Conducted 19 December 1968–9 July 1969
Based on the binder entitled “Originals—Interview of Northrop Frye” in the Library of the CRTC in Ottawa, call no. PN85.C35 1968/69. For Frye’s involvement with the CRTC, see Introduction, xxxviii–xli. The binder contains transcriptions from taped interviews Frye had with André Martin and Rodrigue Chiasson of this department: one on 9 July 1969, which is placed first in the binder but has been put in chronological order here; one on 19 December 1968, which occupies sections 2–5 of the binder; and one whose date is blank but which probably occurred in late May or early June 1969 and is placed here between the other two. Also in the CRTC Library is a binder entitled “Conversations about Canadian Fundamentals—Cathy Richards,” call no. PN85.C353 1971, containing extracts from the interviews arranged under headings. I am indebted to Robert D. Denham and his student Kelsey Quillen for the initial production of this material. In the interests of clarity and continuity, it has been edited rather more than most of the interviews; the note gives details.1
[The conversation begins with an allusion to separatism in Canada, Frye pointing out that all parts of Canada are separatist and that the East–West cohesion of the country is balanced by a North–South pull towards the States.]
MARTIN: Dans votre réflection sur la culture, quelle part jouent les outils?
FRYE: Technology? Well, first of all, the means of communication are physical, and the way the imaginative life developed in this country around the railway, bridges, and roads is truly extraordinary I think.
MARTIN: Pensez-vous qu’il soit possible de créer une culture canadienne, originale, avec des outils aussi anciens que le journal, le livre, la photo-graphie, de vieux outils, de vieilles techniques?
FRYE: This is the Americanising of Canada, but it is what Canada has been living with.
CHIASSON: Fernand Cadieux, a friend of ours, has been telling André that Canadian culture cannot start with the classical notion of culture.2
FRYE: Why not?
MARTIN: À cause des anciennes technologies …
FRYE: Because of the base of classical culture, which is old technology—the book, print, and so on?
CHIASSON: He says that every young French Canadian starting out to write a novel wants to write a French novel, an American novel, an English novel.
FRYE: Yes, there is that problem. But it doesn’t extend to the point of making a Canadian culture impossible, because all modern culture has that problem. You notice how even in the U.S., culture tends to break down into different regions. The kind of literature written around the state of Mississippi, for example, is a whole literature in itself. It’s marketed in New York, but it resists the pull of New York.
CHIASSON: I think perhaps what André was saying is related to something you’ve said in your lecture about Canada’s having developed in a single century from a prenational to a postnational country.3 There may be a connection between this and the possibility of identifiably Canadian cultural expression.
FRYE: Yes, I see; but to move from prenational to postnational means to move from one kind of tribal culture to another. You never have in Canada the pattern of the large expanse of country with the capital city in the middle, like London or Paris. That doesn’t exist in Canadian life; it never has.
CHIASSON: But to return to the earlier question, it is impossible to have a classical notion of culture for Canada because the technologies are too old for Canadian use. That is, we are really in an electronic rather than a literary mode.
FRYE: Of course, I don’t take that view of the book or of literature.
CHIASSON: Would it be advisable to reinforce the capital city of a country as a tool?
FRYE: It’s developing in this direction, it has to. Nothing is less likely geographically or economically than that Ottawa should become a genuine capital, but the communication is happening. But you have a curious kind of intellectual capital here; it’s a capital in a rather different way from the way in which London or Paris is. It’s almost entirely dependent upon communication rather than on marketing or any of the older geographic or economic factors that filled up the big cities.
CHIASSON: There is a problem because of the number of messages arriving in the capital and the government’s inablity to process them all.
FRYE: Yes, but that’s a danger that can only be met by developing a communications base—there’s no other way.
MARTIN: Quebec has two capitals—Quebec and Radio Canada.4
CHIASSON: How could we open the door to the role of Canadian radio and television in the development and dissemination of Canadian culture? It’s the problem of the creation of prototypes.
FRYE: You’ve really got a problem there!
[Martin contrasts the “stereotypes” which are the product of homogeneous mass production and distribution with the “prototypes” which are available through the new technology.]
FRYE: By prototype, I suspect you mean what I mean by archetype: I also distinguish the archetype in literature, which is a repeating unit of literary expression, from a stereotype, which is the same thing in a passive and commercialized environment.5
CHIASSON: André says that the series Seaway on CBC had no Canadian content because it’s stereotyped from the Americans.6
FRYE: The question of Canadian content is a very difficult one to start with, particularly if you are only going to measure it quantitatively, fifty-five per cent or whatever it is.7 I don’t see how you can get very far with that.
[Martin wonders whether the best kind of Canadian content wouldn’t be the use of new technologies before other countries. He gives the example of Candid Eye, a Canadian prototype which was the first example of “le cinéma de vérité.”8]
FRYE: It’s a new art but it’s built in Canada on a very old thing. “Cinéma vérité” is the twentieth-century form of the-watching-of-the-garrison, the-watching-out-in-the-forest.
Have you studied some of the Canadian paintings in the National Gallery by Tom Thomson and Emily Carr? Tom Thomson was a canoeist and was drowned on a canoe trip by himself. If you look at his pictures, so often there seems to be no point of focus, or the point of focus seems to be behind the picture: your eye is carried around the bend, it’s a long-sighted perspective. It’s the same with Emily Carr, who was always probing into the forest.
[The group takes up the idea of a “canoeist” quality to Canadian culture, Martin associating it with new computer tools.]
MARTIN: Est-ce Dr. Frye a fait du canoë?
FRYE: Yes, I have, I know the kind of experience it is—not that I was very good at it.
MARTIN: Avez-vous été photographié en canoë?
FRYE: No, I have not.
CHIASSON: Is it possible to plan and help the development of culture or must we wait?
FRYE: That’s what I’ve been thinking about and that’s exactly what I’m here for, I suppose. I don’t know whether one can plan so much as create the conditions under which native energy can be released; that is, on this side here, a great wave is breaking in that’s mostly the Americanising of Canada, the opening up of the Canadian market, a passive, receptive market; and at the same time there are things going on here. It’s just a matter of keeping doors open so that they have a chance to emerge.
CHIASSON: I’m asking myself the question whether the predominantly American fare that Canadians ingest continuously through radio and television doesn’t occupy too much of the Canadian mental space. In that case energies may not be released in cultural areas, they may be released in other areas. Perhaps they will not be expressed visually in terms of electronic communications and so on: maybe we have no future there.
FRYE: That’s exactly what things like the NFB and CRTC are set up to fight. Canadians are in an unusually passive role vis-à-vis the Americans. The Americans are taking it all in on the subjective and receptive level; nevertheless, they are also producing it themselves, while Canada is simply a place that it’s shot at. They are receiving it and yet they don’t feel a part of it.
CHIASSON: That’s why, André says, he places so much importance on new tools. We were talking a while ago about cables; it’s quite significant that although cable carries the same type of signals as through the air, broadcasting cable was essentially a new tool—not completely new, but a hybrid. It was developed fortunately to a greater extent in Canada than in the States. Many engineers who went to the latest cable conference in the U.S. said that Canadian cable technology was more advanced than American and the use of cable was proportionately greater.
The latest policy announcement of the FCC said that they are starting to curb the development of cable.9 If there is a curb of cable in the States, there may be a chance for Canada to go through the interstice.
FRYE: There are other things in the Canadian tradition that are worth thinking about. Thirty years ago the great radical movement was international Communism, which took no hold in Canada at all. There were no Marxist poets, there were no Marxist painters. (There were a few but there was no connecting point to Canadian culture.) The radical movement of our time is anarchist and that means that it’s local and separate and breaks down into small units. That’s our tradition and that’s our genius. Think of Toronto or Montreal (I know Toronto better than Montreal, but I think the same is true of both cities): after the Second World War, we took in displaced persons from Europe to something like one-quarter to one-fifth of the population. In Toronto in 1949, one out of every five people had been there less than a year. We have not had race riots, we have not had ethnic riots, we have not had the tremendous pressures and collisions that they’ve had in American cities. Because Canada is naturally anarchist, these people settled down into their own communities; they work with other communities and the whole pattern of life fits it. I do think we have to keep a very wide open and sympathetic eye towards radical movements in Canada, because they will be of an anarchist kind and they will be of a kind of energy that we could help liberate.
CHIASSON: How do you explain materially the fact that there is not a serious breakdown in the country if the base is anarchist?
FRYE: Well, I think that the ideal of anarchism is not the shellfish, the carapace, the enclosed, isolated group. It’s rather the self-contained group that feels itself a community and because it’s a community it can enter into relations with others. At the moment we are getting some mollusk or shellfish type of radical movement—I think certain forms of separatism are of that kind—but I think we’ll get more mature about this as we go on, a more vertebrate structure.
[Martin and Chiasson begin to discuss, mostly in French, concepts of journalism such as “le système gatekeeping” which involve “international front page” considerations and are not appropriate to Canada.]
FRYE: I’m having trouble: it is two languages at once. I am not familiar with the language of communications. Even where you use English, I have to stop and think what you mean.
MARTIN: “Gatekeeping” is a historical concept. Je pense que si jamais je parle l’anglais un jour, ce sera un anglais étrange parce que j’ai beaucoup lu et pas beaucoup parlé.
CHIASSON: I wonder if it’s of relevance to attempt to see how like the Americans we are and what part of the Canadian identity is not different from the American.
FRYE: It’s rather easier to define things by contrast than it is to define them by their similarities. This leads to the question of what is American as distinct from what is European. For example, the Americans have a revolution as the centre of their historical tradition, and with a revolution for a tradition you get, among other things, a certain contempt for history. Canada has not had a revolutionary tradition, in the sense that its history and its traditions have been proportionally much stronger. The motto of the province of Quebec used to be “Je me souviens.” In the U.S. you have Henry Ford saying “History is bunk.” With us, we are still living with our traditions, both English and French, in a curiously intense way. A revolutionary country tends to try and short-circuit the law; that is, it tends to think of the law as a kind of clumsy and cumbersome machinery. Canada was held by a military occupation, in that it had the Northwest Mounted Police, and it’s always been brought up under a regime of law. So the American impatience with history and the American violence and cult of lawlessness—these are things that we are quite different about.
[Chiasson asks about the egalitarian principle in Canada and the U.S.]
FRYE: Ah, yes! Now that is one point. The class structure of European society disappeared even more rapidly in Canada than it did in the U.S., with the flight of the seigneurs in French Canada and the similar thing in English Canada. The tendency towards egalitarianism which has a kind of implicit sense of a classless society—that is, I think, in common. That is a thing we understand. We don’t need to be aggressive about it as are the Communist parties in Europe.
CHIASSON: These are fundamental things in our cultural behaviour.
FRYE: In English Canada in the nineteenth century there was a strong prejudice against the English which expressed itself in religion; for example, the Methodist movement is very largely a protest of the native Canadian against the religious establishments which are Anglican in the English communities and Presbyterian in the Scottish. And in the Methodist movement again there is an emphasis on the democracy of feeling, on the sense of direct participation.
CHIASSON: The slogan that Trudeau has launched, “participatory democracy,” seems to have met with real response immediately. Is it a principle for Canadian communications?10
FRYE: Yes, it is. I think your example is a good one, because this was instantly what the Canadian public knew that it wanted. Whether it gets it from Trudeau is another matter, but there is no question about whether it wants it.
MARTIN: Peut-être que l’idéal de la radio et la télévision canadienne serait d’arriver à faire des inventions sociales en matières de radio et de télévision. C’est les inventions qui demandent vraiment la mobilization de l’intérêt public, un effort financier de nombreuses années, une vigilance, un effort.
FRYE: That certainly is one of the primary items on the agenda, I would say.
CHIASSON: Perhaps it is possible to prepare the design for this social participation.
