“Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture” by Northrop Frye

“To cite but one example, what a difference between Anatomy of Criticism (1957), based on an inquiry into literary specificity, and the more recent texts of Northrop Frye, whose object is, increasingly, verbal culture as a whole (and not just literature).”
-Tzveltan Todorov.

For brevity’s sake, I shall henceforth refer to Divisions on a Ground as Doagecc. It consists of thirteen articles, most of them previously published, ten of them being addresses at various meetings, one a lecture, one a book excerpt, and one essay. These largely occasional and somewhat fugitive pieces offer, not unexpectedly, very little sustained analysis or interpretation, being secondary offshoots, albeit from the practice of a major critic. Mr. Frye writes a clear and vital prose, of course, sprinkled with a good amount of wit, wisdom, insight, and information; nevertheless, the book is low-pressure, and of interest mainly to devotees of his oeuvre. For Doagecc’s book production values the publishers are to be commended, and Mr. Polk has very ably compiled and edited and prefaced. (His remark that Northrop Frye may be, “perhaps the most important” critic “of our century”—anonymously rephrased on the dustjacket blurb as “Perhaps the most influential critical thinker of our century”—does not appear very astute, however. Thus far Mr. Frye’s work has not enjoyed the very tremendous success or neglect that usually accompanies such unique importance.) Doagecc, I want to add, is provided also with a gratifyingly thorough and accurate index of names and titles.

Nearly half of the book is on literary topics, and the rest on university teaching and experience, with frequent reference to what may be called English Department matters. The university portions are for the most part pleasantly journalistic, in a stylish, almost memoirist fashion, giving the author’s general views as a teacher and educationist. If one comes to them hoping for a broad or deep study of culture, one may indeed find them a trifle starry-eyed:

It is only when we get to the point of having some sense of the total subject in our minds that we begin to recognize the source of an authority beyond that (of initial response), of the poet or creative artist whose work we are studying. If we are listening to music, let us say, on the level of Bach or Mozart, the response keeps shifting from the personal to the impersonal. On the one hand we feel that this is Bach, that it couldn’t possibly be anybody else. On the other hand, there are moments when Bach disappears, and what we feel is: this is the voice of music itself; this is what music was created to say. At that level, we are not hearing the music so much as recognizing it.
Mozart recorded by Landowska?

Excesses of analogy and metonymy inform also the portions on literary matters, but here Mr. Frye’s expected methodological programme provides some urgency and excitement. In an article called “Culture as Interpenetration,” he finds that “Canada is perhaps as interesting and valuable a place as any to study…the relations between a culture and the conditions under which it is produced.” High culture, the creation and consumption of the arts, is the actual subject discussed. And a fair number of references are made, briefly, and often vaguely, to Canadian writing and painting as illustrative or symptomatic of this or that. But the most lengthy and detailed discussion (here, and in the whole book) is of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, one “of the most remarkable works of fiction in our time,” which is shown to be about pattern, design, destructive order, and constructive order. It is said to afford “an instructive parallel to some of the social conditions underlying Canadian literature,” which was beset by violence against a feared, unknown environment, now much routed, this dark, by the light of Canadian arts. I myself have noticed something similar about Canadian cats. We were adopted by yet another one recently, a female we have named Annie, after possibly one of the most remarkable musicals of our time. At first she displayed much fear, etc., in her new home, but got over that soon enough, in response to our loving assurance and persuasion.

If we are to know and assess the valuable literature, after enjoying it, that has been produced in Canada, we ought not to proceed by capturing it within a quite rigid and predetermining methodology and theory; such as Mr. Frye is engaged upon since Fearful Symmetry (1947). This is not to banish him from the engagement of Canadian studies, but to urge even more variation and improvisation in the approach. Doagecc and The Bush Garden (1971) are interesting mainly as the side-effects, so to speak, of a major creative thinker; they are also very much in-house, rarely noticed outside of Canada even in lengthy studies of his work, not, I think, because of the subject-matter. In the Frygean view, Canadian literary work is engaged upon a cultural convalescence after some rather grimly humourous cultural complaint—a cartoon that can be adapted to any collective literary notion of any time.

In his opening chapter, on Anatomy of Criticism, (Chicago, 1980), Frank Lentricchia finds that Frye’s vision is “generated by a thoroughly despairing and alienated understanding of the possibilities of historical life. For Frye actual history can be nothing but a theater of dehumanization, a place of bondage and torture.” To this the Frygean remedial effort, characterized as neo-Kantian and Nietzschean, is pointed to be “a fantastical, utopian alternative to the perception of a degraded social existence: a human discoursing free of all contingency, independent of all external forces, a discoursing empowered by unconditioned human desire.”

The chief lack in the Frygean remedy may be usefully labelled as “evaluation.” Friendly and unfriendly critics of Frye have been troubled by his denigration of it. Even the leading Frygean apologist, Robert D. Denham (in his excellently fair and useful Northrop Frye and Critical Method, 1978), locates it close to home:

But there is no escaping, finally, the issue of assessment. The very nature of Frye’s work will not permit us simply “to murmur politely that it shows things in a new light and is indeed a most stimulating contribution to criticism.” There is hardly a page in Frye which does not invite controversy or reaction. A student of his work cannot rest content with having described the details of his method, the nature of his argument, the example of his practice, the large claims and audacious scope of his entire undertaking. Part of our task is to take stock of the entire effort, to assess its powers and limitations, and to suggest at least some of its problematic areas.

The quotation within this quotation is from Frye himself, and Denham describes it as “one of his ironic jibes directed toward deterministic critics.”

