Broadcast 14 March 1967
From the tape in the CBC Radio Archives, reference no. 670314-2, transcribed by Monika Lee. This conversation with Professor Murray MacQuarrie on the subject of “style and image in the modern century” was broadcast on the CBC program Ideas, 14 March 1967, as part of a series on style. MacQuarrie was a member of the English department of the University of Waterloo. The immediate context for the discussion includes the Centennial of Canada’s Confederation; the ideas that Frye had been developing in his recent Whidden lectures at McMaster University (delivered in mid-January and aired over the CBC in the six weeks preceding this interview; subsequently published as The Modern Century); and the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in China.
MACQUARRIE: Mr. Frye, you’ve just completed a series of six lectures in which you’ve been defining the difference between a closed mythology and an open mythology. A closed mythology, you said, is one which fills in all of the assumptions for the person who believes in that mythology, whereas an open mythology provides the individual with options, with various ways in which he can imagine himself in relation to the total society, in relation to religion, morality, the future, politics, his total world view, if you like. You implied—because these lectures were originally given in connection with the Centennial—that Canada’s particular destiny and glory was that we have the conditions in this country, more fortunately perhaps than other countries, for the arrival at an open mythology. * * * I wonder if we can expect this to survive, in the context of (a) different sections of Western culture, which are perhaps seeking after darker and more collective gods, and, (b), on the other hand, this great religion of progress which is coming out of Asia?
FRYE: It seems to me that the reason for the necessity of an open mythology is the same as the necessity for world peace, because the closed mythology is always, in the long run, closed for war. It’s got to have an enemy, and if there isn’t an enemy there, it’s got to invent one. With Marxist mythologies, you must have the inner enemy like Trotsky in Russia or the present civil war in China. You couldn’t have medieval civilization, ultimately, without a crusade, without cleaning up on the nasty old Saracens. The breakdown of an open mythology into a number of closed mythologies is really the spreading of a kind of sectarianism in society, which breaks down the whole cultural pattern. The necessity for an open mythology is not that it’s a luxury, but that you cannot have world peace without having what Tennyson called the “Parliament of man”—and Tennyson was not talking about the United Nations.1
MACQUARRIE: One wonders sometimes whether the Western imagination has not failed in some particular way. There is a persistent desire for a closed mythology, for the return to what we now regard as the security of the Middle Ages, or any arbitrary point in history which different artists in our own time feel to have provided a comforting mythology. We turn to the church the way Eliot, for instance, became royalist and Anglo-Catholic. We wonder if it’s a sign of health that we can dispense with closed mythologies or whether it’s a sign of ill health, perhaps, that we want to return to them. What prospects does the open mythology afford people who feel their loneliness and anxiety in the face of what change and time are bringing?
FRYE: I think that the natural drift in all societies at any period in history is towards a closed mythology. People want to be, like the people in Eliot’s early Preludes, assured of certain certainties, and they also find it cosier to have an enemy, either intellectual or actual. Consequently, the preservation of an open society is not an easy thing. It’s a constant and organized struggle. It does give, to the artist and to the educator, a certain mission or function in society, because there are the two kinds of conflict. There are the conflicts of closed mythologies with each other, which produce only the kind of conflict that has to be done all over again, or there is the conflict between the open and the closed mythology, which is what Blake meant by “mental fight,”2 the work of the imagination that is really fighting for the freedom and the sanity of mankind.
[MacQuarrie notes that in Canada we have just emerged from a period of closed mythology. Canada’s Protestant mythology had modulated into a myth of progress—the notion that we are proceeding towards a plateau in which we will all be happy and well fed, with a helicopter in every garage, but “It’s very difficult for people to believe that any more.” He asks Frye if we can be content with a relatively passive experience of history to replace the notion of progress?]
