Recorded 31 March 1971
From the CBC audiotape no. 650, released by the Centre for Cassette Studies, 1975, transcribed by Elisabeth Oliver. Dated by Frye’s datebook for 1971. In this program heard in the Ideas series, Ideas producer David McPherson talked to Frye about The Bush Garden, to which the page numbers in the text refer, followed by the page number in vol. 12 of the Collected Works. He began by asking how the Canadian imagination differed from that of other nationalities, particularly the American.
FRYE: The first and most obvious difference is that the American imagination is that of a tremendous imperial power. Whatever America does is very important for the world as a whole. American people, if they have any sense of responsibility at all, are conditioned in this attitude to things right from the beginning, whereas Canada, with its twenty million people, has a much more observant and less involved view of the world as a whole. Its attitude towards things has that slightly quieter quality of a more observant people. It’s more like that of Scandinavia, say, than of Russia.
The ideology that developed in Canada in the nineteenth century did not identify independence and freedom with national independence because it remained in a colonial relation to Great Britain for so much longer. Consequently, what you got in Canada was a radicalism which was more like British radicalism than like American radicalism. It didn’t take this fervently patriotic tone. It was rather more like Tom Paine—who of course was British in origin: the Americans have never quite adopted Paine.
MCPHERSON: The other thing that you stress is that most Canadian literature has been didactic; has been political and rhetorical rather than creative (I hesitate to use the word). Why do you think that this is so?
FRYE: In the nineteenth century, Canada was at one remove from the major cultural centres. It takes a good deal of direct association with a literary tradition before a poet or a novelist can really get it through his skull that he is writing poems and novels. If he is removed from the centres of literary tradition, he finds it very much easier to talk about things than to present them as the poet and the novelist should. As a result you get argumentative, didactic, rhetorical treatises which are disguised as poems and novels.
MCPHERSON: In the sense that the people on the frontier have no time to absorb the tradition, being involved, basically, with conditions of survival.
FRYE: I think it has more to do with the fact that the people here, however primitive their living conditions may have been, were not really simple people. The rhetorical and the didactic are the qualities of the somewhat imperfectly educated, but they are not qualities of simple people. You don’t find them in Eskimos, for example.
MCPHERSON: You think then that the problem is building up a native Canadian literary tradition of some sort? Is it possible? It has always struck me that the problem in Canada is that even in our universities you are constantly taught English literature, or literature from England. Even yet, there’s not too much stress on the Canadian tradition.
FRYE: That is true, but of course the real tradition is still the British tradition. That’s true for Americans as well—their real tradition is the one that starts with Chaucer. I spent ten years in reviewing Canadian poetry, and while I was doing my best to respond impartially to all kinds of poetry, and not to prefer one kind of poetry to another, still, I did hail every tendency towards the concrete that I could.1 The more the poet was using images from direct sensory experience and concrete sensational language, and the less he was arguing and rhetoricizing, the more I felt that he was getting closer to the centre of the tradition of culture. Now, in my conception of what a myth is, which is that it is the narrative shape of the poem, I think that the more concrete a poet is, and the more he sticks to the central language of poetry, the more clearly the myth will stand out. Consequently that means that the development of concreteness and specific qualities in imagery is what is going to establish the articulate national tradition.
In a poem like Towards the Last Spike, Pratt is dealing with the East– West vision and the longitudinal vision (the North–South one). He represents these—he symbolizes them—by Macdonald and by Blake. Whether that’s accurate history or not, I don’t care, because as I said in reviewing the book, we’ve got far too much accurate history and far too little accurate imagination.2 Now, I think that when the imagination goes to work on such figures as Macdonald and Blake, a poet is bound to twist the history into a somewhat nonhistorical guise. But in doing that, he is going to create a myth and practise creating the myth in the poem because he is doing his job as a poet. It never entered his head that he was going to produce a myth.
MCPHERSON: In other words, poets really draw the imaginative essence out of a historical conflict.
