On 3 December 1985 Frye presented a lecture, “The Dialectic of Belief and Vision,” at the School of Continuing Studies, University of Toronto. I asked Frye if he would permit me to send the typescript to Shenandoah (I was on the board of the journal at the time). He consented, and the talk appeared in Shenandoah 39, no. 3 (1989): 47–64. It was reprinted in Myth and Metaphor, and it appears in the Collected Works, vol. 4, 344–59. Nicholas Graham had made a tape of the lecture, following which members of the audience addressed a series of questions to Frye. Graham was able to capture these up to the point when his tape ran out. What follows is Graham’s transcription, slightly edited, which is published here with his kind permission. The title has been added.
Q: Could you explain further, Dr. Frye, the relation of sound, hearing, and sight?
FRYE: I spoke of them as metaphors and as metaphors that enter into the two stages in which we experience art. First, literature moves in time. The words are heard, if you are listening to somebody read them. They are heard silently in your own mind if you are reading them. But, then, we start using metaphors of seeing when it comes to total understanding, and that is because it all pulls together in a single structure, which is there in a way that a painting is there.
Music is the same. You listen to the music when it is performed, but if you have a score of the music, you spread it out in front of you and see it all there at once. And these metaphors get incorporated into things like the experience of God in the Bible, where after the Fall we hear the voice of God from the burning bush on. But we hear it because the voice which is heard is the starting point for a human action, whereas what is seen brings you to a halting place, to a stopping point. You are there.
That is one reason why there is a bit of recurrent suspicion in the three religions based on the biblical tradition—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—about representation of the Godhead. The visibility of such things seems to imply a total understanding, which, of course, they don’t get. But as metaphors they do refer to the power that the moving arts and the stationary arts play respectively in our experience. The visibility of the Book of Revelation at the end of the Bible, where the author is continually saying what he saw in a vision, is designed to express the fact that the narrative of the Bible is moving up towards the suggestion of this total simultaneous apprehension.
Q: This seems to be beyond hearing—or other than hearing. Does it include hearing?
FRYE: I would suppose that it includes both continuous hearing and seeing of which the actual hearing and seeing that we know about are again metaphors. We are told that playing harp is a compulsory cultural accomplishment in heaven. Perhaps that symbolizes a continuous hearing as well as a continuous seeing. Both of these things have as their metaphorical kernel the thing that we do when we hear and see. But in their spiritual dimension they mean something else again.
Q: Dr. Frye, when you approach to the Bible on this plateau, how has this affected your prayer life? When one approaches the Bible in a literary way, how is one’s prayer life affected, how does one now pray spiritually?
FRYE: Well, when somebody asked me what I thought prayer was, I said that it was the only form of self-awareness that did not involve introversion. In other words, it is the attempt to place in the center of one’s experience something which is neither subjective nor objective but like a work of literature, only in a different way. It forms a potential community of vision. And if you are producing anything, whether it is a work of criticism or literature or music, you are at the same time conscious of or at least sensitive to the religious implications of what you are doing. You will think of it as an offering, and the value of what you are doing will depend on the acceptance of that. I don’t know that the activity of prayer really differs in quality from that, though it may in a different context.
Q: In the study of the Bible on the literary plateau, how does form criticism apply to scriptural studies?
FRYE: Well, it applies very relevantly in that it indicates the units out of which the Bible was put together. In trying to look into that, however superficially, I have been very struck with the way in which the elements explored by Form Criticism seem to be put together by the editors of the Bible in a way that makes, from one point of view, a complete unity and, from another point of view, a completely decentralized structure which has passed beyond the unity. I don’t think we would have ever got to this stage without the analysis of the various conventional form-structures which these critics have examined.
Q: How can we achieve peace in a world of conflicting ideologies?
FRYE: As I say, the deadlocks in the world today have been caused by conflicting ideologies. And the reason why ideologies conflict is that they have conflicting languages. If you use the language of creed or doctrine and say that there is a God, you have already suggested the possibility of saying there is no God, and you have already defined the people who are going to say that as enemies. The ideological approach either to religion or to politics seems to me to have burnt itself out. As I said in my paper, the work of the literary critic is to try and integrate the centrality and the relevance of what the creative imagination has to say to the world, because the creative imagination is always at peace. As Shelley said in his Defence of Poetry, the language of the imagination is always the language of love, and we have Paul’s authority for it that that language is going to last longer than most of our human communication. That is why in such a country as Canada, for example, the curious chaos that one sees in both its political and its economic structure doesn’t really matter so much. What you look for is culture, because that is what the people in the year 2300 are going to be concerned with: that is the only thing that they will care about. And culture, as I think of it, is the total production of the creative imagination. It has nothing to do with a social elitism—that is an ideological fantasy. It has to do with the attempt to see the life and culture around one with an eye that is not out to prove this, to rationalize that, and to make out a case for the other. In short, what I am concerned with, in connection with the creative imagination, is a model of the forms of charitable activity. If I didn’t think of it as charitable, of course, I would have no interest in it whatever.
Q: I read in an interview with you, where you were discussing the poet Blake, that he helped to consolidate some of your own views on religion. Could you say something about that?
FRYE: Well, Blake was the person who, of course, has really taught me everything I know. But apart from that, what struck me forcibly about his own religious views was, first of all, that they didn’t step on the toes of anybody else’s religious views. … [end of tape]