Recorded 18 September 1990
From “Northrop Frye in Conversation,” Republika, 46, no. 11–12 (November–December 1990): 48–54. Translated from Serbo-Croatian by Igor Djordjevic. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1990. The interview was conducted during Frye’s visit to Zagreb, 16–19 September 1990, when he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Zagreb. The interviewers were Ivo Vidan, professor of English at the University of Zagreb, Janja Ciglar-Žanić, professor of English specializing in Canadian Literature, currently chair of the Department of English Literature at the University of Zagreb, and theatrologist Giga Graĉan. The interview was translated from English into Serbo-Croatian with the assistance of Giga Graĉan, currently the president of the Association of Croatian Literary Translators; it is reprinted in the second edition of the Serbo-Croatian translation of AC (also the work of Graĉan) discussed in no. 50, above. At the time of the interview Yugoslavia still existed, though racked by ethnic tensions; Republika had been founded in 1989 to advocate human rights, democracy, and the avoidance of armed struggle.
VIDAN: Professor Frye, today, so many years after publishing your first books, which sent your work in a certain direction, I would be interested to know how you personally view your approach in relation to other approaches of the mid-twentieth century and of the subsequent decades?
FRYE: The answer is not simple, because after 1957, the year when the Anatomy of Criticism was published, there was a great explosion of critical disciplines; that is to say, of approaches and methods. I think that they are basically of two types: one emphasizes narrative characteristics, like Bakhtin with dialogue and the various narrative schools in the United States, and the other is a development more in the direction of rhetorical and analytical techniques (e.g., Derrida and the deconstructionists). I have always been interested in studying literary criticism as what I call an autonomous discipline. By that I don’t mean that I consider criticism separate from anything else, and certainly not from literature; I am referring to studying it by means of its own historical methods. It seems to me that in the real or affected disagreements about critical methods that we see in today’s journals there is a fundamental consensus about the importance of literature and its social function. I still insist on that importance and on that fundamental consensus.
VIDAN: It seems to me that, on the one hand, your approach is not completely consistent with the criticism later termed Structuralist. On the other hand, you yourself make a distinction in some of your texts between your approach and the so-called mythical or mythological criticism. Yet it still belongs in some ways to those schools. Do you consider this true, or do you think that your position is in fact at a certain distance both from Structuralism and from the mythical approach?
FRYE: No, I don’t think at all that my position is that distant from them. The word “Structuralism” was a word that I was not aware of before I wrote the Anatomy. Later, they told me that I had in fact written a work about Structuralism. Ten years before that I did not know even of the notion of “myth criticism,” and they later told me that I had written a book on the topic: a study of William Blake. I am a little sceptical of these attempts to reduce critical approaches to schools. That is one way to classify them to make things easier for students, but it sheds a very weak light on their real nature. I do not want to be classified merely as a myth critic in the sense that suggests a study only of comparative mythology, or comparative literature, or comparative religion. In all my texts I insist that literary characters are structurally derived from the gods of mythology, as well as on the historical origin of literature in mythology, which has always been my central interest.
VIDAN: In fact, the link with Structuralism—if one exists, and you would agree, it seems, that it does exist—is more interesting to me at this moment in the history of criticism. Maybe not so much regarding Structuralism as a group of terminological systems, but rather in the sense of a classification (and you yourself several times used that word). From that point of view, a few days ago a connection occurred to me with the neo-Aristotelian approach of the Chicago school in the ’50s—of Crane and Olson—and the way in which phenomena blend into one another, the way in which the material is assembled by a kind of induction. But the question, if you will, relates to the critic’s optical apparatus with which he classifies, arranges, and expresses some sort of coherent interconnection with the material he is studying.
FRYE: Two approaches exist there. I was writing the Anatomy while Crane was in Toronto. I listened to his lectures and we talked a lot.1 I sent him my early essays that became a part of the Anatomy and he told me that they did not seem at all difficult to him. At that time there was a great rivalry between people like those in the Chicago school and those like me. In the works of the Chicago critics from that period I found many related things. They took the tenets of Formalist criticism in another context. While I was writing the Anatomy, the important thing for me was that the meaning of literature is derived largely from context. But the context can be both internal and external. The internal context had been very thoroughly explored by the so-called New Critics, analytical and rhetorical critics. However, it is as though the external context had been the subject of critics who separated it entirely out of literature, and studied literature as a branch of history or of all kinds of philosophical disciplines. I believed that there was a middle area, the context of a literary work that is at the same time inside literature. Many misunderstood this as an attempt to construct a system; I was not trying to build a system, but rather to establish a context for an individual work that would bring that work closer to other works.
