A conversation with Eric O’Connor, Charlotte Tansey, Cathleen Going, Martin O’Hara, Stan Machnik, Roberta Machnik, Patricia Coonan, Helene Loiselle, Gerald MacGuigan, and others, recorded 14 May 1976. The Thomas More Institute, located in Montreal, is a university-level academic institution, offering B.A. degrees in the liberal arts through an affiliation with Bishop’s University. The Institute organized year-long courses around recently published books, in this case Frye’s The Secular Scripture. Frye was invited by Fr. Eric O’Connor to attend one of the discussion sessions at the end of the course. The discussants and questioners were members of the class. The dialogue was transcribed by Nicholas Graham in 2007 and is published here with his kind permission.
ERIC O’CONNOR: I do not know whether I am to introduce Dr. Frye or not, but our delight in having Dr. Frye for this class is what I would like to express to him. I don’t think we need to have him introduced to you. Thank you, Dr. Frye.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: As we know, Dr. Frye has been engaged in the exploration of what he calls “that mysterious world” [The Secular Scripture 166; CW 18: 108] of the imagination. It is to his credit that he first glimpsed light in an area where he was convinced that a dark inscrutable workmanship was present and brought light to it; but for most of us who are trying desperately to follow in his footsteps there is still a lot of dark inscrutable workmanship in romance. Your adventures in this work remind me of this passage from Wordsworth:
Oh! when I have hung
Above the raven’s nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed)
Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
Sholdering the naked crag, oh, at that time
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ear! the sky seemed not a sky
Of earth—and with what motion moved the clouds.
[The Prelude, Book I, 330–9]
This must have been something like the adventures, the personal adventures in this area of yours.
To begin the discussion, I would like again to use Wordsworth’s image: an image that has stayed with me over the years of the artist’s work:
As one who hangs down-bending from the side
Of a slow-moving boat, upon the breast
Of a still water, solacing himself
With such discoveries as his eye can make
Beneath him in the bottom of the deep,
Sees many beauteous sights—weeds, fishes, flowers,
Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more,
Yet often is perplexed and cannot part
The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky,
Mountains and clouds, reflected in the depth
Of the clear flood, from things which there abide
In their true dwelling; now is crossed by gleam
Of his own image, by a sun-beam now,
And wavering motions sent he knows not whence
Impediments that make his task more sweet;
Such pleasant office have we long pursued.
[The Prelude, Book IV, 256–70]
And I took this as the artist, the literary artist both reflecting and making possible the revelations from deep within. And I wonder if we could begin with this for a discussion of, a reassurance, regarding archetypes and perhaps beginning with the distinction between the existential and the imaginative archetypes.
FRYE: I spoke of Jung’s archetypes as existential. I meant that they were the archetypes that emerge during, say, a Jungian analysis as elements of the personality which have been conditioning the social behavior of that personality. That is, when he discovers from Jung what an anima figure is, he realizes that in a man’s experience with women, this inner anima figure gets projected on various people and as a consequence is a conditioning aspect of behavior.
And, in the study of literature, one is examining these things, not with reference to one’s own personal life and behavior, but simply as something hypothetical and something that passes in front of you in a kind of cinematic world.
That is the very, very simple distinction that I really had in mind. I always get a little nervous when I am classed with Jung as a critic, because I am never quite certain what the next step is; but it does seem to me that psychology, not only Jung, but a great deal of contemporary psychology has to do with trying to isolate and clarify certain elements of behavior as though everybody carried around a whole sort of commedia dell’arte inside him, and put on various masks and acted various roles. And that is, of course, a completely different area from watching these various masks and roles passing in front of you in a romance.
Q: I was wondering about value judgments: it’s a term we have been dealing with throughout the course. If you were a literary psychologist, you would formulate value judgments.
FRYE: Why would you?
Q: If you don’t, then it is only descriptive: you describe and classify.
FRYE: My position on value judgments is that they are incidental by-products of literary experience. They are the kind of thing that you are forced to admit to account for the fact that some things that you read stick with you and other things that you read slip away from you. I don’t discourage the use of judgment at all in literature; it is utterly inevitable. What I do feel suspicious of is the attaching a value to that judgment. Because that is what the person who believes in value judgments always says he is not doing, but is what he invariably winds up doing.
PATRICIA COONAN: At one stage, where you complimented Hippolyta [The Secular Scripture 187; CW 18: 122–3] as being a good critic; was it on the level of imagination or of projecting?
FRYE: I was just looking at the dramatic situation as it unfolds in the last act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the way in which Shakespeare sets up these contrasting figures: and here’s this amiable, bumbling, gracious Prince, Theseus, doing his best trying to act up to his own image of himself and Hippolyta, the very sharp mind that never misses, but says very little, and you couldn’t have more perfect dramatic foils than that; but that’s what you always get in Shakespeare: one character paired off against another so that you are forced to recognize the complete validity of both without making any sort of comparative statement between them.
It’s the same thing that you have at the end of Measure for Measure where the Duke comes back and he is practically in the role of God or, at least, he thinks he is and takes charge of the whole scene; and there’s Lucio beside him making the most impertinent remarks; but every time he says something, he scores off the Duke. The Duke tries to shut him up, but he doesn’t succeed. Again, you don’t compare them. You just recognize that they are dramatic foils for each other.
ERIC O’CONNOR: What the novelist is saying in the story as opposed to what the convention is saying: for example, the incest theme—it keeps coming out. Does the novelist have to know the convention and to be writing within it?
FRYE: He has to know it on a practical level, yes. He may not have a theoretical notion of what it is, but he certainly has to know it as a craftsman; he has to have a practical shaping knowledge of it. I remember when I was listening to a Mozart symphony, the first movement, and thinking of this complete and utter serenity of spirit, it suddenly came to me that this is the sonata form taking over. Mozart is one of those very rare spirits who can occasionally just lose himself and be taken over. It is same thing that fascinates me, with some work I’m now doing on the Bible—the point at which you pass from possessing words, from being the wise man to the point when the words start possessing you and turn you into a prophet.
ERIC O’CONNOR: Could a person, could an able writer decide to go against all the structures and steep himself in something else?
FRYE: Then he would have to set up another structure; and that structure would be certain to have a heredity.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: The new artistic creation—could you say a little more about that? Or is that the mystery that can’t be talked about?
FRYE: The analogy I always think of is that of the new human being, the baby that gets born, who is the unique individual, as his mother will point out at some length. But the mother would not be proud of the infant if it did not conform to a convention, if it weren’t a recognizable human being. And it is the same way with literature. When Ulysses and The Waste Land appeared in 1922, a lot of people said these are monsters; these are simply spawned from the mouth of the Nile; they have no shape and no tradition. They are the works of literary Bolsheviks, and so forth. But we know now that they were very deeply traditional works. And this is what is always happening in literature: that what seems new and original and unexpected is actually recreating tradition on a deeper level. The new detective story recreates its convention on a relatively shallow level; that is, it’s very much like other detective stories. But occasionally you come across, say, in the history of painting, with the Barbizon school doing early nineteenth-century landscapes, and then Manet comes along with the impressionists: something cataclysmic has happened here—a complete break with tradition. But what has happened is that a deeper layer of tradition than the layer of where Goya and Velasquez are—that’s what begins to emerge.
Q: When you say there’s a tendency today to avoid technique and composition and tradition, how does that relate to convention?
FRYE: The avoiding of technique is in itself a convention, because convention is a tricky thing. One of the central elements of convention is that it is always pretending not to be convention. You take the rhetoricians, in Shakespeare’s time, for example. The one thing that they are almost certain to say is that “I am a plain, blunt man and I don’t know anything about rhetoric.” And in the sixteenth century with Petrarchan love-poem writers, the most conventional thing they can say is: “all other poets are conventional, they got their emotions out of books but I’m getting mine out of my own real experience.” The abandoning of conceptions of craftsmanship is conforming to another kind of convention. In Dickens you have a convention of a carefully contrived plot, which keeps the readers guessing as to how the story is going to turn out.
