Interviews With Northrop Frye 9781442688377

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Interviews With Northrop Frye
 9781442688377

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Credits
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. What Has Become of Conversation?
2. On Human Values
3. University
4. Literary Trends of the Twentieth Century
5. The Voice and the Crowd
6. Breakthrough
7. Style and Image in the Twentieth Century
8. Dix Ans avant la Néo-critique
9. B.K. Sandwell
10. Engagement and Detachment
11. L’Anti-McLuhan
12. Student Protest Movement
13. CRTC Guru
14. The Only Genuine Revolution
15. The Limits of Dialogue
16. “There Is Really No Such Thing As Methodology”
17. Into the Wilderness
18. The Magic of Words
19. Two Heretics: Milton and Melville
20. Notes on a Maple Leaf
21. The Canadian Imagination
22. Poets of Canada: 1920 to the Present
23. On Evil
24. Blake’s Cosmos
25. Science Policy and the Quality of Life
26. Modern Education
27. Symmetry in the Arts: Blake
28. Harold Innis: Portrait of a Scholar
29. Easter
30. Impressions
31. CRTC Hearings
32. Canadian Voices
33. Sacred and Secular Scriptures
34. Education, Religion, Old Age
35. The Future Tense
36. “A Literate Person Is First and Foremost an Articulate Person”
37. The Education of Mike McManus
38. An Eminent Victorian
39. Between Paradise and Apocalypse
40. Frye’s Literary Theory in the Classroom: A Panel Discussion
41. Getting the Order Right
42. Tradition and Change in the College
43. The New American Dreams over the Great Lakes
44. Four Questions for Northrop Frye
45. “I Tried to Shatter the Shell of Historicism”
46. The Wisdom of the Reader
47. Identity and Myth
48. Literature in Education
49. Northrop Frye: Signifying Everything
50. The Critical Path
51. Regionalism in Canada
52. Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity
53. From Nationalism to Regionalism: The Maturing of Canadian Culture
54. Commemorating the Massey Lectures
55. Marshall McLuhan
56. Storytelling
57. A Fearful Symmetry
58. Medium and Message
59. Scientist and Artist
60. The Art of Bunraku
61. On The Great Code (I)
62. Chatelaine’s Celebrity I.D.
63. On The Great Code (II)
64. Towards an Oral History of the University of Toronto
65. Back to the Garden
66. On The Great Code (III)
67. Maintaining Freedom in Paradise
68. On The Great Code (IV)
69. Making the Revolutionary Act New
70. Visualization in Reading
71. Hard Times in the Ivory Tower
72. Frye at the Forum
73. The Scholar in Society
74. Inventing a Music: MacMillan and Walter in the Past and Present
75. Criticism after Anatomy
76. Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism
77. Les Lecteurs doivent manger le livre
78. The Darkening Mirror: Reflections on the Bomb and Language
79. Music in My Life
80. Books as Counter-Culture
81. The Primary Necessities of Existence
82. Criticism in Society
83. On the Media
84. The Great Test of Maturity
85. Archetype and History
86. Moncton, Mentors, and Memories
87. William Blake: Prophet of the New Age
88. Morningside Interview on Shakespeare
89. Love of Learning
90. Frye, Literary Critic
91. On The Great Code (V)
92. On The Great Code (VI)
93. On Education
94. Schools of Criticism (I)
95. William Morris
96. What Is the Purpose of Art?
97. Canadian Writers in Italy
98. The Great Teacher
99. Canadian and American Values
100. Nature and Civilization
101. Second Marriage
102. Northrop Frye in Conversation
103. “Condominium Mentality” in CanLit
104. Modified Methodism
105. Family Stories
106. Imprint Interview
107. Stevens and the Value of Literature
108. Time Fulfilled
109. Schools of Criticism (II)
110. Cultural Identity in Canada
111. The Final Interview
Appendix A. Other Films Featuring Northrop Frye
Appendix B. Interviews Which Led To Discursive Articles
Appendix C. Lost, Unavailable, or Untraced Interviews and Discussions
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Collected Works of Northrop Frye VO LUM E 2 4

Interviews with Northrop Frye

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee General Editor Alvin A. Lee Associate Editor Jean O’Grady Editors Joseph Adamson Robert D. Denham Michael Dolzani A.C. Hamilton David Staines Advisers Robert Brandeis Paul Gooch Eva Kushner Jane Millgate Ron Schoeffel Clara Thomas Jane Widdicombe

Interviews with Northrop Frye VOLUME 24

Edited by Jean O’Grady

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Jean O’Grady (preface, introduction, annotation) 2008 Printed in Canada isbn 978-0-8020-9742-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991. Interviews with Northrop Frye / edited by Jean O’Grady. (Collected works of Northrop Frye v.24) Includes index. isbn 978-0-8020-9742-2 1. Frye, Northrop, 1912–1991 – Interviews. 2. Literature – History and criticism – Theory, etc. 3. Critics – Canada – Interviews. I. O’Grady, Jean, 1943–. II. Title. III. Series pn75 f7 a5 2007

801c.95092

c2007-903007-6

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Preface xv Credits xxi Abbreviations xxv Introduction xxix

1 What Has Become of Conversation? 3 2 On Human Values 13 3 University 23 4 Literary Trends of the Twentieth Century 28 5 The Voice and the Crowd 32 6 Breakthrough 48

vi

Contents 7 Style and Image in the Twentieth Century 51 8 Dix Ans avant la Neo-critique 58 9 B.K. Sandwell 63 10 Engagement and Detachment 64 11 L’Anti-McLuhan 74 12 Student Protest Movement 79 13 CRTC Guru 88 14 The Only Genuine Revolution 145 15 The Limits of Dialogue 174 16 “There Is Really No Such Thing As Methodology” 190 17 Into the Wilderness 198 18 The Magic of Words 210 19 Two Heretics: Milton and Melville 219 20 Notes on a Maple Leaf 227 21 The Canadian Imagination 230

Contents

vii 22 Poets of Canada: 1920 to the Present 239 23 On Evil 245 24 Blake’s Cosmos 254 25 Science Policy and the Quality of Life 264 26 Modern Education 275 27 Symmetry in the Arts: Blake 278 28 Harold Innis: Portrait of a Scholar 283 29 Easter 284 30 Impressions 291 31 CRTC Hearings 303 32 Canadian Voices 306 33 Sacred and Secular Scriptures 310 34 Education, Religion, Old Age 317 35 The Future Tense 328

36 “A Literate Person Is First and Foremost an Articulate Person” 330

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Contents 37 The Education of Mike McManus 344 38 An Eminent Victorian 355 39 Between Paradise and Apocalypse 367 40 Frye’s Literary Theory in the Classroom: A Panel Discussion 400 41 Getting the Order Right 413 42 Tradition and Change in the College 430 43 The New American Dreams over the Great Lakes 442 44 Four Questions for Northrop Frye 445 45 “I Tried to Shatter the Shell of Historicism” 449 46 The Wisdom of the Reader 452 47 Identity and Myth 455 48 Literature in Education 461 49 Northrop Frye: Signifying Everything 469 50 The Critical Path 477 51 Regionalism in Canada 483

Contents

ix 52 Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity 487

53 From Nationalism to Regionalism: The Maturing of Canadian Culture 496 54 Commemorating the Massey Lectures 506 55 Marshall McLuhan 510 56 Storytelling 512 57 A Fearful Symmetry 518 58 Medium and Message 526 59 Scientist and Artist 528 60 The Art of Bunraku 536 61 On The Great Code (I) 546 62 Chatelaine’s Celebrity I.D. 565 63 On The Great Code (II) 568 64 Towards an Oral History of the University of Toronto 575 65 Back to the Garden 642

x

Contents 66 On The Great Code (III) 656 67 Maintaining Freedom in Paradise 670 68 On The Great Code (IV) 681 69 Making the Revolutionary Act New 685 70 Visualization in Reading 693 71 Hard Times in the Ivory Tower 700 72 Frye at the Forum 704 73 The Scholar in Society 709 74 Inventing a Music: MacMillan and Walter in the Past and Present 718 75 Criticism after Anatomy 720 76 Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism 723 77 Les Lecteurs doivent manger le livre 726 78 The Darkening Mirror: Reflections on the Bomb and Language 729 79 Music in My Life 733 80 Books as Counter-Culture 743

Contents

xi 81 The Primary Necessities of Existence 744 82 Criticism in Society 752 83 On the Media 766 84 The Great Test of Maturity 770 85 Archetype and History 779 86 Moncton, Mentors, and Memories 790 87 William Blake: Prophet of the New Age 809 88 Morningside Interview on Shakespeare 813 89 Love of Learning 821 90 Frye, Literary Critic 826 91 On The Great Code (V) 830 92 On The Great Code (VI) 832 93 On Education 836 94 Schools of Criticism (I) 840 95 William Morris 849

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Contents 96 What Is the Purpose of Art? 858 97 Canadian Writers in Italy 860 98 The Great Teacher 862 99 Canadian and American Values 887 100 Nature and Civilization 904 101 Second Marriage 910 102 Northrop Frye in Conversation 916 103 “Condominium Mentality” in CanLit 1036 104 Modified Methodism 1040 105 Family Stories 1043 106 Imprint Interview 1055 107 Stevens and the Value of Literature 1067 108 Time Fulfilled 1074 109 Schools of Criticism (II) 1079 110 Cultural Identity in Canada 1089

Contents

xiii 111 The Final Interview 1097

Appendix A: Other Films Featuring Northrop Frye 1103 Appendix B: Interviews Written in Discursive Form 1105 Appendix C: Lost, Unavailable, or Untraced Interviews and Discussions 1109 Notes 1113 Index 1175

Frye photographed by Deborah Shackleton after an interview with her, April 1980 (see no. 52).

Preface

This collection aims to assemble all those interviews or discussions with Northrop Frye that were published in question-and-answer or dialogue form, or broadcast on radio or television as interviews. It cannot claim to be equally inclusive regarding unpublished interviews, but efforts have been made to discover, and include here, those additional interviews Frye granted for which the interviewer kept the tape or transcript and which have some intrinsic interest. Also included are a few brief oral pronouncements that are not really interviews (e.g., nos. 9, 28): these obviously derive from Frye’s response to a question, but only the answer remains. In fact it has been difficult to define exactly an interview (so that the volume might more pedantically be titled Northrop Frye’s Interviews, Dialogues, and Other Oral Pronouncements); but these semi-interviews do seem to belong in this, the only volume of the Collected Works to capture Frye’s off-the-cuff, spontaneous utterances. Not included, however, are films of Frye in which he appears as a “talking head” without audible questions; these are listed in Appendix A. Appendix B lists other interviews given by Frye that were written up and published in discursive form, usually incorporating some direct quotations; these include the interviews with John Ayre that were used for background and factual information for his biography. Finally, Appendix C assembles chronologically the other interviews known to have taken place but no longer available. Several sources have been used to search for interviews with Frye. The largest number have been recorded in Robert D. Denham’s Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography. A collection of “Correspondence relating to media projects” in The Northrop Frye Fonds, 1991, box 41, files 1 and 2 at Victoria University Library indicated several more usable inter-

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views. For each year from 1970 on, Frye’s secretary Jane Widdicombe has provided a list of his major engagements which includes appointments for interviews, while the daybooks for 1970–90 on which these lists are based, available in the Frye Fonds, have other jottings indicating interviews. There are incidental references to interviews in the autobiographical volumes of the Collected Works, in Ayre’s biography, and in miscellaneous print sources. All clues have been followed up by library research, letter and personal appeal, internet searches, and a combing of the CBC Archives undertaken by Mary Ellen Kappler. In spite of these efforts, the present collection could not be described as exhibiting the sum of Frye’s efforts to contribute to intellectual fare in the media. For instance, his diaries as a young professor in the 1950s mention his taking part in a number of radio programs which have not survived on tape: these include a discussion of the H-bomb on the student radio station with philosopher Marcus Long and theoretical physicist Melwyn Preston (D, 266, 269); a planned CBC discussion of religion in 1950 which may not have taken place (D, 290, 301); and several contributions to the CBC’s “Citizens Forum.” In 1982 (a good year from this point of view), there are clues to interviews with sixteen people: seven are included here, four resulted in known articles, and only five have not been tracked down. But in 1985, distressingly, nine of the thirteen interviews listed seem to have left no trace, including a tantalizing “Steve Minuk interview for MENSA” (25 March). Some missing interviews of this type were potential contributions to larger projects that had to be abandoned. Fiona McHugh, for instance, interviewed Frye on “world mythology” for a survey that did not eventually work out. In a scenario that will be all too familiar to researchers, she replied to a query in 2004 about her interview that she had kept the tape since 1981, but three weeks ago had finally thrown it out. People working on a topic for broadcast sometimes taped Frye’s views but did not use them in the final program, as happened with Kay Armatage’s video Storytelling (interview of 27 June 1983) or Dennis Duffy’s program on historical fiction (9 October 1986); again the original tapes are no longer available. In the late 1970s the Thomas More Institute in Montreal and its offshoot Discovery Theatre in Toronto offered a course on “Story” based on The Secular Scripture and an interview concerning it conducted with Frye in Montreal; but the tape of this, though still in existence, apparently crumbles at a touch. Given the length of the present collection and the inevitable repeti-

Preface

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tions, some readers may be grateful that these research efforts were not more successful. However, in spite of overlaps it was thought useful to publish each interview in full for researchers to make what use of them they wish. The introduction, p. xxxvii, makes some suggestions as to the most rewarding for the general reader interested in Frye’s ideas. The interviews have been arranged in chronological order according to the date on which Frye gave them, if this is available; if not, by date of their publication or broadcast. Thus where possible we follow the evolving sequence of ideas in Frye’s life, rather than the somewhat arbitrary dates of appearance. The dates could frequently be ascertained by the Widdicombe list already mentioned, referred to in the headnotes as “Jane Widdicombe’s list,” supplemented by Frye’s daybooks. Sometimes it has been possible to deduce the date of the interview from correspondence with the interviewer in files in the Frye Fonds. Finally, there is sometimes internal evidence, either in the interview itself or in the discursive introduction to it, that dates the encounter or provides historical clues. Many of the pieces’ titles have been retained from the original published version or broadcast program. But so many were headed with some variation of “An Interview with Northrop Frye” that in these cases other, more descriptive titles have been supplied. When Robert Denham devised titles for the interviews published in his collection A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-Two Interviews with Northrop Frye, these have been used in order not to multiply sources of confusion. Oral discourses demand editorial principles somewhat different from those used in the rest of Frye’s Collected Works. No one would wish to read an exact reproduction of conversation, with all its hesitations, false starts, grammatical slips, and incomplete sentences. These have, in the most conservative manner, been edited out, as have some of Frye’s frequent uses of the phrase “Well, I think that” as he begins an answer, though perhaps he appears slightly more dogmatic without this modest filler. As he is such an articulate speaker, known for his magic ability to pull whole paragraphs from the air, the only other frequent adjustment was to remove the ruminative “and” by which he often moved from one sentence to the next. Even when the source is a published document—almost inevitably deriving from someone else’s transcription of a tape, soundtrack, or written notes—some silent corrections of this sort have been introduced. I have listened to the original tape or watched the video whenever these

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Preface

were available, and this has helped in the correction of apparent mishearings, as has comparison with what Frye normally said or thought. Among the most amusing mishearings I might mention Vic Report’s having Frye refer to “what was going on fifty years ago in Kamucketrak in Tennessee.” Only after some time spent trying to trace down this city and its shenanigans did I realize that what Frye must have said was “in the monkey trial in Tennessee.” In a recent telephone conversation, interviewer Bruce Reynolds spontaneously recalled listening to the tape many times to catch the name of that city; Frye’s rapid, low-pitched tone, at times scarcely more than a mumble, could be a challenge to his transcribers. Nevertheless, it is hard to excuse some of the College English Association’s wild approximations, including calling Frye’s circle of mythoi the “circle of Ithaly,” Jung’s mandala his “man–thou arc,” and integral calculus “integral competence.” Our general editor Alvin Lee, at that time vice-president, academic of McMaster University, is charmingly metamorphosed into “vice-president and master at Hamilton.” A phrase in Cayley’s Northrop Frye in Conversation, “according to one notable critic, named Ayme” (104), generated a good deal of fruitless research until a rehearing of the tape revealed that what Frye had really said, tongue in cheek, was “one notable critic, namely me.” Undoubtedly, more of these mishearings remain, undetected by me. In the case of discussions involving several people, it has been necessary in the interests of space to compress or eliminate some of the nonFrye matter. This has been replaced by editorial summaries, in square brackets and italics, where necessary to maintain continuity. Otherwise, omissions are signalled by three asterisks, to distinguish them from the three spaced dots that are used to indicate a voice trailing off or an incomplete sentence in the original. Words which have been added editorially to clarify someone’s statement, but which are conjectural, are placed in square brackets. Short paragraphs in newspaper-type columns have been run together. Frequent introductory paragraphs in the originals, explaining who Frye is, have been omitted. In other respects the general guidelines of the Collected Works have been followed. Printed sources have been regularized to use Canadian spellings in “-our” and to include two commas in sequences of three. Titles of poems and books are italicized. Interviews published in French have been left in French in accord with the bilingual policy of the Collected Works, while those in other languages have been translated or, if this has survived, replaced by the English original. Headnotes to each

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item specify the source of the text, the means for dating if this is not the date of publication, reprintings in English and French, and whatever contextual information is judged necessary. Generally this includes some indication of the nature of the publication and the identity of the interviewer, when this could be ascertained. Other background information is provided in the notes. Notes that were present in the original printed source are so identified. References to page numbers in Anatomy of Criticism, Fearful Symmetry, and The Great Code, often given in square brackets in the text, are followed after a slash by the page number in the Collected Works edition (e.g., GC, xv/9). When a person or book title is mentioned in passing, a note is not provided, but the person’s full name and life dates, and the book’s date of publication, are given in the index (which I compiled myself). Acknowledgments I am indebted to a number of individuals who provided or searched for lost interviews, including Kay Armatage, Dominique Aubry of the NFB, Debra Bennett of TVO, Barbara Brown of the CBC, Dennis Duffy, Ellen Esrock, Nicholas Graham, Marty Gross, Fiona McHugh, Gilbert Reid, Robert Sandler, Ann Silversides, Glenna Davis Sloan, Alison Sutherland of Berkeley Studios, United Church of Canada, Jeff Walden of the BBC Archives, Garron Wells of the University of Toronto Archives, Ken Wilson in the Archives of the United Church and Victoria University, and Sara Wolch. Most of the printed items were scanned or typed by Elisabeth Oliver. Ten of the taped items had already been transcribed by Robert Denham for A World in a Grain of Sand. Subsequent interviews were transcribed from tape or videocassette by Leslie Barnes, Margaret Burgess, Mary Ellen Kappler, Monika Lee, Elizabeth O’Grady, and Carrie O’Grady, and translated by Nella Cotrupi, Igor Djordjevic, and János Kenyeres, for all of whose careful work I am most grateful. (Those not attributed I transcribed myself.) Janet Ritch cast an expert eye over the French interviews. I should also like to thank Margaret Burgess for her proof-reading, exemplary copy-editing, and many helpful suggestions for notes. I received most welcome help with the notes from my research assistants, particularly Mary Ellen Kappler and Christopher Jennings, with later contributions by Scott Schofield, Leslie Barnes, and Erin Reynolds. Other information was kindly provided by John Ayre, Kathleen Cabral,

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Derek Chan, John Robert Colombo, William Conklin, Robert D. Denham, Tibor Fabiny, Branko Gorjup, John Webster Grant, Robin Jackson, Alexandra Johnston, János Kenyeres, Rosemary Knox, Martin Levin, Ann Lewis, Wallace McLeod, Margaret Prang, Ian Singer, Alex Thomson, Kenneth Thompson, Lynn Welsh, Jane Widdicombe, and Peter Yan. Robert Denham has been generous in sharing both his unrivalled knowledge of Frye and his powerful computer. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my colleagues at the Northrop Frye Centre: to Alvin Lee, the general editor, who entrusted this volume to me; and to Margaret Burgess and Ward McBurney, and latterly Erin Reynolds, daily companions whose presence and encouragement have often brightened the day.

Credits

We wish to acknowledge the following sources for permission to reprint or transcribe interviews previously published, broadcast, or otherwise aired by them, or in their possession. We have not been able to determine or to contact the copyright holders of all the works included in this volume, and we welcome notice from any who have been inadvertently omitted from these acknowledgments. The dates given are those of publication or broadcast, where applicable.

The BBC Written Archives Centre for “Marshall McLuhan” (1981). The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for “Between Paradise and Apocalypse,” Morningside (1978); “Beyond the Ivory Tower,” Ideas (1972); “B.K. Sandwell,” Tuesday Night (1967); “Blake’s Cosmos,” On Man and Cosmos (1971); “The Canadian Imagination,” Ideas (1975); “Canadian Writers in Italy” (1988); “Commemorating the Massey Lectures” (1981); “CRTC Hearings” (1974 and 1975); “The Darkening Mirror: Reflections on the Bomb and Language” (1985); “Easter,” Concern (1973); “On Evil” (1971); “The Future Tense” (1977); “Getting the Order Right,” Anthology (1978), “The Great Test of Maturity,” Media File (1986); “Hard Times in the Ivory Tower,” Ideas (1983); “Harold Innis” (1972); “On Human Values” (1952); “Impressions” (1973); “Inventing a Music: Macmillan and Walter in the Past and Present,” Ideas (1983); “The Limits of Dialogue,” Ideas (1969); “Morningside Interview on Shakespeare” (1987); “On Education” (1988); “On The Great Code” (I) (1982); “Notes on a Maple Leaf” (1971); “Poets of Canada: 1920 to the Present,” Anthology (1971); “Symmetry in the Arts: Blake,” Ideas (1975); “Richard Cartwright and the

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Credits

Roots of Canadian Conservatism,” Ideas (1984); “Storytelling,” Ideas (1981); “Style and Image in the Twentieth Century” (1967); “Two Heretics: Milton and Melville,” On Man and Cosmos (1971); “The Voice and the Crowd,” Media 1 (1966); “What Has Become of Conversation?” The Varsity Story (1948); “William Blake: Prophet of the New Age” (1987). The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for “CRTC Guru” (1968–69). David Cayley for Northrop Frye in Conversation (1992). The College English Association Critic for “Frye’s Literary Theory in the Classroom: A Panel Discussion” (1980). The CTV TV Network for “Second Marriage” (1989). Le Devoir for “Dix Ans avant la Néo-critique” (1967) and “L’Anti-McLuhan” (1968). Doubleday Inc. for “Canadian and American Values,” from Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas, by Bill Moyers, © 1989 by Public Affairs Television, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Ellen Esrock for “Visualization in Reading.” The Estate of Northrop Frye/Victoria University for “The Critical Path” (1979); “An Eminent Victorian” (1978); “A Fearful Symmetry” (1981); “Frye at the Forum” (1991); “On the Media” (1986); “Scientist and Artist” (1981); “Tradition and Change in the College” (1978–79); “Into the Wilderness” (1970). The Fiddlehead and Studies in Canadian Literature for “Moncton, Mentors, and Memories” (1986). Tibor Fabiny for “Time Fulfilled” (1995). Branko Gorjup for “Regionalism in Canada” (1980). Marty Gross for “The Art of Bunraku (1980).”

Credits

xxiii

Francesco Guardiani for “Schools of Criticism” (I) (1988). The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies for “William Morris” (2001). David Lawton for “Archetype and History” (1986). Libération for “Les Lecteurs doivent manger le livre” (1984). Vijay Mishra, Alan Roughley, and Imre Salusinszky for “Making the Revolutionary Act New” (1984). Carl Mollins for “Cultural Identity in Canada” (1991). The National Council of Teachers of English for “Literature in Education” (1980). The National Film Board for University (1961) and The Scholar in Society (1984). The Newspaper (University of Toronto) for “Maintaining Freedom in Paradise” (1982). Hugh Oliver for “There Is Really No Such Thing as Methodology” (1970) and “A Literate Person is First and Foremost an Articulate Person” (1977). Radio Canada International for “Back to the Garden” (1983). Harry Rasky for The Great Teacher (1988). Gilbert Reid for “Identity and Myth” (1980) and “On The Great Code” (IV). Imre Salusinszky and Taylor & Francis for “Criticism in Society” (1987). Deborah Shackleton for “Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity” (1980) and Frontispiece photograph of Frye. Glenna Sloan for “The Magic of Words” (1970).

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Credits

The Student Administrative Council of the University of Toronto for “Student Protest Movement” (1969). Torstar Syndication Services for “Love of Learning” (1987). TV Ontario for “The Education of Mike McManus” (1977) and “Imprint Interview” (1991). Unitarian Universalist World for “Modified Methodism” (1990). The United Church of Canada for “Breakthrough” (1967). The University of Toronto Archives for “Towards an Oral History of the University of Toronto.” The University of Toronto Bulletin for “‘Condominium Mentality’ in CanLit” (1990). The University of Toronto Columns for “The Primary Necessities of Existence” (1985). The University of Western Ontario Gazette for “Literary Trends of the Twentieth Century” (1963). The Varsity for “Education, Religion, Old Age” (1976) and “Northrop Frye: Signifying Everything” (1979). Peter Yan for “The Final Interview” (1993).

With the exception of those listed above, all works are printed by courtesy of the Estate of Northrop Frye/Victoria University.

Abbreviations

note: Books are by Frye unless otherwise noted. AC AC2 Ayre BBG BG C CBC CCF CP CR CRTC CW D DG E

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 22. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. John Ayre. Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House, 1989. Board of Broadcast Governors The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. Northrop Frye on Canada. Ed. Jean O’Grady and David Staines. CW, 12. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Co-operative Commonwealth Federation The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Creation and Recreation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (originally Canadian Radio-Television Commission) Collected Works of Northrop Frye The Diaries of Northrop Frye, 1942–1955. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 8. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Divisions on a Ground: Essays on Canadian Culture. Ed. James Polk. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Rev. ed. Ed. David Erdman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

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Abbreviations

EAC

The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979–1990. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1963. “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963. Ed. Germaine Warkentin. CW, 21. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Ed. Nicholas Halmi. CW, 14. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Ed. Alvin A. Lee. CW, 19. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Jane Widdicombe Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 5–6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Northrop Frye on Literature and Society, 1936–1989. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 10. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake. Ed. Angela Esterhammer. CW, 16. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. The Modern Century. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967. Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. New Democratic Party Northrop Frye National Film Board Northrop Frye in Conversation. Ed. David Cayley. Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992. Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

EI EICT

FI FS FS2 FT GC GC2 JW LN

LS

M&B MC MM NDP NF NFB NFC NFCL

Abbreviations NFF NFHK

NFL NFMC NFR

NFS NP OISE RE RT

SeS SeSCT

SM StS TBN

TS TSE TVO UC U of T VC

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Northrop Frye Fonds, Victoria University Library The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932–1939. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 1–2. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Northrop Frye’s Library: the books in Frye’s personal library that were annotated, now in the Victoria University Library. Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. CW, 11. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Northrop Frye on Religion: Excluding “The Great Code” and “Words with Power.” Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. CW, 4. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Northrop Frye on Shakespeare. Ed. Robert Sandler. Markham, Ont.: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1986. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965. Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts. Ed. Robert D. Denham. CW, 13. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991. Ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. CW, 18. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972. Ed. Michael Dolzani. CW, 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Typescript T.S. Eliot. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963. TV Ontario University College University of Toronto Victoria College

xxviii WE

WGS WP WTC

Abbreviations Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education. Ed. Jean O’Grady and Goldwin French. CW, 7. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. A World in a Grain of Sand: Twenty-two Interviews with Northrop Frye. Ed. Robert D. Denham. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990. The Well-Tempered Critic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.

Introduction

Northrop Frye had no desire to be a “media celebrity,” no itch for publicity in itself. Undoubtedly, he would rather have been at home in his study writing and thinking than sitting before a microphone fielding questions he had probably heard many times before. The enormous number of interviews he granted bears witness both to his heightened sense of the social responsibility of academics, and to his personal, Methodist-derived belief in his own vocation as a preacher (in an extended sense) of the Word (318–20). And as the preface points out, the present volume, large as it is, represents only what remains of an even greater number of appearances. In spite of needing to husband his resources, he could be persuaded to be interviewed by almost any individual or on behalf of any organization that revealed itself to be interested in the value of literature, reading, and culture. He talked with Roman Catholic priests, poets, teachers, students crying out for change, graduates deploring change, professors, Italian and East European critics steeped in literary theory, interviewers and journalists of many persuasions. Just two months before his death, ill with cancer, he still agreed to answer questions from the type of person he found it hardest to resist, a student writing for undergraduates. The range of printed sources is large in this volume, including newspapers of all stripes and from several countries, magazines and periodicals from the popular Chatelaine to the scholarly Studies in Canadian Literature, student organs, teachers’ journals, and books. His voice was heard on radio programs discussing the future of humanity, the bomb, evil, and a host of other topics besides his own books and ideas. In these discussions he was acting as he thought the intellectual should act in society, contributing to informed, civilized discussion.

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By happy chance, the very first interview in this volume, a radio discussion on “What Has Become of Conversation?” (1948), establishes the importance for Frye of such verbal exchanges. Though he is delightfully cynical about the normal characteristics of conversation—the competing egos, the slander of absent friends—nevertheless he defends good conversation as an essential basis of civil life. And in the second interview he names discussions between people with different points of view as one of the central civilized values that must be defended (18). As he says later, “the kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication” (747); the man who can produce such sentences extemporaneously is a fine advertisement for his own belief in articulate speech. In no. 71, deploring jargon and gobbledygook, he links good scholarship in the humanities with “constant practice in conversational style, speaking to intelligent people in a kind of concrete language” (702). No. 84 is a sympathetic discussion with Vince Carlin, chief correspondent for CBC Radio news, about the problems the journalist faces in an age of mass media and their rain of clichés. Frye speaks feelingly of the importance of the individual voice and of how, if he were a journalist, he might wish for a platform “in which I would have the chance to express things the way I would express them. My idiom would come through, and the sense of the impact of a personality has everything to do with whether it’s memorable or not” (772). It is that personality and that idiom which he stamped on Canadian culture, and which can be revisited in this volume. Fortunately, though some of the interviews were originally broadcast on radio or filmed for television, the essence of Frye can still be savoured here: perhaps he was like his favourite composer Bach, whose structure survives in any medium. At any rate, the sound of his voice and his visual image are not central to his presentation. Margaret Atwood has memorably described the far from expressive “Frye dance” during lectures: He stood at the front of the room. He took one step forward, put his left hand on the table, took another forward, put his right hand on the table, took a step back, removed his left hand, another step back, removed his right hand, and repeated the pattern.1

As a “talking head” he has, of course, no feet to step with; and left and right hands seldom appear. His head movements and facial expressions

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are minimal. Occasionally, in his effort to craft a sentence, he closes his eyes for a moment or nods his head gently, at which times you can almost hear the mental wheels turning. Visually he is benign, cooperative, patient, and a little baggy around the cheeks by the time he reaches the TV age; often he is dressed in a tweed jacket of nondescript colour. Aurally, he is no nightingale. There is an amusing passage in his diary for 1950 when he hears himself on the radio: At six [p.m.] I heard a most curious noise over the radio purporting to come from some Professor named Frye who was talking about books. It’s the first time I’ve heard my voice, except for a few remarks in that Infeld programme. I would never have recognized it as my own voice: that nasal honking grating buzz-saw of a Middle-Western corncrake. I need a few years in England. (D, 293)

Throughout his life he was troubled by his throat, and attempted little ineffectual clearings of it. Frye’s willingness to appear so often in the media was the more praiseworthy in that the interview was not really his most congenial form. Although, as remarked, he was an excellent speaker—one feels that, unlike his students and the misinformed M. Jourdain in Molière,2 he had been speaking prose all his life—the informal address was his preferred medium. In a piece of self-analysis in his notebook he wrote that “what’s ‘creative’ in me is the professional rhetorician . . . . I’m one of Jung’s feeling types, a senser of occasions . . . . I’m usually first-rate at impromptu” (LN, 247). A one-on-one interview could be more troublesome because of his innate shyness. He admitted that he seldom took the initiative in conversations. Asked by John Plaskett whether this reticence might work against him, he replied quietly, “Yes, I think it would. It’s worked against me all my life” (435). Mathieu Lindon offers a graphic description of Frye’s nervously twisting hands (726). At the end of the tape of the interviews that make up Northrop Frye in Conversation is a final, unprinted interchange. David Cayley asks whether there are any more questions he should have asked, and Frye apologizes that he hasn’t answered a lot of the questions in a very satisfactory way, but that he felt like a worm on a hook only proving it was alive by wriggling. From time to time one seems to feel this squirm. Not only was Frye himself nervous; he also reacted to the nervousness of others. Mild and accommodating though he was, some interviewers

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worked themselves into a frenzy of apprehension at the thought of questioning the great man. My collection of expressions of such dread includes Peter Yan’s confession that “interviewing Frye was one of the most nerve-racking experiences of my life, right up there with getting married and filling out my first income tax form”;3 Irma DeFord’s remark that “I felt I was going to talk to Moses on the mount”;4 the CBC’s Paul Kennedy’s “my knees were knocking”;5 and Deborah Shackleton’s introducing her two-part interview with Frye with the thought that, “being neither a scholar nor a writer and having read of his genius, I was terrified that the interviews would be a debacle.”6 Deanne Bogdan relates that she was so nervous she tripped over the tape recorder’s cord and pulled out the plug.7 Frye’s reaction to such an excess of nerves could be to become tongue-tied himself. Helen Heller (at one time Frye’s editor at Fitzhenry and Whiteside) asked him what went wrong in the interview on Morningside (no. 88), and he replied, “Oh my dear, the first thing Mr. Gzowski did was to tell me how afraid he is of me. And I couldn’t think of anything to say after that.”8 In fact, Frye is too modest here: the tape shows him coming out with fairly fluent answers, thanks in part to his complete mastery of the material in Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, some of whose phrases he echoes. In an unfortunate closed circuit of fear echoing fear and nervousness proving contagious, it is Gzowski who is reduced to a jelly. Gzowski’s questions on pp. 813–20 have been edited considerably for ease of reading; an accurate transcription of one of his remarks would read something like: [Shakespeare’s] all on the stage, as you say, I mean, I’d, there’s—this is a charming idea this offers—if he were a twentieth-century playwright we’d have him on—well, I don’t think the curr—he’d be on Morningside—we’d have him—he’d do a regular—or we’d—Morningside would at least phone him up, right, and say, “What do you think of what’s happening in Afghanistan now, Will?” [talking over Frye’s murmur of assent, bounding thankfully to the end].

The interview is an anomalous form for Frye by reason, too, of his characteristic habit of thought. He often remarked on the fact that for him thinking involved essentially finding the right verbal formulas. To interviewer Ann Craik he explained that “there is no such thing as an inarticulate idea waiting to have the right words wrapped around it. . . . [I]deas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words” (746).

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Or as he wrote in a notebook, “I keep revolving around the same place until I’ve brought off a verbal formulation that I like” (LN, 89). Once he had formulated the phrase, this was the idea, and this, in more or less the same words, was what he brought out when questioned. For instance, the notion that a writer’s meaning resides in both what he meant to his own time and what he means to us is a favourite one. Possibly its first use is in the talk “The University and Personal Life” of 9 December 1968, where the understanding of an alien culture is linked to the educational practice of humanism and the training of British civil servants for India, and called the “liberalizing element” in a liberal education (WE, 374). The same ideas and expressions fit handily into an interview shortly afterwards, on 30 December (167–8). Another interview of September 1969 may be the first to introduce the verb “kidnap” for the understanding of an author in only modern terms (194).9 The whole complex of ideas and phrases is still doing duty in the Presidential Address to the MLA in 1976 (WE, 485), in a 1982 interview (634), and elsewhere. Readers will undoubtedly come across many a familiar formulation, from the notion that you can’t take off in a jet plane and expect to find a different civilization when you land (299) to the foolishness of ascribing creativity to genres rather than to the people working in them (471). This use of stock phrases (along, of course, with his being asked the same questions) leads, one must admit, to a good deal of repetition in this volume. The sequential reader needs to hold fast to Frye’s dictum on the Koran: “What I tell you three times is true. What I tell you three hundred times is profoundly true” (RT, 198). The downside of Frye’s ability to write in lucid prose is that, unlike more impenetrably technical writers, he has no need of an interviewer who might induce him to translate his ideas into ordinary English. He has already hammered his idea out in the best English he can find, and if asked he will say it again. Besides which, shyness makes it handy to have a pre-thought reply. These cavils aside, one must point out Frye’s efforts to put his interviewers at ease. Their fear of him was largely self-induced and unnecessary. He was not one to condescend to them. On the contrary, he was a perfect gentleman, calibrating his response and respecting the sensibilities of his interlocutor. What the Frye community knows affectionately as the “shitty garment episode” when the young Frye is relieved of fundamentalist religious doctrines is habitually described in those terms (see pp. 922–3), but to Deanne Bodgan Frye more politely speaks of “blinkers” falling away (796). He listened carefully to questions and did

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his best to answer them. As he remarked in one of his notebooks, “I’m also particularly good, or used to be, at answering questions; my ability to translate a dumb question into a searching one has often been commented on” (LN, 248). This volume gives ample testimony to his sporting willingness to find an answerable question in some rather opaque formulations. In no. 25, “Science Policy and the Quality of Life,” for instance, Cathleen Going and others give him some posers: Going: Your suggestion for wisdom and discrimination within the vitality of a vital tradition would be . . . ? Frye: Within the . . . ? Going: Within the reemergence of the more vital, or the recovery or the rediscovery of a more vital experience, where would one look for the criteria of discrimination, in other words where would one look for the wise man? Frye: The wise man? Yes. Well, I think that if one compares wisdom and knowledge . . .10

In which answer one sees both ingenuity and a relieved reliance on one of his ready-made formulations (first seen at p. 83 here, and used often in graduation addresses). Naïm Kattan’s experience (no. 8) is fairly typical: he found that at first Frye reflected long and silently before answering his questions, but that as the interview progressed he became engaged, and even waxed vehement over Marshall McLuhan.11 Of course, ancient lore has it that the interviewer’s nightmare occurs when the interviewee pays great attention to a long, carefully-crafted question, ponders, and then answers very accurately, “yes,” or it may be, “no.”12 There are a few instances in this volume where Frye interprets a question more literally than might have been desirable: Bogdan: You have thought a lot about the relationship of aesthetic experience to religious experience, haven’t you? Frye: Oh, a great deal, yes. Bogdan: Can you expand on that? (806) Rasky: Is the Bible fact or fiction? Can one answer that? Frye: No. (864)

William Barker (no. 71) was probably not the only interviewer who disguised this problem in editing:

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He answered in very short clips, in a tightly polished aphoristic style. It was tough to get a flow. I found if I could ask three linked questions, I could then later edit myself out of the exchange, and you could get a whole minute of Frye speaking seamlessly on a topic—a string of elegant aphorisms that almost sounded like a continuous series of thoughts.13

But some of Frye’s short answers are remarkably effective rhetorically. Given his detestation of some of the university reforms of the 1960s, one can well understand the following exchange with the Varsity: Fraser: Do you think the students of the ’60s accomplished anything? Frye: No. (476)

I particularly like the following: Rasky: I wonder if I would be prying if I said, Does Northrop Frye talk to God? Frye: Yes. (871)

His thoughtful silence before replying, his slight smile, do not reveal which part of the question he is answering, but definitely discourage prying. Nevertheless, questions are important to Frye: there is a sense in which the question is more important than the answer. He has often remarked upon the fact that to answer a question is to consolidate the mental level upon which it is asked, and thus to block further advance.14 As a teacher, though he did of course answer students’ questions, he thought his real role was to feign ignorance and to pose questions himself, “just as Socrates did” (987). An interview reversed the situation: the interviewer was the one asking the questions and in control of the flow. So Frye depended to some extent on the interviewer’s astuteness in finding questions, and perhaps on his or her willingness not to take Frye’s words as final, but to insist on “ the right to keep on repeating the question” (273). The most effective interviewers here are those who follow up a response by probing its implications, joining Frye, in one of his favourite images, in a dialectic. Thus Cayley is successful in his Northrop Frye in Conversation partly because he continues to question Frye with a “What do you mean by that?” approach. When Frye goes off on a tangent, he is capable of com-

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plaining that “I’m still not sure you’ve answered my question” (948). Hugh Oliver is another interviewer who won’t take any guff from Frye, but, when Frye for instance objects to the phrase “learning grammar” and maintains that “You don’t learn grammar. What you learn is a language that has a grammatical structure,” argues back with some cogency, “But you are taught grammatical terms, are you not? You learn what a gerundive is and that sort of thing” (333), and thus gets Frye to enlarge on what he thinks is the right approach to grammar in teaching a language. Amusingly in this interview with a member of OISE, Frye takes the opportunity, when asked about the effect of the ideas in Design for Learning, to complain that they might have had more influence if the government hadn’t obliterated the Curriculum Institute with this American-staffed mammoth institution (i.e., OISE itself). Oliver ventures to point out that less than a quarter of the staff are American, and adds tartly that in any case “such an argument would have little to do with literacy” (332). Frye learned from his students’ questions and from working out his own ideas before them (321): “In a sense I don’t believe anything I say until I hear myself saying it” (674). As he points out here, whereas the videotaped Bible lectures appear to be quoting The Great Code, in fact The Great Code uses expressions hammered out in the classroom. Did he learn in the same way from his interviewers? One amusing such instance came to my attention because of the time I had spent, as editor of Northrop Frye’s Writings on Education, fruitlessly searching for the source of Frye’s assertion that “Buckminster Fuller has remarked that unless a first principle can be grasped by a six-year-old, it is not really a first principle” (WE, 525). Only when I came to edit these interviews did I realize that Frye was actually quoting, almost verbatim, a remark made to him a month earlier by interviewer Bryant Fillion (465). The connections between the interviews and the writings will be fully apparent only when all the Collected Works have been published and indexed. But experience, and Frye’s prodigious memory, suggest that Frye was surely alerted to puzzlements and gaps by astute questioning. What do we, as readers, learn from the efforts of these questioners?— people who, at the best, act as our surrogates in interrogating the author. When researching the identity of the interviewers for the headnotes, I was amazed at the later eminence of many of the people who questioned Frye at an early stage in their careers, not to mention those who were already established. They include youngsters who would grow up to be

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university presidents, distinguished professors and heads of departments, members of the Order of Canada, writers, a future general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, and many others, some of whom because of my own limitations I have failed to identify. Between them they give a panorama of Frye’s thought and concerns. Readers who do not plan to read the whole volume might consider concentrating, first, on David Cayley’s Northrop Frye in Conversation (no. 102), a splendid survey, both biographical and theoretical, by an interviewer who has studied Frye’s works in depth. (The presence in the background of Sara Wolch, with whom Frye felt comfortable, no doubt helped to grease the wheels of this interview.) Imre Salusinszky probes Frye’s literary theory in the context of other modern schools in no. 82. There is a sensitive exploration of his early life in “Moncton, Mentors, and Memories” by Deanne Bogdan (no. 86). Bruce Mickleburgh does an excellent job of eliciting Frye’s views on education (no. 14), as does Hugh Oliver specifically on reading and writing (no. 36). Interesting questions on science vs. art are broached in no. 59 by John Cargill and Angela Esterhammer: Frye reacted favourably to student interviewers such as these, even to disaffected ones. An interview with graduate student Andrew Kaufman, himself a writer (no. 67), sheds interesting light on Frye’s habits of composition. A number of interviewers have tackled Frye’s religious views; particularly interesting is his dialogue with Gregory Baum (no. 5). David Lawton is a knowledgable Biblical scholar who has pertinent questions about Frye’s Christian background and the reaction of Jewish readers to his work (no. 85). The state of Canadian literature is handled well by Robert Fulford (no. 53). For those interested in Frye’s education and involvement with Victoria College and the University of Toronto, there is a fascinating series of interviews that were made in connection with an oral history project, and that elaborate on many personal relationships (no. 64). Interviewer Valerie Schatzker obviously has a point of view of her own, but fortunately it is not dissimilar to Frye’s; and she provides a helpful, running historical background. There are two areas of particular interest, showing Frye’s involvement in Canadian culture, which deserve somewhat extended consideration because of their unfamiliarity. The first did not, eventually, yield a publishable interview for this volume, but its existence should be noted here. As part of Canada’s exhibit at Expo ’67 in Montreal, “Man and his World,” the National Film Board had undertaken to produce an innovative, multi-screen work revolving around the labyrinth, on the theme of

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“man’s conquest of himself”: the title Labyrinthe was given its French form in deference to the Quebec setting. The production team already knew Frye: director Roman Kroitor and film editor Tom Daly, as well as associate Wolf Koening, had worked on the film University in which he appeared (no. 3). They persuaded Frye to act as chief consultant to the project, and he attended a brain-storming session at a ski lodge in St. Jovite, Quebec on 12 May 1964. Notes on this interview survive in a holograph notebook of Tom Daly entitled “Discussions on the Future of the Labyrinthe Project, St. Jovite, May 12, 1964” in the Archives of the NFB. Although written in dialogue form, these are too fragmentary or illegible to provide a readable text, but they do show Frye suggesting the way archetypal patterns and images of the quest and Minotaur myth—the descent to the underworld, struggle with the monster, and rebirth— could be used to shape what he said was the “only one story—the story of your life.”15 His knowledge awed Daly: “It was like he had an encyclopaedia of all his researches right there in his brain.”16 Frye’s contribution surely influenced what proved to be a very popular spectacle, for which there were long line-ups. It also influenced Frye himself: he came back from Montreal with the plan of “writing the book [his ‘Third Book’] in the fullest quest or labyrinth form” (TBN, 81). Another type of involvement is represented by the substantial series of interviews (no. 13) with the Canadian Radio-Television Commission. Established by the Broadcasting Act of 1 April 1968, the CRTC replaced the Board of Broadcast Governors as the regulator of Canadian broadcasting, as a result of a white paper which had stressed that a national system was essential for fostering Canadian identity and unity. Frye was asked to join as one of nine part-time members shortly after its establishment, and served loyally until mid-1977—“nine bloody years,” as he recalled them later (984). Jane Widdicombe’s list of dates (which does not even include the 1968 and 1969 interviews published in this volume, and at least one which preceded them) shows an astonishing 137 days devoted to CRTC meetings in Montreal, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Toronto, Kingston, and Quebec City between 1970 and September 1977. The Commission’s mandate included reviewing the program logs of stations and issuing or renewing licences, as reflected in no. 31. Frye’s presence at public hearings into the past or future performance of stations has been commented on before; he is generally described as a quiet member of the Commission, somewhat intimidating the petitioners. (His

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most widely quoted intervention, in which he corrected a hapless broadcaster who had taken “Junius” for a Roman rather than an eighteenthcentury Englishman, is not likely to alter this perception.)17 Less well known is his participation in the theoretical underpinnings of the Commission. He had been induced to join mainly as a “tame intellectual” who would discuss ideas with the CRTC’s Research Department, as he explains at p. 997, and in 1969 and 1970 he spent day-long sessions with André Martin and Rodrigue Chiasson of the Research Department, discussing the ways the CRTC might fulfil its mandate of furthering Canadian culture (no. 13). In their original, unedited form especially, these conversations are a tribute to one characteristic of Canadian life, being a delightful, bilingual mélange. At times it is not always clear how much mutual understanding there was. For instance, it is charitable to suppose that Martin had not picked up Frye’s reference to his work on Labyrinthe (107); and we hope that Frye did not hear him when he used Labyrinthe later as an example of an unsuccessful, wasteful film, “un jeu dénué de sens” [a senseless game] (119). Frye’s own concrete vocabulary sorts oddly with Martin’s technological jargon, his talk of “severing static or heuristic dynamic diet to dynamic analogic diet”18 and the like. But in other ways these two CRTC theorists are men after Frye’s heart. They react with en-thusiasm to Frye’s “Logos” diagram—“It’s a fountain, it’s a well” exclaims Martin (140). In fact Martin is preparing a Frye-like chart, which he constantly revises, showing the intersection of the “open system” with the “current information system” (95). The research department were facing an uphill battle in their desire to promote a fundamentally Canadian broadcasting system. They had no direct contact with the producers of programs, but could only judge the general management of the stations. The CRTC had become involved in requiring a certain amount of “Canadian content” which would foster native production instead of American imports; but Martin’s initial suggestion here is that perhaps their attention should be turned to the system rather than to content, technological innovation being a Canadian specialty. He is speaking at a time of technological change, with the development of cable, satellite communications, and even primitive computers about to complicate the CRTC’s purview. Frye is aware of this cultural upheaval; it is interesting to see how much he draws on his experience with students, who help him to understand the new ways of simultaneous perception and its strengths and weaknesses (120). But for

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all his belief that the new technologies can be on the side of creativity (108), Frye is not on Martin’s wavelength here: as he often made clear in his explanations of how he disagreed with Marshall McLuhan, for him the medium is not really the message,19 and the book, one of Martin’s “anciennes technologies” (89), is not about to be superseded. His remark on current astronomical feats, “You get to the moon without stopping to think whether the moon is worth landing on” (139),20 is typical, as is his gloomy prediction that “We’ll set up the hardware with great speed and efficiency and then there will be a long silence” (142): obviously he is not following in the footsteps of his father, a hardware salesman. Normally Frye’s inclination is to stress form over content, and in this discussion he champions not Canadian content but a type of form, the Canadian attitude (96). There is much interesting discussion about the nature of this attitude, its cool observant quality and its relation to abstraction, the landscape, and the black and white of winter. As in his literary criticism, Frye champions regionalism—the local and specific which can become universal—and the use of imaginative images rather than argument. His ideal program is one which presents discontinuous images (in the manner of some of his favourite poetry), leaving the viewer to connect them and thus to be at once detached and involved. The problem addressed here is how the CRTC could foster a climate in which such creation could be encouraged: it is easier to say what should be avoided (censorship, coercive value judgments, and excessive regulation) than to suggest solutions (conferences on experimental projects are one suggestion, p. 107). These discussions sufficiently impressed the full-time staff of the CRTC that they entered into a scheme to use Frye to help develop “foreground studies.” In NFF, 1988, box 75, file 5 is the correspondence describing these variously as “a study of operational and figurational activities and practices,” “a study of the symbolic form and content of TV programming,” and “an inductive method of comparative and positive evaluation.” Martin arranged for the rental of two colour television sets, at a time when colour was an expensive luxury—but one that influenced presentation—so that Frye could view television programs both in his office and at home. (One can only imagine the puzzlement of students who came to discuss their essays with Frye and found him hunched over the Miss Canada beauty contest.) His detailed reports on this and other programs, also in NFF, have been published in vol. 10 of the Collected Works;21 they include the judgment that “talking heads and interviews

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are the easiest and cheapest forms of filling up time on television” (LS, 290). Was this confirmed or regretted, one wonders, in the light of subsequent experience? Transcriptions of some of the discussions setting up Frye’s work are in the same box in the Frye Fonds; though in dialogue form, these were judged not to be “interviews” but rather notes on meetings, dominated by other commission members, and so are not reproduced here. It would be interesting, though difficult, to trace specific ramifications of these CRTC discussions. For Frye himself they surely intensified his thinking about the new media and their influence; without the CRTC he would hardly have been exposed to Sesame Street or the Carol Burnett Show. They were an experience in embodying theory in specific social policies; and, like the Labyrinthe session, they brought him to envisage what a Canadian cultural artefact in a different medium might look like. Frye’s influence on broadcast policy would also be hard to pin down. It would be fascinating to find that the arcana of Frye’s Logos diagram and its Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus quadrants had left their mark in some media planning; easier, meanwhile, to see the time and effort Frye was willing to devote to defining the Canadian identity in quarters where this brought absolutely no scholarly or personal credit. The CRTC item is more of a conversation than a normal interview. In most other cases, the interlocutor is trying to elicit facts or explanations that help to clarify the Frye oeuvre. Much in this volume provides an overview of what it is most important to know about Frye. Perhaps even more valuable, however, are the “sidelights” which, perhaps owing to the way a question is asked or to some particular felicity in the phraseology of Frye’s reply, suddenly illuminate an aspect of Frye’s thought. For me, one such moment occurs when Stan Corey asks Frye about Dante’s four levels and the theory of “polysemous meaning.” Perhaps there has never been a better explanation than Frye’s saying that one could take it “as a kind of expanding dialectic that grew in the reader’s mind as he continued to read and study the book in front of him; so that what you have is not different levels of meaning and different senses but a single sense that keeps growing and expanding in its range of significance” (665).22 There is a lovely explanation to Cayley of Frye’s avoidance of dialectical argument: “to me criticism is really the expression of the awareness of language” (954). He finely illuminates, also to Cayley, the distinctive nature of his criticism, at once scientific and poetic:

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I think I am a critic who thinks as poets think—in terms of metaphors. If you like, that’s what makes me distinctive as a critic. I don’t say that there aren’t other critics who think metaphorically, but I do. And I think that whatever success I have as a critic I have because I can speak the language of metaphor with less of an accent than a good many other critics can. (986)

And what could be a more moving expression of Frye’s acceptance of his own background in an open society: “I am what I am: let others be what they are” (1031). Or it may be that the course of conversation reveals the way Frye actually used certain concepts. We are all aware that he believed value judgments were tentative and should not enter into the task of criticism; yet he obviously made them, and we might well wonder on what they were based. In an early discussion of (yet unflowering) Canadian literature, Frye having said that he prefers Canadian poetry because Canadian novels are not well written, Naïm Kattan points out that Frye does not believe that one can say that a work is well or badly written. Frye agrees, and changes the basis of his value judgment to the presence of “power” or “conviction” (62). At p. 314, the criterion is “genuineness,” carefully distinguished from a judgment on “greatness.” Yet there is a sense in which he does distinguish “greatness” as having some kerygmatic power: great works, he explains, have a social function that smashes out of the category of literature (420)—a clue to the Frye labyrinth of secular and sacred scriptures. Interesting too is the value that Frye assigns to realistic content when he says that getting a sense of the different social assumptions in, say, Victorian England is an important part of the study of literature (703). The true nature of education to Frye is nowhere better brought out than when he tells Stanley Jackson that though any reasonably bright student can pass exams, “There’s no way of testing—no examination that has ever been devised will ever find out—whether the educating process has actually got into his soul or not” (27). His notion of the teacher as a transparent medium comes into focus when he describes how, in teaching the nineteenth-century thought course, he unconsciously adopted in turn the persona of Mill or Ruskin or Carlyle (801–2). People have frequently wondered, as I did when editing the volume of educational writings, why Frye did not speak out more in public when the structure of English courses he loved at the University of Toronto was being dismantled by the Macpherson Report. We learn now that he

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did submit a brief, but he felt it was not listened to. His quotation of Amos 5:13 to Valerie Schatzker encapsulates his feeling of helplessness and disgust as the student revolution rolled on: “Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time” (637; cf. 993). John Ayre, a questing student at a time of doctrinal upheaval, presses Frye on the question concerning man’s communicating with God that still puzzles Frye scholars: is there an entity outside of man to communicate with, since Frye rejects the traditional transcendent God (207)? Pointing out the fallacious notion of an “entity” that lurks in the question, Frye stresses both the suffering man, Jesus, and the notion of the religious group as a human community, without attempting to be precise on the “infinite” dimension. Later, in the course of his discussion with Kaufman, Frye explains that, “As far as man is concerned, it seems to me there is no reality in the conception of God outside human consciousness. But man is not the whole of creation.” Elaborating on ideas obviously related to Blake’s, he goes on to say that, like our senses, “the brain is a filter, too, and . . . there’s all kinds of experience surrounding us that the brain simply can’t absorb or assimilate. Consequently, I’m quite prepared to accept the feeling that there’s a life that’s infinitely larger and more inclusive than the simple cradle-to-grave progression of the individual” (677). Finally, in 1989, this faith in transcendence is revealed as an existential choice: Frye: I don’t know what else [than God] is transcendent. Otherwise, you’re left with human nature and physical nature. Physical nature doesn’t seem to have very much conversation. It’s a totally inarticulate world. Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has grown out of physical nature. It has various ideals and hopes and wishes and concerns, but its attempts to realize these things are often abominable, cruel, and psychotic. I feel there must be something that transcends all this, or else. Cayley: Or else? Frye: Or else despair. The Bible is to me the body of words through which I can see the world as a cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something redeemable, as something with a right to survive. (1014–15)

One can see in this volume perhaps more easily than anywhere else the evolution of Frye’s views of nature from his early, totally negative ones, as mankind’s destruction of nature became more apparent and more appalling. Frye speaks feelingly of the ecological movement at

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p. 437, and in 1983 he tells his Australian interviewers that he would no longer use the word “conquest” in connection with nature: “I would put a much stronger emphasis now on the participation of man in nature” (686). Old habits die hard, however. At one of his most vulnerable periods emotionally, a few months after the death of his first wife, Helen, he agreed to an interview with Deanne Bogdan. Asked at the end whether there was any other question he would have welcomed, he responded, apparently with breaking voice, with an anecdote that amplified his answer to a previous question: “I suppose the best answer to your question about nature is the time when Helen died in Australia, Jane [Widdicombe] pulled the curtains aside so I could look at the sea and palm trees, and I said, ‘Nature doesn’t care how I feel. Close them’” (808).23 A “humanized,” responsive nature was still his ideal. For many readers a moving personal revelation such as the above is the pearl in the oyster of an interview. It is, however, as rare as real pearls are: Frye guarded his privacy and had no inclination whatever to dramatize his life for public consumption. In fact he declared that he had “unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me” (SM, 16), that a biography need never be written, and that all the important things about him are in his works: “everything I write I consider autobiography” (316). He is a writer par excellence, only completely happy when he is composing: “I don’t seem to know what to do with vacations and holidays because this little internal typewriter just goes on tapping and won’t stop” (674; cf. 65). “I’m a bit short on hobbies,” he confessed when another interviewer asked about them. Those who imagine he does nothing but think all day “wouldn’t be far off the truth. One of the consequences of being the kind of scholar I am—that is, working on my own ideas—is that they never leave you.”24 Yet there is a genuine interest in the life events of such a major figure. Many of these have now been related in Ayre’s Northrop Frye: A Biography (itself based partly on interviews, including many of those here) and in Joseph Adamson’s Northrop Frye: A Visionary Life. Every once in a while an arresting new picture emerges, such as that of the young Frye piping up in his 1920s high school class with a question about syphilis (823), or his being spat at and taken to be a German in Ravenna just before the war (603). Frye agreed to a joint interview along with his new wife Elizabeth that opens a charming window onto his second marriage (no. 101). Not content with these nuggets, some interviewers have persisted in searching for something in Frye’s early life that helps to explain his

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career, or in trying to uncover some emotional core. Many have probably wished to ask the question put forward with apologies by student Philip Chester: “How do you see yourself? What does Northrop Frye mean to Northrop Frye?” (320). Here the interviewers have to do much of the work, Frye regularly failing to seize the opportunity to enlarge on a suggestion: Bogdan: In your essay “Lacan and the Full Word,” you use his concept of the stade du miroir in the individuation process to emphasize the importance of coming to terms with “the gigantic face of personality imprisoned within an alienated self.” Is there a sense in which Moncton represents to you a kind of pre-mirror stage of your life? Frye: Yes, I think it does. (802)

He is surprisingly cagey when asked about specific myths, personal and otherwise (cf. 1059). In one strange personal interview, quite painful to listen to on tape and never published (no. 105), Ann Silversides presses Frye to reveal the family stories that shaped him, while he is quite sure that he hasn’t any. What emerges from this very lack of story is the joylessness of Frye’s early existence. When Silversides inquires how his parents met, Frye insists that he could never have asked them about such a thing. “Anything in the way of intimacy or tenderness wasn’t stressed at all. There was a kind of mutual tolerance” (1048). The whole Frye family seems emotionally isolated. It is well known that the death of Frye’s older brother Howard in World War I cast a gloom over his parents from which they never recovered. In the Silversides interview Frye says that “my mother, I think, always regarded me as God’s rather bumbling and inefficient and stupid substitute for the son that she had lost. I discovered later that a lot of cute stories and bright sayings that were told about my babyhood were in fact about my brother and not about me” (1043). His poor elementary school marks and lack of athletic abilities seemed to validate the opinion. We learn further that when Cassie “was eaten up with cancer and dying she never called me anything but Howard. She never called me by any other name than his” (1053). When Bogdan, who has prepared for her interview by reading family letters in the Frye Fonds, confronts him with the evidence that his mother wrote to her sister in detail about Norrie’s college career and honours, he replies, “I never knew . . . I’m sorry . . .” (796). He is obviously surprised, and I would like to think deeply moved,

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though Bogdan recalls him as normal. Could this be a key to Frye’s career? Was he misreading the signs, imputing to his mother an indifference that he imagined or exaggerated, carrying on his shoulder a chip that proved to be a rocket fuelling his stellar career? To Silversides Frye names the motif of the bear’s son, one of the stories of the good-for-nothing third son who succeeds where his elder brothers fail. But he also maintains that he was not shaped by any tales and expectations, negative or positive, and that one forges one’s own myth by living and only discovers the shape of it later (1049). He appears on the face of it to have a robust, unselfpitying attitude, only marginally disturbed by parental displeasure, confident that he had great things in him that would emerge when the time was ripe. With an alarming utilitarianism he declares elsewhere that fathers and mothers are unnecessary anyway (908); in a late notebook, speculating on whether his mother’s preference for Howard may have affected him in some way, he concludes that “Fortunately I was always too indolent & selfish to make silly efforts about it, trying to ‘prove’ myself and the like” (LN, 237). Frye does not encourage his interviewers to wade further into these murky waters. Those who wish to psychoanalyse him would be well advised to turn instead to his notebooks, where thoughts and opinions are allowed to flow more uninhibitedly. The comment Frye gives to an interviewer about Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, for instance (784), is a good deal more circumspect than his private notebook’s “Art of Biblical Narrative my ass” (LN, 174). But I would emphasize that to Frye, personal identity resides far more in one’s public self and work than in some supposed inner essence. In a society of concern, he says, “a man’s real self would consist primarily of what he creates and of what he offers” (WE, 296). As he said in answer to Philip Chester’s question about the real Northrop Frye, “I suspect that other people’s notions of what you are come closer to being your real self than your view of yourself” (320). It is the public self that is on display here, the Canadian icon. In the interviews we probe what he thought, what he induced us to think about, and what he thought it important for us to discuss in the endless conversation that gives shape to civilized life.

Interviews with Northrop Frye

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1 What Has Become of Conversation? Broadcast December 1948

From CBC audiotape reference no. 820303-9 (4), transcribed by Monika Lee; the title is the CBC’s. This was a panel discussion between University of Toronto professors Northrop Frye and Lyndon Smith and students Anthony Wallace and James Reaney, led by host Lister Sinclair, on the subject of the “lost art of conversation.” It was part of the Varsity Story series, broadcast on the CBC, December 1948. James Reaney later became a well-known Canadian poet and professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

Announcer: What has become of conversation? Is it a lost art? Is it, in fact, an art? Those are the questions that concern the five people who meet tonight as CJBC unfolds another chapter in the “Varsity Story.” The University of Toronto and the CBC present the “Varsity Story.” To discover what has become of conversation, there follows a conversation. Now our chairman, Lister Sinclair. Sinclair: We often hear that university days are a paradise. But nowadays some people think that the university paradise is like the one at the end of Goethe’s Faust, where the indescribable now is done, as far as the faculty is concerned, and the eternal feminine leads us on, as far as the student body is concerned. I think this is a very mistaken view, however, and to show you that, we’ve tracked two members of the faculty at the University of Toronto and two of the students, one undergraduate and one graduate, and we propose to get them to talk to you about the lost art of conversation. Sitting here on my left is Mr. Lyndon Smith, professor of Church History at Trinity College. Next to him is Mr. Anthony Wallace, fourth-year English student and editor of the Trinity Review. Next to him is Mr. Northrop Frye, a professor of English, author and critic, editor of

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the Canadian Forum, and next to him, finally, is Mr. James Reaney, graduate student in English, poet, and fiction writer. I’d like to begin this talk about the lost art of conversation by seeing if we can get a definition of conversation. I think it does no harm to know what it is we’re supposed to be talking about. Mr. Frye, are you prepared to offer us a definition of conversation? Frye: Certainly not, Mr. Chairman. A literary critic of experience never defines anything. I can define only by instances and I suppose a negative instance is better than a positive one. If one looks over English literature, one sees, for example, Dr. S. Johnson and his circle . . . Sinclair: The late Dr. S. Johnson. Frye: . . . the late Dr. S. Johnson, regarded as a conversationalist, and yet I’ve never been able to understand that that is conversation. Sinclair: Why not, Mr. Frye? Frye: Because Dr. Johnson is lugged into the conversation for the sole purpose of annihilating it. Somebody feeds him his lines and his lines constitute the end of the conversation. Do you think, Dr. Johnson, that Christopher Smart is a better poet than John Dyer? Sir, says Dr. Johnson, it is no good arguing the comparison between a louse and a flea.1 That is not conversation. That is the art of murdering conversation. [The other panellists have some difficulty finding an example of positive conversation. Smith suggests Plato’s Dialogues as a model; Reaney praises the brilliance of Oscar Wilde’s conversation while admitting he might be considered a monologist; and Wallace says that ordinary talk such as is overheard on a streetcar is not a conversation but a dialogue.] Smith: When do we know we are eavesdropping on a conversation then? Sinclair: That seems a very good point, Mr. Smith. Would you care to tell us? Smith: Well, I suppose that one of the conventions in a conversation is that you are trying to persuade someone, gently perhaps and pleasantly, but persuade them to accept your point of view and they gently and pleasantly, but firmly, refuse to be persuaded, and so you have a conversation.

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Sinclair: I see an evil glint behind your glasses, Mr. Frye. Frye: Well, I just wonder if the motive for persuading him is fundamentally to persuade him to stop talking. I wonder if, in a competitive society like ours, every normal person doesn’t feel that in order to make a conversation brilliant, it is necessary to do all the talking himself. Smith: Well, that seems to me to destroy conversation, actually, but, on the other hand, are you going to get anywhere a conversation without competition? Isn’t it necessary for a person to be inspired by some degree of enthusiasm, some deep feeling, before you can have an entertaining conversation? Wallace: I question that very strongly, because the very necessary background for any form of conversation, which is not an argument and which is not a battle, is going to be an urbanity, a lack of enthusiasm. I should feel that enthusiasm in conversation as conversation is something that should be curtailed hotly. [Reaney suggests that conversation is much lighter and more delicate than an attempt to persuade someone to a point of view.] Frye: I suppose you would locate conversation somewhere between a discussion of a serious subject, which is a form of conversation, and prattle, or the exchanging of clichés, which is a form of conversation too, but at the other extreme. I suppose what we’re looking for is somewhere in the middle. Smith: You can deal with serious subjects in a conversation. Frye: Yes. Smith: It’s the method by which you deal with them that determines the quality of the conversation. Sinclair: What is the method, Mr. Smith? Smith: Lightness of treatment, even if the subject is serious. Sinclair: Lightness without frivolity, perhaps. Smith: Lightness without frivolity. And the subject doesn’t need to be light. It can be extremely ponderous.

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Frye: Yes, Mr. Wallace mentioned the word “urbanity.” I think that’s very important in overcoming a distinction between the light and the serious. [Wallace and Smith discuss the need to have ideas in common, and Smith remarks that “clear thinking and happy expression” are necessary.] Sinclair: Yes, I think that’s a very good suggestion. I do also think that there should be a certain flow to the proceedings. Frye: The qualities of good conversation are essentially the qualities of good swearing. It requires an inexhaustible vocabulary and a good sense of rhythm. I think rhythm is of an extraordinary importance in a conversation. You cannot have a conversation where each person is in so much of a panic for fear he is going to be interrupted that he cannot complete his sentence. So many people talk in a series of semicolons and dashes and occasionally they will end a sentence with a kind of apology for having uttered it in the first place, like. Sinclair: Yes, there are too many conversations in which all the contestants seem to be retreating into the woodwork backwards, as it were, while they’re talking. I would differ with you, by the way, Mr. Frye, about the qualities of swearing. It seems to me that an extensive vocabulary is not required, but what is required rather is a sense of arrangement. However, . . . Frye: With plenty of repetition, of course . . . Sinclair: It seems to me that we are getting a sort of feeling about what a good conversation should be. The sense of lightness, the sense of wit, urbanity, perhaps courtesy also. I think, however, we’ll probably settle our ideas a good deal more firmly if we can decide what is, after all, the object of a conversation. Why do men sit down to converse, rather than simply to talk about something or to tear a subject to tatters? What is the purpose of a conversation? Mr. Smith, you are looking so judicious, I can’t resist. Smith: It’s a very solemn thought, because conversation begins almost naturally, but the analogy that springs to my mind is playing a game. You have a pleasant competition. The game is unbalanced and unsatisfactory. One is superlatively better than the other. On the other hand, you play to win, but only because that’s a necessary convention. You feel satisfied if the game has exercised your wits.

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[This notion of conversation as a game is discussed further, Wallace maintaining that winning is not a very important component and Sinclair saying that it is.] Frye: How do you win a conversation? Sinclair: Well, I didn’t suggest there was a game. Mr. Smith did. Wallace: It’s Mr. Smith’s pigeon, I feel. Smith: How do you win a conversation? The conversation comes to an end, no doubt, when everyone is persuaded to agree with you. So a game comes to an end when you have won, but it is the length and the skill with which the game is played, the exercise, that gives the feeling of satisfaction afterwards. Frye: So the feeling of satisfaction in a conversation is derived from the fact that everybody has gone to sleep except one person who is still talking. Smith: That wouldn’t be the end of the game unless possibly a boxing bout. Sinclair: As in Plato’s Symposium. Frye: As in Plato’s Symposium. [There is further discussion in which Reaney disputes the analogy of the game.] Sinclair: I see Mr. Frye brooding darkly on this subject. Frye: I’m in labour with profound thought, Mr. Chairman. It seems to me that when people get into a conversation, they do so because each one is an individual and wishes to contribute his individuality to a group. [There is a gap in the tape here, where Frye presumably mentions “a vision of the form of society,” alluded to below.] I should say that a conversation dramatizes the form of society and that is the motive for conversation on the largest possible basis. Smith: Is that from the point of view of a spectator or from the point of view of a participant? Frye: I wouldn’t draw a distinction there between the spectator and the participant. I think that talkers in a conversation listen to what is going on. It’s like a jam session, partly improvising and partly listening.

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Smith: And it is a successful conversation if the person emerges from it with a sense that they have grasped a vision of society? Sinclair: A vision of the form of society. What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. Frye? Society—do you mean the society in which the conversation has taken place or society in its widest sense, or how? Frye: I think that the society of the conversation dramatizes, and is an example of, society as a whole. You notice how many conversations have for their subject the cursing of some person who is absent or the talking over or gossiping about some person who is absent. [Mr. Wallace’s laughter overtop] The reason for that is that he serves as a scapegoat. That is to say, the conversers draw together in a closer unit by all throwing stones at somebody who is not there. Sinclair: Is that a satisfactory conversation? Frye: It is a profoundly satisfying conversation. Sinclair: How do we distinguish then, Mr. Frye, conversation from abuse? This particular kind of conversation, I should say. Frye: I should say that abuse is an extremely articulate form of conversation. It is necessary, of course, for the person abused to be absent, because if he’s present then the whole urbanity of conversation relaxes. Wallace: The high tone of the proceedings. Frye: The high tone of the proceedings, yes. Smith: But when you have finished abusing your absent friends, you have a vision of our society. Frye: You have a rather cosy feeling of being integrated with the group that you are talking to and you are thanking your lucky stars that you are not the person absent. Wallace: Are you not feeling also that you are putting off the evil day when you are going to be absent and providing that cosy little feeling for those who are left? Frye: That is true. That is why you keep on with a form of society. Smith: It’s a shocking picture of hatred being the common ground on which we must meet for conversation.

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Reaney: Yes, Mr. Smith, but aren’t games often common ground for hatred too? Smith: Ah, yes, but they cease to be games. Urbanity disappears. Sinclair: And Mr. Frye’s insisting that conversation appears under these circumstances. No, I’m sure he wouldn’t say that it would necessarily require these circumstances. Frye: No. Sinclair: I would like to ask you this question, Mr. Frye. If we have a conversation between a party of rebels, outcasts, and revolutionaries sitting in a cellar with a powder keg marked “this side down,” is that not a conversation? Does that represent a view of the form of society? Frye: That is more likely to be, from my experience of such circles, the sort of thing which Mr. Wallace spoke of earlier in connection with streetcar talk, which is really a series of competing monologues, in which A will put up with B’s monologue in order to hand his own out in exchange later on. Sinclair: The form of society seems to me to be a very good point; in other words, you feel, Mr. Frye, that conversation mirrors life and life arises from our surroundings? Frye: Oh, yes. Smith: Economic determinism, Mr. Frye? Frye: I wouldn’t push it to the point of determinism, but the conversation is itself a kind of surrounding, I suppose. Smith: What are the indispensable physical accompaniments of a successful conversation? Good food? Aside from people. Frye: Not food necessarily, rather something to do with the hands. The hand should be curved around a cigarette or a glass. Sinclair: A full glass or a glass whose contents, perhaps, varies as the evening progresses. Wallace: There’s one point there that I question. Surely nothing is more distressing in a conversation than watching some members of the conversation knitting. And that is distracting; . . . I mean, that is something

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for their hands, but it is taking away from the mental comfort of those around. Smith: More suitable for the foot of the guillotine. Frye [among several voices]: Yes. Sinclair: Though, mind you, the conversation at the Arts and Letters conference . . . very few of the members knit . . . Wallace: I am not a member. Smith: Seems such a pity. Reaney: I find a necessary ingredient of persons in conversation is a small grain of hypocrisy. I mean they should be truthful, but there should be enough hypocrisy to make them at least pretend to agree with everyone. Wallace: I’m glad you brought that up, Mr. Reaney. That’s a point I feel very strongly about, that it’s not necessary to be entirely sincere in a conversation and it is often a great help to a conversation and of great interest if you adopt a position that you don’t necessarily subscribe to. Frye: I don’t get that altogether. I think that that is more of a debate than a conversation, and it seems to me that you certainly have to be polite, but I should avoid the society of a conversationalist that I have to be hypocritical to. It seems to me that courtesy is more important, and that it is discourteous not to be sincere, not to say what you mean. Reaney: Well, I said a small grain of hypocrisy, not heaping tablespoons full. Wallace: Well, I said heaping tablespoons full, I gather. [The talk turns to the question of subjects it might be necessary to exclude in order to have a good conversation.] Sinclair: Sex, religion, and politics have notoriously been excluded from the conversation of officers’ messes, theoretically, at any rate, though any officer’s mess I’ve been in seems to talk . . . well let’s say very little about religion. [laughter] However, it seems to me that we have something of a point there. Mr. Frye, what do you say about this question of sex, religion, and politics? In other words, major subjects that strike deep.

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Frye: It seems to me that those three subjects constitute a great proportion of all intelligent conversations whatever, and the only thing to be guarded against is to carry them to the point at which the conversational group splits in two. If you are discussing sex to the point at which the conversational group splits with all the men on one side and all the women on the other, then the conversation breaks down. The same thing is true of religion and politics. If the people talking suddenly line up in two opposite camps, then you’re done for. [This topic is pursued a little further by the other participants.] Sinclair: Here we are with our time nearly up, and we haven’t really discussed the lost art of conversation. We’ve certainly amused ourselves, at any rate, by talking about the art of conversation, but is this art of conversation lost? In other words, can we find it nowadays in the places where we would expect to find it? Where would we expect to find it? That seems to me to be the first thing. Smith: One should find it in a university circle, I should think. Wallace: One should, but one doesn’t necessarily do so. Smith: I have occasionally found conversations, which, if they are not worthy to rank with the greatest in the world’s history, because no one has taken them down, nevertheless, seem to leave me with a feeling of satisfaction. Sinclair: Let’s divide this up quite clearly. Mr. Smith and Mr. Frye, as far as the faculty are concerned, do you know of any conversations going on at the university at present? Frye: It seems to me that an inarticulate professor certainly suffers from a formidable occupational disease. I have been around this university for about twenty years as student and as member of staff and I can’t say that, in the whole of that time, I have ever suffered from any particular lack of conversation or that I’ve felt that it was, in particular, a lost art. It’s true that not all my evenings are passed in composing Platonic dialogues with my friends, but neither, I suspect, were the evenings in Athens in Plato’s time. Sinclair: And how about you, Mr. Smith? Smith: I feel that I have taken part in conversations where the art of conversation is not entirely lost.

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Sinclair: Among members of the university? Smith: Among members of the university faculty. [Wallace and Reaney, speaking for the students, admit to having had some satisfactory conversations at the university. They and Sinclair agree that “forced conversations” between a professor and a group of students are apt to be deadly. Sinclair recalls one such event.] Sinclair: We all sat in an enormous ring, staring at each other. Smith: It corresponded to a form of society. Sinclair: Yes. Frye: There was also the Oxford don who used to invite a colleague and a group of students to breakfast in the morning and start conversation on a picture of Queen Victoria which hung opposite him on the wall. Unfortunately, he asked the same student twice (it was a friend of mine) and went through the same identical conversation on two successive Sundays. That was the form of society in that particular Oxford college, I think. Sinclair: I’m afraid we don’t have too much more time. It seems to me— I don’t know how you feel, gentlemen—that we have given some feeling, perhaps, of the art of conversation. Words like “persuasion,” “courtesy,” “urbanity,” “likeness” seem to have been bandied about a good deal. In spite of Mr. Smith’s very eloquent remarks, it seems to me that the idea that conversation is a game has not been altogether approved of, though I must say that I have a grudging admiration still at the back of my mind for some of things he said. The idea that a conversation should lie between an argument and a prattle seems fairly clear and it seems also that some of the great conversational reputations of the past do not entirely fit in with our ideas of conversation, as we’ve been expressing it tonight. The subject of conversation we settled fairly well. We even, I think, settled the object. To mark out the form of society seems to me to be the most striking remark on that—Dr. Frye’s remark—and even sex, religion, and politics came into the thing. Finally, we did, I think, say that conversation can be found where today we would expect to find it, in the university.2

2 On Human Values Recorded 15 August 1952

Transcribed by Margaret Burgess from a tape in the CBC Radio Archives of a panel discussion on the closing evening of the annual Couchiching Conference, held at Geneva Park, Ontario, in August 1952. Dated by internal evidence. The purpose of the conference was to discuss “how [the participants] as Canadians can contribute to the defence of human values,” and the subject of this concluding session of the conference was, “What are the human values we wish to defend?” Participating in the panel along with Frye were E.F. Carpenter, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and a particular colleague of Marshall McLuhan’s, and Lawrence E. Lynch, professor of philosophy at St. Michael’s College. The chair of the discussion was Joseph McCulley, warden of Hart House.

McCulley: This evening, ladies and gentlemen, we are coming to the culmination of our week’s discussions. We have had a week of extremely fruitful discussions on military defence and economic assistance, and we’ve now come to what seems to me to be basic and fundamental to the discussions that we have been pursuing during this whole week: that is, the question, What are the human values we wish to defend? * * * I’m going to begin the discussion by asking each of the three members of the panel if he will make a brief statement outlining what is his general position and what in his judgment are the values that we wish to defend. I’m first of all going to call upon Dr. Carpenter. Dr. Carpenter was born in the United States and educated at the universities of Pennsylvania, Yale, and Cornell. He served overseas as a captain in the United States marine corp. * * * He is now assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. Mr. Carpenter, I wonder if

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you can give us your ideas as to what are the human values we wish to defend. [Carpenter takes an aggressive tone, declaring that, as a social scientist on a panel with a Protestant clergyman and a Catholic philosopher, he feels called upon to dispute the notion “that acceptance of one of their creeds is indispensable to the recognition and attainment of worthy ideals.”1 On the contrary, he declares, secular science is itself a religion, offering “ideals that are fresher and more convincing than those worn threadbare by ritual and dogma.” As an anthropologist studying different cultures, Carpenter has found that human history shows a general evolution towards greater self-realization, the emergence of the ego, and the development of the individual as a unique yet social being. So “those values which I would consider worthy of defence are those which promote self-realization, which allow unlimited growth of man as a social being, and these would not only involve freedoms of speech and worship, but the freedom to produce sufficient food for nourishment, the freedom to establish social relationships on a level of equality, in short, the freedom to live life to its fullest.”] McCulley: Thank you very much, Mr. Carpenter. I’m now going to call on Professor Lynch of St. Michael’s College, assistant professor of philosophy in that institution. Dr. Lynch was educated at St. Michael’s College, and had his M.A. and Ph.D. degree in philosophy from St. Michael’s and the University of Toronto. During the war he served with the United States Navy, Washington, Pearl Harbor, and Japan. * * * I rather suspect that Mr. Lynch’s point of view on this matter of values may differ somewhat from that of Mr. Carpenter. [Lynch begins by remarking that the question of values is a moral question, which is treated in a different way from a scientific question. He then suggests that the central value, in social life at least, should be justice, or giving a person his due. He adds that “in interpreting the meaning of justice, I would insist that giving man his due would mean attributing to him and making it possible for him to fulfil and to develop all the capacities that he has. But as a dependent being I would insist too that part of that justice was a duty upon man to satisfy a justice towards God, upon whom he is dependent. Consequently, in brief I would suggest these values in addition to or in explication of justice: religion, humility, freedom, and equality.” To him the religious tradition is not static or outmoded, but has expressed itself in different ways throughout history as mankind seeks to embody the needs of the spirit.]

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McCulley: Thank you, Mr. Lynch. I’m now going to call on the third member of our panel, Professor H. Northrop Frye of Victoria College in the University of Toronto, professor of English in that institution and extremely well known for his recent book Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. [A brief summary of Frye’s life follows.] I wonder, Professor Frye, if you can give us some indication of your thinking on this subject of the values we wish to defend. Frye: Mr. Chairman, I accept both the facts of tradition and of evolution, but evolution always strikes me as a rather slow conception to introduce into historical and political problems. It’s too much like Mark Twain’s effort to descend a mountain by sitting on a glacier and waiting for it to carry him into town.2 I feel that the evolution of man today is a much less immediate and urgent problem than the revolution of man, and I should give that twist also to what Mr. Lynch has said about tradition. Ever since about two hundred years ago, for a variety of reasons, and for better or worse, man has embarked upon a program of revolution. In the centre of that revolutionary program I see democracy. That seems to me to be the one genuine revolution of our time, and Communism seems to me the most important counter-revolutionary movement of our time. Therefore, one cannot identify democracy with a form of government like republic or monarchy. It is a process, and a process which, I should say, following the terms of the French Revolution, is a pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity. If you pursue liberty and forget about equality you get laissez-faire, which ends in a most abominable tyranny. If you pursue equality and forget about liberty, you get a totalitarian state, which also ends up in an abominable tyranny. And consequently, the central revolutionary process of our time pursues simultaneously liberty and equality. By liberty I mean, of course, the mature, responsible activity of an adult citizen of a modern democratic state. I do not mean simply the sterile or narcotic liberty of doing as one likes. And when I say equality I mean that the Communist ideal of a classless society consisting entirely of workers is also a democratic ideal, and that if democracy fails to meet the challenge of Communism in its hope for equality it will fail in its attempt to transform the world. And by fraternity I mean the essential respect of man for man which makes the other two points of view work, and in particular I should like to see it, at least in reference to this discussion, as a kind of working alliance of a religious and a secular point of view. I believe that, without the infinite perspective on man’s life that

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religion gives, man goes mad with claustrophobia and does all sorts of insensate things, but I also believe that the self-critical publican will always get much further than the self-righteous Pharisee. And so I am willing to be charitable about Mr. Carpenter’s self-realization. I just wonder if it wouldn’t look a little provincial in this one world of ours in which there are hundreds of millions of, say, Hindus and Buddhists, who believe that the end of man is the annihilation of the self. [Lynch agrees with Frye that religion and science work together. He asks Carpenter what he means by the general term “science”—to which Carpenter replies that it is “a technique for creating, altering, shaping, and expanding knowledge”—and then asks him what insights it gives into the nature of man.] Carpenter: Let me limit myself to the field of anthropology where I’m perhaps least ignorant. I believe that employing the comparative approach we can contribute much to the understanding of the nature of human nature. In fact, I’m naive enough to think that the comparative approach has offered more in that field than any other technique now being employed. By the comparative approach I simply mean going out and studying in great detail different societies, different institutions, seeing how they operate, and comparing them with our own and with other societies and so on. There’s more to it than that but, in briefest outline, that would be the technique employed. Frye: I wonder if one of the most important things to be compared wouldn’t be the conceptions of the nature of the self? In connection with this conception of self-realization? Carpenter: Yes, I think it would be. In fact, it’s a field in which I’m now actively engaged. I can think of nothing quite so exciting as a comparison, a cross-cultural study, of self-definition, or, the self, as seen by a scientist, in different societies. And I’m sure that we would find one thing. In fact, I’m almost positive of this: that the self does differ from one society to another, that human nature does differ from one group to another, that it’s not merely a common denominator which is cast in a different language and different colours, but that there are basic and real differences here. [Lynch and Carpenter then engage in a discussion of the degree to which people in different cultures differ. Lynch argues that “within the differences they’re very much alike, and for the purposes of values in this discussion, it seems to me

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that those are the points—the points of similarity—which will enable us to assess the values that are common to different societies, and perhaps come to a notion of the self that Mr. Frye is concerned with.”] Carpenter: Is that directed to me or to you? Lynch: Well, I was hoping perhaps Mr. Frye would go on with his notion of the self as he originally intimated it would be. Frye: I’m not sure that I have any very clear notion of the self, particularly not when I’m trying to relate it to a social process, because an individual with a multiple personality is in much less lamentable a state than the world is today, but . . . I see the process as one emerging from a vast conflict of selves, that is, an enormous interchange of opinion and of ideas. Very much bigger forms of realization arise there than simply the individual self-realization. I think the whole conception of the self as individual might be one of the things which is most lacking in democratic philosophy. That is, we assume the existence of an individual as the basis of our political thought. That might be an abstraction. It might be an untenable one. Lynch: I gather, then, that you are insisting that man in addition to being an individual is a social being, and consequently that perhaps the study of his social needs might shed some light on his personality? Frye: Not only that, but I believe that society is something much more than simply an aggregate of individuals. I think that society is a larger human being. McCulley: Mr. Carpenter? [Carpenter returns to the question of whether science and religion are in conflict, asking Lynch to comment on the commonly held belief that the Thomist dialectic will crush opposing arguments. Lynch again points out the different spheres addressed by different subjects, and the different degrees of certitude attainable within them.] Frye: There’s another question too, and that is the question of the authority of the truths involved. That is, there are certain sciences in which the authority of the truth involved is verifiable. It’s easy to attain. There are other sciences in which it is more difficult and more elusive, and in my own field there are the arts, which are very much more difficult still, and

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nobody knows what the source of authority in the arts is. And yet it’s there and it has to be there. McCulley: I think that we’ve now explored some of the differences that exist in these three positions. I’m beginning to wonder if in spite of these differences that have been expressed there are some values on which, within those differences or perhaps in spite of those differences, we can agree at this particular juncture in history? I wonder if any of the members of the panel would care to . . . Frye: At the risk of being obvious, Mr. Chairman, it seems to me that one of the things we’re agreed on is the propriety, shall we say, of holding discussions like this among people with differing points of view and without losing any of our respect for one another because we do differ in points of view. I’d suggest that that’s perhaps a central one. [Lynch and Carpenter agree on the value of freedom, including in this concept both circumstances that allow one to develop, and freedom of worship.] Frye: Yes, I agree with that too. I think we’re all agreed on the desirability of freedom. I think that there are certain vulgar perversions of the idea which are very important too. That is, most people when they say they want freedom usually want merely to be left alone, and that I should call a bourgeois conception of freedom—the theory that freedom consists in not doing anything in particular about anything. And then there is the totalitarian view of freedom which is, of course, a glad and eager acceptance of slavery. And then there is the dictatorial view of freedom which is really a desire for mastery—the sort of freedom that Milton’s Satan has, where he says, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav’n.”3 And those conceptions are all around us. They are all being used today with the name of freedom. Lynch: Yes, I should agree whole-heartedly with that, and it seems that what you are intimating, Mr. Frye, is that there is a certain responsibility that goes with the gift of freedom, let us say. Would that be what you have in mind? Frye: Yes, certainly responsibility, and responsibilities in the modern state of very specific kinds. In other words, I don’t think that there is an antithesis between freedom and necessity. McCulley: Would you attempt to define some of those responsibilities at all, Mr. Frye?

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Frye: An intelligent awareness of what is going on in one’s society, a participation—political action within the law—and the disinterested pursuit of truth by the scientist and philosopher, of beauty by the artist, and of life itself: those are things which all involve responsibilities. Lynch: Yes, the remark that you made of freedom within the context of necessity strikes me as a notion which is very much forgotten at the moment. To me, a society that is chaotic and anarchic makes freedom quite impossible. To take a simple example in the physical order, if there were no laws of nature, let us say, or no physical laws governing the floor here tonight and the chairs, I doubt very much that you’d feel free to sit down or walk, not knowing what was going to happen. So also in a society you need a certain fabric, and a kind of predictable structure—not that it’s a static structure at all, but something that you can hang on to. I think that’s perhaps what you have in mind by a kind of necessity, that you have a framework, and then within that framework you can be free. Frye: Yes. To take an analogy, when a painter is painting a picture every brush stroke is free because it is compelled. That is to say, he is free because every brush stroke he makes goes in the right place. The man who can play the piano is free because he can play the right notes. He is not free to play the wrong ones. Lynch: Perhaps we could generalize on that and say that freedom requires virtue. Would that be a fair statement of it? Virtue as developed habits that help you to work easily and well. If you work well you’re not particularly necessitated in what you do and yet you do it in a regular, orderly way. Frye: I suppose so. I don’t know quite where the pursuit of virtue would take me in this case. I prefer not to go further than discipline. [The discussion ends with Carpenter and Lynch discussing differences of culture, and Lynch answering Carpenter’s charge that Catholicism is as rigid, as untenable, and as dogmatic as Communism.] McCulley: Gentlemen, I don’t wish the panel to monopolize this discussion, although we could follow this particular avenue of thought, I think, a little further. I think perhaps we might at this time get a few questions from the audience. [The first question has to do with the fact that the Korean war is in progress.]

