Frye, the world of literature has a centre, which is the book he is reading at the time. From which one may infer that if one is reading Blake in Moncton, the centre of the imaginative world is Moncton. Frye is dead right about this, and the point is crucial. In another mood one feels like muttering that he is dead wrong, that imaginative worlds fall away and leave us united with the author in the humanity of his loves and fears, but these are doubtless anti-literary moods. The world of literature is envisaged, not asserted, ‘a body of hypothetical thought and action’: the temptation to attribute to an author a concern with the ‘anxieties of the age’ that his work reflects, and to take account of those anxieties in one’s criticism, is to be resisted as drawing one away from the author’s work to the commonplaces of his age.34 To a lad marooned in Moncton factuality may be a bore at best, but he can entertain hypotheses as well as any. As for the Public Library – well, libraries are where books are, especially if you are raised in a small town and a not-too-bookish home. And Frye’s Canada, like that of the rest of nature’s good CCF-ers, is the land that Herschel Hardin has described so well35 – the land par excellence of public and semi-public institutions, a land whose literary emblem the Public Library might fitly be. In 1956, a neophyte teacher at Victoria College concerned with aesthetics, I sought and was generously given permission to sit in on Frye’s graduate seminar. In addition to the intellectual quality of the discourse, which was of overpowering richness and intimidating brilliance, and the content, which included much that was soon to appear as the Anatomy of Criticism, I carried away two powerful impressions.

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One was that Frye never once touched on any book he had announced (and asked us to consult) as the basis for that day’s class, but always broached some unheralded topic. The other was that none of the students present were able to challenge Frye’s ideas or to ask searching questions. To a student, they were mesmerized and buffaloed. The result was that his most basic principles were unprobed. Nobody knew (and most of us did not know that we did not know) what exactly was going on. It has in fact always been a striking fact about Frye’s thought, and one that has often been remarked on, that a combination of intense sophistication with passionate reticence and evasive irony has somehow prevented any close examination of his theoretical claims. What, exactly, one used to ask, did his theory amount to? Was he describing literature as such, or anatomizing a specifically Greco-Christian complex of literary traditions, or what? If his ‘archetypes’ were purely literary how did they come by their Jungian name and no less Jungian air? If the cycles were literary phenomenology, why did Spengler’s name keep turning up? Gradually we have come to realize that it is Frye’s position, and presumably was so all along,36 that the writers whose work he drew on, though they might have believed themselves to be historians, anthropologists, and psychologists, were really anatomists of the imagination, literary critics of an impure and unselfconscious sort. But it remains true that the precise and copious detail and the reiterated schematisms of Frye’s theoretical expositions generate a disconcertingly floating and detached nexus of ideas and images.37 Frye’s students are not the only questioners who have not known how to get him to come clean. His reply to his critics in the Krieger volume, especially to Wimsatt’s penetrating challenge, are a case in point.38 With frankness, humility, and generosity of mind, Frye turns all questions aside with a smart remark. Nothing is clarified by his response, and he gives no ground. In this he is like many another genius, who has no interest in explaining anything he had decided to leave unexplained in the first place and may be unwilling even to ask himself a question that goes counter to the natural flow of his energies. Frye, then, is a builder, not a debater; and not a participant in any continuing discussion of what literature is.39 But there is also a clear sense in which he is not a theorist at all. Like Blake, who in a way remains his model, and from whom the perplexed reader of Fearful Symmetry seeks in vain to disentangle him, he is a visionary and allegorist. He sees these patterns and relationships, and describes what he sees, as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel, so high that it is dreadful.

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And in each new work he sees afresh: what he sees again he will say again, in the same words if necessary, but in any case what he says now will be what he sees now. What he does is not repeat or elaborate or refine a theory in work after work, but spontaneously bring a growing repertoire of patterns and relations to the perception of successive works. The unity of literature, on which he insists, reflects in his practice the fitful reliability of the light shed by the schematisms his preferred thought-patterns endlessly generate. ‘I don’t know why it should help,’ James Reaney once remarked to me of one of Frye’s more recondite assignments of genre, ‘but it does.’ From which we may infer that the assistance, though solid and real, does not quite take whatever the form of an explanation may be. Whether ‘theories’ is quite the best word for them or not, Frye has given two separate accounts of what literature is. The earlier and more famous account is anchored in Blake, Spengler, and Frazer (the latter names recur obsessively in his occasional writings of the early fifties); the later account is not. The two accounts are partly complementary, the earlier serving as a special case of the later; but in some respects they are in direct conflict. According to the earlier account, literature as a whole (the word ‘total’ recurs like a hiccup throughout the Anatomy of Criticism) is a single imaginative order, as it were a single great work of which particular writings are parts that could not have existed without it and cannot be understood without reference to it.40 In the last resort, that is why a critic’s value judgment is otiose: all the critic can do is elucidate the work’s actual place within literature, and acknowledge the part the work actually can and does play in the imaginative lives of its readers. To suppose that a critic’s summary opinion can make that part substantially greater or less is merely silly.41 What the one great work that is literature does is present to the imagination a total order incorporating the unchanging forms and conditions of human life, the range of possibilities for aspiration and dread, the limits of social order and anomia, of incorporation and exclusion, all held together within the seasonal cycle of growth and decay in the wider context of an eternal order in which all else is fixed; the presentation being at the same time a deployment of the resources possible to human discourse. The imaginative order itself is fixed and starkly simple. What are endlessly complex are the ways in which these simplicities can be exemplified and veiled. Whether the actual world is really like this imaginative order or any part of it is beside the point, if indeed the question has any meaning. The point is that our imaginations are humane insofar as they

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live easily in this order, in which it is the prime function of liberal education to acclimatize us – so that the English Department is the central (and perhaps the only necessary) department in a true university. The later theory is very different in tone: it is a theory, not of literature, but of literatures. On this later account, in any society many folk tales are current. From among these, a mythology ‘crystallizes in the centre’ of the culture,42 articulating the shape of its imaginative concerns. What the literature of the culture does is to elaborate this central mythology and relate more and more areas of experience to it, slowly building up an imaginative world in which one can live and be at home – that ever-present Eden from which we can be expelled only by eating that forbidden fruit, the knowledge of fact and fable. What makes this a change rather than a mere generalization of the earlier theory is that the specific forms of such a mythology are not fixed by any literary necessity but only (if by anything) by natural or psychological causes with which literary scholarship as such has nothing to do. This really entails the rejection of the old claim that unless literature has a single determinate structure it cannot be an object of scientific study.43 Fortunately, the claim was wild, and the new pluralism affords just as firm a base for criticism: what makes a science possible is not the pre-established unity of its subject but the functional coherence of its methods. In practice, one might think, new pluralism and monism come to the same thing. Literature for us must be the ‘Western’ literature that embraces all our forefathers read and defines the imaginative world that is the proper home of our civilization. But doubts may creep in. How are cultures and their literatures individuated? Did Homer and Isaiah really crystallize out of a single body of folklore into a single mythology? In what does the singleness consist? To most of us it may not matter (though jealous classicists wondering why their colleagues in English are teaching Sophocles may have sour thoughts),44 but for Frye, still apparently committed to the all-inclusiveness of the Bible and to the view that each literary work is what it is only by its relation to a determinate totality, the question might pose difficulties. However that may be, Frye’s vision is deeply conservative: to educate the imagination is not to free it for ever new possibilities, but to equip it with unchanging forms to which new actualities can be referred and reduced. Freedom is commensurate with knowledge,45 and knowledge is of what already exists. Nothing could be more mistaken than to suppose that Frye’s relegation of all extra-literary concerns to the periphery of literary studies makes him a formalist. On the contrary, the practice

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of referring every work to total literature is designed to give the student the freedom of an imaginative standpoint from which a critique of life and society will be, as it was for Blake, inevitable.46 Frye’s own talent as a social critic is immense. In perceptiveness and in generosity of mind, The Modern Century excels many works in its genre that are far better known. And it is the fruit of a literary imagination: a mind free to examine the actual because it is entrenched in the possible, that knows where here is because it has walked up and down in the hypothetical elsewhere.

notes ‘Frye in Place’ was first published in Canadian Literature 83 (Winter 1979): 143–55. 1 Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 221 – from his ‘Conclusion’ to Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, 2nd ed., Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976). 2 See among others Desmond Pacey in Klinck’s Literary History of Canada, Vol. 3: 25. 3 Pelham Edgar Across My Path (Toronto: Ryerson, 1952). I do not know who coined the word ‘Frigian’ to mean ‘pertaining to Northrop Frye’; more than one contributor to Klinck uses it. 4 Frye’s assumption of centrality may be contrasted with E.T. Salmon’s remark, in introducing a set of lectures by Frye, that it is ‘cause for pride in his native country’ that the lecturer should have been made the subject of a volume published by the Columbia University Press (Northrop Frye, The Modern Century [Toronto: Oxford, 1967], 8). The underlying thought is the same as Pacey’s (note 2), but the reference to the New York publisher strikes an odd note. 5 Malcolm Ross cites George Woodcock to this effect in Klinck’s Literary History of Canada, 3: 160, though Lauriat Lane elsewhere in the volume demurs. The reviews in question formed part of ‘Letters in Canada’ in the University of Toronto Quarterly. The impartiality is perhaps not unqualified: whereas in 1955 Frye detects a polarity in Canadian poetry between the formal and the representational, the latter being ‘sophisticated and civilized’ and the former ‘primitive, oracular, close to the riddle and the spell,’ in 1957 (with reference to Jay Macpherson) what seems to be the same

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polarity has become one between the amateurish and the professional, and the tone has become rather strident. Towards the genuinely amateurish, Frye remains gentle, forbearing to tear them for their bad verses. A single phrase, ‘garrison mentality’ (Bush Garden, 225), made a new perspective part of our permanent view of ourselves. Frye is unlike many of his colleagues in holding that ‘The constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don’t get in any other way. That’s why it’s important for Canadians to pay particular attention to Canadian literature, even when the imported brands are better seasoned’ (Northrop Frye. The Educated Imagination [Toronto: CBC Publications, 1963], 53). In an interview in The Strand (1 March 1978, 9) Frye says ‘There is no such thing as a Frye school of poetry … I don’t think a critic directly influences poetry, that’s not his job. If it is his job, he’s a very dangerous influence.’ But it has seemed to some that there is a school which, if it is not a Frye school of poetry, will do until a Frye school comes along. See Robert D. Denham, ed., Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 55 and note 65 with references. The issue is a very sensitive one. Not perhaps the NDP (of which for all I know Frye may be a loyal adherent); all is changed, changed utterly, a terrible banality is born. The humane innocence of the old party was such as to make Frye one of nature’s CCF-ers, which he would have been even if his allegiances had made him (what some idiot once called him) ‘a Liberal Party guru.’ Frye takes every opportunity to lament or denounce the University of Toronto’s scrapping of its Honours Courses. Perhaps only a battle, not a war, was lost on this issue. I do not mean to suggest by this that Frye’s books are teaching aids. Frye is a didactic writer, but above all a writer. His preface to his Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), viii, says that the book ‘forced itself on’ him, and in a recent interview he says ‘My work and my writing does have to come first. There’s no arguing on that, because I don’t run it – it runs me. Everything else has to get out of the way’ (Vic Report, 7, 2 [Winter 1978–9]: 6). Compare his veiled remarks on the PhD in his Spiritus Mundi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 3–8. In the Strand interview (see note 7), 7, Frye makes the subtle and profound observation that the weakness of the undergraduate Honours Course in an Ontario context was that it required too much maturity in the student ‘because it was founded on the principle that wherever you are is the cen-

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Francis Sparshott tre of all knowledge.’ We shall see that this is a very Frigian principle; that it might be the underlying principle of such an education as Frye has in mind is something that might not have occurred to one. A University College graduate from those days told me recently that she and her contemporaries were puzzled by the superior excellence her department claimed for itself. The basis of this claim was never explained; so far as they could see, there were good scholars and good teachers (as well as bad ones) on both teams. The prolonged and intricate batrachomyomachia of the colleges at Toronto awaits its Homer. ‘Without the possibility of criticism as a structure of knowledge, culture, and society with it, would be forever condemned to a morbid antagonism between the supercilious refined and resentful unrefined’ (Northrop Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963], 136). Something of the tone of the department under Edgar may be gathered from Kathleen Coburn’s account of how she was recruited, in her In Pursuit of Coleridge (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1977). The tone is of a very laidback ‘Come over and join us.’ It used to be told that, when some speaker from the floor had claimed authority for her philistine views because she was herself a graduate from a university Arts course, Frye retorted: ‘Madame, if you are a graduate of an Arts program, we have failed.’ Can that really be true? We all believed it at the time. See Klinck’s Literary History, 2: 61. The evangelical impulse in Frye is also discussed by Geoffrey Hartman (in Murray Krieger, ed., Northrop Frye and Modern Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press. 1966], 112–14), and it is avowed by Frye himself (see Spiritus Mundi, 18). See Pelham Edgar, Across My Path, 86. To me personally, this tone becomes downright oppressive when Frye is discussing writers whose intentions are theological, notably Milton in The Return of Eden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965) and especially Eliot in T.S. Eliot (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963), which strikes me as the closest Frye has come to a pot-boiler. But literary judgment and personal anxieties easily become confused in these matters. Perhaps the most egregious of these sudden transfigurations comes at the very end of his Address as 1978 recipient of the Royal Bank Award. In the circulated text the transition, though abrupt, is intelligible; but an audience replete with chicken and oratory felt positively aufgehoben. On reflection, since the thou art that is supposed to be the ‘intersection of the timeless with time,’ the abruptness and brevity are appropriate.

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21 See for instance The Educated Imagination, 46. 22 Note that this makes the underlying mythology of our literature very specifically Christian. Since many of our finest and most powerful writers are Jewish by tradition if not also by faith, Frye must hold that either their personal and literary orientations must be at odds, or that their work belongs to an alternative tradition (of the existence of which he has given no hint), or that in their work the common literary mythology takes a special turn. 23 Bush Garden, i. 24 In his ‘Introduction’ to Pelham Edgar’s Across My Path, xi. 25 Most of Frye’s works, when not responsive to specifically Canadian occasions, have been published abroad, with first Princeton and then Indiana as the preferred houses. 26 That Frye as a critic ‘can hardly be described as a Canadian summing up Canadian experience’ is remarked by Geoffrey Hartman in Krieger’s Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, 109. 27 Bush Garden, 14. 28 For example, By Liberal Things (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1959), 5. 29 In his ‘Introduction’ to the second edition of E.J. Pratt’s Collected Poems (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), xxviii, Frye speaks of Canada as ‘a shambling, awkward, absurd country, groping and thrusting its way through incredible distances into the west and north.’ But unless one started in Montreal the direct way to the north might be through Hudson Bay, and the way to Vancouver was up the coast. 30 Frye’s personal pilgrimage is legendary. In the version in the Vic Report interview, the young Frye has the highest standing in English in his high school, and is rewarded with a scholarship to the local business college, where he becomes an expert typist so that he is sent to Toronto to enter a competition for speed typing (which he wins), and while in Toronto (still only seventeen) he becomes an undergraduate at Victoria College (so that he can study English again). As in all good legends, there is a strong hint of the miraculous here, and a certain shimmering of the outline of truth. But it is true that of all Frye’s gifts his prowess at the typewriter is the one for which he is most sincerely envied by his colleagues. 31 Edgar, Across My Path, 84. 32 Strand interview, 5 33 See Frye, The Well-Tempered Critic, 149. 34 See Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 41. 35 Herschel Hardin, A Nation Unaware (Vancouver: J.J. Douglas, 1974). In the third lecture of The Modern Century, Frye contrasts the CBC with its com-

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Francis Sparshott mercial rivals in terms that surely owe more to ideology than to experience. I say ‘presumably,’ because the late J.A. Irving used to claim that he had witnessed the very moment when Frye discovered that this was the line he had to take on Frazer – and, by implication, on Spengler and the rest. Frye and Edmund S. Carpenter, with others, were taking part in a panel discussion of mythology in general and J.G. Frazer in particular. Frye, prepared to expound Frazer as revealing the universality of certain patterns of myth and ritual, was horrified to hear Carpenter, an anthropologist by trade, revealing the poverty of Frazer’s methods and the unreliability of his results. Shock and panic (so Irving’s story used to go) pursued themselves across Frye’s features, to be followed by relief and the well-known grin of triumph as Frye realized that what would not pass muster as anthropology would do very well as the shape of the literary imagination. The rest is history. Readers not acquainted with the late J.A. Irving should note that the relationship between his anecdotes and the facts was sometimes one of a peculiar subtlety. In the reading room of the Pratt Library hangs a portrait of Frye seated among the clouds (‘magic realism’?). Frye comments on this picture (Strand interview, 9) that ‘There are jokes about Frye having no visible means of support.’ I have several times heard Frye make similar remarks about how people associate the portrayal with the free-floating nature of Frye’s ideas; but I have never heard anyone actually make the association, except when quoting Frye himself. It must in fairness be said that most of the critiques in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism are trivial, or irrelevant, or mistaken. In general, I know of no criticism of Frye’s general position that is at once well-informed, seriously critical, and directly concerned with the heart of Frye’s position. It is not only his students who have been mesmerized and buffaloed. Most references to Frye’s work, when not expositions by disciples, take the form of general encomium and disparagement. Considering his reputation, it is surprising how seldom other scholars cite his opinions on specific points, either to agree or to disagree. On general aesthetic theory he has made almost no impression at all. This view of literature, though singular, is not unique to Frye: René Wellek (History of Modern Criticism, II, 345, note 6) finds it first in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lessings Geist. Perhaps the most incisive statement of this position is that in Denham, Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature, page 148, a book review of 1959; the best-known is certainly that in the ‘Polemical Introduction’ to the Anatomy

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of Criticism. Frye’s position has often been attacked, but his opponents face a dilemma which can be crudely stated as follows: if value judgments are subjective they contribute nothing to knowledge, if they are objective they add nothing to the facts they recognize. Either way, value judgments as such can add nothing to knowledge. In The Stubborn Structure (London: Methuen, 1970), 66–73, Frye goes much further and denounces value judgments as anti-intellectual. The Critical Path (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 35. Anatomy of Criticism, 16–17. It is a three-step argument. First, every science must be a self-contained and ‘totally intelligible body of knowledge,’ possessed of ‘total coherence.’ Second, ‘criticism cannot be a systematic study unless there is a quality in literature which enables it to be so.’ Third, this quality lies in literature not being ‘a piled aggregate of works’ but ‘an order of words,’ this order being postulated rather than demonstrated because its demonstration would be the completion of literary study. The implied model of a science here seems to be that of a formal system; but the completeness of a formal system has nothing to do with its applicability. The implied epistemology is, in fact, obscure. Perhaps Frye is taking ‘science’ in Hegelian fashion (as in fact the coincidence of the completion of a science with the exhaustion of the potential development of its subject matter suggests); but one hardly sees how the Hegelian theory of knowledge can be divorced from dialectical development, which is something quite alien to Frye’s patterns of thought. In 1969, Frye became chairman of the University of Toronto’s new program in ‘Comparative Literature’ – a venture to which many of his colleagues in departments of languages and literatures were and are bitterly opposed and for which they profess contempt. ‘I know of no conception of freedom that means anything at all except the promise held out at the end of a learning process’ (By Liberal Things, 18). Abeunt studia in mores, Victoria College’s official motto, catches this facet of Frye’s thought and attitude as precisely as ‘The truth shall make you free,’ which is carved over the front door, captures the facet recorded in note 45. There ought to be a third term in this series, which would be the target of one of Frye’s devastating ironies; I am sure he has thought of it already, but I don’t know what it would be.

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PART II Frye’s Influence on the Canadian Literary and Critical Imagination: Challenging the Legacy

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2.1 Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet (1) than any Northrop Frye poet (2) than he used to be george bowering

By now it is apparent that the mainstream of today’s Canadian poetry (in English) flows in the same river-system as the chief American one – that (to change figures of speech in mid-stream) nurtured first-hand or second-hand by followers of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. The Contact people in Toronto of the fifties, and the Tish people in Vancouver of the sixties are in the middle of what has been happening in Canadian poetry, mid-wars. But there is a small group of poets in Ontario who arose after World War II, and who remain outside the contemporary mainstream. They may be said to descend not from Williams and Pound, but from T.S. Eliot and Robert Graves, especially, to bring it home, as those figures from an earlier time are reflected in the literary theory of Northrop Frye of the University of Toronto. The poetry produced by this group has not had any noticeable influence on younger Canadian poets and their magazines, possibly because it takes literary criticism as an important source; it tends to find its audience in the universities of Canada, or more precisely, of Upper Canada. To speak of something perhaps not as relevant, the work of these poets looks more British than American – one could say more bookish than American. The poets I am writing of are Jay Macpherson, Douglas LePan, and James Reaney. Eli Mandel was once drafted into this tradition by some critics, but has lately opted out. James Reaney, as I will want to show, is also of late finding a separate way. Northrop Frye has written a lot of literary theory, which is best known from his Anatomy of Criticism. A few years ago he chose to popularize

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his critical thoughts in a short series of CBC talks, published by the CBC as The Educated Imagination, which title suggests one main belief to be found in the poetry written by the members of the ‘Frye School,’ that they are dealing with a knowledgeable and critical rendering of discoveries made through the imagination, usually thought of in terms of archetypal mythology. There, too, is their principal weakness and contradiction, that while they want to tap the enormous resources of the unconscious to body forth their poetry, they appear rather as super-conscious and architectural poets, making verses with too much obvious eye for critical theory. Critical theory of Frye’s sort is interesting as long as it remains a game (in the philosophical sense), but when it begins to shape poetry, then it defeats its own proclaimed premises, as the unconscious becomes a thing mocked. Poets who operate this way can look like upper-middleclass adults doing teenage dances at a rock-blues dance. But I will look at Frye’s The Educated Imagination, and some of the poems of the ‘mythopoeic’ poets, and see whether and how Frye’s pronouncements describe (or prescribe) what has been happening. Frye’s major concerns, of course, seem dated, no matter what truth may lie in them. They are filled with nostalgia for the critical exploitation of the unconscious that happened in the twenties and thirties. And they are sometimes, for all Frye’s talk of the imagination, quite turgidly clerical. The first thing man notices, says Frye, is that nature is objective, apart from man’s sense of himself. Then he makes or sees a series of consequent splits, between his emotions and his intellect, between the world a man lives in and the world he wants to live in. So man sets to work in this context and tries to make the world over, to create a humanized world. Frye seems to me to be calling for the maker as one who imposes his desires on the world of nature – and that is the conventional Christian/Western conception, regarding the settlement of America, for instance. Developing his argument in a classical way, Frye then speaks of a third level of the mind, beyond the simply emotional or intellective levels – the imagination, where a man sees a vision or a model of a world beyond present accomplishments. That vision has nothing to do with time, with the future. It is nothing like the scientist’s or engineer’s plan, which is only a progressive improvement of the present accomplishments. Literary people, says Frye, are left in the cold by things, like science, that evolve. Artists could never run the objective world. Poets

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are superstitious, living by the evidence of their senses – a flat earth, for example. As in most of his pronouncements Frye is here half-right, as Freud was. He agrees with Freud in associating the artistic and neurotic minds. He agrees with many other professors that the artist has to be a Luddite. The ‘limit of the imagination is a totally human world,’ he says, but here he is led astray by his original opposition of human and objective, the subject-object split, which may be conceived only by the self-appointed ‘subject.’1 So he says that the poet’s job ‘is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind.’2 This is where the poets of the Frye school are outside the Canadian mainstream. A poet who would possess the world with his mind writes his poetry from the mind, the possessor. He begins by subjecting the rest of his faculties and responses to the admiral mind. Get a hold on yourself, is his advice to himself. Then reach for everything else. The ego rules, or thinks it does. As Eliot treated history, Frye’s poet would treat nature, as organizer and possessor of it. Today my quatrains, tomorrow the world. This is different from the poets outside this particular myth – they would rather become possessed by nature, to discover their natures, by exploring with all their faculties, the mind as one among them. Frye speaks many times of the poet seeking identity of mind with nature. The un-Fryed, or ‘raw,’ poet is likely to surrender identity (as in a psychedelic awakening) as a step towards communion with the rest of his self (see Whitman’s use of that last word). Frye tells how his poets (he tends to generalize his ideas to cover all poets) seek identity of mind and nature. Men create gods, creatures who are similar to both men and objective nature – hence the wind-god and the wolf-god. Then when men no longer believe in those creatures, they become part of literature. Poets, says Frye, do not literally believe the things they write, but rather make codes. When, as with Hemingway and his bullfights, the writer seems to believe in the truth of his rituals, Frye says that he is actually imitating previous literature. Frye would not accept that Allen Ginsberg actually saw the face of Moloch on the skyscraper wall. But Jay Macpherson, Frye’s most ardent follower, obviously agrees that the names and events in poems are mythcharactered codes of experience: I’m Isis of Sais, If you’d know what my way is, Come riddle my riddle-mi-ree.3

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Frye’s point is that Aristotle’s arrangements hold; there is a universe of things and a universe of ideas, and a universe of literature. To write literature, the poets draw from the universe of literature. Forms, he says, come only from earlier literature, but by forms he appears to mean ideas and events. (He says that Canadian writers imitate the models of D.H. Lawrence and W.H. Auden – and he says this on the radio in 1962! His being that far out of touch with Canadian writing helps to explain the distaste for Frye among most Canadian writers.) I don’t want to give the impression that I thoroughly disapprove of all that Frye says. I agree with many of his words. He seems to agree with Williams, for instance, by saying that ‘it isn’t what you say but how it’s said that’s important,’ but then he moves to something I can’t agree with when he speaks of poets’ ‘transferring their language from direct speech to the imagination.’4 (Italics mine.) Once again the human mind as separate from and superior to the materials of the natural universe. Primitives feared the animals and their spirits, so they donned their skins in dance and poetry. Frye would say that we now make poetry by pretending to do the same thing, while scientists and others study primitives and animals among other things. But today we fear our own technology and not nature, because we have subdued and understood nature, or so we are told. In modern dance and poetry it is the skin of the technology we wear, including the skin of Relativity and Quantum. The poets are the unacknowledged shamans of the world. They do not get their forms from literary code alone. Literature is not myth with belief removed, though it may be written as though it were, as witness Jay Macpherson. Frye says that the great theme of English poetry is the desire to regain paradise, and James Reaney says that is what Macpherson is trying to do. The poet who wants to possess the world with his mind often writes of that desire as his subject material. The poets who want to become possessed act like primitives, hoping to know paradise in their poetic forms, all the faculties engaged, as in dance with music and incense. It is not what you say that’s important but how you say it. The poetry of Eliot’s age and mode was ironic in tone as it spoke of the terror in this fallen world outside paradise. So the raw poets think of poetry’s words as action, often ritual action. Frye’s poet thinks of it as code of thought. In Frye’s view, characters in literature are different from characters in history in that they are typical or universal manifestations, representatives, representing parts of our

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lives. Allegory has crept in. All images are symbols – Frye says that. Williams distrusted symbolism as an act of the overbearing intellect. To go to the extreme of this line of thinking, Frye says that knowledge of literature cannot grow without knowledge of the main stories in the Bible and classical literature. That would come as a surprise to many readers of the Tale of Genji. Of course Frye probably had only a Western literate in mind. That is one of the limitations of his argument. I have said something to the effect that Frye sees the poet gathering materials of life, nature, literature, to himself and his poem, much as Eliot’s persona is seen trying to do at the end of The Waste Land, and that the raw poets see it another way around. It is not surprising, then, that Frye embraces the old favourite notion of the writer’s detachment, that he favours things in literature to be removed just out of reach of action and belief. Of course we know that we are hearing about two ways of viewing poetry, when we hear from Frye and his opposites. Frye could likely make a logical case for Blake as detached, much to the dismay of some other writers. I think, though, that we can fault Frye especially for his generalizing on the process of writing literature. Related to that is his overstressing of literature as inspiration for literature. (Much important new writing may be seen as attempts to provide alternatives for literature.) And related to that is his confusion between the writing of lyric and the writing of its criticism. Anyone who has too much Graves and Frye on the mind might plead for myth rather than creating it, asking readers to see with the eye rather than through it. Witness Jay Macpherson, who often jams together homely observations and spooned-on myth-figures: My mother was taken up to heaven in a pink cloud, My father prophesied, The unicorn yielded to my sweetheart, The white bull ran away with my sister, The dove descended on my brother, And a mouse ran away in my wainscot.5

Why, no one ever sees or mentions a ‘wainscot’ in Canada! But in the Frye mind, literature is a game. Literature, says Frye, has no moral referent (all these remarks are secularizations or diminishings of Keats’s remarks about the poetical character), and so in that endless debate about the topic, he stands opposed to Pound and Williams and their followers, tenuous as that following may be. In fact he goes so

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far as to say that ‘literature has no consistent connection with ordinary life, positive or negative,’ though later he calls the world of literature a model to be striven after.6 (But the self-contradictions in Frye have been a topic of conversation in the learned journals ere now.) He carries on the closet fiction of the New Criticism, the idea that the poem is entirely self-contained, which may be a good system for criticism, but lousy for literature. As a poet, I feel it impossible to agree with Frye that my writing looks either up toward heaven or down to hell, never horizontally at life. I find that horizontal view is possible as soon as my self begins to expand outside the bounds of the ego, the ‘subject.’ But literature, says Frye, is there to refine the sensibilities, always with knowledge of the artifice foremost. That is literature as a game. Games have counters, players, and rewards, all totally symbolic, with no referents save in the psyche. The reader, as well as the literary character, exists ‘only as a representative of humanity as a whole.’ 7 So it is that Jay Macpherson may declare that her first person in the poem is Isis. I find that a reasonable stance, but shallow compared with Olson’s ‘Maximus’ or Williams’s ‘Paterson’ – and I will not accept it as the only possible way. I think Raymond Souster, for example, walks through the Toronto streets of his poems in no one’s skin but his own, perceived through, not by, the literary imagination. But, says Frye, ‘how dangerous the emotional response is, and how right we are to distrust it.’8 Distrust rhetoric, his opposers would say, for he does not, and distrust reason at least more than you distrust emotion. Emotion, at least, makes for better dance, and the primitive mind is in the head of the best dancer in the World. Frye is right to say that poetry is the first primitive writing, but he wants, he says, a poetry of impersonal nexus, the poem as dance removed from the dancer. The beginning of reason, where it is not primarily intuitive, causes awkward stumbling, as seen in the poetry of Auden or Spender. Or of Jay Macpherson, for instance. Her verses tend towards closed form, with the ever-present threat of disorder – that is fine, a creditable imitation of the primitive. But the jungle dance seeks to evoke a favourable response from nature (external or internal), not to cow it. Macpherson’s syntax and vocabulary are awkwardly and deliberately ‘literary,’ poetic diction as an attempt to make magic – thus to impose her will on nature. The ordering ego hulks over Miltonic inversions: In the snake’s embrace mortal she lies, Dies, but lives to renew her torment,

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Under her, rock, night on her eyes. In the wall around her was set by one Upright, staring, to watch for morning With bread and candle, her little son.9

There is no doubt that Macpherson is Frye’s most faithful follower (her book is dedicated to him), especially concerning his notion that all literature is imitation of earlier literature. In reading a poem such as her ‘The Marriage of Earth and Heaven,’ one encounters metrics and philosophy copied from an earlier century. But I don’t find a real encounter with myth. Such real encounter would be a here-now fright or swoon or rapture. Myth is the imaginative base of culture, and culture is not alive if it is not being formed with the materials and shapes available to the senses. The literary mind thinks about past culture, but to copy the modes of past culture is to give oneself over to time, where gods and giants are only reported, never met. They must be met in the here and now, where their faces and limbs are seen through eternity’s film. (In ‘The Rhymer’ Macpherson uses 1940s slang in the 1950s, and is false even to time.) Macpherson should look to Robert Duncan, the great American romantic, who understands these things in his poems of Osiris and Set, not as literary gentlemen but as fleshy shadows in his room’s corners. In an article on Jay Macpherson’s book, James Reaney says that she is trying to return to Paradise, an effort that fits into one of the major themes of English poetry. But Paradise is straight ahead, not somewhere on the trail we have made since the Fall. (Incidentally, in that article Reaney points out the most important contribution of Macpherson, her attempt to make a book rather than a collection of poems. The suite of poems was a valuable artistic innovation in Canada, and Macpherson and James Reaney seem to have led the way with theirs.) Reaney also mentions Macpherson’s care for the ‘myth of things within things’10 – which may be a way of avoiding the horizontal view, but which may also be an illusion disguising a bookish isolation. The poet makes the choice of either the easy acceptance of that old pattern or trying to make metaphor from contemporary discoveries and views, in his own skin. I catch, in the poetry of Macpherson, as well as in that of LePan and Reaney, Frye’s uninterest in or distrust for science and technology. The poets in what I’ve called the Canadian mainstream hearken in their various imaginations to Whitman’s decree that science and art are no enemies, which extends from Blake’s pronouncement

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that the body and the spirit are one. Douglas LePan gives his view of the result of man’s technology in his poem ‘Image of Silenus,’ where in contrast to the wilds he sees the city, and calls on his reader to look at how men shrink the gods in themselves, to See them, the shrunken figures of desire, Swarming complete as when they were first here posited, But not heroic, filling all the sky, Miniatures rather, toys in a toy shop window.11

There is Eliot’s detestation of his surroundings, which is finally a detestation of self, a useful Christian emotion, but poor starting view for a poet, unless he really does feel that literature looks only up or down, in this case down, where ‘The figures fashioned out of desperation / … all throng behind the ironic mask.’12 The pun says that our technology will not permit myth-figures anywhere but in literature. The romantic fallacy holds that the city destroys magic, a sentimental and reactionary view. I suspect that Douglas LePan doesn’t like Marshall McLuhan’s books, for the wrong reasons. The opposition of wild nature and ugly city and the diminishing of myth are two consistent themes in LePan’s poetry. He seems to be resentful that the Canadian forests were not found filled with nymphs and sprites and their chroniclers. In ‘A Country without a Mythology’ he begins to lament that no mythology has been fashioned, as ‘No monuments or landmarks guide the stranger,’ but a reader begins later to see that it is history that’s not here in (presumably) frontier Canada, that mythology dances in its wild danger, figured by a war-painted ‘lust-red manitou.’13 Good enough for any land. But there LePan is stuck, in the wilds. Canada confronts the explorer with waterfalls and tangled forests that a man must find his mind in. LePan seems to be trying to do what Frye suggested – to identify himself or his mind with the external world, to choose where he will pretend that he sees gods. As man separates his self and the ‘objects’ of his sight, he here separates the areas of those ‘objects,’ into untouched nature, to which the poet looks upward, and the city of man’s technology, to which he looks down, with irony. In falling easily into the romantic fallacy (truth and beauty and innocence in nature – all opposite in cities), LePan (punning on his name?) also takes refuge in literature as alternative to common life, answering another Frye description and stepping out of the mainstream, into the forest preserve.

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I invite you to read these titles: The Boatman, The Net and the Sword, The Wounded Prince, A Suit of Nettles. They all make reference to standard literary myth, hoping to suggest universal archetypes. But any reader knows that he has to be prepared by books to know what the universalities are, before reading the poems. In so doing he knows that he has made himself a specialist. He is aware of that irony. He is so aware due to the knowledge in his conscious and civilized mind that has forever removed all possibility of stepping into the world of the child or the primitive. That is likely why Frye thinks that poetry is myth with belief removed. James Reaney was once a Fryed poet (A Suit of Nettles, 1958), but has in most recent years broken loose to make myth from local materials rather than spooning it on from the golden bowl of literary materials. In the later poems and theatrical experiments he has sought a way of understanding myth and myth making not as alternative to history and politics and commerce and city planning, but as the register made on the emotions and unreason by all those things. He is not the reader encountering Icarus in book or painting, and observing his after-images in contemporary flights and minds. He observes the materials in Winnipeg or Stratford, and shines the infrared light on them, revealing their own vibrations that are in the present act of producing myth. He is the man on the ground, seeing Icarus while he flies, and understanding the meaning without gloss. The process really got under way, I believe, in Twelve Letters to a Small Town, and has continued, despite misunderstanding by CBC actors, in the recent radio suites, and is best apprehended in the latest forms Reaney uses – amateurs and children, the actual human materials produced by the soil, speaking the words discovered by both the poet and themselves, not simonized by the wax of literature. Reaney begins to move beautifully away from Frye’s strictures with the first quatrain in Twelve Letters to a Small Town (Reaney may deny all this), where the poet tries to see under the literary name laid on the ‘Avon River above Stratford, Canada’: What did the Indians call you? For you do not flow With English accents. I hardly know What I should call you Because before

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I find two things important here – the personal pronoun and the determination to find myth with the senses, the taste of water in cupped hands, not the idea of a sacred Greek or English stream. So that when Reaney comes to say The rain and the snow of my mind Shall supply the spring of that river Forever14

he has moved inside, he has made the world human, as Frye would say, but he has done so by finding out that what is human is in the world as surely as the stream’s water is in his body, here and now. Not Noah of the book, but Reaney of the river, is the prototype of this myth’s beginning (and middle, anyway). And that river, the river running through Stratford, runs into the Canadian mainstream at last, enriching it. Not that this is final aspiration or subjective concept of good. Just a view of how it is to this horizontal sight.

notes ‘Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet (1) than any Northrop Frye poet (2) than he used to be’ was first published in Canadian Literature 36 (Spring 1968): 40–9. 1 Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination (The 1962 Massey Lectures; Toronto: CBC Publications, 1963), 9. 2 Ibid., 11. 3 Jay Macpherson, ‘Isis,’ The Boatman and Other Poems (Toronto: Oxford, 1968), 27. 4 Frye, Educated Imagination,17. 5 Macpherson, ‘Ordinary People in the Last Days,’ The Boatman, 5. 6 Frye, Educated Imagination, 39. 7 Ibid., 42. 8 Ibid., 59.

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9 Macpherson, ‘Eurynome,’ The Boatman,14. 10 James Reaney. ‘The Third Eye: Jay Macpherson’s The Boatman,’ Canadian Literature 3 (Winter 1960): 23–34. 11 Douglas LePan, Weathering It: Complete Poems 1948–1987 (Toronto: McClelland andStewart, 1987), 99. 12 Ibid., 99. 13 Ibid., 76. 14 James Reaney, Twelve Letters to a Small Town (Toronto: Ryerson, 1962).

2.2 Butterfly in the Bush Garden: ‘Mythopoeic’ Criticism of Contemporary Poetry Written in Canada1 barbara belyea

‘[N]ational literatures’ is a concept which was first established after the awakening of nationalities under the power of the Napoleonic superstate, which is therefore highly time-conditioned and hence … obstructive to any view of the whole. E.R. Curtius2 What we long to see we readily believe that we have seen. C.S. Lewis3 we seize on what has happened before, one line only will be enough ... John Newlove4

A numerically representative sampling of poetry written in Canada in the last fifteen years, from Alden Nowlan in the Maritimes to bill bissett on the west coast, yields a variety of poetic subjects and styles. This variety would seem to contradict the claims of recent literary criticism to a ‘national’ literature, definable by a number of dominant archetypes contributing to a coherent mythic evolution in a search for cultural identity. There are two major difficulties to be encountered in positing a Canadian national literature. Firstly, there is confusion over which national identity is in question: for English-speaking writers, it is that of

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federal Canada; for writers in Quebec, it is more often than not that of a separate Quebec. Secondly, when national identity is applied to literature, criticism is limited to a sociological approach that considers the relations between literary and cultural values. Internationally, this sociological approach has been associated with Marxist criticism, as opposed to formalist theory and practical criticism.5 In Canada, its shortcomings have been masked by association with another approach, that of Northrop Frye’s persuasive, ‘mythopoeic’ criticism. In 1943, Frye reviewed A.J.M. Smith’s first Oxford collection of Canadian poetry, the publication of which was a great impetus to consideration of poetry in Canada as a collective phenomenon. Thus began two decades of provocative criticism of Canadian literature, now assembled under the title of The Bush Garden. At the same time, Frye was working out a theory of literature based on a cycle of seasonal mythoi, in Anatomy of Criticism. The two aspects of his critical activity, practical and theoretical, naturally influenced each other.6 Frye’s definition of mythos, his basic working concept, is carefully maintained throughout the two works, and should not be confused with ‘myth,’ in its usual meaning of figurative explanation of natural or historical phenomena. Frye’s myth is ‘the structural principle of the poem itself ... the integral meaning presented by its metaphors, images and symbols.’ 7 This definition is very close to Frye’s concept of form – I mean by form the shaping principle of the individual poem, which is derived from the shaping principles of poetry itself. Of these latter the most important is metaphor, and metaphor, in its radical form, is a statement of identity.8

– and here we find the jumping-off point of critics intent on discovering a ‘national literature’ for Canada. Frye’s successors have not been so careful in their definition of myth, and have translated his ‘fables of identity’ into a limited number of truly Canadian themes, on the one hand, and the creation of a coherent, mythic super-poem to which all Canadian writers have contributed, on the other. James Reaney published an article in a 1957 issue of The University of Toronto Quarterly entitled ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,’ in which he lists, by a ‘sampler’ of quotations, the principal themes of Canadian literature.9 In thus revealing the poet’s predicament – his traditional isolation – Reaney refers to the critic’s dilemma: to decide for or against a Canadian ‘cultural memory.’

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I rather worry about ... whether it’s any use talking about the poet’s predicament in national terms. It’s sensible if you think living in a certain kind of nation has any shaping effect whatsoever upon that country’s imagination. I happen to think that Canada is a very peculiar and different country; whether its national colour and shape have anything to do with the colour and shape of its poetry is a question that you might as well say yes to again – just to see what happens.10

Reaney is more interested in a poet’s manifesto for the future than a critic’s honestly dispassionate retrospect, so he opts immediately for the idea of a national poetry, ‘just to see what happens.’ But in bringing Frye’s criticism back to the poet, he reduces the concept of mythos to a school-book definition of ‘theme,’ thus breaking up the unity of subject and form, and blurring the distinction between poetry and the individual poem that Frye always observed.11 In Butterfly on Rock, a ‘study of themes and images in Canadian literature’ by D.G. Jones, which appeared in 1970, the evolution of Canadian literature is likened to the Old Testament saga of expulsion from Eden and eventual return to (or recognition of) the promised land. Mythos thus becomes generalized myth. The pattern of Jones’s criticism is similar to his poetic use of the Orpheus legend,12 and here is both the strength and weakness of his criticism – its proximity to the poetic vision – as he frankly admits in the Introduction. One can never be sure that, as one reader suggested, the result is not simply another poem. If so, it is a possible poem, and one that is well worth writing. In other words, it seems worth the risks.13

Jones gives a shape to Canadian literature, a poetic shape; he makes a poem of poems, and also of prose. This approach has its merits, but they are limited to individual theme and the overall, evolving myth. The limits are those of form, of recognition that prose and poetry are different, and changing, media of expression. Jones’s last chapter, ‘An Ancient Slang or a Modern’ again admits, though tacitly this time, these limits; abandoning the myth of Eden-to-Israel, this essay concentrates on the language and form of contemporary poetry. The most recent and most popular (in all senses of the word) critique of Canadian literature is Margaret Atwood’s Survival, published in 1972. In her apologetic preface, Atwood claims that her book is no more than ‘a vitamin pill ... cheaper to acquire and faster to swallow,’

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of information and ideas that have been compressed from previous, more original critical writing.14 But compression indicates metamorphosis, with ideas as with nature; moreover, since this book is destined for school use, it is likely that literary history for years to come in this country will be influenced by this critical digest.15 Survival implies too many variations on its title theme without adequately, if summarily, distinguishing between them. The result is a confusing medley of man’s triumph and/or acceptance of nature and his exploitation/victimization of other men (white and/or Indian) and/or animals. And although Atwood gives these several definitions of her mot-clé in the course of the book, she does not pursue its most logical implication, that of the survival of inherited forms, literary and cultural, which has resulted in distinctive poetic and social patterns of development within the country. Canada is, after all, a federation of separate regions, and it is interesting to note that Frye, Reaney, Atwood, and Jones have originated from or have been attracted to the ‘Central Canada (English)’ axis of Ontario and English-speaking Quebec. The obvious example of protest against Ontarian cultural imperialism – the assumption that what is true for Ontario is true for all of Canada – is the opposing nationalism of ‘Central Canada (French),’ the cultural ‘nation’ of Quebec. French poetry of Quebec represents (in spite of Clément Moisan and Ronald Sutherland) a distinct pattern of literary influence and development unlike that of other regions of Canada, distinguishable not so much from a thematic point of view – survival is nowhere so insistent a theme as in Quebec – as by its origin and interrelated images.16 Inheritors of the symbolist movement in France, Quebec poets created a ‘poésie d’exil’ that evolved, around 1960, into a new grouping of traditional images, that of ‘terre-Québec.’ Almost simultaneously, poetry in Quebec became overtly political.17 The declaration of Parti pris in 1963 indicated by its title and its editorial manifesto that literature was now a means to achieve the goal of national independence. Prendre parti, essentiellement, c’est assumer une situation telle qu’on la vit; c’est découvrir en l’inventant le sens de cette situation, et l’organiser en fonction des buts et des obstacles qu’on y définit ... La parole ... nous servira à créer une vérité qui atteigne et transforme notre société ... nous ne visons à dire notre société que pour la transformer.18

Certainly the coherence of its purely literary development (common

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source, interrelated images, comparable movement and emphasis) and the increasing insistence of its thematic preoccupation mark Quebec poetry’s participation in a ‘national literature,’ by the criteria of any of the critics discussed above. But it is not therefore a Canadian national literature; instead, it represents a unified, for the most part even homogeneous attack on the vague, diffuse notion of a unified, culturally homogeneous Canada, poetic and critical expression of which is largely confined, as I have said, to poets from Ontario. The most obvious distinguishing feature of the French poetry of Quebec is language. The English-language Montreal poets, however, have a voice of their own, an attention to images, idiom, and sentence rhythm that comes from living simultaneously in more than one culture. Klein, Layton, and Cohen draw liberally on Biblical and traditional Jewish imagery, while Scott, Smith, and with them Jones and occasionally Gustafson show an awareness of language that comes with continual confrontation and translation. Scott’s ‘tarte aux pommes profondes’ is a facetious example; Jones’s poem quoted below is more typical.19 Another example of distinctive regionalism is the independent development of west coast poetry, that of bp Nichol, bill bissett, George Bowering, and also of younger poets such as Susan Musgrave and Tom Wayman. Inevitably (by geography) more subject to American than eastern-Canadian influence, the west coast poets have favoured simple, ‘imagist’ statements and concrete poetic ‘objects.’ Nichol’s Journeying and the Returns includes the following short poem: the sea the sun everything here tide rolling in ships moving out mind in motion eyes at rest the continent stopped against the west wall called ocean20

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I quote this poem because in a letter to Nichol, Margaret Avison (a good poet, but also from Ontario) praises this lyric as a ‘poem of Canadian absence,’ Canada being ‘a depressed, placeless place.’21 Now, although the best minds in Canadian poetry would seem to be in agreement over the existence of ‘national’ themes, I should still like to question this interpretation of a poem which, to my mind, speaks not of Canadian ‘absence’ but of tricks of perception, the in/out movement of a harbour view as the poet participates in the scene. I cannot imagine that this little poem is any more oriented toward a ‘national’ Canadian theme than the intensely private world of Susan Musgrave’s poetry and the sea-bound images which pervade it, or the formal experiment of bill bissett.22 Contemporary criticism of poetry in Canada is, in the last analysis, not so much historical – a balanced retrospect – as teleological – a program for the future, seeking in past and present writing evidence for the achievement to come. In the light of federal financial support for publication, and of frequent contact and influence that exists among recognized writers,23 such a national literature may indeed emerge in the future. But past and present writing in Canada still reflects as its most important common characteristic the relative isolation of the individual writer and, where there is mutual influence and interaction, a centre of attraction which does not go beyond the major geographical regions of Canada and which is often confined to a city or area (Montreal, Vancouver, Fredericton). Attempts to project a national literature for Canada belie these regional differences and subscribe, consciously or not, in some degree to the attitude of Parti pris. And the logical conclusion to this argument, to regard literature as a means to a political end, was reached by the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, held at Moscow in 1934: the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism ... demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its evolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.24

Socialist realism apart, comparison with the Parti pris manifesto of 1963 yields striking similarities. Art has become a means rather than an end in itself, in the struggle for social justice. It is interesting to note that in

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a cultural rather than overtly political sense, the poet-critics Reaney, Jones, and Atwood have made Frye’s ‘mythopoeic’ critical approach as parti pris as the Quebec review’s opening editorial. This might be a case against the writer-as-critic, and for a more objective, independent criticism – independent not only from the future, unwritten dimension of literature that should concern only the writer, but also from the political and cultural concerns and involvement which have dominated the critical works under discussion.25 A literary tradition must be judged from inside, as an accumulation of individual works and influences which, after several hundred years (certainly not within a bare centenary), leads to certain assumptions and conventions. It is doubtful if even the long-lived literatures of France and Spain, for example, can claim to be independent literary traditions; instead, they could be more accurately described as national variants of the Western literary tradition rooted in classical antiquity and Christianity. To speak, then, of a distinctive and characteristic Canadian literary tradition would appear to be following too closely on the nationalistic preoccupations of Europe since 1830 and the Third World in this century. We should rather be wary of our own Zeitgeist and try to see once more the large pattern of tradition judged in literary terms alone.26 Within this larger literary tradition the poet speaks of universally significant themes informed by his own, local experience. His real environment in Canada is definable only in terms of areas and regions, even where he moves from one region to another, as Jones, Bowering, Gustafson, and others have done. It is certainly not that of the federal organization, an arbitrary historical structure scarcely able to bear political, let alone cultural pressures. As critics, Reaney, Jones, and Atwood try to describe and program Frye’s ‘Canadian sensibility.’ But as poets, the sum of their own work is not (in Atwood’s words) ‘Canadian literature, as Canadian literature’; it is at once local and universal, literature that, no more nor less, ‘happened to be written in Canada.’27 In Phrases from Orpheus, for example, Jones presents an apparently ‘Canadian’ mixture of languages and poetic tones, from purely lyric to colloquial. But this actually speaks only of Jones’s own place in a bilingual Quebec community, as he suggests in a powerful and finally optimistic alternative to Yeats’s Byzantium. For Hell’s the Lord’s Bijouterie, A Byzantine world

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Where the clock-work birds And the golden bees Eternally repeat What the heart once felt The mind conceived. For the mind in time Is a perishing bird, It sings and is still.28

At her best, even in the persona of Susanna Moodie, Margaret Atwood follows suit: she speaks of particular experience and at the same time, of universal imagination. His feet slid on the bank, the currents took him; he swirled with ice and trees in the swollen water and plunged into distant regions, his head a bathysphere; through his eyes’ thin glass bubbles he looked out, reckless adventurer on a landscape stranger than Uranus we have all been to and some remember.29

As Jones himself recognized when praising Reaney, ‘It is not the theme of making a dumb nature articulate, but the actual doing so that is significant.’30 Thus Canadian poets ignore the demands of current Canadian criticism, even when they are critics themselves, and speak to the world with authentic, if diverse and divided voices.

notes ‘Butterfly in the Bush Garden: “Mythopoeic” Criticism of Contemporary Poetry Written in Canada’ was first published in Dalhousie Review 56 (Summer 1976): 366–45. 1 Discussion is limited to poetry, because I think the ‘mythopoeic’ approach is, in this area, truly limited and distorting. The novel, which can present

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Barbara Belyea ideas without transforming them so entirely into literary forms and images, is more open to explorations of cultural environment and identity. E.R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 13. C.S. Lewis, Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 66–7. John Newlove, ‘The Pride,’ in Eli Mandel, ed., Poets of Contemporary Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), 82. For reception of Marxist literary theory in Quebec, see Paul Chamberland. ‘Aliénation culturelle et révolution nationale,’ Parti pris 2 (1963): 10–22, and Jean-Marc Piotte, ‘Un appui critique à la néo-bourgeoisie,’ Parti pris 2 (1964): 6–9. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), and The Bush Garden (Toronto: Anansi, 1971). Frye, The Bush Garden, ix. Ibid., 177. James Reaney, ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,’ University of Toronto Quarter1y 26 (April 1957): 284–95. Cf George Bowering. ‘Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet: (1) than any Northrop Frye poet; (2) than he used to be,’ Canadian Literature 36 (1968): 40–9. Reaney, ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,’ 284. Cf Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 131–40. D.G. Jones, Butterfly on Rock (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). See George Bowering, ‘Etre chez soi dans le monde,’ translated by R. Lacasse, Ellipse 13(1973): 82–103. Also, reviews of Butterfly on Rock by W.H. New, ‘Quelques arpents de papillons,’ Canadian Literature 47 (1971): 94–7, and by Douglas LePan, University of Toronto Quarterly, 41 (1971): 90–1. LePan comments, ‘The method Jones has chosen virtually precludes critical examination in depth of individual works … [and] it runs the risk of giving undue prominence to works which contain explicit affirmations …’ The same could be said, with even more reason, of Atwood’s Survival. Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 41. New’s review, ‘Quelques arpents de papillons,’ comments on the final chapter ‘so curiously tentative, compared to the others, and so like an essay from a book yet to be written rather than the conclusion to this one.’ Margaret Atwood, Survival (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), 12–13. As George Jonas notes in Maclean’s (August 1973), 14, ‘Survival was published in 1972 and everybody noticed it … posterity is maddeningly unfair in that it generally extends its grace to those who were already appreciated in their lifetime. It may not be enough to be known, but it is useful, because the unknown seldom survive.’