FRYE: There are always two reasons for the existence of a Canadian community: one is local (the water mill and that kind of thing), and the other is its relationship with the network of communications (perhaps it’s a railway divisional point or a stop on one of the old voyageur trails). Every community thinks of itself as both local and part of a network of communications. It’s interesting to talk to, say, a farmer in Ontario—I’m thinking in particular of the old days of the railway—and he will talk about local conditions, town meetings, the crops, and so forth, and then he will hear a train go by and look at his watch and say, “That’s the Flyer to Toronto.” Suddenly you realize that this is the other half of his imagination.
[Martin and Chiasson discuss a table Martin is working on and constantly changing, which shows the intersection of the “open system” and the “current information system.” These seem to have something to do with the distinction between writing a book and profitably interviewing the writer of the book and lead to some acerbic comments about certain reviewers. Then the meeting breaks for lunch.
After lunch Martin begins by talking about the new graphic media and the “tools of symbolic and schematic processing.” He wishes to record Frye’s answer to his question about the possibilities of changing Canadian culture by paying more attention to technological aspects, “content and values of technological systems,” than to content itself.]
FRYE: By this you mean the fifty-five per cent Canadian content rule and this sort of thing?
CHIASSON: Yes.
FRYE: You see, you start with a paradox: that Canada is a nation and yet the actual feelings are local feelings and international feelings—prenational or postnational. In so far as Canada is a nation, it operates mostly in terms of inconvenience: examining your luggage when you get to a Canadian port, collecting income tax, and so on. The Canadian content rule is that kind of nationally imposed inconvenience, because the ordinary viewer surely doesn’t give a damn about Canadian content as such—he cares about his locality (which, of course, can extend to Canada) and he cares about being in the world. He cares very much about being in the world.
[Martin suggests that, time and energy being limited, it is perhaps necessary to think more of the transformation of the system itself than of the transformation of its contents.]
FRYE: What I’d like to see is the criteria shifted from content to attitude. I think there is a specific Canadian attitude toward world events. As soon as I cross the border and start teaching at American schools, I feel like a Finn entering Russia or a Dane entering Germany. I have moved from a small observant country into a big power complex. Now, that makes for a difference in attitude, and as long as that attitude is preserved I wouldn’t care too much about the content. But the difficulty is of course that you can check up on content, because it’s quantity, and you can’t check up on attitude. What I would like to see is ninety-five per cent Canadian attitude.
CHIASSON: Isn’t the problem situated precisely in finding the systems and means that would preserve the Canadian attitude?
[Chiasson and Martin agree that this is a key role for the CRTC. Instead of talking about foreign ownership or Canadian content, it is important to explore and define this nebulous “Canadian attitude.”]
FRYE: I can give you an example of what I mean: the American tends to think of world conditions in terms of American operations and interventions because America is so profoundly responsible for everything that happens. Trudeau’s views on Nigeria and Biafra are American attitudes because he is so terrified of his own separatist problem that he wants to keep absolutely out of the Nigeria–Biafra situation.11 The Canadian public knows that he’s dead wrong, but it’s an observant country; so he’s just lost touch with his own people at that point because his own attitude is the manipulative attitude of the power that’s involved.
MARTIN: Ce sont vraiment les outils d’un “observant country.”
FRYE: Like Switzerland or Denmark. Scandinavia is so like Canada: it even has two nations. When I was in Scandinavia I noticed how completely different Norway and Sweden were.12 The reason is of course that culturally and historically they turned their backs on each other—Norway has always faced the West and Sweden has always faced the Baltic. In a way that’s our English–French problem in Canada: we’re oriented in different directions.
CHIASSON: How is the cultural status of the “observant” country translated into works? How does it manifest itself in the arts?
FRYE: I think it manifests itself in literature, which is what I know best, by a certain coolness in tone—what I called pastoral when I said that Canada was America’s pastoral myth.13 There is a kind of pastoral tone in Canadian poetry and fiction. Many people confuse this with a regional tone which, of course, it can be, but it’s just the insulation of all this immense space that’s packed in and around us. Then there’s the sense of what I call the original fortress or garrison watching, first of all because it had to to preserve its structure, and then because the big show was going on in Europe or in the U.S.
CHIASSON: There is this spatial insulation, on the one hand, which is kind of a security element, whereas the state of mind that applies in garrison watching is the insecurity.
FRYE: Yes, but there are many insecurities in Canadian culture. I spoke of a variety of ethnic groups in Toronto and Montreal and connected it with the anarchist tendency to break down into small units, but of course they are minorities, and minorities are insecure: the French Canadian who feels himself a minority on the North American continent, the English Canadian who is a minority as regards the American, the Jewish minority which has been of tremendous cultural importance, not only in Montreal. The insecurities of minorities are built in to this watchful observant quality.
CHIASSON: It seems to me that the term “observant” is perhaps an antonym to “active.”
FRYE: Well, it’s not passive, it’s perhaps contemplative. It’s not geared to immediate action. Whenever the American thinks about what goes on in China, he instantly thinks, “What are we going to do about it?” The Canadian doesn’t have that feeling.
CHIASSON: Canada is also in many respects, in many of its works of art, imitative. On essaye tout simplement de déceler les avantages et les dangers des “observant countries,” to see what is the chemistry of the “observant” country.
MARTIN: Et même quelles sont les formes contemplatives …
FRYE: The contemplative form tends, in the first place, to accept a convention given it from the outside. English Canadian literature follows the form set up by England. And it waits for the English or the Americans to set the new standard and then goes along with an imitation, but within the imitation there’s something else.
CHIASSON: This “something else” is a manifestation of what we’re looking for, the epicentre of Canadian identity. On the non-imitative side of contemplation, there’s the creative side. There’s a problem because it’s my feeling that the “observant” acts more seldom, and over a longer period of time.
FRYE: Yes, so that when it does act, it could act very swiftly. You notice how Canada is one of the peaceful countries at the start of the war and yet Canadians are the most ferocious fighters in the world.
[Chiasson comments on the rounded forms in Eskimo sculpture, which contrast with the incisive forms of African sculpture. He suggests this may be related to the Eskimo’s contemplative attitude brought about by his difficult life.]
FRYE: But the Eskimo culture is a very long-sighted culture, always looking for that black spot on the horizon, and those forms have to do with that. I once amused myself by looking at a number of Canadian poems, novels, and works of scholarship, including Creighton’s Life of Sir John A. Macdonald; I was looking at the last sentence, and it was almost always a big white horizon. [Gap in tape.] This means that the possibility of communication within those small units is very great because there is almost no part of Canada in which the possibility of intercommunication has dried up as it has dried up in New York.
Did you listen to the Ottawa hearing?14 Did you hear the two men who wanted to open a [television] station in Whitehorse in the Yukon? They were shrewd men who knew their business. They said the Yukoner is in a tightly enclosed community and the people who are there have a special status—the rest of Canada is referred to as “outside,” which is a word they use in prison. One of them said he was going to run his programming almost entirely with open-line programs. The person opposing this objected that this was no way to program television, but he simply said, “You don’t know Yukoners, they’ll talk about anything.” The possibility of intercommunication, he knew it was there, and that surely was a fact of immense importance. Suddenly when I was listening to this I realized how John Diefenbaker had managed to run an election on that preposterous program about exploiting the North—this Canadian garrison still exists.15
CHIASSON: The garrison structure is still very strong then, isn’t it?
FRYE: Well, it’s still there in our tradition, it’s still built in.
CHIASSON: We have many tools of observation now. There is a straight line, a historical connection between the Yukon outpost and the garrison. The Yukoner is still talking with that mentality and our observation posts could be the television, the universities.
FRYE: And there’s a curious pattern: when the country pushes out into unsettled areas, what it finds there is its own relations; as it pushes, it rediscovers the old.
CHIASSON: In terms of communications, our observatory or garrison is not a physical one, it’s not even a geographical one any more, yet we still move within our psychological garrison. Somehow we carry the cultural water and the cultural wood.
FRYE: Yes, that’s what Hugh MacLennan was trying to say in his novel Two Solitudes. The two solitudes being, of course, Westmount English and East Bleury Street.
CHIASSON: André asks if there are possibilities of action or must we wait? That is to say, given the “observant” aspect of Canadian culture, is it possible to think of a contemplative strategy or must we wait for Canada to swallow modern communications?
FRYE: I don’t see why, in the world in general and in the U.S., people divide society into the majority who want a pleasant view presented to them and the minority who are worried and concerned and who will listen to programs like The Air of Death.16 It seems to me that there is a very soft foundation in Canada to build on, and an attitude which is both of these things at once. Being contemplative it is not “concerned” in the sense of feeling that this country is going to be involved instantly, but at the same time it is not going to take a lot of pre-digested nonsense. You steer a course between what in most countries has become a kind of schizophrenic split between the worried concerned minority and the big placid milch cow in the herd. I think that this is, of course, wrong about everybody, but it is especially wrong about Canadians.
CHIASSON: The possibility of steering a middle course is here. Would you say that in Canada at this time the population generally is more aware, less ready to accept “predigested nonsense,” as you call it?
FRYE: Well, I don’t know, I suppose they are subject to the same psychological laws as the Americans, but I also feel that there is a power of response there that only needs to be tapped. Sometimes the lack of sympathy between the CBC and its public has been caused by the tendency on the part of the CBC to think in terms of the worried concerned minority of the big country that is going to be instantly involved. I have some sympathy with the Canadian public that feel that a lot of the CBC programs are not really addressed to them.
[Chiasson agrees that many CBC programs are geared to the reaction of the liberal minority in the U.S. He and Martin wonder about the danger of Canada’s contemplative tendencies.]
FRYE: The danger is, of course, of its collapsing into passivity.
MARTIN: Au milieu d’un système actif.
FRYE: But that of course is the whole secret of wisdom, isn’t it, to be detached but not withdrawn. The Canadian knows very well he’s involved in the world, but Canadian statesmen, people like Lester Pearson at the United Nations, feel that the Canadian role is an advisory one. It doesn’t try to duck out of responsibilities; it merely is not involved in this action.
CHIASSON: It’s a sort of moral authority. In terms of communications, what might happen is that to a great extent Canadian productions are not for Canadian consumption but for world consumption.
FRYE: It is possible.
CHIASSON: Perhaps you know something of this—undoubtedly you do—do Canadian writers want to be read at home or do they want to be read abroad?
FRYE: I think that in Canadian literature there has been something of a change in attitude in the last thirty or forty years. The Canadian writer, originally, was only successful if he could publish outside Canada. Now there is a very strong desire to be read primarily by Canadians. You can see this in the conferences which the poets hold and so forth. It has always been to some extent true of French Canadian literature but it’s increasingly true of English Canadian. Canada is not a bad environment for the writer because Canadian publishers are fairly generous to Canadian writers, even poets, and an astonishing proportion of the books that Canadians buy are Canadian books. If you look in book stores you’ll see that they always have Canadian sections and they’re not just for tourists.
[A brief discussion of Ottawa bookstores follows.]
CHIASSON: André says that there is a seeming contradiction between the (passive) contemplative and the (active) exploratory.
FRYE: Well, the explorer is the most contemplative of men. He has his eyes fixed on the horizon. He is planning his course.
MARTIN: Alors l’explorateur est un caractère contemplatif. Les “trackless communications” sont vraiment les communications contemplatives.
CHIASSON: In fact what you yourself say is similar to that: instead of the very short-term production and consumption, it’s the interest in a subject that can span nearly a lifetime.
FRYE: Does everyone know what a blazed trail is? When one explorer finds his way through the woods, he goes through with a hatchet and makes little chops in the bark of trees so that the next man coming along can follow them. This is something in between trackless communication and the paved road. You probably don’t remember the days when the roads in New Brunswick were marked by painting red or blue bands around the poles. Originally all the roads in New Brunswick were banded. The red-band road went down the St. John River to Moncton. The blue-band road went from Moncton up the northeast coast and the yellow-band road started at St. Stephen and went up to Bathurst. It was exactly the trailblazing technique.
[Martin and Chiasson discuss the similarities between the blazed trail and the somewhat anonymous modern production of information for all.]
CHIASSON: I’m considering some thoughts that Tocqueville, the French historian, had about the U.S. and indeed about Canada,17 which I think have something to do with the fundamentally classless situation of North America.