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S.B. East, Islington, addressing a question to the whole panel: I think we’re well aware, Mr. Chairman, that the Department of National Defence is very interested in this conference. They have seen fit to send Colonel Clark, officer commanding Camp Borden, to this gathering. Along with him, other army men, representatives of the navy. It is a hope, I suspect, that from this gathering there will go out such a wave of enthusiasm for the ideals of the Western world that we’ll find that the recruiting offices of the Canadian nation are crowded throughout next week. I would therefore like each of the panel in turn to address themselves to the question of what they’d say to Johnnie Canuck, as to why he should get in this thing, and get over there to Korea, and defend the values of the Western world. Thank you. Carpenter: I think we’re all honoured to have the Canadian military men here tonight. I wonder if the American general staff is quite as interested. They probably are wondering now, don’t these Canadians understand what they’re supposed to do? Other than that I have nothing to say. I would have no contribution or no comment or no thought on why any Canadian should enter the armed forces. Frye: It seems to me that the very essence of the democratic way of life is that it does not wind up with any such appeal to anybody. It is a broad, tolerant, and charitable way of life in which people seem to enjoy themselves while they’re living, and if the Canadian soldier does not enjoy himself in living in Canada, then there is perhaps no reason why he should go to fight, but if he does love his country, if there are reasons why he loves his country, he doesn’t need to be told in any dialectical terms or in terms of any ideology why he should defend himself and his home. [Lynch points out that he and Carpenter are both Americans and thus perhaps should not comment, but that no person should be forced to act in defence of values such as freedom: “the very forcing would be a denial of the values.”] Gar Marcos, Toronto: I should like to ask the panel, Mr. Chairman, to clarify if these moral values are relative or absolute. McCulley: Which one of you will take that one, gentlemen? [laughter] Frye signals madly to Mr. Lynch. All right, Mr. Lynch. [Lynch explains that in morals the only absolutes are very general principles

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such as that you should do good and avoid evil. The positive law that develops within a certain culture is an expression of those ideals, relative to the time and place in which it is expressed.] McCulley: Thank you, Mr. Lynch, but I am not going to let Mr. Frye duck that question just as easily as he did. Mr. Frye, I wonder if you’d care to make any comment on it? Frye: I don’t think there’s very much to add to Mr. Lynch’s very fine and very coherent statement, which is a statement of a trained philosopher, and I’m not that, certainly. I should say that there are two points of view from which one could consider absolutes and relatives. One is secular and the other religious, and in the secular context the values are relative and the only absolute that one has to go on is existential. It simply is founded on the fact of man as being alive and as moving toward certain things. From a religious point of view religion, that is to say, my religion, consists of an infinite revelation directed towards a finite mind, and that is certainly a combination of absolute truth and a perennially finite and relative understanding of that truth. Helen Tucker, from Port Credit: I’m not employed by the CBC, but I am zealous for the standing of this institute in explaining values to the listeners on the air. I’m wondering if anyone is still listening because of certain terms involved in trying to explain our freedom. Now, if they’re as hard to express as this, I’m afraid nobody’s going to fight for them very hard. For instance, we seem to have such an expression as an antithesis between freedom and responsibility [sic] and I don’t think many of us here would follow that awfully well. We’ve had such words used as “analogy” when “an example” might suit the meaning. We have another expression such as “freedom within the context of necessity,” and that last one that Mr. Frye pulled out was absolutely unintelligible to an average university graduate, I think (I’m one). I find that I’m not getting very much understanding about the defence of values in the words or the vocabulary that you gentlemen are using. Could you clarify those? [enthusiastic applause] Frye: I would call Miss Tucker’s attention to the fact of the central principle in the arts, which any critic of the arts has to deal with, and that is, that the simple is the opposite of the commonplace. It is very easy to think up a commonplace cliché. Simplicity is the last secret of the arts,

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and it is attainable only by a long and concentrated discipline. It is not attainable when one is trying to think out, as we are trying to do tonight, our own mental stock of ideas. That is all [more applause]. [The tape is cut off here, though the discussion apparently continued.]

3 University Released 1961

This is part of the soundtrack of the National Film Board’s film University (1961); there is an untitled transcript in NFF, 1988, box 1, file p, with some minor inaccuracies. The film examines the crisis in university education brought about by the dramatic increase in enrolment, and questions the purpose of education in today’s world. As well as filming student discussions, director and narrator Stanley Jackson interviewed students and university officials, though his questions appear only as “voiceovers.” The segment with Frye includes a discussion with some remarkable students: Margaret Atwood (later distinguished poet and novelist), Dennis Lee (poet honoured as Toronto’s poet laureate, perhaps best known for his books of poetry for children), Alexandra Johnston (later professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of Victoria College), and Donna Youngblut (who went on to a teaching career and was soon to marry Lee). The section begins, however, immediately after footage of a seminar debating Plato’s view of education.

Jackson: For some students, this constant collision of new ideas is a challenging experience, boldly entered into. For many others university is a confusing and upsetting experience after the certainties which were characteristic of their previous schooling. But Dr. Northrop Frye, principal of Victoria College, Toronto, and an eminent man of letters, feels that this is a necessary stage in a student’s development. Frye: I am afraid it is an essential part of the educating process—the educating process just can’t go on until the mind gets unsettled and very badly unsettled. The whole method of education that was laid down in the dialogues of Plato by Socrates begins by unsettling the mind: you

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begin by demonstrating to the student that he doesn’t actually know what he is talking about and that he uses words instinctively without the faintest notion of what they mean. By the time he has figured out what they mean he has got a very much wider perspective on life, but that doesn’t increase his security—it increases his feeling of doubt about the adequacy of what he knew before. It’s the same in religion. All religions have tried to shock and unsettle the mind—they have always tried to make a monkey out of the reasoning intellect—either by putting faith above it or by some technique of paradox. And there doesn’t seem to be any way of getting any further with the mind until a certain amount of tearing apart and reassembling is done. The beginning of the process is beginning to wonder if there aren’t other societies, other ways of life, other forms of culture, other modes of experience and of knowledge and apprehension which are utterly different from anything you have so far encountered. The first realization of that is bound to be unsettling. Jackson: We frequently hear that students come to college to learn to think. What would you say to that? Frye: I would be all in favour of learning to think if one takes certain precautions. The man in James Thurber’s story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was always assuring his wife that he was thinking, but what he was actually doing was simply mooning or day dreaming. There are all kinds of mental processes which we call thought which have nothing to do with thinking at all. Mooning and daydreaming and associating and worrying are some of the things that go on in our minds that have nothing whatever to do with thought. Thinking is not a natural process—it’s not something like eating or sleeping—it’s a very difficult technique that has to be learned. Jackson: I think you once used the phrase “those difficult techniques that set one free.”1 Would you explain what you meant by that, Dr. Frye? Frye: There’s a kind of half-baked notion in society that the untrained act is the free act, and I have never understood that feeling or that assumption. If you have a musical ability, for example, that is expressed in an ability to play the piano, you sit down and practise the piano for many long and weary hours, and by doing so you eventually begin to set your own musical talent free. But you can only set your musical talent free as a result of relentless discipline and very hard work. And I can associate freedom only with a disciplined act. I don’t see that free speech, for

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example, has anything to do with mumbling and grousing. I think free speech is pretty accurately disciplined speech. Jackson: How would you say such disciplines are useful? Most people feel that the study of literature, for example, hasn’t much to do with real life. Frye: Well, what’s real life? Is real life the life that is actually being lived around you or is it the life that man could live? What the university tries to give you is the sense of what man could do on the basis of what he has done. The whole aim of a university education is to get you maladjusted to your actual society because it tries to make you compare the society that you’re living in with what humanity has shown it can do. It tries to get you to compare the morning paper or the weekly periodical that comes into the house with Shakespeare and Milton, and it tries to get you to compare the kind of sympathy with humanity that you read in the news or hear over the radio with the wisdom of the philosophers and the love of the saints, and in all those it’s continually measuring what society is doing against what society in its greatest moments has done and could do. And it says that the latter is what is real. Jackson: Dr. Frye had once written “the university preserves the memory of mankind.”2 At one of his informal seminars we found fourth-year students arguing about whether an ordinary man of the present day can be a great tragic figure in a dramatic work. The case in point was the effectiveness of Willie Loman, the central figure in Death of a Salesman. [Scene shifts to a seminar:] Student [Margaret Atwood]: In what does it consist? Student [Donna Youngblut]: In his tenacity—the way he won’t let go of his dream. Atwood: If it were a sort of compelling dream you could see why he was being tenacious. But as it is, it is a very sort of commercial thing. Youngblut: Oh, I object, it isn’t all commercial. I think his dream is the dream of all mankind translated into the terms of his day and age and that is the dream to be at the top—Number One—the god. Frye: Let us take a parallel. Take the case of King Lear, who is a tremendous titanic figure—the biggest in drama, I suppose—and yet Lear tries

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to become heroic through his royalty and finds that the only way that he can achieve any dignity at all is through a rather weak and suffering humanity when he is being cuddled by Cordelia. Student [Alexandra Johnston]: This is the point. The difference between them is that Lear comes through it and realizes it—that in this lies his dignity. But Willie never realizes it—he dies mad. Frye: Do you know what I thought was the most moving passage in that play? It was when his son Biff said to him, “I am a dime a dozen pop, you know that, and you’re a dime a dozen too,” and his father said, “I am not a dime a dozen, and neither are you. I am Willie Loman, and you are my son.”3 Suddenly at that point my mind went back to a very different play, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, where they have come to kill her and try to make her reconciled to being killed, and she stands with her back to the wall and says “I am Duchess of Malfi still” [4.2.142]. Now I think that that is a heroic statement, and it is when you are falling back on your humanity that you achieve a heroic dimension. Jackson: Gradually as he acquires the habit of trying to understand the experience of other ages the student may begin to reach some understanding of his own times, of his own experience. Student [Dennis Lee]: . . . this is where I think it is tied in with real life. I think only a man of the stature of Sophocles or of Shakespeare who has to a greater or lesser extent experienced what Lear goes through—what Oedipus has gone through— Atwood: In other words you are saying that Lear is a reflection of Shakespeare’s own life? And that is why he wrote King Lear? I think that is very unfair to Shakespeare. Lee: No, I don’t say that’s why he wrote King Lear. But I don’t think he could have written King Lear without having the deepest, most profound elements of King Lear. I think Shakespeare must have been highly aware of . . . Jackson: Of course, not all students see the opportunity a university offers to become familiar with the larger world. We reminded Dr. Frye of the remark to the effect that the exposure to a university education is not in itself automatically beneficial. Frye: It is certainly possible to collect every degree that a university can

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hand out and still not be an educated man. There’s a difference between manipulating the machinery of learning and actually letting the learning affect you as an organism. Anybody can operate the machine—a reasonably bright student, whether he works hard or cares about what he’s doing at all, can usually get through his exams. He can usually get his degree and pass as an educated man. There’s no way of testing—no examination that has ever been devised will ever find out—whether the educating process has actually got into his soul or not. There are no instruments for diving that deeply. Only he knows that. It is perfectly possible to run the machine of learning and pass your exams and get your degree and have nothing happen to you. Jackson: “Nothing happen to you.” What do you think could happen? Frye: I think that there are two ways of going ahead. You can go ahead like an express train or you can grow as a plant does. What can happen to a student is the growth of his mind. Most of us live, I suppose, with eight to ten per cent of our total mental capacities. And whenever a student feels that a little higher percentage of his mental capacity is being used he feels that he is growing inside. That will be marked in all kinds of ways—it will be marked by an increase of wisdom, tolerance, and sympathy in ordinary practical affairs, but nobody can devise any methods of making this automatic. The student must do that himself. Jackson: It’s the first time that I have heard the word “wisdom” used, which I expected to hear a great deal of. I suggested this to a student. He said, “Well, how often do you hear ‘wisdom’ nowadays, how often do you hear ‘sin’?” He suggested that these are meaningless terms in the present day. What do you think? Frye: The words “wisdom” and “sin” are completely meaningless to people who are operating, as I say, with eight to ten per cent of their total mental capacity. To understand the seriousness of such ideas your mind has to grow up to the context in which words like that can be used. And that is partly what I meant. The old distinction between wisdom and knowledge is really a distinction between the mind’s actually growing, and operating the machinery of learning.

4 Literary Trends of the Twentieth Century Published 12 March 1963

From “Northrop Frye and Literature,” The Gazette [University of Western Ontario], 12 March 1963, 6. Frye visited Huron College at Western in March 1963 on the occasion of its centennial to deliver the four lectures on Paradise Lost which became chapters 1–4 of The Return of Eden. The interviewers were Tim Traynor, Jerry Wadsworth, and Pete Miller.

Interviewer: What is the state of Canadian literature today, Professor Frye? Frye: In the field of poetry, with which I am most familiar, Canada is doing remarkably well for its population. For one thing, this is not a bad environment for a poet—he is able to remain more anonymous here than he would in some places and is less compelled to become part of a clique. If [Irving] Layton, for instance, were writing in the United States he would probably be just another member of one of the contemporary poetic movements there, and certainly James Reaney would never have been able to experiment as he did in A Suit of Nettles had he been writing elsewhere. Canadian fiction however is not in such a happy state. Except for the prose of such people as Morley Callaghan and Hugh MacLennan, Canadian nonpoetic writing has generally been little better than mediocre. Interviewer: Is this true of French Canada as well? Frye: Not entirely. French Canadian writers are at somewhat of an advantage in that there is more tension in their community. Whereas the English Canadian writer is never quite sure whether to write about Can-

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ada as part of the modern world or as a separate country, the French Canadian is pretty well obliged to write as a member of a community. Interviewer: Does this mediocrity in fiction mean there is a smaller or less interested reading public in Canada than, say, the United States, which is said to be primarily interested in the novel? Frye: No, I don’t think so. Much of the boom in fiction south of the border since the war is merely the result of high-powered publicity for second-rate novels. Interviewer: Do you mean to imply by this that there have been no important new writers or styles since the 1930s? Frye: No, no. There is no dearth of new writers and new styles. Norman Mailer has been classed as an important new writer.1 Interviewer: What do you think of his work? Frye: Personally, I find his books rather lengthy and somewhat insensitive. That is not to suggest of course that he lacks integrity—I don’t think he does. And then I can only make a personal judgment, not a critical one, since I have never read his books that closely. Interviewer: What about J.D. Salinger? Frye: Ah yes! Now there is someone with whom I have much more affinity. His, I think, is a really unique insight into life in this era. Mind you, his preoccupation with Zen and Oriental culture does strike me as a bit phony. But his study of the Daemon child, for instance, is awfully well done.2 There is nobody else I know who has done quite that thing. And this work is not just important as an “adolescent scream” to be put on university reading courses because students can easily identify with the characters. It has great tragic and ironic implications. Of course this has very little to do with its wide popularity. Like Nabokov’s Lolita, it is an example of a substantial piece of fiction of this era which has been widely read not for the things that make it great but for its incidental appeal to a certain audience. Interviewer: You seem to suggest that there has been a decrease in the “discerning” reading audience—the audience who “read fiction for the right reasons.” What has drawn them away from the novel and the short story?

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Frye: I am not sure that it has drawn the audience you speak of away from fiction, but there is a rising interest today in nonfiction. You can see this by looking at the literary magazines which now often read like an academic exercise. Interviewer: How do the new media like television fit into this picture? Are they having an adverse effect on the older written media? Frye: No, I don’t think the various forms of verbal communication need interfere with one another. For one thing, writing for one [medium] is entirely different than writing for any other. If you are a journalist you cannot be a good novelist. You can become a good novelist but you will have to forsake the journalism or TV scripting or whatever your specialty happens to be. Each medium has its own very rigid set of conventions. And then I think the responses to various media are different. For instance you wouldn’t respond to a piece of advertising the way you would to a poem. No, I think the various media do sort themselves out and find their own audience. Interviewer: Written poetry then isn’t doomed as some would have us believe? Frye: Oh no. The audience for poetry is always very small, very avid, and very much involved with it. Most readers of poetry, for instance, write poetry themselves. Interviewer: Switching to the field of criticism, there seems to be a wide tendency to judge a work on moral or personal grounds. Is this a valid function for the critic? Frye: No valid critic would use these grounds to judge. This is more the method of the reviewer—the person who writes about a work of literature in a popular magazine—than of the critic who addresses himself to the artist. Interviewer: Do these reviewers often hinder writers? Frye: No, I don’t think so. Most writers seem to be infuriated by them but are careful to ignore their judgments. Actually one of the biggest problems for both the writer of prose and of poetry is the great battalion of critics who are always on his tail. Lately, they have assumed the position of a kind of “bedevilling conscience” and the contemporary writer must sometimes wish there was no such thing as criticism.

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Interviewer: Apart from the increased volume, would you say literary criticism has improved in the last hundred years? Frye: Yes, criticism is being better written now than previously and is also becoming more important. This is a very theoretical, self-conscious age. Such things as the social sciences which existed previous to this century only in the most rudimentary form are now beginning to come into their own. Criticism is somewhat analogous to this. Whereas previous ages were largely content to produce literature and art, this one is intent upon examining it. Thus criticism has come to occupy a much more central position now than previously. Also, as might be expected, it has become more creative while literature is tending to become more academic. Interviewer: There appears to have been a much greater emphasis on form in the last seventy or eighty years than ever before. Does this imply that form is more important than content in criticism? Frye: Of course criticism begins with form. The job of the critic is to relate a work to the corpus of literature and this can only be done by revealing the inner structure of the work. He is not primarily concerned with the content or group of platitudes and truisms that form its philosophical attitude. Interviewer: A more general question, Professor Frye. Do you agree with such people as T.S. Eliot that we are living in an age of moral and spiritual decline? Frye: No, I think you can cut the attempts to demonstrate our degeneration out of Eliot’s work without losing much. This is an age of historical myths and our thinking is steeped in the myth of progress, of perpetual advance, of the revolutionary effects of the new technology. Eliot with his claim that this is false and that we are actually on a toboggan slide downward is just the inevitable reaction to this.3 In actuality, it seems to me, all life goes on a more or less steady plane with only the outward forms being transformed and mutated.

5 The Voice and the Crowd Broadcast 7 April 1966

From Media 1 (Toronto: CBC Publications, 1966). This is a discussion with Gregory Baum, who was then professor of theology and religious studies at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Like Frye, Baum was somewhat unorthodox. A convert from Judaism, he was a Catholic priest with radical views and a concern for social justice, much involved in the ’60s’ realignment of religion. He asked to be laicized in 1976, got married, and joined McGill’s Faculty of Religious Studies in 1986. The talk, part of a series called The Human Condition, was originally broadcast by the CBC on 7 April 1966. Reprinted with the subtitle “A Dialogue on Man’s Search for Salvation” in University of Toronto Graduate, 13 (December 1966): 75–6, 78–91, and in WGS, 23–40.

Baum: Dr. Frye, we have been invited to have a conversation on the attempts of men to reach out for salvation, and on whether this means a withdrawal from or an involvement in the world. I must say that I don’t find this subject an easy one, because the very meaning of salvation is not something that is always very clear to me. At the moment, in the Catholic Church, and it seems to me in all the Christian churches, there seems to be a tendency to re-interpret the meaning of salvation. At one time we thought that salvation meant to be with God, to be reconciled with God, and that the effects were, above all, in the life hereafter. Salvation was really meaningful and powerful, not now, but after death. It would seem that in most Christian churches there has been a shift of emphasis. We seem to say that if salvation has any meaning at all, it must have meaning right now; that it is a new condition, a liberation, a healing that takes place in us in many ways. Therefore, if one asks

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Christians today what they mean by salvation, I think one will get many different answers. Frye: My own background is evangelical and my first encounter with the word would be associated with, say, going to revival meetings and having people with the glitter of pure hysteria in their eyes say, “Are you saved, brother?” Whatever I mean by salvation, it is not that. In that context, it seems to me to be really a state of unanswerable self-satisfaction, and I would imagine that anything which is worth making the centre of one’s life ought to be something very much more ambiguous. I would say that salvation has something to do with finding one’s identity, that we’re always finding ourselves in situations that are morally neutral, but every so often you can be in a situation where you feel that by a certain act, you would essentially betray yourself, and by another act you would be standing by yourself; that second one is where the conception would begin, to my mind. Baum: I would like to add that our idea of salvation depends very much on our understanding of what we want to be saved from. Do we feel the need of redemption, of liberation? Are we conscious of our isolation, of the wounds in us? Are we conscious of the ambiguity of life; that not only our evil deeds but even our good ones are somehow tainted by selfseeking, that there is much in our lives that is somehow determined by psychological mechanism, by little compulsions? Are we conscious that we cannot really do or be what or who we want to be, and that it is precisely from these forces, which draw us away from our true selves, that we want to be redeemed? Frye: The dilemma of right and wrong, good and bad, is something that one never escapes from in any action. Every action is involved in a situation which is both good and bad, both right and wrong. I would find the search for salvation to have something to do with a kind of awareness of freedom which is also an awareness that one has somehow or other come alive, moved from ordinary life into the same life repeated more intensely. Baum: Dr. Frye, could you explain a little further what you mean by living life more intensely, or reliving life more intensely? Frye: I mean that we face situations in ordinary life with a kind of reserved emotional charge. We don’t see things with the maximum

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intensity of vision or of emotion—we’d destroy ourselves if we did—but every so often we become engaged in significant acts, and realize that although we’re in this same life, in this same world, we’re suddenly seeing the significance of what we’re doing in more dimensions and with a greater intensity and awareness. That to me is the repetition on a more intense plane of the acts which we carry on in ordinary experience. Baum: The religious person would say that this kind of freedom, the freedom to live more deeply and to experience the ordinary things of life with a greater meaning, is communicated through faith in Jesus Christ. I think the religious person would say that through the forgiveness of sins and through the trust that one has been accepted by the Lord and lives as a son of God, suddenly so many threats and fears which normally might surround us are removed and we are enabled to enter into a greater personal freedom and to live with many less reservations about the questions and the meaning of life. Frye: I understand that, but couldn’t the same kind of awareness occur without any kind of religious context in it at all? Baum: I firmly believe that this is possible and yet, as a Christian, I would say that wherever this happens, it is indeed God who is at work transforming men according to the image of His Son, making them into deeper human beings through the action of the Spirit, in some mysterious way. Frye: Let me put that in my own terms, which are different and may or may not be contradictory. I would say that I can imagine situations, such as the Nazi terror in the last war was very fruitful in producing, where people die as martyrs, not so much for something as against the evil thing that kills them. Many of these people who died as martyrs were martyrs in the classical traditional sense; that is they are witnesses to the existence, here and now, of a community which will be here after the Nazis have been swept into the ashcan of history. I can see that that kind of martyrdom has within it another dimension (at least for me) into what I would call the infinite, the eternal. But for them it might not have, and in fact the renunciation of religious faith might be for martyrs an essential part of their act of freedom. Baum: Could you explain a little more how the renunciation of one’s faith or of one’s religious practice could be a sign of greater freedom?

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Frye: Well, suppose, for example, in Canada there was set up a particularly abominable tyranny and that all men of good will, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic, atheist, everybody who had any kind of sense of normal human decency, had to unite in opposition to this tyranny. There would be many martyrs to such a tyranny, if it were strong enough. Many of these martyrs would be people who would be, say, liberal humanists; they would be people without any religious commitments at all. They would fight this tyranny with the same courage and the same intelligence as religious people, and if they died, it would be absolutely essential for them to shut out of their minds the religious dimension, or significance, of what they were doing. Baum: Oh, yes. I would like to introduce, at this point, the distinction between religion and faith. I think that in many parts of the world, even in Canada, there are many families and whole sections of society where religion is traditional, where people grow up into religious surroundings and where it is natural and normal to go to church and to accept the teachings of the church. This, I think, is religion. It is something that can be observed from the outside. Yet it seems to me that this is really different from faith, because it is possible to be religious and perform religious acts and not really believe that God is good and that all people are brothers. These inner acts, or these inner gifts, are communicated through the practice of religion, but not automatically and not necessarily. One can therefore distinguish between religion and faith, and sometimes we meet people who do not practise any religion, and yet, somehow, are touched and, even without putting it into such words, believe that the substance of life is love. Frye: Couldn’t this awareness of freedom, this consciousness of what we would mean by salvation, not be attained by somebody for whom God did not, in any practical sense, exist or who had examined the conception of God and decided that it didn’t belong in his life? baum: Certainly. I might mention here that at the Second Vatican Council there has taken place an interesting doctrinal development. In antiquity, we had a formula called “no salvation outside the Church.”1 This was interpreted at that time as meaning that salvation, that is, God’s mercy, was available only to those who were baptised, and to those who remained in the Christian community. Since those days, a tremendous doctrinal development has taken place. Little by little, reflecting on the

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gospel, on the message of Christ, the Christian community (the church) became aware that the mercy of God is active everywhere, that a long time before the call of Abraham and the coming of Jesus the mercy of God was at work among men, and even today, beyond the Christian church, God is at work transforming men. The church firmly believes that the God who has revealed Himself in Jesus is the God of mercy, and that He is always more wonderful than we expect Him to be and that he is surely at work among men who, on one level, say “no” to Him. Frye: So that the will of God can be achieved by the denying of God, if it is done from the premises which would be necessary to certain kinds of attitudes. Baum: It seems to me that this follows from what I have said. There is an old tradition among Catholics, and among Christians generally, that Christian life, and therefore the life of the saved, means basically the avoidance of sin, the avoidance of evil. The idea here is that the best way in which we can be faithful to the call of God would be by avoiding contact with an evil world as much as we can, and therefore by some sort of withdrawal to save our souls. * * * I think that what is happening at the moment in the Christian churches, at least as I see it, is that this attitude is changing. We now feel that in order to be saved, to be liberated, to be redeemed, we have to die to ourselves many times and we can only die to ourselves if we become involved in the lives of others and in the world of men. We feel that by concentrating on ourselves we reinforce our basic egotism, while by becoming involved we experience the kind of liberation and freedom you have spoken about. Frye: Yes. I imagine we probably agree that trying to retreat from situations in which there is evil is like trying to run away from our own backbones, that we’ll always take that kind of situation with us into whatever situations we enter. It seems to me that every significant involvement with the world and any significant action in the world is at the same time, to some degree, a withdrawal from that world. That is, most of us are creatures of social ritual, we carry out habits imposed on us by our profession, our age group, and so on, and the current movements of protest, let us say, in connection with civil rights for Negroes, Vietnam, and so on (whether they are right or wrong is not my concern now) are attempts to involve oneself in society, which are at the same time a questioning of the assumptions of that society, and to that extent, a standing

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back from society. It seems to me that unless you have this double focus, the action is not wholly a free action. Baum: I agree that to go out from oneself and be involved in the lives of others, or in political life, is possible only if this is accompanied, or guided by, a certain critical sense. There is never any total surrender to other men or to other movements, because this would be unfaithful to the recognition that human life is ambiguous. While we want to bear the burden with others, we do not want to become ill with society. We want to acknowledge the illness in others as well as in ourselves. By involvement with the world, we don’t want to be conformed to a neurotic environment, but to become healthy. Therefore, I think that every involvement in this sense also means a greater recognition of the illness of society, and therefore of detachment. Frye: I think of the remark of Socrates in The Republic [592b], that the wise man will always live under the laws of the just society, no matter what society he is actually in, and I suppose every man who does find his identity, who does perform an act which he feels is a free act in the sense of having stood by himself, is really living under two cities—the actual, Canadian middle-class twentieth-century society around him and another city which is also here and now and which won’t go away. Baum: What do you mean by this “other city which won’t go away”? Would you amplify on this, Dr. Frye. Frye: Well, take a social worker, for example, working with underprivileged people in Toronto. She would have in her mind, however unconsciously, a vision of a better, a more just, a more equal city, and it’s in the light of that vision that she does her work. I should think that anybody whose work is an expression of his own freedom also has within him some kind of vision, conscious or unconscious, of a society towards which he is working. Baum: So we live in two cities, in the sense that one is the actual situation in which we find ourselves and the other one is our ideal which we discover, or in a sense initiate, but towards the realization of which we ourselves must be totally engaged. Frye: Yes. And the moment of salvation or of the awareness of freedom that I spoke of is to me the moment of suddenly realizing that you are, in fact, a citizen of a different city from the one you’re actually in.

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Baum: Yes. And this would give a meaning to withdrawal. This would be the kind of withdrawal, therefore, which is required in order to discover the real dimensions of one’s engagement in transforming the world. Do I understand you correctly? Frye: I would prefer the word “detachment” to the word “withdrawal,” because I’m not thinking of moving from one place into another, but of being in two aspects of the same place. Baum: Yes, I agree with you that the word “detachment” is much clearer. We were speaking of the two cities and this recalls to my mind two other cities—those of which St. Augustine spoke and wrote: the City of God and the City of Men. This was a kind of division which ultimately proved to be somewhat dangerous, because it created the impression that the City of Men is somehow doomed and cannot be totally redeemed, and that it was the City of God which really counted—a city that was never totally incarnate here among us. It was a reaching out and away from this world, to be achieved in some sense by withdrawal from this world. Of course, St. Augustine could cherish the dream of the two cities because he lived in the Roman Empire, and it really did not occur to him that the structures of society could be altered. He felt that this had been the structure of society for centuries, and that the few Christians couldn’t really change it because this was somehow the eternal structure of the world. Therefore, salvation, to him, did consist in living faithfully to that invisible City of God. This subject is also of great importance in our dialogue with Marxists. It is not at all clear whether the Marxists, the classical Communists, are opposed to religion because God does not fit into their philosophical vision of the world, or whether they oppose religion on account of the social consequences as they were observed by Marx in the last century. It could just be that the opposition of Marxists to religion is founded on the social consequences of a religion which emphasizes that salvation is in the life to come; that life in this world is a valley of tears; that we must try to help our neighbour, but ultimately cannot change society; that we can only suffer here and look forward to a happier future in the life to come. It seems to me that the discussion about salvation, therefore, is of the greatest importance in our dialogue with Marxists. At the Second Vatican Council, the bishops were conscious of this and in the document called “The Church in the Modern World” (in the first part, chapter 3), they wanted to stress and emphasize that the Christian who believes in the age to come is by this very belief of faith obliged to take this world seriously.

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Frye: Of course, for Marxism, God is a symbol of man’s alienation, his tendency to give away his energies and his powers, either to the ascendant political class, or in exchange for an imaginary life afterwards. The question of life after death, certainly, would have to give place to the question of life before death; not whether you live after death, but whether there’s any proof that you’ve ever come alive. That would be the central issue that the church would have to face, I imagine. Baum: This problem is very important in places like South America. I think that if, in Marxist terms, religion would actually be revolutionary, would make people more profoundly engaged in changing society, then their attitude toward religion would change. It would seem that the kind of dialogue between Marxists and Catholics which has been carried on recently has brought this out as one of the remarkable results. I think that the reason we do not follow St. Augustine any more is that we have a different understanding of human and political life than he had, that we are convinced that the city here on earth can be changed, and that we are, in some real sense, responsible for it. You introduced, for example, a division of two cities different from St. Augustine’s. Frye: Yes, I know that there is a traditional Christian view of two cities, where one is sacramentally related to the other and where you live by certain habits, certain disciplines, certain attitudes. Surely the thing which twentieth-century literature and twentieth-century theology have emphasized a great deal is that one has to discover this unchanging city for oneself in all sorts of unexpected ways and unexpected experiences, and that nobody except God (if one is working with the conception of God) knows who the people are who have discovered a more permanent dimension in their lives. Baum: Could you develop this? Frye: I’m thinking of the way in which it has become almost a literary convention to build a work of fiction, a short story, a play, or even an entire novel, around events leading up to a certain crucial decision on the part of the chief character in the course of which he decides either for his freedom or against it. The whole Existential movement in Sartre and Camus seems to have a great deal to do with building up towards this kind of crucial incident in a person’s life. That moment where one feels either that one has betrayed oneself or that one has stood by oneself, is the moment I started from when I was trying to think of a conception of

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salvation. With many of the writers who deal with this, who illustrate it in literature, there is, of course, no explicit background of faith at all. It’s simply an aspect of human experience. Baum: I don’t think that I totally understand what you mean by freedom, because as you describe it, the choice, the total engagement of being faithful to oneself, still remains ambiguous to me. We do know nowadays from psychology that there are alive in all of us some self-damaging tendencies, some masochism, if you like. I think it is possible for a man to desire his own destruction. I think it is possible for a man to desire his own failure, to provoke a relationship and crisis at his place of work, or even a crisis with his wife and children, in order to be defeated. I think that this kind of choice of one’s own misery has all the earmarks of freedom; it feels like freedom. Therefore, unless we have some norm or standard outside of ourselves, constantly calling us into question and making us respond to a norm which is above us (and when I say this, I think of course as a clergyman of the Word of God), I do not see how it will be easy for us not to be misled at times and find freedom in experiences which ultimately are destructive. Frye: Let me give you a deliberately trivial example of what I mean by this kind of theme in contemporary fiction: it’s a Canadian novel, a war novel, and in the course of it, a soldier gets into bed with a prostitute and the prostitute says, “I want you to say that you love me.” The soldier’s first impulse is to say, “Oh, go to hell,” and then suddenly he realizes what her life has been like, how tough and mean it’s been, how she’s been pushed around and how important it is for her to have this said to her, and so he says the words she wishes to hear.2 The statement itself is technically or formally a lie, but in human and existential terms the soldier knows that he’s done something rather important at that point. Baum: How does he know that he is not feeding some really destructive neurosis in this girl? Frye: He doesn’t know. The point is that he is choosing that as the resolution of the particular situation, in spite of its possible ambivalence, in spite of the risk that it may be nonsense. We began by using words like “salvation” and “involvement” and “alienation”—those are words connected with religion or with philosophy. It’s almost impossible to use these words without falling oneself into the more commonplace meanings of them; that is, it’s hard to speak of withdrawal from the world

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without suggesting, either to others or even to yourself, that you mean running away from the world, and it’s hard to speak of salvation without thinking of yourself as being hooked and landed by some other power and pulled out of the sea. The thing that interests me about the contemporary situation is that there seems to be in the world not a conviction of sin, which for most people is a question-begging term, but a conviction of alienation, a sense of being somehow cut off and left to live without the dimension of any kind of eternal community. That, of course, is related to the Marxist conception of alienation, as the result of man’s being cajoled into giving away his life to his masters, but it has entered the West very deeply, too, in the sense that man somehow has to come to terms with being. For many people, it amounts to saying that man has to come to terms with being abandoned by God, and this is a conviction, a kind of axiom of experience in the West, which I think makes communication on any kind of religious plane extraordinarily difficult. Do you see what I mean? Baum: I’m not so sure whether I completely understand you. Do you describe alienation as man’s estrangement from other people, his loneliness, his incapacity to enter into communion with others, or do you think that it must be, first of all, described in religious terms? Frye: No, I was thinking rather of alienation as a fact of contemporary consciousness whereby man accepts the fact that he is both an individual by himself and a member of a society, but doesn’t feel any essential link outside himself either as an individual or in relation to a society. Baum: You mean he has no access to his neighbour, to his brother, he regards other people somehow as a threat, or he is suspicious that they are somehow against him? Frye: He may feel that. As a member of society, he does not feel identified by or with society. He is a member of what is called “the lonely crowd.”3 But when he thinks of himself as an individual, he feels equally alone and equally bereft. Baum: But is this not precisely the mystery of human life—that we can only be ourselves to the extent that we enter into communion with others. In other words, we need the brethren to be ourselves, and therefore I wouldn’t even bring up the question of alienation from God. It seems to me that what one wants to say could very well be said in terms of the

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community, and it may well be that men can find God only if or when they have found the brother; that it is through the love of the brethren, through being drawn into communion with others, that suddenly talk about God which before was meaningless makes some sense. Frye: Yes, it would doubtless make sense, but if we think for example of the conception of salvation as the opposite of being abandoned, what strikes me in contemporary literature and a great deal of contemporary thought is that the consciousness of being abandoned seems to be almost primary in twentieth-century man, in some of the most deeply thoughtful and sincere and intelligent people. Unless one is willing to accept that and to come to terms with it, one cannot communicate with a very radical element in contemporary consciousness. Baum: What do you think this consciousness is due to? Frye: It’s partly a feeling that man has nothing outside himself with which he can identify as being an essential part of his personality. He knows that he is a member of a society, and that the social being that is a part of his individuality doesn’t permit him to draw a circle around himself and say that his individuality ends there. Yet society does not give him the values that he really needs and hungers for. There are so many people in this prosperous and apparently contented North American society who have simply been driven by superior sensitivity to reject the values of that society. Baum: But why should this happen in our age? Why was this not experienced in the same way by men of the nineteenth or early twentieth century? What do you think are some of the factors? Would it be our affluence? Our wealth . . . ? Frye: Well, it has something to do with affluence and wealth. That is one reason, I suppose, why the Marxist challenge to middle-class values has never really taken root in our society. The whole business of alienation for the worker and waste for the member of a leisure class (who simply lives off the worker) has been replaced with us by the affluent society. But we discover that the conceptions of alienation and waste are just as lively as they ever were. There is a sense of loneliness or abandonment which is only relieved in certain crucial moments of conflict or tension, which are very often moments of rejection of society. I’m not putting this very well . . .

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Baum: I think I understand what you mean, and yet I find it difficult to agree with such a tragic understanding of human life. I find it difficult to accept that salvation, this experience of freedom in which the self becomes richer through the identification with another or with others, is such a rare experience. I find it difficult to accept that modern man, who is perhaps more threatened by alienation, is therefore further away from salvation, and that communion, sharing, friendship, and faith are so far away from him. Perhaps one reason why estrangement is so widespread today is that the old-fashioned kind of community, stable community, mother and father, the village and the unchanging town, have disappeared, and therefore the child from the very beginning is exposed to an ever-shifting community and can never really identify for long with any one system or set. I think that this is one of the reasons for the estrangement. And yet does this not perhaps point to the way in which salvation today must be offered to men and the way in which we ourselves must discover it: by finding communion (not by finding God I was almost going to say), by finding communion first, by entering into a friendship with others and discovering dimensions of sharing which we were close to in the past, and only after being saved in this way, listening to what God has to say about himself in the gospel? Frye: Yes, you may feel that this mood is excessively tragic, and yet I’m trying to define what seems to me to be almost the overwhelming feeling in contemporary literature, which is just as characteristic of deeply religious writers like Graham Greene or François Mauriac as it is of, say, Sartre. Baum: I think this is true, yet when you look at the extraordinary revival of religious concern you see another side of modern society. In the literature of the last century, religion and God were hardly ever mentioned. When Balzac wrote his novels about France, a priest might occasionally occur in them, but only as a kind of marginal figure, as a representative of the ancien régime, while in our modern contemporary literature, it seems to me that God, and even the church somehow, have moved into the centre of preoccupation; that deep down, modern man is concerned about the eternal questions, even when he says no to them. Frye: One could look at it another way—that the reason for that rather careless treatment of the priesthood in Balzac is that he thinks of the church as a normally functioning part of society, whereas in the twenti-

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eth century the church is a big question mark, something which is felt either to have no function, or to need its function accounted for in some way. Baum: And yet, isn’t it good and healthy and Christian if the church is a question mark? Must not the gospel and God always also be a question mark? There are so many people who believe that to have faith means to have convictions which never change, which are safely wrapped up in our pockets, and the less often we look at them the more certain we are that they will always be with us. In our modern day we have found that we cannot protect religious convictions by wrapping them up and putting them into our pockets. We can only preserve them, if that is the right word, by constantly questioning them. Frye: In other words, doubt is not the opposite of faith but the complement of faith? Baum: Yes. Frye: And the particular problem I’m posing is that while the vision of faith may or may not be true, the vision of doubt certainly is true. It’s the obvious physical fact in front of us. There is a sense in which salvation is a quest, the quest being the discovery of what gradually becomes more and more negative as you keep discovering it. First of all, you think of it as something sinful or as something wrong. Then eventually it becomes nothingness, just something that isn’t there. That experience seems to me [to be] primary and unanswerable, and because it’s unanswerable, there must be an answer. The quest of the twentieth-century sensibility seems to me to be a quest for what is being called the absurd, and the only thing which can complement or fill out the discovery of the absurd is something which is itself absurd, and which you must believe in because it is absurd. The point that I’ve been harping on as a kind of Devil’s advocate all along is that man lives most of his life on a relatively unreflective plane, that there are certain moments of awakened intensity in that life, and that in the twentieth century the majority of such moments are also moments of horror. These are moments of absurdity, moments of feeling abandoned and lost. Baum: Dr. Frye, I really have some difficulty following you here, because my own experience of literature and of modern theatre and films is really somewhat different. I agree that the people who are presented there per-

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haps do not find answers to their questions, but they all seem to have an inkling of the kind of answer they are looking for, and even when they find themselves condemned never to find anyone whom they can love, or by whom they are loved, they somehow know that what really counts is love. Even if they are incapable of believing in anyone and of being really trusting, they do seem to know, even in their despair, that this is exactly what they desire. I find, therefore, that modern literature and modern films, in addition to the message of despair, have in and behind them some very definite vision of what salvation is all about. Frye: There seems to be such a restless, incessant, and, for many people, morbid emphasis on the part of contemporary literature to discover what you might call the nature of man. One of the great classics of English literature, which students always have the greatest possible difficulty with, is the fourth book of Gulliver’s Travels, about the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms. These stinking, ferocious, nauseating creatures, the Yahoos, are the animals, and the horses have some education and common sense and some reason. Gulliver finds that his nature is Yahoo nature, that he is cleaner and more intelligent, but he is still the same kind of thing. Because Swift was working within the church establishment and within a set of social values that he assented to, he knew what to do with that conception: Gulliver goes back to England, not hating the human race (that would be silly) but hating pride. It seems to me that in contemporary literature you have this constant probing into the nature of man. You have it in, say, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where the characters are engaged in a dramatic action which is not an action at all; they are simply waiting around for something to happen. Nothing does happen, but in the meantime what has been revealed is what has always traditionally been called the natural man. And in a novel like Lord of the Flies you have almost the experimental-laboratory conception of natural man—put man on a desert island and what becomes of him? Well, what becomes of him, of course, immediately is that he sets up a most demonic tyranny. This is the same kind of ironic vision that you get in Gulliver’s Travels, but you get it without the sense that there is in Gulliver of bringing to bear the norms of a church and a society in judgment on it. It is left up to the reader to evaluate it, and the reader is just as lost and bewildered as the characters in the novel. Baum: Dr. Frye, if you think this is the image of man that is described in modern literature, it reminds me very much of the image of man that is

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described in certain Biblical passages. For instance, St. Paul talks about man without God. Frye: St. Paul had his answers. I’m not suggesting that this is a new problem. I’m suggesting that it’s the old problem in which the answers are no longer accepted. Baum: It seems to me that what you are leading up to, in a way, is the traditional Protestant position that salvation is really forgiveness of sins. If it is our hidden feeling of guilt that is the inner accuser which provokes us to regard other people as our enemies, then the remedy would indeed be some experience of the forgiveness of sins; that is, some experience that we are accepted and that despite our wounds and the fragile and miserable in us, we are nonetheless accepted because someone else loves us. Frye: That’s quite a jump to take. Of course, I know what you mean, but many modern men wouldn’t accept this remedy because they feel they’re going to die of the disease anyway. I think that the forgiveness of sins that you mention would certainly be a cure for alienation if it were an experience. Baum: I find that films and some modern novels which seem to betray the despair of man really lead not to despair, but rather help us to understand our own awful experiences of life. By understanding them more deeply, and seeing in them a deeper dimension, we are enabled to transcend them and to move ahead. If we do not move ahead from the important experiences of the past, we remain with them and regress; instead of having new experiences we simply relive the old ones. I think there is something therapeutic in modern literature and films, because by reliving something very deeply and by discovering deeper dimensions in it, we are free for new experiences, and therefore are led to salvation. Frye: Well, mind you, I’m not disagreeing with any of this—I think our assumptions are the same assumptions—but I’m merely stressing the fact that the language in which one puts this can be extremely misleading because the language sounds consoling, and the rejection of consolation seems to me to be very important as a characteristic of modern man. Baum: Yes, at least the rejection of words. I think people refuse to listen. They don’t want words. They have been disappointed. Language itself is no longer trusted. Only action is credible.

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Frye: And consequently if man experiences the absurdity and loneliness of existence for himself in his own mind, then he has to experience what we’ve been calling salvation in this way as well, and everybody concerned with what is called charity, with Christian love, has to respect this quality of the self-discovery of salvation in whatever form it comes. Baum: I don’t think there is really a difference between Christian love and other love. Whenever men forget themselves and reach out for one another, this is a mystery which is called in the Bible death and resurrection. This happens not only when Christians are led to love, but whenever people reach out for one another. Therefore I agree with you that a specifically religious language today no longer communicates the real mystery of the transformation of life, but only the kind of language which is real and describes and manifests the kinds of experiences which are available to us every day. Frye: Yes, so that when W.H. Auden says that we must love one another or die,4 I think I know what he means and I imagine you know what he means. Yet for many people this has overtones of trying to hypnotize oneself into thinking that people are amiable who are not amiable. And while I know what you mean when you say that there’s no difference between love and Christian love, still there is a difference between love and gregariousness. The kind of unanswerable vision of the community of man which we may or may not be fortunate enough to get in our lives is perhaps what we have been revolving around.

6 Breakthrough Recorded 1967

From the tape in the United Church Archives. Frye was interviewed early in 1967 for a series of short programs with the general title “Breakthrough: Into Tomorrow” arranged by the Anglican and United Churches during Canada’s centennial year on the theme of life in the future. The programs were distributed to radio stations across Canada. A letter from the United Church notes that Frye’s interviews were used in three of the programs; in his reply Frye says, “My only regret is that I did not succeed in making a more intelligible comment on the subject of life on other planets, which is of course, to put it mildly, not my field” (letter of 27 June 1967; NFF, 1988, box 8, file b22). In the completed programs, his recorded remarks are interspersed with the comments of others, the actual question asked not always being apparent.

[At the start of the segment on life on other planets, astronomer Helen Hogg comments that it is likely that superior civilizations exist in the universe.] Narrator: If life is discovered on other planets, and if that life is superior to ours, how might that affect us? Frye: I don’t feel that the existence of superior intelligences in other worlds has much effect on us. Men have believed in many centuries in angels, but it hasn’t affected human behaviour profoundly. We remember the philosopher Montaigne, who said that he found himself entirely unable to make any impression whatever on his cat, who insisted on continuing to live as a cat without reference to his wisdom.1 It seems to me we’re in exactly that position in regard to any superior intelligence. [In the segment on communication and media, the narrator remarks that the verbal art is used in many ways.]

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Frye: Politics and advertising and so on are applied verbal arts. Literature is the pure verbal art, and then there are a great number of areas of verbal technology, like law and teaching and business and so on. Our mass media have a great deal to do with these applied technologies. [Later, the narrator comments that an educated imagination is able to distinguish between what is valuable and what is not.] Frye: Advertisers are very well aware that man participates in society through his imagination, and consequently advertising is addressed entirely to what you might call a passive imagination: that is, its statements are so outrageous that they stun and numb the reason. Then they slide into the mind on an unconscious level so that you accept them without realizing that you’ve done so; whereas everything to do with education has to do with making the imagination both active and a source of the individual’s freedom. [The question turns to politics and the prevalence of “image.”] Frye: Man makes up his mind on how to vote not on rational issues but on things like TV personalities, and on impressions about personalities and about issues and events that he’s picked up really through his imagination. * * * Man belongs to something before he is anything; that is, he’s a member of a society before he’s an individual, and consequently all your life long you exist in a certain context of other people. Communication is merely what makes that context possible. [In the segment on religion and its future, Frye’s voice is heard along with that of Virginia Dobson, a director of Christian education.] Narrator: What happens to religion as man discovers more about himself and the universe? Where are we now? Frye: I think we’re in a revolutionary time in religion. The church has been struggling along as a social institution, founded very largely on two things which are now visibly cracking up: one is the morality which is centred on sexual anxiety, and the other is a belief in individual survival in another world. Those traditional conceptions are very soon going to be in the ashcan. * * * Narrator: As man becomes more sophisticated in a scientific and technological world, what significance will the Bible have?

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Frye: It will be read increasingly as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, the way it always was traditionally read. It’s no good claiming that there’s some special virtue in believing something which is contradicted by the plainest evidence of history or science. To me the Bible is a single and definitive myth. * * * Narrator: In tomorrow’s world, will different religious beliefs grow together or further apart? Frye: Different religions have been growing more closely together. I think one can see that within Christianity, where the Roman Catholic Church is now Protestant to a degree that would have been unthinkable a couple of generations ago, while the Nonconformist churches have been Catholicized to a degree which would have horrified their grandparents. * * * It is the duty of humanity to kill whatever gods can die. The god that seems to me to be dead is the god “out there”; that is, the god of time and space, the first cause of the order of nature. That god is dead because he was never alive. The god of human life who is at the centre of Christianity is the god that man always tries to kill if he can ever catch him, but he’s also a god that refuses to die.

7 Style and Image in the Twentieth Century Broadcast 14 March 1967

From the tape in the CBC Radio Archives, reference no. 670314-2, transcribed by Monika Lee. This conversation with Professor Murray MacQuarrie on the subject of “style and image in the modern century” was broadcast on the CBC program Ideas, 14 March 1967, as part of a series on style. MacQuarrie was a member of the English department of the University of Waterloo. The immediate context for the discussion includes the Centennial of Canada’s Confederation; the ideas that Frye had been developing in his recent Whidden lectures at McMaster University (delivered in mid-January and aired over the CBC in the six weeks preceding this interview; subsequently published as The Modern Century); and the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in China.

MacQuarrie: Mr. Frye, you’ve just completed a series of six lectures in which you’ve been defining the difference between a closed mythology and an open mythology. A closed mythology, you said, is one which fills in all of the assumptions for the person who believes in that mythology, whereas an open mythology provides the individual with options, with various ways in which he can imagine himself in relation to the total society, in relation to religion, morality, the future, politics, his total world view, if you like. You implied—because these lectures were originally given in connection with the Centennial—that Canada’s particular destiny and glory was that we have the conditions in this country, more fortunately perhaps than other countries, for the arrival at an open mythology. * * * I wonder if we can expect this to survive, in the context of (a) different sections of Western culture, which are perhaps seeking after darker and more collective gods, and, (b), on the other hand, this great religion of progress which is coming out of Asia?

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Frye: It seems to me that the reason for the necessity of an open mythology is the same as the necessity for world peace, because the closed mythology is always, in the long run, closed for war. It’s got to have an enemy, and if there isn’t an enemy there, it’s got to invent one. With Marxist mythologies, you must have the inner enemy like Trotsky in Russia or the present civil war in China. You couldn’t have medieval civilization, ultimately, without a crusade, without cleaning up on the nasty old Saracens. The breakdown of an open mythology into a number of closed mythologies is really the spreading of a kind of sectarianism in society, which breaks down the whole cultural pattern. The necessity for an open mythology is not that it’s a luxury, but that you cannot have world peace without having what Tennyson called the “Parliament of man”—and Tennyson was not talking about the United Nations.1 MacQuarrie: One wonders sometimes whether the Western imagination has not failed in some particular way. There is a persistent desire for a closed mythology, for the return to what we now regard as the security of the Middle Ages, or any arbitrary point in history which different artists in our own time feel to have provided a comforting mythology. We turn to the church the way Eliot, for instance, became royalist and AngloCatholic. We wonder if it’s a sign of health that we can dispense with closed mythologies or whether it’s a sign of ill health, perhaps, that we want to return to them. What prospects does the open mythology afford people who feel their loneliness and anxiety in the face of what change and time are bringing? Frye: I think that the natural drift in all societies at any period in history is towards a closed mythology. People want to be, like the people in Eliot’s early Preludes, assured of certain certainties, and they also find it cosier to have an enemy, either intellectual or actual. Consequently, the preservation of an open society is not an easy thing. It’s a constant and organized struggle. It does give, to the artist and to the educator, a certain mission or function in society, because there are the two kinds of conflict. There are the conflicts of closed mythologies with each other, which produce only the kind of conflict that has to be done all over again, or there is the conflict between the open and the closed mythology, which is what Blake meant by “mental fight,”2 the work of the imagination that is really fighting for the freedom and the sanity of mankind. [MacQuarrie notes that in Canada we have just emerged from a period of closed

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mythology. Canada’s Protestant mythology had modulated into a myth of progress—the notion that we are proceeding towards a plateau in which we will all be happy and well fed, with a helicopter in every garage, but “It’s very difficult for people to believe that any more.” He asks Frye if we can be content with a relatively passive experience of history to replace the notion of progress?] Frye: The trouble with a belief in progress is that it’s a donkey’s carrot theory. It’s one thing to have hope. We’re told in the New Testament that hope is one of the great virtues. At the same time, we are also warned in the New Testament not to take thought for the morrow.3 The progressive ideal is something that drags us on into a hypothetical future and it’s always strongest during a war. Everybody says to us, as soon as a war begins, “Now, as soon as this war is over, then we’re going to abolish poverty and do all sorts of incredible things,” but the state of mind which this engenders is the state of mind of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. When your consciousness is thrown forward into the future, all that happens is that you drain the present moment of all significance and all meaning. It’s one thing to believe in God, but nobody can believe in Godot. He isn’t there. He will never come. I would say that the alternative to this kind of hope is a genuine hope, which I should locate in the present rather than in the future, and which takes a form of realization rather than an expectation. [MacQuarrie notes that this is not an easy thing for North Americans, who as middle-class people in the ruins of a Protestant culture have always taken thought for the morrow. As Calvinists we sought to lay up treasures in heaven. Now we have many anxieties about such matters as the population explosion, technology, and pollution: for instance, Canadians are said to be the world’s largest per capita purchasers of life insurance. McQuarrie suggests that such tension and anxiety may be congenital, and may have brought about some of our courage and decency as well as less desirable qualities.] Frye: Ah yes, but that kind of anxiety is the anxiety that seeks to be overcome in the present moment. The kind of religion which says that your real life begins as soon as your life is over is not a type of religion that has very much appeal today. The important thing is not whether you live after death but whether you ever come alive during life. The sense of overcoming anxiety by what I call realization, letting your light shine— the ability of the characters in Waiting for Godot to move, and tell Godot to go to the devil, which is where he is anyway, and start to live—I think

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that that is the only way in which anxiety can be overcome. It can never be overcome as long as you say, As soon as this is out of the way, then we will do all sorts of things. [MacQuarrie remarks that in the East people took this anxiety, combined it with Western eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political theory, and turned it into a religion of progress, in which present pleasure is sacrificed for the future wellbeing of humanity. For example, in China at the current time, it appears that the people winning out are those around Mao who believe in present suffering for the benefit of future paradise. He comments that it will be hard for the West to arrive at an open mythology when there is powerful closed mythology operating in the rest of the world.] Frye: I think that that’s true. The closed mythology always seems to be much more efficient and effective. That was true even of the Nazi closed myth, but I suspect that what Communism, where it’s established, really depends on is a number of very sincere and dedicated Communists. If you talked to them, they would say that what gave their lives meaning was not the notion that they would be making society better for their great grandchildren, but that they were right now engaged in history and in a real historical process, that they were busy building socialism or transforming their society. Before any religious movement—and this really is, in this context, a religious movement—before any religious movement can actually achieve any really great dignity and influence and transforming power in society, it has to overcome this sense of expectation. We feel that Russian Communism is more mature than Chinese Communism because it has outgrown the notion that Communism is going to be brought about all over the world next Tuesday. They have survived the disappointment of the immediate world-transforming revolution and have lived in the process. Christianity, similarly, had to outgrow the notion that the end of the world was going to come in the next week or so, and after it had outgrown it, it settled down to being a way of life, rather than a way of postponing life. MacQuarrie: It seems to me, Mr. Frye, that what we feel about the future is going to be reflected in our cultural experiences in a very intimate way. We look to our writers or playwrights or film directors for imaginative models of society, either as an ideal or as a present reality, and I wonder what kind of imaginative models we’re getting. Are we getting the kind of comprehensive and encyclopedic view that we get in a work like The

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Divine Comedy, are we getting fragmented ones, are we getting exclusively infernos like 1984 or Brave New World, or is there some possibility of the Paradiso emerging from the modern imaginative experience? Frye: One difficulty that we are in, in the twentieth century, is that it is an ironic age, and that we derive our sense of vision from contemporary artists negatively. It’s the great achievement of Beckett and William Golding and the great film makers, Pinter and so on, to put in front of us a hideous or grotesque world, and we react against that with our sense of normality, which we are assumed to have. In general, it seems to me that the opposite of draining your present moment of significance by throwing it on the future is to fill one’s present life with the past. Education has an imaginatively transforming power of this kind, and I should put in the centre of the whole educational process the whole operation that is described as “dialogue” in the current highbrow slang. If a person is a Protestant, say, his natural tendency is to think of Catholics as those people over there, or for them both to think of Communists, who don’t believe in a God at all, as those people over there. The kind of human contact which enables people with differing versions of an open mythology to come together, to leave without having really changed their beliefs, but having gained a new insight into what they actually do believe by a recognition of the intellectual honesty and human decency of the person they’re talking to: it seems to me that these are the positive ways in which one continues to expand and to clarify one’s own necessarily very limited vision. The closed myth, in short, defines the enemy, and the open myth defines the friend or the neighbour. MacQuarrie: We seem to respect in this culture, however, art which has a message for us. We seem to demand, perhaps more than anything, that a film or a poem or a novel will have some kind of paraphrasable philosophical content. It must have a message, it must give us a moral view of the world in some way, and again this seems to reflect our anxiety. * * * Frye: Yes, well, this is how the demand works: for the artist to translate what he has to say into the clichés and stock responses that people already have. It seems to me that genuine art always appeals on its own terms. But, of course, genuine art is not always a fantasy, and one doesn’t necessarily have to develop guilt feelings about entering a world of escape, which is what bedevils a great deal of our response to the arts. One shouldn’t underestimate the very positive and transforming power

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of an ironic vision. I’m told that one of the most effective performances of Waiting for Godot anywhere was at the San Quentin prison in San Francisco. The audience were prisoners, and so they knew what that play was all about with an intensity that might not have been available to people who imagined that they were not being imprisoned. MacQuarrie: You spoke of dialogue as providing an image of the open society and the open mythology, and an image of hope. Here I go again perhaps being the critical and negative voice: doesn’t the dialogue between religious denominations mean that there are no longer any significant religious issues? Frye: It means that significant religious issues are approached in a different way, not as dogmatic structures, which, by their very nature, are sealed off against all other structures, but as being derived from what I have been calling “the Parliament of man,” the area of free discussion. The fact about modern times is that the imagination, the sense of what I have been calling a mythology, is the primary thing which man engages in society with, and his beliefs and his convictions, the axioms of his conduct and so on, are subordinated to that and are liberalized and made more flexible by it. MacQuarrie: I suppose emotionally I’m a Tory in that I think that the sense of identity and sense of completeness you derive from existing within a dogmatic structure are a more benevolent and therapeutic thing than the experience of simply existing in an open field of dialogue—shall we say in a world now where there is nothing to do but communicate and where the content of communication is largely disappearing. That’s a reactionary view: I suppose like many critics and academics the reactionism is an occupational hazard, isn’t it? Frye: Yes. Well, it’s partly that this McLuhan world, where the medium is the message, means that, when communication forms a total environment, nothing is really being communicated. What there is is really just an ambience of noise. Out of that noise a single, genuine effort at communication—that is, something intelligible being said by A to B—cuts across with a kind of vividness which is perhaps unparalleled in history. The role of genuine communication becomes much more obvious and immediate once this tremendous roaring environment of false communication has been set up by the mass media. When I speak of an open mythology, I am not saying that we’ve entered a civilization which is

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completely relative and where there can be no standards and no doctrines and no real beliefs or convictions any more. That seems to me to be nonsense. That’s the exact opposite of what I’m talking about. There is no difference between an open mythology and a closed one except in the difference that society makes of it. The real way to strengthen one’s beliefs and convictions and to make the axioms of one’s belief not merely a professed creed, but the real principles underlying one’s conduct, is to regard them as under the judgment of dialogue and “the Parliament of man,” as still something that can always be liberalized, made flexible, and filled with the love and respect for other people which the opensidedness of the myth makes possible.

8 Dix Ans avant la Néo-critique Conducted late April 1967

From “Northrop Frye: Dix Ans avant la Néo-critique,” Le Devoir (Montreal), 3 June 1967, 13; title is that of Le Devoir. Frye was interviewed in Toronto by Naïm Kattan, literary critic for the Montreal daily newspaper, later a distinguished writer, professor, and official of the Canada Council. Dated by correspondence with Kattan in NFF, 1988, box 40, file 17. The interview also appeared as “Entretien: ‘Je ne souhaite pas avoir de disciples. Je voudrais être utile,’” in Le Monde, 25 October 1967, supplement, iv. In fact Kattan says that it was Le Monde (a prominent Paris newspaper) that requested the interview; however, the version in Le Devoir is more detailed.1 Newspapertype headings in this piece have been omitted and the names of the speakers added.

[Kattan begins by explaining that “Frye me reçoit dans son bureau, dans l’un des nouveaux édifices qui continuellement s’ajoutent au campus torontois. Je lui fais part des reproches qu’on n’a cessé de lui faire depuis dix ans. Sa vision ‘anatomique’ de la critique ne risque-t-elle pas de figer la littérature, d’en faire un corps inanimé que l’on dissèque froidement? N’est-ce pas la négation de la démarche et de l’écrivain et du critique? La réponse de Frye est toute prête.”] Frye: Il est essentiel de distinguer entre l’expérience littéraire et la critique. Celle-ci a pour but de comprendre la littérature en tant que fond de connaissance. Une telle approche ne peut menacer la littérature. On n’a jamais dit que la linguistique a tué le langage. Le critique tente d’élaborer une théorie sur la littérature, sur l’expérience littéraire. Celle-ci est inépuisable et la critique est comparativement bien plus limitée. Il y a deux manières de lire un livre: le lecteur peut vouloir participer à une

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expérience littéraire: il peut nous communiquer ses impressions, mais il ne fait pas oeuvre de critique. Par contre, le critique examine un poème ou un roman comme un médecin examine un patient. Pour le médecin, le patient est un corps, et non pas un ami. De même, le critique n’établit pas avec l’auteur un rapport de dialogue. Il s’agit là d’une convention qu’il faut accepter dans toute élaboration conceptuelle. [Kattan explains that “Je fais rapidement état à M. Frye des controverses et des polémiques qui opposent les tenants de la critique traditionelle et ceux de la nouvelle critique en France, ainsi que les débats entre les chefs de file de l’ancienne nouvelle critique et de la nouvelle nouvelle critique.2 M. Frye, qui lit pourtant le français, ne connait pas les oeuvres des critiques français, même si ceux-ci reprennent certaines de ses thèses, inconsciemment sans doute, avec dix ans de retard. Le seul nom qu’il me cite est celui de Bachelard . . . . Il ne sait pas si l’intentionnalité dont parle la nouvelle critique a un sens qui se rapproche de celui de l’acte intentionnel indiqué dans son oeuvre.”3] Frye: J’explique la structure par la cause formelle d’Aristote. Le critique accepte comme un axiome que l’intention de l’écrivain s’exprime dans son oeuvre et en est la motivation première. Il y a deux genres de rapport de structure dans chaque oeuvre littéraire: le premier est l’ordre interne, qui implique tous les détails dans leur rapport avec l’ensemble. Il existe un autre ordre de rapport, un ordre extérieur; quand on jette une vue d’ensemble sur la littérature, on s’aperçoit que les mêmes thèmes reviennent: ce sont les mythes et les archétypes qui donnent, en quelque sorte, son intentionnalité à l’expérience littéraire. C’est cela que j’ai essayé de démontrer dans l’Anatomie de la critique. Kattan: Vous dites, dans l’Anatomie de la critique, qu’il importe de libérer la littérature de l’histoire. Frye: Ce que je veux dire en fait c’est qu’il faut distinguer l’histoire de la littérature de la critique littéraire. Dans chaque oeuvre, on peut distinguer deux dimensions: celle qui nous permet de déceler le sens d’une oeuvre telle qu’elle s’inscrit dans un moment précis de l’histoire; et celle qui explique le sens de l’oeuvre dans les différentes périodes subséquentes. Le sens de l’oeuvre se développe à travers les âges. Toute théorie de la littérature doit englober les deux dimensions. Kattan: Pensez-vous que la langue représente une structure autonome? Frye: Chaque poète est unique, mais l’individualité d’une oeuvre ne suf-

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fit pas au critique, car si un poète est différent de tous les autres, il ressemble aussi à tous les autres; le poème est intraduisible, mais il est incompréhensible du point de vue du critique s’il n’est pas relié à la totalité de la littérature. Ainsi, les critiques tentent de libérer le poème non seulement de l’histoire, mais aussi de la langue et de l’auteur individuel. Kattan: Quand vous parlez de la littérature dans son ensemble, vous ne voulez pas dire uniquement la littérature anglaise. Frye: Certes pas. C’est cette littérature qui est ma spécialité, et là encore pour la comprendre, je dois cheminer dans d’autres avenues. Pour étudier l’oeuvre de Milton, il faut avoir une idée précise de la littérature grecque ou latine, et si l’on ne connaît pas la littérature italienne, il est difficile d’aborder les écrits de Spencer. Kattan: N’avez-vous pas essayé d’examiner des oeuvres littéraires françaises ou autres à partir de votre théorie? Frye: Je cite fréquemment Valéry, Mallarmé, et Rimbaud. Je dois dire que je me sens beaucoup plus près de Mallarmé que de Valéry. Kattan: Dans son Roman Historique, Georg Lukács décèle des correspondances entre les périodes historiques et les genres littéraires. Frye: Il y a des thèmes qui reviennent dans la littérature à des périodes très diverses, et ce serait avoir une vision irréelle de la littérature que de vouloir identifier une oeuvre par la période où elle est née. Kattan: Vous dites dans votre livre que la culture élimine toutes les classes [AC, 347–8/323]. Que pensez-vous de la culture de masse? Frye: Dans ma conception de la culture, je suis influencé par Matthew Arnold, qui affirmait que la culture conduit à la société sans classes.4 Cette attitude me semble aussi vraie aujourd’hui qu’elle le fut hier pour Arnold. Il y a deux attitudes opposées envers les arts: une attitude active et une attitude passive. L’attitude active permet une réaction aux arts et une utilisation des arts, tandis que l’attitude passive tend à provoquer les réactions et à les activer par la propagande et la publicité. La révolution technologique a augmenté la puissance des deux attitudes. Kattan: Votre collègue à l’université de Toronto, Marshall McLuhan, accorde une grande importance aux techniques nouvelles de communication.

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Frye: Je pense que McLuhan ne distingue pas suffisamment entre l’attitude active et l’attitude passive, entre les possibilités nouvelles que la technique nous offre et les dangers qu’elle suscite. Le culte de McLuhan prend son point de départ dans l’illusion du progrès. Il donne l’impression que les médias donneront naissance à une nouvelle civilisation. Voilà qui n’est point prouvé. Tout dépendra de la manière dont la société fera usage de ces médias. Kattan: Que pensez-vous des critiques actuels? Frye: Plusieurs personnes établissent un parallèle entre mon oeuvre et celle d’autres critiques. Ce parallélisme n’est pas toujours fondé. On prend pour acquis maintenant certaines idées qui, voici dix ans, lors de la publication de l’Anatomie de la critique, paraissaient révolutionnaires. Je ne souhaite pas avoir des disciples. Je voudrais être utile. Beaucoup de critiques utilisent ma théorie des archétypes. Certains, comme Norman Brown, leur donnent un sens psychologique: d’autres, comme Chomsky, leur donnent une application en linguistique.5 Les écrits de ce dernier me dépassent. Certes, les rapports entre la littérature et la psychologie et l’anthropologie m’interessent, mais le sujet principal, pour moi, c’est la littérature. L’oeuvre théorique que je tenterai d’écrire pour faire suite à l’Anatomie de la critique cherchera à définir ce sujet total qui englobera non seulement la littérature, mais aussi la philosophie, la religion, et l’anthropologie.6 Je n’ai pas encore de titre, ni de définition exacts. C’est à partir du moment où je pourrai délimiter le champ d’étude que je pourrai donner un titre à l’ouvrage. Ce champ est existentiel, mais j’essaierai de l’étudier scientifiquement. Il existe une différence entre la pensée poétique et la pensée conceptuelle. Je voudrais découvrir dans quelle mesure le mythe est à la base de la pensée poétique. [Kattan explains that “Northrop Frye ne s’est pas occupé que de la théorie littéraire et de ses applications dans les grandes oeuvres de la littérature anglaise. Il s’est occupé de la littérature contemporaine de son pays. Les seules oeuvres actuelles qu’il a commentées sont celles de ces compatriotes. Je lui demande s’il a essayé d’appliquer sa théorie à la littérature canadienne actuelle.”] Frye: Il faut être flexible. Quand j’ai écrit sur les poètes canadiens je les abordais comme si le lecteur n’a pas d’autres poésies à lire. Il y a un autre aspect à mon interêt pour la littérature canadienne. La poésie nous permet de comprendre notre environnement. Il ne faut pas appliquer à la littérature actuelle une échelle de valeur qui lui soit extérieure. Il ne faut

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pas la comparer avec la poésie d’un autre pays. Comme vous savez, je ne crois pas à l’application d’une échelle de valeurs quelconque en littérature. J’essaie seulement de comprendre la littérature. D’ailleurs, dès que l’on aborde la littérature contemporaine, il faut prendre pour acquis que l’on ne puisse distinguer ce qui est grand et durable de ce qui ne l’est pas. Tout ce que l’on peut choisir, ce sont les oeuvres qui nous paraissent plus sérieuses que les autres. Kattan: Avez-vous lu des écrivains canadiens français? Frye: Oui, bien sûr, je connais surtout Saint-Denis Garneau et Anne Hébert.7 Je connais bien moins les romanciers aussi bien anglais que français. Je trouve que les romans canadiens ne sont pas bien écrits. Kattan: Pourtant, vous ne croyez pas que l’on puisse dire qu’une oeuvre soit bien ou mal écrite. Frye: Vous avez raison. Ce que je veux dire, c’est que je ne découvre pas, dans le roman canadien, une conviction, une puissance. Certes, on peut trouver de grands passages dans les romans de Dickens et de Balzac écrits sans soin; et pourtant, ce sont des romanciers puissants. Je me sens plus à l’aise d’ailleurs avec les poètes.

9 B.K. Sandwell Broadcast 25 July 1967

From a tape in the CBC Radio Archives (reference no. 670725-12), transcribed by Monika Lee. Frye comments on Saturday Night as part of a profile of Sandwell, managing editor of the magazine, 1932–51. Broadcast on the CBC series Tuesday Night, 25 July 1967, on a program written by Allan Anderson and produced by James Anderson.

Frye: Saturday Night projected itself as a kind of lighthouse of civilization in a world which is full either of howling Marxists or of howling fascists. It was an earnest, perspiring world which had a great sense of ideas as weapons, as things to be used in some kind of dialectical battle, and Sandwell projected the image of an economy and an attitude towards civilization which was clear of all this kind of thing. I think that that feeling really attracted a good deal of loyalty, which was not so much a personal loyalty to Sandwell as an enthusiasm for the kind of tone which his magazine seemed to symbolize. Saturday Night, in its Sandwell days, was a kind of manifestation of a cultural period, rather than a former of it. Saturday Night had this sense that it was for the reader, that it would put him in a kind of urbane and intimate relationship with the important cultural phenomena around him; that is, it had something, in its own way, of the Reader’s Digest tack of giving him a kind of cross-section of everything that he wanted to know about. At the same time, Saturday Night didn’t bother him. It didn’t make him feel like he ought to get out and join parades or sign petitions or get into demonstrations or bread lines or that kind of thing. I think that it did attain a certain relationship to the culture of its day, which it is very hard for any periodical to attain now. I think that this is a time when a periodical of any sort, the more serious the worse really, has a very hard struggle to survive.

10 Engagement and Detachment Filmed 1968

An interview transcribed from the soundtrack of the film Exchange #2, produced by the Metropolitan Educational Television Association of Toronto, and filmed by the York University Television Centre in 1968. From the transcription by Robert D. Denham in WGS, 41–50, where the date is given and title assigned. The interviewers were Roby Kidd, chair of the Department of Adult Education at OISE, 1966–82, and D.M. Smyth, dean of Atkinson College, the adult education college of York University, Toronto, 1964–70.

Kidd: Critics are seldom popular. I expect you remember that Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “Nature, when she invented and manufactured and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.”1 But Canada has at least one critic who has won and deserved the admiration of writers and readers and students of all ages. Northrop Frye, you yourself have been an author and an editor and a theologian and a college administrator and a social reformer. One time—in the Massey Lectures—you introduced yourself by saying, “For the past twenty-five years I have been teaching and studying English literature” [EI, 1; EICT, 437]. I’ve always felt that it was because you continued to study as well as teach that you’ve had the influence you’ve had on students and on those who read you. Frye: Well, I think that’s true, because study and teaching are really two sides of the same coin. The teacher who doesn’t keep up with the changes in his subject, which are, of course, always revolutionary changes in every discipline, is going to become a pretty humdrum teacher. And a person who is locked into his subject and is not commu-

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nicating it to other people verbally and practically is going to disappear into a kind of vacuum. Kidd: It must be a real struggle to keep up with your own work. How do you find time for the demands on you as an editor and writer, as well as a teacher? Frye: It’s very difficult to say. My approach to time is a little furtive. It’s like a squirrel burying nuts. I find that odd moments—and there are a surprising number of odd moments during the day—are times when one can do bits and pieces of writing. I think there is some kind of recording machine that just keeps turning around all the time. One can work in bits and pieces of time, I think. Kidd: Have you always been able to do this? Or did you learn how to do it? Frye: I think I learned how to do it, but I wasn’t altogether conscious of doing so. It was just something forced on me by the general situation. In teaching, I did definitely make up my mind in the beginning that I would lecture without notes, that the only notes I would take would be after the lecture and not before. Smyth: So you forced yourself to learn to teach by this process? Frye: I forced myself to learn how to teach what I felt was my own way, that is, making it something in which ideas would emerge either from me or from the students. Kidd: You could have had several careers, of course. How did you happen to choose teaching as your main effort? Frye: I’m not sure I did choose it. I think it chose me. If I had chosen, I would have perhaps gone into a number of other things that I would have been less fitted for. I think it’s very good for people, especially young people, that their power of choice is so limited. Kidd: That’s not an entirely conventional notion these days. Frye: No, but there is such a thing as a vocation, I think. Smyth: I wonder if I might turn to the question of how one learns to criticize. It seems to me that in the world we live in we criticize rather freely, but we don’t often do it intelligently. How does one learn to criticize intelligently?

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Frye: One of the first things you do is forget about all of the traditional metaphors about the critic. The critic is supposed to be the judge of literature. He’s supposed to sit up there, and people like Shakespeare and Milton are way down there in the prisoner’s box. And finally you put your black hat on and make your judgment. I think the sooner one forgets about this judicial aspect of criticism the better. I’ve never tried to judge authors. I’ve only tried to understand them. Smyth: So learning how to criticize is really the process of trying to understand what a person has to say? Frye: Yes, and trying to understand more generally what it is that literature is trying to say to the world. The poet himself doesn’t know this. Kidd: Then to the extent that this is true, the critic really is a teacher. The processes are very similar. Frye: Oh, yes, they are. I think that with literature they are really closer together than they are in most disciplines. Smyth: Do you think that the critic is really conscious of his role in the areas of popular culture and political events? I’m thinking of the people who comment on political events—the pundits. Is it sufficient for them to learn how to criticize by just criticizing? Frye: Well, of course, they have a special problem. Their criticism is always connected with crisis. That is, there is always a specific event which has happened now and they have to pronounce on it now. In my type of criticism, even if I’m dealing with a current novel or poem, I’m dealing with it against the permanent background of the whole tradition and heritage of literature. Kidd: It’s very interesting about you that you have strong views about present social developments and events. You’ve taken part in things. And yet some conventional notion of you might be that you were sitting back as a dispassionate observer only. What’s the relevance of your interest in literature with the present? How is it relevant? Frye: In the first place, I would say that any sane person has to conduct his life with a mixture of detachment and engagement. If he’s wholly engaged, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. If he’s wholly detached, he’s not there. But the subject I am concerned with is different from the sciences in that science, it seems to me, tries to avoid being controversial

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because it’s always appealing to verification, whereas literature, religion, philosophy, political science, and so on are the discussable subjects. They are the subjects where there are no fixed standards of verification. And they are also the subjects of what the existential people call concern. It’s because I am professionally engaged with the study of concern in society that I reflect some of that concern myself. Kidd: So that nothing might be more relevant to the present situation of change than a disciplined approach to something that requires judgment? Frye: Yes, and that has a long memory. Smyth: What about other critics who are less disciplined? I’m thinking of Mailer. Frye: But Mailer is not a critic. He’s a novelist. He has a creative mind. When he speaks in the role of the critic, he reflects the confusions that a person who is not really a critic gets into. I think that we’ve found over and over again in the history of literature that some of the world’s greatest poets have also been the most confused people in their reaction to the current political scene. The reason is that they are concerned with so fundamentally different a job that they really shouldn’t be asked to pronounce in these areas. Kidd: If you look at the social morality of the great poets, you do find them in all shades of the political spectrum. Frye: Yes. When I was a student during the Depression, there was a great deal of Marxist controversy on the university campus. I rather distrusted Marxism because it was so obvious that literature was talking about something else. It was quite possible for the people I most admired, like T.S. Eliot and Yeats and Pound, to be people of the most preposterous social views. Kidd: Do you find that the poetry of today illuminates the present condition we’re in? Frye: Poetry is always extremely illuminating of the present situation to the critic who knows something about the context of poetry and who doesn’t confuse it with discursive writing, who knows how to allow for its imaginative structure.

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Kidd: One of the notions that interests some of us very much these days is that of continuous learning—the lifelong, integrated experience of growth and development. If this is a real need, we will have to begin to think of the development of a curriculum over a time span—not just in pieces. I suppose that in mathematics, to some extent, and in the field of literature there is the first consistent approach to the longitudinal curriculum or to what some people call the spiral curriculum. I’d be interested in your views about this and how you would see this developing in English literature from early stages to later stages. Frye: How it’s developing in English literature? Or do you mean as an educational process in the university? Kidd: I mean both. Is there anything in the notion, first of all, that we ought to be seeing the curriculum in its long dimensions as well as what might be done in a given week or month? And, second, how do you go about developing an expanding notion of English literature, starting in the early ages and going on? Frye: Oh, yes, I see. Well, it seems to me obvious that education is a womb-to-tomb activity, and that the person who isn’t educating himself is obviously dead. If one is forced, whether he wants to or not, to keep educating himself as long as he’s alive, then obviously it’s an advantage for him to be educating himself in a certain direction. There is something, I think, repetitive about literature, because literature doesn’t develop or progress towards the future in the way that a science does. It fixes itself on the classic, which always remains the classic. Consequently, what you get in the study of literature is a repeated series of understandings. That is, the understanding that you get of Macbeth in grade 9 or 10 is clearly not what you’d get in your fifties. Kidd: In the first case, it could be melodrama, even, and action. And later on it might be an understanding of character, which could only come from someone who’d experienced these very things. Frye: And who had a larger background of experience to fit it into. Kidd: Is it true that you’ve said that you would start with the Bible in a curriculum on English literature? Frye: Yes, it is true. I would say that literature really inherits a mythology, that it really is concerned with certain shaping structures or forms

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which are myths and which descend from myths. By “myth” I mean something that gives shape to a story, a fiction. I don’t mean something that is not true. And that’s why I would speak of Biblical mythology. The Bible and the Classical myths are the basis of our literary heritage in that sense. I think that there has been a tendency to introduce the study of mythology around grade 9 in our schools, which is a good point to introduce it. But, of course, the place to start reading and listening to mythical stories in the Classics and the Bible is much closer to grade 1 or 2, or in the home before that. Kidd: Do you think the sequences need to be ordered? Or can they be left to chance or to the genius of the teacher or the interests and concerns of the students? Frye: I think there’s always a danger in overplanning any curriculum and not leaving room for something spontaneous to emerge. At the same time, it’s obvious that there does need to be a considerable amount of guidance for people even up to the end of their first degree in university. With all of the good will in the world, a student needs a good deal of guiding and directing in his reading. But, of course, the older and more mature one is the more random one’s reading can be. Smyth: I wonder if I might pose a question in a different but related field. Given the enormously increasing amount of information which is coming to each individual from the moment of birth, what kinds of tools— intellectual tools—do you think individuals need to develop in our society that perhaps were not necessary in other kinds of societies? I’m thinking, for instance, of the ancient tools of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. How do we develop these tools in relation to the new media? Frye: I think that the techniques in the study of literature are fairly conservative ones. I don’t see them as being very radically altered by the new kinds of media. It seems to me there has to be periodically a kind of re-emphasizing of the traditional reading and writing functions. That is, things like Dick-and-Jane readers with their Gertrude Stein repetitiveness and their tendency to a kind of phony, pumped-up emotionalism, like “See the ball” and “Run, Jim, run,” and so forth, train you very expertly not to read a book but to read the advertising in the subways, because it’s geared exactly to that kind of rhetoric. It seems to me that a training in rhetoric which, among other things, explains to the student something about the rhetorical devices of the mass media—of advertis-

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ing, of propaganda and newspapers, and so on—would have this reemphasizing effect. Smyth: Do you think that in the field of education our approach to rhetoric or rhetorical skills is sufficiently sophisticated for people to understand the subtleties of modern forms of communication? Frye: They could be sophisticated and subtle enough—yes. I would strongly agree with Marshall McLuhan, who is saying very different things from what a lot of people think he’s saying, when he says that one of the central duties of education is to provide “civil defence against media fallout.” That’s his phrase.2 Kidd: Do you find theatre and cinema useful in relation to courses in literature? Frye: There is no question about the film, because that is a literary art in itself, and it has a power of expressing symbolism that I think is unmatched by any other form in the history of mankind. Smyth: Even poetry? Frye: Even poetry, yes, because of the combination of the visual and audible symbol. Kidd: There’s much talk these days about creativity, about imagination. What is the place of the imagination in a curriculum of a university? Frye: The basis of it is the recognition of the fact that man lives in two worlds. There’s the world that’s around him, the objective world, and there’s the world that he’s trying to build. The imagination is the building power. It’s the power that’s most directly concerned with man’s trying to build the kind of world that he wants to live in. The function of training in literature is to define something of the scope of the imagination, the poet being the person professionally concerned with the imaginative model, with the ideal at one pole and irony at the other. Kidd: Do you see imagination being fostered in other disciplines as well, though not necessarily in the same way? Frye: I think that imagination comes into all the disciplines. I doubt very much that there’s any psychological difference between the artist and the scientist. But literature, it seems to me, has a peculiar relevance to the role of the imagination.

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Smyth: We’ve talked of power and creativity, and I wonder if we can help students to learn about power and creativity in more fruitful ways than we’re doing now. I think, for instance, of the curriculum of the medieval university, which was substantially different in many ways from the modern curriculum. Given the change we’re experiencing in this century, I wonder whether we might teach people about creativity and power in different ways. Frye: There are two things that occur to me in that connection. In the first place, it seems to me obvious that the two instruments man has for transforming his environment are words and numbers, so that literature and mathematics become pretty central disciplines—the one in the subjects of concern, the other in the sciences. You spoke of the medieval university, and, of course, the seven liberal arts were divided on precisely that basis. You had the trivium, which were the literary arts, and the quadrivium, which were the mathematical ones. At the same time, it seems to me that a student learns most about creativity when his attention is least focused on it. There is a danger in making the student too self-conscious about his own creative processes. Kidd: Like learning about brotherhood, even. If you’re so conscious about your relationship with someone, this may even lead to an estrangement. Frye: Yes, there is a law of diminishing returns there. I notice it with students who have got themselves into the position of affecting a kind of contempt for facts, or what they call “this information thing,” and studying principles instead. But, of course, principles are simply ways of ordering facts. An appetite for facts is a sign of educational good digestion. If you despise facts, you have educational dyspepsia. Keeping the student’s mind directed outward is the important thing. Kidd: You mentioned how you started in your classroom in the early days. Have you changed your practice as a teacher very much? Frye: I haven’t changed my practice fundamentally, except that I have got more cautious and prudent with advancing years. When I think of some of the things I got away with as a young man, I shudder. Smyth: What about your learning patterns? I understand that as we grow older we lose so many neurons every day. I wonder how you’ve been able to continue gaining the power to learn.

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Frye: Well, I’m not sure that I have. But, of course, all disciplines, as I said earlier, change very radically in the course of time, and you have to keep up with those changes. One of the reasons for the university’s obsession with the productive scholar is that the productive scholar has solved the problem of retraining. He retrains himself by the books he writes. I don’t know that he gets any more neurons, but he probably spreads them around in larger quantities. Smyth: Well, I think that what you have to have is the stimulating learning environment that the scholar has. This is what saves him in the final analysis. Kidd: Yes, and this is what we must provide for all people now. But how do we get this environment now, not just for professors but for everyone? Smyth: One of the concerns I have is about this notion of retraining, as if the mind of a person was like an old tire that you could retread. I wonder if we don’t really have to start with thinking about the minds of young people and how we should be approaching them and then how we should be developing them for a lifetime of learning. Have we made an error in saying that the prime candidate for education is the child rather than the adult? Frye: Certainly there’s no question of the fact that education is equally relevant to a person at all stages of his life. For that reason, I think that the university is bound to change its relation to the community. It can’t go on being that place which you walk into and walk out of again. It’s got to be in the middle of the community. People have got to keep coming back to it constantly, dropping in and out of it, and not simply coming to alumni reunions once every fifteen years with the expression of regret that now they don’t seem to use their minds any more. Kidd: What kind of mechanism do you think might be used to change the university from its present form into this new kind of form? Frye: I have no definite answer to that, except I think the growth of leisure time and the fact that what a person earns his living at gets more and more to be a small part of his life, rather than the whole of his life, are bound to suggest mechanisms of various kinds. That is, there is bound to be an enormously increased production of what we would now think of as leisure-time activities. And those will all involve the educational insti-

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tutions—not only the university, but the church and the galleries and the museums and so on. Smyth: But isn’t this one of the great areas of weakness, especially in North America? In an article I read recently, David Riesman pointed out that there is not one centre for the study of leisure in North America. Frye: I’m not surprised. I think that, again, it’s so big a problem that people don’t dare look it in the face.

11 L’Anti-McLuhan Conducted 14 November 1968

From Le Devoir, 23 November 1968, 11; title is that of Le Devoir. The interviewer, as in no. 8, was Naïm Kattan; the interview was dated by his correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 40, file 17. The occasion for this interview was the appearance of the first French translation of one of Frye’s works. The Modern Century (1967) had just been published as Le siècle de l’innovation: essai, trans. François Rinfret (Montreal: Éditions H.M.H., 1968).

Kattan: Comme votre livre l’Anatomie de la critique l’indique, vous êtes un anatomiste de la littérature, vous examinez les oeuvres comme un médecin examine un corps. Quel rapport établissez-vous entre la littérature et la réalité, la littérature et la vie? Frye: Si l’on prend comme point de départ la vie, la littérature nous apparaît comme un exercice mineur, et pourtant la littérature est plus que la vie; c’est la vie de l’imagination, pas la vie, elle l’englobe, elle l’avale. Kattan: Existe-t-il cependant un rapport significatif entre la littérature et la vie? Frye: Il existe deux mondes: le premier est objectif et c’est à la science de le révéler, l’analyser, le découvrir. Mais il y a un autre monde, celui que l’homme tente de bâtir lui-même. La mythologie nous fournit les clés de ce monde, et quand je parle de mythologie j’englobe tout à la fois la religion, la psychologie, la sociologie, l’ensemble des sciences humaines. J’ajoute que la littérature se trouve au centre de ce monde que l’homme essaie d’édifier.

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Kattan: Pensez-vous que l’écrivain se rend compte qu’il est le constructeur d’un monde? Frye: Oui, sans doute, quoique la conscience qu’il a de sa démarche soit très souvent instinctive et parfois incohérente. Le critique a pour rôle de faire sentir au poète l’importance de son oeuvre. Il y a un malentendu, bien sûr, entre le poète et le critique puisque le premier croit que le critique est le porte-parole du public. Le critique ne dit pas à l’écrivain comment écrire, mais lui donne une idée de l’importance de son travail. Kattan: La critique selon vous peut-elle être, par conséquent, un acte de création? Frye: Absolument, mais non de la même manière qu’en ce qui concerne la poésie. Le critique parle de la littérature que le poète produit. Kattan: On accuse souvent le critique d’être un parasite. Frye: Bien entendu, cela est injuste. A mon avis le rôle de la critique n’est pas de commenter la littérature, mais d’établir un cadre cohérent dans lequel on peut situer la fonction de la littérature dans la société. Ainsi, il existe des personnages qui font l’histoire, mais il existe aussi des historiens qui les expliquent, les situent, et les jugent. En d’autres termes, la critique situe la littérature dans un système conceptuel. Kattan: Existe-t-il par conséquent une fonction sociale de la littérature? Frye: Le poète articule les mythes par lesquels l’homme exprime son désir d’édifier son propre monde. Les psychologues, les sociologues se penchent sur ces mythes, les traduisent en leurs propres termes. Le critique explique comment la littérature constitue le point central, le foyer de la mythologie par laquelle l’homme tente de construire un monde, ou d’éviter un monde qui est construit. Kattan: Vous parlez uniquement des poètes. Ne considérez-vous pas que le roman, par exemple, fait partie de la littérature? Frye: Je ne fais pas de distinction entre poésie et roman. Je pense à la poésie en tant que forme concentrée de la littérature, et c’est une forme plus facile à appréhender quand il s’agit d’une mythologie. Je reviens à Aristote qui a fait la remarque: Il n’existe pas un mot pour le travail littéraire.1 Le poème me semble un mot court et adéquat. Kattan: Quand j’ai lu vos essais sur Shakespeare2 il m’a semblé que les

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comédies et les tragédies que vous analysiez n’étaient qu’un prétexte pour exprimer une vision du monde qui est la vôtre. Ainsi vous élaborez une oeuvre personelle à travers celle de Shakespeare. Frye: Chaque oeuvre littéraire se situe entre deux pôles: la signification qu’elle avait à l’époque où elle fut publiée et sa signification pour nous aujourd’hui. Bien sûr, chaque oeuvre importante possède une dimension qui demeure constante à travers les âges. Prenons encore une fois l’exemple de Shakespeare. Johnson en a parlé au dix-huitième siècle, Coleridge au dix-neuvième et je poursuis leur tradition au vingtième siècle. J’appartiens à un monde qu’ils ont connu et qu’ils ont exploré. Mais chaque période donne à l’écrivain de nouvelles ressources de communication. Shakespeare ne comprendrait sans doute pas la fascination qu’il exerce sur nous, mais cela n’a pas beaucoup d’importance. Je n’éprouve pas quant à moi le besoin d’écrire de la poésie. Au dixhuitième et au dix-neuvième siècles l’écrivain était généralement un essayiste et un poète. Au vingtième siècle il se trouve à l’université comme professeur. Écrire la poésie est un besoin, une impulsion inexplicable que seule la production de la poésie peut satisfaire. Par ailleurs, je ne pense pas qu’il me soit nécessaire d’écrire de la poésie pour savoir comment elle est faite, comment on l’écrit. Kattan: Comment concevez-vous le rapport entre le réel et l’imagination? Frye: Traditionellement la littérature ne décrivait pas la réalité, elle créait son propre monde et la réalité se trouvait dedans. Cela est aussi vrai à notre époque, sauf que les poètes sont plus conscients de ce fait. Kattan: Comment voyez-vous le rapport entre les oeuvres nouvelles et les oeuvres anciennes? Frye: Tout ce qui est neuf c’est l’ancien reformulé. Kattan: Il existe toutefois des oeuvres nouvelles qui n’entendent se rattacher à aucune tradition, qui se veulent éphemères. Frye: Il y a là aussi un retour à la tradition. Il s’agit d’une renaissance de la culture orale. C’est dans ce cadre-là que se situe la chanson, la poésie improvisée. Cela résulte de l’existence de formes de communication autres que le livre. Kattan: Le livre est-il condamné?

