{"id":14606,"date":"2010-08-02T15:19:12","date_gmt":"2010-08-02T19:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?page_id=14606"},"modified":"2010-08-02T15:19:12","modified_gmt":"2010-08-02T19:19:12","slug":"northrop-frye-and-his-canadian-critics","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-his-canadian-critics\/","title":{"rendered":"Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Branko Gorjup delivered this paper at the Frye Festival on April 21, 2001.\u00a0 An extensively expanded and revised version of this paper appeared in <\/em>Northrop Frye’s Canadian Criticism and Its Influence, published by University of Toronto Press<\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Much has been written in the past half century on Northrop Frye\u2019s \u2018Canadian\u20191<\/sup><\/strong> criticism: on his various discussions, dealing with what he had once described as the \u2018imaginative continuum\u2019 of Canadian literary sensibility. The views offered in this large and still growing body of critical commentary by some of Canada\u2019s leading fiction writers, poets and critics can be best approached in terms of so many metaphoric mirrors, each reflecting and refracting Frye\u2019s own thinking on the subject into provocative and engaging arguments. The very fact that Frye generated such an extraordinary attention is a powerful reminder of his far-reaching contribution to the mapping out of the initial stages of modern Canadian literary culture. At the same time, it represents a resounding response to his ascendency as Canada\u2019s pre-eminent critic, to his dominant, almost mythical position in what some critics believed was becoming an alarmingly homogenized cultural environment, presided over by nationalists\u2019 inwardness and their obsessive search for identity. What ultimately these works provide us with is a series of meditations on Canadian literature and its criticism, covering a variety of views each exhorting other writers and critics to work towards the creation of a de-colonized national cultural space. Undoubtedly, it was Frye who, more than anyone else in this period, contributed to the articulation of such a space by introducing Canadians to the notion of a \u2018garrison mentality\u2019 as one of the colonized mind\u2019s most fundamental tropes.<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s Canadian criticism consists of numerous reviews, articles and essays, written between 1943 and 1990. His initial interest in Canadian literary culture dates back to the late 1930s, when as editor of the Canadian Forum<\/em> he encouraged young emerging authors by publishing their works. But it was not until the 1940s and 1950s that Frye produced his first important work in which he directed his attention\u2014both in reviews and essays–to the subject of national literature, a subject which had been on the minds of many Canadians for over a century and had eluded a consensual definition. Frye\u2019s annual poetry surveys, written between 1950 and 1960 for the University of Toronto Quarterly<\/em>\u2019<\/em>s<\/em> \u2018Letters in Canada,\u2019 introduced him not only as a commited \u2018public\u2019 commentator\u2014a role he would play until his death in 1991\u2014but also as a critic who, in George Woodcock\u2019s words, \u201cestablished the criteria by which Canadian writing might be judged.\u201d Likewise, Frye\u2019s various critical essays, culminating in the influential 1965 Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada,<\/em> explored, though in a more expansive and sustained manner, the possible formation of a national literary consciousness arising from within the Canadian context, from within what he metaphorically described as \u201cthe leviathan of Canadian nature.\u201d Most of these occasional pieces and well-considered essays were subsequently collected in The Bush Garden<\/em> (1975), Divisions on a Ground <\/em>(1982) and Mythologizing Canada: Essays on the Canadian Literary Imagination <\/em>(1997).<\/p>\n

In his Canadian criticism Frye attempted to encompass disparate elements of a vast and loosely defined country and to assemble them into coherent and illuminating patterns of representation, a task that had not been previously undertaken. At the same time, this criticism disclosed how he acquired and constructed his perception by closely interrogating the existing literary traditions within Canada\u2019s shifting cultural context; a perception that saw the imagination as a transformative and re-creative force. In addition, Frye documents his expanding consciousness about Canadian culture, revealing his uniquely synthetic and site-specific critical mind, and his penetrating insights into cultural differences between Canada\u2019s past and present and between Canada and the United States. In his early essays, \u201cCanada and Its Poetry\u201d (1943) and \u201cThe Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry\u201d (1946), Frye examined and assessed the achievement of Canadian writing and set out to develop his primary conceptual and organizational categories for its criticism. What he outlined in these essays was what he believed to be a fundamental discrepancy between two types of literary production in Canada. On the one hand, he identified the writing that had found expression through \u201cprefabricated rhetoric about the challenge of a new land and the energetic optimism demanded to meet it,\u201d mostly produced in the 19th<\/sup> and the early 20th<\/sup> centuries, and, on the other, the writing that had captured a more genuine response to actual Canada, one of \u201csolitude and loneliness, of hostility or indifference of nature,\u201d represented by the post-World War I literature. Later, in \u201cPreface to an Uncollected Anthology\u201d (1957) and, particularly, in \u201cConclusion to a Literary History of Canada<\/em>\u201d (1965), Frye outlined a more cogent theoretical frame of reference within which Canadian literature could be read and discussed in terms of a distinctive Canadian imagination, an imagination that was directly linked to and defined by its environment. The result of such interdependency was what Frye \u201cprovisionally\u201d described as a garrison culture. Yet, these and other essays, also disclosed Frye\u2019s less frequently noted observations about the national context as an unfinished construct, an imaginative project whose completion would forever be deferred by succeeding generations of Canadians, forever proposing alternative models for national unity and identity.<\/p>\n