FRYE: The thing is that when you don’t have a class structure you have to diversify society in some other way, otherwise you just get a mob; of course, the mob is what Tocqueville is worried about. This is why, I think, this breaking down of the Canadian population into separate groups is so very important.
CHIASSON: And something to be encouraged?
FRYE: Well, it takes place anyway. It has extraordinary versatility about it, in that a person from Newfoundland can move to Vancouver without any sense of being uprooted. Some of the nineteenth-century clerical intellectuals of Quebec tried to create this kind of community artificially by keeping people on the land, restricting them educationally, and talking a great deal about home and mother. That, I think, leads to stagnation. [What’s wanted is] the give and take for the person who is involved in this community and yet is also polarized along that railway and can easily move out of it.
CHIASSON: I know the phenomenon of internal emigration, because I know the Maritimers. In fact, it doesn’t hurt the ones who move, it hurts the ones who stay.
FRYE: Yes, there is something in that. Yet you notice the extraordinary exhilaration a Maritimer or a Westerner gets by moving to Ontario and how quickly he becomes a leader of the community.
MARTIN: I think of a CBC or Canadian Broadcasting Canoe.
CHIASSON: I think there is, though, a tremendous pressure for Canada to get people from other countries of the world. The luxury of space and resources is not one that will endure for very long.
FRYE: And what is hopeful is the extraordinary power that Canada has shown of assimilating people without trying to assimilate them. It has never tried to make one hundred per cent Canadians out of them, and yet the extraordinary peacefulness of the Greek and Portuguese and German and Scandinavian populations in Toronto never ceases to amaze me.
CHIASSON: In another area of Canadian singularity, in the big cities like Toronto or Montreal, we are industrious and hard-working and productive: I don’t know if we are as hard-working as the Americans but—is this also your observation?
FRYE: I should think the rhythm of work is very similar with the same regional variations: that is, the Maritime tempo is a little more leisurely, just as the New England tempo is a little more leisurely in the U.S. I think that the work habits and patterns are very similar.
CHIASSON: I’m thinking of the contemplative characteristic of the “observant” country. Will it be able to function better in a society where leisure time increases?
FRYE: There is a certain response to communication as a leisure activity.
CHIASSON: André asks whether you yourself have written on the “observant country”?
FRYE: Well, not specifically on that. My conclusion to the Literary History of Canada has a reflection or two about it. Most of what I have written has been in the form of reviews, mostly of Canadian poetry, and this has emerged from them, rather by accident.
[Martin and Chiasson talk about some chronological tables which they display, and offer some reading matter including a report of the Consultative Committee on Program Policy.]
FRYE: I do have that, and I’ve read particularly the second volume rather carefully, the long-term one.
CHIASSON: André suggests that there’s a sentiment of inadequacy in the communicative institution when it starts to sell unrest.
FRYE: Yes. That’s the danger side of this separation into great groups. One of the things that ought to be on the left-hand side [referring to Martin’s chart] is a kind of mindless subversiveness, a deliberate creation of revolutionary situations where there aren’t any, talking up of controversial issues even when there’s no controversy, and that kind of thing.
CHIASSON: In fact the manufacturing of copies. There is some degree of that criticism in the Hall Report, I suspect.18
FRYE: I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but the story about the students in Quebec breaking windows is that apparently the television cameramen told them they wanted some action and suggested they do it.
CHIASSON: Indeed often just the presence of television cameras will create that type of activity. I’ve seen it happen in New York. I was doing a film one day on the Negroes of Harlem in ’63 or ’64, and just the presence of the camera crews created attitudes and actions. The Chicago events are interesting too in that respect.19 Some members of radical movements and students themselves have said that the only recognizable consensus left is attention from the media. They disagree on everything else but they could agree to be photographed.
FRYE: I think that part of our function is a social one of creating a kind of non-violent concern which permits both radical and conservative points of view to exist. The great danger of this kind of subjective and receptive response is the creation of a general mood of violence. Because in spite of 1984, you’ve also got to have something to hate.20
CHIASSON: Who are your favourite French poets? In Canada as well as France.
FRYE: I find myself going back to a certain type of poem rather than poet. There’s a wide variety of people I’m very fond of: Rimbaud, and I suppose Valéry because I come back to his poems so often; I suppose if I had a favourite it would be Verlaine. One poet I’m very fond of and who isn’t very widely read is [?].21 I don’t know if it’s just that I don’t know French well and I’m not too sensitive to it but it has a very haunting quality. Among the Canadians it’s just your obvious people.
[They discuss future meetings and concerns.]
CHIASSON: Do you really think that there is some place for concern in terms of the CRTC’s activities in the area of cultural creation and circulation? Conceptually from what end do we grasp this?
FRYE: I think the definition of some kind of social aid, like what we’ve just been talking about, is important. The loudest and promptest complaints that the CRTC is going to receive are going to concern things like this Air of Death program. It does need some kind of overall social view which is flexible and not doctrinaire.
CHIASSON: In the area of encouragement of Canadian creation, the CRTC obviously has some role to play, the problem again being the forms of representation.
[Change of tape here.]
CHIASSON: André asks the question of how to propose the necessary social inventions to release Canadian creative energies.
FRYE: In other words, we are now moving into the question of strategy.
CHIASSON: Yes, I think so.
FRYE: Well, what sort of liaison would you have normally—say with the CBC, private broadcasters, or the NFB?
[Martin answers that they monitor productions.]
CHIASSON: Yes. The production is looked at, but there is not much of a relationship between these institutions and the CRTC. But I think the possibility for contact is there now, which is a new thing that didn’t exist with the BBG.
FRYE: But these channels of liaison are surely the first thing, because if we don’t get a sympathetic response from the NFB we won’t get it from anywhere. The CBC is much more frightened and boxed in than the NFB. Even so, there are a great many people there who need encouragement. I should think that the liaison has to be first of all on an official basis that doesn’t matter particularly. Underneath that are the creative people of the CBC who want to do their proper job. They’re people who’ll have to be approached apart from the hierarchical structure. I should think that of all these channels of liaison, the one with ACTRA will be extremely important, because they’re much more interested in questions of personality than of content.22 And I should think the CBC, for example, would have had most of what we want if all the talent that had once been there were still there, and still allowed to function, instead of so much of it being thrown away to the United States. But then, we’re boxed in, in so many different ways. As a result of the frustration you get these rather defensive and edgy tones in some of the programming.
[Chiasson wonders whether some of the frustration at the CBC and the NFB comes from working in a medium that is not suited to the present community, but is a global, centralizing, and imitative medium.]
CHIASSON: If we’re to concentrate on an area of possible encouragement with large institutions such as the CBC, it would be to get to their regional and local programming rather than to their network organization.
FRYE: Yes, I think so. They were talking about Max Ferguson at lunch and the way he begins at Halifax with an explosion in that very localized community, and comes out of it with something which is both the community and something exportable.23 Now, if you contrast that with Frank MacKinnon’s big building in Charlottetown, as a cultural centre: what is this goddam morgue on top of Charlottetown; surely it’s an entirely foreign culture and Charlottetown doesn’t want it.24
CHIASSON: Yes, indeed, the network world is really too big for Canadian production. You can’t find resources at home; fundamentally they don’t use that vehicle naturally.
FRYE: In listening to these hearings I’ve been struck with the way in which the sense of locality seems to increase as you go out from Ontario. In Ontario, the talk was almost always about cutting up the pie—all indistinguishable parts of the same pie—whereas out West, and in the Prairies, the Yukon, and Maritimes, the sense of locality grows. I find it rather difficult to answer the strategic question because I’m not too clear on just what your links are.
CHIASSON: I think André’s question was, without entering the really strategic area which is close to the policy area, we must work on sort of a pre-strategy stage—which is nearly the same as policy but attempts to deal with bringing some resources together or looking at how they might work. I suppose when we start thinking of institutions like the CBC, NFB, and the rest, we’re doing that to some extent.
FRYE: And then you send out the task force or monitors to different local stations. The reports they bring back all contain information which is quite relevant, as long as you know what kind of thing you want to foster.
[They speak of the need to consult local sources rather than the network, “a fast train that never stops.”]
CHIASSON: Is there a possibility of real action by the CRTC, André asks, given the very delicate nature of balance?
FRYE: The creation of a climate of opinion or of feeling, a climate of sensitivity, where a creative person knows that he’s being recognized and thought of as a creative person, and that what he’s doing is appreciated: it seems to me that this kind of thing is possible, whereas action in the present setup is hardly possible. The people I’ve been listening to at the hearings are mostly honest men who want to do a decent job; that is, if their profits would admit it, they’d just as soon have a good program as a bad one. I think that it’s only on that level of response and recognition that you can really work effectively. You can’t really do anything; you can’t send out directives or even suggestions.
CHIASSON: Would there be a place for a new sort of institution, a program laboratory, if you wish, a place of experimentation for the creation of Canadian television prototypes?
FRYE: You have a program department that would be …
CHIASSON: We have a program department. It’s an “observant” service. At this time it’s mostly there to process information given by the broadcasters on their programming in their program log.
FRYE: That of course has to go on. But I think your suggestion is an admirable one of having a kind of experimental laboratory to which, if there could be a bit of money, people of the NFB or the CBC could be attached on a fellowship basis.
CHIASSON: Yes, to experiment, because there is no other means of experimentation.
FRYE: I can envisage certain conferences about experimental projects where you would have not only the film board and CBC people but also educators and so on. I remember when Roman Kroitor asked me to come in on the Labyrinthe discussion; I had assumed that nothing would really come of this [discussion], but after I had seen the film, I felt that I had really contributed something with respect to the tools involved.25 Of course I could only do that because Kroitor and Daly and so on were very perceptive people—but I think that this kind of conference around a more theoretical issue could attain …. I have the feeling that many of my colleagues in the university often don’t know how much they know, or how very useful they could be.
CHIASSON: It’s my feeling too. I’ve always had a difficult time connecting with the university people except in a couple of cases. You would have thought that in a general public affairs program the “humanist” would have been willing to contribute, but I found that it was the mathematician and the biologist who were willing to talk on public affairs.
FRYE: That’s because their subjects are in the news at the moment.
[The discussion turns again to the possible value of decentralizing.]
FRYE: I think the whole orthodox tendency is a centralizing tendency. It’s founded on a journalistic instinct for headline news, and fans out from there. This becomes a kind of habit. As for who needs to be convinced of the value of decentralizing, I would say everybody. Because in a sense we all have a centralizing habit. We’re all fed in the same processes at both the television station and the supermarket. All culture begins as a preventative against the inertia of habit.
CHIASSON: I’m trying to imagine what kind of decisions might bring that about. If the CRTC were to say the network is going to be operational only one hour in a day …
FRYE: But you would have to have a very strong decentralizing apparatus ready to take over; otherwise it would just be a vacuum. Yes, I think the hour of decision had better be postponed. Once you start acting with decision you simply disturb one kind of habit without actually fostering the other. In a sense I don’t mind that the network train keeps on running, because you have a large group of non-listening listeners: that is, people who just keep the television running from the time it’s turned on in the morning until it automatically goes off at night.
CHIASSON: You were saying a while ago that what really needs to be changed is the climate rather than the system as such.
FRYE: Yes, and it’s also a matter of focusing on images. I’m thinking for example of Canadian politics. The CCF/NDP socialist party is probably the most honest party in Canada. It’s the one with the most consistent set of principles. It’s always arguing with the Canadian public, trying to change its mind to a better way of thinking about things. It never gets anywhere in elections because the voter votes in terms of images. You can never change by arguments; you simply point to an image and say, “What I want is that.” I think it’s the same in communications: the suggestion, “This is good for you,” or, “This is a superior type of program,” is going to meet with nothing but resentment.
[Martin alludes to possibilities in modern technology to decentralize and increase access.]
FRYE: I think the technological developments are on the side of creativity—there’s no question of that. But they won’t work automatically by themselves.
CHIASSON: Yes. They’re on the side of the Canadian pattern as well. André thinks that it is possible to evaluate which models are closer to the Canadian tissue or fabric.