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Frye: Non, malgré ce que disent les imitateurs de McLuhan. On a beaucoup simplifié la pensée de ce dernier. Il y a un point sur lequel je ne suis pas d’accord avec lui. Il dit que le livre est linéaire et que notre culture est simultanée. Mais là il confond la lecture d’un livre et l’impact exercé par cette lecture, une fois terminée. On lit un livre d’une manière linéaire, page par page, mais une fois la lecture terminée l’impact s’exerce d’une manière simultanée. Kattan: Voyez-vous un rapport entre la mythologie et la religion? Frye: Avant la religion judéo-chrétienne la démarche de la religion se confondait avec celle de la mythologie. Avec la tradition judéo-chrétienne nous sommes entrés dans une ère où l’on accepte le raisonnement. Nous retournons à l’heure actuelle au monde de l’imagination, au monde de la mythologie. Nous cherchons les véritables fondements de la religion dans l’expérience. Essentiellement, le langage de la religion est celui de la poésie et non celui de la logique. Kattan: Mais ce retour à la mythologie et à l’expérience peut conduire à un désir d’intensifier la sensation et si la religion ne le satisfait pas l’on peut recourir à la drogue. Frye: Pour moi, intensifier un sentiment c’est le rendre plus précis. Afin de l’articuler dans le domaine de la création l’on ne peut pas accepter que le sentiment demeure subjectif et introverti. L’esprit créateur agit tandis que l’esprit introverti se retire du monde. La drogue n’intensifie pas le sentiment. D’ailleurs il n’y a rien de très neuf en cela. Nous savons par la lecture de De Quincey et de Baudelaire que le recours à la drogue aboutit à une lutte entre la volonté créatrice et l’introversion. Kattan: Que pensez-vous de la littérature canadienne actuelle? Frye: Nous sommes pris dans un contexte international, nous subissons les courants qui agissent sur d’autres parties du monde, notamment aux États-Unis. Si nous avions un écrivain majeur, la situation serait sans doute différente. Tel que je la vois, elle est confuse. Je vois, quant à moi, une grande différence entre le séparatisme et le régionalisme. Je crois que toutes les parties du Canada sont séparatistes. Au dix-neuvième siècle l’on accordait une grande importance dans la littérature à la région, à la couleur locale. Un séparatiste, qu’il soit au Québec ou en Belgique, est différent. Son intérêt pour sa propre culture ne le conduit pas à explorer sa propre région, mais à créer une cohésion de cette région

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pour qu’elle se défende. Il trouve le foyer de son sentiment dans une attitude defensive enver les autres. Il se place en face d’une élite anglophone plutôt que de chercher des ressources de force à l’intérieur de sa communauté. Du point de vue littéraire, cette attitude tire sa force créatrice de la confrontation avec le monde extérieur. Je ne pense pas qu’elle soit nécessairement faible. Cependant, seules les oeuvres nous en fourniront la preuve. Ainsi l’on peut obtenir une excellente littérature à partir de la confrontation des Noirs avec le monde blanc, mais elle ne sera pas une littérature noire; elle sera une bonne littérature tout simplement. Kattan: Vous disiez tout à l’heure: “Si nous avions un écrivain majeur au Canada . . .” Ne pensez-vous pas qu’il en existe un? Frye: Nous ne sommes pas à l’époque des grands écrivains. Dans les années 20 et 30 quand on parlait de la littérature l’on pouvait citer un grand nombre d’écrivains: Joyce, T.S. Eliot, etc. Mais nous faisons autre chose maintenant. Nous sommes à l’époque où l’on diffuse une somme considérable d’énergie dans des formes éphémères. Ce n’est pas là la preuve d’une décadence. Cela est quelque chose de nouveau. Bien sûr il ne faut pas que nous oublions nos critères d’il y a vingt ou trente ans, mais l’on peut se demander s’ils sont toujours bons.

12 Student Protest Movement Conducted December 1968

From “An Interview,” Random, January 1969, 18–22; dated by internal evidence. Random was a publication of the Student Administrative Council at the University of Toronto. This interview is the first to reflect the student unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s with its questioning of university purpose and organization; the interviewer was SAC commissioner Bob Bossin, a musician who at university was one of the milder student radicals.

Bossin: I can always tell that I am reading a Frye speech when I see within the first four pages a reference to Marx and within the last three pages a quotation from Blake. Frye: That’s because I like to look back to my student days when I was interested in Blake and everyone else was interested in Marx. [Victoria College professor Northrop Frye is not only renowned for his literary criticism, but also for his writings on education, universities, and scholarship. Random sent SAC education consultant Bob Bossin to interview Professor Frye; in a discussion ranging from the structure of the modern university to the role of the student in society, they found several areas of disagreement.] Bossin: Professor Frye, I often feel a dichotomy of sorts present in your writing. You say on one hand, “Life won’t stay to be prepared for,” and yet on the other hand, you have described the student as withdrawing for four years in order to learn how to think.1 Frye: I accept the general premise that the university is a part of society. It is strongly imbedded in society and it is subject to a normal kind of inertia. It is pulled toward accepting more and more unconsciously the

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axioms and assumptions of society. As regards the student in university, I would distinguish between detachment and withdrawal. If the student is in a protected place where he is withdrawn from society as a whole, he is in what I have called a fresh air camp for the overprivileged. On the other hand, the university does foster the kind of detachment from society which makes an examining and re-examining of society’s assumptions possible. Bossin: What was your reaction to Jerry Farber’s article “The Student as Nigger”?2 Frye: My snap reaction to it was that it was a piece of interested polemic. It took a conception that I understand, that is, the conception of the students as a proletariat in a Marxist sense. It is a very foolish and unnecessary kind of proletariat. But the writer’s eye here seemed to be on the horizon and I didn’t feel that he was talking directly towards the students or that he was primarily concerned with their interest. Bossin: How do you respond to the idea of the students as a proletariat? Farber’s solution was to give the students complete freedom immediately. Would you agree, or should students be a proletariat? Frye: No, students should not be a proletariat. An analogy I have made, whether it is a sound one or not, is with the feminist movement, giving the women the vote, fifty years ago. I think that society is always trying to create proletariats: but they’re unnecessary, they always create unnecessarily difficult situations. But, of course, there were a great many things said during the feminist movement besides the question of giving women the vote. There was a great deal said about the participation of women in society and politics, and the immense effects that this would have on politics. I am not sure that the student movement as a student movement will become a major revolutionary force without becoming modulated or modified into rather a different kind of development. Bossin: How do you see this? Frye: It seems to me that radicalism in the university has been moving out from the university towards other social goals and has been trying to involve itself more and more with the community around itself: so that the university is no longer the main target of political questioning. What seems to be taking shape is a radicalism that deals with society as a whole and with the university only to the extent that it is part of society.

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Bossin: Do you find this a happy eventuality? Frye: I think at that point one must learn to say with Shaw’s Caesar, that “One must learn to do without happiness.”3 Bossin: I recall that in one of your speeches early this year, you lambasted the Varsity editor for wanting simply a system of unrestricted electives.4 Elsewhere, you have written that the present Honour system was about the best that could be developed.5 Do you still feel that this is the case? Frye: I don’t remember saying that about the Honour system. I do think that the Honour Course presents a pretty original and unique contribution to North American education. I’m not too happy to see it destroyed with such speed and hysteria as it is being destroyed in the present Faculty of Arts meetings.6 Bossin: You have said that the university cannot be first-rate unless “intellect, passion for ideas, long hours of work, and devotion to one’s course are socially acceptable to the student body.” You have also said, “The impact of the university arouses all the powers of the mind to fullest activity, and stirs up as much mental conflict as possible” [WE, 92, 95]. Do you really think this is happening today in Victoria College and the University of Toronto? Frye: I think it is always happening. But every college and every university is subject to a great many dampening factors, such as the competence and the interest of the instructor and the immense differences there are among students. Students are, after all, just the human race: and anybody teaching them has to remember the parable of the sower [Matthew 13:1–23]: that you will always get in any class a spectrum of concern which extends from the profoundest to the trivial and shallow. Bossin: Yet one reads increasingly in the student press and hears increasingly from student leaders that the working goals of university are not real learning and real questioning. Every year we see increasing numbers of intelligent, creative, and questioning students dropping out. Frye: Yes, but every classroom is going to present this kind of thing. The students who want a really lively university where there is a passion for ideas and a life lived with the intellect in the fullest sense are going to find themselves in the same classroom with people who have very different social assumptions and goals.

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Bossin: Is the classroom a necessary and logical approach to learning? Frye: Well, it’s a very convenient one in the way that it encloses space and enables a subject of study to be set up within it. Bossin: But there has been a great deal of criticism, especially in the last decade, of the classroom as a learning situation. You have the Hall-Dennis Report urging broad open spaces where students can pursue a number of different interests;7 and in many other experiments, students are moving from the classroom into many areas of field work. Frye: I think that knowledge is a structure. To gain knowledge means entering into the structure. The university is at a level of education sufficiently mature for something of the pluralism which is always inherent in scholarship to begin to show itself. For that reason, the large room with its multifarious activities does not seem as appropriate to the university as to the public school. Bossin: But given this multiplicity of interests and concerns, the concept of a course that says, in effect, you will learn the principles of literary symbolization from September to February, at which time you will be examined, seems to be less tolerant of the pluralism of scholarship than the open-ended system. Frye: I think that what is actually produced is always going to be a working compromise among a number of disparate ambitions and aims: and perhaps the ordinary classroom is as practicable a working compromise as one can get. Bossin: In university today, does not the authority of the discipline become effectively the authority of Northrop Frye at the front of the class? I, as a student, know who I have to please to get marks on my union card. And this deference can make me pretty passive: I merely wait for the word from Northrop Frye. What you get is, in effect, almost a tyranny. Frye: Anybody who has ever faced a classroom knows how terribly easy it is to become a kind of opaque substitute for the subject that one is teaching. This could, I suppose, present a temptation to the teacher; but more often, for an honest teacher, it represents simply an obstacle to his teaching. He is very well aware of the fact that people have all kinds of ways of resisting the educational process and that docility is perhaps the

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most subtle kind of resistance there is. The tendency to accept the teacher’s authority as a substitute for the authority of the subject is of course something that is always there; all the teacher can do is to try to make himself, as far as it is humanly possible, the transparent medium for his subject. I think it is clear to the student in my own class that he doesn’t have to agree with me to get his marks, that I am not interested in myself primarily at all. To accept the teacher’s authority as the authority of the subject is simply a means of failing as a student, whatever your marks are. One cannot think at random; one cannot just start to think. The ability to think is like the ability to play the piano: it depends on previous practice. The original thinker in physics or chemistry or literary criticism is the person who has entered into the structure of thought and has hitched it onto himself and has added to it. This is something very different from wisdom: I think that the way toward wisdom is through knowledge: knowledge is in itself essentially continuous in structure. The authority of the subject is something supreme over both teacher and student. It represents something by which both teacher and student can escape the tyranny of having to be teachers and students, and pursue this knowledge for itself. Bossin: Don McCulloch, a psychiatrist at this university, has written that when a person is constantly subjected to the authority of others, I suppose even if they are acting as a transparent medium for the authority of a subject, he will begin to doubt his own worth and become even more docile.8 What checks do you see to halt the further development of this docility? Frye: I don’t know if I have any patented formulas for escaping from this. I think that the picture drawn there is probably accurate as far as some students are concerned. But I would raise the question, whether it is really an inevitable product of their educational system if the students go in this direction, or whether it is simply a working out of feelings within themselves. The description does not account for all the students who have been coming into my office for the last thirty years: people who have just caught an idea of their own and say they want to work it out and nobody is going to stop them from doing it: they have obviously taken fire at some point or another. I have had that kind of experience just as frequently as I have of students who have tended to distrust their own creative power.

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Bossin: I’ve certainly felt that spark of interest. But at those times, the structure of the university, which has mapped out all my courses and essays in advance, militates against my being able to follow up my thoughts creatively. Frye: Well, there is always a collision and conflict in life. Wherever one is living it and no matter what one is doing, what one wants to do is continually interrupted by other kinds of commitments. This would happen to a student’s life no matter what his pattern of study was like. The structuring of courses in a university is perhaps the result of the fact that these courses are not gone into to a depth beyond which the student can handle his own creative response to them within a relatively limited time. I don’t know whether there are any patented formulas to remedy such situations. One can deal with them sympathetically as they arise. Bossin: And yet there are radically different models for educational institutions; such as, for example, Rochdale College, where learning follows not a curriculum, but the interests of the students themselves.9 Frye: Well, I’d like to see what happens. I view Rochdale with a very sympathetic eye. Then again, if this is fair for the student, it ought to be fair for the instructor as well; and if the student is set free in this way, then the instructor should be also. You would then really get a course of study only when the orbits of the student and instructor happened to coincide. I don’t know just how that would work. Rochdale seems to me to be the kind of thing that would work best geared to an adult education program. People come straight from high school into university. There is in elementary education an element of compulsory learning, simply because it is hardly possible to take a role as a responsible citizen in a modern democracy without the kind of elementary knowledge of literature, history, arithmetic, and geography one needs to live in the twentieth century. As one goes on, this kind of compulsory conspectus of information begins to break down and become a little more flexible; but at the undergraduate level, it has not really disappeared for the majority of students. The kind of short-term haul which has the undergraduate taking four or five interrelated subjects has some advantages in that it gives him some sense of perspective, and of the interrelationships of the different disciplines; it leads him to realize that creativity is a very versatile thing in a very strong way.

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Bossin: I wonder if this process is not self-defeating. You have written that students are eager to be directed to maturity with the least loss of time. Could not doing this deny the student the necessary learning space to feel that excitement you speak of? Frye: Yes, but I think that the disadvantage of a self-educated person is that it takes so long to find out things which other people already know. I think that the process of facilitating contact with a subject which is part of the teaching process is really a means of, or should ideally be a means of, freeing a student’s energies so that he can find out things for himself with the least possible amount of frustration. The scholar learns from experience to make things as little frustrating as possible for his students. Bossin: This sounds fine to me in the ideal; but, to quote a phrase from Northrop Frye, the one thing we can know for certain is that we are damaging the present.10 Surely the violence and inhumanity that we see daily in the Year of the Tiger that you describe in The Modern Century is connected to an educational system that has not really changed in a thousand years. This suggests to me that a major overhaul or radical change is certainly not a bad thing. Frye: Well, I wouldn’t suggest that it was a bad thing. Bossin: And yet you do not seem to be in any particular rush to have the university overhauled. Frye: When I spoke of damaging the present, I was talking about the philosophy of progressivism, that is, that there are certain desirable goals to be reached in the future and that we should make any kind of sacrifice in the present in order to attain them. I was making the point that the philosophy of progress can be the most morally callous of all the philosophies. The present generation has some rights and the present moment has some rights. It seems to be an essential part of the educational process to increase the significance of the present moment for the student and the teacher and everyone else. For that reason, I am willing to work within any kind of system so long as it’s here. I don’t object to the overhaul of the educational system; I would object only to the draining out of all vitality in the present system in order to reach something in an undefined future. Bossin: The system we’re studying under now seems to have very little to do with the present moment. A friend of mine complains that she is

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tired of students because they are always thinking in the past and cannot come into the present moment in any creative way. Frye: All I mean is, I am engaged at the present moment in the teaching function. I have classes to meet and I am willing to accept the situation I am in as a means of getting whatever creative power can be released as a result. In my experience as a teacher, I have found that an astonishing amount of it is released, in spite of all the frustration and competition and all the rest of it. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see the whole thing overhauled, or wouldn’t welcome very deep-seated and radical changes; but only that the present process has to keep on going with the present generation of students so that they can get as much out of their education as they possibly can. I do not want to sacrifice them to the future. Bossin: What deep-seated and radical changes would you make in the structure of Victoria College if they were yours to make? Frye: I can only work along the lines I know. I think that I would have to work from the direction of my own interest in literary criticism, mythology, and so on. The trouble is that any new model, once it is worked on by teachers and students, tends to shake down into the old model very quickly. The human material of students and teachers has always been the same in my thirty years of teaching. The question is, to what degree can that material be transformed? Bossin: If you feel that changes are necessary, are you gearing your activities to this in any way? What has Northrop Frye done for the revolution? Frye: Well, I understand what Dennis Lee means when he says he doesn’t know where he is going.11 What I am trying to do is get my own mind clear, because I wouldn’t trust any direction I would move in. Bossin: You and Matthew Arnold. Frye: Yes. Bossin: Do you consider the in loco parentis a rather silly fetish for university students? Frye: The way it is usually applied, it often is. On the other hand, I am not sure whether I would want to see the student’s relationship to the

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university replaced by a completely impersonal or contractual relationship, where the university took no responsibility for protecting the students from the result of their own inexperience, from the draft, and from various other things. Bossin: Do you think that he should have more protection than, say, the young average shopworker? Frye: I’m of two minds about that. The student is, in a sense, taking bigger chances than the shopworker. When I spoke of protecting him from the results of his own inexperience, I didn’t mean so much drinking as, say, the taking of LSD to transcend his ego, or, something much more normal in university life, engaging in radical political activity. This seems to be something that is part of a student’s life in a way that it is not part of the shopworker’s life. Bossin: Many critics of the university say that the examinations are really counterindicated to learning. What do you think of that? Frye: I don’t know what I think about the examination system. I approached it myself as an undergraduate in a pretty cynical frame of mind.12 That hasn’t changed. I realize that examinations are like a piano recital: they have to be done quickly, and if you make a mistake, you have to cover it up fast. I knew that I had to stand first in first class honours in order to stay at college (I didn’t have the money to stay otherwise), and I figured out very quickly the way to beat the examinations. It’s not all that difficult, and it certainly didn’t stop my desire to learn. Bossin: Do you want to tell us what that system was? Frye: No. Bossin: One final question: Would a guaranteed annual income for students and everyone else help the situation? Frye: Yes, it would.

13 CRTC Guru Conducted 19 December 1968–9 July 1969

Based on the binder entitled “Originals—Interview of Northrop Frye” in the Library of the CRTC in Ottawa, call no. PN85.C35 1968/69. For Frye’s involvement with the CRTC, see Introduction, xxxviii–xli. The binder contains transcriptions from taped interviews Frye had with André Martin and Rodrigue Chiasson of this department: one on 9 July 1969, which is placed first in the binder but has been put in chronological order here; one on 19 December 1968, which occupies sections 2–5 of the binder; and one whose date is blank but which probably occurred in late May or early June 1969 and is placed here between the other two. Also in the CRTC Library is a binder entitled “Conversations about Canadian Fundamentals—Cathy Richards,” call no. PN85.C353 1971, containing extracts from the interviews arranged under headings. I am indebted to Robert D. Denham and his student Kelsey Quillen for the initial production of this material. In the interests of clarity and continuity, it has been edited rather more than most of the interviews; the note gives details.1

I

19 December 1968

[The conversation begins with an allusion to separatism in Canada, Frye pointing out that all parts of Canada are separatist and that the East–West cohesion of the country is balanced by a North–South pull towards the States.] Martin: Dans votre réflection sur la culture, quelle part jouent les outils? Frye: Technology? Well, first of all, the means of communication are physical, and the way the imaginative life developed in this country around the railway, bridges, and roads is truly extraordinary I think.

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Martin: Pensez-vous qu’il soit possible de créer une culture canadienne, originale, avec des outils aussi anciens que le journal, le livre, la photographie, de vieux outils, de vieilles techniques? Frye: This is the Americanising of Canada, but it is what Canada has been living with. Chiasson: Fernand Cadieux, a friend of ours, has been telling André that Canadian culture cannot start with the classical notion of culture.2 Frye: Why not? Martin: À cause des anciennes technologies . . . Frye: Because of the base of classical culture, which is old technology— the book, print, and so on? Chiasson: He says that every young French Canadian starting out to write a novel wants to write a French novel, an American novel, an English novel. Frye: Yes, there is that problem. But it doesn’t extend to the point of making a Canadian culture impossible, because all modern culture has that problem. You notice how even in the U.S., culture tends to break down into different regions. The kind of literature written around the state of Mississippi, for example, is a whole literature in itself. It’s marketed in New York, but it resists the pull of New York. Chiasson: I think perhaps what André was saying is related to something you’ve said in your lecture about Canada’s having developed in a single century from a prenational to a postnational country.3 There may be a connection between this and the possibility of identifiably Canadian cultural expression. Frye: Yes, I see; but to move from prenational to postnational means to move from one kind of tribal culture to another. You never have in Canada the pattern of the large expanse of country with the capital city in the middle, like London or Paris. That doesn’t exist in Canadian life; it never has. Chiasson: But to return to the earlier question, it is impossible to have a classical notion of culture for Canada because the technologies are too old for Canadian use. That is, we are really in an electronic rather than a literary mode.

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Frye: Of course, I don’t take that view of the book or of literature. Chiasson: Would it be advisable to reinforce the capital city of a country as a tool? Frye: It’s developing in this direction, it has to. Nothing is less likely geographically or economically than that Ottawa should become a genuine capital, but the communication is happening. But you have a curious kind of intellectual capital here; it’s a capital in a rather different way from the way in which London or Paris is. It’s almost entirely dependent upon communication rather than on marketing or any of the older geographic or economic factors that filled up the big cities. Chiasson: There is a problem because of the number of messages arriving in the capital and the government’s inablity to process them all. Frye: Yes, but that’s a danger that can only be met by developing a communications base—there’s no other way. Martin: Quebec has two capitals—Quebec and Radio Canada.4 Chiasson: How could we open the door to the role of Canadian radio and television in the development and dissemination of Canadian culture? It’s the problem of the creation of prototypes. Frye: You’ve really got a problem there! [Martin contrasts the “stereotypes” which are the product of homogeneous mass production and distribution with the “prototypes” which are available through the new technology.] Frye: By prototype, I suspect you mean what I mean by archetype: I also distinguish the archetype in literature, which is a repeating unit of literary expression, from a stereotype, which is the same thing in a passive and commercialized environment.5 Chiasson: André says that the series Seaway on CBC had no Canadian content because it’s stereotyped from the Americans.6 Frye: The question of Canadian content is a very difficult one to start with, particularly if you are only going to measure it quantitatively, fiftyfive per cent or whatever it is.7 I don’t see how you can get very far with that. [Martin wonders whether the best kind of Canadian content wouldn’t be the use

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of new technologies before other countries. He gives the example of Candid Eye, a Canadian prototype which was the first example of “le cinéma de vérité.”8] Frye: It’s a new art but it’s built in Canada on a very old thing. “Cinéma vérité” is the twentieth-century form of the-watching-of-the-garrison, the-watching-out-in-the-forest. Have you studied some of the Canadian paintings in the National Gallery by Tom Thomson and Emily Carr? Tom Thomson was a canoeist and was drowned on a canoe trip by himself. If you look at his pictures, so often there seems to be no point of focus, or the point of focus seems to be behind the picture: your eye is carried around the bend, it’s a long-sighted perspective. It’s the same with Emily Carr, who was always probing into the forest. [The group takes up the idea of a “canoeist” quality to Canadian culture, Martin associating it with new computer tools.] Martin: Est-ce Dr. Frye a fait du canoë? Frye: Yes, I have, I know the kind of experience it is—not that I was very good at it. Martin: Avez-vous été photographié en canoë? Frye: No, I have not. Chiasson: Is it possible to plan and help the development of culture or must we wait? Frye: That’s what I’ve been thinking about and that’s exactly what I’m here for, I suppose. I don’t know whether one can plan so much as create the conditions under which native energy can be released; that is, on this side here, a great wave is breaking in that’s mostly the Americanising of Canada, the opening up of the Canadian market, a passive, receptive market; and at the same time there are things going on here. It’s just a matter of keeping doors open so that they have a chance to emerge. Chiasson: I’m asking myself the question whether the predominantly American fare that Canadians ingest continuously through radio and television doesn’t occupy too much of the Canadian mental space. In that case energies may not be released in cultural areas, they may be released in other areas. Perhaps they will not be expressed visually in terms of electronic communications and so on: maybe we have no future there.

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Frye: That’s exactly what things like the NFB and CRTC are set up to fight. Canadians are in an unusually passive role vis-à-vis the Americans. The Americans are taking it all in on the subjective and receptive level; nevertheless, they are also producing it themselves, while Canada is simply a place that it’s shot at. They are receiving it and yet they don’t feel a part of it. Chiasson: That’s why, André says, he places so much importance on new tools. We were talking a while ago about cables; it’s quite significant that although cable carries the same type of signals as through the air, broadcasting cable was essentially a new tool—not completely new, but a hybrid. It was developed fortunately to a greater extent in Canada than in the States. Many engineers who went to the latest cable conference in the U.S. said that Canadian cable technology was more advanced than American and the use of cable was proportionately greater. The latest policy announcement of the FCC said that they are starting to curb the development of cable.9 If there is a curb of cable in the States, there may be a chance for Canada to go through the interstice. Frye: There are other things in the Canadian tradition that are worth thinking about. Thirty years ago the great radical movement was international Communism, which took no hold in Canada at all. There were no Marxist poets, there were no Marxist painters. (There were a few but there was no connecting point to Canadian culture.) The radical movement of our time is anarchist and that means that it’s local and separate and breaks down into small units. That’s our tradition and that’s our genius. Think of Toronto or Montreal (I know Toronto better than Montreal, but I think the same is true of both cities): after the Second World War, we took in displaced persons from Europe to something like onequarter to one-fifth of the population. In Toronto in 1949, one out of every five people had been there less than a year. We have not had race riots, we have not had ethnic riots, we have not had the tremendous pressures and collisions that they’ve had in American cities. Because Canada is naturally anarchist, these people settled down into their own communities; they work with other communities and the whole pattern of life fits it. I do think we have to keep a very wide open and sympathetic eye towards radical movements in Canada, because they will be of an anarchist kind and they will be of a kind of energy that we could help liberate.

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Chiasson: How do you explain materially the fact that there is not a serious breakdown in the country if the base is anarchist? Frye: Well, I think that the ideal of anarchism is not the shellfish, the carapace, the enclosed, isolated group. It’s rather the self-contained group that feels itself a community and because it’s a community it can enter into relations with others. At the moment we are getting some mollusk or shellfish type of radical movement—I think certain forms of separatism are of that kind—but I think we’ll get more mature about this as we go on, a more vertebrate structure. [Martin and Chiasson begin to discuss, mostly in French, concepts of journalism such as “le système gatekeeping” which involve “international front page” considerations and are not appropriate to Canada.] Frye: I’m having trouble: it is two languages at once. I am not familiar with the language of communications. Even where you use English, I have to stop and think what you mean. Martin: “Gatekeeping” is a historical concept. Je pense que si jamais je parle l’anglais un jour, ce sera un anglais étrange parce que j’ai beaucoup lu et pas beaucoup parlé. Chiasson: I wonder if it’s of relevance to attempt to see how like the Americans we are and what part of the Canadian identity is not different from the American. Frye: It’s rather easier to define things by contrast than it is to define them by their similarities. This leads to the question of what is American as distinct from what is European. For example, the Americans have a revolution as the centre of their historical tradition, and with a revolution for a tradition you get, among other things, a certain contempt for history. Canada has not had a revolutionary tradition, in the sense that its history and its traditions have been proportionally much stronger. The motto of the province of Quebec used to be “Je me souviens.” In the U.S. you have Henry Ford saying “History is bunk.” With us, we are still living with our traditions, both English and French, in a curiously intense way. A revolutionary country tends to try and short-circuit the law; that is, it tends to think of the law as a kind of clumsy and cumbersome machinery. Canada was held by a military occupation, in that it had the Northwest Mounted Police, and it’s always been brought up under a regime of law. So the American impatience with history and the

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American violence and cult of lawlessness—these are things that we are quite different about. [Chiasson asks about the egalitarian principle in Canada and the U.S.] Frye: Ah, yes! Now that is one point. The class structure of European society disappeared even more rapidly in Canada than it did in the U.S., with the flight of the seigneurs in French Canada and the similar thing in English Canada. The tendency towards egalitarianism which has a kind of implicit sense of a classless society—that is, I think, in common. That is a thing we understand. We don’t need to be aggressive about it as are the Communist parties in Europe. Chiasson: These are fundamental things in our cultural behaviour. Frye: In English Canada in the nineteenth century there was a strong prejudice against the English which expressed itself in religion; for example, the Methodist movement is very largely a protest of the native Canadian against the religious establishments which are Anglican in the English communities and Presbyterian in the Scottish. And in the Methodist movement again there is an emphasis on the democracy of feeling, on the sense of direct participation. Chiasson: The slogan that Trudeau has launched, “participatory democracy,” seems to have met with real response immediately. Is it a principle for Canadian communications?10 Frye: Yes, it is. I think your example is a good one, because this was instantly what the Canadian public knew that it wanted. Whether it gets it from Trudeau is another matter, but there is no question about whether it wants it. Martin: Peut-être que l’idéal de la radio et la télévision canadienne serait d’arriver à faire des inventions sociales en matières de radio et de télévision. C’est les inventions qui demandent vraiment la mobilization de l’intérêt public, un effort financier de nombreuses années, une vigilance, un effort. Frye: That certainly is one of the primary items on the agenda, I would say. Chiasson: Perhaps it is possible to prepare the design for this social participation.

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Frye: There are always two reasons for the existence of a Canadian community: one is local (the water mill and that kind of thing), and the other is its relationship with the network of communications (perhaps it’s a railway divisional point or a stop on one of the old voyageur trails). Every community thinks of itself as both local and part of a network of communications. It’s interesting to talk to, say, a farmer in Ontario—I’m thinking in particular of the old days of the railway—and he will talk about local conditions, town meetings, the crops, and so forth, and then he will hear a train go by and look at his watch and say, “That’s the Flyer to Toronto.” Suddenly you realize that this is the other half of his imagination. [Martin and Chiasson discuss a table Martin is working on and constantly changing, which shows the intersection of the “open system” and the “current information system.” These seem to have something to do with the distinction between writing a book and profitably interviewing the writer of the book and lead to some acerbic comments about certain reviewers. Then the meeting breaks for lunch. After lunch Martin begins by talking about the new graphic media and the “tools of symbolic and schematic processing.” He wishes to record Frye’s answer to his question about the possibilities of changing Canadian culture by paying more attention to technological aspects, “content and values of technological systems,” than to content itself.] Frye: By this you mean the fifty-five per cent Canadian content rule and this sort of thing? Chiasson: Yes. Frye: You see, you start with a paradox: that Canada is a nation and yet the actual feelings are local feelings and international feelings—prenational or postnational. In so far as Canada is a nation, it operates mostly in terms of inconvenience: examining your luggage when you get to a Canadian port, collecting income tax, and so on. The Canadian content rule is that kind of nationally imposed inconvenience, because the ordinary viewer surely doesn’t give a damn about Canadian content as such—he cares about his locality (which, of course, can extend to Canada) and he cares about being in the world. He cares very much about being in the world. [Martin suggests that, time and energy being limited, it is perhaps necessary to think more of the transformation of the system itself than of the transformation of its contents.]

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Frye: What I’d like to see is the criteria shifted from content to attitude. I think there is a specific Canadian attitude toward world events. As soon as I cross the border and start teaching at American schools, I feel like a Finn entering Russia or a Dane entering Germany. I have moved from a small observant country into a big power complex. Now, that makes for a difference in attitude, and as long as that attitude is preserved I wouldn’t care too much about the content. But the difficulty is of course that you can check up on content, because it’s quantity, and you can’t check up on attitude. What I would like to see is ninety-five per cent Canadian attitude. Chiasson: Isn’t the problem situated precisely in finding the systems and means that would preserve the Canadian attitude? [Chiasson and Martin agree that this is a key role for the CRTC. Instead of talking about foreign ownership or Canadian content, it is important to explore and define this nebulous “Canadian attitude.”] Frye: I can give you an example of what I mean: the American tends to think of world conditions in terms of American operations and interventions because America is so profoundly responsible for everything that happens. Trudeau’s views on Nigeria and Biafra are American attitudes because he is so terrified of his own separatist problem that he wants to keep absolutely out of the Nigeria–Biafra situation.11 The Canadian public knows that he’s dead wrong, but it’s an observant country; so he’s just lost touch with his own people at that point because his own attitude is the manipulative attitude of the power that’s involved. Martin: Ce sont vraiment les outils d’un “observant country.” Frye: Like Switzerland or Denmark. Scandinavia is so like Canada: it even has two nations. When I was in Scandinavia I noticed how completely different Norway and Sweden were.12 The reason is of course that culturally and historically they turned their backs on each other— Norway has always faced the West and Sweden has always faced the Baltic. In a way that’s our English–French problem in Canada: we’re oriented in different directions. Chiasson: How is the cultural status of the “observant” country translated into works? How does it manifest itself in the arts? Frye: I think it manifests itself in literature, which is what I know best, by a certain coolness in tone—what I called pastoral when I said that Can-

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ada was America’s pastoral myth.13 There is a kind of pastoral tone in Canadian poetry and fiction. Many people confuse this with a regional tone which, of course, it can be, but it’s just the insulation of all this immense space that’s packed in and around us. Then there’s the sense of what I call the original fortress or garrison watching, first of all because it had to to preserve its structure, and then because the big show was going on in Europe or in the U.S. Chiasson: There is this spatial insulation, on the one hand, which is kind of a security element, whereas the state of mind that applies in garrison watching is the insecurity. Frye: Yes, but there are many insecurities in Canadian culture. I spoke of a variety of ethnic groups in Toronto and Montreal and connected it with the anarchist tendency to break down into small units, but of course they are minorities, and minorities are insecure: the French Canadian who feels himself a minority on the North American continent, the English Canadian who is a minority as regards the American, the Jewish minority which has been of tremendous cultural importance, not only in Montreal. The insecurities of minorities are built in to this watchful observant quality. Chiasson: It seems to me that the term “observant” is perhaps an antonym to “active.” Frye: Well, it’s not passive, it’s perhaps contemplative. It’s not geared to immediate action. Whenever the American thinks about what goes on in China, he instantly thinks, “What are we going to do about it?” The Canadian doesn’t have that feeling. Chiasson: Canada is also in many respects, in many of its works of art, imitative. On essaye tout simplement de déceler les avantages et les dangers des “observant countries,” to see what is the chemistry of the “observant” country. Martin: Et même quelles sont les formes contemplatives . . . Frye: The contemplative form tends, in the first place, to accept a convention given it from the outside. English Canadian literature follows the form set up by England. And it waits for the English or the Americans to set the new standard and then goes along with an imitation, but within the imitation there’s something else.

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Chiasson: This “something else” is a manifestation of what we’re looking for, the epicentre of Canadian identity. On the non-imitative side of contemplation, there’s the creative side. There’s a problem because it’s my feeling that the “observant” acts more seldom, and over a longer period of time. Frye: Yes, so that when it does act, it could act very swiftly. You notice how Canada is one of the peaceful countries at the start of the war and yet Canadians are the most ferocious fighters in the world. [Chiasson comments on the rounded forms in Eskimo sculpture, which contrast with the incisive forms of African sculpture. He suggests this may be related to the Eskimo’s contemplative attitude brought about by his difficult life.] Frye: But the Eskimo culture is a very long-sighted culture, always looking for that black spot on the horizon, and those forms have to do with that. I once amused myself by looking at a number of Canadian poems, novels, and works of scholarship, including Creighton’s Life of Sir John A. Macdonald; I was looking at the last sentence, and it was almost always a big white horizon. [Gap in tape.] This means that the possibility of communication within those small units is very great because there is almost no part of Canada in which the possibility of intercommunication has dried up as it has dried up in New York. Did you listen to the Ottawa hearing?14 Did you hear the two men who wanted to open a [television] station in Whitehorse in the Yukon? They were shrewd men who knew their business. They said the Yukoner is in a tightly enclosed community and the people who are there have a special status—the rest of Canada is referred to as “outside,” which is a word they use in prison. One of them said he was going to run his programming almost entirely with open-line programs. The person opposing this objected that this was no way to program television, but he simply said, “You don’t know Yukoners, they’ll talk about anything.” The possibility of intercommunication, he knew it was there, and that surely was a fact of immense importance. Suddenly when I was listening to this I realized how John Diefenbaker had managed to run an election on that preposterous program about exploiting the North—this Canadian garrison still exists.15 Chiasson: The garrison structure is still very strong then, isn’t it? Frye: Well, it’s still there in our tradition, it’s still built in.

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Chiasson: We have many tools of observation now. There is a straight line, a historical connection between the Yukon outpost and the garrison. The Yukoner is still talking with that mentality and our observation posts could be the television, the universities. Frye: And there’s a curious pattern: when the country pushes out into unsettled areas, what it finds there is its own relations; as it pushes, it rediscovers the old. Chiasson: In terms of communications, our observatory or garrison is not a physical one, it’s not even a geographical one any more, yet we still move within our psychological garrison. Somehow we carry the cultural water and the cultural wood. Frye: Yes, that’s what Hugh MacLennan was trying to say in his novel Two Solitudes. The two solitudes being, of course, Westmount English and East Bleury Street. Chiasson: André asks if there are possibilities of action or must we wait? That is to say, given the “observant” aspect of Canadian culture, is it possible to think of a contemplative strategy or must we wait for Canada to swallow modern communications? Frye: I don’t see why, in the world in general and in the U.S., people divide society into the majority who want a pleasant view presented to them and the minority who are worried and concerned and who will listen to programs like The Air of Death.16 It seems to me that there is a very soft foundation in Canada to build on, and an attitude which is both of these things at once. Being contemplative it is not “concerned” in the sense of feeling that this country is going to be involved instantly, but at the same time it is not going to take a lot of pre-digested nonsense. You steer a course between what in most countries has become a kind of schizophrenic split between the worried concerned minority and the big placid milch cow in the herd. I think that this is, of course, wrong about everybody, but it is especially wrong about Canadians. Chiasson: The possibility of steering a middle course is here. Would you say that in Canada at this time the population generally is more aware, less ready to accept “predigested nonsense,” as you call it? Frye: Well, I don’t know, I suppose they are subject to the same psychological laws as the Americans, but I also feel that there is a power of

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response there that only needs to be tapped. Sometimes the lack of sympathy between the CBC and its public has been caused by the tendency on the part of the CBC to think in terms of the worried concerned minority of the big country that is going to be instantly involved. I have some sympathy with the Canadian public that feel that a lot of the CBC programs are not really addressed to them. [Chiasson agrees that many CBC programs are geared to the reaction of the liberal minority in the U.S. He and Martin wonder about the danger of Canada’s contemplative tendencies.] Frye: The danger is, of course, of its collapsing into passivity. Martin: Au milieu d’un système actif. Frye: But that of course is the whole secret of wisdom, isn’t it, to be detached but not withdrawn. The Canadian knows very well he’s involved in the world, but Canadian statesmen, people like Lester Pearson at the United Nations, feel that the Canadian role is an advisory one. It doesn’t try to duck out of responsibilities; it merely is not involved in this action. Chiasson: It’s a sort of moral authority. In terms of communications, what might happen is that to a great extent Canadian productions are not for Canadian consumption but for world consumption. Frye: It is possible. Chiasson: Perhaps you know something of this—undoubtedly you do—do Canadian writers want to be read at home or do they want to be read abroad? Frye: I think that in Canadian literature there has been something of a change in attitude in the last thirty or forty years. The Canadian writer, originally, was only successful if he could publish outside Canada. Now there is a very strong desire to be read primarily by Canadians. You can see this in the conferences which the poets hold and so forth. It has always been to some extent true of French Canadian literature but it’s increasingly true of English Canadian. Canada is not a bad environment for the writer because Canadian publishers are fairly generous to Canadian writers, even poets, and an astonishing proportion of the books that Canadians buy are Canadian books. If you look in book stores you’ll see that they always have Canadian sections and they’re not just for tourists.

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[A brief discussion of Ottawa bookstores follows.] Chiasson: André says that there is a seeming contradiction between the (passive) contemplative and the (active) exploratory. Frye: Well, the explorer is the most contemplative of men. He has his eyes fixed on the horizon. He is planning his course. Martin: Alors l’explorateur est un caractère contemplatif. Les “trackless communications” sont vraiment les communications contemplatives. Chiasson: In fact what you yourself say is similar to that: instead of the very short-term production and consumption, it’s the interest in a subject that can span nearly a lifetime. Frye: Does everyone know what a blazed trail is? When one explorer finds his way through the woods, he goes through with a hatchet and makes little chops in the bark of trees so that the next man coming along can follow them. This is something in between trackless communication and the paved road. You probably don’t remember the days when the roads in New Brunswick were marked by painting red or blue bands around the poles. Originally all the roads in New Brunswick were banded. The red-band road went down the St. John River to Moncton. The blue-band road went from Moncton up the northeast coast and the yellow-band road started at St. Stephen and went up to Bathurst. It was exactly the trailblazing technique. [Martin and Chiasson discuss the similarities between the blazed trail and the somewhat anonymous modern production of information for all.] Chiasson: I’m considering some thoughts that Tocqueville, the French historian, had about the U.S. and indeed about Canada,17 which I think have something to do with the fundamentally classless situation of North America. Frye: The thing is that when you don’t have a class structure you have to diversify society in some other way, otherwise you just get a mob; of course, the mob is what Tocqueville is worried about. This is why, I think, this breaking down of the Canadian population into separate groups is so very important. Chiasson: And something to be encouraged? Frye: Well, it takes place anyway. It has extraordinary versatility about

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it, in that a person from Newfoundland can move to Vancouver without any sense of being uprooted. Some of the nineteenth-century clerical intellectuals of Quebec tried to create this kind of community artificially by keeping people on the land, restricting them educationally, and talking a great deal about home and mother. That, I think, leads to stagnation. [What’s wanted is] the give and take for the person who is involved in this community and yet is also polarized along that railway and can easily move out of it. Chiasson: I know the phenomenon of internal emigration, because I know the Maritimers. In fact, it doesn’t hurt the ones who move, it hurts the ones who stay. Frye: Yes, there is something in that. Yet you notice the extraordinary exhilaration a Maritimer or a Westerner gets by moving to Ontario and how quickly he becomes a leader of the community. Martin: I think of a CBC or Canadian Broadcasting Canoe. Chiasson: I think there is, though, a tremendous pressure for Canada to get people from other countries of the world. The luxury of space and resources is not one that will endure for very long. Frye: And what is hopeful is the extraordinary power that Canada has shown of assimilating people without trying to assimilate them. It has never tried to make one hundred per cent Canadians out of them, and yet the extraordinary peacefulness of the Greek and Portuguese and German and Scandinavian populations in Toronto never ceases to amaze me. Chiasson: In another area of Canadian singularity, in the big cities like Toronto or Montreal, we are industrious and hard-working and productive: I don’t know if we are as hard-working as the Americans but—is this also your observation? Frye: I should think the rhythm of work is very similar with the same regional variations: that is, the Maritime tempo is a little more leisurely, just as the New England tempo is a little more leisurely in the U.S. I think that the work habits and patterns are very similar. Chiasson: I’m thinking of the contemplative characteristic of the “observant” country. Will it be able to function better in a society where leisure time increases?

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Frye: There is a certain response to communication as a leisure activity. Chiasson: André asks whether you yourself have written on the “observant country”? Frye: Well, not specifically on that. My conclusion to the Literary History of Canada has a reflection or two about it. Most of what I have written has been in the form of reviews, mostly of Canadian poetry, and this has emerged from them, rather by accident. [Martin and Chiasson talk about some chronological tables which they display, and offer some reading matter including a report of the Consultative Committee on Program Policy.] Frye: I do have that, and I’ve read particularly the second volume rather carefully, the long-term one. Chiasson: André suggests that there’s a sentiment of inadequacy in the communicative institution when it starts to sell unrest. Frye: Yes. That’s the danger side of this separation into great groups. One of the things that ought to be on the left-hand side [referring to Martin’s chart] is a kind of mindless subversiveness, a deliberate creation of revolutionary situations where there aren’t any, talking up of controversial issues even when there’s no controversy, and that kind of thing. Chiasson: In fact the manufacturing of copies. There is some degree of that criticism in the Hall Report, I suspect.18 Frye: I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but the story about the students in Quebec breaking windows is that apparently the television cameramen told them they wanted some action and suggested they do it. Chiasson: Indeed often just the presence of television cameras will create that type of activity. I’ve seen it happen in New York. I was doing a film one day on the Negroes of Harlem in ’63 or ’64, and just the presence of the camera crews created attitudes and actions. The Chicago events are interesting too in that respect.19 Some members of radical movements and students themselves have said that the only recognizable consensus left is attention from the media. They disagree on everything else but they could agree to be photographed. Frye: I think that part of our function is a social one of creating a kind of non-violent concern which permits both radical and conservative points

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of view to exist. The great danger of this kind of subjective and receptive response is the creation of a general mood of violence. Because in spite of 1984, you’ve also got to have something to hate.20 Chiasson: Who are your favourite French poets? In Canada as well as France. Frye: I find myself going back to a certain type of poem rather than poet. There’s a wide variety of people I’m very fond of: Rimbaud, and I suppose Valéry because I come back to his poems so often; I suppose if I had a favourite it would be Verlaine. One poet I’m very fond of and who isn’t very widely read is [?].21 I don’t know if it’s just that I don’t know French well and I’m not too sensitive to it but it has a very haunting quality. Among the Canadians it’s just your obvious people. [They discuss future meetings and concerns.] Chiasson: Do you really think that there is some place for concern in terms of the CRTC’s activities in the area of cultural creation and circulation? Conceptually from what end do we grasp this? Frye: I think the definition of some kind of social aid, like what we’ve just been talking about, is important. The loudest and promptest complaints that the CRTC is going to receive are going to concern things like this Air of Death program. It does need some kind of overall social view which is flexible and not doctrinaire. Chiasson: In the area of encouragement of Canadian creation, the CRTC obviously has some role to play, the problem again being the forms of representation. [Change of tape here.] Chiasson: André asks the question of how to propose the necessary social inventions to release Canadian creative energies. Frye: In other words, we are now moving into the question of strategy. Chiasson: Yes, I think so. Frye: Well, what sort of liaison would you have normally—say with the CBC, private broadcasters, or the NFB? [Martin answers that they monitor productions.]

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Chiasson: Yes. The production is looked at, but there is not much of a relationship between these institutions and the CRTC. But I think the possibility for contact is there now, which is a new thing that didn’t exist with the BBG. Frye: But these channels of liaison are surely the first thing, because if we don’t get a sympathetic response from the NFB we won’t get it from anywhere. The CBC is much more frightened and boxed in than the NFB. Even so, there are a great many people there who need encouragement. I should think that the liaison has to be first of all on an official basis that doesn’t matter particularly. Underneath that are the creative people of the CBC who want to do their proper job. They’re people who’ll have to be approached apart from the hierarchical structure. I should think that of all these channels of liaison, the one with ACTRA will be extremely important, because they’re much more interested in questions of personality than of content.22 And I should think the CBC, for example, would have had most of what we want if all the talent that had once been there were still there, and still allowed to function, instead of so much of it being thrown away to the United States. But then, we’re boxed in, in so many different ways. As a result of the frustration you get these rather defensive and edgy tones in some of the programming. [Chiasson wonders whether some of the frustration at the CBC and the NFB comes from working in a medium that is not suited to the present community, but is a global, centralizing, and imitative medium.] Chiasson: If we’re to concentrate on an area of possible encouragement with large institutions such as the CBC, it would be to get to their regional and local programming rather than to their network organization. Frye: Yes, I think so. They were talking about Max Ferguson at lunch and the way he begins at Halifax with an explosion in that very localized community, and comes out of it with something which is both the community and something exportable.23 Now, if you contrast that with Frank MacKinnon’s big building in Charlottetown, as a cultural centre: what is this goddam morgue on top of Charlottetown; surely it’s an entirely foreign culture and Charlottetown doesn’t want it.24 Chiasson: Yes, indeed, the network world is really too big for Canadian production. You can’t find resources at home; fundamentally they don’t use that vehicle naturally.

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Frye: In listening to these hearings I’ve been struck with the way in which the sense of locality seems to increase as you go out from Ontario. In Ontario, the talk was almost always about cutting up the pie—all indistinguishable parts of the same pie—whereas out West, and in the Prairies, the Yukon, and Maritimes, the sense of locality grows. I find it rather difficult to answer the strategic question because I’m not too clear on just what your links are. Chiasson: I think André’s question was, without entering the really strategic area which is close to the policy area, we must work on sort of a pre-strategy stage—which is nearly the same as policy but attempts to deal with bringing some resources together or looking at how they might work. I suppose when we start thinking of institutions like the CBC, NFB, and the rest, we’re doing that to some extent. Frye: And then you send out the task force or monitors to different local stations. The reports they bring back all contain information which is quite relevant, as long as you know what kind of thing you want to foster. [They speak of the need to consult local sources rather than the network, “a fast train that never stops.”] Chiasson: Is there a possibility of real action by the CRTC, André asks, given the very delicate nature of balance? Frye: The creation of a climate of opinion or of feeling, a climate of sensitivity, where a creative person knows that he’s being recognized and thought of as a creative person, and that what he’s doing is appreciated: it seems to me that this kind of thing is possible, whereas action in the present setup is hardly possible. The people I’ve been listening to at the hearings are mostly honest men who want to do a decent job; that is, if their profits would admit it, they’d just as soon have a good program as a bad one. I think that it’s only on that level of response and recognition that you can really work effectively. You can’t really do anything; you can’t send out directives or even suggestions. Chiasson: Would there be a place for a new sort of institution, a program laboratory, if you wish, a place of experimentation for the creation of Canadian television prototypes? Frye: You have a program department that would be . . .

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Chiasson: We have a program department. It’s an “observant” service. At this time it’s mostly there to process information given by the broadcasters on their programming in their program log. Frye: That of course has to go on. But I think your suggestion is an admirable one of having a kind of experimental laboratory to which, if there could be a bit of money, people of the NFB or the CBC could be attached on a fellowship basis. Chiasson: Yes, to experiment, because there is no other means of experimentation. Frye: I can envisage certain conferences about experimental projects where you would have not only the film board and CBC people but also educators and so on. I remember when Roman Kroitor asked me to come in on the Labyrinthe discussion; I had assumed that nothing would really come of this [discussion], but after I had seen the film, I felt that I had really contributed something with respect to the tools involved.25 Of course I could only do that because Kroitor and Daly and so on were very perceptive people—but I think that this kind of conference around a more theoretical issue could attain . . . . I have the feeling that many of my colleagues in the university often don’t know how much they know, or how very useful they could be. Chiasson: It’s my feeling too. I’ve always had a difficult time connecting with the university people except in a couple of cases. You would have thought that in a general public affairs program the “humanist” would have been willing to contribute, but I found that it was the mathematician and the biologist who were willing to talk on public affairs. Frye: That’s because their subjects are in the news at the moment. [The discussion turns again to the possible value of decentralizing.] Frye: I think the whole orthodox tendency is a centralizing tendency. It’s founded on a journalistic instinct for headline news, and fans out from there. This becomes a kind of habit. As for who needs to be convinced of the value of decentralizing, I would say everybody. Because in a sense we all have a centralizing habit. We’re all fed in the same processes at both the television station and the supermarket. All culture begins as a preventative against the inertia of habit. Chiasson: I’m trying to imagine what kind of decisions might bring that

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about. If the CRTC were to say the network is going to be operational only one hour in a day . . . Frye: But you would have to have a very strong decentralizing apparatus ready to take over; otherwise it would just be a vacuum. Yes, I think the hour of decision had better be postponed. Once you start acting with decision you simply disturb one kind of habit without actually fostering the other. In a sense I don’t mind that the network train keeps on running, because you have a large group of non-listening listeners: that is, people who just keep the television running from the time it’s turned on in the morning until it automatically goes off at night. Chiasson: You were saying a while ago that what really needs to be changed is the climate rather than the system as such. Frye: Yes, and it’s also a matter of focusing on images. I’m thinking for example of Canadian politics. The CCF/NDP socialist party is probably the most honest party in Canada. It’s the one with the most consistent set of principles. It’s always arguing with the Canadian public, trying to change its mind to a better way of thinking about things. It never gets anywhere in elections because the voter votes in terms of images. You can never change by arguments; you simply point to an image and say, “What I want is that.” I think it’s the same in communications: the suggestion, “This is good for you,” or, “This is a superior type of program,” is going to meet with nothing but resentment. [Martin alludes to possibilities in modern technology to decentralize and increase access.] Frye: I think the technological developments are on the side of creativity—there’s no question of that. But they won’t work automatically by themselves. Chiasson: Yes. They’re on the side of the Canadian pattern as well. André thinks that it is possible to evaluate which models are closer to the Canadian tissue or fabric. Frye: I wonder if it’s really a matter of picking out this as opposed to that, or just a matter of making ordinary judgments—“This is first-rate, this is just run-of-the-mill.” Because the first-rate is always going to be what you’re looking for. Its Canadian identity, its relation to the Canadian fabric, is going to take care of itself: the better it is, the more typical

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it will be of the fabric. As long as you’re working in Canada and with predominantly Canadian personnel you need never be in a position of saying, “This is first rate but it’s not what we’re looking for.” Once you get into that position, then you’ve had it. II Interview of an unknown date This interview, the sixth in the black binder, is headed, “Northrop Frye—Interview of —.” A note indicates that the interview was “not completed,” perhaps meaning that the transcription was not completed. Internal references such as that to a remark made“the last time I was here” on p. 117 indicate that it follows that of December 1968. On p. 110 Frye refers to his remarks in the Air of Death discussions, which took place in March 1969; in a remark not here reproduced Martin suggests a possible meeting “après le mois de juin”; on p. 117 the allusion to China is probably stimulated by the government’s policy announcement on 29 May. Thus the interview probably took place in early June 1969. Chiasson: André’s question is this: is it possible to consider broadcasting as a whole and attempt to lay down principles of action that approach it in totality, or must we continue to think in terms of independent action on programming, on ownership, and so on? Frye: Well, I’m operating blindfold here, and you’ll have to tell me if I’m not connecting at all, but I think this is the first generation which feels the impact of psychological overcrowding, and consequently there’s a sort of claustrophobia that develops. This is what has led to a demand for participatory democracy, and the technical instruments of a participatory democracy are communications media. Consequently, the general lines along which one has to work in communications media are the lines of decentralization. That came out in our last report: the development of a smaller, more localized sense of community along with the whole growth of world consciousness.26 Consciousness of the world takes care of itself—you can’t avoid that—but the feeling of being a community is what has to be created. [This brings up the possibility of a massive reorganization of the networks, and of the definition of objectives to guide them.] Frye: As you develop new media, they tend to focus on the experiential

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side, and the older media then take over the teleological side. Television is very largely for presenting the world as it appears; radio and still more the newspapers become the teleological side of comment. [Martin reflects on the possibility of creating a “third service,” which unfortunately we only know how to finance by creating a perhaps unwanted “third network.”] Chiasson: André reflects upon the present state and foreseeable evolution and asks whether it is possible to do something. Should we attempt it or should we “laissez-faire”? Frye: But “laissez-faire” merely continues the same operation. That is, the private broadcasters will always carry on their traditional light programs and will throw in serious programs here and there in order to reassure themselves that they are doing a proper job. I think that in our day the communications gap between seriousness and lightness is breaking down. [Inaudible remark on Gilbert and Sullivan.] And I found in my teaching of literature that a person who knows the folk singers like Bob Dylan or the Mothers of Invention has far less difficulty with symbols in poetry. Twenty years ago you had to teach the students the language of symbolism which they often just refused to learn. Nowadays, young people know that language. There is less of a communications gap. Chiasson: André was asking, what part of the CRTC’s activity should be regulatory, what part should be guideline, policy [or the creation of new works that could serve as models]? Frye: Regulation is something I don’t react to much. It seems to me that certain very obvious things emerge in connection, for instance, with the Air of Death program. The reporting of the news is in the public interest, the creation of news is against the public interest. If you are covering a student riot, that is in the public interest, but if you incite the students to riot in order to have a more interesting picture, that’s against the public interest. The distinction which I drew in these Air of Death discussions was the distinction between concern and panic.27 Chiasson: That’s a fundamental distinction. In matters of public concern there are what we might call “trigger issues.” When such issues are touched they create panic. The special combination of the general problem of pollution with the lethal element of fluorosis in the same film . . .

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Frye: In this program, the arousal of concern over pollution called up something that everybody wants. Yet the Hall Report speaks of tourists driving through Dunnville and complaining about the comments they hear from the citizens of Dunnville. What you have is the community on the one side and the mob on the other, and the fundamental job of communications is to create the community and dissolve the mob. In this kind of thing, a mob always has a scapegoat. So the tourist going to Dunnville says everything is poisoned in Dunnville. And this is what I mean by panic, this is what’s against the public interest. There’s a much more difficult point, of course, between the factual and the imaginative. When you were analysing the layout of that Air of Death program, you were analysing what was essentially the imaginative structure in it. Imagination creates the shape; facts, of course, have no shape. Imagination is the “form” part of information. In English, there is a distinction between “imaginative” and “imaginary.” “Imaginative” means “shaping form” and “imaginary” means “things that are not there.” For example, when the script says, “cattle lying down and dying in the fields, hundreds of them,” it’s probable that the word “hundreds” refers to something imaginary, relative to the number of cattle dying. Chiasson: Although you do not like the idea of regulation, you see some need for regulation? Frye: It may be very difficult to draw up a statement of what constitutes the creation of panic and what constitutes the irresponsible making of news, but obviously that’s the kind of thing which calls for regulation and which the public would like to see regulated. Chiasson: Yes, the CRTC really does have the interest of the public as much as the interest of the broadcaster to consider. In fact, it has only the interest of the public—the interest of the broadcaster only inasmuch as broadcasting or communications are public. Frye: There’s always [need for] protecting the honest broadcaster from the dishonest one. I think the same question of regulation comes in to the area of censorship. Take, for example, this very thorny question of taste and morals. Twenty years ago, the obscene expression was what in English is called a four-letter word, the words that referred either to excretion or to copulation. These words have really stopped being obscene now, and the obscene ones are words like “nigger” and “wop” and “frog”; that is, words that create a mob, words that devalue a whole

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group of human beings. That kind of obscene expression is a real offence against taste in contemporary terms. Chiasson: Are you saying that morals are a sort of cursor, as on a slide rule, and that because of that moving and evolving aspect they are very difficult to regulate? Frye: Yes, at this present stage. This is in fact something that all branches of legislation are trying to legislate about. They are trying to define, for example, hate literature, something that builds up a sense of hatred or contempt for a group of human beings, which is against the public interest. Chiasson: Have the ethical aspects changed in recent years? Frye: I think they’ve changed to a more realistic conception of what is really socially dangerous. It’s dangerous to start speaking with contempt or ridicule of black people, and in reaction to this to speak with contempt or ridicule of white people is just as dangerous. Whereas plays that deal with homosexuals or that kind of thing are no longer regarded as socially dangerous. Chiasson: The question I’m asking is, when some things are no longer regarded as morally dangerous, can they be dangerous on another level—can they be culturally dangerous? Frye: I would prefer not to extend the conception of danger or “against the public interest” beyond this point of creating social hatred and contempt. [Martin wonders whether Frye has answered his question (p. 110) as to whether the CRTC should concern itself with making experimental works, or regulations.] Chiasson: André suggests that maybe part of the CRTC’s energy would be better applied to creating prototypes; for example, in collaboration with CBC or CTV, to invent new forms of electronic representation, rather than to regulate extensively. Frye: That’s true. But regulation only applies to what is here and now and wouldn’t apply to any form of creativity. Chiasson: Do you see that as a likely role for the CRTC?

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Frye: It would be a marvellous role, if we could create new forms of communications. Chiasson: André asks, would you be interested in working at definitions and orientations of CRTC activity in regards to programming with a view to accomplishing Canadian prototypes? Frye: I’d be fascinated, but I don’t know about my competence on those lines. [Chiasson assures him that there’s no need to be worried about technical competence. The basic grammars of technical production are fairly simple.] Chiasson: What we’re really concerned about is not that aspect of competence anyway. It is in defining what might be new functions, how they might be formulated . . . Frye: May I talk at random for a minute, and if I get anywhere that’s of some use to you then just say so. There’s a paradox in oral communication that looks for two contradictory things: one is detachment, the other is involvement. Perhaps this has something to do with the two sides of your triangle there. News should be reported objectively and create a mood of detachment in the viewer. There are other things which demand his concern, his involvement. In a drama, the attempt is normally to involve the watcher in a story. On the other hand you have people like Brecht saying that what he wants is to chop holes in the rhetorical facade, to alienate his audience so that they will be detached from the play and in command of their own souls. If you had an incompetent Brecht, what he would produce would be almost identical with the ordinary television program which is interrupted every five minutes by a commercial. Now it seems to me that the way to genuine detachment is not through interruption but through the building up of very small organizations, in a discontinuous sequence. I’m not speaking of discontinuity in the sense of not having sequence, I’m speaking rather of the rhythm in the sequence. If a man writes a book, he’s writing a continuous piece of prose, and you keep turning over the pages, from one paragraph to another; but if he’s a wise man, a guru, an oracle, what he will do is talk in a series of detached paragraphs. That’s the oracular style: it has been from Heraclitus28 to Marshall McLuhan. There are pauses between each remark and this pause requires a great deal of concentration, but it also leaves you in command of your own soul.

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Martin: Nietzsche utilise les deux techniques, lui. Frye: It’s exactly that technique. It’s found in the Bible, too, which breaks down into a discontinuous sequence. This mixture of sequence and discontinuity, I think, is found most successfully in contrapuntal music. You have an overall sequence but the different voices come in. You find this contrapuntal technique in the multi-screen films. Chiasson: André suggests that it would be interesting to consider a program that would test this structure. Frye: Young people today have developed tremendous agility in responding to these techniques out of the television experience, an agility that’s just waiting to be drawn on. It’s a different cultural atmosphere from the Romantic one of the last generation, where your attention can relax because it’s always the same atmosphere. Chiasson: I wish we could push that thought or explore it in relation to the general field of communications and see where it leads us: the discontinuous sequence in the program, the discontinuous program in the schedule, the discontinuous schedule in the whole diet of communications. Is it possible to think that way? Frye: This is pertinent to education, the discontinuous incorporated into the sequence. Martin: Les films de Jean-Luc Godard procèdent par segmentation aussi, mais sans concentration.29 Frye: I think that one of the things that emerges from this is that the job of achieving the sense of sequential unity is being handed over to the viewer. There are two extremes one has to avoid. One is the construction of an overall sequence which manipulates the viewer, pushes him in a certain direction. The other is the refusal to make any overall sequence at all. That gets you to the state of a great deal of contemporary art where the sense of fantasy is developed to a point where the viewer feels he is being invaded by a kind of overthrow of his own sense of identity. It seems to me that what a great many of the younger generation are going through today is a kind of Rimbaudisme, the same [diet?] of drugs and a common withdrawal from society. Rimbaud did this quite deliberately, and his sense of identity was almost obliterated in the process. After the Saison en Enfer he just forgot the whole thing.30 I think we’re going through his Saison en Enfer period now and that there is a kind of lost

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generation of extreme radicals in there. But beyond them, among the younger people, you have more adjustment to overcrowding. You might find that they will respond more to an appeal to their own identity. Chiasson: In the two extremes that you mentioned, the overall sequence which manipulates and the refusal to make any overall sequence, it is the second that is the hardest to deal with. The avoidance of the first falls into the category of freedom of expression; the second brings up the problem of order . . . Frye: Yes, that’s close to what it means. For example, the whole art of satire. Restoration comedy was attacked by the clergymen of its day as being morally evil. The Restoration dramatist said, we’re presenting the grotesque and the absurd for a moral purpose. But in order to do that, we have to assume a certain normality in the audience’s mind which forms a standard against which you can measure them. When you get to the point of suggesting there isn’t in effect a standard of normality, then the audience begins to feel fettered in the sense of identity. I see that difficulty with our young students. They resist, because everything that comes over television, radio, or newspaper is from the enemy, is the voice of the enemy. And they’re holding on to what identity they’ve got. They’re afraid of the wrong things, perhaps, but they are afraid of having it taken away from them. Chiasson: How do we assess normality, how do we define normality or abnormality? Frye: Normality is perhaps the wrong word. I think the term “identity” is a better term: the sense on the part of the reader or viewer that he is always himself. On that basis you can distinguish, for example, the creative from the merely subjective and introverted. This is the mistake that the LSD people make. They confuse the creative, the ego-transcending side of personality with the subjective, withdrawn, introverted side: not only the people who take drugs, but the people who say this is a new religion, a new means of transcending the ego. One’s sense of identity has two poles: it’s partly one’s self and partly one’s place in society. And with the claustrophobia developing, the sense of overcrowding, the sense of being surrounded by the enemy, which our young people have very, very strongly—that whole sense of community function has come out, so there’s only the subjective side left, and naturally you want to establish a pole there through this mind-expanding process.

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Chiasson: If communication ought to create many communities, how do we deal with the problem of creating “vertical images” toward which all the communities may converge? Frye: It seems to me that the vertical dimension is really the time dimension—the historical or traditional dimension. You may not think this is relevant, but nevertheless, it’s a very deep-seated feeling in religion: the conception of creation, of form emerging out of chaos. The psalms of the Bible, for example, are based on this New Year festival where the world is recreated every year.31 Then the Apollo 8 people go around the dark side of the moon with no guarantee of ever seeing the earth again and they start reading the creation hymn from Genesis.32 That is a moment of genuine history, because it articulates the whole Western cultural tradition. Chiasson: André is thinking of the next step. Surmising that we have outlined the cultural dimension, how do we now produce the images that we want? The idea of “communities of communication” is similar, perhaps, to the idea of “sectors” which I have heard André and Fernand [Cadieux] talk about. Showbiz, for example, would be a sector, the transmission of knowledge another sector. Each has its own internal logic, each creates its community. Grierson has said that when you’re dealing with the atom bomb or the problem of pollution, the laws of showbiz do not, must not apply; the laws of entertainment do not apply.33 Frye: If you think of entertainment as a passive response, certainly that has to go: if something serious turns up, you have to stop being passive and become an active participant. The current logic of showbiz is surely aimed at keeping the viewer passive, and in order to do that you have to keep a continuous, homogeneous atmosphere instead of this discontinuous sequence . . . Chiasson: I’m thinking of the practical problem of ensuring the discontinuous sequence. I wonder if it’s better to attempt to transform the present system, or to create parallel systems. Frye: It seems to me that transformation is ultimately what you have to do anyway. What I think is rather dangerous or perhaps futile about the “third program” concept is that it defines not only a separate kind of viewer but also a separate area of interest. “If you’re a serious person, you will be interested in this, in real literature, and not in that stuff”: this

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is likely to create a kind of dissimulated war between two kinds of entertainment, which seems to me very bad. It’s better to think of transformation of what is being done now. Chiasson: Well, there are problems to transformation. In a sense, you are perhaps entirely right when you say that the third program idea would only create a war between two kinds of entertainment, the “highbrow” and “lowbrow.” The greatest problem in transformation may be in changing the direction of communication, or rather in adding a direction. “We are being overcommunicated to,” says Grierson. We were talking of participation at the beginning. Frye: It’s not a question of shifting the content, it’s a question of informing—of giving imaginative form to what has presently no form, or has only this homogenous pouring form. Chiasson: André would like to go back to the concept of the vertical, conciliatory image. Is it possible to come to an accord on a number of necessary large, conciliatory images? Frye: On the most vulgar level, you notice how the ready-made social symbols, like the national flag, are always archaic ones. While Russia was busy building tractors, what you got on the flag was the hammer and sickle.The things that hold society together reach back into the past. I think the main development should be along the lines of what we were talking about the last time I was here, the canoeing thing [p. 91], the theme of transportation which repeats itself in different ways all through the history of Canada, so that you have the communication of the fur trade first, the railway next, and then the telephone, radio, satellites. The garrison is another thing which evolves out of the decentralized community. Chiasson: That reminds me of something you said, Dr. Frye, about the East–West conservative direction and the North–South liberal direction [p. 88]. André says that our travel images are more in the southerly direction. Would it be good to develop an East–West image of transportation? Frye: Remember that the East–West axis begins in Europe, and after we’ve recognized Communist China, we’ll have attained Asia.34 There’s a kind of rebirth image there that’s very strong in American culture. American culture begins on the American seaboard with a great deal of optimism; now you have Jeffers on the California coast being pessimistic

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as though the whole cycle has gone into its sunset.35 I think that our East– West thrust is down the St. Lawrence and up the Great Lakes—the conservative thrust that began in Europe and continues. This is the newworld aspect of Canada, with adherence to the Western tradition. Most of our time sequences do flow along that East–West axis. If you think of the North–South relationship you get back to the garrison again because you have Canada wedged in between the U.S. and Soviet Russia. III 9 July 1969 Chiasson: André would like to return to a point you made in our last conversation [pp. 109–10], about the difference between the experimental or imitative nature of new media, and the emphasis in the older media on the teleological and on commentary and reflection. Frye: I certainly notice the difference in the response that my students make to literature. Twenty-five years ago, when I began teaching, the conception of learning was almost entirely linear. The educators concerned with the teaching of literature said, first you start with utilitarian prose, then you work towards literary prose, and finally, you might then, with great reluctance, approach poetry. Of course, this is exactly the reverse of the way literature is constructed: poetry is in the centre and it goes out through prose. The justification for this was that literature is an art of communication. But communication was thought of almost entirely in terms of a step-by-step direction, turning over the pages to get to the end. With poetry, you don’t turn over the pages to get to the end, and so that becomes fantastically difficult. And I’ve noticed that a generation of students more trained on movies and television and (much more important for literature) who have listened to folk singers and so on, can take in these simultaneous simple patterns. The poetic habit of thought seems much more normal to them than it did to students twenty-five years ago. They approach even difficult poets like Rimbaud and Wallace Stevens with much less panic than they did a generation ago. Chiasson: If we are at an age where new media are appearing, must we then give up all hope of the teleological function and just expect the experiential priority? Frye: Well, I think that we’d have to take on a new function without abandoning the old. In all the arts, there are two different mental pro-

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cesses which succeed each other in time: there is the linear participation when you are reading a book or watching a play or seeing something on the television or in the film; and then, at the end, it suddenly freezes into a simultaneous unity and you can see what the whole structure is like. In literature, you have, say, a detective story, which is constructed like a parabola. It starts out with a question: who murdered X? And it ends with the answer that Y murdered X. This is what Aristotle calls the recognition, the anagnorisis [Poetics, 10.4–8]. As soon as you reach the recognition, you’ve completed the pattern. This is where a critical study of any work of literature has to start. The ordinary reader who simply reads to get to the end doesn’t need to bother with that; he simply follows along to the last page. I think that the poetic habit of mind is much more simultaneous from the beginning—it’s much more concentrated—and the film habit of mind, presenting things in symbols and film clusters, also forces you into this more simultaneous apprehension along with the teleological one. Martin: Mais la contradiction n’est pas fondamentale? [He wonders if the “reproductive” arts, whether of photography or of recording, emphasize the experiential because they are in fact anti-teleological.] Frye: Up to a point they are. They certainly put the emphasis on a more simultaneous side. You see this in university disputes between the student and the scholar. The scholar has been brought up teleologically. He talks of the “pursuit of truth, wherever it may lead,” but of course that metaphor is a dog following a scent: it means continuous prose. And the student is thinking in terms of big configurations presented simultaneously; he doesn’t understand this. [Martin recurs to the problem of the technical means of developing the teleological, which is the domain of the imagination and of responsibility, in the new media which resist it.] Martin: J’ai l’impression, par exemple, que les moyens de reproduction et d’enregistrement sont utilisés d’une façon non-téléologique, sans explication et sans commentaire, d’une façon simultanée mais sans ordre mentale; c’est le multi-écran de l’Exposition Universelle de Montréal, c’est un jeu dénué de sens. Alors, j’ai l’impression que la téléologie est à ré-inventer. Chiasson: In your assessment, do you see the simultaneous, experiential

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side as good? Do you think there is a need for re-inventing, as André says, the teleological side? Martin: Or this will be made naturally? Frye: I think it will tend to take its own place as soon as people have understood that this is one of the most important things about the generation gap, that the young people of today do not have to advance gradually, step by step, to the extent that people of the older generation did. Consequently, the teleological, the gradual unfolding, becomes really a dramatic thing, rather than a mode of knowledge. It’s rather like a great presentation of a tragedy where the audience already knows the main theme, and has the simultaneous perception in its mind, but then participates through the gradual unfolding of it. Chiasson: André says that the low form of the process of simultaneity is “collage.” It is not the poetic. Frye: You notice that in the history of music there have been contrapuntal developments, and then sudden simplifications where you had emphasis on a tune, on an air going along the top with chords underneath, which is a teleological approach to music. But every so often the contrapuntal reasserts itself. I think that we have been bringing up students to learn along a single melodic line and that now they are educating themselves along contrapuntal techniques. That’s why they don’t find poetry so difficult, because poetry, like Shakespeare, has all these different levels [at once?], that is contrapuntal. Martin: [Recurring to the problem of the creation of communities through various types of symbolic expression.] Coming here in the train, I asked myself what sort of broad- or narrow-casting was Rembrandt, Milton, Pascal practising. I believe that Rembrandt was narrow-casting, and Milton or Pascal. Do you understand what I mean? It’s for one town, for a special class of merchants, and the beginning of wonderful painting. Is it possible to create painting as high as the Flemish in the context of mass broadcasting? Frye: Surely Rembrandt is narrow-casting to his Dutch clientele, but he is also broadcasting to the world because everybody in the world can respond. Martin: Yes. But I am asking about the start of a value, not the dissemi-

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nation. Perhaps we are wrong in trying to create immediately in large broadcasting the same type of values. All the problems of the creation of a community are problems of narrow-casting. Frye: Here, of course, is where the separating tendency in modern political life comes in—the fact that we are in an age of smaller groups feeling their identity. I think that the prejudice against American academics in Canadian universities is due not so much to the fact that they are Americans, as to the fact that they are behavioural scientists, for the most part.36 Consequently they have no sense of the community and the environment they are in; they just plunk down the same pattern wherever they are. But we’ve gone through that pattern when they laid out the West in squares and built railroads across it, and I think that now we can start becoming more aware of the immediate community. Chiasson: So actually, you agree that the identification of numerous small communities is the start of establishing a system of communications—the creator recognizes the community that he is working in, rather than necessarily working for or with. This is why you get targets in programs. You say, well, my program’s going to be directed to people that read the editorial page of the newspaper. Then you say, yes, I’m doing it for the people who read the editorial page, but I’m not sure they’re going to watch it, so I should put in something else, I don’t know, some song and dance. Frye: And, of course, the only people that you are sure of getting are the people within the vicinity of your signal. Chiasson: Yes, exactly. And that’s a way of describing a community, if you want. Frye: Yes. If you’re not aware of the environment, you’ve really had it. This has gone on a good deal in newspapers. I noticed it when I was in Berkeley,37 reading a San Francisco newspaper: in that paper, the world was the San Francisco area and a few rumours from outside. I think that this is a quite normal and healthy tendency. Martin: We have no solution for the problem of violence in the mob with the mass media, which are essentially mob media. Frye: But a mob is only capable of simultaneous perception, and it can only react to a present symbol. This People’s Park at Berkeley was noth-

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ing but a stretch of mud covering a city block. But, for the mob, it was the garden of Eden with a fence around it. There is no teleological sense in a mob whatever. You have to understand the techniques of simultaneous apprehension to dissolve one. Martin: If mob tendencies continue, perhaps it will be necessary to create new communities on the side, on the margin of mob territories. Frye: But the mob doesn’t march, you see. That’s the teleological rhythm. The mob drifts. Somebody says, let’s go and smash that shop, and so they go there. And then they go somewhere else. Martin: Yes, but it’s possible to design a territory of a mob. It is not the first time in the history of humanity that it is necessary to create a new community on the frontiers of the old. Frye: This is starting, I think. To return to Berkeley, Telegraph Avenue is a place which is full of what they call “the street people.” In other words, it is a drifting mob without much sense of home. And yet in the middle of that are all these little contemplative groups, studying yoga and listening to some Tibetan lama, and this kind of thing. [The discussion of how communications create communities continues.] Frye: Isn’t that the trouble with most commercial television programs, that they are thought of and broadcast to the greatest possible number rather than focused? Martin: It is impossible to create faith, pride, or national loyalty ou la volonté d’être ensemble avec des mass media. Frye: You have to create a sense of identity, I think. Everybody in Canada wants to hear about the moon shot next week, but if one of those astronauts were a Canadian, the interest, in this country, would be about a hundred times what it is.38 Martin: Yes, we are a nation within the shadow of the U.S.A. Chiasson: The CBC, created precisely for developing the Canadian sense of identity, is now really used to promote the identity of a few people who work in it. Martin: The problem is to create a community around achievement, not a community of fear ruled by mob concepts.

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Frye: The mob, of course, is the opposite of the community. The mob needs to have a focus of hatred, while the genuine community must have a focus of identity. [Martin brings up the curious example of the NFB film about La Bolduc, born Mary Travers, a French Canadian singer and violinist of the Depression years who won an enormous following with her comic, derisive songs on such topics as unemployment. The soundtrack never gives a song in its entirety, but the whole film concentrates on the background of expropriation and poverty.] Frye: So that she’s just dissolved against her background. Martin: Yes. It was a film about achievement, and the images of achievement are neglected. Chiasson: Isn’t there some link between the focus of hatred and the focus of identity? Frye: Well, yes. I was thinking of the difference between that mob being surrounded by the police and saying, “Get the pigs!” and a group listening to a folk singer like this woman. She is speaking for the group that she is addressing, and that provides a focus of identity. Chiasson: André says that we have a regulatory function. We spoke last time of a possible role as a producer of images and prototypes, though in discussion with John Grierson subsequently we found that that side of our function is not in the Act, although perhaps the promotion of such is within our orbit. But he says there is a third possible area, which is the development of a body of criticism. This is the teleological side. Can we create this body of criticism? Martin: Indirectly; it would be a by-product. Frye: Something like this came up at the Air of Death hearing. There’s a contrast between a censorship which says, “This is something you must not do”—which immediately creates a complete demoralization among the producers—and the opposite of that which comes out in things like what Harry Boyle said: that the program is about an urgent public issue, where the producer takes the viewer into his confidence rather than delivering oracles.39 This is something that a sympathetic review of such a program could say. That is, the question of censorship is not there, not within a million miles of being there. It’s just a matter of what the person concerned about the community feels.

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Chiasson: Yes: in criticism, there is the sympathetic approach and there is the damning or acid approach. Is it desirable that a body of criticism be developed? How could we envisage this encouragement by the CRTC? Frye: The techniques of embodying this, I’m afraid I am not too clear about. But I had the feeling all through that Air of Death hearing that people like Larry Gosnell and Stanley Burke were both dedicated and sincere people, but they were also members of a professional elite.40 And they were here and the audience was down there. The feeling of knowing what was good for them was very strongly in their minds. There has to be this interchange of confidence, the sense of interdependence, that everybody in the community is dependent on everybody else: the producer of a program is dependent on his viewers, just as the viewers are dependent on him. Chiasson: What’s happened largely is that we tend to define our behaviour according to what we see on television. The politician, when he thinks of broadcasting, thinks of how he will look in that given situation . . . Frye: It’s a curious process, because the political leader is worked on by advertising agents who also consult the public as to what kind of image they want. But when he’s put on television, there is the most elaborate pretence that the audience has not in fact been consulted. If people have said, in answer to Gallup polls and so on, that they want this sort of thing, then the fact should be recorded somewhere; it should be in the open as part of the whole game. [Martin and Chiasson wonder whether a new, nonprint type of criticism could be developed, perhaps in university departments of communication.] Frye: I don’t see why it couldn’t be, although I don’t know that I can suggest practical possibilities at this point. Certainly the universities could be used as a resource for personnel in this sort of thing, and will be increasingly, I think, as their departmental structure breaks down and begins to re-establish itself along the lines of communication. [They instance underground groups, or small contemplative groups, as sources of a body of criticism outside the usual forms of classic scholarship.] Frye: Regarding the contemplative groups and the underground ones, there is also a great deal of the sort of Quaker meeting development.

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That is, there are encounter groups where people sit down and tell each other what they don’t like about one another, and try to tear off the clothes of ordinary hypocritical good manners. Students are extremely sold on these. I think that part of the reason goes back to the whole conception of communication. If you stop a man on the street and ask him for an example of communication, he will say, “Well, it’s when A says something to B,” which implies that A is being active and B is being a passive recipient; whereas students now are tending to use words like “dialogue.” What they mean is that communication grows inevitably out of the fact that there are two people, and the relation is not a one-way one but a reciprocal one. I do think that one has to take account of the growth, among the younger generation, of these sorts of experiential communities, because community and communication are interdependent ideas. Chiasson: If we see the mass media, for example, as one-directional communication from the few to the many, we’ve got part of the solution if we can develop two-way communication, in which people can have access to the means of expression in the media, the means of production. Frye: But it’s not just a matter of finding walkie-talkie reporters interviewing people. It’s not just a matter of open-line programs. It’s an educational program problem. Chiasson: André says that the one form that we don’t see often on television is two persons in dialogue who are not professionals. There is always a professional catalyst, or interviewer. Frye: Because, when you’re interviewing people at random, you are still assuming that they are passive units, and that what you will get will be the more or less reflex prejudice. People fall in with this. [A section of manuscript is missing here. The dialogue returns with the problem of developing broadcasting in terms of the common good. Should one wait for an indication from Parliament, or has one the right to assume leadership, in a democratic society?] Frye: The democratic leader, of course, falls between two extremes. One is the leader who is set over against his community, and the other is the mob leader who is simply a part of the mob. The leader has to be the individual who is at the same time identified with his group, and with a freedom of movement which enables him to understand the plurality of

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communities. Trudeau came in first as a symbol of national unity (being both English and French), yet at the same time, like almost all politicians east of Winnipeg, he doesn’t really take in the Prairie Provinces. He is at a bit of a loss there because he doesn’t understand them and they don’t understand him. So the leader has to have the extra mobility which comes from the fact that there is always more than one community involved. Chiasson: That’s the leader in a democracy, and you’re thinking specifically of the political leader. Frye: Well, I gave you the example of the political leader, but I think that it is true of all leadership. Chiasson: I think that André’s question is a little more specific: should we study more the mandate or should we study more the fact of broadcasting? He gives the example of the Annual Report of the CRTC which we prepared, where we really talked about the development of the technical industrial aspect,41 and said, should we not have, for example, looked at the Parliamentary Committees, looked at the House of Commons debates, looked at the newspapers, looked at the many expressed concerns about broadcasting, and made a table of that as well? [At this point they apparently look at Frye’s “Logos diagram,” a version of what Frye sometimes called his “Great Doodle,” a way of visualizing the intellectual cosmos or the manifestations of the Word that guided his thinking at this time. Circular in form, it is divided into four quadrants labelled Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus.]42 [See diagram next page.] Chiasson: On your large diagram here, if we are at the bottom of the circle, which I think we are, it’s a problem of Prometheus, a will. Martin: A will of achievement, of goals. What’s going on now is violence, disturbance, unrest; it’s more anxious than revolutionary. Frye: It’s just teetering on the boundary between the two. People of my generation belong in the ironic phase of culture. They’ve been brought up with the Existentialists; they’ve been brought up with the anxiety of being thrown forward into the future. The younger people are much more revolutionary in their mood. They are romantic and idealistic and Utopian, they are not ironic.

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ADONIS Proust

Nietzsche Rimbaud

EROS mysticism ascent of soul

loss of innocence

past to present

prescent to past

HERMES

PROMETHEUS

existential anxious

revolutionary

present to future

future to past

Dante’s Purgatorio Plato

Hegel Marx

THANATOS

Martin: Perhaps the present revolution is only a phase of the Hermes quadrant? To be revolutionary, it is necessary to do the work of Lenin, Hegel, and Marx. It’s hard, theoretical work. And we don’t get actually the same body of work of analysis and projection. Frye: I think that is one reason why Marxist society, and more particularly Maoism, has such an appeal for younger people. They feel that there is where the will is being directed. It comes out of their cultural tastes, as I say. My generation were brought up on an ironic literature: we read the Existentialists, we read the rather oblique poets, like Wallace Stevens, and we understood the conceptions of alienation and absurdity and anxiety. Now, with the under-thirty group, there is an intense neo-

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Romantic feeling. They’re afraid of irony, they hate it. They feel that this is something the older generation has got them imprisoned in, and they want to break out of it. They listen to folk singers who are talking in Utopian terms, not in tragic and ironic terms. Martin: Yes, but Romantic and Utopian tendencies are situated before August Comte, Hegel, and Marx in the succession of mental landscapes. Perhaps you have a sector, a Romantic sector, before the Thanatos pole. And at the same time, Apollo and moon shot techniques are already in the Prometheus phase, where there is a body of planning, pre-vision, analysis of works, and new direction. But perhaps you are always mainly in the Hermes fast phase. Frye: Certainly, the main centre of gravity of democratic civilization is still there; I think that’s true. Chiasson: The striking element of the youth movement is its globality. It’s not just one society, it’s really the world as one community—that is, a Utopia. Isn’t it? Frye: Yes. Chiasson: So that achievements that have a national tag to them are up for criticism. Frye: It depends on the nation. In Canada, yes, but Cuba would be different. Chiasson: I was trying to see the nature of the revolutionary ideal, and where the will was being applied. Frye: I speak of revolutionaries like Hegel and Marx who, in the nineteenth century, were rationalist people. The revolutionary feeling in our time is Freudian as well as Marxist. That is, the sense of creative sexuality is very strong. This circle [the Logos diagram] is really on the analogy of the human body. You have the brain here, and the sky-father who makes the world, the artificer, and down here you have the sexual and anal regions, and the earth-mother; you have the angels of Logos here and the titans or the giants down here, like Prometheus. In the Christian centuries, you have the top, the brain, the sky-father, idealized, and everything which is down here becomes infernal, a part of hell. Then you have Rabelais going on a long quest for sexual and anal imagery. In the last chapter of Rabelais there is the priestess who says goodbye to the giants,

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saying, “Now remember, all good things come from below ground.”43 This is the mood now, I think, the sense of creative sexuality coming up. Chiasson: The special Canadian situation vis-à-vis the turmoil, perhaps we could identify what’s peculiar about it. You’ve just been to the United States, and I remember your remark that there seemed to be more balance here. Frye: Canadians have more of an administrative mentality, thinking very concretely in terms of what committees they can be on. This means that the students are presenting negotiable demands instead of these non-negotiable demands which create a reign of terror in American universities. Chiasson: I see. We have a sense of negotiation. Frye: Negotiation derived from the fact that they don’t think in terms of confrontation for its own sake, they think of participating in the administrative machinery. Chiasson: Can this be linked to something that is fundamental in Canadians? Frye: I think that one of the things that is fundamental in Canada is the sense of the artefact, of manipulating things rather than bringing them to birth. Canadians are not a race of great creators. They are rather a race of adminstrators, manipulators, people who are good at practical situations, or thinkers—that kind of thing. Consequently, they tend to think more in rational terms. [The question is linked to the characteristic Canadian landscape.] Martin: In Canada, it’s a problem of monuments versus the landscape. Frye: We’re still in the pyramid stage where the things that man creates are mathematical and are imposed on the landscape and don’t blend in with it. Chiasson: In trying to describe broadcasting in Canada, you come to the conclusion that we’ve done marvels at building the pyramid—tremendous networks, hundreds of stations, interconnections, everything—but there’s a certain vacuum about what ought to go in, the things that we are producing.

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Martin: C’est aussi la prédominance de l’adaptation sur la création. Frye: But this is repeated below the broadcasting towers: that is, the West is laid out in those square sections. If you look at the buildings in a Western village, they don’t come from the landscape, they defy the landscape. I think Versailles begins the intelligent or geometrical conquest of space which you have over here: it’s the conquest of nature by an intelligence that doesn’t love nature and doesn’t feel itself a part of it. Chiasson: I remember I said that the next time we talked, perhaps we would talk of Canada as a non-brilliant society, and you said, “Thank God Canada is not a brilliant society.” We would like to see the possibilities of creation in a non-brilliant way. Martin: Une société brillante, une culture brillante, it’s an overstimulated culture: Vienne, Paris . . . Frye: I think of California where the climate is overstimulating to begin with, and they don’t have this long deep introverted winter which is so valuable to us. It’s characteristic of a brilliant culture to think in terms of very concrete images, whereas in Canada we have a sense of the conceptual, as both articulating, and, to some extent, cooling down the direct presentation of the symbol. You’ll never get a Monet in Canada. You would get a man who would start with a pencil and a piece of white paper, and who would think of the colours as emerging. I was looking at an exhibition of paintings by Canadian students of landscapes, and one of them was a student from Ghana. I realized that what was different about his imagination was that he had never seen a black-and-white world; consequently, he lived in a world where colours existed from the beginning. He did not think, as we do, of colours emerging in the spring, and coming into their focus in the autumn and then disappearing. There is an annual birth and death of colour, out of the black and white, in Canada. [All agree on the importance of this black-and-white phenomenon in Canada.] Frye: There is an analogy, and I think it is a very deep-rooted analogy, between the image derived from sense experience which the poet uses, as the colour, and the concept, as the black-and-white thing. And I think that our habit of mind is instinctively conceptual. You see it in Canadian poetry, both English and French: the struggle that they have to get the pure image across, and the almost gasp of relief with which they fall

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back into the conceptual argumentative line. That’s what struck me in my reading about Canadian nineteenth-century literature, the fact there is such a high intelligence carried out at an argumentative level, and the extraordinary act of will that it takes for a Canadian poet to get away from the conceptual basis. Chiasson: I saw this in another context, that of French Canada, being extremely argumentative, aggressive. I’ve wondered if the verbal aggression let loose didn’t sometimes cut them off from their historical or cultural foundations. Frye: I think it does, to some extent, because the Canadian is always uneasy when he’s left the field of argument. Martin: A capital is a tool of civilization. Is it possible to create a real capital in a non-brilliant society? Frye: I think that the capital of a non-brilliant society is going to be an administrative centre. I think that it will be some time before there is a brilliant society here, that is not what Ottawa is all about. It’s very much a brain centre, it’s a centre of communication signals, but it is not the dramatization of a way of life in the way that London or Paris would be. I think that I mentioned this earlier in connection with Charlottetown: something is put on top of a Canadian community, and someone says, “Now this is culture, you rally round it.” And you know, they won’t. Chiasson: And it’s true in other areas of Canadian life, not just the cultural area. In some respects, social organizations or patterns developed in brilliant countries, or maybe even in the United States, don’t take root here . . . . André asks if we can say that the black-and-white culture is a culture of abstraction. Frye: Yes. There’s an analogy which may be something more than an analogy between the black and white and the conceptual. It is such an instinctive figure of speech that there must be something there. Chiasson: André asks whether a new sector of communications that would put the accent on the transmission of knowledge and abstraction might have a chance to be more successful in Canada. Martin: New channels or new tools of representation, visual terminals with computers and so on, all means of processing of information, are more fitted for Canada, perhaps, than for other countries.

