Northrop Frye's Writings on Education ed. by Jean O'Grady, Goldwin French (review)

342 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 opens with a motto: >Orare est laborare. Working at what one can do is a sacrament.= The present review, no more than a string of quotations and allusions, may help to inform the passage cited below. Found among Frye=s typed papers, its date is unknown: STATEMENT FOR THE DAY OF MY DEATH: The twentieth century saw an amazing development of scholarship and criticism in the humanities, carried out by people who were more intelligent, better trained, had more languages, had a better sense of proportion, and were infinitely more accurate scholars and competent men than I. I had genius. No one else known to me had quite that. (LINDA MUNK) Jean O=Grady and Goldwin French, editors. Northrop Frye=s Writings on Education. Volume 7 of Collected Works of Northrop Frye University of Toronto Press. liv, 684. $100.00 The first thing that strikes one about this volume is its size. The fact that Northrop Frye wrote as much as he did about education is a reflection of his popularity as a convocation speaker and of the number of universities eager to offer him an honorary degree. However, it attests also to his commitment to the theme of education as deserving rigorous, sustained reflection and commentary. This volume is not a repository of ephemera but the record of some of a great scholar=s most incisive thinking and memorable expression. There is sketchiness and repetitiveness here, to be sure, but some of the sketches capture the essence of their theme in an accessible and memorable way while the repetitions (even verbatim ones) reveal the author=s fundamental and often unswerving convictions about the role of universities, and the particular role of the humanities, especially literary studies, in the modern world. Reading this stout volume from cover to cover tells one a good deal about the twentieth-century history of Canada and the interactions of academic work with political and social crisis and change. The editors of this volume make available material hitherto unpublished or virtually inacessible, as well as establishing new contexts for pieces that have been reprinted more often. The editors draw on their extensive knowledge of Frye, Victoria College, and the University of Toronto to provide useful and accurate headnotes for sensibly chosen copy-texts, and endnotes clarifying allusions to colleagues, co-participants, fellow honorees, and the rituals and quirks of an academic locale so influential on the national life. The reports Frye wrote as principal of Victoria are not reproduced but listed in an appendix with his early student columns for HUMANITIES 343 Acta Victoriana for the information of anyone interested in seeing how his wit and style developed and then survived an unyielding administrative genre. We gain access to the material included here via an extensive, twopart introduction offering >historical and literary backgrounds,= the first by Goldwin French and the second by Jean O=Grady. They cumulatively offer us a man with equally powerful senses of the credal and the social, someone whose consistencies far outweigh his contradictions in a career well preserved in this magisterial edition. Some might argue that Frye=s day as a literary critic and theorist has passed. However, it seems to some of us that he is as important as ever, not least because his scholarly eminence was connected to a passion for teaching and a commitment to the role of public intellectual. Which humanist can claim such eminence today in Canada? Which humanist can equal that commitment? And what forces in government, society, and the contemporary university most actively discourage such work? I am writing this review from Saskatchewan, which Frye termed >a kind of experimental station in Canadian life=; and I am writing it from a position farther to the political left than Frye ever occupied. And yet I find nothing tiresomely Ontario-centric about this collection, nor much that could be considered political smugness or unexamined moderation. There is far too much >concern= here, and reflection on what >concern= might mean, to leave the impression of complacency or of his resting on his ever more bountiful laurels. A Protestant work ethic is from the outset firmly connected to democracy=s defining freedoms...