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16 Clément Moisan, L’âge de la littérature canadienne (Montreal: Editions HMH, 1969); Ronald Sutherland, The Second Image (Toronto: New Press, 1971). 17 Paul Wychzinski, ed., Archives des lettres canadiennes: La poésie canadiennefrançaise (Ottawa: Fides, 1969); Gilles Marcotte, Une littérature qui se fait (Montreal: HMH, 1962), and Le temps des poètes (Montreal: HMH, 1969); Guy Robert, Littérature du Québec: poésie actuelle (Montreal: Déom, 1970). See also the reviews Gants du ciel, Liberté, La Barre du jour, and Parti pris. 18 Editorial, Parti pris 1 (Oct. 1963): 2. 19 A.M.Klein, The Collected Poems of A.M. Klein, edited by Miriam Waddington (Toronto: McGraw Hill Ryerson, 1974); Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1961); Irving Layton, Collected Poems (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965); F.R. Scott, The Blasted Pine (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), 33, and The Dance Is One (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973); A.J.M. Smith, Collected Poems (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1962), 99, 84, 64 (both Scott and Smith include translations in their collections); D.G. Jones, Phrases from Orpheus (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967). 20 bp Nichol, Journeying and the Returns (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1967), part III. 21 Margaret Avison, ‘Letter to bpn,’ included in Nichol, Journeying and the Returns (Broadsheet). 22 Jim Brown and David Phillips, eds, West Coast Seen (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1969); Ann Wall, ed., Mindscapes (Toronto: Anansi, 1971); Al Purdy, ed., Storm Warning (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971) contain selections. Cf Bowering’s sense of known place, his own environment, in the preface to In the Flesh (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 8: he associates this sense of place with his lyric writing, and notes that his environment is western British Columbia and Alberta. For him, ‘in southern Ontario there is no place. At least not the kind you can get lost in & find your way in.’ 23 Northrop Frye observed in 1956 that ‘much of Canada’s best poetry is now written by professors or others in close contact with universities’ (The Bush Garden, 175). The contact and communication possible among universities are furthered by the League of Canadian Poets – see Louis Dudek, ‘The Writing of the Decade: Poetry in English,’ Canadian Literature 41 (1969): 111–20 and by the national institution of the Canada Council. See George Woodcock, ‘On the Resources of Canadian Writing,’ and Robin M. Farr, ‘Sources of Financial Assistance to Authors and Publishers’ in the Royal Commission report Book Publishing: Background Papers (Toronto: Queen’s Printer, 1972), 61–85, 86–110.

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24 Abram Tertz, On Socialist Realism, translated by George Dennis (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1960), 148. 25 Cf Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 3–13. The functions which Frye ascribes to criticism are derived from his concept of art as ‘dumb’ creation: interpretation is needed because ‘poetry is a disinterested use of words; it does not address the reader directly.’ Criticism must have ‘some measure of independence from the art it deals with’ (4–5). Cf Jones’s ‘other poem,’ Atwood’s manifesto, and socialist realism as a program for both creation and criticism. 26 Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 6–7, 12–14; Lewis, Allegory of Love, 61, 90 speaks of ‘the prison of the Zeitgeist.’ Curtius’s inclusive approach is inevitably reached by comparatists. Cf Jones’s references to the participation of Canadian literature in the larger Western literary tradition, Butterfly on Rock, 6–8, and Atwood’s brief comment, Survival, 17. 27 Atwood, Survival, 13. 28 Jones, Phrases from Orpheus, 8. 29 Atwood, Journals of Susanna Moodie, 30. Cf Al Purdy’s review of the Journals, ‘Atwood’s Moodie,’ Canadian Literature 47 (1971): 80–4: ‘I believe in Atwood-Moodie. I think the Moodie conveyed by Atwood is … a real person … However, the Atwood-Moodie persona crosses me up in “Death of a Young Son,”’ 83. 30 D.G. Jones, ‘The Conquest of Medusa,’ Canadian Literature 40 (1969): 68–71.

2.3 Surviving the Paraphrase frank davey

It is a testimony to the limitations of Canadian literary criticism that thematic criticism should have become the dominant approach to English-Canadian literature. In its brief lifetime, Canadian criticism has acquired a history of being reluctant to focus on the literary work – to deal with matters of form, language, style, structure, and consciousness as these arise from the work as a unique construct. It has seldom had enough confidence in the work of Canadian writers to do what the criticism of other national literatures has done: explain and illuminate the work on its own terms, without recourse to any cultural rationalizations or apologies. Even the New Criticism’s espousal of autotelic analysis did not move Canadian critics in this direction. Instead, in every period they have provided referential criticism: the evaluative criticism of E.K. Brown and A.J.M. Smith looks away from Canadian writing towards other national achievements; the anti-evaluative thematic criticism of Northrop Frye, D.G. Jones, Margaret Atwood, and John Moss looks away towards alleged cultural influences and determiners. With few critics interested in writing as writing, it is not surprising that Canada has in recent years seen the emergence of a large number of writer-critics. For unlike much earlier Canadian work, the recent writing has been engaged for the most part at the level of form and language rather than theme. Rudy Wiebe’s journey from Peace Shall Destroy Many to The Temptations of Big Bear has been an odyssey in novelistic technique about which thematic criticism can say very little. bp Nichol’s Two Novels speaks only through its formal complexities, and until these are illuminated the thematic critic has to remain silent – as

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he has. At the moment it is Canadian writers who appear to have the greatest understanding of the technical concerns and accomplishments of their fellows, and it is these – Eli Mandel, Miriam Waddington, Gary Geddes, Douglas Barbour, Stephen Scobie, George Bowering, Dorothy Livesay – who are writing most of the periodical criticism that in any way comes to terms with the writing. Many of the academic critics (and I include here Jones and Atwood because of their acceptance of the thematic approach) appear almost as ignorant of movements in contemporary Canadian writing as their colleagues in the 1920s were of the formal experiments of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce. Most of the weaknesses of thematic criticism stem from its origin in Arnoldian humanism, a tradition in which both the critic and the artist have a major responsibility to culture. In this view, the artist speaks, unconsciously or consciously, for the group. Says Jones, ‘[artists] participate in and help to articulate … a supreme fiction … that embodies the dreams and nightmares of a people, shapes their imaginative vision of the world, and defines, as it evolves, their cultural identity.’1 Language here is a tool employed not for its own intrinsic qualities but for the expression of ideas and visions. The critic’s role is not to attend to language, form, or even to individual works of literature but to something called by Jones in Butterfly on Rock ‘our imaginative life,’ by John Moss in his Patterns of Isolation the ‘national being,’2 and by Northrop Frye in The Bush Garden ‘cultural history.’3 At best these assumptions are extraliterary; at worst, anti-literary. The focus of such criticism invariably rests outside the writing – on ‘literature,’ ‘culture,’ geography, history, and ideas. Books that begin ostensibly as attempts to illuminate separate instances of Canadian writing become messianic attempts to define a national identity or psychosis. The critical process produced by these assumptions is reductive. A novel is reduced to its declared themes and its plot outline; a poem to its declared themes; the Canadian culture ultimately to catchwords such as Atwood’s ‘victimization’ and ‘survival.’ Critical analysis is performed mostly to derive new catchwords and formulae. The movement here is towards paraphrase – paraphrase of the culture and paraphrase of the literature. The critic extracts for his deliberations the paraphrasable content and throws away the form. He attends to the explicit meaning of the work and neglects whatever content is implicit in its structure, language, or imagery. Thus Atwood discusses the overt attacks on Puritanism in Marian Engel’s The Honeyman Festival, but makes no comment about the novel’s two most arresting techni-

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cal features: its low-key style (common to all of Engel’s fiction) and its unlikely, perhaps incredible, conclusion. Jones quotes lengthy passages from F.R. Scott and Patrick Anderson in order to integrate into his thesis their explicit statements on Canadian culture, but has no comment about their direct and largely denotative use of language. My objection here is based on a principle formulated by Frye: ‘the literary structure is always ironic because “what it says” is always different from “what it means.”’4 Thematic critics in Canada have been interested in what literary works ‘say,’ especially what they ‘say’ about Canada and Canadians. They have largely overlooked what literary works ‘mean’ – for the attempt to establish meaning would take them outside thematic criticism. As Robert Creeley has remarked, it cannot be simply what a man proposes to talk about in a poem that is interesting – this is like going to hear an after-dinner speaker. His information will be interesting just to the extent that it exists, but after that we are through with him and through with the information in the form that he has given it to us. But the poem has this informational character … in such form that we don’t throw away the poem. In other words, after we’ve read a play by Shakespeare, let’s say, we don’t throw away the play. We continue to define what is said/happening in how it is said.5

Since Frye’s genuinely thematic criticism of Canadian literature constitutes a small body of work (less than half of The Bush Garden), since Moss’s criticism is largely derivative of Frye and Jones, and since my opinion of Atwood’s Survival is on record elsewhere,6 I will restrict my detailed comments about thematic criticism here to Jones’s Butterfly on Rock. One of the first characteristics of thematic criticism that one notices in this book is the humanistic bias. To Jones, culture is a gentleman’s club inside which any member can speak piously on behalf of the rest of the group: our westward expansion is complete, and in the pause to reflect upon ourselves we become increasingly aware that our identity and our view of the world are no longer determined by our experience of Europe ...7

Apparently no one is allowed by Jones to detach himself from this rather arrogant humanistic assumption of corporateness of society. The assumption leads to further difficulties when extended to writing; the literary work comes to have little significance outside the body of

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the national literature. It can be valued not for its unique or idiosyncratic qualities but only for what it shares with the larger body. This means, in effect, that the derivative and the mundane can receive the critic’s attention while the unusual or original do not. The eccentric Robertson Davies, for instance, does not get even a mention in Jones. Such a situation parallels the effect of humanism on society and culture where whatever coincides with mass values is tolerated and whatever conflicts is rejected or ignored. A second feature of thematic criticism evident in Jones is a disregard for literary history. Atwood develops her thesis that victimization is a characteristic theme of Canadian literature by ignoring its ubiquity in contemporary world literature. Moss develops his thesis that isolation is the major theme of Canadian fiction by overlooking, as George Woodcock has noted,8 the fact that in all literatures the traditional subject of the novel has been the person who is ‘isolated’ by his not being able to fit comfortably into society. Similarly, Jones tries to advance on the basis of work by the Confederation Poets the thesis that the Canadian landscape has been seen as ‘a savage place … holy and enchanted’ – ignoring the documented fact that the ghostly presences in Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Charles G.D. Roberts were inherited from English romanticism and American Transcendentalism rather than gained osmotically from the Canadian condition. In each case the critic is forced into ignoring literary history by a paradox unique to his critical approach. Thematic criticism in Canada seeks above all to define a national culture but chooses to work with materials – literary themes – that are, because of their limited number, international in nature. The paradox creates a dilemma from which there appears to be no scholarly escape. A third feature is thematic criticism’s tendency towards sociology – usually bad sociology. While the social scientist is content to describe society and predict the effects of specific events or interventions, Jones attempts both to describe Canadian culture and to prescribe how it should change. His sociology is not only extra-literary; it is normative and polemic. His declared aim is to locate a culture ‘in which the Canadian will feel at home in his world’ and abandon his ‘colonial mentality.’ The weakness of the colonial mentality is that it regards as a threat what it should regard as its salvation; it walls out or exploits what it should welcome and cultivate.9

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This unscholarly approach leads Jones eventually to cast himself as a Canadian Adam who can announce to Canadians the end of exile and the discovery of ‘the first days of Creation.’10 A fourth feature is an attempt at ‘culture-fixing’ – something very common of late in Canada in such books as Al Purdy’s The New Romans, William Kilbourn’s The Peaceable Kingdom, John H. Redekop’s The Star-Spangled Beaver, Frye’s The Bush Garden, Robert Fulford, Dave Godfrey, and Abraham Rotstein’s Read Canadian, and Atwood’s Survival. To Jones, Canadian culture is in transition from an Old Testament condition of exile and alienation towards a New Testament one of affirmation, discovery, and community. This metaphor for the Canadian experience dominates Butterfly on Rock and becomes, much like Atwood’s victim/ victimization concept, a formula for Canadianism. Like all formulae, it is a restricting and potentially paralysing thing. It restricts the writers that Jones can discuss; they are necessarily selected by their suitability to the thesis rather than by the quality of their writing. It is potentially paralysing in the way that any attempt to define the Canadian subject must be – it serves to intimidate future Canadian writing into taking as its own the particular concerns that have been declared officially Canadian. A fifth feature that Jones has in common with other thematic critics is the fallacy of literary determinism. The artist ‘embodies the dreams and nightmares of a people’;11 his work can be ‘explained’ by reference to the geography and climate of the country, to Western intellectual history, to his culture’s religious heritage. Jones is much less guilty of this fallacy than is Frye in The Bush Garden with his reference to the ‘bleak and comfortless winters’12 and to the St Lawrence River’s swallowing of travellers into ‘an alien continent,’13 but he nevertheless fails to make clear that the writer is in some small way free, that the writer chooses among influences and traditions rather than being passively formed by them, and that this process of election is more important to an understanding of literature than the influence or tradition itself. As Gaston Bachelard has observed, to ‘explain’ a work by its sources is tantamount to explaining ‘the flower by the fertilizer.’14 But of course thematic criticism is not principally interested in the artistic progress, in the artist, or in the literary work – its interest lies, as Jones states, in things ‘cultural and psychological rather than purely aesthetic or literary.’15 The motivations of thematic criticism strike one as essentially defensive in respect to both the culture and the literature. A declared motive has been to avoid evaluative criticism, which Frye has claimed

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would reduce Canadian criticism to a ‘huge debunking project.’16 An even more important but undeclared motive appears to have been to avoid treating Canadian writing as serious literature. For there are many kinds of non-evaluative criticism which these critics could have practised other than the thematic. It seems that the thematicists believe Canadian literature incapable of sustaining analytic, phenomenological, or archetypal inquiry – of sustaining any kind of criticism whose existence is not also supported by the ruse of sociological research. Another declared motive has been to articulate a cultural identity to a nation, which the thematic critic believes convinced of its lack of one. It is noteworthy here that the thematicists’ concerns – Jones’s quest for ‘the obscure features of our own identity,’17 Moss’s for ‘a coherent body of Canadian fiction,’18 Atwood’s for ‘a single unifying and informing [Canadian] symbol’19 are not those of critics of more mature and secure literatures. One cannot imagine a British critic being worried about what constitutes, in one word or less, the essence of his literature. Instead, he goes about its illumination, writing books with such titles as New Bearings in English Poetry, A Key to Modern English Poetry, Four Metaphysical Poets, The English Novel. Much more effective than Butterfly on Rock, The Bush Garden, Survival, and Patterns of Isolation in asserting a Canadian identity would have been books of this British type – books which assumed, rather than argued, a national identity’s existence and a national literature’s significance. It is extremely important that Canadian critics not forget that there are indeed alternatives to thematic criticism, and that most of these do not involve a return to that bête noire evaluation. Further, these alternatives, like thematic criticism, do allow the writing of overviews of all or parts of Canadian literature. But unlike thematic criticism, they attend specifically to that ground from which all writing communicates and all themes spring: the form – style, structure, vocabulary, literary form, syntax – of the writing. One such alternative, historical criticism, could provide a history of Canadian poetry – a history not of its themes and concerns but of its technical assumptions, the sources of these assumptions, and the relationship between the prosody of Canadian writers and that of other Western writers. While the prosody of Canadian poets has undoubtedly been mostly derivative, there have been shifts in the ingeniousness of the borrowing, in the time-lapse between the model and its imitation, in the sources of the models, and in the amount and significance of the modifications contributed by the borrower. All writing is to some extent derivative, but there would appear to be a clear

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division in Canadian poetry between obsequious borrowing – for example, that of Charles Mair or Roberts – and the intelligent combining and expansion of borrowed forms. Needless to say, one by-product of such a non-thematic study would be an implicit statement about Canadians, Canada, and its evolution. Analytical criticism could yield such works as ‘Modernism in Canadian Poetry’ or ‘Discontinuous Structure in Postmodern Canadian Writing.’ The former would not only address itself to the late appearance of the modernist movement in Canada – some thirty years after its appearance in Hispano-American literature and fifteen years after its appearance in Anglo-American literature – but inquire into the formal characteristics which distinguish Canadian modernism from its sister movements. Hispano-American modernism was anti-colonial in spirit; its rejection of European models in favour of native forms led artists eventually to primitivism. Anglo-American modernism was anti-Georgian and, from an American point of view, also anti-colonial. Canadian modernism, in the work of A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, Ralph Gustafson, and Robert Finch, copied the Anglo-Americans in both theory and practice; it proposed, unlike the South Americans, ‘cosmopolitan’ models rather than regional ones, and to this extent seems to have been a colonial movement. My point here is that a colonial, imitative modernist movement is not to be deplored or rationalized into something other. It is itself an intrinsically interesting literary phenomenon, and in an absolute sense worthy of analysis and study; such a study can be done in terms of Canadian literature as successfully as it can in terms of any other.20 The second analytical project, ‘Discontinuous Structure in Postmodern Canadian Writing,’ could directly attempt on the basis of Canadian literature an elucidation of the problems and advantages of discontinuous literary structure. Such structure has been at the core of most significant new writing in Canada in the last decade: Rudy Wiebe’s The Blue Mountains of China, David McFadden’s The Great Canadian Sonnet, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Gerry Gilbert’s AND, bp Nichol’s The Martyrology, Juan Butler’s The Garbageman, to name a few. While it would be absurd to argue that Canada has had any kind of monopoly or ‘lead’ in such writing, the opportunity nevertheless exists for a literary problem important to all literatures to be usefully discussed strictly in terms of Canadian writing. The literature would provide the critic with a rich stock of relevant writing and a compact, clearly defined area for investigation. Were genre criticism to attempt a work such as ‘The Polemic Novel

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in Canadian Literature,’ the same procedure would be involved; that is, of discussing on the basis of Canadian writing a literary issue of paranational interest. Here I am not asking for a repetition of thematic criticism’s numerous discussions of the ideas of these novels, but for an examination of them as examples of a literary form – for an examination of their language, usual methods of characterization, narrative techniques, et cetera. The polemic novel exists throughout Canadian literature in abundance, with William Kirby’s Chien d’Or, several of Ralph Connor’s works, Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist, Morley Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved, Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes, Rudy Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many, Atwood’s Surfacing, Austin Clarke’s Storm of Fortune, and Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk being among the stronger. Having had such an unusually large hold on Canadian fiction, it could, like derivative modernism or discontinuous form, be studied as thoroughly through Canadian literature as through any other body of national work. Such a claim does not imply that these Canadian novels are ‘great’ novels; only that they form a more than adequate basis for serious literary study and deserve to be so treated. Phenomenological criticism is another alternative non-evaluative approach that could do much to replace the present sociological perspective that dominates Canadian criticism with a literary one. Again, the essential assumption would be that Canadian literature is a highly useful frame of reference for approaching particular literary problems. One title which the phenomenologist could – and here no derogation would be intended by the word ‘colonial’ – produce is ‘The Colonial Writing Experience.’ From Charles Mair and Charles Heavysege to A.J.M. Smith and Mordecai Richler our writers have given literary form to the experience of living and writing in terms of values imposed by non-native cultures. The phenomenological critic could study how this experience is projected by the form of the writing, could participate in the consciousness of the artist as it is betrayed by his syntax, imagery, and diction; ultimately the critic could give the reader a portrait of each writer’s psychological world. Another possible project for this kind of criticism is ‘The Regional Consciousness in Canadian Writing.’ In regional literature too, Canada has a more than sufficient body of work for the study of a particular, intrinsically interesting literary phenomenon. In fact, it is not unfair to say that the bulk of Canadian literature is regional before it is national – despite whatever claims Ontario or Toronto writers may make to represent a national vision. The regional consciousness may be characterized by specific attitudes to language

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and form, by a specific kind of imagery, or by language and imagery that in some way correlate with the geographic features of the region. The analyses in Atwood’s Survival, for example, despite the book’s ignoring of regional factors, imply a possible prepossession with closed space in southern Ontario writing and with the closing of space in prairie writing. These leads call for further investigation. A final type of criticism that might profitably be practised by Canadian critics is archetypal criticism which, despite the eminence of Frye, has never been applied in its pure form to Canadian writing. Frye’s ‘theory of modes’ would supply an especially interesting approach to a literature which has seen in recent years a curiously large number of attempts at high-mimetic art – including John Newlove’s ‘The Pride,’ Don Gutteridge’s Riel, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Nichol’s The Martyrology, Gwendolyn MacEwen’s King of Egypt, King of Dreams, and Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear. Possibly Frye’s theory of an evolution from high mimesis to low mimesis to irony does not fit Canadian literature; perhaps in literatures which lack a native high-mimetic inheritance writers are stimulated to attempt such writing despite living in ages in which international writing is overwhelmingly low-mimetic or ironic. Only an archetypal examination of the language and structures used in Canadian and other recently developed literatures could confirm such hypotheses. Unless these or similar critical alternatives are taken up, there is a danger that the shape of the literature could suffer long-term distortion. Thematic criticism does not use, or need to use, literary criteria in selecting writers to document its arguments. It selects writers not in terms of literary competence or talent but in terms of how well their work fits the critic’s particular thematic thesis. While one may agree with Frye that evaluation is the ‘incidental by-product’ of criticism rather than its end, one finds that the by-product of thematic criticism is to create the illusion that palpably inferior writers are somehow more important – at least to loyal Canadians – than obviously superior ones. Thus Atwood makes Dennis Lee appear more significant than Irving Layton and Graeme Gibson more significant than Margaret Laurence; Jones makes Patrick Anderson and Phyllis Webb appear more significant than Dorothy Livesay; Moss makes Charles Bruce and Thomas H. Raddall appear more accomplished than Robert Kroetsch, Hugh Hood, or Robertson Davies. The only criticism which can yield the kind of critical by-products that Frye has in mind is one which focuses not on sociological issues but on the writing itself. Here no writer can be ex-

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cluded because of his attitudes or subject matter. All competent uses of literary form can enter into the deliberations of the historical, analytic, genre, phenomenological, or archetypal critic. The more profound uses rise to prominence because of their power, complexity, and ingenuity. Thematic criticism searches for apples among oranges by looking for cultural seers among men and women whose principal task is articulation and whose principal loyalty is to their language; these alternative kinds of criticism would turn the critic’s attention back to where the writer’s must always be – on literature as language, and on writing as writing.

notes ‘Surviving the Paraphrase’ was first published in Canadian Literature 70 (Autumn 1976): 5–13. 1 D.G. Jones, Butterfly on Rock (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 4. 2 John Moss, Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), 7. 3 Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 215. 4 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 81. 5 Tape-recorded lecture at home of Warren Tallman, Vancouver, B.C., 29 August 1962. 6 Frank Davey, ‘Atwood Walking Backwards,’ Open Letter (second series) 5 (Summer 1973): 74–84. 7 Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 3. 8 George Woodcock, ‘Isolating a Theme in Our Fiction,’ Maclean’s, April 1974, 96. 9 Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 7. 10 Ibid., 183. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 Frye, The Bush Garden, 225. 13 Ibid., 217. 14 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), xxvi. 15 Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 4. 16 Northrop Frye, ‘Conclusion’ to Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 821–49.

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Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 183. Moss, Patterns of Isolation, 10. Margaret Atwood, Survival (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), 31. For another example of the analytical approach to colonial writing see William D. Gairdner’s article ‘Traill and Moodie: The Two Realities,’ The Journal of Canadian Fiction 1, 2 (Spring 1972): 35–42.

2.4 Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism versus Literary Criticism barry cameron and michael dixon

Observers from Mars, or someone equally alien (Americans, say), seeking to comprehend the meaning of ‘Canadian Literature’ might reasonably expect a difficult task, especially if they had some experience with apparently similar rubrics where the first term is ‘American,’ ‘English,’ ‘French,’ or ‘classical.’ Imagine their surprised delight at discovering, on consulting the best available authorities, that the entire phenomenon consists simply of theme – and a single theme at that, ‘survival in a garrison’ – having only two connotations: sociological and/or autobiographical. ‘What a paradise for writers!’ they would conclude, ‘no problems of thematic invention; no worries about prosody, structure, genre, style, influence, convention – all the petty details that bedevil authors in other times, other places. They need only dash off a sociological and/or autobiographial treatise on survival in a garrison every now and then, conserving their creative energies to form unions, be public figures, attend conferences, review each other’s treatises, and join with publishers to develop ingenious financial proposals to their common employer, the Canada Council.’ True, the more thoughtful of our remote observers might wonder about the role, if any, of readers in this closed system. ‘Must be a bit boring for them, always reading the same thing. Perhaps it’s reassuring. Something to do, no doubt, with “national identity” and “Canadian sovereignty.”’ What a shock awaits the alien when he actually reads the literature himself and tries to reconcile its thematic variety, formal abundance, and technical inventiveness with the simple image derived from official sources. Native readers, conditioned by the same sources, may undergo

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an equivalent shock: the gulf between their perception of the works and that projected as acceptable through public reporting and literary commentary could make them feel very remote indeed – aliens in their own cultural community. More likely, of course, and more disastrous for Canadian literature, is the probability that untrained readers will find exactly what they have been conditioned to expect, and only that. Thus, Canadian criticism generally fails in its primary task, to mediate between writer and reader, betraying both author and audience with a critical scope too restricted to capture the complex vision and achievement of our literature. The essays collected in this volume represent a concerted effort to expand the scope of Canadian criticism. We call them ‘penultimate’ essays because they point the way to an ultimate goal: the consistent practice of a critical craft in Canada that is equivalent and responsive, in range and discipline, to the literature it treats. Towards this end, all the studies in the collection reflect two fundamental premises: that Canadian literature deserves treatment as part of the autonomous world of literature and that the choice of criteria and approach should be appropriate to the work under analysis. It follows, as a corollary to these premises, that privileged criteria or ‘special pleading’ on the grounds of national origin are invalid. That we must state such self-evident canons of responsible criticism, and feel compelled to defend them in an atmosphere of polemical homily, is of course ludicrous – an embarrassing symptom of the immature state of commentary on Canadian literature. These essays do not, after all, propound some startling new philosophy of literary criticism. This sort of attention and respect has been accorded works from other literatures for decades. What accounts for the disadvantaged condition in which Canadian criticism finds itself? Basically, the problem is one of time. The major achievement of Canadian literature is virtually a contemporary manifestation. Less than two decades ago, Northrop Frye could assert with considerable justification, Canada has produced no author who is a classic in the sense of possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his best readers (Canadians themselves might argue about one or two, but in the perspective of the world at large the statement is true.) 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.1

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Such a condition limits the possibilities of critical response: 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. The conception of what is literary has to be greatly broadened for such a literature … Even when it is literature in its orthodox genres of poetry and fiction, it is more significantly studied as part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature.2

Frye did not, because he obviously could not, take into account the best work (in some cases the only work to date) of such writers as Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Hugh Hood, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Al Purdy, to name only a few. The achievement obvious in this considerable body of Canadian literature demands reconsideration of Frye’s evaluation and his view of an appropriate critical attitude. Yet our literature continues to be studied primarily as a part of Canadian life and almost exclusively in its ‘social and historical setting.’ To what extent Frye’s remarks are responsible for this critical anachronism is a debatable point. No doubt some ‘disciples,’ justifiably respectful of Frye’s unequivocal genius and international reputation as a critical theorist, continue to reflect the dated letter of this particular pronouncement and ignore the liberal spirit of his general theory. Of at least equal significance as contributing factors, however, would seem to be the very bulk and explosiveness of literary activity itself coupled with the coincident upsurge in preoccupying national self-examination during the past decade. Together these factors have severely restricted both the time and the climate of opinion essential to a deliberate, objective evaluation and appreciation of our writers’ accomplishments from the disinterested perspective of ‘an autonomous world of literature.’ In consequence, the largest bulk of commentary on Canadian literature takes the form of reviews and review-articles, the traditional medium for first opinions and topical responses.3 Many of our writers have received no other form of critical recognition. Even if the reviewer has the training and inclination to give a work full critical consideration, press deadlines and word-limitations will abort the enterprise. Most reviewers, however, are journalists, ‘free-lancers,’ or creative writers, who tend to consider the immediate social and historical characteristics of a work not, like Frye, as secondary aspects of literary achievement, but as the only values worth considering. Thus, whether it starts from Frye’s premises or their diametrical opposites, the major part of our

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literary commentary ends up at the same point, firmly fixed within the boundaries of ‘social and historical setting.’ The appearance, side by side, of our writers and journalists in the review section of our public press is emblematic of a third critical problem connected with time. Writers cannot wait for the critical evaluation process to mature. They must live, and reviews – however much they underestimate, simplify, or distort the writer’s achievement – serve nevertheless the essential purpose of providing immediate public attention in the marketplace. Thus, Canadian writers often review each other’s work and generally publicize the literary enterprise through various forms of public exposure. Encouraged, for better or worse, by such institutions as the Canada Council, many writers are continually on display as personalities and performers; some are forced, willingly or unwillingly, into the role of cultural guru. Most, in fact, earn more from a six-week reading tour than from years of book sales. The real problem for criticism in this situation is one of objectivity. All this movement, public exposure, and mutual dependency, among what is really quite a small community, forges a tight coterie including not only the writers themselves but also their commentators. Likes and dislikes, jealousies and hero-worship, vested interests and competitions are inevitable, and probably healthy, in such a situation. The critical enterprise, however, suffers. Hyperbolical praise or hyperbolical blame takes the place of judgment; ‘free-lance’ commentary is more free with the hatchet and the back-scratcher, the tar-brush and its whitewash equivalent, than with the tools of analysis. Even with the best intentions, a critic may allow the writer’s personality to influence his judgment of the work, may even substitute one for the other. Under such circumstances, ‘social’ setting becomes paralysing in its limitations. One of our intentions in collecting a set of essays that lead away from these privileged contexts of sociological immediacy and authorial personality is to redress the critical imbalance resulting from a hitherto concentrated focus, underlying both contexts, on the word ‘Canadian’ in such locutions as ‘Canadian literature’ and ‘Canadian criticism.’ As Eli Mandel has said, ‘as soon as we add the word Canadian to criticism, we move the object of our concern into a particular space and time, a geographical and historical context, where what might normally remain simply an element of the background – the sociology of literature – becomes the foreground.’4 Such undue emphasis on Canadian accounts for the limitations as criticism of many influential studies that go well beyond the scope of reviews, particularly D.G. Jones’s Butterfly

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on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (1970), Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), and John Moss’s Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction (1974). All treat works of Canadian literature as if they were primarily repositories of indigenous themes and images documenting localized historical, psycho-social, mythological, and political concerns. None treats the works as autonomous verbal structures with a literary integrity of their own; in short, each violates the harmony of form and content. Yet form and content are complementary and symbiotic; how a writer has done something is the primary determinant of what he has done. In practice, the thing-crafted can be separated from the craft only at the cost of distorted perspective. Survival and isolation, for instance, are not unique to Canadian literature. Canadian authors may use these universal themes in characteristic ways that reveal a common cultural focus, but the existence and nature of such a focus can be determined only within a consistent series of comparative contexts. Particular themes must be situated within the total form of a particular work; that work within the author’s canon; that canon within the national literature; that literature within the context of literature in general. Atwood, Moss, and Jones adopt a method contrary to this critical induction. Their approach treats the whole of Canadian literature, in effect, as a vast, uncontextualized commonplace book (or, to be modern, data-bank) from which isolated fragments are selected arbitrarily to support an individual deductive hypothesis of what the ‘Canadian consciousness’ might be. This method, and the preoccupation with content it necessitates, corresponds to the operating procedures of the sociologist and produces, once again, a sociological, not a literary meaning for the term Canadian. Again, too, such studies are symptomatic of immediate responses to a young literature, and two of the three are written by people whose familiar métier is the novel or the poem, not the critical study. Each covers a wide range of works and imposes a kind of preliminary pattern on the seething phenomenon of our national literature, making it comprehensible and approachable to a large number of hitherto uninterested readers. Criticism will build on the ground they have cleared, and it would be ungracious not to recognize and commend their labours. We must not, however, follow their sociological bias. As early as 1955, George Woodcock argued against a Canadian version of New Criticism exclusively ‘devoted to the task of textual analysis.’ He proposed, instead, an ideal for this country: ‘The Canadian critic, when he emerges, will have a wider task to embrace; he will have to be

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something of a psychologist, something of a sociologist, something of a philosopher, something of a mythologist, besides having a developed consciousness of formal values and an imagination that is both creative and receptive.’5 If Canadian criticism has avoided the claustrophobia of narrow textualism, it has nevertheless fallen into the equally stifling trap of parochialism by fulfilling only part of Woodcock’s ideal. As the studies of Atwood, Moss, and Jones illustrate, we have critics in abundance who are ‘something of’ a psychologist, sociologist, philosopher, or mythologist, but precious few who display ‘a developed consciousness of formal values.’6 Yet such values are the key to an understanding of what Canadian means as a literary term. Form is the universal in art, and its study permits us to discern how our writers have made specific adaptations and choices which distinguish them from the common background of literature in general. To ignore such values and search only for sociological uniqueness in our literature is to deny ourselves a clear perspective on Canada’s cultural identity. We remain stricken by what Eli Mandel has termed ‘a form of national schizophrenia’: ‘It [Canadian criticism] tries to find its boundaries outside itself, in some imperial world of literary tradition beyond nationality, and it seeks, both in its origins and in its development, for an authentic identity – something that expresses itself as a sort of conceptual space between its works of literature.’7 In these essays, we search too for this ‘conceptual space,’ but we recognize that the quest will be of necessity a long one made up of small steps, and it cannot be shortened by pretending that literature consists only of content: 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 his experience and environment may be new, but it will be new only as content: the form of his expression of it can take shape only from what he has read, not from what he has experienced.8

Thus a novel written in the Sahara may exhibit themes of survival and isolation and contain much sand imagery, and a novel written in the Arctic may exhibit themes of survival and isolation and contain much snow imagery; but they are both novels and, as such, are autonomous, transcending national and geographical boundaries. The themes are commonplaces of fiction; the snow and sand are commonplaces of environmental experience. What gives them individuality and significance is the author’s particular use of the formal resources of the novel.

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Comparative formal criticism requires learning and experience of a kind seldom found outside the academy. Yet the learned critic in Canada has done little to counter the inhibiting preoccupation with indigenous content at the expense of form. Such inertia is again largely a product of time. Those scholars with the widest background in literature are seldom specialists in Canadian writing. Some are, but their number is small, and the assimilation of an entire body of unfamiliar literature with responsible care is not the work of a moment. Allowing graduate students to specialize in the field is an increasingly popular alternative, but this remedy must be approached with caution. If specialists in Canadian literature lack broad grounding in other literatures, they will simply tend to reinforce parochialism. Then, too, because of the youth and explosiveness of our literature, its major creators are still living: ‘as critics we have lived beside the archetypes of our own tradition.’9 Such proximity is disturbing to most scholars whose experience is with literature that has been sifted, weighed, and distanced by time. We suspect that some of the most talented critics in Canadian universities have hesitated to engage professionally with our literature for this reason alone. One purpose of our collection is to encourage them to do so. There are certainly risks in any form of pioneering, but the literature has ripened for harvest: what we need are more skilled reapers. To focus on form is to place works of Canadian literature in their most immediate and proper context, the autonomous world of literature. We have not yet discovered what the word ‘Canadian’ means in this context. We have not yet discovered the ways in which Canadian writers as a group handle form, and transform it. We have not yet discovered, in other words, whether there is anything indigenous about our literature, as literature. The journey to that discovery will be a long one; these essays represent twelve steps along the way. The collection was primarily motivated by experience in the classroom, and is intended as an aid to those who, like its editors and most of its contributors, teach Canadian literature day-to-day and experience a lack of critical direction behind the subject. Margaret Atwood asserts that the teaching of Canadian literature is a political act.10 It is certainly an act of criticism, of mediation between the student and his cultural heritage, and is, or should be, ‘political’ only in the fundamental sense that it aims to develop an informed citizen capable of independent judgment. Such an aim accords with the ideal of education in any society: to preserve continuity and community by transmitting from one generation to the next essential ‘lore of the culture.’ Among

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Western societies, of course, the sheer volume of accumulating ‘lore’ has paralysed efforts to agree upon what is essential, and educational institutions have responded with a kind of sympathetic explosion: the house of learning has fragmented into a bewildering array of ‘disciplines,’ ‘sub-disciplines,’ ‘inter-disciplines,’ ‘departments,’ ‘courses,’ and ‘half-courses.’ The task of determining which combination of these fragments constitutes essential lore has been irresponsibly delegated to the young themselves under the manipulative banner ‘freedom of choice.’ Only a parody of freedom exists where alternatives and consequences of choice are unknown and cannot be determined. ‘Canadian literature,’ as an academic subject, is a recent creature of this Balkanizing spirit. Its teachers, however, need not fall victim to the pressures of compartmentalization and isolation. Because the teacher functions as critic, all the principles and arguments for treating the work of Canadian authors as a particular manifestation of the literary art apply to the classroom as well as the journal. Students must recognize in our literature insights which not only validate their immediate experience as Canadians but also situate that experience within the tradition of their common birthright. Such recognition obviously demands more information than any single teacher, course, or subject can provide; but the class in Canadian literature does serve as a locus, rare in the student’s education, for the conjunction of cultural universals with Canadian particulars. The potential in this unusual situation for the development of critical judgment is considerable: where else can students encounter so direct an opportunity to explore the complex relationships between art and experience, to analyse not only the lines of inference between evidence and conclusion but also the sources of their mental sets, presuppositions, and values? The scope and discipline of their critical method will determine the extent to which teachers can further this process. Students do not need more random information; they need the means to recognize and assimilate what is essential. Our contribution to an informed citizenry may have severe practical limits, but we can make a significant contribution to their capacity for independent judgment. In accord with these aims, essays were included in the collection primarily on the basis of method, not content. Although the collection deals with a large number of authors and a wide variety of genres, neither individually nor collectively do the contributors attempt an ‘overview’ or ‘survey’ of Canadian literature. All treat theme and setting as elements of formal technique. This common focus and the individuality

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of each approach develop a broad spectrum of critical models providing a useful alternative to the predominantly sociological monotone. Included here, for instance, are a number of comparative stylistic and imagistic studies widely diverse in concern and method: John Kertzer traces the influence of Rimbaud in Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, Wilfred Cude sets Robertson Davies against Mark Twain, Nancy Bailey explores the limits of Jungian myth in Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka novels, Frank Davey defines the meaning of characteristic stylistic devices in Atwood’s poetry, and Anne Blott analyses Ondaatje’s use of cinematographic techniques in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. The resources of generic form are dominant concerns in the studies of Neil Carson on Canadian historical drama, Jack David on visual poetry, and of T.D. MacLulich and Elspeth Cameron, both treating adaptations of the journal form from divergent perspectives. A number of critics – Sheila Campbell on Richard Wright, Kent Thompson on Hugh Hood, and R.D. MacDonald on George Grant – demonstrate the uses of rhetorical analysis in diverse ways. These groupings are arbitrary, and serve merely to exemplify the categorical range of critical approaches in the collection. Most essays fit more than one category, and all categories could be greatly refined. To stipulate further how the essays might be grouped and approached for application, however, would presume on the prerogatives of the critic or the teacher, and we have been presumptuous enough already in this introduction. Our hope is that each essay will be read for the formal insights it contributes to an understanding of its particular subject and that the collection will serve as a ‘secondary source’ in another sense: as a stimulus and guide to the discovery of significant meaning through the analysis of form and craft. An American now living in this country once told us that works of Canadian literature should never receive an unfavourable review. She meant, we think, to be kind, but if the term ‘elitist’ has any meaning at all, such an attitude surely exemplifies it. Condescension, the notion that Canadian writing cannot stand and should not be subjected to the full light of disinterested critical scrutiny, is repugnant and destructive. To study Canadian works as part of the autonomous world of literature and not as a subclass of sociological data or a protected national species is, in our view, not an ethical matter; it is a logical one. Yet the issue involves questions of value. Our national literature can achieve its full potential only if we develop a trained audience with the critical awareness both to demand the highest accomplishment of our writers and to

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appreciate that accomplishment when it occurs. As mediator between writer and audience, therefore, the critic assumes a responsibility that is both daunting and stimulating. Finally: to all those critics, reviewers, and scholars who regularly, or occasionally, demonstrate the principles we advocate, our respectful apologies for the neglect you suffer in this introduction. Like all forms of sociological criticism, subversive polemic is a blunt instrument for discriminating analysis. And to our contributors, who endured the two long years it took to collect a suitable group of original essays and who suffered our presumptuous demands for revisions and rewritings, we offer our gratitude and respectful appreciation. We must also render special thanks to the editors of Studies in Canadian Literature, without whose encouragement and insight this collection might never have been published.

notes ‘Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism versus Literary Criticism’ was first published as an Introduction to Minus Canadian: Penultimate Essays in Literature, a special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature 2 (Summer 1977): 137–45. 1 Frye, ‘Conclusion’ to Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 821. 2 Ibid., 821–2. 3 A glance at the bibliographies in Frank Davey’s From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature (Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1974) amply demonstrates this predominance of reviews. Davey’s book devotes considerable attention to formal and rhetorical values, but is necessarily limited by its function as an introduction, its review-length entries, and, to some extent, by its postmodernist bias. 4 Eli Mandel, ed., ‘Introduction,’ Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 3. 5 George Woodcock, ‘Views of Canadian Criticism,’ in Odysseus Ever Returning: Essays on Canadian Writers and Writings (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970), 136. 6 Woodcock argues that ‘the foundation of Canadian Literature recognized the maturing of the art of criticism in Canada.’ In our judgment, it announced a birth, but is nonetheless important for that. See ‘Introduction’ to

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Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon George Woodcock, ed., The Canadian Novel in the Twentieth Century: Essays from Canadian Literature (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), vii. Mandel, Contexts of Canadian Criticism, 3. Frye, ‘Conclusion’ to Literary History of Canada, 835. Frye’s assertion here reflects, of course, a concept that is central to all his writing. Woodcock, ‘Introduction,’ Poets and Critics: Essays from Canadian Literature 1966–1974 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974), ix. Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1972), 14.