And then we pass to what I think of as the ironic convention where it is part of that convention that there should be no contrivance, that you should pretend to your readers that this is just the way things happen. And eventually, of course, there is a convention; it meets itself coming around the corner, and the abandoning of technique becomes a form which disappears into language.
I think that happens with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the “chatter” novels and Ivy Compton-Burnett where you feel that all human relationships are disappearing into language relationships, and you are right back with the medieval rhetoricians, with things like medieval manuals of rhetoric where, again, everything disappears into a whole set of linguistic formulae.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: There’s a point, then, where ritual and convention somehow meet?
FRYE: But in ritual there is usually a kind of teleological element; I mean there is something that is supposed to emerge as a result of ritual; it is more consciously and deliberately structured. If you look at William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, you will see, as I say in The Secular Scripture [57; CW 18: 41] that some people show great skill in ritualizing their own lives in patterns of that kind; but there is always this teleological side to it.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: I have difficulty with the word “recreate”: it doesn’t seem fresh enough? Are there other words one could use?
FRYE: What Harold Bloom says is “misunderstand”; and that is all right—you do misunderstand. I don’t like “misunderstand” because it seems a bit negative and it seems to lead to a filleted conception of literature where you don’t have a structure that gets reconstructed: you have sort of spineless flipflop of misreadings. But that’s just emphasizing different things—that’s all.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: If you speak of secular scripture, then, in the cluster of words that go along with “scripture,” you have “fundamentalist.” Are the realistic critics in much the same tradition as the scriptural fundamentalists, and the difficulty is that they are not fundamental enough: that they don’t know where to place the literal meaning?
FRYE: It is a confusion over the term “literal.” There is an analogy, I think, between realism in criticism and fundamentalism in religion. I would say they are greatly confused about the term “literal,” because of certain curious twists in our cultural tradition. And we tend to say that a thing is literally true if it reflects something outside itself, i.e., you hold to production of truth by correspondence: where if “A” is a satisfactory verbal replica for “B,” then it is literally true of “B” to say “A.”
I’ve always taken the view, which seems to be inseparable from literary criticism, that a thing means what it says and not what it points to. And that, of course, is the great strength of realism, that it does set up a literary structure beside a set of social conditions and says, “Now let’s see how good the literary structure is at reflecting these conditions.” But sooner or later you have to come back to the structure of the work itself.
ERIC O’CONNOR: I’m confused as to your answer about the fundamentalist and the literal. Is the point that the fundamentalist took the literal as descriptive?
FRYE: That’s what I understood: that’s what I thought Gerald MacGuigan meant by the question.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: A term we had difficulty with was “kidnapping” [The Secular Scripture, 29–30, 57, 58, 165, 168; CW 18: 24, 41, 107, 109]. Is the concept of “kidnapping” coextensive with your concept of “displacement” or, is it restricted to the displacement or conditioning to cliché mythology?
FRYE: I would say that “displacement” and “kidnapping” were really quite different things. The “displacement” is the adapting of the structural principles of fiction to the demands of plausibility and credibility. And what I meant by “kidnapping” is really the existing social structure taking over a certain form and using it for its own purposes.
Criticism is always polarized between what a work was in its own day and what it is to us now. That is, a play of Shakespeare meant a certain orbit of things to its original audience and within the culture for which it was written. It communicates to us over the centuries for reasons which neither that audience nor Shakespeare could possibly have understood. So you have always these two poles. If you are going to be a purely historical critic, and try to study Shakespeare only as his original audience understood him, then literature becomes a kind of astronomy: that is, you make no kind of contact whatever with these works. If, on the other hand, you disregard the historical setting and simply say what Shakespeare says is Shakespeare our contemporary, then you are putting Shakespeare within your own network of values completely, and judging him by twentieth-century standards. That is one of the things I mean by “kidnapping.”
Q: You say that modern criticism is coming closer to formulation, to some kind of consensus or jelling. Could you expand on that?
FRYE: Literary criticism is a very new discipline and it’s been for a great many years in the condition, say, that Jungian psychology was fifty years ago, where the existence of competing schools, with each calling the others heretics, was a sign that nobody really knew what the hell he was talking about. And, I think, that that is to some extent still true. But I see larger patterns emerging in the critical scene; I think that certain things are slowly getting established. That is what I mean by formulation.
I’ve always thought of literary criticism as a kind of social science, that is, as a discipline which works on a certain body of material and can establish certain things, so that certain things do get established and you don’t need to keep going back and starting from fundamentals all over again.
Q: It’s a beginning that’s established?
FRYE: Yes.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: You spoke of the two poles of criticism: what Shakespeare was to his audience three-hundred years ago, and what Shakespeare is today, to an English-speaking audience. Do you in that polarization allow for the possibility of cross talk?
FRYE: I think there has to be a good deal of cross talk, even if it is all invented by the same person. I think that to some extent Shakespeare’s context in his own age is really the liberalizing element in the liberal education that one gets by reading Shakespeare. If you think of Shakespeare as, in part, not our contemporary, that means that he does set up standards and formulas and values, which are a little different from our own. And in the process of trying to understand them, we expand and liberalize our own. Because our ways of apprehension are just as narrow and just as provincial and prejudiced as Elizabethan London.
Q: You were also talking about two cultures: the Apollonian as being passive and the Dionysian culture as being more active. Are they not two of the same elements?
FRYE: Yes, they are two elements of the same general imaginative universe. One very often finds that societies have a tendency to commit themselves either to one or to the other. Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, for example, shows very clearly how certain societies like the Zuni Indians in California are what she would call Apollonian and the Plains Indians are Dionysian. And you find this similarly in writers: what we think of as the French tradition, for example, in comparison, say, with the German tradition.
Q: What would you call the culture today?
FRYE: We have moved from Dionysus the drunk to Dionysus the dead drunk.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: Does mystery with you generally carry a sense of mystification rather than a sense of clarification?
FRYE: As a rule, yes. That was because I started out with Blake who, of course, is a person who sets up very simple Biblical categories. Revelation is white; that’s the light that starts the Creation. Mystery is black; that’s everything that leads to tyranny and to misery. And I’ve never quite shaken off that influence. But I recognize as, of course, Blake recognized that there are forms of mystery which are more creative than that. And I speak in the Anatomy [88; CW 22: 81] of there being a mystery at the heart of a play like King Lear, which arises not from the unknown but from the unlimited.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: But the unlimited would have to be perceived in some way. If it is not to be perceived in terms of knowledge, what is the alternative: that it be perceived or felt in terms of power?
FRYE: It is a good mystery, because it does not prevent you from finding all you can about it; it is just that there is always more behind.
Q: I was interested in the “popular” literature you spoke of [The Secular Scripture, 29; CW 18: 23–4]. Am I right in seeing the difficulty of identifying popular literature in our own time, when so much of it is manipulated? I’m thinking of the packaging on television, which is popular in a different sense than the popular stories and songs of another time.
FRYE: Yes. I was trying to unravel those two meanings of the word “popular,” that is, I suggested that there was a popular literature which demands the minimum of previous literary education from a reader: that’s the “popular” of the folktale or the ballad, and it does turn up in literature in all categories and levels. And then, of course, there is what is popular in terms of being mass produced. I think that the word “popular” is an example of how perilous it is to rush into value judgments before you’re ready, because something you read at the age of seven perhaps may have a tremendous impact which never leaves you all life long: it represents a permanent imaginative achievement on your part and that can come from anywhere, at any time. And, of course, it depends also on the vitality of the imagination. I’m thinking of the appalling silent movies I used to see when I was a child in Moncton, New Brunswick. I remember getting quite an imaginative experience out of them, because the things they dealt with were new to me and they represented genuine imaginative experiences.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: You shouted too: “look out behind you, Tom!”