FRYE: I wonder if it’s really a matter of picking out this as opposed to that, or just a matter of making ordinary judgments—“This is first-rate, this is just run-of-the-mill.” Because the first-rate is always going to be what you’re looking for. Its Canadian identity, its relation to the Canadian fabric, is going to take care of itself: the better it is, the more typical it will be of the fabric. As long as you’re working in Canada and with predominantly Canadian personnel you need never be in a position of saying, “This is first rate but it’s not what we’re looking for.” Once you get into that position, then you’ve had it.
This interview, the sixth in the black binder, is headed, “Northrop Frye—Interview of—.” A note indicates that the interview was “not completed,” perhaps meaning that the transcription was not completed. Internal references such as that to a remark made “the last time I was here” on p. 117 indicate that it follows that of December 1968. On p. 110 Frye refers to his remarks in the Air of Death discussions, which took place in March 1969; in a remark not here reproduced Martin suggests a possible meeting “après le mois de juin”; on p. 117 the allusion to China is probably stimulated by the government’s policy announcement on 29 May. Thus the interview probably took place in early June 1969.
CHIASSON: André’s question is this: is it possible to consider broadcasting as a whole and attempt to lay down principles of action that approach it in totality, or must we continue to think in terms of independent action on programming, on ownership, and so on?
FRYE: Well, I’m operating blindfold here, and you’ll have to tell me if I’m not connecting at all, but I think this is the first generation which feels the impact of psychological overcrowding, and consequently there’s a sort of claustrophobia that develops. This is what has led to a demand for participatory democracy, and the technical instruments of a participatory democracy are communications media. Consequently, the general lines along which one has to work in communications media are the lines of decentralization. That came out in our last report: the development of a smaller, more localized sense of community along with the whole growth of world consciousness.26 Consciousness of the world takes care of itself—you can’t avoid that—but the feeling of being a community is what has to be created.
[This brings up the possibility of a massive reorganization of the networks, and of the definition of objectives to guide them.]
FRYE: As you develop new media, they tend to focus on the experiential side, and the older media then take over the teleological side. Television is very largely for presenting the world as it appears; radio and still more the newspapers become the teleological side of comment.
[Martin reflects on the possibility of creating a “third service,” which unfortunately we only know how to finance by creating a perhaps unwanted “third network.”]
CHIASSON: André reflects upon the present state and foreseeable evolution and asks whether it is possible to do something. Should we attempt it or should we “laissez-faire”?
FRYE: But “laissez-faire” merely continues the same operation. That is, the private broadcasters will always carry on their traditional light programs and will throw in serious programs here and there in order to reassure themselves that they are doing a proper job. I think that in our day the communications gap between seriousness and lightness is breaking down. [Inaudible remark on Gilbert and Sullivan.] And I found in my teaching of literature that a person who knows the folk singers like Bob Dylan or the Mothers of Invention has far less difficulty with symbols in poetry. Twenty years ago you had to teach the students the language of symbolism which they often just refused to learn. Nowadays, young people know that language. There is less of a communications gap.
CHIASSON: André was asking, what part of the CRTC’s activity should be regulatory, what part should be guideline, policy [or the creation of new works that could serve as models]?
FRYE: Regulation is something I don’t react to much. It seems to me that certain very obvious things emerge in connection, for instance, with the Air of Death program. The reporting of the news is in the public interest, the creation of news is against the public interest. If you are covering a student riot, that is in the public interest, but if you incite the students to riot in order to have a more interesting picture, that’s against the public interest. The distinction which I drew in these Air of Death discussions was the distinction between concern and panic.27
CHIASSON: That’s a fundamental distinction. In matters of public concern there are what we might call “trigger issues.” When such issues are touched they create panic. The special combination of the general problem of pollution with the lethal element of fluorosis in the same film …
FRYE: In this program, the arousal of concern over pollution called up something that everybody wants. Yet the Hall Report speaks of tourists driving through Dunnville and complaining about the comments they hear from the citizens of Dunnville. What you have is the community on the one side and the mob on the other, and the fundamental job of communications is to create the community and dissolve the mob. In this kind of thing, a mob always has a scapegoat. So the tourist going to Dunnville says everything is poisoned in Dunnville. And this is what I mean by panic, this is what’s against the public interest. There’s a much more difficult point, of course, between the factual and the imaginative. When you were analysing the layout of that Air of Death program, you were analysing what was essentially the imaginative structure in it. Imagination creates the shape; facts, of course, have no shape. Imagination is the “form” part of information. In English, there is a distinction between “imaginative” and “imaginary.” “Imaginative” means “shaping form” and “imaginary” means “things that are not there.” For example, when the script says, “cattle lying down and dying in the fields, hundreds of them,” it’s probable that the word “hundreds” refers to something imaginary, relative to the number of cattle dying.
CHIASSON: Although you do not like the idea of regulation, you see some need for regulation?
FRYE: It may be very difficult to draw up a statement of what constitutes the creation of panic and what constitutes the irresponsible making of news, but obviously that’s the kind of thing which calls for regulation and which the public would like to see regulated.
CHIASSON: Yes, the CRTC really does have the interest of the public as much as the interest of the broadcaster to consider. In fact, it has only the interest of the public—the interest of the broadcaster only inasmuch as broadcasting or communications are public.
FRYE: There’s always [need for] protecting the honest broadcaster from the dishonest one. I think the same question of regulation comes in to the area of censorship. Take, for example, this very thorny question of taste and morals. Twenty years ago, the obscene expression was what in English is called a four-letter word, the words that referred either to excretion or to copulation. These words have really stopped being obscene now, and the obscene ones are words like “nigger” and “wop” and “frog”; that is, words that create a mob, words that devalue a whole group of human beings. That kind of obscene expression is a real offence against taste in contemporary terms.
CHIASSON: Are you saying that morals are a sort of cursor, as on a slide rule, and that because of that moving and evolving aspect they are very difficult to regulate?
FRYE: Yes, at this present stage. This is in fact something that all branches of legislation are trying to legislate about. They are trying to define, for example, hate literature, something that builds up a sense of hatred or contempt for a group of human beings, which is against the public interest.
CHIASSON: Have the ethical aspects changed in recent years?
FRYE: I think they’ve changed to a more realistic conception of what is really socially dangerous. It’s dangerous to start speaking with contempt or ridicule of black people, and in reaction to this to speak with contempt or ridicule of white people is just as dangerous. Whereas plays that deal with homosexuals or that kind of thing are no longer regarded as socially dangerous.
CHIASSON: The question I’m asking is, when some things are no longer regarded as morally dangerous, can they be dangerous on another level—can they be culturally dangerous?
FRYE: I would prefer not to extend the conception of danger or “against the public interest” beyond this point of creating social hatred and contempt.
[Martin wonders whether Frye has answered his question (p. 110) as to whether the CRTC should concern itself with making experimental works, or regulations.]
CHIASSON: André suggests that maybe part of the CRTC’s energy would be better applied to creating prototypes; for example, in collaboration with CBC or CTV, to invent new forms of electronic representation, rather than to regulate extensively.
FRYE: That’s true. But regulation only applies to what is here and now and wouldn’t apply to any form of creativity.
CHIASSON: Do you see that as a likely role for the CRTC?
FRYE: It would be a marvellous role, if we could create new forms of communications.
CHIASSON: André asks, would you be interested in working at definitions and orientations of CRTC activity in regards to programming with a view to accomplishing Canadian prototypes?
FRYE: I’d be fascinated, but I don’t know about my competence on those lines.
[Chiasson assures him that there’s no need to be worried about technical competence. The basic grammars of technical production are fairly simple.]
CHIASSON: What we’re really concerned about is not that aspect of competence anyway. It is in defining what might be new functions, how they might be formulated …
FRYE: May I talk at random for a minute, and if I get anywhere that’s of some use to you then just say so. There’s a paradox in oral communication that looks for two contradictory things: one is detachment, the other is involvement. Perhaps this has something to do with the two sides of your triangle there. News should be reported objectively and create a mood of detachment in the viewer. There are other things which demand his concern, his involvement. In a drama, the attempt is normally to involve the watcher in a story. On the other hand you have people like Brecht saying that what he wants is to chop holes in the rhetorical facade, to alienate his audience so that they will be detached from the play and in command of their own souls. If you had an incompetent Brecht, what he would produce would be almost identical with the ordinary television program which is interrupted every five minutes by a commercial. Now it seems to me that the way to genuine detachment is not through interruption but through the building up of very small organizations, in a discontinuous sequence. I’m not speaking of discontinuity in the sense of not having sequence, I’m speaking rather of the rhythm in the sequence. If a man writes a book, he’s writing a continuous piece of prose, and you keep turning over the pages, from one paragraph to another; but if he’s a wise man, a guru, an oracle, what he will do is talk in a series of detached paragraphs. That’s the oracular style: it has been from Heraclitus28 to Marshall McLuhan. There are pauses between each remark and this pause requires a great deal of concentration, but it also leaves you in command of your own soul.
MARTIN: Nietzsche utilise les deux techniques, lui.
FRYE: It’s exactly that technique. It’s found in the Bible, too, which breaks down into a discontinuous sequence. This mixture of sequence and discontinuity, I think, is found most successfully in contrapuntal music. You have an overall sequence but the different voices come in. You find this contrapuntal technique in the multi-screen films.
CHIASSON: André suggests that it would be interesting to consider a program that would test this structure.
FRYE: Young people today have developed tremendous agility in responding to these techniques out of the television experience, an agility that’s just waiting to be drawn on. It’s a different cultural atmosphere from the Romantic one of the last generation, where your attention can relax because it’s always the same atmosphere.
CHIASSON: I wish we could push that thought or explore it in relation to the general field of communications and see where it leads us: the discontinuous sequence in the program, the discontinuous program in the schedule, the discontinuous schedule in the whole diet of communications. Is it possible to think that way?
FRYE: This is pertinent to education, the discontinuous incorporated into the sequence.
MARTIN: Les films de Jean-Luc Godard procèdent par segmentation aussi, mais sans concentration.29
FRYE: I think that one of the things that emerges from this is that the job of achieving the sense of sequential unity is being handed over to the viewer. There are two extremes one has to avoid. One is the construction of an overall sequence which manipulates the viewer, pushes him in a certain direction. The other is the refusal to make any overall sequence at all. That gets you to the state of a great deal of contemporary art where the sense of fantasy is developed to a point where the viewer feels he is being invaded by a kind of overthrow of his own sense of identity. It seems to me that what a great many of the younger generation are going through today is a kind of Rimbaudisme, the same [diet?] of drugs and a common withdrawal from society. Rimbaud did this quite deliberately, and his sense of identity was almost obliterated in the process. After the Saison en Enfer he just forgot the whole thing.30 I think we’re going through his Saison en Enfer period now and that there is a kind of lost generation of extreme radicals in there. But beyond them, among the younger people, you have more adjustment to overcrowding. You might find that they will respond more to an appeal to their own identity.
CHIASSON: In the two extremes that you mentioned, the overall sequence which manipulates and the refusal to make any overall sequence, it is the second that is the hardest to deal with. The avoidance of the first falls into the category of freedom of expression; the second brings up the problem of order …
FRYE: Yes, that’s close to what it means. For example, the whole art of satire. Restoration comedy was attacked by the clergymen of its day as being morally evil. The Restoration dramatist said, we’re presenting the grotesque and the absurd for a moral purpose. But in order to do that, we have to assume a certain normality in the audience’s mind which forms a standard against which you can measure them. When you get to the point of suggesting there isn’t in effect a standard of normality, then the audience begins to feel fettered in the sense of identity. I see that difficulty with our young students. They resist, because everything that comes over television, radio, or newspaper is from the enemy, is the voice of the enemy. And they’re holding on to what identity they’ve got. They’re afraid of the wrong things, perhaps, but they are afraid of having it taken away from them.
CHIASSON: How do we assess normality, how do we define normality or abnormality?
