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-

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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

xxii

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 all right, his use of me is going to be all right, too. That way, I have no particular difficulty. But as far as the general response to my work is concerned, I’ve seen it go through all of the stages, from the what-nonsense stage through the brilliant-but-unsound stage, to the many-fine-insights-but stage, and finally to the of-course-we-knew-itall-along stage. Everybody goes through that. Cuthbert: What about your students? What do you gain from your students? Do they have much to say to you in class? Do they ask questions? Frye: Yes, they do, and I notice in my Bible teaching, for example, that if you’re teaching a course on the Bible in the orbit of academic freedom, of course you can’t be concerned with matters of doctrine or belief. Students understand that at once. On the other hand, the questions they ask are existential questions. They are very central, very serious questions, and they do grow out of the actual content of the course. It’s always been a matter of principle with me to try not to dodge these questions, to try to answer them as honestly as I can. Cuthbert: What questions present the most difficulty for you? Frye: It’s hard to say. The questions I find it impossible to answer are the questions which are personal questions: “What do you personally believe?” Because my answer is always, “Well, what you’re really asking me is, Do I believe things in the same way that you do? and the answer is probably No.” Cuthbert: Again, you spoke in the Introduction to the Anatomy of those who import their private beliefs into their systems but believe that they keep them out and find it highly gratifying that they happen to correspond [23–4/24–5]. Of course, many people have remarked on the fact that you’re an ordained United Church minister and that you teach a

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course in “Symbolism in the Bible,” and they assume that there must be a connection. I suppose there is a connection, but what you say is that it’s not a doctrinal connection. Frye: Well, it’s a connection that I’m aware of. When people discover that I’m ordained in the United Church, some of them regard this as a delightful bit of scandal. After all, I did know it before they knew it. Cuthbert: I want to go back to a remark you made about the transmission of your ideas evidently being most satisfactory and most successful at first hand. You said you generally didn’t have difficulty with your students’ misunderstanding you, but with people you didn’t know misunderstanding you. Is that an essential element in the transmission of ideas—the personal contact in university teaching? Frye: I think it is. I think it’s why all these gadget-happy technocrats trying to substitute mechanical aids for the direct personal confrontation of student and teacher are really barking up a tree that isn’t there. There has to be that kind of personal confrontation, I think. I’ve always found teaching a very fertilizing activity. I find it feeds into my writing and my writing feeds into my teaching. I have always found it something pretty essential to keep going. I suppose, comparing small things with great, that’s why the great religious teachers are people who don’t write but do teach. Cuthbert: That question arises, of course, since you say that you’re less well understood at a distance. Why write? Is writing a pale imitation of the teaching process? Frye: In some respects it’s an imitation of the teaching process, and yet it has to be there for people to keep a point of reference, to keep on referring to. Even for the great religious teachers, there had to be gospels and sutras afterwards. Somebody had to write what they had to say. Cuthbert: Joan Didion said in an essay last year that she wrote to find out what she thought.11 Do you find that that happens to you? Frye: Oh, certainly, yes. I regularly find that I don’t know what I think about something until I’ve written about it. That is, you write down what you think you know at the moment and then other things are lurking behind and they begin to emerge. You find out what you really do think. Cuthbert: A couple of years ago when Margaret Laurence wrote The

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Diviners, there was quite a specific statement that she was writing about the myths, which seemed obtrusive at the time. Is there a danger of writers taking your criticism and using it as a formula? Does it happen? Frye: Oh, certainly. No critical method is foolproof. It can be done by the writer, it can be done by the teacher who is looking for, again, a methodology, who is looking for some kind of substitute for literary experience. And a writer could use me as a substitute for the creative experience. That’s just a risk one has to take and hope there won’t be too much of it. Cuthbert: Ideologies get into writers’ works in other ways, and you’ve commented specifically on some of the disturbingly fascist tendencies that have shown up in the creative mind. You’ve talked about Eliot’s conservatism, and the fascism of Pound, and the ideas of Yeats and Coleridge, and so on.12 But I’ve never seen any satisfactory explanation of the connection. Frye: There was always something that Julien Benda calls the betrayal of the intellectuals, the trahison des clercs. I think that the writer is apt to fall into that partly because he’s a sensor. In submarines they used to carry white mice to indicate when the air was getting polluted, and poets are a kind of white mice in that respect. That is, what Eliot, Pound, Yeats, and Wyndham Lewis were converging on back in the ’30s was what broke out in the late ’60s in the United States and elsewhere, a kind of anarchism which had strong and very unpleasant fascist connotations. Cuthbert: You’ve talked about that intruding on the life of the university, too, in a recent essay.13 Is that gone now? Frye: It seems to have gone, but things don’t “go” in this world. The older you get the more you realize that things go in cycles, and I just hope I’ll be off the scene before the next cycle of that stuff turns up again. Cuthbert: Was it destructive? Frye: Yes. Cuthbert: Has it left lasting scars? It seems to have come at a time when the university was bloated by public and government expectations and turned into a large generalized trade school and is now suffering the withdrawal symptoms. Frye: Yes, though that would have happened anyway. That’s a different kind of cycle which is coordinated with the other.

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Cuthbert: But it was a vulnerable time for the university. Frye: It was a very vulnerable time, yes. But I don’t think there was very much fresh air or fresh light brought into the situation by the disturbances of the late ’60s. I think they were nothing but a symptom of a disease. But in a democracy you have to maintain some kind of centre of resistance. The first thing that gets taken over when a government becomes totalitarian is the university, and that’s really why the anti-university manifestations of the late ’60s couldn’t get anywhere. Unless they were all out for a totalitarian government taking the university over, the university had to survive, if only faute de mieux, as a place where dissent could be protected. Cuthbert: But I do want to go back to something you mentioned, the treason of the clerks, the scholars, in another context—that of Quebec separatism. Certainly Quebec is known in the rest of Canada for its strongly homogeneous artistic folkloric-based culture. The very people most involved in that also seem to be the ones most involved in separatism in Quebec. Frye: It’s always been an organizing notion of mine that political and economic phenomena tend to centralize and get bigger and bigger, whereas cultural movements tend to decentralize. The reason for Quebec’s tremendously impressive cultural record is that it does have that kind of cultural coherence. It seems to me that when you attach cultural developments to political and economic centralization, you get an imperialist culture, which is an empty, pompous, anonymous, monumental kind of culture. On the other hand, when you attach political and economic developments to cultural growths, you have a kind of cultural neo-fascism. Cuthbert: There are strongly fascist elements, it seems, in the language policy, for instance. Frye: I think there are. I think there are some very unpleasant things which are partly masked by the very genial personality of Lévesque, and there are elements in the Parti Québécois I don’t like at all. I think that that’s the reason for it, and that’s the reason why it’s almost entirely an intellectuals’ movement. I doubt very much whether either business or unions in Quebec want to go all the way with the Parti Québécois. I think most of its support comes from people in the NFB, Radio Canada, and the intellectual media.

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Cuthbert: There is perhaps an element of the froda, of the trickster, too, in Lévesque. You mention his genial nature, and it certainly does make the whole thing much more attractive than it might otherwise be. Frye: Yes, that’s true. Cuthbert: You said in The Secular Scripture that the age of the great work of art is over . . .14 Frye: I said that it may be over. Cuthbert: . . . May be over. I think a lot of people have thought that if the great Canadian work of art ever appeared, it might appear in Quebec. But does that suggest that Canada is too late? Frye: Well, if that’s really the direction that things are going, then Canada is too late. But it was a very tentative suggestion. I felt that what has happened since about 1950 is a gradual democratizing of culture. That is, poetry, with the rise of the ballad and folksinger people, has become popular and has become oral to a degree that one would never have guessed possible before 1950. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to be in an age of great poets. It means that the poetic impulse will have a wider distribution, will become more genuinely popular. What direction that will take, whether that is actually what is going to happen, a democratizing of the creative instinct rather than an age of great writers, I’m not sure. But it’s a possibility. Cuthbert: At another point you said that this kind of thing comes in when literary movements have run their course.15 I think you referred to the modernists and the absurdists as pretty well having run their course. Other writers have talked about the sterility of so-called serious culture in recent times, the disappearance of sex from pictorial art, of feelings of strong animation in music and in literature. Is there a decadence in that kind of culture? Frye: Decadence is a morally loaded term which actually means that certain conventions are getting exhausted. Cuthbert: Not decadence in a Marxist sense? Frye: No. But it is true that you get cycles in culture where things come into the foreground and are exploited by so many writers or painters or whatever that the conventions become exhausted. They go out of fashion

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and then something grows up from more primitive and popular roots. I think the whole development of culture from 1920 to 1950 was about as great an age of poetry as literature has ever had, but it did become exhausted at that time. Something much more primitive has grown up instead. There is a very great development of musical composition up to the period of, say, Stravinsky, and now you get great developments in jazz and popular music—that kind of thing. Cuthbert: While serious music seems to become more and more alien from its audience at the same time. Frye: Alien from its audience—that’s not the hottest kind of cultural news anymore. People in that area tend to think the parade is going down some other street now. Cuthbert: You have said specifically that the reading of literature educates the individual and helps him to respond to life. And yet many people say that literature and especially romance literature, which you dealt with in The Secular Scripture, is escapist in nature and takes people away from life. How can it be both? Frye: Well, the subjective world, the dream world, can be two things. It can be something withdrawn from actuality, or it can be the reservoir of the powers that we impose on reality. Wordsworth spoke of the huge and mighty forms that kept wandering through his inner soul and connected him with nature.16 Well, he knew that those huge and mighty forms were things that united the world of subjectivity with the world that was out there. Cuthbert: Does that lead to the knowledge required for action then? Is it practical, in that sense of praxis? Frye: Yes, it is. The powers are always there, but you can do two things with them. One is to run away from the world and turn them into dreams and fantasies and subjective wanderings in inner space. The other is to recognize that they are potentially powers to transform the outer world and overcome the subject–object split.

42 Tradition and Change in the College Conducted 23 November 1978

From “Interview: Dr. Northrop Frye,” Vic Report, 7 (Winter 1978–79): 3–6. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook. Frye was interviewed shortly after his installation as chancellor of Victoria University, 11 October 1978. The interviewer, John Plaskett, was a former Victoria student (who graduated in 1974) and former editor of Vic Report, an alumni magazine. Frye received a written copy of the interview for correction before typesetting; see NFF, 1988, box 60, file 4. The notes provided by Plaskett in Vic Report are identified by [P].

Plaskett: The role of chancellor is, at best, an ill-defined role. Could you outline what you see that role as being? Frye: Well, I’m not sure. Victoria changed over from the University of Toronto scheme sometime in the 1930s. Walter Brown was the executive officer before that, and there was no president. It was Brown who changed the [Victoria College] Act and brought in Brigadier Spencer as the first chancellor, while he became vice-chancellor and president.1 Then we had Lester Pearson and Louis Breithaupt.2 And then the office lapsed for fifteen or twenty years. So there really isn’t a great deal of precedent, but I would assume that the chancellor’s function at Vic is roughly the same as that of the chancellor of the University of Toronto— that is, to preside over convocations, to be an ex-officio member of committees, and just be (if he’s in residence, at any rate) an active participator in the college’s business. Plaskett: Why was the office allowed to lapse for so long? Or, why do you think Vic saw this as an appropriate time to install a new chancellor?

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Frye: I think that in the past it was not very functional because there was only one convocation to preside over. But in the last few years the University of Toronto has been drifting into a more monolithic structure. It seems that more and more people are forgetting that the Faculty of Arts at Toronto is a federation of autonomous universities. To have a chancellor-figure in one of the federated colleges is perhaps a way of counteracting this. Otherwise, people will get the notion that Victoria, Trinity, and Emmanuel are simply residences—or appendages—of the university. Plaskett: Of the past chancellors, who was the most memorable? Frye: Oh, Pearson, I suppose. Plaskett: Was he very active in that role? Frye: No, he wasn’t terribly active. Of course, he was busy running Canada. He was rather preoccupied. Plaskett: Do you think that your appointment, particularly because your name carries a lot of weight, might have been a tactic to prevent the university from pushing Vic around? Frye: Yes, or even more . . . from forgetting that the college exists, that the college is a university in its own right with the power, by agreement of Charter, to confer its own degrees.3 Some of the people at Victoria—the president and the chairman of the board, and so on—were rather shocked to discover that a lot of people, even on the governing council, didn’t realize the federation basis for the structure of the University of Toronto. Plaskett: Do you think that the principle of federation has affected the life of the individual colleges? Frye: Oh, yes. Federation has made the colleges much more than simply residences. A college has to be a teaching unit, and it has to have its own power of appointment if it’s going to be a genuine college. Other places, like Harvard and Yale, have spent extraordinary amounts of money trying to build up a college system, and they have always had to struggle against the strong drift back to centralization which every bureaucracy likes. For a university, you can’t operate in that centralized, bureaucratic way. You have to keep decentralizing things. Plaskett: You’ve taught at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale.4

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What do you see as the biggest difference between those particular Ivy League universities and the University of Toronto? Frye: Up to about fifteen years ago, I’d have said that Toronto has two things that made it just about as good a place for undergraduate training as you could get. One was the federation system, and the other was the Honour Course. We’ve destroyed the Honour Course out of hysteria, and now we’re settling into a drift against the federation system.5 Plaskett: Then would you like to see the Honour Course reinstated? Frye: Well, something has to be reinstated. That’s what the Kelly Report says, and they’ve studied the matter very closely.6 It’s possible that the old Honour Course did require more maturity from the undergraduate than the undergraduate possessed. I’m not averse to seeing greater flexibility in a restructured program, but that there has to be some kind of structured program is beyond question. I think the first people to say so are the students.7 Plaskett: When do you think Vic was at its best? Frye: Oh, undoubtedly when I was an undergraduate. The College was small enough—eight or nine hundred students—with a high concentration in the residences. At that time, 1929–33, a great many people came to Toronto from small towns in western Ontario. There was no university in Guelph or Waterloo, no McMaster University in Hamilton, so you got a large core of people in the residences, and that gave a very strong community feeling. I knew everybody in my graduating year. I’ve been rather disconcerted to see how students have lost the sense of community—in knowing each other and in being aware of themselves as a body of people. Plaskett: What do you think accounts for that? Frye: Greater numbers and the fact that the University of Toronto has become a metropolitan university; more and more students live in Toronto and simply commute to the college. They don’t get much of a sense of the university community. Plaskett: If the college was at its best when you were an undergraduate, do you think there is any way in which we could go back to a similar time?

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Frye: We can keep fighting for the decentralizing of the student body. I doubt that we can ever get back to a number like eight or nine hundred— I don’t think that’s economically feasible. But it is possible to do something with a number like fifteen hundred. It’s partly a matter of giving students a home, a sense of belonging, rather than of being part of a milling mob that drifts from one lecture room to another. Plaskett: What do you think would happen if the individual colleges lost their identities? Frye: The University of Toronto would become simply a Middle-Western cultural packaging plant. It would become one of those big, shapeless universities which you find in the American Middle West. Plaskett: You’ve taught and lectured at universities all over the world, and I’m sure you’ve been approached by many to go on staff. You first came to Toronto from New Brunswick when you were seventeen. Can you tell me a bit about that? Frye: When I got through high school I had the highest standing in English. That gave me a scholarship to attend the local business college, and that gave me a training in shorthand and typing. I found that, partly because of my playing the piano, I was fairly good at the typewriter. In those days, the Underwood typewriter company used to organize typewriting contests (in Toronto) in order to demonstrate that its model was the fastest. I got involved in one of those. Plaskett: At the same time you became an undergraduate at Vic. Who were some of the people who were meaningful to you as a young student? Frye: Our year is a very homogeneous one. A lot of us stayed on living in Toronto and we still have reunions. I’m going to be at a reunion party in a few days of which the hostess is Pauline McGibbon; she’s a classmate of mine. The sense of belonging was so strong that you did get to know people in the same course, or in similar courses in the other colleges. Bora Laskin was another classmate of mine, although not a Victoria man.8 In my year I made a great many lifelong friends. When I was seventeen, in the fall of 1929, we were shoved into Frosh House on Charles Street; when I was installed as chancellor, seven people from the house turned up . . . and that’s after nearly fifty years.

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Plaskett: In your Installation Address, you said,”A great tradition is not a dead weight from the past, like a chain tied to a ghost, but a continuous source of energy.”9 How, as chancellor, do you envision maintaining that tradition? Frye: I don’t know if one man can maintain a tradition, but I am aware of it and I can remind other people of it. I can talk about the continuity that there has been through the college. There was a rather remarkable series of lectures last spring: the Sesquicentennial Lectures. Margaret Prang and John Webster Grant talked about the continuity of that liberal, nonconformist tradition in Victoria,10 and I’ve been very much aware of that. It’s not only Victoria people who are aware of it; that recent CBC documentary on Hart Massey obviously was too.11 Plaskett: After graduating from Vic, you attended Emmanuel. You were ordained and had a mission field one summer in Saskatchewan. Was the latter a good time for you, or was it difficult? Frye: It was difficult for me because I was a city boy and I’d never been on a horse before. I didn’t know farmers and ranchers, so the Westerners were a new breed of people for me. In retrospect, it was an extraordinary experience: the people were just wonderful to me. The physical life—the fact that I had to live from week to week in different farm houses, sharing the facilities with the hired hands, a whole new world of bugs—these were some of the very surface things that preoccupied me at the time. But when I look back on it, it was an experience I wouldn’t have done without. Plaskett: Did that experience have anything to do with your decision to pursue the study of university teaching? Frye: Gradually it had been growing on me. By the time I took that mission field I already knew that I wanted a university career. Plaskett: How do you combine your ordination with your lay work? Frye: I’m on a sort of permanent leave from the Maritime Conference, and it doesn’t really enter into my life at all. That is, I don’t preach . . . except to students. Plaskett: Do you still perform any duties as a minister? Frye: No, I have no parish work.

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Plaskett: How do you see Victoria’s relation to Emmanuel? Frye: There’s Victoria University. It’s composed of Victoria College and Emmanuel College. Plaskett: As a theological college, Emmanuel has a dual responsibility—one to the church, as a training ground for new ministers; the other to Victoria University, as an academic institution. Do you see any conflict, or potential conflict, in this duality? Frye: No, not necessarily conflict. The existence of Emmanuel is very important—and probably indispensable—in maintaining the sense of Victoria as an autonomous university, with a college that is peculiarly its own. But the fact that it is also a professional training school for United Church clergymen doesn’t bother me; it doesn’t affect the arts teaching. Plaskett: You say that it doesn’t “bother” you. Frye: Well, I thought your question implied that it might. Plaskett: There are those who feel that Emmanuel is shadowed by Vic and who would like to see them on more equal grounds, just as there are those who feel that Emmanuel’s fiftieth anniversary was perhaps overshadowed by your installation as chancellor. Is this just pettiness, or is there some validity to this? Frye: I suppose, again, it’s the case of the mouse and the elephant, the college with one hundred students and the college with twenty-five hundred students. They’re bound to be somewhat unequally paired. I was forced to say much more about Victoria than I could say about Emmanuel because I’ve worked at Vic and I know it better. Of course, I’m also a graduate of Emmanuel, and I thought it was very sensible of them to combine the two affairs. I really don’t think anyone was squeezed out as a result. Plaskett: Of yourself, you’ve said: “I’ve been told I’m very difficult to talk to. I seldom take the initiative in conversations. I suppose I’m a listener rather than a talker.” As a symbol of Victoria University, you’ll be in a fairly public position. Will that reticence work against you? Frye: Yes, I think it would. It’s worked against me all my life. It would work against me whatever I was. But while I say I’m a listener rather than a talker, of course I’m a professional talker. I can do that, at least.

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Plaskett: As chancellor, will you be involved with the raising of funds for Victoria? Frye: I shouldn’t think so. I’m no earthly good at it. I don’t know what contacts there would be, and I’ve never been in any sense a fundraiser. I just don’t know where the money is or how to talk to the people who’ve got it. Plaskett: Of advertising, you’ve commented that it’s a judicious mixture of flattery and threats. In a sense, the chancellor is a walking, talking advertisement for Victoria. Do you foresee yourself employing flattery and threats? Frye: No, it’s a much more genteel form of advertising I’m going to be involved with. I won’t be talking about body odour . . . that kind of thing. Plaskett: Claude Bissell, past president of the University of Toronto, was quoted in Time as saying: “Northrop Frye is the best literary critic of our time . . . . He is also a social critic of wide range and unusual perceptiveness and in this respect he occupies a position in the twentieth century similar to that of Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth.” And Frank Jones, in the Toronto Star, wrote: “Northrop Frye, thank heavens, eats Shredded Wheat for breakfast and just loves ice cream . . . . Frye, without meaning to be, is one of the scariest men in the Canadian world of learning. His students sit mute and awestruck as the Great Man glides soundlessly up and down the platform . . . seeming to float above the ground as he delivers his distilled wisdom.”12 What do you think when you read things like this? Frye: I have to read them as though they were about somebody else. Once you let things like that take over, you’re sunk. I know there are many things about me on which other people are much better qualified to express an opinion. I have to detach myself from the person they’re talking about. The public man and the private man are always two different people . . . there’s no way out of that. Plaskett: When were you first aware of being a public man? Frye: The transition came fairly early. When my first book appeared, Fearful Symmetry, in 1947, I shot up from assistant professor to full professor within a year, and I noticed immediately that my relation to the

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students had completely changed. While I was assistant professor, I was Big Brother—students would come to me and tell me their troubles. After I became full professor I was “a man with a book and a legend” and the relationship was different. Plaskett: Which did you prefer? Frye: It’s not a question of preferring. It’s what you’re stuck with. I don’t buy that business about my students being awestruck. I haven’t noticed a great deal of awe in my students. Plaskett: You’ve said that for verified experiment and observation, students need to face in the same direction; for ethical choice, they need to face one another [WE, 519]. In what ways do you think Vic and the other colleges might best enhance this somewhat paradoxical position? Frye: The main concern of the federated colleges is with the humanities and the existential subjects where the students are facing one another. That’s been their traditional strength. They gave up their teaching of science—their labs and so forth—with the federated system. What they are now are humanistic communities. Plaskett: You talked in your Installation Address of the importance of the study of the social use of science [WE, 520]. How do you feel that might be better explored? Frye: I was thinking there of things like the ecology movement, the sense of the growing energy crisis, the preservation of the environment, the preservation of buildings in the city, and so forth. Those all add up to a very widespread social concern with the environment. The old notion that Canada is a land of unlimited natural resources, and that all we have to do is keep mining the coal and cutting down the trees, is a very sinister and a very dangerous philosophy now—but it’s not reflected in our curriculum. Presumably we have people in Forestry trained in the importance of the conservation of forests, but society’s use of science and technology is really an aspect of humanistic study. I think that will become a part of our curriculum in the very near future. It would be best taught in the college structure because it’s a humanistic thing more than a matter of laboratories. Plaskett: What events of the last fifty years do you think have made the greatest impression on the university?

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Frye: What affects the university is the general economic situation. If there’s a depression, the university’s this kind of thing; if there’s a boom, it’s that kind of thing. The boom period is of a somewhat doubtful value to a place like Toronto because Toronto is the obvious place for centralizing things—big research institutes and big grad schools—and the core of all university education is the small, liberal arts, undergraduate community. It’s a great misfortune for a university when it gets taken over by the research and the graduate work. A place like Columbia, for example, has to fight for the autonomy of its undergraduate college. There has always been an emphasis on undergraduate teaching at the University of Toronto which I’ve always thoroughly approved of, and which I think the federation system has a lot to do with. I would want to keep on trying to fight for that. Plaskett: More generally, how do you think the economic situation affects the needs and wants of the students, especially in the last decade? Frye: There was a great deal of hysteria around in the late 1960s which was a result of economic prosperity. The students who raised hell around that time were the offspring of well-to-do families, students who were trying to express some kind of revolt against middle-class values and had no idea where to take it. Students are said to be much more utilitarian now, much more preoccupied with getting jobs, which one can understand. But there is another side to it: I think that students today are more attracted by genuine social issues than by phony ones. Plaskett: Of the activities of the young reared on television, you once said that they “showed symptoms both of a withdrawal from waking reality and of an irritability of the sort produced by dream deprivation. More important, [television] made the impact of cliché mythology so intolerable that it provoked a frenzied rejection of it, followed, as such outbreaks must be, by a kind of stupor” [SeS, 170; SeSCT, 111]. That was in 1976. Are we still in a stupor? Frye: I was speaking of television that made an impact as new popular art forms do. There have been a series of those: the movies at the beginning of the century, radio in the 1920s, and then television in the 1950s. Television was the most penetrating of all the media that has yet been invented. It comes straight into the home—it brings the actual image into the home—and its impact on people, especially on young children who sat in front of the TV for hours a day, was overwhelming.

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There was a good deal in the hysteria of the 1960s which was a result of the psychological effect of television. I was teaching at Berkeley at the time of the “People’s Park” business, so I know what it’s like to be in a university where there are tear gas and soldiers with bayonets. I felt that, while the students who were making the noise were certainly not “watchers of television,” nevertheless they had been. There was what I called a frantic kind of rejection of TV because it just brought the whole American middle-class set of values right into their living rooms. Then there was a period of almost eerie quiet in the early 1970s. The longrange event is that society is gradually assimilating and containing television as a medium. Plaskett: The rejection of it seems to have been to little end. Do you see it happening again, let’s say, in the next ten years? Frye: I think there’s a process of assimilation so that you don’t need these violent extremes, where students say, “Our parents accept all these values . . . we reject them!” There’s a settling-down process where it becomes a condition of the environment. Plaskett: With the youngest students today being in their teens, and the oldest alumni being in their nineties, how do you think the university might better accommodate the generation gap? Frye: I don’t feel that the generation gap is really that much of a problem. That’s why I mentioned in my Installation Address the dinner that we gave first-class Honours graduates along with the graduates of fifty and sixty years back. That was where I became aware of the fact that continuity was far more important than the rather superficial changes in manners, and in the anxieties about liquor and that kind of thing. The best way to overcome the generation gap is to get more and more people into university education. Plaskett: How do you think the college might better accommodate its alumni? Frye: Well, it’s doing its best. Certainly the federated colleges were working with the alumni much more effectively than the professional faculties appeared to be for many years. When the University of Toronto began to take a real interest in its alumni, it found that places like Victoria and Trinity and St. Michael’s had already been doing it. And that’s another aspect of the “intellectual home” for the students. The efforts

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that are made by the Victoria Alumni Association to keep the alumni coming back to lectures, social gatherings, and so forth, add up to quite a remarkable social service. Plaskett: “Within the framework of the university community, students are in an ideal situation to face one another.” As you noted in your address, the university provides a stage for students, but once they leave, their community expands and becomes more diverse. Do you think the university should provide a stage on which the alumni might come face to face? Frye: There are efforts to do that, such as the “Mind and Matter” series of lectures,13 but the best way to do it, although it’s a very complicated social issue, is simply to provide a full-time return to the university for people in their thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. Plaskett: Getting and keeping more and more people in university education. How do you see that coming about? Frye: As I say, it’s a complicated social issue, but I don’t think the undergraduate, liberal arts community should be the exclusive preserve of the age group from eighteen to twenty two. It should have all age groups in it. A teacher who was trained in 1929, who is still teaching, is in some danger—for all the professional development!—of losing touch with the modern concepts of his subject. I don’t think you can make that up except either by unusual energy or by a full-time withdrawal—a sort of immersion course. I think society ought to provide for that. Plaskett: As a scholar, what do you think is your strongest asset? Frye: I don’t know . . . there are people who say I’m not a scholar, and perhaps they’re right. I said in my Royal Bank Address that I regarded myself as much more of a teacher than a scholar, and that I thought of my books as teachers’ books rather than as scholarly books [WE, 508]. I’m not very good at reading books that other people have not read; that is, I’m not a research person, particularly. I can see things that are close to the centre of a subject, and I can write with a certain amount of lucidity about it. Those are teaching qualities. Plaskett: In 1967 you were the first person to be given the title of “university professor.” What does that title mean? Frye: It means that I’m not attached to a department, but I could teach

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whatever subject I like in whatever department was ready to accept me. I’m responsible directly to the president rather than to a chairman. Plaskett: Has that allowed you more freedom? Frye: Yes it has. It gets me out of department meetings, for one thing. I always feel that the university is a very paradisal community if you cut out meetings. Plaskett: When you finished your term as principal of Victoria, you talked about having more time for your own work. Now, as chancellor, you’ve taken on yet another responsibility . . . Frye: Well, I’m afraid my work and my writing does have to come first. There’s no arguing on that, because I don’t run it—it runs me. Everything else has to get out of its way. But the people who asked me to be chancellor know that. Plaskett: Your wife went through a seven-year term with you as principal, something which must have been a heavy responsibility for her as well. Now that you’re chancellor, she must feel a bit as if she’s jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Frye: Yes, a bit. I’ll try to keep the work to a minimum . . . for her.

43 The New American Dreams over the Great Lakes Conducted early May 1979

Translation by Nella Cotrupi of the Italian article, “Sogna sui laghi il nuovo americano,” La Repubblica, Culture section, 12 May 1979. La Repubblica is a prominent Left/Centrist daily newspaper published in Rome. Frye was interviewed in Toronto by Gian Piero Brunetta just before his departure for Italy on a lecture tour that would take him to seven universities—in Milan, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Florence, Urbino, and Rome—for lectures and conferences. He arrived on 13 May, the day after this article appeared, and stayed until 6 June. Before the text of the interview Brunetta remarked that, in spite of the translation of seven of Frye’s books into Italian in the preceding ten years1 and the high esteem in which he was held, Italian critics had not scrutinized his work in depth. He prefaced his remarks with the following quotation from Frye: I find it difficult to say where my interest in Italian culture begins and ends. I’m interested in the Renaissance, Machiavelli, Castiglione, Bruno, and La Commedia and, since I’ve begun to focus on the theory of criticism, in Vico. I read, out of sheer curiosity, the works of some contemporary poets. I also read Croce but I got very little out of it.

Brunetta: Mr. Frye, you maintain that Canadians, after being for a long time an American colony, are today trying to discover, or rediscover, their own identity. Frye: For as long as Canada has existed Canadians have had an almost neurotic obsession that has pushed them to seek their own identity, underlining, as much as possible, the non-American traits. This preoccupation, one widely held, goes back to the nineteenth century when Can-

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ada became a political entity thanks to Loyalist refugees from the American Revolution. Canadians have always been troubled by the fact that in other countries they are always presumed to be American citizens. Personally, I believe that the identity of a nation can be reached only through a distinct culture; as far as literature is concerned, this identity, at least in English Canada, is a development of the last few decades. Today, in Canadian literature, we can point to important poets like Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, or Margaret Atwood, or prose writers such as Alice Munro or Timothy Findley—some of whom are well known in Italy, too. Brunetta: Since the war in Vietnam the American myth has been shaken to its very foundation. To what extent has this also affected Canadians? Frye: Traditionally, the American consciousness is exuberant and progressive. This exuberance has always been envied by Canadians, who don’t possess the natural and technological resources of the United States. But since the Vietnam war, the Americans have begun to realize that even their civilization can experience a downward spiral, or, at least, that it can have limitations. So, in some ways, Americans have moved closer to the Canadian mentality, which is more introverted and perhaps self-deprecating. I maintain that the Americans have been “Canadianized” in their way of life. But maybe only a Canadian can understand this paradox. Brunetta: What would you say are the most characteristic aspects of the Canadian myth and how does it differ from the American myth? Frye: The difference is firstly geographical. When you arrive in Canada by sea you are literally swallowed by the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the St. Lawrence River, and the Great Lakes. You have the impression that Canada is a “one-dimensional” country which remains united thanks to the driving East–West movement that, starting from the St. Lawrence, crosses the Great Lakes and, continuing in the same direction, reaches the wide prairies. An analogous pattern arises in the United States too, but in the U.S.A. there are two directions, insofar as a North–South movement was established during the American Revolution. Another difference lies in the existence of the American frontier in the West which expanded gradually until it reached the Pacific, where it totally disappeared. In the history of Canada the frontier has always been circular,

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embracing all parts of the country, so that, even today, you can find many entirely isolated communities which try to establish contacts in all directions. As far as the historical difference goes I have already given a partial answer: the Canadian, practically speaking, is an American who has repudiated the American Revolution and therefore has repudiated everything that, in terms of English history, would be described as “Whig” elements: i.e., the assumption that freedom and independence are the same thing. In this country, a great part of the economy is based on the American model, but state control is more widespread. In Canada, there are national radio and television and a national railway system, and you can find other forms of government subsidy which would be unthinkable in the U.S. Brunetta: The cluster of mythologies which made up the so-called American myth, do you think they have reached an end or do you think they can re-emerge in different forms? Frye: I think the naive stage based on the optimistic progressivism of the American consciousness has come to an end, as has the desire to live apart from the rest of the world. The Utopian conviction of being able to create a totally different way of life has vanished. The United States for some time now has taken on the role of great imperialistic power. Since I believe that nothing in history reaches an end, it follows that there must be a restructuring even of the American consciousness sooner or later. However, it is difficult to foresee what characteristics it will assume. I do think, however, that the mosaic of the modern world consists of various pieces: the Marxist consciousness of Russia or China, the American, the Japanese, the consciousness of the European common market . . . Brunetta: Is it possible today to posit once again great unitary mythologies, or are we witnessing the fragmentation of mythologies? Frye: I think that there exists only one social mythology which results from the co-existence of many contradictory mythologies. I’ve always tried to show that unity is the opposite of uniformity. On the one hand there is the Marxist revolutionary push, eager to create an essentially uniform structure, and on the other hand there is a growing society that presents a variety of contradictory mythologies. For me, the latter represents the ideal solution. Uniformity means sameness; unity means the co-existence of diverse individual expressions.

44 Four Questions for Northrop Frye Probably conducted 14, 15, or 16 May 1979

From the translation by Nella Cotrupi of the anonymous “Quattro Domande à Northrop Frye,” Alfabeta, 1 (September 1979): 14. A list of Italian interviews in NFF, 1988, box 67, file 5 reveals that the interviewer was writer and intellectual Umberto Eco. According to a story Frye told Robert Denham, he and Eco were having dinner together in an Italian restaurant; Frye did not know he was being interviewed, but he did notice that from time to time Eco would scribble something on a paper napkin. This must later have formed the basis of the written report. The interview probably took place in Milan, the first city Frye visited on his Italian tour, as Eco lives there; he was one of the founding editors of Alfabeta, a new Milanese monthly periodical which aimed to discuss culture, semiotics, and literature in a nonacademic way.

Eco: Your last book to be translated into Italian, The Secular Scripture, is dedicated to romance. This is a difficult category for the Italian reader, for whom the expression “fantastic novel” would be more apt as a description given the absence, in our language, of the distinction between a “novel,” as a realistic tale, and a “romance.” Nevertheless, even if we do not have the romance genre, we have produced a few of them in Italy, and you would even include in this category the Divine Comedy. Moreover, as is true throughout the world, the younger Italian generation has discovered the “fantastic,” naturally with Tolkien and all his literary offspring, but also with the new science fiction which isn’t really in search of knowledge, as was the case ten or twelve years ago, but instead follows the path of the fantastic. At the end of the day, whether we like it or not, we may include in romance even the new film extravaganzas such as Star Wars. Why do you think that the generation

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which in 1968 was highly political and preferred the realistic and socially engaged novel now seeks out romance? What is the link between youthful extremism and what you call the “revolutionary” aspect of romance? Frye: I am fully aware of the ambiguity of the term “ romance” in almost all the European languages; even in English, we are constrained to make use of it in many different senses. I find it very interesting that European students would have preferred realistic narratives in 1968, because in North America, in my view, the entire student movement was thoroughly romantic even in its literary tastes. In the 1930s, students on the left, who were in those days mainly Stalinists, read realistic narratives; they considered them to be more dignified than romance, which they dismissed as “escape literature.” I think that the taste for romance in film and television, as in literature, reflects a trend that was present from approximately 1960. There are two levels of realism: one, which I have elsewhere described as “stupid realism,” [MC, 61; NFMC, 33] is, in fact, a form of idealism and consists in taking as reality the surface or outward appearance of society. This is closely linked to the sentimental and is typical of “socialist realism” in the Soviet Union. The other level, typified by Goya’s Disasters of War, smashes the surface and penetrates through to the reality that lies beyond. But even here a strongly conservative element is implicated in the acceptance of the reality that we see, for example, in Balzac. Even Freud and Marx are realistic. For me it was interesting to see how, in America, Freud was transformed into a prophet of revolutionary optimism and Marx into a neo-humanist whose “alienation” is considered a spiritual problem rather than an economic one. Similarly, science fiction “hardware” has pretty much exhausted itself, and today, science fiction has become a kind of philosophical romance. Eco: Not only in your last book, but also in Anatomy of Criticism, you spoke of romance as “the search for the satisfaction of the libido or desiring self.”1 As you know, today, the word “desire” is much in vogue, even in a political sense, largely due to the influence of Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari.2 Do you think that (apart from the fact that in both cases there is a strong push towards a psychoanalytic perspective) there is a link between the theme of desire and the return of the fantastic? Frye: Science fiction is almost entirely based on the theme of the dream

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of flight, so that there is, without question, a link to the desiring self. I derived my own personal view of desire from Blake, not from Freud, and I find Blake’s conception more useful. In Blake, “desire” is the motive force for imaginative vision, or rather, it is the root cause of human creativity. In my view, today’s younger generation is interested in the idea of the creation of new possible worlds. This gives their revolutionary interests, for example, a more anarchistic shape than the orthodox Marxist one where everything depends on taking control of an already existing order. We may note here, as well, that the youth protest movements contain a strongly sexual element that was virtually absent from the older generation of which I spoke earlier. Eco: Some have seen in the return to the fantastic a kind of return to the sacred, to religious thought. But you are clearly juxtaposing a sacred epos, the Bible, to romance as a secular phenomenon. This was by way of background. Do you think that today the secular fantastic represents an Ersatz of the sacred? Frye: Religion has something to do with engagement and other similar existential problems, and no serious religion that I know of makes much use of the fantastic. A cult based on the fantastic would represent a rather inferior version, even as Ersatz. The fantastic is a quite recent development in the arts, and before our century it had no more than a marginal existence. Its increasing influence has much more to do with the “desire” to create a new world. It would be discouraging to think that the mob of psychotic monkeys on this planet is the best that the universe is capable of as far as sentient life goes. There has always been a belief in higher or alternative forms of sentient beings. At other times the superior beings were angels, large birds that flew in the sky; today they arrive in space ships and are cultural heroes. Once upon a time, the only alternative forms of life were fairies, trolls, and elves: since Tolkien they have been propagating everywhere in time and space. Certainly it is a romantic belief that in creation man participates in divine nature, and this interest in the direction of human creativity, from this particular point of view, could approach religion. Eco: In light of the previous questions, there is an interesting point to clarify. You have spoken of romance as a polarized narrative—good and evil, black and white—a structure similar to that of chess. In The Secular

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Scripture, you refer briefly to the fact that the university unrest of 1968 produced “manic” situations; and you also suggested (even while attributing the idea to others) that there was a link between the polarized paradigm of war (us versus them, the enemy) and the structures of television or melodrama [50; SeSCT, 35–6]. If this is so, do you see the new taste for romance as the result (even the sublimation of) that generation’s point of view? Frye: I referred earlier to the two levels of realism: the level that accepts the veneer of social authority, and the level that penetrates and goes beyond it and that is the genuine form of realism. Advertising and propaganda reinforce the veneer, the appearance, of the social, and the invention of television has made the impact so overpowering that, in America, the youngest generation, starting from at least 1965, has been pushed almost to the point of hysteria. It has not been able to grasp a sense of the reality that goes beyond the veneer: it has not produced a Marx who could offer a comprehensive understanding of how the surface was contrived, as Marx did in his analysis of capitalism. All that they could do was adapt and regurgitate the categories of television itself: the struggle between the good guys and the bad, between the forces of light and darkness. Enemies were described in paranoid terms such as “the politicomilitary establishment.” I don’t see how a different point of view is realistically possible for sensitive, imaginative young people, although there are, certainly, enormous dangers inherent in transforming a conflict into an apocalypse. The most promising approach is to see the struggle as a clash of ideas rather as one of individuals.

45 “I Tried to Shatter the Shell of Historicism” Conducted May or early June 1979

Translated by Nella Cotrupi from “Ho cercato di rompere le croste dello storicismo,” Tuttolibri (Turin), 9 June 1979. Interviewer Claudio Gorlier was a professor of English at the University of Turin; he refers to Frye’s having been in Milan, 14–16 May.

Gorlier: The role of history is one of the most debated aspects of your theoretical framework. This is especially so in a country where historicism and the historical approach are still very much in evidence. Can you comment on this? Frye: I don’t know much about the historical approach to criticism in Italy. When I attended university, there was a strong historical slant to literary criticism, especially at a very mechanical level. In other words, a literary-historical perspective emerged which could be reduced in substance to the proposition that one author came after another, and that therefore one had to examine the influences that predecessors had on an author and so on. I broke away from this approach, and I want you to note that even the English criticism of the twentieth century that was most divergent and “New,” say that of William Empson, was not entirely free of this hold. My appeal for a typological approach that follows neither a rigidly chronological structure, nor a limitation to specific cultural domains, was, in fact, an attempt to break out of this shell. Gorlier: What about the historic “immobility” of your perspective? Frye: I don’t think you can speak about fixity or immobility. The models are recycled and reshaped according to the historical context. The

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English sixteenth century, for example, can use an archetype according to the “fluid” paradigm of romance with its adventures and actions typical of poetic or dramatic types of the dominant, aristocratic culture. On the other hand, in other narratives of the same period, emerging from the rising middle class, these will be transposed to a realistic level. A few centuries later, narrative is given over to the now dominant notions of the middle class, as this level reaches its peak of articulation. Gorlier: Can you say the same about Shakespeare? Frye: Of course. Take, for instance, The Winter’s Tale and see how certain models are taken up and utilized. Here the same type of verbal analysis could be adopted. One of the most frequently used words in the text, “grace,” has different values depending on the transformation of the archetype. Gorlier: So, these models, these archetypes, pre-exist platonically? Frye: In some senses, yes. They are linked to myth, to ritual; they are constants that then undergo transformations, that intertwine and replicate. Gorlier: Do you think, then, that going from one archetype to another we eventually arrive at God, at a fixed universe? Some have suggested that you are actually doing theology. Frye: I think this is too rigid an interpretation. I realize that theology enters into my work. But I am very well aware of when it does and does not. Gorlier: Let’s go back to Shakespeare and one of your favourite plays, The Tempest. In the panel that you participated in in Milan [14 May], Nemi d’Agnostino maintained that you gave an interpretation that was too comforting, ignoring all the painful implications of the play. Frye: As I have written,1 at the end of The Tempest you reach a cycle, a process of rebirth, a paradise in which spring and autumn coexist. Prospero’s vision of the world becomes the world itself. This is not to say that Prospero, who before his exile was a very incompetent Duke of Milan, will not be, on his return to Milan, even more incompetent. Gorlier: Please excuse the rough schema, but, assuming that there could be a precise distinction, an opposition, between formal and sociological criticism, on which side would you be?

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Frye: I don’t see that they should be mutually exclusive. They are complementary, so that, going beyond schematization, they are both basic tools of criticism. Gorlier: For some decades, Dante has represented an essential point of reference for Anglo-Saxon culture. Is this so for you too? Frye: Certainly, the Paradiso in particular represents an essential touchstone for me. Gorlier: During the Milan panel discussion, Portinari stated, paradoxically, that Anatomy is in its diversity a creative work: in effect, a novel. Frye: That there is a creative dimension—though probably not in a narrow sense—may be supposed. A novel? A novel needs characters, and in Anatomy the only character is me. Gorlier: The book on Blake and the Anatomy represent crucial points of departure. Can you trace any precise lines of development since then? Frye: I feel like a dog that at a certain moment sniffed out a trail and followed it. I continue to follow that trail.

46 The Wisdom of the Reader Conducted 25 or 26 May 1979

From “La Sapienze del Lettore,” L’Unità, 11 June 1979, translated by Nella Cotrupi. Dated by Frye’s itinerary. L’Unità, a leftist Rome newspaper, was historically the organ of the Italian Communist Party. Frye was interviewed in Florence by Beppe Cottafavi.

[After preliminary remarks on Frye’s work, Cottafavi asks Frye about the relationship between literature, myth, and ritual.] Frye: Let’s say, for the sake of simplification, that myths are words arranged in a certain order. In primitive societies, all the myths were translated into stories because there was no other system for arranging words and also because abstract argument had not yet emerged. We are speaking about stories that usually dealt with gods and tended to stick together, giving birth to a complex mythology. It is this mythology which, in turn, handed down to later centuries a cultural heritage of allusions. From this literature then developed, and its function has always been to recreate mythology. In this sense, abstract arguments and descriptive narratives (roughly speaking, what we know as essays) operate outside literature. The distinction between myth and ritual is essentially one between a narrative and a dramatic form—even if these two forms later seem to unfold together and strengthen each other. Cottafavi: What is the relationship between literature and science? Or rather, in what sense can literary criticism be defined as scientific? Frye: I would start from this assumption: if science, or at least the natural sciences, are concerned with nature’s workings, the study of the human-

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ities, literature included, has always been perceived to operate in an existential key, that is, to focus on society and to be more directly involved in exploring the question of man. In some ways, however, the situation has changed—at least in the last century with the emergence of the social sciences, which try to be as objective and as quantitative as the natural sciences, even though they apply their methods to existential and human problems. From this perspective, I believe that literary criticism can be a form of social science even if by nature it can never become as scientific as some aspects of anthropology and psychology. These remarks of mine go back to 1957, the year in which Anatomy of Criticism was published; I would say that since then the development of structuralism has proved me right. Cottafavi: And if we speak about criticism and psychoanalysis, or criticism and semiotics, or criticism and sociology, or criticism and linguistics . . . what connotations are evoked by these pairs? Frye: I’ve often considered criticism as an activity which indicates how various topics articulate themselves around a centre. For example, at the end of Anatomy of Criticism, I gave some suggestions on how linguistics, anthropology, and other disciplines can be grouped around the exercise of critical activity [350–4/325–30]. But in the 1950s I was still a pioneer and my advice today is certainly outdated. I cannot but rejoice over the progress that has been made since then. I have only one reservation: I would have wished that, in the course of this evolution, a deeper interest had emerged in literature itself. Everyone shows a great interest in language, grammatical metaphors, philosophical ideas, and social sciences. But, with only one or two exceptions—and one is certainly Roland Barthes—there is a certain reluctance to contend with literature in and for itself. Cottafavi: Yes, literature that for you is one unique, grandiose organism endowed with constant forms. But what does “reading” mean? And who is the reader? Frye: Traditionally the author–reader relationship was seen as follows: an active agent—the book—and a passive recipient—the reader—who had nothing more to do than study the text in front of him. Many things have changed today. We have become aware that the reader is as active an agent as the author and that he never limits himself to reading a text but always translates it using his inner horizons of knowledge and expe-

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rience. In other words, reading means recreating the text, and this to my mind explains numerous literary phenomena. Naturally the recreation of a text can be very faithful to its original intention or it can be the result of a total misunderstanding. But in each case the process is the same. Cottafavi: In your latest book which has been translated into Italian, The Secular Scripture, you identify a secular scripture, typical of romance, which tells the epic of man, and you contrast this with a sacred scripture, found in the Bible, which tells the epic of God; the difference between fable and myth, however, is a difference of authority and social function, not of structure. In structure, fable and myth are similar; their distinction is rather the distinction between what one believes to be true and to be false. Now, how do we explain this point in relation to the difference between social mythologies and literary mythologies? Frye: I believe that one of the intellectual activities of our time consists in trying to see what is behind the social and political façade of authority. The fact that this exists underlines the fact that we are all surrounded by a mythology which is for the most part false: that of publicity, advertising, propaganda, and all the other means which deceive man and reduce him to the role of a docile and obedient citizen. The role of the critical act, then, is that of tearing down the wall of false mythology to reach the structure of serious convictions that each of us must have in order to be a responsible member of society. Beyond any personal convictions, however, there is the vision of society which creates and shapes those convictions. This image is something that literature is meant to express, because social vision is derived from the imagination and the imagination is what is fundamental in literature.

47 Identity and Myth Conducted June 1979

When in Rome, 1–6 June 1979, Frye spent considerable time with Gilbert Reid of the Canadian embassy, who interviewed him for a small Italian-language promotional magazine Reid was publishing for the Canadian embassy, Canada contemporaneo. The interview appeared, translated into Italian, in the first issue, no. 1 (January–February 1980): 8–9, 11, accompanied by biographical and bibliographical notes and two photographs. However, the following text is taken, courtesy of Gilbert Reid (later a writer and broadcaster in Canada), from his original English notes.

Reid: What do you think characterizes you as a literary critic? Frye: My own interests have always been centred upon literature itself, and upon what might be called the social context of literature, its real function in society. I was educated in the authentic philistine tradition: literature was something you only concerned yourself with after the day’s work, that is, after you’d earned your living and had success. Literature was a luxury article, a thing one could easily do without, an amusement to be cultivated only after the real problems had been resolved. However, when I started to study a truly primitive culture, for example, the culture of the Inuit, a culture in which their problems of survival, of food, and of shelter, are very serious and direct, I noted that both poetry and the poetic tradition were for them of vital importance. The more primitive the society, the more important poetry is for its survival. In contemporary societies, complex and sophisticated as they are, literature and life are suffocated under a vast weight of false priorities. So I decided to study the original functions of literature in order to

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discover what literature can still do for us today. In fact, I think an individual participates in society principally through his or her imagination. In the last hundred years there has been a fracture between appearance and reality, between language and reality. In the Middle Ages, this division—or fracture—did not exist: symbol and reality, language and reality, were one and the same. You just have to think of the “realism” of St. Thomas Aquinas. However, from Rousseau, Marx, and Freud, we have learned not to trust appearances: we’ve learned to look for the reality which is hidden behind the façade of society and of language. We have learned to refuse to believe the myths imposed by the authorities because they are patently false and absurd. The collapse of the myths which make society and authority cohesive has, in turn, provoked a collapse of commitment and faith. Now it seems to me that literature can help us to discover, behind and beyond the various façades offered by society, the real sources and structures of our personal and collective imagination, and thus of commitment and faith. So literature itself has always been at the centre of my interests, and that makes me somewhat rare among contemporary literary critics. Much interesting progress in recent literary criticism, in fact, has come from nonliterary fields, from sectors such as linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and so on. Critics such as Roland Barthes, who adopt the conceptual instruments from these sectors, often stray from literature and from criticism—in the narrow sense of the word—towards these other parallel fields. But I have remained centred on literature—on its role in the creation and transmission of our personal and collective imagination. Reid: You’re now working on a book on the Bible. Is this project linked to what you’ve just told me? Frye: I believe that language developed from an initial metaphorical stage, a stage in which the distinction between subject and object was very confused, certainly not as clear as it is today. The Bible rose during this metaphorical stage of language, and cannot be studied using modern criteria regarding language and the relation of language to reality. Literature continually recreates the metaphorical function of language. Poets, precisely because they are constantly rediscovering this function, are often considered “atavistic” or “primitive.” But I believe that the metaphorical functions of language are essential, today perhaps more than ever before. In fact, most of the “existential” problems of life can be

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considered aspects of the problem of “identity,” a problem which the metaphorical function of language to a considerable extent resolves. In the metaphor A = B, A is still A, and B is still B; metaphor therefore creates a unity without creating uniformity. Through metaphorical identification, one overcomes the split between nature and man. Man rediscovers himself and places himself in a natural and social world. In our culture, the Bible is the work which provides the fundamental mythical context for the metaphorical functions of language, for the stories which we tell ourselves. The Bible helps us to rediscover ourselves, to quest for and discover our individual and collective identities. Reid: “Identity” is a key concept in your system. Is this interest in identity rooted in your experience as a Canadian? It’s known, even in Italy, that Canadians have often been preoccupied with discovering their identity. Frye: You know, I didn’t realize how profoundly both my consciousness and my work were rooted in my experience as a Canadian until I worked with the CBC on a program called Journey without Arrival. Suddenly I discovered how great was my interest in the Canadian environment. When the first white colonists came to this immense country, they brought with them a Baroque European consciousness and a mathematical approach; their mentality and methods aimed at dominating the land, not at uniting with it. Engaged as they were in dominating the landscape, these first colonists were incapable of loving the land and its features. Theirs was that type of Cartesian mentality which considered animals only as potential providers of fur. This left a deep sense of guilt in the conscience of Canadians. The death of an animal is often the source or subject of images of intense emotion, among the most beautiful in Canadian poetry. Unlike the United States, Canada never had a single frontier moving continuously towards the West. Canada is simply too vast, broken up by geography and geology, and surrounded by frontiers on all sides. This situation created what I call the “garrison mentality” (C, 351). Thus, isolated from nature and from the landscape, isolated from each other, Canadians have always had to fight their isolation, or at least understand it. And this explains, I think, their great interest in communications. The concept of communications is fundamental for historians and theorists like Harold Innis, George Grant, and Marshall McLuhan. The concept of communications is also basic to my own work. Literature, in fact, is an indirect form of communication. Literary myths, and the general mythologies of which they are part, constitute the heart of a com-

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munity, and form the general context of all communications within that community. It is from this context that the members of a community receive their identities and their values. A particular and intense interest in this theme is, naturally, a very Canadian characteristic. Reid: What role do you think your book on the Bible will play? Frye: My book on the Bible, like my book on romance, aims at providing a general perspective on the myths from which our literature descends. Myths aggregate among themselves, forming a single, more or less homogeneous, mythological corpus. My book will become, I think, two books. The first will analyse the Bible as a literary work, as a global, allinclusive myth. The second will analyse the way in which the Western world has interpreted and absorbed this myth in the different periods of its literary tradition. Reid: You have written a great deal on Canadian literature and you have had considerable influence on many Canadian writers. Do you think that Canadian literature is too provincial, too much concentrated on local problems, to arouse interest in other countries? Frye: There is a paradoxical and mysterious law regarding culture and in particular literature: the more intensely local and provincial a work is, the more universal is its message. In American literature, for instance, you just have to think of Faulkner. In Canada, we have works which are universally known, such as Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business, and many others. These works are both intensely local and widely read and appreciated outside their local context. Reid: What, according to you, is the relationship between English Canadian and French Canadian or Quebec literature? Frye: I believe that French Canadians discovered their own identity first. The French Canadian intellectuals and writers, including Quebeckers, understood, almost from the beginning, what their function and role should be. They should be the defenders and the heralds of a language and a culture in a continual state of siege; it is precisely this which allowed them to define, with maximum clarity, their own identity. English Canadian writers, when they in turn discovered their identity in the 1960s, did it, as it were, by rebound, as a reaction to the problems posed by the French Canadians.

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Reid: In Italy, both the intellectual tradition and popular consciousness are impregnated with history which, for Italians, is an obsession. Crocean Idealism, Italian Marxism, Italian Catholicism, Italian Fascism, are all impregnated, in different ways, with a sense of history. Can your system, which is largely a taxonomy, be considered ahistoric, or antihistoric? Frye: No, I don’t think so. My system begins and ends with history. Anatomy of Criticism was intended to be, in part, a history of literature, which I conceived as a history of the various literary genres and traditions, of their metamorphoses and transformations. These traditions and these genres renew themselves continuously, in function above all of the class structure of the society in which they operate and the transformations of that class structure. Some have said that this is a rather naive conception of literature and of literary history. But I don’t think so. For example, when I said that the recent ironic phase of literature would bring us to a mythic phase and that this would then be transformed into a romance phase, I didn’t know about Tolkien and many other contemporary writers. In the ironic phase, the public considers with disdain literary norms, traditions, and myths, while being extremely conscious, albeit with ironic distance, of these substrata and deep structures of literature. In the mythic phase, these structures are explicitly adopted by the writers themselves, and the new liberty they thus acquire opens the road to a new romance period, where fables, science fiction, and fantasy dominate. Since I first formulated this tendency, it has in fact appeared on schedule. Reid: What do you think will be the main tendencies of the end of the 1970s and of the 1980s? Frye: I think that the neo-Romantic period which we have entered, with people like Ginsberg and Tolkien, is very different from the first half of the century, which was dominated by giants of the calibre of Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Valéry, and Proust. Now literature has become more democratic, more collective. Poetry is often sung and listened to by masses of people. This would have been inconceivable in the first part of the century. Everywhere, if you look around you, a literary consciousness exists. Look, for instance, in newsstands or bookstores. There are shelves and shelves of books on the tarot, on alchemy, on astrology, all systems which have a close affinity to the metaphorical and symbolic schemata used by poets.

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Reid: Doesn’t this open the door to new and perhaps very dangerous forms of irrationality, such as those analysed by Lukács early in the century? Frye: I don’t think so. The real danger doesn’t come from these systems. There are too many of them, and as structures of faith they more or less cancel each other out. No, the real danger comes from the modern techniques of propaganda, from charismatic leaders, from totalitarian ideologies. In reality, the most important thing is that human beings discover who they are, and that they continue to create and recreate themselves. In this process literature plays a role of the first importance.

48 Literature in Education Conducted 10 September 1979

From “Literature, Language and Learning: Purposes and Importance of Literature in Education,” Language Arts, 57 (February 1980): 199–206. Frye was interviewed by educator Dr. Bryant Fillion, at that time a professor at OISE, and author of the forthcoming Writing for Results (1981). Frye received some questions ahead of time, and edited a transcript of the interview before publication (see papers in NFF, 1988, box 60, file 3, where a pencilled notation supplies the date). Language Arts, an organ of the National Council of Teachers of English, was directed particularly to elementary school teachers. Frye’s interview was part of a section designed to introduce new perspectives on language education from related disciplines. Subheads in the article have been omitted.

Fillion: Would you begin by commenting on your idea of the educated imagination, a central notion in many of your works? Frye: It is primarily by means of our imagination that we participate in society. That sort of participation makes us concerned citizens and, since a democracy depends on concerned citizens, it follows that the education of the imagination ought to have a central priority in our schools. Fillion: You have said, “Ultimately, works of literature are not things to be contemplated, but powers to be absorbed.”1 Does that statement indicate how literature educates our imaginations? Frye: Yes, that notion is part of it. I think that the iconic view of literature, namely, that all you can do is genuflect before the classic masterpiece, is a kind of leisure-class amusement and isn’t as serious as the role which literature really plays. Great literature doesn’t simply present

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beautiful forms or constructs, but releases articulate power. Using literature to tune in to that power and to shape one’s own articulateness is the end of a literary education. Fillion: In this regard, would you comment on your notion of the principle of continuous recreation—the personal recreation of reality? Frye: Many critics have raised the question of whether a text exists and, if so, where does it exist? Is it on paper or in the mind of the reader? The principle of recreation is necessary to deal with these questions. Basically, it says that you recreate the meaning of everything you read. You translate everything you read into your own orbit of interests and your own particular background of knowledge. Even a letter from a personal friend is still translated and recreated by the reader. Literature too must continually be recreated in that fashion. Fillion: Do you feel that this principle applies to the way in which children create, or recreate, their culture from their own experiences? Frye: Yes. A small child is his or her own culture appearing once again in that new individual. The recreation of his or her culture’s meaning hits with a kind of immediate power that is possible only in childhood. Fillion: It seems to me that it must be largely through the powers of literature that children gain some foothold in the world. Frye: Yes. It helps them create their own world within the context of their society. Fillion: You have said, “Literary education is not doing the whole of its proper work unless it marshals the verbal imagination against the assaults of advertising and propaganda that try to bludgeon it into passivity” [StS, 87]. Do you feel that children should directly examine propaganda with teachers? Frye: Yes, I do. A teacher who presented his students with advertising and asked them to analyse the rhetorical devices in it told me that he discovered he was having students respond to a type of language use in society that ordinary literature doesn’t deal with. One of our central preoccupations in the modern world is distinguishing between reality and illusion. Since advertising and propaganda are deliberately designed to create an illusion, I think it’s a good thing to analyse their rhetorical devices.

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Fillion: One of the results of the “back to basics” movement in many schools has been a reduced emphasis on literature and an increased emphasis on “language development.” Would it be fair to state that your position is that the study of literature or the releasing of verbal and imaginative powers through literature ought to be an essential or “basic” part of children’s education and should not be considered a mere frill? Frye: As I’ve said, the source of one’s participation in society is the imagination. The development of language skills has to be subordinate to the question of what those skills are being developed for. One doesn’t become articulate in a vacuum. There’s nothing more basic in education than entering into the general stream of articulateness in the English language which has become encapsulated in English literature. I’m very suspicious of any program that begins with “Back to . . . .” It seems to be based on a pastoral myth in which people think of a little red school house in hazily ideal terms. Literary education is not a frill and not just a subject to be studied. It’s the central part of what attaches an individual to his or her society. Fillion: What does increasing maturity in the reading of literature mean? What signs would a teacher look for to determine that, in fact, he or she was having a beneficial effect on the children? Frye: The quality of the articulateness that develops in the children. There’s something of a vicious circle in the teaching of articulateness. That is, a good writing style can only be based on a good speaking style. They have to reinforce each other in the educational process. Fillion: You once wrote, “It does not matter a tinker’s curse what a student thinks and feels about literature until he can think and feel, which is not until he passes the stage of stock response” [StS, 83]. What does stock response mean and how would a teacher know that a student was not expressing a stock response? Frye: The concept of stock responses, or automatic clichés, as a response to literature comes from I.A. Richards.2 He tells how his students raved about a particular unidentified poem simply because it was in blank verse and they thought it was by Shakespeare. Then he gave them an unidentified extract from a beautiful sonnet of John Donne. They all attacked it because it sounded religious and they were edgy about religion. These responses had nothing to do with the text in front of them. It

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was not a recreation process, but rather the building up of a barrier against that process. Fillion: In the schools there seems to be some controversy over the goal of literary study. Are we trying to develop appreciative and eclectic readers of literature or are we attempting to develop scholars and critics? As I read your work, I think you would consider that to be a false dichotomy. Frye: It is a false dichotomy. But I’ve always been very impressed by something Charles Comfort said when he was in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Toronto. He remarked that the object of a course in fine arts was to create an educated public for the arts. Not to create painters, not to create art patrons, and not to create people who are more appreciative of painting, except incidentally, but rather to create an informed and sympathetic public which painters could address. I think that view would also be very good as a statement of the aim of literary education. Fillion: You once said that it is impossible to teach or learn literature. What one teaches or learns is criticism [AC, 11/13]. Frye: Yes, criticism exists on a great many different levels. It doesn’t follow that, by teaching literature to students, you are training them eventually to be literary critics. You are training them to be people who can respond to the role of words in society. That purpose has both a contemporary reference and a cultural heritage reference. Fillion: It is a common practice in many schools to evaluate students’ reading of literature by asking them simply to recall details from what they have read. Do you think this is appropriate for assessing a student’s reading of literature? Frye: I can see some need at times to determine whether or not a student has actually read a work. I would not object to checking on factual recall if it were used as that sort of tactical device, but it should not be confused with actually assessing the aims or goals of literary education. Fillion: You’ve referred often to the “humanistic curriculum.” What would a humanistic curriculum for the elementary grades consist of? Frye: It would consist largely of stories and poems. I think that the basis of literary education is poetry. Poetry is rhythm, movement. The enter-

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ing of poetic rhythm into the body of the reader is very important. It is something very close to the development of an athletic skill and, as such, it can’t be rushed. One should begin in the early grades with a heavy emphasis on rhyme and nursery rhymes. The other fine arts are perhaps not so central to one’s participation in society, but they are just as central to the development of one’s imagination. For example, music can release the power of the imagination because it too is a rhythm, something that has to be absorbed bodily. The actual literature selections chosen should probably rely heavily on traditional materials—myths, folk and fairy tales, and central cultural stories. There are only so many story patterns in literature and contact with the central, traditional ones is, I think, inescapable. They form part of the time dimension of the society that the student is entering into. Most of the key story patterns are in the Bible and Classical mythology. There have also been a number of key works in English literature. A person is simply deprived of part of his or her social context by not knowing them. If I hadn’t had the Alice books at an early age, it would have been like a couple of front teeth missing! Fillion: What do you feel about the role of pop culture or literature that has been written specifically for elementary-age children? Frye: I think that children’s literature is, on the whole, rather good and well worth reading. Much of it is written by people who understand young children and talk to them from a child’s perspective instead of talking down to them from an adult perspective. Fillion: In the Anatomy of Criticism you say that one proof that a systematic comprehension of a subject actually exists is the ability to write an elementary textbook expounding its fundamental principles [12–13/14]. In the same vein, Buckminster Fuller said that unless a first principle could be understood by a six-year-old, it wasn’t a first principle.3 Are there some first principles that teachers should be concerned about imparting to children? Frye: I think there are some principles that ought to be in the teacher’s mind, but they don’t have to be taught as principles. They are simply taught in practice. For example, the reason for instructing three-yearolds in nursery rhymes is to get the rhythm and movement of poetry solidly into their fannies. But that isn’t a principle you need to teach a threeyear-old. For a child, learning is an inductive process. Yet in the teacher’s

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mind it’s a deductive pattern and the strategy of teaching consists of concealing that fact. Fillion: In regard to first principles and teaching strategies, would you consider that students’ conscious recognition of a pattern which has appeared in several stories they have read would be desirable? Or is that the sort of thing that should simply be left to the child to perceive? Frye: I think that children will respond well to the identification of patterns since that is one of the major ways the human mind is built to learn. Fillion: I assume you would include in your previous statements materials from the pop culture, even comic strips, since they too would reveal the basic patterns in literature. Frye: I’ve always insisted that if you teach Shakespeare to a thirteenyear-old and he discovers that he prefers the old movie he saw last night on television, you need to point out the structural similarities between the two. You don’t need to suggest that they belong on the same level, but you also don’t need to suggest that one is good for you and the other is bad. Fillion: You’ve said quite a bit in the Anatomy of Criticism about this temptation to put labels on things and, particularly, to make value judgments about works of literature. Do you feel that it is desirable for teachers to try to impart these value judgments to students? Frye: No, I think those judgments emerge as a kind of incidental byproduct. Concern about the value labels put on literature by critics is not part of the world of a reader’s contact with literature at all. Fillion: You once said, “All methods of criticism and teaching are bad if they encourage the persisting separation of student and literary work; all methods are good if they try to overcome it.” I also remember you telling the story about one of your teachers who would read a poem and simply say, “Beautiful, beautiful!” In the light of the first statement, do you think there’s a place for that kind of a response from a teacher? Frye: Oh, yes, if that is the way the work has affected the teacher. The suggestion that it does affect people in certain ways is a valuable one to pass on to students. Fillion: Is it all right for students not to say, “Beautiful, beautiful!”?

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Frye: It’s all right for them to not say it because it should not be conveyed as the learning of a stock response. Fillion: What kind of talk should accompany the teaching of literature and the reading of literature? Frye: I think it’s a sort of Darwinian process. You throw out talk at random and whatever has a survival value remains and emerges. You find that some of the things you say have more impact than others, so you naturally tend to shape more and more of what you say around that. Fillion: There’s a common feeling, I think, among contemporary educators that children should do more of the talking than, in fact, they do in classrooms. Assuming that one isn’t just getting stock responses, but is trying to take children beyond that, do you feel there is a role for students to simply say what they think and feel about a work or to ask their own questions about it? Frye: Oh, certainly I do. The more of that the better. If you can get a class talking, disagreeing, and arguing, then you begin to get some sense that a work of literature belongs in a community, that it is itself the focus of a community. I don’t see how you can get that solely with a monologue. Fillion: What role do you see children’s questions playing in the study of texts? Does their inquiry have a place in literary education? Frye: It has an extremely central role to play. You can’t deal with literature solely by a teacher’s monologue. It’s only when you begin to get questions that you know whether what you’re saying has been intelligible or not. Sooner or later a question that you haven’t thought of will be asked. Out of that question can come an expansion of the teacher’s understanding, as well as the students’. I always say to my students, “Now I know you are shy about asking silly questions, but remember that the silly ones are the only ones that express your real difficulties. So let’s start with them.” Fillion: What do you feel is the role of children’s writing in literary study? Frye: I think it’s very important because it’s a way of empathizing, of understanding what writers go through when they write and of knowing what they are trying to do when they write. So the next time a student says, “Why did this author have to make things so difficult?” the

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teacher can say, “Well, in this poem you gave me yesterday, there’s a passage I don’t understand.” The student may say, “It had to be that way. It wouldn’t work any other way.” Then the teacher can respond, “Well, that’s exactly how the author feels.” Fillion: Reading literature aloud is very often left behind in school. Do you feel it should be? Frye: No! Reading aloud is extremely important as a means of indicating that speaking style and writing style ought to be different aspects of the same thing. Fillion: I have the feeling that literature is now very hard pressed in the elementary schools, partly because of back-to-basics pressure and partly because of teachers’ own inexperience with children’s literature. Do you have any final comments on the centrality of literature in education, that it isn’t something to be pushed aside for spare time on Friday afternoon? Frye: If it is regarded in that sort of reduced light, then the whole conception of education has gone wrong from the beginning. It’s not a question of back to basics, but forward from the basics. Until the absolute centrality of the literary operation in making a student an adult citizen is understood, I think that everything else has gone wrong.

49 Northrop Frye: Signifying Everything Conducted 17 September 1979

From the Varsity, 1 October 1979, 6–7. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook of 1979. The interview was conducted by Varsity Features editor Matthew Fraser in Frye’s Massey College office. Fraser went on to become a well-known journalist and professor of communications at Ryerson University.

Fraser: You grew up in Moncton, New Brunswick, where you must have spent a lot of time in front of a typewriter, because you soon found yourself in Toronto competing as a representative of Underwood in a typewriting contest at Massey Hall. Were you planning on going into a business career at that time? Frye: No, I got a scholarship from a local business college when I graduated from high school, because I had the highest standing in English. I thought it would be a good thing to have. I was offered various secretarial jobs, but I was very anxious to get out of Moncton and the Maritimes. Fraser: You entered Victoria College in the late ’20s, which was an interesting time because the stock market crashed in 1929. Frye: That’s right; I came in the fall of ’29 and the stock market crashed about a month later. Our mathematics instructor said that if we’d only studied mathematics we’d know how these things worked. Fraser: How did the crash affect university life during the Depression? Frye: The Depression actually increased attendance at university. People couldn’t get jobs so they went to college.

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Fraser: Today we are living through an economic slump and our reaction has been a shift to more conservative attitudes. In the ’30s there was a great shift to the left in North America. How can we account for these two different reactions under similar conditions? Frye: I should think that some of the explanation is fifty years of experience with left-wing governments. If you think of all the idealism there was about North Vietnam, and now we have the boat people. In my day there was a very lively Trotskyist group and also a Stalinist group, and of course they were always fighting with each other. But the great Stalin massacres of the later ’30s rather cooled people off on the notion of the Soviet Union as heaven on earth. Fraser: Are people without real causes these days? In the ’30s there was the Spanish Civil War, which was a great battle of principle to many people. Frye: The Spanish Civil War wasn’t until the late ’30s, but yes, you’re right, it was a very real cause at the time. It was partly because it was lost that it has retained something of the glamour. Fraser: Is it true that many of the students and professors at Oxford joined the cause of the left during the Depression? Frye: Well, the Labour Club was certainly the best organized and the most numerous club at Oxford. But when I was there in 1939, I was very surprised and horribly depressed at the strength of the fascist movement at Oxford. Fraser: Was there one point in your life when you were suddenly inspired to become a literary scholar, or was it a gradual decision? Frye: It was a gradual thing. During my undergraduate period I began to realize more and more clearly that I wanted to teach in a university. I had always been given the nickname of “the professor” when I was a child because I wore glasses, but it never occurred to me then that I would teach in a university. Moncton at that time was not a university town. Fraser: You are often asked why you don’t sit down and write an epic poem or a great novel, and I think your reply has always been that you don’t have that kind of creative facility. But then there is T.S. Eliot, who managed to establish a reputation both as a critic and an artist—

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Frye: Well, Eliot was a poet who was also a very skilful propagandist for his own poetry, which is all his criticism really was. I never felt that I was a poet, and I daresay that if I desperately wanted to be a poet, I would have arrived at the age of ninety-two as one of the more promising young poets of the country. I thought more seriously of writing fiction, but then I realized that I would have nothing to say in fiction that other people wouldn’t say better.1 But I did have something to say in criticism that I thought was my own. But I never, of course, agree that poetry and fiction are creative and criticism noncreative. That seems to me to be nonsense, because it applies the conception of creativity to certain genres rather than to the people working in them. Fraser: One of my English professors once told the class not to use any secondary sources that were more than ten years old when writing the major essay that was assigned to us. The explanation given was that criticism tends to be relevant only to its own time, and that it eventually gets categorized under the “history of thought.” This struck me as odd, because much criticism—say Granville-Barker’s, which is almost a century old—remains relevant today. Do you agree with this view that criticism, unlike art, has only a temporary significance? Frye: I think that’s a rather extreme view, the notion that only what has been produced in the last ten years is still relevant to its own time. Things certainly change very drastically and in a very revolutionary way in the humanities, but they change quite slowly. I think it’s true that literature, unlike science, doesn’t progress and improve; rather, it produces the classics and that’s it. And I think to some extent there are classics of criticism as well. I certainly would agree that if you were studying Shakespeare, Granville-Barker, or even Bradley, would be still just as relevant as they ever were.2 Fraser: The language of literature is often very different from the common spoken language of a country. For example in Russia, because of the strong influence of Pushkin, the literary language is divorced from spoken Russian. In North America, however, the literary language is virtually the same as our spoken language. Why do you think that in some countries there is such a gap between literary and spoken language, and in other countries there is no difference at all? Frye: I think that with Russia it has something to do with the rather late development of their literature. And of course there are other countries

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like Norway where the literary language is almost an invented language. I think that the gap between literary language and ordinary spoken language is a very unhealthy thing, especially in fiction where the dialogue, at any rate, has to capture the spoken word. I don’t know how countries get along if there is too great a gap between literary language and the colloquial language, but certainly in North America that battle was fought out as early as Huckleberry Finn, where it was clear that the language spoken by the people is the literary language as well. Fraser: Would you say that the language in Dickens is an accurate account of the language spoken in his day? Frye: Dickens had two idioms: he used one for dialogue and the other for description. They don’t really get too much in each other’s hair, but certainly his reporting of the speech of people like Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers is something that had a certain class bias or edge to it. That is, the people reading it would also feel that Sam Weller was a cockney and not too well educated, which is one of the feelings that make it funnier. Fraser: Do you think that the reason why modern fiction is more accessible to modern readers than earlier novels is because of the tendency towards common language? For example, it is easier to read Margaret Atwood or Henry Miller than it is to approach Fielding or even Dickens. Frye: Perhaps so, Henry Miller more, I think. I’ve just been reading Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, Life before Man, and I’ve noticed in that how she tends to minimize the dialogue. It is because her speakers are not very interesting speakers that she does this, which is part of the point about them. The real interest of the language is her own comment, which is a sort of half-unconscious monologue on the part of her characters. That’s the way she gets around the problem. It is of course an old problem—fifty or sixty years old—in fiction, of the work being divided into two languages: the literary language for description and the other for dialogue. There has been a great deal of loosening up since then, of course. For example, there is the Huckleberry Finn device of telling the story through the mouth of a main character, as Holden Caufield does in Catcher in the Rye. Fraser: But if you think of the characters in, say, Jane Austen, it is hard to believe that people in her day really spoke that way. Frye: You’re right, they didn’t speak that way. Again, there are differ-

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ences of levels in Jane Austen. Her sensible people show that they are sensible people by the way they speak. They are extremely articulate. In her own day people were not quite that articulate, so it is a literary convention that they speak that way. They would have been slightly more associative in rhythm but even so there is a very considerable difference, for example, between the way Elizabeth Bennett speaks in Pride and Prejudice and the way her mother speaks. Fraser: So then it’s the same as in Russian literature, where the literary language is separate from spoken language? Frye: Well, not separate from spoken language, but to a degree conventionalized. I suspect it is in Russian literature too. I can’t imagine Tolstoy’s dialogue, for example, as being unrelated to the way people talked. Fraser: It is known that you believe strongly in an early education in the Bible and Classical mythology. Do you think it is a weakness in the school system that children are not exposed to these subjects at an early stage of their intellectual development? Frye: Well, I don’t know what the hell the schools are supposed to do if the parents start yelling that their kids ought to get religion in school and then immediately start yelling that they should not get religion in school. It becomes rather confusing for the teachers. And then there are all the emotional red herrings that are drawn across the issue, like the Lord’s Prayer and so on. I don’t think that it’s beyond the ingenuity of a good teacher to teach religion without indoctrinating students. Fraser: Does the way you look at the Bible conflict with the new wave of Christian fundamentalism that is sweeping across North America in the form of “born-again” Christians? Frye: It might conflict with Christian fundamentalism: I don’t understand that process at all. But it doesn’t conflict with the sort of Christianity I feel in contact with, whether Protestant or Catholic. Fraser: Do you think that this fever of Bible-belt Christianity is antiintellectual? Frye: Yes. Fraser: How then would Northrop Frye be received at a Bible university in the southern United States?

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Frye: Well, I don’t know; there would be difficulties for sure. But if I had a class over a long period of time, I could explain to them what I was talking about and how I looked at things. In a university classroom I think we could come to terms, but if I were a visiting lecturer there might be difficulties. Fraser: Do you find it ludicrous that people like Bob Dylan are considered poets? Frye: Oh, I think Bob Dylan is a poet. I am quite interested in the folksong idiom as a poetic idiom. It’s a revival of an oral tradition in poetry which disappeared for centuries. Poetry got too badly bogged down with books, and I think it’s a very healthy thing when poetry becomes something that can be recited to an audience with a musical background. Fraser: Isn’t T.S. Eliot often accused of being a bookish poet? Frye: Yes, but he never wanted to be. He said he would prefer an audience that couldn’t read or write.3 Fraser: There is a lot of discussion today about the value of the university, especially since the universities are so heavily funded by the taxpayers. What, in your view, is the value of the university to both society and the individual who attends a university? Frye: What I say to my students at Victoria College is that the university is a community organized in a specific way for a specific purpose, which in the liberal arts is to indicate how life could be lived if the intellect and the imagination were constantly functional, that is, if they were real factors in life. And if you get a glimpse of that, however brief it may be, then you never wonder again why you came to college. You keep speaking of it as the best years of your life, although they weren’t actually the best years: they were just the years that circled around one special moment. That is what the university always has stood for, apart from the professional faculties, of course. The university was a bit of a middle-class playground fifty or sixty years ago. People go on saying that it is a middle-class playground now, but that is because their noses are all fifty years back. It’s actually not true, really: there are incidental advantages a university can provide in the way of raising you up on the class structure to some degree. But I don’t think the university was ever set up, at least not in the liberal arts faculty, to train people specifically for jobs.

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Fraser: You have often said that you think the university keeps society “open-ended.” What do you mean by “open-ended” exactly? Frye: It means a society where there is the possibility of free critical response to what is being done in society; so that you are not sealed off as you are in a police state or a propagandist country like the Soviet Union or South Africa. In those countries, you must believe, or say you believe, in certain things—or else. Fraser: About ten years ago the Honours system was abandoned at this university, and there is now a lot of talk about bringing it back, with the Kelly Report pointing in that direction. Could you explain briefly what the Honours system was, why it was tossed out, and if you think it was a bad thing that we lost it? Frye: The Honours Course was originally a four-year course, in distinction from the three-year course; you got the same degree as you did in the three-year General Course, but the Honours Courses were more specialized around certain disciplines. For example, if you entered the Honours Course in English Language and Literature, that was practically the last choice you made. But you got English Language and Lit— Beowulf to the present day. You did have some options, like History or Philosophy, or another language, but you were given an intensified training in your own subject. It was, in my opinion, the best education an undergraduate could get on the continent. In spite of grade 13, it required more maturity from students, perhaps, than they were capable of giving. That is, they weren’t all capable of making a choice for Mathematics or Physics or English, knowing whether they liked it or could do it or not. But it was destroyed in the later ’60s out of a fit of hysteria. There was a feeling of . . . well, the word “elitist” got batted around, and it was used very loosely, as though you were training a special brood of people. But of course that wasn’t the case, because it was a matter of motivation and not the quality of the individual. I think it was the greatest disaster the faculty of Arts and Science has gone through. It immediately knocked out the U of T as a pre-eminent place. It is a very good university still, but no better than two or three dozen others. It’s not easy to set a thing up once it’s been destroyed. It’s true that people had a vague notion of this being something the students wanted, but the students wanted nothing less, and were the first to complain about the destroying of structures. But it’s a long, slow business to get something going again once it’s been torn to pieces.

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Fraser: Do you think the students of the ’60s accomplished anything? Frye: No. Fraser: Has Canada finally arrived as an important literary force in the world? Frye: Yes. I think from about 1960 on it has produced good literature. I’m speaking only of English Canada, of course. French Canada always had quite a respectable body of poetry and fiction because the writer was more functional in French Canada. But English Canada has come along in the last twenty years. There is no question any more of us being just a sort of children’s corner. We have a real literature now that is respected abroad. Fraser: You were in Italy during the summer, lecturing to students there on The Tempest, among other things. When you travel abroad to lecture, do you find the climate of scholarship and the quality of students different from place to place, or are they all pretty much the same? Frye: I find it remarkably similar. I think an audience of students is pretty well the same the world over. Wherever I am—Japan, New Zealand, Guyana, Italy, Great Britain, the United States, Canada—I think I always know where I am in a classroom, whatever part of the world I’m in. Fraser: You are presently at work on your tour de force on the Bible, which many people are awaiting. When do you expect it will be finished? Frye: I’m going to finish it next year if I can.

50 The Critical Path Composed 5 December 1979

From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 39, file 10. In the same file is correspondence that reveals that Yugoslavian Frye student Maja Herman-Sekuliñ (who had written an M.A. thesis on Frye’s theory of myth) wished to interview Frye in connection with the recent publication of the Serbo-Croatian translation of Anatomy of Criticism by Giga Graôan (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1979). HermanSekuliñ mailed Frye a series of questions, and he sent back a typescript including questions and answers. The interview appeared in Serbo-Croatian in NIN (a political weekly) in shortened form, 30 December 1979, and in its entirety in KnjiÌevost (Literature), fall 1980, with the title “Put Kritike.”

Herman-Sekuli/: Mr. Frye, your book Anatomy of Criticism, a classic of contemporary literary criticism, translated into many foreign languages, even into Japanese, finally appeared in a Yugoslav edition thanks to the efforts of the publishing house Naprijed of Zagreb. We waited long— the first edition of Anatomy was in 1957—to see your book translated into Serbo-Croatian, but we are happy that it has seen the light of day in our bookstores in quite a good translation and an attractive edition. Do you know of any reason for such a late publication in Yugoslavia? Was it just another case of a certain indolence on the part of the publishers or were there some other reasons? Frye: Naturally I know nothing about publishing conditions in Yugoslavia, but I would assume that the translating of so long and complex a book would normally be delayed, because of the small number of people interested in reading it who would be unable to read it in some other language. (There are French, German, and Italian translations as well as English.)

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Herman-Sekuli/: Are you satisfied with the edition? Frye: I have not yet seen the edition, but would be glad to do so. My reading knowledge of Serbo-Croatian is nonexistent in any case so I shall have to take the accuracy of the translation on faith. Herman-Sekuli/: How could you explain the lack of the notes and index in this edition? Frye: I am sorry if there is no index to the book: the usefulness of such a book is greatly reduced without one. The same thing would apply to the footnotes which I supplied, if they also are omitted. Herman-Sekuli/: There were certain misunderstandings in translating some of your terms. You said once that you prefer “to compromise with the present confused terminology than to increase the difficulties . . . by introducing too many new terms” [AC, 248/230]. You used some terms from other fields of knowledge, e.g., psychology, giving them new meanings to avoid further complications in already chaotic critical terminology. But difficulties and misunderstandings still remain. What are the major problems of the contemporary terminology of the theory of criticism and literature? Frye: The only way to answer this question is to say that while critical terminology was underdeveloped twenty years ago, when the book was published, it is now overdeveloped and is in utter and impenetrable chaos. Whenever possible, I tried to use the words in a sense closely connected with their familiar and traditional use, such as “romance” and “irony.” I had hoped also that the term “archetype” was being used in its traditional sense, but Jung seems to have taken over that word, and misunderstandings inevitably resulted. Herman-Sekuli/: Is there a chance for them to be solved? What would be, in your opinion, the best solution to the problem? Do you believe in the possibility of a universal language of criticism of literature? Frye: I think a generally agreed-on terminology ought to be attainable in literary criticism as well as in other subjects. There are other subjects, such as psychology, where the terminology is still pretty chaotic. In my view, critical terminology should be based primarily on the practice of criticism, and the use of terms belonging to philosophy or psychology increases the confusion. On the other hand, there has been an inevitable

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complication of the issue by the fact that problems in linguistics, with all its terminology, are now inseparable from those of literary criticism. Herman-Sekuli/: Mr. Frye, today, almost a quarter of a century after the first edition of Anatomy of Criticism, if you look back to it from your present position, could you tell us what is its place and role in your own opus and in contemporary criticism? Frye: In relation to my own work the Anatomy was a consolidation of theoretical ideas derived very largely from an intensive study of the poetic practice of William Blake. Since then, I have written mainly briefer essays either in practical criticism or in social criticism. I am now at the stage of life, I suppose, when I should make some effort to pull all this together. As for its relation to the history of criticism generally, it seems to me that the Anatomy was extremely useful to students of literature who felt that the New Criticism was not only getting to be a dead end, but was getting away from a sense of proportion and perspective about literature as a whole. The book is often described too as a pioneering work in structuralism, which perhaps it is. Herman-Sekuli/: After Anatomy, a work of “pure critical theory,” a “Bible of modern criticism” as some critics called it, after writing the book that is in this century probably the closest to poetics in Aristotle’s meaning of the word, you turned to concrete literary works as you did in your book on Blake that preceded Anatomy, and on the other hand to the questions that go beyond the field of literature, narrowly conceived, into the wide region of education and society. How could you explain this “critical path” of yours? Frye: It seems to me that it is a natural expansion from the Anatomy, which says in its preface that it could do with a supplementary volume devoted to practical criticism. Many people have also totally misunderstood the book as holding a view of literature which removes it from social conditioning or social problems. Naturally I’d try to set that record a bit straighter. Herman-Sekuli/: I liked some of your sharp and witty statements. For example, when you said that you resemble Maud Bodkin, and other exponents of so-called Jungian criticism, “about as closely as I resemble the late Sarah Bernhardt” [CP, 16]. Still, archetype and myth play very

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important roles in your critical language and your scheme of the literary world. Every attentive reader of your books should agree that you gave these terms new and original meanings. It would be very interesting to hear from you what in your opinion are the basic differences between your theory of myths, of “mythical or archetypal criticism,” and socalled “myth criticism”? Frye: I think that Maud Bodkin’s book,1 like much of Kenneth Burke’s work in a different way, seems to depend on psychology in a way that tends to make literary criticism a derivation from psychology. I will have nothing to do with this: I strongly resist all determinisms, whether psychological or economic, that ground the real principles of literary criticism in some other subject. The real grounds of literary criticism are in the practice of poets, and nowhere else. Consequently, “myth” to me means first of all narrative or story; “archetype” means first of all a repeating unit in a literary structure. Herman-Sekuli/: It is known that you had certain disagreements with New Critics. The best known is probably René Wellek’s disagreement with your statement that the theory of literature is not directly concerned with value judgments.2 Some critics think that you took the first step beyond New Criticism. On the other hand some of their fundamental principles are the initial steps in your critical approach to literature. How do you see your role in relation to New Criticism? Frye: My interest in literature as a total form, which provides a context for every individual work of literature, gives me a primary interest in such structural questions as convention and genre. My primary disagreement with the New Critics was, first, that they tended to ignore generic and conventional factors, second, that they assumed that “texture” was the content of the critical operation and that structure was not. With regard to value judgments, I have always maintained that they were tentative working assumptions, many of which would be confirmed in practice, but some of which could be subject to revision. Everyone accepts the value judgment that Shakespeare was a great poet; everyone finds this value judgment confirmed in practice; but no Shakespearean scholarship whatever is founded on that value judgment. Herman-Sekuli/: The fact that you wrote Anatomy of Criticism before any important work of the French structuralists was published is not as well known, in my opinion, as it should be. Still, there are critics that con-

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sider you as one of the forerunners of structuralism in the theory of literature. Would you agree with them? In what way could you have anticipated such a theoretical orientation, or become part of it? Frye: It seems to be an occupational disease among the French to add the suffix “ism” to everything they are interested in. I think structure is an essential element of literature; I am well aware that this is really a metaphor from architecture, and I do not for the life of me see why one cannot be interested in structure without becoming a “structuralist.” I am interested in my own existence too, but I don’t necessarily have to be an existentialist. Herman-Sekuli/: What, in your opinion, are the major trends in the theory of literature today? In what direction is literary criticism heading now? Frye: I think that the word “direction” is over-optimistic. I think there is a good deal of mining and blowing up being done, and that after the dust settles the context of a foundation may become visible. I think Lacan’s conception of the subconscious as linguistically structured is worth following up; so is Derrida’s conception of metaphysical presence;3 and there are many things that interest me in the work of the new Marxist critics who have got away from the old notion that ideology is something that only non-Marxists have.4 But I am not capable of making a unifying theory out of all this mess, and I doubt if anyone else is either. Herman-Sekuli/: You have written about the masterpieces of world literature. You have also written very inspiring essays on the forms of popular literature. As a Canadian author you have not neglected Canadian literature. It would be interesting to hear from you in what measure such a literature as the Canadian could influence some of your critical views. Frye: I have described my work in Canadian literature as a kind of “field work” like that of anthropologists [BG, viii; C, 148], in which I could see trends of world literature extending to and settling into a rather peripheral, even provincial development of literature. Without a sense of what was going on in my own cultural environment I think I should have lacked the power to bring things together to the extent that I may have done in the Anatomy and later essays. If one comes from a relatively small country culturally, that smallness provides a perspective difficult to explain. I should have been a totally different kind of critic as an

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American, just as, say, Kierkegaard would have been totally different as a German. Herman-Sekuli/: Yugoslav literature has some resemblances to Canadian. In both literatures there is a certain tension between different languages and cultures. Did you, by any chance, have any contacts with Yugoslav literature? Frye: I have had no direct contact with Yugoslav literature, as I do not read the language. I know something of how very lively a literary culture it is, and there are various Yugoslavs working in Canada, such as Darko Suvin at McGill, who have indicated to me something of this. But I quite understand the parallel with Canada: I recently felt that there was such a parallel even with the larger and more populous country of Italy. Herman-Sekuli/: Finally, I would like to pose you a “classic” question: What are you doing now? Are you preparing a new book? Frye: I am trying to write a large book on the relation of the Bible to the conventions of Western literature. I am trying to analyse the narrative and imagery of the Bible in such a way as to show that it set up a mythological framework for European writers down to about the eighteenth century.

51 Regionalism in Canada Published 30 January 1980

From an untitled typescript in NFF, 1988, box 60, file 3. The interview, based on pre-submitted questions by interviewer Branko Gorjup, was taped in Frye’s office at Victoria College. It was published in Naše Novine, the newspaper of the Yugoslavian community in Toronto, 30 January 1980. Gorjup is a scholar and critic who has taught Canadian literature in universities in Canada and Italy.

Gorjup: It has been a fact that your theory of criticism, developed in your masterwork Anatomy of Criticism, has had a much greater and more persuasive influence on a generation of critics in both English- and nonEnglish-speaking countries than that of any other literary critic in recent history. Could you tell us how and why you came to construct your “systematic” framework for the critical study of literature in view of the fact that literature has always been thought to be that aspect of the human mind which opposes itself to any “systematization”? Frye: It is hardly possible to explain how I came to construct the framework of the Anatomy of Criticism. I had worked for fifteen years on a study of Blake. As a result I got various pieces of insight into the structure of literature as a whole, which I had considerable difficulty in disentangling from my book on Blake. The question says that “literature has always been thought to be that aspect of the human mind which opposes itself to any systematization.” In the first place, there is a considerable difference between literature and criticism. Criticism has a framework of its own, and is one with which the writer himself does not need to bother. The work of literature itself is not a part of the systematic study, but it still has to make sense. It does this by working itself out within the

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conventions and genres of literature. The writer of a detective story knows from the first sentence that he is not producing an epic poem, and every word he writes conforms to the convention he adopts. All the critic has to do is to recognize this fact. Gorjup: Is it true that the myths of the past, which have thus far informed our Western thought and our values, are becoming more and more obsolete for the twentieth-century technological mind? You have often said that a given myth in a given society has always had the power to explain that society to itself. If twentieth-century technological man ceases to be a mythmaker how is he then going to comprehend himself and the world which he creates? Frye: It is not true that the myths of the past are becoming obsolete, and there is nothing in technology which opposes itself to myth. Our choice is only between good myths and bad myths. It is certainly true that if man ceases to be a mythmaker he will become totally unable to comprehend either himself or his world. But I think man has too much sense of self-preservation for this to be likely. Gorjup: Until very recently the literature of English-speaking Canada has hardly been known outside the borders of this country. In your opinion, what has been the cause of such a long delay? and do you think that Canadian literature has finally emerged as an important force in the world? Frye: I think the explanation for the emergence of Canadian literature in English is very simple: its quality and quantity have dramatically improved and increased since about 1960. Canada does not belong to the “third world” economically or politically, but I think it does culturally, and this fact in itself is one of the elements in its organization. Gorjup: Can it be still maintained that the notion of the “two solitudes” regarding the two main cultures, the Anglophone and the Francophone, is as real as it was some decades ago? If this is still the case, what is or has been, in your opinion, the factor that has prevented a greater degree of interpenetration between them? Frye: There is still a great deal of the “two solitudes” mentality in Canada. On the English side the reason for it is simply the unwillingness of English-speaking people to learn any other language. When MacLennan wrote Two Solitudes two decades ago the separation was religious (Prot-

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estant and Catholic) as well. That aspect of the separation has largely disappeared. The movement known as separatism is something that affects every part of Canada, but I have a feeling that it is becoming a spent force in the political and economic arenas. Gorjup: In the past few years there has been a significant arrival of native cultures onto the Canadian scene, mainly in the field of the plastic arts and the theatre. It is curious that this aspect of the Canadian reality has been neglected for such a long time. In your opinion, is it possible for the white man’s culture to come to terms in a beneficial way with the ancient cultural heritage of the native peoples? Frye: I think that the white man’s culture in Canada is now sufficiently mature to feel that the culture of the indigenous peoples is a part of its own ancestry. This is being explicitly said by an increasing number of Canadian writers. At the same time the Indian and Inuit cultures have also matured to the point of detaching themselves from the routine of rituals and handicrafts. Gorjup: The question often asked of a Canadian is the one regarding the search for a Canadian identity. Can we consider this near-obsession with a single, uniform identity as a positive mental outlook, or a negative one? In your opinion is it possible and necessary for a country as enormous and diverse as Canada to evolve one single identity? If not, what is the alternative? Frye: My view about Canadian identity is that I think identity is a cultural and regional matter. There should be a dozen identities in Canada, and they should increase and multiply. In short, identity is not the same as unity. Unity is a political and economic matter, and it is, or should be, the opposite of uniformity. Identity is cultural and limited in range. Gorjup: Besides the three oldest cultures in this country—Native, English, and French—now we find a mosaic of cultures which have come from all continents. What is or will be their role with regard to this search for Canadian identity? Do you believe the idea of multiculturalism positive, or would it be better for Canada to become another “melting pot”? Frye: From what I have just said it is clear that the increase in variety of cultures in Canada is a positive factor in the growth of Canada’s identity. It has been a great advantage to Canada that it has never insisted on

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being a “melting pot,” and its different ethnical groups seem to me to feel a minimum of strain in adapting to a Canadian environment. Gorjup: Can you tell us if any of your books were translated, or are being presently translated, in Yugoslavia? Frye: I understand that Anatomy of Criticism has been translated into Serbo-Croatian, but I have not yet seen a copy of the book.1

52 Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity Conducted 3 and 16 April 1980

From “Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye,” Descant, 12, no. 32–3 (1981): 216–26. Reprinted in WGS, 211–20. Dated by entries in Frye’s daybook for 1980. Interviewer Deborah Shackleton, then a Vancouver photographer, went on to become an associate professor of Communication Design at the Emily Carr Institute. She interviewed Frye in his office at Massey College as part of a series of interviews on the topic of Canada’s cultural sector. The series appeared in the Toronto Star and Contemporary Canadian Photography as well as in Descant, a literary magazine then co-edited by Donna Bennett and Russell Brown that publishes new Canadian literature. Frye was able to check over the text before typesetting (see NFF, 1988, box 60, file 2).

Shackleton: Do you draw a distinction between your roles as scholar and teacher, or do you view them as being integrated? Frye: I think that there is a difference in practice, though there shouldn’t be in theory, between a scholar and a teacher. And it’s only recently that it’s dawned on me that all of my books have essentially been teachers’ manuals rather than works of scholarship. Of course the two things overlap a good deal, but the scholar is a person who gathers material and does research. He puts everything he has in front of the reader. And a typical scholar trains his students in techniques of scholarship. I’ve never felt that I was any good at that. Also my writing technique is different; I use secondary sources much less than the typical scholar. I think of the teacher, not as a person who knows something instructing someone who doesn’t know something, but rather as a person who attempts to be a transparent medium for his subject; whose goal it is to produce a

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response in the student or reader, “Well, now that you put it that way I can understand it.” He may be intensely personal but because of his need to be a transparent medium for his subject, he has to keep something in reserve. Shackleton: I recall reading a Toronto Star article on Eric McLuhan and the Centre of Culture and Technology in which he states that “the private individual of early Greek times can’t exist any more. The rational world of the left brain is dominated by the impulsive, irrational right brain.” He cites television and the electronic media, right-brain orientations, as being responsible for turning Westerners into Orientals. Do you feel that it is no longer possible for the literate, rational, private individual of Greek times to exist any more? Frye: As long as there are two lobes in the brain, there are going to be the two possibilities of Western and Oriental thinking. And I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a “counterenvironment.” That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university; there is always something of Mark Hopkins and the log.1 There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities. I suspect that no teaching is worth doing unless it has a militant quality to it. Shackleton: Have you found it to be a problem that the arts student thinks solely in terms of self-expression, subjectivity, and in-jokes as opposed to seeing the validity of coming from an historical base and the forms and conventions therein that are quantifiable? Is it that we have been so influenced by the media with our instant breakfasts and our instant SX-70 exhibitions2 that we no longer feel the need to pursue the classics and classical thought? Frye: Oh, there’s a great deal of what you refer to as instant as a reflection of the mass-processing techniques of our civilization. If I were to be asked what my definition of a classic was, I would say it was a work that won’t go away. It just stands in front of you until you deal with it. It’s the angel that every Jacob has to wrestle with. What you’re speaking of has something to do with the scale of maturity or maturation of the creative mind. Often creative people begin with the sense of a small school to

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which they belong and they write manifestos defending that school. However, as they get more authority, they tend to break away from the school and speak more and more with their own voice. As the maturing process goes on, the voice becomes steadily more impersonal. If it’s a great creative mind, it moves in the direction of speaking with the authority of the art behind it. I’ve often drawn the distinction between listening to music, say, on the level of Tchaikowsky, where you feel that this is a very skilful, ingenious, and interesting composer, and music on the level of Mozart or Bach, where you feel that this is the voice of music. And that’s not to say that the music is impersonal because it obviously couldn’t be anybody but Mozart or Bach. Nevertheless, the feeling is one of having transcended that ego which is no longer opaque but completely transparent for revealing the authority of the art itself. Shackleton: Earlier you mentioned that no teaching was worth doing unless it had a militant quality in it. Could you define your use of the word “militant” as it relates to teaching? Frye: As I’ve already said, teaching is not a matter of somebody who has the information presenting it to somebody who does not have it. That’s a very simplistic notion of what goes on in the teaching process. From the days of Socrates it’s been realized that the teacher’s function is to remove the blinkers of repression from the student which prevent him from knowing what he potentially already knows. In order to do that you’re really engaged in a militant operation against the forces that are creating all these blinkers, repressions, clichés, and prejudices. Shackleton: In the course of conversation you’ve mentioned two definitive phrases—“transparent medium” and “voice of authority.” With respect to your teaching, how do you relate one to the other? Frye: In the first place, one distinguishes between the egocentric personality and the real personality. You’ll notice that the strongest characters are the people like saints who’ve forgotten about their egos. When you’re teaching, there’s always the tendency for students to be influenced by the accidental personality of the teacher—“Oh, isn’t he wonderful.” That’s the thing you have to avoid at all costs because the teacher as ego has no authority. Only the subject he teaches has the authority. To the extent that you try to train yourself to let the subject speak through you, you also acquire your own genuine personality.

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Shackleton: With respect to your writing, you mentioned that it’s only dawned on you recently that your books have essentially been teachers’ manuals rather than works of scholarship. If you believe that the teacher is a transparent medium, how do you merge that with the concept of authority and authorship? Frye: I think that the same principles that would hold true for oral teaching would also hold true for writing and for the scholar. It’s never true that the facts speak for themselves. Nothing speaks except the words. Still, the rhetorical pretence that the facts are speaking for themselves is perhaps essential for a scholarly writer. In a way, the scholar is in the position of the scientist; he appeals to the authority which is beyond controversy. A scientist will perform an experiment and say, “These are the results; if you don’t believe me, go do the experiment yourself.” That kind of authority attempts to escape from controversy. It appeals to the established facts, to the power of repeating an experiment. And I think the same thing holds true for scholarship in the humanities. The emphasis with the teacher is different because the teacher is concerned with the social crusade of delivering the student from the blinkers of social prejudice. Shackleton: From the humanist viewpoint, how do we separate scholarship from personal interpretation? Isn’t this a very fine line? Frye: Well, it is a fine line. You can’t distinguish it from interpretation, but there is a psychological difference that people realize, in practice, between the egocentric interpretation and the interpretation which tries, at any rate, to follow what is suggested by the data. Shackleton: With the developments in contemporary writing, are we laying a foundation for what you term a classic? Frye: Today there are a great many things happening. The Romantic movement brought in a certain mystique of creativity which was founded on the perfectly valid assumption that, in a sense, the poet is the hero of everything he writes. That built up the notion that the creative person was somehow qualitatively different from other people. There’s been a considerable shift in the centre of gravity away from the writer and towards the reader. Now the reader is the hero of what he reads. Culturally, for anyone interested in the verbal arts, it’s quite an exciting time to live in.

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There’s always been a difference between writing poetry, drama, or fiction (the practice of literature) and writing criticism or scholarship (the theory of literature). Traditionally the critical functions have been something of a parasitic activity; the literature is produced and the scholar comes along and comments on it. What I see happening now is a reshaping of critical theory around religion, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and so on. This means that the theory and the practice of the use of words is beginning to form a dialectic in which one is recreating the other. I feel that that has a genuine future. Too, there’s still a capacity to recognize the voice of impersonal authority when it comes. It’s a capacity to know when one is being spoken to. It’s quite easy to recognize the voice that lacks authority because it doesn’t speak to you; it’s speaking from him or her. The sense of the response to the authoritative statement in the verbal arts may take a while to percolate but when it is recognized, it’s generally recognized in the same way. For example, when Ulysses and The Waste Land came out in 1922 people said that these were cultural Bolsheviks out to destroy everything that was traditional in the arts. But in proportion as these works became recognized, they became recognized as traditional and belonging to the sequence of classics. Shackleton: In terms of that percolation, where would you place contemporary Canadian fiction? Frye: There’s been an immense increase in the sheer quantity of literary production in Canada in the last twenty years. At a certain point a quantitative increase brings about a qualitative change. As a whole, Canadian literature has an authority which it certainly didn’t have back in 1930. Other countries are beginning to recognize that. Furthermore, the sheer amount of serious literary work published in this country in the last twenty years is an astonishing achievement when you consider the handicaps, such as the division in language. Shackleton: You mentioned the development of a dialectic between criticism and creativity. What is the role of the critic in contemporary Canadian society, and why is criticism no longer a parasitic function? Frye: It’s a question of maturity. In a mature culture there is less worry about the poet doing something and then the critic coming along, a kind of middleman taking half the profits, and explaining to the public what the poet is doing. There are obvious things that a critic cannot and

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should not do with literature; he has no business telling the poet how to write; he has no business being a frustrated poet himself and pointing to someone who represents his own frustration and saying, “There’s the man who’s doing what should be done.” These are the aberrations of a criticism. The writer (practice) and the critic (theory) work in different conceptual frameworks. As a culture matures, both its literature and its criticism mature and find each other increasingly useful. Social criticism could conceivably get along without literature, though it shouldn’t try. And literature could conceivably get along without criticism, though, again, it shouldn’t try. In a mature civilization the two things keep reflecting one another. Within the last fifteen or twenty years in Canada this has happened. Shackleton: What do you see as the role of the poet in contemporary Canadian society? Frye: I think that the poet is part of the creative imagination of the country, and the creative imagination tells you things about an environment which nothing else can tell you. That’s always the function of the creative imagination in a society. And that’s why you find expertise in economics, politics, industry, etc., and finding out what’s going on in the processes there, however useful and essential, still has to be corrected by some kind of creative imagination to put it into perspective. In that regard, writers are a kind of resource. Shackleton: In The Bush Garden you use the term “separatism,” not specifically as a French phenomenon, but as a regional one [iv; C, 415]. If it’s true in literature that the more provincial, regional, and limited the subject matter becomes, the more universally it communicates, couldn’t this form of separatism in Canada be harnessed and channelled to create universal impact? Frye: I would think so. Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It’s a disastrous movement within politics and economics. Of course the difficult area is in radio, television, movies, and so on, which are a mixture of economic centralizing developments and culturally decentralizing elements. Shackleton: Is there such a thing as “Canadianism” in our literature? Frye: There’s no such thing as “Canadianism,” but there are a number of poets working within a specific environment with a specific kind of his-

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torical background and that, I think, will influence and give a distinctive quality to their work if they don’t pay too much attention to it. The thing is that you can’t aim at something. It’s only the ego that aims at something. The genuine writer simply writes as he has to write; he writes out what takes shape in his mind and the “Canadianism” of what he writes will look after itself if he does that and has the talent. That’s why you need the critic to translate what he’s doing into another conceptual framework. Insofar as Canada is a distinctive environment, with dimensions both in time and space, that is, in both history and geography, it does present certain unique qualities. Shackleton: Why do you think that we in Canada have the tendency to say things like, “Well, after all, we’re still a young country, and, therefore, couldn’t possibly have the cultural development of a European country”? Frye: Those types of excuses are disguised forms of anti-intellectualism. They are really a hatred for the intellect and imagination. It’s certainly part of the responsibility of the critic who is primarily a social critic to point out that these excuses are all completely phony and that Canada is the same age as any other bourgeois democracy with a capitalist economy. Shackleton: On a more personal note, what attracted you to the verbal arts? Frye: Well, it would be a very complicated process. I think that all such things have to do with environmental influences that go back to infancy. The home that I was brought up in was certainly a verbal home. My grandfather was a clergyman, and being brought up in small towns that were not university towns at that time, I had a strong attraction to the ministry simply because that was the central sort of cultural symbol. While I came to feel that this was not my vocation, I did retain the feeling of commitment to the verbal area of expression. Shackleton: If creativity comes out of confusion, how does confusion relate to your writing process? Frye: In my experience you start out with what William James calls the buzzing and blooming confusion in the mind,3 and out of all that eventually something crystallizes. My own writing is developed out of a number of discontinuous aphorisms. When I’m in the routine of teaching

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I find that my writing becomes extremely furtive; I scribble notes; that’s where the aphoristic side of my writing develops. When I have to settle down to a sustained piece of narrative writing, I pull in on myself, sometimes to a frightening degree, in order to pull the aphorisms together in the right sequence, to produce the right sort of connective tissue. I’ve said quite frequently and meant it very intensely that I don’t run my writing operation, my writing operation runs me. Whatever it wants is what I’ve got to produce. What it doesn’t want is what a novelist or a poet can produce. I can remember spending two days in a great fever of excitement writing a long introduction to an article I was preoccupied with, and at the end of two days a little voice said in my ear, “You can keep one sentence of it.” Well, I fought against this, protested and squawked, but there was no arguing. It had to go. Shackleton: What is your relationship to writing? Frye: I’m really building everything around a highly personal vision, a vision that I think I’ve had since I was a child. Consciousness of it came in various stages. I suppose it began to take its present form in my undergraduate years at university. That’s partly because when I encountered the university I realized that I wanted to spend my life there. I’ve always had a temperamental affinity with the Blakes that have stayed in one place rather than the Byrons who’ve wandered. I understand very well how Emily Dickinson made it with just a hymnbook and a dictionary. Shackleton: With respect to the democratization of the arts, how do we then establish a niveau, an ideal of excellence? “We are all created equal,” being entitled to the same opportunity, usually means an equalization downward rather than upward. Personally I find the disparity hard to deal with. Frye: Yes, I find that difficult to deal with because for me the statement that “all men are equal” is really a religious statement. Except that all men are equal in the sight of God and have equal rights before the law, I don’t see that it really makes any sense. My own feeling is that in a properly organized society everybody would belong to some kind of elite because everybody would be in a group making a contribution to that society that nobody else could make in the same kind of way—the plumber, the barber, the writer, and so on. Each would have some kind of skill or expertise. I’m not against the conception of elitism; I’d just like to see it universalized, to see it identified with social function. It’s one of

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those semi-paranoid words like “establishment” that really refer to something that isn’t there any more, but is still pretended to be a danger. Shackleton: It’s curious. Elitism, if identified with social function, is something that would improve the quality of life, and yet we tend to put it into a political construct. I guess that pursuit of higher ideals really has to be left up to the individual. Frye: I suppose in the long run it has to be. I don’t think you can form committees preventing equalization from meaning levelling down, which is what it means in most social terms. If you’re going to level up, your unit almost has to be the individual. Shackleton: Given our mass-processing techniques, is the existence of that individual inconceivable? Frye: It’s not inconceivable. Society comes first and the individual grows out of society. You don’t get society by aggregating individuals. The fact that man is an individual means that his society has gotten to a certain level of civilization. It’s his responsibility to develop and diversify that civilization by being an individual. Shackleton: Are we the best of Romantic and Classical thought? Frye: The best is there. Our job is not to cheat ourselves.

53 From Nationalism to Regionalism: The Maturing of Canadian Culture Conducted 2 May 1980

From Aurora: New Canadian Writing, 1980, ed. Morris Wolfe (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1980), 5–15. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. The interview, a joint venture between the literary annual Aurora and the CBC, was heard on the CBC’s program Anthology in the fall of 1980 and published at about the same time. Reprinted in The “Anthology” Anthology, ed. Robert Weaver (Toronto: Macmillan, 1984), 62–72, and in WGS, 183–194. Frye was interviewed by Robert Fulford, editor of Saturday Night magazine and frequent arts commentator.

Fulford: Culture in Canada in the 1970s expanded enormously in numbers, in everything from the number of books of poetry published to the number of dancers employed. But as the decade ended there was a sense of—maybe not despair, but certainly disappointment that somehow things hadn’t worked out as everyone had hoped or expected. Did you get that feeling? Frye: I’m not so sure. I think there are other factors such as the growing recognition of Canadian literature outside Canada, and a growing response to it which I find almost miraculous. I don’t understand what people on the continent of Europe get out of Canadian literature, but they certainly get something out of it, and it registers as a kind of unified statement to them. With us it’s the ordinary entropy which seems to set in with almost any cultural movement after a few years. Perhaps we’ll be refreshed by seeing our mirror images coming back to us from other countries. Fulford: When I read about the culture of various periods, usually in

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Europe but to some extent in America, I see again and again the well-to-do playing a part—the person, say, who founds a dance company with her father’s millions. Is there something that keeps Canadian private money from being interested in the arts? You don’t have in this country the families—one thinks of the Guggenheims or the Rockefellers—who in the United States pour in millions of dollars. One thinks of patrons of the arts throughout European history. Nothing like that seems to happen here. Frye: No, it doesn’t happen. I think we are basically a country of deficit financing, and we tend to look to government agencies to subsidize culture just as we look to government agencies to set up a broadcasting commission or a national railway or a national film board. Consequently, private business seems to feel that’s something they pay taxes for anyway and don’t need to support further. I think a peculiar feature of Canadian cultural life is its dependence on government assistance. Fulford: Peculiar for a democracy anyway. In a democracy it’s unusual to find the government as the mainstay, without a powerful equivalent in the private sector. It seems to me, though, that in the period we’re talking about, the 1970s, government has not been as much help as it might have been, even though the federal government spent a lot more money than ever before. The government really hasn’t demonstrated strong leadership. I wonder if it would have been different if Pierre Trudeau had been as interested in the development of Canadian culture as he was in renewed federalism and the constitution. Frye: I have a notion that the government’s attitude to culture should be a fairly relaxed one. It’s more a matter of trying to let the cultural imagery of the country emerge than providing leadership for it. I’m not just sure where government leadership would take it. I think that as a culture matures, it becomes more regional anyway. And whatever a culture does, if it’s worth doing, there’s going to be a strongly unpredictable element in it. I think the best and wisest government policy is to allow for a certain leeway, to allow for the spontaneity of cultural expression. In the natural course of events the real initiative comes from the creative people themselves. They know what they want to do, and they can go to a foundation, whether it’s a government one or a private one as in the States, and say, “Look, I’ve got a wonderful idea,” and the foundation’s job is to evaluate the idea and to respond accordingly.

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[Fulford argues that things like the creation of the Canada Council, along with the government’s determination of its size, show that governments “are crucially involved at least in a quantitative sense.”] Frye: They’re involved in the quantitative sense but there’s a fine line, I think, between laissez-faire, saying the culture can look after itself, which in our case would mean that culture would still be at a pretty undeveloped state, and assuming leadership, actually providing the cultural ideas. Fulford: It seems to me in looking at the 1970s that one of the most striking features is the diminishing role of some of our major cultural institutions. Even though some of them have grown larger, they seem less visible. * * * I’m thinking of the National Film Board, which at times seems to vanish from sight; of the Canada Council, which seems dispirited and defensive even though it has grown considerably; of the National Gallery, which, to anyone who goes in to see their exhibitions, seems to be a shambles. Major cultural institutions to which we looked for some kind of leadership, or coherence, some way of making our culture accessible and understandable—they seem to be slipping into the background. Frye: There are several processes at work there. One is that anyone handling so expensive a medium as television or film tends to get mired in real estate, bureaucracy, and vested interest. I hesitate to draw the inference that there is a connection between limited funds and liveliness of intellect, but it is true that when these things started (the National Film Board, CBC Television) there was a feeling, not merely of starting something new, but of defining oneself over against society. I think culture always has to have a feeling of cult about it. And again I hesitate to say that complete public tolerance of, say, the art of painting, would tend to make painting rather decorative—that is, it would become simply a function of society and not the voice of a creative impulse that is stirring and prodding the society. I think that those things have set in in many respects. The golden days of the National Film Board had a lot to do with its defining itself as an entity in the Grierson days. And similarly with the CBC, where the level in radio, I think, is much higher than the level in television simply because it is more of a minority medium. Fulford: What you’re suggesting is that one has to have some kind of

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outsider status in order to come to life. You can’t be totally accepted and still remain culturally alive. Frye: I think the question of defining oneself as a presence over or against a society is pretty essential for the creative life. I think that it’s been an immense advantage to the writers and creative people in Quebec to feel that they were fighting for a beleaguered and threatened language. And I think that separatism is a very unattractive combination of a progressive cultural movement and a regressive political one—and that the cultural side is the genuine part of it. Fulford: It seems to me that in the 1970s regionalism became the dominating force in the culture. Maybe it was always so, and became a lot more visible in the 1970s. Frye: Regionalism is an inevitable part of the maturing of the culture of a society like ours. I think that in this “instant world of communications,” as it’s called, there is a kind of uniform international way of seeing and thinking which is derived from the fact that everybody is involved in the same technology. Regional developments are a way of escaping from that, developing something more creative. If you want to learn about American life from its literature, for example, you learn about it inferentially from what Faulkner tells you about Mississippi and what others tell you about New England or the Middle West. That is becoming increasingly true of Canada, where the conception of Canada doesn’t really make all that much sense. “Canada” is a political entity; the cultural counterpart that we call “Canada” is really a federation not of provinces but of regions and communities. Fulford: To me it was very striking that in the 1970s one began to be able to read poetry and guess what region the poet was from without reading the poet’s biography. I don’t think that was true ten or fifteen years before. Frye: It’s an inevitable part of the maturing of the culture. One area after another becomes culturally articulate through its writers. If you want to know about Canada from its culture, look to see what Jack Hodgins has to say about Vancouver Island, or James Reaney or Robertson Davies about southwestern Ontario, or Roger Lemelin about Quebec. If you add up the cultural communities you get a sense of the vitality and variety of Canadian culture.

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Fulford: Can you see a time when there’ll be national cultural figures? In my lifetime the only people who have done it have been the Group of Seven. They created a kind of art that has strong adherents in every region, and in both language groups. Frye: The Group of Seven were really pre-Canadian in the sense that they were imaginative explorers. Their literary counterpart would not be our established writers so much as people like David Thompson and Samuel Hearne. [The Group of Seven] were the end of a long period of exploratory and documentary painting which plunged into the country in the wake of the voyageur. I think the country we know as Canada will, in the foreseeable future, be a federation of regions culturally, rather than a single nation. I think cultural nationalism gets confused about its units and tends to introduce unreal forms of casuistry, that is, what is truly Canadian and so on. The question can be answered more precisely in different terms. Fulford: When I’ve lectured in a different part of the country from the one I live in, Toronto, and when some element of what I regard as cultural nationalism comes into what I’m saying, there’s always an objection. I remember a painter in Halifax telling me that my point of view was that of Ontario politics, not Canadian nationalism at all. It had nothing to do with Halifax, he said. Frye: I can understand that reaction very well. I was brought up in the Maritimes myself. I think it’s been of an immense benefit to Canada, first that it went from a prenational phase to a postnational phase without ever quite becoming a nation, and second that it never tried to be homogeneous, a melting pot. It always let ethnic groups have their own head, culturally speaking, and I think that is of tremendous benefit to the variety of our culture. To some extent the melting pot, the homogeneity, occurs anyway in response to certain social conditions, and it happens all the better if it isn’t too much forced from the outside. The process takes longer. There are many elements in Canadian life—I’m thinking of the Ukrainians and the Icelandics, of the Mennonites on the prairies— they have all made a distinctive appearance in our literature and our painting which, I think, is all to the good. Of course, I see it as a minority movement. Fulford: But television is the most pervasive conveyor of culture and, many people believe, the most important one. Yet in this period, despite

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what we’ve said about regionalism, and in a period which has been characterized as nationalistic, Canadians have watched less and less Canadian television and more and more American television. Do you think this is, in any significant way, the fault of the government, or of the CRTC, of which you were a member? Or is it simply a function of North Americanism? Was it inevitable, no matter what we did? Frye: I think it was inevitable. I joined the CRTC in 1968, when the new Broadcasting Act made a good deal of sense. And then what happened was the practically autonomous development—through microwave and cable satellite and pay TV—of new technology that tends to follow the centralizing political and economic rhythms rather than the decentralizing cultural ones. And every new medium seems to have to recapitulate a history from a very archaic phase to a very sophisticated one. I think in radio and film we’re a long way now from Amos ’n’ Andy and the Keystone Kops.1 Television is still pretty formulaic. But mass culture is just that—it’s what the vast majority of people want. If we speak of Canada being flooded with American programs, we find that the Canadian viewer is a fish, not somebody who wants to get into a Canadian ark, floating on top. Fulford: What happened was that the technology had control of the CRTC, rather than the CRTC having control of the technology. Frye: The technology took the bit in its teeth, and there wasn’t much that any government regulatory agency could do about it. Fulford: Cable made all this American programming available, the people gobbled it up, and nothing you could have done would have changed that. Frye: I don’t think that anything could really have changed that. But there will be other technological developments in Canada that will again regionalize things, and bring smaller communities into focus. Fulford: Then you see the development of a more sophisticated form of television which will encourage a more sophisticated form of culture, namely regionalism? Frye: I think it’s inevitable that as any medium matures it tends to become more directly an expression of human beings, rather than an expression of mass formulae.

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Fulford: Certainly we can see that with phonograph records. * * * But I’m interested in pursuing your idea that as culture becomes more sophisticated it also becomes more local or regional. It seems to me that’s the opposite of many people’s view of culture. Those people see big cities and the development of communication as making it possible to centralize culture. Frye: I see increasing regionalism as a way for the creative mind to escape from a centralizing uniformity. I was in New Zealand recently, and in Guyana for a week, and when I looked into the literature of New Zealand and of the Caribbean, I noticed intense regionalism alongside certain ways of handling time and space and characterization which reminded me strikingly of what I’ve seen in Canadian as well as British and American literature. I think we can take the centralizing aspect of contemporary culture for granted. But it’s at that point that the growth towards more and more regionalism begins. If you get on a jet plane, you can’t expect a different culture in the place where the plane lands, but you will find different people, and the creative people will be aware of the differences. Fulford: In other words, if you go to Guyana you may find as you glance around first of all that everyone watches American television, or American films, but then you will also find an intense local expression. Frye: Yes. Although Guyana is not really a clear example, because they don’t get American television. But if they did, it would be the same thing as you have here: the mass response is for the mass culture, but within that, little creative pockets form. Fulford: I saw an Australian film last year, Newsfront, about people working in newsreels in Melbourne—and it was astoundingly like Toronto. People I’ve known for twenty years were in that film, except they were speaking with an Australian accent and had different faces. They were the same people with the same attitudes and the same views and the same resentment of Los Angeles and the same hope—to create something uniquely their own. That feeling of resistance towards a distant metropolis which is really in control of mass culture came through very strongly. Frye: Yes, that’s part of the general uniformity of attitude, I think. Fulford: A curious thing has happened in a field which I take a special

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interest in, and that’s making films for theatrical distribution. It seems to me that Canada has actually stepped back from the position it held, very shakily, a decade ago, before the Canadian Film Development Corporation came along. * * * In a curious way the government has helped to set up an imitation Hollywood in Canada. We’re making movies that almost no one, even the producers, would claim have anything to do with Canada. Work has been provided for some people. That’s about all that can be said for it. Frye: I think there’s a powerful undertow in both film and television which follows the centralizing political and economic rhythms of the country rather than the decentralizing cultural rhythms. Certainly that undertow has been very evident in both film and television in Canada. The CRTC Canadian content regulations look rather unreal now. And yet I think that the tendency which is built into the technology and into the quality of response has to work itself out, and one shouldn’t be too discouraged by finding that these media from time to time relapse into commercial formulas and mass productivity. Fulford: In a curious way, what has happened in the Canadian film industry is that it’s become an inferior Hollywood. It hasn’t developed that edge of creativity which you see in a number of current American filmmakers such as Coppola and Altman. * * * It’s all been imitative, and imitating something that someone saw four years ago. Frye: A great many people make the same remark about Canadian television. They would say that it is bad American television and that the best American television is far better. Fulford: The matter of films and television opens up the larger question of the Americanization of Canada. Some people believe that only a tiny number of Canadians are touched by anything that could be called Canadian culture. And almost everyone in the country has now been submerged by American culture. Frye: The phenomenon that we call mass culture is uniform in the United States and English Canada. I’m not greatly worried about what is called the Americanization of Canada. What people mean when they speak of Americanization has been just as lethal to American culture as it has been to Canadian culture. It’s a kind of levelling down which I think every concerned citizen of democracy should fight, whether he is a Canadian or an American.

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Fulford: And yet there is a choice between American and Canadian culture in some areas. For instance, I remember a friend who was teaching in a community college in southwestern Ontario when the War Measures Act was brought in, who discovered that most of what his students knew about the War Measures Act they knew from what Walter Cronkite told them.2 The fact is that Walter Cronkite, and those broadcasts, are an expression of America, even though it may be a levelled America. And so are movies. Movies can be good or bad expressions of America. They can be levelling, or they can be defining, but they are America. And they leave out the reality of Canada. Frye: I think that to the extent that they become genuine American cultural products, they tend more and more to speak for a smaller community than the United States of America. While Faulkner is not a part of American mass culture, he is a very articulate expression of American culture. But the American part is an inference from what he tells you about his corner of America. Fulford: Paradoxically, although I’m as worried as anyone about the phenomena we’ve been discussing, the curious thing is that the Canadians I know are much more Canadian today than they were twenty-five years ago. By Canadian I mean sophisticated to some extent about the different parts of Canada, interested and so on. * * * Something has happened, and I think it’s television. Television has worked for a lot of these people. Frye: Television does have a profoundly civilizing aspect in that it compels people to look like people. I think of what an abstract notion I had of Eskimos when I was a student at school, or even college, and how that simply disappeared as soon as one began seeing them on television. Fulford: You have to accept René Lévesque as a human being when you see him three times a week on the eleven o’clock news. Frye: You have to start whittling away your stereotypes. Fulford: When the 1970s began we had a crisis in the publishing business which led to a great deal of government activity. Ryerson Press was purchased by an American firm, McGraw-Hill. The Ontario government appointed a Royal Commission.3 The Canada Council threw itself into a frenzy of activity. The Secretary of State made various moves. And a publishing community of a kind was created. What’s been the result of

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that? Has it affected you? Has it changed what you’re reading in any way? Frye: I’m not sure that it has, really. The publishing and selling of books is an economic enterprise; it follows economic rhythms, rather than strictly cultural ones. It didn’t worry me too much that certain publishers in Canada were British, like Macmillan and Oxford, because they were working very hard and conscientiously to produce Canadian books. I regret the kind of nationalism that defines a Canadian publisher in artificial terms. A certain amount of takeover is almost inevitable, given the economic conditions. Canadian authors in the meantime seem to continue to get published. And it doesn’t worry me too much if a roomful of Canadian schoolchildren are asked who the prime minister of Canada is and say Jimmy Carter. What interests me is that Jimmy Carter is reading Peggy Atwood. The growth of Canada as a distinctive presence in the world scene is something that’s also going on. Fulford: The idea that in Italy and elsewhere there are courses in Canadian literature would have seemed outlandish ten or fifteen years ago. How do you explain that? Is Canada becoming exotic in some way? Frye: It’s partly that, but I think too it’s the maturing of a culture. An immature culture imports its culture. So long as Canada was a colony, the works of British and American literature were brought out to the boondocks and people tried to imitate them. But as a culture matures, it becomes a native manufacture, and eventually it’s an export. Canada is now producing a literature which has an imaginative integrity to other countries. I was talking with a professor at the University of Bordeaux who spoke eloquently about Canadian literature as the expression of a people finding its own voice. I assumed he meant French Canadian literature, but he didn’t. He meant English Canadian writers like Margaret Laurence and Timothy Findley and Jack Hodgins—writers working within a region.

54 Commemorating the Massey Lectures Conducted 24 September 1980

From a tape supplied courtesy of Nicholas Graham, transcribed by Elizabeth O’Grady. Dated by correspondence with Geraldine Sherman, executive producer of Ideas, in NFF, 1991, box 41, file 2. Writer and teacher Morris Wolfe spoke with Frye at his Victoria College office as part of a series to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Massey Lectures aired on the CBC’s Ideas in 1981. The program on Frye began with lengthy extracts from his 1962 Massey lectures, later published as The Educated Imagination (to which the page numbers in the text refer). Wolfe then interviewed Frye:

Wolfe: I asked Professor Frye how his 1962 Massey lectures would be different if he were preparing them today. Frye: Only in small details. The larger contours would be the same. Wolfe: I asked him to what extent he thought his view of literature had been shaped by the fact that he was Canadian. Frye: A great deal, but in ways that would puzzle me perhaps to make explicit. I just know that every person with any sort of creative power grows out of his immediate environment and is shaped by that environment in ways that are often too subtle and too pervasive to identify. I think that being a native of a relatively small country with a somewhat observant role in history is one thing that I can more or less pinpoint, because I notice the difference between Canadian and American students when I teach in both countries. The American students have been conditioned from their infancy to be part of a great world power whose decisions tend to shape modern history. Canadian students have not

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been a part of that sort of world power and their whole attitude is much more observant and detached. Wolfe: I told Frye that I’d asked John Kenneth Galbraith the same question, and that he’d dismissed the notion that being Canadian could have shaped his views in some way. Frye: Yes, there are two things there. One is that my field of interest is much closer to the cultural field, and culture seems to me to be much more regional than national. Economics is something that follows national and international rhythms, but culture is restricted to a much more limited locality. And then, I have always remained in Canada, and Galbraith has not. Wolfe: Frye says in The Educated Imagination that knowing about a poet’s life is only of incidental interest. I asked Frye if he thought the same thing could be said of knowing about a critic’s life. Frye: There are always personal motivations which, in the long run, if the writer is important enough, become relevant to discussing his work. There have been a few articles appearing lately in learned journals about the psychological roots of the critic. I’d say that writers vary a great deal among themselves. Byron is really a person who imposed his personality through his poetry and became popular largely because of that, so when you study Byron you find yourself involved with his life almost immediately. If you study T.S. Eliot you don’t, although the life is there, and it has certainly played a role in conditioning his work. I would think that my own life is relevant to the kind of work I’m doing—it has conditioned it in a way that couldn’t have been done in the same way by anybody else—but I think it’s a matter of very incidental interest. Wolfe: Frye went on to add that there was a biographer [John Ayre] working on him at the present time, and that he sometimes found that a nightmarish experience. That day, however, he was far more exercised by the results of a newspaper interview he’d granted. The Toronto Star was doing a series titled “Fame, Beauty, Brains.” The piece on Frye carried the headline “Plain Mr. Frye Condemned to be Lonely.”1 In his Massey lectures, Frye said that much of a writer’s best writing is, or seemed to be, involuntary [38; EICT, 469]; that in the best writing, the forms of literature take over. I asked if that were true of his own work. Frye: I think that that is true. I think that, like other writers, I know when

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a passage is right. It may have taken eighteen or twenty rewritings to get it to that stage but I know when it’s there. And that is an experience that the poets have recorded time and time again, that they revise their work not because they like what they’re putting in better than what they had before, but because it is better than what they had before. I always had a kind of intuitive feeling that I knew when a passage I was writing either was right for me, or was the best I could do at that point. When I’ve finished a book, for me, it goes into a kind of limbo: it’s now for other people to read, but I can hardly bear to reread it myself. Wolfe: “In my opinion,” said Frye in The Educated Imagination, “value judgments in literature should not be hurried. It does a student little good to be told that A is better than B, especially if he prefers B at the time” [48; EICT, 477]. But that presumes, I suggested, that value judgments are being imposed from outside. Doesn’t it make sense for a student to examine his or her own feeling of “I like this” or “I don’t like that”? . . . Frye: [after gap for tape turnover] . . . may very soon feel, is a phony feeling. And that’s my whole point about value judgments, that they are tentative and they are subject to revision. The thing that you’ve just described, of saying not only, “I like this and don’t like this,” but also, “Why do I like this and don’t like that?” seems to me all right because that is putting value judgments where they belong: not as the Ten Commandments and not as facts, but simply as indications of one’s present feelings. I mean, even the superiority of Shakespeare to the television movie is not strictly a fact, it’s a generally accepted value judgment. Any keen student of literature has been bowled over by things at the age of fourteen that by the age of twenty he has no use for at all. There’s no harm in that. The feeling itself was genuine enough. Wolfe: I asked Frye whether or not he thought literature was better taught today than it was twenty years ago. Frye: I imagine it is, yes. My students seem prepared to have a lot of pseudo-issues just ignored, whereas I think when I began teaching I would have to deal with them to some degree. I think we know more about literature than we did a generation or so ago. When I was an undergraduate I had to answer questions about a writer’s style, but of course now you have much more precise tools for dealing with such a conception as style. It’s much less a matter of the “From my study window” type of subjectivity that literary study used to be.

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Wolfe: Frye said he felt much more encouraged about the teaching of literature than he was about the general state of higher education. One of the results of the smorgasbord approach to course selection and the watering down of standards at his own university, he said, is that it’s no longer one of the best four or five on the continent. Frye worries about that. As he put it in the 1962 Massey lectures: Frye (from the 1962 recording): In these days we’re in a hare and tortoise race between mob rule and education. To avoid collapsing into mob rule we have to try to educate a minority that’ll stand out against it. The fable says the tortoise won in the end, which is consoling, but the hare shows a good deal of speed and few signs of tiring [55; EICT, 483]. Wolfe: Northrop Frye has done an enormous amount to help the tortoise along, especially through his work as a teacher, educating the imaginations of almost two generations of literary scholars.

55 Marshall McLuhan Broadcast 4 January 1981

From a tape of a broadcast on CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning, 4 January 1981, transcribed by Margaret Burgess. Marshall McLuhan had died on 31 December 1980. Also featured in the broadcast were Sam Solecki and Derrick de Kerckhove of the University of Toronto.

Interviewer: Professor McLuhan’s great contemporary at the university, Northrop Frye, says that McLuhan’s background enabled him to achieve his insights. Frye: He was a literary critic and that meant that he looked at the form of what was in front of him instead of at the content. And so instead of issuing platitudes about what was being said on television he looked at what the media were actually doing to people’s eyes and ears. He had a gift of epigrammatic encapsulating that made some of the things he said extremely memorable. [Other comments intervene.] Interviewer: Professor McLuhan’s ingenuity was easily seen, but his message was not easily understood. In the 1960s and ’70s there were sometimes crude journalistic interpretations of his work, and reporters began to write that, after all, the master of communications could not communicate. The result was that as the 1970s closed Marshall McLuhan’s influence declined, and at the end of his life his colleagues saw him neglected by the public which had once clamoured for him. Frye: That’s true, but that was because he got on the manic-depressive roller-coaster of the news media and that meant he went away to the

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skies like a rocket and then came down like the stick. But he himself and what he said and thought had nothing to do with that. That’s what the news media do to people if you get caught in their machinery.

56 Storytelling Conducted 28 January and 5 February 1981

This is a partial transcription of the tapes in NFF, 1991, box 64, of a four-part program “Storytelling,” written and narrated by poet Maureen Harris, broadcast on CBC’s Ideas in 1981. Dated by entries in Frye’s daybook for 1981. In NFF, 1988, box 39, file 10 is a preliminary outline and request for an interview from Maureen Harris. The host was Russ Germain, who explained that the program was part of an extended series that would explore the role of narrative forms in our experience of ourselves and the world. Throughout the episodes, readings of stories alternated with narrative, interviews, and comments. A statement from Frye was used as a general introduction:

Frye: Man doesn’t live nakedly in nature the way that animals do. He lives inside a transparent envelope that we call his culture or his civilization. The verbal part of that culture or civilization consists of stories that express his central concerns about himself, his destiny, and his nature, and also about the origin of his society. These become theological or political arguments later on, but they begin as stories in a culture where everything is concrete. When the arguments develop, they often repress the fact that they are in fact later developments of stories. 1 Creating the World, Creating Myself Germain: In this segment, Maureen Harris discusses the importance of stories in childhood. Harris: Northrop Frye * * * has spent much of his life exploring our storytelling and mythmaking. I asked him why we told stories.

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Frye: The earlier students of myth were greatly preoccupied by the reason for creating myths. They felt that there must be some reason to account for myths, and that we’re giving up the game if we just say that myths are autonomous, that man makes myths because he makes myths and that no explanation for the cause will work. But that seems to me to be unmistakably true. Man is a creative person existing in time and so stories arise as one of his creative products. I think that in our day the shape of literature is considerably confused by the capitalist system and the sense of private property and the law of copyright. The writer has to make his story different enough from other stories to take out a patent on it, whereas in the Middle Ages a poet would say, “Hundreds of people have already told this story, but I’m going to tell it better and I’m going to get more of it in.” [The program discusses creation stories and all the many stories that show how men and animals received their characteristics or how certain practices began.] Harris: When logic and science fail us, the imagination is there to supply a story. Northrop Frye: Frye: In the first place there’s no scientific theory of creation: that is, you can start off with a big bang, but something happened before that. As far as science is concerned, the universe doesn’t begin or end, it’s just there, and you don’t really need a creation myth in science except by a kind of analogy. But, hell, we begin and end, so we assume that beginning and ending must be much more important in the scheme of things than nature gives us any hint of. Nature could get along perfectly well without us; it doesn’t care whether we begin or end; it cares only for the continuity of the species. But that outrages us. We feel that our beginning and our end must be something absolutely central and fundamental in the scheme of things. So whatever happens we’re going to construct creation myths and apocalyptic myths. * * * 2 The Sacred Storyteller [This segment turns to the centrality of stories in adult life, suggesting through a consideration of the story of Scheherazade that fiction, not facts, holds life together.] Harris: What is the relation between fact and fiction in our lives?

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Frye: The facts are elements within a fiction and the fiction is really the controlling vision which indicates the purpose of the work you’re doing. If you take a social worker in Toronto, she is confronted with facts of deserted and broken homes, abused children, derelicts, and so forth. If she disregarded those facts she’d be totally incompetent; but she would be just as incompetent, or at least helpless, if she didn’t have somewhere in her mind a vision of a saner and cleaner and better organized Toronto. * * * 3 The Political and Historical Arena [Frye’s voice is used to introduce this segment on the reverberations of storytelling in public life:] Frye: If you ask a person at random on the street why he voted as he did in the last election, the answers that you’ll get have to do with the imagination. Only for exceptionally well-informed people will you get answers that are based on straight arguments or concrete examples. In other words, it’s through the imagination that we participate in society. [Harris discusses the central myths that help to define societies, such as those linking the founding of Rome or Britain to Troy.] Frye: All formulations of the social contract do what John Stuart Mill called the passing off of a fiction as a fact.1 That is, once upon a time people got together and surrendered their power to a dictator—that’s Hobbes—oh, no, once upon a time people got together and delegated their power to a ruler—that’s Locke—oh, no, once upon a time people got together to form a natural society and were gypped out of it by the aggressor or the dishonest—that’s Rousseau. No matter how you formulate it you’re going to come up with some kind of myth. It seems to me that there are two very powerful myths in political life: the myth of origin, which is a version of the social contract, and the myth of ending or telos, which is going to be some form of Utopia. It doesn’t matter whether you say you believe in a social contract or Utopia—belief has nothing to do with it—the thing is that these are maintained in your mind as the frames by which you do your thinking about society. [After some further remarks on the central Judaeo-Christian myth of exile and return, Harris comments on the problem of making our collective stories more inclusive and universal, and of the difficulties of seeming to question them.]

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Harris: We need to see that we are the mythmakers and storytellers, so that our own involvement becomes clearer. Northrop Frye: Frye: The essence of a myth is the human construct. If Venus, for example, is a goddess to whom a temple is built, sacrifices made, and prayers addressed, all that is a projecting activity. When you stop believing in Venus, then she really does become the goddess of love and beauty and the poets know what to do with her. Whereas if she’s a projected pseudoreality there’s something about her that hasn’t emerged very clearly— except when the artist does what the sculptor of the Venus de Milo does: just ignores the projection, and treats her as a human construct. * * * Harris: We don’t entirely trust politicians as storytellers, but they are not going to stop telling stories. In fact, they may do so more deliberately as they become more aware of the importance of the imagination in reaching the voter. Northrop Frye: Frye: Politicians themselves have been involuntarily forced to consider it, partly because of the importance of television. Within the last quarter of a century there’s been a great deal of talk about how a political party is going to improve its image and so on. They say that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; this cult of the image is a tribute of the same kind to the importance of the role of the imagination in the fluctuations of opinion polls and that sort of thing. [A discussion of Plato’s belief in the power of stories, and of his desire to control the type of stories told in his ideal republic, leads to a general consideration of the tension between art and politics.] Harris: Politics is concerned with maintaining a stable society, while art concerns itself with the variety and totality of individual human experience. We find it difficult to understand the relation between them because we confuse them. We think they move in the same way instead of in opposing directions. Frye: I think the normal tendency of culture is to decentralize. The human imagination has something vegetable about it; it likes to send down roots and work within a limited environment. We have to distinguish the way culture operates from the way political and economic movements operate. If you hitch on a political or economic development to cultural decentralizing you get something that might very well go in the direction of fascism. You notice how separatist movements are often

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linked with terrorism. On the other hand, if you hitch a cultural movement on to the centralizing rhythms of politics and economics you get a pompous imperialistic art that means nothing to anybody. It’s because Faulkner stuck to one county in Mississippi that he’s intelligible all over the world, whereas if he’d just written about the human race or human destiny or human problems he would have been nowhere. * * * Harris: In Canada in some way we still have to fashion our story or stories. Frye: Canada has always had its famous problem of identity and a problem of diffidence. The result is that it’s not a nation that places much trust in heroic leaders. The attitude to Mackenzie King in every election was, “Oh my God, do we have to go out and vote for that guy again?”— but they always did. Then, when Trudeau came along . . . I’ve been convinced that the enormous outburst of creative activity in English Canada from about 1960 on was the result of the previous Quiet Revolution in Quebec; it was a response to the fact that French Canada had developed and was conscious of an identity of its own. I think people in 1968 saw Trudeau as the person who united those two forms of consciousness. But no golden age lasts, and the Canadian habit, like the habits of any country, will reassert itself sooner or later. So now we’re back at the stage of, “Oh my God, do we have to go out and vote for that guy again?” [Harris emphasizes the importance of understanding the way our imagination responds to different versions of stories.] Frye: Well, there is no possible way of eliminating the imagination. You have only the choice between making a proper and a pathological use of it. There’s no use talking about getting rid of the imagination—it just won’t go away. 4 The Visionary Journey [This episode deals with the role of story in religious thought. Its very Frye- or Blake-like theme is that the imagination with its images and myths can overcome the dualistic view of life in which subject and object, spirit and flesh, inner and outer, are seen as warring opposites. Harris stresses, as Frye does, that religion should be approached not as a body of belief and rules of conduct, but as enriching mythology.]

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Harris: The world is a story unfolding. Within the story of the world, the story of our lives unfolds. If we can learn to recognize and to understand our own storytelling, we may find ourselves in place, located in relationship with the world and other people. Frye: First of all, you think of God or the gods as objective, as out there somewhere or up there somewhere. Then you realize that you can keep going for billions of miles and it isn’t going to get you anywhere, that there’s no god in outer space. So you think you have to go back home and look, as we say, within. But the subjective is just as much a fallacy as the objective. Projecting is wrong but injecting is really no better. So you have to go back home but avoiding the subjective or psychologizing fallacy. You can’t be reduced to something that’s going on inside your skull. Because man belongs to something before he is anything and it’s really a community united in a common vision that he has to turn to.

57 A Fearful Symmetry Conducted 15 April 1981

From “A Fearful Symmetry: Northrop Frye on Victoria, the Bible, and the Canadian Way,” Vic Report, 9 (Summer 1981): 58–70. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1981. Frye was interviewed by Donald G. Bastian, a professional editor then editing Vic Report, on the occasion of Frye’s being appointed for a second three-year term as chancellor of Victoria.

Bastian: You have a new book coming out on the Bible. What is it called? Frye: It’s called The Great Code, a phrase from Blake. He says the Bible is the great code of our art.1 Bastian: What do you do in this book? Frye: I’m trying to relate the Bible to the cultural, imaginative traditions of Western Europe. So it’s not Biblical scholarship, it’s not theology, it’s about the Bible in literature. In fact, “The Bible and Literature” is its subtitle. Bastian: So you’re coming from Western civilization back to a consideration of the Bible? Frye: It’s actually broken into two volumes and the volume I’m publishing now is more concerned with the Bible. In the second volume I’ll try to go more closely into the actual influence of the Bible. Bastian: When one looks at your work, it seems at one point when you were young you sat down and said, “My work will be done in these steps: a critical study of William Blake’s writings, a book then on the

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theory of literary criticism, some books on Biblical allusions in literature, with many studies in between on aspects of these subjects.” Frye: Yes, but historically it wasn’t really like that. I sort of blundered into things unconsciously. Bastian: How much of a plan did you have? Frye: Very little. I was confused about what I wanted to do for a long time. Bastian: Your scholarly work really began with Blake. How did you become interested in his work? Frye: Well, my teacher, Pelham Edgar, realized that I would be attracted to Blake, and he very unobtrusively pushed me in that direction. Bastian: Why did he think you would be? Frye: He had ESP with students. He knew what students could do. He had an earlier student named Kathleen Coburn whom he turned towards Coleridge in the same way. Bastian: You have written that a knowledge of the Bible as literature is a basic step in literary education. Why is that? Frye: The Bible has been a central element in our cultural heritage. It’s referred to so often and alluded to so constantly in English literature that a student who doesn’t know the Bible very often doesn’t know what in hell’s going on in English literature. He can’t construe the meaning, even. Bastian: Is it simply a matter of knowing what the allusions are or does it go deeper than that? Frye: It goes much deeper, but it starts at the allusions. The Bible carried along with it a whole framework of ideas, and a great deal of the philosophy in the Western world has been a series of inferences from the body of imagery in the Bible. Bastian: A lot of people just look puzzled when someone mentions something from the Bible. It doesn’t seem as broadly known to people as it once was. Is that going to affect our whole culture? Frye: Oh yes. It’s simply malpractice in education. It means that a whole

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generation is growing up cheated out of some of the essential facts about their own cultural heritage. We’re raising a generation of highly intelligent young people to be deliberately senile and to live without a cultural memory. Bastian: What effect will this have on society? Frye: I think it will intensify the tendency to live in a kind of floating present without any sense of a time dimension behind you. Bastian: Is this having any effect on the literature being written now? Frye: That’s more difficult, because contemporary writers vary a great deal among themselves in their awareness of their cultural traditions and most conscientious writers realize that they have got to get acquainted with their own cultural tradition somehow. So I think the serious writers are doing the best they can to put us back on the rails. They’re atypical in the sense that they realize they have to be educated for their own jobs. People like Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Jack Hodgins, those people are very well aware of the need of experiencing their imaginations in time. Bastian: What teachers influenced you most when you were at Victoria College as a student? Frye: My seniors in English here: Pelham Edgar, who steered me on to Blake, and Ned [E.J.] Pratt, because of his general enthusiasm and because I admired his poetry. And there was also John Robins, who was less well known but who I think was more of an influence on me than either because he was interested in popular literature—ballads, folk songs, Paul Bunyan stories, that sort of thing. I think I learned from him the fact that there’s no boundary line between highbrow literature and popular literature. Bastian: What do you remember about the way they taught? Were they good teachers in the classroom? Frye: In a way they were. I think if one had tape recordings of their lectures they might not seem so remarkable. Pelham somehow managed to convey the fact that the life of a scholar was worth living. It’s difficult to say how he did it. He’d come into a rather crowded and noisy class and sit down at the desk and begin to mutter. Nobody could hear what he said, but eventually you had to keep quiet in order to hear.

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Lecturing then was very different from lecturing now because there are so many courses in contemporary literature and Canadian literature. In those days there were none. You had to digress in order to introduce those topics to your students. So the lectures wandered all over the world and the fact that they did was in keeping with the educational conditions. I think that Victoria professors were unusually useful to students who wanted to know something about how the things they were learning related to the contemporary world. Bastian: What about Pratt? Do you remember anything about his teaching style? Frye: I didn’t have Pratt a great deal, because he taught mainly the General Course and I was in the Honour Course. I remember him much more as a colleague later than as a teacher. Other people have spoken very eloquently of his teaching, so I know it was all right. I came in contact with relatively little of it. Bastian: What was the intellectual atmosphere at Vic like then as compared to now? Frye: It was a very much smaller college and there was a basis of personal knowledge of a kind that just couldn’t be today. If you had read in a newspaper that Pelham Edgar had just appointed to the English staff a demonstrator in psychology in his late thirties who had published nothing, and had announced that this demonstrator would make a good professor of English and a poet as well, you would naturally assume he was insane. But the person he picked was Ned Pratt. Bastian: What about major changes at Vic since then? Frye: It’s a matter of growth. I had a great respect for the Honour Course. I could see that it demanded rather more maturity from a lot of students than a lot of students could bring to it. On the other hand, it gave as good an undergraduate training as one could get on the North American continent. When the Honour Course was scrapped in a fit of hysteria in the 1960s it was an irrevocable disaster, and Toronto will never be in the foreseeable future as distinguished a university in its arts and science teaching as it was then. I feel the same way about the more monolithic organization in the abolishing of college departments and so on. I know the arguments there. I think the mistakes that were made at the beginning of the feder-

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ation system made its eventual scrapping inevitable but I don’t like it any better. We had of course an unusually large number of specialists in the college subjects because the same course was taught by four different people. It did mean that there was an unusually large number of productive scholars. Bastian: Can you formulate any strategy that would maintain the excellence of Victoria and the U of T even though they have less money to work with now because of budget cutbacks? Frye: It will run by sheer habit. The people that we already have here are dedicated people, but it won’t run indefinitely. Sooner or later, you’ve got to replace your retiring people with younger people. Bastian: And that’s the big problem, I suppose, with the budget cutbacks, the inability to hire new people? Frye: Yes. Bastian: When you were here as a student, did you live on campus? Frye: Yes, I was in residence at Burwash. I got a great deal out of my time in residence. I was rather introverted as an adolescent and being in residence was immensely beneficial to me. I plunged into almost everything: drama and debates and everything. Bastian: When people think of Canadian scholars, they invariably put two people together as the prime examples: the late Marshall McLuhan and you. How well did you know McLuhan? Frye: I knew Marshall reasonably well. We were colleagues in the same department. Later, of course, we both became extremely busy in different lines, so we saw less of each other than we had. Bastian: Have his views been well understood? Frye: Well, yes and no. What he said was perhaps praised too much for the wrong reasons in the 1960s. And I think he himself realized as well as anybody that they were the wrong reasons. So his intellectual career seems to me to be curiously unfinished in a way. He wrote two remarkable books: The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. Everything he wrote after that seems to have been in collaboration with other people and he got increasingly tentative, so that he wouldn’t even defend a position if it were criticized. He’d say, “Well, that’s just a probe, some-

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thing to think about.” In a way that came to be a substitute for the very serious work I think he could have gone on to do. Bastian: What do you think his lasting influence will be? Frye: I suppose his recognition of the fact that the electronic media were bringing in a form of apprehension2 which was not new, because it was a recreation of things that have always been here, but was new in relation to the domination of print and mathematics. The whole business of being able to see the symbolic importance of things like the electric light, and the occasional insight, such as the way the telephone turned the street walker into a call girl—that kind of sharp, detailed observation was very unusual. I rather wish he’d carried his academic interests more along with his interest in the contemporary scene, that he’d added his observation of the contemporary scene as an extension of his academic work. Bastian: You were born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Did you live there until you came to Victoria College for undergraduate training? Frye: No, we moved to New Brunswick when I was a child of eight. I grew up in Moncton; that’s where I had my schooling. Bastian: How would you compare the current political climate in Quebec to what it was like when you were growing up? Frye: I have described the Sherbrooke and the Moncton that I grew up in as in a state of amiable apartheid [BG, v; C, 416], which has been very much criticized. I wouldn’t use a word like apartheid to describe anything I approved of, but there are different kinds of it. The way in which English and French populations remained apart was regrettable, but still it was better than rioting. And I don’t remember bitterness. All I remember is that the French-speaking kids went to different schools and to different churches, for the most part. So we just didn’t come into contact. Bastian: Do you think Prime Minister Trudeau has a grasp of the current regional tensions in Canada? Or does he create the tensions? Frye: I was going to say he creates as many as he understands, but that wouldn’t be fair. I think he started out with a quite clear understanding of the general pattern and still could have it. He certainly has the intelligence and insight and the information still. He tends to paint himself into a corner as a political figure and listens to too small a group of people.

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Bastian: You’ve called the famous question of Canadian identity really not so much a political question as a cultural question or imaginative question. Could you explain? Frye: The way in which I expressed it was to say that the fundamental question in English Canada is not “Who am I?” but “Where is here?”—of coming imaginatively in contact with the country.3 As a culture matures, it also becomes more decentralized and regionalized; that’s one of the things that happens. More and more parts of the country come to life culturally and it’s that realization of environment which is the real identity problem. I think that in the nineteenth century questions of Canadian identity got a bit vague and abstract, because they were really talking about the individual somewhere in the world, or somewhere within a huge, sprawling, thinly settled country. I think this question is gradually becoming more specific. Bastian: What is the question now? Frye: It’s the question of the diversity of regions in the country and of ways of confining that diversity to the cultural sphere, where it belongs, and not to the political or economic, where it’s an anachronism. Bastian: Do you think in the current separatist movement in Quebec there’s an identification of political and economic questions with the cultural question? Frye: Yes, a quite illegitimate yoking of the two things. That is, the cultural part of it is quite comprehensive, quite genuine. The attempt to hitch it to political and still more to economic developments seems to me to be nonsense. Bastian: However, French Canadians say that it’s precisely because they feel culturally separate and have their own imaginative history that they want to be separate politically. Frye: It’s not an argument, because political phenomena depend on economic ones, and economically we’re simply a distributing centre for the United States and we will be that in the indefinite future. Bastian: Are we being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States?

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Frye: I think we are, but then I think the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It’s just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours. Bastian: You said in the Whidden Lectures in 1967 that there’s a cultural conservatism in Canada that historically rejects the revolution.4 Is that a clear element in Canadian culture today or is the popular culture from the United States beginning to push that aside? Frye: The popular culture follows the expanding and centralizing political and economic rhythm in both countries. When I speak of the cultural connections in Canada with Toryism, I’m speaking of a counter-culture which is the genuine part of Canadian culture. Bastian: It seems that the United Empire Loyalism of our past makes us tend, in any crisis, to go with what we know, with what we’re loyal to, rather than taking a revolutionary stance. Frye: There’s something of that kind, yes. A revolutionary mind is a deductive mind. It starts at major premises about human rights and works out a constitution which it amends but doesn’t change. Our attitude is much more pragmatic and empiric than that. We meet one crisis after another with a kind of ramshackle, ad hoc settlement. If we manage to survive the crisis, we take a long breath and wait for the next one. Bastian: Does that explain the way the federal government has dealt with the separatist issue? Frye: That’s a very typically Canadian way of dealing with a crisis, yes, to go through a crisis where the country appears to be coming apart at the seams. Perhaps one of these days it will, I don’t know. Bastian: What about your future work? When you finish the work on the second volume of the Bible book, do you have plans for further writing? Do you know yet what you will be moving on to? Frye: I don’t know, I’m still carrying it blind. I haven’t any long-range plans, because whenever I make long-range plans, they invariably blow up in my face. So I just do what comes to hand.

58 Medium and Message Recorded 1 May 1981

From a transcription of the BBC program provided courtesy of the BBC’s Written Archives Centre. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1981. Frye’s comments were part of a program on McLuhan entitled “Medium and Message” written and presented by Russell Davies and produced by David Perry. Frye was thanked for his participation in a letter from Perry dated 20 May 1981 (NFF, 1991, box 41, file 2). The program was broadcast on the BBC’s Radio 3 on 25 November 1981. Frye’s comments were interspersed with those of a number of other contributors.

Davies: [McLuhan’s] own commitment * * * was to literacy, and in his anxiety to point out the possibility of its decay, he failed to do justice to the full powers of print technology. Such at least is the view of his Toronto colleague, the critic Northrop Frye. Frye: I rather wish that Marshall had come to terms with the linear nature of the book because I think he would have been a much more permanent influence if he had done. What he has said about the linear quality and the self-hypnotizing power of the eye in written books and mathematics was, I think, with all due respect to him, a half truth. There’s another side to the printed text, and that’s its uniformity, the fact that it always says the same thing, no matter how often you open it. That seems to me an equally obvious aspect of it. For example, when it came in in the sixteenth century, it had a very close association with magic. You can see that in Shakespeare’s Tempest when Caliban says of Prospero, “Burn but his books, because without them he is just as big a fool as I am.”1 And that capacity for the printed word to create a kind of instant

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hallucination is distinct from the merely remembered thing of oral culture. There are so many aspects of the written word which were there right in front of him and which he knew about, and I rather wish he had incorporated them. It was really the G.K. Chesterton butterslide: the notion that everything was unified in the Middle Ages and that we have been splitting and specializing ever since. * * * What I regret in the distinction of hot and cool media is the tendency to determinism in his thinking, which made him assume that a nation would turn hot or cool as its prevailing media were hot or cool. And he might perhaps have noticed the fact that he lived in a very cool country where all the tempers are cool and consequently all the media are cool. Davies: Exposure to the kind of world that was here exposing itself to him did not go without its effect on McLuhan’s work or on his expectations. Northrop Frye, who still lives and works in the quiet of Toronto, has firm feelings about this. Frye: I don’t think that academics ought to get on this manic-depressive roller-coaster of publicity. They are just not built for it; they are built for much longer and more leisurely rhythms. And I think he was a little confused by being blown up so much in the 1960s and even more confused by being neglected in the 1970s. Davies: The operation had been for a brain tumour that had curtailed McLuhan’s activities in the mid-’70s. In 1979, he suffered a stroke. Frye: Being an utterly charming person whom nobody but Ebenezer Scrooge could ever have disliked, he was a very colourful presence in the community. I think most people’s feeling when he had his stroke was that the campus will now be a lot duller.

59 Scientist and Artist Conducted 26 October 1981

From “Acta Interview: Northrop Frye,” Acta Victoriana, 106 (Fall 1981): 58–70. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1981. The article was introduced by the explanation that “Recently, Professor Frye was keynote speaker at the January 1981 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science where he read an address entitled ‘The Bridge of Language’” [NFMC, 315–29]. Acta editors John Cargill and Angela Esterhammer (the latter to become Distinguished University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario) interviewed Frye on a major theme of that address, the relation between the arts and sciences.

Interviewer: Professor Frye, your first published book was a study of William Blake. Blake is emblematic, for many people, of the poet’s antipathy towards the sciences. What was it that Blake saw in science that would lead him to say, “May God us keep / From single vision and Newton’s sleep!”?1 Frye: It wasn’t what he saw in science, it was what he saw in politics. He saw a kind of death impulse trying to get control of science and the death impulse was the thing that had caused the Napoleonic Wars. He had started out as a partisan of the French Revolution but when the French Revolution just turned into imperialism he realized that there was something much more sinister going on than a desire for freedom. Interviewer: What about the animosity, which you talked about in “The Bridge of Language,” between artists and scientists? Frye: Well, that springs first of all from the humanist vision. If you look

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at something so unbearably hideous as the outskirts of a modern city, you realize that there must be something wrong with any organism that could construct a carapace of this kind. Ruskin in the nineteenth century, for example, attacks the squalor and the ugliness of civilization. But that is not just an aesthetic judgment. He relates it very specifically to the exploiting of workers.2 So the protest against civilization and technology is not a protest against science. It is a protest against polluting the earth through activities which begin with men exploiting other men and end with men exploiting nature. Nobody ever dreamed that the exploiting of nature by man was evil except the poets. Interviewer: What about the animosity that goes the other way? That is, scientists who consider that the study of the humanities is worthless and doesn’t contribute to the advancement of civilization? Frye: Yes. But they’re just clunkheads. I think that’s all one can say about that attitude. Interviewer: Do you ever come across any of this animosity in your own work as a literary critic? Frye: I have almost never met any indifference or contempt for the arts on the part of scientists. It is always people who know nothing about either art or science who take that view of things. Interviewer: One chapter of Fearful Symmetry is entitled “Tradition and Experiment.” What is the role of experiment in the arts and how does it differ from experiment in the sciences? Frye: Well, the experiment in sciences, of course, is designed to be a repeatable experiment; that is, if it can be repeated by someone else then it becomes a basis for prediction and prediction is an extremely important element in the sciences. What Blake meant by experiment was rather the attempt to make every work of art or imagination unique. Then it would operate more or less upon Darwinian lines; that is, if the experiment had survival value then it would last. Interviewer: You are saying that scientific theories must be supported by the evidence of repeatable experiments. Is there anything analogous in art: can art be right or wrong? Frye: No, it can’t be right or wrong, but as I say, some works of art can have survival value. In Shakespeare’s day most of the serious drama crit-

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ics assumed that Ben Jonson was a much more serious artist than Shakespeare was and what happened was not that they were proven wrong, but simply that Jonson gradually faded off the stage, except for one or two plays, and Shakespeare just stayed stuck on the stage and refused to budge. Interviewer: In “The Bridge of Language” you contrast the development of a “global unity” in the sciences with decentralization or regionalism in the arts. Why do the arts tend, as you put it, “to bring increasingly small areas into articulateness” [NFMC, 318]? Frye: Well, that seems to be what has happened. The example that I give in “The Bridge of Language” is that there is no such thing as American literature, there is Mississippi literature and New England literature and Western literature. There is something vegetable about the creative imagination that needs a rather limited environment. Consequently you learn about America through its imagination, through its literature, by adding up these various regional writers, and the same thing has been emphatically true of Canada in the last twenty years. It’s simply that the imagination can never be discarnate or dehumanized so as to take a sort of global perspective. Interviewer: You have said that the scientist quantifies his data while the poet qualifies his [NFMC, 320]. Could you elaborate on this? Frye: It’s a matter of common knowledge, I think, that the work of the scientist may begin with the same sort of hunch or intuition that the work of the artist does. Still, he himself can’t take it seriously until he has reduced it to some kind of mathematical formulation, some kind of equation. But for the poet or the painter the aim is to convey directly the essence of what was being seen, which is unique for everybody who sees it, and so can never be quantified. In science what you end with is something like a – b = 0; in literature what you end with is something like a = b. Although a and b are different things, nevertheless they are asserted to be the same thing. It is that metaphorical imagination that gives you a sense of quality in the sense of the whatness of the thing. Interviewer: Professor Moffat commented that in the process of scientifically quantifying an intuition it may happen that all of a sudden something works out wrong and you have to scrap years and years of work.3 So scientific work is really a gamble. Do you see anything analogous in the work of the artist?

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Frye: Oh yes. Balzac has a story called Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” of a man who worked all his life on what to everybody else was just a meaningless tangle of lines. There have been all kinds of examples of that in the history of the arts; although Balzac wasn’t consciously prophetic, he didn’t realize that this was the kind of thing people would be looking at one hundred years after his day. But it is true that artists may mistake their own abilities and waste years trying to do things that the inner voice inside them doesn’t want to do. Interviewer: I suppose the same thing could hold true for the critic. Frye: Yes, it certainly could. Interviewer: In 1938 Einstein said that “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”4 Did Einstein’s recognition of the fictional, or, if you like, mythical status of physical concepts open up a new common ground between the activity of the scientist and the activity of the poet? Frye: Oh, I think so, yes, and I think Einstein knew that. He was really saying that science is a mental fiction just as the arts are and that the question of what is really there underneath the construct we put on it is only a kind of working consensus. If a painter looks at railway tracks stretching out to the horizon he will see them meeting at the horizon. But, as Margaret Avison says, “a train doesn’t run pigeon-toed.”5 You wouldn’t get on the train if you knew that was really true; so that what is really there is a matter of a working consensus. Similarly, you can prove mathematically the atomic construction of protons and neutrons and electrons inside an object like this desk, but as a matter of ordinary social working consensus you keep on bumping into it. Interviewer: I wanted to talk for a moment about your Anatomy of Criticism, which is interesting for our topic simply because you have called it an “anatomy.” To what extent does this title indicate that you have used scientific principles in the study of literature? Frye: Well, “anatomy” in the seventeenth century meant a kind of dissection and it also extended itself to becoming the name of a literary form. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is one of my favourite books. It is ostensibly a medical treatise on the disease of melancholy, but actually it’s an artistic reaction to the human experience. Similarly with Lyly’s

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The Anatomy of Wit, which has a slightly deprecating quality, meaning that it’s closer to satire. It’s the use of a scientific term by literature to summon up the idea of something analytic yet at the same time comprehensive that I had in mind when writing the Anatomy of Criticism. Interviewer: In the Anatomy of Criticism you suggest that “criticism” must be understood as an organized body of knowledge about art in the same way that “physics” is understood as an organized body of knowledge about nature [11/13]. If this understanding of criticism is generally accepted in the intellectual community, will humanists and scientists find themselves in a more fruitful dialogue? Frye: Yes, I think they would. With the big revolution in physics that began with Einstein and Planck you have the principle established that it’s no longer sufficient to work in a world where the scientist is the subject and the world that he’s watching is the object, because the scientist is an object too; the act of observation alters what you are observing. That of course does bring the arts and sciences close together in a common meeting ground. The social sciences, which are very largely twentiethcentury in origin, are entirely founded on the need to observe the observer. I think of criticism as ultimately a form of social science. Of course, that cuts across a lot of conditioned reflexes, and I first said that in the days when my humanist colleagues thought that what characterized the social scientist was that he wrote very badly. Well, an awful lot of literary critics write very badly too, so that’s not a very safe dividing point. I think that criticism can never be a science in the physical scientist’s orbit, that is, it can never be quantified experimentally and lead to prediction. It’s something else; it’s more like a kind of cultural anthropology or certain forms of psychology. Interviewer: Some people seem to fear the intrusion of any kind of scientific ways of working into art or criticism. Have you encountered this? Frye: Well, of course there’s always fear, and the fear is more on the part of the people who have spent their lives with pen and pencil. There are certain aspects of literary criticism that you need a computer for and there is no point in running away from the fact; it doesn’t make literary criticism dehumanized. In fact, the thing I’ve been attacking all my life is the notion that the humanities have a monopoly on what is genuinely human. That is an illusion by which certain types of humanists try to fortify themselves but it just doesn’t work.