2.5 Bushed in the Sacred Wood john moss

The resources of English Canadian literary criticism are no longer adequate to the achievement of the literature. The boom years of Canadian self-consciousness have passed and sales of Canadian books are down, critical commentary is in a state of exhaustion. Responses that were apparently valid only a short time ago now seem inappropriate and often at odds with the function of good criticism. Access to the literature is threatened; appreciation is on increasingly tenuous grounds. In order to discover why, and then perhaps what may be done, we must consider the characteristics common to so-called thematic criticism of the early nineteen seventies in English Canada. In the tenets of its phenomenal success lie the sources of our present condition. Critical evaluation at the time was based primarily on social or rhetorical utility rather than on aesthetic achievement. Is a work quintessentially Canadian, or marginal? Is it pedagogically attractive; that is, would it teach well, illuminate society, illustrate real life from a Canadian perspective? Does it reinforce the generalizations, the thematic schemes and cultural constructs that provide its critical context? The evaluation of art as art, even the appreciation of craftsmanship, of style and technique, were seldom allowed to intrude on the critic’s role as mediator between the literature and society, explicator of its usefulness. Excellence was largely a matter of sympathy, and achievement the measure of a work’s participation in the tradition, as critically defined. Based on ingenious schemes that were devised to contain an impossibly diverse literature and to define an improbably diverse society, an orthodoxy evolved. It is this CanLit orthodoxy which today threatens

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Canadian literature by limiting access to it, obscuring genuine works of merit while distorting the significance of secondary works, and constricting its future development. Critics as different as D.G. Jones and Robin Mathews developed criteria for the appreciation of Canadian letters that in effect created a hierarchy of literary values based on concepts of nationality. Both men skilfully explicated the national character. Margaret Atwood, in Survival, casually drew our collective caricature. Frank Davey incisively defined us through our lack of definition. Criticism as caricature, or as mirror, or as chiaroscuro portraiture, criticism which seeks to define rather than illuminate, particularly when its object is a nation, can become uncomfortably insular. Critics of the early seventies more than ever before asserted Canadian nationality as both the object of critical inquiry and its beneficiary. Criticism became the expression of an ebullient chauvinism that had about it more than a touch of paranoia. Behind each declaration of our sovereign differences, swarming hints of our inferiority struggled for articulation and were necessarily quelled. These were not the times for humility or doubt. Yet any conception of culture as a phenomenon continuous beyond our borders, of continuity from our own literature to another, made us feel unspeakably colonial. We therefore in a cultural revolution of extreme but subtle importance severed our own tradition from those which threatened to overwhelm it. If we must have connections with the outside world, let them be with Commonwealth literature, Australian, Nigerian, West Indian, where we can, more likely, hold our own. By consensus among Commonwealth specialists not only American literature but British literature as well is excluded! The effect is a curious lateral context without depth: we move from Margaret Laurence to Patrick White to Chinua Achebe to V.S. Naipaul, without reference to Melville or Twain or to Dickens or Trollope or Fielding. We have divorced Canadian literature of the past, present and by implication, the future, from some of the greatest creations of human-time; seeking authority instead in archetypes, in Biblical or in allegorical allusions, and in our own generalized experiences of Canadian social, geophysical and historical realities. Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman threatened our integrity as Canadians, whereas the word of God or C.G. Jung, the Indian or Inuit personification of nature, the collective experience of the Canadian ‘folk’ all served to reinforce our existence. Bear in mind that we had, culturally at least, been a spectral presence in the world until this time, the lumbering shadow of sev-

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eral empires, and our writers as well as our critics struggled artfully to make us whole: the writers would provide substance and dimension but it was up to the critics to outline the form, to define our shape. The effect of this insularity, born out of pride and fear in strident combination, was the critical perception of Canadian letters in a literary vacuum. There was no standard of comparison, no established source of criteria for aesthetic judgment, no perspective from which to approach a work, nor context within which to examine it, that was not arbitrarily devised. Critics seemed to be judging the size and shape of a constellation in the firmament, without regard either to their own arbitrary perspective or to the containing universe. It is a ludicrous task if you think about it; constellations do not exist except as imposed patterns of coherence. Yet we, that is, the critics, devised ingenious constellations to cast upon our literature, then assessed each separate work as it conformed to the design. Critics of the early seventies served profound social needs of their time but left such a distorted perception of our literature that it will take a determined effort to offset it in the future. Those not caught up in the enthusiasms and anxieties of Canada of less than a decade ago have trouble understanding critical responses to our literature at the time. They tend to assume Northrop Frye was somehow responsible – more because Frye’s reputation would legitimize what they regarded as questionable practices, rather than for any evidence of his influence. If Frye generalizes about the literature and society, and so do these others, then Frye must be their source. But of course Frye responded to the same socio-cultural conditions as the others; he did not create them. Frye on Blake, Milton, and Shakespeare is a very different phenomenon from Frye on Canadian literature, about which he generalizes with as much careless aplomb as the least of his apparent followers. The outsider is often puzzled by the very concept of a Canadian literature. Random works may command attention: Fifth Business, for instance, bears up under disinterested scrutiny; Wacousta appeals as a literary curiosity; Pratt’s poetry stands apart from referents and antecedents in the way a Tom Thomson painting does, satisfying without jarring a pre-fixed sensibility. But what of all those other Canadian works – clearly secondary, inferior, derivative, provincial? Canadian criticism to date has no response to the unconverted. Yet these same sceptics accept the value of secondary works in the major traditions; in fact, they often make their living explicating these works in Canadian universities. The fault is not theirs, however, but lies with the critics of

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Canadian literature who in cleaving from the mainstream, in devising arbitrary criteria of evaluation, in subverting worth to rhetorical utility, have generated an orthodoxy that bewilders outsiders. Instead of proselytizing for the literature among the literate, as it intends to do, such criticism limits access to it – particularly to the often delightful secondary works which are celebrated for the wrong reasons, ones to which the uncommitted reader is quite probably indifferent. For those caught up in the CanLit syndrome, the distinction between literature and its social and historical contexts became blurred. Connections established by the so-called thematic critics as rhetorical devices seemed the truth, at the time. The most exciting writing of the sixties and early seventies apparently affirmed the importance of certain themes and motifs in what came to be called ‘the Canadian experience.’ Furthermore, the same predilections could readily be discovered in our literary past – the land was monstrous and Indians personified the land, and if the land was also beneficent and Indians the embodiment of natural good, contradictions could be subsumed merely by enlarging the perimeters of the rhetorical scheme. The Canadian imagination, it turned out, was populated by wolves in snow, fool-saints and ubiquitous bastards, slumbering giants and victims in a curious display of quasi-sexual positions, all preoccupied with survival, isolation, the body odour of their race, wanderlust, even sex and violence. For a brief period it was not only appropriate but essential, perhaps, to confuse content with context, placing arbitrary perimeters around the literary tradition and then using it to define our social history, and necessary to confuse content with critical criteria, thus assessing by the extent of its conformity a work’s artistic significance. The conditions of our cultural history that engendered such criticism passed, however. Its purpose, to redeem the literature from the imperialistic darkness and assert its social worth as the voice and vision of national sovereignty, had been served. Less than a decade later, such a response seems inadequate, both to the literature and the society. Once an orthodoxy has set in, it is difficult to dispel. Adversaries of the so-called thematic critics proved ineffectual. This is because they offered only the vaguest of alternatives, the most tentative of new directions. And this is so because critics of thematic criticism, for all their ingenuous self-righteousness, have never really accounted for the origins of the response they perhaps justifiably despise, nor accounted for its apparent success, nor for its residual effectiveness. Without knowing where the ‘thematic’ response originates, nor why it was appropriate

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to the social, cultural, and even literary needs of its time, their call for change amounts to little more than an expression of contempt for our mutual blindness. What we need is someone to turn on the lights. Mitigating against the darkness, thematic criticism has offered readers, teachers, critics, even writers a coherent guide through Canadian literature that for all its being arbitrary is no less a convenience. Teachers in particular enjoy the benefits of a critical rhetoric which emphasizes content over form, and subverts aesthetic judgment to the criteria of schematic generalization. Literature is reduced to a pedagogical tool: The Stone Angel illustrates themes, motifs, literary devices, all of which affirm that it is indisputably Canadian. ‘Keine Lazarovitch 1870–1959’ illuminates similar themes and motifs, uses similar devices, and is likewise empirically a Canadian work. Both Laurence’s novel and Layton’s poem fit into a scheme of things, to several schemes, in fact. They are eminently teachable: critical systems that make them so, and offer them as prototypes in retrospect of an entire tradition, will not easily be abandoned. That these two works are excellent art is fortunate. Other works which also reinforce one system or another and are not of the same quality, however, are taught as if they were. And the best works, like these, are taught for the wrong reasons. And works that do not fit are not taught. While The Man from Glengarry, for instance, might be a suitable novel for either a grade ten class or a graduate seminar, for very different reasons, it is taught in that broad area between, as if it were a worthwhile work of art in its own right, which is questionable. And contrarily, Lives of Girls and Women, which is superb art, is often used as a source for discussion of social hygiene in grade ten, and as an example of aesthetic sophistication in graduate school, and for both it is inappropriate. And the novels of Mavis Gallant and Hugh Hood are consigned to limbo, beyond schematic rhetoric, outside the proscriptive tradition – and so, too, with the poetry of Joe Rosenblatt and even of Gwendolyn MacEwen. In the classroom or wherever else the Canadian sensibility has been conditioned by so-called thematic criticism, there is little room for creative eccentricity, or for a critical revision of the past to handle our shifting perspective upon it, or for renewed congress with other traditions and the outside world. The current environment is not a healthy one for Canadian writers, the best of whom have left behind the thematic preoccupations writers shared with critics in the recent past. John Metcalf’s comic novel General Ludd is brilliant – and has been casually denigrated or simply ignored: it belongs in company with the most sar-

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donic works of Evelyn Waugh, but alongside Sarah Binks and Cocksure it seems merely out of place. Insights from the larger world are allowed to intrude as little as possible on the Canadian sensibility. Only an enlightened anarchist like George Woodcock seems able to appreciate fully The Colours of War, or to question honestly the achievement of The Scorched-Wood People. ‘Experimentation’ has been discouraged, although orthodoxy does admit exceptions: Kroetsch and Ondaatje are the best examples of formally innovative writers who have captured critical attention. In both cases, however, and with The Double Hook as well, invention is inseparable from a strong thematic thrust, which itself is highly conventional and very ‘Canadian.’ Other experimental writers of the sixties, and the early seventies, either faded, like Graeme Gibson and Douglas LePan, adapted, like Matt Cohen, or became, like bp Nichol and George Bowering, members of the permanent avant-garde. The problems for the critic of Canadian literature today are in good part a legacy of the so-called thematic criticism of our immediate past. While close attention to text or to a single author’s canon avoids much of the confusion, as soon as comparative evaluation is attempted, the exhaustion of previous approaches becomes all too apparent. The ‘further’ a work lies outside the thematic constructs of CanLit, the more pronounced the difficulty. For me as a critic, personally, this was brought home not long ago when I was set the task of writing a comprehensive critical piece on John Glassco. Glassco was a writer about whom I once admiringly wrote that his genius lay in the consumption of his own life in order to have something to write about, a man who literally lived for his art, and whom I applauded for the dispassionate elegance of his style and for his elliptical insights into the creative sensibility. Yet more recently, in a commentary on Glassco’s erotic fiction, I denounced the lifelong squandering of his talent, and judged his literary achievement trivial at best. Now, as I circled the man and his work, trying to resolve discrepancies of response, to separate personality from aesthetics, I became aware of being encircled myself. The many emanations of John Glassco refused to coalesce into a critical artefact. Instead, my assumptions, judgments, perceptions were deflected back and were, it seemed, found wanting. The inevitable response was intemperate. I wrote as follows: It is difficult to ignore John Glassco. A minor poet, bloodless pornographer, elegant hack riding on the reputations of such truly creative eccen-

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trics as Beardsley and von Masoch, smug memoirist, amateur translator, gourmand, titillating darling of the Presbyterian literati, Glassco so squandered his talent, so indulged his appetite for public self-abuse, that he achieved the status in Canadian letters of ‘failed celebrity.’

And so it went. Having previously acclaimed Memoirs of Montparnasse, I now assailed the personality informing it – given that it is a memoir, this seemed a valid enough critical approach. My notes teemed with comments about the book as a compendium of menus, about its author’s staggering lack of imagination, about his role as a petty whore slithering through decadence that he had not the wit to enjoy nor the sensitivity to condemn. Eventually sense prevailed and it became apparent just how far afield frustration had led me from legitimate critical function. Such recognition raised more problems than it answered, though, and their resolution superseded the enigma of John Glassco in engaging my interest as a critic. Why is it so difficult to reconcile Glassco’s achievement with his failures? Why does his writing often seem to be both, at the same time? Why does Glassco seem so large and yet peripheral in Canadian letters, while in an international context he is small but comfortably ensconced? Why do the careless achievement and unrealized potential evident throughout his work both fascinate and repel? Why does the man so much intrude in the consideration of his literary canon? Somehow taste and judgment have fallen askew in the Canadian context, both of each other and of their informing principles. In the context defined by Laurence and Layton, Glassco seems, at best, amiss. Among concepts of Canadian regionalism and/or the garrison mentality, among newly perceived mythologies of a communal personality, amidst schemes of themes, doctrines of aesthetic relativism and cultural utility, Glassco defies coherent appreciation. But as a decadent among decadents, an eroticist in the tradition of literary eroticism, an ironist, memoirist, bellelettrist, an apostle of esoteric hedonist sub-genres, against the criteria of these contexts his achievement falls into perspective. The present critical climate in Canada, however, hardly admits the practice of such urbane and cosmopolitan criticism as Glassco’s work demands. We have isolated our literature from world literature, cut our tradition away from the mainstream and run it through a mill-race, through the flume of historical necessity, to drive the wheels of national selfconsciousness. But the mill grinds slower now, on other power, and

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the backwater in the race threatens to stagnate. It is time to open the floodgate. The critical past cannot simply be repudiated, if radical change is to take place. Long before the vogue of thematic criticism, Canadian critics displayed a penchant for rhetorical generalizations, and a distaste for aesthetic evaluation. From the beginning, taste, informed usually by a knowledge of world literature, and judgment, based on the social function of the critic within a perpetually fledgling society, bore little relation to each other. The critic, attracted by educated taste to particular works of art, then suspended critical judgment in deference to the demands of his society, and discussed the literature in terms of cultural history. The critic as parochial historian, art as artefact, these premises dominated until well after World War II, when our traditional sense of continuity with the British tradition attenuated, then severed. Finding ourselves adrift on murky waters, critics like Carl Klinck and Desmond Pacey took soundings and with little reference to our former anchorage charted the topography of our own obscured past. Their purpose was literary in the broadest sense: theirs was not so much an aesthetic as a documentary function. Preceding critics had likewise placed more emphasis on enthusiasm than aesthetic evaluation while struggling, often brilliantly, towards a coherent sense of a developing tradition. Sara Jeannette Duncan, writing in the eighteen-eighties, was perhaps the first modern Canadian critic, that is, the first to write self-consciously of literature from a Canadian perspective. Her work, never collected, was followed in this century by volumes with expansive titles like Headwaters of Canadian Literature, An Outline of Canadian Literature, and Canadian Writers. Such names as Archibald MacMechan, Lorne Pierce, Arthur Phelps, Pelham Edgar, A.J.M. Smith, and E.K. Brown ring through our cultural history, not ringing the changes but at least tolling our distinctive presence. It was not until after the war, however, when Canada culturally roused itself out of protracted adolescence, that criticism of Canadian letters took on the airs of a literary discipline. Through the inspired diligence of Klinck, the casual authority of Pacey, the professional zeal of people like Roy Daniels, Clara Thomas, Elizabeth Waterston, and Malcolm Ross, a lively awareness was generated of major works and key figures in the Canadian literary past. Yet the tradition itself remained amorphous; any claim it laid to achievement or coherence seemed pretentious and at the same time provincial. The critic was trapped by our cultural history in the role of apologist – until the sixties came and then

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the seventies and our writers and critics alike proclaimed Canadian reality as real, and proclaimed it good. For a time, thematic criticism seemed to animate us and yet to absolve us from the burden of being ourselves, free us from the outside world, celebrate the best we had and were. Criticism, literature, and society seemed in perfect harmony. The querulous opponents of so-called thematic criticism would do well to consider how this came to be. Critics of thematic criticism like Frank Davey, the editor of Open Letter, W.J. Keith, the editor of University of Toronto Quarterly, and Barry Cameron, editor of Studies in Canadian Literature, for all their articulate opposition, have failed to consider the implications of thematic criticism’s apparent appropriateness and its undeniable success during the preceding decade. Yet it is there that the resolution to the muddle such opponents offer as an alternative will inevitably be discovered. What is it that has nurtured thematic criticism in the bush garden of Canadian letters? The literature is diverse and so are the critical responses to it. Book-length studies like Butterfly on Rock, Patterns of Isolation, Vertical Man, Horizontal World, The Haunted Wilderness, Harsh and Lovely Land, Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel, Unnamed Country; personal anthologies like Odysseus Ever Returning, Articulating West, Another Time, The World of Canadian Writing; extended essays like Frye’s seminal ‘Conclusion’ to The Literary History of Canada, Dennis Lee’s Savage Fields, and Warren Tallman’s ‘Wolf in the Snow’; teacher handbooks like Survival, or the series on Canadian themes written by committees and published by the Writers’ Development Trust, all these, it seems, fall under the versatile rubric ‘thematic criticism.’ Each gathers a variety of works into a rhetorical context. Each relates one work to another according to the configuration of its argument. Each treats literature in effect as a system, obscuring rather than enhancing the luminescence of individual works, particularly those that lie outside its rhetorical design. At the extreme, this leads to the estimation of Hugh MacLennan as peripheral, while the critics’ friends write works apparently the very embodiment of Canadian experience. More often, it merely lends to the literature itself an aura of insularity that is erroneous and demeaning. Literature becomes the vehicle of archetypal visions, patterns, regional idiosyncrasies, and socio-cultural obsessions. Art becomes secondary. Some critics conscientiously attempted to counter this, but so long as systems are promulgated, their needs demand to be served. The prolific creation of rhetorical contexts was in part because there

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were none extant. Each critic approaching the literature had to decide for himself the perimeters within which to work, the criteria, even the vocabulary to be used. Our cultural history yielded up no established literary tradition and certainly not a critical tradition. Canadian achievement was at the nether edge of a much larger and indifferent world. Separate works seemed, particularly to sensibilities conditioned from abroad, to relate far more to movements elsewhere than to each other. Thus early critics were forced to provide arbitrary connections among them, based not on literary but on socio-historical principles. The context and the criteria for literary appreciation necessarily came from abroad, and inevitably our achievements here seemed rather paltry and peripheral. Nonetheless, attempts were made to see the literature as a whole. When, however, the time came to see it also as worthwhile, it was necessarily divorced from all others. For cultural survival we rejected as tyranny anything which threatened to overwhelm us. The question in the early seventies was not whether we were good enough but how our qualities could best be appreciated. If critical perception of Wordsworth defines a particular tradition, then, axiomatically, the criteria of that tradition will hold Wordsworth paramount. What chance has anyone else but to be considered below Wordsworth on a Wordsworthian scale; what chance a Canadian in comparison with those from whose achievement the scale is made. The problem was not that Ernest Buckler might be inferior as an artist, but that he is not so Lawrentian as D.H. Lawrence, not as Wolfe-ish as Thomas Wolfe. Similarly Sinclair Ross might empirically be a better artist than Sinclair Lewis, but against the awesome presence of the American tradition in our consciousness, Horizon seems provincial and Main Street apparently runs through the cultural heartland. How could we fairly appreciate Canadians in alien contexts, using for judgment criteria derived from alien achievements? The answer of course lay in reducing the outside world to a level of inconsequence, simply by ignoring its existence. Our culture could stand alone – otherwise, it seemed, it would not be allowed to stand at all. Taste might be informed by alien experience, but judgment would serve Canadian needs. Encouraged by, or perhaps in response to, the maturity of a new wave of Canadian writers, typified by Margaret Laurence, Al Purdy, and the precocious Margaret Atwood, each of whom seemed to turn away from international response and write to us alone, critics shrugged off the great tradition and with only a vacuum to take its place devised

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systems of their own. Rhetorical generalizations no longer provided merely a framework to meet the needs of a gradually coalescing culture; they now defined that culture, asserted its sovereignty. Thematic schemes created critical contexts and provided criteria of evaluation without reference to the larger world. Critical systems served an obvious social function, and the literature served to illuminate the systems. For a brief period a symbiosis seemed apparent among Canadian society, its literature, and the criticism which mediated between the other two. There was an express need in the early seventies for a cultural identity in English Canada to appease our fears of separatism and to perpetuate Centennial self-love. Historically, perception of the collective identity in Canada has always been at odds with social reality. By the seventies this discrepancy had become acute, and not only critics but writers of the time rushed to reconcile our strong sense of self with our apparent lack of definition. Critics discovered systems, themes, patterns, visions which held our literature together. And writers like Margaret Laurence in The Diviners, Rudy Wiebe in The Temptations of Big Bear, Al Purdy with In Search of Owen Roblin, David Helwig in Atlantic Crossings, Margaret Atwood in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, they too, sensitive to their social environment, discovered through their art patterns of identity in Canadian experience. To some extent, thematic criticism is in direct response to the thematic predilections of Canadian writers. In the past, when literature was necessarily derivative, form and style sustained our continuity with the colonial source, while content expressed our differences. The legacy of this is that even now the most fiercely independent Canadian writers tend to express their sovereignty in content, and form remains reassuringly conventional. Good experimental work is rare in Canadian literature: among novels there are exceptions like The Deserter, The Double Hook, Beautiful Losers, Five Legs, and Coming through Slaughter, all of which seem aberrations; in poetry, the Martyrology of bp Nichol, the works of bill bissett and Daphne Marlatt, seem equally eccentric. Much more in conformity with the tradition as presently perceived are the pellucid prose of Alice Munro, the strong characterizations of both Laurence and Davies, the arresting themes of Kroetsch, the strident attitudes of Richler. More central among poets are Alden Nowlan, Layton, Dorothy Livesay, Purdy, all of whose work demands close attention to what is said, far less to how, or Reaney, Jay Macpherson, Margaret Avison, and P.K. Page, whose pyrotechnics reinforce the content of

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their poetry rather than embody it. In good part, critics have addressed themselves to content in Canadian writing because that is what predominates. Criticism in response to content, to fulfil a social need, to fill a critical vacuum and construct a coherent literature of our own, such criticism is no longer adequate. As Wilfred Cude argues in his recent book, A Due Sense of Differences: An Evaluative Approach to Canadian Literature, excellence demands analysis, and the end of analysis should be the explication of excellence. The refusal of Canadian critics to treat our literature seriously, as literature, earns Cude’s wrath. It also provokes him to write fine criticism. Rhetoric he reserves for the articulation of critical theory and the disparagement of current critical practice in Canada. The literature is never used to make his case: rather, his treatment of it provides the example of how it should be treated. Perhaps the best forum for criticism as it is presently being written is the most arbitrary: learned journals, or anthologies like Contexts of Canadian Criticism and The Canadian Imagination. Encyclopedic handbooks such as Survey and From There to Here, of course, nicely beg the question. At the other extreme, specific social and cultural concepts are readily promulgated in works quite unambiguously designed as rhetorical vehicles – for example, Ronald Sutherland’s Second Image, Dooley’s Moral Vision in the Canadian Novel, and Robin Mathews’s Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution. It is time now that Canadian literary criticism serve the literature itself, time to stop considering literature a map of our collective consciousness; a mirror of our personality; a floodlight illuminating the national sensibility. It is time to consider Canadian literature as literature and not another thing. Schools may continue to use art as an exercise in civic awareness or moral development, the Canada Council may continue to endow talent on the basis of regional representation and the influence of referees, the Governor General’s Award may continue to pass predictably among kith and kin, but Canadian criticism must learn to correlate, discriminate, evaluate. The responsible Canadian critic must force the reintegration of taste and judgment in his own work, and demand it of his peers. The literature demands it. Works of Canadian literature must be celebrated for their individual excellence as works of literature. They must be appraised in relation to other works in the Canadian tradition but also to the best works anywhere in their genre, of their kind. Nationality must be recognized as having more to do with nationalism than with art. If we cannot be worldly and

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urbane as critics, then we should adjure the critical function, or at least more modestly address problems within our grasp. Frye, who has become somewhat of a false prophet, was true in his time. Offering by example modes of perception that effectively denied the necessity of explication or aesthetic evaluation, validating cultural generalization as a critical instrument, lending credibility to the serious consideration of Canadian literature, he served a vital purpose. Now, if we must discover a critic to emulate, one whose approach is cosmopolitan and urbane, one who does not shy away from evaluation and who is sceptical of critical schemes and cultural generalizations, we might do no better than to take another look at George Woodcock, who has been a critic practising among us for a generation. Thoroughly informed about even the most obscure reaches of Canadian literature, at home with the best of British, American, and European literature and cultural history, insistent that these are not separate but interpenetrating realities, Woodcock has often seemed a curious anomaly. As the editor of Canadian Literature for nearly two decades and the prolific author of critical books and anthologies, he has been at the very centre of the CanLit boom, yet distinctly an outsider. When MacLennan was passé, he wrote on MacLennan. If Malcolm Lowry seemed an imposition on Canadian hospitality, he welcomed him among us. He celebrated the polish of Purdy’s poetry, the humanity of A.M. Klein. He elevated James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder to a peerage that includes Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, and W.H. Mallock’s The New Republic. While more parochial critics have justly celebrated Matt Cohen’s The Disinherited and The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone, Woodcock went on (or back) to assess Korsoniloff in the context of the nouvelle vague fiction of Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor. Cohen’s critically assaulted novel The Colours of War, Woodcock suggests, is a wry equivalent of Voltaire’s achievement in Candide, and discredits the novel’s adversaries. Unfettered by systems of literary perception and social utility, Woodcock is a superb model for the critic of the future, not to be imitated but emulated, not for what he sees and says, but how. He is not the best mind among us, necessarily, nor the best informed, nor the best critic, but he is the most free and accomplished in evidence and we would do well to follow his example. Our literature has come of age. It no longer needs a protective environment, favoured treatment. The same critical procedures that a short while ago were essential to its development and to our perception of it

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now inhibit its appreciation. It is time to assess Sheila Watson in relation to Jean Giono and not just the shaman and scripture, time to enjoy Roughing It in the Bush as a sentimental romance, time to recognize the radical genius of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. It is time to acknowledge that we are the heirs of a living past, citizens of the larger world. The Canadian tradition is a term of convenience, not definition. Canadian literature is a critical concept, not a limit of creation. Canadian is a label of affiliation, not a quality of being. It is time for Canadian literary criticism to recognize these precepts and respond to them, for the sake of the literature, for the sake of excellence, for the appreciation of art as art and not another thing.

‘Bushed in the Sacred Wood’ was first published in David Helwig, ed., The Human Element: Second Series (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1981), 161–78.

PART III Frye’s Canadian Criticism and the Making of Canadian Literary and Critical Culture

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3.1 Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition eli mandel

Northrop Frye’s writing on Canadian literature has been extraordinarily influential in both criticism and poetry but, despite widespread admiration for his achievement, the nature of his influence and the character of his work continue to be controversial and unclear in certain aspects. It is by no means surprising that his achievement is paradoxical: peripheral to his major critical work, his Canadian writing nonetheless remains, or so he tells us, oddly central to his writing career, ‘always ... rooted in Canada and drawing its essential characteristics from there.’ Cogent and powerful, it still is puzzling, widely misunderstood. Misreadings of it form one of the fascinating chapters of Canadian literary history. Strangely too, his criticism now reveals itself as at once coherent and inconsistent, systematic and contradictory, perhaps not entirely surprisingly so, considering the length of the period its concerns involve, but nonetheless disturbingly difficult to explain or resolve. And widely regarded as comprehensive, even exhaustive, the Canadian writing turns out to be for the most part occasional and only briefly sweeping in essays or surveys, ‘episodes,’ as Frye himself says, ‘in a writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature and has addressed an international reading public.’1 No doubt it is possible to explain away contradictions by reference to his poetic style and method (the end to which this essay does resort). ‘The imagination,’ Frye reminds us, ‘is occupationally disposed to synthesis’2 and so, just as it seeks to put together a country that seems to be coming apart, it seeks as well to resolve apparent critical discontinuities and disorder. It is difficult if not impossible to believe that so witty and

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urbane a commentary as Frye’s could be dismissed as confusion rather than retrieved as poetry. His writing on Canadian subjects takes shape in two ways: first, as what he calls ‘field work,’ the ten essays he wrote for the annual survey of Canadian poetry in the ‘Letters in Canada’ section of the University of Toronto Quarterly through the decade of the nineteen-fifties; second, as a series of essays of cultural criticism. The essays, written from 1943 to 1965, and the reviews, are collected in The Bush Garden, subtitled ‘Essays on the Canadian Imagination.’ Aside from these, the only work of note I take account of is his little book on modernism, which puts Canadian writing in the context of contemporary internationalism and Canada in the post-national world, The Modern Century; his survey of poetry of the fifties, ‘Poetry’ for The Arts in Canada, edited by Malcolm Ross; and his essay on contemporary romanticism in Canadian poetry, ‘Haunted by a Lack of Ghosts’ in The Canadian Imagination, edited by David Staines. Frye’s cultural essays form the basis of his theory of a literary tradition in Canada. That and the questions his position pose occupy the major portion of my essay. It seems adequate to note here that the theoretical formulation develops first out of Frye’s earliest critical article, a review of A.J.M. Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), that the alternating rhythms of Canadian life that occupy him in his extraordinary ‘Conclusion’ to Literary History of Canada first came to his attention through Canadian painting, and that he extends his discussion of the major themes of the first and last essay in his discussion of narrative form and his imaginary anthology of Canadian poetry. His version of the literary tradition of Canadian poetry we note, not entirely by the way, turns out to be a version of the romantic fall into modern consciousness, the wilderness or labyrinth of space and time, and the antithetical quest for a return to an integrated being. Obviously, it is a matter of some critical consequence as to where one chooses to put the emphasis in reading Frye’s work: whether, for example, on his romanticism or his nationalism. This essay seeks to acknowledge his romantic reading of a Canadian literary tradition while placing its emphasis on critical problems arising from questions having to do with a definition of a national literature. Frye’s ‘field work’ is especially interesting and important for several reasons. It provides one of the most extensive reviews of Canadian poetry of the fifties, a period less closely noted or discussed elsewhere. It views that poetry both particularly and in the light of a developing

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theory of considerable importance in Canadian thought. It is probably the period most consistently misread in Frye’s work and is certainly the period that raises the vexed question of his influence as a reviewer and critic. Probably of least interest is the fact that some of the contradictions within his work appear at this point. We are told, for example, that ‘The representational tendency in poetry is sophisticated and civilized: the formal tendency is primitive’; yet, ‘In our day, the primitive tendency is reached through a further refinement of sophistication,’3 a puzzle less bothersome than his shifting attitude towards the values of regionalism in art. It is during this period that Frye reviews a poetry beginning to articulate its modern concerns through new methods and conventions. In a peculiar way, the fifties is a slack period of Canadian writing, a sort of postwar depression. Yet during the fifties, the modernism of the thirties and forties took new directions and a characteristic set of concerns took shape. Reading Frye’s reviews of this period, one becomes aware of certain recurrent phrases, imaginative keys to the sound he is hearing and reading: repeatedly, one encounters phrases about symbolism or ‘a symbolic language of the poet’s own,’ ‘erudite, elegiac and allusive,’ ‘mythical and metaphorical,’ and notably, ‘typically formal poetry, mythical, metaphorical, and apocalyptic.’ There is nothing sloppy in the repetition. It points to a poetic recurrence, a pattern or design of the kind of poetry the fifties is providing and Frye is reading in his reviews; the range is wide and various, the interests diverse: James Wreford, F.R. Scott, A.J.M. Smith, Kay Smith, Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster, Alfred Bailey, R.A.D. Ford, John Glassco, Al Purdy, Ron Bates, Fred Cogswell. But it does not take long to sense where Frye’s interests lie and in what poetry. He writes major essays on E.J. Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike, Earle Birney’s Trial of a City, James Reaney’s A Suit of Nettles, Jay Macpherson’s The Boatman, Anne Wilkinson’s The Hangman Ties the Holly, George Johnston’s The Cruising Auk, and Wilfred Watson’s Friday’s Child. He tells us ‘One can get as tired of buttocks in Layton as of buttercups in the Canadian Poetry Magazine,’ but soon notices that with Layton we are in the presence of ‘a poetic mind of genuine dignity and power.’4 Reading The Boatman, he is moved to observe a growing professionalism among younger Canadian poets, which ‘has nothing to do with earning a living,’ but a lot to do with the view of poetry ‘as a craft with its own traditions and discipline.’5 He introduces an essay on Patrick Anderson with a discourse on the technical development of a lyric poetry (from obscurity to simplicity) and a review of a retro-

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spective Bliss Carman with an account of the characteristic development of a romantic poet’s mind (from impressionism to myth making). He prefaces a review of Indian mythical poems and a selected Charles G.D. Roberts with an astute comment on the poles of poetry: primitivism and representationalism. In short, the reviews are occasion for both practical criticism, evaluation, and theoretical speculation. The latter is, in some ways, the most intriguing. His ‘field work,’ Frye tells us, was carried on while he was working out a comprehensive critical theory. The theory, we now know, can be found as the Anatomy of Criticism, in turn developed from Fearful Symmetry, where his conception of three great periods of English literature emerged in the last chapter of that book. ‘I was fascinated to see how the echoes and ripples of the great age kept moving through Canada and taking a form there that they could not have taken elsewhere.’6 Myth to Frye means not ‘an accidental characteristic of poetry’ but ‘a key to the poem’s real meaning,’ ‘the structural principle of the poem itself.’7 The theory, says Frye, was ‘widely misunderstood,’ for ‘I was thought – still am in some quarters, evidently – to be advocating or encouraging a specific mythological school of academic, erudite, repressed and Puritanical poetry, in contrast to another kind whose characteristics were undefined but which was assumed to be much more warm-hearted, spontaneous and soul brother to the sexual instinct.’8 The confusion to which Frye points has not been cleared to this day9 though it is obvious that in discerning mythopoeia in Canadian writing, it was not his own influence that he was seeing but the language and poetics of a time. Watson, Wilkinson, LePan, P.K. Page, Birney, Pratt, Anderson, and Layton, not to say Reaney, Macpherson, and Cohen (whose first book is significantly entitled Let Us Compare Mythologies), all were articulating the poetics that Frye sensed in ‘the echoes and ripples of a great age,’ as that wave washed across Canadian poetry of the fifties. As to his own influence on poets, few have spoken of it more gracefully, accurately, or easily than Frye himself: These reviews are too far in the past to do the poets they deal with any good or harm, not that they did much of either even at the time. In any case the estimates of value implied in them are expendable, as estimates of value always are. They may be read as a record of poetic production in English Canada during one of its crucial periods, or as an example of the way poetry educates a consistent reader of it, or as many other things, some of them no doubt most unflattering to the writer.10

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As to Frye’s influence not upon poets but critics, the reading of his work as a ‘pharmacopoeia’ or of Frye himself as ‘the great white whale of Canadian criticism’11 suggests some of the grosser distortions possible in a misreading, but the development of what has been called ‘thematic criticism,’ particularly in the work of D.G. Jones in Butterfly on Rock, and Margaret Atwood in Survival, suggests also that younger critics were quick to sense the establishment in Frye’s work of the nationalist and literary contexts within which it would be possible to speak of a Canadian literary tradition. Recently, one of these younger critics spoke directly to this point: Frye’s influence on Canadian criticism, on me anyway, had less to do with his own criticism, which obviously I admire, than with his cultural generalizations, which made me feel good. Frye and the whole tenor of the 1970s led me to write systems criticism in spite of myself. I tried very hard to be a functionalist, but everything kept relating to the larger argument. To sex and violence, to isolation, to regional consciousness, irony. It was historically necessary to go through this, to establish contexts and connections. In retrospect it seems like we were defining the perimeters of the garrison.12

Elsewhere, John Moss speaks of a ‘very parochial school of criticism’ and touches there on the irony and paradox of Frye’s criticism: seeking to enlarge the field, to move the parochial into the wider world of international concerns, he in fact locates the ‘systems, contexts, connections,’ to use Moss’s language,13 in a narrower context. The process of that narrowing is what we trace now. The larger context of Frye’s study of Canadian poetry, then, is the Canadian literary tradition, the literary context of Canadian writing. The first task of the critic, in these terms, is the locating of a literary tradition. The second (as we shall see) is the very difficult one of justifying its national existence, to name it as a Canadian tradition, and the third, to rename (or review) it. One would expect that ‘Canada and Its Poetry,’ a truly extraordinary imaginative feat, would provide a major account of the literary context of Canadian writing. But oddly Frye seems preoccupied there by geographical and political (or at least national) questions. In ‘The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry,’ as the title suggests, he picks up the question not in political or geographical terms but in terms of language. This has the advantage of suggesting at once the literary

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connections that need to be examined. A double Canadian poetic ‘nature’ then appears: nineteenth century in its employment of customary, routine forms, but much older in spirit, Anglo-Saxon in fact. The argument is not complex: ‘it is at least possible that some of the poetic forms employed in the earlier centuries of English literature would have been more appropriate for the expression of Canadian themes and moods than the nineteenth-century romantic lyric or its twentieth-century metaphysical successor.’14 So it is that the narrative poem has a surprising role in the Canadian literary tradition. The argument points to an uneasy fusion of form and theme that we encounter in a more serious and difficult version later, but it also suggests an even more surprising aspect of the literary tradition. In his 1952 review of Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike, Frye fastens on a poetic question raised by narrative, a question that becomes central to the contemporary modernist poet, manifesting itself in both Michael Ondaatje’s edition of The Long Poem Anthology and Robert Kroetsch’s article on the contemporary long poem, ‘For Play and Entrance.’15 I have a notion that the technical problems involved in Towards the Last Spike are going to be central problems in the poetry of the future. And I think that the ingenuity with which these problems have been met would make the poem a historical landmark even for readers who disliked it as a poem ... (Some younger writers who are interested in the theory of ‘composition by field’ may see an important aspect of it in this poem.)16

Frye tends to speak of prophecy as vision, the fully aroused senses, certainly not fortune-telling, but the remark above is uncanny in its prescience. More than the acute awareness that Pratt’s ‘mosaic technique’ links with ‘composition by field’ and so with contemporary experimentalism, the prophetic vision of a tradition from pre-Chaucerian time to contemporary primitivism provides an astonishing overview of Canadian literary tradition and its significance. This was written in 1946, but it still resonates today: the lyric, if cultivated too exclusively, tends to become too entangled with the printed page: in an age when new contacts between a poet and his public are opening up through radio, the narrative, as a form peculiarly well adapted for public reading, may play an important role in reawakening a public respect for and response to poetry. There are values in both tradition and experiment, and in both the narrative has important claims as Canadian poetry hesitates on the threshold of a new era.17

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Insight of this order can be found throughout this brilliant criticism, fusing literature, society, the cultural order we strive to discern. Signals, codes, messages flash across poetry to criticism to the social and cultural order, each illuminating the other like the network of lights linking the outposts of civilization in this vast land, itself a mirror of the cosmic night lighted above, perhaps a metaphor of the meaning of tradition. Frye’s incidental comments on tradition sometimes prove even more illuminating than his articulated argument. Certainly, in ‘Canada and Its Poetry,’ he is taken up with more incidental questions than he can handle easily and even the more articulated ‘Preface to an Uncollected Anthology’ loses some focus in trying to sort out the literary question from the social and historical ones with which the critic must ‘settle uneasily.’ It has long seemed to me that a passage in his 1954 review of The Selected Poems of Bliss Carman, edited by Lorne Pierce, serves as the best summary of his sense of the literary tradition in Canada, its context of romanticism, its development from impressionism to mythmaking poetry.18 In these terms Canadian poetry in its lyric phase begins with Roberts’s Orion, develops through elegiac or at least wistful and nostalgic impressionism in Carman to a kind of fusion of subject and object in Lampman’s visionary City of the End of Things and D.C. Scott’s ancestral voices that suggest the appearance of the mythic in nature. Pratt’s devotion to narrative, as Frye puts it, suggests a deep, albeit unconscious, affinity with the Canadian tradition exemplified in Charles Sangster, Charles Heavysege, and Joseph Howe earlier, and in the post-Confederation period in Charles Mair, Isabella Valancy Crawford, and John Hunter Duvar, besides important narrative works by Lampman and D.C. Scott. The development to modernism is both documentary and urban (in Pratt and F.R. Scott) but continuous from Carman to A.J.M. Smith in plangent elegies of the death and resurrection myth. In brief, the romantic mode defines the Canadian tradition from its beginning to its modern mythopoeia, from Carman’s Sappho to Layton’s Birth of Tragedy. Two complementary aspects of this myth, the tragic identity of the sinister and terrible with man’s death wish and the comic fusion of human life and life in nature, are not inconsistent with each other but together account for the unity of impression in Canadian writing, perhaps best summed up as a pastoral quality. For Frye, an emblematic summary of the argument from tradition would be two famous primitive American paintings, Historical Monument of the American Republic, a vision of the technological will to power, and The Peaceable Kingdom, where the lion lies down with the ox.19

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So far we have been tracing a tradition that is romantic and pastoral and that because it is linear shows a tendency to look obsolete (an objection urged against it by modernists who tend to see it as academic and ‘ancient’). Recently Frye chose to note a shift in attitude towards tradition from viewing in linear terms to a ‘more kaleidoscopic and simultaneous affair.’20 Everything happens at once: from echoes of Spenser, to descent themes from Ishtar and Boris Karloff movies, to prosodic devices from Old English to concrete poetry. We noted earlier the curious contemporaneity of Pratt’s ‘mosaic’ technique in narrative; now with this same mode of vision appearing in an account of tradition, we might wonder about the cultural forces at work. Imagery of descent (a contemporary vision of the solitude of the wilderness) ends, Frye comments, ‘not in introversion but in an intensely centered vision,’ a reflection as it happens on the effects of modern technology.21 Frye’s criticism, then, in its formal and literary aspect, appears to provide a fusing link between poet and critic (criticism and creativity – idea and image) and – to use Reaney’s phrase – ‘an electrifying organizing effect with regard to the imagination.’ His account of tradition shows no tendency to become dated or obsolete but rings a contemporary note, as the line from Frye to Reaney to bp Nichol suggests. But the effort to hold the discussion of Canadian writing at the formal or literary level produces an oddly strained effect. ‘The critic of Canadian literature,’ Frye himself notices, ‘has to settle uneasily somewhere between the Canadian historian or social scientist, who has no comparative value-judgments to worry about, and the ordinary critic, who has nothing else.’22 The problem of naming a Canadian literary tradition (that is, discerning Canadian literary forms) is not only exceedingly difficult, but virtually impossible. What follows is necessarily rudely schematic, given the range of ambiguities and possibilities. First, one admits that few social commentators, if any, have been so perceptive or illuminating as Frye about this place and its conventions (his famous image of entering the country by sea as if being swallowed by a leviathan might serve as one example). Second, if we accept that turning society into a series of literary conventions were to resolve the major dualities of this discussion, all would fall into place in the argument. But the terms prove to be slippery. I note one example. In his ‘Preface to an Uncollected Anthology,’ Frye states the major premise of his argument: We spoke at the beginning of certain principles that become important in the study of Canadian poetry. One of these is the fact that while literature

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may have life, reality, experience, nature or what you will for its content, the forms of literature cannot exist outside literature, just as the forms of sonata and fugue cannot exist outside music. When a poet is confronted by a new life or environment, the new life may suggest a new content, but obviously cannot provide him with a new form. The forms of poetry can be derived only from other poems …23

This is firmly stated and as always lucid. But what are its implications? First, because there is a problem of identity in English Canada associated with the question of language and poetry (i.e., the political selfidentification of Canadian vis-à-vis British and American poets), there has developed a feeling that Canadian poetry needs a defence or manifesto: ‘The main result of this has been that Canadian poets have been urged in every generation to search for appropriate themes, in other words to look for content.’24 But a poet’s concern or quest is not for content, but form, the informing or shaping principle of the poem. Of these, the most important is metaphor, at its purest and most primitive in myth. The second – and most critical – implication follows. ‘When we look for the qualities in Canadian poetry that illustrate the poet’s response to the specific environment that we call Canada, we are really looking for the mythopoeic qualities in that poetry.’25 We may be looking for myth, but we won’t, I submit, find it. We will find only content. Frye’s much-praised account of the romantic myth in Canadian poetry – a symbolic response to the environment, the riddle of the unconscious, the confrontation between the poet and a blank, pitiless, indifferent nature – is not a myth but a theme, an idea, content. So in the famous review of Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry, ‘Canada and Its Poetry,’ we are told, ‘And the winter is only one symbol, though a very obvious one, of the central theme of Canadian poetry: the riddle of what a character in Mair’s Tecumseh calls “inexplicable life.” It is really the riddle of inexplicable death: the fact that life struggles and suffers in a nature, which is blankly indifferent to it.’26 There is a passage in the ‘Preface to an Uncollected Anthology’ that suggests Frye’s uneasiness with the context of nationalism and prefigures the argument of his ‘Preface’ to The Bush Garden. At the close of his ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada, there is a stunning meditation on the disappearance of Canada in a post-Canadian world and the reappearance in the foreground of its old rival as the eternal frontier, the first thing the writer’s imagination must deal with.27 The poetry of the future has been written in Pratt’s The Truant, a science-

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fiction poem about the quarrel between an imp and a sky-god that has strange echoes in bp Nichol’s The Martyrology. Though, in Nichol’s version, language not machines provides the landscape. The argument of the ‘Preface to an Uncollected Anthology’ and the ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada is repeated in The Modern Century, along with an apology for once holding a romantic folklore version of culture.28 But the main attempt at a resolution to the dilemma raised by shifting from a literary to an environmental or nationalistic context is to alter again. Either it has disappeared, as The Modern Century suggests, or it reappeares as locality and region. The Alice-in-Wonderland sense of Frye’s critical world is partly a matter of altered contexts, partly the result of the appearance and disappearance of figures repeating identity questions we thought had been answered. ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where is here?’ Environment and politics reappear in the ‘Preface’ to The Bush Garden, now in somewhat changed forms from their appearance in the earliest essay about ‘Canada and Its Poetry’ or in The Modern Century. The political argument here is impeccable, a defence of a multicultural society against those centrifugal and centripetal forces (called separatism and nationalism) that threaten to destroy it by implosion or explosion. The environmental argument, less tidy, depends on a version of what has been called the geographical fallacy (the flatness of prairie poetry and the soaring lines of B.C. mountain writing), but defining region as place leaves it open to the flanking attack of linguistic regionalism (not to say ethnicity). Frye’s position, of course, restructures his earlier argument about Canadian writing by shifting the question of identification (the central literary question of his work) from its Canadian context: ‘the question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a “Canadian” question at all, but a regional question.’29 But that shifts the political terminology too. Identity is not a political term, but a cultural one. The political question of Canada is a question of unity. ‘Identity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination, and in works of culture; unity is national in reference, international in perspective, and rooted in political feeling ... The tension between this political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality is the essence of whatever the word “Canadian” means.’30 It is difficult to offer less than admiration for this critical performance. An apparently insoluble tension, beginning at the point where theory descends to practice, appears to have been solved or re-solved. Along the way, Frye has taken us through history and literature – wed-

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ding a Laurentian theory of Canadian history with a romantic myth of a descent to the interior, through cultural history – ranging across folkculture theories of nation to modernist internationalism, through the distinction between romanticism and modernism, quest and antithetical quest, art and anti-art, structure and composition by field. If indeed the question a survey of this kind should address itself to is the vexed one of influence, it now seems fair to say that the real influence of Frye is to have shown the precise points where local creation becomes part of the civilized discourse he speaks of as criticism and creativity, the world of wonder, the universe of words. To close by entering a reservation may seem not only graceless but ungenerous. But I would enter two, if only to suggest the more important reply that might be made. One is that the vegetable form of regionalism of Frye’s ‘Preface’ (‘there is always something vegetable about the imagination’) sorts oddly with the equally Blakean vision he consistently urges: ‘All human forms identified.’ The other is to note how younger contemporary regionalists (Kroetsch, Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Jack Hodgins) locate their landscape not in place but in story, in word, in language. It may very well be, then, that a profoundly true critical instinct told Northrop Frye that his Canadian anthology had to remain an uncollected one, and in his own words an ‘ideal,’ one he ‘imagines,’ ‘with no difficulties about permissions, publishers or expenses.’31

notes ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition’ was first published in Eleanor Cook, Chaviva Hosek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker, and Julian Patrick, eds, Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 284–97. 1 Frye, ‘Preface,’ The Bush Garden (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), i. 2 Ibid., x. 3 Ibid., 44–5. Contradiction in Frye seems to have more to do with historical change than logical inconsistency. Occasionally, too, it springs from his love of paradox. For example, he speaks of ‘a quality in Lampman,’ surely the least adventurous of our writers, ‘which links him to our great Canadian explorers, the solitary adventurers among solitudes’ (ibid., 147). It might be useful to think of paradox as a structural principle of his work:

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genesis as apocalypse, for example, in his definition of tradition (the past) as origin (‘Originality [is] largely a matter of returning to origins, of studying and imitating the great poets of the past’ [ibid., 136]). Ibid., 8, 41. Ibid., 75. Ibid., viii. Ibid., ix. Ibid. An important exception can be found in Frank Davey’s comments in From There to Here, which provides a startling rereading of Frye in the light of modernist theories of composition, ‘correcting’ the long-held misreading of ‘myth criticism’ Frye points to here: ‘A … misconception about Frye is that his theories of poetry require a conscious effort by the contemporary poet to incorporate mythology into his writing … Far from resembling the conscious myth-usage of the “Frygians” … Frye’s theory of composition – based on Blake’s dictum, “The authors are in eternity” – resembles that of such contemporary pre-reflective writers as Gerry Gilbert, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering, Victor Coleman, bp Nichol, and Bill Bissett’ (From There to Here [Erin,ON: Press Porcépic, 1974], 110–11). Elsewhere Davey notes that a misconception about the ‘other worldliness’ of this theory of literature as dream and mythology as well as his preference for ‘consciously literary’ writing unfairly links him ‘with an aestheticist and formalist tradition in Canadian writing.’ Davey’s rereading is, itself, problematical, as his version of Reaney’s Suit of Nettles and Macpherson’s The Boatman makes evident. He cannot have read Frye’s reviews of the two books. The Bush Garden, viii. This comment in the ‘Preface’ is picked up again in the last review of the decade: ‘The reviewer knows that he will be read by poets, but he is not addressing them, except indirectly. It is no part of the reviewer’s task to tell the poet how to write or how he should have written. The one kind of criticism that the poet himself, qua poet, engages in – the technical self-criticism which leads to revision and improvement – is a criticism with which the reviewer has nothing to do’ (ibid., 124). Ibid., ix. Interview with John Moss by Geoff Hancock, Books in Canada, 10, 9 (November 1981): 39. Moss identifies ‘thematic criticism’ with what he calls ‘systems criticism.’ This misreading of Frye’s view of myth as ‘systems criticism’ appears to reflect a confusion about the principles of criticism to which Frye refers, and Frye’s account of Canadian romanticism (the fall into modern consciousness) for the advocating of a specific ‘mythological school’ of poetry.