FRYE: Yes, that’s what a myth is. History is not really the source of truth, but the myth is: that is, I think the mythical Riel is a lot closer to the truth than the historical one.
MCPHERSON: How exactly do the longitudinal and East–West visions conflict?
FRYE: Canada was settled by people who were, like the voyageurs, hunting for furs or going along canoe trails and penetrating very deeply into the country. Whenever I talk about Canada, I come back to the fact that it has no Atlantic seaboard. You go through this enormous stretch of waterways, up through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes; you can keep on going until you come to Edmonton. This East-to-West thrust is the opening thrust of Canadian history. It starts in Europe and therefore it’s a conservative, and to some extent a romantic, thrust. But it’s the one that builds up the fur trade, it builds up the exploration of the West, it’s behind the building of the railway to the Pacific coast. Then as soon as the country is settled, of course it becomes aware of the pull of the big American cities to the south.
MCPHERSON: And the markets, especially.
FRYE: And the markets. So, a different kind of mentality comes on top of the other one.
MCPHERSON: You mentioned the expansionist East–West drive. You also mentioned in your book a more cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and satirical aspect of the Canadian imagination [235; C, 359]. Are they related to the longitudinal and the East–West model?
FRYE: I think I do see a connection. That is, I speak several times in the book of Canada as having a seat on the revolutionary sidelines. It neither engaged in the American Revolution, nor did it fight against it as the South did. So it’s had a slightly detached and observant quality which comes out in the particular kind of Canadian humour and also in the rather reflective and pastoral quality of Canadian poetry and fiction.
MCPHERSON: You also mention in the book that Canada is the only nation that is still a colony, both economically and psychologically [iii; C, 414]. What aspects do you stress when discussing that?
FRYE: When I speak of Canada as a colony now, of course, I’m not speaking about the British connection, I’m speaking about the American connection. I was recently reminded of this by the public reaction to the CRTC’s guidelines about Canadian content in Canadian television. There were a good many protests which seemed to take it for granted that freedom consisted in being annexed to the American mentality. That’s something that you wouldn’t find in any quarter of Africa or Asia today.
MCPHERSON: How do you think it will be possible, or what measures do you think you would try, to overcome the colonial mentality?
FRYE: I don’t know. There’s always, of course, a question of time. One sometimes wonders if it isn’t too late. I can see the reason for the CRTC’s desire to carry out the mandate it was entrusted with: enforcing rules of Canadian content. What I see most clearly is that if this had been done to the Canadian film industry, the Canadian book industry, the Canadian magazine industry, we might have got somewhere by 1971. But I wonder if after you’ve sold all the passes, the fact that you’ve still got one to defend may not be too significant.
MCPHERSON: Do you think it’s realistic, in imaginative terms, to extend biculturalism? Is biculturalism viable?
FRYE: I don’t quite know what to say about that because it seems to me so obvious that in a country like ours, bicultural means multicultural. I cannot think in terms of the bicultural aspect of Canada—the English and French part of it—without remembering that there are several hundred thousand people of Italian origin in Toronto, that there are Ukrainians and Icelandic people in the West, that there are many ethnical groups which are different. Those have traditions and languages and literatures that are worth preserving and that have their role to play in the country. I’ve always been glad that Canada has been much less obsessed by homogeneity than the United States. It hasn’t put pressure on people to lose their identity.
MCPHERSON: Of course, in many ways, that’s why Canadian literature or Canada as a nation seems to be so weak at the seams, if you can use such a phrase. People tend to identify more with the old world than they do with the country they’re in.
FRYE: That may be so, and yet, émigré or immigré literature is a genre worth having too. Some of the most remarkable pieces of Canadian writing have come from rather small ethnical groups and people who are brought up within them. I’m thinking of, say, the Winnipeg Jewish population and a novel like Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice, which I think is a very remarkable story, but one that would be inconceivable without that tight little ethnical community.