VIDAN: I would gladly connect what you just said with what I myself have been thinking, that you have also in a way laid the foundation for the later development of your method in other areas. Fairly recently I read Hayden White’s Metahistory and immediately remembered the Anatomy. Although the Anatomy is concerned with literature in the internal sense, its method was obviously very fruitful in historiography, where the categories differ to a large extent, but where the method of thinking and finding interconnections, in fact the creation of a universe of discourse, is to a large extent analogous to it.
FRYE: Well, this is certainly true about Hayden White—after all, he did write a text about how the first chapter of the Anatomy influenced his historiographic work.2 There is no question, therefore, that it was useful for him. I do not know how widely it has been accepted by other historians, because, of course, I do not know that field so well.
CIGLAR-ŽANIĆ: Let’s stay a moment with the same basic question. Hayden White talks, for example, about Fredric Jameson’s study The Political Unconscious as a specific yet discernible adoption/adaptation of your Anatomy of Criticism. He particularly points to Jameson’s reliance on your theory of symbols, but also on its—as he puts it—“standing on its own two feet”: its roots in material reality, its transformation, something very similar to Marx’s transformation of the Hegelian dialectic. When one looks at Jameson’s theory of narrativity in The Political Unconscious from that perspective, it does indeed appear as a conversion of your theory, although Jameson recognizes—even explicitly emphasizes—your interest in the question of the community, your understanding of literature and religion as essentially collective social endeavours. I am curious, how do you view such an adoption/adaptation of your theory and hermeneutic by explicitly Marxist or neo-Marxist theorists?
FRYE: This is precisely what I had in mind when I said earlier that a fundamental consensus does exist among critics about the purpose or function of criticism as a discipline. I consider very wrong the kind of reading of my works, the ones Frederic Jameson would never indulge in, according to which I am working out some kind of construction which is outside of the social world and is moreover completely opposed to that world. Jameson knows very well that I have a social perspective, even though I resist the ideological tendencies of Marxism and other critical schools of thought that are apt sooner or later to adopt something from a kind of reductionism, and thus to convert literature into a branch of something else.
CIGLAR-ÃANIĆ: Now I would like to ask you something on a different topic, with which I am particularly concerned at the moment and on which you have done much work: I mean romance. I myself have tried to apply your theory of romance to the interpretation of Shakespeare’s romances. You have been considered the most prominent theorist of the romantic imagination after Coleridge; you have been called the knight-protector of romance, its Prospero. It is evident that your literary and theoretical insights distinctively privilege romance, and that in your conception of literature romance is one of the central, if not the very central mythos. Why is this?
FRYE: You remember that in the first chapter of the Anatomy I suggested that the mythological gods, who are by definition able to do whatever they wish, were the model for the heroes of romance, who are able to do what normal people cannot and whose actions constantly resemble the actions of the gods even though they are human beings in human situations. From there we move to the titanic characters of exaggerated dimensions like Lear or Macbeth, who nevertheless act in a human milieu. And thence, perhaps, to people like Leopold Bloom, or Prince Myshkin, or Emma Bovary, whose archetypal meaning is equal but in a different social context. It was particularly important for me that a critic should not consider romance, due to its peculiar historical position, an infantile form of literature that people ought to outgrow as soon as possible. While I was working on the Anatomy the great success of Tolkien’s books convinced me that people would not do this after all. That is one of the reasons why I devoted so much space to romance. Of course, I wrote with equal interest about, let’s say, realistic satire, but that had less influence.
CIGLAR-ŽANIĆ: In its original shape, so to speak, in a specific historical period, romance had the status of a high mimetic mode. In its later history romance suffered a considerable downward displacement, a move from a high to a low mimetic mode. Today it has been adopted as a generic model of types of trivial literature: stories about the Wild West, crime stories, TV melodramas—you talk about this yourself—and similar subliterary genres. In your opinion, what was the main reason for, or what circumstances or conditions of the social context could have influenced, such a downward displacement of romance? Can you predict a cyclical return, a return of romance to its original state in the high mimetic mode?
