Filmed 1968
An interview transcribed from the soundtrack of the film Exchange #2 produced by the Metropolitan Educational Television Association of Toronto, and filmed by the York University Television Centre in 1968. From the transcription by Robert D. Denham in WGS, 41–50, where the date is given and title assigned. The interviewers were Roby Kidd, chair of the Department of Adult Education at OISE, 1966–82, and D.M. Smyth, dean of Atkinson College, the adult education college of York University, Toronto, 1964–70.
KIDD: Critics are seldom popular. I expect you remember that Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “Nature, when she invented and manufactured and patented her authors, contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.”1 But Canada has at least one critic who has won and deserved the admiration of writers and readers and students of all ages. Northrop Frye, you yourself have been an author and an editor and a theologian and a college administrator and a social reformer. One time—in the Massey Lectures—you introduced yourself by saying, “For the past twenty-five years I have been teaching and studying English literature” [EI, 1; EICT, 437]. I’ve always felt that it was because you continued to study as well as teach that you’ve had the influence you’ve had on students and on those who read you.
FRYE: Well, I think that’s true, because study and teaching are really two sides of the same coin. The teacher who doesn’t keep up with the changes in his subject, which are, of course, always revolutionary changes in every discipline, is going to become a pretty humdrum teacher. And a person who is locked into his subject and is not communicating it to other people verbally and practically is going to disappear into a kind of vacuum.
KIDD: It must be a real struggle to keep up with your own work. How do you find time for the demands on you as an editor and writer, as well as a teacher?
FRYE: It’s very difficult to say. My approach to time is a little furtive. It’s like a squirrel burying nuts. I find that odd moments—and there are a surprising number of odd moments during the day—are times when one can do bits and pieces of writing. I think there is some kind of recording machine that just keeps turning around all the time. One can work in bits and pieces of time, I think.
KIDD: Have you always been able to do this? Or did you learn how to do it?
FRYE: I think I learned how to do it, but I wasn’t altogether conscious of doing so. It was just something forced on me by the general situation. In teaching, I did definitely make up my mind in the beginning that I would lecture without notes, that the only notes I would take would be after the lecture and not before.
SMYTH: So you forced yourself to learn to teach by this process?
FRYE: I forced myself to learn how to teach what I felt was my own way, that is, making it something in which ideas would emerge either from me or from the students.
KIDD: You could have had several careers, of course. How did you happen to choose teaching as your main effort?
FRYE: I’m not sure I did choose it. I think it chose me. If I had chosen, I would have perhaps gone into a number of other things that I would have been less fitted for. I think it’s very good for people, especially young people, that their power of choice is so limited.
KIDD: That’s not an entirely conventional notion these days.
FRYE: No, but there is such a thing as a vocation, I think.
SMYTH: I wonder if I might turn to the question of how one learns to criticize. It seems to me that in the world we live in we criticize rather freely, but we don’t often do it intelligently. How does one learn to criticize intelligently?
FRYE: One of the first things you do is forget about all of the traditional metaphors about the critic. The critic is supposed to be the judge of literature. He’s supposed to sit up there, and people like Shakespeare and Milton are way down there in the prisoner’s box. And finally you put your black hat on and make your judgment. I think the sooner one forgets about this judicial aspect of criticism the better. I’ve never tried to judge authors. I’ve only tried to understand them.
SMYTH: So learning how to criticize is really the process of trying to understand what a person has to say?
FRYE: Yes, and trying to understand more generally what it is that literature is trying to say to the world. The poet himself doesn’t know this.
KIDD: Then to the extent that this is true, the critic really is a teacher. The processes are very similar.
FRYE: Oh, yes, they are. I think that with literature they are really closer together than they are in most disciplines.
SMYTH: Do you think that the critic is really conscious of his role in the areas of popular culture and political events? I’m thinking of the people who comment on political events—the pundits. Is it sufficient for them to learn how to criticize by just criticizing?
FRYE: Well, of course, they have a special problem. Their criticism is always connected with crisis. That is, there is always a specific event which has happened now and they have to pronounce on it now. In my type of criticism, even if I’m dealing with a current novel or poem, I’m dealing with it against the permanent background of the whole tradition and heritage of literature.
KIDD: It’s very interesting about you that you have strong views about present social developments and events. You’ve taken part in things. And yet some conventional notion of you might be that you were sitting back as a dispassionate observer only. What’s the relevance of your interest in literature with the present? How is it relevant?
FRYE: In the first place, I would say that any sane person has to conduct his life with a mixture of detachment and engagement. If he’s wholly engaged, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. If he’s wholly detached, he’s not there. But the subject I am concerned with is different from the sciences in that science, it seems to me, tries to avoid being controversial because it’s always appealing to verification, whereas literature, religion, philosophy, political science, and so on are the discussable subjects. They are the subjects where there are no fixed standards of verification. And they are also the subjects of what the existential people call concern. It’s because I am professionally engaged with the study of concern in society that I reflect some of that concern myself.
KIDD: So that nothing might be more relevant to the present situation of change than a disciplined approach to something that requires judgment?
FRYE: Yes, and that has a long memory.