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Frye: I think so, yes. Because you’re dealing with a community that thinks conceptually first, and moves from that to symbols and images and concrete things. Martin: Is our difficulty to represent accompanied by a special facility to schematize or to abstract? Frye: That’s interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Of course, the poet thinks schematically too, but in a rather different way. He classifies images, whereas this community tends to classify concepts. Chiasson: André asks whether in the history of Canadian communications there has been a proven aptitude to schematize: for example, some achievement in mapping? Frye: Yes, there has been a good deal of that in the Canadian temperament and, in a sense, that is what I owe my reputation to: a schematization of forms of literature. I’ve often mentioned that story by Stephen Leacock about the Canadian town, with the rivalry between the Episcopalian and the Presbyterian. The Presbyterian minister taught ethics in the local college five days a week and then preached on Sunday, and Leacock says that in his college classroom he gave his students three parts Hegel and two parts St. Paul, and when he preached to his congregation on Sunday, he reversed the dose and gave them three parts St. Paul and two parts Hegel.44 That couldn’t exist anywhere but in Ontario. It starts as Scottish Presbyterianism but that particular form is pure Canada. [Martin wonders whether Frye could say something about the relationship between the “black-and-white” culture and characteristics of contemplation and abstraction.] Frye: As I say, the people in this country go through this deep introverted winter every year and it tends to be a kind of seed bed into which things fall and from which they emerge. But regarding the Canadian experience rotating into the winter and back to it again, one thinks of flowering out of this self-contained introversion and then a withdrawal to it. It isn’t an outside world which is there all the time. Chiasson: André asks if winter impresses us with the sense of a cosmic cycle, whereas in cities where it is warmer, you are more aware of mechanical time. Frye: Oh, yes, I think so, because you can go through a year in Los Ange-

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les without ever thinking of the climate. Whereas here, you always notice the weather and you are continually being pulled back to this cycle of nature. Chiasson: André asks if you know of black-and-white cultures other than Canada. Frye: Yes, Russia—I think that is one that has many things in common with Canada. Japan is another, because of the emphasis they keep putting on things like the cherry blossom in the spring and the chrysanthemum in the autumn . . . for the Japanese, it’s not always there. It grows and it dies, they’re always conscious of this circle going around. And the Japanese also have this manipulative and administrative gift. When you get into Sweden, you begin to get into another kind of rhythm, this sort of midnight sun rhythm, which is something that you would know. Chiasson: To me, the “black and white” and the “garrison” are similar, there is a certain sense of loneliness, in a way, in both impressions. Frye: And of course, the black-and-white world is the schematic world, it’s the world of the drawn lines, the world of communications, the articulations, the skeleton world. [Chiasson floats the idea of looking at Canadian history and fundamentals in terms of a tropism or ecology of abstraction.] Frye: The tropism45 is something that is established from here; that is, the north seeks the south, the south never seeks the north. Chiasson: Exactly. The northern exploration of the Promethean, the development of the north. The Russians have been tremendous in that respect, of course. But then, the culture which has the capacity for abstraction may also have the capacity for destruction. Frye: Yes, it can destroy nature by imposing this abstract pattern on it. And it can be humanly destructive, too. It’s also got something to do with rocks—there are so many damn rocks in this country. The pre-Cambrian shield is just lying all over the country; there’s a sense of the vegetation just pushing its way out of the rock.There’s a tremendous sort of mining culture in this part of the world: it’s all part of the same cultural complex. [Martin remarks on how the Canadian capacity for abstraction contributed to

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the development of American animation and cartoons, for instance in the work of Mack Sennett.] Frye: I knew about Mack Sennet, and I knew about Larry Semon who turned the old comics into a cartoon just by the gymnastics.46 Martin: They both, at the same time, font entrer de l’abstraction. These are all the family trees of the beginning of the American animated cartoon. Frye: But still it is significant that he was developed in the NFB. Everything is imported in Canada, but I think it’s what it does when it gets here that . . . Chiasson: It would be interesting to find other examples of this schematic effect. Frye: In painting, one would think of things like the Group of Seven, going up into the country around Lake Superior, and schematizing what they see—Lismer and Harris, particularly, laying the colours on, just blocks of colour one after the other, reds and yellows and greens and blues. And then Harris going into abstraction. There is nothing uncommon about abstraction, but what is uncommon is the way he gets to it, simplifying and schematizing a landscape. [Martin talks of the country’s being so large that one can emigrate to the interior, as the early settlers did, necessarily leaving behind their monuments.] Chiasson: André is going one step further: a culture without monuments, a culture of abstraction, is also a culture of emigration. Frye: My wife realized this when she started to study the history of art and found that, as she hadn’t at the time been in Europe, she had never actually seen the works of art themselves, but had been trained entirely on conceptual analogues, that is, reproductions in books, and that sort of thing. Martin: It’s retrieval and references. Frye: You are really manipulating the conceptual skeleton of the art world. I think it does affect a country when its whole cultural tradition has been based on these conceptual analogues. It makes a lot of difference, because if you create a new work of art, you’re not making a new

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appearance in a community of art; something is flowering out of these conceptual analogues. Chiasson: I think we’ve a capacity to adapt to certain trends coming from elsewhere. I wonder if that is also linked to our capacity to process in the abstract. Frye: I suppose so. Again, I think of a culture like that of Japan and China where things begin by adaptation and imitation and eventually get established. Chiasson: What are the chances of a black-and-white culture’s radiating, influencing, developing in the world through satellite, the cosmopolis? Frye: I think its chances of doing that are like Rembrandt’s, that is, they are in proportion to the extent to which it realizes its own community and directs itself on that. Chiasson: [alluding to Martin’s distinction between radiation and amplification] He says, for example, that Brigitte Bardot is more amplified than radiating and that Rembrandt radiates more than he is amplified. Frye: Yes. But radiation is a quality of intensity, and intensity is a quality of concentration and that arises out of a rapprochement in a community. Chiasson: Then the future of Canada is more toward concentration than toward dissemination? Frye: I think that if you start out with the idea of making an exportable culture, you’ve had it; I just don’t think that that works at all. The Americans, for example, didn’t have a literature that was communicable to the outside world until they got intense regional developments in Mississippi and New England and New York and the West, and I think that is true of us, too. You can’t aim at a world market unless you are doing something completely undistinguished. Chiasson: André is suggesting that we are better equipped to export natural resources or food or nickel than to export theatre and cinema. It’s a wrong direction. Frye: Well, I think that if we go in the other direction, then we will export it all the more quickly and it would become communicable.

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Chiasson: André says it can also act as a shield to prevent cultural hegemony: it is also the best defence. What is the ultimate form of abstraction in terms of a community? Is it a certain degree of nearly atomic communities linked somehow, organically or some other way? Frye: Yes. And concentrating on the immediate conceptual form of communication. Communication through emblems, through images and symbols, presupposes contact and sympathy, whereas the argumentative, the conceptual, is more aggressive. The argument is like the railway, it just goes straight across the country, and that form of communication is the kind you develop in a country where communication is difficult. Chiasson: The cycle spring–fall, fall–spring, has an aspect of colour-toblack-and-white. There is a movement from animate to inanimate, to the cold of winter which is the antithesis of the brilliant. Frye: Yes. Cold is a self-contained quality, it holds its life in itself. Chiasson: André suggests that it might be a program of action to change the emphasis, in the linguistic problem in Canada, from the political aspect that it has now to a human ideal. Frye: I certainly would like to see that, yes. Of course, the linguistic barrier of, let’s say, Ontario and Quebec, is no greater than the cultural barrier between Ontario and the Prairies—and they both speak English—or between the French Canadians in Quebec and the Acadians in the Maritimes. Chiasson: André is asking how to take it away from the political arena, where it’s always a contest, a degradation, into an area of human development. Martin: It’s a problem of aesthetic programmation. Frye: There again, the political atmosphere is part of the whole conceptual and argumentative atmosphere. If it weren’t political, it would be religious, it would be something where you could have an argument. The only direction away from this, I think, is away from the narrowly conceptual and argumentative into the presentation by emblem and symbol and image, which are things which you cannot argue about. Either they are there or they are not there. Chiasson: It’s a problem of images, ideals, and universals.

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Frye: But if the ideal is presented as an image, as a vision, then it is not only something that you cannot argue about, it is also something communicable through all languages. Whereas the ideal as something that you argue about runs into this linguistic problem which is largely a mental problem. Chiasson: Images really grow; they’re not of the domain of abstraction itself. The source, the roots are in the guts more than in the mind. Frye: They’re certainly in sense experience rather than in abstraction, and to that extent they are more bodily. Chiasson: The things that we are trying to define, the fundamentals: André asks to what extent they are applicable to all the territory, the Maritimes, the Prairies, the West? Frye: I think what we are trying to find might be called latitude things— what connects us because we are all Canadians in the same latitude. The longitude things which pull us down into an American culture, they’re something else again. Latitude things have to do with climate and the existence of winter and that immense drive in to the interior and down the St. Lawrence. Chiasson: I wonder if we can say that the common bonds are more numerous than the divergent or dissociative. [He comments on Canadians’ lack of real knowledge of their territory, especially the north; “we have made an abstraction of our north.”] Frye: Our country is abstract to ourselves. [The discussion returns to Frye’s Logos diagram. Martin asks about the Hermes and Prometheus phases in Canadian terms.] Frye: I think in Canada you start out with a very Logos-dominated conception, a very Dantesque one, the intelligible order, what you impose on the landscape. This, around here, is the pastoral area, when Dante’s Purgatorio goes up to the Garden of Eden, and the Eros ascent is towards an earthly paradise. The pastoral world is very deeply rooted in Canadian consciousness. At the same time, the world of winter in so much Canadian literature is a thing of terror and nihilism. Martin: The annual “thanatos.” Frye: It’s a very traditional pattern that you have in most Canadian liter-

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ature. The pastoral theme is generally diffused in so much nineteenthcentury Canadian literature and poetry, the Mariposa type of thing—the small town and the protected community.47 The chase for submarine monsters is what you begin to get in Pratt, and the sense of nihilism of the iceberg: the ship hits it and disappears. Then there are the mechanical and technological poems of Pratt which are Promethean, on the building of the CPR railway [Towards the Last Spike]. This kind of thing begins to come in more and more with twentieth-century literature. But with so much of the French Canadian lyrics, Henri Carnot, that kind of writing is still very anxious and so inelegant.48 Chiasson: Thanatos being the unexpressible, or perhaps unsayable. Martin: L’anthropologie française a un mot, je n’en connais pas l’origine, pour tout ce qui est le sexe, la morte, c’est le “numineux.” So, Thanatos will be numinous. Frye: Well, yes, that is, this point here where Dante reaches the end of the Purgatorio, the garden of Eden or earthly paradise, [looking] up to the stars and the paradisal vision, the vision of order. You look downward, and you see the whole cycle of nature revolving below. Down here, that’s the point of the underworld journey. You look down and you see this world of eternal pain, and you look up and you see the cycle of nature turning. This is where the bateau ivre and Moby-Dick kind of journey goes. You can either stop there and look down at this unending world of life and death, or you can think of it in terms of a rebirth, as the tomb becoming a womb. Chiasson: And even the life hereafter. Frye: Yes, in religious terms, it becomes a life hereafter; in purely literary terms, of course, it doesn’t. Chiasson: Even in religious terms the religious order grows out of the Logos. Frye: In the Christian conception, the Logos descends down through the Adonis role; that is, Christ comes to the world and becomes the dying God. The answer of the soul to this is the ascent of the soul back to its creator. There are two levels in the Christian story. Christ comes from Heaven to the earth and then goes back in the Ascension. And then he also descends into the underworld, into hell, and then comes back again in the Resurrection.

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Martin: I thought about the astronautic American operation (you see, we are now in this point of the cycle), that it is not an American cycle, it’s a German cycle with an American budget. The American Promethean enterprise in astronautics is in advance of the civilized cycle. It is criticized. It is in contrast to the general development of the society. It isn’t an absolutely American cycle, it’s an import, an acculturation. If we have to do the work of a Hegel, a Marx, an August Comte, we have to do it now. And only after we will launch our rockets, with a new body of knowledge. Frye: But it’s typical of the twentieth century, I think, that it does the technological thing first, and then it thinks afterwards. Chiasson: And it gets things imposed on it by technology. Frye: You get to the moon without stopping to think whether the moon is worth landing on. Martin: If we intend to arrive here, it is necessary to take some precautions in this phase, otherwise we will fall into the “Thanatos” phase. You have never written about this cycle? Frye: I haven’t yet, no. Martin: But you intend to do so? Frye: Yes, sometime soon. Martin: It would be possible to illustrate it by a modern equivalent of illumination. It would be a collage with some little bits of newspaper illustrations, with a little head and some character with wings [cut from?] another paper. Frye: Of course, in medieval or Renaissance literature, you do get very literal diagrams of this kind. Martin: C’est intéressant d’essayer de faire des itinéraires entre les phases. Chiasson: Can you make itineraries of this kind? Are there steps? Frye: There are all kinds of them, fictional patterns, of course. But you spoke of the “numinous” a while ago, and of course, in Christian teaching, you cannot look to nature for the numinous; that is, nature is a created order and all the gods that men have discovered in nature are really

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devils. That is the Christian view. With us, we start rediscovering the numinous in nature. Martin: I need to study this [diagram] for some time before asking any more questions. It’s a fountain, it’s a well. But I ask myself some questions about revolutionary techniques in the Hermes phase and in the Prometheus phase. And it is very curious because the pre-revolutionary state, actually in the Romantic and Hermes phase, takes the form of a journey in the revolutionary attitude. It’s the correction of images and references. [The modern revolution] is a revolution without an ideal, without a strategy, without a program, and without even the desire for power. It’s a very curious revolutionary spirit. Frye: You’re thinking of people like Cohn-Bendit, for example, and the feeling of simply renouncing the whole technological side of revolution.49 Martin: It’s intelligent, reasoned, living, “sympathique,” but no program. And it isn’t a question of age. Lenin was young when he started to think in strategic terms. It’s a loss of a sense of government. Is the art of government a Promethean feature? Frye: It can be, yes. The Hermes quest tends to individualize. I think a community disintegrates as it goes on; it becomes more and more a collection of solitudes. With Prometheus, you’re coming in the other direction, and things begin to coalesce. Martin: Prometheus starts with a prophet and ends with a strategist, Alexander the Great, for example. [After a break, Martin alludes to Innis’s remarks on the development of the monastic structure, in a manuscript they hope to study.]50 Frye: Burckhardt, a nineteenth-century historian, predicted some of the things that would happen in the twentieth century. He said that the only cure for some of them would be the rise of the new monastic movement.51 Martin: I don’t know this reference. Perhaps the uncontrollable crisis will develop in the next five years. It will be surely the opportunity for a new separation movement; I mean not national separatism, but the real disappearance of a limited group of men united by the same inspiration and direction.

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Frye: If the universities keep on with this kind of unrest, the scholars are going to be compelled to form monastic communities. Chiasson: We were talking of vertical images and images of convergence. Martin: This sort of big symbolic images in medieval programs of images. And we talked about difficult programmation in terms of symbols. Labyrinthe was an opportunity to do a big tympan, a big series of stained glasses, and the opportunity was missed. And isn’t the democratic process to program in big roles? Do you think that perhaps some day it will be more convenient to do a sort of show business of old and new at the same time? Frye: In the medieval cathedrals, you get an encyclopedic symbolism with the whole drama from the creation and the fall of man into death, and then the regeneration of man and the apocalypse. The Bible starts with the creation, the intelligible order, and goes through the fall of man, and the fall of Israel into Egypt, and then the coming of Christ, and the regeneration of man and the church which leads him back there again. What I was hoping Labyrinthe would do was to indicate a similar encyclopedic sequence in terms of this Hermes and Prometheus, this “thanatos”-centred thing, the labyrinthine underworld quest. [They wonder whether it is possible to think in terms of the creation of Canadian images disseminating in a worldwide system.] Frye: Oh yes, I think it is. It’s difficult to know where to stop before you start prescribing the creative processes of producers. And it’s important not to get into that kind of area. Chiasson: Exactly, and perhaps it’s at that juncture that the body of criticism is important. Frye: Perhaps so, yes, certainly in a negative way. [Chiasson wonders about how the CRTC can interpret its mandate concerning the “national interest.”] Chiasson: The terms of the mandate are fairly strong, so that, without getting into dictating to the creators what they ought to do, there is nevertheless an area of definition of the national purposes of production; that perhaps has to be done. And, I suppose, if we are in the Pro-

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methean part of the circle, excellence in every subject, excellence in every regard . . . Frye: And we’re following the Promethean order, in which all the technological machinery, all the hardware gets set up first, and the thinking is done after that. Chiasson: I wonder if we will extend our energies, to a great extent, on the technological side, on setting it up, on the time-tables, and find that vis-à-vis programs, we have the same problem as we have now. Because for the observant country, the problem of creation is a difficult one. And we will still be observing . . . Frye: If we remain within the general cultural orbit that we’ve been discussing, that is exactly what we will do. We’ll set up the hardware with great speed and efficiency and then there will be a long silence. Chiasson: However, in Canada, I think there has always been a certain expression of patriotism; for example, the national identity has somehow come about in times of war. I suppose this is normal. Frye: It’s an attack on the garrison. Chiasson: Now, I feel that we are in a period where the garrison is being threatened. That could be communicated, and it could become a reason for the country to realize its identity. Frye: It always has been true, in the past, that war could create a cohesive community, in a way that nothing else could. Now that, for better or for worse, we have pretty well outgrown war, we have this constant eroding of the Canadian identity by the uniformity of the world it’s in, which is a war of too many fronts to fight on. Martin: I don’t know if I have the right to ask you this, but in your literary discipline, do you have a special body of knowledge intended in the direction of the image or contrary to the images? Frye: Well, I suppose the body of knowledge comes from the images and symbols of poetry. Martin: Is it a system of explanation or a system of direction? Do you intend to use it as an exploration of the past or do you intend to develop a system to create some new big images, to choose the next program?

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Frye: My own function is really to explain why certain images and symbols are in poetry, and this is the kind of schematization I come up with. I think this will explain why you have images such as going down the river, the quest to the South Pole, or disappearing underground, in certain types of Romantic and symboliste poetry, and why you get images of coming up from the ground, of Titan rising, of climbing a mountain, the ascent of the soul on the mystical ladder, and that kind of thing. So that my work is critical, and I would hope that it would be useful to poets and artists generally, to suggest to them new forms of combination. In fact I think that it has already been of some help to them. Chiasson: I could see a series of films on that. Martin: The start of John Grierson’s National Film Board was a Promethian tentative. Chiasson: I’d put the Liberals in here [on NF’s chart]. And the Conservatives here. Frye: Yes, I suppose that’s the realistic axis, that horizontal one, the other is the idealistic. Chiasson: Where would you put Louis Riel in Canadian history? Frye: Over towards the end of the Adonis one, the pastoral ideal surrounded and overwhelmed. Romantic literature begins with things like Scott’s novels, with the old hardened aristocracy wiped out by the middle class, and you get the battle of the Plains of Abraham; the one that loses is the Marquis, the one that wins is the Hanoverian commoner.52 Louis Riel is that kind of romantic figure overwhelmed by the middle class. Martin: In working with you, it seems to me that we have found new reasons for the decentralization of a system of defence of a community in physical terms and not in institutional terms. Chiasson: Yes, and I think that should be communicated to the Commission, communicated to the Chairman. Frye: Because, even on the Pacific Coast, there is only Vancouver, which is sheltered in behind that island, so that there is nothing like San Francisco or Los Angeles. Similarly, there is this tremendous Strait of Belle Isle and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that is nothing like the Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, area.

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Chiasson: That’s true. It’s a little peninsula, the Maritimes. Until you get to Quebec, you can’t go in too many directions. There is this bottleneck at the top. Frye: The result is that everything seems to flow into the centre, to Montreal and Toronto.

14 The Only Genuine Revolution Recorded 30 December 1968

“The Only Genuine Revolution” and “Educating the Imagination” appeared originally in Monday Morning, February 1969, 20–6, and March 1969, 22–8. The text of the two linked interviews is taken from Monday Morning, with some of the editorial emendations from the reprint in WGS, 51–83. Dated by internal evidence. Monday Morning was a magazine for Canadian teachers published from about 1967 to 1972 by Saturday Night Publications. The interviewer was Bruce Mickleburgh, dean of English and Communications at Seneca College, Toronto, and managing editor of the magazine. The interview was broadcast in four parts on radio station CJRT-FM, 3–24 March.

Mickleburgh: Not long ago the principal teacher at the district high school in Atikokan, Ontario, asked me, “What is the aim of education?” I undertook to quote you from memory: “The aim of education is to be able to distinguish illusion from reality.” Frye: Yes, I did say that, and I was speaking of a particular stage in the educational process. I think I located it somewhere in the high-school stage of education, where it seems to me that the distinction between reality and illusion is really the central problem—the problem of distinguishing the realities from the illusions in society, for example.1 Along with that is the growth of literary and mathematical culture where the units are symbols. That is certainly one of the aims of education, but one could list a great number of others, and when you got all through, it would still remain true, I think, that education is an end in itself. It is simply a way of living, rather than a process aimed at something else. Mickleburgh: Somebody told me that you once said, perhaps in a polemic, that the aim of education is to make people maladjusted.

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Frye: Yes, I said that, too—about twenty-five years ago in an article in the Canadian Forum2—because at that time everybody was talking about adjustment and all the other clichés that were being used in education circles in those days. I naturally brought out the other side of it—that the whole process of distinguishing reality from illusion is also a process of disillusionment, and that consequently the educated person is the one who refuses to accept the illusions and the clichés and the bromides of society. Mickleburgh: Some of those bromides and clichés are still with us, and some of the talk about the aim of education being to make people “adaptable” is still around. People now seem particularly to be talking about adaptability to change, on the grounds that “the only thing constant now is change itself.” They talk about the accelerating rate of change and about the vast accumulation of knowledge in the world, which leads them to the conclusion that there is no point in learning facts any more. They say that since nobody can now learn all the facts, what people have to be able to do is find their own facts. This is a current argument. Frye: I’m not sure that one can call that an argument. I think it’s the result of the general bankruptcy of the previous views. The original idea was that education was a tool for producing the docile and obedient citizen who fitted into his particular niche in the economic and social setup. The idea of education was to produce round pegs and put them into round holes. Now that that has become so obviously impossible, the naked anti-intellectualism which is inherent in this adaptability idea begins to come out. So when you talk about adaptability to change itself, which of course means nothing at all, it suggests that the whole educational process has become expendable. Mickleburgh: Do you relate this to what you have spoken of in The Modern Century as “the panic of change” [22; NFMC, 10]? Frye: I think that a statement such as, “You have to develop an adaptability to change,” without saying where you are going to change or what form the change is going to take, is an expression of panic or hysteria, yes. Mickleburgh: It seems to me that a great many people who are working in the schools really believe that what they are there to do is to mould people or to plant values. I’ve often raised the question (and always got

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lively responses) as to what this had to do with helping people distinguish between illusion and reality. Frye: Well, of course, if you spend thirty or forty years doing a routine job in a routine way, you naturally get the notion that society is a static structure, and that by the time you get through educating these little potential citizens of tomorrow, you can then place them in their proper locale within this static framework of society. But of course there is no such framework, and education cannot prepare you for life, because life will not stay around to get prepared for. By the time you are prepared for life, there is a different life in front of you. It’s only being sheltered by routine that makes it difficult for people to see that. Mickleburgh: Do you think it is possible to counterpose the child and the subject? For several decades now there has been a debate going on that has been put in these terms: we need a child-centred school rather than a subject-centred school. Frye: I don’t object to the concept of a child-centred school as long as you are really dealing with children. That is, the child’s personality, by which I mean mostly his ego, is certainly the central fact of the child’s experience. I think the process of education tends to move from a child centre of gravity to a subject centre of gravity in proportion as a student matures. It seems to me to be an insult to a student of any degree of maturity to give him anything except a subject-centred education. Mickleburgh: You have spoken of subjects as having their own structures and, I think, posed the question that what a person does in mastering a subject is to enter into the structure of the subject.3 Could you clarify that a bit? And what is the relationship between the term “subject” and the term “discipline”? Frye: I don’t know that I would distinguish subject from discipline so far as they are generally employed, except that “discipline” seems to me to mean “subject” with a slightly emotional colouring attached to it designed to emphasize the nature of the structure. But I do think that you tend to move into a certain area of knowledge where your mind has to join on to what has previously been thought and worked at in that area. The term “subject,” of course, is extremely flexible. It simply means an area of knowledge with an extremely vague circumference. And, of course, any area of knowledge is also the centre of all knowledge. At the

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same time there are certain facts established, certain logical principles laid down, certain demonstrable and repeated experiments that have been done, certain classics of the imagination that have established their authority (this is true of literature particularly), and the contact that the mind makes with them is entirely a matter of moving into that area and taking root there. There isn’t any form or habit of thinking, it seems to me, that can go on outside thinking within the subject itself. You don’t think for yourself in that sense. What you do is to add a bit organically related to what has been thought before. [Mickleburgh alludes to students who simply master a certain content in different subjects, as opposed to learning, to some extent, to think as professors of those subjects think. It may be that the schools risk teaching a substitute for the subjects—a “rhetoric of conclusions”—rather than a “rhetoric of inquiry.”] Frye: I understand that very well, and I certainly understand the conception of two levels of learning. Every normal student finds that there are some subjects that he is more interested in than others. And for those in which he is not interested, it seems to me very natural, very human, that his response should be largely a response of memory and a kind of second-hand information, and that actually learning to think as the people in that subject themselves think will be confined largely to subjects in which he is particularly interested. I certainly remember this in my own schooling. I was as lopsided as could be in my own interests. Even in high school I knew that I wanted to study English and did not want to study mathematics. I always got through my mathematics examinations very well simply by memorizing what there was and handing it back and thereby getting rid of mathematics. I never thought like a mathematician. I never thought creatively or originally in that field at all. But nobody is likely to think creatively or originally in all his subjects, and I think that that is perhaps the reason why one’s study tends to narrow in range as one gets older and more mature. Mickleburgh: There are people now who say you don’t need mathematics to enter a university. Frye: I don’t see why one has to carry this always to the point of taking the subject away from the student. I never got the point of things like Cartesian coordinates and was never able to think my way around them or to understand why these subjects were developed in the way they were. But it seems to me that a great deal of education, particularly at ele-

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mentary levels, is bound to be tentative. A student has to be shown the general conspectus of intellectual and imaginative resources in the civilization around him. Out of that he picks the particular place where he wants to advance for himself, but I don’t see the reason for his not doing it. I said in a lecture that the education system compels a high-school girl to do some algebra even though she hates it because her whole life is already geared to marriage and bridge on a Saturday night and shopping in the suburbs.4 But this is a democracy, and consequently it is her right to be exposed to quadratic equations, however little she wants them. Mickleburgh: Do you think there are some senior disciplines, or essential disciplines, that form a necessary, almost obligatory, part of the education of a civilized, well-rounded person? Frye: I daresay there is such a thing as a core curriculum. There are a certain number of things that a person needs to know in order to take any active or responsible role in a complicated society like ours, and I should think that they would correspond pretty well with the subjects that are now taught in high schools: the disciplines of mathematics and the major natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Mickleburgh: Do the disciplines sometimes, or often, get submerged in a process of rationalizing the status quo so as to produce a bureaucracy that is able to reproduce these rationalizations and operate an unchanging society? Frye: There is always a tremendous pull towards inertia and towards habit, and of course that creates rationalization that tends to identify reality and illusion. That is, the realities of society are taken to be whatever the instructor is accustomed to. This is something which is built into the educational process. It would be there no matter who was doing the teaching, and it’s something which the student has to try to separate out as best he can. Mickleburgh: I wonder to what extent objectivity is possible in, say, the study of history. Frye: I’m not sure that objectivity as such is possible—that is, as an absolute. I think it is obvious that anybody teaching history at a university here today is going to be a middle-class, twentieth-century Canadian. This gives him a position, a stance, a perspective on things which would

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not be that of somebody teaching in Indonesia or somebody teaching in the nineteenth century. Given that perspective, it is obvious that objectivity is not a possible absolute. On the other hand, it is a part of the whole educational process to recognize as far as possible the extent of one’s own conditioning, and to become aware of what one’s own assumptions and axioms are. That is a process in which the teacher and the student have mutually to disentangle their own assumptions and their own axioms, and the only thing that will make that possible is an atmosphere of tolerance and good will. Within that tolerance and good will, I think one can come as close to objectivity as is possible—or desirable—in the human world. Mickleburgh: Two questions arise at this point. I’ll start with the less important. On the front page of the Toronto Globe this morning the question is raised about the inundation of the Canadian university by personnel from the United States, particularly in such fields as political science and sociology, where this question of the stance that people adopt is germane to a controversy that has broken out.5 Would you care to comment? Frye: I can see that there is a difficulty for a country such as Canada, faced with a burgeoning problem of new universities growing up on all sides. These universities have to be staffed by qualified people, and they have to be staffed in a hurry. The American and Canadian cultures are so close to each other, and the academic world is so much an international world anyway, that this is not in my view a disaster. Even if it were, I don’t quite know what could be done about it, because the only alternative would be a much bigger disaster in not having enough people to teach these courses. I do feel that it constitutes a problem for the Canadian universities that at the very time they are putting more and more responsibility on the faculty, so many of their teaching staff are people without any real knowledge of the communities that they are teaching in or the traditions that have developed them. I feel, for example, that the University of Toronto faculty of arts and sciences is engaged in getting rid of its Honour Course program at what seems to me to be a rather panicky speed,6 and I can see that the presence of so many on the teaching staff who were not brought up with the Honour Course at Toronto has accelerated that process. I think that we had something in Toronto that was valuable and unique that now we have lost, and that while we doubtless will develop other virtues, other freedoms, and other flexibili-

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ties, we will also become one more big, Middle-Western academic packaging plant. [Mickleburgh’s second question had to do with whether objectivity in the attitudes people adopt towards each other was part of the social aspect of education.] Frye: Yes it is. This is what I had in mind when I spoke of complete objectivity as being not only impossible but undesirable. It seems to me that when it comes to things like a preference of life to death, of freedom to slavery, of tolerance to prejudice, one shouldn’t try to be objective. There are certain fundamental, built-in values which are a part of the whole existential aspect of education, and the attaining of knowledge, from that particular point of view, is merely a means of becoming articulate and responsible within that framework of social values. Mickleburgh: Eli Mandel recently made a speech in which he raised the problem, if I understood him correctly, of how the liberal classroom accommodates itself to a view which is anti-humanities, anti-education, even anti-language. What he was getting at was drawn largely from a series of essays by George Steiner which pointed out that Nazi barbarism arose, not in the Gobi Desert or in the Amazon, but right outside the walls of the university, that all the horrors of the Nazi regime were chronicled and written down, that words uttered things that words should not utter, and that the reaction of some people today is to adopt an explicit strategy of silence in the face of this.7 So in contemporary literature, for example, you get a stream of writing, to use Mandel’s expression, that is shoddy, anarchistic, and brutal. I suppose the real question lurking here is the integrity of the humanities in the face of these towering human problems. Frye: I suppose everyone today realizes that there aren’t any Gobi deserts or Amazon jungles in civilization, that where the desert and the jungle really are is in the big cities. That is where the real horror of existence is, and that is where the worst passions that human nature is capable of are exhibited. It is true in that sense that the enemy the university has to fight is right next door. I don’t believe in the strategy of silence, but neither do I believe in a strategy of horrified condemnation which tends, of course, to increase the attractiveness of what is condemned. That is why I suggested in The Modern Century that the anarchistic, or perverse, or muddle-headed type of culture being promulgated by people like, say, Céline, who are quite able and significant writers and yet at

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the same time are simply bloody-minded kooks—that what is necessary with this kind of perverse cultural product is not to denounce it, but simply to teach it.8 Because study is a cool medium, and by the time this kind of thing is looked at as part of the spectrum of modern culture it tends to become denatured. So what students do is to write crisp and competent essays about the anarchistic vision of Céline and then go on about their business. Mickleburgh: I think the expression you used in the book had to do with the Prince of Darkness becoming an Angel of Light if he is viewed as having made a contribution to modern thought. Eli Mandel asked, “What if education itself turned out to be the Prince of Darkness?” Frye: I can understand that question well enough. I think that what never can be the Prince of Darkness is the kind of thing I call the educational contract, that is, the area of free discussion in society where the authority is not a social authority or any kind of externally imposed authority but the authority of the logical argument, the established fact, the repeatable experiment, and the compelling imagination. In an atmosphere like that, I simply don’t see how it can become demonic. Mickleburgh: That is using the word “authority” in the Chaucerian sense of auctorite,9 in the original and honourable sense, not in the sense of an enforcer. Frye: Well, that is what authority means to me, and your reference to Chaucer is the right one, because this is the medieval and Renaissance humanist conception of authority: a thing is true, not because Aristotle said so, but because it is true. Mickleburgh: This really brings us to the basis of the authority of the school. There is a challenge to the school today, and part of it is a challenge to what I call—to distinguish it from the genuine kind of authority—authoritarianism. Eli Mandel, if I understood him correctly, talks of the challenge to the genuine kind of authority too, so that the school is somewhat beleaguered on both counts. Yet perhaps it is the authoritarianism that gets in the way of the genuine authority of the school. Frye: I daresay it does. The externally imposed authority in the university, so far as the university is an institution, has no justification, except as an embodiment of the genuine internal authority of the subjects that are studied there. I think the danger of that is not very great: the univer-

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sity is simply not an authoritarian institution in that sense, at least not in North America. The people within the university have very little power as such, and behind them, of course, is the structure of society in which many people see the university as hopelessly enmeshed. I think that it is possible perhaps to exaggerate the degree of authoritarianism in social institutions, because there are still quite a large number of checks and balances operating in a democratic structure. Mickleburgh: The situation is probably sharper in the secondary and elementary schools, where the student has very few rights, than it is on the university campus. There are enlightened regimes developing today, but they are by no means predominant yet, I would think, and this atmosphere of inquiry in the school is still fighting tooth and nail to get established. Frye: I would be more worried about that if I thought it was worse than it had been in the preceding millennium. When I think of how authoritarian the schools have been up to within living memory, and when I think of how different the parents’ attitude, for example, is towards their children’s education compared to what it was even fifty years ago, and when I think of the amount of liberalization there has been within the school itself, I feel, on the long view, somewhat encouraged. Mickleburgh: John Seeley said a few years ago, when he was at York University, that the school does everything well except give the student the opportunities to discover the truth about life.10 That was a sweeping statement, and there have been changes since then. But you can have a conception of a school where children are well looked after physically, where psychologists help them to untangle some of their emotional problems, but where you still have to raise the question of what actual learning is going on. Is somebody actually discovering something about history, about criticism, and so on, or are they getting substitutes for the bona fide inquiry in these fields? Frye: I’m certainly not denying that an immense amount still has to be done in the schools. It’s just that I don’t think the education system is quite as much of a solid wall designed to prevent the student from finding out these things, or to prevent him from making any kind of imaginative discoveries on his own, as it was a generation ago. [Mickleburgh raises the question of class bias in schools, as studied for instance by Brian Thomson and Denis Maisden in their Education and the Working

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Class. These authors found in a study based in Huddersfield, England, that working-class students experienced a conflict of loyalties when they attended grammar schools, tending to lose the values of their class and become assimilated into the middle class. In spite of educational programs for those deemed culturally disadvantaged, few loggers go to university. To what extent can and should the school free itself from class bias, Mickleburgh asks, and does this have to do with the integrity of the school?] Frye: It has a great deal to do with the integrity of everybody. Naturally a working-class student is not going to get interested in literature as long as he thinks of literature as essentially a middle-class status symbol. If he does get interested in it on that basis, then he gets, as you say, assimilated into the middle class. It seems to me that the way out of that is not to assume that you can teach a working-class Shakespeare and a middleclass Shakespeare (which is nonsense), nor to assume that the working class should not bother with Shakespeare because it is essentially something reserved for the middle class (which is also nonsense), but simply to keep on fighting for the principle which was laid down one hundred years ago by Matthew Arnold, which was that culture seeks to do away with classes, that the whole end of everything Arnold meant by culture—the best that has been thought and said in the world—tends to make for a classless society.11 It tends to create an intellectual and imaginative equality which is so important that the social inequalities become less and less significant. I know that sounds Utopian, but you have to be a Utopian in this area. Mickleburgh: That calls for quite a fight. Frye: It calls for a terrific fight. When I was a student at university, I remember that intelligent working-class parents wouldn’t have anything to do with college for their children, even though they might have got scholarships which could have taken them there, simply because they didn’t want their children declassed. I can understand that very well, but I think it’s a matter of unconsciously building in certain class biases to one’s teaching processes. The important thing is to become steadily, increasingly aware of those biases and to weed them out, one after another. Look at the way the psychologists, for example, have lost confidence in the IQ test as they began to realize how much of the test was actually accepting the knowledge of a certain ascendant class as equivalent to human intelligence.

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Mickleburgh: I suppose this means that culture in the Arnoldian sense has revolutionary consequences. Frye: I would think of education as the only genuine revolution that society is ever likely to accomplish. Mickleburgh: How do you see the social consequences of this? Frye: I see the consequences as making for a progressively greater openness in society. I don’t know just how much the phrase “classless society” means, but I think that when you have a university education thrown open to students entirely on the score of abilities, rather than on the score of their heredity or what college their parents went to, you’ve gone a long way. To get to that stage, of course, there’s still a great deal in front of us. I have been to universities in the southern United States, which people told me very proudly were entirely desegregated, but where I didn’t see any black students simply because they didn’t go to the kind of high schools that would allow them to enter the university with their qualifications. Obviously that’s a class barrier that has to be battered down. Mickleburgh: If people began to make critical judgments, began to free themselves from being the perfect consumers, the television fodder, if they were to that extent able to distinguish illusion from reality, if they were able to identify the symbol of the doomsday weapon (I think you mentioned that in The Modern Century),12 then surely the consequences of these acts of recognition and the resulting impact on the way people lived, voted, shaped their relationships with their neighbours and so on, would have profound consequences on the outcome for all mankind. Doesn’t this relate to the question you persistently raise about mob rule? Frye: The mob is simply the intensified and the logical form of the adjusted society: the one thing that a mob cannot stand is the individual. Mickleburgh: Could you visualize the schools as an aspect of mob rule? Frye: Well, of course they would become an aspect of mob rule if we were living, for example, in a police state or a totalitarian state. That would be the only thing you would use the schools for. [Mickleburgh comments on the relative freedom of schools in England from ministerial directives as to what may be taught. In the Canadian provinces, on the other hand, teachers are at the end of a long chain of command. Perhaps, if the real professional decisions could be made by the staff in the schools, the

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schools would be able to strengthen their position as part of a democratic process of education.] Frye: Certainly, as a teacher myself, I think of the teacher as the cornerstone of liberty in society, and I think that the amount of responsibility given to the teacher has a great deal to do with the particular relationship that education is going to have to society. I notice, for example, that in The Republic and The Laws, where Plato is prescribing exactly what ought to be taught to the generation growing up so that they will learn all the right things, he has no confidence in the teacher whatsoever, at least as far as his program of education is concerned: the teachers are told what they are to teach.13 It seems to me that the liberalizing of education is bound up with the attaching of a sense of responsibility and authority to the individual teacher, qua teacher, and not to the administrative machinery which actually ought to be operated only to set free the teacher. Mickleburgh: Do you believe that the teacher should be a scholar? Frye: I can’t imagine a person teaching with devotion year in and year out without having what I should call scholarship, that is, without having a creative interest in the subject that he is teaching and a feeling that he’s really done something when he sees a student’s eyes catch fire, when he sees a student beginning to find out things for himself. A teacher who is interested in his subject to that extent is a scholar. Whether or not he produces articles for learned journals is another matter. Mickleburgh: I think there is one question left from our discussion about subjects. At present there is an assault on subjects. There is the general scornful discussion of the subject-centred school and there is the fad about interdisciplinary studies. It seems to me that “interdisciplinary,” a word that’s thrown around a bit loosely, presupposes disciplinary. There are people who say, for example, that students should study themes and topics, like environmental studies, communication studies, and value studies, and that within these broad general themes, subjects could be drawn on as “sources”—this is the word that is used. I wonder whether this discussion is misplaced and might not do some damage in the end. Frye: I suppose it arises really from the recognition of the fact, which I mentioned earlier, that every subject has an extremely hazy boundary or circumference—it doesn’t really have a boundary except one you draw

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for convenience. So people who like taking a large view will discover, for example, that language is a means of communication and consequently the study of literature ought to form a subdivision of something called communications. I think the trouble with that is that you are likely to do one of two things. The first thing, which is the right one, is to look at these vast, huge, cloudy fields in terms of their subdivisions, so that you can mark out those subdivisions, which brings you back to the subjects again. The other thing, which is the wrong one, is to try to teach according to these inflated and hazy categories, so that what you wind up with is a kind of sociological soup. I know that literature has been taught by themes—you study about war, about death, about love, about life, and so on. But you wind up with a kind of empty, platitudinous pseudo-moralism as the result of your personal possession of the literary experience. That all seems to me to be thoroughly anti-intellectual. Mickleburgh: What do you think is the main blow that has to be struck for education today? Frye: It seems to me that there are the set values I have spoken of, the fact that life and freedom are better than their opposites and that we are committed to a democratic process which increasingly tries to break down social barriers and to equalize society in what I’ve been calling the educational contract, the area of genuine authority. These are common to all educational areas, but the particular tactics, the particular blows struck, will vary according to the nature of the field, the position of the teacher, the maturity of the student, and the aims of the whole educational process in that particular institution. Mickleburgh: At the conclusion of The Educated Imagination you discussed the tower of Babel myth. Do you feel that this is as relevant today as it was five years ago? Frye: Yes, because I think the main danger of society today is still the danger of Babel, that is, the danger of the confusion of tongues, the blurring of dialogue by the use of strange jargon-language which expresses the interest of a certain kind of pressure group. This is a weaseling language which, because it cannot aim at understanding, can only shout. This is the opposite of what it means. Everything that confuses and fouls up the precision and honesty and integrity of verbal communication— that is what I mean by the tower of Babel, and it still seems to me to be the tower of Darkness.

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[Mickleburgh returns to this question at the start of the second part of the interview, asking what light the tower of Babel myth sheds on our contemporary situation.] Frye: Well, the story of the tower of Babel is the story of a gigantic technological and engineering project which eventually broke down because of a confusion of tongues. It seems to me that this is a parable of one of the central dangers of civilization today: that at the very time when technology is drawing the world closely into a single unit, and at the time when cooperation in scientific research and even research in political and economic matters is so utterly essential for the safety of civilization, we also have a great variety of competing languages which have been developed in such a way as to become almost deliberately unintelligible to each other. The language of American democracy and the language of Russian Marxism, for example, get so self-enclosed and so solipsistic that neither can really get outside itself to reach towards the other. That seems to me to be perhaps the greatest central danger society faces today. Mickleburgh: Confucius and his disciple (if we can call him that) Mencius developed the dictum that things should be called by their right names if we are to be clear in thought and action. Frye: Yes, that is true, although of course that would give a very high status to the noun. But it is true insofar as honesty and clarity of description are certainly one of the fundamental tasks of language. Also the development of euphemism, of speaking of unpleasant things as though they were pleasant—that kind of weaseling speech is certainly something that deliberately creates social disaster. An undeclared war, for example, is called an “incident,” and the Nazis spoke of the massacre of the Jews as “the Jewish question.” Mickleburgh: Notices go home from school that say, “In case of inclement weather . . .” A weather forecaster speaks of “a severe degree of precipitation,” which almost makes one want to go down to the store and order “an anti-precipitation garment.” Frye: Exactly. This is all part of the psychology of jargon, which is to wrap up everything in cotton wool and to produce shock absorbers for everything and to rock the whole civilization in the cradle of advertising and official communiqués. Mickleburgh: I mention this because I notice that very often in your

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writing you insist on working out a definition, whether it’s of a given genre in literature or of the term “myth,” and so on. I believe you attach a great deal of importance to definitions. Would you care to comment on the currently modish term “the language arts”? What’s the difference between that and the old term, “English”? Frye: I suspect that there isn’t any difference, except that a term like “language arts” (a euphemism of the kind I’ve just mentioned) makes people feel that they are really up on things like theory of communication and the world of the global village and electronic stimuli, as well as the teaching of language and literature, and that they’ve got things in the right context. I’m not sure whether that’s a necessary consolation to a person teaching literature or not. Mickleburgh: Is English a bundle of disciplines? If so, how many sticks are in the bundle? What possible relationship do they have to each other? Frye: I think that English is an area arbitrarily marked off because of a single language, an area of literature, and that literature exists on various levels. There is the level of ordinary literacy or the elementary level: the ability to read and write. Naturally the ability to read and write is a necessary form of education because without it you can’t take any part in your society. But learning to read and write in itself can only produce the docile and adjusted citizen. The next stage is to read with some sense of direction and to write with some clarity and articulateness. Before long you’re into the study of literature in the more customary, proper sense. It seems to me that English is essentially one discipline with its own structure, just like mathematics, although it is often taught as a loose bundle because so many people don’t understand that it is in fact a subject to be taught and learned. Mickleburgh: You have said, I think, that what you experience is literature, but what you teach is criticism [cf. AC, 11/13, 27–8/28–9]. What do you mean by criticism in that sense? Frye: Criticism is the whole apparatus set up to talk about literature. There is a sense in which the work of literature, the poem or novel or whatever, does not speak. That is, it speaks only in the particular words which are in that poem or novel, and the writer does not mean anything but what he has said. If he had meant anything else, he would have said something else. So there is a sense in which a work of literature is an

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object of contemplation, an object of study, and it doesn’t talk about itself, just as a work of music or painting doesn’t talk about itself. But because it is an object of study, it can also be taught and learned. Once you set up the apparatus of teaching and learning you have criticism. Everything that has to do with the teaching and the learning of literature is criticism. Mickleburgh: You’ve tried to make a contribution to the establishment of literary criticism as a discipline. Do you feel that this effort has made progress? Frye: I think it’s made progress, because criticism itself has advanced immeasurably in its sense of confidence about the genuineness and worthwhileness of what it’s doing. I don’t quite understand why the whole movement of the nineteenth century which grew up around philology, mainly in Germany, didn’t maintain its original head start. There seemed to be a regression in the early part of the twentieth century towards a kind of dilettantism in the study of literature, where there was a certain social status attached to being as tentative and amateurish as possible in talking about literature. The criticism of the last twenty-five years has got over a great deal of that, and there has been a great resurgence of criticism as a subject, first in the United States and Great Britain, and now on the continent as well. Mickleburgh: What sequence, what general plan would you propose for the teaching of criticism in the school? Should you begin with young children so they might really get well grounded in literary criticism? Frye: Yes, although I would not want to see the teaching of criticism, as a methodological course, introduced much below the university level. As I say, the teaching of literature itself is a form of criticism, and it seems to me that it is following the natural curve of a child’s mind to begin with something fairly concrete: with poetry, which lays a heavy emphasis on physical movement and on rhythm, and with stories which are told simply as stories, so that the child gets a sense of the actual shape of the story as it begins and develops and ends. From there one can go on to more and more analytic procedures as the student becomes older. Mickleburgh: What place do you see for the teaching of myth in the school? Frye: Myth to me is the actual constructive or informing principle of lit-

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erature. That is, myth is what gives shape to works of literature as they move in time—the particular shape that we speak of as narrative. Myth begins in the whole complex or body of stories which are told in a society before writing is developed. Such stories are often committed to memory for centuries. Among these there is usually a central group which are regarded as having a peculiar kind of importance. That is, they explain certain facts about the society, they account for the origin of rituals or for the origin of social classes or for natural phenomena, or they tell the central legends of society, of its great victories, its great heroes of the past, and so on. These particularly important, central stories are what I mean by myths. They have the same form or shape as folk tales and legends, but legends and folk tales are nomadic, travelling all over the world and interchanging their themes and motifs, whereas myths seem to take root in a specific culture and grow up with that culture. Mickleburgh: You have argued in favour of teaching the Bible as myth or literature.14 This is a point which is easily misunderstood, so I wonder if you could clarify the point you are getting at here. Frye: If I’m right about myths, then certain things happen to myths. In the first place, because of their particular importance, they tend to stick together and to form a mythology, that is, a coherent body of stories of particular importance. As society grows and becomes more complex, and as writing develops, these stories become expanded in literature, so that every literature in effect inherits a mythology, and the particular mythology it inherits is going to be the one that lies immediately before it historically. For our Western society, in Europe and in North America, the mythologies which we have inherited are the Classical and the Biblical. Consequently, an early study of the Classical myths and the Bible is, to me, essential in getting a grasp of the shape of literature. [Mickleburgh alludes to Richard Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy, which argues that, far from ushering in the hoped-for millennium, the spread of literacy has made people more vulnerable. He asks whether literary criticism has a part to play in making people invulnerable.] Frye: Criticism certainly has a part to play in developing one’s sense of literature, and of course the only way to develop a sense of literature is to make it more active and more and more one’s own particular possession. I think that teachers faced with a restless and often inattentive class tend to become magicians. There is a great deal of belief in magic in teaching.

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I have sat in committee meetings in the Department of English at the university where we have discussed for hours whether putting ABCD in the form ADCB wouldn’t create a kind of magical response on the part of the student. The magical belief that literacy is going to transform civilization that Richard Hoggart speaks of is simply an illusion of that kind. The fact is that the ability to read and write is just as useful to a tyranny as it is to a free civilization, and that any tyranny or any totalitarian state would want its citizens to be able to read its handouts. The thing is, of course, that it would block them, that as soon as the desire for contact with the great imaginations of culture began to become operative, that would be the point at which you would cut off the learning process in a police state. That’s been set out very well in Orwell’s 1984, which I think says more clearly than almost any other book I know that there is always the possibility of freedom as long as the words that can express freedom are there, and that the only way permanently to create a slave state is to smash language and debase it until it becomes a kind of mechanical gabble. Mickleburgh: Humpty Dumpty said, “A word means exactly what I choose it to mean.”15 I hear it rumoured that some people who call themselves structural linguists have been saying something like that. * * * Is it fair to accuse the structural linguists of the assault on English? Frye: I don’t know. The linguists began with a descriptive attitude to language, trying to take the traditional value judgments out of it, and this, of course, is what they should have done. They said that you can’t take a single inflected language like Latin as a kind of norm of what a language ought to be and, further, that what a language does is determined by usage. I think it is possible to make that into a catchword, into a cliché. It’s possible to make every kind of procedure into something prefabricated. I think that every language develops extremely subtle and precise distinctions, and that it’s the business of a critic, and a student and teacher of literature, to try to fight for the advantages which his language already has, and to try to fight against the debasing and the blurring of distinctions in language. I don’t see that there is anything quixotic in doing that. Not to do that is to betray the subject. Mickleburgh: I heard a man who was the head of a curriculum branch (he was trying to illustrate how progressive that branch really was) make the following statement: “As soon as The Research showed that there was no necessary connection between the study of formal grammar and effec-

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tive written or oral communication, we dropped the grammar.” There are many people today who say, “Why study grammar?” As an editor on the receiving end of an increasing number of manuscripts that betray an appalling lack of grammar, I’m concerned. Do you believe that what is called traditional or formal grammar is passé? Frye: Well, it isn’t to me. The fetishism attached to good grammar as a kind of social status, as something which the well-to-do middle class are educated to talk, is, of course, silly. But grammar in itself, once you try to rid it of that social fetishism, is simply a means of finding out what the resources of your language are and the different things it can do. After all, all writing is the conveying of a meaning, and the conveying of a meaning is not possible unless there are certain conventional or agreedupon meanings and significances. And that conventional or agreed-upon meaning not only extends to the fact that you and I mean approximately the same thing by “cat,” but also extends to phrases like “between you and me,” where the pronouns are objective for a perfectly understandable reason. It seems to me that to break down the precision and the accuracy of verbal discourse is part of the whole anti-intellectual barbarism which one has to keep fighting against. Mickleburgh: If I remember correctly, you raised the question in the introduction to Design for Learning as to whether the study of rhetoric might not find a place today that it has not found for some little while. I wonder if you might define what you mean by rhetoric and illustrate the circumstances in which this question becomes pertinent today. Frye: That was talked about much more in the English report of that book [pp. 42, 63] than it was in my introduction. At the same time, I would agree with the general position advanced in the English report: that during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there was a great deal of study of rhetoric in which the various effects that language was capable of performing were studied and classified. As with grammar, it perhaps isn’t necessary to remember all the long names that were given to these different devices. The device that we call rhyme, for example, was called homoioteleuton in the rhetoric books, and I certainly don’t approve of burdening a ten-year-old’s mind with this kind of vocabulary. Nevertheless, the study of the resources of language—the study of what language can do—there was a very precise and intensive training in that in the Renaissance schools, and that training lies behind the work of Sidney

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and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton. They didn’t just wait for a muse to come and inspire them, you know; they spent years at school doing these rhetorical exercises and finding out what language could do. Mickleburgh: Is there a danger of a false social rhetoric today? Frye: Most social rhetoric is false, because it is bound up with the whole cotton-wool, shock-absorbing technique which I spoke of a moment ago [p. 158, above]. Mickleburgh: And to the danger of mob rule, I suppose. Frye: Yes. And the infallible sign of it is the development of a language which looks as though it were technical, but actually isn’t technical; it’s only bumbling and pretentious and polysyllabic. Mickleburgh: Could you conceive of a state where we get completely surrounded by communication media and messages that would utterly insulate us from reality? Frye: Oh yes, I think that’s quite a possibility. And, of course, when communication forms a total environment, nothing is being communicated. Mickleburgh: What happens then? Frye: What happens then is that you’re simply in the world of Narcissus. Everything is simply echo and reflection, and there isn’t any communication in the sense of a conveying of information from A to B any longer. Mickleburgh: This would be the ideal synthetic world of Big Brother, I suppose. Frye: Oh, yes, but it could also be the complete fantasy world that you read about in some science fiction satire, where people go around with their heads insulated in a continuous radio and television program, where they’re simply pure solipsism and completely removed from society. Mickleburgh: In a talk to the Canadian Association of School Superintendents and Inspectors, you cautioned against including in the study of literature things that do not belong there.16 I wondered what you might have meant by that. Frye: I think you know much better than I do how other things get tossed into the English curriculum. It’s apt to become a kind of catch-all

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for studies of such things as how great a man Henry Ford was. It seems to me that in literature, poetry is in the centre and imaginative prose is immediately around it. Outside of this again comes utilitarian language, the language you use for writing committee reports and that kind of thing. There is a tendency to start the wrong way around—to start with utilitarian prose (or communication arts) and then gradually work your way into novel or drama, and then, if you can get around to it, perhaps some poetry. This is backing into literature the wrong way. Mickleburgh: What about modern ballads and film criticism? Some people quite strongly argue that the English department should assume a major responsibility for film criticism and for teaching such things as the Beatle records. Some people think it helps to make Beowulf contemporary if you relate the Beowulf themes to some of the Beatle records. Frye: I think that I’d actually prefer to let the student make those connections himself, because this is where the student can find an immediate sense of discovery on his own. If he can find that the kind of rock-androll records which he is going to be listening to anyway really have a family likeness in their symbolism and their imagery to the kind of literature he’s learning about at school, this creates a personal discovery which I wouldn’t want to take away from him and put into the regular curriculum. I teach a graduate course in university on literary symbolism, and I tell my students that they are to write essays on anything in literature that happens to interest them. One year I picked up two essays side by side: one was on the Gilgamesh epic of ancient Sumeria—about 3,000 years older than the Bible; the other was on the rock-and-roll group called The Mothers of Invention.17 And I thought, “Oh boy, this is it— this is exactly the spread that I want.” Naturally most of the other essays fell somewhere in between those two extremes. Mickleburgh: Where does film criticism belong? Frye: Film criticism is simply making its way, surely and not too slowly, into the teaching curriculum—certainly at the university level. I know a man at an American university who had been teaching a course in creative writing for a couple of years and has now turned it into a course in filmmaking because this is what his students are mostly interested in. That is something that is bound to increase very rapidly in the study of literature.

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Mickleburgh: There seems to be a great deal of concern at the moment about the possible lethal effects of television on young people, and about the need to arm young people with critical weapons to face the television screen. Frye: I think it is one of the major responsibilities of education to make the student an active and responsible citizen. This means that education is not just a process; it is also a fight; it is a crusade—you have an enemy. The particular enemy, as I see it, is passivity, the inertia of mind that tends to take what’s handed to it. The more you can build up resistance to that, the better. Of course, resistance is not a matter of pointing to the television program and saying, “That’s bad, avoid it.” Resistance is a matter of cultivating in the student an active and critical response to whatever it is he happens to be looking at. Mickleburgh: The consequences of success in doing that could be quite devastating. For example, consider a billboard with a pink convertible against a black velvet background. Draped across the hood of the convertible is a blonde who is created by the advertising agencies, the nevernever blonde. Beneath all this is the name of the brand of car and the words, “The sweet look of success.” There is an appeal to bestiality here rather than an appeal to what we like to think is civilized in man. But this car sells . . . Frye: Oh, yes. Mickleburgh: It sells and sells and sells, despite the fact that it’s built to wear out. Frye: So is the blonde, of course. Mickleburgh: There’s little consideration of the mechanical advantages of the car, of the value of the product, of its usefulness, of the extent to which it would lighten your life. Frye: We spoke a moment ago of the importance of studying rhetoric, and it seems to me that one reason for studying rhetoric is to show the student how advertising is a form of rhetoric and what its means of rhetorical persuasion are. Most sensible adults take advertising rather ironically as a kind of game. They respond to it all right—they’ll buy the car—but I think they can distinguish reality from illusion to that extent. I should think, though, that for somebody at the age of ten or twelve it

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might come as something of a shock of disillusionment to find out that advertising does not in fact mean what it says, is never intended to mean what it says. It seems to me that’s the age level at which one can bring about a revolution in one’s attitude to language far deeper than conventional literature can actually make at that age. Mickleburgh: How would you go about doing that? Frye: I would simply give them advertisements—the technique of Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride. Just say, “Now what forms of persuasion are being used in this ad? What sort of person are they trying to make you pretend you are?” Mickleburgh: There is a question today of the relevance of the past in literature. Some teachers ask, for example, what possible relationship the study of Chaucer has to the lives that my students are living today? They believe they have to concentrate on The Catcher in the Rye and various other, more contemporary books. Frye: Historical imagination is a difficult thing to develop, and I’m not surprised that people shrink from trying to do it. But I’m always terrified when I hear the word “relevance” applied to education, because I can never forget that it was one of the jargon terms of the Nazis, and particularly the Nazi youth, around 1933 to 1934. That is, the professors around the universities that were being shouted down and hounded out of the place because they didn’t like Hitler were the people who didn’t understand the relevance of everything that was being studied to the Nazi movement. With any great writer like Chaucer there are two relations, or rather two centres of gravity. There is, in the first place, his relation to his own time, and there is, in the second place, the communicating power by which he reaches us. It’s the communicating power of Chaucer or Shakespeare, the way they can speak to us across all these centuries, that makes them immediately relevant. But the study of what they meant in their own time introduces us to ways of thinking that are unfamiliar, ways which expand our own habits and our own attitudes. Consequently, it’s the irrelevant side of them that’s the really liberal and emancipating side. That’s the side that takes us into the total world of the human imagination and not just this muddy, squalid little segment of it that we have in the mid-twentieth century. Mickleburgh: If we could understand Chaucer better, we might be able to understand the Chinese better—is that it?

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Frye: It would be a start, certainly. Mind you, in the nineteenth century Great Britain was sending people off to the civil service in India and trained them in the Classics. This is thought of now as being wildly and even perversely irrelevant, and yet I think that the study of an alien civilization was perhaps a very good training for civil service in India. Mickleburgh: The dramatic example of that is an Oxford graduate who had no other basis except his Classical education being sent off to be consul, I believe, in Zanzibar. There he was, the lone Britisher at this centre of Arab slave-trading empires, with great deals going on and power plays and struggles, sending his highly perspicacious dispatches back to the Colonial Office at the same time he was wheeling and dealing with all these people. And it was all based on his Classical education. Frye: Yes, because his Classical education had presented him with a civilization which he could study as he could study in a laboratory, without committing himself to its values or beliefs—and that provides a certain objectivity and detachment when you’re in Zanzibar. Mickleburgh: Do you believe that the cultivation of this sense of detachment can in the final analysis prove effective against the doomsday weapon? Frye: It’s one of the weapons, one of the things we have to fight with. We hear a great deal about commitment and engagement in our society. Commitment and engagement, of course, are aimed at the community. Consequently, commitment and engagement are uncritical. That is, they don’t see absurdities in what they’re committed to, and they tend to rationalize absurdities. The other pole of development, it seems to me, is the detachment of the individual. Of course the individual is detached from his society but never withdrawn from it. He is never a mature or completed individual until he has come to terms with his society, and his detachment is still operating within the society. Mickleburgh: You have suggested that a function of literature is to constantly recreate for each generation a social vision of what this world can be.18 Frye: That illustrates the range of the literary universe. The literary universe is constructed by the human imagination, and this means that its poles are the poles of desire. At one extreme is the ideal, and at the other is the nightmare, the thing we try to get away from. Around the ideal

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cluster the romances; around the nightmare cluster the ironies; and other things, like the tragedies and comedies, come in between. The value of the study of literature is in part to compare the civilization around us with the civilization which the human imagination envisages, which extends from the heaven of human imagination to the hell of human imagination—which is much bigger than the actual world extends. Mickleburgh: I once heard Louis Dudek discussing modern literature with a group of high-school teachers, who reported that their students much favoured Romantic literature, that they wanted to have a much more favourable view of the world than was presented by Joyce and Eliot. Dudek argued very hard that if the teacher doesn’t make accessible to the student The Waste Land and similar works of modern literature, then he’s disarming the student in the face of his subsequent life experiences. He posed it as a rough, tough, necessary, difficult task. Frye: I would agree with Dudek entirely on that point. Mickleburgh: What social vision do you think is being recreated by literature today? Is it a new myth that is arising? Frye: Contemporary literature tends to be ironic in its general attitude. It is more concerned with trying to define the dangers of the world, and picturing the world that we want to get away from, than with envisaging the ideal. It tends to distrust formulated ideals and tends rather to formulate the misery, the squalor, the degradation, the absurdity, the loneliness in modern civilization. This means, of course, among other things, that the twentieth century is a tough century to learn literature in, especially if you hold that you ought to study mostly contemporary literature. Mickleburgh: Are the humanities optimistic? Frye: The humanities are not in themselves either optimistic or pessimistic. The humanities present reality in terms of human desire, and I suppose they are optimistic to the extent that they show desire as having its own kind of reality. But the humanities would include both comedies, which end hopefully, and tragedies, which end pretty bleakly. The humanities simply give you the imaginative picture that man has of his world. Mickleburgh: What place does literature occupy in the scheme of the humanities?

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Frye: It seems to me that literature is at the centre of the humanities. There are really two worlds and two kinds of study. There is the world around us, a world we call nature, the physical environment, and I take it that science, particularly natural science, begins in the study and the exploration of the world that man lives in. But there is also the world that man is trying to make, the world of his own culture, his own civilization, and this is something which the humanities are concerned with. Consequently, the humanities can never be right or wrong in the way an answer to a scientific problem can be right or wrong, and they can never rid themselves of the quest, the search for values of a kind which we are now calling existential. I would call these subjects which deal with the world that man is trying to build, rather than the world that man lives in, the concerned subjects, the mythological subjects. Literature is at the centre of those because literature is the great laboratory of myths, that is, the statement of reality in terms of man’s hopes and desires and fears. Literature is at the centre, and then around it come religion and very large areas of history and political theory and psychology and philosophy and so on. All those subjects would need a good deal of internal division, but in general those are the two broad areas. Mickleburgh: Would you say also that literature is the language of the imagination? Frye: Well, of course it is, yes—or at least it is one of the languages of the imagination, along with painting and music. Mickleburgh: How do you define the imagination? Frye: The imagination is in general the creative power. It is the power which is concerned with man’s building his own human world. Mickleburgh: What place do the intellect and the emotions have in the imagination? Frye: The imaginative faculty seems to me to be one in which the human mind is totally engaged. The intellect and the emotions are different aspects of that which can be separated in analysis but which cannot be separated in the actual production. I don’t see how, in the writing of King Lear, for example, or in the total response to it, you can distinguish an intellectual from an emotional factor. You might in other areas, but the world of imagination seems to me to incorporate everything which is at once feeling and logic.

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Mickleburgh: A writer in the magazine Edge criticized the schools for tending to separate the intellect from the emotions, which he saw as a fateful and destructive process. He said the characteristic North American virtue then becomes the ability not to vomit,19 and he had some words to say about Franz Boas’s idea of one-sided rationalism.20 Frye: One-sided rationalism would be a danger, certainly, just as onesided emotionalism would be. It’s the function of criticism—the teaching of literature—to bring out the very tough kind of rationality that lies behind great works of literature. But it is also concerned, of course, with showing that emotion is not a vague and cloudy thing, as most people think, but an infinitely subtle and precise thing. People like myself who teach literature are often referred to as intellectuals because we wear glasses, but actually I think we’d be much more accurately described as emotionals. We are just as much concerned with trying to stimulate a feeling response to literature as a logical one. Mickleburgh: I don’t know any other book about educating the imagination except the one you named The Educated Imagination. The consideration of the imagination as such is almost a neglected subject in discussions of education theory. Do you think this is accidental, the product of neglect, or is there a reason for it? Frye: I think it’s just ordinary cultural lag. The term “imagination” was developed by the Romantics because the Romantics were really the first to think of literature as part of man’s creation of his own civilization. Consequently, they felt they needed a separate word for what man was doing when he was producing literature. They didn’t need the separate word up to that point. The Romantic movement has only been around for about 160 years, and it will perhaps be another couple of centuries before the educational theory catches up with it. Mickleburgh: Someone said, “Literature is content.” He made an argument in favour of it; he was mainly striking a blow against what he conceived of as a formalism in the teaching of literature. Frye: The statement that literature is content strikes me as a kind of bourgeois version of the Marxist view of socialist realism—that you demand of the artist that he protest against society before the Marxist revolution has taken place, and that he devote himself to panegyric after that. It seems to me that literature is something that has to be approached in

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terms of its form. That is, literature, as literature, is practically all structure, like mathematics, and what is content is not really the content of literature, but it’s rather the social context of literature. That would include, of course, the artist’s life, his biography, the social milieu in which he grew up, the particular slant given him by his period in time, his class origin, and so forth. The statement that literature is content seems to me to be one hundred per cent wrong. [Mickleburgh says that perhaps the writer’s main point was to distinguish between literature and entertainment: if a work is not entertainment, then it is literature.] Frye: That’s an awfully dangerous distinction to make. If literature ever lost its connection with entertainment, then it would have had it as literature. Mickleburgh: The old formulation that the task of literature is to instruct and delight catches the two sides of it. Frederick Philip Grove * * * adjured the Canadian writer not to fall into the U.S. trap of writing for entertainment only.21 Frye: My trouble with that is that when you say it instructs and delights, you imply that literature is doing two different things to us, and I don’t think that is psychologically right. I think that literature expands the mind with a feeling of exhilaration which has both aspects. Mickleburgh: The original psychedelic experience? Frye: Yes. What Grove means by mere entertainment is something that you receive passively. I can imagine a Shakespearean comedy being mere entertainment just as I can imagine a television show being literature. Mickleburgh: This takes us full circle back to the active response. Frye: Yes, it’s the response that’s important. Mickleburgh: Do you care to speculate in conclusion about what you have called the hare-and-tortoise race between mob rule and education [EI, 55; EICT, 483]? Frye: One of the reasons why I call it a hare-and-tortoise race is that the powers of mob rule are always just on the point of winning and the powers of freedom and intelligence are always in a desperate situation, yet somehow or other mob rule never quite wins and the intellect and the

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intelligence are still there. This rather desperate situation, where all the probabilities seem to be utterly hopeless and despairing, and where nevertheless the values of the intelligence and the imagination and the disciplined emotions keep on functioning—I think that this will continue. At least the hope that it will continue is the only thing surely that keeps people teaching and studying and writing and reading and doing all the other things they ought to be doing. Mickleburgh: I suppose we’re talking about the prophetic role of the school. Frye: The school does have a prophetic role, certainly.

15 The Limits of Dialogue Broadcast 19 February 1969

From WGS, 5–22. This was a discussion with Eli Mandel, poet and professor of English and Humanities at York University. It was part of a six-week series on language broadcast on the CBC’s Ideas every week night beginning 10 February, and covering a wide range of topics such as bilingualism, Chomsky’s revolution, and Hebrew literature. Dated from the CBC Times.

Mandel: If we’re going to be talking about the limits of dialogue, one place to begin is to ask about both of the limits. That’s perhaps a naive way to begin, but I wonder whether there are not upper limits and lower limits. What I have in mind as an example of a lower limit would be ignorance—ignorance of language, the inability to speak at all because one didn’t know anything, one didn’t know the words. At the other extreme, I have in mind what George Steiner refers to in Language and Silence as the upper limits of language for poets: light, music, and silence. He says that the language of the Paradiso moves from language to light, light itself being beyond words; that the Orphic vision moves toward music, which is beyond words; and that some poets (I think he mentions Rilke) move toward silence and finally become quiet.1 Are these the limits of dialogue—upper and lower? Frye: I should think that along with ignorance there is also the pooling of ignorance, the kind of thing that goes on in most conversations where at least one person is invariably talking nonsense and where the contributions, so to speak, are invariably tentative. Dialogue of that kind is the natural form of satire. That’s why so many of Plato’s dialogues (I suppose Plato really invented the conception) are satires of that kind. Somebody’s talking nonsense and gets refuted by Socrates, and only when a

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real subject—something that Plato would call a dialectic—is introduced, and the whole situation suddenly becomes structured, does any real conversation start. Mandel: I have the uneasy feeling that if the subject begins to take over, perhaps the dialogue is ended. Is there really a difference between dialectic and dialogue in that sense? Frye: I think that the entrance of a genuine subject, a dialectic, does a very different thing to the dialogue. Up to that point, everything that has been said has been tentative. The silly things are just as acceptable socially as the shrewd or penetrating things. The situation is usually that of a symposium—that is, a drinking party—because you’ve got to have liquor to persuade the members of such a group to believe in their own wit. And as soon as the genuine subject is present, of course, it really doesn’t matter whether there is a group discussion going on, as there is in Plato’s Symposium, or whether one person is doing all the talking and the others are simply reduced to punctuation. If Socrates takes over and the others just say “yes” and “no” when they’re supposed to, that doesn’t mean the dialogue has turned into a monologue. It means that Socrates has hit the trail of something and is going right down that trail with the other people following him. Mandel: Is there a distinction here between drunken dialogue and sober dialogue? Do you have to be sober? Frye: Not necessarily. Most forms of participating dialogue are more or less drunk. Mandel: And the sober ones—are they systematic and structured? What I’m getting at is the strength that comes into your sense of the subject when you say that Socrates is now on the trail, that something has taken over. Is there a kind of systematic, ordered procedure here that is opposed to the tentative? And is this better than the tentative? Frye: There is something that is continuous and sequential that has taken over—yes. But the real structure, of course, comes from the shape of what it is that Socrates has discovered. It doesn’t come from him. Consequently, it’s not an authoritarian thing. It’s the sharing in a common vision of something that has a shape. The upper limit of dialogue is reached when one reaches the possession of that kind of subject, and that becomes a silence because possession is silence.

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Mandel: There are moments in Socrates’ life, as we know it, when there are these silences. He’s the one who stood on the hill and meditated about Apollo, uttered a prayer in the morning, and then walked away. What about prayer? Is this in any way related to the Socratic dialectic that you’re talking about? That is, if one is in dialogue with God, is there a dialectic as well as a dialogue? Frye: Many religious thinkers are convinced that there is. For example, Martin Buber, in speaking of the I–Thou relationship in religion, says that the dialogue is really the central form of religious experience. It seems to me that this doesn’t happen only in religion. It happens whenever anybody writes a book and presents it to the public. It looks as though a book written entirely by one person is a dictatorial or authoritarian kind of monologue, where the writer is simply holding your buttonhole and not letting you go until he’s finished. But actually the written, sequential treatise is a very democratic form of dialogue with the reader. The author is putting all his cards on the table in front of you. He has made his response to the subject with which he has been in dialogue. He is now transmitting the possibility of dialogue to his reader. If he has really retreated into the upper limits of silence, then he will not write continuously. He will write in separate paragraphs, that is, in aphorisms, or detached oracular utterances. Oracular writers, from Heraclitus to Marshall McLuhan, have always written prose of that kind, that is, in separated sentences, where every sentence is surrounded by a big packet of silence. Mandel: Such writers tend to talk about the form itself: their subject is silence. Wittgenstein, for example, ultimately comes through his oracular utterances to the point that he says there are some things we cannot and ought not talk about.2 Is there value in silence? Or is it submission of some sort? Is the end of dialogue a victory or a defeat? When Socrates has been taken over by the subject and has followed it to the end, has he triumphantly produced the notion of the good? Has he won or lost? Or does that matter? Frye: I think it’s very clearly marked in Plato when he wins and when he loses. In some of the more satiric and ironic dialogues he simply ends with a confession of ignorance, which is, of course, itself ironic. But the most common symbol indicating when he’s won is the myth or the story. The Republic, for example, ends with the myth of the transmigration of

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souls, and a myth like that in Plato, I think, indicates the possession of what the dialectic is about. Mandel: When we get to story, we’ve left dialogue, and I begin thinking no longer of the Socratic form but of the more mythic form of the dialogue itself. I’m thinking of the kind you get in the seventeenth century—the dialogue of the self and soul. Is there something more than the struggle between the body and the soul, something that’s taking over the poet as he tries to reconcile these divided parts of himself? Frye: Oh, sure. Everything that goes on in a society is also going on inside the individual. Just as you have the confused and tentative discussions in conversation, so you have within the individual mind all this unshaped and compulsive babble that continually goes on, which may be spoken aloud or simply thought to oneself. The attempt to construct a dialogue of body and soul, or self and soul, is an attempt to find some kind of structure within the mind that can be approached by different aspects of the mind. I think that traditionally, from Plato’s time until fairly recently, people thought of the structure of the wise man’s mind as a kind of inner dictatorship. That is, reason was in control, the appetite was underneath, and the will acted as a kind of thought-police which hunted down all the subversive elements. We today don’t think of the wise man’s mind as a dictatorship. In fact, we don’t think of the wise man’s mind at all. We think of the mind as a conflict of forces, with the ego fighting for its life to preserve its sanity; in short, we think of the mind today as a kind of participating democracy. Mandel: But don’t we think of the mind too as a kind of theatre in which parts of the mind are playing various roles? There is a dialogue of the self with the self, rather like the way existential psychiatrists talk about it—a self talking to a false-self system—or like the way Sartre talks about the man who is imitating himself.3 This highly theatrical situation I find very typical of the contemporary mind—the acting out within oneself all kinds of roles. Frye: I think the conception of the role is very strong, and one can see in every kind of demonstration people throwing themselves into roles with the greatest enthusiasm. The trouble is, of course, that the role is usually a part in somebody else’s play. Consequently, the sense of autonomy and of freedom and of individual independence is continually being threatened by this process.

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Mandel: Yes, I think it’s precisely a part in somebody else’s play because one doesn’t feel that one is oneself. This is the meaning of the false-self system that R.D. Laing talks about in The Divided Self and The Self and Others. Frye: And with role, of course, the question of sincerity is no longer relevant, because the actor’s sincerity consists in putting on a good show, not in believing what he says. Mandel: This is something that really interests me. The theatre of the absurd can be thought of as a parody form of dialogue. In other words, you don’t have dialogue with any content; you simply have the form of dialogue, as in Waiting for Godot. Frye: The parody there, I take it, would be the act that killed vaudeville, that is, the endless kind of cross-fire talk between the stooge and his feed. The two clowns come on stage and will say anything to avoid going off the stage. Mandel: Yes, what are we doing right now, by the way? Waiting for Godot, or saying anything to keep from going off the stage. But isn’t the vaudeville act an abstract form of dialogue itself? If it is a parody of dialogue, then is that a kind of criticism of the Socratic dialectic? I mean that quite seriously. When one character talks to another character in a Pinter play and there’s no apparent connection, we have a parody of the form of dialogue rather than a parody of its content. Perhaps the parody of dialogue we find in theatre of the absurd suggests something about historical development—that we have moved from the dialectic of Socrates to a world in which we can no longer be seized by the form of the subject. We can never get beyond the tentative beginning, beyond the first part of the Socratic dialogue, because we’re always playing roles rather than allowing ourselves to be absorbed by the subject. Is the parody dialogue of the theatre of the absurd suggesting a failure in our own sensibility that is connected with the false-self system? Frye: Yes, I think there is a great deal in the theatre of the absurd that mirrors the particular kind of exhibitionistic moral rearmament which occupies so very large a part of the contemporary scene. Mandel: What are the students who want to participate, rather than talk, telling us? Or to phrase the question in another way, can criticism be participation and response rather than analysis and system? Students

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want to stop at participation. They don’t want to go to analysis. They don’t want to go to systematic structures of any kind. It seems to me that much of what you’ve been saying about dialogue is about some kind of structure that takes over the trivial, the superficial, the synthetic in the human being—that we finally give ourselves to something that is larger than we, that we discover a subject bigger than we are. I think this is what education is. But it is precisely this kind of feeling that there is a good deal of reaction against among young people today. Frye: There’s a medieval story about a group of people who were celebrating and dancing. Through some form of magical retribution, they found themselves going around in a circle until they finally sank into the ground. The song they kept singing was “Why Go We Not?” If you think of the last few words of Waiting for Godot—where one says, “Yes, let’s go,” and then the final stage direction is “They do not move”—you’ve got exactly the state of mind of somebody who wishes to participate but not enter a structure. I don’t believe it is possible to discover anything within oneself which is not a response to something within a structure of intelligence or imagination. If this resistance to the objective correlative, to the thing out there, is your only means of self-discovery, it cuts off the whole educational procedure. Mandel: I wonder whether one always discovers something out there. Perhaps we discover it in here. Let’s take the example of a psychoanalytic dialogue. What is it that one is concerned with in the dialogue if it is a genuine one? Presumably, one talks and talks and talks, so that finally one can hear oneself. Now that seems like a ludicrous thing to do—to keep talking so that you can hear yourself. I can imagine other ways of doing it. One could be quiet to hear oneself, or one could talk so that one could hear what one’s words are. For me, writing is an obsessive act. I write so that I can see what it is that I want to say. Now I’m not sure that’s entering into a larger structure. It’s turning inward to discover my own self. Does that make any sense? Frye: Oh, yes, it makes a great deal of sense. But I think that the act of writing and the whole psychoanalytic dialogue are rather different processes from the educational procedure. In writing or in talking to a psychiatrist, the attempt really is to try to break through some kind of block and to release some current or stream of energy in the mind. But in the educational procedure, it seems to me, there is a body of thought of

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which the basis is information. One cannot just think at random. Thinking is an acquired skill, like playing the piano. It depends on habit and on practice. To think is to enter into a body of thought and to try to add your own thinking to it. No discovery, no progress, no mental adventure is possible without throwing this line across—the line of correspondence between your own mind and the subject. Mandel: I think you’re avoiding the word “reason” here. I wonder whether the poet thinks in the way you’re describing “thinking” here. Isn’t it more random at times? Now I’m very much impressed by literary convention, about which you’ve written so much, and you’ve influenced me in your writing on literary convention. But there seems to me surely much more than the convention, than the larger structure of poetic thought which I enter into. There is the random kind of association in my own mind, the babble that you’ve talked about, too, that I use to discover and order. It could be that’s the collective unconscious muttering away inside me. Frye: No, I don’t think it is the collective unconscious. One reason why I avoid the term “reason” is that the whole operation has just as much to do with the emotion or the imagination as with the reason. It certainly does in the case of poets. I feel very strongly, as you know, that what the poet does really is to hitch himself onto the imaginative body of poetry and find his individual voice within that community of poetry. Mandel: He wouldn’t write poetry unless he knew what poetry was. Frye: He wouldn’t write poetry unless he knew what poetry was. I’ve read several tons of poetry written by people who didn’t know what was being written around them, and it was all bad. Mandel: This makes structure in poetry very important. Does it make poetry a part of dialogue? Frye: Well, there are certainly dialogue elements. I suppose that a poet writes as a kind of response to experience. He has an experience which demands the poetic response. This is just another way of saying that he writes poetry because he must. Mandel: Ah, yes, this is a lovely way around what I thought was an impasse. I’ve become very interested in the notion of the poet as a liar. It’s an old charge against the poet, and there are various ways it can be

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answered. Most defences of poetry are dialogues with those who call the poet a liar. As a liar, the poet doesn’t enter into the community of discourse, into what we’ve been calling dialectic. He is solely in the world of appearances. I’m not saying that the poet as a liar is opposed to the poet as teller of truth. I’m saying that the poet is a liar in precisely the sense that Laing says he’s a liar—self-deceiver, hypocrite, dissembler. He plays with illusions. What if I want to live with the world of illusions? Can I carry on a dialogue with anyone else? Frye: The sense in which the poet lies is the sense in which the horses in Gulliver’s Travels say that the lie is “the thing which is not.”4 The discourse person, the philosopher, the historian, are concerned with the world of things, while the poet is always concerned with the things surrounded by nothing, by the silence. Mandel: Perhaps that’s why I grudgingly come into the world of structure. Perhaps as a poet I’m trying to be in a world of emptiness and in that world to create, “to give to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name.”5 Frye: Socrates indicates his possession of his dialectic when he tells his story, when he has his myth. It seems to me that that’s the area in which the poet is operating. The myth is a story which is neither true nor not true. Mandel: The poet becomes possessed, and the possessed man has passed the limits of dialogue. Earlier I was suggesting that our culture, our young people, might be possessed and therefore beyond dialogue. Is the psychedelic movement the pursuit of madness, or possession, and therefore beyond dialogue? Frye: I suppose everybody is really fighting to be taken over by something, and there are various things that can take you over. One is a structure of thought, one is a lunatic, one is the incarnation of a lunatic, like Hitler. All of these things are more or less goals at which various people are aiming. Mandel: Let’s say that as poet I’m aiming for lunacy, that I want to be a poet madman. From the point of view of the Socratic dialectician, I suppose you would have to dismiss me. But what if I’m not dismissed by the community? Leonard Cohen, for example, is probably quite a sensible young man and very much in possession of his senses. Yet he keeps

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insisting that something speaks through him. He doesn’t say, “I speak.” And what seems to speak through him is a Dionysiac voice, a lunatic voice, from certain points of view. Frye: I said earlier that I was avoiding words like “reason” because I was very anxious to insist on the validity of the emotional and the imaginative, as well as the rational, approaches to structure. I’m thinking of the fact that the first word in European poetry is the word “madness.” In the first words of the Iliad Homer says, “I’m going to sing about madness.”6 And the result is one of the most beautifully structured and symmetrical poems that the human imagination has ever completed. Mandel: Yes, but Leonard Cohen isn’t Homer. Frye: He isn’t Homer, but he is being taken over by something which is a creating and structuring power. So are you. Mandel: In The Modern Century you use the phrase “Freudian proletariat” to describe madness in poetry and contemporary culture. The point you make about the Freudian proletariat is that it’s fundamentally antisocial. You do admit at one point that society itself is a worn-out convention that needs to be thrown aside.7 But the other implication of your argument in The Modern Century is surely that the Freudian proletariat is in some sense antisocial in a rather trivial and silly way, and that education is the means by which we can subsume its silliness into society and take the best of its creativity. Frye: Yes, I think that the death and rebirth process is a much more serious process than disintegration, one which only education is serious enough to carry on. Mandel: I have an objection to the argument you were using in The Modern Century when you say that education is a cooling-off process.8 I suppose its dialogue is one in which we distance or detach ourselves from certain destructive forces, and this is related to the whole idea of a subject or structure that’s bigger than ourselves. You said, for example, that Satan becomes something else when he’s regarded not as an angel of light, but as a contribution to modern thought. I wonder if there is not a serious objection to be raised about the detaching, cooling-off process of education. It’s the kind of objection George Steiner speaks against in Language and Silence, where he argues that detachment itself may be enervating, that by becoming cooled-off we may as a matter of fact become less

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human than we were before. As he puts it, the cry in the book may sound more loudly than the cry in the street.9 Frye: I think there’s a lot to be said for the view that the cry in the book does sound more loudly than the cry in the street. Mandel: Well, that makes Satan a contribution to modern thought. Frye: Yes. I don’t think the cooler person is less human. The reason for the cooling-off process is that it is the only thing that enables any kind of progress or advance or discovery to take place. The hot emotional response is also a circular response. It’s a repetitive response. In other words, it has all the qualities of a neurosis. It keeps running around in circles. But you suggest an interesting possibility to me as a teacher. The whole teaching method has been Socratic in the sense that Socrates uses the ironic question to try to get rid of illusions, and then the leading question to try to pull students on into the discovery of the dialectic. In our day, it seems to me, the whole educational system has reversed itself into a kind of anti-Socratic mood, where the Socratic figure no longer asks the questions. He’s the cockshy. He’s the person you throw things at. This is tough enough for the teacher, but for somebody in Claude Bissell’s position10 or in Trudeau’s, it becomes almost an intolerable strain. Mandel: Their situation is reversed? Frye: Yes. The fact that a man is prime minister means that he’s a natural target for students. This was not R.B. Bennett’s conception of the prime minister, nor was it Sir Robert Falconer’s conception of a university presidency11—that is, the kind of battering that a committed public figure of responsibility takes nowadays. As this goes on, about the only refuge a person in that position has is simply to shut up, simply to retire into silence. Mandel: Yes, there seem to be these forces pushing at the teacher, the poet, the thinker, the intellectual at all levels—pushing toward silence. I feel it as a poet. I’m pushed toward silence. Frye: When I speak of the death and rebirth of society as a serious matter, and of education as the only way of carrying us through so very serious a process, I’m speaking of two things. One is the sense of the expendable, the sense that many things have come to an end, things we have to throw away, that are worn out. The other is that disintegration is

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not an end in itself, that something else has to take its place. Consequently, one’s attitude has to be a sequential, continuing, progressive attitude, and there has to be an opening up of the mind to fresh experiences wherever they come. This is what I take it you mean when you speak of your ambition to try to quiet down the noise and simply to listen. This is one of the things I mean essentially by education: the ability to see what is there and to hear what is there. Mandel: Yes, I think I do mean something like that by the notion of trying to quiet down the noise. But you’re also saying why you want to resist disintegration. I’m not always certain, you see, that I want to resist disintegration. There’s a very strong nihilistic impulse in me. I don’t mean this just personally. It’s part of a larger structure of thought, a nihilistic impulse that says, “Why not disintegrate? Why not let this structure of thought fall apart?” Let’s say it’s the outworn social convention you mention in The Modern Century. Let’s say I want to see that torn apart. Or let’s say that I want to see things disintegrate because that’s some limit, some end to things, and it’s the end of things I’m anxious for. That’s an apocalyptic desire. Now I know how horrendous this can sound. I know that the terrible things that are going on at the moment in Iraq may be part of that vision of disintegration, and I don’t really want to share in that or contribute to it.12 Yet I have to admit that I’m not always delighted by the notion of building up, of being reborn, of structuring or restructuring. I’m attracted by disintegration itself. Frye: As an end in itself and for its own sake? Mandel: I keep thinking it would be cheating if I say anything but an end in itself and for its own sake. The kind of thing that’s happening to language in the poetry of bill bissett and bp nichol is a tearing apart. Language has become shriek, sound itself, babble, as you might say, yet I find this a very rich and rewarding and exciting poetry—though one could argue about whether it’s structured or not structured. It’s the disintegrating part of it that I like. Frye: Yes, but a disintegration of that kind is not anything I would apply a moral judgment to and say that this is civilization going on the skids. I would never say that. I think it’s the kind of analysis that is really part of the experimental process. It’s inherent in the experimental process that everything that can die ought to die, and that everything that can wear out ought to wear out.

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Mandel: If one wants to wear out those parts that ought to wear out, this is moral, this is defensible. But what if it’s the shell, the body itself one wants to wear out? That’s a kind of Rimbaud position: I will wear out my senses. Frye: Yes, but not one he stuck with very long. Rimbaud is really the pioneer in this business of dérèglement, of deliberately smashing and breaking down the structures.13 He knew what he was doing. He got to the end of it, and then he simply dropped everything cold and ran away from it. And the rest of his life he spoke of it with the greatest contempt. Mandel: I don’t suppose you could stay with it very long. That would be the point. The moments of vision might be so terrifying as a consequence that you could never go back to them again. Or they might be so intense that you could only sustain them once in a lifetime. I’m trying to say that a negative approach might be a part of a dialectic, a consistent nay-saying. All the time we’ve been talking I’ve been impelled by the coherence and power of the things you’re saying, which, I think, are part of the whole structure of thought that you yourself have entered into and have spent such a long time so brilliantly developing. These have pulled me along in a way that I don’t want, in a sense, to be pulled along. I think nay-saying is a part of it. Perhaps that’s why I keep asking questions. Frye: I think nay-saying is a part of it. In a civilization like ours, which is so obsessed by the sense of the metaphysical absurd, which is so obsessed with the importance of the death wish, the death impulse, the death consciousness, of life proceeding toward an identity which only death succeeds in reaching—this civilization of the absurd can perhaps go so far that it will turn into a counter-absurdity. That is, in some respects everything that I’ve been talking about, everything that is sequential and progressive and consecutive, does go on towards the end of life, towards a kind of death principle. Yeats says that “wisdom is the property of the dead.”14 I think that following out a straight, logical path always leads to suicide, not only in pessimists. It’s just inherent in the shape of things. If you go on living in spite of the logical case for suicide, then you have begun on a kind of counter-absurdity, and the next step in counter-absurdity, it seems to me, is creativity, because what could be more absurd than designing something? What could be more absurd than a story with a beginning, a development, and a conclusion? Nothing begins or ends in this world.

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Mandel: Yes, it’s like Mailer saying in Armies of the Night that when history becomes a crazy house, egotism is the only tool left for the novelist and the historian.15 The fool-hero of Armies of the Night, then, is the counter-absurdity that you’re talking about. Curiously, I suppose, by becoming the reporter and by going through dialogue with himself, Mailer does become the counter-absurdist, since in Miami and the Siege of Chicago he’s already taking up a kind of conservative position. I know that’s not entirely the implication of what you were saying, but he’s prepared to come into society in that book in a way that he wasn’t prepared to in Armies of the Night, where he wanted to celebrate the rites of passage and the assault on the Pentagon and so on. Maybe we finally live at the end of dialogue in a counter-absurdist way. Frye: I suspect that’s the real death and rebirth process I’m speaking of. Mandel: But I do believe that dialogue has ended, that as Mailer says in Armies of the Night, no matter what happens to him afterwards, these young people are forever different after their rite of passage.16 I don’t mean a generation gap. We can no longer speak to them, nor they to us, and we’ve come into a new era. It’s an epoch. This is part of what I tried to say in criticizing your approach to the cooling-off process of education. I’m sceptical about whether that will work, because I think the experience of these youngsters is so radically different from our own now. Frye: In what respects is it different? Does it cut off the possibility of communication? Mandel: This is the meaning of the rites of passage in Mailer. Frye: But what have they passed to? Mandel: We can’t know. Frye: Do they know? Mandel: Not necessarily. This is one of the meanings of silence and therefore one of the limits of dialogue. Their not knowing the ends they have in mind and not knowing where they are now and our not knowing means an end of dialogue. I think in its crudest form this gets expressed in the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and the more radical student groups who refuse to talk about ends, who talk only about means and tactics. They’re all excited about their Trotskyism and Maoism and

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perhaps don’t even themselves realize that the extreme New Left is involved in a silence. They’ve come to something new and they don’t understand. Now that may be just mystification. Frye: Is there something fundamentally different about this feeling than simply the kind of latent wish to be taken over by somebody? That is, do you feel that the Maoism of today is qualitatively different from the Stalinism and Fascism of a generation ago? Mandel: Yes. I’m much impressed by Godard’s version of these young people in his films. This is a case for me of life imitating art. Godard’s version of these young people reaches its climactic point in a muchpraised scene where the old revolutionary talks to the young revolutionary, and the young girl who has just assassinated the wrong man and gone back and assassinated another one is talking to the old revolutionary, and they don’t understand one another at all.17 It’s not the same revolution. There’s something radically different here. The sources of it are what I’d be interested in discovering, if I could. I suspect—and I’ve tried to argue this—that the sources are in the enormous revulsion these young people feel toward the wars and atrocities of the past fifty years— World War II, the concentration camps, the Vietnam War. I think they are so enormously repulsed by this that, in a sense, they participate in it to act out its violence for us. This is a new thing. Frye: That’s very interesting to me, except that I’m revolted by these things, too, so I find their moral revulsion eminently intelligible. I don’t feel that that really cuts off the possibility of communication. Mandel: But you said in The Modern Century that one of the odd things about the antisocial attitudes of the Freudian proletariat was their inability to define their ends [85–6; NFMC, 48]. Frye: I may have said that. I was thinking, of course, of the extremely teleological sense of the Stalinist-Communists, who, when I was a student, were defining the revolutionary goals entirely in terms of the next step. That is, everything they did was one step on the march of the workers’ victory. The collapse and disappearance of that teleological sense has somewhat mystified me. Mandel: Well, it’s that mystification that I feel myself and that I’m referring to when I talk about the silence. Silence is for me a metaphor for that mystification. Incidentally, there’s another form of silence that comes to

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mind here, and so perhaps another limit of dialogue. Steiner is partly the source for this, but also George Orwell, who I think is becoming more and more a prophetic figure in our time. Frye: Yes, I think so, too. Mandel: I mean the silence that comes about because, to follow Steiner’s argument, the poets no longer want to use a language that has been used for such terrible purposes as ours has been. The poets no longer want to use a debased language, because language itself has been debased. Is this another end of dialogue? Frye: I don’t get that. Hitler’s language is debased by Hitler, but I don’t see that the German language is debased. Mandel: Steiner’s argument, which first appeared in Encounter, provoked a good deal of controversy, and the general line of argument against him was the one that you’re using, that is, that Hitler’s language is Hitler’s language. But why is Hitler’s language not part of a larger structure of thought or a dialectic—the German language? If my language as poet can’t be private to me but is part of the larger language, poetry, then Hitler’s language is part of that larger language he uses, German. And insofar as he debases language, he debased German language. Pound’s argument that the poet is exploring the possibilities of language suggests that the poet using language increases its possibilities, opens it up, enriches it, makes it more viable. But if he debases it, he debases language. That’s Orwell’s argument, isn’t it? Frye: Well, yes, but Orwell draws a very clear distinction between the people who debase language, because they are themselves debased, and the people whose function it is to recreate language. Mandel: He also says it goes both ways. The man who debases language is debased by his use of language, and then others become debased by his debased use. I suppose the creative person is the poet, the writer, the thinker who opposes this debasement. In 1984 if Winston isn’t an antihero, a fool, the proles, who only sing old songs that are themselves . . . Frye: Well, 1984 is a picture of a society that has been wholly debased beyond the possibility of recreation. You spoke a moment ago of poets such as bill bissett and bp nichol experimenting with a kind of disintegrating language. This is the way the poet rights the real kind of debas-

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ing, the weasel words and the clotted abstractions and the tones of menace and abuse and all the nauseating aspects of propaganda—that kind of demonic language. Mandel: That’s interesting because it suggests the direction such poets are taking is one that, in a sense, is imposed on them by dialogue, by a dialectic—by their own dialogue with language. They can no longer use certain words because they have been ruined—“interpersonal relationship” instead of “love” and so on. Frye: Yes, it’s pretty hard to hitch that into metre. Of course, that’s the point about weasel language: it hasn’t any rhythm. Mandel: “Lay your sleeping head, my interpersonal relationship . . .” Frye: Yes, exactly.