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Interviewer: In the Anatomy you said that “one is forced to wonder whether [literary] scholars realize the implications of the fact that their work is scientific” [8/10]. How does the situation stand twenty-five years after the publication of the Anatomy? Frye: There has been a lot of double-talk written since then, and also a great many other areas like semiotics and linguistics have developed. The Anatomy, published in 1957, begins to look like a sort of blazed trail through a forest. Now it’s a paved road. I said in the Anatomy that either criticism is scientific or hundreds of people are wasting their lives in a pseudoscience like palmistry. I think that is quantitatively much more true now than it was then. Interviewer: I wanted to bring up the question of education and teaching in the humanities and sciences. When you study physics you must first spend years and years learning the math before you can really approach physics. There is, so to speak, a language barrier to cross before your studies can begin. Do you see anything analogous for the study of literature? Frye: It seems to me that the human race has developed two languages, the language of words and the language of numbers. Mathematics is increasingly the primary language in the sciences so you can’t study the sciences until you have studied the language in which they are written and with which the scientist thinks. Similarly, you can’t write until you’ve studied language to the point at which you know what you’re doing when you use words. Interviewer: Of course, most people learn a language when they are two or three years old. Is there something beyond that which you must learn to prepare you for work in criticism? Frye: Oh yes. The reason why we have compulsory education and compel children to read and write and count is that we have to have, in this very complex civilization, a world of docile and adjusted and obedient citizens. That is, you read in order to read traffic signs and you count in order to make out your income tax. But if you are going to use these languages with any freedom or any responsibility or independence there’s a long process ahead of you yet. Interviewer: A book like James Joyce’s Ulysses seems to require that the reader learn a special “artistic code” before the book can begin to make

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any sense. The same thing might be said of modern painting. Is it going to become increasingly the case that a special sort of training will be required to understand modern art? Frye: Not necessarily. When someone says he “understands” abstract painting he may mean that he can respond to it. For most of the arts that is what is really primary. You may feel a response without being totally aware of all the details of what you are responding to. One thing, of course, is that it’s what the creative person does now that the rest of society will be doing a hundred years later. That curious sort of prophetic quality in the arts is something that I think a lot of people respond to. Interviewer: You have said that literature, unlike history, does not tell us what happened but rather what happens [AC, 83/76]. That is to say, it reveals the universal forms of human experience in and through the representation of particular experiences. Now science also relates particular experiences to general laws. Does this mean that science and literature may be understood as two different ways of mediating between the particular and the universal in human experience? Frye: I would think that there was certainly something more than an analogy connecting the two things. From something that goes on in the synapses of a rat learning a maze you can learn something about the way the nervous system operates. Faulkner can confine his energies to an unpronounceable county in Mississippi and get the Nobel prize in Sweden because there seems to be a law of literature that the more particular and specific your subject matter the more universal its appeal is. Interviewer: The central metaphor that Professor Moffat used to describe the activity of the scientist was “imagination in a straitjacket.” Is there a straitjacket upon the imagination of the artist? Frye: Actually, looking at what the nuclear physicists did in the first half of the twentieth century I’d have said it was very largely speculative cosmology, and the amount of “straitjacketing” it had to fit into was applied at a very much later stage. The wildest dreams seem to me to have come out of that period—Paul Dirac’s conception of antimatter, for example. I think the same thing is true of the arts. You can have an imagination as far out as Salvador Dali or Edgar Allan Poe but once you start to write a specific story or paint a specific picture then you’re in a very strictly limited area.

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Interviewer: Today it seems an established thing that at least by the time a person gets to university he has either chosen to go into the humanities or the sciences. Do you think that it is possible or worthwhile to get a joint humanistic and scientific education today? Frye: I think that what it is essential to do is to get the feeling that wherever you happen to be is the centre of all knowledge and that no matter what it is you’re studying in detail you’re not excluding anything else; you’re right in the middle of it, you’re right where the action is. One doesn’t need to be in a hurry about establishing connections with things that seem most remote from whatever it is that you’re specializing in. I think it’s perfectly normal for a person to devote their energies to the study of literature or the study of a science and realize that for the time being their knowledge of what they’re not studying is a bit hazy but still relevant. It’s when you start saying that it’s not relevant that you’ve really had it. If you realize that it is relevant then there’s nothing to stop you from branching out into it.

60 The Art of Bunraku Conducted 18 December 1981

From the transcript supplied and dated by Canadian filmmaker Marty Gross. His first feature film was The Lovers’ Exile, an adaptation of the classic Japanese drama by Monzaemon Chikamatsu (1673–1724) originally known in English as The Courier for Hell. The story concerns a penniless courier-shop worker, Chubei, who is in love with the prostitute Umegawa and steals money to buy her freedom; the lovers are forced to flee. In the traditional art of Bunraku from Osaka, the story and dialogue are chanted by a narrator to the music of a samisen player, while the story is acted out by life-sized puppets manipulated by three men each, one fully visible and two cloaked head to foot in black. The work was filmed in Japan with English subtitles; it was shown in Japan in 1980 and later was screened for the Fryes. Frye, asked for a statement, suggested instead an interview, which was arranged with the additional participation of critic Robert Fulford. The film is available on DVD.

Gross: Was this your first encounter with Bunraku? Frye: No. I had visited Japan and was taken to Osaka and had seen a performance of a Chikamatsu play—or half of it; I was exhausted by the end of the first half. So I knew something about what the whole ensemble was. When I saw Marty Gross’s film I realized chiefly what an extraordinary synchronizing job he had managed to make of the total impression of the original. Fulford: What happens in the theatre? I still have never experienced it. How does the experience of the theatre differ from the film experience? Frye: Well, in the first place the puppets are being manipulated by pup-

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peteers. You’re often told that as time goes on you forget about the puppeteers and just concentrate on the puppets. To some extent that happens, but what really happens is that the puppeteers get absorbed into your impression of the play, so that you get the feeling of human characters being watched and manipulated by other forces. Fulford: The material I’ve read about Bunraku sometimes emphasizes Bertolt Brecht’s interest in it and how he drew from it. It seems to me that that’s one basis for the whole alienation effect. Frye: Yes, I suppose the puppet theatre is really the centre of a conception of alienation. But your ultimate reaction is not one of alienation: it’s not thinking that, after all, we are not puppets, it’s more the thought of, my God, maybe we are puppets. Fulford: What about the idea that Brecht obviously seized, that when you see this, you can imagine a theatre in which the audience looks with its thoughts—that is to say, looks with its mind rather than its feelings. I think it never happened either in Germany or in his English translations. Does it work at all? Do we logically think about these things? Do we step further back than we would in ordinary theatre? Frye: Perhaps initially at any rate. But I think the attempt to suppress the involvement of feelings doesn’t work in any form of drama. As you say, it doesn’t work in Brecht either. You can be as deeply moved when you are at a distance. It is partly a matter of perspective. It’s rather like the difference between a realistic play about a promiscuous lover such as Don Juan and the Mozart opera: with the music you feel more distanced from the action, but you aren’t less deeply moved. Gross: One reaction I’ve had to the film from people not familiar with Bunraku has been that they try to separate and intellectualize the various elements of the theatrical construct, but find themselves unable to sustain this, except for brief moments. * * * Frye: I think the thing Brecht was really getting at was the contrast between a passive involvement of feelings—where you’re acted on by the action—and an involvement which is active. That seems to me to be what Bunraku is admirably designed to do. Fulford: Would you say that’s one way this differs from a typical, oldfashioned, sentimental Western play? That is, in outline this play is very

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much like a Victorian melodrama, yet it has a very different effect. At least, on us—I want to ask Marty about the effect he sees in Japan itself. But would you see that as a difference between our traditional theatre and Bunraku? Frye: It certainly is a difference between the plots of Chikamatsu and what we would call melodrama. I think that melodrama prefabricates the audience’s feelings. It sets up the standards and values that the audience brings into the theatre with them. Consequently, you may be moved to tears by the seduction of a Victorian heroine in a way you would not be in a story like this Lovers’ Exile. But the feelings are just as intense. It is just a matter of not responding passively to a stimulus from the action. Fulford: In other words, you get more involved. But in this case you don’t think much about it, do you? If I can mention Brecht once more, he imagined the audiences for his new epic theatre thinking about the social questions he presented. Nothing like that happens here, does it? I don’t look at this and then say, “Now I understand something about postmedieval Japan that I didn’t understand before.” Frye: Of course, my background is more Shakespeare than Brecht. To me, Shakespeare is a dramatist who consistently says, “You’re to look and you’re to listen, and the more intently the better. But for God’s sake, don’t try to think; leave the thinking to Shakespearean scholars, who don’t read anybody but each other, and experience the play.” Fulford: How would you compare that with The Lovers’ Exile? Frye: The Lovers’ Exile is not unlike certain types of Shakespearean comedy, Measure for Measure for example—well, it’s not a comedy, of course. I think that what my experience of the Bunraku play did for me was to revolutionize my whole feeling about Shakespearean romance—the plays of his last stage, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. It didn’t really change my views of those plays but it consolidated them, because I’d always realized that in the romances the characters are scaled down. They are not titanic characters like Hamlet or Othello; they’re looked at from a distance. Very often there’s someone like Prospero setting up the action, so that the other characters seem like his puppets. In Pericles and Cymbeline there are gods, Diana and Jupiter, who seem to be manipulating things off stage.

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Fulford: How do you relate that to Chikamatsu? Frye: In Chikamatsu the same thing is true. The characters are being controlled by forces outside themselves. After sitting for four hours in that hot stuffy theatre in Osaka, my mind did a sort of hysterical backflip. I began to get the illusion—a very powerful illusion—that these puppets were under the impression that they were making all these sounds and movements themselves. Fulford: They do seem to be dragging the men around after them after a while, don’t they? Frye: One could write a very good ghost story about a puppet that gets loose from these men. [Fulford and Gross discuss the degree of understanding and expertise of the audience and performers. The apprentice puppeteers themselves are usually not highly educated or analytical, but learn their craft as a ritual, Fulford offering the analogy of some people’s participation in the Catholic Mass. The narrators learn their part by rote but have a more theoretical understanding of what is going on.] Fulford: Perhaps the people who performed in Sophocles’ time didn’t understand it any better than the Bunraku people. Gross: Dr. Frye was saying that the dolls are dragging the men around, and I would also maintain that there is some kind of tradition that is pulling everybody through this. When the narrator utters three sounds, everybody moves. Frye: Just before I attended the theatre, I attended a tea ceremony. I couldn’t get anything out of that and was quite disappointed. I realized later that it was probably the conditioning of my Christian background: that I simply could not take in the notion of an aesthetic ritual. I think your analogy to the Mass is very close. But I think what is going on in the puppet theatre is really a Mass for people who have suspended belief as well as disbelief. That is, they’re entering into something but not responding passively to it. Or at least, the source of activity carries along the puppets with the puppeteers, as you say. It also tends to carry the audience as well, even though that particular audience remained, from all observation, quite detached—they just went on meditatively eating their lunch. Still, they know they were a part of it.

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Gross: They know when to put down their lunch, too. Performances tend to be long but quite rhythmic with various parts of a work requiring closer attention. The audience knows that Bunraku is a stronghold of a particular Japanese world view. The same conflicts continually recur: questions of love, money, and honour. In particular the conflict between obligations and one’s instincts or one’s dreams for oneself, known in Japanese as “giri” and “ninjo.” [Gross and Fulford discuss the audience for Bunraku, which is still quite limited; the theatre is subsidized by the government and “a lot of school children are dragged in and out.”] Fulford: I remember reading some notes you did, Professor Frye, on puppets on television.1 I think you referred to the fact that the children watching Sesame Street are watching masks, in which there is essentially no expression compared to a human face, although they will twist the faces a bit. I wonder if you see any relationships between that kind of ritualization and the puppet theatre we’re talking about? Frye: I think the ritualization is there, and also the distancing that goes with it. The great pioneer of that in the movies is Charlie Chaplin, who realized that the central figure in his kind of movie had to be a puppet figure. Fulford: Even walk like a puppet. Frye: The things that happen to Chaplin in the movies are profoundly moving things. But the action is distanced to that degree. It’s something I think children respond to without worrying about the kind of cultural conditioning that adults are apt to have. Fulford: How would that relate to The Lovers’ Exile and that kind of ritual? Frye: I think that children would have much less difficulty with the conventions of the public theatre. In Dickens’s England, for example, when a Punch and Judy show was shown, it was very largely to a child audience, and the same thing is true here. If Bunraku is, as Mr. Gross says, dying in Japan, it’s partly because of its being too much of an adult cultural experience. If they’re sending in school children, that’s a good idea. Fulford: The puppets here have been taken over almost completely by children’s culture. I suppose if a puppet theatre was advertised as an adult show, it would be a great surprise to everyone.

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Gross: Part of the success of Bunraku is the continual surprise. So many aspects of what we see are contrary to our notions of puppetry. The men are more puppets than the puppets are. Looking for some sign of life, we see it only in the inanimate. Frye: That’s the reason for the backflip that I mentioned. Gross: First there’s this extremely stylized chanting. Off to the side men are declaiming every manner of emotion and every manner of thought. When I first approached Bunraku I found it a very modern phenomenon because of the matter-of-fact artifice combined with extreme interest in surfaces. The relationship between the cadence of the voices and the visual movement is as important as what’s being told. Fulford: In Western literature, there is this long tradition, or countertradition, of self-reference in the novel or the play: at a certain point the eighteenth-century novelist addresses you and says, “Dear reader,” or in a play you may suddenly have the chorus speak to you. But what is interesting here is the constant reminder that this is only a show. There is never a moment when you can think that that creature or puppet is a living thing. Gross: But you said that you did forget, Dr. Frye. Frye: I forgot that. I think what you are never allowed to forget is that the audience is an audience. You don’t get that individualizing quality that you get in cultures like Victorian England. You get developments of drama and music in cultures where there is a strong feeling of the group as an entity. Gross: The audience group as an entity? Frye: Yes. I never feel that Shakespeare, for example, is talking to me over the heads of the audience. That’s very rare in drama. You can get individualized responses in certain types of plays, but it certainly wouldn’t happen in anything as stylized as Bunraku. Fulford: You would never weep at Bunraku, would you? Gross: People certainly do, but I believe it’s a ritual weeping, not really an individual emotional response. The play triggers certain buttons standing by to be pushed. In Western culture, too, you’ll hear someone say, “I’ve read The Old Curiosity Shop ten times and I always weep when little Nell dies.”

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Frye: I suspect that, as Marty says, that is ritualized, too. Gross: I had an interesting experience seeing Gone with the Wind at the University of Hawaii—a huge hall and it was packed. There was all this mumbling going on and I couldn’t understand why everyone was talking. It was so aggravating. Sure enough, they were mouthing the lines. [Fulford discusses the human need for ritual, as seen for instance in the intense emotion of the audience at a Beatles concert where the music could not be heard above the audience’s screams.] Frye: You need different kinds of rituals at different times. There is something in the pantomime, where you don’t hear words, that has a very direct childlike appeal. So it didn’t matter whether you heard the Beatles, as long as you saw them. The response to the aural stimulus is something that develops much more gradually. Gross: In the Bunraku theatre, it is quite difficult to determine where the literary understanding is supplanted by the emotional absorption in the act and the power of the music. When I have shown the film in Japan, many people have commented that Bunraku was somehow clarified by virtue of the English subtitles. Fulford: These were Japanese who could read English. They saw your subtitles, which were an edited version—the film is a cut-down version of Bunraku—and they said, that’s what it’s all about. Frye: I was told by a Japanese scholar that the Japanese themselves often use the Arthur Waley translation of The Tale of Genji as a kind of crib to the original.2 [Fulford and Gross discuss the technique, which was to shoot frontally in an empty theatre. Gross also tried to link each movement or image with a subtitle; the film “needed to be shot and cadenced according to the phrasing of the narrative.”] Gross: I wasn’t really trying to make it equivalent to the theatrical experience, I was trying to crystallize the artifice. Showing an audience would undermine all this. The audience would particularize the moment, by suggesting a particular setting of time and place: there someone is smiling, here someone watching attentively, etc. Frye: Very glad you left that out.

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Gross: I am very curious to know if this design or concept of the film, as I explain it, has any relationship to what you saw? Frye: That was what impressed me: it did. I was certainly aware, all through my own experience of it, of this direct frontal view. As I say, the audience was reasonably detached about the action, but you were always part of the audience. I didn’t know a word of Japanese, but a lot of the Japanese perhaps didn’t know clearly what was going on either, so you just didn’t worry about that. All you had to do was face forward and look and listen. I thought your synchronizing of that was admirable. * * * Fulford: The film after a while seemed to me to be erotic. I can’t remember ever feeling any sort of erotic atmosphere in a puppet show before and I wanted to know if you had the same feeling? Frye: There was a certain something in the theme that had that. I didn’t feel it myself. I understand the film was banned someplace. Gross: Nova Scotia.3 Frye: My secretary [said], we saw an obscene movie and didn’t even notice. Fulford: I think in my case it was a combination of the androgynous quality of the man reading the woman’s part plus the intensity of the music and the intensity of the speaking. And the theme of course. Gross: The interaction between Umegawa and her puppeteer is fascinating. He plays up to her a bit—perhaps more than he ought to. Frye: I think that any kind of sustained intensity is going to have a connection with the erotic sooner or later—the feel of listening to the St. Matthew Passion. Gross: May I ask your opinion of the attractions for the modern artist and thinker of Bunraku as an art form? Frye: I can certainly understand that, because the tendency in theatre in the last thirty or forty years has been to increase stylization. I think of the man in Yeats’s autobiography who was going to write a play for actors with masks. But they wouldn’t wear the masks, they would just carry them in their hands. It would express his contempt for reality if they actually wore them. I think it is that attempt to ritualize the theatrical experience which was very prevalent in Yeats’s time, and still is to a very

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considerable degree. I think that’s brought Bunraku into the centre of our dramatic experience in somewhat the same way as Hokusai and Hiroshige became central in the Impressionist period.4 Gross: Do you think it is a drive to strengthen and crystallize feeling, or is it a drive to look at the mechanics of the thing? Frye: I think it’s a drive to intensify concentration. In the early part of the twentieth century, we were living through a period of broken and divided attention. And the attempt to overcome that with the sense of focus again, the sense of the audience being continuously present as an audience, is part of the reaction against the disappearance of the audience in things like television. I think there is always a movement in culture which is counter to what the general environment is producing. Gross: When I started this production I placed on the front of my notebook a quote from Borges: “It prevents the spectators from forgetting unreality, which is a necessary condition of art.”5 Would you agree? Frye: Yes, I’d put it in a slightly different way. The distinction between reality and illusion, which we come in to the theatre with, gets reversed in the theatre, where the illusion is the reality. In a play like The Tempest, for example, there is a very strong sense that, as T.S. Eliot says, humankind cannot bear very much reality.6 I think that what the romances of Shakespeare are saying is that humankind can’t bear any at all, except in the form of an illusion. Gross: We go with the idea of losing ourselves somehow, but we are not allowed to lose ourselves. Frye: No. We are presented with an illusion which we always have to remember is an illusion. But it is also as close to reality as we are ever going to get. Gross: So that in order to see something as real we need to have it presented to us as a fiction. Frye: As a fiction and also as conventionalized, as a ritual. Gross: Maybe that’s why Bunraku is so important. Performers present a fiction not only by putting on the persona themselves but by putting on an enactment of the fiction. I’m not sure that I see it as ritualized quite as you do.

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Frye: Well, I don’t know, except that I think that the word “ritualized” could be misleading. In one of Thomas Hardy’s novels, he is speaking of their local people putting on a St. George and the Dragon play and he remarks, “You can always tell the authentic folk ritual by the fact that it bores the hell out of everyone connected with it.”7 But that is because it isn’t a skill. You don’t have to apprentice for twenty years to be the hobbyhorse in a St. George play. When it takes as much skill and as much practice as Bunraku does, the performance is an act of faith, as well as an act of vision.

61 On The Great Code (I) Recorded 18 March 1982

From CBC audiotapes, reference nos. 820406-1 and 820407-1, transcribed by Carrie O’Grady. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1982 for an appointment with producer Robert Prowse. Frye was interviewed by Don Harron in connection with the publication on 10 February 1982 of The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), to which the page numbers in the text refer, giving first the original and then the Collected Works page number. The interview was broadcast in five parts on the CBC’s Morningside, 5–9 April 1982.

I Harron: Where does the term “The Great Code” come from? Frye: It comes from a series of aphorisms that Blake wrote around the margins of an engraving he did of the Laocoön, and . . . Harron: That’s those three guys all tied up together. Frye: Yes, that’s right. And he had several remarks there about the Bible, and in the course of it he says that the Old and the New Testaments are the “Great Code of Art.” Of course originally “code” was a word that had rather specific reference to the Bible itself, whereas now it means communication theory, so I’m simply using the title for all it’s worth: for all its echoes together. Harron: What is the extra meaning that the Bible had? Frye: Well, it’s closely connected with the conception of a Scripture as a

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code of laws, and the original manuscripts of the Bible, at least the earliest ones we have, are mostly codexes. That’s almost the last word used in my book. Harron: What is the last word used in the book? Frye: Well, I’m not sure just what the very last word is, but I do stop with an Anglo-Saxon riddle that talks about the preparation of a Biblical codex in Anglo-Saxon times.1 Harron: Is your point that the Bible is a pivotal influence in our cultural life as well as our spiritual life? Is that the point that Blake was making? Frye: Yes, yes it was. He was very anxious to see the Bible absorbed into Western culture in an imaginative way, as well as a doctrinal way, and that was why he called it the “Great Code of Art,” because it was something that influences the creative imagination. Harron: Now are we talking about the Bible meant to be read as living literature (which is a title I remember from the ’40s or the ’30s)? Frye: Well, that tends to lead one to think of the Bible as literature, and that is not really what I’m after, nor what I think Blake meant. I think that the Bible has literary qualities—it must have, or it would not have influenced literature so precisely and specifically as it has done—but it’s more a matter of seeing how poets traditionally have read the Bible, why they would read the Bible, and assuming that they had to read it for other reasons, how they would read it as poets. Harron: I assume that John Bunyan read the Bible because he probably didn’t get to read any other book. Is that why he wrote like the Bible? Frye: That’s very largely the reason, yes. His education was certainly Bible-centred. And yet when he says in the Preface to the Pilgrim’s Progress, in that little verse poem that he writes introducing it, “I did it my own self to gratify,” he’s talking very much as a poet would do. Harron: There are two passages I’m always puzzled about. One is the beginning of the Old Testament (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) and the other is the first verse of the Gospel according to St. John (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”). Is there a significance between those two passages? Do they reflect on each other?

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Frye: I think the opening of John is intended to be a kind of Christian gloss on the opening of Genesis. In the account of creation in Genesis, one of the first things said is, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” In other words, it’s the saying, the word of God, that is the creative agent. Harron: You mean that the world was created by one word from God? Frye: That is the way it’s explained in the opening of Genesis, that God speaks, and things come into being. That suggested to me that creation has more to do with human consciousness than it has to do with the beginning of the order of nature. Harron: You say in your book that the concept of God can be considered as a verb, not a noun [17/35]. Could you explain that? Frye: Well, God introduces himself to Moses in the burning bush; he gives himself a name, but he also says that his real name is “I am that I am.” The scholars say that should really be rendered as “I will be that I will be” or “what I will be,” and that suggests that our ordinary noun thinking, where we associate God with things and objects, is not really adequate. It’s more a process completing itself that is involved in the conception “God,” and so we would understand what God was more clearly if we tended to think of him more as a verb than as a noun. Harron: Is the Bible that we read today adequate, because it’s a book that’s been translated, and it’s been edited, and it’s been expurgated— what do we get of the original? Frye: Well, we get quite a mixture of things. I keep quoting from the King James version in my book, because it is not only the most accessible and familiar version, but it’s also the version which was intended by its translators in 1611 to be a traditional rather than a new translation. They say that very clearly in their address to the reader. That means in practice that it’s very close to the Vulgate tradition which is at the centre of the Catholic tradition, and that’s one reason why I use it. It’s essentially a Vulgate translation, so it comes close to the Bible that has always been used from the beginning on. Harron: But it is a translation, and you say there are very important puns in the Bible which would surely get lost in translation. Frye: They do get lost; they’re only mentioned in the margins, but the

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translator has to take account of them, and of course that means what it always means in literature (and any structure of words), that translation is a settling for a second best. Harron: Puns you don’t think of as being serious. They’re sometimes a deflection of the original course of a thought. But are they important to the Bible? Frye: Puns are absolutely essential to poetic thinking, because the poet is establishing the powers of words rather than defining things. When he uses words he uses them in as many senses as possible; that is, ambiguity is merely a difficulty and an annoyance in scientific writing, but it’s a structural principle in poetic writing, and so the notion that puns are not serious goes along with the notion of poetry as not serious. Harron: You say in your book that poetry came before prose [209/230]. Frye: Always, yes. Harron: Do you mean written poetry or spoken poetry? Frye: I mean in this case spoken, because writing was very largely used for commercial purposes before it extended into anything that we call literature. Harron: But do you mean that when man found human speech, he was poetic before he was prosaic? Frye: Well, I think that the kind of language that emerges as having a certain kind of cultural ascendancy must have been in the first place poetic, because poetry depends on rather simple schemata like rhyme and alliteration and rhythm, and consequently it’s much easier to remember than prose is. If you look at the Anglo-Saxon kings, you find that their names all begin with the same letter, and that’s very largely so that the poet could hitch them into alliterative verse. Harron: You say that there are three ages of literature, exemplified by Homer, Socrates (or Plato, his biographer in a sense), and Francis Bacon [6–15/23–33]. Would you like to elaborate on that? Frye: Well, I think of these as phases in the culturally ascendant language. That is, you start off with a poetic language where the subject and the object are not very clearly separated, so that the—

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Harron: That’s how God can be a verb and a noun at the same time? Frye: Yes. It’s in some respects a primitive use of language, but then every human mind, including twentieth-century minds, is a primitive mind. That’s the bedrock of our language. Then we begin to get a language of abstraction, where words are thought of as following from thoughts, and the thoughts in their turn follow from the logos, from the word. Harron: Thought rather than felt, maybe? Frye: Yes. This conception of language used abstractly dominates from Plato and Aristotle’s time down to Kant and Hegel, because for one thing it’s an instrument of authority. Harron: So we get Socratic dialogues—questions rather than statements—is that it? Frye: Well, the Socratic dialogues mark the beginning of a revolution in language from the metaphorical to the dialectic. That is, it horrified Plato that poets were the great teachers (including Homer), and he thought philosophers ought to be the teachers. The Socratic dialogues are a form of his propaganda. Harron: Plato was wrong? Frye: Not wrong, no, but he was initiating another social use of language, and what that social use was comes out much more clearly in books like the Laws, where Socrates doesn’t appear. Harron: Do we see these different forms reflected in the Bible—the Homeric and the Socratic? Frye: To some degree we do, but the Bible has always avoided abstract language, even in the New Testament. There are no true abstract arguments in the Bible, and it’s held its social function partly because it’s so concrete, and so close to poetry. While it’s close to poetry, its intentions are not purely or wholly poetical. It’s more a form of rhetoric, of oratory, of something that’s addressed directly to the reader in a way that the poet doesn’t address people. Harron: How about Francis Bacon? Was he a “Renaissance man”? Frye: Yes, Bacon was the initiator, or one of the initiators, of a descriptive

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approach to language, where the word is evoked by the thing, and that means that the criterion for the word has to be found in nature. That tends to make the culturally ascendant use of language from the sixteenth century onward increasingly a reflection of nature. Harron: So is Bacon writing history, as opposed to poetry? Frye: Well, history would be included. But he was really more interested in inductive science. Harron: What’s the difference between the Bible and history? Frye: In history, you have a set of words which are paralleling a set of events in time, so that history relates primarily to the past. In the Bible you have what I call myth, which is an abstraction from history, which gives you historical events so that they relate to the present and to the experiences of the people who are reading the story. II Harron: You have said in your book The Great Code that the Bible is a gigantic myth. Now a lot of people would be offended by that but you obviously have another meaning for the word “myth.” Frye: I certainly do. I think that the tendency to think that myth means something not really true goes with a contempt for poetry; there’s a traditional belief that poets are a form of licensed liars, and naturally I have no use for that view of literature, having taught it all my life. To me, a myth is the exact opposite of a story which is not really true. Harron: You mean it’s more than true? Frye: Well, in a sense it’s more than true, because it involves the lives of the people who are reading it. In other words, a myth is a story of particular concern and importance for its society. Harron: What do you make of people like Velikovsky, who’s now coming back into fashion? He’s the man who takes the Bible myths and attempts to prove them scientifically: that the sun did stand still for Joshua.2 Frye: Yes. Well, I don’t particularly object to that, I don’t dismiss it out of hand; if his evidence holds up, then it’s evidence. The only thing I would

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say is that if you accept a criterion of truth external to the Bible to prove the truth of the Bible, you’re applying a standard that the Bible itself does not recognize. Harron: You have an interesting quote—and I hope I get it accurately— “There is no historical evidence that Jesus ever lived.”3 Frye: I don’t know that I would say it quite as blatantly as that; I would say that there is no evidence for Jesus as a major historical figure outside the New Testament. There are references to him outside the New Testament, but they would hardly amount to making him a world-changing figure. That is entirely within the New Testament, as far as I can see. Harron: But is the fact that he is rarely mentioned irrelevant? Frye: No. I think it’s clear that the writers of the New Testament preferred it that way; they preferred to keep the evidence for Jesus sealed within the Bible itself, because they didn’t bother looking for evidence for the historical existence of Jesus, which they could easily have found. The only kind of evidence they were interested in was the agreement between what the Old Testament, as they read it, said would happen to the Messiah, and what the Gospels record as having happened to Jesus. Harron: And do those two accounts conform? Frye: Well, they keep pointing out the resemblances, and through the account of the Crucifixion, for example, there are certain specific references to the Psalms: the fact that his bones are not broken on the Cross, the fact that he says, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—those are from Psalm 22. The Gospel writers don’t just make these echoes, they also quote specifically, and say, “This is what is said in the Scriptures,” and are urging you to look up the reference yourself. Harron: So are we dealing with prophecy or editing? Frye: We’re dealing with both. We’re dealing with an editing process which regards the life of Christ as a fulfilling of a prophecy. Harron: So the New Testament fulfils the Old Testament? Frye: That is the view in the New Testament itself; the New Testament itself regards itself as the key to the Old Testament, as explaining what it really means. Harron: And what does the Old Testament regard itself as?

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Frye: In the Old Testament itself you have a work of the Revelation of God, and it consists of various aspects, law and prophecy and wisdom and the like. Harron: You’ve divided the Bible into seven phases—I assume it’s you? Frye: Yes. Harron: Could we just enumerate them? The first is creation; and then there’s revolution; then the law; then after the law comes wisdom; and then prophecy, then gospel, and finally apocalypse. Now, how do these correspond to the various books of the Bible? Do they follow in a linear direction? Frye: They’re more or less linear. Creation, of course, comes in Genesis. What I mean by revolution is Israel and Egypt in Exodus, which is the second book. Harron: Oh, you don’t mean kicking out of the garden, then? Frye: Not that, no. That’s not a revolutionary movement, that’s the fall of man, which was part of the creation. Then that is followed by law, because when the Israelites get out of Egypt they wander in the wilderness and the law is given to them there. And then we have wisdom which is the individual response to the law, which is in the various books associated with Solomon. Harron: The Koran has a system of law too. Is there a connection? Frye: There is a connection, yes, because the Koran is related to the Bible. The Koran really is a work of prophecy which incorporates a certain amount of law— Harron: Different laws from the Bible? Frye: Some of them are from the Bible, some of them are peculiar to the Koran. But it’s like Christianity in regarding the Old Testament as primarily a work of prophecy. Harron: Is the Bible then a kind of social code of human organization? Frye: It’s that among other things, yes. Harron: What about wisdom? Is that Solomon? Everybody thinks of him as the wise man.

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Frye: Well, Solomon is the typical wise man so he is associated with a number of the books of the Bible that are called wisdom books— although I don’t think that any scholar would claim that he wrote them all—and the real meaning of wisdom to me is the permeation of law into the individual life, as the individual’s response to law. Harron: Does that mean a man who doesn’t need the law to remind him of what he should do? Frye: Well—perhaps in a sense it does, yes, but it means also a continuous study of law, and guiding your life by precedent and tradition from the past, and by what is called in the King James Bible “prudence,” in relation to the future. Harron: And after that comes prophecy. You say the whole of the Bible, of the Old Testament, is a prophecy? Frye: That’s how Christianity thinks of the Old Testament, yes. Harron: A Judaic scholar would disagree. Frye: I think in Judaism the Old Testament is regarded as primarily the Torah, which is a word we often translate as “law,” although it includes a good deal that is not law. It would include prophecy, certainly. But the notion that the Old Testament is essentially a number of prophetic anticipations of what is revealed in Christ is of course peculiar to Christianity. Harron: Do you mean the prophets all said, “Some day, He will come”? Frye: That is how Christianity read the prophets, yes. Harron: And do you read them the same way, as a Christian? Frye: Well, I read them that way because I’m concerned with the Christian Bible, and I’m concerned with the Christian Bible because it’s the one that has been important for Western culture ever since. Harron: And what about the gospel—that’s the beginning of the New Testament, is it? Frye: Yes, the gospel is the revelation of all the phases that have preceded, and it consequently internalizes the law and wisdom and prophecy. Harron: And “apocalypse”—that’s a word that strikes terror into the

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hearts of people who read it, if they’ve seen Apocalypse Now—it means the end, to some people! Is that right? Frye: Well, it can mean that, although I prefer not to think of the apocalypse as a big show of fireworks starting next Tuesday. I’d prefer to think of it as the ultimate expanding of human consciousness, which, as I see it, is what is meant by the term “revelation” as applied to the Bible. III Harron: You mention in your book that other cultures weren’t nearly as interested in words as the Hebrews were. The Egyptians, for example [201/221]. Frye: Yes. The Egyptians didn’t seem to have so much interest in recording their mythology, and what they did record seems to be confined to temples, pretty well. The Isis–Osiris myth, obviously, was central to Egyptian life for thousands of years, but we don’t seem to have a continuous account of it before Plutarch, who was a Greek traveller. Harron: Were they content to build things like pyramids, and make their statement that way? Frye: I suppose most of their cultural energy went into monuments, yes. Harron: You say the Hebrews were not very good builders, that Solomon’s temple was probably built by imported labour [200/221]? Frye: Yes, I think that’s true. There was a kind of joke about the Hebrews being an unhandy sort of people, who are not famous for their artefacts. It’s something that Josephus glances at in the course of his history.4 Harron: Is he a Roman historian? Frye: He was Jewish, but he has a Roman name, and he was writing around the time of the destruction of Judah by the Roman armies. Harron: I got the impression from your book and from history that they weren’t good at anything except words. Frye: Well, certainly they were politically generally losers. They formed a crossroad between more powerful empires, and the only periods of relative prosperity they had were in the intervals between the decline of one world empire and the rise of the next one.

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Harron: But they were always commenting on these events? Frye: They commented on them to the extent of working out a version of history, which anticipates revolutionary theories of history in that the important events of history are the ones that are still to happen. Harron: I see. Well, weren’t they winners at some time? What about King David, wasn’t he a winner? Frye: That was one of the two periods of relative independence and prosperity, because David and Solomon rose at the time that the Egyptian power had declined, and the Assyrian power had not yet arisen in full strength. The second time was the Maccabaean period, between the Syrian Empire and the Roman Empire. Harron: They’re those heroes who rose up and said, “We’re not going to take this any more”? Frye: Yes, they were the ones who established independence for Judaea from the Seleucids. Harron: One of your statements is that the Bible is a divine comedy [169/190]. Perhaps you’d better explain, before we get letters and phone calls. Frye: I think of the narrative of the Bible as having roughly the shape of a U, that is, you get a great many stories repeated over and over again in the Bible: some protagonist, usually Israel, is in a state of relative independence and prosperity, then goes in for disobedience, and consequently is overwhelmed by enemies and is occupied and enslaved and humiliated. Then a deliverer comes and brings it back to the state it was in before. That is particularly obvious in the Book of Judges; but it contains the entire Bible, and it’s a shape that’s close to the shape of comedy. Harron: You mean we’re up, we’re down, and then by the end of act 3 we’re up again? Frye: By the end of act 5, usually. Harron: So are you saying that the Resurrection is a kind of comic finish? Frye: It’s a comedy in the sense in which Dante called his big sacred poem a comedy. That is, it deals with the rising rhythm of ascent, and

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there’s a hint of that at the end of comedy, where the hero and the heroine are allowed to marry in spite of the obstructions, just as the hero of the Bible, the Messiah, redeems his bride, who is the Church, and a new society is crystallized in the final act. Harron: And this pattern is repeated all through the Bible—up, and down, and up again. Are there any tragic figures in the Bible, people who don’t get up again? Frye: There are, but the Bible’s view of tragedy is rather oblique, because it doesn’t accept what is really essential, at any rate to Greek tragedy, and that’s the conception of the semi-divine hero. The most tragic figure in the Bible, I think, is King Saul, David’s predecessor, who starts out as a man of great physical strength and courage, and a fair-minded man with a good deal of shrewdness and wisdom, but who never seems to be able to do anything right, and finally disintegrates in somewhat the same way that Macbeth does. Harron: But by the end of the apocalypse it is an upper, not a downer. Frye: Yes, the Bible begins practically on page 1 with man being supplied with the tree and the water of life, which he loses; the last page talks about the restoring of the tree and the water of life to man. IV Harron: In dealing with the imagery in the Bible, you talk about types and antitypes. What do you mean by those terms? Frye: Well, I’m speaking of the traditional way in which Christianity has read the Old Testament as a series of anticipations of what is more clearly revealed in the New Testament. St. Augustine said that in the Old Testament, the New Testament is concealed, and in the New Testament, the Old Testament is revealed.5 It’s the concealing of the New Testament in the Old that makes what happens in it “types” of what are revealed—in the Christian view—in the New Testament, which are therefore called “antitypes.” Harron: Can you give me an example? Frye: The story of Noah’s ark, which comes to rest on top of Mount Ararat in the middle of a drowned world—according to St. Augustine, that’s a type of the founding of the Christian church.6

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Harron: On a rock. Frye: And then, when Moses dies outside the Promised Land, the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land is carried out by his successor Joshua, and Joshua has the same name as Jesus (that’s merely the Greek form of the word “Joshua”), so that Joshua’s conquest of Canaan is a type of Jesus’ conquest of the Promised Land for mankind, the spiritual kingdom. Harron: You mentioned that parody is sometimes used in the Bible. Frye: The Bible has a binary system of imagery, of which part refers to an ideal world, or what I call in the book the apocalyptic or revealed world, and then there are also demonic images, which are concerned with tyranny: the kingdoms of Egypt and Babylon, and other symbols of alien power in the world. Those are of two different kinds: there’s the temporary prosperity of Egypt and Assyria, which employs the same images that are used for the ideal world, but they are only going to last a short time and then they’ll collapse. And then there’s another set of demonic images, which are the “You just wait” demonic, which tells you what is going to happen to these kingdoms eventually. Harron: Small boys love to look through the Bible to find the dirty parts, and I did that, and I used to find (I think) Isaiah 36:12, in which a bunch of men sat on a wall, and drank their own urine, and ate their own dung. Now what does that mean, in the Bible? Frye: That comes from a speech by the Assyrian general who was trying to capture Jerusalem, and he was making a speech to the Jews to try to persuade them to surrender. This was his version of what they got by being independent. He goes on, and within a few verses there are some much more savoury images about gardens and paradise and bread and wine, which you will get if you join Assyria. Harron: Do you mean that the excrement is a parody of the Christian communion? Frye: A Christian reader would regard it as a demonic parody of communion, and this of course is an example of a demonic figure, Rabshaketh of Assyria, expressing the parody himself, though unintentionally in a different context. Harron: Is there a significant change in imagery between the Old and New Testaments?

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Frye: I wouldn’t say that there was a change in imagery, because you get for example pastoral imagery—“the Lord is my shepherd,” and the martyred shepherd Abel, and all kinds of sheepfold, pastor, and flock imagery—in the Old Testament, but it turns up in the New unchanged. Harron: The ninety and nine and that sort of thing? Frye: Yes, and you also get harvest and vintage imagery in both Old and New Testaments. Harron: You mentioned that sexual imagery, the man/woman thing, is also treated as a God/man parallel [154/175]. Frye: Yes. The difficulty in visualizing there is the fact that you cannot think of an ideal society in human terms, except by alternating the sense of being alone, with nobody else to bother you, and belonging to a society. Harron: “All one body we”?7 Frye: Yes. But if the body never disappears, and you never have a sense of solitude, you miss something essential to human freedom. Of course if society disappears then you go crazy in the other direction. Harron: But God allows you to be alone and yet not alone, is that the idea? Frye: Yes, there has to be an alternation of the individual and the social. What the Bible does to unite the two is to use a sexual image, whereby the Messiah, the Christ figure, is symbolically the only male in the world, and he is the bridegroom of all his followers, who are symbolically all female: the Church. Harron: And that’s why nuns become the brides of Christ? Frye: Well, that is included in that kind of imagery, yes. Harron: But isn’t there a change between the Old and New Testaments in the image of God himself, as kind of a vengeful, rather cruel, cranky old patriarch in the Old Testament, and isn’t he more like his son in the New Testament? Am I reading something into that? Frye: That is often said, and yet while there are certainly more emphases on the power and wisdom of God in the Old Testament than on his love, still, there is a great deal about his very deep concern for his people. In a

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book like Hosea, for example, Hosea is told to go and marry two whores, one after the other. The reason he does this is symbolic: the two whores are the unfaithful harlots, Northern Israel and Southern Judah, whom God still loves even though they are unfaithful to him. Considering the mores of an ordinary patriarchal society I think that ascribes a tremendous amount of concerned and loving imagination to God. V Harron: Aside from its role as a religious code, what is the point of the Bible? Frye: I think the point of the Bible, from the point of view of its reader, is that it communicates what has traditionally been called revelation, which I think of not primarily as conveying information in signal language from A to B, but rather as a program of the expanding of human consciousness. It seems to me that if you look at the very last page of the Bible, at the end of Revelation, it’s a very open-ended conclusion, almost as though the writer were simply handing you the Bible and saying, “Now it’s complete, and now it’s yours; now you start.” Harron: How is that different from the treatment in Islam, or Buddhism? Frye: I don’t know that it is essentially different. I think all religions are really concerned with the expanding of human consciousness. There are degrees of emphasis, and there has always been what seems to me an unnecessarily nervous tendency on the part of many religions to regard their sacred books as something closed off, so that the reader has to accept them, believe everything they say, but not actually absorb them into his own consciousness. Harron: But the direction of the Bible seems to be a little bit like Mr. Micawber, in David Copperfield. He’s hourly expecting something good to turn up. Frye: That’s right. And that expectation of something good that will turn up is still going strong on the very last page of the Bible, where the tree of life and the water of life are restored to man; but when the book is handed over to the reader, the only thing that is now going to turn up is going to turn up inside the reader. Harron: What relation does this have to Marxism, which seems to be pointing to the future and the withering away of the State?

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Frye: I think that Marxism is a conception which really keeps what I call its antitypes, its real forms, steadily in the future, and consequently acts as something of an obvious carrot; that is, if you have to make moves now that seem to be in the direction of the enforcing of power or of tyranny, still this is all a means to an end, and the end is in the future. The Biblical end, the Second Coming, is more concerned with the annihilation of history as we have known it, and consequently there’s less of that donkey’s-carrot feeling, of being asked to make sacrifices for the sake of a progeny who may or may not know that you’ve made them. Harron: And the annihilation of history doesn’t mean the annihilation of mankind? Frye: It could mean that, and all the threats and the warnings in the Bible have to do with that possibility. The other thing it could mean is the expanding of human consciousness into the world, where, according to the story of Adam and the garden of Eden, it always ought to have been. Harron: You have an interesting quote from the poet Wallace Stevens: “The imperfect is our paradise” [168/189]. Frye: When Stevens wrote that, he was writing a poem called Sunday Morning, in which a woman stays home from church and tries to rationalize the fact that she doesn’t want to go to church.8 One of the things she comes up with is the feeling that you cannot imagine complete happiness or complete beauty apart from change, and that in the world as we know it, change ends inevitably in death. It is true that the imperfect is our paradise, but most religions, including Christianity, say that all change doesn’t have to be a change in the direction of death. Harron: Now today is Good Friday, and Christians are anticipating a miracle by Monday. You say poetry begins with renunciation of magic. Does magic have a connection with miracles? Frye: Magic has a connection primarily with nature, where the recitation of certain spells or charms is supposed to produce an objective response from nature. Harron: Hocus pocus. Frye: Yes. And then something happens, that is, you get the right kind of weather for building your boat, or something of that sort. And that is an operation on nature which has continued to haunt the mind ever since, and has now very largely migrated into science. But for the Bible, there is

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nothing in nature that responds to the human charm or spell in that way. The only responses are in the world of human life itself. So that it seems to me that poetry really starts when it gives up the magical element in the spell and the charm and turns it from the world of nature to the reader. Harron: Is that what Prospero means in The Tempest, when he says “I’ll drown my book” [5.1.57]? Frye: Yes, and Prospero in The Tempest is only one of hundreds of people in literature who start out as magicians and end by renouncing their magic, because magic demands the invariable formula that mustn’t change by a hair’s breadth, whereas poetry demands novelty and recreation at every step. Harron: So the Bible’s a book that gave up magic, and accepted poetry? Frye: Yes. The Bible is founded on the rejection of pre-Biblical magic, and poetry retains that same symbol of rejecting magic, on the ground that the real message is from one part of the human world to another. Harron: What does original sin mean in all this? Frye: Original sin means that man is born mortal, that is, he’s going to die, and according to some twentieth-century philosophers consciousness is primarily consciousness of death. That means that there’s an inertia built into human effort, which can be got over in various ways, but as a fact of experience, Christianity has always insisted that it was there at the centre of human operations. Harron: Is one of the ways “creative doubt”? That’s a phrase I read in your book [227/248]. Frye: Yes. I am saying there that every proposition contains its own opposite. If you say there is a God, you have already suggested the possibility of saying there is no God. And some philosophers like Hegel tell us that these propositions have to combine with their opposites. It seems to me that as long as faith uses the language of propositions, it has to employ doubt as the other half of itself. Doubt is not the enemy of faith; the enemy of faith is indifference or stupidity. Harron: Now St. Thomas was the doubting apostle, wasn’t he? What kind of a Christian was he? An honest scientist?

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Frye: According to legend, he determined to travel further than any other disciple in order to propagate the gospel, so he went to India (that’s according to the legend), and I think that he was told at the time that he would have understood the Resurrection more clearly without looking for visible and tangible evidence. The reason for that is that visible and tangible evidence has an authority apart from the Bible which the Bible itself is not interested in and not concerned with, so that the more trustworthy the evidence, the more misleading it is. Harron: So he would have been better if he hadn’t doubted? Frye: Well, he would have understood the Resurrection more clearly if he hadn’t used visible and tangible evidence as a criterion for something that had, in effect, already happened to him. Harron: So he should have used faith? Frye: Well, faith would have involved the re-enacting of the Resurrection within himself, and Paul says that he knows the Resurrection is a fact because this happened to him. Harron: So the Bible is something that must happen to every one of us? Frye: That I think is the implication of the Bible, yes. Harron: And we go through all those cycles, and phases, and as they say in modern parlance, hopefully achieve a kind of resurrection ourselves? Frye: I think that that is what the Bible is ultimately talking about, yes. Harron: The current generation, I think, is growing up without reading the Bible. Are they poorer for that? Frye: Very much poorer, I should say—poorer in every term. That is, they miss so central a part of our cultural heritage that they don’t really know what’s going on in English literature. But there’s a great sense of self-preservation among young people, and I’ve noted that they very much want to understand the Bible, or understand something about it, just for that reason. They know they’ve been gypped, if they’ve been brought up without it. Harron: And what are they doing about it, do you think? Writing rock concertos about Biblical figures?

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Frye: Actually the ballad-writers and popular singers do make surprisingly erudite use of the Bible, and rather uninhibited use of it, as though it were something essential to their imaginations, as in fact it is. Harron: Think they can handle your book? Frye: Well, I would hope that too. Harron: I think they should look into it.

62 Chatelaine’s Celebrity I.D. Conducted 13 April 1982

From Chatelaine, 55, no. 11 (November 1982): 43. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. Chatelaine’s Allan M. Gould was one of many people to draw attention to Frye on the occasion of the publication of The Great Code, though that work does not feature in his interview. What were evidently questions from Gould have been rendered in Chatelaine as subject headings. Gould was a former student of Frye’s then working as a freelance writer; he later became a prolific author.

Height: 5' 8 or 9". Weight: About 155. Shoe size: I don’t know. I get my shoes measured. Eyesight: I’m nearsighted; but gradually I’m becoming less so, as everybody does, after the age of sixty-five. When I write: My writing becomes an oddly furtive business, like squirrels burying nuts against a hard winter. I’ve learned to adapt myself so I can write at odd moments and in odd corners. Average day: I find that my schedule tends to be very much nine to five or six. I like to be home for dinner. I am usually in bed by ten; I do a good deal of reading in bed. Hobbies: The first time I was asked that, I said my only hobby was writing books, which didn’t satisfy the person who asked me. I use the piano for relaxation, but there isn’t much else I do. Personal heroes: The three people who were my seniors here in the department at Victoria College—Pelham Edgar, John Robins, Ned Pratt—have always loomed up in my life as rather important influences. Recollected favourite movies: There was a time when I got interested in

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the Charlie Chaplin films; I wrote articles about both The Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux.1 Television: My wife seldom gets away from Channel 17 [the Public Broadcasting Service station in Buffalo, picked up in Toronto]. I saw some of the Jacques Cousteau undersea things. Favourite composer: Bach. On productions of plays: Although I lecture on Shakespeare, I am so frequently dissatisfied with performances of his works and producers’ ideas of what they ought to be, that I think it’s a kind of occupational hazard. I should be disbarred from going. Popular songs: Snatches of tunes—sometimes very silly tunes—suddenly appear in one’s head, and it takes a while to get rid of them: popular songs I heard as a child, evangelical hymns, all kinds of musical hogwash is slurping around that part of the brain that’s sometimes regarded as “the seat of thought.” Shakespeare favourites: The late romances—The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. I find them incredibly rich and suggestive. And the tragedies, Hamlet and King Lear particularly. General attitude toward life: That of a liberal bourgeois intellectual, which I consider the flower of humanity. Religion in my life: It has a great deal of importance. Words like “infinite” and “eternal” are not fuzzy to me; they are words that prevent the human spirit from getting claustrophobia. On Canadian leaders: I rather approve of the tendency of this country to put intellectuals into political power, and I think that Canada has people with interesting and unusual minds in politics, even when one totally disagrees with their philosophy—René Lévesque would be an example. On political leaders in history: Most of the people who rank as great leaders—say, Lenin—seem to me to be utter creeps. On Canadian nationalism: Nationalism, as the term is generally understood, is simply a psychotic state of mind. But there is such a thing as cultural consciousness, which I’m glad to see Canada developing. Canadian characteristic I could do without: The unwillingness to admit that anything Canadian can be first-rate. Greatest outrage: Well, the whole course of human history is pretty well an outrage. Acts of territorial aggression, like those tinhorn fascists in Argentina grabbing the Falkland Islands. Capital punishment: I’ve never quite made up my mind about capital punishment; I don’t trust the law to get hold of the right people. It

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catches the drug addict who murders in quest of a fix, but it doesn’t catch the man who controls the heroin. Abortion: I think that having an abortion might be a traumatic shock to a woman, and she ought to consider carefully all the factors before going into it. But I’m not prepared to say whether it is right or wrong. Attitude toward the feminist movement: There’s a kind of nagging pedantry about it that seems to me concentrating on rather peripheral issues, like “chairperson.” I think the central issue is the economic discrimination against women, which is a serious and important issue. Sentimental over: I have a good deal of emotional feeling, not all of which I suppose is genuine. And when it’s phony, it’s sentimental. Most painful childhood experience: My brother was killed in the First World War when I was six years old, and my father’s business failed at almost the same time. Most difficult time of my life: I came up from New Brunswick without any financial resources and lived by my wits. I did well under the capitalist system; scholarships kept me going. Special moments: I have very pleasant memories. But I don’t know that I would put them in the same category as the sense of the sudden expansion of the mind, which I have had occasionally. Favourite drink: I knew an old man once who settled for drinking straight Scotch, and he said, “I find it agrees with me.” I find the same thing. Greatest beef against others: Other people are not to blame for anything that’s frustrating me. I distrust the instinct to throw the blame on others. On fear: Fear is a state of mind in itself, irrespective of what one is afraid of. Hopes for the next decade: The second volume of The Great Code (on the influence of the Bible on Western culture); a small book on Shakespeare. Best time of day: I’m a morning worker. Bad habits: I’ve never been a well-coordinated person; I suppose that’s developed a certain laziness or indolence. Favourite cities: When I was a student in Italy, the first places I saw were Pisa and Siena. Siena has remained in my mind with great vividness as a place full of colour and warmth and life. If I could live my life over: I would think with the utmost horror of being reborn as Northrop Frye; I would want to be someone else. I’d rather be somebody else with different talents and, consequently, a different set of experiences.

63 On The Great Code (II) Recorded 15 April 1982

From an audiotape transcribed by Elisabeth Oliver. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. This was an interview with journalist and radio host Hélène Gougeon recorded for broadcast on radio station CFRB, possibly on the same day, in connection with the publication of The Great Code.

Gougeon: Professor Frye, should it be surprising to anyone to realize that a university course on the Bible is attracting students and other teachers from every corner of the world? Frye: It’s not surprising to me as a teacher because I’ve been aware for a good many years that students were not getting trained in the Bible at an early age. They realized they were being gypped, because when they came to read English literature and struggled with things like Paradise Lost, they realized how clueless they were. So naturally, the intelligent people wanted to know something about the Bible. Gougeon: Of course, most people’s first confrontation with the Bible is often in a negative frame of reference. One could think of the average child growing up in a home where, perhaps, there is a fundamentalist teaching, or they feel bored because it’s a duty. Frye: Oh, that certainly happens, and I think it’s really quite a discovery for many students to realize that it can suddenly reverse itself and turn inside out into a very positive experience. Gougeon: Someone, in writing about you, has said that you felt there was a need to make some sense out of the Bible, and this presumably is what you’ve done in The Great Code.

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Frye: Well, I’ve tried to. The sense that I was trying to make was specifically an imaginative sense. That is, it grew out of a course that I had taught mainly for students of literature. I was trying to explain why poets would read the Bible and how they would read the Bible. Of course, that is parallel to a number of theological developments as well, but it’s not the same thing. Gougeon: Do you meet with many students who have made any sense of it prior to your courses? Frye: Yes I have. Some of them, of course, are my intellectual grandchildren. That is, they’ve been taught by students of mine. But I find that there are always quite a number each year for whom it comes as something of a surprise. Gougeon: Actually, they’ve never met with it before. Frye: No, and they’ve never associated anything as positive as the creative imagination with the Bible. Gougeon: Now, though you are an ordained minister, your intention is not to turn them on to the Bible in a religious way. Frye: You can’t do that if you’re a teacher, of course, under the general heading of academic freedom in a classroom, where you’ve got everything from Greek Orthodox to Communist. Gougeon: But is this sometimes the inevitable fallout? Frye: Well, I’ve had people very disturbed, very worried. But I think the great majority of my students understand what’s going on. Gougeon: One of your comments has to do with the purpose of a university education. It’s no longer an entrée to a job. We all know that, though a lot of people used to think that it was. You’ve said that you don’t like the idea that education is a preparation for life.1 What is it? What should it be? Frye: The reason why I say it’s not a preparation for life is that life won’t stay there to get prepared for. By the time you’ve prepared for it, it’s a different kind of life altogether. So, education is simply a means of sharpening your wits, by which you participate in society. It isn’t a preparation for a job either. That’s another way of saying that the university is not just a middle-class playground.

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Gougeon: Professor Frye, while other teachers have been glad to quit the classroom just a little past middle age, you’re still there dealing with younger people. What keeps you there, at the front of the class? Frye: Well, I suppose teaching has always been rather a vocation with me. I find that it clarifies my own mind, for one thing. If I can make a point clear to a class of undergraduates, I’m well on the way to making it clear to myself. Gougeon: Do you pride yourself on being able to present ideas understandably and reasonably simply? Frye: I don’t know if it’s a matter of priding myself. It certainly is a thing I struggle to do very hard and I’m always conscious when I feel that I’ve failed to do it. Gougeon: So many people cannot do that, though: impart their knowledge. Frye: Well, some people take the view that students have to come to the teacher’s level and there are some very good forms of teaching that are of that kind, but they are for a rather specialized group. Gougeon: Do you still have time to talk to students? I’m sure in the early days, students were knocking on your door. Frye: Yes, that is true, there’s bound to be a certain barrier. The barrier is partly the generation gap and it’s partly one’s reputation and partly one’s extremely full schedule. But students are fundamentally people of good will. They know they can talk to me if it’s important. Gougeon: Can they surmount that sort of fear that one could have in asking Northrop Frye a question? Frye: Well, many of them do and of course I generally try, as far as I can, to insist on having questions asked in the classroom. Gougeon: This is done, of course, in the series of video lectures that you did for the University of Toronto which is being circulated around the world.2 Frye: Yes. Yes, it was a little different from the actual classroom conditions, but it was the same format. Gougeon: And it does give us a good picture of what it is like to be in one of your classes.

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Frye: Well, I hope so, yes. Gougeon: If you had an opportunity to see or hear some of the great minds that went before yours, would there be one person in particular you would have liked to have seen on a video? Frye: Well, I don’t know. There are quite a number of people that I would like to see, recognizing that a lot of them would have been an anticlimax. Perhaps it’s sometimes better to form an impression of a great man from what he’s left behind. Gougeon: Yes. Someone once told me, “Never try to meet the person you admire because he often proves to be less than you had anticipated.” Frye: Well, less, or at any rate, different. The fact that every creative person has two personalities is very hard to come to terms with. Gougeon: And clay feet. Frye: Yes. Gougeon: Are you aware, do you think, of the problems that students face today compared with the problems they might have faced when you were a student? Frye: I think they are fundamentally the same problems [rest of sentence is inaudible]. It’s a matter of going in circles. One thing that I’ve picked up from the wisdom of the ages is the fact that everything goes in cycles and if you don’t like what’s happening, just wait. Gougeon: Yes, you’ve said something about looking through the rearview mirror if you want to know what’s going to happen.3 Frye: Yes. I think that’s true. Gougeon: To go back to the Bible for a moment, as a child you were exposed to the Bible in your own home. How do you think that affected you? Frye: Well, I don’t know. Somehow or other, it affected me in wherever my creative imagination is located. I don’t remember negative reactions to the Bible itself. I certainly remember negative reactions to ministers and Sunday school teachers, but one separates that sort of thing very quickly from the real stuff.

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Gougeon: Of course many people don’t separate it . . . I mean, the people who read it literally and who are waiting for the apocalypse. Frye: Yes. But our house was always full of books. It was full of Scott and Dickens as well as the Bible, and somehow or other I managed to see that they had a family likeness. Gougeon: Professor Frye, do you think about the hereafter? I mean, does heaven exist for you? Frye: Heaven exists for me, but I always to try think of it as really the actualization of something present, rather than something to be prepared for in the future. I’m not at all sure that one takes our ordinary conception of time with us because I think our ordinary conception of time is pretty stupid. Gougeon: What do you mean by that? Frye: Well, I mean that our ordinary conception of time doesn’t exist. The past doesn’t exist anymore, the future doesn’t exist yet, the present never quite exists at all. You have to turn that inside out. Gougeon: You describe the Bible in one interview as, “huge, sprawling, tactless,” and I was rather curious about that word “tactless.” [The Bible] disturbs people when they read it, is that it? Frye: Perhaps so. I put that into my introduction in the book [GC, xviii/ 12] and I meant by that that it doesn’t fit the ordinary categories. Now, when the Greeks were building up their mythology they had Homer and he did fit the categories: he was a poet and everything about him fit in the conception of the creative imagination. But the Bible is always saying, “Look, there’s a lot more.” That’s what I mean by “tactless.” Gougeon: Is the Bible for everyone to read? Frye: Everyone at some level and in some area, I should think. Gougeon: Is there any particular Bible that you favour to read? Frye: I use the King James in my teaching, simply because, in the first place, it’s the most familiar and accessible version, and in the second place, it’s really in the Vulgate tradition so it’s very close to the Bible that’s always been the Bible of Western Europe. Modern translations—I find the Revised Standard Version of the 1950s a quite satisfactory one. Gougeon: Professor Frye, this weekend we are going to see the events in

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Ottawa unfold as they should, with the patriation of the Canadian Constitution. You’ve said that you are not interested in politics, but you must have some thoughts about Canada at this point. Frye: I’ve always felt that Canada’s identity had a lot to do with the British Commonwealth, which is no longer an empire but a community of nations with something in common in the cultural traditions. I suppose the patriation of the Constitution clears up a kind of paradoxical legal situation which needed to be cleared up.4 Otherwise, I’m not sure that I understand how much difference it’s going to make to the ordinary Canadian life. Gougeon: We see Quebec remaining apart from the ceremonies this week and indeed, from the negotiations. Since you were born in Quebec, I suppose you’re permitted an opinion on Quebec’s stance. Frye: I’ve always said that cultural developments decentralize, and political and economic ones centralize, so I think that separatism in Quebec in the cultural area is a very genuine development, but as a political and economic development, it seems to me to be nonsense. Gougeon: As a person who was born in Quebec, you are probably known as a Québécois in Quebec. Frye: I dare say. But that implies, of course, the total unreality of Canada, and it’s not an unreality for me. Gougeon: In the old days, you used to sit around the fire with people like Morley Callaghan and Barker Fairley, talking of ways to change the world. Do you have any thoughts about how you would change it now? Frye: The world is changing itself much faster than I could ever keep up with it, not being a computer expert, for example. I think it’s a useful exercise to go through a Utopian phase, in getting one’s own mind clear, but I think man affects history that he makes only to a very limited extent. A great deal of it gets by in spite of him. Gougeon: Wars start. Frye: Wars start, and technological developments throw everything out of balance. The technology of the twentieth century has introduced so many imponderable factors. Gougeon: Well, technology was very close to home to you in connection with The Great Code.

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Frye: Yes it was. It was my first encounter with the word processor. Again, I suppose a good many of these developments are still in what would be regarded in the twenty-first century as the dinosaur stage. Certainly, there were a lot of difficulties as well as a lot of advantages. Gougeon: And your book is a product of the word processor, is it not? Frye: It’s the product of my secretary [Jane Widdicombe] and her struggles with the word processor, yes. Gougeon: One last question, Professor Frye. Are you optimistic about the future? Where are we going? Looking as closely as you do at the Bible, do you find any messages in the Bible about our future? Frye: Well, the Bible’s message about the future is (a) that it’s going to be a hell of a mess, and (b) that things will eventually clear away and make more sense. Everything has been predicted for the year 2000, ranging from the total annihilation of the human race to the coming of the millennium. I imagine that what will actually happen will fall somewhere between those two things. Gougeon: Is that optimistic? Frye: It’s optimistic in the sense that wherever humanity is in history, there are always things to be warned against—possible disasters—and there are always possible opportunities for advance. Gougeon: Do you know what some of those possible disasters—aside from the bomb—are? They are within ourselves, aren’t they? Frye: They are entirely within ourselves. They are the tendency on the part of people in power to hold on to power, usually by seizing the technology and making it work for them instead of for the people. That’s disaster. Gougeon: Of course, we see this happening in Central and South America. We’re not only talking about military take-overs. Frye: No. That’s quite true. Gougeon: Professor Frye, thank you very much for giving us your precious time today. Frye: Thank you.

64 Towards an Oral History of the University of Toronto Recorded 27 July–4 October 1982

From original sound recordings in the University of Toronto Archives, accession no. B1986-0046, transcribed by L. Barnes (of the Collected Works). Dated on some of the seven tapes themselves, and also by Jane Widdicombe’s list. This series of interviews between Frye and researcher Valerie Schatzker was recorded between 27 July and 4 October 1982 in Frye’s office at Victoria as part of the University of Toronto Oral History project, initiated by former president Jack Sword and funded by the University of Toronto in the 1970s and 1980s.

I (27 July 1982, Part 1) Schatzker: You were born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, in 1912, Dr. Frye. Frye: That’s right. Schatzker: And your full name, I should mention, is Herman Northrop Frye. Frye: Yes. Schatzker: Of Canadian parents? Frye: Yes. Schatzker: What were their full names? Frye: My father’s name was Herman Edward Frye and mother’s name was Catharine Howard Frye. Schatzker: I gather you spent your early childhood there and also in Moncton, New Brunswick.

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Frye: I spent the first five years of my life in Sherbrooke, the next three in Lennoxville (a town next to it), and then we moved to Moncton, New Brunswick, where I had my primary and secondary education, such as it was. Schatzker: “Such as it was” indicates that you weren’t too pleased with it? Frye: I really meant that I got as far as grade 11 and was admitted to the University of Toronto on the basis of the old Pass Course, an alternative to grade 13 which they abolished the year after I took it.1 Schatzker: I see. Do you have any comments about your early education, what it might have instilled in you, and how it might have sparked you to study what you studied later? Frye: I was one of those children who were taught a good deal at home. I was eight years old before I started school. I also was brought up to be a reading person, partly because of a blue Sunday and a Protestant environment. The result was that in some respects I was very far ahead when I went to school and in other respects, of course, totally illiterate. The result was that I was bored to death with school, as most children are who have a good deal of home background training. Schatzker: What kind of education did you receive at home? Was it heavy on the classics of English literature? Frye: There was a full set of Scott which I remember reading around the age of eight or nine and there were two full bookcases; it had been a fairly literate home. My mother had acquired a good many books from her father, who was a Methodist circuit rider, and so there was never any lack of books in the house. Schatzker: Any other particular interests that you pursued with your mother at home? Frye: It was she who taught me to read at the age of three. Of course there was a strong religious environment, some of which I would have been better without, I think. There was a good deal of the kind of cultural background that was available in the days before radio, and before television. Schatzker: Any languages?

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Frye: No. I’ve always had a block about languages for that reason. The English and French populations in the towns where I grew up, Sherbrooke and Moncton, were segregated from each other, partly on religious grounds and partly because of the language. While I don’t remember any conflicts, particularly, we did keep apart and I didn’t acquire much speaking knowledge of French—in fact I didn’t acquire any. Schatzker: Did you study French? Frye: I studied French but it was book French. Schatzker: Latin as well at high school? Frye: I started Latin at grade 7, so that I could say that I had five years of Latin by the time got out of grade 11. But actually the first two years of Latin only got you about as far as the present indicative passive. It wasn’t really a training in the language. Schatzker: Greek at all? Frye: No. There was a question of my studying Greek with my Latin teacher in high school—she was the only person probably in the city who knew any Greek. But I found that the time schedule, what with my music lessons and the cadet corps, made it impossible. But Greek was an option against French and what was called natural history. Schatzker: What about the teachers in the system in the Maritimes? I imagine most of them in the high school would have had a university education. Did they inspire you to study further? Were they enthusiastic? Frye: I don’t know that I would say that. My elementary teachers, I think I can safely say, were rather ignorant. That is, they’d had grade 11 and then they had a year of normal school and that is not a liberal education. I knew at the time that they were mispronouncing words and that they were teaching things of which they really had no background knowledge whatever. The high-school teachers were people who had university degrees, mainly from the University of New Brunswick or Mount Allison. Some of them had a genuine interest in their subjects. But I think the only person who really influenced me was my music teacher, who was a FRCO graduate and who cared more about music than about putting on recitals or showing off his students.2 That was the one sense that I got of what scholarship might be.

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Schatzker: Did you ever consider studying music? Frye: Yes, but I realized that I had come in contact with so very little of it that it was really out of the question. Schatzker: When you decided to come to Toronto to study, did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to do? Was theology your first consideration at the time as your eventual vocation? Frye: I signed up as a church student. That was largely because in the town in which I grew up there was at that time no university. It never occurred to me that I would become a professor at a university, even though my schoolmates gave me the nickname of professor. That was just because I wore glasses and was always myopic. I was attracted to the ministry because it was the cultural symbol for a small town of that kind. Also, the clergyman who finally came to the church I attended was a very intelligent, sympathetic, and understanding person. He had a daughter who went to the ballet and wrote a book on the Follies Bergières, which she eventually joined.3 Schatzker: That’s a wonderful story. What drew you to Toronto and Victoria? You could have gone to UNB or Mount Allison. Frye: Yes, but I wanted to get out of the Maritimes very badly. It was the Depression, you remember, and the feeling of being culturally isolated was very intense. Moncton had only acquired a public library in 1927. I think it was partly a homing instinct of which I was very largely unconscious at the time. My grandfather had attended Victoria in the old Cobourg days and somehow or other that seemed to me to be the centre. Schatzker: Were your parents encouraging this? Because it was a tradition in the family, did they encourage your leaving Moncton? Frye: They didn’t oppose it, but they were rather timid about it because of the very slender financial resources. Schatzker: That was another question I was going to ask. The life of a student who didn’t have financial backing from home in any great degree must have been quite difficult. Frye: I went to business college for the year following my graduation from high school and I did various odd jobs as a public stenographer recording meetings and out-of-court hearings and that kind of thing. So

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I saved up enough to struggle through my first year and after that I made do with scholarship money. Schatzker: Were you able to work in the summer time? Frye: The first summer I was.4 After that I tended more to work on things that brought in awards, like the scholarship for a prize essay, for example, which was a hundred dollars and which in those days was a lot of money.5 Schatzker: When you arrived in Toronto which type of accommodation was it normal to choose: residence at Victoria or off-campus residence? Frye: For a person coming as I did the only possibility was residence. There was also a special reduction for church students in residence if you got that scholarship, which I did in my second year.6 Schatzker: I see, so there was no choice at all. And residence life must have given you a feeling of closeness to the college—a sense of belonging. Frye: Oh, yes. I’d had a very introverted adolescence so I went to the other extreme and plunged into everything that was plungeable into, including a lot of things that I had no qualifications for whatever, such as being treasurer of the year. The honorary president of ’32 tells that story at every reunion of the class of ’32 about how incompetent I was as class treasurer. Schatzker: Did you take part in sports, dramatic activities? Frye: Not sports. I was always very badly coordinated and rather a scrawny ectomorph. If I were reincarnated I would want another physical incarnation. Schatzker: Well, it might have deterred you from other things. What about dramatic activities? Frye: Yes, I went into the dramatic society which actually dissolved that year and I had to reconstitute it. I had to pick the new executive myself, in my third year. Schatzker: What kind of atmosphere would you describe as existing in Victoria at that time? Was its connection with the church much more apparent than it was later on when you became a professor? Frye: The connection with the church was fairly obvious, more particu-

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larly in the kind of social taboos that have a very peripheral relation to religion. I remember some years later a girl in residence ordering a case of beer, which there were no regulations about, because while there were signs up everywhere about not smoking, it had never occurred to anybody that anybody would want beer [chuckles]. So she wasn’t really breaking a written regulation, although I think they hastily added one after that. It was that kind of thing. Originally Victoria had banned dances. We still had the odd “promenade,” as they were called—which, after all, was a much better stimulus to conversation than dancing was.7 There was skating in the winter. In spite of all that it was not a hidebound place at all and intellectually it was, I think, extraordinarily tolerant. Schatzker: Was it intellectually stimulating on many levels? Did you find that a good part of your undergraduate education took place outside of the classroom, in conversation with your peers? Frye: Conversation was certainly a very strong element, but for a person brought up in a small town, coming to Toronto itself was a part of one’s college education. In those days there were lecturing circuits and one went to Massey Hall to hear people like G.K. Chesterton and Bertrand Russell. There were also concerts. Of course my love of music was still strong and there were still people like Paderewski whom I’m very glad to have heard—I don’t think he could play for nuts, but his reputation was certainly legendary. All that kind of atmosphere, the university sitting in the middle of a larger city than I’d been accustomed to, was very important. Schatzker: What about student interest in politics? I ask that question because later on it assumed such an important role in the history of this university. Was it normal for students to be involved in the political issues of the day? Frye: It was a little later, not in my early undergraduate years. But when the Depression began to sharpen, and after the CCF had come to birth with the Regina Manifesto, and with two Communist groups—the Stalinist group and a Trotskyist group—there was quite a bit of student activity. Earl Birney’s novel Down the Long Table is about that. Schatzker: How did Victoria fit into that? Frye: Victoria was middle-class but it also had a very strong Social Gos-

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pel bias.8 We had people like Havelock in Classics and John Line in Philosophy of Religion who were very active in what was called the League for Social Reconstruction, a kind of social-democrat organization. Schatzker: Were a good number of the students inspired by these new ideas or did they tend to be generally complacent? Frye: There was the same mixture that there always is. There is always a minority, sometimes quite a sizable minority, that are concerned, and there’s always a majority that are apathetic. I’ve never known a time in the university where that was not true. Schatzker: I suppose in the ’60s the minority who were concerned about things like the Vietnamese war became a little larger and more vocal. Frye: They became noisier. That meant that the more apathetic ones didn’t get into the news because the whole activist movement of the ’60s was entirely an adventure of the media. The majority were still people who were pursuing their normal interests at university without much regard for the political situation. Schatzker: Another aspect of college life at that time that has totally disappeared now was the idea that the college was acting in loco parentis to the students. Did you feel that you were in a sheltered atmosphere, that people cared about you? I think probably it was small enough that students knew the professors and certainly knew the dons in residence. I wondered if you could compare your experience in any way to what students might experience now. Frye: I think it’s very different. There was a good deal of the in loco parentis situation. I think it affected women much more than men. Women’s leaves in the evening were very rigidly rationed and certainly there’s no question that the dean of women regarded herself as an official in loco parentis. That was Margaret Addison, and she was actually a person of great zeal. She wasn’t stuffy at all, but there were certain rules which it was her job to enforce. There are things which are before my time which indicate how much of an interest in students such people did take. During the 1918 flu epidemic for example, about half to two-thirds of the girls of Annesley Hall were laid out, and Miss Addison brought their meals to them. She worked night and day, twenty-four hours a day, practically with no sleep, as long as that epidemic was on, looking

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after her girls.9 That kind of thing, while it was considerably relaxed in my day, was still to some extent there. The college was about eight hundred students, and that made for a kind of supervision, but even so it was extremely relaxed, for the men particularly, in comparison to, say, St. Michael’s College. If you look up the calendars of the University of Toronto of that period and look under St. Michael’s and what it proposed to do to its students once it got them, you can see that Victoria was pretty broad-minded. Schatzker: As broad-minded as UC? Frye: Well, of course we tended to think in Victoria that UC didn’t have a mind: that it was mostly a nonresident college and that it drew from too miscellaneous a group to have an ethos of its own. That, of course, was very largely nonsense. [Victoria] was more broad-minded in a sense which affected me as a student of literature. I was taught by Pelham Edgar who was an extremely civilized man. Under him were Ned Pratt, the poet, and John Robins. The professors of English at University College were still, some of them, telling their students that D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were degenerates wallowing in filth. Consequently, the really bright students, like E.K. Brown from UC, would come over to Victoria. One has to remember, of course, that any reference to a twentieth-century writer had to be bootlegged at that time because there were no courses in contemporary literature. Pelham would discuss contemporary writers with some sympathy and impartiality. It’s true he didn’t like them much but that was a matter of temperament and taste. Schatzker: That’s something I haven’t really encountered in my interviews yet. The atmosphere of the study of English at University College has been overshadowed completely by the Woodhouse era.10 I haven’t talked to that many people who studied before Woodhouse arrived and I’m left only with a few legends about people like Alexander and people outside of English like Hutton. I didn’t realize that they were less liberal than the people at Victoria. Frye: On the whole they were less liberal. They were closer to Matthew Arnold and felt that literature ought to be possessed of high seriousness. Even Woodhouse—his views of literature were extremely sanitized: that is, he tended to assimilate literature to what was called then the history of ideas. By that time, of course, you couldn’t avoid teaching certain types of twentieth-century literature. I was already on the staff before

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there was a course in American literature. I think I taught the first course in Canadian literature at the university myself.11 Schatzker: Do you remember any of the people well? Did you have any contact with some of the English professors outside of Victoria? Did you sneak into lectures just to see what they were like? Frye: No, I didn’t as an undergraduate. That may have been just sheer indolence, I don’t know. I didn’t really get to know the personnel of University College until I was on the teaching staff. Or rather when I was a graduate student. Schatzker: What about Trinity? Frye: Trinity was much the same, I think. Schatzker: And I don’t think St. Michaels had the same reputation for literature. Frye: Well, in English it didn’t have the same close contact with Victoria that it had in other fields, in German for example. I don’t think they even had anybody in German when I was a freshman. I think they sent their people over to Surerus here at Victoria. Schatzker: Did you study German at all? Frye: I began a course when I was an undergraduate with a man named Holt who had a degree in music.12 I liked him very much but I can’t say I learned a great deal of German because I found it very difficult to work into my schedule. So whatever knowledge I have of other languages is a reading knowledge only, and was acquired largely by myself after I had graduated. Schatzker: With much effort I’m sure. Frye: Yes. Schatzker: It’s hard to do on your own. The question I just asked about knowing professors at the other colleges brings up the whole idea of the college student’s relationship to the rest of the university. You were enrolled in Philosophy and English, which meant that you did take a university subject, and would have had contact with the university through the philosophy department. Before we get into that particular strand, how did the student at Victoria feel towards the whole U of T? Was there a sense of belonging to the greater federation?

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Frye: It was true then, as it’s true now, that the majority of Victoria students were not in college subjects as I was. They were in courses like mathematics and physics, which meant that they took nothing at Victoria. What really held the college together, I think, was the residence and the social life. There were many more undergraduate parties than there came to be later on when the high schools got more sophisticated. When I started philosophy, I studied with Brett, whose erudition was immense, and I did know him, and Fulton Anderson; also somebody—well, I don’t know if you want this in or not, but they made some unfortunate appointments and one of my teachers in philosophy had an alcoholic problem. He was supposed to teach me two major philosophers but he never got beyond page two of the first one. That was a gap I also had to fill in after I was graduated. Schatzker: That’s not the first time such things have happened on campuses. Ethics was taught at Victoria, as it was in all the other colleges, with that strange division of philosophy versus ethics. Frye: Yes, I took ethics at Victoria with a man named Wilmot B. Lane. The in loco parentis principle was at its best in regard to Lane because he really did take a strong personal interest in his students. Actually, after I had graduated and was back in the Maritimes with no prospects, facing a fairly bleak future, it was Lane who noticed that I was no longer around and got a bursary for me so that I managed to get back into the college system as a graduate student. Schatzker: Those kinds of relationships I think are important. Many students often single out one person who has taken that kind of an interest in their careers or helped them get over a particular hurdle. I wonder sometimes whether it’s possible in the university that we know today, which is so large. Frye: I think that there was more possibility of this happening [when I was a student]. Today, of course, I walk into classes of two hundred and I realize the sheer impossibility of a personal relationship developing there. When I was principal of the college and used to meet with the registrar on bursaries, I realized how many students were struggling along at the subsistence level, and were facing, sometimes, parental opposition. People in my days as an undergraduate might very well have been helped personally by somebody like Lane. It was true all over the country. We have a Canada Council now, but Pelham Edgar spent a great

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deal of his time and energy trying to organize societies for the relief of others: people like Frederick Phillip Grove who couldn’t make a living by their writing and yet were serious writers. Schatzker: What about other relationships with faculty members at Victoria? Do you remember any others with particular affection or interest? Frye: I remember particularly the courses with John Robins. I’ve always felt that I unconsciously took a lead from Robins because Robins— though this wasn’t generally known—was descended from one of the black families that came across the Detroit River in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin days. He had quit school at the age of twelve to help support the family and it was from there that he set out to earn the qualifications for a university teaching position. He finally got a Ph.D. at Chicago. At the same time his background had conditioned him to an interest in the ballad and popular literature. He was interested in Paul Bunyan stories and in Uncle Remus stories. He was a superb storyteller, a raconteur. It wasn’t until I was well advanced in my own career that I realized that what I was doing was applying to literature as a whole the kind of principles which every student of folklore adopts as a matter of course. That is, questions of convention and genre and type and that sort of thing. Schatzker: That’s most interesting. I didn’t know that about Robins myself; it certainly adds a dimension to the man that I’m sure few know. II (27 July 1982, Part 2) Schatzker: We were talking about Professor Robins and the influence that you felt he had upon you as an undergraduate student. Did you have him as a graduate student? Did you take courses with him? Frye: Yes. One of the first courses I had in the first term of my first year was with Robins. It was a general course in literature, but it began with a ballad. I’d never heard of the ballad before and had no idea that that dimension of literature existed. It was an amazing discovery. All through my contact with Robins I realized what a really great man he was. Although he put on a front of joviality which made a lot of people think that there was nothing behind it, in fact there was a tremendous amount behind it. One of my most vivid memories was during the war when the casualty lists of my students kept coming in week after week. At the very bottom of the war when the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor, we

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were still going on with our series of public lectures and Robins gave a lecture on Alfred the Great. It was about how Alfred’s land was nearly all lost by the Danish invasion. He was beaten into a corner of the country and then slowly he began to win back his kingdom. But at the same time he never let down his standards of scholarship: he saw to it that all the great classics of Western Europe were translated into Anglo-Saxon and he devoted a great part of his life to learning. I remember coming out of that lecture thinking, “Well, this is what the university is.” Schatzker: That’s interesting. Were these people interested in teaching? Was teaching the main reason for their being professors? Frye: Yes, that was true of Robins. I’m not so sure about Ned. Ned was interested in people and of course in students, he was most kind to students, but his interest in the actual teaching operation I don’t think was as great. But Robins was a passionate teacher. The passion didn’t show in his lecturing manner but it was obvious that he had vocation for teaching. Schatzker: Pelham Edgar? Frye: Pelham Edgar was a curious mixture of things. He really was a fine teacher. His technique was a very unusual one: he would come into a rather noisy class and sit down at his desk and start to mutter. And nobody could hear a word of what he was saying so naturally they had to shut up to listen. Eventually he got complete control of his class. He was, I think, an excellent teacher when he was teaching something that interested him. He was the only English professor I’ve ever known who—well, no, there have been two or three others, but one of the few— who honestly disliked Shakespeare. So guess who got the Shakespeare course to teach? [laughter] Schatzker: Why? Did he have good reasons? Frye: Well, he was brought up on the Romantics and for him poetic expression meant [Shelley’s] Ode to the West Wind and the five odes of Keats, that kind of thing. It did not mean a stage play. It was rather strange in that way. But of course the theatre was so rudimentary at that time. We had nothing like Stratford. Schatzker: Oh, no. Just a few travelling companies. Frye: We had a stock company at a place called the Empire Theatre that used to put on third- or fourth-rate plays. Apart from the big names that

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used to come and visit, there was really almost nothing. And there you went to see the actors rather than to see the play. Schatzker: What about Hart House? It was in operation at that time. Frye: Hart House was in operation and there had been a very lively dramatic movement from within the student body during the ’20s, but I don’t think there was a great deal of that left in the ’30s. That’s something that somebody like Robertson Davies could tell you more about. Schatzker: The pressure to publish, of course, wasn’t the same for the people who taught you. Some of them did publish. But there certainly wasn’t this tremendous pressure to add lists of articles and books to your curriculum vitae for promotion. Frye: No. The general esprit de corps at the college was rather like Oxford and Cambridge around the same time. Brett, for example, was a man who had no degree except an M.A. (Oxon.). That was true of many of the people of that generation. Kathleen Coburn and Woodhouse and myself never got Ph.D.s. There was enough anglophile feeling for there not to be the requirement for the doctor’s degree. It was assumed that what you published was the distillation of a life’s work. Brett, for example, wrote a history of psychology, which I think is still a standard text after sixty years.13 That kind of publication was assumed to be the kind of thing a scholar would do. But I think that by the time I was a graduate student we had already begun to move into the publish-or-perish syndrome. Schatzker: There were still, even in the late ’50s and early ’60s, a few of the older professors who had hardly published at all. Frye: They wouldn’t get tenure, now. Schatzker: No. And yet some of them were very fine teachers and inspiring, not only to their students but their colleagues because of their wide reading and tremendous knowledge; I’m thinking of somebody like Norman Endicott. Frye: That’s right. Norman Endicott is a typical example and I’m not sure whether he had a doctor’s degree or not. I think he got a Rhodes scholarship and went to Oxford and read Medieval History, but whether he got a D.Phil. or not I don’t remember.14 He had no impulse to write and, in fact, I don’t see why everybody teaching on a university staff should be the same kind of person, really. In many respects this system is

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extremely beneficial. Pelham Edgar wrote a book on Henry James, published in 1927, which was an extraordinarily early date for a book on Henry James, who died in 1915.15 That was again the distillation of his interest. He wasn’t under any pressure to write it. Two of his students, Kathleen Coburn and myself, were allowed to undertake vast projects, the editing of the Coleridge notebooks and the deciphering of Blake’s prophetic books, without anybody breathing down our necks and saying, “It’s about time you had a number of articles in print.” Schatzker: Another famous figure of this university, Barker Fairley, I believe did the bulk of his writing after retirement. Close to the end of his career, certainly. Frye: Close to the end, yes. He always took a quite detached view of scholarship and had an extraordinary faculty for backing losing causes. He’s the only person to my knowledge that has written a book on Charles Doughty, and he also wrote a book on a German writer named Raabe who has quite a reputation in Germany but none outside it.16 Of course I don’t think he was ever deeply committed to teaching, and as soon as he could he went into portrait and landscape painting. Schatzker: Do you want to enter the fray, while we’re on the subject, and say what you think of this present system which forces everyone to follow the same course, be in the same role, do the same things, and get the right degrees; and of the system of promotion which forces people to observe certain rules and achieve certain things before they can rise in the academic world? Do you think this is an improvement upon the past? I wonder if there were people in your time as an undergraduate who really were deadwood—or do you think that this produces just as much if not more deadwood? Frye: I think there’s a great spread. Your question about Barker Fairley reminds me of a note that I wrote to him after his second book on Goethe appeared. I can still remember saying that most secondary sources on most authors that I was interested in were pretty unrewarding, so as a rule I didn’t read them or didn’t read beyond the first ten pages; and that his was the first book I had read in years that I had actually gone through with a pencil making marginal notes as I went along.17 Now that is scholarship as the distillation of what you know at its best and that was what Pelham, I think, did have. It’s true that he got a doctoral thesis through Johns Hopkins on a subject that would now be done by a computer,

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namely a thesis on the imagery of Shelley, but still that was his scholarly ideal and it was the one that Kathleen and I inherited from him. I think that there would be the same spread now that there was then. Then you would get everything from people who would write profound and erudite books at the top, to lazy bastards at the other end who would be doing nothing at all and would be lecturing from the same yellowed set of lecture notes for years and years. Now you get people with considerable ability writing genuine contributions to knowledge at the top, and other people just covering paper with type at the bottom. Schatzker: Filling the libraries and making the effort for graduate students of the future more difficult as they try to get their bibliographies done. Frye: That’s right. There’s no way of preventing a bad and useless and totally unnecessary book on somebody from becoming a bibliographical item and consequently an obstacle in the next student’s research. Schatzker: Yes, I remember well. What about other personalities? There was obviously the president and the principal at Victoria and of course there was the president of the U of T, Falconer—he was probably a remote figure. Frye: Falconer was very remote to me, but of course he was only there in the early part of my undergraduate period. Canon Cody I did know because he stayed on when I was a graduate student and had become more a member of the university.18 Bowles I hardly knew at all. He once remarked that if he’d known how long he was going to live he wouldn’t have retired so soon.19 He quit around 1930 and was succeeded by Wallace.20 He was a very decent person but his background had been a missionary compound in China, and missionaries of course were accustomed to having a large flow of cash funnelled in at one end and converting the heathen at the other. It was under him that Emmanuel College was built in 1931 at the very bottom of the Depression. The college really was tottering at that point. Teaching staff staged a rebellion and insisted on an inquiry into the finances, which of course had been unheard of before. Eventually we got Brown as principal of Victoria College; it was when that post was established.21 And Emmanuel College had its own principal, Richard Davidson. We staggered through the Depression with salary cuts and that kind of thing.

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Schatzker: Like everyone else on the campus. Frye: Yes. I’m not suggesting that there was mismanagement. Merely that the building of the Emmanuel residences and Emmanuel College on a fairly lavish scale was realistic at the time it was mooted in 1929 but very different in 1931 when it was done. Schatzker: Of course, Victoria had always had a good relationship with some of the prominent members of the United Church in Toronto and they did well from bequests and gifts from some of these families. Frye: I think the United Church [1925] rather attenuated that. It was most prosperous when it was a Methodist college. Schatzker: I suppose the difficulties of [church] union dissipated the interest somewhat. You graduated in 1933 from the Honours Course in Philosophy and English. Now I must get something straight. You entered in the Pass Arts Course and you did your first year in Pass Arts, and then you went into the Honour Course? Frye: Yes. As I remarked earlier, I came in on the last year that they had the old first-year Pass Course, which was a substitute for grade 13. Other students from Ontario went into either the first year of an Honour Course or the second year of the Pass Course. Schatzker: I see. Was that a course in which you had to take subjects from all over the calendar? Frye: Yes, and my admit-to-lectures card was stamped “on probation,” which was what they did with everybody who came from the Maritimes. Fifty years later or thereabouts, I as chancellor conferred an honorary degree on a student to whom the same thing had happened, Wallace Gerber, who was a few years ahead of me but came from Halifax.22 Schatzker: Was this just the prejudice of Ontario education? Frye: It was partly prejudice and partly bureaucratic imbecility. Schatzker: Not because they had a true conception of the education there being far below what was available in Ontario. Frye: There was a good deal of that, and of course a total lack of imagination as to what the words “on probation” on a student’s card would actually mean to the student.

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Schatzker: So after doing that first general year you entered the first year of the Honours Course . . . Frye: No, I entered the second year of the Philosophy and English course, a course that had been designed by Brett. You had Honour Philosophy but you had an option either in English or in History and I took the option in English. Schatzker: Those Honour Courses were remarkable. I know from my own experience that one of the wonderful things about them was that when you took the options—whether you were in Honours English or History and took French or German options or whatever—you would be able to compare the work going on in each of those subjects. The years were so planned that if you took seventeenth-century English you took seventeenth-century French; or if you took seventeenth-century German you could take philosophy of the same period that would influence the literature. Did you find that? Frye: You’ve put your finger on exactly what was eighty to ninety per cent of the benefit I got from my undergraduate education. It was studying the Renaissance from the point of view of philosophy and English and certain Pass options, and the eighteenth century in the third year, and the Romantics and nineteenth century in the fourth year. Schatzker: We had the same in the Honours English course that I took much later and it was a great benefit. The departments were considered to be very rigid and before the ’60s there was a certain discouragement placed upon students from doing comparative work. But this was one way in which you did do some valuable comparative work. Frye: Yes. Schatzker: So having been graduated in 1933, you entered the theological course in Emmanuel College and were ordained in the United Church of Canada in 1936. When you finished your B.A. were you not convinced you wanted to go into that field [English]? Frye: Completely convinced, yes. But at the same time I had got so much scholarship money from being a church student that I felt obligated to complete the theological course. The question of whether I should be ordained or not was another matter and I did consult various people on that. I don’t regret having chosen ordination but it wasn’t a thing I had to do, in view of the United Church doctrine of the priesthood of believers.

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Schatzker: You never intended to . . . Frye: I never seriously intended to do parish work, no. Schatzker: What about the course at Emmanuel? How long did it last? Was it three years? Frye: It was a three-year course, but I took graduate courses in English along with it and I’m afraid I spent rather more time on them. Schatzker: Did you find your theological studies valuable, though? Frye: They have become valuable since, though again with me, and I suspect with most people, my effective education has been self-education. Schatzker: What about the atmosphere at Emmanuel as compared with the undergraduate atmosphere in Victoria? Frye: Of course, there’s always an anticlimax when you go into graduate training, which is always a professional training. I think there was less anticlimax at Emmanuel than there was for the people who went to OCE [the Ontario College of Education] because they used to come and complain to me that they practically had a jail sentence. I quite enjoyed my Emmanuel years although I was by no means a model student. That was partly because my interest was growing so rapidly in English that I could hardly put my mind on it. Schatzker: One of the thrusts of people presently on campus in theological education is to separate the vocational training from the academic work. I wondered if, during the time that you were at Emmanuel, that was at all considered, or whether certain professors had a more academic attitude to theology? Frye: It’s hard to say. In retrospect it seems to me that it was mostly a professional vocational training. The person who stands out in my memory as having a strong academic interest in the subject was John Line in the Philosophy of Religion. I felt that there was a disinterested scholarship that was to my mind much more effective in that area than a more committed one would have been. Schatzker: What about your fellow students? Were they mainly interested in becoming pastors and less interested in the scholarship? Frye: They knew they were going to be pastors and I would say that most of them were pretty well pastorate-oriented with one or two excep-

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tions: Art Cragg, George Birtch, Kingsley Joblin—they were people who had a genuine scholarly interest. Schatzker: So you had some colleagues with whom you could relate. Frye: Oh, yes. Schatzker: Having completed that course and having been ordained you decided finally to pursue university teaching as your career. Perhaps before we go on to the decision to go to Merton College in Oxford we should talk about what you were doing in the graduate courses, which I suppose helped you make your decision. You mentioned that Robins gave you and Kathleen Coburn scope to do work on your own. Was it at this time . . . ? Frye: It was Edgar who was an influence on Kathleen; I don’t know that Robins was. One person I got to know very intimately as a graduate student was Roy Daniells, who died a few years ago. He was the head of the English department at UBC [the University of British Columbia]. He was at Victoria at that time.23 He was about ten years older than I was and he was working on his doctorate in Milton. I got a great deal out of conversations with him. Also Wilson Knight was at Trinity College at that time and I got a great deal out of discussions with him. I used to go over there in the evenings and talk to him. He had no subject but Shakespeare at that time; he hadn’t developed the interest in the Romantic poets that he did later. Those two stand out as people who more or less nourished an academic feeling in me. Schatzker: Nobody at UC? Frye: I don’t remember that so much. People like Norman Endicott and Jim MacGillivray I knew very well. But though their conversation moved on a very high level of cultivation, it didn’t actually mesh with the particular kinds of ideas that I was developing. I think it’s fair to say that Norman never had the slightest use for what I was getting at in criticism. Schatzker: What about Herbert Davis? Frye: Davis was very important to me because I signed up for a course on Blake. My interest in Blake had been awakened by an undergraduate essay I’d done on him which had been assigned by Pelham Edgar. I always used to claim that Pelham had ESP with students. He looked at

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Kathleen Coburn and said “Coleridge,” and he looked at me and said, “Blake.” So as soon as I learned that there was actually a graduate course on Blake being offered I snatched at it. I took it twice: once as a M.A. course in English and once as a theological elective. Schatzker: The same course? Frye: Yes. Schatzker: With the same person? Frye: Not quite—well, with the same instructor, but with different people. Schatzker: That’s an interesting idea. The instructor must have been broad enough to allow you to benefit from both times. Frye: Yes, he was. Schatzker: Because that could be a stultifying experience. Frye: Davis was a receptive teacher. He wouldn’t have people around who weren’t ready to contribute to a discussion because he couldn’t function if he just had puddings in front of him. So it was a pretty lively group: Mary Winspear, who became a head mistress, Peg Stobie (who’s still teaching I think in Manitoba),24 her husband Bill, John Creighton (Donald Creighton’s older brother) . . . Schatzker: What about his ideas about Blake? Did they stimulate you? Frye: That was a point: he didn’t have ideas about Blake. That so very civilized a person whose interests are mainly eighteenth-century—anything of Swift—could have this kind of interest in Blake was quite a revelation to me. I was looking over Foster Damon’s reminiscences the other day and he was still feeling bitter about the way in which Harvard had practically ostracized him because he was interested in a nut.25 That was a common academic attitude. Davis just did not have it. He also had a considerable interest in D.H. Lawrence. Schatzker: It was all right at UC, I suppose, at that time. Was this the period that you mentioned before in which you and Kathleen Coburn were able to go ahead and work on your subjects without anybody hampering you or breathing down your necks? Frye: We were given time to do what we liked in our own way. You can

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find out something of Kay’s timetable from her autobiography In Pursuit of Coleridge. With me the book on Blake took something like fifteen years and five complete rewritings; but after all it was a hell of a difficult subject for one’s first book. Schatzker: Did you do any teaching before you went to Oxford, as an assistant or . . . ? Frye: Yes.26 Schatzker: How did that appeal to you? Frye: I knew that I wanted to be a teacher. I remember I made the change in the fall of ’37.27 There was a giant reunion of the alumni of ’36 and ’37 once; this when I was principal, back in the 1960s. First of all I was approached by a man from ’36 who insisted on buying me a drink on the grounds that I had saved his year by writing an essay for him in the spring of ’36 when I was still a graduate student. The second person who approached me was a woman who complained bitterly . . . [unfortunately the tape breaks off here] III (10 August 1982, Part 1) Schatzker: We have been talking about your career around the time of 1936 when you were in the graduate school at University of Toronto and teaching. You had just begun to tell me about the Student Christian Movement of those days, its interest in social activism and the political ideas of the time. Frye: I didn’t come in contact with a great deal of that. I attended various conferences in Couchiching.Then there was something called a Hazen conference financed by some well-to-do philanthropist28 which met in the early 1940s and I went to that. It [the SCM] was the main channel of student activism in those days. Some of the leaders in it were people like Ken Woodsworth, people who had come from missionary families and consequently had seen a good deal of radical activity in the Orient and thought it was the answer here as well, as a lot of people did.29 Schatzker: Could you give me an idea of what political interests you felt were operating on campus in the late ’30s, before you went to Oxford, and whether there was much interest in what was going on in Europe, the looming threat.

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Frye: There was a good deal. I mentioned the SCM and the League for Social Reconstruction—they were the more bourgeois ones—and the Regina manifesto of the CCF, and the great deal of social-democratic activity in the country. Apart from that there were also two Communist organizations: one Stalinist, the other Trotskyite. They made quite a bit of noise. I think I mentioned Earl Birney’s Down the Long Table as something which deals with that kind of activity in the ’30s. Schatzker: Campus life has always been divided among the few students who are really interested in politics and the greater mass that doesn’t particularly care. But was the greater mass of students at this time beginning to be aware of the political currents in the world? Frye: Well, I would say they were beginning to be aware of it, yes. They could hardly avoid it with the kind of news there was in the paper. But there still wasn’t a mass activism. Schatzker: No. Not the kind that I experienced as a student over the Vietnamese war. Frye: I don’t think there was, no. I think that Depression conditions in the economy tend to throw a wet blanket over student activism and it was still the Depression at that time. Schatzker: There were two notes that I made about some things that you said in the last tape. Firstly, you mentioned that the two courses you took from Herbert Davis on Blake were taught by the same instructor but didn’t have the same people in them. It reminded me to ask you how much you felt that learning, especially on the graduate level, but also on the undergraduate level, was determined by the students you came in contact with as opposed to the professor who instructed the course. How important that is in the teaching and learning process? Frye: That’s rather hard to say. I think we had a graduate program in which certain courses loomed up as more or less compulsory for those who were going on to Ph.D. work, like the courses of Woodhouse. Davis’s courses were rather more, well, refuges for graduate students because he himself didn’t push the teaching element in it. The students did their own work and cultivated their own interests. Schatzker: He ran more of a seminar type of class. Frye: Yes, much more.

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Schatzker: Do you think that that is more valuable in the long run for a graduate student? Frye: I wouldn’t want to generalize. I think it is very valuable for graduate students. There are certain things that you can do in lectures that you can’t do in seminars. I have always rather disliked graduate teaching and I’ve only come to terms with it by treating my graduate students exactly as though they were undergraduates. In other words, I do lecture to them. In many ways I think there are theoretical objections to that, but on the other hand what I have to do I think I can communicate only in that way, and it seems to be useful to them. Schatzker: In other words there’s a place for many different styles of teaching. Frye: Many different styles. Davis was before anything else a civilized man and contact with him was really where the education was. He was a bit like Pelham Edgar at Victoria, who was not a critic in the sense of making critical evaluations or judgments on the texts he read, but nevertheless managed to convey the impression that a scholar’s life was a good life. Schatzker: You’re telling me then that the teacher in the university is important as a role model; that’s an awful phrase, but he sets a pattern as a scholar and an educated, well-read person and that’s almost as important as the learning of the student. Frye: Yes, I would accept that. I don’t think the student knows what he’s learning unless he does have some such personal model. Schatzker: The other question I had, arising out of the last tape, was the one of accepted areas for study in these times. I imagine that the atmosphere that we’ll talk about in the ’30s must have pervaded the ’40s and perhaps the early ’50s as well. You mentioned that Damon in his reminiscences talked about his estrangement from Harvard College because of his interest in Blake; Blake was considered a nut and the student who studied him would be similarly judged. I would like to know if that atmosphere was really pervasive. Was there a sense that certain things were worthy of study and others weren’t? I think that atmosphere has disappeared now because almost everything is open to study. Frye: Well, Blake is still regarded as a nut at Harvard, but that’s because

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Harvard has gone in for a civil-service mentality which has pretty well knocked it out of the really top league as far as a humanist education is concerned. Schatzker: And here at Toronto, was there the same sense of rigidity in applying your interest to the great authors or could you apply it to anyone and be accepted? Frye: If I can say this about a person whom I personally liked and admired immensely, I think it would have been just as rigid if Woodhouse had had more control of the department than he in fact did have. But the federation system prevented him from having that. As long as Davis was here, of course, there was a more urbane interest in varieties of people. I’ve mentioned his interest in D.H. Lawrence as well as in Blake. The variety of interests which the different colleges all developed I think was of immense importance. That’s why it has been a mortal blow to the colleges to lose their power of appointment. Schatzker: That’s something we’ll discuss further at another point. Do you think that, as compared with the atmosphere of the late ’30s, scholarly attitudes have changed, all over the continent and perhaps in the English-speaking world, about the subjects considered worthy of study? Frye: Oh, yes. They’ve changed in the same way that the sciences have changed. A student studying, say, biology in the 1980s with the DNA molecule and so on isn’t in the same world as a student studying it in the 1930s. A student of the humanities today has to get into realms of critical theory and linguistics and hermeneutics and so on that simply did not exist in the ’30s. Schatzker: Has the pendulum perhaps swung too far in the other direction; are graduate students pursuing topics that are not really worthy of their study? Frye: Well, that happens wherever the pendulum is. That’s going to happen in graduate school: you’re going to have some people chasing up blind alleys and supervisors not really in a position to do much about it. Schatzker: You went to Oxford in 1939, was it? Frye: Yes . . . . It was actually in 1936–37 that I had my first year there but I came back and taught for a year and then I went back for my second year in 1938–39.

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Schatzker: I have that now. And you received your Oxford M.A. in 1940. Frye: Yes. Schatzker: Why did you decide to go abroad to study? Why did you choose Oxford and Merton College? Frye: In the first place, I’d been in Toronto long enough. In the second place it was Herbert Davis who got me to Oxford, his connections were with Oxford. Merton College, because Merton College, at that time, was the big centre of English. It isn’t now, but then again, colleges go through cycles. Schatzker: At this time you had decided that your vocation was in university teaching and that’s why you went on. Frye: Yes. Schatzker: You must have received some financial assistance. Frye: I got a fellowship offered by the Royal Society. I got that largely through Pelham’s efforts.30 Schatzker: Was it adequate? Frye: I struggled through. In second year I got a scholarship administered by Currelly, or at least through Currelly and the Trick family that had married into the Masseys, I think.31 Schatzker: There are so many questions I have to ask about Oxford. But if you could tell me first of all how your studies were organized and who were the professors that you came into contact with most, that would be a good place to begin. Frye: The Oxford system was very like the Honour Course here. It was an intensified version of it. The reason why I read the undergraduate school in English was that after three years of theology I was getting a little rusty in my English, in spite of the English courses I’d taken from Davis. I knew by that time I wanted to teach English, so that seemed to me the best thing to do. In those days, as I’ve explained earlier, it was possible to get a tenure stream appointment without getting a Ph.D.: that was the sort of anglophile tradition at Toronto. Of course Oxford very much wanted everybody to take the undergraduate school because it

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was the only thing they knew how to teach. They had very unwillingly put in a B.Litt. course in order to discourage Rhodes scholars from going on to do a doctorate; but the Rhodes scholars went on to do it anyway, so that eventually they had to change around. But I skipped all that and simply did the undergraduate school. Schatzker: How did it compare with what you remembered from the Honour Course? Frye: It was very largely a repetition of what I’d done. I read more intensively, but, as I said, my real reason for taking it was that I wanted to become fresher in the whole English area. If you ask about instruction: of course it was tutorial, and my tutor was Edmund Blunden, who was a rather shy, diffident man. For some bloody reason, which I’ve never figured out, he was pro-Nazi. I didn’t know who to blame for that. But in any case, I seemed to meet fascists everywhere I turned at Oxford, so I was politically and socially extremely unhappy for that time that I was there. England’s morale seemed to be the lowest in its history. If you read Howard K. Smith’s Last Train from Berlin (he’s a CBS announcer, and he was a classmate of mine at Oxford), the first chapter is about his experiences at Merton College and it will give you some idea of what I myself found extremely uncongenial about the place.32 Schatzker: That’s interesting. I’ve interviewed people who were in England at Oxford or Cambridge around this time (not necessarily at Merton College and not studying English), and I had the feeling that there were many left-wing groups. Was it your particular area of study or the people that you met through your English studies that were more . . . Frye: It may have been just pure accident. But if I found myself just meeting people casually, I seemed to keep running into the fascist groups all the time. I know that the Labour group was the largest single group in Oxford, but the general feeling at Merton, certainly, and I think at several other colleges as well, was very much not to my liking. Schatzker: Was it more politically active than Toronto—perhaps from being closer to the continent? Frye: I wouldn’t say that it was more politically active, but the undercurrents were beginning to swirl around and they were very ugly ones. There was one man who had gone up to Merton on a scholarship which

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had been donated by Oswald Mosley and his job was to recruit people as far as he could.33 I felt that if England had not been forced into an antiHitler position it would have gone in a very sinister direction or at least the intellectual leadership would have done so. Schatzker: Did you find yourself ostracized? Frye: No, I didn’t. That’s too strong a word, I didn’t find myself ostracized. And of course there were very intense left-wing people both in Merton College and elsewhere. Howard Smith was one, and another was a tough egg from Yorkshire who came home drunk to his room and found about four or five Fascists roughing it up. So his head cleared and he went into action and pretty soon the air was thick with Fascists flying out the windows. Schatzker: It sounds very lively. Frye: Well, it wasn’t lively in the right way. Schatzker: How did you feel as a “colonial”—I put that in quotation marks—at Oxford? Were you made to feel colonial? Frye: In my second year I tended to make my friends mainly among the Americans and the colonials simply because of the age gap. My best friends were a New Zealander, Mike Joseph, who died recently, and a Rhodes scholar from Mississippi, Rodney Baine, whom I visited a few months ago because his son had set up a lectureship in his honour at the University of Georgia and I went and opened it. There were some English friends as well, such as Bernie Mellor, who was the registrar at the University of Hong Kong for many years.34 But just because of that age gap I tended to find myself with Canadians and colonials. Schatzker: You mentioned Blunt. Frye: Blunden: Edmund Blunden the poet. Schatzker: I see, I had not heard you correctly. Frye: Blunt was my wife’s teacher at the Courtauld Institute in London.35 Schatzker: Any other tutors in your first or second year that impressed you or influenced you? Frye: Not particularly. There was Bryson in Balliol, who is dead now, who was our tutor in Anglo-Saxon.

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Schatzker: What would you say was the greatest benefit which you received from these two years at Oxford? Frye: Simply the time to read English literature. Schatzker: Did you work on anything in particular, continue your work? Frye: Yes, I got interested in Blake. I knew by that time I was going to write a book on Blake. So I kept working on that to the extent that I could. The lectures, I avoided. In those days it was considered playing to the gallery if you were a decent lecturer. The only Oxford lecturer who tried to make himself worth listening to was C.S. Lewis, who of course later went to Cambridge. His lectures were published after his death in a book called The Discarded Image.36 Schatzker: Did you find yourself influenced by his literary ideas to a great extent? Frye: To some degree I did. That is, there was real information in them, and real ideas. Schatzker: What about your student life in relationship to students studying other subjects? Was Oxford isolated in that way or did you have openings to meet students who were studying in other fields? Frye: There were openings. Not being athletic I missed the main area of contact with other students, but I did talk to other people—though not in a way which I remember as particularly memorable. Schatzker: You returned to Toronto and taught for a year, then went back. By the time you went back the war had already broken out. Frye: No, the year I went back was 1938–39. I wrote my exams in the spring of 1939. What I had done was get married in that intervening year. My wife came over in the Spring of ’39 and we had a trip to Italy— a very unpleasant time to be travelling in Italy—and got back to Toronto the day that the Soviet-Nazi pact was signed. Schatzker: Oh, I see. You weren’t abroad, then, when the hostilities really broke out. Do you have anything to say about your trip to Italy? Frye: Just that Mussolini and his epigrams were plastered all over the place. People were unfriendly when they heard that I was actually a part

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of the British Empire. I was spat at in Ravenna, but I was rather pleased about that because people usually took me to be a German. I noticed that the Italian people, whatever the officials and police said, did not care for the Germans, who of course came in huge busloads with their little pittance of Nazi money to spend and were an extremely arrogant lot. Schatzker: You returned to a position in Toronto. I wondered, did you ever consider going anywhere else? Frye: Well, when offers began to come from the United States . . . Schatzker: No, I mean at this point. Frye: Oh, not at this point, no. Schatzker: It was just the normal natural thing to return to Toronto. Frye: I came back because Pelham Edgar and Ned Pratt and John Robins and so on knew me personally; it was the obvious place to come. Schatzker: What situation did you encounter here in Toronto during the war years? Was there any threat that you would have to go into the service or anything like that? Frye: Actually my class, a married man born in 1912, was never called. Schatzker: The student population must have been decimated to a certain extent. Frye: It was indeed, yes. Schatzker: Much smaller classes, and I think women seemed to predominate. Frye: Women naturally predominated—they were left; but the casualty lists coming in every week is something I don’t like to think about too much. Schatzker: And I’m sure you knew most of them. Most of the people that I interview were students in the late ’20s and ’30s and became members of the staff in the ’40s. They were difficult years for the university. The ’30s was a time of financial constraint; nothing really expanded or moved ahead in a material sense. And the war years must have been the same. I’m sure there was a good morale in the sense that everybody was supporting the country’s cause, but there must have been some damage

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to the intellectual life of the university because so many promising young men were not returning. Frye: Oh God, yes. Schatzker: Did you ever have a feeling that the university had really not been progressing, or did that just never affect the student and the young staff member? Frye: Progressing is of course a term that you can give a great many meanings to. At that point we felt that if we could only hold together until the war was over we’d have done a good deal. I remember some rather timid people saying that they wouldn’t bet two cents on the university’s chances of opening in the fall. That kind of thing was said from time to time. But the university did keep opening in the fall and it struggled through until the end of the war. Schatzker: I think interesting things happened during the war from the information I’ve received from interviewees: women who had really very little chance of teaching before found positions, and the female student became a little more important just because she was for a short time predominant in the class. Frye: That may have been true. Victoria of course never had any hangups about having women on the staff—at least Pelham didn’t and he was the head of the English department. In other colleges it was very different. Schatzker: And in the science departments: some of the first women that taught there taught because of the war. You were really still very much a part of Victoria and the happenings in the rest of the university I suppose really didn’t affect you and your colleagues as much. Frye: I suppose that is true. I was too small [sic] to be in the advisory circles of the university. I didn’t really know what was going on in general policy, but I certainly got the impression that it was a kind of holding operation. Schatzker: The postwar period brought in the veteran students and tremendous financial activity on the part of the federal government and the university to educate them. Many people have pointed out that these students were very interesting and changed the face of the university to a certain extent because of their maturity and drive.

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Frye: That couldn’t be more true. It was the golden age of teaching. I remember Arthur Barker saying to me some years later, “Well, we’re back to teaching children again.” Schatzker: That’s interesting. There is now sometimes a prejudice against older students. Not perhaps in the arts . . . IV (10 August 1982, Part 2) Schatzker: I’d like to talk a bit about the period from 1940 through to the end of the war, the period of the veteran students and the early ’50s. I suppose it ends in 1956, the date when the university decided that it had to expand because of the Plateau Committee, because of Professor Sheffield’s predictions about the large numbers of students that would be entering.37 Going back to this period, could you talk a bit about being a teacher at Victoria, the principals under whom you worked, the presidents if you had much contact with them, the atmosphere, the type of students that you encountered. I’m particularly interested in whatever work you had to do on college councils or university committees: the Faculty of Arts council, for instance, or the Senate. But if we could just go back and talk about what it was like being a teacher during this period. Frye: First of all, I was rumoured to be rather good with Honour students, so I got the Honour Courses to teach: partly too because my elders, Ned Pratt and John Robins, preferred the Pass Course. My colleague Joe Fisher had signed up almost the first day of the war. So I came back in the fall of 1939 to discover that in addition to three major Honour Courses which I was slated to teach I would also have to teach the Restoration and eighteenth-century course which he had. So I tackled that. I got fairly close to my students because I think the students’ instinct is always to go for the youngest member on the staff. I remember the students of those days quite well and they became close personal friends later. I realized that when the holding operation was over and the returned men had come back there was much more of a teaching challenge to meet, but I enjoyed those years immensely. I don’t know if I’ve remarked that in the first summer course with the returned people I had Judy LaMarsh and Doug Fisher and Keith Davey in the same class.38 In the period 1945–50 I was working pretty well within the department, going to council meetings, but not very faithfully, not connected with the

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senate; in general fairly preoccupied with teaching and my relation to the students. In those days being honorary president of the year was more than just a formality;39 and I was [faculty] advisor to Acta Victoriana, the student magazine, that kind of thing. Then Pratt and Robins reached retiring age around 1952. After the war, Fisher had come back and Principal Brown thought that he would be the head of the department and that I would be left for writing and scholarship. But Joe died of cancer that year, in the summer of 1952, and I carried on as chairman of the department with what advice I could get from John Robins, who died in the Christmas of that year. So 1952 is not a date I’m likely to forget. From then on until the mid-’50s I was pretty well preoccupied with that kind of activity. I had a Guggenheim year, a year off [at Harvard], in 1950–51. That was just before I came in as chairman. And then I had two spring terms, one at Princeton in 1954 and one at Harvard in 1957. Schatzker: There’s much to discuss here. The first question is, For someone who was as devoted to teaching and scholarship as you were, was the burden of administration an unwelcome one, did it interfere very much? You’ve had much administration to do in your career; there’s a general saying in the academic world that it’s perhaps wrong to place administrative burdens on productive academics. Frye: I’ve always felt that the alternative was very much worse—that is, to have professional administrators come in. The whole university just goes rotten at the core when that happens. I think that academics have to take their turn at administrative jobs in their own sometimes very blundering and inefficient way. I don’t think the university ought to be an efficient organization in any case; it’s misconceived its whole aim and social function if it is. Schatzker: In these days of being accountable to the man who pays the piper, which is the government, I think efficiency is demanded in certain areas. Frye: It’s demanded, yes, but it’s wrong. It’s just plain wrong. Schatzker: That’s an extremely interesting comment because in this university there have been many fine academics who’ve held administrative posts. It’s an argument worth discussing, especially now when the short terms of appointment cause a tremendous turnover. In the sci-

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ences, people tell me that they would advise scholars not to accept administrative appointments because five or ten years out of the stream would be disastrous to their career. Frye: Yes, I think the pressure in science is very tough and I don’t know exactly what answer I would give if I were in the sciences. The humanities move fast but they don’t move as fast as all that. Schatzker: In the old system, before terms were placed upon appointments, there were some career administrators who were scientists by training and inclination who decided at some point in their career to devote themselves to teaching and administration and the promotion of their fellow scientists. Some of them, such as Professor Wasteneys,40 had twenty-five-year terms in science departments. But that’s no longer possible. So there’s, I think, a problem that has to be addressed . . . Frye: Oh there is, yes. In Wasteneys’ generation, the university was smaller and the relationships were more personal; the chairman of the department was a father-figure who took an interest in your second mortgage. The whole relationship within the university as well as between the university and the community outside was quite different. I don’t know what all the answers are. I just feel that the university is a special-function institution and it cannot be treated like a business. Scholarship goes to pieces once you take out the sort of “wandering in a wilderness” aspect and the sense of hunch, the feeling of, “Well, let’s see if this will work out,” without any accountability to anybody whatever. That’s the atmosphere out of which creative scholarship grows, I think, in every field. Schatzker: You said that you didn’t attend the council of the faculty of arts on a regular basis in these early days. Why was that—did you find that it was just a burden, a waste of time? Frye: It seemed to me a waste of time, but perhaps I was being rather remiss in that regard. I took as little interest in the actual operation of the university as I could. I’m not defending that; I’m not saying that I was doing the right thing by any means. I’m just saying I did what I did. Schatzker: I was just interested because at that time, it seems to me, the colleges operated quite separately and functioned well on their own. There were all these little fingers [sic] that you could pursue into the university at large, and of course you must have had departmental respon-

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sibilities. Essentially, correct me if I’m wrong, I think the Faculty of Arts in those days was not a very powerful office. The colleges had so much control over their own staff and students—not the curriculum really, but the way they pursued it—that the Faculty of Arts really didn’t have much of an impact on them. Frye: I daresay that’s true. Although of course all the sciences and social sciences were in the Faculty of Arts and they were apart from the colleges. I remember when a friend of mine named Hazard Adams who was Dean of Arts at California [Irvine] wrote a book about being dean. He remarked in that book that it’s the instinct of every academic to be loyal to the smallest group that he could attach himself to.41 That certainly was true of me—that’s why I tended to hole up in Victoria. Schatzker: What about relations with the Department of English?42 Which as head of the department you must have . . . Frye: Yes, well, there was a great deal of that. That meant Woodhouse at UC and Arthur Barker at Trinity. Woodhouse, of course, was so dominating a figure; I tended to let him dominate because he always knew what he wanted. Schatzker: Were you in agreement? Frye: I could usually go along with it. He was an aggressive person and could be arrogant but for the most part he really did have a genuine sense of the welfare of the standards of English. There was very seldom a reason for going to bat on a major issue. Schatzker: Other people have complained about the dominance of Woodhouse and felt it was a stultifying dominance—that we didn’t progress during some of the time of his leadership. Yet you recognize it as basically positive. Frye: It seemed to me a positive thing. Of course I’m temperamentally rather conservative in academic matters and so was he. I quite see that Clifford Leech was right when he remarked a few years later that Woodhouse could not have survived into the ’60s: he just wouldn’t have known what the hell to do. But the same thing was true of me: I felt out of it too. Schatzker: The change was so radical between the scholars of the previous era and the ones of the ’60s. The period of change was so short that there was really no development time.

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Frye: Yes, that’s true. Schatzker: You just belonged to one age or another; there weren’t very many people in between. I guess Father Shook was head of the English department [at St. Mike’s] and Arthur Barker [at Trinity]. Did they chafe under Woodhouse’s domination? Frye: I think that Arthur Barker perhaps did to some extent, and that that was one of the reasons why he went to Illinois. I’m not certain of that; I believe there were tensions within his own college as well. I think he felt that being in Woodhouse’s field, which was Milton studies, he was better off with another university.43 Schatzker: What about the development of the teaching of English under Professor Woodhouse’s direction: did he change what had gone before to any great extent? While he was chairman of the department, were you constantly modifying and working things over, were you responding to criticism, or did it just stay the same? Frye: I don’t think there was a great deal of change. He and E.K. Brown between them brought in the Honour English course, which previously had been the English and History Course. Brown pressed hard, first for a course in American literature, and then for a course in modern literature; there was a bit more of the twentieth century by that time. I think that if Brown had (a) lived longer, and (b) stayed more in Toronto, he and Woodhouse—because of the great personal friendship between them plus the temperamental clashes—would have brought about much more change than Woodhouse by himself did.44 I can remember when Brown came back from Chicago and we had a meeting at Canon Cody’s. Brown had just discovered the New Criticism, the expository criticism. He said something about spending nineteen hours on Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn with his graduate students and Woodhouse said, “What did you say in the other eighteen?” [laughter] Which I thought was the absolutely perfect confrontation of two methods of teaching. Schatzker: What about the staff of the Department of English at this time? You must have contributed to it as head of the [Victoria] department by hiring new people, and I imagine there were new faces coming in at the other colleges. Frye: I brought in Millar MacLure, to the great disgust of University College because Woodhouse felt he ought to spend a little more time in the

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boondocks. I also brought Jack Robson from Alberta.45 Those were the major appointments I made. Schatzker: Was that Woodhouse’s pattern, to send them off to the provinces, so to speak? Frye: Sure, he’d heard that from Harvard, that’s what they do. Schatzker: And then he would bring them back. You sort of stole Robson, I think, from under his nose. Frye: Well, I certainly stole Millar MacLure from under his nose, yes, because he had his eye on MacLure. But not for a few years yet. Schatzker: What about your relationship to some of the new staff members in the rest of the department? Were there any particularly close ones? Frye: Well, it was about that time that Marshall McLuhan came to St. Michael’s from Windsor and Gordon Roper was at Trinity. I don’t remember many new people at UC, except for Douglas Grant who came and stayed for some years. Schatzker: Priestley would have come in at this point, too. Frye: I think of him as a bit of an older generation, but perhaps he would have done. Schatzker: Yes, he was brought in by Woodhouse, having spent a lot of time in the West.46 Then I suppose in the late ’50s there were quite a few new faces at UC: Hugo McPherson, Jess Bessinger . . .47 I imagine Victoria expanded in the same way around the end of the ’50s. Frye: In 1959 when I became principal, Ken MacLean took the department over.48 There were certainly a good many appointments that he was responsible for that I processed as principal. Schatzker: As head of the department you didn’t have to make a great number of new appointments, and neither did your confrères at the other colleges. But at the beginning of the ’60s there was a tremendous amount of hiring to accommodate the large numbers of students who were going to come. The hiring happened very quickly and changed the face of the whole university; I think, from my interviews and from my own knowledge, that it changed the character of the Department of English drastically.

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Frye: Oh, yes, yes, I think that did happen. I think that Toronto had less of that than other places did, because in the smaller and the newer universities you would bring in somebody from a graduate school, say in Princeton, and his first move would be to hire all his pals from graduate school at Princeton, so that you get a department almost entirely staffed by Americans. And it happened to some extent here as well. I remember Millar MacLure remarking to me after a Department of English meeting of the early ’60s, “This is getting to be a terrible department, can’t pack it any more.”49 Schatzker: The ways things had been done for the past quarter of a century or more were just not acceptable to some of the younger staff members, who didn’t appreciate the traditional values or didn’t agree with the historical approach to English, etc. Was it disturbing for you? Frye: It was disturbing for me. I looked at it a little differently, you see. I thought of Toronto as a place that allowed great freedom to members of the staff to do what they wanted to do. I think Marshall felt that way, too. I remember his remarking that a man like Bill Blissett would be just unthinkable in a graduate school like Harvard or Yale.50 He would be processed—he would be put through the regular graduate-school mill— of the first-rate American institutions. Toronto seemed to be so much more relaxed. Schatzker: You mentioned that you spent a term at Princeton and a term at Harvard, so you must have become acquainted with this mill at that time. Frye: To some degree, yes. Schatzker: Can you describe what the differences would be between their approach to training a graduate student and ours? You said it’s more relaxed, but how do they actually put them through a mill? Frye: In the first place, the old, traditional method at Harvard was to put in people who were obviously given a vocation for teaching. In other words, you would frequently have to take a chance. Harvard took a chance and put in Livingstone Lowes, who was one of the great scholars and teachers of English.51 By the mid-century I think all the Ivy League places had been caught up in what I called a civil-service mentality [see p. 598], where the people chosen were the people who did the right thesis on the right topic and had shown a certain capacity for what was

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called productive scholarship. I have never forgotten how I was allowed to take my own time to finish my Blake book, which took a great many years. I’ve always been fanatically loyal to Victoria because of things like that. Schatzker: That changed so much, though; we have become more of a mill. Frye: We’ve become much more of that, yes. But the way I looked at it was that we were tightening up and becoming more of an institutional, predictable academic assembly line. Schatzker: You’d like to relax some of that, I suppose. Frye: Well, I regret that aspect of the change. Schatzker: Do you think it’s possible to go back? Frye: You can’t go back but it’s possible that you may find out people who’ve been smothered by this kind of system—that is, genuinely creative people who take a long time to do what they have to do sort of coming up from under again. Schatzker: Of course, so many present conditions militate against that. The fact that young people can’t even get a job at the university. Frye: The job situation now is just miserable. When I think of all these brilliant, dedicated young people and how little we can promise them in the way of careers, it makes me sick to my stomach. Schatzker: Just to finish the tape, one of the other aspects of this particular period [1940–56]: it wasn’t a period of tremendous change in the history of the University of Toronto. It was kind of a sleepy period despite the fact that it was postwar and you’d think there might be a bit of a boom. There wasn’t much capital expenditure at the time; there wasn’t a great expansion of the physical plant. And there were some areas in which it was badly needed, especially in the sciences. The central administration was still run by a president who related to the board and then related to the rest of the university; he brought the decisions of the board through the senate or to the colleges through the principals in a way that had been done all along under Falconer and Cody.52 I’m sure that when you were on staff it was the way it was done and nobody ever thought that anything would be done any differently.

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Frye: Well, the university, and Victoria itself on a smaller scale, was set up in such a way that everything got funnelled through the president. I found when I became principal that I was in effect the assistant to the president. In the setup of Victoria there was nothing else I could be. Now of course it’s quite different. Schatzker: Well, you had Dr. Moore as president, so I don’t suppose there were many difficulties. Frye: No, there weren’t difficulties and, besides, he was so conscientious a president that . . . it would be too much to say that there wasn’t much for me to do, but there wasn’t very much in the way of, well, creative administration, if there is such a thing, for me to do. It just wasn’t set up that way. Schatzker: At Victoria it was agreeable to you because of the personalities involved. Do you think it could have been a destructive system? Frye: It could have been, sure. Any system could be destructive if you’ve got a man of very strong will. I think to some extent—I’m not speaking personally now, but as an administrator—I think it would have gone in that direction if Walter Brown had remained much longer at Victoria. A philosopher colleague of mine said that the trouble with Brown is that he’s a volunteeristic Hegelian, and I said, “What the hell does that mean?” And he said, “It means that he’s as stubborn as a hog on ice.” Schatzker: There isn’t much more time but perhaps you could talk about any recollections you have of the two presidents of this era, President Cody and President Smith. Frye: I regard them both as extremely genial people who seemed to me to be quite genuinely committed to the values of the university. I had a great respect for both of them. V (20 September 1982, Part 1) Schatzker: We’re coming to the great changes that occurred in the University of Toronto starting at end of the ’50s. Around 1956 the university assembled a committee which was later called the Plateau Committee to assess the implications of the Sheffield report. Professor Sheffield had predicted that the institutions of higher education would be flooded with students in a few years because of the increase in the population after the

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war. This proved to be true. Not only did that increase of population flood the campuses, but the Ontario government at the same time developed a policy that encouraged students to seek higher education. I think it was Premier Davis’s platform that assured the residents of Ontario that university education would be available to anyone who could manage to pass the entrance tests.53 This decision helped increase the moneys available for scholarships and aid and bursaries in every form. As a result the population of the established universities expanded and other universities were formed. Do you remember what your thoughts were around this time? You had become principal and you must have been faced with some of these problems. Frye: I was faced with them, certainly. I felt that along with the increased grants, which were very sensible, there was also a tendency to open more universities in local areas (on political grounds) than the province could possibly support, because boom times never last. Everybody regards them as normal times but of course the normal condition for a university is depression. That’s how it’s been since the thirteenth century. So when Leslie Frost [Ontario’s Premier], I remember, said, “OK, that’s enough universities,” then they opened four or five more and every one has been on the rocks financially ever since. However, that was not my business and I wasn’t on the Plateau Committee. The thing that I had to watch was that we made enough appointments so that there wasn’t a gradual squeeze of extra pressure on the staff. It’s one thing to meet an emergency situation like the returned men after the war, but it’s another thing to have suddenly twenty extra essays on your teaching schedule, or just one more class here and there. So we had to go in for an increase in staff, although we certainly didn’t get to anything like stockpiling. Schatzker: When the Faculty of Medicine decided to increase its class by one hundred per year and to expand in many other directions, one of the faculty members noted that it would be easy to build the buildings and purchase the equipment, but the hardest thing would be to find qualified staff in a hurry. In some cases I think this has proved to be true. Were you able to add gradually and choose your staff carefully according to the same principles you had used before? Frye: At the time you are speaking of I was not personally the chairman of the English department here at Victoria. It was possible then for Toronto to do what Harvard and Yale and the other big private universities in the States are still trying to do; that is, they send their graduate stu-

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dents out for a few years to civilize the boondocks and then they recall them when they’re about fifty-nine. Well, I’m not interested in recalling a man at the time when he’s already produced everything he’s going to, but I did get some quite good younger people from our own graduate school, from other Canadian universities. Now of course that was an act of piracy because the other universities lost very good men. On the other hand the men were quite anxious to come to Toronto. In the departments like English there was still a bit of competition among the colleges here. Schatzker: And when you became principal, that rush to expand staff continued. Did you find that there was difficulty in the departments at Victoria? Frye: The departments varied a good deal. There was very seldom any difficulty with making extra appointments in the two major ones, English and French, but in smaller departments like Near Eastern Studies, it was more touch and go. Schatzker: What did you feel about the government’s attitude towards encouraging higher education for a larger percentage of the population? Frye: The encouragement of higher education for a larger proportion of the population is something I would always approve of. I don’t in the least believe that only a very small minority are capable of university experience. It seems to me that they will be a minority, but when the population of the country is something like twenty-two million that gives you quite a large university population, even within a minority. So that part of it was straightforward enough. It was the dispersal of our resources without anything to meet the future which bothered me. Schatzker: You could see that at the time? Frye: Well, I could see a bit of it at the time. I may be talking from hindsight now, but I think I do remember feeling at the time that more community colleges and fewer universities would be a better idea, if we could only abolish the social snobbery that attaches to universities. Schatzker: One of the effects of the increase in the number of universities in Ontario was that the University of Toronto, which had a little more political clout in the past, lost it because the competition for funds became so great. Many committees were set up: there was a Presidents’ Committee of all the Ontario universities and there were other decanal committees; these I gather ended up being matches to see who could

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claim the most money for his programs. I think the University of Toronto felt that it lost a great deal of prestige because of this competition. Some people, on the one hand, have said that we cannot jeopardize the excellence of our one established university by building up the others; then of course the opposite answer would be, “Why should Toronto have it all?” Frye: As I say, I felt that there were too many new universities opening— more than the country could really support—and some of them would never be anything more than a different kind of community college without as much relevance to the economy. On the other hand, when a university does start, it’s a well-known principle that the care and feeding of small infants is a more exacting operation than the care and feeding of healthy adolescents who can come in and grab their own food. I think the feeling in Toronto was that if these universities are starting they will naturally have very keen and ambitious people in them who are trying to make them larger and cover a wider variety of the academic spectrum, and as long as the funds are there they should be encouraged to do it. Schatzker: Of course, that early boom time when funds were much more readily available than they ever had been did create a great deal of activity on this campus. Leaving out the construction of the medical building and other major buildings, there was the establishment of institutes and schools and centres in the School of Graduate Studies which expanded the whole graduate department . . . Frye: When it comes to graduate work, that is where I feel there’s a case to be made for centralizing, even at the price of thinking of Toronto as Hogtown. The small, undergraduate liberal arts college is still a conceivable unit, although it’s getting more and more out of date. But no province of the size and population and wealth of Ontario can really afford more than a very few graduate centres that are worth anything at all. I made some crack myself around that period about the university that opens its buildings with a shelf of books in the library, and a second shelf with an old copy of Time, and appoints a dean of graduate studies. Schatzker: Of course the inevitable result of the rapid growth of something like the School of Graduate Studies is that, now funds have declined, some of these centres are drastically threatened and may even have to close. This is a terrible thing for everyone to face. Frye: Of course it is. I have every sympathy with it. But, as I say, depres-

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sion is the university’s normal orbit, I don’t see how they could function in any other way. Schatzker: It was, I think, one of Claude Bissell’s major ambitions to improve the graduate school, along with building a library which would strengthen both the undergraduate and graduate programs. I think that’s one thing that he did achieve along with the help of Dean Sirluck.54 Frye: Yes, Claude and Ernest between them did a lot of very good and very hard work along that line. Of course the Robarts Library was intended to be a research centre for all the Ontario universities. Ontario’s a big place and there are difficulties with that too. Schatzker: There have been criticisms made of that policy: some people have said that the emphasis placed on graduate studies caused a deemphasis on teaching undergraduates. I don’t know whether one can ascribe the effect to Bissell’s and Sirluck’s desire to improve graduate studies, but a lot of people feel it was a very real happening of the ’60s. Frye: Well, yes, I certainly think it was. I can understand the drive towards undertaking graduate work in smaller universities, because they get people on the staff who are anxious to teach their own special subject, which they can very frequently do only in a graduate environment. It doesn’t always follow that that makes for a really first-class research program. There aren’t very many universities with the resources, physical and human, to build that up. Schatzker: Did you notice an increasing lack of interest in teaching undergraduates among your staff? Frye: I can’t say that I did notice that, because there’s been a very powerful tradition of undergraduate teaching at Toronto, and it’s nowhere been more powerful than in the federated colleges. With one or two exceptions, I can’t think of people who ever did any complaining about their undergraduate teaching. They understood its place in the university program. Schatzker: It’s difficult to sort out all the reasons why undergraduate teaching did have difficulties at this time. Part of it is the decline in standards in the high schools, so that many students came to the university inadequately prepared. Remedial English courses had to be established at a rate that we never knew before. Also there was a trend to dilute the

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undergraduate courses: the main effect of that was the abolishment of the Honour Course. All these things came together to create an atmosphere in the undergraduate world of the university that was quite different from what had gone on before. Frye: Yes, that’s quite true. Most of the improvements I disapproved of. I found my feet sinking deeper and deeper into the mud as I went on. I loved the Honour Course; I thought it gave the undergraduate at Toronto a better training than he could have gotten anywhere else on the continent. I recognize that it was due for a considerable overhaul, but I thought the Macpherson Report really went bananas on the extent to which this should happen. Schatzker: Dr. Bissell told me in private conversation that when he established the committee his main aim was not to focus attention on the Honour Course’s problems, which he felt were minor, but to beef up the General Course. Many students were complaining that the teachers were not giving it the same attention that they were giving to the Honours students. Now I don’t know if that was true or not; perhaps it was in some areas and not in others. Frye: There was a lot of hysteria abroad in those days. People used to yell words like “elitist” and thought it meant something. The difference between an Honour Course and a General Course student is not one of intelligence, it’s a difference in motivation. I said myself at the time that this committee was holding its hearings that the General Course was fair game—you can experiment with that as much as you like—but that the Honour Courses were a rather fragile thing that, once destroyed, could never be replaced. While I was very open to certain reforms in the Honour Courses including my own subject of English, which I think were pretty rigid in some places, nevertheless their principle, that the centre of all knowledge is where you happen to be, was a sound one. Schatzker: Many people agree with you, but I think it’s proved impossible to return to it, as you predicted. Frye: Oh, yes. Once an earthquake’s swallowed up a building, it’s had it. That architectural monument is gone. Schatzker: The Kelly Report tried to address itself to some of these problems.55 What do you feel about its results?

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Frye: The Kelly Report in effect said that it was a mistake to abolish the Honour Course in such a terrific hurry without looking around to see what the consequences would be, and that we need a bit more structure put back into the curriculum. Because during the age of hysteria we assumed that we were doing this for the sake of the students. That this was their great boo hurroo war cry, this was how they got freedoms, by elective choices. Of course, as soon as they got it the students found that that wasn’t at all what they wanted, and began to agitate for more structure in the program and more guidance in the choice of courses. The Kelly report struggled with that but hardly wrestled it to the ground. The whole process had gone too far. Schatzker: The comments about that report included one that expressed tremendous disappointment that they were unable to define the value of a humanities education, but felt that the views were too disparate to come to any conclusion. Frye: That’s always been a major difficulty. Nobody could ever define the humanities. Anybody who’s had any experience of them knows how valuable they are, but without that experience it’s very difficult to understand why they should be there. Schatzker: The same person, a senior administrator in this university, felt that the arts faculty was in great danger of losing its position and prestige because of the tight financial situation and the increasing demands for money from the scientific and professional courses, and also because of the proclaimed attitude of the government and the rest of society that education must have a teleological result. It has to have a purpose within society. Frye: Yes. The public is always convinced that the social situation is just there, a solid thing that won’t change; you keep pouring a new generation of students in to it every year, and the thing is not to pour too many in or you’ll break the mould. Well, there isn’t any mould. Right now we’re going through a major technological revolution of which most people, including myself, haven’t the faintest notion. What you need for that is the mind power of people who’ve been trained to think in a larger perspective. Schatzker: And the humanities, you feel, would do that better than professional training?

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Frye: Special training goes out of date as soon as you get a new model. You learn to work one kind of computer and that computer has gone the way of the dinosaurs in about two years. Schatzker: The changes in the ’60s were so rapid that it’s difficult to sort through. But one of the other problems, which I’m sure must have affected you as principal, was the increasing dependence on government and the increasing power that government had within the university. Did you sense this during the time that you were principal? Frye: I sensed that, and I felt too that that was very likely to be one of the results of abolishing a bicameral system, of having a board of governors and a senate.56 God knows I was bored enough with Senate meetings: without much to do and rubber-stamping what there was. But at the same time the existence of the Board of Governors was extremely useful to the university because it acted as a kind of buffer between the university itself and bureaucrats in Queen’s Park. The decisive part of it was made up of men who took a real interest in the university, and were also prominent enough in business and the professions and so on to bring a certain kind of pressure to bear on the government. So it didn’t turn into a governmental dictatorship. Schatzker: Do you feel that under the present system, the unicameral system, the university has been reduced to a position of going hat in hand to the government and asking, “Please, more?” Frye: Yes, it does seem to me that there’s a kind of unconscious dictatorship of bureaucracy in education in the province now. Given the way things have developed economically I suppose it was inevitable. But I think that the university did weaken itself in many respects. Schatzker: The former Dean of Arts, Professor Kruger, made a statement during the difficulties he had in the last couple of years of getting enough money to run his faculty. He said that in California when Reagan was governor he was very stingy with the funds he allotted to the state University of California. But the fact that a private university, Stanford, existed, keeping its standards high, forced the government not to let standards in the state university drop too much. He said that in Canada we don’t have that at all, so that once government has total power the standards can continue to decline. Frye: I can’t do anything with that sentence except put a period after it.

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This is absolutely true and it is what happens. The absence of a wellendowed private university in Canada is our major weakness: I think there’s no question on that point. Schatzker: It seems to be much more difficult in Canada to raise private funds for our universities. Our alumni programs don’t have great success. Frye: They don’t have the success that they should have, certainly. It’s partly the curious cultural diffusion in Toronto where there are so many different things to support. But certainly if you approach a number of people downtown with a request to help finance the university, you get a lot of answers of the “Well, we already pay for it through our taxes” variety. It’s difficult to explain to anybody that doesn’t want to be convinced on that point that in fact the taxes don’t begin to do it. On the other hand, John Leyerle does seem to have had some success in getting his research institute off the ground.57 While it still seems to be grouped around medical research, which is easier to get money for, still I think that does indicate a wider public interest than one might think.58 Schatzker: I think we probably have a great deal to learn from some of the American private universities about fundraising. Frye: Oh, yes. We’ll never get to that level. Schatzker: Just to make sure we’ve covered the increase in staff in this period: there didn’t seem to be enough Canadian graduates to fill the ranks of expanding departments. A lot of American- and some Britishtrained professors came in and changed the atmosphere at the university, bringing different ideas, some of them fresh and valuable, and others somewhat hostile to Toronto. Frye: Yes, I think that that’s true. I also felt very apprehensive, particularly at a new university where you would have departments where there might be one isolated Canadian with the rest all American. The trouble with that is that Canadian students get very confused if they’re taught subjects like modern history or political theory and economics by Americans who know only the American situation and haven’t very much interest in what’s going on in Canada. In other words, there was a reinforcement of the colonial attitude which was originally British but has now turned American. Schatzker: Do you think that had any effect on English studies or his-

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tory, or any other studies? I think we did have a certain Canadian attitude to the study of literature, probably something in between Britain and the United States. Frye: Oh, yes, there’s no question of that. I wrote an article about that for the [University of Toronto] Quarterly describing an experience of my own on my Guggenheim year at Harvard in 1950, looking at the bookshops and realizing what a tremendous dent in the scholarship of the humanities Canadians had made,59 without benefit of major research funds for travel or secretarial assistants, and without major libraries too. The scholars had go to the British Museum or Washington to do the job. Schatzker: I’m not sure that this is a correct impression, but I sometimes felt that with the large influx of young and enthusiastic American professors we got an overdose of their particular schools of criticism. Do you think that Canadian attitudes to literary criticism were lost for a while in the shuffle, or did they manage to survive? Frye: I think a lot of them have been lost and lost permanently. Take such a thing as the separation of the Department of Political Science from the Department of Economics: that is typical of an academic mode that wants economics to be as quantitative and mathematical as possible. The tradition of Toronto was a philosophical tradition which tended to unite subjects rather than make them hive off like cells reproducing by fissure. Certainly in the undergraduate school, I’ve always favoured a centralizing tendency, and the philosophical and historical approaches in Toronto I’ve always felt were immensely valuable. I don’t think we have those to the extent that we did have them, although there are still some very dedicated people here. Schatzker: The Honour Courses reinforced that by their very constitution, demanding a historical approach in the study of English. Frye: There are inflexibilities about that, but in my second year I got the Renaissance from the point of view of philosophy, English, and history; in the third year the eighteenth century; in the fourth year the nineteenth. To me the element of the single greatest value of my entire educational experience was to study a single period in three or four different fields and see how they all came together. Schatzker: I think the philosophical approach, too, was extremely powerful in the Honour Course in English especially, because we studied

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philosophers in the final two years extensively. They were writers but they were also philosophers. Frye: Oh, yes. There was never any attempt to draw a sharp boundary line between English literature and philosophy. Schatzker: How did you feel about the separation of areas of study in the graduate school? Did you feel that was valuable, to establish a medieval centre, a Renaissance program, a Celtic program, various things? Frye: Yes, I think that those have justified their existence as they’ve developed. The disadvantage is that the comparative literature department has been rather left out in the cold. Toronto dragged its feet on comparative literature for so long that when Sirluck finally—I won’t say got around to organizing it because it was one of his priorities from the beginning—but when he did start to organize it, the medieval and Renaissance fields were already preempted by those institutes, so that all the comparative literature department could take was Romantics and moderns and the theory of criticism. VI (20 September 1982, Part 2) Schatzker: We have been discussing some of the many changes that happened to the university in the ’60s. I was just mentioning that I felt the change had gone on so rapidly that it made people feel very insecure. Frye: Certainly people felt insecure and there was an absence of leadership. When you get into one of these mock-revolutionary situations such as the one built up by the age of hysteria you find that academic people hesitate to take sides because a side commits them either to a radicalism or to a conservatism that they don’t really want. What’s the point in being an academic unless you can see both sides of the question? In listening to the Senate debates after the Macpherson Report I thought to myself, “Well, what is the use?” The people who felt that the traditions in Toronto were worth keeping were not mocked or ridiculed particularly, they were simply ignored. I submitted a brief myself, as principal, to the Macpherson Committee, but that was simply dismissed as, “Well, you know your own mind, but after all we have much bigger things in view.” And when I was inaugurated as Chancellor of Victoria I said there were two things that made Toronto a world-class university: one was the

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Honour Course and the other was the federated college system, and we’ve destroyed both. But that speech was never reprinted anywhere.60 Schatzker: It wasn’t? Frye: No. Schatzker: This brings to mind the idea that something must have happened at the university to change it from an institution in which scholars listened to each other to one in which committees held sway. There weren’t as many committees, certainly, up until the late ’50s; principals and deans had more power; the unicameral system had not been put into place. I don’t suppose you’d like to start pinpointing where the blame may lie, and I’m sure it’s impossible, but can you speculate on what happened to this university? Frye: For one thing there was an increase in numbers. Marx says that a quantitative increase at a certain point will produce a qualitative change;61 he forgot to add that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the qualitative change is disastrous. More and more sections of the community began demanding representation on boards like the Council or the Senate. One can understand the justice of these claims and in a democratic environment one doesn’t want to argue against them, but what happens is that these bodies become so unwieldy that the actual work has to be left to committees. So that the responsibility becomes more and more hidden and the authority becomes increasingly anonymous. Schatzker: Something similar is happening to our national parliament; at least, some of the politicians view it as a dinosaur and don’t have any respect for it. There seems to be a tendency in the entire society to govern by oligarchy. Frye: Well, bureaucracy. I think the only government of which the human race is capable is more or less efficient or corrupt bureaucracy. The degrees of efficiency and corruption are what make the difference. Schatzker: Would you say that the central administration—which had to increase because of the increase in size and the amount of change that was going on—became too powerful? Frye: It isn’t so much that it was too powerful as that the individual qua individual began to lose a sense of participation. For any kind of participatory democracy you need a thorough-going decentralizing process

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breaking down into smaller units. That is why I’ve always supported the federated college system, and even they are too big. But of course that is expensive, so things tend to centralize; and as they centralize the administration becomes so complex that it passes into the hands of people who in effect do nothing else. Whereas traditionally in the university, the administrator was an academic who was simply stuck with an extra job. Schatzker: I think we had some very fine administrators who took their onerous roles very seriously and tried very hard to satisfy all elements . . . Frye: So do I. Schatzker: But I think they couldn’t possibly do it. Frye: That’s right. Schatzker: Especially, as you say, during the age of hysteria, when the other pressures just became too much. Another major development during this time which continues to be problematic is the organization and demands of the staff. I was told by a member of the Board of Governors that Walter Gordon came into a board meeting—I think it was in the mid to late ’50s—and astounded them all by saying that his research on the salaries of the professors at the University of Toronto made him realize that we were underpaying them in a way that was dreadful—it bore no relationship to what was going on in the rest of society. That single courageous action of his caused a general salary increase. Up until then the staff had been rather sleepy and not terribly demanding. But things changed very rapidly and during the age of hysteria the Faculty Association became beset with factions; how did you survive that? Frye: It’s just a case of survival. I detest the thought of a unionized staff in a university. A university is a special-purpose organization where the whole labour–management setup doesn’t fit at all. I think that a unionized staff would bring something rather cancerous into university life. I know I’m defining my generation when I say that but I do believe it very, very strongly. I think that traditionally academics, like clergymen, have been regarded by society as already paid by the spiritual benefits of what they do. At present I understand what the CAUT is doing in demanding across-the-board increases and the like, but I also see that while those who have something get more, those who have nothing, that is graduate

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students struggling for TAs, are deprived of the hope of ever getting anything.62 Schatzker: Do you think that this has caused any decline in morale that affects the teaching and the attitude of the professors? Frye: To my mind it’s been a little short of miraculous that the morale has kept up as well as it has. Whatever you can say against a university teaching staff it is full of very deeply dedicated people, and as long as that goes on the teaching process will go on. But I suppose one can hardly expect it to last forever. Schatzker: I don’t know whether you have any views at present about the Faculty Association? Is it, like so many organizations, composed of a small group who press for these kinds of changes and a majority of members who are really not too interested; or do you think that the full force of the faculty is behind these demands? Frye: I suppose that the faculty is in a state of more or less resigned agreement. That is, they know quite well that you can’t run a university on peanuts and good will. At the same time there was by no means unanimous approval of the last general increase. My own loyalties are divided because so much of my loyalty goes to what I just referred to, the graduate student trying out for his first job. The way in which departmental chairmen have had their wings clipped I regard with horror but . . . Schatzker: What are you referring to? Frye: In their power to make new appointments. Schatzker: Who has usurped that? Frye: Nobody’s usurped it, it’s just that they can’t make it any more, the money isn’t there. Schatzker: Oh, I see. The latest development I’ve heard in that regard was that, because of the increase in salaries, positions that have become vacant by death or retirement will simply not be filled. Frye: I think that that’s true. If you’re talking of abolishing the college departments—I don’t have any great enthusiasm for that, but it has been done—then you could say that in some departments there is perhaps more specialized knowledge than is needed by the number of students. I think of courses like Classics and Near Eastern Studies where so many

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things are involved. In Classics there’s philosophy and there’s history and there’s literature and there are the two languages, Greek and Latin. You need a tremendous battery of people to do decent work in Classics but again, where’s the student body? Schatzker: What do you feel about the changes in terms of promotion at this university? They’ve become, I gather, much more rigid and codified than they ever were. Frye: That again is part of the expansion of numbers, I don’t see any way out of that. I know that, as I think I remarked earlier, the reason for my fanatical loyalty to Victoria was that I was given what amounted to a tenure appointment from the start because my superiors in the department knew me. When you can’t have that kind of personal knowledge of people there have got to be more impersonal developments. Schatzker: And just as admissions in so many of the competitive faculties must be based on something measurable like marks, then promotions must be based on something measurable like publications. Frye: That is almost bound to happen. Again I don’t see any cure except a radical decentralizing, which is prohibitively expensive. I certainly don’t see why everybody on a university staff should be the same kind of person, that is, a producer of articles. Schatzker: The rules of appointment of heads of departments and other administrative positions changed as well during the ’60s with the Haist Committee’s report.63 I don’t think people have really considered the results of that work but it has changed the face of the university. Frye: Yes, it has. Yet it seemed to be at the time a very stabilizing measure. Everybody referred to the Haist rules as though they were the Ten Commandments. Schatzker: The five-year term in some departments may mean that people are appointed who have no gift for the job; they resign after their five years, and another uninterested person is appointed. In some other departments the two terms will be filled by someone who has a gift for administration. But it doesn’t seem to affect the department as much as the other way would cause difficulties. Frye: Are you speaking of people taking administrative jobs from the department?

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Schatzker: Yes. For becoming chairman and that sort of thing. It has abolished the possibility of a great career chairman of twenty-five years, like some of the great chairmen we can point to in the history of this university. And I think in the sciences it has become a great albatross for young researchers, because accepting a five-year appointment to administer a department really means kissing your research goodbye. Frye: Well, that again I don’t see. I haven’t any patented method for getting around that under present conditions. In the old decentralized days the departmental chairman was a father-figure, but under the present conditions, just the straight numerical ones, I don’t think that’s possible anymore. Schatzker: I don’t know whether anybody would ever want to change it, but it seems that it may cause more problems as the staff becomes older and is not replenished by younger people to take on some of these duties. It would mean, in some of the smaller departments, a rotating system of chairmanship. Frye: Yes, it may become that. Mind you, there are other sides to it. The expansion days meant that a lot of people who were really of rather second-rate quality got tenure. I’m not sure that this is so true of Toronto, but I could certainly name universities that are just stuffed full of zombies from the days of the ’50s that haven’t an idea in their heads and never will have any. But they’ve got tenure so they can keep out anybody younger who has more ability. When I look at the amount of sheer genius, dedication (not just competence), among the young graduate students today, I think it’s a miracle to get such good people considering what we can promise them. Schatzker: Society has a really difficult task in accepting professorial tenure because they say it doesn’t exist anywhere else in the competitive business world. Frye: Yes, and I think myself that the reason for tenure, which was to protect somebody who might be a critic of society from saying what he thought, has now become just job security. Schatzker: Do you think that anyone will ever attack this principle successfully? I know that in some of the American universities, because of financial problems, they actually had to let some tenured professors go.

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Frye: I think it will erode, probably; to some extent it has to erode. The whole area then would be a question of discrimination. If a person opens his mouth on a social issue there are enough human rights organizations and so on to give him a certain amount of security even if he does not have tenure. Schatzker: I would imagine that some kind of protective organization could be established within the university to oversee those rights. Frye: I think so; and I think that if a woman, for example, discovers that she’s doing the same work as a man and she’s getting paid five thousand dollars a year less, there are procedures that she can resort to which don’t involve the tenure question at all. Schatzker: You’ve described that era of the ’60s and early ’70s as an age of hysteria. You were principal during much of this time and I wonder what comments you would have from your vantage point now on the student unrest and the demands of students? Frye: We actually got the minimum because Toronto was not as hard hit as the American universities were. As I used to tell my American friends at the time, Canadian activist students have an outlet that your students don’t have, namely the American Embassy. If all else fails they can go down and demonstrate there. Toronto certainly had its share of all that kind of hysteria but it never reached the proportions it did at Cornell or Harvard. Victoria has always been a fairly secure middle-class stronghold. I think the students kept one token resistor around for two or three years on a kind of salary; he was a rather pathetic creature but he was their representative of the fact that they were with it. They had no enthusiasm at all. I remember when Ted Hodgetts made his opening speech to the students and a heckler in the front row said, “How much do you make?”64 The other students just told him to shut up. Schatzker: It was small enough that they knew him and wanted to protect him. Frye: Well, it wasn’t so much him as the feeling that this isn’t what goes on in a university. Schatzker: Yes. And yet it did in other areas, and the small handful of activists caused changes that we’re still living with. Frye: Yes.

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Schatzker: The administration itself seemed to be divided at the time of the old board. There were conservatives who felt that some actions could be considered criminal and should be prosecuted by the authorities, and then there were others who had an opposing view. This was an extension of the idea that the university was in loco parentis which said, “No, we will not call in outside forces, these are our students, we look after them, we punish them under our own code.” This proved to be hopelessly inefficient. What do you feel about that? Some of these actions I think were in the strict point of law and I think Justice Arthur Kelly resigned from the board because of this very debate. Frye: Resigned because the . . . ? Schatzker: He felt the police should have been brought in and the offenders should have been prosecuted. Frye: In some circumstances I would have agreed with that. I think that a lot of student protest, whatever it called itself, was actually a very ugly form of neo-fascism. If you bring somebody here whom they’ve decided to call a racist and they break up the meeting, then I think that is a case for the outside police force. The university is not in loco parentis, both parents are dead. And the alma mater is something else altogether. Schatzker: I found it ironic that students were protesting against the idea of the university being in loco parentis and the university, in that very action of protecting them, was adopting this role. And many of the administrators who were faced with these questions were plagued by the problem of what to do, agonized over it. I think it was almost like serving a term in the penitentiary when you served a term in the administration in those days. Frye: Well it was almost a penal appointment in some places, yes. Schatzker: Do you feel there has been any great change in the student population from the end of the ’50s to now? I just mentioned the inability of many of them to speak and write the language with any finesse, but is there anything else or do you have comments on that? Frye: I think that the next generation of students realized that the university was not the enemy, that the whole tendency to attack the university was part of the rationale of a military-political establishment and all that sort of thing was really nonsense. The particular thing that cut the

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ground from under the students’ feet was the stopping of the war in Vietnam. Of course, one reason why Canada remained so much cooler was that Canadian students were not eligible for the draft. I think that the student protest movement simply perished for the lack of any social roots. Schatzker: What about the qualifications of entering students during the ’60s: do you feel there was a noticeable decline or do you think they’re the same as they always were? Frye: I think you get the same human material to work with that you always have. Of course, the high schools have been affected by the same squeezes that the university has. Teachers don’t have time to mark compositions as they used to. That is why you get students in university who have never written three hundred consecutive words in their lives. They are the people that all the language testings are about. Grade 13, when it stopped being a marked examination and became simply a principal’s report, meant that you were taking in people more or less blind. Schatzker: Do you feel that re-establishment of the departmental examinations would be a useful gauge of students’ ability? Or do you feel that former Dean Kruger’s suggestion that the university conduct its own entrance exams is a better idea? Or none at all? Frye: I think in practice it’s very hard to get people to mark papers in the summer, whether they’re high-school teachers or university teachers. Schatzker: Even for ready money? Frye: Yes, but you can’t have both that and the CAUT. If you keep pressuring for higher salaries in the faculty they are going to use their summers to go off to the British Museum or be masters of their own time. As soon as high-school teachers’ salaries went up the number of people who would stay around to mark grade 13 papers went down, even though they were quite well paid. It’s very tedious work. I think of what my colleague Marguerite Stobo and I do in a course we have on Biblical typology and Classical mythology: she sets a test for the students at the very opening of the term, and if they literally don’t know one end of the Bible from the other or can’t tell Hercules from Venus, then they are told, not that they will be refused admission to the course, but that they’re going to have to work like hell to get through it.

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Schatzker: Does it seem to have any effect? Frye: Oh, yes. Schatzker: Are students getting less than they did before of cultural background such as Classical mythlogy or the Bible or just general knowledge of the great figures in English literature? Frye: Oh, yes, I think there’s been a very considerable erosion of that. There are many reasons for it. You can’t blame it all on the imbecility of educators but a lot of it does go back to that. I’ve had enough experience on educational committees to know that “think as radically as possible” is usually a euphemism for “how much of the traditional stuff can they get away with not teaching?” Schatzker: Once I had contact with a student in high school who studied as his novel of the year In Cold Blood. I found it appalling because it isn’t even a novel and there seemed to be a total disregard of the classical tradition in English literature. Frye: I think that that’s more the fault of the teachers than the students. Students discover very quickly when they’re being gypped. I remember somebody who was giving a course in Modern Literature; he was starting with Jack Kerouac to provide a sort of historical background, and was going on to all the latest bestsellers. The students said that they wouldn’t take this; that they wanted something like Joseph Conrad that they knew was worth reading. Schatzker: The change in the high-school curriculum has promoted this kind of teaching. I think in truth far more choice has been given; the teachers do not have to follow any kind of set curriculum but can decide amongst themselves in the school which pieces of literature they will teach. Frye: The result of that of course is that they teach what interests them. One has to undergo the discipline if you’re teaching the same plays every year because although these plays are no longer new to the teacher they’re new to the students. It’s the students who come first in any questions of that kind. Schatzker: The thing that I can’t quite grasp is why generations of teachers in the past did this with dedication and the new generation will not.

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Frye: That’s a complex question with, I suppose, many kinds of answers. I think again it’s the attenuating of the personal relationship between the teacher and student. It’s the difference between the small shop where you know the shopkeeper and the supermarket where you’re checked out. Schatzker: Perhaps partly the greater tendency towards instant gratification as well. So many teachers in the past were dedicated to forming each mind. It didn’t matter what they were teaching, it was the formation of the student that interested them, and watching him progress. Now there isn’t the same general interest among teachers, perhaps because of size. Frye: One can understand causes of that kind. I think there’s also been a considerable decline in the ability to see things in time as well as space. The whole business of instant news rather wipes out the continuity which is the basis of all real education and all wisdom too. VII (4 October 1982) Schatzker: [You have said that] people are not able to see things in terms of time as well as they can in terms of space. You related this to the fact that we are faced with instant news these days. I wonder if you think that people had more ability to see things in terms of time in the past; and if so, how has this affected the situation at the university? Frye: I suppose if you stay in one spot for a great many years you do notice certain changes taking place. One skyscraper after another thrusts its way into the sky and every one of those is a kind of intrusion on your memory of what is there. Over the years you build up a pattern of things disappearing and other things coming in. It’s not a complete phantasmagoria: if you have a long-range memory of a place you see it in an additional perspective. The same thing is true of being connected with the university where the tradition and ethos is actually a part of the community you’re working in. Schatzker: Do you think that students have an inability to see things in time now, and that this affects their learning? Frye: I don’t think you begin to see things in time until you’ve had a fair stretch of it yourself. It’s not normal to a young person’s perspective. The

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time perspective of youth is naturally thrown into the future and nobody knows about that. Schatzker: Things have changed in terms of background. We’ve talked so much about the changed background in learning literature. It’s also changed in history because, perhaps due to nationalism, Canadian history has become much more important in the high schools and other aspects of history have dwindled. We all used to study British history; now I don’t think that you can find a current high-school text for British history. Frye: I would be very sorry to feel that that was true but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised. Education in the sense of time is extraordinarily important for young people just because it doesn’t come from their experience. The liberating part of a liberal education has a great deal to do with discovering other areas in time. If you’re teaching Shakespeare, for example, there are the two poles: there’s the present pole where it’s relevant to our own experience and then there’s his own pole as a dramatist in 1600. It seems to me that knowing about the original audience and society and its standards and assumptions is the liberating part of learning about Shakespeare. Otherwise he just gets kidnapped into the orbit of our own cultural prejudices. Schatzker: Perhaps the most important discussion for the purposes of this interview is the one concerning the colleges. I’m talking to you as a former principal of Victoria College and as one of the most illustrious members of it. You’ve said many times during this interview how important Victoria has been to you; you feel a part of the college as much as you are a part of the University of Toronto. The colleges had a tremendous strength in the past; we’ve talked about that and the various atmospheres that existed in the different colleges and how this affected student life. But this began to break down, I suppose, in the ’60s. I wondered if you had any thoughts about why that happened specifically? Frye: About why the breakdown of the college . . . ? Schatzker: College life. Was it was only a financial thing, because that was one of the major problems? Frye: It wasn’t just financial. I think that when I was an undergraduate the residences tended to dominate the social life of the college much more than they do now. And then again the social life of the undergrad-

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uate was much fuller. I think undergraduates are rather partied out by the time they get to college. It doesn’t become so much a part of their routine as it used to do. Because of the residences and the parties and games and that kind of thing, people who took mathematics and physics and had no lectures at all at Victoria nevertheless could feel very intensely a part of the college. I think it’s doubtful that you can recapture that because of the enormous increase in numbers for one thing. I know that young people are accustomed to living in much bigger social units than people of my generation were. Even so they seem to feel that even the college is a bit of a mass. I remember a friend of mine who was dean of arts at the University of California and wrote a book about it and he remarked in the course of the book that the academic instinct is to give the major part of your loyalty to the smallest practicable unit.65 That’s true certainly of my instinct. I tend to feel that a college of Victoria’s size, or Massey College, is a much more intelligible thing to feel a part of, than the University of Toronto, though of course I have a loyalty to that too. Schatzker: So the financial strains that were placed upon the colleges you don’t think were the only contributing factor to their decline? Frye: That goes a way back in history. It wasn’t just the financial strains. The original division of humanities and science subjects made in 1884 made a certain amount of sense for 1884 but Victoria made some curious mistakes even then. They allowed philosophy to become a university subject because the teacher of it happened to be a very attractive person and they wanted Victoria students to get him.66 So they split that department into philosophy and ethics: ethics became the college subject; of course that’s nonsense. Then when the social sciences arose, that threw a tremendous weight on the side of the university. As new humanities subjects came along like Fine Art, Spanish, Italian, and Far Eastern Studies, they just automatically went to the university. The report of the committee that led up to the Act of 1906 recommended that the colleges take over philosophy and history. If they’d done that they would have been in a much better bargaining situation in the future, but they thought it would be too expensive and they just didn’t. So really the reasons why the college subjects become an utterly unworkable and unpractical idea were built into the history of federation from the beginning. Schatzker: When it was apparent that the colleges were going broke, partly because of the split in subjects and the numbers of students who

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were only nominally registered at a college but actually took most of their courses outside of it, the university felt that it had to make some sense of this. In private comments to me Dr. Bissell said that it was an almost impossible task, one he didn’t want to involve himself in. The only time that he really faced the problem was when there was a proposal from the board to build a large undergraduate residence on St. George St.; he fought that because he thought it would undermine the strength of the colleges. But Dr. Bissell was a college man and understood the nature of the colleges to the very core. Perhaps Dr. Evans, coming from the medical faculty, didn’t have the same understanding and wasn’t hampered by it so he could go ahead with the Memorandum of Understanding more easily.67 Frye: I think it was also Claude Bissell who felt that New College and Innis College, and other new colleges, should be teaching units and not just residences. They have become teaching units but rather circumscribed by this monolithic centralizing of things at the university headquarters. Schatzker: Did you have any part in the discussions leading up to the Memorandum of Understanding? Frye: That came up later. The discussions were just beginning about the time that I felt that this was nothing I could contribute to and cleared out. Schatzker: And that memorandum has been highly controversial. Each college seems to have taken it in a different spirit and applied it differently, because the results, after some years, at University College are quite different than they are at St. Michael’s or Victoria. Frye: Of course University College went through a somewhat premature evolution; Victoria and St. Michael’s didn’t. For one thing, Victoria had a Board of Regents to protect it. Schatzker: Yes, and St. Michael’s too is an independent university. Frye: It also had some kind of autonomous authority that would prevent its library from being sacked, for example. Schatzker: Is that what happened at University College? Frye: More or less, yes.68 Schatzker: Did you know President Evans very well?

