Recorded 30 December 1968
“The Only Genuine Revolution” and “Educating the Imagination” appeared originally in Monday Morning, February 1969, 20–6, and March 1969, 22–8. The text of the two linked interviews is taken from Monday Morning, with some of the editorial emendations from the reprint in WGS, 51–83. Dated by internal evidence. Monday Morning was a magazine for Canadian teachers published from about 1967 to 1972 by Saturday Night Publications. The interviewer was Bruce Mickleburgh, dean of English and Communications at Seneca College, Toronto, and managing editor of the magazine. The interview was broadcast in four parts on radio station CJRT-FM, 3–24 March.
MICKLEBURGH: Not long ago the principal teacher at the district high school in Atikokan, Ontario, asked me, “What is the aim of education?” I undertook to quote you from memory: “The aim of education is to be able to distinguish illusion from reality.”
FRYE: Yes, I did say that, and I was speaking of a particular stage in the educational process. I think I located it somewhere in the high-school stage of education, where it seems to me that the distinction between reality and illusion is really the central problem—the problem of distinguishing the realities from the illusions in society, for example.1 Along with that is the growth of literary and mathematical culture where the units are symbols. That is certainly one of the aims of education, but one could list a great number of others, and when you got all through, it would still remain true, I think, that education is an end in itself. It is simply a way of living, rather than a process aimed at something else.
MICKLEBURGH: Somebody told me that you once said, perhaps in a polemic, that the aim of education is to make people maladjusted.
FRYE: Yes, I said that, too—about twenty-five years ago in an article in the Canadian Forum2—because at that time everybody was talking about adjustment and all the other clichés that were being used in education circles in those days. I naturally brought out the other side of it—that the whole process of distinguishing reality from illusion is also a process of disillusionment, and that consequently the educated person is the one who refuses to accept the illusions and the clichés and the bromides of society.
MICKLEBURGH: Some of those bromides and clichés are still with us, and some of the talk about the aim of education being to make people “adaptable” is still around. People now seem particularly to be talking about adaptability to change, on the grounds that “the only thing constant now is change itself.” They talk about the accelerating rate of change and about the vast accumulation of knowledge in the world, which leads them to the conclusion that there is no point in learning facts any more. They say that since nobody can now learn all the facts, what people have to be able to do is find their own facts. This is a current argument.
FRYE: I’m not sure that one can call that an argument. I think it’s the result of the general bankruptcy of the previous views. The original idea was that education was a tool for producing the docile and obedient citizen who fitted into his particular niche in the economic and social setup. The idea of education was to produce round pegs and put them into round holes. Now that that has become so obviously impossible, the naked anti-intellectualism which is inherent in this adaptability idea begins to come out. So when you talk about adaptability to change itself, which of course means nothing at all, it suggests that the whole educational process has become expendable.
MICKLEBURGH: Do you relate this to what you have spoken of in The Modern Century as “the panic of change” [22; NFMC, 10]?
FRYE: I think that a statement such as, “You have to develop an adaptability to change,” without saying where you are going to change or what form the change is going to take, is an expression of panic or hysteria, yes.
MICKLEBURGH: It seems to me that a great many people who are working in the schools really believe that what they are there to do is to mould people or to plant values. I’ve often raised the question (and always got lively responses) as to what this had to do with helping people distinguish between illusion and reality.
FRYE: Well, of course, if you spend thirty or forty years doing a routine job in a routine way, you naturally get the notion that society is a static structure, and that by the time you get through educating these little potential citizens of tomorrow, you can then place them in their proper locale within this static framework of society. But of course there is no such framework, and education cannot prepare you for life, because life will not stay around to get prepared for. By the time you are prepared for life, there is a different life in front of you. It’s only being sheltered by routine that makes it difficult for people to see that.
MICKLEBURGH: Do you think it is possible to counterpose the child and the subject? For several decades now there has been a debate going on that has been put in these terms: we need a child-centred school rather than a subject-centred school.