The subject of Canadian literature and culture in Frye\u2019s work constitutes a smaller segment of his critical writing, commonly described as \u2018occasional\u2019 or \u2018domestic.\u2019 It has stood, as such, somewhat apart from his summa–<\/em>best represented by his large theoretical works as Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> (1957), The Great Code: The Bible and Literature<\/em> (1982) and Words with Power<\/em> (1990)–with its predilection for abstraction, systematization and universalization. For some critics, including James Reaney, Margaret Atwood, D. G. Jones and John Riddell, Frye\u2019s Canadian criticism espousing literature\u2019s mimetic and non-autonomous status proved useful for its didactic applicability. By adopting it as the starting points for their own critical thinking, these so-called \u2018supporters\u2019 of Frye developed their particular theoretical frameworks, later to be identified under the rubric of thematic criticism. To others, including George Bowering, Frank Davey and David Jackel, the discrepancy between Frye\u2019s two types of critical inquiry was the cause for a great deal of debate and controversy. But not only that. They believed that Frye\u2019s concepts were misleading, or even dead wrong. They objected to his recommendation that Canadian writing be studied \u201cas part of Canadian life\u201d rather than \u201cas part of an autonomous world of literature.\u201d They felt, and said that this was not only inconsistent with his theoretical stance regarding non-Canadian literary texts but also protectionist, designed to exempt Canadian authors from the rigorous and universally sanctioned critical standards that are applied to the world\u2019s great classics. While Frye\u2019s detractors accused him of being patronizing toward Canadian literary achievement, his supporters saw him as an important ally in their quest for a national literature. For the latter group, Frye\u2019s Canadian criticism represented a powerful endorsement of their belief that literature\u2019s distinctive character is realizable only in relation to its context, to its geography and its history.<\/p>\n

At the intersection of these two opposing sets of views are those of Eli Mandel, Eleanor Cook and Linda Hutcheon, which present a \u2018conciliatory\u2019 attitude, aimed at finding a reasonable answer to the question: why did Frye allow a fault-line to develop in his critical thinking? How can apparently contradictory perspectives of his criticism\u2014one that sees literature as an autonomous and self-generating system and the other that sees it as defined by the environment in which it is produced\u2014be reconciled?<\/p>\n

To trace the debates that Frye\u2019s approach touched off, it is helpful to understand the dominant assumptions of Canadian criticism before Frye. Up until the late 1940s, the trajectory of Canadian critical thinking on the subject of domestic literature was more or less straightforward and predictable. Critics were almost exclusively preoccupied with what<\/em> the literature\u2014particularly in its \u2018national\u2019 dimension\u2014was supposed to do rather than with how<\/em> it was done.2<\/sup><\/strong> It was a universally accepted belief that the primary responsibility of the critic was to mediate between the collective imagination and the project of nation-building. Such a strictly utilitarian notion naturally valorized literature for its didactic, moral and ennobling purposes and, above all, for its power to constitute the nation\u2019s genius. Thus for Edward Hartley Dewart, in his introduction to the 1864 Selections from Canadian Poets<\/em>, \u201ca national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character.\u201d Another early anthologist, William Douw Lighthall, in his 1889 introduction to Songs of the Great Dominion<\/em>, was even more specific about the functionality of poetry. His selection, he pointed out, was a conscious effort to include poems that illustrated \u201cthe country and its life in a distinctive way\u201d omitting most of the poems \u201cwhose merits lie in perfection of finish.\u201d<\/p>\n