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Frye: Not very well, but I did know him. Schatzker: Did he ever discuss this problem with you? Frye: No, he didn’t particularly. I didn’t want to get on to problems of political infighting. I knew that he had a great interest in the university. But with his background at McMaster, where they had tried a similar experiment to ours and then given it up, I didn’t expect that he would feel the way I felt about the federated colleges. Schatzker: Which experiment are you referring to at McMaster? Frye: My memory’s vague, but it seems to me that at McMaster they did divide things more or less along college lines. Then the lines were redrafted along the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences quadrant. Schatzker: Did you maintain any interest after this period in the changes in administration and the exits having [unclear] on university life? Frye: For a time I was rather reacting against that sort of thing. I didn’t feel quite as strongly as the Biblical prophet who said that the prudent will keep silence at such a time because it’s an evil time [Amos 5:13]. But I did feel that a kind of hysteria was spreading across the campus which I couldn’t fight. I was just going to pull out till the dust settled. Schatzker: As the colleges lost strength in the ’70s the power seemed to shift in two directions: to the central administration (because of the central financing of the university) and to the faculty of arts. How do you feel that this shift of power has affected the students and teachers in the university? Frye: I think it’s turned the University of Toronto campus into much more of a big Middle-Western state university. The more distinctive qualities that I remember in the Faculty of Arts have gone now. What really makes Toronto a first-rate university is the quality of the teaching staff. Of course that won’t stay forever either unless they start making appointments in the younger generation. Schatzker: Do you feel that the student is in a difficult position? They have what some people have characterized as a cafeteria-style curriculum in the arts course. They don’t always have their college to rely on for

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that kind of small community and intellectual support that they had before. I wonder if they wander around not knowing who to talk to and what to decide on to study. Is it really that bad for the undergraduate or do you think they find places to . . . ? Frye: I daresay they find places. They don’t know one another as well as they used to. It’s a thing that has taken me a long time to get used to. If a student misses a lecture of mine and wants to know what to do about it, my answer used to be, “Go get the notes from a classmate.” But when they don’t know any classmates that’s a problem which I hadn’t faced before. I think it’s partly the lifestyle of the ’70s and ’80s, that students are more accustomed to living anonymously. At the same time there are places like Ned’s here at Victoria for social gatherings.69 I think that a normal student can always find a certain personal, social niche to operate in among his classmates. Schatzker: Do the professors get to know them as well as they did before? Frye: Some of them undoubtedly do. If you’re asking about me, the answer is no, because my classes are so huge. I do know there’s a great deal of good will and good feeling on the part of the students towards me and I just wish I could . . . . I’d give up that mob of two hundred and fifty students who turn up to my Shakespeare course but . . . Schatzker: It’s impossible. Frye: It is impossible, really. Schatzker: Talking in generalities now, the influence of government has become much more apparent within the university. And the attitude of government towards university education has changed as well, I think. It’s become perhaps more anti-humanistic, and the ministry of education has decreed that education must become more relevant to the market place. Job security and finding a job are of prime importance. I don’t know if this has begun to affect the university yet, but some people fear it so much that I gather there’s a presidential committee to make the university’s views felt in the general community about the importance of higher education and especially the humanities. Have you heard about this? Frye: Yes. I don’t know whether I said this before, but I think that the

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political attitude is the last stand of people who can’t see beyond their noses, because a politician isn’t trained to see beyond his nose or at least beyond the next election. Consequently he thinks of the labour market as a solid thing and students as a liquid mass poured into it. The reason our economy’s in a mess is that we’re in the throes of a major social revolution which politicians just haven’t a clue to. If there was ever a need for trained minds it’s now. Schatzker: However, we’re moving away from that and students are not encouraged to train their minds, especially in the humanities, by either the economic facts or the people surrounding them. Frye: Again, that’s the last-stand mentality, I think. Students respond so readily to any kind of perspective that enables them to see over the head of the next year or so. Schatzker: We’ve talked a bit before about continuing education. Perhaps that will provide the answers for students as they come back. So many of them will probably come back to the university at one time of their life or another. Frye: That to me is the only sensible solution: having adult education programs for people making a full-time commitment to the university in middle life. I think more and more that that is the social direction in which universities ought to be developing. But again that takes quite a major reconstruction of society. Schatzker: Following directly from this discussion of government as opposed to the academic, in a convocation address at Carleton you said that academic freedom was the unrestricted pursuit of undiscovered truth and not the repeating of truths that certain pressure groups in society think they have. How would you relate that to some of the pressures that are coming from the federal government now in the area of research, encouraging certain types of research by providing more funds for Canadian Studies, Women’s Studies, Minority Studies? Frye: That kind of trend-education has always been a disaster. It’s always been utterly futile; the whole record of the history of education is strewn with the wreckage of those things. In the United States, I know, a first-rate private university like Harvard or Yale or Princeton would have nothing to do with government programs of that kind. They would set their own programs and they would see to it that they were founded

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in pure scientific research. If you concentrate on utterly useless and irrelevant scientific research, the benefits to the country are enormous, but if you concentrate on immediately relevant goals you just waste your time and your money. Schatzker: Of course some of these goals of the federal government as set up in the SSHRC70 are very political goals. Frye: Oh, sure, yes, they’re vote-keeping goals. Schatzker: I think we’ve covered all the major topics, unless there’s something that you have remembered that I’ve forgotten to ask. One of the things I wondered if you could talk about was some of the major personalities you think have affected the course of this university during the time that you’ve been associated with it. Frye: In my little corner both Victoria people and English people are the ones I know best. There’s been a very marked shift in academic attitude from the rather Anglophile setup that I walked into as an undergraduate and what I’ve called the “Middle-Western state university” feeling that I find now. What you get out of your teachers is more the ideas that come to you as a result of having known them than anything that they say, or even the way they teach. I remember taking philosophy from Brett—I don’t know if I’ve said this already—there’s no question of Brett’s enormous erudition but what I chiefly remember from him was his rather priestly attitude to the subject: that is, he would have given the same lecture if there were two students there as if there were two hundred. Somebody like Pelham Edgar, whom many people underestimated as a scholar: there’s still something in his manner, in his whole attitude to people, that convinced you that the scholar’s life was worth having. Haven’t I gone over some of this before? Schatzker: Yes, but it’s interesting. In other words we won’t be able to replace teachers with video tapes and television. Frye: Any student who’s found himself facing a box instead of a human countenance could tell you about that. Schatzker: Not too many people have put it as succinctly as you have. They will say that they were influenced by certain people but rarely separate the ideas from the force of the personality. And yet, for so many people that I’ve interviewed, the influence of personality on their deci-

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sions to study a certain field or pursue a certain career seems to be of paramount importance. Frye: I know that that is of major importance and I know that I’m quite an influence that way myself. It’s hard to pinpoint it from my point of view. Schatzker: And of course that reflects even more disastrously upon the present situation because the inability of the students to relate to different generations of the teaching staff will make this kind of influence even more impossible. Frye: Yes, that’s quite true. There is such a generation gap, and a student’s instinct, at least a freshman’s instinct, is always to consult the faculty member who’s nearest to him in age. He doesn’t want to go to somebody old enough to be his grandfather and talk to him. Schatzker: Well, it’s more difficult. You do eventually, in your final years, come to approach the older men. Frye: Yes, but I was speaking of freshmen and people who start again. Schatzker: Yes, that’s right. Thank you very much, Dr. Frye, for participating in this program. I’m very grateful that you gave us some of your valuable time.

65 Back to the Garden Recorded 16–17 September 1982

From Radio Canada International disc no. E-1296, transcribed by Mary Ellen Kappler. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. This was an interview conducted by Cliff Arnold, which formed the main part of a program with contributions by Margaret Atwood, Don Harron, Eli Mandel, Robin Matthew, and Vincent Tovell. It was produced by Cliff Arnold and broadcast on Radio Canada International as “Back to the Garden: A Profile of Canadian Author and Critic Northrop Frye” in September 1983. The program is in two parts, and may have been originally broadcast as two half-hour segments.

I [The program begins with a brief overview of Frye’s career and a comment by Margaret Atwood. It continues:] Arnold: But let’s start with him telling his own story, which begins when he arrives at Victoria College. Frye: I came to Victoria College in the fall of 1929, and Toronto, while it was still a small town by world standards, was still a lot bigger than anything I’d seen before. The movement to the city of Toronto in itself was quite an education, and then of course the whole undergraduate career was one that provided me with a sense of social function. I’d always been a bit isolated as a high-school student, and at college there were a number of things I could go into, like dramatics and debates and the college magazine, that kind of thing. Arnold: 1929 changed the lives of many people, as Frye recalls.

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Frye: I came in in the fall of ’29, the big stock market crash was in October, and within another year most of the students had become, relatively speaking, radicalized. My own political outlook was a thoroughly middle-class one. It has always been that. I regard the bourgeois as the finest fruit of humanity so far, and have always been middle-class in my loyalties and affiliations. But there was a good deal of what you might call social democratic feeling among the students: there was the League for Social Reconstruction, and of course the CCF party got organized within a year or two after my graduation. Gradually—well, not so gradually either, within a year or two—there were a couple of Communist groups, one Stalinist and one Trotskyist. But I had only rather indirect contact with those. Arnold: Northrop Frye was never a Communist, but Communism did have its appeal for many other University of Toronto students. Frye: Among my classmates there was Herb Norman, who was a victim of the McCarthy witchhunts, and committed suicide in Cairo.1 Earl Birney was not a student then, he was a graduate, and became an instructor of English shortly afterwards, but he was interested in the Trotskyist group. His novel Down the Long Table gives a very good account of those days. Arnold: In 1936 Frye had completed his undergraduate work at Victoria College, and had studied theology. In that very troubled year he went to Oxford. Was it to be the kind of intellectual Mecca that he had imagined? Frye: When I went to Oxford it was still the same world, but Nazism was of course very much stronger, and there seemed to be a rather nauseating amount of intellectual fascism in England at the time. It was the years between the Munich pact and the actual outbreak of war that I was in Oxford, and England seemed to me totally demoralized. At Oxford itself I found myself politically much more isolated than I had been. I thought that anybody who thought that that was the way out for England in 1938 and ’39 was embarking on an utterly suicidal course. I found very little intellectual stimulation at Oxford. The lecturers all seemed to regard it as beneath their dignity to be good lecturers, and they expected their students, or most of them, to do what I did: that is, go to the first lecture to get a look at the man, and then quit. The only really stimulating figure was C.S. Lewis, who was still at Oxford at that time.

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Arnold: He returned to teach at his alma mater, Victoria College, in 1939. Frye: Having had three years of theology before that, I simply read the undergraduate school at Oxford, so that I have no graduate degree now. Oxford, of course, was still primarily interested in the undergraduate course—it was really all they knew how to teach—and at that time there was enough Anglophile feeling in the humanities at the University of Toronto for a person without a Ph.D. still to be able to make his way. [Arnold explains that Frye has spent most of his career teaching English at the University of Toronto. Don Harron praises Frye’s teaching.] Arnold: It’s always hard to say what makes a great teacher, but Frye feels the lecture is the most important part of teaching. Frye: I enjoy teaching undergraduates, because I feel that that’s where the centre of action is in liberal education. Graduate teaching is professional teaching—it’s something I’ve never quite got accustomed to. I can only get accustomed to it by treating graduate students as though they were undergraduates. I suppose many people would say that that indicates that I am not a scholar, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that statement—it depends on your definition of scholarship. But I feel that there’s no question about my function as a teacher with an undergraduate class. There’s a great deal of mystique about the seminar, and a sort of hazy notion that the smaller the class the better the teaching, and there’s also a great admiration for the tutorial system as they had it in Oxford and Cambridge. That admiration comes mostly from the people who have not gone through it. There are certain things that a lecture can do that a seminar cannot do; that is, it can present a broad historical sweep. I think in many respects that teaching should be an alternation of an informal teaching lecture with a somewhat smaller group. I don’t feel that a seminar should become too small, unless the students are very unusually good, because if it does, then the amount of the seminar that’s simply a pooling of ignorance becomes extremely obvious. Arnold: Frye stresses a traditional English literature curriculum, with its background in the Bible and Greek mythology, and he has weathered years of teaching trends. Frye: We will probably always have anti-intellectual vogues among educators to contend with. Articles will appear telling people that the less

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education they have the better, and that what they really need to know is the social mythology of their time—which of course is an advertising and propaganda mythology; it’s a phony, fake mythology. You will have educators insisting that this is the one essential thing to teach, then they will go out of style, or something will happen like Sputnik in 1957, and there will be a reaction the other way. The wise teacher realizes that these reactions never last, that the general set of society will always be antiintellectual, and he has to prepare for it accordingly. At least as long as I’ve been teaching, I’ve been talking to students who sincerely believed that nothing of any importance happened in the world before they were born, and that the kind of literary education that would really be exiting and challenging would be the literary education that began approximately with the year of their birth. There’s nothing particularly new about that. One of the things the university stands for is to give its students some sense of historical imagination, and to convince them that a culture without a memory is senile, just as an individual without a memory is. Arnold: During the 1950s, he was already a renowned critic of William Blake, but he still took time out from his busy schedule of writing and teaching to edit the Canadian Forum. At that time, the Forum was the nation’s most exciting intellectual and cultural review. As editor and critic, Frye gave encouragement to a new generation of talented writers. He recalls: Frye: The development of Canadian literature in the last quarter-century has tended to confirm what I was saying in my reviews of Canadian poetry between 1950 and ’60. During the ’50s I was well aware that Canadian literature was still next-year country, as it always has been. I also knew that that couldn’t last forever, that sooner or later there would be a Canadian literature with a massiveness and a weight that you couldn’t argue against. Arnold: Some Canadian critics have written about a Frye school of Canadian literature, but what was his real influence? [Eli Mandel agues that Frye had a major impact due to his criticism and commentary. Atwood denies that her style was dictated by Frye, but agrees that he was extremely important, because he was one of the few to take Canadian literature seriously.]

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Frye: What I have done is to take poetry seriously, to make it clear that I regard what happens in Canadian literature as very important to the country as a whole, and to make it clear that I believe that writers have a primary and essential social function. After that, it’s their business to write as well as they can. I’ve tried hard not to express a preference for certain types of writing as opposed to other types, and there’s no Frye school of Canadian literature—in the nature of things there can’t be. * * * Arnold: Frye has devoted most of his writings to world literature, but out of his years studying Canadian writers, he began to understand his own country. His ideas about Canada appeared in his book The Bush Garden. What makes Canadians different from other peoples? What unites them? Frye: Canada belongs to the world, and has to take on the same technical and imaginative qualities that writers all over the world have. The fact that it’s a separate environment with its own characteristics means that that doesn’t need to become uniform, or assimilate to other cultures. Culture, in any country with a large size, is likely to be an aggregate of regional developments. These regional developments do add up to some kind of larger, more national, unity. In Great Britain, we have Hardy and Wessex, and D.H. Lawrence and Nottingham, and Hugh MacDiarmid and Dylan Thomas and Scotland and Wales, and in the United States we have Faulkner and Mississippi, and Frost and New England, but somehow or other when you add up the British writers and the American writers you do get a different body of feeling, a sensibility. My opinion is that it’s almost impossible to define this, and that whenever you venture on a definition of it, you’re into very simplistic formulas. Arnold: Regional identities are strong in a country as big as Canada, but underlying our regionalism is something Frye calls “the garrison mentality.” Frye: Well, I used the phrase “garrison mentality” because the eighteenth-century maps of Canada consist almost entirely of forts as far as the inhabited centres are concerned. Then I noticed that Canada, and Canadian sensibility, has nothing corresponding to the American frontier, the line from north to south that keeps moving irregularly towards the west until it reaches the Pacific. The frontier gives a specific kind of imaginative conciseness to American writers, but in Canada, wherever you are, the frontier is a circumference that surrounds you, because Can-

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ada is spatially so broken up: British Columbia from the prairies by the Rockies; the big wilderness, as it has been for so long, of northern Ontario; then French Canada with a different language and traditions between Ontario and the Maritimes; the big upthrust of Maine; the separation of Newfoundland, that kind of thing. Arnold: Of course, not everybody agrees with him. [Robin Matthews claims that Frye is not really familiar with Canadian literature, and harms the study of it with oversimplified theories. He argues that the “garrison mentality” is not really present in Canadian literature. Vincent Tovell claims that the theory of “garrison mentality” is incontrovertibly true. Arnold asks if the strength of regionalism means that there is no Canadian national identity. Atwood suggests that regionalism and nationalism are different ways of looking at the same thing.] Arnold: Frye agrees that there are themes common to all his countrymen. Frye: I’m pretty sure that there is something that connects, on a very deep level of consciousness, Canadian writers with one another, including the English and the French writers. The fact that Canada is rather sparsely populated; the feeling of moving over immense distances; the feeling of being in a northern latitude, which suggests a kind of moral indifference in nature (of course that belongs largely to the nineteenth century, but I think the legacy is still here); the sense of, for example, colour as something that goes in cycles—it comes in the summer, and goes into black and white in the winter—that kind of environmental influence; the feeling of being in a small country that does not make the history that it is participating in but is an observant country; all these make for a fundamental difference, I think, between Canadian and American consciousness, whether they’re writers or not. Arnold: Observers? Is the Canadian temperament detached and uncommitted? Is it an ironic one? Frye: I think that this observational role does make for irony—that’s the usual form in which detached observation records itself in literature. I think there is an ironic and an almost negative tone that avoids too clearcut a resolution. That was the thing I think that fascinated Margaret Atwood in Survival. She was not saying that Canadians are a race of losers, or that they write that way, but rather that Canadians tend to distrust the slap-bang happy-home ending.

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[Atwood confirms this, and adds that she meant that “there are other ways to go” than failure.] Arnold: He often uses the word “mythology” in his writings on European literature, but isn’t there also mythology that’s specifically Canadian? Frye: Canadian history begins too late to have anything like a true mythology, and what we have is sometimes a recreation, the way that Isabella Crawford recreates Indian mythology. You have Douglas LePan writing a poem called A Country without a Mythology, and you have Earl Birney saying that Canadians are haunted by their lack of ghosts.2 I think in a sense both of these things are true, and yet the absence of mythology in itself creates a kind of mythology in reverse—a mythology of an alien nature, and of a civilization that relates rather distantly to it. There is nothing really more ghostly than an absence of ghosts. You notice in Europe that you’re always in a place that has been lived in for many centuries, and that contributes some kind of inexplicable quality to the landscape. [Mandel says that the “cultural problem” in Canadian literature is “the Romantic problem”—which is “the fall as described in Blake’s poetry.”] Frye: I think that Canada has always been Romantic. It started out in French Canada in the seventeenth century with the Baroque expansiveness—the Jesuit missionaries, and the voyageurs, and so forth. Canada missed the rational eighteenth century that gave Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the American consciousness, and the Constitution of course. It didn’t spend the eighteenth century exercising its reason, it spent the eighteenth century battering down the forts of the British and the French, whichever they were, and so it went directly from seventeenth-century expansionism to nineteenth-century Romantic expansionism, which had its origin in Great Britain, for the most part, and took the form of fanning out over the country, through waterways and the railways and the like. We inherit that expansionist tendency. I think that Romanticism is so much a part of our ancestry that we’re bound to resemble our parentage to some degree. Arnold: His interest in Romanticism has contributed to his understanding of Canada, but what did he learn from Blake’s poetry itself? In part 2, we’ll consider Frye’s early work, we’ll look at his development from

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Blake critic to commentator on the Bible, and Frye will talk about the connection between literature and society. II Frye: I don’t think there’s been any diminution of the excitement with which I first discovered writers such as Blake or Shakespeare or Milton. They are like old friends—they are familiar, but every time you meet them, there is something new. Arnold: In 1947, Frye published his first major work, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Why was he interested in the strange and misunderstood vision of this Romantic poet? Frye: I think the reason for my fascination with Blake, and later my very strong and deep interest in Milton, was that I had been brought up in that kind of culture, that rather nonconformist middle-class Protestant cultural orbit. There was a great deal in it that I emotionally and instinctively rejected, but Blake made imaginative sense of it. Arnold: Did Blake teach him anything new? Frye: Everything I know I’ve learned from Blake in one sense or another. Blake really introduced me to the conception of poetry as having its own peculiar language. Everybody said, of course, that Blake had a private symbolism, and what I discovered in working on Blake was that there’s no such thing as a private symbolism, except something profoundly neurotic; that is, there may be private allusions that you have to know a man’s life to understand, but Blake was obviously constructing something very much more objective than that, even though there were private allusions. So that by working on Blake, and trying to figure out what he meant by Orc and Urizen and Vala and so on, I began to get some notion of a specific kind of language that imaginative writers use. Arnold: Northrop Frye’s work soon put him outside the mainstream of critical thinking in the 1940s and 1950s, especially the New Criticism. Frye: The New Criticism simply approached a work without any reference to its structure or its genre or its convention, and studied what Ransom called its “texture.” Well, I could see that the texture was important, but I could also see that words like “convention” and “genre” were pretty important too. I’d got that feeling partly from my interest in

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music, where I realized that things like fugue forms and sonata forms were something that existed apart from the individual works in which they were embodied. Music has always been primarily musical structure. So I began to look for a context for individual works within literature, not because I wasn’t interested in the individual work, but because I thought it gained a new dimension of significance, and a new kind of resonance, from being placed in the context where it belonged, where it would echo and re-echo the things that were closest to it in imaginative experience. That is, profound as, and unique as, King Lear is, it becomes still more resonant when you measure it against the background of Shakespearean tragedy, and still more so when you measure it against the background of tragedy as a whole, as a type of experience. Arnold: Frye’s ideas about literature found expression in his next major work, the Anatomy of Criticism. [Mandel outlines the central argument of the Anatomy.] Arnold: Is the Anatomy really Frye’s most important work? Frye: Well, everybody assumes that I am the person that wrote the Anatomy, and for many other people that’s it, they know only that book. It’s a book that certainly defines more fully than any other book what I’ve been hunting for in literature, but it’s a very schematic book. I felt that it had to be, because that was the way it came, and it was schematic because that’s the way poets think. There are people now who regard it as a product of an over-toilet-trained mind, of somebody who wants to tidy everything up and put everything away in pigeonholes. Of course, I had no interest in pigeonholes. From the beginning, I was trying to establish a context for individual works of literature within a totality of literature; and my belief that literature is a total imaginative structure, and not just the aggregate of things that have got written, has remained unchanged. Arnold: In particular, he objects to the value judgment, the shopper’s guide found in most kinds of literary criticism. Frye: I think that genuine value judgments are always assumptions; that is, they are working assumptions, heuristic assumptions, and they are consequently subject to later scholarship, which means that scholarship always has the power of veto over value judgments. Any keen student of literature is going to be enraptured by some writer in his teens, who will strike him as immature later on. That’s a quite normal process. I think of

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the value judgment as something you assume to go on with. I assume that Shakespeare is an important dramatist if I’m going to write about him or teach him. I find, in practice, that value judgment confirmed. The point is that the value judgment never becomes the basis of any scholarly work whatever; it remains in its own area of value. And a teacher should not fight the student’s preference for the television serial that he saw the night before. I think it’s better teaching tactics to indicate the similarity of devices between the two, and then the permanent values of Shakespeare will look after themselves. Arnold: Frye is known as a writer on Blake, Shakespeare, and Milton, but does that mean that he doesn’t enjoy a good read in sci-fi or whodunits? Frye: I read detective fiction, science fiction, popular fiction a good deal. The lectures that I gave at Harvard as Professor of Poetry [SeS] were very largely on popular fiction. I’m interested in popular writing because it preserves the same formulas that more serious literature does. If you read Tom Jones or Pride and Prejudice, you will find that the plots are surprisingly complex, and that in Emma, for example, or even in Wuthering Heights, there are mysteries that are withheld until the very last few pages. You’ve got a simplified form of that in the detective story. The thing is that you don’t often want to read the detective story a second time, certainly not until you’ve forgotten who’s done it. The structure of Tom Jones or Pride and Prejudice is not really all that different, but you find that you can read them many times without any diminution of interest. Arnold: His theories have fundamentally altered the way many critics see literature. One of the terms he uses is the “archetype”—that is to say, the repeating image of literature. Frye’s theories are complex, and he has many admirers and imitators. Frye: A student of mine once referred to “archetype spotting”; for instance, you read about somebody looking in a mirror and you automatically say, “Narcissus.” That is, of course, a technique which tends to substitute for the actual experience of literature. I don’t think the people that do that are going to get very far on their own, but it’s not my business to tell them so. Arnold: Frye has always believed that the Bible is the basis of all Western literature.

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[Harron discusses the influence of Frye’s theories about the Bible on his book Old Charlie Farquharson’s Testament.] Arnold: A lifetime interest in the Bible culminated for Frye in 1982, with the appearance of his book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Even the title of this book found its inspiration in Blake. Frye: Blake’s remark about the Bible was that the Old and the New Testaments are the great code of art [E274]; that is, not that the Bible is a work of art itself—that’s nonsense—but that it supplies any number of suggestions for the kind of mythological and metaphorical thinking that poets use. While, as I see it, the Bible itself does not provide you with a mythological universe, any culture which accepts the Bible as a sacred book can find any number of leads and suggestions in it. As a matter of fact, the development from primitive Christianity through the Middle Ages down to just about the end of the seventeenth century had done just that. Arnold: But if the Bible is myth, and if it is written in the language of literature, how can it be historically true? Frye: In every literary structure, you get the structure of words itself, which is the primary thing, and then you get a number of signposts pointing in the direction of history or doctrine or something else. When I came to the Bible, I found that while you couldn’t say that the Bible was a work of literature, nevertheless it was written in the imaginative language of literature, and consequently what was important was the story it told. That to me was what the Bible literally meant, was just what it said as a book. But the people who say that the Bible is literally true often mean that it points to something outside itself, and that it’s the truth of that something outside itself that’s important, and that is the criterion of truth. I don’t believe that. I don’t think that the events in the Bible can be pursued into history: they are what scholars call “language events,” they’re what the Bible has incorporated, and that to me is the primary thing to look at. One of the things that Biblical scholars do know is that the whole question of authorship is extremely suspect. Nobody regards Moses as the author of the first five books, nobody thinks of the Book of Isaiah as a book written by Isaiah, and the Gospels, as we now know, are later than the letters of Paul, and were not written by the twelve disciples of Jesus. That doesn’t affect the actual text of the Bible, it just affects certain historical legends about them. The Bible, when it deals with histori-

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cal material, is primarily interested in certain patterns that emerge. In the Book of Judges, for example, you get a series of heroes who redeem Israel. They’re different people, and they are different stories, but they tend to run together in your mind after you finish the book, simply because the Bible is interested primarily in what I would call the myth, that is, the shape of the story rather than in the historical achievements of Gideon or Samson or Jephthah. Arnold: The Bible even stands outside history. Frye: Ordinary history is a story of the bloodiest possible stupidity and cruelty; that I think is what Byron meant when he said that history was the Devil’s scripture.3 The record of human history is so unutterably foul and never shows you a successful bid for freedom or dignity that isn’t instantly smothered by a new kind of tyranny. So the fact that you really have no vision of salvation in history whatsoever is why you get in the Bible a story which is put over against human history, but also shows you something of the cruelty and folly of that history. The story of the Crucifixion is there to indicate that human history as we know it still does have a point, in relation to something which is not itself. Arnold: And the Passover story, too, is a tale of revolution and human hope. Frye: The Bible is, among other things, the story of Israel, and the story of Israel begins with Israel in Egypt, about to walk out of Egypt. The Book of Exodus begins with God telling Moses that he is going to enter history, he’s going to give himself a name, he’s going to take an extremely partisan role in history, and that he’s going to be on the side of the walkers out, and not on the side of the Egyptian establishment. And that seems to me to give a revolutionary quality to the Bible which recurs in Christianity. It recurs in a different form in Islam, and such a movement as the Reformation is really a re-emphasis on the revolutionary quality of the Biblical revelation. Arnold: But does the Bible really still affect the way we see the world today? Frye: I think that all of our philosophical and scientific structures in Western civilization come out of a matrix which is mythological, and which draws its main source from the Bible. The notion of there being a beginning and an end to time, for example, is something that we get

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from our Biblical heritage. The condemning of idolatry, which is really a resistance to getting wrapped up into the cycle of seasons, of a cyclical fatalism, is Biblical in its origin as well. Arnold: And Frye talks about the Bible in relationship to philosophy and science in modern life. Frye: We got, in the eighteenth century, the beginning of the waning of the big structures of authority, both spiritual and secular. You get things like the American Revolution and the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, and that began to bring with it a sense of a possible progress within human history itself. Then, in the nineteenth century, the conception of evolution entered biology, and many people seized on that as affording a scientific proof of progress in history. I don’t think it does—I think the biological conception of evolution and the historical conception of progress are quite different things—but nevertheless many people associated the two. There is still a very widespread feeling that evolution is finished except for us. Nature may have different ideas, and may actually tend to view the human race as an intolerable parasite and throw it away and start on something else. Arnold: But if religious authority has waned, the Bible still has the power to inspire and excite. Frye: I’ve been really quite astonished at the extent to which my book has sold. It may have something to do with my having spent my life in Canada and reached my seventieth birthday, but I am very grateful that it has become something of a bestseller, at least in this country. I think that it does indicate that people are passionately interested in what the Bible can still say, and I’ve been aware of that for some time. [Tovell discusses the importance of religion in the modern world. Arnold asks if Frye has become politically conservative. Matthews argues that he has, and criticizes Frye’s work on political grounds. Mandel considers Frye’s later work to be “austere, remote, rigid.”] Arnold: The events he has seen in his lifetime may make Frye sceptical about certain kinds of ideology. Frye: Whenever views of life that attempt to establish themselves on history begin to promise us a goal in the future, we’re really travelling along with a donkey’s carrot in front of us. So we are urged by interested par-

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ties, for example, to make all kinds of sacrifices because our great-greatgrandchildren are bound to be so grateful to us, they will be living in so much better a world. And it seems to me that the century which has seen what the twentieth century has cannot afford to believe in donkey’s carrots any more, and can only really turn to something that confronts them in the present moment. If that improves the future so much the better. Arnold: Whatever the future is to be, literature will still have a place. Frye: The book happens to be the most efficient technological instrument that the human mind has ever devised, and consequently it will always be here, at the centre of our technology, no matter what else we do. There has to be a large siphoning process to take care of the people who don’t want to read, and television does that. People who don’t want to read can always stare at television, or they can go down the street with headphones on, living in a different world from the ones they see around them. Arnold: But in Frye, there still burns a strong sense of idealism. He keeps deep down a hope, a hope he says we all keep, that some day man may still get back to the garden. Frye: When I was teaching at Berkeley in the spring term of 1969, the People’s Park business blew up, and suddenly all the archetypes of the garden of Eden story began pouring out of the student paper, and out of the student demonstrations. So I realized that these archetypes that I’ve been writing about were in fact determinates of one’s life in society. The thing that keeps us going is really a vision of what the world could be. I can’t imagine a social worker, for example, devoting herself to such a profession unless she had in her mind, at some level of consciousness, a vision of a better society than the one she’s actually engaged with day after day. And similarly with any profession, with teaching or medicine or with anything that has a social function at all, it rests, somewhere or other in the consciousness, on some kind of social vision which is cleaner and purer and tidier than the actual world you’re living in. Without that vision I think you would regard life as a form of penal servitude. Arnold: And that’s what Blake meant in his poem Jerusalem, sung here by Paul Robeson. [A recording of Robeson is played.]

66 On The Great Code (III) Conducted 20 September 1982

From the transcription by Robert D. Denham in NFF, 1988, box 48, file 1. Frye was interviewed by telephone by Stan Correy, a producer with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and Don Anderson, for broadcast later. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. Printed in WGS, 221–35. A sound cassette of the interview is also available in NFF, 1991, box 64. Interviewer: Professor Frye, could I first ask you why you chose the Bible as a subject for literary analysis when there is already a vast canon of works on Biblical scholarship? Frye: Well, I found myself as an English teacher first of all engaged in trying to explain poems like Paradise Lost to students who didn’t know one end of the Bible from the other. And so the importance of studying the Bible as a guide to the study of English literature was impressed on me for a long time. It’s true that there has been a great deal written on the Bible, but for the most part it has been scholarship in a rather different field. When I first started seriously to think about a book on the Bible as a literary critic would see it, I really didn’t know of any other book that covered that ground at all. Since then—in the last ten years or so—there have been a number of very distinguished literary critics who have come along in that field, but even so it’s a small field, and the vast libraries of literary criticism really deal with quite different issues. Interviewer: You make a distinction in the introduction to your book that it’s not really the Bible as literature that you’re looking at but the Bible and literature [GC, xii/6, xvi/10]. Could you expand on that distinction?

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Frye: I was confronted with the difficulty that the Bible seemed to have all the characteristics of literature, such as the use of myth and metaphor, and yet at the same time it was clearly not intended to be a work of literature. On the other hand, no book could have had its influence, a very specific influence, on literature, without having literary qualities. Those were the qualities I wanted to isolate in the study of the Bible. Interviewer: This may relate The Great Code to what I take to be your major work, Anatomy of Criticism. You say in the introduction to The Great Code that man lives not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals but within a mythological universe [xviii/12], which is, I think, what you’re also telling us in Anatomy of Criticism. Would you like to expand on this? Frye: It seems to me obvious, as I think I said, that there are no noble savages; that is to say, there are no purely natural men who simply live within nature. All human societies live within some kind of transparent envelope of customs and habits and traditions and myths and legends. That is the primary imagination, so to speak, the primary constructive efforts that man makes with words. Later on more sophisticated developments of philosophy and science take place, but literature is dedicated to recreating that original mythical and metaphorical form of construction. Interviewer: I take it that what might also happen eventually is that men’s recreation of that might run down. You say, again at the beginning of the book, that “What I am concerned with at present is not the question of whether God is dead or obsolete, but with the question of what resources of language may be dead or obsolete [17/35].” I wonder if you’d expand on that for us? Frye: Well, I’ve read a fair number of books lately in the popular science field that indicate that there is a growing chorus of dissatisfaction with what some of them call the Cartesian paradigm, that is, the conception of a world clearly split into a subject and an object, and pleas for more holistic approaches. That’s one area where it seems to be reaching a general public. Of course, there are all kinds of attacks on the scholarly front towards a new conception of language. I’m very interested in seeing this new conception of language develop. I would just like to make sure that, as it does develop, it doesn’t lose anything essential to itself which it has produced.

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Interviewer: What do you mean by this new conception of language losing something? Frye: Man begins with large metaphorical pictures of the world where subject and object are not very clearly separated and he goes on to other forms of verbal construct. Right now he is dealing with a subject–object relationship which has outlived its usefulness in many fields. I think it’s possible to develop a more holistic view of language which would incorporate descriptive language, as I call it, but would also incorporate the earlier forms of rhetoric and grammatical expression which are being recreated by our poets. Interviewer: You find this in the Bible. Is that one of the reasons you chose The Great Code as the title for your book? That in the Bible can be found the beginnings of Western literary imagination? Frye: Yes. The word “code,” of course, has an enormous number of ramifications in the English language. I chose that title because Blake had said in one of his aphorisms that the Old and New Testaments are the great code of art [E274], meaning that the Bible is not in itself a work of art but that it contained endless ideas and suggestions for people who were working in the arts. Interviewer: Would one of the worrying developments in language theory that we were talking about a moment ago be, say, the recent developments in semiotics which insist on the arbitrariness of the sign? Do you think that that’s leading us into some sort of intellectual dead end? Frye: Well, it could be. These issues are being raised and there are bound to be a great many trial-and-error attempts. Some of them will lead to dead ends, others won’t. The arbitrariness of the sign, I suppose, is something that has been pretty well agreed on since Saussure anyway.1 That is something that would be incorporated into a theory of language and get us away from the pitfalls in the magical use of words. Interviewer: I have a sort of second half to that question, which is that in the chapter on language in The Great Code, and I think comparably in Anatomy of Criticism, a considerable amount of your rhetoric is derived from late medieval rhetoric and the rhetoric of the church: “Oratory,” you say, “on the highest level of oracle, exhortation, kerygma, or whatever the most appropriate term is” [29/47]. Would you care to talk both

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about what kerygma is and again whether you are in many important ways rediscovering medieval rhetoric for us? Frye: Kerygma is a word I took from Rudolph Bultmann, who has used it in the sense of the proclamation of the gospel. I thought it could be extended to the entire Bible, and I used it as a way of explaining why the Bible is essentially a rhetorical book. It uses all the devices of language without committing itself to a literary intention, which is precisely what rhetoric does. I am interested in the late medieval, Victorine typological tradition,2 and further back, Augustine and Gregory, and also in certain forms of Reformation commentary. That represents a use of language that I hope again would not be overlooked by contemporary students of language as they continue to rebuild the science of language. Interviewer: I would like to agree with that, because I’ve seen your Anatomy of Criticism both as a continuation of that work and as a critical response to modernism’s rediscovery of that sort of work. James Joyce made Anatomy of Criticism necessary. I myself see a connection back through modernism to the sort of medieval discourse we’re talking about. I don’t know whether you see that. Frye: Well, certainly Joyce would agree with you very strongly. There’s no question about the influence of medieval rhetoric on him. Interviewer: Could I ask what will be my final question about language? You say very properly in The Great Code that the Bible is a work to which we come always and perforce through translation [3–4/21–2], whether it be the Vulgate or the Douai or the Authorized Version or the recent Reader’s Digest Condensed Version. That seems to me eminently true as a statement of fact. I wonder if it’s also true somehow as a grand metaphor. Do you think our relation not only to the Bible but to the world the Bible represents is a relation of translation, that somehow our connection with the word and the world has to be translated for us? Frye: Well, I suppose you’re really translating everything you read, even if it’s a personal letter from a friend. Certainly a book as remote in its cultural orbit as the original Bible is from us can only be translated even when it is read in Hebrew and Greek. One has to watch and make sure that this translating process doesn’t go so far as to kidnap the whole Bible into our particular cultural orbit. It’s the same problem that you get with the study of English literature.

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Interviewer: We’ve been generally talking, Professor Frye, about the importance of the Bible, but in The Great Code you actually ask the question and then go on to answer it—a question about the attraction of the Bible to poets and other creative artists. You talk about the seven phases of revelation. I wonder if we could discuss some of these phases. Could you give examples of what you mean by those particular phases? * * * Frye: Well, it seems to me that there is a sequence in the Bible as you read it of different phases of what is traditionally called revelation. It seems to me that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis is most intelligently approached as a phase of revelation, that is, as a manifesting to human consciousness of what Heidegger says is the first question of all philosophy, “Why are there things rather than nothing?”3 I don’t think that the creation story is an account of the beginning of the order of nature, and I don’t think it was ever intended to be that. If it had been it would have been a little cleverer and not had the trees created before the sun was. If you see it in terms of the first awakening of human consciousness it begins to make sense, and its place at the beginning of the Bible begins to illuminate. Interviewer: Do you see it as the beginning of a tradition of narrative, the beginning with birth as the beginning of storytelling? What is the significance of the Bible’s beginning with creation? Frye: Well, you have storytelling because, in an age where subject and object are not too clearly separated and where the imagination is extremely concrete and abstraction has not really developed, about the only way of communicating sacrosanct meaning is through stories. I have always stuck to the original meaning of the term “myth” as meaning mythos, that is, a story or a narrative. Interviewer: That is, in fact, as I’m sure you’re aware, what has interested recent critics such as Frank Kermode and Robert Alter.4 They’ve been turning their attention from secular narratives to Biblical narratives. You also are interested in it. You say, for example, “The narrative framework of the Bible is a part of its emphasis on the shape of history and the specific collision with temporal movement that its revelation is assumed to make” [198/219]. And you contrast it, for example, with Buddhist sutras and the Koran, which you say have very little narrative. Has Biblical narrative imposed on us in the West a sense of what narrative ought to be?

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Frye: I daresay we have derived our whole sense of narrative from the Bible’s narrative shape. I think that the relationship that Dante saw when he called his poem a comedy is one that has really etched itself into the Western mind, and we can hardly avoid thinking of narrative except in relationship to a structure that moves into and out of time the way that the Bible does. Interviewer: Have these structures, such as the narrative structures and the seven phases of revelation, become necessary qualities of the Western mind, qualities we can’t escape from? Frye: I think they are conditioning factors. It seems to me one of the practical values of literary criticism in the West would be to make us more aware of our mythological conditioning. Whether we can escape from it or not, it surely can’t do any harm to know that it’s there. Interviewer: We’ve only mentioned one of those phases. Could we talk about the other phases of revelation you discuss? And could you perhaps give some examples of what you mean by them? Frye: Well, the second one is Israel and Egypt, the fact that the Bible imposes a dialectical way of thinking, in which you have to take one side or the other and the neutral ground is abolished. Certain of the characteristics of the revolutionary type of mind—the trust in the historical beginning of a movement, the sense of the canonical text, the definition of the man next to you as a heretic if his views are slightly different, and all that attitude of mind—seem to me to be something that we derive directly from the Bible, and it has a very different shape, if it exists at all, in the Eastern world. Interviewer: I have a different sort of question about narrative. There is a recent book by two American feminist critics, called The Madwoman in the Attic, which asserts that all narrative is essentially patriarchal.5 You quite rightly raise in your current book the question of why the deity is so intolerably patriarchal, and you explain that. Would you care to comment on the relationship between narrative and patriarchy? Frye: I suppose in the development of human society you have a centripetal rhythm going towards the hearth, which is female-centred, and a centrifugal rhythm going outward towards the hunt, which is male-centred. All our notions of the quest—that the hero starts from his home plate, so to speak, then goes out and does something and then returns—

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that movement out and back again is perhaps a rhythm which has been derived from the whole sociological setup in the relations of men and women in primitive society. Interviewer: And that has determined narrative, I take it. How would one break out of that pattern? Would one have to be parodic to break out of it? Frye: That’s one way of breaking out. I suppose a narrative like Joyce’s Ulysses which picks up the Odyssey nostos rhythm, where the one thing that you want to do is to get back to mamma, is a way of incorporating the whole centripetal movement back to the hearth again in with the quest story, and so making the whole narrative structure to that degree androgynous. Interviewer: You seem to be stating in making comments about the Bible’s influence on literature that it has also had a great influence in shaping our ideas about things other than religion. In reading The Great Code I was struck by the way you took comments about the Bible and related them to social and political concepts. Was this a conscious effort? Were you trying to talk about the Bible’s influence not only on the imagination but also on the way we think about many other things? Frye: The thing that I was aware of almost always was the universality of the Bible’s influence on Western thinking. While I didn’t go consciously out to make a comprehensive survey about this, when something walked into the book and demanded to be there I couldn’t keep it out. Interviewer: How did this occur? Could you give particular examples? Frye: One of the central issues of the book is that in ordinary meaning [sic] we read a book and we assign its meaning to a world outside the book. In reading the Bible traditionally the Christian reading has been that the book, the Word of God, points to the presence of Christ first in history in the Incarnation and then in later history. It seemed to me clear that the Word of God as book and the Word of God as person of Christ were not related in that way at all, that they were being identified, that there was nothing outside the book. That total identification of the world of words is something that is being pretty widely discussed among people interested in such things now. It was an issue which I simply could not escape.

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Interviewer: What’s the most powerful imagery in the Bible? What aspects of the Bible exert the greatest power on the imagination and on thinking? Frye: It’s hard to say, because I think the Bible has an oddly cumulative force. The things that you tend to gloss over or not pay much attention to become with more frequent rereading more and more relevant. If you’re reading something like the parable of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan or if you’re reading the conclusion to the Book of Job or if you’re reading the account of Joseph in Genesis, part of the immense resonating power of all this comes from all the rest of the book moving in to help it. I think that’s also true particularly of the poetic parts of the Bible, the Psalms and the wisdom literature. Interviewer: I’m worried that I didn’t really make myself very clear when I asked that earlier question about translation. If I could ask it again in the context of the question just asked. It would seem that one of the central images of the Bible is a tree, or the tree, or the tree of life. In your second chapter on metaphor you say, “Two trees are mentioned in Genesis 2:9, the tree of life and the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Metaphorically they would be the same tree, and as the forbidden tree clearly has something to do with the discovery of sexual experience as we now know it, the tree of life is one of the myths of what has been called the ‘lost phallus’” [147/167]. Now I don’t know whom you’re quoting there, though I thought it may have been Lacan,6 but that is what I meant by the question about translation. To explain that tree as a lost phallus—is not that an explanation by translation? And are we not getting further and further away from primal meanings, and again and again through language and writing are we not cast out of Eden? Frye: Well, I’ve said that translation is essential for reading anything from a different era or perhaps even contemporary work, and that one should try to avoid kidnapping a work as remote in time and space as the Bible into our own cultural orbit. Now it is true that when I spoke of the tree of life and the myth of its loss as to some degree the myth of the lost phallus, I was referring specifically to Jacques Lacan, because what interests me partly about the work on symbolism that one gets in the psychologists—Freud and Jung and Lacan himself—is the archaic nature of the material they seem to get hold of. And I thought it might make it easier for a twentieth-century reader to have that kind of connection. The

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translation was a translation which was essentially a gloss or midrash on the statement in the Bible that when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they knew that they were naked. Interviewer: The committed evangelical Christian today in many parts of the world, whether it’s in the Southern United States or in any Christian country, would see your attempt at reading many things into the Bible as heresy. You discuss this question of faith in the Bible as a received truth. Did you find when you were doing your research or studying the Bible and writing The Great Code that you were treading on dangerous ground in that you were trying to do something that Biblical scholars would probably not attempt because they see the Bible as the Word of God? Frye: Well, I did say in the introduction that I haven’t taught forty years in a university for nothing, and I know something of how emotionally explosive this kind of material can be [xx/14]. At the same time somebody has to say it sooner or later and say it in language that will reach a general public and hope for a certain amount of good will. I have been actually astounded by how much good will there’s been towards my book by people whom I thought would hate its guts from the start. I think as far as, say, evangelical people are concerned, everything turns there on that central issue that I mentioned a few moments ago, the fact that as I see it the Bible does not recognize any criterion in history external to itself to judge itself by. I think I could sell that to quite a number of otherwise quite conservative people. Interviewer: You certainly do raise the question in the book that “If we insist that the Bible is ‘more’ than a work of literature,” which many people do, “we ought at least to stick to the word ‘more,’ and try to see what it means” [220/241]. You begin the next paragraph, “What I think it means is that we have to turn again to the traditional but still neglected theory of ‘polysemous’ meaning,” which I take it brings us back to Dante. Would you expand on the notion of polysemous meaning for us? Frye: We’ve inherited from the Middle Ages a conception of meaning on different levels, but with the Reformation there came a great deal of suspicion of that way of reading the Bible, not just from the Protestant reformers but from the Catholic tradition as well. It was felt that if you interpreted passages of scripture in more than one sense, you were leaving the road open to any kind of irresponsible, subjective criticism. It

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seemed to me that one could take the conception of polysemous meaning out of Dante’s medieval context7 and look at it more or less along Hegelian lines 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. Interviewer: You spoke earlier of the responses to your book. What kind of responses were they? What did these people say, who you thought would have reacted in a different way? Frye: Well, it was just a general sort of friendliness. The book seemed to impress the people who read it that I talked to as a book of good will which was not setting up an attitude of hostility to anyone. Considering how very hostile religious arguments get at times, I was astonished that there was so little of it visited on me. Interviewer: I understand from one of my colleagues who’s recently been in Toronto that one of the ways you’ve disseminated the results of your teaching is a series of video-cassettes that you distribute among American colleges. Could you tell us about that? Frye: Well, the Toronto Media Centre attached to the university here videotaped my lectures as I gave them for a couple of years and then edited them and attached brief discussions with students to the end of each one. There are thirty of them altogether. As archival material for students to use in university libraries, I think they might be quite useful. Interviewer: You say in the introduction to The Great Code that your interest in the Bible came out of teaching pursuits rather than scholarly pursuits, and you actually make a few comments about the distinction between the teacher and the academic [xi–xii/5–6, xiv–xv/8–9]. I wonder if you could expand on that distinction, because that seems to be important in the way you approach a book like the Bible. Frye: I saw from the beginning that it was no use my writing a scholarly book on the Bible. I was not a Biblical scholar to begin with. If I had made myself a scholar in some field, what I have to say would be specialized in that field. I had found from experience the value of a teaching course on the Bible of the kind that has got into my book. I sensed something of its importance for students, and so I thought there was room for a teacher’s

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book on the Bible which would relate it first of all to the undergraduate classroom. Interviewer: What lessons then do you want the students to take from the course you’ve set out for them? Frye: Mainly awareness of what is in the Bible, awareness of the way in which the Bible raises questions about the use of language generally, and of course the extent to which it has been used as a source of allusion and reference by writers, more particularly in English literature from AngloSaxon times right to our own day. Interviewer: Do you think the students try to find answers in the Bible? Most people when they use it as a religious book use it to find answers to questions in their own lives. In a literary way can it be used in the same fashion? Frye: I daresay it might. I tend to stress a rather different approach myself. The fact that every verse of the Bible, as I see it, echoes every other verse, and that a vast network of contexts arises around every passage in the Bible that you may be looking to as a guidance for life, that is not an area in which I can venture with much authority either as a scholar or as a teacher. I can only point out the inner coherence of the book and the way in which if you look for guidance in life you get a great deal more than you actually bargain for. Interviewer: There is an inner coherence to the book, yet in The Great Code you mention that while the Bible does have a unified structure it also is a bit of an encyclopedia and a mosaic of different structures that have been joined together over time. Perhaps the reason why people can read so many different meanings in the Bible is that it goes in so many different directions, even though it does have a unity, in that it begins with creation and ends with apocalypse. Frye: Yes, it has a unity, but it’s not a confining unity. That’s the distinction between the Bible, I think, and literary works. In literary works unity is an ultimately defining quality, it seems to me. There are exceptions, but that’s the general rule. In the Bible we seem to pass through unity into something else that is not in conflict with it. Interviewer: Again, if I could come to the topic of the book having grown out of your teaching. In your introduction you have a moving

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defence of teaching in terms of Platonic anamnesis [xv/9]. My feeling is that much of your writing has grown out of teaching, which is one of the things that makes it such a pleasure to read. Towards the conclusion of the Anatomy you say quite rightly that “it is a commonplace of criticism that art does not evolve or improve . . . . What does improve in the arts is the comprehension of them, and the refining of society that results from it” [344/320]. I take it that’s part of the function of criticism, of teaching, and of reading? Is that what we are doing? Frye: Yes, I think so. I don’t think the quality or the intensity of art necessarily varies from one age to another, or if it does, it does so by accident. But the understanding of what literature is doing in society and the variety of things it could do is something that can grow and progress. That is why I found myself more and more fascinated by the hypnotic gaze of the Bible: because that seemed to point toward so many of those critical problems I struggled with in secular literature. Interviewer: Again, I think it’s in Fables of Identity, you quote Coleridge, who says that there are two types of critics, Iliad critics and Odyssey critics, and Odyssey critics are critics who tend towards works of comedy and romance.8 You categorize yourself as an Odyssey critic. Can you tell me how the Odyssey came to the Bible? Frye: The Bible is, again in Dante’s phrase, a divine comedy. It’s a movement of exile toward home, and it passes through the tragedy of history on its way to get there, but the tragedy, even the tragedy of the Crucifixion, is not ultimate or final. The final thing is the return. Consequently, the Bible seems to be in the great romance tradition of the Odyssey and the Aeneid rather than in the tradition of the Iliad, where there is a more detached view of the human situation. Interviewer: Joyce, who wrote one of our great comedies, was of the opinion that comedy was a saner form (“saner” is his word) than tragedy. And his comedy of course includes both Homer and the Bible. Do you feel an affinity with Joyce’s work? Frye: Yes, I do. I feel quite a strong affinity with it. I think perhaps more with Finnegans Wake than with anything else in Joyce. There, of course, there are two worlds simultaneously. There’s the world of the cycle, where the last page swings around to the first page again, and then there’s another world over against the cycle of which only the cyclical

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world can give us an idea. It’s that final subtlety and refusal to find an easy solution that fascinates me about Finnegans Wake. Interviewer: Though the title of The Great Code comes from Blake, I think, though I haven’t counted accurately, that the poet most quoted in the book is Wallace Stevens. I just wonder what Wallace Stevens offers us. Frye: I wondered that too. I found myself haunted by phrases from Stevens, and I really didn’t realize that Stevens was so much in the forefront of my mind. I have of course written essays on Stevens and he’s always been a writer who fascinates me, but I was surprised myself to find so many of his phrases turning up. I think it has something to do perhaps with his being the kind of New England mind that’s rather close to my own cultural orbit. Perhaps I discovered affinities there that I wasn’t consciously aware of. Interviewer: You don’t think that Stevens might be offering us in the twentieth century a secular scripture? Frye: Stevens does say that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poetry of earth has yet to be written.9 I think that Stevens makes a great deal of sense in his conception of imagery and metaphor and the theory of poetry generally. Interviewer: Would you take him as revivifying through language the concerns that you’ve found continuous since the writing of the Bible? Frye: I would take them, yes, as revivifying, just as I would the phrases of any poet who seems to me to be very centrally in that imaginative Biblical tradition. I suppose it’s partly that I had passed through the absorption of Milton and Blake and others that had gone so far I couldn’t absorb any more. That may be one reason why Stevens stuck out as he does. Interviewer: The Great Code is a very different book, say, from the Twickenham [edition of] Pope or editions of Spenser, which assist students by having footnotes explaining who Ahab was or who Eve was. How do you see the difference between your book and that sort of annotated edition? Frye: I started out with a footnote book myself in the sense that when I first began to teach a course in the Bible and literature I had thought of it very largely as a kind of allusion and reference course that would enable

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people to see the kind of references that had been made to the Bible by writers, but that seemed to me a very bitty and piecey approach and very confusing to a student. The footnote is a bit of a mudhole for a student to step into, and I thought it was better to give him a large structure where he could see the general sense of the Bible and of how poets had used it as kind of general theory. Then he might find the footnote references in the Variorum Spenser and the like less difficult and less irrelevant.

67 Maintaining Freedom in Paradise Conducted 24 September 1982

From “Northrop Frye on Literature and Religion,” The Newspaper [U of T], 27 October 1982, 5. Reprinted under the present title in WGS, 237–48. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. The Newspaper is a student alternative to the Varsity. Frye was interviewed by Andrew Kaufman, then a Ph.D. student at Toronto working on a thesis on Blake and teaching a course in creative writing. Frye was not on his Ph.D. committee, but Kaufman had taken two courses from him.

Kaufman: Did there come a particular point or did it dawn on you gradually that your career was not going to be that of a more typical professor, who might publish a handful of articles and perhaps an obscure book? Frye: Well, I don’t really know how to answer that. People have said that my career looks as though I had drawn up an agenda in my early twenties as to exactly what I was going to do and when I was going to do it. But it wasn’t at all like that. I simply went completely in the dark, dragged from one book to another without knowing where I was going from there. Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, and The Great Code are all books which, when I started on them, I had no idea of where or how they were going to finish. I began my preface to the Anatomy by saying that the book had forced itself on me when I was trying to write something else, a study of Spenser’s Faerie Queene—which was quite literally true, which was exactly what happened. I didn’t want to write the Anatomy. Kaufman: Fearful Symmetry (1947) was your first book. Can you talk about how it got started?

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Frye: I really committed myself to writing a book on Blake in the graduate course I took on Blake, where I had to write a paper on Blake’s Milton. That was in 1935. Prior to that, some of my ideas on Blake had been developed in an undergraduate essay I had written. I started the really serious writing of the book around 1941, and finished in 1945. It completely occupied my life for a long time. Kaufman: When you began working on Fearful Symmetry, did you have any idea it was going to be such a massive project? Frye: Well, there was a curious fallacy there. I was convinced that I was writing a relatively simple and short introduction to Blake. And the book that was finally published was the fifth of the complete rewritings the book had, and the third and fourth rewritings were half as long again. It was only when I started numbering the manuscript pages and found that it came out to 658 that I began to think that somebody might consider this a long book. Kaufman: What goes through your mind when you’ve rewritten a book four times from cover to cover and find that it requires yet another complete rewriting? Frye: There’s a strong sense of something with its form, trying to achieve that form. The best thing you can do is stay out of its way. Kaufman: You’ve said that the process of writing poetry and fiction often requires a tremendous exertion of will on the part of the writer, in order to relax his will [AC, 88/81]. And that the writer’s imagination and his conscious will often conflict with one another. Are you suggesting that something similar is involved in your own work? Frye: I think the same principle is involved in any kind of serious writing. The will power that it takes to start writing comes from what you might loosely call the ego. And then you discover that the ego is not all of what is involved. I remember very vividly writing an article for Canadian Forum. The introduction grew and grew until I felt I’d have to publish the article in two sections. But after the introduction had itself grown to the length of a full-sized article, a little voice in my ear said I should keep only one sentence of it. After a good deal of resistance, I cut the project down to a single article and kept the one sentence. Kaufman: When you’re rewriting numerous drafts of a huge book from

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cover to cover, do you ever despair of completing the project in a form you’re going to find acceptable? Frye: Well, despair is a rather loaded word. I certainly go through difficulties in every major project, and in fact almost everything I write I begin like a kitten with a ball of yarn. Everything is fouled up. The thing is to get hold of one end, so that the sequence of B following A and C following B becomes clear. Once that starts, then you’ve got a lead. Then you’re on the way to writing. Kaufman: So when you’re progressing from one draft to another, the changes you make are primarily in the organization rather than in the ideas of the book? Frye: Nine-tenths of the work, of the drudgery of my writing, consists in trying to get things in the right sequential order. I invariably find that my first drafts are attempts to say everything at once. It’s a kind of explosive thing, and of course they’re totally unreadable in that form. Kaufman: Is there a particular tension or difficulty in the fact that your ideas tend to involve a simultaneous grasp of a very large subject matter, while writing itself is a very sequential activity? Frye: Yes, but I think it would be very common for writers, whether they be poets, novelists, or critics, to find their ideas are all coming at once, and to try to arrange them in a line. Kaufman: Which aspects of the process of writing a book do you find most exciting or gratifying? Frye: The only moment in my writing I find exhilarating is the moment just before I start on a new book—when it’s going to be the best book ever. As soon as I write the first sentence, I know it will be as good as I can make it and no better, but just before that there’s a brief age of innocence. Kaufman: Once you’ve completed a major book, how do you usually feel about it? Frye: I tend to lose interest in a book after it’s complete, because then it’s born. It’s got a life of its own, and it has to make its own way in the world. And it’s infantile to be a possessive parent of something that’s already been published. I have a tendency to behave like a puppy that’s just smashed some crockery: I walk away as quickly as possible. After I

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finished Anatomy of Criticism, I realized there was going to be a great todo about the theory of criticism, but that wasn’t my affair. Kaufman: What do you think about the ways in which your books have been received? Frye: Some books take longer than others to make their full impact, and I think mine perhaps do require a fair amount of time, of soaking and seeping. If you write a book which is really something relatively new, you get, first of all, a what-nonsense reaction, and then the many-brilliant-insights-but-of-course-all-wrong reaction, and then finally the weknew-it-all-along reaction. After that you may feel that the book has finally begun to be digested. It doesn’t really matter what the original reviews say. Kaufman: Some professors, when asked about your approach to literature, say things to the effect that “It works for him because he’s a genius,” and suggest that your methods would not be of great use to others. Do you have any response to this? Frye: Well, if a person says that, it means that he’s been studying under different teachers and that his own critical methods are different; he’s better in different things. There are critical methods involved in my work, but nobody can make a critical method foolproof. Nobody can prevent somebody else from using it as a substitute for the experience of literature. And while I’ve warned people often enough about not thinking that you can spot archetypes and think that is the experience of literature, nevertheless you can’t stop people from doing it. Kaufman: You’ve been extraordinarily dedicated and committed to teaching throughout your career. Do you use your lectures to your graduate and undergraduate students to develop and try out your ideas? Or do you see teaching as a responsibility which you fulfil and then go back to write your books? Frye: I find that teaching is indispensable to my writing. It’s not out of vanity that I keep teaching as long as I possibly can. I really need the teaching for my writing. I don’t know how I’d get along without it. The televised series based on The Great Code are videotapes of my own undergraduate lectures. They sound as though I were just quoting from the book, as though I had memorized my own book and were simply reciting sentences from it. But actually it went the other way just as often.

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That is, the book was quoting the lectures quite as often as the lectures were quoting the book. Kaufman: What in the activity of teaching makes it this important to your writing? Frye: I suppose it’s the whole business of dramatization and the presenting of something to a community. Sometimes I’m guided by the questions I get. Sometimes I don’t get any questions. I imagine a dramatist, for example, wouldn’t actually believe in the reality of his play until it had been performed. And in a sense I don’t believe anything I say until I hear myself saying it. Kaufman: And it’s important to say it to a room full of people rather than to the books in your study. Frye: Well, it seems to me, yes. Kaufman: How much of the material in The Great Code has been presented in your course on the Bible? Frye: The crux of the book is in the two chapters towards the end on the imagery and the narrative. That is what my course has always been about. And in late years it’s taken on some teaching of typology. The whole first chapter of The Great Code on the different phases of language is something I’ve never taught directly as a part of the course, though I have taught it in other contexts. Kaufman: A lot of writers, critics, and students have a much different attitude toward their work than you appear to. Norman Mailer says that writing a book for him means that he doesn’t have any fun for a few months. A lot of people work with the idea that they want to get done so they can clear out and go to their cottages or whatever. Frye: It doesn’t seem to work that way with me. I don’t seem to be of that temperament. The writing monkey on my back never lets go. And even when I finish something, it’s always, “What about the next piece you’re going to give?” 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. Kaufman: Do you think that helps account for your success? Frye: I don’t know. Everyone has his own lifestyle, and this happens to be mine. It isn’t better than anyone else’s lifestyle. It’s just mine.

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Kaufman: You’ve been tremendously productive for the last forty-five years. If you had another forty-five years of health and strength, what would you want to do with it? Frye: Well, I don’t think I would decide. That’s always been true of my writing: there always seems to be something else doing it. Kaufman: So you would go on, led by your work from project to project? Frye: Yes, and for all I know, sometime the inner voice would say, “Okay, Buster, you’ve had it, now shut up.” Kaufman: And that voice hasn’t yet been heard? Frye: Not yet, no. Kaufman: You write in The Great Code that “what primarily distinguishes Christianity (and Judaism) from most Oriental religions . . . is this revolutionary and prophetic element of confrontation with society” [133/153]. Since organized religion has to be a social organization, is it possible for any organized religion to do justice to this quality you find in the Bible, rather than to distort or pervert it? Frye: Organized religion has a tough time with a prophetic religion, because the prophetic religion is set over against society, whereas the social institution is committed, by being a social institution, to upholding society. Kaufman: So you see a very strong, fundamental, and inevitable tension between prophecy and organized religion? Frye: Yes. I think that to the extent that a social organization interprets a religion, it is going to interpret it in terms of its own social ascendancy, and so it is going to become more and more a parody of that religion, just as Khomeini in Iran is a parody of the Moslem religion.1 He’s worshipping the devil and so were the inquisitors and the Protestant fanatics in the history of Christianity. Kaufman: In The Great Code you suggest that there should be a movement towards an open “community of vision” rather than a “terminus of belief” [227/248]. Do you think that this is something that must occur through the individual working on his own, expanding his understanding of the Bible and of literature, rather than through any organized religion or congregation?

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Frye: It’s a kind of give-and-take relationship. There have to be both individual and socially organized approaches to religion. There’s nothing wrong with a social organization as such. It’s merely the association of religion with temporal authority that gets you into the dangers of bigotry and fanaticism. I feel that the language of faith is not a complete language because it’s a proposition language. And, as Hegel says, a proposition contains its own opposite.2 So anything cast in that form is hostile and aggressive by its very nature. That’s why Paul says that charity is greater than faith.3 It’s the fulfilling of the law. Kaufman: You say that religion as a social structure is necessary, and you say as well that organized religion as a social structure is incompatible with prophecy. Frye: Well, no, it’s not incompatible, because nobody thinks by himself except a psychotic, and the voice of prophecy is also addressed to a community. Kaufman: In Fearful Symmetry there is a penetrating observation that “the chief reason why people insist on substituting religion for art . . . is that only in abstractions can they find absolutes, and only in absolutes can they find an unchanging invariable support for their imaginations. No work of art claims to be more than one of an infinity of mental syntheses” [88/92–3]. Is it possible for organized religion to treat prophecy or gospel without turning it into law or an “absolute” or the “unchanging invariable support” you speak of? Frye: I think religious experience has to have two poles, one in some kind of traditional and historical context usually connected with an organization, the other in the individual. Without the tension between them, you get either bigotry and persecution or some kind of mania. All power corrupts, and if you assign too much power of judgment to the individual, he gets corrupted, too. There is no final answer; there can only be tension and compromise. Kaufman: Do you see any tension between your understanding of the Bible as a literary critic and your being an ordained minister? Frye: There hasn’t been a great deal of tension for me because the nonconformist nature of what I’m attached to [The United Church] admits of a certain amount of flexibility. I daresay tensions would arise if I were more active in the church, but for the most part when I speak to other

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clergymen at Emmanuel College reunions and that kind of thing, I’m very gratified by the amount of sympathy I get. Kaufman: Do you attend church? Frye: Not very regularly, no. But the fact has no particular significance. It’s just that I’m involved in so many things that I’m rather afraid to let a church get hold of me. If my Sunday is not a day of rest—that means rest from anything—the rest of the week is likely to be rather messed up. Kaufman: Your work gives the impression that for you, as for Blake, there is no divinity or spiritual essence that is separate from man’s imagination. Frye: I would say that it is not separate from the imagination, but in theory it could be separable. But that is a theory that would take me beyond human experience, and I can’t go beyond human experience. Kaufman: Is that a theory you subscribe to? Frye: Well, I don’t know. 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. It’s the situation that arises in Paradise Lost where Adam says to Raphael, “Are the planets inhabited?” and Raphael says, “That’s not your business. What you’re to do is maintain your freedom in paradise.”4 Kaufman: Do you have any belief as to what happens after death? Frye: I don’t know that I would call it belief. The language of belief, as I said, I tend rather to distrust. I feel that our five senses are filters. That is, they admit the kind of experience that maintains one’s survival as an organism, and they screen out a great many other things. I suspect that the brain is a filter, too, and that 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. The thing I do not believe in is the indefinite survival of the ego in the same categories of time and place, which is more or less the popular conception of heaven. Kaufman: Blake’s influence on your thought is frequently acknowledged by you and observed by others. Are there any significant differ-

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ences which come to mind between your sense of Christianity and that which you associate with Blake? Frye: I am less certain of my attitudes than Blake was—much more fuzzy around the edges. After all, I am an academic. Also I’ve had a century more of history to look at. I’m not, as he was, a devil mocking the angels. I am an angel trying to teach the message of the devil and be fair to it. Kaufman: What difference, if any, do you experience between writing on the Bible and writing on a secular author such as Shakespeare? Frye: The difference is partly that I struggle to maintain the same attitude with regard to the Bible that I would in regard to a secular writer. This has bothered some people. They simply cannot understand how I could write a book on the Bible and sound as uncommitted as I do. Kaufman: And that’s a struggle for you, too? Frye: That’s a struggle for me, too. What makes it more difficult is that even the greatest writers—Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer—are still bounded by the category of literature, whereas the Bible is not. In my experience it’s a unique book. Kaufman: What sorts of limitations do you find are present in Dante, Shakespeare, and Homer, as a result of their being bound by the limitations of literature, which are lacking in the Bible, as a result of its not being bound by these limitations? Frye: It’s not very easy to say, but within literature the hypothetical is the real. That is, the poet says, “Let’s assume this.” You never get past that hypothetical element in a work of literature. This means that insofar as Dante is not simply hypothesizing, he is referring to things outside his poem. In the Bible I think you have, uniquely, a book which has no outside. At least, once you try to work in the outside, as a historian of Near Eastern civilization would do, you find yourself in a quite different order of experience. In the Bible what is inside the book and what it points to outside the book have become identified. The Bible is not confined by what we usually call the imaginative, which I sometimes call the hypothetical. Kaufman: It’s interesting that you speak of the imaginative as something confining, rather than as something liberating.

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Frye: Not necessarily confining, but finite. That results simply from the fact that a work of literature has a form, or it wouldn’t be recognizable as a work of literature. Kaufman: So the very form that makes literature art also imposes types of limitations that the Bible doesn’t work under? Frye: I think that is true, yes. A work of literature fits into the category of literature, just as a tree fits into the category of trees and not the category of animals. And with the Bible there seems to be something additional. That’s a very vulgar way of putting it, but the Bible is clearly not intended to coincide with a work of literature. Kaufman: In other words, the Bible is more inclusive than anything that can be accommodated within a literary structure? Frye: Yes. Kaufman: A moment ago you said the Bible is unique in that it has no outside. How does it differ in this regard from, say, Blake’s prophetic works or the lyric poetry of Dylan Thomas or Wallace Stevens? Frye: It’s true that in one sense, and a very important sense, a work of literature has no outside. My own critical interests, however, have conditioned me to think of every work of literature as having a context within literature as a whole, so that what’s outside the work of literature is the rest of literature. The Bible eludes this kind of categorizing, too. Kaufman: Why do you think that not much work of the sort you are involved with has been done on the Bible? Frye: Because it’s been used as a weapon and an arsenal, and the overwhelming instinct in writing about the Bible is either historical—to see what it points to, however indirectly, in the ancient world—or to look at it as a text proving certain doctrines. Kaufman: Why is it that the Bible, which, as you put it, “contains the imagination,” has been seen so persistently through the centuries as historical or doctrinal? Frye: I suppose it’s bound up with what I call “concern.” I’ve said that every society is founded on a concern, and the formula of concern is usually, “What must we do to be saved?” I read a psychologist once who

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said that children don’t listen to what their parents say; they listen to the imperatives implied in what they say.5 And that’s exactly the way people have read the Bible—not in terms of what’s there, but in terms of what the implications are for your own actions. Kaufman: If you had been born in 1812 instead of 1912, in what ways might your work have been different? Frye: My central intuitions might very well have been the same, though of course the expression of them would have been totally different. I might have been a little more optimistic about human nature. If you’re living inside the British Empire, as it was growing up in the nineteenth century, it wasn’t the age of barbarity and violence and all of the things that make us despair of the human race like the twentieth century. People often don’t realize how much the Blake book was haunted by the Nazi movement. Yet I think the twentieth century, brutal and bloody as it is, is perhaps the first century in which I could write a book like The Great Code. In the sixteenth century I would have been burned alive by the first person who got hold of me, whether Catholic or Protestant. The seventeenth century wouldn’t be very different. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a book as uncommitted as mine sounds would have raised a tremendous storm of irrelevant emotions. Kaufman: Do you think people take the Bible less seriously when they see it as a structure that contains the imagination rather than as a factual, historical, or doctrinal statement? Frye: Well, I don’t know. No book really works by magic. I think that there are people who take the Bible very differently, and who would regard a book like mine as leading to taking it less seriously. On the other hand, I think there are just as many people who are very deeply concerned about the kind of thing the Bible points to, who want a book that won’t nudge them in the ribs, that won’t seize them by the elbow, that hasn’t any designs on them and doesn’t try to sell them anything. I think it’s only that kind of approach which, for a lot of people, would enable them to take the Bible very seriously at all.

68 On The Great Code (IV) Conducted 6 January 1983

This previously unpublished interview is recorded in Gilbert Reid’s notes, to which I am indebted. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1983. In his introductory remarks Reid notes that this second interview with Frye was not as easy as the first (no. 47) for several reasons: in place of Italy’s sunshine, he was confronted with Toronto’s icy, grey winter; Frye was recovering from a bad flu; and Reid had not found the recently published The Great Code easy. After the interview, Frye turned to Reid and said, “Critics of the book have focused on the question of whether I believe in God or not; but that is irrelevant; that is not the point at all.”

Reid: At the beginning of The Great Code, you explain that the book rose out of your teaching experience and that it was aimed at overcoming a series of “repressions” in the minds of the students. Teaching, you point out, should help students to realize what they already know [xv/9]. What exactly did you mean by that? Frye: Well, many scholars hate the guts of this book, and the reason, I think, is simple: every scholarly establishment creates its own institutions and conventions, its own canons of what is acceptable and what is not, and these rapidly become a repressive mechanism. Specialized knowledge is possessed knowledge, knowledge which excludes others, and it is thus repressive knowledge. It is for this reason that a pretence of naiveté is valuable, and that we need fools who will come in from outside and trespass on the specialist terrain. Otherwise, we have increasing compartmentalization, jealousy, repression, and mutual and collective impoverishment of our culture, our spirits, and our minds.

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Reid: How do the Bible and The Great Code fit into this picture? Frye: I think we are ready to repossess the Bible. We can now approach it in a critical spirit, without being loyal to a particular creed or social institution. If we reappropriate the imagery and mythology of the Bible we will be reappropriating a large part of our own sensibility, and thus increasing our freedom. Reid: Do you think this will help us recapture a general sense of the sacredness of life, the numinous sense of presence, which in a way seems to have disappeared with paganism and animism? Frye: Yes, it is true that the historical development of language and of religion which I sketch at the beginning of The Great Code reflects a progressive dispossession of the world or separation between the human sensibility and the world surrounding it. When the Bible attacks idolatry, it is attacking the unconscious projection of human energies and capabilities into the objects of nature. Projection itself, when it is conscious, becomes an aspect of freedom. It can be playful, flexible, nonalienated, and it helps to make us at home in the world by emotionally and conceptually uniting us to the objects and landscapes in the world around us. This unification is one of the essential functions of metaphor, in which A = B, and one of the essential qualities of language itself, the poetic or hieroglyphic phase of language, in which subject–word–object are felt to be largely indistinguishable. Of course, projection is essential to poetry, and one of the functions of poetry is to return us to the metaphorical roots of language, to make the world inhabitable for our sensibility. By approaching the Bible critically we can see how it is central to the symbolic systems of our culture; we can make its symbolism more readily available to us, and more permeable to other symbolic systems. We can break down the spiritual exclusiveness and xenophobia which has often marred the role of the Bible—and of Christianity—in history. This should help encourage the free play of projection, and liberate human imaginative energies. The free, nonalienated projection of human energy and of the capacities of the human spirit was, of course, one of Blake’s great themes. Reid: You have said that Christianity has often been a willful and exclusive religion.1 Does this not make it a dangerous force in history? Frye: Yes, very. The Bible was a product of this history of ancient Israel.

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Israel was a relatively unsuccessful state, surrounded by powerful empires and commercial seaboard states, and Israel went through a series of cyclical and traumatic vicissitudes. The Bible—Israel’s book—which purports to give form to history, has therefore a revolutionary and messianic quality: the other empires will collapse and die; Israel’s hour will come. The revengeful, voluntaristic side of the Old Testament comes, in part, from this sense of frustration and jealousy. In addition, Israel desperately needed to mark itself off culturally from the tribes and nations surrounding it and to assure its own internal cultural cohesion. This fact explains, I think, many of the taboos surrounding Old Testament practices: key practices of close and competing groups were made taboo in order to provide a clear demarcation line between Israel and the other nations. These taboos enshrine and perpetuate Israel’s xenophobia as a minor, threatened nation, often in vassalage to others. The Bible’s messianic quality and its xenophobia have made it a dangerous and revolutionary book. At the time of Christ, a world empire was being established under the Caesars, and the emperor was about to be deified. Therefore, though Jesus tried to separate what was due to God from what was due to Caesar, this dichotomy was made impossible by the universal and divine pretensions of Caesar; Christianity was therefore forced to become a universal and revolutionary or subversive religion. This, added to the messianic and xenophobic qualities of the Old Testament, have made it potentially very dangerous. But Christianity has always had a safeguard in the concept of charity, which later analogues and descendants of Christianity, such as Marxism, lack. Reid: How are your study of Biblical typology and your theory of language meant to influence our attitude to the Bible itself? Frye: Well, as I just mentioned, I hope to help make the fundamental structures of the Bible more permeable to elements from other traditions and more accessible to our imaginations. The general thesis is that there are powers in the human imagination implicit in the Christian tradition—such as eros or sexual love—which only begin to emerge through contact with other traditions. For example, some elements were allowed to emerge because of the influence of Classical literature. These progressive transformations or liberations will be part of the subject of the next volume, which will deal with the role of the Bible in literature. The Bible and its underlying structures are central to our tradition, and I hope to make that role explicit and clear. Demonstrating its central role may help

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to reduce what might be called the xenophobia of the Bible towards other traditions. Reid: Your book is not only scholarly then. It has a program? Frye: Yes, the program is to put the Bible explicitly in the middle of the literary tradition, where it belongs and where it has always in fact been. By doing this, I hope to aid a long-term shift in sensibility, to help create a sharper and more universal ethical sensibility, without the exclusivities and xenophobias of the past. After all, it is clear that we live in one interdependent world. Reid: You are now working on the second volume? Frye: Yes. My research is now taking two directions. A historical direction, to show the gradual permeation of the literary tradition by the Bible and the penetration of the literary tradition into the Bible. The other direction is taking me deeper into the Bible itself. Reid: The extent to which The Great Code deals with problems of method is perhaps surprising. Is this concentration on methodology perhaps partly a symptom of your struggle to come to terms with the rather explosive issues surrounding the Bible and its role in our civilization? Frye: Yes. It was a struggle with myself. We carry the tradition within us, and teaching—or learning—is, as I have said, a lifting of repressions, a form of self-discovery and self-knowledge. Since working on Blake in the 1930s I have been dealing with the same problems, and the title of the book comes from a statement by Blake: “The Bible is the Great Code of Art” [cf. E274]. I am still exploring the implications of that single statement. But, in order to do so, I had to deal with all sorts of questions regarding the status of the Bible, questions concerning concepts of meaning, metaphor, myth, language, and typology. Only in this way could I free myself for an examination of the role of the Great Code: of how it has created us, and of how we go on creating, and recreating it.

69 Making the Revolutionary Act New Recorded 7 July 1983

From “An Interview with Northrop Frye,” Scripsi (University of Melbourne), 2, no. 4 (1984): 220–6. Reprinted under the present title in WGS, 249–57. The interview was recorded at the School of Criticism and Theory, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., where Frye was speaking on “Social Concern and the Authority of the Arts.” The interviewers, graduate students Imre Salusinszky (an Australian), Alan Roughley (Canadian), and Vijay Mishra (originally from India) added the concluding question on Wallace Stevens from an earlier, unpublished interview conducted by Salusinszky on 10 May 1982 in Toronto before publishing the ensemble in Scripsi. Salusinszky went on to teach English at the University of Melbourne and then became a senior writer with the Australian; Roughley taught in Australia and later became associate professor at Liverpool Hope University; Mishra already had a position at Murdoch University, Australia, where in 2006 he remains professor of English and Comparative Literature.

Interviewer: Could we begin by discussing the relation of Fearful Symmetry to Anatomy of Criticism? You say at the end of Fearful Symmetry that the study of anagogy could provide the missing piece in contemporary thought. What’s the place of anagogy in your present work? Frye: The reason it took me so long to write Fearful Symmetry was that a great deal of what later became the Anatomy was being mixed up with it, and so the Anatomy did grow quite directly out of the Blake study. That, in its turn, reaches the conception of anagogic criticism, which is the theme of my work on the Bible now. It’s the apocalyptic vision, where all the images are identified with each other, and it has to do with the classless myth which I have spoken of.

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Interviewer: You have talked about ruling-class anxieties, and the word “anxiety” is prominent in your work. I wonder if Marxists couldn’t argue that you portray the repressive nature of society as simply a psychological condition, or psychological obstacle? Frye: I would certainly say that it produces that in the individual. The conception of anxiety, to me, is connected with the conception of a kind of intransitive fear, that is, a state of fear where you’re not afraid of anything—you just fear. It’s a very ancient idea: we can find it in Greek culture as well. I usually use the term to mean a kind of imaginary and undefined state of prohibitions and inhibitions that seems to surround people. Interviewer: Does the term “anxiety” also have a place in the persistent opposition in your work between imagination and ego? Frye: Oh yes, I think so. I think the Buddhists are right in saying that anxiety is an ego product. It’s closely connected with the waking consciousness, where everything that is repressed is still lurking around the edges. Interviewer: In Fearful Symmetry you say that, while in nature there is misery, in art there is tragedy; and you say that art allows us to undertake the “imaginative conquest” of nature [265/262]. I wonder if that’s related to your ego–imagination dialectic? Frye: I think it would be. I wouldn’t use the word “conquest” now. I would speak more of “identification.” I was thinking very largely of Blake’s “where man is not, nature is barren,” and of Blake’s resistance against everything that Graves means by the White Goddess: the nature that surrounds man, the thing that’s the environment but not the creation. I would put a much stronger emphasis now on the participation of man in nature. Largely through my work on Canadian literature, I’ve become more and more impressed with the Baroque hostility to nature as something mindless, as something just to be parcelled out by the consciousness. I can see how very sinister some of the results of that have been. Interviewer: In Anatomy of Criticism you provide a corrective to the idea in Hamlet that art holds the mirror up to nature, and you suggest that literature doesn’t reflect nature so much as cause it to be reflected within its containing form [84/78]. I take this to mean very much the same thing as

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when you talk about imagination transforming man’s hostile environment into a place which is inhabitable for him. Frye: Yes, I think that that is involved. The transformation seems to me now to have two stages. There is the Utopian stage, which is represented in the Bible and elsewhere by images of human work—the garden, the farm, the domesticated animals, the sheepfold, the city, and so on—and where work is an expenditure of energy with some further end in view. But the further end in view, in Blake’s innocent world, is a rehabilitated nature. Interviewer: You were talking about Canadian literature. We would be fascinated to hear your views on the similarities which have often been attributed to the Australian and the Canadian imaginations. Frye: Well, I don’t know Australian literature in detail. It’s largely a mass of people whom I remember having read but whom I really haven’t put together—people like Judith Wright and A.D. Hope and so on. I’ve read their poetry with great admiration but without seeing the patterns in it. I just don’t know enough about it. But I would think that the mood would alternate between the sense of exile and the sense of being the spearhead. It is just as in Canada, where all the values are way out there in Europe, and we look at them with nostalgia; but at the same time, the imperialistic thrust is coming out of Europe, through Canada. You feel you’re on the spearhead of that. Interviewer: Patrick White’s Voss would perhaps illustrate that? Frye: Yes, Voss has the same sense that so much Canadian literature has of probing into the distance, and of the sheer size of the country as an imaginative challenge. The fundamental challenge of penetration in this case is that people are explorers. Voss picks up the same theme that you get in Canadian literature, the feeling of the country itself being penetrated, not only physically by the explorers, but imaginatively as well; and of the people back home not being able to know quite what to make of this sense of a crusade within their own country. Interviewer: Both of our literatures have been affected by not being the products of a revolutionary culture like America. Frye: We have always been a relative culture, in the sense that we were built up from dispossessed Tories, whereas the American revolution was a Whig revolution.

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Interviewer: There is a passage in one of your essays on Canadian culture where you suggest that the difference in attitude between Canadians and Americans to the thrust of European influence is that Canadians seem to be trying to achieve the same thing that America achieved but without the revolution.1 Frye: The revolution, I’ve tried to explain, sets up a deductive pattern in society: you set up a constitution; you derive things from that. So you have your inspired document, your Book of Genesis, in American culture. In Canadian culture you have the inductive, Burke tradition of limping along from precedent to precedent. Interviewer: Would you see the recent patriation of the Canadian Constitution as a change? Or is that a continuation? Frye: I would see it as a continuation, though it is partly an assimilation to an American pattern. There’s very little difference between the deductive revolutionary mentality in America, and the kind of Jesuit-trained Collège Classique mentality in Quebec, which is what Trudeau emerges from. Interviewer: Literature in America is so heavily affected by the ideology of the original revolutionary act upon which American culture is based. Literature is constantly making that act new. Frye: Yes, I think so. The Constitution itself is an inspired document that is constantly reinterpreted and amended, but never scrapped. I think that has affected the whole temper of American literature very strongly. Interviewer: So is republicanism a possible cultural bonus in Canada and Australia, simply because it would bring Canadianness and Australianness to the forefront of the imagination? Frye: The idea of a Commonwealth is a very attractive idea to me, now that it no longer has an imperialistic basis. I think the symbol of royalty as something that nobody can possibly earn but that you can only get by accident is still something that I would buy. Otherwise, the whole of society becomes open to competition. If you have a symbol that’s beyond the competition, it seems to me to be a very powerful kind of community image. Interviewer: One of the major issues that was raised in Canada during the debate about the Constitution was the problems raised by native

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leaders in their attempts to get their aboriginal rights enshrined. Several Canadian writers have commented that Canadians will find their identity only through the identity of the native peoples. Frye: You find that in Canadian culture increasingly. To some extent, it’s a voluntary thing, but I don’t know that it’s any less genuine for being that. The feeling of Susan Musgrave continuing a Haida tradition is, I think, very strong, and the same thing is true of John Newlove. That is something that is bound to increase and become more and more articulate in Canada—the fact that you can’t found a culture on the pure destruction of another culture; otherwise, you’ll be haunted by guilt feelings all the time. You have to establish some kind of continuity with it. The moment that the indigenous people seem to be at their last gasp politically and economically is the point at which the cultural backlash begins, just as it has done in French Canada. It may get confused with political and economic movements, but it’s fundamentally a cultural movement. Interviewer: In Australia the spearhead of American imperialism is advertising and television. In The Modern Century and elsewhere you’ve mused on literature as a spearhead against the degrading effect upon imagination of some of these cultural forms. Frye: There is an element in culture which is a mass culture, which follows the economic, centralizing forces of marketing and distribution and so on, and out of that may crystallize something which begins to move in a different direction. Those nine bloody years I spent as an advisory member of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, I was trying to keep abreast of the CRTC’s policy of not selling out the mass media entirely to the American market, in which of course it had to fight the whole of Canadian public opinion as well as the American interests. The CBC seems to have let us down rather badly in that regard. At the same time, I think the film has not done so. There seems to be almost a general correlation between films and radio and television programs produced on a shoestring budget and the creativity that goes into them. It seems to me to have something to do with this backlash against the economic. Interviewer: In his autobiography, Patrick White makes a lot out of the specific nature of the artistic consciousness as an isolated and almost androgynous consciousness.2 That is very much a Romantic myth that still exists in Australia.

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Frye: There is, I think, the possibility of a recreation of an earlier way of cultural thinking, which is something beyond simply getting caught in it. I don’t think Patrick White is really caught in it. He’s aware of it. He’s too aware of it to be wholly confined by it. The sense of the isolation of the writer in the community is just as strong in the twentieth-century environment as it was in the nineteenth, though for somewhat different reasons. They are the ones which have to do with the source of authority in the writer. It’s not a privileged authority; it’s not a class thing; it’s a matter of commitment. Interviewer: The teacher, too, is in an increasingly outcast role, in a militant role, as you’ve put it.3 Has television helped to bring that about? What are the real bases of it? Frye: Because teaching is a political act, society is never really neutral with regard to the teaching process. Society is instinctively anti-intellectual, and the higher you go in the process the more you discover that. You discover a large public opinion which doesn’t think universities ought to be there at all. So the mere act of teaching is an act of social defiance, or at least a defiance of certain aspects of society. Society will support elementary education up to a point, because it wants docile citizens. Reading and writing, which you must learn to be a part of your society, is thought of by society as a passive act: you read in order to be able to read the traffic signs, and you write in order to sign your name to your income-tax form. To transmute that passivity into an activity is what makes the genuine teaching operation militant. That is something that so many professional educators just don’t see: they think that the aim of education is to make you an adjusted citizen. The genuine teacher has to think of what he’s doing as militant, and increasingly he has to think in terms of organization. The educators talk about individuality, because they want to disintegrate any kind of social opposition. Interviewer: How do we begin to turn back the tide of the financial attack upon the universities? Frye: I have no pat answer for that. It’s a matter, in the first place, of articulate spokesmen for the university, who do very much more than they are believed to do. And there has to be some kind of appeal to votes, however factitious it may be. Without the universities, Canada would simply become again what it was at first: the hewer of wood and drawer of water for Americans. The whole mercantilist bit is something that

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Canada swallowed—hook, line, and sinker—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If it gives up its universities, it gives up its possibility to outgrow that. Interviewer: But many students these days say that they see the university simply as an avenue to professional and financial gain. Can the individual teacher fight that? Frye: A lot of that on the part of students is simply a product of immaturity: they say that because they don’t know what else to say. I’ve just attended the fiftieth anniversary of my class at Victoria College. We were a class of over three hundred, and after fifty years the number of people who turned up at the reunion was over a hundred and fifty. I think that indicates something of the solidarity of the social ties which come from that college. They didn’t come back to a playground of class privilege. They were older, and they knew that that was not what the university was about. Students today, whatever they say and however they talk, will know better by the time they’ve graduated, and they will certainly know better by the time they’ve been in the business world or whatever. Interviewer: Is that also true of economics or computer science, and other practical disciplines? Frye: Oh, yes. By the time they’re forty-five, they’ll be saying, “I wish to hell I’d got myself an education.” What they have to do is build on the education they’ve got. Interviewer: What is the function of the critical imagination in countries like Canada and Australia? Should it exist in a kind of symbiosis with the artistic imagination? Frye: I would hope that there was a symbiosis, though it would be one in which they didn’t get in each other’s hair. I think I have, as a critic, a function in Canadian literature, so long as I don’t tell writers how they should write. I think that a writing culture without a critical part has lost half of its articulateness: you have to have both. I know that writers do depend on critics, often very much more than they think they do: not to tell them what to do, nor for the quality of the reviews of their work, but simply to express a form of articulateness which they have nothing to do with as writers. Interviewer: Three of the newer universities in Australia have departments of comparative literature rather than English departments. Liter-

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ary theory has to be taught in comparative literature, because there is no other rationalization for comparative literature. You have said that literary theory shouldn’t be taught to undergraduates.4 Frye: To me, the knowledge of literature is an inductive process; it’s a matter of reading one book after another. One of the things I’m always aware of with undergraduates is the immense ease with which an undergraduate will accept a theory of criticism as a substitute for the experience of literature. That seems to me to invert the whole educational process. I’m inclined to agree that comparative literature, wherever it is taught, does have along with it a theoretical component which is essential to it. I’d like to see it put off as long as possible, that’s all. Interviewer: Why has your influence been so much greater in America than in England? Frye: I suppose it’s partly the business of being a theoretical critic at all. The Edmund Burke inductive tradition is very strong in Great Britain. In fact, I remember reading an article by somebody who said that modern criticism had been turned inside out by three American critics: I.A. Richards, William Empson, and Northrop Frye.5 In other words, “critical theorist” equals “American.” Interviewer: Commentators have pointed to a special relationship between your criticism and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. At the 1948 meeting of the English Institute in New York, you read a paper on comedy,6 and Stevens read his paper on “Imagination as Value.” Did you meet him? Frye: I’m afraid that’s one of those things that happen about personal meetings. I did listen to that paper. Stevens muttered it into his shirt collar, with the avenue traffic rolling outside. I was brought up to meet him afterwards, and I racked my brains for something to say about a paper of which I had not heard one complete sentence. Stevens saw that I was embarrassed, so he put me at ease by asking me about various stockbrokers and insurance people in Toronto, whom he had met the last time he had visited Toronto, which was in 1908. As a matter of fact, I was very well aware, even at that time, of a particular relationship to Stevens. Ever since I was a teenager working in the Moncton Public Library, I’d been fascinated by Stevens more than almost any other of that group of poets. For some reason or other, the Harmonium poems had a special resonance for me.

70 Visualization in Reading Conducted early July 1983

This previously unpublished interview was conducted, like the preceding one, at the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University during Frye’s visit there, 5–8 July. Interviewer Ellen Esrock, at that time a graduate student, became associate professor of literature at Renssaelaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y. I am indebted to her for the text. Drawing on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Esrock investigates the role of mental images in our experiences of viewing art and reading literature. The present interview was one of a series asking prominent writers and critics (including Margaret Atwood and Geoffrey Hartman) about their mental processing of written texts.

Esrock: I’m interested in your experiences as a reader reading texts. I’m particularly interested in visual images, at least in that commonsense way we talk of them. I have a few questions, so maybe you can put yourself in a meditative, rather than a programmatic frame of mind. Can you form the visual image of an apple? Frye: I think so. Esrock: Can you make it a red apple? Frye: Yes. Esrock: A green apple? Frye: Yes. Esrock: Can you turn it upside down? Frye: Yes.

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Esrock: That’s simply to establish something about your imagining capacities, at least your reports of it. When you are reading literature, do you form visual images? Frye: They’re hazy, but they’re formed all right. And if I see the movie version of a book I’ve read, it’s a quite distressing experience. Esrock: Do you form them continuously throughout the reading process? Frye: Oh, I think so, yes. If there’s anything to visualize at all I do. Esrock: Do you find there’s any structural relationship between the visual image and the text? Tensions? Is there anything more than a visually moving picture going on? Frye: Not very much more than that. Visualization is pretty primitive. I usually put characters in their houses, which is the house I lived in as a child—which doesn’t always work. It might be anything from William Faulkner to Thackeray. There is a kind of grey haze of visualization running concurrently with the writing. Esrock: Would you say you fill out the text with details in your visual images that are not really specified in the text itself? Do you “embellish”? That’s one way in which people have described visual imagining. Frye: I don’t do a great deal of that, I think. I tend to look at the book as a datum and to accept what the writer gives me. Esrock: You feel that your visual images complement the datum but do not exceed it in any unusual way? Frye: I don’t really think I add much visually to what I’m reading, unless there is something in the text which suggests that I should be doing so. Esrock: When you’re reading something where the sound is very important, where the author works with the sound, do you ever feel as though the visual imagining gets in the way of hearing the sound? Frye: If it does, it simply becomes vaguer. The little television screen of one’s mind may just become a fleck of dust. Esrock: Do you feel you ever visualize in response to a particular type of stimulus? Some say that visual imagining comes about when the subject matter is of a certain nature—that we visually image some things more

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than others—that we have an interest in seeing certain kinds of things and so we visually image. Frye: I daresay there is that. But I really haven’t examined my own reading processes to know what elements I am interested in. I think it depends much more on the quality of the writing than on my own personal setup. Because some writers are so much more evocative in visual imagery than others. Esrock: Do you visualize more when reading one kind of material than another? Frye: I think it depends on the kind of material it is. I think that authors differ among themselves as to the intensity of the worlds they visualize. The way they put that across to the reader determines the quality of his visualization. Esrock: Would you find poetry or prose the kind of medium that best elicits the visual response? Frye: That would be difficult to say. I should think, ordinarily, prose fiction is where you have a continuous pattern of visual response. You have to do something with the characters you’re reading about. Esrock: I’m also curious about the role of sound in reading—sound and any other responses you might have. Do you have kinaesthetic responses, for example? Frye: Rarely. Again, it depends on the subject matter. Certain forms, like the film, make a much more direct assault on the kinaesthetic response. Esrock: Do you have any particular feelings associated with the print on the page that contribute to the reading experience? Frye: I don’t know whether this is a relevant answer to you or not. Once I was assigned Huckleberrry Finn to teach, and I bought a copy and started in. There was something all wrong about the copy that I had. I couldn’t teach out of that book at all. Finally, I discovered what it was. The pages weren’t turning over in the right places. So I had to write home and get mother to send me the copy of Huckleberry Finn that I had read at the age of eight. Esrock: [laughter]

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Frye: This was after I had in the first place gone to work with a razor on the illustrations. I had thought they were what was bothering me. Then, after that, I had gone though the book marking all the pages that I’d turned over in my eight-year-old’s copy. Esrock: So you remembered where the pages had turned? Frye: Every time. Without that visual background, I’m pretty helpless in my memory. Esrock: So because of your form of memory, the entire layout of the page contributes to your ease of moving into the text. Frye: At the age of eight, of course, it’s absolutely clear cut. Even now, when I’m quite certain that the passage I want is at the bottom of a lefthand page, and I look through at the bottom of left-hand pages: if it turns out to be, in effect, at the bottom of a right-hand page, I still feel very insecure, as if I’m going senile. [mutual laughter] Esrock: When you’re reading, do you hear the sounds of the words? Frye: Sometimes, particularly when I’m reading poetry. Esrock: Would you say you hear the sounds of the words all equally? Frye: No, not equally. It comes in and out. Esrock: What would that depend on? Frye: I suppose the intensity of the language, and some accident in the response. Esrock: What do you mean by “the intensity of the language”? Frye: There are some poems which throw more emphasis on the sound of the words. I would get it much more intensely with Tennyson than with Browning, for example. Esrock: This isn’t on my list of questions, but I’m interested in it. When you’re hearing the sound of a word and that sound has some relationship to other sounds in a poem, how would you describe that experience of “knowing” there is a relationship to other sounds? The knowledge that the sound is related to other sounds seems to influence the actual hearing of the sound in some way. Frye: If you’re reading poetry, there are, in the first place, certain obvi-

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ous things, like rhyme and assonance. Then you notice there are all sorts of other assonantal relationships, which you wouldn’t have noticed if [the others] hadn’t been there to guide you. But I have a rather quick eye for repetition of sound, of phrases, which indicate the kind of sound pattern that’s emerging. In poetry the sound occupies such a large aspect of the meaning that you have to attend to it. Esrock: I’m interested in what that attending amounts to. Someone might claim that you simply recognize the patterns—take note of them. You work out the meaning and you use that with sound simply as a cue. Someone else might say that the point of the sound pattern is to read the work actually “hearing” these relationships. In one case, the point of the reading experience is to experience the sounds “as sounds” and know that they’re related to meaning. In another, the point is only to “decipher” them. Frye: I suppose, again, that depends on your state of mind. I have often had the experience—I had this experience when I first discovered T.S. Eliot when I was seventeen—that I had read and unconsciously memorized nearly all of the poems up to The Waste Land without having made any conscious effort to do so, and without having even begun to think about what they meant. Esrock: I had a similar but less impressive experience with Eliot, with Four Quartets. I didn’t understand what it meant but I loved the sound. To me, that experience, of being moved by the sound, is very important. It wouldn’t satisfy me just to know that the sound is there. Does this distinction make sense to you? Frye: Yes, I understand the distinction. I think it depends so much on the quality of poetry you’re reading and also the mood that you’re in. Light verse depends very heavily on rigorous sound patterns. There, I think you are almost expected to consciously recognize the sounds patterns, rather than having the song come as the primary experience. Esrock: I suppose my ideal would be to have both. Frye: Oh, yes. Esrock: I feel most of the time the movement in criticism, and reflected in general literary education as well, is to emphasize the knowledge of the pattern, without ever taking that knowledge back to the experiencing of the poem. Does this criticism sound reasonable to you?

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Frye: The conscious knowledge of the poem’s meaning, if it stops there, is a substitute for literary experience, and to be drowned in the sound, uncritically, is another kind of substitute for literary experience. I’ve often said that when you’re reading a poem, you’re following the poem in time, and that’s a precritical stage, and when you’ve finished reading then it becomes the critical icon—the simultaneous pattern that you analyse. But you have to keep rereading it, recreating the experience. Esrock: I’m curious about a conventional distinction we have between pornography and sensuality in literature. With fine erotic literature, the proper aesthetic attitude involves a kind of “disinterested interest.” I’m rather sceptical of such clear-cut distinction—not in terms of what the author wants to do but in terms of the reader’s interest in the text. Frye: Well, I did say in my Harvard lectures that a lot of people with censorious minds tend to identify the erotic and the pornographic. The difference in my mind is that pornography is intended to stun and numb the reader and the function of erotic writing is to wake him up. Esrock: Ah, so you think that a reader who has been awakened sensually is not an improper literary reader. That’s nice. Frye: I think that in hardcore pornography there is no story, no characters, no comment, no nothing—just a steady prodding of reflexes. After awhile you begin to resent getting your reflexes prodded and feel that as a free human being you have a right to an active response, rather than simply a passive, knee-jerk response. Esrock: Do you find this view shared by other people? I find that distinction still rather cut and dried—that there’s a distancing of response that is necessary. Frye: I wouldn’t call it distancing of response . . . it’s the difference between straight passivity in responding automatically and an active response. But I wouldn’t say that the active response was necessarily a disinterested one. Esrock: Maybe we could call it an “active voyeurism.” Frye: I remember a cartoon I saw with somebody looking at a picture of an extremely luscious youth, reading the title, Study in Vertical Planes, and saying, “Who’s he think he’s kidding?” [laughter]

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Esrock: I interviewed Jack Hawkes after a public lecture he gave on his book Virginie, a work that plays on pornographic material. In his public lectures Jack was adamant about the reader’s not responding erotically to the work but placing emphasis on the writing. But then in the private interview, I heard the other side (which was not contradictory). His interest was in the visual and his appetite was for a certain kind of excitement. Frye: Yes, he wants that from his reader, too. Only he doesn’t want the wrong kind of response. Esrock: Yes, but it’s difficult to figure out what that wrong kind of response is. What about slightly different verbal formulations that produce the “same” visual image? Frye: I feel the image invoked by other [verbal] formulations would be coloured by the differences in those other formulations. Esrock: Want to comment on what it means to be “coloured by”? Frye: Well, a red image is different from a green image. Esrock: That’s cheating? Frye: Is it? Esrock: I’m interested in what it means for something to be coloured by how we experience it. We have ways of talking about that semantically: we say, “The semantic fields overlap.” But that doesn’t reflect our experiencing of how something overlaps. Frye: I think we’re back to something like Locke’s primary and secondary qualities. The primary ones are primary because we can’t see them. If you look at it in another way, there’s really nothing but an assemblage of secondary qualities. So if colour changes the essence changes. Esrock: Yes, and now I must let you go. Thank you very much.

71 Hard Times in the Ivory Tower Recorded 21 September 1983

From the CBC transcript of the program of that name, reference no. 4-ID-042, heard on Ideas, 2–6 October 1983. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. The program was a five-part documentary prepared by narrator William Barker, then a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s University in Kingston, dealing with the problems of overcrowded universities in a time of continuing recession. Barker, a frequent contributor to Ideas who taught English for many years at Memorial University in Newfoundland, became president of the University of King’s College, Halifax, where we hope times have improved.

Part 2 (3 October) dealt with “The Problem of Community.” Barker: In last night’s program, I showed how government and universities have encouraged students to come to university. I argued that the vocational role of the university, the ability to train students for jobs of higher technical skill as well as higher status, was always in danger of overshadowing the intellectual curriculum. Tonight I want to argue that, while an intellectual curriculum can be found in a large decentralized university, it does not flourish there unless it is closely related to the spontaneity and support found in a vigorous social life. Frye: The dilemma of a university which is caught in the middle of a big industrial town is very acute. Toronto in particular is bound to have a great number of commuting students who don’t really get into the community at all except as hearers of lectures and writers of essays, and that’s only a very small part of what the university is about. Educational authorities like Cardinal Newman have always insisted that the university is primarily a social entity rather than an intellectual one.

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Barker: By a social entity, Northrop Frye is not referring to the university as parties or fraternities, the kind of life depicted in Animal House and other movies. Rather, Frye refers to the communication of ideas. Frye: The university is a social community in which the intellect has a continuous function, and in ordinary society the intellect doesn’t, as you can see if you read the political news in the paper. On the other hand, the intellectual function without a social community is what you can get in some very intense research projects, but that is something which is on the periphery of the university, it’s not the centre of it. The centre is the communication of what these research projects result in to a still larger community who are not specialized in their own knowledge. Barker: Many professors find it essential to belong to a community where communication leads to the growth and development of thought. Thought is dialectical, argumentative. You have to have people around you to react to your ideas. I asked Northrop Frye if belonging to Victoria College has helped the development of his work. Frye: Oh yes, it’s meant everything to my work, to be in a community where you can find your own identity with others. You notice of the scholars in the humanities, a disproportionately large number come from the colleges, and I think that’s because the college really does foster the intellectual community that a scholar needs, where everything you write is a contribution to the community. And unless you are constantly in a community and feeling that kind of response, it interferes with your processes as a writer. I’ve known many people turn very pedantic and really get off the track of scholarship simply because they were working by themselves too much.

Part 3 (4 October) was entitled “Teaching and Research: A Delicate Balance.” Barker: Specialization does give the researcher a close view of how things work, a glimpse into the room within, and often yields results of great benefit. But there are few researchers who have the language to come back to tell us what they’ve seen inside the room. Last night we heard Northrop Frye say that the centre of the university for him is the communication of specialized research, not the research itself. Otherwise the research could just as well go on in an

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institute. For many professors caught up in the language of their discipline, the ability to convey the excitement of research in intelligible language is a real problem. In the humanities especially, the language of clear conversation is needed. Frye: One can have any variety of conversations, especially with people who are close enough to what you’re doing to be able to communicate intelligibly, but the important thing is the constant practice in conversational style, speaking to intelligent people in a kind of concrete language, which is the language that makes for good conversation. That’s why whenever scholastic developments take place in the humanities of using special jargon and terms that are understood only by initiates, the whole humanities structure just falls to pieces. I remember reading the opening sentence of a critical essay on phenomenological criticism, and I thought, well, if anybody asks me what my position is critically, it consists of a headlong flight from sentences like that, and from the people who compose them.

Part 5 (6 October) was entitled “The Liberal Arts: An Enduring Conversation,” and dealt with the notion of the university as a refuge where critical thinking may be encouraged, chiefly through the humanities. The program began with a statement by Frye: Frye: The ivory tower is a very silly phrase, and it’s fostered by people who think that the people who stay in the universities to teach are somehow misfits, that they’re people who can’t get out into the real world. That is particularly the view that a large number of people take of the humanities. It’s a kind of sexist symbolism. The humanists are the people who stay home and make the home beautiful, but they’re not doing anything really important. * * * Barker: One could argue that the main contribution of the university to society is not manpower or specific research discoveries; rather, it is the development of critical thinking, a way of standing back from the society we live in so that we see it more clearly. This kind of thinking is encouraged in many areas of what are traditionally called the humanities, subjects like philosophy, languages, art, and literature. I asked Northrop Frye how reading English literature might create a sense of detachment.

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Frye: In reading works of English literature, you come in contact with civilizations like the Elizabethan or the Victorian one, which are very different from ours in their social assumptions, and yet those social assumptions made sense to them. Getting some sense of that kind of society which is different and yet can communicate to us, I think does build up a sense of detachment towards our own society so that we’re not creatures of our own prejudices, though we don’t withdraw from the society. * * * Barker: Often the university stifles the desire to learn. Students take classes in large courses where they have to regurgitate old information dealt out by professors who are more interested in research than in the three hundred students crowded before them. And who can blame the professors in these circumstances? Or there is the common problem of the egotistic teacher who sets himself up as a wall between the students and the subject. Here the professor tells the students how hard the work is, how long the apprenticeship, how demanding the work. Frye: What the teachers in the university ought to do is to indicate that the process of knowing can be a pretty exciting operation. Many people speak of thinking and of learning as objects of immense difficulty, like trying to march through gumbo. And people like that are telling a great deal about their own mental processes, but not about what is really going on in the mind. I think that most students come to university with a real keenness for some kind of mental awakening, and will respond readily to anything that gives them that. And once you’ve had that, then there’s no good arguing that it’s not a good thing to have. You’ve had it and you know better.

72 Frye at the Forum Conducted 29 September 1983

From the Canadian Forum, 69 (March 1991): 15–17. Frye contributed extensively to the Forum during the 1930s and 1940s, served as managing editor from May 1948 to June 1950, and then joined the editorial board, along with Helen Frye. They remained there until June 1956. Correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 39, file 5 reveals that the following interview was conducted at Victoria College on 29 September 1983 by Hilda Kirkwood (Mrs. J.L. Green), a longtime contributor to the Forum and former member of the editorial board, in connection with a planned article on the history of the Forum. The interview remained unpublished until shortly after Frye’s death in January 1991. The square brackets in this piece are the Forum’s.

Kirkwood: Do you think that writing on a variety of subjects in the Forum when you were a younger man helped you to form your style and your ideas in any way? Frye: Oh yes, very much so. I spoke once of the Forum’s good-natured hospitality that has helped so many Canadians to learn to write,1 and actually that was one of the things I had as a kind of ideal when I was literary editor. I wanted it to be a forum for bringing along younger writers. Kirkwood: In October 1938, some years before you became editor, you wrote an article about an art show at the CNE. At that time big art shows were rare in Toronto, and this was an important one, our first public exposure to surrealist art in this country. In your review of this show you said, “In the coming fight between creators and destroyers, the artists must present a united front on the creative side.”2 It was a prophetic piece dealing with the impact of disintegrating forces on society.

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Frye: The point was that this art show appeared at the CNE [at that time few large shows were accessible to the public here] and the CNE never had anything but the most conservative kind of art shows. A number of people, Fred Haines and so on, had put together this surrealist show purely as a joke—expecting people would laugh.3 So when a perfectly serious article came out in the Forum, Fred Haines muttered to my wife that the trouble with Art was that there were too many damn intellectuals running it! Surrealism was right in the centre of fashion at the time, so their timing was perfect even though their intentions were perverse. What they wanted was hostility. Kirkwood: We always like to think that the Forum is supportive of artists, but at times it seems to have put more emphasis on the analytical and synthesizing sorts of writers than on the creative ones. Do you think it was more daring in this respect when it was younger? Frye: The magazine had more fronts to fight on then. For example, if there was a picture [on display] with a nude in it, the Toronto Star would immediately scurry around to try to get people to express shock and horror and say, “This ought to be banned.” That kind of thing is a dead issue now, but in the 1920s and right into the 1940s the Forum had to fight an extremely narrow bigoted provincialism which is no longer the threat that it was. Kirkwood: How much of your time did you devote to the various editorial and dogsbody duties entailed in getting the Forum out each month around 1950? Frye: I did a lot of proofreading and a lot of editing and writing. One of my friends thought I was wasting my time.4 Kirkwood: You didn’t think so? Frye: Well, a writer doesn’t waste his time by learning altogether. I met people many years later who complained that three or four of their articles had been rewritten as one article. I still think it was an improvement. Kirkwood: Do you have an overall view of how the short story has developed over the years in the Forum, or was your interest more specifically in the poetry? Frye: I had more interest in the poetry because it was a little better written than the prose, and we didn’t have a great deal of room for the kind

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of short story the New Yorker runs, for instance. During the 1930s and 1940s there were a great many didactic stories with a political moral. I found a lot of them very dull so I was more interested in the poetry because on the whole it was a more interesting genre. Kirkwood: The short story has flowered in Canada in the past two decades. Frye: Yes, and the novel made up of short stories such as Lives of Girls and Women [Alice Munro]. This is a very distinctive Canadian feature. Kirkwood: Appearances have changed greatly in magazines, and in the Forum there are more visuals than there used to be during the ’40s and ’50s. Frye: I think it made a difference that during the war and after the Forum got to be more and more a resistance press. We had to concentrate on print. We used visuals as much as we could but economics affected that. Now photography has made its appearance in the Forum. I think it does reflect visual education to a considerable extent. We started in the shadow of the Victorian journal where there was never an illustration. There is a more general assumption [now] that people can’t read! The older type of magazine with a subscription list is a pretty hard thing to keep going. Especially in the shadow of the imported papers, etc. We tried to keep a window open on Canadian visual culture but the Forum was stronger in the abstract field. Kirkwood: When I was talking with Barker Fairley he said that when the Forum began they had thought of it as becoming a weekly. Frye: We kept talking about turning it into a weekly whenever we could finance it. You see, the whole Canadian situation was closer to the British than it is now. George Grube was trained in England and he always thought of the CCF as the Canadian Labour party which would eventually force the Conservatives and Liberals to amalgamate, and similarly they were originally thinking of a model like the New Statesman. Kirkwood: In the New Statesman and the New Republic, then, was not the literary aspect minor? Frye: Well, I don’t know, they had a fairly full literary section, they had the same format as the Forum had in those times [the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.] The first half was political and the second, literary.

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Kirkwood: Over the years one notices that many people who were young and relatively unknown and who are now successful writers and thinkers in Canada contributed some of their first work to the Forum. I think of Frank Underhill, Earle Birney, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Ramsay Cook, Robert Fulford. A very early short story of Alice Munro’s appeared and poetry by Margaret Atwood before she was known. Were there others you feel added vitality to the Forum when you were the editor? Frye: Oh yes, Ivon Owen, Edith Fowke, Al Shea, Milton Wilson. They all did a lot of good work, and there were others. Kirkwood: Was George Grube your immediate predecessor? Frye: Yes, he was, and I was literary editor, and although in many ways I didn’t agree with Grube’s attitude I had great respect for him. He didn’t get along too well with the Morrises, who of course were “the civil service,” and the issue involved was pulling away from the CCF.5 Kirkwood: Would you say the Forum’s politics were left of centre in Grube’s time? Frye: They followed the CCF’s party line pretty closely. Yes, I suppose by the standards of those days they were pretty left of centre. Kirkwood: In looking over the issues of the time when you were editor (1948–50), there seems to be a division in the editorials, very much so. You have said it was in a CCF phase when you began to contribute to it. Would you say it was more radical in its beginnings than later when you were there, or did it change? Frye: Well, I don’t know, the political situation was a lot less polarized in the 1920s. Fascism hadn’t come on the scene for one thing, and the very strong Communist movement, which of course the Forum never supported but nevertheless was very aware of, came along in the 1930s. That changed the whole political orientation very radically. Kirkwood: When I looked over the issues on which you spent a lot of time and effort I wondered if you wrote strictly literary articles or whether some of the anonymous editorials on public affairs were your work? Frye: When I was editor I wrote a fair number of editorials, yes.

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Kirkwood: You wrote on public affairs?6 Frye: Well, yes—I always established a distinction between politics and public affairs. That was a distinction which Grube never accepted. He just didn’t believe that there was such a thing as a discussion of public affairs aside from a political approach. But I think the distinction is there, and I felt that the Forum ought to be what it was called on its masthead after I came in, that is, an independent journal of public opinion, and it should be as free to criticize the CCF as any other group of writers. Kirkwood: Every now and then someone says in print what a great contribution the Forum has made to the cultural life of this country, but it still has to struggle along day to day, hand to mouth. Frye: The amazing thing is that it has struggled for so long! Kirkwood: Literacy has increased, readership has not increased in proportion. I wonder why? Frye: The whole relationship of people to magazines has changed so much. You get magazines thrown in your door; there is a flurry of little magazines being started for which you can hear the funeral march playing in the background. There are a lot of publishers of what I call the resistance press, and a lot of poetry books you can get out by mechanical printing methods. It is extraordinary that the Canadian Forum has kept going in the face of all this, and I say it is unique.

73 The Scholar in Society Filmed 18–21 October 1983

From WGS, 259–68. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. This is the soundtrack of the film The Scholar in Society: Northrop Frye in Conversation (Montreal: National Film Board, 1984), transcribed by Robert D. Denham. The film was directed by interviewer Donald Winkler, director and writer of documentaries at the NFB from 1967 to 1995. It is available on videocassette in NFF, 1988, box 33.

Winkler: Could we begin with your understanding of the role which the university plays in society? Frye: I think that the university stands for a certain attitude to society, which is an attitude of detachment without withdrawal. That sense of detachment from partisanship, at the same time being fully aware of everything that’s going on in society and concerned about it, is really the model for the citizen of a democracy. The university, I think, does provide the nearest thing to a model community for the student that human nature permits. Once he has graduated, then he is the university wherever he is. I’ve always been impressed by the loyalty and affection of so large a proportion of the alumni to the place where they took their first degree. It’s as though they realized that something very crucial happened to them at that point. Winkler: You have said that “of all the superstitions that have bedevilled the human mind, one of the most dismal and fatuous is the notion that education is a preparation for life.”1 Frye: Education is not a preparation for life because life won’t stay

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around to get prepared for. If the student is not alive when he’s getting an education, I don’t know when he’s going to be. What the student is doing when he’s getting educated is living—very intensely—in society. To the extent that it’s a preparation for anything, it’s a preparation for an anticlimax, for how to live with a lower rate of intellectual intensity. Winkler: On the other hand, there seems to be a consensus nowadays among those concerned for the quality of education that this generation of students cannot expect to be as well educated as previous generations have been. Frye: The word “education,” of course, is such a versatile word and applies to a great many things. I’ve always told the students who are about to teach that what a teacher of, say, English is concerned with is the entire verbal experience of his students and not simply with that one per cent of it which we call literature. That verbal experience comes to you through gossip with your classmates, through the films and television you see, from remarks picked up off the street, and so on. I think that students may get a variety of impressions in that way without quite realizing what has happened to them; so that while a student may know less about the things that I would expect him to know about by the time he got to college, I’m not too concerned about that. What I’m concerned with is a certain amount of good will and the willingness to acquire the habit of reading. If you teach the habit of reading, that’s all you need to do. What he doesn’t know you can fill in. Winkler: Do you feel quite simply that education in language skills has deteriorated over the past decade? Frye: It’s awfully hard to say whether or not there has been a general deterioration in the use of language. It depends so much on what kinds of standards one applies. There are, for example, forms of colloquial speech which are formally ungrammatical and yet convey meaning much more intensely than other forms do. A small child usually speaks in a kind of uninhibited burble, and the right way to teach a student like that is just to listen to the burble and try to clarify it at certain points. So many schools tend to teach formal grammatical English as though it were a dead language. We grow up with the superstition like that of Molière’s Jourdain, who says he’s been speaking prose all his life.2 Well, prose is actually very difficult to speak. Yet students come to university convinced that prose is the language of ordinary speech, when they can’t

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speak it and they certainly can’t write it. I think that kind of discrimination is very important and that, again, a young student should not be taught to write as though he were deciphering a dead language, because a language that has no connection with his ordinary speaking habits is a dead language. Winkler: Yet there seems to be a feeling that students are less and less able to use their own language, and the instinct seems to be to “return to basics.” Frye: I distrust all slogans of the “back to basics” type because I distrust anything that starts with “back to.” That is, I know that what is called a pastoral myth is operating—that at one time people were much better taught than they are now. I simply don’t believe that. Winkler: You don’t believe that? Frye: No. I think that people have always had difficulty expressing themselves, that people were just as illiterate at the age of ten in 1883 as they are in 1983. The student today faces a much more complicated world than he did a hundred years ago, when he could get by with certain conventional formulas. In a world where he can no longer do that, his failures of expression become much more noticeable. I think the development of writing workshops indicates a greater concern about this. It’s a matter of ordinary survival to learn to read and write. All the government of a country is interested in is to produce docile citizens. That is, you read and write passively. You read things like traffic signs and you cipher well enough to make out your income tax, and that’s as much as society is interested in. What goes on in the university is using reading and writing as instruments of freedom, and that means a great advance in articulateness. Winkler: You’ve said there is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.3 Frye: The remark was inspired primarily by George Orwell’s 1984, where he puts his finger on Newspeak as the essential instrument of a tyranny which would turn human life into an indefinite hell. The reason is that jargon—Newspeak—is a pseudological simplifying of language, which actually turns language into something automatic, like a squirrel’s chatter. You could use it without being a conscious being. Nothing a politician says is to be taken as a statement of fact. We assume that if ques-

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tions are asked in the Houses of Parliament, they are not to get information but to embarrass the government, and we assume that the government’s replies are not to give information back again but to defend themselves. As long as we allow for that element of irony in all the language that we use, we can still function as a free society. Winkler: What do you mean by irony in that context? Frye: Irony is something that arises wherever you say what everybody knows you don’t mean, but also understands why you’re saying it. One of the essential roles of any form of education, whatever it’s concerned with, is to make the student more and more aware of these different levels of meaning in what is said. All advertising, for example, is ironic. Nobody believes literally what advertising says. If you did, you’d be so gullible you could hardly look after your own affairs. Winkler: What are the differences between active and passive attitudes to culture? Frye: A passive attitude is one that tends to repeat clichés or habitual prefabricated statements. The kind of remarks that you can overhear on the street or the subway are very frequently not the product of the speaker’s mind at all; they’re simply echoes of whatever he has picked up. It’s the attempt to become aware of the degree to which you’re being conditioned in your speech by forces external to yourself that seems to me to be at the centre of the educational process wherever it’s carried on. Winkler: How do you teach someone to recognize that in himself and to take a critical attitude towards the ideas around him? Frye: I think it’s possible in dealing with students to say, “Look, is this what you say or think, or is it merely what you think ought to be said at this point?” If you read an undergraduate essay you find it frequently written in the kind of jargon that represents the student’s notion of the way professors write—and the way some of them do write. You have to say, “Look, you’re not supposed to be an echo; you’re supposed to find out your own phrases for these things and say what is in your mind.” Winkler: One gets the feeling that this sort of education is important to an individual’s proper functioning in a democracy. Frye: I think that a democracy simply cannot function without articulate citizens. There is a very strong anti-intellectual current in society always

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trying to pull the level down as far as it will go, and that anti-intellectual current is, of course, found among professional educators just as it’s found among everybody else. The whole educational operation, for that reason, is a militant one. It’s a continual fight, it’s a continual crusade to develop in people the kind of informed and articulate speech that you need to participate in a society with any freedom in it. Winkler: How is the battle going? Frye: The battle is always just on the point of being lost. The point is that it never stops. Winkler: How was your discovery of Blake a turning point in your intellectual development? Does it cast any light on your own cultural inheritance? Frye: I belong to a middle-class, English-speaking, white, Protestant, Canadian society. My grandfather was a Methodist circuit rider, and he was still very much in evidence when I was a child. You don’t have to be Freud to see that you keep revolving around your childhood all your life. There’s always the tendency, if you’re brought up in an evangelical background, to think very largely in terms of inhibitions, distrusting your own impulses because they might carry you too far—without being very clear about what “too far” is. Because you’re a human being, subject to original sin, everything you do is probably all wrong anyway, so you embark on a progressive spiritual impoverishment. The sudden realization that one didn’t have to do that, and could still keep a wide-open perspective on whatever words like “infinite” and “eternal” mean, was the revelation that Blake was to me. He had had the same kind of middleclass, Anglophone Biblical training that I had had. He saw structures in it that made human sense and didn’t discourage the full use of the human faculties. He was such a civilized person as a poet and as a painter. Winkler: I know that there’s a close relationship between your teaching and your writing. Frye: I’ve always thought that my teaching and my writing fed into each other. My writing tends to get pretty obscure unless it has been preceded by an interval in which I’ve tried out the ideas on some kind of audience and got some kind of reaction from them. I find that trying to explain what I think to people of the usual sort of undergraduate age and level of experience is extraordinarily important for me in getting those ideas to

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the point at which I can actually believe them myself. All the great teachers, including Jesus, have known that you really only teach by parable: that’s the only way that a free man can understand anything. The great writers, like Shakespeare, are writers who are extremely moral—morally coherent—but they never moralize. It’s the obliqueness of teaching by example, I think, which reflects to some extent on the teacher as well. Certainly the influence of my teachers on me was not directly through anything they taught me, but the impression they gave that the life of a scholar was worth living. Winkler: To what degree can art and culture have a beneficent influence on human society? Frye: Training in literature won’t make you a better person unless you are already determined to be a better person. I think that the confusion about value judgments is very much bound up in this. People are always horrified when they find that the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp can have a cultivated taste in literature and music. But if he had a cultivated taste in organic chemistry, there wouldn’t be any shock. I don’t think that the arts work by magic, and I don’t think they can make anyone a better person. If the person wants to be a better person, the arts can certainly help. When I see people on the subway coping with books by Margaret Atwood and Joy Kogawa and Thomas Pynchon, I know that the human instinct for self-preservation is still there in spite of all the work of television and film and so on. Winkler: There are those who are concerned with the fate of the book in our day. Frye: Well, there are people who used to be concerned with the fate of the book. I think that’s rather waned of late years. The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It’s the world’s most patient medium, for one thing. It doesn’t go away. It comes back with exactly the same message no matter how often you consult it. Winkler: Could you talk a bit more about the book as technology? Frye: There are two elements to the book. One is reading it. The other is using it afterwards. While you’re reading it, you’re following out a linear line of narrative from page one to page “the end.” That was the aspect of it that interested Marshall McLuhan. He spoke of the book as a linear

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medium in contrast to the simultaneous media which the electronic forms of communication were developing. But there’s another side to the book. It becomes, besides being read, the focus for a community. It can be given to a class and referred to over and over again. You can always go back to a certain point. Consequently, it is not a linear medium primarily. It is the most continuous of all media. Winkler: You’ve claimed that the electronic media are in fact the linear media. Frye: I think they are the linear media because you have to follow them as they go along. Then they disappear, and you can’t refer to them afterwards except by very special efforts, so that the experience of them is discontinuous, as McLuhan said. But it’s also linear. It’s television that makes you live in a clock. Winkler: You’ve talked of the dilemma of our age being in part the loss of a sense of continuity in time [CP, 153–5, 163]. Frye: I think that the continuity of institutions was, if you look at the nineteenth century, a very major source of support—in the church, the state, the legal traditions, and so on. But the twentieth century has seen so many revolutionary changes that it’s becoming more and more clear that institutions are not really continuous but are part of a dissolving pageant. I pointed to the university as about the only thing that was left that seemed to preserve some semblance of continuity. The churches are putting up a gallant fight, but I think it’s obvious that religion is a very poor basis for a state anywhere. If you look at some of the Moslem states now and Christian ones before them, it’s always been the wrong choice. The university is perhaps the most coherent institution that I can think of in society, partly because it, in a sense, pretends to less than either religion or law. Winkler: What sort of authority can it wield, then? Frye: The authority it wields is a kind of spiritual authority, as Milton defined it. That is, it hasn’t any police force or powers of prosecuting or jailing. It hasn’t the temporal power. It does have the authority that comes from the appeal to observation and repeated experiment in science and the appeal to imaginative experience in literature—the only kind of authority, in short, that one really respects, the only kind of authority that increases your freedom by a day.

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Winkler: You talk about the mythological conditioning to which one is subject in society. Frye: In every society—like that of, say, America today—you have a certain mythology about democracy and about equal rights for all citizens and the right to privacy and so on, which, although I call it mythology, is as genuine a thing as we have. One only wants to strengthen it. But there is also the parody of this. Every mythology gets kidnapped by an ascendant class and turned into the opposite of itself. The conception of freedom, for example, as something which only the individual can experience but which society has to have up to a certain approximate point before the individual can be free, is a very genuine social ideal. But when laissez-faire and what is called private enterprise are identified with freedom, that is a very different matter. There’s a democratic tendency in American life, for example, and there’s also an oligarchic tendency to build up huge fortunes at the expense of the rest of the population. One is the parody of the other. The process of verbal education has to do with bringing out the genuine mythology and exposing the fraudulent one. Winkler: You contrast what you call an open mythology with a closed mythology [CP, 106–7]. Frye: A closed mythology is when an existing ascendant class or political power says that this is our ideology and you’ve got to say you believe it or else. That can be a very powerful instrument of social coherence, given the right circumstances, but it’s entirely the wrong one for us. An open mythology is a mythology where the fundamental principles are agreed upon but not imposed. In the United States, for example, there is a very deep respect for the democratic process and for rights of the individual, and nobody can fail to respect those feelings precisely because they are not imposed. Nobody is told he must agree with these things or else. Winkler: So you feel that it is possible for an open mythology of this sort to hold a society together effectively? Frye: I think that it is possible. That is really what the democracies are all about. Winkler: Why does it seem so hard to create and maintain an open mythology? Why do people seem to crave an imposed, rigorous ideology?

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Frye: Well, because the rigorous, imposed ideology does away with, or at least gives the illusion of doing away with, the sense of self-conflict. The more free you are, the more responsibility you have to take on. Of course, people dread responsibility and the kind of maturity that goes with that. It’s much simpler to have a charismatic leader who gives you all the answers so that you can pretend to be a machine. The machine fascinates us because it does work without self-conflict, or so they tell me. Winkler: Finally, why is cultural tradition so important? Frye: I feel that senility is exactly the same in society as it is in individuals: you lose your memory and you’ve had it. If you lose your sense of tradition and the sense of what is behind you as a dimension of your own life, then you are simply floating in some kind of ether. There is a continuity of cultural rhythm. One of the things that most interests me about literature is the way in which, for example, characters in the comedy of Aristophanes in the fifth century b.c. turn up as the same types without change in twentieth-century drama. Winkler: I’ve sometimes wondered if your work could be regarded in part as an attempt to encapsulate the cultural tradition that we have? Frye: I would like to feel that I was contributing to that. When the world moved from the fall of the Roman Empire into a new civilization, there were a number of people, like Boethius, who did more or less hold traditional culture together in that way and passed it on to the next age. Boethius got his head cut off by a stupid king. I trust I’ll have a better end than that, but I wouldn’t mind having somewhat the same historical role.

74 Inventing a Music: MacMillan and Walter in the Past and Present Broadcast 25–6 October 1983

From the CBC tape, transcribed by Monika Lee. In this two-part program, heard on the Ideas series on 25 and 26 October, writer and musician Whitney Smith traces the careers of Sir Ernest MacMillan and Dr. Arnold Walter, leaders of Canadian music for a period spanning fifty years. In the course of the program he visits the sites associated with their life and achievements. The brief segment involving Frye occurs during a car ride between sites with “Sam.” Sam spots Frye at a subway stop and calls to him, and Frye gets into the car.

Frye: Hello, Sam, it’s good to see you. Sam: Northrop Frye, this is Whitney Smith. Smith: Hello, Mr. Frye. Sam: Mr. Smith here is doing a program on Sir Ernest MacMillan and Arnold Walter. I was telling Mr. Smith what you said about music as a social art. Frye: Well, music is an ensemble performance for audiences, and I think that societies that have a strong sense of themselves as societies, like Elizabethan England, are societies where music and drama forged to the front as the main means of expression. When you get a strongly individualized society, like Victorian England, music and drama tend to recede into the background and things like the novel, and the essay, and the easel painting come forward. Sam: That was it. Ah, this is your stop, Northrop. Good to see you. Frye: Bye, Sam.

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Smith: Goodbye, Mr. Frye. [car door closes] Sam: Northrop is such a brain, a very kind person also. Anyway, where were we? . . . End of segment.

75 Criticism after Anatomy Recorded 24 April 1984

From the untitled National Public Radio tape no. 840424, transcribed by Robert D. Denham. This interview with NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg was conducted on 24 April 1984, when Frye was in Washington, D.C. to give a paper at the Library of Congress. It was aired on the All Things Considered program, of which Stamberg was the co-host.

Stamberg: Northrop Frye, one of the world’s most distinguished literary critics, is giving a lecture at the Library of Congress this evening. His topic is “The Social Authority of the Writer.” Frye’s authority as a critic was established with his now classic book, Anatomy of Criticism, praised for raising the level of the critic to that of the artist. Frye: The Anatomy of Criticism is now thirty years old,1 and at that time there was still a lot of feeling around that literary criticism was a parasitic subject, that the literary critic was somebody who profited by the poets without contributing anything creative of his own. Stamberg: Well, it’s the same thing they say about drama critics or movie critics: if you know so much how come you’re not in the movies instead of watching the movies? Frye: Yes, that’s what I mean. Since then, I think, there has been an increasing feeling that the critic has his own specific job to do. There are contemporary critics in the Derrida school at Yale and elsewhere who go much further than I do, saying that there is really no gap between creation and criticism at all because every criticism, every reading of a poem, is in fact a recreation of it.2

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Stamberg: By anybody who reads the poem? Frye: Anybody who reads the poem is going to produce his reading and not somebody else’s simply because he isn’t all the other people who’ve read the poem. Consequently, you do to some extent translate it into your own idiom. Stamberg: Does the fact that we can read criticism about a poem ever get in the way of our appreciation of the poem, or can it only enhance it? Frye: Well, that’s a question that a lot of students have asked me, particularly students who wanted to get out of as much reading as they could. I always say that the end of critical reading is to possess the poem, to make it a part of your own life. To possess somebody else’s poem means that a certain death-and-rebirth process has to be gone through. So if they tell me that it kills a poem to analyse it, I can only say that somebody has to kill it if he’s going to bring it back to life again. Stamberg: And you may as well do it in an educated way? Frye: Yes. Stamberg: You were saying that your own Anatomy of Criticism is thirty years old now and that criticism has been taken in different directions today. How? Improved? Better? More complicated? More difficult? Frye: More complicated and difficult certainly, more specialized, and very much closer to linguistics and semiotics. Stamberg: Those are words, especially semiotics, which are so difficult for people to understand. Does that push us further away from the work of art itself, do you think? Frye: I do think that criticism is going through a phase which it will not stay in for very long—a very technical preoccupation with a lot of complex disciplines. After all, if you talk about linguistics or semiotics or phenomenological philosophy to an undergraduate classroom their eyes are going to glaze over pretty fast. The strength of this is, of course, that the criticism of literature is gradually becoming a more systematic affair. The disadvantage is the remoteness of the kind of thing they do from experiencing the literature directly. Stamberg: Your book was called Anatomy of Criticism. They are now through their criticism anatomizing literature to death almost.

722 Frye: Yes, but all criticism has to anatomize to some degree. Stamberg: Otherwise, it wouldn’t exist. Frye: Yes.

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76 Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism Recorded 17 October 1984

From a transcript of the program “Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism” issued by the CBC in 1985, reference no. 4-ID-100. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. This was a three-part series on Upper Canadian Loyalism written and narrated by CBC broadcaster David Cayley and hosted by Lister Sinclair, broadcast on Ideas on 14, 21, and 28 November 1984. Frye’s contribution was aired on 28 November. Richard Cartwright (1759–1815) was an early Loyalist who settled in Upper Canada during the American Revolution. The third segment of the program dealt with Loyalism from the 1840s to the present. Immediately before Frye, English professor Dennis Duffy had spoken on the Loyalists’ attitude to the British Empire.

Cayley: Dennis Duffy indicates here both the strength and the weakness of Loyalism. Through the movement for an imperial federation of British nations, the Loyalists sought a wider, more universal identity for Canada. But at the same time, they were often forced to overlook Britain’s actual indifference to Canada and its concerns, and this inevitably led to a certain sentimentality in Loyalism. Frye: Nobody coming from the planet Mars and studying Canadian history would believe that Canadians retained a loyalty to the British government through a century of total ineptness, where the British had always preferred American interests to Canadian ones and made it clear that they would have more respect for Canada if it were no longer a colony. But the problem from the Canadian point of view is, What else are we going to do? Where else are we going to find our identity except in the continuity of that tradition?

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[The nature of the British tie is discussed. Cayley mentions the belief of commentators such as Donald Creighton and George Grant that in abandoning its real tradition Canada left itself open to American absorption. Syd Wise on the other hand is heard celebrating the new Canadian pluralism.] Cayley: Syd Wise’s sense of the diversity, complexity, and resiliency of local cultures is shared by Northrop Frye. Frye argues that although we may have fallen under the political and economic domination of the United States, yet we have still achieved what he refers to as a cultural identity. Frye: I tend to think more and more as I get older that the only social identity that’s really worth preserving is a cultural identity. And Canada seems to me to have achieved that, so I don’t join with other people in lamenting the loss of a political identity. Cayley: Frye holds that a cultural identity is possible even in the absence of political and economic sovereignty because culture obeys different laws than politics. Frye: I think that culture has a different sort of rhythm from political and economic developments which tend to centralize, and that the centralization process has gone so far in the great world powers that the conception of a nation is really obsolete now. What we have instead among the great powers are enormous consolidations of social units, and cultural tendencies are tendencies in a decentralizing direction. If you talk about American literature, for example, you have to add up Mississippi literature and New England literature, Middle-Western, Californian, and so on. And the theme of a cultural identity immediately transfers you to a postnational setting. Cayley: In such a postnational setting, regions become the operative units, and this, for Frye, accords with the nature of the creative imagination. The imperial tie to Great Britain was undoubtedly necessary for national survival, but it produced a literature that lacked a sense of place. Frye cites as an example the poetry of Charles G.D. Roberts. It is therefore only with the development of regional cultures that we are truly at home in Canada. Frye: Regional culture, as I see it, is a culture in which the writer has struck roots in his immediate environment. There’s always something vegetable about the creative imagination, and you can’t transplant James

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Reaney or Alice Munro to the middle of Brazil and expect them to produce the same kind of work. They’d become different cultural vegetables in that case. With the poets of the Charles G.D. Roberts generation, there was really very little of that sense of region. The Confederation Ode of Roberts is inspired by a map, it’s not inspired by a people. I think we’re in a period of history now where we’re just beginning to realize that, as one book says, “small is beautiful,” that is, that there is a tendency to decentralize and a feeling that the great world powers have grown to the point at which they’re no longer workable any more.1 They’re becoming increasingly dinosauric in their functioning. And with that, the sense of a cultural or regional identity begins to emerge as a genuinely human identity.

77 Les Lecteurs doivent manger le livre Conducted 9 November 1984

From Libération (Paris, France), 21 November 1984, 29. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. The interview was given shortly after the publication of the French translation of GC: Le Grand Code, translated by Catherine Malamoud, introduction by Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984). The interviewer was Mathieu Lindon, novelist, literary critic, and commentator for Libération, a prominent Paris daily newspaper.

Le bureau de Northrop Frye à Victoria College a une grande fenêtre mais le store en semble à jamais baissé. Une petite table supporte la machine à écrire, celle qui, selon la légende d’ici, donne des cauchemars aux occupants des bureaux voisins “parce qu’on l’entend taper un livre pendant qu’on n’a que le temps de taper un article.” Dans la bibliothèque, les oeuvres de Joyce (“Avec Mallarmé, il est le seul à avoir voulu faire une oeuvre totale, comme la Bible: Finnegans Wake”), Ezra Pound, Shaw . . . et Émile Mâle. Quand Frye parle, il tord ses mains avec nervosité, si bien que l’index de sa main gauche est perpétuellement à la droite de son médius, et l’auriculaire à la gauche de l’annulaire. Il évoque, à propos du Grand Code, les rapports entre la Bible, l’histoire, et la littérature dans les sociétés occidentales. Frye: La Bible est un livre original en cela qu’il n’y a pas grand-chose de neuf dedans. L’auteur original est toujours celui qui retourne aux origines de la littérature. Shakespeare n’est pas neuf parce qu’il a inventé de nouvelles histoires, mais parce qu’il a su en raconter d’anciennes. Dans le Nouveau Testament, Jésus n’a rien enseigné qui ne soit déjà dans l’Ancien. La conception de ce que nous appelons la vérité, la croyance, a pas mal changé au cours des vingt derniers siècles. Ce n’est plus

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parce qu’elle contient des faits historiques que nous nous intéressons à la Bible. Elle est un mythe. Et la fonction du mythe est de transporter le passé dans le présent pour y confronter le lecteur. Les contradictions qui apparaissent dans la Bible n’ont donc pas grande importance. On ne les remarque que si on recherche la verité historique. Quand on dit à Walt Whitman qu’il se contradisait dans ses poèmes, il a répondu: “J’ai en moi une multitude d’êtres.”1 De même, si on a quatre Évangiles, il ne faut pas essayer de créer une harmonie entre eux ni de prétendre que l’un est le plus vrai. Un message qui ne supporterait pas quatre versions differentes serait un message bien faible. Lindon: Ces contradictions ont-elles un rapport avec la parodie? Et les prophéties relèvent-elles du même système? Frye: Non. Le rôle de la parodie est d’éclairer les côtés humoristiques et satiriques de la personnalité. Celle utilisée dans la Bible en revient à rendre la race humaine le sujet de la parodie. Par exemple, quand la crucifixion du Christ est décrétée, il est visible qu’on s’est moqué de lui: on l’appelle le roi des Juifs, on lui met une couronne d’épines . . . Mais cette parodie s’est retournée contre ceux qui l’avaient faite, contre elle-même. Le message qu’elle mettait en scène s’est réalisé, de sorte que le sujet de la parodie n’est plus le Christ, mais la race humaine qui l’a rejeté. Quant aux déclarations des prophètes, dans la Bible, elles sont en général une source de persécution et de martyre pour eux. En effet, en révélant ce qui leur apparaît, ils remettent en question les valeurs de la société dans laquelle ils vivent. Pour en revenir encore à Jésus, son martyre n’est nullement un accident historique: il est appelé a se réproduire chaque fois qu’il [Jésus] réapparaîtra dans l’histoire. De la même façon, Jeanne d’Arc a été brûlée en tant que sorcière, et elle est maintenant considerée comme une sainte. Mais si on ne l’avait pas brûlée auparavant, on s’en débarrasserait aujourd’hui. Lindon: Pourquoi considérez-vous le marxisme comme une religion? Frye: Une de mes idées à propos de la Bible est qu’elle comporte une philosophie révolutionnaire. Dans l’Ancien Testament, l’événement majeur est la rébellion d’Israël contre l’Égypte. Et, dans le Nouveau Testament, les chrétiens ne se voulaient pas révolutionnaires, mais, de fait, ils ont été forcés de le devenir à cause du culte de César: les Romains les contraignaient à adorer un faux dieu. L’esprit révolutionnaire a certaines caractéristiques qui sont dans la Bible et qui sont réapparues dans le marx-

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isme: d’une part, la croyance en un point de départ historique, et, d’autre part, un état d’esprit dialectique qui divise les gens en deux camps: pour ou contre. Mais l’important pour moi n’est pas tant de dire que le marxisme est religieux, que de montrer que l’antithèse entre le sacré et le profane n’est plus valable.2 C’est pourquoi j’ai de la sympathie pour quelqu’un comme Garaudy qui essaie de faire dialoguer le marxisme et la religion.3 On pourrait d’ailleurs prétendre aussi que la psychanalyse est une religion. Les freudiens ont leur hérétiques et leurs problèmes dialectiques. Toutefois, ils me semblent moins avoir la volonté de changer le monde. Lindon: Vous retrouvez dans la littérature bien des histoires bibliques: Saül et Macbeth, Job et Joseph K. Frye: Au départ, le Macbeth de Shakespeare est un chef bon et loyal. Sa femme le persuade de s’emparer du trône en assassinant le roi. Mais, comme c’était un homme fondamentalement bon, une fois cet acte accompli, il devient fou. Il perd son âme. Il est rejeté de Dieu, et le symbole de ce rejet est qu’il fait confiance aux sorcières, qu’il les croit, quand elles lui jettent un sort. Saül a le même lien avec une sorcière, et s’il n’a pas commis le même crime auparavant, il se sentira tout autant rejeté de Dieu que Macbeth. Le rapport est encore plus net entre l’histoire de Job et Le Procès de Kafka. Joseph K. ne connaît pas les charges retenues contre lui, et Job dit aussi qu’il espère que son ennemi écrira un livre pour qu’il puisse apprendre ce dont on l’accuse. Joseph K. se lance dans un grand discours de justification dont le moins qu’on puisse dire est qu’il n’arrange pas les choses. Cela se passe également avec Job. La différence entre les deux est qu’à la fin du livre de Kafka on retrouve une certaine ironie, ce qu’on pourrait appeler de la parodie. Tandis que pour Job, à la fin, il y a quand même une réponse. Lindon: Vous dîtes que la Bible est “plus” qu’une oeuvre littéraire. Comment cela ce manifeste-t-il à la lecture? Frye: Il se passe avec la Bible quelque chose d’extrêmement rare: le lecteur ne s’identifie pas à ses personnages, mais au livre lui-même. Dans le texte, Dieu donne un manuscrit à Ezechiel et lui dit qu’il devrait le manger [2:8–3:3]. On demande un peu la même chose au lecteur de la Bible, d’avaler le livre.

78 The Darkening Mirror: Reflections on the Bomb and Language Recorded 7 January 1985

From the CBC transcript, reference no. 850214. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. Frye’s remarks occurred during a program in CBC Radio’s Ideas series with the above title, broadcast 14 February 1985. The purpose of the program, according to host Lister Sinclair, was to explore “words and mirrors, words as mirrors, and the way they are distorted in the looking-glass world of nuclear discourse.” Interviewer Tim Wilson spoke with, among others, philosopher Jacques Derrida, author Jonathan Schell, graduate student Shelly Youngblut, professor Derrick de Kerckhove, and Frye.

[Wilson refers to a speech Derrida gave at a colloquium on nuclear language at Cornell University. Before Frye’s comments, a segment of this speech is heard in which Derrida remarks on the fact that nuclear war is a “fabulously textual” phenomenon to the extent that it has not yet taken place, but is talked and written about; “some might call it a fable, then a pure invention.” Then there is a reading of the passage in Alice in Wonderland in which Humpty Dumpty asserts that a word means whatever he chooses it to mean; and Youngblut maintains that the loss of clear, unambiguous meaning associated with postructuralism is profoundly influenced by the bomb.] Frye: People have been drunk with words ever since they began to use them. Wilson: This is Dr. Northrop Frye, the eminent literary critic. He’s written voluminously on language, most recently in his book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Frye: And I suppose that the model for what Derrida is talking about is

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Finnegans Wake, where every word has a number of supplements in addition to its surface meaning, whatever it is, and where you don’t follow a plot, but you simply follow a number of allusions into a verbal world. Well, I think this conception of a verbal world is a very useful one. In fact that was one of the first things I began talking about myself as a critic. But once the verbal world becomes a containing thing, then of course it’s dangerous, because there is a point at which words become mere words. And the thing is that you can’t go back to the old referentiality theory; that is, it isn’t good enough to say that words, after all, relate to external things. One has to think in terms of a possession of language, which is still not being imprisoned within it. Our conventional notion of language has always been Cartesian—the ego confronts the object and the word means the thing. With the Derridian universe of words, now, and with the conception of the linguistic model that preceded that, we’ve more or less realized the possibility of getting past what Blake calls the cloven fiction [E268], the subject–object split. That means, I think, getting into a phase of experience where you are—well, the theological way of putting it would be identification with the Word, with a capital “W,” and the realization that man doesn’t wholly use the Word, the Word uses man if man lets it do so. Wilson: The Word here being what? Frye: Something on the other side of the mere word. The word is the product of human consciousness, and consequently it’s not a dead thing, it’s something with a life of its own. And the poet who finds that his poem has suddenly taken shape in his mind is dealing with the fact that words have a life and a power of their own. In The Great Code [18/36] I mention Goethe’s Faust, who looked at the phrase “In the beginning was the Word,” and just couldn’t stand it. And so eventually he said the true translation is, “In the beginning was the deed or the act,” of which the word is the servomechanism. Well, that actually is the translation that the whole Christian church has given to the opening of John. In the beginning, God did something, He created the world, and the word comes along as the servomechanism that interprets that to us. I think it’s really time the human race got into a different frame of mind. “In the beginning was the Word,” and the beginning is consciousness. Not necessarily a chronological beginning, but every beginning that matters is verbal and conscious.

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[Sinclair reads the verses from Genesis 11:1–9, which describe the building and destruction of the tower of Babel.] Derrida: Seventh missile, seventh missive, the end. The name of nuclear war is the name of the first war which can be fought in the name of the name alone, that is, of everything and of nothing. Today, in the perspective of a remainderless destruction, without meaning and without symbolicity, those who contemplate launching such a catastrophe do so no doubt in the name of what is worth more in their eyes than life. “Better dead than Red,” for instance. On the other hand, those who want nothing to do with that catastrophe are ready to prefer any sort of life at all. Life above all, life as the only value worthy to be affirmed. But nuclear war as a hypothesis, a phantasm of total self-destruction, nuclear war can only come about in the name of what is worth more than life, of that which, giving its value to life, has greater value than life. Thus, it is indeed waged in the name of. That, in any case, is the story that the war-makers always tell. Wilson: Again, this is Derrida at the end of his lecture. He talks about going to war in the “name” of something, or making these threats in the name of—in the name of what? What can there be a possible name of that is greater than life? Frye: It doesn’t matter what it’s called, as long as there’s a formula there. “Our interests demand that”—that sort of formula. And as I say, the human mind confronted with the actual threat of extinction may follow the formula of the Book of Deuteronomy: “I have set before you life and death . . . therefore choose life” [30:19]. “Therefore” is not a logical “therefore” but it’s— Wilson: A command. Frye: Yes. [Youngblut laments the all-encompassing nature of death by nuclear destruction, in which there is not even the consolation found in the death of individuals in the thought of the creative works they had left behind them. She comments on the possibility of becoming whole again under the shadow of the bomb, alluding to Beckett’s Endgame and its sense of illogically going on.] Frye: It’s just the way the human mind is built. I think the contemplation of nothing is really impossible. “Nothing” means “not anything,” but

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whenever anybody talks about “nothing,” it’s always about something which I am calling “nothing.” And you can’t really look into the face of nothingness. It’s a contradiction of existence. Wilson: And yet we’re being almost taken by the scruff of the neck and forced to look into nothingness, to look at the brink, every day now, if we choose to consider . . . the present situation. Frye: Yes, but we would never do this voluntarily. We certainly wouldn’t do it for pleasure. And so I think that’s what I meant when I said a while ago that the confrontation with nothingness, with obliteration, which was forced on us is perhaps the only way that will shock and startle us into, well, into breaking with our present diplomatic routines.

79 Music in My Life Recorded 25 January 1985

From WGS, 269–79. Transcribed by Robert D. Denham from the Arts National audiotapes in the CBC Archives. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. First published in the Northrop Frye Newsletter, 1 (Spring 1989): 10–16. The interview with Ian Alexander, the host of the CBC’s Arts National and a former student of Frye’s, was broadcast on the CBC’s Music in My Life series on 1 February 1985.

Alexander: Northrop Frye, you’ve said, “I’m really building everything around a highly personal vision I think I’ve had since I was a child.”1 Can you talk about your childhood and what that vision might have been? Frye: I suppose I’m really saying what is true of almost all members of the human race, that they get what I call their archetypes in their childhood and then spend the rest of their lives elaborating them in various ways. I was brought up in a middle-class, nonconformist environment. I have been more or less writing footnotes to the assumptions I acquired at the age of three or so ever since. Alexander: Do most of those assumptions and archetypes tend to come from your mother? Frye: I suppose they came through my mother, yes. The kind of teaching one gets in very early childhood, I suppose, comes to one at any rate in the form of pictures and images. I used to say I always knew where heaven was because it was the other side of the St. Francis River in Sherbrooke that first dawned on my vision.

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Alexander: You moved when you were relatively young from Sherbrooke to the Maritimes, I believe. Frye: Yes. Alexander: Was there a sense of being, at that time, relatively isolated? Was there a sense that you were not near a major metropolitan centre? Frye: That was very strong as I grew older—into my adolescence. In the Maritimes in the 1920s we were rather culturally isolated. There was no radio—or it was just beginning to come in. It was mostly scratching and screaming for a very long time. There was no bookstore that I remember in Moncton. Everybody in Moncton who was adult simply regarded Moncton as a kind of remote suburb of Boston. Alexander: It’s interesting that you say Boston rather than a Canadian city. The Maritime ties are to the south rather than to the west? Frye: The Maritimers tend to refer to New England as the Boston states. When I graduated from high school, practically all my female classmates went off nursing in either Boston or Providence. A lot of them returned, but that certainly was their headquarters. Alexander: By this point, I gather, you had become deeply involved with music through the influence of a very important teacher. Can you tell me a bit about George Ross and your first encounter with him? Frye: George Ross was the organist at the Saint John’s Presbyterian, later United, Church in Moncton. He had been a student of Sir Hubert Parry, and he was a properly trained musician. He was a music teacher who had a tremendous influence on me, not so much from what he said or did but simply from the authority which he carried from knowing his subject. Alexander: I want to speak more about George Ross and Northrop Frye as teachers. But first, some music. Was it about 1928 that you were working on the Schubert Impromptus? Frye: Nineteen twenty-eight was the centenary of the death of Schubert, and I played a couple of movements from Schubert’s sonatas over the Moncton radio, which was called CNRA in those days.2 Fortunately, that was long before the age of tapes. Alexander: So we haven’t preserved it. But we do have a Schubert

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recording here—Murray Perahia playing the Opus 90 Impromptu. Was that a work you studied? Frye: Oh, yes, I worked on the first Impromptu. It was one of the things I came across. Alexander: Let’s listen to it now. [Murray Perahia plays Schubert’s Impromptu, Opus 90, No. 1 in C Minor. Columbia Masterworks IM 37291.] Professor Frye, I know that the piano music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a special interest of yours. What does that particular Schubert Impromptu say to you? Why is it the sort of music that grabs hold of you? Frye: I suppose because of the rather simplified, rather square-cut tunes. The music expresses to me the kind of sanity which is the front entrance, so to speak, of a very profound serenity. I have cultivated composers who are not as well known or famous as Schubert, like Clementi and Hummel and Dussek, because they seem to me to be eminently composers of sanity, which I find is very important in my general emotional stability. Alexander: When you became deeply interested in music as a young man, it was in large part because of your teacher George Ross. I think of you as a teacher above all else—above being a writer or a critic. Do you think of yourself as a teacher? Frye: Oh, yes. Alexander: You’ve spoken of the impersonality of the teacher and connected this with what you saw of how George Ross taught. Can you explain that a bit? Frye: Well, I suppose what impressed me about him, or at least gave me complete confidence in him, was that he was never pushing his students to do dramatic things which would redound to his credit. All that he cared about was the music and transmitting that to people. Alexander: Can you carry that over to your own approach to teaching English literature? Frye: I’ve always said that the teacher is subject to the temptation to make himself a substitute for what he’s teaching, whereas his real efforts have to be directed toward making himself a totally transparent

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medium. If he disappears in the student’s mind as a medium between what he’s teaching and what the student learns, then he’s accomplished what ought to be his ambition. Alexander: In Moncton in the late 1920s there were, in fact, two keyboards that figured prominently in your life. We’ve talked about the piano, but some people may not know that you were a champion typist at that time. Frye: Well, yes. I came up to Toronto to operate an Underwood typewriter for a contest that the company was running. I got my way paid to Toronto, and that was how I managed to get to the University of Toronto. The two forms of touch don’t seem to have clashed a great deal, although many people have said that I played the piano as though it were a typewriter. Alexander: I understand—and this surprises me a bit in terms of what I know of your personality—that when you came to Victoria College at the University of Toronto, you threw yourself into all kinds of extracurricular activities. Frye: I was rather apart. I suppose a teenager, an adolescent, is a rather ingrown person anyway, and I was unusually so because I was not athletic and not well coordinated. So I lived my own life at high school. Then when I came to university, I suddenly found myself in a community where I felt I had a function. And, of course, I just swung over to the opposite extreme and threw myself into everything going. Alexander: Tell me about the Gilbert and Sullivan musical and its role in the future Frye marriage—your meeting your wife. Frye: The Music Club at that time was organized largely around a Gilbert and Sullivan performance, and I got in on that. I didn’t actually take a part in the performance. I never did. I was running the arc light, or helping to do so, in The Pirates of Penzance, which was put on in my first year. The second year was The Gondoliers, and I remember operating the arc light on the left side, while keeping an eye out on the rather cute girl on the right side, who was the prompter and who had previously played the piano for the rehearsals. And she is the present Mrs. Frye. Alexander: You asked that we play a particular excerpt from The Gondoliers. Could you set the excerpt up for us here?

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Frye: I was very impressed by Brian MacDonald’s commedia dell’arte show of The Gondoliers.3 I thought it was amazing. But being the kind of show it was, he was compelled to cut out some of the numbers. My impression of The Gondoliers was so intense that anything left out was like a missing tooth. I noticed particularly that the rather delightful gavotte late in the second act had been cut. Alexander: I think we can reinsert it for you right now. [Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts the Pro Arte Orchestra in Sullivan’s “I am a courtier grave and serious” from The Gondoliers. Angel 3570 B/L.] Does that fill in the gap from the Stratford production? Frye: Yes, indeed. Alexander: You spoke of your coming to the University of Toronto and realizing, in a sense, that you were coming home—coming to your natural environment. Was that the feeling? Frye: I suppose I’m an urban type and with my tastes I can live only in a city. Alexander: What about the fact that you have spent such a long time in one place, professionally as well as geographically? Victoria College has been home to you since you went there as an undergraduate. You have taught there for many years and are now chancellor. Has it been a good and important thing for you to be rooted there? Frye: I suppose that it has. I’ve never seen any occasion to move. That is, I’ve had suggestions that I should move, which I have had to consider very carefully, and sometimes it’s been quite an agonizing decision. Toronto and Victoria have always been very good to me, and I’ve never regretted having stayed here. I found, as I grew older, that my roots were going deeper and deeper into the Canadian society and that I couldn’t really pull out of that. Alexander: Is it possible to generalize about how university life, life at the University of Toronto at least, was different, say, about fifty years ago? You got your B.A. in 1933. What was different in the university environment then? Frye: There was surprisingly little, really. The university is an enormously continuous institution. While Victoria fifty years ago was, I suppose, a small Methodist college and now it’s a big cosmopolitan uni-

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versity, nevertheless people who have been around it for half a century, like myself, don’t feel any violent discontinuity in what has taken place in that time. Alexander: Your sense of the university then and now might lead some people listening to think of it as closed or cloistered, or, to use a word of yours, in garrison terms. But your own scholarly activities, it seems to me, have always tended to modulate out into social commentary and to speak of things beyond what we consider traditionally to be the realm of academic study. Frye: Oh, yes. I think that that stupid phrase “ivory tower,” which has all the wrong contexts and echoes, is particularly misleading when applied to the university. The university is the engine-room of society. That’s where the source of society’s energy is. Alexander: After you got your B.A. you spent some time at Oxford and took a degree there. Was it not at Oxford that you got deeply involved with The Magic Flute? Frye: When I was at Oxford a classmate of mine there had bought a recording of The Magic Flute—a 78 recording. While I had known about The Magic Flute, this was the first opportunity I’d had to study it in detail. It’s my favourite opera, not because the libretto by itself is anything wonderful, but because when it’s presented through Mozart’s music it gives the impression of revealing all the mysteries that ever were. [James Levine conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera Chorus in “O Isis and Osiris, grant the spirit of wisdom to the new pair!” from act 2 of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. RCA CTCA-4124.] Alexander: You’ve been interested in romance—I use the term in its cultural sense—for a very long time. Why would a critic be drawn to what is in some sense a kind of trashy, popular literature? It’s not necessarily high art. Frye: I’ve never felt that starting civil wars between highbrow and lowbrow literature was very helpful. I notice that popular literature in the first place is often better than it’s said to be, and in the second place it contains the formulas that the greatest literature does and sometimes in a form that’s a little easier to explain if you’re a critic. So I’ve often found myself using popular literature as a guide to what literature as a whole is all about.

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Alexander: Would it be fair to say, then, that your academic preoccupations over a very long time have been variations on a theme, or as a recent title of a book of your essays puts it, divisions on a ground? Frye: I think so. My life has been a kind of spiral, expanding from and always revolving around the same issues. I picked up a remark in a review of a book of mine which said that I was always rewriting my central myth in every book I wrote, and it occurred to me that every writer I would ever read or trust has done the same thing. Alexander: Certainly, as a lot of people know, books of yours like Anatomy of Criticism, and the more recent Great Code, are rooted in your early interest in the poetry of William Blake. Frye: Yes, I suppose I learned everything I know from Blake in one way or another. Alexander: You’ve spoken of your coming to an awareness of Blake as a kind of epiphany. Can you describe that experience? Frye: Perhaps you mean the time when I was taking a graduate course in Blake with Herbert Davis, who later went to Oxford. I was assigned a paper to write on Blake’s Milton for which there was, of course, no secondary material whatever. My very bad habit in those days was to start a paper the night before I was to read it. About half-past three in the morning some very funny things started happening in my mind, and I began to see dimensions of critical experience that I’d never dreamed existed before—a sudden expansion of the horizon. When I went out for breakfast—I remember it was a bitterly cold morning—I knew that I was to write a book on Blake. And fifteen years later I did. Alexander: That was Fearful Symmetry in 1947. Frye: Yes. Alexander: Probably the piece of William Blake’s poetry that most people know best is the piece from Milton [the hymn Jerusalem] that Hubert Parry set. There is a connection between yourself and Parry, I think. Frye: He was my musical grandfather—the teacher of my teacher. George Ross always had a great respect for Parry and spoke of the intelligence of the exercises that he set his students to do. As for the Blake,

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Jerusalem is the greatest hymn in the English language. While I’m not sure that any musical setting of it is definitive, that’s as good a one as I know. [Alan Wicks directs the Choir of Canterbury Cathedral, the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble, and organist David Flood in Jerusalem, words by William Blake and music by Sir Hubert Parry.] Alexander: Do you ever feel at all uncomfortable with the kind of image, the kind of position you now hold, not just in the academic community, but in the minds of people in Canada and around the world? Does that position disturb you? Do you wish you didn’t hold it? Frye: I really don’t know that it does disturb me all that much. I wouldn’t care to be idolized, but then I don’t think I am idolized. If I get, say, a crank letter from somebody, I think, well, he must believe that I’m accessible or he wouldn’t write to me. Alexander: You do remain quite accessible. That must cut into the time available for your own ongoing original work. Frye: It certainly does, yes, but there’s no way out of it that I can see. I have an unlisted telephone number and I have a wonderfully efficient secretary, but there are still limits, and I don’t want to shut myself away. That would turn me into a different person. Alexander: We’ve spoken about early nineteenth-century piano music by composers less well known than Franz Schubert, and you mentioned in particular Muzio Clementi. I’d like to find out a little more about your interest in Clementi. You play the piano a good deal yourself and have done so throughout your life. Frye: Yes. At first, of course, I took in the standard keyboard repertoire, starting with the Beethoven sonatas. But the thing is that you get so completely absorbed in the standard composers that eventually, if you’re still playing, you look around for more variety. Because I’m an amateur pianist and I don’t play in public, I have looked for keyboard music from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which an amateur can play and enjoy. Alexander: I think you have quite a collection of Clementi. Frye: Yes, I have a fairly large collection of that. Alexander: You asked us to play a particular sonata by Clementi. Does

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it have not only musical resonances for you but mythological, programmatic resonances, too? Frye: Yes, it’s Clementi’s sonata on the abandoning of Dido. It always amused me, because Clementi was such a level-headed composer, and he starts off in a minor ninth, which for him, of course, was a frightful dissonance. Before long he marks the movement con disperazione. But in a very few minutes you’re in the regular finale rondo of early nineteenthcentury piano music. It’s a triumph of musical conventions over literature, a kind that rather amuses me. Alexander: We’ll listen now to the last movement of the sonata. [Pianist Lamar Crowson plays Clementi’s sonata Didone Abbandonata, Opus 50, No. 3 in G Minor. L’Oiseau-Lyre Sol 306.] Before and after Clementi, many composers dealt with the story of Dido and Aeneas, and many writers made use of it in prose and poetry. Why do stories like that get set into human consciousness and keep floating to the surface? Frye: Well, it’s one of the central stories about how a woman dies for love, so she became a saint and martyr in the courtly love tradition that’s celebrated all through the Christian centuries down to the seventeenth and eighteenth. What I like about that movement is that if Dido had only had the sense of proportion that Clementi had, she would never have thrown herself away on a jerk like Aeneas. Alexander: But what I wanted to get at was the idea that no matter how original a work of genius may be, the best are always rooted in things that are furthest from originality. Aren’t they often? Frye: The original writer is the person who returns to origins. The man who produces the imperishable classic is not a man with a new story but a man who tells one of the world’s great stories again and tells it better. Alexander: I think Yeats said something about choosing between the unity of the life and the unity of the work.4 You seem to have been able to organize both life and work pretty well. Has that been good luck or good management? Frye: It’s been a mixture of both, but I think mostly good luck. That is, the things that look as though I had planned them from infancy I just blundered into. I think that I have always kept my life as quiet and uneventful as I possibly could in order to keep my work more or less in balance.

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Alexander: What remains to be done? What is at the top of your list of priorities right now? Frye: Oh, another big book on how all literature comes out of certain metaphorical and mythological patterns, most of which are in the Bible. Alexander: I’ve been most interested in some of the things you’ve had to say about music this evening. This last operatic excerpt, though, is of a very different sort. It’s the Finale to act 3 of Verdi’s Falstaff. Tell me why this is an appropriate way for us to end. Frye: Well, if I were asked who my favourite composer was, the answer would have to be Johann Sebastian Bach. So I suppose I have a particular affection for somebody who can display the acrobatic skill that Bach does in things like The Art of the Fugue. It’s partly for that reason that the greatest single moment in opera for me outside of Mozart is that Finale of Verdi’s Falstaff, the great fugue at the end. Alexander: Are they sentiments with which you can agree—everything in the world is a jest? Frye: Well, I think of a very profound devotional, religious poet, George Herbert, who said All things are big with jest; nothing that’s plain But may be witty, if thou hast the vein.5

I’ve always had a strong interest in the nature of comedy and the way in which even tragedy seems to fit inside as a kind of episode in a total story which is comic. While I’m not sure that everything in the world is simply a jest, there is a point at which the oracular and the witty do come together. Alexander: Northrop Frye, I’ve enjoyed chatting with you once again. Thank you very much. [The Los Angeles Philharmonic plays the Finale to act 3 of Verdi’s Falstaff.]

80 Books as Counter-Culture Conducted 20 February 1985

From J. Samuel Cope, “Frye Looks Forward,” in his column “Between the Lines,” San Francisco Chronicle, 17 March 1985. The article has been reformatted to add speakers’ names. Frye had travelled to the west coast of the United States to deliver lectures at Berkeley, Santa Clara, and UCLA; his daybook for 1985 notes the interview with Sam Cope in Santa Clara.

Cope: These days we hear talk that television is ruining the attention spans of prospective readers and that the commercialized world of publishing inhibits the growth of serious literature. Whether this is true or not was a question posed recently to Northrop Frye, the eminent scholar and literary critic * * *. In the Bay Area recently, Frye was asked the Big Question: Does he believe literature in North America is headed for renewal or demise? Frye: I think I’m hopeful * * * . I know that when I travel on the subway in Toronto I see that people are reading books, sometimes quite long and difficult books. They are not entirely hypnotized by new media such as television. . . . Television doesn’t really affect the book-reading audience, it just siphons off the people who don’t really want to read anyway. [Frye said that the concentration of power in major publishing houses is forcing a concentration of another sort among proponents of high culture.] Frye: As the publishing business becomes a form of mass culture, the genuine poets and novelists get out from under cover and organize what amounts to a resistance press. . . . Literature becomes a sort of counterculture, and when it does I think that’s very healthy. Of course a cultural movement is partly regional. More and more movements in Canada keep sprouting out of what used to be called the boondocks.

81 The Primary Necessities of Existence Conducted 7 March 1985

From “Northrop Frye Talks about the Role of the Humanities” and “Embarking on an Encounter with Real Life,” a two-part interview in Columns, Fall 1985, 6–7, and Winter 1985–86, 4–5. Reprinted under the present title in WGS, 303– 11. Partially reprinted in the Toronto Star as “Don’t You Think It’s Time To Start Thinking?” Saturday Magazine, 25 January 1986, 3; in Canadian Context, ed. Sarah Norton and Nell Wadman (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1988), 234–5; and in Inside Language: A Canadian Language Reader, ed. Jennifer M. MacLennan and G. John Moffat (Scarborough: Prentice Hall Canada, 2000), 33–5. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Columns was a short-lived publication of the University of Toronto’s Public and Community Relations Office. The interviewer was Anne Craik, then assistant editor of Columns. The scripts of this interview were sent to Frye for revision before typesetting (see NFF, 1988, box 59, file 6).