FRYE: Normality is perhaps the wrong word. I think the term “identity” is a better term: the sense on the part of the reader or viewer that he is always himself. On that basis you can distinguish, for example, the creative from the merely subjective and introverted. This is the mistake that the LSD people make. They confuse the creative, the ego-transcending side of personality with the subjective, withdrawn, introverted side: not only the people who take drugs, but the people who say this is a new religion, a new means of transcending the ego. One’s sense of identity has two poles: it’s partly one’s self and partly one’s place in society. And with the claustrophobia developing, the sense of overcrowding, the sense of being surrounded by the enemy, which our young people have very, very strongly—that whole sense of community function has come out, so there’s only the subjective side left, and naturally you want to establish a pole there through this mind-expanding process.
CHIASSON: If communication ought to create many communities, how do we deal with the problem of creating “vertical images” toward which all the communities may converge?
FRYE: It seems to me that the vertical dimension is really the time dimension—the historical or traditional dimension. You may not think this is relevant, but nevertheless, it’s a very deep-seated feeling in religion: the conception of creation, of form emerging out of chaos. The psalms of the Bible, for example, are based on this New Year festival where the world is recreated every year.31 Then the Apollo 8 people go around the dark side of the moon with no guarantee of ever seeing the earth again and they start reading the creation hymn from Genesis.32That is a moment of genuine history, because it articulates the whole Western cultural tradition.
CHIASSON: André is thinking of the next step. Surmising that we have outlined the cultural dimension, how do we now produce the images that we want? The idea of “communities of communication” is similar, perhaps, to the idea of “sectors” which I have heard André and Fernand [Cadieux] talk about. Showbiz, for example, would be a sector, the transmission of knowledge another sector. Each has its own internal logic, each creates its community. Grierson has said that when you’re dealing with the atom bomb or the problem of pollution, the laws of showbiz do not, must not apply; the laws of entertainment do not apply.33
FRYE: If you think of entertainment as a passive response, certainly that has to go: if something serious turns up, you have to stop being passive and become an active participant. The current logic of showbiz is surely aimed at keeping the viewer passive, and in order to do that you have to keep a continuous, homogeneous atmosphere instead of this discontinuous sequence …
CHIASSON: I’m thinking of the practical problem of ensuring the discontinuous sequence. I wonder if it’s better to attempt to transform the present system, or to create parallel systems.
FRYE: It seems to me that transformation is ultimately what you have to do anyway. What I think is rather dangerous or perhaps futile about the “third program” concept is that it defines not only a separate kind of viewer but also a separate area of interest. “If you’re a serious person, you will be interested in this, in real literature, and not in that stuff”: this is likely to create a kind of dissimulated war between two kinds of entertainment, which seems to me very bad. It’s better to think of transformation of what is being done now.
CHIASSON: Well, there are problems to transformation. In a sense, you are perhaps entirely right when you say that the third program idea would only create a war between two kinds of entertainment, the “high-brow” and “lowbrow.” The greatest problem in transformation may be in changing the direction of communication, or rather in adding a direction. “We are being overcommunicated to,” says Grierson. We were talking of participation at the beginning.
FRYE: It’s not a question of shifting the content, it’s a question of inform-ing—of giving imaginative form to what has presently no form, or has only this homogenous pouring form.
CHIASSON: André would like to go back to the concept of the vertical, conciliatory image. Is it possible to come to an accord on a number of necessary large, conciliatory images?
FRYE: On the most vulgar level, you notice how the ready-made social symbols, like the national flag, are always archaic ones. While Russia was busy building tractors, what you got on the flag was the hammer and sickle. The things that hold society together reach back into the past. I think the main development should be along the lines of what we were talking about the last time I was here, the canoeing thing [p. 91], the theme of transportation which repeats itself in different ways all through the history of Canada, so that you have the communication of the fur trade first, the railway next, and then the telephone, radio, satellites. The garrison is another thing which evolves out of the decentralized community.
CHIASSON: That reminds me of something you said, Dr. Frye, about the East–West conservative direction and the North–South liberal direction [p. 88]. André says that our travel images are more in the southerly direction. Would it be good to develop an East–West image of transportation?
FRYE: Remember that the East–West axis begins in Europe, and after we’ve recognized Communist China, we’ll have attained Asia.34 There’s a kind of rebirth image there that’s very strong in American culture. American culture begins on the American seaboard with a great deal of optimism; now you have Jeffers on the California coast being pessimistic as though the whole cycle has gone into its sunset.35 I think that our East–West thrust is down the St. Lawrence and up the Great Lakes—the conservative thrust that began in Europe and continues. This is the new-world aspect of Canada, with adherence to the Western tradition. Most of our time sequences do flow along that East–West axis. If you think of the North–South relationship you get back to the garrison again because you have Canada wedged in between the U.S. and Soviet Russia.
CHIASSON: André would like to return to a point you made in our last conversation [pp. 109–10], about the difference between the experimental or imitative nature of new media, and the emphasis in the older media on the teleological and on commentary and reflection.
FRYE: I certainly notice the difference in the response that my students make to literature. Twenty-five years ago, when I began teaching, the conception of learning was almost entirely linear. The educators concerned with the teaching of literature said, first you start with utilitarian prose, then you work towards literary prose, and finally, you might then, with great reluctance, approach poetry. Of course, this is exactly the reverse of the way literature is constructed: poetry is in the centre and it goes out through prose. The justification for this was that literature is an art of communication. But communication was thought of almost entirely in terms of a step-by-step direction, turning over the pages to get to the end. With poetry, you don’t turn over the pages to get to the end, and so that becomes fantastically difficult. And I’ve noticed that a generation of students more trained on movies and television and (much more important for literature) who have listened to folk singers and so on, can take in these simultaneous simple patterns. The poetic habit of thought seems much more normal to them than it did to students twenty-five years ago. They approach even difficult poets like Rimbaud and Wallace Stevens with much less panic than they did a generation ago.
CHIASSON: If we are at an age where new media are appearing, must we then give up all hope of the teleological function and just expect the experiential priority?
FRYE: Well, I think that we’d have to take on a new function without abandoning the old. In all the arts, there are two different mental processes which succeed each other in time: there is the linear participation when you are reading a book or watching a play or seeing something on the television or in the film; and then, at the end, it suddenly freezes into a simultaneous unity and you can see what the whole structure is like. In literature, you have, say, a detective story, which is constructed like a parabola. It starts out with a question: who murdered X? And it ends with the answer that Y murdered X. This is what Aristotle calls the recognition, the anagnorisis [Poetics, 10.4–8]. As soon as you reach the recognition, you’ve completed the pattern. This is where a critical study of any work of literature has to start. The ordinary reader who simply reads to get to the end doesn’t need to bother with that; he simply follows along to the last page. I think that the poetic habit of mind is much more simultaneous from the beginning—it’s much more concentrated—and the film habit of mind, presenting things in symbols and film clusters, also forces you into this more simultaneous apprehension along with the teleological one.
MARTIN: Mais la contradiction n’est pas fondamentale? [He wonders if the “reproductive” arts, whether of photography or of recording, emphasize the experiential because they are in fact anti-teleological.]
FRYE: Up to a point they are. They certainly put the emphasis on a more simultaneous side. You see this in university disputes between the student and the scholar. The scholar has been brought up teleologically. He talks of the “pursuit of truth, wherever it may lead,” but of course that metaphor is a dog following a scent: it means continuous prose. And the student is thinking in terms of big configurations presented simultaneously; he doesn’t understand this.
[Martin recurs to the problem of the technical means of developing the teleological, which is the domain of the imagination and of responsibility, in the new media which resist it.]
MARTIN: J’ai l’impression, par exemple, que les moyens de reproduction et d’enregistrement sont utilisés d’une façon non-téléologique, sans explication et sans commentaire, d’une façon simultanée mais sans ordre mentale; c’est le multi-écran de l’Exposition Universelle de Montréal, c’est un jeu dénué de sens. Alors, j’ai l’impression que la téléologie est à ré-inventer.
CHIASSON: In your assessment, do you see the simultaneous, experiential side as good? Do you think there is a need for re-inventing, as André says, the teleological side?
MARTIN: Or this will be made naturally?
FRYE: I think it will tend to take its own place as soon as people have understood that this is one of the most important things about the generation gap, that the young people of today do not have to advance gradually, step by step, to the extent that people of the older generation did. Consequently, the teleological, the gradual unfolding, becomes really a dramatic thing, rather than a mode of knowledge. It’s rather like a great presentation of a tragedy where the audience already knows the main theme, and has the simultaneous perception in its mind, but then participates through the gradual unfolding of it.
CHIASSON: André says that the low form of the process of simultaneity is “collage.” It is not the poetic.
FRYE: You notice that in the history of music there have been contrapuntal developments, and then sudden simplifications where you had emphasis on a tune, on an air going along the top with chords underneath, which is a teleological approach to music. But every so often the contrapuntal reasserts itself. I think that we have been bringing up students to learn along a single melodic line and that now they are educating themselves along contrapuntal techniques. That’s why they don’t find poetry so difficult, because poetry, like Shakespeare, has all these different levels [at once?], that is contrapuntal.
MARTIN: [Recurring to the problem of the creation of communities through various types of symbolic expression.] Coming here in the train, I asked myself what sort of broad- or narrow-casting was Rembrandt, Milton, Pascal practising. I believe that Rembrandt was narrow-casting, and Milton or Pascal. Do you understand what I mean? It’s for one town, for a special class of merchants, and the beginning of wonderful painting. Is it possible to create painting as high as the Flemish in the context of mass broadcasting?
FRYE: Surely Rembrandt is narrow-casting to his Dutch clientele, but he is also broadcasting to the world because everybody in the world can respond.
MARTIN: Yes. But I am asking about the start of a value, not the dissemination Perhaps we are wrong in trying to create immediately in large broadcasting the same type of values. All the problems of the creation of a community are problems of narrow-casting.
FRYE: Here, of course, is where the separating tendency in modern political life comes in—the fact that we are in an age of smaller groups feeling their identity. I think that the prejudice against American academics in Canadian universities is due not so much to the fact that they are Americans, as to the fact that they are behavioural scientists, for the most part.36 Consequently they have no sense of the community and the environment they are in; they just plunk down the same pattern wherever they are. But we’ve gone through that pattern when they laid out the West in squares and built railroads across it, and I think that now we can start becoming more aware of the immediate community.
CHIASSON: So actually, you agree that the identification of numerous small communities is the start of establishing a system of communications—the creator recognizes the community that he is working in, rather than necessarily working for or with. This is why you get targets in programs. You say, well, my program’s going to be directed to people that read the editorial page of the newspaper. Then you say, yes, I’m doing it for the people who read the editorial page, but I’m not sure they’re going to watch it, so I should put in something else, I don’t know, some song and dance.
FRYE: And, of course, the only people that you are sure of getting are the people within the vicinity of your signal.
CHIASSON: Yes, exactly. And that’s a way of describing a community, if you want.
FRYE: Yes. If you’re not aware of the environment, you’ve really had it. This has gone on a good deal in newspapers. I noticed it when I was in Berkeley,37 reading a San Francisco newspaper: in that paper, the world was the San Francisco area and a few rumours from outside. I think that this is a quite normal and healthy tendency.
MARTIN: We have no solution for the problem of violence in the mob with the mass media, which are essentially mob media.
FRYE: But a mob is only capable of simultaneous perception, and it can only react to a present symbol. This People’s Park at Berkeley was nothing but a stretch of mud covering a city block. But, for the mob, it was the garden of Eden with a fence around it. There is no teleological sense in a mob whatever. You have to understand the techniques of simultaneous apprehension to dissolve one.
MARTIN: If mob tendencies continue, perhaps it will be necessary to create new communities on the side, on the margin of mob territories.
FRYE: But the mob doesn’t march, you see. That’s the teleological rhythm. The mob drifts. Somebody says, let’s go and smash that shop, and so they go there. And then they go somewhere else.
MARTIN: Yes, but it’s possible to design a territory of a mob. It is not the first time in the history of humanity that it is necessary to create a new community on the frontiers of the old.