Desire for the creation of a national literature that would reflect the Canadian uniqueness of character was general. It continued, more or less, with the same intensity and the same habit of mind, into the era that is discussed by the authors I just mentioned, seeking fulfilment in the completion of a project that could offer Canadians a universally comprehensible image of their literary imagination. But the project\u2019s completion was deferred at every stage. In the late nineteen sixties, throughout the seventies and the eighties, as Canada was rapidly turning into a multicultural and multiracial society, the idea of fixing a single identity for its literature or culture would have been not only inappropriate, but counterproductive. Yet, it seems to me now, as we are passing through a vertiginous stage of Canada\u2019s representational turmoil\u2014each newcomer dreaming his or her version of Canada into fictional existence\u2014that we must revisit more than ever before the historical sites of our culture, of our collective fiction. We must go there not only to see what was done but also how it was done and for what reasons. We must absorb all the dialogues, shifts and changes that took place in our literary past by engaging in a discourse with those who initiated and carried them out. The authors who responded to Frye\u2019s Canadian criticism provide many such sites, densely related and competitively diverse.<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s critics\u2014because of the very nature of critical inquiry, which is always predisposed to contamination and grafting of one sort or another\u2014also reflect the general perspective and the global mood of literary criticism and theory. Not so long ago\u2014as recently as the mid-sixties and the seventies\u2014literary criticism in Canada seemed to have reached a certain consensus. A number of influential surveys of Canadian writing came out at very short intervals during this period, including D. G. Jones\u2019s Butterfly on Rock<\/em> (1970), Northrop Frye\u2019s The Bush Garden<\/em> (1971) and Margaret Atwood\u2019s Survival<\/em> (1972). <\/em>What these surveys had in common were two things. They outlined what their authors variously believed was the distinctive character of Canadian writing; and they used the methodology that was subsequently defined as thematic criticism\u2014that is, they proceeded by selecting recurring themes in the body of national literature. These surveys were rapidly absorbed into the academic curricula because of their pedagogical applicability and because of their overt nationalist agenda, at a time of heightened cultural nationalism in Canada.<\/p>\n

But the \u2018thematic\u2019 consensus was quickly shattered. Global shifts in criticism and critical theory were reaching Canada with near simultaneity, turning the sixties and the seventies into two decades of enormous critical upheaval\u2014with no clear end in sight. Thus, received views of formalism, of literary history, of the relation between readers and writers, and of national canons came under scrutiny\u2014and were challenged, questioned, revised and replaced. Post-structuralism, postmodernism, feminism and, later, post-colonialism all engaged in dialectical discourses with more traditional critical approaches, of which thematicism was the most prominent in Canada.3 <\/sup><\/strong>At the time, the term frequently used to describe this dialectics, one that was more often than not used as a thinly disguised battle cry for a radical abolition of what had already been set in place, was \u201cdeconstruction.\u201d Old critical constructs were taken apart, sometimes before they were tested, as was the case with thematic criticism. This activity\u2014albeit largely rhetorical–was not entirely negative for it aimed at creating an atmosphere conducive to the processes of critical pluralization.<\/p>\n

Because most of Frye\u2019s critics I\u2019m discussing here wrote during this period, their work has by now gained the significance of historical documents, showing the ways in which the head on collisions between the forces of pluralism and monism had been played out. They tell the story of how Canadian critics, while responding to a global shift in critical thinking, kept resisting the more aggressive kind of globalization that threatened to pre-empt their ongoing concern for a recognizable national literature.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

I will now briefly outline some of the ways in which Frye\u2019s theorizing\u2014both mythopoetic and environmental\u2014was used as a potential critical framework within which the investigation of the national literature could be undertaken. James Reaney<\/strong>\u2019<\/strong>s <\/strong>1957 <\/strong>piece, \u201cThe Canadian Poet\u2019s Predicament,\u201d was the first sustained response to Frye\u2019s essay, \u201cThe Narrative Tradition in English-Canadian Poetry,\u201d published almost a decade earlier. Like Frye, Reaney lays out a hypothetical scheme, drawn from a selection of Canadian poets\u2014one that could eventually become the kernel of a Canadian literary tradition, an \u201cancestral pattern,\u201d as he put it. But this is not all. Reaney also brings into sharp focus two fundamental concerns in Frye\u2019s thinking, which, in fact, constitute the dialectics that is below the surface in every discussion of Frye\u2014the tenuous overlapping of mythopeic and thematic perspectives.<\/p>\n

What Reaney sets in motion is the future dialogue on the status of Canadian criticism, particularly as it relates to its thematic branch. With the list of poets and themes, his \u201csampler\u201d translates into practice a methodology of thematizing (already in evidence in Frye\u2019s piece) based on the idea of selection and induction. He narrows down a large body of poetic representation in order to arrive at a coherent view of a mythopoetic pattern that can be shared by \u201cthe Canadian poet\u2019s most imaginative ancestors and contemporaries.\u201d This technique of combining native mythology, history and landscape is predicated on the notion that poetic images move from the \u201cthings outside personality to a place somewhere inside personality.\u201d The \u201cthings outside\u201d from the Canadian environment, fictionalized\u2014via Frye\u2019s essay\u2014as a half-empty landscape of spiritual exile.<\/p>\n