FRYE: I don’t object to the concept of a child-centred school as long as you are really dealing with children. That is, the child’s personality, by which I mean mostly his ego, is certainly the central fact of the child’s experience. I think the process of education tends to move from a child centre of gravity to a subject centre of gravity in proportion as a student matures. It seems to me to be an insult to a student of any degree of maturity to give him anything except a subject-centred education.
MICKLEBURGH: You have spoken of subjects as having their own structures and, I think, posed the question that what a person does in mastering a subject is to enter into the structure of the subject.3 Could you clarify that a bit? And what is the relationship between the term “subject” and the term “discipline”?
FRYE: I don’t know that I would distinguish subject from discipline so far as they are generally employed, except that “discipline” seems to me to mean “subject” with a slightly emotional colouring attached to it designed to emphasize the nature of the structure. But I do think that you tend to move into a certain area of knowledge where your mind has to join on to what has previously been thought and worked at in that area. The term “subject,” of course, is extremely flexible. It simply means an area of knowledge with an extremely vague circumference. And, of course, any area of knowledge is also the centre of all knowledge. At the same time there are certain facts established, certain logical principles laid down, certain demonstrable and repeated experiments that have been done, certain classics of the imagination that have established their authority (this is true of literature particularly), and the contact that the mind makes with them is entirely a matter of moving into that area and taking root there. There isn’t any form or habit of thinking, it seems to me, that can go on outside thinking within the subject itself. You don’t think for yourself in that sense. What you do is to add a bit organically related to what has been thought before.
[Mickleburgh alludes to students who simply master a certain content in different subjects, as opposed to learning, to some extent, to think as professors of those subjects think. It may be that the schools risk teaching a substitute for the subjects—a “rhetoric of conclusions”—rather than a “rhetoric of inquiry.”]
FRYE: I understand that very well, and I certainly understand the conception of two levels of learning. Every normal student finds that there are some subjects that he is more interested in than others. And for those in which he is not interested, it seems to me very natural, very human, that his response should be largely a response of memory and a kind of second-hand information, and that actually learning to think as the people in that subject themselves think will be confined largely to subjects in which he is particularly interested. I certainly remember this in my own schooling. I was as lopsided as could be in my own interests. Even in high school I knew that I wanted to study English and did not want to study mathematics. I always got through my mathematics examinations very well simply by memorizing what there was and handing it back and thereby getting rid of mathematics. I never thought like a mathematician. I never thought creatively or originally in that field at all. But nobody is likely to think creatively or originally in all his subjects, and I think that that is perhaps the reason why one’s study tends to narrow in range as one gets older and more mature.
MICKLEBURGH: There are people now who say you don’t need mathematics to enter a university.
FRYE: I don’t see why one has to carry this always to the point of taking the subject away from the student. I never got the point of things like Cartesian coordinates and was never able to think my way around them or to understand why these subjects were developed in the way they were. But it seems to me that a great deal of education, particularly at elementary levels, is bound to be tentative. A student has to be shown the general conspectus of intellectual and imaginative resources in the civilization around him. Out of that he picks the particular place where he wants to advance for himself, but I don’t see the reason for his not doing it. I said in a lecture that the education system compels a high-school girl to do some algebra even though she hates it because her whole life is already geared to marriage and bridge on a Saturday night and shopping in the suburbs.4 But this is a democracy, and consequently it is her right to be exposed to quadratic equations, however little she wants them.
MICKLEBURGH: Do you think there are some senior disciplines, or essential disciplines, that form a necessary, almost obligatory, part of the education of a civilized, wellrounded person?
FRYE: I daresay there is such a thing as a core curriculum. There are a certain number of things that a person needs to know in order to take any active or responsible role in a complicated society like ours, and I should think that they would correspond pretty well with the subjects that are now taught in high schools: the disciplines of mathematics and the major natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
MICKLEBURGH: Do the disciplines sometimes, or often, get submerged in a process of rationalizing the status quo so as to produce a bureaucracy that is able to reproduce these rationalizations and operate an unchanging society?
FRYE: There is always a tremendous pull towards inertia and towards habit, and of course that creates rationalization that tends to identify reality and illusion. That is, the realities of society are taken to be whatever the instructor is accustomed to. This is something which is built into the educational process. It would be there no matter who was doing the teaching, and it’s something which the student has to try to separate out as best he can.
