Conducted 9 January 1990
From “Northrop FRYE: A Conversation,” The World: Journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association, 4 (July–August 1990): 5–6. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Interviewer Gary Burrill, a former teacher of sociology and Maritime studies, was at that time a staff writer for the World and a student at Harvard Divinity School; he subsequently became a minister of the United Church of Canada serving in Nova Scotia. He interviewed Frye in his Victoria College office. Some parts of the article are discursive and have been given in summary. The first quoted answer, after considerable introductory matter, follows Burrill’s allusion to the Bible as being neither fact nor fiction, but incorporating the kind of truth that belongs to myth.
FRYE: It’s rather similar to the kind of truth that one gets through the study of literature. “Myth” is from the Greek work mythos, which means a story or a plot. If you say the Bible is history, you’re opening up a terrific can of worms, because the Bible is a mixture of things which are obviously not historical, things which have a kernel of history to them, completely rewritten, and so forth. But if you say the Bible tells a story, nobody can disagree with you. Sometimes you read a book to get information about something that’s outside the book, and that is the kind of thing you normally apply the word “truth” to. But there are all kinds of ways of approximating truth besides doing that.
BURRILL: And what might some of these be, in the Bible?
FRYE: Well, one has to approach the Bible in terms of its own language, and its own language is a poetic language; it’s a language of myth and of metaphor. Most of our creeds and doctrines are in propositional and logical language, which is totally inappropriate to the Bible.
[Burrill alludes to Frye’s favourite definition of faith as “the substance of the hoped for and the evidence of the unseen” (Hebrews 11:1)—a formulation that “throws the emphasis back on personal experience.”]
BURRILL: Is this the kind of idea you have in mind when you write that the Bible is also a “violently partisan” book, one that can even be understood as a special form of “propaganda” [GC, 40/58]?
FRYE: Yes. Because it’s founded on the poetic, which is neither true nor false, but says, “Now let’s look at this and see what’s in it for us in the way of experience.”
[Burrill summarizes Frye’s view of the Bible as a revolutionary book that has often been kidnapped into ascendant ideologies. He alludes to the apparent strangeness of the fact that this should be the view of one brought up in the Methodist tradition. But Frye’s course of life shows that we are wrong to think that the road to where we want to go leads as far away as possible from the point where we began.]
FRYE: I had always distinguished between the actual, authentic religious education that I had had as a child, and the literalist anxieties connected with it. I think that was an unconscious result of my mother’s teaching. Mother had a hard streak of common sense in her and she thought she ought to believe a lot of things which, with a child’s insight and intuition, I realized she didn’t believe at all.
[He remembers the conservatism of Methodist Moncton in the 1920s.]
FRYE: The whole denatured world of playing with cards without suits, of soft drinks instead of liquor and so forth—I always knew that that was stupid. And the literalism of “If a guy had died, he’d have to go to either heaven or hell,” and so forth … somehow or other I’d acquired some kind of intuition that that was horseshit, too.
[Burrill alludes to Frye’s rejection of fundamentalist teachings during his high-school years.]
FRYE: I realized that if I started revolting against my background, then I would just go into an endless detour of objections and negative statements and so forth, and that I would finally come back, unconsciously, to the place where I started. So I tried to find a more open way of looking at what I’d been brought up to.
BURRILL: Would that have been because you felt this particular Methodist background was who you really were, and that by rebelling in that way it would be the structure of your own consciousness you’d have been rebelling against?
FRYE: Yes. And I didn’t want to come back unconsciously. I didn’t want to go around this long detour. I wanted to arrive consciously at the real centre of where I’d started from.
BURRILL: In the sense that you wanted to take the part of your upbringing that you intuitively did believe, and remake the whole on the basis of this kernel?
FRYE: Yes, I think that’s it: the part of my training that I realized to be authentic—I saw that it would always be a part of my own conditioning. And to revolt against your own conditioning is the start of civil war against yourself. And civil war against yourself impoverishes both sides.