FRYE: This is starting, I think. To return to Berkeley, Telegraph Avenue is a place which is full of what they call “the street people.” In other words, it is a drifting mob without much sense of home. And yet in the middle of that are all these little contemplative groups, studying yoga and listening to some Tibetan lama, and this kind of thing.
[The discussion of how communications create communities continues.]
FRYE: Isn’t that the trouble with most commercial television programs, that they are thought of and broadcast to the greatest possible number rather than focused?
MARTIN: It is impossible to create faith, pride, or national loyalty ou la volonté d’être ensemble avec des mass media.
FRYE: You have to create a sense of identity, I think. Everybody in Canada wants to hear about the moon shot next week, but if one of those astronauts were a Canadian, the interest, in this country, would be about a hundred times what it is.38
MARTIN: Yes, we are a nation within the shadow of the U.S.A.
CHIASSON: The CBC, created precisely for developing the Canadian sense of identity, is now really used to promote the identity of a few people who work in it.
MARTIN: The problem is to create a community around achievement, not a community of fear ruled by mob concepts.
FRYE: The mob, of course, is the opposite of the community. The mob needs to have a focus of hatred, while the genuine community must have a focus of identity.
[Martin brings up the curious example of the NFB film about La Bolduc, born Mary Travers, a French Canadian singer and violinist of the Depression years who won an enormous following with her comic, derisive songs on such topics as unemployment. The soundtrack never gives a song in its entirety, but the whole film concentrates on the background of expropriation and poverty.]
FRYE: So that she’s just dissolved against her background.
MARTIN: Yes. It was a film about achievement, and the images of achievement are neglected.
CHIASSON: Isn’t there some link between the focus of hatred and the focus of identity?
FRYE: Well, yes. I was thinking of the difference between that mob being surrounded by the police and saying, “Get the pigs!” and a group listening to a folk singer like this woman. She is speaking for the group that she is addressing, and that provides a focus of identity.
CHIASSON: André says that we have a regulatory function. We spoke last time of a possible role as a producer of images and prototypes, though in discussion with John Grierson subsequently we found that that side of our function is not in the Act, although perhaps the promotion of such is within our orbit. But he says there is a third possible area, which is the development of a body of criticism. This is the teleological side. Can we create this body of criticism?
MARTIN: Indirectly; it would be a by-product.
FRYE: Something like this came up at the Air of Death hearing. There’s a contrast between a censorship which says, “This is something you must not do”—which immediately creates a complete demoralization among the producers—and the opposite of that which comes out in things like what Harry Boyle said: that the program is about an urgent public issue, where the producer takes the viewer into his confidence rather than delivering oracles.39 This is something that a sympathetic review of such a program could say. That is, the question of censorship is not there, not within a million miles of being there. It’s just a matter of what the person concerned about the community feels.
CHIASSON: Yes: in criticism, there is the sympathetic approach and there is the damning or acid approach. Is it desirable that a body of criticism be developed? How could we envisage this encouragement by the CRTC?
FRYE: The techniques of embodying this, I’m afraid I am not too clear about. But I had the feeling all through that Air of Death hearing that people like Larry Gosnell and Stanley Burke were both dedicated and sincere people, but they were also members of a professional elite.40 And they were here and the audience was down there. The feeling of knowing what was good for them was very strongly in their minds. There has to be this interchange of confidence, the sense of interdependence, that everybody in the community is dependent on everybody else: the producer of a program is dependent on his viewers, just as the viewers are dependent on him.
CHIASSON: What’s happened largely is that we tend to define our behaviour according to what we see on television. The politician, when he thinks of broadcasting, thinks of how he will look in that given situation …
FRYE: It’s a curious process, because the political leader is worked on by advertising agents who also consult the public as to what kind of image they want. But when he’s put on television, there is the most elaborate pretence that the audience has not in fact been consulted. If people have said, in answer to Gallup polls and so on, that they want this sort of thing, then the fact should be recorded somewhere; it should be in the open as part of the whole game.
[Martin and Chiasson wonder whether a new, nonprint type of criticism could be developed, perhaps in university departments of communication.]
FRYE: I don’t see why it couldn’t be, although I don’t know that I can suggest practical possibilities at this point. Certainly the universities could be used as a resource for personnel in this sort of thing, and will be increasingly, I think, as their departmental structure breaks down and begins to re-establish itself along the lines of communication.
[They instance underground groups, or small contemplative groups, as sources of a body of criticism outside the usual forms of classic scholarship.]
FRYE: Regarding the contemplative groups and the underground ones, there is also a great deal of the sort of Quaker meeting development. That is, there are encounter groups where people sit down and tell each other what they don’t like about one another, and try to tear off the clothes of ordinary hypocritical good manners. Students are extremely sold on these. I think that part of the reason goes back to the whole conception of communication. If you stop a man on the street and ask him for an example of communication, he will say, “Well, it’s when A says something to B,” which implies that A is being active and B is being a passive recipient; whereas students now are tending to use words like “dialogue.” What they mean is that communication grows inevitably out of the fact that there are two people, and the relation is not a one-way one but a reciprocal one. I do think that one has to take account of the growth, among the younger generation, of these sorts of experiential communities, because community and communication are interdependent ideas.
CHIASSON: If we see the mass media, for example, as one-directional communication from the few to the many, we’ve got part of the solution if we can develop two-way communication, in which people can have access to the means of expression in the media, the means of production.
FRYE: But it’s not just a matter of finding walkie-talkie reporters interviewing people. It’s not just a matter of open-line programs. It’s an educational program problem.
CHIASSON: André says that the one form that we don’t see often on television is two persons in dialogue who are not professionals. There is always a professional catalyst, or interviewer.
FRYE: Because, when you’re interviewing people at random, you are still assuming that they are passive units, and that what you will get will be the more or less reflex prejudice. People fall in with this.
[A section of manuscript is missing here. The dialogue returns with the problem of developing broadcasting in terms of the common good. Should one wait for an indication from Parliament, or has one the right to assume leadership, in a democratic society?]
FRYE: The democratic leader, of course, falls between two extremes. One is the leader who is set over against his community, and the other is the mob leader who is simply a part of the mob. The leader has to be the individual who is at the same time identified with his group, and with a freedom of movement which enables him to understand the plurality of communities. Trudeau came in first as a symbol of national unity (being both English and French), yet at the same time, like almost all politicians east of Winnipeg, he doesn’t really take in the Prairie Provinces. He is at a bit of a loss there because he doesn’t understand them and they don’t understand him. So the leader has to have the extra mobility which comes from the fact that there is always more than one community involved.
CHIASSON: That’s the leader in a democracy, and you’re thinking specifically of the political leader.
FRYE: Well, I gave you the example of the political leader, but I think that it is true of all leadership.
CHIASSON: I think that André’s question is a little more specific: should we study more the mandate or should we study more the fact of broadcasting? He gives the example of the Annual Report of the CRTC which we prepared, where we really talked about the development of the technical industrial aspect,41 and said, should we not have, for example, looked at the Parliamentary Committees, looked at the House of Commons debates, looked at the newspapers, looked at the many expressed concerns about broadcasting, and made a table of that as well?
[At this point they apparently look at Frye’s “Logos diagram,” a version of what Frye sometimes called his “Great Doodle,” a way of visualizing the intellectual cosmos or the manifestations of the Word that guided his thinking at this time. Circular in form, it is divided into four quadrants labelled Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus.]42
[See diagram next page.]
CHIASSON: On your large diagram here, if we are at the bottom of the circle, which I think we are, it’s a problem of Prometheus, a will.
MARTIN: A will of achievement, of goals. What’s going on now is violence, disturbance, unrest; it’s more anxious than revolutionary.
FRYE: It’s just teetering on the boundary between the two. People of my generation belong in the ironic phase of culture. They’ve been brought up with the Existentialists; they’ve been brought up with the anxiety of being thrown forward into the future. The younger people are much more revolutionary in their mood. They are romantic and idealistic and Utopian, they are not ironic.
MARTIN: Perhaps the present revolution is only a phase of the Hermes quadrant? To be revolutionary, it is necessary to do the work of Lenin, Hegel, and Marx. It’s hard, theoretical work. And we don’t get actually the same body of work of analysis and projection.
FRYE: I think that is one reason why Marxist society, and more particularly Maoism, has such an appeal for younger people. They feel that there is where the will is being directed. It comes out of their cultural tastes, as I say. My generation were brought up on an ironic literature: we read the Existentialists, we read the rather oblique poets, like Wallace Stevens, and we understood the conceptions of alienation and absurdity and anxiety. Now, with the under-thirty group, there is an intense neo-Romantic feeling. They’re afraid of irony, they hate it. They feel that this is something the older generation has got them imprisoned in, and they want to break out of it. They listen to folk singers who are talking in Utopian terms, not in tragic and ironic terms.
MARTIN: Yes, but Romantic and Utopian tendencies are situated before August Comte, Hegel, and Marx in the succession of mental landscapes. Perhaps you have a sector, a Romantic sector, before the Thanatos pole. And at the same time, Apollo and moon shot techniques are already in the Prometheus phase, where there is a body of planning, pre-vision, analysis of works, and new direction. But perhaps you are always mainly in the Hermes fast phase.
FRYE: Certainly, the main centre of gravity of democratic civilization is still there; I think that’s true.
CHIASSON: The striking element of the youth movement is its globality. It’s not just one society, it’s really the world as one community—that is, a Utopia. Isn’t it?
FRYE: Yes.
CHIASSON: So that achievements that have a national tag to them are up for criticism.
FRYE: It depends on the nation. In Canada, yes, but Cuba would be different.
CHIASSON: I was trying to see the nature of the revolutionary ideal, and where the will was being applied.
FRYE: I speak of revolutionaries like Hegel and Marx who, in the nineteenth century, were rationalist people. The revolutionary feeling in our time is Freudian as well as Marxist. That is, the sense of creative sexuality is very strong. This circle [the Logos diagram] is really on the analogy of the human body. You have the brain here, and the sky-father who makes the world, the artificer, and down here you have the sexual and anal regions, and the earth-mother; you have the angels of Logos here and the titans or the giants down here, like Prometheus. In the Christian centuries, you have the top, the brain, the sky-father, idealized, and everything which is down here becomes infernal, a part of hell. Then you have Rabelais going on a long quest for sexual and anal imagery. In the last chapter of Rabelais there is the priestess who says goodbye to the giants, saying, “Now remember, all good things come from below ground.”43This is the mood now, I think, the sense of creative sexuality coming up.
CHIASSON: The special Canadian situation vis-à-vis the turmoil, perhaps we could identify what’s peculiar about it. You’ve just been to the United States, and I remember your remark that there seemed to be more balance here.
FRYE: Canadians have more of an administrative mentality, thinking very concretely in terms of what committees they can be on. This means that the students are presenting negotiable demands instead of these non-negotiable demands which create a reign of terror in American universities.
CHIASSON: I see. We have a sense of negotiation.
FRYE: Negotiation derived from the fact that they don’t think in terms of confrontation for its own sake, they think of participating in the administrative machinery.
CHIASSON: Can this be linked to something that is fundamental in Canadians?
FRYE: I think that one of the things that is fundamental in Canada is the sense of the artefact, of manipulating things rather than bringing them to birth. Canadians are not a race of great creators. They are rather a race of adminstrators, manipulators, people who are good at practical situations, or thinkers—that kind of thing. Consequently, they tend to think more in rational terms.
[The question is linked to the characteristic Canadian landscape.]
MARTIN: In Canada, it’s a problem of monuments versus the landscape.
FRYE: We’re still in the pyramid stage where the things that man creates are mathematical and are imposed on the landscape and don’t blend in with it.
CHIASSON: In trying to describe broadcasting in Canada, you come to the conclusion that we’ve done marvels at building the pyramid—tremendous networks, hundreds of stations, interconnections, everything—but there’s a certain vacuum about what ought to go in, the things that we are producing.
MARTIN: C’est aussi la prédominance de l’adaptation sur la création.
