University of Oklahoma

The Canadian Connection: Frye/Atwood

Author(s): B. A. St. Andrews
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), pp. 47-49
Published by: University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40141117
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COMMENTARIES
The Canadian Connection: Frye/Atwood
By B. A. ST. ANDREWS Second Words (1982)certi-
fies the good news and the
bad: first, Margaret At-
wood rises again as one of the most readable, most
insightful, most generous writers of literaryand cultur-
al criticism around. Second- and for a student of both
literature and criticism this is the bad part- her article
"Northrop Frye Observed" in that volume eschews
any exact literary "influence" by Frye. As she sum-
marilyputs it: "The critic'sjob is not to tell poets what
to do, but to tell readers what they have done. The
writer's job is to write. This was an arrangement that
"
seemed appropriate to me, and still does (401). She
then honors"Frye not with mere "influence"but with
"Influence.
It was Northrop Frye, indubitably, who proclaimed
the merit and grandeur and existence of a vital Cana-
dian literature. He defined the Canadian imagination
for this century. So perhaps this encomium by Atwood
can allow not a high-minded literary criticism but,
rather, a good-natured rumination about how the cri-
tical and the creative have overlapped in the works of
Frye and Atwood?
* epiphany," where "the undisplaced apocalyptic world
The dean of Canadiancritics, Frye unabashedly in-
sists upon the spiritualcomponent in good, contempo-
rary literature. Literature itself, he maintains in the
three-volume Literary History of Canada, remains
"essential to the spiritual health of the individual and
the nation."1 In the midst of the ongoing Canadian
Renaissance, which Atwood enthusiastically has pro-
claimed "a literary expansion of Malthusian propor-
tions,"2Frye has declared this same MargaretAtwood
a nationalresource. Her celebrated novel Surfacing he
has pronounced "extraordinary."Frye's praise is valu-
able, and he has praised not only Atwood's creative
work but also her controversial book of literary critic-
ism, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Litera-
ture (1971). This book remains provocative not be-
cause it lacks either perception or utility but because
Survival addresses itself to the common rather than to
the scholarly reader- and it does more. In an in-
terview with Books and Arts (7 March 1980) Atwood
dismissed the other major irritant in Survival: "The
book upset a lot of academics- first of all because it had
no footnotes . . . and second because they felt I was
poaching on their territory."
Despite this "poaching" by Atwood, Frye has
deemed the work "a most perceptive essay on an
aspect of the Canadian sensibility."3 Still, few readers
of Frye's own considerable critical opus could register
surprise at his support; that is, Atwood's creative (and
critical) writings indicate- to positive advantage-
Frye's influence upon the younger generation of Cana-
dian thinkers and writers. That Frye would select
Atwood's Surfacing for keen praise makes good critical
sense: her book employs key components of Frye's
own appraisalsof literature. The tension between the
wild and the domesticated is a moral tension, accord-
ing to Frye. Although the issue in Surfacing might
arguably involve reintegrating rather than the "taking
over" of identity, Frye's definition proves serviceable:
"The heroine is isolated from her small group and finds
something very archaic, both inside and outside her,
taking over her identity" (C, 324).
The wild setting selected for this coming to terms
with identity proves the influence of Frye or, at the
very least, the accuracyof some perceptions regarding
the Canadian national character. In his classic study
Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye notes that a certain
physical setting symbolizes what he calls "the point of
and the cyclical world of nature come into alignment. "4
Such is the island of the Surfacer'schildhood identity
against which (and upon which) she must now define
her adult self. The island is an oracular place for the
Surfacer;here she confrontsmemory, her lost parents,
her transforming self-knowledge. This return to the
natural world is a central motif in the Canadian novel
examined in Edmund Wilson's O Canada (1964)and in
Frye's Bushe Garden (1971). Frye expands the notion
of returning to the land to reassemble identity by
clarifying the "nostalgiafor a world of peace and pro-
tection" as essential to the Canadian assessment of
identity.5
Atwood suggests the complexity of Frye's "peace-
able kingdom" by making the Surfacer fear nature's
power to reveal identity. Caught between "the city and
the bush"- a particularlyresonant phrase for the Frye
follower- the Surfacerwants "to go back where there
is electricity and distraction" (Surfacing, 59). This is
not mere nostalgia, then; the return to nature involves
fear of self-renewal. The bush is burning in the Cana-
dian imagination, and such confrontationsnever prove
childish or easy.
