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\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The Frye Festival takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick, where Frye lived for the greater part of his youth, from 1919 to 1929, when he left to study at the University of Toronto.\u00a0 He was born in Sherbrooke, and Moncton, especially for his mother, was hard exile, as John Ayre<\/a>\u2019s biography makes clear.\u00a0 But Moncton is where he grew up and Moncton shaped him in crucial ways.\u00a0 In a talk he gave at the 2003 festival, titled \u201cMoncton, Did You Know?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Bob Denham looked at Frye\u2019s years in Moncton and asked the question, What happened to Frye in Moncton that set him, at age 17, firmly on the path that he was to follow.\u00a0 A copy of this talk can be found on the festival website, www.frye.ca<\/a>, and in the book Verticals of Frye\/Les Verticales de Frye<\/em>, a collection of festival talks I edited in 2005.<\/p>\n The first festival took place in April, 2000, with about 50 authors \u2013 poets, novelists, playwrights \u2013 in attendance.\u00a0 And we invited David Staines<\/a> to talk about Northrop Frye.\u00a0 Thus began a splendid series of talks by scholars and others with intimate knowledge of Frye, including Branko Gorjup<\/a>, Nella Cotrupi<\/a>, Bob Denham<\/a> (who has given 3 talks over the years), Na\u00efm Kattan<\/a>, John Ayre, Michael Dolzani<\/a>, B.W. Powe<\/a>, Alvin Lee<\/a>, Jean O\u2019Grady<\/a>, Glenna Sloan<\/a>, and Germaine Warkentin<\/a>.\u00a0 As well, each year we\u2019ve organized, as part of the same \u2018Frye Symposium\u2019, at least one roundtable in which these same speakers and others, including Glenn Gill,<\/a> Jeffrey Donaldson<\/a>, Joe Velaidum<\/a>, Peter Singer, and Jean Wilson<\/a>.<\/p>\n In April, 2006 the festival inaugurated a second series of talks, which we call the Antonine Maillet<\/a>-Northrop Frye Lecture, featuring a well-known writer\/thinker with no necessary connection to Frye.\u00a0 Neil Bissoondath<\/a> spoke in 2006, followed by David Adams Richards<\/a> in 2007, Alberto Manguel<\/a> in 2008, and Monique LaRue<\/a> in 2009.\u00a0 Paul Curtis<\/a> at the Universit\u00e9 de Moncton, a member of the Frye Board of Directors, has been the driving force behind these talks.\u00a0 Goose Lane Editions<\/a> of Fredericton has published each talk in a handsome, bilingual, paperback format.<\/p>\n In April, 2010, our invited speaker for the Frye Symposium lecture is Craig Stevenson, who will give a talk on Jung and Frye. \u00a0Our invited speaker for the Maillet-Frye lecture is Noah Richler<\/a>.\u00a0 The tentative title for Noah\u2019s talk is “The Unknown Soldier” and it will be a polemic on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know if he will have anything to say about Frye.\u00a0 I take it as a sign of growth on our part that we\u2019ve invited Noah, and a token of Noah\u2019s sense of adventure that he would gladly accept an invitation to a festival named for Northrop Frye.\u00a0 In his book This Is My Country: What\u2019s Yours?<\/em> Noah takes Frye to task on several fronts.\u00a0 He finds the phrase \u2018garrison mentality\u2019 especially objectionable.\u00a0 With this phrase \u201che was expressing (a) Eurocentric judgment and planted a stigma on the Canadian literary psyche for a good few decades afterwards.\u201d\u00a0 Much of Noah\u2019s book is an exploration and celebration of the aboriginal contribution to Canadian culture and literature and so for him \u201cthe bush is not <\/em>empty but occupied.\u00a0 And if it was occupied, then it was therefore habitable and safe \u2013 and the towns were not \u2018garrisons.\u2019\u00a0 Recognizing, in particular, that aboriginal peoples were living in spaces that Northrop Frye and others of his generation had previously considered wild, dangerous, and empty of culture if not of people, was the spur of a creed of ethnic and cultural sensitivity that was learned in the bush and then transferred to the cities.\u201d<\/p>\n Branko Gorjup, in his talk at the April, 2001 festival, entitled \u201cNorthrop Frye and His Canadian Critics,\u201d recounts some of the previous negative reaction to Frye\u2019s \u2018Canadian\u2019 criticism.\u00a0 The common theme of these negative assessments seems to be that Frye\u2019s ideas about Canadian literature are based on \u201cimported theories and values.\u201d\u00a0 Perhaps this is all a misreading of Frye.\u00a0 Frye, in conversation with David Cayley<\/a>, says, \u201cThe phrase \u2018garrison mentality\u2019 has a certain historical context, and the phrase has got overexposed.\u201d\u00a0 This is a very gentle way of saying that it\u2019s usually not a good idea to take things out of historical context.\u00a0 Branko ends his essay, however, by asking: \u201cWas Frye really \u2018misread\u2019 or was it simply that his work required multiple readings?\u201d\u00a0 And he quotes Eli Mandel<\/a>, as conceding that \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bush Garden<\/em><\/a>, where so much of the damage was done, if I can put it that way, was first published in 1971, and I have in my possession, a precious fruit from my years as a bookseller, Timothy Findley<\/a>\u2019s signed copy of the first paperback edition.\u00a0 It\u2019s interesting that the first words he underlines, on page 213, are these: \u201cAnd 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).\u201d\u00a0 I like to picture Timothy Findley at Stone Orchard reading these words and saying to himself, By God, just you wait.\u00a0 (In 1977 he published The Wars.<\/em>)\u00a0 Of course, Frye did wait, for it all to happen, as he knew it would.\u00a0 Findley also underlines, and gives two long slashes in the margin, to this from page 222: \u201cAgain, Canadian culture, and literature in particular, has felt the force of what might be called Emerson\u2019s law.\u00a0 Emerson remarks in his journals that in a provincial society it is extremely easy to reach the highest level of cultivation, extremely difficult to take one step beyond that.\u00a0 In surveying Canadian poetry and fiction, we feel constantly that all the energy has been absorbed in meeting a standard, a self-defeating enterprise because real standards can only be established, not met.\u201d\u00a0 Whether he agreed or disagreed with Frye\u2019s historical perspective, Findley was intent on lifting himself above and beyond the force of Emerson\u2019s law.\u00a0 That he succeeded, as did so many others of his generation, is something we can all celebrate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 The Frye Festival takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick, where Frye lived for the greater part of his youth, from 1919 to 1929, when he left to study at the University of Toronto.\u00a0 He was born in Sherbrooke, and Moncton, especially for his mother, was hard exile, as John Ayre\u2019s biography makes 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