FRYE: Yes.
Q: Do you see the recreation then as just new to me?
FRYE: Yes. That’s where it starts. If it’s new to you, that’s the beginning of an experience, which ends by you possessing the kind of thing that is yours, in what you are reading or seeing.
Q: Is this going beyond the dead-drunk point you mentioned?
FRYE: Yes. That’s the cycle of modes I was talking about in the Anatomy, where you start with the mythical: stories about divine beings. You then go down to romance, where the heroes are human beings, but the laws of nature are a bit suspended. Then you go down through the different levels of mimetic literature. Then you go down to irony, where the reader is above what is happening and looks down on it. And then what you find is that by the very logic of irony itself, the story becomes mythical again. And you can trace irony from Zola’s time to our own: the gradual re-establishing of mythical patterns.
Q: Does it have to do with identity?
FRYE: There’s that. And there is also myth as the structural principles of literature emerging very clearly. That is, to me, the myth of the poem is the structural principle of that poem. And you see these structural principles at their most concentrated in these stories that we think of as myths, like St. George killing the dragon and the story of Oedipus. And, consequently, the return of myth to literature is very similar and parallel to the return of the structural pictorial elements in abstract painting and Cubism and so forth, which are turned away from representation, just as literature is turned away from realism.
Q: Is there something that helps in the transcending phase, moving beyond the sulking phase and the attachment phase. What about the transcending phase?
FRYE: Yes. But I’m not sure what the implications of transcend would be at that point. Certainly, the feeling that you are looking at the very centre of literary structure does perhaps provide you with what Kant would call a transcendental perspective—I’m not sure.
I think, again, of music and of the example I’ve given that at a certain level, say, of the Bach B Minor Mass, or the Jupiter symphony, or Schumann or Tchaikovsky, you are listening to what music was made to say: this is the voice of music, this is the fundamental authority that that art is all about. And that is what you get, say, in Shakespearean romance.
HELENE LOISELLE: But this knowledge is only going to come with persistence and experience?
FRYE: Certainly, it does have to be a habit; it has to be built up by practice. But it has to be a very relaxed form of experience, because it’s a matter of continually exposing yourself to impacts.
Q: Is it just this structure of romance that you have in The Secular Scripture?
FRYE: I think the structure of romance does provide you with a remarkably clearer view of the structural principles of storytelling generally, of what there is in a story. And I think that what I was trying to set up in that book, as I try to set up in the article that you are reading [“Expanding Eyes,” in Spiritus Mundi, 99–122; CW 27: 391–410], I was trying to set up a context for the individual romance, which communicates a kind of resonance to the individual work.
Very often, if you go into a theatre or pick up a novel you think that you have seen this kind of play or read this kind of story many times before. Very often you have a negative feeling: you get nothing from it. But I think there is a positive aspect to the same feeling. I think the positive aspect comes when you realize that this is that great story once again.
ERIC O’CONNOR: When you say that there are only a certain number of plots—you quote Carlo Gozzi [The Secular Scripture, 38; CW 18: 27]—what do you mean by that? When you generalize that statement of a plot, well, you can say simply that there is only one plot: there is a beginning and an end. Now, obviously, I haven’t gained anything by saying that.
FRYE: Yes. I know that. And I would be very leery of constructs like Gozzi’s about the thirty-six possible dramatic situations. I think it is all right to work that kind of thing out, but I would be very doubtful about saying that there were X number of plots. What I do feel is that you find yourself pulled towards a kind of centre of literary experience, where you feel that this is what your kind of literary experience has been all about. It’s that centralizing feeling that attracts me about good romance.
Q: So the roles are typed: like male and female—given out from long ago?
FRYE: Every character you read about in literature has been there since the Tertiary Age.
ERIC O’CONNOR: But has not been written down?
FRYE: No. There are hundreds of thousands of years when nothing is written down, but they are always there.
HELENE LOISELLE: Is this back, then, to the beginning? Where would you begin your schema of mythology.
FRYE: Well, I wouldn’t begin it, you see. You can have a creation myth in a mythological universe; you have to have one; but I don’t think there is any chronological or historical beginning.
PATRICIA COONAN: Can you create one?
FRYE: That is what you have to do, you see. You have to admit that you weren’t around in the Tertiary Age, and you don’t know how it all began.
PATRICIA COONAN: But I couldn’t do anything new. I couldn’t change the universe into a new myth.
FRYE: Again, take the analogy of the human being: in a sense, everything is new. In a sense, every baby born is an individual, unique human being. In another sense, nothing is new.
PATRICIA COONAN: But, in history, don’t we have different eras with different myths about creation that get a little more sophisticated?
FRYE: They get a bit displaced and they get accommodated to realism. But different races and different peoples have had their mythologies and yet there is such an extraordinary family likeness among all these mythologies. And I’ve noticed with religion, that it is the doctrinal and conceptual elements of religion that make one religion different from another. But mythologically a lot of these distinctions disappear. So you begin to suspect that in the study of mythology you are learning a language, and a language which is intelligible, roughly, all over the world.
PATRICIA COONAN: I’m thinking of Eric Voegelin and his distinguishing different stages in history by the mythological universes that were envisioned.
FRYE: But I think that what would happen there would be a distinctive emphasis on things that were potentially present elsewhere but not so emphasized.
PATRICIA COONAN: But would it allow human nature or rather human beings to develop differently, if your myth is more open rather than closed?
FRYE: Yes. And it would make Roman mythology different from Greek; and Greek different from Hebrew; and Hebrew different from Egyptian. But they are not so different that they are unintelligible to each other.
ERIC O’CONNOR: In the romance, you are especially thinking of European romance and European civilization?
FRYE: Yes. That was my general area.
ERIC O’CONNOR: You would expect though, whenever you have explored outside, you would expect to find, at the mythic level, the same resemblances?
FRYE: In the very limited reading that I have done, I would not only expect to find, but I have found it. I mentioned the Indian play Sakuntala [The Secular Scripture, 103; CW 18: 68], showing the same kind of progression that you get in Shakespeare’s Pericles. I said in a very early article, one that I wrote about thirty years ago, that if we discover a new civilization and its literature in ancient Crete or wherever, it may not have plays like King Lear, but it certainly will have plays like Pericles or Sakuntala.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: Does this extended treatment of romance take it out of the springtime? It seems to me it overflows a bit your earlier distinctions.
FRYE: Oh! The mythoi—yes. Well, of course, the four seasons was really a mnemonic device. I was trying to give my reader something they could remember, something they could take in—the universe generally. And I think there are various elements in it. There is a historical element, according to which medieval romance comes along, after a mythological period, and before a mimetic one. And then there is also the sense, which I am using in The Secular Scripture, that romance is one of these perennial things that are always there. But it is always to some extent the mythos of summer, even if it is written in the mid-twentieth century.
ERIC O’CONNOR: These categories, myth, irony, and the like, seem to be part of a mandala that you work with. Would it be as accurate to say—I can see a reason that it wouldn’t be—that your theory of modes is a heuristic structure. But ordinarily you say “heuristic” for concepts, while “mandala” seems to be an equivalent thing for symbols?
FRYE: Yes. It is heuristic in the sense that if you have a general structure of this kind, if you know that that is there, then you can perhaps deduce that this is down here, and check whether it is. I found that very valuable heuristically.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: I would like to ask about the recovery of myth. I am aware of two authors, apart from secular romance, that in a way speak of the recovery of myth. One is Marx’s concept of religion, where religion is the alienation, the projection onto the sky of everything that is good and creative and right in the human being and only what is evil and bad can come from the human. The humanizing effort then would be to destroy the myth. The other author is Blake. Blake’s illustrations of the book of Job, where Job does emerge as Pope and Emperor at the end, with potentialities fulfilled: he is now using the musical instruments that in the first place were hanging on the trees. But the turning point in Blake is not where Job is tortured but the later one, where God appears to him in the Whirlwind. And we know from the text that what God says to Job at that time is all about creation. And yet, apparently, accepting the creation myth Job is liberated and comes to the freedom, the creativity that properly belongs to the human being.
