Conducted 27 November 1990
From “Interview with Carl Mollins,” Northrop Frye Newsletter, 4, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 1–8. Dated by Mollins’s prefatory remarks. Portions of the interview were reprinted as “Glimpses of a Boundless Mind” in Maclean’s, 104 (4 February 1991): 51. Carl Mollins, executive editor of Maclean’s, interviewed Frye in his Toronto home eight weeks before his death.
MOLLINS: In the preface to The Bush Garden (1971), you talk somewhat despairingly of Canada’s seeming to be on the verge of disintegration, but say that having multiple cultural identities is not necessarily irreconcilable with national unity. Do you feel more intensely now than you did twenty years ago that the country is in trouble as a unit?
FRYE: Well, I have said in another speech that if a sculptor were to make a statue of a patriotic Canadian, he would depict somebody holding his breath and crossing his fingers.1 In other words, there has never been a time when Canada has not thought in terms of disintegration. And why don’t I extend myself on this point? It’s quite complex. I think that Confederation was by no means an ignoble achievement. It was a remarkable achievement, but its great disadvantage was that it was culturally impoverished and it was treated largely as a British conquest in which the French and the indigenous people were sort of cute cultural variations on the pattern. And they made promises to the Indians, but it was subconsciously assumed that they would soon be extinct or assimilated anyway so it didn’t matter what was promised them. And, on that basis, of course, you can have only a very primitive culture.
I think of culture as having different areas of expression. In the first place, there is a life-style culture—the British have pubs and the French have bistros and the Germans have Bierstuben and so forth—and there are specific ways of eating and drinking and socializing, and making one community different from another. And then, secondly, there is a culture of a shared tradition, largely through language, and through an awareness of one’s history. Then, thirdly, there is culture in a more specific sense—the production of literature, painting, and films, and so forth. Now Canada had, after Confederation, no distinctive life style really. The French Canadians preserved some sense of shared heritage, but the creative part of culture was still impoverished and second-rate. I think that what happened after 1945, the end of the Second World War, was a growing awareness of the fact that Canada needed a kind of reconfederation on a better cultural basis. One reason for that was the immense increase in immigration into the urban centres as distinct from the rural ones. Another was the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, which secularized Quebec. And another was the growth of television and jet-plane travel and satellite communication, which made the immense geographical difficulties in Canada less obvious. I think I need to add, as part of that, that when Lenin organized the Russian revolution, he assumed that the sense of cultural identity was out of date and that it didn’t matter whether the Lithuanians were hitched to the Soviet Union or to Germany or by themselves, because everybody would pitch in to become the proletariat of a new civilization altogether. I think that Lenin confused the cultural identity of community with nationalism, and that is why, as cultural identities prove Lenin wrong one after the other and reassert themselves all over Europe, there goes along with that the increasing danger of nationalism revived. To some extent that’s happened in Canada, too.
MOLLINS: So Canada is just part of a larger recognition that nationalism is not enough, that cultural identity …?
FRYE: No, that nationalism is the parody of the reality of cultural identity. I was down in Moncton, New Brunswick, where I had all my elementary public school and high school. I was talking at the University of Moncton, and I said that if you say that a man is a New Brunswicker, that tells you nothing except that he lives in New Brunswick. But if you use words like “Maritimer” or “Acadian,” you are telling a great deal more about the historical heritage that he brings with him and the life style he belongs to, and so forth. Quebec feels the same need, certainly, but Quebec is a cultural revolution managed, and therefore bungled, by politicians.
MOLLINS: You have said that assimilating identity to unity leads to cultural nationalism, but assimilating unity to identity leads to provincial isolation or separatism [BG, iii; C, 414]. Now that suggests that the only answer, assuming that anyone wants to retain a nation called Canada, is to somehow assimilate the various identities across Canada into a unity. But what form would this take?
FRYE: Well, that’s what I meant by reconfederation. I think that the natural economic tendencies in the world are to unite and form bigger and bigger units. Canada is now in the middle of the world, with the United States on the south, the Soviet Union on the north, the Common Market on the east, and Japan, China, Korea on the west. Of those four powers, two—the Soviet Union and the Common Market—are trying to form what are essentially cultural units. That means that they are uniting economically but allowing each division to have its own autonomy culturally. Maggie Thatcher put herself in a rather isolated position by insisting that the two things are the same thing, that economic unity would lead to the dissolution of the distinctive British culture. I don’t think that’s true. And the same thing is working out for the Soviet Union in a much more unpredictable form.