FRYE: But this is repeated below the broadcasting towers: that is, the West is laid out in those square sections. If you look at the buildings in a Western village, they don’t come from the landscape, they defy the landscape. I think Versailles begins the intelligent or geometrical conquest of space which you have over here: it’s the conquest of nature by an intelligence that doesn’t love nature and doesn’t feel itself a part of it.
CHIASSON: I remember I said that the next time we talked, perhaps we would talk of Canada as a non-brilliant society, and you said, “Thank God Canada is not a brilliant society.” We would like to see the possibilities of creation in a non-brilliant way.
MARTIN: Une société brillante, une culture brillante, it’s an overstimulated culture: Vienne, Paris …
FRYE: I think of California where the climate is overstimulating to begin with, and they don’t have this long deep introverted winter which is so valuable to us. It’s characteristic of a brilliant culture to think in terms of very concrete images, whereas in Canada we have a sense of the conceptual, as both articulating, and, to some extent, cooling down the direct presentation of the symbol. You’ll never get a Monet in Canada. You would get a man who would start with a pencil and a piece of white paper, and who would think of the colours as emerging. I was looking at an exhibition of paintings by Canadian students of landscapes, and one of them was a student from Ghana. I realized that what was different about his imagination was that he had never seen a black-and-white world; consequently, he lived in a world where colours existed from the beginning. He did not think, as we do, of colours emerging in the spring, and coming into their focus in the autumn and then disappearing. There is an annual birth and death of colour, out of the black and white, in Canada.
[All agree on the importance of this black-and-white phenomenon in Canada.]
FRYE: There is an analogy, and I think it is a very deep-rooted analogy, between the image derived from sense experience which the poet uses, as the colour, and the concept, as the black-and-white thing. And I think that our habit of mind is instinctively conceptual. You see it in Canadian poetry, both English and French: the struggle that they have to get the pure image across, and the almost gasp of relief with which they fall back into the conceptual argumentative line. That’s what struck me in my reading about Canadian nineteenth-century literature, the fact there is such a high intelligence carried out at an argumentative level, and the extraordinary act of will that it takes for a Canadian poet to get away from the conceptual basis.
CHIASSON: I saw this in another context, that of French Canada, being extremely argumentative, aggressive. I’ve wondered if the verbal aggression let loose didn’t sometimes cut them off from their historical or cultural foundations.
FRYE: I think it does, to some extent, because the Canadian is always uneasy when he’s left the field of argument.
MARTIN: A capital is a tool of civilization. Is it possible to create a real capital in a non-brilliant society?
FRYE: I think that the capital of a non-brilliant society is going to be an administrative centre. I think that it will be some time before there is a brilliant society here, that is not what Ottawa is all about. It’s very much a brain centre, it’s a centre of communication signals, but it is not the dramatization of a way of life in the way that London or Paris would be. I think that I mentioned this earlier in connection with Charlottetown: something is put on top of a Canadian community, and someone says, “Now this is culture, you rally round it.” And you know, they won’t.
CHIASSON: And it’s true in other areas of Canadian life, not just the cultural area. In some respects, social organizations or patterns developed in brilliant countries, or maybe even in the United States, don’t take root here …. André asks if we can say that the black-and-white culture is a culture of abstraction.
FRYE: Yes. There’s an analogy which may be something more than an analogy between the black and white and the conceptual. It is such an instinctive figure of speech that there must be something there.
CHIASSON: André asks whether a new sector of communications that would put the accent on the transmission of knowledge and abstraction might have a chance to be more successful in Canada.
MARTIN: New channels or new tools of representation, visual terminals with computers and so on, all means of processing of information, are more fitted for Canada, perhaps, than for other countries.
FRYE: I think so, yes. Because you’re dealing with a community that thinks conceptually first, and moves from that to symbols and images and concrete things.
MARTIN: Is our difficulty to represent accompanied by a special facility to schematize or to abstract?
FRYE: That’s interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Of course, the poet thinks schematically too, but in a rather different way. He classifies images, whereas this community tends to classify concepts.
CHIASSON: André asks whether in the history of Canadian communications there has been a proven aptitude to schematize: for example, some achievement in mapping?
FRYE: Yes, there has been a good deal of that in the Canadian temperament and, in a sense, that is what I owe my reputation to: a schematization of forms of literature. I’ve often mentioned that story by Stephen Leacock about the Canadian town, with the rivalry between the Episcopalian and the Presbyterian. The Presbyterian minister taught ethics in the local college five days a week and then preached on Sunday, and Lea-cock says that in his college classroom he gave his students three parts Hegel and two parts St. Paul, and when he preached to his congregation on Sunday, he reversed the dose and gave them three parts St. Paul and two parts Hegel.44 That couldn’t exist anywhere but in Ontario. It starts as Scottish Presbyterianism but that particular form is pure Canada.
[Martin wonders whether Frye could say something about the relationship between the “black-and-white” culture and characteristics of contemplation and abstraction.]
FRYE: As I say, the people in this country go through this deep introverted winter every year and it tends to be a kind of seed bed into which things fall and from which they emerge. But regarding the Canadian experience rotating into the winter and back to it again, one thinks of flowering out of this self-contained introversion and then a withdrawal to it. It isn’t an outside world which is there all the time.
CHIASSON: André asks if winter impresses us with the sense of a cosmic cycle, whereas in cities where it is warmer, you are more aware of mechanical time.
FRYE: Oh, yes, I think so, because you can go through a year in Los Angeles without ever thinking of the climate. Whereas here, you always notice the weather and you are continually being pulled back to this cycle of nature.
CHIASSON: André asks if you know of black-and-white cultures other than Canada.
FRYE: Yes, Russia—I think that is one that has many things in common with Canada. Japan is another, because of the emphasis they keep putting on things like the cherry blossom in the spring and the chrysanthemum in the autumn … for the Japanese, it’s not always there. It grows and it dies, they’re always conscious of this circle going around. And the Japanese also have this manipulative and administrative gift. When you get into Sweden, you begin to get into another kind of rhythm, this sort of midnight sun rhythm, which is something that you would know.
CHIASSON: To me, the “black and white” and the “garrison” are similar, there is a certain sense of loneliness, in a way, in both impressions.
FRYE: And of course, the black-and-white world is the schematic world, it’s the world of the drawn lines, the world of communications, the articulations, the skeleton world.
[Chiasson floats the idea of looking at Canadian history and fundamentals in terms of a tropism or ecology of abstraction.]
FRYE: The tropism45 is something that is established from here; that is, the north seeks the south, the south never seeks the north.
CHIASSON: Exactly. The northern exploration of the Promethean, the development of the north. The Russians have been tremendous in that respect, of course. But then, the culture which has the capacity for abstraction may also have the capacity for destruction.
FRYE: Yes, it can destroy nature by imposing this abstract pattern on it. And it can be humanly destructive, too. It’s also got something to do with rocks—there are so many damn rocks in this country. The pre-Cambrian shield is just lying all over the country; there’s a sense of the vegetation just pushing its way out of the rock. There’s a tremendous sort of mining culture in this part of the world: it’s all part of the same cultural complex.
[Martin remarks on how the Canadian capacity for abstraction contributed to the development of American animation and cartoons, for instance in the work of Mack Sennett.]
FRYE: I knew about Mack Sennet, and I knew about Larry Semon who turned the old comics into a cartoon just by the gymnastics.46
MARTIN: They both, at the same time, font entrer de l’abstraction. These are all the family trees of the beginning of the American animated cartoon.
FRYE: But still it is significant that he was developed in the NFB. Everything is imported in Canada, but I think it’s what it does when it gets here that …
CHIASSON: It would be interesting to find other examples of this schematic effect.
FRYE: In painting, one would think of things like the Group of Seven, going up into the country around Lake Superior, and schematizing what they see—Lismer and Harris, particularly, laying the colours on, just blocks of colour one after the other, reds and yellows and greens and blues. And then Harris going into abstraction. There is nothing uncommon about abstraction, but what is uncommon is the way he gets to it, simplifying and schematizing a landscape.
[Martin talks of the country’s being so large that one can emigrate to the interior, as the early settlers did, necessarily leaving behind their monuments.]
CHIASSON: André is going one step further: a culture without monuments, a culture of abstraction, is also a culture of emigration.
FRYE: My wife realized this when she started to study the history of art and found that, as she hadn’t at the time been in Europe, she had never actually seen the works of art themselves, but had been trained entirely on conceptual analogues, that is, reproductions in books, and that sort of thing.
MARTIN: It’s retrieval and references.
FRYE: You are really manipulating the conceptual skeleton of the art world. I think it does affect a country when its whole cultural tradition has been based on these conceptual analogues. It makes a lot of difference, because if you create a new work of art, you’re not making a new appearance in a community of art; something is flowering out of these conceptual analogues.
CHIASSON: I think we’ve a capacity to adapt to certain trends coming from elsewhere. I wonder if that is also linked to our capacity to process in the abstract.
FRYE: I suppose so. Again, I think of a culture like that of Japan and China where things begin by adaptation and imitation and eventually get established.
CHIASSON: What are the chances of a black-and-white culture’s radiating, influencing, developing in the world through satellite, the cosmopolis?
FRYE: I think its chances of doing that are like Rembrandt’s, that is, they are in proportion to the extent to which it realizes its own community and directs itself on that.
CHIASSON: [alluding to Martin’s distinction between radiation and amplification] He says, for example, that Brigitte Bardot is more amplified than radiating and that Rembrandt radiates more than he is amplified.
FRYE: Yes. But radiation is a quality of intensity, and intensity is a quality of concentration and that arises out of a rapprochement in a community.
CHIASSON: Then the future of Canada is more toward concentration than toward dissemination?
FRYE: I think that if you start out with the idea of making an exportable culture, you’ve had it; I just don’t think that that works at all. The Americans, for example, didn’t have a literature that was communicable to the outside world until they got intense regional developments in Mississippi and New England and New York and the West, and I think that is true of us, too. You can’t aim at a world market unless you are doing something completely undistinguished.
CHIASSON: André is suggesting that we are better equipped to export natural resources or food or nickel than to export theatre and cinema. It’s a wrong direction.
FRYE: Well, I think that if we go in the other direction, then we will export it all the more quickly and it would become communicable.
CHIASSON: André says it can also act as a shield to prevent cultural hegemony: it is also the best defence. What is the ultimate form of abstraction in terms of a community? Is it a certain degree of nearly atomic communities linked somehow, organically or some other way?
FRYE: Yes. And concentrating on the immediate conceptual form of communication. Communication through emblems, through images and symbols, presupposes contact and sympathy, whereas the argumentative, the conceptual, is more aggressive. The argument is like the railway, it just goes straight across the country, and that form of communication is the kind you develop in a country where communication is difficult.
CHIASSON: The cycle spring–fall, fall–spring, has an aspect of colour-to-black-and-white. There is a movement from animate to inanimate, to the cold of winter which is the antithesis of the brilliant.
FRYE: Yes. Cold is a self-contained quality, it holds its life in itself.
CHIASSON: André suggests that it might be a program of action to change the emphasis, in the linguistic problem in Canada, from the political aspect that it has now to a human ideal.
FRYE: I certainly would like to see that, yes. Of course, the linguistic barrier of, let’s say, Ontario and Quebec, is no greater than the cultural barrier between Ontario and the Prairies—and they both speak English—or between the French Canadians in Quebec and the Acadians in the Maritimes.
CHIASSON: André is asking how to take it away from the political arena, where it’s always a contest, a degradation, into an area of human development.
MARTIN: It’s a problem of aesthetic programmation.
FRYE: There again, the political atmosphere is part of the whole conceptual and argumentative atmosphere. If it weren’t political, it would be religious, it would be something where you could have an argument. The only direction away from this, I think, is away from the narrowly conceptual and argumentative into the presentation by emblem and symbol and image, which are things which you cannot argue about. Either they are there or they are not there.
CHIASSON: It’s a problem of images, ideals, and universals.
FRYE: But if the ideal is presented as an image, as a vision, then it is not only something that you cannot argue about, it is also something communicable through all languages. Whereas the ideal as something that you argue about runs into this linguistic problem which is largely a mental problem.