16 “There Is Really No Such Thing As Methodology” Conducted September 1969

From Orbit, 1, no. 1 (February 1970): 4–7. The interviewer was Johan Aitken, a former student of Frye’s and at that time a member of the English department of the Ontario College of Education, later professor at OISE. Dated from NFF, 1991, box 1, file 8, which contains a preliminary version of the interview and correspondence regarding it. Orbit is a publication of OISE, still in existence as the present volume goes to press, discussing matters of interest to educators throughout the school system. Apart from two “preliminary issues” in 1969, this was the first issue of the magazine, and the interview was the lead item.

Aitken: I should like to ask you to comment further on some of your earlier observations which we, as teachers, find “echoing in our minds.” The following remark from the Educational Courier is an example: “We cannot have education without incessant repetition and practice, drill, and going over the same things over and over until they become automatic responses.”1 This remark was met with a certain repugnance by many school teachers. Why can’t we have education without incessant repetition, practice, and drill? Frye: I don’t know—it’s just the way the human animal is constructed. The most miraculous feat of education I think I ever heard of was Gieseking remarking to a friend of mine that piano playing had always come very easily to him—he could always play anything after he had gone over it carefully ten times. Well, what Gieseking could do on a piano is considerably more than most people could do with anything else. The only reason for the repugnance, I think, is that this repetition is so often associated with the subconscious, with drudgery, with the imposing of an

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external discipline, of somebody doing it and not liking to do it, and so on. You get the same process in, say, learning a foreign language, where one person picks it up in a few weeks and another person slugs at it for years. The only difference is that the person who picks it up quickly hardly notices the amount of repetition and practice that has been going on in his mind. Aitken: The connotations of drudgery and conditioning, then, are the ones to avoid; but no teacher should delude himself that drill need not be done at all. Frye: Well, I think it’s a dangerous delusion to assume that you need not do it at all. There are things like the multiplication table and the alphabet that do require a certain amount of repetition before they are in the mind. The thing to do, of course, is to eliminate the whole atmosphere of “Write this out fifty times”—that’s not what I’m talking about at all. Aitken: In The Educated Imagination you explain why the Bible and Classical mythology must form the foundation of a literary training. If we don’t know why, that’s our fault; you have told us clearly and often. You have even told us the part of one’s anatomy which should first come into contact with poetry. Now could you suggest how a teacher might begin to provide young children with this literary foundation? Are you supposed to read the story of Ruth to a grade 1—or what? Frye: Well, is the answer really so difficult? I mean, the stories are there. They are written out by people in the form in which they can be told to children. The story of Ruth the Moabitess is an utterly simple story, and its moral is the same as the moral of the Good Samaritan—that there are human beings outside your own group—and this is not too difficult even for grade 1 to grasp. I think it’s just a matter of choosing materials and also of making sure that you keep pointing out similarities among everything that you do use, so that, whatever you use, the child who is listening to it will be able to make a transition from one to the other and will feel, not that they are two completely separate experiences, but that they have been linked in some corner of the imagination. Aitken: You often mention the fact that the cadences and rhythms of the King James Bible come into our language, our speech, our literature, even though at times we are unaware of it. In a watered-down translation, this element would be partially lacking, wouldn’t it?

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Frye: I think that’s true. Young children tend to become very much attached to certain word orders, and they want the same thing over and over again without permitting very much in the way of change, so there’s a strong argument for getting the right words in the right order into their ears as soon as possible. I noticed that, when I was reviewing The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes and found that the authors had slightly different versions than the ones that I was used to, I resented it on a very subconscious level every time.2 Aitken: You mention in one of your recent articles that you think the teaching lecture will re-establish itself in a short time.3 Do you also foresee the day when grade 8 children may be relieved of stewing in their own intellectual juice in small groups for interminable periods of time, and when the teacher will be reinstated as at least one of the possible sources of knowledge? Frye: Well, as the man said when he shot himself with his hunting rifle, that’s a slightly loaded question. But I sympathize with you entirely. I think that the seminar method is a thing there’s a vogue for, and educators are great on vogues. There’s no question that there is a place in the teaching process for people, no matter what age, to be discussing a matter among themselves. The point is, of course, that if you make that the regular teaching program you are throwing a strain on the student which is pretty tough, even for university students, and I think it is absolutely intolerable for children at grade 8 level. If you are going to make the process of education anything more than a painful stumbling through one pooling of ignorance to another, you more or less have to find a place simply for communication in its elementary form—as the conveying of information from A to B, where A knows what he is talking about and B doesn’t. Aitken: Your mention of conveying information from A to B reminds me of your recent article in the Graduate in which you state: “Education can take place only where there is communication, which means the conveying of information from A to B, or a discussion united by the presence of a specific subject. Such discussion is educational in proportion as it is structured.”4 Would you comment further on the importance of “structure” in education? Frye: Well, I think rather of a discussion I got into where a colleague of mine afterwards said that most of the questions really meant, “I think

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you’ve explained that a bit too clearly; would you mind clouding it up a little?” In the first place, there are a great many false analogies from democracy that get into educational theory, and the notion that for A to tell something to B is undemocratic is about as crude a superstition as one could get hold of. If A is knocking himself out trying to make something clear to B, he is simply offering to share what he has with B and is trying to equalize the whole social situation—and the more efficiently he does that, the better off B is. Aitken: In the same article you go on to say that “everything connected with the university, with education, and with knowledge, must be structured and continuous. Until this is grasped, there can be no question of ‘learning to think for oneself.’”5 Frye: It seems to me quite obvious that knowledge is consecutive, that there is no such thing as irrelevant information in the sense of information which is unconnected with the next bit of information. So all knowledge is a gradual unfolding of a structure which gets more and more continuous as one learns more and more of it, and the teaching rhythm has to follow this continuity in knowledge. When people talk about unstructured conversation or dialogue or encounter groups, and so forth, they are really engaged in what seems to be a religious rather than an educational activity. They’re looking for existential things, but they’re not looking for knowledge. Aitken: If the student’s form of participation was thinking about what he hears instead of being ready with an impressive rejoinder, real learning might have more chance to occur. Frye: Oh, I couldn’t agree with you more. I think that when you set up the conditions for this kind of seminar-symposium discussion, what you get is a sort of group monologue. Aitken: There used to be jokes suggesting that the universities believed English literature had ended with Matthew Arnold. All this has changed now. Recently I taught some graduate students who seemed to think that English literature began with Matthew Arnold—or some time later. This seems to me a greater and more serious distortion than the one embodied in the jokes. As you have said, the nature of the discipline, not a truant officer, dictates what we should study.6 If, however, more and more students are permitted to choose their own courses, what can the ele-

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mentary and secondary schools do to ensure that these choices will be informed ones? Frye: That raises the whole question of the role of historical imagination in the learning process. I remember when I was at Oxford there were three English courses which were arranged in order of prestige. The first, and the most “prestigious,” as people say now, was mostly Old Norse and Gothic; the second one staggered about as far as the death of Chaucer, or maybe it was 1500; and the third, which was the popular one—the mass-produced one for the Rhodes scholars—went down to 1830, the end of the Romantic movement, and thereby left everyone in a state of great confusion about the date of Wordsworth’s Prelude, which was written in 1804 and published in about 1850. The theory behind this, however, was something that I sympathized with. The theory was that a cultivated person, such as an Oxford undergraduate was assumed to be, would be reading contemporary literature on his own, that it was not something he ought to be getting academic credit for, and that consequently what he studied was the literary heritage and not the literature that was springing up all around him. Well, I doubt that this is practical pedagogics in North America in 1970, but I still have a lot of sympathy with that view. I feel that to start out learning English literature with what is quoted in T.S. Eliot is a rather barbaric and dubious practice, and that as you go on with that, the cruder it gets. You see, there are always two things about a writer—like Shakespeare, let us say: there is what he meant in his own time, and there is what he means to us. If you concentrate solely on what he means to us, then you are simply kidnapping him and turning him into a twentieth-century writer, which he wasn’t. If you keep in mind the other pole, that he was writing for a quite alien civilization and culture with very different standards and assumptions, that is the liberalizing element in your reading. It’s introducing you to an unfamiliar cultural milieu. Aitken: So you’re no longer confined by the blinkers of your own time and place? Frye: Of your own assumptions, yes. Like scolding Shakespeare for not having an enlightened view of Jews, for example. Aitken: For some reason contemporary literature is often the only kind considered “relevant.” Could high-school teachers do more to infuse an interest in the literature of other ages?

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Frye: I think it is true that every age left to itself is extremely provincial and narrow-minded in its cultural assumptions, and an education in other cultures and other periods is the only possible way out of it. Relevance can be an extremely barbaric cry if it’s overstated. Aitken: We seem to be getting away from any prescriptions in the English curriculum. Do you see an end to this? Frye: Oh yes. I think as long as I’ve been watching education, it’s been a very pendulum-swinging kind of operation. There have been the wildest swings from one extreme to the other. One hopes that, like a cuckoo clock, eventually the pendulum will come down a little bit further and not swing quite so wildly. Aitken: Would you comment upon educational media, or audio-visual aids as they are often called? Frye: Well, the oral tradition, the association of literature with the spoken word, is too much there ever to be ignored, and that comes partly from the teacher. That’s one reason why the lecture is never going to be abolished as the centre of education. Recordings can be part of this whole process. It’s very interesting to know that some poets are the best readers of their own poetry and other poets are the worst, and that a good many other poets are somewhere in between. I don’t know so much about the visual aids. I’ve seen television programs based on literary themes with scenic effects, and the scenic effects seemed to be for the most part rather churned up. They didn’t seem to belong naturally to the subject. Aitken: High-school students flocked to see the film Romeo and Juliet because the play was on their course of study. Is there any danger that in the case of a “first encounter” the director’s interpretation could dominate a student’s thinking? Frye: It is certainly true that a dramatist intends his work for the stage and a stage is where that work should be seen. There is perhaps some danger in allowing the film presentation, or even the stage presentation, to dominate one’s conception of the play so that one can’t really see anything in the printed text except what one saw previously in the film. I didn’t see a movie of Romeo and Juliet until I was of college age, and then, I remember, Juliet was played by Norma Shearer, who of course was quite old enough and strong enough to have thrown Romeo over her shoulder and walked to Mantua with him.7 If I had seen this at a very

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impressionable age, I perhaps might never have got that Juliet out of my head whenever I read the play. Aitken: Can that happen with picture books? Frye: Yes, I think that could happen. A very good example is the Tenniel illustrations to Alice in Wonderland. I mean, I wouldn’t accept anybody else’s Mock Turtle at all. Aitken: As Design for Learning reminds us, “the term ‘creative writing,’ applied to writing in the schools, has no precise meaning” [40]. Nevertheless, periods for “creative writing” are still set aside in all our schools, and during these classes most children put words on paper. Most of what my children wrote has great appeal to adults—perhaps this is what the youngsters intended. What is your view of children writing to order at regular intervals? In fact, do you think this whole area of so-called creative writing makes sense for young children? Frye: It seems to me that using the word “creative” as an adjective for writing attaches a kind of mystique to the whole operation which is unutterably phony. It’s obvious that one has to learn to write as well as learn to read, and practice in writing is something that I don’t see how anybody could object to. I think it should be clear, though, that when young people practice writing, they are actually practising a rhetorical skill, and what they turn out is going to be the product of a rhetorical skill. I thought your remark was very shrewd, that they produced what they knew adults were going to like. This has just as much to do with what the professional writer does as anything creative. It doesn’t need to be attached to the notion that you are somehow fishing in the subconscious. Aitken: Children’s writing is often a matter of accurate diary-keeping. Do you think that calling it anything else glorifies it out of all proportion? Frye: Yes. I think it illustrates a sort of “Rousseauish” sense of the natural man which seems to me a little half-baked. The ability to express oneself in painting and writing, and even in composing tunes, ought to be a fairly natural secretion of any child of normal intelligence up to the age of twenty or so. But the question of acquiring the rhetorical skill is a quite different thing from the question of what you are going to do with it after you have acquired it. That’s the point at which very many people stop.

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Aitken: So often children are asked to write and paint and generally emote Tuesday and Thursday afternoons when they haven’t had enough experience, literary or otherwise, to have much to say. Do you think these activities are nevertheless worthwhile? Frye: Yes. The developing of the skill has something to be said for it, I think. The question of the profundity of the content is not important at that point. It’s just another example of what I mean by the repetition and practice which is in all the learning process. Aitken: Many people in education decry content and emphasize that it’s the thinking process and “thinking about thinking” that matter. What is your impression of all this? Frye: Well, I’m very astonished to find that this is still going on in educational circles. I thought it had perished with Sputnik back in 1957, and that educational theorists were now much more aware of the fact that content is absolutely essential in every subject and that no teacher is worth anything except to the extent that he has mastered that content. There is really no such thing as methodology, and there is certainly no such thing as thinking about thinking, except among a very small group of epistemologists. The process of thinking is something you cannot do at random. It’s an acquired habit. It’s just like playing the piano. If you are thinking, you can only think about something. What you’re thinking about has itself a body—an interconnected body of ideas. You enter into that body, and then you add something new to it. But you can’t think at random; you can’t think at will. Consequently there can be no education at all apart from the communication of content. Aitken: You would agree that knowledge of his own discipline is what inspires the great teacher? Frye: It’s the only thing that inspires him. If you’re teaching mathematics, you get inspired by mathematics. Nobody gets inspired by some vague notion like teaching as an end in itself.

17 Into the Wilderness Conducted December 1969

From Acta Victoriana, 94 (February 1970): 39–50, where it is subtitled “An Interview on Religion with Northrop Frye.” The interviewer was John Ayre, then a student of anthropology at Victoria and editor of Acta Victoriana, the college literary magazine; he was later to become a writer and researcher and to write Frye’s biography. Reprinted in WGS, 95–107. Dated by information from Ayre.

Ayre: There is a passage in your The Modern Century which says: The world we are in is the world of the tiger, and that world was never created or seen to be good. It is the subhuman world of nature, a world of law and of power but not of intelligence or design. Things “evolve” in it, whatever that means, but there is no creative power in it that we can see except that of man himself. And man is not very good at the creating business: he is much better at destroying, for most of him, like an iceberg, is submerged in a destructive element. [121; NFMC, 68] This is rather pessimistic. I was wondering how you would expand on this. Frye: Well, I would say that the traditional Christian framework has been within the conception of God as the creator of the world back in 4004 b.c., and He looked at the world and saw that it was good.1 Now man broke that contract with God and fell out of the garden of Eden into the wilderness. That is where he is now, but still the conception in God’s

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mind is there and we can get back to it. That has been the traditional Christian myth, but we don’t have much confidence in that myth any more now. We really can’t think of God as a creator of the world. All we can see is a moon a quarter of a million miles away that you can get on with NASA hardware which is not worth landing on when you get there. And you have billions of years of evolution in which nothing ever happened that was at all cheerful. So there is just no use trying to think of God as a big Santa Claus up in the sky that made the world six thousand years ago and will then tear it up in another thousand years. Ayre: Well, what does “God” mean today, in our modern world? Frye: The only thing that God can possibly mean is what he really does mean in Christianity, that is to say a suffering man. Ayre: Are you equating the suffering man with God? Frye: I’m saying that the only role that God can have in human life is that of a man who cares enough about society to go even to the extent of a hideous death for man’s salvation. I think it is the conception of God as the power that recreates man rather than God as the creator of the order of nature that is the really valid element in Christianity. I would differentiate between the divine and the human because the human contains many things that are not divine. Ayre: What would you say, then, the suffering man was who represents God? Frye: The suffering man who represents God may be a martyr in the original sense of a witness. That is, he is a man whose vision of a better form of human life and society is so strong that he lives in the light of that vision and acts according to what it suggests. Ayre: What is the source of this light? Frye: I am not sure what the source of it is. It is implanted in the human mind at a depth that makes one think there is some point in the destiny of man that we have perhaps never really grasped. The idea is, of course, pre-Christian. Socrates says in The Republic [592b] that once he has got his republic all built, it is something that will never exist but the wise man will always act according to its laws no matter what society he is actually living in. The moment Socrates said that he made himself a potential martyr.

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Ayre: Is man completely alone in that he has no inspiration from outside himself? Frye: Man is alone in the objective environment around him which is what we call “nature.” Everything in nature is submoral, subintellectual, and subhuman, and man gets nothing from that at all in the way of inspiration. Ayre: Would you say that man is part of that nature, or is he sublimated from it? Frye: Man is a part of the nature around him and, therefore, there is an element in man which is not divine. Ayre: Who would you say are the modern-day religious martyrs and prophets? Frye: Somebody who was a martyr in the literal sense was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered by the Nazis. I think of the martyr as predominantly the witness, the person who does something significant whether it is a death or something in relation to the sense of a greater community that man knows.2 I should think that anyone who dedicates his whole life to the service of that kind of vision is uniting himself to the central redemptive act of mankind, whether he does it as a writer or social worker or in any other walk of life. Ayre: Do you think that the pseudo-religions like Marxism are offering the solutions that religion once did? Frye: I think that they do for a great many people, but I wouldn’t call Marxism a pseudo-religion. I would call it a quite genuine religion. The thing that bothers me about Marxism is that it accepts the ordinary categories of time and space and life and death. If there is a question in your mind that death might not be all there is to be said about life, then Marxism says that is morbid, that you have to live for today and for society. I think that that gives the human race claustrophobia—when you have a religion founded on the ordinary categories of time and space and life and death. The thing which is to me so important about the other religions, particularly Christianity, is that they keep the words “eternal” and “infinite” right in the middle of experience, and as long as they are there you don’t get claustrophobia. Ayre: So you think that man should have some sort of mechanism of escape from time and space, as in the Christian mythology, for example?

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Frye: Oh yes. Ayre: What did religion mean to you and your fellow students in the 1930s when you were going through the crisis of the Depression? Frye: Well, I can’t answer for my fellow students. But there was a very strong feeling that Christianity was losing touch with the world by putting all its eggs in one middle-class basket. What is so obviously true now was just as obviously true then—that an institution with all its taxfree real estate is not going to take a very concerned interest in the problems of the world. So we had people trying to organize movements for Christian Socialism to show that a real concern for the human race and for social problems was Christian as well. Ayre: Like the students of the 1930s, we are in search of some sort of answer out of the chaos that seems to be descending upon us. The hippies, for example, have turned inward and become very spiritual. The New Left have turned outward to criticize social forms. To what extent do the hippies and/or the New Left encompass the aspects of religious experience? Frye: They both seem to me to be religious heresies in the strict sense of the term. That is, their impulse is religious but their method of defining it is extreme. As soon as you say, “I will look within and not without,” you are copping out. As soon as you say, “I will look without but not within,” you are copping out, too. Religion, to me, means the achieving and the holding of a social vision which comes from inside and yet includes others as well. Ayre: So you would like to see a full integration of both the spiritual and the social within one experience? Frye: Yes. Christ said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you” [Luke 17:21], but a lot of people think that “within” also means among you. It seems to me that it has to be both. Ayre: So you see the “new spiritualists,” as one might call them, as somewhat lacking in the ability to integrate these two aspects—the spiritual and social? Frye: I think in a time of troubled change you get people looking for simplistic solutions which attract because they are simple and extreme solutions. You get people saying, “Well, it’s all right to say that the medium is the message, but it is all the same medium and all the same message,

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and it’s a pretty stupid message, so you might as well take drugs to develop a real experience inside.” Then you get other people saying, “It’s morbid to think about what goes on in your mind,” and “You have work to do in society because you are a social being.” But both of those are simplistic solutions. Ayre: Do you see the hippies, perhaps, as an extreme vanguard movement whose values may diffuse down through different layers of the younger generation and may improve the ways of perception in a more modern way? Frye: That is possible. I think that the hippies have a very limited social function, really. They were quite valuable in the challenge that they made to the work ethic. I don’t feel that the movement has any roots or has any real power or permanence or that it can really hold even individual loyalties beyond a very short time. For many people the hippie movement is something to drop into and out of. Ayre: A way of spiritual cleansing? Frye: Something of that kind, yes. Ayre: In order to, say, reorient your experience and maybe your perception to perhaps throw off, temporarily, all that you have learned and been educated into? Frye: Well, if it can do that it is very valuable. Of course that depends a great deal on the person himself. Ayre: Do you think there are any real modern mythologies, and are they religious in nature? Frye: I think all mythologies are religious in nature, and I think that every new mythology is a modification of an old one. Ayre: So you have the recurring archetypes? Now, one thing I am interested in is the function of the modern poet. Poets and artists, at one time, used to work for the church and the state. You can see that in the Renaissance almost all the art was religious—the Madonnas and so on. But since the hold of the church on society has been loosened, the artist seems to have gone off on his own into a very isolated cultural environment. Do you see the modern poet as a specialized mythmaker? Frye: The poet is certainly a mythmaker. That is his business, because all

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poetry is mythopoeic, and I would say that the poet is working for religion but, of course, not necessarily for a religion. That is, you get people like Ginsberg who go into Buddhism, and you have others like Brother Antoninus who become Roman Catholics.3 You also have others who are not committed to any institutional religion at all. It seems to me that the things they say and the kinds of protest they make in their social attitudes are all essentially religious, though you are quite right in saying that they tend to become individualized. I think they almost have to at a time when institutional religion has a somewhat limited hold. Ayre: There seem to be somewhat the same processes working in modern art, in all art, as a matter of fact—the tapping of the subconscious, the emergence of the archetypes. Whereas these used to be used in an institutionalized religion, they do not seem to be so today. How does that leave organized religion, when it no longer has these creative individuals developing new mythologies? Do you think, in other words, modern religion is developing new mythologies that are vital and of interest to all people? Frye: I think that the poets are developing mythologies which religious people can use and can see the religious significance of. Now many poets may be what I just called “heretics.” That is, they may have intensely individualized and simplistic and extreme views, but they are not the less valuable for that. In an age like ours you can’t possibly do without the heretic. He is the person who really counts. A writer like Nietzsche or D.H. Lawrence can have tremendous religious significance, but it is up to the people who understand the importance of a religious perspective to see what that significance is. Ayre: How do you think that organized religion can develop a mythology in our modern world that is applicable to people? For instance, young people just aren’t going to church any more. * * * How do you think the church can become more attractive to young people? Frye: If I had the answer to that I would be an awfully useful person! I simply don’t know. I think that organized religion has got itself caught in this middle-class bind which, as I say, is not just the fact that it is the well-dressed and the washed and the middle-class people that go to church. It is not only that, it is also all the real estate they have and the mortgages they have to meet and that kind of thing. They have got to be a kind of tax-free business. I think everybody with any penetration in the

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church knows that the church has to break clear of that, but the person who could tell them how would be the great prophet of our times. I am not sure that there is any “how.” I think that things just have to grow up in their own way in other places; the need is there. Young people, as I have said elsewhere, are desperately religious.4 They go to meetings and “encounter” sessions which, back in the 1930s, were associated only with the most extreme evangelical things such as the Oxford Group, as it was called then—Moral Rearmament and so on.5 The fact that these things appeal so intensely to young people today indicates how very strong the religious feeling is. It is bound to grow up, for the most part, outside the present institutional organized religion, though perhaps not entirely. And perhaps as it continues to grow it may work out some kind of modus vivendi with organized religion when it gets to be less afraid of it and less suspicious of it. Ayre: So, in other words, the spiritual, inward impulses are there, but there is no institution right now that they can attach themselves to, other than the Marxist groups, etc. Frye: Yes, I think what we are in for today is a gigantic Methodist movement. In the eighteenth century the Church of England got frozen into its real estate and the local squire presented the living to a parson who, of course, had to keep in with him. The Methodists went out into the fields and the big cities that were developing, and I think that something like that is happening now. Ayre: That is very interesting. That is the sort of thing that I myself have been looking for. Whether it will come or not remains to be seen. This whole century has been very, very black—no hope, no salvation. It just seems to be going down and down. You wonder sometimes whether it actually will revive and whether the optimistic point of view will materialize. Naturally, literature follows the patterns of the rise and fall of the spirit. We have had anti-literature. How do you think that literature will develop in future years? Frye: I think that literature, at the moment, is predominantly ironic literature. That is its general attitude and function. It will continue to be that until it has exhausted the possibilities of that convention, which will take quite a while. I think also that there has been, within the last ten years or so, a quite sudden revival of the oral tradition of literature, that is, of poetry recited to listening audiences with musical backgrounds. Then, again, there has been a strong movement to break down the distinction

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between art and life. It is the age of the “happening,” of the spontaneous improvised act, of that kind of theatre, and of events which you can’t say are either works of art or happenings in social life, because they are both at the same time. I think this indicates a kind of disseminating of the mythopoeic habit of mind among more and more groups of people. Ayre: This would be the total or psychedelic experience where you have the bright lights on the wall and the simulated acid experience, the loud music that creates a womb-like atmosphere. I have always had the conception of the artist as an extremely individual person, off in his study, writing his verses. Do you think that this new tendency toward the breakdown of poetry and of the joining of the audience with the artist in one experience is a good thing? Frye: I think it is a thing that is happening and consequently it has potentialities either for good or for evil, depending on how it is used. I think that it has great possibilities for good. It does tend to break down that very unhealthy discrimination between the artist’s writing obscure and impenetrable poetry in the garret and the public’s not reading it. I think we are beginning to get the end of that kind of specialization in society. Ayre: Would you consider this new art experience as valid as the older art forms and as qualitative? Frye: I think that art has a different relationship to society at different periods. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth there came to be something of a divorce between the production of art and the social response to it. That is, there was a cultural lag between the most important and serious writers and their popularity. People writing around 1918 to 1920 wouldn’t become widely read or bestselling writers until around 1940 or 1950. So the author tended to feel that he was writing for posterity and over the heads of most of his contemporaries. He wasn’t necessarily a snob in doing this. It was just part of the social effects of his situation. I think that that gap is narrowing down now, that there is less of a cleavage between serious and popular literature than there was, and consequently a more direct public response to it. It has its good elements and its disadvantages. It doesn’t necessarily mean that art will become better or worse. It means that it will be geared to a different kind of social response. Ayre: Well, if we deal with this phenomenon of, say, the discotheque— the simulated acid experience where there is a total environment and the

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breakdown of the individual—is it not an abnegation of the individual and a sort of surrender to an almost chaotic totality? Frye: I think that the return to the womb, that is, this completely sealedin or enclosed experience, is a rather passing vogue. It is a tendency which is a part of the drug cults and the general retreat psychology of the ’60s. I don’t think that that is going to last very long. I think it will give place to a much more simple and open-air response where the artist, the poet, the folk singer, whatever he is, is thought of in more normal terms as an entertainer. Ayre: Is there not implicit in all this new art form a union of the social and the spiritual in that you get the spiritual from the social? Or that you get your experience from the social group rather than as a differentiated individual reading a book of poetry in isolation? Is it a good thing that there should be a surrender of individualism in the actual process of artistic relation and communication? Frye: It seems to me that in a spiritual response there has to be a continuous oscillation between the individual’s sense of himself as an individual and his sense of his place in a social body. If his responses are purely social and if, for example, he takes drugs in order to destroy the conception of the contours of his individuality, if he finds himself merging in with other people, then that society is going to turn into a mob, because a mob is a society without any individuals. Similarly, if he remains an individual and pulls away from his social context, then the kind of response he has is unhealthy in a different direction. Ayre: Wouldn’t you consider the art forms that we are seeing now as a mob art experience? Frye: There are many tendencies toward the mob in contemporary society, yes. I think that there is a curious mixture of the two things. The more individualized or introverted a person’s reactions are the more he becomes, without realizing it, a typical example of a certain kind of social or class snobbery. Similarly, the more a person dissolves his responses into that of the group, the more his own sense of continuity, his own sense of identity, disintegrates. Ayre: Do you consider this disintegration of the individual as essentially religious? Frye: Oh, no.

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Ayre: How do you define the religious experience? Frye: Religion is a matter of finding one’s identity. I think you could almost define a man’s religion as that with which he is trying to identify himself. Ayre: What do you think a man should be identifying with? Frye: I think he should be identifying with God, but of course that would involve one in a long discussion of what God is. Ayre: In the religious experience, what is man communicating with? Frye: I think that religion is made possible by God’s communicating with man, and that the response that man makes to that, whether it is in prayer or worship or in other ways such as writing or painting or doing his own job, the sacramental life as it is called, is his communication. Ayre: Is there any entity that he is communicating with, or is it an internal thing that he is relating himself to, or both? Frye: Well, I think it is both. I certainly don’t think it is a subjective thing, largely because I’m not quite sure that there is such a thing as a subject. It may well be that there is nothing to man except the experiences he has, and consequently what he responds to is something which includes himself or is essential in himself and infinitely more besides. Ayre: So this is a very existential idea that man is relating to experience rather than to any particular thing. Frye: I suppose so, yes, or relating through his experience anyway. Ayre: So you have no conception, then, of any entity beyond man that is acting upon man? Frye: Well, when you say “entity” you are implying something essential that you could put a finger on and define. The mystics, for example, always said that everything is to be related to God in two ways. One way is: this-also-is-thou, and the other is: neither-is-this-thou. That is, everything that exists both is and is not God. Ayre: What is the church doing now to change old ideas of a God that is anthropomorphic—the Father in the sky? How is it going to be able to communicate to young people new concepts? How is it going to be able to relate existential philosophy, which certainly doesn’t filter down into the local parishes?

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Frye: I’m not sure that there is a “how.” I think that the churches have to cast around for different things to do. There has been a very strong tendency on the part of the church to get rid of the big classical ghost, that is, the creator of the order of nature that got stuck into Christianity at one stage of its development. People are beginning to realize that that figure isn’t there any more and never was there. So when they say that God is dead, they are talking about a God that was never alive. The centre of Christianity, the suffering servant Jesus, who descends from a line of persecuted outcasts and alienated prophets, is still the centre of the religion. Ayre: Do you know of anything concrete that has been done in the church to bring young people back? Frye: I think different churches are doing things in different ways, depending on the particular environment they are in and the temperament of the clergyman in charge. In cities, they do various kinds of social work. There is a church near Yorkville that does a lot of work with the Yorkville colony. There are churches which do a great deal of work toward integrating new Canadians who have come into the country or into the community recently, and so on. It is a matter of looking around to see what has to be done in that particular neighbourhood. Ayre: But isn’t social work essentially a civil function rather than a religious one? There does seem to be a tendency for civil functions to take over what used to be religious so that the church is being left out. If this is so, shouldn’t religion be defining man in the world and his relation to God, rather than trying to get into a field that they have already lost out on? Frye: It seems to me that the first thing that any religion does anywhere is to create a community, that what it sets up is a focus for a community, and that as soon as it stops being a community it stops being anything. It may be a philosophy, it may be a theology, it may be all kinds of things, but unless it is something with its roots in the society around it, it is no longer a religion. Ayre: What you said before: the unity of the social and the spiritual. Frye: Yes. Ayre: Finally, do you see religion as providing alternatives and answers in the future?

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Frye: Alternatives to what? Ayre: To secular orientations. The materialistic American Dream. Frye: I think that the tendency is for society to feel that it doesn’t really need the religious dimension of experience as long as it is doing things for itself in a reasonably successful way. When religion comes in again as a social force it is really a product of disillusionment. It takes shape or seems to have the most persuasive powers when man begins to feel that the bottom of his world has dropped out and that his achievements don’t really amount to so much after all. I think that the particular kind of middle-class disaffection in our own time has very strong religious affinities for that reason. This is something likely to continue because it is not man’s failures, his wars, his imperialism, his conquests, or his moral failures that are being questioned now so much as his successes—whether the welfare state and the good and comfortable life and the chicken every Sunday and so forth have any substantiality. As soon as you begin to question the best social values of our time, then the religious dimension begins to creep in. Ayre: But is established religion going to be able to provide answers to these doubts? Frye: When you say “established religion,” that perhaps begs the question. It is possible that there may be an answer there, but it perhaps doesn’t answer the particular person who is asking the question. That is, there are two kinds of answers. There is the general or universal answer and there is the specific and personal answer. Many people are trying to find their own answers in their own ways, and if they are genuine questions, I think they will find that there is a certain resemblance in the answers that different people get. This resemblance in their answers may create another community. Ayre: Another religion? Frye: Perhaps.

18 The Magic of Words Recorded 12 January 1970 ff.

Professor Glenna Davis Sloan, then a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, who was also lecturing at Queens College, CUNY, interviewed Frye on 12 January, 23 February, and 27 August 1970 in connection with her dissertation on literacy development. This thesis argued against the dominant trend of focusing on the mechanics of learning to read and advanced the proposition that the critical consideration of the literature used is crucial to teaching reading and writing at the elementary level. Specifically, it demonstrated how literary criticism such as Frye’s could inform good practice. The study was published as The Child as Critic (New York: Teachers College Press, 1975 and subsequent eds.) with an introduction by Frye (see WE, 476–8), from which the present title is drawn. Sloan, who later became a professor at Queens College, kindly put together the text below from transcripts of the interviews.

Sloan: A perennial question that children and even my students at Queens College ask is, “Why study literature?” I’d add a question, “How do you go about the study?” Frye: You start off with reading and writing because of course you can’t take any part in your society without it. Eventually you realize that there is a difference between learning to read and write at the minimum standards of literacy and learning to write with some power of articulateness and read with some sense of direction. So, in fact, the teaching of literature is the teaching of reading and writing. Sloan: Children in elementary school are taught to read with the mediocre material typically found in basal readers. Shouldn’t they learn from the best?

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Frye: I don’t know that I would stress the studying of the great rather than the mediocre, although in all learning, especially of this kind, there is a certain amount of learning from models. I have always taken the view that one shouldn’t start too early the civil war between what is really worthwhile in literature and what is trash. The child is very likely to prefer the trash and I don’t think it is any good trying to force standards on him, which he might accept externally but doesn’t feel. I think that the effort of training ought to be towards showing the resemblance between what he likes to read or look at on television and the central patterns of literature. The value judgments will take care of themselves in due course. Sloan: Can you talk further about these “central patterns”? Frye: One principle which emerges from literature is that there are certain patterns of storytelling—conventional ways of beginning, developing, and finishing it off. And also there are stories that seem in some odd way to be central, like the story of Job, where somebody who is in prosperity gets the book thrown at him and then is eventually restored to prosperity. That story shape seems to be fundamental. And because of the general tendency to start with simple patterns in simple societies, those are the ones which have been preserved in our myths and legends and our folk tales. They help to give the child, who recapitulates the history of the race in his own development, the sense of what the central patterns are, what really evokes echoes in one’s mind. Sloan: That is so far from the notions most elementary teachers have about literature. For the most part, it seems to me, they see literary works as tools to teach reading or socialization skills. A key word today is “relevance.” Teachers ask, “Are the stories instructing the children about today’s world?” Frye: Well, it’s difficult to explain the principles of literature to somebody who thinks they know what they are and has got them all wrong. And I think it’s also very hard to discuss the matter on the basis of a word like “relevance” because relevance means vogue or fashion, and whatever is fashionable this year will be in the garbage can next year. All education has to avoid relevance in that sense. Of course the people who talked it up in this century were the Nazis; it’s the same psychosis. Sloan: Writers for children these days attempt to deal with issues of the time, to tell it like it is. To be relevant, I suppose.

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Frye: I think the good books are very often written by people who have some sense of the kind of structure that a child responds to. The basis of teaching when I grew up and many decades before that was really concentrating on the realistic detail: you’d take some work of art because it had a venerable name attached to it and you would pick out this and that and the other that was true to life, like what you knew, and so forth. This is relating the known to the less known. It seemed to me that one thing this kind of teaching never can do is develop any sense of the total structure of what’s being read. It’s bitty and piecy and never gets to any sense of perspective. I don’t know a great deal about contemporary children’s literature, but the little I’ve looked at that seems to be the most competent, written with a knowledge of children, is the type that concentrates on the structure of the story and doesn’t try to be cute or piecemeal. Sloan: Or didactic. Frye: Or didactic. Mind you, the adults may be following the child’s taste in these matters. I think children go in for a rather priggish didacticism at a certain stage—say nine to eleven—around there. Sloan: Some writers for children do insist that they don’t set out necessarily to cater for children’s tastes or preferences. Maurice Sendak1 said in a presentation at Queens College that he wrote for the child within himself. Frye: That’s an excellent description of the really great children’s classics. They were all written by adults for the child within themselves, I think. Sloan: Now back to the process of teaching literature. There’s the question of where and how to begin. We want young children to grasp the structure of stories. How can you do this beyond just telling them stories? Frye: One thing that I have learned by talking to teachers around Toronto is that the more gifted and imaginative teachers take their own line and don’t get swallowed up in this bloody leviathan of OISE. Some years ago it was said that the place to start the study of mythology was grade 9. Then, I was later told that the place to introduce mythical stories can go further and further back, even as far as grade 2 or 3. So obviously teachers who know more realize that children can take in the structural outlines of a simple story at earlier and earlier levels. In fact, I think it’s the first thing a child can do. And what’s more, the young child wants

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the story as an unchangeable verbal pattern—the same story again and again. They concentrate on the story as a whole, not in bits and pieces. Sloan: Your idea of studying literary works as entities within an interrelated structure is to me new and exciting. It makes so much more sense to me than putting individual works under a microscope for examination. Most teachers are not familiar with Anatomy of Criticism or even The Educated Imagination. My hope is that I can present this perspective in an accessible way in my paper. Frye: This presents a challenge because it does involve reversing the whole perspective of most English education. In genuine literary studies poetry is in the middle and fictional prose and all the rest are outside it, together with the prose of communication, a decidedly peripheral prose. Teachers have all been taught to back into this study the wrong way: start with the art of communication and then go back to novels, poetry, and plays by way of relaxation. Poetry is there at the centre but many approach it as though it were a cauldron of boiling oil. Sloan: These ideas of yours about the principles of literature: I hope they are being taught in college courses where teachers are enrolled. Frye: They belong to an area that is very much talked about and discussed. In fact, there is more talk than illumination. The whole study of literature developed out of philology a hundred years ago and became gradually focused on historical or linguistic aspects. People got bored with that approach and developed critical or explicatory criticism. All this gives the feeling that there was an avoidance of the true centre of this study. And of course we’re going through an age of hysteria now. Everybody is shouting about relevance to either this or that. I’ve been rather violently attacked myself for taking literature away from somebody else’s anxieties. Sloan: I think you’re saying that we have to go beyond the mere close reading of individual texts, is that correct? Especially with poetry, we analyse it to destruction and students learn to hate the process. Frye: Well, yes. There is, however, an attraction for puzzle solving as long as it is recognized as that. I once suggested to a teacher that he might get his kids to write two poems on the same theme: one in a strict metrical form and the other in free verse. I said that the free verse poem in almost every case would be the better poem. But the child might have

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more fun working out the other one. There is something about puzzle solving that can hold one’s interest. But what is wrong with this approach for poetry [close analysis of text] is, I imagine, that it assumes prose is the natural way to talk and think instead of being what it is, an extremely artificial and sophisticated way of talking and thinking. Verse is a much more primitive and direct way of talking and thinking. But we are brought up in a prose-based civilization inclined to feel that verse is just a perverse way of distorting prose. So we ask the students to work a poem all out and reduce it to its prose statement. This is one part that I think bores the hell out of kids. Sloan: Obviously, teachers, especially elementary teachers, need to be re-educated in the process of teaching literature. Frye: Well, yes. It’s the elementary teachers who really have to be shown these things, because it seems to me if you really got a child started properly on reading by grade 5 or even before, there is a limit to how much damage you can do to him afterwards. But the training of a teacher of literature is literature. Sloan: You talk of the relationship in story of content and structure. Please say something more about this. In my experience as a student, content is always emphasized in literary study. Isn’t it true that you can’t divorce structure and content? Frye: Well, yes. But literature is a structural subject like mathematics. There is a sense in which there isn’t any content in it. It’s a matter, if it’s a story, for example, of concentrating on what is being told. This sounds like a content thing, but it’s actually a matter of, “Where does the story begin?” “Why does it begin there?” “Where’s the crisis or turning point in the plot?” and that kind of thing. This of course can become a new kind of pedantry in its turn. But I think that you need to keep relating everything to the overall structure [as you read]. Sloan: I still find the notion of thinking of a story more in terms of structure than content difficult to grasp. Frye: This is why I keep insisting on capitalizing on and exploiting a small child’s attention when you’re telling him a story, because to hold that attention until the entire story is told is a very rare mental achievement for an adult. Children can do it and if you can persuade a child to keep doing it he won’t have any trouble with literature. But instead of

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that, children get switched over to the values of the prose-based civilization and the conception of content so they become trained to look at every work of literature or every painting, for that matter, or even a piece of music, and ask, “What’s in it for me? What can I grab and carry off?” Or they look at an abstract painting and say, “What does it mean? Explain it to me; then I’ll be able to ‘get something out of it.’” The very simple childish response is to just stare at the picture. That’s what the painter wants you to do. Sloan: So we are confusing art with the utilitarian? Frye: “What good is it to me?” we ask; or, “How does this relate to me?” “What’s its relevance?” See how it all fits together? The fundamental act of criticism is simply staring at the picture or listening to the story. But the end of literacy education is not just admiration of a work either. I often quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, who says that the correct response to great creative masterpieces is to do whatever you can creatively, not necessarily writing.2 An oral response can be creative. Sloan: To work out curriculum for elementary school based on your ideas, I need your help with a scope and sequence plan. From my reading of your work, I know that you suggest beginning literary study with Biblical stories and Classical myth. What comes next? Frye: Well, then you work your way into literature, folk and fairy tales and classics and contemporary stories, always looking for and pointing out the resemblances in everything you read. Explaining the unknown by the previously known. Sloan: Quantities of so-called realistic fiction are being written these days for children. Some feel that fantasy does a better job of educating the imagination. What do you say? Frye: I believe children should have as mixed a bag as possible. I think a child can read everything and that we should expose him to a great many different kinds of things, tentatively, so the child can develop his own pattern of preference. Some people will go through life wanting realistic stories and others will go through life wanting science fiction. Sloan: You write about the forms and structures in literature recurring in stories, but I find that some of the recent novels written for children have an apparent formlessness, no actual beginning, middle, and end.

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Frye: Well, there are traditional story shapes, but there is a traditional shapelessness as well. In stories, there is a series of displacements from myths and the ironic displacement is the farthest away. Most twentiethcentury literature is written in the ironic mode and the ironic mode has always made a feature of a kind of pretence of shapelessness or amorphousness. Modern writers use the same paradigms and structures as their ancestors and they always will as long as literature goes on being recognizably literature. Young writers read their contemporaries and when they do that they write in the convention they find there. When they develop enough originality to find their own style, they may be ready to read farther back in the history of literature. I should say, by the way, that when I speak of myth, I’m speaking of the structural, the formal principle of the work of literature. If you are reading a story in which a man falls in love with his own image in the mirror, you say, “This isn’t Narcissus, but this is myth, a story pattern.” Sloan: How much of this theory is appropriate for direct teaching to children? I would think very little. Frye: Well, the cyclical and dialectic structures, and other major principles of literature, should certainly be things that the teacher understands. This understanding provides her with a deductive framework for teaching while the student proceeds inductively, through a process of discovery. The teacher has a fairly elaborate schematic in her mind, but the child should be put in the position of discovering things. That’s one reason why the teacher shouldn’t talk too much. Leave the questioning to the children. Surely a child with any intellectual curiosity will bring up things that puzzle him, given the opportunity, of course. Sloan: Is there any approach that you would want teachers to avoid when teaching literature? Frye: What I would steer away from is any kind of examination of the student that is based on content and memorization. I don’t mean memorizing a poem—that’s another thing altogether. I think the study of content is always incidental and the study of structure is primary, and other things have to be related to that, the form. Form, of course, embraces content. It’s going to take in all the content, but not as content. When I say “steer away from content,” what I am really saying is to steer away from unrelated detail. If you make the structure primary, then every-

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thing which will otherwise be content becomes related to the form or structure and so becomes relevant through it. There are archetypes, elements such as plot patterns, characters, and the like that recur in literature from its very beginnings. And literature itself proves to be a series of displacements from the earliest stories. Literary study is an attempt to see what the literary context of the work of literature is. It’s a generally accepted idea that you get the meaning of anything through context. A building, say: you have to see whether it’s a church or a theatre—in other words, know its context or its function— before you can say much of anything about it. For anything that works, there are two contexts; for literature there is the context of ordinary discourse and the context of literature itself. In talking about literature, which is criticism, most critics take the context of ordinary discourse to be the primary context of a work of literature, although in fact it’s always the secondary context. That’s where you get the idea that the meaning of literature is what you can get out of a paraphrase. But in archetypal criticism, you go first of all to the literary context, to see what meaning can be thrown on an individual work from its context in the whole of literature itself. The archetypal approach allows you to stand back, to see the recurring patterns and associations. Sloan: You have said that “The critic may want to know something of the social sciences, but there can be no such thing as, for instance, a sociological approach to literature” [AC, 19/20]. In my experience, most criticism of literature is content-oriented and often takes a sociological or psychological approach. Frye: Yes. That’s a reality but that doesn’t make it right. You need to remember also that a theory, literary or otherwise, isn’t any good unless it explains facts. A psychological theory can explain psychological facts but literary facts can only be explained by literary theory. While realizing that you will find yourself picking up analogies with psychology and anthropology, perhaps, as you read literature, you need to keep your centre of attention on the literature and not be taken over by them. Sloan: You say that poetry should be central to a literary education. But in my experience elementary teachers find poetry a difficult form and avoid it. When they do teach it, they take an analytical approach. People expect poetry to be hard to understand, I think.

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Frye: The real difficulty with modern poetry is that it is so very simple. The language couldn’t possibly be simpler. Readers themselves make it difficult. The same is true of painting, where you hear people say, “If someone would explain it to me, I would understand.” But the painter would say, “Well, hell, just look at the picture.” Sloan: Then “teaching poetry” to the young should mostly be the experiencing of a wide range of poetry? Frye: Yes. I’ve always attacked the practice of putting “talky” poets into books for young people because they write versified prose. Instead, if you put emphasis on springy rhythm, imagery, and that kind of thing, you have poetry based on the assumption that poetry is a natural expression, older and more primitive than prose. Sloan: The same for “teaching” story? Experiencing stories of all kinds? Frye: As to teaching, I would try to talk about the content of a story as far as possible in terms of form and structure. If the child says, “I don’t like the way this author works out the relationship between the boy and his mother,” the teacher says, “You tell me the story your way or rewrite the story in which you work out the relationship as you think it should be done.” Sloan: Very often, too often, the study of literature is reserved for the “best” students, the bookish ones. Frye: That’s nonsense. Sloan: You would not agree that the less bookish students should receive a practical literary education, working mostly with the practical prose of communication? Frye: I would not agree. That’s exactly the opposite of what I would say.

19 Two Heretics: Milton and Melville Conducted 16 December 1970

From WGS, 119–26. Transcribed by Robert D. Denham from CBC audiotape no. 572, released by the Centre for Cassette Studies, 1975. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Frye was interviewed by John J. Teunissen, head of the English department at the University of Manitoba, on a program produced by Robert Zend; like no. 24, it was part of the series On Man and Cosmos broadcast in 1971.

Teunissen: One of the things I’ve been interested in is the role that chaos plays in the great epic, or perhaps tragic, poem, and I’ve called it an archetype. I wonder if the word “archetype” is a legitimate label to attach to it. Frye: Yes, it is a legitimate label, because an archetype is an image that recurs throughout literary experience. Chaos comes into the first verse of the Book of Genesis and keeps on going long past Melville. Teunissen: Is it legitimate to go back to Hesiod—who in my experience, at least, is one of the very first poets to utilize this material—and to suggest that if the element of chaos is present in a cosmological structure, then we could expect a modern poet to come up with associated archetypal material, such as the Promethean myth? Frye: Oh, yes, he would come up with the same archetypes, though he’d put them in a different context. There are many aspects of Prometheus, and certainly the Prometheus crucified by the wrath of the sky-god and released by Hercules, the Prometheus whose name traditionally means intelligence and foresight, is part of a recurring structure in religion.

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Teunissen: Does chaos play a significant part in Prometheus Unbound, or has it been resolved some way? Frye: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound gives you a cosmology which is more or less Milton’s upside down. In Milton the stars and their courses represent the divine creation and chaos is at the bottom of creation, that is, something which is strictly controlled by God; whereas in Shelley everything that is good comes bubbling up from below and is associated with volcanoes and springs. Prometheus for him is imprisoned under the earth and his only friend there is Mother Earth. He’s man in revolt against alienation. In Shelley the source of alienation is in the sky, whereas in Milton it is exactly the opposite. Teunissen: Shelley, then, picks up at exactly the point at which Aeschylus concludes. At least in the play we have, Prometheus makes a kind of invocation to chaos at that point where he says something like “I hate you all, you gods,” and then he’s buried, as I recall. Frye: Yes. But in Shelley, of course, Prometheus can only become free when Jupiter is destroyed; whereas in Aeschylus, Prometheus can only become free when he makes a deal with Zeus. Teunissen: So that there is more of that element I call diplomacy involved in the Aeschylean version. Frye: Yes. The Aeschylean version is conservative and maintains the authority of the sky-god. Teunissen: I’m interested in what a theologian might say about the presence of chaos in Paradise Lost. Is it absolutely outrageous to suggest that chaos could be considered coeternal with an eternal God? Frye: Well, I think not for Milton. That of course was the problem Milton returned to in his Christian Doctrine. Milton was very bothered by the dilemma of the creation myth. If you say that the world was created from nothing, you’re involved in a mathematical paradox—that you can multiply by nothing and still get something. If God made the world out of something, then that something must be coeternal with God. So Milton decided to solve that by talking about the creation de Deo as an emanation from God as God, extending his empire out of chaos. So that chaos is simply that to which God’s presence has not yet come. Teunissen: It’s not something that must always remain?

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Frye: No. It’s not a thing in itself. It’s simply the absence of God’s presence. Teunissen: Perhaps I’ve overstressed the personality of chaos in my reading of the poem. Frye: It becomes a personality, of course, after the fall of Satan, because it gets integrated then into the chain of being. So you have this curious world in the second book of Paradise Lost where you never know whether you’re up against an abstract personification or a person. Teunissen: Yes, and it seems to me that most critics prefer an allegorical reading of chaos rather than a reading which really makes it part of Milton’s cosmos—an active part. It may be to avoid the possibility of this being a heretical position that Milton has chosen. I’m not sure. Frye: Well, I think that Milton intends you to waver. I think that he intends you to be uncertain of all your landmarks when you’re in chaos. Teunissen: The Promethean figure then, to get back to Shelley for a moment, is, as a cosmic archetype, obviously very adaptable to political views—to move from a cosmic to a social vision. Frye: Oh, yes, certainly from the Romantic period on. Teunissen: It depends, doesn’t it, greatly upon your idea about how important it is to have a strong central government, whether or not you look upon the Promethean figure as a heroic rebel or as an irresponsible anarchist? So after the French Revolution, I suppose, the Promethean figure could be nothing but heroic for Shelley, even in the face of what happened in that revolution. Frye: Well, yes. In the Romantic social setup Prometheus is a revolutionary man certainly. In Milton, I think the Promethean side of man would be associated with Christ; that is, Christ for Milton is essentially the isolated prophet to a hostile world who is crucified like Prometheus. And if I were to look for a Promethean figure in Milton, I would look at Samson Agonistes, who was a prototype of Christ but a bound giant in the Philistine temple. For Milton, Christ descends with the fire of God and spreads it among man. Teunissen: In the early history of the church there was a debate between Tertullian and the Marcionites, named after the leader of their sect, in

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which one of the major arguments was whether or not Christ was a true Promethean figure. Who was the true Prometheus? I think Marcion’s writings are mostly lost and have to be reconstructed by what Tertullian had to say about this problem, but it is interesting, at least for me, that the archetype should lend itself so beautifully to a theological debate in the formative years of the church. Frye: Well, Marcion was a Gnostic, and what made the Gnostics heretical was their belief that the order of nature was fundamentally corrupt and that, therefore, the God who would produce this order of nature must be an evil God, whom Jesus fought against. There’s something strongly Gnostic about all Romanticism, I think, especially of the Shelleyan kind, because it recurs to this conception that the God who produced the order of nature is somebody to be got rid of. He’s a sinister god. Teunissen: Would you call Shelley a mythmaker in his setting up other cosmic possibilities in Prometheus Unbound? Frye: I’d certainly call him a mythopoeic poet, yes. A poet doesn’t make a myth in the sense in which he makes a poem; that is, the poem is what he makes and the myth is what he makes it out of. He makes it out of the same myths, just as all English poets make their poems out of the same language. Teunissen: Is the problem, then, in moving the myths from their original basis in ancient religions to some degree of usefulness in, say, the twentieth century? In James Joyce’s Ulysses you obviously have the archetypal materials, but they’re handled in such an ironic and frequently satiric way. Is that the necessary result now, do you think, for a mythopoeic poet? Frye: I think that we are in an ironic age of literature, and that all our major serious works have been for some time in an ironic or satiric mode. But that has not been the only mythical significance of them. I think that Ulysses is primarily an ironic mode—it’s based on a failure of communication. Finnegans Wake, I think, is also ironic—it goes round in a circle. Still, I think that the cycle there symbolizes something a bit more than a cycle. Teunissen: Is it possible for a twentieth-century poet to use an archetype like the Promethean one in what I might call the straight sense? Or

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must he use it ironically? Must he, for example, create only ironic Christ-figures? Frye: Well, I think that a modern poet would be bound to put his Prometheus in a fairly ironic situation. He might be in the situation of, say, Dostoevsky’s idiot. Teunissen: So that Ahab, if he’s a Promethean kind of hero, is a movement in that direction—having less knowledge than his predecessors had about the cosmos and about who indeed is responsible for his sufferings? Frye: Yes, Ahab has the Promethean elements about him, but you’ll notice that he gives up the central Promethean quest of the search for fire. He says the right worship of fire is defiance. But I think he lives in a universe which has been polarized without reference to the physical structure in Milton’s universe. That is, in physical structure Milton has a created order, symbolized by the stars in heaven; and chaos, which is way down there; and a kind of absolute space. But Melville’s world doesn’t have those spatial landmarks. He lives in a universe which is polarized between identity and alienation. The sea in Moby-Dick is an element of alienation. And there’s an obsessed element in Ahab which is driving him into that, so that he in a sense loves what he hates. Teunissen: He has a very difficult problem in a sense. Some critics have suggested that his pursuit of the whale is an attempt to discover the truth in the universe, as in his famous speech about all visible objects being but pasteboard masks and man’s job being to strike through the masks and discover what’s behind them [chap. 36]. If Moby Dick is an instrument of an omnipotent God in the sense that Milton presents that God, then Ahab must inevitably be destroyed by the whale. If, on the other hand, he kills the whale, he may discover that there’s nothing behind it and become a mere fisherman. He seems to be on the horns of the eternal dilemma there. Frye: Yes, it’s a dilemma which comes this side of Isaac Newton, I think, where the poet is living in a universe where the stars are no longer symbols of a divine purpose and order. Teunissen: And where the sea becomes a kind of symbol for the fact that we do not know our origins and we do not know which port we finally reach, if any.

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Frye: Everything in the Bible and in Milton’s Paradise Lost is thrown in the direction of God’s ability to command the sea, of his ability to control chaos, so it’s characteristic of a great nineteenth-century epic that the sea gets out of hand. Teunissen: There’s an interesting problem I’ve been thinking about and I wonder if you can help me with it. If a novelist begins with a social vision (could we use Jane Austen maybe?), it’s practically impossible to rise to a cosmic perspective, but if one begins with a cosmic perspective (let’s take Brontë in Wuthering Heights), one can include the social within it. In both those works what we could call perhaps the archetype is marriage, but in one it becomes a hierogamy—it is truly mythic—and in the other it is only social. Is that a possibility? That once you have chosen a limited vision you cannot blow it up? Frye: Well, once you’ve chosen a novel, I think you enter into a social structure, so you go in the direction of Jane Austen or Henry James or Proust with all his princes and dukes playing at aristocracy. This hierarchical structure seems to be built in to the whole form of the novel, and the fact that Melville is clearly writing something other than novels indicates a kind of anarchistic drive in him, I think, which is very close to the American revolutionary feeling. It might consolidate into democracy or fascism or into half a dozen other things, but the essential drive is a kind of anarchistic revolutionary drive. There are certain genres that can accommodate mythical structures in a much more open way. In the kind of society that the United States was building up with the frontier advancing toward the West, American prose fiction was bound to become a series of devices for avoiding the novel—which demands, again, a structure of society. Anybody who wants to devote himself to the novel, like Henry James, almost has to remove himself partly from the American scene. But Mark Twain and Melville and Hawthorne are obviously out for something else. Teunissen: When Melville, then, talks about the shock of recognition,1 I assume that he means that in reading any mythological material—the Prometheus of Aeschylus or the Bible or any other number of these things—one recognizes in the life pattern or in the cosmic structure put forth in that work something that is real within oneself. In that sense, are the types of the Old Testament prophecies not only of Christ who is to come but also of people like Samson to whom we look to explain ourselves?

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Frye: They are more than prophecies of Christ certainly, but for Milton, Christ would be the unity which holds this variety together, and Samson is a very different figure from David. And yet in Milton’s view they would both be types of Christ. In Melville you wouldn’t have quite that same view of the Bible, but he does have something of Milton’s contempt for the hysteria and the panic which tries to make people think all alike and not realize that genuine unity is a matter of variety. In such a book as Mardi the figure of Christ—he calls him Alma—is certainly present as the unifying, reconciling principle, which makes people think not alike but as they should think, individually. Teunissen: If Milton experienced the shock of recognition—I would argue that he did—did he not run the risk of becoming what one might call an idolater? Would there not be the risk of becoming a comparative mythologist rather than a Christian? Frye: I suppose so, but of course that danger would take you in the direction of what Blake calls the Everlasting Gospel. That is, you proceed from the point that there’s nothing in Christianity that isn’t in all other religions to the point that there’s nothing in all the other religions that isn’t in Christianity. So you arrive at a kind of Catholicism in your view of Christianity which takes in the whole spread of symbolism. I think Milton is very keenly aware of the difference between the element of devil worship in, say, Greek and Roman polytheism and the use of their gods as poetic images in counterpoint to Biblical or Christian ones. Teunissen: Which he does superbly. Frye: Which he does superbly and couldn’t do without a certain element of belief. But the belief is never externalized. The thing which is bad is what you just called idolatry, the thing out there, the thing objectified, like the remark in the Psalms that those who make idols are like unto them, or as Blake says, they become what they behold.2 Teunissen: And that would be not just heresy but idolatry? Frye: Yes, that would be man giving himself away to his own creation, a sort of Frankenstein nightmare. Teunissen: Does the believer, then, construct, insofar as he’s able to with the aid of the Bible and grace, his own picture of the cosmos to suit his own life experience?

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Frye: I think Milton’s view is that the Bible is handed to the believer. If he simply enters into the structure that is there, he will find that there is something inside him which is reading the Bible and not himself, and the something inside him which is reading the Bible is, of course, the Holy Spirit or what Milton calls the Word of God in the heart.3 This takes over and works out the understanding of the Bible which is appropriate to that man. For Milton, there cannot be any essential or any dangerous disagreement among believers who are united by their common acceptance of the spirit. He says that the spirit unifies but does not make for uniformity. That is, the uniformity is the opposite of unity. In the Areopagitica, for example, he speaks of the stones of the temple of God.4 They’re not continuous but they’re contiguous. That is, each person is a stone in himself but he’s part of the building.

20 Notes on a Maple Leaf Recorded 22 March 1971

From a tape in the CBC Radio Archives, reference no. 710424-2, transcribed by Monika Lee. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1971. “Notes on a Maple Leaf” was a documentary on Canadian literature and publishing, prepared by freelance writer and broadcaster Val Cleary, and broadcast in the Anthology series on CBC Radio, 24 April 1971. In his introduction, Cleary refers to the crisis in Canadian publishing, and the question of whether we have a Canadian literature for it to publish. Obviously relevant was Frye’s recently published The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971).

Frye: The fiction writer, though, has a rather different problem from the poet. A poet makes poems and each poem is a separate creative effort, whereas a full-length work of fiction takes a terrific amount of drive to get through. You’re sustained in that drive by the feeling of a fairly immediate response from your public, and if you don’t get that, of course, you’re simply hung up. Back in the early nineteenth century, poor old Major Richardson said he might as well have published his book in Kamchatka as Canada.1 I think that that feeling of no echo coming back from this stone that you drop into the well can do more damage to a writer than simply the lack of media. [Other people interviewed speak. Author Marian Engel comments on the “flat, dreary, underpopulated,” nature of western Ontario, from which nevertheless a great number of writers have emerged.] Frye: I suppose that’s so, but actually I think the southern Ontario community is one of the more inarticulate ones in Canada. There have been

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an astonishing number of writers developed in the Maritimes and on the Pacific coast. To some extent, we parallel some of the developments in the United States. The United States went through this unity/identity business in a much tougher way than we did. They had to fight a Civil War over the issue of unity, and yet, although the South lost the Civil War, they certainly won the cultural war. The state of Mississippi, for example, has produced an astonishing amount of the best American writing. I think that that’s a feature of writing, that it tends to come from communities where there is more of pressure on the more imaginative people to seek an outlet in writing. * * * It’s a curious law of literature that the greater variety there is, the more cohesion there is. If you’ve got twenty really good writers, you’ve got a much more coherent literature than if you had two, even though the twenty may be wildly different from one another. The place of publication matters very much less than the place of imaginative origin of the writer. [Cleary reads a long quotation from The Bush Garden: excerpts from the passage in the conclusion to Literary History of Canada regarding the problematic relation of the Canadian writer to his literary tradition (BG, 232–4; C, 357– 8).] Frye: It seems to me that technical experiment has to be founded on a pretty solid tradition, that Robbe-Grillet today, for example, wouldn’t know what he was doing if he didn’t have Proust and Balzac and Flaubert solidly behind him. There was no use telling our writers to experiment before they had something to experiment with. But I think it’s true that the whole tradition of writing has become more internationalized, that Canada has absorbed more and more of that tradition, and that the younger writers are reaping the benefits of being young. I suppose that novelists, perhaps, are people who try to live by their writing, whereas poets, who know that they can’t do that, are more apt to be employed by universities, at any rate in English Canada, and so they migrate to the universities. [Cleary discusses the publishing of more novels in Canada.] Frye: I’m more conscious of the general decline in the market for continuous fiction, which has been setting in for the last twenty-five years. It isn’t only the rise of the electronic media. It’s also just a change in public taste, that they prefer reading nonfiction to fiction. I think that this has

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discouraged a good many fiction writers, who tended to feel that form was just washed up, and it’s possible that that decline is nearing its end and we’re in for another cycle. [Cleary asks whether our writers shouldn’t more naturally move, like Mailer, Capote, and Talese, towards the nonfiction novel.] Frye: That’s an interesting idea. Yes. I think that it’s quite possible that Truman Capote and Mailer together have, to some extent, popularized the form of a kind of work which is intermediate between fiction and fact, in the tradition of things like Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. There is a kind of writer who takes very well to that. I can’t get through Norman Mailer’s fiction, but I do find his journalistic work—the book on the march on Washington, for example—fascinating. I had a friend say that he perhaps wouldn’t have read In Cold Blood if he hadn’t known that it was fact rather than fiction.2 So it’s possible that fiction may be making a comeback by way of this kind of journalistic hybrid form. Cleary: There’s a certain irony in the fact that what impels French Canada’s cultural growth threatens the ideal of a bicultural literature. Frye: My feelings are reasonably hopeful. I think that really the answer to the future of Canadian culture lies in the future of Canadian politics. If Canada can preserve a certain sense of unity and a sense of shared tradition, then its culture will go ahead very rapidly, because that has certainly been evident in the last fifteen to twenty years: it’s been developing at an amazing speed. If the country falls apart, then its culture, of course, will be fragmented as well. So my prognosis would be an extremely hopeful one on the understanding that culture is dependent on other things, which it is rather powerless to affect.

21 The Canadian Imagination Recorded 31 March 1971

From the CBC audiotape no. 650, released by the Centre for Cassette Studies, 1975, transcribed by Elisabeth Oliver. Dated by Frye’s datebook for 1971. In this program heard in the Ideas series, Ideas producer David McPherson talked to Frye about The Bush Garden, to which the page numbers in the text refer, followed by the page number in vol. 12 of the Collected Works. He began by asking how the Canadian imagination differed from that of other nationalities, particularly the American.

Frye: The first and most obvious difference is that the American imagination is that of a tremendous imperial power. Whatever America does is very important for the world as a whole. American people, if they have any sense of responsibility at all, are conditioned in this attitude to things right from the beginning, whereas Canada, with its twenty million people, has a much more observant and less involved view of the world as a whole. Its attitude towards things has that slightly quieter quality of a more observant people. It’s more like that of Scandinavia, say, than of Russia. The ideology that developed in Canada in the nineteenth century did not identify independence and freedom with national independence because it remained in a colonial relation to Great Britain for so much longer. Consequently, what you got in Canada was a radicalism which was more like British radicalism than like American radicalism. It didn’t take this fervently patriotic tone. It was rather more like Tom Paine— who of course was British in origin: the Americans have never quite adopted Paine.

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McPherson: The other thing that you stress is that most Canadian literature has been didactic; has been political and rhetorical rather than creative (I hesitate to use the word). Why do you think that this is so? Frye: In the nineteenth century, Canada was at one remove from the major cultural centres. It takes a good deal of direct association with a literary tradition before a poet or a novelist can really get it through his skull that he is writing poems and novels. If he is removed from the centres of literary tradition, he finds it very much easier to talk about things than to present them as the poet and the novelist should. As a result you get argumentative, didactic, rhetorical treatises which are disguised as poems and novels. McPherson: In the sense that the people on the frontier have no time to absorb the tradition, being involved, basically, with conditions of survival. Frye: I think it has more to do with the fact that the people here, however primitive their living conditions may have been, were not really simple people. The rhetorical and the didactic are the qualities of the somewhat imperfectly educated, but they are not qualities of simple people. You don’t find them in Eskimos, for example. McPherson: You think then that the problem is building up a native Canadian literary tradition of some sort? Is it possible? It has always struck me that the problem in Canada is that even in our universities you are constantly taught English literature, or literature from England. Even yet, there’s not too much stress on the Canadian tradition. Frye: That is true, but of course the real tradition is still the British tradition. That’s true for Americans as well—their real tradition is the one that starts with Chaucer. I spent ten years in reviewing Canadian poetry, and while I was doing my best to respond impartially to all kinds of poetry, and not to prefer one kind of poetry to another, still, I did hail every tendency towards the concrete that I could.1 The more the poet was using images from direct sensory experience and concrete sensational language, and the less he was arguing and rhetoricizing, the more I felt that he was getting closer to the centre of the tradition of culture. Now, in my conception of what a myth is, which is that it is the narrative shape of the poem, I think that the more concrete a poet is, and the more he sticks to the central language of poetry, the more clearly the myth will

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stand out. Consequently that means that the development of concreteness and specific qualities in imagery is what is going to establish the articulate national tradition. In a poem like Towards the Last Spike, Pratt is dealing with the East– West vision and the longitudinal vision (the North–South one). He represents these—he symbolizes them—by Macdonald and by Blake. Whether that’s accurate history or not, I don’t care, because as I said in reviewing the book, we’ve got far too much accurate history and far too little accurate imagination.2 Now, I think that when the imagination goes to work on such figures as Macdonald and Blake, a poet is bound to twist the history into a somewhat nonhistorical guise. But in doing that, he is going to create a myth and practise creating the myth in the poem because he is doing his job as a poet. It never entered his head that he was going to produce a myth. McPherson: In other words, poets really draw the imaginative essence out of a historical conflict. Frye: Yes, that’s what a myth is. History is not really the source of truth, but the myth is: that is, I think the mythical Riel is a lot closer to the truth than the historical one. McPherson: How exactly do the longitudinal and East–West visions conflict? Frye: Canada was settled by people who were, like the voyageurs, hunting for furs or going along canoe trails and penetrating very deeply into the country. Whenever I talk about Canada, I come back to the fact that it has no Atlantic seaboard. You go through this enormous stretch of waterways, up through the Gulf of St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes; you can keep on going until you come to Edmonton. This East-to-West thrust is the opening thrust of Canadian history. It starts in Europe and therefore it’s a conservative, and to some extent a romantic, thrust. But it’s the one that builds up the fur trade, it builds up the exploration of the West, it’s behind the building of the railway to the Pacific coast. Then as soon as the country is settled, of course it becomes aware of the pull of the big American cities to the south. McPherson: And the markets, especially. Frye: And the markets. So, a different kind of mentality comes on top of the other one.

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McPherson: You mentioned the expansionist East–West drive. You also mentioned in your book a more cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and satirical aspect of the Canadian imagination [235; C, 359]. Are they related to the longitudinal and the East–West model? Frye: I think I do see a connection. That is, I speak several times in the book of Canada as having a seat on the revolutionary sidelines. It neither engaged in the American Revolution, nor did it fight against it as the South did. So it’s had a slightly detached and observant quality which comes out in the particular kind of Canadian humour and also in the rather reflective and pastoral quality of Canadian poetry and fiction. McPherson: You also mention in the book that Canada is the only nation that is still a colony, both economically and psychologically [iii; C, 414]. What aspects do you stress when discussing that? Frye: When I speak of Canada as a colony now, of course, I’m not speaking about the British connection, I’m speaking about the American connection. I was recently reminded of this by the public reaction to the CRTC’s guidelines about Canadian content in Canadian television. There were a good many protests which seemed to take it for granted that freedom consisted in being annexed to the American mentality. That’s something that you wouldn’t find in any quarter of Africa or Asia today. McPherson: How do you think it will be possible, or what measures do you think you would try, to overcome the colonial mentality? Frye: I don’t know. There’s always, of course, a question of time. One sometimes wonders if it isn’t too late. I can see the reason for the CRTC’s desire to carry out the mandate it was entrusted with: enforcing rules of Canadian content. What I see most clearly is that if this had been done to the Canadian film industry, the Canadian book industry, the Canadian magazine industry, we might have got somewhere by 1971. But I wonder if after you’ve sold all the passes, the fact that you’ve still got one to defend may not be too significant. McPherson: Do you think it’s realistic, in imaginative terms, to extend biculturalism? Is biculturalism viable? Frye: I don’t quite know what to say about that because it seems to me so obvious that in a country like ours, bicultural means multicultural. I can-

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not think in terms of the bicultural aspect of Canada—the English and French part of it—without remembering that there are several hundred thousand people of Italian origin in Toronto, that there are Ukrainians and Icelandic people in the West, that there are many ethnical groups which are different. Those have traditions and languages and literatures that are worth preserving and that have their role to play in the country. I’ve always been glad that Canada has been much less obsessed by homogeneity than the United States. It hasn’t put pressure on people to lose their identity. McPherson: Of course, in many ways, that’s why Canadian literature or Canada as a nation seems to be so weak at the seams, if you can use such a phrase. People tend to identify more with the old world than they do with the country they’re in. Frye: That may be so, and yet, émigré or immigré literature is a genre worth having too. Some of the most remarkable pieces of Canadian writing have come from rather small ethnical groups and people who are brought up within them. I’m thinking of, say, the Winnipeg Jewish population and a novel like Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice, which I think is a very remarkable story, but one that would be inconceivable without that tight little ethnical community. McPherson: Do you think that there is a recognizable difference between the French Canadian and the English Canadian imagination? Frye: I think that the French Canadian imagination is a much more intensive one. It’s conscious of the fact that literature is a real need in a human community. The whole notion of literature as an expendable luxury for an ascendant class, which has polluted so much of the English Canadian scene, has not bothered the French Canadian because he knows perfectly well that the survival of his language and his culture depends on the preservation of a literary tradition. That sense of the need for the writer is extremely important. Quebec has come through a social and religious evolution in the last few years which has put pretty intense pressure on the imaginations of poets and novelists; pressure of a kind that most English Canadian writers could hardly conceive of, I think—what people like Saint-Denys Garneau and Anne Hébert have gone through in trying to shape their imaginations. McPherson: And this, in effect, produces a better writer. Frye: It produces a much more intense writer, certainly; yes.

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McPherson: Don’t you think that cultural nationalism is very intimately tied up with the survival of Canada at this particular point in history? Frye: It may be. My resistance to cultural nationalism is identical with my feeling that rhetorical and argumentative literature is second rate. Cultural nationalism, in confusing the two categories of unity and of identity, tends to deal in abstractions. It’s really about ideas, rather than about people. I’m not sure that cultural expression can be national. Canada is too big and too varied for that. The expressions are going to be limited, they’re going to be much more parochial and confined than that. I think it’s generally true that poets function within local units, whatever they think they ought to be functioning in. You notice, for example, that the empire—the centrifugal movement of society—doesn’t produce great poets. There is one great poet of empire, and that’s Virgil. He’s the exception that proves the rule. You’ll notice that when Bliss Carman goes imperial and starts talking about the Song of the Open Road, that’s when he starts to write applesauce. It’s when he’s writing Low Tide on Grand Pré that he’s a poet. McPherson: Would you say, then, that the longitudinal division of the country is apt—that somebody in the Maritimes has a greater spiritual affinity with New England than with Ontario, for example? Frye: I think he has one kind of affinity with New England. Yet there is an astonishing affinity among Canadians as Canadians straight across from East to West. That’s why I say that unity is such a very different thing from uniformity. The relationships in real unity which embody a great variety and a great diversity are much more real and much more tangible than the relationships of solidarity which are phony. McPherson: Obviously the imagination expresses itself in the thematic patterns of literature, for example. What do you think are the major themes that are dealt with in Canadian literature? Frye: I never think much about literature in connection with themes. I have tried to indicate what I’ve called a pastoral quality in the Canadian imagination, and the fact that a rather sparse population in a huge country has produced a sense of the imminence of the natural world. That is, when you’re on the prairie, the sky is everywhere, and when you’re in a Canadian novel the trees and the lakes and the forest are everywhere, even if the novelist himself is a thoroughly urban person.

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McPherson: This I find to be one of the paradoxes and one of the distressing things about Canadian literature: that it seems unreal in many cases. Frye: It may be absurd, but writers can only write out what takes shape in their minds, and what takes shape in their minds is very largely conditioned by the imaginative pattern of a country. McPherson: Which is still predominantly rural. Frye: Which is still predominantly rural in spite of the fact that the whole population has changed over to an urban one. McPherson: There’s also a distinction between Montreal and Toronto writers—Montreal writers being, generally speaking, more vitalistic and Toronto more intellectual. Do you think this distinction means anything? Frye: It may mean something, or it may be a pure accident. It may be partly the greater intensity of the different groups in Montreal: the English, French, Jewish groups and so on. Their relations vis-à-vis one another are perhaps of a kind that produces a different quality of imagination. My own sense of the rather pastoral and meditative quality in Canadian imagination may very well be a Toronto-centred idea, I’m not sure. McPherson: Right, I was just going to suggest that. [laughter] What sort of changes in the imagination could a strong conflict between these ethnic groups produce? What different qualities would it tend to bring forward? Frye: I suppose it brings out a very strong sense of identity in the poet himself because he’s continually thrown back on the question of who he is and what he belongs to and what makes him what he is. McPherson: You also mentioned the idea of the garrison mentality as a conditioning factor [225–6; C, 351]. How does this manifest itself in the literature? Frye: Well, it manifests itself in a kind of sectarian quality. However, that’s more of a condition of Canadian life than of Canadian literature, perhaps. The literature, I think, expresses that in what we just said about the sense of the natural physical world being all around and about one. That’s the sense the fort in the forest would naturally have, and that’s the

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psychological sense that hangs on, even after your garrison has become a street in Westmount. McPherson: The thing that strikes me is that there isn’t much of the Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone type of character—the explorer type—in Canadian literature. Frye: The American opening of the West was a very different affair from the Canadian one. There was a kind of anarchism that produced all the bad men: the outlaws, the vigilantes, and that stuff. There’s also a kind of narcissism: the American mentality, looking into a reflecting mirror of itself and seeing there the myth of the West. The Western story is the pastoral myth in American literature, but there’s nothing corresponding to that that I see in Canadian literature or the Canadian imagination. The whole Canadian approach to the West was an engineering and an administrative approach right from the beginning. McPherson: I would imagine that nature was terrifying for these people. Would you say that they wrote in order to exorcize, or in order to express this fear? Frye: The fear of a very uncomfortable and very cold country is certainly present in nineteenth-century Canadian literature. In the twentieth century, the sense of fear shifts from nature to human society. That is really the reason why the natural world still hangs on in the imagination. It used to be the thing that was sinister, the thing that you were frightened of, but increasingly in the twentieth century it becomes the thing that’s alive which is being strangled by all the clover-leaf highways and railway tracks and things. McPherson: I was very interested too in your comparison with AngloSaxon literature [183–4; C, 385–6], but it seemed to be in the past tense, in the sense that at one time Canadian literature had been similar in pattern to the Anglo-Saxon. Would you say it’s changed? Frye: I think that that curious disjunction between a rather hectic, sophisticated civilization and a very primaeval forest is the mood that people like Duncan Campbell Scott do communicate. But it pretty well dried up with that generation, except for the way in which it’s carried on in Pratt: it’s not such a vital thing now. McPherson: What do you think has replaced it?

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Frye: It’s more the sense of a human mechanism as the enemy and as the expression of a kind of death wish in modern civilization. That doesn’t distinguish it of course from the same kind of thing in other countries, but it has a peculiar intensity here, I think. McPherson: What new themes, or what old themes transfigured, do you think will continue to dominate in Canadian literature? What changes do you foresee occurring in the Canadian imagination? Frye: I am not sure because changes always take place within a certain continuity. What I would look for would be a gradual extension of the continuity along the lines of the changes that are going to take place all over the world. What those will be like, I’m not quite sure. But I think that the rhythm of assimilating cultural developments to the news—so that you have five or six schools of music and painting in as many years, for example—is bound to slow down and relax. I think we’ve gone through the big orgasm of communication now and the arts can go back to their job of building a kind of bridge of continuity between the past and the present and the future. McPherson: You don’t think that Canadian nationalism as a political force will influence the literature strongly? Frye: I don’t quite see how something ending in “ism” is going to influence something as specific and concrete as the making of a poem. Again, it’s something that increases what I’ve been calling the rhetorical and argumentative tendency, which is anti-poetic. The question of imaginative belonging, the sense of identity, is one that moves through a whole series of concentric circles, and the nation is certainly one of those larger circles. But creative people don’t make themselves creative by an act of will or by adhering to a program. The creative person has to be left to take his own way, and if he takes his own way then the qualities and characteristics of what he’s looking for are certainly going to be reflected in what he does.

22 Poets of Canada: 1920 to the Present Broadcast May–June 1971

From tapes in the CBC Radio Archives, reference nos. 710522-2, 710529-2, 710605-4, 710612-3, and 710619-5, transcribed by Monika Lee. This sevenpart program on recent poets of Canada, prepared and introduced by broadcaster and writer Allan Anderson for the CBC’s Anthology, included comments by Frye in five of its parts.

Part 2 22 May 1971 Anderson: “Are you a Canadian poet?” I asked the seventy poets I interviewed for this series. It’s a question that’s been asked again and again in this country. Is there something distinctively Canadian, specifically identifiable about our poetry, or some of it at least? Well, various poets I talked to found this query infinitely tedious, while others had surprisingly varied answers. Seventeen of the poets who answered are heard tonight, plus a couple of literary critics. I’ll introduce each in turn. * * * Northrop Frye: Frye: It’s true that Canada is an environment; that is, it’s a place where an imagination grows up and takes root. I’ve always felt that there is something vegetable about the imagination—that it takes root in a landscape. Certainly no quality, whether national or regional, is ever given by content. That is, you don’t become an Australian poet by writing about kangaroos. I think, though, that you cannot avoid the imaginative influences of the place where you grew up in your impressionable years. Just as you will always have a recognizable accent if you were born in a

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certain district, so you’ll have a recognizable imaginative outlook in the same way and for the same reason. That is the kind of thing that does emerge in Canadian literature. I find it impossible to distinguish Canadians from Americans as long as I’m in Canada, but as soon as I leave Canada—if I’m in England, for example, listening to the North American accents—I can pick out the Canadians very quickly. The same thing is true about literary experience: if you can get outside it a bit, you begin to see that there is a recognizable tone and accent which you can pick up, whether it’s in Victoria, B.C., or Cape Race, Newfoundland. Part 3 29 May 1971 Anderson: Tonight, we have an informal, many-faceted history of Canadian poetry [since 1920]—Canadian poetry viewed by six individuals, themselves involved as critics or as critics and poets. Together they cover the full range of poetic activity over the five decades the programs cover. * * * We start tonight’s program with literary critic Northrop Frye. Frye: There is a tradition in poetry, but a good deal of it is established unconsciously. One of the first things that struck me when I was dealing with the history and the traditions of Canadian poetry was the extent to which poets had concentrated on narrative. There are so few good lyrical poems before Roberts’s Orion of 1880, and yet long before that there were many very ambitious and very striking narratives. Pratt, when he started, became a narrative poet. I’m quite certain that Pratt knew very little about his traditions in Canadian poetry, and I don’t think they influenced him if he did know about them. Nevertheless, he unconsciously established a kind of kinship with them. Similarly, every generation of poets that I’ve watched since then has assumed that the previous generation was producing stuff that was just too damn corny for words, and that Canadian poetry really started with them. That’s a perfectly natural way to feel, but as they develop and find their own styles and their own authority, they begin to establish, in a rather mysterious way, a link with the tradition before them. I think that Canadian poetry is likely to become increasingly self-conscious about its tradition, simply because there is more academic study of Canadian literature. When Art Smith and Leo Kennedy were using the Eliot Waste Land imagery back in the ’20s, they were, without know-

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ing it, recreating the kind of imagery that was in Bliss Carman, who was following the pre-Raphaelites and the late Victorians. What happens is that, in the whole international world of literature, certain changes take place, and occasionally those changes are felt in a country like Canada as plateaus in development. The Victorian age succeeded by the late Victorians produced a very distinct cultural change in England, which was reflected in Canada in the Roberts and Lampman group. Similarly with the upsurge of poetry in the United States, starting from about 1912 on, that hit Canada in the ’20s. It has been mainly a response to international currents: first in the early nineteenth century from Britain, then increasingly from the United States, and to a considerable extent from France. The Auden/Spender/MacNeice/Day Lewis period of poetry began to hit Canada with the Preview and First Statement people and the generation of the 1940s. Neufville Shaw and Bruce Ruddick were certainly of that generation, and so was P.K. Page. F.R. Scott and A.J.M. Smith were already established writers by that time. It seems to me that the ’50s, which is the period in which I was most closely observing Canadian poetry, was a time when the production of really fine work was rather sparse. But it was an extraordinary period with a sense of a gathering of a range of powers, and every once in a while a fine book would flash out, like Jay Macpherson’s Boatman or Jamie Reaney’s Suit of Nettles or Irving Layton’s In the Midst of My Fever—those are just at random. One had the feeling that these books were important not only for what they were, but for what they typified. One had the feeling that a tremendous burst of creative energy was just around the corner, and, of course, that’s what came in the next decade. What happened in the ’60s is a little difficult to define, but it was something like this. If you look at the state of poetry in Great Britain, I think you’ll have the feeling of a certain depression; that is, a feeling that creative powers are a bit on the wane, that they’re not being used, that the energy of the country, such as it is, is not going into poetry. That has a lot to do, of course, with the political and social decline of Great Britain. Similarly, if you look at the United States, you see a great deal of surface vitality, a great deal of put-on literature, and yet an output of literature that is not really commensurate with the size and vitality of the country. That, obviously, has something to do with the troubled conscience of the country. I don’t mean that Canada is smug, but merely that it is an observant country, that it’s more of an observer than a par-

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ticipant in current events, and that, consequently, great revolutionary changes, like the changes that we’re seeing in the ’60s, stimulate Canada to articulateness in a way that they do not stimulate Great Britain or the United States. Part 4 5 June 1971 Anderson: Little literary mags have had a spunky and often partisan history. They’ve been the mainstay of Canadian poets during the last fifty years. We’ll look at some of them tonight. * * * Frye: I was editor of the Canadian Forum for several years,1 and I felt that the function of the Forum was to be hospitable to new and coming writers, just by being there: to help young people to learn to write, by trying it over and over again. Certainly I got a lot of brickbats as a result. I used to have to throw away great wads of song that were sent up from Tennessee and so forth by somebody who thought this would be a soft spot. The editor, as I know from experience, has a rather unhappy time with poets, yet he has to realize that he’s a kind of midwife. He’s bringing a spirit or community of poetry to birth, and once it’s born, it’s on its own, it has its own life to live. Part 5 12 June 1971 Anderson: Tonight we take a look at younger poets, their points of view and some criticism of them. We hear also about concrete poetry. *** Frye: I’m rather interested in concrete poetry, in shape poems and that kind of experiment. They show you that there’s no hard-and-fast line between the poetic and the pictorial. There is a point at which poetry becomes a kind of verbal design, as it does in some of e.e. cummings’s poems. From there, there’s no reason to stop this side of a complete picture. I’m thinking of the poem by Lionel Kearns called The Birth of God, which consists of the figure one made out of zeros, set inside a zero made out of figure ones. That is a poem which, to put it mildly, would be difficult to read aloud, and yet it does communicate a perfectly legitimate

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imaginative experience, even though it’s a primarily pictorial one. There is, perhaps, an element of stunt or even a put-on about a good many experimental developments in our time, and yet we are in an age of collage: an age where we’re more or less committed to the unexpected juxtaposition. Part 6 19 June 1971 The sixth program featured a discussion of some of Frye’s theories by, among others, Canadian poets Margaret Atwood, Eli Mandel, Irving Layton, and Miriam Waddington. Frye responds to an accusation by editor and poet Peter Stevens: Stevens: I feel that the role of the critic is a very important one, provided he doesn’t get bogged down in too much academic criticism. I think Northrop Frye is at fault here, because he seems unaware of the immediate things that are happening on the literary scene. Frye, I think, is only looking at Canadian poetry from his mythopoeic point of view and doesn’t see what kinds of developments have been taking place. Frye: I struggle very hard as a critic not to like one kind of poetry more than another, because it seems to me that that’s critical laziness. It’s the critic’s job to greet every type of poetry as though it were his dearest friend. In my work as a teacher, I find that there is a kind of explicitly mythopoeic poetry which I spend a great deal of time on because of the particular kind of interests that I have. That sort of poetry is easier to teach, I know how to teach it—having brought myself up on Blake—and I recognize it in contemporary poetry. But, along with that, one has to remember that all poetry is equally mythopoeic. That is, Raymond Souster is just as mythopoeic as Jay Macpherson, and I could demonstrate that very quickly. [After an interlude during which Irving Layton opines that many critics have not the faintest idea what poetry is all about, Anderson introduces the subject of the “garrison mentality” as elaborated in Frye’s conclusion to Literary History of Canada. Frye’s is the first of five comments on the subject.] Frye: Canada had a different history from the United States, and it created a different imaginative environment for the poet. The example that

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I keep coming back to over and over again is the absence of an Atlantic seaboard in the Canadian landscape, because the Atlantic seaboard is so crucial for the development of American culture. There’s the absence, too, of a general frontier. I know that the frontier theory in American history may have been a bit overworked,2 but, nevertheless, there was one, and it did extend from the north to the south of the country, and it did move back irregularly until it reached the Pacific. Canada, on the other hand, never had a single frontier. You had a number of isolated outposts, each of them surrounded by forest or wilderness, and isolated from one another, and they were, in the strictest sense of the word, garrisons. That is why they developed what I have called a garrison mentality—that is, the mentality of a small, tightly organized group that is in some danger (if not physical danger) of losing its sense of identity, and, consequently, very apt to resist any kind of analytical criticism or sceptical mentality. This attitude persists in Canada until very recent times.

23 On Evil Recorded 27 May 1971

From the CBC audiotape 693, released in the United States in 1975. Reprinted as “Tragedy, Heroism, and the Problem of Evil” in WGS, 85–94. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1971. This was part of a series on evil aired on the CBC’s Ideas; the CBC Times gives the broadcast date as 18 August 1971. The interviewer was Janet Somerville, at that time coordinating producer of Ideas. A prominent Catholic layperson and thinker, she later worked as associate editor of the Catholic New Times, served as general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches, 1997–2002, and was made a member of the Order of Canada in 2004.

Somerville: Professor Frye, I think most people identify the problem of evil with the problem of bad choices, the problem of reprehensible actions. But it seems to me that in much of your work the whole question of evil is seen in a larger or more ancient than moral context. I remember reading in your book on Shakespearean tragedy, Fools of Time, that the experience of the tragic can’t be moralized or contained in a conceptual world view, and that a tragic hero is a tragic hero whether he is a good or a bad man [4]. Frye: I would start by saying that tragedy is really about disaster, and disaster is something which often does, in fact usually does, revolve around the question of evil or of wrong choice. Yet I think that the conception of wrongness in tragedy is rather more comprehensive. Any discussion of evil has to start with the fact that most of our conceptions of good are really conceptions of moral good, and moral good is something that is founded on moral evil and is derived from it. That is, when Blake

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says that the virtues of innocence are mercy, pity, peace, and love, mercy and pity mean that somebody has already been cruel.1 That means that moral good is never really good because it is founded on moral evil. Every once in a while there comes a tremendous upset in society when somebody looks at the whole structure of accepted moral values and says, “This is evil.” Somerville: Was Milton that kind of visionary? Frye: Oh, Milton was that kind of visionary, very much. Yes. Milton, being a revolutionary, based his whole life on the conception of liberty. But for Milton liberty was not anything that man naturally wants. What he wants is mastery. When Milton’s Satan says, “Here at least we shall be free,”2 what he means is, “Here at least some people can be masters and others can be indolent and inert.” Somerville: Milton was a revolutionary, you said, and yet you described Milton’s Satan as an “egocentric revolutionary” [RE, 28; M&B, 53]. That’s the archetype of evil in Milton, so how can we tell a satanic kind of revolutionary from the other kind? Frye: Milton himself draws a sharp distinction between what he calls liberty and licence. That is, liberty is something which implies the acceptance of moral responsibility, and consequently is never anything that man wants for himself. It’s simply something which God has determined he shall have and which those capable of responding to a divine revelation are ready to accept. But the egocentric revolutionary, the man who wants to do what he likes, is, of course, in an impossible situation, because what he likes to do is to obey a set of impulses inside him. In other words, he wants to be a slave to those impulses. Somerville: In your own writing about Milton, I sometimes have the impression that what the genuine revolutionary does—and all he can really do as he strives toward liberty as you’ve just described it—is iconoclasm. He can tear away either the false assurances of liberty or the comforting enslavements that men build up for themselves. Do you think that’s a fair description of the kind of revolutionary that you recognize as being in the Miltonian tradition, and can you think of people doing that today, especially in literature? Frye: For Milton there’s nothing that man can do to achieve his own salvation apart from God except knock down his idols. That indicates a willingness to worship something better than idols. If he’s in that state,

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then God will move in with his conception of liberty, and this involves becoming one of what Milton would call the elect. In his play about Samson, Samson is being deliberately worked to death in a Philistine mill, and his father comes offering ransom so that he can go back to his own people and die in peace and comfort. Now as God understands liberty, according to Milton, Samson is actually closer to liberty being worked to death in a Philistine mill than he would be in his own country dying in peace and contentment. Somerville: That reminds me of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle and works in that tradition. Do you think they carry on that understanding of liberty? Frye: Since the American Revolution or the Romantic movement there has been much more of a tendency to think of liberty as man-centred, as something that man wants and struggles to achieve. The conception of the responsibilities that liberty brings, of course, remains one of the central problems of democracy. People are still struggling with it. I think that contemporary writers have the same general perspective on liberty as Milton, but they don’t want to think of liberty as coming fundamentally from outside man. Somerville: There are other characters, other demons in Milton’s epic, which you comment on very interestingly in your book The Return of Eden—Moloch and Belial and Mammon and Nimrod and other companions of Satan or fallen angels. You remark that conventional heroism, as the Classic epics depict it or as the medieval or Renaissance romances depict it, is seen as demonic in Milton [28; M&B, 53], as attributed to these characters like Moloch and Belial. Why do you think they are there? And do you think that that link between the heroic and the demonic is more than just fleeting and more than just in Milton? Frye: I think that Milton is identifying the heroic and the demonic because by creating Hell he’s got a sort of laboratory where he can isolate evil. That is, you wouldn’t call the Duke of Wellington an evil man because he devotes himself to trying to defeat Napoleon. He is in that inextricable tangle of moral good and moral evil. Every once in a while when you run across somebody for whom war is an end in itself—somebody like Hitler or perhaps Henry V in Shakespeare’s play, somebody who deliberately starts a war for kicks—then you begin to realize that there is the association between the heroic and the demonic in that the demonic is the root of the heroic.

