From Fathers to Sun: Northrop Frye and the History of English-Canadian Poetry

Abstract

When John Ayre's biography of Northrop Frye was published in 1989, its dustjacket suggested that Frye ought to be considered foremost figure in Canadian intellectual history. He authored, it proclaimed, of most influential books of literary criticism of all time--Fearful Symmetry (1947), Anatomy of Criticism (1957), and The Great Code (1982). Their influence, it implied, has also made Frye into something more than a literary critic. He has become the fourth most cited twentieth-century thinker, behind only Freud, Lenin, and Roland Barthes. In short, dustjacket asserted that because no critic in any time has produced so impressive a body of Frye is now familiar to generations of writers, intellectuals, and students everywhere. For students of Canada, however, significance of Frye's achievement is both more elusive and more consequential is not just a function of his having achieved international renown so heralded on his biography's dustjacket. Because Frye paid considerable attention to Canadian literature and culture throughout his career, he involved himself in a tradition of specifically national discourse. He thus established lines of relation from himself to influential predecessors and successors. His lasting national significance will ultimately be determined by these complex lines of relation, rather than proven by citation statistics. Still, nature of Frye's elusive Canadian significance is also suggested on Ayre's dustjacket, which metaphorically casts Frye in a central and illuminating role. The metaphor appears in a 1978 quotation from Marshall McLuhan: Norrie is not struggling for his place in He is sun. Though context in which McLuhan was then centering Frye remains unclear, Frye's history of English-Canadian poetry now places him, like sun, at center of a Canadian critical solar system.(1) He attained this position by recreating, and thereby displacing, history that A. J. M. Smith and John Sutherland fashioned together.(2) Contextual Background During 1940s--and largely through agency of such publications as Canadian Forum and University of Toronto Quarterly--critical attention turned in a higher degree to definition of a Canadian tradition in writing. Smith and Sutherland edited anthologies of Canadian poetry, while E. K. Brown published his early critical overview On Canadian Poetry (1943) and, almost immediately, revised it in response to Smith's reaction to what he had written, bringing out a new version in 1944. Reviewing anthologies that Smith and Sutherland edited during decade, Frye initially validated many aspects of their work, in which they depict a unified poetry of present reconciling and surpassing its divided past. But when he turned his attention to English-Canadian poetry of 1950s, Frye saw those same past divisions being more preserved than resolved in his two predecessors' anthologies and criticism. He then adopted a position similar to that which Smith and Sutherland occupied before him, one from which English-Canadian poetry appears to be prematurely split. Like them, he too sought to exorcise division. And three decades later, Frye also supplied terms that implicitly characterize his relation to Smith and Sutherland. In an essay entitled Literary History (1981), he wrote: It seems to me that central conception involved in historical sequence of literary works is conception of recreation. A reader recreates everything he reads more or less in his own image.... In all recreation there is a son/father relationship which has a double aspect: an Oedipus relation where son kills and a Christian relation where son identifies with father (225). These terms suggest that Frye, too, re-created in his own image history that Smith and Sutherland constructed for English-Canadian poetry. In son/father aspect of his recreation, Oedipal Frye metaphorically killed his fathers by asserting that a mature literary tradition was established neither by poets that Smith promoted, nor by those that Sutherland upheld, but rather by their successors in 1950s. …