Recorded 17 October 1984
From a transcript of the program “Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism” issued by the CBC in 1985, reference no. 4-ID-100. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. This was a three-part series on Upper Canadian Loyalism written and narrated by CBC broadcaster David Cayley and hosted by Lister Sinclair, broadcast on Ideas on 14, 21, and 28 November 1984. Frye’s contribution was aired on 28 November.
Richard Cartwright (1759–1815) was an early Loyalist who settled in Upper Canada during the American Revolution. The third segment of the program dealt with Loyalism from the 1840s to the present. Immediately before Frye, English professor Dennis Duffy had spoken on the Loyalists’ attitude to the British Empire.
CAYLEY: Dennis Duffy indicates here both the strength and the weakness of Loyalism. Through the movement for an imperial federation of British nations, the Loyalists sought a wider, more universal identity for Canada. But at the same time, they were often forced to overlook Britain’s actual indifference to Canada and its concerns, and this inevitably led to a certain sentimentality in Loyalism.
FRYE: Nobody coming from the planet Mars and studying Canadian history would believe that Canadians retained a loyalty to the British government through a century of total ineptness, where the British had always preferred American interests to Canadian ones and made it clear that they would have more respect for Canada if it were no longer a colony. But the problem from the Canadian point of view is, What else are we going to do? Where else are we going to find our identity except in the continuity of that tradition?
[The nature of the British tie is discussed. Cayley mentions the belief of commentators such as Donald Creighton and George Grant that in abandoning its real tradition Canada left itself open to American absorption. Syd Wise on the other hand is heard celebrating the new Canadian pluralism.]
CAYLEY: Syd Wise’s sense of the diversity, complexity, and resiliency of local cultures is shared by Northrop Frye. Frye argues that although we may have fallen under the political and economic domination of the United States, yet we have still achieved what he refers to as a cultural identity.
FRYE: I tend to think more and more as I get older that the only social identity that’s really worth preserving is a cultural identity. And Canada seems to me to have achieved that, so I don’t join with other people in lamenting the loss of a political identity.
CAYLEY: Frye holds that a cultural identity is possible even in the absence of political and economic sovereignty because culture obeys different laws than politics.
FRYE: I think that culture has a different sort of rhythm from political and economic developments which tend to centralize, and that the centralization process has gone so far in the great world powers that the conception of a nation is really obsolete now. What we have instead among the great powers are enormous consolidations of social units, and cultural tendencies are tendencies in a decentralizing direction. If you talk about American literature, for example, you have to add up Mississippi literature and New England literature, Middle-Western, Californian, and so on. And the theme of a cultural identity immediately transfers you to a postnational setting.
CAYLEY: In such a postnational setting, regions become the operative units, and this, for Frye, accords with the nature of the creative imagination. The imperial tie to Great Britain was undoubtedly necessary for national survival, but it produced a literature that lacked a sense of place. Frye cites as an example the poetry of Charles G.D. Roberts. It is therefore only with the development of regional cultures that we are truly at home in Canada.
FRYE: Regional culture, as I see it, is a culture in which the writer has struck roots in his immediate environment. There’s always something vegetable about the creative imagination, and you can’t transplant James Reaney or Alice Munro to the middle of Brazil and expect them to produce the same kind of work. They’d become different cultural vegetables in that case. With the poets of the Charles G.D. Roberts generation, there was really very little of that sense of region. The Confederation Ode of Roberts is inspired by a map, it’s not inspired by a people. I think we’re in a period of history now where we’re just beginning to realize that, as one book says, “small is beautiful,” that is, that there is a tendency to decentralize and a feeling that the great world powers have grown to the point at which they’re no longer workable any more.1 They’re becoming increasingly dinosauric in their functioning. And with that, the sense of a cultural or regional identity begins to emerge as a genuinely human identity.