CHIASSON: Images really grow; they’re not of the domain of abstraction itself. The source, the roots are in the guts more than in the mind.
FRYE: They’re certainly in sense experience rather than in abstraction, and to that extent they are more bodily.
CHIASSON: The things that we are trying to define, the fundamentals: André asks to what extent they are applicable to all the territory, the Maritimes, the Prairies, the West?
FRYE: I think what we are trying to find might be called latitude things—what connects us because we are all Canadians in the same latitude. The longitude things which pull us down into an American culture, they’re something else again. Latitude things have to do with climate and the existence of winter and that immense drive in to the interior and down the St. Lawrence.
CHIASSON: I wonder if we can say that the common bonds are more numerous than the divergent or dissociative. [He comments on Canadians’ lack of real knowledge of their territory, especially the north; “we have made an abstraction of our north.”]
FRYE: Our country is abstract to ourselves.
[The discussion returns to Frye’s Logos diagram. Martin asks about the Hermes and Prometheus phases in Canadian terms.]
FRYE: I think in Canada you start out with a very Logos-dominated conception, a very Dantesque one, the intelligible order, what you impose on the landscape. This, around here, is the pastoral area, when Dante’s Purgatorio goes up to the Garden of Eden, and the Eros ascent is towards an earthly paradise. The pastoral world is very deeply rooted in Canadian consciousness. At the same time, the world of winter in so much Canadian literature is a thing of terror and nihilism.
MARTIN: The annual “thanatos.”
FRYE: It’s a very traditional pattern that you have in most Canadian literature The pastoral theme is generally diffused in so much nineteenth-century Canadian literature and poetry, the Mariposa type of thing—the small town and the protected community.47 The chase for submarine monsters is what you begin to get in Pratt, and the sense of nihilism of the iceberg: the ship hits it and disappears. Then there are the mechanical and technological poems of Pratt which are Promethean, on the building of the CPR railway [Towards the Last Spike]. This kind of thing begins to come in more and more with twentieth-century literature. But with so much of the French Canadian lyrics, Henri Carnot, that kind of writing is still very anxious and so inelegant.48
CHIASSON: Thanatos being the unexpressible, or perhaps unsayable.
MARTIN: L’anthropologie française a un mot, je n’en connais pas l’origine, pour tout ce qui est le sexe, la morte, c’est le “numineux.” So, Thanatos will be numinous.
FRYE: Well, yes, that is, this point here where Dante reaches the end of the Purgatorio, the garden of Eden or earthly paradise, [looking] up to the stars and the paradisal vision, the vision of order. You look downward, and you see the whole cycle of nature revolving below. Down here, that’s the point of the underworld journey. You look down and you see this world of eternal pain, and you look up and you see the cycle of nature turning. This is where the bateau ivre and Moby-Dick kind of journey goes. You can either stop there and look down at this unending world of life and death, or you can think of it in terms of a rebirth, as the tomb becoming a womb.
CHIASSON: And even the life hereafter.
FRYE: Yes, in religious terms, it becomes a life hereafter; in purely literary terms, of course, it doesn’t.
CHIASSON: Even in religious terms the religious order grows out of the Logos.
FRYE: In the Christian conception, the Logos descends down through the Adonis role; that is, Christ comes to the world and becomes the dying God. The answer of the soul to this is the ascent of the soul back to its creator. There are two levels in the Christian story. Christ comes from Heaven to the earth and then goes back in the Ascension. And then he also descends into the underworld, into hell, and then comes back again in the Resurrection.
MARTIN: I thought about the astronautic American operation (you see, we are now in this point of the cycle), that it is not an American cycle, it’s a German cycle with an American budget. The American Promethean enterprise in astronautics is in advance of the civilized cycle. It is criticized. It is in contrast to the general development of the society. It isn’t an absolutely American cycle, it’s an import, an acculturation. If we have to do the work of a Hegel, a Marx, an August Comte, we have to do it now. And only after we will launch our rockets, with a new body of knowledge.
FRYE: But it’s typical of the twentieth century, I think, that it does the technological thing first, and then it thinks afterwards.
CHIASSON: And it gets things imposed on it by technology.
FRYE: You get to the moon without stopping to think whether the moon is worth landing on.
MARTIN: If we intend to arrive here, it is necessary to take some precautions in this phase, otherwise we will fall into the “Thanatos” phase. You have never written about this cycle?
FRYE: I haven’t yet, no.
MARTIN: But you intend to do so?
FRYE: Yes, sometime soon.
MARTIN: It would be possible to illustrate it by a modern equivalent of illumination. It would be a collage with some little bits of newspaper illustrations, with a little head and some character with wings [cut from?] another paper.
FRYE: Of course, in medieval or Renaissance literature, you do get very literal diagrams of this kind.
MARTIN: C’est intéressant d’essayer de faire des itinéraires entre les phases.
CHIASSON: Can you make itineraries of this kind? Are there steps?
FRYE: There are all kinds of them, fictional patterns, of course. But you spoke of the “numinous” a while ago, and of course, in Christian teaching, you cannot look to nature for the numinous; that is, nature is a created order and all the gods that men have discovered in nature are really devils. That is the Christian view. With us, we start rediscovering the numinous in nature.
MARTIN: I need to study this [diagram] for some time before asking any more questions. It’s a fountain, it’s a well. But I ask myself some questions about revolutionary techniques in the Hermes phase and in the Prometheus phase. And it is very curious because the pre-revolutionary state, actually in the Romantic and Hermes phase, takes the form of a journey in the revolutionary attitude. It’s the correction of images and references. [The modern revolution] is a revolution without an ideal, without a strategy, without a program, and without even the desire for power. It’s a very curious revolutionary spirit.
FRYE: You’re thinking of people like Cohn-Bendit, for example, and the feeling of simply renouncing the whole technological side of revolution.49
MARTIN: It’s intelligent, reasoned, living, “sympathique,” but no program. And it isn’t a question of age. Lenin was young when he started to think in strategic terms. It’s a loss of a sense of government. Is the art of government a Promethean feature?
FRYE: It can be, yes. The Hermes quest tends to individualize. I think a community disintegrates as it goes on; it becomes more and more a collection of solitudes. With Prometheus, you’re coming in the other direction, and things begin to coalesce.
MARTIN: Prometheus starts with a prophet and ends with a strategist, Alexander the Great, for example.
[After a break, Martin alludes to Innis’s remarks on the development of the monastic structure, in a manuscript they hope to study.]50
FRYE: Burckhardt, a nineteenth-century historian, predicted some of the things that would happen in the twentieth century. He said that the only cure for some of them would be the rise of the new monastic movement.51
MARTIN: I don’t know this reference. Perhaps the uncontrollable crisis will develop in the next five years. It will be surely the opportunity for a new separation movement; I mean not national separatism, but the real disappearance of a limited group of men united by the same inspiration and direction.
FRYE: If the universities keep on with this kind of unrest, the scholars are going to be compelled to form monastic communities.
CHIASSON: We were talking of vertical images and images of convergence.
MARTIN: This sort of big symbolic images in medieval programs of images. And we talked about difficult programmation in terms of symbols. Labyrinthe was an opportunity to do a big tympan, a big series of stained glasses, and the opportunity was missed. And isn’t the democratic process to program in big roles? Do you think that perhaps some day it will be more convenient to do a sort of show business of old and new at the same time?
FRYE: In the medieval cathedrals, you get an encyclopedic symbolism with the whole drama from the creation and the fall of man into death, and then the regeneration of man and the apocalypse. The Bible starts with the creation, the intelligible order, and goes through the fall of man, and the fall of Israel into Egypt, and then the coming of Christ, and the regeneration of man and the church which leads him back there again. What I was hoping Labyrinthe would do was to indicate a similar encyclopedic sequence in terms of this Hermes and Prometheus, this “thanatos”-centred thing, the labyrinthine underworld quest.
[They wonder whether it is possible to think in terms of the creation of Canadian images disseminating in a worldwide system.]
FRYE: Oh yes, I think it is. It’s difficult to know where to stop before you start prescribing the creative processes of producers. And it’s important not to get into that kind of area.
CHIASSON: Exactly, and perhaps it’s at that juncture that the body of criticism is important.
FRYE: Perhaps so, yes, certainly in a negative way.
[Chiasson wonders about how the CRTC can interpret its mandate concerning the “national interest.”]
CHIASSON: The terms of the mandate are fairly strong, so that, without getting into dictating to the creators what they ought to do, there is nevertheless an area of definition of the national purposes of production; that perhaps has to be done. And, I suppose, if we are in the Promethean part of the circle, excellence in every subject, excellence in every regard …
FRYE: And we’re following the Promethean order, in which all the technological machinery, all the hardware gets set up first, and the thinking is done after that.
CHIASSON: I wonder if we will extend our energies, to a great extent, on the technological side, on setting it up, on the time-tables, and find that vis-à-vis programs, we have the same problem as we have now. Because for the observant country, the problem of creation is a difficult one. And we will still be observing …
FRYE: If we remain within the general cultural orbit that we’ve been discussing, that is exactly what we will do. We’ll set up the hardware with great speed and efficiency and then there will be a long silence.
CHIASSON: However, in Canada, I think there has always been a certain expression of patriotism; for example, the national identity has somehow come about in times of war. I suppose this is normal.
FRYE: It’s an attack on the garrison.
CHIASSON: Now, I feel that we are in a period where the garrison is being threatened. That could be communicated, and it could become a reason for the country to realize its identity.
FRYE: It always has been true, in the past, that war could create a cohesive community, in a way that nothing else could. Now that, for better or for worse, we have pretty well outgrown war, we have this constant eroding of the Canadian identity by the uniformity of the world it’s in, which is a war of too many fronts to fight on.
MARTIN: I don’t know if I have the right to ask you this, but in your literary discipline, do you have a special body of knowledge intended in the direction of the image or contrary to the images?
FRYE: Well, I suppose the body of knowledge comes from the images and symbols of poetry.
MARTIN: Is it a system of explanation or a system of direction? Do you intend to use it as an exploration of the past or do you intend to develop a system to create some new big images, to choose the next program?
FRYE: My own function is really to explain why certain images and symbols are in poetry, and this is the kind of schematization I come up with. I think this will explain why you have images such as going down the river, the quest to the South Pole, or disappearing underground, in certain types of Romantic and symboliste poetry, and why you get images of coming up from the ground, of Titan rising, of climbing a mountain, the ascent of the soul on the mystical ladder, and that kind of thing. So that my work is critical, and I would hope that it would be useful to poets and artists generally, to suggest to them new forms of combination. In fact I think that it has already been of some help to them.
CHIASSON: I could see a series of films on that.
MARTIN: The start of John Grierson’s National Film Board was a Promethian tentative.
CHIASSON: I’d put the Liberals in here [on NF’s chart]. And the Conservatives here.
FRYE: Yes, I suppose that’s the realistic axis, that horizontal one, the other is the idealistic.
CHIASSON: Where would you put Louis Riel in Canadian history?
FRYE: Over towards the end of the Adonis one, the pastoral ideal surrounded and overwhelmed. Romantic literature begins with things like Scott’s novels, with the old hardened aristocracy wiped out by the middle class, and you get the battle of the Plains of Abraham; the one that loses is the Marquis, the one that wins is the Hanoverian commoner.52 Louis Riel is that kind of romantic figure overwhelmed by the middle class.
MARTIN: In working with you, it seems to me that we have found new reasons for the decentralization of a system of defence of a community in physical terms and not in institutional terms.
CHIASSON: Yes, and I think that should be communicated to the Commission, communicated to the Chairman.
FRYE: Because, even on the Pacific Coast, there is only Vancouver, which is sheltered in behind that island, so that there is nothing like San Francisco or Los Angeles. Similarly, there is this tremendous Strait of Belle Isle and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that is nothing like the Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Washington, area.
CHIASSON: That’s true. It’s a little peninsula, the Maritimes. Until you get to Quebec, you can’t go in too many directions. There is this bottleneck at the top.
FRYE: The result is that everything seems to flow into the centre, to Montreal and Toronto.