MCPHERSON: Do you think that there is a recognizable difference between the French Canadian and the English Canadian imagination?
FRYE: I think that the French Canadian imagination is a much more intensive one. It’s conscious of the fact that literature is a real need in a human community. The whole notion of literature as an expendable luxury for an ascendant class, which has polluted so much of the English Canadian scene, has not bothered the French Canadian because he knows perfectly well that the survival of his language and his culture depends on the preservation of a literary tradition. That sense of the need for the writer is extremely important. Quebec has come through a social and religious evolution in the last few years which has put pretty intense pressure on the imaginations of poets and novelists; pressure of a kind that most English Canadian writers could hardly conceive of, I think—what people like Saint-Denys Garneau and Anne Hébert have gone through in trying to shape their imaginations.
MCPHERSON: And this, in effect, produces a better writer.
FRYE: It produces a much more intense writer, certainly; yes.
MCPHERSON: Don’t you think that cultural nationalism is very intimately tied up with the survival of Canada at this particular point in history?
FRYE: It may be. My resistance to cultural nationalism is identical with my feeling that rhetorical and argumentative literature is second rate. Cultural nationalism, in confusing the two categories of unity and of identity, tends to deal in abstractions. It’s really about ideas, rather than about people. I’m not sure that cultural expression can be national. Canada is too big and too varied for that. The expressions are going to be limited, they’re going to be much more parochial and confined than that. I think it’s generally true that poets function within local units, whatever they think they ought to be functioning in. You notice, for example, that the empire—the centrifugal movement of society—doesn’t produce great poets. There is one great poet of empire, and that’s Virgil. He’s the exception that proves the rule. You’ll notice that when Bliss Carman goes imperial and starts talking about the Song of the Open Road, that’s when he starts to write applesauce. It’s when he’s writing Low Tide on Grand Pré that he’s a poet.
MCPHERSON: Would you say, then, that the longitudinal division of the country is apt—that somebody in the Maritimes has a greater spiritual affinity with New England than with Ontario, for example?
FRYE: I think he has one kind of affinity with New England. Yet there is an astonishing affinity among Canadians as Canadians straight across from East to West. That’s why I say that unity is such a very different thing from uniformity. The relationships in real unity which embody a great variety and a great diversity are much more real and much more tangible than the relationships of solidarity which are phony.
MCPHERSON: Obviously the imagination expresses itself in the thematic patterns of literature, for example. What do you think are the major themes that are dealt with in Canadian literature?
FRYE: I never think much about literature in connection with themes. I have tried to indicate what I’ve called a pastoral quality in the Canadian imagination, and the fact that a rather sparse population in a huge country has produced a sense of the imminence of the natural world. That is, when you’re on the prairie, the sky is everywhere, and when you’re in a Canadian novel the trees and the lakes and the forest are everywhere, even if the novelist himself is a thoroughly urban person.
MCPHERSON: This I find to be one of the paradoxes and one of the distressing things about Canadian literature: that it seems unreal in many cases.
FRYE: It may be absurd, but writers can only write out what takes shape in their minds, and what takes shape in their minds is very largely conditioned by the imaginative pattern of a country.
MCPHERSON: Which is still predominantly rural.
FRYE: Which is still predominantly rural in spite of the fact that the whole population has changed over to an urban one.
MCPHERSON: There’s also a distinction between Montreal and Toronto writers—Montreal writers being, generally speaking, more vitalistic and Toronto more intellectual. Do you think this distinction means anything?
FRYE: It may mean something, or it may be a pure accident. It may be partly the greater intensity of the different groups in Montreal: the English, French, Jewish groups and so on. Their relations vis-à-vis one another are perhaps of a kind that produces a different quality of imagination. My own sense of the rather pastoral and meditative quality in Canadian imagination may very well be a Toronto-centred idea, I’m not sure.
MCPHERSON: Right, I was just going to suggest that. [laughter] What sort of changes in the imagination could a strong conflict between these ethnic groups produce? What different qualities would it tend to bring forward?