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Somerville: You said “you begin to realize.” You didn’t attribute that to Milton. You really think that the demonic is the root of the heroic. What do you mean by that? Frye: The hero is the person who finds his fulfilment in what is essentially a destructive activity. Evil to me has something radically negative about it. It is something that really wants to tear down the whole structure of whatever it is that man is trying to build up. Somerville: Is it only the military hero, though, whose essential activity is destructive? Frye: Oh, no. The military hero is only one form. But the danger of the military hero is that he becomes socially approved. I think that if you study the anatomy of guns you can see that there is a great deal in warfare which takes the form of sexual perversion. I suspect that war, along with violence and terror, is perhaps the only really evil form of sexual perversion. That’s partly because it’s the one socially approved form. Somerville: What about other forms of socially approved heroism, like landing on the moon? Frye: The exploit is another matter. I don’t think that to identify the heroic and the demonic really needs to lead to denying that courage is a virtue. I think courage is a very great virtue, is very obviously a virtue. The Christian teaching, as I understand it, is that the greatest form of heroism expresses itself in endurance and in resisting evil rather than in engaging oneself in a destructive activity. Somerville: You’ve mentioned the virtuousness of courage, and a little earlier you mentioned the inextricable tangle of good and evil in any concrete, historic life. In another place you remark just in passing that the Hebrews made their greatest contribution to history through one of their least amiable characteristics; that is to say, not because they believed that their God was the true God but because they asserted because all other gods were false gods [RE, 54; M&B, 71]—an entirely novel notion in history and an entirely intolerant notion, one that would have been meaningless to Greeks or Romans. You not only said that they made their greatest contribution through their least amiable characteristic, but you added “as is the wont of human nature” [ibid.]. How inextricable is good from evil in your vision of things?

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Frye: Well, there was perhaps a bit of irony in that parenthesis. I merely mean that there are no unmixed blessings in history. The thing that was so decisive about the Judaeo-Christian religion is the thing that is so decisive about Marxism now, that is, a revolutionary and dialectical movement which defines itself by attacking neighbouring heresies rather than actual opponents and which is anti-liberal and resists anything that we can call revisionism. The conception “false god” would hardly be intelligible to a cultivated Greek or Roman. You wouldn’t get a cultivated Greek saying, “I believe in Zeus, the Father Almighty, and in Dionysus, His only Son our Lord.” He just didn’t think in those terms. The greater tolerance goes with a conception of God as He who Is, that is, an essential God. But, of course, God introduces himself to Moses not as He Is but as I Am, as an existential God, which is an entirely different setup. Somerville: I’m beginning to sense a very coherent thread in what you say that makes sense out of a remark of yours that I read in Fables of Identity in an essay where you were discussing Shakespeare’s sonnets. It was another aside. Asides always throw me because people reveal so much more through them than they do sometimes through the substance of their essay. What you said was this: “When the conventions of love poetry developed, the model of most of these patterns was the spiritual discipline of Christianity. In Christianity one may, with no apparent cause, become spiritually awakened, conscious of sin and being under the wrath of God, and bound to a life of unconditional service to God’s will” [92]. Then you go on to say that much courtly poetry was based on this analogue. * * * It was a shock to me that the first element in spiritual awakening, in your aside, was consciousness of sin and of being under the wrath of God. * * * It seems to me that that remark of yours is compatible with a very profound conviction that the human experience is to come to terms with evil, that there is nothing deeper, that until you have confronted the omnipresence of evil in your life and in the world’s life you simply haven’t woken up to a human life. Frye: Yes, what all this has stemmed from, I think, is my original postulate, that what Christianity calls the fall of man was the discovery of the knowledge of good and evil, that is, discovering that good and evil are interpenetrating and that moral good depends on moral evil, and that there is no moral good except what is salvaged from an antecedent and prior evil. This means, of course, that the great revolutionary movements

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that have really changed the course of human life have always begun in a mood of abhorrence, that is, the sense that idolatry or sin or exploitation or the wheel of death and birth were somehow all wrong. Those were the things that started off Judaism and Christianity and Marxism and Buddhism. The people who get into that state of consciousness are immediately regarded as more or less insane by their contemporaries. What they are discovering in their own way is a new faith. But the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is the attitude that says, “What’s all the fuss about?” Somerville: Are there any such people writing today? Frye: I have a great respect for a good many contemporary writers and their sense of moral intensity and their desire to portray truth as they see it and portray it honestly. I think we have a great many such writers. It’s very easy of course for this sense of abhorrence to be kidnapped by some kind of social movement which really has its mind on other things. It’s also easy for it to become simply a set of cliché reactions or responses. Somerville: You mean you think the sense of abhorrence is especially dangerous when it is turned against a finite evil, a particular time-bound evil that actually can be changed? Frye: Oh, yes. You can select certain things, like apartheid in South Africa, which almost everybody outside white South Africa would admit to be bad. But when tactical considerations come in and you think it’s better to soft-pedal the same situations happening elsewhere, then you’re back in the tangle again. Somerville: In many ways, as you’ve often pointed out, tragedy in itself—not some particular tragedy but the form of tragedy in itself—and comedy in itself—not some comedies but simply comedy—are different ways of coming to terms with the mystery of evil. Would you like to say something about that? Frye: I suppose that tragedy, as I said at the beginning, really deals with the whole question of disaster. Consequently, it deals with a kind of flaw or fault in things, which is like a geological fault; that is, at any time an earthquake might occur and swallow up good and bad people alike. In the whole element of tragic form there is a vision of human life that tries to get away from what I’ve called the tangle of moral good and moral evil. You have melodrama, for example, when you’ve got a hero repre-

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senting moral good and a villain representing moral evil. The audience is supposed to know which is which: it’s supposed to applaud the hero and hiss the villain. But tragedy somehow manages to avoid that oversimplified treatment of the problem. It points to a fundamental fissure in the whole human situation, which may mean that a tragic victim may be somebody bad, like Macbeth, or somebody good, like Desdemona. When Aristotle says that the function of tragedy is to raise pity and terror and then purge them by casting them out,3 I don’t think he means that you’re supposed to leave the theatre saying, “The poor thing—what a tough break she got,” or, “It’s a good thing to have got rid of him.” Those are the moralistic reactions. But the central reaction to tragedy is: “This happens. This is something extremely profound in human life. It does happen.” There’s something wrong about its happening, and yet as an event it has to be accepted. So there’s a mixture of the acceptance of the event and the repudiation of the ultimate necessity of the event. It’s rather like the conception of Christianity that although death seems the most natural and inevitable of all human events, yet from the Christian point of view it is really an unnatural event; it shouldn’t happen. Somerville: How does this differ from the handling of evil in comedy? Frye: Comedy usually works up through complications to a potentially threatening tragic conclusion. I think one finds that the more profound the comedy the more it tends to contain a tragic action rather than simply avoid one. That is, in many comedies complications threaten, but then there is a gimmick produced at the last moment and everything ends happily. But then you also get comedies like The Winter’s Tale, where some of the characters are involved in a genuinely tragic action, and the comedy goes right through the middle of that. It seems to me that comedy constructed along those lines is closer to the sense in which Dante spoke of the Christian myth as a comedy, as a narrative action that goes through humiliation, death, torture, and hell to a final commedia. Somerville: Where would a modern work, like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? fit between the poles of tragedy and comedy? Frye: I think that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is neither tragic nor comic but is fundamentally an ironic play. It’s a product of an ironic age. The appeal of that kind of play is not unlike that of tragedy, except that it points up a contrast between the acceptance of the event and the repudiation of the necessity of the event, which is perhaps more moral than a

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tragedy is. I don’t think you can have an ironic play like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? without an assumed moral standard in the audience’s mind: these people standing around bitching at each other all evening really represent something that you don’t want any part of. That’s really a moral judgment. Somerville: Are we writing tragedies in the twentieth century? Or are we only writing irony? Frye: I don’t quite know what the answer to that is. I would say that the twentieth century was fundamentally an ironic age and that tragedy is a very rare development in literature that comes in certain historical periods. It seems to have come really in only two periods, Renaissance Europe and Periclean Athens, where you had an aristocracy that was on its way out although its prestige was still there. That particular development in society gives you the mixture of the ironic and the heroic, which I think is characteristic of tragedy. I wouldn’t say that people can’t write tragedy in the twentieth century. I would say merely that it’s not a central form of expression. Somerville: Is that connected in your mind with what you mentioned before, that this is a time of the fundamental calling into question, whether comic, ironic, heroic, or anything else, of received moral values in our time? Has that something to do with the centrality of the ironic mode in our time, rather than the tragic? Frye: I think that that is true. The radical vision always has an ironic aspect on its negative side. To some extent it does retreat from tragedy: that is, tragedy was very central and very essential not only to Greek culture but to Greek religion. But in the whole Judaeo-Christian development, simply because it was a more socially radical or revolutionary view, the tendency was to get rather restive about tragedy. The same thing is true, I think, of Marxism today. Somerville: Say more about that. Frye: Well, I think that when the radical vision comes into society, first of all, it tries to define itself dialectically as to the place where it’s going and to cut itself off from the rest of the world, which is an outer darkness. At any rate, if you try to reach the outer world you have to start with a recognition that it is, from your point of view, in darkness. That kind of vision, which leads to very intense programs of social action and devel-

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opment, seems to me to be moving really in the opposite direction from tragedy, which to my mind has a great deal to do with the sense of nature as an order. I don’t think it’s an accident that the two developments of tragedy coincide roughly with the two great developments of science, Renaissance science and Ionian science. Somerville: When we’re into these waters, we’re up against the very mysterious question of the extent to which we are responsible for evil. Frye: Well, I certainly think that man has to act as though he alone were responsible for evil. I don’t think it would make sense in any other context. Somerville: The individual man? Frye: I suppose the choice has to be an individual one—yes. But it may be a very difficult choice. The Nuremberg trials raised the question of whether a necessarily hopeless resistance to evil on the part of subordinates in the German army was not only morally but legally binding.4 One has only to look at the repercussions of the Calley case to see what happens to that.5 Somerville: Is it an unbearable burden to think of man as fully responsible for evil and good in history? Frye: I don’t think it’s unbearable because it’s a condition of the human situation. Surely if religion says anything at all, it says that it’s no fair blaming the Devil for your own evil actions. Somerville: For your own evil actions? That’s why I asked earlier about the individual. Evil is so rarely individual in history. Frye: That’s true. Evil is a part of the whole network, as I said before, of the interaction of moral evil and moral good in society. There is a certain pattern of choices where you feel that your own integrity as a human being is involved. I suppose if you chose the wrong way often enough, eventually the situation in which you could recognize that it was a choice would disappear. In other words, the penalty of losing a temptation is demonic possession.

24 Blake’s Cosmos Conducted 25 August 1971?

From the transcription by Robert D. Denham, in WGS, 109–18, of CBC audiotape no. 578, released by the Centre for Cassette Studies in 1975. Dating is somewhat speculative. Jane Widdicombe’s list gives “August 22–30: London, CBC Blake Interview, Alasdair Clayre.” Frye’s daybook has a note for Wednesday 25 August to meet Alasdair Clayre (a brilliant English producer) at the BBC’s Broadcasting House. However, here the actual interviewer is not Clayre but Melvyn Hill, at that time the chair of the Division of Social Sciences at York University in Toronto, later a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. The interview was heard on a program produced by Catherine Gallant as part of the series On Man and Cosmos on CBC Radio’s Ideas in 1971.

Hill: Dr. Frye, we’re going to be talking about William Blake this evening. He’s a poet who has been described as being radically original in respect to his cosmology. I wonder if we could start with the question, What is a cosmos? What is a cosmology in the traditional sense of the word? Frye: Traditionally a cosmology has been an ordering of the objective picture of nature that man sees around him. That is, traditionally heaven has always been “up there.” When Jesus left the world he ascended into the sky, and his disciples gazed upward until a cloud received him out of their sight. The emphasis on his going back up into the sky is very much insisted on. Similarly, with his going down, he goes into hell between the death on the cross and the Resurrection. For Blake, this spatial cosmology is just a tissue of metaphors. What Blake lives in is a universe which

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is the same but can be perceived in different ways, so that heaven is the world perceived to the maximum of human imagination, and hell is the same world when the human imagination gives up. Hill: Are you suggesting that in Blake the cosmos is no longer presented as an objective order of the universe but as a creation of the imagination? Frye: That’s right. You start a mythology usually with a creation myth, but that is usually followed by some myth about the fall of man or the limitation of human power. It becomes obvious that the creation myth is projected from man’s sense of his own alienation. If you think of man as making his myths, you can see that the sense of alienation comes first and the creation myth follows it. That is also true of Blake. For Blake there is no creator in the picture except man himself. The creation is what man still has to accomplish: it’s not something that’s there. Hill: Does he retell the myth of creation in his poetry? Frye: He retells the myth of creation, but he retells it without putting it back to the beginning of time. For him the opening verse of the Bible reads something like “To start with, God makes the heavens and the earth,” but Blake, of course, is identifying God and man. Hill: I see. Is it possible to give a brief telling of the myth at this stage? The essentials of it as we find it in Blake? Frye: The essentials of the myth, I suppose, are that there is in eternity, that is, outside the continuum of time, an identity of God and man. Blake is a Christian because for him Christianity is a religion that identifies God and man. But in the particular human orbit we’re living in, there is a sense of having forfeited the eternal heritage and having broken away from that unity of God and man, so that the program of life is to reconquer it. Hill: And how does one do that? Frye: According to Blake, the state of eternity is followed by the fall— when the human mind gets lazy, when instead of creating it thinks of the thing outside itself as independent of itself and falls into an objective world. The true creation is the overcoming of the sense of the objective and the restoring to man of his creative heritage. Hill: So that it depends upon the exercise of one’s mental powers?

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Frye: Yes. Hill: And which mental powers in particular? Is there any indication in Blake? Frye: Well, Blake always associates three words: mental, intellectual, and imaginative. And the word which he opposes to all three of those is the word “reason.” By reason, he means the opposite of what he would consider mental or intellectual activity. That is, reason in the bad sense is simply accepting the objectivity of the world as a final datum. In other words, reason for him is essentially rationalizing the status quo, the world in which man finds himself. Hill: And the imagination enables man to transcend that state? Frye: Yes. Blake has a picture of the three ancient Britons, of which one, he says, is the ugliest man, and he represents two things, the human reason and the incapability of intellect.1 Hill: Does this enable us to understand the distinction of the four levels of existence in Blake? Frye: Blake says that there are four levels, and that the fourfold vision, which he calls Eden, is the highest. This is the perception of the world in which perception and creation have become the same thing. Hill: And what comes in between the level of alienation and the level of Eden? Frye: There are two stages in between—the threefold vision is the stage of Beulah, where the thing created is beloved and consequently is in a sexual or feminine relationship to the creator. For Blake, this sexual relationship is the relaxed form of creativity. As the relaxation of creativity, it is fine. But there is also a great danger in it, because the loved object may become autonomous and separate from the creator. Hill: And the twofold? Frye: The twofold in this context means simply man struggling with his environment. It’s not man fallen under complete tyranny, which is his hell, or what he calls single vision, but it’s man being continually thwarted, baffled, and frustrated by the objectivity of the world but still putting up a fight.

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Hill: So far we’ve been speaking about Blake’s cosmology in relation to the traditional Christian cosmology. I don’t know if the word applies to the scientific tradition, but where does Blake stand in relation to the view of nature and the universe that emerged with the scientific revolution? Frye: Well, his great bogeys are Bacon and Newton and Locke. The reason why he makes them demonic figures in his symbolism is that he thinks that the scientific attitude of his day tends to encourage an attitude of passivity on the part of man. That is, you accept the world as it is given to you first of all, and because you accept it you get into a habit of thinking that what exists must necessarily exist, and that extends to the feeling that evil and injustice and cruelty and slavery and misery must exist simply because they do exist. Hill: From the trend of your discussion it seems that Blake’s opposition to the scientific thinkers is ultimately a social and political one. Is that true? Frye: Yes, that’s quite true. There’s an interesting analogy in a passage in Milton’s Paradise Lost [bk. 8, ll. 175–8] that I think has often been misunderstood. Adam in paradise asks Raphael whether the other planets are inhabited or not. Raphael says, “Don’t bother about that,” and it looks as though Milton was being an obscurantist and being anti-scientific. But actually all that Raphael is saying is that the question of human freedom is more important than the question of whether there are other worlds and other kinds of life. This is Blake’s attitude to the science of his own day. He pictures the traditional, orthodox creative God as an old man with a white beard holding a compass in his left hand and setting a horizon (that’s where he gets his word “Urizen”) on the face of the deep. And then he has a picture of Newton in which Newton is doing exactly the same thing, that is, tracing a compass circle on a piece of paper. But he’s looking down; he’s not looking at the stars. The inference is always, in the old Marxist cliché, that it’s more important to change the world than to study it. Hill: He’s suggesting that the scientific view of the world reduces man’s capacity to do so? Frye: It does, if it is taken as an end in itself. In the Introduction to the Songs of Experience the bard says to earth, “The starry floor / The watry shore / Is giv’n thee till the break of day.” The point is that the scientific

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universe of Newton and Locke is the floor; it’s the place to start from. It’s not the ceiling; it’s not the place to end with. Hill: Now what does this say about the project of science which was held up from the earliest time in the scientific revolution? Descartes, for example, foresees the development of science as leading to the happiness of mankind because of the progress that the scientific control of nature will give man. Frye: For Blake, that is again associating, or rather confusing, the creative imagination of man with the objective world. The notion that man can be satisfied by something brought to him from the objective world is for Blake one of the great fallacies about human life. He says, “More, more, is the cry of a mistaken soul / Less than all cannot satisfy man.”2 He means that man should recover his creative abilities. Hill: When we started off talking about cosmology, you said that it referred to the objective order in the world—in the traditional view of cosmology. Did Blake also find an order in his subjective treatment of cosmology? Frye: He certainly found an order. He said in A Descriptive Catalogue that the artist’s job is to find form and to keep it.3 But of course form for him is always living form. He says, “Fire delights in its form.”4 There is no dead or static or monumental form for him. His conception of form is not subjective either because that’s the other side of the objective fallacy. The real form is the identification of the subject and the object, where one becomes the creator and the other the creature. If you think of the implications of the word “subject,” you see that it’s ultimately a political word. It means somebody kept down by his environment. Hill: Is he using the model of the artist’s creativity? Frye: That’s why he says that a person who is not an artist is not a Christian.5 By that he means a man who is not using his creative capacities, whatever they may be, is not fully human. Hill: Does this mean that all good citizens should be artists? Frye: Not in the narrow sense, because art for him includes a great deal that we don’t think of as art, and it excludes a great deal of what we do think of as art. That is, he attacked people like Joshua Reynolds very violently. His conception of art was simply that the work of art is the model

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of man’s creative effort. But while it is man’s duty to be creative so far as he can be, the work of art is merely the model of what creativity is. It’s not the form it always has to take. Hill: Now the creation of a republic, for example, would be the political form of creativity? Frye: It would be, yes. Hill: Does Blake give any indication of the nature of the republic in which the citizens would be artists in the more extended sense of the word? Frye: Well, his republic is what he calls the New Jerusalem, where everybody, insofar as in him lies, works to build up the eternal human community. He says, in contradicting Bacon on the matter about control over nature as leading to the satisfaction of man’s wants, that the increase of a state, as of a man, is in intellectual acquirements.6 Hill: So what would be the ultimate goal of a republic of men? Frye: The ultimate goal would be a community in which all men were creative and therefore—this may sound like quite a jump, but it’s a very short jump for Blake—all men finally realize that they are the same man. Hill: Is this the ultimate form of the imagination then—the realization of unity? Frye: The ultimate use of the imagination is the realization by men that they are all the same man and that that man is God. That is a conception of unity that Blake says is to be attained by what he calls “mental fight.” But it’s the opposite of uniformity. It has nothing to do with people thinking alike. Hill: What is the distinction between uniformity and unity? Frye: Well, unity is something that the poet gives you in the metaphor, where he says A is B: “The hero is a lion,” something of that kind. These two things are said to be the same thing and yet they remain different things. Similarly, Blake’s doctrine that God is man is a metaphor. It says that there are two things which are the same thing. But once you say that A is like B, then you are abstracting something which the two hold in common, and abstraction for Blake is going in the wrong direction. It’s

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going in the direction of monotony, a world in which everybody acts and thinks alike, a world of immutable law. Hill: So what would be the bond that unites men in the New Jerusalem? I assume that it would not be a law. Frye: It would not be a law because, as Blake says, “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”7 That is, the only law is the law of one’s being. For that reason, everybody who is alive has his own law. But at the same time, the creative life is the constructive and forming life. It’s not a destructive life. So his New Jerusalem would be a world in which all things were the same and therefore individual. Hill: We’ve followed Blake’s thought through from his opposition to both the objective concept of cosmology and science and the traditional Christian cosmology. What would you say is the ultimate content of his cosmology? Frye: Well, most cosmologies exist in time and in space. That is, they start where time begins—with the creation—and end where time ends— with the last judgment, and they extend from the heaven, which is way up there, to the hell, which is way down there. For Blake, time and space are not to be objectified in that way. Time as we ordinarily experience it consists of three unrealities: a past which doesn’t exist any more and a future that doesn’t exist yet and a present that never quite comes into existence. Similarly, with space, which consists entirely of “there,” that is, the conception of space as pure alienation. The centre of time is now, but in ordinary experience, we never experience now. And the centre of space is here, but in ordinary experience we never know that here is here, unless we draw a circle around ourselves and say that here is inside it. In Blake, the traditional religious words “infinite” and “eternal” mean the real here and the real now. That’s why he says, “To see a world in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”8 That is, normally we think of the infinite and the eternal as time and space going on and on and never stopping. But Blake calls that the “indefinite,” and for him it’s the opposite of the infinite and the eternal. Hill: So once more you’re suggesting that in his cosmology things are brought together and transcend the distinction between subject and object, between here and there, or between now and then?

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Frye: Yes, things are brought together but they’re also transformed by the intensity of perception. “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”9 The thing is not to look for other worlds in other places, but to expand one’s powers of perception where they are. Hill: Does Blake anywhere indicate the way in which he arrived at this expanded perception himself? Frye: He doesn’t so far as I know. He seems to have thought of it as something he had always had. In fact, his main trouble in communication was that this was so obviously true to him that he couldn’t understand why other people had difficulty in grasping it. But there never seems to have been a time when he didn’t hold it. Even the anecdotes we have about his early childhood indicate that he had it then. Hill: Sometimes one hears that Blake was considered mad in his own time. Does this account for that? Frye: Oh, yes. Madness is a social judgment. The person who is mad is the person who is out of line with what society regards as normal behaviour. But of course all prophets are mad in that sense. Hill: And Blake was a prophet? Frye: Oh, yes. Hill: What do you mean by a prophet in this context? Frye: Originally the Biblical prophets were the people who had an unusual power of perception. At first this threw them into trancelike states. But the prophets that we know and remember in the Bible, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, were simply people who had an unusual capacity for seeing what was there at the present moment. That is how Blake defines the prophet, too. He says quite explicitly that the prophet is not the man who can foretell the inevitable future because there isn’t any inevitable future. But he’s the person who can see the results of a present line of policy.10 Hill: Now is the capacity to see what is going on in the present related to the capacity to imagine the cosmos in the way that Blake does? Frye: Yes, because imagination is simply seeing at its most concentrated. Seeing at its least concentrated is simply seeing what is there, what is

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presented, what is the datum. But seeing at its greatest power of concentration is also creating what you see. Hill: I’m thinking here of Plato’s myth of the cave. The philosopher who goes off to discover the forms finds great difficulty when he comes back into the world because other people do not share his ability to see the truth, the beauty, and the goodness of things. At the same time, he rejects their cave, the world in which they’re living. Is there the same indication in Blake of a rejection of the world and a turning away from things? Frye: You see, there aren’t two worlds in Blake. There’s only that cave. There isn’t any world of the sun outside. The only sun is in the brain that sees these shadows flickering on the cave walls. The conflict is between the people who study the flickering shadows on the walls and the people who realize it is their eyesight that is producing those shadows. Hill: So Blake as a radical is not someone who would, say, turn away from civilization back to nature? Frye: He wouldn’t turn back to nature. He wouldn’t go to heaven. He wouldn’t go any other place. There isn’t any other place. Hill: How then does he work in a world that is caught in the realm of experience—in the twofold vision? Frye: Well, he works as best he can as an artist. He warns his readers of terrible disasters in the future, when man’s power of self-destruction will be very much greater than it was even in his own day. In the meantime, he attempts to get along as well as he can in his own trade. Hill: Was he successful? Frye: Well, he kept alive for seventy years and he kept his wife alive. She outlived him by a few years. He was never wealthy or successful in the worldly sense, but he seems to have managed to keep going. He made a good deal of sense to about half a dozen people, and in the eighteenth century that was all you needed to stay alive. Hill: Besides these few people he was in contact with, would you call him a full member of the society? Or had he withdrawn from society? Frye: It depends on what one means by withdrawal. Blake certainly had nothing of the noble savage in him. He had nothing of the desire to live in solitude. He lived in London all his life, and he was very much a city

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man and loved the feeling of a society around him and the sense of crowds and of movement. He was obviously a person very easy to make friends with. He was often regarded as queer, but he was never regarded as unlikeable. Hill: You said recently in an article on Blake that he realized that introversion was not profundity.11 Frequently today Blake is identified with the new cult of introversion, I suppose associated with the use of hallucinogenic drugs and so on. I wonder if you could explain your comment? Frye: Well, I said that he makes bogeys, more or less, of Bacon and Newton and Locke, particularly Locke, whose Essay on Human Understanding he seems to have read with a great deal of dislike. We haven’t turned up his copy, but I think we know what his attitude would have been. According to Locke, you perceive the outer world with your senses, and then you retire into your own mind and reflect on what you perceived. For Blake, that is the philosophy of introversion, the philosophy of subjectivity, of withdrawing and retiring into yourself, and it’s the exact opposite of what he meant by vision, which was the outward-directed creative force that built up the New Jerusalem.

25 Science Policy and the Quality of Life Recorded 26 May 1972

From the disk in the Victoria University Library, transcribed by Mary Ellen Kappler. Date from the label of the disk. This is a conversation with Charlotte Tansey, Cathleen Going, Martin O’Hara, and Eric O’Connor for the seminar “Science Policy and the Quality of Life,” which took place in the Bonaventure Hotel, Montreal, 27–28 May 1972. The seminar was organized by the Thomas More Institute, a Montreal institute for the education of Catholic laymen of which Eric O’Connor, S.J., was president and with which the others were associated. See correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 45, file 5. O’Connor was a mathematician, Going a teacher of theology, O’Hara a professor of English, and Tansey a director and former president of the institute. Background comments indicate that the interview was conducted by phone with Frye in Toronto; at the end it appears that the questioners were being televised.

[Frye and Martin O’Hara speak to each other, while the tape is being set up, about Frye’s plans to attend a convocation ceremony at the University of Waterloo on the following day.] O’Hara: One of the quotes I have in front of me is from The Bush Garden [ii; C, 413], where you say that the central images of everyone’s life are formed in childhood. [Relates an anecdote about a four-year old child who asked him if a lake was polluted.] It struck me that it means that here’s a formation of something in childhood that is going to alter the young person’s perception of what water is, and the baptismal, the salvific, notions of water. The first question becomes, “Is it polluted?” which is a very unnatural one. Frye: Well, I don’t know. I think that pollution, in that context, is really

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something that a child of four hardly understands; it’s really just a word. As a concept, it’s something with a very complicated scientific and political context, but at the core it’s really a myth. It’s the old myth of original sin. What is really strange about the notion is the separation of ideas. That is, when we do certain things to the natural environment we call it pollution, and when we do precisely the same kind of things to the human environment, we call it development. The notion of pollution as something that extends also to our highways and our mean streets and that kind of thing is something that brings the whole context of Songs of Experience into the world, as well as the Songs of Innocence. O’Hara: Yes. I’m thinking too of the slogans all around currently— things like “the water you drink you can’t swim in,” which, again, has this notion. But you would say that’s altering it at a mythic level? Frye: Well, I think that the core of the conception “pollution” is really a mythical core, and it’s something that has to enter a mind sooner or later, if it’s to be a realistic mind. As far as the impact on a child’s mind is concerned, one has to remember the extent to which a child recreates his world. I got all my own archetypes in the city of Sherbrooke, where I spent the first five years of my life, and heaven, for example, is still the other side of the St. Francis River, which goes up on a hill. But when I go back to that part of the world, I realize that all my archetypes take place in a world which I’ve recreated, and which not only isn’t there now but never was there. O’Hara: Yes, yes, I see. I have another question that’s related to this. [Tells about teaching Wallace Stevens’s Anecdote of the Jar to fourth-year university students, some of whom read the poem as being about culture dominating nature in a destructive and polluting way, and suggests that this is similar to the child’s preoccupation with pollution.] Frye: I think that what is happening there is a kind of extension of the Romantic and partly Rousseauist tradition which has brought the word “artificial” into disrepute. That is, the notion that whatever man does to nature is wrong, which, of course, is half the truth. And the other half— that man’s perception of nature is a creative act, not just selective, and that art could also be seen as the fulfilment of nature, rather than as a kind of military conquest of nature—is what Wallace Stevens is trying to express in the poem. But it’s a more difficult and subtle notion, and the

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obvious thing to see first is the domination, the imperialistic domination of nature by civilization. O’Hara: It seemed to me such a wildly wrong interpretation of what Stevens was saying, though. And I was startled that the reaction of so many of these students, who were at a level where they can read poetry, I thought, in a fairly sophisticated way, should be dominated by this sort of current attitude about chain-making and road-making. Frye: Well, they’re dominated by it because it’s a foreground attitude. The obviousness of the polluted world is what’s confronting them on all sides. Of course Wallace Stevens also says what they’re saying in other poems, like The Man on the Dump. There’s no question that that’s part of reality too, but the notion of art as a kind of emancipation of nature is a much subtler idea. O’Hara: Yes, and this was missed entirely, even with the forceful image of a jar, which somehow can give the meaning. Frye: Yes. Tansey: [Says that she is interested in Frye’s ideas, expressed in The Bush Garden, about the unconsciousness of nature and the Canadian fear of nature (BG, 139–41; C, 34–5). She then suggests a contrast between the cyclic images of nature found in Japanese poetry and Judaeo-Christian notions, suggesting that the former indicate an entrapment in nature, while the latter offer freedom from nature.] Frye: The conception of man as a creature of the cycle of nature is something that has very primitive roots, but is actually a fairly sophisticated development. You get it in things like Stoicism. It seems to me that in the Japanese tradition there’s a very important element of human consciousness as somehow or other the creator, or at least the place where the creative power in the cycle of nature is really located. In some of the haikus and so on they describe nature, but not in any sense a subjection to nature. It’s the watching, the observant mind, that’s the focus of all of that, and to some extent the whole cyclical activity, the cherry blossoms and the chrysanthemums, is going on inside the mind that perceives it. Tansey: You don’t feel, though, the imagination on a kind of wheel? You don’t think history makes a difference? This is almost a reversal of something that is on Martin’s mind, as being free of the burden of history,

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which you have also said, with the poetic imagination. But how would you see the other freedom which history gives? Frye: I don’t know about Shinto, but I would think that in Buddhism, and particularly in Zen Buddhism, there’s a very strong emphasis on the thrust, or the leap, of the mind that makes it clear of the wheel of nature, but which also enables the emancipated mind to see nature turning, so to speak, below him. Tansey: Yes, so that, in another way, the Oriental seems to me never free from . . . can’t be in an imagination that hasn’t got pictures. Frye: No. Or at least . . . Tansey: No. I would think that, there again, we’re more sophisticated . . . . We know that there’s a level of abstraction where one doesn’t expect pictures. Frye: Yes, but you also get that in the Orient. That is, there are pictures of the whole process of enlightenment where one picture in the series is a complete blank. And there is, I think, a similar feeling that what you arrive at is a pitch of consciousness in which you are no longer a subject. That is, you are no longer subjected to the involuntary perception of the cycle of nature. Tansey: Yes. Now about history, could you . . . Frye: Well, there’s a sharper sense of history in the West. I think that the reason is that in the Biblical tradition you have the structure of the Bible, which from the literary point of view is a comic structure—it’s what Dante called it, a commedia. Like other comedies, it turns on a recognition scene where the saviour and the redeemer of Israel turns out to be a person with a specific name and historical role and function. And that means that the recognition scene occurs within a dramatic context, and a historical context. Whereas it seems to me that Buddhism in particular is almost all recognition; that is, there’s the leap from the subjected consciousness to the liberated consciousness, and there isn’t the previous sense of the unfolding of a dramatic pattern. It’s that sense that gives a much sharper feeling of history to the Western mind. Tansey: Yes, perhaps I’ll come in again in a few minutes. Frye: I’m sorry, am I not answering your question?

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Tansey: I’m not sure, so I think I’ll . . . I think it’s somehow related with the social again, isn’t it? The entry of the social into the whole dramatic picture is different in the East and the West. Frye: What I see in the mythical tradition is the record of a country that was never lucky at the game of Empire and consequently thinks in terms of a force in history which is also counter-historical, and that’s different from the sort of immanent Hegel–Marx conception of history, which is a sort of donkey’s carrot view of it. O’Hara: When you speak in that context of the imaginative element in works of art that lifts them clear of the bondage of history, I’m thinking of the ecologist who might at this point say, but is that not simply using the imagination as a kind of escapism? Frye: Well, it’s possible to use the imagination as escapism. We have that distinction in our language, about the distinction between the imaginative and the imaginary. If you contrast the visions of an ideal world with its images of garden and city and so on with the laziest and idlest of daydreams, you’ll find that there’s the same pattern of images in both. But in the daydream the work is all assigned to somebody else, such as God. O’Hara: So that there’s a question of social responsibility. Is this something that becomes part of the mature imagination? Frye: Oh yes. And social responsibility, of course, is inseparable from the individual’s assumption of that responsibility. O’Hara: Could you imagine, which at the moment I can’t, a valid social responsibility without a certain quality of imagination? Frye: Oh, I think that it is your imagination that attaches you to society, and that to assume responsibility is the product of a certain vision of society. No, I couldn’t imagine that either. O’Hara: Yes, yes. I was just separating out something that was starting to blur on me, and that’s helped. Cathleen Going: [Asks in what sense Frye believes the modern imagination to be religious, with particular reference to science policy and “quality of life.”] Frye: Well, I think that, in the first place, the religious perspective is the only one that doesn’t give the human mind claustrophobia. That is, it’s the only one that suggests some kind of functional use for words like

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“infinite” and “eternal,” and the only one that keeps, so to speak, the fact of death in proportion, instead of being the fundamental and central [break in recording]. And I think that the attempt to look for that kind of imagination is very deep in our time. But what we call a crisis in belief, I don’t think is really a crisis in belief. I think it’s a crisis in understanding what the language of belief in the modern world actually is. Going: Would you say that the shift in all areas to the mythical and imaginative is a shift to the religious?1 Frye: Well, it wouldn’t necessarily be that, but I think it’s quite consistent with the turn to religion. Going: It wouldn’t be that if it is a shift to the closed mythical, is that . . . Frye: Well the closed mythical, of course, is the substitute. It’s the attempt to crawl back into the womb, so to speak. Going: [Asks how students of religion can adopt an attitude that is both religious and critical, and whether or not “openness” is the way to do this.] Frye: Well, openness is very important. And I think that anything in the structure of belief which tends to exclusiveness, that is, which makes any kind of candid or open contact between people of different religions and different cultural traditions impossible, is something that is quite rightly regarded with more and more distrust. And when people use words like “dogma” in an unfavourable context I think that’s really what they mean, the closing off of the possibility of dialogue. Going: And is that unfavourable context what you are suggesting when you talk about the shift from the doctrinal to the mythical? Frye: Yes. The shift from the doctrinal to the mythical doesn’t necessarily remove the dogma, but it does mean that the way of understanding it is a way which renders one more open to alternative approaches. Going: [Asks if a “concern for quality” would constitute “an opening of the myths that sustain scientific endeavour.”] Frye: Oh yes, I think that the concern for quality, which is really derived from an imaginative vision of some kind of life in an ideal context, is something which can draw people together. But then, when people say that “there is only one way to achieve this, and that is by” etc., etc., then you get a kind of dogmatic closing off of the agreement.

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O’Hara: And you would mean, would you, that that could come in, not necessarily as a religious dogma, but just as even a political dogma or any other dogma? Frye: Oh yes. Going: [Asks what the “concern for quality” does for scientific questions.] Frye: Well, it attaches the scientific vision to a social vision. Science qua science is like any other kind of scholarship. That is, it’s pluralistic, and it tends to specialization, so that you tend to know a smaller and smaller speciality and there are very few other people that even understand your language. But you’re still united with other people, not through the scholarship, but through the fact that you’re all citizens of the same society. It’s the common social vision that unites. Going: As the common religious vision united in more obviously religious terms in another day. Could one say that? Frye: Yes. That is, it united parts of the world and not other parts. If you take for example a sixteenth-century Spaniard and a sixteenth-century Turk, they didn’t know anything about each other’s religion, but they were both quite sure that it was damnably wrong. Going: [Asks if an interest in primitive religion is comparable to what Frye calls the nineteenth century’s “museum” stage of culture in The Modern Century (94; NFMC, 52–3).] Frye: Yes, I think so, and I think that the study of, for example, the art of painting became rather narrowly evolutionary and progressive in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was felt that artists were getting out of the barbaric and the primitive towards something very much more refined. And we today don’t take that view of art; we feel that the primitive is actually a very living, vital mainspring of our cultural tradition. The same thing is true of religion. Instead of thinking that we’re getting steadily more and more reasonable and more and more reconciled to science and that kind of thing, we recognize that what Kierkegaard calls “the absurd” is still very strongly an element in consciousness. And that what corresponds to the primitive in art, the primitive in religion, can actually describe a kind of experience which is much more real than our amiable sense of progress. Going: And one would certainly misunderstand you badly if, in what

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you say about religion, one didn’t notice at all your link of the mythical and the real? Frye: Oh yes. Going: We’d be back in the realm of reading your statements as though you were talking about the imaginary again. Frye: Well, of course myth to me means, fundamentally, narrative, or plot, or story. And to me the Western, the Judaeo-Christian, tradition is rather important because of its emphasis on the story. And the word “myth” is like the words “fable” and “fiction,” which are words of literary structure which have acquired a secondary colouring of something untrue or unreal because people don’t realize the seriousness of the language of myth and fable and fiction. Going: So it certainly would be wrong to simply equate what we were just speaking about, the primitive religion, with your sense of the mythical, which depends upon an articulate and a literary culture. Frye: Yes, but the articulate and literary culture is something which grew out of the primitive, and which still, to the extent that it is articulate, retains some kind of vital connection with it. Going: [Asks where “the wise man” can be found in the re-emergence of a vital tradition or experience.] Frye: Well, I think that if one compares wisdom and knowledge, one would say that knowledge was of the actual, and wisdom is rather a sense of the potential. Think of the great religious leaders, Jesus or Buddha: you don’t think of them as knowledgeable men, but you do think of them as wise men. And you think of them as people whose knowledge is, as the Buddhists say, “unborn.” That is, it’s the sense of the potential rather than of the actual. Going: So that really ties with the openness that we were talking about at the beginning. The wise men, in some way, are the agents of openness within a society. Frye: If you examine a primitive mind and its religion in terms of any formulated beliefs, the formulated beliefs are probably absurd, or superstitious, but if you examine it in terms of openness to experience you get a very different result.

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Eric O’Connor: [Asks Frye to clarify his earlier comments about pollution and development.] Frye: Well, I was thinking of a situation in the city of Toronto, for example, where citizens have to keep fighting to preserve any sense of beauty or proportion in the city and where the implications of the word “development” are simply the unrestricted growth of an utterly hideous urban sprawl. O’Connor: It’s the urge of growth as such? Frye: Yes. O’Connor: [Explains that his question relates to the idea that adult education should be based on a “structure of questions” instead of a “systematic idea of the universe,” then begins to outline the basic situation of Athol Fugard’s play The Blood Knot, with particular reference to the sado-masochistic elements within the play. He suggests that “these words are the result of an analogy between what one knows about sex in our civilization,” and that it is “only a structure of questioning that makes this analogy pop up.” After the tape is changed, he resumes his remarks, saying that one of the “roles of teaching adults is to make such analogies visible,” and that repetition also does this. He then asks how one can reach people and engage their imaginations.] Frye: I was reading a book the other day on Joyce’s Ulysses, by Dick Ellmann, and he happened to remark that the centre of the young person’s mental experience is discovery, whereas for the older person it’s coincidence.2 And that is certainly true of my own experience as a teacher with the young. The young are looking for answers. Consequently there is always some slight danger of their falling into the whole sadomasochistic cycle, because the answer is either something that stimulates aggression, as words like “positivism” indicate, or something that throws them the other way, into assuming that some political body or some church or other has all the answers. So the search for the answer and the search for discovery are, I think, interconnected. And in teaching the young one always has to keep in mind the fact that they will become older, and there are other things they will be looking for. It seems to me that as one gets older the sense of repetition, of coincidence, of things turning up over and over again, becomes the middle-aged form of the sense of discovery. That of course doesn’t have that danger of becoming either positivistic or masochistic in one’s approach because there the emphasis is

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rather on the question than on the answer. In fact there’s almost a sense that having an answer cheats you out of the right to ask the question, and it [the question] tends to move you from the knowledgeable, from the possession of the secret magic formula, to the conception of what I just meant now by wisdom, a sense of the potential. O’Connor: You mean there is a mild, but very strong, deep underlying questioning in this? Frye: Yes. O’Connor: But it’s not questioning that’s looking for a formula. It’s looking for further connections. Frye: Further connections, and, essentially, in the long run, for the right to keep on repeating the question. The context of the question may be new each time, but the new situation leads to the reformulation of the question, rather than to the brand-new which is there for all time once discovered. O’Connor: [Suggests that Frye’s idea that leisure or play is just as important as work is given contemporary expression in phrases such as “do your own thing” and in sensitivity training, but that these fail to bring things together, to relate things, or to recognize coincidences. He then asks whether the “myths” of work and play are as important to older people as to the young.] Frye: Oh, I think they must be, yes. As one goes on, one begins to recognize that the relationship of work to play is perhaps very closely connected with the relationship of content to form. That is, I have to make a speech at a convocation tomorrow, and the occasion of the convocation is play. It’s a “let’s pretend” occasion, but at the same time I’m serious about what I want to say, and I work at the speech. And so the seriousness of the work goes into the content, of which the form is really a “let’s pretend,” dramatic, ritualistic form. And I think that the cult of “doing one’s own thing” is analogous to the rather facile and rather irresponsible formalism in the arts which tends to erode the sense of seriousness or responsibility in the arts. O’Connor: Do you mean that it says there can be form without any content at all? Frye: Well, there’s the attempt to develop a form without relation to content, that is, to make the whole activity one of pure play.

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O’Connor: Now looking for pattern and exploring pattern is of course content, is it not? Frye: Well, looking for pattern could be a way of looking for similarities in form. O’Connor: So that becomes then content. [O’Hara, Tansey, Going, and O’Connor thank Frye, and good-byes are exchanged.]

26 Modern Education Recorded 1 June 1972

From CBC audiotape no. 863, transcribed by Robert D. Denham. This was an interview with Frye by David McPherson at the meeting of the Learned Societies of Canada, Montreal, May–June 1972, where Frye had presented his talks “The Critic and the Writer” and “Pistis and Mythos.” His interview was broadcast on the CBC’s Ideas on 30 June 1972, at the end of a week-long series on the Learned Societies’ meetings produced by Earl Pennington. This last program used interviews with four scholars to address criticisms of the university in an era of student unrest, and the pressures universities are facing from the public.

Narrator: We asked Northrop Frye whether he thought the quality of university education today was being eroded by social pressures. Frye: The university is after all a special purpose institution, and the decline in undergraduate registration in the last year or so indicates that the students are beginning to realize that. A university education does not guarantee a comfortable middle-class living. Further, it is not something that one really has to have or can demand as a right. I think that what is really the problem is the old hierarchical system—that the university is the first-rate education that the gentleman got and that technical colleges and so forth represent a second-rate consolation prize for the people who (a) may not be quite so intelligent or (b) may not be quite so high in social status. Now those, of course, are pestiferous notions, and the sooner we get rid of them the better. McPherson: Are too many people going to university?

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Frye: I think too many people will always go to university as long as it has this kind of artificial and unreal social status attached to it. As a result you’re bound to get, human nature being what it is, a certain number of spoiled middle-class brats who regard their teachers as their nursemaids. When the values of the university are generally questioned, this kind of thing goes up very steeply. McPherson: Many of the traditional Honours programs, for example, at the university, are being broken down in the name of flexibility and greater chance to give the student initiatives. What do you think of this line of development? Frye: I think it is a definite erosion of quality. The old Honour Course in the University of Toronto gave the undergraduate about as good a training as he could have got anywhere on the continent. I am very sorry that the undergraduate Honours program was thrown over for that reason.1 I think that perhaps the Honour Course did demand more maturity and a higher degree of commitment from the student than the student was always capable of giving it. So I’m glad that more flexibility has been brought in for that reason. But you get into a cycle with these things. You scrap one program in the name of flexibility and variety and you introduce another kind, and after a few years the more intelligent students begin to realize they’re getting gypped, and so the cycle has to start over again. McPherson: Is there any sign at this point that the cycle is beginning to move the other way? Frye: I think that there are signs, yes. I’m thinking of a story of a couple of years ago of an instructor who drafted a course in English literature simply bulging with relevance. He started with things like Kerouac’s Dharma Bums just to provide the historical background, and then he filled it full of black revolutionary literature and anything that had been published the day before yesterday. And the students said, “To hell with this stuff. We want Joseph Conrad or something we can get our teeth into.” I think you’ll find that increasingly the type of student response. They want an education; they don’t want a finishing school. McPherson: I think that one of the arguments for a more general undergraduate education is that if a student specializes fairly early, he’s not able to bring to the social problems that face us all a kind of informed intelligence about many issues.

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Frye: It’s true that the student has the difficulty of the fact that there are always two contexts of education. In scholarship, the world is very pluralistic and specialized. That is, the humanist can’t speak to the scientist. In fact, he can hardly speak even to the humanist who is working in a neighbouring discipline. And there’s no way around that: that’s the way scholarship is. But the humanist and the scientist are still united by the fact that they’re both citizens in the same society, and they’re both committed to that. I think that that is something which always has to be kept in the foreground of any educational process. McPherson: I’m wondering if we could persuade you to be a prophet for a few minutes and talk about the kinds of direction you see the university moving in. Frye: The university is, of course, hitched to its economy. Certain things happen when there’s a boom cycle. There are more universities established, usually far too many universities. Then there’s a bust cycle, and everybody gets hysterical and panicky and starts cutting budgets. As long as we’re hitched to that kind of roller coaster, the future of universities is in considerable doubt. I feel myself that the principle of federation at Toronto—which, I think, although it’s unique in Toronto, was really quite a good principle—was that the humanities are best taught when they’re decentralized and the sciences when they’re centralized.2 That means, I think, that in any community there ought to be one university which has far more money spent on it than other universities. I don’t care if that’s elitism. It just seems to me to be educational good sense. You have to have one research library which is big enough for any kind of work and certain types of research facilities and laboratory equipment for the sciences. A country like Canada cannot afford more than at most two such universities. Consequently, the decision where to put them ought to be a federal one and not a provincial one. Then, along with that, I would think, could go a number of decentralized, rather smaller liberal arts colleges, which do an honest, conscientious job of teaching the arts and the sciences at an undergraduate level. I would like to see the university situation work itself out along those lines.

27 Symmetry in the Arts: Blake Broadcast 17 November 1972

From the CBC audiotape no. 892, reference no. 721117-3, released by the Centre for Cassette Studies, 1975, and transcribed by Robert D. Denham. This was an interview broadcast on the CBC on Ideas, as fifth of a series of ten programs on symmetry in the arts. The interviewer was James Robertson.

Robertson: We asked Dr. Northrop Frye why he called his book on William Blake Fearful Symmetry. Frye: I used this quotation from Blake’s most familiar poem, The Tyger, because I thought it would be recognized by the public and also because I felt a great deal of Blake was bound up with his conception of symmetry, which was partly a revolt against the eighteenth-century, classical conception of symmetry. Poets always develop a type of verse which suits their habit of thought, and Blake was looking for something in metre, or at least in a poetic rhythm. He was almost the first to realize that we’d taken in so many long words from Latin and Greek that the speech of the ordinary educated Englishman was getting to be a kind of polysyllabic babble, and that to represent the language of ordinary speech in English you need a longer line than the pentameter. If you compare Blake’s Prophecies with the blank verse in, say, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, you’ll see that Blake is very much closer to the language of ordinary speech than Shelley is. I think that’s the reason why his line is longer. “He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars / General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer.”1 That kind of rhythm in speech needs more breath, needs more length.

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He says in his preface to Jerusalem that he wanted the rhythm of his poetry to fit the curves of what he was saying. He remarks in that connection that “Poetry Fetter’d, Fetters the Human Race!”2 He disliked the poetry of Dryden and Pope with the stopped couplet because for him that was an antithetical mode of thought which represented the kind of symmetry that he most disliked. With his poetic rhythm there is much more of a sense of the line not only lengthening to accommodate longer words but also spilling out into other lines and forming larger paragraph rhythms. It’s not unlike what Milton was doing in Paradise Lost, except that Milton’s texture is the texture of humanist, seventeenth-century rhetoric. Blake’s texture is founded more on the colloquial speech of the eighteenth century. His use of metre is a very fluid and flexible one. He does not actually go to the point of writing what we should call free verse. I think that he had enough sense of the traditional epic quality—the convention of the old, borrowed punctuating of rhythm of song on the harp or the lyre— to want to keep a recurring rhythm in his poetry. But within the limits of the long line that he uses, he adopts a kind of musical rhythm where the structure is very much what it is in music. That is, in music you can have a certain time-beat and then within the measure you can have a variable number of notes. Similarly in Blake, you can have six or seven beats to a line but a variable number of syllables in between the beats. Robertson: So we can find symmetry in William Blake’s forms, in his metres and lines and stanzas. How about his metaphors, symbols, images, and vision? Frye: Blake’s use of metaphor has several aspects. I said that he was in revolt against a certain kind of symmetry in the eighteenth century. If you look at the stopped couplet in Dryden and Pope, you’ll see there a sense of symmetry that Blake considered a static symmetry. That is, the first line of a couplet is always completed by the second half. So what you have is a conception of symmetry in which the second half neutralizes the first half and so brings it to a kind of stop. Blake’s sense of symmetry was more inclined to the conception of symmetry Hegel was later to develop in philosophy, where instead of one action neutralized by its opposite you have the thrust and counter-thrust of two opposing forces. Blake has different views of allegory. He defines it in one place as, really, the use of metaphor. At other places he distinguishes allegory from what he calls vision. That is, in poetry you often have a technique

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of allegory where the author believes that other things are more important than the literary expression. Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, is an allegory because Bunyan was much more interested in religion than in literature, whereas Blake could never be more interested in anything else than he is in the arts. So for him a work of literature has to carry its own meaning, but the meaning is not to be interpreted from something outside literature, as it is in allegory. In Blake, the unit of his poetry is an image, like the image of the tiger, the lamb, the little boy lost, and so on. This image is, as he says, seen by the imaginative eye, which means that it is a kind of storm centre of mental and imaginative forces. It means a great many things in a great many different contexts. As soon as you have said that the tiger means this or that, there are always twenty-seven other things that it also means. So you may as well give up trying to count the number of different things it means and recognize that it is simply a force or centre of meanings and significances. That, of course, brings you to a conception of symmetry which is the power that holds the living organism together. I think that Blake was always very emphatic on the distinction between what he calls mathematic form and living form. By that distinction he meant the two kinds of symmetry that I mentioned a moment ago, the static symmetry, which gives you an abstract design like a building, and the kind of dynamic symmetry that enables a tiger to be a unit and still be a tremendous force. Robertson: William Blake was not a poet only. He was a designer and an artist too. Is his design symmetrical? Frye: If you read Blake’s poems as he intended them to be read, you find that you’re not really reading a text so much as looking at a sequence of plates. There is often a pictorial design accompanying the poem, and there may be any proportion of text and design. Very frequently you see in the design something that looks like a rather static form of symmetry. That is, you may find two angels over a human figure and their wings balance exactly. Yet if you look again, you’ll find that Blake’s drawing of, for example, the human body is very much out of drawing according to all the academic standards of his day because what he’s interested in is expressing the symmetry of the body in movement. Consequently, the look of the body on the page is in some respects a distortion. I was told once by a curator of a museum in which there are a great many Blake drawings that of all the people who came in to study Blake’s drawings

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one of the types that turned up most regularly were students of ballet. That is, they found in Blake’s approach to the human body exactly what they were looking for, the sense of the shape of the body in movement and action. I think Blake was obviously revolutionary in his approach both to poetry and to painting in his time. While there were revolutions going on, they were not going on in England. England was trying to sit on all the revolutions it could sit on. Consequently, somebody of Blake’s outlook was regarded as insane. His attitude, which was pretty consistent all his life, was that it was what England meant by sanity that was really insane. So naturally, he would not be a person with very much influence during his lifetime. It’s actually taken about a century since his death for us to catch up with the contemporary quality of what he had to say. I think that Blake knew better than any other Englishman of his time how very important the revolutionary movements in his day were, particularly the American Revolution and the French Revolution. He was also almost the only poet of his time to grasp anything of the significance of the Industrial Revolution. He saw in all this something which had great powers for evil, against which he warned very sharply. He saw also opportunities for other things, and in particular he understood the possibility of developing a more revolutionary mode of thought. That’s what I’ve been trying to characterize as his sense of dynamic symmetry. He says, “Without Contraries is no progression.”3 You have to have both love and hate, good and evil in human existence, and it’s their struggle against one another that constitutes life. The living organism is something which is a kind of logical paradox, even an impossibility. That is, it’s alive, it has movement, it has force, it has power, it can change its position, and yet at the same time it’s a unity, it holds together. That means that the vital symmetry of the organism, the body, expresses something asymmetrical in relation to what he calls mathematic form, that is, the stasis, the balance, the completing of one thing by another thing. Yet the body, the living organism, is not really asymmetrical, because it creates another kind of balance against its environment, against the things that it lives among. For Blake, I think it’s essential that symmetry should always be an aspect of unity. He makes fun of what he calls the “cloven fiction”: that is, of splitting reality into a subject and an object—of seeing two sides to everything. That’s the usual conception of symmetry: you put a chair on one side of the room and then you balance it by putting a chair exactly

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like it on the opposite side of the room. For Blake, symmetry was something worked out by something which was unified and alive as a part of the tension within its own being. The kind of symmetry that Blake disliked, that he thought was dead, which he calls “mathematic form,” is always founded on duality: that is, on an opposition of two things which remain two things, like good and evil or subject and object. This he always associated with what he called “generalization,” which starts out with a conception of a world split between mind and matter, where man goes to work in a world which is not himself and tries to arrive at some kind of living compromise out of the antithesis between himself and nature. Since for Blake symmetry was always an aspect of unity, it follows that he was trying to get away from the general, which leaves you with two things: the particular and the universal. He is always emphasizing in his theory of art the importance of what he calls “Minute Particulars,” that is, the detail. The reason for his emphasizing it is that it is only in the minute particular that you can see the universal, whereas all you can see in the generalization is the abstraction. That’s what Blake means when he says “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the Palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.”4 The minute particular is the grain of sand, which is also the world, or it’s a flower, which is also heaven. That means that words like “infinite” and “eternal” do not mean space and time going on forever and forever and never stopping (he calls that “the indefinite”). For him, infinity means the real here, the thing that’s at the centre of space, and eternity means the real now, the thing that is at the centre of time.

28 Harold Innis: Portrait of a Scholar Broadcast 21 November 1972

From a tape in the CBC Radio Archives, reference no. 721121-8, transcribed by Monika Lee. The program was produced by Elspeth Chisholm, who had helped Innis with his unpublished History of Communications. Chisholm commented on the way that the ideas of the liberal Innis, who died in 1952, were now being adopted by both neo-Marxist economists and communications theorists like Marshall McLuhan. Frye’s contribution to the program is brief:

Chisolm: Professor Northrop Frye is a literary critic and a commissioner for the CRTC. He has long thought that Innis’s theories were central to any communications philosophy. Frye: This is something that naturally interests both historians and theorists of language, so that Innis, like Hegel, is a person who has both leftwing and right-wing disciples. I don’t think that you could find greater contrasts in outlook and temperament in the University of Toronto than between, say, Marshall McLuhan and Donald Creighton, and yet both of them have been very strongly influenced by Innis.

29 Easter Recorded 6 February 1973

From the tape in the archives of the CBC, reference no. 730418-2, transcribed by Carrie O’Grady. Dated by Frye’s daybook for 1973. Frye was interviewed by Marjorie Harris, introduced by Warren Davis. The program was broadcast by the CBC in the Concern series on 18 April 1973, and rebroadcast 10 April 1974. Marjorie Harris is an editor and writer, gardening expert, and producer of radio documentaries for the CBC.

Davis: We begin with a question to a distinguished Canadian scholar and humanist, Northrop Frye. Why did the life of Christ parallel almost everything we know about the nature of the hero in mythology and literature? Frye: There’s a tendency for all religions to develop mythologies, that is, bodies of stories at the centre. The tendency of myth is to stick together to make mythology; the mythology tends to become encyclopedic, to cover the whole range of time and space. One of the things in Christianity that’s important is that it must have hit the people in the Mediterranean world as a complete synthesis of all the other myths that they had heard in various quarters. Harris: What sort of myths were prevalent at that time? Frye: There was a religion of Mithras the sun-god, who was born at the winter solstice; and there were the dying and reviving gods, Adonis and Attis, who were hung on trees, then searched for, and then found on the third day; and there were goddess figures like Isis, the star of the sea and the queen of heaven, and so forth—all of these elements come into Chris-

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tianity in some way or other. The dying-god story was the story of fertility or vegetation, which died in the autumn and revived in the spring, but by the time it got into a religious ritual, it took in most countries the form of a three-day festival. In the cult of Attis, which got to Rome fairly early, you have a god (or his puppet) hung on a tree on the first day, then the next day is the day of wrath where the god has vanished from the earth—that was the great orgy where the priests castrated themselves— and then on the third day there is a procession to a marsh, where the newborn god was found. Harris: Did the Christians just pick up this kind of thing and relate to it? Frye: Paganism is never an influence on Christianity. At no point has there ever been a pagan influence on Christianity of any kind. What happens is that Christianity develops out of an Old Testament Judaist religion, and as it spreads over Europe it comes in contact with analogous patterns and to some extent they merge and they mesh. We can see that in the word “Easter” itself, which comes from an ancient British spring goddess. But the festival itself is Christian, and the writers of the Gospels were of course concerned to tell above everything else the story of the Passion and the Resurrection of Christ. But they told it entirely in terms of the Old Testament story of the Passover. When the Israelites were leaving the land of death, there was a plague which killed all the Egyptian first-born. The Israelites smeared the blood of a lamb on their door instead, and so their children escaped. There you have the theme of human sacrifice commuted to animal sacrifice (as in the story of Abraham and Isaac), and you have also the theme of the redeeming lamb. Christianity takes up this theme and makes it a little more primitive by returning to the theme of the human victim who is also the lamb. The reason for the death of the victim is that the redeeming God is redeeming people who live, as the Israelites in Egypt live, symbolically in the land of death. And in order to enter the world of death, he himself has to die. When he rises again he kills death, and of course to kill death is to bring to life. The story of Jesus is the ruler of divine descent born in secret, whose life is threatened at birth by a massacre from which he escapes; he wanders in the wilderness, he gathers a band of followers, he appears in his messianic guise once or twice, and then he goes through the ritual pattern of death and resurrection, and later ascent to heaven. The story develops from a story thousands of years old, where the protagonist is

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the dying and reviving cycle of nature: it’s either the sun that goes down out of the West and comes up again in the East, or the life that disappears in the winter and revives in the spring. Harris: Could it have happened at any other time? Would it have been possible? Frye: Christianity was surprisingly loose about its actual dates; it didn’t seem to give a damn when Christ was born. They seem to have taken over the winter solstice festival. I think actually they got it from the Jewish dedication of the Temple, but certainly they did adopt the winter solstice festival which was held in the north and called “Yule.” They do, on the other hand, very carefully put the death and resurrection of Christ against the Jewish Passover, so that coincidence was clearly important to them. There were disputes between the Eastern and Western churches and then later between the Roman and Irish churches about what the proper date for Easter was, and it finally settled on the Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox, I think it is. Harris: When did they decide that they would follow the moon? Frye: I remember that there were early Christians who had been brought up Jews who wanted Easter to be celebrated on the fourteenth or the fifteenth of the month to correspond to the Passover, and there were others who were more anxious to get the day of the Crucifixion on a Friday, and the day of the Resurrection on a Sunday. They were the ones that won out. And then there was a later dispute between a fixed Easter and a movable Easter; the Roman movable Easter won out because the Roman organization was stronger; it would have been much more sensible to have had a fixed Easter. What happens on Easter Sunday is so closely connected with Good Friday that it’s much more difficult to sentimentalize, whereas Christmas (which has never been a fully Christian festival anyway) has simply reverted to its normal pagan origins. Harris: What were they going through at that time? Frye: Well, most Mediterranean countries observed some kind of festival of death and rebirth in the spring. It was usually connected with a mother-goddess, who had a rather different relationship to the dying god than the Virgin Mary has to Christ; still, there is an analogy. What they were concerned with above all was to provide the sense of continuity in time: that life might disappear but new life would come. That was

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their particular anxiety. And that of course makes it quite different from Christianity, because rebirth and resurrection are not at all the same thing. Rebirth is the return of life in time, and resurrection is the lifting from one plane of existence to another. Harris: What about the kinds of symbols that surround Easter? Frye: Easter, like Christmas, contains a number of what for lack of a better term you might call pagan elements, rebirth elements—all the sort of bunnies-and-eggs aspect of Easter belongs to that. That is, the renewal of life brings the prolific rabbit too. The Christian theme of it is the dramatic pattern of the God who dies, who then disappears, and during his disappearance is torn to pieces and disappears into the bodies of his worshippers—as in T.S. Eliot’s Gerontion—and the third day rises with the body in a new phase of existence. The story of the death and the rebirth of the God is of course connected with the death and rebirth of vegetation, so it’s not unnatural that a central symbol should be a dead tree which becomes the tree of life. That is a very ancient element in it; I think it was in the Egyptian ritual of setting up a wooden pillar. Things like the maypole are survivals of it too, in medieval England. The Last Supper feast is a very important one, certainly, and it’s introduced in the New Testament; the earliest, and the clearest and simplest description of it is in Paul. He speaks of it as instituting the period of history in which Christ is eaten and drunk by his worshippers, in the bread and the wine which are the body and blood. That becomes in its turn a prototype of the consummation of all things, the final harvest and vintage in the book of Revelation. [Warren Davis reads Revelation 14–20, a vision of the reaping of the earth and casting of it into the great winepress of the wrath of God.] Harris: Why is it necessary to eat and drink the blood? Frye: Originally, you have a central figure in the community who is regarded as sacred, that is, who is regarded as a god-man. If his strength fails, then obviously he’s dangerous and he has to be put to death, but there’s no sense letting all that strength go to waste. And so, for the primitive mentality, the way to acquire it is to eat it. The need for betrayal is connected with the fact that the moral significance of Christ’s life is not his sinlessness or moral perfection, but the fact that he was the one man in history that nobody could stand, that

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everybody agreed had to be got rid of. The figure of the betrayer turns up accordingly. The traitor and the thirty pieces of silver [Matthew 26:15, 27:9] come from one of the Old Testament prophets, Zechariah [11:12–13]; you don’t really need a betrayer in the sense of somebody to tell the Romans where he was, because as he says before Pilate, “in secret have I said nothing” [John 18:20]. He never at any time tried to conceal himself—he didn’t need to be betrayed in that sense. Harris: What was Judas’s function? Frye: Judas’s function is to stand for the human race, all of whom have betrayed Christ. Harris: That’s a very violent image. Frye: Well, yes. But until that violent image—that everybody is a murderer and a traitor—is an image confronting one, it’s rather difficult to think seriously about the Passion story. There are two patterns in the life of Christ: there’s a pattern in which he descends from the sky to the earth, and then goes back to the sky in the Ascension; then there’s the other one, in the three-day rhythm, where he disappears from the surface of the ground to the underworld and then comes back in the Resurrection. And the Resurrection is certainly pretty important to the Gospels, but the rest of the story is extraBiblical. It comes in later with an apocryphal work called the Gospel of Nicodemus.1 There are only a few hints of the descent into hell in the New Testament, and those only from the latest and most dubious books.2 The accounts of the life of Jesus in the Gospels are put into the form which makes Christ the history of Israel in an individual form: a people chosen for a certain purpose, who go into exile and bondage, and then are restored at the end. And the period of exile and bondage, which in the second part of Isaiah is personified as the suffering servant [chap. 53], is identified by Christianity with the suffering of Christ. Parallels in the Resurrection are largely with the references in the Old Testament, in some of the Psalms, for example. There’s one passage which is an aria in Handel’s Messiah, where the Psalmist says that God will not permit his Holy One to see corruption [49:9]. The implication that the chosen servant of God may die, but even in death he is restored to life, is one of the things that the penitential Psalms are all about. In the relating of the New Testament story to the Old Testament, there

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is a very early Christian hymn, by Venantius Fortunatus in the sixth century I think, where he speaks of the Resurrection as the deliverance of Israel from the army of Pharaoh on the Red Sea.3 That means that one of the Old Testament prototypes of the Resurrection is the deliverance of Israel from a sea in which the Egyptians are drowned. That connects again with the story of St. George and the dragon, where the dragon in the Christian myth is death and hell; for the hero to kill him, he has to enter the place where the dragon is. In other words he has to go down his throat and into his belly, as Jonah does. Then the deliverance of his people is from a world which is symbolically under water. That’s one reason why there’s so much about fishing in the Gospels. Harris: How have writers used it—specifically the earlier writers? Frye: When they first dramatized the story, they were particularly interested in the descent to hell and the harrowing of hell. That, as I say, is not very clearly set out in the New Testament; it comes mainly from the later work. But some of the most vivid and striking scenes in the medieval plays are of Christ’s battering down the door, which is also the open mouth of the monster, and going in: the hero by himself, in solitude, contending with a whole army of darkness and then coming out again with the body of his redeemed people behind him. That was the dramatic element that the medieval playwrights fastened on. Harris: Sounds very psychological, the fact that we obviously need this event in our lives. Frye: Psychologists have thought a good deal about the psychological meaning of this descent myth. I think it’s important that in the medieval myth of the harrowing of hell, apart from John the Baptist (who has a special place), the first people to be redeemed from the lower world are Adam and Eve, in other words father and mother. This descent to the lower world in quest of one’s parents, and then the return from there, is something which is I suppose reduplicated in almost every psychological analysis. At least there’s an attempt at it. Wallace Stevens says, “On Easter, the great ghost of what we call the next world invades and vivifies this present world, so that Easter seems like a day of two lights: one the sunlight of the bare and physical end of winter, the other the double light.”4 I think it goes back to what I said earlier, that resurrection is really the opposite of rebirth. Continuity in time is all very well, and so is the promise of new life, but of course all

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the eggs and the bunnies, just as the ecologists tell us, mean more pollution. What one needs, I think, is rather a dialectical sense of the heave from one world to another: from the world of time to a world which has entered time but is not in time—is not imprisoned in time. It’s the whole paradox of the power which is above time, which has entered time but has refused to be imprisoned with us in time and which therefore has to go back again, has to disappear from us, and yet at the same time it’s still here with us. It’s a paradox in which the “here” and the “there” are the same place, and the same thing. I think that naturally when one is faced with something which has a pretty powerful imaginative force, one wants to explain it. The fact that you’re confronted with something which completely transcends explanation doesn’t mean that you have to be uncritical or make a sacrifice of the intellect to understand it. It merely marks the limits of a certain kind of mental process. To understand the meaning behind a story is fundamentally wrong; in other words, the way to understand the meaning of a story is to listen to the story. We’re accustomed to think of words as describing things, as describing bodies or phenomena or processes out there. Every once in a while we begin to realize that the descriptive capacity of words is really very limited—that that’s only a secondary and subordinate thing that words can do. What words primarily exist to do is to express metaphors and build up myths. Those are the things that are true because they are impossible to understand. What is terrifying about Easter is the fact that the existentialists say that consciousness is primarily consciousness of death, and that in Easter what we’re conscious of is renewed life, yet that goes along with the feeling that renewed life is just an extension of death.

30 Impressions Broadcast 2 September 1973

From the CBC tape, reference no. 730902-2, transcribed by Margaret Burgess. This is the soundtrack of a discussion broadcast on CBC’s television network on 2 September 1973. The interviewer is Canadian historian and professor Ramsay Cook.

Cook: I believe that you’re an ordained minister, isn’t that so? Frye: That’s true, yes. Cook: Did you in fact take a charge in the early part of your life? Frye: No. I had a mission field in Saskatchewan one summer, that was all.1 Cook: And then you went back to your studies? Frye: Yes. Cook: And you’ve taught in a church-affiliated college all your life. Yet you teach the Bible as a form of literature. Is that something which has easily been accepted in a church-affiliated college, your treating a sacred document as though it was simply a piece of literature? Frye: Well, the college never thought anything of it, and neither has the United Church. Sometimes the students give me quite an argument. Cook: Professor Frye, you’ve been associated with Victoria College at the University of Toronto for a very long time. You began there as a student, I believe?

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Frye: Yes, I did. Cook: You must have seen very considerable changes at both the university and the college over those years. Frye: Oh, very considerable changes, although I think one is also impressed by the continuity of the university—how it can start out as a small Methodist college and end as an international university and still be the same place, really. Cook: You think it’s the same place in the sense of the kind of education the students get? Frye: The kind of education they get and the type of student seem to me to be remarkably uniform over the years. Cook: Are these mainly students from the Toronto area or some particular part of Toronto or Ontario? Frye: Victoria has become mainly a metropolitan university, yes. I think the year that I was in as an undergraduate was about the last one that had a majority from outside Toronto. And of course that did make a considerable change in the student ethos because it used to be that coming to Toronto was part of the education. Cook: You yourself were no exception to the rule of coming to Toronto. You came from quite a distance to go to Victoria. Frye: I came from the Maritimes, yes. Cook: What attracted you to Toronto? Was it some family relationship or the university’s reputation? Frye: Partly family and partly church. It was the United Church college. That was my own connection: my grandfather had attended Victoria in the old Cobourg days.2 I had not been born in the Maritimes and consequently I didn’t feel that I was altogether a Maritimer. Cook: But you came from Moncton? Frye: Yes. Cook: Which was a society then of what, half French and half English? Frye: About half and half, yes, I would say. Cook: Were you very conscious of this division in Moncton society?

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Frye: Well, I described it in one piece of writing I did as a kind of amiable apartheid,3 and naturally I wouldn’t use a word like apartheid to describe anything that I approved of. But if one has to have it then there are degrees of it. The kind that there was in Moncton was one of the better kinds because the difference was in both language and religion, which meant that the two groups of children went to different schools and simply didn’t get much in contact with each other. Cook: So you never met many French Canadian children or played with them much in your childhood? Frye: Not much. There were some, but there again, you see, the two groups tended to live in different parts of the city. Cook: You came up to the University of Toronto with the intention of going into the ministry, is that so, or did you have any clear intention? Frye: I had that intention, yes. I was a church student all through arts. Cook: And then you went on into theology, but at the end of theology you turned your attention to literature? Frye: Yes, I knew by that time something that I didn’t know when I began the university course: that I loved to teach English. Cook: Obviously that was because of your own developing interest, but were there particular teachers who influenced you in this direction? Frye: They didn’t influence me in that particular direction but they certainly influenced me. There was Pelham Edgar, to whom I dedicated my first book, and Pelham had an extraordinary way of indicating somehow or other in a way that you couldn’t ever pin down that the life of a scholar was somehow a very good life. And then there was Ned Pratt, who was writing his poetry at that time. He was right in mid-career. And there was John Robins, who came from working-class origins and was interested in popular literature and the ballad, and I think that that was an aspect of my literary education that was pretty essential. Cook: Well, those teachers are very interesting people. In these days in the 1970s some people are going around claiming that Canadian literature is just being discovered. Yet you mention Pelham Edgar and E.J. Pratt: obviously those two people, and I think Professor Robins as well, had a great interest in Canadian literature.

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Frye: Well, it was one of the things that you did if you were somebody of Pelham’s stature. You wrote an article every so often asking whether there was a Canadian literature, and the answer was always yes. Pelham was writing articles like that in Saturday Night back in the 1890s. Cook: Pratt was obviously a great poet. Was he also interested in the academic life? Frye: Yes, he was. He was not, I would say, a particularly great teacher. His interest in the actual subject that he taught varied a great deal: that is, he had some very strong preferences and some very strong dislikes. The Toronto curriculum was pretty rigid and he had to teach a lot of poets he didn’t like and he didn’t teach them too well. But when he got on to something like the Romantics or Shakespeare he could be a very inspiring teacher, and his personal interest was something else again. Cook: I take it that he had the sense of responsibility that teachers at Victoria seem always to have toward the students outside of the classroom as well as inside. Frye: Oh yes, immense. Cook: Did he work with people who were interested in creative writing? Frye: Yes, he did. His standards when it came to judging poetry were pretty rigorous. I remember I got him when I was editor of Acta Victoriana to judge the poetry contest. He put his finger on one poem and he said, “Well, that’s not bad, it has some feeling, but well, well, damn it, it isn’t worth money.” Cook: [laughs] Well, after your period at Victoria College, I’ve noticed that you don’t have what most of us modern professors have, a Ph.D. You didn’t do graduate work like the rest of us, is that so? Frye: I was almost the last member of a generation for whom Canada was still sufficiently Anglophile that not to have a Ph.D. was almost a status symbol. That is, when I got through theology I knew that I wanted to teach English literature, so I went to Oxford and read the undergraduate school there.4 That was what Oxford wanted everybody to do anyway because they hated graduate work. Cook: So that you then came back from Oxford to go into a teaching career?

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Frye: Yes. Cook: Now, all of this time of your early education was, I take it, during the Depression, is that so? Frye: Oh yes, very much so. I came to college in the fall of ’29. The stock market crashed a month later. Cook: Life must have been pretty difficult for students in those days. Did you have financial backing that made it possible for you to go on through university? Frye: I had no financial backing but I collected enough scholarships to keep going. I did odd things, like a job in the library in the summertime pasting labels into books, $15 a week, and living on 65 cents a day for food, that kind of thing. One could do that. Cook: Sixty-five cents a day? Frye: Yes. It was a pretty close figure anyway. Cook: You must have eaten rather well [laughs]. And so you began as a lecturer at Victoria College, and between then and now you’ve acquired a very substantial, to put it mildly, international reputation. But you’ve always stayed at Victoria College: you’re obviously terribly devoted to the place. Frye: Oh yes. Cook: Do you feel, when you go to other places as a visiting professor, something of a foreigner? Frye: I wouldn’t say a foreigner. I think that the academic world is sufficiently a unity that you feel like a citizen of it wherever you are. But every once in a while, teaching in the United States as I have done from time to time, I do suddenly have the feeling that I’m in a foreign country and I don’t quite know what my next move is. But that feeling is rather rare. It’s rather that, well, Victoria took a chance on me when I was nobody and it left me alone while I thought out five different versions of a very long and complicated book [FS]. Cook: Well, Professor Frye, you’ve developed a view of literature which, if I understand it correctly, is a view of literature as an autonomous body of thought which can be examined in some sense scientifically. Is that a fair way of putting it?

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Frye: It’s an autonomous body of imagination and I think that it can be studied by criticism in a way which is relatively free of presuppositions and prejudices and values. I think that literature as a whole forms a total imaginative structure. Cook: And you examine the structure according to a group of what you call myths, is that right? Frye: Yes. Myth comes from the word mythos, which means a narrative or a plot, and myths are essentially a group of stories, a group of plots or narratives. Cook: And there are a limited number of these, or an unlimited number of them? Frye: There’s a limited number of them. Cook: So you would argue that all literatures fit into these categories, if I may call them that? Frye: Well, all literature keeps on using the same formulas over and over again. Cook: Consciously on the part of the artist, or . . . ? Frye: Well, it’s rather better if it’s not too conscious on the part of the artist. I’m looking now at romance, for example, which begins in late Classical times. Wherever you go it’s always by shipwreck, and the heroine’s virginity is always being threatened, but she always wins through somehow or other. If you read science fiction it’s a spaceship wrecked in a different kind of hostile territory but the storyteller’s tactics are exactly the same. Cook: Do you think that Canadian literature is an autonomous literature or is it simply a branch of English literature as it’s understood in Great Britain and, say, the United States? Frye: Well, all literatures are a branch of world literature really, and I don’t know that Canadian literature is any more one than British or American literature. It’s bound to reflect the modes and the techniques that are in vogue in the bigger centres and the bigger markets, but I wouldn’t say that it’s a colonial literature by any means. I think it has its own independence.

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Cook: You have said in the past, I think, that Canada is a colonial society and that its literature reflects this, but you don’t believe that any longer? Or am I misrepresenting you? Frye: It seems to me that I said that about thirty years ago when it was true.5 I don’t think I would say it now because I don’t think it’s nearly so true. Cook: Some people these days, I suppose, would argue that it’s still a colonial literature because of its immersion in international or American standards, but you see things which are independent and autonomous in not quite the sense of the term you were using earlier—in other words, it is a national literature? Frye: Well, yes, there is a literature of this country. I jib a little at the word “national” because I think that what is real for poets is an environment rather than a nation. Cook: Actually, I think that you have argued in recent times that the whole question of culture and literature and identity is one which is separate from national unity and nationalism. Is that right? Frye: Yes, I think it is. I have said that a country as big and as heterogeneous as Canada is bound to be a collection of rather separate cultures, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.6 I think it’s a very good thing. I would want British Columbian literature to be different from Maritime literature. Cook: But do these literatures of British Columbia and the Maritimes and Quebec and Ontario have something in common that makes them not just regional but also Canadian? Frye: I think that they do, but it would be very difficult to pinpoint because I don’t think that there are any essences in these matters that one can get hold of. I don’t think there’s anything you can put your finger on and say, “That is Canadian and you wouldn’t find it anywhere else,” because you know you would. Cook: Well, there is one argument which you know very well since it’s presented by one of your students, Peggy Atwood: that Canadian literature is obsessed with a concern about survival.7 That’s what makes it unique. Does that seem to you to fit the case for Canadian literature?

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Frye: That’s a very interesting thesis of Margaret Atwood’s, and there’s a great deal that could be quoted and which she does quote in support of it. I think it’s relatively easy to account for in view of the weather we get in this country and the kind of rather sparse population it’s had, where one is thrown back on the primacy of survival. The thing is that it’s a rather reflective attitude to survival. If you get a really primitive culture where the question of survival is imminent from day to day—as with the Eskimos—you find that poetry is one of the fundamental needs, whereas Canada has been kidding itself for the last hundred years that literature doesn’t have that high a priority. Cook: So that you would have the sense that perhaps not all of our literature can be fitted into that theme of survival and victim and so on? Frye: I shouldn’t think so, and I shouldn’t think that Miss Atwood would claim that it could. I think that she is highlighting what does belong in that thesis very well. Cook: What would make a poem Canadian? Would it be the kind of environment that was described? If it was full of pine trees, as the paintings of the Group of Seven are, would that make it Canadian? Frye: No, and neither do pine trees in the Group of Seven. That is, the question of content, of what is in the work, I don’t think affects its quality. You’re not being Australian if you write a story about a boomerang and a kangaroo, and you’re not being Canadian if you write about a Mountie and a beaver. That, of course, is a great fallacy in literary criticism. Nevertheless, a person looking around him will get an imaginative response from that environment that he wouldn’t have got in another environment. Cook: In one of your books, the book in which you wrote about the nature of modern society, The Modern Century, you talked about the emergence of a postnational consciousness [17; NFMC, 7–8]. What do you mean exactly by postnational—a sense of belonging to the community of mankind? Frye: I think so. I think that the sense of belonging to that community is very strong. The kind of feeling one had in the summer of 1969 when that first team landed on the moon was surely a much deeper kind of feeling than anything that nationalism could churn up. Cook: So that you would feel that—despite the continued existence of

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national boundaries, national sovereignty, and so on—at least in the developed world, people live pretty much according to the same value systems in the late twentieth century? Frye: I would think so, yes. Cook: Is this a function of modern technology? Frye: Technology helps to unify the world, certainly. If you take off in a jet plane you can’t expect a completely different world where that plane is going to land. Cook: Well, it seems to me that one of the aspects of modern nationalism is precisely a rejection of the modern technological world, of what Professor George Grant calls the homogenizing aspect of the modern technological world,8 and that many societies, including Canada, are reacting very strongly against that. As I read Professor Grant, he seems to me to argue that the struggle is useless, that it’s inevitable that we become a homogenized world. Is that implicit in what you’re saying about the postnational culture as well? Frye: No, I’m saying that there are really different kinds of reactions. In things like economics and technology the powerful currents are making for unity and homogenization. I don’t think that that’s too bad a thing, because the only alternative to a reliable jet plane is an unreliable one. But when it comes to culture, the imagination, literature, painting, music, the intensity of one’s sense experience of one’s immediate environment is what counts. I mean, the more lively your sense experience is, the more alive you are, but your senses take in a locale, they don’t take in a whole world. Cook: Well, in a country as disparate and different as Canada is with so many regions, if literatures are regional—this is not, obviously, a question that a literary critic like yourself necessarily has an answer to—what then is to hold a country together if it doesn’t have some kind of cultural consciousness? Frye: What I’ve been speaking about is very largely perception in space, perception of the environment about one, but of course man is a historical being as well. He thinks in time, and historically we’ve had things that have unified us. In that dimension and in that perspective there is a complementary sense of unity.

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Cook: Do you feel that—if we may move on to a somewhat different subject—do you feel that the university teacher, as you have been all of your life, has a special obligation to involve himself in contemporary issues? Or does he have a special obligation to stay out of contemporary issues? Frye: Well, if he’s a university professor he has a responsibility to teach, and to teach means showing the student the necessity of commitment without pushing him. Cook: In the modern contemporary university we have had a great many developments. Our students and some members of our staff have argued that in fact the university has to be more relevant, that we have to teach subjects which have an application to society. Frye: My opinion of that argument is something that would involve some mechanical interference with this program. [laughter] I think that relevance is something which the student has to establish for himself, whatever he studies. If he can’t do that he isn’t worthy of the very impressive and dignified title of student. Cook: In other words, the study of Greek philosophy can be as relevant, or perhaps more relevant, than the study of the problems of the lower ward of Toronto? Frye: Of course it is. When England was sending out people to run India in the nineteenth century it gave them a totally irrelevant education in Classics. That meant that when they got to India they had some acquaintance with a totally alien language and method of thought. I don’t think it was too bad a training. Cook: In the last ten years Canadian universities, like universities elsewhere, have had some quite difficult times. You were in an especially good position to observe them because you were the principal of Victoria College throughout a large part of the 1960s. Did you find the move from the lectern to the principal’s office a difficult one? Frye: I did in a way and yet, of course, my job was not so completely administrative that it involved a total change in work habits. I had too many commitments to write anyway. I had to shuffle a great deal more paper but I think that I was still living and working in a university community. I still was teaching some.

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Cook: Do you still teach undergraduates? Frye: Oh yes. Cook: Is that a pleasant part of your teaching career? Frye: Oh yes. I can only reconcile myself to graduate teaching by treating them exactly like undergraduates. Cook: So that you haven’t allowed yourself, even when you were principal of a college, to fall into the category of the airport professor who is constantly absent? Frye: Well, I spent a lot of my time sitting around in airports, it’s true, but I think again it’s difficult to know just what aspects of one’s job have priority. Cook: I wonder if I could ask you, Professor Frye, what you’re working at these days? Frye: I finally realized that the thing I’ve been circling around all my life is something I’ve got to face now, and that is a book on the Bible, which is the structure of imagery in English poetry and provided the structure of the mythological framework of English poetry. So it’s really the Bible and English literature. Cook: Does this take you back to your theological training? Frye: It does up to a point, although my own interests have always been mythological rather than theological. I’m more interested in what brings religions together than in what divides them. Cook: You mean the different religions of the world? Frye: Yes. That is, the religions of the world differ from one another very markedly in their theology and their conceptions, but mythologically they’re all very much alike. Cook: We talked a few moments ago about the decline of Classical education. I suppose we could talk also about the decline of Christianity. Has that decline of Biblical knowledge had a marked impact on contemporary literature? Frye: One would think that it had, yet it’s had far less than one would expect. I notice, for example, that the ballad singers, the folk song people,

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are much freer and more uninhibited in their use of Biblical imagery than anybody would ever have thought. And of course some of them have come out of quite solid religious backgrounds, like Leonard Cohen. Cook: Do you have a sense among students these days that there’s a new interest in religious questions? Frye: Oh, very much, yes, yes. Cook: Do you have any conjecture about why that’s so? Frye: I think students are serious people and they realize that this is a serious matter. The demand for relevance was silly in a lot of the forms that it was expressed, but they do know that some things are pretty important to them existentially as human beings and that religion might very well prove to be one of them. Cook: I believe that you have quite regularly taught a course on the Bible as literature. Frye: Yes, I’ve taught it for about twenty-five years. Cook: And this is a course which has been consistently interesting to students? Frye: It seems to have been, yes. Cook: Is that because it’s interesting as literature, or is it because of a search for some kind of personal explanation of life? Frye: Well, for a lot of reasons. I think they were fascinated to see how the study of the Bible pulled all their literary experience together, but they also were interested in it simply as a means of articulating some of their own feelings. I began it as a course for literature people, but then I found that people in the social and physical sciences were just as interested in it and did just as well in it.

31 CRTC Hearings Recorded February 1974

From audiotapes in the CBC Radio Archives, CBC reference nos. 740218-2, 740220-1, 740222-4, 750825, transcribed by Monika Lee. These were news reports giving highlights of the day’s proceedings at a special inquiry of the CRTC into the CBC. On the occasion of the CBC’s application for a five-year renewal of its broadcasting licences, the CRTC had instituted a five-day inquiry into its nature, role, and performance. The emphasis was on CBC English television, which had been threatened by the growth of cable TV and had yet to forge a distinct identity. The commission received 304 briefs with suggestions for reform.

18 February 1974 [The announcer states that the questioning of CBC executives had continued throughout the afternoon. He notes that CRTC commission member Northrop Frye was unhappy with the three-model theory unveiled by CBC president Laurent Picard, which was an oversimplification of the make-up of society and its wants.] Frye: I have been wondering about the conception of Canadian society that seemed to be implied in your report this morning, Mr. Picard. I’m rather unhappy about statistics which show that the CBC is better at concentration and the CTV better at distraction. It seems to me so obvious that to be educational and to be entertaining are aspects of a good program—they are not categories of programs. I feel unhappy when I discover that there are three pure models available: a wholly commercial mass appeal, a different Canadian mass appeal, and a different Canadian specialized minority appeal. I wonder if you’re not working with a

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rather antiquated conception of Canadian society, in which there’s a small group of rather grim highbrows, who want stories about heroes who always fail or want others to fail, and another group who want something exactly the opposite. The reason why I say this is that I’ve been reading these briefs until my head swam and however much one may disagree with them, I’ve been deeply impressed by the amount of goodwill and intellectual honesty behind even the most sharply critical ones. I just wonder if you haven’t really got a single homogeneous, remarkably intelligent clientele in the people of Canada, rather than a number of groups of mutually exclusive interests. [Picard says that, while entertainment and education need not and should not necessarily be separated, people do perceive the CBC as more educational and CTV as more entertaining. This should not be taken as a policy statement, but it is a fact established by factor analysis.] 20 February 1974 [The announcer comments on the brief of the Toronto-based Committee on Television, which included such public figures as Robert Fulford, editor of Saturday Night, and Abe Rotstein, former managing editor of the Canadian Forum. The brief recommended that the CBC be divided into two parts, one providing plant and facilities, the other producing programs. Frye was not totally convinced.] Frye: We seem to keep coming back to some kind of gigantic amoeba in the middle of the CBC. That is, a large coagulated mass of primitive life, which seems to be blocking every kind of creative endeavour. How is a separation of software from hardware going to help that? Surely, if you split an amoeba, what you get is two amoebas. [audience laughter] I certainly don’t need to remind Mr. Rotstein, of all people in Canada, that the expectation that when a state is revolutionized, it withers away, has proved illusory. [Rotstein defends the proposed division as providing more freedom for the creative artists in the CBC.] 22 February 1974 [The announcer notes that there were several briefs regarding broadcasting in

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French and other languages, and that Frye discussed this with Picard and CRTC chairman Pierre Juneau.] Frye: The commission has had two briefs presented to it at this hearing and it has also received several others from other ethnical groups representing other interests in language. Therefore, it seems an obvious question to ask whether the CBC considers it part of its mandate to enter into these questions of other languages. I don’t think we’re unaware of the immense difficulties involved, but in view of the strength of these representations and their articulateness, the question does have to be aired.

32 Canadian Voices Conducted Spring 1975

From Canada Today/D’Aujourd’hui, 7 (January–February 1976): 3–4. Canada Today was an eight-page brochure put out by the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., for an American readership. The issue Canadian Voices was a humorous look at the Canadian psyche and its relation to the United States through quotations from well-known Canadians such as Frye, Mordecai Richler, and Mel Hurtig. In introducing Frye’s section, the editors commented that “in an interview last spring, he talked about a variety of things and, most particularly, about the ways in which Canadians and Americans are not alike.” The interview took place while Frye was living in the United States; he spent the academic year of 1974–75 at Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. The italicized headings presumably represent topics introduced by the unnamed interviewer.