FRYE: Yes. I think the process in Blake is a little more complicated. That is, if you have time as a horizontal line, which is the way in which it is always symbolized, where you are dragged backwards, away from the past towards the future so that your fundamental category of reality, which is time, consists of three dimensions that don’t exist: the past, the present, and the future. And when you are hit by a disaster, as Job is, the natural tendency is to say: well what caused this? why did this happen to me? And the place to put the cause is here at the beginning of time. In other words, at the Creation.
So that in the Book of Job, God says to Job: were you around when I made the world? Well, you weren’t, so why are you asking questions about my administrative competence? And it sounds as though God were just bullying Job, but actually, I think, what God is saying in the Book of Job is: don’t look there; that’s just a chain; it’s just what binds you. And what’s important for you to know is not how you got into this mess, but how you can get out of it again. And that sets up a different perspective altogether. So that in Blake’s “Book of Job” you have, first of all, God coming down to Job in the form of the Whirlwind [Plate 13]. That is followed by the vision of the Creation [Plate 14]: “the Sons of God shouting for joy”; and so forth, where a human a world is over on top of the created order. And after that, Job sees Behemoth & Leviathan [Plate 15]. And then, after that [Plate 16] God turns human, i.e., he turns into the form of Jesus and becomes the essential part of Job himself.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: And this would be completely opposed to the Marxian recovery of myth?
FRYE: It would have analogies, I think, to the Marxist view. The Marxist view would be that as long as you keep projecting your notions of divinity onto a creator up there in the sky, you are, of course, doing nothing about the situation and have to recapture it for yourself. I think that Blake would say the same thing, but they would differ on the nature of the human being that did the recovering.
Q: What does the recovery have to do with the genuine earth story that you mention in the third chapter?
FRYE: The descent to the lower world theme?
Q: No. It’s “when the cyclical conjunctions of divine birds and human women are finally broken, and the human imagination has passed beyond the empty heavens into its original earth” [The Secular Scripture, 93; CW 18: 63].
FRYE: There I was taking Yeats’ figure. According to Yeats, history shows an alternation of cycles of two-thousand years each. One cycle is tragic and heroic and the other cycle is comic and altruistic. So you have two-thousand years of a classical cycle followed by two-thousand years of a Christian cycle. That would be succeeded by a third one which would go back to the Greek tragic and aristocratic pattern.
These are always symbolized by the conjunction of the bird and the woman: Leda & the Swan were the Classical; the Virgin and the Dove were the Christian. And the Heron in the Irish marshes and the Priestess in Yeats’ play [The King’s Threshold] convey it. What I was suggesting there was that the ultimate recovery of myth gets man out of the bind of the historical cycle: the kind of thing that Vico and Spengler talk about.
Q: But not necessarily projecting?
FRYE: Projection is what starts the cycle, you see? As soon as Marxism becomes a social institution, then you are told that the real explanation of the power struggle going on in Peking is that this man is a capitalist rogue and he has to be got rid of. And if that is not the opiate of the people I don’t know what is. But it’s a projection again which starts another cycle turning.
Q: Would you see the recreation of the classical order, according to Yeats, as a return to myth?
FRYE: A return to myth, perhaps. But not a return to the particular emphasis in classical myth that Yeats found in the Oedipus story.
Q: So do you see that as a form of an increase in consciousness because you held the poet as the hero rather than the work he creates?
FRYE: Of course, there is another stage where the reader becomes the hero. I think what Yeats would call a Christian cycle, from the literary point of view, is perhaps a culture where you get more and more of the shift over to the poet as hero. Perhaps in the immediate future we are shaping up more or less to a community of letters, where more and more is entrusted to the reader.
PATRICIA COONAN: Who then becomes the poet?
FRYE: No. Who then becomes the reborn poet—in a sense, who possesses what the poet has.
HELENE LOISELLE: What signs do you see of that?
FRYE: I would think, for one thing, in the greater explicitness that writers set forth their mythical patterns. That’s one thing. It throws more responsibility on the reader. And in proportion it is a kind of compensation for the passivity of the mass produced art of the television set. And the literary development seems to me to keep demanding more and more of the reader.
Q: Do you think this is conscious on the part of the poet or the writer?
FRYE: It depends on where his consciousness is. Some people just write with their conscious minds; others, write with whatever is underneath it. It just depends.
Q: That’s what I was wondering: is it a conscious trend or is it something that is happening in the psyche.
FRYE: These things are never a sort of either/or set up. It is always consciousness mixed up with other things. And if it were a conscious movement then it would tend to be a trend or a vogue. I think that it is something which articulates itself in highly conscious acts, but the actual drive itself is among other things.
Q: Would you care to name any of the people you think are writing this way? In the book you admit that self-recognition comes from what you read [The Secular Scripture, 157; CW 18: 104].
FRYE: What the important thing is is not who is writing or even what is being written, but what the reader is doing. It is conceivable that you would have nothing in the contemporary scene except trash. And, yet, if you had sufficiently lively and imaginative readers they could make something out of that. Dante hadn’t read Homer but he could make something out of two bad lines in Lucan. And that is the way great writers operate, and it is the way we should start thinking in terms of the great reader.
Q: In the first chapter you looked at popular literature for the signs of what is coming next and what the reader can do for himself.
FRYE: I’ve noticed too in studying the biographies of great writers that the most fertilizing influences seem to be very often second or third rate writers. Because what they inspire is: well, I could do as well as that. Gerard Manley Hopkins said something extremely sensible when he said that the effect of great masterpieces on him was to make him admire and then do something else.1
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: Could you say a little about the use of the word “vision” or “visionary.” How is one a visionary?
FRYE: The term started in the writing of my early book on Blake where, first of all, I had to get rid of all the stuff that had been written on Blake, which was almost entirely trash. There was only one book that was at all useful at the time when I was starting on Blake’s Prophecies, and that was Foster Damon’s.2 And so many of these books said that Blake was a mystic and mystics do this, that, and the other thing. And I wondered why Blake wasn’t doing any of these things, and why he talked so insistently about his being a poet, an artist, a painter. I arrived therefore at a distinction, in fact, almost a contrast between a mystic like, say, John of the Cross, who eventually moves in the direction of getting rid of images, and the visionary who goes after images. And that is what I mean by visionary. It’s rather like the visions of plenitude and vacancy in Eliot’s Quartets.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: Would the images then be either/or or perhaps both/and. Would they be presented to us by the artist as symbols of experience or instruments of thought?
FRYE: They could be either, because it is very important that literature is the focus where experience and thinking meet. That has been the classical Aristotelian view of poetry: it is where the moral precept and the historical example come into focus. So they would have to be both images of experience and instruments of thought.
ERIC O’CONNOR: I don’t know if this is a fair question, but I catch these two things in your writing. You are saying criticism should be different. You are also saying most explicitly that one should creatively criticize.
FRYE: Creatively criticize criticism?
ERIC O’CONNOR: No. Operate as a critic.
FRYE: I think the general point of view there is what I said in the Anatomy, that I am not attacking different critical procedures if I am satisfied that they are valid procedures. What I am attacking is the barriers between the procedures. I was trying to set up a conspectus for all forms of critical activity. But that was back in the fifties, even the forties when I was thinking about the issue. Then you had the New Critics, who were forming a group of themselves and setting themselves up over against the historical people, and then there was the new crop—Frye and his myth criticism and so forth. I felt that this was a terrible waste of time, when one could see what criticism as a whole was getting at, even if you were temperamentally drawn to certain techniques rather than others.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: It goes back to the thirties, when A.S.P. Woodhouse in a Milton class would make a reference to that Blake scholar over at Victoria College.