Rosemary Sullivan<\/strong>\u2019<\/strong>s<\/strong> \u201cNorthrop Frye: Canadian Mythographer\u201d (1983) is in a way a continuation of Reaney\u2019s essay, \u201cThe Canadian Poet\u2019s Predicament.\u201d She begins by quoting Reaney, who asks the question: \u201cCan the critic help the poet?\u201d\u2014a question Sullivan sets out to answer in the course of her discussion. Obviously for Reaney, who has always occupied a dual role, that of the poet and the critic combined, the answer is yes, the critic can help the poet. And even though Reaney\u2019s essay is about the poet\u2019s predicament, it is also and mostly about criticism and the critic\u2019s role as an active agent in the shaping of a literary tradition. Reaney identifies the critic\u2019s function, in Sullivan\u2019s words, with that of an \u201canatomist\u201d who can provide the poet with \u201chints and guesses,\u201d with a \u201cgrammar of motifs.\u201d Is the role of the critic, she asks, \u201cto define the cultural gaze?\u201d<\/p>\n

To answer this question, Sullivan provides a sharply focused r\u00e9sum\u00e9 of Frye\u2019s critical theory, discussing at some length Anatomy of Criticism<\/em> and Fearful Symmetry<\/em>. She revisits these texts because of her stated belief that it was Frye\u2019s archetypal and mythopoeic criticism, not his Canadian critical writing\u2014like his University of Toronto Quarterly<\/em> reviews and his Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada<\/em>\u2014<\/em>that most profoundly influenced Canadian poets. Yet in the last part of her discussion, she considers the influence of Frye\u2019s Canadian criticism, \u201cbest illustrated\u201d in Margaret Atwood\u2019s Survival<\/em>. This aspect of Frye\u2019s influence for Sullivan is not satisfactory\u2014and here she quotes Frye\u2019s own comments on Atwood\u2019s Survival<\/em> as \u201cover-simplified and rhetorical.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the poets who have been frequently identified with Frye\u2019s theory of mythopeic and archetypal structures\u2014Reaney, Atwood and Jay Macpherson\u2014Sullivan chooses to examine Atwood\u2019s early poetry and Surfacing<\/em>. What she suggests here is that Atwood\u2019s work can be meaningfully approached from the point of view of \u201cmythological conditioning\u201d and \u201cironic displacement,\u201d both concepts central to Frye. The former, in its contemporary manifestation, pulls towards conformity and the latter pulls away by making the individual aware of the conventions and structures that entrap him. Much of such pulling and counter-pulling takes place in Atwood\u2019s work, which uses contemporary mythology and at the same time ironically displaces it. Atwood, according to Sullivan, is \u201cone of the best users\u201d of this technique because it triggers her \u201cironic gift.\u201d A good example is Atwood\u2019s \u201cre-writing of the Odyssey from the woman\u2019s perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer to Sullivan\u2019s initial question takes the form of a disguised warning\u2014too much help from the critic can get the poet overly entangled in literary conventions and patterns, blinding her from distinguishing the representation of actuality from the actuality itself.<\/p>\n

Rounding off part I of my discussion is Francis Sparshott<\/strong>\u2019<\/strong>s<\/strong> essay, \u201cFrye in Place\u201d (1979), which in its major key discusses Frye\u2019s humanistic approach to literary criticism, and in the minor, his identity. Who is Frye and what are the cultural forces that shaped his imagination? Sparshott\u2019s list of influences is long and varied, from Blake\u2019s writing and non-comformism to Moncton, Victoria College, and western civilization, both in its Biblical and Classical manifestations, and so on. It is this minor key that is particularly relevant to my discussion, because Sparshot looks at the ways in which the influences that shaped Frye\u2019s critical theory are deeply present in his views of the Canadian literary imagination.<\/p>\n

