Conducted 6 February 1990
From “An Interview with Northrop Frye,” a typescript in NFF, 1991, box 38, file 6. First published in Northrop Frye Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 8–13. Graduate student Marylou Miner, who went on to teach at Nipissing University College in North Bay, Ontario, interviewed Frye in his office at Victoria College in connection with her thesis on the function of literature in society and theories of the imagination. In her introduction Miner explained that “I began by briefly introducing myself and explaining my reason for requesting the interview. I said that in my thesis work I wanted to study the function of literature in society in connection with the development of secondary school English curricula. In this regard I wanted to discuss two main topics: one was the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the other was Frye’s work, in particular, his various thoughts on the sciences and the humanities (especially as presented in The Stubborn Structure).”
MINER: I am interested in the “moral vision” in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, particularly in his later lyrics. My first question is to ask you how you see Stevens using Biblical imagery and Biblical allusion in his poems?
FRYE: It is not easy to say because Wallace Stevens is not like Eliot, a deliberately allusive poet. In fact, he is a poet who avoids allusion, so while I have no doubt that the image in the Palm at the End of the Mind is a garden of Eden allusion, he is careful not to rub it in or to make it obvious that it is. And the same thing with the cloak in The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour. All these things have very distant Biblical allusions. But it is exposing oneself, perhaps, to a type of secondary criticism to say that they are there.
MINER: It has been suggested that Stevens uses allusion in a variety of ways, that he alludes to himself, and that there is a lot of Keats in Stevens. Do you see some of the Keatsian connections coming from Biblical sources?
FRYE: Ultimately they do. The Bible is a framework of Western poetry. But, of course, Keats also tended to avoid direct allusion. He would be utterly horrified with people like Milton, Blake, and Browning who were constantly echoing the Bible. That’s one reason why Keats found Milton a rather hostile influence on him and his solution was to turn to Classical allusion, which gave him the same kind of thing but in a different idiom. Stevens just doesn’t like alluding at all. He likes to pretend, at any rate, that his images are autonomous.
MINER: We know that poets “lie” and that they can lie in their prose statements as well. When Stevens says that he wasn’t influenced by anyone do you believe him?
FRYE: No. It is impossible for a poet to write poetry without being totally influenced by the whole tradition of poetry. I can believe him when he says that he doesn’t see any kind of connection with Eliot, that he thinks he does the opposite thing from Eliot. But I don’t believe him when he says he’s free of all influence. That’s nonsense.
MINER: The second topic that I would like to discuss with you is your distinction between the sciences and the humanities: your distinction between the levels of thinking, reasoning, and imagination employed in these two different areas. I see a kind of paradox in your interpretation of their similarities and differences. Would you clarify this for me?
FRYE: It is clear that there are two aspects to the world. There is the purely external and objective aspect which the scientist studies, and there is the emotionally involved area or rather the personally involved universe which is more particularly the habitation of the poet. That is, there is the universe where the quantitative and the measurable take the lead, and with that goes a certain impersonality. Then there is the universe where categories like the beautiful, and things like a sense of humour and so forth, have a function. Psychologically the poet and the scientist will work very similarly. They have to work by imagination and intuition, obviously. But the scientist would have to go on to a kind of impersonal verification of what he is saying, which the poet doesn’t need to do. The important thing to remember is that this personally involving imaginative universe, which is another aspect, of course, of the same world which the scientist studies, is not a subjective one. You can’t line them up along the subjective and the objective. There is no such thing as the subject. There is only the historically and socially conditioned individual. And this only comes at the end of a cultural tradition. One thing which is subjective is the dream, and Freud felt that the dream and the myth were the same thing, which is nonsense. Jung took a step further when he talked about a collective unconscious, but Plato said that art was a dream for awakened minds.1 In other words, it’s a collective consciousness. I think that there are two kinds of minds; one is ideological and the other is genuinely imaginative, but that’s another story.
MINER: You talk about the myth as being the underlying framework of all of literature.
FRYE: Yes, the myth being the narrative with a shape.
MINER: How do you align that with any kind of moral vision or moral purpose behind literature? Or is there one?
FRYE: I don’t know about purpose. I rather hold with Kant’s view in The Critique of Judgment that beauty has a lot to do with purposiveness without purpose.2 That is, the snowflake is beautiful; it looks as though it may have been designed by an intelligent creator, but we’ll never arrive at a perspective where that is satisfactory to us. That is to say, it looks purposive and leave it alone. I think that the moral function of the artist is a variable one. The poet’s power of communication exists on two levels. He addresses his own time and he speaks with the moral accent of that particular generation. Shakespeare, for example, spoke of the mystique of the Tudor monarchy behind him in his history plays. But then there is a great mystery about how poets communicate across many centuries of time and space and cultural context. There you have to have something which is on a different level than the ideological one. There is the conditioning which the poet had from his own time. It is impossible to study a major poet on the level of Shakespeare and Dante without realizing that our views of them and why they are great would have been totally unintelligible either to them or to their contemporaries.
MINER: You talk about the distinction between concern and detachment in terms of the sciences and the humanities, and that raises some confusion in the minds of students (of all ages). Would you clarify those two terms for me?
FRYE: Detachment is one of the rewards of being a conscious being: you can detach yourself from a situation and look at it with enough objectivity to see whether you are acting out of an hysterical stampede or whether you are displaying a conscious attitude towards it. The important thing is that detachment is not at all the same thing as withdrawal. You cannot withdraw from a social situation anyway. But detachment is the essential quality of a concerned being.
MINER: So this is where you link concern and detachment?
FRYE: Yes.