FRYE: Sure! And I remember the time when E.K. Brown came back from Chicago and had an evening with Woodhouse on the explication of texts, where he said that he had spent sixteen periods on Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes; and Woodhouse said, “What did you say in the other fifteen?” Those are two radically different critical procedures, each of them valid.
MARTIN O’HARA: You refer here to the movement into linguistics as one pole and into sociology as the other. Do you see these as the two strong camps?
FRYE: They are strong in the sense that they are quite well organized. I think they have got hold of a sufficiently concrete subject matter perhaps to put them in a rather stronger position than the different schools of criticism had.
PATRICIA COONAN: You talk about the dream world: “we are not awake when we have abolished the dream world: we are awake only when we have absorbed it again.” [The Secular Scripture, 61; CW 18: 43]. But then there is also the sleeping, the trapped demonic lower world of dreams and sleep.
FRYE: Yes. The descent quest is a perilous quest. There is a quite remarkable poem by the New Brunswick poet, Alden Nowlan, about going down into the cellar of the mind and coming up covered with blood and he says that two examples of people who have made that descent are St. Francis of Assisi and Bluebeard. And he says the same experiences “instruct the evil as inform the good.”3
When I said that we are awake only when we have absorbed the dream world again, I meant that it appears to be a fact of literature that all creative power seems to demand an organizing of the mind, which includes the consciousness but isn’t wholly conscious, and which includes something we call the subconscious or unconscious but isn’t wholly that either.
HELENE LOISELLE: How about the vision that “must be kept unspotted” from the actual world [The Secular Scripture, 58; CW 18: 42]?
FRYE: In what I was talking about there, I wound up by referring to the book, The Treason of the Clerks, La Trahison des clercs, the betrayal of the intellectuals. I mean the kind of writer who instead of focusing on his vision carries it into the world of social activity and gets it mixed up with that. The locus classicus of that kind of thing in English literature is the treatment of Rousseau in Shelley’s poem, The Triumph of Life. He studies Rousseau in that poem as an example of the kind of flawed genius that confuses his vision by the way in which he relates it to activity. I don’t mean that vision should never be related to activity but there are premature ways of doing it. And that explains, for example, why poets who have also been men of action have been great poets partly because they were so hopeless as men of action. Milton, for example, took a very active part in seventeenth-century revolutionary politics, but if he had ever understood the first thing about what was happening in the seventeenth century, he wouldn’t have been Milton. Charles II did; but he didn’t write Paradise Lost—he was just a king who died in his bed.
ROBERTA MACHNIK: Would you say the same thing for William Morris?
FRYE: William Morris, again, had a rather clearer notion of the way in which an artist’s vision can be used and in which social action can take place; I don’t think that he mixed the things up in a way which confused both.
FRYE: Yeats had his moments of confusion. He couldn’t tell the difference between what was happening in Ireland and what the Blue Shirt movement was going to do to Ireland. He pulled out of it in time, but if he had gone along with that, it would have been another example of the treason of the clerks. It would have been a completely wrong mixing up of poetic vision and social action.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: But is there a way of affecting or influencing social action that would not be guilty of what Arnold accuses Carlyle of: down in the cockpit mixing it up, who’s ever going to trust Carlyle again?
FRYE: I think that is irreparable as far as Carlyle is concerned, but it is possible for the poet to think of himself as both a poet and as a man living in the world and yet to keep the two things functioning by themselves and even uniting with one another. I think there are good ways and bad ways of doing it.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: But the transformation of the world is not a transformation in the world out there, in society. As with Blake’s vision, so with Jesus’ vision. At the time, they did nothing in society; it didn’t lessen any of the exploitation of the laborers in the mills or the armies or the commerce men or the kings or the priests.
FRYE: But again, there is the realization that poetic vision cannot do that, it doesn’t necessarily prevent you, on another level, working in that area.
MARTIN O’HARA: I’m thinking of Auden saying: “For poetry makes nothing happen” (In Memory of W.B. Yeats, pt. 2, l. 5.), but then, on other occasions, writing poems with strong messages about the war and poverty. Are these the two sides?
FRYE: Yes. I think so. And that’s what I mean by keeping the vision unspotted from the world.
PATRICIA COONAN: Is it part of the reader’s job then to get the vision?
FRYE: It is one of the reader’s jobs, I think, to see when a writer has confused these two things, as Carlyle did.
MARTIN O’HARA: Do writers tend to confuse a bit more as they grow into the centre of what you refer to in one part as the elitist literature?
FRYE: Very often they do.
MARTIN O’HARA: More than the popular writer?
FRYE: Yes. I think that’s true. I think it’s often a help for a writer not to have any social influence at all and not to be able to get any. That’s one reason why Blake came through to me with such a blinding clarity because everybody just assumed he was a nut.
MARTIN O’HARA: Some thought he was mad?
FRYE: Yes.
CATHLEEN GOING: One of the social functions of this book, it seems to me, would be that it makes the convention visible and valuable. But, on the other hand, I go back to the prophet and the moment where the word takes over, which you are studying now—to say nothing of the moments of the taking over of the music examples. The awareness of the convention has the function that if someone knows what he is doing, the visionary knows that there is such a thing as a vision, and it helps not to confuse them. But, on the other hand, the seemingly praiseworthy moment of the word taking over makes it difficult for the man to know what he is doing.
FRYE: Yes. I think that is true. You remember what happened to the prophets in the Bible. They all got stuck in prison.
CATHLEEN GOING: Probably socially ineffective, temporarily?
FRYE: Yes. You remember the story of Micaiah in the Book of Kings [1 Kings 22], where Ahab and Jehoshaphat have all their court prophets say unanimously go up and attack the king of Syria because you are certain to win. And then Micaiah says: if you go up and attack the king of Syria, he’ll take you to the cleaners. And so the king says: put this fellow in prison until I come back. So he went up; and he was taken to the cleaners. And I would say that all these court prophets were examples of betraying intellectuals.
Q: They didn’t let the Word take over?
FRYE: No. They knew that the prophet was supposed to go into a trance and speak with a different voice, but they also knew that they should not go too far under to forget what the king wanted to hear.
ERIC O’CONNOR: Is a fanatic, a psychotic, an example of what you are saying about one who has an idea and is going to make it happen? Is that what you are saying?
FRYE: Yes. I think the notion that you can make something happen is a very dangerous notion to get hold of, especially if it starts out as some kind of imaginative vision, because it does drive you into a narrower and narrower corner.
MARTIN O’HARA: Should the reader and the writer be very different on this score? Is it better, given the choice, that the writer should know more of the structure or that the reader should?
FRYE: Oh! The reader should. And if you think of the people that you most instinctively think of as prophetic, people like Blake, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Kafka, they are people who have no sense of wholeness or integration; they are people who get smashed up by their time; and fragments get rescued from the smash of a terrific intensity. But those prophets have sacrificed themselves for something else of which the reader benefits.
PATRICIA COONAN: Why do they write, if they don’t expect anything to happen?
FRYE: You see, there are two kinds of community. There is a community of individuals sharing a vision and certainly poetry happens in that area. …
PATRICIA COONAN: You talk about the imagination and its otherness: “for the imagination it is rather some kind of force or power or will that is not ourselves, an otherness of spirit” [The Secular Scripture, 60; CW 18: 43].
FRYE: I’m talking about Wallace Stevens there, am I not? Yes, it is Wallace Stevens. There I’m really saying what I just said that there are two kinds of community. There is a community which is man in nature and there is also a community of the spirit: a community that the imagination directly addresses. And I think that in the actual work of building up culture and civilization you are always up against the otherness of nature. As Father O’Connor said at the beginning [when setting up the tape recorder], you can’t rewire certain things in this room without doing certain concrete things; you can’t just use a metaphor. And that is where the otherness belongs to this nonhuman, nonconscious, amoral world that we call the order of nature. But within the circle, which the arts address, religion and philosophy and so forth, you become aware of another kind of otherness. Wallace Stevens, who described himself as a desiccated Presbyterian, quotes the theologian Karl Barth on the conception of God as the wholly other; and that is obviously something he has in mind.4 And, as I say, you do pass from a world where the otherness is not of nature, which is really below that, as far as consciousness or morality is concerned, to a world where the otherness is the spiritual otherness, which is much harder to define.