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13 Ibid. 14 The Bush Garden, 148–9. 15 Robert Kroetsch, ‘For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem,’ Dandelion 8, 1 (1981): 61–85. 16 The Bush Garden, 11–12. 17 ‘The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry,’ The Bush Garden, 155. 18 Frye’s review of Carman appears in The Bush Garden, 34–5. The outline of the tradition that follows is suggested variously throughout his reviews in ‘Letters in Canada’ and in his articles in The Bush Garden. 19 Frye, ‘Conclusion’ to Carl F. Klinck’s 1965 edition of Literary History of Canada,’ The Bush Garden, 247–9. 20 Frye,‘Haunted by a Lack of Ghosts,’ in David Staines, ed., The Canadian Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 45. 21 Ibid., 44. 22 Frye, ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada, The Bush Garden, 215–16; ‘of the general principles of cultural history we still know relatively little’; ‘We do not know what the social conditions are that produce great literature, or even whether there is any causal relation at all.’ 23 Frye, ‘Preface to an Uncollected Anthology,’ The Bush Garden, 173. 24 Ibid., 176. 25 Ibid., 178. 26 Ibid., 139. Theme, we note, is content. 27 Ibid., 250. 28 Frye, The Modern Century (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), 53. 29 Frye, ‘Preface,’ The Bush Garden, i, ii. 30 Ibid., iii. Compare especially Ramsay Cook’s comments in his own preface to the second revised edition of The Maple Leaf Forever (Toronto: Macmillan Company of Canada, 1971). 31 To argue that Frye’s criticism is ‘fictional’ is not ‘entirely’ fanciful. Frye himself distinguishes between experiential and traditional (that is, literary) poetry in ‘Canada and Its Poetry’ in The Bush Garden, and resolves the criticism/creativity duality in ‘The Road of Excess,’ in Eli Mandel, ed., Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 125–39. Miriam Waddington, among others, insists on the purely metaphorical nature of thematic criticism. Hence its limitations as a kind of fiction (see her ‘Literary Studies in English,’ Supplement to the Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature [Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1973], 206). In ‘Criticism as Ghost Story,’ Another Time (Erin, ON: Press Porcépic Ltd., 1977), 145–50, I argue that Atwood’s Survival is a ghost story, that is, a fiction.

3.2 Retrieving the Canadian Critical Tradition as Poetry: Eli Mandel and Northrop Frye margery fee

Either a fraud or a magician, the crude choice would seem to be. To which we answer … neither: this is only a story about both. Eli Mandel, ‘Atwood Gothic’ (Another Time, 143)

Eli Mandel is indeed ‘as shifty as a halfback in the open field’ (MacLulich, 119). Tackling him isn’t easy; in fact, some would say it’s impossible even to tell what team he’s playing for. Nonetheless, despite his own unabashed declarations of duplicity, he has taken a more consistent theoretical position on the nature of English-Canadian literature than he is often given credit for. We are best able to locate him by tracing his long intellectual relationship with Northrop Frye, whose theories have, in a sense, pinned the otherwise mercurial Mandel down. On the good days, Mandel’s struggle with Frye is Houdini and the chains; on the bad, it’s Laocoön and the snakes. Broadly put, the difficulty results from Mandel’s putting the poet and the creative imagination first, while Frye puts the critic and analytic reason first.1 Instead of simply dismissing Frye, as so many have lately done, Mandel keeps wrestling, because the appearance of an unbroken Canadian critical tradition is at least as important to him as his particular view of literature. These tensions explain why Mandel has been misread by other critics. In The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Donna Bennett records the fairly common opinion that Mandel is ‘the most literary and wide-ranging’ of the ‘“thematic” critics’ – the other members of that group are Margaret Atwood, D.G. Jones, and John Moss – whose

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critical works are influenced by Northrop Frye’s theories (160). Some, however, argue that Mandel, in both his poetry and his criticism, has shifted away from Frye’s influence. Frank Davey has at least twice argued that Mandel is an anti-thematic critic. In 1974, in From There to Here, Davey singled out Mandel, along with Marshall McLuhan, as announcing ‘the demise of the modernist period and the beginning of a decentralized, “post-electric,” post-modern, non-authoritarian age’ (Introduction, 19). Later, in ‘Surviving the Paraphrase,’ Davey again put Mandel on the side of those who deal with ‘formal complexities’ and ‘technical concerns’ rather than merely attending to ‘extra-literary’ matters such as cultural history (2). According to George Bowering (in ‘Mandel’s Shift’), the shift from a concern with myth and symbol to a concern with language and voice occurred in An Idiot Joy (1967). Both Russell Brown and Peter Stevens suggest that Criticism: The SilentSpeaking Words (1966) marked an important shift from what Mandel called ‘conservative’ criticism focused on interpretation, evaluation, and technique (Criticism, 67) to a ‘savage’ criticism that ‘must risk the excesses of subjectivity and sentimentality if it is going to become human once more’ (71, 72). Although these shifts are generally seen to be from mythopoeic or high-modernist poetry to that of postmodernist process, and from thematic to phenomenological criticism, of course it is not so simple. Certainly Mandel has declared himself to be a phenomenological, or, as he put it, a ‘savage’ critic. Nonetheless, his second book of criticism, Another Time, is, as Russell Brown notes, ‘kinder to thematic studies than is fashionable’ (168). Stevens feels that the explanation for this kindness is that ‘Mandel the Prairie poet cannot escape from Mandel the poet’ (67). Further, that Davey had underestimated the importance to Mandel of both Frye and cultural nationalism becomes clear in Davey’s response to Mandel’s 1981 article ‘Strange Loops: Northrop Frye and Cultural Freudianism’ (reprinted as ‘Strange Loops’ in The Family Romance). Davey stumbles over Mandel’s observation that ‘the most cogent and powerful means of describing Canadian culture through its literary expression has been historically the so-called thematic criticism of Frye’ (Family Romance, 13), commenting hopefully that ‘this statement does not say that Frye’s is the most powerful means of describing Canada’s literature’ (‘Itself,’ 195). Davey expresses surprise at the central position Mandel assigns to Frye, and concludes, ‘Perhaps we should ask him to begin again’ (179). Davey, involved in an institutional struggle to define what should be

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central in Canadian poetry, is eager to enlist Mandel’s aid in fighting what Davey calls the ‘limited perspective of literary nationalism’ (195), and what he sees as the wrong-headedness of a humanism that ‘view[s] its civilization as the fruit of its own heroic struggle against a hostile nature’ instead of ‘a miracle of cosmic process, of a fertile planet, a lifeaffirming universe’ (196). As a result, he consistently misunderstands Mandel, who is struggling to produce what Harold Bloom calls a ‘strong misreading’ of Frye that will rescue thematic criticism from geographical determinism, knee-jerk nationalism, and liberal humanism, while retaining its focus on content and on national and regional definition.2 Mandel is attempting to bend rather than break with the central Canadian critical tradition: a tradition dating from Confederation that consistently defines the Canadian imagination in terms of the Canadian landscape. He does not, however, wish wholly to abandon either cultural nationalism or Northrop Frye. In fact, Mandel is making a concentrated effort to rewrite both from the position he calls ‘cultural Freudianism.’ Thus his shift is not so much a shift from conservative, nationalist modernism to savage, universalist postmodernism as it is a cannibalization of the former from the standpoint of the latter, or, as the title of one of Mandel’s poems puts it, ‘Earthworms Eat Earthworms and Learn’ (Stony Plain). Mandel then adapts the result to resist cultural imperialism: what Kenneth Sherman has called ‘the swallowing of one nation’s ghosts by the more powerful ghosts of another’ (549). In order to rescue the Canadian critical tradition, Mandel first dismantles a central critical distinction of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism – that between literature and criticism: ‘Criticism … is to art what history is to action and philosophy to wisdom’ (12). Frye’s analogy makes literature an object of criticism’s study, as rocks are the object of geology’s. Frye is prepared to admit that ‘We have no real standards to distinguish a verbal structure that is literary from one that is not’ (13) as long as we agree that there should be such a distinction, because criticism ‘has to exist’ as an infant discipline ready to grow up into an academically respectable system (4). Here Frye puts reason ahead of imagination in a way that both Mandel and William Blake would reject. Certainly it is his imaginative ‘savagery’ that causes Mandel to reject Frye’s suggestion that ‘It may … be a scientific element in criticism which distinguishes it from literary parasitism on the one hand, and the superimposed critical attitude on the other’ (Anatomy, 7). And in ‘The Poet as Critic,’ Mandel confesses that he is puzzled by the distinction between poetry and criticism (Another Time, 11–12); elsewhere, he notes that Frye himself finds

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his critical principles in the work of a poet: Blake (‘Toward a Theory,’ 63). Frye’s analogy between criticism and geology breaks down, finally, because rocks can’t read. Poets and novelists, however, both read and write criticism, and so the arm’s-length, objective, scientific relationship that Frye feels ought to exist between literature and criticism is, in fact, an incestuous muddle. Once the wall between poetry and criticism is down, the barbarian can move into the ruins. Mandel can now accept the influential perceptions of Canadian critics, historians, and cultural philosophers as among the fictions that, according to Robert Kroetsch, ‘mak[e] us real’ (quoted in Mandel, Another Time, 67). Because he is prepared to ‘explain away contradictions’ in Frye’s critical writings on Canadian literature ‘by reference to his poetic style and method’ (Mandel, ‘Northrop Frye,’ 284), he need not pretend to ignore Frye’s enormous influence, as Davey does, and yet can attack those of Frye’s ideas he does not like. Thus he writes, in ‘Criticism as Ghost Story,’ of the issues that haunt us: ‘in what sense could a thematic or mythic version of a national literature be taken as serious social comment?’ (Another Time, 147). His answer is that such writings have ‘power as a structural feature of Canadian life’ (149). Unfortunately, nonsensical, mistaken beliefs, such as the belief in the natural inferiority of certain groups, have very real effects. To take a literary example, the widespread belief of critics, writers, artists, and readers that Canada’s harsh northern climate in some sense explains our culture may be total nonsense (indeed Mandel and I agree that it is), but it has supported some good art (the painting of the Group of Seven), and almost all English-Canadian literary criticism, both good and mediocre. Thematic or mythic versions of Canada cannot be overlooked or dismissed as ‘defensive’ or ‘Canada-besieged’ (Davey, ‘Itself,’ 196), however much we disagree with them. They are, finally, too powerful. They must be misread, reviewed, ‘retrieved as poetry’ (Mandel, ‘Northrop Frye,’ 284). Mandel cannot simply either refute or ignore Frye for another reason. Despite Frye’s skill at synthesis, his writing is not a monolith. He is at least double, if not duplicitous, and Mandel consistently champions the Frye of the Blakean imagination against the geographical determinist found in much of the Canadian criticism. Mandel faces contradictions such as one found in Frye’s ‘The Road of Excess’ (1963), a paper that Mandel included in his collection Contexts of Canadian Criticism. Here Frye dismantles the wall he himself erected between poetry and criticism in the Anatomy:

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In Blake there is no either-or dialectic where one must be either a detached spectator or a preoccupied actor. Hence there is no division, though there may be a distinction, between the creative power of shaping the form and the critical power of seeing the world it belongs to. Any division instantly makes art barbaric and the knowledge of it pedantic. (139)

Thus Mandel needs Frye, because it is often Frye he is using to refute Frye. The formalist-structuralist theory of the Anatomy, a product of the international Frye, reflects, according to Terry Eagleton and others, a formalism ‘even more full-blooded than that of New Criticism’: ‘nothing external can be allowed to infiltrate it lest its categories are deranged’ (Eagleton 92). At home, Frye has been attacked for something completely different: he is, as Davey, for example, argues, too involved with Canadian reality and too much of a cultural nationalist. Certainly, because he places most Canadian literature outside the charmed circle he draws around great literature, he feels able to stress its political and social context. Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada (1965), probably his most influential and widely disseminated essay on Canadian literature, states 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.’ Such literature, he concludes, ‘is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature’ (The Bush Garden, 214). Here Frye implies that our literature can be best comprehended by locating Canada in time and space. For Frye, the Canadian sensibility ‘is less perplexed by the question “Who am I?” than by some such riddle as “Where is here?”’ (220). Mandel’s most decisive attack is on this focus in Frye and others, which he calls ‘environmentalism,’ after McLuhan (Introduction, 14); ‘vulgar sociology,’ after Marx (5); ‘the spectres of time or space,’ after Blake (Criticism, 64); and ‘the geographical fallacy,’ after Milton Wilson (Introduction, 23). Frank Davey is, to some extent, vindicated in that Mandel, in ‘Strange Loops,’ says that the ‘central metaphor’ of thematic criticism links literature and the environment: ‘Frye’s central point is that the formative response in Canadian writing is to a dominant physical fact – the land as wilderness or north as symbol’ (Family Romance, 14). Mandel’s favourite refutation of geographical determinism comes from Paul Hiebert’s Sarah Binks, where Rosalind Drool, the critic, comments of the ‘Sweet Songstress of Saskatchewan,’ ‘Unschooled, but unspoiled,

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this simple country girl has captured in her net of poesy the flatness of that great province’ (xix, xviii). Mandel also specifically attacks one of Frye’s most influential aphorisms: ‘the outstanding achievement of Canadian poetry is in the evocation of stark terror’ (Bush Garden, 138). He comments that in environmentalism, ‘literature appear[s] as a reflection of environment: detached, ironic, remote, or “the evocation of stark terror”’ (Introduction, 14). This view of ‘literature as a reflection of environment’ (Another Time, 46) leads to the reduction of the power of the imagination and of literature itself: ‘When we describe literature in social terms we tend at once to turn it into an imitative rather than a formulative art.’ As a result, literature becomes ‘secondary,’ ‘caused,’ ‘incomplete or partial’ (Criticism, 58). Mandel promotes the priority of the imagination: ‘Society, like politics, becomes a formal element of literature, not a cause of it’ (60). He concludes that, ‘far from being a determinism, an environment may be a human creation’ (Introduction, 9). Typically, Frye has elsewhere refuted the geographical fallacy himself, naming it ‘the Ferdinand the Bull theory of poetry,’ which assumes ‘that the true poet will go into the fields and smell the flowers and not spoil the freshness of his vision by ruining his eyesight on books’ (The Bush Garden, 135–6). Frye also insists, and Mandel quotes this passage in italics in ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition’ (292), that ‘When a poet is confronted by a new life or environment, the new life may suggest a new content, but obviously cannot provide him with a new form. The forms of poetry can be derived only from other poems …’ (The Bush Garden, 173). If we accept this, however, then we accept that what distinguishes Canadian literature from other literatures is mere content, and thematic criticism is just as misguided and simpleminded as Davey says. But to turn our backs on thematic criticism, as some contemporary critics suggest we should, is to fall into an even more treacherous swamp. Both Frye and Mandel are struggling in it: if we can’t clearly distinguish Canadian literature from other literatures, especially American and British, then it vanishes as a subject. Frye says that the good poet does not simply look for content, but for myth, a word that implies both content and form at the same time: ‘When we look for the qualities in Canadian poetry that illustrate the poet’s response to the specific environment that we call approximately Canada, we are really looking for the mythopeic qualities in that poetry’ (178). Mandel replies: We may be looking for myth, but we won’t, I submit, find it. We will find only content. Frye’s much praised account of the romantic myth in Cana-

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dian poetry – a symbolic response to the environment, the riddle of the unconscious, the confrontation between the poet and a blank, pitiless, indifferent nature – is not a myth but a theme, an idea, content. (‘Northrop Frye,’ 292)

Mandel’s main tactic in salvaging Canadian literature is to note that the debate between the environmentalists and the formalists, or between what he terms the ‘sociohistorical’ and the ‘autotelic’ (Introduction, 21), a debate that seems to be going on within Frye, is based on an illegitimately identified dichotomy between content and form. His argument emerges in a discussion of McLuhan: Like Blake’s giant Albion, the environmentalist critic who sees an overwhelming physical landscape around him has splintered his senses and speaks with eyes rather than with tongues. The duality of form and content, in other words, or of ‘figure’ and ‘ground,’ or of self and landscape, exists as a perceptual flaw and can be resolved as soon as the single or framing perspective becomes multiple or mosaic. This, McLuhan’s organizing image, means simply that the content of any one medium (form or technology) is another medium, and that the development of a new form turns its content into a work of art, and art ‘is a means of perceiving the environment itself.’ (Introduction, 19–20)3

Thus the dualistic battle is transformed in a widened perspective: Mandel comments that ‘the Canadian dilemma is only a local version of the endlessly recurrent demands of imagination and reason’ (22). Generally, Mandel is looking at literature imaginatively, Frye rationally, but their perspectives, like content and form, are ultimately interdependent. Neither extreme of this continuum is finally a valid position for Mandel, as he makes clear in ‘Banff: The Magic Mountain,’ where he sets out the dialectic as one between the radical and the formalist critic. On the one hand, Mandel says, quoting George Orwell, that radicals should not reduce literature completely to its material or ideological relations: ‘there has to be a residuum of something [in literature] that simply is not affected by its moral or meaning – a residuum of something we call art’ (Another Time, 158). Here he disagrees with ‘the new nationalists, determinedly parochial, refusing to allow poetry to relinquish its commitment to specific social conditions,’ and counters the argument of vulgar Marxists (‘Masks,’ 25). On the other hand, the formalists should

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not cut literature off completely from its contexts, but ‘must finally admit the extent to which writing is local, particular, regional, and therefore, in Canadian terms, native in its concerns and interests’ (Another Time, 158–9). Naturally Mandel has shifted more than once. His second shift, from the nationalism of Contexts of Canadian Criticism (1971) to the regionalism of Another Time (1977), was first evident in the poetry and title of Stony Plain (1973). Five years later came the parallel puns of the two titles Out of Place and Another Time.4 In those books, he tackles the spectres of time and space head on: out of place on the prairie where he was born, he writes self-consciously out of place. This shift was not an accident of nostalgia, or worse, a lapse into the romantic belief that only in our roots can we find an authentic poetic voice. Anyone, even a ‘Jewish Tennysonian’ can write westerns, Mandel points out (Family Romance, 62), citing Michael Ondaatje’s admiration for the Italian film director Sergio Leone’s Once upon a Time in the West (72), and admitting his debt to Leslie Fiedler’s concept of the mythic western. For Mandel, poetry begins in displacement; when as a child he suddenly realized that he was ‘the abandoned child of Martian royalty ... poetry [became] possible’ (ix). In part, political concern motivated this shift to regionalism in Mandel, as it did in the cases of many Canadian thinkers. Frye’s regionalist preface to The Bush Garden (1971) was clearly a response to what he labelled the ‘reactionary’ ‘introverted malaise’ of separatism, which found for Frye its extreme in ‘the squalid neo-fascism of the FLQ terrorists’ (iv, v). For Mandel, whose first working title for Stony Plain was ‘War Measures’ (‘Interview’ [Fee] 10), the shift also originated in the FLQ crisis. Clearly both were more devoted to national political unity than to national cultural homogeneity. Indeed the word ‘nation’ implies a cultural homogeneity that Canada has never had. John Porter opposed the image of the Canadian vertical mosaic to that of the American melting pot; in his preface to The Bush Garden, Frye resolved the problem in a formula that Mandel has quoted approvingly several times: ‘Identity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in works of culture; unity is national in reference, international in perspective, and rooted in a political feeling’ (ii). In other words, Quebec or any other region should have its cultural, but not its political independence. Again Mandel approves of only part of Frye’s argument, since although here Frye says that identity is rooted in the imagination, earlier

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in the same preface he makes a strongly environmentalist version of the same point, asking, what can there be in common between an imagination nurtured on the prairies, where it is a centre of consciousness diffusing itself over a vast flat expanse stretching to the remote horizon, and one nurtured in British Columbia, where it is in the midst of gigantic trees and mountains leaping into the sky all around it, and obliterating the horizon everywhere? (ii)

Mandel’s response is that ‘the vegetable form of regionalism of Frye’s “Preface” ... sorts oddly with the equally Blakean vision he consistently urges: “All human forms identified”’ (‘Northrop Frye,’ 294). Despite his prairie roots, then, Mandel shifted not for personal reasons so much as for political and theoretical ones. He had already written about his prairie childhood, but in order to write about his own community he had to confront the question of how to be ‘a Jew in a goyisha land’ (Another Time, 95). The Quebec minority is only one minority, and Mandel is constantly aware of what it is to have one’s community overlooked by Upper Canadian thinkers. The dominant central Canadian myth is Anglo-Protestant, despite the forays by Scots from Sara Jeannette Duncan to Margaret Laurence, and by Roman Catholics from Morley Callaghan to Hugh Hood. Mordecai Richler and Irving Layton have declined the contest; neither believes that if you can’t lick them you should join them. Thus Richler, in The Incomparable Atuk, attacks the Canadian myth rather than trying to rewrite it, while Layton depends for much of his poetic energy on an anti-establishment stance. Mandel, however, is well aware of the satirist’s sin of self-righteousness. To attack the powerful is often to abdicate the responsibility of working out a better way. Thus, Mandel is able to praise Frye’s political argument in the regionalist preface to The Bush Garden, calling it an ‘impeccable … defence of a multicultural society’ (‘Northrop Frye,’ 293). But other nationalist thinkers do not fare so well. (I would argue that Frye’s move to regionalism is ultimately a nationalist tactic, since it was aimed at preserving national unity.) Nationalist arguments are, generally, unlikely to support any ethnic vision other than the dominant one. Mandel’s article on George Grant is an attempt to see exactly why Dennis Lee, a friend of Mandel’s, admires Grant enough to write, in ‘Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space,’ that ‘for months after I read his essays I felt a surge of release and exhilaration … the somber Canadian has enabled us to

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say for the first time where we are, who we are – to become articulate’ (45). Grant, a conservative, culminates an old tradition in Canada, the promotion of the United Empire Loyalist as the Canadian ancestor. The Loyalist myth asserted Canada’s ties with Britain against the spectre of annexation by the United States and helped to stay the restive French-Canadian opposition.5 The Canadian imperialist movement (1867–1914), in which both of Grant’s grandfathers were active, used this myth to support their vision of a renewed empire where the white settler colonies were partners with Britain. The proponents of the myth tended to overlook anything that violated their concept of Canada’s purely British origins, including the settlement of the prairies by a vast range of people of various cultures. Mandel’s argument does justice to those parts of Grant’s argument that deserve it. However, he does ask, with what can only be described as admirable self-control, ‘What is the significance of speaking about “Christian man” as “the finest flower … western civilization has produced?”’ (Family Romance, 90), and remarks of a comment that dismisses the importance of Roman Catholics, Jews, and ethnic communities to North American culture that it is ‘not worthy of serious intellectual discourse’ (98). This self-control proves, I think, that Mandel’s recurrent tendency to lay out both sides of any argument is not the result of confusion or a failure of critical courage, but the result of a belief that mudslinging cannot destroy a tradition. Just whose cultural myth becomes current is not an issue that can be settled by hand-to-hand combat. And ultimately, he counters Grant’s discovery of Canada in the Loyalist tradition with another tradition. He follows Frye’s argument in the preface to The Bush Garden (an argument also found in Ramsay Cook’s The Maple Leaf Forever): ‘Historically, at least, the regional-national tension makes more sense now than the loyalism of Grant’ (Family Romance, 98). The shift to regionalism is also, for Mandel, a shift from one theory of culture to another: One, elitist, privileged in language and status, non-historical in relation to truth and society; the other, popular, particularist in language, and experiential in form; one, more than likely, high in its literary criticism, formal in structure, continuous in form; the other, low or vulgar in approach, phenomenological in structure, discontinuous in form. (Family Romance, 12)

Thus to write, and to write about prairie literature, or any regional lit-

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erature, for that matter, is to reject the central, the monolithic, the imperial culture of the best that has been thought and said. How is it that the shift to regionalism, which, as Mandel points out in ‘Images of Prairie Man’ (Another Time), has a tradition of geographical determinism, too, solves so many problems? Regionalism, even of the environmentalist kind, differs from nationalism in one major respect: it is not necessarily political. As soon as it becomes political, as in Quebec, it becomes nationalist. To avoid the political, however, is to enact the major failure of formalism, the failure to connect literature with society. If we follow Mandel in seeing the ‘environment as a creation of literature’ (Another Time, 46), that environment has to be a social environment, and all social environments must include the political. Mandel says, We have been dreamed by our fiction. A preposterous claim, surely. Those clumsy tales. Those distortions. The exaggeration. The falsification of history. How little to the point about the labour movement of the thirties, about Jewish immigrant families in Hirsch or Hoffer, Saskatchewan, about narrow cities in their pride and greed and oil. Only, say, Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House to tell of how (in Grove’s phrase) the wilderness uses up human material. Only Robert Stead’s Grain, a creaking vehicle for the realities of farm life. We expected the land itself would speak, as Grove dreamed it might, but it has not been so. Not the land, but art. Not experience, but vision. (66)

Art speaks, and so it can tell lies, too. Literature reduces politics as much as politics reduces literature. Thus the absence of Jewish immigrants, of the labour movement, of any critique of metropolitan exploitation of the hinterland. And in noticing this absence, Mandel makes an admission that opens his argument up to the criticisms Daniel Drache makes in his response to ‘Strange Loops’: In my perspective, environmentalism is really not about geography but about ‘totems,’ ‘myths,’ ‘superstitions’ which explain nothing and offer false answers to complex issues … cultural theories which rely on the primacy of geography to explain the development of Canada or to account for our regional character are an ideological mask. (198)

Drache’s point is telling, although to take it to the extreme would be to

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dismiss art as merely ideological, ignoring the complexities of its social function, not to mention its appeal and mystery. The sense of place as language that Mandel offers up to geographical determinism largely ignores economics, class, history. In his idealization of the power of the imagination, Mandel is uneasily aware that he has avoided dealing with art as ideology. If, as Mandel says, ‘literature … judges us’ (Criticism, 49), we are morally responsible for the exaggerations, the falsifications, the distortions, for our own culture, our own myths. We choose, and the choice is ultimately a moral one: ‘We would be badly mistaken if we accepted a shallow cultural myth’ (‘Interview’ [Arnason, Cooley, and Enright] 76). The strangeness of the important theoretical article ‘Strange Loops: Northrop Frye and Cultural Freudianism’ seems to result from Mandel’s attempt to overcome the obvious gaps between culture and politics and literature and society created by his shift to mythic regionalism. Mandel’s attraction to Frye from the first, after all, had been bound up with his hope that Frye’s theories would provide a way of relating society and literature: ‘What is sought for is a conception of criticism as at once disinterested and engaged with social reality’ (Mandel, ‘Toward a Theory,’ 65). In Criticism: The Silent-Speaking Words (1966), Mandel says that Frye, ‘Without violating either the integrity of individual works or the autonomy of art itself … seeks to provide an account of literature which will allow us to speak of its social significance’ (39). In 1983, he comments that Frye’s attitude, set forth in the ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada, that Canadian literature should be studied as part of Canadian life ‘encourages me in this attempt to view history and literature as significantly connected, the purpose of one discipline reflecting the intent of the other’ (Family Romance, 31). But the environmentalist strain in Frye proved consistently problematic: geography, after all, is not society or history.6 And of course, as various critics of Frye’s international theory point out, his archetypal patterns remain distant from engagement in the social world. In ‘Strange Loops,’ Mandel lays out a more detailed description of thematic criticism than he has anywhere else, and thus this article deserves careful reading. He labels Frye’s approach to Canadian literature ‘cultural Freudianism’ (think of the garrison mentality), keeps the approach he previously called ‘environmentalism’ as ‘literary geography,’ and adds a literary sociology, ‘more often than not Marxist,’ which sees literature as ‘a product of society and accordingly a portrait not

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of its external features but of its very nature and mode of operation.’ Although ‘no one has yet made sense of the so-called causal relations between literature and society,’ he says that Taken together, these three views constitute, as many argue they do, a psychological, geographical, and sociological portrait of Canada and hence an image of its character invaluable for the particularized sense of felt life of the country, not only its general features but its very textures. (Family Romance, 18)

What is Mandel up to here? First, he is laying out the possibilities of thematic criticism, both actual and potential, rather than reducing it simply to a geographic determinism. He is making it remarkably attractive. But he says that the role of this criticism is not to explain the connections between literature and society, even though its authors may think it does, but to produce an inevitably fictive or mythic Canada. He grants this ‘image of [Canada’s] character’ and nature what he calls here ‘a convincing metaphoric position’ (Family Romance, 18). Then he continues the discussion by sandwiching a post-structuralist critic, Robert Kroetsch, between two thematic critics, Atwood and Moss. He avoids the need to deal with Moss’s problematic thesis in Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel by saying he has not read the book. He then elevates its theoretical importance by saying that he has ‘heard’ that it is ‘modelled on Leslie Fiedler’s wonderful Love and Death in the American Novel’ (19). Finally, he brings in the regionalist Frye of The Bush Garden, omitting any reference to the vegetable imagination, and uses Frye’s authority to suggest that thematic criticism transferred to a regional plain is thematic criticism transformed: a regionalist criticism ‘refers to “destructive poetics” which seek to demystify tradition, that is, literary history, traditional forms and structures’ (19). His use of the word ‘destructive’ is taken from Paul Bové’s Destructive Poetics, where it is used to mean, roughly, ‘postmodernist.’ He continues, to suggest that the shift to regionalism ‘involves the substitution of process, discontinuity, the poetry of flux and phenomena and the substitution of selfreflexive forms of strange loops or paradoxes of self, for the timeless structures of the work of art outside of time (the artifices of eternity, in Yeats’ phrase)’ (19). Then he dusts off his hands and moves right along to the next section. Clearly, this is either a misreading or a joke. I suspect that Frye’s work does not fit well with ‘destructive,’ that is, postmodernist poet-

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ics, and certainly Atwood and Moss, as critics, do not belong in the same paragraph as Kroetsch. Further, Frye is looming a lot larger in Mandel’s argument than he looms in the world of Canadian literary criticism these days. I conclude that Mandel once again is transforming the old tradition into food for the new one. But why? Simply because he can’t bear to waste all those brilliantly written pages? Claude LéviStrauss has suggested that ‘the trickster is a mediator’ and that, ‘since his mediating function occupies a position halfway between two polar terms, he must retain something of that duality – namely an ambiguous and equivocal character’ (310). When thematic criticism was dominant in Canada, Mandel reacted by pulling towards formalism; now that thematic criticism is under the gun from those who feel language, rather than society, should be the critical focus, he pulls back towards an admittedly revisionist form of thematic criticism. (I say revisionist because Mandel has rather drastically revised thematic criticism, while disingenuously implying that his version of thematic criticism originates with Frye.) Mandel thus transforms himself into the pivot point, the hinge, the mediator between two extremes of critical thought in Canada, one that focuses on the figure, and one that focuses on the ground. His writing obsessively follows the pattern of myth as described by social anthropologist Edmund Leach: ‘myths tell the same story over and over again, and always a story involving a dualism resolved by a monstrous or holy third’ (Another Time, 149). If there is a weakness in Mandel’s approach, it is not in his shiftiness, which is ultimately more honest than an inevitably feigned consistency. Because Mandel attempts to reconcile the entire Canadian critical tradition, he might be suspected of a desire for unity and stasis, but the self-deconstructive nature of his tactics counters this possibility. Perhaps inevitably, the major weakness in Mandel is also a weakness in the Canadian tradition as a whole: the absence of any tradition of Marxist analysis of culture. Geographical determinism, given the simplistic quality of its explanation of the relation between Canadian society and culture, only deserves the long and careful critique that Mandel has devoted to it because of its ubiquity. Contemporary Marxist analysis has long since compensated for its simplistic determinism by untying itself from a monolithic political movement and becoming a field of philosophy. The failure of Mandel’s usually omnivorous appetite when confronted with this approach, given his ostensible interest in the relations between society and literature, makes me wonder if Mandel senses that here is an analysis that challenges his resolution of the problem of iden-

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tity in myth: ‘if there is a distinctive regional prairie literature, it would have to be, in Fiedler’s terms, mythic’ (Another Time, 48). If we accept the western as a regional myth, we instantly have to face the critique produced, in response to Leslie Fiedler, by Jack Brenner in his essay ‘Canada and the Invention of the Western’: the western myth is both sexist and imperialist. Indeed, Mandel apologizes for his ‘paternal’ approach in the preface to The Family Romance (xii). Thus, although the shift to regionalism has solved some of the problems caused by the nationalist ideological underpinnings of earlier Canadian criticism, it has definitely failed to solve them all. Certainly it is better to base our cultural myth on the freedom of the imagination than on the passive domination of the senses by geography. But to postulate a human imagination freed from its time and place is to fail to cope with the ideological nature of art. Further, the use of the word ‘myth’ valorizes the past in the way Paul Bové sees as suspect in Harold Bloom, Northrop Frye, and others, whose work ‘nostalgically reif[ies] an aesthetically ordered, often humanistic, tradition as an alternative to the radical flux, disorder, alienation and death which characterize the Postmodern world’ (Bové, ix–x). Bové’s comment about Bloom’s idea of a tradition formed by struggles between ‘strong poets’ explains what is going on between Frye, the strong father critic, and Mandel, the son: ‘Bloom’s idea of “difference” is carefully designed not to allow for any radical break from the tradition and, therefore, for real discontinuity – if such is possible – but merely for “swerves” away from the immediate predecessor at a certain point of his achievement’ (15). By focusing on a transformed regionalism, Mandel is able to shift from modernist to postmodernist, and to shift his use of the term regional to convey praise rather than disparagement. To define the regional essentially as the self-reflexive is, as Frank Watt remarks, for Mandel to revise the term ‘to the point where he at last was able to apply it to all the books that he likes’ (123–4). Similarly, Frye used the old romantic nationalist framework of his predecessor-critics, but rewrote the tradition (in ‘The Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry,’ written in 1946 and reprinted in The Bush Garden) in order to insert his favourite poet, E.J. Pratt, at the end of it. A new literary content is inserted into the old critical forms, forms that themselves have a content: region, nation, landscape. In both Frye and Mandel, the need to maintain a tradition is so great as to warp logic and to require considerable rhetorical fancy footwork. Ultimately, the need to maintain the tradition is, as

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Bové points out, a legacy of humanism. Bové remarks that ‘Any break in the unified tradition might introduce change as a threat to the stable identity of the ego or to the narcissistic will’ (15). In Canada, the most problematic identity has always been the national identity: to abandon it completely is, for critics such as Mandel and Frye, to abandon part of their own identity as Canadian writers. Mandel is perhaps better equipped to face this problematic issue than many others, as he has always realized how many groups don’t fit into the mainstream version of the national identity. Further, in his general, as opposed to his Canadian criticism, which I have almost entirely neglected here, Mandel reveals not only that he has read widely, but also that he has the ability to adapt, amend, revise, criticize. In his Canadian criticism, he has generally remained within the boundary drawn by Canadian thinkers, notably Frye. Although he has implied that the ideal for the critic is ‘to transcend the family to become one’s own voice’ (‘Eli Mandel,’ 108), he does not. He never abandons his habits of massive and eclectic citation and of overtly inserting his own arguments into dense networks of cultural myth and critical discourse. And this is certainly not the result of any lack of theoretical sophistication or flexibility, since he has consistently been at the forefront of theoretical developments in Canada. His refusal to grow up and leave home, the goal of all good western individuals, reflects his inability to forget his family – the Canadians, the Jews – who have always (to varying degrees, obviously) been relegated to the category of Other in Western culture. Only those who have convinced themselves that they belong everywhere can delude themselves and us into thinking that they have their own voice. Similarly, Mandel has resisted the infinite-play varieties of post-structuralism, retaining a focus on the personal and the cultural that is revealed by his use of phenomenological and psychological ideas. Mandel has always situated his creativity, critical and poetic, at the margins, just outside the walls of the accepted. Rather than reifying the humanistic tradition, he remains in an agonistic relation to it: the black sheep, the trickster, the Martian foster child, the barbarian.

notes ‘Retrieving the Canadian Critical Tradition as Poetry: Eli Mandel and Northrop Frye’ was first published in Essays on Canadian Writing 45/46 (1991–2): 235–53.

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I would like to thank several people for commenting on drafts of this paper, including Connie Rooke, who originally asked me to write it, Donna Bennett, Ian MacLaren, and Smaro Kamboureli, who kindly permitted me to read her paper on Mandel in manuscript. 1 Kamboureli (‘The Poet as Critic’) describes the relationship between Mandel and Frye this way: ‘Mandel’s admiration of Frye’s work … resembl[es] the kind of love affair whose continuity depends largely on the partners continually breaking up’ (115). 2 According to Harold Bloom, the poetic tradition since Shakespeare can be described in Freud’s words as a ‘family romance,’ where ‘strong’ poets are engaged in Oedipal struggles with their predecessors. The critical tradition is similar: ‘Critics are more or less valuable than other critics only (precisely) as poets are more or less valuable than other poets. For just as a poet must be found by the opening in a precursor poet, so must the critic. The difference is that a critic has more parents. His precursors are poets and critics’ (Anxiety of Influence, 95). Mandel discusses some of his ‘fathers’ in the Meyer interview (‘Eli Mandel’), and confesses his strong attraction to Bloom’s ideas in the preface to The Family Romance. 3 See Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media. 4 I succumb to the temptation here to say Mandel should have called Black and Secret Man, Out of Sight, and then he could have called An Idiot Joy, Out of Mind, and Life Sentence, Out of Time. 5 See Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power. 6 In ‘Banff: The Magic Mountain,’ Mandel, perhaps aware that to label Frye, Jones, and Atwood geographical determinists did not do justice to their work, briefly seems to toy with the idea of constructing thematic criticism as a version of formalism by conflating Frye’s international criticism with his Canadian criticism: ‘the most influential kind of literary criticism in Canada, the thematic criticism of writers like Margaret Atwood and Doug Jones, derives from the work of Northrop Frye, himself an extraordinarily powerful cultural and political force and the foremost theoretician of the aesthetics of formalism’ (Another Time, 157).

works cited Bennett, Donna. ‘Criticism in English.’ In William Toye, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 149–66. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983.

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Berger, Carl. The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Bové, Paul. Destructive Poetics: Heidegger and Modern American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Bowering, George. ‘Mandel’s Shift.’ Craft Slices, 70–2. Ottawa: Oberon, 1985. Brenner, Jack. ‘Response: Canada and the Invention of the Western: A Meditation on the Other Side of the Border.’ In Dick Harrison, ed., Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature, 99–104. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1979. Brown, Russell M. ‘Critic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 11 (1978): 151–83. Davey, Frank. Introduction. From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature since 1960, 11–15. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1974. Vol. 2 of Our Nature – Our Voices. 2 vols. 1971–4. – ‘Itself a “Strange Loop”: A Comment on Eli Mandel’s “Northrop Frye and Cultural Freudianism.”’ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 6,1–2 (1982): 195–7. – ‘Surviving the Paraphrase.’ Surviving the Paraphrase: Eleven Essays on Canadian Literature, 1–12. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1983. Drache, Daniel. ‘Drowning in the Metaphysics of Space.’ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 6,1–2 (1982): 198–9. Eagleton, Terry. ‘Structuralism and Semiotics.’ Literary Theory: An Introduction, 79–109. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. – The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. – ‘The Road of Excess.’ In Eli Mandel, ed., Contexts of Canadian Criticism, 125–39. Patterns of Literary Criticism 9. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Hiebert, Paul. Author’s Introduction. In Sarah Binks, xv–xxi. New Canadian Library 44. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964. Kamboureli, Smaro. ‘The Poet as Critic: Eli Mandel’s The Family Romance.’ In Ed Jewinski and Andrew Stubbs, eds, The Politics of Art: Eli Mandel’s Poetry and Criticism, 105–20. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Lee, Dennis. ‘Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space.’ Open Letter 2nd ser., 6 (1973): 34–53. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. ‘The Structural Study of Myth.’ In Vernon W. Gras, ed., European Literary Theory and Practice: From Existential Phenomenology to Structuralism, 289–316. New York: Dell-Delta, 1973.

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MacLulich, T.D. ‘Don’t Read This Book.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 30 (1984–5): 115–23. Mandel, Eli. Another Time. Three Solitudes: Contemporary Literary Criticism in Canada 3. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1977. – Criticism: The Silent-Speaking Words. Toronto: CBC Publications, 1966. – ‘Eli Mandel: Double Vision.’ With Bruce Meyer and Brian O’Riordan. In Bruce Meyer and Brian O’Riordan, eds, In Their Words: Interviews with Fourteen Canadian Writers, 106–13. Toronto: Anansi, 1984. – The Family Romance. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1986. – ‘An Interview with Eli Mandel.’ With Margery Fee. Essays on Canadian Writing 1 (1974): 2–13. – ‘Interview with Eli Mandel, March 16/78.’ With David Arnason, Dennis Cooley, and Robert Enright. Essays on Canadian Writing 18–19 (1980): 70–89. – Introduction. In Eli Mandel, ed., Contexts of Canadian Criticism, 3–25. Patterns of Literary Criticism 9. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. – ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition.’ In Eleanor Cook, et al., eds, Centre and Labyrinth:Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, 284–97. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. – Stony Plain. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1973. – ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Revolution.’ Canadian Literature 1 (1959): 58–67. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw, 1964. Sherman, Kenneth. Review of The Family Romance, by Eli Mandel. Dalhousie Review 67 (1987–8): 546–50. Stevens, Peter. ‘Poet as Critic as Prairie Poet.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 18–19 (1980): 54–69. Watt, Frank. Response to Eli Mandel’s ‘The Regional Novel: Borderline Art.’ In Charles Steele, ed., Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel, 113–29. Downsview, ON: ECW, 1982.

3.3 Against Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye eleanor cook

‘There are advantages, indeed, in coming from a large, flat country that nobody wants to visit.’1 This is not myself speaking: it is T.S. Eliot, and the Flatland whereof he speaks is not Canada, but in fact Canada’s two nearest neighbours, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. Those who ‘came from’ were Henry James and Ivan Turgenev, so that ‘coming from’ means not only ‘born and brought up in’ but also ‘leaving.’ Eliot ‘came from’ the United States in both senses, and he knew the twofold advantage for himself of having done so. This essay is about Northrop Frye in relation to Canadian criticism, and I begin at the only possible beginning: the immense gratitude that Frye comes from Canada in one sense and not the other, that he has chosen not to leave Canada. To quote Francis Sparshott: ‘It matters to all of us that Frye has taken it for granted that Victoria College, Toronto, is quite a natural place for a world figure to be … like Kant in Koenigsberg, [his] removal from one particular spot would seem like a violation of the natural order.’2 The mathematical formula for the work of Northrop Frye is 4 plus 1 (or so I have always thought), where ‘plus’ is sometimes the mathematical sign (+) but more often the word ‘plus’ in a metaphorical not an additive sense. My essay also takes this formula, though I fear only in the additive sense. It is divided into four parts plus a conclusion. I begin with the general thesis that a good many misreadings of Frye come from reading him as a monist and underestimating the dialectical principle that informs his work from start to finish. Second, I’ll speak briefly of a few trends in recent Canadian criticism in relation to Frye’s work: developments from it, quarrels with it, departures from it. Third,

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I’ll touch on Eli Mandel’s difficulty with Frye’s criticism of Canadian literature, Mandel’s argument being that we find only theme criticism in this part of Frye’s work – a monism of theme, so to speak. Fourth, I’ll suggest an indirect answer to that difficulty: not so much Frye’s passing comments on formal aspects of Canadian literature, excellent as these are. Rather, the form itself of the Anatomy of Criticism, which is not just anatomy but also confession. Perhaps indeed this combination of anatomy and confession is a peculiarly Canadian form, as some Canadian writing suggests. I shall end with an exegesis of two sentences from Anatomy of Criticism which I think have never been read. In one sense, the whole essay is a response to Eli Mandel’s ongoing dialogue with Northrop Frye. First then, the matter of ‘monism.’ Here is a definition of ‘monism’: ‘the philosophic view of the world which holds that there is but one form of reality, whether that be material or spiritual.’3 The term, invented by Christian Wolff before 1754, did not come into English until 1862, and two of the three examples in the Oxford English Dictionary are theological rather than philosophical. Example 1a is from a work on Hinduism, for which ‘the establishment of monism, or non-duality, is most essential. They [the Vedantins] wish to make out the soul to be Brahma, and the world to be false; whence it would follow, that Brahma solely is true, and that naught but him exists.’ Example 1c, 1872, is from a work on Christian doctrine. ‘Against the dualism of the Manicheans, Augustine defends the monism of the good principle.’ The statement about Augustine is true, and yet Augustine’s so-called monism is so different in kind from Hindu monism as to constitute a separate meaning; it should not be just number 1c of a single entry. Here are some uses of the term ‘monism,’ as applied to Frye: (1) the loose, general, and I think acceptable, sense of someone who conceives of the works of literature as forming a total verbal order rather than an aggregate (thus Francis Sparshott).4 (2) Wayne Booth, in his book, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. For Booth, the contrast is with pluralism, the situation is one of various criticisms, the problem escalates into the so-called ‘colonizing’ of Frye’s ‘monism’ (a wonderful thought to a Canadian); Booth is in danger of confusing the pluralism of a liberal democracy and the critical pluralism which is a contrast to Frye’s total order of words.5 Sometimes the word ‘monist’ is not used but the attitudes are anti-monist. Such attitudes range from the windiest militant trash all the way to a thoughtful challenge like Mandel’s, to which I shall return.

