Today is de Tocqueville‘s birthday (1805-1859).

Frye in the “Conclusion to the Second Edition of Literary History of Canada“:

The coherence of the “American way of life” is often underestimated by Americans themselves, because the more thoughtful citizens of any country are likely to be more preoccupied with its anomalies.  Hence outsiders, including Canadians, may find the consistency easier to see.  De Tocqueville, who didn’t like much of what he saw in the United States, wrote his book [Democracy in America] very largely about that consistency, almost in spite of himself. (CW 12, 452-3)

In his “Speech at the New Canadian Embassy, Washington”:

De Tocqueville, in his magesterial survey of democracy in America, says only one thing about Canada, but what he says bears on our present point.  “In Canada,” he says, “the most enlightened, patriotic and human inhabitants make extraordinary effort to render the people dissatisfied . . . more exertions are made to excite the passions of the citizens there than to calm them elsewhere.” He is speaking mainly of French Canada, but the remark applies to the whole country.  One reads between the lines the desperate frustrations of the earlier communicators, and the massive indifference of those they attempted to address. The silence of the eternal spaces remained at the bottom of the Canadian psyche for a long time, and in many respects is still there.  (ibid., 647-8)

In a 1969 interview, “CRTC Guru”:

Chiasson: I’m considering some thoughts that Tocqueville, the French historian, had about the U.S. and indeed about Canada, which I think have something to do with the fundamentally classless situation of North America.

Frye: The thing is that when you don’t have a class structure you have to diversify society in some other way, otherwise you just get a mob; of course, the mob is what Tocqueville is worried about.  This is why, I think, this breaking down of the Canadian population into separate groups is so important.

Chiasson: And something to be encouraged?

Frye:  Well, it takes place anyway. (CW 24, 101)

On this date in 1534 Jacques Cartier planted a cross on the Gaspe Peninsula and declared it for Francis 1 of France.

Frye in “Levels of Cultural Identity”:

Even careless populizers are more hesitant to write such sentences as “Jacques Cartier was the first man to set foot on Canadian soil,” which were fairly recent usage not long ago.  Even when the word “white” was inserted, the implication “first genuine human being” was often there. (The Eternal Act of Creation, 179)

On this date in 1841 the United Province of Canada was created by the Act of Union, which lasted until the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867.

Frye on the “anarchist tradition” in Canada in a 1969 interview, “CRTC Guru”:

Frye: There are other things in the Canadian tradition that are worth thinking about.  Thirty years ago [in the 1930s] the great radical movement was international Communism, which took no hold in Canada at all.  There were Marxist poets, there were no Marxist painters… The radical movement of our time is anarchist and that means that it’s local and separate and breaks down into small units.  That’s our tradition and that’s our genius.  Think of Toronto and Montreal (I know Toronto better than Montreal, but I think the same is true of both cities): after the Second World War, we took in displaced persons from Europe to something like one-quarter to one-fifth of the population.  In Toronto in 1949, one out of every five people had been there less than a year.  We have not had race riots,we have not had ethnic riots, we have not had the tremendous pressures and collisions that they’ve had in American cities.  Because Canada is naturally anarchist, these people settle down into their own communities; they work with other communities and the whole pattern of life fits it.  I do think we have to keep a very wide open and sympathetic eye towards radical movements in Canada, because they will be of the anarchist kind and they will be of a kind of energy that we could help liberate.  (CW 24, 92)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23V9U_616aw&feature=related

Today is Marshall McLuhan‘s birthday (1911-1980).

Above, Marshall McLuhan and Norman Mailer interviewed on CBC TV in 1968 as the hippie movement takes deep hold of youth culture and protest against the Vietnam War begins to escalate sharply.

From an interview with Frye about McLuhan broadcast on CBC Radio in January 1981, shortly after McLuhan’s death.

Interviewer: Professor McLuhan’s great contemporary at the university, Northrop Frye, says that McLuhan’s background enabled him to achieve is insights.

Frye: He was a literary critic and that meant that he looked at the form of what was in front of him instead of at the content.  And so instead of issuing platitudes abut what was being said on television he looked at what  the media where actually doing to people’s eyes and ears.  He had a gift of epigrammatic encapsulating that made some of the thing he said extremely memorable.

Interviewer: Professor McLuhan’s ingenuity was easily seen, but his message was not easily understood.  In the 1960s and 70s there were sometimes crude journalistic interpretations of his work, and reporters began to write that, after all, the master of communication could not communicate.  The result was that as the 1979s closed Marshal McLuhan’s influence declined, and at the end of his life his colleagues saw him neglected by the public which has once clamoured for him.

Frye: That’s true, but that was because he got on the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the news media and that meant he went away to th skies like a rocket and then came down like a stick.  But he himself and what he said and thought had nothing to do with that.  That’s what the news media do to people if you get caught in their machinery.  (CW 24, 510-11)

Frye in Notebook 12:

McLuhan has of course enormously expanded my thesis of the return of irony to myth.  His formulation is hailed as revolutionary by those who like to think that the mythical-configuration-involved comprehension is (a) with it (b) can be attained by easier methods than by the use of intelligence.  Hence everyone who disagrees (as in all revolutionary arguments) can be dismissed as linear or continuous.  But there are two kinds of continuity involved: one is the older detached individuality, the other the cultural and historical continuity of preserving one’s identity and memory in moving from one to the other.  The issue here is a moral issue between freedom of consciousness and obsessive totalitarianism, plunging into a Lawrentian Dionysian war-dance.  (Cited by Robert Denham, Northrop Frye Unbuttoned, 174)

McLuhan on Frye:

Norrie is not struggling for his place in the sun.  He is the sun.  (Ibid.)

On this date Mazo de la Roche died (1879-1961).

Frye in “English Canadian Literature, 1929-1954”:

The Canadian novelist who is perhaps best known outside Canada is Mazo de la Roche, whose long “Jalna” series of stories began in 1927.  The formidable familiy with which these books deal is well representative of the colonial phase of Canadian development, and of the ability of well-to-do families during that phase to live apart from, and almost in defiance of, the real life of the nation around them.  (CW 12, 248)

In “View of Canada”:

And so we developed that curious streak of anxiety that distinguishes us from other North Americans.  Which we kept trying to sweep under the carpet . . . In the popular Jalna books, Mazo de la Roche manages to make life in Canada seem a pastoral idyll.  The Whiteoaks are a British county family transplanted to the colonies.  (ibid., 470)

Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe of Upper Canada, anti-slavery advocate

On this date in 1793, the Act Against Slavery was passed in Upper Canada (present day Ontario), also prohibiting the importation of slaves into Lower Canada (present day Quebec).  This was a full fourteen years before the British Empire outlawed the slave trade, forty years before it outlawed slavery altogether, and sixty-nine years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.