Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture by Northrop Frye (review)

470 LETTERS IN CANADA 1982 - Le Negre prend les libertes qu'on lui autorise. (P 218) Le pole oppose de ces stereotypes est represente par trois phrases dans Les Demi-civilises de Jean-Charles Harvey dans lesqueUes 1) Les Negres ont cree une musique endiablee. 2) Les Negres ont produit un art (musical) enfantin. 3) Les Negres sont les ennemis des Blancs (en Amerique). 4) Les N~gres cnt reussi it faire accepter leur musique et leur danse au Blanc. 5) Les Negres se sont venges des Blanes dans cette donation. 6) Les Negres gambadent en dansant comme des enfants. 7) Les Negres crient en dansant comme des betes en rut. (P 210) Et voila enfin ces images de sexualite agressive et d'enfantillages insenses qui caracterisent les Noirs dans tant de romans fran~ais et canadiens !Dommage que Joachim n'ait pas fait une analyse de nos manuels scolaires en fran~ais! Un dernier mot sur la preface, par Max Dorsinville, et l'introduction a ce travail. Les deux se completent et nous donnent l'etat present des recherches sur Ie Negre dans la Iitterature occidentale. Le pre£acier signale que Joachim evite la redondance par son choix de corpus Iitteraire et vise, en meme temps, des resultats critiques fondes sur une methode scientifique. Joachim ne de,oit pas son lecteur attentif bien que nous souhaitions qu'un jour bientat il procede a une analyse plus comprehensive de la Iitterature canadienne. (FREDERICK IVOR CASE) Northrop Frye. Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture Edited with a preface by James Polk Anansi. 199· $19·95 Much has happened since 1965 when Frye's insights into the central metaphors of the Canadian imagination became authoritative in his Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada. The quiet revolution that broke the introversion of Quebec, the clarification of the American experience as seen in Vietnam and Watergate, the increaSing power of the media to communicate across the various solitudes that make up Canada these factors in the cultural renaissance of the last several years are examined in this book, making it a proper sequel to The Bush Garden (1971). And much has happened in Frye's intellectual and public life, too, with its active concern throughout the seventies with the social context of cultural production. As a results, Divisions on a Ground marks a new direction in the social criticism of Canadian artistic culture. Its HUMANITIES 47' division into sections on Writing, Teaching, and the Social Order is an artificial convenience, perhaps most handy to the reviewer. For the three concerns are extensions of a single-minded devotion to the life of the imagination and to the vision of human community it articulates. 'I think all my books have been teaching books rather than scholarly books: Frye said in a moving reminiscence on the occasion of receiving the Royal Bank Award in 1978, which is printed as the last piece in this collection. 'I keep reformulating the same central questions ... ' Beneath a wealth of good-natured anecdote, personal asides, and charming illustration, the same central questions are put to us in familiar metaphors of tension and interpenetration. Canada is still defined as a tension between a centrifugal and expanding rhythm of development, largely conservative and romantic in attitude, and a centripetal pull towards localized definition, often in the face of physical or psychological obstacles. These were the conditions for what Frye in 1965 called the garrison mentality; now they promise the sense of regional belonging that is the true source of culture in 'a kind of global Switzerland, surrounded by all the world's great powers: While our social mythology is suffiCiently developed to anticipate a comic tradition in Canadian literature, it is still not cohesive enough to hold at bay sudden gothic intrusions of a nature we have martyred. Frye's evidence for moments of meditative shock and for a fear of still life in Canadian writing are the most significant revaluations of his earlier comments on the Canadian imagination of nature. Altogether, he recounts with satisfaction the flourishing of creative life that is possible when the imagination no longer disappears romantically into the periphery or gazes paranoically at its objectified...