Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture

A.T.J. Cairns was Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Any praise, by this date, given to the work of Northrop Frye is as irrelevant as it is inevitable; this volume, even though it covers often contentious and divisive ground, deserves the inevitable praise.

Perceptively culled from sources dating from 1958 to 1980, but mostly from the mid- or late seventies, the papers are divided into three groups: writing, teaching, the social order. In the majority of them, as so often elsewhere, Frye deals with Canadian culture in the broadest and least nationalistic sense, quite unembarrassedly placing it in a world context and discussing it as a natural and integral part of all the universals that this increasingly suspect term contains (e.g., in “Culture as Interpenetration,” an address delivered to UNESCO in 1977).

This collection — as the editor, James Polk, intended — particularly contradicts the view of Frye (which he himself has frequently protested) “as some sort of ivory-tower cosmologist.” The reader is reminded of the author’s sheer readability; how lightly he can carry his immensely sane common sense (perhaps best illustrated here by the 1978 paper “The Rear-View Mirror”). As well, there is the remarkable up-to-dateness of his mind — he is as accurately penetrating on Thomas Pynchon as on Blake — while earlier items serve to emphasize the accuracy and essential timelessness of his ideas (as in the 1968 “Ethics of Change,” which, concerning itself with the student radicals of the 1960s, moves back in time to link them to the Marxist-oriented radicals of his own ‘30s youth, then expands with illusionless accuracy to consider the universals of radicalism itself: “...and of inevitable compromise”).

In fact, the temptation is to quote to the limits of allotted space — nothing any reviewer says could do as much to encourage his readers to peruse this volume: “Of all the superstitions that have bedevilled the human mind, one of the most dismal and fatuous is the notion that education is a preparation for life”; “Society consists largely of adolescents and arrested adolescents”; “A poet would have to be spectacularly bad before he could live on his poetry”; “...the past is functional in our lives only when we neither forget it nor try to return to it.”

Do we deserve him? Perhaps not; but we are immensely lucky to be represented and interpreted to the world by this vitally civilized man.