PATRICIA COONAN: Which the secular scripture then has to struggle with?
FRYE: Yes, as Jacob has to fight the angel.
Q: Would a very early myth, like Beowulf, have been concerned with the world of nature?
FRYE: Yes, and yet there are other things there too, I think. In the last part of Beowulf, when Beowulf is the old man—the old king—the dragon comes and lays waste the country and Beowulf goes out to fight this dragon because it’s his dragon—because, in a sense, it’s his death. It is not that he is the hero, it is just that he is the man the dragon has come for.
Q: In that sense the myth does seem to have two distinct parts.
FRYE: Yes. I think there is an otherness of spirit there very definitely. Grendel, on the other hand, is from the race of Cain, and represents something of the mindlessness of the order of nature.
MARTIN O’HARA: There are two parts as well—you point out in the Iliad and the Odyssey, how the violence and fraud contrast [The Secular Scripture, 65; CW 18: 44].
FRYE: Yes.
HELENE LOISELLE: On page 58 of The Secular Scripture, you suggest it is the reader’s world; it is not the writer’s world.
FRYE: It is not the reader’s world, qua reader; it is rather the workaday world, where you work for six days and then play one day or, first you are awake and then you dream. That is, in ordinary experience, you are aware of these continual antitheses: awake at day, dreaming at night, and working X-hours and playing X-hours, and so on.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: A concept of the arts then, Dr. Frye, as merely aesthetic liberation would be quite foreign to your presentation?
FRYE: Oh, very much, yes. That leads to the situation that I was glancing at at the end of that “Expanding Eyes” article about the people, such as Hannah Arendt, who get so bewildered because they find that very evil men can have a very polished taste in the arts [CW 27: 391–410]. To me, that’s not a problem at all. But when that happens it means that this person with the taste in the arts is keeping it rigidly in the aesthetic sphere; there’s nothing he’s being committed to.
Q: It’s going beyond art as meditation?
FRYE: When it becomes part of something that you really have to do in a very, very profound sense.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: When you talk about the particularity of the rising motion; it seems to me right, but I don’t know why. “As we go up, we find ourselves surrounded by images of increased participation” [The Secular Scripture, 183; CW 18: 120]. I was thinking of particularity and it isn’t— it’s more social, more differentiated?
FRYE: Yes. The whole process of ascent is being delivered from isolation, from psychosis, from the feeling of being all alone in the dark. And as that happens other shapes begin to form around you and you find that you are in a human community and on further levels, the whole order of nature becomes responsive in the way it was in the garden of Eden. You find yourself interested in conceptions like evolution or you feel that you are part of an ongoing process, which is also a cooperative process.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: Perhaps I misread it as being more concrete, more unique.
FRYE: That is true, because the more egocentric your perception, the hazier and more general is what you see; and the less so, then the more sharply particularized is what you see. That is Blake’s doctrine of the minute particulars: when the ego has collapsed then you are in a world of particulars.
HELENE LOISELLE: It is something you get on the seventh day?
FRYE: It is an ideal; it is something you are moving towards.
Q: Do you think you should take a story down with you, as you go down, or you write it as you go or you create it as you go.
FRYE: I suppose people do that to some extent. I think, if you are a writer, you more or less have to go where you are writing.
Q: If you are not a writer, you pick a good story?
FRYE: You pick your story.
HELENE LOISELLE: Your story then becomes part of the particular?
FRYE: I think that the story would become, with increasing practice and skill, and so forth, it would become increasingly particularized. The one thing I have experienced in literature, that convinces me that I’m on at least some of the right track, the more deeply impressed I am by what I read, the more clearly I see in it the whole shape and substance of what among other things come out less clearly.
ERIC O’CONNOR: What’s more clear, the mythological universe?
FRYE: Yes.
ERIC O’CONNOR: Would that be your mythological universe?
FRYE: It’s first of all mine, yes; and then it’s something that I share with others.
ERIC O’CONNOR: But as it’s yours, there are some parts that you will never share; everybody’s will be somewhat different?
FRYE: O! Yes. But out of that some kind of community emerges.
MARTIN O’HARA: I get frightened by an increasing number of students who are not capable of responding to a story, where there’s a numbness. I haven’t seen it before, but from what you are saying, they would have difficulty in making community.
FRYE: Yes, they do. Because we live in a very introverted society: a superhighway where the main danger is falling asleep is obviously a much more introverted place than an unfrequented country road would be. And it is that kind of introversion that we can’t escape from: the introversion of high rise apartments and all these streets with the cars going down the middle, and the sense of community obliterated constantly, which makes it very hard for children not to adopt that kind of pacing, because it is a very rigorous pacing that is demanded. And to listen to a story, you’ve got to just clip that right off, you’ve got to relax and lose all that sense of panic, all that sense of timing and marching.
MARTIN O’HARA: The moment of getting caught, a phrase that came up earlier of “being new to me.”
FRYE: Once a thing is genuinely new to you, you are delivered from the march of time.
ERIC O’CONNOR: Is Conrad’s book, Romance, a book you are familiar with?
FRYE: Not immediately, no. Chance I remember.
ERIC O’CONNOR: It is one I read when I was very young.
FRYE: Sorry, I’m not that clear on it.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: But the insight into Blake must have come through, you said a blinding flash but that must be an understatement.
FRYE: I suppose. It was fifteen years and five complete rewritings that book [Fearful Symmetry] had.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: The certainty that it gave you: I have seen this, and now that I have seen this, I am able to see this, this, this and this. And then you worked out your chapters, section by section, for the Anatomy of Criticism, including the basic work on romance. And what comes through to me, from your writing, from the very first that I know of your writing, the Fearful Symmetry through the others, even to the occasional convocation lectures and others, is this reassuring confidence that you have. For instance, when you say in your book on romance here that institutional Christianity has got the two judgments mixed up [The Secular Scripture, 150; CW 15: 99], that hit me like that! And I said, of course, that’s exactly what has been bothering me practically all my life about this. And here this man has come and, out of literary studies, solved this problem for me. It’s a sort of a spill-over and it shed light not just on literature, not just on literary criticism, or a theory of literary criticism, it sheds light everywhere, doesn’t it?
FRYE: Yes. It’s part of what I mean by the unspotted [The Secular Scripture, 58; CW 18: 42]. You deal with very pure and intense imagination in the study of literature. Whereas in the history of any social institution, you are also dealing with a great many anxieties. And so the pure imagination throws a very sharp light on the anxiety.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: I have a Christian family movement and we meet every two weeks. At one session they asked me to present the recent Roman document on some problems of sexual ethics or something like that. And I did give them a presentation on that, but I put that to one side and I gave them what you have there in your book about the unwilling knowledge of self as more terrible than death [The Secular Scripture, 123; CW 18: 82]. We had our best session in five years. We made it into intimacy, married intimacy, etc. This just brought in an atomic explosion of light into this area.
HELENE LOISELLE: The distinction between comedy and romance.
FRYE: Comedy usually remains on a social level. In the last scene of a comedy all the characters are on the stage at once and a new society gets born. And when a romantic comedy like A Midsummer Night’s Dream goes wandering off into the fairy woods, near Athens, it does so in order to come back to Athens and force that kind of wish thinking on that stupid ass, Theseus, so that he can do something about Athens and his marriage law. But the reference in comedy is usually social. Whereas, clear romance always points in the direction of the Garden of Eden or the Song of Songs: the reintegrated nature, the recreated world.