SMYTH: What about other critics who are less disciplined? I’m thinking of Mailer.
FRYE: But Mailer is not a critic. He’s a novelist. He has a creative mind. When he speaks in the role of the critic, he reflects the confusions that a person who is not really a critic gets into. I think that we’ve found over and over again in the history of literature that some of the world’s greatest poets have also been the most confused people in their reaction to the current political scene. The reason is that they are concerned with so fundamentally different a job that they really shouldn’t be asked to pronounce in these areas.
KIDD: If you look at the social morality of the great poets, you do find them in all shades of the political spectrum.
FRYE: Yes. When I was a student during the Depression, there was a great deal of Marxist controversy on the university campus. I rather distrusted Marxism because it was so obvious that literature was talking about something else. It was quite possible for the people I most admired, like T.S. Eliot and Yeats and Pound, to be people of the most preposterous social views.
KIDD: Do you find that the poetry of today illuminates the present condition we’re in?
FRYE: Poetry is always extremely illuminating of the present situation to the critic who knows something about the context of poetry and who doesn’t confuse it with discursive writing, who knows how to allow for its imaginative structure.
KIDD: One of the notions that interests some of us very much these days is that of continuous learning—the lifelong, integrated experience of growth and development. If this is a real need, we will have to begin to think of the development of a curriculum over a time span—not just in pieces. I suppose that in mathematics, to some extent, and in the field of literature there is the first consistent approach to the longitudinal curriculum or to what some people call the spiral curriculum. I’d be interested in your views about this and how you would see this developing in English literature from early stages to later stages.
FRYE: How it’s developing in English literature? Or do you mean as an educational process in the university?
KIDD: I mean both. Is there anything in the notion, first of all, that we ought to be seeing the curriculum in its long dimensions as well as what might be done in a given week or month? And, second, how do you go about developing an expanding notion of English literature, starting in the early ages and going on?
FRYE: Oh, yes, I see. Well, it seems to me obvious that education is a womb-to-tomb activity, and that the person who isn’t educating himself is obviously dead. If one is forced, whether he wants to or not, to keep educating himself as long as he’s alive, then obviously it’s an advantage for him to be educating himself in a certain direction. There is something, I think, repetitive about literature, because literature doesn’t develop or progress towards the future in the way that a science does. It fixes itself on the classic, which always remains the classic. Consequently, what you get in the study of literature is a repeated series of understandings. That is, the understanding that you get of Macbeth in grade 9 or 10 is clearly not what you’d get in your fifties.
KIDD: In the first case, it could be melodrama, even, and action. And later on it might be an understanding of character, which could only come from someone who’d experienced these very things.
FRYE: And who had a larger background of experience to fit it into.
KIDD: Is it true that you’ve said that you would start with the Bible in a curriculum on English literature?
FRYE: Yes, it is true. I would say that literature really inherits a mythology, that it really is concerned with certain shaping structures or forms which are myths and which descend from myths. By “myth” I mean something that gives shape to a story, a fiction. I don’t mean something that is not true. And that’s why I would speak of Biblical mythology. The Bible and the Classical myths are the basis of our literary heritage in that sense. I think that there has been a tendency to introduce the study of mythology around grade 9 in our schools, which is a good point to introduce it. But, of course, the place to start reading and listening to mythical stories in the Classics and the Bible is much closer to grade 1 or 2, or in the home before that.
KIDD: Do you think the sequences need to be ordered? Or can they be left to chance or to the genius of the teacher or the interests and concerns of the students?
FRYE: I think there’s always a danger in overplanning any curriculum and not leaving room for something spontaneous to emerge. At the same time, it’s obvious that there does need to be a considerable amount of guidance for people even up to the end of their first degree in university. With all of the good will in the world, a student needs a good deal of guiding and directing in his reading. But, of course, the older and more mature one is the more random one’s reading can be.
SMYTH: I wonder if I might pose a question in a different but related field. Given the enormously increasing amount of information which is coming to each individual from the moment of birth, what kinds of tools—intellectual tools—do you think individuals need to develop in our society that perhaps were not necessary in other kinds of societies? I’m thinking, for instance, of the ancient tools of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. How do we develop these tools in relation to the new media?
FRYE: I think that the techniques in the study of literature are fairly conservative ones. I don’t see them as being very radically altered by the new kinds of media. It seems to me there has to be periodically a kind of re-emphasizing of the traditional reading and writing functions. That is, things like Dick-and-Jane readers with their Gertrude Stein repetitiveness and their tendency to a kind of phony, pumped-up emotionalism, like “See the ball” and “Run, Jim, run,” and so forth, train you very expertly not to read a book but to read the advertising in the subways, because it’s geared exactly to that kind of rhetoric. It seems to me that a training in rhetoric which, among other things, explains to the student something about the rhetorical devices of the mass media—of advertising, of propaganda and newspapers, and so on—would have this reemphasizing effect.
SMYTH: Do you think that in the field of education our approach to rhetoric or rhetorical skills is sufficiently sophisticated for people to understand the subtleties of modern forms of communication?