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You may have anticipated the direction that my argument will take. For there is something close to contradiction in the two examples in the OED. Monism on the model of Brahma is not monism on the model of Christianity. In fact, only in what were judged heretical forms of Christianity was the individual absorbed back into the Godhead with loss of self, loss of individuality. It is this model of monism that lies behind notions of Frye as imperial power wanting to colonize out from Toronto through the Great Lakes to a ‘beach-head’ in Chicago. As we know from Augustine, however, to say nothing of Dante, there is another model of oneness. Even in the most radical form of unity for Augustine, the afterlife of the blessed in God, human beings do not become divine; they become truly human. (See the De Trinitate.) Their word or verbum does not become the divine Word, the Logos, the Verbum. It is redeemed; it is not absorbed into unity with loss of self. I do not want to make Frye into an Augustinian. But he is very much an Augustinian in always retaining, at least in theory, a dialectical principle in the relation between individual and group. The term ‘monist’ is just not very useful in any precise discussion, and we should throw it out. It usually functions as polemic, with an imperial model, rather than the Christian or anagogic model I have suggested. Of course, the word ‘dialectical’ is itself a little tricky. The words ‘dialectic’ and ‘dialectical’ run through Frye’s own work, and they have a double career. Frye can attack ‘a dialectical habit of mind’ when it is ‘a tendency to polarize everything into the for and the against.’6 He uses the word in a very different way in the Anatomy, when he speaks of the ‘real dialectic of the spirit’ (347). And throughout The Great Code, Frye is unobtrusively defining different senses of ‘dialectical.’7 If we assume that a dialectical principle seeks to ‘reconcile’ (that Coleridgean word) or leads to harmony (on Leo Spitzer’s model of the word Stimmung), then we have the wrong model for Frye.8 He shies away from such a model, as from all ‘bridge-building’ models, for they easily lead towards that kind of monism which Frye emphatically does not want. The word ‘dialectic’ also echoes through Angus Fletcher’s 1975 essay on Frye’s work, and it seems to me exactly right.9 I come now to ways in which Frye continues to inform Canadian critical writing. One useful terminus ab quo is the second edition of Carl F. Klinck’s indispensable Literary History of Canada, published about a decade ago, in 1976.10 It tells a story that is by now familiar: of Frye’s wide-ranging influence on criticism in Canada, as well as on other forms of discursive writing and thinking. I must set aside Frye’s influ-

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ence on general scholarship, on educational theory and practice, on the understanding of historians, on the common reader from all parts of the Canadian fabric. I must also set aside French-Canadian criticism, though not without observing that it’s possible to write a PhD thesis at the Université de Montréal on Frye’s theories. Among work developing out of Frye is a particularly interesting 1983 essay by James Reaney, called ‘Some Critics Are Music Teachers.’11 It shows how Frye’s very categories, far from being deadening, can themselves point to new ways of performing drama. Reaney reads categories as musical directions, not as pigeon-holes, to say nothing of monist monsters. Margaret Atwood’s 1982 reminiscing essay helps us to hear Frye’s tone of voice, for she identifies Frye the Maritimer. Identity, says Frye, has to do with region, and here’s an affectionate placing of one Maritimer by the daughter of two others. It’s quite possible ... that my version of Frye is subjectively coloured by the fact that my parents were from Nova Scotia. The things that intimidated other people did not intimidate me. The deadpan delivery, the irony, the monotone, and the concealed jokes, may have seemed odd to those from Ontario, but to me they were more than familiar. In the Maritimes they’re the norm. Puritanism takes odd shapes there, some brilliant, most eccentric, and no Maritimer could ever mistake a lack of flamboyance for a lack of commitment, engagement, courage or passion. Light dawned when I found out Frye had originated in New Brunswick.12

This also bears on the question of monism, but I leave it to you to decide how. Two senior scholars writing in Klinck’s Literary History of Canada, Malcolm Ross and Desmond Pacey, offer overviews of Frye’s influence.13 Both Pacey and Ross pay just tribute to Frye. Both also tilt a lance with him, and I will mention three tiltings because these quarrels seem perennial. In all three instances, I think Frye is being misread as a monist. First, the old question of evaluation. Desmond Pacey writes: ‘I frankly disagree with his theoretical views that criticism is not and should not be concerned with evaluation’ (26). George Woodcock, however, simply divides Frye’s work into academic and public criticism.14 In fact, this was Frye’s own division (or very nearly his division) in the 1949 article that became his ‘Polemical Introduction’ to Anatomy of Criticism.15 (Incidentally, to compare this first version with the 1957 revision is a lesson in itself. Just the change in preposition from ‘below’ to ‘behind’

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in the third paragraph shows Frye’s scrupulous sense of metaphor, a scruple so fine that it amounts to a moral sense. People who demand more sense of ‘commitment’ in Frye’s academic criticism might ponder this kind of commitment). In 1949, Frye wrote: ‘There is one kind of critic … who faces the public and another who is still as completely involved in literary values as the poet himself. We may call this latter type the critic proper, and the former the critical reader … The critic and the critical reader are each better off when they know of one another’s existence, and perhaps best off when their work forms different aspects of the same thing’ (3, 4). By 1957, he was dissatisfied with the loose expression, ‘different aspects of the same thing.’ He decided, perhaps in a polemical spirit, that the public critic works in the history of taste, and the critic proper practices genuine criticism. Criticism that evaluates, that is, tells us how to use literature, shouldn’t be called ‘criticism.’ Clearly, Frye did not think that the judgment implicit in all taxonomies and all interpretations was evaluative judgment.16 Pacey, I think, misread Frye here by reading him as a monist. Malcolm Ross’s tilting of a lance with Frye is more complicated and interesting. He certainly misreads Frye as a monist in the phrase ‘worldruling archetypes,’ which makes them sound like Gnostic Archons in a David Lindsay science-fiction romance. Ross’s difficulty with the question of belief deserves more serious attention. He wobbles over the term ‘belief,’ because his quarrel with Frye’s Anatomy is twofold, not single. One quarrel is with tone: he wants a sense of commitment in critical writing – ‘critical’ in Frye’s sense of the word. Frye’s passionate commitment in accuracy and vision in the anatomy part of the Anatomy is not heard as commitment. But Ross’s real quarrel is with the function of the existential in Anatomy of Criticism. He might have considered the one place in the Anatomy where there may just be a slipping of terms from one category to another – from ‘existential’ to ‘metaphorical’ in the third essay in the section on anagogic metaphor. Frye’s use of kerygma or proclamation in The Great Code speaks indirectly to existential questions, and it may answer some of Ross’s difficulties. The notion of Frye’s work being reduced to slogans is highly depressing. But indeed, for fifty people who can repeat the phrase ‘garrison mentality,’ only one can repeat the crucial argument in the ‘Introduction’ to The Bush Garden and get it right. Ross’s attack on this argument has had some influence. It’s reprinted in his 1986 collection of essays, The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions,17 and I’ll pause over it, because it also bears on the question of monism. Here is Frye:

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When the CBC is instructed by Parliament to do what it can to promote Canadian unity and identity, it is not always realized that unity and identity are quite different things to be promoting, and that in Canada they are perhaps more different than they are anywhere else. Identity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in works of culture; unity is national in reference, international in perspective, and rooted in a political feeling. There are, of course, containing imaginative forms which are common to the whole country, even if not peculiar to Canada ... The tension between this political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality is the essence of whatever the word ‘Canadian’ means. Once the tension is given up, and the two elements of unity and identity are confused or assimilated to each other, we get the two endemic diseases of Canadian life … empty gestures of cultural nationalism [or] separatism.18

‘The political argument here is impeccable,’ says Mandel.19 But Ross reads Frye as a regional monist. ‘Is it possible,’ he asks, ‘that we are now in recoil from an artificial and merely political sense of the nation and are indeed retreating in purely regional allegiances …?’ (49) The adjective ‘artificial’ is his own, and makes no sense to me, there being no such thing as an artificial or a natural nation. That adverb ‘merely’ is astonishing: why a ‘merely political sense of the nation,’ as though this were not an achievement? Frye says no such thing. Wallace Stevens once wrote that there was such a thing as a political imagination, and that it was satisfied by very different things than those that satisfy a poetic imagination.20 Ross does not have to misread Frye as a regional monist. He just has to ask whether there is perhaps a political imagination, and, if so, what it has to do with our identity. These questions of evaluation, belief, and political imagination, are typical, and repeat themselves in other critics. It has become common now to cry out against thematic criticism of Canadian literature,21 though the term itself cries out for defining. Frank Davey’s impassioned 1974 essay, ‘Surviving the Paraphrase,’ attacked theme criticism, some of it by Frye and Atwood and D.G. Jones, and attacked it from Frye’s own general ground in Anatomy of Criticism: that such criticism is satisfied with accounting for literature by things outside the art itself. Davey called for more, not less, consideration of archetypes (Frye’s third essay) or modes (Frye’s first essay). Theme criticism is taught in the schools, and sometimes taught glibly, so that critics profoundly influenced by Frye, like Magdalene Redekop, want to move away from it. It is perhaps this reduction of thematic arguments into slogans that has caused such a reaction among critics.

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Paradoxically, some of the departures from Frye’s criticism seem to me very close to the spirit of his work. In 1980, Frye murmured a complaint that few Canadian critics paid attention to new developments in criticism outside their own country.22 That is no longer true. Feminists can find useful observations in Frye; deconstructionists might listen to a sly shaft; and Frye has answered and found a place for antithetical reading.23 Where recent work moves towards critical models that are radically schismatic, the challenge to Anatomy of Criticism is what Paul Ricoeur said it was in 1983: ‘to demonstrate that the phenomena of deviance, schism, and the death of paradigms constitute the inverse side of the problem posed by Anatomy of Criticism of an order of paradigms.’24 Now to Mandel’s difficulty with Frye as a critic of Canadian literature. Mandel’s argument is that a dialectical principle is certainly at work in Frye’s theoretical statements on Canadian culture and literature. But he finds this dialectic lacking in Frye’s practical criticism of Canadian literature. Mandel agrees with Davey, and faults Frye for writing thematic rather than formal criticism, content rather than formal detail.25 One possible answer is that Frye’s insights, offered in passing, constitute a valuable glossing of Canadian literature. These insights appear in the reviews of Canadian poetry from 1950 to 1960, and in some later remarks. For example: the remark that while English-Canadian writing in the nineteenth century echoes Tennyson, the texture of the work is closer to James Thomson, and that there is a parallel feel to French-Canadian nineteenth-century writing.26 Recently, the question of form in Canadian literature has focused on the image of voice;27 Frye’s remark helps us hear an older voice in Canadian literature. I want to suggest that Frye provides an indirect response through Anatomy of Criticism – not so much through anything in the four essays as through the form of the whole book. I want to return to that form and look once more at the question of anatomy, and the unnoticed question of confession. It is common to note that Frye’s Anatomy includes an ‘anatomy.’ ‘Anatomy’ is, of course, one of four proposed strands of prose fiction, the others being the novel, the romance, and the confession. ‘Anatomy’ is the term Frye suggests instead of the more precise term, Menippean satire. But Anatomy of Criticism is also, by Frye’s own testimony within it, partly a confession. Here is the testimony, from near the end of the ‘Polemical Introduction’: ‘It should hardly be necessary to point out that my polemic has been written in the first person plural, and is quite as much a confession as a polemic.’ Some twenty years ago, Geoffrey

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Hartman identified two tendencies in Frye’s work: ‘scientism’ and ‘evangelism.’28 Both terms should be widened. ‘Scientism’ to ‘anatomy’: that is, to have not only the taxonomist but also the Menippean satirist. And ‘evangelism’ should be widened to include the inward form of evangelism, that is, confession. Here are two tendencies, then: one towards anatomy, whether a taxonomic or a satirical dissection of parts; and the other towards examination, whether outward towards society (evangelism) or inward towards the self (confession). Now, it may be that there is a Canadian bent for irony, as some have remarked.29 I think the genius may be for satire, perhaps even Menippean satire. We might remember Stephen Leacock’s Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, with its Menippean names and dialogue: the Mausoleum Club, Concordia University, St Asaph’s Church (Anglican), and St Osaph’s (Presbyterian). I wonder if there is something peculiarly Canadian in the combination of anatomy and confession. Consider the sense of schemata at work, often satiric schemata of Menippean flavour, together with the confessional or evangelical impulse in the following: the novels of Margaret Atwood; the dramas of James Reaney; the novels of Robertson Davies (a very strong example); the film of Denys Arcand, ‘Le declin de l’empire américain’ (very schematic, very confessional in the sense of being profoundly Québécois); Antonine Maillet, La Sagouine; Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue, with its play between autobiography and the anatomy of seedtime. It is interesting to find Kroetsch talking about the Canadian tendency to be morally superior and self-denigrating at the same time30 because that is the parody form of this double impulse, this combining of anatomy and confession. To be speculative, I will suggest this. Perhaps English criticism has tended to have an insufficient dialectical sense of confession. That is why someone like Terry Eagleton, who is intelligent and passionate about a confessional stance, can sweep the English critical scene. On the other hand, perhaps American criticism has tended to have an insufficient dialectical sense of anatomy, whether Menippean satire or other. That is why someone like Jacques Derrida, who is intelligent about anatomy, can sweep the American critical scene. As for Canadians, it is an insufficient sense of dialectic that bedevils us. Cheap Canadian criticism is just as Kroetsch describes it: a combination of moral superiority and self-deprecation, with no testing of one by the other. Back to the sentence quoted earlier, from Frye’s movement towards closure in the ‘Polemical Introduction’ to Anatomy of Criticism. This time, I will quote it with the preceding sentence, for the two really should not

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be separated. ‘Now that we have swept out our interpreter’s parlor in the spirit of the law, and raised the dust, we shall try it again with whatever unguents of revelation we may possess. It should hardly be necessary to point out that my polemic has been written in the first person plural, and it is quite as much a confession as a polemic.’ Frye is drawing on the work of a great English Nonconformist – not Blake but John Bunyan, a Nonconformist much read in Canada unlike Blake, even on Sundays in sabbatarian homes, certainly unlike Blake. Pilgrim’s Progress is called a romance by Frye: this is the slightly surprising category. The more obvious categories are anatomy and confession: an anatomy of false logic for the Christian pilgrim; and a confession of personal trials for the Christian pilgrim. Frye’s own work is sometimes thought of as a romance quest, but that seems to me true only if it is some such quest as Bunyan’s. In the sentence just quoted, Frye is alluding to the House of the Interpreter. Most of us would cast Frye himself in the role of that capital-I or archetypal Interpreter. Frye casts himself in the role of servant within the Interpreter’s house, the man who comes to clean with a broom and begins by raising a lot of dust and choking those present. In Bunyan, this man represents the type of the law. He is followed by a damsel who sprinkles the room with water – she represents the type of grace – and the cleaning proceeds sweetly in clear air. Frye changes this: the damsel is not mentioned, nor are water and grace. We have instead a poetic phrase, ‘unguents of revelation.’ I call the phrase ‘poetic’ because Frye is working, like any competent poet, along the broad spectrum of the words.31 Thus our revelation should be easy to take, smooth, even soothing, sweet-smelling, and we trust not oily. I also call the phrase poetic, because Frye is working with allusive echo, an echo that goes back behind Bunyan. Here I must ask you to listen with care. Your ear is expecting a damsel, sprinkling the water of grace. What you actually hear is that we should all apply whatever unguents of revelation we may possess. Well, most of us smile at the substitution of the word ‘revelation’ for the word ‘grace.’ Yes certainly, we say (and we still do desire revelation even in these anti-logocentric days, and even Derrida says it just might come now and then).32 Yes certainly, we say, critics try to provide revelation of sorts; grace is really another matter. But consider that the force of the echo is still working. Consider that the usual metaphor of revelation has to do with light rather than unguent. Consider that our ear, listening, searches to remember if there ever was a damsel who

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brought unguents she possessed, if she applied them, and if the application was revelatory. Well, there was one, and she did, and it was. This is the figure I hear completing Frye’s own confessional sentences in Anatomy of Criticism. She turns up in all four Gospels, and so she is appropriately a type of grace rather than law. She brings precious ointment (the word in the Vulgate is a form of the word ‘unguent’), ointment that she possesses. She anoints the feet or the head of Jesus (the accounts vary a little). The story certainly has implications for interpreters, that is, for us, insofar as we go on interpreting. It’s inappropriate to sermonize here, and I will just touch on some little allegories. First, the woman is reproached for wasting her expensive ointment in this tribute, and reproached by Jesus’s own disciples. She could have sold it in the marketplace (they say) and spent the money for something practical, like feeding the poor. The reproach of impracticality is common enough against interpreters, and it comes even from the well-intentioned. Second, her act is said to be prophetic: it shows forth the coming death of Jesus – in the Gospels, a death that leads to new life. Interpretation is sometimes literally, and always figuratively, a matter of life and death. Third, Jesus repeats the woman’s action when he washes the feet of his disciples, an action repeated to this day. So also, we might think of the master-servant roles in Bunyan’s House of the Interpreter, and in our own houses of interpretation. Master becomes servant in a paradoxical reversal that undoes the ‘master-servant duality,’ to use a phrase from The Great Code. About anatomies of any kind all critics can argue, change our minds, change our terminology. Not so with the confession when it is our own. It is different in kind, and we do not easily change a confessional stance. Frye’s famous answer to the tired old question of Canadian identity is not just spatial. The tired old question asks, ‘Who am I?,’ and Frye evades it by saying the real question is something like ‘Where is here?’ A number of Canadian critics have taken out microscopes or plumb-lines as if one’s own ‘here’ could be measured that way. When Luther said, ‘Here I stand. I can do no other,’ the answer to the question, ‘Where did Luther stand?’ is not just Worms. Confession shows where one ‘comes from,’ to return to my opening quotation. It is the way one answers ‘Where is here?’ And so, unless one is coming from exactly where Frye is coming from, the confessional part of one’s criticism will not be the same. For Eli Mandel, for example, one question is: what about the Jewish tradition, which is my tradition? And so, in Mandel’s work, along

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with anatomy is autobiography, and the combination is seen in both his poetry and his criticism, for example, his 1986 collection of criticism, The Family Romance,33 where Frye’s influence is mediated through the model of Harold Bloom. I do not think Frye’s work offers any direct answer to Eli Mandel’s desire. But it offers the best, the only, indirect answer. And it’s an answer already heard in the creative dialectical tension between anatomy and confession in Mandel’s own work. What it says is: Go thou and do likewise – which is to say, otherwise.

notes ‘Against Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye’ was first published in Agostino Lombardo, ed., Ritratto di Northrop Frye (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989), 283–97. 1 T.S. Eliot, ‘Henry James: The Hawthorne Aspect,’ Little Review, 5 August 1918, 44–53. 2 Francis Sparshott, ‘Frye in Place,’ Canadian Literature 83 (1979): 144, 147. 3 Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. ‘Monism.’ See also the useful article on monism in Paul Edwards, ed., Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967). 4 Sparshott, ‘Frye in Place,’ 150. 5 Wayne Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1979), 345. 6 Northrop Frye, Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture (Toronto: Anansi, 1982), 19. 7 Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (Toronto: Academic Press, 1982), 8, 26, 225, 228–31. See also the different contexts of ‘dialectical’ in Divisions on a Ground, 86, and ‘Reflections in a Mirror,’ in Murray Krieger, ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism: Selected Essays from the English Institute (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1966), 144. In his address ‘Auguries of Experience,’ to the Modern Language Association in December 1987, Frye began with some remarks on the relation of dialectical arguments and a sense of vision. 8 Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Ghostlier Demarcations,’ in Krieger, ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, 127. 9 Angus Fletcher, ‘Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion,’ Critical Inquiry (1975): 741–56.

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10 Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed. (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1976), vols. 1–3. 11 James Reaney, ‘Some Critics Are Music Teachers,’ In Eleanor Cook, et al., eds, Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, 298–308 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). 12 Margaret Atwood, ‘Northrop Frye Observed,’ Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: Anansi, 1982), 403. 13 Desmond Pacey, ‘The Course of Canadian Criticism,’ in Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, Vol. 3: 16–31; Malcolm Ross, ‘Critical Theory: Some Trends,’ in Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, Vol. 3: 160–75. 14 William Toye, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 2nd ed. (Toronto, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 282–4. 15 Frye, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 19 (1949): 1–16. 16 Cf Harold Bloom, ‘Interview with Harold Bloom,’ Scripsi 4, 1 (1986): 81. 17 Malcolm Ross, ‘The Imaginative Sense and the Canadian Question,’ The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions: Reflections on Canadian Literature (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 145–62. 18 Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), iii. 19 Eli Mandel, ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition,’ in Cook et al., eds, Centre and Labyrinth, 293. 20 ‘The differences [of different imaginations] … entail differences of value. The imagination that is satisfied by politics, whatever the nature of the politics, has not the same value as the imagination that seeks to satisfy, say, the universal mind’ (Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination [New York: Knopf, 1951], 144–5). 21 Frank Davey, ‘Surviving the Paraphrase,’ Surviving the Paraphrase: Eleven Essays on Canadian Literature (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1983), 1–12. See also Ross, ‘The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions,’ in The Impossible Sum of Our Traditions, 184–202, at 185; Robert Kroetsch, ‘Contemporary Standards in the Canadian Novel,’ Open Letter 5, 4 (1983): 37–46 at 41; Magdalene Redekop, ‘Authority and the Margins of Escape in Brébeuf and His Brethren,’ Open Letter, 6, 2–3 (1985): 45–60, at 58–9. 22 Frye, Divisions on a Ground, 35. 23 Feminists: among other places, see ibid., 51, and ‘The Revelation to Eve’ in The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (London: Methuen, 1970), 135–59. Deconstructionists: ‘A good deal has been said about the deferring of written language to the spoken word; much less has been said about the deferring of written poetry to music … For centuries poets

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refused to admit that their expression was verbal: they insisted that it was song, or even instrumental music’ (Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, eds, Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism [Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1985], 34). Antithetical reading: New Literary History 12 (1981): 225. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Anatomy of Criticism or the Order of Paradigms,’ in Cook et al., eds, Centre and Labyrinth, 1–13. Mandel, ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition,’ in Cook et al., eds, Centre and Labyrinth, 284–97. Frye, Divisions on a Ground, 22. For example, W.J. Keith, ed., A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981). Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Reflections in a Mirror,’ in Krieger, ed., Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, 134. For example, see Ross, ‘The Imaginative Sense,’ 154. From a 1970 interview with Margaret Laurence: ‘I am fascinated by the Canadian need to be morally superior and to put oneself down at the same time.’ In Robert Kroetsch, ed., Creation (Toronto and Chicago: New Press, 1970), 61. The phrase is taken from the British poet Geoffrey Hill. Jacques Derrida, ‘D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie,’ in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds, Les fins de l’homme: A partir du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1981), 485–6. Mandel, The Family Romance (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1986).

3.4 Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space heather murray

I have been writing of cadence as though one merely had to hear its words and set them down. But that’s not true, at least not in my experience. There is a check on one’s pen which seems to take hold at the very moment that cadence declares itself. Words arrive, but words have also gone dead. To get at this complex experience we must begin from the hereness, the local nature of cadence. We never encounter cadence in the abstract; it is insistently here and now. Any man aspires to be at home where he lives, to celebrate communion with men on the earth around him, under the sky where he actually lives. And to speak from his own dwelling – however light or strong the inflections of that place – will make his words intelligible to men elsewhere, because authentic. In my case, then, cadence seeks the gestures of being a Canadian human: mutatis mutandi, the same is true for anyone here – an Israeli, an American, a Quebecker. But if we live in space which is radically in question for us, that makes our barest speaking a problem to itself. For voice does issue in part from civil space. And alienation in that space will enter and undercut our writing, make it recoil upon itself, become a problem to itself. The act of writing ‘becomes a problem to itself’ when it raises a vicious circle: when to write necessarily involves something that seems to make writing impossible. Contradictions in our civil space are one thing that make this happen, and I am struck by the subtle connections people here have drawn between words and their own problematic public space … To explore the obstructions to cadence is, for a Canadian, to explore the nature of colonial space … Dennis Lee, ‘Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space’ (1974, 36)

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Northrop Frye, in his ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada, assumes for a moment the persona of ‘rigid evaluator’ to note the absence of ‘genuine classics’ in the Canadian literary canon (1977, 2: 333). This ‘fact’ about Canadian literature does offer critics and readers one ‘advantage,’ however, for in Frye’s opinion ‘[i]t is much easier to see what literature is trying to do when we are studying a literature that has not quite done it. 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. The conception of what is literary has to be greatly broadened for such a literature ... Even when it is literature in its orthodox genres of poetry and fiction, it is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature’ (ibid., 333–4). Ostensibly, Frye’s project here is to outline a recommended direction for Canadian – or, more specifically, if implicitly, English-Canadian – literary criticism. This would be a criticism that welcomes the unconventional and unorthodox; we would ‘at every point remain aware of [the writer’s] social and historical setting’ while ‘greatly broaden[ing]’ the ‘conception of what is literary.’ Here, as elsewhere in his writings on Canadian culture, Frye is accepting, encouraging – only momentarily, it would appear, the ‘rigid evaluator.’ As are so many of Frye’s passages, this is a memorable one. (Omitted from the shortened quotation above is his observation that many Canadian writings – explorer journals, for example – ‘are as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon.’) It seems to go directly, pithily, quotably, to the heart of things – to outline a state of affairs, solve a problem, suggest a direction. The conversational tone, however, permits a certain conceptual relaxation: and there is room here for some questions. Under what sort of criticism may Frye call the absence of ‘genuine classics’ a ‘fact’ rather than an opinion? And what is the relationship of this judgment to the concluding recommendation that we broaden our very conception of the literary? Frye says that ‘[i]t is much easier to see what literature is trying to do when we are studying a literature that has not quite done it.’ But what is this ‘it,’ anyway? Presumably we all know, already, ‘what literature is trying to do.’ Clearly, here we have two very different uses of the term ‘literature,’ to apply both to a specific body of works (‘a literature that has not quite done it’) and to that which aspires to but does not achieve the status of literature (‘what literature is trying to do’). The prosopopoeic figuration of ‘what literature is trying to do’ alerts us to the fact that Frye is working here with the very model of ‘an autonomous world of literature’ that he discourages us from using.

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It is a centred world, operating on a high experiential level and general principles (‘the centre of literary experience itself’) in which great authors presumably are situated: ‘if’ there were a great Canadian author, he could ‘pull’ us ‘toward’ it, away from the ‘Canadian context.’1 In the absence of one, as Frye sees the situation in 1965, we have as compensation an awareness of the writer’s ‘social and historical setting.’ The displacement of a literary term – ‘setting’ as the ‘setting’ of a work, applied here to the author – is significant: work, author, reader are all located in a ‘social and historical setting’ adjacent to the realm of the literary ‘itself’; and it is ‘as a part of Canadian life’ that Canadian literature may most ‘significantly’ be studied. Frye’s expressionistmimetic paradigm makes a gesture to reconciliation of the seemingly divergent aesthetic and social critical models that could potentially be developed: the examination of the ‘literary,’ the examination of ‘life.’ But in the closing sentence of this passage, Frye advises we choose the historical over the literary mode, and this is curious in the light of his earlier statements that the study of Canadian literature will not only require us to broaden our conception of ‘what is literary’ but will enable us to learn something about the very nature of the literary itself: for ‘[i]t is much easier to see what literature is trying to do when we are studying a literature that has not quite done it.’ Thus Frye’s passage on the complexities and problems of Canadian critical discourse is a good example of the complexities and problems of Canadian critical discourse. Frye here is a wolf in sheepdog’s clothing. He stands guard over a fledgling Canadian literature, protecting it from the ravages of evaluation – but is he really the leader of the pack? For study of the ‘autonomous world’ of the literary is inevitably founded on just such evaluation, a priori. If Canadian literature does not measure up to Frye’s notion of literature, neither does his concept of literature ever really measure up to Canadian writing, ever really ‘broaden’ as it should.2 But it is useful to retain, at least temporarily, this implicit distinction between the literary and Literary, keeping in mind the stresses and strains under which these terms are developed.3 As Frye construes it, there is on the one hand a literature which is Canadian, contextualized, connected somehow to life; it is unorthodox, slightly failed or fallen short. On the other hand is a Literature which is general, autonomous, the term ‘Literature’ signifying both the realm of ‘literary experience itself’ and the fully achieved ‘classics’ which belong there. To determine what is the relationship between literature and Literature has been the

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job of English-Canadian literary criticism, and this is not an easy task. To return to Dennis Lee’s terms, Canadian literature is cadenced, complex, local, concrete, checked, obstructed, problematic. How are we to read it? Here I would like to track some ways in which English-Canadian literature has been read (read for coherence) and move on to a consideration of ways that it might be read (read for contradictions). I will refer to some theoretical systems which seem at times very remote from Canadian literary study (specifically, Marxist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, and feminist modes of inquiry), to suggest that these may offer ways of reading more suited to and accepting of the already contradictory writing of colonial space, and that these may help us to develop a criticism attentive to both literature and history, a form of discourse analysis. Here I am trying to address myself in the most basic way to the questions: why should Canadian literary scholars do forms of contemporary critical work, and what might such a criticism look like if we did?4 That New Criticism is at base a reading for coherence will not be news to anyone anymore. The premise of New Criticism is that poems are self-contained ‘worlds’ or organic unities, composed of parts working to form a synthetic synergistic whole whose total effect and meaning exceed the sum of its components. The poem’s function is to resolve and integrate its various tensions, ambivalences, and contradictions. The critic’s function is to show how the poem accomplishes this. There is a mimetic intent to New Critical work, with its ‘close reading’ meant to resemble the balanced, coherent, complex, and non-reductionist poem under examination. The characteristics of the poem as self-contained art ‘object’ are carried into the critical work and validate it: for a criticism which is equally balanced, coherent, complex, and non-reductionist is also, it would seem, fair, full, fully accountable – in a word, ‘objective.’ While the critic’s directive is to ‘stick to the text,’ the New Critical reading may work to create an order which the text does not supply: to knit in the unravelled strands, pick up the dropped stitches, maybe even rip out a few lines and redo them. (This is the point of Theodore Spenser’s delightful parody, ‘How to Criticise a Poem’ [1943].) It is easy to laugh at ingenious excess, but more difficult to determine how these notions of integration and autonomy determine the ways we think about literature even today. Because New Criticism seemed to offer an unobjectionable ‘objectivism,’ because it was so thoroughly integrated into the institution, and

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because it made critical work in the humanities seem as important and systematic as that in the sciences, New Criticism was difficult to query (Fekete 1977, 85–8; Ohmann 1976, 66–91). It has taken a long time for us to realize that there are values and investments and personal and political stakes even in – especially in – so ‘objective’ a criticism. Literatures which are seemingly not coherent or synthetic, which lack aesthetic unity, pose a problem to New Criticism as soon as we have reason to take them seriously. As could be glimpsed in Frye’s passage, their advent entails a kind of cognitive dissonance. (Contemporary innovations in theory have had much the same effect.) Clearly, Canadian literature can never receive evenhanded treatment under a criticism whose basic principles rule it out of court. Less apparent, however, is the way in which Canadian literature is doomed to fall short of the standards set by Leavis. For if works are valued for the ways they help us to think about experience and for their moral and heuristic complexity, then surely Canadian literature, as a ‘part of Canadian life,’ could be assessed under at least a modified form of them. This question has a particular pointedness in a Canadian context, for the Leavisite influence has been much stronger here than in the United States. If nothing else, could a work be praised for being somehow ‘essentially Canadian,’ for example, as Leavis valued an ‘essential Englishness’? While Leavisite criticism seems to be a ‘social’ criticism, in its polemics, in the way it is situated, and in its dismissal of the ‘merely’ literary, it is in fact deeply ahistorical, providing an alternative definition of the worthily literary. With its talk of life and vitality and concreteness, it seems far removed from New Critical preoccupations with tone and balance and the relational. But they share formal assumptions, to the point where, as in Leavis’s introduction to The Great Tradition, having perfection of form seems to be more or less the same as having something important to say. (And certainly, one can’t say something important without it.) The picture of a ‘natural’ ‘organic’ society that lies at the heart of all this begins to seem very much like the diagram for a coherent and harmonious poem. Further, New and Leavisite Criticisms share a belief in both the necessity and the possibility of making ‘essential’ and ‘challenging’ discriminations and distinctions. Leavis begins with his famous ‘recall to a due sense of differences’ in which he distinguishes ‘the few really great’ (1948, 2). Presumably, we could refuse to remain dim, distant asteroids in the universe of George Eliot and Henry James – we could create our own star system. But on what

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criteria? We would have to refrain from the sort of cultural questionbegging in which Canadian books are used to define the ‘essentially’ or ‘centrally’ Canadian, which in turn is applied to Canadian books … But if we are to maintain any semblance of Leavis’s project, we cannot avoid an explicit or implicit formalism, with its evaluations and their consequences. Since Canadian literature lacks ‘great’ works whether on New Critical or Leavisite categories, what would be the alternative critical direction? Observers as diverse as Frank Davey and Paul Stuewe indicate that the passage from Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ might be the founding moment of thematic criticism in Canada – and what this account may lack as good history, it makes up as strong myth making. The thematic approach is one they both repudiate, although they advocate very different alternatives to it. Thematic criticism is of course now universally despised; and while this should not be taken as a call for its revival, I would suggest that it deserves a retrospective.5 For just as the ‘obvious’ strengths of the New Critical and Leavisite positions have blinded us to their weaknesses, so too the all-too-apparent flaws of thematic criticism have hindered examination of its virtues and scope. I refer here not only to its integral role in the (thoroughly admirable) effort to read/teach/ write ‘Canadian,’ and to its serious consideration of so-called minor writers (such as women), but also to the ambition and complexity of the critical project. This point needs to be asserted, given a current tendency to view thematic critics as the hunter-gatherers of the literary world. Thematic criticism at its best, I think, was a serious if over-extended and under-equipped attempt to form exactly the sort of criticism called for by Frye in his ‘Conclusion’ – a criticism both literary/aesthetic and social/historical, a criticism attentive to both the text and its culture. In its broad research thematic work at its best had much in common with structuralist activity.6 (It might be said, although this is a speculative point, that structuralist activity in Canadian literature has developed as much from these indigenous imperatives as in response to European critical demands.) However, both thematic criticism and ‘stricturalism,’ to use Derrida’s term, share a totalizing tendency; as with New Criticism, data are always incorporated, explained. In this lies the initial attraction of these methodologies and their ultimate inadequacy. But this is not the usual explanation for the failure of thematic criticism. In his influential indictment ‘Surviving the Paraphrase,’ Davey lists its flaws, of which he considers the most serious to be obliviousness to the language and structure of the text. ‘The critic extracts for

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his deliberations the paraphrasable content and throws away the form’ (1983, 3). Further, the thematic critic disregards literary history to practise a sort of pseudo-sociology, and develops either reductionist formulas (Canadian literature is about theme X) or over-large claims (author Y speaks for the Canadian people). The criticism creates the ‘illusion’ that ‘palpably inferior writers are somehow more important … than obviously superior ones’ (11), and this parochialism is at the heart of the entire critical enterprise: ‘the thematists’ concerns … are not those of critics of more mature and secure literatures’ (7). Davey closes by suggesting some ways (such as archetypal and generic criticisms) to examine language and structure, for ‘[t]he only criticism which can yield the kind of critical by-products which Frye has in mind is one which focuses not on sociological issues but on the writing itself’ (11). But it will be recalled, from this increasingly familiar passage by Frye, that the ‘incidental by-product’ of criticism is – evaluation. (Davey himself has noted this quotation, sentences before.) The final lines of Davey’s paper, its talk of ‘competent uses’ and ‘profound uses,’ of ‘power, complexity, and ingenuity,’ and ‘rises to prominence’ (11) establishes, as did Frye’s conclusion, an entire problematic. Davey both wants and does not want evaluation: we should deliberately cultivate approaches that will give it to us incidentally, on the side. It is difficult to see how the innovative, experimental literature Davey advocates (and practises) could thrive under an evaluative process through which works are ‘palpably’ or ‘obviously’ inferior or superior – an evaluation which never, really, remains a ‘by-product.’ This ambivalence about assessment is perhaps inevitable on the part of critics who are themselves writers. Robert Kroetsch, in ‘Contemporary Standards in the Canadian Novel,’ envies Leavis’s confidence and records his own simultaneous ‘reluctance’ and ‘need’ to ‘locate/ discriminate the canon of Canadian fiction’ (1982, 9).7 How, he asks, can one avoid a subjective relativism and an endlessly inclusive canon if the alternative is to use the ‘paradigms of other literatures’ (13)? This question worries Kroetsch, as it vexes the canon debate even today; his solution of the time is a list of personal favourites which mixes the vocabulary of the descriptive and prescriptive: ‘naming,’ ‘voice,’ ‘silence’ – ‘success,’ ‘failure,’ ‘masters.’ Davey’s and Kroetsch’s statements here are intriguing, as they seem so out of keeping with their larger critical and literary projects. Time and circumstance may explain some of this, for Davey’s paper is an early (1974) anti-thematic polemic, given at the founding sessions of the Association for Canadian and Québec

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Literatures, while a version of Kroetsch’s paper was delivered to the infamous 1978 Conference on the Canadian Novel, which attempted to develop a hit-list for Canadian fiction. But the persistence of Frye’s subjective-objective, literary-cultural dilemma, and the re-emergence of the problem of evaluation, begin to seem by this point an uncanny recurrence. Not all responses to thematic criticism have been marked by such an ambivalence, however. For some, assessment and evaluation are the express goal of their work. In Clearing the Ground (1984) Paul Stuewe begins, as does Davey, with a critique of Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ and the thematic criticism that, on his account, arose from it.8 Theme counting, as he puts it, is statistically fallacious and pseudo-scientific (13); Canadian literature no longer requires such hot-house nurturing; it should be assessed in ‘traditional literary terms’ (12). Stuewe goes on to suggest, variously, that we treat Canadian literature as ‘literature’ (14) and that we become aware that ‘the conditions which govern our literary culture are exactly the same as those which govern every other aspect of our communal life’ (105). This comes close to paraphrase of the very passage of Frye’s which Stuewe is out to overturn: the ‘autonomous world of literature,’ literature as ‘part of Canadian life.’ For Stuewe, the direction to follow (although Leavis is not expressly mentioned here) is to create a Leavisian bridge between life and art. Wilfred Cude, in A Due Sense of Differences, while evoking Leavis in title and preface, pushes back the critical clock to an antecedent belletristic discrimination, and quotes T.S. Eliot to the effect that ‘there is no method except to be very intelligent’ (1980, v). B.W. Powe in A Climate Charged recommends a similar Eliotesque intelligence as a protection against the double curse of reactionary and fashionable literary and critical tendencies (1984, 91). Canadian literature must be placed in an international context, and the search for national identity give place to a quest for ‘human identity’ and universal values (ibid., 92). The works of Stuewe, Cude, and Powe may be seen as various counter-moves against ‘academic’ criticism, whether thematic or theoretical. Despite the opposition to Frye, despite the talk of culture and context, this is work based upon an essentialist notion of literature, assuming that literature has intrinsic qualities that we may discern and discuss. And such work clearly illustrates how discussion of evaluative ‘quality’ often functions under the consideration of Platonic or literary ‘qualities.’ Twenty years after the initial publication of the Literary History, the gap between ‘literature’ and ‘Canadian life’ seems as wide as ever. At

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the one pole are literary critics, those concerned with literary quality or qualities of whatever kind. Some of the problems and shortcomings of such criticism have been sketched above. At the other end of the scale are people doing historical or documentary research. This is frequently adjacentist, or based on the assumption of a past that is extra-textual, available, and recoverable. I think it would be a fair statement of the current situation to say that most of us are somewhere between these two extremes of the ‘purely’ literary or ‘purely’ historical, trying to do work that will bring these two endeavours together and feeling we’re not doing a very good job of it. How do we get out of the ‘Frye dilemma’? – which is not to attribute causal or foundational status to Frye’s statement, but to see it as the first text in which this problematic may be fully read. How, then, are we to fulfil both terms of the critical mandate, in developing a criticism attentive both to the text and to history? To return to Dennis Lee: But if we live in space which is radically in question for us, that makes our barest speaking a problem to itself. For voice does issue in part from civil space. And alienation in that space will enter and undercut our writing, make it recoil upon itself, become a problem to itself. The act of writing becomes a problem to itself when it raises a vicious circle: when to write necessarily involves something that seems to make writing impossible. Contradictions in our civil space are one thing that makes this happen, and I am struck by the subtle connections people here have drawn between words and their own problematic public space … To explore the obstructions to cadence is, for a Canadian, to explore the nature of colonial space …

From this, I would like to ask: what would happen if we were to make a gestalt shift? Suppose we were to stop reading for coherence altogether, and began to take our critical cues from the literatures before us, to read for contradiction. By this I do not mean that we should read around the contradictions or despite them, but that we read the ‘obstructions to cadence’ as integral to the ‘connections people here have drawn between words and their own problematic public space.’ In Marxism and Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton has described just such a process, which he explains as follows: It is in the significant silences of a text, in its gaps and absences, that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt … The text is, as it were,

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ideologically forbidden to say certain things; in trying to tell the truth in his own way, for example, the author finds himself forced to reveal the limits of the ideology within which he writes. He is forced to reveal its gaps and silences, what it is unable to articulate. Because a text contains these gaps and silences, it is always incomplete. Far from constituting a rounded, coherent whole, it displays a conflict and a contradiction of meaning; and the significance of the work lies in the difference rather than unity between these meanings ... (1976, 34–5).

I would query (and possibly, now, Eagleton would, too) the implication that ideology is something that lies beyond or around the text; and I am certain that Eagleton would now alter the critic-as-‘he’ of his account. But in general this provides a useful point of entry to the idea of reading for contradiction, since what Eagleton describes here as a distinctively Machereyan practice could apply equally to other types of Marxist analysis and to deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, and feminist modes of reading. For all of these are, in varied ways, systems of reading for contradiction.9 Under a Marxist analysis, literature is both the product of and index of social contradictions; in turn, social contradiction may be read through an examination of textual contradiction. (In fact, such contradictions are available to us only in language, and thus textual examination is an integral element of practice.)10 Althusser has developed one system of examination, following from a structuralist approach to Freud: under such ‘symptomatic reading’ texts show symptoms of what they lack and what is absent from them (1971). On a Marxist view, then, a text’s aesthetic consonancies reveal attempts to gloss or mediate real, lived, social contradictions: its occasional lapses are traces of the impossibility of that project (Belsey 1982). Deconstructionist theory, in an analogous way, sees literature as a perpetually undermined, or self-undermining, attempt to establish stability of meaning, to efface its own differences and deferrals. A typical procedure here is to read the text’s express project in the light of the language by which it attempts to accomplish this: for example, to show how philosophical claims to literality and unique reference are unable to overthrow the role of metaphor and textual reiteration. (In suggesting that we ‘use’ deconstructionist theory, I must qualify that I do not think that European/Derridean deconstruction is ‘usable’ for literary analysis in the way I am talking of ‘use’ here, although its grammatological successor may be.)11 ‘Wild’ Yale deconstructionism, on the other hand, like ‘wild’

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analysis, permits movement to interpretation and provides strategies for rhetorical analysis that have a wide applicability. Psychoanalytic theory, as it is being developed as a form of textual theory, is becoming increasingly less ‘wild,’ less inclined to draw fast connections between manifest and latent content, more concerned with the circulation of the sign. It provides us, too, with a continuing reminder that people and texts are not usually who or what we say we are: from this comes a strong encouragement to examine essentialist notions of the unified subject or unified discourse. This querying of the received notion of an essential self or text is integral to the feminist endeavour, which has from its earliest stages been founded on an acknowledgment of contradiction: the different social placement of men and women, the difference between the description of women and our own experiences, the difference between how things are and how they might or should be.12 In suggesting that these are all ‘contradictory’ reading modes I do not mean to deny some very real discrepancies or clashes between them. The relationship between deconstructionism and Marxism is notoriously difficult (Ryan 1982),13 for example, and there is at the moment no satisfactory system which may account for the interlocking oppressions of class, race, and gender (Barrett 1980; Barrett and McIntosh 1985; Davis 1981). But exciting work can and does happen at the intersections of these areas of inquiry, with feminist theory being probably the best example, in its employment and redeployment of Marxist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic work. ‘Yale’-style deconstructionist theory has, as mentioned, a wider applicability than it presently enjoys, with its technique of reading a text against the grain of its own systems. The current movement in psychoanalytic theory, to view the total analytic discourse and its transferential interplay of narrative and interpretation as a textual analogue (Skura 1981), will help to ease out the epistemological dualism of Althusserian symptomatic reading: again, to look for the circulation of the sign rather than its simple referentiality or relatedness.14 These ideas and issues may be brought home with the question: what do these modes of reading have to contribute to the understanding of English-Canadian literature? All, in some way, are already detectable presences in Canadian literary criticism – most especially, feminist work15 – and all of them hold out the possibility for developing a questioning criticism which remains open to the literatures under examination, and which turns attention to itself as theory and activity. But how would this operate more specifically? Should we trace our revi-

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sionist way through canonical and uncanonical works, doing Marxist analysis of one text and feminist interpretations of another? Clearly, in many cases this is and could be useful: deconstructionism’s exposure of myths of origin and presence has much to contribute to the understanding of English-Canadian literature, for example, and the impact of feminist rereading has been considerable. Equally clearly, however, it is not possible to do any sort of reading on every sort of work (how, a sceptic might ask, would one do a Marxist analysis of ‘Tantramar Revisited,’ for example), although this says nothing about the validity of any particular critical perspective and much about the restrictions imposed by confining examination always to the individual and isolate text. While revisionist – and visionist – reading has an important part to play, we may most profitably draw on all of these reading modes in the attempt to develop a criticism attentive to both text and history, to bring together the literary and social analyses whose separation plagues us today. I suggest, therefore, that these criticisms should operate in the service of a discourse analysis, by which I mean not only the examination of a wider variety of cultural texts, but also the discursive organization of Canadian literature and literary study. Discourse analysis is being developed in Canada in some interesting ways at this moment – most particularly in the works of Dorothy Smith (1974) and Bryan Green (1983)16 – but perhaps I could most clearly illustrate what this work would be able to do by looking at some of the difficulties and dilemmas of this essay. The project here has not been to suggest that we stamp out evaluative criticism – evaluation seems inevitable, if implicit, in the daily choices made about what to read and teach – but rather to point out that all criticisms are as historically situated as are the works themselves, that they are never neutral, and that they always work from particular positions and for certain people (Tompkins 1985). This has been difficult to do, however, without a firm understanding of the placement of English-Canadian critical discourse within cultural industries generally and the academy particularly.17 The research work that would permit this sort of analysis has yet to be done. I would criticize, too, the somewhat utopian assumption that broken is better, that the fragmented text is somehow more subversive than its coherent counterpart. (This is an issue with implications for the study of women’s writing, as well.) But the example of the American romance would suggest that this is not necessarily so, since the romance is mainstream American literature and happily suited to the notion of perpetual, pluralist, openness.18 My suspicion, and hope, is that Eng-

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lish-Canadian literature is and will be a literature of resistance; but to account for its particular operations one would need to work within a much fuller account of the development and reception of various genres in this country. Again, such groundwork remains to be done. I am dissatisfied, too, with the residual essentialism and considerable ethnocentrism of my own work here. While I must claim responsibility for it, the sort of discourse analysis being envisaged would assist a better understanding of such omissions and commissions. Some of the essentialism comes from the ahistoricity of this account; some from the myths of origin and presence, whether natural or significatory, which operate powerfully for English-Canadians. Analysis of cultural discourse may help us to understand more clearly why and how we believe and know the things we do. It is necessary, too, to dismantle the ‘we’ and ‘us’ of this and other statements. Analysis of the discursive organization of culture and cultural study will help to show who is in it and who is not, who is included and who excluded, who speaks and who is spoken for. These are examinations which are very much needed and which require collective and interactive endeavour. A ‘theorized’ examination of Canadian literature would, therefore, begin from two basic premises. First, it would acknowledge that all texts have a history and are in history – and so is their criticism. Second, it would assume that there is no history with-out or without the text, that all histories are ‘literature,’ arranged and selected in certain ways. And just as there is no Literature of intrinsic qualities of timeless value and contextless significance, so there is no History available to an unmediated discernment, discovery, or recovery. All literature is contradictory; Canadian literature is intriguingly and perhaps uniquely so; these countering and encountering criticisms may help us to read it on its own terms, to bring together ‘voice’ and ‘civil space.’

notes ‘Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space’ was first published in John Moss, ed., Future Indicatives: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987), 71–84. 1 Here as elsewhere in Frye’s writing, the idea of literary and other ‘worlds’ and their interrelationship is established largely through figurative

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language and metaphors of enclosure and escape: ‘[t]here 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’ (333). It would be possible, I think, to read more of Frye’s criticism in this way, that his theoretical containment of Canadian literature serves to protect his ‘other’ theoretical system from the challenge posed by colonial and postcolonial writings. As an example of the dissonance between the two critical projects, one could note that the Anatomy of Criticism has no slot in its hero-graded hierarchy for a hero lesser in degree and kind than the reader, although this is characteristic of the animal story as it has developed in Canada. Frye does not make a distinction between lower-case and upper-case ‘literary’ and ‘Literary.’ I have done so here to emphasize a distinction, basic to the ‘Conclusion,’ which is slurred by its multiple use of the term. The works cited in this essay are designed to point out some useful critical sources and resources. Russell M. Brown provides a thoughtful survey of thematic criticism in ‘Critic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics’ (1978). This observation was made by Robert McDougall, in drawing comparisons between Canadian and Australian thematic criticisms. Barry Cameron leaps between the horns of the dilemma in his ‘Response’ to Kroetsch, also in Taking Stock: ‘The critic’s function, then, is not to bridge art and “life,” but to analyze the components of invented worlds and their relationship – thus to create new worlds’ (29). The critic-as-creator has been elemental to contemporary, postmodern criticism in Canada (including the work of Davey and Kroetsch). However, what Cameron is outlining here is a critical-interpretive rather than theoretical agenda. A range of opinions on the issue of thematic criticism is found in the deliberations of the panel on that issue, published in the same volume. Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon, in another anti-thematic polemic, also have recommended a return to consideration of the ‘autonomous world of literature,’ in ‘Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism versus Literary Criticism,’ the ‘Introduction’ to Minus Canadian: Penultimate Essays on Literature (1977). For these authors, such formal study will permit us ‘to discern how our writers have made specific adaptations and choices which distinguish them from the common background of literature in general’ (141). Catherine Belsey (1980) is a most useful introduction to the notion of contradictory (or, in her terms, ‘interrogative’) reading and writing.

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10 The political significance of a theorized literary practice is the subject of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981). 11 Gregory L. Ulmer (1985) takes up the question of the application of grammatological theory to cultural study. 12 Toril Moi (1985) is a fine guide to the wide range of feminist literary work. 13 The winter 1985 issue of Diacritics, Marx after Derrida, is also devoted to this problem. 14 The point about Althusser’s epistemological dualism has been made by James Sosnoski. 15 Much of this, like feminist work (or theorized Canadian work) generally, is in ephemeral form. Two recent resources are Barbara Godard (1986), and Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli (1986). 16 Green distinguishes Smith’s work as dealing with ‘the social construction of documentary reality,’ and his own as concerned with ‘the documentary [or textual] construction of social reality’(17). 17 Foundational work on this has been provided by Margery Fee (1981). 18 Geraldine Murphy has made this point about the American romance. Michael Sprinker has noted, in ‘Cold War Criticism’ (1985), how American literary criticism of the 1950s valued ‘complexity’ and ‘ambiguity’ over ‘ideology.’

works cited Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review, 1971. Barrett, Michèle. Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis. London: Verso, 1980. Barrett, Michèle, and Mary McIntosh. ‘Ethnocentrism and Socialist-Feminist Theory.’ Feminist Review 20 (1985): 23–47. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: New Accents-Methuen. 1980. – ‘Re-Reading the Great Tradition.’ In Peter Widdowson, ed., Re-Reading English,121–35. London: New Accents-Methuen, 1982. Brown, Russell M. ‘Critic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 11 (1978): 151–83. Cameron, Barry, and Michael Dixon. ‘Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism versus Literary Criticism.’ Minus Canadian: Penultimate Essays on Literature (special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature) 2 (1977): 137– 45. Cude, Wilfred. A Due Sense of Differences: An Evaluative Approach to Canadian Literature. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980.