HELENE LOISELLE: Is that part of the recovery?
FRYE: Yes. It’s a higher part of recovery because we can easily imagine a renewed society with all the curmudgeons reconciled and the hero getting the heroine; but it is harder to think in terms of green pastures and still waters and a restored soul, that’s more rarified.
ERIC O’CONNOR: Why did you choose this book, why did you choose to work on romance?
FRYE: I don’t know, except that I wanted to—I’ve been fussing around with a book on the Bible for quite a while, and ever since, I recognized that I had to write that. And then these Norton Lectures came up; and it suddenly struck me that this might be part two. So that was how it originated.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: It is hard to know that this is part of an open-ended romance?
GERALD MACGUIGAN: For the sake of my scientist friend [Eric O’Connor] down there, Dr. Frye, you do speak of criticism in terms of science. And Anatomy of Criticism is very definitely a scientific analogy. I would think that your thinking, your mind works in a very scientific way. It is a very precise way that you do get insights, possible understandings, and that you do go about verifying. Now, how does your process of verification differ from the man who works in the lab?
FRYE: I suppose it is in the degree of communicability; that is, I can verify it for myself and I can suggest that the experiment can be repeated by anyone I talk to, but the process of repeating it is much more subtle and indirect. That is, the repeated experiment is something where you know what the level of repetition is: you simply do the experiment over again and if it works that’s fine. But when you are transferring something like an experience of literature to somebody else it is a more indirect process. It demands a kind of less conventionalized personal attitude, because emotional attitudes and that kind of thing get mixed up with it.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: But that would be the presentation of your personally confirmed insight or theory. Now, in the confirmation, is it simply self-consistency?
FRYE: As far as I can see, there is a kind of consistency in the sense that one’s experience fits another’s, that is, it belongs to the same kind of body. And also that there is a consistency of odd experience, a linear consistency through one’s experience of literature.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: And perhaps harmonious relationships, if not coincidences, with the experience of what we might call other mysteries?
FRYE: Oh, yes, very much so.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: I choose those two terms the “self-consistency” and the “other mysteries” because this is what theologians tell us they do, when they are speaking of their work as a science. But they are in a way literary critics? Like criticizing the Word?
FRYE: Yes.
Q: Aren’t all schools of criticism, though, consistent within the system they set up to criticize within; and, if that is so, how is yours, your consistency better than any other consistency?
FRYE: I wouldn’t claim that it was.
Q: But obviously you believe in it?
FRYE: Yes. But the thing is, I believe in the other critics too, if their systems make sense. But I think that ultimately anything which is consistent with itself will also be consistent with something else that is also consistent with itself. That is why I say that I am not opposed to other schools of criticism but I am opposed to the barriers that separate them.
HELENE LOISELLE: When you use the word “interpenetration,” at one stage, is that similar?
FRYE: I use the word interpenetration because, for one thing, I’ve grown to distrust the word reconcile. I think that if you reconcile A with B, you water down both A and B so much that you haven’t really got anything at all. And so I don’t want to reconcile literary criticism with psychology. But I would like to interpenetrate with psychology and anthropology. And that is a word [interpenetrate] that I got actually from Zen Buddhism, from Suzuki’s writings on the Lankavatara sutra, and the way in which in the height of vision for the Buddhist, everything is everywhere at once, and everything interpenetrates with everything at once. And that to me was a much clearer explanation of what the apocalyptic vision was than I ever found in the West.
ERIC O’CONNOR: Lonergan expresses the movement to mature science as a movement from relating things to us to relating things to one another. And actually, they are almost your words also: relating things in literature to other things in literature.
FRYE: Yes. That’s right. But then, of course, there comes the problem of critic A saying to critic B, look this is how these things are related to one another. And that process is a little more difficult than it is in the sciences.
MARTIN O’HARA: The interpenetration goes through time as well. Just as everything is somehow present at once; it is timeless in a way.
FRYE: There is only a pure present and presence.
Q: Your notion of having earned the right to silence [The Secular Scripture, 188; CW 18: 124] again, sounds more Eastern?
FRYE: Perhaps it is, in that context, yes. I meant by silence really the possession of literature, where you don’t need to talk anymore. That is, I began the Anatomy of Criticism by saying that the reason why you have to have criticism is that criticism can talk; and all the arts, including the arts of words, are dumb: they show forth but they don’t speak. So that the end of criticism is perhaps the entering into that kind of silence.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: I took it that you were saying in answering my question that beyond the vision is something that doesn’t need a vision?
FRYE: Yes. In a sense, you are the vision.
ERIC O’CONNOR: Supposing someone said to you, who hadn’t had too much literary experience, that the Faerie Queene is just a little too much for me to master and I’d like to do something that is a great romance and covers the whole scope of it. What would you suggest?
FRYE: I would suggest, first of all, that a reader should fundamentally follow his own nose, that is, follow his own instinct. He should stick to what sticks to him, in other words. And if he finds his kind of thing in Tolkien, then he should read Tolkien, and if he finds it in William Morris then that’s the man for him. And if he finds it in Borrow, it will help him but …
CATHLEEN GOING: Who is more surprised, the social scientists or the literary critics, when you suggested that the literary critics were social scientists?
FRYE: The social scientists, of course, don’t like what I say next, which is that the social sciences are the applied humanities.
ERIC O’CONNOR: One of the great insights for me in your “Expanding Eyes” was where you said you were so sure Frazer and Spengler were literary critics [Spiritus Mundi, 111; CW 27: 401]. And I spent a whole day trying to see how you were so sure, and it was so obvious because it couldn’t have been anything else. I mean, apart from your verifying, that was an experience in itself.
Q: How can you explain that in Latin American cultures or Spanish and so on, there isn’t much criticism? Octavio Paz, in one of his lectures, berates the Spaniards and the Portuguese for not entering criticism [“On Criticism,” 35–9]. And yet it seems to me that Latin American writing is very, very lively and quite interesting and speaks to me personally.
FRYE: I simply don’t know why there isn’t criticism, more prominence given to criticism in Latin American countries. It may be that there is a much lower proportion of young people going to university. And, of course, the university is a great employer of critics. But, on the other hand, I’ve read criticism of Borges, who is one of the few Latin American authors I have looked into and that must have come out of something and there must be a tradition behind that.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: Rather more English background than some of the others.
FRYE: Yes, perhaps. He read a great deal of English literature.
HELENE LOISELLE: Would it have to do with the kind of anxiety these people have?
FRYE: It could. But I think probably the main thing is just the economic market of critics.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: May I suggest that one of the reasons might be that if their manuals of literature are similar to French manuals of literature, then they are not descriptive; they are prescriptive: that every art becomes the art of rhetoric and you learn the techniques for it, manipulation for creating effects, for getting results. And the manuals—I have one on my desk and I look at it every so often and it is complete, but it is prescriptive. It is the training of the faculty for doing this, and poetry is just rhetoric in four-inch columns rather than in five-inch columns. It might well be that. Perhaps the shock they would experience coming into a kind of literary criticism like this, the experience that a graduate of one of the collèges classiques that had studied, say, economics or sociology in a collège classique, then goes to Harvard and comes up against the empirical method and the case method for the first time. He has to dismantle his thinking apparatus and rebuild it. The Roman approach.
FRYE: That sounds very likely.
PATRICIA COONAN: The word interpenetration would be an absorbing of the green world. Would integration be a closing word?
FRYE: As it is generally used, it tends to be, yes. In fact, I got to distrust the word integration because of the way it was used in educational theory where, thirty years ago, everybody was saying: don’t stand there, get yourselves integrated. It came to have the wrong overtones to it.
PATRICIA COONAN: But then the structures just point, they don’t frame?
FRYE: Structure is an architectural metaphor which I use because I can’t think of a word that would be less confusing.
PATRICIA COONAN: But it would be more of an arrow than a frame?