Even the unity which the surfacerachieves with her
48 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
dead parents underscores the importance of Frye's
critical theories on the younger Canadianwriters. The
belief in the spiritual connection between the human
and animal world combines with the connection be-
tween the living and the dead. The Surfacerthinks she
sees her father's "wolf eyes," and she identifies her
mother with the blue jays. This primitive vision re-
mains a salient component of Canadian literature, ac-
cording to Frye. He attributes to the native Canadians
the force of this idea on the Canadian imagination:
"The Indians symbolize a primitive imaginationwhich
is being reborn in us: in other words, the white Cana-
dians, in their imaginations, are no longer immigrants
but are becoming indigenous, recreating the kind of
attitudes appropriate to people who really belong
here/6 The Surfacer's animism is, therefore, con-
sistent with the fusion of ancient and modern Canadian
identity. Atwood, in an interview for the Malahat Re-
view, herself admits the foreceful presence of the In-
dian imagination on the Canadian writer: "North
American Indian legends have people who are animals
in one incarnation, and who can take on the shape of a
bird at will."7
The animism manifest by the Surfacer is distinctly
marked, on the one hand, by the Indian tradition and,
on the other, by Atwood's sustained interest- both in
prose and in poetry- with the idea of protean changes
extant in all fairy-taleand folktale traditions. This sense
of nature in its Manitou power prepares the Surfacer
for her holy identification with nature, her past, and
her responsibilities in life.
This responsibility and reverence for life builds,
again, on the critical apprehensions of Frye and the
Canadian literary tradition. He notes in much of his
criticism, particularly in The Bushe Garden, that
Canadianwriting condemns the subjugation- at least
the wanton subjugation- of the naturalworld, where-
as much American criticism celebrates this tradition in
American letters. Leslie Fiedler, for example, pro-
claims the male test in the wilderness, and that test
usually involves the death of some part of the natural
world. Frye contrasts this attitude with the restraint of
Canadian heroes in the wild.
"Perhaps," Frye ruminates in his "Conclusion"es-
say for the Literary History of Canada, "identity only
is identity when it becomes, not militant, but a way of
defining oneself against something else" (C, 321). In
this deft phrasing, Frye brings together the personal
dimension of Surfacing and the political dimension,
since the novel examines both private and national
identity. The novel, that is, seems as intent upon
discovering and rooting out "second-hand American"
influences as it is upon integrating adult identity in the
heroine. Aware of both traditions, Atwood cites Fied-
ler's Love and Death in the American Novel in an
interview for the Chicago Review: "InAmerican litera-
ture, you killed the animal and achieved something by
doing it; in the Canadianone, you killed the animal and
it was a negative achievement."8
In Surfacing, therefore, the character who repre-
sents this American attitude is the unregenerate
David, who ecstatically records eschatological images
of mutilated heron, disemboweled fish, and general
carnage in his repulsive "home movie" Random Sam-
ples. The finest critical appraisalof this male and the
"American" attitude toward nature appears in At-
wood's Survival: "The war against Nature assumed
that Nature was hostile to begin with; man could fight
and lose, or he could fight and win. If he won, he would
be rewarded: he could conquer and enslave Nature
and in practical terms, exploit her resources."9 Sur-
facing - and most of Atwood'soeuvre- repudiates this
attitude; the more pacific and kindred attitude toward
the natural world (which includes a respect for and
even fear of its powers) suffuses Atwood's world and
workers. Thus, Frye's contention that the "nostalgia
for a world of peace" and the concept of a pastoralmyth
govern the Canadian imagination receives consider-
able evidence in Surfacing.
The final, perhaps quintessential component in
Frye's critical writings which receives a beautiful
translation into Atwood's fiction is that of "vastness."
This term collectively incorporates the sense of Cana-
da's huge land mass, its scant population, and its vast
resources of water and naturaltreasures. Frye's assess-
ment of this concept of "vastness," then, clearly cen-
ters Atwood's Surfacing; the idea of Canada's formi-
dable resources is a conscious, working formula for
contemporary writers. As Atwood remarked in a re-
cent American Poetry Review interview: "Ifyou look at
an aerial map of Canada,you will see that there is more
water per square mile there than in almost any other
"10
country. This vast, naturalresource connects water
with identity in Surfacing; the lake is "blue and cool as
"
redemption (18). Water becomes the symbolic ele-
ment for the peaceful unification of the hero and the
"peaceable kingdom"proclaimed by Frye. In the last,
shamanistic section of the novel, the Surfacer is hu-
man, tree, place; she realizes that "everything is made
of water." And, unlike Eliot's Phlebas, she returns to
tell all. Water is resanctified as the purifying and life-
giving element without losing the recognition of its
being foreign, powerful, and vast.
In composing this novel about contemporary uni-
ty- on a nationaland personal level- and the quest for
unity, Atwood advances the entire Canadian Renais-
sance, of course, but she also reinforces the accuracy,
and the influence, of a perceptive literary critic. Her
novel testifies in its way to Frye's own passionate belief
in "afuture in which modern man has come home from
his exile in the land of unlikeness and has become
something better than the ghost of an ego haunting
himself."11
Upstate Medical School, SUNY
1Desmond Pacey, "The Course of CanadianCriticism," in Liter-
ary History of Canada, Carl F. Klinck, ed. , 2nd ed. , vol. 3, Toronto,
University of Toronto Press, 1976, p. 26.
