Conducted 19 December 1989
From University of Toronto Bulletin, 26 February 1990, 11. Dated by an entry in Frye’s datebook for 1989. The interviewer was Peter O’Brien. John Ayre’s Northrop FRYE: A Biography (Toronto: Random House, 1989), had recently been published.
O’BRIEN: What is your response to the biography?
FRYE: I suppose you always have to read a biography of yourself as though it were about somebody else … It’s very painstaking … I think it’s quite a respectable book and it seems to have done quite well.
O’BRIEN: What about all the idiosyncratic, personal details in it?
FRYE: There’s not much you can do about them if you’re going to write a biography. I suppose some of them have to go in.
O’BRIEN: What are you working on now?
FRYE: I’m in the last stages of a sequel to The Great Code, a sequel that I promised in the introduction to that book. I feel I’m pretty well through with it. There may be some minor revisions … there’s still the footnotes. I have a reputation for not taking footnotes very seriously. John Ayre says that’s an irritating habit of mine. I’m collecting material for the footnotes now.
O’BRIEN: Is it possible to produce a book like that and abandon footnotes altogether?
FRYE: No, not altogether. If you put the footnotes all at the end of the book you don’t have to worry about the bloody things until you get to page proofs … doing footnotes is just donkey work.
O’BRIEN: Is there any book or writer that you regret not having worked on?
FRYE: I don’t know that there is. I have written at least essays on most of the people that really interested me. If I were starting over again I would perhaps do more work on the Old and Middle English period. That’s a period that’s always fascinated me. I can’t say that there’s a great deal I’ve left untouched that I very much wanted to do, except perhaps Dante.
O’BRIEN: You’re known to have somewhat ambiguous enthusiasm for Canadian literature. What are your current thoughts?
FRYE: I’m enthusiastic about it in its totality. Since about 1960 it has been incredible how much has come out of Canada and how much of it has been respected and admired all over the world. I would have thought that French Canadian literature would have been appealing to other countries, but back in 1960 I would have said that English Canadian literature didn’t have much of a future.
O’BRIEN: Which Canadian writers are you most enthusiastic about?
FRYE: The obvious people: Peggy Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro, Timothy Findlay, Mordecai Richler, … especially Alice Munro, who seems to me a twentieth-century Jane Austen. In Quebec literature, Marie-Claire Blais, Yves Thériault. Of the younger generation: Barry Callaghan, Roo Borson, Peter Van Toorn.
O’BRIEN: Do you think Canadian writers still have a “garrison mentality” in which they isolate themselves from the cold, barren wilderness and from each other?
FRYE: “Garrison mentality” was a phrase I invented to cover the aftereffects of not having had an eighteenth century, and the sort of smalltown pressures of the kind that have been described in nineteenth-century Canadian literature. Canada now of course is the most highly urbanized country in the world. The garrison mentality has been replaced by the condominium mentality, which means that writers have to fight just as hard against an anti-cultural environment, but in a different context: I mean a somewhat introverted big-city living that makes the kind of human conflict that writers need more difficult than ever to identify.
O’BRIEN: What are your thoughts on recent critical methods, such as deconstruction?
FRYE: I’ve always been trying to put things together rather than take them apart. I think that what I’ve seen over the course of my literary career is a number of analytic and to some extent disintegrating techniques of criticism, one after the other. I think you have it that way because each one tends to run out of material sooner or later. I think the deconstructionist movement has done some remarkable work. I think it’s also coming close to the end of its act. There’s a limit to what you can do with those logical supplement techniques.
O’Brien: What do you think the next stage of literary criticism might be?
FRYE: I would like to see a more comprehensive view among critics. I’d like to feel that they weren’t really fudging what seems to me a very central part of their work, and avoiding the overview that I’ve been struggling for and that some of the mythological people have been struggling for as well. Critics find it much easier if they can get hold of an ideology and twist everything into that shape. It’s relatively easy to be a Marxist or a Freudian or a Jungian critic.
Among the first-rate critics there’s an underlying consensus which the [other] critics are unwilling to face. I’d have to recite a long book to give this consensus in detail, but I keep reading critiques and keep seeing a kind of coincidence of perspective which the individual critics seem to be carefully keeping out. It’s a deliberate self-limiting perspective. From the point of view of prudence and caution I suppose they’re right but I like taking risks myself.
O’BRIEN: Has U of T treated you well?
FRYE: Oh yes. Both Victoria and Massey are very congenial environments.
O’BRIEN: Do you come to the office every day?
FRYE: Not every day. In the last year or so, with the new marriage and new family and so forth, I’ve come less regularly than I used to, but I still keep in as close touch as I can.
O’Brien: Is there another book in the works after the second volume of The Great Code comes out?
FRYE: There may be but it’s not in the works yet. I wrote The Great Code, which was the Bible and literature, and this would be a follow-up on that. That’s a subject that is in itself inexhaustible. I could go on to study things like Utopian literature in relation to the Bible’s New Jerusalem, but that’s in the future.
O’BRIEN: What about your legendary talent for typing? What if you weren’t such a great typist?
FRYE: I would view with more alarm the prospect of rewriting and revising. I never compose on a typewriter. I start out with handwritten copies and when they get so written-over that I can hardly read them myself, I type them out; then when that gets so written-over I can hardly make out the typing, I retype it. After about five or six rewritings it begins to look the way it’s going to look. Because I can type fast, retyping a page doesn’t have any terrors for me.
O’BRIEN: Do you use a computer?
FRYE: The mechanical age stopped with the Selectric typewriter, as far as I’m concerned.
O’BRIEN: Is there anything in the biography that you regret not seeing? Any nugget that was missed?
FRYE: There are always things to add. I have a great admiration for people who write biographies because I never know how they can tell that they’re finished. The last thing I would want to do is badger John Ayre by suggesting things that he’s left out. The only point about his book is that it is of necessity unfinished because I’m still alive. Perhaps the last couple of years have had incidents that he would have put in if I had been dead. But I can’t help that.
O’BRIEN: Presumably you have a few more books in you yet.
FRYE: I don’t know. That’s “on the knees of the gods.” That’s a Homeric phrase.1