FRYE: It would be more like a skeleton, perhaps; something that is inside, that does the articulating but which is not the life.
MARTIN O’HARA: You can add to a structure too, build on to it?
FRYE: Yes.
ERIC O’CONNOR: What about the word “radical”; what is your image of that—a radical of something?
FRYE: The image is that of the root, the radix.
ERIC O’CONNOR: I was thinking of the square root side of it.
FRYE: Yes. Well, that’s a root.
ERIC O’CONNOR: You mean root, rather than square root?
FRYE: Well, yes. But there is a metaphor in square root as well.
HELENE LOISELLE: I love the image of the world pulled inside out. I was wondering if that’s your idea of the skeleton inside. I loved the idea but I didn’t know what to do with it: the notion of the world pulled inside out [The Secular Scripture, 174; CW 18: 114].
FRYE: Dante comes into the presence of God and suddenly realizes that the universe is God centred and not Earth centred. It connects with the image of the vortex, the gyre that seems to run through all literature: that you are continually passing from one realm of reality into another one, which is the first one turned inside out. And that’s what happens in the descent theme when it turns into the ascent theme.
CHARLOTTLE TANSEY: “Romance as the kernel of fable” [The Secular Scripture, 183; CW 18: 120], could you say something about that?
FRYE: I was thinking, among other things, of the fable as one of the democratic and revolutionary forms of literature. That is, the fable, like the proverb, is the expression of popular wisdom and popular energy. There is that wonderful poem of Hart Crane’s on the black man in the cellar of the Chicago suburb and thinking of Aesop who, of course, was black too.5 And the feeling of the fable as somehow or other a thing of the people. It keeps clutching to their hearts. And the fable is the source of the parables of Jesus, and so on. These are the essentially popular forms which humanity clings to when they are starting to recover myth.
ERIC O’CONNOR: And that is really what you are looking for.
STAN MACHNIK: Is it the fable writers, would you say, who are the first literary critics or philosophers?
FRYE: The fable writers are the popular philosophers, just as the maker of proverbs is. Aesop is a black slave—that’s the legend about him. Phaedrus, who collected the Roman fables, is a slave, and he says so at the beginning of his book. And there is something in the fable that makes it a popular possession and a potentially revolutionary form.
STAN MACHNIK: How far back do you take literary criticism? You take it to Aristotle here, but where are its roots?
FRYE: It goes back into a simpler society, where things are much harder to distinguish from other things. And I think the differentiation of criticism from creation probably begins with the kind of thing that was growing up around the time of Plato, the kind of thing that Eric Havelock has studied, of the thing that happens with the writing culture, when the poets are no longer in the oral tradition, when they are no longer the teachers of society but you need somebody else to do the teaching. And you have a polarization between the poet and the teacher of the poetry.
Q: How would you say the ballad form or its story fits into any kind of romantic context?
FRYE: The ballad usually tells an intensely romantic story.
Q: Is there no place you could fit it in here with your concept of romance?
FRYE: Oh! Yes, I would. I was dealing, for tactical reasons, mainly with prose romance, but I would not exclude the ballad as a form of romance. And the types of stories that you find, if you look through a child’s book of ballads or Grimm’s Fairy Tales, again, they are very much the same kind of thing.
Q: It’s a kind of romantic tale, with every third line left out.
FRYE: I always think of the ballad as giving you just the sketched situation, that is, a ballad like Sir Patrick Spens. I think of Valéry’s principle: that whatever in poetry has to be said is never said well. So that in Sir Patrick Spens, which is a poem about a shipwreck, the shipwreck is what you have to talk about. Consequently, there isn’t one syllable about the shipwreck in Sir Patrick Spens. You see, first of all, going out into the storm, and then you see the hats floating on the water.
ERIC O’CONNOR: That is something like what I was talking in the car with you, about reading Pericles quickly one night. And just being caught by the story, without any of the images except as you read them fast and tired, but the story caught. And that’s what you are saying here. That’s what ballads get at somehow.
FRYE: And that’s what is so remarkable about Pericles; and it is so remarkable when you see it on the stage too: what an astonishingly actable play it is. Because all the things that you have to do are just ignored.
Q: What you have to do is what you have to do for yourself?
FRYE: No. What you have to do is connect the tissue, what you have to describe and say, “and then” you see this is what happened “because.”
Q: Aren’t you doing that all the time?
FRYE: I think your mind is really responding to the action, which, according to the opening page, is set dispersedly in various eastern Mediterranean countries. First of all, there’s this, and there’s that, and you just watch the procession of things. There’s certainly a connective tissue that builds up in your mind, that’s true. But the thing is that it is not presented in the play.
Q: But this is where the onus in on the reader?
FRYE: That’s right. The same thing that happens in The Waste Land, where I think Eliot got his ideas from Pericles in large part: I mean, something just stops and something else starts and it is up to the reader to make the connection.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: Do you remember that statement in one of your other books—I think it was from the lectures in Hamilton—that the “Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have failed to create” [The Modern Century, 122–3: CW 11: 69]. This, you said, was a demonstration of what a myth is. Now, I haven’t connected that up with the way you are talking about myth here but it seems to me that it is not quite the same.
FRYE: It’s not quite the same no, but there is a connection. One’s social life is an action which to the degree that it is intelligent and consistent action, is informed by a vision. That is, a social worker in Montreal must have at some level of her mind, a vision of a cleaner and a healthier and saner and more just Montreal. And, it is in the light of that vision that she does her social work. And it is that quality of informing vision that I was speaking of there.
CHARLOTTE TANSEY: Vision which is not visual somehow.
FRYE: Not visualized as such, no. But nevertheless has a capacity to be realized.
Q: Would the analogy there be the state “in between” the world of what is and what is not [The Secular Scripture, 166; CW 18: 108]? Is that where we find the vision?
FRYE: The “in between”—the neither is nor is not—is where the vision is.
GERALD MACGUIGAN: The mysterious imaginative world.
HELENE LOISELLE: Is the danger in thinking of that mysterious world as somewhere “out there” [The Secular Scripture, 154; CW 18: 102], when it is really left for you to create?
FRYE: It’s the danger of projection, yes. And, of course, a great many revolutionary and utopian schemes are founded on exactly that. That is, they have got their model and they say, it says here that you have to do so and so.
CATHLEEN GOING: That’s what I thought you were saying very early about the difference between the existential archetype and the literary archetype.
PATRICIA COONAN: If we see them as being somehow imaginative then we can’t say: it says here you’ve got to do this. It’s a vision that can’t be seen, but it is a vision.
FRYE: Yes. I think that this kind of informing vision can actually produce tremendous energy but it doesn’t lead to the thing we were talking about earlier about the betrayal of the intellectual.
CATHLEEN GOING: The line of the quest is from past to future, not the quest caught up in the other movement. I was thinking of the statue of the young Gotama that was given to us here. He has large ears to listen. He isn’t yet Buddha but he’s on the quest.
FRYE: Of course, quests have a tendency to go either up or down; that is why I spoke of the four movements of plot as either coming from an upper world or going to a lower world or reversing.
ERIC O’CONNOR: Eric Voegelin uses the word “Metaxy” for the “in between” state, which he gets from Plato. By using the word, he gives it an objective sense for us who need something “out there” to start with, but he doesn’t make it any more objective in the bad sense [“Reason,” 289–90; Order 408].
MARTIN O’HARA: It seems like in Don Quixote you are going to keep going as long as there is land under you?
FRYE: But he is on a parody quest. And I have always been very touched and very deeply moved by the scene, where Don Quixote meets some Spanish peasants and they share their dinner of acorns with him. And, then, he starts talking about the Golden Age, and then you realize, suddenly, that this is what Quixote is all about. And his own psychotic dream of rescuing beautiful maidens from giants is all overlaid on top of this. But there is a real vision there. He wouldn’t be so unforgettable a madman if it weren’t.