FRYE: The trouble with a belief in progress is that it’s a donkey’s carrot theory. It’s one thing to have hope. We’re told in the New Testament that hope is one of the great virtues. At the same time, we are also warned in the New Testament not to take thought for the morrow.3 The progressive ideal is something that drags us on into a hypothetical future and it’s always strongest during a war. Everybody says to us, as soon as a war begins, “Now, as soon as this war is over, then we’re going to abolish poverty and do all sorts of incredible things,” but the state of mind which this engenders is the state of mind of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. When your consciousness is thrown forward into the future, all that happens is that you drain the present moment of all significance and all meaning. It’s one thing to believe in God, but nobody can believe in Godot. He isn’t there. He will never come. I would say that the alternative to this kind of hope is a genuine hope, which I should locate in the present rather than in the future, and which takes a form of realization rather than an expectation.
[MacQuarrie notes that this is not an easy thing for North Americans, who as middle-class people in the ruins of a Protestant culture have always taken thought for the morrow. As Calvinists we sought to lay up treasures in heaven. Now we have many anxieties about such matters as the population explosion, technology, and pollution: for instance, Canadians are said to be the world’s largest per capita purchasers of life insurance. McQuarrie suggests that such tension and anxiety may be congenital, and may have brought about some of our courage and decency as well as less desirable qualities.]
FRYE: Ah yes, but that kind of anxiety is the anxiety that seeks to be overcome in the present moment. The kind of religion which says that your real life begins as soon as your life is over is not a type of religion that has very much appeal today. The important thing is not whether you live after death but whether you ever come alive during life. The sense of overcoming anxiety by what I call realization, letting your light shine—the ability of the characters in Waiting for Godot to move, and tell Godot to go to the devil, which is where he is anyway, and start to live—I think that that is the only way in which anxiety can be overcome. It can never be overcome as long as you say, As soon as this is out of the way, then we will do all sorts of things.
[MacQuarrie remarks that in the East people took this anxiety, combined it with Western eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political theory, and turned it into a religion of progress, in which present pleasure is sacrificed for the future well-being of humanity. For example, in China at the current time, it appears that the people winning out are those around Mao who believe in present suffering for the benefit of future paradise. He comments that it will be hard for the West to arrive at an open mythology when there is powerful closed mythology operating in the rest of the world.]
FRYE: I think that that’s true. The closed mythology always seems to be much more efficient and effective. That was true even of the Nazi closed myth, but I suspect that what Communism, where it’s established, really depends on is a number of very sincere and dedicated Communists. If you talked to them, they would say that what gave their lives meaning was not the notion that they would be making society better for their great grandchildren, but that they were right now engaged in history and in a real historical process, that they were busy building socialism or transforming their society. Before any religious movement—and this really is, in this context, a religious movement—before any religious movement can actually achieve any really great dignity and influence and transforming power in society, it has to overcome this sense of expectation. We feel that Russian Communism is more mature than Chinese Communism because it has outgrown the notion that Communism is going to be brought about all over the world next Tuesday. They have survived the disappointment of the immediate world-transforming revolution and have lived in the process. Christianity, similarly, had to outgrow the notion that the end of the world was going to come in the next week or so, and after it had outgrown it, it settled down to being a way of life, rather than a way of postponing life.
MACQUARRIE: It seems to me, Mr. Frye, that what we feel about the future is going to be reflected in our cultural experiences in a very intimate way. We look to our writers or playwrights or film directors for imaginative models of society, either as an ideal or as a present reality, and I wonder what kind of imaginative models we’re getting. Are we getting the kind of comprehensive and encyclopedic view that we get in a work like The Divine Comedy, are we getting fragmented ones, are we getting exclusively infernos like 1984 or Brave New World, or is there some possibility of the Paradiso emerging from the modern imaginative experience?