Points Of Difference Every once in a while [a Canadian in the U.S.] realizes he is in a foreign country. When I was first faced with the question, I thought: my religious affinities at the moment are the United Church of Canada, and my political affinities at the moment are CCF.1 These were two categories I could never translate into American terms. The boundary has a reality in the Canadian mind of which the American has no conception. In Canada you hear the phrase “across the line” to describe America. I’ve never heard an American say, “across the line.” I think the greatest source of misunderstanding by Americans is the assumption that the two countries are essentially the same—that there have not been enough differences in historical cultural development to

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make Canadians a separate people. The two countries have had different rhythms of aggressiveness. There has been a great deal of aggressive violence in American history, whereas the violence in Canadian history has been imposed from the top—the military conquest of French Canada, the Western police. In Canada, it has never taken the form of the elimination of dissident elements. Canada has managed to avoid things like Indian wars. The United States became articulate in the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, and it’s had a fixation on the eighteenth century ever since. The Constitution begins by saying, “We hold these facts to be selfevident.” Canada is a country where nothing has been self-evident and it didn’t have an eighteenth century at all. The English and the French spent the eighteenth century battering down each other’s forts. Canada took shape in the Baroque, aggressive seventeenth century and took new shape in the Romantic, aggressive nineteenth. I often run into people from the U.S. who come to Canada and who haven’t the remotest notion of the kind of unconscious arrogance they have as people among colonials. I have often said Canada is the only real colony left in the world. It is now an American colony. The Young American students are much more frank in talking about their personal problems. Americans also ask me about my own personal views or beliefs—political or religious beliefs—much more freely. Canadians are much shyer and more reserved. I have a great affection for American students, but young people who have been conditioned from infancy as citizens of a great world power are not the same people as young Canadians. Population I think that people think in terms of empty space in Canada, but the empty space is not so easy to fill up. The people who come to Canada mostly head for Montreal and Toronto. The increase in population is going to be substantially in the very places that don’t need it. The whole fantasy about the great open spaces—that there ought to be a hundred million people here—just doesn’t fit the facts of twentieth century life. Even if we got fifty million, the U.S. would have five hundred million. Canada will always be a small country.

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The conception of Canada as a country of ironies—for example, Margaret Atwood’s concept of the loser as hero—does identify a certain quality of Canadian writing that is worth looking at. Mackenzie King was a loser, but he was the incarnation of the kind of compromise that you have to keep making to hold the country together . . . If Canada had not been able to compromise, it would never have been Canada. The Significance of Technology Two things, the airplane and television, are beginning to make sense of the country. Now it is possible for Canadians to become simultaneously conscious of the rest of the country in a way that was never possible before. It makes for a considerable quieting down of the separatism which has been such an active movement in every part of the country. Economic Domination I suppose that almost every industry in Canada is a subsidiary of an American industry, so that the great masses of the working population are in effect American employees. I don’t suppose there is a great difference in working in a refinery in Canada or one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But I think the higher up you go, the more you are aware that the real orders come from somewhere else, and there comes a point at which that becomes very oppressive. Nationalism I have much more sympathy with economic nationalism than I have with cultural nationalism, which seems to be a substitute activity. I don’t think the Canadian writer is threatened; that’s why I think the question of cultural domination is partly phony. It’s a matter of understanding the potential of your own environment. The Canadian Radio-Television Commission I sat on the CRTC for some years, and the CRTC is really putting up a very gallant fight to keep control of our communication systems, so

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they won’t become just a branch of NBC and CBS. You know when all the magazine business, all the book business, all the movie business, and so forth have already been sold, it’s a pretty desperate, last ditch struggle.

33 Sacred and Secular Scriptures Conducted late April 1975

From “A Conversation with Northrop Frye, Literary Critic,” Harvard Magazine, 77 (July–August 1975): 52–6. Reprinted in OE, 206–11. This interview must have been conducted towards the end of Frye’s academic year of 1974–75 at Harvard. His visit culminated with the delivery on 7–24 April of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, subsequently published as The Secular Scripture; he returned to Toronto 30 April. Interviewer Justin Kaplan, sometime visiting professor at Harvard and award-winning biographer, prefaced the interview with a brief summary of Frye’s career, in the course of which he noted that Frye, “a mild-mannered and modest man,” was “a dazzling public lecturer” and, “judging from the enthusiasm with which his Norton Lectures were greeted, a contemporary culture hero.”

Frye: I am preoccupied at the moment with a very large and complicated book on the Bible and the way in which the Bible set up the mythological framework within which Western culture operated for many centuries. Kaplan: And continues to operate? Frye: I think it does. There is hardly anything else with which to work. There is in secular literature—more particularly what I call romance—a curious kind of shadow effect. I have been looking at romance as consisting of a number of themes or narrative units, which make up the same kind of legend of the universe that religion also has, and which has certain recurring themes and images. Every society has a body of stories that it regards as more important than others, and particularly important in explaining that society’s cus-

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toms and rituals and social structure. These stories become myths, as I call them, and they form the kernel of the kind of thing that the Bible is in Western culture. I’m trying to show that the traditional way of reading the Bible as a book with a beginning, middle, and end is the right way. Despite all the appearance of a hodgepodge that it presents when you open it, the Bible is actually a pretty well unified book. What unifies it is not doctrine and not history, but a certain narrative outline that runs from creation to apocalypse. There are also a number of other stories that have been recounted for entertainment. These become what I call fables, and they are the ancestor of romance. Kaplan: Fable being of a somewhat smaller order of magnitude than myth? Frye: It’s a matter of social function. Myth and fable are the same structurally; they can tell the same kind of story. However, in social function and in authority, myth is higher in social acceptance, as a rule. Thus, myth is what defines culture; it takes root in a specific culture. It’s the Bible that makes Hebrew culture; it’s Homer that makes Greek culture; and so on. Then, as a culture develops, the folk tales and the fables that have been circulating around the world nomadically also begin to take root and contribute to the heritage of allusion, so that you get Dante and Milton writing in the Biblical area and Shakespeare and Chaucer in the romance area. The theme of the Edenic paradise, the fall of man, and so forth, is central in American literature just because it is central in all Western literature. I can certainly see that many stories about the American West, for example, are a development of the pastoral convention, and I don’t have any difficulty with the theses of books like R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam or Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden.1 These all make quite good sense really. But I think it might be found that there are other aspects of mythology that are also important in American literature. There is a great deal in Melville’s books, for instance, that has much more to do with the tower of Babel and that kind of thing. Kaplan: Since we recognize a decline in our sense of community, Babel may be more to the point now than Eden. Frye: I don’t know. In technology you get a continually increasing speed, and an increase in speed means an increase in introversion and a breaking down of personal relationships. But one of the things that attracts me

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about romance is its pastoral, Arcadian atmosphere. You find yourself in a world greatly reduced in numbers, where the emphasis is on the individual, the handful of shepherds, the pairs of lovers, and so on. Something of Adam and Eve wandering in the garden of Eden comes back when you begin to think of that pastoral kind of human ideal. Kaplan: The extraordinary reception you’ve been having here—does this suggest to you any comparisons or contrasts with Canada? Frye: I think there is a certain difference in temperament, which is more the result of social conditioning than of anything inborn. Canadian students are not conditioned from infancy to be members of a great imperial power. They belong to a small, observant country on the sidelines of history. I find that responses are more personal and more direct in the United States as a rule. I have been very fortunate in the particular generation I came to teach. If I had come here in 1968 or 1969, my reception would have been very different, I imagine. There is now much more of a sense of the genuineness of history and of tradition. A country, like an individual, is senile if it has no memory. While there is a great deal of self-contempt of a kind that rather distresses me about the attitude of this country, say, to the Bicentennial [of the United States], there is nevertheless a basis of pretty solid and serious feeling on the part of the students I meet. Still, there is something about American attitudes toward the eighteenth century that has always puzzled me. The Bicentennial is seen not as a celebration of 1975—it is a celebration of 1775. The United States achieved its identity in the Age of Enlightenment and seems to have been revolving ever since around the kind of mentality that produced Jefferson and Franklin. I don’t say that that is a bad thing. It merely strikes me as curious, coming as I do from a country that had no eighteenth century. Kaplan: In that same century Dr. Johnson was referring rather confidently to literary allusion in general as the parole of learned men, a lingua franca.2 Very few people speak this language any longer. Frye: It is certainly a declining market, I believe as a result of the ignorance and incompetence of professional educators. I would use an even stronger word than incompetence—what has been called le trahison des clercs, a betrayal.3 One reason I have so little difficulty with students is that they know they have been cheated. They are very serious people, and they rise to a

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challenge. There is also a strong self-preservative instinct in the human mind that makes them pick up the things they have been cheated of. If teachers are too dumb, too incompetent, to give their students some kind of coherent historical organization in their teaching, the students will pick it up themselves. The cheating begins when a teacher avoids his essential job. There is a certain body of what you might call initiatory education—that is, a certain objective body of information, knowledge, and facts that you need in order to participate in a society as complex as this. To refuse to give that to students is to cheat them. Education is a long, repetitive thing. I went through all the hysteria of the late ’60s, when there was a great vogue for teach-ins and importing people at immense expense from other countries to come talk to students. Great enthusiasm was generated. What I said at the time was that these things were entertaining, and they were even quite useful, but they were not educational. Education is in the repetitive process—it is something that has to go on and on and on. Things should break into the continuum from time to time, but the continuum is the education. Students want to make up for the time that they know they have lost. This is a recent development, but it is a very much saner and better proportioned development than that utterly indiscriminate rejection of traditional authority, which I think had something schizoid about it, in the Age of Hysteria. Kaplan: An age that has ended? Frye: I suppose it ended around 1971, perhaps around the time of the closing down of the Vietnam war, although I don’t think that that was really the central thing about it. It ended with the collapse of prosperity, with the cutting down of the military commitment. A lot of it had to do with the physical impact of the television screen. The containing of television is something that is a feature of our lives now—keeping it under control, keeping it as a subordinate element of our cultural life. Television has driven many people back to the book, and that is a symptom of the fact that the human race is still motivated by self-preservation. I think university students will be driven back to the Bible and Classical mythology for exactly the same reason, for self-preservation. It is interesting to me that so many of the balladeers and folk singers of our time are extremely uninhibited in their Biblical, even in their Classical, allusions. I’m not surprised at that—I think it is a necessary feature of all popular poetry. I’m interested for example in the fact that

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one of the best known of the Canadian folk singers, Leonard Cohen, started out in the 1950s with a book called Let Us Compare Mythologies. The mythologies were the Jewish, the Christian, and the Hellenic. Kaplan: To come back to education for a moment—you’ve expressed strong doubts about the notion of “teaching” literature to begin with. Frye: Literature has to be rather indirectly presented. The framework within which the teacher and the student operate is the framework of criticism, and that is what I have said consistently: what is taught and learned is the criticism of literature and not literature itself. I have always been rather distrustful of the importance attached to value judgments on the part of the New Critics and others. Values can be assumed, they can be argued about, but they cannot be demonstrated. Kaplan: Value judgments also encourage the arbitrary game of ranking writers. Frye: Well, that is the literary stock exchange. It’s an utterly vulgar and futile form of activity. The primary criterion of value is a certain sense of genuineness. The conscientious reviewer of a book of poems, for example, will try to react to the genuineness of what he is reading. The questions of greatness—whether “A” is better than “B” and whether “B” is better than “C,” and so forth—should be avoided as far as possible. I find myself browsing through anthologies, for example, and every so often I strike what seems to be a consistently interesting and intelligent mind. Then I want to look him up and read him in greater breadth and detail than the anthology gives me. It is a purely random operation. I could name a few names at random easily enough, but I would forget a lot of others. When I was about sixteen or seventeen I was excited by a great many different poets—Wallace Stevens, for one. Some of them did not stay with me. Others did. There are no reasons I can give as a critic why some of them turned out to be more permanent. A great deal of contemporary literature that I read is Canadian literature, simply because that’s where my roots are. I suppose there are about thirty or forty poets in Canada whom I find interesting to read. The output of good, genuine poetry in Canada is really astonishing. There is a reflective quality in the Canadian consciousness that is a good breeding ground for poetic expression. The very intensity of the American temperament sometimes works against this—its expression is so intensely political.

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Kaplan: What, would you say, turned you toward literary criticism as a vocation? Frye: Like other subjects, literature has a theory and a practice. I seem to have been drawn temperamentally and in other ways to the theory and have never seriously attempted writing poetry or fiction. I didn’t feel that meant that I was noncreative. “Creativeness” ought not to be applied to genres but to the people working in them. I had a rather intensively religious upbringing and thought of becoming a clergyman—which in fact I did do. But when I went to college I realized that my vocation was for university teaching. As an undergraduate I discovered Blake, which of course was exactly the right discovery for me at that point. He had all the religious—almost evangelical—presuppositions with which I had been brought up, but he turned them inside out in a way that made complete sense to me. What really interested me about him was his demonstration that the old man in the sky was actually Satan rather than God and that, consequently, anything that had to do with tyranny and repression in human life was Satanic and that there was no religion worth a second glance that hadn’t to do with the emancipation of man. I date everything, I think, from my discovery of Blake as an undergraduate and graduate student. Everything of Blake that I could understand convinced me that his mysterious poems would be worth working at. Thus I had to try to get inside his mind as well as I could, and that meant that my critical interest had to be central and primary. When I came to write about Blake, I stressed the importance of the fact that he belonged in the eighteenth century. The historical took on a peripheral quality to me and receded to the circumference. It was relevant all right, but I had to get at the actual structure of Blake’s mind first. It’s the way I would recommend to most students of literature—to try to grow up inside the mind of a great poet and to hang the history onto that, rather than start with the history, which has a way of cutting down the great figures of poetry into a kind of circus parade. Kaplan: You’ve described autobiography as a form of prose fiction.4 I wonder what you make of the present state of inflamed interest in the study of autobiography? Frye: I suppose it goes along with the kind of thing that made encounter groups so popular—the feeling that the more layers of the onion you

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peel off, the closer you get to the centre. I think it is a fallacy myself. A person’s real self is perhaps more clearly evoked by what other people think of him than by his own analysis of himself. The “real me” may be a layer of personae, the relationships with other people. Kaplan: The “real me” may be the work, then, and not the person at all. Frye: Yes, I think that is true. Somebody was in my office the other day urging me to write my autobiography. What I couldn’t explain to him is that everything I write I consider autobiography, although nobody else would.

34 Education, Religion, Old Age Conducted 13 October 1976

From “A Conversation with Northrop Frye: Education, Religion, Old Age,” The Varsity, 22 October 1976, 14–15. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1976. The Varsity is the student newspaper of the University of Toronto, noted for its radicalism in the 1960s; the interviewer was Philip Chester.

Chester: Dr. Frye, when you were first informed of the Varsity’s request to interview you, what was your initial reaction? Frye: Well, the Varsity has had a great variety of editorial policies over the last few years, and I’d normally be very pleased and honoured to have an interview from the Varsity. Chester: I understand, though, that you have been interviewed before by The Varsity. Your secretary mentioned that you weren’t very pleased with what had happened. Is this true? Frye: What happened then was that one of the professional student organizers from the States came in in the middle of it and broke it all up so that there was no interview printed at all. Chester: Why would someone break that interview up? Frye: Well, that’s what things were like in those days. That was a few years ago. Chester: You’re almost an institution here at the U of T. You’ve seen a lot of students come and go. Have students changed? Has campus life altered over the years? Are you encouraged by what you’re seeing file into your classroom these days?

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Frye: I don’t really think that there’s been a great deal of change in students: we’re getting the same human material now that we’ve always had. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I think that various things, such as the degree of permissiveness in high-school education, go around in cycles. My experience with students is that they are always intellectually curious and lively people, and as long as they are that it is always an immense pleasure to talk to them and teach them. I don’t think I’ve noticed any long-term permanent trends in student attitudes. Chester: So, in kind, students aren’t much different now than, say, thirty years ago. Frye: I don’t really see how they can be. I mean certain social conventions change, for example, but those things are trifles. When I was principal of Victoria there used to be a little function of having dinner for the first-class honour members of the graduating year along with the alumni of fifty and sixty years back. Those who were graduated fifty and sixty years ago knew a small Methodist college where you were not allowed to dance and where the most rigid restrictions were placed upon residence life and so on, but those were conventions and they found themselves living quite happily as far as those conventions were concerned. I don’t think that the essential nature of people has changed, and I never thought the conventions were very important anyway. Chester: Given the kind of world we’re living in today, do you see a real threat to a continuation of studies in the humanities? Will that be a problem in the future? Frye: I think it’s a problem of the past, present, and future. The humanities have always had their backs against the wall: they’ve always been in a rather desperate last-ditch fight to preserve themselves. There have been times when for social reasons Classics would be in the ascendant because people could quote Horace to each other in parliament—that depends on the class structure—but in general the humanities have not been popular and anybody who is teaching the humanities has to be a kind of missionary. He has to explain what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, and students in my experience have enough good will to respond to that. Chester: Do you see yourself sometimes as a missionary?

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Frye: Oh yes, yes. My grandfather was a Methodist circuit rider, and I still think I’m more of an evangelical person than anything else. Chester: Going back to education for a moment, what exactly is going on as you see it? Is the concern for literacy and getting back to the basics a useful concern or has education become the victim of uninformed witch hunts? Frye: I think both of those things are true. I think that a great deal of confusion exists in the world over the nature of freedom. Free choice is something that doesn’t necessarily apply to choices of subjects. There is such a thing as a core, a basic minimum of information, that you need in order to participate in a society as complicated as ours, and to make that, say, “compulsory” in high school is not a limitation of freedom. It’s a means of achieving freedom. If you want to learn to play the piano, you have to set yourself free to play the piano and that means practice. There’s no antithesis between freedom and compulsion in that area. Chester: Are you concerned with students you have now over their literacy or their ability to write a grammatical sentence? Frye: Oh, certainly, I’m concerned about that, but then, I always was. I think that prose is a very difficult medium. I’ve done what I can in my own field to destroy the notion that prose is the language of ordinary speech.1 It’s a language that takes a great deal of skill and discipline and practice to acquire, and yet it’s the means of making people articulate. When I mark students’ essays I feel that my function is to try to set them free to be articulate, to say what they want to say. Chester: Thus far in your career, Dr. Frye, what do you consider to be your greatest achievement? Is there something you have done that you hold particularly dear? Frye: I don’t know that there is for me a single achievement of that kind. I see everything that I’ve done as contributing to a general pattern of teaching and writing and scholarship over the years. It seems to me a cumulative thing. I know that my book Anatomy of Criticism has sold more widely and been more widely discussed than anything else, but it’s really for other people to say what my major achievement has been. Chester: Has your whole life, then, been devoted to the study of English literature and to your theory of literature in general?

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Frye: Oh, yes. I think my whole life forms a pattern. The study of literature has not been the exclusive thing in it. I’ve taken part in a great many other things—I’m on a government commission, I’m the president of a language association—one does these things.2 They’re part of one’s public service. They attach themselves to one’s career and what one does, but I think it’s really the total shape of what one achieves that’s important. Chester: Are you building up to a tour de force? . . . Are we going to get another definitive statement from Northrop Frye? Frye: One hopes that every statement will be the definitive statement. I’m working now on a very large and complicated book on the Bible and its relation to English literature. My favourite book is always the one that I’m working on now. I hope that that will be a definitive statement, but as soon as you start writing a book instantly you realize that that book will be as good as you can make it and no better. Chester: This may seem like a silly question, but it’s not silly to me and I don’t think it will be silly to the people who are going to read this interview. How do you see yourself? What does Northrop Frye mean to Northrop Frye? . . . You mention that you see yourself as a missionary sometimes . . . do you see yourself as a defender of some kind? Frye: Yes, I am a defender of certain values that I’ve always believed in. Teaching and study and research are not isolated activities, they are militant activities. They’re carried out in the teeth of human ignorance, human inertia, and human confusion. I don’t mean that I identify people with these things. It’s a state of the world. That question is more difficult to answer than it seems because it seems to me that most of us assume that we have an outward personality to the world and that we have an inner personality which is our real self. I’m not so sure that that’s true. I suspect that other people’s notions of what you are come closer to being your real self than your view of yourself. Now I know something of my reputation. I read reviews of myself. I would be sunk if I allowed that to take me over. Chester: Northrop Frye, then, both in public and private is the same man. Frye: Isaac Newton said, “I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem like a child playing on a beach and picking up occasional stones.”3 That, I think, is all that anybody can really ever say about

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himself. Everybody in his own eyes is a relatively poor creature. He has to be much sterner and stiffer and less charitable with himself than he could ever afford to be with anybody else. Chester: Do you feel more at home, say, in your office surrounded by the books you love, books that you’ve written, than you do in your classroom lecturing or walking down Yonge St. just being an ordinary human being? Frye: I think I’m as much at home in a classroom talking to students as I am anywhere. I find I work better when I’m living at home and in my office with my own books around me—that doesn’t mean the books I’ve written because I very much dislike rereading what I’ve done, but I do like to be surrounded with familiar objects, and I have a kind of nostalgic conservatism about my surroundings. I find the extent to which Toronto has transformed itself in the last fifteen years emotionally very disturbing. I sometimes feel less at home here than I originally did, but that’s a rather superficial thing. No, I’m at home wherever I feel that I’m functioning in the way in which I’m supposed to function. I think I do that in the classroom. I’d like to teach as long as I could. My teaching feeds into my writing and vice versa. Chester: Do you ever learn anything from your students? Frye: Yes I do, but in ways that would be very hard for me to identify. There’s something in the atmosphere that students’ questions set up so that I could never say that I have learned that from him but simply that I’ve had things churned up and reassembled and new lights thrown on what I know as a result of being with students. Chester: As a professor, do you feel that teaching would become a chore for you if you did not learn anything from your students? . . . Or could you teach to automatons? Frye: Nobody could teach to automatons. A lecture, like any other public performance, can’t be indefinitely better than the quality of its hearers. A pianist can’t really play to an audience of deaf mutes. No, I couldn’t teach automatons. I never think of myself as simply stuffing information into people who haven’t got any. I think that, as I say, it’s a liberating activity. Students come to me with a certain verbal experience, and I am concerned with attempting to liberate that experience, to make it more of a power for them.

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Chester: Walter Jackson Bate, in his book Criticism: The Major Texts, says by way of introduction to excerpts of your work that, “Frye is essentially in the Arnoldian tradition as an ‘apologist’ for literature.”4 Is this an accurate assessment of you, do you think? Frye: It’s an assessment that’s very often been made of me. Again, that’s something I trust other people’s opinions on more than I would trust my own. I have read Arnold a great deal and taught him, and there are things in him that are stupid enough to infuriate me. I hope that I’m not guilty of quite the same stupidity. On the other hand, there is a sensitivity that I can’t reach—he had powers as a poet that I don’t have—I think that perhaps the sense of the humanities as something that you have to struggle and fight for may be common to us. Chester: As a result, do you see yourself sometimes as a sentinel against the incursion of certain elements in our society that might try to destroy and distort the humanities in general? Frye: Sentinel is a very good word. Any teacher who is a teacher has to be on guard constantly against that kind of thing in all its manifestations. Chester: Why do you say Arnold was quite stupid at times? Frye: Well, he was frightened by a lot of things. He was frightened politically by things like giving the vote in the second Reform Bill to so many people. He thought they wouldn’t have enough education to use it. He was timid and frightened about things like Biblical criticism, and he was contemptuous to a degree that I don’t think he should have been about various liberal movements. I feel that there were occasions where he just didn’t pull his weight as a liberal. Chester: Do you see the period of time in which Arnold lived as a crisis in confidence? Frye: Yes, but every age has that. Chester: What’s our crisis in confidence? Frye: In this North American complex that we’re in there’s a crisis of confidence perhaps in our own liberal and democratic values, and I think that that’s partly a political and economic thing. It’s almost a repetition of what happened after 1929 when I was a freshman here. There was a great wave of buoyant confidence which was really infantile, based entirely on credit. Then there was a great stock market crash. Then

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there was a tremendous reassessment of the values of capitalism and out of that emerged the Roosevelt period. I think that something like that is happening now. We’re going through a crisis of confidence not so much in capitalism as in democracy. Chester: Can you tell us something about this book you’re presently writing? Frye: It’s a study of the Bible and the way in which it has helped to shape the whole framework of English literature as well as European literature generally. I don’t think the book itself is likely to get beyond the Bible. I’ve been teaching a course in the Bible for a great many years, and I’ve written about poets who are intensely Biblical like Milton and Blake. It’s always fascinated me not for reasons of belief but for reasons of criticism. The Bible seems to me to be an utterly unique structure for a critic to tackle and a structure of unique importance for our own world. So I’m in the middle of that now. Chester: Isn’t your system of analysis, by definition, absolutist? Frye: Why should it be? Chester: Doesn’t the idea that, as you see it, literature cannot be taught but . . . Frye: Yes, that is true. Literature is something that you study but do not study directly. The analogy that I make is with a student of physics who says he’s studying physics, not that he’s studying nature, although physics in itself is a way of studying nature [AC, 11/13]. I think that what is directly taught and learned is the criticism of literature. Literature itself is something that is experienced rather than taught and learned. Chester: How does the book that you’re writing now stack up against your previous ones? Will it conclude your earlier works or is it a study all by itself? Frye: Well, it’s bound to be to some extent a summary of the general critical views that I’ve always held because it does deal with a subject that I’ve been rotating around. I would hope to have some new readers for it. One always hopes for new things to say. I find that my own critical attitude has not changed a great deal over the years. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. It’s just what I’m stuck with. I do find myself revolving in a spiral around the same issues.

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Chester: In chapter 5 of The Educated Imagination, you state that with regard to the teaching of literature, the Bible “should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it” [46; EICT, 475]. If you had the power, Dr. Frye, would you make the teaching of the Bible compulsory in secondary school English classes? Frye: There again, you see, I would consider that the Bible belongs to what you would call a core curriculum. I think it’s part of the kind of thing you have to know in order to participate in modern society. If it were absolutely clear what I said earlier, that I don’t think in terms of an antithesis of freedom and compulsion, I don’t think that if you made the Bible part of a core curriculum it would be a limitation on freedom. It would be if you taught it in terms of belief, and if you made academic status depend on a profession of belief. That’s a violation of academic freedom and you can’t have that at any price. But the Bible has never been that to me. It’s been a guide and key to human imagination over the last thousand years or more. It’s just as essential as the multiplication table is to mathematics. Chester: What you’re saying, then, is that anyone who doesn’t have a firm grasp of the Bible itself is not entitled to an opinion on poets like Milton and Blake. Frye: Well, he’s entitled to opinions but he doesn’t know what the hell’s going on in Paradise Lost or Blake either. Chester: Then you can never really remove an art object from the period in which it was written or from the sources of information that gave rise to it? Frye: Milton himself would have been horrified if he thought that any reader of Paradise Lost was ignorant of the Bible. Chester: What favourite poets of yours, if they could come alive today, would be horrified at what they might see? Frye: I think that all the poets I respect would be horrified at, say, things like racism, the atomic bomb, the rise of tyranny and dictatorship. All the poets I respect fought against those things in different ways. In the early twentieth century you had poets who thought they were conservative but I think their essential values were, again, humanist values. They were fighting for humanity against the death impulse in humanity.

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Chester: Is there a death impulse in humanity now? Is it stronger now than it ever was? Frye: I don’t know that it is stronger, but the power of organization is greater. I don’t know that the actual will to go to war is any stronger now than it was, but I think that the destructiveness of war is certainly much greater. Chester: Dr. Frye, you studied theology at Emmanuel College and were ordained in the United Church of Canada in 1936. Have you ever held a pastoral charge? Frye: No, except a mission field in Saskatchewan one summer. I came to college as a church student. I realized during my undergraduate time that my real vocation was to teach literature in a university and not to be a clergyman. Being a clergyman required qualities of personality and administration that I just didn’t possess, so I assumed very quickly that this would be my pastoral charge. I’m on a permanent leave of absence arrangement from the Maritime Conference.5 Chester: Do you feel that the work you have done and continue to do in the field of literary criticism and in your theory of literature in general has been a kind of ministry for you? Frye: Yes, I think it has been a kind of ministry. Religion to me, again, is something that liberates. It’s something that relieves man of claustrophobia. If you don’t have words like “infinite” and “eternal” in your mind somewhere you do find yourself banging your head against a wall. It’s only because of its liberating aspect that I’m interested in it. Chester: But other religions have liberating aspects to them. Frye: Oh, sure. Chester: Why the United Church of Canada in particular, then? Frye: Well, it was what I grew up in. I’m United Church of Canada for the same reason I’m Canadian and not American or Zulu. I just happened to be here. Chester: Are you a nationalist in a sense? Are you gung-ho on being Canadian? Frye: I’m very deeply interested in Canada. When I first began to get

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offers to go to the United States, I thought of my religious commitments (to the United Church of Canada), and my political commitments (which at the time were the CCF)—those are two ideas I can’t even translate into American terms. I felt that to move to another country would mean tearing up a great many roots. In short, I really belonged here. Chester: Just to get back to the United Church of Canada again—do you think the role of the ministry had changed over the years? And has it changed for the better or for the worse? Frye: The general relationship of organized religion to society as a whole has declined very considerably not only in the United Church but in everything else. Certainly Protestant religion in Canada forty years ago was putting all its eggs into a middle-class basket. Also it got hung up with certain anxieties—drinking and liquor and that sort of thing—and people began to think that it just wasn’t very serious and was really rather frivolous. The fact that we see the drug stores so full of books on Zen Buddhism and occultism means, I think, that people are still very deeply and almost desperately religious in their yearnings, their ideals, their wishes and desires. But I don’t think they have much confidence in the institutions and organizations of religion in contemporary society around them. Chester: What was your feeling about the attempt to amalgamate the Anglican Church of Canada to the United Church of Canada?6 How did you view that proposal? Frye: It’s the normal destiny of man to unite rather than divide. I think, if I could use a religious phrase, that the spirit unites: what divides people are human things. Who’s going to be boss, who’s going to run the organization, what kind of organization there is going to be—that’s what keeps people apart. Chester: Would you like to see the amalgamation? Frye: Yes, I think I would. Chester: Would it make much difference anyway? Frye: Perhaps it wouldn’t except as a testimony to the fact that, as I say, it is the destiny of man to unite. The spiritual force is a uniting force. One could, of course, keep any kind of organization. I don’t think it matters much to Canada whether Quebec separates or not. That kind of separate-

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ness, I think, matters even less than the union would. The union would be very important as a symbol. Chester: Do you have any fears about the destiny of man? Do you have fears that someday we may blow ourselves up? Frye: That’s always a possibility. Man would be foolish if he just tunes that out. There are always two kinds of reactions to the present-day world at any time. One is the warning reaction—watch out or you’ll meet with disaster—and the other is the opportunity reaction—you’re at this position now, this is what you could do if you wanted to. By temperament and for other reasons, I’ve always been one of the opportunity people. I feel that there is no lack of people who like to warn. Chester: And how long will Northrop Frye be at the U of T? Are you hoping that you’ll be able to teach until you are physically incapable of teaching? Frye: I reach the age of sixty-five next year. That means another year after that, and then it’s in the hands of the administration what I do. Left to myself I would like to go on teaching indefinitely until I drop in my tracks. I always like teaching. I like students. I find the relationship a very fulfilling one. At the same time I can understand that there are young people who need jobs.

35 The Future Tense Recorded 6 January 1977

Transcribed from the CBC tape no. 770220-14 by Monika Lee. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1977 for an interview with Carol Bishop of the CBC. “The Future Tense,” broadcast 20 February 1977, was part of the Special Occasions series produced by the CBC Radio news department regarding the future of Canada and the dangers Canadians would face before the end of the century.

[Marshall McLuhan asserts that a major change, an apocalypse of sorts, has occurred because of the electronic media. The Eastern world is becoming more Western and the Western more Eastern. The left hemisphere of the brain, which rules logic, has traditionally dominated in the West, but is now being pushed back by the right hemisphere of the brain, which rules creativity. Meanwhile the East, traditionally a right-brained culture, seeks to become logical, individualist, goal-oriented, and with consumer values. The electronic world threatens organized existence in the West and has, in fact, ended it. All that remains of the Western world is its monuments. He states that this view of human history is not gloomy, but objective. The change we are undergoing is so drastic as to be apocalyptic, a “simultaneous, instantaneous smash.”] Narrator: As Northrop Frye says, Mr. McLuhan’s vision of apocalypse is worth thinking about. But there’s another side too. Frye: The possibility of a smash is something that we would be foolish to dismiss. I think that our minds go in a kind of manic-depressive, up-anddown rhythm between feeling that we’re all going to be wiped out by the atomic bomb, which is the depressing one, and feeling that we’re going

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to move into an Age of Aquarius where everything will be wonderful and lovely, which is the manic side.1 I don’t believe in either the manic peak or the depressive depth. I think that the human race somehow or other manages to stagger on between the two.

36 “A Literate Person Is First and Foremost an Articulate Person” Conducted 7 February 1977

From Interchange, 7, no. 4 (1976–77): 32–8. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1977. Interchange was a scholarly journal with particular emphasis on educational theory and its integration with empirical research. Interestingly, given Frye’s acerbic remarks below, it was published by OISE; Hugh Oliver, the interviewer and managing editor of Interchange, was the editor-in-chief of OISE Press. Correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 13, file 14 reveals that Frye saw a transcript of this interview before publication, and answered an additional question (see note 2).

Oliver: Literacy is a term that seems to be open to a range of interpretations—from the mechanical ability to read and write to an understanding and a familiarity with literature. First I should like to consider the more mechanical aspects, especially writing, because the inability of students to express themselves in writing has recently caused such a fuss around the country. What are your own feelings about this? Do you think standards have deteriorated? Frye: Certain kinds of standards have. I think it’s very seldom realized that the mechanical ability to read and write, especially to read, has no particular social value except that it enables one to participate in a very complicated civilization. Society is set up in such a way that what you learn to read are traffic signs and advertisements and it is only when you start producing verbal structures yourself that you’re capable of any sort of freedom or responsibility. I also think that people suffer from two fallacies about writing. One is that prose is the language of ordinary speech, which it is not. And the other is that there is such a thing as a substantial

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idea, that you can have ideas without being able to put them into words. Both of these are completely wrong and they lead to a great deal of illiteracy at other levels. Oliver: But why is there so much criticism at the present time? Do you think the permissive trend in education has made students more illiterate? Frye: I think there was a time when certain normative standards were associated with what was essentially a kind of open class system—that is, it was assumed that the working class spoke one way and the middle class spoke another; and as long as you have that assumption, then middle-class children will learn to speak in middle-class idioms from very early ages onwards. But now, of course, you have the feeling that these things ought not to be attached to a class structure, with the result that nobody quite knows what the guidelines are. Oliver: Whereas I am familiar with the class structure in England, I am much less aware of it in Canada. Frye: It’s more open in Canada but it exists just as much, and it takes the form of people being very defensive about their grammar. If I’m picked up in the morning by somebody driving a car, I have to be careful not to say I’m a professor of English because the rejoinder will always be, “Well, I’ll have to watch my grammar,” and that is really a kind of class remark. Oliver: Do you think any of the ideas in the book Design for Learning had beneficial effects on the teaching of English? Frye: I think they would have had some if the government hadn’t descended with this avuncular avalanche of OISE, which completely obliterated what I was interested in because I thought it was a grassroots movement. Oliver: You are referring to the Curriculum Institute? Frye: Yes. And the Curriculum Institute was really uniting teachers at the elementary, secondary, and university levels. It was just about to get somewhere when that thing hit.1 Oliver: As a member of “that thing,” I am curious. Why should the absorption of the Curriculum Institute by OISE have obliterated everything you were interested in?

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Frye: Well, a big institute that is built and financed by the government and staffed by Americans is not going to be a grass-roots movement in Ontario education. Oliver: I cannot entirely agree with you. For example, less than a quarter of staff members are American. But such an argument would have little to do with literacy. So . . . how do you think people should be taught the skills of writing? Frye: The skill of writing is a very difficult one. It’s part of a very complex process of which, I think, the root is learning to speak—and learning to speak in a mixture of prose and associative rhythms so that what you say is an integral part of your personality and yet isn’t just a bumbling associative structure like Gertrude Stein’s writing. A lot of university students have acquired the notion that prose is the language of ordinary speech, disregarding the fact that they still cannot speak it and certainly cannot write it. Articulate speech in prose is a difficult and sophisticated acquirement. Not realizing this is what I call the Jourdain fallacy—the man in Molière who thought he had been speaking prose all his life.2 Writing takes practice, and it takes still more practice to be able to assimilate your writing style to a good speaking style. Oliver: I must say the notion of learning how to speak is not one I have ever associated with writing. Do you envisage the teacher correcting students in the way they express themselves as a move toward writing better? Frye: I think that a certain amount of training in oral composition does have to be done, though it’s a very difficult and tricky thing to teach. I am not underestimating the difficulties for a moment. Oliver: In what way is it being done? Yes, I suppose a teacher or parent might correct what a child says. Is that what you mean? Frye: Of course, correction implies steering a middle course. There have to be certain agreed-on conventions for society to communicate. On the one hand, I think you need to avoid the extreme of purely associative speech, which has no clarity or articulateness in it at all, and, on the other hand, you must avoid speaking, or still more writing, in prose as though it were a dead language. That is what the matter is with most composition in elementary and high schools: students write English as though it were a dead language. They never associate it with their speech rhythms,

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and usually for very good reasons; but the result is that you get a kind of pseudo-monumental style with no relation to any form of articulate expression. Oliver: Often, I suppose, the teacher suffers from the same problem. Frye: The teacher suffers from the same problem, and the ability to become genuinely articulate is something you can only really catch from the community. It’s a hard thing to learn in a teacher–student relationship. Oliver: It requires a great deal of practice, I assume? Frye: It requires incessant practice, and I’ve often pointed out in my writings on the subject how the culture of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and poets was based on relentless training in rhetoric in school and endless translations and re-translations from Latin into English and back again. Oliver: You would regard translation as a valuable exercise? Frye: The translation is essential because of the way in which it teaches you that there is a grammar to a language and that the grammar is not a series of unbreakable rules. If you’re bouncing one language off another, you begin to realize that there is such a thing as grammar and that it is something to be used and not something to take over. Oliver: This “back to the basics” cry is often interpreted as back to learning grammar. And, as I remember from my school days, learning grammar was a discipline that seemed very remote from the actual process of writing. Indeed, it could easily turn one off from attempting to write at all. Frye: But there’s a fallacy, you see, in the phrase “learning grammar.” You don’t learn grammar. What you learn is a language that has a grammatical structure. Oliver: Sure. But you are taught grammatical terms, are you not? You learn what a gerundive is and that sort of thing. Frye: You pick these things up, yes. But the nomenclature is not itself an end, and the whole emphasis has to be as practical as possible. Oliver: Often, I reckon, learning the nomenclature does tend to become

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an end in itself. However, to what extent do university professors correct the writing and grammar in the essays they get from students? Do you think they should be responsible for doing this? Or are they, like many teachers, at a loss when it comes to criticizing written expression? Frye: You remind me of what happened recently in this university when a student turned in an essay in political economy, and added a note saying please do not take off marks for grammar and spelling because I never claimed to be an English scholar. And that of course is again a fallacy—the notion that English is just a subject like other subjects instead of the means of expressing yourself in all subjects. I don’t know how sensitive people are in other departments, but I think there’s a very strong tendency in most universities to feel that, unless you’re in the Department of English, you don’t need to bother too much about style; and style, of course, looked at in that light is yet another fallacy. Oliver: Is this the opinion of the professors as well as the students? Frye: I think it’s both: it’s a working agreement on an anti-intellectual basis. Oliver: In terms of categories of writing, I suppose you can distinguish between descriptive writing and metaphorical writing. Do you think this distinction is meaningful in teaching people how to write? Frye: I doubt if it’s possible to break it down into categories of that kind. I would tend to look at it more sociologically and say that learning to read traffic signs and advertisements is learning to read a series of directions and exhortations to conform, and that the essence of teaching writing is to encourage the student’s own speech and own thinking to emerge. Oliver: Do you see the educational scene in Canada as presenting special problems in the teaching of writing? I am referring to the multicultural aspect of Canadian society. Frye: I don’t know what to say about that. I should think that theoretically the advantages of a bilingual country ought to be enormous, but that of course takes in the question of the quality of teaching. In Canada there’s a great deal of self-deprecation now about belonging to the bourgeois class—that is, people feel ashamed to adopt the principle, which I think they might very well adopt, that bourgeois equals human being

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and anything else is strictly out of the trees. But this is something that takes on a kind of academic self-deprecation as you go on in the educational process, and when you add to that the Canadian self-deprecation, then you’ve really got quite a lot of castration anxiety. Oliver: This, though, is not necessarily an ethnic problem. Frye: In Toronto, as I’ve been watching it grow from a homogeneous WASP town into a cosmopolitan city with a great number of ethnic groups, I’ve observed the tendency among the first generation ethnics to conform as closely as possible to what they feel is the native norm and to renounce their own indigenous culture. It then takes another generation or two before they see the importance of drawing on what they’ve brought with them or what their grandparents brought. Oliver: But in terms of handling words, it seems hard enough to master one language well. Frye: It’s not quite so hard in early childhood perhaps. Oliver: I once interviewed Wilder Penfield and he was very caught up on that.3 Frye: Yes. As far as I know, early childhood is the time when there are fewest inhibitions; and what is a relatively simple matter for a child—if you’ve got a Yugoslavian aunt, you just make a different set of noises when the aunt turns up—is a much more inhibitive business for adults. Oliver: We’ve mainly been talking about writing. Do you have any views on teaching children how to read? Frye: I would say that the goal of teaching children to read is to get them to acquire the habit because, if they do, then their education, or ninetenths of it, will look after itself. As for writing, that’s a more difficult matter. To be done properly, it takes a great deal of practice on the part of the student and a great deal of supervision on the part of the teacher. And that’s why it just isn’t done in the high schools. There aren’t the mechanics for it. Oliver: But what about the content of students’ reading matter? Obviously it will vary from grade to grade, and is such a broad question we could likely discuss it for hours. Frye: Just as language is a set of conventions that society has agreed on,

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so there is such a thing as a cultural heritage that society has more or less agreed on. Possession of that heritage puts individuals in a very advantageous position with regard to themselves as well as to society. For this reason, I think certain books ought to be read at school. I think there should be a core of reading which takes in something of our cultural heritage. That’s not a limitation of the student’s freedom because if it’s genuine freedom, freedom and discipline are the same thing. But the rush of teachers to be in vogue means that all kinds of tripe and trash get prescribed in the hapless English course. The teachers feel they want to be with it or to get their students with it. Oliver: So they choose contemporary novels without much thought of literary merit? Frye: There’s a great deal of that, and it persists even in university where you get an instructor who will draft a course in contemporary fiction. This is an example that came to my attention some years ago. The man started with Jack Kerouac as a kind of historical background, and he went on from there to all the bestselling paperbacks that you could find in the drug store. But the students just sat back on their heels and said they wanted Joseph Conrad. They wanted something they could get their teeth into—the hell with this stuff! And that was an example of the educational process working itself out properly. Oliver: In the context of a cultural heritage, do you have any strong feelings, pro or con, about teaching Canadian literature? Frye: Well, I think that ideally (and I’m speaking of a very remote ideal) Canadian literature should not be taught at all but left to the student’s own cultivation. When I was at Oxford, the English school there stopped at the year 1830, and the theory was that if you learned the historical background, then the university had done its job, and that modern literature (which was anything in the last century or so) ought to be up to yourself to study—that is, if you wanted to be a cultivated enough person to take in the contemporary scene. I still think that theoretically that’s the best thing to do. But it’s a very remote ideal, and in the meantime I think students have to have presented to them what is going on around them—and Canadian literature does give you a sense of the country you’re living in that nothing else can give you because it tells you what the Canadian imagination has recorded and how it has reacted.

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Oliver: Of course the study of English literature is fairly recent as university disciplines go. But it still seems a bit arbitrary for Oxford to exclude modern literature. Frye: Yes. But the fact that you’re studying English at all means that you’re studying something modern, as distinct from the Greeks. Oliver: Sort of pre–Matthew Arnold? Frye: Yes. I suppose Matthew Arnold was really the founder of English literature as an academic subject. Oliver: I would like to ask you how you see yourself in this context. Your name is familiar internationally and in Canada. But I suppose in terms of the general population relatively few are familiar with your writings. When you write, to whom do you address yourself? To students or to fellow critics or to writers? Or do you have them all in mind? Frye: The audience I keep most centrally in my mind is that of interested readers. My writings always have a minimum of footnotes, and sometimes I have different audiences for different books. If the book has arisen from a series of public lectures, which is a very frequent form with me, that means I’m not addressing a specialized audience. And as I’ve gone on, I’ve become less and less inclined to address a specialized audience. Oliver: But in your early works, you were surely writing for fellow critics and students? Frye: My book on Blake was certainly not addressed to anybody who didn’t have a fairly sustained interest in Blake. But my approach to my writing has always been evangelical. A great deal of my writing has grown out of a teaching interest rather than research or scholarly pressures, and I’ve always tried to keep in mind the fact that no idea is really any good unless it can be explained to a fairly young person. Oliver: Are you ever aware of yourself as oversimplifying or popularizing your ideas? Two compartments, say? As for example with Bertrand Russell, who admitted writing popular philosophies for the layman and intellectually more demanding stuff for his peers. Frye: It is extremely dangerous to have two compartments because both of them tend to shrivel and you’re liable to end up as Russell did—sup-

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porting propaganda campaigns in which he knew that what he was saying was false. But he rationalized it by arguing that when you’re involved with propaganda, you have to make positive statements.4 Oliver: In what way do you see literature as important in this twentieth century? Frye: That’s a question that I frequently come back to, and was the subject of my Massey lectures [EI], which have been distributed quite widely in Canadian high schools. My general answer is that the imagination is what man constructs with; and therefore human society is essentially an imaginative construct, and it is by imagination that man participates in society. Consequently a training of the imagination, particularly through literature, is the central means of understanding one’s own social role. Oliver: You emphasize the social context then? Frye: Yes. That’s one set of values. Oliver: Or there’s Eliot’s argument about unifying experience— Spinoza, the noise of a typewriter, the smell of cooking, etc.5 But you could treat that in a social context as well. Frye: Yes. And I also feel that society is always controlled by certain mythologies and that you have a choice between evolving your own mythology from your own cultural traditions or getting taken over by the mass clichés and stock responses which society is only too ready to provide. I see a literary training as a means of becoming aware of one’s mythological conditioning. Oliver: And therefore having insight into the contemporary scene? Frye: Yes. So you stop believing the advertising or other statements in the propaganda. Oliver: At a more personal level, I find value in some of the insights into behaviour that literature, and especially the novel, provide. For example, you may imagine some of your deeper feelings, your private world, to be very peculiar. And then you read about a character whose feelings are virtually identical. And you no longer feel so isolated. You realize that you are part of the human race. Frye: Yes. And this personal insight signifies a growing sense of detachment. I think the primitive way to establish contact with a work of liter-

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ature is to identify yourself with a character you happen to like. However, you’ll very soon realize that such a process of identification is immature. It has to be outgrown, and, in proportion as you outgrow it, you get a more detached view of human behaviour. That sense of detachment, which is a mixture of irony and compassion, is, I think, what literature can provide. Oliver: Surely complete detachment is quite rare. Most people when they see a play or read a novel tend to identify in part with one or more of the characters. It’s a way of experiencing the action and, at the lowest level, of wanting to find out what happens because it is happening to oneself. Or perhaps I have yet to outgrow the process? Frye: It depends on the literary work. If you’re up against a play of Harold Pinter’s, there’s nothing there that you can permanently identify with. That is, what you identify with is some kind of normative standard in the light of which the characters appear as something broken off from you. Oliver: What about the historical imagination? You mentioned in a previous interview that it provides insight into a past cultural milieu.6 But so what? Why do you think that’s important? Obviously, to fully understand Shakespeare’s historical plays you need some knowledge of the Elizabethan sense of hierarchy. But of what value is that to us in the twentieth century? Frye: There again it’s a process of identification which is followed by detachment. The original humanist theory was that you were trained quite deliberately in the culture of dead civilizations. You were trained in Latin and Greek because they presented political and social problems that were no longer yours. They presented a religion that you didn’t believe in; they presented all kinds of things that you tried to see from the inside and yet from which you had finally to detach yourself. Oliver: To achieve detachment would generally be an easier process than it would be studying a contemporary work. Frye: It might be. But if you were being trained for a civil service job in India, say, in the early nineteenth century, a training in Classics was probably psychologically the best training you could have had, and much superior to a training in cost accounting or in diplomatic procedures, because those are things which give you no sense of perspective.

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Oliver: The Bible and Classical mythology as the foundation of a literary training—this is your particular argument, is it not? But what do you mean by a literary training of this kind and of what significance is it to most people? In a sense this is a repetitive question, but perhaps you would explore it a bit further. Frye: I think that man lives in two worlds. There’s the world of external nature, which I assume it’s the function of the physical sciences to study. Then there’s the world of man’s own culture and civilization, and he understands this world verbally as a mythological structure. That is, what man produces in a form which you can react to verbally is a mythological universe, and the Bible and Classical mythology in our tradition provide the essential building blocks, the essential structural principles of that universe. Oliver: The Bible seems obvious; Classical mythology less so. Though clearly it helps to study Classical mythology in order to understand a lot of contemporary literature. An obvious example is Joyce’s Ulysses. But that’s not what you mean, I think? Frye: No, though perhaps it’s the beginning of what I mean. I think that Classical civilization did develop a number of things in contrast to the Hebrew civilization. One notes the emphasis on the eye. Everything in the Bible is confined to the Word of God, the listening. What the Greeks produced were nude sculptures and the theatre, which are primarily visual experiences; and what the Greeks emphasized were such things as Eros, love rooted in the sexual instinct, which the Bible tends to be rather jittery about. There are many things absolutely essential in our imaginations that come to us through the Greek tradition. Oliver: And the study of Classical myth provides an underlying base on which everything else is erected—a sort of basis for the human condition? Frye: Yes. Myths are not just chaos. Myths are things which stick together and form a mythology, and the mythology sticks together to form a mythological universe; and our mythological universe is a combination of things derived from the Hebrew and the Greek tradition. Oliver: And is this universe being continually recreated? Frye: It keeps recreating itself, yes, although I think the structural principles remain fairly constant. That’s a thing which there is great resistance to on the part of students when I tell them. It’s not a thing that I would

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have welcomed myself, but I did discover through my own experience that literary genres, for example, change remarkably little from one millennium to another. Oliver: What would you regard as a literate person in the context we’re discussing? Someone who is familiar with what? Frye: I think a literate person is first and foremost an articulate person, one who has the power to say what he means, which sounds simple but is immensely difficult. Oliver: But wouldn’t you extend the concept of literacy to being familiar with certain books? Frye: In practice it is impossible to be articulate and to say what you mean without a pretty wide and deep familiarity with the verbal cultural tradition. Oliver: To go back a bit, how much influence do you think reading has on one’s writing skills? Frye: I think the extent to which one’s reading has an influence on one’s writing is very hard to verbalize. We’re tied up in words the wrong way, and we often assume that whatever we can’t put into words is unreal; but there’s no question that one’s reading puts fuel on the fire and keeps it burning. Oliver: But what about the imitative influence, of being exposed to a style that you find particularly seductive? Might that not cramp originality? Frye: You get imitation when the consciousness is focused on what you’re reading, but that doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes when you read, unconscious influences are making impressions on your mind without your being quite aware of what is happening. When you look back and focus your attention, then you’re imitating. And that can be a very essential thing to do at certain times. Oliver: These days, it seems the imaginative world is largely dominated by the television set. And I recall Johnny Bassett once telling me that one should pitch one’s TV scripts at the level of the Saskatchewan farmer.7 Frye: I had a mission field one summer in Saskatchewan and I got a rather high impression of the intelligence of Saskatchewan farmers.

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Oliver: That may be, but I don’t think it was the message that Bassett was intending to convey. Quite the contrary. More germane, however— what are your views on television? Frye: I think there’s a great pressure in all mass media toward mediocrity. The particular problem of television is that it represents such a vast block of time, and like a shark’s maw it devours everything that’s thrown into it. At the same time I would think that the unselected audience ought to be a fairly healthy thing. As I say, I suspect that the Saskatchewan farmer may be more intelligent than John Bassett and sooner or later the people exposed to idiot programs get rather tired. It takes a while, and every new medium has to go through a rather archaic phase. When the movies began they went through an extraordinarily primitive period, and the same thing has been true of radio and television. Oliver: Looking ahead fifty years, do you see programs getting any better? Frye: Yes. I don’t know that it will even take fifty years. I think that the real impact of television when it hit us in the ’60s was profoundly demoralizing. It brought on all kinds of confusion and unrest. But in the 1970s we’re starting to absorb the medium and I think we’ll go on absorbing it. Oliver: And as a result the quality of the programs will improve? Frye: The quality of programs may improve, but I think that whether they do or not it will sort itself out. Society has absorbed the newspaper, for example. There’s a great deal of the newspaper that’s tripe and a great deal that’s irrelevant. People have developed a capacity for using the newspaper as they want, and I think the same thing will happen with the other media. Oliver: This question is a bit removed from the point, but these days there seems to be a lack of giants on the literary scene. And considering world population growth and more widespread literacy, this strikes me as odd. But I wonder if each generation feels this way, and it is only after a century or so, looking back retrospectively, that the giants begin to emerge. Frye: I think that’s true. One’s immediate contemporaries all look pretty well the same size, and it takes quite a long time before you get enough

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distance for certain ones to stand out from the others. At the same time, I do think from 1920 to 1950 was one our great verbal periods in Western culture. What’s happened from 1950 on has been a certain democratizing of literary qualities, which means they are more diffused in the population and are less dependent on people of overwhelming genius. The revival of oral and popular poetry, for example—the notion that poetry could be popular, that it could be read to a listening audience to the background of music (as it was in Homer’s or Beowulf ’s time)—is something relatively new. Oliver: When you refer to the period 1920 to 1950, who do you have in mind? Frye: I could name people, but it would take a crystal ball to say which are going to be permanent ones; and it’s not a question I find of particular importance because a cultivated interest in the contemporary does regard people as roughly the same size. Oliver: Is there anything else on the subject of literacy that you feel strongly about? Frye: I don’t think so. I think I’ve stated most of my guiding principles on the subject. Oliver: You must get interviewed very frequently and have acquired a repertoire of stock responses. Frye: I think over the years one does acquire certain basic responses. As Blake says, you change your opinions but not your principles.8

37 The Education of Mike McManus Filmed 5 October 1977

From the TVO videocassette, transcribed by Leslie Barnes. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. The interview was one of a series with host Mike McManus broadcast over TV Ontario, the educational television station for Ontario.

McManus: He explains a medieval legend in which the souls of the dead had to keep running day and night or crumble to dust. This, he says, is a parable for modern society [MC, 22–3; NFMC, 11]. My guest: one of the leading literary critics of the Western world, Dr. Northrop Frye. Our subject: A Man for All Seasons. And my name’s McManus. Dr. Northrop Frye, I quoted in my opening from a book that you wrote in 1968 called The Modern Century. In it you told how we’re being reduced to despair by the steadily increasing speed of total movement. This you call the alienation of progress. I’m wondering, since some of the frenzy of the 1960s has gone, if you’d change that diagnosis at all. Frye: I wouldn’t change the diagnosis as far as the general rhythm of society is concerned. I think that more and more there’s been a revolt against that, simply out of self-preservation. There’s been a great deal more gathering into one’s self and trying to just turn your back on the express-train mentality which mechanical and technological progress has built up. McManus: So this is a more reflective time, a more inward-turning time, than the ’60s? Frye: I would say so, yes. I think that the time in the ’60s was actually very introverted as well, but it expressed itself in different ways.

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McManus: You also write of the city becoming increasingly hideous and nightmarish. You describe us as ants in the body of a dying dragon [MC, 37; NMFC, 19]. That too is late ’60s. What for you today remains the most hideous aspect of our cities? Frye: I suppose the insecurity and the constant humiliation of people having to live with that insecurity; and the growing violence which makes the cities even more unmanageable and uninhabitable now than they were ten years ago. McManus: What would be the cause of the insecurity? What’s the relationship between the insecurity and the modern city? Frye: It’s a simple matter of constant fear of violence. The hesitation on the part of people in New York or Detroit to go out in the evenings for entertainment or to ride on the subways after dark, that kind of thing. McManus: You say that in our society today mass art is brutal because those who write and sell it think of their readers as the mob? Frye: I think that a good deal of art of that kind is mass produced, because it’s very economical to produce that way. You find that violence in television, for example, is really a by-product of a certain kind of economic process. That means, of course, that it does appeal to reflexes rather than to anything that you could call the mind or the imagination. The mob is simply an aggregate of people who are moved by a common reflex. McManus: You feel that this kind of reflex action leads to resentment and panic and finally to anarchy? Frye: On the part of whom, the viewer? McManus: The viewer. Frye: Perhaps so, yes. I think, perhaps, the viewer gets a bit bludgeoned and rather numbed as a result. I had to sum up a CRTC symposium on violence recently. I suggested there that television also has a profoundly civilizing role to play in that it brings the camera right up against people and exposes them as human beings instead of as stereotypes.1 McManus: But where it does lead to violence, are you talking about content or just the fact that it’s not a two-way kind of communication?

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Frye: I think the fact that it’s a monologue from the set to the viewer is a very important element. I’m not speaking of just the content. Television is inherently a rather violent form because it does come so close to the viewer and gets through all the barricades: getting into his house, and getting through to the children as well as the adults. McManus: So it’s a kind of invasion of privacy? Frye: I think that that’s a pejorative phrase and one can take it in different ways. I think that it does get through defences to the extent that no other art has been able to do. McManus: Marshall McLuhan, if I’ve understood him correctly, says or feels that the ultimate effect on the viewer of mass doses of television is one of apathy. That is not your conclusion, Dr. Frye. It’s more anarchy and violence. Frye: I think it’s partly the conclusion. Apathy is a very important and central response [cf. MC, 20; NMFC, 9]. One can see that in the behaviour of people in the cities, where an act of violence can go on under their eyes and they just stand around with their hands in their pockets. That is the result of apathy. Marshall also speaks of “civil defence against media fallout,” which I think is a very accurate phrase in that connection.2 McManus: Vandalism and terrorism. You wouldn’t lay the blame for the violence of our age totally with television? Would you put it under a larger umbrella of the whole of technology? Frye: People always look for causes of social problems and feel if they’ve located the cause they’ve more or less solved the problem. The trouble is that every cause that you locate turns out to be just one more effect. Television is an effect of violence and not a cause of it, though it may be a contributory cause in a kind of vicious-circle development. McManus: One last question about Dr. McLuhan: some years ago he was predicting that television would replace the book, the print medium. I don’t know what he’s saying now. Would that be your feeling? Frye: It’s not my feeling and I doubt very much that it’s his. I think that there is the aspect which he isolated, the linear aspect in reading a book from the top left-hand corner of page one to the bottom right-hand corner of the last page. But the book, the printed medium, has a unique

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power of staying where it is so that it can be consulted again and it always presents the same words. To that extent it can become a focus of a community. It’s not just a linear, express-train thing. McManus: How would you differ, though, in what he says the book does to us, what reading does to us: that it separates us from the community and that it individualizes us and makes us more competitive and more isolated? Frye: Yes, but not all isolation is a bad thing. We began by saying that people are alienated by the linear technological progress of our time and that introversion and turning away from the panic of keeping on going is perhaps one of the ways of saving one’s imaginative life. McManus: The book, then, accentuates a sense of privacy? Frye: The book is a safeguard of privacy, yes. McManus: The role of literature today, Dr. Frye. You’ve been quoted as saying that it’s necessary to a democratic society. Frye: Yes, I think that’s true, although I was speaking rather of the public access to information. The public access to information is made possible by the printing press. So I think that the book is the technological instrument that makes it possible for democracy to function.3 McManus: And you believe that great literature belongs to everyone? Frye: Oh, yes. McManus: Why do you think that students and certain of us adults feel a certain hostility or at least an intimidation when faced with highbrow literature? Is that a fault of our teaching? Frye: It’s social conditioning, very largely. A gap grows up in a student’s mind at a very early age between what he is told he ought to want by some people and what he is told he really does want by certain other people. Now, neither of these things is true, but a certain schizophrenia does tend to make a kind of civil war between the highbrow arts and the popular arts. Whenever you have a genuine piece of entertainment you find that distinction breaking down. I think you’ll find that television itself steadily moves in the direction of destroying the distinction between an elitist audience and a mass audience: that notion is out of date. Last weekend I was looking at the series of York Biblical plays writ-

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ten in the fourteenth century; over forty-seven of them put on on the weekend here on the front campus. What struck me about that was the fact that there were not only all kinds of professors of medieval literature there, but there were also four-year-old kids sprawled out over the stage and getting in everybody’s way. They assumed that the show was theirs. McManus: You’ve tried to overcome this intimidation by a book called Anatomy of Criticism, which has had an influence right across North America on the whole teaching and curriculum of English. What exactly were you trying to do with Anatomy of Criticism? Frye: I was trying to help people to see literature as an intelligible area of study: that it’s not just a matter of reading one book after another or one play after another or one poem after another, but that there is a kind of total intelligible unity to be gained from the study of literature, to which any work of literature can lead you. I didn’t really get interested in literature as a scholar and a teacher until I saw that there were ways of introducing it to very young people. As a result of that book there’s a series of texts now published in the United States for grades 7–12, but I think even that is older than it needs to be.4 I think the main principles of my book are so simple that they could be started much earlier. McManus: Could you say a little more about the principles? Frye: One of the main principles is that there are four types of story: romance, tragedy, comedy, and irony or satire. The nature of these stories can be taught to any child as soon as he can listen to a story at all. The curve up at the end of comedy, the curve down at the end of tragedy are quite unmistakable even to very young children. McManus: So one could, then, begin to see the structure in a drama on television last night, or in a play or great novel? Frye: I am very keen on emphasizing the similarities rather than the differences between a Shakespearean comedy and the old movie that you saw on television last night. McManus: And this would allow a reader or a teacher then to read a work and see whether those elements were there or were not there and evaluate it accordingly? Frye: Not quite that, because in the first place those elements always are there. They’re elements of structure. Any story that has a beginning and

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a middle and an end will show a structural type. I’m not so much concerned with evaluation. I think that that’s a byproduct of what the critic does rather that the actual end or aim. Because the principles of evaluation come from your social historical context and they tend to grow out of date in another century or so. It’s better to study what is there rather than to say this is good whereas that which you may like better is bad. McManus: So you wanted us to keep away from value judgments in literary criticism? Frye: I’d be cautious and sparing of them and, especially teaching young people, rather tentative about them. McManus: Is this a possible criticism, then, that taking all value judgments out of criticism would thus equate great literature with popular literature?—or is that what you would want? Frye: It would illustrate the structural similarity between great literature and popular literature and would therefore explain something which people find great difficulty in explaining, which is the fact that great literature always grows out of popular literature. In certain social conditions, popular literature can be artificially debased—we were talking about that a few minutes ago—but it doesn’t have to be. McManus: I want to move on now to myth and archetype. You say that we all live in a mythological world. Now a lot of us have the feeling that when we use the word “myth”—for instance, when somebody says, “One race is stronger than another race,” and somebody else says, “That’s a myth”—what we’re really saying is, “That’s a lie.” That is not what you mean by myth. Frye: It’s part of what I mean by myth. I think that a myth to me fundamentally is a story. Most of the great myths are very early stories; they’ve been around for a long time and they’re stories about gods. They are told in order to tell a society what it needs to know about its structure and social origin and so forth. But a myth, being a story, fits into another, larger pattern. We all look at the world from inside some kind of framework. Now that framework can be either true or false. I think we’re conditioned to accept a lot of false mythology from our social surroundings as we grow up. That is really a parody of the genuine forms that you get.

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McManus: Would you give an example of the kind of false myths that we’re forced to grow up with? Frye: “I just live to get away from this rat race where I can get away from it all, at the cottage, in the country.” That’s the pastoral myth. It’s not particularly a false myth but it’s a parody of the conception of an idealized life which forms a value judgment on the life that we’re actually leading. Or the notion of an aristocracy: that people by their birth or blood are superior to other people. That is a perfectly comprehensible myth, but it’s false and in our day, of course, it’s pernicious. McManus: Now you have dwelt for many, many years both as a professor and in your studies on myth in the Bible. There you talk about archetypes, symbols, and myths, which we know now are stories. Could you say something about archetypes and symbols? Frye: To me an archetype is simply a repeating unit in literature. You find that you’re running into the same themes over and over again. If you examine the Bible you find that while it looks like a great chaos, an accumulation of books, nevertheless it has made its impact on Western culture as a unified book. If you look at the things that unify it, you find that first of all it has a narrative unity: it starts at the beginning of time; it ends at the end of time; it tells the stories of Adam and Israel in between. Then there are certain symbols or images like city and hill and river and tree. Those are repeated in such a way as to indicate that they are forming a unified picture of the world. So it’s by the symbols or the images and by the story it tells that you can see it as a unity. When you see it as a unity you begin to understand how it has affected Western culture, both philosophy and imagination. McManus: Would you say something about archetypes? Frye: The archetype is the repeating unit. That is the fact that you have in the Bible the idealized pastoral life: the Lord is my Shepherd; Jesus calls himself a good shepherd. In Classical literature, without any influence from the Bible, you get a pastoral development where the poet pretends to be a shepherd. The life is a simplified, idealized life. The modern Western story, except that [the author] uses cattle instead of sheep, is also a pastoral myth of the same kind. McManus: That author, influenced by the Bible?

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Frye: Not necessarily. He may very well have been but these things don’t depend on direct influence. McManus: The story of the prodigal son, an archetype that appears throughout the Bible and also in secular literature? Frye: Yes. The general shape of that story is a “U” shape. You start in a condition of relative peace and prosperity. You then go into exile or bondage or humiliation and then you’re brought back to something like the original state. It’s the same as the story of Job. It’s the same that you get in hundreds of thousands of comic structures in literature. McManus: Would this kind of knowledge and understanding destroy someone’s faith in the Bible or is it a passage to liberation? Frye: I think the question of belief is partly a linguistic question. Most beliefs are expressed in language of dogma, of proposition: “I believe this,” and so on. That only unites the people who do believe it. It’s exclusive and shuts out the people who don’t. But when you’re talking about images you’re talking about something you can’t argue with. Consequently you include everybody. I’ve taught this course on the Bible to all kinds of people, and have found that the differences in their attitudes and their commitments was much less important than having an area of study that was withdrawn from commitment of that excluding kind. McManus: In 1947 you published Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, and there too you were looking for patterns and structure in his work. It took you almost fifteen years, off and on, I understand, to write that book. In 1976 you published The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, once again searching for structures, patterns. What are you working on right now, Dr. Frye? Frye: I’ve finally come to grips with the book that’s been haunting me all my life. That’s the book on the Bible and its relationship to Western culture which informed the mythological framework. I think we’ve derived all our philosophy and all our literature from the kind of setup which we got from Greek and Hebrew origins, and the Bible is the centre of that. McManus: You’ve called this book your last phase. I’m wondering why. Frye: I suppose because I passed my sixty-fifth birthday. I don’t mean anything morbid or funereal by that. Merely that it’s likely to be the last

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creative phase that I’ll be dealing with. I don’t mean it’s my last book by any means. McManus: You’ve said, not here tonight, but in other places, that one thing that Canada does offer us is an opportunity to be a kind of observer of the world situation;5 and you yourself have been observing patterns and looking for structures. I’m wondering if in this stage in your life you see the structure of your own professional life? Frye: Yes, I suppose one does. I would be rather hard put to characterize it. I think that staying in Canada during my whole professional life has been important to me because it is a watcher’s country, it’s on the sidelines of where the great decisions are made. The observer sees more than the player, very frequently. McManus: Could you articulate the structure of your own life’s work? Frye: I think I’ve been circling around the same points pretty well all my life. The view of literature that I put in the Anatomy of Criticism was already there in my earlier book on Blake and has been repeated since. It doesn’t mean that I’m saying the same thing every time, but that I’m going back in what has been called a spiral curriculum. Trying to get new ideas, new ways of looking at things, and yet finding that somehow or other they do hook themselves on to what I’ve done before. McManus: I want in our remaining moments together to talk a little bit about Canada and the present Canadian scene. You wrote in The Bush Garden, among many other things about the Canadian imagination, that part of our problem is in failing to realize that Canadian unity and Canadian identity are two different things [ii; C, 413]. Could you say something briefly about that: Canadian unity; Canadian identity. Frye: I said that political and economic developments in our world tend to centralize and build up bigger and bigger units. Our unity as Canada is a political unity that fits into a still larger unity, of which the United States is a dominating factor. I don’t think Canadians have much desire to resist the fact that they go along with the Americans economically, and to a considerable extent politically too. That seems to me to be just part of the time we’re living in. But in his imagination, in his creative power, man is a bit of a vegetable; he needs to strike roots and deal with a fairly limited community. If you look at American writers you find that they turn out to be Mississippi writers, and New England writers, and

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Paris expatriate writers, and so on. Similarly with Canada you find that more and more small communities in Canada are becoming articulate through their writers and their painters. McManus: So when we search for our own identity it’s going to be a regional identity? Frye: It’s going to a pluralistic identity, and a regional one, yes. McManus: On the question of separation, and we’re talking about the separation of Quebec, you’ve said that separation is a betrayal of the intellectual and that Quebec intellectuals have been socially and politically irresponsible.6 Frye: Oh, well, if I . . . Did I say that, in so many words? [smiles] I don’t think I would say that they had been politically irresponsible. I do feel that separatism in Quebec is very largely an intellectual movement and consequently one that doesn’t have to consider the actual political or economic consequences as primary. My own view is that culturally we’re all instinctively separatists. McManus: That comes back to the regional identity. Frye: Yes, it does. Politically and economically it’s a great mistake to hitch that on to a separating, decentralizing cultural movement. When you do that you’re likely to get something rather ingrown and introverted and provincial. McManus: Do you think they’re liable to do it? Frye: I don’t think that in a world like ours Quebec has all that much liberty. I think that it can only choose between being a province of Canada and being an outcropping of the United States, that is, economically. McManus: Dr. Frye, we didn’t get a chance to talk about your own life other than your professional life. You were born in Sherbrooke, Quebec and went to Moncton, New Brunswick for your grade school and high school; came to Toronto for a typing course; came second and stayed and went to Victoria College; 1936: ordained in the United Church as a minister. Then to Oxford for your M.A. in English and then back to Vic and the U of T. In parting: religion and the student today, could you say something about that? Frye: I said in one of my essays on the disturbances of the late ’60s that I

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thought that the students at that time were intensely and even desperately religious, but weren’t quite certain what they were looking for.7 They had rather stronger views about what they were repudiating than what they were accepting. McManus: And today? Frye: I think today the situation is still roughly the same except that there is less of a sense of panic, perhaps. There is a very strong desire to get at what is regarded as the core of religion, the essential thing, a kind of consciousness that has broken out of all the categories that our world of time and space puts on it. The institutional manifesting of the religion is much less important to contemporary students. McManus: I wish we had more time. I know that, to be here with us tonight, you have taken your time, which is very precious, from the great labour that you’re under. I’m very grateful to you. The audience might be happy to know that Dr. Northrop Frye, in high school, was bored. Thank you, Dr. Frye.

38 An Eminent Victorian Conducted 30 January 1978

From “Eminent Victorians: The Frye Interview,” The Strand [Victoria College, University of Toronto], 1 March 1978, 5–11. Partially reprinted in Acta Victoriana Centennial, 1878–1978, 102 (Fall 1978): 53–4, as “Interview: Northrop Frye.” Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1978. This was one of a series of interviews in the Strand with eminent professors at Victoria College. The questions were prepared by Douglas Janack, Rob Lapp, and Bruce Reynolds; the interviewer was student Bruce Reynolds, then associate editor of the Strand, later a partner at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP specializing in construction law.

Reynolds: Do you have any favourite recollections from your days as a student at Victoria College? Frye: Well, I’d had rather a lonely time growing up and I found myself in a very congenial community, so I threw myself into quite a lot of activities: debating, dramatic society, year executives, residence executives, editor of Acta in my last year, and so on.1 So there are quite a number of pleasant memories, including the friends that I met. I think that students did know each other very well in those days, more than they do now perhaps. There are something like eighteen married couples within our year so obviously they got together somehow. Reynolds: During the recent “E.J. Pratt Remembered” evening held at Wymilwood Music Room, David Knight recalled Pelham Edgar as “sweeping into a lecture hall one night with two of the prettiest girls in class on either arm and the glowering fiancé of one of the girls in tow.”2 And last year in your talk on the “University as a Community” you

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described him as chairman of the English department reading a newspaper while the professors decided what courses they would be teaching. Still, many students are not aware of this great teacher in Victoria’s past. Could you say something further concerning the man behind these anecdotes? Frye: Well, he was just that. That is, he came from a sort of upper middle-class family and his home, which was a Victoria residence for many years, was on the southern part of Bloor Street. He was originally in the French department and he taught at Upper Canada College along with Stephen Leacock, and then came down to Victoria. In those days it was quite easy to go from high-school teaching to university teaching. Just to look at him, if you didn’t know him, you would swear that he had nothing on his mind except himself and his own comfort. But he was writing articles on “Is there a Canadian Literature?” in Saturday Night as early as 1895, and he was extraordinarily shrewd at picking people. He hauled Ned Pratt into his department from the Department of Psychology. Ned Pratt was the latest-blooming poet in the history of literature—his first book didn’t come out until he was in his forties—but Pelham thought he might write some day. He got Kathleen Coburn and me on the staff, and he got a number of people together who eventually turned up at UBC (Roy Daniells, Al Purdy, and others). He had an extraordinarily sharp eye for people, but his lecturing was very erratic, spasmodic. He wasn’t a theorist at all, but he read, and he read extraordinarily well. As a result of taking lectures from him you got very spasmodic information from your notes but you realized that devoting your life to scholarship was somehow an honourable career—that was what he managed to put across. Reynolds: The great kindness of John Robins was another recollection which you shared with those people who gathered to reminisce about E.J. Pratt. Frye: I think John Robins was a very great man, really. He came from a working-class family and he had to leave school at the age of twelve in order to earn money for the family. It was from there that he had not only to go on to university but to earn the qualifications for teaching in university. As a result, he was a person whose literary tastes were in popular literature. That is, ballads—he knew the ballad very well—and folk tales, and Paul Bunyan stories. That kind of thing. Of course, in

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those days, that was not as academically respectable as it is now. He was quite a pioneer in that kind of interest. So people, while they liked him very much, often didn’t take him as seriously as a scholar as he should have been taken, because he really was a very perceptive scholar. He was also, like Pelham, a reciter, and what he told were things like Uncle Remus stories. His accent was just perfect for those. So you got exposed to an oral tradition with those men, that was rather unusual I think. Reynolds: Those who attended the “E.J. Pratt Remembered” evening heard of the poet’s legendarily poor memory and the intense research that went into his poetry as well as many humorous and affectionate stories concerning Dr. Pratt. Professor Love expressed disappointment that you were unable to be there to add your memories to those that were present. Do you have a favourite Pratt story? Frye: Well, I don’t know. You see, Pratt deliberately cultivated a reputation as an absent-minded duffer. I used to see him doing that. When he was still young enough for the question of the secretaryship of the department to come his way, he would immediately start telling the story of how he once was made secretary of a committee and he got so interested in the conversation he forgot to take any notes. He realized that there is a great deal of make-work and busy-work around a university as there is around any institution and that he had just to keep away from it if he was going to be let alone to do his own writing. Professors and poets are supposed to be absent-minded so he just played up to that legend. But he was no fool. He would get things mixed up, but he kept a speaking, lecturing, and teaching schedule going for years that no business man would have attempted without a secretary. And it was generally other people’s dimwittedness that was responsible for the blow-ups rather than his. Reynolds: Do you think that the many versions of some of the Pratt myths, which it seems were mostly begun in their different forms by the poet himself, will make it difficult to separate man from legend when someone comes to do a complete critical biography? Frye: Yes, except the critical biography is now being done by someone who has been fanatically clever at disentangling the two things. His name is David Pitt and he’s at Memorial University in Newfoundland. When that book of his finally sees the light of day I think it’ll probably have things pretty clear.3 But you’re right. He did cultivate the legend himself.

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Reynolds: Professor Love told how Dr. Pratt pawned his philosophy medal and took five other Newfoundland students to dinner at the King Edward [Hotel]. Frye: Well, that kind of gesture he loved and he loved parties and sitting at the head of the table, and so on. And he loved conversation, but he was quite serious about his conversation. He didn’t want gossip. And those evenings were really quite rewarding evenings; they weren’t just shooting the breeze. Reynolds: Has the character of Victoria changed fundamentally during the time that you’ve been here? Frye: Not fundamentally, no. It’s changed in many respects. When I was an undergraduate there was still a majority of people coming from outside Toronto. It hadn’t become the metropolitan university that it is now. Now people just charge in from the Toronto high schools and that’s mostly it, but in those days there was no Guelph, no Waterloo, no McMaster, no Trent,4 and so people came in from all the small towns in the west of Ontario. That meant that coming to a bigger city was a part of their college education. And that meant also that the residence was much more the focus of university life perhaps than it is now. And, as I said at the beginning, students perhaps knew each other a little better than they do now. It was smaller. Reynolds: As a result of expansion many students are no longer aware of Emmanuel College, Victoria’s Methodist cornerstone, and its place in Victoria’s identity. If Victoria loses its sense of being a United Church institution, from the student’s standpoint, will it lose its traditional identity, becoming merely a residence college? Frye: Well, you can’t go on ethos alone and the United Church connection is a part of the ethos. It’s always been an extremely flexible part because even at the turn of the century, around 1890 or 1900, there were perhaps more Methodists going to UC than going to Victoria, and there were always a great number of other people coming to Victoria. I think that it’s a much subtler ethos to put your finger on than simply the church connection. That’s something else again. Reynolds: Each of the professors interviewed by the Strand this year has expressed regret over the loss of the Honour Course system. Many stu-

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dents do not even know what once constituted the Honour program.5 Do you feel that the discontinuation of the Honour program was a loss? Frye: Oh God, yes. The Honour Course gave the best undergraduate training that was available on the continent. If you went into the Honour Course you got relatively few choices through your undergraduate years, but you got your subject and you knew it when you got out. And I did have some quite intelligent students say to me in the science courses, more particularly, that they felt they got more of a technical training than an education. But in the humanities it was an extraordinarily good training. It perhaps required a bit more maturity from the student than the student was able to give to it coming from grade 13 because it was founded on the principle that wherever you are is the centre of all knowledge, and it takes a while to get that through one’s head. But I think that after the Macpherson Report, they should have experimented as much as they liked with the General Course, but it was a disaster to destroy the Honour Course.6 Reynolds: Were the students in favour of discontinuing the Honour Course? Frye: They didn’t know. Reynolds: It’s been suggested that students in the ’60s were so embittered and frustrated from the high-school system that they came to university with the intent of doing what they could to demolish it, almost out of revenge. Do you think that that’s possible? Frye: Some of them perhaps did, yes. It was simply a kind of mass hysteria that was in the air and I don’t think that many of the student activists really knew what the hell they were about. They had vague notions of revolutionizing society but the movement accomplished extraordinarily little. I think that the reactions to it were panicky: they were panicky when they were repressive, and they were panicky when they were permissive. The result was that when we came out of it the two things that made Toronto unique among universities—the federal system, and the Honour Course—were both mortally injured. So now it’s just another big packing and processing plant like Michigan, and Ohio, and Indiana. But these movements always achieve the very opposite of what they intend to achieve. That is, instead of liberating things they just created an atmosphere in which the individual teacher was much more the dic-

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tator in his classroom than he ever was before. It’s the same thing with representation: so many different groups of people are represented on decision-making bodies that they become too big and too unwieldy, and so you get an invisible committee deciding everything. That to some degree has settled down. That is, the people who demand representation are the people who want to get their fingers on the very centres of power, and then of course they find it a very dull job, and they get off. Then you get the decent students, the ones who are willing to work and serve on committees, and you get proper student representation. Reynolds: Many people still come to university with very poor attitudes * * * and don’t really enjoy and experience the opportunities here to the full. Frye: Yes, I think that’s true. It’s extremely difficult to understand just what the university is for undergraduates. It gives you four years’ experience of a life in which the intelligence and the imagination have functional roles to play, and it’s rather difficult to get that. Most people, including the editorial writers in the Globe and Mail, are determined that the university should be a place to get you a better middle-class job in a middle-class community. Reynolds: Is it possible to avoid the teaching of extremely large classes? Or is this not an undesirable teaching situation? Frye: Large classes are not necessarily a bad thing. We’ve had a great deal of the mystique of the seminar or the small class—what they call at Princeton the preceptorial and so on—but those turned out to be monologues from the instructor like everything else. There are certain things that the large lecture can do. In the humanities, for example, you can give a kind of historical perspective which a tutorial can’t give. I think there is a place for the large classroom and I don’t think it inhibits questions necessarily. I’ve had quite lively discussions with classes of three or four hundred. Reynolds: Does the loss of autonomous departments at Victoria threaten Vic’s identity as a liberal arts institution?7 Frye: Yes. As I say, you can’t keep a college going on ethos alone. You have to have some autonomy of departments. I think that they have to renegotiate the whole basis of federation and put the federated colleges back on their feet as autonomous institutions. Otherwise, it just gets to be

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another great big monolithic structure where all the individual parts are not really colleges but just residences and classroom space. Reynolds: Does the loss of individual Vic departments in liberal arts reflect a trend towards the shrinking of liberal arts in the university as a whole? Frye: Oh, possibly. These things go in cycles to some degree. You get a great concentration of students in natural sciences or the social sciences, and the humanities always do better than people think they’re going to do. When the federation agreement was drawn up in 1884, the principle then was that the humanities are better when they’re decentralized and the sciences better when they’re centralized. Since then the social sciences have come into the picture, and a good many humanities departments, like Spanish and Italian and Fine Art and so forth, have also come in and automatically become university departments. That meant that the situation got very lopsided. Of course the University of Toronto wanted it to become lopsided so as to push the federated colleges into a corner. But I think it’s still true that the humanities are best taught in a more decentralized atmosphere. Even though Victoria and University College are bigger than they should be, students can still find an identity there. Reynolds: How do you feel when you enter the reading room of E.J. Pratt Library and see the painting of Frye in the sky?8 Frye: Well, I don’t know exactly how I feel. For one thing I’m glad that the wall is there. That’s mostly what I think of. The architects originally wanted to make that wall entirely glass, and I had visions of students fried to grease spots in the summer with the sun pouring in through the west windows. After discussing an inside screen and an outside screen, they finally decided on a blank wall that is so high that it doesn’t give you a sense of being closed in at all. I think they should go easy with the pictures: there shouldn’t be too many. I don’t particularly like that picture of me. There are jokes about Frye having no visible means of support. I don’t think it bothers me very much though. Reynolds: What does the university faculty of liberal arts do for the working man, at Stelco, for instance, who supports universities with his tax money but never attends them? Frye: Well, I don’t know. The university doesn’t perhaps directly affect the individual tax payer as such. I don’t think very many of the things we

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pay our taxes for do, but the university creates a kind of free space in society. It has a great deal to do with the fact the working man is living in a democratic society and has the minimum of interference with his personal liberty. The university has a great role to play in keeping society open-ended. That’s the main benefit I see, but, of course, there are all sorts of subsidiary ones. Having a centre of scholarship and research— that’s part of keeping society open-ended too. Reynolds: Your television program “Journey Without Arrival” pointed out the existence of a uniquely Canadian identity.9 To what extent do you think the Canadian people are aware of their country’s identity? Frye: I think they’re much less aware of it than they are when they leave the country. I always assumed that it was impossible to tell a Canadian from an American until I lived for a year or two in Great Britain, then I realized that was nonsense. There was quite an obvious difference between them. But that’s the kind of perspective you get only when you’re outside for a bit. The people who stay within the country aren’t particularly aware of it, and there’s not much reason why they should be, really. Reynolds: Since the CRTC imposed Canadian content restrictions on the media, has it had any active role in bringing Canadian culture to the public? Frye: I think it’s helped, yes. At least it’s given employment to certain people who would otherwise have had to go to the States. As we’ve already sold the pass on things like the book business, the magazine business, the movie business, we’ve only got one thing to hold on to now, and I think it’s worth trying to hold on to that as long as we can. Reynolds: Do you think that Canada’s “branch office” mentality is the reason for Canadian artistic endeavour assuming an alternate role in our society, which, for example, in the theatre world manifests itself in a solid London–New York fare at major theatres? Frye: I daresay that’s true. The fact that we in English Canada speak the same language as do much larger centres naturally does mean that we, as you say, alternate between a feeling of what we can produce locally, and of what we import. The main thing is to make sure the balance of trade isn’t too much upset in either direction, I suppose, because a very considerable amount of even New York theatre is imported from

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Europe. It’s the kind of balance that almost anyone in the entertainment business would look for. Reynolds: A group of Canadian artists is becoming prominent now who were initially affected by your ideas. How do you think this changes the relationship between the poet and critic? Or does it? Frye: I don’t think criticism can affect poetry very directly. There is no such thing as a Frye school of poetry. What I’ve done as a critic may make people concerned with literature more aware of what they’re doing in one way or another, but I don’t think a critic directly influences poetry: that’s not his job. If it is his job, he’s a very dangerous influence. There is perhaps a tendency to regard critics as possible friends rather than as possible enemies. Reynolds: Is a Canadian Walt Whitman possible, imaginatively unifying a nation of regionalists? Or do you think that the Group of Seven and E.J. Pratt have accomplished that imaginative unification? Frye: It’s a very large and complex process for people to become aware of a cultural identity. I think the Group of Seven and Pratt have done a great deal towards that, partly because they’re a generation removed from us. I certainly don’t think a Canadian Whitman is possible; he seems to be something absolutely peculiar to the United States. He couldn’t possibly have existed here. But he of course had to fight all his life against neglect and indifference. He very much wanted to be a national poet but nobody took him very seriously as that in his lifetime. These things take a while to settle and grow: cultural rhythms can’t be hurried. They don’t make an immediate impact; they’re not news. Reynolds: If the separatist movement in Quebec were successful, how would that affect the Canadian imaginative identity? Frye: Well, it would break it up. At least it would damage it considerably. I would hate to see it happen. At the same time I don’t think it would fatally destroy the Canadian identity. I think that English Canada has got a new sense of identity, partly bounced off from the French Canadian sense. Culturally a sense of Quebec separatism only intensifies what is there anyway and ought to be there, because culturally it’s good for regions to develop in a country, especially a country as big as this. The disasters would be economic and political disasters, and they would be very considerable.

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In an interview the Star had with me some months ago I said I didn’t think separatism was going to work politically and economically: if it did win the referendum it would be a matter of more or less symbolic separation.10 The people backing it are very largely people in the National Film Board, and the CBC, and teaching. I don’t think business people in Quebec want separatism, and I don’t think unions want it, but there is a tradition among intellectuals of being rather socially irresponsible. If you mention economic problems their eyes just glaze over. They don’t care about that, and I think that there’s a large body of these people. They’re well organized, they’re very articulate, and they’re perhaps strong enough to win a referendum in Quebec. The presence of the United States will prevent it from becoming a real rupture. The Canadian temper seems to be pretty cool, and I’m very glad to see that it is cool. They seem to be trying to understand the aspirations of the Québécois, or at least some of them. I think that negotiations will always be open. There are some very unpleasant things, of course, under the surface of the Parti Québécois. It’s a very nasty neofascist movement, and if they got their head then that would be quite literally a case of hell breaking loose. Reynolds: So many groups have come forward in the last ten years to demand more from our society, people who have been oppressed: the blacks, the Indians, women, and gays. Can society continue to make reparations in order to give everyone a decent chance? Frye: The sense of the rights of minorities is a very healthy sense in itself. I think it’s a good thing society is getting more and more sense of the kinds of things it does consciously or unconsciously to minorities who can’t fight back. I’m very glad to see more awareness of smaller minority groups, homosexuals for example, as human beings, with their own dignity, their own rights. It is of course possible to go overboard on that. When affirmative action in American universities gets to the point of hiring third-rate people because they’re blacks, that’s a kind of discrimination in reverse. Reynolds: How do you think the Bible, since it is an integral part of our cultural modelling, could be re-introduced to education on the primary level as something other than the focal point of religious education? Frye: I think that the Bible should be taught very thoroughly and very early and that it should be taught very largely in relationship to its con-

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tent but not didactically. It’s quite possible to teach it in terms of stories, in terms of what it actually does record, without going on to say, “This proves, dear children, that you ought to hold exactly the same views as I hold.” You don’t need to do that at all. I’ve taught a course in the Bible for thirty years to a variety of people ranging from Greek Orthodox to Communist. I don’t think anybody’s ever felt that his privacy was being invaded by the course. Reynolds: Time has called the evangelical movement in the United States, which is also having a large effect in Canada, the “new empire of faith.” And this movement accepts the historical truth of the Bible. Do you think that this attitude could frustrate an attempt to teach the Bible as the imaginative focus for a secular educational process? Frye: Oh, it could. But that’s merely another example of the fact that antiintellectualism is built into our whole way of life, especially on the North American continent. People’s instinctive attitude towards the Bible or religion is an uncritical attitude. It’s quite true that you get people horsing around in California trying to set up the book of Genesis as an alternative to evolution and so forth, but when you consider what was going on fifty years ago in the monkey trial in Tennessee, for example, things are not all that bad now. These people do not get as much play as they used to. That’s why you have to have a university to keep society openended and to indicate that there is a place for the intelligence and the critical intelligence. Reynolds: The contemporary social imagination is full of apocalyptic images, as in Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. How is this related to our socio-economic conditions? Frye: There’s a sort of manic-depressive feeling about society. The manic phase is the “Age of Aquarius” part of it, and the depressive phase is the “atomic holocaust” part of it.11 I think it’s very easy to jump to blackand-white extremes of emotion one way or the other. Actually what impressed me about Star Wars was its stock conservatism. That’s exactly the way the pictures were being made in the days when I used to go clutching a dime and a penny to the Empress Theatre in Moncton: the good guys win, the bad guys lose. Reynolds: A space western? Frye: Yes. There’s a lot more hardware busted than there used to be, but that’s the main difference.

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Reynolds: The black-and-white nature of these different images which are appearing seems to appeal to many people. Is this the same kind of attitude that makes people want to believe in the Bible literally? Frye: Yes, I think it’s the same oversimplified tendency to think you must be this way, otherwise you’re totally opposed. It’s the sense of melodrama really, and melodrama is for people who cheer the heroes and hiss the villains. As a kind of emotional release, there’s no great harm in that. It becomes harmful when it becomes a serious and consistent social attitude. Reynolds: In your essay “The University and Personal Life” you speak about the loss of the teleological sense in our time: of the feeling, which is close to absurdity, that the continuity in our lives is really not there, that life is a discontinuous sequence of intense moments [WE, 365]. Could the confusion often resulting from this perception be related to people’s desire to see everything in terms of black and white? Frye: I would think so, yes. If you’re thinking in terms of going towards an end you become aware of certain complexities leading towards it, but if you’re in on the jokes-per-minute routine, if you’re just out for pure sensation, then the more black or the more white it is the better.

39 Between Paradise and Apocalypse Taped 6 February 1978

From WGS, 127–61. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list; available on cassette in NFF. This interview was taped for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and broadcast in five parts on the CBC program Morningside, 17–21 April 1978. Interviewer Don Harron, a well-known Canadian actor, was a friend and former student of Frye’s.

I Harron: Professor Frye, there’s a lot of talk these days about a return to religion. The flower children have gone to seed, and the counter-revolution seems to be here. People are born again. Is there any real meaning in a return to religion? Does it ever leave? Frye: I think it springs from the fact that we all belong to something before we are anything; that is, we’re conditioned to be people in a certain social context even before we’re born. I think that people consequently have certain feelings of loyalty built into them, and there are times when the institutions that command loyalty don’t seem to command it; things seem to modulate. Either the political unit or the religious unit to which you’re attached at birth doesn’t command your loyalties and you shift over to something else. I think a natural human tendency is to be loyal to the smallest unit that makes sense. Harron: One’s mother, you mean? Frye: It starts with one’s mother and one’s immediate family, and it goes on to the small gang that you’re attached to as a child or adolescent, but

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when you get to things like Stoicism you realize that you’re in a rather tired world, because nobody becomes loyal to the universe if there’s anything else he can be loyal to. Harron: What accounts for young people today joining things like the Moon groups?1 Frye: There’s a great relaxation, a great emotional release, I think, in joining a group that asks you no questions on the understanding that you don’t ask it any questions. That completely uncritical acceptance of something, a return to a dialectical womb, so to speak, has a very strong appeal to a lot of young people, especially in the period where they’re just emerging from adolescence and where the loyalty to the group is a very strong one. Harron: So joining, say, the Hare Krishna is not really adopting Eastern culture, but finding another group like a summer camp?2 Frye: Yes, I think so. I don’t think there is really anything Oriental about the Hare Krishna, the Moon cult, most of the Zen people. They perhaps have a teacher who comes from Asia, but by the time it gets here it settles down into something very recognizable as a North American pattern. Harron: You said that we’re preconditioned to get into a social group even before we are born. Would you care to elaborate on that? Frye: Well, I was a middle-class, mid-twentieth-century Canadian nine months before I was born, and I think it’s true of everybody that they are, as Heidegger says, “thrown” into the world,3 that they don’t choose to be what they are, they don’t choose their context. They have a certain colour of skin, they have a certain nationality, and they have a certain context in religion and politics and other things. Harron: Is that what’s meant by the Christian doctrine of original sin? Frye: Original sin is not that you belong to something, but that you ought to belong to something as fast as possible, namely, the Christian church, and get baptized at the earliest opportunity in order to clear up original sin. That’s the theory. Original sin really means that man is born with a kind of entropy in him. That is, he’s a being heading toward death. He’s a person who’s going to die, and his finiteness, his mortality, means that there’s a limit beyond which he can’t attain his own ideals.