MOLLINS: So that perhaps those who say that Canada ought to give up any attempt to achieve a national culture or political unity, and instead break the system down and rebuild it on the basis of an economy, would be going in the right direction? Or is it too late, do you think? Or does it matter?
FRYE: Well, I think that if I were living and I were saying this in Quebec, I would be a strong federalist, because I think that Quebec is a political unity and, therefore, a province like other provinces. On the other hand, I think that French-speaking Canada is a tremendous cultural force in its own right. And I think that a reunited Canada is the inevitable context for Quebec because of the tendency of the economy to unite.
MOLLINS: So perhaps there was some instinctive recognition of this in the government having set up this nonpolitical forum?
FRYE: You mean the Keith Spicer outfit.2 Yes, well, I think that is the job he’s been assigned to look into. To me, the impressive thing about Meech Lake was not that it failed—it was set up in such a way that it couldn’t possibly have succeeded—what was impressive was that it so nearly did succeed. The Québécois were told to interpret Meech Lake as the rejection of French Canada by English Canada. Actually, it was the exact opposite. It was an intense desire to keep French Canada within the Canadian unity. That was what was really impressive to me about Meech Lake.3
MOLLINS: Where does the artist, where does the writer come in on this?
FRYE: Well, culture, in the specific sense of the creative people, has something vegetable about it. It tends to decentralize and localize—in other words, identify with these cultural units of society. And if somebody in a post-Confederation period says, “Now we’re a new nation, namely Canada, and I’m going to be a Canadian and write Canadian poetry and a great Canadian novel,” what he’s going to produce is blither. What happens is that, whenever there’s a minority, the feeling of cultural identity grows. Oppress the blacks in nineteenth-century United States and they revolutionize music. You ignore the Eskimos and they turn out to be a nation of tremendous creative genius in sculpture and painting. And you treat the French Canadians as a minority and they produce a literature of great intensity and power. And then, finally, the last thing anybody would believe happens: English Canada comes to life and produces a specific culture that’s respected and studied and regarded with great admiration all over the world.
MOLLINS: Now how do you explain that? They are also behaving as a minority?
FRYE: They are a minority in their own context, which is a North American one. And because they feel that, it throws them back on the sense of cultural identity. The present feeling of cultural identity of English Canada is at the opposite extreme from the “Maple Leaf Forever” type of British Canada. You can’t get a culture out of that.
MOLLINS: So if you were a prophet—and I guess that, as a critic, you are into telling us or helping us to understand what is happening—where would you see Canada heading, and where would you like it to head? Do you think it is worth preserving, first of all?
FRYE: Oh, I do. I think it gives every part of Canada a context that they could not have in any other respect. And, being surrounded as it is with a great power like the United States, it has simply become what it was a century ago—a place for commodity products, with nothing left but beaver pelts and softwood forests and soldiers to fight in other people’s armies.
MOLLINS: And it is important to the world to have an alternative to what you have called “mercantilist whiggery”?
FRYE: Well, I think that Canada is a nation that has derived what profit it has derived largely from being exploited by others. I think Canada can do better than that.
MOLLINS: You were born in Quebec and raised in Moncton and lived briefly on the prairies, and yet your scholarship is without boundaries. Do you ever consider whether you would have done what you have done had you stayed at Oxford, for example, or had you been working at Princeton? Is there anything about your own experience and your own location that has made your work any different?
FRYE: Well, I have often thought of that. I’ve thought about it a great deal. I am convinced that if I had gone to Harvard or Princeton or Oxford or Chicago—mind you, I could have gone to all those places—what I would have produced would have been quite different in tone and in context. So, I became a Canadian scholar in the same way that Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Alice Munro have become Canadian writers—through not trying to be Canadians but simply writing about what they know.
MOLLINS: But there was nothing in particular in your experiences that made you think in the terms that you have, to discover or recognize what there is that is common to our literature and to our culture?
FRYE: Well, science and scholarship as such have no boundaries. I think the creative arts do have boundaries. You can’t take Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro and interchange them. They have to be where they are in order to be what they are. At the same time, creative culture is infinitely porous. It absorbs influences from all over the world. That’s what differentiates a genuine culture from nationalism. A few weeks ago, I was travelling on a train from Zagreb in Croatia to Ljubljana in Slovenia—the distance of about from here to Kingston—but when I got off the train I was in Slovenia, which speaks a different language from Croatia, has been a rather reluctant part of Yugoslavia, and before that was a much more reluctant part of Austro-Hungary. I thought, well, this is what a culture is—something that hangs on to its identity through centuries of being overlooked and discriminated against and infiltrated by foreign conquests and so forth. But why was I in Slovenia? Because the University of Ljubljana had decided to open a school of Canadian studies. So that’s it, you see: they are Slovenians and they hang on to that particular coherence that gives them their own social reality, but they are open to influences from all over the world, even Canada.