Craik: What is the role of the humanities in today’s technological world? Frye: The humanities came into existence around the time of the Renaissance to distinguish the study of human matters from the things that were concerned with theology on the one hand and nature on the other. The things concerned with nature became the source of modern science, but that still left the study of mankind itself. Mankind is the only organism that has been able to study itself as a thing, as something in the world. And while part of that study belongs to the sciences, the central part of it, the construction of the imaginative models of experience, belongs to the humanities. The humanities are primarily verbal disciplines. At the centre are lan-

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guage and literature, the disinterested study of words. Around them is philosophy, the verbal organization of ideas, and history, which is essentially the actualizing of memory. Man without memory becomes senile, and this is just as true of a civilization as it is of an individual. The literary imagination, of course, creates a world of possibilities, and these possibilities are alternative ways of seeing things. Briefly, it is the business of the humanities to nurture the capacity to articulate freely. Articulateness builds the human community. The surest way to destroy freedom is to destory the capacity to articulate freely. Craik: Would you say, then, that a training in the arts is a better preparation for our technological society than a training in science? Frye: We tend to regard the arts and sciences as being very different from one another, and this is true up to a point. The sciences are primarily concerned with the world as it is, and the arts are primarily concerned with the world man wants to live in. What is not readily recognized is the fact that both require the same mental processes. Reason and a sense of fact are as important to the novelist as they are to the chemist. Genius and creative imagination play the same role in mathematics that they do in poetry. Laws and principles exist just as much in the verbal disciplines as they do in the sciences. And precision, clarity, and the ability to reason are just as much the concern of the student of the humanities as they are of the student of science. The humanities graduate is not condemned simply to teach what he has been taught. In fact, he is much less likely to be the victim of technological unemployment than someone who has learned only specific skills. The businessman who hires someone totally inarticulate soon finds out that such a person is no more use to him than someone who falls asleep on the job. But the humanities graduate who has developed good verbal skills, whose mind has been framed to be flexible and adjustable, will find many options open to him. Craik: How do we develop good verbal skills? Frye: The acquisition of verbal skill is a continuous process. The informal, and much larger, part of it comes from casual conversations, social contacts of all kinds, contacts with the media, with advertising, and with the printed word. The formal part starts in school and continues through university. When we examine just this formal part we find that it is beset with difficulties and misconceptions.

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How well you can read or write is largely a matter of practice. The habit of practice, of progress through repeated, sometimes mechanically repeated effort, is something that used to be inculcated through the formal Classical training in Latin and Greek. It was a training which imposed a kind of mental discipline that is apparently impossible in the modern school. And an added advantage of the Classical training was that it introduced you to languages that had certain kinds of structure. Linguists today are busy telling us that English is not constructed the way Latin was; nevertheless, if you approach English on something like a Latin model you get a sense of the structure of language. I don’t think I could ever have become a writer if I had not been exposed to the teaching of grammar in elementary school of a kind that often is just not given now. Grammar taught me language as a structure. I even learned the elementary categories of philosophy from grammar, things like the concrete, the abstract, the particular, and the universal. I think that a student often leaves high school today without any sense of language as a structure. He may also have the idea that reading and writing are elementary skills that he mastered in childhood, never having grasped the fact that there are differences in levels of reading and writing as there are in mathematics between short division and integral calculus. Yet, in spite of his limited verbal skills, he firmly believes that he can think, that he has ideas, and that if he is just given the opportunity to express them he will be all right. Of course, when you look at what he’s written you find it doesn’t make any sense. When you tell him this he is devastated. Part of his confusion here stems from the fact that we use the word “think” in so many bad, punning ways. Remember James Thurber’s Walter Mitty who was always dreaming great dreams of glory. When his wife asked him what he was doing he would say, “Has it ever occurred to you that I might be thinking?” But, of course, he wasn’t thinking at all. Because we use it for everything our minds do, worrying, remembering, day-dreaming, we imagine that thinking is something that can be achieved without any training. But again it’s a matter of practice. How well we can think depends on how much of it we have already done. Most students need to be taught, very carefully and patiently, that there is no such thing as an inarticulate idea waiting to have the right words wrapped around it. They have to learn that ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words. Until that point you don’t know whether you are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach.

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Craik: Your comments suggest there are very few articulate people. Why? Frye: The operation of thinking is the practice of articulating ideas until they are in the right words. And we can’t think at random either. We can only add one more idea to the body of something we have already thought about. Most of us spend very little time doing this, and that is why there are so few people whom we regard as having any power to articulate at all. When such a person appears in public life, like Mr. Trudeau, we tend to regard him as possessing a gigantic intellect. A society like ours doesn’t have very much interest in literacy. It is compulsory to read and write because society must have docile and obedient citizens. We are taught to read so that we can obey the traffic signs, and to cipher so that we can make out our income tax, but development of verbal competency is very much left to the individual. And when we look at our day-to-day existence we can see that there are strong currents at work against the development of powers of articulateness. Young adolescents today often betray a curious sense of shame about speaking articulately, of framing a sentence with a period at the end of it. Part of the reason for this is the powerful anti-intellectual drive which is constantly present in our society. Articulate speech marks you out as an individual, and in some settings this can be rather dangerous because people are often suspicious and frightened of articulateness. So if you say as little as possible and use only stereotyped, ready-made phrases you can hide yourself in the mass. Then there are various epidemics sweeping over society which use unintelligibility as a weapon to preserve the present power structure. By making things as unintelligible as possible, to as many people as possible, you can hold the present power structure together. Understanding and articulateness lead to its destruction. This is the kind of thing that George Orwell was talking about, not just in 1984, but in all his work on language. The kernel of everything reactionary and tyrannical in society is the impoverishment of the means of verbal communication. The vast majority of things that we hear today are prejudices and clichés, simply verbal formulas that have no thought behind them but are put up as a pretence of thinking. It is not until we realize these things conceal meaning, rather than reveal it, that we can begin to develop our own powers of articulateness. The teaching of humanities is, therefore, a militant job. Teachers are

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faced not simply with a mass of misconceptions and unexamined assumptions. They must engage in a fight to help the student confront and reject the verbal formulas and stock responses, to convert passive acceptance into active, constructive power. It is a fight against illiteracy and for the maturation of the mental processes, for the development of skills which once acquired will never become obsolete. Craik: Have the electronic media superseded the printed word as a means of conveying information? Frye: Over the last few years television has certainly taken over as the dominant medium, and this has resulted in changes in the other media. CBC radio, and other stations, too, have made radio into a more discursive medium, more adapted to discussing serious issues than to conveying instant news. And this has happened to an even greater extent with newspapers which have been forced to become much more journals of comment than simply purveyors of headlines and deadlines. It’s a slow process, but nevertheless there seems to be an inexorable law which gradually squeezes out a medium until it finds its proper place in the scheme of conveying information to the public. The main problem is selection. Film, radio, and television are mass media, and much of what is put out for mass consumption tends to be formulaic and appeals to the imagination on a low level. What we select depends upon the maturity of our mental processes. Programs that are informative or intellectually challenging will appeal only to a more articulate group of people. The inarticulate amongst us will continue to turn to the trivial, unmeaning babble of such programs as Dallas and All in the Family. As television, in particular, seems determined to keep going in the mass distribution direction, it would seem that this kind of programming will continue to proliferate. And even if we select prudently, a great disadvantage of the electronic media as a learning tool is that they move so fast in time and then disappear without leaving any corpus behind them. The book is the most efficient technological instrument for learning that has ever been devised by the human mind. It stays around and always says the same thing no matter how often you consult it. And while the act of reading is linear, just as watching a television program is, the book itself is not linear. It is an object and it becomes the focus of a community as more and more people read it and discuss it with one another. Sometimes, of course, a picture can make a more forceful impact than

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the printed word. Television coverage of Vietnam, for instance, had a profound effect on the way the American public eventually came to view that war. And I particularly remember the night that Nixon gave his abdication speech. At the end, a neighbour who had watched the program with us said, “It will be a long time before I get that face out of my mind.” He was not listening to the words. He was looking at the face of a desperate, cleaned-out gambler and he was seeing what was there on a level that was not the one ostensibly being presented. On the whole, though, it’s more difficult to get a sense of depth from what is being communicated through a television program. However, continued exposure to the constant rain of sense impressions can lead to the development of very sharp powers of observation, and this is something that I see reflected in the students I teach now. Craik: Are students different today? Frye: Apart from the acute sense of perception that I have just mentioned, I would say no. It is the universities which have changed rather than the students. Anyone involved in our universities is deeply concerned about the consequences of their broad and rapid expansion in recent years. Modern universities have been geared to political and economic growth. They have grown into multiversities, with research institutes and professional training centres, and while we undoubtedly need these things, we have to take great care that they do not erode the central core of university life. The hub of the university has always been, and must remain, a community where life can be experienced with greater intensity than anywhere else. The everyday world which comes to us through newspapers and television is not real life but a dissolving phantasmagoria. An empire is a world power one moment and has dissolved the next, and it doesn’t matter who was president of the Supreme Soviet Praesidium or the United States. The student entering the university is the one who is embarking on an encounter with real life. He is descending into the engine room of society, seeing the machinery of the human intellect and the human imagination driving all the great power structures around him. In studying the liberal arts, he studies the permanent form of human society and begins to understand where the causes are that make society change so rapidly and seem so unpredictable. I believe that it is possible for young people to live in masses today that they would have found utterly dehu-

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manizing fifty years ago. Nevertheless we must make great efforts to safeguard the university as a place where one can get the sense, which is so irreplaceable, of what life would be like if the intellect and the imagination were continuously a part of it. One welcome change that has occurred over the last few years is that the university is no longer a monopoly of the eighteen- to twenty-twoyear-old age group. It makes a big difference when you realize that there are some people in the class old enough to be the parents of others, that you are not just talking to young people. The tensions in the class become very exciting and, of course, the generation gap gets closed up on all sides. I’ve been saying all my life that the salvation of the university lies in making it a place for adults at various stages to come for retraining in skills which have now become out of date, or for a renewed contact with things that have become hazy in their minds. I think the university will never do its job in society until a great mass of people of all ages, from thirty to ninety, feel they can come and get their lives revitalized. The process is somewhat like a religious retreat, except that it would be a much more permanent thing because being involved in some form of cultural activity is what really makes one a human being. I remember listening to an extremely moving speech by the Hungarian-born poet George Faludi, who has had the distinction of being imprisoned by both the Nazis and the Communists. He said that when he was in a concentration camp he organized discussion groups. Some people dropped out, because they were physically exhausted at the end of the day of sweated labour, but some kept going despite the exhaustion. Invariably the people who dropped out died, and those who kept going survived. So there is something in human life which is very deeply bound up with culture, and I think I am seeing it in my students now. They say that as the job market is so uncertain anyway, they will study what interests them most, with the result that registration in the humanities and even, I’m told, in the Classics, has gone up. And, of course, if you look at a simplified culture, like that of the Inuit people, where life is reduced to a few basic needs of survival, poetry and painting and sculpture leap into the foreground as some of those primary necessities of existence. Craik: Is the quality of our cultural life being threatened by the current proposals to reduce funding for the arts?

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Frye: The arts owe their existence to man’s dissatisfaction with nature and his desire to transform the physical world into a human one. Art is not an escape from reality but a vision of the world in its human form. Nurture, not neglect, is what generates artistic vitality, and society has a responsibility to foster its own culture. Since about 1960, English Canada has become culturally extraordinarily vital, and its vitality is recognized all over the world. Institutes of Canadian Studies have been set up all over Europe and Asia. This has been the result, largely, of a good deal of judicious pump-priming by the Canada Council and related organizations. I was at a dinner in Ottawa sitting beside the late Hugh Garner, whom one would think of as a tough, self-made, proletarian novelist. Yet he made an extraordinarily eloquent speech about what the encouragement he had got from the Canada Council had meant to him, as a writer and a human being, and as recognition of his place in society. The cutbacks which threaten our cultural life at the present time are the product of superstitious priorities. In the twenty-third century nobody, except a Ph.D. student desperately looking for a subject in Canadian history, will dig out the names of the people who are promoting cutbacks today. Those amongst us who are producing the literature, the poetry, and other cultural artefacts are the people who will interest mankind in the twenty-third century. They will be the essence of Canada.

82 Criticism in Society 16 September 1985

From Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society (New York: Methuen, 1987), 27–42. Dated by correspondence with Salusinszky in NFF, 1991, box 11, file 5, which reveals that Frye read a transcript, made a few changes in the interests of readability, and answered a couple of supplementary, written questions (indicated here by an asterisk). Interviewer Salusinszky was at the time of the interview a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale; by the time the book was published he was teaching English at the University of Melbourne. His book is a series of interviews with contemporary critics on the function of criticism. When he interviewed Frye, he had already talked to Jacques Derrida; he was later to talk to Harold Bloom, Edward Said, and others. Notes provided by Salusinszky are signalled by [S]. In introducing the interview, Salusinszky remarked that “the following interview, which took place in Toronto in September 1985, is the third that I have recorded with Professor Frye.” For the others, see no. 69 and the additional remark at the end of it.

Salusinszky: I’m going around talking to a series of people about the social and institutional contexts of contemporary criticism. I’d like to talk to you first about the role of criticism in society, and I’ve been thinking of what you’ve written about “concern”—the things that a society thinks it needs to know about where it’s coming from or where it’s headed—and the relation of criticism to concern. I want to talk about three of the concepts with which your name always has been, and most likely always will be, associated within criticism. First, the notion of myth or archetype. I know that this a very general question, but I want to ask you to summarize briefly the main steps or landmarks or intellectual moments which brought you to your view of myth or archetype.

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Frye: I suppose that, autobiographically, it was largely a matter of what I happened to be most interested in studying and teaching. When I began here, I was trying to write a book on Blake and trying to teach Milton, and both of them being very intensely Biblical poets led me to see something of the infiltration of the Bible into English literature. I think that what gradually dawned on me over the years was that most people start out with a social context as an ideology, and feel that literature fits within the ideology and to some degree reflects it. Well, that is true, but I think that an ideology is always a secondary and derivative thing, and that the primary thing is a mythology. That is, people don’t think up a set of assumptions or beliefs; they think up a set of stories, and derive the assumptions and beliefs from the stories. Things like democratic, progressive, revolutionary, Marxist political philosophies: these are comic plots, superimposed on history. Salusinszky: Does ideology differ from “concern”? Frye: Only to the extent that I regard mythology as prior to ideology, and ideology as taking its shape from the mythology that it derives from. A Christian ideology comes from a Christian myth, a collection of interconnected stories that Christianity tells—and similarly with other religions. Salusinszky: The second, very central concept that comes out of your work in the 1950s and 1960s is the “order of words,” or the idea of an overall structure to all of literature. What brought you to that? Frye: I think it was somewhat the same principle. I soon realized the priority of mythology to ideology in a culture, and then I realized that a mythology is an interconnected series of myths, and that the distinguishing characteristic of the myth—as distinct, say, from the folk tale or the legend—was that myths tended to link together and to form a mythology. I felt that there had never been a corresponding term for works of literature. Because, as literature grows out of a mythology, and is the most direct product of the mythology, it also has a group of stories which are interconnected by convention and by these recurring units that I called archetypes. Salusinszky: If mythology is prior to ideology, why do we find clashing ideologies within a given society, which has a shared mythological structure?

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Frye: Well, that’s the point: you can’t stay at the mythological level, because you can’t argue about a story. You can merely say whether you think it’s true or false. But as soon as the secondary ideological development takes place, then you’re in the realm of proposition and thesis, where every statement implies its own counter-statement. The Bible begins with a story that God made the heaven and the earth. That leads to the ideological statement, “There is a God.” And that in turn leads to the possibility of saying, “There is no God.” Judaism and Christianity differ on the question of whether an incarnation of God is possible, but mythologically they’re just about the same religion. Salusinszky: The third and final theme in your work which I wanted to pick up in this way was the argument in the Anatomy about the need for criticism to be systematic and progressive—for criticism to become, I suppose, a social science. What was the development of that idea? Frye: It developed out of what I call the “stock market,” the way in which criticism was being used tactically, by people like T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, to boost certain names and denigrate certain others, in connection with certain literary movements they were promoting. I noticed that, particularly in painting, for example, these “isms” and schools were a sign of immaturity and of not properly established authority. Consequently, it seemed to me that they were all really pseudo-structures, and that the real, genuine advance in criticism came when every work of literature, regardless of its merit, was seen to be a document of potential interest, or value, or insight into the culture of the age. It simply arose from my observation of normal scholarly practice, which is that if you’re “in” the eighteenth century, you read everything in your field, regardless of its merits. Salusinszky: How has the fact that the critical schools seem to be warring as fiercely these days as they were during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s affected your view? In other words, is this something you still think can be broken? Frye: Well, your question assumes that I’ve got very much more cynical about the willingness of critics to tackle the essential jobs of criticism as I see them, and that is quite true. I think that criticism is still bound up to ideology, and consequently much more concerned to develop the language of argument and thesis than really to embark on the empirical study of literature.

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Salusinszky: What would you say are the reasons for that? Frye: It may have different reasons in different communities. In Great Britain, when I started thinking about the things connected with the Anatomy, I thought it had a social reference, and that criticism was bound up with the conception of gentlemanliness. If you were a gentleman, you were a cultivated person, but you didn’t actually work systematically at a job. Or, if you were a person of not quite that social class, but trying hard to be a gentleman, like F.R. Leavis, you were even more defensive. With France, I daresay it’s different. The cultural traditions there are so Cartesian and anti-Cartesian, and the French critics tend to start out with a philosophical position and then rationalize. Salusinszky: *In the Anatomy, you say that “a public that tries to do without criticism . . . brutalizes the arts and loses its cultural memory” (4/6). Is criticism, then, a mediator between society and the arts? Frye: Yes, criticism has to be a mediator between literature and society, because its essential job is to examine first the literary and then the social context of whatever it’s studying. But, as I keep saying, the mediation has to take account of the difference between the ideological and the mythological. For one thing, that’s the only way to account for the fact that so many great writers have been ideological fat-heads: Yeats, Pound, Lawrence—you name them. Salusinszky: You’ve kept fairly distant from the specifics of critical struggles of recent times, but I wanted to get your reactions to two of the currently very influential critics. First, Harold Bloom and his poetics of influence. Bloom has very readily acknowledged, at least in his early work, your influence upon him. But clearly the current Bloom would not accept that the New Testament is the great code of art. The patterns he’s finding now are much more Hebraic ones, both normative and gnostic. What do you think of them? Frye: My whole early training focused on the structure of the Christian Bible because, as I say, my original job was writing about Blake and teaching Milton. That, to me, holds together as a mythological pattern, but I’m not prepared to say that it’s the right one or the true one or the most complete one. I’m merely saying that it’s the one that seems to me to be central in the traditions of English literature that I’m most concerned with. I think there is some danger, perhaps, of painting yourself

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into a corner once you decide that a Kabbalistic tradition, for example, is the more authentic, the more right, the more true one. I remember disagreeing with Bloom, very early on, over his conception of the “authentic Romantic,” and feeling that it didn’t matter a damn whether one was authentic or not. Salusinszky: Can you understand Bloom, and other Jewish scholars, becoming uncomfortable with what has been, after all, a very Christianizing tradition of English literary criticism? Frye: Well, I think that Bloom was certainly uncomfortable with what he found at Yale at the beginning, the New Criticism there. But that, of course, was in a line of Christianity that I don’t have a great deal of interest in myself. As I say, I’m interested in the mythological structure; I’m not interested in the ideological content. Salusinszky: But when you talk about the “secular scripture” and so on, your “economy of concepts,” as the popular saying goes, still has a Christian framework—that is, a displaced Christian framework, which a Jewish scholar might conceivably still feel was not a comfortable one. Frye: Yes, he might very well. I’ve just been compelled to write out my undergraduate lectures on Shakespeare, for a publisher who demanded them, and there I found myself unable to proceed without thinking of the kind of assumptions that Shakespeare’s original audience would have brought into the theatre with them. If I were Jewish, I would be made exceedingly uncomfortable by a play like The Merchant of Venice, but it does exist; it did represent something which the audience of its time accepted. I think that there you can point to Shylock and say: this is an utterly skewed and corrupt notion of Judaism; but it was there, it’s a historical fact. Salusinszky: If Bloom has, to some extent, challenged the Christian direction of English literary studies, it is Derrida who has challenged the persistent Platonism that one can also see running through English literary studies. Criticism has always tended to think of any great literary work as possessing unity, with some sort of closure, and as being in some sense seminal. Now Derrida seems to have opened up a whole range of new possibilities, where instead of closure and insemination he has his concepts of dissemination, of trace, of displacement. Derrida, however, is a philosopher, and I wonder if you regard his present influ-

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ence as merely one of those enclosure movements which you describe, in the Anatomy (6/8), as coming from outside criticism and wanting to take it over. Frye: It certainly seems to be the way his influence has operated, yes, but I don’t think that it’s entirely fair to Derrida that it has operated that way. I think he’s genuinely interested in opening up, as you’ve just said, new possibilities in criticism. The thing is that I don’t see why the sense of an ending and the sense of wholeness and unity, and the kinds of things that he’s talking about, should be mutually exclusive. I don’t see why you have to have an either/or situation. It’s like those optical puzzles you look at, which change their relationship when you’re looking at them. Salusinszky: In the days of the Anatomy, you faced more than a few hysterical reactions. Does the reaction of the “critical establishment” to Derrida seem to you to have some traces of hysteria about it? Frye: Sometimes it almost does seem to. I thought there were some very curious words being used—“parasitic” and so forth. I don’t understand what all the hoop-de-do is about. I can understand that certain disciples and followers of Derrida might get lost in a morass, but then people said that my disciples got lost in a morass, so what the hell? Salusinszky: I think I mentioned to you that I was going to do a sort of I.A. Richards exercise: instead of showing an unseen poem to first-year English students at Cambridge, I was going to travel the world and show an unseen poem to the most famous literary critics. This is an exercise which, if it works, I hope will give those outside criticism a sense of the alternatives within the field, and the way they affect practical interpretation. When you face up to a poem like Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself, by one of the poets who has been closest to you right through your career [Stevens], how do you begin to work with the poem, what processes do you take it through, what are we looking for? Frye: What are we looking for? I suppose I’m really looking for, in this case, a poem which illustrates the title: the fact that, when you’re dealing with ideas about a thing, you’re dealing with statements which have a tendency to become self-enclosed. And that when you are using the metaphor of the “thing itself,” the metaphor of vision, the metaphor of eyesight, you are speaking of something which keeps shifting from the

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inside, where your eyes are, to the outside, where the thing is. So my eye would be caught first of all, I think, by the dots after “snow” and “papier-mâché” and by the musing “It would have been outside,” and then again “The sun was coming from outside”—and yet realizing that that statement can’t possibly be as simple as it looks, and that what he’s after is a “new knowledge of reality,” where you get past the whole inside/outside tail-chasing. Salusinszky: I see it as a somewhat personal poem. I suppose it’s hard to avoid that, because it comes at the very end of the Collected Poems, and we’re tremendously moved by the very old Stevens writing this. How much of the personal element in the poem can criticism retain—or does it have to wash it entirely clean of the personal element? Frye: No, it doesn’t: that’s an either/or situation again. Stevens had a personality, and there is an aspect of that personality which is his business and peculiar to him. There’s another aspect of it which gets into the poem, and is transmissible: that’s the personality which I am capable of absorbing. Salusinszky: You know, it struck me when I was conceiving the present project that almost all of the critics I wanted to interview for the series have been very heavily influenced by Stevens. What do you think the great attraction of Stevens is for the more theoretical and more Romantically oriented critics like you, Hartman, Bloom, Hillis Miller? Frye: Well, I think, again, there is no point of closure in his mind. He’s always, even in his very last poem, looking for a new knowledge of reality. I didn’t realize how often I’d quoted Stevens in The Great Code until I got an interview from Sydney, Australia, where they asked me this over the telephone, why the hell I referred to Stevens so often—I hadn’t realized I did.1 He seems to me to have the kind of representative culture for a person of my generation. He’s just, exactly, what speaks to me with the voice of contemporary poetry. Of course, that comes from back in the Harmonium days, a generation behind people of your generation. Salusinszky: *Regarding what you say about Stevens as, even in his very last poem, looking for a new knowledge of reality: this seems to me to be one of the many respects in which you resemble him. Stevens spent his later years trying to write out a version of the “supreme fiction,” and you are presently working on your own equivalent, the “great code.”

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You’ve mentioned being affected by Harmonium, but Stevens’s long meditations on the supreme fiction are the product of his sixties and seventies: have these late, long poems acquired any additional resonance for you as you have entered the same period of your own life? Frye: Yes, the conception of the “supreme fiction” in Stevens has acquired a good deal of resonance for me, though I get this resonance less from the long meditative poems than from shorter ones: Prologues to What Is Possible, Forms of the Rock in a Night Hymn, the paramour soliloquy, the last poem, Of Mere Being. Salusinszky: There’s one thing I’ve never understood fully about Stevens: his relentless unpopularity; his not being, at all, a “popular” poet. This struck me when I was passing through Hartford recently, and thought to drive past the house on Westerley Terrace where he lived. I was surprised that, while America is happy to erect plaques and memorials to every old thing, Stevens’s house just sits there without any public memorial or plaque or plate on it. (Actually, in what I suppose is an irony, it’s now the Deanery of the Hartford Episcopalian Church.) Why do you think Stevens never caught on with the public? Frye: I suppose because he’s so studiously oblique. His work is all “asides on the oboe.”2 You’re never quite sure just what you are hearing. You said a moment ago that Derrida is perhaps the first non-Platonic critic; well, when you read a poem of Stevens saying, “Beauty is momentary in the mind . . . but in the flesh it is immortal,” people just blink.3 That’s not what he’s supposed to say. He’s supposed to say it’s momentary in the flesh, but it’s immortal in the mind. Salusinszky: I think he was worrying at that Platonic dialectic right through his life. I think the influence of contemporary philosophy on Stevens has been overrated, at the expense of his obsession with the Platonic contrast. I mean, obviously his imagination–reality dialectic is in some way derived from it. Frye: I think that’s very close to the truth about him. The point is that he was aware of it as a problem. It wasn’t just an unconscious assumption. Salusinszky: I would like to move on and talk about criticism in its institutional context, the university. You are in some ways in a unique position, because you have been in a position of leadership in the university through a very difficult period. And you’ve seen the changes

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which have come over the university through a very long period, because you’ve been involved in the university since the 1930s. When one reads over your early professional history, it can function, these days, almost like a lost pastoral vision. You went to Oxford, and then you returned to the college where you had been an undergraduate. You were welcomed back there. You were given all the time you needed to publish your first book, which became the major study of Blake. As we know, this sort of leisure, and this sort of pattern, is not typical of what’s faced younger scholars in the last ten years. How has the tightening, the shrinkage in the university, the competition for jobs, the competition through publication, affected the universities and the sort of work done in the humanities? Frye: It has, really . . . “destroyed” is a strong word . . . it has transformed them into places of labyrinthine arguments. I read so many articles which are arguments, which don’t seem to get anywhere in particular, but which are sufficiently coordinated to be publishable as arguments. One feels that the reason for their existence is simply to get them on a dean’s list, and that the notion of the pursuit of a structure, or of knowledge, so that it gets clearer in the mind, is just something you haven’t the time for. Salusinszky: There’s a very unhappy irony in what you’ve said. Society cuts back funding to the universities, because it wants them to be more socially relevant, more socially responsible. Instead, that simply produces more highly specialized, irrelevant work. Frye: That’s exactly right. And I think you’re quite right in what you implied: that is, that a great deal of what I’ve written about education has been an attempt to recapture my own pastoral myth. Because I know that there was something genuine about the college that took me in when I was nobody, took a chance on me simply because they knew me, then sat back and waited for me to get that infernal Blake book off my hands. I know that that position wouldn’t have been possible in very many universities even then, and wouldn’t be possible anywhere now. Salusinszky: I was always particularly influenced and moved by what you’ve written about the university, but when I left graduate school and actually entered the university, and the job market, I found it hard to square with reality. Is an idealistic story about the university becoming a harder line to push?

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Frye: In a sense it is. It must have been very difficult to believe in Christianity during the Thirty Years’ War, but perhaps the original dream was still there, in some form or other. Salusinszky: The Thirty Years’ War ended: will this work itself through? Frye: I profoundly hope so. I think, in the natural course of events, it will. The only thing that keeps me reconciled to life in my seventies is my realization that everything does go in cycles. Salusinszky: Is academic freedom severely compromised by the tightening of the budgets? Frye: Oh yes. The question, for example, in Canada, is whether Canada should get into Reagan’s Star Wars schemes or not, and whether this would be accompanied by contracts let out to universities. Well, hell, there was a time when no university that valued its reputation would even think of such a thing. It would mean classified information, and the universities are not supposed to deal with classified information. If you want to work on that stuff, you get the hell out of the university. Salusinszky: Talking of that, when you were the managing editor of the Canadian Forum, you were very involved at the centre-left of Canadian politics. Was there a period in your development when you were attracted to Marxism? Frye: I suppose everybody’s attracted to Marxism in the sense that it gives you a kind of outsider’s viewpoint on bourgeois society. That part of it is something totally inescapable. The difficulty, of course, is the difference between Marxism as a critique of bourgeois society and Marxism as the instrument of a Marxist government. As I never felt the Soviet Union was making very much of a bid for human freedom or independence of thought, I was never attracted to political Marxism of that particular kind. Following a party line: I never wanted to buy that at all. I think that Marxism has been, or certainly should be, incorporated into the Western imagination as an essential part of its thinking—just as Darwin, or Nietzsche, or anybody else should be. Salusinszky: During the “McCarthyist” days in America, there was a similar tendency for witch-hunts going on in Canada. I know that the Canadian Forum was very outspoken, and I know that the universities

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were very much under investigation and attack then. Those must have been strange and difficult times. What are your memories of them? Frye: I wasn’t as involved in them, because I was never marked out as a Marxist. Earle Birney, a Canadian poet, has written a book called Down the Long Table, which evokes the time when he was here during the 1930s and the early 1940s. He was a Trotskyite, and he summons up those days very well, I think. I was never in that aspect of the movement, but it was certainly going on all around me. I think that Canadians have a lot to be grateful for in their own cold-bloodedness. The country is so big, and so sparsely populated, that it just can’t work up the kind of hysteria that America can. Salusinszky: You’ve said that academic freedom “is the only form of freedom, in the long run, of which humanity is capable,” and that it cannot be obtained unless the university itself is free [WE, 421]. How can the university be free when, after all, the state and, increasingly, various corporations hold the purse strings? Frye: Freedom is a relative term, and the degrees of freedom are of immense importance, simply because complete or absolute freedom is out of the question. The university will always, to some extent, be controlled both by government and business influences; but there’s an immense difference between a professor’s being able to speak his mind and get away with it and hold his job, and his finding himself in a concentration camp. Salusinszky: In the same essay, you write that it’s the university’s task to define the vision of society [WE, 421], and in your 1976 Presidential Address to the MLA you say that the university works to dissolve all elites into the classless society that is the final embodiment of culture [WE, 486]. Increasingly, Marxists within the university are telling us that the university is one state institution among others and that, far from working for a classless society, it simply passes on a sophisticated version of the very ideology which the bourgeoisie needs in order to preserve its own privileged class position. How do you react to that? Frye: Well, again, I think it’s a half-truth. It implies that those who are trying to speak their own minds and tell the truth as they see it are still incapable of realizing the extent to which they may be speaking for a bourgeois hierarchy. I think that rather underestimates the intelligence of many people.

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Salusinszky: What does society want, or think it wants, from the university? And what do we, within the university, think that we want to give society? Frye: I think that there is a great deal of respect for the university in society, insofar as it can become a community, where truth and learning are pursued as such, though not necessarily for their own sakes. I think there is such a thing as a moral majority, even if the people who call themselves that aren’t it. I sense this kind of respect for the university, and I see the loyalty of the alumni, which I’ve had some experience of as an administrator and which I’ve always been very touched by. I think that what the university wants to give society is not really very different from that. They realize that what they are doing will perhaps be oblique in its social impact, but that that doesn’t necessarily undermine its genuineness. Salusinszky: I’m thinking about what you’ve spoken of as “phony mythology”: propaganda and advertising, things that society is trying constantly to force down our throats. I suppose that, in that sense, the university always has to be at odds with the society within which it exists, because it’s working to . . . Frye: Oh yes, always, always . . . Salusinszky: Why is it tolerated, then? Frye: It seems to be part of the democratic process. Democracies seem to depend on advertising, and dictatorships on propaganda. The difference is not so much in the rhetoric, as in the fact that advertising is more open to the spirit of criticism. Salusinszky: There is a lot of feeling now that the specialization within the humanities is counterproductive, in that it cuts the humanist off from the social context. I know you’ve always been an opponent of specialization in criticism. Frye: I’m not really opposed to specialization in itself. I’m opposed to the cutting out of the perspective. A person can be specialized, and still be a very broad and humane scholar. I have a former student who sends me offprints on analytical bibliography, which is about as specialized a discipline as you could ask for, but I know that he’s a genuine scholar, in the sense that the perspective on knowledge has not vanished for him. He’s working within that. It’s the absence of the perspective that I’m opposed to.

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Salusinszky: And what are the causes of that, when it occurs? Frye: I suppose the causes are, again, the competitive spirit of the graduate schools, the fact that so many articles exist for the sake of existing— that kind of thing. Practising that is bound to corrupt one’s vision, and to instill in its place a kind of cynicism. Salusinszky: In closing, a couple of biographical questions. I asked Derrida whether his great fame had affected his work. In this respect, among the group I’m talking to, only you really compare to Derrida. It’s a very unusual position for a humanist to be in; it’s almost unique. How has it affected your own work? Frye: It’s bound to have affected it. I think it affects it mainly in the fact that the question which had always been latent very deep in my mind when I’m writing—what kind of audience am I addressing?—comes much closer to the surface. You are continually thinking in terms of somebody who hates your guts; or, more rarely, of somebody who’ll take this as gospel, and therefore you ought to make sure it isn’t fatuous. Salusinszky: I also asked Derrida what he saw as the main events in his life, and rather to my surprise he came out with a reading list. I know your work somewhat better than I know Derrida’s, so I’d be less surprised if your answer was along those lines. Would it be? Frye: I daresay it would be, fundamentally, yes. Salusinszky: And what are the landmarks? Frye: The discovery of Blake, which happened in my adolescence. And there would be a variety of things. The art show at the Chicago Art Center in 1933, during the World Fair, when I was twenty-one and seeing all those glorious pictures for the first time in my life. A great deal of it has to do with the novelty of impact. The time when I first read Spengler, for example, knowing with every page I turned what a stupid, thick-skulled Teutonic ass he was, and yet nevertheless fascinated by that kind of perspective. Samuel Johnson said that all wonder was the effect of novelty upon ignorance,4 and I think that whenever novelty has hit my ignorance, that’s been the turning-point. Salusinszky: How did the Second World War affect the composition of Fearful Symmetry?

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Frye: Well, I think if you look carefully at the book, and even more at the footnotes, you’ll see it’s a very anxious, troubled book. It’s written with the horror of Nazism just directly in front of it all the time. When I first read Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century—the big Nazi bible, about the Atlantis myths and the Nordic heroes and so forth—it just sent the shudders up my spine. If this kind of thing had prevailed in the world, everybody would not only be reading him, but thinking that Blake thought that way too. Salusinszky: Did the Cold War have anything like a comparable effect on the Anatomy? Frye: Not so much on the Anatomy, which grew directly out of my work on Blake. The most fruitful part of that I was doing at a period before the Cold War really set in, still in that period of hope between 1945 and 1950. I think that that came out more in my articles on education and the universities. Salusinszky: I remember hearing you give a talk in Chicago once where you said that, whenever you were asked to commit yourself to a talk sometime in the future, you gave it a title that reflected where you hoped to be, intellectually, when the time came around to give the talk. Where do you hope to be, in the next few years? Frye: The rest of my life will be what Jerome Bruner calls a “spiral curriculum,”5 revolving around this successor to The Great Code, which has gone up in metamorphic flames several times (so did the other one). So, I imagine it will be just a series of revolutions, bringing me back to somewhat the same point, but nevertheless tracing out a circumference in the meantime. The only thing is that one does get very much aware of the passing of time when one gets into one’s seventies. Besides, there must have been times when even the noble and pure-hearted Sir Galahad said, “Bugger the Grail.” Salusinszky: You haven’t looked beyond the second volume of The Great Code?6 Frye: That’s about it, that’s the main thing. The first book was of two kinds. Half of it had been on my mind so long that it was obsessive— just really to be excreted, to be dumped. The other half were things that were really coming in, and were new in my mind. This one I’m not going to let go of until I’m ready to let go of it. I don’t know where I’ll be after that.

83 On the Media Conducted 20 February 1986

From “Interview with Northrop Frye,” Acta Victoriana, 110, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 23–5. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Prepared by Cheryl Carter, Stephen Gaebel, and Karen Vinke, editors of the magazine, for a special issue on the media.

Interviewer: Some people would say that popular culture arises only out of its definition. Could you distinguish between popular culture and high culture? Frye: The distinction between popular culture and highbrow culture assumes that there are two different kinds of people, and I think that’s extremely dubious. I don’t see the virginal purity of highbrow literature trying to keep itself unsullied from the pollutions of popular culture. Umberto Eco wasn’t any less a semiotics scholar for writing a bestselling romance [The Name of the Rose]. There isn’t a qualitative distinction. It just doesn’t exist. And I think that the tendency on the part of the mass media as a whole is to abolish this distinction. Interviewer: Reading and writing have been described as being very powerful promoters of the imagination and of creativity. Is this restricted to works of “high art”? And is popular culture, on the other hand, merely entertainment? Frye: Well, again that assumes the distinction which I’m not very clear about. I think that the maturity of any nation’s culture depends a great deal on minimizing that antithesis. There are people who talk about wanting to be passively entertained, but that’s a state of mind that

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doesn’t necessarily postulate anything. I think that practically anybody who goes to a play or reads a book or turns on the television wants both entertainment and something that won’t insult his intelligence. Interviewer: But most people see high art as having a more overtly instructive value attached to it. Frye: Yes, well they do. I don’t know how one defines a classic except in truly pragmatic terms as (in literature, for example) a work that simply won’t go away. Shakespeare was a mixture of popular culture and highbrow culture in his day. That is, some of his audience was made up of courtly people or students at the Inns of Court, and some of them were patrons of the popular theatre. People like Ben Jonson were often regarded as more serious by the highbrow. But Shakespeare just sat down on the stage and refused to budge, and that’s why he’s a classic. He just won’t go away. Interviewer: So you don’t see popular culture as being distinguished by a certain transience—that it’s what is here today and gone tomorrow? Frye: Well, a certain amount of it follows trends, but there’s nothing very sinister about that—it’s just something that happens. Interviewer: Do you see any place in the university for the study of popular culture? Is it something that students and faculty are made to recognize—or want to recognize? Frye: Of course you’re talking to a literary critic. The formulas of popular literature are the same formulas which underlie James Joyce or Henry James. I’ve always said, for example, that an elementary school teacher does no good telling a youngster that the battered old movie he saw on television the night before is inferior to the kind of thing he’s going to study now. That is, if he prefers the battered old movie, the better teaching technique is to point out the structural similarities between what he’s interested in and what he’s supposed to be studying. And you find out that they’re much the same structures. Interviewer: Could you discuss the notion of popular culture more specifically with reference to Marshall McLuhan? Frye: Well, as I understand it McLuhan started out with the thesis that print is a linear medium—the pages follow one after the other—and that the electronic media make an impact on a great many senses all at once.

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On that basis he drew a distinction between two kinds of mental response. That distinction, I think, is totally wrong, and I think he himself realized that very quickly, but by that time he was caught up in a public relations blender and he couldn’t do anything about it. But the print medium is not linear, because the book stays around and presents the same words no matter how often you consult it. So the book becomes a focus for a community. And it’s really the electronic media that are the linear ones, because they are very much harder to remember. If you forget what’s in a book, you can pick it up and consult it. But if you forget what was on last night’s television, then it’s gone into outer space. Interviewer: What about McLuhan’s distinction between the visual and the aural societies? Frye: It’s very difficult to avoid metaphors. If, for example, you’re reading something, you frequently use metaphors of the ear. And that’s what critics like Jacques Derrida are attacking: the convention that somebody is speaking. But still, when you’re following a narrative, you are in a sense listening. And then at the end you get a sort of Gestalt: you “see” what it means. When somebody tells a joke, he leads in by saying, “Have you heard this one?” and then, if he’s lucky, by the end you see what he means. But these are just metaphors. The hearing is something associated with sequence and time; the seeing is something associated with the simultaneous and the spatial. Interviewer: We have chosen the title of “Mediascape” for our theme issue. How are we living in a mediascape today? Frye: Well, if you mean that people live within a cosmos essentially constructed out of the formulas of television, it is only in the extreme that some people do. That’s one reason why you get those extraordinary stories of people on the street all standing around with their hands in their pockets watching someone being attacked. It’s because they see everything as happening on television, and so it seems that nothing is really happening. But the impulse to self-preservation is very strong in the human race, and the tendency to try to break out of the mediascape is correspondingly strong. Every responsible citizen breaks out of the mediascape. Interviewer: How might the mediascape—television—reshape the methods of perception and cognition of our culture?

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Frye: Television does not necessarily blur our sense of reality. It depends on how completely you accept the conventions of mass media and apply the mediascape to the actual environment. In a stage play the illusion and the reality are the same thing. At the same time that you are living in a world of mediascape, if you are going to be a sane and responsible person you have to realize how much of it is illusion. And to realize how much of it, on the other hand, can contribute towards your mental construct, which is actually all you can get from reality. There is no natural environment in human consciousness except what the human consciousness has constructed. Television does have some rigid conventions that possess a certain projective power. The fact that the great land mass of Canada, which made so little sense in the nineteenth century, is being brought together partly by air travel and partly by television is proof of this. If you see, for example, the Inuit people on television, they no longer are abstractions wrapped up in seal skins. They are people like ourselves. We have the possibility of humanizing the abstract into something relatively real, as long as we don’t fall into the kind of hypnosis I spoke of a moment ago, where we can’t take part in anything because it’s all “television.” Interviewer: Do you see the media age as evoking a new mythology, one which helps us to come to terms with the advances of science, and with our new conceptions of the universe? Frye: A myth is really a structure of human concerns, of human anxieties and hopes and ambitions. As such, it is not a science, so it really can’t be set aside by science or have very much contact with science. There are certain types of myth that develop certain cosmologies which do come into contact with science and have to be replaced by scientific explanations. But the pure myth is a literary structure—not pseudoscientific information. I see the media age as reshaping the old myths—there aren’t any new ones. No matter what the mechanical devices employed, mythologies are transmitting words and pictures, which is what the human race has transmitted since Palaeolithic times.

84 The Great Test of Maturity Recorded 28 May 1986

From WGS, 313–22, where it is transcribed by Robert D. Denham from the CBC tape with the present title. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. Interviewer Vince Carlin acknowledged the assistance of Grace Cirocco in preparing the interview, which was broadcast on the CBC’s Media File, 10 June 1986. Carlin was at that time chief correspondent for CBC Radio News; after a distinguished career in broadcasting he became chair of the Department of Journalism at Ryerson University, and then ombudsman for the CBC.

Carlin: First of all, does the popular journalism of today have a real impact on our society and its culture? Or does it just flit on the surface of it? Frye: Oh, it’s bound to have an impact, and even if it’s superficial, nevertheless it has a cumulative effect day after day in the steady bombardment of events. A world in which an atomic energy plant springs a leak and you see the results in the air in Winnipeg is obviously a world in which there is a very considerable response to this bombardment of sense impressions. Carlin: Now I’m a bit hesitant to ask this, but I noticed you were taking notes while we were doing World Report [the news] a little while ago. I also recall that you’ve written that the vast majority of things we hear today are prejudices and clichés. I’m wondering whether your note-taking was relevant to that. Is what we hear on radio and television so pedestrian, so routine, as to not have meaning or to have a negative impact?

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Frye: Well, a great deal of it is, and a great deal of it is bound to be, with all of the deadlines that people have to meet. I think that all of these things are morally neutral, and the moral effect of them depends entirely on how they are used by the consumer. A consumer who understands that a great deal of improvised communication is bound to be full of prefabricated phrases and clichés and doesn’t worry about that but simply writes it off is still making the kind of use of it that a concerned and civilized citizen ought to make. Carlin: Well, let’s talk a bit about the use of clichés—the kind of language that so often finds its way into radio, television, and newspapers. Is that really a context-setting method? Is there something detrimental about that? Frye: There is something detrimental in the sense that it’s used to more or less block off a process of thought. We’ve become much more sensitive in the last thirty or forty years to the extent to which clichés really conceal prejudice. The women’s lib people, for example, have told us how full the language is of putdowns of women of which we’re totally unconscious. And yet because we use them, it doesn’t really matter that they’re on an unconscious level. The same thing is true when we talk about a police state, totalitarianism, and so forth. Even when those things are basically true, they’re still oversimplifications. Carlin: Is there a better way to do this—a better way to present the events of the day than by the use of formulas and clichés? I think you’ve said that there’s no thought behind the news. It’s just a reactive writing or communication. And what would be your advice to me? I have to go in there every day and write, as well as read, some of that information. How do we avoid the cliché? Frye: I’m not sure that it is possible to avoid it under the circumstances in which you work. If you had more time, you would instinctively try to cast your language into a direct expression of yourself. But when you know you have to go in there within ten seconds and you have nine-andone-half-minutes to deliver the news, naturally you use what’s readiest at hand. Carlin: An American television journalist, Ted Koppel, said in a speech that almost everything that is publicly said these days is recorded and almost nothing of what is said is worth remembering. There’s also the

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idea that thoughts expressed by philosophers remain universal, and philosophers have endured without videotape and film. What about the constant recording of everything that’s said and done? Frye: Well, that merely brings out the fact that ninety-nine per cent of what is said and done is produced on a surface level and is largely secondhand in the ideas it uses and in the kind of expression it uses for those ideas. It may be true that practically nothing is worth remembering, but nevertheless there is a great deal that can still be said that is worth remembering only in slightly different departments of contemporary culture. Carlin: What do you mean by that? Are journalists capable of doing that on a daily basis? Or is that the province of the philosopher? Frye: I wouldn’t, if I were a journalist, want to give up entirely to philosophers the saying of memorable things. I would like to feel that my ambition would be to get into some kind of position where I could, say, write a column in a newspaper or host a program on radio 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. Carlin: Can you think of any examples in our current culture of things that are memorable in the popular media? Frye: We don’t have very many articulate people in politics now. Everybody remembers that Trudeau once said something about the universe unfolding as it should.1 That happened to be a personal remark, so it stands out from the great welter of babble in Canadian politics. Carlin: Why is that? Do you assume that there is a lower level of articulation or literacy among politicians? And if so, why is that? Why has it declined? Frye: I don’t know that it’s a lower level. It’s simply the entering into a world of very largely anonymous and impersonal communication. And the impersonal has no contact. Until it’s become personalized, it’s not really verbal expression at all. Carlin: So that their having to communicate with large numbers of people through microphones and cameras would produce this?

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Frye: Well, there’s that, and there’s also the fact that in a world dominated by advertising and propaganda nearly everything that’s said is ironic. That is, if the opposition asks questions in Parliament, their aim is to embarrass the government, not to get information. And the government’s response is not to give information but to defend themselves. Every rational citizen knows that and allows for it. But that makes for completely anonymous communication. Carlin: It’s interesting that language is becoming ironic or is being used in an ironic way in the language of public debate. Frye: It always was, in a sense, because so much language is designed to keep the ascendant class in the ascendancy, or vice versa. Carlin: I think you have also voiced the opinion at one time or another that perhaps newspapers shouldn’t be in the form they are now—that maybe they should be turned totally into journals of opinion and comment. Frye: Well, I was merely noting the fact that newspapers have an increasingly hard time competing with television as a popular medium, and that people read in the newspaper very frequently what they’ve heard on television the night before or earlier that morning. Consequently, the healthiest thing for the newspapers to do in that situation is to become more of a minority medium, more preoccupied with discussion and analysis than with headlines and deadlines. The same thing happened to radio when television came in. Carlin: There’s an interesting question here: As the literacy rate of society has increased over time, has the communications level decreased? Would there be an audience for those newspapers if they were turned into journals of comment and opinion? Or have people become so used to shorter, snappier, less communicative articles, less communicative means of gathering information? Frye: Again, that depends on the reader. The reader who is disinclined to make the effort certainly doesn’t want a journal given over to analysis and discussion, which requires him to think about the issue. But I think there are enough people who do to make a market for that. Carlin: I must say I wonder whether there are. Frye: I know it’s a difficult thing, but the great test of maturity is know-

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ing when one is bored. I think that people are really bored out of their minds by what they get from the news media. What bores me is the expression of what is obviously hypocritical, as when a government official in Washington comes out with a statement on free trade or tariff or limiting the arms race and so on. Of course, he believes in God and he wants peace, but . . . It’s that kind of stuff—the excuses for thought and expression—that bores me. Carlin: What about things here in Canada? There’s another phrase that has struck me—“the tedium of the permanent identity crisis in Canada.” Does that creep into the daily media? Does that permeate what we do as Canadian journalists? Frye: I suppose it does, because the issue is usually something that has been thoroughly discussed already. To raise it again is to raise the practical certainty that there’ll be nothing new or original said about it. Carlin: That’s a rather daunting task for the journalist—trying to figure out something new to say about these subjects. Frye: But surely that’s what journalism is. Carlin: Well, one wonders sometimes, even given what you’re saying, whether what we’re doing is recasting information in understandable ways but perhaps in clichés, which, while understandable, become meaningless. You’ve talked about the Bible as the great code for European and Western literature and for our culture. Is journalism in a small way trying to use languages which recall that code? Or have they so misinterpreted that code as to become meaningless? Frye: They relate to that code at a very considerable distance, a distance of many centuries of the institutionalizing and accommodating of its language, again, to prefabricated forms of speech. The real reason why the Bible fascinates me as a literary critic is that its language comes out of direct experience. It’s not secondhand language. Naturally, when people are presented with that, their instinct is to blink and look away and turn to something which is more familiar and more reassuring. Carlin: Can we talk about that a little more—the difference between direct experience and secondhand language? Can you relate that to the way we work today? Are you saying that the writers were writing directly from things they saw, or just that it so infused their lives as to inspire their writing?

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Frye: Certainly the prophets were people who had suffered greatly in their own experience and had been persecuted for what they’d said, so that naturally they had nothing to waste on commonplace ideas or things that everybody knew. And the same thing happened to the Resistance press in France under the Nazis. There was no time to waste on chitchat. What you presented were the essential things that the people who picked up the journal had to know. That is really the function, I suppose, of our novelists and poets. They are dealing with the same kind of human experience that everybody else is going through, but they are straining it through an individual, distinctive, personalized utterance. Carlin: You seem to be suggesting almost that perhaps it wasn’t such a good thing that twentieth-century journalism moved away from the parti pris style of having various newspapers reflecting viewpoints. We’ve moved today into the so-called objective style, where the opinion is supposed to be relegated to one page of the newspaper, and the rest is supposed to be written in—I always put quotes around the words— “objective style.” Frye: Well, that is a difference in idiom or convention. For a time, of course, it produced a very considerable impact. I think that Time magazine got a reputation for being practically the voice of God in news simply because they cut out the editorial page. It established the convention, because what it said was the news. Carlin: Can we talk more about what’s important and what’s not important? We get a fair amount of mail on this program charging us and the media generally with missing the important stories. There’s one person who writes all the time and says we’re not talking enough about the U.S. conspiracy against various freedom-loving peoples of the world. Others who write say we’re missing other important stories. What do you think of the stories that are important that we haven’t been communicating? Frye: It’s difficult to give a coherent answer to that on all levels. When I pick up the morning paper, I find the correspondence column one of the things I turn to first simply because it records a lot of different ideas on what the newspaper should have been reporting. About the best we can do in that respect is to have a certain free play and to keep reminding ourselves that any act of selection, no matter who does it, is going to be conventionalized and is going to stress some things more than others.

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Carlin: When archaeologists or historians a couple of hundred years from now come back to try to find out what were the significant events of our day, are they going to find them in the archives of the CBC and on the front pages of the Globe and Mail? Frye: I doubt it very much. They will find out what is going on on the level of news, but actual history—what people will be interested in in the twenty-first century—is largely invisible to the news media. I remember looking at a retrospective television program on the Diefenbaker years in Parliament, and the television showed all the rowing in Parliament and all the seesawing back and forth. Finally a reporter got hold of that conscientious man Stanley Knowles and asked him what he thought of the Pearson regime, and he gave a list of the measures that had been put through.2 Well, with that answer you are in real history. But that’s what gets squeezed out. You have to remember that our lives are the history and that it’s what is very largely invisible to the news media that makes the history. What is going on here is made by the universities and by our writers and thinkers and so on. But that, again, doesn’t come in the idiom of news. Carlin: You say our lives are history. What does that imply? Are you talking about the lives of the thinkers of our society or just the lives of ordinary people? Frye: The lives of ordinary people. The whole process of living is a personalized process, naturally. And the rain of impressions of the news media conveys something impersonal, which, like your breakfast food, you have to eat and try to digest. Carlin: I guess we can’t avoid the subject—if we talk about culture, and I’ll have to put “culture” in quotation marks because the definitions would vary—of the CBC, which is always cited as either a cornerstone or a threat to Canadian culture, depending on your point of view. I’d be interested in hearing your reflections about the place of the CBC (this is the fiftieth anniversary, actually, of the CBC) and its relationship with the culture of Canada, particularly its relation to the thoughts you expressed earlier about culture springing from an individual location. Can a national organization like the CBC reflect that? Or does it tend to wash it down, to thin it out? Frye: Well, it could wash it down and thin it out, but I think the CBC people realize the importance of the regional in Canadian culture and

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are very well aware that what happens on Vancouver Island is a very different kind of culture from that in Cape Breton Island. I think that there are two extremes that we’re all aware of and want to keep away from. One extreme is total laissez-faire, where all the news media are simply the reflection of certain advertising pressures. The other extreme is the totalitarian handout of government propaganda that goes through all the media. In a democracy we want to have those two extremes fighting and knocking each other out so that we can get some kind of reality out of the middle ground. I think the combination of what are called private broadcasters and of nationally subsidized broadcasting is a rather healthy thing for a country. I was on the CRTC for some years and we had hearings for the CBC when its licence renewal came up.3 I was very deeply impressed by the way that people went to Ottawa from the Northwest Territories and British Columbia and Newfoundland in order to say, “Look, there are lots of things we don’t like about CBC Television”—it was mostly television—“but it’s ours and we want it.” It was simply a feeling that the CBC was something shared by people over a vast territory and that they were proud of the possession. Carlin: Perhaps we could talk in the few minutes we have left about you personally. I presume you’re in full flight on the second part of your work on the Bible. Perhaps you could tell us what you’re up to. Frye: I am, it’s true, trying to work out a book on the Bible and its relation to literature which will deal with the Bible as such and more with the way it infiltrated the imaginations of poets and dramatists and fiction writers in the Western world. That, of course, is a huge subject, one that I would never tackle if I were young and still had a reputation to make or break. The book has been considerably delayed partly through thinking of it as a sequel to another book. I have to start at square one and realize that whenever you begin a big project you begin with a reflection that you know nothing whatever and then go on from there, for everything you learn is bound to be new. Carlin: I’ve read that you’ve occasionally said—I’ve never been quite sure whether it was in jest or in seriousness—that if you had to do it all over again, maybe you wouldn’t want to be exactly the way you are. I’m wondering why that would be so. Frye: Well, I have heard people talk about what they would do if they had their lives to live over again, so naturally I’ve reflected on the same

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thing. But I always come back to the fact that what I did was an expression of what I was. If I were going to do it over again, it would really be the same kind of thing because the same kind of person is behind it. But one can get bored with one’s personality after seventy or eighty years. And if I wanted to do it all over again, I would want to be somebody else to do it with. Carlin: You would want to be somebody else but to do the same kinds of things? Frye: Well, not somebody else, but someone with a different set of qualities and interests. Carlin: Like what? Frye: Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been very heavily specialized in the study of literature. Practically, I’m an absolute duffer. Anything mechanical comes apart in my hands at once. It would be nice to know what it would be like to live as a person who was a practical handyperson. Carlin: What’s beyond this “daunting”—I think that’s the word you use—this daunting prospect of the second book on the Bible? What do you see down the road? Frye: I haven’t any idea, because it’s blocking the view. Once I get through with it, then I will see what’s down the road.

85 Archetype and History Conducted July 1986

From “Northrop Frye: An Interview with David Lawton,” AUMLA, the journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 66 (November 1986): 249–59. Frye’s summer trip to Australia and New Zealand, 17 June–7 August, included a number of speaking engagements and a seminar at the Australian National University, the fruits of which may be seen in the other scholars’ papers included in this “special Northrop Frye number” of AUMLA. Tragically, the trip concluded with the death of Helen Frye at the Great Barrier Reef area. This interview was conducted at the University of Sydney, where Frye had a visiting professorship in English, 7–24 July; he also spent 23–27 June in Sydney. Interviewer David Lawton was a professor of English and a scholar of the Bible at Sydney University, later at Washington University in St. Louis.

Lawton: During a question-and-answer session in Sydney I heard you say, “I rather resent being known as that man who does archetypes and myths.” Do you accept archetypal criticism as a good label for the sort of work that you do? Frye: On the understanding that “archetypal” means recurrent patterns in literary experience which give unity to the criticism of literature, I would consider that it was all right. I use the term “archetypal” in its Neoplatonic sense, only as something immanent and not as something belonging to another world and generating things in a lower world. But I used the word “archetype” without realizing how completely Jung had taken it over and, while ultimately Jung seems to mean much the same thing by archetype that I do, in practice his archetypes are psychological entities, which would have the effect of turning the whole of literature into a gigantic allegory of Jungian individuation.

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Lawton: Do you prefer the word “archetypal” to the word “symbolic”? Frye: I thought that “archetypal” at least did have this conception of something which, if not exactly a model, was at any rate repetitive. Symbol seems to me so very vague a word. I think that symbol really has two meanings. There’s symbolon, which means a ticket or check—something you can break in two and recognize by the identity of the break. That’s the symbol related to something outside itself which completes it. Then there’s also the word symbolos, which means a portent or augury—which makes it a metonymic thing, something that refers to a larger pattern within it. I don’t object to the word “symbol,” but the kind of thing that I am doing I think is more accurately described by “archetypal.” Lawton: What I am exploring is the importance for you of something beyond language. Faced with the two accounts of creation, a later (Genesis 1–2:4) and an earlier account in the rest of Genesis 2, the early Church Fathers and particularly the Alexandrian ones, presumably based on Jewish exegesis, came up with the idea of a sort of Platonic archetype or prototype for the human world (including human language) in the first account, and the actual human world and actual human language in the account of Genesis 2. Do you find that kind of space important for your own criticism: the notion that there is something beyond language that Saussurean linguistics doesn’t concede is there? Frye: Yes. I think there is, and that’s one of the reasons for using the term “archetypal.” The Platonic, or Neoplatonic, exegesis which comes through in Clement of Alexandria and Origen thinks in terms of a world which generates models or copies in this world, and I regard that as something of a figure of speech. You have in our day people like Mircea Eliade finding that conception of archetype among various primitive societies where they speak of a mythical time which existed before our time, the events of which we keep repeating in what we know as time. That’s all right, but I think of the archetype as, as I say, immanent, as working within time. I don’t object to a feeling that there is something about the archetype which is not removed to another world but at any rate inexhaustible in this one; something which can’t ever be completely analysed or understood. There’s a residual mystery about it. Lawton: It is a fairly clear dividing point, isn’t it, between you and linguistically inspired critics: the notion that there is in some sense behind

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language a set of forms which generates individual languages as we use them—rather than the languages in some ways dictating what we think, what we do, and what we construct? Frye: Yes. You are thinking of Chomsky and the way in which the grammatical process is generated. I have no doubt that that’s a good deal of the truth as far as the evolution of language is concerned. The thing is that once man starts to use language, all kinds of unpredictable things begin to hitch themselves on to the use of language, such as puns and ambiguities and the associations of words, which may be arbitrary but nevertheless condition our thinking for all that. That’s what sometimes gives the impression that behind the set of generating forms there is some kind of power—not necessarily a power beyond humanity but a power that gets tapped like electricity—that tends to take the speaking human being over. Lawton: What happens to history in an archetypal account? If I temporarily wear the hat of a historical materialist I would complain, would I not, that an archetypal account is somehow de-historicizing? Frye: That’s often said, and, as a matter of fact, here in Australia when I was expounding on this point, somebody, quite obviously a Marxist critic, said, “How would you historicize what you have just said?” Well, I thought I had historicized it. But, to me, in the first place, I am, as a literary critic, dealing with the history of literature, and the history of literature is not something that yields itself entirely to a historicized study. That is, the history of current ideologies, the history of origins and influences, things that can be documented—all that aspect of history is extremely legitimate; but there is also a factor in literary tradition which is very much more elusive than that, which has to be reconstructed by comparative generic criticism, and I don’t see that as being anti-historical—I see it as being what Derrida would call a supplement to history.1 Lawton: So part of the answer is that you simply don’t deal with some more historical aspects which you accept to be valid when dealt with by others? Frye: I leave them to other people who are more interested in that and more competent to do it; I just feel that there are aspects of history that most historians don’t recognize as history. But then, of course, I was brought up in the school that said that history was a branch of the

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humanities, and that the best way to write history was to write it rhetorically, like Thucydides. I’ve been told many times that my view of the Bible in The Great Code is anti-historical, and my answer—which is a snap and irritated answer—was that I didn’t think I was anti-historical, but the Bible certainly was, and I had to explain why it was. The Bible is not strictly anti-historical, but it does use historical material in a way which infuriates and exasperates the conscientious historian. In other words, supplementary methods must be used to bring out the real history in the Bible. Lawton: Since we have moved on to the Bible, one of the problems that I have constantly met when I work on it is deciding whether I think that the problems I meet in the Bible are simply the concentrated problems that I meet everywhere else, or whether in fact the Bible presents a completely special lot of problems as well as, or rather than, those others. When I read The Great Code it occurs to me, not necessarily that you have the same problem, but that you’re aware of this ambiguity in one’s response to the Bible. I wondered if you’d like to say more about it. Frye: I would say that they are typical human problems in a special context: the problem, for example, about the historical Jesus, the figure behind the Gospels. The original twelve disciples had just as much trouble with that problem as we have, and they missed everything that was happening to them because they were looking for the historical Christ and getting nowhere, instead of accepting the unique mythical experience that was being handed them. What they were given an opportunity to do was to concentrate the ordinary human experience in a very special unique context. Lawton: Is the Bible perhaps the last place where one needs the criterion of truth? Frye: The criterion of truth? Lawton: Where one can use the criterion of truth? Frye: That depends on the meaning of verbal “truth.” The truth of correspondence, of the verbal structure related to a body of phenomena which it is allegedly describing, is not anything primary in the Bible. The Bible is quite obviously passing over that in favour of something else. The kind of truth that it’s after is an inner truth, which arises from the resonances and inner complexities of the verbal pattern of what’s being said. Noth-

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ing happens in the Bible except verbal events, but it’s the interplay among those verbal events in which the truth emerges. Afterwards it is inexhaustible. That’s why mystery is sometimes used in a demonic context in the New Testament—the mystery of iniquity. It is also sometimes used in a good sense: “And thus it is given to you to understand the mysteries of the kingdom of God.”2 What mysteries mean there, I think, is something which, if not unknowable, or unknown, is something unlimited. Lawton: I wonder whether we have particular problems when we use the English language: that is to say, languages which can talk about histoire are in a rather fortunate position. There is no primary need to distinguish at the basic level of interpretation between fact and fiction, which English does force on one. Frye: On the other hand, I would always feel greatly handicapped if I weren’t working with a language that distinguished a history from a story, because I don’t believe that the Bible is a history in the sense in which that term is usually applied, but everybody agrees that it tells a story. Lawton: The question is, I suppose, whether history ever does anything else but tell a story? Frye: Sure, if you mean by history simply a story, but not raising a question that history is true story whereas story is fictional story. I would say the Bible tells a story which is not the less true for being unhistorical. Lawton: What you have said about the resonance of the text and the words, the verbal structures, is a necessarily reader-oriented, interpreteroriented entry to the Bible, is it not? I suppose that’s the absolutely basic argument with the fundamentalists that you have: it really denies the idea that there is any perspective from which one can distinguish, at least easily, between what one sees and what, in fact, there is. Frye: The difficulty in that is that the Bible is an extraordinary example of what is true, really, of all books: that you can never make a definitive response to any work of literature because you’re not all the other people who read it. The work is a focus of a community and the community extends through the centuries. We can’t simply step into the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New Testament without all the differences between supersubstantial bread and daily bread and apostle and bishop and so forth rolling around in our minds.

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Lawton: But even after we have done that . . .? I’m very struck by the limitations of Old Testament Form-Criticism. At the end of the day one perhaps knows less, but I’m not sure if one knows more. Frye: You said it. Lawton: You don’t care to comment? Frye: Well, I always feel there is something getting away from me in all this, that Robert Alter and his kind know things that I don’t know—I don’t know what, I haven’t yet discovered what they are from their books. Lawton: It seems to me that a lot of your critical position on the Bible and your sense of the relation of the work on the Bible to other critical activity is probably best called Coleridgean. Frye: I think that if I believed in anything like reincarnation I would feel that maybe I was commissioned to write Coleridge’s book of the Logos which he kept hugging to his bosom in the form of fifty-seven notebooks that a colleague of mine has tried to edit.3 Lawton: Is Coleridge prominent in your new book? Frye: He’s prominent in my thinking about the new book, and I daresay there will be a fair amount of the typology stuff in the Friend and elsewhere, because Coleridge’s instincts in the matter, I think, were very sound and very central—just with the exception that he was a lazy bastard and didn’t write them out. Lawton: What happened to the place of the Bible, in talk about literature, between the times of Coleridge and Frye? Why is it that until The Great Code, on the whole, the Bible had edged further and further away from the centre of literary-critical thinking? Frye: I suppose the reason was that the analytic school took over, and in between Coleridge and Frye there was first of all Strauss’s Life of Jesus and the whole attitude to the Bible laid out in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I think of myself as kind of another Casaubon in some respects, though I hope I have a better sense of perspective.4 I think that there was the same kind of schizophrenia that you have in literature between the extreme naturalists of the Zola school and the symbolistes of the Mallarmé school. You have very analytic and textual critics of the Bible disintegrat-

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ing it, and then you have all the Blavatskys and occult people, who are not working with the Bible at all, who are working with symbolic patterns which are rather like it: and of course, they’re poles apart—they never get together. Lawton: Is there any way in which that can happen now? Is there any way in which we need literary critics to tell Biblical scholars what frame of reference they should bring to how they expound what they know? Is there a possibility of a common discourse again in a world as increasingly specialized as ours is? Frye: I would rather tell literary critics what they could use from the literary aspects of the Bible than Biblical scholars, but I know what you mean. I know that the critical approach to the Bible when I came to it as a student is very out of date now, and I’m not quoting it as contemporary scholarship, but back in the 1930s everybody was saying that Mark was closer to being a biography of Jesus than John was, whereas any literary critic would have known that that was nonsense. Lawton: I’m struck by the fact that our view of criticism as an activity in the Western world developed, if from the ancient Greeks at all, then via first and second century Alexandria. I play—I don’t know whether I can do any more than this—with the idea of Jacques Derrida as a kind of modern Origen, an enormous allegorical exegete, with the idea that critical activity, particularly of the French kind, is in fact locked into a tremendously allegorical process. I’m pursuing a fugitive connection here with what went on in the earliest days, when you have Origen really teaching Western Christian Europe how to read, not how to read the Bible, but how to read anything. There seems to have been an extraordinary ricorso in Derrida, in the deconstructionists: looking at any other meaning than the “obvious” one, in effect—which is what Origen did if you reduce it to a simple technique—without any of that sort of integrating sense of a discourse through which all those other readings become culturally possible. Frye: I think that you have an antithesis there which should have synthesized: that is, you have a Greek tradition which hit on some extraordinary central notions, like the notion of reconciliation—the Bible as the total summation of knowledge, which I think is still something that I am chasing myself; and then opposed to that is the Latin tradition, which is working with a legal language, and keeps abstracting and tying down,

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and defining. Somehow or other the richness of the one and the precision of the other never seemed quite to get together. Lawton: At what point do you think they came decisively unstuck? Frye: I suppose all things happen from the second century on, since the condemnation of Origen. Lawton: There seems to me to be in that answer a dream of an integrating humane scholarship. It’s almost as if you have revived the idea of an integrating approach based in the humanities which goes all the way from criticism to social organization. Your answer, “Any time after the condemnation of Origen,” almost denies the possibility of this in any kind of society or culture we’ve actually known. Frye: Except when it breaks out in things like the Victorines.5 And even there, of course, it’s very carefully guided and ruled. The Romanization of Christianity imposed something like what the doctrinaire Marxists imposed, say, in the Soviet Union: the thaws are just ways of permitting a certain amount of flexibility—but only as long as you don’t forget that the Holy Church is still infallible, whether Communist or Catholic. Lawton: To take the historical question from another angle: do you feel the need to distinguish sharply, and do you in fact distinguish sharply, between the Christian Bible and the Jewish Bible? Frye: I find that very difficult to answer. I feel that it’s ideological and propositional language that divides, and that symbolism and imagery are a universal language. In imagery and in metaphor it seems to me that Judaism and Christianity are identical. But doctrinally a religion which accepts incarnation is very different from a religion which does not, and while I think I can come to terms with the Jewish conception of the Bible, it’s just possibly the prejudices of my upbringing that I feel that the Bible is beheaded if it doesn’t have the New Testament. I just can’t get over that. Lawton: This is a problem I experience. I feel much more ashamed in front of a Jewish student who raises this point than I do in front of the denunciations of any fundamentalist student, because I feel that at least the fundamentalist and I have had an honest disagreement, but the Jewish student is accusing me of an act of complicity in a two-thousandyear-old act of theft.

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Frye: Yes, I think I managed to get over the gap in the course on the Bible I taught at Harvard, where I had something like four hundred and twenty students and a fair number of them were Jews. I tried to explain something of the difference between the two conceptions and the way in which Christianity had used Jewish conceptions in ways that Jews would think intolerable but nevertheless did fit consistently the structure of Christianity. They went off and held special sessions themselves to discuss the Christian interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, and they’d come out shaking their heads and saying, “Clever buggers these Christians.” Lawton: To accept that, though, puts a level of ideology into one’s own work with a text at a point earlier than one is prepared to accept that it ought to be there. Is that a fair comment? Frye: I suppose so, yes, and in the same way I can’t imagine what I would do with the Bible if the Koran were tacked onto it as a still more sacred text. Lawton: When you talk about the Bible, you’re clearly talking about adherence to the Christian Bible rather than the Jewish Bible or Islamic Bible. This would mark you as a very Christian reader. Do you accept this description, and how do you think your Christianity as a reader, Christianity or not, would reflect on your definition of good criticism, which would seem to me to be highly ethical? Frye: Well, I would be committed to Christianity in certain existential contexts. As a literary critic, I accept the Christian Bible rather than the Jewish Bible or the Koran not from religious conviction but simply because it is the Christian Bible that has actually infiltrated the literary culture that I’m interested in: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, and so on. So I really have no choice in the matter. I simply don’t know enough about the ramifications of the Jewish Bible and Jewish literature of the imagination, or the Islamic. So that as a literary critic I am constantly aware of the fact that I grew up within a Christian church as a person, and keep trying to back away as far as I can from imposing any sort of sales pitch on the reader or trying to slip in Christian dogmas disguised as critical judgments. Lawton: One last issue, then, which I think comes out of these. It seems to me that today Christianity is in a highly anomalous position. You and

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I and lots of people regard it as culturally central, historically central, yet I can’t help thinking those who most actively and dogmatically assert the values of traditional Christianity probably know the least about it. You’ve spent some time in what must be (a purely personal judgment, you understand) the most unenlightened Anglican diocese in the entire Anglican communion—the Sydney diocese. It seems to me that in terms of the values of social and political organization we no longer live in a Christian society, and I don’t know to what extent we live in a Christian culture. Would you like to comment on that, and arising from it: would that make your current enterprise somewhat anomalous too, in the same way? Or to put it positively, how would you see the core and what you’ve called the resonance of the Christian myth—that is, what you take to be timeless in it, independent of any particular social or political context—how would you see that surviving, in whatever transformed form, in the criticism and the creative writing of the future? Frye: I think that it would go on being a central element in the literature of the future simply because of the centrality of its structure of narratives and images. The present social situation of Christianity is so varied that almost anything you can say about it has some truth in it. In some parts of the world the churches are forced to fight on a left-wing radical side. They are, at the same time, being threatened—or they consider they are being threatened—by various movements like feminism and so on, and Christianity as a social institution has all those difficulties. I myself grew up in a culture in which the Orange Order, that is, the anti-Catholic organization, controlled everything in the city of Toronto. You could go and hear a very well-known pastor say that God was in his heaven and the only things that bothered him were the machinations of the Roman Catholic clergy.6 But there has been a very considerable growth of fairly elementary charity since then, and you wouldn’t find those remarks socially acceptable anymore. I do find that an encouraging sign. But even so, all the difficulties that Christianity is in have to do with doctrines and beliefs, and statements that this is true and therefore that is not true. I have nothing to do with that. I am concerned only with what the poet sees in a religious structure. Lawton: The question is whether the increasing lack of centrality of Christianity as a social institution does not drag the Christian myth, if you like, out of its central cultural position.

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Frye: It may do that, but if you think of the analogy, for example, of the use of Jupiter and Venus in medieval and Renaissance poetry: nobody built temples to them, nobody worshipped them, nobody thought they were worth anything except puerile fables of the heathen; nevertheless they took on an imaginative life of a kind they never had before. I would look forward to a tremendous emancipation of Christian imagination to the extent that it now does break down into deadlocks of fossilized belief, and going on doing the same things because we’ve always done them and therefore they’re sacred. Lawton: And you would expect writers of the future to tap that in some way? Frye: I think that they would tap it because they really have no choice. Again, a poet can only work within the conditioning framework of imagery that he inherits. Whatever the social and religious situation may be in Australia, I am rather struck with the number of Australian poets who come from a Catholic background and, whether they remain practising Catholics or not, certainly use that background in their poetry. I think this is just something they can’t help. I don’t think D.H. Lawrence had any use for his evangelical training in Nottingham, but he used it just as much as though he did. Lawton: Critics, however, can help it: because critics have, or are, a kind of built-in censor [sensor?]. Do you think that criticism runs a risk by turning its back, as decisively as for example some of the French critics have, on the Christian myth? Frye: Oh yes, I think that that’s a very dangerous form of self-mutilation. I’ve noticed it when they deal with somebody like Mallarmé, who had no religious commitments in terms of doctrine but nevertheless used Biblical images such as the martyrdom of John the Baptist and used the word verbe in practically a theological sense. You can’t just ignore all that. You’re simply bowdlerizing the text if you leave that out.

86 Moncton, Mentors, and Memories Conducted 7 November 1986

From the “New Brunswick Literature” issue of SCL (Studies in Canadian Literature), 1986. Reprinted in WGS, 323–41. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook and correspondence with interviewer Deanne Bogdan. The article included a photograph (not reproduced here) of Frye’s grade 8 class at Edith Cavell School, and notes which are signalled here by [B]. Bogdan was at the time a professor in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Education at OISE; she later became professor emeritus in the graduate program in Philosophy of Education, Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education, OISE. She notes in her introduction that the interview traces the influence of Frye’s early life in Moncton on his mature work.

Bogdan: Professor Frye, you were born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, but grew up and went to school in Moncton. During what years was that? Frye: It was sometime around 1919 or 1920 that we moved to Moncton. There had been a background of disaster in the family. My older brother was killed in the First World War in 1918. My father’s hardware business in Sherbrooke failed at the same time, so he moved to the Maritimes to take agencies for the hardware companies in Upper Canada. Moncton was the logical centre for travelling in the Maritimes. So I moved there when I was seven or eight, and I went to school in grade 4 (my mother had been teaching me at home). Those were fairly easygoing days; you could stay out of school from the period of six to eight [years of age]. Bogdan: You lived at number 24 Pine Street? Frye: We moved there, yes, in about 1924, I think, and stayed there for the rest of the time.

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Bogdan: What kind of neighbourhood was that? Frye: Well, Pine Street was rather a back street, and we looked into the back doors of the houses on the next street, Cameron Street, which was much more stylish. Cameron Street fronted on a park, and on the other side of the park were two public schools—the ones I attended—Victoria School and Edith Cavell, a name that was common after the First World War.1 Bogdan: You have said that you grew out of a pastoral myth of ordered values. What did you mean by that? Frye: I don’t quite know what I meant by that . . . . My parents felt the shock of all these events, and my mother was growing deaf at the same time. The fact that I was born very late (they were forty-two when I was born) meant that, in effect, I was brought up by grandparents. So my childhood was an extremely lonely one, I think, and I suppose creating a kind of pastoral world was the obvious resource open to me. Bogdan: You have suggested that perhaps your early years in Moncton served as a kind of foil to what you were to become in your later creative life. Frye: Well, I suppose one always spends one’s adolescence discovering who one is; that’s all one can do. I was pretty vague about it, really. I had the nickname “Professor” because I wore glasses and was never very well coordinated, but it never occurred to me to teach in a university because Moncton at that time was not a university town. Bogdan: Was there a sense of cultural life flourishing at the time that you were growing up, in terms of the arts and general intellectual life? Frye: There was very little of that that reached us. We were on the wrong side of the tracks; that’s quite a literal statement in Moncton because it’s a railway town. The railway runs right through the middle of it, and north and west of the railroad is the second-class area, for the most part. And the cultural life I didn’t have much contact with. As I said, my parents were even more retiring than I was. On a very rare occasion a concert would come to the city. I remember one group of Welsh singers came purely by accident to Moncton, and I myself realized that I actually wanted to hear them. In the course of it they played Purcell’s Golden Sonata, and it hit me like a cold shower.

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Bogdan: How old would you have been at the time? Frye: Oh, nine or ten, I think. Bogdan: We’re at present celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the CBC. Are you aware of any influence Canadian radio may have had on you? Frye: Not at that time. Canadian radio was then—this was long before the CBC—very largely a matter of all the kids building crystal sets and tuning in on all the squeals and groans that got produced. We never had a radio in our house, just a heavy supply of static. Bogdan: You are a champion of cultural regionalism—you’ve said that “the more specific the setting of literature, the more universal its communicating power” [WE, 515]. Yet your own cultural antecedents were more cosmopolitan and structural—the poetry of Blake, the drama of Shakespeare, the music of Bach. Frye: That is true of the musical interests that I had, yes. The literary ones were largely a matter of trying to find out what had happened in the twentieth century. My parents had acquired no books since about 1910, and there was no public library in Moncton until I was about 14 or 15. When it came in, I started reading people like Bernard Shaw, who had just been a name to me before. The school itself had a room they called a library, books behind glass cases, but nobody had the faintest notion of what to do with that; nobody ever went in there. Bogdan: The library you speak of, that was the one on Archibald Street. You worked there, didn’t you? Frye: I did one summer, yes. Bogdan: It was new at the time. Frye: It was put into what had been a private house.2 And apparently the wiseacres of the town got the notion that that was the place for a library because a retired surgeon from Chicago had a valuable collection of local material, and offered to give it to the Moncton Library if they could put it in a fireproof building, which, of course, it wasn’t.3 Everything was made of wood in Moncton, so everything burned sooner or later. In fact, there used to be fire alarms, and the classwork would stop for a minute or two while somebody fished out the list of stations to see where it was. Bogdan: So you lived in a state of contingency.

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Frye: Yes. Bogdan: You have said that the Maritimes represented to you a kind of divided culture, an “amiable apartheid,” I think you’ve called it [BG, v; C, 416]. Were you acutely aware of this when you were living there? Frye: Not acutely. But the reason why I called it “amiable” was that there wasn’t conflict or bitterness or any genuine racism; it was just that some people spoke English and went to Protestant schools, and other people spoke French and went to Catholic schools; that is, most of the Catholics went to French schools. But I would never use a word like “apartheid” to describe anything I approved of. Nevertheless, there are degrees of it. It’s better to have that than to have active racist prejudice. Bogdan: You have also said that everybody in Moncton who was adult simply regarded it as a remote suburb of Boston and that many of your classmates from Aberdeen High went on to postsecondary studies in New England.4 Frye: That’s right. They called New England the Boston States, and practically every girl in the class who graduated from grade 11 went on to nursing at either a Boston or a Providence Hospital. Bogdan: And yet you came to university in Toronto. Did you ever think of going to, say, Harvard or Yale? Frye: No. I came to Toronto and Victoria because of family roots. That is where my mother is from, from the area around Kingston. And my grandfather, her father, had attended Victoria for a year or two in the old Cobourg days.5 Bogdan: And so, when you say that coming to Victoria was like coming home to your natural environment, you didn’t mean it only in its intellectual and imaginative context. Frye: It was my actual environment because my parents never wholly moved to the Maritimes. The Maritimes have the name of being rather exclusive. They never felt at home there in any case, and I inherited from them the feeling that I was floating in the Maritimes, and the sooner I got out of it and back to where I came from, the better. Bogdan: And so how would you have felt when you returned home for Christmas and summer vacations from university? You spent them in Moncton, didn’t you?

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Frye: Yes, not Christmas, but the summer. I had a small group of friends around me, but for the most part it was just a matter of catching up on my writing. Bogdan: In one of your mother’s letters to your cousin, Donald Howard, she says that you came home to Moncton after graduating to see whether you could earn your living by writing.6 What kind of writing did you have in mind at that time? Frye: I suppose short stories, and breaking into the magazines, which everyone was trying to get into then. Bogdan: You’ve also said that you didn’t really have the right feel for the fictional mode, that you were already beginning to think in theoretical patterns.7 Frye: Yes. I didn’t realize that at that time. The fictional model seemed to be possible for me, but I was very green, and in the same way I had opted for the ministry as the obvious job for someone of my interests. Bogdan: Moncton has spawned two other internationally renowned intellectuals, the jurist Mr. Justice Ivan Rand and the physicist Simon Newcomb.8 Can you think of any traces of an archetype that would link the three of you to Moncton? Frye: I’m not really sure that I can. I remember Rand was running on the Liberal ticket and a man named Reilly for the Conservative party. And that was another thing. My parents were fiercely Conservative on the whole, while Moncton usually voted Liberal at that time. Bogdan: You have described your background as middle-class, and sometimes I read “nonconformist” and at other times “claustrophobic.” Which is the more accurate term? Frye: They’re both accurate. It was middle-class in the sense that my father and mother always regarded themselves as middle-class people. There was no question of a working-class psychology with them. It was nonconformist in the sense that my mother’s father had been a Methodist circuit rider, and there was a very strong evangelical religious streak in the family. My father went along with this, but I never understood how I identified so quickly with Blake’s thunder-god in the sky with a beard and reactionary political views—because my own father was a very decent person and utterly unpretentious—until I realized that I got this feeling at one remove, from my grandfather.

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Bogdan: Your grandfather was a minister. Frye: Yes. Bogdan: In one of the letters from your Aunt Mary, your mother’s sister, to Donald Howard, she discusses the fact that your grandfather’s last words to her were, “Mary, I don’t understand God.”9 This despite his commitment to his own hermeneutical position. Frye: Well, that I think illustrates a considerable intellectual honesty in the feeling that perhaps his career as a clergyman had been, to some degree, putting on an act, as just everybody’s career is to some extent. Bogdan: Your Aunt Mary seems to be aware of that; she seems to have been rather an independent thinker. Was she more that way than your mother? Frye: Aunt Mary was the one in the family who didn’t marry, who went out to the West to teach Ukrainians, and who read what was at that time contemporary literature. The odd copy of Ibsen and H.G. Wells we had in the house came from her. Bogdan: She also introduced you to Shaw, did she not? Frye: Yes. I think we had his “pleasant plays,” Candida and Arms and the Man as well.10 Bogdan: So you thought of her as a kind of frontierswoman? Frye: I never came in all that much contact with her because, when she came back to live with my parents, I was away at college, and we didn’t meet a great deal; but I did greatly respect her position as an intellectual, and so did my mother. Bogdan: To use the current jargon, we might say that you were “socialized” very early into your primary disciplines, literature and religion. For some, this would mean a future of working quite strictly within the bounds of those disciplines. And yet you have very much broken out of that into a kind of open mythology in both. Is this true, and if so, does it have its genesis in your early life, and in what way? Frye: It’s a difficult thing to talk about, but I remember one morning walking to school (that was Aberdeen School, which was much further from the house than the public schools). I’d just got into high school. I was reflecting rather idly on some of the religious categories that had

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surrounded me, and—this is where the word “claustrophobic” came in—I suddenly realized that these were just blinkers, and I didn’t have to have them on my eyes; and they just disappeared like that, and they have never come back since. Bogdan: Was that a kind of apocalyptic experience for you? Frye: Almost, yes. That is, I thought I was an agnostic for a while; then I realized that, if I started revolting against my background, I would just make a long detour and come back to where I started from. So I tried to find a more open way of looking at what I’d been brought up to. I’ve always had a strong feeling that mother was very conscientious in her religious teaching of me, but that she didn’t actually believe much of what she was saying, although she thought she did. In fact, she was convinced she did. But something else got through instead. Looking back on it (this is hindsight, I know), I think she felt that what she taught me must be true because her father had told it to her, and she was very much dominated by her father. At the same time, she had a great deal of common sense, and that, as I say, was what came through. Bogdan: And, I would think, a great deal of confidence in you. Frye: Yes, there was, and there was an anxiety to hold on, too, that I think all mothers have. Bogdan: She displays a great deal of detailed knowledge about your comings and goings at Victoria College, that you dined in Burwash Hall, but had lodgings at Fifth House. She certainly knew all of that, the prizes and the amounts of money associated with them, and so on. Frye: I never knew . . . . I’m sorry . . . . I knew that she was writing those letters [to Donald Howard] but I never read them. Bogdan: You had some very successful relations in your family—your cousin Alma Howard, who earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and did early research in DNA.11 Frye: Yes, a distinguished researcher. Bogdan: And then another cousin became vice-president of the Royal Bank.12 Was success in the conventional sense very much part of your ethos? Frye: I think it was, yes. I think mother was very pleased when I

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announced that I would be a candidate for the ministry, but I think that if I had become wealthy, she would have been even more impressed. Bogdan: So there was a kind of snobbery about . . . Frye: It really works out to that, yes, a kind of snobbery, but it’s the work ethic; it’s the way Methodism functioned. Bogdan: If we could move now to your early education. In Spiritus Mundi you describe your conception of the educational contract as a “free authority, something coherent enough to create a community but not an authority in the sense of applying external compulsion” [42; WE, 373]. Yet you say your own early education was one of the milder forms of penal servitude.13 How would you relate these two phenomena? Frye: Well, when I spoke of penal servitude, I was speaking about the teaching methods in the elementary schools in Moncton. Bogdan: You have talked about your ideal of the teacher as being not an opaque conductor but a transparent medium.14 Did you ever have any of the latter kind of teacher? Frye: What I remember was my music teacher, who was outside the curriculum. Bogdan: George Ross? Frye: Yes. Bogdan: You studied piano with him? Frye: That’s right. Bogdan: He was an organist, though, was he not? And he had done a Ph.D. dissertation at Toronto? Frye: Yes, Mus. Doc. He did a doctoral exercise which has never been performed that I know of, but I would very much like to hear it performed sometime. Bogdan: It was a composition? Frye: Yes, you had to send that in. Bogdan: What was it about him particularly that you admired so much as a teacher?

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Frye: Simply the fact that he didn’t exist to show off his students. The only authority that came through was the authority of music itself, because I was under no obligation to go to him. Bogdan: How long did you continue to study with him? Frye: About three to four years. Bogdan: Did you like to practise? Frye: Not much, no. Bogdan: Did you practise? Frye: Yes, yes, I did. I did a fair amount of work. Bogdan: Was there a difference in feeling about studying music and reading literature? Frye: There was to me. Music was the great area of emotional and imaginative discovery for me. Bogdan: Your Aunt Mary writes, “Cassie [Dr. Frye’s mother] and I think it would be so nice if Northrop could concentrate on music.”15 Did your mother encourage you more in this than in your scholarly endeavours? Frye: Not particularly. Neither she nor my father were at all anxious for me to go on with music. Bogdan: You subscribed to Étude magazine as a teenager. Was that a Canadian publication? Frye: No, it was published in Philadelphia. The editors were all epigones of Macdowell, who had been trained in Germany.16 So I picked up the notion that the only serious music was German music, and that Verdi and Puccini and so forth were just a bunch of organ-grinders. It took me a long time to get over that. Bogdan: Did you have any sense of Canadian music at the time, or Canadian composers? Frye: Not except for George Ross. I didn’t know a single composer at that time, not until I met him. Bogdan: Another early source of your literary and musical life was the Palgrave Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, book 2.

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Frye: Yes, the Board of Education put that on the curriculum by mistake. Bogdan: It was a textbook kind of publication, with poems by Blake? Frye: Not Blake, it was seventeenth century; it was early Milton and Marvell.17 By technical standards it was a very bad anthology, but the poems in it were very powerful. I used to say, and I think it’s true, that that’s one reason why I’m in literature, because the Board of Education made a mistake and put that on the curriculum. And, of course, then they realized what they’d done and put on Maria Chapdelaine instead the next year. But by that time, it was already too late. Bogdan: You were already hooked. Frye: Yes. Bogdan: You played Schubert impromptus at radio station CNRA. Frye: I think what I actually played were two movements from the Schubert sonatas, on the centenary that they had in 1928. Bogdan: Did you suffer at all from performance anxiety? Frye: Oh, very much, yes. I never had the motor control that I wanted. That was because I started too late. Bogdan: So therefore “the word” is a somewhat safer terrain? Frye: That’s right, yes. Bogdan: In an interview with Ian Alexander [no. 79] you say about the Schubert Impromptu, Opus 90, No. 1 in C Minor, that what appeals to you are the rather simplified, square-cut tunes, and yet it expresses to you a profound serenity. You like composers such as Hummel, Dussek, and Clementi for the same reason. Frye: Yes. I found a certain sanity in them. I didn’t discover Clementi and Dussek until very late, but the night my wife went into the hospital for a hysterectomy, I played twenty-five Clementi sonatas straight through. Bogdan: Emotional stability. Is music a safer psychic container than literature because it is less referential? Frye: I think very probably it is, yes. Bogdan: In Creation and Recreation, you quote Oscar Wilde on what it

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means to play Chopin as the recreation of “unlived experience” [CR, 11; NFR, 41]. How does that relate to emotional stability? Frye: Well, I suppose it’s a matter of recollection in tranquillity, as something that has been there for some time. That’s a very profound remark of Wilde’s, that music seems to recreate the experiences for you that you didn’t actually go through. Bogdan: If we could return now to a discussion of some of your mentors. You were a good friend of Professor Krug of Mount Allison.18 He was your don at Victoria College. What was his influence on you? Frye: Well, I don’t know, except that I suppose it was just a straight case of hero worshipping. He was older; he was large and handsome, and intelligent. I don’t know that there was a great deal of influence there, but I enjoyed so much talking with somebody who could refer to philosophers and carry on a conversation in that sort of vein. Bogdan: A well-known teacher of yours was E.J. Pratt. In one of your mother’s letters she said, “Pratt is a Newfoundland poet, but we call him one of the Canadian poets.”19 Was there for you a sense of the disjunction between Newfoundland and Canada at that time? Frye: Of course, Newfoundland was not part of Canada at that time. A great many Newfoundland people had come to Mount Allison and were classmates of my sister there,20 and the sense of the disjunction of Canadians from Newfoundlanders was perceptible. What I felt was that Ned only found himself as a poet after he had come to Toronto. That was one reason why he didn’t start writing until very late in life. Bogdan: It was Pratt who helped you to become, as you say, “more detached from the Romantic mystique that opposes creative writers to critical ones” [SM, 24]. Was that Pratt himself, his poetry, or both? Frye: I think it was his poetry rather than himself. I don’t think that Ned was interested in criticism at all, but the thing that made the difference was the amount of pure scholarly research that he put into his poems. Bogdan: On the other hand, your own scholarly research in criticism has been described as a kind of poetry. For example, Robert Denham sees your taxonomic structure in the Anatomy as “aesthetically rather than instrumentally motivated” [NFCL, 56], and that it is, in a sense, an outgrowth of your influence by Pratt. Would you agree with that?

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Frye: I think there’s something in it, yes. Bogdan: You were once asked why someone with your kind of creative imagination became a critic rather than a poet, and you replied that it had to do with your early physical and emotional make-up—your shyness, your myopia, and your lack of physical coordination. Does this imply that a greater degree of self-consciousness goes into a critic than into what we normally think of as a creative artist? Frye: Yes, I think that a critic works mainly with the left half of his brain. That was the way I always worked. And I used to steal metaphors from the right-hand side of the brain. Bogdan: A fellow Monctonian has described you this way as an adolescent: “A tall, thin youth, his wildly blowing reddish hair . . . seemed the essence of artistic eccentricity. He never seemed to move at anything but a half-running pace. His books stacked under an arm, obviously concentrating, he seemed to look neither to right nor left, just straight ahead and determined.”21 Is that your view of yourself then? Frye: Well, it sounds like a fairly sharp observation. Bogdan: You were going somewhere . . . Frye: [laughing] I was usually in a hurry. Whether I was going somewhere or not is a matter of personal rhythms. Bogdan: In your recent book on Shakespeare, you write this on Romeo and Juliet: “nothing perfect or without blemish can stay that way in this world . . . . nothing that breaks through the barriers of ordinary experience can remain in the world of ordinary experience . . . . [Romeo and Juliet’s passion] went only where it could . . . . out of this world” [NFS, 32]. This is an exuberantly romantic view of the world’s most beloved lovers. It doesn’t seem quite to fit with the shy, tall youth from Moncton. Is there a way in which your literary ideas perhaps are a projection of your inner self? You say you like to hide behind an uninteresting life. Frye: Well, I think that there’s a great deal of projection, in the sense of acting out roles. I was talking yesterday, I think, with a woman who had taken the course in nineteenth-century prose thinkers with me back in the 1940s. And she said that what impressed her about it was that I became Mill or Ruskin or Carlyle or Newman, that I had half the class

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meditating conversion to Catholicism as long as I was lecturing on Newman, but when I got to Matthew Arnold, my persona changed views. In other words, there is a matter of stepping into a certain role as a teacher. I’ve always stressed the importance of that in saying that the authority in what you’re teaching never comes from yourself, and if it does, you’ve had it. It always comes from what you’re teaching, and you try to make yourself a transparent instrument of that. Bogdan: That seems also to be the case in your writing and your criticism, so that the essence of the text comes through. Frye: That’s what I try for, yes. 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.”22 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. Bogdan: Was your “Damascus experience”23 in walking to school that day a kind of bridge for you in having that sense of oppression lifting? Frye: Yes, the real liberation came from the fact that the sense of oppression up to that time had been unconscious. I wasn’t revolting against anything that I consciously knew was stifling me. I suddenly became conscious that it was, and that it didn’t have to be there. Bogdan: Did it manifest itself in your daily life? Did you then move from a more introverted to a more extroverted social life? Frye: I didn’t move to any sort of extroverted life until I hit college at Victoria when I flung myself into every kind of student activity. Bogdan: Your mother’s letters indicate that you were a member of many clubs, that you were constantly being issued invitations, and that there came a point when you had to quite deliberately curtail those activities. Was that difficult for you to do? Frye: Yes, it was difficult for me to find a balance. I had been rather isolated in Moncton (which was as much my doing as Moncton’s, if not more). And as soon as I hit Victoria, I perhaps went to the other extreme and had to pull myself up for fear of dissipating my energies.

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Bogdan: You were a Boy Scout, and actually earned badges, I believe. Did you enjoy that experience? Frye: I did enjoy the experience, yes. Although it was a rather unfortunate Boy Scout troop because it was almost impossible to find a scoutmaster. We did have a very good one when I first joined, but he left town. For a long time we carried on by ourselves, nothing except boys playing together. Bogdan: Your parents were not people of means, but your father placed a priority on buying you a bicycle, which you loved to ride. Frye: No, I think it was Mother who squeezed the bicycle out. Bogdan: Where would you go riding? Frye: Oh, all over the place. Moncton then was very easy to get out of. And there wasn’t a paved road in the province at that time. They were all either gravel or dirt roads, and it was easy to roam around the countryside. Bogdan: Was that a kind of germinating space for you? Frye: Yes, it was. Bogdan: Did you have a sense of the terrain being nondescript in any way? Frye: Oh, I don’t know about that. I think that I always tended to create a kind of fairy-tale world around me, and every road, every dirt road going into the country, seemed to me to be wrapped in mystery. Bogdan: A springboard for the imagination? Frye: Perhaps so, yes. Bogdan: On Sunday, 20 January 1929, you are listed on a church brochure as being Devotional President of the Young People’s Society. Frye: Oh, God! Bogdan: Was that your parish church? Frye: I think that that was a convention of a group of boys from Saint John and elsewhere. Bogdan: You gave a speech. Do you remember the topic?

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Frye: I’m afraid not. Bogdan: Do you have any sense of your involvement there in terms of making your decision to enter the ministry? Frye: Well, I suppose there must have been. It was just that the fundamentals of that kind of thing were already there in my mind, so I could make a speech about them. And I must have been at business college [the Success Business College, Moncton] at the time. Bogdan: That was 1928–29. Frye: Yes. Bogdan: Can you give us some sense of your daily activities then? Did you attend regular classes? Frye: Yes. Bogdan: Did you have homework? Frye: No. I was given a scholarship because I had led the class in English, and the business college automatically gave a scholarship to the top person in English. And so I went and learned shorthand and typing. That was the stenographic course. They had a better course, which included bookkeeping, but I loathed bookkeeping and had nothing to do with it. So I learned shorthand and typing, and, because of my piano-playing, I was fairly proficient at it. Bogdan: And so, the famous typing contest. Frye: Yes. Bogdan: There’s a sense in which that, too, was a bridge in your life, bringing you to Toronto. Frye: Yes, that was. Bogdan: Do speed and accuracy in typing and their relationship to the production of print, i.e., the book, invoke the spatialization, the possession, of literature? Did you feel that at all about actually constructing print? Frye: Well, it did make a psychological difference when things I was interested in could appear on printed pages, at least on typewritten pages. I never got to the point of composing on the typewriter.

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Bogdan: Do you now? Frye: No. Well, I do now more because of arthritis setting in; my hands are, in fact, very painful and I’ve had to change my working habits. But my working habits were always originally to write out things in longhand. Bogdan: You speak of the “genuine primitive” as the reader who is innocent of literary convention, as someone completely swallowed up by the reading act.24 Was this your experience in your early reading of George Eliot, Thackeray, and Sir Walter Scott, or were you already discerning theoretical patterns? Frye: I suppose I was subconsciously, but I was totally naive when I was reading Scott. The devices of the storyteller were something that were entirely new to me, and I didn’t realize how contrived these books were until I read a few more hundred novels by other people. Bogdan: Do you feel that with your work on The Great Code you are returning to a more—I don’t want to say naive—but a more direct experience of the text? In contrast to the privileging of the critical response in your earlier work? Frye: Yes, yes. I think that’s quite definitely true. Bogdan: Would you go so far as to say that you are coming to terms with your own particular literary-religious sensibility? That is, you have secreted the pilgrim within the critic. Are we going to see more of that in the second volume of The Great Code? Frye: I would think so, yes. I’ve become much less self-conscious, and I am feeling out of the great critical trends today. The man who’s giving the Alexander Lectures this year has four; he’s addressed one lecture to the deconstructionists, one to the Marxists, one to the formalists, one to something else.25 Now, none of this includes me. I’m totally out of fashion, and I think I’m rather relieved to be. Bogdan: Do you think criticism today is entering a phase of fundamentalism? Frye: Well, it’s entering a phase of sectarianism. Bogdan: A tower of Babel? Frye: Yes.

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Bogdan: One of your inspirational figures was the composer Sir Hubert Parry, who wrote, among other things, The Ode to Newfoundland, but also a setting of Blake’s Jerusalem. He was in a sense your musical grandfather? Frye: That’s right. Yes, he was George Ross’s teacher. Bogdan: Grove’s Dictionary of Music, 1910 edition, says that part of Parry’s power came from the fact that his music could be felt as much by the untrained hearer as the educated listener. In that sense, he’s a kind of counterpart to Blake, isn’t he? Frye: I think that he did reveal the spirit of that Blake poem, very clearly, in his musical setting. I remember George Ross telling me how extraordinarily brainy and clever the exercises were that he would set his students, and so obviously he had a tremendous intellectual control and technique with them. 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? Frye: Well, in the first place, I don’t believe in either/or. I don’t think that the aesthetic experience is in a separate category from the religious experience. I think that, if anything, it’s the other way round, that it’s the experience that I’ve got of literature and music, and to a lesser degree of the other arts, which has given me the sense of what Kierkegaard calls ethical freedom, and it seems to me that it’s the aesthetic attitude that made me break away from the objectivity of literature as “out there.”26 Bogdan: A state of personal innerness? Frye: Yes. Bogdan: Has your work on the Bible, in the two volumes of The Great Code, made you perhaps less wary of “the gambling machine” of an ideal literary experience? Frye: Well, I’ve often said, of course, that the ideal literary experience happens so seldom that you have to construct criticism in order to make up for the absence of it.

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Bogdan: But there’s a sense in which reading the Bible as literature becomes its own critical world view. Frye: Oh, yes. In fact, it moves a good deal further than that, I would think, and it’s pointing in the direction of the kind of experience where you no longer really need literature so much as the vision you already have. Bogdan: And so, therefore, there is a greater chance of the ideal and the real coinciding? Frye: I would think so; that’s more or less the assumption I’m working on, though I’ve never come very close to any such experience. Bogdan: But it’s what you always seem to be pointing to, and in that sense you are a kind of “drop-out” from “ordinary existence”? Frye: Yes, I think that’s true. Bogdan: Another drop-out from ordinary existence was the late Glenn Gould. But he sought isolation from human contact, control over his art through technology, and fled the city (the archetype for civilization), Toronto, where he was born and grew up, for the intransigence of untamed nature.27 You, on the other hand, have adopted the city, have been committed to people through your teaching, and for you art is a consolation for living in an inhuman, that is natural (in the narrow sense of the word), universe. Frye: Well, the retreat from the city to nature simply isn’t a practicable thing for me. Despite my years as a Boy Scout, I haven’t much of a notion about what to do with nature. The city seems to me the natural environment for the introvert. A person who can live alone can feel a certain presence around him. Bogdan: Anonymity is an important aspect of that, isn’t it? Frye: I daresay it is, yes. Bogdan: A certain freedom comes with that . . . Frye: The freedom of being recognized, in a sense, but not really interfered with. Nature doesn’t interfere, but it doesn’t recognize either. Bogdan: Given the task that we have set ourselves, are there any questions that you would have wanted me to ask which I didn’t ask?

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Frye: It’s always difficult for me to think of possible questions not asked. I don’t have much initiative thinking of them myself, and I’m very much dependent on questions that are asked. Bogdan: Then, I very much appreciate what you have shared with us. Frye: 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.”

87 William Blake: Prophet of the New Age Conducted 21 January 1987

From the copy of the CBC transcript of the program with this title in NFF, 1991, box 41, file 1. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. This was a three-part series on Blake by David Cayley which aired on Ideas on 12, 19, and 26 March 1987. It featured readings from Blake, biography, music, and comments by Blake’s contemporaries and modern critics, including Kathleen Raine and Gerald Bentley. Frye was not present in a studio discussion, but was interviewed separately by Cayley, who then inserted his remarks at suitable points in parts 1 and 2 (part 3 dealt with Blake’s painting). Frye’s words are used to lead into the first part.

Cayley: Why read Blake today? Frye: Why read Blake today? Cayley: Yes. Frye: Well, because he’s one of the half-dozen people in the world it makes sense to read. Lister Sinclair: That was Northrop Frye. I’m Lister Sinclair and this is Ideas on the poetry, the painting, and the prophecy of William Blake. Frye: Blake was the first poet of English literature, and as far as I know, the first person of the modern world who not only had revolutionary ideas but realized that the whole mythical structure of the universe that man had been using for a couple of thousand years had had it, and we needed another one. [After a discussion of Blake’s scorn for the scientists’ conception of an “objec-

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tive” nature governed by uniform laws and set apart from the human observer, Frye’s voice is heard.] Frye: The “real” conventionally means what is “out there” and therefore can’t be changed. Cayley: University of Toronto professor Northrop Frye, whose book Fearful Symmetry set the standard in Blake criticism. Frye: But ninety per cent of our encounter with reality is an encounter with human rubbish, with what man has already made and has no longer much use for. And Blake, like Vico in Italy before him, is saying, “Reality is what you make and you can’t understand what you haven’t made.”1 [The discussion turns to intellectual influences on Blake and begins to follow the growth of his oeuvre. After a reading of There Is No Natural Religion (b), Frye remarks:] Frye: By natural religion, he means the religion that we derive from the sense of design in nature. A sense of design in nature is something we’ve already put there as a mental construct, so we’re really staring in a mirror, like Narcissus. In other words, we get nothing from nature, the passive contemplation of the world. All real knowledge and understanding is created, that is, it’s something that’s an activity in man himself. So all religion is revealed by the imagination. [Three poems are read from Songs of Innocence and Experience.] Frye: Innocence is associated with childhood, not because the child is morally good but because the child is civilized; that is, he believes that the world makes sense and it was created very largely for his benefit and his happiness. Experience comes when you’re older and you realize that isn’t true. So what happens to the child’s innocent vision is that it gets driven underground into what we now call the subconscious, and there it becomes the bound Orc, the sexual energy that’s repressed, and keeps thrashing around trying to get free. Freud discovered that two hundred [sic] years after Blake discovered it. [The theme of revolution introduces the figure of Orc as described in a reading from Blake’s America.] Frye: Orc is the youthful, rebellious energy which can be made constructive instead of destructive, because it’s a sexual energy, and there are

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ways of channelling it so that it isn’t stifled or suppressed. When it’s stifled or suppressed, it gets very dangerous. And Urizen is the capacity for wisdom and experience which can get perverted into authoritarianism. Cayley: And is there an interrelation between Orc and Urizen? Frye: Well, really, all young people are Orcs and all old people are Urizens. These characters are “states,” as he calls them, states of the human mind, and we spend all our time being in one state or another. * * * Cayley: What did Blake see in the revolutions in America and France? Frye: He saw two things in the revolutionary activities of his time. One is the sudden awakening to the fact that man has been playing a damn silly game over the centuries and that he doesn’t have to go on playing it. He can kick over the table and spread the pieces on the floor and go on with something else. On the other hand, he also saw cyclical movement, where a revolution consolidates power by going back to what it was in the first place, and that was what he saw in France when it went from the destroying of the Bastille to Napoleon, and what he saw in the United States when it kept on owning slaves and maintaining an oligarchic economy. * * * [Part 2 covers the middle years of Blake’s life, up to and including the composition of Jerusalem. Urizen is introduced.] Cayley: Urizen is God as a caricature of human reason. He is humanity’s creative power, alienated and imprisoned within an abstract divinity. And inevitably, says Blake, he is a tyrannical God, an allegory of kings and priests, his heavens “Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole” [E521]. Against this God Blake pits what he calls the divine humanity and he takes his stand, according to Northrop Frye, on the Bible, the book which Frye follows Blake in calling “the Great Code of Art.” Frye: The Bible to Blake was really the Magna Carta of the human imagination. It was a book that told man that he was free to create and imagine, that the power to create and imagine was ultimately the divine in man, and that Christianity, and of course it’s the Christian Bible Blake is talking about, was preeminently the religion which united the divine and the human and consequently opened a path of freedom to man which was infinite. The Gospels represent Jesus as saying that nobody can understand God except through him, that is, except through the

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God-man. So you have God, and you have God-man, and you have man. And if you try to approach God without the idea of the humanity of God, then you get what he calls Nobodaddy, that is, the ferocious old bugger up in the sky with the whiskers and the reactionary political views, who enjoys sending people to hell. [Blake’s Let the Brothels of Paris Be Opened, ll. 5–12, is read.] Then old Nobodaddy aloft Farted & belched & coughed And said I love hanging & drawing & quartering Every bit as well as war & slaughtering. Then he swore a great & solemn oath To kill the people I am loth, But If they rebel they must go to hell They shall have a Priest and a passing bell. [E499]

Frye: If you turn to man, simply man, then of course you’re involved in all the evil that makes man a psychotic ape, and that’s the tendency he calls Deism; that is, the tendency to substitute the totalitarian for the social. If you insist on separating God from man, you have merely God, who is a scarecrow in the sky, and merely man, who is a psychotic ape. You have to approach through your own humanity. The human cannot really comprehend the nonhuman or what transcends the human. * * * Cayley: Blake began writing his poem Milton while he was at Felpham, and he engraved the first two copies of it in 1808. It was his reckoning with the figure of John Milton, a poet with whom Blake wrestled all his life, loving him as another inspired man, but passionately disagreeing with many of his views. Frye: I suppose this is an example of what Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of influence. That is, Milton and Blake were so close together in their points of view, and yet there were things about Milton which confined him to the seventeenth century, his very literal view of the Bible. He thought of the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden as literally and historically true. His instincts as a poet drove him in another direction, but still, that was there. And Blake felt that a poem in which Milton was more or less transcended by entering Blake would also be, for Blake himself, a kind of emancipating process.

88 Morningside Interview on Shakespeare Recorded 19 March 1987

From a CBC tape, transcribed by Monika Lee. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Host Peter Gzowski interviewed Northrop Frye on his CBC program Morningside, aired 30 March and 1 June 1987, to celebrate Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1986). The book was soon to be awarded the Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction for 1986.

Gzowski: I could introduce Northrop Frye this morning by enumerating a long list of his honours and achievements, but I’ll forego that and I’ll mention his latest accomplishment: his book on Shakespeare, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, a collection of lectures on the great bard that were once the prize of the privileged few, more than a few, who’ve been Frye’s students. Now they can be enjoyed and shared by us all. Northrop Frye joins me in the studio now. Good morning, sir. Frye: Good morning. Gzowski: Now, I’m intimidated. I don’t know how to deal with the fact of being intimidated in the presence of Northrop Frye. Are other people intimidated? Frye: Oh yes. My wife used to say to them, “You ought to see his baby pictures.” Gzowski: [laughs] You’ve been known to comment on this before. Your reputation is, in fact, a handicap for you, isn’t it? Frye: Oh yes, yes it is. I suppose everybody who is a public character as well as a private one has a kind of schizophrenia to overcome.

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Gzowski: But the publicity of your character is also the publicity of a giant intellect, of a man of ideas. Some of those ideas I find more intimidating in contemplation than I do when I run up against them. You’re not an intimidating writer. Your reputation’s more intimidating to me than some of your conversation. Frye: I’m very pleased if that’s true. Gzowski: Do people run from you at cocktail parties? Frye: Yes, they do, and I’ve been told of occasions when people realized I was coming to a lunch and they all huddled in a corner at the other end. But they were people who don’t know me, I think. Gzowski: How do you deal with that? Frye: Well, you just accept it as a fact of life and try to overcome it when you can do something about it positively. Gzowski: You’re also very shy, I think, are you not? Frye: Yes, that is true, and that has worked against me all my life. Gzowski: You are a minister of the United Church, a clergyman, but you chose not to pursue that career, as I understand it, because you’d have to have that social life, as well as preach. Frye: Social and administrative, those are two things I’m not as good at. Gzowski: The preaching part? Frye: That I think I could have done. Gzowski: You think you could have done? Frye: Yes. Gzowski: I was just wondering. I’m still somewhat in the same sentence, in the same part of it. Perhaps we’d be less intimidated if we knew that . . . Did you come to Toronto because you’d won a typing contest? Is that what brought you to this city? Frye: Not because I’d won it, but I came up here to win it and I came second. Gzowski: Who out-typed you? Do you remember? Frye: A girl from Orangeville.

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Gzowski: What happened to her? Frye: I don’t know, but she was a very good typist at that age. Gzowski: Is your typing ability connected with your ability to play piano? Frye: I suppose so. I had started on the piano earlier, and found that the two didn’t really clash a great deal, although some unkind people said that I played the piano as though I were typing. Gzowski: You weren’t a great scholar, Biblical scholar, as a child. You weren’t a great student. Frye: No. Gzowski: You got marks of the kind I got when you went to school. Frye: Yes. I remember pointing out to my parents with some pride that, as I’d come twenty-eighth out of a class of thirty-two, there were four that were below me. Gzowski: What was that in? When was that? Frye: That was around grade 7. Gzowski: Do you know how many people it makes feel good to know that Northrop Frye came twenty-eighth in a class of thirty-two? Frye: Well, I don’t know, but . . . I thought that public school was one of the milder forms of penal servitude. Gzowski: But you also began your first contact with, understanding of the Bible. Would there be any glimmerings at that time of the ideas that you would later bring to everyone’s understanding? Did you think of it at all as a work beyond parts of the penal servitude of learning? Frye: Well, no. I’d been given an evangelical upbringing and I’d been soaked in the Bible from infancy, and at university or even a year or two earlier I came across William Blake, who made an amount of imaginative sense of the Bible that I never dreamed could be made. Gzowski: Was there a real epiphany? People who write about you talk about epiphany at one time or another, but was there ever a moment in your life of which it’s possible to say, “There was something before and something else after”?

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Frye: I don’t know whether it would be as complete as that, but there certainly were moments when I realized I was turning a corner. When I stayed up all night to write a paper on Blake for graduate school, I knew, at the end of it when I went out for breakfast, that I was going to write a book on Blake, and fifteen years later it appeared. Gzowski: Can you describe that understanding? How would you know that? Frye: Well, I had the very bad habit, in those days, of writing my assignments the night before I was to deliver them, and somewhere around three in the morning something very funny started happening in my mind. I was commenting on one of Blake’s most complex and difficult poems [Milton] and I began to get glimpses of a world that I had never imagined could exist in that many dimensions before, and nothing came clear at that point except that crystal clear determination: someday or other, I’d write a book about this. Gzowski: That’s Blake. I mean . . . you were Blake. Frye: Yes. Gzowski: I want to talk about Shakespeare. I have been going through your Northrop Frye on Shakespeare and I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know where he is. Is it fair to say that after the Bible, Shakespeare is second in our consciousness, or is it in the same level, or where are we? What does Shakespeare mean to me? Frye: Well, I suppose that he conditions the way we speak. His turns of phrase get into the idioms of the language and, because he conditions the way we speak, he conditions the way we think too, because we think along the grooves suggested by our language and by the bits and pieces we remember. It’s a power of articulateness that keeps going past you and every once in a while you catch on to it, and then [on to] the kind of characters it creates, like Hamlet and Falstaff and King Lear, who are so titanic in relation to what we are in their power of expression, and yet they’re recognizable as human beings. Gzowski: You say in the introduction that we make a mistake if we try to think of Shakespeare’s being exclusively relevant to our world or exclusively relevant to his time. Where is Shakespeare’s time? Frye: I was thinking really of the Tudor Shakespeare, the man who

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wrote for audiences in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I; he had to be intelligible to those audiences, and he carries down to us the atmosphere and the assumptions of that audience. So it’s unfair to kidnap him and judge him in entirely twentieth-century conventions. But, on the other hand, if we don’t make him relevant to our time, then we lose all that dimension. Gzowski: And yet he’s all within himself. He’s all on the stage, as you say. I mean this is a charming idea—if he were a twentieth-century playwright we’d have him as a regular on Morningside. Morningside would at least phone him up, right? Frye: Oh, yes. Gzowski: And say, “What do you think of what’s happening in Afghanistan now, Will?” Tudor England didn’t do that. Frye: No. Gzowski: What he said on the stage was enough? Frye: Well, it was all he was allowed to say for one thing. The great mystery about literature is how the great writers communicate over centuries out of totally different cultural environments and frameworks, and that’s been a mystery to me about Shakespeare as about everyone else. The Tudor mystique of royalty and so forth, and the sense of social stratification, the fact that degree and rank is so very important, all that is unintelligible in the twentieth century, but it makes sense in a Shakespeare play. Gzowski: There are three plays not normally associated with each other, but which become associated with each other in the way you’ve thought about them and put them together. Hamlet, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra have almost a chronological context for us, right? Hamlet is the nineteenth-century play, central to the understanding of the nineteenth century. Can you explain that a bit? Frye: Well, I think that the nineteenth century was preoccupied, almost obsessed, by the paradoxical relationship between acting and thinking about action. I mean acting in the general sense, not stage acting. They seem to feel that that was the central paradox of being a human being and that consciousness was a kind of death principle that fought against the power to act spontaneously, and yet it was the human birthright, it

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was the human trademark, so to speak. There’s no end to the number of people who kept revolving around Hamlet, as the play that dealt with that. The French symboliste poets, for example, Mallarmé and Laforgue and so forth, are all possessed by Hamlet. I think the play just sat in the middle of all that nineteenth-century preoccupation with the riddle of consciousness. Gzowski: Would there have been a nineteenth century if there had not been a Shakespeare and Shakespearean Hamlet?1 Frye: Certainly not the nineteenth century we have, no. But the nineteenth century began with figures of action like Napoleon, who didn’t do much thinking, and a little earlier with people like Rousseau who brought in a very intense kind of subjective sensibility, and the way in which these things kept colliding all through the century was what made Hamlet relevant to the nineteenth century. But, of course, if it hadn’t had a Hamlet, it would have done something else. Gzowski: Then King Lear. We’re in King Lear’s time. Frye: I think that that has more of a political than a psychological sense. The world, in these days of terrorism and violence, is really a world set up for the benefit of the Cornwalls and the Gonerils, who know how to take advantage of it. It’s that contrast between the world of love and loyalty, which is so helpless, the world of Lear and of Cordelia, and the world of aggressive action, of Goneril and Regan and Edmund, that seems to have made its particular impression on the twentieth century. It’s a very human world. It’s a very spooky play, King Lear is, but nothing really supernatural happens in it. What happens is the direct result of human behaviour and I think that that speaks more directly to the world since about 1945. Gzowski: Finally, we’re going toward an Antony and Cleopatra world. Frye: Well, I just threw that out as a suggestion: that the world of the Roman triumvirates is really a lot more like our world than it’s like Shakespeare’s world. Gzowski: How? Frye: Well, the feeling of the world as a global unit and the feeling that your loyalty is to certain world leaders, but not necessarily to a nation primarily. That is, in Antony and Cleopatra, the loyalties are to Antony or

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to Caesar, whereas with the historical plays like Richard II, the loyalty is to the person within a national unit, within England. You can get a patriotic speech at the end of King John, but you don’t feel that they’re in order in a play about the Roman world. Gzowski: By definition, can there only be one Shakespeare? Frye: Oh, yes. That’s the way that literature is set up. There can be only one of every writer. We may get writers in the future as good as Shakespeare, though they’d be very different writers, but he’s one of the writers who represent the limits of imaginative expression. The arts don’t improve in the way that the sciences do. Gzowski: Is it possible to imagine that another writer could reach the same limits? Frye: It’s possible to imagine that and I think some of the great tragedians did. Gzowski: And yet, they don’t resonate for us the same way. Frye: Well, I’m not so sure. I remember at Stratford after hearing King Lear for an hour and forty minutes, and then hearing Antigone for forty minutes,2 my wife said to me, “There’s a lot to be said for a play that just gives you the bad news.” Gzowski: I want to talk about public critic and private critic, because you are both, and the essays about you occasionally dwell on that. Do you think of yourself as one or the other? Does either of those phrases have any meaning for you? Frye: Not a great deal of meaning. One tries to be the same person in both capacities and one does a critic’s job, whatever the context suggests. I suppose I’m a public critic in the sense that I’m concerned partly with the theory of criticism and also with the teaching of literature. Gzowski: “Popular critic”: I wonder if that would be another way of saying what I’m trying to get at with “public critic.” A popular critic who guides us through the literature of our times hot off the press. A reviewer maybe in some ways, who says, “Pay attention to this. Don’t pay attention to that. Here’s a way to get into . . .” Is that an important role or one that you’ve ever seen for yourself? Frye: It’s quite an important role to me. I spent ten years reading every

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poem published in English Canada, and doing a review for the University of Toronto Quarterly [1951–60]. That was certainly a reviewing activity and I regarded it as quite an important one, because Canada was just beginning to take hold as a literary unit at that time. Gzowski: Was that a different mind-set you would bring as you would do those reviews of Canadian poetry? Would you say, “Oh, I gotta put on that coat now and do that”? Frye: I didn’t really feel it as different. I realize that reviewing is, to some extent, a contraceptive job, and that was what rather got me down about it, that you were saying, “This is a permanent thing, which you will want to go back to, and this is something which is expendable.” I dislike making that kind of judgment very much, but you can’t avoid it, of course. Gzowski: You disliked it, why? Frye: Well, it made me too much of a judge, and while the judge is the traditional metaphor for a critic, I never believed in it. I’ve believed that the critic was not there to judge literature, but to put the people he was writing to or talking to in possession of what he was talking about. Gzowski: But in not making the judgments . . . the judgments are made. When you approach Blake, Shakespeare, the Bible, you’re not taking any chances here. Frye: No. It’s also true, of course, that when the critic is up against something that size, he’s the one that’s being judged, because the best he has to offer is none too good. Gzowski: That’s, of course, true, isn’t it? How do you spend your time now? Are you having a good time, generally? Frye: Well, I’m in labour with a book. I shall probably keep on being in labour for a long time, and I am teaching one course, but that means I work a great deal at home now. Gzowski: In labour with more books to come and more teaching. Northrop Frye, thank you so much for joining us on Morningside today.

89 Love of Learning Recorded 30 March 1987

From the published interview, by Louise Brown and Bill Schiller, “‘Key to Education’ is Love of Learning,” Toronto Star, 10 May 1987, A1, A10. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. The interview with Star reporter Bill Schiller was part of the Star’s survey of the Ontario education system. Short newspaper paragraphs have been run together in the following text, and the format has been changed to indicate speakers’ names. Words and phrases here in square brackets within Frye’s responses were not within the quotation marks enclosing his words in the original, but were interpolated by Schiller in between quotations. In his introduction Schiller comments on Frye’s importance as a teacher. He continues:

Schiller: Why, then, does a man whose life has been steeped in the classroom call his own schooling as a boy “penal servitude” [WE, 143]? Why has he said over the years that “I probably owe my present interest in education to the fact that I had so little of it” [ibid.]. He claims no school teacher had any lasting influence on him. Just what does Northrop Frye expect of a school system? Frye: I’ve always said that when a person loses his memory, he’s senile. A nation that loses its sense of history goes senile. That’s why I think the memory should be kept active in the educational process; because of the continuity. [Education is] particularly important to Canada because Canada is a commodity country. Economically, it is dependent and limited, in ways connected with its being a commodity country. The liveliest thing about Canada is its culture. It is the one thing that is really respected all over the world. Culture is a product of articulateness. And it is also indirectly a product of education.

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Schiller: Articulateness is a word Frye has used often over the years. What does he mean by it? Frye: The word “articulateness” is a very approximate term. What I mean is, people must have enough words to think with. A great deal of what we call intelligence is actually the ability to handle words and numbers. [This is the very heart of what parents should expect from their children’s education,] some power of articulateness. But schools have to fight with the students’ unwillingness to speak. There is some shame attached to speaking the language articulately, which is a very deeprooted social problem. Schiller: How important was school to the young Northrop Frye, whose studiousness as a child earned him the prophetic nickname “Professor”? Frye: In elementary school, they were just teachers doing their job. Nothing in my school compared for a moment to the influence I had at my home. My mother came from a clergyman’s family and her house was full of books. I was taught to read at the age of three, long before I went to school. So that was by far the most important influence. Children who grow up in a reasonably articulate family with books and habitual reading going on are at an enormous advantage, because the important thing is not what you read, but the desire to read. Schiller: That, to Frye, is the key to education: instilling the love of learning. Frye: What schools should be concerned with is not bodies of knowledge. The basics are not bodies of knowledge. They are skills. It does not matter to me if I am teaching a freshman class who have not read the books I think they ought to have read. I can give them the information they lack, but what I cannot do anything about is the disinclination to read anything. If students come to me with no particular desire to read, because they have been handed a lot of trash to read and they feel reading is for the birds and they have developed a certain passivity of mind that goes with staring at television and repeating prejudices—that is something you cannot do anything about. But if a person has the good will and the impulse to read, then you can do anything with him. You can educate him. Schiller: Once the will to learn is there, what should we teach young people?

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Frye: I very much distrust slogans like “Back to Basics,” because the question of what is basic has to be perpetually redefined. But there are essential things to be taught if you are going to take your place in modern society, such as training in words and numbers, in literature and mathematics. Schiller: In recent months, a flurry of new courses have been recommended to Ontario’s already full high-school program, from classes in the prevention of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) to the teaching of human rights, media literacy, and heritage language. Does Frye approve? Frye: Teachers should not be overloaded with trendy issues to the point of losing sight of—well, the words “core curriculum” are going to get me in trouble—but there are essential things to be taught. I think that education could take advantage of the new frankness in discussing sexual issues. I remember when I was in high school, the teacher told us that there were very few diseases that were transmissible by heredity, and I just instantly asked, “Is that true of syphilis?” My classmates looked at me with the utmost horror. They really thought I was out of my mind for using such a word in public. But I don’t think anyone’s hair would rise now. And I think that kind of frankness is a good thing. Schiller: Another good thing, says Northrop Frye, is the use of standardized tests. Frye: I would, with great hesitation, support a return to departmental exams. They represent something in the educational process that nothing else really replaces. Without them we really have no clue as to the abilities of our students, much less of what they have learned or what they know. There is a great deal of variety in schools, and some students are lucky enough to get a pretty fair literary education, while some are just given trash to read by people who have trashy minds. The trouble with mass education is that you are going to have some teachers who have mass minds and they will want to turn out a mass product. But nothing can replace a personal contact between the teacher and the student. There should be fewer students in the classroom so that the personal contact is possible. There were a lot of gadget-happy people who thought, for example, about twenty-five years ago, that television would replace the lecturer. Well, nothing can replace a human counte-

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nance in front of students and any student could have told them about that. Schiller: Frye himself never got into the “habit of watching television,” although he sat for nine years on the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Frye: . . . because television is a very slow medium for me. What I get out of it as far as news or information, I can get faster from a newspaper. But I think it is a matter of great importance for a child to learn how to select programs, and also study the way he’s being manipulated. It’s a question of making watching television into a skill, like everything else. [What is central to education] is to develop a very critical, independent, active approach to what is put in front of you. Never mind the text, what it says. Look at it with an active mind. Books like Huckleberry Finn have to be read with a certain historical imagination. It’s the same way when you read Shakespeare. Someone asked me a while ago whether The Merchant of Venice was anti-Semitic. You might as well say that Dracula is anti-Hungarian. You have to take these things in the context in which they appeared. Train the student’s critical intelligence. If it turns out to be racist, then throw it away, but do not throw Huckleberry Finn away on that basis. Schiller: As Ontario moves into the twenty-first century, there is much talk about making sure schools create graduates who will serve the needs of the workplace, but Frye says education is too fundamental to be geared to specific economic or political demands. Frye: The industrial elite should do its own bloody education. If they want people to serve their demands, they can set up the organization for training them to do so, quite distinct from elementary and high school. But at the same time, I understand the exasperation of people confronted with potential employees who can’t talk, can’t think. It seems to me that what is central about education is its continuity. That means there has to be a lot of learning by rote, like the multiplication tables and the alphabet. And a lot of drills seem tedious to a child, but nevertheless the child does gradually build up certain skills. Like playing the piano or violin; you can’t do it without practice and without drill. [Although schools are] always in need of improvement, [it should be a] steady and rather unpanicked operation. I’ve seen a lot of revolutionary schemes for the educational system come and go, and they haven’t

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really made much impression on the contemporary scene. There is a great deal of talk about the need for trained minds in the country, but training is something that goes out of date very quickly. The person who was trained in computers in the 1950s, for example, isn’t really very good in the computer world now, unless he’s kept up with the changes. But what is really essential is the feeling, the mental energy, the willingness to tackle a new problem. If a student has the impulse to know, and Aristotle says that all men by nature desire to know,1 then it doesn’t matter what the particular area of knowledge is. It’s not the trained mind but the dedicated mind that matters most; a mind dedicated to knowledge.

90 Frye, Literary Critic Conducted late May 1987

Frye was in Rome 23–28 May to attend the conference “Portrait of Northrop Frye,” 25–27 May. During this time he was interviewed by Loretta Innocenti, who shortly afterwards became professor of English literature at the University of Venice. The interview was conducted in English though translated into Italian by Innocenti for publication under the title “Frye, critica letteraria” in Alfabeta, 100 (September 1987): 28–9, prefaced by some general remarks on Frye. The original English questions and answers in the following text were sent to Robert D. Denham by Innocenti, 12 September 1987.

Innocenti: Your criticism deals mainly with the search for the basic elements of literature—those of formal structure (myths) and those of imagery (archetypes). If these are the common components of different literary works, how can the critic capture the specificity of a single text and of its individual and autonomous meaning? Frye: I think of criticism as a structure of knowledge about literature. If it isn’t that it’s not anything worth pursuing. Uniqueness and individuality are elements of experience, not elements of knowledge. We cannot know the unique, or even the individual, as such: knowledge is of likenesses within differences. In any structure of knowledge, meaning is derived from context, and understanding literature involves among other things understanding the conventions and genres that link works of literature together. Innocenti: In literary studies you stressed the autonomy of the text, which should be analysed systematically in itself and in its relations with literary conventions. Historical, social, and cultural contexts are second-

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ary. How can the critic consider the importance of these contexts in determining and conditioning literary creation? In other words, how can the unchangeable substance of myths and archetypes be reconciled with the dynamic evolution and transformation of the context? Frye: An author means something in his own time: that’s what makes him intelligible to his contemporaries and even to himself. He also means something to us, and we may admire him for reasons that would have been unintelligible to him. His relevance to us, across what are often the thickest barriers of time and space and language and cultural situation, can, in my view, be made comprehensible only by studying his context in literature. His social context is essential too, but it makes a different aspect of him intelligible. Myths and archetypes have no unchangeable substance: they are infinitely flexible and adaptable. If they lose their identity they turn into other myths. I think the examples I have given, such as the unknown origin of the hero as it comes down from the birth of Moses to the plots of Tom Jones and Oliver Twist, illustrate this. Innocenti: In The Stubborn Structure you wrote that the world has a mathematical form because scientists applied it [47; WE, 251]. Don’t you think it is the same with the literary world and our patterns of interpretation? I mean, what is or what should be the relationship between objective knowledge and subjective interpretation in criticism? Frye: A work of literature is the focus of a community. Different people will read it differently, agree and disagree about it, and eventually some kind of consensus emerges. This consensus is the objective residue, what remains after the subjectivity of individual approaches becomes increasingly dated. Much the same thing happens in the sciences—for example, Einstein made invaluable contributions to the contemporary picture of the physical world although he never really accepted the quantum randomness which is also now a part of that picture. Innocenti: Some new trends in criticism, such as deconstruction, deny that we can reach the meaning of a literary work or even that there is a meaning. All efforts to interpret are ways to proliferate structures and senses in an infinite chain of nuances and differences. In my opinion, this sceptical position reduces all criticism to a solipsistic and narcissistic exercise. In your opinion, do literature and criticism possess a sense that might be saved from nihilism?

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Frye: The deconstructionists will have to speak for themselves, but I think the “anything goes” stage is headed for the dustbin already. Derrida himself has a “construal” basis of interpretation that he starts from, and I think his followers will soon discover that there is a finite number of “supplements” that can be based on that.1 In another decade they should have rediscovered the polysemous scheme of Dante, or something very like it. Innocenti: You have written that you don’t believe in a plurality of critical methods. What do you mean exactly? Frye: I don’t remember having said that I don’t believe in a plurality of critical methods: if I did I expressed myself carelessly, as it’s obvious that there is such a plurality.2 What I don’t believe in are mutually exclusive methods: I think a valid critical method owes its validity to a rough consistency with other valid methods. I think of validity as something to be established by experience, with certain approaches proving more useful than others, not by theory. Innocenti: What is the function of criticism in the contemporary world? Frye: Criticism and literature are related as theory to practice, and the function of criticism is to explain the social function and relevance of literature. Also to deal with the relationships of different kinds of verbal experience often, in practice, spoken of as “outside” literature. Innocenti: According to you, value judgments should be avoided in analysing a text. Sometimes negative evaluations have had remarkable consequences for certain authors such as Milton, who was much abused by critics. Do you think there are writers who have been as much abused and deserve a critical re-evaluation? Frye: As long as I believe criticism to be a structure of knowledge, I don’t see how value judgments can be anything but tentative and provisional assumptions. One approaches Shakespeare with an assumption that his reputation is based on something that will make him rewarding to work with: one finds this assumption confirmed in one’s experience, but no actual scholarship can ever be based on the value judgment. “Wrong” value judgments are not errors in taste: they are expressions of inadequate knowledge about literature. The negative value judgments about Milton two generations ago did nothing either for Milton or for the advance of criticism. They were really political and moral judgments,

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and are as dead as the dinosaurs now. I don’t say that a classic writer can never lose his original position: Cicero certainly lost something of his after the social climate of early humanism changed, but he didn’t lose it because anybody made out a case against him. “Re-evaluation,” I keep insisting, is leisure-class gossip, not the study of literature. Innocenti: What are you working on now? Frye: I am trying to follow up my study of the Bible and literature, The Great Code, with a successor that will take in more critical theory and more of the Bible’s actual infiltration into Western literature. Anyone studying Islamic culture would almost certainly start with the Koran; I’d like to see if a similar procedure wouldn’t work with the Bible and Western literature.

91 On The Great Code (V) Published 26 May 1987

From “Northrop Frye: fate studiare la Bibbia,” Il Tempo, 26 May 1987, translated by Nella Cotrupi. While he was in Rome Frye was also interviewed by Donata Aphel, journalist with Il Tempo, an influential Rome morning daily of a conservative cast. The Great Code had recently been translated into Italian by Giovanni Rizzoni as Il Grande Codice: la Bibbia e la letteratura (Turin: Einaudi, 1986).

Aphel: With your book on the Bible, it may be the first time (at least in Italy) that the Old and New Testaments are linked to the study of narrative works. At the international level, what kind of a response has this work garnered? Frye: Let’s say that it was not a unanimous response; many critics had a feeling that this was a book on religion, and that is not so. Others thought that I was being anti-historical, but it is the Bible that is anti-historical. There have also been, however, positive, generous reactions. There are those who understood that the Bible is a unified whole, to be read precisely as a great code. Aphel: In recent days Il Tempo launched a debate around the proposal to include the study of the Bible as an alternative to the teaching of Catholicism in schools.1 Do you agree with this proposal? Frye: It’s an initiative that could well be realized. I have taught a course on the Bible in which Jesuits and Communists have participated. My thinking is that the big book could be a guide for students of every persuasion: Jews, Protestants, Moslems . . .

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Aphel: Excluding the theological aspect, what Biblical theme do you think is most compelling for students? The historical, metaphorical, poetic, imaginative? Frye: What my students find most compelling is the unified whole that the Bible represents; the fact that it incorporates the entire history of humanity. But perhaps what intrigues them most are my tables of imagery, the series of images that I trace graphically and which are also included in The Great Code. Aphel: You speak of The Great Code: the Bible has provided a code of behaviour not only in the moral realm, but also in the public domain. In today’s world, should politics take more or less inspiration from religion? In Italy this is discussed widely in the context of the present electoral climate. As a student of Eliot—who raised this very issue in Murder in the Cathedral—what are your thoughts? Frye: More than anything, I would call it a code of understanding, not of behaviour. Whether politics should or should not take its inspiration from religion is one of the recurring problems in the realm of this “understanding.” Eliot presents it in one way and the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky in another.2 On this matter I have no opinion; otherwise I should have written a novel. Aphel: Another illustrious Canadian scholar, Marshall McLuhan, has said that “the medium is the message.”3 The Bible has had the media of literature, music, painting, the cinema; now it will also have animated Japanese cartoons for TV. Do you believe that the Bible can be abused by these media? Frye: I would say “used” rather than “abused.” McLuhan’s statement is a highly constructed formulation; the message arrives via the medium and it is important that it should arrive. Thus the message of the Bible reaches us even through animated Japanese cartoons. This does not surprise me.

92 On The Great Code (VI) Conducted 28 or 29 May 1987

From “Il Grande Codice: Conversazione con Northrop Frye,” Portofranco: quaderni della casa di cultura [Quarterly of the House of Culture], 2 (May 1988): 29–30, translated by Nella Cotrupi. After the Rome conference, Frye spent two days in Vicenza at the home of interviewer Roberto Plevano and his wife Carla, whom he knew already. (She had been partly responsible for the Italian translation of Fearful Symmetry.)

[The interviewer begins by noting that The Great Code has not so far had much influence in Italian intellectual circles.] Plevano: There is a tension, a problem, in defining the structure and characteristics of the category of the modern in literature. The modern seems almost to be that point beyond which conventional narrative structures dissolve, or at least are put in question. In what sense can the Bible offer us an understandable model for modern narrative? Frye: It is a model in the sense that many contemporary narrators actually dedicate themselves to a quasi-parody, to a deliberate inversion, or to a deconstruction of the conventional forms. This means that the reader is forced to have in mind the traditional model that is being deconstructed. In other words, the reader is made to see that what is being read is its opposite. And this is why I am in favour of an educational system and a mode of instruction organized around traditional imaginative centres such as the Bible. Plevano: In Western ecclesiastical history, particularly from the Middle Ages on, differing interpretations of the Biblical message have emerged

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for the Old and the New Testaments. On the one hand, we may isolate an immanent aspect of God’s message: God revealed in history through the actions of man; on the other hand, we have a different interpretative thread, that of the “desert,” of silence. It is difficult to reconcile the writings and doctrines of St. Dominic and St. Bonaventure, on the one hand, with the thought of Meister Eckhart on the other. How can one speak of a unitary tradition or imagery? Frye: There is nothing of the unitary; the images, metaphor, and myth constitute a universal language. There is the same type of structure in the Oriental tradition, outside the Christian tradition, which is that of the West; with the difference that in the East it is less rooted in a single distinct story and it has a less revolutionary character from a social perspective. The verbal structures are, however, very similar in both instances. Plevano: So, in your view, cultural and even not specifically cultural phenomena typical of the modern, such as the “great narratives” of human history ( the narrative of man’s emancipation by means of technology, or the story of the emancipation of the proletariat via revolution) have this metaphorical model on their back. Frye: They have the model of the Exodus, in which the essential paradigm that initiates the story of Israel is God, who expresses the intention to intervene in history by supporting the oppressed class against the establishment Egyptians. All of this is followed by a movement towards the Promised Land. Furthermore, throughout the Bible, there is the theme of slavery that oppresses the Hebrew race, and always the hope of the prophets that one day Israel will be restored. Then there is the evangelical thread of the prophet Jesus, completely alienated to the point of being crucified, who at the same time turns the world upside down with his revolutionary act. Plevano: Nevertheless, in the history of Western culture it has always been difficult to identify unitary reference points or models; for example, today in Italy there is a tendency to speak of a neo-paganism, recuperating a line of thinking that, from the time of Giordano Bruno, moves out to libertine culture and to the Enlightenment. Frye: In my book I referred to the story of Japan: in the beginning there was a widespread belief in local gods and in the spirits of the ancestors; then Buddhism arrived, with its doctrine of the One, and all the Buddhist

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theologians maintained that the local gods and spirits of the ancestors could be considered as aspects of Buddha. In this way, in Japan, the two religions could be in perfect accord, proceeding “hand in hand.” I think that in the West we are living through the same process, but in reverse. Christians have had to sever ties with other cultures, and affirm that they possess the only truth, but at the same time that they were becoming culturally dominant, they tended to absorb rather than repulse the other religions. So, from the Renaissance on, there has been much paganism— the creation of “stories” of Venus and Jove has been much more lively in literature during the Christian period than during the period when people believed in these divinities. The American poet, Emily Dickinson, speaks of one who will dare to “refund us finally / Our confiscated gods,”1 and in some measure this has meant that the pagan god Eros, through Freud, has become an aspect of Western culture, as had Prometheus, at least the first version of the myth, through Marx, etc. It is simply a process of expansion and, at the same time, of continuity. As the central metaphorical tradition moves forward, it tends to absorb and unify rather than separate. Plevano: For some time we have seen a return of interest in studies of Jewish culture. Without losing sight of the fact that the Bible is the product of a specific cultural and linguistic space, is it possible to clarify the complex question of the Bible as the source of our own tradition? Frye: Judaism and Christianity have more or less the same metaphorical base. They have different doctrinal foundations because one accepts the immanence of God in man, while the other does not. But their roots are intimately tied and the divergence comes only at a later time. Christianity arose as a heresy within Judaism, and also had to struggle, on the other hand, against the Gnostic movement, which favoured a complete separation of Christianity from Judaism. The Gnostics held that the God of the Old Testament was an evil being from whom Jesus had liberated humanity; this is why the first Christian church insisted adamantly on the fact that the New Testament really expressed the true meaning of the Old. In this way, the rediscovery of the Jewish roots of Christianity becomes a continual process, particularly notable in the time of Pico della Mirandola—I have in mind the Kabbalists—and again with Lessing in Germany in the eighteenth century. And naturally it is returning today: people like Buber, for example, are elaborating interpretations of the Jewish religion that come very close to Christian thinking. I am work-

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ing on these issues in my new book, God as Nothing Who Seeks to Become Something, and as yet my thoughts on this issue are not very clear. Plevano: In your work, which is more important, the direct reading of the Biblical text, or reading various exegetical texts? Frye: The reading of both, naturally.

93 On Education Filmed 23 November 1987

From the videocassette in NFF, 1992, box 5. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1987. Frye was interviewed in Massey College by broadcaster Valerie Pringle for CBC’s Midday, 3 March 1988, to mark the imminent publication of his collection of essays, On Education. The book actually appeared in November 1988, according to a letter in NFF, 1991, box 20, file 5.

Pringle: You started your formal education in school at the age of eight, which is later than most kids. In all I read about you, you don’t have very kind things to say about teachers or the educational system, which you’ve called a form of penal servitude [WE, 143]. It seems sort of bizarre that you’d end up spending your life in its service. Frye: Well, I was taught at home, and those were fairly easy-going days, when our family was shuttling back and forth between Quebec and New Brunswick. So it was just a matter of accident that I did start when I was eight. They put me in grade 4 and I staggered through to grade 11—that was as far as you could go in Moncton at that time. So that’s really why I’m still interested in education—I had very little of it. Pringle: But you were a great reader? Frye: Oh yes. I was brought up in a family that was full of books, and I did get a hand on reading. Pringle: You talk of having a good grasp of nineteenth-century literature by the age of fifteen, reading volumes of Dickens and Scott . . . Frye: Yes, reasonably, I did have that, because our house had those

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books. It was partly a matter of being brought up in a Methodist blue Sunday home too—there was nothing else to do on Sunday except read. Pringle: You had a very Evangelical and strict upbringing as a child. Were you really pumped with religion? Frye: In a way I was. My mother’s father had been a Methodist circuit rider. She taught me what her father had taught her and felt that she ought to believe in. But children are rather quick at seeing what’s behind the scenes and something else got through. Anyway, it never warped either her mind or mine, I don’t think. Pringle: You talk about one time—it sounds like almost an epiphanylike experience—when you were walking along and all of a sudden the weight of your religious upbringing just lifted from your shoulders. Frye: Well, everything that was stupid about the religious background, everything that was anxiety and taboo—“And don’t do this,” and so forth—that just fell off. It was such an immense relief. There was no question of revolt or inner turmoil at all, it was just something I didn’t have to carry around any more. Pringle: And yet you’re ordained as a minister. Did you really think you would spend your life doing that? Frye: When you’re brought up in a town like Moncton in the ’20s, which at that time was not a university town, [the church] is the only cultural symbol there is, and it never occurred to me that I would be teaching in a university because I didn’t have any direct contact with university. I came to Victoria as a religious student and I finished that course. But again, I discovered . . . it wasn’t an intellectual revolt at all, it was simply the fact that clergymen in the modern world are primarily administrators, and I’m not. Pringle: You had a brief time as a minister out in Saskatchewan in a place called Stone Pile. Do you have any memories of that time? Frye: I remember Katy, who had a trot that she was very proud of. But when she trotted the only thing you could do was stand up in the stirrups and the saddle would come up and smack your rear end and come down again. That’s what I remember most vividly. Katy was slightly older than I was; she was about twenty-five. She heard a fair amount

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about my parishioners. From the way her ears twitched I knew she understood me. Pringle: You decided that wasn’t the life for you; you weren’t meant to be a minister. Frye: I had mixed feelings about it. It obviously wasn’t the life for me—I wasn’t brought up to it. At the same time the people I met were extraordinary people and I developed a respect for them that I would not want to be without. I think I would always find people wherever I was in the ministry that I would respect very deeply. But, again, I would feel that I was a fish out of water, that I was born to be a teacher. Pringle: Do you feel that now, that you were born to be a teacher? Frye: Oh, I feel I was born to be a teacher. Perhaps at the age of seventyfive one can let up on a bit of it. During my active career I’ve always felt that my writing and my teaching played into each other a great deal, that the one benefited the other, and that I couldn’t believe anything I said in writing unless I’d tried it out on a class and got them to respond to it. Pringle: There must have been times when people said, “Look, we’ll get rid of the troublesome part for you; you should just concentrate on writing books and that form of academia.” Frye: Yes, but there’s also the fact that one gets rather fond of students and one likes personal contact with people; and that a lecturer is a public performer, which means he’s about nine-tenths ham and he consequently likes a public response to what he does. Pringle: Do you have a sense ever that there’s not enough time to read all the books that you want to read? Frye: I still have that feeling at times, and then at other times I feel great relief about the number of books that I’m never going to read. That’s partly a matter of perspective of course. I remember a student, a girl of about eighteen, telling me that she hoped she would live to be eighty so that she could read everything she wanted to read. What amused me about that remark was that eighty at that time to her sounded like a hundred to me. But you get there fast enough. Pringle: Where do you think you’ve had your greatest influence, through your books—and obviously you’ve been read by millions of

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people and will be—or on the individuals who’ve passed through your classroom? Frye: It’s hard to say, because there are two very different rhythms there. I know that I have had a very considerable personal influence on students. The long-term influence is spotty, because it goes in the cycles of fashion. In one decade, everybody reads Frye; in the next decade, nobody reads Frye—he’s old hat and they read something else. But in another decade that may change again. Pringle: It’s something to come in and out of fashion in your own lifetime. Frye: Whatever happens you don’t worry about it. Pringle: You don’t care about posterity? Frye: I don’t care about posterity. I’m not writing for posterity, I’m writing for me. Pringle: And you’re pleased with it? Frye: Yes.

94 Schools of Criticism (I) Composed December 1987

From “Interview with Northrop Frye,” Quaderni d’italianistica, 9, no. 2 (Autumn 1988): 317–25. In NFF, 1991, box 38, file 7 are written questions submitted by interviewer Francesco Guardiani, dated 14 December 1987, and typed answers by Frye which the printed version follows with a few omissions and minor changes. The implication is that a face-to-face interview did not take place. Notes included by Guardiani in his questions and in print are signalled here by [G]. Quaderni d’italianistica was published in Ottawa as the official journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies; Guardiani is a professor in the Department of Italian Studies, University of Toronto.

Guardiani: The main thesis of Anatomy of Criticism was the establishment of a “new science,” if I may use the expression, of literary criticism as an empirical, systematic, and progressive discipline drawing directly from literature the necessary instruments of analysis. The new discipline should be free from the direct experience that one might have in reading literature and free from the dependence on other disciplines such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, etc. In regard to the first point, what do you have to say to Harold Bloom protesting that “There are no texts. There are only ourselves”?1 Do you think that criticism can be creative? In regard to the second point, I would like you to expand on what you have observed lately, when you said that criticism has not really evolved from its infancy, being “still bound up to ideology, and consequently much more concerned to develop the language of argument and thesis than really to embark on the empirical study of literature.”2 Are you less hopeful now, with respect to the establishment of a new criticism, than you were thirty years ago?

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Frye: I don’t see that Bloom’s remark is anything more than a boutade: it’s a statement of pure solipsism, and while solipsism is always difficult to refute, it’s also easy to ignore. I’ve rather lost interest in talking about the scientific nature of criticism, not because my views have changed, but because conceptions of science (more particularly social science, which is the context involved) are still too inflexible. But whenever critics disagree with each other the only effective disagreement is about the meaning of a text, and the text is always there to appeal to. As there are now about fifteen critical schools to every one that there were in the 1950s, it is about fifteen times more true than it ever was that criticism is bound up with ideologies. Good work may be done within any critical school, but in the aggregate they form a self-enclosed interminable argument. What I feel now, however, is that the pluralistic tendency must work itself out to exhaustion before any real advance in criticism can occur. Guardiani: Literary criticism has been constantly sustained by the support of philosophy. Storms of scholars in the past studied Kant, Hegel, and, at least in Italy, Croce in order to speak competently as literary critics. Today they study Nietzsche and Heidegger. 1) Do you think it is a healthy attitude? 2) Do you think it is necessary to contain the influence of philosophy to remain in the boundaries of literary criticism? 3) Where does philology fit in this concentration on theory? 4) How about the help that a critic can get from psychology? (I know that I am speaking to someone who has meditated on hundreds of books of psychology, who has a particular penchant for Jung, who has recently written an article on Lacan.)3 Frye: In my student days, the literary establishment was mainly philological and historical (the study of modern literatures in the nineteenth century grew up partly as a by-product of imperialistic ideology, which doesn’t say that the study itself was wrong). A number of my seniors were reacting against this and stressing the relevance of philosophy, forming what was called a “history of ideas” approach. I belonged to a generation in which the relevance of psychology and anthropology was also becoming obvious. No sensible critic can question the relevance of these disciplines to the literature that borders on them: what I have consistently objected to is turning literary criticism into a specialized branch of philosophy or whatever.

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Guardiani: In a previous conversation, not recorded, you mentioned that your reading of Vico was an important and revealing experience. You felt that you “had been there before,” having previously studied Blake and having been “innoculated”—that was your word—by his works. What were the cycles of history that you found in Blake? Frye: Blake saw the revolutionary movements of his time in America and France as a repetition of the revolutionary movements in the Bible represented by the Exodus in the Old Testament and the Resurrection in the New. Both of these were “betrayed” revolutions: the Exodus turned into Jewish legalism and the Resurrection into Christian authoritarianism. He saw the industrial movements of his time, including the slave trading in America, the Napoleonic wars, and the intellectual rationalizing of these things, as evidence that the revolution in his day also contained elements of its own reversal. Out of that he developed a cyclical view of history, symbolized as a periodic birth of “Orc,” the revolutionary impulse, Orc being eventually martyred or aging into the opposite of himself. The Mental Traveller is one of several poems that describe this. Guardiani: Vico, like Blake, was interested in understanding the products of mankind, rather than its environment. But Vico, unlike Blake, had no problems in recognizing the presence of a divine power external to man. Who made the world of nature for Blake? Frye: Vico lived in a much more hysterical climate of opinion than Blake did, and he deliberately avoids all problems connected with sacred or Biblical history. But his axiom of verum factum, that man understands only what he has made, and that he has made history, obviously carries him far beyond this putting of history into sacred and profane compartments. As for Blake, he regards nature as either chaos or a human creation: “Where man is not, nature is barren,” he says, and in the imaginative or creative state all objects in nature are “Men Seen Afar.”4 Guardiani: Blake, you say, “is the first person in the modern world who understands that the older mythological construct had collapsed and that a new one had to be created.”5 What is the sense of “creation” for him and how far is he from Nietzsche? Frye: All creation for Blake is also recreation. What is recreated is the original creation before the fall, the fall being a power struggle among “Eternals,” human-titanic beings. Hence all creation today has a pre-

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existent model, and The Four Zoas ends: “How is it that all things are changd even as in ancient times?” [E407]. For him all energy is either creative or perverted and destructive: there is no “will to power” in him as in Nietzsche, where power is not identified with creativity. Guardiani: You made extensive use of the concept of typology (“a vision of history”) in The Great Code, the Bible being the typological text par excellence. Yet the temporal distance that necessarily seems to associate the antitype to the type is disregarded by Blake as a fallacy. How do you reconcile his “eternal Now” with typology? Frye: Blake thinks of the climax of imaginative power as the collapsing of time into an “Eternal Now,” certainly. But he also realizes that man lives in history, and describes, among other things, a temporal sequence of seven ages symbolized by different names under which God has been worshipped, the last two being Jehovah and Jesus. Both testaments of the Bible represent a past looking forward to a future: what Blake means by the “mental fight” of building New Jerusalem is the turning of the future into the present, not waiting for some inevitable process to unroll itself. Guardiani: It is your view that there is something in Blake that makes him stand out of his own historical time. Harold Bloom said that reading Fearful Symmetry one never knows when Blake ends and Frye begins.6 I believe, with many others, that in fact your work as a critic, like Blake’s writings, has a certain atemporal quality even though it is clearly rooted in our times. Have you ever thought about it? Frye: I think every creative effort springs out of its own time, and to the extent that it “springs” it rises above it. One cannot deal critically with any writer without taking both his relation to his own time and his relation to us into account. There must be elements in Dante that rise out of the thirteenth century or he would not still be a great poet to us; but if we ignored his thirteenth-century context we should simply be kidnapping him into our own cultural presuppositions. I felt that I could write about Blake only by entering his mind as completely as possible; but I think I kept his eighteenth-century context in mind too. Guardiani: Bloom has no problem in seeing literature, and literary criticism with it, as a narcissistic experience. Your idea is totally opposed to that, but narcissism seems to be very common among creative writers. Do you see some value in it? You clarify the difference, in Creation and

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Recreation, as well as in The Great Code, between two different kinds of faith: the one we think we believe in and the one that is the principle of our actions, which is rooted in our cultural identity. Do you see the possibility for literature to touch us on the deeper level of faith? Frye: Narcissism is the normal attitude that most writers, and probably all readers, begin with. It’s essentially an immature attitude, and must be outgrown before any genuine distinction in creative or critical work can emerge. At a certain point you realize that that lovely face is in the water and that yours is in the air, at which point you stop seeing the reflection of yourself and start looking for fish. Similarly, there are two levels of reacting to literature. One can think of one’s reading as an acquirement, as a body of cultivation one possesses: that’s a stage of connoisseurship, where the moral nature is not touched. I think there are much profounder and more deeply committed ways of approaching literature, and that those would affect the personality, but most people who get to that stage do so unconsciously. Guardiani: In your theory in general, and in your dealing with Canadian literature in particular, you have resisted the notion of the “global village,” proposed by your good friend the late Marshall McLuhan. You said that the trend to unify and to conglomerate, which is so clear in politics and economics, is reversed in literature and culture. Yet more and more people in our day and age move from place to place, from country to country, from culture to culture. A good number of “Italians” I know here do not speak the language of their parents; some of them were born in Belgium, in Germany, in Switzerland, where their parents had settled before deciding to move to Canada. What is their cultural identity? Where is their “genetic identity” so important in your concept of faith? Moreover, the movement from culture to culture can be an intellectual journey of no less importance: your “Canadian” ideas are shared by readers in South America and in Japan. Derrida was born in Africa, educated in France, and is now mostly appreciated in the U.S. Do you regard these cultural exchanges as ineffectual in defining cultural identity? Frye: McLuhan’s global village was a conception developed quite explicitly in connection with the electronic media, and it’s true that they impose a cultural conformity wherever they go. But there are also cultural cottage industries, like writing and painting and composing, that tend to decentralize society and form a kind of counter-environment. When I speak of being “rooted” in a culture I’m using a vegetable meta-

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phor, and man, being an animal and mobile, can choose (or at least drift to, like a seed) the place where he will root. There are expatriate writers, but they’re not necessarily rootless. They’ve simply gone somewhere else, and I should certainly agree that movement from one culture to another can be a deeply enriching experience. The essential thing is that one should write out of an imaginatively coherent environment, however one constructs it. By that last I mean that the coherent environment may not always be there: D.H. Lawrence roamed all over the world looking for his imaginative home, but it was that home he wrote from whether he was in Australia or Mexico or Sardinia. Coherent environments are always communicable and intelligible to other communities over the world, so that a writer may write in Nigeria or Colombia and get a Nobel Prize in Sweden. Guardiani: From the previous question I am tempted to expand into a much debated topic of today, the woman’s cultural identity. Women’s Studies is becoming increasingly relevant, in North America at least, as a “new” subject in the humanities. Do you see significant innovations coming from it in the area of literary criticism? Frye: I find feminist criticism most interesting when it’s an aspect of social history. The main principles of its specifically literary criticism are disappointing: they’re quickly exhausted and don’t sustain any novel or challenging interest. I’d much prefer to believe that it represented as new and important a dimension of sensibility as you suggest, but I haven’t found it so, even if that is a statement only about me. Guardiani: In a recent interview Barbara Johnson expressed the very interesting notion that “women are all trained, to some extent, to be deconstructors . . . .”7 It seems clear that there is a “different” point of view out there, of enormous importance, that in the development of literary criticism has been completely neglected. How do you feel about it? Frye: The remark quoted is certainly interesting, but the word “trained” sounds a bit ominous: it suggests that deconstruction may be a twentieth-century form of needlework. Freud, though not highly regarded as a feminist writer, remarked that women were much quicker than men at picking up the subconscious elements in communication, and I suppose that that ability is related to deconstruction. Guardiani: On a theoretical ground deconstruction criticism appears to be well grounded. You also gave credit to Derrida for having expanded

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the notion of “delay.”8 But do you see any problem coming from practical criticism? It appears to me that when the elusiveness becomes the rule one seems condemned to remain in the dark. There is also the problem of the infinite possibilities of “other” meanings, of multiple “differences,” appearing in every line of a poem which, therefore, one might never finish reading. Do you see in the insistence on ambiguity and on texture (rather than on all-encompassing structures) a return to a type of criticism of the past? Do you see deconstruction as the most important poststructuralism trend? Frye: Yes, I think poststructural criticism is the “new” criticism of two generations ago refurbished with a more elaborate theoretical framework. One is poststructural and the other prestructural, but they both neglect the totality that the word “structure” is a metaphor for, and concentrate on texture. When I say totality I don’t mean anything that can be finished and done with, but something that suggests a context or bigger totality beyond itself, in the way that the work of literature has the rest of literature for its context. I think it’s only that sense of context that enables literary scholarship to make genuine advances. In the Middle Ages the logic of syllogism promised new knowledge, but failed to provide any because the conclusion said only what the major premise told you already. So it remained simply a methodology for ensuring correct reasoning. I think the logic of supplement may be in much the same case: it’s a methodology for discovering aspects of texture, but not a progressive way of learning about literature.9 Guardiani: Marxist critics do not like deconstruction for obvious reasons. They are closer to your position because you assign great relevance to the social function of criticism. Where is the point where you split from Marxism? Frye: I split from Marxism at the same point where I split from everything in criticism that finds the essential explanations of literary phenomena in something outside literature. I seldom object to the explanation itself, only to the assumption that it’s not just one of many, but the explanation that makes all others unreal. Guardiani: There is a new tendency today to see Marxism not as an ideology, but as a method to assess, verify, and possibly condemn all ideologies. Do you see this as a healthy trend?

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Frye: The tendency you speak of is a return to the original Marxist conception that it was the one structure of knowledge that had no ideology, ideology being only what the bourgeoisie and counter-revolutionaries developed to avoid the challenge of the revolution. Whenever Marxism came to political power, however, it turned into one more defensive ideology. Marxism has always insisted on the inseparability of its theory and its practice, but it seems to me that an inconsistent Marxism, pure theory with no reference to what Marxism actually does to culture when it gets the chance to do it, would be the healthiest possible form of it. Guardiani: The social function of the critic is that of bringing people close to the arts, to open the access to a higher level of humanity. Yet the prospect may appear rather confusing if we consider that there are artists, immersed in the arts, whom you do not hesitate to call “ideological fat-heads” (Yeats, Pound, and Lawrence, for instance).10 Should the critic, then, separate the poetry of an artist from his ideology? Is this possible to do without misrepresenting the artist? Frye: I once wrote a book on Eliot [TSE] in which I began with two chapters on him as a critic. The first chapter dealt with his polemical and ideological criticism and treated it as part of a temporary fashion; the second chapter dealt with his genuine literary criticism, which has been permanently influential. I don’t think I misrepresented Eliot, because I included both aspects of him, but it seemed to me that the two aspects fall apart like chalk and cheese. I did this mainly as an experiment for myself, trying to see if a writer’s genuine work (as I saw it) could be separated from what seemed to me just anxiety-junk. I think the separation is possible, though I’m aware of the easy objections to saying so. I know, for instance, that my own anxiety-junk would get into the act, but other critics could take care of that. Ezra Pound was a great poet and a nut: perhaps some great poets have to be nuts, but great poetry and nuttiness will always be different things, and it’s part of a critic’s job to see them as different. Guardiani: Your concern about the social value of literature has led you to work on an endless number of committees, both here and in the U.S., for the review of school curricula from elementary school to university, not to mention your work as advocate of the unlearneds (no critic that I know has ever had the inspiration, or the courage, to produce something that comes close to that little masterpiece that is The Educated Imagina-

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tion); you have also worked as editor of textbooks, and have always been available to lecture all over the world. Yet you never institutionalized your theories and concerns with a school. Why? Frye: I suppose the short answer is that I now know enough about institutions not to want to become an institution. My experience with students, more particularly undergraduates, has given me an immense respect for nonspecialized public opinion and I should want my influence to be a pervasive force that would help to set other people a little freer to do what they wanted to do in their own way. Some of them may turn antagonistic to me: that’s their way of being influenced. But my influence is one thing, and I hope a good thing: discipleship, with its routine of did-he-really-say-this-or-that disputes, seems to be tedious, not to say sinister.

95 William Morris Conducted January 1988

From “A Conversation with Northrop Frye about William Morris,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 10 (Spring 2001): 35–42. Dated by the introductory material, which explains that interviewer Christopher Lowry was a co-founder of the Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture, “a marriage of ecology and imagination,” who was attracted to “Morris’s radical vision of social and ecological justice.” The interview was originally intended for the society’s Journal of Wild Culture, but this ceased publication shortly after the interview was conducted. Lowry, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario in English, later became coordinator of Green Enterprise Toronto, an organization promoting ecological practices in business, and a teacher at the George Brown College School of Design. Notes supplied by Lowry are signalled by [L].

Lowry: Can you recall your first introduction to Morris? Was it as a literary figure or a political figure? Frye: It was more a literary figure. I was interested in Blake because he was the subject of my first book and, of course, one of Blake’s main interests was the democratizing of art, of making it a general possession. Morris carried that a good deal further from the study of Carlyle and Ruskin. He felt that the difference between the major and the minor arts—painting, music, literature on the one hand, and pottery, ceramics, and textiles on the other—was a class distinction of the kind to get rid of. He concentrated on what were then called the minor arts as a kind of index of social stability, and that led him to the second thing which is interesting about him: the feeling that the index of social stability has a great deal to do with the relation of man to nature. That is, that the exploiting of men by

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other men was something that Morris as a socialist knew was wrong, but he also realized as a socialist what they did not realize: that the exploiting of nature by men was equally bad. Lowry: That is striking, the cross-over that he was able to achieve, because most socialists weren’t particularly ecologists or necessarily artists. Frye: Of course, Morris lived before the days of Stalinism and putting industry in front of everything else, but certainly the general Marxist thrust was in the direction of exploiting nature as much as possible, which is very different from the way that Morris wanted it. Lowry: Asa Briggs describes Morris as being “too active and exuberant . . . and too much aware as a working craftsman of the sense of the honest and the genuine” to be a cynic.1 It’s a marvellous connection which I’ve never seen made in that way: the idea that you wouldn’t be a victim of what may be considered the disease of the decadent culture, which is cynicism, if you worked with your hands. Frye: That’s right. Morris was an Oxford graduate, and, in nineteenthcentury terms, a “gentleman” who didn’t work with his hands, and then he had to give all that up and did work with his hands. Lowry: In his utopian fiction News from Nowhere, Morris describes his vision of the future as Communism with a large “C.” You’ve already referred to a distinction in his ecological vision between him and Marx. According to his essays he seems to have gotten his socialism through social exchanges, more through conversation with other socialists, thinkers, and friends than through reading. He claims he didn’t get very far with Marx’s economics. Frye: I don’t think he read twenty pages of Das Kapital. Not everybody agrees with that but I just don’t think he got anywhere with it. Lowry: So it comes more out of a tradition of English socialism which is much broader and in some crucial ways different from orthodox Marxism. Frye: Very different. It’s the Carlyle–Ruskin tradition which is concerned not with asking the question, “Who are the workers?” but the question, “What is work?”