MINER: The terms “engagement” and “detachment”—where do they differ and where do they connect?
FRYE: Engagement is the first decision taken after the detached view of the situation. If you don’t take a detached view, then engagement is simply hysteria, getting on the bandwagon. Of course, that is often trumpeted as a virtue by people who are in a hurry to get you on their bandwagon. And they talk about the virtues of engagement in itself. But the old liberal principle of John Stuart Mill is that you have to permit freedom of thought because it is the only way to eliminate the hysterical or unthought-out liberty of action. Otherwise there is mob rule.
MINER: Do you see any situation where censorship of the arts is required or would you suggest a totally liberal approach to even the popular culture of our times?
FRYE: I draw the line against what is usually called hate literature, that is, something which deliberately churns up an hysterical hatred of a minority group. I think that there is a case for censorship there. Otherwise, censorship is such a self-defeating thing and it is based on a contempt for other peoples’ vision. “I want this play banned because I know it can’t do me any harm, but there are all those people over there who may be corrupted in their morals if they see it.” It is that element of contempt which is so wrong about censorship.
MINER: I would like to come back to Stevens for a minute. My concern is with your challenge of continuing to prove the value of literature in society and I like your comment about the fact that literature is not essential for the survival of society but that society cannot survive without literature [sic]. I’m suggesting that Wallace Stevens is one of those pivotal poets in the twentieth century who displays the kind of “moral vision” that perhaps can address some of the social concerns you raise in your books.
FRYE: Well, I find myself continually quoting Wallace Stevens. In fact, when The Great Code came out I was interviewed by Australian television, and they asked me why I quoted Stevens so often.3 I don’t know; it’s just that he happens to say the thing that I want to say at that point. In spite of that idiotic collapse on his deathbed where he went into his fold, I think he is what I would call an intensely Protestant poet. Like Emily Dickinson, he had a faith that he wanted to fight with and not knuckle down under.
MINER: Are you thinking of the comments in Peter Brazeau’s Parts of a World about his conversion to Catholicism, which his daughter denies?4
FRYE: Yes, that’s right.
MINER: Do you see a development in his poetry from his early Sunday Morning to a poem you have already mentioned, The Palm at the End of the Mind, either in spirituality or in any kind of secular moral vision?
FRYE: There is a kind of sensuousness about the Harmonium poems that gradually turns into something more abstract and austere as he goes on. That doesn’t mean that he gets more didactic; it just means that he seems to be more interested in form than in colour.
MINER: Is it possible to suggest a kind of didactic aestheticism in the later Wallace Stevens?
FRYE: I think if we start with a kind of assumption that poetry should be either didactic or aesthetic, that it should be either a spokesman for ideological concerns or it should be art for art’s sake, then we start with nonsense. All those either/or oppositions are false and you have to get beyond them before you can get to any kind of intelligible position in criticism at all. You can’t have an art of pure poetry and an art of the state. You can’t have a poetry that is purely a didactic spokesman of ideological values—you can but it will be in the ash can in ten years.
MINER: Would you expand further upon the role of aesthetics in poetry? In your writings, aesthetics is part of the detachment phase, the objective phase of criticism. And I’m wondering if there is, as there often seems to be with you, a paradoxical reversal whereby aesthetics is very much an engaged, concerned feature of literature as well.
FRYE: Aesthetics to me doesn’t mean a withdrawal from social concerns. It cannot possibly mean that. The whole association of aesthetics with beauty, for example, seems to me a fake criticism because “beauty” turns out to be the most heavily conditioned of all ideological terms. It is what we like at present. I feel that poetry is not a decorative object. It is a social force, but it is not a simple social force. It is a social force with powers and dimensions of communication that ideological statements and ordinary rhetoric don’t provide.
MINER: And so the talk of your disciples, or future critics, is to try to determine what precisely that social force is and how it can be conveyed through the study of literature?
FRYE: You have to begin to distinguish the rhetoric of ideological language from imaginative language, which is the poetic force.
MINER: You have spoken to so many audiences, but those of us who are English teachers appreciate the fact that you have addressed us so often as one of your primary audiences. Considering all the messages and advice that you have given in the past, what would you say to us now, in the light of changing educational policies, about our role and function as teachers?
FRYE: Your role hasn’t changed. It is the same thing I have been saying for the past fifty years. I don’t think that one syllable of all the trends from Dick and Jane to Effective Communication changes anything. I think all of that is an expression of North American anti-intellectualism. The humanists have been fighting a rearguard action to the point of being lost and we have been doing that for centuries.
MINER: Some call you a twentieth-century Matthew Arnold. Do you like that comparison?
FRYE: Except that Matthew Arnold had yellow streaks in him which prevented him from being a proper liberal at times. It’s the streak of cowardice in Arnold that seems to make him a flawed liberal from my point of view.
MINER: You said that your advice to English teachers would be what it has always been. Have you essentially said all you want to say about the role and value of literature or is there still more to be said?
FRYE: There is more to be said and one says things as well as one can and hopes that next time one will say it better.
MINER: It is hard to imagine Northrop Frye saying it any better. Do you see an evolution in your own vision? Some critics see a change in your perspective from a dichotomized one to a unified one, from one which oscillates between engagement and detachment to one which enjoys a more synthesized relationship.
FRYE: I have always said that. I have never thought of man as going into the locker room first and then going out to play the game. It’s one and the same thing.
MINER: So, when you have spoken of it [engagement and detachment] earlier as a separate process, there has been a paradoxical intention in your statements.
FRYE: They can be distinguished, but they always have to be essential to one another in a Hegelian dialectic where every notion incorporates its opposite but has to negate its negation.