FRYE: One difficulty that we are in, in the twentieth century, is that it is an ironic age, and that we derive our sense of vision from contemporary artists negatively. It’s the great achievement of Beckett and William Golding and the great film makers, Pinter and so on, to put in front of us a hideous or grotesque world, and we react against that with our sense of normality, which we are assumed to have. In general, it seems to me that the opposite of draining your present moment of significance by throwing it on the future is to fill one’s present life with the past. Education has an imaginatively transforming power of this kind, and I should put in the centre of the whole educational process the whole operation that is described as “dialogue” in the current highbrow slang. If a person is a Protestant, say, his natural tendency is to think of Catholics as those people over there, or for them both to think of Communists, who don’t believe in a God at all, as those people over there. The kind of human contact which enables people with differing versions of an open mythology to come together, to leave without having really changed their beliefs, but having gained a new insight into what they actually do believe by a recognition of the intellectual honesty and human decency of the person they’re talking to: it seems to me that these are the positive ways in which one continues to expand and to clarify one’s own necessarily very limited vision. The closed myth, in short, defines the enemy, and the open myth defines the friend or the neighbour.
MACQUARRIE: We seem to respect in this culture, however, art which has a message for us. We seem to demand, perhaps more than anything, that a film or a poem or a novel will have some kind of paraphrasable philosophical content. It must have a message, it must give us a moral view of the world in some way, and again this seems to reflect our anxiety. * * *
FRYE: Yes, well, this is how the demand works: for the artist to translate what he has to say into the clichés and stock responses that people already have. It seems to me that genuine art always appeals on its own terms. But, of course, genuine art is not always a fantasy, and one doesn’t necessarily have to develop guilt feelings about entering a world of escape, which is what bedevils a great deal of our response to the arts. One shouldn’t underestimate the very positive and transforming power of an ironic vision. I’m told that one of the most effective performances of Waiting for Godot anywhere was at the San Quentin prison in San Francisco. The audience were prisoners, and so they knew what that play was all about with an intensity that might not have been available to people who imagined that they were not being imprisoned.
MACQUARRIE: You spoke of dialogue as providing an image of the open society and the open mythology, and an image of hope. Here I go again perhaps being the critical and negative voice: doesn’t the dialogue between religious denominations mean that there are no longer any significant religious issues?
FRYE: It means that significant religious issues are approached in a different way, not as dogmatic structures, which, by their very nature, are sealed off against all other structures, but as being derived from what I have been calling “the Parliament of man,” the area of free discussion. The fact about modern times is that the imagination, the sense of what I have been calling a mythology, is the primary thing which man engages in society with, and his beliefs and his convictions, the axioms of his conduct and so on, are subordinated to that and are liberalized and made more flexible by it.
MACQUARRIE: I suppose emotionally I’m a Tory in that I think that the sense of identity and sense of completeness you derive from existing within a dogmatic structure are a more benevolent and therapeutic thing than the experience of simply existing in an open field of dialogue—shall we say in a world now where there is nothing to do but communicate and where the content of communication is largely disappearing. That’s a reactionary view: I suppose like many critics and academics the reactionism is an occupational hazard, isn’t it?
FRYE: Yes. Well, it’s partly that this McLuhan world, where the medium is the message, means that, when communication forms a total environment, nothing is really being communicated. What there is is really just an ambience of noise. Out of that noise a single, genuine effort at communication—that is, something intelligible being said by A to B—cuts across with a kind of vividness which is perhaps unparalleled in history. The role of genuine communication becomes much more obvious and immediate once this tremendous roaring environment of false communication has been set up by the mass media. When I speak of an open mythology, I am not saying that we’ve entered a civilization which is completely relative and where there can be no standards and no doctrines and no real beliefs or convictions any more. That seems to me to be nonsense. That’s the exact opposite of what I’m talking about. There is no difference between an open mythology and a closed one except in the difference that society makes of it. The real way to strengthen one’s beliefs and convictions and to make the axioms of one’s belief not merely a professed creed, but the real principles underlying one’s conduct, is to regard them as under the judgment of dialogue and “the Parliament of man,” as still something that can always be liberalized, made flexible, and filled with the love and respect for other people which the open-sidedness of the myth makes possible.