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Lowry: Morris’s emphasis on individuation is also very contrary to Marx. Frye: Yes, very much so. He hadn’t any feeling for a mass movement as such, and felt that when a person had found his work or what his vocation was then he had defined himself as an individual, but he thought in terms of people and not in terms of masses. Lowry: How do you think he would have reconciled his own religious convictions with the Marxist idea that religion is the opiate of the masses? Frye: He didn’t have any religious convictions. Lowry: How would you say he responded to religion then? Frye: I don’t think he responded to religion at all. He was very deeply interested in the Middle Ages but he thought of the Middle Ages as a time of respect for craftmanship. The whole theological apparatus he didn’t react to at all. Lowry: Well, maybe I’m thinking more in terms of what Jung would have called the religious instinct. When reading Morris I read an affinity even with William Blake, and Blake’s idea that “All Gods reside in the human breast.”2 Frye: Well, that, I think, was in his mind all right, but it was something he didn’t very often haul to the surface. In The Earthly Paradise you get a group of old men who are shipwrecked on an island in the North Atlantic telling the great stories of Classical and Northern culture. He obviously thought of these stories as the shaping elements of human civilization, which is a very Blakean view, but he was rather defensive about that, and sort of blacked it out and repressed it. He kept saying, “I’m the idle singer of an empty day.”3 Well, nobody could call Morris idle. Lowry: Morris declared that “the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”4 News from Nowhere seems to be a vision of supplanting that. That is, what he called civilization was socialism, which is a society of equality. Do you think this dream was viable then, at the end of the nineteenth century, in some way? Frye: Well, Morris simply applied a different sort of criterion to society

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which he got mainly through Ruskin. He looked at nineteenth-century England and decided it was ugly, and he looked at what nineteenth-century restorers did to medieval cathedrals and he thought it was totally destructive. In other words, certain ages have a sense of beauty and a sense of craftsmanship, and other ages just lack them entirely. He saw the industrialization, the decay, the degeneration of craftsmanship and an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. It’s the same thing as Ezra Pound picked up later, the perception of misery as something that industrialized civilization is cursed with. Lowry: Morris envisioned supplanting his corruption that passes for civilization with a new society where there are no rich, no poor, and no waste: the true meaning of commonwealth. Do you think that there’s any potential to integrate that in the future, or is something going on towards that now? Frye: People are beginning to wake up to the fact that the unlimited exploitation of nature will not work and is very dangerous. After we’ve used up everything there won’t be very much to go on with, and Morris certainly told them that one hundred years ago. Lowry: This gets back to the tradition of Ruskin and Carlyle. Morris rails against private property as a basic evil and suggests that from it all other inequities arise. The argument goes that if there was no private property there would be no conflicts based on power and money; but this has always seemed to me to be false consciousness or contrary to both history and experience. I wonder if Morris understood a viable way to do away with property that escapes me? Frye: Well, I don’t know if he did. In Ruskin there is an attack not so much on property in itself as on the extraordinary inequities of rich and poor, and the exploiting of one class by another. Carlyle talked about the Dandies and the Drudges, the Dandies being what he called the unworking aristocracy and the Drudges being the exploited workers.5 I think it was more the sense of general injustice inherent in the class system that bothered Morris than the existence of property itself. That view of private property as in itself evil was anarchist but not really socialist, and of course many of Ruskin’s friends and associates weren’t really anarchists. Lowry: Morris makes a very telling remark about his political education. He says that his anarchist friends convinced him against their intention

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that anarchism was impossible and he learned from reading the antisocialist tracts of Mill that socialism was necessary. Frye: Mill’s essays on socialism were of course looked over and revised a good deal by his wife, who was a much more militant socialist than Mill himself was, and I imagine that Morris saw the implications in those essays that Mill didn’t see.6 Lowry: Morris insists in News from Nowhere that the reward for labour is life. I wonder how one might raise children to understand that the reward for labour is life? Frye: Well, of course you know that the children in News from Nowhere are not getting much education anyway. They’re not being put in school to learn how to read books. They’re trained to be active in practical ways as much as possible. Morris is not afraid of child labour as long as the social conditions are right for it and it’s not exploited labour. Lowry: He seems to think that they would absorb culture and ideas, or have a natural inclination to study. Frye: Yes, he thinks that they pick things up very quickly and much more quickly than if they were taught them in school. Lowry: And they would turn to their elders and ask for instruction. Frye: Yes, or get it out of a kind of apprentice system. Lowry: Maybe this comes out of his own experience, because in his autobiographical sketch he says that he had read a great many books by the age of seven. Frye: Yes. But he wouldn’t have read those at school. Lowry: No, so he had this idea that children would spontaneously be drawn to knowledge if they were given the freedom. Frye: Yes. Lowry: If he were a child today, do you think he would be a reader or do you think he would be seduced by television? Frye: Well, it would be difficult to say. I suppose everybody gets seduced by television now, and the passivity of mind that builds up staring at a tube would produce a very different kind of William Morris.

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Lowry: Morris says that happiness arises from taking pleasure in work, and pleasure of work arises if a worker approaches it creatively. Could you elaborate on how it might be possible for children to learn this? Frye: For Morris there was a very keen pleasure in creative work and, as I say, he was interested in the question of what work is rather than who the workers are. He assumes that work means really creative action, and he feels that nothing gives a greater sense of self-satisfaction than to be released to do that kind of creative work. It’s the sort of thing you get in kindergarten teaching theory as far as children are concerned. Lowry: Montessori and Waldorf . . . Frye: Yes, they’re all sprawled out on their tummies doing things. Lowry: Yeah, he suggested that making art is joy and contentment, and happy daily work or art equals a kind of hybrid notion of work/pleasure. How do you think Morris would view the condition of the artist in the twentieth century, which is more often defined by commercial art, stardom, and/or by sensual excess, suffering, and despair? Frye: I don’t think he would have very much good to say about most of the contemporary trends in the arts. The feeling for nature in his leaf and floral patterns—on his book designs and his wallpaper designs and that kind of thing, and the textiles he did—that’s very different, and his whole feeling for taste, from what you get now. I think he would have had a horror of that kind of Bauhaus functionalism that came in the twentieth century, but he would have approved of certain things, such as the rather benevolent attitude of the government towards the arts in the form of subsidies. Lowry: Do you think he would have seen the whole movement of modernism, and the sort of anguish and irony and the grotesque in modern art, as a kind of sign of the ones who are suffering from what’s wrong with the culture? Frye: Well, no doubt he would. Lowry: He says in News from Nowhere that in the old days these things— disappointment, ruin, misery, despair—were felt by those who worked for change because they could see further than other people. He disparages pettiness and meanness in the nineteenth century as retained by commercial morality, and he implies that it is a meagre century in com-

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parison with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. What did the Middle Ages and the Renaissance have that the nineteenth century didn’t have? Frye: Well, the Middle Ages had a sense of craftsmanship. The carving and the cathedrals and the painting and the sculpture and the architecture of the Middle Ages was an age of craftsmanship, and so was the literature. He just didn’t see any of that kind of thing being produced in his own time at all. Lowry: So we’re talking about craftsmanship. A man named Arthur Pendenys wrote a critique of Morris charging that he talked about arts for the people and beautiful books for mankind but he created very ornate and costly and therefore elitist art objects.7 Frye: I’m sure that’s so easy to say, but it’s a paradox that everybody gets involved in, and if you want to democratize art you do get involved with well-to-do patrons. That was the same paradox that Blake was in. He wanted his art to be for all the people, but in practice he had to keep alive by doing these engraved poems for the people who could afford to buy them. But that was a matter of coming to terms with social conditions of which he didn’t approve; and Morris’s business firm . . . he paid very small salaries, it’s true, but he at least gave an honest product for an honest price. Lowry: There’s something else I found as a bit of a tangent to Morris. He repeatedly places a very strong emphasis on the value of good looks physically, and in a strange way our youth-worshipping, beautyobsessed society is kind of a grotesque parody of Morris’s values in this respect. But he had a very interesting theory about it in News from Nowhere. He said pleasure begets pleasure, freedom and good sense make natural and healthy love, which breeds beautiful children. Do you think he meant it literally as an opinion about evolution or as a metaphor for consciousness? Frye: Well, not so much about evolution, but he thought that the natural beauty of the human body would have a chance to emerge under equalized social conditions. Even as late as the First World War, if you looked at the officers and the enlisted men in the British Army, they were just two different races of people. The officers had been brought up on protein foods, and they were all big and handsome, and the enlisted men had starved and kept alive on very inferior foods, and they were all

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stunted and warped. Morris saw all this around him and realized how much beauty there could be in the world if there were more good health, and how much more good health there would be if social conditions were equalized. Lowry: Morris criticizes the nineteenth-century university as an institution of pretence and hypocrisy, a place of commercial learning in the main devoted to producing cultivated parasites and handing out meal tickets called degrees. He contrasts this with his vision of the art of knowledge. Do you share his misgivings about contemporary education? Frye: I imagine what he said about Oxford was true in his day.8 The curriculum at Oxford was centuries out of date, and the public schools and the universities were used for training what was essentially a military upper class. That was why there was so much emphasis on flogging and Spartan discipline and compulsory games and that sort of thing. It was really a military training for an upper class which would form an oldboy network, so once you made your social contacts of course you were in. So that was really what Morris was thinking about, and I think that was really what the educational setup was like in his day, pretty well. You notice that he spent a good deal of his time talking to the new Working Men’s College, mechanics’ institutes, and that kind of thing for the working-class people. Lowry: What do you think Morris meant by the art of knowledge? Frye: I suppose what he meant was the teaching of principles of thinking rather than stuffing the people’s heads with obsolete and misinformation. Lowry: In News from Nowhere, Morris writes that “The spirit of the new days, of our days, was to be delight in the life of the world; intense and overweening love of the very skin and surface of the earth on which man dwells, such as a lover has in the fair flesh of the woman he loves; this, I say, was to be the new spirit in time.”9 It seems to me that many people are now beginning to absorb and express this idea and this dream from many sources and in many ways. Would you agree with that? Frye: I certainly agree that the awareness of nature as man’s habitat and as a kind of complement to human life is much more intense than it has been, and in a way the relation of man and nature takes up a great

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deal of what used to be sexual games, which, again, were an upperclass amusement. Lowry: Do you think there’s any potential for the realization of this kind of new spirit of the age through some kind of long-range, morphic resonance? Frye: Well, yes, trends start with a very small minority, and they gradually grow; if the conditions are right, they begin to turn into mass movements. Lowry: Morris believed, with Ruskin, that beauty was unattainable except as the expression of man’s joy in everyday work. His company, the firm, was a group of artists producing together what most interested them. Is this ideal relevant for artists today? Frye: Well, yes. That is the sense of craftsmanship as linked with creativity and secondly with social function you learn from Ruskin: that where you have gross inequalities in the leisure class and an exploited class, the result is that more and more useless and ugly products are made for the benefit of the leisure class. And so that’s why Morris says, “Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,”10 and urged that kind of sharpened sensitivity to the things around you and the things that you use and handle all the time. Lowry: Well, Dr. Frye, I see we’re out of time. It has been delightful to talk with you about Morris’s views on nature and culture, and the spaces that we inhabit between the two. Thank you very much.

96 What Is the Purpose of Art? Conducted 9 or 23 February 1988

From the section headed “Northrop Frye” in the article “What Is the Purpose of Art?” in Grammateion: The St. Michael’s College Journal of the Arts, 13 (1988): 36. Frye’s daybook for 1988 has two entries for Bert Archer; probably the first interview was cancelled. Frye was one of several artists and critics, including Robertson Davies, Alex Colville, and Robert Fulford, who responded to the question posed by Bert Archer: “What do you think is the purpose of art? Why do you create and why do we appreciate?” Archer noted that some responded orally, others in writing; Frye did so orally. Archer later became a writer and journalist.

Frye: A great many people would say that art has no purpose, that that’s the whole point about the arts. I think myself that I prefer not to use the word “purpose,” but it does have a function. I think that humanity has certain concerns, and some of them are concerns that can be expressed verbally, such as political loyalties and religious beliefs, and others are more primary and immediate, like seeing and hearing, and also making a living and staying healthy and that kind of thing. I think that literature has a specific function among the verbal arts in that it does deal with these primary concerns along with the more ideological ones. Painting and music concentrate more on the developing of a sense experience so that becomes something creative on the part of the seer or hearer as well as the producer of the art. “Purpose” is Aristotle’s word, and it leads to a kind of goal which I would distinguish, and did distinguish a moment ago, as ideological. Some people can’t think of art apart from its relationship to either political or religious concerns, or both. I would think that the criticism of the

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arts is set free when you’re not so much concerned with that kind of attachment. At the same time, there’s no point in being a critic unless you believe the arts are important. The concept of art having a purpose goes back really to the whole Socratic revolution in thinking, where it was felt that the way to truth and the way to beauty is really through dialectic and through understanding rather than through the senses. It’s really as old as that is, I think. The Puritan side of it comes in in the emphasis on the Biblical traditions, which are again extremely verbal, and tend to be iconoclastic; that is, they make some use of music but very much less of the visual arts. That is particularly true of a certain recurrent emphasis in Christianity which came up with the seventeenth century Puritans. It came up also in the seventeenth century in France with the Jansenist movement, and both of those of course struck roots in Canada in English Canada and in Quebec.

97 Canadian Writers in Italy Recorded 19 April 1988

From a tape in the CBC archives, transcribed by Margaret Burgess. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. The interview was broadcast on the program Sunday Morning, 24 April 1988, as part of a feature on “Canadian Writers in Italy.” Frye was interviewed by David Downey on the first day of an international conference at the University of Toronto and York University. Sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute, the conference addressed the topic “The Italian Connection: the Reception of Canadian Literature in Italy.” Frye gave one of the opening addresses in Northrop Frye Hall. Downey subsequently became a cultural journalist writing from France and Italy.

Frye: In culture, as in athletics, it’s fine for Canadians to win the odd game or pick up the occasional bronze medal, but to win an entire series or a fistful of gold medals would be, well, ostentatious. [Frye’s voice continues in the background while the narrator talks.] Downey: Northrop Frye is revered in Italy. It’s part of the reason he was asked to give the opening address at this Toronto conference on the reception of Canadian literature in Italy. Italian scholars and Canadian writers meet to talk about Canadian writing. Northrop Frye hates being asked why other countries are interested in our writing. He thinks the answer is obvious: it’s because we’re good. We may have started off as the great white north, but Northrop Frye says our literature is beyond that now. Frye: You do get a kind of writing which is really a sort of exported romance. There was a time, for example, when Australian writers put a boomerang and a kangaroo into everything they wrote, and there was a

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time, too, when we featured Indians and the kind of thing that would impress people really looking for romance clichés. But the appeal of the kind of writing that they get from Peggy Atwood or Robertson Davies or Mordecai Richler is the kind of thing that follows one of the laws of literature that the more specific, restricted, and local your environment the more universal your appeal, because the patterns of behaviour are still human patterns whatever the differences in setting.

98 The Great Teacher Filmed 7, 8, 10 June 1988

From the sound track of filmmaker Harry Rasky’s film Northrop Frye: The Great Teacher, transcribed by Mary Ellen Kappler. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list, which reveals that it was filmed at Hart House, the student athletic and recreational facility. Shown over CBC Television, 10 February 1990. The film consists of extensive interviews between Rasky and Frye, interspersed with imagery and music. The main emphasis is on ideas in The Great Code, to which (unless otherwise indicated) page numbers in the text refer. At the beginning are images of nature with the superimposed caption, “‘And the trees shall clap their hands’ [Isaiah 55:12].”

Frye (voiceover): I think of a nature that got along for billions of years without man, but I don’t think of creation as a factor. Somebody talking about the origin of the universe would be better advised not to use the word “creation” in that context. He’s talking about a natural process. The conception of creation for me, as a term, only begins to make sense when there is a consciousness responding to it. Rasky: Is it important that the first words be “In the beginning,” do you think, in the Bible? Could you imagine a Bible that started any other way? Frye: No. That’s one of the reasons why I think there is such a highly developed narrative sense in the Bible. You can’t start a narrative more logically than with the words “In the beginning.” [Images of a boys’ choir, an image from Blake, nature scenes. Voiceover reading from Genesis. Images of Victoria College, covers of Frye’s books, Frye teaching a class, an image from Blake, stained glass windows. Voiceover introduction and background information about Frye.]

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Rasky: You say at one point that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads. What do you mean by that? Frye: Well, that remark came out of my earliest teaching experiences, where I was teaching Paradise Lost and trying to write a book about Blake. Milton and Blake are Biblical writers, and I found that my undergraduate students couldn’t respond to allusions made to the Bible in the way that a previous generation had been able to. So I complained to the head of my department about my difficulties in reaching them, and he said, “Well, you can’t teach Paradise Lost to students who can’t tell a Philistine from a Pharisee.” Rasky: Is there a simple answer to “who wrote the Bible”? Frye: That is a very complex question. It seems to have been founded on earlier literature, a great deal of which was poetry, as earlier literatures always are. And there seemed to have been a process at work that squeezed the essence out of that literature. The Bible is not a work of authorship, it’s a work of editing. Rasky: Well, how about the fundamentalists who say it was all written by God and that those people were stenographers or something in between? Frye: Yes, well, that’s a possible view. But it overlooks certain difficulties which the historical and textual scholars have been working with for at least a hundred and fifty years. And you find that even the view of direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit can’t have lapses of memory, or inconsistencies in attitude. [Images of nature and from Blake, and voiceover readings from the creation account in Genesis, punctuate the conversation about the Biblical creation.] Frye: I’m not a Biblical scholar. I’m a critic and student of English literature who regards the Bible as indispensable in understanding that subject, and somebody, a sort of door-to-door salesman, trying to explain the importance of the Bible to a more secular-minded audience. Rasky: You say in the introduction [to GC], “The years have brought me an elastic conscience” [xxiii/17]. What does that mean in terms of your own development, that you have an “elastic conscience”? Frye: I suppose it means primarily that at the age of seventy-five I no longer give a damn what anybody says about me.

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Rasky: Has it taken you that long to come to that conclusion, would you say? Frye: Well, scholars, as a rule, have rather twitchy skins. Rasky: Do you find as you get older that there are more questions than answers? Frye: I think that they’re all questions; I don’t think there are any answers. I think that the answer cheats you out of the right to ask the question and that the function of the answer is to make you formulate a better question. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” That suggests an event, that in the beginning, God did something and the words are there to tell you about it. But you have to turn that inside out, I think. It’s a metaphor, meaning something to do with the awakening of human consciousness into a world that made sense. And that is why, in the act of creation, the word precedes the act: “God said let there be light and there was light.” The word comes first, the object follows it. Rasky: What existed before existence? Frye: There is never a moment of time you could think of where you can’t raise the question of what was before that. And that question made St. Augustine so irritable that he said that before the creation God was preparing a hell for people who asked that question.1 But that was just St. Augustine’s philosophical difficulties with the fact that you can’t take it in. You can talk about the beginning of time endlessly but you can’t really realize it. You can only think of time as an indefinite category without a beginning and without an end. Rasky: Is the Bible fact or fiction? Can one answer that? Frye: No. Rasky: No? There’s no answer to that? Frye: In the Bible the distinction between fact and fiction has ceased to exist. Rasky: Is it more fact than fiction? Frye: No. Fact is objective, and fiction is a human construct. The Bible is neither. It’s something beyond both. If you say “fact” you’re saying that

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the Bible is historically accurate. And one glance at the Bible and you’re not in accurate history, you’re in something else, a different kind of world altogether. On the other hand, you’re not in the world of novels or romances. You’re in the realm of narratives and stories, but that’s rather different. Rasky: You write that Genesis presents the creation as the sudden coming into being of the world through articulate speech, conscious perception, light, and stability. Does that mean “flash,” and it’s suddenly there? Frye: It reads a little like that, yes. The account in Genesis spends very little time on the original chaos. But first of all there is the great primordial light that comes into being. And the modern line, of course, thinking of all those billions of years where nothing very cheerful was happening, is apt to think of the creation as something of a revolution which brings consciousness into the world, and the sense of a subject and object. [Cosmological and natural images, images from Blake.] Rasky: When you read scientific items, as we all do, in the paper about billions of years, does that in any way affect your idea of creation, of God’s creation? Frye: Not really, no. Because I think of creation as starting, really, with the human perception of order and system in the world, and love and beauty in the world. Michelangelo’s Sistine painting of God creating Adam—whenever I look at that picture I turn it inside out mentally, and think of Adam as waking up to a world which has things by God in it. Rasky: I guess feminists have a very good point: the whole idea of creation, as expressed in the Bible, is a very masculine-dominated event, according to the way it was written, correct? Frye: That’s right. When you open the Bible you find apparently a male God, creating apparently a male Adam, then taking a woman out of his body, and then saying that because the woman took the lead in the fall there will be patriarchal societies which are really patriarchalism gone mad. But if you take the perspective of the entire Bible I think you get a very different impression. Again, there’s a very intricate metaphorical language involved. The Bible, as I see it, does represent, to some extent, a reaction against some of the earth-goddess mother cults. And the reason is that the mother is the parent that you have to break away from in order to get born.

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Rasky: So there’s a reason for it, because the earlier literature before the Bible was so maternal? Frye: Yes, and that means that it’s completely wrapped up in the goddess Nature, so that man remains a kind of embryo, in a sense, unborn. He can’t get out from under his surrounding of nature. The symbolism of a sky-father is, I think, there to enable men and women to escape from that kind of embryonic position. Rasky: A sky-father? What does that mean? Frye: Well, God is called a father consistently through the Bible, and he is usually associated with the heavens. He’s said to ride around the sky, actually, on the back of a cherub [2 Samuel 22:11; Psalm 18:10]. And the reasons for having God associated both with the sky and with fatherhood have to do with the sense of the world as a system or order, something to be responded to by intelligence, and also by love, which is a factor of very high intelligence. Rasky: I don’t know if you were totally in jest when you said everything that follows the creation of woman in the Bible is two thousand pages of anticlimax.2 Is that just a joke, or is there some truth in that? Frye: That’s what I hope would be a joke with some truth in it. Rasky: The whole question of Adam and Eve suddenly acquiring knowledge, is that what makes us all semi-neurotics today, would you say? Frye: I think it’s an attempt to define, in metaphorical terms, the nature of the human neurosis, yes. And the creation of woman is the great climax of the creation account in Genesis. And the fact that woman took the initiative in the fall means that she takes the initiative in going back again. Rasky: In going back again? Frye: Yes. I don’t think that the fundamental antagonism is really between good and evil, because so much of “good” is what society has decided is good. The real contrast is between life and death. That’s the contrast that, according to Deuteronomy, is the one that God makes: “I have set before you life and death . . . therefore choose life” [30:19]. [Readings from the Genesis account of the fall; images from Blake.] Frye: No master really understands his slave, and our attitude to nature

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is overwhelmingly one of mastery and of exploitation. The point about the story of the garden of Eden is that ideally man should be in the position of loving nature. And whatever is loved is the equal of the lover. Rasky: And therefore man obviously isn’t a great lover. He keeps destroying nature. Frye: That’s right. Rasky: I’ve always been fascinated with the fact that so much Christian writing concentrates on the fall. Why is that? Frye: Well, it’s because the Bible actually begins with the creation by a God who looked at what he did and saw that it was good. And, as Shaw says somewhere, “What would He say now?”3 But of course the answer is that this isn’t the world God made, so you have to have the fall myth. Rasky: In the fall, man acquired this sexual knowledge, of good and evil. But the possibility is always that the concentration on this by the evangelists will be on that sin, sin, sin and it becomes a perversion of what is meant in the Bible. Frye: I think that what Adam and Eve acquired at the fall was a moral sense founded on a sexual repressiveness, and human beings have been struggling with that neurosis ever since. The person who talks about the sin of the fall very frequently thinks in his heart that God ought to have been ashamed of himself for having thought up the idea of sex in the first place. If you can’t explicitly say that, nevertheless you should be referring to it as little as possible. That’s all part of exactly what the Bible’s trying to say. Rasky: To say what? Frye: That man got everything screwed up when they had their fall, including his notions of sex. Rasky: However, God made these various contracts with all these individuals—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah. Why is the contract an important device in the Bible, would you say? Frye: It’s important to suggest the conception of continuity, the continuity of Israel. And, incidentally, that’s an exact reversal of thinking that the sexual thing was something we should have avoided altogether, because the sense of being fruitful and multiplying is certainly part of

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God’s intention in regard to Israel throughout—all the contracts imply and suggest that. Rasky: Why do you think that in the Bible, as a metaphor, the ear is so much more used than the eye? Frye: Because the eye sees the object, and God is not an object. If you hear a voice, that is both something that comes from outside and something that comes from inside; that is, the distinction between the outside and the inside is not clear-cut. So there’s no difficulty about hearing God’s voice. But once you see God, then you’re limiting him to a natural object. Rasky: Of course, God is never seen, correct? Frye: Never really fully seen, no. There are visions of God in Isaiah and Ezekiel, but they’re always something else rather than visions. [Images of masks from different cultures. Voiceover reading of the prohibition on graven images in Exodus 20:4.] Rasky: In your discussion of God in your book you suggest that maybe we could understand God if we thought of him as a verb rather than a noun [17/35]. Can you help me a little bit with that? Frye: The noun is normally the name of a thing. There’s no such thing as God, because God is not a thing. You’re pointing to something very vague and approximate when you use “God” as a noun, as though he were an object. Rasky: Or as a person. People tend to think of him as a person—a wise old man like Northrop Frye or something like that. Frye: Yes. God is personal, but not a person. Rasky: So if you think of God as a verb, then where does that carry you? Frye: It carries you into the point of thinking that the word “God” implies a process which is there from the beginning rather than something you reach at the end. [Images of nature.] Rasky: The crossing of the bridge from “gods” to “God,” which has already taken place in the Bible, is felt as a release from the tyranny of nature. Frye: Well, man develops a conception of gods out of nature and his ear-

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liest gods are probably things like tree-spirits and mountain-spirits and river-spirits. And then as society gets more organized, they tend to become an aristocracy, and man is related to them as social inferiors are to a warrior class. And all these gods, being really founded on a conception of a nature which is thought of as bigger than man, and as to some extent alien from him, have the capriciousness that goes with elements in nature. The gods can lose their temper, just as you get thunderstorms. They can be ferocious and destructive, just as some animals can be. When you get to the conception of God you’re free of the notion of a kind of personality evolving out of nature. You’re in the realm of something which is still personal but contains both humanity and nature. Rasky: Is it that simple? To think of God as a kind of a parent? Frye: It’s an intelligible metaphor, indicating that God is, among other things, the entire past of the human race. Rasky: Is there any easy way of defining God? Frye: You can’t define him at all. It’s not a definable word. Rasky: I remember asking Chagall that question and he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, even Einstein couldn’t define that.” Frye: Einstein wouldn’t try. Rasky: You say at one point that the Bible is a violently partisan book, even propaganda [40/58]. Now that might shock some people. Why do you say it’s a partisan book? Frye: It’s pretty clear in the accounts, say, of the kings of Israel and Judah. The kings are, quite simply, good if they promoted the cult of Jehovah and bad if they didn’t. Rasky: I suppose it’s really that idea that whatever side God was on was the right side, is that it? Frye: Yes, and by a coincidence, the right side was always the Israelite side. Rasky: Why did it end up that one group did do it and another group didn’t? Do we know that? Frye: Well, again, it’s that mystery about language. Israel were the people with the book, and they had control of the language. And that means

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that what they had, their versions of things, and their attitudes about things, are what have survived. [Images of the Middle East and Hebrew writing on an ancient scroll.] Rasky: I think you referred to Ozymandias. Other people have pyramids and great towers and so on, but the Israelites had the words. That’s their power, I suppose. Frye: All those tremendous stone monuments disappeared under the sand, and the little papyrus scrolls are still in reasonably good shape. Rasky: Therefore the word is stronger than the physical, created things, would you say? Frye: It certainly looks as though it were, yes. [Images of ruins. Voiceover reading of Shelley’s Ozymandias.] Frye: Man has made many discoveries and improved his technology and his social organization and so on, but he’s just as violent and cruel and beastly as ever. Rasky: Can we still have a personal connection with God? [Images of Abraham and Moses.] Abraham was supposed to have talked to God, and Moses had this conversation with God, but if God is not this kind of noun that we think of him as, is it still possible to do that? Frye: I think it’s what makes it possible really, because God is always shown in action in the Bible, and the verb is particularly the word of action. Rasky: Do you think in fact they did have those conversations, or do you think that was poetic imagery that was invented later? Frye: It could be either, and it would mean the same thing, whichever it was. Rasky: It doesn’t matter, whether they did or didn’t? Frye: I find myself getting more and more distrustful of either/or situations. I always think it’s a both/and situation. I think Abraham was (a) talking with God, and (b) hallucinating. I think both things are going on at the same time. Rasky: And of course today people say that we can’t have those conversations because, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “God is dead.” Where do you stand on that controversy, if that is what it is?

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Frye: Even Nietzsche had to say that it was going to be awfully hard to get rid of God as long as we continue to believe in grammar.4 And I would alter that to say that you can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word. Rasky: All words are part of the Word? Frye: A part of the consciousness which we’ve been stuck with as human beings. Rasky: Even though parts of the Bible are such great poetry, much of it is violence. People think of television as being violent, but the Bible is a very violent document. Why do you think the authors of the Bible thought it so important to pour that violence in, wars and so on? [Images of ancient violence.] Frye: Well, they didn’t put it in. It was there from the beginning. That’s what human life is like. And the violence is, again, part of the fact that man is part of nature and nature has a titanic quality. It’s not all sheep and pasture grass, by any means. Rasky: Was the phrase “history is the nightmare from which we’re all trying to wake up”? Frye: That’s in Joyce’s Ulysses. I think Byron said it more neatly when he said that history is the devil’s scripture.5 Rasky: I wonder if I would be prying if I said, Does Northrop Frye talk to God? Frye: Yes. [Images of nature.] Rasky: Does the Bible mean one thing? The “Great Code”: does it all add up to one thing in the end? That’s a tough question, I know, but how would you tackle it? Frye: Well, it adds up to a unifying of experience, yes, I’d say that, but when Isaiah says that “all the trees . . . shall clap their hands” [55:12], the reader’s instinct is to say, “Well of course we can’t take this literally, but . . .” In other words, something is being said that’s important. It’s what follows the “but” that is important. Rasky: What did he mean when he said “all the trees shall clap their hands”? It’s such a lovely phrase. [Images of trees.] Frye: He’s speaking of a natural creation bursting into the praise of its

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creator. And that’s something you can only do in pure language, because that is not a description of a scientific process. Rasky: What in fact are the basic images of the Bible? Frye: The paradisal images of trees and rivers and fountains and fruits. Then there are agricultural images of harvest and vintage, and wedding images of bridegroom and bride. And there are urban images of the city with the temple at the centre. [Images of crops, weddings, and a domed temple.] Rasky: The tree, what does the tree keep personifying in the Bible? It keeps referring over and over again to the tree. [Images of trees.] Frye: Well, the tree is one of the images of what appears all through the mythology of the world as the axis, connecting this world with a higher world. Of course, it’s only metaphorically higher. But the tree of life is the crucial tree in the garden of Eden, and I think it’s thought of there as the axis that symbolizes the relationship of God and man. Rasky: You mean because it physically points to heaven, is that it? Frye: Yes. Rasky: Just the physical being of the tree. Frye: Yes. You can get other images of ascent, like Jacob’s ladder or towers or mountains, but the tree is a very central image of something that is alive and grows upwards into a higher world. There are the two trees: metaphorically they’re the same tree, but in the narrative they have to be two. [Images of a ladder, a tower, a mountain and trees.] Rasky: How can the same tree cause both life and the possible expulsion from paradise? Frye: Well, one is the parody of the other. One is the tree of life, the other is the tree of death, and the tree of knowledge which brought about what D.H. Lawrence would call “sex in the head.”6 Rasky: “Sex in the head”? Frye: Yes, the sense of self-consciousness about the sexual act was evidently a kind of genuine knowledge which was dangerous in that particular context because we’re not told that the tree of life is forbidden to man before he ate from the wrong tree, but only afterwards.

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Rasky: And water. What is the symbolism of water in the Bible? What does that mean? [Images of water.] Frye: Well, water is, again, one of the symbols of life, like air or spirit. All of the images in the Bible have a benevolent side and a malevolent side. There’s the water of life, which, again, means immortality, like the tree of life, and there’s the water of death, which you get in Noah’s flood, and the crossing of the Red Sea, which drowns you. Rasky: So that contrast that occurs with every symbol. Frye: Yes. Rasky: Then we have the bride and the groom—they appear frequently. What do they mean in the Biblical context? Frye: Well, they’re again a very ancient and worldwide symbol. The sacred marriage, the wedding. Very frequently it’s the heaven and the earth that are married, but in the Bible, it’s God and his people. [Images of weddings, female nudes and flowers. Voiceover reading from the Song of Songs.] Frye: In the Song of Songs you have a bride and a bridegroom, and they expand into King Solomon and his land—or his queen, or whatever— and that in turn expands into a sense of God and his people. His people, in this case, would be both the society and the country. It would be both the Israel bride and the land, the nature bride. [A boys’ choir singing Blake’s Jerusalem, and images of Jerusalem.] Rasky: What does the city represent in the Bible? Frye: The city is the centre of the people. After David took Jerusalem, the imagery of the Bible becomes very urban, and the city with the Temple in the middle of it is the image of the relation of God to his people. The New Testament was written shortly after the emperor Titus had sacked and looted Jerusalem, so for it, Jerusalem is no longer a place, it’s a state of being. But still, there is a physical Jerusalem all through the Old Testament, which is often forsaken, as in the Babylonian captivity, but is always still there to be rebuilt. But in the Book of Revelation, and elsewhere in the New Testament, you’re giving up the idea of rebuilding Jerusalem, or centring things there. Rasky: The symbols in the New Testament seem to mimic the symbols in the Old Testament, like the twelve tribes, twelve disciples.

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Frye: There is no image in the New Testament that doesn’t have its counterpart in the Old. Rasky: Does that mean that the New Testament is just plagiarizing the Old Testament? Frye: It means that it’s a kind of mirror reflection of the Old Testament. The early Christians, when they found difficulty in understanding what to them were new doctrines, like the Resurrection, were simply told to go and read the Old Testament, but read it differently. Rasky: Sometimes in hotel rooms, when I’ve been travelling, I see that that they have only the New Testament. It seems kind of strange that they’ve discarded the Old Testament. So in fact if people read only the New, they’ve missed out the source in many ways? Frye: Yes, it’s utterly impossible to understand a word of the New Testament without having the Old. Rasky: Where did the idea of Jesus being a fisherman come from? Frye: We all live in what is symbolically a kind of submarine existence. That is, for most of us, Noah’s flood has never really receded. We’re still more or less under water. So any attempt to redeem us has to descend into the water. It’s the type of the story of Jonah, who was thrown into the sea and swallowed by a great fish. He spent a submarine existence for three days and then came out of it. Jesus accepts that as an image of his own ministry, where he descends to a lower world for three days, then comes up. [Images of sheep and shepherds.] Rasky: Also, the image of the shepherd is very prevalent in the Bible, right? Frye: Oh yes. The pastoral world is idealized in the Bible. The agricultural world was much more likely to be contaminated by heathen influences. So it’s Abel, the martyred shepherd, who is the ideal figure, and “the Lord is my shepherd” in the twenty-third Psalm. Christ is the Good Shepherd. [Voiceover reading of the twenty-third Psalm. Images of a soprano singing, Blake’s images of the Passion and Resurrection.] Frye: The purpose of the Bible is to go a step beyond that and rearrange the whole way that you live. The Gospels, for example, are not out to teach a new doctrine, they’re not out simply to tell you a story, but to rearrange the pattern of your life, the way you see things.

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Rasky: Could you explain that a little bit more? Frye: I think that if, for example, the Crucifixion of Christ, which is a historical event—I assume it is, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be one—but if it’s a primarily historical event, then Jesus is simply one of all those poor wretches who suffered that very cruel and hideous death. And it becomes a historical fact in the general nightmare of history which Byron calls “the devil’s scripture.” Presented as it is in the Gospels, as a myth, it becomes “the” Crucifixion. It didn’t occur in the past, it’s occurring now in the present. Rasky: It’s occurring in the present? Frye: Well, it’s something that keeps confronting the reader. It’s something that is happening now. Its significance is not exhausted by what happened two thousand years ago. Rasky: The message of the Crucifixion keeps going on? Or the event itself? Frye: The event itself keeps confronting you. This is what we’re like. This is what we would still do to God if we could catch him. Rasky: Are you suggesting that if Jesus came back today he would probably be crucified all over again? Frye: Not necessarily crucified, but he would certainly be made an unperson, if it would be possible to do so. Rasky: An “unperson”? Frye: Well that’s the phrase from Orwell’s 1984. Rasky: Oh yes. So does that mean that we aren’t improving as a race, or as a breed? Frye: I don’t know just how we’re improving. I think that for me, the moral is the same as the one in the Epilogue to Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, where everybody kneels and praises St. Joan, and she says, “That’s fine, can I come back into the world now?” and they start to shuffle off. Rasky: Is that a great human failing, that we can’t accept the ideal? Frye: I think so. We can’t really tolerate a complete individual. The individual must conform to the standards of society around him and some-

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body who is obviously standing beyond those standards and values is somebody we instinctively hate. [Images of stained glass.] Rasky: But I would like to ask some personal questions now. You have this passion for music. Where did that come from? [Images of Frye’s childhood.] Frye: Well, my mother taught me a note when I was about three, and I splashed around with it myself, and started to take lessons when I was thirteen. But I’ve always been a great devotee of the piano and its literature. Rasky: And how does that reflect itself in your life today? Do you play an instrument still, or sing? Frye: I keep trying to play, yes. Rasky: And do you think you’re pretty good at it, at this stage? Frye: No, I’m not very good at it. Rasky: Where were you born? And your parents, what did they do? [Images of Frye’s childhood.] Frye: I was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and my father was in the hardware business, and my mother was the daughter of a Methodist circuit rider. Rasky: So that’s where the religious beginning would come from, I would think. And people want to know where the name “Northrop” came from. Frye: My grandmother was Sarah Ann Northrop. It’s a common New England name. She came from Lowell, and was a factory girl at the time when Lowell was one of the model flourishing towns in the United States. Rasky: But did your fellow classmates in school call you Northrop? It seems like a long name for a child. Frye: I know, but nevertheless the Northrop area covers a good deal of southeastern New Brunswick. The “Norrie” one was what came in when I attended university. Rasky: “Norrie” was your nickname. Or is still your nickname?

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Frye: Still is. Rasky: And your early interest in the Bible would have been because of your grandparents? Frye: Well, I suppose it came through my grandfather to my mother, but I had the kind of religious and Biblical education that most nonconformist families did have in my generation. Rasky: And you said somewhere, “I’ve been interested in religion solely as a means of expanding the mind, not of contracting it.”7 Do you think that’s what does happen as you study religion? Does it in fact expand, or does one become more and more particular and secularized? Frye: Well, it’s possible to go in either direction, but what interests me about words like “infinite” and “eternal” is that they do not mean, for me, time and space going on for ever. Rasky: What do they mean? Frye: They mean the fact that the centre of time, the present, becomes real and becomes now. And the centre of space, the here, becomes a real place. Whereas in our ordinary existence there’s really no such time as “now.” As soon as you’ve said “now,” it’s receded into the past. Rasky: Yes, Tennessee Williams made that point. He talked about the past, the present, and the perhaps.8 That time going so quickly is memory immediately. Did you ever actually become a minister? You studied theology, but were you preaching at any point? Frye: Well, except for a mission-field summer in Saskatchewan, I’ve preached mainly to students, but I am ordained. Rasky: Sitting in this library it seems hard to me to relate to the fact that you would come from a hardware store into the vast knowledge that you’ve been able to accumulate. Do you have any easy explanation for that? Frye: The hardware business is a very meticulous one, with people coming in to inquire about the little dingus that fits over the whatchamacallit, and I suppose scholarly work is not really all that different. Rasky: I was at Massey Hall recently when they had Arthur Miller speaking there, and they said that you had had your first Toronto expe-

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rience by being in a typing contest which was conducted on the stage at Massey Hall. Is that right? Frye: That’s true, yes. With a banner over my head saying “New Brunswick.” Rasky: And how did you make out in that contest? [Images of Frye’s adolescence.] Frye: I came second in the Canadian one. I came way down in the international one. Rasky: You said that school was always a mild form of penal servitude [WE, 143]. Frye: Elementary school I found boring. A great many children do. High school rather less so, but I didn’t really get interested in my education much until I got to university. I found that I was in a community where I had a function and that I could do things—drama, debates, editing the journal, that kind of thing—which I had never been able to do before. By myself, I would just automatically go on teaching until I dropped dead in the middle of a classroom. I find that teaching feeds my writing and the other way around. I’ve always been a teacher, and I don’t know what I’d have done without it. Rasky: I’d like to now move on to a whole different subject. What caused you to be so interested in Blake? Frye: Well, in my undergraduate years, my teacher, Pelham Edgar, assigned me an essay on Blake. And what I discovered very quickly about him was that the evangelical, nonconformist background I’d been brought up in actually made a great deal of imaginative sense, because that was Blake’s background. And he turned it into something that really awakened my enthusiasm and what I had of intelligence, as well. Rasky: Who was he? Who was William Blake? [Images of and by Blake.] Frye: He was the son of a shopkeeper in London in the mid-eighteenth century. He never went to school. He was apprenticed to an engraver, because in the days before photography, all books had to be engraved, or at least the illustrations had to be engraved, by hand. So you could make a living. And that brought him into a world of books and artists. Rasky: Some people say he had a madman’s scrawl. Was he mad, do you think?

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Frye: Well, madness is a social judgment, and I’m not sure that society always has a right to make that judgment because it can’t distinguish what’s below its standards from what’s above them. Blake called himself a visionary [E715]—he didn’t call himself an illustrator—and by that he meant that he painted, for example, but without models, and he worked entirely from inner visions. The world, as he saw it, was a world in which reality is what is made, rather than what is looked at. He entered into the world of creation. He felt it was a function of the artist to recreate the original creation. His doctrine was that imagination is the human existence itself and that the imagination is what is created in man, which means that it’s really the whole of man. And it’s also for him, in religious terms, the godhood of man. Rasky: And then there’s this question: if you’re not creative, does that mean that you cannot reach God? Frye: You have to be creative to be a part of God, though not necessarily a poet or a painter. Anybody who lives what has always been called a charitable life is creative. It makes sense. Rasky: “A charitable life”? What does that mean? Frye: Well, that’s the technical term. “Charity” is the New Testament word for love. Rasky: Was Blake fundamentally a painter, or was he a writer would you say? Or a poet? Frye: He was professionally a painter and an engraver, and that was the way he got his income. He was almost totally unknown as a poet in his lifetime. He says, “To the eye of the imagination, nature is imagination” [E702]. He has no use for the cult of natural religion, of the worship of nature, which, again, makes man an embryo, wrapped up inside nature. This is a Song of Experience called The Sick Rose. [Frye reads poem.] Rasky: You said that there was a similarity in Blake’s thinking to your own thinking. And it seems strange to me. Looking at Blake’s drawings, they seem kind of wild. It seems quite a distance from the United Church. Can you explain that a little bit? [Violent images from Blake.] Frye: The Bible, and the kind of thing that Blake was interested in, is a bit bigger than the bourgeois morality that covers it over from time to time. And I just discovered in Blake somebody who made complete imaginative sense of the universality of the Bible and the kind of spiritual world

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that he was talking about. I’ve always thought of the rebel angels not as devils, but as very human, as something that are really a part of the untapped resources of humanity. And Blake was one of the people who saw that. Rasky: Do you believe in angels and devils and those figures as literal forces? Frye: Not as objects or events, no, not that. But I think that there are powers within man that are much bigger than man ever uses. The evil powers are all there: you can see how man has created hell from the beginning of history. But there are, I think, angelic forces in him, too. Rasky: I want to talk about Job for a minute. What is it in the story of Job that fascinates people over and over again? Frye: Well, it’s a sense of the inherent mystery in the relation between God and man which, in the Book of Job, turns out to be some kind of act of understanding—an understanding that incorporates and includes the mystery, but also becomes a kind of revelation. The vision of Job is the vision of a man who has seen the essential sanity of the world, in spite of the utter insanity of what has happened to him. Rasky: He sees the sanity of the world, not the insanity of the world? Frye: He sees the sanity of the world in spite of the insanity which has happened to him, which is also present too. Rasky: And in Blake’s case you make the point that he did twenty-two plates. Does that number have any particular meaning? Frye: Well, one of Blake’s critics points out that there are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Blake knew that much Hebrew, certainly. [Images of Blake’s Job illustrations. Voiceover reading, some Frye’s, from the Book of Job.] Frye: He simply sums up and says he doesn’t know what the case against him is. He’s confident that whatever has happened to him, there must be a framework which makes it intelligible, and that while he may have done wrong things, he hasn’t done anything as wrong as all that. Rasky: You say that every work of literature that we continue to read and study meant something to its own time and something quite different to us. Does that mean that Paradise Lost was some specific thing in Milton’s time, but is something very different for us?

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Frye: If you ignore the seventeenth-century background of Milton, you’re just kidnapping him into your own assumptions, and if you don’t take him into your own cultural orbit than you’re just leaving him as a historical document. Rasky: Critics say that Paradise Lost is a monument to dead ideas, and your comment is, “There are no dead ideas in literature, there are only tired readers.”9 Do you think that maybe the modern media, including this one, television, has destroyed our capacity for patience and reading such documents as Paradise Lost? Frye: No matter what age you’re living in, you have certain cultural obstacles to fight against and the habit of short and fragmented attention in television and other such media means that that’s just another obstacle to fight. Rasky: Why was Milton such a favourite of yours? What was the reason for Milton being so dominant in your own thinking? [Images of Milton and scenes from Paradise Lost.] Frye: Well, partly because he was a person who preserved the general Christian framework that he inherited. But he was also a revolutionary thinker, and he kept trying to put together the revolutionary intuitions that he had picked up from his time, the Civil War against King Charles and so on, with his religious framework. So that he is really, to my mind, the person who combines the religious and the liberal. Rasky: Do you think of yourself as something of a revolutionary? Frye: Well, not a revolutionary in the sense that I think in terms of a social upheaval as either possible or desirable. I think that at a certain point revolution goes into its other meaning of a turning wheel, and goes back to reconstituting whatever it started with. But I do believe in transcendence. I do believe in untapped possibilities. Rasky: Transcendence? Is that what it means, in fact—untapped possibilities? Frye: It’s one of the things it means to me, certainly. Rasky: I recall your quoting Sartre as saying, “Hell is other people,” and Kierkegaard in response saying, “Hell is being locked up with oneself.”10 There seem to be opposite choices there. Which is the ideal one?

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Frye: Well, they’re both right. They’re not really a contradiction because the hell in which you’re imprisoned is the hell in which you are in the lonely crowd—that is, you’re lonely because the crowd is there. Rasky: And then you quote Proust as saying that “the only paradises are the paradises we have lost.”11 Now what did he mean by that? Frye: Wallace Stevens says “the imperfect is our paradise.”12 And that means that any paradise you would try to reach would be an anticlimax. The real paradise is something you can dream of but it’s no longer there. Rasky: There’s no complete paradise, is that correct? Frye: Well, there’s no state one can live in which is paradise. Rasky: I’m going to turn now to Anatomy of Criticism, because, for many people, that’s where they first heard of Northrop Frye. Could you just explain a little bit about what your ideas are of criticism? Frye: Well, there I was of course, by implication, attacking the view that the critic is a parasite, that his study is simply a fastening on to literature and making his own career and his reputation out of what poets have done. I think that’s a false view of criticism. I think that criticism is something with a specific cultural job to do. Rasky: You don’t think you’re giving the critic too great a role in your estimation? Frye: I don’t really think so. In my experience, that phrase, “I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like,” always turns out to be that what you like is pretty dismal. Rasky: So you should like what the critic likes, is that what you’re suggesting? Frye: No, I’m suggesting that there is an educational process at work and that it is possible to improve on one’s likes. If you say, “I know what I like,” then you’re cutting off a possibility of your own future advance, and that’s something that the critic might be able to help with. Rasky: Is it possible, really, that the artist shouldn’t be the final one to say, “I did that, and that’s what it means”? That somebody should come along later and say, “No, he didn’t mean that at all”? Frye: Shakespeare presumably knew what he meant in 1602. But he

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couldn’t possibly know what he was going to mean in 1988, and it’s also possible for writers to change their minds about what their work means. I think Shaw changed his mind about Candida several times. Rasky: And does it all mean something as a collective force? Is that what you’re saying? Rather than that the individual poem is its own little isolated thing, there is some overall pattern. Frye: I think there is. I think the Bible comes closer than any other work to explaining what it is, and that’s why I call it, or at least why Blake called it, “the Great Code of Art.” Rasky: What made you come to that conclusion? Frye: It dawned on me when I was working on Blake. I think I’ve learned everything I know from Blake. Blake was practically the only man of his time who realized that we all live inside a big mythical and metaphorical framework of images, and that unless we become aware of that we can never change anything of the social condition—we just keep on responding to the same conditioning. That was where I derived the notion that literature, as a whole, made sense. Rasky: Does it mean that there’s nothing new in literature too, or does that not follow? Frye: It means that everything is new in literature, and that nothing is new. Rasky: Can you explain that a little bit? Frye: Well, the example that I generally use is that of a human being. The mother’s pride in her baby is based on the fact that it’s a new and unique individual, but she wouldn’t be proud of it unless it conformed to the convention and was recognizably human. Rasky: And so every new poem is like a new baby in that sense. Frye: In that sense, yes. It’s recognizable as a poem. Rasky: I want to turn to Shakespeare now. At the beginning of your fascinating book on Shakespeare, you observe Ben Jonson’s line,“He was not of an age but for all time” [NFS, 1], and you say that perhaps he should have said, “Not only of an age.” Well, what’s the difference? Frye: I don’t think Jonson really intended to say that Shakespeare was

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not intelligible to his own age, because he goes on to say that he was. And I think that that simply illustrates what I was saying a moment ago, that the poet belongs both to his own time and to our time, and that we shouldn’t kidnap him into our time, and we shouldn’t leave him wholly in his. Rasky: Where do you stand on this whole debate about who Shakespeare really was? Frye: Well, my favourite solution to that problem is that of a rather bewildered person who said that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by William Shakespeare but by somebody else whose name was William Shakespeare. I don’t think its possible to improve on that. Rasky: But you think he was that character that we see the image of with the bald head and the little beard and so on? [Images of Shakespeare.] Frye: Yes, I think so. All the evidence indicates that he was, and there’s no evidence of any other kind. Rasky: And what was it that made him so fantastic? What made the difference? Frye: You’re up against something there there’s no quick answer to. He just was what he was. [Images of Shakespearean scenes.] Rasky: You say that in every play Shakespeare wrote, the hero or central character is the theatre itself. What does that mean? Frye: Well, simply that Shakespeare devoted himself totally to the theatre and to the show that he was putting on. And if you had said, “Look, this play, The Taming of the Shrew, is a bit sexist,” or, “This play, Titus Andronicus, is a bit violent or brutal, and this play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is pretty sloppy and chaotic,” he wouldn’t have listened to any of that. He was listening only to the show he was putting on at the moment. I think its fair to say he’s the world’s greatest poet, but I think of him as a dramatist who used poetry rather than as a poet who used the drama. Rasky: We’ve talked about the Bible, we’ve talked about literature, now we’re on to Shakespeare. What do you think that Shakespeare has to say to the modern world that perhaps no other poet can tell us? Frye: I don’t think that Shakespeare says anything. I think he presents

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you with the plays, and the plays are unlike anything else that God or man ever made. Rasky: How about passages of Shakespeare that you feel reach the greatest heights? Frye: If I wanted favourite passages I think I would read the sonnets rather than the plays. Rasky: Okay, I think at this point what I’d like to do is then have you do some reading. [Frye reads Sonnet 146. Images of ancient and modern statues and carvings, mummies, a religious procession, and pictures by Blake.] Rasky: You make several statements towards the end of The Great Code, and I’d like to talk about one. You say that death is a leveller, not because everyone dies, but because nobody understands what death means [230/251]. But the fact is, of course—isn’t the question we don’t know what life means? Frye: Yes, that’s true, but at least we can assume that we’re alive. We can’t make any assumptions about death. Rasky: We can’t assume what happens after death? Frye: We can’t assume what’s on the other side, so to speak, or whether there is any other side. Rasky: Then we have the Apocalypse, and you write that “anyone coming cold to the Book of Revelation, without context of any kind, would probably regard it as simply an insane rhapsody” [137/156–7]. Frye: I think I may quote there: I think it was Calvin who said that Revelation is a book that either finds a man mad or leaves him so.13 And the reason is, of course, that it’s talking about the mental transcending of the categories of time and space. And at present the only people that can do that are lunatics. [Images of Blake’s pictures and atomic bombs exploding. Voiceover quotations from Blake and Oppenheimer.] Rasky: Shaw said there’s only one religion and everything else is a variation on it. Why do you think it is so hard for people to get over that fringe difference; why do the variations tend to blind us? Frye: Well, it’s a by-product of the hostility and aggressiveness that

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seem to be partly built into human nature. I don’t think they have to be there, but they have been there from the New Stone Age, at least. And so we get to projecting enemies and we make religious differences a pretext for constructing enemies. Rasky: But if things don’t improve, does that leave you optimistic or pessimistic about the human condition? You’ve been through these seventyfive years now, and you’ve examined it very closely, but where does that leave you in judgment, if I can ask that? Frye: Well, in history, it doesn’t look as though we were any closer to the Millennium, which, according to the seventeenth-century theologians, is going to come in 1996. I don’t think it’s going to come in 1996, and so I think that history is Joyce’s nightmare from which we’re trying to awake and it’s going to go on being a nightmare. But there is also the constant attempt to awaken from it, and that’s what produces all the love and the beauty in the world. [Doxology sung; Jerusalem.]

99 Canadian and American Values Conducted 24 August 1988

Interview with Bill Moyers, from “Northrop Frye: Canadian Literary Critic,” in his A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future, ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 494–505. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Bill Moyers is a well-known American TV journalist and supporter of liberal and environmental causes, whose previous activities include serving as special assistant to Lyndon Johnson and acting as deputy director of the Peace Corps. He had founded the company Public Affairs Television in 1986, and was the producer of many programs of an informational nature. His book is a transcript of conversations with forty-one thinkers for a PBS series called A World of Ideas in the election year of 1988, on the theme “American Values.” Frye was one of only four non-Americans interviewed; his interview was broadcast over PBS on 28 October 1988. It is available on videocassette in NFF, 1992, box 5.

Moyers: Does it bother Canadians that the United States pays them so little attention? Or do you just consider yourselves lucky? Frye: Well, there is a good deal of resentment about the Americans’ ignorance of things Canadian, considering that the first thing the American learns about his own country is that it’s bounded on the north by Canada. At the same time, the American policy of taking Canada more or less for granted rather suits the Canadian temperament. Moyers: Poor Mexico has to wake up every morning wondering what good deed the United States is going to do to it that day.

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Frye: Exactly, yes. But Mexico has a different language and a radically different culture. It’s quite a different situation. Moyers: Some stereotypes of Canada appeared recently in an American humour magazine called Spy. One was that obedience is in the Canadian blood, that every citizen knows the thrill of being a follower, and that Canadians won’t cross against a red light even if there’s no traffic coming and a dog is chasing them. Now what do you say about that caricature? Frye: Well, it has this much to be said for it: that historically Canada was developed in a very different way from the United States. For example, we don’t have the tradition of the bad men, the outlaws in the West. We started out with the British military occupation of Quebec, and then went on to the Northwest Mounted Police. The violence in Canadian history has been mostly repressive violence, mostly from the top down. That has made us, to some extent, a country that puts up with pragmatic compromises. But I don’t know that it’s any different from the way that Americans follow their donkeys’ carrots in elections. Moyers: Canada didn’t become a nation until 1867. By then the United States was a nation almost a hundred years old. Frye: Canada, of course, had spent the eighteenth century with the English and French battering down each other’s forts. In other words, we didn’t have any eighteenth century, and we have nothing corresponding to culture heroes like Washington or Franklin or Jefferson. Moyers: Is there a dominant figure in the Canadian idea similar to Washington or to Lincoln? Frye: There really isn’t. The closest we have are leaders like Sir John A. Macdonald, who was the architect of Confederation, and later on, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. But we don’t have a father of the country. Moyers: What about the stereotype in the United States that Canadians are so friendly that they even say thank you to the bank machine? Frye: Well, that could be true. I remember a Chicago taxi driver who heard me say something like, “Sorry,” or “Beg your pardon,” to something I didn’t hear, and it impressed him for the rest of the morning.1 Moyers: There’s also an old saw about a culture that thrives on Valium—that although the United States and Canada share a 3,968-mile

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border, Canada doesn’t keep troops on that border because Canadians know that if the United States invaded, you would win by simply boring us to death in the first three days. Frye: Yes, or scaring you to death. After all, we won several battles in the War of 1812 with about thirty Indians scattered through the woods. Moyers: What do you think is the dominant image of Canada in the United States? Frye: I think it’s a bit dim. They regard it as a neighbour they can more or less take for granted, and otherwise don’t think too much about it. It’s very reassuring to the United States to feel that there’s a country in which most people speak the same language they do and have a great deal of their culture in common. Moyers: One of your intellectuals, the novelist Mordecai Richler, says that most new ideas and energy come from the States.2 Canadians find that they’re subject to the finest in American culture as well as to the worst. People here are brought up on American literature and American films. When all is said and done, therefore, Canadians and Americans are all North Americans. Do you think that’s a fair assessment? Frye: Well, I think it’s very largely true. It’s a trifle oversimplified—there are differences in temperament that he isn’t altogether taking account of. But it is true that Canadians are sometimes apt to talk rather glibly about the Americanizing of Canadian culture, forgetting that the features they disapprove of are also at work in America itself, and that the United States has to struggle between its best culture and its worst culture. Moyers: What do you see as the best of United States culture? Frye: It’s the same as the best in any culture, I suppose: the arts themselves, and the respect for freedom and individuality that makes the American ideal something real. There’s a Canadian novelist, Frederick Philip Grove, who wrote a book called A Search for America. Grove says there are two Americas, one connected with Whitman and Lincoln, and the other with selling encyclopedias from door to door, which is the job he had. And he says in a footnote at the end of the book that he thinks that the former way of life has been better preserved in Canada. But that is not a statement I would buy, particularly. Moyers: What do you think is the worst aspect of American culture?

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Frye: The worst aspect, I suppose, is what anybody would say was the worst: the violence, the lawlessness, the corruption and greed and so forth—all the human vices. Moyers: You don’t seem to have the crime here that we do. Frye: Well, that’s the elementary arithmetic of original sin—twenty million people can’t get up to all the hell that two hundred million people can get up to. Moyers: But although you don’t have this mythological idea of a nation that the United States has, there seems to be more obeisance to the obligations of society, to the sense of community. Frye: That’s because the sense of community in Canada is more complex than it is in many countries. The oscillation of national feeling and regional feeling makes for rather a quieter setup in general. And that is why, I think, various ethnic groups in a city like Toronto can get along with each other to a degree that doesn’t seem possible in a comparable American city. Moyers: The homogeneity of Canada is changing, is it not? When I came into the airport last night, I was struck by the number of people arriving, either as visitors or as potentially new citizens, who were of ethnically diverse backgrounds. Frye: The Toronto that I’m living in in 1988 is a totally different city from the Toronto I entered in 1929. Then it was still “Hogtown,” and still entirely a WASP city controlled by the Orange Order. There’s almost nothing of that left now. There’s no room for it. Moyers: Is there a sense that Canada is becoming more like the United States, not only in this regard but in others as well? Frye: It’s bound to become more like the United States for a rather paradoxical reason: that the more diverse it becomes, the more homogeneous the continent becomes. The statement that you quoted from Mordecai Richler is quite right on that point. Moyers: Someone said that you gave us Saul Bellow and we gave you the Cosby show. You exchange a great intellectual and novelist for a sitcom mass-produced in Hollywood. Frye: But again, that’s one of these rather simplistic contrasts, where the

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side of American culture that you can’t praise very highly is something which is just as lethal to American culture as it is to Canadian culture. Moyers: Lethal? Frye: In the sense that it creates a market, which to some degree curtails the richness and variety and scope of the genuinely creative people in the country. Moyers: You once talked about Canada as being an anti-intellectual society.3 Of course, that’s a common lament made in the United States, too. Do you think that’s still true? Frye: Oh, I think it’s true in most countries. Actually, it’s less true in Canada than in many other places, and it’s becoming less true in proportion as more and more Canadians begin to realize that the creative people in Canada are the people to be prized, the people who are actually defining the country at its best and producing the best image of it. Moyers: Eighty-five per cent of all Canadians live within a hundred miles of the United States border. That’s close enough to hear Ed Koch even when the television set is not on.4 Is Canada a kind of cultural colony of the United States? Frye: Canada may very well be the only genuine colony left in the world. The degree of economic and to some extent political penetration by the United States is of course very great, and the reasons for it are quite obvious. Moyers: But does the mindset of the colony exist here—that there is a great paternalistic and pervasive force shaping the culture from the outside? Frye: I don’t think Canada has ever thought of the United States as in any sense a mother country or a country that would shape its imagination. It has regarded the United States as a friendly ally, but always on equal terms with itself. There’s nothing corresponding to the somewhat romantic views that nineteenth-century Canadians had about Great Britain or French Canadians about France. The Americans were simply the Whigs who won the revolution, and the Canadians were the Tories who lost it. Moyers: And burned the White House in the process of the war that followed the revolution.

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Frye: But you know why they burned the White House—because the Americans burned Toronto a year before. The Americans burned York, as Toronto was called then, in the middle of the winter, and half of York got pneumonia. In reprisal for that, the British shelled Washington the next year. Moyers: It’s fascinating to me that the United States won its independence from Britain and then fought with Canada, and yet among no nations of the world do more amicable sentiments manifest themselves than between these three societies. Frye: That’s true. Canada, of course, had its civil war first, with the British and the French. The War of 1812, however stupid a war it was, was something of a war of independence for Canada. It meant that Canada was going to go its own way. At the same time, it never seems to have left any legacy of bitterness behind it, the way the American Civil War did in the South. Moyers: Do those wars of Canada’s history play the role in the mind of your country that our war of revolution and our Civil War play in our mind? Frye: It’s not nearly as intense. Canadians really know very little about the War of 1812 and care less. The eighteenth-century struggle for the country is still remembered with a good deal of heart-burning in the French part of Canada. They speak of 1759 as l’année terrible—the year of disaster. But that’s something they more or less get out of the history books. I’m not sure how much they feel it. Moyers: So much of American history has taken on mythological proportions in our society—the city set upon a hill, frontier, the manifest destiny to make the world safe for democracy. Mythology plays a powerful role in the American consciousness. Frye: I rather regret that the same mythological patterns are present in Canada and yet are paid so little attention to. We also have our city on the hill, namely Quebec, the fort where the river narrows, a fort that was taken and retaken about five or six times. And we also have our Maccabean victories in the War of 1812 and the Fenian raids later, and so on. We have all that mythology potentially. But because Americans started with a revolution and a Constitution, they brought the myth right into the foreground of their lives in a way that has never happened with Canada.

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Moyers: We talk about the American dream, but I don’t hear anyone talking about the Canadian dream. Does mythology play a part in the Canadian’s sense of himself or herself? Frye: Mythology does play a part, but it’s a different kind of mythology. The Americans started with a revolution, and a revolution tends to impose a deductive pattern on a society, so you get phrases like “one hundred per cent American.” Of course, nobody ever can find out what one hundred per cent Canadian is. To start with, you’ve got the AngloFrench division. Every Canadian feels himself part of a federal unity, but he also feels himself very intensely a part of a more regional unity. Very often in Canadian elections he’ll vote one way federally and the opposite way provincially. All of that means that the Canadian dream is very much more complex than the American dream. In American terms, it’s much more Jeffersonian. Moyers: So it appeals more to the romantic idea of individualism. Frye: I don’t know that it gets as far as individualism, but it gets as far as regionalism. Moyers: What role does the imagination play in the shaping of a nation’s sense of itself? Frye: It builds up the sense of the empire expanding without limit, the inscriptions from Assyria saying “the king of kings, the king of the world,” and so forth. That’s an imagination that gets out of touch with reality. Then eventually you begin to see how the historical process works, that there are always other societies in the world. The imagination takes on other constructs, such as the rise and fall idea—Herodotus explaining that the Greek resistance defeated that tremendous Persian machine because the gods don’t like big empires.5 Moyers: I’ve often thought that one of the secrets of Ronald Reagan’s appeal was that he was able to make Americans feel as if we were still the mighty giant of the world, still an empire, even as around the world we were having to retreat from the old presumptions that governed us for the last fifty years. Did you see any of that in the Reagan appeal? Frye: Oh yes, very much so. It’s the only thing that explains the Reagan charisma. In fact, I think that what has been most important about Americans since the war is that they have been saying a lot of foolish things—

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the Evil Empire, for example—but doing all the right ones.6 I think nobody but Nixon could have organized a deal with China, for example. Moyers: Well now, what does that say about a society, that it says one thing even as it must do another? Frye: It means that the mythological imagination functions on two levels. There is the superficial level of the stereotype, and there’s another and very much more realistic one, where you actually do the things that promote self-preservation and survival. Moyers: Is it really superficial? Isn’t the myth a binding power, an integrating force, for people? What people believe becomes what holds them together, even as they’re having to operate more realistically? Frye: Yes, it’s the function of myth to make a binding force in society. But if that other, more realistic level in mythology is not there, then the stereotype runs away with the realism, and you’re heading for disaster. That’s the Nazi direction. Moyers: When we talk about myth this way, what do we mean? Frye: We mean a story extrapolated from history which takes the form of an ideology. That is, because of the American Revolution and the American Constitution, there is such a thing as an American way of life. The American myth becomes the American ideology. Moyers: So to know the American story is to buy into the American way of life. Frye: I think so. Moyers: And why is that important? You say you wish Canada had more of the story, more of the myth. Frye: Well, I just wish that the imagination in Canada had something more coherent to work on, that’s all. We’ve always got along on an Edmund Burke type of pragmatic compromise. The conquest of Quebec by the British, for example, was not really a conquest, and they had to make compromises as a result. The Quebec Act was a very humane document by eighteenth-century standards, but it meant that every episode of Canadian history is a crisis in which the country seems to be falling apart at the seams. It never quite does. There is always some ad hoc compromise or arrangement. It’s an entirely different attitude from the deductive, revolutionary American model.

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Moyers: How do you see our myth? Frye: I see it as the myth of a social unification that is geared to the idea of a progress through time. There are passages in Walt Whitman, for example, where he compares American democracy to something very like an express train—he doesn’t use that image, but that’s what he means.7 The country’s just going ahead. But since Vietnam, the American imagination has become much more like the Canadian imagination in that it realizes that no imperial power, however great or however wealthy, is immortal. Moyers: And you see this since Vietnam, the war America lost? Frye: It was the beginning of a sense of mortality about a certain part of American history. Moyers: I agree with you. Now there are even books being written about “the decline of the United States,” and Americans—except for Ronald Reagan—are talking with a fatalism that is new in my country. Does it strike you as ominous or just mature? Frye: To the extent that it’s fatalism, it’s ominous. But to the extent that it’s an acceptance of certain historical processes, it’s very healthy and realistic. Every empire has to get to the point where it loses its swelled head and begins to get a sense of proportion about its role in the world. The British Empire began to do that after the Boer War, and the Soviet Union has been doing it in the last twenty to twenty-five years. Moyers: Does American society strike you as acting fairly maturely at this moment? Frye: It’s acting as maturely as it has done in its history. I don’t feel uneasy about the climate of opinion in the United States, to the extent that I felt uneasy about it during the Joe McCarthy period, for example, when the stereotype was running away with the reality. Moyers: I think that we are showing some signs of maturity at the moment, although the rhetoric sometimes reminds one of the worst excesses of American pretension. Frye: Yes, but there’s another streak that doesn’t take the rhetoric too seriously. Moyers: We’ve been through the season of American politics. How does it strike you?

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Frye: It’s a process that has become like a sporting event. That’s really what keeps it going and what keeps the public interested in it. I listen to the discussions on American television and notice how they ascribe mental processes to things that don’t strike me as mental processes at all. That kind of discussion—building up the speeches of George Bush and others as though they were all part of a great intellectual debate—all that seems to me to be extremely healthy. It’s a way of getting people to participate in their own democracy. Moyers: But do you see much evidence of a genuine debate about ideas and policies? Frye: I see evidence not in the politicians themselves, but in the people who talk about the politicians. Moyers: The politicians play the storytelling role, while the real making of the life of the country goes on, including the intellectual life of the country. Frye: Yes. If you watch a Japanese puppet play long enough, you start thinking that the puppets are saying the lines themselves. Moyers: Is it different here in Canada? Frye: It’s different to the extent that it’s a parliamentary system. It’s becoming more and more like the American system, but there is less emphasis on the party convention, and there is still the possibility of the prime minister going down with his party. The operation of the parliamentary system is different enough to make for a slightly different climate of opinion. Moyers: Is television here influencing politics the way it is in the United States, making it a sporting event or entertainment? Frye: Very much so. I would like it better if I thought we had people who could play up to it. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter all that much who’s president of the United States. What did it matter in twentiethcentury history that George Ford was a president of the United States? Moyers: Gerald Ford. Frye: Gerald Ford. Sorry. Moyers: Are you saying the president is the front man for a system that continues to operate irrespective of his leadership?

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Frye: I’m not sure that the pyramid myth, the notion of the man at the top of society, really conforms to the realities of twentieth-century life. There is a whole machinery that is bound to continue functioning, so that ninety-five per cent of what any president can do is already prescribed for him—unless he’s a complete lunatic. For that reason, it doesn’t seem so profoundly significant who is in the position of leadership. Moyers: What does that say about the role of the leader in the modern world? Frye: It means that the leader has to be a teammate. The charismatic leader, to the extent that he is that, is a rather dangerous person if he starts taking himself seriously. I’m a little leery about the adulation bestowed on Gorbachev. He has a very complex piece of machinery to try to help operate. The historical process works itself out in ways that really don’t allow for the emergence of a specific leader. It’s only in the army that you have the specific leader because that’s the way the military hierarchy’s set up. Moyers: But historical processes are the accumulated actions of autonomous individuals expressing their wills, appetites, desires, passions in the world out there. Those are subject to being changed by leaders, are they not? Frye: People are much more pushed around than that by the cultural conditioning in which they’re brought up and the social conditions under which they have to operate. The person who emerges as leader is really the person who is the ultimate product of that social conditioning. Moyers: There was an Italian Marxist in the 1920s who said that in the future, all leaders will be corporate. There will not be single leaders. Of course that was before Mussolini and before Hitler. Frye: He was right to the extent that the charismatic single leader turned out to be a disaster. Moyers: So maybe the corporate leader is not only an historical necessity, but a desirable phenomenon as well. Frye: He’s desirable because I think he’s essential for movement in the direction of peace. When I said that it was only the military that gives you the person on top, the supreme command, you notice that the dictators, the supreme leaders, have always been leaders of an army and have always imposed what is essentially martial law on their communities.

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Moyers: Mao, Mussolini, Hitler— Frye: Yes, and some of the African states. Moyers: I remember something you said in a sermon delivered on the 150th anniversary of the founding of Victoria College here. You said, “I seldom hear people talking about ‘systems’ with any confidence now. The world today is in so deeply revolutionary a state that all systems, whatever they’re called, are equally on the defensive, trying to prevent further change.”8 Do you still hold to that? Frye: Oh, I think so, yes. Doctrinaire Marxism will not work anywhere in the world—not because it’s Marxism, but because it’s doctrinaire. I don’t think anything doctrinaire will work anywhere. Moyers: And by “doctrinaire,” you mean—? Frye: I mean a simplified deductive pattern that carries out policies from major premises about ideology— Moyers: —instead of from the experience of the real world? Frye: Yes. Moyers: Gorbachev is trying to change his system. Frye: He’s trying to loosen up his system. It’s because he doesn’t have the belief in the system that the followers of Lenin did in the 1920s and ’30s that his policies take the shape they do. It’s the same in China. Moyers: You’ve lived through the revolution of Russia, the Stalinist era, the Holocaust, two world wars, genocide around the world—this has been quite a century. Frye: It’s led me to the feeling that the historical process is a dissolving phantasmagoria. When I was young, George VI was the Emperor of India, and Hitler ruled an empire from Norway to Baghdad. All that has vanished into nothingness. That says to me that history is a process of continuing dissolution, and that the things that survive are the creative and the imaginative products. Moyers: —the mind, the life of the mind. Frye: —the arts and the sciences. Moyers: Thirty years ago, you wrote that the hope of democracy rests

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entirely on the earnest student and the dedicated teacher.9 Do you still believe that? Frye: Yes, I do. That is the only stable and permanent thing in human society. I’m not bringing in religious perspectives at this point, but insofar as we’re speaking of human beings constituting a human society, that is what stabilizes and makes permanent the whole structure of society. Moyers: The “earnest student”—how do you differentiate the earnest student from the student who’s not earnest? Frye: The student who’s not earnest is simply a middle-class product. He’s a member of a privileged class who takes his privileges because he thinks it’s the thing to do. But his is a career without discovery. And a career without a discovery is going to move within the prison of his social conditioning. He’s never going to see a crack in it anywhere. Moyers: And what’s the dedicated teacher as opposed to the teacher who’s not dedicated? Frye: The teacher who is not dedicated is a mass man, and he gets a mass product. He teaches largely because he has particular certainties that he wants to implant in the minds of his students. But the dedicated teacher realizes that the end of education is to get yourself detached from society without withdrawing from it. If a man is teaching English literature, for example, he’s in contact with the entire verbal experience of his students. Now nine tenths of that verbal experience is picked up from prejudice and cliché and things the student hears on the street corners, on the playgrounds, and from his family and his home, and so forth. The dedicated teacher tries to detach from all that and to look into it as something objective. It’s not something he can withdraw from, because it’s his own society, but it’s something that he can cultivate a free and individual approach to. Moyers: Doesn’t this lead to a lonely life, the life of a dissenter, the life of someone who’s always questioning instead of affirming? Frye: Except that the next person who is also doing this can form a very intimate society with you. Moyers: You said that “the mind best fitted for survival in any world is the mind that has discovered how knowledge can be joyful, leading to the friendship with wisdom that is pure delight, and is ready to tackle any

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kind of knowledge with clarity of perception and intentness of will.”10 There’s a difference between a trained mind and a dedicated mind. Frye: I was suggesting that the trained mind has acquired techniques which, in a world like ours, will probably be out of date in ten or fifteen years. Training is not the important thing, it’s the readiness to take on training. That’s what I mean by the dedicated mind. Moyers: As the world dissolves, you learn to swim to the next ship. Frye: That’s right. Moyers: I noticed that the inscription on Victoria College is the same as the inscription on the main tower of my alma mater, the University of Texas. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” [John 8:32]. What kind of truth? Frye: In its original context in the Gospel of John, Jesus says that he is the truth, meaning that the truth is a personality and not a set of propositions, and that the truth about him was the union of divine and human natures. The feeling that the human destiny is inseparably involved with something divine is for Jesus what makes one free. Moyers: Is that true for Northrop Frye? Frye: Yes. Moyers: No separation of the secular and the sacred—even in learning? Frye: Oh, there are separations, yes. But the separations are in many contexts much less important than the things they have in common. Everything in religion has a secular aspect. Everything in secular life has a religious aspect. Moyers: What do you mean by the divine? Frye: That’s quite a big question. I think that in human terms it means that there is no limit toward the expansion of the mind or of the freedom and liberty of mankind. Now, of course there are aspects of freedom and liberty, such as wanting to do what you like—which really means being pushed around by your social conditioning. Moyers: —your appetites, as well. Frye: Yes. But the feeling that the genuine things you want, like freedom,

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are inexhaustible and that you never come to the end of them—that’s the beginning of the experience of the divine, for me. Moyers: And you said that the truth that makes one free must be shared. It can’t be owned. Frye: Truth is not a possession. If it’s a possession, it becomes a secret and becomes untrue. If a scientist makes a new discovery, the first thing he wants to do is publish it. If a novelist has a new imaginative model for a story in his mind, the first thing he wants to do is publish it. Moyers: As Jesus said to his disciples, “Go publish the good news” [Mark 13:10]. Frye: Yes. And also, if you invest your talents, you’re doing something sensible. If you bury them, you’re committing suicide. Moyers: You said once that the differences over faith are far less important than the agreement on charity.11 Is this what you’re talking about— this sharing impulse, this sense of solidarity with others, this need to help others? Frye: Yes, I think so. The word “faith” is so often associated with assent to propositions, usually without enough evidence, and wherever you have that, of course, you have disagreement. Moyers: If I think a statement means one thing, you’re going to think it means something else. Frye: That’s right. And if one person is Christian and the other Jewish, it means they differ on certain doctrines, like incarnation. But when it comes to things that make for the freedom and happiness of mankind, they can be solidly united. Moyers: Propositions create holy wars because people differ over them. Frye: That’s right. Moyers: So you’re saying we need an agreement on charity. Frye: Yes. Charity is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the only virtue there is. Moyers: What do you mean by charity? Frye: Agape, the New Testament sense of love.

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Moyers: Don’t you sometimes feel like Isaac Newton’s imagined child playing with pebbles on a beach while there’s an undiscovered ocean out there?12 There’s so much to know and so little time. Frye: Oh yes. Everyone feels that who has ever collided with any serious subject at all. Moyers: Do you still feel that in your own field of literature and culture? Frye: I still feel it very strongly, except that I don’t think that the ocean has to remain undiscovered. I think one can go on exploring it indefinitely, and that it wants to be explored. Moyers: In The Educated Imagination, you say that the Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it [46; EICT, 475]. Why the Bible? Frye: Because the Bible is the definitive mythology in the Western world, which the imagination has incorporated into a social life. The Bible to me is not a structure of doctrine, not a structure of propositions, but a collection of stories making up one single story, and that’s the interrelationship of God and man. You can understand the importance of that interpenetration without necessarily believing in God. Moyers: But in your case, it points toward God, does it not? Frye: Oh yes. Yes. Moyers: Mankind’s creation, mankind’s fall, mankind’s constant restless search to get back to the paradise lost. Do you think that’s the controlling vision in most of our lives? Frye: I think it is a very fundamental vision. It may come out in some very queer ways, like the man who just lives to get out of this rat race and go to a summer cottage. But in its way, even that is a kind of paradisal myth. Moyers: What does one come to grips with when the Bible has sunk to the bottom of one’s mind? Frye: One comes to grips with the essential questions of human nature and human destiny. When you develop a knowledge of nature, as science does, you’re really looking into a structure of intelligibility that

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you’ve constructed yourself. In other words, you’re a narcissist, falling in love with your own reflection. That wonderful book of Martin Buber’s, I and Thou, talks about the feeling of the divine as the “thou” which gets you out of the prison of looking at your own reflection. You’re still looking at your own reflection when you’re talking to him or her on equal terms. Moyers: In the Bible story, you also look at the face of God, which is the least narcissistic glance one can cast. Frye: Yes. Moyers: Do you think we can find in literature a vision of the society we want to live in? Frye: That, to my mind, is what the paradisal vision is. We’ve been living with this myth, which I think is a sound myth, for thousands of years— that we’re living in a world that is not the world either that man wants or that God intended for him, and that there is another world that we can get to, though not necessarily the world we enter at death. It’s a different kind of thing altogether. Moyers: As I was watching the Democratic and Republican conventions, I thought that politics, too, is trying to create out of the world we live in a world we would like to live in. And while I admire the aspiration, I’m reminded by the Bible that it’s an almost hopeless quest. Frye: It may be almost hopeless, but we have to keep on doing it. The voter has to say to himself, “Now, which of these visions corresponds more closely to my own paradisal vision?” Moyers: —of getting back into paradise, creating heaven on earth. Frye: He knows that ninety-nine per cent of this is nonsense, and yet, nevertheless, what else keeps him going?

100 Nature and Civilization Conducted 24 February 1989

From Impulse, 15, no. 3 (1989): 76–80. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Impulse was an avant-garde periodical publishing contemporary Canadian art and culture. The interview, entitled simply “Northrop Frye,” was conducted by the magazine’s business manager Stuart Inglis, later an art director, along with interning student Christopher Webber, in Frye’s office at Massey College.

Interviewer: Professor Frye, what does the word “nature” mean to you? Frye: Traditionally, there have always been two aspects of nature: nature as structure or system in the environment—the nature of physics; and the nature that is the force of growth in life—the nature of biology. Interviewer: As man did not make nature we therefore cannot understand it. How has man dealt with this incomprehensibility of nature? Frye: Man looks at nature and finds it intelligible. How the intelligibility got there is none of his business as a scientist, but he does find that he can make a picture out of it, and that human picture is what we use for nature. We don’t know what’s behind the human picture. Interviewer: You’ve stated that gods in nature are usually evil [GC, 68/ 86], and in the Bible we find nature symbolized by monsters like Leviathan and Behemoth. Why do we look at nature as a monster? Frye: In the Bible there is a strong polemical tendency to try and get the Israelites away from the nature cults of the peoples around them. The pre-Biblical religions were mostly cults of the mother-goddess, and the Biblical authors were afraid that as long as you have a mother-goddess

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representing nature at the centre of things, man will always be an embryo; he’ll never be able to get out of the womb of the mother-goddess. The tradition that started with the Bible and runs through both Judaism and Islam, too, is to find man’s salvation in human institutions, not in natural objects. Interviewer: Is it related to death? Frye: The mother-goddess nature is both the womb and the tomb. She is the repository of all death as well as the fosterer of all birth, so she has a very ambivalent character. Interviewer: Is the ambivalent character of nature the reason why we develop a cultural envelope, “a social skin that defines a boundary between us and nature” [cf. GC, 50/69]? Frye: Yes, man is not a noble savage; he can never live directly in nature the way the animals do. Interviewer: As a way of coping with nature, early in Canadian history we tended to accumulate in small communities isolated from one another by natural barriers. The people living in this period exhibited what you’ve called a “garrison mentality.”1 What does this term mean? Frye: In nineteenth-century Canada where conditions were so frequently pioneering conditions, where small populations were isolated and cut off from one another, Canadians threw all their energy into the integrity of the human community. Interviewer: What was the artistic reaction to this isolation within nature? Frye: The reaction was really a kind of intensification of the Biblical view that there is nothing worshipful or numinous in nature. Nature in many nineteenth-century poems is rather sinister. Other poems which were composed in the summer take a different view of nature, but nature is very seldom thought of as something that really complements the nature of man. Everything in Canada suggests a dominating of nature by an intelligence that doesn’t love it. Interviewer: In this century our population has become concentrated in urban areas. Do our artists still work within the “garrison mentality” or has it metamorphosed?

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Frye: I think the contemporary Canadian poets tend to deal with the sinister elements of the natural environment more in internal terms. There is a sense of psychological exploration of inner space, and that’s where nature seems to have moved to. Interviewer: In the past century nature was considered the enemy of creative forces. Do you see any new enemies to creative forces? Could it be the city? Frye: The city will always be an enemy because it’s humanity in the form of a mob; the sense of the big city as being so full of violence and a kind of lawlessness that has almost got out of hand, and that is certainly an enemy of all creative spirits in Canada as elsewhere. Interviewer: Does the city offer any creative benefits that the countryside does not offer? Frye: Yes it does. It’s the focus of the community and the focus of creativity. Culture is vegetable. It sends out roots and needs something with a limited environment. At the same time the city is your market, and also the place where you draw your techniques from. In nineteenth-century Canada a great deal of culture was provincial because they thought of standards as something that were established elsewhere: London, New York, Paris. They also thought that it was important for Canada and Canadian authors to meet them. Well, you don’t meet standards, you can only establish them yourself, but in order for that to happen you have to be in control of the international setup, or least be in touch with it. And out of that, the region becomes articulate. Interviewer: Would you explain how the airplane, television, and other communicative media have created what you’ve called an “obliterated environment”?2 Frye: If you journey from Toronto to Ottawa by plane you’re simply moving from one point of space to another and you’re hardly conscious of the intervening land. The flight itself takes only forty minutes and you’re sealed up in a tube. If, however, you find that you have to go by train instead, it’s a hell of a long bleak journey through a great deal of landscape, but at least you’re aware of the landscape. You can see that it is there. Interviewer: Why does an obliterated environment cause “imaginative dystrophy”?3

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Frye: Because there is no sense of rapprochement between a human community and the environment of that community. You’re getting a self-contained community which never gets outside itself, like those science fiction stories where people spend years travelling to the nearest star inside a spaceship. Interviewer: How are the study of the laws of nature—that is, science— and tragic drama related? And what effect has the theory of evolution and quantum physics had on tragic drama? Frye: The two developments of science which were contemporary with two great movements of tragedy were both discoveries of law in science. A sense of the immutability of certain processes: certain effects follow certain causes. The tragedians also worked out dramatic patterns that if you do A, B is certain to follow. With evolution in the nineteenth century and the quantum jump and the uncertainty principle in twentieth-century physics, you have something which is not quite this cause–effect relationship, and consequently it causes a more ironic tone in the arts. Interviewer: As the natural world disappears from our awareness, along with it disappear the names of nature. If you took a typical youth of today into the forest and asked him to identify ten different species of trees, he probably couldn’t; yet he could give you many names of things found in the cityscape. He could, for example, name ten “species” of cars. There has been a loss and a gain in our lexicon. What is the net effect of this loss and gain on symbolism? Frye: This is a matter of turning away from the physical environment into the human envelope. You give names to what you have priorities for. The Eskimos are supposed to have twenty-five names for the word “snow” because snow is very important for their lives. We have twentyfive names for different kinds of buildings because they are important in our lives. Interviewer: The Bible tells of the divine act of making the world and our subsequent fall from it. What is the status of these two myths today? Frye: When you have a myth like a paradise lost in the past or a hell threatening you in the future, you have myths which are distorted by the anxieties of time. The great strength of myth is that it really has no past or future, everything is in the present tense. The reality of hell is the fact that we put it there, and the unreality of paradise is that we failed to put

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it there. If you transpose these past and future things into the present tense you have the genuine myth. Interviewer: According to Christian theology, we are dominated by a sky-father, not an earth-mother. This leaves us with a nature lacking in spirits and deities. How has this influenced our attitude towards nature? Frye: I think the Bible’s insisting so much on the fact that there were no gods in nature, that all the gods discovered in nature are really demonic forces, and that man was to look to his own institutions for his salvation, had an unfortunate side effect. The side effect was this dominating and exploiting of nature which has reached a dead end now. Interviewer: And what would be different if we adopted an earthmother? Frye: We would have to rejuvenate her and turn her into an earth-bride, that is, into something which complements humanity. I don’t know why we need fathers or mothers. They are symbols which are appropriate for childhood. I would think that the tendency was rather in the direction of the New Testament image where you have bridegroom and bride, where humanity is a male principle and the surrounding environment is female, or the other way around, it doesn’t matter which. What is symbolically female doesn’t have to be sexually female, and vice versa. Interviewer: Do our present artists reflect a sense of belonging to nature? Frye: They may have adopted a more complex view of nature. The whole abstract expressionist period of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, is an approach to nature which really sees it through a film of twentiethcentury physics, as well as various other human constructs, by which we make nature intelligible to our own perceptions, so that it is no longer a simple landscape. If you fly over a city at night in a plane and look down on the geometrical patterns of lights you can see why this is the century of Kandinsky and not the century of Renoir. We really haven’t felt in touch with our natural environment the way native Indians and Eskimos have. In fact, we have a history of not really being “in touch” with the native people. The British and the French white settlers in our country really did their best to obliterate the civilization that was in front of them. They regarded the Indians as some kind of blank in the cosmos, and unless they could be converted to the

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white man’s religion or way of life, they were simply not human beings. I think we have outgrown that. Our poets and painters, particularly, are looking for ways to establish some kind of continuity with the culture we have obliterated. Of course, when you try to destroy a culture, or found a culture on the destruction of another one, it does breed guilt feelings that you are unaware of for a long time. Interviewer: Will we ever learn to love our planet instead of simply imposing ourselves on it? Frye: I would hope that we will learn to love nature. That is surely what ecology is all about: a feeling that humanity and nature are interdependent, that man is a child of nature. Man sprang out of nature. He ought to have some gratitude to it for giving him his own existence. The only way to achieve a love for nature is through stimulating awareness. You said a moment ago that you cannot take a modern child into the forest and point out trees and have him recognize the names. That sense of a lack of contact with the physical world is the state of unstimulated awareness. Loving nature is a matter of the awareness of it being poured into our minds.

101 Second Marriage Filmed 3 March 1989

From the videocassette in NFF, 1992, box 5, transcribed by Elizabeth O’Grady. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. The interview was taped for the Lifetime television program on CTV and broadcast on 14 March 1989 as part of a week of interviews of prominent Canadians over the age of fifty. The interviewer was Stephen Ashton. In NFF, 1991, box 41, file 1 is a transcription of the “preinterview” in which possible questions and answers were run through to avoid unpleasant surprises on air. Refreshingly candid, this transcript has been cited occasionally in notes. Helen Frye had died on 4 August 1986; on 27 July 1988 Frye married Elizabeth Eedy Brown. The second Mrs. Frye was a former classmate of Frye’s in the Class of 1933 who had studied modern languages. She had been married to Liberal politician James Brown until he died in 1974.1

Ashton: In July of last year, a loving union was announced that captivated the imaginations of all Canadians. Dr. Northrop Frye, one of the most influential scholars of this century, was getting married. For both him and Elizabeth, his bride-to-be, it was a second marriage. Now there may be nothing too special about that, but what brought the romantic out in all of us, I think, was that Northrop and Elizabeth had known each other since their university days. They were part of the Class of ’33 at Victoria College in Toronto, and when they exchanged vows for the second time, each was in their mid-seventies. Theirs is a heart-warming story, and here to tell us about it, the newly-married couple themselves, Professor and Mrs. Northrop Frye. Welcome to Lifetime. As you know we’re talking all this week about life as a different kind of adventure than it used to be. Mrs. Frye, I think there was a time that, when people

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who were in their seventies got married, people reacted with surprise, even shock. Any of that in this situation? Elizabeth Frye: Absolutely not. We were amazed about that. We thought there’d be all sorts of flak about these two oldsters getting married but we just said, “Well, we met at sixteen and we married at seventy-six and we’re having a wonderful time.” Isn’t that right? Frye: Oh yes, everybody seemed to think it was a wonderful idea. Ashton: So, no shock, no surprise, but you have quite an extended family: children, grandchildren, and so on. Did they say, “Good for you, Mom. Good for you, Grandma!” Elizabeth Frye: Every last one did. We were waiting for somebody to make a little fuss, but they didn’t. Ashton: In fact, the wedding itself . . . it was a very small private ceremony, is that correct? Elizabeth Frye: That’s right, yes. We decided on Monday we’d be married and we were married on Wednesday. Frye: Phoned another ’33 classmate who was a clergyman and asked him to come up and hitch us as we leaned against the piano. 2 Ashton: It was done in your own home then? Frye and Elizabeth Frye: Yes. Ashton: Well, that’s kind of wonderful. And there was in fact a big party afterwards, with all the well-wishers. Frye: A reception, yes. Elizabeth Frye: Yes, a supper. Oh, you mean a big reception at the College. Oh, yes. Ashton: I know that you exchanged vows in a very intimate way, but there were so many people who wanted to wish you well. Elizabeth Frye: Then we had a reception a week or two afterwards. Ashton: You two have experienced something that I think probably a lot of people in our audience have experienced: the loss of a spouse, and the void that that creates when someone who’s been there for so many

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years, whom we love very much, is suddenly gone. It’s impossible to describe until it happens, but is a “void” the right word, Mrs. Frye? Elizabeth Frye: I don’t know whether that’s the right word. I’d say probably it was a little closer to confusion. You just wonder, Well, now what happens? Ashton: Suddenly you’re alone. Elizabeth Frye: Yes. Ashton: They say what you ought to do is try and fill up your life as much as possible, to try and take your mind off the fact that there has been this loss. Did you approach it that way? Elizabeth Frye: Partly, and also I listened to the advice of my children, who said, Don’t make any decision for one year at least, don’t make any new plans, just go on as you are and keep doing the things that you enjoy for a whole year and then at that time you may be able to make a new decision. Ashton: And gradually your emotions become a little more balanced. Professor Frye, can you remember your feelings, if I’m not prying too much? Frye: Oh yes, my feelings were a little different. Elizabeth had the support of a large affectionate family and I didn’t have a family. It was just unutterably horrible for nearly two years. Ashton: After a marriage of that length, to suddenly be alone. Some people say it’s hard to carry on when that person’s gone. Did those feelings ever go through you? Frye: That was the feeling I had, yes, that I was just living with half a body. Ashton: And yet, your scholarship’s so well known one would think, Oh well, he has his work, but for some reason— Frye: Oh, I had my work, of course I carried on with that. Ashton: But it doesn’t take the place of another person in your life. Frye: Not in the least. Ashton: I want to open the yearbook here and get us on to a brighter

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subject. I love looking at old yearbooks. This is not the oldest that I’ve ever seen—I’ve seen my own grandfather’s. This is the Class of ’33. Let’s go up into this corner. Professor Frye, how do you remember this young lady when you first met her at the University of Toronto? Frye: Just like that. Ashton: You were Elizabeth Eedy at that time. Elizabeth Frye: Yes, that is I, I think. Ashton: What type of personality did she have then, Professor Frye? Frye: Well, very much the same type she has now. Very captivating young person. Ashton: Gregarious, outgoing. Let’s pan across the page, to use our television term, over to a gentleman over here and, Mrs. Frye, it’s the gentleman beneath my finger there, a very, very bright student, this guy, right? Tell me about Northrop Frye as he was then. Elizabeth Frye: Well, he was a very interesting young sixteen-year old who had read nearly every play in the English language, and he was very fond of typewriting. Ashton: In fact he won a typing contest. Is that how you got from Moncton to Toronto, on scholarship as a typist? Frye: Yes, at least my way was paid up, which was something in those days. Ashton: We’re also young when we’re in college, and it’s hard to imagine what mark people will make on the world. I guess your class must have been quite impressed by what Mr. Frye was able to accomplish. Elizabeth Frye: Well, sure, everyone in the year who accomplished something different and interesting was very much looked up to. And they seem to survive the longest, that’s the strange thing. Ashton: You’re a great class. Now one of the things that happens between people’s university years and the years which they call the “golden” or “senior” years, or whatever term is in vogue, is that people get set in their ways. And when you come together in a union like yours, is it difficult? Because all of a sudden you’re living with someone? Professor Frye, what would you say?

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Frye: I don’t find it difficult in the least because we have this large block of friends in common. And as I say, all of Elizabeth’s family rallied around, and it seemed to need an absolute minimum in the way of adjustment. Just no difficulty that I experienced. Ashton: Elizabeth, did you feel the same way, that you just fit together as simply as that? Elizabeth Frye: Yes, really, yes. And for me there wasn’t any adjustment in having to get to know a whole bunch of grandchildren, as my husband did. He’s had to adjust— Ashton: Was that fun? Or was it confusing? Frye: Oh yes. Ashton: Bit of both? Frye: Well, it was a little startling to have all this instant progeny of three children and five grandchildren, to say nothing of assorted sisters- and brothers-in-law. Ashton: Have you found it’s brought zest back to your work to have the companionship that you obviously have now, the love back in your life? Is it affecting you quite profoundly? Frye: Oh yes, I think so—in all sorts of ways that I don’t recognize at the moment but will later. Ashton: Are you the type of man to wake up whistling in the morning? . . . Perhaps not. You have a philosophy, Mrs. Frye, I believe, about just making the most out of the time that you’ve got. You love being outdoors and birdwatching . . . tell us about how much that factors in your life. Elizabeth Frye: Well, I like to do different things. I mean, one thing different from another and in another area really, and I do love being out of doors and I do love travelling and I’m very fond of people. Ashton: And the kind of exchange you can have with your husband. It’s all part of staying young, I suppose. People often say—apparently your mother said this too—“I may be eighty years old but I still feel like a young girl.” Do you feel that way a bit? Elizabeth Frye: Quite a bit, yes. And it may amuse you as something

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that happened after our reception, after our marriage, that two different sets of people our age and a little bit older have suddenly decided they are going to get married. One was a friend who hadn’t seen her new husband for at least twenty-five years and she called him up and said, “Would you mind driving me somewhere?” and he said, “Why, I’d be delighted to do so.” And he drove her somewhere and took her back and then they decided they’d get married. Just like that. They hadn’t seen each other for twenty-five years, but they went to the reception, and they got the idea.3 Ashton: Hard to believe, isn’t it? And think back to being in the Class of ’33 again. Would you have thought, when you were in the Class of ’33, that the seventies could be one of the happiest decades in your life. Do you feel that way now? Frye: I feel that way now, yes, but then the Class of ’33 is practically last Tuesday. Ashton: Yes. Time is flying, and it’s certainly flown here for us. Thank you so much for coming in. We’ve wanted to hear this story and I know it’s one you don’t tell often but we’re delighted to have you— Elizabeth Frye: It’s been delightful to be here. Just great to meet all you nice young people. Ashton: Thank you very much for coming.

102 Northrop Frye in Conversation Recorded 11–15 December 1989

From Northrop Frye in Conversation (Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992). Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. This series of interviews with the CBC’s David Cayley was recorded at Massey College over five days in December of 1989 with the assistance of Sara Wolch. Portions of the interviews, along with contributions from other participants, were used in a three-part series entitled “The Ideas of Northrop Frye” broadcast on the CBC’s Ideas on 19 and 26 February and 5 March 1990. A transcript of this was published by Robert D. Denham in Northrop Frye Newsletter, 3, no. 1 (Winter 1990–91): 2–14; 3, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 5–16; and 4, no. 1 (Winter 1991–92): 7–18. Parts were printed in “Inside Mythology” in the Idler, 32 (March–April 1991): 23–4, and another selection as Northrop Frye, “On Religion and Language,” in the CBC’s Ideas: Brilliant Speakers Speak Their Minds, ed. Bernie Lucht (Fredericton, N.B.: Goose Lane, 2005), 62–83. Shortly after Frye’s death producer Sara Wolch used some of the sections on an Ideas program on the Book of Job dedicated to Frye, 5 and 12 February 1991. An audiotape of the interviews is also available in NFF, 1991, box 65. The original ten tapes of interviews, transcribed by Denham and slightly rearranged and edited by Cayley, formed the basis for Northrop Frye in Conversation. The book has been translated into French by Clifford Bacon as Entretiens avec Northrop Frye (St. Laurent, Que.: Bellarmin, 1996), into Spanish by Carlos Manzano (1997), and into Japanese by Junichi Miyazawa (2003). In the following text, notes taken from the Cayley edition, with the exception of brief locating references to Frye’s works or to Ayre’s recently published biography, which have been inserted in parentheses in the text, are followed by [C]. Additional editorial matter is either in square brackets (in the text or within Cayley’s notes), or in new notes.

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I Moncton and Methodism Cayley: I would like to begin by asking how your religious and cultural background shaped your vocation. Frye: I think my religious background really did shape almost everything. It gave me the mythological framework I was brought up inside of, and I know from experience that once you’re inside a mythological framework you can’t break outside of it. You can alter or adapt it to yourself, but it’s always there. Cayley: Can you say what it was? What was, or is, Methodism? Frye: I think Methodism is an approach to Christianity that puts a very heavy emphasis on the quality of experience. That is one reason why I’ve always tended to think in terms of, first, a myth that repeats itself over and over again through time, and, second, the experience which is the response to it. Nothing that happens in history is unique. Everything is part of turning cycles or mythical repetition. Everything in experience is unique. I think it was because of the emphasis on the uniqueness of experience I acquired so early that I realized the other half of this was the mythological pattern. Cayley: The emphasis on experience in Methodism—can you contrast that with other approaches to Christianity? Frye: The Catholic approach, for example, is very much more doctrinal. You learn a structure of doctrine, you step inside it, and the doctrine performs instead of the myth. In Methodism you listen to the stories of the Bible. As Presbyterians used to say, the reason why Methodist ministers moved every three years was that the structure of doctrine in Methodism was totally exhausted long before then. Cayley: What were the historical conditions under which Methodism arose? Frye: It arose as a Canadian resistance to British and French establishments. There was a Roman Catholic establishment in Quebec, and a Church of England and a Presbyterian one in Ontario. Methodism moved in as part of a native protest. And of course the only place from which the influence could come was the United States. Cayley: How was this manifest in your particular background?

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Frye: My mother’s father was a Methodist circuit rider. He always stayed in country areas because he was so innocent. He always thought that the place he was assigned was the place that God had called him to, and he didn’t realize that he was in with a bunch of pushing entrepreneurs who were grabbing all the soft spots in the bigger cities. Cayley: Did you know him well? Frye: No. He died when I was about nine years old, and I wasn’t connected with him after about four or five. What I know of him is what I picked up from the family. Cayley: There’s an image in John Ayre’s biography of you clutching your copy of Pilgrim’s Progress like a teddy bear (25). Is this fanciful or not? Frye: It was partly the Methodist blue Sunday, where you couldn’t do anything on Sunday except read. I had a whole shelf full of children’s adaptations of the classics, and The Pilgrim’s Progress was one thing that most homes like the one I was brought up in encouraged the reading of. Cayley: But would you have been steeped in that book? Frye: Well, it was there. Cayley: You grew up in Moncton? Frye: I was born in Sherbrooke, and when my father’s business failed, we moved to Lennoxville, about three miles away. I stayed there until I was about seven or eight. Then my father became a hardware salesman for the Maritimes and settled in Moncton because it was central for his travelling. So I moved to Moncton when I was about eight. Cayley: And did you feel like an exile when you went to Moncton? Frye: My parents did, and I suppose I caught it from them. I was too young to feel that I was an exile, but they lost all their friends and never felt accepted in the Maritimes. Cayley: To the very end? Frye: Of course, other things happened. My father was always of a rather retiring disposition socially. He was affable enough with people, but he wasn’t a socializer. And my mother got extremely deaf and withdrawn and introverted. I was really brought up by grandparents, in

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effect. That is, I was born when my mother was over forty. My father’s business had failed, my older brother had been killed in the First World War, and we were in a new community where they were too old to adapt—my mother was deaf. I always felt there was a kind of generation gap there. Cayley: And a remoteness from the society you were living in? Frye: Yes, both from that and even from my parents themselves, because they belonged to a previous generation more dramatically than most parents do with their children. Cayley: How did this affect you? Frye: It made me extremely introverted and drawn in on myself. You see, I was brought up not only psychologically as a grandchild but also as an “only” child. I did have one sister, but she was twelve years older and so of another generation.1 I was very much thrown in on myself. And being temperamentally extremely bookish and rather awkward physically made me even more so. Cayley: What part did imagination play in your life? Frye: I suppose it was always there. It was a matter of becoming more and more aware of it. I should have added that, along with the introverted temperament, there was also the fact that our family was in a state of shabby-genteel poverty the whole time. I simply could not afford the freedom of social movement that other boys had. So, to some extent, I lived in an imaginary dream world. I suppose most children do. I was very much lacking in practical skills and social savoir faire. Because of that I suppose I spent the first seventeen years of my life mooning. When there is no world to live in except the world of the imagination, naturally that’s going to take shape. Cayley: How did it take shape for you as a child? Do you remember? Frye: I suppose it took shape as a world to become a writer in. My first impulses were the writing of fiction, and I kept writing fiction. For some reason or other I was born without the poetic faculty, or at least I never seemed to have much affinity for that. But for prose fiction I did, because that was what I was reading. It didn’t take me long to discover that that wasn’t my field either.

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Cayley: How did you first get to Toronto? Frye: The typing contest. That’s part of the Frye saga. I went to business college after high school. The Underwood Typewriter Company was running a typing contest in Toronto, and I got my fare paid, which was quite a consideration. Cayley: I can’t pretend not to know this story. You placed second, I think. Frye: In the Canadian one, yes. I didn’t do so well in the North American one. Cayley: How old would you have been then? Frye: I was sixteen for the Canadian contest in the spring and seventeen in the fall, when I went to college. Cayley: And you travelled alone to Toronto? Frye: Yes. Cayley: Do you remember that journey? Frye: Oh, yes. I remember several journeys. I took one to Chicago to see my sister when I was fourteen. They made a very considerable impression on me. Cayley: How? Frye: I don’t know. It’s hard to pin it down. It was the feeling of drifting through the landscape in this immense space and the darkness gradually closing in and gradually lightening up again. I think I’ve recorded, too, the view of Quebec in the early dawn from the Lévis side of the St. Lawrence [BG, vi; C, 416]. But it was not as overwhelming as the ship voyage coming in through the Gulf of St. Lawrence and then down the river. That was something utterly unforgettable. Cayley: You were seventeen when you went to Victoria College? Frye: Yes. Cayley: I have the impression you found it quite liberating. Frye: It was tremendous, because I was in a society where I felt I had a function. But there were many awkwardnesses at first, because I was

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from the Maritimes and I was quite different from the Ontario boys. I had to become like them as fast as possible. Cayley: How different? Frye: Oh, they wore hats and I wore a cap. These were trifles, but my general attitude was different partly because the high school in Moncton was so primitive in the ’20s, and they had all had a very much better education. They were grade 13 and I was grade 11, plus business college. II Critical Beginnings Cayley: When did you begin reading Blake? Frye: I think I began reading Blake in Pelham Edgar’s Shakespeare class, which he taught very badly because he didn’t like Shakespeare. He’s the only professor of English I ever knew who didn’t like Shakespeare. Victoria College being what it was, he got the Shakespeare course to teach, but he was always talking about other things, usually about contemporary Canadian poets. He did mention Blake in a way that aroused my curiosity, so I looked into him. This was in my second year as an undergraduate. In my third year I took the eighteenth-century course with him, and he assigned me a paper on Blake. From then on I was hooked. Cayley: Did you see right away that you had found your teacher in Blake? Frye: Not right away. But here was a fascinating character that very little had been said about. Two years later, after my graduation, I was at Emmanuel, where Herbert Davis, who was a Swift scholar in the graduate school, gave a course on Blake, and I signed up for it. I was assigned a paper on Blake’s Milton, one of his most difficult and complex poems, and started working on it the night before I was to read it. It was around three in the morning when suddenly the universe just broke open, and I’ve never been, as they say, the same since. Cayley: What was it? I know you can’t describe the experience, but what was it in Blake that provoked this experience? Frye: Just the feeling of an enormous number of things making sense that had been scattered and unrelated before. In other words, it was a mythological frame taking hold.

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Cayley: A conversion? Frye: Conversions usually relate to the other side, the experience. As a Methodist I was brought up converted. I never went through a conversion process. Cayley: A reconversion? Frye: Well, it was really getting the other half of what conversion is about. Cayley: What provoked it? Frye: The feeling that here I was dealing with an extremely complex poem of Blake’s about Milton, with whom he obviously had a very close, intricate love–hate relationship. Toward the end, I had the feeling that what united Blake and Milton, for all their differences—one was a Puritan and the other was very much an eighteenth-century nonconformist—was their common dependence on the Bible and the fact that the Bible had a framework of mythology that both Milton and Blake had entered into. Of course, by that time I’d shucked all the anxiety side of the religion I was brought up in. Cayley: What actually happened that night? Frye: I don’t know that I can say what it was. But it was an experience of things fitting together. I’ve had two or three nights where I’ve had sudden visions of that kind, visions ultimately of what I myself might be able to do. Fearful Symmetry, for example, was started innumerable times, but the shape of the whole book dawned on me quite suddenly one night. And the same thing happened once when I was staying in the YMCA in Edmonton, where I was for very dubious reasons reading Spengler’s Decline of the West, and I suddenly got a vision of coherence. That’s the only way I can describe it. Things began to form patterns and make sense. Cayley: You say that by then you had already shucked the anxiety side of the religion you were brought up in. There’s a remarkable letter in John Ayre’s biography in which you say that you remember “walking along St. George Street . . . and just suddenly that whole shitty and smelly garment [of fundamentalist teaching I had all of my life] just dropped off into the sewers and stayed there” (44). Was this earlier?

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Frye: Yes, this was earlier, when I was still in high school. As I realize now, I wasn’t really brought up with that garment on me at all. Mother told me a lot of nonsense because her father had told it to her, and she thought it must be true and that it was her duty to pass it on. But something else came through, and you know how quick children are at picking up the overtones in what’s said to them rather than what is actually said. I realize that Mother didn’t really believe any of this stuff herself. Cayley: But was unable to say so? Frye: She thought she did believe it. She thought she ought to believe it. But I can see now that as a child I picked up the tone of common sense behind it. Mother had a lot of common sense in spite of all that stuff. Cayley: What was the garment that fell away? Frye: Oh, the anxieties about the old stinker in the sky and the postmortem hell and all the other anxieties that I was brought up with. I felt like the man in 1984 when he walked into the room of the man who had the privilege of turning off the telescreen.2 The old stinker up in the sky was not only dead, he was never there. My attitude, I’m afraid, was always the opposite of Newman’s Lead, Kindly Light, where he says, “I loved to choose and see my path” and calls that pride.3 Well, I always wanted to choose and see my path and was convinced that that was what God wanted too, and that if I went on with this “Lead Thou me on” routine I would run into spiritual gravitation and fall over a cliff. Cayley: There’s another letter to a friend in which you say from that day forth you resolved to take only what you could use from religion.4 I find it remarkable that at that age you could see it so clearly. Frye: Yes, I had no use for compulsory doctrines after that. Cayley: And you really were from that time forward free from anxiety in relation to God? Frye: I think so, pretty free, and I was also relieved from the anxiety of having to rebel against what I’d been taught. Cayley: The remarkable part of this for me is that you stopped arguing so young. It must have given you a remarkable freedom to get on with your work. Frye: Yes, it did.

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Cayley: Your experience with Blake’s Milton was many years before Fearful Symmetry actually came out. When did you begin writing the book? When did you know you were going to go as deeply into Blake as you did? Frye: About the time that I was writing that graduate paper, I started to make some tentative scribbles. I knew that I was going to write a book on Blake sooner or later, but I had both graduate courses and the Emmanuel theological course to get rid of first. Then I had to go to Oxford for two years, where I reread the English school, because I knew I wanted to teach English then. With three years of theology, I was getting rusty on English, so that hard program of reading rather kept the Blake on the back burner, although I did have a large pile of manuscript when I was an undergraduate at Oxford. When I came back, I had to get all those courses in a condition so that I could teach. I came back in the fall of 1939. The train got into Toronto the day the Soviet–Nazi pact was signed, and the next day one of my colleagues who taught the eighteenth century signed up, so I had that course to do as well as the three that I’d been assigned.5 Preparing for lectures really took all of the energy I had until about 1941, I think it was, when I began to write the book seriously. Then I struggled through the whole process. The book had five complete rewritings of which the third and fourth were half again as long as the published book. Cayley: This is a ridiculous question to ask about a book of four hundred closely argued pages, but what was it you wanted to say about Blake that hadn’t been said? Frye: I wanted to show that Blake was inside this mythological framework that I have been trying to outline ever since. I was trying to explain that framework along with Blake, and of course that made an absolutely impossible book. Cayley: Why was it impossible? Frye: It was just too long and complex for any reader to dig his way through. I owe the reader at Princeton University Press, Carlos Baker, a great deal, in that he actually went through that chaos of manuscript and saw that it was totally unpublishable in that form, but that there was something there to retrieve. So I retrieved the Blake and left the rest until I wrote the Anatomy of Criticism.

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Cayley: What was the rest? Frye: Some of it comes out in the Anatomy of Criticism, such as the historical modes and the circle of myths. The connection with the Bible, while it was very obvious in my mind, didn’t come very explicitly into the Anatomy. It comes out in The Great Code and in the book I’ve just got through with now, Words with Power. Cayley: What were the critical principles you got from Blake? Frye: The general assumption when I began as a critic was that you started with literal meaning, which is what Jacques Derrida calls the transcendental signified.6 That is, there’s something standing outside the Bible or whatever it is, and the words point to it. When Christianity began saying “In the beginning was the Word,” it was really warning against that kind of procedure, which of course Christianity promptly ignored and ignored totally for eighteen centuries. Blake was, it seems to me, again the first person to bring religion back to this “In the beginning was the Word” [John 1:1]. There’s nothing outside the text. Cayley: What did the Bible mean to Blake? Frye: The Bible to Blake was really the Magna Carta of the human imagination. It was the book that told man that he was free to create and imagine and that the power to create and imagine was ultimately the divine in man, that Christianity (and of course it’s the Christian Bible Blake is talking about) was preeminently the religion which united the divine and the human and consequently opened a path of freedom to man which is infinite. Cayley: In The Everlasting Gospel Blake says, “Thou art a Man, God is no more / Thy own humanity learn to adore” [ll. 71–2, E520]. Frye: The Gospels represent Jesus as saying that nobody can understand God except through him, that is, except through the God-man. So you have God and you have God-man and you have man and, if you try to approach God without the idea of the humanity of God, then you get what he calls old Nobodaddy, the ferocious old bugger up in the sky with the whiskers and the reactionary political views, who enjoys sending people to hell. And if you turn to man simply as man, then of course you’re involved in all the evil that makes man a psychotic ape, and that’s the tendency that he calls Deism—that is, the tendency to substitute the

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totalitarian for the social. If you have the God-man, then you have both the divine and the human united in a single place. If you insist on separating God from man, you have merely God who is a scarecrow in the sky and merely man who is a psychotic ape. Cayley: So when he says God is no more, he’s not saying what it might at first seem. Frye: He is really saying that this more cannot be approached directly. You have to approach it through your own humanity. The human cannot really comprehend the nonhuman, or what transcends the human. Cayley: Some have thought to find an atheist in Blake. Altizer, for example, wrote of this in the ’60s.7 Frye: There is no atheism in Blake, because that means that God is not personal. For Blake a God that is not personal is nothing at all. Cayley: So it’s the objectivity of God that he denies? Frye: It’s the impersonality of God that he denies. He says that man can worship only two persons. If he doesn’t worship God, he will worship, well, somebody like Hitler or Stalin—in other words, Antichrist. Cayley: He also says that man in his creative acts and perceptions is God, or so you paraphrase him. Frye: Yes. For him everything that God does comes through man—the consciousness and the imagination of man. But you can’t say that man is God. What you say is that God becomes man in order that we may be as he is. When Blake said that, he was, whether he knew it or not, quoting verbatim from St. Athanasius.8 Cayley: Do you think he did know it? Frye: It’s possible that he knew it. It’s always a very dicey thing to say that Blake didn’t know about something. Cayley: I can remember Kathleen Raine saying that she set out as a young woman to read the books that Blake had read and found herself as an old woman still reading.9 Frye: In my opinion Blake read the first twenty pages of a lot of books, but he had one hell of a struggle to get to page twenty-one. By that time his own desire to say what he had to say took over. The only books that

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he seems to have read with some thoroughness were books he hated and disliked, so that he could write curses in the margins. Cayley: What did Blake mean by vision? Frye: He meant the capacity to live with one’s eyes and ears in what he calls a spiritual world. It was not a world of ideas, it was not a Platonic world, it was a physical world in its organized form. He says, “Spirits are organized men.” He also says, “A Spirit and a Vision are not . . . a cloudy vapour,” or anything fuzzy. They are organized and minutely articulated beyond anything the physical world can produce. 10 In other words, it was his world of poetry and painting. Vision was for him, as I say, the ability to see and hear in that world. Cayley: This was not a world that had an independent existence? Frye: Oh, no. This is the world as it really is, not the world as our lazy minds and senses perceive it. Cayley: But in the act of vision one creates or organizes this world? Frye: One creates in order to have evidence that one does see and hear that way. The kinds of things that people used to get out of LSD visions are a kind of parody of what Blake was talking about. You see the world that’s there, but you see it with an intensity and a clarity that, as I say, most people are too indolent to bother with. Cayley: Where were his feet while he was hearing and seeing these things? Frye: They were on the ground mostly, because you have to sit down to paint and write poetry. But in a spiritual sense, they were dancing. Cayley: George Goyder said to me that only Blake could paint people in midair and have them be plausible, and that when Fuseli or other contemporaries did it, they looked ridiculous.11 Frye: There are quite a lot of Blake things at the Fogg Museum at Harvard, and the woman who ran it when I first went there said that of the people who came in to look at the Blake drawings perhaps the largest single group were students of ballet. Cayley: You begin Fearful Symmetry with Blake’s theory of knowledge and his attack on the unholy trinity of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, who

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often appear together in his writings as a sort of three-headed monster. What did he have against them? Frye: They all represent what most people now attach to Descartes. That is, a theory of a conscious ego which is an observer of the world but not a participant in it and that consequently regards the world as something to be dominated and mastered. That is, his real hatred of what he calls Bacon, Newton, and Locke is based on what is ultimately a political feeling, that this kind of thing leads to the exploitation of nature and, as an inevitable by-product, the exploitation of other people. Cayley: This is what he calls the cloven fiction, two-horned reasoning. Frye: By cloven fiction he means the Cartesian tendency to preserve the subject as something absolutely separate from the object. Man is not a subject separate from a natural object, he is a natural object, and things only get serious when the subject and the object get together and become unified. The notion of the subject as passive, collecting impressions from the outside world, struck him as abhorrent. It isn’t that the creative person sees what isn’t there; it’s just that he sees what is there with his own distinctive power. He says that you are mutilating your own life if you are isolating the pure sense experience and classifying it rationally, that is that the emotional elements in sense experience are just as real, that you can’t think of reality in a sterilized or antiseptic context as something that has escaped from the emotional. The real conventionally means what is out there and therefore can’t be changed, but ninety per cent of our encounter with reality is an encounter with human rubbish, with what man has already made and has no longer much use for, and Blake, like Vico in Italy before him, is saying that in fact reality is what you make and you can’t understand what you haven’t made. But it’s not a subjective making. Cayley: Blake speaks in his poem Milton of “cast[ing] off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration.”12 What is his distinction between memory and imagination? Frye: He’s really the first person to use “imagination” in its positive, creative sense, as the later Romantics—Coleridge and those people—did. Previously, imagination had meant what it meant to Shakespeare’s Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream [5.1.7–8], as seeing something that isn’t there, what we would call the imaginary rather than the imagina-

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tive. The memory for him is again the tendency in the mind that we would call superstition. That is, a superstitious person is a person who does things because they have been done without having any knowledge of why they should be done, or why he’s doing them. In a way, it’s a rather misleading use of the term “memory.” There are two forms of memory: there is one where you’re just brooding on the spectres of the past, which is what he condemns, and there is another memory, which is the practice memory, and he’s all for that. He says you can’t learn to paint unless you do a lot of slavish copying for years and years. I think it is unfortunate that he uses the word “memory” to mean only one aspect of memory. But Blake had an excellent memory, and people with excellent memories are like people with excellent digestions: they’re often rather insensitive about their luck. Cayley: How did Blake’s views contrast with those of his more conventional contemporaries? What was his relation to his eighteenth-century milieu? Frye: Of course, he was almost totally isolated from his eighteenth-century milieu. There were about five or six people who could see what he was about. But the others, he just put all of their anxieties up. Cayley: What does he mean by natural religion? Why did he denounce it in his contemporaries? Frye: By natural religion he means the religion we derive from the sense of design in nature. The sense of design in nature is something we’ve already put there as a mental construct, so we’re really staring in the mirror like Narcissus. In other words, we get nothing from passive contemplation of the world. All real knowledge and understanding is creative, that is, it’s an activity in man himself, and so all religion is revealed by the imagination to man. But you don’t get any religion from contemplating nature, or at least what you do is to invent gods in the image of nature and that gives you storm-gods and war-gods and all the beings who reflect all the stupid things that human beings do. Natural religion was for Blake what the Bible calls idolatry. It meant finding something numinous in nature, in the physical environment. The Bible says that there are no gods in nature, that nature is a fellow creature of man, and that while one should love nature, you actually get your spiritual vision through human society. Then you see nature as it is. But all the gods that people have pretended to find in nature are in fact devils. That is, they’re

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projections of the wrong side of man’s natural origin. So he hated natural religion because he saw it as turning into what in his day was the Napoleonic War and what he called Druidism, which was something projected on the past that was actually a prophecy of the future, that is, totalitarianism. Cayley: You mention in one of your essays that Blake played the role of spiritual preceptor for you, and I think you recommend to other critics that they develop such a relationship with a particular poet (SM, 15). What has been your continuing relationship with Blake? Frye: I was originally attracted to him because he made sense of the background I was brought up in. He continued to make that kind of sense for me in the developments I’ve made in the synoptic theory of criticism in the Anatomy and in my later interest in the Bible. Blake, again, was the person who led me to see the shape in the Bible and the reason why it’s so central in our cultural tradition. Cayley: You suggest in the passage I’m thinking of that you’ve also arranged your life in imitation of him. Frye: I think that there is a reality in ancestor worship, let’s put it that way. And a person whose role model is Blake is going to be a somewhat different person from a man whose role model is Byron or D.H. Lawrence. Cayley: Did you ever have serious differences with Blake? Frye: I think that Blake was perhaps certain of a lot of things I am much less certain of. But that may have been partly his social isolation, where, for reasons of security, he was given to dogmatic assertions. I can’t buy his view, for example, that Michelangelo and Raphael are what painting is all about and that Rubens is an incompetent bungler. I can’t take that. Cayley: So when you spoke of the tone of mock paranoia in Blake,13 that was your way of allowing him his eccentricity, of seeing that this is what happens to a supremely sane man in almost intolerable circumstances? Frye: Yes, I think that that’s true, although I wouldn’t say that it was quite the same thing as the mock paranoia. I think that Blake quite deliberately throws himself into a kind of lunatic guise at various times. We’re told, by what biographical evidence we have, that he used to do that with people too.

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Cayley: Sharing so many of your views with Blake, you must have been a bit of a heretic at Emmanuel College? Frye: I suppose I was, yes. A lot of my contemporaries regarded me as somebody who just stood outside what they were standing for altogether. My close friends didn’t: they knew me better than that. Certainly the dominating ethos then at Emmanuel was Presbyterian and doctrinal in a way that I wasn’t. On the other hand, when Fearful Symmetry came out in 1947, a professor at Emmanuel said, “How did you manage to do all this reading in contemporary Protestant theology?” Cayley: Meaning? Frye: Meaning there had been a tremendous upheaval in Protestant circles, what with Barth and Bultmann and other theologians, since I had been a student at Emmanuel. That was a period of about twelve years. Cayley: And you’re saying that you hadn’t read these people at all, that you just followed Blake? Frye: That’s right. Cayley: What else were you reading during your years as a student? What else was truly significant for you or gave you a key piece of the structure you were building? Frye: At Hart House library, when I was an undergraduate, I picked up Spengler’s Decline of the West and was absolutely enraptured with it, and ever since I’ve been wondering why, because Spengler had one of these muzzy, right-wing, Teutonic, folkish minds. He was the most stupid bastard I ever picked up. But nevertheless, I found his book an inspired book, and finally I’ve more or less figured out, I think, what I got from Spengler. There’s a remark in Malraux’s Voices of Silence to the effect that he thought that Spengler’s book started out as a meditation on the destiny of art forms and then expanded from there.14 And what it expanded into is the key idea that has always been on my mind, the idea of interpenetration, which I later found in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, the notion that things don’t get reconciled, but everything is everywhere at once. Wherever you are is the centre of everything. And Spengler showed how that operated in history, so I threw out the muzzy Teuton and kept those two intuitions, which I felt were going to be very central. The other book that enraptured me was Frazer’s Golden Bough,

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which, again, was written by a rather stupid man. I felt that scholars could attack this book on practically every ground, but mythically it was the great pyramid, it was solid. Cayley: What about the seasonal metaphor that structures The Decline of the West? This also seems to have come into your work. Frye: Yes, Spengler has seasonal metaphors, but he doesn’t regard history cyclically. He thinks of history as cultures that grow up like dandelions. When the West is declining, the Russian culture starts. But the Russian one was being strangled by Western influence. So the Soviet Union hailed the first volume of The Decline of the West with great admiration and damned the second volume, which was on the strangling of Russia under Communism. I think that the seasonal metaphors are ones that I adopted more for mnemonic purposes than anything else. I never thought that people would take them so seriously or be so outraged because I reversed the spring and summer ones between an article and a book.15 Cayley: This idea of your structure-building as a mnemonic device is interesting to me. Had you read Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory? Frye: Yes, but that was published much later.16 Cayley: Did you already practice an art of memory? Frye: I did, but I didn’t know it. I’d heard of memory theatres but not enough to know anything at all about them. Cayley: You just made your own? Frye: Yes, I just unconsciously acquired my own and had no idea about how you operated with memory theatres until Frances Yates’s book came out, which was some time in the mid-’60s. Cayley: So that was all just good luck or instinct? Frye: Yes. Cayley: But it was essentially the idea of a structure to which things could then adhere? Frye: Yes. I recently gave a paper to an institute concerned with computing in the humanities in which I said that when I wrote the Anatomy phrases like “software programming” were entirely unknown.17 But if

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they had been known, I think I would have talked more about that and less about my approach being scientific. That bothered a lot of people too. Cayley: But I don’t see why the one way of speaking could have effectively replaced the other. Frye: It would be an explanation of the way in which I set up the model. I set up the model not because I thought it was mine, or at least I didn’t think I set it up because it was mine. I thought I was setting it up because it was there: my literary experience told me it was there. I don’t think I have a psychological compulsion to build models. Rather, there has to be something to supplement the experience of literature. If you like, mine was a construction to end all deconstruction. It was the supplement to end supplements.18 Cayley: Why do you need that supplement? Frye: That’s the term the Derrida people use when they are reading a text and deciding that what the author really had on his mind was something different from what he says. That becomes the supplement, which means both something extra and something which completes. I think that the real supplement, the one that lurks behind everything, is a mythical structure which repeats itself. Cayley: And it’s a supplement to end all supplements because it’s permanent and repeating? Frye: Yes. Cayley: Frazer and Spengler, recognizing all their liabilities, were the two people who gave you the key pieces, then. They were not the ones you admired, but the ones who gave you something you could borrow or use? Frye: Yes, that’s right. It was, again, a matter of looking for what I could use, but not for something to believe in. Cayley: What about Whitehead and the idea of interpenetration? Frye: The conception of interpenetration, as I said, I found in Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World. Other people have found it in Mahayana Buddhism and the Avatamsaka Sutra. It’s a way of accounting for the fact that the centre is everywhere. Traditionally we’ve always

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defined God as a being whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. But I would think of God as a being whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is everywhere too. The opposite of interpenetration, where everything exists everywhere at once, is an objective centrality, which, it seems to me, is a most tyrannical conception. Cayley: Objective centrality—what does that mean? Frye: In political developments, for example, it’s a matter of an empire getting so big that everything gets centred on Rome or London or New York or Tokyo. That seems to me an anti-cultural direction. In an interpenetrating world every community would be the centre of the world. Cayley: What about the social and political ’30s in which you came of age? How do you think that entered into your choice of a vocation? Frye: When I was compelled to reread Fearful Symmetry in order to write a preface to a reprint of it, I discovered what I hadn’t realized before: how very troubled a book it was and how much the rise of Nazism was on my mind and how terrified I was by the clarity with which Blake saw things like Druidism coming, whereby human sacrifice, as he says, would have depopulated the earth. Cayley: With your interest in myth and symbol, you entered early on into a kind of magical territory where a lot of people seem to have turned wrong politically. Yeats and Pound and Eliot, in their different ways, would all be examples. But you seem to have always kept your head. Frye: Well, it was Blake who helped me to keep my head. One of the books I picked up was Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, which was a big Nazi polemic claiming that the racially pure come from Atlantis and so forth. Having been concentrating on Blake so heavily, I could see that this was the devil’s parody of Blake. I think Yeats plunged into something rather similar without realizing that it was the devil’s parody of Blake, although Yeats knew Blake. Cayley: So it was Blake but also your Christianity that kept you sane. Frye: I suppose so, yes. And I suppose besides being a student of Blake and a Christian, I’m also a bourgeois liberal. I feel that anybody who isn’t one, or at least doesn’t want to be one, is still in the trees. Cayley: Was it difficult to decide whether to seek ordination?

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Frye: Yes, it was difficult for me. I consulted a friend whose judgment I had great respect for, Hal Vaughan. He asked me what my difficulty was, and I said that various people, including Herbert Davis, a very civilized man, pointed out that it might be embarrassing later on if I had a professional connection with the church, and Vaughan said, “Well, isn’t that your answer?” Cayley: I don’t understand that. Frye: It’s the business of being a witness. Cayley: You mean if it’s embarrassing then you should go ahead? Frye: Yes. Cayley: And you did go ahead and ended up as a student pastor in Saskatchewan. That’s also part of the Frye saga. Was that just an episode outside your life? Frye: Not outside my life, no. But I did realize that the active ministry was not for me, simply because it’s an administrative job and I had no consuming interest in administration. Cayley: Can you recall those few months in Saskatchewan? Frye: Oh, yes, quite well. Cayley: What do you recall about them? Frye: I recall my horse, Katy, who was older than I was and who had a trot that she was very proud of. Whenever Katy broke into a trot you had to stand straight up in the stirrups and let the saddle come up and caress your backside at intervals. I remember something that I found later in a Canadian critic, I think it was Elizabeth Waterston, who spoke of the prairies as the sense of immense space with no privacy.19 And I found that on top of Katy, who naturally stimulated one’s bladder very considerably. I realized that I couldn’t get off in that vast stretch of prairie because everybody was out with opera glasses, you see, watching the preacher on top of Katy. Cayley: There must have been some place between the range of the opera glasses. You really were observed to that extent? Frye: That was what people did. They all had spy glasses. They weren’t doing it with any malicious sense. It was just that their lives were rather

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devoid of incident, and naturally they liked to see who was going along. It wasn’t their fault. Cayley: And the people lived in rather poor circumstances? Frye: Oh, yes. The field I was in was a little better off than the ones that were all grasshoppers and dust. They had a kind of subsoil irrigation, which kept them alive, but it was discouraging for them. Cayley: So you were there for just a summer? Frye: Yes, a summer. I thought the people were wonderful, but again, I realized that this wasn’t the thing I would be good at. III Anatomy of Criticism Cayley: How does Anatomy of Criticism connect with your work on Blake? Did you realize at the time Fearful Symmetry was published that you had something bigger on your hands? Frye: Yes, very quickly I realized that there was another structure there and that a lot of it I had tried to stuff into the Blake book unsuccessfully. It was time to take a look at that independently of Blake. Cayley: You say in the introduction to the Anatomy that it forced itself onto you [vii/3]. It sounds as if you were a bit unwilling. Frye: In a sense, I was. What I expected to do next was write a book on Spenser, because I was teaching The Faerie Queene. Spenser had a great many things in common with Blake, and he was a major influence on Milton, so I settled very happily into collecting notes for a book on Spenser. But in order to get down to Spenser I had to talk about the theory of criticism, and the theory of criticism got longer and longer and more and more elaborate until I finally had to junk Spenser, though he did get into the book. The Anatomy came out in bits and pieces—the theory of modes, the circle of myths, and so forth. Cayley: What is an anatomy? Why did you call it that? Frye: The word “anatomy” in Shakespeare’s day and a little later meant a dissection for a synthetic overview. One of my favourite books in English literature—there are times when it is actually my favourite—is Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Of course, there were four humours

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then, but for Burton there was only the one, melancholy. That was the source of all mental and physical diseases in the world. So he writes an enormous survey of human life. It ranks with Chaucer and Dickens, except the characters are books rather than people. It was both an analysis of the causes and cures and treatment of melancholy and a kind of synthetic overview of human nature before it gets melancholy. On a much smaller scale there was Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, which has given us the word “euphuism,” meaning that if you’re too bright and don’t know enough you can get into trouble. That use of the term “anatomy” was one that I thought exactly fitted what I was doing. Cayley: Did you suffer from melancholy yourself? Frye: To the extent that I was poor and very much thrown back on myself, yes. But there are two sides to that, the side of alienation and the side of self-reliance. If there’s nobody else but yourself, you have to depend on yourself. Burton has a long episode on miseries of scholars, which I certainly reacted to at one time. Cayley: Why is Burton’s book sometimes your favourite? Frye: Because here was a man writing with tremendous erudition and tremendous exuberance. The fact that he’d referred to about six hundred books per page practically never blotted his sense of humour. He wrote with an almost childlike delight in what he was writing. Cayley: The Anatomy begins with a “Polemical Introduction,” as you call it. I reread it this summer, and I was struck by its forcefulness and a kind of bracing quality. How did you see the environment into which you were sending this book? Frye: I felt that the world of criticism was inhabited by a lot of people who were pretty confused about what they were doing and didn’t particularly mind that they were confused. I was also impatient with all the semi-literate productions that I had been compelled to read in the way of secondary sources. I was tired of a historical approach to literature that didn’t know any literary history but that simply dealt with ordinary history, adding a few dates of writers. I was tired of people who said that books like Gulliver’s Travels and Moby-Dick were just untidy books, when they should have said they were Menippean satires. It was just a matter of being fed up with a field that seemed to have no discipline in it.

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Cayley: What’s a Menippean satire? Frye: It’s something that comes down from Classical times. There was a Cynic philosopher named Menippus, who wrote a kind of parody of the Platonic dialogue with a certain romance theme. We know the kind of thing he did from Lucian, who picked it up in Greek, and Apuleius, who did it in Latin. That’s the kind of tradition that Gulliver’s Travels belongs to. It’s a type of fiction that deals with ideas, usually crank ideas, rather than with people. As I looked at it, it was a subdivision of the anatomy genre itself. Cayley: I believe some of your literary productions as an undergraduate were satires. You were attracted to this form of satire? Frye: I was always attracted to that form, because at that time certainly, like most students, I knew more about ideas than I did about people. If somebody like Borges had been known to me at the time, I would have tried to pick up that kind of tradition, I think. Cayley: You also remark in Fearful Symmetry that Blake can be better understood sometimes if he is seen as a satirist. Frye: One of Blake’s earliest works was an extraordinarily funny satire called An Island in the Moon, which is a perfect Menippean satire.20 And I think The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is satiric too. What it’s satiric of is Milton, Swedenborg, and Jehovah, in that order. Cayley: The Anatomy is a claim for the autonomy of literary criticism. In what ways did literary criticism lack autonomy at the time that you began writing? Frye: By autonomy I mean having a discipline. If you study history, you’re a historian, and history has a discipline. There are certain rules for writing correct history, and ways of writing sloppy history that eventually get recognized as such. The same thing is true of philosophy. Criticism, it seemed to me, had no discipline of that kind. It had no sense of its own integrity. I think autonomy was a rather misleading word in some respects, because it suggested to a lot of people who wanted to have this suggested that criticism as I conceived it was a retreat from the world. In fact, the original Italian translator of the Anatomy used the word fuori, meaning “outside,” which was a complete misapprehension of autonomy. The translation has been revised since then. But I didn’t think of

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either criticism or literature as in any respects withdrawing from life. I thought that criticism was a study in its own right and not simply a parasitic approach to literature. Cayley: It’s hard for me, certainly in light of your later work, to see that misunderstanding of you as anything but willful on the part of people who have maintained it. But I guess it has been persistent. Frye: Oh, yes, especially with left-wing Marxist critics who tend to think that anybody who doesn’t take their line is retreating into his bourgeois liberal cave. Cayley: What was criticism subservient to at the time you wrote? That is, what were the forces outside it that dominated it, to which it attached itself? Frye: The things I was attacking were the reductive or deterministic criticisms, such as the Marxist, the Freudian, and, at that time, the Thomist type. Cayley: The Thomists were notably at the University of Toronto, I think. Frye: Yes. Cayley: You never mentioned any names. But that was at the time of [Étienne] Gilson’s great influence. Frye: Oh, yes. Cayley: There’s also a suggestion that criticism is and should become scientific. You’ve said that the choice of the term was problematic. Respecting that, what did you mean by speaking that way? Frye: By scientific I meant progressive, so that criticism could build on the work of its predecessors in the way that a physicist builds on the work of earlier physicists. There is a metaphor about hard science and soft science, and I’ve never been impressed by that metaphor. I knew that my conception of science was as soft as a marshmallow, but I didn’t give a damn. Cayley: Where would you have located criticism at the time you wrote in terms of the trajectories of other sciences as they developed? Frye: Criticism was just lying around in bits and pieces. It wasn’t a discipline at all. Therefore, it couldn’t be a progressive one.

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Cayley: So did you see yourself as doing something analogous to what, say, Darwin did for biology, or at least as beginning to give criticism that kind of focus? Frye: I hoped that I would, as Francis Bacon says, ring a bell to call the wits together,21 and that I would awaken some people at any rate to the fact that criticism could be a lot better organized than it had been. But my main strategy was to keep away from the parasitic view of criticism on the one side, and the deterministic one on the other. Criticism neither should be parasitic on literature nor should it be derived from or attached to something that is not literature. Cayley: Had Blake been a preceptor in this regard—in showing you what the critic is or can be? Frye: I think I learned everything I knew more or less from Blake. He must have been in the background there somewhere. Cayley: I’m thinking of a remark you made in an essay on Blake, where you say that it was Blake who initially showed you the critic’s path by showing that creation and the awareness of that creation are ideally one (StS, 174; M&B, 329). Frye: Yes. Blake himself said that he had to create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.22 I applied that to criticism generally: one had to see a systematic integrity within criticism or else be taken over by the Marxists, the Freudians, the Thomists, who would then fight among themselves. Cayley: Recognizing again that “autonomy” may not have been the ideal word, this view that literature has an independent existence, that it constitutes an order of words, by which I think you intend an analogy to an order of nature—does this view provoke anxiety? Frye: It seems to, and I’ve never quite understood why. Cayley: Maybe you can tell me the history of the anxiety then, if you can’t explain it. Frye: What I always kept getting were anxieties of the kind, “But what about life, Professor Frye?” And I would say, “But literature is full of life. Life is inside literature. All you have to do to find out about life is just read literature.” Oh, my, that bothered them. They were bothered by the

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suggestion that a writer gets what he acquires technically out of other books instead of by empiric observation. They just had to have it the other way. I began to realize that a great many academics were in fact frustrated poets and novelists, who didn’t like the idea of limitations applied to poetry and the novel. If you are interested in writing poetry or a novel and haven’t got very far with it, you don’t like the idea of there being conventions or genres or limitations of any kind on your capacity. So I used to get all kinds of anxieties about my not attending to the uniqueness of the work of art. And I would keep saying that uniqueness is not an object of knowledge. We never know the unique. The unique exists in experience only. It’s part of the response to literature, but it’s not part of literature. People still seem to regard that simply as the old artfor-art’s-sake paradox of the nineteenth century in a new guise, and that one is running away from all sorts of social responsibilities if one maintains that literature is a structure. Cayley: Were you also provoking anxieties that go all the way back to Plato’s banishing the poets from the republic and wanting literature always to be attached to some ideological structure? Frye: Well, yes, Plato was the first to want to take over poetry and hitch it onto an ideology, namely his. All the poets who wouldn’t do that would have to leave the republic. But according to The Laws there are others who stayed around writing hymns and panegyrics to the greatness of the Platonic idea.23 That’s still true of all ideologues. Cayley: You’ve talked about the anxiety provoked by the idea that literature creates literature, that most of what the poet is doing is working with things that have already been done. For the structure of that world of myth you use the word “archetype” in the Anatomy. What are these archetypes? Frye: Archetypes are myths and units within myths. They are the repeating elements of literature. They can be anything from conventional images to story patterns. Cayley: Are they universal? Or are they restricted to particular cultures? Frye: They are culturally conditioned, certainly. They never transcend the cultural and social environment. But they are universal in the sense that the Chinese or Japanese drama is recognized by Westerners as drama, as dramatic experience.

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Cayley: What is a myth? Frye: A myth is a story—the Greek word mythos. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end, whereas life doesn’t. Cayley: How does your use of the term “archetype” relate to the way, say, Carl Jung uses it? Frye: I used the word “archetype” because it was a traditional term in criticism, though not many people had ever run across it. But I didn’t realize at the time that Jung had monopolized the term and that everybody would think I was a Jungian critic because I used it. I’m dealing with a world that is intermediate between the subjective psychological world and the social world, the objective or natural world. That is, I don’t think in terms of a subject contemplating an object. I think of a world of metaphor, where the subject and object have fused, the world of myth and metaphor. The old-fashioned term for it was “beauty.” It’s the world where emotion is relevant, where the categories of beauty and ugliness are relevant, where you don’t look for objective truth and you don’t look for subjective turmoil. What I don’t want to do is to reduce criticism to something subjective and psychological. Jung’s archetypes are powers within the soul, and they have very intimate and very fascinating analogies to some of the conventional characters of literature, but Jung’s treatment of literature, I think, is barbaric, and most of the Jungians don’t seem to be much better. Cayley: He doesn’t recognize this intermediate world, in your view? Frye: I suppose he would in theory, but after all, his job is the psychological one. That’s what he’s preoccupied with. To try to make a literary extension of Jung’s archetypes would impoverish criticism, in my view, exactly in the same way that Marxist, Freudian, and Thomist criticism impoverished it. I don’t want a Jungian criticism. When I was writing the Blake book I deliberately avoided Jung because I didn’t want to write a Jungian book on Blake. At that stage I was afraid I would. I read Jung afterwards, and then it was all right. Cayley: Is it possible to find an origin for an archetype, a beginning to a myth? Frye: I don’t think one can find beginnings, because written literature— the thing we have documents for—goes back to hundreds of thousands

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of years of oral literature, so that anything like a starting point is lost in the mists of the late Pleistocene. Cayley: So does man make the myths? Or is it rather that the myths make man—in the beginning? Frye: It’s probably a cooperative enterprise. An astonishing number of people—and some very unlikely people—feel that it’s language that uses man rather than man who uses language.24 And I have a great deal of sympathy for that feeling. It’s partly because central to my whole thinking is “In the beginning was the Word.” Cayley: So that would argue that the myths are latent in language from the beginning? Frye: Yes. I think the primitive impulse in the use of words, the use of language, is to set up a kind of counter-environment. You can teach a chimpanzee to understand sign language if you’ve got enough bananas on hand, but he wants the counter-environment set up to express what I call his concerns—things like food and sex and company and property and so forth. Cayley: There’s a story in Gregory Bateson’s last book, Mind and Nature, of a man who wants to inquire of a computer whether the computer thinks that computers will ever be able to think. He types in the question, and the computer answers, “That reminds me of a story.” That’s similar to what you’re saying, in a way. I think Bateson’s point is that story is ultimate. You can’t look behind it and ask what was there before the story. You can’t ask whether we made the story or the story made us. Frye: According to the poets themselves, there was nothing. Faust is told by Mephistopheles he has to go down to the world of the mothers, but this is the world of nothingness, and what he fishes up are the stories that go into the second part of Faust. Cayley: Could you give an example of the structure you see in the sequence of modes that occur in the history of literature? What are the modes? Frye: If you’re going to tell a story, you’re going to have to have characters. They’re the most important units of a story. Stories differ from the point of view of the size of the characters and the reader’s attitude toward them. Traditionally, say around Homer’s time, the central char-

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acter of a story was a hero, that is, a man who was more than life-size. In the still earlier stories, some of which are incorporated into Homer, there are gods. So you can see that there’s a descending series of characters. There’s a god, first of all, the biggest one you can imagine. Then there’s the hero, who is human but more than life-size. Then there’s the leader, the titanic figure like King Lear or Othello or Hamlet, who is, again, recognizably human but conforms to the general operations of nature. Then there’s the person like yourself. In that kind of mode, which we find in the Romantic movement, the poetic hero is generally the poet himself, and in fiction, he is a character more or less on our level. Finally, in the ironic mode, the characters are below us; they are in a position of greater frustration or absurdity than we are. It doesn’t mean you take a smug view. It’s simply a matter of perspective. Cayley: Do the modes form a line? Or is it a circle? Frye: It’s a circle, because irony goes back again to myth. Cayley: How does irony reach the gods? Frye: Eventually you begin to realize that when you have irony you know more about what’s going on than the characters do. So you gradually acquire the feeling that there’s another half to the whole business of irony. Irony appeals to a sense of what is normal in the audience. Eventually irony goes into reverse, in a sense; it relates itself to what makes a situation ironic. So you go back to myth and romance. When I wrote the Anatomy, science fiction was not yet in the centre of popular literature, but I knew that it would be very soon, because it would revive romantic and eventually mythical formulas. Cayley: And in five years we were all poring over Tolkien. Can you give an example of a work in which you can see a myth beginning to peer out from behind irony? Frye: Well, one example would be some of the later stories of Henry James, who learned his trade from the ironic novelists of the nineteenth century and whose stories usually end ironically. As he goes on, you find this curious occult streak in him—in stories like “The Altar of the Dead” or “The Sense of the Past” or “The Turn of the Screw,” where the irony in seeing the absurdity and frustration of a human situation begins to suggest the gods’ point of view. The God of the Book of Job must have taken a very similar view of the human situation.

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Cayley: Another of your ideas in the Anatomy is that myths go through a series of displacements. That’s a term that you borrowed from psychoanalysis. Frye: Yes. Freud says that two operations of the dream are condensation and displacement. I think there is condensation and displacement in literature as well, though it operates very differently, of course. You have displacement when you have a structure made credible or plausible or lined up with something the reader finds credible. You have condensation when you go the other way, when the structure is intensely metaphorical and has no specific relationship to the outside world. The most condensed book ever written was Finnegans Wake. You get displacement at its most extreme when you get a totalitarian government insisting that everybody write allegories of their own fantasies. Cayley: What would be an example from literature of displacement? Frye: The naturalistic novel. A book like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood would go even further. Cayley: Where there is an almost subliminal mythic structure . . . Frye: There has to be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Wherever there is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, there is always a myth, because that’s what myth means—story. In an intensely displaced structure, the story line is still there but the main emphasis is focused on its similarity to experience. Cayley: The other thing from the Anatomy which became notorious and caused you to write several clarifications was your position on value judgments, your refusal to think of the critic as primarily a taste-maker. What were you getting at there, and what were the consequences of your trying to get at it? Frye: I was getting at the conception of the critic as judge, as sitting on a bench with the defendant in front of him squirming. I felt that that was a preposterous ego trip for the critic to attempt. Value judgments are things that people argue about and discuss endlessly, and they do enter into one’s critical experience. The thing is that they can never be demonstrated. What a value judgment manifests is the taste of its time, and it’s filtered through the individual critic. The value judgment of the most serious critics for a century after Shakespeare’s death was that Ben Jonson was really a much more serious writer. Value judgments of the later

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eighteenth century said that Blake was a lunatic. The great boners of criticism, such as Rymer’s calling Othello a bloody farce, are not the result of a critic’s lack of taste.25 They’re the result of his following the conventions of his time. Cayley: Did you feel that was the dominant self-image of critics at the time? Frye: In the eighteenth century there was a great deal of feeling that, as Samuel Johnson says, “The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live.”26 Well, that is true, but with other people, like Addison, for example, you get public taste set up as the arbiter of literary quality. Cayley: What is the alternative view? Frye: The alternative view is that value judgments have to be under veto by the changes in the history of taste. Every age is inadequate in its taste. As the age changes, its canons of taste will change too. Every positive change rescuing a neglected writer is good. Cayley: Why do you think there was such misunderstanding on this point? Frye: There was great misunderstanding because people were brought up to think that being a literary critic was a gentleman’s occupation, and the gentleman is the person who attaches immense importance to his taste: I like this, I don’t like that. Cayley: In rejecting that, where were you trying to go as a critic? Frye: In rejecting that, you move from the gentleman to the scholar. The scholar reads everything in his historical period. It’s all good, because it’s all documentation for his work. He works entirely without explicit value judgments. They may enter into his work at some point or other, but good, bad, or indifferent, everything that comes under the literary scholar’s purview has to be read by the scholar. Cayley: He’s trying to understand, not to judge? Frye: Yes, and very often you can understand the taste of an age from its least interesting writers. Cayley: In rejecting criticism as a gentleman’s occupation, you’re also implicitly trying to democratize criticism.

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Frye: To democratize criticism and also to remove criticism from the area of morality, because every value judgment is a moral judgment in disguise. Cayley: What are the consequences of doing that? Frye: The moral judgment reflects the ideological conditioning of a certain age. Every age is mortal. I’m not trying to eliminate value judgments from the critical practice; I’m merely pointing out their grave limitations and the fact that so many judgments have been thought of as transcending the age in which they’re made. Of course, they never do. Cayley: Presumably you couldn’t eliminate them if you wanted to. Frye: You can’t eliminate them. Cayley: You’re just showing them as something limited, conditioned, and not at the centre of activity? Frye: Yes. The nearest you come to a value judgment, I think, are in words like “classic” or “masterpiece,” where you have value terms, but what they mean are works of literature that refuse to go away. It was all very well to say for a century that Ben Jonson was a closer follower of nature than Shakespeare and therefore a far more serious dramatist, but Shakespeare just squatted down on the stage and refused to move and survived even the most grotesque manhandlings of his work, whereas only two or three of Jonson’s plays have really held the stage. Cayley: So now if one says that Shakespeare is a great writer one is doing something other than making a value judgment? Frye: Yes, and you also find in the course of your critical experience that some writers are more rewarding to deal with than others. You find that confirmed by your experience. I’m not suggesting that criticism can ever be a value-free thing; I’m merely trying to take out the tyranny of value judgments from the critical enterprise. Cayley: Your Anatomy begins with a “Polemical Introduction” and ends with only a “Tentative Conclusion” but nevertheless expresses a hope for criticism. I notice in a later book you remark that many critics are still mired in ideology.27 How do you see your project for criticism with more than thirty years of hindsight? Frye: I see it partly as a matter of distinguishing between ideology and

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poetics. I think that the ideologue addresses the public and wants to make a kinetic effect on them. He wants them to get out there and do something. The poet turns his back on his audience. I begin the Anatomy with John Stuart Mill’s remark that the poet is overheard, not heard,28 and he doesn’t look for a kinetic effect on his audience at all. He’s creating an absence so that his audience can move into a presence. Cayley: But the Anatomy was a manifesto for a scientific or disinterested criticism. In your view, has that come into existence? Frye: No, it hasn’t, partly because of the very nature of language as it’s used by critics, particularly humanist critics. That is, it’s a matter of where you put your emphasis, and where you put your emphasis can never be definitively right or wrong. I still think that there is an underlying consensus of agreement among the really top-flight critics—the people who obviously know what they’re talking about. But they themselves wouldn’t care to admit that. Cayley: What do you mean? Frye: I mean that you pick up an academic article, and after the first sentence there’s a footnote, and the footnote refers you to twenty-seven previous articles on the same subject. If you check up on the twenty-seven articles, you’ll find that about four of them are written by people who know what they’re saying. The others are doing literary exercises demonstrating their competence in handling criticism, but not contributing to its knowledge. Cayley: I’m still not sure you’ve answered my question about whether you see progress along the line you sketched out in the Anatomy. Frye: I think I see, as I say, a kind of implicit consensus, which means that there is also a kind of implicit progress. There are certain kinds of critical junk that are definitely obsolete. We don’t have to bother with them very much now. There are an awful lot of new kinds, and we have to get rid of them too. Cayley: You mention in another essay that if you want to make a splash you should make it at a time when a path of knowledge is forking, when a change is about to take place, when one discipline is about to precipitate out of another, and you use the example of Freud.29 You say that if Freud had written today, he probably would have been regarded as a crank with insufficient clinical experience.

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Frye: I wrote that at a time when all psychologists were chasing rats and wouldn’t have anything to do with human beings. Cayley: Do you think you found such a moment with the Anatomy? Frye: I would have to write a very different book today, because I would have to deal with the developments of criticism since 1957. That would mean that I would have to consider all kinds of things that didn’t come into the Anatomy because they weren’t around in 1957. Cayley: I was thinking rather of the fact that within ten years of the Anatomy’s coming out it was, in a sense, the book to be reckoned with. Was that because of the opportune moment at which you published it? Frye: I daresay, yes. Cayley: Did it then become something of an albatross for you? Frye: To the extent that it’s been so persistently and, it seems to me, often deliberately misunderstood, it has become something of an albatross. So much so that I confessed to a very good friend in a letter that I rather regretted having written it. But of course I don’t really. Cayley: All of that misunderstanding surely stimulated you to produce other books. Frye: Well, yes. Cayley: When you wrote the Anatomy of Criticism, you’d written one book on Blake. When did you realize that you had written not just another book but what was being described within ten years as the book of its generation? When did you begin to realize what the Anatomy was going to mean to people? Frye: I thought it would clarify things and perhaps set criticism going in a more systematic and progressive direction. It didn’t do what I had hoped it would do, but then it was naive to hope that. You have to have certain illusions in front of your nose if you’re writing, and when you’ve finished writing you don’t mind if they fade away. Cayley: I remember at the memorial service for C.B. Macpherson you recalled a time in both of your youths when you could meet for coffee as friends and not, you said, as a collision of monuments. When did you begin to feel that you’d become a monument?

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Frye: It’s something that comes gradually with age. It’s not so much the hardening of the arteries as a hardening of what some people call the characterological armour. Cayley: But in saying that you seem to blame yourself. I understood your joke about you and Brough Macpherson to refer more to the embarrassment of reputation than to anything that had actually happened to you. Frye: It’s a reciprocal thing. It’s something that other people do to you, and you have to react to it somehow. IV Critical Arguments Cayley: I’d like to ask you about your critics. The ones I have read all seem to be saying that you think of myth as immaculately conceived. A psychoanalytic critic, like Frederick Crews, says that you’re concealing the origin of myth in discontent.30 A Marxist critic, like Frederic Jameson, says that you’ve erased the mark of ideology from myth.31 And even Geoffrey Hartman says at one point—in Northrop Frye and Modern Criticism—that myth comes to us already institutionalized: we never see it in any other way.32 So all three, it seems to me, are finally saying the same thing, that you have a version of myth as pure, as archetypal, as free from its social origins, and distinguishable from the institutionalized forms in which it appears to us. How do you see this criticism? Frye: Let’s start with the statement that myth comes to us already institutionalized. Now there are some myths that do come to us institutionalized. Those are the ideological myths, the myths that underlie official Christianity or the church or institutionalized Judaism, Islam, Marxism, and so forth. But most of my critics do not know that there is such a thing as a poetic language, which not only is different from ideological language but puts up a constant fight against it to liberalize and individualize it. There is no such thing as a pure myth. There’s no immaculate conception of mythology. Myth exists only in incarnations. But it’s the ones that are incarnated in works of literature that I’m primarily interested in, and what they create is a cultural counter-environment to the ones that are—I won’t say perverted—but at any rate twisted or skewed into ideological patterns of authority. Cayley: I think that critics like Jameson are saying that all myths are in some sense skewed.

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Frye: They say that because they are pan-ideologists. They can’t conceive of any myth that doesn’t come in an ideological form. But for Shakespeare myth is not ideological. Dante and Milton perhaps more obviously reflect the ideology of their time, but their structure is radically a poetic structure, which is something different. Cayley: So you’re saying that all these critics, in their different ways, don’t finally accept the claim for the autonomy of poetry that you have made throughout your life? Frye: Yes, that’s right. Cayley: And that’s why you’ve said repeatedly there’s really not enough in common between you and these people to have a discussion? Frye: Yes. Cayley: Have you ever entered into dialogue with any of your critics on this issue? Frye: No. I detest arguments. You’re going to lose any argument with an ideologue, because you can only argue on the basis of a counter-ideology, and I’m not doing that. Cayley: Are there critics you’ve learned from, critics with whom you’ve shared enough in common that they could teach you something? Frye: There are critics, yes, who know what I’m talking about. Cayley: But no case in which you’ve really seen something as a result of criticism of your work? Frye: Well, I’m afraid I learn very little from my critics. That’s not arrogance. It’s just self-preservation. Cayley: It seems to me you’ve run in parallel with various contemporary intellectual trends without exactly being part of them. The Anatomy, for example, seems to embody elements of what was called structuralism. Frye: I stumble into things. When I published Fearful Symmetry I was told on all sides, by all my reviewers, that I was a myth critic. At that point I didn’t know what the hell a myth critic was, and I certainly didn’t realize that there was a school called myth criticism. But I did know that you had to know something about myth to understand or to expound Blake. Similarly, when the Anatomy came out I had no idea what structuralism

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was—I’d never heard the word—but I did know that literature had a structure, and I tried to give some impression of what it was. Cayley: When you found out what it was, what did you think of it as an approach? Frye: Again, the structuralists seem to be interested in other things—in linguistic and semiotic applications—which I had no direct interest in. I was naturally very interested in Lévi-Strauss and his parallels between poetic structures and, say, kinship structures in anthropology, but that’s not a field where I can follow him at all. Cayley: But all of this still would come under your strictures about the search for a giant lever to move the world of literature, rather than working from within the world of literature? Frye: Yes, I think so. Structuralism tried to straddle a whole field of language. As a result it ran into a poststructural ideology, and that’s something I cannot relate to somehow. Cayley: How do you mean? Frye: Well, the little book of Jean Piaget on structuralism stretches all over language and all over mathematics as well.33 I can’t stretch that far. I’m concerned only with works of literature and distinguishing poetic structures from others, including ideological ones. Cayley: Jacques Derrida is someone who seems to have had an immense influence in literary criticism. Frye: Derrida seems to have continued the whole tradition of the analytic, rhetorical criticism I encountered when I started the Anatomy. He’s put it on a more philosophical basis with his conception of a logic of supplement. As a result, he’s developed a group of disciples who don’t accept anything as an authentic text except what Derrida has written and has scratched out again. I think that that’s an interesting technique in many respects, but I think it’s also exhaustible. Cayley: What is a logic of supplement? Frye: A logic of supplement means that what actually appears in a text is always written with a more complex mind. Consequently, there are many things in your mind that have been suppressed from the text, and the criticism of supplement attempts to indicate what some of those are.34

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Cayley: That’s deconstruction? Frye: That’s deconstruction, yes. Rousseau wrote on the origin of language, but he was primarily interested in masturbation, so your criticism says that.35 Cayley: This is obviously not an approach you would find congenial. Frye: No. Well, I can see the point of it. But it is not something that I either know how to do or want to do. Cayley: So the critical schools that have succeeded each other in your time have really defeated your hope for a unified and progressive science of criticism in the Anatomy? Frye: They would have if they were winning. Cayley: But they aren’t? Frye: I am often described as somebody who is now in the past and whose reputation has collapsed. But I don’t think I’m any further down skid row than the deconstructionists are. Cayley: I’m interested in your unwillingness to argue. This ties in with your style of writing. It seems to me that in your books you don’t generally present an argument. For a long time I wanted to be able to say, finally, “This is the program that Northrop Frye is arguing for.” But I’m not sure any more that that kind of statement is possible. Frye: I think that there are implied arguments in what I say, but the actual technique of argumentative writing is something I avoid as far as possible, because when you argue you are selecting points to emphasize, and there can never be anything definitively right or wrong about an emphasis. It’s simply a choice among possibilities. Consequently, an argument is always a half-truth. We’ve known that ever since Hegel. It is a militant way of writing, and I’m not interested in militancy. As I’ve often said, the irrefutable philosopher is not the person who cannot be refuted but the philosopher who’s still there after he’s been refuted. Cayley: What’s the alternative to argument? Frye: Literature doesn’t argue. That’s the principle of Shelley’s Defence of Poetry—that literature cannot argue. As Yeats says, “You can refute Hegel but not the Song of Sixpence.”36 The whole argumentative side is something that critics, without examining the matter, think must be true

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of criticism if not of literature. But to me criticism is really the expression of the awareness of language. And what I try to do in my writing is express awareness of language, particularly of literary language and what it’s trying to do. Cayley: In your latest book, Words with Power, you have an interesting quotation from Bertrand Russell. He says, “Every philosopher, in addition to the formal system which he offers to the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be quite unaware. If he is aware of it, he probably realizes that it won’t quite do; he therefore conceals it, and sets forth something more sophisticated, which he believes because it is like his crude system, but which he asks others to accept because he thinks he has made it such as cannot be disproved.”37 Is there a crude system of this sort behind your writings? Frye: What Bertrand Russell is saying could be considered under two metaphors. One is that the myth is the naked body and that the philosophical structure is the clothes that make it possible for the body to appear in society. The other is that the philosophy is the body and the myth is the skeleton underneath the body. You can take either of those metaphors, but they both say that there is something that cannot go around on its own without this philosophical superstructure, or whatever it is. There have been a few naked systems, like Yeats’s Vision and Poe’s “Eureka” and, to some extent, Dante’s Convivio, which he offers partly as an explanation of what the cosmology of his poetry is about. I think that that is something that is worth looking into. Paul Valéry, commenting on Poe’s “Eureka,” says that cosmology is really at bottom a literary structure.38 Cayley: When I read the Russell quotation, it made me feel that there is in all your writing a simpler structure, a basic myth that is being elaborated or dressed up. Frye: I don’t know, though I suppose it could be the myth of creation— a sense of a total verbal order. I’ve talked about the verbal universe ever since I’ve been writing. The idea that the human consciousness lives inside a universe of words, which is in turn inside the universe of nature, has always been very central to me. Of course the difficulty with the word “universe” is that it suggests something spatial, whereas the true verbal universe is a conflict of powers and, consequently, exists in time as well as space.

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Cayley: It seems to me there’s a sense in your writing, very palpable at times, of the possibility of redemption. Frye: That’s right. Man’s destiny is not predetermined. It’s his heritage, it’s his birthright, it’s something he can fulfil if he wants to. So far he hasn’t wanted to. V Milton and the Romantic Tradition Cayley: You’ve always emphasized the cosmological dimension in poetry, and I’d like to talk about Milton and the Romantic revolution in that light. Was Milton important for you fairly early on in your career? Frye: I read him dutifully as an undergraduate and passed examinations on him, but I think I didn’t really get into him in any sort of existential depth until I started teaching him. Then I began to see the integrity of the man, the way he holds together: the political polemicist and the baroque poet and all the other sides of him fitted together so admirably. He is obviously a person of towering stature. If you teach Milton, you find that those tremendous lines in Paradise Lost begin to separate from their context and take on an individual life and start chasing themselves around your skull. Any poet who does that to you is obviously somebody you have to reckon with. Cayley: I see Milton as being more of a polestar for you than other writers to whom you’ve devoted equal attention and who would be equally great in your view, Shakespeare or Spenser. Is that true? Frye: Perhaps so. Cayley: You’re in his lineage? Frye: Yes, Milton is solidly within my tradition. He was solidly within Blake’s tradition. The combination of the humanist conservative and the revolutionary was a very fascinating one for me. Cayley: How was Milton a revolutionary? Frye: He was a revolutionary in the sense that he went through four English revolutions and took the revolutionary side every time, until he was finally checkmated by the Restoration.39 He fought for liberty all his life, for civil and domestic and ecclesiastical liberty. I felt that I was on his side in all three of these areas. But at the same time he was a conservative

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in that he thought that liberty was a good thing because it was what God wanted for man, but that man could not and did not want liberty for himself. What man wants always is slavery or mastery. That is, he wants mastery first, and if he can’t have mastery he’ll settle for slavery. Cayley: With that view how can one have the confidence to take the risk of revolution? Frye: Because God wants liberty for man. Therefore, he must be on man’s side when man is fighting for liberty. Cayley: Can you explain how Milton’s revolutionary views grow out of his Christianity, and his reading of the gospel? Frye: He reads Paul saying, “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” [Galatians 5:1]. The freedom here is from the law, in the sense of internalizing the law. The criminal is not free; he just breaks the law. But the person who has internalized the law is no longer a subject of external obligations; he’s an integrated person. Cayley: So only a good man can be free? Frye: Only a good man can be free, and there is no antithesis between freedom and necessity. If you’re playing the piano and exercising your free will about whether you’ll play the right notes or the wrong notes, you’re not playing worth a damn. You know what you’re doing only when what you want to do and what you have to do are exactly the same thing. Cayley: And that, I think, has been important for you as well. Frye: Oh, yes. Cayley: Now to take the other side of Milton, what is the source of his conservatism? Frye: His conservative view derives from his belief in original sin, which, of course, every serious Christian has to have. But he didn’t draw the preposterous inference from original sin that because man is born in sin he ought to be pushed around by people who, by definition, are no better than he is. Cayley: How did Blake deal with Milton? Frye: He dealt with Milton as a person inhibited by the sense of an objec-

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tive God. In Paradise Lost Milton still had the old stinker in the sky. Paradise Lost to some extent rationalizes the creation as it stands, whereas for Blake the creation was a bungle, and things start with man recreating a ruined universe. Cayley: You’re with Blake? Frye: Oh, yes. Cayley: But Blake also says that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it.40 Frye: There he’s using angel and devil in a very specific context. The angels are the conservatives and the devils are the radicals. Cayley: What is the order which Milton rationalizes and Blake rejects? Frye: The traditional structure is that theologically there are four levels. There is, first of all, the presence of God, which is always associated with metaphors of “up there,” even though they’re known to be nothing but metaphors. Then there is the state that God intended man to live in, that is, the garden of Eden, the golden age, paradise. Then there is, third, the fallen world, the world man fell into with the sin of Adam and Eve. Then there is, fourth, the demonic world, the world below the order of nature. On that scheme, there are two levels to the order of nature, the one that God designed and the one that we’re living in now. The destiny of man is to climb out of the fallen world as nearly as he can to the state that was originally designed for him. He does this under a structure of authority: the sacraments of religion, the practice of morality, education, and so forth. Cayley: And what role does poetry play when such an order is intact? Frye: Poetry begins with two strikes against it because God made the world and made it better than poets can make poems. Sir Thomas Browne says that nature is the art of God, and of course that means that man just sweeps up the shavings, so to speak.41 The poets didn’t take that as seriously as the theologians did, fortunately. But after about 1750 it came to be clearer and clearer that these four levels were the façade of a structure of authority. With the Romantic movement you get this whole cosmology turned upside down. Cayley: Why at that date did it come to be clear?