MOLLINS: Is that one of the languages that your Great Code is in?
FRYE: Well, it’s only been translated into what is called Serbo-Croatian, a kind of compromise language of the two biggest units.
MOLLINS: When I was at the University of Toronto in the early 1950s, there were you and Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan who were all concerned in the broadest sense with communication, and I have often wondered whether this was mutually stimulating, or whether it was coincidence?
FRYE: I don’t think it was coincidence, but it wasn’t mutually stimulating either. It’s very natural for a country with the physical difficulties of communication that Canada had fifty years ago to be passionately interested in the theory of communication. So it is not surprising that the three of us were all attracted to that same general theme. But we came from such different backgrounds and had such very different temperaments that we all worked independently of one another.
MOLLINS: Although I suppose McLuhan has certainly acknowledged his debt to Innis and to you, I think?
FRYE: Well to Innis, not to me [laughing]. I suspect a great deal of that—I think that’s something to give the critics to play with. Innis was a man who worked like a vacuum cleaner, picking up books everywhere, and he saw something very distinctive in McLuhan, and so he asked McLuhan for autographs, and they did exchange some correspondence. There was a bit of a mixture there. I think McLuhan was just a coming person and, with no special reputation at that time, was very flattered by this (as he should have been), and the result was that you get a rather tenuous Innis–McLuhan link. But I don’t really see a great deal of influence from Innis on McLuhan.
MOLLINS: There is something in each of you—the use of the aphorism, the cryptic utterance which compels a reader to dwell upon a sentence.
FRYE: It is true that both McLuhan and I are rather discontinuous, mosaic writers of very different kinds. It’s less true of Innis, although actually that book that Christian got out, The Idea File of Innis,4 does indicate that he thought aphoristically. That’s certainly true of me. I keep notebooks and write aphoristically, and ninety-five per cent of the work I do is in putting them out on the line, and then you have continuous rhythm.
MOLLINS: Is that a consequence of our “disintegrated culture”?
FRYE: I’m not quite sure what it is. Maybe it’s the result of living in a country with a railway where you have a lot of stops.
MOLLINS: If you were required to describe yourself in one word—on your passport, for example—are you a critic, a scholar, a teacher, a philosopher? In your own view, what is the most important thing that you are?
FRYE: I suppose I’m all those things. I don’t know if there really is a word for the kind of thing I am, although what I am is not all that uncommon. Newspapers often use the term “analyst.” I suppose “critic” comes closest to being what I am, although I am a critic who recognizes no boundaries between criticizing that particular novel and criticizing Meech Lake and the future of Canada.
MOLLINS: You still teach regularly?
FRYE: Yes. I should be teaching right now but I’ve had a bit of a setback in health, but I’m still teaching one course. It’s an undergraduate course—I’ve always preferred to teach undergraduates—symbolism and typology of the Bible.
MOLLINS: Is it of any importance which translation of the Bible is used, or is it significant that the King James Bible coincides roughly with one of the great periods that you have identified, namely, the early 1600s?
FRYE: I think it coincides in two ways. In the first place, it came at that tremendous period of Baroque brilliance, the period of Shakespeare and Donne and Spenser and the rest. The other is that the King James Bible of 1611 and the Shakespeare Folio of 1623 are both essentially written for the ear rather than for the eye. The King James Bible was appointed to be read in churches. That was the reason for translating it. It wasn’t important for people to read it at home, but the thing that was authorized about it was that it was the Bible to be read aloud in churches. The translators’ scholarship was often at fault, but their sense of the spoken word and the rhythm of the spoken word was pretty accurate. Naturally, so was Shakespeare’s, because everything he wrote had to be spoken by somebody else across the stage. Of course, since 1611 many more manuscripts have grown up with the tremendous advances in scholarly knowledge about what Hebrews and Greeks meant when they said what they said. That’s why there has been the steady series of revised versions. But the 1611 held its ground as a work of literature. It really got in people’s minds and stayed there.
MOLLINS: You say in the introduction to Words with Power—I’ll just look at the words here …
FRYE: I haven’t seen that book myself yet, incidentally.
MOLLINS: Oh, really? You say, “It was a disappointment to find this book beginning to sound like an initial (or a genuine) farewell tour” [xii]. You mean, I take it, on this subject.
FRYE: Well, yes. Remember how Adelina Patti, the nineteenth-century operatic singer, used to make a career of farewell tours. [laughter]