For Sparshott, Frye is a \u201cvisionary and allegorist\u201d; a critic whose natural impulse is not to \u201cexplain what he decides to leave unexplained.\u201d A mind like Frye\u2019s perceives the world in large patterns, which make sense of a culture and which offers\u2014particularly in places like Canada\u2014possible answers to such questions as \u201cwhere is here?\u201d Wherever we are is the centre of our imaginative world–for Sparshott, Frye\u2019s having remained all his life in Canada exemplifies this fact. Referring specifically to the Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada<\/em>, Sparshott attributes to Frye the creation of a \u201csynthetic identity\u201d for \u201cour literature, which is a construct derived from literary texts that includes\u2014is inclusive of\u2014all the minor parts organized into a larger pattern. \u201cThe world of literature is,\u201d says Sparshott, \u201cenvisaged, not asserted\u201d and, quoting Frye, \u201cit is a body of hypothetical thought and action.\u201d In other words, one knows where one is\u2014where the here is\u2014because he has \u201cwalked up and down in the hypothetical.\u201d And this is the fruit of literary imagination\u2014a mind free to examine the \u201cactual\u201d because it is \u201centrenched in the possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second part of my discussion examines the oppositional discourse presented by such critics as George Bowering, David Jackel and Frank Davey, a critique of Frye\u2019s excessive and negative influence on other Canadian critics and writers. In the last essay, we see a shift in emphasis toward a more general discussion, which focuses on the alarming preponderance of thematic criticism in the Canadian literary culture, the provenance of which is implicitly assigned to Frye. These essays, as a group, provide a counterpoint to those of Reaney, Sullivan and Sparshott, reflecting the emergence of a strongly dialectical tension that was taking shape inside Canadian criticism at the time these essays were made available to the public.<\/p>\n

George Bowering\u2019s<\/strong> early 1968 piece appears to be the first major \u2018negative\u2019 criticism4<\/sup><\/strong> of Frye\u2019s mythopeic theory of literature and especially of Frye\u2019s alleged influence on a group of Canadian poets. The poets associated with this group\u2014Jay Macpherson, Douglas LePan and James Reaney (though Reaney\u2019s recent work, Bowering noted, was beginning to pull away from Frye\u2019s influence)\u2014are described as out of touch with what was happening in poetry in Canada in the 1960s. The mainstream poets of the period, in Bowering\u2019s estimation, were associated with Contact<\/em> Press<\/em> and Tish<\/em> magazine, and shared an affinity with contemporary American poetics, which had been influenced by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. The so-called \u201cFrye school\u201d\u2014the existence of which Frye himself vigorously dismissed on several occasions\u2014was targeted by Bowering for being \u201csuper-conscious and architectural.\u201d Their fault\u2014and here Bowering examines in some detail Jay Macpherson\u2019s poetry to illustrate how big a fault it is\u2014was their attempt to impose their identity on the world of experience. They deliberately set out to mythologize reality, rather than surrender to the reality that surrounded them and establish communion with it. Their fundamental mistake was to believe, with Frye, that a poem was a self-enclosed system, an autonomous verbal universe, unaffected by any external influence. Interestingly enough, Bowering\u2019s main objection is to the influence of Frye\u2019s mythopeic criticism, as it made itself manifest through the poetry of a number of poets\u2014not to Frye\u2019s assessment of Canadian literature, in which Frye largely replaces the autonomy of literature with environmental determinism.<\/p>\n

<\/strong>The essay, \u201cNorthrop Frye and the Continentalist Tradition\u201d (1976), by David Jackel<\/strong> is one of the most sharply focused denunciations of Frye\u2019s view of literature ever published, and of what Jackel characterizes as Frye\u2019s anti-nationalistic definition of Canada. Jackel\u2019s tone is hauntingly resigned, suggesting that the type of analysis he offers will be unfashionable and ultimately futile because of Frye\u2019s domestic and international stature. He points this out, citing other critics\u2014such as W. K. Wimsatt, Frederick Crews and John Fraser\u2014whose strongly voiced oppositions to Frye\u2019s supreme dominance in the world of contemporary criticism\u2014to his \u201cruthless schematism\u201d and \u201cunnecessary elaborate terminology\u201d\u2014went unchallenged. The reason for this neglect, in Jackel\u2019s words, is Frye\u2019s position of being \u201ca critic beyond the reach of criticism,\u201d an indomitable presence in the Canadian critical environment, making his influence \u201ca very bad one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike most critics before and after him, Jackel does not see Frye as a chief spokesman for and a defender of Canadian literary culture.5<\/sup><\/strong> In fact, he maintains that Frye\u2019s \u201cway of dealing with Canadian issues is the reverse of nationalistic.\u201d He places him \u201csquarely in the continentalist tradition,\u201d which is \u201cinimical to the idea that Canada could posses an identity distinctive from that of the United States.\u201d At the heart of Jackel\u2019s argument against Frye\u2019s representation of Canada as a country shaped by a hostile environment is a belief that, in fact, it was such desirable forces as \u201cindividualism, egalitarianism, freedom, vigour and adaptability\u201d that formed the Canadian cultural identity. Frye, for Jackel, remains an \u201cunrepentant environmentalist\u201d whose ideas about Canadian literature are based on \u201cimported theories and values.\u201d6<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