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Davey, Frank. ‘Surviving the Paraphrase.’ Surviving the Paraphrase: Eleven Essays in Canadian Literature, 1–12. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1983. Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random, 1981. Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. Fee, Margery. ‘English-Canadian Literary Criticism 1890–1950: Defining and Establishing a National Literature.’ PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1981. Fekete, John. The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Literary Theory from Eliot to McLuhan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Frye, Northrop. ‘Conclusion.’ In Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, 2: 333–64. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Godard, Barbara. Gynocritics/Gynocritiques. Downsview, ON: ECW, 1986. Green, Bryan S. Knowing the Poor: A Case Study in Textual Reality Construction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Kroetsch, Robert. ‘Contemporary Standards in the Canadian Novel.’ In Charles Steele, ed., Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel. Downsview, ON: ECW, 1982. Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition. London: Chatto and Windus, 1948. Lee, Dennis. ‘Cadence, Country Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space.’ Boundary 2 3, 7 (1974). Marx after Derrida. Diacritics (Winter 1985). Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: New Accents-Methuen, 1985. Neuman, Shirley, and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Edmonton: Longspoon and NeWest, 1986. Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Powe, B.W. A Climate Charged. Oakville, ON: Mosaic, 1984. Ryan, Michael. Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Skura, Meredith Anne. The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981. Smith, Dorothy. ‘The Social Construction of Documentary Reality.’ Sociological Inquiry 44, 4 (1974): 257–68. Spenser, Theodore. ‘“How to Criticise a Poem” (in the manner of certain contemporary critics).’ The New Republic (6 Dec. 1943): 816 ff. Sprinker, Michael. ‘Cold War Criticism.’ Unpublished talk presented to MLA convention (Chicago, Dec. 1985).

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Stuewe, Paul. Clearing the Ground: English-Canadian Literature after Survival. Toronto: Proper Tales, 1984. Tompkins, Jane. ‘But Is It Any Good?: The Institutionalization of Literary Value.’ Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860, 186–201. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Ulmer, Gregory L. Applied Grammatology: Post(e) Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Benys. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

3.5 Frye Recoded: Postmodernity and the Conclusions linda hutcheon

The last few decades appear to have witnessed every possible extreme of response to, and evaluation of, the work of Northrop Frye,1 but few commentators on the cultural scene have been able to ignore it. As early as 1976, Malcolm Ross claimed that Frye ‘caught up all our national anxieties, all our moral and metaphysical concerns, all our critical and formal queries about the nature and purpose of arts, reordered them, transubstantiated them, made of them a great Summa, made of criticism itself a total gestalt, a substitute for religion’ (‘Critical Theory,’ 167–8). Frye’s largely occasional pieces on Canadian cultural topics find their place in this Summa, but they too are not exempt from extremes of response. For some, the ‘dean of Canadian critics’ was responsible for proclaiming ‘the merit and grandeur and existence of a vital Canadian literature,’ defining ‘the Canadian imagination for this century.’2 For others, his influence on Canadian literature and criticism was ‘pervasive’ but ‘bad,’ destructive of ‘the distinctive qualities of the Canadian identity.’3 For still others, his impact was ‘minor’ and ‘overestimated.’4 Most have noticed the discrepancy between Frye’s grand systematic structures of literary myth (in general and in the literature of the past) and his more ‘immediate and formally more fragmentary pieces on the literature of his own country.’5 My own approach to one particular part of Frye’s corpus – his Canadian writings, and in particular his ‘Conclusion’ to the first (1965) and the second (1976) editions of the Literary History of Canada – is what some would call a typically ‘postmodern’ one that eschews this kind of binary opposition in order to explore the both/and logic of the middle ground. Like many Canadians educated at the University of Toronto,

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I was once Frye’s student, though I never knew him outside the classroom, then or later. My personal debt to him comes not only from what he taught me directly in his lectures and in his writing, but also from what he did to make English departments ‘safe’ (if not always hospitable) for a later generation of literary theorists who were also interested in Canadian literature and culture. On the surface, that is where the similarity ends between Frye – the modernist and the humanist – and many of those who followed – postmodernists and the poststructuralists or feminists or ‘post-colonialists.’ But perhaps we should not stop at superficial differences. It is not hard to see why Frye has been located in the modernist camp.6 Even in his Canadian writings, Frye insisted upon an ‘international’ style (reminiscent of architectural modernism’s ‘international style’) and upon an antimimetic, modernist view of the autonomy of art: as he taught, ‘the poet’s quest is for form’ (Bush Garden, 176). But aesthetic modernism is a particular manifestation of modernity, a broader cultural and social ‘paradigm’ (Huyssen via Kuhn) or ‘project’ (Habermas) or ‘episteme’ (Foucault) or ‘condition’ (Lyotard) – depending on whose term and definition you choose to adopt. Nevertheless, what philosophers and social analysts seem to agree upon is that what all call modernity began with the shift from Renaissance humanism to Cartesian rationalism, with a move onto what Stephen Toulmin characterizes as ‘a higher, stratospheric plane, on which nature and ethics conform to abstract, timeless, general and universal theories’ (Cosmopolis, 35). It is on this general, universal, totalizing plane that are born and flourish both Frye’s totalizing, visionary order of myth and his fervent humanist belief in value and the function of art. Frye’s work has been seen by some either to anticipate,7 or actually to be itself, an example of structuralism at work. While both obviously share this modern systematizing impulse, the nature of the system and its derivation could not be more different.8 The even more evident difference, however, is less with structuralism – which, arguably, remains on one level very much a product of modernity – than with those diverse theories grouped together under the label of poststructuralism, for they belong squarely in the domain of postmodernity: almost twenty years ago, Edward Said had already contrasted Frye’s centred theory with the decentred ones of Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze (Beginnings, 375–7). While there are some critics who see Frye as prefiguring,9 or even initiating10 certain poststructuralist notions, they do not take sufficiently into account what Andreas Huyssen calls the major ‘shift in sensibility, practices,

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and discourse formations which distinguishes a postmodern set of assumptions, experiences and propositions from that of a preceding period’ (After the Great Divide, 181). Dealing in the most general of terms, in the postmodern (non-)scheme of things, foundational concepts like system, order, and rationality are called into question by nonfoundational notions like contingency, ambiguity, and provisionality. The universal, the general, and the timeless are undermined by a valuing of the particular, the local, and the timely. In what follows, I would like to address the magisterial, totalizing work of Frye, the ‘Mandarin,’ modern, Canadian theorist, but I will do so in what Dick Hebdige has called a somewhat ‘smaller voice,’ that of ‘a finite, gendered being bounded by particular horizons, perspectives, experiences, knowledge’ (Hiding in the Light, 11). This voice can only offer a partial (and postmodern) reading of Frye’s Canadian writings and of both their links to, and their breaks with, the paradigm of postmodernity. To begin with the obvious and move to the more contentious (and more interesting perhaps) is also, in this context, to move from the general and theoretical to the specifically Canadian. Despite Terry Eagleton’s views of Frye’s classificatory scientificity as antihumanist (Literary Theory, 91–6), I think for most of us it would be Frye’s passionate humanist commitment that likely marks the greatest divergence from such postmodern stances as Derridean deconstruction with its emphasis, to use A.C. Hamilton’s term, on ‘difference not identity, temporality not spatiality, fissure not fusion, gaps not continuity, dissemination not polysemy, fragmentation not unity, aporias not vision’ (Northrop Frye, 218).11 In a very different sense from Derrida’s much-discussed challenge to Western metaphysics, Frye’s system of mythic patterns is also vast in its implications, because it is ‘epistemologically constitutive, conditioning our basic perceptions of the structure of the universe.’12 The teaching of literature, therefore, becomes the teaching of ‘the ability to be aware of one’s imaginative social vision, and so to escape the prison of unconscious social conditioning’ (Bush Garden, 29). The step from humanist educational mission to, say, certain kinds of feminist or poststructuralist teaching may not, at times, seem a great one: all share a desire to defamiliarize the ‘givens’ of culture and to raise consciousness. But Frye’s ‘mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from ... [human] existential concerns’ (Great Code, xviii), is conceptually quite distant from a Barthesian or Althusserian postmodern concept of ideology. Indeed, what Frye called ‘ideology’ was always secondary to the mythic, derivative rather than creative.13

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This emphasis on the imaginative and the creative (rather than on any postmodern stress on the subjection to, and seduction of, ideology as what ‘goes without saying’ in culture) is a sign of Frye’s roots in a tradition that is both idealistic and romantic. However, it also signals his modernist faith in the autonomy of art that is the core of his ‘militantly non-referential view of literature’14 as ‘a disinterested structure of words.’15 In his discussion of Canadian literature before 1965 – in his ‘Conclusion’ to the first edition of the Literary History of Canada – Frye asserted that the ‘forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature’ (347), but that Canadian literature is still ‘more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as part of an autonomous world of literature’ (334). As we shall see shortly, this particular judgment exemplifies one of the major tensions in Frye’s work, a tension that is arguably postmodern in its paradoxical recognition of both the reflexivity and the worldliness of literature. For the moment, however, let us remain within the modernist frame of reference of Frye’s detached and autonomous mythology (349), a frame that shows (as did Eliot’s before it) romantic roots and classical aspirations: ‘the imagination is the constructive element in the mind,’ argues Frye, while noting that its ‘intensity cannot be conveyed except through structure, which includes design, balance, and proportion’ (‘Conclusion’ [1976], 330–1). Frye’s mythic theorizing, as many have pointed out, is itself definable in these terms as a high modernist work, a triumph of the totalizing, organizing imagination; of course, a postmodern view might well see such an ‘Apollonian’16 ordering impulse as also manifesting a certain ‘will to power over the field of contemporary criticism.’17 Frye’s ‘elaborate and beautiful structures,’18 as they have been called, are nothing short of a total, and overtly utopian, scheme for interpreting the universe. In other words, in direct opposition to what Jean-François Lyotard calls the postmodern ‘incredulity toward metanarrative,’ and in strong contrast to the postmodern suspicion of the power behind such hermeneutics and its possible suppression of difference, Frye’s inclusive ‘master’ or metanarrative could be seen to elide difference in the name of both the commonality (indeed universality) and the coherence characteristic of the paradigm of modernity. Aiming to reconcile, rather than foreground, differences, this ‘synoptic’ view (Anatomy of Criticism, 3) of literature and criticism may well be an ‘artistic achievement,’19 but its achievement would have to be defined within a very particular context – that of modernity. In that frame of

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reference, the postmodernly plural – the contingent, the provisional, the multiple, the different, and the indeterminate – would have to be homogenized: Frye, the humanist, the modern, argues that ‘the imagination is occupationally disposed to synthesis’ (Bush Garden, x). When Hamilton interprets this synthesizing disposition as a ‘distinctively Canadian response to an overwhelming, alienating, and therefore selfalienating physical environment’ (Northrop Frye, xiii), he is therefore aptly interpreting Frye very much in his own terms. But are all tensions and contradictions really resolved so easily? For example, Frye may indeed debunk the notion of the romantic genius in the first ‘Conclusion’ (335), but he simultaneously invokes (over thirty times in as many pages) an equally romantic notion of the imagination, interpreted in characteristically liberal humanist (paradoxical) terms as both individual and universal. To complicate matters even more, Frye also adds something called the ‘social’ or the ‘Canadian imagination’ – and this is where things start to get interesting, and maybe even postmodern.20 Of all the theoretical positions that Frye took over the years, perhaps none caused more debate than his famous stand on the danger of making value judgments the goal or starting point of criticism (Anatomy of Criticism, 18–24; ‘On Value Judgments’). Almost everyone who has written on Frye has had his or her own (mis)understanding of this position,21 and I am no exception. Even if Anatomy of Criticism were the ‘memorable and influential piece of counteraxiology’ that Barbara Herrnstein Smith makes it out to be (Contingencies of Value, 12), the view Frye offers in two ‘Conclusions’ to the Literary History of Canada is not so far from Smith’s own theories of the necessarily mutual implication of criticism and the ‘history of taste’ (22), and thus of the historical relativity and contingency of values in the light of intellectual, social, and institutional contexts. In 1965, Frye was willing to make a judgment call, to say that there was not yet any ‘classic’ writer in Canada, classic in the sense of ‘possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his [or her] best readers’ (‘Conclusion’ [1965], 333). Having done so, however, he could then safely deny that the Literary History of Canada, as a whole, was evaluative: it could not be an act of canonization because there was nothing yet worthy enough to canonize. The postmodern challenges to canon-formation over the last decades might make Frye’s contradictory remarks about evaluating the quality of Canadian writing seem disingenuous to some, but I would argue that they represent precisely what we have come to see as the postmodern tension between the local and the particular versus the universal and the general. This and other

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tensions forced Frye into the seemingly contradictory position of valuing in our literature that which ‘pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself’ (‘Conclusion’ [1965], 334), and yet being unable to ignore the Canadian ‘social and historical setting’ (334). By 1976, when he published the second ‘Conclusion,’ Frye could happily celebrate ‘a bulk of good writing,’ with an ‘extraordinary vitality and morale behind it’ (‘Conclusion’ [1976], 319): ‘Canadian literature is here’ (319), he proclaimed, but still added: ‘perhaps still a minor but certainly no longer a gleam in a paternal critic’s eye’ (319). By 1991, just before his death, Frye could go even further: ‘English Canada, the land nobody wanted, the land that seemed unable to communicate except by railways and bridges, began, from about 1960 on, to produce a literature of a scope and integrity admired the world over.’22 Frye did steadfastly refuse to rank Canadian writers, saying: ‘The differences in value will emerge after a century or so and we don’t need to hurry about them’;23 but he thereby obscured his own, very considerable role (as reviewer, critic, teacher, and editor) in that very act of canonization and differentiation. Indeed, he has been called one ‘of the most significant canon-makers of postwar criticism,’24 and not only within Canada. It has been pointed out that many of his so-called factual terms are in fact value judgments – ‘naive allegory,’ ‘superficial convention,’ and so on25 – and that his reviews are obviously full of evaluative statements (see P.J.M. Robertson), especially his ‘Letters in Canada’ reviews of Canadian poetry in the 1950s. There, aware of writing for a specifically Canadian readership, not for ‘invisible posterity’ (Bush Garden, 126), Frye chooses to deal with ‘the positive merits of what is before him’ rather than with ‘vague relativities of “greatness”’ (Bush Garden, 126). His reason is not unlike the one he would give a short time later in the first ‘Conclusion’: ‘while much Canadian verse could be honestly described, by the highest standards of the best twentieth-century poets, as metrical doodling, it could also be described, just as honestly and perhaps more usefully, as the poetic conversation of cultivated people’ (57). I suspect this tension between his humanist/ universalist or his modernist/internationalist ‘standards’ of the ‘classics’ and the Canadian contextual specifics is what brought about the diverse responses to Frye’s position: on the one hand, he was praised for honestly judging the quality of Canadian writing and thus being in ‘the grandest Western tradition of self-criticism’;26 on the other hand, he was called, in Heather Murray’s memorable image, a ‘wolf in sheepdog’s clothing,’ standing guard ‘over a fledgling Canadian literature,

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protecting it from the ravages of evaluation – but is he really the leader of the pack?’ (‘Reading for Contradiction,’ 73). This very argument, however, can only be carried on within the frame of reference of the modern paradigm, where foundational truth supports firm and accepted universal standards of judgment. But what if we chose to examine Frye’s position from a postmodern perspective, one which, in Zygmunt Bauman’s terms, ‘does not seek to substitute one truth for another, one standard of beauty for another, one life ideal for another ... [but] braces itself for a life without truths, standards, ideals’ (Intimations, ix)? In other words, what if we changed the turf utterly? Suddenly, instead of sounding like a failed nation with a deficient or at least immature culture (according to the model of modernity), Frye’s Canada might start to sound postmodernly open and provisional. Maybe it would not be a negative, as (a modernly read) Frye implies in the first ‘Conclusion,’ to be ‘trying’ to do something and ‘not quite [to have] done it’ (333). If the universal were undermined (were shown, in fact, to be very limited in terms of class, race, gender, and so on), then maybe it would not be a bad thing to ask, ‘Where is here?’ (‘Conclusion’ [1965], 338) – that is, to position oneself locally and specifically. Perhaps what (the modernist, progressivist) Frye disliked as Canada’s romantic ‘fixation on its own past’ (338) could be recoded in terms of the postmodern queries about, and challenges to, the ontology and epistemology of history itself (see Hutcheon; White).27 In short, the contradictions that Heather Murray (‘Reading for Contradiction,’ 73) wants us to read for in Canadian writing by means of Marxist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories are to be seen in Frye too – at least, when we are not blind to the pesky postmodern eruptions that break through the modernist order of his thought. That these eruptions occur most often in his Canadian writing, I want to argue, is not an accident.28 Most of the time, however, the tensions that mark what I would like to call these ‘eruptions of the postmodern’ have been read as simple contradictions: for Frank Lentricchia, Frye is ‘half-structuralist, halfaesthete’ (After the New Criticism, 10). In his Canadian writings, Frye gives us, according to A.J.M. Smith, ‘paradoxes which, as he presents them, seem like truisms’ (Towards a View, 202). Eli Mandel reads the simultaneously ‘nationalist, internationalist, regionalist’ Frye as inconsistent (Another Time, 158) and contradictory (‘Northrop Frye,’ 284). Indeed, within the modern paradigm, any postmodern inclusive, both/and thinking – that would accept and seek to value such seeming opposites

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– is literally inconceivable: the modern is the realm of the binary either/ or.29 But if we are willing to accept the multiple and the tentative instead of the single and the sure, if we can live with the relational instead of the oppositional, then maybe those tensions that are so (modernly) troublesome can become the (postmodern) complexities that might enrich our understanding both of Canadian culture and of Frye’s position on (and in) it. We have already seen the most obvious of these tensions – the nonevaluating Frye evaluating Canadian literature, both reinforcing and calling into question the validity of universal standards of judgment. Part of the tension here no doubt results from the two different – but often simultaneous – roles Frye played (or was made to play) in Canadian letters, including in writing the two ‘Conclusions’: he was at once (to use his own distinction) an ‘academic critic’ and a ‘public critic,’ at once the detached analyst of autonomous art and the ‘Tory radical,’30 concerned with the social and historical function of art, and particularly of Canadian art.31 So, often at one and the same time, Frye was the Olympian, detached theorist and the engaged field-worker as teacher and reviewer. His faith in humanist universals and his modernist internationalism sat side by side with his belief in the power and value of Canadian regionalism; his view of art as autonomous rubbed shoulders with his commitment to the local roots of imagination: ‘Poets do not live on Mount Parnassus, but in their own environments, and Canada has made itself an environmental reality,’ he wrote in The Bush Garden (10). Typically these so-called contradictions are expressed in the same sentence: sometimes he is writing about himself, such as when he mentions his ‘writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature and has addressed an international reading public, and yet has always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential characteristics from there’ (ibid., i); at other times, he is referring to such things as Canadian poetry, where he has seen how ‘the echoes and ripples of the great age kept moving through Canada, and taking a form there that they could not have taken elsewhere’ (ibid., ix). In either case, the paradoxes remain. Or do they? Some have argued (e.g., P.M. Cummings) that Frye actually managed to synthesize disinterested aesthetic criticism with socially conscious humanistic criticism; but perhaps that too is a modern, totalizing position that resolves (and dissolves) the tensions instead of dealing with them. The existence of many commentators who have constantly remarked on such tensions suggests that they need to be thought through, not reconciled, or – in another typically modern re-

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sponse – denied. Readers of Frye have often chosen, of course, to ignore one half of the contradiction, on the grounds that it does not fit their particular vision of consistency and right order. For instance, some see only his interest in the Canadian social and historical context, and then either celebrate that or condemn it as a reduction of the ‘study of literature to that of various aspects of Canadian life’32 or, worse, as the founding principle of the much derided ‘thematic criticism’ that is said to have dominated Canadian literary thinking, leading to what Frank Davey once called ‘sociology – usually bad sociology … extra-literary, normative and polemic’ (‘Surviving the Paraphrase,’ 5). Others have seen only the other side, only the interest in ‘literature as some kind of separate, total system.’33 There is no doubt that Frye believed in the ‘order of words,’ the ‘total structure of literature itself’ (Stubborn Structure, 88); but he also said that the role of criticism was ‘to examine first the literary and then the social context of whatever it’s studying’ (ibid., 33). The subtitle of The Critical Path, after all, was An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism; that of The Stubborn Structure was Essays on Criticism and Society. But it is in his writings on Canadian culture that this side of his work comes out most clearly, and those critics who have not looked at these writings frequently miss this important tension in his thought. Those who have studied these texts, though, often take what I would see as a postmodern stance, accepting the tensions and seeing them, in fact, as productive. Ian Balfour notes that Frye’s writings on ‘Canadian culture qualify and complicate (for his readers) the rest of his oeuvre,’ because they force a ‘reconsideration of many sides of his work, especially with regard to the status of history and the role of regionalism in cultural production’ (Northrop Frye, 79). However contradictory it may seem within the paradigm of modernity, Frye’s Canadian writing displays postmodern both/and thinking, offering both a theory of archetypes and the autonomy of art and a theory of the ‘rootedness’ of texts in social, political, economic, and cultural terrain. Similarly, his analysis of the Canadian cultural situation was usually much more provisional than later commentators have wanted to grant. As Russell Brown has pointed out, most have conveniently forgotten that even the most infamous concept of the first ‘Conclusion’ – that of the ‘garrison mentality’ – was introduced with the words: ‘what we may provisionally call’ (342). But even granting that postmodern gesture to the provisional, we would not be wrong to see the defining of the overarching concept of the garrison mentality as a most modern act: ‘Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological “fron-

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tier,” separated from one another and from their American and British cultural sources: communities that provide all that their members have in the way of distinctively human values, and that are compelled to feel a great respect for the law and order that holds them together, yet confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting – such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality’ (342). It is also within the paradigm of modernity that Frye is here defining the garrison – as a ‘closely knit and beleaguered society’ within which one can be ‘either a fighter or a deserter’ (342). The general context for this structuring either/or binary opposition of the human and the natural can only be a modern one. In other words, we are dealing here not simply with the description of a state of mind in the past34 – though it is that – but with an entire frame of reference that excludes other possible conceptualizations of the social. In that light, rather than try to suggest what a postmodern version of Frye’s garrison might look like, I would like to take from his definition of it one word – the word ‘communities’ – and show how that concept, from the perspective of postmodernity, might offer a ‘recoding’ of Frye’s insights that could account for our current cultural scene more adequately than would any simple applying of the totalizing metanarrative of the (historical) garrison image to describe living and creating in the Canada of the 1990s. Typically, however, a few words of (problematizing) caution are in order. Taking off from Benedict Anderson’s theory of nation as ‘imagined community,’ Zygmunt Bauman points out that ‘community is now expected to bring the succour previously sought in the pronouncements of universal reason and their earthly translations: the legislative acts of the national state’ (Intimations, xix). But perhaps Canada, as a nation state whose fragile legislative identity has been under severe scrutiny recently, already is itself a community that defies ‘the pronouncements of universal reason’ to define itself in terms of linguistic and cultural duality, even multicultural multiplicity. But such a community, Bauman insists, ‘does not grow in the wilderness: it is a greenhouse plant, that needs sowing, feeding, trimming and protection from weeds and parasites’ (xix). Somewhere between the garrison and the wilderness, then, is the greenhouse community, precarious and in constant need of loving care. Bauman continues: ‘It is precisely because of its vulnerability that community provides the focus of postmodern concerns, that it attracts so much intellectual and practical attention, that it figures so prominently in the philosophical models and popular ideologies of postmodernity’ (xix). Frye too had seen

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that artists drew strength from their community (Divisions on a Ground, 24), but for him this was regional and historically defined: ‘No Muse can function outside human space and time, that is, outside geography and history’ (ibid., 31). As Bauman illustrates, within the postmodern paradigm community lacks that kind of ‘stability and institutionalized continuity’ and so requires ‘overwhelming affective commitment’ even to come into being (Intimations, xix); put in other words, the postmodern community is as likely to be organized around the fluctuating and shifting allegiances, loyalties, obligations, and responsibilities of daily life as it is to be defined by gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual choice, or religion. Region does not go away, but takes its place as one of many variables that define community. The e-mail computer network or the social or medical support group would therefore be as much a community, in this postmodern sense of the word, as Pratt’s Newfoundland (see Bush Garden, 194). Of course, community is a word that appears often in Frye’s writing, whether the focus is generally liberal humanist or specifically Canadian. He often speaks of ‘fraternity,’ of ‘a society of neighbours, in the genuinely religious sense of that word’ (Modern Century, 102). Marxist critic Fredric Jameson has located the ‘greatness of Frye’ in ‘his willingness to raise the issue of community and to draw basic, essentially social, interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective representation’ (The Political Unconscious, 69).35 Based on what David Cook has called an ‘educational contract’ (Northrop Frye: A Vision, 83), Frye’s view of the university was also one of a scholarly community36 that could ‘play an active role in the national intellectual life.’37 In the seventies and eighties, Frye also wrote about ethnicity and community in Canada, about how postwar immigrants found their place in the larger community of largely Scots-Irish Toronto ‘with a minimum of violence and tension, preserving much of their own cultures and yet taking part in the total one’ (Divisions on a Ground, 68). Acknowledging that this case of communal integration was likely made possible by the already double nature of the Canadian self-definition, Frye also came to value the resultant ‘decentralizing rhythm that is so essential to culture’ (ibid.). But that very ‘decentralizing’ is what makes the notion of multiple (postmodern) communities unintelligible within the context of modernity’s totalizing and centring rage for order. The postmodern writing being done from within the plural and shifting communities of Canada today cannot, I suspect, be understood (at least not in its own terms) within the modernist terms of reference Frye set up, for example, in the first ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of

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Canada. What would feminist or gay, socialist or conservative, native or black or Asian writers make of Frye’s distinction between the ‘rhetorical’ and the ‘poetic,’ between the ‘impulse to assert’ and the ‘impulse to construct’ (364)? The modernist Frye believed that the genuinely ‘imaginative writer’ might well begin ‘as a member of a school or group’ but would ‘normally’ pull away from it, as he or she develops (354). Within the postmodern paradigm, such a pulling away would be illusory, if not impossible: the particular and the local cannot be left behind. Today, to write from such a ‘situated’ position is not to produce ‘propaganda’ (345) or ‘reportage’ (348); it is to produce Daphne Marlatt’s Anahistoric or Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. There are obviously differences – major ones – between the stances of Frye, the modern, and the art of postmodernity, between the garrison and the community. To his insight into class structures – that the garrison mentality was the ‘conservative idealism of its ruling class, which for Canada means the moral and propertied middle class’ (‘Conclusion’ [1965], 350) – we would have to add today a self-consciousness about that class’s race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and European culture. In other words, we cannot simply argue that Frye was a closet postmodernist. But there are perhaps postmodern moments in his writing, most especially in his Canadian writing. These are moments in which the postmodern erupts into the systematic and rational order of modernity – moments in which both/and thinking is the only way to explain (without explaining away) the paradoxes and the contradictions, what I have been calling the tensions between autonomy and historical/social context, between evaluation and explication, between detachment and engagement, between the universal and the local, between the international and the national. Eli Mandel once said that Frye’s Canadian criticism was ‘cogent and powerful’ but ‘still … puzzling, widely misunderstood.’ He added that ‘misreadings of it form one of the fascinating chapters of Canadian literary history’ (‘Northrop Frye,’ 284). As a provisional and tentative contribution to that chapter, I offer this ‘misreading,’ not in the name of any modern ‘fearful symmetry,’ but in the hope of a postmodern ‘fearless asymmetry.’38

notes ‘Frye Recoded: Postmodernity and the Conclusions’ was first published in Alvin A. Lee and Robert Denham, eds, The Legacy of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1994), 105–21.

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See Hamilton, Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism, for summary. St Andrews, ‘The Canadian Connection: Frye/Atwood,’ 47. Jackel, ‘Northrop Frye and the Continentalist Tradition,’ 228. Cameron, ‘Frye Talking,’ 114. Woodcock, ‘Diana’s Priest in the Bush Garden,’ in his The World of Canadian Writing, 227; see also Davey, From There to Here, 108; Pacey, ‘The Course of Canadian Criticism,’ 26. E.g., Cook, Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World, 14; Sullivan, ‘Northrop Frye: Canadian Mythographer,’ 5; Scobie, ‘Leonard Cohen, Phyllis Webb, and the End(s) of Modernism,’ 67. Sparshott, ‘Frye in Place,’ 144. Todorov, The Fantastic, 17–19. For summary of the relationship, see Denham, ‘An Anatomy of Frye’s Influence’; Riccomini, ‘Northrop Frye and Structuralism.’ O’Hara, The Romance of Interpretation, 190. Hamilton, Northrop Frye, 216. However, Derrida, the high priest of decentred narratives, admits to Imre Salusinszky that when he was writing Of Grammatology he finally got ‘a coherent vision of Western culture and its relation to writing and speaking’ (Criticism in Society, 23). Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 144. In Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, 31. Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 136. Frye, ‘Conclusion [1965],’ in Vol. 2, Literary History of Canada, 344. For clarity, I will refer to Frye’s conclusion to the first edition as ‘Conclusion’ (1965) and to the second edition as ‘Conclusion’ (1976), though I will use the pagination of the second edition throughout. Jones, Butterfly on Rock, 18. O’Hara, The Romance of Interpretation, 189. Woodcock, ‘Diana’s Priest in the Bush Garden,’ 225. Denham, Northrop Frye and Critical Method, 224. The combination of universalism and individualism, without this admixture of the social, can be seen in Frye’s response to what today would be considered trademarks of the postmodern aesthetic: the use of parody and the challenge to the accepted borders between high and popular art forms. In reviewing Canadian poetry in the 1950s, Frye felt that the frequent use of parody to solve ‘the problem of form’ (Bush Garden, 174) was a weakness, not a virtue: ‘in every age Echo is merely the discarded mistress of Narcissus’ (175). In a feminist or postmodern age, we might well recode this as ‘in some ages and in some places Echo is the challenging and generative partner of a self-deluded Narcissus.’ (It may not read as well, but

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Linda Hutcheon that is often the fate of the problematizing postmodern.) Similarly, Frye’s hierarchical modernist view of popular art (see Huyssen for the relation of modernism to mass culture) as ‘formula-writing’ (‘Conclusion’ [1965], 349), good for relaxation because it reinforces social values and does not prod us ‘into making the steep and lonely climb into the imaginative world’ (350), is one that has been contested by postmodern critics such as Jim Collins, who argues a view of popular culture as much more resistant and much more complex and decentred than modernism had allowed. For Frye, writing in 1965, one could separate the ‘genuinely imaginative’ (354) and the ‘mass market’; but by 1976, in part thanks to the success of Leonard Cohen as both a ‘serious poet’ and a ‘genuinely popular’ singer (‘Conclusion’ [1976], 331), he too came to see that this typically modern binary opposition at least needed questioning. See Hamilton, Northrop Frye, 21–5. Frye, ‘Northrop Frye’s Canada,’ A13. Slopen, ‘Climate, Distance Shape Canada’s Writers,’ 66. Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 121. Davey, From There to Here, 107–8. Clark, ‘Bibliographical Spectrum and Review Article,’ in Schoeck, ed., Review of National Literatures, Vol. 7, 155. Within a postmodern paradigm, Frye’s championing of homo ludens (‘Conclusion’ [1965], 343) would also not have to be read, as his (equally modern) critics have, as reducing all literature to a ‘verbal game’ (‘Conclusion’ [1976], 331). Play could become ‘that for the sake of which work is done’ (331–2). Even in his general theorizing, though, at least one recent critic has noted what could be read as postmodern tendencies – the ‘rich intertextual shape’ of Frye’s canon (Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon, 129) or the ‘dynamic, unsettling energy’ that myths come to have within what is seen as a destabilizing rather than consolidating ‘visionary canon’ (143). Kaplan, Postmodernism and Its Discontents, 5. Czarnecki, ‘Reflections of a Radical Tory,’ 50. See Solecki, ‘Criticism and the Anxiety of Identity,’ 1029. Stuewe, Clearing the Ground, 12. Edward Said in Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, 141. Delany, ‘The Letter and the Spirit,’ 56. Jameson then goes on to use Frye’s views on myth as informing literature to argue for literature as informed by ‘a political unconscious’: ‘all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community’ (The Political Unconscious, 70). He also argues that Frye ends up ‘recontain-

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ing’ this radical possibility of ‘collective and social interpretation which his hermeneutic had seemed to open’ (71). 36 In Salusinszky, Criticism in Society, 39. 37 Woodcock, ‘Northrop Frye,’ in Toye, ed., Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 283. 38 I thank Len Findlay for this line, one he fittingly presented in describing a notion of community today, in his remarks at the University of Saskatchewan’s conference ‘Realizing Community,’ April 1992.

works cited Balfour, Ian. Northrop Frye. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Bauman, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1992. Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Brown, Russell M. ‘On Reading for Themes in Canadian Literature.’ Manuscript. This unpublished essay later became ‘Critic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics,’ Essays on Canadian Writing 11 (1978): 151–83. Cameron, Barry. ‘Frye Talking.’ Canadian Literature 101 (1984): 113–14. Clark, Richard C. ‘Bibliographical Spectrum and Review Article: Is There a Canadian Literature?’ In Richard J. Schoeck, ed., Review of National Literatures, Vol. 7, Canada. New York: Griffon House, 1976. Collins, Jim. Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Cook, David. Northrop Frye: A Vision of the New World. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1985. Cummings, P.M. ‘Northrop Frye and the Necessary Hybrid: Criticism as Aesthetic Humanism.’ In O.B. Hardison, Jr, ed., The Quest for Imagination: Essays on Twentieth-Century Aesthetic Criticism, 255–76. Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971. Czarnecki, Mark. ‘Reflections of a Radical Tory.’ Maclean’s 95, 25 (21 June 1982): 49–50. Davey, Frank. From There to Here: A Guide to English-Canadian Literature since 1960: Our Nature – Our Voices II. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1974. – ‘Surviving the Paraphrase.’ Surviving the Paraphrase: Eleven Essays on Canadian Literature, 1–12. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1983. Delany, Paul. ‘The Letter and the Spirit.’ Saturday Night 97, 5 (May 1982): 55–6. Denham, Robert D. ‘An Anatomy of Frye’s Influence.’ American Review of Canadian Studies 14 (1984): 1–19.

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– Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. – Northrop Frye and Critical Method. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1970. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. – The Bush Garden. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. – ‘Conclusion [1965].’ In Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, Vol.2 (1976), 333–64. – ‘Conclusion [1976].’ In Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, Vol.3 (1976), 318–32. – Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. – The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press, 1982. – The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. – ‘Northrop Frye’s Canada.’ The Globe and Mail (15 April 1991). – ‘On Value Judgments.’ Contemporary Literature 9 (1968): 311–18. – The Stubborn Structure. London: Methuen, 1970. Gorak, Jan. The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea. London: Athlone, 1991. Habermas, Jurgen. ‘Modernity – An Incomplete Project.’ In Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-esthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 3–15. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Hamilton, A.C. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Hebdige, Dick. Hiding in the Light: Of Images and Things. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1988. Huyssen Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Jackel, David. ‘Northrop Frye and the Continentalist Tradition.’ Dalhousie Review 56, 2 (1976): 221–39. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Jones, D.G. Butterf1y on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970.

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Kaplan, E. Ann, ed. Postmodernism and Its Discontents. London: Verso, 1988. Klinck, Carl F., ed. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English 2nd ed. 3 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Mandel, Eli. Another Time. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1977. – ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition.’ In Eleanor Cook, Chaviva Hosek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker, and Julian Patrick, eds, Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, 284–97. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. Murray, Heather. ‘Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space.’ In John Moss, ed., Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature, 71–84. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987. O’Hara, Daniel T. The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to de Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Pacey, Desmond. ‘The Course of Canadian Criticism.’ In Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, Vol. 2 (1976), 16–31. Riccomini, Donald R. ‘Northrop Frye and Structuralism: Identity and Difference.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 49 (1979): 33–47. Robertson, P.J.M. ‘Northrop Frye and Evaluation.’ Queen’s Quarterly 90 (1983): 151–6. Ross, Malcolm. ‘Critical Theory: Some Trends.’ In Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, Vol. 3 (1976), 160–75. Said, Edward. Beginnings. New York: Basic Books, 1974. St Andrews, B.A. ‘The Canadian Connection: Frye/Atwood.’ World Literature Today 60, no. 1 (1986): 47–9. Salusinszky, Imre. Criticism in Society. New York: Methuen, 1987. Scobie, Stephen. ‘Leonard Cohen, Phyllis Webb, and the End(s) of Modernism.’ In Robert Lecker, ed., Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, 57–70. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Slopen, Beverley. ‘Climate, Distance Shape Canada’s Writers.’ Publishers Weekly 215, 10 (5 March 1979): 66–9. Smith, A.J.M. Towards a View of Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays, 1928–1971. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1973. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

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Solecki, Sam. ‘Criticism and the Anxiety of Identity.’ Queen’s Quarterly 90, 4 (1983): 1026 –33. Sparshott, Francis. ‘Frye in Place.’ Canadian Literature 83 (1979): 14–55. Stuewe, Paul. Clearing the Ground: English-Canadian Literature after Survival. Toronto: Proper Tales Press, 1984. Sullivan, Rosemary. ‘Northrop Frye: Canadian Mythographer.’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 18, 1 (1983): 1–13. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. New York: Free Press, 1990. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Woodcock, George. ‘Diana’s Priest in the Bush Garden: Frye and His Master.’ The World of Canadian Writing: Critiques and Recollections, 223–34. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1980. – ‘Northrop Frye.’ In William Toye, ed.,The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 282–4. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983.

3.6 Frye: Canadian Critic/Writer david staines

Frye’s writings on Canadian painting, literature, and culture have not always met with approval. There were some, of course, who did acknowledge his singular importance. In 1976 Malcolm Ross observed that Frye, ‘more than anyone else, put into perspective and thus into a kind of hierarchical order and coherence the nagging questions that have beset our criticism’ (‘Critical Theory,’ 164). The same year Sandra Djwa noted that Frye’s early reviews and essays were ‘to provide the critical framework for much of the present writing and study of Canadian poetry’ (‘The Canadian Forum,’ 24). And three years later Clara Thomas asserted that Frye’s writings ‘offered us liberation from a colonial cringe towards all literature, especially our own ... His work has dignified the study and the teaching of all literature and especially, for me and others like me, the study and teaching of our own’ (‘Towards Freedom,’ 7,11). But there have also been many detractors. In 1958 Louis Dudek dismissed Frye as ‘the Great White Whale of Canadian criticism’ (‘Frye Again,’ 26). Ten years later, George Bowering wrote that the major concerns of Frye’s writings ‘seem dated, no matter what truth may lie in them. They are filled with nostalgia for the critical rape of the unconscious that happened in the twenties and thirties. And they are sometimes, for all Frye’s talk of the imagination, quite turgidly clerical’ (‘Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet,’ 41). In 1978 Robin Mathews denounced Frye as ‘one of the worst – certainly one of the most arrogant – critics of Canadian literature’ and claimed that his critical writings ‘guarantee our quiet colonialism by promulgating a kind of anaemic

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resignation’ (Canadian Literature, 136, 170). And in 1987 Janice Kulyk Keefer was consistently disdainful in her study of Maritime literature: ‘Frye’s Laurentian paradigm of Canada can, in fact, be seen as an incidental demolition of the Maritimes and that region’s vision of the reality it constitutes’ (Under Eastern Eyes, 27). The recurring dismissal of his Canadian studies suggests a misreading and/or a misappreciation of them, and Eli Mandel has correctly noted that misreadings of Frye’s writing on Canadian literature ‘form one of the fascinating chapters of Canadian literary history’ (‘Northrop Frye,’ 284). The title of my essay, ‘Frye: Canadian Critic/Writer,’ underlines my theme, that Frye is a writer, a writer who deliberately chose criticism as his creative mode, and that his Canadian writings occupy a significant and unique place in his work. In his preface to The Bush Garden, Frye refers to the essays in this retrospective collection as ‘episodes in a writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature and has addressed an international reading public, and yet has always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential characteristics from there’ (i). These ‘episodes,’ only nineteen in The Bush Garden, represent slightly more than one-fifth of his Canadian critical studies. Frye wrote more than ninety reviews, editorials, and essays on Canada. He began with a review of Canadian painting in The Canadian Forum of January 1939. And he ended, in his literary criticism, with an afterword to Ethel Wilson’s Hetty Dorval in the New Canadian Library in September 1990 and, in his cultural studies, with an address two months later to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada at the University of Toronto; in the latter, which was to be his last formal address, he reiterated his vision of Canada, its history, its culture, and his own hope for the future of a tolerant and cosmopolitan country. These Canadian writings form a whole and reveal a movement from Frye as a reviewer to Frye as cultural theorist, a movement that parallels to some degree his shift in his non-Canadian writings from literary critic to protostructuralist. And it deserves emphasis that it is Frye’s Canadian writings, which span nearly fifty-two years, that led him from and through reviewing into literary criticism and then into cultural theory. If we see his Canadian studies as a corpus of a writer, we may advance from his detractors’ misappreciation and dismissal of these, and move on to a proper appreciation of Frye’s writing about things Canadian. Historicizing Frye in his milieu, that milieu which he often claimed as so crucial to his critical thinking, does justice to his place as a Canadian writer. It also suggests that his detractors may be much

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narrower than they claim Frye himself to be in their attitude to his Canadian writings. As a student of Canada, Frye began his work as a reviewer, not in his well-known reviews in University of Toronto Quarterly, but much earlier, in The Canadian Forum. As a reviewer, he saw himself, as he later reflected, ‘As a nurse, that is, as somebody bringing along a culture that was not yet wholly mature but showed so many signs of it’ (Cayley, 135). The reviews in The Canadian Forum and his role as managing editor of the magazine from 1948 to 1950 form the first period of Frye’s Canadian writings. In this first period of twenty-six essays and reviews, Frye examines Canadian paintings, poetry, and some fiction to find the underlying themes and symbols that seem to characterize his own culture. In the early writings, he moves quickly from the canvas or the text to generalized observations. His first Canadian study, for example, ‘Canadian Art in London,’ examines briefly the Group of Seven: The Group was not badly represented, though I should have preferred bigger and better MacDonalds, and at least one Lawren Harris abstract picture, not only for its own merit but to show that the Group effected a revolution in rhythm and outline as well as in colour. And a good chance to make something of Varley, who seems to me subtler and more emotionally precise an artist than Morrice, was passed up … The Group of Seven put on canvas the clear outlines of the Canadian landscape in the hard Canadian light, and provided a formula for bright posterish painting, often with abstract tendencies. (304–5)

Two years later, in 1941, a comparison of the paintings of Tom Thomson and Horatio Walker begins no longer with the paintings themselves but with the abstract concepts and even archetypal patterns suggested by them: The countries men live in feed their minds as much as their bodies: the bodily food they provide is absorbed in farms and cities: the mental, in religion and arts. In all communities this process of material and imaginative digestion goes on. Thus a large tract of vacant land may well affect the people living near it as too much cake does a small boy: an unknown but quite possibly horrible Something stares at them in the dark: hide under the bedclothes as long as they will, sooner or later they must stare back. Explorers, tormented by a sense of the unreality of the unseen, are

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first: pioneers and traders follow. But the land is still not imaginatively absorbed, and the incubus moves on to haunt the artists. (‘Canadian and Colonial Painting,’ 77)

Two years later, Frye writes about the landscape of Canadian poetry: ‘Canadian poetry is at its best a poetry of incubus and cauchemar, the source of which is the unusually exposed contact of the poet with nature which Canada provides. Nature is seen by the poet, first as unconsciousness, then as a kind of existence which is cruel and meaningless, then as the source of the cruelty and subconscious stampedings within the human mind’ (‘Canada and Its Poetry,’ 210). Already one can see in these early remarks Frye’s characteristic drive towards some greater synthesis, a reviewing of the work in a context whose circumference is the total structure of the Judaeo-Christian imagination. The second period of Frye’s Canadian writings centres on the 1950s when he took over from a dying E.K. Brown the duty of reviewing the year’s poetry for the University of Toronto Quarterly – and he did regard it as a duty and a responsibility. These reviews demanded a more constant and more detailed attention to Canadian literature than did those of the preceding decade. Given the yearly task of reading all the poetry published in Canada, Frye approached it as an opportunity to work out his growing understanding of mythic patterns within the specific parameters of one art form in one country. These reviews were, as he later reflected, ‘an essential piece of “field work” to be carried on while I was working out a comprehensive critical theory. I was fascinated to see how the echoes and ripples of the great mythopoeic age kept moving through Canada, and taking a form there that they could not have taken elsewhere’ (Bush Garden, viii–ix). Deliberately and, I suspect, happily, Frye ‘dealt with Canadian poetry for the reader of the Quarterly,’ to use his own words, ‘as though no other poetry were available to him’ (NFC, 135). As a reviewer, he remained the committed, caring, and consistent writer, seeing his function as a constructive critic, as a ‘nurse’ helping writers and, more importantly, readers: The reviewer knows that he will be read by the poets, but he is not addressing them, except indirectly ... The reviewer’s audience is the community of actual and potential readers of poetry. His task is to show what is available in poetic experience, to suggest that reading current poetry is an essential cultural activity, at least as important as keeping up with current plays or concerts or fiction … The reviewer must take poetry as he finds it, must

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constantly struggle for the standards of good and bad in all types of poetry, must always remember that a preference for any one kind of poetry over another kind is, for him, laziness and incompetence ... The reviewer is not concerned with the vague relativities of ‘greatness,’ but with the positive merits of what is before him. And every genuine poet is entitled to be read with the maximum sympathy and concentration. (‘Letters in Canada 1959,’ 458–9)

In this final review for the University of Toronto Quarterly, he concluded: ‘The appearance of a fine new book of poems in Canada is a historical event, and its readers should be aware that they are participating in history’ (460). Frye’s wish for his readers is his own sense of his mission: situated in a particular moment of Canadian literary history, he considers himself ‘participating in history,’ and the reviewer must read ‘with the maximum sympathy and concentration.’ Frye’s concept of the reviewer is not dissimilar to the position of E.K. Brown, a critic Frye admired and his predecessor on the poetry pages of the University of Toronto Quarterly. For Brown, The criticism of poetry as of any art must first interpret. If in the exercise of his interpretative function a critic writes chiefly of what is genuine in a poem, what is notable, what is there, rather than of what is spurious, what is negligible, what is not there, his doing so need not mean that he is abandoning another of his functions, the making of judgments. Careful interpretation, conducted with insight and a measure of sympathy, must precede judgment, and in writing of recent or contemporary poets it is much wiser to make sure that one’s interpretation is adequate than to press on judgment. (‘Letters in Canada 1948,’ 255)

Like Frye, Brown refers to the need for sympathy from the reviewer, though he places more emphasis on the interpretative function of the reviewer. For Frye, these reviews of Canadian poetry, like his earlier reviews, serve the same function in his Canadian writings as does his study of Blake in his non-Canadian writings. ‘I think it advisable for every critic proposing to devote his life to literary scholarship,’ Frye wrote, ‘to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual preceptor for himself, whatever the subject of his thesis. I am not speaking, of course, of any sort of moral model, but it seems to me that growing up inside a mind

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so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane studies. Some kind of transmission by seed goes on here too’ (‘The Search for Acceptable Words,’ 19). For Frye’s non-Canadian writings, the major writer was, of course, William Blake, and Frye worked his way through Blake’s writings to become the creator of Anatomy of Criticism. The earlier account of the order and structure of Blake’s symbology in Fearful Symmetry led directly to Frye’s next book, for Anatomy of Criticism studies on a grand scale the archetypal or mythic patterns in literature through critical techniques already explored in Fearful Symmetry. The student of Blake could later agree with his critics that his writings were a precursor of structuralism, and his insistence on larger patterns may fairly be described as proto-structuralist in its anticipation of later critics’ similar concern with schemata and structures. But Frye the reviewer of Canadian painting and literature did not have ‘a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual preceptor’ in his own country. In 1965 he observed that his country had ‘produced no author who is a classic in the sense of possessing a vision greater in kind than that of his best readers ... 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’ (‘Conclusion’ [1965], 821). Instead, in lieu of the absent master-worker, Frye collectively made the paintings and books he reviewed his spiritual preceptor, and these works of art serve as his literary training, which in turn prepared him for the third and final period of his Canadian writings, those later commentaries that embody a vision of the country, its history, its culture, and its future. Through his reviews, then, Frye became a cultural theorist who articulated the myths he saw shaping the paintings he examined and the books he read. And this third and final period that begins in the sixties includes no reviews but many commentaries and essays on the cultural life of his country. Frye the reviewer becomes, therefore, Frye the cultural theorist, the mythmaker and the mapmaker of, and for, his own country. In Canada’s centennial year of 1967 he affirmed: ‘The Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have failed to create. In a year bound to be full of discussions of our identity, I should like to suggest that our identity, like the real identity of all nations, is the one that we have failed to achieve. It is expressed in our culture, but not attained in our life, just as Blake’s new Jerusalem to be built in England’s green and pleasant land is no less a genuine ideal for not having been built

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there’ (Modern Century, 122–3). And that identity has found definition in Frye’s challenging explorations of the myths he sees as characterizing his country. From his reviews, Frye turned to a consistent articulation of many of the myths that he first found in the paintings and literary works he reviewed. And these myths have become part of our critical vocabulary, indeed of our very language: Canadian nature with its bleak and terrifying desolation; the garrison mentality, that closely knit and beleaguered society at odds with its environment; and, perhaps most crucially, the observation, often repeated and often pondered, 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 such riddle as “Where is here?”’ (‘Conclusion’ [1965], 826). By situating Frye historically in his culture and its development, by seeing him situate himself first in his country’s works of art, by seeing him regard his own reviewing as ‘participating in history,’ we can see his final function in Canada as that of a cultural theorist, giving a voice to his land. And his Canadian writings form a significant part of his total corpus, what, for example, Seven Rivers of Canada became to Hugh MacLennan’s literary career. But unlike MacLennan, who ventured out of fiction for his geographical and social studies, Frye stayed within criticism, producing steadily and consistently a body of Canadian writings, a legacy that provided, and provides, a context for defining some of the boundaries of critical inquiry about our culture. When he graduated from Victoria College in 1933, Frye wanted to be a writer. He returned home to Moncton to see if he could earn his living by writing, hoping to publish short stories in magazines. During the next two years, he wrote one novel and had an outline for a second about a couple deeply in love, one of them religious, the other communist.1 But he came to realize that fiction was not possible for him, and his reviewing, which began at this time, led him into criticism as an alternative to writing fiction. Here he achieved success. Historicizing his Canadian writings reveals a three-phase pattern or progression that characterizes his long commitment to the exploration and elucidation of his country and its cultural life. Those who dismiss Frye’s Canadian writings provide a final commentary on my theme, and their attitude only affirms the lasting significance of Frye’s Canadian corpus. In the Alexander Lectures given at the University of Toronto in 1969, W. Jackson Bate examined his sense of how the legacy of the past bears

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on writers in his The Burden of the Past and the English Poet: ‘the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness, before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past, has become the greatest single problem that modern art ... has had to face’ (4). While focusing on English poetry, he observed that the ‘burden of the past’ does not seem to cripple writers in the critical mode: The critic, biographer, or historian, in his consideration of the arts, has by definition a different vocation ... and in his own personal experience the situation we mention does not press home to him to the same degree or in the same way. He may have his own anxieties and competitions in the face of previous achievement, and these may certainly cripple rather than inspire him in his own range and magnanimity as a humanist. But the accumulation of past work from which he may feel tempted or even forced to differ in order to secure identity ... is chronologically far more limited. It is primarily the product of the last fifty years. (7–8)

Since 1969, literary theory has grown in stature, significance, and volume. The literary critic too suffers, consciously or not, from ‘the accumulation of past work.’ Frye’s detractors too suffer from this ‘burden of the past,’ and rather than acknowledge this anxiety, they continue to find fault with his theories, not realizing that so much of their writing uses Frye’s enunciated myths as a point of departure. In The Burden of the Past and the English Poet, Bate refers – and acknowledges indebtedness – to Frye’s criticism. He also provides a fitting conclusion to any assessment of Frye as a Canadian critic/writer. ‘The greatest single cultural problem we face, assuming that we physically survive,’ Bate concludes, is ‘how to use a heritage, when we know and admire so much about it, how to grow by means of it, how to acquire our own “identities,” how to be ourselves’ (134). And an old epigram about Plato is an all-too-fitting epigram about Frye in relation to other Canadian critics, his detractors included: in whatever direction you happen to be going, you always meet Frye on his way back.

notes ‘Frye: Canadian Critic/Writer’ was first published in Alvin A. Lee and Robert Denham, eds, The Legacy of Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 155–63.

