What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book that defends the essential,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

I hope you and your family had a good Christmas and that you are returning to work with your mind and heart refreshed. I suspect 2008 will be a busy year for us. I have a book to finish and you have a government to run. We both hope to get good reviews for our respective labours.

I was in Moncton in late November last year, doing a series of special events organized by the Northrop Frye Literary Festival, which runs every year in April. Someone asked me, in a lovely Acadian accent, “As-tu lu The Educated Imagination, de Northrop Frye?”

I hadn’t read Frye’s The Educated Imagination. Or anything else by him. Northrop Frye—and I’m educating myself as I tell you what follows, catching up—lived between 1912 and 1991, spending his early formative years in Moncton (hence the name of the festival) and most of his adult years at the University of Toronto, where he was a great light. Frye was a world-class literary critic who wrote such books as Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, Anatomy of Criticism and The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. He led a thrilling life of the mind, most of it fed by literature, and he gave much to his students and readers. He was a great thinker, teacher, Canadian.

I should explain why I have never until now read Frye. It wasn’t intellectual sloth. It was rather a conscious decision. Frye, as I’ve just said, was a literary critic. He looked at literature, he looked through literature, seeing in it recurring symbols, underlying structures, overarching metaphors. All of which is no doubt fascinating—but not to the young man I was when I started writing. Self-knowledge is often a good thing—it teaches you your limits—but too much of it too soon can ruin the incipient artist in you if it gives you the sense that you have no original core, that you are just dough in a pre-established mold. Then, as now, I just wanted to write, to create, to invent. I wasn’t interested in being told what I was doing, whom I was repeating, what convention I was adhering to. Why become self-conscious if it meant I wouldn’t dare to write? So I avoided literary criticism, those words and books that might snuff out my wavering creative flame. Trope was tripe to me.

However, right after being asked the question by the person with the lovely Acadian accent, I was presented by her with the book in question, Northrop Frye’s The Educated Imagination. She thought of it because of the small book club you and I have going. She wondered if you might not enjoy it (you may be interested to know that I get suggestions of books to send you all the time). I felt it would be rude not to read so considerate a gift. And surely, with three books completed and a fourth one nearly done, I could withstand a literary critic suddenly turning a mirror on me.

Well, I’m happy to report that I read the book and I’m still standing. The Educated Imagination was interesting to me, and I think it might be even more interesting to you. Frye, in this short, oral book—he delivered it in six parts as the 1962 Massey Lectures—speaks about the role of literature in education and society, about whether the first is needed by the other two.

It certainly is needed, Frye argues persuasively. It all comes down to language and the imagination. Frye explains that no matter what use we are making of language, whether it’s for practical self-expression, to convey information or self-consciously to be creative, we must use our imagination. As he puts it: “Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination. But we use our imagination all the time: it comes into all our conversation and practical life: it even produces dreams when we’re asleep. Consequently we have only the choice between a badly trained imagination and a well trained one, whether we ever read a poem or not.” Imagination is not just for writers. It’s for everyone. At another point, Frye says, “The fundamental job of the imagination in ordinary life…is to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.” This statement has obvious political implications. You see why I said this book might be of interest to you.

One of the classic dualities of existence is that of the head and the heart, of thinking and feeling, of reason and emotion. It’s not untrue, but I do wonder how useful this division is. One might suppose that a mathematician hard at work is being entirely reasonable while someone crying at the scene of a terrible accident is being entirely emotional, but otherwise can we so clearly delineate between the two? Frye believed that these are rather different ways of using one’s imagination, that the imagination underpins them both. And the better, the more fertile our imagination, the better we can be at being both reasonable and emotional. As broad and deep as our dreams are, so can our realities become. And there’s no better way to train that vital part of us than through literature.

The imagination, then, is where is all starts, both for you and for me.

Happy New Year.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback book

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