2 Claude
Bissell, "Politics and Literature in the 1960's,"in Liter-
ary History of Canada, p. 15.

3 "
Northrop Frye, "Conclusion, in Literary History of Canada,
p. 324. Subsequent references use the abbreviation C.
4
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton,
N.J., Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 203.
5 9
Northrop Frye, The Bushe Garden, Toronto, Anansi, 1971,
p. 239.
6
Northrop Frye, "Haunted by Lack of Ghosts," in The Canadian
Imagination, David Staines, ed. , Cambridge, Ma., HarvardUniver-
sity Press, 1977, p. 40.
CurrentShiftings in Aims and Relationships among Indo-
English Poets
By JOHN OLIVER PERRY In reviews of individual
poets, in research proj-
ects, and in other es-
says, I have been developing some very tentative
general hypotheses about what is happening in Indo-
English poetry today, ideas which I have recently been
trying out- fairly successfully- with a few Indian and
U.S. correspondents. In a gesture I hope provocative
of discussion, I would like briefly to offer them here. As
a group, quite understandably in view of basic prob-
lems of status and identity that need examining, the
Indo-English poets seem, and in easily cited essays
assert themselves, to be very isolated, involuted, al-
most inevitably elitist and culturallyalienated. Among
themselves, perhaps missing the cultural supports (ac-
cess to academic creative-writingjobs, artists'retreats,
poetry centers, numerous fellowships, and literary
journals) that American poets enjoy, they are more
than "normally"contentious, often apparentlyenvious
or ignorantof each other's work.x Except for those few
focused on Nissim Ezekiel in Bombay and on P. Lai in
Calcutta, they have usually had little interaction with
each other and have established no group identity.
Further, there is no accepted body of criticism, theory,
or "schools,"and no usable modern Indo-English liter-
arytraditionbrings them together. Of this fact both the
traditionalistDom Moraes (in Girija Prabhakar,Gen-
tleman, 1984) and the postmodern surrealist poet
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, attacking R. Parthasarathy
and A. K. Ramanujan in "The Emperor Has No
"
Clothes (Chandrabhaga, 1982), continue to com-
plain.
Among English-medium-educated, upper-class
(often upper-caste) Indians, whether or not they main-
tain traditionalfamily and social duties and embedded
relationships, considerable personal choice and in-
dividual development are encouraged and permitted.
This special kind of .background for Indo-English
poets, to a relatively high degree for the karma- and
dharma-dominatedIndian cultural context, raises an
arrayof questions or choices of identity that profoundly
affect their creative lives and work. In a forthcoming
PERRY 49
7 Linda
Dandier, "Interview with Margaret Atwood," Malahat
Review, 41 (January1977), p. 14.
8
Mary Ellis Gibson, "A Conversation with Margaret Atwood,"
Chicago Review, 27 (1976), p. 109.
Margaret Atwood, Survival, Toronto, Anansi, 1972, p. 60.
10 Karla
Hammond, "An Interview with Margaret Atwood,"
American Poetry Review, 8:5 (1976), pp. 27-29.
11
Frye, "Haunted by Lack of Ghosts," p. 45.
essay in the Journal of Indian Writing in English (Gul-
barga), I have outlined the areas and types of choices
poets consciously or unconsciously may- sometimes
must- make in creating a personal and poetic identity
in the Indo-English context. Thus, to understand the
poetry with culturally appropriatecriteria, it is crucial
to inquire about such matters as the poet's early train-
ing, sources of guidance and inspiration, reading
habits, family background, initial models for poetic
work, present literary and social relationships, fears
and delights, past experiences and present hopes,
ideal and expected audiences, and actual and per-
ceived publication problems. Distinctions and sub-
groupings among the poets need to be made according
to patterns dictated by the poet's identifications with
regional language and cultural traditions, communal
(religious and caste), family, class, political, philo-
sophical, and literary groupings. Not widely accepted
among Indian critics, this broad personal and cultural
approach depends indeed upon the American post-
Freudian interpersonal identity and individuation the-
ories of Erik Erikson, but as adapted in the work of Dr.
Sudhir Kakar.Though Kakar'sclients and findings are
admittedly limited mostly to upper-caste traditional
Hindu males, most Indo-English poets, if not from this
culturally dominant category, have mainly grown up
surrounded by this authoritative community, from
which also comes most of their English-medium-
educated audience. The fundamental point that the
approachemphasizes is exactly what most Indian poets
choosing to write in English since Independence have
insisted upon: namely, that they, like Anglo-American
and international modernist writers, must cope with
deep feelings of alienation in their necessarily bicultu-
ral relationships and identity formations.
Nevertheless, as many observers have noted, a con-
siderable shift in aims and attitudes and in perceptions
of their situation is now taking place among all the
active participants- poets, critics, audiences- in In-
do-English poetry. The shift is toward greater self-
sufficiency and"is similar to that termed "the process of
indigenization in other cultural and economic activi-