FRYE: They could be sophisticated and subtle enough—yes. I would strongly agree with Marshall McLuhan, who is saying very different things from what a lot of people think he’s saying, when he says that one of the central duties of education is to provide “civil defence against media fallout.” That’s his phrase.2
KIDD: Do you find theatre and cinema useful in relation to courses in literature?
Frye: There is no question about the film, because that is a literary art in itself, and it has a power of expressing symbolism that I think is unmatched by any other form in the history of mankind.
SMYTH: Even poetry?
FRYE: Even poetry, yes, because of the combination of the visual and audible symbol.
KIDD: There’s much talk these days about creativity, about imagination. What is the place of the imagination in a curriculum of a university?
FRYE: The basis of it is the recognition of the fact that man lives in two worlds. There’s the world that’s around him, the objective world, and there’s the world that he’s trying to build. The imagination is the building power. It’s the power that’s most directly concerned with man’s trying to build the kind of world that he wants to live in. The function of training in literature is to define something of the scope of the imagination, the poet being the person professionally concerned with the imaginative model, with the ideal at one pole and irony at the other.
KIDD: Do you see imagination being fostered in other disciplines as well, though not necessarily in the same way?
FRYE: I think that imagination comes into all the disciplines. I doubt very much that there’s any psychological difference between the artist and the scientist. But literature, it seems to me, has a peculiar relevance to the role of the imagination.
SMYTH: We’ve talked of power and creativity, and I wonder if we can help students to learn about power and creativity in more fruitful ways than we’re doing now. I think, for instance, of the curriculum of the medieval university, which was substantially different in many ways from the modern curriculum. Given the change we’re experiencing in this century, I wonder whether we might teach people about creativity and power in different ways.
FRYE: There are two things that occur to me in that connection. In the first place, it seems to me obvious that the two instruments man has for transforming his environment are words and numbers, so that literature and mathematics become pretty central disciplines—the one in the subjects of concern, the other in the sciences. You spoke of the medieval university, and, of course, the seven liberal arts were divided on precisely that basis. You had the trivium, which were the literary arts, and the quadrivium, which were the mathematical ones. At the same time, it seems to me that a student learns most about creativity when his attention is least focused on it. There is a danger in making the student too self-conscious about his own creative processes.
KIDD: Like learning about brotherhood, even. If you’re so conscious about your relationship with someone, this may even lead to an estrangement.
FRYE: Yes, there is a law of diminishing returns there. I notice it with students who have got themselves into the position of affecting a kind of contempt for facts, or what they call “this information thing,” and studying principles instead. But, of course, principles are simply ways of ordering facts. An appetite for facts is a sign of educational good digestion. If you despise facts, you have educational dyspepsia. Keeping the student’s mind directed outward is the important thing.
KIDD: You mentioned how you started in your classroom in the early days. Have you changed your practice as a teacher very much?
FRYE: I haven’t changed my practice fundamentally, except that I have got more cautious and prudent with advancing years. When I think of some of the things I got away with as a young man, I shudder.
SMYTH: What about your learning patterns? I understand that as we grow older we lose so many neurons every day. I wonder how you’ve been able to continue gaining the power to learn.
FRYE: Well, I’m not sure that I have. But, of course, all disciplines, as I said earlier, change very radically in the course of time, and you have to keep up with those changes. One of the reasons for the university’s obsession with the productive scholar is that the productive scholar has solved the problem of retraining. He retrains himself by the books he writes. I don’t know that he gets any more neurons, but he probably spreads them around in larger quantities.
SMYTH: Well, I think that what you have to have is the stimulating learning environment that the scholar has. This is what saves him in the final analysis.
KIDD: Yes, and this is what we must provide for all people now. But how do we get this environment now, not just for professors but for everyone?
SMYTH: One of the concerns I have is about this notion of retraining, as if the mind of a person was like an old tire that you could retread. I wonder if we don’t really have to start with thinking about the minds of young people and how we should be approaching them and then how we should be developing them for a lifetime of learning. Have we made an error in saying that the prime candidate for education is the child rather than the adult?
FRYE: Certainly there’s no question of the fact that education is equally relevant to a person at all stages of his life. For that reason, I think that the university is bound to change its relation to the community. It can’t go on being that place which you walk into and walk out of again. It’s got to be in the middle of the community. People have got to keep coming back to it constantly, dropping in and out of it, and not simply coming to alumni reunions once every fifteen years with the expression of regret that now they don’t seem to use their minds any more.
KIDD: What kind of mechanism do you think might be used to change the university from its present form into this new kind of form?
FRYE: I have no definite answer to that, except I think the growth of leisure time and the fact that what a person earns his living at gets more and more to be a small part of his life, rather than the whole of his life, are bound to suggest mechanisms of various kinds. That is, there is bound to be an enormously increased production of what we would now think of as leisure-time activities. And those will all involve the educational institutions—not only the university, but the church and the galleries and the museums and so on.
SMYTH: But isn’t this one of the great areas of weakness, especially in North America? In an article I read recently, David Riesman pointed out that there is not one centre for the study of leisure in North America.
FRYE: I’m not surprised. I think that, again, it’s so big a problem that people don’t dare look it in the face.