Frye’s most recent position on evaluation poses as inflexible: “I realized early in my critical life that evaluation was a minor and subordinate function of the critical process, at best an incidental byproduct, which should never be allowed to take priority over scholarship” (The Great Code).

The elaborations of scholarship which Frye and Denham deem necessary is a spurious issue, in my opinion. The danger in evaluating is that scholarship may wear it down, and deflect judgement in the direction of leniency or harshness. If I read more Frye than Freud, I do so, for reasons which I know best and need not defend, and such private choosing has no evaluative connotations. I would be severely unusual, if I claimed that Frye was a more important critical thinker than Freud, and idiotic if I persisted in reading Frye, and about his work, unless such reading were positively valuable to me, beyond the inferiority or superiority of this or that particular book. Before evaluation, which works always in tandem with self-evaluation (but not at all on a one-to-one level with the matter evaluated, not even in self-evaluation), one must have humility, whether one is subject or object, and certainly whether the criticism is hostile or friendly, fair or not quite. One cannot depend on evaluation for unruffled happiness. But it is a great teacher, as process.

There are no given values in literature, only proposed ones, and one must continue choosing and re-choosing. If you happen to believe something before you go to bed, you will have to renew or refute your belief sometime during the morning. If you have reason to think you know a great deal, most of what you know is something about things that you don’t know very well.

It is the autonomy of criticism which Frye so strongly and passionately defends—the right to be right, or unintentionally wrong, within a decently separate field of endeavour—in seeking to refuge “the broken links between creation and knowledge, art and science, myth and concept…” (Anatomy of Criticism), which is the dynamo of his best work, when he leaves, his old ironic tactics behind for new ones. The restrictions on evaluation, of criticism practised as an art, are signs of what Frank Lentricchia finds generally wrong: “I believe that the desire for originality, in all of its senses and variants, has seriously marred and enervated more than a few of the most brilliant critics on our contemporary scene.” Another, I find, is the desire to be inferentially arresting, as in “arrestingly original,” say.

A useful example of original arrest occurs in the final paragraph of the Doagecc article I have already discussed:

Contemporary painting and writing, whatever the language, speaks an international idiom, and the capitals where that idiom is established are still, as they have always been, the big centres, London, Paris, New York. Trying to ignore this international idiom is, experience suggests, futile, and leads only to a bind of archaism. The general principle appears to be that a painter or writer who is self-conscious about his immediate context will be likely to sound provincial, whereas a painter or writer who accepts a provincial milieu, in, say Newfoundland or southern British Columbia, will be much less likely to do so.

The first word “Contemporary” is unnecessary and misleading. New York is not a capital, so “capitals” is wrong. Idiom is characterized by variance, in all its permutations. What happens in big centres is not the establishment of idiom, but of strong and powerful media to observe, analyze, report, and transmit the flow of idiom. If one is ambitious as an artist, as one may or need not be, one will be attentive to the flow of idiom, as well as the cargo of content that it carries, which cargo is also observed and so on in big centres. For whatever reason, it is desirable to be in a milieu that is acceptable. For an artist a milieu provides much of the incident that goes into artistic content. Any blockage with regard to milieu or big centre media, in favour or against either (and even both, I suppose), may be dealt with by art, or at least, the artist. Perhaps, Mr. Frye infers that Canadian literature ought to be more established as a read entity in the big centres. Quite a lot of it already is.

It may be unkind to do the next quotation, but in criticism being or seeming to be an ogre is one of those things:

A Canadian artist may leave Canada to live and work in one of the big centres, like the painter Riopelle, but this does not affect the matter. Within the last twenty years we have been seeing more and more areas of this huge and sparsely settled country, become culturally visible through painters and writers who belong, as creative people, less to Canada than to the prairies, the Pacific coast, the Atlantic coast, southern Ontario or Quebec. The process has been aided by Canada’s more relaxed attitude to ethnical groups; there is no such thing as a hundred percent Canadian, and the homogenizing of immigrants has been less intense than in the United States. But if we look at the pictures of Kurelek on the prairies or Jack Chambers in Ontario, or read Buckler on the Maritimes or Rudy Wiebe on Alberta Mennonites, we can see the “provincial” aspect of Canadian culture going into reverse, from inarticulate form to articulate content.

Certainly, three cheers for our milieux! But have we any business to comment on Riopelle’s choice of residence, or to label his work with meaningless phrases like the arresting “inarticulate forme”? If one is going to say nothing un-travel-brochurish about Kurelek, Chambers, Buckler, or Wiebe, one has said positively nothing.

In another article, Mr. Frye quotes a witticism from Wilde: “The Muses care so little for geography.” He justly praises its sound critical instinct: “a writer cannot try to be anything except a writer, and a poet must adhere to literature…” But soon enough, in the same paragraph, the formula is served again of “Jack Hodgins tells us about Vancouver Island,” etc., etc., spiced with a reassurance about Mavis Gallant’s expatriate status, “Canadian literature is diversified enough…”

The portions of Doagecc first published in the second edition, (1976) of Klinck’s monumental Literary History of Canada: Literature in English, and those dealing with criticism and scholarship in Canada since the 1930’s, offer more cogently written, more palpably verifiable brief expositions of vital literary matters, such as this:

And whenever a Canadian scholar makes a personal statement, as, say, Kathleen Coburn does in her autobiography, In Pursuit of Coleridge, it becomes clear that scholarship, no less than poetry, grows out of a specific environment and is in part a response to it. ■

S.G. Buri is a Winnipeg poet and critic.