FRYE: I’ve already mentioned Tolkien, but there is also the great popularity of science fiction. In the ’50s I saw that science fiction would be one of the main forms of popular romance, and that was what happened. From a kind of technological romance of the type written by Jules Verne and others, it transformed itself into a philosophical form of the type practised by Lucian. I think that all the main literary genres take on popular formulaic forms that are easy to read and to sell. For example, the pastoral is becoming in the United States—or rather, it has already become, a generation ago—the story of the Wild West that is concerned with the simplified world of animals, etc., which has always been a part of the pastoral tradition. I think that the place of such romance in Walter Scott is often obscured by the fact that people do not realize how his works are formulaic, and that he developed a formulaic type that was perfectly suited to the Italian opera of the nineteenth century,3 but which did not have much influence on the other types of mimetic narrative.
CIGLAR-ŽANIĆ: One more question related to romance. Towards the end of his career, Shakespeare changed dramatic genres and more conspicuously turned to romance. How do you explain this?
FRYE: I think that Shakespeare always instinctively stayed with the popular theatre. He always avoided court theatre—or, if he did not avoid it, at least he did not nurture it in the way that, for example, Ben Jonson did. I think that a part of his instinct for the popular audience led him to get increasingly closer to the type of drama that is popular not in the sense that it gives the audience what it expects, but popular in the sense of simplicity, the wellspring of the theatric experience. Enchanted islands, Calibans, sprites like Ariel, etc.—all of these are the absolute foundation of the dramatic experience. I once said, I think it was forty or fifty years ago, that if the archaeologists ever unearth a civilization in which drama flowered, maybe they won’t find any plays like Oedipus or Othello in it, but there will almost certainly be plays like Pericles or The Winter’s Tale.4
VIDAN: A few years ago I had a lot of fun at a waterpolo match; I sat beside a great expert, but the man who sat beside him on the other side kept explaining the course of the game to him. I would not like to find myself in the same position in relation to you, but I would like to tell you something that I discovered on the various levels of your opus …. Only very recently did it become clear to me that the four essays that make up the Anatomy of Criticism in fact talk about four aspects of the same thing and that one should consider all four together. And it is perhaps precisely this, from the viewpoint of its influence on criticism, that is one of the most productive things in the Anatomy—that coexistence, the simultaneity of aspects. Or, something that I myself always strive to achieve—the unity of narrative progression and stasis, what you, I think, call the thematic, the dianoia. This became abundantly clear to me after I read a short text about Blake which you contributed to a collection about myth.5But in your book about the Bible, The Great Code, I was particularly fascinated by the polysemy of words. I think that the wealth that you reveal in some words is exceptionally inspiring, but it reminds me at the same time of approaches that are very far from yours. For example, what is today called poststructuralism, deconstruction, in fact is very close to what you do, but, naturally, without that systematic overview of the field that is your characteristic. You already said something about this at the beginning of this conversation, but have you perhaps in more recent times taken a look at the state of the battlefield?
FRYE: I’m afraid that the answer to your last question is in fact “no.” I have not dealt with that in detail. I read Derrida with great admiration. There is no question in my mind about his quality as a thinker or his critical strength. It seems to me that deconstruction as a movement is more easily exhausted simply because of its tendency to disintegrate the analytical approach. But when Derrida talks about the various meanings of the word pharmakos, the scapegoat, in Plato, for example, I am unreservedly on his side, because I know that it is precisely this that a critic ought to do with a text.6 The same thing happens when in Wallace Stevens I discover the line “the imperfect is our paradise”—here I immediately understand that a paradox is involved between the word “imperfect” in the negative sense, in the sense of “something less than perfect,” and “imperfect” in the sense of openness, of continuity.7 That kind of polysemy, I think, is imbedded in the whole conception of figurative language. The critic cannot deal with literature unless he has at least some idea about the different viewpoints that can be gathered around any critical theme, exemplified, among other ways, by the different referential contexts of the same word.
VIDAN: But still, it seems to me that the majority of your texts that I have read rarely deal with questions of discourse—in other words, with the insistence on the value of the word, and its part in the tone of the utterance. The grand scheme, mutual links, the establishment of context—yes; but there is no mention of the individuality of words that in fact creates the relation to the object of which one speaks, that creates tone. Did you consider this as something secondary, something that belongs to rhetoric? It seems to me, therefore, that here you did not enter into an important area—you, who have rarely left out any important areas.
FRYE: Well, I tend to leave out what I think other critics do better, or for which they have a greater interest.
VIDAN: A moment ago I was referring to the internal approach, as in the New Critics, and even in stylistic criticism like that of Spitzer.8 You did not concern yourself with these things, so one gets the impression that for a critic what is important is the broad scheme that puts a text in a certain sequence. For example, a moment ago you mentioned the pharmakos: you are primarily interested in discovering that type in various works, and that is important. But the role of the pharmakos in a given text is less important for you.