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Frye: Because of the American, the French, and the Industrial Revolutions. Cayley: What about the scientific revolution? What role did that play? Frye: That of course knocked out all of the “up there” metaphors. After Newton’s time you couldn’t regard the stars as a world of quintessence, as all that was left of the unfallen world. That’s why in his poetry Blake gives Isaac Newton the job of blowing the last trumpet [E65]. Cayley: What was the alternative view that Blake began? Frye: Blake says that we live in, if you like, a fallen world, that is, a world of great inequities, of privilege, a world of ferocity. He doesn’t have an idealized view of nature like Rousseau. He doesn’t believe in the noble savage. Wordsworth says that nature is our teacher, and the Marquis de Sade says that nature justifies your pleasure in inflicting pain on others. Blake would say that there is a lot more evidence for the Marquis de Sade’s view of nature than for Wordsworth’s. So for Blake what happens is that the child, who is the central figure of the Songs of Innocence, is born believing that the world is made for his benefit, that the world makes human sense. He then grows up and discovers that the world isn’t like this at all. So what happens to his childlike vision? Blake says it gets driven underground, what we would now call the subconscious. There you have the embryonic mythical shape that is worked on later by people like Schopenhauer, Marx, and Freud. Cayley: Blake sees the child as innocent. You’ve also described that as seeing the child as civilized. Does that distinguish Blake from Rousseau? Or are different terms being used to say the same thing? Frye: Yes, it does distinguish him from Rousseau and brings him much closer to Milton, who also thought of the original state of man as civilized. Cayley: In the traditional structure the movement is from God to man. What is the movement within Blake’s cosmos? Frye: For Blake, you have to think of God as at the bottom of creation, trying to rebuild it, and as working through man to that effect. Cayley: The four levels are still there? Frye: They’re still there, but they’re upside down. The world “up there”

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is the world of science fiction, of outer space. It’s a symbol of alienation. There’s nothing there except infinite resources for killing you. Then below that comes this very unfair world of ordinary experience, where the predators are the aristocrats. Below that is the world of frustrated sexual and social desire, the world of Marx’s proletariat, of Freud’s repressed consciousness. And below that again is the creative power of God, which works only through man as a conscious being. Cayley: How does Blake relate to the Romantic movement? Frye: I think Blake wraps up the whole Romantic movement inside himself, although nobody else knew it. You can find a good deal of the upside-down universe in all of the other Romantics, most completely, I think, in Shelley, where in a poem like Prometheus Unbound everything that’s “up there,” namely Jupiter, is tyrannical, and everything that’s down in caves is liberating. Cayley: But Shelley takes this in a more atheistical direction than Blake does. Frye: Shelley doesn’t derive primarily from the Biblical tradition in the way that Blake does. Blake is always thinking in terms of the Biblical revolutions, the Exodus in the Old Testament and the Resurrection in the New Testament. Cayley: In other words, Blake has a given structure of imagery from the Bible that he works with, and that distinguishes him from the other Romantics. Frye: It certainly distinguishes his emphasis from Shelley. Cayley: And that would be an advantage in your view? In The Critical Path you talk about the status of poetics and humanism in the Augustan age, and you say that by Coleridge’s time, despite Coleridge’s own efforts, critics had ceased to teach and poets to learn from them an integrated structure of imagery (59–64). You suggest that people were casting about, but, of course, Blake wasn’t in any sense casting about. He had only to transform the given structure, whereas Shelley was inventing one. Frye: I think that that is true. Shelley keeps picking things up from Plato and others. He would argue endlessly with Byron, who was, in a way, a more Christian poet than Shelley. I think Byron, at any rate, could under-

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stand the solidity of the Biblical tradition, even when it had been transformed into a structure of authority, whereas Shelley kept changing his mind and tinkering with his cosmology. He knew Plato very well, but there’s the authoritarian streak in Plato too, which Shelley didn’t like. Cayley: Why is the Romantic movement called Romantic? This seems to be a word like “myth” which has opposed meanings. What does the term mean? And why does romance define this period? Frye: There’s a long and complex history of the words “romance” and “Romanticism,” all of which I read at one time and all of which I’ve completely forgotten. So I really can’t answer the question from any scholarly point of view, but in general the Romantic is, according at any rate to one notable critic, namely me, the mode in which there is a heroic figure who can transcend the laws of nature to some degree [AC, 33/31]. That is, the heroes of medieval romance can accomplish things that in fact no human being can do, as Don Quixote points out. In Romanticism, to some extent, that power gets transferred to the poet, a power of transcending ordinary experience through imagination. Cayley: So that the poet’s becoming the hero is what makes for Romanticism? Frye: Yes. Cayley: And sometimes leads to the substitution of art for religion? Frye: Yes, in the sense that it often turns into something prophetic. Cayley: You’ve described the Romantic inversion of the traditional order of things as the central mythological event of the modern age. How does it set the terms not just for literature but even for politics and philosophy? Frye: Well, it throws the emphasis on movements from below upward. Revolutionary philosophies, like those of Marx and of most Freudians, though not altogether Freud himself, do this: they move from below upwards, or at least tend to draw their strength from what is below. The whole set of metaphors whereby everything that is good for man came from above and came down on top of him has been changed to a set of metaphors where everything that is good for man comes from inside him and works upwards toward manifesting itself.

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Cayley: In one of your essays you use the image of the drunken boat to represent this change.42 Frye: The image of the drunken boat, which comes from Rimbaud, is the image of a sort of Noah’s ark containing all the values of civilization floating on top of something very sinister and powerful that threatens it. Whether the ark will stay afloat or not depends on the optimism of the thinker. With Schopenhauer it was the world of idea floating on top of the world of will. With Marx it was the ascendant class floating on top of a bigger and bigger and stronger proletariat. With Freud it was the ego fighting to stay afloat with the libido and id underneath it. With Kierkegaard, it was again the ego, or something like it, floating on top of angst, of dread. Cayley: It’s interesting that although the structure is constant one can make a conservative or revolutionary view out of it, or one can make an optimistic or pessimistic philosophy out of it. Frye: Oh, yes. One can take the view of Schopenhauer that the world of will is evil but can’t be got rid of. Or one can take the view of Nietzsche that this is what we ought to get hold of and use for ourselves. Cayley: In our century there’s been an attempt to retrench on this Romantic cosmology, which you argue has not been entirely successful. You say that the conservative response to Romanticism in Eliot and others had the resources only to become post-Romanticism. It couldn’t find a third way between Romanticism and reaction.43 Why? Frye: As a structure of metaphors it doesn’t really matter. I mean, you can put all the good things “up there” coming down to man in a shower of blessings. Or you can use the inverted framework. Metaphorically it doesn’t matter which you do. And you can have people using traditional Dantean cosmologies, as Eliot does, and make convincing poetry out of them. In a sense, that was what Yeats did too. I think that the answer is Jacob’s ladder: there are angels ascending and there are angels descending. Cayley: Then one can’t have a third structure of imagery, because there isn’t one to be invented? Frye: That’s right, there isn’t one. When you’ve got everything coming from the top down, you’ve got a structure of authority, and when you’ve

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got everything coming from the bottom up you’ve got another structure of authority, a revolutionary one. The thing to do is try to duck out from under all structures of authority. Cayley: So when you say that the modern reaction couldn’t become anything but a post-Romanticism, you’re saying that it could only revert to the earlier structure. If it rejected the Romantic structure, it had no other possibility than reaction. Frye: Mythically and metaphorically, as I say, it doesn’t matter, but ideologically it’s very apt to take on the colouring of the old authority structures. Cayley: You encountered these authority structures particularly in Eliot, about whom you wrote a book [TSE], which was not well received by him, I gather. Frye: Yes, I did find them in Eliot, though I didn’t find fascism in his work. There’s flirtation with fascism in Pound and Yeats and others because, again, they were looking back to the earlier metaphorical structure and therefore took on some of its ideological colouring. Eliot didn’t go that far, but he was certainly, in my terms, a reactionary. When I read After Strange Gods after it first came out, I felt it was a betrayal. Cayley: Was that important for you? Frye: It was. In a way it was my becoming aware of my own responsibilities as a critic. Because you couldn’t trust the poets, you had to do it yourself if you were going to be a critic. Cayley: So that was the beginning of your understanding that the characters and political views of poets are unrelated to their poetic abilities. Frye: Yes. One of my guiding principles is that a poet can be any kind of damn fool and still be a poet. Cayley: How did the Eliot book come about? Frye: A firm called Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh was doing a series on modern poets and they asked me to do Eliot. I was to do a book 192 pages long. I did one that was 216 pages long, and they said that an extra gathering would turn their profit into a loss. So I cut so much out of it that I produced a book of 85 pages, and they didn’t quite know what to do with that. Then I had to expand the bloody thing until I got it into 192

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pages. It was also a part of the format of the series that you should begin with a biography. So I had to put in a biographical preface, and that was what Eliot himself objected to. I didn’t want to write the biography at all, but I did want to write the rest of it. I thought it would be interesting to see if I could get the whole of Eliot into 192 pages. I didn’t want to write a biographical sketch, because I didn’t think Eliot’s biography was relevant to his poetry. I disliked his personality anyway. There just wasn’t anything I wanted to say, or anything fresh I had to say, about his life. That rather spoiled the book in some respects, but the rest of it I think was all right. The first two chapters of the book were on two aspects of his criticism. The first was the ideological and polemical side. I wrote that because I wanted to see whether you could take all of the reactionary element in Eliot and just snip it off with a pair of scissors and leave him intact as a man of letters. And it worked. The thing about Eliot that holds everyone’s interest is his extraordinarily memorable quality. He seems to have that knack that Coleridge had in Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner of going just below the surface of consciousness, just far enough to bring up all that haunting power and all the richness and portentousness of the subconscious that is very close to consciousness. And, as I said in the book, you may like or dislike his poetry but you can’t forget it once you’ve read it.44 Cayley: Yes, I find it amazing how much of Eliot I’ve retained. Another poet about whom you’ve written a good deal is Wallace Stevens. Was he someone who challenged you in some way? Frye: When I was sixteen working in the Moncton public library, I used to pore over Untermeyer’s anthologies of modern American poets, and all there was of Stevens at that time was Harmonium, but that fascinated me. That had some of the same qualities that Eliot had, even though it was a very different kind of poetry. I found that Stevens was somebody who held up, whereas so many of the others, like the imagists, just dropped out of my sight. I didn’t cease to read them for pleasure, but Wallace Stevens remained something very central. Once the Collected Poems came out, I decided I had to write an essay on Stevens. Cayley: Was that “The Realistic Oriole” (FI, 238–55)? Frye: Yes. I find myself quoting Stevens very frequently, so frequently that when The Great Code came out, the people who interviewed me by

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telephone from Sydney, Australia, wanted to know why the hell I’d put so much Wallace Stevens in, and I couldn’t tell them why, except that he just seemed to fit what I had to say.45 Cayley: The reason I asked whether he challenged you was because it seems to me that some of those famous phrases you quote from Stevens—“the weight of primary noon,” “the dominant X,” “one confides in what has no concealed creator”46—have a sense of the independent existence of nature and the sense of the imperialism of the imagination and the necessity of there being a struggle with no winner. It seemed to me that this might have challenged your sense of nature’s finally being taken inside the enlightened imagination. Frye: Well, it was taken inside in him too. Description without Place tells you you don’t live in a natural environment at all. You live in a coating, the husk of human culture or civilization, and you take nature in through that. Cayley: So there’s nothing in Stevens that necessarily challenged your own view, although it may have extended it or given it a language? Frye: It extended it, yes. It didn’t set up anything I couldn’t very easily come to terms with. Cayley: I think of Stevens as an atheist. Frye: I think of Stevens as a Protestant. I know he turned Catholic on his death bed, but people do funny things on their death beds.47 Cayley: A nature with “no concealed creator,” the earth as “all of paradise that we shall know,” the idea of a “supreme fiction”—I suppose that as a young man reading Stevens lines like these suggested atheism to me.48 Frye: He says “in the new world all men are priests,”49 and I think that he had a sense of man assigned to recreate the universe, just as Blake had. His attitude toward God was very like Emily Dickinson’s, who didn’t want to repudiate her faith but wanted to fight with it. Cayley: What about the view of nature as uncreated? Frye: I think he disliked the thought of God as an artist, because again that writes off the human artist.

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Cayley: I know nothing about Stevens personally except that he worked in insurance, and obviously my knowledge of his poetry is sketchy too. Was he in fact a religious man in his own way? Frye: Oh, I think so, yes. Look at what he says about Easter in Adagia in Opus Posthumous.50 He doesn’t very often commit himself to a religious statement, but it’s there, all right. VI The Critical Path Cayley: Could we talk now about your book The Critical Path, which you wrote around 1970? Perhaps we could begin with the title. Where did that come from? Frye: I picked it up as a term in business administration. It set up an echo in my mind of the last paragraph in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant says, “We’ve tried the dogmatic way and it doesn’t work, we’ve tried the sceptical way and it doesn’t work; the critical path is alone open.” The dogmatist says, “I know that,” and the sceptic says, “I don’t know that,” and the critic tries to figure out what he tentatively knows and doesn’t know. Cayley: This is the first place in your work that you develop, at least at any length, the idea of concern. What was the origin and the necessity of that idea for you? Frye: I think the word “concern” is roughly self-explanatory. I’m not using it in any peculiar sense. Man is a concerned being. I think that’s one way of defining a conscious animal. As I went on, I tended to see a distinction between the primary concerns of man as an animal, that is, food and sex and property and freedom of movement, and secondary concerns, which are religious belief, political loyalties, and everything ideological. It seems to me that literature has a profound and, well, a primary connection with primary concerns. That is what distinguishes it from ideology and rhetoric of all kinds. Cayley: How do you read the history of ideas in the light of these two concepts? Frye: The primary concerns, which I think literature deals with, are the concerns of man as an individual. You can learn a great deal about the ideological or religious structure of a society from a novelist like Flaubert

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or Zola or Tolstoy, but in the work of fiction they have to be subordinated to making love and making a living and getting on with your life—the questions of survival. Cayley: In The Critical Path you describe a tension between what you call a myth of concern and a myth of freedom. What did you mean by these terms? Frye: As a matter of fact, I’m not entirely happy with the phrase “myth of” any more. I had a discussion with Max Black of Cornell when I was staying there for a couple of months, and I realized that that was not really a proper description of what I was talking about. I wouldn’t, I think, use the phrase “myth of concern” now. I would speak more of concern expressing itself in myths. Cayley: What I was getting at was the idea that, as Kant says, only the middle way is open. Freedom by itself becomes parasitical. Concern by itself leads to ideological domination. Frye: Every society is dominated by an ideology. When Marxism began, it professed to be something of an escape from ideology and said it would not set up a structure of authority. It would be something in which the state would wither away. But that didn’t happen, because all ideologies are contained within a mythological framework. As long as people don’t realize that, they will simply shift the emphasis without actually getting anywhere. Ideology is militant and builds up empires and class structures. It’s an ideological concern that sends the Russian tanks into Czechoslovakia and the American troops into Vietnam. If there’s one thing clear about the late twentieth century, it is that it’s an age where primary concerns have got to become primary or else. I mean that food and sex and freedom of movement and property, in the sense of what is proper to individuality, are the primary concerns. We must come to terms with those. Cayley: Could we look at artists in different periods in relation to ideological concern? Frye: Artists have always been told that they have no real authority, that they live in a world of let’s pretend, and that they just play around with fictions. Their function is to delight and instruct, as Horace says [Ars poetica, l. 333]. They can learn from their own art how to delight, but they can’t learn how to instruct unless they study philosophy or theology or politics. As a literary critic, I’ve been fighting that notion all my life.

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Cayley: How have poets made space for themselves in the face of this view? Frye: Well, I think poets have to come to terms with the ideological structures of their time, particularly if they can’t find any source of encouragement to believe in the validity of what they’re doing in its own right. Again, from the eighteenth century on you get almost every decade something thrown up in the arts that is anti-establishment. But the goliardic poets and others in the Middle Ages also had to confront authority.51 The poets in the Middle Ages, for example, invented the code of love, which was something that ran parallel with the Christian religion and just got by ecclesiastical authority. The authority didn’t like it, but it was there. The poets refused to budge. Dante starts with that. He winds up with divine grace in the presence of God, but he starts out with Beatrice. Cayley: So the poets in this sense are a kind of loyal opposition—or at least as loyal as they have to be. What does Renaissance humanism represent by way of an accommodation to ideological concern? How does it manage it? Frye: The Renaissance humanist comes to terms with the Renaissance prince, much more obviously in Ben Jonson or Racine than in Shakespeare, who stuck very closely to his job as dramatist. Again, they go along with what the ideological authorities of their time say they have to go along with. But there is also in humanism itself a belief in the power of words. They called it style, the sense that it makes such an immense difference how you say something. This, again, sets up a claim of independence for the writer. Cayley: So again you have a tension? Frye: Yes. Cayley: Now when you reach the Romantic period, that ideological authority is overthrown? Frye: Not always overthrown. A great many Romantic poets still come to terms with the ideology, because there were conservative Romantics as well as radicals, like Blake and Shelley. But you’re quite right. For the most part, the poet does claim that being a poet gives him an authority independent of ideological pressures. Goethe certainly thought that. Cayley: What does that do to the role of the critic, then, in the post-

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Romantic period? How does the critic’s role change when he no longer mediates between literature and the structure of authority? Frye: There is still the poet and his society, and there is still the poet responding to various ideological currents, even if he takes an independent view of them. So that the critic interested in the history of ideas has to deal with that in Goethe just as he has to deal with it in Dante. Cayley: One of the people to whom you’re sometimes compared, or said to be in the lineage of, is Matthew Arnold. Do you recognize the link? Frye: I have a strong affinity with Arnold when he says that culture is the ultimate authority in society and that all the class struggles between the barbarians, which is what he calls the aristocracy, the Philistines, which is what he calls the middle class, and the populace or the proletariat—all these are really subordinate to the authority of culture, even though culture may be impotent to impose its authority and, in fact, would be false to itself if it did. But, Arnold says, culture left to itself would move in the direction of a classless society. Cayley: What does he mean by culture? Frye: He calls it the best that has been thought and said,52 but what he has in mind is an educational ideal. I would give much more prominence to the arts and less to the sort of nineteenth-century Classical training than he does. But with all that, I’m quite solidly with Arnold. The trouble is that Arnold called himself a liberal, but he funked a great many of the liberal issues of his day. I feel he didn’t really pull his weight as a liberal. Cayley: Is that because this ideal, this idea of culture, still ultimately depends on there being gentlemen who can play the game? Is that what you mean? Frye: No, I just mean, for example, that Bishop Colenso attacked the historicity of the Book of Exodus, saying that if you think of the Israelites wandering around in the wilderness for forty years without their shoes even wearing out you begin to suspect that there are certain elements that prevent the Exodus from being a really reliable historical narrative. Now everybody knows that that’s true, and Arnold knew that it was true, but somehow or other he thought it was a little ungentlemanly to say so right out in public where vulgar people might read the statement. Cayley: So, like Mill, his confidence in the people is sometimes pretty shaky?

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Frye: Well, Mill was a much more genuine liberal. Cayley: But still, Mill suffers from tremendous anxieties about what the consequences of his views coming to fruition might be. Mill and Arnold are akin in that respect, aren’t they? Frye: Yes, but the anxieties with Mill come from his recognition of the power of the classes and their immense desire to fight the other classes. With Arnold, it’s more a sense of nervousness mainly about the populace, mainly about the lower classes. Arnold never quite got over the fear inspired in him by the second Reform Bill, which threw about five million extra votes on the British elections. He was afraid that some of the traditional values would be going down the drain, and that forced him into panics, which don’t sit very well on his record as a liberal. Cayley: Arnold’s idea of culture as authority is a response to the overthrow of the traditional authority of revelation, of the society’s original myth of concern. And the overturning of that ideological structure as the exclusive authority then leads to a parliamentary image of culture where the competing claims freely interact. Frye: Except that you don’t overturn it, you transcend it. Cayley: What’s the distinction? Frye: To overturn it means that you bring another class into the ascendancy. The title of the book that I’m writing now is Words with Power, which comes from the remark in the Gospels about Jesus that his word was with power [Luke 4:32]. I would add to the word with power all of the other arts as well. They have no physical power. Mao Tse-tung says that power comes out of the barrel of a gun.53 Now if that is your conception of power, the human race is not going to survive the twenty-first century. Cayley: Culture is an alternative conception of power? Frye: Yes. It’s utterly weak physically, but it’s the only surviving power there is. Cayley: It seems to me you’ve also been interested in an alternative tradition to Arnold’s, a tradition in which the artist is a worker, as in Blake and Morris, and education a meritocracy rather than a way of producing gentlemen? Frye: Arnold really had no choice. He was working in the nineteenth-

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century British class structure, and, like Newman, he felt that education was there to produce the gentleman. That conception of gentleman is obviously obsolete now, and for a person brought up in a North American democracy, like myself, it never was an alternative. I always thought of the structure of society as a structure of workers, and I was never frightened by words like “elite,” because in a properly constituted society everybody would belong to an elite of some kind. That is, everybody would have an expertise that wasn’t completely replaceable. Blake and Morris certainly thought of the artist as worker, as producer. Cayley: So that doesn’t leave the arts outside of society as being the activity of gentlemen or depending on the patronage of gentlemen. Blake and Morris, in a way, are precursors of the contemporary view that you said you had from the beginning. Frye: That’s right, yes. Both of them, of course, ran into paradoxes. Morris could run his business only when he was patronized by fairly well-todo people, and it was only well-to-do people who could buy Blake’s engraved poems. But those are accidents of their time. They don’t destroy the conception of the artist as worker. Cayley: You’ve described yourself as a bourgeois liberal and even said that people who aren’t bourgeois liberals are still “in the trees” [p. 934, above]. Frye: Or would be if they could. Cayley: I don’t quite understand what you mean by that. This seems on the face of it a strange statement for a social democrat and a Methodist and a populist to make. Frye: Well, the bourgeois liberal to me is the nearest analogy I can think of to a man who is sufficiently left alone by the structure of authority in his society to develop his individuality. Because he’s a liberal, he doesn’t become an anarchist, that is, he doesn’t grab all the money and corner all the property in sight. He’s a person who can relate to other people. He doesn’t either withdraw from society or become a mass man. Cayley: So the emphasis is not the same as Marx gives to the term “bourgeois” when he uses it to signify the hegemony of a certain class? Frye: The bourgeois liberal is capable of seeing himself as having a certain position in society. He’s also capable of seeing something of the limitations that that situation puts him into. You can’t avoid being

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conditioned, but you can to some extent become aware of your conditioning. Cayley: And your identification with bourgeois liberalism is part of your reaching back, let’s say, to Mill or Arnold—not endorsing what they are in their context, but seeing them as ancestors? Frye: Seeing them as ancestors and as a kind of human type that is produced when society is left sufficiently open. Actually, what I mean by bourgeois liberal—and of course I’m being deliberately provocative when I use the term—is steering a middle course between the totalitarian mass man on the one hand and a kind of anarchism of the ego on the other. Cayley: Is there no antithesis between the bourgeois liberal and the leftwing Christian revolutionary? Your biographer John Ayre sees you, I think, as a mandarin and a rebel in one skin [180]. Is there anything to this? Frye: There could be. In certain types of society, including, I should think, most of classical China, the mandarin could not be a rebel. The principles of Confucianism wouldn’t allow it. I think it is possible to be both, up to a point. Cayley: And you’ve tried it? Frye: Up to a point I’ve tried it, yes. VII Canadian Culture Cayley: Are you a Canadian critic whenever you’re writing, and not just when you’re writing about Canada? Frye: I think what one is is very largely a matter of environment. The question came up when I was on the editorial board of the Literary History of Canada, and we argued a bit about whether, as I put it in one article, every European immigrant who stopped off in Canada for a ham sandwich on his way to the States was a Canadian.54 I said I thought that Canada was an environment, that it was a place where certain things had happened, and that anybody who operated within that environment was a Canadian, whatever his passport said. Cayley: So that Malcolm Lowry wrote a Canadian book when he wrote a book in Vancouver?

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Frye: What he did in Vancouver, he did within the Canadian environment. Under the Volcano has claims to be considered within the Canadian environment. Brian Moore is somebody in the same position.55 Cayley: How do you think the Canadian environment has influenced what you have done as a critic? Frye: I think it makes you less anonymous. You tend to get lost in a country as big as the United States, and you have to be frantically aggressive to make much of a sense of your individuality. But in Canada there’s a small enough community responding to you—I’m thinking roughly of the cultured, intellectual community—so that you do get known as a person, or at any rate identified as a person. Cayley: That would account for a greater flamboyance in some of the American critics? Frye: I daresay, yes. Cayley: In an essay about you Margaret Atwood suggests that the size, the blankness, and the forbidding quality of the Canadian environment has something to do with your liking for taxonomies and large conceptual schemes.56 Does that make any sense to you? Frye: Yes, but I think she also had a larger spectrum than that in mind— that Canadians have been obsessed with communication, which took itself out in building bridges and railways and canals in the nineteenth century and in developing very comprehensive theories of communication, like Innis’s and McLuhan’s in the twentieth century.57 I suppose I belong to some extent in that category. Cayley: Could you explain how you belong in that category? That is, where would be the link with Innis and McLuhan? Frye: Well, Innis started out with a Laurentian theory of Canadian expansion, with the fact that coming to Canada from Europe is a totally different experience than coming to the United States and with the fact that you live in what is, for practical purposes, a kind of one-dimensional country. It’s just a long line of river and Great Lakes and railways from one ocean to the other. The difficulties within communication, within the very act of communicating at all, and the fact that the settlements in Canada are isolated from each other in geographical ways—these things, I think, have brought about certain affinities among people who have talked about communication in Canada.

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Cayley: So your schemata are bridges and telegraph lines? Is that how the analogy would run? Frye: It would be a rather shaky analogy, I imagine, but I have looked at literature always as a kind of overall pattern, just as Canada, when you see it on a map as one colour, looks like an all-over pattern, even though it is actually a collection of isolated communities, or has been. Cayley: So you’re motivated by a kind of rage for order? Frye: It’s a rage for order, all right, yes. Order without hierarchy, because hierarchy creates a limited order. Cayley: Order without hierarchy—is that a principle that comes from your response to the Canadian environment? Frye: That’s a principle of mine, order without hierarchy. There has to be order, because order liberates. I’ve always attacked, as we discussed earlier, the whole business of value judgments, because that creates hierarchies in literature: this comes first, and that comes second, and so forth. That doesn’t liberate. Cayley: How do you begin to make order if you don’t have a sense of hierarchy? Frye: The conception of order is a conception of the integration of knowledge, and the conception of hierarchy is a conception of action and stimulus to action. I think you have to have some traces of hierarchical order in any democracy, as far as the life of action is concerned, but you don’t need it in a cultural context. A scientist, say, sees order in what he’s doing. He keeps referring that order to his repeatable experiments or to demonstrations of some kind. That is not a hierarchical use of order. I think the same thing is true of literature. You have pump-priming operations, like the Canada Council when it works, but they are not hierarchical ones: they don’t say, “This is the primary value we are interested in.” Cayley: We talked earlier about journeys by train, and you mentioned then how impressed you were by the experience of being in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on board ship. Was that when you returned from Oxford in 1939? Frye: Yes, in the 1930s you had to go by ship. There weren’t any transatlantic flights then. I suddenly realized when I was in the middle of the

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Gulf of St. Lawrence that I was surrounded by five Canadian provinces, all of them invisible.58 You don’t get that kind of experience anywhere in the United States. Cayley: What did that image say to you? Frye: Well, it said Jonah and the whale, more or less. It was also the beginning of the sense that Canadian economy developed from a big Laurentian thrust from the east to the west. It took on political shape with John A. Macdonald, who thought in terms of east to west movement, starting in Great Britain and going across Canada and federating Canada as part of the British Empire on its way to India. Cayley: Were you by that time already aware of Innis or Creighton?59 Frye: No, they came later. Cayley: Innis was already the chairman of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto in the ’30s, wasn’t he? Frye: Oh yes, I was aware of him as a personality but not as an author. His important books hadn’t come out at that time. I really didn’t formulate this theory until I wrote the review of Ned Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike in 1952 for the University of Toronto Quarterly [C, 103–6]. Cayley: How does your later idea of a “garrison mentality” in early Canada relate to this experience of being surrounded? Frye: I was trying to explain in that phrase the psychological effects, first of all, of the Anglo-French War for the possession of the country, and then of the anxieties and moral compulsions of living in small towns that were totally isolated, as Canadian communities were. I knew something of cultural isolation from having been brought up in Moncton in the 1920s. The phrase “garrison mentality” has a certain historical context, and the phrase has got overexposed. Like other overexposed pictures and images, it has got a bit blurred and fuzzy, because Canadians are now [among] the most highly urbanized people in the world. So the garrison mentality has been replaced by the condominium mentality. The garrison had priorities that subordinated culture, but still it was a genuine social unit. The condominium is neither cultural nor social. It is perhaps another, well, threat is too strong a word, but it’s something one has to cope with.

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Cayley: It seems a tremendous threat to me, as someone who has lived in Toronto and had family here for many generations. Toronto seems to me a city that’s desperately trying to forsake its past, its character. Suddenly there’s this anxiety about being “world class.” And now the latest refrain is that Toronto is becoming more like New York. This is usually said with a kind of prurient concern which claims to fear what it actually hopes for. Frye: Part of the point is that technological developments tend to a greater and greater introversion. As long as Toronto was a city of homes, of individual houses, it was possible for genuine communities, like the churches and the labour halls, to function. But they tend to freeze up in a town of high-rise apartments. There’s hardly a community left. The television set is so much more introverted than even the movie, and the movie in turn more introverted than the concert hall or the stage. Cayley: But to return to my earlier question: did you see the anxiety of isolation as different in Canada than it was in the United States, where small towns were also isolated? Frye: It was more intense, and there was the sense of being surrounded on all sides by a frontier, instead of having the frontier over there on the West, which was the American experience. Cayley: This relates to the image of Jonah in the whale. In Canada there was never an established, eastern-seaboard civilization which then moved. Frye: No, there wasn’t. There was a southern Ontario community, cut off from the prairies by the hinterland of northern Ontario (I’m speaking now, of course, of years ago); and the Quebec community, which was different culturally; the Maritime community, cut off by the upthrust of Maine; Newfoundland, with its insular status, cut off by the inland sea; and the prairies, cut off from British Columbia by the mountains. The absence of a seaboard meant the absence of that turned-out political quality that the British had and the seaboard nations—the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and then later the Americans—also had. Central Canada gathered around the Great Lakes, to use Plato’s expression about the Mediterranean Sea, “like frogs around the pool,”60 and that gave us what little cohesion we had, with these immense distances probing out on all sides.

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Cayley: You’ve also suggested, I think, that this produced an inner, as opposed to an outer, frontier in Canada. Frye: Oh, I think so. I think the sense of introversion in the Canadian psyche is very marked, and it’s a matter of making internal journeys and finding there are images there. If you look at Canadian poetry, you’ll find that not decreasing with the advance of technology and communications and so on, but increasing. Cayley: Is that distinctly different from the American approach? Frye: There’s a distinction of emphasis, I think. It’s very difficult to generalize as a whole, but, if you think of somebody like Walt Whitman thinking of history as a big machine that’s winding up and catapulting the Americans into the future, it’s so different in its attitude from this rather cautious, piecemeal ad hoc solution of one crisis after another in Canada. Cayley: You have identified in early nineteenth-century Canadian writing an argumentative tone, which served as a barrier to its becoming a more fully literary expression. How does that relate to the garrison mentality? Frye: It means that your normal form of linguistic communication is an argumentative one. That is, you have in every Canadian small town half a dozen churches representing a set of propositions, and you used to have a conservative–liberal dialectic politically, which led to a good deal of eloquence and rhetorical passion. That was the way that Canadians instinctively used words. They didn’t use them imaginatively or metaphorically. Cayley: But why was the society so highly politicized? Frye: There wasn’t anything else. If you’re in a culturally isolated small town and if you’ve got political parties, one representing British imperialism, the other continentalism, the only thing you can do is argue. Cayley: So it’s the sense of threat that creates the argumentative culture? Frye: It’s the sense of opposition. You see, every proposition is a halftruth, is a half-proposition. It contains its opposite. That means that using words as propositions is a militant use of words. To use words metaphorically is to get out of that militant dialectic. But it takes a good deal of security to get to that stage.

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Cayley: How does Canada compare in this respect with the United States, which shared at least a partly similar environment? Frye: I think the same phenomenon can be found in the United States. But you also get in New England and to some extent in the MarylandVirginia area enough security of cultural tradition, which enabled them to develop writers much earlier than we could. Also, there wasn’t the linguistic barrier that there was between Ontario and Quebec. Cayley: And presumably the Revolution tended to have a settling effect. After that, the Americans could get on with it. Frye: Yes, the Revolution introduced a kind of deductive pattern into American life. It meant that you had an eighteenth-century inspired document—a constitution—and you didn’t touch that document: you amended it and reinterpreted it. In many cases it came to mean the opposite of what it originally meant, but that’s what always happens to legal documents. Cayley: But it gave that society a stable framework, whereas in Canada we just argued endlessly . . . Frye: And argued on an inductive basis. That is, what kind of ad hoc compromise is going to save this country from falling apart? Cayley: So in the U.S. between the Revolution and the Civil War there was a relatively stable period in which a literature could take shape, a cultural stability in which writers like Hawthorne and Melville and Emerson and others could flower. Frye: Yes, there was a cultural stability. Also, the constitution itself came out of a very stable cultural climate, namely the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which Canada never had any trace of. Cayley: In Canada, by way of contrast, it seems that by the time you get to something it’s already over. This is what I take your idea of foreshortening in Canadian history to mean. By the time Canada is independent of Britain, it’s already in such a completely internationalized environment that it never really is independent. It passes from colony to postmodern international state. Frye: Yes, you get books like Lower’s From Colony to Nation. But actually you find that in culture, at any rate, Canada goes from the provincial to

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the regional, which is the more mature form of provincial culture, without going through the national phase at all. Or rather, to make this more intelligible, “culture” is a word with different contexts. One context is the lifestyle context: the British pub and the French bistro and the German ratskeller are different forms of a culture of drink. Canada doesn’t have a very distinctive lifestyle culture. Its culture is pretty much identical to the northern American one. But that’s just part of the homogenizing of the entire world. Then there is culture in the sense of the historical tradition, the shared heritage, where Canada does feel distinctive and threatened by American influences, and feels that it is the daughter of a mother country in Great Britain. Then there is a third area of culture, the creative life of a country, its literature and painting and music. Particularly in literature and painting and film, Canada has had quite a distinctive role to play. Cayley: As Canada, or as regions? Frye: Not as Canada, but as a collection of regions within Canada that add up to something Canadian. There are no Canadian writers, but there are southern Ontario writers, British Columbia writers, Maritime writers, and Quebec writers. When you add them all together, you get a Canadian culture with a distinctive feeling of its own. Cayley: How can a country like Canada have cultural independence when it lacks political and economic independence? Frye: I think that culture has a different sort of rhythm from political and economic development, which tends to centralize, and that the centralization process has gone so far in the great world powers that the conception of a nation is really obsolete now. I think it is possible to be independent culturally because the cultural tendencies are tendencies in the decentralizing direction. If you talk about American literature, for example, you have to add up Mississippi literature and New England literature, and middle-Western, California, and so on, and the theme of a cultural identity immediately transfers you to a postnational setting. A regional culture as I see it is a culture in which the writer has struck roots in his immediate environment. There’s always something vegetable about the creative imagination. And you can’t transplant James Reaney or Alice Munro to the middle of Brazil and expect them to produce the same kind of work—they’d become different cultural vegetables in that case. And, with the poets of the Charles G.D. Roberts generation, there

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was really very little of that sense of region. The Confederation Ode of Roberts was inspired by a map, not by a people. Cayley: Roberts was consciously trying to be Canadian. Frye: Right, and you can’t be a Canadian by an effort of will. The whole conception behind it is too amorphous. “O child of nations, giantlimbed”—that’s Roberts harrumphing about the Confederation era. But that’s not poetry, that’s not culture, that’s not anything except a manufactured sentiment. Cayley: So when do you see this regional centring of culture really begin to acquire strength and authority? Frye: The difference between the provincial and the regional, as I see it, is that the provincial regards itself as importing its cultural standards from somewhere else, either England or France. Many of the most effective influences are American, but of course no Canadian ever thought of the United States as a mother country and never thought of Canada as effectively in a colonial relationship to it. So you import your standards, and of course the standards are out of date by the time they arrive. The nineteenth-century English and French poets may use quotations from Tennyson or Victor Hugo, but the texture of their work belongs much further back, with James Thomson or Béranger. Then eventually writers become more aware of international currents sweeping across the world, and those currents bring with them the feeling that cultural standards cannot be met; they can only be established by the writer himself. So you take on international qualities in style, which are not homogenizing qualities, because they take root in soils in different areas. Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, and Alice Munro are very solidly rooted in southern Ontario, but they are not, like Stephen Leacock, provincial writers in the sense of being branch-plant writers. They use international techniques and devices, but they are very different from writers who use them elsewhere. Cayley: So this is a function both of maturation within Canada and of changes in international communication? Frye: Yes. You follow an international idiom in order to mature and establish your own standards instead of accepting standards from elsewhere.

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Cayley: And from what writers do you begin to date this change? Frye: If you read a book like Knister’s White Narcissus, you see a very conscientious, carefully written book that nevertheless seems to reflect standards established elsewhere—not techniques, devices, or idioms, but standards. So I would call it a very good provincial novel. With Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Imperialist, you’re beginning to move from something provincial into something regional, and by Morley Callaghan’s time, where he’s taking on an international influence through Gilson and Maritain, of course, you’ve moved into the regional period, which has escaped the provincial.61 And from then on, it’s an open field. Cayley: You yourself have played an important part in opening up this field, first as editor of the Canadian Forum. When did you take that on? Frye: I was managing editor in 1948 to 1950 or thereabouts. But when I was on a Guggenheim year, the editor of the University of Toronto Quarterly asked me to take over the job that E.K. Brown had been doing of reviewing Canadian poetry and making an annual survey of it. And from 1950 to 1960 I read all the poetry published in English Canada.62 Cayley: How did you see your role in those years? Frye: As a nurse, that is, as somebody bringing along a culture that was not yet wholly mature but showed so many signs of it. And that was why I said that I dealt with Canadian poetry for the reader of the Quarterly as though no other poetry were available to him [C, 228]. Cayley: How was that received? Frye: Well, up and down. It depended on what I said, of course. Cayley: It’s possible to resent a nurse, someone who has seen your destiny but doesn’t think you’re achieving it. Frye: Yes, especially when you come along and stick a needle in, as I had to do from time to time when people confused violent statements with the structures of myth and metaphor. Of course, a lot of people insisted that I was merely plugging a group of poets, whom they called the Frye or mythical school.63 Cayley: Who would have been included in that group? Frye: In the ’50s, Jamie Reaney, Jay Macpherson, and George Johnston particularly.

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Cayley: Those were people who were friends and colleagues in some cases, and there must have been some influence. Frye: There was. But I did my level best to respond impartially to every kind of poetry that I was handed. Cayley: How did your dislike of value judgments fit with your role as nurse? Frye: I’m working in a different area there. I think a reviewer has to make value judgments, knowing all the time that they’re extremely tentative, but he can’t get along without doing it because a lot of his activity is contraceptive. That is, he’s trying to indicate to his readers what is likely to stay around and what has been really aborted at birth. Cayley: So in that context you were inevitably functioning as judge and taste-maker, and you accepted that you were doing that? Frye: Yes, I accepted that I was doing it. It’s only on paper that it’s an inconsistency. In practice, it’s not one. Cayley: How do you see the proper relationship between critic and writer? You’ve rejected the idea that writers like Jay Macpherson or James Reaney were acolytes. But does the critic have some role in tutoring writers or in indicating to them a possible structure of imagery? What is the relationship? Frye: A critic knows that he’s going to be read by poets, but he’s not really addressing the poets. He’s addressing the public, telling them what they will get if they read this poetry. The one thing the critic should never try to do is to tell the writer how to write, or to say that if he’d done so-and-so he might have written a better book. Occasionally you may suggest something like that, but that is not the critical function. The critical function is to take the book as presented and say what you see in the book. Cayley: Do you have any concerns about Canadian culture today in the wake of the free-trade elections and the free-trade debate?64 Frye: I think there has been something of a golden age in English Canadian literature. French is different. But in the past, golden ages have had a tendency not to last. I know there’s the constant tendency from publishers to keep on pushing for the Agatha Christie syndrome, that is, to produce commercial best sellers. Canadian authors have responded to

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that and have produced extremely good books that were at the same time commercial best sellers. But it is a terrific strain on the writer to ask him to carry off that kind of double first, so to speak. The people at the top, the well-known established writers, Atwood, Davies, Findley, Munro, and others, seem to be able to do it almost indefinitely, but whether you can ask for a continuous supply of such writers is another matter. Cayley: It seems to me you might be saying that there’s a risk to them too, that Margaret Atwood, for example, has to write another Margaret Atwood novel and that this inhibits her ability to experiment, to grow, to expand. Is this part of what you’re saying? Frye: It may be part of what I’m saying, yes. I think that every writer who is established has to take risks, the risk of repeating himself, the risk of deviating from himself, and so forth. The thing is that the bigger you are the more you have to take risks. Cayley: Your answer on the face of it doesn’t seem to relate to free trade. Frye: Well, I think it’s the natural tendency of political and economic movements to centralize. I know that there are books called Small Is Beautiful,65 but they don’t apply to Canada. Insofar as books are a cottage industry, there’s still a chance for Canadians to fight for their own cultural autonomy. To the extent that they’re commercial products, there’s a tendency to homogenize. We set up the CRTC in the Broadcasting Act of 1968 because we had sold the film industry, and the literary industry as well, pretty well down the American river. We’ve got some of it back. But I think that free trade does pose a certain threat to the cultural autonomy of Canada. Cayley: You’re saying that unless we maintain the tradition of a strong central state with the ability to protect and foster Canadian culture . . . Frye: Unless we believe in it, and the present government I don’t see as believing. Cayley: How do you see the role of the critic today, then, in the light of what we have been talking about? Frye: When I was doing the surveys of Canadian poetry in the ’50s, I saw a maturing process going on that I thought would eventually produce more and better work. But now one has to think more of fighting a rear-

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guard action, which in fact the humanities have been fighting ever since the Old Stone Age. Cayley: You’ve been teaching at Victoria College since the late 1930s. Was it by design that you never left, except for an odd year now and then? Did it just happen that way? Frye: It just happened that way. I had to go through a period when I was getting a great many offers to go elsewhere. I know there must have been people who thought I was just playing with these offers, pretending to consider them. But that wasn’t true. Some of them involved very serious and even agonizing decisions. The thing that began to grow in my mind was the feeling, first of all, of the religion I was closest to—the United Church of Canada. Next was the political party I felt most in sympathy with—the CCF, later the NDP. Neither of those can be translated directly into American terms. And then later on, when I became a better-known public figure, I began to realize that there would be some feeling of resentment in Canada if I left. I couldn’t let that influence me beyond a certain point, but the feeling that there would be a certain betrayal in my leaving had, as its flip side, the feeling that I was making a contribution here and I had a function here that I would not have had somewhere else. I also went through a period, which impressed me a great deal when I was principal of Victoria, of seeing so many academics who had gone from Canada to the United States wanting desperately to come back. Cayley: During what period were you principal? Frye: From 1959 to 1967. Cayley: That was a long time. Frye: A hell of a long time. Cayley: And was it onerous? Frye: Yes, though I had an extraordinarily conscientious and able president over me, Arthur Moore. Because of him it was a tolerable job, but it was not a congenial one. Cayley: How did you become principal in the first place? Frye: I seemed to be the fall guy, that was all. As the academic head of the college, that made some sort of sense. I’ve always been a bit of a

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pushover for anything that can be sold to me as public service. That was why I stayed for nine bloody years on the CRTC. Cayley: It doesn’t seem to have cut into your writing. You kept up a phenomenal amount of writing during that whole period, with books appearing almost annually. Frye: No, it didn’t cut into my writing. Cayley: How did you do it? Frye: Well, I had to, because my writing isn’t something I run. It runs me. I have to do what it says, and I had to give it priority. There was nothing else I could do. That meant, of course, that I skimped a good deal on my administrative duties, but there wasn’t any way out of it. Cayley: And didn’t sleep much sometimes? Frye: That’s what people said, certainly. VIII The Educational Contract Cayley: What has teaching meant to you during all these years? Frye: Teaching to me is a way of trying out ideas. I used to say that I could never believe anything I said until I had said it to students and watched their reaction. I’ve always found that teaching and writing fed into each other. I made up my mind almost at once as a lecturer that I wouldn’t write any notes for my lecture until after I’d given it. Cayley: You say, I think in the introduction to The Great Code, that you are employing the tactics of the teacher in that book [xv/8–9]. I have the feeling that perhaps you had been doing that all along. What is the relationship between the teacher and the writer in you? Frye: The teacher, of course, helps to keep the writer in touch with the public. I suppose in a way I’ve been one of Derrida’s logocentric people, that is, a talker who deprecates writing. I don’t really deprecate writing—I think that principle is nonsense anyway—but I felt as I went on, and more and more as deconstructive, phenomenological, and other critical schools developed, that they were getting to a point where they could only talk to each other. In fact, back in the Anatomy days, I said that criticism had a mystery religion but no gospel. That was why I tended

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increasingly to address a general cultivated public rather than the primarily scholarly or academic audience. Cayley: I’m interested in your view of yourself as logocentric in Derrida’s sense, as someone for whom writing follows speaking. I first heard that put into a principle by Eric Havelock, who I think must have been a friend of yours, when he was here just at the end of his life for the literacy and orality conference at Emmanuel College.66 He suggested that the problem of primary education for him was that writing was being pushed at people, that people were learning to write before they learned to speak, and so the proper relationship, in his view, was being inverted. In an essay in The Well-Tempered Critic you seem to be saying something similar.67 Is that your view? Frye: I think so. Havelock was one of a group of people, including Marshall McLuhan and his student Walter Ong, who seem to be close to what has always been one of my educational views, that in teaching youngsters to write you throw a dead language at them and ask them to decipher it. I think the obvious way to teach a person to write is to listen to the way he talks and to try to give some shape and direction to that talk as it goes on. There’s a great current of verbal energy that comes out of any child, and the thing to do is to direct that, not to lead him into a sort of rat’s maze of subjects and predicates and objects before his time. Cayley: Well, we do see an extraordinary amount of dead prose in the world at the moment. I know there are more people writing than ever before. But do you think that might relate to your idea that this current of energy is not present in the writing? Frye: Yes. One thing I’ve attacked all my critical life is the notion that prose is the language of ordinary speech. The language of ordinary speech is associative, and prose is a very highly skilled, sophisticated form of writing. Almost nobody speaks prose. It’s a written form, but people who approach it without having trained their speaking style, I think, give the impression of deciphering something from Linear B. They write what is in effect for them a dead language. Cayley: After I heard Havelock, I began to look back at the prose of, say, Dickens or De Quincey, and I found that in sentences that were a paragraph long and that were incredibly convoluted I could still hear a speaking voice inside them.

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Frye: Yes, it’s not dead prose. Cayley: And with you as well it’s very evident that a voice is speaking. What does metaphor have to do with the way you write? Frye: Everything. Cayley: Can you explain how? Frye: 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. Cayley: What does it mean to say that you think metaphorically? Could you contrast it with another way of thinking? Frye: Most modes of thinking in words are founded on the subject– object split, the thing that Blake called the cloven fiction. A descriptive writer, a scientist or a historian, works with a body of words and a body of events or things out there, and one reflects the other. A logical writer is writing so that one statement follows out of its predecessor. The rhetorical writer writes to produce a kinetic effect on his reader. But the poet is the person who enters into a world where subject and object have become the same thing. They’re different aspects of the same thing. It’s a very primitive language, but the poet speaks it. Cayley: In reading your essays, I have the sense that they cohere but don’t follow. Frye: If they cohere but don’t follow, then the total structure would be something like a mosaic, where there is an overall pattern but everything fits, as Milton would say, contiguously rather than continuously.68 Cayley: And is that how you see them yourself? Is that what you think you’re doing? Frye: There is a continuity, but that’s in the chronology of my writing. I write one book after another. Cayley: But if I take an individual essay, I see it as a whole permeating parts, rather than as an argument in which one thing leads to another.

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Frye: Yes, that’s right. Cayley: How does the aphoristic quality in your writing, which is very pronounced, relate to your method of composition? Frye: I keep notebooks in which I write very short paragraphs, and everything I write is the insertion of continuity into those aphorisms. Cayley: Education and the university, it seems to me, are really at the heart of society in your view, and you’ve sometimes spoken about “the educational contract” [e.g., WE, 372–3]. I wonder if you could say a little bit about that and why you’ve called it the educational contract, with the implied contrast to the social contract. Frye: The social contract is not a historical fact, but it’s a necessary fiction: people all got together in order to surrender their power to a ruler— that’s Hobbes—or people all got together in order to delegate their power to somebody—that’s Locke. In the educational contract there is a relationship of teacher and student in which it is the student who knows less than the teacher but paradoxically the teacher asks most of the questions. The process going on is the Socratic process, in which the relation of teacher to student as such is a somewhat embarrassing one, and you try to get over it as fast as possible in order to make a community of searchers. That’s how the contract takes shape. Cayley: It’s the teacher who asks the questions, in your view? Frye: Yes, for the most part, just as Socrates did. The teacher has to pretend he doesn’t know anything in order to communicate with or to educate his students. Cayley: And you still subscribe to that? Frye: Well, it’s what happens in the classroom. Cayley: But you do lecture? Frye: Yes. Cayley: You’ve also said, perhaps trying to deprecate the vogue use of the word “dialogue,” that what happens in Plato is that eventually Socrates gets the bit in his teeth and everybody else shuts up. Frye: That’s the next stage, because you pass from the symposium stage to the lecturing stage. If I’m lecturing on Milton, for example, the only

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presence that has any business being in that room is Milton. If I become an opaque presence myself and people listen to me instead of listening to Milton through me, then I’m becoming some sort of fake priest. Cayley: Is the questioning stage the unsettling stage? And then comes the lecturing stage? Frye: More or less. Cayley: Is it possible to arrange things that way in practice? Frye: You stumble into it. You have to stumble into everything. Cayley: People have spoken about the long pauses in your lectures. What are you listening for? Frye: I’m listening to the echo of Milton from my students. It takes a long time for that to penetrate, to percolate through to my students. People have talked a good deal about these pauses, and the thing they don’t notice is that they come partly out of respect for the students. I know that students are too serious to ask questions just for the sake of asking questions. When I teach, I try to transmute myself into a kind of transparent medium so that the room in theory is full of the presence of what I’m teaching, Milton or whatever. It’s a long slow process for the students to realize that they are in effect within the personality of Milton and are not being talked to by me. Cayley: How do you bring Milton alive in the classroom? What do you do? Frye: What you do, first of all, is expound Milton and speak as though you were Milton until it becomes fairly obvious even to the dumbest student that you’re not. You expound him in a way that obviously engages your entire personality. Somebody said that Paradise Lost was a monument to dead ideas, and my comment on that was that there were no dead ideas, there were only tired readers.69 I remember once a number of Catholic students from St. Michael’s came over to listen to my Milton lectures because for some reason or other nobody was teaching Milton at St. Michael’s then. One girl stamped out of the classroom in a fury, saying she was a Catholic and she wasn’t going to have her church insulted in that way. I took that as something of a compliment, because it meant she was confusing Milton with me. At the same time, I somewhat respected the boy who turned to her and said, “Ah, shut up.”

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Cayley: And for you, what’s at the very heart of education is coming into the presence of the writers you’re teaching? Frye: Yes. The only authority in the classroom is the authority of the subject taught, not the teacher. Cayley: Since you put it in terms of authority, can we talk about where the university fits into a free society as a source of authority? Frye: The university is the source of authority in society. It’s the only one there is that I can see. But, of course, by authority I mean spiritual authority, the kind that doesn’t give orders. The university and the church are the two different areas of spiritual authority. The university is where you go to learn about an authority that is not externally applied. It doesn’t tell you to do this or that. Cayley: You’ve often written about the unreality of the real world, and my sense of what you mean is that when one comes into the presence of Milton, to take your example, one then enters what is truly real. The educational journey is from unreality to reality in your view. Frye: Yes, the unreality being what’s out there and reported in the papers, and the reality being what remains stable or improves. If I look over the seventy-seven years I’ve lived in this ghastly century, I don’t see anything politically or economically that has not been part of a dissolving phantasmagoria. I see only one thing that has improved in that time, and that’s science. I see only one thing that has remained stable during that time, and that’s the arts. I would include religion with the arts, by the way. Cayley: And can you say what you mean by stable? Frye: Something that’s there and won’t go away. Cayley: So education leads people into the presence of this something that won’t go away. Frye: Yes. Somebody wrote a book called Shakespeare Our Contemporary,70 and that means that Shakespeare is both our contemporary and his contemporaries’ contemporary. If he is a purely seventeenth-century dramatist, you can study him only the way you do the stars, not getting anywhere closer to him. And if he’s only our contemporary, then we kidnap him into our orbit and turn him into something that is not Shakespeare at all. He stretches over the whole period of time.

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Cayley: How have you seen the university change in your many years of teaching? Does it seem the same world to you now as then? Frye: The university has reflected the changing social conditions. It’s changed as society has changed. The nineteenth-century university was the very small college, which was the training ground for young gentlemen. That meant that all relations were personal: tutor and student had their private hours. As the university has come to reflect more advanced industrial and technological conditions—and of course the world is irremediably pluralistic in both the arts and the sciences—it has to be a world of specialists. It can’t function otherwise. So you get a great deal of highly specialized scholarship, which makes a problem for the person who is still teaching undergraduates and who is still in that personal relationship with them. It throws more responsibility on the undergraduates too. Cayley: You have always continued to teach undergraduates, which by itself is remarkable, given your reputation as a scholar. I don’t know whether that’s unusual at the University of Toronto. Frye: Toronto has always prided itself on its reputation as a university for teaching undergraduates. It hasn’t always lived up to that reputation, although I think it’s done better in the humanities than in the scientific or professional faculties. But the teaching of undergraduates seems to me to be where the action is. That’s where minds are being opened and admitted to what I’ve always called the engine-room of society, where all the work is going on. I feel that the graduate school is the place where the good people ought to be teaching themselves anyway. It’s also a very highly pluralistic, specialized, and, in these days, competitive school. So I find the undergraduate classroom really the educational centre. Cayley: What I’m wondering really is whether the university, as you would like it to be and as it must be to play the role you see for it in society, actually exists any longer. Is that university gone? Frye: Yes. The university as I would like it does not exist. The only thing you can do is fight rear-guard actions in small corners. Cayley: Did it once exist? Or was it always an ideal? Frye: It was always an ideal, really. But where you have a small intimate college with students and teachers personally known to one another, you have the possibility of something close to the ideal.

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Cayley: I see your idea of the university as having two dimensions, dimensions that are different but not necessarily antagonistic. You believe that education must liberate us from the unreality of the world. But I also see you as standing against many of the more conventional ways of understanding liberation. You’re very strongly in favour of discipline and habit—sometimes you use the Latin word habitus. You’ve argued against the idea that education should be “relevant” or immediately gratifying. Some of this goes back to discussions that were going on in the ’60s, and I wonder if you might talk about the ferment of the ’60s, about the consequences of that time, and about the role you played. Frye: The student activism of the ’60s was something I had really very little sympathy with. It started out with a group of students in Berkeley feeling that they were not being paid attention to as students, something I could profoundly sympathize with. As it went on they became more and more attracted by the clichés of revolutionary ideology. Then they turned into something which was no longer intellectual. In fact, that was the thing that sickened me about the student movement: it was an antiintellectual movement in the one place in society where it had no business being. Once a student gets on a self-righteous kick, he becomes utterly impervious to argument because he’s still too young and insecure to listen to anything except the applause of his own conscience. I knew that that movement would fall dead in a very short time because it had no social roots. It wasn’t like feminism or black emancipation, movements with real social causes behind them. Cayley: How was it anti-intellectual? Frye: It was anti-intellectual in that it used the anarchist and neo-fascist tactics of breaking up meetings and occupying buildings. They felt they were doing something when they were engaging in that kind of nonsense. Cayley: The element of desperation in the student movement was something you could understand, I think—the feeling of unreality in the world that was provoking their reactions. You sympathized with that? Frye: Yes, but it was a counter-unreality that they were thrusting toward. What I find hopeful about the present political situation all across the world is the gradual loss of belief in the validity of ideology qua ideology.

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Cayley: What was your advice to students at that time? What was the way you wanted students to take? Frye: It was the way of the intellect and the imagination. Those are the powers that you’re given and the things you’re responsible for. Cayley: How did you respond to the demand for relevance? What did that slogan mean to you? Frye: I said that it was a favourite word of Nazis. Cayley: Meaning? Frye: Meaning that the student radicals were going in a neofascist direction. The Nazis talked about Fachwissenschaft, about target knowledge, and sooner or later the useful came to mean what was essential for waging war. That attitude not only destroyed art and science in Germany for a whole generation; it also helped materially in losing the war for the Germans. Cayley: You did, I think, sympathize with the spiritual crisis, the crisis of faith, that was behind the student movement. But you saw in the demand for relevance, if I understand you, a dangerous illusion. Frye: Yes, the demand for relevance was, to my mind, the absolute antithesis of what education is about. Education is a matter of developing the intellect and the imagination, which deal with reality, and reality is always irrelevant. Cayley: This brings us back to habitus and the idea that you can’t climb the ladder of imagination without practice. You’re saying—you may have even used the image in one of the essays—that the door is open but you have to walk through it [WE, 378]. Frye: Yes. The demand for relevance, which was, again, an anti-intellectual movement among students, meant of course that they wanted every lecture, every classroom meeting, every gathering of students to be an exciting existential experience. They wanted to shuck off the steady repetitive practice which is the only thing that does contribute to the real advance of either the intellect or the imagination. Cayley: At that time there were changes in the structure of the University of Toronto too, notably those coming from the Macpherson Commission.71 How did you see those changes? Did you speak to the Commission?

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Frye: I did speak to the Commission. But of course there was a great hysteria gripping the university, and nobody would listen to me, so I gave up. But I felt that what it led to was something that Macpherson never envisaged, and that was the abolition of the Honour Course on the grounds that it was elitist, one of the most absurd words ever invented. I supported the Honour Course because I felt it dramatized the principle that whatever you’re learning is the centre of all knowledge, so that it doesn’t matter so much what you learn as that you should keep on doing it. Cayley: I read the Commission’s report. I never had a chance to speak with Macpherson about it, but the Commission did seem to recommend the dismantling of the Honour Course. Frye: Yes, I suppose it did, but I think Macpherson himself was very much taken aback by the extent to which the dean of arts at that time took the bit in his teeth and revamped all the Honour courses. I don’t think Macpherson quite had that in mind. Like Gorbachev, he never knew it would come to that. Cayley: How did you see the consequences of that? Did it work out as you expected? Frye: The consequences were that the faculty said to themselves, “Now we’ve put in all this cafeteria elective work because the students wanted it.” And the students wanted nothing less. Consequently, they had to set up another committee to try to reverse the direction and get back to what the educational-jargon people call a core curriculum. I don’t know to what extent that improved things, because the courses still had to be changed all around to accommodate the Macpherson recommendations. Cayley: I remember a recent conversation with Claude Bissell about the Macpherson Commission in which he said that he thought the pendulum had begun to swing back toward the old Honours philosophy.72 Frye: It’s come back to some degree, but it’s much easier to destroy than to rebuild. “The evil that men do lives after them, / The good is oft interred with their bones.”73 Cayley: How do you find your undergraduates today as opposed to twenty years ago or even forty years ago? Frye: Of course, they don’t have as solid a high-school background to fall back on. In my day undergraduates could get through a university

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course on the strength of what they learned in high school. I don’t think that’s any longer true. The good students today have a kind of earnestness, a sense of intensity. Cayley: And that’s good? Frye: Certainly, it’s good. Cayley: You’ve also made recommendations for elementary and secondary education. What were your activities in that regard? Frye: It was an extension of my feeling of addressing a public rather than a specialized scholarly audience. I said in the preface to the Anatomy that any subject that can’t be explained to an intelligent nineteen-year-old is not a subject [14/15]. The only change I made in that statement was to push the age-level of comprehension down until it finally got somewhere close to kindergarten. Cayley: And what was your interest in the curriculum? What did you hope to see established? Frye: You remember the great panic after Sputnik. The American public thought they’d been gypped by their educators. Cayley: I was in grade 8 in the United States at that time—one of those being panicked over. Frye: The publishers woke up to this fact. Harcourt Brace was running an extremely profitable series of readers from grade 7 to 12. They sent me the books and asked me to report on them as educational material. I said that the books taught no literature, that all they taught was American ideology, the American way of life. I said that their only educational effect would be to freeze the Cold War on the American side.74 They agreed with this and asked me if I would put out a series. I said I couldn’t possibly work that into my schedule, but I got people who understood what I was driving at, and they did get out a series. You can read about this in John Ayre’s biography [297–300]. It attracted a great many teachers, but in the meantime, of course, the panic over Sputnik had abated. The old educators had crawled out of the woodwork again and the old formulas were coming back in. Harcourt Brace is still making a great deal of money out of the books I ridiculed and condemned. Cayley: When you spoke at the opening of the Northrop Frye Centre,

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you gave me an image that I liked very much. You talked about the lumber room at Hart House, and said that you’d like to become a kind of lumber room for later generations, or even present generations. What brought that to mind? Frye: I don’t know where the image came from. It just floated into my head. I feel that the university’s teaching staff is made up of functioning scholars. I’m a scholar, I suppose, but I am also a type of scholar. I do not devote myself to training graduate students to be scholars in their turn. So I’m just there as a resource person for students to explore and get ideas from. Cayley: But I think “the lumber room” extends to those outside the university too, who are rummaging around in your books in a somewhat similar way. Frye: Yes, I think it does. I hope it does. IX Technology and Society Cayley: In his two most recent books, ABC and In the Vineyard of the Text, Ivan Illich suggests that during the 1980s a profound and shocking change has taken place in Western civilization. He summarizes this as a change from the book as world image to the computer as world image. In his view the computer has replaced the book as the comprehensive metaphor for knowledge and what it means to know. Obviously the book plays a central role in civilization for you. Do you see anything like this yourself? Frye: I see a good deal of it, yes, and I sympathize with much of what Illich is saying. I’ve often said that the book is the most efficient technological instrument ever devised in learning. I think it’s more efficient than a computer ever will be. It’s a model of patience because it keeps saying the same thing no matter how often you consult it. It’s a stable thing. It is a growing point of learning in a way that I don’t quite see the computer being. There are many superstitions about the computer I don’t share. I think it is being looked at on a kind of phony Cartesian basis, a view in which the mind is opposed by a body which is a mechanism. Nobody worries about the fact that the automobile runs faster than the human being because only the body, the mechanism, is involved there. But as soon as it becomes obvious that the computer can calculate

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and in many respects think faster than a human being, people get the jitters. They think that something peculiar to the human animal is being invaded by a rival kind of alien, science-fiction being. I don’t think that that is true. The computer is a tool, an instrument. The difficulty is in thinking of man as conscious and of having a mechanism attached to that consciousness, whereas man is primarily a conscious will. The machine has no will to do anything. It depends on being plugged in or turned on. Only when it develops an autonomous will can it become a fully conscious being. Cayley: Illich, I think, is close to McLuhan in seeing that our tools don’t just do things, they also tell us something about who we are. The same idea is in Eric Havelock when he says that abstract or universal conceptions of justice occur to the ancient Greek mind only as a consequence of the new technology of alphabetic literacy.75 What Illich is saying now, I think, is that the very idea of a stable self is a textual idea which tends to dissolve in the presence of cybernetic technologies, where a more evanescent idea of the self takes over. Frye: I think that the computer, again, is an instrument, a machine, a tool, an extension of a being. Now, there is a most pernicious tendency in the human mind to project onto machinery the qualities of external autonomy. Man invents the wheel, and in no time he’s talking nonsense about a wheel of fate or a wheel of fortune or a wheel as a cosmological force which is alienating him from himself. He invents the book, and he starts talking about the book of life, in which all your sins are recorded. He invents the computer, and God knows what he’s projecting out of that. But it’s all superstition. Cayley: Marshall McLuhan was a colleague of yours. How did you see his influence when it was at its height? Frye: I thought that McLuhan was being praised to the skies for the wrong reasons and then, after the vogue passed, being ignored for the wrong reasons. I think there’s a great deal of permanent value in McLuhan’s insights, and I had a great sympathy with what he was trying to do. Unfortunately, he had such rotten luck with his health that he was never able really to complete what he had to say. That’s why he has come down as a kind of half-thinker who never worked out the other part of what he was really talking about. He talked about defence against media fallout, for example, an immensely fruitful idea, which, as a matter of

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fact, we’ve been discussing for the last few minutes.76 That I would like to have heard more about. But, as he told me himself, he suffered such pain with the brain tumour that it just knocked him out. Months at a time, even years at a time, he couldn’t work. Cayley: Speaking of defence against media fallout, you yourself were on the front lines during your years on the CRTC. How did that come about? Frye: When I was asked to come on the Commission in 1968, I was told that it was largely because of Lester Pearson’s influence. He thought it would be a good idea to have a tame intellectual on the board. The first chairman was Pierre Juneau, a person for whom I had an immense admiration and respect. Juneau said in effect that he didn’t really care whether I attended the hearings, that what he wanted me to do was discuss theories of communication with the research department. Well, I did that and I worked reasonably hard at it. But the CRTC, like any other government agency, was swept up in an avalanche of routine. The research department was so caught up in this routine that it almost disappeared as a research department. There became a gradual lessening of what I could effectively do. Cayley: The CRTC was created with great hopes. Frye: Yes. When the Broadcasting Act of 1968 came out, it made a lot of sense. But it wasn’t only bureaucratic routine that the CRTC had to cope with—it was one of the busiest agencies in Ottawa in that regard—but also the steady development of technological things, like microwave, which increased the degree and effectiveness of satellite communication and the degree and effectiveness of American penetration. It also had to deal with local autonomy and with the community channel, which the CRTC was trying to foster. Cayley: So you see those ten years as a sort of rearguard action against technological change? Frye: Yes, increasingly a rearguard action. Cayley: Could the CRTC have done anything? Frye: Well, it did what it could. Cayley: Could it have done more?

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Frye: I’m not really sure how much more it could have done. Cayley: What if it had refused to licence the Global Network? Frye: It did that for as long as it could. But the pressure was pretty hard to resist. Of course the CRTC had to answer to Parliament, which was more manic-depressive in its attitude toward these things than the CRTC was. Cayley: The Modern Century is the main place where you try to address what our times have been like. How do you see the progress of technology? And why, as you said earlier, do you associate it with introversion? Frye: It just seems obvious to me that in the technological developments that I’ve lived through in the twentieth century, each new stage brings with it an intensifying of the introverted. That’s simply a hazard which has to be overcome, but it seems to be obvious. In the stage play you have an ensemble performance for an audience. The existence of the audience as a consensus, as a group, is very important. With the movie, you still have an audience, but it’s an individualized audience sitting in the dark. Then with the television set, you don’t move out of your living room. Similarly, the ocean liner is a place for romances and endless discussions and social movements of all kinds. On the jet plane, you just sit there and the guy beside you sits there, and that’s it. Cayley: This growing introversion is not a happy picture. What are its consequences? Frye: It’s a hazard which has to be overcome. I think that nobody quite realized during the unrest of the ’60s that a great deal of it had to do with the panic caused by television and the need to absorb it. As time goes on people do absorb it and bring it under control. Right now, there’s a similar fear that computers will increase introversion to a practically solipsistic point, where people will simply be locked up in their own private jails. Again, that’s a hazard. It’s something I think eventually we’ll learn to control. Cayley: Could you expand a bit on why the ’60s were a panic caused by television? Frye: It’s a matter of saturation with images. If you’re totally dependent on visual images, it causes a good deal of confusion. Is that stone dame over there Venus or Juno or Minerva? If it’s a matter of hearing, you

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don’t have that particular problem. But the saturation of images certainly dissipates one’s sense of identity, until one begins to get control of it. Cayley: And that control is beginning to be evident to you? Frye: In the course of time, yes. The machine becomes more and more what it ought to be, an extension of a personality and not an independent personality set over against you. Cayley: You’ve described modern society as a skyscraper. Frye: As a tower of Babel. Cayley: Why do you think that’s a relevant contemporary image? Frye: In the Book of Genesis we’re told that the Assyrians or Babylonians or whatever people the author has in mind decided to build a tower to reach heaven. That meant that on a physical basis you were trying to get to a spiritual level, and the result of that was the confusion of language or conflicting tongues. I think every structure in human civilization has something of that quality about it: the difficulty of not understanding one another. You asked me about other schools of criticism, and the fact is that I don’t so much disagree with them as simply fail to understand them. They’re speaking their language; they have a right to. I’m speaking mine; I have a right to. But there’s something in the construction of critical language that becomes more and more intensely specialized. Cayley: If the different languages can be understood as images of introversion, and we understand each other less and less, how can commonality come back into our lives? Frye: As I say, it’s a process which society, left to itself, can control. If you think how much time people spent staring at movies or listening to the radio in the ’20s, and how much time they spend today watching television, you see that we’ve got a series of technological cycles. Each one seems to begin with something extremely primitive, but the technology matures. Eventually, you just get control of it. Cayley: I myself have never been so pessimistic about this as in the last two years. Frye: Pessimistic in what sense?

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Cayley: About the inability to get control of it, about the increasing evidence that it gets control of us. I have a sense that we’re moving toward a society of cybernetic organisms—“cyborgs.” Frye: That’s a hazard. You notice in Orwell’s 1984 the role of the telescreen. That’s a technological development that a structure of power grabbed hold of, and that froze the technology at that point. The danger comes when the technology is frozen at a certain point. There isn’t as much danger of its enslaving society when the way is left open for further developments, as I think it will be. Cayley: In The Modern Century you also introduced the idea of an open mythology. What did you mean by this? Frye: I suppose when I spoke of open and closed mythologies, I was thinking partly of Popper’s open society,77 and also of what has later become in my thinking the distinction between the imaginative, poetic mythology and the ideological form of it. Cayley: How does one live in an open mythology? Frye: An open mythology is one where there is an atmosphere of criticism and where there is room for the imagination to have free play and all the other things we associate with cultural freedom. Cayley: It means entertaining what might be true? Frye: Yes, and as distinct from a closed mythology, where the authorities say, “This is it; this is what you must believe.” Cayley: An open mythology requires a kind of maturity. Frye: It’s certainly more difficult, but then difficulties are a part of the responsibility that one takes on with freedom. Cayley: Today society is continually dissolving and reforming. People’s beliefs are at best provisional. The social order seems to be a phantasmagoria, composed of what William Irwin Thompson calls noetic ecologies—communities that appear and dissolve and reappear and dissolve again.78 All of this seems as if it could be construed as an open mythology? The postmodern person, it seems to me, is someone who no longer has any anxiety about myth or belief, but who participates in all these provisional, ever-changing structures, perhaps without very much commitment. I’ll give you a very concrete example. Not long ago, shortly after

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I had been reading what you say about technology and introversion in The Modern Century, I happened to be on the street beside a young woman who had a most extraordinary appearance. I can’t remember what it was: she had green hair or bobby pins through her cheeks or something. My first thought was that I wouldn’t be able to appear in public like that. But then it occurred to me that she didn’t necessarily think of herself as appearing in public in the sense of appearing among people to whom she was at least implicitly related. Perhaps by her appearance she was communing with distant role models and was involved in a private relationship with things I couldn’t see. We might be standing beside each other on the street, but there was no relationship between us that could possibly embarrass her. Couldn’t this also be an image of an open mythology with everyone, as Tocqueville says, “enclosed in the solitude of his own heart”?79 Frye: I think what you’re pointing to is a tendency in the human mind to resist an open mythology, with all its difficulties and responsibilities, and to head for some kind of closed mythology. So the dissolving phantasmagoria that we mentioned as a feature of twentieth-century life is also a part of one society after another trying to close up—the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or the Nazis in Germany, for example. And the fact that it can’t last doesn’t make it any better for the people who have to live under it in the meantime. In a society with more tolerance, a great percentage of that tolerance is going to be indifference, certainly. Freedom is going to mean for many people freedom to be apathetic, in other words, to live as though they’re in a closed society. Then subsocieties get formed—the hippies or the punk-rock people, who are actually living in societies which are as conventionally closed as they can get—and such groups have a greater sense of security by being closed. Cayley: So an open mythology can terminate in either apathy or aspiration. Frye: Yes. We’ve gone through history thinking of peace as meaning that the war has stopped, and consequently, a lot of people, when you use a word like “peace,” say, “Well, the world of peace sounds awfully dull. There’d be nothing to do if there’s nothing to fight about.” What I go for is Blake’s “I will not cease from mental fight / Till we have built Jerusalem” [E95]. God says in the Book of Deuteronomy, “I have set before you life and death . . . therefore choose life” [30:19]. Well, nobody, with all

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respect to God, could possibly say that that was a logical “therefore.” A lot of people who choose life choose it only because they have got into the habit of living. They find it easier to do that than to break clear of it. Others will choose life, but when life becomes an act of choice, then there’s the question of what you’re to do with it, what direction you’re to go in. Cayley: And you’ve chosen life. Frye: I suppose it comes down to the question that I cannot accept the pure arbitrariness of existence, or what Heidegger calls our thrownness.80 I think, to put it crudely, that there is a point in one’s being alive. That would throw me back on my religious convictions, I suppose. I don’t know how I can put it more clearly than that. X The Bible Cayley: Have you read the Bible continuously throughout your whole life? Frye: “Continuously” is a big word. Cayley: On and off? I mean, you haven’t left it alone for any long period of time. Frye: No, I don’t think I have. For one thing, I’ve always been teaching or writing about intensely Biblical people. Cayley: How do you read the Bible when it’s so familiar already? Frye: That is a problem, actually. I find myself reading the Bible less and less. More and more I simply spot echoes of it when they turn up in other books. Cayley: Or recalling it? Frye: Recalling it, yes. What I do now largely is check the original text, the original Greek and Hebrew words. Cayley: The Great Code—was that a project that was a long time gestating? Frye: Oh, yes. It grew out of a course that I started teaching way back in the early ’40s, when I found that my students weren’t responding to Par-

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adise Lost with the knowledge of the Bible they had to have if they were going to figure out what the hell was going on in the poem. So I took this problem to John Robins, who was chairman of my department, and he suggested my giving a course on the English Bible as a literary document. But I very soon found out that I didn’t need to confine it to students of literature. Students in the social and natural sciences were just as interested. I found, too, that I would get response from people with a range of backgrounds—from Greek Orthodox to Communists—so it was obviously filling a need somewhere. People kept urging me to write a sort of handbook to the Bible for students, but I kept putting it off because of my lack of scholarly background. I was not a Biblical scholar. I was particularly weak in the nuances of the original languages. But eventually I realized I had to get it out of my system or bust. Cayley: Creation and Recreation, written a couple of years before, already contained a lot of what you were going to write in The Great Code. Frye: Yes, I was moving in on it. If you’re a knight about to kill a dragon, you better explore the territory first. Cayley: Your subtitle for The Great Code is The Bible and Literature. And yet it seems in many ways to be about the Bible as literature. That is, you are discussing the Bible much more than you’re discussing its later literary echoes. Why the subtitle? Is that a strategic disclaimer? Frye: I didn’t want to write a book called The Bible as Literature. That had been the subject of so many footling courses, and there were also a number of books, good and bad, on the Bible as literature. They tended to take a sort of anthology approach to the Bible, to take bits and pieces out, like the Book of Job, that relate to other people’s literary experience. What I wanted to do was deal with the entire narrative and imagery of the Bible and the impact that it has made as a totality on literature. That is why the word “and” was extremely important to me. Cayley: So it’s not a strategic disclaimer to fend off charges that you’re poaching on theological territory? Frye: It was partly that as well. I wanted to make it clear that I was dealing with the Bible’s relation to literature, that it was written mostly in literary language, and that it was neither an aesthetic literary approach to the Bible nor a doctrinal one.

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Cayley: Your title comes from Blake, who speaks of the Bible as “the Great Code of Art.” In other places in his work Blake goes even further. He says, for example, that Christianity is art, and there’s another passage where he says that only a poet, a painter, or an architect can be a Christian.81 What do these things mean? Frye: He meant that a man is not taking seriously what the Christian religion is all about unless he’s a creative and imaginative person. The word “artist” is a metaphor. You don’t really have to be a painter or a poet or an architect to be a Christian, but you have to understand what an imaginative and creative approach to religion is. Cayley: You have to recreate the Bible? Frye: Yes. Cayley: You begin The Great Code with an idea adapted from Vico which you think sheds light on the language of the Bible. Vico envisions history as a spiral form in which an age of gods is followed by an age of heroes, an age of men, and then a ricorso or return. You apply this sequence to language, which yields the metaphoric, the metonymic, and the descriptive as its three phases. Beginning at the end, what is descriptive language? Frye: In ordinary speech, we use words to represent things outside the structure of words. But as a technique of writing, descriptive prose is a fairly late development because it depends on a technology. You can’t write history until you have historiography and archives and documents. And you can’t do science until you have a machinery for experimentation. You can’t write descriptively in any sort of mature or fully developed way until you’ve established these things. Consequently, I wouldn’t put descriptive language as a continuous form of prose much earlier than about the seventeenth century. Cayley: What is happening before that? Frye: First of all, you get the logical language that developed out of Plato and, more particularly, Aristotle, where the criterion of truth is in the integrity of the verbal structure rather than in its relation to something outside. Aristotle was a very descriptive-minded writer, but he didn’t have the technical equipment available to carry out his observations, say, on the generation of animals.

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Cayley: Can you explain what you mean by saying that the integrity is within the linguistic structure? Frye: I’m speaking of the logical way of writing where sentence B must follow sentence A according to certain rules. Cayley: So the syllogism is the archetype of this way of writing? Frye: The syllogism is at the centre, yes. The criterion of truth is, again, not a descriptive one. The words are not being related to external facts so much as interrelated around the argument. Cayley: So the question of whether these things exist outside of the writing doesn’t arise? Frye: It arises, but it arises incidentally. The essential criterion of truth is whether you described it logically, not whether your description itself is accurate. Cayley: Moving back one stage, what does one find before Platonic or Aristotelian dialectic came into existence? Frye: Socrates was a person who wanted to examine things dialectically. That is, you make a statement and you cut off the opposite of the statement if it’s false. And you arrive at truth by argument with him in dialogue form. The people before Socrates were actually raising questions that move in the direction of science—questions about the four elements, about the nature of the stars and heavenly bodies, about the nature of substance, and so on. But they didn’t, again, have the technology to get very far with them, so they stayed with cosmology. Cayley: And how does mythic thinking differ from analytical thinking? Frye: Mythic thinking is the earliest of all, the most primitive form of thinking. Consequently, the illusion turns up in every generation that it’s something that will be outgrown, but we always find that if you outgrow mythical thinking, you end up by rehabilitating it. Mythical thinking proceeds metaphorically in a world where everything is potentially identifiable with everything else. Gods, for example, are linguistically metaphors. That’s how they start out. You have a sea-god or a sun-god or a war-god, where a thing is being identified within a supposed personality. Cayley: So metaphor is an energy that unites?

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Frye: Yes, metaphor is the way of thinking that holds the personal and the impersonal world together in the form A is B. The point about metaphor is that it opens up a current or channel of energy between the subject and the object. The most obvious unit of both myth and metaphor is the god, because the god is a ready-made metaphor. If you say Neptune is the sea, you’ve got some aspect of personality or consciousness identified with something in nature. The gods are not just human projections on nature, they’re evocations of the powers of nature. Cayley: Is metaphor the original form of human thought? Frye: I think it’s where the use of words begins, and I think it’s where it’s likely to end. What evidence there is indicates that human consciousness shaped itself out of animal consciousness, which of course is totally and completely identified with its natural environment, and the notion of a separate and subjective consciousness, which is watching and observing the natural world, is something that takes time to develop. Cayley: Where does the Old Testament fit in terms of this development? Frye: The Old Testament is fairly late, and even if you adopted the most impossibly early date, even if you assumed that Moses wrote the first five books, that would still be late in the Middle Kingdom. I mean, the Old Kingdom of Egypt would be gone by then, and so the Bible sits on top of a very long historical development. It’s already graduated from gods and nature-spirits and these currents of energy in the natural world, and it is afraid of what it considers idolatry, that is, attaching something numinous, something divine, to nature. It wants its readers to turn aside from that to human institutions and find their god there, and that means that their language has to be a language of transcendence, of something that turns away from the order of nature. Cayley: So what does the Bible have to say to the contemporary revival of interest in the goddess, which you see in books like Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman or Edward Whitmont’s The Return of the Goddess? Frye: The reason for the Bible’s distrust of all goddesses and female powers is that what they lead the mind to is the conception of the human being as an embryo wrapped up in Mother Nature and still unborn. The mother is the parent you have to break from in order to exist at all, and that is why the Biblical god is male. Of course, one can take that and use it to rationalize patriarchal societies, but I don’t think that’s the real symbolic reason for the maleness of God in the Bible. So far as human beings

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are redeemable, man is woman. In Christian theology, the Virgin Mary has been given the place she has because she’s the highest of the creatures, the things that are created, so that to the extent to which man can be reconciled with God, man is symbolically female. Cayley: When you were studying theology, Rudolf Bultmann was talking about demythologizing the Bible. It would seem on your view of myth that this is quite impossible. Frye: It’s impossible because the Bible is a tissue of metaphors from beginning to end. As I once told my students, there’s a verse in John that says “Jesus wept” [John 11:35], and that’s about all that would be left of the Bible if you demythologized it consistently. Cayley: You’ve said if you try to demythologize, you end up remythologizing. The result is always paradoxical. Can that be shown in modern Protestant theology? Frye: I think it can be shown in Bultmann himself, because that’s really what he does. He knows, as any competent Biblical scholar must know, that everything, for example, said in the New Testament has its roots in the Old Testament. That means that while what is in the New Testament may be historically factual, it’s not there because it’s historically factual. It’s there because it fits something in the Old Testament. Cayley: So to reduce it to facts is meaningless, because the facts are all dependent facts organized metaphorically? Frye: Yes. You cannot approach the Bible beyond guesswork. You can’t approach the Gospels, let’s say, as historically factual narratives except by hunch. You get various films saying that Jesus was a married man or was in love with Mary Magdalene or went to Marseilles and founded the Merovingian dynasty.82 All of these are quite interesting as guesses, but they’re not anything more than guesses, because the only source of the material is the Gospels, and the Gospels have no interest whatever in presenting Jesus as married or as in love with a woman or as having selfconflicts. They present him as a God on earth. Cayley: What are the Gospels interested in, in that sense? Frye: They’re interested in saying that the historical Jesus was in fact the Old Testament Messiah. And I use “was” because they were all written long after Jesus’ death.

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Cayley: This view of the Bible draws on a very old science of interpretation called typology, which you’ve helped to revive. Can you say what it is? Frye: The Christian Bible consists of an Old Testament and a New Testament, and the relation between them is, from the Christian point of view, that everything that happens in the Old Testament is a type of something that happens in the New Testament. So you get this tennis-game view of evidence. How do you know that the Old Testament is true? Because it’s fulfilled in the New Testament. How do you know that the New Testament is true? Because it fulfils the prophecies of the Old Testament. After the Resurrection, we’re told, the disciples confronted the risen Jesus and said, “We find this Resurrection very hard to understand.” And he simply said, “Search the scriptures and you’ll find that the Messiah has to rise from the dead.” [Cf. Luke 24:25 ff.] Cayley: So everything goes in a circle? You can’t find the beginning? Frye: Yes. That’s the only evidence that the writers of the Gospels are interested in. They are not biographers. The one criterion they subject themselves to is that what happens to Jesus in their account must fit what the Old Testament said would happen to the Messiah. Cayley: Now is this way of reading and understanding original with Christianity? Or is it already present as a way of understanding in the Old Testament? Frye: There is a typological structure within the Old Testament also. When Moses climbs the mountain and comes down again, he finds that Aaron has made a golden calf in his absence. Then later on you’re told that Israel split in two, with the northern ten tribes and the southern two, and that the northern ten tribes set up golden calves or bulls to worship. One is the type of the other. Cayley: Is this way of thinking distinctively Biblical? Frye: It’s distinctive with the Bible, I think. Typology is really a view of history. It says that history is going somewhere and that it means something. Cayley: And the meaning always appears in the future? Frye: Yes.

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Cayley: How is that different from other world views contemporary with the Old Testament? Frye: It’s distinguished by having a temporal dimension that carries you beyond the surrounding environment. All ideologies are typological in the sense that they’re all donkey’s carrots. That is, they pull you forward to something that’s to be fulfilled. Cayley: Our normal way of thinking is cause and effect. The cause has to be antecedent to the effect. In typology, it’s the other way around? The future is seen, in effect, as causing the past? Frye: Yes. In ordinary causality thinking, the phenomena around you are effects, and you immediately start looking for their causes, which are, of course, antecedent, so you’re carried backwards in time when you’re thinking causally. Cayley: And do you see this anti-causal thinking as unique to Judaism and Christianity? Frye: So far as I know, it’s unique. At least it’s the earliest form. There have been derivations from it since. Cayley: How do you see its influence on Western civilization? Frye: I see it as introducing a temporal dimension into thought, which I don’t think was there in anything like the same form in, for example, Greek culture. There’s also a difference between the Biblical and the Oriental religions. In Buddhism you have a compassionate Buddha and in Christianity you have a compassionate Jesus, but he’s also a Jesus who confronts and condemns the world. It is a more militant conception of religion. It throws more on the will and less on enlightenment. That is, the crucifixion of Jesus is something that goes on every day. It goes on in El Salvador, it goes on in Vietnam, and it goes on in Canada. The fact that the world is always trying to kill God is what, it seems to me, is distinctive of the Biblical religions. Cayley: Why do you call the Biblical-Hebraic tradition revolutionary? Frye: I call it revolutionary because the Old Testament comes out of a people who were never any good at the game of empire. They were always on the underside, oppressed and placed in bondage by more powerful kingdoms, like Egypt and Assyria and Babylonia. So the central thing in the Old Testament is the liberation of an enslaved people, in

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other words, the Exodus. That liberation goes on repeating through the return from Babylon. In the New Testament it is again a struggle between Christ and the world, in which the world wins, to the extent that Christ is crucified and dies and was buried. Of course, the central thing was the Resurrection. God can’t die. Similarly, the Bible is monotheistic, but it’s a totally different kind of monotheism from the kind you get in the empires—in Marcus Aurelius or the late Stoic philosophers. Those are imperial monotheisms. Cayley: What does the eye/ear dialectic in the Bible have to do with its revolutionary cast? Frye: The metaphor of the ear—the voice of God, God speaking—suggests an invisible God who nevertheless enters into you and becomes a part of you. The eye always retains a sense of the objective, the thing over there. In a polytheistic religion, like the Greek one, you have to have visual symbols, like statues, in order to distinguish one god from another. But if you don’t have the problem of distinguishing among gods, if there’s only one, then it’s a reduction of that God to see him as an object. Cayley: Does the word also become a command? Frye: It often takes the form of a command, yes. I think that the word of command in ordinary society is the word of authority, which relates to that whole area of ideology and rhetoric. That kind of word of command has to be absolutely minimal. It can’t have any comment attached to it. Soldiers won’t hang themselves on barbed wire in response to a subordinate clause. If there’s any commentary necessary, it’s the sergeant major’s job to explain what it is, not the officer’s. Now that is a metaphor, it’s an analogy, of the kind of command that comes from the other side of the imagination, what has been called the kerygmatic, the proclamation from God. That is not so much a command as a statement of what your own potentiality is and of the direction in which you have to go to attain it. But it’s a command that leaves your will free, [as to] whether you follow it or not. Cayley: You have suggested that some of our difficulties with understanding God are language difficulties. Can you explain that? Frye: It has always been assumed that the proper language for comprehending the conception of God is dialectical or theological language. I think that’s a valid way of approaching God, but its limitations and its

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context ought to be kept in mind as well. The motive for persecution is never “You must believe in God.” It’s always “You must believe in what I mean by God.” And, of course, whatever the human being thinks of God is totally inadequate. Cayley: But why, as you say in The Great Code [16/34], does Nietzsche’s famous statement that God is dead refer to an event within the history of language? Frye: Nietzsche himself, after his lunatic prophet Zarathustra said that, scratched his head and said,“Well, it’s going to be very difficult to get rid of God as long as we keep on believing in grammar.”83 Believing in grammar, I think, meant for him primarily believing in subjects and predicates and objects. As long as the human being is a subject and God is an object, there will always be an unresolved problem in language. The metaphorical approach, on the other hand, moves in the direction of the identity of God and man. My interest in the Bible has led me to a growing interest in the way that nouns or the world of things rather block movement. The scientist, for example, is trying to describe processes in space-time, and ordinary language has to twist that into events in time and things in space. But these processes are not going on in space and time. One of the most seminal books I have read is Buber’s I and Thou. Buber says we are all born into a world of “its,” and if we meet other human beings we turn them into “its.” In this view, everything is a solid block, a thing. Consequently, when we think of God, we think of a grammatical noun. But you have to get used to the notion that there is no such thing as God, because God is not a thing. He is a process fulfilling itself. That’s how he defines himself: “I will be what I will be.”84 Similarly, I am more and more drawn to thinking in terms of a great swirling of processes and powers rather than a world of blocks and things. A text, for example, is a conflict of powers. That’s why the Derrida people can pursue a logic of supplement. They can extract one force and set it against another. But the text is not a thing any more. A picture is not a thing. It’s a focus of forces. XI Faith Cayley: What’s your relationship to the United Church? Frye: I used to describe myself as a United Church plainclothesman, meaning that I was in effect somebody who was attached to a church.

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Most undergraduates are instinctively agnostic and rather rebellious about churches and about religious institutions generally. I have always used a very secular attitude in order to win the confidence of people, not because I want to catch them in a trap later but precisely because I want them to understand that there isn’t any trap. Cayley: So you have not really ever been a minister except for those few months in Saskatchewan? Frye: Not really. The Puritans distinguished between a congregation and a church, and I feel that I am a fully active member of the congregation, although my field of activity has been the university and my writing. Cayley: What is faith? Frye: Faith, according to the New Testament, is the hypostasis of hope and the elenchos, the proof or evidence, of the unseen (Hebrews 11:1). I would translate that approximately as meaning that faith is the reality of hope and the reality of illusion. Cayley: The reality of illusion? You put it rather paradoxically. Illusion is something that is not real by definition for us. Are you saying that faith means believing in fairy tales? Frye: No, that’s what other people say. For most people, it’s the schoolboy’s definition. Faith is believin’ what you know ain’t so. I have no use for that kind of faith, and I don’t think the New Testament does either. Faith is achieved through experience. The Wright brothers start to wonder if a heavier-than-air machine can actually get off the ground. Everybody says, “That’s impossible, that’s an illusion.” They get the thing off the ground. That’s faith. Cayley: So faith is something that one does, something that one achieves, not something that one believes? Frye: It’s not an objective body of propositions. The author of Hebrews, after he’s given his definition of faith, goes on and gives examples from the Old Testament. He says that by faith these people did certain things. They weren’t talking about a Trinity of three persons in one substance. They weren’t saying that anybody who doesn’t believe in the identity of the substance or the difference of the persons is et cetera, et cetera.

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Cayley: When we talked about Blake a few years ago, you quoted Vico’s Latin adage verum factum, that we can’t believe what we haven’t made.85 Frye: “What is real is what we’ve made.” Cayley: Now how does that enter into this understanding of faith? Is faith a structure that we make, in effect? Frye: It’s a structure that we have made and can, therefore, remake. When you wake up in the morning, you dismiss the dream world of illusion for the reality that your conscious waking mind sees around you. But actually, that reality is entirely man-made. Everything in the bedroom around you is human in its construction, and whatever men have made they can remake. Cayley: What does practice have to do with the achieving of faith? Frye: Practice has everything to do with the achieving of faith, because of the fact that all skilled effort, all constructive, creative effort, depends on practice. Cayley: But in the area of faith, how does that work? It seems to me that your view implies that one would need, first of all, to strengthen the imagination. Frye: Again, faith relates to realization, and realization means, to put it rather coarsely, craftsmanship. That is, it’s a matter of recreating your experience. That is something you have to acquire a skill in doing. The Gospel says that faith can remove mountains [Matthew 17:20, 21:21]. It’s no good just saying, “I have faith that that mountain shall not be there.” The next minute, of course, it stays there. So obviously you have to keep on working at your conception of faith until it becomes more precise and heads in the direction of realization. Cayley: And moving the mountain doesn’t necessarily exclude shovels. Is that what you’re saying? Frye: It takes on shovels in the process. Cayley: You have spoken of literature as a laboratory of possibilities and of myth as what might or could be true. I’ve sometimes had trouble understanding what that means. Does it mean what we could make true, in the same sense that you spoke earlier of illusion as something that we can make real?

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Frye: Yes. The criterion in literature is not the real. It’s the conceivable. The conceivable means that there are many things that are not here but could be here. So literature is constantly a challenge to the sense of possibility, the potential. Cayley: But what is the guarantee that what we make is not simply what we would like to be true? Frye: There’s every possibility that what we make is what we’d like to be true. Cayley: Is there any way we can know that we’re not simply committing ourselves to our wishes? Frye: But you do commit yourself to your wishes. Most of your wishes turn out to be phony, but you just have to keep on going. Cayley: In a critique of The Great Code in the Toronto Journal of Theology, William Fennell is troubled by your seeming to deny what he at one point calls “the objectivity of God.”86 He seems to be trying to get at the question of whether the reality of Christianity exists anywhere outside of our imaginations. In another place he says that you seem to understand God as a linguistic event. Frye: It comes to us as a linguistic event. There is nothing that we get from Christianity except a body of words, and they become transmuted into experience. I wouldn’t talk about the objectivity of God. I’d talk about the transcendence of God. The New Testament says that God and man became fused in Jesus. Well, obviously before the Resurrection Jesus did not think of himself as a complete fusion of God and man. He kept praying to God, he kept talking about his Father, he kept talking about somebody who sent him. Someone said to him, “Good Master,” and he said, “There’s none good but God” [Matthew 19:16–17]. After the Resurrection, he becomes that perfect fusion. It doesn’t follow that that perfect fusion exists for us. We all have a God or a Christ in us, but it’s always in a transcendent relationship to us. There is always more there that we have not accomplished. Cayley: Why do you take it as given that God is transcendent? Frye: I don’t know what else 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

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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. In Western culture it’s the comprehensive book that takes in everything. It takes in the divine and the demonic, as well as the human. It takes in all the things that we reach out to and that are not simply out of reach, as food and drink were for Tantalus. It puts the present moment in its context, from the beginning of time until the end of time, from the centre of space to the circumference of space. I think if I didn’t read the Bible and were confronted with all these dire prophecies about the possibility of the human race disappearing from the planet, I would be inclined to say, “The sooner the better.” It’s like in the question asked in Job: what is there in life for him unless he has a vision of something else? Cayley: And that’s faith—the substance of things unseen? Frye: Faith is the feeling that despair is not the whole answer. Cayley: Fennell seems to be reaching for some way of establishing a more solid ground for his religion than he finds you providing. Frye: Pascal talks about a leap of faith, and I have a feeling that religious experience is always, to some degree, in midair, that the more solid ground is really the collapse of faith onto the status quo. Cayley: Are there criteria by which faith can be distinguished from its counterfeits? Frye: The criterion for faith to me is a pragmatic rather than a dogmatic one. Faith is something that works. It is, according to the Epistle of James, manifested in good works [cf. 2:24], but the important thing is that it does work. It’s a process of turning into reality what has been either a matter of hope or a matter of illusion. Cayley: “By their fruits ye shall know them” [Matthew 7:20]. Frye: I think the test of faith comes when you tend to assume that your

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capacity for realization stops, or when you say that faith is something that has an answering chorus from God, that it will always be rewarded by a certain satisfactory way of life. Job, for example, was doing his best to live a life of faith in that way and lost everything he had and got boils in the bargain. That was a test of faith, but, according to what we’re told, that simply drove him to continue to hold on in his new condition, instead of committing suicide. In the story of Job you have, first, an old creation, a natural order, and then a social order into which Job fits as a wealthy man. He fits into it in the physical and social sense. After his disasters God comes to him, but he doesn’t explain anything. He doesn’t either condemn Job or applaud him. He simply starts from the fact that Job doesn’t understand what’s happened to him. What he does is to present the creation all over again, with the morning stars singing together at the top and the big Leviathan beast at the bottom. In God’s renewing of his own vision of creation, Job’s faith is recreated. The Bible presents a present vision of something that transcends the human perspective. It pulls away from that riding-backwards-on-a-train perspective, which is what we get by living in time. Cayley: This is a staple image of yours, this analogy between our experience of time and sitting backwards on a train, being dragged into the future facing the past. Frye: We experience time in a way that is continually elusive and frustrating and exasperating, because we’re dragged through time facing the past with our backs to the future. We know nothing about the future except by the analogy of the past. That means that all our hopes, when they’re projected into the future, have this extraordinary limitation about them. If somebody starts out on a career, let’s say as a doctor or a social worker, he or she must have some kind of vision of a world of better health or of better social organization in his or her mind in order to carry on the career with any kind of consistent energy. It’s that sense of the vision in the present which is the real dynamic. You can die without seeing that come. In other words, you can give up the future as far as your own life is concerned and still carry on with the same vision. Cayley: So does vision correspond to sitting face forward on a train? Frye: Oh, no. You get out of any horizontal dimension of time altogether. You stop in the present and see a vision of the present that extends over

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the past and the future, or, as Eliot says, “where past and future are gathered.”87 Cayley: What does the Bible as a whole potentially mean in terms of the realizing of the present moment? Frye: The present doesn’t exist in ordinary experience. It’s always a “never quite.” It keeps vanishing between the past and the future. The Bible doesn’t raise so abstract an argument; nevertheless, it makes it clear that reality is a matter of a real present, a “now” that exists, and a real presence, a real “here” in space. In space things are just as alienated as they are in time. “Now” is the centre of time, but there’s no such time as “now” ordinarily. “Here” is the centre of space, but there’s no such space as “here.” It’s always a “there,” even if you’re pointing to your own backbone. To me, the words “eternal” and “infinite” do not mean time and space going on and on without ever stopping. They mean the reality of now and the reality of here. Cayley: When Jesus says “I am the door” or “I am the way” or “I am the vine” [John 10:9, 14:6, 15:5], he’s not indicating a door or a way or a vine. Frye: You notice that those are all metaphors, and consequently you cannot approach what he’s saying unless you’re going to think metaphorically. Christ is saying that he is identifiable with everything else in human experience. Cayley: This is related to Fennell’s saying that God is for you a linguistic event. The Bible, then, doesn’t indicate anything outside itself? Frye: Oh, no. Cayley: The Bible itself is the way in? Frye: Yes. You get nothing but a body of words. You start out with the notion that if you have a body of words, they must point to an event. According to this view, in the beginning God did something, and the words are the servomechanisms that tell us what he did. But the Gospel of John doesn’t begin that way. It says that the Word came first. You’ve got a body of words and nothing else. You create the events yourself. “God said, Let there be light: and there was light” [Genesis 1:3]. The word comes first. The event follows. Cayley: So the God who speaks is ultimate for a Jew or a Christian?

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Frye: Yes. And the verbalizing consciousness precedes the physical existence. Cayley: There are words before there are things? Frye: There are in Genesis, certainly. Cayley: So what you’re saying in your recent writings about the need for metaphorical or spiritual discernment in reading the Bible is implied in your earlier writings when you use the phrase “order of words”? Frye: Oh, yes. Cayley: I have the impression that the Bible has become a real stumbling block in the last generation. Some people may have just forgotten it, but there also has been a turning to Eastern religions and what are perceived, anyway, as fresher sources. I wonder, first of all, if you think that’s true, and secondly, what you think the consequences will be if it is true. Frye: I think the vogue for Oriental religions was at its peak about twenty years ago, when the students were desperately looking for something but were not in the mood to be sent back to Sunday school. I remember around that time one of my colleagues was listening to me lecture, when a hippie who had come in off the street and who was sitting beside her, squirming and fidgeting, said, “When is he going to get to Eastern symbolism?” My colleague said, “I don’t know that he’s going to. This is advertised as a course in the Bible.” So he just signed off at that point. But you often get a very cleaned-up interest in Eastern religions. You get hippies going to India looking for yogic ecstasies and ignoring the poverty, the illiteracy, the violence, the things the Indians themselves have to struggle with. These cleaned-up versions, extracting religion from the culture in which it is embedded, strike me as a bit phony. That’s not to say, of course, that we can’t learn infinitely and indefinitely from Oriental religions. Of course we can. But we have to remember the rock from which we were hewn, which is something else again. Cayley: Are we remembering the rock from which we were hewn? Do you see a laying aside of the Bible in the last generation? Frye: I think that forgetting the Bible is on a par with forgetting the rest of our cultural heritage. I’ve always, of course, maintained that when you lose your memory you become senile, and that’s just as true of a society as it is of an individual.

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Cayley: Do you see our society as senile in that sense? Frye: Well, there’s a lot of senility about, yes. XII Job and Genesis Cayley: When we talked about the vertical dimension of time you gave the example of the vision of creation in the Book of Job. Why do you think Job fascinates people so? Frye: I suppose the Book of Job has the imaginative power it has partly because it outrages the reader. You start with the powerful scene of Satan as a tolerated guest in the court of God, saying to God, “You set things up in such a way that it’s in people’s interest to worship you.” And God says, “Well, I don’t know about that. What about Job? There’s an example of somebody who I think would stick by me even if the cupboard was bare, so to speak.” Satan says, “Well, let me try.” So he takes all of Job’s goods away from him. This reduces Job to a sense of nihilism, a sense of nothingness. But he still hangs on to his loyalty to God. And God says to Satan, “How are you getting along?” And Satan says, “Well, it’s true that nothing has happened yet, but let’s move in on Job’s body” [cf. 2:5]. So he gives him all the sore boils. Then the three friends turn up, armed with the Book of Deuteronomy, and say, “If you worship God properly you will live a happy and prosperous life. And as you are not obviously living that kind of life now, you must have done something wrong.” At that point, Job is outraged. He says he could have done something wrong, of course, but he hasn’t done anything that wrong. There’s a total disproportion between anything he could have conceivably done and what has happened to him. The thing is that Job and his three friends are all profoundly devout men, and it never occurs to them that something might have happened that the reader already knows about: the half-wager or the almost jocular bet between God and Satan. They would have considered it blasphemous that God could have had any stake in Job’s loyalty. Yet we’ve been told that he has. The argument with the three friends reaches a deadlock, and Job winds up with a most magnificent speech, a speech of human dignity and human responsibility that contains everything that makes man worth redeeming in the universe, everything that makes God interested in man instead of regretting that he ever made the creature in the first place [chaps. 26–31]. Then you get Elihu, who is probably an insertion from a later time, who’s an elo-

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quent poet, but he just repeats the arguments of the friends [chaps. 32–7]. He vanishes away into darkness, and then the voice of God begins. God never refers to Satan. We never hear any more about that bargain. He offers a series of rhetorical questions to Job, saying, “Were you around when I made the world?” What he’s apparently saying is, “You don’t know about the creation, but I do because I was there and I made it. You weren’t there, so why are you questioning the justice of my ways?” In other words, it’s a bullying answer, or it appears to be one. Job simply says, “Yes, Lord, I know that you know everything and I know nothing, so I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes” [cf. 42:6]. God says, “Well, that’s better,” and he restores everything Job had before. Now that’s a possible way of reading the book. It’s the way Bernard Shaw read it. He talks about the ignoble and impertinent tirade of God with which the book concludes.88 I don’t think it is quite that. I think it’s God simply presenting the order of creation to Job’s intelligent, conscious mind. As I say, he presents it on all levels from the morning stars singing together to that mighty beast Leviathan at the bottom. Job is inside the Leviathan, although he doesn’t know it. But the fact that it can be pointed out to him means that he’s been delivered from it, just as Jonah was from the fish’s belly. So the vision of the renewed creation is what God presents to Job, and Job’s life is renewed because God has, in a sense, renewed himself by presenting this creation to him. So a new society takes shape. Everyone gives Job a piece of money, and his friends flock around. Then God says, “Now I want you to pray for the three friends because they have been slandering me by calling me a just God.” So Job recreates the society around him, and he gets three of the most beautiful women who were ever seen for his daughters. There’s a touch of fantasy in that, which reminds us that tragedy is always something inevitable, whereas comedy always contains a concealed gimmick that you don’t quite believe in. It takes an act of faith to believe in a comedy. It takes an act of faith to believe in the whole of the Book of Job, including the restoration at the end. It’s even possible that if you’d seen Job, you might not have seen the beautiful daughters. You might have seen a beggar on a dunghill. But he has seen something that we have not seen and known something that we don’t know. Cayley: Why does God make the wager in the first place? Frye: Because he cares about human beings.

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Cayley: How does the wager show his care? Frye: The fact that he’s willing to risk his own credit as God by betting on Job’s loyalty. Cayley: So he’s not toying with Job? He’s not abusing Job? Frye: He’s not playing with Job. Satan is. Cayley: He’s actually trying to deliver Job from his illusion, the illusion in which his goodness has landed him? Frye: He’s trying to split off what is genuine about the human being, Job, from the world of Satan in which Job lives. Cayley: And why is Satan allowed there in the court to begin with? Frye: We don’t know, except that Job obviously goes through an evolution, which would have been impossible if it had not been for the disasters that Satan inflicts on him. Cayley: Can you say how the events of Job illustrate what you said earlier about the vertical axis in our experience? Frye: As I say, God is presenting his creation to Job as an order, a cosmos, rather than a chaos. It has a top and bottom. It’s different from the horizontal experience of time because it transcends that. Cayley: It seems to me this is the prototypical moment in the Bible and in literature for you—the point where the horizontal path ends and one looks up and down. Frye: The horizontal path doesn’t actually end. It keeps on going. Time has no beginning or end. That’s the trouble with time. But the present vision is the one that extracts you from the tyranny of time. Cayley: Does anything happen to God in the course of the book? Frye: Nothing happens to him except that he manifests himself to man. Cayley: And that’s the meaning of Jehovah passing into Jesus in Blake’s illustrations of the book [cf. pls. 16, 17]? Frye: Yes. Cayley: Perhaps you could say how Blake’s drawings illustrate this reading.

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Frye: Blake looks at Job as a kind of spiritualized version of the story of the fall in Genesis. That is, you start with Job doing his moral duty and, therefore, not being quite on the upper limit of what human beings can achieve. So he falls into Satan’s world. Satan is young and vigorous, God is old and imbecile, and Satan takes over and dominates the world until Job goes through the vision of the morning stars singing together in plate 14 and the vision of the Leviathan or Behemoth in plate 15. The new creation and consequently the renewed God, who is among other things the divinity in Job himself, take over. Cayley: You’ve called the Book of Job an epitome of the Bible. What does that mean? How does it epitomize the whole Bible? Frye: It seems to me that Job begins with a spiritualized form of Genesis. It ends with a spiritual form of apocalypse or revelation. And in the middle comes this vertical contact between God and man. The New Testament has a different version of this. It sees that contact as existing in Jesus. But imaginatively and mythically it’s in the Book of Job. Cayley: Do the two readings of the Book of Job that you’ve given relate to the conceptions of God as a noun and as a verb? Frye: The reading I disagree with, which makes God a bully who forces Job into agreeing with the justice of his ways, is the objective God who is sitting up there in the sky and is linguistically a noun. That is, he’s an object that never changes. All he does is to say, “Look what I did in the remote past: I created this wonderful world.” As I see it, the opening of the story with Satan in God’s court depicts God shifting the centre of action to Satan, who brings about all these disasters. Job then is driven to assert the dignity of human beings, at least in his own context. “If I’ve done so and so, then it’s all right. But I haven’t; therefore, there’s a problem.” At that point God moves in, and the new creation he displays to Job is the old creation again, but it’s something in which Job now participates. It’s something that engages Job as an actor, as an experiencer. That means that God himself has become a principle of action and experience. He has transformed himself from a noun in Job’s mind into a verb in Job’s spiritual body. Cayley: Can we turn now for a minute to Genesis? One of the things that’s going on in the world today is a search for a new nature philosophy. For example, within environmentalism a movement has emerged

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called deep ecology, which takes what it calls a biocentric as opposed to an anthropocentric view of things.89 It seems to me that your reading of the Bible offers an interesting caution to this movement, and I’d like to talk about the Book of Genesis in that light. Can we begin with the Bible’s account of creation? Frye: There are two accounts of creation in the Bible. The first one, the one with the six days and the day of rest, is a creation that throws the emphasis on structure and system. God rests on the seventh day, and thereby the creation becomes objective to him and therefore to man. This is an order that the conscious mind can study. I don’t think that the first chapter of Genesis was ever intended to tell us how the order of nature came into being. I think it tells us how the cosmos dawns on a conscious human mind. Everything in that first creation deals with differentiation. The land is split off from the sea, the waters from the firmament, the light from the darkness, and man emerges at the top of the natural creation. Then you get the other account in chapter 2, which begins with a garden and deals with animals as domestic pets. The imagery is oasis imagery. It’s all gardens and rivers. And the emphasis is heavily on the distinctness of the human order. First you get Adam, then you get Eve as the climax of that account of creation. Obviously, that describes a state of being in which man and his environment are in complete harmony. Then comes the fall, which is first of all self-consciousness about sex, or what D.H. Lawrence calls “sex in the head.”90 That really pollutes the whole conception of sexuality and thereby pollutes in the same way the relation of the human mind to its natural environment. Cayley: Why is self-consciousness about sex the fall? And why is it particularly threatening to God? It’s said, I think, that God is particularly worried that Adam and Eve have eaten this fruit and that they have gained this knowledge. Frye: When Genesis says that Adam and Eve have eaten of the fruit of knowledge, it means that they are now in a moral order founded on sexual repression. The great danger is that they may reach their hands to the tree of life. The explanation of Milton is one that makes sense at that point. God throws Adam and Eve out of the garden because if they eat of the tree of life now, they will live forever in a fallen world. Cayley: Isn’t there also an intimation of threat to God, and perhaps to other gods whom he seems to be addressing, after they eat of this tree?

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Frye: It sounds as though there was, yes. Cayley: And why is that? Frye: I think that the grammatical structure of the sentence, where there is a kind of break, does indicate something very like panic in the mind of the Elohim.91 If man lives forever in a fallen world, then he is, in Milton’s terms, demonic rather than human. The demonic is something that sets up a rivalry with God, instead of simply being disobedient to him. Cayley: The fallenness of the world is something that is not actually in Genesis. At least, the idea that nature falls with man is not explicitly stated. Frye: It’s not explicitly stated, no. But Adam is told to go and till the ground from whence he was taken. He has to struggle for his living in an alienated nature. Cayley: So implicitly it’s not a garden any more. Frye: It’s not a garden obviously. In fact, the ground is cursed after the fall and remains so until the flood. Cayley: Is this idea of fallenness necessary to your understanding of things? Do you accept it? Frye: It’s necessary to my understanding in the sense that I think that there is a great deal in human nature that is maladjusted to physical nature. I simply cannot believe in noble savages and that a harmony between man and nature is possible in the present state of human consciousness. But we are in the twentieth century gradually beginning to realize that exploiting nature is just as evil as exploiting another man. Cayley: What I see in current thinking is an effort to construct a democratic philosophy that extends to the natural world, to see human beings as having no privileged place in this order, and to see nature in a pantheistic way, as a teacher, as our primary teacher. I think the Bible presents a stumbling block to this philosophy, partly because of the idea of creation. In the age of ecology, an immanentalist, Buddhist type of philosophy is more attractive, because it doesn’t objectify creation and separate us from it to the same extent. Is this something that you’ve been thinking about at all? Frye: Yes. I think that the way the Bible deals with this question is confusing to most readers, because we’ve got two bodies of imagery to deal

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with. One is humanity versus physical environment. The other is the sexual image of man and woman. The fall was, as I say, a pollution of sex. Adam and Eve knew that they were naked and started to make clothes. Therefore, rehabilitation—going the opposite way from the fall—would be, among other things, a rehabilitation of sex. So that the relation of man and nature would become part of the relation of love, God says to man in the first chapter, “Now you’re the boss of creation, you’re the head privileged person here.” The implication is that if you’re the boss, you ought to love what is subordinated to you. Otherwise your authority is worth nothing. After the fall, God says, “From now on man is going to boss woman.” It’s explicitly said that the patriarchal society is a result of sin, a result of the fall. So that to go the other way would be to restore the original love relationship between humanity and physical nature. Cayley: As between man and woman? Frye: Yes, but that precedes it, you see. In the Song of Songs the bride’s body is a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed, that is, the inner paradise that has not yet become integrated into human experience. Cayley: What your view has to say to the current discussion, it seems to me, is that it’s important to distinguish the two levels of nature: nature as subhuman mechanism and nature as it appears to illuminated vision. This distinction does not permit us simply to deify nature as such. Frye: The Bible regards the deifying of nature, of course, as one of the most dangerous things you can do. There’s nothing numinous or worshipful in nature. It’s a creation. Cayley: So how do you view current attempts to rediscover the sacred in nature? Frye: I would share the Bible’s concern. I don’t think it’s possible to locate the sacred in nature, though you may use images from nature in expressing sacredness. XIII Primary Concern and Imaginative Vision Cayley: In The Critical Path, published in 1970, you distinguished between freedom and concern. In more recent writings you have distinguished between primary and secondary concern.92 What do you mean by primary concern?

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Frye: Primary concern is what man has as an animal in nature. He wants to eat, he wants to copulate, he wants to have certain things that are part of his individuality, such as property, and he wants freedom of movement. In the Cold War you had in the Soviet Union, in the name of a supposedly materialistic ideology, food shortages, prudery, the abolition of all property, and rigid restrictions on freedom of movement. In the United States during the same period you had far too much food and drink and far too much sex and far too much property and far too much nomadism or wandering around. In other words, all these primary concerns were fulfilled without any respect for the fact that there’s a mind as well as a body and that there is a sublimation process as well as a satisfaction process. Cayley: Why have you argued that primary concern must now become primary? Frye: What I’ve said is the twentieth century is the century in which primary concerns must be recognized as primary, or else. In other words, in the past the desire to survive had to give place to the desire to go to war, to grab somebody else’s territory. But you can’t afford that kind of thing any more. It’s not only that nobody could win wars. It’s also that wars affect the actual survival of the human species on the planet. Cayley: Could you paint a picture for me of a world in which primary concern has become primary? Frye: It never has. Cayley: I know, but if it did? I’m trying to get at the difference between that kind of world and a world of hedonism. Frye: It would be a world in which the purely physical satisfaction of the primary concerns combines with the denial of these concerns in the interest of something which is conscious and mental and, if you like, spiritual. That is, a primary need is sex, but love is something of which sex is only a very small part. But the really primary concern takes in both dimensions. Cayley: Primary concern has to be met because if it’s repressed, then everything else appears warped in consequence. Frye: I suppose I am saying that, yes. Everything which is excluded from the mind or from society will fight its way back in sooner or later. The thing is that it sets up a very destructive situation when it does that.

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Cayley: What I’m trying to get at here is the opposition between discipline and desire. You’ve said again and again that people can acquire the understructure of freedom only by patient habit. And yet you emphasize the primacy of physical and emotional satisfaction. Frye: But there’s no antithesis there, you see. Satisfying primary concerns on a purely physical level means depending on externalities for their satisfaction. It means that there is nothing at the centre which assimilates. You’re just a baby being fed. As you mature you become more and more an integrating force that assimilates things which make for survival, for love, for freedom of movement, and so forth. Cayley: You assimilate them? Frye: Well, yes. If you’re referring to me, I would rather be alive than dead, would rather be free than a slave, and would rather love people than hate them. That means that I try as far as possible not to be dependent on purely external things, because they give out sooner or later. For a conscious being concern extends over the mind as well as the body. I would rather be alive than dead. But what have I got to live for? When I start to answer that question, I’m in a mental world, in a world of sublimation. I want freedom rather than bondage. But what do I want freedom for? So that I can do what I must do. Cayley: But how is the “must” given to you? Where does the “must” come from? Frye: The “must” is what you enter into from your actual situation. Jesus has a parable about the talents. The word “talent” meant a certain sum of money in those days. Now it means something that is a quality, something that’s born in you. As we’ve known ever since Aristotle, in fact, thousands of years before that, everybody tries to fulfil himself, to fulfil his possibilities as a being. Cayley: Primary concern expands as it is fulfilled. You don’t see any necessary opposition between physical and spiritual satisfactions? Frye: I’ve spent most of my writing career avoiding either/or questions. At first, when I taught a course on the Bible, students in class would say, “Do you believe this or not? Answer yes or no.” And I would say, “You know what you can do with all either/or questions in that framework.” I just don’t accept them.

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Cayley: This comes back to why you don’t argue. An argument has a dialectical either/or structure. Frye: The dialectical structure runs along an either/or framework: either this or that. So you exclude that, but the that is lying in wait for you, and pretty soon it has taken over. Cayley: What’s the alternative? Frye: You’re in a both/and world, where, again, the “either” and the “or” have fused. Cayley: But down here on earth we do often face brutally simple choices in which “either” and “or” remain quite distinct. Frye: Yes. Cayley: You can be a conservative radical in the world of ideas, but there must be a point in the actual world where you have to be one or the other. Frye: Yes, you’re quite right. But you see, there’s the area of knowledge and there’s the area of experience. In the world of knowledge there is nothing new under the sun, and in the world of experience there is a time for all things. In the world of knowledge, I think there are things that get established, but the only either/or dialectic I am interested in is the apocalyptic one, which moves toward the separation of a world of life from a world of death. Not a separation of the good from the evil—I don’t believe in that. When you make choices, when you make decisions, you are always moving toward an apocalyptic vision of something that doesn’t die, and throwing off the body of death that you ought to be delivered from. I know it sounds as though I am dodging your question, but that’s really very central to what I believe. Cayley: Could you say a bit more about how an apocalyptic separation of life from death differs from a moral distinction between good and evil? Frye: In ordinary life the good/evil distinctions are hopelessly tangled. Jesus has another parable on the wheat and the tares, in which he says there’s no use in trying to root out the weeds from the grain in this world [Matthew 13]. They’re too inextricably entangled. So that the final separation of life and death has to be in the form of an imaginative vision.

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Cayley: Has to be in the form of an imaginative vision? Frye: Yes. That’s what literature expresses and what the critic has to explain. Cayley: But what does that say to life in the ordinary world, where one encounters good and evil inextricably mixed? How does an imaginative vision get one beyond that? Frye: It gets you beyond the relativity of moral judgments. Pascal says there’s good on one side of the Pyrenees and evil on the other.93 Your expressions of what is good and what is bad are usually expressions of an ideology which is concerned with promoting the ascendancy or authority of this as distinct from the ascendancy or authority of that. All good/evil judgments are tentative. You have to try to move, as in the title of one of Nietzsche’s books, beyond good and evil. Cayley: He means something rather different, I think. Frye: I’m not so sure. He comes to rest finally on a conception of a will to power, which a great many people regard as evil and which in many of its manifestations is. Cayley: Are you saying that good and evil are ultimately unreal? Frye: I think the antithesis is unreal. Blake said, “Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.”94 He said that in the context of satire. There is a real hell in Blake, a hell of torture and cruelty and death-wish. But we all live under a structure of authority in which there’s a tendency to regard the following of that authority as good and a tendency to regard any effort to break out from it as evil. That is something that always turns out to be inadequate. Cayley: Partly what I’m trying to understand are the political or realworld implications of your thought. Frye: The political implications are, again, in the direction of what I’ve called primary concern. What has thrilled me about the movements in Eastern Europe is that they are not ideological movements. They are movements for fundamental human rights to live and eat and to own property. The authorities there, insofar as they are opposing these demands, are no longer saying, “We are conducting a certain course in the interest of a higher socialist destiny.” They are saying, with George

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Orwell, “The object of power is power, and we’re going to hang on to it as long as we’ve got guns to shoot you with.” The protest is made in the direction of something which breaks out of the ideological framework altogether. Some of the protesters are loyal Communists, others would prefer a capitalist system, others are protesting on religious grounds, and so forth. But it’s not really an ideological struggle at all. It’s a struggle to break clear of the fetters of ideologies. Cayley: In your way of thinking, ideology seems to be the great evil. Frye: No, ideology is not evil. It’s something essential to human life. The thing is that it has to be subordinate to the very simple and primary things that the imagination is about: life, love, freedom, dignity. Cayley: How can ideology be subordinate to those things? Frye: We want to live, but we go to war for ideological reasons. War or terrorism is sold to us as a realistic way of smashing somebody else’s ideology. Cayley: Yes, but how would it be possible to invert those relationships, to make primary concern primary and secondary concern secondary? You’ve said that we can’t live without secondary concern, that ideology is not something we can do without. Frye: But as long as primary concerns are primary, ideology doesn’t have to develop structures of antagonism. It doesn’t have to develop structures of enmity. Cayley: I would have thought these things were a part of its nature. Frye: Well, they have been a part of its nature, but I think they can be removed from that context. If I adopt, say, an ideological nonconformist position, it doesn’t mean I don’t respect and love people who have Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, or other positions. The relativity of ideology to human peace and dignity is what I would insist on. That to me is what the word “liberal” means. Cayley: So you accept the fact that you belong to a place, a tradition, a way of thinking, and that those things for you will inevitably have the aspect of an ideology? Frye: Certainly. Oh, yes. I’ve said over and over again that we belong to something before we are anything. Nine months before I was born I was a middle-class, twentieth-century Canadian intellectual.

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Cayley: But this can be subordinate to primary concern? Frye: The fact that I’m a middle-class Canadian intellectual of the twentieth century doesn’t mean that I repudiate what came before the twentieth century, or that I want Canada to assert its ascendancy over something else. I am what I am: let others be what they are. Cayley: To return to this question of politics, you said earlier that one of your reasons for not going to the United States was that you felt an attachment both to the CCF/NDP and to the United Church. You have always been socially engaged and have always reached out. Yet you also say that the historical realm is an arena of illusion. That is, the movement in your thought is toward the permanent structures of human creation and achievement, it’s toward the eternal world of the mind, it’s away from the illusions of history. So is there really room for political hope, for political action, in your approach? Frye: Certainly there is. But the political action, again, has to be action in the light of the vision. Two nations relate to each other. They may be at peace, and they may be at war. But they ought to be at peace, and they have no business going to war. Cayley: So the political is the realm in which vision is enacted. Frye: Yes. The longer I’ve lived the more I realize that I belong in a certain context. Just as a plant grows in the soil, I am in a Canadian context. The more completely I am that, I think the more I am acceptable to others. It’s the law in literature, which I’ve often expressed, of Faulkner’s devoting himself to a county with an unpronounceable name in Mississippi and getting the Nobel Prize in Sweden. Cayley: What, in your view, is the path to making primary concern primary? At times you’ve spoken of the university as the engine-room of society, particularly when someone else has called it an ivory tower. Is education the pathway? Frye: All pathways are educational pathways, yes. If you’re going in any direction at all, it has to be some kind of educational direction. Cayley: Then how do you see the university in relation to society? Frye: I see the university as standing for the permanent realities of life. The one form of improvement or progress is science. The one form of stability in human life is the arts and the products of the imagination,

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which, as I say, include religion. The university is the place that safeguards and promotes those. Cayley: How do you think the university is doing in that regard? Frye: It’s struggling with inadequate budgets. Cayley: But that’s not all it’s struggling with. It’s struggling, for example, with a growing specialization, and a growing domination by antiintellectual ideologies and interest groups. The decline of the university is the theme of a number of currently popular laments. Now I’m sure the decline of the university has been a staple theme since there was a university, but there does seem to be an especially acute sense of crisis at the moment. Frye: I think that there is. The university has always had to struggle with the fact that scholarship is specialized on the one hand and the fact that students have to be taught on the other. The problem is to specialize without going into all the hysterias of pedantry, and to teach without going into the vulgarities of popularization. Cayley: And how is that going at the moment? Frye: What I know best is the study of literature. I don’t think it’s impossible for a person to be a specialist in a literary area and at the same time be able to communicate literature to students in a way that doesn’t insult their intelligence. Cayley: I understand that, but I guess I’m talking more about the big picture. Take a book like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Without mentioning Bloom’s name you satirize this book very effectively in one of your recent essays,95 but I’m not sure whether you’re concealing from your readers how much of it you think is true. Frye: I thought the student activist movement of the ’60s was mistaken in the sense that it was not a movement from genuine social roots, but I don’t brood over it. I don’t feel it is something in the light of which we have to consider a drastic reform of universities. I distrust all quack remedies, and I distrust all back-to-basics movements, simply because they begin with the phrase “back to.” I don’t know how I could put that more clearly, really, except to say that there are no quick-fix cures. Cayley: This is also part of not having an argument.

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Frye: That’s right. Cayley: To you all educational prescriptions, such as Bloom’s, are inevitably ideological. They won’t change anything, they’ll just establish another equally blind regime, though the blindness might take a different form. Frye: They just turn the wheel of history. The word “revolution” has two meanings. One is the upheaval of the social order. The other is turning a wheel. And eventually one meaning of the word “revolution” gives place to the other. Cayley: You seemed to suggest a moment ago that if one didn’t go to university, one didn’t have much hope of learning to make primary concern primary. Frye: I see the university as very central in the educational process, but of course it’s only one of many institutions that are concerned to safeguard the permanent values of what I mean by the arts and sciences. If I said that going to university or being attached to the university was a sine qua non, a condition of human freedom and dignity, I would be talking nonsense. Cayley: Why? Frye: Because it’s so obvious that one can be a fully developed human being without going near a university. Cayley: Could one be a fully developed human being without reading? Frye: In our society, it would be very difficult to be a fully developed human being without reading, that’s true. Cayley: So you’re just saying that one could get an education another way, not that one could be fully developed in your sense without an education. Frye: Yes. Any specific program of education, like going to college, is expendable. I once had a student say that he was rather frustrated by having gone through a university course and wound up knowing what his grandmother had always known without ever having heard of a university. There is, I think, a built-in wisdom in the human mind, which is a part of its need to survive. And that can work itself out in almost any social area.

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Cayley: And yet again and again you emphasize the need for training, for practice, for habitus. Frye: Yes, everybody needs to have a sense of self-fulfilment, and the self-fulfilment has to be in the direction of acquiring skills and powers which can be acquired only by practice. Aristotle begins his Metaphysics by saying that all men by nature desire to know. It’s not so much a question of what they know. It’s the desire for self-fulfilment. Cayley: Have you ever wondered whether education is wasted on the young? Frye: It’s like Bernard Shaw says, “Youth is too valuable to be wasted on the young.”96 You’re rather stuck with it. I think that students at university have many obstacles thrown in their way by the pedantry and misunderstandings of their teachers and so forth, but those are human conflicts. We all have those. Cayley: I was privileged to have had four years at Harvard between 1962 and 1966, and if I think of the use I could make of those years now when I know what I want to know, and what I did with them then, I find the contrast appalling. Frye: Roland Barthes says all reading is really rereading,97 and similarly all education is really re-education. Anything effective in your education has to be, I think, a product of hindsight. Cayley: I understand that and appreciate it, but I still think my point has some practical application to the structure of universities. Frye: Yes, certainly I’d accept that. A lot of students go through university with very little profit, and the fact that they go through with very little profit is not always their fault by any means. I quite agree with that. Cayley: In your scheme of the three phases of language, which in The Great Code you borrow from Vico, you suggest along with Vico that at the end there’s a ricorso, a return. And you say a similar thing in your sequence of modes in the Anatomy—that underneath or behind irony, myth begins to reappear. You have been able to take a synoptic view of the history of language, the history of literature, the history of our civilization, to see these histories in a way that makes them all present at once for you. This vast learning seems to be characteristic of our age. We stand at what sometimes seems to be the end of a tradition, encompassing it all.

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At one time Spengler was important for you. Later on you satirized him and made jokes about the Great Western Butterslide. Did you once accept the idea of decline in Spengler, and do you wonder now what’s next? Frye: I’m not sure I ever reacted to the word “decline” in Spengler’s book. The vision I got from Spengler was not a vision of decline. It was a vision of maturing to a certain point. The question of cycle always turns up. There is a cycle in Vico, it’s a little different in Spengler, but it’s a cycle again in Toynbee. As I’ve said often, every cycle is a failed spiral. When you get to the end of the cycle, what should be done is to encompass the entire structure up to that point on another level, not just to go back to the beginning, although there’s going to be a certain amount of that. Cayley: Do you see instances in history of spiralling rather than cycling? Frye: We find the idea of the turning cycle in the movement that went from the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the medieval civilization. People always thought in terms of a renewed Roman Empire, all the way down to the eighteenth century, and they certainly regarded that as a spiral. Whether we would think so or not is another question. Cayley: I would think there’s some argument for it. So the question then becomes whether we take our tradition with us on another turn, or whether, as appears to be the case and was noted in your remarks on senility earlier, we forget it. Frye: I think it’s a disaster to forget it, because that means that anything new will simply be the primitive coming around again, making the same mistakes all over. And we can’t afford to make those mistakes with the technology we’ve got now. Cayley: And yet a tradition can also be a burden. Frye: It’s hard, yes. Cayley: One feels that your ability to sum up an entire tradition is something that can’t continue. Frye: It seems to me that that is part of what the word “university” means. It’s a matter of the universe, the “one turning,” a matter of wrapping things up in a single form. You have to start at a centre. It takes a long time to get to any kind of intelligible circumference. But if you keep on going you can eventually get there.

103 “Condominium Mentality” in CanLit Conducted 19 December 1989

From University of Toronto Bulletin, 26 February 1990, 11. Dated by an entry in Frye’s datebook for 1989. The interviewer was Peter O’Brien. John Ayre’s Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989), had recently been published.

O’Brien: What is your response to the biography? Frye: I suppose you always have to read a biography of yourself as though it were about somebody else . . . It’s very painstaking . . . I think it’s quite a respectable book and it seems to have done quite well. O’Brien: What about all the idiosyncratic, personal details in it? Frye: There’s not much you can do about them if you’re going to write a biography. I suppose some of them have to go in. O’Brien: What are you working on now? Frye: I’m in the last stages of a sequel to The Great Code, a sequel that I promised in the introduction to that book. I feel I’m pretty well through with it. There may be some minor revisions . . . there’s still the footnotes. I have a reputation for not taking footnotes very seriously. John Ayre says that’s an irritating habit of mine. I’m collecting material for the footnotes now. O’Brien: Is it possible to produce a book like that and abandon footnotes altogether? Frye: No, not altogether. If you put the footnotes all at the end of the

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book you don’t have to worry about the bloody things until you get to page proofs . . . doing footnotes is just donkey work. O’Brien: Is there any book or writer that you regret not having worked on? Frye: I don’t know that there is. I have written at least essays on most of the people that really interested me. If I were starting over again I would perhaps do more work on the Old and Middle English period. That’s a period that’s always fascinated me. I can’t say that there’s a great deal I’ve left untouched that I very much wanted to do, except perhaps Dante. O’Brien: You’re known to have somewhat ambiguous enthusiasm for Canadian literature. What are your current thoughts? Frye: I’m enthusiastic about it in its totality. Since about 1960 it has been incredible how much has come out of Canada and how much of it has been respected and admired all over the world. I would have thought that French Canadian literature would have been appealing to other countries, but back in 1960 I would have said that English Canadian literature didn’t have much of a future. O’Brien: Which Canadian writers are you most enthusiastic about? Frye: The obvious people: Peggy Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Timothy Findlay, Mordecai Richler, . . . especially Alice Munro, who seems to me a twentieth-century Jane Austen. In Quebec literature, Marie-Claire Blais, Yves Thériault. Of the younger generation: Barry Callaghan, Roo Borson, Peter Van Toorn. O’Brien: Do you think Canadian writers still have a “garrison mentality” in which they isolate themselves from the cold, barren wilderness and from each other? Frye: “Garrison mentality” was a phrase I invented to cover the aftereffects of not having had an eighteenth century, and the sort of smalltown pressures of the kind that have been described in nineteenth-century Canadian literature. Canada now of course is the most highly urbanized country in the world. The garrison mentality has been replaced by the condominium mentality, which means that writers have to fight just as hard against an anti-cultural environment, but in a different context: I mean a somewhat introverted big-city living that makes the kind of human conflict that writers need more difficult than ever to identify.

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O’Brien: What are your thoughts on recent critical methods, such as deconstruction? Frye: I’ve always been trying to put things together rather than take them apart. I think that what I’ve seen over the course of my literary career is a number of analytic and to some extent disintegrating techniques of criticism, one after the other. I think you have it that way because each one tends to run out of material sooner or later. I think the deconstructionist movement has done some remarkable work. I think it’s also coming close to the end of its act. There’s a limit to what you can do with those logical supplement techniques. O’Brien: What do you think the next stage of literary criticism might be? Frye: I would like to see a more comprehensive view among critics. I’d like to feel that they weren’t really fudging what seems to me a very central part of their work, and avoiding the overview that I’ve been struggling for and that some of the mythological people have been struggling for as well. Critics find it much easier if they can get hold of an ideology and twist everything into that shape. It’s relatively easy to be a Marxist or a Freudian or a Jungian critic. Among the first-rate critics there’s an underlying consensus which the [other] critics are unwilling to face. I’d have to recite a long book to give this consensus in detail, but I keep reading critiques and keep seeing a kind of coincidence of perspective which the individual critics seem to be carefully keeping out. It’s a deliberate self-limiting perspective. From the point of view of prudence and caution I suppose they’re right but I like taking risks myself. O’Brien: Has U of T treated you well? Frye: Oh yes. Both Victoria and Massey are very congenial environments. O’Brien: Do you come to the office every day? Frye: Not every day. In the last year or so, with the new marriage and new family and so forth, I’ve come less regularly than I used to, but I still keep in as close touch as I can. O’Brien: Is there another book in the works after the second volume of The Great Code comes out?

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Frye: There may be but it’s not in the works yet. I wrote The Great Code, which was the Bible and literature, and this would be a follow-up on that. That’s a subject that is in itself inexhaustible. I could go on to study things like Utopian literature in relation to the Bible’s New Jerusalem, but that’s in the future. O’Brien: What about your legendary talent for typing? What if you weren’t such a great typist? Frye: I would view with more alarm the prospect of rewriting and revising. I never compose on a typewriter. I start out with handwritten copies and when they get so written-over that I can hardly read them myself, I type them out; then when that gets so written-over I can hardly make out the typing, I retype it. After about five or six rewritings it begins to look the way it’s going to look. Because I can type fast, retyping a page doesn’t have any terrors for me. O’Brien: Do you use a computer? Frye: The mechanical age stopped with the Selectric typewriter, as far as I’m concerned. O’Brien: Is there anything in the biography that you regret not seeing? Any nugget that was missed? Frye: There are always things to add. I have a great admiration for people who write biographies because I never know how they can tell that they’re finished. The last thing I would want to do is badger John Ayre by suggesting things that he’s left out. The only point about his book is that it is of necessity unfinished because I’m still alive. Perhaps the last couple of years have had incidents that he would have put in if I had been dead. But I can’t help that. O’Brien: Presumably you have a few more books in you yet. Frye: I don’t know. That’s “on the knees of the gods.” That’s a Homeric phrase.1

104 Modified Methodism Conducted 9 January 1990

From “Northrop Frye: A Conversation,” The World: Journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association, 4 (July–August 1990): 5–6. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Interviewer Gary Burrill, a former teacher of sociology and Maritime studies, was at that time a staff writer for the World and a student at Harvard Divinity School; he subsequently became a minister of the United Church of Canada serving in Nova Scotia. He interviewed Frye in his Victoria College office. Some parts of the article are discursive and have been given in summary. The first quoted answer, after considerable introductory matter, follows Burrill’s allusion to the Bible as being neither fact nor fiction, but incorporating the kind of truth that belongs to myth.

Frye: It’s rather similar to the kind of truth that one gets through the study of literature. “Myth” is from the Greek work mythos, which means a story or a plot. If you say the Bible is history, you’re opening up a terrific can of worms, because the Bible is a mixture of things which are obviously not historical, things which have a kernel of history to them, completely rewritten, and so forth. But if you say the Bible tells a story, nobody can disagree with you. Sometimes you read a book to get information about something that’s outside the book, and that is the kind of thing you normally apply the word “truth” to. But there are all kinds of ways of approximating truth besides doing that. Burrill: And what might some of these be, in the Bible? Frye: Well, one has to approach the Bible in terms of its own language, and its own language is a poetic language; it’s a language of myth and of metaphor. Most of our creeds and doctrines are in propositional and logical language, which is totally inappropriate to the Bible.

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[Burrill alludes to Frye’s favourite definition of faith as “the substance of the hoped for and the evidence of the unseen” (Hebrews 11:1)—a formulation that “throws the emphasis back on personal experience.”] Burrill: Is this the kind of idea you have in mind when you write that the Bible is also a “violently partisan” book, one that can even be understood as a special form of “propaganda” [GC, 40/58]? Frye: Yes. Because it’s founded on the poetic, which is neither true nor false, but says, “Now let’s look at this and see what’s in it for us in the way of experience.” [Burrill summarizes Frye’s view of the Bible as a revolutionary book that has often been kidnapped into ascendant ideologies. He alludes to the apparent strangeness of the fact that this should be the view of one brought up in the Methodist tradition. But Frye’s course of life shows that we are wrong to think that the road to where we want to go leads as far away as possible from the point where we began.] Frye: I had always distinguished between the actual, authentic religious education that I had had as a child, and the literalist anxieties connected with it. I think that was an unconscious result of my mother’s teaching. Mother had a hard streak of common sense in her and she thought she ought to believe a lot of things which, with a child’s insight and intuition, I realized she didn’t believe at all. [He remembers the conservatism of Methodist Moncton in the 1920s.] Frye: The whole denatured world of playing with cards without suits, of soft drinks instead of liquor and so forth—I always knew that that was stupid. And the literalism of “If a guy had died, he’d have to go to either heaven or hell,” and so forth . . . somehow or other I’d acquired some kind of intuition that that was horseshit, too. [Burrill alludes to Frye’s rejection of fundamentalist teachings during his highschool years.] Frye: I realized that if I started revolting against my background, then I would just go into an endless detour of objections and negative statements and so forth, and that I would finally come back, unconsciously, to the place where I started. So I tried to find a more open way of looking at what I’d been brought up to.

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Burrill: Would that have been because you felt this particular Methodist background was who you really were, and that by rebelling in that way it would be the structure of your own consciousness you’d have been rebelling against? Frye: Yes. And I didn’t want to come back unconsciously. I didn’t want to go around this long detour. I wanted to arrive consciously at the real centre of where I’d started from. Burrill: In the sense that you wanted to take the part of your upbringing that you intuitively did believe, and remake the whole on the basis of this kernel? Frye: Yes, I think that’s it: the part of my training that I realized to be authentic—I saw that it would always be a part of my own conditioning. And to revolt against your own conditioning is the start of civil war against yourself. And civil war against yourself impoverishes both sides.

105 Family Stories Recorded 16 January 1990

From the tape provided by Ann Silversides, transcribed by Leslie Barnes. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Freelance writer and broadcaster Silversides interviewed Frye in preparation for her CBC program on Family Stories; in the finished program, perhaps because of the reticence of Frye’s family, only a few sentences were used. The book Silversides refers to several times is Elizabeth Stone’s Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us (New York: Times Books, 1988). The following transcription gives the complete interview until the point where the CBC’s tape recorder broke down. It has been edited to remove a few false starts and misunderstandings.

Frye: . . . broken in rather curious ways. I had a brother who was thirteen years older than I and a sister who was twelve years older. So I was in effect brought up as an only child. When I was six years old, my brother was killed in the First World War and 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. Silversides: A foundling. Frye: Yes. Then my father’s business failed, so he completely retired from a rather active social life in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and went down to Moncton, New Brunswick. Because of their retirement, my mother’s growing deafness, and the fact that she felt like an exile, an outcast in the Maritimes where she had no friends, I was in effect brought up by grandparents—psychologically, that is. There’s always been a large feeling of

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belonging to an earlier generation. Is this the kind of thing you want at all? Silversides: That’s wonderful. I didn’t know if you wanted to speak about your family as well . . . So you found it was stories of ancestors, then, that formed . . . Frye: No, it wasn’t much about ancestors. Neither my father nor mother had much interest in that beyond preserving a number of myths about them which were all entirely false. My father believed that the Fryes were Loyalists. Actually, the Fryes fought on the other side in the revolutionary war and came across later, mainly because the land was cheaper and they were farmers. There was always a sort of myth that my mother’s family, which were Howards, were connected with the Norfolk Howards. But that was one of those [inaudiable syllable] myths that are so frequent in family. Silversides: Glorifying ancestors, you mean? Frye: That is, linking yourself with more distinguished ancestors than you probably had. Silversides: Do you think that’s quite a common thing? I was wondering about that because the book that I read is by an American. She talked a lot about the inflation of ancestors and I wondered if that might be more peculiarly American than Canadian. Frye: On the whole it is more peculiarly American but it did touch our family to some degree. Silversides: What about stories from your grandparents if they were the ones that psychologically1 . . . did they tell stories about further back as well, or were most of the stories you heard from your mother? Frye: As a matter of fact, I didn’t hear many stories about the family. My father had a rather droll sense of humour and I remember a lot of quite funny anecdotes about people whom he knew when he was young in Windsor Mills [now Windsor], Quebec, outside Sherbrooke. That was the sort of folklore I grew up with. Silversides: Of a larger society, not immediate family? Frye: Yes, of a sort of small village farming group. Some of them were stories about very familiar patterns. Such as, my family were English-

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speaking and had a very uncertain hold on French, and when a little boy of five was staying with them overnight he started howling because my grandmother said, “Come now, Pete, time to cochon now.”2 But I didn’t hear many stories about the family itself. I knew that mother’s father was a Methodist circuit rider and there were various stories about him. He was quite a character. My father’s father and mother both died before I was born and there was very little reference to them, except that I was named after his mother Sarah Ann Northrop. She was a factory girl at Lowell at the time when Lowell was a model flourishing town. Then of course they moved all the mills to the south and Lowell went dead. Silversides: When you mentioned at the beginning that you felt that you were the poor substitute for the older brother who had died, how was that made clear to you? Was that articulated in stories as well? Frye: It was made clear in my school reports. My brother was always first or second in the class. I was usually something like twenty-eighth out of a class of thirty-two. Silversides: So it was your brother who was glorified for his achievements and you were . . . Frye: I was contrasted with him. If you want the motif it’s the bear’s son motif, the younger son who was always the stupid one and is never going to amount to anything.3 Silversides: One of the theses in the book is that children often subscribe to the stories that are provided for them or the roles that they’re coached into. Frye: Yes, but I didn’t. [They laugh.] Silversides: No, I was going to say, why is it that you didn’t? Were there counter-stories from grandparents? What came into the equation? Frye: It was an inner knowledge of myself that these conditioning people don’t take into account. I knew that I wasn’t dumb. In fact, my mother and father knew it too; they just felt, quite correctly, that I was being a lazy bastard. But what they didn’t quite realize was that I was bored to death with school, which I regarded as penal servitude. Silversides: The inner knowledge of yourself. Were there any stories or examples that helped you believe that that was possible, within the fam-

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ily? Were there other renegades or black sheep? Was there something else that you could hold on to? Frye: I don’t know that there were. If I read a novel of Scott or Dickens I would perhaps feel that I could write something like that sometime. I don’t know that I grew up inside an archetypal myth myself. I don’t have that feeling particularly. Silversides: I’m not sure what you mean, that you grew up inside . . . Frye: Well, what you just said. Silversides: Oh, that there was support from outside from this idea of unrecognized talent early on. [pause] You just made a reference to these conditioning people and what they neglect. Could you speak to that a little bit more? When I outlined the series I talked about a point in perhaps middle age or early middle age when people redefine themselves using their family stories. Certainly the model I was going on here was that people either accept or react against these stories, but that they are very, very powerful to them. You’re suggesting that there’s something else that can be more powerful. Frye: I think you really re-enact myths in your own experience rather than settling into a prefabricated myth. The myth you eventually live will belong to a familiar pattern, a catalogued and ticketed set of patterns. But you discover that yourself almost entirely, I think. At least I did. Silversides: It’s only after the fact that you can . . . Frye: It’s only after the fact that you can perhaps relate it to other things. Silversides: Do you think there is power in family stories, though? Frye: I daresay there is and must be. I feel such a dearth of stories in my own background, coming along as a late and unexpected arrival in the family. Silversides: Yes, I’ve been wondering about that, the difference in families. Because there are some families where the stories are told and retold, and some stories [sic] where you have to go out at a certain point and try to find out. It sounds perhaps that you did that at some point, from what you said about Sarah Ann Northrop and where she came from. Was there a point where you found that the absence of stories made you want to go out and find out facts and details, historical circumstances?

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Frye: No. [chuckles] As I say, the mythology of my childhood was almost entirely this anecdotal mythology that I’ve mentioned concerning other people, none of whom I’d ever met, most of whom were dead before I was born. I did begin to realize something of the isolation and the sectarian divisiveness within a community when I made a friend of a woman in Toronto who’d been brought up in the same small village of Windsor beside Sherbrooke that my father had been. So I took my father to meet her. But she was a Roman Catholic and he was Methodist, and the only person they knew in common was the town drunk. Silversides: You suggested at the beginning that this kind of upbringing and identification with an earlier generation might have had some bearings on your personal myth. Frye: No, I was just trying to explain the comparative dearth of a traditional body of stories. I mean there were stories that my father repeated and repeated. But there were stories of that kind that didn’t involve me. Silversides: Right. But earlier when you said that you were psychologically brought up by your grandparents, you mentioned identification with an earlier generation as something that you felt strongly in your childhood. Frye: So, I suppose I was really acting out the myth of the exile, because that was what my mother always felt she was. I think my father did too, except that he wasn’t a reflective person and also had to earn his living. He made business acquaintances, but it was significant, I thought, that he never had any social life of any kind. So that being in the middle of a social community has always been a tremendous strain for me. I suppose the exile myth was the one that I was unconsciously living through myself. Silversides: Much of your life’s work has been concerned with understanding earlier writers, earlier times, and how they’ve affected the present. Do you see that as having had any connection with this early identification with previous generations? Frye: That I’m not sure of. I’d have to think about that. Silversides: Because it’s an imaginative knowledge and association that other people might not have had early on in their lives. Frye: Yes. I think that being an utterly nonathletic and badly coordinated person very much out of the sort of team spirit of my contemporaries—

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although I always had a very strong affection for other people and wanted friends—I always felt it difficult to find my place in a society in my school days. Coming up here to Victoria College had a great deal of the exile’s return about it. This is where my grandfather had gone to college in the old Coburg days. I felt almost immediately that I had come home, that I had come into a society where I did have a function. I don’t quite know where I acquired or why I acquired this tendency to system building, except that Peggy Atwood maintains that it’s a Canadian characteristic.4 Silversides: Perhaps the most central family story is the courtship story: sort of, “Tell me how you and dad met, what was that about?” I wondered if you could speak to what you were told when you asked that question as a child. I assume that it’s a creation-myth parallel. Frye: There was relatively little of that in my family. They were reasonably good friends, but my mother found my father’s inability to earn any money so off-putting that they really weren’t close enough for me to ask that. Silversides: Even to ask how they met, you mean? Frye: No. The John Ayre biography of me quotes my cousin, Willie Solomon, as saying that my mother was a “stiff, formidable woman.”5 I saw a much more vulnerable side of her than that. But even so I felt that the relations between my mother and my father were relations that I wouldn’t be encouraged to ask about. Silversides: So just the distance there put a prohibition on asking how they came to be together? Frye: Yes. I mean anything in the way of intimacy or tenderness wasn’t stressed at all. There was a kind of mutual tolerance. Silversides: It seems to me, when you look at courtship stories in many families, they convey instructions or warnings. The courtship story articulates the model of marriage the children have and then you carry that with you. For instance, if it was very romantic then you may feel that’s what you have to relive as well; or if it was long periods of friendship and then a marriage, then that conveys some buried instructions to the child about how they’re supposed to proceed. Frye: Yes, perhaps so. I don’t know. My own courtship with my wife

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was a sort of intellectualized one because by accident we were separated over a period of two or three years. It was at least five years between the time I first met her and the time we married.6 I suppose that was to some degree a product of family conditioning. I was somewhat incurious about women and thought almost entirely in terms of marrying one woman rather than of sexual experience as such. Silversides: Interestingly, your remarriage was to someone you’d known for a long period of time as well. Frye: Yes, exactly. It’s a matter where friendship and companionship have an extremely central place. Silversides: Although they didn’t in your parents’ marriage. Frye: They did in a sort of vestigial way. That is, they got along well enough, but there wasn’t much intimacy or tenderness between them. They just weren’t that way temperamentally. Silversides: Coming in, I had a list of typical family stories, and I thought we could examine how they might correspond to particular myths. But I think you suggested that what was more interesting than finding those correspondences was looking at the individual as they were making their own myth. Frye: If you have a reflective temperament you may discover fairly well on in your life, usually not until your sixties or seventies, that you have actually been living through and forging a myth of your own. Silversides: In what sense is there a correspondence between that and the myths that were the bedrock of our culture? Frye: Myths are like human beings: every one is unique. And yet there’s a very small number of conventions which apply to all of them. Silversides: What would be some of the central conventions which, when people look back on their life, they might recognize? Frye: I mean that a myth is a story. A story has a beginning and a development and a projected end and there are only so many ways to begin a story and so many ways to develop it. Silversides: But could you, in the most general sense, say what some of those might be for people who might not have thought in mythological terms before? You mentioned earlier the exile and the return home.

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Frye: I’d begun to think in these terms largely because of having a biography written about me by a person who interviewed me a great deal for it, and by having people like you coming along and asking me about my earlier life. I hadn’t really thought about it much before then. Silversides: There must have also been a process by which you told, say, your wife, stories about your family. You would in your selection of those stories be discarding some of the stories you were told and selecting some to tell. That itself is a process of beginning to identify your story . . . Frye: Yes, possibly it would be. I don’t remember talking to Helen very much about my parents. She made up her own mind about them. Of course she only met my mother once. That was the summer two months before she died.7 She knew my father a little better because he came to live with us. But there wasn’t a great deal of shared mythology either with my parents or with hers, it seems to me. She was very fond of her parents and so was I. I think that she had some of the eldest-daughter syndromes. That is, she felt responsibility and she had a sense of social function right from the beginning. Elizabeth, my present wife, was also an eldest daughter and I think has some of the same characteristics. That’s the opposite of what I had. Silversides: The opposite, in what sense? Frye: The eldest daughter, as I say, has a sense of responsibility. Silversides: And you were irresponsible? Frye: I wasn’t exactly irresponsible, but I grew up with a strong tendency to accept things as more or less a natural right. You might say I was overprotected in that sense, except that that has overtones I’m not clear about. Silversides: When you were beginning to say, accept things as a natural right, I was thinking you were going to say, to challenge things . . . Frye: Yes, but what I challenged was in another context. The actual getting a job, getting a routine established around me in which I could do certain things: I tended to take a somewhat passive and accepting attitude to that rather than an active one. I’m not putting this very well, but I have a feeling that a person who was so very much the youngest in the family gets taken care of in a way that the first-born don’t.

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Silversides: Catered to by all the other children, who would show him and bring him along. Although in your case, as you said, you grew up very much as an only child. Frye: I did later. In the first five years I didn’t so much. Silversides: I haven’t formally interviewed that many people yet for what I’m doing, though obviously I’ve spoken to a lot of people about family stories. I did interview Michael Ignatieff and he said that his first memory was sitting on his father’s knee with his father telling him family stories. Frye: Ah yes, in the first place that’s Russian. The sense of family mythology is much more highly developed there. Silversides: [Comments on Ignatieff’s book The Russian Album (1987), in which Ignatieff traces five generations of his family roots back to 1815.] I was wondering if you had any thoughts in general about the role that ancestors play, because it seemed to me it has something to do with identification and eradicating time. Frye: It does have something to do with it. My own relative lack of curiosity about ancestors I suppose is . . . . I suspect that Michael Ignatieff is rather exceptional in this way. I’ve met so many students who are firmly convinced that the world was created the day they were born and that nothing could matter less than a perspective of time behind them. One of the main difficulties I’ve had as a teacher is to try to get some sense of historical imagination into kids, to think that there were other people who had other ways of doing things back in, say, Shakespeare’s day. Technician: Excuse me, we have a problem. The machine has gone into . . . a happy rumble has come into it. Frye: You mean it’s not coming from me? [tape turns off] Silversides: Professor Frye, you astutely remembered where we were. And we were going to speak about how your lack of ancestral stories or models might have had something to do with finding a sense of ancestors in your literary studies. Frye: In my career as a teacher and as a writer I’ve been concerned with literature and have always had a very strong sense of tradition and, if you like, imaginative ancestry in literature. I feel that the plays of

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Shakespeare, for example, were designed for an audience of 1600, but they also appeal to us. That to me is the great mystery of literature: how can something cross over all these barriers of time and space and culture and still convey meanings, many of which would have been unintelligible to the people of 1600? That’s my main concern as a teacher and writer, and I suppose it really is an ancestral concern. Except that the ancestors are the ancestors of my own craft, my field of literature. Silversides: You mentioned earlier that you were dismayed by a general feeling among students that the world began with their birth. Is that something that has held constant through your years of teaching, or might it be more so now? I ask because one suspects family stories are told less now because of pace [sic], time, distance, all kinds of considerations. Frye: The absence of a sense of historical imagination in my students has always been a problem in my teaching, I think. I’ve always insisted that the really liberal part of a liberal education is in getting to know Shakespeare as he was in his day and Milton as he was in his setting, because being so different from ours, and the assumptions being so different, you get to know a variety of ways in which the human race has experienced life. That is the really enlarging part of the mind when it comes to studying literature. The relating of literature to one’s own life is, I think, a process that can very largely take care of itself if you understand that the difference is at the other end. That was why I never had any patience with these relevance slogans in the ’60s, where you had students saying they wanted the whole of the past to look as much as possible like them. Silversides: But that sense among students hasn’t changed? Frye: I’ve always found that among students, let’s put it that way. They have greater or less degrees of it, depending on the class, but it’s always there to some degree. Silversides: I was looking down the categories that I’ve written out of common family stories, and right there at the top was “dead children,” which is fairly central in your family as well. Is there anything lasting from the sense of having a dead older brother in the working out of your life? Frye: I daresay there is, but it’s very difficult for me to identify it. He was such a shadowy memory to me because he left home for Europe when I

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was about five, I think. I do remember him around the house, but hardly as a personality. He was just a figure in an infantile landscape. Silversides: I guess I was speaking to the importance someone like that assumes after they’re dead in the lives of their family. Frye: My mother, of course, centred her whole emotional life around him after he was dead. In the last years when she was eaten up with cancer and dying she never called me anything but Howard. She never called me by any other name than his. In other words the two of us had simply merged our identities as far as she was concerned. Silversides: You weren’t a child at that point? Frye: No, I wasn’t. Silversides: But if some of that happened earlier, it would certainly be very confusing to a child. Frye: Oh yes, it would have been. But there was a break in the whole family fortunes after or around about the time my brother was killed: my father’s business failing, having to move to the Maritimes, my mother’s deafness, and so forth. All that was part of a break in the family which I think broke any sense of mythological continuity. Silversides: You mentioned your personal story of exile. One of the things talked about in the book is the immigrants’ family stories. The author felt that she could delineate whole different world views in the United States. New immigrants saw a much more difficult world and their stories reflected that—difficulty of travel and so on—whereas third- and fourth-generation stories are much more optimistic. Would you think that the same might be true in a Canadian setting? Frye: It would be. I think immigrants have a very strong sense of the continuity of mythology as one thing to hold on to when they’re facing a new life. My own parents were not really facing a new life in the sense of there being an agenda of new things to do, they were thinking more in terms of survival. [break in tape] There are perhaps two stages in which ancestral mythology is operative. One is in the immigrant stage where they are very keen on preserving a continuity of identity in a new land. Then they tend to drop it for a generation or two. They get rather ashamed of their European background and want to become as fully as possible integrated into the community around them. Then a generation

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after that they begin to become more mature and to think more in terms of reconstructing their cultural ancestral roots. I think that that perhaps happens to a nation as well. When Canada was very largely a land of immigrants it had the various mythologies which have been chronicled in a lot of Canadian fiction. Now that it’s become more mature culturally it’s beginning to recapture that. But the time when I was growing up was rather a bad time for ancestral mythologies, really. [tape cuts out]

106 Imprint Interview Filmed 22 January 1990

From the videocassette in NFF, 1992, box 5, transcribed by Elizabeth O’Grady. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. The program was aired on 28 January and 4 February 1991 on TV Ontario; the interviewer was novelist and book show host Daniel Richler. It began with comments on Frye’s work by A.C. Hamilton, who had just finished Northrop Frye: An Anatomy of His Criticism (1991, © 1990); Pauline McGibbon, the former Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, who had been a classmate of Frye’s at Victoria College; and John Ayre, whose Northrop Frye: A Biography had initially furnished the impetus for the program.

I Richler: It gives me great pleasure to welcome to the Imprint studio, Northrop Frye. Professor Frye, how much of what you are now as a man and a thinker has its origins in your early childhood? Frye: I suppose as much as anyone else’s does. One can’t escape one’s social and cultural conditioning and one’s context in time and space, or one’s physical heritage, that kind of thing. Richler: Is there a point where you remember religion specifically entering your life? Frye: Not specifically as entering, because my family was a religious family; my mother’s father was a Methodist circuit rider and somehow or other it was just part of the ambience, it was part of the air we breathed. Richler: You spent a summer, a rather odd summer, as a trainee priest,

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and in fact you’re still an ordained minister. At what point did you realize that the clergy wasn’t for you? Frye: Oh, I think at some point during my undergraduate career, and my growing realization that an active career in the ministry was, as much as anything, an administrative job, rather than an intellectual or academic job as I had more or less assumed it to be. I’m not a person who wants to commit myself permanently to administration. Richler: So you discovered the poet William Blake at a certain point. Was there a need to immerse yourself in the work of someone who was considered by many in orthodox religion as a heretic in order to return to the Bible with fresh eyes? Frye: Well, of course I was born heretic, I was born nonconformist. I found that Blake had made a degree of imaginative sense out of the religious structure I was brought up in that I had never thought possible. And I suddenly saw through him a way of uniting my childhood experiences and everything I’d come into the world with, with the academic life that I wanted to devote myself to. Richler: Blake was considered notoriously difficult and even beyond the pale of literary study until your book Fearful Symmetry. What was it that made you so convinced that you alone understood Blake? Frye: Well, in the first place there are two aspects of Blake’s writing. There are things which are pellucidly simple and easy to grasp: the Songs Of Innocence for example—Blake himself boasted that that could be understood by children, which of course they can; and some of the lyrics and other things are just as straightforward and plain-speaking as they could possibly be. Then there are other poems which are more difficult and more complex. But it was obvious to me that the man who wrote the Songs of Innocence was not a phony, and consequently, if he put most of his time on more difficult works, they were worth investigating. Richler: Blake said at one point, “I must Create a System or be enslaved by another Man’s.”1 Would you see that as a sort of motto for your life? Frye: I suppose so, yes, although I rather regret that Blake used the word “system” because that implies something metaphysical and Blake wasn’t that—he had an extremely concrete image-making mind. I’ve always thought of poetic thinking as schematic rather than systematic as philosophical thinking is.

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Richler: T.S. Eliot said that comparison and analysis are the chief tools of the critic.2 But in the second part of that quotation from Blake, Blake says, “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.” Do you see your critical work as a creative work? Frye: Yes, I do. I don’t believe that people who write poetry and fiction are necessarily creative or that critics are necessarily uncreative. I think that attaches the word “creativity” to the genres you happen to be working in rather than to the people who are working in them. Richler: Blake had a definition of poetry actually very similar to Plato’s definition. He said that poetry was “Allegory addressed to the Intellectual powers while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding.”3 What does that mean to you? Frye: Well, it means what Blake meant when he talked about having a double vision, one physical and the other spiritual. The physical vision of nature is an objective vision, it’s there to be studied by science. And there is another universe altogether in which the emotions are involved, in which categories like beauty and ugliness or a sense of humour are involved. That was the poetic world for Blake and that was the one he kept seeing. He always insisted that the spiritual vision had nothing vague or cloudy about it; it was more minutely organized (that’s his phrase) than anything in the physical world. Richler: You once compared enthusiasts of Blake’s work to the readers of mysteries [FS, 7/15]. What did you mean by that? Frye: Well, there is something of a code to be deciphered. You remember Blake used the phrase “Great Code” about the Bible [E274] and I picked that up for my book on the Bible. I think that there was something of the deliberately cryptic quality about his work. He told a very stupid clergyman he was writing to that what could be made explicit to the idiot, meaning his correspondent, was not worth his care.4 Richler: You wrote once that “what Blake demonstrates is the sanity of genius and the madness of the commonplace mind” [FS, 13/20], and it is here that he has something very apposite to say to the twentieth century with its interests in the arts of neurosis and the politics of paranoia. What do you think Blake does have to say to us today? Frye: Well, he has the insistence on the reality of what he calls a spiritual vision, that is, that in the Bible the world is uneasily polarized between a

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heaven and a hell. A hell is something that man creates and lives in most of the time. The heaven is what he ought to be creating and what he ought to be living in all the time. Richler: Do you think that man can perceive anything higher than man? Frye: No. But what he can perceive at the height of human power and human vision is something pretty impressive. Richler: Eliot, I think, said at one point that we have the same respect for Blake’s philosophy as we do for an ingenious piece of homemade furniture.5 What was it about Blake’s philosophy that convinced you completely otherwise? Frye: Well, one thing was Eliot’s essay, which was a most god-forsaken piece of nonsense. Eliot was rolling around in categories which said that Dante took all his ideas from St. Thomas Aquinas, which was where a poet ought to take them—which was nonsense. Whereas, as a matter of fact, Eliot himself is constructing exactly the same piece of bricolage, the same kind of homemade philosophy that Blake was. Richler: Blake viewed the Bible as a unity from Genesis to Revelation. Do you see it in that way? Frye: Oh yes. Richler: I’m going to ask you a very basic question but I think it’s an important one: what is myth? Frye: A myth is a story, the Greek word mythos. That means that what is important is the shape of the story, not its reference to something that really happened thousands of years ago. When you get back there you find it probably didn’t happen at all, or it’s a disguised form of what did happen. Richler: Do you see a function of criticism as being the making of man aware of our mythological conditioning? Frye: Oh, absolutely. The function of criticism is the sense of awareness about words. And we all live inside frameworks of mythology without knowing that we’re doing so and the great contribution that people like Blake make to the reader is to make them aware of that fact. Richler: Do you think that there’s a distinct connection between religion and human creativity?

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Frye: There certainly is, because religion begins with the story of God as a creator, and if God is a creator then man ought to be a creator. And, as Vico says, we only understand what we have made ourselves. Richler: You said at one point that “pattern-making extends over philosophy from Pythagoras to the Renaissance as a kind of intermediate stage between magic and science” [FS, 33/40]. Do you see your own work somewhere in between those two conditions, magic and science, as an attempt to reconcile them as they once were in the early Renaissance? Frye: Well, I guess I am concerned with that kind of schematic universe. What I would say now is a little different. I would not say that it was intermediate between magic and science, I would say that it runs parallel with science in the contemporary world. If you’re taking part in Canadian politics and voting, for example, you’re voting with your imagination and you’re taking part in a mythology and you’ll have to realize that the myths come first and the effects, if there are any effects, come trundling along afterwards. Richler: So you say we’re not aware of the myths at the time but nonetheless we’re tied up in a mythological structure whether we like it or not. Frye: Yes, they tend to be assumptions of which we normally remain unconscious. Richler: What do you think our common myths are now? Frye: Well, I think that the human being has certain concerns, some of which are primary like food and sex and freedom of movement and owning of property. Then he has secondary concerns like his ideologies, his religious beliefs, his political attachments and loyalties and that kind of thing. I think that what has emerged in the later twentieth century is a sudden realization that these primary concerns of living and loving and moving around as you like are in effect primary and must be or the human race is done for. Richler: For your favourite authors, which are Shakespeare, Milton, and certainly Blake, the Bible is really a key source. Frye: Yes. Richler: But do you think that its influence continues to exert itself over contemporary writing?

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Frye: That’s where these unconscious assumptions come in. People write inside the Bible without ever having opened the Bible. Richler: Do you think the myth is dying? I mean, what happens if our culture almost dies? Frye: Then nature will have to try some other species. I mean that quite literally. Man is his myths. Richler: We are our myths. And if we lose them . . . Frye: And if we lose them, we’re lost. We’ve had it. Richler: But does that not defy Blake’s notions of a loving God? Would not a loving God protect us from ourselves? Frye: One hopes so. Richler: Do you think there are any aspects of the Bible that are purely imaginative? Frye: I think the entire Bible is written in essentially mythical and metaphorical language. That applies predominantly to the prophetic and poetic parts of the Old Testament and to the New. Richler: You said once that all your critical work revolves around the Bible [GC, xiv/8]. What did you mean by that? Frye: Well, I don’t know how I could put it more simply. I think that the Bible is the compendium, the microcosm so to speak of the whole verbal structure that we’ve inherited in Western culture. And that everybody’s critical and creative work and words in our culture does revolve around the Bible although with different degrees of awareness of the fact. Richler: Do you think that we’re unusual in the sense that our knowledge and the influence of our Bible really come from a translation of the Bible, as opposed to the Koran, for example, or Buddhist texts or Hindu texts? Does that make a difference? Frye: It does make a difference, certainly. And I think what difference it has made is in making our mythological framework associated with what the New Testament calls the gift of tongues [Acts 2:1–4]; that is, it seems to have an uncanny way of making itself felt through all barriers of culture and language.