MICKLEBURGH: I wonder to what extent objectivity is possible in, say, the study of history.
FRYE: I’m not sure that objectivity as such is possible—that is, as an absolute. I think it is obvious that anybody teaching history at a university here today is going to be a middle-class, twentieth-century Canadian. This gives him a position, a stance, a perspective on things which would not be that of somebody teaching in Indonesia or somebody teaching in the nineteenth century. Given that perspective, it is obvious that objectivity is not a possible absolute. On the other hand, it is a part of the whole educational process to recognize as far as possible the extent of one’s own conditioning, and to become aware of what one’s own assumptions and axioms are. That is a process in which the teacher and the student have mutually to disentangle their own assumptions and their own axioms, and the only thing that will make that possible is an atmosphere of tolerance and good will. Within that tolerance and good will, I think one can come as close to objectivity as is possible—or desirable—in the human world.
MICKLEBURGH: Two questions arise at this point. I’ll start with the less important. On the front page of the Toronto Globe this morning the question is raised about the inundation of the Canadian university by personnel from the United States, particularly in such fields as political science and sociology, where this question of the stance that people adopt is germane to a controversy that has broken out.5 Would you care to comment?
FRYE: I can see that there is a difficulty for a country such as Canada, faced with a burgeoning problem of new universities growing up on all sides. These universities have to be staffed by qualified people, and they have to be staffed in a hurry. The American and Canadian cultures are so close to each other, and the academic world is so much an international world anyway, that this is not in my view a disaster. Even if it were, I don’t quite know what could be done about it, because the only alternative would be a much bigger disaster in not having enough people to teach these courses. I do feel that it constitutes a problem for the Canadian universities that at the very time they are putting more and more responsibility on the faculty, so many of their teaching staff are people without any real knowledge of the communities that they are teaching in or the traditions that have developed them. I feel, for example, that the University of Toronto faculty of arts and sciences is engaged in getting rid of its Honour Course program at what seems to me to be a rather panicky speed,6 and I can see that the presence of so many on the teaching staff who were not brought up with the Honour Course at Toronto has accelerated that process. I think that we had something in Toronto that was valuable and unique that now we have lost, and that while we doubtless will develop other virtues, other freedoms, and other flexibilities, we will also become one more big, Middle-Western academic packaging plant.
[Mickleburgh’s second question had to do with whether objectivity in the attitudes people adopt towards each other was part of the social aspect of education.]
FRYE: Yes it is. This is what I had in mind when I spoke of complete objectivity as being not only impossible but undesirable. It seems to me that when it comes to things like a preference of life to death, of freedom to slavery, of tolerance to prejudice, one shouldn’t try to be objective. There are certain fundamental, built-in values which are a part of the whole existential aspect of education, and the attaining of knowledge, from that particular point of view, is merely a means of becoming articulate and responsible within that framework of social values.
MICKLEBURGH: Eli Mandel recently made a speech in which he raised the problem, if I understood him correctly, of how the liberal classroom accommodates itself to a view which is anti-humanities, anti-education, even anti-language. What he was getting at was drawn largely from a series of essays by George Steiner which pointed out that Nazi barbarism arose, not in the Gobi Desert or in the Amazon, but right outside the walls of the university, that all the horrors of the Nazi regime were chronicled and written down, that words uttered things that words should not utter, and that the reaction of some people today is to adopt an explicit strategy of silence in the face of this.7 So in contemporary literature, for example, you get a stream of writing, to use Mandel’s expression, that is shoddy, anarchistic, and brutal. I suppose the real question lurking here is the integrity of the humanities in the face of these towering human problems.