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1 Ayre, Northrop Frye: A Biography, 116.

works cited Ayre, John. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Bate, W. Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1970. Bowering, George. ‘Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet (1) than any Northrop Frye poet (2) than he used to be.’ Canadian Literature 36 (Spring 1968): 40–9. Brown, E.K. ‘Letters in Canada 1948: Poetry.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 18 (April 1949): 254–62. Cayley, David. Northrop Frye in Conversation. Toronto: Anansi, 1992. Djwa, Sandra. ‘The Canadian Forum: Literary Catalyst.’ Studies in Canadian Literature 1 (Winter 1976): 7–25. Dudek, Louis. ‘“Frye Again” (But Don’t Miss Souster).’ Delta 5 (October 1958): 26–7. Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. – ‘Canada and Its Poetry.’ Canadian Forum 23 (December 1943): 207–10. – ‘Canadian and Colonial Painting.’ Canadian Forum 20 (March 1941): 377–8. – ‘Canadian Art in London.’ Canadian Forum 18 (January 1939): 304–5. – ‘Conclusion.’ In Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 821–49. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. – ‘Letters in Canada 1959: Poetry.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 29 (July 1960): 440–60. – The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. – ‘The Search for Acceptable Words.’ Daedalus 102 (Spring 1973): 11–26. Keefer, Janice Kulyk. Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Mandel, Eli. ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition.’ In Eleanor Cook et al., eds, Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, 284–97. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. Mathews, Robin. Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution. Toronto: Steel Rail Educational Publishing, 1978. Ross, Malcolm. ‘Critical Theory: Some Trends.’ In Carl F. Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2nd ed. Vol. 3, 160–75. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. Thomas, Clara. ‘Towards Freedom: The Work of Northrop Frye.’ CEA Critic 42 (November 1979): 7–11.

3.7 ‘A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom’: The Narrative in Northrop Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada robert lecker

The publication of Literary History of Canada, in 1965, was a signal event that transformed the making of Canadian literary history and permanently altered the country’s critical and creative landscapes. Although several earlier studies had attempted to place Canadian writers within a distinct literary tradition and had grouped them according to various ideological and aesthetic concerns, Literary History was the first ‘comprehensive reference book on the (English) literary history’ of the country (Klinck, ix). As ‘a collection of essays in cultural history’ (Frye, ‘Conclusion,’ 822), it opened the field to diverse forms of literary discourse; it brought together the state-supported work of ‘the Editors and twenty-nine other scholars’ who canonized Canadian literature ‘by offering reasons for singling out those works regarded as the best’ (Klinck, ix, xi);1 and it ‘gave a definitive imprimatur of respectability to the academic study of Canadian writing’ (MacLulich, 19). Most important, its concluding chapter, by Northrop Frye, introduced an influential theory about the evolution of Canadian literature and about the shifting modes of representing this evolution. The twenty-eight-page ‘Conclusion’ is the product of an eminent critic who explicitly approved – and therefore concretized – the institution called English-Canadian literature. When it appeared in the 1965 edition, the document seemed to be the culminating essay among many that Frye had written about Canadian art and culture. Although these works – collected in The Bush Garden (1971) and Divisions on a Ground (1982) – remain ‘largely unread outside his own country’ (Balfour, 88), they provide insights into some of the questions that Frye approaches

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in his better-known critical studies. In The Bush Garden, he notes that he ‘was fascinated to see how the echoes and ripples of the great age kept moving through Canada’ (viii–ix). His responses to this age constitute the critical documents on Canadian literature that he describes as ‘episodes in a writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature and has addressed an international reading public, and yet has always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential characteristics from there’ (Bush Garden, i). Of all these ‘episodes,’ Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ is arguably the central text. The theories it articulates form the primary basis for how most Canadian critics of the past two decades have envisioned and evaluated their literature. Two prominent editors have expressed the widely held view that ‘no essay in Canadian literary criticism has been more influential than Northrop Frye’s “Conclusion”’ (Daymond and Monkman, 460). Yet despite its influential status, I can find no critique devoted exclusively to Frye’s text.2 I do not know how to explain this curious absence of commentary. I do know that I offer here the first extended reading of Frye’s ‘Conclusion.’ In doing so, I focused on a central feature of the essay: its narrative depiction of Frye’s evolving sense of how critics necessarily become involved in their critical creations and, further, of how the degree of this involvement provides a measure of their own imaginative development. If one looks at the ‘Conclusion’ from this perspective, it becomes apparent that Frye is doing much more than establishing some basic terms or theories for the analysis of Canadian literature. He is reading the Canadian literary tradition as a romance that implicates him in its structures. This approach provides an early gloss on his concept of romance, which he calls ‘the structural core of all fictions.’ His reading of Canadian literary history as a romance, and of himself as the romance’s reader-hero, anticipates his view that ‘the message of all romance is de te fabula: the story is about you.’ In other words, ‘one becomes the ultimate hero of the great quest of man, not so much by virtue of what one does, as by virtue of what and how one reads’ (Secular Scripture, 15, 186, 156–7). Ian Balfour observes that in The Secular Scripture, Frye ‘rewrites the romance scenario by substituting the reader for the hero, or, more precisely, by inscribing the reader as the hero.’ Implicit in this ‘allegory of reading’ are the assumptions that ‘the critical quest is itself a romance ... and that Frye’s particular quest is ... a romance of romance’ (61). The same remarks apply to the critic’s quest in the ‘Conclusion,’ which appeared more than a decade before Frye’s study of the structure of

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romance. While the projection of the reader as hero in the ‘Conclusion’ anticipates Frye’s later work, it also reflects Frye’s earlier commentary on Blake, which argues for the interaction of critical and creative energy. As A.C. Hamilton notes, Frye’s vision of ‘literary-cultural history’ recognizes ‘the Blakean struggle of the artist’s imagination to shape reality’ (59). As interpreter and moulder of reality, the critic participates in this struggle. The ‘Conclusion’ exemplifies this point. Frye’s representation of Canadian literary history is clearly the product of his deliberate shaping. It is, characteristically, formal, centralist, Protestant, male-centred, and overwhelmingly English. As a history, it appears to be fundamentally untroubled by the dual linguistic and cultural heritages that both define Canada and threaten its stability as a nation. In the ‘Conclusion,’ Frye discovers a pastoral version of English-Canadian literary history that transcends the divisiveness endangering his country. Assuming the role of narrator as reader and romantic quester, he moves from a distanced and innocent condition to a final harmonious state that merges innocence and experience, the objective and the subjective, the perceiver and the perceived.3 Because the ‘Conclusion’ glosses the romantic myth of fall and redemption that inspires much of Frye’s work, it also demonstrates how Frye as narrator-critic can seek redemption through a romantic unification with nature that is linked to a discovery of self. Such a discovery, the ‘Conclusion’ makes clear, is not easy to come by. While the goal of self-discovery is an inspiring narrative force, the actual status and validity of selfhood remain in doubt. As a literary historian, Frye knows that the narrative identity he seeks stems from the cultural and historical roots that define his conception of romance and his own experience as a minister of religion and teacher; there can be no distinct self in the context of this palimpsest. His self-representation is inevitably a misrepresentation; it is paradoxically undercut by the romantic genre. In appealing to the influence of romantic doctrine, Frye must acknowledge that his notion of identity is necessarily plural, that it is determined by a plural notion of cultural and national identity. At the same time, he is driven towards writing a conclusion that traces a change in his perspective, in the way he sees his literary world. It is the tension between these collective and individual impulses that gives the critinarrator his double-sided stance. The version of Canadian literary tradition one enters by following this twofold representation expresses what Eli Mandel describes

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as one of Frye’s critical preoccupations: ‘the romantic fall into modern consciousness, the wilderness or labyrinth of space and time, and the antithetical quest for a return to an integrated being’ (285). Thus the ‘Conclusion’ illustrates how Frye’s conception of literary history making is simultaneously an act of culture making and self making. It provides an excellent example of how literary criticism is often the outgrowth of the critic’s private dreams and desires. And it lends credibility to Balfour’s view that, for Frye, ‘the distinction between writer and critic is an unstable one’ (78). As Hayden White observes, although Frye wants to insist on important differences between poetry and history, he is sensitive to the extent to which they resemble one another. And although he wants to believe that proper history can be distinguished from metahistory, on his own analysis of the structures of prose fictions, he must be prepared to grant that there is a mythic element in proper history by which the structures and processes depicted in its narratives are endowed with meanings of a specifically fictive kind. (58)

In the ‘Conclusion,’ Frye assumes the telling role of an ‘Odyssey critic’ whose narrative about ending is also the story of his ‘quest for the peaceable kingdom’ of Canada that will satisfy the utopian impulse informing much of Frye’s extended poetics.4 This pastoral realm evokes more than an image of Canada and the nation’s literary tradition. Lying beyond history, beyond space and time, the peaceable kingdom represents for Frye ‘the reconciliation of man with man and of man with nature’ in ‘a haunting vision of serenity that is both human and natural.’ This vision is another expression of Frye’s preoccupation with ‘romantic historical myths based on a quest or pilgrimage to a City of God or a classless society’ (Fables of Identity, 53–4). In the end, the pastoral universe Frye discovers through his Canadian quest is emblematic. It embodies ‘a serenity that transcends consciousness’ and locates Canada (and Frye’s narrative) in relation to ‘the mood of Thoreau’s Walden retreat, of Emily Dickinson’s garden, of Huckleberry Finn’s raft, of the elegies of Whitman’ (‘Conclusion,’ 848).5 This experience enables Frye to construct Canada as the apotheosis of metaphor, while reconstructing the criticism attached to Canada (his apocalyptic conclusion) as a romance, a fiction, a myth. In the ‘Conclusion,’ as in his non-Canadian criticism, Frye provides ‘a fusing link between poet and critic’ (Mandel, 291), one that will allow him to create an allegory with himself at its mythologized centre.

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To apprehend this evolution, one has to focus on the ‘Conclusion’ as a romance that has its own shifting rhetoric, its own shifting images, and its own developing persona who performs in the narrative he is both observing and creating anew. Frye’s involvement in this narrative testifies to his engagement with the subject of his criticism. Yet his focus on identity paradoxically undercuts the very notion of concluding. By emphasizing development over resolution, the essay diverts attention from the Literary History’s ostensible end. After all, the ‘Conclusion’ affirms that, for Frye, history-making will in some way enact a dream of self-creation in literary time, a dream that replaces closure with conception and history writing with fables of identity. Frye’s working metaphors are all aligned with origins, creation, birth. His ‘Conclusion’ is no conclusion. It is a meditation on poetic genesis. I Frye divides his essay into four distinct sections. In the first of these, in the first sentence, Frye’s narrative strategy becomes apparent. He says that ‘it is now several years since the group of editors listed on the titlepage met ... to draw up the first tentative plans’ for a history of EnglishCanadian literature (821). Because his emphasis is on imagination and dream, the precise date of the editorial meeting is unimportant. What matters is the drama of creating literary history, of naming a world called Canadian literature, and of giving it credibility through the production of a literary history. In the opening pages of the ‘Conclusion,’ Frye suggests that the production of this history is bound to the production of personal and collective identity: ‘One theme which runs all through this book is the obvious and unquenchable desire of the Canadian cultural public to identify itself through its literature’ (823). For Frye, the power and drama of this form of identification seem akin to the power of literature itself. From the outset, his ‘Conclusion’ assumes the transhistorical status of a myth aligned with what he calls ‘the autonomous world of literature’ (822), a world intimately bound up with the iconographic qualities of dream and descent. In recalling the undated, once-upon-a-time event that gave rise to the Literary History, Frye pictures the work as an imaginative structure: ‘What we then dreamed of,’ he says, ‘is substantially what we have got,’ a romantic narrative that confirms his ‘intuitions on the subject’ rather than any historical fact, a prophecy that focuses attention on how ‘some writers on Canadian literature’ articulate a unifying romantic consciousness that links

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cultural and national identity. ‘By “some writers,”’ Frye then confesses, ‘I meant primarily myself’ (831). His observation that Canada is ‘preoccupied with trying to define its own identity’ might well be applied to his own self-defining romantic quest (827). The opening paragraph of the ‘Conclusion’ sets the stage for what will unfold as a drama of creation, a drama rooted in the story that Frye, among others, has dreamed. The more he discusses this dream, the more he is led to comment on his own purpose, which is not to evaluate Canadian literature, or to study it, but to show how its forms relate to its perceiver and to Frye’s belief that the writing of Canadian literary history is similar to all other forms of writing because it shows how ‘the verbal imagination operates as a ferment in all cultural life.’ In this sense, Frye finds in his ‘Conclusion’ precisely what he finds in literature at large: evidence that the critical quest takes one towards the notion of identity at ‘the centre of literary experience itself.’ Thus he emphasizes that ‘many Canadian cultural phenomena are not peculiarly Canadian at all, but are typical of their wider North American and Western contexts.’ So when he states that anyone reading the Literary History, ‘even [someone] not Canadian or much interested in Canadian literature as such, may still learn a good deal about the literary imagination as a force and function of life’ (822), he suggests that he will attempt to discover this form of imagination through the critical quest at hand. This quest allows his ‘verbal imagination’ to operate ‘as a ferment’ in his intellectual life. Because Frye consciously pursues this ferment and narrates his conclusion in response to it, one can say that his quest for the Literary History enacts his view of literary historiography. This study, he says, ‘has its own themes of exploration, settlement, and development,’ and these are related ‘to a social imagination that explores and settles and develops [according to] its own rhythms of growth as well as its own modes of expression’ (822). As Frye traces the ‘rhythms of growth’ and ‘modes of expression’ that identify ‘Canadian verbal culture,’ he displays the corresponding characteristics in his own development within the ‘Conclusion’ (822). In the first section, he devotes considerable attention to detailing how ‘Canada began as an obstacle … to be explored only in the hope of finding a passage through it’ (824). He describes entering the country as an ‘intimidating experience’ that ‘initiates one’ into a consciousness that evokes Biblical associations: ‘The traveller from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the Straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Cana-

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dian provinces surround him’ (824). In this first section the ‘one’ being initiated is the speaker, the hero-to-be who will enter uncharted territory – whether literary, historical, or geographic – and confront the obstacle of his inquiry, the Canada he must transcend, just as he transcends himself. I use the word ‘hero’ with some hesitation, and only to emphasize Frye’s interest in presenting his narrator as a recognizable, transhistorical persona whose movement towards knowledge is an archetypal, trans-spatial quest. Yet Frye carefully destabilizes the individual power associated with the notion of hero, just as he tries to deflate the notion of genius by arguing that genius is a myth, ‘doubtless of romantic origin,’ that should be redefined as ‘a matter of social context’ as much as of ‘individual character’ (823). In this sense, the narrator-hero observed at the beginning of the ‘Conclusion’ could equally well be called an Everyman who inhabits a ‘no-man’s land’ stretching ‘from sea to sea’ (826). For the narrator, this imagined territory is a devouring land: ‘to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent.’ Such an entry, though ‘unforgettable and intimidating,’ ensures the narrator’s quest: ‘the experience initiates one into that gigantic eastto-west thrust’ that has ‘attracted to itself nearly everything that is heroic and romantic in the Canadian tradition’ (824). Frye’s attempt to understand this tradition goes hand in hand with his attempt to solve the well-known riddle of the ‘Conclusion’: ‘Where is here?’ (826). To answer this question, Frye must become involved in charting his own narrative quest. As he discusses the charting of the frontier, he is drawn to speculate on the ways the frontier affects not only ‘national consciousness’ but also personal consciousness: ‘One wonders if any other national consciousness has had so large an amount of the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested, so built into it.’ Frye’s narrator is struck by how ‘the frontier was all around one,’ how it is ‘a part and a condition of one’s whole imaginative being’ (826). For the explorer, it was ‘the immediate datum of the imagination’ that ‘had to be dealt with first’ (827). As the explorer in the ‘Conclusion,’ Frye also confronts this datum. But because his notion of the frontier is becoming much more personal and creative than cultural or geographic, he meets the challenge by evoking the myth of Canada as the ‘next year country’ that will one day be revealed by a myth, ‘the myth of the hero brought up in the forest retreat, awaiting the moment when his giant strength will be fully grown and he can emerge into the world’ (827). This myth obviously relates to Frye’s self-understanding as a critic, for by his own account

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it ‘informs a good deal of Canadian criticism down to our own time.’ He is the critic, but he inhabits the autonomous world of literature he writes about. Frye’s conception of this world often seems to resemble a male dream of potency. If he is the hero of his narrative, then he is also a version of the archetypal hero attached to the romance mode, the one who awaits the moment ‘when his giant strength will be fully grown.’ Through his identification with the ‘unforgettable’ experience of entering Canada as a process of gaining both potency and the means to self-expression, Frye can be seen as the romantic hero and, metaphorically, as the erotic quester whose journey into the country is an impregnating act. The critic-explorer enters ‘into that gigantic east-to-west thrust’ that initiates ‘the growth of Canada’ (824). It is not surprising to find that some of Frye’s metaphors are erotically charged. After all, ‘the romance, for Frye, is “almost by definition” a love story,’ while ‘the trajectory of romance is toward erotic consummation’ (Balfour, 58). But the imagery he associates with this entering thrust suggests more than a purely sexual encounter and more than a dream of male potency inscribed on a waiting landscape. If the country can be figured as a whale that swallows the explorer, it can also be imaged as an engulfing womb that deprives him of power and agency, presumably the very resources necessary for exploration. For this reason, perhaps, the search for the peaceable kingdom frequently finds Frye pursuing a double narrative stance: while he organizes the ‘Conclusion’ around tropes connected with sexuality, conception, and birth, he responds to another set of tropes that threaten to stifle his quest and to turn the birth image towards suffocation, impotence, and death. His confrontation with the dual implications of his metaphors is reflected in a problem he encounters in creating the entire document as a text that must somehow end. The ‘Conclusion’ stretches before him; it is the apocalyptic ending he must reach, a Blakean ending that promises a new reality, a remythologized beginning. Yet to find this ending is to work against the quest, for once the end is reached, the quest ceases to have value. Frye is caught in a bind: his job is to write a conclusion that must not conclude. How does he meet this challenge? II In the second section of his essay Frye pulls back from this paradoxical problem after he realizes that ‘it is not the handicaps of Canadian writers but the distinctive features that appear in spite of them which are

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the main concern of this book, and so of its conclusion.’ He would like to believe that possibility lies before him, that he can see the Canadian landscape, through its art, as a metaphorical realm of potential, that he can adopt a sensibility ‘inherited from the voyageurs,’ the sensibility that finds one ‘probing into the distance’ or ‘fixing the eyes on the skyline’ (828). This preoccupation with unfathomable distance expresses his desire to find the peaceable kingdom that transcends the here and now. Frye identifies with the ‘faraway look’ of the voyageur relentlessly scanning the horizon (828). But the Canadian voyageur cannot always contemplate this horizon, which signifies potential and release, for all around him there is immediate nature, whose conquest ‘has its own perils for the imagination.’ For Frye the critic, and for Frye the selfimagined voyageur, something must be asserted against these perils, because ‘the human mind has nothing but human and moral values to cling to if it is to preserve its integrity or even its sanity’ (830). The mind asserts these values against ‘the vast unconsciousness of nature’ by developing what Frye calls ‘a garrison mentality.’ Critics have conventionally seen this mentality as a negative force and, in the past, have used Frye’s concept to justify the view that Canadian literature is characterized by a ‘tone of deep terror in regard to nature,’ the product of a ‘beleaguered society’ obsessed with isolation and survival (830). Although such an application of Frye’s ideas is now generally discredited, critics continue to ignore his emphasis on the positive aspects of the garrison mentality that develop when ‘the individual feels himself becoming an individual, pulling away from the group.’ When this separation occurs, the individual is confronted with ‘a more creative side of the garrison mentality, one that has had positive effects on our intellectual life’ (831). Frye realizes these effects by asserting intellect over landscape, creativity over culture. His task is to find a poetic means of crossing the various frontiers that he identifies throughout the ‘Conclusion.’ A figurative voyageur, he perceives these frontiers as both psychological and aesthetic. He notes that while quarrels within a society merely produce rhetoric, ‘the quarrel with ourselves’ produces poetry (831). His position at this point is interesting because he finds himself pulled two ways. One way tempts him to explain Canadian literature by ‘using language as one would use an axe, formulating arguments with sharp cutting edges that will help to clarify one’s view of the landscape.’ He does this. But he knows that using language in this way ‘remains a rhetorical and not a poetic achievement’ (832). So he is pulled in an-

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other direction away from language as axe, towards poetic language as a vehicle of connection, towards an ultimate conclusion that envisions the world as myth rather than as event, through synecdoche rather than occurrence (‘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’ [823–4]). In Frye’s expanding narrative the part known as Canada becomes the whole world; similarly, the part called the ‘Conclusion’ becomes a metaphor of apocalyptic consciousness. In this world – ‘an autonomous world of literature’ – all human forms may one day be identified (822). The more Frye writes, the more he pursues this type of identification, and the more he focuses on the literary forms that have begun to construct his world. By the end of the second section, he is no longer speaking about garrison mentalities; instead, he is involved in discussing texts that reflect his developing concern with ‘the fundamental issue of the role of the creative mind’ (833). As he discusses this role, Frye comes to inhabit it. Now he can assert what his readers have suspected from the start: his enemy is not the wilderness, or nature, or society, or rhetoric; it is ‘the anti-creative elements in life as he [the writer] sees life. To approach these elements in a less rhetorical way,’ by which Frye means a more poetic way, is to ‘introduce the theme of self-conflict, a more perilous but ultimately more rewarding theme.’ This theme anticipates the third section of the essay, in which Frye describes the conflict he has entered through his pilgrimage towards the conclusion of a world made into art: ‘The conflict involved is between the poetic impulse to construct and the rhetorical impulse to assert, and the victory of the former is the sign of the maturing of the writer’ (834). If readers continue to see this conflict as something external to the ‘Conclusion,’ they become victims of ‘the rhetorical impulse to assert,’ for it is this impulse that directs them away from what Frye sees as the poetic centre of truly creative and critical pursuits. But if they see the conflict as a struggle that informs the ‘Conclusion’ and energizes its critic-protagonist, then the essay opens up a double-sided story: Frye writes about the process of entering an allegorical literary consciousness that he is in the process of creating. He is writing transformation literature and transformation criticism; his metamorphosis could be, and should be, his readers’ as well. But their entry into this allegorical creative and critical realm is blocked, as it is for Frye’s narrator, by the overwhelming presence of history. The Canadian literary mind, Frye asserts, ‘was established on a basis, not of myth, but of history’ (835).

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His distinction between myth and history is crucial. Myth releases the individual from time and space; it bridges the gap between subject and object. In contrast, ‘the Canadian attitude to time as well as space’ – its ‘preoccupation with its own history’ – restricts the individual to a social perspective bound up in the ‘need for continuity’ (829) and the valorization of linear thought. To find the peaceable kingdom, one must transcend history and embrace myth. III The means of transcending this ‘historical bias’ is the subject of Frye’s third section, which deals with the problems inherent in the ‘conceptual emphasis’ that is ‘a consequence’ of the Canadian preoccupation with history and determinism (835). This bias detracts from the essence of literature, Frye argues, because ‘literature is conscious mythology,’ which one must enter in order to experience literature. If this mythology does not exist, the authentic writer is driven to create it. Frye’s insistence on the need to create ‘an autonomous world that gives us an imaginative perspective on the actual one’ emerges in the ‘Conclusion’ through the narrator’s increasing devotion to ‘a recreated view of life.’ Such a view is illuminated by the ‘metaphor-crystallizing impetus’ that transcends the ‘habitual social responses’ aligned with various forms of mimetic thought that endorse ‘the separation of subject and object.’ Only by overcoming this separation can the writer discover ‘the real headwaters of inspiration’ (836–8). As Frye moves towards these headwaters, he contextualizes himself in relation to the ‘heroic explorers’ who know that identity can be located only within the story itself, not through commentary. The critical act of commenting distances him as writer from self-consciousness and the social mythology he is trying to absorb. From this removed perspective, Frye as external spectator remains ‘dominated by the conception of writing up experiences or observations’ and thus thwarted in his attempt to find the peaceable kingdom. In contrast, the critic who ‘enters into a structure’ and who embraces ‘metaphorical thought’ becomes not merely an observer but also ‘a place where a verbal structure is taking its own shape’ (836). Locating this place involves an act of devolution: one must undo literature that is ‘rhetorical, an illustration or allegory of certain social attitudes,’ and return to those genuine forms of experience that ‘exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature’ (834, 835). Such a movement al-

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lows the writer to withdraw from ‘a country without a mythology into the country of mythology’ that Frye seeks (840). In these comments Frye reveals the extent to which his own goals have changed through his narration of the ‘Conclusion’: now he implies that his task is to become a creator rather than a curator of Canadian literary life. He will free himself from literary history. He will leave behind the academic school that encouraged his undertaking in the first place. He will move away from the concept of closure, away from his own conclusion, away from his narrative death. Finally, he will act out his assertion that ‘the imaginative writer, though he often begins as a member of a school or group, normally pulls away from it as he develops’ because such a writer ‘is finding his identity within the world of literature itself’ (839–40). As Frye comes closer to this autonomous world, he gradually becomes a different kind of reader and writer of literary history. In this double role, he can identify with the members of his audience, each of whom has witnessed his transformation and each of whom is eligible to share in this transformation by joining Frye’s quest for the peaceable kingdom and all it has come to symbolize. Frye invites his readers to partake in the particular difference that characterizes his own journey: ‘The difference is in the position of the reader’s mind at the end, and in whether he is being encouraged to remain within his habitual social responses or whether he is being prodded into making the steep and lonely climb into the imaginative world’ (838). IV By the time Frye reaches the fourth and final section of his ‘Conclusion,’ he has become deeply involved in making this climb. His discussion of Canadian literature has set the stage for a critical epiphany to be realized in the heights associated with ‘the imaginative world.’ The bald declaration that begins this section contrasts sharply with the speculative observations that mark the opening of the ‘Conclusion.’ Now Frye can say that there is a myth, a ‘pastoral myth ... at the heart of all social mythology’ (840). On one level, this myth can be a ‘sentimental or nostalgic’ one that promises the dream of ‘a world of peace and protection’ whose inhabitants have ‘a spontaneous response to the nature around it’ and ‘a leisure and composure not to be found today’ (840). But on a more complex level, the ‘genuine’ pastoral myth identifies nature as ‘the visible representative of an order that man has violated, a spiritual unity that the intellect murders to dissect’ (845). It is ‘the sense of

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kinship with the animal and vegetable world’ that affirms a profound ‘identifying of subject and object, the primary imaginative act of literary creation’ (842). As Frye comes closer to this form of identification, his narrator explores ‘the aspect of Canadian literature’ that provides access to the peaceable kingdom Frye equates with pastoral consciousness. Because one who reaches this kingdom finds harmony with nature, not so much physically as imaginatively, the search ‘for a North American pastoral myth in its genuinely imaginative form’ becomes a means by which one ‘tries to grasp the form’ of a ‘buried society’ that the imagination can resurrect. By this reasoning, ‘the conception “Canada” can also become a pastoral myth in certain circumstances’ (841, 842). To promote these circumstances, Frye openly embraces the identification of subject and object by relating his own developing perceptions to the developing perceptions of the nation and by allowing the story he comments on to become his story. This narrative traces a three-part movement from prelapsarian to postlapsarian to prelapsarian awareness: (1) The ‘Conclusion’ begins in a once-upon-a-time realm of genesis and dream where Frye’s consciousness remains free by virtue of its distance from history and the historically oriented task at hand. (2) But then there is a fall – embodied in the garrison mentality, the speaker’s increasing self-consciousness, and the act of writing a literary history – that excludes its creator, Frye. (3) Finally, the narrator retreats to the pastoral ideal of the peaceable kingdom that appears as the ‘Conclusion’ approaches its ending. By embracing this resolution, the speaker finds his way out of the creative and critical paradox I have described: the need to produce a conclusion that does not conclude. Only by evoking a pastoral myth can Frye approach the true object of his quest – an ending that finds human beings not exiled from the garden and at odds with their world, but pursuing the peaceable kingdom that Frye has been seeking. The peace he finds in realizing this quest is conveyed by his closing affirmation that ‘an imaginative continuum’ inspires him and all writers. By participating in this continuum, Frye can transcend both the conclusion he has apparently reached and the title of his essay as well, for his conclusion actually brings him back full circle to his dreamed-of beginning, back to a consciousness that elevates the imaginatively conceived over the historically determined. From this perspective, Frye is able to see his conclusion as only the first step in a narrative process that links him with the ‘writers of Canada’ who ‘have identified the habits and attitudes of the country’ and ‘left an

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imaginative legacy of dignity and of high courage’ (849). In his expanding story, these writers have become heroes, the voyageur-heroes who are sharing his steep climb to a new ‘imaginative world.’ If one ignores the direction of Frye’s own imaginative involvement in his ‘Conclusion,’ one is forced to endorse a diminished response to the work’s literary value – the kind of response that characterizes most of the well-known Canadian criticism the essay ostensibly influenced. By focusing deliberately on the practical application of his observations to a theory of culture, such criticism becomes preoccupied with all the by-products of the pastoral vision denied: garrison mentalities, or themes of isolation, survival, and national identity. But the ‘Conclusion’ appears in a new light when it is examined from the vantage-point of Frye’s own transforming voyage through it. It depicts the creation, through a romance narrative, of the idea of Canada, a metaphoric conception that is transhistorical, autonomous, and distinctly literary before it is cultural. Frye’s narrative leads his readers away from history towards self-creation, away from isolation towards integration. At the end of this movement – this quest – lies the peaceable kingdom of Frye’s original dream. His vision of this once-upona-time kingdom anticipates its resurrection, through his telling, at the very moment the kingdom seems most displaced. As Frye says: ‘The moment that the peaceable kingdom has been completely obliterated by its rival is the moment when it comes to the foreground again as the eternal frontier, the first thing that the writer’s imagination must deal with’ (848). In concluding his essay, then, Frye points the way to a new beginning. Now beyond history, he leaves his readers contemplating his distance from time, space, and any version of mimesis. He is not in the Literary History. He is not in literary history. He is out there, in the autonomous world he has always sought. ‘Again,’ he reminds his audience, ‘nothing can give a writer’s experience and sensitivity any form except the study of literature itself’ (849). The ‘Conclusion’ that closes with these words is nowhere near its end.

notes ‘“A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom”: The Narrative in Northrop Frye’s Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada’ was first published in PMLA 108, 2 (March 1993): 283–93.

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1 The general editor, Carl F. Klinck, says in his introduction that the Literary History of Canada treats ‘not only works generally classified as “literature,” but also, chiefly in separate chapters, other works which have influenced literature’ (xi). Frye notes in his ‘Conclusion’ that the editors of Literary History of Canada went out of their way to broaden the concept of literature by including ‘chapters on political, historical, religious, scholarly, philosophical, scientific, and other non-literary writing’ (822). (Unless otherwise indicated, all citations of Klinck’s introduction and Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ refer to the 1965 edition of Literary History of Canada). Klinck points out that ‘the support provided by the Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada Council can never be suitably acknowledged. During every year of preparation the Humanities Research Council provided funds.’ In addition, ‘the Canada Council made twenty-two short term grants in aid of research to individuals who were working for the Literary History of Canada; not one application was refused’ (xiv). 2 While reviews of Literary History of Canada comment on Frye’s ‘Conclusion,’ the 1965 text of the chapter has never been considered a discrete document. Similarly, a revised version published in Frye’s The Bush Garden was treated only in the context of that collection. While Robert Denham lists twenty-six reviews of The Bush Garden in his bibliography on Frye, he cites no studies devoted to the ‘Conclusion,’ in either its original or its revised form. Eli Mandel’s perceptive essay identifies Frye’s ‘romantic reading of a Canadian literary tradition’ and emphasizes ‘critical problems arising from questions having to do with a definition of national literature’ (285); but while Mandel provides important commentary on much of Frye’s Canadian criticism, he merely mentions Frye’s ‘extraordinary’ ‘Conclusion’ without discussing it. Most criticism published in the two decades following the appearance of Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ bears his imprint. Thematic in orientation, such criticism promotes the notion that literary texts can be approached as expressions of national identity. The best known of these critical works include those by D.G. Jones, Margaret Atwood, Laurence Ricou, and John Moss. Although the influence of Canadian thematic criticism is still apparent today, several important essays and books have challenged the notion of a poetics based on cultural criteria and have implicitly questioned the authority of Frye’s culturally grounded vision of a stable, unfragmented nation. Among the most frequently cited antithematic texts are those by E.D. Blodgett, Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon, Frank Davey, and Paul Stuewe. 3 When the second edition of the Literary History of Canada appeared in 1976, Frye wrote a new ‘Conclusion’ that hardly resembled the first version. Ex-

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pressing concern over the deepening linguistic tensions that were dividing Canada, he noted that ‘the trends [he] studied in the previous conclusion have reached something of a crisis since then’ (318). In the context of such a crisis, it was difficult for Frye to sustain the pastoral vision that characterized the earlier document. In 1965 the notion of a Canadian literature and Canadian literary history was but ‘a gleam in paternal critic’s eye’; the emphasis was on the future, on infinite potential. But now that Canadian literature had achieved a certain identity, the focus had turned back on a present that made the original vision harder to find. As Frye observes, ‘to achieve, to bring a future into the present, is also to become finite, and the sense of that is always a little disconcerting, even though becoming finite means becoming genuinely human’ (319). 4 In A Natural Perspective, which was published the same year as Literary History of Canada, Frye differentiates, ‘in the manner of Coleridge,’ between ‘Iliad critics [and] Odyssey critics’ (1). The Odyssey critic, like the critic in Frye’s ‘Conclusion,’ is aligned with the romance quest. The phrase ‘peaceable kingdom’ derives from Edward Hicks’s painting of that title – a work completed, Frye says, ‘around 1830’ (‘Conclusion’ 847–8). 5 In his attempt to find appropriate metaphors of pastoral experience, Frye curiously neglected to mention several Canadian models that were clearly important to him. Of these, the most influential is perhaps Lawren Harris, one of the Group of Seven painters. In an essay on Harris published in 1969, Frye observes that Harris interests him in part because the painter also wrote poetry and ‘a great deal of critical prose’ (Bush Garden, 207). Another reason is that Harris shared in his group’s ‘direct imaginative confrontation with the North American landscape, which, for them, began in literature with Thoreau and Whitman’ (ibid., 206). This confrontation encouraged a romantic view that had again become fashionable during the 1960s, when Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ appeared. His reflection on these artists, and on their milieu, is therefore germane to any attempt to establish the ‘Conclusion’ as a romance that traces a search for redemption through faith. Frye writes that the Group of Seven painters, as a result of their reading of Thoreau and Whitman, ‘developed an interest for which the word theosophical would not be too misleading if understood, not in any sectarian sense, but as meaning a commitment to painting as a way of life, or, perhaps better, as a sacramental activity expressing a faith, and so analogous to the practicing of a religion. This is a Romantic view, following the tradition that begins in English poetry with Wordsworth. While the Group of Seven were most active, Romanticism was going out of fashion elsewhere. But the nineteen-sixties is once again a Romantic period, in fact almost oppressively so’ (ibid., 208).

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works cited Balfour, Ian. Northrop Frye. Twayne’s World Authors Series 806. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Daymond, Douglas, and Leslie Monkman, eds. Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestos. Vol. 2 of 2. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1985. Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. – ‘Conclusion.’ In Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, 821–49. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. – ‘Conclusion.’ In Klinck, ed., Literary History of Canada, 2nd ed., Vol. 3, 318–32. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976. – Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. – A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965. – The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976. Hamilton, A.C. Northrop Frye: Anatomy of His Criticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Klinck, Carl F., ed. ‘Introduction.’ In Literary History of Canada, ix–xiv. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. – Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. 1st ed.; 2nd ed., 3 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965; 1976. MacLulich, T.D. ‘What Was Canadian Literature? Taking Stock of the Canlit Industry.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 30 (1984–5): 17–34. Mandel, Eli. ‘Northrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition.’ In Eleanor Cook et al., eds, Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye, 284–97. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

EPILOGUE

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The Northrop Frye Effect russell morton brown

I Frye among the Poets I very quickly discovered that I was not the only young Canadian writer being instructed by Northrop Frye’s writing on narrative and poetry, on Blake’s prophecies and Canadian poetics ... Canadian writers like Eli Mandel, Margaret Atwood, Doug Jones, James Reaney, Jay Macpherson, and Dennis Lee, to name only the most obvious, were changing Canadian literature because they had in turn been changed by Northrop Frye. (Kroetsch, 154).

The title of Branko Gorjup’s Introduction to this volume points to Northrop Frye’s role in decolonizing Canadian culture, a role documented in the first essay collected here, James Reaney’s ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament’ (1957). For Reaney, Frye’s attention to Canadian literature was important to writers because he helped them do what the protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing describes as ‘clear a space’ (177). Atwood’s protagonist is undoubtedly mistaken when she says, ‘Everything from history must be eliminated’ (176), but she is responding to the anxiety that (as Reaney shows us) was felt by writers then coming of age in a colonial culture: ‘you almost go mad because the great tradition of English literature, the glare of its brilliant modern representatives seems so oppressively and crushingly great.’ Reading Frye’s ‘The Narrative Tradition in English Canadian Poetry,’1 Reaney found a solution that didn’t demand erasing history: writers in a ‘new’ country such as Canada were the inheritors of European literature, and

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their inheritance should be looked upon not as a burden but as a gift – because ‘any attempt to ignore that tradition can only lead to disaster’ (NFC, 55). Frye’s Canadian criticism – including his annual surveys of Canadian poetry for the University of Toronto Quarterly throughout the 1950s (David Staines reminds us that these too were an important part of Frye’s Canadian criticism)2 – made writers more than simply inheritors: because their milieu and culture mediated the use they made of that inheritance, they had to reinvent their tradition and make it native. And Frye’s essay told Reaney that, in Canada, the landscape played a significant role in the way tradition would be employed: ‘above all, [Canada] is a country in which nature makes a direct impression on the artist’s mind, an impression of its primeval lawlessness and moral nihilism, its indifference to the supreme value placed on life within human society, its faceless, mindless unconsciousness, which fosters life without benevolence and destroys it without malice’ (NFC, 56). This idea, reiterated in several of the essays that followed, along with Frye’s other characterizations of the early Canadian experience – Reaney particularly mentions the ‘extremely suggestive comment that our civilization in Canada naturally produced narrative poetry with a strong undertone of melancholy to it because it was, until recently, or perhaps still is, at the same stage as the Anglo-Saxon pioneer culture that produced Beowulf and The Wanderer’ – has been much debated. From a contemporary perspective what is important is not the validity of Frye’s generalizations but the fact that they provided writers of his generation with a way to think about the place of the artist in a new environment: ‘What the poet sees in Canada ... is very different from what the politician or businessman sees, and different again from what his European contemporaries see’ (NFC, 56). A poet such as Lampman, Frye thought, may have accepted the romantic inheritance of Wordsworth and Keats but he imbued it with a Canadian ‘quality’ that ‘links him to the great Canadian explorers, the solitary adventurers among solitudes, and to the explorer painters like Thomson and Emily Carr who followed them, with their eyes continually straining into the depths of nature’ (NFC, 57). Along with his essays on Canadian poetry and culture, the general theory of literature that Frye began to articulate in the 1950s gave Canadian writers a way to see their place in the larger world of literature. Robert Kroetsch, in an essay called ‘Learning the Hero from Northrop Frye,’ has described how his discovery of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism,

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which he read the year it was published (1957), made him feel that, since individual experiences were part of a vast imagined and recreated universe, it was not after all limiting to come from outside the Anglo-American mainstream. Similarly, in ‘The Inheritors Read the Will’ (1992), Reaney returned to Frye’s influence to argue that Frye’s large theories of myth taught him the universal could exist in contact with the local: ‘in his analysis of Blake’s Israel/Britain symbolism, Frye suggests that the method used was to lay a map of Palestine over a map of Britain. At the time I first read this, my impulse was to try this experiment with the region in which I was then living and reading – southern Ontario. The result of this experiment was that Windsor became Beersheba, North Bay became Dan, with Toronto as Jerusalem, and Lake Ontario as the Dead Sea’ (126). But while Frye may have suggested that Canadian writers could be both part of the larger literary world and find a place in their nation’s literature, he was aware of the dangers of claiming conscious influence: at the end of his ‘Conclusion’ to the Literary History of Canada (1965), he found a way for Canadian writers to conceive of belonging to a Canadian tradition without having read their precursors by suggesting that, whether they knew it or not, they had become part of a Canadian ‘imaginative continuum’: ‘A reader may feel ... unreality in efforts to attach Canadian writers to a tradition made up of earlier writers whom they may not have read or greatly admired ... Yet I keep coming to the feeling that there does seem to be such a thing as an imaginative continuum, and that writers are conditioned in their attitudes by their predecessors, whether there is a conscious influence or not’ (NFC, 372). Frye thus forestalled arguments about explicit influence of earlier Canadian writers on those who followed – undercutting the later comic bit in John Metcalf’s anti-nationalist polemic, What Is a Canadian Literature?, in which the author describes phoning up writers such as Alice Munro to ask them if they had read D.C. Scott’s short stories – or even knew who Scott was. As Reaney reminds us in ‘The Canadian Poet’s Predicament,’ before Frye began contributing to the Canadian literary dialogue the English Canadian poetic tradition had been largely invisible: for Reaney it was just being made available ‘with two intelligent anthologies – A.J.M. Smith’s and Louis Dudek’s – and with Northrop Frye’s article.’ Frye’s essays combined with those anthologies to produce a sense that Canadian writing was not merely an arbitrary coming together of works and authors but part of a coherent tradition that could sustain writ-

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ers, an idea vitally important to Reaney in 1957. Fifteen years later that discovery could still produce a frisson for Margaret Atwood, who, concluding her Frye-influenced critical survey, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, wrote that it ‘came as a shock to me to discover that my country’s literature ... had a distinct tradition and shape of its own’ (237). As well as giving Canadian writers a way of locating themselves in a tradition both Canadian and international, Frye’s engagement, in Anatomy of Criticism, with the mythic and archetypal dimensions of literature offered them a new way to think about the making of literature. Reaney found in Frye’s theoretical work a handbook that furnished ‘a giant critical focus’ for poets (‘The Canadian Imagination,’ 188). That this was its effect on a number of Canadian writers then emerging is undeniable: the prominence, in Canada, of myth as both topic and technique3 – well after the impact of the Joyce-Eliot infatuation with myth had run its course elsewhere – can be seen not only in Reaney’s drama but also in the poetry and fiction of Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Eli Mandel, D.G. Jones, Margaret Avison, Douglas LePan, George Johnston, Robert Kroetsch, Robertson Davies, Michael Ondaatje, Jack Hodgins, and many others. Out of this ferment came Margaret Laurence’s turn to myth at the end of her career,4 as well as the later mythic play in writers such as Thomas King, whose Green Grass, Running Water (1993) is not only a panoply of myth but also contains a character, Dr Joseph Hovaugh, who can be read as a parody of Frye (see Ridington) while using a four-part structure that recalls Frye’s four seasonal mythoi and their alignment with four generic forms. Rosemary Sullivan points out that it was Frye in person as well as Frye’s ideas that mattered to writers: he had – despite his native diffidence – a powerful charisma that affected not only his students such as Reaney, Atwood, Macpherson, and Dennis Lee, but others who knew and responded to Frye the person, including Mandel, Jones, Avison, LePan, Ronald Bates, and Johnston. In addition, Frye was in the air and many, as Sullivan suggests in her biography of Gwendolyn MacEwen, received their contact at second hand, at places like the early 1960s Bohemian Embassy (the literary and folk-music coffee shop that served as a meeting place for Toronto’s poets): ‘mythology … was a topic of endless discussion at The Embassy, having filtered down from Robert Graves and from Northrop Frye’s lectures at the University of Toronto;

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everyone had read Leonard Cohen’s Let Us Compare Mythologies and Jay Macpherson’s The Boatman’ (Shadow Maker, 112). Victoria College, where Frye had long been in residence, teaching courses in Shakespeare, Milton, and religious knowledge, became a nexus. Macpherson was already deeply immersed in myth when she arrived there, in 1954, to study with Frye at the recommendation of her first mentor, Robert Graves. The man who had been Frye’s guiding spirit, E.J. Pratt, continued to dine there regularly, though then retired. In 1956, Reaney arrived to write his doctoral dissertation under Frye. The year after that Atwood and Lee began their studies at Vic as undergraduates.5 Some of these writers have left us portraits of the man. For example, although Jay Macpherson’s depiction of Noah in ‘The Anagogic Man’ (a central poem in The Boatman) makes him an emblem of the poet, Frye’s biographer, John Ayre tells us that the poem began as light verse about ‘Norrie’ rather than ‘Noah’ (431), and adds that it catches Frye’s ‘vulnerable side’ (260): Noah walks with head bent down For between his nape and crown He carries, balancing with care, A golden bubble round and rare. Its gently shimmering sides surround All us and our worlds, and bound Art and life, and wit and sense, Innocence and experience. … O you that pass, if still he seems One absent-minded or in dreams Consider that your senses keep A death far deeper than his sleep. Angel, declare: what sways when Noah nods? The sun, the stars, the figures of the gods.

