Doing theory “properly” must carry with it the implicit hope that in the world of “action” (i.e., the world of writing literature), one’s insights will take hold, if not in this lifetime then perhaps in the next. Few theorists live to see books deliberately take up the trends they lay down; rather, they content themselves by responding to the texts at hand, hoping others will begin to read texts similarly, and, in time, that some sort of theoretical “trickle down” will ultimately change the way people write texts as well.
A momentous exception to all this, of course, is Northrop Frye, who managed to attain in his lifetime an influence of almost singular uniqueness, in both the abstract world of “theoretical” letters but also, in the immediate and proximate world of “artistic” ones as well.
A theorist can only dream his work will reverberate throughout the cultural world, both academic and creative, the way Frye’s did. Others, in other lands, have achieved comparable success I’m sure; but I doubt that any nation was more in need of a man of such influence and then, subsequently, somehow, able to generate one.
Frye’s conclusion to the literary history of Canada, written in 1976 for example, looks both forwards and backwards in immensely profitable ways. On the one hand, his idea of “garrison mentality” is easily rooted in John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832) and Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Rising Village” (1825). The fact that these two works are of little aesthetic value tells us that their significance lies in their social value. However novel, the exploration of “garrison mentality” is not a significant addition to world literature; hence, these texts are to be taken as a sign of literary immaturity, even though Frye, I don’t believe, is speaking about such texts pejoratively.
Their significance in the Canadian canon tells us something about what Canadian writers were (are) trying to do—namely, construct a national identity lacking unifying myths but armed with finite and aesthetically shallow ideas and concepts, as though one could build a literature around such things. (A nation—at least our nation—is certainly constructed first in the conceptual world. What else is a Constitution than a series of covenants rooted in the world of practice over aesthetics?)
Such an endeavour – achieving social cohesion based on a negotiated ‘social contract’ rather than a shared historical language, experience, or kinship – puts the burden of making such covenants aesthetically pleasing squarely on the shoulders of New World writers. Leaving aside for now the cultural strategies employed by the Americans, we have to ask: were Canadians up to the challenge? If we answer that ultimately, no, they were not, this does not necessarily mean that Canada was cursed with poor writers of little artistic (i.e., revolutionary) merit. Rather, it may speak to the impossibility of the task at hand.
If Canada came of age as a literary nation with the Montreal group (F.R. Scott, Leo Kennedy, Leon Edel, and A.J.M. Smith) during the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was with the recognition that in order to create something of significant cultural achievement, we could no longer go against prevailing international artistic trends, but rather, ingratiate ourselves within them.
Yet what the Confederation poets like Lampman, Carmen, Roberts and Scott were trying to do at the turn of the 20th century is both removed, and not so different, from what the “late” modernists of the Montreal group purported to do. Both groups of writers wanted to break away from colonial influence. Both wanted to explore the nature of alienation with or in regards to nature. Both sought to explore what a Canadian identity was all about.
This last bit on identity is key in lieu of Frye’s opening comment on the question which has haunted Canadian writers since the very beginning: Not ‘Who am I?’ but ‘Where is here?’. Art thrives when questions of place are put to rest, or integrated seamlessly into our subjectivity of the world. Yet if the only “unique” transcendental signifier Canadians have is the land they inhabit, then the stark divorce between land and subjectivity, the easy tendency to deny the harsh climate for the sake of exploring more expedient cultural realities must indubitably be overturned before the important work of culture can begin.
This is what Frye means when he says in order to mature as a nation of letters, we must force form onto our surroundings. The deliberate “mythopoeic” approach, then, allows us to cultivate the subjective experience we ought to in order to ask more meaningfully ‘Who am i?’ rather than ‘Where is here?’
In this regard, many Canadian writers were up to the task, both before and after Frye. Morley Callaghan abandoned the small town regional idyll to describe goings on in Canadian metropolises while using mythic Biblical parables as his formal framework. So too did the early Jewish Canadian writers, like A.M. Klein, whose Second Scroll structurally mirrors the Torah. E.J. Pratt and Hugh MacLennan also took formal cues from both Hebraic and Classical sources, however timidly such works were received.
Once formally given the theoretical green light by Frye, however, Canadian writers thrived, not in having broken away from formal constraints but in suddenly being free to indulge in them. Authors like James Reaney, Robert Kroetsch, the early Margaret Atwood and even Sheila Watson enthusiastically looked to artificial/foreign structural devices and tropes to shape the stories/messages they wanted to tell. Writers had decided that if we were going to talk about place, we could only do it through forms which originated elsewhere. We had made a bold leap with our sudden realization that culture cannot be formed in a vacuum.
I am still uneasy, however, about Frye’s championing of the “professionalization” of poetry, as though form in Canadian writing ought to be bred of intimate study of (say, Classical) form. I’m not sure what the trends are like elsewhere, but what stands out in the case of Canadian poets is how exceedingly well educated they are. E.J. Pratt and Earle Birney both completed doctoral studies at the University of Toronto. Montrealers F.R. Scott (a Rhodes scholar) and A.M. Klein all but wrote the bar exam, while A.J.M. Smith completed a Master’s thesis in Edinburgh.
Hugh MacLennan (also a Rhodes scholar) completed his PhD at Princeton and mid-century poets like Dorothy Livesay, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen and Robert Kroetsch all attended graduate schools abroad. Playwrights James Reaney and Tomson Highway, unlike Shakespeare, were university wits, the former completing his PhD under the supervision of Frye, the latter with two degrees to his credit (English and Music BAs from the University of Western Ontario). Even noted humourist Stephen Leacock received his PhD in Political Economy from the University of Chicago.
According to Frye, to move beyond the conceptual universe (where discussion of ‘vulgar’ concepts like ‘commerce,’ ‘tariffs,’ ‘railways,’ and ‘survival’ are the norm) to the mythological/anagogical universe marks the literary maturity of a nation. Even if new forms are lacking, form can only be bred of form. Aristotle said that we can have plot with no characters, but we can’t have characters with no plot. In order to allow our “characters,” then, to develop the plot they need requires a suspension not of disbelief, but of our skepticism of form. Is this the most expedient way to a unifying mythology—towards a place where form and content exist in harmony?
Frye’s influence certainly has me believing this is the case. Yet how can we ever hope to escape (ought we to?) from foreign formal conventions by ingratiating our poets so rigorously within the academy? Perhaps we require a “bard of fancy,” like the Americans had. Our first chance at anagogy may have come in establishing ties to the ‘Imperial Federation,’ the type of idealism and maturity (though some would argue ‘immaturity’) shown by Lorne Murchison in Sara Jeanette Duncan’s very incisive novel The Imperialist (1904). Yet the need for imperial unity was equally scoffed at back then as it would be now; Britain is no longer the stuff of legend. Can Canada, or can Canadian letters, then, ever coalesce around something that could be? Should we keep striving? Is this a red herring?
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