FRYE: I think that this is due to the fact that linguistic and semiotic techniques developed to a large extent after I had already shaped my approach. It also has to do with my belief that there are others who are better prepared for that work. I think that the road forks in two directions: in the one that leads toward linguistic and semiotic analysis, the differences between the genres are faint, and it is very difficult to distinguish a critical work from a literary, philosophical, or historical one, because all of these are purely structures of words. I took the other path and thought about the practical, common-sense distinction between Shelley and Keats, who are poets but not philosophers, and Kant and Hegel, who are philosophers but not poets. This was a conscious act on my part to avoid entering an area for which I was very poorly prepared. But the fact that I have left it out to a certain extent from my texts reveals my trust in the critics who did concern themselves with it, rather than my holding something against them or my denial of their work.
CIGLAR-ŽANIĆ: As you just said, a man writes most often about what he believes he writes well—and you write brilliantly about a great number of things; you open new perspectives and points of view. Of course, a man writes most often about what particularly attracts him for some reason. Speaking of the writers from the English literary tradition about whom you write most often, it seems that here one can discern your own version of the English literary canon. Your attention has been particularly arrested by three English poets about whom you speak with great affinity, even passion, and about whose works you offer, one would say, almost visionary insights. I am referring to William Blake, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. Could you tell us something more specific about that special English canon of yours?
FRYE: It is difficult to explain Shakespeare beyond the fact that he is hard to avoid for anyone who deals with English literature. I lived in my cultural environment—that is to say, among nonconformist Protestants in Canada—and just when I should have entered the conventional phase of rebellion and rejection, I encountered Blake and discovered that he found in such an environment more imaginative sense than I could have dreamed possible. My environment and my contact with it became completely clear to me, and Blake made of me a person who will maybe have something to say, perhaps what makes him different from others. That is how I got deeply immersed in the study of Blake. In the meantime I tried to teach students about Milton, so that the two of them formed the whole of one interest. I remember that as a student I had to write a seminar paper on Blake’s poem about Milton. In those days I had the very bad habit of writing my papers the night before I had to deliver them; at three-thirty in the morning things really started to turn around for me, and I found myself in a completely new world.
GRAĈAN: While we are on the subject of Shakespeare, the following question seems natural: in your opinion, how does the literary criticism on the Bard relate to live theatrical practice?
FRYE: At the time when I began to be interested in Shakespeare’s plays, poetry was pretty much buried in books. There was a chasm between the works of experts and theatrical performances. An acting company would take the Globe edition and simply throw out what they didn’t understand. The result would be more or less Shakespeare, but not what an expert would call a genuine text. Since then both sides have got better. Actors are becoming more intelligent and they really want to know what words mean. And the experts have realized that Shakespeare’s texts are a lot less monolithic, a lot less bookish, than they thought them to be, so that there are, let’s say, Quarto and Folio editions—thus, thanks to the flexibility of the text, there has been a rapprochement between what the experts have talked about and what the performers have done.
GRAĈAN: Can you be more specific about the Canadian practice of performing Shakespeare?
FRYE: The main venue for Shakespeare performances is Stratford, Ontario. I have often given lectures there about his plays, and encountered very lively reactions by the actors. It seems that my comments were genuinely helpful to them. That is how I once again came to the conclusion that the theoretical and the practical approaches to Shakespeare complement each other very well.
CIGLAR-ŽANIĆ: Just one more short question. Someone once said that the best thing about advice is that one does not have to take it. However, I would be very grateful for any advice you may have about how to teach English literature. Professor Frye, what would you, therefore, recommend to those who teach literature?
FRYE: Well, at the ungrateful age of seventy-nine I still hold a seminar on the mythology of the Bible. I once used to say, what was certainly true then but is today somewhat less so, that I do not believe in a single word I say until I try it out on a group of students. I have always considered that my teaching and my writing are interconnected and that teaching is a sufficiently dramatic performance to be considered an independent literary form. And because the essay is also a literary genre, those two forms are a kind of double prism—bifocal, so to speak.
VIDAN: I was very excited when I discovered some years ago that only you and one other great critic have dealt with a concept and a form that modern criticism virtually has not even touched—Menippean satire. Both you and Bakhtin, in totally different contexts of thought, have called our attention to that peculiar idea that is so helpful when dealing with the literature of the twentieth century.9 It is so exciting to see two spirits who do not even know each other, but who illuminate the horizon for the rest of us. But that is perhaps one of the great pleasures that comes from reading great criticism. Well, if I may say so, in the name of very many readers, thank you for it.