FRYE: I suppose it brings out a very strong sense of identity in the poet himself because he’s continually thrown back on the question of who he is and what he belongs to and what makes him what he is.
MCPHERSON: You also mentioned the idea of the garrison mentality as a conditioning factor [225–6; C, 351]. How does this manifest itself in the literature?
FRYE: Well, it manifests itself in a kind of sectarian quality. However, that’s more of a condition of Canadian life than of Canadian literature, perhaps. The literature, I think, expresses that in what we just said about the sense of the natural physical world being all around and about one. That’s the sense the fort in the forest would naturally have, and that’s the psychological sense that hangs on, even after your garrison has become a street in Westmount.
MCPHERSON: The thing that strikes me is that there isn’t much of the Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone type of character—the explorer type—in Canadian literature.
FRYE: The American opening of the West was a very different affair from the Canadian one. There was a kind of anarchism that produced all the bad men: the outlaws, the vigilantes, and that stuff. There’s also a kind of narcissism: the American mentality, looking into a reflecting mirror of itself and seeing there the myth of the West. The Western story is the pastoral myth in American literature, but there’s nothing corresponding to that that I see in Canadian literature or the Canadian imagination. The whole Canadian approach to the West was an engineering and an administrative approach right from the beginning.
MCPHERSON: I would imagine that nature was terrifying for these people. Would you say that they wrote in order to exorcize, or in order to express this fear?
FRYE: The fear of a very uncomfortable and very cold country is certainly present in nineteenth-century Canadian literature. In the twentieth century, the sense of fear shifts from nature to human society. That is really the reason why the natural world still hangs on in the imagination. It used to be the thing that was sinister, the thing that you were frightened of, but increasingly in the twentieth century it becomes the thing that’s alive which is being strangled by all the clover-leaf highways and railway tracks and things.
MCPHERSON: I was very interested too in your comparison with Anglo-Saxon literature [183–4; C, 385–6], but it seemed to be in the past tense, in the sense that at one time Canadian literature had been similar in pattern to the Anglo-Saxon. Would you say it’s changed?
FRYE: I think that that curious disjunction between a rather hectic, sophisticated civilization and a very primaeval forest is the mood that people like Duncan Campbell Scott do communicate. But it pretty well dried up with that generation, except for the way in which it’s carried on in Pratt: it’s not such a vital thing now.
MCPHERSON: What do you think has replaced it?
FRYE: It’s more the sense of a human mechanism as the enemy and as the expression of a kind of death wish in modern civilization. That doesn’t distinguish it of course from the same kind of thing in other countries, but it has a peculiar intensity here, I think.
MCPHERSON: What new themes, or what old themes transfigured, do you think will continue to dominate in Canadian literature? What changes do you foresee occurring in the Canadian imagination?
FRYE: I am not sure because changes always take place within a certain continuity. What I would look for would be a gradual extension of the continuity along the lines of the changes that are going to take place all over the world. What those will be like, I’m not quite sure. But I think that the rhythm of assimilating cultural developments to the news—so that you have five or six schools of music and painting in as many years, for example—is bound to slow down and relax. I think we’ve gone through the big orgasm of communication now and the arts can go back to their job of building a kind of bridge of continuity between the past and the present and the future.
MCPHERSON: You don’t think that Canadian nationalism as a political force will influence the literature strongly?
FRYE: I don’t quite see how something ending in “ism” is going to influence something as specific and concrete as the making of a poem. Again, it’s something that increases what I’ve been calling the rhetorical and argumentative tendency, which is anti-poetic. The question of imaginative belonging, the sense of identity, is one that moves through a whole series of concentric circles, and the nation is certainly one of those larger circles. But creative people don’t make themselves creative by an act of will or by adhering to a program. The creative person has to be left to take his own way, and if he takes his own way then the qualities and characteristics of what he’s looking for are certainly going to be reflected in what he does.