NP Northrop Frye International Literary Festival

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Otto wrote:
> http://www.northropfrye.com/home.htm

Too bad it doesn't take place in Toronto, six weeks
later. Seems I'll have to settle for the North by
Northeast Festival (www.nxne.com) when the official
part of the trip is over. One might think the name
of the latter festival derives from its being the
mirror festival to South by Southwest. But that's
not all. See, Canadians cannot face North directly
[I guess Northrop refers here to anglos francos and
other "non-native" Canadians, not inuits or indians]:

"The essential element in the national sense of unity
is the east-west feeling [...] The tension between
this political sense of unity and the imaginative
sense of locality is the sense of whatever the word
"Canadian" means [...] The imaginative Canadian stance,
so to speak, facing east and west, has on one side one
of the most powerful nations in the world; on the other
there is the vast hinterland of the north, with its
sense of mystery and fear of the unknown, and the
curious guilt feelings that its uninhabited loneliness
seems to inspire [...] If the Canadian faces south, he
becomes either hypnotized or repelled by the United
States [...] If we face north, much the same result
evidently occurs." (Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden:
Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto 1971. pp.
iii-iv) [Whereas Finns, for example, can easily face
north & south, but when it comes to east, or west...]

Beats me how the above would relate to Frye's genre
mandala: winter-satire, spring-comedy, summer-romance,
fall-tragedy...

But to return to this coming June, there'd be a lot to
choose from in Montreal the same weekend: e.g. Fringe,
and what sounds good, Suoni per il popolo, Sounds for
the people: www.casadelpopolo.com/suoni/spectacles.htm
Any Montrealers/Montreal connoisseurs out there?


Heikki