FRYE: I suppose everyone today realizes that there aren’t any Gobi deserts or Amazon jungles in civilization, that where the desert and the jungle really are is in the big cities. That is where the real horror of existence is, and that is where the worst passions that human nature is capable of are exhibited. It is true in that sense that the enemy the university has to fight is right next door. I don’t believe in the strategy of silence, but neither do I believe in a strategy of horrified condemnation which tends, of course, to increase the attractiveness of what is condemned. That is why I suggested in The Modern Century that the anarchistic, or perverse, or muddle-headed type of culture being promulgated by people like, say, Céline, who are quite able and significant writers and yet at the same time are simply bloody-minded kooks—that what is necessary with this kind of perverse cultural product is not to denounce it, but simply to teach it.8 Because study is a cool medium, and by the time this kind of thing is looked at as part of the spectrum of modern culture it tends to become denatured. So what students do is to write crisp and competent essays about the anarchistic vision of Céline and then go on about their business.
MICKLEBURGH: I think the expression you used in the book had to do with the Prince of Darkness becoming an Angel of Light if he is viewed as having made a contribution to modern thought. Eli Mandel asked, “What if education itself turned out to be the Prince of Darkness?”
FRYE: I can understand that question well enough. I think that what never can be the Prince of Darkness is the kind of thing I call the educational contract, that is, the area of free discussion in society where the authority is not a social authority or any kind of externally imposed authority but the authority of the logical argument, the established fact, the repeatable experiment, and the compelling imagination. In an atmosphere like that, I simply don’t see how it can become demonic.
MICKLEBURGH: That is using the word “authority” in the Chaucerian sense of auctorite,9 in the original and honourable sense, not in the sense of an enforcer.
FRYE: Well, that is what authority means to me, and your reference to Chaucer is the right one, because this is the medieval and Renaissance humanist conception of authority: a thing is true, not because Aristotle said so, but because it is true.
MICKLEBURGH: This really brings us to the basis of the authority of the school. There is a challenge to the school today, and part of it is a challenge to what I call—to distinguish it from the genuine kind of authority—authoritarianism. Eli Mandel, if I understood him correctly, talks of the challenge to the genuine kind of authority too, so that the school is somewhat beleaguered on both counts. Yet perhaps it is the authoritarianism that gets in the way of the genuine authority of the school.
FRYE: I daresay it does. The externally imposed authority in the university, so far as the university is an institution, has no justification, except as an embodiment of the genuine internal authority of the subjects that are studied there. I think the danger of that is not very great: the university is simply not an authoritarian institution in that sense, at least not in North America. The people within the university have very little power as such, and behind them, of course, is the structure of society in which many people see the university as hopelessly enmeshed. I think that it is possible perhaps to exaggerate the degree of authoritarianism in social institutions, because there are still quite a large number of checks and balances operating in a democratic structure.
MICKLEBURGH: The situation is probably sharper in the secondary and elementary schools, where the student has very few rights, than it is on the university campus. There are enlightened regimes developing today, but they are by no means predominant yet, I would think, and this atmosphere of inquiry in the school is still fighting tooth and nail to get established.
FRYE: I would be more worried about that if I thought it was worse than it had been in the preceding millennium. When I think of how authoritarian the schools have been up to within living memory, and when I think of how different the parents’ attitude, for example, is towards their children’s education compared to what it was even fifty years ago, and when I think of the amount of liberalization there has been within the school itself, I feel, on the long view, somewhat encouraged.
MICKLEBURGH: John Seeley said a few years ago, when he was at York University, that the school does everything well except give the student the opportunities to discover the truth about life.10 That was a sweeping statement, and there have been changes since then. But you can have a conception of a school where children are well looked after physically, where psychologists help them to untangle some of their emotional problems, but where you still have to raise the question of what actual learning is going on. Is somebody actually discovering something about history, about criticism, and so on, or are they getting substitutes for the bona fide inquiry in these fields?
FRYE: I’m certainly not denying that an immense amount still has to be done in the schools. It’s just that I don’t think the education system is quite as much of a solid wall designed to prevent the student from finding out these things, or to prevent him from making any kind of imaginative discoveries on his own, as it was a generation ago.
[Mickleburgh raises the question of class bias in schools, as studied for instance by Brian Thomson and Denis Maisden in their Education and the Working Class. These authors found in a study based in Huddersfield, England, that working-class students experienced a conflict of loyalties when they attended grammar schools, tending to lose the values of their class and become assimilated into the middle class. In spite of educational programs for those deemed culturally disadvantaged, few loggers go to university. To what extent can and should the school free itself from class bias, Mickleburgh asks, and does this have to do with the integrity of the school?]