Frank Davey\u2019s<\/strong> widely cited essay, \u201cSurviving the Paraphrase\u201d (1976), is an ambiguous critique of Frye\u2019s influence on the thematic approach to the study of literature, which is, in Davey\u2019s words, a \u201ctestimony to the limitations of Canadian literary criticism\u201d in general. At the opening of his discussion, Davey lumps Frye together with other \u201canti-evaluative thematic\u201d critics, such as Jones, Atwood and Moss, whose critical assumptions about literature he finds at best \u201cextra-literary\u201d and at worst \u201canti-literary.\u201d Their impulse is \u201ctoward paraphrase\u2014paraphrase of the culture and paraphrase of literature,\u201d which translates, Davey points out, into extracting the \u201cparaphrasable content and throw[ing] away the form.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though\u2014as we just saw\u2014Frye is set inside the thematic group and is implicitly made responsible for its existence, he is also set outside it. Further on in his discussion, Davey not only \u2018approves\u2019 of Frye\u2019s archetypal criticism as one of the alternatives but also singles him out as an example of difference. My \u201cobjection here,\u201d meaning an objection to \u201cthe paraphrasable content,\u201d is \u201cbased on a principle formulated by Frye: \u2018the literary structure is always ironic because what it says<\/em> is always different from what it means.<\/em>\u2019\u201d Such a statement can not but suggest that other \u2018thematicists\u2019 misapplied or ignored much of Frye\u2019s general principles that support his entire summa<\/em> by selecting among them those they found useful to thematizing.<\/p>\n

Davey\u2019s essay\u2014first delivered as a public address at the Learned Societies Conference in 1974\u2014is important because it initiates what would soon become a consensual effort among Canadian critics to deracinate the thematicists\u2019 approach. Frye\u2014as shown\u2014is not directly denounced by Davey. Yet his non-evaluative approach7 <\/sup><\/strong>to Canadian writing is alluded to as the basis for a perception that considers the domestic literary production as an adjunct to literature, rather than as literature proper. What Davey\u2019s discussion accomplishes is not only the broadening of the scope of the Canadian critical discourse of the time\u2014the centre of which is obviously Frye\u2019s alleged influence on a group of young critics\u2014but also the disclosing of an apparent \u2018fault-line\u2019 in Frye\u2019s criticism.<\/p>\n

The essays in Part III attempt to show Frye\u2019s entire theorizing in terms of an integrated vision, accepting the \u2018inconsistencies\u2019 as part of Frye\u2019s double perception, which sees the world both as environment and as representation. The discrepancy between Frye\u2019s international criticism, with its predilection for abstraction, systematization and universalization and the domestic, espousing literature\u2019s mimetic and non-autonomous status, began to worry some critics, as we have seen\u2014a sort of irreconcilable contradiction, oppositional rather than dialectical. It became the subject of an extensive debate among Canadian critics in the 1970s and the first part of the 1980s. One of the leading voices in that debate was himself a prominent critic and poet, Eli Mandel<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Mandel\u2019s essay, \u201cNorthrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition\u201d (1983), is the first exhaustive and cautiously argued study that analyses and tests Frye\u2019s theory for its apparent stubborn contradictions. From the beginning, Mandel positions himself in such a way as to approach Frye in terms of process\u2014allowing for duplicity, which can be, however, explained away by \u201creference to his poetic style and method.\u201d (Later critics\u2014Eleanor Cook, David Staines and Robert Lecker\u2014will read Frye\u2019s criticism as an extension of such a poetic impulse.) What makes Mandel\u2019s discussion unique, however, is not that he shows us where and when Frye\u2019s perceptual shifts occur but rather that he reads Frye in terms of a literary and critical tradition that Frye himself helped locate and continued to redefine. And certainly, the identification of Frye with that tradition\u2014which has always manifested an oddly strained relationship between the formal and the instrumental views of literature\u2014places him in a broader cultural context. Mandel quotes Frye\u2019s statement of the dilemma that faces the critic of Canadian literature who \u201chas to settle uneasily somewhere between the Canadian historian or social scientist, who has no comparative value-judgements to worry about, and the ordinary critic, who has nothing else.\u201d8 <\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/sup><\/strong>Frye\u2019s two \u2018contradictory\u2019 readings of literature\u2014the \u2018literary,\u2019 founded on \u201chumanist \/ universalist\u201d or \u201cmodernist \/ internationalist\u201d principles, and the extra-literary, based on \u201cthe Canadian contextual specifics\u201d\u2014can be approached, however, as Linda Hutcheon<\/strong> has proposed in \u201cFrye Recoded: Postmodernity and the Conclusions\u201d (1994), in terms of a typically postmodern tension. What, she asks, if we choose \u201cto examine Frye\u2019s position from a postmodern perspective?\u201d What if we assess Canadian writing without applying \u2018universal\u2019 standards and ideals? Then we might, she answers, negotiate a radically different perception of Canada which, \u201cinstead 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.\u201d From a postmodern position, the contradictions that irritated some of Frye\u2019s critics, particularly those who have argued from within the modernist frame of reference, are overcome: the modern binary either \/ or worldview is displaced by one in which postmodern both \/ and thinking prevails.<\/sup><\/p>\n

