Northrop Frye on space and shape pollution

    The Saunterer lives in Cache Valley, Utah. Once lovely, Cache Valley is every day more spoiled by space and shape pollution, caused by runaway breeding, largely decreed by the people’s religion. The tragic figures of excess: in 2000, there were 91,897 people; in 2010, 117,758 are projected; in 2030, 181,921; in 2060, 331,594 - figures from the Utah Governor’s Office of Budget and Planning, as reported in The Herald Journal, 5 December, 2009.
    How important is the problem of space and shape pollution? Listen to Northrop Frye:

I have been living in Toronto for forty years, have seen it change from a quite habitable town to the usual wilderness of freeways and highrise apartment buildings, and consequently I have experienced something of what you call the realities of sentiment and nostalgia. I am quite convinced that space and shape pollution is quite as important a social problem as noise and dirt.

    (Extract of a letter from Northrop Frye to A. E. Parr, 9 March 1970, from Northrop Frye: Selected letters, 1934 - 1991. McFarland Publishers, 2009.)   
    For images of and relating to Cache Valley, Utah, click here. For a brief biography of Northrop Frye, click here. For images of and relating to Northrop Frye, click here.

Comments

[Michael Happy]

Hi, just found your blog. Love it. We run a site dedicated to Northrop Frye -- The Educated Imagination -- and will be linking to this post.

You can find us at www.theeducatedimagination.com

[Robert Denham]

Here's Frye on the city from The Modern Century (1967):

The traditional city is centripetal, focused on market squares, a pattern still visible in some Ontario towns. Its primary idea is that of community, and it is this idea that has made so many visions of human fulfilment, from Plato and the Bible onward, take the form of a city. To the modern imagination the city becomes increasingly something hideous and nightmarish, the fourmillante cité of Baudelaire, the “unreal city” of Eliot’s Waste Land, the ville tentaculaire of Verhaeren. No longer a community, it seems more like a community turned inside out, with its expressways taking its thousands of self enclosed nomadic units in a headlong flight into greater solitude, ants in the body of a dying dragon, breathing its polluted air and passing its polluted water. The map still shows us self contained cities like Hamilton and Toronto, but experience presents us with an urban sprawl which ignores national boundaries and buries a vast area of beautiful and fertile land in a tomb of concrete. I have had occasion to read Dickens a good deal lately, and Dickens was, I suppose, the first metropolitan novelist in English literature, the first to see the life of his time as essentially a gigantic pulsation toward and away from the great industrial centres, specifically London. And one notices in his later novels an increasing sense of the metropolis as a kind of cancer, as something that not only destroys the countryside, but the city itself as it had developed up to that time.