FRYE: It has a great deal to do with the integrity of everybody. Naturally a working-class student is not going to get interested in literature as long as he thinks of literature as essentially a middle-class status symbol. If he does get interested in it on that basis, then he gets, as you say, assimilated into the middle class. It seems to me that the way out of that is not to assume that you can teach a working-class Shakespeare and a middle-class Shakespeare (which is nonsense), nor to assume that the working class should not bother with Shakespeare because it is essentially something reserved for the middle class (which is also nonsense), but simply to keep on fighting for the principle which was laid down one hundred years ago by Matthew Arnold, which was that culture seeks to do away with classes, that the whole end of everything Arnold meant by culture—the best that has been thought and said in the world—tends to make for a classless society.11 It tends to create an intellectual and imaginative equality which is so important that the social inequalities become less and less significant. I know that sounds Utopian, but you have to be a Utopian in this area.
MICKLEBURGH: That calls for quite a fight.
FRYE: It calls for a terrific fight. When I was a student at university, I remember that intelligent working-class parents wouldn’t have anything to do with college for their children, even though they might have got scholarships which could have taken them there, simply because they didn’t want their children declassed. I can understand that very well, but I think it’s a matter of unconsciously building in certain class biases to one’s teaching processes. The important thing is to become steadily, increasingly aware of those biases and to weed them out, one after another. Look at the way the psychologists, for example, have lost confidence in the IQ test as they began to realize how much of the test was actually accepting the knowledge of a certain ascendant class as equivalent to human intelligence.
MICKLEBURGH: I suppose this means that culture in the Arnoldian sense has revolutionary consequences.
FRYE: I would think of education as the only genuine revolution that society is ever likely to accomplish.
MICKLEBURGH: How do you see the social consequences of this?
FRYE: I see the consequences as making for a progressively greater openness in society. I don’t know just how much the phrase “classless society” means, but I think that when you have a university education thrown open to students entirely on the score of abilities, rather than on the score of their heredity or what college their parents went to, you’ve gone a long way. To get to that stage, of course, there’s still a great deal in front of us. I have been to universities in the southern United States, which people told me very proudly were entirely desegregated, but where I didn’t see any black students simply because they didn’t go to the kind of high schools that would allow them to enter the university with their qualifications. Obviously that’s a class barrier that has to be battered down.
MICKLEBURGH: If people began to make critical judgments, began to free themselves from being the perfect consumers, the television fodder, if they were to that extent able to distinguish illusion from reality, if they were able to identify the symbol of the doomsday weapon (I think you mentioned that in The Modern Century),12 then surely the consequences of these acts of recognition and the resulting impact on the way people lived, voted, shaped their relationships with their neighbours and so on, would have profound consequences on the outcome for all mankind. Doesn’t this relate to the question you persistently raise about mob rule?
FRYE: The mob is simply the intensified and the logical form of the adjusted society: the one thing that a mob cannot stand is the individual.
MICKLEBURGH: Could you visualize the schools as an aspect of mob rule?
FRYE: Well, of course they would become an aspect of mob rule if we were living, for example, in a police state or a totalitarian state. That would be the only thing you would use the schools for.
[Mickleburgh comments on the relative freedom of schools in England from ministerial directives as to what may be taught. In the Canadian provinces, on the other hand, teachers are at the end of a long chain of command. Perhaps, if the real professional decisions could be made by the staff in the schools, the schools would be able to strengthen their position as part of a democratic process of education.]
FRYE: Certainly, as a teacher myself, I think of the teacher as the cornerstone of liberty in society, and I think that the amount of responsibility given to the teacher has a great deal to do with the particular relationship that education is going to have to society. I notice, for example, that in The Republic and The Laws, where Plato is prescribing exactly what ought to be taught to the generation growing up so that they will learn all the right things, he has no confidence in the teacher whatsoever, at least as far as his program of education is concerned: the teachers are told what they are to teach.13 It seems to me that the liberalizing of education is bound up with the attaching of a sense of responsibility and authority to the individual teacher, qua teacher, and not to the administrative machinery which actually ought to be operated only to set free the teacher.