Hutcheon\u2019s essay acknowledges that there is, however, little doubting of Frye\u2019s belief in the autonomous status of literature. But she reminds us that he also engaged in practical criticism: for Frye, the study of society was a natural extension of the study of literature. This position is most evident in his essays on the Canadian literary imagination and culture, and critics \u201cwho have not looked at these writings,\u201d warns Hutcheon, \u201cmiss this important tension in his thought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eleanor Cook <\/strong>in \u201cAgainst Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye\u201d offers an argument, which, in a number of ways, challenges what she believes have been widespread misreadings of Frye\u2019s critical work in terms of monism. Cook\u2019s shift in emphasis here is interesting. The arguments up until this point in Part III, with the exception of Hutcheon\u2019s, have focused mainly on narrowing or eliminating the dialectical gap between Frye\u2019s Canadian criticism and his general theory, unanimously perceived as a failure of consistency or continuity or coherence in the overall design of his thinking. What Cook sets out to do in her essay is to rescue Frye\u2019s criticism from further misreadings, from being superficially repudiated for representing and encouraging a disengaged mental activity that conceives of the \u201cworks of literature as forming a total verbal order, rather than an aggregate.\u201d She does so by going straight to one of Frye\u2019s most theoretical works, Anatomy of Criticism\u2014<\/em>which critics, who generally disapprove of Frye\u2019s notion of literature\u2019s autonomous status, target as a prime example of the structuralists\u2019 obsession with taxonomy\u2014and proclaims it, in addition to being an anatomy, also a confession. This duality\u2014one that orders the world and the other, one\u2019s life\u2014is positive, not negative. And, furthermore, according to Cook, it is not only a \u201cpeculiarly Canadian form,\u201d but also engenders the type of dialectics that\u2014and here she quotes Frye\u2014are \u201cthe real dialectics of the spirit.\u201d Instead of polarizing the mind into opposites, it liberates the mind into possessing a double vision of the world.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, the works of Frye\u2019s critics I discussed here outline the various shifts in Canada that lead to multiple inquiries about how the imagination affects the construction of literature and literary criticism. None of the authors, even those whose theoretical approach leaned toward formal criticism, could stay uninvolved with the cultural reality within which they wrote about Frye\u2019s place in that same reality, and about his influence on their perception of it. The impact of Frye\u2019s literary and cultural criticism has been so vast and far-reaching that it engendered, as so many contributors acknowledge, a great number of \u2018misreadings.\u2019 But that term may itself be a misnomer because it presupposes the \u2018right\u2019 kind of reading, one that would not corrupt the author\u2019s text. To obtain such a result, we have to look for what Umberto Eco and other semioticians have called an \u201cideal\u201d reader. Was Frye really \u2018misread\u2019 or was it simply that his work required multiple readings? Mandel in his essay, \u201cNorthrop Frye and the Canadian Literary Tradition,\u201d anticipated the necessity for such multiple readings when he identified an \u201cinsoluble tension\u201d in Frye\u2019s Canadian criticism, describing it as the transformative moments when \u201ctheory descends to practice\u201d:<\/p>\n

Along the way, Frye has taken us through history and literature\u2014wedding a Laurentian theory of Canadian history with a romantic myth of a descent to the interior, through cultural history\u2014ranging across folk-culture theories of nation to modernist internationalism, through the distinctions between romanticism and modernism, quest and antithetical quest, art and anti-art, structure and composition by field. If indeed the question\u2026is the vexed one of influence, it <\/strong>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.<\/p>\n

Frye\u2019s criticism was very much a product of the central intellectual currents that shaped modern western thought while disrupting, at the same time, the very tradition that founded it.<\/p>\n

Branko Gorjup<\/p>\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

1.It should be pointed out that in the context of this collection that for Frye, and the critics who responded to him, and for this collection, \u2018Canadian\u2019 actually means \u2018English Canadian.\u2019<\/p>\n

2.The only exception at this early stage\u2014the late twenties and the thirties\u2014was A.J.M. Smith and the first Modernists who gathered around him. His rather famous critique of Canadian poetry, that it was \u201caltogether too self-conscious of its environment\u201d (in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada<\/em>. Eds. Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski. Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1967. 33) later became a battle cry for the anti-thematicists.<\/p>\n