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Harron: And this sin is wiped away by the Christian ritual of baptism? Frye: That was the idea, yes. Once you get adopted into the sacramental machinery of Christianity, it puts you into a group with a divine centre at the middle of it which enables you to get back something of what, according to the theory again, man had before he had original sin. Harron: What is a ritual? Frye: A ritual is an action with a specific and specialized meaning that has to do with turning the corners of one’s life. That is, first of all there are certain rituals, such as a wedding, which have to do with special stages of your life, and then secondly there are rituals connected with certain times of the year, Sunday or the Sabbath coming around in the week, or Christmas or Easter coming around once a year, which tend to mark the course of time by moments of specific focusing of attention. Harron: So ritual marks something? A passage through life? Frye: Yes. Harron: Does it explain something? Where does this come from? I feel, for example, that a baptism or a wedding or a funeral is an acting out of something. What is the something that it acts out? Frye: In most setups, I think, a ritual is an appearance in action of some kind of myth or story. That is, the ritual of the funeral recreates the Christian teaching about death, and weddings and baptisms and the sacramental occasions likewise. It’s not so much that the myth explains the ritual, though that is what anthropologists used to say, as that the ritual is a kind of manifestation of myth in action. Harron: Anthropologists also say that primitive society is highly ritualized. Are they more ritualized than we in our contemporary world? Frye: Oh, I shouldn’t think so. I think our lives are a mass of rituals from beginning to end. And people adopt their own rituals, like turning on the television at eight o’clock. That is, we keep punctuating our lives by subrituals. Harron: That’s not a habit, it’s a ritual? Frye: Well, the boundary line between a habit and a ritual is not very easy to determine. But there are some habits that have to do with mark-

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ing certain times. And I think that those shade insensibly into rituals. Harron: I’ve never heard of anybody trying to kick a ritual. Frye: Well, I don’t know. Certainly the reactions against the work ethic by young people in the 1960s were in effect saying that the work ethic is a ritual; it’s a ritual persisting out of habit which is no longer being examined or looked at. And that is practically the definition of superstition— something that you go on doing without knowing or caring why you’re doing it. They were trying to kick a ritual. They adopted a lot of new ones in the process, of course. Harron: Now that there’s up to eight per cent unemployment, do you think they’re still trying to kick the work ethic? Or does a little bit of unemployment cure one of that? Frye: Yes, I think it stops very quickly. That’s perhaps not a very good example. It was just one that occurred to me. But I think that people do kick rituals. They change their religions and get into new patterns; they change their political loyalties and the rituals that go with them. Harron: I think it’s a very good example, because the period of the late ’60s seems to me to be unique. Suddenly the world changed. The miniskirt came in and long hair. I know that long hair has been around for most of our history, but it seemed to me to be a very different period, one that lasted at the most for about ten years. Now are there any other parallels in history to that period? Frye: I suppose that kind of thing goes with a certain degree of nostalgia. I think of the oscillation between long hair and beards and short hair as more or less recapitulating the Cavalier-Roundhead business in seventeenth-century England, where the Roundheads with the short, cropped hair represented the middle classes that were on the make, and the Cavaliers represented an aristocracy that had already lost its social effectiveness. Harron: Would you say we’re entering a Cromwellian period now? Frye: I think that periods alternate much more quickly than they used to do. And we have with us a curious mixture of Cromwellian tendencies and Restoration tendencies. The sudden permissiveness in speech, for example, as we have it in drama and fiction—that kind of thing goes in the opposite direction perhaps.

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Harron: The young people today seem to be anti-historical. They think none of this has ever happened before. Anything that happens, they think, is for the first time. Is that a strange phenomenon? Or has that happened before—that people think it’s never happened before? Frye: Oh, I think it’s always happening. People think the world begins when they did. I have talked to students, for example, who thought it was an outrage to have to study anything before the year of their own birth. The feeling that there is no history before your own time is a very ancient one. One of the oldest histories we have is Thucydides’ history of the war between Sparta and Athens. He begins his history by saying that before about a hundred years ago, nothing much had happened in the world. Harron: You mentioned that the young people in denying the work ethic created superstitions or rituals of their own. Is it impossible to get away from the myth and rituals of our past? Frye: I think that man always perceives from inside some kind of framework or picture of the universe. I call it a mythological universe. He sees from inside certain containing factors, like creation and resurrection. He may not call them that. He may give them secular titles, but they organize his way of looking at things. I doubt if man can create or even act except inside some kind of framework of that kind. Harron: They organize his way of looking at things? Frye: Yes. Harron: So that any man anywhere on this planet thinks in much the same way? Frye: Well, in the same way that your senses are set up in a certain way. As philosophers have told us for centuries, I don’t see the table in front of me; I see what my eyes report to me of the table in the way in which my body is set up to see things. I think that the same thing is true of the intellectual and imaginative world—that what we think and imagine has a great deal to do with a kind of total conditioning that we’re in. Harron: And do the myths that exist for all men on this planet more or less coincide? Frye: I don’t know whether “coincide” is the word, but I think that all

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the myths on this planet are ultimately intelligible to everybody. I think that however strange and bizarre one may find the manners or customs of other societies, nevertheless they are ultimately intelligible. II Harron: Professor Frye, last time we talked you mentioned that really men’s minds are formed in such a way that they accept, generally speaking, the same kinds of myths. Am I quoting you accurately? Frye: Mutually intelligible myths, let’s say. Harron: In other words, from birth to death man sees the important things that happen to him in much the same way. Frye: I think that’s broadly true, yes. Harron: So that we Christians who have our Bible are really sharing with other people the same visions? Frye: Oh, yes. I think that no religion can become a missionary religion, for example, as most of the higher religions have been, unless what it has to say is intelligible to everybody it goes to talk to. Harron: For example, when a missionary goes to New Guinea and talks about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden there is a parallel? Frye: I think there’s a parallel. There’s something there which the people in New Guinea can certainly find parallels to in their own mythology and can understand for that reason. Harron: They certainly have snakes and they have a lot of foliage. But do they have a vision of a time when life was perfect—a golden age? Frye: Well, a great many myths do. Myths of an original paradise and of man’s having lost the gift of immortality—those are worldwide. Frazer has made tremendous collections of them. They’re just everywhere. Harron: So man not only shares a myth of the creation, but he also shares a myth of the fall. Frye: Yes, at least there are myths of the human situation, and they very frequently take the form of some kind of fall or separation from a paradisal state.

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Harron: One of the feelings that people who have left Christianity have about Christianity is that it blames you. They go to something like, say, Taoism, which says it isn’t anybody’s fault, it’s just the way it is—much the way Shakespeare reacts in King Lear. Tragedy—that’s the way it is. There seems to be a decided preference for that kind of philosophy today. Frye: I think the situation there is partly linguistic. That is, all religions say that if you’re good you’ll stop being bad. But if you get this in terms of karma and dharma, you have a feeling of discovering something and not being sent back to Sunday school. Harron: What about the other end of the scale, the death of the god, which we call our Crucifixion? Frye: Yes, I think there is something rather peculiar to the West both in the conceptions of the fall and in conceptions of the death of the god. In Buddhism, for example, Buddha leaves his life as a prince, becomes a hermit and an ascetic, eventually overcomes all the temptations of the world, and then starts to preach liberation. What you don’t get in the Buddhist myth is a notion of a final confrontation with society, such as you have in the Crucifixion and in the death of Socrates in Greek religion. Harron: What about other religions like the ones centred around Mithras and Adonis? Frye: Well, there again, they don’t seem to have the sense of a confrontation with society partly because they are, well, synchronic myths. They are not historical myths. Harron: Synchronic means historical? Frye: No, it means the opposite. It means they go around the year. That is, the birthday of the sun every year on December 25th is the basis of Mithraism. The Biblical tradition is, I think, unusual in that it has a historical dimension, and history is what creates personality. Jesus and Adonis both have dying-god myths attached to them, but Adonis is not a person and Jesus is. Harron: What has this done to us in the West then—this particular myth we hold? Frye: It’s given us a very strong sense of a meaning emerging out of

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human history rather than history as a meaningless series of cycles from which you have to be liberated. Harron: So it’s given us a kind of notion of progress? Frye: Well, progress can be one form of it. But it’s a rather oversimplified form. It’s more, I think, in the Biblical tradition a sense of the meaning of history as being finally revealed by the birth of Christ and consequently as progressing toward some kind of conclusion. The sense in the Biblical religions of the beginning of time and an end of time are extremely strong, whereas in the Hindu and Buddhist setup there’s much more of a sense of the cycle of time turning indefinitely. Harron: But the Christian myth seems to be tied up with the Aztecs and Druids, with its ritual sacrifice. Frye: But with the Aztecs sacrifice was an end in itself. You murdered all your prisoners of war to keep on feeding the sun. The sun would go out if you didn’t feed it corpses. That is a purely synchronic idea: it comes around every year in the same way. But in Jesus there is one sacrifice which is qualitatively different from all other sacrifices, and it’s a crucial act in history. Harron: But it had its origins in a very primitive, pagan ritual, didn’t it, which is cannibalism or sacrifice? In The Golden Bough Sir James Frazer talks about killing the leader before his powers go away. Frye: Yes, according to Frazer you have the leader of the tribe as a god-man, and when his powers are at their peak he’s going to wane, and if his powers decline then the tribe will start losing its battles and the food supply will give out. So you put him to death at the height of his powers. But there’s no use letting all that divinity go to waste, so you eat it and drink it.4 That’s the Frazer theory, and it is in a way an analogy of what happens in the Christian myth as well. Harron: In communion? Frye: Yes, you can’t identify a thing as what it started out to be. That is, an oak tree has a bit more in it than an acorn has. Harron: I was thinking of the oak tree and the Druids. Frye: Well, yes. We don’t know much about the Druids, but they again seem to have had a synchronic mythology and, according to some, a belief in reincarnation. We don’t know.

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Harron: The pattern of witchcraft in Anglo-Saxon history—I always thought that it was connected to the Druids, or at least that people tried to connect it, that it was a kind of nature-worshipping religion which was against Christianity. Frye: People have suggested that Christianity was a big-city religion. It moved into the big cities: Rome and Alexandria and Antioch. The word “pagan” is connected with paganus or paisant, peasant; and the word “heathen” means the person living on the heath. In other words it was the country, the rural people, who clung to their ancient gods and their ancient beliefs. There have been theories that just as Satan turned up with the horns and the tail of woodland gods, like Pan, so there was actually a cult of such a god in medieval Europe and that was what witchcraft was about. I’m not very committed to that view myself. I think you can get evidence for anything if you extract it under torture. Harron: But there is evidence of covens of witches today, and Alastair Crowley made it popular about fifty years ago. It’s been very current, I think, in the last twenty years—the so-called free spirit. Is it a kind of anti-Christianity? Frye: It’s a kind of primordial symbol-making process in the human mind, which has served as a root out of which Christianity has grown. I think that the historical evidence for the covens of witches and the like doesn’t matter quite so much. The witch finders and heresy hunters, the people who tortured witches and forced them to confess to certain things, were actually digging things out of their own subconscious. Harron: The ritual of the mass also contains the ritual of the black mass, which is the opposite. They say the Bible backwards and they make human sacrifice, which was one way the nuns got rid of their unwanted babies. Am I being a bit like Hieronymus Bosch here? Frye: No, I think it’s a bit later than that. I think the black mass was very largely a nineteenth-century invention. There is a tradition in Christianity which has always explained the resemblance between Christianity and pagan myths as due to the fact that the pagan myths were the devil’s parodies of the Christian myths. That is the tradition which incorporates things like witchcraft, mythology, the black mass, and so on. But the black mass seems to me an extremely literary notion and a rather second-rate literary notion. Alastair Crowley is a good example of the level it operates on.

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Harron: So what we have left today is Mardi Gras, Halloween, and Fasching in Germany? Frye: Yes, some of these rituals persist out of habit and they become what you might call a kind of voluntary superstition. That is, kids go around collecting on Halloween not because they actually believe in witches, but because it has become something set up for them to do, and some of our rituals are survivals of that kind. There’s a remark in one of Thomas Hardy’s novels which describes a St. George play, and he says you can always tell the authentic folk ritual because it always bores the hell out of the people who are doing it.5 Harron: But Halloween is the night before All Hallows Day, isn’t it? Frye: Yes, it was originally the feast of the dead. The original primitive year in Europe had the two points of November the 1st and May the 1st. They survive in Celtic legend as the Samhain and the Beltane, and in the Brocken spectres—May the 1st, and the witches’ dance in Germany— Halloween. The Christian church tried to obliterate the feast of the dead by first making it All Souls’ Day and then making the next day All Saints’ Day.6 But it still kept on going and became modulated into a historical disguise with Guy Fawkes. Harron: Really? Frye: Well, Guy Fawkes Day is the fifth of November, which is around that time of year, but the figure of Guy Fawkes is really a Halloween figure. Harron: He is in England, that’s true. I just thought he was a political minority. Frye: Oh, sure he is. But that’s the way in which a very ancient ritual can suddenly get stuck on to some kind of historical character. Harron: There always seems to be the pattern of a night of wild libation before the holy period. I’m thinking of Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday. Frye: Yes, the period of licence before the period of spiritual concentration. You get drunk Saturday night so you can have a nice contemplative hangover on Sunday morning. That’s the principle of Carnival and Lent. Harron: Is that general among people?

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Frye: Yes, I think so. The man who has written so much on this subject, Mircea Eliade, has a whole book on the period of licence, the period of the dissolving of social standards, just before the new year begins. Harron: What’s his book called? Frye: Well, he has a dozen books. One is called The Myth of the Eternal Return, which I think has most of this. Harron: That sounds like a Christian concept—the eternal return, the belief in the Resurrection. Frye: Yes, except that return in some respects is almost the opposite of resurrection, because although resurrection is celebrated at Easter, which is a return, what it means is a sort of leap from one world to another world; whereas the return means the same world coming back again. Harron: The sun will come back, the seasons will return, the snow will go away. Frye: Yes, it’s a cyclical world. Harron: Has our ritual and myth world brought us the neuroses of the present day? Frye: Well, I wouldn’t put it into a causal pattern. I think that man is a neurotic animal, and his ritual patterns will express neurosis just as much as they will express the opposite. III Harron: Professor Frye, you talked last time about a final confrontation which Christianity provides in the crucifixion myth but which other religions don’t really have—for example, Buddhism. Frye: Yes, I think that that’s rather a distinguishing characteristic of the Biblical tradition. It starts with the story of Israel in the Old Testament. The story of Israel begins with God appearing in a burning bush to Moses and saying, “The Hebrews are being exploited in Egypt, and I’m going to do something about it.” So he first of all appears, giving himself a name and a highly partisan role in history and announcing that he’s going to be on the side of the oppressed people against the social estab-

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lishment. That’s something that carries on into Christianity with the Crucifixion, where the final meaning of Christ’s life on earth is that he was the one person that no society could endure. They had to get rid of him. Harron: Is religion always nationalistic? Frye: Oh, no, I don’t think so. There are national religions; they’re not very pleasant things. Harron: Old Testament religion seems to be very nationalistic. It’s them against us, and we’ve got God on our side. Frye: There’s a great deal of that—the sense of the specific society of Israel. On the other hand, of course, Israel gets more lumps than any other nation because it has more responsibilities and ought to know better. You also get a great deal of very broad, humane, cosmopolitan feeling, as in the Book of Ruth and the Book of Jonah. Harron: Is one of the reasons for the prevalence of anti-Semitism that the Hebrews called themselves the chosen people, that they elevated themselves above other tribes? Frye: Perhaps so. The sources of anti-Semitism are very complex. I myself think that anti-Semitism among Christians is always, sooner or later, a disguised form of anti-Christianity. It’s your own religion you hate, and you project it on something else. Harron: So that you can get rid of your own religion by castigating another tribe? Frye: Yes, by calling it something else. Harron: We hear a lot of the word “apocalypse” now. It’s being used almost commercially, as in the film Apocalypse Now, which is about the Vietnam War. What actually is the apocalypse? Frye: The original apocalypse is the unveiling, the revelation of the world as God originally made it, that is, before man fell into sin and a state of confusion. It got to acquire the meaning of an end of history. Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”7 That sense of history as a nightmare from which man is trying to awake is the basis of the apocalyptic feeling, the feeling that some event almost anytime will lift you right out of the whole process of history.

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Harron: So the Bible begins with a myth of an age of perfection in the garden of Eden and ends with the same vision? Frye: Yes, it does. There’s a return to the original state. It’s symbolized in the Bible by the tree and the water of life, which man lost in the garden of Eden and gets back again with the apocalypse. Harron: So is that, in a sense, breaking the binding habit of history— getting outside time? Frye: That’s part of it, yes. I think that that feeling is very deeply rooted in Western consciousness. In the last generation the whole movement of Marxism had an apocalyptic quality to it which it doesn’t have with the same intensity now. But there was a feeling that certain historical movements were taking place that were going to lead us beyond history. Now we’re getting the same kind of thing in more disparate ways, some of them assimilated to the Oriental conception of enlightenment, something that lifts you out of the wheel of death and rebirth. Harron: Is that what you get from Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book, for example? Frye: In Mao Tse-tung’s writings there is a good deal of a progression towards a state of society which is free of class distinction and exploitation and consequently has none of the characteristics of history as man has always known it. Harron: The Russian version of Marxism seems to have become ritualized into an almost Christian form, with the people lining up to visit Lenin’s tomb. Isn’t that like a Catholic church? Frye: Once you have a revolution and a certain group comes to power, one thing they’ve got to stop is any sense of transcendence of what they are. That is, what has to go on in Russia now must be in conformity with the people who are now in power. The same thing happened with the medieval church. You had various visionaries proclaiming the age of the Holy Spirit which would transcend the age of medieval Christendom.8 The church had to put the lid on that because the Christian revolution has already occurred; you can’t have anything transcending that. Harron: The historian Arnold Toynbee said that civilizations decline not from without, but from within by not being able to respond to the challenges, and he thought that our barbarians would come from within.

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And, of course, the young people with the long hair look like the Goths and the Visigoths that brought down Rome. Is there any validity in that parallel? Frye: I don’t know. That’s the Spengler parallel. He [Spengler] said that history consists of cultures that, like organisms, grow and flourish and then exhaust their possibilities and eventually die or at least become moribund, that is, persisting just out of habit. He draws many parallels between what he calls the decline of the West in the twentieth century of Europe and the Roman Empire—the same enormous cities and the same annihilation wars and dictatorships and the great rootless masses moving around in the population. I think that those parallels are there. It’s perhaps an aspect of history rather than the real key to history. Harron: But Toynbee’s refinement on Spengler was to say that if you got a universal religion out of the dying bowels of the old civilization— for example, Christianity came out of the decline of Rome—you renew your civilization. Frye: Yes, I think that that has a lot to be said for it. He says that there’s an internal and an external proletariat and that they combine to form the church out of which the new culture emerges.9 One trouble with the twentieth century is that we don’t really have an external proletariat; that is, the world has become a global unit. We have really a different kind of problem to consider, I think. Spengler talks about the second religiousness as a growth that takes place in the late stages of a culture or civilization.10 Certainly what he calls a second religiousness is all around us. Harron: A second religiousness? Frye: Yes, as distinct from the real age of faith in the Middle Ages, you get an age of cults. You had an enormous number of cults in the Roman Empire, of which Judaism and Christianity were at one time just two tiny splinters. You have the same variety of cults now. Harron: What about these crusades, like the Billy Graham crusade in which an enormous number of people gather and declare for Christ? When you check on it six months later, very few of them have actually committed themselves. Frye: I think that all religions have taught that anything like what the

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Eastern religions call enlightenment and what the Western religions call salvation is a very complex process. It involves the intellect as well as the emotions. If you have a chronic drunk saying he will never touch a drop of liquor again as long as he lives, you don’t necessarily believe what he says. There has to be quite a complex pattern of re-educating going on there before anything permanent is likely to happen. Harron: Do you imply that the Graham crusades, for example, whip people up into a kind of state of enthusiasm so that they are somewhat possessed? Frye: I think a lot of revivalism does do that and possibly his crusade does that for perhaps the majority of people who go to it. I don’t know. I haven’t been to one of his meetings. But it’s highly probable that that kind of approach to religion for most people works on a very temporary and emotional basis. Harron: Now the president of the United States [Jimmy Carter] is a born-again Christian. It seems that it’s the fundamentalist sects that are stronger these days than, say, the Anglo-Catholics or the Presbyterians. Frye: Yes. I think that that is true. It is partly the Protestant strain in American life which leads to a very heavy emphasis on the individual, and the notion of the reborn individual is, of course, a very strongly individualized conception of religion. There have always been two tendencies struggling with each other in religion. One is the tendency to order and liturgy and fixed doctrine and things which establish and structure, and then there’s the other tendency, which the Greeks have called the Dionysiac tendency, to a kind of emotional release. The word “enthusiasm” originally meant possession by a god. But of course the god was Dionysus. He was a wine god, too, which made it a little more concrete. Harron: But Jesus himself was really outside the church in a sense. His group was an anti-establishment faction. Frye: Yes they were, but almost instantly after the Ascension and the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament they start structuring the church. Harron: Who did this? Peter, you mean? Frye: Well, Peter and Paul. After all, Paul’s letters were all written, and Paul himself was dead, before the earliest Gospel appeared. So when the

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Gospels were written, they were written within the structure of a church that was already there. Harron: People are continually saying, “I believe in Jesus but not his church.” Shaw said, “I don’t believe in Crosstianity.”11 Frye: What Shaw believed in, or said he believed in, was creative evolution, which is something else again. That’s something emerging out of nature. What that means, I suppose, is that Jesus might be regarded as an eternal person but that his institutions are mortal. That’s a comprehensible point of view, certainly. Harron: The book Act of God, by Charles Templeton, created a lot of stir by hinting that the bones of Jesus could be found, implying his mortality rather than his divinity. Frye: I once wrote in one of my books that the doctrine that Christ died is the most difficult of all Christian doctrines to disbelieve [FT, 117]. It wouldn’t bother me if the bones of Jesus were discovered, because it’s already said by Paul in the New Testament that what is raised is the spiritual body and not a natural body [1 Corinthians 15:44]. Harron: The Catholic Church has a doctrine of transubstantiation. Frye: Well, that’s the bread and wine changing to the body and blood of Christ—yes. Harron: Is that a symbolic act? Frye: It’s regarded, I think, as part of the doctrine of the real presence, and it’s worked out by a conception of substance—that what appears is the spiritual substance. Harron: You used the word “Dionysian” to imply chaos as opposed to order. What’s the other equivalent? Frye: Not necessarily chaos, but something which works on the level below consciousness, which bypasses the reason and bypasses the intellect. Harron: What’s the other thing called then? Frye: It’s been called Apollonian, because of Apollo the sun-god, but I think that those two tendencies, whether you give them those names or not, have been present all through the history of religion.

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Harron: Man’s instinct and his reason? Frye: Well, a tendency to seek religion as a source of structure and order and a tendency to see religion as a form of emotional release. Harron: Is that the same thing we were talking about, that man has to go out and have a good time and the next day atone for it—the two sides of his nature? Frye: Well, yes, but for many people the emotional release is more an end in itself. It’s not something that necessarily alternates within the same person. Harron: Is this the dichotomy that people find in the two sides of their nature, the Jekyll and the Hyde? Is that a myth which has persisted? Frye: You do have that. But I would think that you have a lot more than two sides to human nature. I think you have a great many different sides. Harron: Is a myth, then, a simplification of a complex problem? Frye: Very often it is, yes. It could be that. Harron: The Dionysian festivals were religions of nature in Greece. When the young people gathered at Woodstock for the rock concerts, there was the same kind of thing. They would stay all day to listen to their gods play music. Is there a connection? Frye: Yes, there’s a very strong connection. Woodstock was the most obviously Dionysiac phenomenon that there’s been in modern society for a long time. Just as you have some religions that proceed entirely with revivals, so you have political movements that proceed entirely in terms of rallies. There isn’t really all that much difference between a revival and a rally. Woodstock, I think, was a rather pathetic illusion that somehow or other you could, again, break through the crust of history and get into a different way of existence altogether by a kind of emotional release. Then of course you had that horrible business afterwards with the motorcycle people. Harron: Altamont, the other festival? Frye: Altamont, yes.12 Harron: Was that a ritual killing? Frye: Yes, it’s the other side of Dionysus. The bacchantes in Greece used

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to go into emotional ecstasies and tear up goats, but sometimes they didn’t stop with goats. You get Dionysiac movements in Nazi Germany as well. They’re not all peaceful. Harron: What about the revival of Nazism and the National Front in England?13 We’re getting from religion into politics, but is there that much difference in terms of ritual and myth? Frye: No, I don’t think so. Both religious and political affiliations tend to become ritualized very strongly. The appeal in Nazism was the rather meretricious appeal of uniforms and parades and music and bands and great massed spectacles. Harron: Was it a revival of pre-Christian religion? Frye: That was a part of it, yes. And, of course, that religion had a great deal of appeal because nobody knew anything about it. So, again, you see you weren’t being sent back to Sunday School. You could discover in it whatever you wanted. Harron: Did the Christian church accommodate itself to things like that as they say it did in Germany? Frye: It doesn’t always accommodate itself fast enough. In the Middle Ages, for example, the church put so much emphasis on structuring and ordering that things like the children’s crusade and the flagellants indicated how little care was taken for the need for emotional release in the same society. There does have to be, I think, a means provided for both impulses, because they will always be there. Harron: You mentioned the cult of flagellation. Isn’t that an institutionalized way of providing emotional release? Frye: Well, it’s not a structured and ordered way. What I’m saying really is that there are two kinds of institutions, two kinds of institutional regularizings of behaviour. The revival is no less a church meeting than a mass. It’s just that it appeals to different things. Harron: What about the individual tradition? For example, the Old Testament is full of prophets who dwell apart, and from a high rock they live on honey and locusts and prophesy the doom of the city. What part of the tradition is that? Frye: The prophets are a key element in what I spoke of before, the fact

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that the Biblical religion seemed to move towards a final confrontation with society. The typical function of the prophet in the Bible is to denounce society, to walk into the city and say, “Whatever you’re doing you’re doing it all wrong.” That function of the prophet as a man with independent authority who speaks with the voice of his God and yet is separate from the authority of the king or the priest is something that seems to be peculiar to the Biblical tradition. IV Harron: Professor Frye, we’ve talked about myths and rituals and the churches that were built upon them, and last time we just touched upon the individual, the loner, the visionary, and his place in the structure of society. You mentioned the Old Testament prophets whose job was to walk into the city and say, “You’re doing it all wrong.” Frye: That was a tradition that got more or less squeezed out of Christianity in the Middle Ages. You have other people like Savonarola who came to just as bad an end as the original Biblical prophets—mostly dead. Harron: He was the book burner, wasn’t he? Frye: He was the bonfire-of-vanities man. It wasn’t necessarily books. Harron: And he ended up in one himself? Frye: Yes. Harron: How does a figure like William Blake come in? Naturally, I know he’s in the Christian tradition because of his drawings. Frye: I don’t think institutional Christianity has really ever found a place for prophetic authority as distinct from secular and spiritual authority. The prophetic authority comes very largely through people like writers, that is, the people whom you think of instinctively as prophets, people like Dostoevsky, Blake, Rimbaud, Kafka. They are people, like the original Biblical prophets, with abnormal powers. They can go into certain involuntary states of mind. Some people pursue wholeness and integration, but this kind of prophet is more likely to get himself smashed up, and there are fragments emerging from the smash that are of tremendous intensity. Those people have a kind of independent authority in modern society, I think.

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Harron: Some people would say that they have a death wish, a martyr complex. Frye: It’s quite possible that some of them do, though I think a person can have that and still be an authentic prophet. Harron: Blake relied a lot on the words of Tom Paine, or at least he’s allied to him in some way. Frye: He had no sympathy with Paine’s intellectual position, but he felt Paine’s resistance to the establishment in England, to the Pitt government that threw up repressive measures when the war with the French began. Blake was just as much opposed to the measures of that government as Paine was, and to that extent he sympathized with Paine. Harron: Was Blake considered political? Frye: Blake didn’t really know enough about politics to have a coherent or consistent political point of view. He said that he thought princes and parliaments were something other than human life. In Milton, on the other hand, you do have a prophetic figure who was not simply a great poet, but a person who had a long and consistent role to play in politics. Harron: Milton, you say, is a prophetic figure? Frye: Yes. Harron: You think of him as a gentleman who was blind, who was relatively immobile, writing very long poems and then a brief thing about censorship. Frye: The pamphlet on censorship, Areopagitica, was about the removal of constraints on the printing press, and the general direction in which that moves, I think, is the implicit recognition that there is a source of authority coming through the printing press that doesn’t come from the court, the parliament, or the church. Harron: And we think of Milton as the one who paved the way for Oliver Cromwell. Frye: Events took their own direction in Milton’s time. Milton followed the parliamentary revolution and then, when parliament split into the Cromwellian group and the anti-Cromwellians, he went along with the Cromwellians.

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Harron: And under Cromwell you got the suppression of the theatre. Frye: Yes. I think that Milton was a rather typical example of an intellectual caught in a revolutionary situation. What he saw, again, was the apocalypse. He saw England as moving out from an Egypt of oppression into a promised land of future liberty. But, of course, that wasn’t the way England saw it. They simply replaced Charles I with Charles II. Harron: This happens every election. Someone gives us a promise of the apocalypse or the garden of Eden. Frye: Yes, in elections the apocalyptic hope takes the form of the donkey’s carrot. There’s bound to be something new if this other man is elected. Harron: So that the myths have been translated into politics but they still exist—the desire in man to find the Golden Age? Frye: Yes, and it’s something much deeper than desire. It’s the way man perceives, it’s something built into his consciousness, I think. Harron: Is that what Carl Jung was talking about? Frye: He was concerned with it. He would have to be, as a psychologist. He was concerned with a specific process which he called individuation, of moving from the ego-centre to the genuinely individual centre which has come to terms with the unconscious. But that’s only one of many ways of doing it. Harron: What was Freud’s way? Frye: Freud’s way, as I understand it, was to think of the ego as something in the centre of the personality fighting for its life against impulses thrusting up from the id, the subconscious, fighting also against the impossible ideals foisted on it by the superego, and trying to achieve a kind of centre of sanity in the middle of these extremes. Harron: He referred to religion as an illusion. Frye: He rather wanted to be, perhaps, a religious lawgiver himself. I don’t think it was an accident that he was fascinated by Moses.14 Harron: So Freud thought of himself as a lawgiver, and we all think of him as a kind of prophet who had to cry in the wilderness for a time before he achieved recognition.

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Frye: Yes, but of course Moses did, too. Harron: The wilderness is a very strong image, as is Freud’s notion of an id and an ego and a superego. Is that a kind of cosmology of its own? Frye: Oh, yes, it’s the same old cosmology that’s been around since before the Book of Genesis. Man has always lived in the middle earth. That’s not Tolkien’s discovery. It’s one of the most ancient myths we have. There’s always been a world up there, symbolized by the sun and the moon and the stars, and there’s always been a world down there, which is symbolized by the underworld or the world under the sea. Man has always lived his life between the things that he’s associated with what’s up there—the ideals, the superego—and what’s down there—the id, all the sulphurous devils running around and stinking. Harron: So Freud in a sense was a creative genius forming his own mythology which conforms with what we’ve always believed? Frye: Oh, yes, and he also gave literary critics a lead on what to do with literature because he discovered, for example, what he called the Oedipus complex, and he found it in a play by Sophocles. The implication is that one of the functions of literature is to project in front of us the states of being which we act out anyway, whether we know it or not. Harron: Is the Oedipus myth as universal in its application as Freud implied? Frye: I don’t know how universal these things are. The most I would say is that I believe that it would be universally intelligible. Harron: Incest taboos and the problem of incest statistically nowadays make you wonder. Frye: Yes, I know. I doubt if there’s any one thing that’s universal. I think that these are possible relationships, because the relationship of father and mother to son is very common and wherever it arises this possible aspect of it, the desire to kill the father and enter into sexual relations with the mother, is going to be one form of it. Harron: And the notion of the wilderness that we talked about—forty days or forty years? Frye: Just as man lives in the middle world so he lives in a middle time. He lives in a state of exile between the paradise in the past and the apocalypse in the future.

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Harron: So the wilderness is really the real world, flanked on the other side by a garden, the place from where man came, to where he hopes to return? Frye: Yes. And he alternates between a feeling that this world that he came from and is going to return to doesn’t exist at all and is a pure illusion, and the feeling that it is in fact the only reality. Harron: The Book of Revelation describes a city full of precious jewels, not a garden at all. Is there a connection between the city and the garden? Frye: The city and the garden are the two forms of human civilization. In the Bible they’re thought of as being originally God’s invention, something supplied to man. That is, there was a city of God before the sons of Cain started building cities, and there was a garden in Eden before man started planting gardens. The city in the Book of Revelation includes a garden. It includes, as I say, the tree and the water of life. Those two forms have always haunted the human imagination as the two forms of what man wants to do with nature, how he wants to see the world. It’s a world that makes human sense. Harron: The present-day concept is to get out of the city, because it’s polluted, and back to the countryside that’s sometimes a wilderness. Frye: But that’s a very different city from a gorgeous gingerbread city that’s glowing with gold and precious stones. Harron: Oz? Frye: Yes. Harron: We’re laughing about it, but there must be a very deep-seated urge towards it. Frye: Of course there is. Man builds cities out of a quite genuine vision. Cities go through a phase where they reflect something of the vision that has produced them. Then original sin or whatever takes over, and they get too big and the life and the vitality seems to go out of them. Cities still represent some of the greatest dreams and ideals. Just think of what’s associated in one’s mind with Rome or Jerusalem or Athens. Harron: And Blake wanted to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, so he thought in terms of the city. Frye: Yes, always. He identified religion with civilized life.

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Harron: Has there been a civilization without religion? Frye: That would depend on how you define religion, but I would say on the whole, no. Religion has to do with a bringing together. They used to derive the word from religare, meaning to pull together. I don’t know whether that’s very sound, but whether it is or not, religion is the unifying of activities around a certain focus, and I don’t think you can have human life without that. Harron: So that a city is in essence a unifying of activity? Frye: It’s one of them, yes. Harron: What are the other—the hearth and the home? Frye: The varieties of the garden, such as the farm, the park, and, yes, the hearth, the family in the middle of the city. Harron: What is your definition of civilization? Some people equate it with leisure, others equate it with the arts. Frye: I would think of it as man living in community, which is the way man starts off. I think that the human community is really something that is prior to the individual. The individual grows out of the community, not the other way around. Harron: And there was a sense of community when man was living in caves or even before he lived in the cave. Frye: Yes, there would be a very intense sense of community then because you would be hunting together for warmth and safety. Harron: Is that what we’re still doing? Frye: Yes. Every so often the old panic returns, the sense of being beset and beleaguered with dangers around us. Harron: Like that nuclear satellite that landed up in the Northwest Territory?15 Frye: Yes, that’s the other side of the apocalyptic state of mind. Harron: Would you care to elaborate on that? Frye: Well, if you’re living in a cave that you’ve taken from a bear, you naturally wonder when the bear is going to come back and retake

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possession. Our ideas about the future seem to run on a kind of manic-depressive cycle. We have manic people talking about the Age of Aquarius, where everything is just going to be wonderful, and then we have depressive people talking about atomic bombs and the destruction of civilization. Harron: Your mention of Aquarius is very apt, because people say that they believe in astrology: that the period of Pisces, which is connected with Christ, is over, and now we begin the Age of Aquarius for the next two thousand years. Frye: I think that’s another donkey’s carrot. There were people in the time of Christ who felt very strongly that they were entering into a new age—Virgil is one of them. What happened, of course, was that they moved into an age which was partly new and partly old. There was perhaps in the formation of Christianity something which for Christians represented a decisive break with history up to that point. But the general course of the world kept on going very much the same as it had before. I think the same thing will be true when we enter the Age of Aquarius. Harron: What about the revival of astrology? What does it mean? Frye: Again, it’s an attempt to see nature in terms that make human sense. The sense of the alienation of man from nature, of nature as having all those billions of years of history and all those billions of light years in space, forms a very profoundly alienating feeling for mankind. And I guess the natural reaction against that is to try to see it once more in terms that relate to man. Harron: But isn’t it an attempt to see everything as being ordered by a power outside yourself so that you’re helpless? Frye: That would be what it was if you took the next step, but the reason for the belief in astrology, I think, is the desire to see patterns in nature that relate to humanity. After all, man used to be the centre of the universe. The whole world was made for him, and the whole of time turned on the creation of Adam and the deliverance of Adam. We very much resent being reduced to the rank of specks on a spinning mudball around a blast furnace. Harron: Does that account for the prevalence of the UFOs?

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Frye: I daresay it accounts for a good deal of that, yes—the feeling that there must be something way out there that’s not just empty space and endless resources for killing us but something like ourselves. V Harron: Professor Frye, the last time we talked you used the phrase “specks on a mudball” to describe the earth and its people. I don’t know whether that was your phrase, but is that the way most people feel? Frye: Well, I was thinking of the emotional appeal of a universe such as we had in the Middle Ages, where the earth was at the centre of the entire universe and the sun revolved around it. Harron: The Ptolemaic universe. Frye: Yes. Now we’ve got unthinkable size and heat and distance. One can understand the worship of the sun. It seems to me a very natural human tendency. But when the sun is a blast furnace ninety million miles away it’s just as impressive as it ever was, though it’s not as worshipful as it was. Harron: So that Copernican revolution stopped man in his tracks? Frye: Well, it tended to dehumanize nature. Harron: The universe seems to be getting bigger, expanding. There are more and more galaxies, more and more billions of stars. Is that why people believe in UFOs? That there must be something out there? Frye: I daresay. I think we have a feeling of being alienated and isolated by all that empty space and a need to populate it somehow with something which is humanly intelligible. Just as you have movies like Star Wars that talk about distant galaxies as being united by beings that look remarkably like Hollywood actors, so you have myths about unidentified flying objects that, again, tend to indicate that there is something way out there which is like ourselves. Harron: Do you think it’s presumptuous to think that we alone of all the billions of planets are inhabited by thinking beings? Frye: I daresay it is presumptuous. It’s one of those notions you can’t do anything about. If planets on distant galaxies are inhabited by intelligent

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beings, that’s so far something our technology doesn’t permit us to do anything with. I would think that if they are more intelligent than we are, we probably couldn’t see them. Harron: Do you think people accept the Christian myths of the world today? If you asked ten people on the street today if they believed in personal immortality, how many of the ten would say they believed in it, do you think? Frye: I would be less interested in what people say they believe than in how people behave. I think a genuine belief is an axiom of behaviour. If you want to know what a man believes you watch him, you see what he does. What he really believes will be what his actions show that he believes. A lot of people who order their lives on assumptions of resurrection and immortality would say no if you asked them if they believed in these things. Harron: Some people say, well, if you could have a nice existence on a cloud with a harp, why not go to it right now, instead of living with all this sleet and snow and slush. Frye: That would take in another part of the mythology, which is that the life has to be completed in some form on this plane first. In other words, I think that the mythology of the cloud and the harp is a little insubstantial to suggest suicide to very many people. Harron: But the mythology of the cloud and the harp does persist, doesn’t it? People don’t want to think of God as a gas or as a principle of gravity. They do see that kind of green-pastures, Santa Claus–figure.16 Frye: Oh, yes. That is what Blake kept saying—that the form of reality is a human form, and that the huge mechanism of buzzing stars and planets in the sky is somehow or another not real. It’s what we’re conditioned to see, but it’s not what’s really there. Harron: And even in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the visitors from outer space are sort of caricatures of ourselves. We tend to make God in our own image. Is that true? Frye: Man can only make things in his own image. He’s stuck with that. There’s nothing else he has material for. Harron: I was thinking of Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali, who do strange kinds of things.

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Frye: Yes, but Hieronymus Bosch is creating a world of fantasy and of monsters, at least his paintings include that. But they’re fantasies and monsters that spring out of the human unconscious and to that extent are quite recognizably human creations. Harron: What about the validity of dreams? Are a lot of our myths and rituals constructed in our subconscious life through dreams? Frye: Oh, yes. Dreams have a curious cipher-like quality. They don’t seem to mean very much to the dreamer even. It’s very difficult to interpret one’s own dreams, yet they do have very strong analogies to works of art which do come partly out of the unconscious as well, and that is probably why Plato spoke of art as the dream for awakened minds.17 Harron: I once had to work with a psychiatrist who couldn’t get me to free-associate. He used my dreams to make the analysis, and it was amazing some of the things he found. Frye: Well, they’re specially trained for that, of course. Harron: It’s a kind of archetypal world that exists in our sleep. Frye: That’s what I mean when I say we possess these mythological structures within ourselves. Harron: Both awake and asleep? Frye: Both awake and asleep. Harron: I don’t know who said it, but somebody has said that art is the product of our dreams. Frye: I think that’s a little oversimplified. Dreams are perhaps the product of an artistic impulse in ourselves, but it’s really the other way around. Man is very deeply and very profoundly and centrally a creative being, and dreams are one of the things he creates. His deeper and more central creations take in the waking world as well as the fantasy world. Harron: Medieval craftsmen built those incredible cathedrals and spent their lifetime worshipping God through putting stone buildings together. Is all art an attempt to do that same thing? Frye: All art is an attempt to transmute life into a creative process, yes. Harron: As when Hamlet said, “Tell my story” [5.2.349]. Is there a need to get it outside and let other people see, so it won’t be wasted?

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Frye: Oh, yes. The thing that’s unsatisfactory about the dream is, as I say, that it’s unintelligible even to the dreamer himself, whereas a work of art is a mode of communication, and communication is a way of keeping the community articulate. Harron: Now we are taught that there was the Middle Ages which was given over to a worship of God through art and all of a sudden there was a change. Columbus discovered America, and Copernicus said the sun was the centre of the universe, and then all of the paintings were about man. I’m sure that’s a tremendously erroneous simplification. Frye: Well, yes. I don’t think the Middle Ages had a very strong sense of art as a thing in itself. They were craftsmen who were employed by the church or the aristocracy for special reasons. And they built churches and castles because that was what the market was for. Harron: Was there an increase of individualism when people decided to paint dukes instead of doges? Frye: Yes, when the cultural perspective changed from the big feudal systems—of overlords and the hierarchy going up to the king—when that changed to the prince, the courtiers surrounding the prince, and the rather small nation, often just a city-state as in Italy, you get a much more concrete and immediate sense of individuality because your prince was somebody you saw in front of you all the time. Harron: I keep trying to relate it to today, because today people seem to be so confused. But is that the way they’ve always been? Frye: Yes, they’ve always been confused, but I think, again, it’s simply a matter of numbers—that millions of people are more confused than thousands of people. Harron: We went through a period of, I suppose, hedonism. The pendulum of the counter-revolution seems to be swinging back to self-denial and fundamentalist religion. Frye: Yes, hedonism is something built into the human animal, and it will always be there. Harron: It’s cyclic, like heat in other animals? Frye: It can be, yes. The other, the tendency to austerity and going off to practise Zen and so forth, is built into the human psyche, too.

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Harron: Zen is the religion of the absurd, it seems. I don’t mean that it’s an absurd religion, but it worships the absurdity of the universe. Frye: It doesn’t worship the absurdity. What it does is to try to present the world in the form in which you habitually see it as absurd, so that you break it down through absurdity. And then what you see is what’s really there, which has been hidden from you by your previous conditioning. Harron: You read about pupils before the master, and the master asks a question. The pupil who answers correctly is the one that broke his slipper over the master’s head. Frye: Well, the general idea, I think, is that your mind runs on coasters, it runs on grooves, it runs out of habit and mechanical impetus. The thing is just to derail it, smash it, stop the habitual movements of the mind. Then in that moment, the habitual way of perceiving the world falls away, and what is really there takes its place. You get similar things in the West. Harron: You get the visionaries, like Van Gogh, and the pioneers who suddenly make you see things in a new way and have a very difficult time. They become almost ritual sacrifices. Frye: Yes, they often do. Harron: Is there a genuine, backlash counter-revolution happening? Frye: I get the impression of a great many people making waves in all sorts of directions, and I would be hard put to say that there was one predominant tendency at present to the exclusion of others. I think that for almost every tendency you could mention there is an opposite tendency somewhere else. Harron: You’ve written so many things in so many directions. You’ve done an Anatomy of Criticism, you’ve done a study of William Blake, you’ve talked about nationalism in art—what are you working on now? Frye: I’m working on a large, complex book on the Bible and its relationship to Western culture generally. It came out of my belief, which I mentioned earlier, that man perceives, creates, and acts from inside a certain kind of mythological framework. And the structure of that framework, I think, has been more completely and fully set out in the Bible than anywhere else.

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Harron: Is it possible to understand Western culture without understanding the Bible? Frye: Not to me, no. I don’t understand how it would be. Harron: And yet so many people go through life now without reading the Bible. Frye: Yes. And that means, for example, not having much notion of what’s going on in English literature, or what a book like Paradise Lost is all about. Harron: Or even Shakespeare? Frye: Or Shakespeare. Shakespeare quotes the Bible in every play he writes. Harron: But people are aware of the Bible even though they’ve never read it. How does that happen? Frye: Partly through allusion and quotation. Even ballad writers, like Bob Dylan, are very uninhibited in their references to the Bible. People pick up a good deal of this out of the air in spite of themselves. It’s the same way if you were studying Islamic culture; you’d have to begin with the Koran. It would be silly if you didn’t. It’s possible that you might find people in Islamic countries who didn’t know the Koran, but they would hear so many quotations from it and so many phrases from it that it would get into their consciousness somehow. Harron: Is there a book at the centre of every culture? Frye: Well, there are books that are very central to the culture, but I think that the particular progression of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has a peculiar relationship to a single sacred book. Harron: And that’s the repository of our myths? Frye: It shows us how our view of the universe is structured. That’s the way I think of it. Harron: And whether you read it or not you’re structured the same way? Frye: Oh, yes. You’re structured the same way and you act out the way your view of things conditions you to act. But I think that if you did

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study the Bible you would become aware of your own mythological conditioning, and that would give you more freedom to act within it. Harron: So the atheist and the agnostic, against their wills or independent of their wills, are following the myths and rituals? Frye: I think they’re acting out the same mythological patterns. In fact, if you read somebody like Sartre, for example, you can see that very clearly. He is simply taking over one after another of the traditional Christian conceptions and translating them into a secular context. Harron: We think of Sartre as the existential philosopher. It doesn’t matter what happened yesterday, it’s now. And so many young people talk about the now generation. Do your own thing. It doesn’t matter about the future or the past. I imagine that’s the cause of a lot of drug addiction. People say it doesn’t matter. They don’t believe in an apocalypse or a golden age. Frye: One of the difficulties with the now cult is that there’s no such time as the present, because the instant you have said “present,” of course, it has joined the past. So that it’s really a completely phony and illogical way of looking at the world. What you’re in is a continuum of the past going into the future, and you’re drawn backwards through it facing the past towards the future that you don’t know. Harron: You’re dragged backwards through the future facing the past? Frye: Yes. Harron: That sounds like an astronaut going to the moon. Frye: Or going in the opposite direction, like Jonah. Harron: The myth of Jonah—it’s biologically impossible for a man to be inside a whale’s belly. Frye: Not if the whale is also the sea that he fell into and if it is also the leviathan, the world of time and space we’re all imprisoned in, and if it is also the heathen kingdom of Nineveh he was sent to prophesy to. That’s the way the mythological mind works. Harron: Is that what Moby-Dick is all about? Frye: Oh, yes. And Melville goes out of his way to tell you that that’s what it’s about.

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Harron: There’s a Norse myth that tells you if you are pulling on that fish, you’ll pull up the whole world. Frye: There’s a story that the god Thor, who was the strongest god in the world, couldn’t pull the fish in because it was the world-girdling serpent, Leviathan. Harron: But Jonah got out of that fish. Frye: Yes. Harron: Is that a resurrection myth? Frye: Yes, because we’re all born inside the leviathan. Harron: And he was in the whale for three days? Frye: Yes. Harron: Which is the amount of time it took the Christ to reappear. Frye: Yes, and Jesus accepted the story of Jonah as a prototype of his own death and resurrection [Matthew 12:40]. Harron: Is it possible to study myth? I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about anybody. Frye: Yes, it is, because myths can only exist in some kind of verbal form. They sooner or later become texts, and they can be studied like other texts. Harron: And obviously it’s worth studying? Frye: Well, as I say, the advantage of studying anything that deals with myth, like literature, is that it does help you to become aware of your own mythological conditioning. Otherwise, you are simply acting out states of mind without knowing why. Just as it’s beneficial in this age of post-Freudian psychology to become aware of some of the things that are going on in your subconscious, so I think it’s worthwhile becoming aware of some of the things that are shaping your own courses of action and belief. Harron: Would you recommend a book to start this process? Frye: If I knew of such a book, I wouldn’t be trying to write one. Harron: I await with great pleasure your new book.

40 Frye’s Literary Theory in the Classroom: A Panel Discussion Held 25 April 1978

Published in CEA Critic, 42, no. 2 (January 1980): 32–42. Dated by introductory remarks in the Critic. The present text is largely indebted to the re-edited version in WGS, 195–210, which makes sense of a number of misheard names and words. The CEA Critic, the organ of the College English Association of the United States, was published at Texas A&M University. When Frye visited that university on 25 April 1978 to give a lecture, he was interviewed by Elizabeth Cowan, Gregory Cowan, Richard Costa, and David Stewart, all members of the English department, on the application of his theories to classroom teaching. The whole issue of the Critic was devoted to Frye.

[E. Cowan begins by describing the books upon which the discussion will be based: Literature: Uses of the Imagination, a series of thirteen anthologies published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich in 1972–74 with Frye as supervisory editor. Designed to be used in teaching literature from approximately grades 7 to 12, they organized their selections not chronologically but structurally, so as to provide an ever-deepening view of the literary universe, with its recurring imagery, character types, and narrative patterns.1 Cowan concludes by asking Frye, “Considering the demands on your time, your academic and scholarly obligations, et cetera, what was your reason for agreeing to do this series of textbooks?”] Frye: There are several subordinate reasons, one being that Bill Jovanovich is a person with a very compelling personality, and after I got a few letters from him saying things like, “Will the real Northrop Frye please stand up,” I had to do something to respond. But the real reason I got interested in it is that my approach to literature has always been a teach-

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ing approach—I have always been a teacher rather than a scholar; my books have been teachers’ books. In a way, I really didn’t believe in my own theories until I found a way in which they could be taught to young students, and I began to consult people who are experienced in elementary and high-school teaching. They said first that the place to begin this kind of thing is about grade 9. Since then I’ve been suspecting that one should keep pushing it back further and further, that perhaps the right place to begin it is pre-kindergarten because actually the principle on which everything turns is the principle of listening to a story. It seems to me that that’s fundamental—what Wordsworth calls wise passiveness, a fundamental suspending of judgment which we all have up to age three.2 Then we go to school and we lose it, and we spend all the rest of our lives trying to get it back again. The centre of my biggest and most difficult book, the Anatomy of Criticism, is actually a very simple centre. It’s organized around the principle that there are four fundamental story types and that it’s possible to get the general characteristics of these story types very early. It’s of course possible to say that that is a very oversimplified view of literature. The multiplication tables are a very simplified approach to integral calculus, but you have to start somewhere. G. Cowan: I’d like to know how you applied that perception of literature to this series of literature for children. It seems to me an incredible accomplishment and task, and I wonder how you went about that. Frye: Actually I did most of it by leaving it to some highly competent people. Will Jewkes got the point very quickly that he carried out by himself. Then there were other books, like Wish and Nightmare, that were done by a man who was vice-president at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and his wife.3 They were both ex-students of mine, and they also understood very clearly the main principles involved. All I had to do was to explain what I wanted done and then leave them to it, because they did understand the central intuition. G. Cowan: How clear were you about what you wanted? How did you achieve clarity about that goal for this series? Frye: About a year after the Anatomy of Criticism was published, a very old and well-loved friend, who was also a distinguished Canadian poet, came into my office. After telling me how slow and stupid he was and

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how long it took him to get acquainted with the thing, he opened the Anatomy of Criticism, and it fell open at the page where I was describing what I call the circle of mythoi in romance, irony, tragedy, and comedy. And he said, “If you can establish that, then the book is made.” At that point, I realized that that really was the centre of the book. And that at the centre was what Jung and his cohorts called the mandala, a circular diagram that anybody at any age could be exposed to. The difficulty from there is in trying to circumvent the lazy teacher who wants to present this as a substitute for the experience of literature, and to try to reach the teacher who realizes that this is more like the lens of field glasses, so that you can see through what you’re experiencing. Costa: Most of us who teach literature have some problem at some time or other with form and content. We find quickly that students are less interested in how something works than what is going on: in other words, less interested in formalism or form than they are in what the story or poem is about. I would like to ask you if, behind your eleven volumes, there wasn’t the idea that this teaching of patterns will force the teacher to get the student reading and will hit the student where he is most sensitive in content and material? Frye: Yes, and I think that the normal reader who does read, as you say, for content—for the plot—doesn’t need too much encouragement to go along with that. That’s what drives him to reading in the first place, what sustains his interest. The thing is, while he is doing that, he is building up a systematic learning process just as he is when he is reading one book after another in political science or in the physical sciences. The difference is that, for the most part, he doesn’t know that, so he tends to think of literature as reading one book after another, and one story after another, even though he does realize, if he picks up a detective story, that he has read this type of story many times before. So that the function of the teacher is to bring out the continuous process which is actually a part of what he has been doing without being fully conscious of it. Costa: I’d like to read a sentence from the review Elizabeth quoted, which I think is very perceptive: “To students, all sound criticism must begin in close scrutiny of the text. The problem, as we all know, is that human energy is finite and often cannot absorb details and broad perspectives at the same time.”4 If the student is involved in the teacher’s presentation of these books as a kind of an organized interrelated whole,

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is there any possible danger that the student will not be able to handle the large concepts, or perhaps that he may lose both the large concept and, in trying to work the large concept, will lose himself or the smaller concept of each individual work? Frye: Of course, there’s no critical method that can be foolproof, and as I say, you always have to circumvent the teacher who is an inspired teacher in reverse—always teaching the wrong things instead of the right things. I think that the word “concept” might be a little misleading in that context: I’m not sure that they are really concepts. I think that they are really illustrative patterns. It’s a matter of seeing a picture rather than of understanding a conception. The principle is that a picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps one might say that a diagram like this may focus many thousand words and perhaps be in the long run a much simpler operation.5 I remember that as an undergraduate at college I had to read Thomas Hardy’s novels and was always having to pass examinations on Thomas Hardy’s conception of fate. That again was a large concept hovering around the shadows of Thomas Hardy’s novels. Of course, Thomas Hardy didn’t have a concept of fate. What he had was a technique of writing stories in a certain tragic formula. If one goes for that essential diagram rather than for the larger concept, one actually simplifies what is in front of him. Stewart: You said children see literature one way until they’re three or four and then they go to school and something happens [p. 401, above; cf. WE, 438], and that does seem to be a widespread phenomenon in this country and Canada, too. It is not so widespread in parts of the world. Apparently children arrive at age ten or fifteen still liking literature. Frye: That hits right in the bull’s-eye, and if I had the answer to it, I’d be a very useful member of society. I was actually asked the same question many years ago by an inspector of schools in Ontario who said in grade 4 nearly all the children are enthusiastic about poetry, and in the adult world hardly anybody bothers to read it. I think that one of the things that happens is the pressure of a technological society. There is the pressure of the vast masses of verbiage written in prose—or what passes for prose—and a certain sense of panic about having to cover all that. The thing about reading poetry is that you cannot read it properly as long as you have a panic about time, about the ticking of the clock. The rhythm of poetry is something that breaks right through the rhythm of time, and

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that kind of detachment—which is leisure in the very best sense of the word—is extraordinarily difficult to attain in contemporary civilization, where we have this subcutaneous sense of panic about time every moment of our lives. And I think that, perhaps, is as near to an answer as I can get to what happens. You drop out of poetry as soon as you drop out of the child’s timeless world. Stewart: There is apparently a discussion going on about whether there is such a thing as children’s literature. Some say there are books specifically for children. Some say there aren’t: there are just good books— some read by children, some not. Where do you come out on that? Frye: I think perhaps there is such a thing as children’s literature, and there is such a thing as a book aimed at a specific age group, that is, allowing for the fact that there is an enormous variety of human beings. It may be true, ideally, that the greatest children’s books are those that really make no difference between the child reader and the adult reader, such as Alice in Wonderland. And there are bad children’s books which are actually addressed to adult readers under the pretence of addressing children. At the same time, I think there is a natural sequence in one’s reading. And this is one of the reasons why I attach so much importance to the subject of continuity in the reading process and in realizing that you are reading the same convention, the same story type, over and over again. Some ways of telling a story can get very complex, such as the later novels of Henry James, which are certainly not children’s literature, and yet they do follow the same formulas as stories that are. The same thing is true of poetry. The poetry can be addressed to children as long as the teacher understands that poetry has a very immediate, a very primitive connection with dancing and singing. The very subtle poems one gets in Wallace Stevens, again, are not poetry for children. But there is such a thing as a sequence that is characteristic of the eager, intelligent child who is always leaping ahead of what is supposed to be his age group. G. Cowan: I would like to know whether young people are closer to the mythic experience or are more receptive to responding to that than adults are. You suggested that living in the timeless world of children contributes in that and in other ways to making them responsive to the mythic experience. Frye: Yes, I think that adults get away from the central function of

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words. You have this [writing on board; cf. GC, 57–8/75–6]—A—as the structure of words, whatever it is. It may be a poem, or a newspaper, or a textbook on gardening, but it consists of words. When you’re reading, you are simultaneously trying to do two things. You’re trying to link the words together into a pattern, and at the same time there is a world outside which you are trying to connect these words with. That is, you are continually remembering in practice what all these words mean. When you do that, you’re looking for the meaning of the words as something outside what you’re reading. If you’re reading something in a language you don’t know and have to look up every word in the dictionary, you can see that the source of this kind of meaning is outside what you’re actually reading. So that you have really two directions of attention, and they both go on at the same time, no matter what you’re reading, always. The difference is that, at a certain point, you begin to suspect in some things you’re reading that there is a kind of pattern formatting itself here corresponding to the pattern there. And, if that is true, then what you’re reading is descriptive, and its intention is not literary. The intention is to set up a verbal pattern corresponding to a body of phenomena outside, and that brings in the criterion of truth because truth means correspondence of the verbal pattern with the pattern outside. What you’re reading is true if it’s a satisfactory verbal replica of what you want to know about. But if you are attending primarily to the inner structure of words, then the meaning of that is primarily a literary one, and instead of a narrative which tells you about something outside, you get a self-contained narrative, which is what I mean by the word “myth.” If you look at the history of language, you will see that poetry always comes first. You have no society so primitive that it doesn’t produce poetry. But prose is always a very much later development. So that what language was first of all created for and what words still do most powerfully and above all, is hang together. It’s much more important that they should hang together than that they should be true descriptively. And that is something the child understands. He can keep repeating words to himself and get a terrific kick out of doing so even if they don’t make any sense because he knows what T.S. Eliot knows: that making sense, truth, is the burglar’s piece of meat to shut off the watch dog.6 To that extent the young person, the child particularly, has the capacity to respond to the directness of the mythical experience, the self-contained verbal experience. And I think that that is encouraged by things like the

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development of film. I think of all the arts, film has an extraordinary immediacy for bringing out the essential and symbolic integrity of the story, of what you’re reading. And I’ve noticed that among the students that I’ve been teaching over the last forty years, to the extent that they change at all, they have taken the mythical experience more and more for granted—something that I find very encouraging. Stewart: Can you accommodate persuasive language in your diagram? Frye: I think that in the history of language you get things arranged the way the holy temple in Jerusalem was. That is, you have a holy of holies in the middle, which is poetry, that is, words arranged centrifugally in their most powerful and direct immediacy. And then there’s the outer court for the Gentiles and the unbelievers, which Jesus called the den of thieves. This is the world of descriptive prose where words are encountering the outside world. In between comes the middle area of rhetoric or oratory. And in rhetoric or oratory, what you’re doing is using the figurative resources of poetry, that is, alliteration, assonance, simile, and metaphor, in order to draw your audience into a closer unity. And so oratory, which is one of the means of holding society together by words, is something which comes in between the poetic, which is disinterested, and the descriptive. That is why in Shakespeare’s day, for example, they went to school and were trained in rhetoric—because most of the people going to school were clergymen or lawyers. In either case, they would need some training in oratory, but rhetoric was also admirable training for the poet. That’s one of the reasons why it was a great age of poetry. Costa: As recently as the class today, I had difficulty about feeling right in using the word “archetype.” I know that Jung uses it in one sense; you in the Anatomy of Criticism use it in a sense related to Jung’s. Could you explain the crucial meaning of archetype in Anatomy of Criticism? Frye: The word “archetype” is Platonic in its origin. Plato used it—or at least the Neoplatonists used it—to mean the forming, creative principles of a work, and in that sense it was used in a great deal of traditional criticism as late as the eighteenth century.7 When I used the term, I used it because it had been a traditional term in the criticism of literature, because so much of our traditional criticism in literature has been Platonic and Neoplatonic. I didn’t really realize at the time how much Jung had cornered the field with his use of archetype in his own highly idiosyncratic sense.

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Jung is a psychologist whose private myth is a myth of individuation, where you start out with the ego and you end up with the individual, which is the same thing, only much profounder. And when you move from the ego to the individual, a number of autonomous forces are let loose in the psyche, and these he calls archetypes. He knows how to use illustrative material from literature in such a way as to suggest that the whole of literature is a gigantic allegory of the Jungian individuation process. Well, that’s all right—that’s his business. It’s his own use of archetype; it’s not mine. I’m trying to use it in its traditional Platonic way as something which is what you might call the instrument of continuous creation. That is, in practice it is the repeating unit in literary experience. To give a minor example: there is a ritual in Mediterranean religion about the elegy of a dying god—Adonis—and invariably, some red or purple flower was thought to spurt from the blood of the dying god. That turns up in the earliest Greek hymns to the death of Adonis, and it keeps turning up in all pastoral elegies—Milton’s Lycidas has the hyacinth, in the same way. Then you have Whitman, who theoretically wants to turn his back on archetypes and do something new and more democratic. But, being a genuine poet instead of a bad theorist, he also wrote an elegy on the death of Lincoln, and the lilac just turns up automatically.8 It’s got to— it’s the only thing that fits. Similar red and purple flowers keep turning up in Eliot and Dylan Thomas and so forth, and will keep turning up as long as there are red flowers and people die prematurely. That’s what I mean by an archetype—a unit which repeats from one work of literature to another and helps to establish the continuity we bring to the process. G. Cowan: There is a lot of talk about a crisis in literacy. Do you think there is such a thing? Frye: I hope so. I think there’s always a crisis in literacy. I don’t think there will be a strong social force getting serious about the humanities unless they have their backs to the wall, and I think the humanities always have their backs to the wall. The reason—I think—is what Ezra Pound got so exercised about, his conception of Usura. Once the moral, religious, and political standards and values of a society begin to loosen or disintegrate, the first sign of it is always the debasing of value, debasing the currency of words. It’s the moral of George Orwell’s 1984. If you want to smash human freedom, the first thing you have to do is smash language, because people will always be free as long as they have the

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words to form ideas freely. And that’s Plato’s answer—if you want to abolish freedom, that’s the way to do it. Consequently, if you want to keep freedom, that’s what you have to preserve. The teaching of literature is a militant activity. It’s carried on in the teeth of ignorance and stupidity and prejudice. A Student: We learn to recognize the conventions of narrative, the conventions of poetry, by reading. By reading a lot, we learn to see what patterns are used in the works. Criticism—that is, the formal procedure of criticism—seems to be an attempt to approximate this procedure in a formal way. In classes we try to teach criticism, that is, an attention to the text, the patterns of the text. It’s often at that point that we find the hardest going. What is the relationship between criticism as a conscious process of reading and pattern acquisition as an unconscious process? Frye: Well, there are two or three things there. One is that the sense of continuity I’ve suggested is a largely unconscious sense that you carry on in the sequence of things that you’re reading; consequently, the critical process has something to do with making you more conscious, aware, of that continuity. If, for example, you are trying to teach a Shakespeare play to a twelve-year-old who would much rather look at a play on television, I should think that the way to establish contact there is to get him to tell you about the play on television, and then indicate the similarities in the conventions between Shakespearean comedy and what he saw on television the night before. It is the structural similarities that seem to be the business of the teacher in that context—that are the real concerns of criticism—rather than to set up a civil war of values within literature itself, saying this is good for you, and this, God help you, is what you like. That is one thing which is involved. Another is the protest of many intelligent students that it will kill a poem to analyse it. I understand that and I sympathize with it, but again the end of teaching literature is not to confront the student with the object over there as something he is to look at and admire. In the long run, what is taught is to be possessed by the student, and there has to be some death and rebirth process going on while the work of literature dies as something out there and then passes into the student to reappear in his inside. So that if it kills a poem to analyse it, that’s not too bad a thing as long as it revives in the student’s own possession of the work of literature. That’s a difficult thing for a teacher to accomplish. You need a teacher with a strong sense of the end of literary teaching, and a student

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with good will, which fortunately most students do have. Then there is the possibility of reconciling the dilemma you speak of. E. Cowan: I’m struck by the irony of the contrast between your reputation as being extremely erudite and the difficulty of your books, on the one hand, and the simplicity of your ideas which are beautifully easy to understand in this series, on the other. You’ve just said this afternoon that they are simple ideas to grasp. Does that strike you as ironic? Frye: I don’t know. It’s the irony of the creative process generally. One of the things a critic has to do is to reflect the characteristics of literature as he finds it, and I think you find in the greatest of the arts—in the music of Bach or the poetry of Dante—extremely complex means used to arrive at an end of massive simplicity. The critic has to catch fire from what is after all the practice of the greatest artists and do the best he can in his own field in the same way. The trick, of course, is to keep one’s vision fixed on the end, which is a simple end. That is why I said in the beginning in response to your opening question that I’ve always felt that I could hardly believe in my own theories until I could figure out a way in which they could be taught to very young people of very limited literary experience. Stewart: There’s a contradiction between your sense of the chronological age of the student or child for whom certain kinds of stories are appropriate, and your thematic approach. It seems to me you have chronology going one way, and you’ve got theme going the other way, the implication being that the difference between an adult story and a child story is only complication—formal complication. Is that a clear statement? Frye: Yes, apart from native suspicion about any sense of the word “only,” I think you’re probably right. The important distinction between a very difficult, complex story, like Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, and something much simpler, like Jane Eyre, which is very close to fairy tale, is very largely one of complication of the means. Sorry, I missed the point of contradiction. Stewart: Thematic approach versus the chronological approach, where you set up stories in terms of the age of the mind that is receiving them. Frye: Yes, that kind of chronology. It’s just a matter—a very pragmatic matter—of selecting, given the age or the taste and preference of the peo-

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ple that you are teaching. There’s a great variety of books on the shelf in front of you and you feel that maybe this one would be the right one to use. So it’s only to that extent one applies a chronological sequence. Costa: One of those wonderful coincidences: Did any of you see The Magic Flute last night? I had just read for class the tail end of your 1951 article—and a review about it—which closes with an analysis of comedy and tragedy and you set up categories.9 I didn’t fully understand them, but seeing The Magic Flute and putting them together, I feel that I understand perfectly now what you were talking about, because The Magic Flute illustrated the vegetable world in the comic vision as a tree of life— the rose, the lotus; the animal world in the comic vision as a community of domesticated animals—lamb, the flock of sheep, the gentler birds; and then the human world. The qualities of the archetype of comedy were gorgeously and vividly illustrated. Frye: That was put on not long ago in Toronto, and I remember reading the review of The Magic Flute in a Toronto newspaper where the disgruntled reviewer said the damn thing’s all about symbolism. Then he went on to say, “No wonder it seems to be one of the favourite operas of Northrop Frye.”10 There again is the difference between the complexity of the meanings and the tremendous simplicity of what is actually being portrayed. The Magic Flute is a fairy tale and is comprehensible to anybody who’ll listen to a fairy tale. G. Costa: I have a playfully impertinent question. I think everybody who’s been exposed to Anatomy of Criticism has been surprised by it and delighted by what you accomplished, and has been continually surprised and delighted by other things you accomplished. My playfully impertinent question is: What has surprised you about what you’ve done? Frye: I suppose what surprises one is the thing which I quote from the experience of the poets themselves. The poets themselves always say that they are not making or shaping their poems. They feel much more like mothers from whom some kind of independent life is coming out and taking shape. Eliot talks about the poet as a catalyst who’s just there. Keats says the poet has no identity, and so on.11 And in my own way I think I’ve felt the same thing emerging. The first thing I say in Anatomy is that the book forced itself on me when I was trying to write something else—a kind of unwanted pregnancy. And eventually one

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realizes that the emerging form of life has its own independence and its own individuality. At whatever level that occurs, there’s always some kind of mystery. E. Cowan: What are you working on now? Frye: Well, I’m in labour with a huge book on the Bible and its relationship to Western culture. That seems to be the sort of thing I have been in the one sense revolving around all my life, and in the other sense avoiding all my life. I suppose now that I’ve got a tenure appointment and I’m very close to retirement I can afford to grapple with it. A Student: I’m interested in what you said earlier about the necessity of preserving language if people are to be free. It seems to me that language is under tremendous pressure these days not merely from people who are ignorant of its rules, but also from people who feel that language needs to be changed amid desirable social change. Of course, government and advertising exert their own pressures on language. It seems, too, that English teachers are fighting a sometimes not too successful battle to preserve English. What do you see as the English teacher’s opportunity and responsibility here? In other words, what particularly do you think it is important to have saved? And can language bend without endangering the possibility of free thought? Frye: A very good question. Again, I say the person who has an adequate answer to that question would have the answer to just about anything one could ask. I think that the greatest enemy of language, and therefore the greatest enemy of a free society, is using language with a doubling, blinding, twisting, weasel-like kind of ambiguity. This is essentially a debasing of rhetoric, because the function of oratory is to address a group of people and pull them into a tighter group. I think the Americans just after a terrible bloody civil war felt more pulled into a unity by something like the Gettysburg Address. That’s an example of the legitimate social use of oratory. But there’s also a kind of rhetoric which regards its audience as some kind of enemy outside it. So people say you should try to use words more precisely, give them better definitions. Of course, that only applies to a certain kind of clarity. The poetic approach to words can make a functional use of ambiguity, and what it seeks is not just precision but precision in company with power and with intensity. Once you have heard words used with genuine power and intensity, you can never again for the rest of your life pre-

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tend that you’ve not heard them used in that way. That’s the voice of authority, and that’s the kind of authority that never detracts from the dignity of anyone who assents to it. That, I think, is what the teacher of English has to present in Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth— the use of a precision which has that power and intensity, that voice of authority behind it, because the authority is that of humanity itself. E. Cowan: One final question. Once you and I were talking about what we would order if we were ordering our last meal, and you said you would order dry cereal so that you wouldn’t mind dying. If this were to be the last time that you talked to an audience like this, what would be your final words to future teachers of literature and to present teachers of English? Frye: I suppose I’ve been saying that what I’m particularly interested in is in establishing the continuity of reading for the student and in breaking out the creative process of literature itself. That means that all depends on encouraging a habit of reading both in the teacher and in the students the teacher works with. There are two kinds of habit. There is the mechanical habit which you keep on doing because you don’t know how to stop. There’s also the practice habit, the repetition which you have to go through when you’re learning a language or learning to play the piano. I think that the last thing I would say to teachers is to love literature. That is not, as I think of it, a sentimental or soft focus, because it seems to me that love is a constant source of new discoveries in the thing or the person that you love. To say “love literature” is an exhortation; some may object that you can’t be commanded or exhorted to love; but I don’t think that’s true. Love is the focusing of the creative power within yourself in order to direct it upon others and to create a new kind of society out of your relation to them. That would be my last answer. The next thing would be the dry cereal.

41 Getting the Order Right Conducted 23 March and 19 April 1978

From the cassette recording in the Pratt Library of Victoria University. In WGS, 163–81, where the title is supplied. Dated by two entries in Frye’s daybook for 1978, the first perhaps just arranging the interview. There is a transcript in NFF, 1988, box 47, file 2. This interview with CBC Radio’s Art Cuthbert, host of Listen to the Music, was originally broadcast on Anthology, 30 September and 7 October 1978, shortly after Frye’s receiving the Royal Bank Award on 18 September.

Cuthbert: First of all, Dr. Frye, why did you begin with Blake? Frye: When I was an undergraduate I had a teacher, Pelham Edgar, who had X-ray eyes, and he took one look at me and decided I had to write a paper on Blake for his seminar. I did, and I got promptly hooked on him. Then when I had got my B.A., Herbert Davis at University College was giving a graduate course on Blake, so I snatched at that. That hooked me into writing a book, although it took me ten years to do it and five complete rewritings.1 But the reason why he fascinated me, apart from his own particular fascination as a writer, was that I had been brought up in the same kind of nonconformist religious tradition that he had been brought up in. He was the first person who really made imaginative sense of it. He had a very schematic set of characters that he kept dealing with in the prophetic books, and it puzzled me for a long time why he had that and what he was doing with it. I finally realized what he meant by it, that the beings that we ordinarily call gods are actually states of the human mind. His characters were mental states that we all keep passing into and out of. From that I began to realize something of the fact that lit-

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erary experience and the response to literature are very largely a matter of being confronted with these states in novels and plays and poems. Cuthbert: Do you think that you’ve been able to elucidate Blake? Frye: I think that I did have some element of solving a puzzle in working on Blake. The business of cracking his code was something that had to be done at that time because there was no book that had really done it. The only way to crack his code was to take him away from all the mystical and occult traditions that people had associated him with and put him squarely in English literature, which is where he belonged. That was what took me so long to do—to see what he was driving at and to begin to realize that what he meant was fundamentally what he kept saying he meant. Cuthbert: That all that was necessary to do was to read the man? Frye: Well, yes. But it took a good deal of rereading. Cuthbert: In the Polemical Introduction to the Anatomy you fired many salvos at other critics. Was it your experience of reading Blake criticism that got you mad? Frye: I suppose so. That was more or less a deliberate rhetorical stunt. That was why I called it “Polemical Introduction.” I thought the only way to get into this action was to start a long preliminary bombardment. When the British army did that at Gallipoli it was a disaster, but I think that in intellectual circles it is probably the best procedure. Cuthbert: In one of your latest works, The Secular Scripture, you talk about forza and froda as primary elements in literature, particularly in romantic literature. Are they elements in criticism as well? Let’s start with the force, the aggression. Were they elements in yours? Frye: Well, they are certainly elements in literature, and criticism has to reflect literature. That is, most tragedy is a form that revolves around the conception of forza, and comedy is a structure that revolves around the conception of fraud. Cuthbert: The closest I ever saw to an accusation that you were involved in—not fraud, I’m sure, but froda, the work of the trickster— was in regard to the criticism of the Anatomy and associated works, like The Educated Imagination, that appeared in a paper by William Wimsatt in the English Institute symposium on your work in 1965. He pointed out

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contradictions that he said he found in your work, and he asked, How does he get away with it? He gets away with it by the speed and energy of his writing and by the entertaining nature of the jokes that he makes about the wrong ways of criticism.2 Frye: There is some truth in that, I think. I am a bit of a trickster critic. One reason why I am is that I’m not always playing the game that other critics think I ought to be playing. Cuthbert: What is the game that others think you should be playing? Frye: Well, with Bill Wimsatt it was the expository, explication de texte, New Criticism game. That is something I have respect for and regard as legitimate within its own area, but every so often I find myself skipping out of that area and into a different ball game altogether. Cuthbert: So you feel that the criticism was really that you weren’t playing the game as you were supposed to? Frye: Oh, I think there is perhaps an honest reason for my being a trickster critic. My whole view of literature, at least when the Anatomy came out in 1957, was, I think, a considerably broader one than any other critic had at that time. Consequently, people who read me found that their own perspectives kept going out of focus. Cuthbert: Wimsatt said that inevitably the critic is involved, whether he likes it or not, in value judgments, in separating the good from the bad in literature. This was a point at issue. Frye: My view of that is that value judgments are an incidental by-product of literary criticism. They are not the end of literary criticism. They are always subordinated to greater knowledge. That is, the really boob criticisms in English literature, such as Rymer’s saying that Shakespeare’s Othello was nothing but a bloody farce, have usually not been mistakes of judgment, because it was quite consistent with Rymer’s judgment to say that. They were deficiencies in knowledge, because Rymer didn’t realize that the stage could do things like Shakespeare’s Othello as well as the French classical tragedies, which he liked better. So the expanding of knowledge always keeps overruling value judgments, and that’s why I say they have a very subordinate and limited role. Cuthbert: You haven’t stayed entirely out of the business of value judgments.

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Frye: No, and no critic can. It’s just that I regard value judgments as expendable, and I also feel that nothing can be constructed on them. They are not the basis of future work. People always think they have caught me in a contradiction whenever I say that Shakespeare is a great poet. They say, “You make a hundred and fifty references to Shakespeare and you only make one to Webster or Marlowe. Isn’t that a value judgment?” My feeling on that is that the acceptance of the value judgment that Shakespeare is a major poet, which I certainly do accept, has been responsible for a great deal of Shakespeare criticism, but none of that criticism, not a syllable of it, has really been based on the value judgment. Cuthbert: You spoke in the introduction to the Anatomy of the simple matter of separating the useful remarks of critics from the incidental material, such as value judgments or the boosting or crashing of literary stock [18–19/19–20]. It seemed to suggest itself as a project at that point, and yet it hasn’t come about. Do you think it would still be a useful project, or did you ever think so? Frye: I think that when you’re working with other critics you find that certain things are useful, other things are expendable. The positive things about a critic are usually what are useful, because a critic writes best about what he understands. Consequently, if a critic is known to be anti-somebody in the way that, say, F.R. Leavis is anti-Joyce, you can pretty well put him aside. You just don’t need him on that subject. But you may find him very useful on somebody to whom his attitude is positive. Cuthbert: And yet in the Anatomy you engage in a good deal of debunking yourself—not of literature, but of other critics or of other critical approaches. Frye: Yes, although my fundamental effort in the Anatomy is to try to see in general the whole conspectus of criticism as it looked in the 1950s. I was trying there to work out a scheme for literary criticism sufficiently comprehensive, so that all the schools of literary criticism at that time— the explication de texte people and the history of ideas people and the source-and-origin people—would all see where their place was. Cuthbert: There is a group that has come along since then, the hermeneuticists, who profoundly disagree with you. At least their major spokesman, Mr. Hirsch, disagrees with you profoundly.3

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Frye: Yes, I daresay. I don’t know how profound the disagreement is. It’s certainly there. Cuthbert: The hermeneutical approach emphasizes the individuality of the text and its close association with the writer, whereas your work has always emphasized the connections of the text with the larger structure of literature and played down the association between the text and the poet or the author. Frye: Yes, I’ve never really understood why the conceptions of individuality and value should be associated, because obviously the world’s worst poem is just as unique as the world’s best poem. I think that the situation in regard to poems is exactly what it is with human beings: every new human being is a distinct and unique individual. But he’s also a creature who conforms to a convention, that is, the convention of homo sapiens. No mother would be proud of her baby if it didn’t conform to the convention as well as being a unique and individual product. Cuthbert: Some poets find that that’s a very emotional and exclusive concept for them. Irving Layton, I think, is one who has clashed with you on that score.4 Frye: Many poets, of course, like to feel that their creative capacities are unlimited. They don’t like to feel that while the possibilities of poetry are unlimited in one direction they are rigidly finite in others. Creators don’t create something out of nothing—only God can do that—and what you create does conform to a certain convention and it is within a certain genre. But creators are magicians: they dislike that feeling about it, and unless they are highly professional people they have a sense of being hampered and confined by the notions of convention and genre. It’s not an objection I can really take too seriously, because one simply points to the evidence of literature. Cuthbert: In the Anatomy you speak of paying the most attention to a critic when he’s writing on a subject about which he’s enthusiastic [cf. 27/27–8]. Frye: Yes, it means that he knows something about it. Cuthbert: And you remarked that you tackled Blake because Dr. Pelham Edgar spotted an affinity in you for Blake. And yet in the Anatomy the writers whom you discuss seem to come out almost as fleshless and dispassionate creatures because the focus is so strongly on the work.

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Frye: It’s possible, yes. But the poets themselves seem to be remarkably unanimous on the point that they don’t regard themselves as producing their poems. They think of themselves rather as nursing mothers, as bringing something of independent life to birth. T.S. Eliot uses the metaphor of the catalyst, Keats says the poet has no identity, Wordsworth speaks of recollecting something in tranquillity, Yeats says the man who sits down to breakfast is not the poet who writes the poem.5 They all speak in terms of wanting to get away from the notion of poetry as the rhetoric of the person. Eliot speaks of wanting to escape from personality, meaning of course a certain kind of personality. I respect that sufficiently to feel that the real individuality is what comes out in the work. While the creative person is also a personality, it’s a different kind of personality from the egocentric one. Cuthbert: You spoke in the introduction to the Anatomy of the schematism of the work as being scaffolding, something you hoped would be able to come down once the building was in better shape [29/30]. Yet there still seems to be a strong sense of schematism in your later works. Even in the most recent writings, although they have a far more informal tone, the schematism still seems to be there. Do you find that? Is it a necessary part of your work? Frye: I think it’s a necessary part of the critic’s work because it seems to me, again, literature has to be reflected by criticism. Criticism can’t avoid being schematic because literature is schematic and poets think schematically. Cuthbert: There’s a great danger in a schematic system in that it tends to project itself perhaps beyond even the evidence. Wimsatt, for instance, says that you make the evidence fit.6 Frye: Yes, I think there is a danger in projecting it, and of course there is a fatal danger in starting to believe it. It’s not an object of belief. It’s an instrument to be used, it’s a tool. It’s as different from anything to be believed in as a wheel is from the wheel of fate or the wheel of fortune. Cuthbert: It should be suggestive, then, rather than doctrinaire? People speak of your doctrines. Is that a false interpretation or a destructive way to picture them? Frye: Yes, because they’re not strictly doctrines at all. What I said on the opening page of the Anatomy was that I was trying to interconnect a cer-

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tain number of suggestions that I thought would be of practical use to critics and that whatever was of no practical use to anybody was expendable. Cuthbert: You said that on the first page because you thought that was the one most likely to be read. Has the Anatomy really been read? Has it had the impact that you hoped? Frye: Well, it’s sold well over 100,000 copies, so somebody must have read it. But of course it’s been read in different ways and for all kinds of reasons. I got a charming letter from a teacher in California who had been teaching a class of young students a book of mine, The Well-Tempered Critic, and they dug their heels in and kicked heavily. They said that this guy doesn’t give you any of the answers, he just lays out the questions. Eventually, of course, as they were students of good will and good humour, he brought them around. But he said he started that because a colleague of his was teaching my methodology, and he was convinced I didn’t have any methodology. Cuthbert: And what’s your conviction? Frye: Well, I told him he was quite right, but that nothing could be done about such people, so I was grateful to him for putting the record straight. Cuthbert: And yet you say that it’s a cohesive and teachable approach, that this is one of the things you find satisfying about it. Frye: Oh, yes, as long as people keep writing to me and saying that they can teach with it and find my ideas useful in the classroom, I don’t care about the more metaphysical questions—what kind of existence it has. Cuthbert: And so it’s intended to be heuristic or suggestive. And yet it often seems to be and is attacked as being prescriptive and tying-down. Frye: Well, as far as the English language permits, I have said that it was not prescriptive or intended to be that. Cuthbert: Have you ever found it so yourself? Have you found that you’ve had to fight against your own schematism to develop your own ideas? Frye: No, because the Frankenstein myth—that people are always constructing machines in order to have the fun of crawling under them and getting trapped by them—has always been obvious to me. It’s an obvi-

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ous fallacy. But what I’m interested in, I think, as I look over my writing career during the last thirty years, is the social function of words—why man uses words and what he does with them. That means that I’m continually developing critical instruments and tools in order to break out of what I consider the one really hampering category, which is not the structure of schematic criticism at all, but the category of literature. Cuthbert: Particularly, great works. Frye: Yes, there is a point at which the response to Shakespeare, to Milton, to Dante, to major works of literature, begins to smash through the category of literature into something much more open—the social use of words. That’s why I’m interested now in the Bible, because there is something you can’t apply value judgments to. It’s just nonsense to apply evaluation to the Bible, and that’s because it keeps continually breaking out of the category of literature. Cuthbert: Why is that? Because of its fundamental nature? Frye: Because it’s a very central document. It’s a logocentric document. It’s the product of a cultural tradition that believed that God has something to do with words. Whether it was right or wrong, at any rate it does present an enormously expanded horizon when it comes to the study of words in human civilization. Cuthbert: You’ve been teaching a very popular course in “Symbolism in the Bible” for many years now. I have kept waiting for it to turn up in book form.7 Since you have delayed the work yourself, I thought that it would turn up in the form of somebody’s lecture notes in an underground edition like Aristotle’s Poetics. Frye: It has done that, I understand. Cuthbert: It has? Frye: Yes, but the course keeps changing every year, so the lecture notes go out of date. Cuthbert: So you defeat that. But to some extent the work has not defeated you, but certainly kept you busy. And you say you’re working on it even now? Frye: Oh, yes. A subject that size is something one has to grow into, and I’m never sure that I’ve grown far enough.

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Cuthbert: Why is it so difficult? Frye: Well, there are many reasons. The complexity of the subject itself. The Bible is a very long and complex book. It’s also a book of which every sentence, every clause, every phrase, has been the subject of whole libraries of commentary, so there’s this frightening matter of omniscience that one ought to acquire in order to write about it adequately, which I haven’t got. And of course the great danger as far as the publication of the book is concerned is that I will keep finding things instead of actually consolidating what I have found. Cuthbert: What’s the state of that work now? Have you an outline? Frye: Yes, I do have an outline finally. Cuthbert: How many years has that taken you? Frye: Oh, it’s taken at least ten years, I think. I had originally started with the idea of a kind of introductory handbook. And then what I had thought of as quite simple, crystal clear, lucid introductions for beginners kept complicating themselves and driving me into a study of modern philosophy and that kind of thing. Cuthbert: And so it expanded and expanded? Frye: Yes. Cuthbert: Did the same thing happen to the Anatomy? Frye: The Anatomy was a curious book. I said in the Preface that it forced itself on me when I was trying to write something else [vii/3]. I did write a good deal of it almost involuntarily: it just kept on uncoiling itself. But there was never any difficulty about the scheme; the great difficulty was in getting the order right. Cuthbert: Why? Frye: Well, it’s in four main parts, A, B, C, and D. Realizing that they were A, B, C, and D was what took the time. Cuthbert: The work often tends to be read as separate essays. Frye: Yes, that’s true, it does. One can start reading it in any of the four sections, but still there is some kind of unity linking them together. I find that ninety-five per cent of my work as a writer—and I’m a very slow

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and laborious writer—consists in getting things in the right linear order. I can’t think clearly, and consequently I can’t write clearly, until it’s in the right order. Cuthbert: George Woodcock was one writer who noted that you were the only major critic in Canada who wasn’t a poet, but he also said he thought you were more of a mediator than you claimed to be, that you were more of a public critic. You had made the distinction between the academic critic and the man of taste who writes in periodical journalism and mediates between the writer and his public [AC, 8/10]. Do you agree with Professor Woodcock that you have become a public critic?8 Frye: I think that’s a part of my function. I really wasn’t thinking of that distinction as an either/or distinction. It was a distinction I felt I had to make in the interest of clarity at the time I wrote the Anatomy. I think that George Woodcock may be thinking perhaps of my context as a Canadian critic. Certainly there most of my writing has been reviewing and public criticizing of that type. But I found that the two things—the public critic and the academic scholarly critic—for me rather meshed together. I’ve said about my Canadian criticism that it was a kind of field work that I undertook [BG, viii; C, 418]. Cuthbert: He detected a note of academic snobbery. This appeared in the review of Spiritus Mundi a couple of years ago, which seemed surprising in view of what appears a very democratic approach to literature.9 Frye: Yes, I don’t understand the charge of snobbery. Cuthbert: You said a while ago that you looked at the use of words as widely as possible, and you certainly have. You’ve gone into soap operas and television commercials and all kinds of things as exemplars of the use of words. In the past few years there’s been a good deal of academic attention given to what’s called popular culture. But most of that seems to be designed to give it a kind of pretentious significance that one wonders if it really has. Is there a connection between that approach to popular culture and yours? Frye: I daresay there is a connection. I think that what interest I have in popular culture has largely grown out of my teaching interest. That is, I have always said that if you’re faced with a reluctant ten-year-old in a classroom and you’re trying to teach him literature and he prefers something he saw on TV the night before, the way to approach him is not to

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say, “Well this is good for you and that’s bad for you,” but to say, “Look, there are certain resemblances in structure between what I’m trying to give you and what you just saw.” I think that pedagogically that’s reasonably sound. That’s really where my interest in popular culture comes from—the fact that it records the same conventions and genres as serious literature, which of course keeps continually growing out of popular roots, just as Shakespeare grew out of the popular theatre. Cuthbert: You wrote a book about six or seven years ago setting out quite explicitly a program of the teaching of literature in grade school [On Teaching Literature, 1972]. Has it had an effect? Do you see the prejudices, which seem to be pretty strong in that area, broken down at all, and do you see an effect in the students that come to you now in university? Frye: Some of the students I teach now have been students of my former students, so I often find a certain receptivity to what I have to say more or less built in. What I was interested in here was something called the [Ontario] Curriculum Institute, which was a kind of grass-roots movement in education trying to get university, high-school, and elementary school teachers together. And I felt it was going pretty well when the government came through with this large, benevolent, avuncular institute for curriculum education [OISE], which completely obliterated the grassroots movement. I daresay that perhaps that had to come, but in any case I think that where my ideas about elementary and high-school education have been most effective has been in a series of books that Harcourt, Brace in New York has had edited on my principles [Literature: Uses of the Imagination]. The people who use them seem to find them useful. Cuthbert: You spoke of students of your students appearing now in university. That would suggest, since you see the effects of your own ideas coming back to you, that they have been clearly and adequately transmitted. I wondered about disciples and about the tendency to distort. Has that happened to you? You certainly acquired students and followers who have been referred to as your disciples. Frye: They are not as much my disciples as they are often said to be. I think people have a kind of occupational disease: they tend to identify schools and groups and factions where they don’t perhaps exist. I’ve always consistently said I didn’t want disciples because I don’t want people revolving around me. What I do want is to set other people free to

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do what they want to do in their own way. I think that people who have been students of mine understand that. People who have not been students of mine say things about me that I simply can’t fit into myself at any point. Cuthbert: What about the general response to your teaching? You’ve commented on that in one or two of the essays in Spiritus Mundi, for instance.10 Are you satisfied with the way people develop your ideas or respond to them? Frye: Again, it depends on the ability of the person. Where the person’s ability is