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 Canada 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?
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.
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.