More importantly, The Boatman as a whole is a remarkable case of a poet responding to Frye. As Sullivan notes, the sequence ‘echoes Frye’s vision.’ ‘The Anagogic Man’ shows us how directly Macpherson was converting Frye’s literary theory into poetry, in particular that part of

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Anatomy of Criticism that describes how, ‘On the anagogic level, man is the container of nature’ (145), so that ‘the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature … Nature is now inside the mind of an infinite man’ (119). Because Frye’s Anatomy appeared in April of 1957 and ‘The Boatman’ received its first publication in the Canadian Forum that July, Macpherson has to have been engaging with the ideas in Frye’s book prior to its publication. She may have encountered them in Frye’s lectures: in them he laid out the conceptual schemes of the Anatomy during its composition; or she may have known them as a result of her professional relationship with Frye as his graduate student, teaching assistant, and marker; it is most likely that she learned about them because Frye valued her highly as a colleague – someone with whom he could discuss his ideas and may have shared work in progress. This kind of productive osmosis was affecting other writers at Victoria around this time. While writing his thesis under Frye and working as his teaching assistant, Reaney was responding to Frye’s theories in plays such as One-Man Masque (1958), which, as he later told Ayre, ‘experimented with circular patterns … using Frye’s mandala’ (Ayre, 276). In her biography of Atwood, Sullivan tells us both how the young writer valued ‘the astonishing discovery that Frye took Canadian literature and young writers seriously’ (The Red Shoes, 90) and how, in one of her tutorials, she heard Reaney suggest that students ‘retell the myth of the Robber Bride and ask: “Who is the Robber Bride in your life?”’ (93).6 As well, Atwood developed a friendship with Macpherson and began reading both her poetry and the books that Macpherson was reading. She also became close friends with, and collaborated in her undergraduate writing with, Dennis Lee. Lee’s own visionary poems, like his important poetic manifesto about the need to find and affirm one’s place in Canada’s culture (‘Cadence, Country, Silence’), were nourished by his experiences at Victoria. In addition, Lee played an important role in disseminating Frye’s ideas after he finished his education there: as co-founder of the House of Anansi Press he brought together Frye’s Canadian essays in The Bush Garden in 1971. Around the same time he worked with Atwood to help her to prepare Survival for its 1972 publication with Anansi. Of course, there were many prominent writers not in direct contact with Frye who were touched by his influence. The strong turn towards myth that the fiction of Robertson Davies took after the appearance of Anatomy of Criticism makes it looks quite different from the novels

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that had begun Davies’s career.7 Indeed, more than just sensing Frye’s influence, we may feel that in the depiction of Dunstan Ramsay – a man who, we are told in Fifth Business, appreciates how the ‘Arabian Nights and the Bible were … pretty close – and I did not mean this in any scoffing sense’ (37) – we can see a portrait of Frye himself. Ramsay sounds particularly like Frye when, as a consequence of such insights, he devotes his career to the ‘explorations of the borderland between history and myth’ (6). He also sounds like Frye when he rebels against the values of his provincial society – formed by the descendants of pioneers who ‘gave hard names to qualities that, in a more sophisticated society, might have had value’ (18) – with the life-changing insights that ‘mythical elements … underlie our apparently ordinary lives’ (40) and that ‘primitive thinking’ inhabits present beliefs (161).8 A backlash in the literary community against someone this influential was inevitable. In the early 1960s, the Montreal poet and editor Louis Dudek began railing against ‘the school of Frye’ (‘Northrop Frye’s Untenable Position,’179), arguing that ‘Toronto mythopoeists’ such as Macpherson and Mandel were producing academic poetry (‘Those Damned Visionary Poets,’166): abstract rather than engaged in the everyday; lacking in immediacy; and unable to compete with the world-affirming, confrontational, and tough-minded poetry coming out of Montreal. Charging that Frye-influenced poets like Daryl Hine, Reaney, and Avison were engaged in ‘a kind of culture mania … that in Canada we associate particularly with Toronto’ (‘Three Major Canadian Poets,’154), Dudek opposed this ‘poetry of mythological abstruseness and apparent remoteness’ with ‘a poetry of direct and immediate relation to concrete issues’ (‘Two Canadian Poets,’ 148) and celebrated Montreal poets such as Ralph Gustafson and, especially, Irving Layton, who, even though he sometimes fell into writing ‘doggerel,’ could create ‘more original and genuine poetry than any of the Toronto scholarpoets’ (Three Major Canadian Poets,’ 155).9 Others joined Dudek in expressing displeasure over Frye’s influence on Canadian poetry. George Bowering, in the 1968 essay reprinted in this volume, argued that Frye’s impact on Canadian writing had been overstated and that he was chiefly attended to by ‘a small group of poets in Ontario who arose after World War II.’ These writers, in Bowering’s view, remained ‘outside the contemporary mainstream’ in Canada – which he thought looked not to a European past but sought to emulate the break from the Old World that had already been made in

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the United States. While Dudek’s and Bowering’s aesthetic principles were quite different, their discomfort reflected a shared anxiety – the fear that Frye, by dominating Canadian critical discourse, was establishing a Toronto-based (or Toronto-biased) aesthetic and literary canon for Canada.10 As Francis Sparshott reminds us in his essay, Frye was sensitive to the charge that he was shaping young writers and always denied the existence of a ‘Frye school.’ Although Sparshott finds this denial disingenuous (‘it has seemed to some that there is a school which, if it is not a Frye school of poetry, will do until a Frye school comes along’), Frye made the issue a complicated one by suggesting, in his Preface to The Bush Garden, that the influence had gone the other way – because, he writes, the annual reviews of poetry in Canada undertaken from 1950 to 1959 were ‘an essential piece of “field work”’ for Anatomy of Criticism – ‘carried on while working out a comprehensive critical theory. I was fascinated to see how the echoes and ripples of the great age kept moving through Canada, and taking a form there that they could not have taken elsewhere’ (NFC 419). II Frye among the Critics While Frye’s influence on Canadian writing is usually discussed as resulting from the theories of myth and archetype found in Anatomy of Criticism, Frye’s influence on Canadian criticism has been viewed in terms of the essays he wrote on Canadian topics, many of which don’t seem to connect in obvious ways to his Anatomy. Jonathan Kertzer has described how Frye, as a critic of Canadian literature, ‘gradually assembled’ in these essays ‘a range of judgements and preferences that coalesced’ into such themes as ‘the garrison mentality, the frostbite of colonialism, the continent as leviathan’ – formulations that ‘inspired one generation of Canadian critics and provoked the next’ (review 570). Coalescence is a particularly apt term for the way these ideas came together in the 1965 ‘Conclusion’ to the first edition of the Literary History of Canada. Although Frye wrote a substantial body of essays on Canadian literature and culture, both before and after his famous ‘Conclusion,’ this single document has come to epitomize his insights on the subject. It originally served, in the Literary History of Canada, as an overview of the volume and was often the only essay read by those daunted by the long surveys that preceded it. When it was subsequently reprinted as the end of The Bush Garden, it was seen

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as the culmination of the essays in that collection. Indeed, Frye himself emphasized it as a synthesis of his thoughts on Canadian literature, describing it, in his opening paragraph, as a summary that involved ‘some self-plagiarism,’11 and adding that the coming into being of the Literary History had supported ‘most of my [previous] intuitions on the subject’ (NFC 340). The timing of the Literary History and The Bush Garden, along with the critical works inspired by Frye’s Canadian criticism around this time – particularly Jones’s Butterfly on Rock (1970) and Atwood’s Survival (1972) – was propitious. The cultural nationalism that had been growing in Canada since the end of World War II became a major force in the later 1960s, reinforced by the centennial celebrations of 1967 and marked by a strong desire to distinguish Canada from the United States, a result of growing anxieties over cultural and economic colonialism combined with a sense that race riots, assassinations, and the disruptions arising from the Vietnam War showed that America had lost its way. In a period of renewed interest in the old question of whether Canada had a coherent and distinct culture and tradition, Frye’s ‘Conclusion,’ by postulating the existence of a ‘Canadian imagination,’ offered an answer that many longed for. Coming at a time when literary criticism was becoming more professionalized and institutionalized; at a time when Canadian studies were being enshrined in academic curricula and scholars were finally beginning to specialize in the field; and at a time when the canon of Canadian literature was felt to be emerging, Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ became, David Staines tells us, ‘an immediate classic’ and ‘the single most-quoted essay in Canadian literary criticism’ (‘Canadian Context,’ 53), its essential ideas assimilated into our Canadian discourse as part of our critical vocabulary, indeed of our very language: Canadian nature with its bleak and terrifying desolation; the garrison mentality, that closely knit and beleaguered society at odds with its environment; and, perhaps most crucially, the observation, often repeated and often pondered, 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 … less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by … ‘Where is here?’ (‘Canadian Context,’ 52)

The aphoristic quality of Frye’s statements – along with his ability to write, as Mandel would later observe about The Great Code, in that

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‘mode of rhetoric … called “kerygma,” the vehicle of revelation or exhortation’ (‘Frye: The Bible,’ 137) – made these formulas exceptionally effective. They were, to borrow a title from one of Frye’s last books, words with power, and Frye’s example may have inspired other Canadian nationalist critics (Mandel, Kroetsch, Jones, Atwood, Lee, Robin Mathews) to adopt similarly prophetic tones. In the decade following Frye’s ‘Conclusion,’ these critics created a body of stirring and visionary – if often polemical and not always well-supported – arguments.12 Forty years later, Frye’s aphorisms continue to echo through our critical and cultural discourse. In 1972, Atwood called the opening chapter of Survival ‘What, Where, and Why Is Here?’ ‘Where is here?’ was also Atwood’s working title for Surfacing.13 Kertzer uses Frye’s question for the opening of Worrying the Nation, his 1998 study of ‘national literature in English Canada,’ writing that ‘losing one’s bearings is de rigueur in Canadian literature – “Where is here?” is the national riddle’ (4). The contributors to the Fall 2000 issue of Essays on Canadian Writing were asked to respond to the question ‘Where Is Here Now?’ More recently Justin D. Edwards remarked, in Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005), that ‘Frye’s query strikes at the heart of a Canadian crisis of identity that continues to haunt literary criticism in Canada’ (xii). But of all of Frye’s memorable phrases, one has been particularly important: ‘garrison mentality.’ That familiar and often-repeated twoword formula has resounded through Canadian criticism and sparked critical controversy ever since Frye used it in his ‘Conclusion’ – and it continues to resound through the essays gathered here.14 As Sparshott observes, none of Frye’s other observations had as much impact as this suggestion that Canadian culture reflected a settlement pattern shaped by garrison or garrison-like experiences. That idea was so central to the extended critical studies that followed – in particular, Jones’s Butterfly on Rock, Atwood’s Survival, John Moss’s Patterns of Isolation in EnglishCanadian Fiction (1974), and Gaile McGregor’s The Wacousta Syndrome (1985)15 – that it became identified as the chief ‘theme’ of a Canadian ‘thematic’ movement. The idea of Canada as a garrison culture continues to be discussed today: moving beyond critical and literary discourse, it has sometimes been recast in ways that Frye would no doubt have objected to – as in a recent position paper from the Fraser Institute attacking the CBC: The Canadian Garrison Mentality and Anti-Americanism at the CBC (Cooper and Miljan). To see this concept disseminated in this way is to recall

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Malcolm Ross’s 1976 description of Frye’s ‘garrison’ as ‘a myth in motion ... a myth breeding myths in its own image … rhetorical rather than poetical’ (133). The Canadian criticism Frye inspired may have been thought of as ‘thematic’ because Frye occasionally used the word ‘theme’ in his Canadian essays – but the designation was more likely the result of the subtitles of Jones’s book (A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature) and of Atwood’s (A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature).16 However, calling this kind of criticism ‘thematic’ is confusing – since it has no connections with what has been called ‘thematic criticism’ elsewhere (such as the thematic criticism of early Russian formalism) and it obscures its close relationship to what in the United States became the influential ‘myth and symbol school.’ The founding document of this school of American criticism was Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950). An important book in the study of American culture and as the departure point for what came to be known as American studies, it emerged out of Harvard’s graduate program in ‘American Civilization’ (from which Smith, in 1940, earned the first PhD) and was published by Harvard University Press the year Frye was at Harvard on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Groundbreaking in its day, Smith’s book is recognized as a classic in American studies and continues to be studied and discussed in American culture and American literature courses. Part of what was new about Smith’s study in 1950 was the author’s willingness to make use of popular and non-literary texts alongside high literature – to take all the verbal products of American culture as his field – in constructing its analysis of American myth making. Smith’s way of approaching American studies probably informed or reinforced Frye’s way of thinking about the analysis of Canadian culture, as when he suggested in 1956 that the proposed Literary History of Canada should include ‘non-literary writing … to show how the verbal imagination operates as a ferment in all cultural life’ (NFC 341). Although there are the differences in exposition that one would expect in comparing the work of a historian like Smith with that of a literary theorist like Frye, there are some striking parallels with Frye’s thought, as when Smith writes that he wants to use the ‘terms “myth” and “symbol”’ ‘as words to designate larger and smaller units of the same kind of thing, namely an intellectual construction that fuses concept and emotion into an image. The myths and symbols with which I deal have the further charac-

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teristic of being collective representations rather than the works of a single mind’ (xi; italics added). As an academic dimension of the construction of an ‘imagined community,’ the myth-and-symbol school in the United States can be understood as part of the American project of self-definition that derives from the idea of ‘American exceptionalism’ – the belief that the United States has a distinct and unique national identity. Smith’s Virgin Land was the progenitor of a number of important studies, most notably R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955) and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964). These books show the growth, outside of Canada, of the kind of criticism – ‘fusing literature, society, [and] the cultural order we strive to discern’ – that Mandel found in Frye’s writing. There were many factors arising in the 1950s and after that made this act of defining national identity seem suddenly important – and they were not limited to Canada. Ross Poole has pointed to a new concern with national identity in this period as a response to the ideas about identity and identity formation found in Erik Erikson’s widely read Childhood and Society (1950), which was especially relevant to cultural criticisms because of its chapter on ‘Reflections on American Identity.’17 Erikson’s influence also stimulated Canadians: indeed, it has been seen as influencing the historian W.L. Morton, whose classic work, The Canadian Identity, appeared in 1961.18 For both Frye and Morton, the new attention in the United States to national identity creation may have served as additional impetus to articulate a set of ideas demonstrating that Canada had its own distinct identity. An awareness of this background should contextualize our understanding of the turn Frye wanted to give the national identity topos when, in the 1965 ‘Conclusion,’ he described ‘Canadian sensibility’ as being ‘disturbed … by a series of paradoxes in what confronts [Canadian] identity’ (NFC 346) – so far as I am aware, Frye’s earliest use of the word ‘identity’ in this sense.19 Frye’s statement, in the opening of his ‘Conclusion’ – that Canadian literature could be used as a field for investigating national identity even though the nation’s literature was still immature – bothered some because it seemed to downgrade Canada’s literature. But what was important about Frye’s opening move was the argument that followed – not just that the inchoate condition of Canadian literature ‘made it much easier to see what literature is trying to do’ but that studying

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such a literature while it is still in the making and not yet shaped by individual genius so much as by its ‘Canadian context’ means that ‘at every point we remain aware of social and historical setting’ (NFC 341) – invited an understanding that was made explicit in two 1972 books, Survival and Robert Fulford, David Godfrey, and Abraham Rotstein’s Read Canadian. It is a civic virtue and a route to self-knowledge for Canadians to read Canadian texts.20 Frye’s critics have charged that, in locating this national identity by reading it out of the nation’s literature, this kind of criticism was reductive and ignored difference, and that it asked literature to serve nonliterary ends. It is worth remembering that Frye’s Canadian criticism is not essentially different from his other critical projects. His revolutionary innovation in Blake studies was that Fearful Symmetry treated the whole of Blake’s work as a single text. Anatomy of Criticism extended that approach to the entire body of literature by seeing individual works as part of the larger whole – resting on what Frye describes as his ‘assumption of total coherence’ (16). Similarly, Frye’s late books on the Bible emphasize a holistic approach to what modern scholarship had begun to treat as a loose collection of scriptural texts. It should therefore come as no surprise that in his approach to Canadian literature Frye writes at times as though there is a single text written by ‘the Canadian imagination.’21 The Canadian writer, he observes in the ‘Conclusion’ to Literary History of Canada, ‘often has the feeling, and says so, that he is not actively shaping his material at all, but is rather a place where a verbal structure is taking its own shape’ (NFC, 357). Compare Frye’s statement in The Critical Path: ‘From Homer onward, poets have continually insisted that they were simply places where something new in literature was able to take its own shape’ (24). While there is legitimate concern that such a view may overlook the unique features of a text, Frye here anticipates structuralist-influenced ideas about cultural discourse – ideas that would soon become widely accepted, including the oft-reiterated notion that ‘we do not write the language, the language writes us.’ 22 The close appearance of a number of critical works, including Jones’s Butterfly on Rock, Atwood’s Survival, and John Moss’s Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction, alongside Frye’s Bush Garden, all of them expounding the garrison thesis, made it appear that a Frye-derived ‘thematic’ approach had become the only framework for extended discussions of Canadian literature and that a critical consensus had emerged. Frye’s statement that his identification of a garrison mentality

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was only provisional (NFC 351) was ignored by his followers; in their use, ‘garrison’ began to stand for a cluster of related but not always examined (or substantiated) ideas – just as Turner’s ‘frontier’ had in American discourse. As Eleanor Cook observes: ‘The notion of Frye’s work being reduced to slogans is highly depressing.’ She adds that ‘for fifty people who can repeat the phrase “garrison mentality,” only one can repeat the crucial argument in … The Bush Garden and get it right.’ Writing that Frye’s conception of a garrison mentality had ‘become a cultural icon, a historical marker in the evolution of Canadian consciousness’ (NFC xxxviii), Jean O’Grady similarly criticized the failure of Frye’s followers to historicize the notion or to recognize Frye’s own desire to locate it in a historical era – instead, using the phrase for ‘its power and memorability.’ O’Grady’s reminder that Frye complained about ‘its specific historical context being usually ignored’ (xxxviii) is useful: despite those who have described Frye as ahistorical, he intended the garrison mentality to be understood as time-bound and seen as part of a historical development.23 The Canadian critical study that most eloquently utilized Frye’s ideas remains Jones’s Butterfly on Rock. Written by a man known for his elegant poetry and based on an image from the concluding lines of a poem by Irving Layton (‘There is no death in all the land, / I heard my voice cry; / And brought my hand down on the butterfly / And felt the rock move beneath my hand’), Butterfly on Rock is a highly imagistic meditation on Canadian literature that combines Frye’s perceptions with the 1960s sensibility of a critic concerned with personal freedoms and desiring to read the world in neo-Nietzschean terms – in which ‘Dionysian’ (viewed as good because liberating) forces vied with ‘Apollonian’ (bad because inhibiting). Ironically, when Davey argues that Butterfly on Rock isn’t good literary history (‘Jones tries to advance on the basis of work by the Confederation Poets the thesis that the Canadian landscape has been seen as “a savage place … holy and enchanted” – ignoring the documented fact that the ghostly presences in Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Charles G.D. Roberts were inherited from English Romanticism and American Transcendentalism rather than gained osmotically from the Canadian condition’), he is making an observation that is very much in the spirit of Frye. Davey is quite right to say that ‘Jones attempts both to describe Canadian culture and to prescribe how it should change,’ and that ‘His sociology is not only

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extra-literary; it is normative and polemic’ – but he ignores the elegance and the rhetorical power of Jones’s analysis. For Jones, as for Atwood, a Canadian literary tradition not only existed and had meaning for readers but could be used in a non-literary way: it could be understood as a symptom that permits one to diagnose a culture. Mandel’s identification of Frye’s ‘cultural Freudianism’ (see Fee’s essay) is useful here. Frye may not have liked Freud, but Mandel is right to suggest that he employs something like a Freudian model in assuming that critical self-awareness, like Freud’s anamnesis, permits a coming to self-awareness that makes it possible to change unhealthy patterns of thought. Frye wrote, in his 1981 essay ‘Criticism and Environment,’ that one task of criticism was to help us ‘become aware of our particular cultural conditioning’ (NFC, 581), thereby to free ourselves from its limitations.24 Jones’s analysis of Canada as deferring action and his call for Canadians to let down the walls of the garrison, like Atwood’s argument that Canada has too willingly played a victim role and her plea at the end of Survival for a ‘jailbreak,’ shows how each of them embraced this vision. If Jones and Atwood are among those Cook is thinking of when she speaks of the failure to get Frye’s ‘crucial argument’ right, it might be more just to say that they (like Mandel and Kroetsch, among many others) found in Frye’s ideas ways to advance their own ends. Frye observed several times – both of his own writing and of that by other critics – that criticism always had a personal and even an autobiographical dimension. That can certainly be said of the way the followers of Frye’s criticism moved away from their master’s examples in the arguments they fashioned about the Canadian ‘garrison.’ They had learned, as Margery Fee writes, that Frye ‘must be misread, reviewed, “retrieved as poetry”’ – and Butterfly on Rock and Survival are best understood as what the (Frye-influenced) American critic Harold Bloom would call ‘strong misreadings.’ Robert Lecker’s later and provocative investigation of Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ through deconstructive eyes – his reading of it as Frye’s own quest narrative and his reminder that later critics ignored the positive aspects of Frye’s ‘garrison’ – shows us that this text remains rich enough to sustain still further rereadings. And I long for more, including some discussion of the relationship of the garrison to the two pastoral scenes that bring the essay to an end. For all the apparent clarity of his writing, Frye’s Canadian criticism (like his larger body of critical writing) can be quite elliptical at times and is often demanding on his reader: Lecker’s

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essay alerts us to the fact that even what seems familiar warrants more discussion. Thus I end my reflections on Frye as Canadian critic by urging further rereading and more careful consideration. It is a good time for a reconsideration of Frye the Canadian critic, one that operates out of a fuller understanding of Frye (one drawing on texts such as The Educated Imagination, The Modern Century, and The Critical Path) and is contextualized by the intellectual currents that surrounded and nurtured him.25 III Frye the Canadian As the responses collected in this volume show, Frye had a profound effect on the perception and the study of Canada’s literary culture. He both helped articulate a Canadian tradition and shaped the Canadian canon.26 Yet in writing a preface for his first collection of his Canadian essays, Frye spoke of his Canadian essays in an offhand manner – ‘episodes in a writing career which has been mainly concerned with world literature and has addressed an international reading public’ (NFC, 412). He added, however, that he was also someone whose career ‘has always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential characteristics from there.’ It was this combination – of international and national roles – that made Frye a cultural symbol for Canadian writers and critics. It is worth recalling that his engagement with the literary ‘greats’ of the established canon and his own great fame as a theorist gave salience, and added authority, to his Canadian criticism at a time when most of his colleagues were not taking Canadian literature seriously because it was thought of as marginal, immature, or endangered. As well, Frye’s impact on Canadian writers and critics went beyond his arguments and theories: his career made its own statement about cultural colonialism. By gaining international standing while staying home, he showed Canadians that they could locate themselves in the centre of the creative and critical dialogue without giving up either national identity or physical location. By turning down offers from prestigious academic institutions outside Canada at the height of his fame, Frye made a tacit declaration that his country was a satisfactory place for those engaged in the world’s culture. He declared that, rather than being a limiting colonial outpost, Canada had nurtured him in his achievements: ‘it becomes clear,’ he wrote in 1980, ‘that scholarship, no less than poetry, grows out of a specific environment and is in part a response to it’ (NFC, 558).

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The attention he continued to pay to the literary production of his own culture, even while achieving his international success, showed his compatriots that being ‘international’ did not mean one had to ignore the local. The fact that Frye continued to write and speak about Canadian literature and culture was an affirmation that knowing about Canadian cultural products was no less important than being aware of the great tradition. These symbolic gestures responded to the anxieties Reaney had recorded – the feeling that while one might find rewards in focusing on a native tradition, which could become ‘ancestral, important, and haunting,’ to see the world from the perspective of the British Museum would undercut that act and make that inheritance seem merely ‘pitiful.’ This burden of the past had made Reaney wonder if he should ‘go over and join the more powerful angels on the other side of the Atlantic,’ but we now take it for granted that Canadians can stay home and send their literature abroad – and we also assume that Canada is seen by expatriate writers as a congenial place to come to. This too has been the Northrop Frye effect.

notes 1 Reaney was responding to the French translation ‘La tradition narrative dans la poésie canadienne-anglais.’ I quote from the English-language version, as published in The Bush Garden in 1971 and reprinted in Northrop Frye on Canada (abbreviated hereafter as NFC). 2 As well as forming an important part of Frye’s critical analysis of Canadian literature, those reviews were important because they showed writers (and those who aspired to write) that there was in Canada a reviewer who – for all Frye’s professed desire to be gentle and despite his often-avowed distrust of evaluative judgments – would combine sympathetic responses with more careful and detailed reading, more rigorous questions about craft and form, and higher standards than had previously been applied by Canadian book reviewers. 3 I am, of course, using ‘myth’ quite largely – which is how Frye and Reaney and many of the writers who followed them understood it – to include folklore motifs, fairytales, and so on. 4 In 1968 Laurence wrote to Adele Wiseman about her plans for The Diviners: ‘Re: possible new areas – I wasn’t thinking of anything new, as such, only something new for me, namely the area of myth’ (242). 5 Atwood has written that ‘a sympathetic English teacher named Miss Bill-

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Russell Morton Brown ings … led me to understand that Victoria College was where I ought to be. There was someone there called Northrop Frye, she said. I had never heard of him, but … I took her word’ (‘Northrop Frye Observed,’ 399). Reaney’s suggestion was probably for his students to consider ‘the Robber Bridegroom,’ since that is the title of the folk tale; the change to ‘Robber Bride’ was Atwood’s later innovation. (Reaney has described how, after he returned from his studies at University of Toronto to teach at the University of Manitoba, he would give ‘a displacement exercise for Creative Writing students – rewrite The Robber Bridegroom in terms of the Winnipeg you’ve grown up in’ [‘The Inheritors,’ 124].) The fact that Atwood did not publish the final fruits of Reaney’s suggestion, her novel The Robber Bride, until 1993 shows how long such early influences can go on inhabiting a writer’s consciousness. (The four women around whom The Robber Bride revolves are further evidence of the influence of Anatomy of Criticism, since they can be read in terms of the Frye’s association of comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony with the four seasons.) So far little critical attention has been given to the presence of Frye in Davies’s texts, though Cynthia Sugars has recently argued that Anatomy of Criticism is an unacknowledged intertext for The Cunning Man. Perhaps the Frye-Davies connection has not been much discussed because, in his many essays, interviews, and letters, Davies almost never alludes to Frye. Brian Johnson has drawn my attention to what may be Davies’s only mentions of Frye: briefly as a dramatized character among the University of Toronto faculty seen in ‘The Pit Whence Ye Are Digged’ (one of the tales in High Spirits), along with the terse reference in ‘The Canada of Myth and Reality’ to Frye’s famous query, ‘Where is here?’ (It suggests some anxiety of influence that, in that essay, originally given as a lecture to an American audience, Davies turns to Joseph Campbell for his definition of cultural myth and not to his prominent Canadian contemporary.) What Dunstan also discovers – ‘the oddly recurrent themes of history, which are also themes of myth’ (Fifth Business, 116) – sounds not only like Frye but also anticipates one of Frye’s most important followers, the American historian Hayden White, who applied the ideas of Anatomy of Criticism to the narratives of history. Regarding Frye’s importance to White, see the latter’s essay in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, in which he says he wants to go beyond his previous praise of Frye as ‘the greatest natural cultural historian of our time’ in order to pay tribute to ‘Frye’s brilliance as theorist of culture and renovator of humanistic studies in the second half of our century’ (28). Dudek did acknowledge that his aesthetics could not be reduced simply to

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place: attacking former Montrealer A.J.M. Smith as the ‘unacknowledged sire of all Platonic and Christian ascetic poets in Canada,’ he contrasts him with Raymond Souster, who ‘stands at the centre of a contrary current’ – and points out the irony: ‘More than anyone else, [Souster] is the clear example in Canada of a poet of immediacy. If you know the history of this, Souster is the best example of what First Statement and “the Montreal poets” were supposed to stand for – so the most representative Montreal poet is a Torontonian!’ (‘Those Damned Visionary Poets,’ 168, 172). Of course, generalizations such as Dudek’s about a ‘Torontonian’ bias was problematic in many ways given the non-Toronto origins of Frye, Mandel, Macpherson, and others who got lumped together in this ‘Toronto’ school. Frye’s increasingly regional characterizations of Canadian literature, beginning with the preface to The Bush Garden (1971), may be in response to accusations of his Toronto focus. Paradoxically, Frye was also attacked, not long after the publication of The Bush Garden, from the other side of the national-regional question by David Jackel. In contrast to the argument that his Canadian criticism was Toronto-centric, and therefore, as Bowering put it, aloof from a mainstream that ‘flows in the same river-system as the chief American one,’ Jackel thought Anatomy of Criticism revealed Frye as a critic only concerned with universals and therefore insufficiently interested in Canada as a national culture (229), and argued that it made Frye part of a ‘continentalist tradition which since the 1930s has been steadily obliterating the distinctive qualities of the Canadian identity’ (228). Throughout I will refer to the text of Frye’s ‘Conclusion’ as reproduced in Northrop Frye on Canada, the version that appeared in the Literary History, not the revision prepared for The Bush Garden. (In the latter, Frye cut this remark.) Frye was quite aware of the dangers inherent in this way of writing. He remarks of Spengler’s Decline of the West that it ‘has all the faults of a prophetic style: harsh, dogmatic, prejudiced, certain that history will do exactly what he says, determined to rub his reader’s nose into all the toughness and grimness of his outlook’ (‘Oswald Spengler’ 269). That 1972 novel retains an allusion to the phrase in its closing section, when the nameless narrator tell us that the man searching for her ‘calls my name, then pauses, “Are you here?”’ She then hears the echo repeating: ‘“here, here?”’ (192). In developing the idea of a garrison mentality, it seems likely that, as Jackel observes, Frye was seeking to express in this brief formula the Canadian counterpart to the influential ‘frontier thesis’ of American historian Frederick Jackson Turner. However, rather than serving as evidence –

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Russell Morton Brown which is how Jackel sees it – of Frye’s Americanization, it is one of Frye’s many moves in establishing crucial distinctions between the two national cultures. McGregor neither acknowledges Frye nor uses this phrase, but her analysis is extensively shaped by the idea. Jones also emphasized an interest in ‘themes’ in his introduction (‘isolating certain themes and images’ will allow us ‘to define more clearly some of the features that recur in the mind, the mirror of our imaginative life’). However, the attention Survival received and the debate it provoked made Atwood’s use of the word ‘thematic’ in the title of her book the most important factor in establishing ‘thematic’ as the label for Canadian criticism that sought to identify features of national culture. As a consequence, the word ‘thematic,’ when employed in Canadian critical discourse, now carries with it a number of associations it does not have elsewhere, chiefly that of a strong nationalist bent and an agenda directed towards identity formation in support of that nationalism. Heather Murray’s 1987 characterization of Canadian thematic criticism as having become ‘universally despised’ may be a bit strong but, since Davey’s 1975 attack, use of the phrase ‘thematic criticism’ has, in Canada, had negative connotations and is most often used dismissively. For a full discussion, see Brown, ‘The Practice and Theory.’ For the many uses of ‘theme’ as a literary term, see Brown, ‘Theme.’ In Nation and Identity (1999) Poole writes, ‘The responsibility for the vogue in “identity” talk can probably be assigned to the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, who introduced this term as part of his attempt to apply psychoanalytic categories to social and historical issues’ (44). Perry Anderson, in A Zone of Engagement (1992), usefully contrasts this newer conception of national identity to earlier ideas about national character (266–70). Philip Gleason – who, in his valuable essay ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History,’ discusses the new interest in national identity and locates Erikson as ‘the key figure for putting the word into circulation’ (914) – sees Morton’s Canadian Identity as one of the studies shaped by this new interest (913). He also points out that the British sociological school of symbolic interactionists (emerging in the 1940s), previously interested in the way individuals approached one another through shared symbolic systems, replaced their focus on ‘self’ with ‘identity’ in the early 1960s, a move influenced by the Canadian-born sociologist Erving Goffman, who, responding to the Eriksonian zeitgeist, ‘shifted from the terminology of “the self” to that of identity in … 1963’ (917). The opening sentence of Frye’s 1969 essay, ‘America: True or False?’ (Wain-

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wright, 52) – about Canada’s ‘perpetual identity crisis’ – shows how fully Frye had, a few years later, assimilated Erikson’s ideas. This idea of gaining self-knowledge through the study of one’s nation became the central tenet in the highly influential ‘Symons Report’ – as T.H.B. Symons’s To Know Ourselves: The Report of the Commission on Canadian Studies (1975) came to be known – with its recommendations for extensive curriculum development and reform to support this project. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Frye treated individual texts as containing crucial elements of the larger ‘text’ of their culture, one that could be discovered by reading them in harmony with one another. Compare A.C. Hamilton’s description of Frye the literary theorist responding to single works as if each ‘contains everything in miniature,’ a habit of mind Hamilton associated with that practice of Biblical exegesis in which Frye was trained – which treats a small and self-contained unit of the Bible, a pericope, as representative of the whole from which it comes. (See Cayley 12.) The curious thing about Bowering’s objections to Frye is that Bowering does not seem to notice what they share: he was himself attracted to and articulated various versions of this structuralist idea, as when he told Caroline Bayard in 1978, ‘I believe in the language. I think the language talks. The language knows how to speak’ (Bayard, 89). The title of Frye’s 1980 essay ‘Across the River and Out of the Trees’ is one reflection of Frye’s desire to put the generalizations in his 1965 ‘Conclusion’ into a historical past: there he remarked on how Emily Carr’s paintings typified the way the Canadian artist’s ‘vision is always, in the title of a compatriot’s book of poems, “deeper into the forest”’ (NFC 348); now we are coming ‘out of the trees.’ Compare Frye’s earlier remarks, in the last chapter of The Secular Scripture (1976): ‘Unconsciously acquired social mythology, the mythology of prejudice and conditioning, is clearly also something to be outgrown: it is therapeutic to recognize and reject it, as with other repressed material’ (170). Because Frye wrote of a ‘garrison mentality’ and not, say, a ‘garrison thesis’ or a ‘garrison hypothesis,’ one area that deserves future consideration is the way his approach to Canadian culture resembles that of the French Annales historians, with their emphasis on ‘mentalité.’ Magdalene Redekop has observed that ‘Frye’s metaphor [i.e., the garrison] is partly responsible for the fact that John Richardson’s novel Wacousta (1832) was elevated to national icon by critics and writers as diverse as John Moss, Robin Mathews, and Gaile MacGregor’ (270).

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works cited Anderson, Perry. A Zone of Engagement. London: Verso, 1992. Atwood, Margaret. ‘Northrop Frye Observed.’ 1981. Second Words, 398–408. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. – Surfacing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972. – Survival. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Ayre, John. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Bayard, Caroline. Interview with George Bowering. Out-Post / Avant-post. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1979. Brown, Russell Morton. ‘The Practice and Theory of Canadian Thematic Criticism: A Reconsideration.’ University of Toronto Quarterly 70, 2 (Spring 2001): 653–89. Brown, Russell [Morton]. ‘Theme.’ Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, 642–6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Cayley, David. Northrop Frye in Conversation. Toronto: Anansi, 1992. Cooper, Barry, and Lydia Miljan. The Canadian Garrison Mentality and AntiAmericanism at the CBC. Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 2005. Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. 1970. Toronto: Penguin, 1996. Dudek, Louis. ‘Northrop Frye’s Untenable Position.’ Delta 22 (Oct. 1963). Selected Essays and Criticism, 175–9. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1978. – ‘Those Damned Visionary Poets (Les Poètes Maudits Visionnaires).’ Delta 18 (June 1962). Selected Essays, 166–74. – ‘Three Major Canadian Poets: Three Major Forms of Archaism.’ Delta 16 (Nov. 1961). Selected Essays, 153–6. – ‘Two Canadian Poets: Ralph Gustafson and Eli Mandel.’ Culture 22 (June 1961). Selected Essays, 146–52. Edwards, Justin D. Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. 1957. New York: Atheneum, 1965. – The Bush Garden. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. – The Critical Path. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. – Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. 1947. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. – Northrop Frye on Canada. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 12. Ed. Jean O’Grady and David Staines. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. – ‘Oswald Spengler.’ Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 11, 265–73. Ed. Jan Gorak. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. – The Secular Scripture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

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Contributors

Barbara Belyea has two degrees in medieval literature and taught for thirty years in the English department of the University of Calgary. She translated for Ellipse (1970–95) and co-edited Driving Home with Estelle Dansereau (Wilfrid Laurier, 1984). Her interest in visual and cartographic subjects is reflected in ‘Captain Franklin in Search of the Picturesque,’ Essays on Canadian Writing (1990), ‘The Columbian Enterprise and A.S. Morton,’ BC Studies (1990), ‘The Sea of Dreams: La Vérendrye and the Mapping of Desire,’ Australian-Canadian Studies (1994), and ‘Mapping the Marias,’ Great Plains Quarterly (1997), and she has produced scholarly editions of David Thompson and Anthony Henday: David Thompson, Columbia Journals (McGill-Queen’s, 1994) and Anthony Henday, A Year Inland (Wilfrid Laurier, corrected printing 2001). Her work on Thompson and Henday led to studies of Native cartography in The Journal of Historical Geography (1992), Cartographica (1992, 1996), and Cartographic Encounters, edited by G. Malcolm Lewis (University of Chicago, 1998). Her Dark Storm Moving West (University of Calgary, 2007) presents six views of fur-trade exploration and mapping. Current projects are a scholarly edition of Peter Fidler’s journals as well as another collection of essays on the fur trade and European/Native contact. George Bowering, born in the Okanagan Valley during the Great Depression, is the author of seventy-five books of poetry, fiction long and short, essays, plays, history, and memoirs. He has taught at various universities in Canada, Germany, and Denmark, and has been writer

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in residence at Sir George Williams University, the University of Rome, and the University of Western Ontario. His numerous awards for poetry and fiction include the Governor General’s Award for poetry for 1969, and for fiction for 1980; the bpNichol Chapbook award for poetry in 1991 and 1992; and the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for poetry in 1993. He has been on the short list for the Governor General’s Award for 2000, the Griffin Award in poetry, the B.C. Book Award in poetry, and the Leacock Prize for humour, to name only a few. He has honorary doctorates from University of British Columbia and the University of Western Ontario. He was the inaugural Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2002 till 2004. He was inducted as an officer of the Order of Canada in 2003, and into the Order of British Columbia in 2004. He has published books in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and French. He has thrown out the first pitch for a baseball game in Milwaukee’s Miller Park, and for minor league games in Welland, Grand Forks, and Vancouver. He has been poet in residence for the Canadian Little League tournament and the Oliver Rodeo. The theatre students of Brock University have performed a masque of his poem about chocolate on Granville Island. He has performed his work in many countries, including New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Mexico, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, South Africa, Holland, and Switzerland. He belongs to no formal writing organization. Russell Morton Brown has taught Canadian and contemporary literature at the University of Toronto since 1977. He is the co-editor most recently of Canadian Short Stories and of A New Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (Oxford, 2002); revised edition forthcoming. In addition to his essays treating writers such as Kroetsch, Laurence, Purdy, Atwood, Munro, Rooke, Davies, and McLuhan, he has written on Canadian thematic criticism, Canadian postmodernism, and the differences between the American and Canadian literary traditions and cultures. Barry Cameron, now retired, was a full professor of English specializing in Canadian literature and theory as well as the director of film in the Fine Arts Program and the coordinator and curriculum designer of the Multimedia Studies Program at the University of New Brunswick. He was for many years the executive director of Atlantic Independent Cinema Exhibitors and the president of the Capital Film Society. He also served on the executive of the New Brunswick Producers’ Association and has for several years produced, directed, and hosted a

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weekly television show, Cinefile, on ASN dealing with film practice and film culture in the Atlantic region. He has also produced several films and television programs, including Reading Tom Sawyer for the CBC (in which he also acted), Shepherd on the Rock for Bravo!, and Witness to Yesterday with Patrick Watson for History Television and PBS. In addition to his work in film, he has published numerous articles and reviews and several monographs on a wide range of literary, theoretical, and cultural issues, including several seminal critical contributions to the study of Canadian literature. Eleanor Cook is professor emerita of English, University of Toronto. She has written widely on poetry and poetics, from Dante to James Merrill, and on allusion, literature and the English Bible, and the trope of enigma. Earlier work includes book-length studies of Robert Browning and Wallace Stevens. Her most recent books are Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford, 1998), Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (Cambridge, 2006), and A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens (Princeton, 2007). She has served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Killam Research Fellow, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Frank Davey retired as Carl F. Klinck Professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Western Ontario in 2005. His numerous books on Canadian literature, especially Surviving the Paraphrase (1983), Reading Canadian Reading (1988), Post-national Arguments (1993), and Canadian Literary Power (1994), helped guide Canadian criticism away from the thematicism of Frye’s work on Canadian literature and towards understandings of Canadian writing as an evolving set of context-specific literary strategies. Davey is known also for his numerous radical poetry publications, including The Abbotsford Guide to India (1986) and Cultural Mischief (1996), and for his irreverent cultural studies books on Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell and Governor General Adrienne Clarkson. He founded the poetry newsletter Tish in 1963, and since 1965 has edited the criticism journal Open Letter. Michael Dixon (1937–2006) was a professor in the Department of English and a distinguished fellow of New College, University of Toronto, which he served from 1970 until his retirement in 2002. He was primarily a Renaissance scholar with particular interest in Spenser. With his Polliticke Courtier: Spenser’s The Faerie Queene as a Rhetoric of Justice, Dixon made a lasting contribution to Spenser studies, though he was

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also an engaging critic of Canadian literature. He was a frequent contributor to Canadian Forum, The Fiddlehead, and the University of Toronto Quarterly. Margery Fee is a professor of English at the University of British Columbia. While a BA and an MA student at York University, she was privileged to study with several students of Northrop Frye’s, including Janet Warner and Eli Mandel. As a PhD student at Toronto, she studied with Frye. These experiences formed her intellectually as a Canadianist and as a thinker. Currently she is working on a range of projects, including (with editor-in-chief Stefan Dollinger and co-editor Laurel Brinton) a second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Walter S. Avis, 1967) and, at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia, a project on ‘race’ and genetics. She is editor of Canadian Literature, which published an Eli Mandel article on Frye’s criticism in its first issue in 1959. Branko Gorjup has taught Canadian literature in Canadian and Italian universities. His editorial work includes two anthologies of Canadian short fiction, Silent Music and Other Lands, and collections of stories by Leon Rooke, Narcissus in the Mirror, and Barry Callaghan, Black Laughter. He guest-edited a special issue, Oceano Canada, for Mondadori’s Nuovi Argomenti. His other editorial work includes Mythologizing Canada: Northrop Frye’s Essays on the Canadian Literary Imagination (published in Canada and Italy) and White Gloves of the Doorman: The Works of Leon Rooke. Since 1993 he has been editor-in-chief of the Peter Paul Bilingual (Italian/English) Series on Contemporary Canadian Poetry, in which the poetry of Irving Layton, Gwendolyn MacEwen, P.K. Page, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Avison, Michael Ondaatje, Dennis Lee, Dionne Brand, and Leonard Cohen is represented. Linda Hutcheon is a University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. The author of nine books of literary theory and cultural commentary, she is also co-author, with Michael Hutcheon, of (so far) three books on the intersections of medical and operatic history. D.G. Jones is a poet and translator who was for many years involved in the Comparative Canadian and Québec Literature Program at the

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Université de Sherbrooke. His books of poetry include Frost on the Sun (1957), The Sun Is Axeman (1961), and Phrases from Orpheus (1967). He won a Governer General’s Award twice, for his poetry collection Under the Thunder the Flowers Light Up the Earth (1977), and for the translation of Normand de Bellefeuille’s Catégoriques un, deux et trois (Categorics One, Two, and Three) (1992). In 1969 he founded Ellipse, the only Canadian magazine in which poetry in English and French was reciprocally translated. He is the author of an influential critical work dedicated to the Canadian literary imagination, Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (1970). Robert Lecker is Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University, where he specializes in Canadian literature. He is the former editor of Essays on Canadian Writing and the editor and author of numerous books and articles including Canadian Writers and Their Works: Essays on Form, Context and Development; The Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors; On the Line: Readings in the Short Fiction of Clark Blaise, John Metcalf, and Hugh Hood; Robert Kroetsch; Another I: The Fictions of Clark Blaise; Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature; Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit; and The Cadence of Civil Elegies. In 2007 he edited the five-volume anthology Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Eli Mandel (1922–92) – poet, editor, critic, broadcaster, teacher, and lecturer – was one of Canada’s most respected men of letters. His numerous poetry collections include Fuseli Poems (1960); Black and Secret Man (1964); An Idiot Joy (1967), which won a Governor General’s Award; Stoney Plain (1973); and Dreaming Backwards: Selected Poems (1981). As an editor and critic, Mandel published several seminal works, among which Contexts of Canadian Criticism (1971), Another Time (1977), and The Family Romance (1986) played an important part in the formation of the Canadian canon. He was a keen observer and popularizer of contemporary Canadian poets, whose poetry he brought to public attention with such publications as Poets of Contemporary Canada: 1960–1970 (1972); Five Modern Canadian Poets (1970); and Eight More Canadian Poets (1972), with Ann Mandel. John Moss is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and professor emeritus in the English Department at the University of Ottawa. He is a mystery writer (Still Waters, 2008; Grave Doubts, 2009) and a scuba div-

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ing professional. He has more than a score of books to his credit, ranging from a collection of short stories, Being Fiction (2001), to memoirs like Invisible among the Ruins: Field Notes of a Canadian in Ireland (2000), to critical theory, The Paradox of Meaning: Cultural Poetics and Critical Fictions (1999), and studies of Arctic landscape, Enduring Dreams (1994), as well as studies in Canadian fiction such as A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel (1981, 1987), The Ancestral Present (1977), and Patterns of Isolation (1974). Heather Murray is in the English Department at the University of Toronto, and is the current president of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. She is the author of Working in English: History, Institution, Resources (1996) and Come, Bright Improvement!: The Literary Societies of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (2002). Her work in progress (co-authored with Yannick Portebois) is on spelling reform as a Canadian social reform movement. James Reaney (1926–2008), poet, playwright, short fiction writer, editor, and librettist, was a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario for three decades. He won the Governor General’s Award three times and was a member of the Order of Canada. His poetry collections include The Red Heart (1949); A Suit of Nettles (1958); Twelve Letters to a Small Town (1962); Poems (1972), which brings together the four previous books; Selected Shorter Poems (1975); Selected Longer Poems (1976); and Souwes to Home (2005). Reaney’s many successful plays include the famous The Donnellys Trilogy (1974, part one; 1976, part two; and 1977, part three), which toured Canada in 1974–5. His adaptation of Alice Through the Looking-Glass, commissioned by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, opened in 1994, and his Sticks and Stones was revived in 2005. His work for young adults includes The Boy with an R in His Hand (1965) and Take the Big Picture (1986). In 1990 the opera Serinette, composed by Harry Somers with the libretto by Reaney, premiered at the Sharon Temple. Nine of his librettos were published in Scripts (2004), edited by his longtime friend and musical collaborator John Beckwith. John A. Riddell, after undergraduate and graduate studies at McGill, Carleton, and Dalhousie Universities, taught at Lower Canada College in Montreal and then in the English Department at Laurentian University for thirty-five years. He established the first courses in Canadian literature at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the university,

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and still retains an abiding interest in aspects of Canadian and American literature, especially the modern and postmodern satirical (and absurdist) novel. Other teaching and research interests include literature of the sea, and individual authors such as Dana, Melville, Lowry, and Conrad. Professor Riddell has also worked as a geophysical and geochemical surveyor; in the RCN(R) and the merchant marine (briefly); and as a northern radar line technician. Post-retirement, he still returns occasionally to Laurentian to teach half-courses. He now lives and writes in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, where he is also a part-time lighthouse keeper and conserver. Francis Sparshott, philosopher by profession, was born in England and educated at Oxford. In 1955 he joined the staff of Victoria College and in 1977 became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. From 1977 to1979 he served as president of the League of Canadian Poets. He has written nine books of philosophy, ten books of poetry, and numerous articles dealing with the relationships among philosophy, literature, and art. His publications in philosophy include An Inquiry into Goodness and Related Concepts (1958), The Structure of Aesthetics (1963), The Concept of Criticism, (1967), and Off the Ground: First Step to a Philosophical Consideration of the Dance (1988). He retired as a University Professor in 1991. David Staines is a professor of English at the University of Ottawa. He received his BA (1967) from the University of Toronto and his MA (1968) and PhD (1973) from Harvard University. An authority on Canadian literature and culture as well as on medieval literature and culture, he has authored and/or edited a number of books on the history and development of Canadian literature, among them The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture (1977), The Letters of Stephen Leacock (2006), and, as co-editor, Northrop Frye on Canada (2003). Rosemary Sullivan is the author of eleven books, including Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille, which won the Canadian Jewish Book Prize for Non-Fiction, 2006. Her other books include the national best seller The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out (1998); her 1995 biography Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, which won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction and was adapted by Brenda Longfellow into the award-winning documentary Shadow Maker (1998); and By Heart: Elizabeth Smart / A Life (1991), which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction. Her

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first poetry collection, The Space a Name Makes (1986), won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In 2001, Black Moss Press released Memory-Making: The Selected Essays of Rosemary Sullivan, a collection of her essays published in Canadian and international magazines. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, Killam, and Jackman fellowships. She currently teaches at the University of Toronto where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction and is director of the MA program in English in the field of creative writing.