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Richler: Blake once said that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.6 Do you think that’s true, do you think that religion still rests in looking after the poor and the humblest and the outcast? Frye: I think so, yes. The whole Biblical context has always been associated with a structure of authority, but actually the key event in the Old Testament is the Exodus, which is a revolutionary rebellion, and the key event in the New Testament is the Resurrection, which is a rebellion against the tyranny of death and hell. Richler: I think you quoted Calvin recently as saying that Revelation, the last book in the Bible, is a work that if it doesn’t find a man mad, it leaves him mad.7 What would you make of that last book? Frye: Well, that says a lot more about Calvin than it does about the Bible. The whole Bible leads up to an apocalyptic vision which separates the world of life from the world of death. Richler: Do you think that there’s a distinct line between literary criticism and social criticism? Frye: No, not a distinct line. Literary criticism keeps drifting into social criticism and out again. The only thing is that literary criticism cannot be reduced entirely to social criticism because literature has its own history and it has the power of communicating to a degree that social conditioning alone will not make possible. Richler: Well, this is something I’d like to pursue next week if we can. Thank you very much for being here. Northrop Frye will return next week to discuss his views on contemporary literature and the modern world. II Richler: Last week we began a discussion with Northrop Frye on literature, Blake, and the Bible. Frye’s views on subjects other than literature are provocative and illuminating. So this week I’d like to discuss a little bit of the modern world. Welcome back, Professor Frye. T.S. Eliot once said that the function of criticism seems to be essentially a problem of order.8 Would you agree with that statement? Frye: I would certainly agree with it. I would extend it a little further

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though and say that every work of literature belongs in a context of literature. And consequently, part of the critic’s job is in trying to expand the work of literature into the framework within which it fits. Richler: So how would you describe the function of the critic in the modern age? Frye: The critic is preeminently the man who expresses the awareness of words, of using words. There can be many types of criticism, such as linguistics and semiotics, with which I have nothing directly to do—other people do them better. But I do feel that the study of literature relates to history and society but that it has its own historical and social categories and that the great mystery about literature, its ability to communicate through vast gaps of time and space and culture, has a lot to do with what the critic’s work is all about. Richler: You’ve been criticized yourself as someone who has remorselessly divorced literature from history, and also described as one of the last great Victorian synthesizers. How do you react to that kind of criticism? Frye: Well, it’s wrong. The Anatomy of Criticism has a historical basis. The historical basis is the first chapter. But the thing is that there is a literary history which is not simply social history or ordinary history with a few dates of authors added; it’s that specifically literary aspect of history that I’ve been trying to bring into my criticism. People who don’t know about it of course assume that it isn’t there. Richler: Do you think that in that case literature becomes a sort of secular religion and the critic a secular priest? Is there any truth in that? Frye: Heavens, no. The attempt to make literature a secular religion would make nonsense of both literature and religion. Richler: Let’s talk about the modern world. What do you think Blake would have made of the world of Einstein and Heisenberg and existentialism? Frye: I don’t think he would have had much difficulty with any of these things. He didn’t like the mechanism which had been set up in the wake of Newton. I don’t know that his quarrel was with Newton himself so much as with the assumption that the world was a machine that God had wound up and left to keep running. But of course you can’t hold that

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view of the universe after you’ve run into relativity and quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle and that kind of thing. I think he could have come to terms with that quite easily. Richler: Do you think that man’s relationship with God changed after we lost the Ptolemaic geocentric universe for the Copernican universe with its vast spaces? Did that change our relationship with God? Frye: Well, it increased the sense of human alienation. Blake of course always maintained that the emotional overtones of the Copernican universe were nonsense, that the essential theatre of human life was still at the centre of the universe and was still the main concern of God; whatever science tells us about the shape of the universe, that doesn’t concern us. Richler: Over your life you’ve really been involved with education primarily. What do you think makes a good teacher today? Frye: I think what makes a good teacher is the ability to make himself as transparent a vehicle as he can for his subject. If he is an opaque personality up there, the students listen to him rather than to what he’s talking about and that’s one way of really betraying your vocation. Richler: But I remember when I was at university the teachers I tend to remember are the ones that did have the great personalities. I certainly remember what they said. Frye: I know, but if you look at the lives of the saints, for example, you’ll discover that the people with the most intense personalities are precisely the people who have forgotten about their egos. Richler: You once said, “For the teacher, the imparting of information is . . . in a context of irony” [GC, xxi/15]. What did you mean by that? Frye: Well, I meant what Socrates meant when he approached the youth of Athens and said, “Look, I don’t know anything but I’m looking for something, will you come and help me look?” He proceeded ironically, that is, with a pretence that he knew nothing. This was not wholly a pretence, but he started the teacher’s strategy in which it is the teacher rather than the student who asks the questions. Richler: During your lifetime you’ve seen an enormous blossoming of a Canadian literature. Who among the modern writers measures up to your classical standards?

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Frye: Oh, all the obvious people, the established people: Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, all the people that you would instinctively think of. Those are the fiction writers; the poets would be the same. Richler: Do you think we’re creating our own myths today? I was watching, with my son I hasten to add, Bambi, and it struck me that there were a lot of mythological elements within a Walt Disney cartoon. Is that true? Frye: Oh yes. Disney films are extremely and explicitly mythological and the thing is that they are not new myths, they are new adaptations of myths that are as ancient as human communication. Richler: You deal primarily with poets, what writers consider the great art. Irving Layton said on this show, in that very chair, that poetry was dead. Is there any truth in that? Frye: I don’t believe he thinks that his poetry is dead, and I’m quite sure it isn’t either. I think that the question of whether, as Edmund Wilson says, verse is a dying technique9 has been raised for fifty or sixty years, partly because of a mistake which my criticism has been trying to correct as well as it can, namely the fallacy that prose is the language of ordinary speech. My students can’t speak prose and they certainly can’t write it but they’re convinced that it is the language of ordinary speech; but it isn’t. Richler: Do you think that poetry has gone back to its roots to some extent in song? With people like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and so on? Frye: I think it’s been very important that poetry, since the ’50s at any rate, has recovered its connection with song and with dance: the notion of reading poetry as a popular exercise in front of the audience, which of course was the basis of all poetry at one time. Back in 1910 it seemed the most unlikely thing in the world that that could ever revive again, but it has. Richler: You’ve been called a quintessentially Canadian critic inasmuch as you make sense out of these vast uncharted spaces. Do you feel a Canadianness about yourself and your work? Frye: Well, I certainly do. I have had chances to operate in the United States. Some of them were very tempting chances and I had to make

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some very agonized decisions. I don’t regret having stayed in Canada because it seems to me that the longer you stay here the more your roots grow into the soil of Canadian problems and predicaments. Things like my religious and political connections don’t have exact American equivalents. I’m very much in a separate country. I feel that increasingly. Richler: You feel that it’s necessary to remain in one place as a teacher to be fully aware of the cultural baggage that your students bring to you. Frye: I think if you’re interested in teaching you can’t make too many moves because it takes a long time to figure out where your students come from and what their assumptions are. But apart from that I think that everything cultural tends to decentralize. There’s something vegetable about poetry and fiction and consequently about literary criticism. You need a limited area and it tends to decentralize. Even in a country as small as Great Britain you have Scottish poets and South Welsh poets and Wessex poets like Hardy and so forth. Richler: In many essays over the years you’ve been concerned with the problem of Canadian identity. How do you react now to free trade, which appears to be the greatest threat to that identity ever? Frye: Yes, I don’t know quite what to say about that. My attitude to free trade was first moot; it was a kind of wait and see attitude. It seemed to me that Canadian culture was too healthy to be snuffed out by absorption from the United States. And to some extent I still feel that culture is something that should be left to privatization. I think that the efforts of some French Canadians to safeguard their language and culture would be much more effective if they didn’t have things like Bill 101 and left it to the people who were genuinely interested in the language.10 Richler: You said once, “Let Quebec go.”11 Do you believe that still? Frye: I’m not sure that I do believe that still, but I think that separatism is something which makes sense in a cultural context. I don’t think it makes any sense in a political or economic context, so I would regret the fact very much if Quebec did go out. I think it would be a terrible disaster. Richler: One final question which I’d like to ask. Time is short for all of us. If we don’t understand the meaning of life, how can we understand the meaning of death? Frye: Oh, we can’t. The meaning of death is something bound up in life

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itself. Life doesn’t make sense without the conception of death, but neither does death make any sense without the conception of life. The two awarenesses go hand in hand all the time that we are conscious of living. Richler: It’s been a great honour having you with us and I thank you very very much. Northrop Frye’s latest book, Words with Power, will be available from Penguin later this year.

107 Stevens and the Value of Literature Conducted 6 February 1990

From “An Interview with Northrop Frye,” a typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 6. First published in Northrop Frye Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 8–13. Graduate student Marylou Miner, who went on to teach at Nipissing University College in North Bay, Ontario, interviewed Frye in his office at Victoria College in connection with her thesis on the function of literature in society and theories of the imagination. In her introduction Miner explained that “I began by briefly introducing myself and explaining my reason for requesting the interview. I said that in my thesis work I wanted to study the function of literature in society in connection with the development of secondary school English curricula. In this regard I wanted to discuss two main topics: one was the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the other was Frye’s work, in particular, his various thoughts on the sciences and the humanities (especially as presented in The Stubborn Structure).”

Miner: I am interested in the “moral vision” in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, particularly in his later lyrics. My first question is to ask you how you see Stevens using Biblical imagery and Biblical allusion in his poems? Frye: It is not easy to say because Wallace Stevens is not like Eliot, a deliberately allusive poet. In fact, he is a poet who avoids allusion, so while I have no doubt that the image in the Palm at the End of the Mind is a garden of Eden allusion, he is careful not to rub it in or to make it obvious that it is. And the same thing with the cloak in The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour. All these things have very distant Biblical allusions. But it is exposing oneself, perhaps, to a type of secondary criticism to say that they are there.

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Miner: It has been suggested that Stevens uses allusion in a variety of ways, that he alludes to himself, and that there is a lot of Keats in Stevens. Do you see some of the Keatsian connections coming from Biblical sources? Frye: Ultimately they do. The Bible is a framework of Western poetry. But, of course, Keats also tended to avoid direct allusion. He would be utterly horrified with people like Milton, Blake, and Browning who were constantly echoing the Bible. That’s one reason why Keats found Milton a rather hostile influence on him and his solution was to turn to Classical allusion, which gave him the same kind of thing but in a different idiom. Stevens just doesn’t like alluding at all. He likes to pretend, at any rate, that his images are autonomous. Miner: We know that poets “lie” and that they can lie in their prose statements as well. When Stevens says that he wasn’t influenced by anyone do you believe him? Frye: No. It is impossible for a poet to write poetry without being totally influenced by the whole tradition of poetry. I can believe him when he says that he doesn’t see any kind of connection with Eliot, that he thinks he does the opposite thing from Eliot. But I don’t believe him when he says he’s free of all influence. That’s nonsense. Miner: The second topic that I would like to discuss with you is your distinction between the sciences and the humanities: your distinction between the levels of thinking, reasoning, and imagination employed in these two different areas. I see a kind of paradox in your interpretation of their similarities and differences. Would you clarify this for me? Frye: It is clear that there are two aspects to the world. There is the purely external and objective aspect which the scientist studies, and there is the emotionally involved area or rather the personally involved universe which is more particularly the habitation of the poet. That is, there is the universe where the quantitative and the measurable take the lead, and with that goes a certain impersonality. Then there is the universe where categories like the beautiful, and things like a sense of humour and so forth, have a function. Psychologically the poet and the scientist will work very similarly. They have to work by imagination and intuition, obviously. But the scientist would have to go on to a kind of impersonal verification of what he is saying, which the poet doesn’t need

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to do. The important thing to remember is that this personally involving imaginative universe, which is another aspect, of course, of the same world which the scientist studies, is not a subjective one. You can’t line them up along the subjective and the objective. There is no such thing as the subject. There is only the historically and socially conditioned individual. And this only comes at the end of a cultural tradition. One thing which is subjective is the dream, and Freud felt that the dream and the myth were the same thing, which is nonsense. Jung took a step further when he talked about a collective unconscious, but Plato said that art was a dream for awakened minds.1 In other words, it’s a collective consciousness. I think that there are two kinds of minds; one is ideological and the other is genuinely imaginative, but that’s another story. Miner: You talk about the myth as being the underlying framework of all of literature. Frye: Yes, the myth being the narrative with a shape. Miner: How do you align that with any kind of moral vision or moral purpose behind literature? Or is there one? Frye: I don’t know about purpose. I rather hold with Kant’s view in The Critique of Judgment that beauty has a lot to do with purposiveness without purpose.2 That is, the snowflake is beautiful; it looks as though it may have been designed by an intelligent creator, but we’ll never arrive at a perspective where that is satisfactory to us. That is to say, it looks purposive and leave it alone. I think that the moral function of the artist is a variable one. The poet’s power of communication exists on two levels. He addresses his own time and he speaks with the moral accent of that particular generation. Shakespeare, for example, spoke of the mystique of the Tudor monarchy behind him in his history plays. But then there is a great mystery about how poets communicate across many centuries of time and space and cultural context. There you have to have something which is on a different level than the ideological one. There is the conditioning which the poet had from his own time. It is impossible to study a major poet on the level of Shakespeare and Dante without realizing that our views of them and why they are great would have been totally unintelligible either to them or to their contemporaries. Miner: You talk about the distinction between concern and detachment in terms of the sciences and the humanities, and that raises some confu-

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sion in the minds of students (of all ages). Would you clarify those two terms for me? Frye: Detachment is one of the rewards of being a conscious being: you can detach yourself from a situation and look at it with enough objectivity to see whether you are acting out of an hysterical stampede or whether you are displaying a conscious attitude towards it. The important thing is that detachment is not at all the same thing as withdrawal. You cannot withdraw from a social situation anyway. But detachment is the essential quality of a concerned being. Miner: So this is where you link concern and detachment? Frye: Yes. Miner: The terms “engagement” and “detachment”—where do they differ and where do they connect? Frye: Engagement is the first decision taken after the detached view of the situation. If you don’t take a detached view, then engagement is simply hysteria, getting on the bandwagon. Of course, that is often trumpeted as a virtue by people who are in a hurry to get you on their bandwagon. And they talk about the virtues of engagement in itself. But the old liberal principle of John Stuart Mill is that you have to permit freedom of thought because it is the only way to eliminate the hysterical or unthought-out liberty of action. Otherwise there is mob rule. Miner: Do you see any situation where censorship of the arts is required or would you suggest a totally liberal approach to even the popular culture of our times? Frye: I draw the line against what is usually called hate literature, that is, something which deliberately churns up an hysterical hatred of a minority group. I think that there is a case for censorship there. Otherwise, censorship is such a self-defeating thing and it is based on a contempt for other peoples’ vision. “I want this play banned because I know it can’t do me any harm, but there are all those people over there who may be corrupted in their morals if they see it.” It is that element of contempt which is so wrong about censorship. Miner: I would like to come back to Stevens for a minute. My concern is with your challenge of continuing to prove the value of literature in society and I like your comment about the fact that literature is not essential

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for the survival of society but that society cannot survive without literature [sic]. I’m suggesting that Wallace Stevens is one of those pivotal poets in the twentieth century who displays the kind of “moral vision” that perhaps can address some of the social concerns you raise in your books. Frye: Well, I find myself continually quoting Wallace Stevens. In fact, when The Great Code came out I was interviewed by Australian television, and they asked me why I quoted Stevens so often.3 I don’t know; it’s just that he happens to say the thing that I want to say at that point. In spite of that idiotic collapse on his deathbed where he went into his fold, I think he is what I would call an intensely Protestant poet. Like Emily Dickinson, he had a faith that he wanted to fight with and not knuckle down under. Miner: Are you thinking of the comments in Peter Brazeau’s Parts of a World about his conversion to Catholicism, which his daughter denies?4 Frye: Yes, that’s right. Miner: Do you see a development in his poetry from his early Sunday Morning to a poem you have already mentioned, The Palm at the End of the Mind, either in spirituality or in any kind of secular moral vision? Frye: There is a kind of sensuousness about the Harmonium poems that gradually turns into something more abstract and austere as he goes on. That doesn’t mean that he gets more didactic; it just means that he seems to be more interested in form than in colour. Miner: Is it possible to suggest a kind of didactic aestheticism in the later Wallace Stevens? Frye: I think if we start with a kind of assumption that poetry should be either didactic or aesthetic, that it should be either a spokesman for ideological concerns or it should be art for art’s sake, then we start with nonsense. All those either/or oppositions are false and you have to get beyond them before you can get to any kind of intelligible position in criticism at all. You can’t have an art of pure poetry and an art of the state. You can’t have a poetry that is purely a didactic spokesman of ideological values—you can but it will be in the ash can in ten years. Miner: Would you expand further upon the role of aesthetics in poetry? In your writings, aesthetics is part of the detachment phase, the objective phase of criticism. And I’m wondering if there is, as there often seems to

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be with you, a paradoxical reversal whereby aesthetics is very much an engaged, concerned feature of literature as well. Frye: Aesthetics to me doesn’t mean a withdrawal from social concerns. It cannot possibly mean that. The whole association of aesthetics with beauty, for example, seems to me a fake criticism because “beauty” turns out to be the most heavily conditioned of all ideological terms. It is what we like at present. I feel that poetry is not a decorative object. It is a social force, but it is not a simple social force. It is a social force with powers and dimensions of communication that ideological statements and ordinary rhetoric don’t provide. Miner: And so the talk of your disciples, or future critics, is to try to determine what precisely that social force is and how it can be conveyed through the study of literature? Frye: You have to begin to distinguish the rhetoric of ideological language from imaginative language, which is the poetic force. Miner: You have spoken to so many audiences, but those of us who are English teachers appreciate the fact that you have addressed us so often as one of your primary audiences. Considering all the messages and advice that you have given in the past, what would you say to us now, in the light of changing educational policies, about our role and function as teachers? Frye: Your role hasn’t changed. It is the same thing I have been saying for the past fifty years. I don’t think that one syllable of all the trends from Dick and Jane to Effective Communication changes anything. I think all of that is an expression of North American anti-intellectualism. The humanists have been fighting a rearguard action to the point of being lost and we have been doing that for centuries. Miner: Some call you a twentieth-century Matthew Arnold. Do you like that comparison? Frye: Except that Matthew Arnold had yellow streaks in him which prevented him from being a proper liberal at times. It’s the streak of cowardice in Arnold that seems to make him a flawed liberal from my point of view. Miner: You said that your advice to English teachers would be what it has always been. Have you essentially said all you want to say about the role and value of literature or is there still more to be said?

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Frye: There is more to be said and one says things as well as one can and hopes that next time one will say it better. Miner: It is hard to imagine Northrop Frye saying it any better. Do you see an evolution in your own vision? Some critics see a change in your perspective from a dichotomized one to a unified one, from one which oscillates between engagement and detachment to one which enjoys a more synthesized relationship. Frye: I have always said that. I have never thought of man as going into the locker room first and then going out to play the game. It’s one and the same thing. Miner: So, when you have spoken of it [engagement and detachment] earlier as a separate process, there has been a paradoxical intention in your statements. Frye: They can be distinguished, but they always have to be essential to one another in a Hegelian dialectic where every notion incorporates its opposite but has to negate its negation.

108 Time Fulfilled Recorded 4 May 1990

From “Beteljesedett idœ,” in Northrop Frye: a biblia igézetében: esszé, prédikáció, interju (Budapest: Hermeneutikai Kutatókzpont, 1995), 38–42; an interview with Tibor Fabiny, translated by János Kenyeres. In his introduction Fabiny explained that, after giving courses on Frye’s major works to students of English at the University of Szeged for roughly a decade, he received a research fellowship at the Frye Centre for a month in 1990. The lecture he refers to below is one he gave on his work in progress, a book on the relationship between Biblical typology and literary symbolism (published as The Lion and the Lamb, 1992). He taped an interview with Frye on 4 May, translated it into Hungarian, and published a shortened, edited version of it; unfortunately the original English is no longer available. Fabiny commented in his introduction that “before visiting Frye, several of his colleagues warned me that I should prepare for the interview with questions as he is not a person who talks a lot: he often gives brief and witty answers and if there is no question, a long silence would follow. It almost happened that way . . .”

Fabiny: Professor Frye, your grand work on the Bible, The Great Code, is just one of your twenty or so books published so far. Is it perhaps the “code” to your life’s work as well? Frye: As a book, it’s of course one among the rest, but it’s true that it is concerned with a topic which I dealt with intensively throughout my life. This book was completed with great difficulty. Fabiny: If you were so much interested in the Bible earlier, why did you write it so late?

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Frye: I was held back because the generally accepted criteria of “expertise” did not quite fit me. Fabiny: In the introduction to the book you write that, in a sense, all your work revolves around the Bible [xiv/8]. Well, typology is not only the central theme, but also the structural principle of The Great Code. Is it an exaggeration to say that your writings on the Bible revolve around typology? Frye: Well, yes, I became interested in typology when I was working on Blake. Typology greatly assisted me in understanding Blake’s Prophecies. Fabiny: Can we say that it is the “central point” of your oeuvre? Frye: There is some truth in this . . . Fabiny: Do you agree with Goppelt’s statement that typology is a pneumatische Betrachtungsweise, that is, a spiritual approach?1 Frye: Yes, Milton also said that in Paradise Lost, and for him, too, spiritual vision had the greatest authority.2 Fabiny: Do you agree that there is a marked difference between allegory and typology, namely, that typology is a figure of speech closely connected to Biblical language, while allegory is the excessive “spiritualization” of the text? Frye: Yes, allegory is prone to move away from the topic. Fabiny: In your works you always talk about “verbal events” in connection with the Bible. What does this mean? Are there any events which are not verbal? Frye: Good question! Yes, there are no events in the Bible which are not verbal. Everything in the Bible comes to us through a verbal form, through words. Biblical events are interpreted events. We have nothing outside the verbal reality. Fabiny: In my lecture I used the phrase that the language of the Bible is the “language of fulfilment.” Do you agree with this statement? Frye: Yes, you have expressed some very interesting ideas about the context in which “fulfilment” appears in the language of the Bible. In my works on Shakespeare and elsewhere I wrote a lot about the fact that

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tragic time is causal time looking into the past, while comic time is directed towards the future and is centred around fulfilment. Comedy is about the filling up of time, its fullness. Think of the source of A Winter’s Tale, Robert Greene’s Pandosto, whose subtitle is “The Triumph of Time.” So the Biblical concept of the fullness of time is akin to the sense of time in comedy. Fabiny: There is perhaps another link between the Bible and Shakespeare, connected with typology in a similar way. It’s as if Shakespeare had also been affected by the Bible’s concept of history based on salvation history. Frye: Yes, Shakespeare shared the idea of Tudor historians, which was later called the “Tudor myth.” In this view, the Tudors were the instruments of divine providence since, as they believed, it was Henry Tudor who put an end to the devastating and bloody Wars of the Roses. It’s not by chance that in the histories we find so many allusions to the story of Cain, the first fratricide, in relation to the Wars of the Roses. At the same time, the Tudor dynasty, the centralized kingdom, is the emblem or type of spiritual freedom. The movement of history shows a lot of analogies to salvation history in Shakespeare as well. Fabiny: Can we say that the projection of salvation history to the world here below is a parody: the various ideological theories of progress eventually end up as parodies of salvation history? And if these parodies fail, as we see these days, doesn’t this invalidate the Biblical concept? Frye: Yes, they are certainly parodies. We see this in the Tudor period as well. Salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) is a valid concept in itself, and what happens in the world is that world history, Weltgeschichte, tries to imitate Heilsgeschichte. Fabiny: My next question concerns the inspiration of the Bible. You have written that you do not like this expression and would rather use the word “revelation.”3 Frye: I do not like the word “inspiration” because it is constantly parroted by fundamentalists. They somehow imagine that the authors of the Bible were living tape recorders and automatically put down in writing what the Holy Spirit whispered into their ears. I have no objection to inspiration if it means the written expression of some sense of enlightenment or internal conviction. I have a problem with inspiration when it is taken as an automatic, infallible way of writing.

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Fabiny: So you don’t agree with the inerrantia, the objective infallibility, of the Bible, as it turns the Bible into an idol. Frye: Exactly! Fabiny: In my lecture yesterday, I mentioned that understanding and reading—to use a Biblical image—are like eating, the “swallowing” of the book: it’s sweet in the mouth but bitter in the stomach. Frye: This is a very important image. The understanding of the word proclaimed, its acquisition and assimilation, are like eating. It’s no accident that this has become closely connected to the eating of the word which has become flesh, to Communion. Fabiny: Oh, yes, I hadn’t thought of that! My next question relates to the relationship between the eye and the ear, which you have often written about [e.g., GC, 116–17/135–7]. In the Bible, the word of God reaches us through the ear—faith comes from hearing. The Hebrew tradition is verbal, whereas the Greek one is visual. In the Biblical tradition, the figurative representation of God is idolatry. You have extensively dealt with Blake, who wrote about the Bible, but thought in terms of visions. Moreover, it seems to me that you also think in a visual way. Your books are full of figures and diagrams . . . Frye: Blake was fully aware of the dangers of idolatry. He used his genius as a painter to talk against idolatry. The problem with the visual representation of God, with sculpture, is that it identifies God with natural or objective things outside us. The Hebrew tradition puts a great emphasis on the voice of the speaking God, which prompts action. At the same time, Blake provides a vision with his painting and poetry, just as Biblical prophecy addresses man through the ear. Both are against idols. Fabiny: Does this mean that Blake uses visuality to fight against the idolatrous use of visuality? Frye: Yes. There is a great difference between the icon and the idol. While the idol is closed, the icon is open. The idol locks up the divine, the numinous, into the objective or natural world, whereas for the icon the divine, the numinous, is always above the objective world. Fabiny: Professor Frye, let me ask you a practical question. You have been teaching young students of literature for about half a century. Should not such abstract things rather be taught to future philosophers or theologians? Are literature majors responsive to these ideas?

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Frye: If I could start again, I would choose literature today as well. You can teach a lot of things through literature. As a young student, I was simply not mature enough biologically to think right at the outset in terms of abstract philosophical or theological concepts. How much do they understand? The work of the teacher is like that of the sower in the parable [Matthew 13:3 ff.; Mark 4:3 ff.; Luke 8:5 ff.]. He sows the seeds, which in some places spring up and bear fruit, while in others they don’t. Fabiny: My last question is absolutely topical. In the past few months, large political changes have occurred in Eastern Europe.4 How do you see these changes, or in a wider sense: how do you envisage the future of the world? Frye: As far as the political changes are concerned, they are almost too good to be true. In history there is perhaps no example of nations wanting to become free with this intensity. Of course, the changes may also bring about significant disadvantages, especially in the economy. I also hear about nationalism, the appearance of skinheads, or the persecution of ethnic minorities. A lot of things may happen in a democracy. People who gather may become a faceless crowd and lose their head. There is no doubt I have fears about the future. But my hopes are much stronger than my fears. Fabiny: Professor Frye, I hope that in a year from now I can show you my home country, Hungary. Thank you very much for the interview.

109 Schools of Criticism (II) Recorded 18 September 1990

From “Northrop Frye in Conversation,” Republika, 46, no. 11–12 (November–December 1990): 48–54. Translated from Serbo-Croatian by Igor Djordjevic. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1990. The interview was conducted during Frye’s visit to Zagreb, 16–19 September 1990, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Zagreb. The interviewers were Ivo Vidan, professor of English at the University of Zagreb, Janja Ciglar~aniñ, professor of English specializing in Canadian Literature, currently chair of the Department of English Literature at the University of Zagreb, and theatrologist Giga Graôan. The interview was translated from English into SerboCroatian with the assistance of Giga Graôan, currently the president of the Association of Croatian Literary Translators; it is reprinted in the second edition of the Serbo-Croatian translation of AC (also the work of Graôan) discussed in no. 50, above. At the time of the interview Yugoslavia still existed, though racked by ethnic tensions; Republika had been founded in 1989 to advocate human rights, democracy, and the avoidance of armed struggle.

Vidan: Professor Frye, today, so many years after publishing your first books, which sent your work in a certain direction, I would be interested to know how you personally view your approach in relation to other approaches of the mid-twentieth century and of the subsequent decades? Frye: The answer is not simple, because after 1957, the year when the Anatomy of Criticism was published, there was a great explosion of critical disciplines; that is to say, of approaches and methods. I think that they are basically of two types: one emphasizes narrative characteristics,

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like Bakhtin with dialogue and the various narrative schools in the United States, and the other is a development more in the direction of rhetorical and analytical techniques (e.g., Derrida and the deconstructionists). I have always been interested in studying literary criticism as what I call an autonomous discipline. By that I don’t mean that I consider criticism separate from anything else, and certainly not from literature; I am referring to studying it by means of its own historical methods. It seems to me that in the real or affected disagreements about critical methods that we see in today’s journals there is a fundamental consensus about the importance of literature and its social function. I still insist on that importance and on that fundamental consensus. Vidan: It seems to me that, on the one hand, your approach is not completely consistent with the criticism later termed Structuralist. On the other hand, you yourself make a distinction in some of your texts between your approach and the so-called mythical or mythological criticism. Yet it still belongs in some ways to those schools. Do you consider this true, or do you think that your position is in fact at a certain distance both from Structuralism and from the mythical approach? Frye: No, I don’t think at all that my position is that distant from them. The word “Structuralism” was a word that I was not aware of before I wrote the Anatomy. Later, they told me that I had in fact written a work about Structuralism. Ten years before that I did not know even of the notion of “myth criticism,” and they later told me that I had written a book on the topic: a study of William Blake. I am a little sceptical of these attempts to reduce critical approaches to schools. That is one way to classify them to make things easier for students, but it sheds a very weak light on their real nature. I do not want to be classified merely as a myth critic in the sense that suggests a study only of comparative mythology, or comparative literature, or comparative religion. In all my texts I insist that literary characters are structurally derived from the gods of mythology, as well as on the historical origin of literature in mythology, which has always been my central interest. Vidan: In fact, the link with Structuralism—if one exists, and you would agree, it seems, that it does exist—is more interesting to me at this moment in the history of criticism. Maybe not so much regarding Structuralism as a group of terminological systems, but rather in the sense of a classification (and you yourself several times used that word). From

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that point of view, a few days ago a connection occurred to me with the neo-Aristotelian approach of the Chicago school in the ’50s—of Crane and Olson—and the way in which phenomena blend into one another, the way in which the material is assembled by a kind of induction. But the question, if you will, relates to the critic’s optical apparatus with which he classifies, arranges, and expresses some sort of coherent interconnection with the material he is studying. Frye: Two approaches exist there. I was writing the Anatomy while Crane was in Toronto. I listened to his lectures and we talked a lot.1 I sent him my early essays that became a part of the Anatomy and he told me that they did not seem at all difficult to him. At that time there was a great rivalry between people like those in the Chicago school and those like me. In the works of the Chicago critics from that period I found many related things. They took the tenets of Formalist criticism in another context. While I was writing the Anatomy, the important thing for me was that the meaning of literature is derived largely from context. But the context can be both internal and external. The internal context had been very thoroughly explored by the so-called New Critics, analytical and rhetorical critics. However, it is as though the external context had been the subject of critics who separated it entirely out of literature, and studied literature as a branch of history or of all kinds of philosophical disciplines. I believed that there was a middle area, the context of a literary work that is at the same time inside literature. Many misunderstood this as an attempt to construct a system; I was not trying to build a system, but rather to establish a context for an individual work that would bring that work closer to other works. Vidan: I would gladly connect what you just said with what I myself have been thinking, that you have also in a way laid the foundation for the later development of your method in other areas. Fairly recently I read Hayden White’s Metahistory and immediately remembered the Anatomy. Although the Anatomy is concerned with literature in the internal sense, its method was obviously very fruitful in historiography, where the categories differ to a large extent, but where the method of thinking and finding interconnections, in fact the creation of a universe of discourse, is to a large extent analogous to it. Frye: Well, this is certainly true about Hayden White—after all, he did write a text about how the first chapter of the Anatomy influenced his his-

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toriographic work.2 There is no question, therefore, that it was useful for him. I do not know how widely it has been accepted by other historians, because, of course, I do not know that field so well. Ciglar-~ani/: Let’s stay a moment with the same basic question. Hayden White talks, for example, about Fredric Jameson’s study The Political Unconscious as a specific yet discernible adoption/adaptation of your Anatomy of Criticism. He particularly points to Jameson’s reliance on your theory of symbols, but also on its—as he puts it—“standing on its own two feet”: its roots in material reality, its transformation, something very similar to Marx’s transformation of the Hegelian dialectic. When one looks at Jameson’s theory of narrativity in The Political Unconscious from that perspective, it does indeed appear as a conversion of your theory, although Jameson recognizes—even explicitly emphasizes— your interest in the question of the community, your understanding of literature and religion as essentially collective social endeavours. I am curious, how do you view such an adoption/adaptation of your theory and hermeneutic by explicitly Marxist or neo-Marxist theorists? Frye: This is precisely what I had in mind when I said earlier that a fundamental consensus does exist among critics about the purpose or function of criticism as a discipline. I consider very wrong the kind of reading of my works, the ones Frederic Jameson would never indulge in, according to which I am working out some kind of construction which is outside of the social world and is moreover completely opposed to that world. Jameson knows very well that I have a social perspective, even though I resist the ideological tendencies of Marxism and other critical schools of thought that are apt sooner or later to adopt something from a kind of reductionism, and thus to convert literature into a branch of something else. Ciglar-~ani/: Now I would like to ask you something on a different topic, with which I am particularly concerned at the moment and on which you have done much work: I mean romance. I myself have tried to apply your theory of romance to the interpretation of Shakespeare’s romances. You have been considered the most prominent theorist of the romantic imagination after Coleridge; you have been called the knightprotector of romance, its Prospero. It is evident that your literary and theoretical insights distinctively privilege romance, and that in your conception of literature romance is one of the central, if not the very central mythos. Why is this?

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Frye: You remember that in the first chapter of the Anatomy I suggested that the mythological gods, who are by definition able to do whatever they wish, were the model for the heroes of romance, who are able to do what normal people cannot and whose actions constantly resemble the actions of the gods even though they are human beings in human situations. From there we move to the titanic characters of exaggerated dimensions like Lear or Macbeth, who nevertheless act in a human milieu. And thence, perhaps, to people like Leopold Bloom, or Prince Myshkin, or Emma Bovary, whose archetypal meaning is equal but in a different social context. It was particularly important for me that a critic should not consider romance, due to its peculiar historical position, an infantile form of literature that people ought to outgrow as soon as possible. While I was working on the Anatomy the great success of Tolkien’s books convinced me that people would not do this after all. That is one of the reasons why I devoted so much space to romance. Of course, I wrote with equal interest about, let’s say, realistic satire, but that had less influence. Ciglar-~ani/: In its original shape, so to speak, in a specific historical period, romance had the status of a high mimetic mode. In its later history romance suffered a considerable downward displacement, a move from a high to a low mimetic mode. Today it has been adopted as a generic model of types of trivial literature: stories about the Wild West, crime stories, TV melodramas—you talk about this yourself—and similar subliterary genres. In your opinion, what was the main reason for, or what circumstances or conditions of the social context could have influenced, such a downward displacement of romance? Can you predict a cyclical return, a return of romance to its original state in the high mimetic mode? Frye: I’ve already mentioned Tolkien, but there is also the great popularity of science fiction. In the ’50s I saw that science fiction would be one of the main forms of popular romance, and that was what happened. From a kind of technological romance of the type written by Jules Verne and others, it transformed itself into a philosophical form of the type practised by Lucian. I think that all the main literary genres take on popular formulaic forms that are easy to read and to sell. For example, the pastoral is becoming in the United States—or rather, it has already become, a generation ago—the story of the Wild West that is concerned with the simplified world of animals, etc., which has always

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been a part of the pastoral tradition. I think that the place of such romance in Walter Scott is often obscured by the fact that people do not realize how his works are formulaic, and that he developed a formulaic type that was perfectly suited to the Italian opera of the nineteenth century,3 but which did not have much influence on the other types of mimetic narrative. Ciglar-~ani/: One more question related to romance. Towards the end of his career, Shakespeare changed dramatic genres and more conspicuously turned to romance. How do you explain this? Frye: I think that Shakespeare always instinctively stayed with the popular theatre. He always avoided court theatre—or, if he did not avoid it, at least he did not nurture it in the way that, for example, Ben Jonson did. I think that a part of his instinct for the popular audience led him to get increasingly closer to the type of drama that is popular not in the sense that it gives the audience what it expects, but popular in the sense of simplicity, the wellspring of the theatric experience. Enchanted islands, Calibans, sprites like Ariel, etc.—all of these are the absolute foundation of the dramatic experience. I once said, I think it was forty or fifty years ago, that if the archaeologists ever unearth a civilization in which drama flowered, maybe they won’t find any plays like Oedipus or Othello in it, but there will almost certainly be plays like Pericles or The Winter’s Tale.4 Vidan: A few years ago I had a lot of fun at a waterpolo match; I sat beside a great expert, but the man who sat beside him on the other side kept explaining the course of the game to him. I would not like to find myself in the same position in relation to you, but I would like to tell you something that I discovered on the various levels of your opus . . . . Only very recently did it become clear to me that the four essays that make up the Anatomy of Criticism in fact talk about four aspects of the same thing and that one should consider all four together. And it is perhaps precisely this, from the viewpoint of its influence on criticism, that is one of the most productive things in the Anatomy—that coexistence, the simultaneity of aspects. Or, something that I myself always strive to achieve— the unity of narrative progression and stasis, what you, I think, call the thematic, the dianoia. This became abundantly clear to me after I read a short text about Blake which you contributed to a collection about myth.5 But in your book about the Bible, The Great Code, I was particularly fasci-

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nated by the polysemy of words. I think that the wealth that you reveal in some words is exceptionally inspiring, but it reminds me at the same time of approaches that are very far from yours. For example, what is today called poststructuralism, deconstruction, in fact is very close to what you do, but, naturally, without that systematic overview of the field that is your characteristic. You already said something about this at the beginning of this conversation, but have you perhaps in more recent times taken a look at the state of the battlefield? Frye: I’m afraid that the answer to your last question is in fact “no.” I have not dealt with that in detail. I read Derrida with great admiration. There is no question in my mind about his quality as a thinker or his critical strength. It seems to me that deconstruction as a movement is more easily exhausted simply because of its tendency to disintegrate the analytical approach. But when Derrida talks about the various meanings of the word pharmakos, the scapegoat, in Plato, for example, I am unreservedly on his side, because I know that it is precisely this that a critic ought to do with a text.6 The same thing happens when in Wallace Stevens I discover the line “the imperfect is our paradise”—here I immediately understand that a paradox is involved between the word “imperfect” in the negative sense, in the sense of “something less than perfect,” and “imperfect” in the sense of openness, of continuity.7 That kind of polysemy, I think, is imbedded in the whole conception of figurative language. The critic cannot deal with literature unless he has at least some idea about the different viewpoints that can be gathered around any critical theme, exemplified, among other ways, by the different referential contexts of the same word. Vidan: But still, it seems to me that the majority of your texts that I have read rarely deal with questions of discourse—in other words, with the insistence on the value of the word, and its part in the tone of the utterance. The grand scheme, mutual links, the establishment of context— yes; but there is no mention of the individuality of words that in fact creates the relation to the object of which one speaks, that creates tone. Did you consider this as something secondary, something that belongs to rhetoric? It seems to me, therefore, that here you did not enter into an important area—you, who have rarely left out any important areas. Frye: Well, I tend to leave out what I think other critics do better, or for which they have a greater interest.

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Vidan: A moment ago I was referring to the internal approach, as in the New Critics, and even in stylistic criticism like that of Spitzer.8 You did not concern yourself with these things, so one gets the impression that for a critic what is important is the broad scheme that puts a text in a certain sequence. For example, a moment ago you mentioned the pharmakos: you are primarily interested in discovering that type in various works, and that is important. But the role of the pharmakos in a given text is less important for you. Frye: I think that this is due to the fact that linguistic and semiotic techniques developed to a large extent after I had already shaped my approach. It also has to do with my belief that there are others who are better prepared for that work. I think that the road forks in two directions: in the one that leads toward linguistic and semiotic analysis, the differences between the genres are faint, and it is very difficult to distinguish a critical work from a literary, philosophical, or historical one, because all of these are purely structures of words. I took the other path and thought about the practical, common-sense distinction between Shelley and Keats, who are poets but not philosophers, and Kant and Hegel, who are philosophers but not poets. This was a conscious act on my part to avoid entering an area for which I was very poorly prepared. But the fact that I have left it out to a certain extent from my texts reveals my trust in the critics who did concern themselves with it, rather than my holding something against them or my denial of their work. Ciglar-~ani/: As you just said, a man writes most often about what he believes he writes well—and you write brilliantly about a great number of things; you open new perspectives and points of view. Of course, a man writes most often about what particularly attracts him for some reason. Speaking of the writers from the English literary tradition about whom you write most often, it seems that here one can discern your own version of the English literary canon. Your attention has been particularly arrested by three English poets about whom you speak with great affinity, even passion, and about whose works you offer, one would say, almost visionary insights. I am referring to William Blake, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. Could you tell us something more specific about that special English canon of yours? Frye: It is difficult to explain Shakespeare beyond the fact that he is hard to avoid for anyone who deals with English literature. I lived in my cul-

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tural environment—that is to say, among nonconformist Protestants in Canada—and just when I should have entered the conventional phase of rebellion and rejection, I encountered Blake and discovered that he found in such an environment more imaginative sense than I could have dreamed possible. My environment and my contact with it became completely clear to me, and Blake made of me a person who will maybe have something to say, perhaps what makes him different from others. That is how I got deeply immersed in the study of Blake. In the meantime I tried to teach students about Milton, so that the two of them formed the whole of one interest. I remember that as a student I had to write a seminar paper on Blake’s poem about Milton. In those days I had the very bad habit of writing my papers the night before I had to deliver them; at three-thirty in the morning things really started to turn around for me, and I found myself in a completely new world. Gra2an: While we are on the subject of Shakespeare, the following question seems natural: in your opinion, how does the literary criticism on the Bard relate to live theatrical practice? Frye: At the time when I began to be interested in Shakespeare’s plays, poetry was pretty much buried in books. There was a chasm between the works of experts and theatrical performances. An acting company would take the Globe edition and simply throw out what they didn’t understand. The result would be more or less Shakespeare, but not what an expert would call a genuine text. Since then both sides have got better. Actors are becoming more intelligent and they really want to know what words mean. And the experts have realized that Shakespeare’s texts are a lot less monolithic, a lot less bookish, than they thought them to be, so that there are, let’s say, Quarto and Folio editions—thus, thanks to the flexibility of the text, there has been a rapprochement between what the experts have talked about and what the performers have done. Gra2an: Can you be more specific about the Canadian practice of performing Shakespeare? Frye: The main venue for Shakespeare performances is Stratford, Ontario. I have often given lectures there about his plays, and encountered very lively reactions by the actors. It seems that my comments were genuinely helpful to them. That is how I once again came to the conclusion that the theoretical and the practical approaches to Shakespeare complement each other very well.

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Ciglar-~ani/: Just one more short question. Someone once said that the best thing about advice is that one does not have to take it. However, I would be very grateful for any advice you may have about how to teach English literature. Professor Frye, what would you, therefore, recommend to those who teach literature? Frye: Well, at the ungrateful age of seventy-nine I still hold a seminar on the mythology of the Bible. I once used to say, what was certainly true then but is today somewhat less so, that I do not believe in a single word I say until I try it out on a group of students. I have always considered that my teaching and my writing are interconnected and that teaching is a sufficiently dramatic performance to be considered an independent literary form. And because the essay is also a literary genre, those two forms are a kind of double prism—bifocal, so to speak. Vidan: I was very excited when I discovered some years ago that only you and one other great critic have dealt with a concept and a form that modern criticism virtually has not even touched—Menippean satire. Both you and Bakhtin, in totally different contexts of thought, have called our attention to that peculiar idea that is so helpful when dealing with the literature of the twentieth century.9 It is so exciting to see two spirits who do not even know each other, but who illuminate the horizon for the rest of us. But that is perhaps one of the great pleasures that comes from reading great criticism. Well, if I may say so, in the name of very many readers, thank you for it.

110 Cultural Identity in Canada Conducted 27 November 1990

From “Interview with Carl Mollins,” Northrop Frye Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 1–8. Dated by Mollins’s prefatory remarks. Portions of the interview were reprinted as “Glimpses of a Boundless Mind” in Maclean’s, 104 (4 February 1991): 51. Carl Mollins, executive editor of Maclean’s, interviewed Frye in his Toronto home eight weeks before his death.

Mollins: In the preface to The Bush Garden (1971), you talk somewhat despairingly of Canada’s seeming to be on the verge of disintegration, but say that having multiple cultural identities is not necessarily irreconcilable with national unity. Do you feel more intensely now than you did twenty years ago that the country is in trouble as a unit? Frye: Well, I have said in another speech that if a sculptor were to make a statue of a patriotic Canadian, he would depict somebody holding his breath and crossing his fingers.1 In other words, there has never been a time when Canada has not thought in terms of disintegration. And why don’t I extend myself on this point? It’s quite complex. I think that Confederation was by no means an ignoble achievement. It was a remarkable achievement, but its great disadvantage was that it was culturally impoverished and it was treated largely as a British conquest in which the French and the indigenous people were sort of cute cultural variations on the pattern. And they made promises to the Indians, but it was subconsciously assumed that they would soon be extinct or assimilated anyway so it didn’t matter what was promised them. And, on that basis, of course, you can have only a very primitive culture. I think of culture as having different areas of expression. In the first

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place, there is a life-style culture—the British have pubs and the French have bistros and the Germans have Bierstuben and so forth—and there are specific ways of eating and drinking and socializing, and making one community different from another. And then, secondly, there is a culture of a shared tradition, largely through language, and through an awareness of one’s history. Then, thirdly, there is culture in a more specific sense—the production of literature, painting, and films, and so forth. Now Canada had, after Confederation, no distinctive life style really. The French Canadians preserved some sense of shared heritage, but the creative part of culture was still impoverished and second-rate. I think that what happened after 1945, the end of the Second World War, was a growing awareness of the fact that Canada needed a kind of reconfederation on a better cultural basis. One reason for that was the immense increase in immigration into the urban centres as distinct from the rural ones. Another was the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, which secularized Quebec. And another was the growth of television and jetplane travel and satellite communication, which made the immense geographical difficulties in Canada less obvious. I think I need to add, as part of that, that when Lenin organized the Russian revolution, he assumed that the sense of cultural identity was out of date and that it didn’t matter whether the Lithuanians were hitched to the Soviet Union or to Germany or by themselves, because everybody would pitch in to become the proletariat of a new civilization altogether. I think that Lenin confused the cultural identity of community with nationalism, and that is why, as cultural identities prove Lenin wrong one after the other and reassert themselves all over Europe, there goes along with that the increasing danger of nationalism revived. To some extent that’s happened in Canada, too. Mollins: So Canada is just part of a larger recognition that nationalism is not enough, that cultural identity . . . ? Frye: No, that nationalism is the parody of the reality of cultural identity. I was down in Moncton, New Brunswick, where I had all my elementary public school and high school. I was talking at the University of Moncton, and I said that if you say that a man is a New Brunswicker, that tells you nothing except that he lives in New Brunswick. But if you use words like “Maritimer” or “Acadian,” you are telling a great deal more about the historical heritage that he brings with him and the life style he belongs to, and so forth. Quebec feels the same need, certainly,

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but Quebec is a cultural revolution managed, and therefore bungled, by politicians. Mollins: You have said that assimilating identity to unity leads to cultural nationalism, but assimilating unity to identity leads to provincial isolation or separatism [BG, iii; C, 414]. Now that suggests that the only answer, assuming that anyone wants to retain a nation called Canada, is to somehow assimilate the various identities across Canada into a unity. But what form would this take? Frye: Well, that’s what I meant by reconfederation. I think that the natural economic tendencies in the world are to unite and form bigger and bigger units. Canada is now in the middle of the world, with the United States on the south, the Soviet Union on the north, the Common Market on the east, and Japan, China, Korea on the west. Of those four powers, two—the Soviet Union and the Common Market—are trying to form what are essentially cultural units. That means that they are uniting economically but allowing each division to have its own autonomy culturally. Maggie Thatcher put herself in a rather isolated position by insisting that the two things are the same thing, that economic unity would lead to the dissolution of the distinctive British culture. I don’t think that’s true. And the same thing is working out for the Soviet Union in a much more unpredictable form. Mollins: So that perhaps those who say that Canada ought to give up any attempt to achieve a national culture or political unity, and instead break the system down and rebuild it on the basis of an economy, would be going in the right direction? Or is it too late, do you think? Or does it matter? Frye: Well, I think that if I were living and I were saying this in Quebec, I would be a strong federalist, because I think that Quebec is a political unity and, therefore, a province like other provinces. On the other hand, I think that French-speaking Canada is a tremendous cultural force in its own right. And I think that a reunited Canada is the inevitable context for Quebec because of the tendency of the economy to unite. Mollins: So perhaps there was some instinctive recognition of this in the government having set up this nonpolitical forum? Frye: You mean the Keith Spicer outfit.2 Yes, well, I think that is the job he’s been assigned to look into. To me, the impressive thing about Meech

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Lake was not that it failed—it was set up in such a way that it couldn’t possibly have succeeded—what was impressive was that it so nearly did succeed. The Québécois were told to interpret Meech Lake as the rejection of French Canada by English Canada. Actually, it was the exact opposite. It was an intense desire to keep French Canada within the Canadian unity. That was what was really impressive to me about Meech Lake.3 Mollins: Where does the artist, where does the writer come in on this? Frye: Well, culture, in the specific sense of the creative people, has something vegetable about it. It tends to decentralize and localize—in other words, identify with these cultural units of society. And if somebody in a post-Confederation period says, “Now we’re a new nation, namely Canada, and I’m going to be a Canadian and write Canadian poetry and a great Canadian novel,” what he’s going to produce is blither. What happens is that, whenever there’s a minority, the feeling of cultural identity grows. Oppress the blacks in nineteenth-century United States and they revolutionize music. You ignore the Eskimos and they turn out to be a nation of tremendous creative genius in sculpture and painting. And you treat the French Canadians as a minority and they produce a literature of great intensity and power. And then, finally, the last thing anybody would believe happens: English Canada comes to life and produces a specific culture that’s respected and studied and regarded with great admiration all over the world. Mollins: Now how do you explain that? They are also behaving as a minority? Frye: They are a minority in their own context, which is a North American one. And because they feel that, it throws them back on the sense of cultural identity. The present feeling of cultural identity of English Canada is at the opposite extreme from the “Maple Leaf Forever” type of British Canada. You can’t get a culture out of that. Mollins: So if you were a prophet—and I guess that, as a critic, you are into telling us or helping us to understand what is happening—where would you see Canada heading, and where would you like it to head? Do you think it is worth preserving, first of all? Frye: Oh, I do. I think it gives every part of Canada a context that they could not have in any other respect. And, being surrounded as it is with

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a great power like the United States, it has simply become what it was a century ago—a place for commodity products, with nothing left but beaver pelts and softwood forests and soldiers to fight in other people’s armies. Mollins: And it is important to the world to have an alternative to what you have called “mercantilist whiggery”? Frye: Well, I think that Canada is a nation that has derived what profit it has derived largely from being exploited by others. I think Canada can do better than that. Mollins: You were born in Quebec and raised in Moncton and lived briefly on the prairies, and yet your scholarship is without boundaries. Do you ever consider whether you would have done what you have done had you stayed at Oxford, for example, or had you been working at Princeton? Is there anything about your own experience and your own location that has made your work any different? Frye: Well, I have often thought of that. I’ve thought about it a great deal. I am convinced that if I had gone to Harvard or Princeton or Oxford or Chicago—mind you, I could have gone to all those places—what I would have produced would have been quite different in tone and in context. So, I became a Canadian scholar in the same way that Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro have become Canadian writers— through not trying to be Canadians but simply writing about what they know. Mollins: But there was nothing in particular in your experiences that made you think in the terms that you have, to discover or recognize what there is that is common to our literature and to our culture? Frye: Well, science and scholarship as such have no boundaries. I think the creative arts do have boundaries. You can’t take Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro and interchange them. They have to be where they are in order to be what they are. At the same time, creative culture is infinitely porous. It absorbs influences from all over the world. That’s what differentiates a genuine culture from nationalism. A few weeks ago, I was travelling on a train from Zagreb in Croatia to Ljubljana in Slovenia—the distance of about from here to Kingston—but when I got off the train I was in Slovenia, which speaks a different language from Croatia, has been a rather reluctant part of Yugoslavia, and before that was a

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much more reluctant part of Austro-Hungary. I thought, well, this is what a culture is—something that hangs on to its identity through centuries of being overlooked and discriminated against and infiltrated by foreign conquests and so forth. But why was I in Slovenia? Because the University of Ljubljana had decided to open a school of Canadian studies. So that’s it, you see: they are Slovenians and they hang on to that particular coherence that gives them their own social reality, but they are open to influences from all over the world, even Canada. Mollins: Is that one of the languages that your Great Code is in? Frye: Well, it’s only been translated into what is called Serbo-Croatian, a kind of compromise language of the two biggest units. Mollins: When I was at the University of Toronto in the early 1950s, there were you and Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan who were all concerned in the broadest sense with communication, and I have often wondered whether this was mutually stimulating, or whether it was coincidence? Frye: I don’t think it was coincidence, but it wasn’t mutually stimulating either. It’s very natural for a country with the physical difficulties of communication that Canada had fifty years ago to be passionately interested in the theory of communication. So it is not surprising that the three of us were all attracted to that same general theme. But we came from such different backgrounds and had such very different temperaments that we all worked independently of one another. Mollins: Although I suppose McLuhan has certainly acknowledged his debt to Innis and to you, I think? Frye: Well to Innis, not to me [laughing]. I suspect a great deal of that—I think that’s something to give the critics to play with. Innis was a man who worked like a vacuum cleaner, picking up books everywhere, and he saw something very distinctive in McLuhan, and so he asked McLuhan for autographs, and they did exchange some correspondence. There was a bit of a mixture there. I think McLuhan was just a coming person and, with no special reputation at that time, was very flattered by this (as he should have been), and the result was that you get a rather tenuous Innis–McLuhan link. But I don’t really see a great deal of influence from Innis on McLuhan.

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Mollins: There is something in each of you—the use of the aphorism, the cryptic utterance which compels a reader to dwell upon a sentence. Frye: It is true that both McLuhan and I are rather discontinuous, mosaic writers of very different kinds. It’s less true of Innis, although actually that book that Christian got out, The Idea File of Innis,4 does indicate that he thought aphoristically. That’s certainly true of me. I keep notebooks and write aphoristically, and ninety-five per cent of the work I do is in putting them out on the line, and then you have continuous rhythm. Mollins: Is that a consequence of our “disintegrated culture”? Frye: I’m not quite sure what it is. Maybe it’s the result of living in a country with a railway where you have a lot of stops. Mollins: If you were required to describe yourself in one word—on your passport, for example—are you a critic, a scholar, a teacher, a philosopher? In your own view, what is the most important thing that you are? Frye: I suppose I’m all those things. I don’t know if there really is a word for the kind of thing I am, although what I am is not all that uncommon. Newspapers often use the term “analyst.” I suppose “critic” comes closest to being what I am, although I am a critic who recognizes no boundaries between criticizing that particular novel and criticizing Meech Lake and the future of Canada. Mollins: You still teach regularly? Frye: Yes. I should be teaching right now but I’ve had a bit of a setback in health, but I’m still teaching one course. It’s an undergraduate course— I’ve always preferred to teach undergraduates—symbolism and typology of the Bible. Mollins: Is it of any importance which translation of the Bible is used, or is it significant that the King James Bible coincides roughly with one of the great periods that you have identified, namely, the early 1600s? Frye: I think it coincides in two ways. In the first place, it came at that tremendous period of Baroque brilliance, the period of Shakespeare and Donne and Spenser and the rest. The other is that the King James Bible of 1611 and the Shakespeare Folio of 1623 are both essentially written for the ear rather than for the eye. The King James Bible was appointed to be

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read in churches. That was the reason for translating it. It wasn’t important for people to read it at home, but the thing that was authorized about it was that it was the Bible to be read aloud in churches. The translators’ scholarship was often at fault, but their sense of the spoken word and the rhythm of the spoken word was pretty accurate. Naturally, so was Shakespeare’s, because everything he wrote had to be spoken by somebody else across the stage. Of course, since 1611 many more manuscripts have grown up with the tremendous advances in scholarly knowledge about what Hebrews and Greeks meant when they said what they said. That’s why there has been the steady series of revised versions. But the 1611 held its ground as a work of literature. It really got in people’s minds and stayed there. Mollins: You say in the introduction to Words with Power—I’ll just look at the words here . . . Frye: I haven’t seen that book myself yet, incidentally. Mollins: Oh, really? You say, “It was a disappointment to find this book beginning to sound like an initial (or a genuine) farewell tour” [xii]. You mean, I take it, on this subject. Frye: Well, yes. Remember how Adelina Patti, the nineteenth-century operatic singer, used to make a career of farewell tours. [laughter]

111 The Final Interview Conducted 29 November 1990

From “Northrop Frye: The Final Interview,” Indirections, 18 (September 1993): 32–7, supplemented by an unpublished section from Yan’s original transcript, here placed between braces. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Interviewer Peter M. Yan notes that “according to Jane Widdicombe, Frye’s secretary and executrix, this is the final interview by Dr. Northrop Frye [who died 23 January 1991]. He granted me an interview because I was writing for the Varsity, an undergraduate newspaper; undergraduates and nonspecialized, lay public were Frye’s favourite and most important audience.” In the event the Varsity decided not to run the interview; it was published later in Indirections, a magazine put out by the Ontario College of Teachers of English. Yan went on to become a high-school teacher.

Yan: I want to talk about education because there is so much teacherbashing going on right now. You mention that a theory of literature should lead to a theory of education because a theory of literature will tell you indirectly what kind of books to read. In your theory of literature what would be your implied theory of education? Frye: It’s pretty complicated. I have written several books on the theory of education, what I would consider the fight from the beginning to the end for the central importance of the humanities in education, and within the humanities for the central importance of poetry, going out from poetry to literary prose. So much teaching of English backs into it the wrong way: starting out by trying to write various forms of applied prose and often not getting to poetry at all. Yan: In your work you often refer to Aristotle’s four causes.1 Is there a

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correspondence between the four causes of literature and education? If the efficient cause is the writer, and the material cause is his life experiences, what are the formal and final causes of literature? Frye: The formal cause is the shape of the poem he produces and the final cause is the culture to which it contributes. Yan: Does the writer define that culture and decide what the final cause would be? Frye: Oh, he doesn’t decide—he inherits it. He has no choice in the matter. Yan: The writer inherits it from the work of previous poets? Frye: Just from being what he is: the fact that he is going to write in his own language with the previous poets in that language as his models. Yan: I was trying to see if there is a link between the causes of literature and the causes of the educational process. What do you think are the four causes in the educational process? Frye: I don’t know—I suppose the efficient cause of education is teaching, the material cause is the books read and the subjects studied in education, the formal cause would be the educated man, and the final cause is the vision of which education is a part. Yan: In answer to the critics reading Fearful Symmetry who said they couldn’t tell where you started and ended and where Blake started and ended, you mentioned that was a good thing because when teaching Blake the only person who deserved to be in the room was Blake and the students.2 Who is in the room or what is happening in the room when you teach the Bible and literature? Frye: Well, I suppose it is the same general principle. It is the vision which constitutes the Bible which is the one presence in the room. But you put it in orthodox terms by saying only the presence of Jesus Christ is in the room. That suggests a dogmatic approach, an attachment or belief not really relevant. If I’m teaching Blake I don’t necessarily believe in Blake. It’s the same thing here. I wouldn’t want that misunderstanding to crop up. But we’re looking at the same thing: the vision which constitutes the Bible is the presence. Yan: I asked you a question a long time ago and I was hoping you would

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elaborate on it now. In the age of gods the important thing was the story, then the concentration was on the poet, the writer. And now we seem to be in an age where all the importance is laid upon the reader. I asked you if there was a next step. You said, in a cryptic remark, “the reader’s spirit.” What did you mean by that? Frye: Well, I think that what follows the reader as hero is the consensus magisterium: the generally agreed reaction of critics. I think that there is an underlying consensus among most first-rate critics today. But of course one couldn’t make that an infallible source of knowledge or anything like that. It’s just that the hero is a hero not only because he hacks up people but because he is part of an army, and the poet becomes a part of the vision of poetry, of the tradition of poetry, and the reader is a hero because he is a part of the body of instructed and intelligent readers of goodwill. Yan: You mentioned vision. Does the vision or imagination of the writers of the Bible differ from the writers of literature? Frye: There is no difference. Yan: I ask that because in Words with Power I was surprised when you wrote that in terms of a final cause or a program of action or the myths we live by, even Shakespeare didn’t go as far as the Bible does in showing what we should be doing [117]. Frye: I’m trying to distinguish the sacred book, the Bible, from secular literature. That literature is written in the imaginative language of myth and metaphor, but it doesn’t provide a model to adopt as a way of life, whereas the object of the writers of the Gospels writing about Jesus was the imitation of Christ, in the sense that they were telling a story just as the writers of literature tell a story. But the particular story they told was the one that they wanted to make a model of the life of the person reading it. {Yan: I’d like to turn to criticism for a second. What happens if we apply your critical principles to your own work: what would show forth? what myths and metaphors would appear? Frye: Everything I write is a manifestation of my critical principles. Yan: But what myths would we find? In Words with Power you showed how each section was informed by the myths of Adonis, Hermes,

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Prometheus, and Eros. What other myths would we find structuring your work? Frye: I guess there are other forms and structures. I don’t know the entire geography of the imaginative world; if I did criticism would stop with me. What I was investigating was one critical conception, the axis mundi, and looking at its aspects of ascent and descent, above and below.} Yan: In the introduction to Words with Power, you mention that the wrong thing to do is to keep prodding the educational bureaucracy [xx]. What can you say to a student who becomes depressed after being caught in a processed education? Frye: Well, they are [being processed]. There is no easy answer to that. I think the basis of that is quantitative. There are just too many students and too few teachers. There are some students who want to be processed and other students who want to flow through school and not have anything much happen to them. It seems to me it has to be, to some degree, up to the students because teaching does not work by magic. There has to be some kind of effort on the part of the student to find out what there is that he wants to know and is still lacking from what he is getting. Yan: You edited two works on literature, The Practical Imagination and Literature: Uses of the Imagination.3 Have they had the effect you wanted? Are the teachers grounded enough in literary theory to use them? Frye: That’s the trouble. There were a lot of teachers who were very enthusiastic about them but there aren’t enough good teachers in the country. Some of the publishers thought they would make more money and make it faster by going back to the old hodgepodge textbooks that they had. Yan: Can criticism guide education? Can we start teaching it as early as kindergarten? Frye: I imagine that the world of explanation is a very limited one at the kindergarten level. It’s a matter of getting youngsters to read things and see things for themselves, tell their own stories, paint their own pictures, and so forth. And then as they get older they get more and more of the sense of the rationale behind this. Yan: You said that the problem with teaching is that teachers themselves

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aren’t aware of their own social conditioning. How can they teach students to be aware if they themselves aren’t? Frye: You can teach what you don’t know, or at least you can teach what you are not aware of knowing because you don’t know anything else. Yan: So, that’s where understanding starts, in misunderstanding? Frye: Yes. I think I quoted a woman writer in Winnipeg as saying that a lot of teachers are attracted to teaching because it gives them a captive audience to whom they can hand over their certainties. Everybody has had teachers like that and everybody knows there are no certainties of that kind. You just get a handful of what really amount to prejudices and find it easier to hand it on to young people who can’t talk back.

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Appendix A Other Films Featuring Northrop Frye

These films do not include an interviewer, but present Frye talking, presumably in response to questions.

Fearful Symmetry: Northrop Frye Looks at the World. Directed by Jon Slan and released in 1969. Frye speaks, juxtaposed with images of the Vietnam War and other events. Journey without Arrival: A Personal Point of View from Northrop Frye. Directed by Vincent Tovell as part of the series “Images of Canada” for CBC Television. Produced 1975, broadcast 6 April 1976. For a transcript of Frye’s words see C, 466–71. The Originals: Portraits in the First Person: Northrop Frye. Produced by Moses Znaimer for his series “The Originals.” Filmed 5 April 1989 in St. James’s Cathedral and broadcast on City TV later in 1989. Spirit Connection, year 3, program 6. Film of Frye made 1 June 1990 for the United Church’s series Spirit Connection, executive producer Shane Chadder. Seen on Vision TV, 5 November 1990.

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Appendix B Interviews Which Led To Discursive Articles

These are followed, when possible, by the reference number in Robert D. Denham’s Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography, where a brief summary may be found.

1 November 1949: Interview with Aileen Fritz “Lazy Author at Vic,” Varsity, 2 November 1949, 1 [D82] 1950: Interview with Dorothy Howarth “Professor of English Abhors Horses, Tales of $5 ‘Millionaires,’” Toronto Telegram, 25 March 1950, 39 [P95] 1951: Interview with Margaret World “Profs Away,” Acta Victoriana, November 1951, 11–12 [P170] 1952: Interview with Pearl Parnes “Campus Profile: Professor Northrop Frye,” Varsity, 21 February 1952, 4 [P132] 1971: Interview with Jean Kappell and Beverley Geary “Soap Tales Cling to Classic Plots,” Dayton Daily News, 15 December 1971, 25 [P100] 5 May 1973: Interview with John Ayre “The Mythological Universe of Northrop Frye,” Saturday Night, 88 (May 1973): 19–24 [L30] 20 October 1975: Interview with Blake Kirby “Frye: Seeking the Canadian Rainbow’s End,” Globe and Mail, 6 April 1976, 15 [P101] 4 November 1975: Interview with Richard Kostelanetz “The Literature Professors’ Literature Professor,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 17 (Fall 1978): 425–42 [L278]. Rpt. in his Three Canadian Geniuses:

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Glenn Gould, Marshall McLuhan, Northrop Frye (Toronto: Colombo, 2001) 23 February 1977: Interview with Harvey Schachter “Let Quebec Go: Professor,” Toronto Star, 3 March 1977, B5 [P139] 15 October 1977: Interview with Daniel Stoffman “Critic Claims Media Built René’s Image,” Toronto Star, 17 October 1977, A2 [P148] 25 May 1978: Interview with Frank Jones “To Frye Fame Is No Fortune,” Toronto Star, 28 May 1978, D7 [P98] 26 January 1978: Interview with Judith Finlayson “The Fearful Shyness of Northrop Frye,” Quest, September 1978, 26– 30 [P75] 11 June 1979: Interview with William French “Frye the Conqueror Wows Them in Italy,” Globe and Mail, 14 June 1979, 15 [P81] 30 November 1978–3 November 1986: 27 interviews with John Ayre Northrop Frye: A Biography (Toronto: Ramdom House of Canada, 1989) [K1] 7 July 1980: Interview with Gillian Cosgrove “Plain Mr. Frye Condemned to Be Lonely,” Toronto Star, 7 August 1980, F1 [P64] 18 September and 1 October 1980: Interview with Susan Gabori “Beginnings,” Today Magazine, 3 January 1981, 3 [D260]. In C, 564–6. 14 January 1981 ff: Interview with Wayne Grady “The Educated Imagination of Northrop Frye,” Saturday Night, 96 (October 1981): 19–24, 26, 28 [L192] 17 and 21 September 1981: Interview with Adele Freedman “The Burden of Being Northrop Frye,” Globe and Mail, 3 October 1981, E1 [P80] 8 February 1982: Interview with Judith Knelman “Experiment in Electronic Publishing Takes Frye from Stone Tablets to Computer Terminals,” [University of Toronto] Bulletin, 22 February 1982, 5 [P103] “The Great Code,” The Graduate [University of Toronto], 9 (May–June 1982): 7–10 [M10.71] 1 and 8 March 1982: Interview with Mark Czarnecki “The Gospel according to Frye,” Maclean’s, 5 April 1982, 40–4 [L101]. Rpt. abridged as “The Vision of Northrop Frye,” Reader’s Digest [Montreal], 121 (October 1982): 55–8; adapted by Daniel Pérouse as “Le Tes-

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tament d’un génie ou l’homme biblionique,” L’Actualité, 10 (February 1985): 8, 11 11 March 1982: Phone interview with Marty Gervais “The Bible according to Norrie,” Windsor Star, 27 March 1982 [M10.46] 24 August 1982: Interview with Janet Hook “Anatomist of Criticism Confronts a ‘Huge, Sprawling, Tactless Book’—the Bible,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 October 1982, 19– 20 [M10.58] 24 January 1983: Interview with Joanne Strong “The Informal Northrop Frye,” Globe and Mail, 26 February 1983, 18 [P150] 19 October 1983: Interview with Martin O’Malley “Northrop Frye’s Life as a Literary Legend,” United Church Observer, 47 (January 1984): 38–41 [P128] 5 November 1985: Interview with Hugh Frazer “Dream World: Scholars Plan Autumn Look at Bard’s Midsummer Masterpiece,” Hamilton Spectator, 9 November 1985, D3 7 April 1986: Interview with Pattie Tasko (of Canadian Press Service) “Frye Does His Research in Mind, Not Library,” Winnipeg Free Press, 8 August 1986, 30; “Northrop Frye at 74: A Legend Just Can’t Let Up,” Montreal Gazette, 9 August 1986, B9; and “Smartest ‘Teddy Bear’ Around,” Vancouver Sun, 8 August 1986, D6 25 September 1986: Interview with Michael Dirda “Shakespeare and the Scholar,” Washington Post Educational Supplement, 2 November 1986, 1, 18–21 16 September 1987: Interview with Shirley Brady “The Work of a Lifetime Continues,” Varsity, 24 September 1987, 6. 30 November 1989: Interview with Renato Banilli Article on Frye’s T.S. Eliot in Il courriere della sera, 1989 (see correspondence with Guardiani in NFF, 1991, box 5, file 1) 6 February 1990: Interview with Ward McBurney “Northrop Frye: A Profile,” Acta Victoriana, 114, no. 2 (1990): 20–2 Interview Which Led To an Oral Presentation 30 April 1984: Interview with David Cayley “The End of History,” broadcast on CBC Radio, 10 May 1984, has one comment by Frye, published in SeSCT, 299.

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Appendix C Lost, Unavailable, or Untraced Interviews and Discussions

The source of the reference to the interview is given in parentheses after the entry. In these instances, JW = Jane Widdicombe.

20 February 1950: discussion over U of T radio with professors Marcus Long and Melwyn Preston on the H-bomb (D, 266) February 1950: discussion on the CBC’s Citizens Forum on film censorship (D, 266) After 26 March 1950: possible discussion of religion over the CBC (D, 290, 301) 10 January 1952: discussion on CBC’s Citizens Forum on “Why do Canadians leave home?” (D, 472, 475) 15 March 1955: interview with Allan Anderson of the CBC on the opinions of the younger generation (D, 616) 1962 or 1963: interview with CBC TV on the subject of education in France and Canada (mentioned in a convocation address at the University of British Columbia, WE, 180–1) 16 March 1970: interview with Janice Kelly, CBC Montreal, on “What’s wrong with youth today” vs. Peter Desbarats (daybook entry) Around 1970: interview with the Varsity that was broken up (mentioned in no. 34, p. 317 above) 20 June 1973: “TV/CBC Mr. Ian Soodor” (faint entry in daybook) 4 October 1973: “Paul Beam and Andre Ransbery / University of Waterloo and CBC / Brave New World Interview re Aldous Huxley” (daybook entry)

1110

Appendix C

27 May 1975: “Mr. Lorenzini and Mr. Pantasso / Interview for Canadian [?] Mosaico” (daybook entry) 19 March 1976: “Al[l]an Anderson CBC” (daybook entry) 14 May 1976 (probably): interview with representative of the Thomas More Institute on SeS. Daybook entry reads, “Montreal, Thomas More Institute. Talk to class of 20 who will have been reading and discussing Secular Scripture.” A pamphlet of the Institute’s classes mentions a taped interview with Frye on SeS; the Institute still has some Frye tapes, but they are in frail condition. 1 December 1976: interview with Ayre for cancelled article in Weekend magazine (Ayre, 2) 9 November 1977: “National news (Don McNeill)” (daybook entry) 19 May 1978: “CKFM John McFadyen or Sue Donaldson” (daybook entry) 28 September 1978: “CFRB Betty Kennedy” (daybook entry) 25 October 1978: interview with Bruce Hoyle, Edmonton, for TV program Face the Newsmen (appointment in General Itineraries, NFF, 1991, box 47, file 1) 30 October 1978: “Global interview with Bodone Williams / Kathy Patrick” (daybook entry) 20 November 1978: “Mr. Guardini interview on Multi-culturalism” (daybook entry) 24 January 1979: “ VUSAC [Victoria University Students’ Administrative Council] Discussion with [U of T] President Ham: Adam Ostry” ( JW’s list) May–June 1979: during his trip to Italy, besides the interviews collected in this volume, Frye was interviewed by Il Corriere della Sera (Milan; Sergio Perosa), Il Tempo (Rome; Domenico Petrocelli), Il Giornale di Vicenza (Carla Plevano), and Il Gazzetino (Venice; Angela Barbieri). He was also interviewed four times by the RAI (Italian Broadcasting Corporation). Especially notable was the filming in Florence of Northrop Frye a Firenze, produced by Claudio Gorlier, the first episode in a series on the most influential personalities of the twentieth century. (Program prepared by the Italian Cultural Institute of Toronto in NFF, 1988, box 67, file 5.) 20 September 1979: Interview with Robert Sandler (Ayre, 406) 8 January 1981: “Pete McGarvey CKEY” (daybook entry) 31 July 1981: CBC TV interview: Fiona McHugh on “World Mythology” ( JW’s list)

Lost, Unavailable, or Untraced Interviews

1111

The project did not come to fruition and the interview is not extant 15 January 1982: “Nancy Ryley CBC / Interview re Lawren Harris” (daybook entry) 17 June 1982: telephone interview with Elizabeth Cowan ( JW’s list) 21 June 1982: interview with Robert Prowse, CBC, for Morningside ( JW’s list) 13 July 1982: interview with Ian Alexander of the CBC on “The Sense of Place in Art” 19 November 1982: interview with Whig Standard, Queen’s Theological College (entry in General Itineraries, NFF, 1991, box 47, file 1) 14 January 1983: “Wendy O’Flaherty, CBC, The Journal” (daybook entry) 27 June 1983: filmed interview with Kay Armatage ( JW’s list) The interview, towards the film Storytelling, proved unsuitable and is probably no longer extant. 4 January 1984: “Ken Hahnfeld and Trevor Willshire / High school interview” (daybook entry) 3 February 1984: “Evan Shapiro / Northview Hts. interview” (daybook entry) 26 November 1984: interview with Los Angeles Times ( JW’s list) 10 January 1985: “CBC Pratt interview, Deborah Collins / St. John’s, Newfoundland” (daybook entry). JW’s list points out that this was conducted by telephone. 28 February 1985: Peter Renolds interview on Milton ( JW’s list) 11 March 1985: John Harvard interview re The Great Code (daybook entry) 22 March 1985: “Interview with Heather Martin and William Nemton, Visions, CBC Ideas” (daybook entry) 25 March 1985: interview with Steve Minuk, Mensa ( JW’s list) 4 April 1985: interview with Gary Ross, Saturday Night, and Robert Fulford ( JW’s list) 5 November 1985: interview with Hugh Frazer, Hamilton Spectator ( JW’s list) 7 November 1985: interview with Meer-ai Cho, Korean Times ( JW’s list) 6 December 1985: interview with Paul Kennedy of CBC on Robert Zend ( JW’s list) Tape no longer exists; it was a brief comment 1 May 1986: Korean film interview (JW’s list) 27 May 1986: “Don Toffaletto, Discovery—Science Radio / interview” (daybook entry) 9 October 1986: interview with Dennis Duffy ( JW’s list)

1112

Appendix C

A brief comment on historical fiction for a radio program 25 August 1987: interview with Ian Anderson ( JW’s list) 31 August 1987: filming for CBC with Bob Gibbons ( JW’s list) 13 January 1988: CBC Journal filming, Massey ( JW’s list) 8 April 1988: “David Kent, interview re. Margaret Avison; David Swail, interview re Loves” (daybook entry) 21 July 1989: “Irma De Ford” (daybook entry; personal conversation)

Notes

Introduction 1 Margaret Atwood, “Northrop Frye Observed,” in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), 399. 2 See, e.g., p. 332, below, for NF’s oft-repeated view that M. Jourdain’s, and everybody’s, ordinary speech is not prose at all, though they may think it is. 3 Email communication to the author, 19 May 2004, re. no. 111. 4 Oral communication to the author, April 2004. De Ford’s interview did not result in a published work. 5 Oral communication to the author, February 2005. Kennedy’s interviews with NF—on Robert Zend, and on Utopias—are no longer extant. 6 Descant, 12, no. 32–3 (1981): 216. This is an introduction to no. 52. 7 Oral communication to the author, 30 June 2005. 8 Email from Helen Heller quoted in a column by Gzowski, Globe and Mail, 7 April 2001, F3. 9 William Blissett has pointed out that NF probably drew the term from Merritt Y. Hughes’s 1934 article “Kidnapping Donne,” rpt. in Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne’s Poetry, ed. John R. Roberts (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), 37–57. Hughes criticizes the then-current fashion for modernizing the scepticism of Donne and making him a touchstone for contemporary poetry: “We kidnap him from the past” (38). 10 Question condensed on p. 271. 11 Naïm Kattan, “La Réception de l’oeuvre de Northrop Frye dans la francophonie,” in Verticals of Frye / Les Verticales de Frye, The Northrop Frye Lectures and Related Talks Given at the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival (Moncton, N.B.: printed for the Festival, 2005), 35. 12 See Peter Gzowski, The Private Voice (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988), 49, for Gzowski’s dismay at the way NF’s short and unelaborated answers gave him no leeway to steer the interview. Interviewer Christopher Lowry (no. 95)

1114

13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20

21

22 23

24

Notes to pages xxxv–4

reported the same phenomenon in a phone conversation of 20 March 2006. Email of 22 March 2006. See, e.g., WE, 497; RT, 489, 562; GC, xv/9. On p. 51 of the Daly notebook. Quoted in D.B. Jones, The Best Butler in the Business: Tom Daly of the National Film Board of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 133. See also John Ayre, “Into the Labyrinth: Northrop Frye’s Personal Mythology,” in Verticals of Frye / Les Verticales de Frye, esp. 38–41. See the reminiscence of Harry J. Boyle (a fellow commissioner), CEA Critic, 42 (January 1980): 19. P. 1 of the transcript of the interview of 19 December, 2nd section. Here Martin proposes that they might investigate “‘content and values of technological systems’ au lieu de s’occuper de technological systems of content and values” (not used in final version). E.g. LN, 234–5: “I have never understood why that blithering nonsense ‘the medium is the message’ caught on so. Apparently the terms ‘medium’ and ‘message’ are being aligned with ‘form’ and ‘content’ respectively. And while it would make sense to say that form and content are inseparable, a medium is just that, a medium.” This is not to deny that NF appreciated the grandeur of the moon landings; he told Ramsay Cook that “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” (298). See LS, 266–301, for the reports on programs and for two more general reports, and LS, xxvi, for a summary of NF’s involvement with the CRTC. NF’s summation of a CRTC symposium on television violence is in NFMC, 156–66. To this should be added the fact that NF helped to draft the report of the CRTC’s Committee of Inquiry into the CBC of 1977, which had its origins in allegations of separatist bias at Radio Canada, and which was enlarged to investigate the general question of whether the CBC was fulfilling its mandate. The idea is expressed at GC, 221/242, but the interview’s wording is more impressive. Describing this interview later, Bogdan writes that “At [this] point of the telling, he broke down in my presence.” Deanne Bogdan, “Musical/Literary Boundaries in Northrop Frye,” Changing English, 6, no. 1 (March 1999): 74. “Frye does his research in mind, not the library,” Winnipeg Free Press, 8 August 1986, 30. This was an interview with Pattie Tasko that was written up as an article. 1. What Has Become of Conversation?

1 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. Herbert Askwith (New

Notes to pages 12–40

1115

York: Modern Library, 1950), 1035. The poets in question were actually Smart and Derrick. 2 In recalling this panel discussion, James Reaney remembered particularly NF’s rather startling statement that a poet friend—identified later in the article as Margaret Avison—took part most brilliantly in conversation by being silent. See “The Identifier Effect,” CEA Critic, 42, no. 2 (January 1980): 27, 30. This statement was either not aired or not taped. 2. On Human Values 1 Earlier that year, on 22 February, NF had debated Carpenter on the meaning of symbolism; see D, 470, and its n. 128 in which NF complains of Carpenter’s aggressive and belligerent character. 2 In chap. 27, “We Travel by Glacier,” of his A Tramp Abroad (1880), Twain described his scheme for arriving at Zermatt from the Riffelberg Hotel by jumping off a precipice, buoyed up by an umbrella, on to the Gorner Glacier. 3 John Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1, l. 263. 3. University 1 NF used this expression for the liberal arts in his installation address as principal of Victoria College, By Liberal Things, WE, 99. 2 Ibid., 94. 3 Quoted from memory with slight inaccuracies from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, act 2. 4. Literary Trends of the Twentieth Century 1 At this time Mailer had written several novels, as well as one or two books using his characteristic mixture of journalism, autobiography, and fiction. His Armies of the Night (1968), the most notable example of this genre, was still to come. 2 Presumably NF has in mind the story “Teddy,” in Salinger’s Nine Stories (Boston: Little Brown, 1948), 253–302. 3 In his TSE (written 1961, published 1963), NF developed this view in the chapter “Antique Drum.” 5. The Voice and the Crowd 1 Cyprian, in his Letters, no. 72, is the source for this doctrine. See Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina, ed. J.P. Migne (Paris, 1844), 3:1123, col. a. 2 Colin McDougall, Execution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), 90–1.

1116

Notes to pages 41–59

3 The term “lonely crowd” comes from the title of a book by American sociologist David Reisman (1950). 4 September 1, 1939, in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), 246. The stanza containing this line was edited out of later editions of the poem. 6. Breakthrough 1 Montaigne said of his cat, “When I play with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her?” Apology for Raymond Sebond, bk. 2, chap. 12. The reference is from a section in which Montaigne is sceptical of man’s ability to penetrate and make sense of God’s Book of Nature. NF has bracketed the section and underlined the word “Cat” in his NFL copy of The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (New York: Modern Library, 1933), 399. 7. Style and Image in the Twentieth Century 1 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall, ll. 127–8. 2 William Blake, Jerusalem (preface to Milton), l. 13, E96. In this and subsequent references to Blake’s works, the reference E indicates the page number in David Erdman’s The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. ed. (1982). 3 See 1 Corinthians 13:13 (“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three”); Matthew 6:34 (“Take therefore no thought for the morrow”). 8. Dix Ans avant la Néo-critique 1 Naïm Kattan, “La Réception de l’oeuvre de Northrop Frye dans la francophonie” (see Introduction, n. 11), 35. 2 New Criticism in France should not be confused with the much earlier New Criticism in North America and England. The French school became well known in 1964–65 with Raymond Picard’s attack on Roland Barthes, its chief practitioner. Whereas the anglophone New Critics believed in close reading of the work without recourse to extra-textual considerations such as biography and history, Barthes denied the existence of a stable text and maintained that all critical readings were subjective. 3 NF had written a preface to Gaston Bachelard’s The Psycholanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C.M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), v–viii, in which he linked Bachelard’s study of the mythology of the elements to literary criticism. Both Barthes and the American New Critics opposed the “intentional fallacy.” NF argues that the author’s “intention” is to produce a verbal form rather than a paraphrasable meaning or message (see AC, 86–7/80).

Notes to pages 60–80

1117

4 In the first chapter of Culture and Anarchy Arnold says that culture “seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light.” See Culture and Anarchy, in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 426. 5 Norman O. Brown studied the psychological dimensions of myth; in NFL are annotated copies of his Hermes the Thief (1947) and Life against Death (1959). Regarding Chomsky, NF is presumably alluding to Chomsky’s explorations of the “deep structures” that underlie all individual languages; see, e.g., Cartesian Linguistics (1966). 6 This was the “Third Book” that NF never brought to fruition. For his notes towards it, see TBN. 7 Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau (1912–43) is generally considered to be the founder of modern “liberated” poetry in Quebec. His cousin Anne Hébert (1916–2000) took some of his symbols into her own poetry of revolt. In 1970 NF was to provide a foreword to a dialogue on translation between Hébert and Frank Scott; see C, 406–7. 10. Engagement and Detachment 1 Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901; orig. pub. 1859), 25. 2 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 246. 11. L’Anti-McLuhan 1 See Poetics, chap. 1, 1447a29–b9, in which Aristotle talks of an art that imitates by means of language alone, either in prose or verse, and that has hitherto been without a name. 2 Such essays might have included, among others, “The Argument of Comedy” (1949), “Comic Myth in Shakespeare” (1952), “Characterization in Shakespearean Comedy” (1953), “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale” (1962), NP (on Shakespearean comedy and romance), and FT (on Shakespearean tragedy). 12. Student Protest Movement 1 See, e.g., WE, 329, 111. See also p. 147. 2 Written early in 1967, published in the Los Angeles Free Press, and frequently republished.

1118

Notes to pages 81–5

3 The remark does not occur in Caesar and Cleopatra; but cf. Shaw’s Candida, act 3, in which Candida says that “He has learnt to live without happiness.” 4 NF, “The Social Importance of Literature” (17 September 1968), WE, 331. The speech was given to the Canadian Association of School Superintendents and Inspectors, reprinted in abridged form in the Toronto Star, and published in full in the Educational Courier, November–December 1968. 5 The U of T offered two types of course in the Faculty of Arts and Science: four-year, specialized Honour Courses in particular subjects, and a threeyear General Course with its own individual courses and a lower pass-mark. Bossin is perhaps thinking of the remark in By Liberal Things that the Honour Courses “seem to me to do everything for the student that a carefully planned and balanced programme of studies can do” (WE, 93). Cf. also pp. 276 and 359, below. 6 Student radicals attacked the Honour Courses both as elitist and for their rigid prescribed curricula. The Macpherson Committee (Presidential Advisory Committee on Undergraduate Instruction in the Faculty of Arts and Science) had issued its Report in 1967, recommending that the Honour Courses be abolished. All students should be able to choose from the same array of courses, though they could arrange to graduate in three years, or in four as a specialist. These proposals were being vigorously debated at the time of this interview; in one hearing NF had called the suggestion to lower entry standards “lunatic and suicidal” (Ayre, 313). The proposals were nevertheless instituted later in 1969 with the “new program.” 7 The Hall-Dennis report was Living and Learning (1968)—the report of a commission appointed by the Ontario government to study the aims and methods of education in the province, co-chaired by Mr. Justice Emmett M. Hall and Lloyd Dennis, a former school principal. This report, which recommended a “child-friendly” form of education, with decreased emphasis on discipline, structure, fixed curricula, and examinations, ushered in a more permissive type of education in Ontario. 8 In “The Community of the University,” in The University Game, ed. Howard Adelman and Dennis Lee (Toronto: Anansi, 1968), McCulloch argued that dependent members of unilateral relationships “become persuaded of their own worthlessness and of the worthlessness of their ideas and their acts,” and hence “apathetic in relation to almost everything” (31). 9 Rochdale was an 18–storey alternative college at 341 Bloor St. W. on the northern edge of the U of T campus. The college, which had no formal connection with the university but was owned and operated by the residents, was founded in 1968 to provide innovative noncredit education, but rapidly became a “hippie” and drug haven. After its demise in 1975 it was turned into a home for senior citizens. 10 Cf. MC, 34 (NFMC, 17), where NF writes that “we do not know the future

Notes to pages 86–90

1119

well enough to know whether those ends [envisaged by a theory of progress] will be achieved or not. All we actually know is that we are damaging the present.” 11 Dennis Lee, “Getting to Rochdale,” in The University Game, 93. Lee was speaking of the need to explore and develop new types of learning at Rochdale. 12 See NF’s youthful “Case against Examinations,” WE, 10–13, and NFHK, 1:423–4. 13. CRTC Guru 1 One hundred and forty pp. of single- and double-spaced typescript, representing all the interviews when scanned, have been reduced to 68 pp. double-spaced. These conversations were informal and at times diffuse. NF spoke in English; Martin usually spoke in French; Chiasson mediated between the two. In accordance with the bilingual policy of the Collected Works, Martin’s French has not been translated. However, assuming the readership of this volume will be largely English-speaking, whenever Chiasson explains that “André says that . . .” I have used his explanation in preference to the original: it is after all what NF heard. And although Chiasson functions remarkably well in English, I have sometimes changed his Francophone expressions to a more idiomatic English. NF’s own words are only lightly edited, but the longer remarks of the others have been shortened. Some exchanges, often about mutual acquaintances, have been omitted altogether, while other remarks have been transposed to aid continuity. As minor omissions are so frequent, they have not been signalled with the three asterisks used elsewhere in this volume. 2 Fernand Cadieux, film critic and media thinker, was closely allied with the development of French Canadian films from the 1950s on. 3 The reference is to MC, 17 (NFMC, 8). 4 Radio Canada is the French name for the CBC, both radio and television divisions. 5 In “Reflections in a Mirror,” his response to the critiques of his system at the 1965 session of the English Institute, NF attributes the distinction between archetype and stereotype to Ionesco. See Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 143. 6 Seaway, the most costly TV series produced in Canada to that date, was seen over the CBC from September 1965 to September 1966. It featured a fearless Canadian duo who worked to keep the St. Lawrence Seaway functioning, but it was designed to appeal to a wider community and followed U.S. trends in broadcasting; it was eventually syndicated to American TV stations.

1120

Notes to pages 90–8

7 The CRTC had inherited the power to set requirements for a specific amount of Canadian content from the BBG. The BBG would review and certify programs as Canadian if necessary, taking into consideration the ownership of the production company, the nationality of the producer and creative personnel, costs paid to Canadians or incurred in Canada, and Canadian themes and subject matter. In 1968 the CRTC required that fifty-five per cent of the broadcasting day be filled with Canadian content, including forty per cent during the prime time from 6 p.m. to midnight. 8 Candid Eye was a groundbreaking series of documentaries by the NFB, under executive producer Tom Daly, seen on the CBC in 1958–59. It introduced a new dimension of realism. Martin mentions particularly the work of Michel Brault, producer of several of the Candid Eye documentaries, who pioneered the use of the shoulder-held camera and the wide-angle lens. He later collaborated with the Frenchman Jean Rouch, the father of cinéma vérité. 9 The Federal Communications Commission was the U.S. equivalent to the CRTC, given the responsibility in 1934 to oversee interstate and international communications by radio, television, and related technologies. 10 Pierre Trudeau, the current prime minister, had been elected leader of the Liberal party on 6 April 1968 to replace Prime Minister Lester Pearson; he led the Liberals to victory in the election of 25 June. “Participatory democracy” as a term can be found in political science articles of the early 1960s. Trudeau seems to have used the phrase for the first time during his leadership campaign; although he did not coin the phrase, he gave it new currency. 11 The region of Biafra was attempting to break away from Nigeria. The Organization for African Unity had asked outside countries not to interfere in this civil war, and Trudeau complied. However, there was a good deal of public sympathy for the starving Biafrans, as evidenced by an outpouring of private donations. By January 1969 Canairelief had been organized by Oxfam, aided by various church groups, to fly in aid to the breakaway state. 12 It has not been possible to date a visit to Scandinavia before that of April– May 1972; daybooks and itineraries are not available for the pre-1967 period. 13 In his Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, 1st ed., ed. Carl Klinck et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), NF had described how the narrator in Frederick Philip Grove’s A Search forAmerica suggested that the North American pastoral myth could still be found in Canada (C, 364). 14 Probably this is the “application by a company to be incorporated represented by John Watt for a licence to establish and operate a new television station at Whitehorse, Y.T.,” referred to in the Annual Report of the Board of Broadcast Governors, March 31, 1968 (Canada, 1968), app. A, 22, and marked DENIAL. The Yukon and Northwest Territories had only one TV station at the time, the CBC, which broadcast in English (app. b, 3). 15 The reference is to Diefenbaker’s campaign to become Conservative leader in

Notes to pages 99–105

16

17 18

19

20

21

22

23

24

1121

December 1956, and the federal election campaign of 1957, in both of which he emphasized the need to make the North a full partner in Confederation. The Air of Death was a program on pollution broadcast over the CBC on 22 October 1967. Its most controversial conclusion was that fluorine emissions from a factory in the Dunville area in southern Ontario were poisoning crops, animals, and people. The program greatly stimulated concern over the environment and led, among other things, to the foundation of Pollution Probe. For more discussion, see pp. 110–11. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la Démocratie en Amerique (1835). This was the report of a royal commission headed by Dr. George E. Hall, former president of the University of Western Ontario, into the accuracy and balance of the CBC’s program The Air of Death on pollution in Dunville. Just released (10 December), the report criticized the CBC for some inaccurate and alarmist statements which caused financial hardship to the residents of Dunville. The Democratic National Convention to choose a presidential candidate opened in Chicago on 26 August 1968. It was the scene of a series of enormous protest marches against the Vietnam war and President Johnson, and of violent confrontations with the police. At midnight on 29 August it was adjourned. This may be a reference to Orwell’s 1984, a novel that NF admired greatly. The meaning is not clear; possibly it is that people continue to hate in spite of the nightmare that Orwell shows is produced by hatred and brutality. Unfortunately the name was not deciphered; it could perhaps have been Stéphane Mallarmé, although he would not normally be considered not very widely read. In one of his late notebooks NF refers to “the pan-literary universe which only three people understand: Blake, Mallarmé, and myself” (LN, 247). The Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists, the professional organization for those who work in the English language in Canadian film, television, radio, and commercial productions. In 1954, radio and television personality Max Ferguson had interviewed Bill Thompson, the fireman who had driven to Halifax harbour to extinguish the fire on the munitions ship Mont Blanc in 1917; the explosion that erupted as he arrived killed the other five firemen and blew him, unconscious, several blocks away. The riveting interview is discussed in And Now Here’s Max: A Funny Kind of Autobiography (Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1967), 134–6. Ferguson broadcast from Halifax on television, 1954–58. Political science professor Frank MacKinnon led the group that created the Fathers of Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, P.E.I.: a cultural centre with library, theatre, museum, art gallery, restaurant, and Memorial Hall whose design was selected by international competition. It was opened

1122

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26

27

28

29

30

31

32

Notes to pages 107–16

in 1964 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference that led to Confederation, and was conceived as a national monument owned and partly financed by all of the Canadian provinces. The reference is to the multi-screen film shown in Canada’s pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal. Roman Kroitor was the director and Tom Daly the editor. For more information, see pp. xxxvii–xxxviii]. The Annual Report of the CRTC, 1968–69 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1969) dealt with the broadcasting year which ended 31 March 1969. Though not directly discussing decentralization, it does stress “community interest” against concentration of ownership (18). The Air of Death had been broadcast in 1967, before the creation of the CRTC. The resultant controversy led the government to commission the Hall Report (see n. 18, above). Shortly after its inception in 1968 the CRTC was also asked to hold hearings on the show and on information programming standards in general; these took place 18–20 March 1969. The CRTC’s report, delivered 9 July 1970, was instrumental in forming the policy that “a balance of views” must be shown in the context of total programming. A summary is provided in the Annual Report of the CRTC, 1970–71 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1971), 42–3. The original transcript reads “Paracletes,” but I am grateful to the Press reader for pointing out that there is no such person. NF often paired Heraclitus with McLuhan as aphoristic, e.g., at p. 176. In an aside in the first conversation (not reproduced here), Martin had remarked that Godard was anti-cinema personified, and that “il fait des mauvais films, mais dans le bon sens.” The reference is to the French film director who became a leader of the “New Wave” of filmmaking by films such as Breathless (1959) and Pierrot le Fou (1965), which used jump-cuts, freeze-frames, and similar devices. NF often commented on poet Arthur Rimbaud’s doctrine of a deliberate “dérèglement de tous les sens,” as expressed in his letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871; see Complete Works, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 102. In 1873 Rimbaud published his Un Saison en enfer, describing his struggle to break with his “hellish” past, and then at the age of nineteen abandoned literature and began a wandering life as a soldier, trader, and gun-runner. See Psalms 74:12–17 and 89:9–10. NF refers elsewhere to the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, which was recited every New Year, and which was closely related to the Priestly account of creation in Genesis (see NFR, 151; RT, 439, 477–8, 517–18; GC, 188–90/209–11). Moon shots had begun in 1959. On 21 December 1968 the first manned mission, Apollo 8, was launched to orbit the moon. The crew headed by Commander Frank Borman transmitted a live TV broadcast on Christmas Eve,

Notes to pages 116–32

33

34

35

36 37 38 39

40 41

42

43

44

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giving pictures of the earth from space and ending with the Creation reading from Genesis. For Cadieux, see n. 2, above. John Grierson was first commissioner of the newly created NFB, 1939–45, where he developed pioneering documentary film techniques. At the time of the interview he was teaching film-making at McGill and Carleton Universities. The move to recognize the People’s Republic of China had long been hindered by the opposition of the United States, and by Canada’s own desire not to abandon the Chinese nationalist government in Taiwan. In February 1969 External Affairs Minister Mitchell Sharp had announced the government’s decision to contact the government of China for talks; on 29 May a review of foreign policy was announced including this planned initiative. The Cultural Revolution hindered the plan, but diplomatic relations were established in October 1970. American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was born in Pittsburgh but settled in Carmel on the California coast. He was much influenced by the cyclical theories of Spengler and Nietzsche, and by the time of the post-war collection The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948) he was proclaiming the collapse of the present civilization. The theme was reinforced in his posthumous The Beginning and the End and Other Poems (1963). See no. 14, n. 5, below (an interview predating this third CRTC one), in which this controversy is first discussed. NF had recently been a visiting lecturer at Berkeley, during the student disruptions in the spring of 1969. Apollo 11 was to be launched on 16 July 1969, and on 20 July Neil Armstrong took the first human step on the moon. Henry J. (Harry) Boyle, vice chairman of the CRTC, chaired the CRTC’s hearings on The Air of Death in 1969. He asked the majority of hard-line questions to CBC representatives regarding the quality of their research. Larry Gosnell was the producer and director, and Stanley Burke the narrator, of The Air of Death. The Annual Report of the CRTC, 1968–69 was much concerned with broadcasting coverage and its extension (3, 13–16), CATV and cable (21–2), and satellite broadcasting (23). The diagram reproduced is from the CRTC folder. For further discussion of it by Robert D. Denham and Michael Dolzani, see LN, xxvi–xxxi, and TBN, xviii–xxxi. In bk. 5, chap. 48 of Gargantua and Pantagruel, the priestess of the underworld, Baqbuc, boasts of the superiority of the underground kingdom. Pantagruel and his companions have descended to receive the wisdom of the Oracle of the Bottle. This favourite anecdote had recently appeared in NF’s Conclusion to Literary

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45 46

47

48

49

50

51

52

Notes to pages 133–45

History of Canada, C, 352. The source is Leacock’s “The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph,” in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (Toronto: Bell & Cockburn, 1914), 208. Tropism is defined in the botanical sense as the turning of an organism in a particular direction in response to an external stimulus. Mack Sennett (1880–1960), born in Quebec, went to the United States, where he acted in films. In 1912 he founded the Keystone production company and engaged in the production of silent comedies such as the Keystone Kops, which involved classic slapstick techniques such as chases and pie-mishaps. Larry Semon (1889–1928), actually born in Mississippi, was a cartoonist who eventually directed and acted in film pantomimes from 1915 until his early death in 1928. Mariposa is the fictional name given to Orillia, a small Ontario town which Stephen Leacock depicted nostalgically and humorously in his Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1922). “Henri Carnot” is in the transcript, but he does not appear in The Encyclopaedia of Music in Canada, the New Grove Dictionary, or the standard reference works on Canadian and Quebec literature. Possibly NF said “Saint-Denys Garneau,” who might well be considered anxious. At p. 1037 he mentions admiring Yves Thériault, who rhymes with Carnot but did not write lyrics. Born in France of German-Jewish descent, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (b. 1945) acted as leader of the student protesters in the famous Paris general strikes against Charles de Gaulle in May 1968. After the protests collapsed he was expelled for sedition. He and his brother Gabriel wrote Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Crawley, Sussex: Andre Deutsch, 1968). This was the manuscript of Harold Innis’s massive, unfinished History of Communications. In the 1980s the CRTC Research Department was given permission to edit and publish it in two or three volumes. NF wrote introductions to the work as a whole (later published in EAC, 154–67; C, 582–95), and to the second volume (LS, 302–6), but the publishing scheme fell through. Jacob Christopher Burckhardt (1818–97) was a conservative historian sceptical of the modern faith in reason and progress, which he felt had led to alienation from land and state. The remedy was personal regeneration through culture, scholarship, and a kind of secular asceticism. In the battle on the Plains of Abraham which led to the conquest of Quebec (1759), the victorious British army was led by General James Wolfe, while the French was led by the Marquis de Montcalm. 14. The Only Genuine Revolution

1 NF made this point in his introduction to Design for Learning, ed. Northrop Frye (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), the report of a joint com-

Notes to pages 146–64

2

3

4 5

6 7 8

9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16

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mittee of the Toronto Board of Education and the U of T, formed to evaluate and suggest changes to the school curriculum; see WE, 139. “A Liberal Education” appeared in the Canadian Forum in two parts, September and October 1945. In it NF said that “offhand, I should say that the purpose of liberal education today is to achieve a neurotic maladjustment in the student” (WE, 48–9). Cf. WE, 114. Mickleburgh had perhaps heard NF’s speech to the Quail Roost seminar, 9 December 1968, not yet published (see no. 16, n. 4), where the phrase “entering into a structure of knowledge” is used (WE, 375). NF used this figure a little later in a public speech at OISE, 4 November 1970; see WE, 410. John Kelsey, “Should U.S. professors dominate Canadian universities?” Globe and Mail, 30 December 1968. The article was followed by another on 31 December, and an editorial on 2 January. Kesley described the increasing numbers and influence of American professors, and the use of American text-books, as a response to the rapid expansion of Canadian universities. The dilemma extended to the training of Canadian graduate students at American universities. See no. 12, n. 6. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York: Athenaeum, 1967), esp. viii. “[E]ven the most blatant advocacy of violence and terror may be, like Satan in the Bible, transformed into an angel of light by being regarded as a contribution to modern thought” (MC, 105; NFMC, 59). See SeSCT, 280–1, for NF’s citation of Céline in support of the notion that “great art can arise in any kind of mind.” In The Oxford Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), editor Douglas Gray points out that the Middle English words “auctour” and “auctorite” had two senses, applying both to an author and to the timehonoured truth in his writings. Seeley’s view is implicit in his article “Mental Health and the Secondary School” (1963), rpt. in The Americanization of the Unconscious (New York: International Science Press, 1967); see esp. pp. 351–2. See no. 8, n. 4. At MC, 24–5 (NFMC, 12), NF argued that the “central symbol of this [alienation] is of course the overkill bomb, as presented in such works as Dr. Strangelove.” Plato’s Republic, 377b ff. proscribes certain stories and poems; 521c–541b discusses ideal education. His Laws, 809b ff. directs teachers. See, e.g., the introduction to Design for Learning (WE, 135), and the speech “The Developing Imagination” (WE, 151). Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, chap. 6. NF, “The Social Importance of Literature,” WE, 334.

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Notes to pages 165–82

17 This explains NF’s ability to drop the Mothers of Invention into his conversation with Martin and Chiasson, p. 110. NF’s graduate course was called “Principles of Literary Symbolism.” 18 See, e.g., EI, 65–6 (EICT, 492–3); WE, 94, 104–5, 264–5 (where social vision is the result of education as a whole). Mickleburgh had reviewed EI in the Educational Courier, 34 (1964): 57–9. 19 Ted Kemp, “Education—Mental Castration in Our Schools,” Edge (Edmonton), 1:64, 74. 20 Franz Boas’s idea of one-sided rationalism is not specifically mentioned by Kemp. In an early article Boas warns against the appropriation of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories for the study of human society. Such an approach, while valuable in some respects, can only be “one-sided” when misapplied. “The Methods of Ethnology,” American Anthropologist, 22 (1920): 311–22; rpt. in Race, Language and Culture (1940), 281–9. 21 The first essay in Grove’s It Needs to Be Said (Toronto: Macmillan, 1929), “A Neglected Function of a Certain Literary Association,” is an address prepared for, but never delivered to, the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Authors’ Association. It contrasts the serious literature the CAA should be upholding with the U.S. mania for mere pot-boilers. 15. The Limits of Dialogue 1 See “Silence and the Poet,” in Language and Silence, 36–54. The poets that are said in the book move towards silence are Hölderlin and Rimbaud. 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 189: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (7th proposition; last line of the book). 3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1956), esp. pp. 101–5 of the section “Patterns of Bad Faith.” 4 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Paul Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 237 (bk. 4, chap. 3). 5 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.16–17. 6 NF’s contention is odd. The Greek word m•nis is normally translated as “wrath” or “anger”; nowhere in Greek literature is it translated as “madness.” 7 See MC, 79–80 for the Freudian proletariat, 86 for society; NFMC, 44, 48. 8 While not using these actual words, NF does say in connection with the study of antisocial works and the transformation of Satan next alluded to by Mandel that “study, as distinct from direct response, is a cool medium” (MC, 105; NFMC, 59).

Notes to pages 183–95

1127

9 Steiner, Language and Silence, 61. Steiner argues that “it is at least conceivable that the focusing of consciousness on a written text, which is the substance of our training and pursuit, diminishes the sharpness and readiness of our actual moral response.” 10 Claude Bissell was at that time president of the U of T. 11 The allusion is to R(ichard) B(edford) Bennett, prime minister of Canada, 1930–35, and Robert Falconer, president of the U of T, 1907–32. 12 In 1969 Iraq was a republic liable to military takeovers and factional revolts. In January 1969 the government of General Ahmed al-Bakr executed fourteen alleged Israeli spies by public hanging. Sixty-five other people were held for trial on similar charges, including the former prime minister Abdul Rahman El-Bazzaz. 13 See no. 13, n. 30. 14 Yeats, Blood and the Moon, l. 49. 15 Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel: The Novel as History (New York: New American Library, 1968), 54. This is an autobiographical nonfiction novel about the march on the Pentagon to protest against the war in Vietnam. 16 Ibid., 280. 17 In Jean Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), the young activist Anne Wiazemsky plots an assassination, kills the wrong man, and then calmly returns to the scene and kills the intended target. 16. “There Is Really No Such Thing As Methodology” 1 “The Social Importance of Literature,” WE, 331. 2 NF’s review of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, ed. Iona and Peter Opie (1951) appeared in The Canadian Forum, 31 (February 1952): 258–60; rpt. in EICT, 146–9. 3 “The Social Importance of Literature,” WE, 330. 4 WE, 376. The quotation is from NF’s speech “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract,” given to the Quail Roost seminar at Duke University, 9 December 1968. Part of it was published in the University of Toronto Graduate, 2 (Summer 1969); it also appeared in New Society in November 1969. 5 WE, 376–7. 6 WE, 332. 7 Irving Thalberg’s 1936 production of Romeo and Juliet starred Norma Shearer as Juliet, Leslie Howard as Romeo, John Barrymore as Mercutio, and Basil Rathbone as Tybalt. Both lovers were past their youth, as Howard was born in 1893 and Shearer in 1902. The more recent film that Aitken refers to is Franco Zeffirelli’s version of 1968.

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Notes to pages 198–226 17. Into the Wilderness

1 Archbishop James Ussher, working on the then current assumption that the Bible was history, established 4004 b.c. as the date of creation in his Annals of the World Deduced from the Origin of Time (London, 1658), l. 2 The text reads “something not in relation to the sense of a greater community,” which seems not to make sense; Ayre’s notes are not available for checking. 3 Brother Antoninus was the name assumed by California “beat” poet William Everson (1912–94) (raised in a Christian Science home) when he joined the Dominican order in 1951. He left in 1969 to embark on a third marriage. 4 See, for instance, NF’s assertion that “contemporary radicalism is deeply, even desperately, religious” in “The University and Personal Life,” WE, 367. 5 The Oxford Group was started in 1920–21 by the American Lutheran Frank Buchman, but did not become really popular until it moved to Oxford, England in the later 1920s. It was a revivalist movement that stressed “lifechanging” experience, contemplation, confession, and personal guidance from God over doctrine and formal structure, and was active while NF and Helen Kemp were students. In 1938 it became known as the Moral Rearmament Movement. 18. The Magic of Words 1 Sendak is an award-winning writer and illustrator of children’s books, the creator of mysterious, oddly grotesque pictures, best known for Where the Wild Things Are (1963). 2 “The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.” G.M. Hopkins, letter of 25 September 1888, in The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbot (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 291 (Letter 166). 19. Two Heretics: Milton and Melville 1 The famous phrase is from his essay “Hawthorne and his Mosses” (1850), a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses for an Old Manse. It reads in full, “Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole world round.” Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrish Hayford et al. (Evanston & Chicago: Northwestern Press & Newberry Library, 1987), 9:249. 2 Psalm 115:8 and 135:18; Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 66, l. 36, E218. 3 Milton, Tetrachordon, in The Complete Prose Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 2:636–7. 4 Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, 2:555. In NF’s copy of Milton’s

Notes to pages 227–45

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Prose, ed. Malcolm Wallace (annotated no. 370 in NFL), this passage has the marginal notation “analysis perfect image” and [Blake’s] “Palace of Golgonooza.” 20. Notes on a Maple Leaf 1 In his introduction to the 1851 edition of Wacousta; or The Prophecy (first published in Edinburgh in 1832), Richardson remarked that “some few years ago I published in Canada—I might as well have done so in Kamschatka—the continuation.” His reference is to The Canadian Brothers (Montreal, 1840). See abridged ed. of Wacousta, ed. Malcolm Ross (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967), xix. 2 The references are to Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, for which see no. 15, n. 15, and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), an account of an actual multiple murder for which Capote interviewed the killers extensively. 21. The Canadian Imagination 1 His reviews, published from April 1951 to July 1960 in the University of Toronto Quarterly, were headed “Letters in Canada: Poetry,” and partially reproduced in BG. For the complete text, see C, 91–229. 2 Sir John A. Macdonald (1815–91), leader of the Conservative party in Canada and prime minister, 1867–73, 1878–91, was a chief promoter of the trans-Canada railway; Edward Blake (1833–1912), leader of the Liberals, 1880–87, was a sceptic. NF reviewed Pratt’s poem dealing with the building of the railway in “Letters in Canada: Poetry: 1952,” rpt. in BG, 11–14; C, 103–6. 22. Poets of Canada, 1920 to the Present 1 NF was a member of the Forum’s editorial committee, and served as managing editor, 1948–50. 2 Historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) first outlined his theory in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). He argued that the frontier, which gave rise to national characteristics such as individualism, freedom, and materialism, was the decisive factor in shaping American history. See F.J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Dover, 1996). 23. On Evil 1 Blake, The Divine Image and The Human Abstract in Songs of Innocence and Experience.

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Notes to pages 246–69

2 Milton, Paradise Lost, bk. 1, ll. 258–9. 3 Aristotle, Poetics, 6.2. 4 The Nuremburg trials (1945–49) were conducted under the charter of the International Military Tribunal that treated the Nazi regime as a criminal conspiracy. In the first and most famous of the trials, 18 of 21 major Nazis were convicted and 11 sentenced to execution. 5 The Calley case arose from an incident in the Vietnam War in which Charlie Company, commanded by Lt. William Calley, massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians in the village of My Lai, 16 March 1968. Calley was the only one charged and convicted of murder by a court martial in 1971. (Sentenced to a life of hard labour, he served three and a half years before being paroled, pardoned, and returned to civilian life.) Presumably NF is wondering about the moral responsibility of the other soldiers. 24. Blake’s Cosmos 1 The reference is to the fifth picture, The Ancient Britons, in Blake’s 1809 Exhibition. See p. 1 of the Advertisement of the Exhibition, and pp. 39–51 of the Descriptive Catalogue, E526, 542–5. 2 Blake, There Is No Natural Religion [b], pl. 3, E2. 3 Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue, p. 27, E538: “Their art [Venetian and Flemish artists’] is to lose form, his art [“Mr. B’s”] is to find form, and to keep it.” 4 Blake, The French Revolution, l. 189, E294. 5 Blake, Laocoön annotations, E274: “A Poet a Painter a Musician an Architect: the Man Or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.” 6 Blake, Annotations to Bacon’s Essays Moral, Economical and Political, 69–70, E625. Subsequently Blake says that “Bacon has no notion of any thing but Mammon.” 7 Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 24, E44. 8 Blake, Auguries of Innocence, ll. 1–4, E490. 9 Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 7, E35. 10 See Blake’s Annotations to Watson’s Apology for the Bible, p. 14, E617. 11 NF, Introduction to Selected Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Random House, 1953), xix. 25. Science Policy and the Quality of Life 1 NF was due to attend the meetings of the Learned Societies in Montreal, 31 May to 2 June (see also the next item). On 1 June he would address the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion on the topic of the shift to the mythical and imaginative. The notes from which he spoke are in NFR, 3–9, headed

Notes to pages 272–89

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“Pistis and Mythos”; a partly inaudible tape recording of his words, labelled “the shift from the doctrinal and conceptual to the mythical and imaginative,” is available in NFF, 1991, box 63. 2 Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 132. In his copy (annotated no. 82 in NFL), NF had noted “very shrewd” beside Ellman’s remark that “The discovery of coincidence is the middle-aged counterpart of the youthful discovery of singularity.” 26. Modern Education 1 See no. 12, nn. 5 & 6, for the background. 2 The U of T grew out of a single college, King’s College, and in 1853 hived off UC as its teaching body. During the nineteenth century there were repeated efforts to form a wider University of Ontario. Three liberal arts colleges, of which VC was the first in 1892, eventually entered into federation with the U of T. The terms of union stipulated that seven humanities subjects would continue to be taught by the colleges to their own pupils, while other subjects, mainly sciences, would be taught by university departments to all students together. The actual division of subjects did not prove to be entirely logical: humanities subjects such as Portuguese, omitted from the orginal agreement, fell to the lot of the university, while history and some other humanities subjects were assigned to the university as a result of special interests. 27. Symmetry in the Arts: Blake 1 2 3 4

Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 55, ll. 60–1, E205. Blake, preface to Jerusalem, pl. 3, E146. Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 3, E34. Blake, Auguries of Innocence, ll. 1–4, E490. 29. Easter

1 In some versions of the Gospel of Nicodemus is a second part, “Christ’s Descent into Hell.” See The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. M.R. James (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924). An annotated copy is in NFL. 2 Ephesians 4:9–10. 3 Fortunatus was a priest in Gaul, d. ca. 600. The hymn referred to, sung on Good Friday, is “Vexilla Regis Prodeunt.” 4 Wallace Stevens, address on receiving an honorary degree from Baird College, 1951; see “Poetic Acts,” in Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York: Knopf, 1977), 238–41.

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Notesto pages 291–312 30. Impressions

1 For details of the Saskatchewan experience in the summer of 1934, see pp. 935–6, and NFHK, 1:222–322 passim. 2 This was Rev. Eratus Seth Howard (1883–1923), who served at eighteen different postings in Ontario and Quebec during his long years as a Methodist minister. 3 Preface to BG, v (C, 416). 4 NF spent two academic years at Merton College, Oxford, 1936–37, and 1938– 39. His B.A. was automatically converted to an M.A. in 1940 according to Oxford practice. 5 “Canada and Its Poetry” (1943) is the source of NF’s celebrated characterization of colonialism as “a frostbite at the roots of the Canadian imagination” (C, 30). Even in the preface to BG (1971), however, NF called Canada “practically the only country left in the world which is a pure colony” (iii; C, 414). 6 Preface to BG, i–iii (C, 412–14). This theme became more pronounced in later years; see, e.g., “Canadian Culture Today” (1977), in which NF argues that “nationalism suggests something aggressive . . . . But culture in itself seeks only its own identity,” and that “contemporary Canadian culture, being a culture, is not a national development but a series of regional ones” (C, 514). 7 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1972). 8 See, e.g., George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965), 76. 32. Canadian Voices 1 Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. “A socialist amalgam primarily of farmers and intellectuals which flourished in the ’30s and ’40s; it is now called the New Democratic Party” (note in Canada Today). The note might well have mentioned a strong orientation to labour also. 33. Sacred and Secular Scriptures 1 R.B.W. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964). 2 Johnson argued against Wilkes that quotation was not pedantry: “No, Sir, it is a good thing: there is a community of mind in it. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.” Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 974 (c.e. 1781).

Notesto pages 315–32

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3 Julien Benda, Le Trahison des clercs (1927). 4 In AC, NF argues that the term “prose fiction” might be applied to all works of literature written in continuous prose, rather than merely novels: “Most autobiographies are inspired by a creative, and therefore fictional, impulse to select only those events and experiences in the writer’s life that go to build up an integrated pattern” (307/287). 34. Education, Religion, Old Age 1 See no. 36, n. 2. 2 The reference is to NF’s service on the CRTC, 1968–77, and to his presidency of the Modern Language Association during 1976. 3 Newton’s remark, in slightly different words, is quoted by Sir David Brewster in his Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1860), 2:331 (chap. 27). 4 Walter Jackson Bate, Criticism: The Major Texts, enlarged ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 600. 5 NF had been ordained in the Maritime Conference, Moncton Presbytery, though the ceremony took place in Toronto. Presumably Moncton was still his official “home address.” 6 The proposed amalgamation, which had been discussed since the mid-1940s and especially after 1960, was accepted by the General Council of the United Church but rejected by the Anglican House of Bishops and the General Synod in 1975. 35. The Future Tense 1 The astrological sign Aquarius, associated with life-giving water, was supposed to end some two thousand years of domination by the sign Pisces and usher in a new world order. The song “The Age of Aquarius” in the musical Hair made the phrase a popular expression of millennial optimism. 36. “A Literate Person Is First and Foremost an Articulate Person” 1 In 1962 NF had participated in the founding of the Ontario Curriculum Institute (OCI), which grew out of the work of the joint committee of the University of Toronto and the Toronto Board of Education that had produced Design for Learning. He was a member of its Board of Governors and its program committee. By April 1965, however, the Institute had agreed to join OISE, the high-powered research and teaching centre recently established by the Ontario government, and began to wind down its affairs. For NF’s address to the first annual meeting of the OCI, see WE, 187–91.

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Notes to pages 335–55

2 Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, act 2, sc. 4. NF added this comment, beginning with “A lot of university students,” in response to Oliver’s query sent with the transcript, “In what way is prose not the language of ordinary speech?” 3 Wilder Penfield (1891–1976) was a Montreal neurosurgeon who, in pursuit of a treatment for epilepsy, developed the physical basis for memory and mapped the brain. 4 As reported in his obituary in the New York Times, 3 February 1970. 5 T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 2nd ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 287. 6 Oliver had perhaps read this favourite point of NF’s in his interview with Bruce Mickleburgh in Monday Morning (see pp. 167–8, above). 7 John Bassett (1915–98) was founder of television station CFTO and a key figure in the formation of the CTV network. 8 Blake, Annotations to Watson’s Apology for the Bible, E 613. 37. The Education of Mike McManus 1 For NF’s speech “Violence and Television,” delivered 26 August 1975, see NFMC, 156–66. Here he discusses the civilizing role of television in terms of catharsis; for his remarks on the breaking down of stereotypes, see his Conclusion to the second edition of Literary History of Canada (1976), C, 460. 2 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 246. 3 NF, “The Renaissance of Books,” published in Visible Language in 1974, NFMC, 154. 4 For a discussion of this series, Literature: Uses of the Imagination, see no. 40. 5 For instance, in “America: True or False?” (1969), C, 403. 6 The Parti Québécois (PQ) under René Lévesque had won the Quebec election of November 1976. They were committed to a referendum on political sovereignty for Quebec along with economic association with the rest of Canada. The date of the referendum had not yet been set. NF’s assertion of irresponsibility and betrayal has not been found. In his preface to BG, he did remark on the reactionary nature of separatism (iv; C, 415). Subsequently, in no. 38 (pub. March 1978), he said that separatism is linked to a tradition among intellectuals of being socially irresponsible (p. 364). 7 “The University and Personal Life,” WE, 367. 38. An Eminent Victorian 1 When NF served on Acta Victoriana as joint review editor, 1931–32, and editor, 1932–33, it was the only student magazine at VC. The Strand, in which the present interview appeared, was a more recently established paper: it

Notes to pages 355–68

2 3

4

5 6 7

8

9

10

11

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reported on current student affairs, leaving to Acta the publication of student literary and artistic efforts. David Knight was a former student of VC, hired by the English department in 1952. The biography appeared in two volumes: E.J. Pratt: The Truant Years, 1882– 1927; and E.J. Pratt: The Master Years, 1927–1964 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984–87). The Ontario Agricultural College became the University of Guelph in 1964; the University of Waterloo was founded in 1957; and Trent University opened in 1964. McMaster University had actually existed since 1890 as a small Baptist university; it moved from Toronto to Hamilton in 1930. See no. 12, n. 5. See no. 12, n. 6. For the original arrangements for teaching departments within the federated colleges, see no. 26, n. 2. The colleges had been experiencing financial difficulties, and finding too that many of their pupils took few or no courses in the college. In the 1974 Memorandum of Understanding between the university and the federated universities and colleges, the distinction between university and college subjects was dropped, the teaching staff of former college departments became members of combined university departments, and the federated universities in effect lost the power to make appointments. The reference is to Douglas Martin’s 1971 painting of NF sitting on an invisible chair against a barren landscape of stormy sky, river, and mountains. At the time of the interview the painting hung on the west wall of the reading room; after renovations to the library it was moved to the south wall. This was a program in the CBC’s Images of Canada series. NF’s segment, devised by Barbara Moon, Vincent Tovell, and NF, was entitled Journey without Arrival: A Personal Point of View from Northrop Frye. Featuring NF viewing various monuments and parts of the country, it was broadcast 6 April 1976. For a transcription of the soundtrack, see C, 466–71. See Harvey Schachter, “Let Quebec Go: Professor,” Toronto Star, 3 March 1977, B5. Here NF was quoted as saying that separatism seemed inevitable and that the rest of Canada should let it happen, “sit quietly on the sidelines as the experiment proves disastrous,” and then welcome Quebec back to a renewed federation. In the event, the referendum of 20 May 1980 was lost, with 59.56 per cent voting no. The Strand actually reads “age of inquiry,” but NF is more likely to have referred to the Age of Aquarius. Cf. pp. 329, 391. 39. Between Paradise and Apocalypse

1 Moon groups, or “Moonies,” are named after the Reverend Sun Myung

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3 4 5 6

7 8

9

10 11 12

13

Notes to pages 368–84

Moon, who founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in 1954. Teaching what he calls the Divine Principle, Moon claims to have had a vision of Jesus telling him to continue Jesus’ work. Best known at the time of publication as purveyors of mass marriages and for Moon’s great wealth, and preferring to be called Unificationists, Moonies are the model for satirical images of modern religious cults. Brought to the west from India by Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in 1965, “Krishna consciousness” seeks to access the supreme reality directly through chanting, transcendence, and simple living. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 223 (1:v). James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd ed., 10 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1911–13), 2:138 (pt. 5, chap. 12). The Return of the Native, in The Works of Thomas Hardy in Prose and Verse, Wessex ed. (London: Macmillan, 1928), 4:143–4 (bk. 2, chap. 4). William Blissett points out that NF is mistaken here. All Souls’ Day is not on Halloween, but on 2 November. It was established in the eleventh century as a day of prayer for all the faithful departed. All Saints’ Day, which does indeed occur on 1 November, was instituted in the fourth century to commemorate the great number who had been martyred or had suffered during the preceding period of persecution. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934), 35. Chief among these was NF’s favourite, Joachim of Fiore or Floris, who envisaged three ages, those of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. See, e.g., LN, 47, 202; GC 85/104. Cf. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, ed. D.C. Somervell, abridg. (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 12–13, though the external proletariat is not given the role NF indicates. This vol. is in NFL. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson, 2 vols. in 1 (New York: Knopf, 1932), 2:310–11. Cf. Preface to Major Barbara, in The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw (London: Bodley Head, 1971), 3:21, 44. Four months after the successful Woodstock festival, a free concert of rock music was held at the Altamont Speedway near San Francisco (6 December 1969). The rock group The Rolling Stones hired the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security. Drunk and drugged, they beat to death a black man, Meredith Hunter, who was armed with a knife and gun. Three other people died during the festival. The National Front was a “Britain first” party founded in 1967 to oppose immigration, multiculturalism, and loss of sovereignty to international bodies. Attacked by its opponents as neo-fascist, it became quite prominent in the 1970s; its decline began shortly after this interview.

Notes to pages 387–410

1137

14 The references are to Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Moses and Monotheism (1939). 15 The Soviet nuclear-powered satellite Cosmos 954 had crashed to earth near Yellowknife on 24 January 1978, shortly before this interview was recorded. 16 An allusion to Marc Connelly’s play The Green Pastures, based on the American black conception of Old Testament history. 17 Plato, Sophist, 266c. 40. Frye’s Literary Theory in the Classroom: A Panel Discussion 1 For a fuller description of the series, see WE, xli–xlii. NF’s On Teaching Literature (1972), WE, 432–61, explains the theory behind the anthologies. 2 William Wordsworth, Expostulation and Reply, l. 24. 3 William T. Jewkes, professor of English at Penn State University, was the general editor. Alvin A. Lee, professor of English and at that time vice-president at McMaster University, and Hope Lee, former teacher of grades 7 to 12, edited the first six volumes. 4 Elizabeth Cowan had quoted from Kenneth Rothwell’s review of the first eleven anthologies in Exercise Exchange, 18 (Fall 1973): 22–7. 5 Perhaps NF had drawn a mandala or other diagram on the blackboard which, we learn later, he was using in his explanations. 6 T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 151. 7 The Neoplatonic use of “archetype” can be seen in Plotinus, Enneads, 5.1.4. In “Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility” NF said he derived the word from a footnote in James Beattie’s Minstrel (EAC, 94; ENC, 24–5). For a fuller discussion of his sources, see Thomas Willard, “Archetypes of the Imagination,” in The Legacy of Northrop Frye, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 16–18. 8 For Whitman’s desire to be more democratic, see his Song of the Exposition, esp. stanzas 2 and 7. His poem on the death of Lincoln is When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (1866). 9 NF, “The Archetypes of Literature,” Kenyon Review, 13 (Winter 1951): 91–110; rpt. in EICT, 120–35. 10 This review has not been found. The Canadian Opera Company performed The Magic Flute in Sept–Oct. 1977. Reviews appeared in the Star, Globe, and Sun, but none of these mentions NF. Toronto Life, Macleans, and Saturday Night did not review the production. An Ottawa production in July 1975 was also reviewed in the Globe without mentioning NF. 11 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, 18. Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse (27 October 1818), in The Letters of John Keats,

1138

Notes to pages 413–26

4th ed., ed. Maurice Buxton Forman (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 227. 41. Getting the Order Right 1 NF actually said he worked on FS for twenty years, but this is an exaggeration. At p. 671 he notes that he became seriously committed to doing the book after the insight he had while writing a graduate paper on Milton and Blake in 1935, and that his serious writing began around 1941. In 1945 the book was accepted by Princeton. 2 William K. Wimsatt, “Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth,” in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, 75–107. 3 E.D. Hirsh, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 4 For a representative attack on NF’s notion that poetry is made from other poetry, complete with ranting and name-calling, see Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, ed. Seymour Mayne (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972), 58. 5 Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (London: Methuen, 1963), 260; Yeats, A Vision, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1937), 73 ff. For Eliot and Keats, see no. 40, n. 11. 6 Wimsatt, “Northrop Frye: Criticism as Myth,” esp. 97. 7 This course has now been published in RT, 413–607, and in Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Foundations of Western Culture, by Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). See also no. 63, n. 2. 8 George Woodcock, “One of the Great Canadian Gurus, Frye Still Provokes,” Toronto Globe and Mail, 19 January 1977, 13. In this review of SM, Woodcock appreciates the fact that many of the essays are those of a mediating public figure rather than a purely academic critic. 9 Woodcock had found a remnant of snobbery, for instance, in NF’s “extraordinary remark that ‘Literary criticism in its present form grew up in the nineteenth century, under the shadow of philosophy.’ What he means, of course, is academic criticism, as it is practiced [sic] in the universities and expressed in learned journals.” 10 In “The Search for Acceptable Words,” SM, 25, NF comments on the “continuous cataract of unsolicited material” sent to a professor. In “Expanding Eyes,” SM, 100, he reflects on adverse criticisms of AC. 11 Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” New York Times Book Review, 5 December 1976, 2, 98–9. 12 For instance, at SM, 190, NF talks of “Eliot the poet and Eliot the snob; Pound the poet and Pound the crank; Yeats the poet and Yeats the poseur,” and so on (NFMC, 307).

Notes to pages 426–34

1139

13 NF, “The University and Personal Life: Student Anarchism and the Educational Contract” (1968; WE, 360–78) is one of several condemnations of the student protest movement. 14 The remark on the age of the great work of art perhaps being over actually occurs in SM, 35 (WE, 367). 15 SeS, 29 (SeSCT, 23), speaks of conventions wearing out. 16 Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), bk. 1, ll. 398–400. 42. Tradition and Change in the College 1 In 1905, the U of T had abolished the office of vice-chancellor and was headed by a president, with a largely ceremonial chancellor. After its union with Albert College in 1884, the newly named Victoria University was headed by a chancellor who was also president. An act of 1944 sponsored by Walter T. Brown (president, 1941–49) provided for a separate chancellor, while the president became “president and vice-chancellor.” 2 Pearson was chancellor, 1952–58; Breithaupt, 1959–60. [P] 3 NF’s reference is to the royal charter for Upper Canada Academy, the predecessor of VC, issued on 12 October 1836. VC gained the power to grant degrees when it was elevated to the status of a university, as Victoria College, 27 August 1841. 4 NF spent a Guggenheim year as a researcher at Harvard, 1950–51. He taught there in the spring term of 1957, and was Charles Eliot Norton professor, 1974–75. He taught at the summer school of Columbia University in 1958. He held the Class of 1932 lectureship in the Special Program in the Humanities at Princeton, spring term 1954. He did not actually teach at Yale. 5 For the Honour Courses and their abolition, see no. 12, nn. 5 and 6. For the federation system, see no. 26, n. 2; for the drift against it, see p. 360–1. 6 “Report of the Committee to Review the Undergraduate Programme” (1979). Chaired by Professor John Kelly of St. Michael’s College, the committee recommended that arts and science students, whether in three- or four-year courses, have a greater degree of concentration along with breadth in other fields. 7 Even in my undergraduate years—1969–73—students had begun to consult the registrar and the old calendars to construct some semblance of order in their 20–course college careers. [P] 8 Pauline McGibbon (1910–2001), a woman active in the arts community, became the first female Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario in 1974; Bora Laskin (1912–84), law professor and labour arbitrator, was made Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada in 1973. 9 NF, Installation Address as Chancellor (11 October 1978), WE, 522. 10 See A History of Victoria University, by C.B. Sissons (Toronto: University of

1140

Notes to pages 434–65

Toronto Press, 1952). [P, referring to the tradition.] In the spring of 1977 there was a series of four lectures at Victoria to mark the sesquicentennial of the U of T. Margaret Prang, historian and former don of Annesley Hall, spoke on “Victoria and Canadian politics.” 11 Lovat Dickson’s two-part dramatized history of the Massey family’s climb to worldwide industrial and philanthropic prominence was telecast in October 1978. [P] 12 Frank Jones, “To Frye Fame Is no Fortune,” Toronto Star, 28 May 1978, D1. 13 This was a yearly series of six open evening lectures on a common theme delivered by Victoria professors to any interested students, faculty, and alumni. It lasted for many years but was eventually discontinued. 43. The New American Dreams over the Great Lakes 1 The seven books were: AC (Einaudi, 1969); MC (Rizzoli, 1969); FI (Einaudi, 1973); EI (Longanesi, 1974); WTC (Longanesi, 1974); FS (Longanesi, 1976); and SeS (Il Mulino, 1978). 44. Four Questions for Northrop Frye 1 “Translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality” (AC, 193/180). 2 Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrenie (Paris: Minuit, 1972). The authors argue that Freud’s Oedipus myth—particularly his concept of desire—depends on a capitalist ideology which distorts and limits our understanding of the term in fundamental ways. 45. “I Tried to Shatter the Shell of Historicism” 1 In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), 19. 48. Literature in Education 1 NF, “Criticism, Visible and Invisible” (1964), StS, 82. Other quotations from StS in the text are also from this essay. 2 See I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement (1929), a book generally credited with reforming the teaching of poetry and encouraging the “close reading” favoured by the New Critics. 3 This reference has not been found. Interestingly, NF repeated Fillion’s remark about Fuller a month later, in “Criticism as Education,” a speech to

Notes to pages 471–86

1141

the School of Library Service at Columbia University, 26 October 1979 (WE, 525). 49. Northrop Frye: Signifying Everything 1 Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (CW, 25) contains the partial drafts of, and jottings for, several novels, as well as youthful short stories published in Acta Victoriana. 2 The reference is to Harley Granville-Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927– 54), and A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). 3 T.S. Eliot, conclusion to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 152. 50. The Critical Path 1 Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological Studies of Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934). 2 Wellek had charged NF with failing in the critic’s task of evaluation when he reviewed FS in Modern Language Notes, 64 (January 1949): 62–3. When NF reviewed Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, 32 (Spring 1956): 310–15, he slyly ended by emphasizing the book’s usefulness in showing how premature value judgments have bedevilled criticism. Herman-Sekuli cB may rather, however, have in mind the well-known criticism by Wellek’s colleague Wimsatt (see pp. 414–15, above). 3 For Lacan, see, for instance, the argument in The Language of the Self, trans. Anthony Wilden (1968). An annotated copy of the 1975 reprint is in NFL. Also in NFL is Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). NF has marked the passage in the “Translator’s Preface” in which Spivak claims that “Derrida uses the word “metaphysics” very simply as shorthand for any science of presence” (xxi). NF has also marked the passage in his copy of Derrida’s Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), in which Johnson discusses how, for Derrida, the communicative act is a moment of différence defined by absence: a place where metaphysics as a concept does not hold true (x–xii). 4 NF is perhaps thinking of Antonio Gramsci or Louis Althusser, who proposed hegemony as an extension of ideology that could be appropriated to counter dominant values. 51. Regionalism in Canada 1 NF had recently corresponded with Maja Herman-Sekuliñ about this; see no. 50.

1142

Notes to pages 488–514 52. Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity

1 President Garfield of the United States is said to have remarked that his ideal of a college would be met by a log in the woods with a student at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other. The allusion is to Mark Hopkins (1802–87), president of Williams College, 1836–72. 2 The SX-70 is the Polaroid camera, marketed in 1972 as the first instant camera to make its own self-developing print. 3 William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), 1:488, describing the confused sense-impressions of a baby. 53. From Nationalism to Regionalism: The Maturing of Canadian Culture 1 Amos ’n’ Andy was first broadcast in March of 1928 as a radio sketch; it became a half-hour radio comedy and then a television program, running until 1966. The Keystone Kops silent films (for which see no. 13, n. 46) began in 1912 and were superseded by 1917. 2 The War Measures Act gives the federal cabinet the power to override provincial authority and civil liberties during an emergency. It has been invoked in peace time only once, during the 1970 “October crisis” when Pierre Trudeau’s government feared a separatist uprising. Walter Cronkite was the anchor for the CBS evening news, 1962–81. 3 The Ontario Royal Commission on Book Publishing was established in December 1970. Its report, Canadian Publishers and Canadian Publishing, presented in December 1972, recommended the establishment of an Ontario Book Publishing Board that would counter the trend to foreign domination of the industry. Among programs suggested were grants to Ontario-based, Canadian-owned publishers to assist the publication of works by Canadian authors, grants for the re-issue of out-of-print Canadian works, and annual literary awards. 54. Commemorating the Massey Lectures 1 Gillian Cosgove, “Plain Mr. Frye Condemned to Be Lonely,” Toronto Star, 7 August 1980, F1. Perhaps NF was “exercised” by this generally appreciative portrait because one section, exploring the loneliness of the genius, is headed “Few close friends” and has him finding most people boring. 56. Storytelling 1 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 252–3.

Notes to pages 518–40

1143 57. A Fearful Symmetry

1 In his Laocoön annotations, Blake said that “The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art,” E273. 2 The original reads “a kind of form of apprehensiveness”: it seems more likely that NF is referring to the altered ratio of the senses that McLuhan ascribed to viewing electronic media, though he did also refer elsewhere to McLuhan’s theory of the “terror” characteristic of oral cultures and, by extension, global villages. 3 NF, “Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada,” C, 346. 4 This assertion was not made directly in MC (the Whidden lectures), but is a frequent theme in NF’s writings on Canada (see, e.g., C, 106, 258, 446–7). NF speaks of the Toryism he mentions in his next answer in his Conclusion to Literary History of Canada, C, 370. 58. Medium and Message 1 Cf. The Tempest, 3.2.91–3, 95. 59. Scientist and Artist 1 From Blake’s poem on double vision, ll. 87–8, in his letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November 1802, E722. 2 See, e.g., Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1862) or his introduction to A Crown of Wild Olive (1866). 3 An interview with Dr. John Moffat (conducted by Cargill and Esterhammer) appears in the same issue of Acta Victoriana that contains the interview with NF. He is described as a professor of physics at U of T, a painter, and a poet. The interview deals with “the relationship between the activity of the scientist and the activity of the artist.” 4 Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, new ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), 31. 5 Margaret Avison, Perspective, ll. 20–2: “Your law of optics is a quarrel / Of chickenfeet on paper. / Does a train / Run pigeon-toed?” Originally published in Poetry (Chicago), 70 (1947): 320–1. Also anthologized in Poetry of Mid-Century, 1940–1960, ed. Milton Wilson (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964), 87–8. 60. The Art of Bunraku 1 This is perhaps an allusion to the report NF did for the CRTC on Sesame

1144

2

3

4

5

6 7

Notes to pages 542–61

Street in 1971, in which he remarked on the technique of using masks, a face that does not change (see LS, 280). These reports were not published, but Fulford may have seen them at the CRTC. From 1925 to 1933 Arthur Waley brought out in sections his translation of The Tale of Genji, the classic Japanese tale by the Baroness Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978–ca. 1031). Nova Scotia’s Amusements Regulation Board, seeing it was a film about a prostitute, labelled it Restricted (to those over 18). See the amusing article by Jay Scott, “Puppets ‘restricted’ in Nova Scotia, ‘certainly an error,’ Censor Agrees,” Globe and Mail, 21 October 1981, 15. Japanese woodcut artists Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), best known for his Hundred Views of Mount Fuji (1835), and Ando Hiroshige (1797– 1858), whose Fifty-three Stages of the Tokaido was very influential in the West. This is the reason for a dramatist’s preferring the verse form in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Secret Miracle” (Spanish, 1943). See Borges, A Personal Anthology, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 187. Eliot, Burnt Norton, pt. 1, ll. 42–3. See no. 39, n. 5. 61. On The Great Code (I)

1 See The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 193. 2 Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (1950); in NFL is a copy of the Dell 1967 ed. In Notebook 24 NF writes that he found the book “much more convincing than I thought it was going to be” (TBN, 291). 3 This quotation is not in GC, but NF does say there that “there is no real evidence for the life of Jesus outside the New Testament” (78/96; cf. 77/95). 4 In a note to GC, NF cites Josephus, Contra Apion, bk. 2, [par.] 15. The passage he probably has in mind is in par. 14 of the Loeb edition, 1:351. 5 Quæstionum S. Augustini in Heptateuchum, Quæstionum 2: 73, in Patrologiæ cursus completus, 34:625. 6 In his City of God, bk. 15, chap. 26, Augustine calls the ark a figure of the city of God, or the church, sojourning in this world as in a deluge. In chap. 27 he continues to allegorize details such as the three stories of the ark. 7 This is l. 26 of Sabine Baring-Gould’s well-known hymn Onward Christian Soldiers. 8 Although GC does ascribe the line to Sunday Morning (168n/327n. 104), it is actually from Stevens’s The Poems of Our Climate.

Notes to pages 566–78

1145 62. Chatelaine’s Celebrity I.D.

1 “The Great Charlie” (1941) and “The Eternal Tramp” (1947), NFMC, 89–102, 116–22. 63. On The Great Code (II) 1 See, e.g., WE, 158, 318, 329. 2 This was a series of thirty half-hour videotapes entitled The Bible and Literature: A Personal View from Northrop Frye issued by the Media Centre at the University of Toronto (1982). These lectures on the Bible, which at the time formed half of a course on “The Mythological Framework of Western Culture,” were drawn on extensively in GC. The videos consisted of classroom lectures followed by question-and-answer sessions around a seminar table with selected students. A transcript of the lectures is in RT, 415–607; they also appear in Northrop Frye and Jay Macpherson, Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 3 For an example of NF’s use of this figure, see an editorial in the Canadian Forum, 1970, in which he argues that “Marshall McLuhan has a phrase about reactionaries who don’t get with it as people driving by a rear-view mirror. This assumes the monumental fallacy that we move forward in time as well as in space, whereas actually, of course, we face the past, and the rear-view mirror of that direction is the shape of things to come” (C, 408). 4 The Constitution was to be patriated on 17 April 1982. Prior to patriation, the Canadian Constitution could be modified only by the British Parliament. Subsequently, the powers to modify the Constitution rested solely within the hands of Canadian Parliament, with Queen Elizabeth’s signature. 64. Towards an Oral History of the University of Toronto 1 This was a four-year Pass Course designed to allow for completion of highschool matriculation requirements within the university. Starting with the 1931–32 school year, senior matriculation was demanded for entrance, after which students could take a three-year Pass Course (replaced in 1951 by the three-year General Course), a new four-year General Course, or an Honour Course. 2 The Scottish-born George Ross (1875–1967), organist and choirmaster at St. John’s United Church (as it was later called), N.B., 1910–50. His FRCO meant that he held the Fellowship Diploma of the (British) Royal College of Organists. 3 The minister was Harold Tomkinson, pastor at Wesley Memorial Church,

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5

6 7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15 16

Notes to pages 579–88

1926–31. His daughter Constance Tomkinson wrote of her experiences as a chorus girl, would-be actress, and arts administrator in a number of autobiographies, including Les Girls (1956). NF had a job at Toronto’s Central Reference Library, then near the U of T at College and St. George Sts., pasting labels into new books—a process which allowed him to become acquainted with Denis Saurat’s Blake and Modern Thought. See Ayre, 68–9, for a description of the essay “Eccentricity,” which arranged eccentrics under categories such as “clown,” “connoisseur,” and “crank.” Ayre reports that it is almost certain NF won the prize (email of 7 November 2005). This was the John Trick and Susan Treble Trick scholarship, which NF continued to receive until he graduated in 1933. This was a social event in which couples strolled about together to the accompaniment of music. This was the Protestant movement to work towards creating the Kingdom of God on earth by improving social justice and following Christian ethics in the political and economic sphere. This remark shows both NF’s sense of justice and his amazing memory. When I was writing my biography of Margaret Addison I had in my possession a copy of an interchange of letters, now unfortunately misplaced, in which a woman graduate complained of a joke NF had made in an after-dinner speech implying Addison was stuffy and a bit absurd. The woman described, in very close to these words, how Addison had toiled during the flu epidemic. Professor A.S.P. Woodhouse joined the UC English department in 1929, and was its chair from 1944 to 1964. He was also chair of the graduate English department for nearly twenty years. For this and other details about the English department, see Robin S. Harris, English Studies at Toronto: A History, with foreword by NF (Toronto: printed by the U of T Press for the Governing Council, 1988), to which I am indebted. This was a one-hour-a-week course offered to senior students in certain Honour Courses, though not to those in English, starting in 1954. Geoffrey E. Holt was professor of German at UC until 1948, and also organist and choirmaster of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Toronto. George Sidney Brett, A History of Psychology, 3 vols. (London: G. Allen, 1912– 21). Norman Endicott was a member of the English department at UC, 1929–70. He had a B.Litt. from Oxford. Pelham Edgar, Henry James: Man and Author (Toronto: Macmillan, 1927). Barker Fairley, Charles M. Doughty: A Critical Study (London: J. Cape, 1927); Wilhelm Raabe: An Introduction to His Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947).

Notes to pages 588–95

1147

17 Fairley’s A Study of Goethe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), is annotated no. 516 in NFL. Fairley had previously published Goethe as Revealed in His Poetry (1932). 18 Robert Falconer was president of the U of T, 1907–32; Canon Henry John Cody served 1932–45. The latter was not an academic but an Anglican clergyman who was chair of the Board of Governors. 19 Richard Pinch Bowles was chancellor and president of Victoria University, 1913–30. He died in 1960. 20 Edward W. Wallace was chancellor and president, 1930–41. 21 Walter T. Brown was principal of VC, 1932–44. He served as president and chancellor (vice-chancellor after 1944) of Victoria University, 1941–49. 22 No person with a name sounding like this occurs in lists of students or recipients of honorary degrees at the U of T or Emmanuel. 23 Daniells did graduate work at U of T and in England. In 1934–35 he taught in the English department at VC and was a don in residence; NF, a second-year Emmanuel student and reader in the department, was a frequent companion. In the 1935–36 school year, NF was a virtual teaching assistant in Daniells’s fourth-year drama course. For NF’s remarks on their friendship, see, e.g., NFHK, 1:353–4, 478. 24 Margaret or Peggy Stobie was the former Margaret Roseborough; NFHK has many remarks on her, Mary Winspear, and the Blake group. 25 No reminiscences of Foster Damon have been discovered; perhaps they were in MS. 26 As a reader in the English department at VC, 1934–35, NF taught two courses while also taking two graduate English courses and doing his work at Emmanuel; in 1935–36, his last year at Emmanuel, he taught three courses. See also n. 23, above. 27 In the fall of 1937, after sending NF to Merton College, 1936–37, VC hired him as a one-year “special lecturer” to replace the departing Roy Daniells. He had to return to Merton College to complete his English studies before becoming a permanent employee in fall 1939. 28 Edward Warriner Hazen (1860–1929), American farmer and teacher who had become an advertising executive, had established the Edward W. Hazen Foundation in 1925; in its early years it was particularly concerned with the lack of value-based and religious instruction in higher education. 29 Kenneth Woodsworth was the co-secretary of the Canadian Youth Congress, an organization which in the 1930s brought together young people of all persuasions to fight for peace and jobs, and author of Canadian Youth Comes of Age (1939). He later had a distinguished career as union organizer, lawyer, teacher, and social activist. His father Harold Frederick Woodsworth (1883– 1939) was a missionary to Japan where he served as a dean at Kwansei Gakuin University. Harold was brother to labour leader J.S. Woodsworth

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31

32

33 34

35

36

37

38

Notes to pages 599–605

and son of James Woodsworth, “The Apostle of Systematic Giving,” in charge of the Western Canadian missions of the Methodist Church. This was a fellowship of $1500 from the Royal Society, specifically for research into the “Development of symbolism in the prophetic books of William Blake” (Ayre, 119). The Susan Treble Trick and the Mary Treble Currelly Travelling Fellowship, controlled by C.T. Currelly. It was designed to help eligible instructors to travel abroad to enrich their teaching (Ayre, 143). Charles Trick Currelly (1876–1957), the founder of the Royal Ontario Museum, was a member of the Senior Common Room at Victoria for many years. In addition to the political uncongeniality, NF’s general misery in Oxford can be seen in the letters in NFHK, vol. 2. See particularly 2:652, where he complains that “I’m simply going mad in this place. Dismally cold, wet, clammy, muggy, damp and moist, like a morgue.” See also his remarks on his tutor Edmund Blunden in this volume. Sir Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), a member of the Labour government of 1929, later resigned and became leader of the British Union of Fascists. NFHK has many references to NF’s adventures with Mike Joseph and Rodney Baine. Bernard Mellor was appointed registrar of the University of Hong Kong in 1948 and served for several decades. He cooperated with the Oxford tutor Edmund Blunden in producing three anthologies of English poetry. Sir Anthony Blunt (1907–93), art historian and director of the Courtauld Institute, where Helen studied, 1934–35. He was later found to be a Soviet agent and stripped of his title. In NFL is an annotated copy of C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). Edward Sheffield of the Dominion Bureau of Statistics predicted, in a 1955 speech to the National Conference of Canadian Universities, that enrolment in universities would double in the next ten years. President Sidney Smith set up a committee to determine the response of the U of T; it was called the Plateau Committee on the grounds that this increase was not a temporary bulge but a permanent step upwards. The committee, reporting in 1956, recommended the founding of several new colleges to handle a doubled enrolment. For this and other institutional details, see Martin Friedland, The University of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), to which several notes are indebted. These distinguished members of the Class of 1949 at Victoria were: Douglas Mason Fisher, NDP member of Parliament, 1957–65, and later a political columnist; Keith Douglas Davey, former National Campaign Director of the Liberal Party, Senator, 1966–96; and Julia Verlyn LaMarsh, known as Judy,

Notes to pages 606–11

39 40 41 42

43

44

45

46

47 48 49

50

1149

Liberal Minister of National Health and Welfare and Minister of Amateur Sport, 1963–65, and Secretary of State, 1965–68. Ayre notes that as a junior professor NF was “nearly as much in demand as honorary president of graduating classes as John Robins” (186). Hardolph Wasteneys, head of the biochemistry department, 1929–51. Hazard Adams, The Academic Tribes (New York: Liveright, 1976), 8. This was the Combined Departments of English, consisting of the full-time staff in English in each constituent college. It had begun to meet formally in spring 1919 under William Alexander of UC. Eventually the chairmanship was rotated among the different colleges. Arthur Barker had joined the department at Trinity College in 1937; he left for Illinois in 1961 and stayed there until 1970. He ended his career at the University of Western Ontario. The first year of the new English Language and Literature course was offered in the fall of 1936, and no new students were admitted to English and History. That course was gradually phased out as each year graduated, the last doing so in June 1939. Woodhouse was particularly involved in restructuring the initial outline of the English course to provide Honour options for “students naturally adapted for History and Philosophy” (Harris, English Studies, 84). Edward Killoran Brown (1905–51), his seconder, had joined the department at UC in 1929 but had been at Manitoba, 1935–37. He left UC again in 1941 to teach in the States. Millar MacLure (1917–91), who joined the department in 1953, was a Renaissance specialist who wrote the well-regarded George Chapman: A Critical Study (1966). John M. Robson (1927–95), a nineteenth-century scholar hired in 1958 after two years in the West, was chiefly known for his editorship of the 33-volume Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. He was the founding general editor of the present Collected Works before his early death. Both had been graduate students at Toronto. F.E.L. Priestley (1905–88), nineteenth-century specialist and founding general editor of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, was at the UC English department, 1944–70. Hugo McPherson and Jess Bessinger joined UC in 1956. Kenneth MacLean joined the English department at VC in 1938, and became head in 1959. NF definitely said “pack” on tape, though one wonders whether MacLure might have said “hack.” However, this idiom is not very characteristic of his speaking style. William Blissett is mentioned several times in D. He was a graduate student who finished his thesis on Spenser and Milton under NF’s supervision in 1950, and went on to a distinguished career which included editing the University of Toronto Quarterly.

1150

Notes to pages 611–26

51 John Livingston Lowes (1867–1945), perhaps best known for his book on Coleridge, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927). 52 Canon Cody had been followed by Sidney Smith, president, 1945–57. 53 William Davis (who as Minister of Education for Ontario from 1962 had presided over the immense expansion of the system) was Conservative premier, 1971–85. During his term of office the Report of the Commission on Post-Secondary Education in Ontario (1972) said that the guiding principle should be the universal access to appropriate educational services for all who wished and were able to benefit from them. 54 Ernest Sirluck was associate dean of the graduate school, 1962–64, and dean, 1965–70, during the time of Bissell’s presidency (1958–71). 55 See no. 42, n. 6. 56 The provincial government at Queen’s Park had had direct oversight and financial control of the university until the University of Toronto Act of 1906, which established a Board of Governors for that purpose. The Senate continued to supervise academic affairs. In 1972, as a result of student unrest, these two bodies were replaced by a single Governing Council with student, faculty, and community representation. 57 John Leyerle, professor of English at UC, became the founding director of the Centre for Medieval Studies in 1966. 58 Readers have suggested that NF must have said “grouped around medieval research,” since that was Leyerle’s field. But on tape he clearly says “medical.” This could be a Freudian slip, but since it is unlikely NF would argue that it’s easy to raise money for medieval studies, I think he is telescoping ideas and means that “it” (i.e., public generosity) is more easily tapped by medical research. 59 “Across the River and Out of the Trees” (1980), C, 555. The books particularly mentioned here are Charles Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture, Barker Fairley’s Study of Goethe, Kathleen Coburn’s edition of Coleridge’s Philosophical Lectures, Priestley’s edition of Godwin’s Political Justice, NF’s own book on Blake, Woodhouse’s Puritanism and Liberty, and Arthur Barker’s Milton and the Puritan Dilemma. 60 It has since been republished in the Collected Works, in WE, 517–22. The address does not directly make the accusation NF quotes; the general point is made in previous interviews, e.g. pp. 359, 432, 475. 61 Cf. the section on “The Circuit of Money Capital,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1992), 2:128. 62 CAUT is the Canadian Association of University Teachers. The U of T Faculty Association had been particularly active; after they had persuaded the administration to agree to binding arbitration, arbitrator Kenneth Burkett had awarded an eighteen per cent increase in June 1982 (not long before this

Notes to pages 627–59

63

64 65 66

67

68

69

70

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interview). As a result, the university needed to find an additional $14 million a year, faculty hirings were frozen, and budgets were cut (Friedland, University of Toronto, 585–6). Physiologist Reginald Haist had chaired a committee that developed new rules for the appointment of deans and divisional chairs in 1966. Whereas previously the president had chosen his own candidates, committees of professors were now struck to make recommendations; and appointments were for a limited term, generally five years. Political scientist John Edwin Hodgetts succeeded NF as principal of VC in 1967 and served until 1970, when he became president of Victoria University. See n. 41, above. Paxton Young (1819–89), a broad-minded Presbyterian minister, philosopher, and mathematician. Friedland in his University of Toronto quotes a eulogy of him as “an enthusiastic and soul-inspiring lecturer” (75). John Evans, dean of the medical school at McMaster University, succeeded Claude Bissell as president in 1972, after a hiatus under acting president Jack Sword. For the Memorandum of Understanding limiting college departments’ powers, see no. 38, n. 7. This incident has not been traced. The most famous student disruption at UC was that at which political scientist Edward Banfield was prevented from speaking in West Hall in 1974. There was also a major sit-in at the U of T over the issue of access to the stacks at the newly-built Robarts Library. Ned’s was the student cafeteria, called after the affectionate name for E.J. Pratt, and in the early 2000s unaccountably re-christened the Wymilwood Cafeteria. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the grant-giving agency of the federal government. 65. Back to the Garden

1 Herbert Norman (1909–57) was a career diplomat who was Canadian ambassador to Egypt. He committed suicide on 4 April 1957 after being accused of being a Communist sympathizer and a security risk. 2 Cf. the last line of Birney’s Can. Lit. 3 Byron, The Vision of Judgment, ll. 688–9. 66. On The Great Code (III) 1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), 67–9. 2 The theological tradition established by the twelfth-century followers of St. Hugh of the Abbey of St. Victor, who stressed the importance of the gram-

1152

3 4 5 6 7

8

9

Notes to pages 660–76

matical, historical, and geographical senses of the Scriptures as a foundation for the allegorical and tropological. See Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941). Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 1. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), and Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981). The latter is in NFL. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 281 ff. Dante Alighieri, “Letter to Can Grande” (Epistola X) and “The Four Levels of Interpretation” (from the Convivio, 2.1), in Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, trans. and ed. Robert S. Hallen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 95–114. The remark actually comes from the first page of NF’s NP: “We are told, by Coleridge, that all philosophers are either Platonists or Aristotelians . . . . I shall begin with a similar dichotomy about literary criticism. I may express it, in the manner of Coleridge, by saying that all literary critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics.” Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value,” in The Necessary Angel (New York: Knopf, 1951), 142. 67. Maintaining Freedom in Paradise

1 Following the fall of the Shah of Iran in January 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris. An Islamic republic was established by referendum on 31 March. Under the new constitution introduced on 15 November, Khomeini gained supreme religious and secular control of the country, and Islamic law was imposed. 2 This favourite notion of NF’s is perhaps a distillation of Hegel’s notion of concepts and the way they contain or evoke their opposites, rather than a direct quotation regarding propositions (cf. p. 562). Hegel says, for instance, that “Positive is not an immediate identity, but is partly a term opposite to the Negative, having significance only in this relation and therefore containing the negative in its concept . . . . Similarly, the Negative, which is opposed to Positive, has meaning only with reference to this its Other: it therefore contains it in its concept.” The Science of Logic, trans. W.H. Johnston and L.G. Struthers (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951), 2:63. In GC, NF says that “the hero of Hegel’s philosophical quest is the concept (Begriff ),” but that this concept “can hardly exist apart from its own verbal fomulation . . . so that the Phenomenology is, among other things, a general theory of how verbal meaning takes shape” (222/243).

Notes to pages 676–704

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3 1 Corinthians 13:13. 4 In Milton’s Paradise Lost, after Adam has inquired about the rotation of the spheres, Raphael counsels him not to dream “of other worlds, what creatures there / Live, in what state, condition or degree” (bk. 8, ll. 175–6). 5 Eric Berne, What Do You Say after You Say Hallo? (New York: Bantam, 1973; orig. pub. 1972), 98, 1004. In his copy in NFL, beside the phrase “from each directive, however indirectly it is put[,] he [the child] tries to extract the imperative essence,” NF has written “will and Word of God.” 68. On The Great Code (IV) 1 In GC, NF comments that the Biblical religions are strongly moral and voluntaristic, and that many today find them in some respects primitive compared with Oriental religions (105/125). 69. Making the Revolutionary Act New 1 These themes are frequent in NF; the interviewer may be thinking particularly of the discussion of similarities and differences in “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts” (1977), C, 472–4. 2 See, e.g., pp. 80–1 in Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass: A Self-Portrait (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). 3 See pp. 320 and 488, above, and esp. p. 408, which the interviewers are more likely to have read. Similar sentiments are expressed, e.g., in SM, 18. 4 This assertion has not been found. At p. 160, above, NF says that criticism should not be taught much before the undergraduate level, an assertion more consonant with his general views. 5 This remark is doubly ridiculous in that both I.A. Richards and William Empson (author of Seven Types of Ambiguity [1930]), were Englishmen, Richards teaching at Cambridge and Empson studying there. Richards did move to Harvard in 1939, but Empson became a professor at Sheffield. Empson’s family could be traced back to the fifteenth-century tax farmer Empson who was executed by Henry VIII. 6 NF, “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D.A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58–73. The occasion of its delivery is described by Jan Gorak in “From Escape to Irony: Frye’s ‘The Argument of Comedy,’” in Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives, ed. Jean O’Grady and Wang Ning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 69–70. 72. Frye at the Forum 1 See his Preface to BG, C, 417.

1154

Notes to pages 704–25

2 The CNE is the Canadian National Exhibition, a Toronto fall fair which combines agricultural and “modern living” exhibitions with entertainment and midway rides. The art show in question included works by Dali, Chirico, Miró, Klee, Paul Nash, and Picasso. See NF, “Men as Trees Walking,” NFMC, 94. 3 Fred Haines (1879–1960) was a Canadian painter and printmaker; he had served as director of the Art Gallery of Toronto (1928–32) and was thereafter principal of the Ontario College of Art. 4 For many references to NF’s work on the Forum, see the index to D. 5 The Morrises, Louis A. and his wife Kay, worked on the Forum for many years, the former as business manager. For comments on their connection with the CCF, see D, esp. 537. 6 Among the anonymous editorials now established to be by NF are “Law and Disorder” (July 1949), on the extralegal persecution of Communists, and “Caution or Dither?” (July 1950), on the British Labour party’s reluctance to enter the postwar Schuman Plan. See NFMC, 224–5, 246–7. Another editorial on the death of H.G. Wells, “Idols of the Market-Place” (September 1946), was established as NF’s too late to be included in the Collected Works. 73. The Scholar in Society 1 NF, “The Definition of a University,” a speech of November 1970 published in 1971 and rpt. in DG, 139–55; WE, 414. 2 See no. 36, n. 2. 3 See, for instance, NF’s talk on the inauguration of Claude Bissell as president of the U of T, WE, 84. 75. Criticism after Anatomy 1 NF refers to the completion of AC (actually in June 1955 according to Ayre, 249), rather than to its publication in 1957. 2 The leading exponents of the “Yale School” of deconstructionists were Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. These four, together with Derrida, published Deconstruction and Criticism, frequently referred to as the “Yale Manifesto” (New York: Seabury, 1979). 76. Richard Cartwright and the Roots of Canadian Conservatism 1 E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973). The book argues that the current pursuit of profit and progress has resulted in economic inefficiency and a backwardlooking society.

Notes to pages 727–72

1155

77. Les Lecteurs doivent manger le livre 1 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, in “Leaves of Grass” and Selected Prose, ed. Sculley Bradley (New York: Reinhart, 1949), 76 (stanza 51). 2 After consultation, I have ventured to retranslate the original’s “l’anthethèse entre le religieux et le laïc” for NF’s favourite phrase, “distinction between the sacred and the secular.” 3 The Frenchman Roger Garaudy (b. 1913) wrote a number of books on Christianity and Marxism between 1966 and 1974, such as The Alternative Future: A Vision of Christian Marxism, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), or, with Quentin Lauer, A Christian-Communist Dialogue (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1968). Much later, in 1998, he was brought before a French court as a Holocaust-denier. 79. Music in My Life 1 Cf. p. 494, above. 2 This was the Canadian National Railways radio station, which began broadcasting in 1924. It was transferred to the CBC in April 1933, but went off the air shortly after. 3 Canadian choreographer and director Brian MacDonald produced The Gondoliers at Stratford in 1983. 4 Yeats, The Choice, ll. 1–2. In SM, NF had quoted these lines and said that they “express a profound insight” (120). 5 George Herbert, The Church Porch, stanza 40. 82. Criticism in Society 1 See p. 668, above. 2 See Wallace Stevens, Asides on the Oboe, in Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954), 250. [S] 3 Stevens, Peter Quince at the Clavier, ibid., 91. [S] 4 Samuel Johnson, “Yalden,” in Lives of the English Poets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 2:303. 5 See Jerome Bruner, The Process of Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). 6 Salusinszky here refers to the forthcoming WP. 84. The Great Test of Maturity 1 “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the uni-

1156

Notes to pages 776–91

verse is unfolding as it should.” These lines from Desiderata, a prose poem composed in 1927 by the American writer Max Ehrmann (1872–1945), found a sympathetic response during the 1960s, when they were mistakenly believed to be an anonymous inscription on an old church wall. Pierre Elliott Trudeau quoted them on a number of public occasions, notably on 22 May 1979 when he conceded electoral defeat. I am indebted to John Robert Colombo for this information. 2 Stanley Knowles represented Winnipeg North Centre almost continuously between 1943 and 1984, first for the CCF and then for the NDP. An ordained United Church minister, he became a social activist perhaps best known for his advocacy of workers’ pensions. 3 See “CRTC Hearings,” no. 31, above. 85. Archetype and History 1 For Derrida on “supplementarity,” see “Structure, Sign and Play,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2001), 278–93. An annotated copy of the 1978 ed. is in NFL. Language is a decentred “field of infinite substitutions,” or “play.” Because there is no centre, “the sign which replaces the centre, which supplements it, taking the centre’s place in its absence—this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement” (289). See also NF’s remarks at pp. 828, 933, 952, 1011, below. 2 Cf. Matthew 13:11; Luke 8:10. 3 Kathleen Coburn of Victoria University was editor of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 5 vols. in 10 (Bolligen series, Princeton University Press). She edited the first three volumes and was co-editor of vol. 4 and the posthumously published vol. 5. 4 In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), the heroine’s first husband, the pedantic Edward Casaubon, labours to find and publish a key to all mythologies, including Biblical. His project is presented as an outdated and futile endeavour. In 1846 Eliot had translated into English David Friedrich Strauss’s controversial Leben Jesu (1835), which attempted to disentangle a core of historical truth from the myths of the Gospels. 5 See no. 66, n. 2. 6 William Blissett points out that this is an allusion to Rev. T.T. Shields, pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church, 1910–55, the Ian Paisley of Toronto. 86. Moncton, Mentors, and Memories 1 There were two primary schools because of the growth in Moncton’s population. Victoria School was built in 1890 on Park St. to serve kindergarten to grade 8, and Edith Cavell School was erected on its grounds in 1920 as a par-

Notes to pages 792–6

2

3

4 5 6

7 8

9 10

11

1157

allel school to take the overflow of students, in which grades it is not apparent. NF started at Victoria School in grade 3 in 1920 (soon skipping to grade 4), but graduated from Edith Cavell in 1925. Victoria School is no longer in existence, but Edith Cavell School, burned down in 1988, has been rebuilt and may still be seen at 125 Park St. This was a large and imposing wooden building at the foot of Archibald St., which had been, at various points in its history, a railway hotel and the residence of P.S. Archibald, chief engineer of the Intercolonial Railway. It was donated (at a nominal rent of one dollar per year) to the city by the CNR in 1926 for a public library, which opened in 1927. The doctor was Dr. Clarence Webster (1863–1950), a native of Shediac, N.B., who became a distingished doctor in Edinburgh and then Montreal before being called to the Rush Medical School in Chicago in 1899. In 1920 he retired and returned to Shediac, where he pursued his lifelong interest in researching and publishing on local history. The Moncton Public Library has no record of any donation from him—perhaps just as well, since the library burned down in 1948. Much of his collection went to the New Brunswick Museum. See pp. 734, above. See no. 30, n. 2. Cassie Frye, letter to Donald Howard, 12 December 1933 (NFF, 1988, box 31, file 8). NF had been planning to stay in Moncton at least until Christmas, but the members of the class of 1933 who were continuing to Emmanuel were instrumental in arranging for a small job and sending some money for travel so that he could attend Emmanuel College (Ayre, 89). See, for instance, p. 315 above. Ivan Rand (1884–1969) was a member of the Supreme Court of Canada for sixteen years, and is known chiefly for his development of the “Rand formula” for levying union dues. He served briefly in the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick in 1925. Mathematical astronomer Simon Newcomb (1835–1909) was actually born in Nova Scotia but spent some time as a youth apprenticed to a herbalist in Moncton. In later years, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, he looked upon his childhood as “an unhappy time spent in a backwater.” Letter of Mary Howard to Donald Howard, 29 September 1929 (NFF, 1988, box 31, file 1). In 1898 Shaw published Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant in two volumes; vol. 2, the pleasant ones, included Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny, and You Never Can Tell. Alma Howard was the maiden and professional name of Alma Howard Rolleston Ebert (1913–84), daughter of NF’s uncle Eratus. The holder of a Ph.D. from McGill, she had a distinguished career in radiobiology and cell kinetics in laboratories in England. During her retirement she and NF

1158

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26

Notes to pages 796–806

exchanged letters, and a month before her sudden death were planning to meet (NFF, 1990, box 4, file 3). Wilbert Howard (1890–1967), son of Daniel Hershey Howard, NF’s maternal uncle. He was a lawyer who held numerous corporate appointments. E.g., in “The Developing Imagination” (1963), WE, 143. E.g., in “The Teacher’s Source of Authority” (1978), WE, 499. Letter from Mary Howard to her sisters [1929] (NFF, 1988, box 31, file 6). [B] American composer Edward Macdowell (1860–1906) was greatly influenced by German Romanticism. Étude Magazine, published monthly, 1883–1957, in Philadelphia, was strongly supportive of German and Romantic music during the 1920s under editor James Francis Cook. One issue offers a reappraisal of German music in the wake of the First World War, concluding that Germany is still musically pre-eminent and dismissing suggestions about the “decadence” of German music. The 1903 edition of the Golden Treasury was in 4 vols.; vol. 2 included three poems by Marvell and eleven of the shorter works of Milton. Rev. Charles Arthur Krug (1906–85) was don at Gate House during NF’s student years. After his studies and ordination he was Hart Massey Professor of Philosophy, 1931–43, and of Philosophy and Psychology (1943–47) at Mount Allison, with time out for war service. NF attended his wedding in September 1932 (NFHK, 1:83). Letter from Cassie Howard Frye to Donald Howard, 3 September 1931 (NFF, 1988, box 31, file 8). [B] NF’s sister, Vera Victoria Frye, received a B.A. from Mount Allison University in 1924. [B] John Edward Belliveau, “Newcomb, Frye and Rand: Three Scholars of Whom Moncton Should Be Proud,” Atlantic Advocate, 69, no. 2 (1978): 46. [B] [This essay appeared, translated into French by] Jacqueline Carnaud, in Ornicar? Revue du champs freudien, 33 (1985): 11–14. [B] After the time of this interview, the original English version appeared in Criticism and Lacan, ed. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (1990). Cf. Acts 22:3–16. Cf. EI, 12–13 (EICT, 447), where the developing imaginative life of a “genuine primitive” is suggested. See also SeS, 29 (SeSCT, 23), which links the periodic rise of primitivism with the wearing out of conventions. This was Jerome McGann, whose published Alexander Lectures had the title Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). His fourth lecture invoked Walter Benjamin and others in calling for an even more politicized reading of texts. At the start of his book, McGann criticizes AC for its lack of historicity. In his Either/Or (1843), Søren Kierkegaard had contrasted the aesthetic and the ethical.