3.In her seminal study of contemporary Canadian criticism and literary theory, \u201cStructuralism \/ Post-Structuralism: Language, Reality and Canadian Literature\u201d (in Future Indicatives<\/em>. Ed. John Moss. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1987. 25-51). Barbara Godard discusses the nature of this \u201congoing dialectics between tradition and imported innovation.\u201d As a point of departure for her discussion she uses the founding conference of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures, in 1974, at which \u201cthe rise of the reader and the plurality of meaning\u201d were celebrated. The same conference, as Godard observes, gave rise to the institutionalization of Canadian literature, \u201cmanifested itself in a rupture with the discipline of English.\u201d At the same time, at the same conference, this rise of \u2018Canadian\u2019 was inadvertently attacked by Frank Davey\u2019s powerful essay, \u201cSurviving the Paraphrase\u201d (included in the present selection), in which the so-called thematic criticism of Frye, Atwood, Jones and others was being critiqued for its insularity and selectivity.<\/p>\n

4.When I asked George Bowering for the permission to reprint \u201cWhy James Reaney\u2026,\u201d he requested that I visibly state that\u00a0 his \u201cessay was writ a long time ago\u201d and that though he does not \u201cdisavow\u201d it, he would \u201cdisagree with Frye more maturely now.\u201d (Quoted from Bowering\u2019s letter to the editor). And, in any case, it was actually Louis Dudek who first strongly objected to Frye\u2019s criticism and influence in his review \u201c\u2018Frye Again\u2019 (But Don\u2019t Miss Souster),\u201d published in Delta<\/em> 5 (October 1958): 26-27.<\/p>\n

5.Even when Frye\u2019s attitude toward Canadian writing\u2014described as \u201cnot having quite made it yet\u201d in the Conclusion to Literary History of Canada<\/em>\u2014is perceived by some critics as condescending, the more general sense of it is best described by Heather Murray: Frye \u201cis a wolf in sheepdog\u2019s clothing. He stands guard over a fledgling Canadian literature, protecting it from the ravages of evaluation\u2014but is he really the leader of the pack?\u201d<\/p>\n

6.Jackel\u2019s argument does not take into consideration Frye\u2019s often-stated differentiation of the historical forces that had set the two countries\u2019 cultural developments on separate trajectories. First, in both conclusions to Literary History of Canada<\/em>, in the 1965 and in 1976 editions, as well as in some later essays, including \u201cHaunted by Lack of Ghosts,\u201d Frye discussed Canada\u2019s self-definition in terms of \u201cthe American parallel development.\u201d The imaginative foundation of the United States was rooted in the revolutionary eighteenth-century sensibility, in the age of rationalism and enlightenment. Believing in \u201cthe rational continuity of life,\u201d the Americans saw their context expandable and in a perpetual state of technological transformation. In contrast, Frye argued that Canada had had no similar enlightenment; it had gone \u201cdirectly from Baroque expansion of the seventeenth century to the Romantic expansion of the nineteenth.\u201d Consequently, the Canadian counterpart of American positivism was predominantly a tragic vision of life manifested by a deep sense of discontinuity, by a \u201cfeeling for sudden descent or catastrophe.\u201d Such an imaginative response to the Canadian context, Frye believed, rendered the Canadian sensibility much more introspective and un-dogmatic.<\/p>\n

7.The \u201cnon-evaluative\u201d aspect of Frye\u2019s criticism was at the heart of Frye\u2019s definition of the critic\u2019s role. Thus, when describing Canadian writing, in the 1965 Conclusion to Literary History of Canada<\/em>, the notion of non-evaluation would not have been foregrounded if Frye did not himself engage in evaluation. Hence the \u201cmotivation of thematic criticism,\u201d argues Davey, \u201cstrikes one as essentially defensive in respect to both the culture and the literature. The declared motive has been to avoid evaluative criticism, which Frye has claimed would reduce Canadian criticism to a \u2018huge debunking project.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

8.\u201cConclusion\u201d to Literary History of Canada<\/em>, The Bush Garden<\/em>, 215-216.<\/p>\n

9.See also Robert Kroetsch\u2019s essay, \u201cLearning the Hero from Northrop Frye\u201d, in The Lovely Treachery of Words<\/em>, Toronto: Oxford, 1989, pp. 151-162.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Branko Gorjup delivered this paper at the Frye Festival on April 21, 2001.\u00a0 An extensively expanded and revised version of this paper appeared in Northrop Frye’s Canadian Criticism and Its Influence, published by University of Toronto Press Much has been written in the past half century on Northrop Frye\u2019s \u2018Canadian\u20191 criticism: on his various discussions, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-14606","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nNorthrop Frye and His Canadian Critics - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/northrop-frye-and-his-canadian-critics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics - 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