Notes to pages 807–31

1159

27 This may be a somewhat fanciful allusion to escapes to his parents’ cottage on Lake Simcoe (the earliest-settled and most southerly area of “cottage country” north of Toronto), where the urbanized Gould liked to play his parents’ old Chickering piano. Or it may perhaps refer to the documentary Gould made on “The Idea of North,” one of the really desolate areas that appealed to him. 87. William Blake: Prophet of the New Age 1 The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Fisch (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), 96–7 (sec. 331). 88. Morningside Interview on Shakespeare 1 Gzowski is presumably thinking of NF’s assertion, at NFS, 99–100, that without Hamlet we might not have had the Romantic movement or the works of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. 2 This is definitely what NF said on tape. It is puzzling in that the plays could not have been performed in the time indicated, yet an hour and forty minutes is too long for a single act of Lear also. 89. Love of Learning 1 See the opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. 90. Frye, Literary Critic 1 See no. 85, n. 1. 2 In StS, NF had written, “I do not believe, ultimately, in a plurality of critical methods, though I can see a division of labour in critical operations” (81). In elaboration he said that he did not believe that there are different “schools” with irreconcilable metaphysical assumptions. 91. On The Great Code (V) 1 In her introductory remarks, Aphel had noted this suggestion by Monseigneur Clemente Riva. The paper published several replies, including that of correspondent Fausto Gianfranceschi, who had focused particularly on NF’s The Great Code. 2 In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, bk. 5, chap. 5, the Grand Inquisitor of Ivan’s poem renounces human freedom in favour of security, gained by following church teachings.

1160

Notes to pages 831–53

3 The Medium is the Message is the title of one of McLuhan’s books (1967) and the message of much of his work. 92. On The Great Code (VI) 1 Emily Dickinson, Because that you are going, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1958), 3:875–6. 94. Schools of Criticism (I) 1 Criticism in Society, ed. Imre Salusinszky, 73. The same collection, recently published, included an interview with NF, no. 82 above. 2 Ibid., 32. [G introduces the Salusinszky volume here] 3 “Lacan et la parole dans sa plenitude,” trans. Jacqueline Carnaud, Ornicar? Revue du champ freudien, 33 (April–June 1985): 11–14. [NF] [The editor of the interview did not use this note supplied by NF on his disk, giving instead a general footnote, “For a detailed and complete list of Frye’s works, including his writings on psychology (Freud, Jung, Bachelard, Lacan), see the voluminous updated bibliography compiled by Robert Denham.”] 4 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 10, l. 68, E38; letter to Thomas Butts, 2 October 1800, E712. 5 CR, 55 [G]; NFR, 69. 6 Guardiani is actually recalling a remark by Frank Kermode in Criticism in Society, 104. 7 Criticism in Society, 169 [G]. 8 CR, 19–20 [G]; NFR, 47. 9 See no. 85, n. 1. 10 Criticism in Society, 33; see also p. 755, above. 95. William Morris 1 Asa Briggs, Introduction to William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs, ed. Asa Briggs (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 13. [L] 2 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 11, E38. 3 This is the poet’s opening address to the reader in The Earthly Paradise. 4 William Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” in News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ed. Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 1993), 381. [L] 5 See Sartor Resartus, bk. 3, chap. 10, where Carlyle speaks of these two sects who strive to divide the English nation into two, one attracting the money and one the hunger of the nation. 6 “Chapters on Socialism” (1879), left incomplete at Mill’s death, was actually revised and published by his step-daughter Helen Taylor. Under the influ-

Notes to pages 855–77

7

8 9 10

1161

ence of his wife Harriet (who died in 1858), Mill had revised the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1852) to show a far greater sympathy with socialism than had the first edition of 1848. “Arthur Pendenys” is the name used by Arthur Lee Humphreys (1865–1946) in an undated letter to Morris which was reprinted as a small booklet (in a limited edition of 100 copies) by the Aliquando Press (Toronto) in 1979. Humphreys was a highly regarded bookseller at Hatchards in Piccadilly, and the publisher of small but beautifully printed books. In his amusing letter, which makes fun of Morris’s hefty books with their unreadable Gothic type, Pendenys says that “Your books are bric-à-brac, and they appeal only to a class which I am told you are constantly condemning.” See Morris’s criticism of Oxford, in particular, in News from Nowhere (London: Longmans, 1891), 77. William Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings, 158. [L] William Morris, “The Beauty of Life,” in Collected Works of William Morris, ed. May Morris (London: Longmans, 1914), 12:76. [L] 98. The Great Teacher

1 This was a frequent inaccuracy of NF’s. In fact St. Augustine mentions someone else’s irritation on this subject, as NF himself explains in CR (NFR, 55–6). See Augustine, Confessions, trans. E.B. Pusey (London: Dent, 1932), 260–1 (bk. 11, chap. 12). 2 This quotation has not been located; perhaps Rasky heard NF say it in the Bible lectures, some of which he attended before filming. NF stresses the fact that the creation of woman comes at the end of the Jahwist account “as the climax of the whole procedure” in “The Mythical Approach to Creation,” which however was not published until 1990 in MM (NFR, 122). 3 Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903), no. 152. 4 Nietzsche’s Zarathustra had proclaimed “God is dead” in The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 167, 181– 2. In The Twilight of the Idols (1888), trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 22, Nietzsche remarks, “I fear we shall never be rid of God, so long as we still believe in grammar.” 5 Joyce, Ulysses, 35; Byron, Vision of Judgment, ll. 688–9. 6 D.H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (London: Martin Secker, 1932), 76. 7 GC, 167/189: “my interest is not in doctrines of faith as such but in the expanding of vision through language.” 8 “The Past, the Present, and the Perhaps” is the name given to the preface of Tennessee Williams’s play Orpheus Descending (1958), a revised version of the Battle of Angels (1945). It first appeared in separate form in the New York Times, 17 March 1957.

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Notes to pages 881–98

9 CP, 16, 97–8. Sir Walter Raleigh made the assertion about Paradise Lost in his Milton (London: Edward Arnold, 1922), 88. 10 Sartre’s “Hell is other people” comes from his famous one-act play No Exit (1944). Kierkegaard (1813–55) lived long before Sartre (1905–80), and so could not literally respond to his remark, though he shared his interest in the relation between the individual and society. Coincidentally, NF had written “Hell is other people” in the margin of his copy of Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for My Work As an Author, p. 116, beside a paragraph which seems to support Sartre; see ann. no. 883 in NFL. T.S. Eliot had advanced the idea that “hell is oneself” in his The Cocktail Party. 11 Marcel Proust, Time Regained, in Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff et al. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), 3:215 (chap. 3). 12 Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate, l. 21. 13 The quip (not attributed at GC, 137/157) has been attributed variously to Calvin, Luther, and others, and has been cited as a reason for Calvin’s not having written a commentary on the Book of Revelation. 99. Canadian and American Values 1 In this regard it is amusing to recall Gzowski’s anecdote that, when he was interviewing NF, he was so tense that he burst out into a fit of uncontrollable coughing, at which NF said, “Oh dear, I’m sorry” (The Private Voice, 50). 2 This remark has not been located, but for examples of Richler’s attitude to the United States, see his childhood memoir, The Street (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969), 59; or St. Urbain’s Horseman (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971), 107. 3 “To Come to Light,” NF’s address on the 150th anniversary of the founding of Victoria College, published in No Uncertain Sounds (1988); NFR, 361. 4 Edward Koch, the bold and outspoken mayor of New York, had appeared regularly on news radio and television besides writing thirteen books. He served three terms (1973–89) before losing a fourth. 5 See Artabanus’s (unheeded) advice to his nephew Xerxes, about a contemplated invasion of Greece, in Herodotus, The History, bk. 7, sec. 10. 6 Ronald Reagan used this phrase in a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, 8 March 1982, defending the decision to build more nuclear weapons. It was widely reported and became a popular term to describe the Soviet Union (or to make fun of Reagan). 7 In Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps Whitman describes “How Democracy with desperate vengeful port strides on” (l. 30); in Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood he compares democracy to a ship advancing with the freight of the ages (ll. 47–57). Both poems are in Leaves of Grass. 8 “To Come to Light,” NFR, 362–3.

Notes to pages 899–915

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9 “By Liberal Things” (1959), WE, 98. 10 “To Come to Light,” NFR, 363. 11 This is the ending of CR (NFR, 81–2), where the supremacy of charity over faith is called the Everlasting Gospel. 12 See no. 34, n. 3. 100. Nature and Civilization 1 “Conclusion to the First Edition of Literary History of Canada,” C, 351. 2 Preface to BG, iii (C, 414). 3 Ibid. 101. Second Marriage 1 In the pre-interview, Ashton tried out this question: Ashton: You and Elizabeth, along with your first wife Helen, were classmates at Victoria College in 1933. How, more than fifty years later, did the talk of marriage come up? Frye: Well, Elizabeth and her husband, and I and my wife, were very congenial friends. After Jim died, the three of us continued to see one another and we were still congenial. After Helen went it just left the two of us—and we were still congenial— Elizabeth Frye: Well, thank you! (laughter) 2 This was Robert P. (Bob) Bates, a classmate both at Victoria and Emmanuel Colleges. 3 In the pre-interview, Ashton asked more about the subject of aging: Ashton: In your travels around the world do you notice different attitudes to aging? Elizabeth Frye: We’ve just been travelling in the Soviet Union and one of the things that knocked me out was having to wait at every door while six or seven huge Soviet men would go through first and practically knock me down. (To Frye) Didn’t you notice that? Frye: Yes, and it’s very different in Oriental countries. In Japan they seem to have a considerable respect for age—more of a sense of age and wisdom [going hand in hand]. In North America there’s perhaps more of a feeling of the lifespan being more or less over at sixty. I mean, when I read reviews— which I do as seldom as possible—of my own books and my own place as a critic, I can very frequently see in the subtext: “You know, it’s time this old bugger was dead.” At the end of the pre-interview, Ashton asked if there was anything they would like to add regarding aging. Frye: Well, there’s one completely stupid story regarding young people’s

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Notes to pages 919–30

attitudes to older people. I met a lad on the subway who asked for my autograph, but he hadn’t given me anything to write on or with so I hesitated. And then he said, “You’re Harold Ballard, aren’t you?” And I said, “Well, I’m not,” and he said, “You know, the old guy who owns the Leafs?” Now there’s a young man to whom all old men must look the same. 102. Northrop Frye in Conversation 1 NF’s older brother Howard had been killed when NF had just turned six. His sister Vera (1900–66) left home to attend Mt. Allison University when he was eight. After graduation she went to work in Chicago. 2 In chap. 8 of George Orwell’s 1984, Julia and Winston visit the luxury flat of party member O’Brien, who has this privilege. The man who walks into the room is O’Brien’s servant Martin. 3 This refers to the hymn “Lead Kindly Light” with words by John Henry Newman (no. 270 in The Hymn Book of the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada, 1971). [C] 4 NF, Letter to Roy Daniells, 1 April 1975, quoted in Ayre, 45. 5 The colleague was Joseph Fisher, who had joined the department in 1937 and was to become chair in 1945. Besides his eighteenth-century course, NF taught Milton and Spenser, seventeenth-century prose, and nineteenth-century thought. 6 “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 249. [C] 7 Thomas J.J. Altizer, The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967). [C] 8 Blake, There Is No Natural Religion (b), last line, E3. Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi Dei, par. 54, in Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, ed. and trans. Robert W. Thompson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 269. 9 Unpublished interview. Kathleen Raine is a British poet and scholar and the author of a number of books on Blake, including Blake and Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1968), The Human Face of God (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), and Blake and the New Age (London: Allen & Unwin, 1979). [C] 10 Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue, pp. [37–8; E]541–2. [C] 11 “William Blake: Prophet of a New Age,” Ideas, CBC Radio, 26 March 1987, 20. [C] This was a program NF also contributed to, no. 87, above. George Goyder was a co-founder and trustee of the William Blake Trust (1949–82), concerned with bringing Blake’s illuminated books to a wider audience by publishing facsimiles. 12 Blake, Milton, pl. 41, l. 4, E142. 13 In “The Road of Excess” NF had discussed the way in which an aphorism of

Notes to pages 931–47

14 15

16

17

18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27

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Blake’s will often sound, “as Blake intended it to sound, like someone in the last stages of paranoia. Blake has an unusual faculty for putting his central beliefs in this mock-paranoid form” in order to destabilize normal language (StS, 161; M&B, 317). André Malraux, The Voices of Silence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 619. An annotated copy of the first ed. (1953) is in NFL. In “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), NF had associated spring with romance and summer with comedy; in AC spring was associated with comedy and summer with romance. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966). Imre Salusinszky in “Frye and the Art of Memory,” in Rereading Frye, ed. David Boyd and Imre Salusinszky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 39–54, discusses this topic and the influence of Yates. NF, “Literary and Mechanical Models,” presented at the Conference on Computing in the Humanities, Toronto, 6 June 1989; rpt. in SeSCT, 451–62. For the remark on software, see EAC, 12–13; SeSCT, 455. See no. 85, n. 1. Elizabeth Waterston, “Travel Books, 1880–1920,” Literary History of Canada, 360. À propos of this work, NF remarks that “One may wonder whether satire was not his real medium, whether in the long run he was not of the race of Rabelais and Apuleius, a metaphysical satirist inclined to fantasy rather than symbolism” (FS, 193/195). Bacon declared that he had taken upon himself “to ring a Bell, to call other wits together,” and therefore wished it to be widely heard. See his “Letter of Request to Dr. Playfer to Translate the Book of Advancement of Learning into Latine,” Resuscitatio, or, Bringing into publick light severall pieces of the works, civil, historical, philosophical, & theological, hitherto sleeping, of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon . . . together with His Lordships life by William Rawley (London: Printed by Sarah Griffin for William Lee, 1657), 33. Blake, Jerusalem, [pl. 10, l. 20, E]153. [C] Plato attacks poets in bk. 10 of the Republic. See his Laws, 660a, on the allowing of subservient poets to stay in the republic. NF’s favourite example is Heidegger, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 198. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1692). [C] Samuel Johnson, Prologue to the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre (1747) [ll. 53–4]. [C] In “Maps and Territories,” his talk at the Rome conference of 1987, NF remarked that “Every writer today is surrounded by ideologues who not only urge him to write according to their formulas but have suborned a large proportion of critics to explain his work in their own terms.” Ritratto di

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Notes to pages 948–63

Northrop Frye, ed. Agostino Lombardo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1989), 14; SeSCT, 439. 28 AC, 5/7. For Mill’s remark, see his “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. J.M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 345. 29 NF, “The Instruments of Mental Production” (1966), StS, 5; WE, 263. 30 Psychoanalysis and Literary Process, ed. Frederick Crews (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1970), 1–24. [C] 31 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 68–75. [C] 32 “Ghostlier Demarcations,” in Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, 68–75. [C] 33 An annotated copy of Jean Piaget’s Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), is in NFL. 34 Cf. p. 933, above, and no. 85, n. 1. 35 This is an allusion to the chapter “That Dangerous Supplement” in Derrida’s Of Grammatology, a reading of Rousseau’s Confessions which points out that Rousseau uses the word “supplément” to describe both writing and masturbation. 36 Yeats, Letter to Lady Elizabeth Pelham (4 January 1939), quoted in Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Dutton, 1948), 285. 37 WP had not been published at the time of this interview, but at p. 925 NF mentions having finished it (cf. also p. 1036). Presumably Cayley read it in typescript, as the quotation from it is on the original tape. Margaret Burgess testifies that Jane Widdicombe did give printouts of the typescript to several people to read. For Russell’s remark, see WP, 150, and NF’s note to A History of Western Philosophy (1945), chap. 23. 38 Paul Valéry, “On Poe’s Eureka,” in Leonardo, Poe, Mallarmé, trans. Malcolm Cowley and James Lawler (London: Routledge, 1972), 170. 39 Most people would probably say that there were not four revolutions in English history, let alone in Milton’s lifetime. But NF made this claim also in his introduction to Milton’s“Paradise Lost” and Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1951), xv. Presumably he was thinking of the various stages of the English Civil War, Commonwealth, and Protectorate. 40 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [pl. 5, last line, E]35. [C] 41 Sir Thomas Browne, “All Things are artificial, for nature is the art of God,” in Religio Medici (1643), pt. 1, sec. 15. [C] 42 “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism” (StS, 200– 17 [ENC, 75–91]). [C] 43 Ibid., 216; ENC, 90–1. 44 “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read” (TSE, 5).

Notes to pages 964–80

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45 Interview by Stan Correy and Don Anderson (WGS, 221–35). [C] See p. 668, above. 46 The first two quotations are from Stevens’s The Motive for Metaphor, the third from So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch. 47 See p. 1071, below, for further comments on this conversion. 48 Cayley’s second quotation is from Stevens’s Sunday Morning, while the third alludes to his volume Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1947). 49 Stevens, Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas, l. 2. 50 Adagia does not specifically mention Easter, though it is concerned with God as imagination. NF is probably thinking of Stevens’s address on receiving an honorary degree which he quotes at p. 289, above. 51 The goldiardic poets were anonymous twelfth- and thirteenth-century authors of satirical and profane poems in Latin, the most famous of which is the Apocalypse of Golias. 52 Matthew Arnold, 1869 preface to Culture and Anarchy, in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190. 53 Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, ed. Lin Piao (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967), 61. 54 NF, “Canada and Its Poetry” (1943), C, 28. 55 Brian Moore (1921–99), born and raised in Ireland, came to Canada in 1948. His early novels, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), The Feast of Lupercal (1957), and The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), were written and published in Canada, the latter winning a Governor General’s Literary Award. Shortly before this (1959) Moore had left Canada for the United States, though he retained his Canadian citizenship. 56 Atwood, Second Words, 94, 405. 57 Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan were both colleagues of NF’s at the University of Toronto. See Innis, The Bias of Communications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951); and McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964). [C] 58 NF is presumably including Newfoundland here, although it did not become a Canadian province until 1949. 59 Historian Donald D. Creighton was another of NF’s University of Toronto colleagues. See Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1937). [C] 60 Socrates stated that he believed that the earth is vast, “and that we who dwell between the river Phasis and the Pillars of Hercules inhabit only a minute portion of it—we live around the sea like ants or frogs around a pond—and there are many other people inhabiting similar regions” (Phaedo, 109a–b). 61 Raymond Knister’s White Narcissus was published in 1929 (around the time of

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62 63

64

65 66

67

68 69 70 71

72 73

Notes to pages 980–93

Callaghan’s early fiction), and Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Imperialist in 1904, so NF is not actually outlining a chronological sequence here, as he appears to be doing. In his essay “Culture and Society in Ontario, 1784–1984,” he discusses White Narcissus as an example of provincial style (C, 623–4). These annual reviews are collected in [C, and in slightly shortened form in] BG. [C] David Jackel, “Northrop Frye and the Continentalist Tradition,” Dalhousie Review, 56, no. 2 (1976): 221–39. On p. 226 Jackel says that some of NF’s students (such as Macpherson, Reaney, and Avison) went on to write poetry which was in turn praised by him. See also George Bowering, “Why James Reaney Is a Better Poet (1) Than Any Northrop Frye Poet (2) Than He Used to Be,” Canadian Literature, 36 (Spring 1968): 40–9. The free-trade agreement between Canada and the U.S. was signed 2 January 1988 under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. After the House of Commons had passed implementing legislation in August, the threat that the Liberal-dominated Senate would reject it led to the “free trade election” of November 1988, in which the Mulroney Conservatives won a majority. The activities of the cultural industries (film, video, audio, broadcasting, and publishing) were exempt from the provisions of the agreement. See no. 76, n. 1. Eric Havelock was a colleague of NF’s at the University of Toronto in the 1940s. In 1977, the year before he died, he returned to U of T to address a symposium on orality and literacy held at Emmanuel College. His views are summarized in his final book, The Muse Learns to Write (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). [C] See the first essay in WTC, “The Moral of Manner,” which contrasts ordinary speech with prose and laments the lack of articulateness and rhythm in much habitual speech. See no. 19, n. 4. See no. 98, n. 9. Jan Kott (1914–2001), Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (New York: Norton, 1974). The Macpherson Commission was named for its chairman, the distinguished political philosopher C.B. Macpherson. It was established in response to student criticism of the U of T’s undergraduate curriculum, with its scholarly and specialized honour courses. The Commission reported in 1967 and recommended that the university virtually eliminate these courses, offer the students more choice, but still maintain high academic standards. (See C.B. Macpherson: A Retrospective, “Ideas,” 24 May 1988, 12). [C] Claude Bissell was the president of the University of Toronto at the time of the Macpherson Commission. [C] Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.2.81–2.

Notes to pages 994–1029

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74 For NF’s report on these “Adventures” readers, see WE, 227–41. For his alternative series, see no. 40, above. 75 See chap. 10 of The Muse Learns to Write, esp. pp. 101–3. See also The Greek Concept of Justice from its Shadow in Homer to its Substance in Plato (1978). 76 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, 246. 77 See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), a defence of liberal democracy against totalitarian trends in Plato and later theorists. 78 William Irwin Thompson, Gaia: A Way of Knowing (New York: Lindisfarne, 1987), 209–10. 79 According to Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy throws each man back upon himself, “et menace de le renfermer enfin tout entier dans le solitude de son propre coeur.” De la Démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla (Paris: Libraire Philosophique, 1990), 2:98 (pt. 2, chap. 2). 80 See no. 39, n. 3. 81 Blake, The Laocoön, [E] 274. [C] 82 NF probably had in mind the films Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Later this theme reached a mass audience with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, made into a movie in 2006. 83 See no. 98, n. 4. 84 In CR, chap. 3, NF remarks of Exodus 3:14, “I am that I am,” that scholars say it would be better rendered as “I will be what I will be” (NFR, 79; see also GC, 17/35). 85 See p. 810, above. 86 William O. Fennell, “Theology and Frye: Some Implications of The Great Code,” Toronto Journal of Theology, 1, no.1 (1985): 113–21. [C] 87 Eliot, Burnt Norton, sec. 2, l. 19. 88 Bernard Shaw, “The Bible,” in A Treatise on Parents and Children (1914), par. 1. 89 See, for example, Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985). [C] 90 See no. 98, n. 6. 91 The reference is to Genesis 3:22 with its unfinished sentence, “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” 92 NF started to use this distinction in about 1983, for instance in a speech on Eros in poetry given on 16 February 1983 and published in 1986 (see SeSCT, 266). Cayley may have come across it in his reading of the typescript of WP; the discussion is on pp. 42–6 of the printed book. 93 Pascal is mocking moral judgments that are influenced by political considerations: “Plaisante justice qu’une rivière borne! Vérité au deçá des Pyrénées, erreur au delà.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1948), 151 (art. 5, par. 294).

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Notes to pages 1029–50

94 Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 3, E34. 95 In Some Reflections on Life and Habit (published as a short monograph in 1988) NF refers to his having recently read “a book that has been on the best-seller list for a long time, and which propounds the thesis that students have been cheated out of their education, socially and morally as well as intellectually” (23). He does not exactly satirize Bloom—with whose views of the ’60s he has some sympathy—but he does say that Bloom’s readers are reacting to a pastoral myth of an idealized past. 96 See Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations from the Library of Congress, ed. Suzy Platt (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1992), 392, for remarks on this epigram, often attributed to Shaw but perhaps originating with Oscar Wilde. 97 On the original tape NF says, “Barthes yesterday was saying,” so the reference is to a speech or conversation. For the general idea, see the claim that everything is already read and “there is no first reading,” in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1974), 16. 103. “Condominium Mentality” in CanLit 1 E.g., Odyssey, trans. Lattimore, bk. 16, l. 129; bk. 1, ll. 267, 401. 105. Family Stories 1 This appears to be a misunderstanding on Silversides’s part. NF had not meant that his grandparents brought him up, but that his parents had somewhat the age and mental attitude of grandparents. Cf. p. 791, above. 2 That is, she had used the word for “pig” (cochon) in place of “to go to bed” (se coucher, perhaps in the form couchons). 3 The bear’s son tale (thought to have influenced Beowulf ) is a widespread folk tale with over two hundred variants telling of a fight with a demon who terrorizes a king’s hall. The important point here is that it is the youngest son, thought to be sluggish and good-for-nothing in his boyhood, who triumphs where his older brothers failed—a motif found in many folk tales. 4 Margaret Atwood, Second Words, 95, 405. 5 Ayre, 32. Willie Solomon was the son of Mrs. Frye’s sister Tessie. 6 NF had met Helen Kemp during their second year at Victoria College, 1930– 31. During 1934–35, Helen studied at the Courtauld Institute in London, while NF was at Emmanuel College. In 1936–37, NF went to Oxford to study at Merton College, while Helen worked at the Art Gallery of Toronto. They were married 24 August 1937. 7 NF and Helen visited Moncton in July of 1940, when his mother Cassie was very sick, but undiagnosed. She died in November. For discussion of a possi-

Notes to pages 1056–71

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ble earlier meeting while NF was visiting his parents in August 1936, see NFHK, 522–9 passim. 106. Imprint Interview 1 Blake, Jerusalem, pl. 10, l. 20, E153. 2 T.S. Eliot, “Imperfect Critics,” in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1960), 37. 3 Blake, Letter to Butts, 6 July 1803, E730. Blake draws attention to the similarity to Plato, apparently having in mind the Phaedrus. 4 Blake, Letter to Rev. Dr. Trusler, 23 August 1799, E702–3. 5 T.S. Eliot, “William Blake,” Selected Essays, 321. 6 Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 12, E38. 7 See p. 885, above. 8 T.S. Eliot, “The Function of Criticism,” Selected Essays, 23. 9 Edmund Wilson, “Is Verse a Dying Technique?” in The Triple Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963; orig. pub. 1938), 15–30. 10 “Bill 101” is The Charter of the French Language (S.Q. 1977, c. 5), a statute passed by the Quebec National Assembly in 1977 as part of Quebec’s determination to maintain French as a viable language in a continent that speaks mainly English. The most controversial sections were those restricting access to English schools and prohibiting the use of English on commercial signs. The Supreme Court of Canada later ruled that these provisions were in conflict with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982). 11 See no. 38, n. 10. 107. Stevens and the Value of Literature 1 Plato, Sophist, 266c. 2 Immanuel Kart, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), 54–5 (sec. 10). 3 See p. 668, above. 4 In Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1977), Peter Brazeau collects interviews with people who had known Stevens. Rev. Arthur Hanley was the chaplain at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, where Stevens died on 2 August 1955; he said that he had succeeded in overcoming Stevens’s objections to the doctrine of hell and receiving him into the church some time in July, although it was kept quiet (294–6). Holly Stevens, the poet’s daughter, “vigorously denies that her father was converted to Catholicism during his last illness. While at St. Francis Hospital, she recalls, Stevens complained of visits by the clergy, but said he was too weak to protest” (310n).

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Notes to pages 1075–85 108. Time Fulfilled

1 Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: Die typologische Deutung des Alten Testaments im Neuen (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1939), 244. This book has been translated into English by D.H. Madvig as Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (1982). 2 In bk. 12 of Paradise Lost, while showing Adam the panorama of the future as portrayed in the Bible, Michael speaks of the movement “From shadowie Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit” (l. 303). 3 See, e.g., “The Double Mirror,” where NF writes, “As for ‘inspiration,’ if there is one thing that Biblical scholarship has established beyond reasonable doubt, it is that authorship, inspired or not, counts for very little in the Bible” (NFR, 86). 4 The collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern European states, partly facilitated by Mikhail Gorbachev’s accession to power in the U.S.S.R. in 1985, reached its symbolic height with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. 109. Schools of Criticism (II) 1 R.S. Crane of the University of Chicago came to Toronto to give the Alexander Lectures for 1951–52, later published as The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (1953). For NF’s comments on the lectures, see D, 544–8 passim. 2 Hayden White discusses his debt to NF for “the story–plot relationship” in “The Structure of Historical Narrative,” Clio, 1, no. 3 (1972): 5–20. In his 1973 book-length study he speaks in detail of four different modes, outlined in AC, as central to his study of narrative designs in historical writing. See Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 7–11. 3 Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Bellini’s I Puritani (based on Scott’s Old Mortality), both of 1835, were the most popular, and lasting, of numerous transformations of Scott’s novels into Italian operas in the nineteenth century. In fact, The Bride of Lammermoor had already furnished three librettos of operas, 1829–34. 4 Cf. NF, “Comic Myth in Shakespeare,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 46, ser. 3, sec. 2 (June 1952): 57. 5 Probably this is “The Road of Excess,” StS, 160–74, originally published in Myth and Symbol: Critical Approaches and Applications, ed. Beatrice Slote (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), 3–20; rpt. in M&B, 316–29. 6 In Dissemination, 130–4, Jacques Derrida links this word, which Plato does not use, with cognates such as pharmakeus, which he does.

Notes to pages 1085–98

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7 Wallace Stevens, The Poems of Our Climate, l. 21. 8 Leo Spitzer (1887–1960), linguist and critic, author of numerous books and articles on literature, style, and syntax. 9 Michail Bakhtin discusses Menippean satire in his 1963 study, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 112–16. Here he discusses the genre “as one of the main carriers and channels for the carnival sense of the world in literature” (113). 110. Cultural Identity in Canada 1 “Speech at the new Canadian Embassy, Washington” (14 September 1989), C, 642. This speech expands on the idea of levels of cultural identity mentioned in the interview. 2 On 1 November 1990, in the wake of Meech Lake (for which see n. 3), the federal government announced the creation of the Citizens’ Forum on Canada’s Future. Chaired by Keith Spicer (b. 1934), journalist, broadcaster, and head of the CRTC, the Forum travelled across the country soliciting Canadians’ ideas about their country. 3 The Meech Lake constitutional accord was a proposed agreement between the federal government and the ten provinces to recognize Quebec as a “distinct society.” The accord was not ratified by all the provinces and so lapsed. 4 The Idea File of Harold Adam Innis, ed. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980). 111. The Final Interview 1 Aristotle’s theory of causation: 1) formal cause is that into which something is made, 2) efficient cause is that by which something is made, 3) material cause is that out of which something is made, 4) final cause is that for the sake of which something is made (from Aristotle for Everybody, by Mortimer J. Adler). Bertrand Russell provides a clear example of what Aristotle means: Let us take again the man who is making a statue. The material cause of the statue is the marble, the formal cause is the essence of the statue to be produced, the efficient cause is the contact of the chisel with the marble, and the final cause is the end that the sculptor has in view (A History of Western Philosophy). [Yan’s note] 2 Reviewers of FS who so complained include Lloyd Frankenberg in the Saturday Review of Literature, 30 (19 July 1947): 19; and Marshall McLuhan in the Sewanee Review, 55 (October–December 1947): 710–13. NF’s expression about

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Notes to page 1100

the complaint/compliment is found in his Notebook 7, par. 19, (NAC, 13–14) and doubtless elsewhere. For his general views on the teacher as a transparent medium, see, e.g., pp. 987–9, above. 3 With Sheridan Baker and George Perkins, NF edited The Practical Imagination: An Introduction to Poetry (New York: Harper & Row, 1983; rev. compact ed., 1987); rpt. in SeSCT, 182–212. For Literature: Uses of the Imagination, see no. 40, above.

Index

note: Some incidental references by interviewers that are not picked up by Frye have not been indexed. Works are indexed under their author; the date is that of first publication in the language of the title.

Aaron, 1008 Abel, 559, 874 Abhorrence, 250 Abortion, 567 Abraham, 870; and Isaac, 285 Abstract expressionism, 908 Absurd, the, 44, 127, 270; and counter-absurd, 185; theatre of the, 178; and Zen, 396 Acadians, 136, 1090 Act, defining or free, 33–4, 37, 39–40 Acta Victoriana, NF and, 294, 355, 606 Active vs. passive response, 116, 166, 172, 537, 712 ACTRA (Association of Canadian Television and Radio Artists), 105 Acts of the Apostles, 381 Adam, 391, 561; and Eve, 289, 312. See also Fall Adams, Hazard (b. 1926), 608, 635 & n. 65 Adamson, Joseph (b. 1950): Northrop Frye: A Visionary Life (1993), xliv

Addison, Margaret Eleanor Theodora (1868–1940), 581–2, 946 Adonis, 407; and Jesus, 138, 284, 373; quadrant, 143 Adult education, 68, 72, 440, 639, 750 “Adventures” readers, 994 Advertising, 49; irony in, 166–7, 712; and propaganda, 338, 448, 454, 462, 645, 763, 773 Aeroplanes, 308, 998 Aeschylus (ca. 525–ca. 456 b.c.e.): Prometheus Bound, 220 Aesthetics, 1072 Affirmative action, 364 Afterlife, 677 Air of Death, The, 99, 104, 110–11, 123– 4; Hall Report on, 103 Aitken, Johan Lyall (b. 1953), interviews NF, 190–7 Albee, Edward (b. 1928): Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), 251–2 Alchemy, 459 Alexander, Ian, interviews NF, 733–42

1176 Alexander Lectures, 805 Alfred the Great (c.e. 849–99), Robins on, 586 Alienation, 41–2, 46, 127 Allegory, 1075; Blake on, 279–80 All in the Family, 748 Altamont Festival, 383 Alter, Robert (b. 1935), 784; The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981), xlvi, 660 Alumni, 439–40 Ambiguity, 411 American Civil War, 892 American Constitution, 688, 894, 977 American literature, 29, 241, 296, 977, 1083; mythology in, 311; regionalism in, 89, 135, 228, 352–3, 458, 499, 530, 646, 724, 978; revolutionary spirit in, 224, 688; at U of T, 583, 609 American Revolution, 233, 247, 281, 443–4, 654, 894, 958, 977; Blake on, 811 Amos, book of, 637 Amos ’n’ Andy, 501 Anarchism, in Canada, 92–3 Anatomy form, 531–2, 936–7 Anderson, Allan, interviews NF, 239– 44 Anderson, Don, interviews NF, 656– 69 Anderson, Fulton Henry (1895–1968), 584 Angels, 48, 447 Anglican Church, 48, 94, 326 Anglo-Saxon: poetry, 549; riddle, 547 Animals, death of, 457 Anthropology, 369; comparative, 16; and criticism, 61, 453, 491, 532, 841, 952 Antichrist, 926 Anti-intellectualism, 365, 644–5, 690, 712–13, 747, 891 Anti-Semitism, 378

Index Antoninus, Brother (pseud. of William Everson) (1912–94), 203 Anxiety, 53–4, 127, 686 Apathy, 346 Aphel, Donata, interviews NF, 830–1 Aphorisms, 176; NF’s, 1095 Apocalypse, 378–9, 387, 388, 1028; as phase of revelation, 554–5 Apollonian vs. Dionysiac, 381–4 Appearance, and reality, 456 Apuleius, Lucius (b. ca. c.e. 125), 938 Aquarius, Age of, 329, 365, 391 Aquinas, St. Thomas (1225–74), 456, 1058 Archer, Bert, interviews NF, 858–9 Archetypal criticism, 217, 480, 779–81 Archetype(s), 59, 61, 217, 219, 350–1, 480, 655, 753; Jung on, 478; meaning of, 406–7, 941–3; in NF’s life, 265, 733; spotting, 651, 673; and stereotype, 90; transformations of, 450, 827 Argentina, 566 Argument, 953 Aristocracy, 350 Aristophanes (ca. 448–ca. 388 b.c.e.), 717 Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.), 59, 152, 825, 858, 1004, 1027; on anagnorisis, 119; language of, 550; on no word for work of literature, 75; on pity and terror, 251; Metaphysics, 1034 Armatage, Kay, interviews NF, xvi Arnold, Cliff, interviews NF, 642–55 Arnold, Matthew (1822–88), 193, 337, 582, 802; on culture, 60, 154; as liberal, 1072; NF and, 322, 968–70, 971 Art: authority in, 17–18; Blake’s theory of, 258–9, 529, 970; contemporary, 55–6, 114; does not improve, 667, 819; and dream, 394–5; and empire, 235; function of, 858–9; genuine, 55–6; impersonality in,

Index 488–9; importance of, 751; modern, 534; and morality, 714, 1069; and nature, 265–6; Plato on, 1069; primitivism in, 270; purpose of university study of, 464; and religion, 806; response to, 60–1, 172, 205, 537; simplicity in, 21–2; and society, 205, 395; study of in Canada, 134–5; task of, 238 Artist, and scientist, 70, 528–31, 1068– 9 Arts and sciences (as subjects), 529–35 passim, 989, 1031, 1033. See also Humanities Ascension, the, 288 Ashton, Stephen, interviews NF, 910– 15 Associative rhythm, 985 Assyria, 558, 1009 Astrology, 459; popularity of, 391 Athanasius, St. (ca. c.e. 296–373), 926 Athens, 389 Atom bomb, 329, 365, 391 Attis, 284–5 Atwood, Margaret (b. 1939), 308, 443, 505, 520, 647, 714, 861, 972, 979, 982, 1037, 1064, 1093; discussion with, 25–6; influence of NF on, 645; on NF, xxx, 1048; Life before Man (1979), 472; Surfacing (1972), 458; Survival (1972), 297–8, 647 Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907–73), 241; on love, 47 Audio-visual aids, 195, 425 Augustine, St. (c.e. 354–430), 659; and the Bible, 557; on questions about creation, 864; City of God, 38, 39 Austen, Jane (1775–1817), 224, 1037; language in, 472–3; Emma (1816), 651; Pride and Prejudice (1813), 473, 651

1177 Australia: literature of, 239, 298, 687, 689–90, 789, 860; NF in, 781, 808 Authority: in arts and sciences, 152; free, 412; spiritual, 715, 989; structure of, 961–2 Autobiography, present popularity of, 315–16 Avatamsaka Sutra, 933 Avison, Margaret (b. 1918), 531 Axis mundi, 1100 Ayre, John (b. 1947), 507; interviews NF, xliii, 198–209; Northrop Frye (1989), xliv, 994, 1036, 1039, 1048, 1050 Aztec religion, 374 Babble, 177, 180, 184 Babel, tower of, 157–8, 311, 999 Babylon, 1009–10; as symbol, 558; Babylonian captivity, 873 Bach, Johann Sebastian (1685–1750), 409, 566; as NF’s favourite composer, 742; as voice of music, 489; The Art of the Fugue (1750), 742; St. Matthew Passion (1729), 543 Bachelard, Gaston (1884–1962), 59 Bacon, Francis, Viscount St. Albans and Baron Verulam (1561–1626), 550–1, 940; Blake on, 257, 259, 263, 928 Baine, Rodney Montgomery (1913– 2000), 601 Baker, Carlos (1909–90), 924 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895– 1975), 1080, 1088 Ballad, 356, 520, 585 Ballard, Harold G. (1903–90), 1164 Ballet, 281, 927 Balzac, Honoré de (1799–1856), 43, 62, 228, 446; Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu (1831), 531 Baptism, 368–9

1178 Barker, Arthur E. (1911–90), 605, 608, 609 Barker, William (b. 1946), interviews NF, xxxiv–xxxv, 700–3 Baroque age, assumptions of, 457 Barth, Karl (1886–1968), 931 Barthes, Roland (1915–80), 453, 456; on rereading, 1034 Bassett, John (1915–98), 341–2 Bastian, Don G., interviews NF, 518– 25 Bate, Walter Jackson (1918–99), 322 Bates, Robert (1913–92), 911 & n. 2 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre (1821–67), 77 Bauhaus, 854 Baum, Gregory (b. 1923), discussion with, xxxvii, 32–47 Bear’s son motif, 1045 Beatles, the, 542 Beauty, 942, 1069, 1072 Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906–89), 55; Waiting for Godot (trans. 1954), 45, 53, 56, 178, 179 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827), 740 Belgium, 77 Belief: and language, 269, 351; professed and actual, 393 Beltane, 376 Benda, Julien (1867–1956): Le Trahison des clercs (1927), 312, 426 Bennett, R(ichard) B(edford) (1870– 1947), 183 Beowulf, 343, 475 Béranger, Pierre Jean (1780–1857), 979 Berkeley, University of California at, 991; NF at, 121–2, 129, 439, 655 Berne, Eric Lennard (1910–70), 679–80 & n. 5 Bessinger, Jess Babor, Jr. (1921–94), 610

Index Bible, 116, 141, 224, 313, 574, 754, 843, 922; authorship in, 652, 863, 1076; Blake and, 925; centrality of, 563–4; demythologizing of, 1007; discontinuity in, 114; and English literature, 666, 753, 755, 863; and expanding of consciousness, 560–1; fall in, 867; as “Great Code of Art,” 518, 546–7, 652, 658, 684, 811, 883, 1057; hearing metaphors in, 340; and history, 267, 373–4, 377, 551–2, 726–7, 782–3, 864– 5, 1008–9; as imaginative vision, 1015–16; importance of in education, 161, 191, 324, 340, 364–5, 397–8, 465, 832; influence of, 653–4, 662, 832–5, 902–3, 1060–1; interpretation of, 664–5; language of, 456–7, 550, 659, 774, 1017–18; and literature, 68– 9, 161, 301–2, 420, 519–20, 568, 656– 7, 668–9, 678–9, 787, 1068, 1099; literary qualities of, 547; and Methodism, 917; monotheism of, 1010; and myth, 49–50, 310–11, 1040–1; and nature, 561–2, 904–5, 908, 929, 1006, 1025; NF and, 571–2, 665–6, 678, 680, 682, 755, 783–7, 1002; NF’s course on (“Symbolism in the Bible”), 291, 302, 351, 365, 420, 424, 569, 631, 666, 674, 787, 830–1, 1002–3, 1088, 1095, 1098; partisan book, 869; patriarchy in, 865–6; resonance in, 663, 666; revolutionary, 727; seven phases in (see also individual phases), 660; sexual imagery in, 1006–7; as tactless, 572; time in, 1016–17; translation of, 659; truth of, 652–3; unity of, 350, 666; as verbal event, 1075; as Word of God, 226, 662 – editions of: Authorized Version (King James Bible) (1611), 548 , 572, 1095–6; Revised Standard Version, 572; Vulgate, 548, 572

Index – imagery of, 687, 872; apocalyptic and demonic, 558. See also Typology; individual images – narrative of, 862; as comedy, 267, 556–7, 661, 667. See also Frye, GC Biculturalism, 233–4 Biology, 598, 654, 904 Birney, Earle (1904–95): on lack of ghosts, 648; Down the Long Table (1955), 580, 596, 643, 762 Birtch, George Wellington (1912–88), 593 Bissell, Claude T. (1916–2000), 183, 617, 636 bissett, bill (b. 1939), 184, 188 Black, Max (1909–88), 966 Blacks, 1092; and affirmative action, 364; civil rights for, 36, 155, 991; literature of, 78 Blais, Marie-Claire (b. 1939), 1037 Blake, Edward (1833–1912), 232 Blake, William (1757–1827), 52, 79, 225, 243, 323, 324, 343, 389, 393, 479, 494, 519, 520, 597–8, 682, 764, 765, 787, 794, 964, 967, 1001, 1075, 1098; and the Bible, 753, 755, 863, 922, 925, 1068; his cosmology, 254–63; desire in, 447; four states of existence in, 256; his illuminated MSS as art forms, 280; imagery of, 279–80; life of, 262, 878; and Milton, 955, 957, 958; and Morris, 849, 851, 855; NF and, 315, 413–14, 588, 593–5, 602, 649, 677–8, 668, 713, 739, 815, 878, 879–80, 883, 921–2, 930–1, 934, 940, 1056–8, 1087; Orc and Urizen in, 810–11; as prophet, 385–6; his reading, 926–7; his relation to his own time, 929; his reversal of the four-level cosmos, 809, 958–9; and the Romantic movement, 959; as

1179 satirist, 938; supposed madness of, 281, 879, 930, 946; his verse form, 278–9 – ideas on: allegory, 279–80; art, 258– 9, 529, 970; Bible as “Great Code of Art,” 518, 546–7, 652, 658, 684, 811, 883; Christianity and art, 1004; cloven fiction, 730, 986; creation, 842– 3; double vision, 1057–8; form, 258; general vs. particular, 282; God as man, 811–12, 925–6; good and evil, 1029; history, 842, 843; idolatry, 1077; imagination, 879; imagination vs. memory, 928–9; innocence, 246, 958; innocence and experience, 810–11; mathematic form, 280, 281– 2; natural religion, 810, 929–30; nature, 686, 687, 842, 958; revolution, 811; science, 257–8, 528, 1062– 3; subject and object, 928; symmetry, 278–82; time and space, 260; vision, 927 – works: Ancient Britons (1809), 256; A Descriptive Catalogue (1809), 258; The Four Zoas (ca. 1796–ca. 1807), 843; Illustrations of the Book of Job (1825), 880, 1021–2; Introduction to Songs of Experience (1794), 257; Island in the Moon (1784), 938; Jerusalem (hymn, 1804–8), 739–40, 806; Jerusalem (Prophecy, 1804–20), 279; Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), 938; The Mental Traveller (ca. 1800– 4), 842; Milton (1804–8), 671, 739, 812, 921–2, 1087; Prophecies, 278; The Sick Rose (1794), 879; Songs of Innocence (1789), 958, 1056; Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794), 265; The Tyger (1794), 278 Blavatsky, Madame, née Helena Petrovna Hahn (1831–91), 785 Blissett, William (b. 1921), 611

1180 Bloom, Allan David (1930–92), 1032–3 Bloom, Harold (b. 1930), 756, 840–1; The Anxiety of Influence (1973), 812 Blunden, Edmund Charles (1896– 1974), 600, 601 Blunt, Sir Anthony (1907–93), 601 Bodkin, Maud (1875–1967): Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934), 480 Body, human, Blake’s representation of, 280–1 Boer War, 895 Boethius Anicius Manlius Severinus (ca. c.e. 480–524), 717 Bogdan, Deanne Gail (b. 1938), interviews NF, xxxii, xxxiii, xxxvii, xlv– xlvi, 790–808 Bolduc, La (Mary Travers) (1894– 1941), 123 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1906–45), 200 Book, 183, 313, 743, 996; as dialogue with reader, 176; efficiency of, 655, 714–15, 748, 768, 995; importance of, 346–7; only partly linear, 77, 526; sacred, 397. See also Reading Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986), 938 Borson, Roo (b. 1952), 1037 Bosch, Hieronymus (ca. 1460–1516), 394 Bossin, Bob (b. 1946), interviews NF, 79–87 Boston, 734, 793 Bourgeoisie: NF belongs to, 566, 934, 970–1; pinnacle of humanity, 334–5, 643 Bowles, Richard Pinch (1864–1960), 589 Boyle, Harry J. (d. 2005), 123, 1114n. 17 Bradley, Andrew Cecil (1851–1935), 471 Brain, hemispheres of, 488, 801

Index Brazeau, Peter: Parts of a World (1977), 1071 Brecht, Bertolt (1898–1956), 113, 537–8 Breithaupt, Louis Orville (1890–1960), 430 Brett, George Sidney (1879–1944), 584, 587, 591, 640; A History of Psychology (1912–21), 587 Bride imagery in the Bible, 873, 908 British Empire, 680, 895 Brontë, Charlotte (1816–55): Jane Eyre (1847), 409 Brontë, Emily (1818–48): Wuthering Heights (1837), 224, 651 Brown, E(dward) K(illoran) (1905– 51), 582, 609, 980 Brown, Elizabeth Eedy. See Frye, Elizabeth Brown, Norman Oliver (1913–2002), 61 Brown, Walter Theodore (1883–1954), 430, 606, 613 Browne, Sir Thomas (1605–82), on nature as art of God, 957 Browning, Robert (1812–89), 696, 1068 Bruner, Jerome Seymour (b. 1915), 765 Brunetta, Gian Piero, interviews NF, 442–4 Bruno, Giordano (1548–1600), 442 Bryson, John N. (1896–1976), 601 Buber, Martin (1878–1965), 176, 834; I and Thou (1923), 903, 1011 Buddha, 271 Buddhism, 16, 250, 267, 686, 933, 1009, 1030; and Christianity, 373, 374; in Japan, 833–4 Bultmann, Rudolph Karl (1884–1976), 659, 931, 1007 Bunraku drama, 536–45 passim Bunyan, John (1628–88): The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84), 280, 547, 918

Index Burckhardt, Jacob Christopher (1818– 97), 140 Burke, Edmund (1729–97), 688, 692, 894 Burke, Kenneth (1897–1986), 480 Burke, Stanley (b. 1924), 124 Burning bush episode, 377, 548 Burrill, Gary (b. 1955), interviews NF, 1040–2 Burton, Robert (1577–1640): Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 531, 936–7 Bush, George, Sr. (b. 1924), 896 Byron, George Gordon (Baron Byron of Rochdale) (1788–1824), 494, 930; and the Biblical tradition, 959–60; on history, 653, 871, 875; life of, 507 Cadieux, Fernand (1925–76), 89 Caesar (generic), 683, 727 Cain, 1076 California, 130 Callaghan, Barry (b. 1937), 1037 Callaghan, Morley (1903–90), 28, 980 Calley, William, 253 Calvin, John (1509–64), on Book of Revelation, 885, 1061 Cambridge University, 587, 644 Camus, Albert (1913–60), 39 Canada, 1009; anarchic tradition in, 92–3; and British tradition, 723, 724; Centennial of, 51; class divisions in, 331; contrast with and relations to United States (see United States, subhead and Canada); and fallacy of “new country,” 493; fragmentation in, 136; French (see French Canada); garrison mentality in, 236, 243–4, 646; history of, 143, 892; identity of, 142, 352–3, 362–3, 442–3, 457–8, 485, 516, 524, 573, 647–8, 1089–93; immigrants in, 102, 208, 233–4; importance of communications in, 88, 90,

1181 95, 117, 457, 972–3, 1094; language question in, 305, 334, 484–5; mythology in, 1054; national character in, 129–37, 335, 566, 888, 976; NF and, 325–6, 506–7, 971–4, 983, 1065, 1093; North–South and East–West axis in, 88, 117–18, 232–3, 972, 973– 4; as observant country, 96–101, 230, 233, 241–2, 352; in postnational world, 298; prenational to postnational, 89, 95, 500; publishing in, 505; Puritanism in, 859; regionalism in, 893; repatriation of Constitution of, 688; resources of, 437; separatism in, 88, 308, 485, 492 (see also under Quebec); small population of, 307; unity of, 299, 646, 769; universities in, 277 – culture of, xl, 229, 304, 566; and assimilation of native tradition, 485, 689, 908–9; CBC and, 776–7; English stimulated by growth of French, 516; ethnic contribution to, 485–6, 500; government role in, 497–8, 751; problem of developing, 89–144 passim, 235, 238; provincialism to regionalism in, 905–6, 977– 8; regionalism in, 499–505 passim, 724–5; scholarship in, 622; Toryism in, 525. See also CBC, CRTC – literature of, 294, 356, 428; animals in, 457; argument vs. image in, 130– 1, 132, 231–2, 976–7; and Australian literature, 687; English influence on, 97; English stimulated by French, 458; ethnic contribution to, 234, 236; fiction, 28, 62; garrison mentality in, 1037; growth of, 77–8, 476, 484, 491, 496, 505, 645, 981–2, 1037; nature in, 235–7; NF as critic of, 103, 422, 481, 686; NF teaches, 583; pastoral myth in, 97, 137–8;

1182 poetry (see next subhead); provincial to regional, 978–80; question of its distinctiveness, 240, 297–8, 492–3, 646–7, 978; read by Canadians, 100; regionalism in, 228, 235, 296–7, 458, 530, 646, 861; and the tradition, 228, 231; value of, 336 – poetry of, 28, 314, 976; development of, 240–2; nature in, 905–6; NF’s approach to, 61–2, 231, 980–1; no Frye school in, 363, 645–6, 980; and the tradition, 240–1 Canada Council, 584, 751, 973 Canadian Forum, 146, 671; NF’s work for, 242, 704–8, 980 Candid Eye, 91 Canoe, in Canadian culture, 91, 117 Capote, Truman (1924–84): In Cold Blood (1966), 229, 945 Cargill, John, interviews NF, xxxvii, 528–35 Caribbean literature, 502 Carlin, Vince (b. 1944), interviews NF, 770–8 Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881), 801; and Morris, 849, 850, 852 Carman, (William) Bliss (1861–1929), poetry of, 235, 241 Carpenter, Edmund (b. 1922), discussion with, 13–22 Carr, Emily (1871–1945), 91 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832–98): Alice books, 465; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), 196, 404 Carter, Cheryl, interviews NF, 766–9 Carter, James Earl (b. 1924), 505 Cartesianism, 457, 657, 730, 755, 928, 995 Castiglione, Baldassarre, Conte di Novilava (1478–1529), 442 Causality, 1009

Index CAUT (Canadian Association of University Teachers), 625, 631 Cavaliers, 370 Cayley, David, interviews NF, 723–5, 809–13, 916–1035; Northrop Frye in Conversation (1992), xviii, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxvii CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 90, 102, 364, 689, 748; contribution to Canadian culture, 104– 6, 107, 776–7; NF appears on, xvi, 457; role of, 303–5; TV and radio in, 498; U.S. influence on, 100 CBS, 309 CCF (Co-operative Commonwealth Federation), 108, 580, 596, 643, 706, 707, 708, 983; NF and, 306, 326 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1894–1961), 151–2 Celtic mythology, 376 Censorship, 111–12, 123, 1070 Cervantes, Miguel de (1547–1616): Don Quixote (1605–15), 960 Change, adaptation to, 146 Chaos, 219, 220–1 Chaplin, Sir Charles (Charlie) Spencer (1889–1977), 540, 566 Charity, 676, 683; religion of, 901 Charles I (1600–49), 387, 881 Charles II (1630–85), 387 Charlottetown, 105, 131 Chaucer, Geoffrey (ca. 1345–1400), 152, 167, 194, 231, 311, 937 Chester, Philip, interviews NF, 317– 27 Chesterton, G(ilbert) K(eith) (1874– 1936), 527, 580 Chiasson, Rodrigue, interviews NF, xxxix, 88–144 Chicago, 1093; Democratic Convention in, 103; NF at, 764, 920; School (of criticism), 1081

Index Children, 462, 958; literature for, 212, 404, 465; and poetry, 192; reading habits of, 210–11, 212–13; speech of, 710 China, 117, 135, 444, 898, 971; Communism in, 54; Cultural Revolution in, 52; drama in, 941; and the U.S., 894 Chisholm, Elspeth, interviews NF, 283 Chomsky, (Avril) Noam (b. 1928), 61, 781 Christ, 225, 1017, 1098; as Adonis, 138; and Prometheus, 221; as Word of God, 662. See also Jesus Christian, William (b. 1945): ed., The Idea File of Harold Adam Innis (1980), 1095 Christianity, 47, 50, 380, 397, 715, 756, 761, 925, 950, 1009; and abhorrence, 250; attitude to Old Testament, 553, 554, 557; authoritarianism in, 842; Blake and, 811–12, 925, 1004; central myth of, 138; as city religion, 375; and Classical mythology, 225, 834; as comedy, 251; and courtly love, 967; and Eros, 683; foundation of, 391; fundamentalism in, 473–4; iconoclasm in, 859; as an institution, 201, 788; and Judaism, 378, 754, 786–7, 834–5, 901; and literature, 787–9; its mythology, 753– 4; nature in, 139–40; and other religions, 225, 284–5, 373–4; and paganism, 375; and persecution, 675; and prophecy, 385; revolutionary religion, 249, 250, 653, 683; and tragedy, 252 – beliefs of: death, 251; death of Christ, 382; Easter, 285–90; end of world, 54; God as man, 198–9, 255; good and evil, 248, 249; original sin,

1183 562; salvation, 32–3; suffering servant, 208; Virgin Mary, 1007; world, 38–9. See also Church, Christian Christie, Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa (1890–1976), 981 Christmas, 286, 369 Church, 715; and university, 989 – Christian, 730; baptism in, 368–9; and doctrine of salvation, 35–6; foundation of, 381–2; function of, 43–4; as an institution, 49, 204, 208; in Middle Ages, 379, 384. See also Christianity; individual churches Church of England, 204 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (106–43 b.c.e.), 829 Ciglar-~aniñ, Janja, interviews NF, 1082–8 City, 389–90, 807; horrors of modern, 151, 265, 272, 345, 346, 529; imagery of in the Bible, 873; positives and negatives of, 906; two, 37–9 passim Civilization, 390 Class, social: in criticism, 755; and education, 153–5; speech and, 331 Classic, 741; meaning of, 68, 488–9, 767, 947 Classical age: literature of, 318, 350, 683; value of studying, 300, 339, 746 – mythology of, 225, 313; importance of teaching, 69, 161, 168, 191, 340, 465; persistence of, 313–14, 834; and poetry, 789 Classics (discipline), 626–7, 750 Cleary, Val, interviews NF, 227–9 Clementi, Muzio (1752–1832), 735, 740, 799; Didone Abbandonata (1821), 741 Clement of Alexandria, St. (ca. c.e. 150–ca. 215), 780 Clichés, 770–1

1184 CNE (Canadian National Exhibition), art at, 705 Coburn, Kathleen (Kay) (1905–91), 356, 587, 589, 593; edits Coleridge, 519, 588, 594, 595, 784; In Pursuit of Coleridge (1977), 595 Cody, Canon Henry John (1868– 1951), 589, 609, 613 Cohen, Leonard (b. 1934), 181–2, 302, 443; Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), 314 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel (b. 1945), 140 Coincidence, 272 Colenso, J(ohn) W(illiam) (1814–83), and Arnold, 968 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772– 1834), 76, 928; Coburn edits, 519, 588, 594, 595, 784; on the Logos, 784; Kubla Khan (1816), 963; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), 963 College English Association, interviews NF, xviii Columbia University, 438 Comedy, and tragedy, 251, 414, 742, 1020, 1076 Comfort, Charles Fraser (1900–94) , 464 Commitment, 168 Common Market, 1091 Commonwealth, 688 Communication, 136, 164; active and passive in, 125; in education, 192; importance of in Canada (see under Canada); involvement and detachment in, 113; true and false, 56 Communications, as discipline, 157 Communism, 15, 55, 94, 187, 707, 750, 786; campus, in NF’s day, 580, 596, 643; in Canada, 92; and futuredirected hopes, 54 Community, 390, 517; and communication, 125

Index Comparative literature, 692; at U of T, 623 Computers, 998; NF and, 1039; as tools, 995–6 Concern, 67, 679–80, 682; primary, 858, 1025–7, 1029–30; primary and secondary, 965–6, 1059; term “myth of” regretted, 966 Condensation, 945 Confederation, and Reconfederation, 1089–90 Confucianism, 971 Connelly, Marc (Marcus Cook) (1890– 1980): Green Pastures (1930), 393 & n. 16 Conrad, Joseph (1857–1924), 276, 336, 632 Consciousness, 862, 864–5, 996; expanding of, 555, 560–1 Contemporary literature, 62, 169, 194, 342–3; and the Bible, 301–2. See also Modern literature Content. See Form and content Context, 217 Continuity, loss of in modern age, 715 Convention: literary, 211, 417, 428–9, 480, 649; social, 318 Conversation: language of, 702; nature of, 3–12. See also Dialogue Cook, Ramsay (b. 1931), interviews NF, 291–302 Cope, J. Samuel, interviews NF, 743 Copernican universe, 1063 Cornell University, 629, 966 Correy, Stan, interviews NF, xli, 656– 69 Cosmology, 769; four-level and its reversal, 957–62; and literature, 954; present-day, 392–3; traditional, 254, 388 Costa, Richard Hauer, interviews NF, 400–12 passim

Index Cottafavi, Beppe, interviews NF, 452– 4 Couchiching Conference, 13, 595 Couplet, 279 Courage, 248 Courtly love, and the Christian church, 967 Cousteau, Jacques Yves (1910–97), 566 Cowan, Elizabeth, interviews NF, 400–12 passim Cowan, Gregory, interviews NF, 400– 12 passim Cragg, Arthur Richard (1910–97), 593 Craik, Anne, interviews NF, 744–51 Crane, R(onald) S(almon) (1886– 1967), 1081 Crawford, Isabella Valancy (1850–87), 648 Creation, 116; as dawn of consciousness, 548, 862, 864–5; as phase of revelation, 553, 660 – human (creativeness), 71, 77, 115, 185, 238, 315, 447; and convention, 417–18; and criticism, 471, 801, 1057; and divine creation, 447, 1059; Romantic notion of, 490 – myths of, 255, 513; in the Bible, 866, 1023; in Milton, 220 Creighton, Donald Grant (1902–79), 283, 594; John A. Macdonald (1952, 1955), 98 Creighton, John, 594 Criticism, 215, 296, 388, 598, 847–8, 937, 968, 1029; anagogic, 685; and biography, 507, 758; classics of, 471; contemporary, 31, 61, 160, 456, 481, 491, 721, 754–5, 805, 841, 948, 953, 984, 999, 1038, 1079–81, 1099; and creativity, 471, 801, 1057; and critic as reviewer, 981; feminist, 845; function of, 75, 661, 882, 954, 1058,

1185 1061–2; and ideology, 947–8; language of, 478–9; learning of, not learning of literature, 314, 323; and literature, 159–60, 363, 414, 464, 483–4, 491–2, 691–2, 755, 806–7, 828, 981; NF’s, 132, 143, 415, 418–20, 449–51, 455–6, 673, 986–7, 1085–6, 1095; not parasitic, 720, 841, 846, 938–9, 940; phenomenological, 702; precritical experience vs. simultaneous apprehension in, 58–9, 119, 698, 826; progress in, 667; public, 422; rhetorical, 1080; scientific aspect of, 452–3, 532–3, 754, 826, 840–1, 939–40; and social criticism, 1061; and structure, 408–9; and task of critic, 243; teaching of, 160, 161; value judgments in (see Value judgments); and the writer, 30, 75, 76, 363. See also Archetypal criticism; New Criticism Croce, Benedetto (1866–1952), 442 Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658), 370, 386–7 Crowley, (Edward) Aleister (1875– 1947), 375 CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission), 982; Canadian content regulations of, 90, 95, 233, 362, 503; NF’s work for, xxxviii–xli, 303–5, 308–9, 345, 501, 689, 777, 984, 997–8; role of, 88–144 passim Crucifixion, 373, 374, 378, 552, 667, 1009; meaning of, 653, 727, 875 Crusades, 52 CTV, 303 Cuba, 128 Culture, 340; active vs. passive response to, 712; Arnold on, 60, 154, 968–9; as counter-environment, 544; cycles of, 426, 428–9;

1186 decentralization in, 107, 427, 501–4, 515, 524, 573, 844–5, 978, 982, 1065, 1091, 1092; as envelope, 512; government role in, 497; importance of, 750–1; mass, 689; popular, 766–7; regionalism in, 299, 492, 507, 646, 724–5, 743; role of opposition in, 498–9; three levels of, 978, 1089–90; vegetable, 906, 1092 cummings, e(dward) e(stlin) (1894– 1962), 242 Currelly, Charles Trick (1876–1957), 599 Curriculum, 68–9; core, 149, 319, 324, 336, 823 Cuthbert, Art, interviews NF, 413–29 Cycles: in culture, 426, 428–9; in history, 571; in life, 761; in nature, 266– 7, 286; and spirals, 1035 Czechoslovakia, 966 Dalí, Salvador (1904–89), 534 Dallas, 748 Daly, Tom (b. 1918), xxxviii, 107 Damon, S(amuel) Foster (1893–1971), 594 Daniells, Roy (1902–79), 356, 593 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), 311, 409, 420, 678, 787, 843, 951, 967, 968, 1037, 1069; on Bible as comedy, 267; on Christianity as comedy, 251; Eliot on, 1058; on levels of meaning, 665, 828; Convivio, 954; The Divine Comedy, 442, 556, 661, 667; Paradiso, 451; Purgatorio, 137, 138 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–82), 761 Davey, Keith Douglas (b. 1926), 605 David, 225, 556, 873 Davidson, Rev. Richard (1876–1944), 589 Davies, Russell, interviews NF, 526–7

Index Davies, (William) Robertson (1913– 95), 499, 587, 861, 979, 982, 1037, 1064, 1093; Fifth Business (1970), 458 Davis, Herbert J. (1893–1967), 413, 593–4, 596–7, 598, 599, 739, 921, 935 Death, 885; and life, 285, 290, 1028, 1065–6; principle, 185; and rebirth, in society, 182, 183, 186; religious perspective on, 269; transcendence of, 200 Decadence, 428 Decentralization, 107, 109 Deconstruction, 805, 828, 832, 845–6, 933, 953, 984, 1038, 1080, 1085. See also Derrida Defoe, Daniel (1660–1731): A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), 229 DeFord, Irma, interviews NF, xxxii Deism, Blake on, 812, 925–6 Delight and instruction, 172, 347, 966 Democracy, 15, 17, 20, 149, 157, 158, 247, 427, 624–5, 709, 712, 716, 973; crisis in, 323; and education, 193; participatory, 94, 109; and written records, 347 Demythologizing, 1007 Denmark, 96 Depression, the, 67, 322, 469, 578, 580, 596 De Quincey, Thomas (1785–1859), 77, 251 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 481, 720, 759, 768, 1080; influence of, 756–7; and logocentrism, 984; and NF, 1085; on nuclear language, 729–31; on supplement, 781, 828, 933, 952, 1011; on transcendental signified, 925 Descent pattern, 289 Desire, and creativity, 447 Detachment: and engagement, 66–7,

Index 113, 168, 1070, 1073; in reading literature, 338–9, 403–4; in university studies, 80, 709. See also Withdrawal Detective stories, 119, 402, 651; convention in, 484 Detroit, 345 Deuteronomy, Book of, 1019; on life and death, 731, 866, 1001 Diagrams, 403 Dialectic, 1028; Platonic, 175, 183 Dialogue, 55, 125, 488; limits of, 174– 89. See also Conversation Dickens, Charles (1812–70), 62, 540, 572, 836, 937, 1046; levels of language in, 472; The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), 541–2; Oliver Twist (1837), 827; The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), 472 Dickinson, Emily Elizabeth (1830–86), 494, 834, 964, 1071 Didacticism, 212 Dido, and Aeneas, 741 Diefenbaker, John George (1895– 1979), 776; and the North, 98 Dionysiac. See Appolonian vs. Dionysiac Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice (1902– 84), 534 Discontinuity, 113–15 Discovery, 272 Discussion, importance of, 18 Disney, Walt (Walter Elias) (1901–66), 1064 Displacement, 216, 945 Donne, John (1572–1631), 463, 1095 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich (1821–81), 831; as prophet, 385; The Idiot (1868–69), 223, 1083 Doubt, and faith, 44, 562 Doughty, Charles Montagu (1843– 1926), 588

1187 Downey, David, interviews NF, 860– 1 Dragon symbol, 289 Drama, 195, 340, 998; emotion in, 537; illusion and reality in, 544, 769; as social art, 541, 718. See also Absurd; Bunraku Dreams: and art, 394–5; Freud on, 1069 Drugs, 77, 87, 114, 115, 206, 927 Druidism, 374, 930, 934 “Drunken boat” construct, explained, 961 Dryden, John (1631–1700), Blake on, 279 Dudek, Louis (1918–2001), 169 Duffy, Dennis (b. 1938), interviews NF, xvi Duncan, Sara Jeanette (1861–1922): The Imperialist (1904), 980 Dunneville, Ont., 111 Dussek, Jan Ladislaw (1760–1812), 735, 799 Dyer, John (1699–1757), 14 Dylan, Bob (Robert Allen Zimmerman) (b. 1941), 110, 397, 474 Earth-mother goddess, 865–6, 904–5, 908 Easter, 284–90, 369, 377 Eastern religions. See Oriental religions Eco, Umberto (b. 1932): interviews NF, 445–8; The Name of the Rose (1981), 766 Ecology, 909. See also Environmental movement Economics: and culture, 978, 982, 1091; subject at U of T, 622 Eden, garden of, 655, 867, 872 Edgar, Pelham (1871–1948), 357, 582, 584–5, 588–9, 593, 597, 603, 604, 640,

1188 878, 921; hires Pratt, 521; influence of on NF, 293, 413, 519, 520, 565, 593–4, 599; life and character of, 355–6; as teacher, 586; Henry James: Man and Author (1927), 588 Edmonton, NF’s epiphany in, 922 Education, 114, 182, 183–4, 1031; adjustment theory of, 533; aim of, 23–7, 49, 145–7, 148–9, 151, 166, 569, 690, 709–10, 712, 716, 821, 823, 824– 5, 992; and class, 153–5; and dialogue, 55; different routes of, 1033; elementary, 84, 148–9; and facts, 71, 197; liberal, 167, 634, 644, 1052; lifelong (see Adult education); mass, 823; and the media, 70; as militant, 713; modern attitude to, 183; NF on, 765; as re-education, 1034; repetition or habit in, 312–13, 746, 992; structure in, 192–3; theory of, 1097– 8. See also Curriculum; Students; Teaching; University Educational contract, 152, 157, 987 Ego, transcending of, 489, 1063 Egypt, 287, 1006, 1009; Israel’s exodus from, 289; mythology of, 555; as symbol, 558 Eighteenth century, in U.S. and Canada, 307, 312, 648, 888 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955), 531, 532, 827, 869 Electronic media, 715, 844; effect of, 748–9; McLuhan on, 523, 714–15, 767–8, 844 Elegy, pastoral, 407 Eliade, Mircea (1907–86): on mythical time, 780; The Myth of the Eternal Return (trans. 1954), 377 Eliot, George (Mary Ann Evans) (1819–80): Middlemarch (1871), 784 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888–1965), 78, 194, 407, 459, 474, 754, 831, 961,

Index 1017, 1067, 1068; on Blake, 1058; as critic, 471; on explicit vs. real meaning, 405; genuine vs. ideological in, 847; life of, 507; NF and, 697; objects to TSE, 962, 963; on poet as catalyst, 410, 418; as reactionary, 962; on reality, 544; social views of, 31, 67, 426; After Strange Gods (1934), 962; Gerontion (1920), 287; Preludes (1917), 52; The Waste Land (1922), 240, 491, 697 Elite, valid meaning of, 494–5, 970 Elizabeth I (1533–1603), 817 Elizabethan Age, 703; rhetoric in, 333; and the social arts, 718 Ellmann, Richard (1918–87): Ulysses on the Liffey (1972), 272 El Salvador, 1009 Emmanuel College, 431, 435; building of, 589–90; NF at, 591–3, 677, 921, 924, 931 Emotion, 170, 180, 182 Empire, and art, 235 Empire Theatre (Toronto), 586 Empson, William (1906–84), 449, 692 Encounter groups, 125, 204, 315 Endicott, Norman Jamieson (1902– 79), 587, 593 Engagement, and detachment, 1070, 1073. See also Commitment England: art in Victorian, 540, 541; education in, 300 English (discipline), 331; curriculum of, 193–5, 276, 336–7; Department of, at University of Toronto, 162, 582–3, 608–12, 615; Honour Course in, at U of T, xlii–xliii, 475, 609, 618, 622–3; NF and, 293, 294, 591–2, 599 – teaching of in schools, 1097; advice to teachers, 412; and articulateness 463; curriculum of, 159, 164–5, 336, 464–5, 632; and total verbal experi-

Index ence of student, 651, 710, 767, 899. See also Literature: Reading; Writing English (language): and Latin, 333, 746; as medium, 334 English literature: and the Bible, 68–9, 666, 753, 755, 863; influence of on Canada, 97; value of studying, 703 Enlightenment, 379, 381 Entertainment, 347; how to improve, 116–17; and instruction, 172, 303, 766–7 Environment: obliterated, 906–7; environmental movement, 437 Epic, Blake and, 279 Epiphany, NF’s, 739, 795–6, 802, 815– 16, 837, 921–3, 1087 Equality, 15; meaning of social, 494–5 Eros, 340, 683, 834 Eskimos. See Inuit Esrock, Ellen, interviews NF, 693–9 Esterhammer, Angela (b. 1961), interviews NF, xxxvii, 528–35 Eternal, 200, 260, 269, 282, 325, 566, 713, 877, 1017 Ethics, 584 Étude magazine, 798 Eucharist, 1077 Euphemism, 158 Europe, 444, 648; liberation of Eastern, 1029–30, 1078, 1090; and North America, 94 Evangelicalism, 33 Evans, John (b. 1929), 636–7 Evil, 33, 1028–9; problem of, 245–53 Evolution, 14, 15, 199, 654, 907; teaching of, 365 Examinations, 87, 823 Existentialism, 39, 126, 290 Exodus, the, 833; counterpart to the Resurrection, 842, 959, 1010, 1061

1189 – Book of, 653; Colenso on, 968 Experience, 917; and knowledge, 1028; precritical, 58–9, 119, 698, 826, 941 Experiment, 529 Expo ’67, xxxvii, 119 Ezekiel, 728; Book of, 868 Fabiny, Tibor, interviews NF, 1074–8 Fable, and myth, 311, 459 Fairley, Barker (1887–1986), 588; Charles M. Doughty (1927), 588; A Study of Goethe (1947), 588; Wilhelm Raabe (1947), 588 Fairy tales, 465 Faith, 901; and doubt, 44, 562; language of, 676; nature of, 1012–16 Falconer, Robert Alexander (1867– 1943), 183, 589 Falkland Islands, 566 Fall (of man): in the Bible, 867, 1023– 5; myth of, 372, 373 Falstaff, 816 Faludy, Gyorgy (George) (1910– 2006), 750 Fantasy, 447, 459 Farber, Jerry (b. 1932): “The Student as Nigger” (1967), 80 Far Eastern Studies, 635 Fascism, 63, 187, 515; modern writers and, 426; at Oxford, 470, 600, 643 Faulkner, William (1897–1962), 694; as regionalist, 458, 499, 504, 516, 534, 646, 1031 Fawkes, Guy (1570–1606), 376 Feminism, 80, 567, 991; feminist criticism, 845 Fenians, 892 Fennell, William Oscar (b. 1916), 1014 Ferguson, Max (b. 1925/6), 105 Fiction: and fact, 513–14; popular, 651; readership of, 227, 228–9

1190 Fielding, Henry (1707–54): The History of Tom Jones (1749), 651, 827 Fillion, Bryant (b. 1938), interviews NF, xxxvi, 461–8 Film, 55, 91, 114, 342, 438, 492, 501, 503, 689, 695, 714, 748, 975; and books, 694; influence of, 118, 119; and introversion, 998; study of, 165; symbolism in, 70, 406 Findley, Timothy (1930–2002), 443, 505, 982, 1037, 1064 Fine Art, 635 First Statement, 241 Fisher, Douglas Mason (b. 1919), 605 Fisher, Joseph (1907–52), 605, 606, 924 & n. 5 Fishing imagery, 289 Flaubert, Gustave (1821–80), 228, 965; Madame Bovary (1857), 1083 Folklore, 585 Folk songs, 520; singers of, 118, 128, 313 Folk tales, 356, 465; myth and, 161, 311, 753 Ford, Gerald Rudolph (1913–2006), 896 Ford, Henry (1863–1947), 93, 165 Form: Blake on, 258; and content, 31, 171–2, 214, 216, 218, 273, 402; mathematic vs. living, 280, 281–2 Formalist criticism, 805, 1081 Fortunatus, Venantius (d. ca. c.e. 600), 289 Forza, and froda, 414 Fowke, Edith Fulton (1913–96), 707 France, 241, 975, 1090; and Canada, 891; criticism in, 59, 481, 755; Resistance press in, 775 Franklin, Benjamin (1706–90), 312, 648, 888 Fraser, Matthew, interviews NF, 469– 76

Index Fraternity, 15 Frazer, Sir James George (1854–1941), 372, 374; The Golden Bough (1907– 15), 931–2, 933 Freedom, 14, 18–19, 716, 717, 900; academic, 324, 762; acts of, 33–5, 37, 39–40; involves discipline, 24–5; and language, 162, 407–8, 411–12 Free trade. See United States, subhead and Canada Free verse, 213 French, NF’s knowledge of, 577 French Canada, 96, 97, 131, 136, 363, 689, 891, 892; culture of, 1065, 1090 – literature of, 28–9, 100, 138, 505, 1037, 1092; social function of writers in, 234, 458, 476. See also Quebec French Revolution, 15, 654; Blake’s attitude to, 281, 528, 811, 958 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 447, 456, 663, 713, 810, 834, 845; on dreams, 945, 1069; and “drunken boat” construct, 958, 960–1; on Oedipus complex, 388; as realist, 446; on structure of personality, 387–8 Freudianism, 128, 728; in criticism, 939, 940, 942, 1038 Frost, Leslie Miscampbell (1895– 1973), 614 Frost, Robert Lee (1874–1963), 646 Frye, Catharine Mary Maud Howard (Cassie) (NF’s mother; 1870–1940), xlv–xlvi, 575, 576, 733, 790–803 passim, 822, 837, 876, 877, 918–19, 923, 1041, 1043–54 passim, 1055 Frye, Elizabeth Eedy Brown (1912– 97), 1049, 1050; talks about her marriage, 910–15 Frye, (Eratus) Howard (NF’s brother; 1899–1918), xlv, xlvi, 567, 790, 919, 1043, 1045, 1052–3

Index Frye family, 1044–5 Frye, Helen Kemp (1910–86), 134, 441, 601, 602, 705, 813; courtship of, 1048–9; death of, 808; as eldest daughter, 1050; NF meets, 736 Frye, Herman Edward (1870–1959), 567, 575, 790–803 passim, 876, 918– 19, 1043–54 passim Frye, (Herman) Northrop (1912–91): attitude to notes, 1036–7; his audience, 337, 985, 994; his books, 401, 440, 487, 672–3, 739; as Canadian, 325–6, 506–7, 971–3, 983, 1031, 1065, 1093; as Casaubon, 784; his criticism (see under Criticism); and his critics, 950–1; his difficulty learning languages, 577; his influence, 641, 838–9, 848; interviews with, xv–xvi, xxix–xlvi; as missionary, 318–19, 320, 337; not a novelist or poet, 76, 315, 471, 794, 919; notebooks of, xlvi, 987; as reader, 693–9, 838; his reputation, 424, 436, 673, 692, 740, 764, 805, 813–14, 863–4, 950, 953, 1163–4n. 3; his role, 717; as speaker, 772; his style, 953; his writing, 65, 425, 493–4, 507–8, 565, 670–5, 804–5, 984–7, 1039 – lectures and speeches: Massey Lectures, 506; Royal Bank Address, 440 – life of: 507, 567; alternate lives, 777– 8; ancestors, 1044–5; business college, 469, 804; childhood, 575–6, 713, 733, 790–2, 803, 917–19, 1043– 54 passim; childhood reading, 792, 795; choice of life’s work, 315, 325, 470, 578, 796–7, 1056; early life, 493; education, 48, 433, 576–8, 790, 797, 815, 822, 823, 836–7, 877, 878, 921; landmarks in, 764; mission field, 434, 837–8, 935–6; ordination, 934– 5; pattern of, 319–20; as revealed in

1191

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–

–

–

interviews, xliv–xlvi; second marriage, 910–15; as spiral, 352, 739, 765; typing contest, 736, 804, 814– 15, 878, 920; uneventful, 741; University Professor (title), 440–1; unplanned, 670. See also U of T; VC; places visited projected works: retrospect on, 1037; on Shakespeare, 567; on Spenser, 670, 936; Third Book, 61; on Utopian literature, 1039 self-analysis, 567; late starter, 1045; passivity, 1050–1; his personal myth, 1045–8; reticence, 435; his self-definition, 1095 as teacher, 71, 86, 327, 1051–2; does not want disciples, 423–4; and honour students, 605; lecturing style, xxx, 65; and mythopoeic poetry, 243; prefers undergraduates, 300–1, 597, 644, 995, 1095; and questions, 272, 321; teaching feeds his writing, 425, 673–4, 713–14, 838, 878, 984, 1088; as transparent medium, 987–9. See also Students, NF’s; names of his courses works: “Across the River and Out of the Trees” (1980), 622 & n. 59; “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), 932 & n. 15; BG, 230–8 passim; “The Bible and Literature” (videotapes, 1982), 570–1, 665, 673–4; “The Bridge of Language” (1981), 528, 530; Conclusion to Literary History of Canada (1965), 103; CP, 965; CR, 1003; ed., Design for Learning (1962), 163, 331; EI, 338; FT, 245; “Installation Address as Chancellor” (1978), 623–4; “Letters in Canada: Poetry” (1951–60), 645, 819–20, 974, 980–1, 982; “A Liberal Education” (1945), 146 & n. 2; ed., Literature: Uses of the

1192 Imagination (1972–73), 348, 400–3, 409–10, 423, 994, 1100; MC, 51, 146, 151–2, 182, 184, 187, 198, 344; “Men as Trees Walking” (1938), 704 & n. 2; NFS, 756, 816–19; ed., The Practical Imagination (1980), 1100; RE, 247, 248–9; “The Realistic Oriole” (1957), 963; Review of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1952), 192; SeS, 445, 651; TSE, 847, 962–3; “The University and Personal Life” (1969), xxxiii; WTC, 419 – AC, 74, 319, 451, 453, 481, 720, 755, 930, 984, 994; aim of, 59, 348, 416– 19, 882, 937, 949; as anatomy, 531–2; centre of, 401–2; on criticism as science, 533, 932–3; fictional modes in, 1083; and FS, 352, 483, 685, 765, 924–5, 936; genesis of, 410, 421, 422, 670, 1079–81; history in, 459, 1062; influence of, 61, 479, 1081–2; later reflections on, 479; Polemical Introduction to, 414; reception of, 415, 419, 673, 947–50; reversal of seasons in, 932 & n. 15; schematism of, 650; and structuralism, 479, 951–2, 1080; theory of modes in, 944; title of, 936–7; translation of, 477–8, 485, 938; on value judgments, 945–7 – FS, 295, 337, 436, 595, 760, 843; and AC, 352, 483, 685, 765, 924–5, 936; title of, 278; genesis of, 413, 612, 670–1, 739, 922, 924; and Jung, 942; as “myth criticism,” 951, 1080; and Nazism, 680, 764–5, 934; reception of, 931 – GC, 730, 758, 782, 829, 925, 1036, 1039; aim of, 458, 518, 568–9, 681–4; genesis of, 320, 323, 351–2, 396, 399, 411, 421, 476, 482, 656–7, 670, 674, 765, 1002–3, 1074–5; NF answers questions on, 546–64 passim, 656–

Index 69, 674–6, 805 (see also Bible); reception of, 654, 664, 665, 830–1; Stevens in, 963–4, 1071; title of, 546, 652, 658, 1003; translation of, 1094; as twentieth-century book, 680; and the word processor, 573–4 – WP, 925, 1099–1100; genesis of, 765, 777, 784, 829, 1036, 1039; title of, 835, 969 Frye, Vera (1900–66), 800, 919, 920, 1043 Fulford, Robert (b. 1932): discussion with, 536–45; interviews NF, xxxvii, 496–505 Fuller, (Richard) Buckminster (1895– 1983), xxxvi, 465 Funerals, 369 Future: bringing into present, 53, 55; unknowable, 398 Gaebel, Stephen, interviews NF, 766–9 Galbraith, John Kenneth (1908–2006), 507 Gallipoli, 414 Garaudy, Roger (b. 1913), 728 Garden, 389, 390 Garner, Hugh (1913–79), 751 Garrison mentality, 117, 236, 243–4, 457, 646, 905; and condominium mentality, 974, 1037 General Course, 618 Generalization, 282 Genesis, Book of, 219, 365, 388, 663, 999, 1018; and Book of Job, 1022; creation in, 116, 548, 660, 865, 866, 1023 Genre, 341, 480, 649; and class, 459 George, St., 376; and the dragon, 289, 545 George VI (1895–1952), 898 Gerber, Wallace, 590

Index German, NF studies, 583 Germany, 992, 1090; philology in, 160 Ghana, 130 Gideon, 653 Gieseking, Walter W. (1895–1956), 190 Gilbert, Sir William Schwenck (1836– 1911), and Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842–1900), 110; The Gondoliers (1889), 736–7; The Pirates of Penzance (1880), 736 Gilgamesh, epic of, 165 Gilson, Étienne (1884–1978), 980 Ginsberg, Allen (1926–97), 203, 459 Globe and Mail, 360 Gnosticism, 222, 834 God: in burning bush, 377; centre and circumference in, 934; communication with, 207; as creator, 198–9, 1059; death of, 50, 208; existence of, 35, 517; hearing vs. seeing of, 1077; and imagination, 677; NF’s, xliii; of Old Testament, 559–60; suffering, 199; transcendence of, 1014–15; in twentieth century, 41; as verb or linguistic event, 548, 868–71, 1010– 11, 1014, 1022 Godard, Jean-Luc (b. 1930), 187 Gods: dying, 287, 373; false, 249; and God, 868–9; and metaphor, 1005–6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749– 1832), 967, 968; Faust (1808–32), 730, 943 Going, Cathleen, interviews NF, xxxiv, 264–74 Golden Age, 372 Golden calf, 1008 Golding, Sir William (1911–93), 55; Lord of the Flies (1954), 45 Goliardic poets, 967 Good, and evil, 33, 245, 249, 1028–9 Good Samaritan, 191, 663

1193 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeyevich (b. 1931), 897, 898, 993 Gorjup, Branko (b. 1944), interviews NF, 483–6 Gorlier, Claudio, interviews NF, 449– 51 Gosnell, Larry (1923–2004), 124 Gospel, as phase of revelation, 554 Gospels, 382, 874; authorship of, 652; presentation of Jesus in, 285, 288–9, 1007–8, 1099 Gougeon, Hélène Carroll (1924–2000), interviews NF, 568–74 Gould, Allan M., interviews NF, 565– 7 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de (1746–1828): The Disasters of War, 446 Graôan, Giga, interviews NF, 1087 Graduate: studies, 616–17; teaching, 644 Grammar, 162–3, 331, 333, 746; Nietzsche on, 871, 1011 Grant, George Parkin (1918–88), 299, 457 Grant, John Webster (1919–2006), 434 Grant, (William) Douglas Beattie (1921–69), 610 Granville-Barker, Harley (1877–1946), 471 Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895– 1985): The White Goddess (1948), 686 Great Britain, 296, 362, 975; army of, 855–6; and Canada, 706, 723, 891, 974, 976, 978; criticism in, 160, 692, 755; culture of, 1090, 1091; education in, 168; influence of on Canadian literature, 231, 241, 724; poetry in, 241; regional literature in, 646, 1065 Great Dictator, The, 566 Great men, 571

1194 Greece, ancient: culture of, 311, 686, 1009; history of, 893; literature of, 337, 407; mythology of, 572; religion in, 249, 252, 373, 381, 383–4, 1010; tradition of, 785–6; tragedy in, 252–3, 557; visual culture of, 340 Greek: Biblical, 659, 783; NF’s knowledge of, 577, 1002 Greene, Graham (1904–91), 43 Greene, Robert (1558–92): Pandosto (1588), 1076 Gregory I, the Great, Pope (ca. 540– 604), 659 Grierson, John (1898–1972), 498 Gross, Marty (b. 1948), interviews NF, 536–45; The Lovers’ Exile (1980), 536–45 passim Group of Seven, 134, 298, 363, 500 Grove, Frederick Philip (1879–1948), 172, 585; A Search for America (1927), 889 Grube, G(eorge) M(aximillian) A(nthony) (1899–1982), 706, 707, 708 Guardiani, Francesco (b. 1949), interviews NF, 840–8 Guggenheim fellowship, NF awarded, 606, 622, 980 Gurus, 113 Guyana, NF in, 502 Gzowski, Peter (1934–2002), interviews NF, xxxii, 813–20 Habit, 369; in education, 746, 992; two kinds of, 412 Haines, Fred (1879–1960), 705 Haist Committee, 627 Hall-Dennis Report, 82 Halloween, 376 Hall Report, 103, 111 Handel, Georg Friedrich (1685–1759): Messiah (1742), 288

Index Hardy, Thomas (1840–1928), 646, 1065; fate in, 403; on folk ritual, 376, 545 Hare Krishna, 368 Harris, Lawren (1885–1970), 134 Harris, Marjorie, interviews NF, 284– 90 Harris, Maureen Scott (b. 1943), interviews NF, 512–17 Harron, Don (b. 1924), 367–99, 546– 64; interviews NF; Old Charlie Farquharson’s Testament (1978), 652 Hart House, 587 Harvard, 431, 594, 597–8, 629, 639, 1093; Fogg Museum at, 927; hiring practices at, 610, 611, 614–15; NF at, 606, 622, 651, 698, 787 Harvest and vintage images, in the Bible, 559 Havelock, Eric Alfred (1903–88), 581, 985, 996 Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–64), 224 Hazen, Edward Warriner (1860– 1929), 595 “HEAP” diagram, CRTC examines, 126–9, 137–43 passim Hearing vs. seeing, 998–9; in the Bible/religion, 868, 1010, 1077; in different civilizations, 340; metaphors of, 768 Hearne, Samuel (1745–92), 500 Heathenism, 375 Heaven, 572; and hell, 1058 Hébert, Anne (1916–2000), 62, 234 Hebrew (language): Biblical, 659, 783; Blake’s knowledge of, 880; NF’s knowledge of, 1002 Hebrews, Epistle to the, on faith, 1012 Hebrews (people), culture of, 311, 340. See also Israel Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831), 128, 132, 268, 283, 550,

Index 1086; dialectic in, 279, 1073; on propositions or concepts containing their opposites, 562, 676, 953 Hegelianism, 613, 665 Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976): on first question of philosophy, 660; on thrownness, 368, 1002 Heilsgeschichte, and Weltgeschichte, 1076 Hell, 907, 1085; harrowing of, 288, 289, 881–2 Heller, Helen, xxxii Hémon, Louis (1880–1913): Maria Chapdelaine (1914, 1916), 799 Heraclitus (ca. 540–ca. 480 b.c.e.), 113, 176 Herbert, George (1593–1633), 742 Herman-Sekuliñ, Maja, interviews NF, 477–82 Hermeneutics, 416–17, 598 Hermes quadrant, 140, 141 Herodotus (ca. 485–425 b.c.e.), 893 Heroism, nature of, 247–8 Hesiod (8th c. b.c.e.), 219 Hierarchy, and order, 973 Hill, Melvyn, interviews NF, 254–63 Hinduism, 16, 374 Hippy movement, 201, 202 Hiroshige, Ando (1797–1858), 544 History, 551, 566, 573, 745, 938, 1004; in AC, 459; and the Bible, 267–8, 373–4, 652–3, 1008–9; Blake on, 842, 843; Byron on, 653, 871, 875; cycles in, 917; doctrine of progress in, 654–5; Joyce on, 378, 886; and myth, 232; objectivity in, 149–50; as phantasmagoria, 898, 989; real, 776; writing of, 781–2 Hitler, Adolf (1889–1945), 167, 181, 188, 247, 898, 926 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679), 987; on social contract, 514

1195 Hodgetts, John Edwin (b. 1917), 629 Hodgins, Jack (b. 1938), 499, 505, 520 Hoggart, Richard (b. 1918): The Uses of Literacy (1957), 162 Hokusai, Katsushika (1760–1849), 544 Holmes, Oliver Wendell (1809–94), 64 Holt, Geoffrey E., 583 Holy Spirit, 863 Homer (8th c. b.c.e.), 311, 343, 572, 678, 943–4, 1039; Plato on, 550; Iliad, 182, 667; Odyssey, 662, 667 Honour Course, 591, 624; abolition of, 81, 150–1, 276, 359, 432, 475, 521, 993; value of, 618–19 Hope, 53 Hope, A(lec) D(erwent) (1907–2000), 687 Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844–89), on masterpiece, 215 Hopkins, Mark (1802–87), 488 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 b.c.e.), 318; on delight and instruction, 966 Hosea, Book of, 560 Howard, Alma (Alma Howard Rolleston Ebert) (1913–84), 796 Howard, Donald, 796 Howard, Rev. Eratus Seth (1833– 1923), 292, 319, 576, 713, 793, 794–5, 796, 837, 876, 877, 918, 923, 1045, 1048, 1055 Howard family, 1044 Howard, Leslie (1893–1943), 195 & n. 7 Howard, Mary, 795 Howard, Wilbert (1890–1967), 796 & n. 12 Hugo, Victor Marie (1802–85), 979 Humanism, 1072; Classics in, 339; Renaissance, 967 Humanist, and scientist, 277 Humanities, 149, 471, 750; centrality

1196 of, 1097; changes in, 598; and concern, 169–70; militant, 407–8, 983; plight of, 318; role of, 744–8; and sciences, 277, 452–3, 528–9, 532, 745; teaching of, 361, 437, 488, 490; thought effeminate, 702; value of study of, 619–20. See also Arts Human nature, 16, 1014–15 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk (1778– 1837), 735 Hypocrisy, 10 Hysteria, Age of, 313 Ibsen, Henrik (1828–1906), 795 Icelandic peoples, in Canada, 234, 500 Icon, 1077 Ideas, and words, 331, 746 Identification, in literature, 339 Identity: and metaphor, 457; national, 458; personal, 33, 37, 115, 207, 316, 320 Ideology, 717, 894, 991, 1009, 1029–30; and art, 966–8, 1071–2; and literature, 847, 858, 947–8; and mythology, 753–4, 950–1 Idolatry, 1077 Ignatieff, Michael (b. 1947), 104, 1051 Illich, Ivan (b. 1926), 995–6 Illusion, and reality, 462, 544 Image(s): in Blake, 280; vs. concept, 130–1, 136–7; in politics, 108 Imagination, 180, 182, 516, 745; and God, 677, 879; vs. imaginary, 111, 268; and literature, 70, 168–9, 454; and national identity, 893; nature of, 170–1; participation in society through, 49, 56, 268, 338, 456, 461, 492, 514, 515; Romantics on, 928; as vegetable, 239, 352, 515, 530, 724–5, 844–5, 978 Immigration, 335, 1053–4 India, 168, 300, 339

Index Indiana State University, 359 Indians, North American, 307, 485, 1089; assimilation of mythology of, 648, 908–9 Individual, and society, 17, 41, 42, 49, 177, 206, 367–8, 390, 495, 559, 875–6 Industrial Revolution, 281, 654, 958 Infinite, 200, 260, 269, 282, 325, 566, 713, 877, 1017 Inglis, Stuart (b. 1961), interviews NF, 904–9 Innis, Harold Adams (1894–1952), 283, 457, 972, 974, 1094 Innis College, 636 Innocenti, Laura, interviews NF, 826– 9 Inquisition, 675 Inspiration, 1076 Intellect, 170 Intelligence, tests of, 154 Intentionality, 59 Interpenetration, 931, 933 Introversion, and technology, 311, 344, 347, 975, 998 Inuit, 231, 907, 908; culture of, 98, 298, 455, 485, 750, 1092; on television, 504, 769 Irony, 478, 712; in advertising, 773; in Canadian literature, 647 Irony (mode), 55, 126–8, 169, 204, 216, 222–3, 251–2; moves towards myth, 459, 944 Isaiah, 261, 288, 871 – Book of, 868; authorship of, 652 Isis, 284, 555 Islam, 675, 715, 787, 905, 950; and the Koran, 397; revolutionary, 653 Israel (Biblical), 869–70; Christ as, 288, 289; as powerless kingdom, 555–6, 683, 1009–10; story of, 377–8, 653 Israelites, mechanical ineptness of, 555

Index Italian (discipline), 635 Italy: Canadian literature in, 443, 482, 860; historicism in, 449; NF in, 442, 567, 602–3; NF’s knowledge of literature of, 442 Jackson, Stanley, interviews NF, 23–7 Jacob, ladder of, 872, 961 James, Epistle of, on faith, 1015 James I (1566–1625), 817 James, Henry (1843–1916), 224, 404, 767; Edgar on, 588; occult in, 944; The Altar of the Dead (1895), 944; The Sense of the Past (1917), 944; The Turn of the Screw (1898), 944; The Wings of the Dove (1902), 409 James, William (1842–1910), 493 Jameson, Fredric (b. 1934), 1082 Jansenists, 859 Japan, 133, 135, 444, 1163n. 3; Buddhism in, 833–4; drama in, 941; man and nature in, 266–7; NF in, 536, 539; puppet plays in (Bunraku), 896. See also Bunraku Jargon, 157, 158, 702, 712 Jeffers, Robinson (1887–1962), 117–18 Jefferson, Thomas (1743–1826), 312, 648, 888 Jehovah, 938 Jephthah, 653 Jeremiah, 261 Jerusalem, 389, 873 Jesus, 208, 271, 683, 833, 969, 1009, 1022; and Adonis, 284–5, 373; as God and man, 811–12, 1014; historical existence of, 552, 782, 1007–8; and Jonah, 399, 874; and Joshua, 558; and Old Testament, 726 – life of: death, 382; harrowing of hell, 289; and the Old Testament, 285, 288–9, 552; pattern of, 254, 285,

1197 287, 288; significance of, 378; sinlessness, 287–8 – teaching of, 201, 1028; and metaphor, 1017; by parable, 714; on the talents, 1027; on truth, 900 Jewkes, William Thomas (b. 1928), 401 Jews: in Canada, 97, 234, 236; persecution of, 158; and Shakespeare, 194, 756. See also Judaism Joan of Arc (ca. 1412–31), 727 Job, 211, 351; and Kafka, 728 – Book of, 663, 944, 1003, 1015; analysis of, 880, 1016, 1019–22; epitome of Bible, 1022 Joblin, Kingsley (1912–2003), 593 John, Gospel of, 288, 785, 900, 1007; opening of, 548, 730, 1017 John the Baptist, 289, 789 Johnson, Barbara (b. 1947), 845 Johnson, Samuel (1709–84), 4, 76, 946; on novelty, 764 Johnston, Alexandra Ferguson (b. 1939), discussion with, 26 Johnston, George Benson (1913– 2004), 980 Jonah, 289, 398–9, 974, 1020; and Jesus, 874; Book of, 378 Jonson, Ben (1572–1637), 530, 967; and Shakespeare, 767, 945, 947, 1084; on Shakespeare, 883–4 Joseph, M(ichael) K(ennedy) (Mike) (1914–81), 601 Joseph (Old Testament), 663 Josephus, Flavius (ca. c.e. 37–100), 555 Joshua, and Jesus, 558 Journalism, challenges of contemporary, 770–8 Journey without Arrival, 362, 457 Jovanovich, William (d. 2001), 400 Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius

1198 (1882–1941), 78, 416, 459, 582, 659, 767; on history, 378, 886; Finnegans Wake (1939), 222, 667–8, 730, 945; Ulysses (1922), 222, 272, 378, 491, 662, 871, 1083 Judaeo-Christian tradition, 271; and tragedy, 252 Judaism, 380, 397, 905, 950, 1030; and Christianity, 378, 554, 754, 786–7, 834–5, 901; as revolutionary religion, 249, 250. See also Jews Judas, 288 Judges, Book of, 556, 653 Juneau, Pierre (b. 1922), 997 Jung, Carl Gustav (1875–1961), 663; on archetype, 406–7, 478, 779, 942; on collective unconscious, 1069; on individuation, 387; mandalas of, 402 Jungian criticism, 1038 Jupiter, 789, 834 Justice, 14 Kabbalah, 756, 834 Kafka, Franz (1883–1924): as prophet, 385; The Trial (1937), 728 Kandinsky, Vasily (1866–1944), 100, 908 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 550, 1086; on purposiveness without purpose, 1069; Critique of Judgment (1790), 1069; Critique of Pure Reason (1781), 965 Kaplan, Justin (b. 1925), interviews NF, 310–16 Kattan, Naïm (b. 1928), interviews NF, xxxiv, 58–62, 74–8 Kaufman, Andrew Frederick (b. 1953), interviews NF, xxxvii, 670– 80 Kearns, Lionel (b. 1937), 242 Keats, John (1795–1821), 1086; and

Index Milton, 1068; on poet’s lack of identity, 410, 418; Ode on a Grecian Urn (1820), 609; odes, 586 Kelly report, 432, 618–19 Kennedy, Leo (b. 1907), 240 Kennedy, Paul, interviews NF, xxxii Kermode, Sir Frank (b. 1919), 660 Kerouac, Jack (Jean Louis) (1922–69), 336, 632; The Dharma Bums (1958), 276 Kerygma, 659, 1010 Keystone Kops, 501 Khmer Rouge, 1001 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah (1900– 89), 675 Kidd, James Robbins (Roby) (1915– 82), interviews NF, 64–73 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye (1813–55), 270, 482, 881; and “drunken boat” construct, 961; on ethical freedom, 806 King, William Lyon Mackenzie (1874–1950), 308, 516 Kirkwood, Hilda, interviews NF, 704–8 Klinck, Carl Frederick (1908–90): ed., Literary History of Canada (1965), 971 Knight, G(eorge) Wilson (1897–1985), 593 Knister, Raymond (1899–1932): White Narcissus (1929), 980 Knowledge: and experience, 1028; structure in, 82, 83, 193; and wisdom, 27, 271, 273 Knowles, Stanley Howard (1908–97), 776 Koening, Wolf, xxxviii Kogawa, Joy (b. 1935), 714 Koran, 397, 787, 829; and the Bible, 553 Korean War, 19–20

Index Kott, Jan (1914–2001): Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1974), 989 Kroitor, Roman, xxxviii, 107 Krug, Rev. Charles Arthur (1906–85), 800 Kruger, Arthur M. (b. 1932), 620–1 Labyrinthe, xxxvii–xxxviii, xxxix, 107, 141 Lacan, Jacques (1901–81), 481, 663 Laforgue, Jules (1860–87), 818 Laing, R(onald) D(avid) (1927–89), 178 LaMarsh, Julia (Judy) Verlyn (1924– 80), 605 Lampman, Archibald (1861–99), 241 Lane, Wilmot Burkmar (1871–1960), 584 Language, 711–12, 744–5; clarity in, 157–9; contemporary importance of, 657–9; of conversation, 702; criticism and, 954; debasement of, 162, 188–9; experiments with, 184; and freedom, 407–8, 411–12; inclusive, 771; literary, 471–3; new approach to, 730; personal vs. impersonal, 772–5; and reality, 456; study of, 163–4; teaching of, 746; uses man, 781, 943. See also Speech – types of, 165, 405–6, 462, 986; metaphorical, 456–7, 682; three, 549–51, 1004–6; two, 533 Laskin, Bora (1912–84), 433 Last Supper, 287 Latin, 162; and English, 333, 746; NF’s knowledge of, 577; tradition, 785–6 Laurence, Margaret (1926–87), 505, 520, 1064; The Stone Angel (1964), 458 Laurentian axis, 920, 972–4 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid (1841–1919), 888

1199 Law, 715; as phase of revelation, 553, 554 Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885– 1930), 203, 582, 594, 598, 646, 789, 845, 930; perverse social views of, 755; on sex in the head, 872, 1023 Lawton, David (b. 1948), interviews NF, xxxvii, 779–89 Layton, Irving (1912–2006), 28, 417, 443, 1064; In the Midst of My Fever (1954), 241 Leacock, Stephen (1869–1944), 132, 356, 979 Leadership, 124, 125–6, 566; changing conceptions of, 897–8 League for Social Reconstruction, 581, 596, 643 Leavis, F(rank) R(aymond) (1895– 1978), 416, 755 Lecture(s), 195, 360 Lee, Alvin A. (b. 1930), and Hope (1929–98): ed., Wish and Nightmare, 401 Lee, Dennis (b. 1939), 86; discussion with, 26 Leech, Clifford (d. 1977), 608 Legend(s), 161, 753 Leisure, 72 Lemelin, Roger (1919–92), 499 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870–1924), 566, 898, 1090 Lennoxville, NF at, 576, 918 LePan, Douglas Valentine (1914–98): on country without a mythology, 648 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), 834 Lévesque, Réné (1911–87), 427–8, 566 Lévi-Strauss, Claude (b. 1908), 952 Leviathan, 398–9 Lewis, Cecil Day (1904–72), 241 Lewis, C(live) S(taples) (1898–1963),

1200 602, 643; The Discarded Image (1964), 602 Lewis, (Percy) Wyndham (1882– 1957), 754; social views of, 426 Lewis, Richard Warrington Baldwin: The American Adam (1955), 311 Leyerle, John Frank (1926–2006), 621 Liberal, NF as, 934, 970–1, 1030 Liberty, 15; Mill on, 1070; Milton on, 246, 955–6 Life, 1001–2; and death, 285, 290, 1028, 1065–6 Lincoln, Abraham (1809–65), 889; Gettysburg Address (1863), 411 Lindon, Mathieu, interviews NF, 726–8 Line, John (1885–1970), 581, 592 Linear vs. simultaneous apprehension in reading, 119–20, 698, 714– 15, 767–8 Linguistics, 162, 533, 598, 721, 1062, 1086; and criticism, 453, 456, 479, 491; linguistic model, 730 Lismer, Arthur (1885–1969), 134 Literacy, 162, 341; crisis in, 407 Literary symbolism, NF’s graduate course in, 165 Literature, 49, 1029; authority in, 148; and the Bible, 519–20, 568, 656–7, 668–9, 684, 787, 1003, 1068, 1099; centrality of, 74, 75, 170, 745; children’s, 212, 404, 465; and class, 154; condensation and displacement in, 945; as counter-culture, 743; and criticism, 159–60, 414, 453, 483–4, 491–2, 691–2, 755, 806–7, 828; delight and instruction in, 172, 347, 966; does not argue, 953–4; does not improve, 471; erotic, 698; as existential subject, 67; form and content in, 171–2, 214, 216, 218; function of, 455–6, 457–8, 460; as hampering

Index category, 420; history of, 449, 459, 781; as hypothetical, 678–9, 1014; and ideology, 753–4, 847, 947–8, 950–1; and imagination, 70, 168–9, 338, 454; levels of, 159; and life, 74, 76, 212, 940–1; and mathematics, 71; meaning in, 827; and morality, 714; and myth, 68–9, 161, 452, 513, 657, 950–1, 1080; no word for work of, 75; oral (see Oral culture); originality in, 726, 741; pastness of, xxxiii, 59–60, 76, 167–8, 194, 339, 827, 843, 1051, 1062, 1069; popular, 349, 356–7, 520, 738, 1083–4; precritical experience vs. simultaneous apprehension in, 58–9, 119, 941; and primary concern, 858, 965–6; regionalism in, 534; and religion, 1062; response to, 844; and social vision, 454; structure in, 59, 481; and style, 775; as total order of words, 295–6, 348, 402, 480, 650, 883; tradition in, 717; value judgments in (see Value judgments) – teaching of, 68–70, 118, 157, 160, 171, 210–18, 314, 323, 1032; goal of, 408, 461–8 passim, 645; improvements in, 508; as militant activity, 408; and total verbal experience of student, 408, 422–3, 466, 767. See also Contemporary literature; English (discipline); English literature; Modern literature; individual genres Lithuania, 1090 Locke, John (1632–1704), 699, 987; Blake on, 257–8, 263, 928; on social contract, 514; Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), 263 Logic, 846 Logos: Christ as, 138; NF’s diagram of (see “HEAP” diagram)

Index Long, Marcus (1908–68), xvi Lord’s Prayer, 473 Love, Christian, 47 Lowell, Mass., 1045 Lower, Arthur Reginald Marsden (1889–1988): Colony to Nation (1946), 977 Lowes, John Livingston (1867–1945), 611 Lowry, Christopher (b. 1955), interviews NF, 849–57, 1113–14 Lowry, (Clarence) Malcolm (1909– 57): Under the Volcano (1947), 971 Lucian (ca. c.e. 120–80), 938, 1083 Lyly, John (ca. 1554–1606): Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), 531–2, 937 Lynch, Lawrence E. (1915–2001), discussion with, 13–22 Maccabees, 556 McCarthy, Joseph Raymond (1909– 57), 643, 895 McCulley, Joseph (b. 1900), discussion with, 13–22 McCulloch, Don, 83 MacDiarmid, Hugh (Christopher Murray Grieve) (1892–1978), 646 MacDonald, Brian (b. 1928), 737 Macdonald, Sir John A(lexander) (1815–91), 232, 888, 974 McDougall, Colin (1917–84): Execution (1958), 40 & n. 2 Macdowell, Edward (1860–1906), 798 McGann, Jerome, 805 & n. 25 McGibbon, Pauline (1910–2001), 433 MacGillivray, James Robertson (1902–92), 593 Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527), 442 McHugh, Fiona, interviews NF, xvi MacKinnon, Frank (b. 1919), 105

1201 MacLean, Kenneth (1908–99), 610 MacLennan, Hugh (1907–90), 28; Two Solitudes (1945), 99 McLuhan, (Herbert) Marshall (1911– 80), 56, 283, 328, 457, 610, 611, 972, 985, 1094–5; achievement of, 510– 11, 522–3, 526–7, 996–7; on counterenvironment, 488; criticism of, 61; on global village, 844; on hot and cool media, 527; on linear vs. simultaneous media, 77, 714–15, 767– 8; on media fallout, 70, 346; on medium and message, 831; style of, 113, 176; The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), 522; The Mechanical Bride (1951), 167; Understanding Media (1964), 522 MacLure, Millar (1917–91), 609–10, 611 McManus, Mike, interviews NF, 344– 54 McMaster University, 358, 432, 637 Macmillan Co., 505 MacNeice, Louis (1907–63), 241 Macpherson, C(rawford) Brough (1911–87), 993 McPherson, David, interviews NF, 230–8, 275–7 McPherson, Hugo (1921–99), 610 Macpherson, (Jean) Jay (b. 1931), 243, 980; The Boatman (1957), 241 Macpherson Commission, 992–3; Report, xlii–xliii, 359, 618, 623 MacQuarrie, Murray, interviews NF, 51–7 Magazines, 63, 708 Magic, 561, 1059 Mailer, Norman Kingsley (1923– 2007), 29, 67, 229; The Armies of the Night (1968), 186 Mallarmé, Stéphane (1842–98), 60, 784, 789, 818

1202 Malraux, André (1901–76): The Voices of Silence (1951), 931 Mandel, Eli (Elias Wolf) (1922–92), 645, 654; discussion with, 174–89 Maoism, 127, 187 Mao Tse-tung (or Zedong) (1893– 1976), 379, 969 Marcion (ca. c.e. 100–ca. 165), 222 Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (c.e. 121– 80), 1010 Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973), 980 Maritimes, 102, 106, 136, 228, 235, 292, 500, 590, 734, 793, 1090 Mark, Gospel of, 785 Marlowe, Christopher (1564–93), 416 Martin, André, interviews NF, xxxix– xl, 88–144 Martin, Douglas (b. 1947), paints NF, 361 Martyr(s), 34–5, 199, 200 Marvell, Andrew (1621–78), 799 Marx, Karl (1818–83), 79, 128, 268, 456, 624, 834; and “drunken boat” construct, 958, 959, 960–1; as realist, 446, 448; Das Kapital (1867), 850 Marx, Leo (b. 1919): The Machine in the Garden (1964), 311 Marxism, 52, 63, 158, 444, 447, 683, 950; and alienation, 41, 42; and art, 171; criticism in, 481; and the future, 561; and history, 379; and ideology, 966; limitations of, 200; Morris and, 850; NF and, 67, 761–2, 846–7, 898, 1082; present appeal of, 127; and religion, 38–9; revolutionary, 249, 250, 728; and tragedy, 252 Marxist criticism, 781, 805, 939, 940, 942, 1038 Mary, Virgin, 286, 1007 Mary Magdalene, 1007 Mass, black, 375

Index Massey, Walter Edward Hart (1864– 1901), 434; Massey family, 599 Massey College, 635, 1038 Mass media, 49, 56, 342, 488, 501–3, 748, 766; study of, 69–70. See also Media Mathematics, 324; and imagination, 745; importance of studying, 148–9; as language of sciences, 71, 533; and literature, 159, 172, 214 Matthews, Robin, 647, 654 Mauriac, François (1885–1970), 43 Meaning: literary, 217, 290; polysemous, 664–5 Media, 61, 511; differences in, 30; hot and cool, 527; linear vs. simultaneous, 77, 714–15, 767–8; new, 109– 10, 118. See also Electronic media; Mass media Meech Lake Accord, 1091–2, 1095 Mellor, Bernard (ca. 1918–98), 601 Melodrama, 250–1, 366, 538 Melville, Herman (1819–91), 219, 224, 225, 311; Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849), 225; Moby-Dick (1851), 138, 223–4, 398, 937 Memorandum of Understanding, 636, 1135n. 7 Memory: importance of, 745, 821, 1018; two kinds of, 929 Menippean satire, 937–8, 1088 Menippus (fl. 250 b.c.e.), 938 Mennonites, 500 Merovingians, 1007 Merton College, NF at, 599, 600–1. See also Oxford Messiah, 559; as hero of Bible, 557; as Jesus, 1007–8 Metaphor, 290, 457; thinking by, 1005–6, 1017; value of, 530 Metaphorical language. See Language, subhead types of

Index Methodism, 94, 204, 319, 358, 797, 837, 1047; and NF, 713, 876, 917–18, 922, 1041–2 Mexico, 888 Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti) (1475–1564), 865, 930 Michigan State University, 359 Mickleburgh, Bruce (d. 1987), interviews NF, xxxvii, 145–73 Middle Ages, 152, 163, 179, 456, 846, 967, 1035; art in, 395; cathedrals of, 141; church in, 379; closed mythology in, 52; cosmology of, 392; drama in, 289, 348; idealization of, 527; levels of meaning in, 664–5; literature in, 513; Morris and, 851, 855; religion in, 380, 384, 385; university in, 71 Middle English, 1037 Mill, Harriet Taylor (1807–58), 853 Mill, John Stuart (1806–73), 801, 969, 971; on liberty, 1070; on poetry, 948; on social contract, 514; “Chapters on Socialism” (1879), 853 Millennium, predictions for, 574, 886 Millennium (Biblical), 886 Miller, Arthur (1915–2005): Death of a Salesman (1949), 25–6 Miller, Henry (1891–1980), 472 Miller, Peter, interviews NF, 28–31 Milton, John (1608–74), 25, 60, 164, 311, 323, 412, 420, 715, 787, 799, 936, 938, 951, 986, 1023–4, 1052; and the Bible, 753, 755, 863, 922, 1068; and Blake, 812, 958; on Christ, 225; on Classical culture, 225; cosmology of, 220, 223; Daniells on, 593; and English politics, 386–7; on heroism, 247; importance of to NF, 649, 668, 881, 955, 1087; on liberty, 247, 955– 6; Promethean figures in, 221;

1203 teaching of, 987–8; value judgments on, 66, 828; on Word of God in the heart, 226; Areopagitica (1644), 386; Christian Doctrine (pub. 1825), 220; Lycidas (1638), 407; Samson Agonistes (1671), 221, 247 – Paradise Lost (1667), 279, 324, 397, 568, 656, 863, 955, 988, 1002–3, 1075; chaos in, 220–1, 224; God in, 957; Raphael’s speech in, 257, 677; Satan in, 18 Mind: dedicated vs. trained, 899–900; expansion of, 27; models of, 177 Miner, Marylou, interviews NF, 1067–73 Minorities, rights of, 364 Mishra, Vijay (b. 1945), interviews NF, 685–92 Mithraism, 373 Mithras, 284 Mob, 101, 111, 121–3, 155, 172, 206, 345 Modern age, 31, 56; alienation in, 41– 7; division of attention in, 544; irony in, 55, 251–2; and King Lear, 818; loss of continuity in, 715; and primary concern, 966, 1026; religion in, 77 Modern literature, 336, 832; as ironic, 216, 222–3; perverse writers in, 151–2; view of human situation in, 39–47 passim. See also Contemporary literature Modes, fictional, 943–4, 1083 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) (1622–73): on M. Jourdain’s prose (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 1671), 332, 710 Mollins, Carl (b. 1931), interviews NF, 1089–96 Monasticism, new, 140 Moncton, NF at, 292, 365, 469, 470,

1204 523, 576, 577, 578, 692, 734, 790–805, 836–7, 918–20, 963, 974, 1041, 1043, 1090 Monet, Claude (1840–1926), 130 Monotheism, 1010 Monsieur Verdoux, 566 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de (1533– 92), 48 Montcalm, Louis Joseph, Marquis de (1712–59), 143 & n. 52 Montreal, 92, 97, 144, 236, 307 Moon: cult of, 368; shots at and landings on, 116, 122, 139, 199, 298 Moore, Arthur Bruce Barbour (1906– 2004), 613, 983 Moore, Brian (1921–99), 972 Morality: and art, 714; and censorship, 111–12; relativity in, 20–1, 245–6 Moral Rearmament, 204 Morris, Lou A. (1919–2003) and Kay, 707 Morris, William (1834–96): on art and society, 849–57, 970; The Earthly Paradise (1868–70), 851; News from Nowhere (1891), 853 Moses, 653, 827, 1006, 1008; as author, 652; in burning bush episode, 377, 548; and Freud, 387; and Joshua, 558 Mosley, Sir Oswald (1896–1980), 601 Mother goddess. See Earth-mother goddess Mothers of Invention, 110, 165 Mount Allison University, 800 Movie. See Film Moyers, Bill (b. 1934), interviews NF, 887–903 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756– 91), 742; as voice of music, 489; Don Giovanni (1787), 537; The Magic Flute (1791), 410, 738

Index Munro, Alice (b. 1931), 443, 520, 725, 978, 979, 982, 1037, 1093; Lives of Girls and Women (1971), 706 Murasaki, Shikibu (978–ca. 1031): The Tale of Genji (1925–33), 542 Musgrave, Susan (b. 1951), 689 Music, 170, 196, 215, 465, 858; contrapuntal, 114, 120; form or structure in, 279, 650; impersonality in, 489; modern, 429; NF plays, 565, 734–6, 740, 797–800, 815, 876; in NF’s life, 566, 577–8, 580, 733–42 passim; as a social art, 541, 718 Mussolini, Benito (1883–1945), 602 Mystery, 783 Mysticism, 207 Myth (mode), reappearance of, from irony, 459 Myth(s), 59, 205, 284, 290, 405, 465, 480; creation of, 513; development of, 827; displacement of, 216; vs. dogma, 269–70; and folk tale, 753; and genre, 224; and history, 551; importance of, 271, 310–11, 484; in individual lives, 1046, 1049; and literature, 68–9, 160–1, 452, 657; mutual intelligibility of, 372; “myth criticism,” 951, 1080; and mythos (story), 296, 660, 942, 945, 1040, 1058; NF’s personal, 760, 791, 1045– 8; and poetry, 231–2; and present tense, 907–8; and projection, 515; and ritual, 369, 452. See also Mythology Mythoi, four, 348, 401–2 Mythological: conditioning, 338, 399, 661, 716; universe, 340, 371 Mythology, 74, 77, 202, 203; ancestral, 1053–4; Canadian, 648; false, 454, 456; Greek, 572; and ideology, 753– 4, 950–1; importance of, 1058–60; open and closed, 51–7, 716, 1000–1;

Index and science, 769; social, 349–50, 444, 514, 645, 716, 892–5; teaching of, 212. See also Myth Nabokov, Vladimir (1899–1977): Lolita (1955), 29 Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) (1769–1821), 247, 811, 818, 842, 930 Napoleonic wars, 528 Narrative, 661, 662 Narratology, 1079–80 Nationalism, 308, 566, 1090 Naturalism, 784 Natural man, 45, 196 Natural religion, Blake on, 810, 929– 30 Nature: Biblical view of, 561–2, 1006; Canadian attitude to, 130, 133; Christian view of, 139–40; and culture, 340; cycle of, 286; idealization of, 958; mankind’s relation to, 200, 265–7, 391, 457, 512, 513, 654, 657, 686–7, 807–8, 849–50, 852, 856–7, 865, 866–7, 904–9, 929, 1024–5; NF’s view of, xliii–xliv; and physics, 323; pollution and exploitation of, 529; transformation of, 389 Nazis, 34, 54, 158, 200, 602–3, 680, 750, 775, 894, 934, 1001; may love art, 714; on relevance, 167, 211, 992 Nazism: and FS, 765; at Oxford, 643; religious aspect of, 384 NBC, 309 NDP (New Democratic Party), 108, 983 Near Eastern Studies, 615, 626 Negroes. See Blacks Neoplatonism, archetypes in, 779, 780 Neo-Romanticism, 459 Neptune, 1006 New Brunswick, 101, 1090 New College, 636

1205 New Criticism, 314, 415, 449, 609, 649, 756, 846, 1081; NF and, 479, 480 New England, 102, 235, 734, 793 Newfoundland, 800 New Guinea, 372 Newlove, John (b. 1938), 689 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal (1801–90), 801–2; on education, 970; on university, 70; Lead Kindly Light, 923 Newspapers, 110, 115, 121, 342; changes in, 748, 773, 775 New Statesman, 706 Newton, Sir Isaac (1642–1727), 223; Blake on, 257–8, 263, 928, 958, 1062; on the ocean of truth, 320, 902 New York, 98, 103, 345, 362 New Yorker, 706 New Zealand, NF in, 502 NFB (National Film Board) , xxxvii– xxxviii, 92, 104–5, 106, 107, 134, 364, 427, 498 nichol, b(arrie) p(hillip) (1944–88), 184, 186 Nicodemus, Gospel of, 288 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844– 1900), 114, 203, 761, 843; and “drunken boat” construct, 961; on grammar, 871, 1011; on will to power, 1029 Nigeria, 96 Nineteenth century, 168; and Hamlet, 817; Morris on, 849–57 passim Nineteenth-century prose, NF’s course in, 801–2 Nixon, Richard Milhouse (1913–94), 894; resignation of, 749 Noah: ark of, 557; his flood, 873, 874 Nobel Prize, 534, 845, 1031 Noboddaddy, 812, 925 Nonfiction, 30, 228–9 Norman, Herbert (1909–57), 643

1206 North America, 889; crisis of confidence in, 322 Northrop, Sarah Ann, 876, 1045 Norway, 472 Nothing, 731–2 Nova Scotia, film censorship in, 543 Novels, 901; and romances, 224 New Testament, 786, 873, 1010, 1014, 1022; on faith, 1012; on hope, 53; language of, 783; mystery in, 783; and Old Testament, 288–9, 552, 557–8, 559, 726, 834, 874, 1007–8, 1060–1; sexual symbolism in, 908 Nuclear war, 731–2 Nuremberg trials, 253 Nursery rhymes, 465 O’Brien, Peter, interviews NF, 1036–9 O’Connor, Father Eric R. (d. 1980), interviews NF, 264–74 O’Connor, (Mary) Flannery (1925– 64), 1093 O’Hara, Martin, interviews NF, 264– 74 Objectivity, in studies, 149–50, 151 Obscenity, 111–12 Occultism, 326, 785 Oedipus complex, 388 Ohio State University, 359 OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education), 212; as oppressive, 331–2, 423 Old English, 1037 Old Testament, 873, 1006, 1009, 1012; Christian view of, 285, 553, 554, 557; language of, 783; and New Testament, 288–9, 552–3, 559, 726, 834, 874, 1007–8, 1060–1; xenophobia in, 683 Oliver, Hugh (b. 1929), interviews NF, xxxvi, xxxvii, 330–43 Oliver & Boyd, 962

Index Ong, Walter J. (1912–2003), 985 Ontario, 106, 132, 136; literature of, 227, 499, 979; policy on higher education in, 614–16 Ontario College of Education, 592 Ontario Curriculum Institute, 331, 423 Opera, 1084 Opie, Iona (b. 1923) and Peter (1918– 92): ed., Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951), 192 Oracle, and wit, 742 Oracular: style, 113; utterance, 176 Oral culture, modern revival of, 76, 204–6, 428–9, 459, 474, 1064 Oratory, 411. See also Rhetoric Orc, 810–11; cycle, 842 Order, 973 Orient: and Occident, 488; tradition of, 833 – religion of, 381; vogue for, 368, 373, 1018; contrasted with Western religion, 267 Origen (ca. c.e. 185–ca. 254), 780, 786 Original sin, 265, 562, 713, 956; meaning of, 368 Orwell, George (Eric Arthur Blair) (1903–50), 1029–30; on language, 188, 747; 1984 (1949), 162, 188, 407, 711, 747, 875, 923, 1000 Osiris, 555 Ottawa, 90, 131 Owen, Ivon, 707 Oxford, 587, 644, 1093; NF at, 12, 294, 470, 598–602, 643–4, 738, 924, 973; in nineteenth century, 856; teaching of English at, 194, 336 Oxford Group, 204 Oxford University Press, 505 Paderewski, Ignace Jan (1860–1941), 580

Index Paganism, 285, 375, 834 Page, P(atricia) K(athleen) (b. 1916), 241 Paine, Thomas (Tom) (1737–1809), 230, 386 Painting, 170, 196, 215, 218, 531, 754, 858, 929; abstract, 534; Canadian, 130, 134; role of rejection in, 498; study of, 270 Pan, 375 Pantomime, 542 Paradise, 388, 907–8; meaning of, 882; vision of, 903 Parry, Sir Charles Hubert Hastings (1848–1918), 734, 739–40, 806 Parti Québécois, 364, 427 Pascal, Blaise (1623–62), 1015; on good and evil, 1029 Passover, 285, 286 Past, 398; brought into present, 55 Pastoral, 350, 1083; convention, 311– 12; elegy, 407; imagery in the Bible, 874; myth, 711 Patriarchy, 1025; and the Bible, 865–6, 1006; in narrative, 661 Patti, Adelina (1843–1919), 1096 Paul, St., 46, 132, 381, 563; on charity, 676; on last supper, 287; letters of, 652; on liberty, 956; on spiritual body, 382 Paul Bunyan stories, 520, 585 Peace, 1001 Pearson, Lester Bowles (1897–1972), 100, 430, 431, 776, 997 Penfield, Wilder (1891–1976), 335 Persia, 893 Peter, St., 381 Pharmakos, in Plato, 1085 Ph.D., 751; NF and, 294; unnecessary, 587, 599, 644 Phenomenology, 702, 721, 984 Philology, 160, 213, 841

1207 Philosophy, 371, 745, 772, 938, 953; and art, 966; and concealed system, 954; as concerned subject, 67, 170; and criticism, 478, 841; and grammar, 746; NF studies, 584, 591; at University of Toronto, 623, 635 Physics, 907; and art, 908; and nature, 323, 532, 904; nuclear, 534 Piaget, Jean (1896–1980): Structuralism (1970), 952 Picard, Laurent (b. 1927), 303 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, Comte (1463–94), 834 Pinter, Harold (b. 1930), 55, 178, 339 Pitt, David George (b. 1921): E.J. Pratt (1984–87), 357 Pitt, William “the Younger” (1759– 1806), 386 Planck, Max Karl Ernst (1858–1947), 532 Plaskett, John, interviews NF, 430–41 Plateau Committee, 605, 613–14 Plato (ca. 428–ca. 348 b.c.e.), 11, 23, 408, 959–60, 975, 1004, 1085; on archetype, 406; on art, 394, 1069; dialogue in, 174–5; language of, 550; myth in, 177, 181; and teaching, 156; on wise man’s mind, 177; Laws, 156, 550, 941; Republic, 37, 156, 176, 199, 262, 941; Symposium, 7, 175 Plevano, Roberto, interviews NF, 832–5 Plutarch (ca. c.e. 46–ca. 120), 555 Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), 534; “Eureka” (1848), 954 Poem, sometimes used to mean “work of literature,” 75 Poetry, 30, 70, 120, 705–6; centrality of, 165, 213, 405, 1097; and Classical mythology, 789; concrete, 242; and convention, 417; and criticism, 363;

1208 and ideology, 966–8, 1071–2; impersonality in, 418; language of, 188–9, 456, 459, 682; modern, 218; and myth, 231–2; poets as readers of, 195; and prose, 214, 405; reading of, 403–4, 698, 720–1; and religion, 202–3; revival of oral, 428–9, 459, 474, 1064; sound in, 696–7; teaching of, 464–5; thought in, 61, 118, 119, 132, 549, 986, 1056; and the tradition, 1068, 1098; writing of, 180–1 Poet(s), 228; as hero, 490; preposterous social views of, 67, 962; role of, 492; and scientist, 1068 Political science, 402; as concerned subject, 67, 170; at University of Toronto, 622 Politics, 11; and art, 966; and culture, 978, 982; and imaginative vision, 1031; language in, 772; and religion, 831 Pollution, 110, 264–6 Polysemy, 1085 Polytheism, 1010 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), Blake on, 279 Popper, Sir Karl Raimond (1902–94), 1000 Popular culture, 422–3 Pornography, 698–9 Portugal, 975 Positivism, 272 Poststructuralism, 846. See also Deconstruction Pound, Ezra Loomis (1885–1972), 459, 852; perverse social views of, 67, 426, 755, 847, 962; on Usura, 407 Practice, 1034; and faith, 1013. See also Habit Prairie provinces, 106, 136 Prang, Margaret (b. 1921), 434 Pratt, E(dwin) J(ohn) (1882–1964),

Index 138, 237, 240, 356, 363, 582, 603, 605, 606, 800; hiring of, 521; influence on NF, 293, 294, 520, 521, 565; life and character of, 357–8; as teacher, 586; Towards the Last Spike (1952), 232, 974 Pre-Raphaelites, 241 Presbyterianism, 94, 917, 931 Present: and past and future, 398; realization in, 53, 55 Preston, Melvin Alexander (b. 1921), xvi Preview, 241 Priestley, F(rancis) E(thelbert) L(ouis) (1905–88), 610 Primitivism, 270 Princeton, 360, 611, 639, 1093; NF at, 606 Princeton University Press, 924 Pringle, Valerie, interviews NF, 836–9 Prodigal son, 351, 663 Professors: diversity among, 627; and the media, 107, 124; responsibilities of, 300, 334; unionization of, 625–6 Progress, 344, 347; doctrine of, 31, 53, 85, 270, 654–5 Projection, 682 Prometheus, 219–23 passim, 834; quadrant, 140, 141, 142 Promised Land, 558 Propaganda, 460 Prophecy, as phase of revelation, 553, 554 Prophets, 261; Biblical, 727; language of, 775; religious and secular, 385–6 Propositions: and their negatives, 754, 976 Prose, 165; continuous, 113; and ordinary speech, 319, 330, 332, 710, 985, 1064; and poetry, 214, 405 Protestantism, 675; anxieties of, 326;

Index Bible in, 664; and individualism, 381; and Roman Catholic Church, 50, 55; and sin, 46 Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), 224, 228, 459 Providence, 734, 793 Psalms, 23, 225, 288, 663, 874; and life of Jesus, 552 Psychoanalysis, 179, 728; and criticism, 456 Psychology, 154; as concerned (mythological) subject, 74, 75, 170; and criticism, 217, 453, 478, 480, 491, 532, 841; and literature, 61 Ptolemaic universe, 392 Publishing, 505, 743, 982 Puccini, Giacomo (1858–1924), 798 Punch and Judy, 540 Punishment, capital, 566–7 Puns, in the Bible, 548–9 Puppet plays, 536–45 passim, 896 Purcell, Henry (1659–95), 791 Purdy, Alfred Wellington (1918– 2000), 356 Puritans, 859, 1012 Pynchon, Thomas (b. 1937), 714 Quakers, 124 Quebec Act, 894 Quebec (City), view of, 892, 920 Quebec (province), 90, 93, 102, 103, 136, 894; and Canada, 1090–2; culture of, 688; Quiet Revolution in, 516, 1090; role of artists in, 499; separatism in, 77–8, 326–7, 353, 363–4, 427, 524–5, 573, 1065. See also French Canada Quest imagery, xxxviii; in twentieth century, 44 Questions, 424, 467; and answers, 273, 864; either/or, 1027–8; NF and, xxxiii–xxxvi

1209 Raabe, Wilhelm Karl (1831–1910), 588 Rabelais, François (ca. 1493/94–1553), 128–9 Racine, Jean (1639–99), 967 Radicals, 115 Radio, 110, 115, 342, 438, 492, 501, 689, 748, 773; in Canada, 427; early, 792; NF heard on, xxxi; regulation of (see CRTC) Rand, Ivan (1884–1969), 794 Ransom, John Crowe (1888–1974), on texture, 649 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (1483– 1520), 930 Rasky, Harry (1928–2007), interviews NF, 862–86 Reader’s Digest, 63 Reading, 690, 746; aloud, 468; importance of, 412, 710, 711, 747, 822, 1033; influence on writing, 341; and leisure, 403–4; process of, 119–20, 405, 698, 714–15; reader as hero, 490, 1099; and recreation, 453–4, 462, 720; sequence in, 404; teaching of, 210–11, 214, 215, 330, 335–6. See also Book Reagan, Ronald Wilson (1911–2004), 761, 893–4 Realism, xlii; philosophical, 456; and romance, 450; socialist, 171, 446; stupid, 446; two levels of, 446 Reality, 928; two types of, 70, 74, 170, 340, 1068–9 Reaney, James Crerar (b. 1926), 499, 724–5, 978, 980; discussion with, 3–12; A Suit of Nettles (1958), 28, 241 Reason, 180, 182; Blake on, 256 Rebirth, and resurrection, 287, 289 Red Sea crossing, 289, 873 Reformation, 653, 659, 664 Regionalism, 499

1210 Reid, Gilbert (b. 1942), interviews NF, 455–60, 681–4 Relevance, 167, 195, 211, 215, 276, 300, 302, 992 Religion, 11, 16, 21, 24, 302, 989, 1032; and art, 806; as concerned (mythological) subject, 67, 74, 170; contemporary, 49–50, 53, 56, 77, 198–209 passim, 380–1; and criticism, 491; dialogue in, 176; Dionysiac vs. Apollonian elements in, 381–3; and faith, 1015; and fantasy literature, 447; and infinity, 268–9; as an institution, 367; liberates, 325; and literature, 1062; nature of, 390; NF’s, 795–6, 837, 877, 917, 922–3, 1041–2; and oral teaching, 425; organized vs. individual, 326, 675–6; and politics, 715, 831; primitivism in, 270; and salvation, 34–6, 38; and science, 14; and the secular, 900; similarities in, 301; students and, 353–4; teaching of, 473; universal intelligibility of, 372 Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn) (1606–69), 120, 135 Renaissance, 442; art in, 395; humanism in, 152, 744, 967; rhetoric in, 163, 406; tragedy in, 252–3 Renoir, Pierre Auguste (1841–1919), 908 Restoration, 370; comedy in, 115 Resurrection, 288–9, 874, 1008, 1014; counterpart to the Exodus, 842, 959, 1010, 1061; evidence for, 563; and rebirth, 287, 289, 377 Revelation: meaning of, 555; phases of, in Bible, 553–5 – Book of, 287, 389, 873, 885; Calvin on, 1061; ending of, 560 Reviewing, 30, 820 Revolution, 15, 128, 155; as phase of

Index revelation, 553, 661; two meanings of, 1033 Reynolds, Bruce (b. 1955), interviews NF, xviii, 355–66 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–92), Blake on, 258 Rhetoric, 196, 333, 659; in advertising, 462; in the Renaissance, 406; study of, 69–70, 163–4, 166 Rhodes Scholars, 194 Rhyme, 163 Rhythm, in conversation, 6 Richards, I(vor) A(rmstrong) (1893– 1979), 463, 692 Richardson, John (1796–1852), 227 Richler, Daniel (b. 1957), interviews NF, 1055–66 Richler, Mordecai (1931–2001), 861, 890, 1037, 1064 Riel, Louis (1844–85), 143, 232 Riesman, David (b. 1909), 73; The Lonely Crowd (1950), 41 Rimbaud, (Jean Nicolas) Arthur (1854–91), 60, 104, 118; on dérèglement, 185; and “drunken boat” construct, 961; as prophet, 385; Un Saison en enfer (1873), 114 Ritual: fossilized, 376; importance of, 542, 544; and myth, 369–70, 452 Robarts Library, 617 Robbe-Grillet, Alain (b. 1922), 228 Roberts, Sir Charles George Douglas (1860–1943), 241, 724; Confederation Ode, 725, 978–9; Orion (1880), 240 Robertson, James, interviews NF, 278–82 Robins, John Daniel (1884–1952), 582, 593, 603, 605, 606, 1003; influence on NF, 293, 520, 565, 585–6; tribute to, 356–7 Robson, John Mercel (1927–95), 610 Rochdale College, 84

Index Role-playing, 177–8 Roman Catholic Church, 32, 36, 38, 39, 286, 539, 988, 1030, 1047; and the Bible, 664; doctrinaire, 786; prejudice against, 788; and Protestantism, 50, 55, 917 Romance, 296, 312, 445–6, 478; and popular literature, 1082–4; and realism, 450; and Romanticism, 960; as secular scripture, 310 Romance (mode), reappearance of from irony, 459 Roman Empire, 717, 1035; analogy of with modern age, 380; religion in, 380 Romantic movement/Romanticism, 143, 221, 247, 265, 294, 648, 944; gnosticism in, 222; idea of creativity in, 490; ideology in, 967; on imagination, 171; revolutionary cosmos of, 957–61; and romance, 960 Rome, 375, 389 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1882– 1945), 323 Roper, Gordon Herbert (b. 1911), 610 Rosenberg, Alfred (1893–1946): The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), 765, 934 Ross, George (1875–1967), 577, 734, 735, 739, 797–8, 806 Rotstein, Abraham (b. 1929), 304 Roughley, Alan (b. 1952), interviews NF, 685–92 Roundheads, 370 Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712–78), 265, 456, 818, 953; and Blake, 958; on social contract, 514 Royal Society, 599 Royalty, advantages of, 688 Rubens, Peter Paul (1577–1640), 930 Ruddick, Bruce (1913–92), 241

1211 Ruskin, John (1819–1900), 529, 801; and Morris, 849, 850, 852, 857 Russell, Bertrand, 3rd Earl Russell (1872–1970), 580; on concealed system, 954; and propaganda, 337–8 Russia, 117, 133, 230, 444, 966, 1051, 1090; Communism in, 52, 54, 379; literary language in, 471, 473; and U.S., 158 Ruth, 191; Book of, 378 Rymer, Thomas (1641–1713), on Othello, 415, 946 Sade, Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de (1740–1814), 958 Saint-Denys-Garneau, Hector de (1912–43), 62, 234 St. Michael’s College (Toronto), 439, 582, 583, 610, 636, 988 Saints, 1063 Salinger, J(erome) D(avid) (b. 1919), 29; The Catcher in the Rye (1951), 472 Salusinszky, Imre (b. 1955), interviews NF, xxxvii, 685–92, 752–65 Salvation, 32–47, 381 Samhain, 376 Samson, 225, 653 Sandwell, B(ernard) K(eble) (1876– 1954), 63 San Quentin prison, 56 Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–80), 39, 43, 177, 398, 881 Saskatchewan, NF in, 291, 325, 341, 434, 935–6 Satan, cult of, 375 Satire, 115, 1083; NF and, 938 Saturday Night, 294, 356; significance of, 63 Saul, 557, 728 Saussure, Ferdinand de (1857–1913), 658 Savonarola, Girolamo (1452–98), 385

1212 Scandinavia, and Canada, 96, 230 Schatzker, Valerie, interviews NF, xxxvii, 575–641 Schiller, Bill, interviews NF, 821–5 Scholarship, 72, 119, 946, 995; barren, 760, 948; specialization in, 270, 277, 701–2, 763–4, 990, 1032; and teaching, 64, 156, 487, 490; useful and useless, 588–9 Schools, 147; authority in, 153; secondary, 149 Schopenhauer, and “drunken boat” construct, 958, 961 Schubert, Franz (1797–1828): Impromptus, 735; sonatas, 734, 799 Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich (1911– 77): Small Is Beautiful (1973), 725 & n. 1, 982 Science, 66–7, 74, 149, 402, 513, 901, 1004, 1005, 1059; and art, 70, 529–35 passim; authority in, 490; Blake on, 257–8, 528, 1062–3; and humanities, 277, 361, 452–3, 528–9, 532, 744–5, 1068–9; and language, 1011; and mathematics, 71, 533; and mythology, 769; order in, 973; and religion, 14; and society, 270, 437; studies nature, 170, 340, 902–3, 904, 1057; and tragedy, 907; truth in, 17. See also Arts and sciences Science fiction, 164, 296, 445, 446, 459, 651, 944, 1083 SCM (Student Christian Movement), 595–6 Scott, Duncan Campbell (1862–1947), 237 Scott, Francis Reginald (1899–1985), 241 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), 143, 1084; NF reads in youth, 572, 576, 805, 836, 1046

Index Sculpture, 340 Seaway, 90 Second Vatican Council, 35, 38 Seeley, John R. (b. 1913), 153 Self: nature of, 16–17; real (see Identity, personal) Seminar, 192–3, 360, 644 Semiotics, 456, 533, 721, 1062, 1086 Semon, Larry (1889–1928), 134 Sendak, Maurice (b. 1928), 212 Sennet, Mack (1880–1960), 134 Senses, as filters, 677 Separatism, 93, 499, 515–16; in Canada, 88, 308, 485, 492 (see also under Quebec) Serbo-Croatian, 1094 Sesame Street, 540 Sex, 11, 129; in education, 823; and the fall, 867, 872, 1023, 1025; imagery in the Bible, 559, 908 Shackleton, Deborah (b. 1951), interviews NF, xxxii, 487–95 Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), 25, 120, 154, 164, 172, 294, 311, 348, 397, 408, 412, 420, 423, 538, 541, 586, 593, 649, 678, 726, 787, 921, 951, 967; importance of, 816, 1086; and Jews, 824; morality of, 714; pastness of, 76–7, 167, 194, 634, 817, 882–3, 883– 4, 989, 1051–2, 1069; performance of, 566, 1087, 1095–6; popularity of, 767; and popular literature, 1084; and rhetoric, 333, 406; romances of, 538, 544; time in, 1075–6; uniqueness of, 884–5; value judgments on, 66, 415–16, 463, 466, 480, 508, 530, 651, 828, 945–6, 947; Antony and Cleopatra (1623), 818; Cymbeline (1623), 538; Hamlet (1603), 538, 566, 816, 817–18, 944; Henry V (1600), 247; King John (1623), 819; King Lear (1608), 25–6, 170, 566, 650, 816, 818,

Index 819, 944, 1083; Macbeth (1623), 68, 251, 557, 728, 1083; Measure for Measure (1623), 538; The Merchant of Venice (1600), 756, 824; The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602), 884; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600), 928; Othello (1622), 251, 415, 538, 944, 946, 1084; Pericles (1609), 538, 1084; Richard II (1597), 819; Romeo and Juliet (1597), 195–6; Sonnets (1609), 885; The Taming of the Shrew (1623), 884; The Tempest (1623), 450, 526, 538, 544, 562, 566; Titus Andronicus (1623), 884; The Winter’s Tale (1623), 251, 450, 538, 566, 1076, 1084 Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), 81, 792, 867; on evolution, 382; on Book of Job, 1020; on youth, 1034; Arms and the Man (1898), 795; Candida (1898), 795, 883; Saint Joan (1924), 875 Shaw, (John) Neufville (1915–96), 241 Shea, Albert A. (b. 1916), 707 Shearer, Norma (1902–83), 195 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797– 1851): Frankenstein (1818), 419 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), 589, 967, 1086; cosmos of, 959–60; A Defence of Poetry (1821), 953; Ode to the West Wind (1820), 586; Prometheus Unbound (1820), 220, 221, 222, 278, 959 Sherbrooke, NF in, 265, 523, 576, 577, 733, 790, 876, 918, 1043 Shields, Thomas Todhunter (1873– 1955), 788 & n. 6 Shinto, 267 Shook, Father Lawrence Kennedy (1909–93), 609 Short story, 706 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–86), 164

1213 Siena, NF visits, 567 Silversides, Ann (b. 1952), interviews NF, xlv–xlvi, 1043–54 Simplicity, 21–2 Sin, 27, 36, 46 Sinclair, Lister (1921–2006), 3–12 Sirluck, Ernest (b. 1918), 617, 623 Sixties movements, 344, 370. See also Student Protest Movement Sky-father god, 866 Slavery, 842 Sloan, Glenna (b. 1930), interviews NF, 210–18 Slovenia, 1093–4 Smart, Christopher (1722–71), 14 Smith, Arthur James Marshall (1902– 80), 240, 241 Smith, Howard Kingsbury (b. 1914), 601; Last Train from Berlin (1942), 600 Smith, Sidney Earle (1897–1959), 613 Smith, Whitney, interviews NF, 718– 19 Smith, W(illiam) Lyndon (1905–79): discussion with, 3–12 Smyth, Delmar McCormack, interviews NF, 64–73 Social contract, 514, 987 Social Gospel, 580–1 Social science, 149, 361, 453, 532, 841; at U of T, 635 Social vision, 7–8, 12, 37, 270, 454, 514, 655, 1016; and literary imagination, 168–9 Social work, vision of goal of, 37, 514, 655, 1016 Sociology, as mythological subject, 74, 75 Socrates (469–399 b.c.e.), 550, 859; death of, 373; and dialectic language, 1005; role in Platonic dialogue, 174–83 passim; as teacher, 23,

1214 489, 987, 1063; on wise man, 37, 199 Solomon, 556, 873; his wisdom, 553–4 Solomon, William, 1048 Somerville, Janet, interviews NF, 245– 53 Song of Songs, 873; bride in, 1025 Sophocles (ca. 496–405 b.c.e.): Antigone, 819; Oedipus Rex, 26, 388, 1084 Souster, Raymond (b. 1921), 243 South Africa, 250, 475 Soviet Union, 470, 475, 749, 761, 895, 932, 1091; art in, 446; Communism in, 786, 1026; NF in, 1163n. 3 Spain, 270, 975; Civil War in, 470 Spanish, 635 Specialization. See under Scholarship Speech: importance of articulate, xxx, 331–4, 341, 713, 745, 747, 822; rhythm of, 985; and writing, 463, 468, 710–11 Spencer, Theodore (1902–49), 430 Spender, Sir Stephen Harold (1909– 95), 241 Spengler, Oswald (1880–1936), 764, 1035; and Toynbee, 380; The Decline of the West (1918), 922, 931–2, 933 Spenser, Edmund (ca. 1552–99), 60, 164, 669, 1095; projected work on, 936; Faerie Queene (1590–96), 670, 936 Spicer, Keith (b. 1934), 1091 Sputnik, 197, 645, 994 Stalin, Joseph (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili) (1879–1953), 926; Stalinism, 187, 446, 470, 580, 596, 643 Stamberg, Susan (b. 1938), interviews NF, 720–2 Star Wars, 365, 392 Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946), 69, 332 Steiner, George (b. 1929), 151; Language and Silence (1967), 174, 182–3,

Index 188 Stereotype(s), 90, 345 Stevens, Peter, discussion with, 243 Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955), 118, 127, 314, 404; beliefs of, 964–5; on Easter, 289, 965; on imperfect as paradise, 561, 882, 1085; and NF, 668, 692, 758–9, 963–4, 1071; and the poetic tradition, 1067–8; supposed conversion of, 1071; Anecdote of the Jar (1923), 265–6; Description without Place (1945), 964; Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour (1953), 1067; Forms of the Rock in a Night Hymn (1954), 759; Harmonium (1923), 692, 758, 963, 1071; The Man on the Dump (1923), 266; Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself (1964), 757–8; Of Mere Being (The Palm at the End of the Mind) (1954), 759, 1067; Prologues to What Is Possible (1954), 759 Stewart, David, interviews NF, 400– 12 passim Stobie, Bill, 594 Stobie, Margaret Roseborough (Peggy) (1909–90), 594, 631 Stock response, 463 Stoicism, 266, 368, 1010 Stoker, Bram (1847–1912): Dracula (1897), 824 Stories, 660, 945; importance of, 401, 512–13; in NF’s family, 1044–7. See also Mythoi Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811–96): Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), 585 Stratford Shakespearean Festival, 586, 737, 819, 1087 Strauss, David Friedrich (1808–74): Life of Jesus (trans. 1846), 784 Stravinsky, Igor (1882–1971), 429 Structuralism, 453; NF and, 479, 481,

Index 951–2, 1080 Structure: in education, 192–3; importance of, 179–82; in literature, 59; and texture, 846. See also Form Student protest movement, 80–7 passim, 129, 312–13, 359–60, 426–7, 438–9, 446, 476, 581, 619, 623–4, 629–31, 991–3, 1032, 1052 Student(s), 691; active participation of, 467; American vs. Canadian, 307, 506–7; and choice of subjects, 148–9, 276; earnest, 899; and the media, 115; new modes of apprehension among, 119, 120; relation to teachers (see under Teacher(s)); and religion, 353–4; speech of, 710– 11; of today, 631–2, 633, 749, 993–4; total verbal experience of, 651, 710, 767, 899; types of, 81, 83, 1100; writing style of, 712 – NF’s, 83, 318, 321, 631, 750; their lack of historical sense, 371, 645, 1051–2; new awareness among, 110, 118, 406; NF’s relation with, 423–4, 436–7, 570, 638; postwar, 605; their questions, 424, 467; speech of, 1064. See also Student Protest Movement; Youth Subject, and object, 429, 657–8, 986 Subject(s) (of study): choice of, 148–9, 319; relations between, 156–7; structure in, 146–7; two kinds of, 170; worth of all, 535 Substance, 382 Sun, worship of, 392 Sunday, 369 Superior life-forms, 48, 447 Surerus, (John) Alvin (1894–1976), 583 Surrealism, 705 Suvin, Darko (b. 1930), 482 Swearing, 6

1215 Sweden, 133 Swedenborg, Emmanuel (1688–1772), 938 Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745), 594, 921; Gulliver’s Travels (1726), 45, 181, 937–8 Switzerland, 96 Symbolisme, 143, 784, 818 Symbol(s): in films, 70; social, 117; two meanings of, 780 Symmetry, Blake’s idea of, 278–82 Tansey, Charlotte, interviews NF, 264–74 Tantalus, 1015 Tarot, 459 Taste, history of, 946 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilyich (1840–93), 489 Teacher(s): dedicated, 899; good, 197; inadequacies of some, 1100–1; as medium for subject, 82–3, 487–8, 489, 735–6, 802 1063, 1098; NF’s, 714; personal influence of, 640–1; role of, 156, 1072, 1078 – relation with students, 150, 632–3, 987; importance of, 823–4; at university, 641. See also Teaching Teaching: graduate, 990; magic in, 161–2; as militant, 320, 488, 489, 690; by parable, 714; personal influence in, 597; repetition in, 190–1; and scholarship, 64, 156, 487, 490; seminar vs. lecture in, 360, 644; and student’s total verbal experience, 651, 710, 767, 899; undergraduate, 990; at university, 81–7 passim. See also Lecture; Professors; Seminar; Student(s); Teachers; individual subjects Technology, 88, 108, 139, 142, 299, 484, 529, 573–4, 619; effects of, 995–

1216 1000; and introversion, 311, 344, 347, 975; and uniformity, 499, 501–2 Television, 110, 122, 172, 195, 408, 492, 544, 655, 689, 714, 715, 743, 853, 881, 975; American influence on Canadian, 233; effects of, 114, 115, 118, 308, 313, 342, 347, 438–9, 448, 504, 515, 748–9, 768–9, 773; importance of studying, 824; and introversion, 998–9; mass entertainment on, 501, 503; NF and, xl–xli, 566; regulation of (see CRTC); spurious action seen on, 103; violence on, 345–6 Temple, the, 286, 406, 873 Tennessee, 365 Tenniel, Sir John (1820–1914), 196 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809–92), 52, 696, 979 Tenure, 628–9 Teunissen, John J., interviews NF, 219–26 Text, 1011; what? where? 462 Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–63), 694 Thatcher, Margaret Hilda (b. 1925), 1091 Theology, 450; and art, 966 Thériault, Yves (1915–83), 1037 Thinking: and habit, 746; nature of, 24, 83, 148, 180, 197; nonconceptual, 986, 1005–6, 1017; poetic, 61, 118, 119, 132, 549, 986, 1056 Thirty Years’ War, 761 Thomas, St., doubt of, 562–3 Thomas, Dylan Marlais (1914–53), 407, 646 Thomas More Institute, xvi Thomist criticism, 939, 940, 942 Thompson, David (1770–1857), 500 Thomson, James (1700–48), 979 Thomson, Tom (1877–1917), 91 Thor, 399

Index Thucydides (ca. 469–ca. 400 b.c.e.), 782; Histories, 371 Thurber, James Grover (1894–1961): The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1941), 24, 746 Time, 116; beginning of, 864; Biblical notion of, 653–4; importance of understanding, 633, 634; and the timeless, 290; in tragedy and comedy, 1076; unreality of, 572 – and space: Blake on, 260; ordinary vs. Biblical conception of, 1016–17; transcendence of, 200 Time Magazine, 775 Titan, 143 Titus, Emperor (c.e. 39–81), 873 Tolkien, J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) (1892–1973), 388, 445, 447, 459, 1083 Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich (1828–1910), 473, 966 Tomkinson, Constance (b. 1915), 578 & n. 3 Tomkinson, Harold (1885–1944), 578 & n. 3 Toqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de (1805–59), 101 Toronto, 144, 236, 272, 307, 892; change in, 321, 890, 975; immigration to, 92, 97, 102, 234, 335; in 1930s, 580 Toronto Star, 364, 705 Tovell, Vincent, 647, 654 Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889–1975), 1035; and Spengler, 379–80 Tradition, cultural, 717 Tragedy, 120; and the Bible, 557; and comedy, 414, 742, 1020, 1076; and evil, 245, 250–1; Greek, 557; historical periods favouring, 252–3; and science, 907 Translation, 333, 549; in reading, 659, 663, 721

Index Transubstantiation, 382 Traynor, Tim, interviews NF, 28–31 Tree: imagery in the Bible, 379, 663–4, 872; of life and of death, 287, 1023 Trent University, 358 Trick Scholarships, 579, 599 Trinity, the, 1012 Trinity College (Toronto), 431, 439, 583, 593, 608, 610 Trotsky, Leon (alias of Lev Davidovich Bronstein) (1879–1940), 52 Trotskyism, 470, 580, 596, 643, 762 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott (1919–2000), 94, 96, 126, 183, 516, 523, 688, 747, 772 Trusler, Rev. John (1755–1820), 1057 & n. 4 Truth, 17; of correspondence, 405; and language, 1005; in VC inscription, 900–1; in verbal structures, 782–3 Tudor dynasty, 1076 Turkey, 270 Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835–1910), 15, 224; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 472, 695, 824 Typology, 658, 674, 1008–9, 1075; in the Bible, 557–8 UFOs, 391–2 Ukrainians, in Canada, 234, 500 Uncle Remus stories, 357, 585 Unconscious, collective, 1069 Underwood Typewriter Co., 920 United Church, 48; NF and, 291, 292, 306, 325–6, 425, 591–2, 676–7, 814, 935, 983, 1011–12, 1056; and union, 326; and VC, 358, 435, 579–80, 590 United States, 749, 811; Bicentennial of, 312; blacks in, 1092; changing consciousness in, 444; criticism in,

1217 160, 1080; culture of, 117–18, 503–4, 889–91; excess in, 1026; fundamentalism in, 365; literature in (see American literature); national character of, 314; NF and, 1064–5; politics in, 895–7; religion in, 381; and Russia, 158; segregation in, 155; social mythology of, 716, 894–5; student movement in, 629; universities in, 364, 433, 611, 614–15, 639– 40; and Vietnam, 966 – and Canada, 295, 364, 979; American domination of Canadian universities, 611, 621–2; “Canadianization” of U.S., 443; contrasting histories of, 444, 648; contrasting size of, 972; cultural influence of U.S., 77, 91–2, 97, 121, 122, 150, 233, 241, 332, 501–4, 505, 524–5, 917, 997, 1092–3; difference in frontier and seaboard, 237, 244, 443–4, 457, 646– 7, 975–6; difference of power in world, 96, 97, 230; difference re. immigration, 234; different views of revolution, 525, 687–8; economic domination of U.S., 308, 352; free trade, 982, 1065; similarities and differences, 93–4, 306–7, 312, 888– 93; and Star Wars scheme, 761; U.S. consciousness of Canada, 887–8, 889 Unity, and uniformity, 235, 259, 444, 485 University(ies): access to, 155; American influence in Canadian, 121, 150; authority of, 715; and colleges, 275, 277; as community, 700–1; continuing education in (see Adult education); as engine-room of society, 738; importance of, 690–1; many capable of education in, 615; meaning of word, 1035; medieval, 71;

1218 popular prejudice against, 690; scholarship in, 72, 119; teaching at, 81–7 passim, 990; unrest in, 141; value of education in, 23–7, 474–5, 703; and writers, 228 – as institution, 79–80, 152–3, 277, 438; administration of, 606–7, 625– 6; continuous, 715; and the establishment, 762; funding of, 620–1; government role in, 639–40; growth of, 616, 749, 760–1, 990; tenure question, 628–9 – role of, 360, 645, 1031–3; in adult education, 72; in loco parentis, 86–7, 630; showing reality, 749–50; in society, 361–2, 709, 762–3, 989. See also Professors; Student Protest Movement University (film), xxxviii University of Bordeaux, 505 University of British Columbia, 356, 593 University College (Toronto), 361, 413, 582–3, 593, 608, 609–10, 636 University of Guelph, 358, 432 University of Hong Kong, 601 University of Ljubljana, 1094 University of Moncton, 1090 University of Toronto, 283, 700; conversation at, 3, 11–12; distinction of, 150, 359, 432, 475, 521, 623–4, 637; Faculty Association of, 626; federation at, 277, 360–1, 431–3, 437, 438, 521–2, 598, 624, 625, 634–7; history of, 575–641 passim; NF as student at, 576, 590–1, 595–8; NF as teacher at, xxxvii, xlii–xliii, 644; undergraduate instruction in, 990. See also English (discipline); Honour Course; Victoria College University of Toronto Quarterly. See Frye, “Letters in Canada”

Index University of Waterloo, 358 Untermeyer, Louis (1885–1977): American Poetry since 1900 (1923), 963 Urizen, 810–11 U-shaped narrative, 351 Utopia, 154; Utopian literature, 1039 Valéry, Paul (1871–1945), 60, 104, 459; on cosmology, 954 Value judgments (in criticism), 62, 66, 714, 973; basis of NF’s, xlii, 314; cannot be taught, 211, 408, 466–7; not the goal of criticism, 415–17, 754; reflect the age, 349, 945–7; in reviewing, 30, 819–20, 981; as working assumptions subject to revision, 480, 508, 650–1, 828–9 Values: in education, 150, 157, 170; human, 13–22 Vancouver, 143 Vancouver Island, 499 Van Toorn, Peter (b. 1944), 1037 Varsity, The, interviews NF, 317 Vaughan, Harold Withrow (1908–89), 935 Victoria College/University, 474; Alumni Association of, 439–40; character of, 318, 358, 360–1; Class of 1933 at, 691, 910, 913; NF as Chancellor of, 430–1, 434, 436, 441; NF as student at, 291–5, 355, 432–3, 469–70, 520–1, 522, 578–85, 642–3, 736–8, 793, 800, 802, 878, 920–1, 1048; NF as teacher and administrator at, xxxvii, 295, 300–1, 584, 595 & nn. 26–7, 603–41 passim, 701, 737, 924, 983–4, 1038; relation to U of T, 431–3, 636; and United Church, 358, 435, 579–80, 590; women at, 581, 604

Index Velikovsky, Immanuel (1895–1979), 551 Venus, 515, 789, 834 Verdi, Giuseppi (1813–1901), 798; Falstaff (1893), 742 Verlaine, Paul (1844–96), 104 Verne, Jules (1828–1905), 1083 Versailles, 130 Vico, Giambattista (1668–1744), 442, 1035; on verum factum, 810, 842, 928, 1013, 1059 Victorian Age, 540, 541, 703, 706; individualism and art in, 718; literature of, 241 Victorines, 659, 786 Vidan, Ivo (1927–2003), interviews NF, 1079–88 Vietnam, 1009; War, 36, 187, 313, 470, 631, 749, 895, 966 Vinke, Karen, interviews NF, 766–9 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70– 19 b.c.e.), 235, 391; Aeneid, 667 Vision: Blake on, 927; double, 1057; imaginative, 1028–9, 1031 Visualization, in reading, 694 Wadsworth, Jerry, interviews NF, 28– 31 Waley, Arthur (1889–1969), 542 Wallace, Anthony, discussion with, 3–12 Wallace, Edward Wilson (1880–1941), 589 War, 53, 98, 142, 248, 325 War of 1812, 889, 892 Wars of the Roses, 1076 Washington, George (1732–99), 888 Wasteneys, Hardolph (1881–1965), 607 Water imagery: in the Bible, 873, 874; and tree imagery in the Bible, 379

1219 Waterloo University, 432 Waterston, Elizabeth (b. 1922), 935 Webber, Christopher, interviews NF, 904–9 Webster, Dr. Clarence (1863–1950), 792 & n. 3 Webster, John (ca. 1580–ca. 1626), 416; The Duchess of Malfi (1623), 26 Weddings, 369 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley) (1769–1852), 247 Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866– 1946), 795 Western (genre), 237, 350, 1083 Western provinces, 121, 130 Wheel imagery, 996 Whigs, 444 White, Hayden (b. 1928), 1081–2 White, Patrick (1912–90), 690; Voss (1957), 687 Whitehead, Alfred North (1861– 1947): Science and the Modern World (1925), 931, 933 Whitman, Walt (1819–92), 363, 407, 727, 889, 895, 976 Widdicombe, Jane (b. 1943), 543, 574, 808 Wilde, Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills (1854–1900), on effect of music, 800 Will, relaxation of, in writing, 179, 671 Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972), 1064 Wilson, Milton Thomas (b. 1923), 707 Wilson, Tim, interviews NF, 729–32 Wimsatt, William K. (1907–75), on NF, 414–15 Windsor, Que., 1044, 1047 Winkler, Donald (b. 1940), interviews NF, 709–17 Winnipeg, 234 Winspear, Mary (d. 1998), 594

1220 Wisdom, 1033; and knowledge, 27, 83, 271, 273; and literature, 663; as phase of revelation, 553–4 Wiseman, Adele (b. 1928): The Sacrifice (1956), 234 Witchcraft, 375 Withdrawal, 1070; vs. involvement in world, 32, 36–41 passim. See also Detachment Wittgenstein, Ludwig Joseph Johann (1889–1951), 176 Wolch, Sara, xxxvii, 916 Wolfe, James (1727–59), 143 & n. 52 Wolfe, Morris, interviews NF, 506–9 Women: in the Bible, 866; liberation of, 771; at VC, 581, 604. See also Feminism; Patriarchy Woodcock, George (1912–94), 422 Woodhouse, A(rthur) S(utherland) P(igott) (1895–1964), 582, 587, 596, 598, 608–10 Woodstock Festival, 383 Woodsworth, Kenneth Chown (1914– 2006), 595 Word (of God), 226; Christ as, 662; and words, 730 Words: function of, 290, 405–6, 420; power of, 869–70; as verbal universe, 954; and the Word, 730 Wordsworth, William (1770–1850), 401, 412, 429; on nature, 958; on recollection in tranquillity, 418; The Prelude (1805, 1850), 194 Worlds, two. See Reality, two types of Work: ethic, 370; and play, 273 World War I, 790, 855, 919, 1043 World War II, 187, 585; at U of T, 603– 4 Wright, Judith (1915–2000), 687 Wright, Wilbur (1867–1912), and Orville (1871–1948), 1012 Writer: authority of, 690; commercial

Index pressures on, 981; and critic, 30, 75, 76, 492, 981; may have preposterous social views, 426. See also Book Writing, 341, 690, 746; and relaxation of the will, 179, 671; social importance of, 711, 747; and speech, 710– 11; teaching of, 196–7, 330–5, 463, 467–8, 985 Yale University, 431, 611, 614–15, 639; criticism at, 720, 756 Yan, Peter (b. 1963), interviews NF, xxxii, 1097–1101 Yates, Dame Frances (1899–1981): The Art of Memory (1966), 932 Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939), 459, 961; on masks, 543; on poetry, 418; on refuting Hegel, 953; social views of, 67, 426, 755, 934, 962; on wisdom, 185; A Vision (1937), 954 York cycle of plays, 347–8 Yorkville, 208 Young, (George) Paxton (1819–89), 635 & n. 66 Youngblut, Donna, discussion with, 25 Youth, 125; anti-ironic mood among, 126–8; and drugs, 114; ideology of, 448; new modes of perception among, 114, 120; of 1960s, 370; possibility of communication with, 186–7; religious impulse in, 204; and sex, 447; speech of, 747. See also Students Yugoslavia: AC in, 477–8; literature of, 482 Yukon, 98–9, 106 Zachariah, 288 Zanzibar, 168 Zen Buddhism, 267, 326, 368, 395–6 Zola, Émile (1840–1902), 784, 966