MICKLEBURGH: Do you believe that the teacher should be a scholar?
FRYE: I can’t imagine a person teaching with devotion year in and year out without having what I should call scholarship, that is, without having a creative interest in the subject that he is teaching and a feeling that he’s really done something when he sees a student’s eyes catch fire, when he sees a student beginning to find out things for himself. A teacher who is interested in his subject to that extent is a scholar. Whether or not he produces articles for learned journals is another matter.
MICKLEBURGH: I think there is one question left from our discussion about subjects. At present there is an assault on subjects. There is the general scornful discussion of the subject-centred school and there is the fad about interdisciplinary studies. It seems to me that “interdisciplinary,” a word that’s thrown around a bit loosely, presupposes disciplinary. There are people who say, for example, that students should study themes and topics, like environmental studies, communication studies, and value studies, and that within these broad general themes, subjects could be drawn on as “sources”—this is the word that is used. I wonder whether this discussion is misplaced and might not do some damage in the end.
FRYE: I suppose it arises really from the recognition of the fact, which I mentioned earlier, that every subject has an extremely hazy boundary or circumference—it doesn’t really have a boundary except one you draw for convenience. So people who like taking a large view will discover, for example, that language is a means of communication and consequently the study of literature ought to form a subdivision of something called communications. I think the trouble with that is that you are likely to do one of two things. The first thing, which is the right one, is to look at these vast, huge, cloudy fields in terms of their subdivisions, so that you can mark out those subdivisions, which brings you back to the subjects again. The other thing, which is the wrong one, is to try to teach according to these inflated and hazy categories, so that what you wind up with is a kind of sociological soup. I know that literature has been taught by themes—you study about war, about death, about love, about life, and so on. But you wind up with a kind of empty, platitudinous pseudo-moralism as the result of your personal possession of the literary experience. That all seems to me to be thoroughly anti-intellectual.
MICKLEBURGH: What do you think is the main blow that has to be struck for education today?
FRYE: It seems to me that there are the set values I have spoken of, the fact that life and freedom are better than their opposites and that we are committed to a democratic process which increasingly tries to break down social barriers and to equalize society in what I’ve been calling the educational contract, the area of genuine authority. These are common to all educational areas, but the particular tactics, the particular blows struck, will vary according to the nature of the field, the position of the teacher, the maturity of the student, and the aims of the whole educational process in that particular institution.
MICKLEBURGH: At the conclusion of The Educated Imagination you discussed the tower of Babel myth. Do you feel that this is as relevant today as it was five years ago?
FRYE: Yes, because I think the main danger of society today is still the danger of Babel, that is, the danger of the confusion of tongues, the blurring of dialogue by the use of strange jargon-language which expresses the interest of a certain kind of pressure group. This is a weaseling language which, because it cannot aim at understanding, can only shout. This is the opposite of what it means. Everything that confuses and fouls up the precision and honesty and integrity of verbal communication—that is what I mean by the tower of Babel, and it still seems to me to be the tower of Darkness.
[Mickleburgh returns to this question at the start of the second part of the interview, asking what light the tower of Babel myth sheds on our contemporary situation.]
FRYE: Well, the story of the tower of Babel is the story of a gigantic technological and engineering project which eventually broke down because of a confusion of tongues. It seems to me that this is a parable of one of the central dangers of civilization today: that at the very time when technology is drawing the world closely into a single unit, and at the time when cooperation in scientific research and even research in political and economic matters is so utterly essential for the safety of civilization, we also have a great variety of competing languages which have been developed in such a way as to become almost deliberately unintelligible to each other. The language of American democracy and the language of Russian Marxism, for example, get so self-enclosed and so solipsistic that neither can really get outside itself to reach towards the other. That seems to me to be perhaps the greatest central danger society faces today.
MICKLEBURGH: Confucius and his disciple (if we can call him that) Mencius developed the dictum that things should be called by their right names if we are to be clear in thought and action.
FRYE: Yes, that is true, although of course that would give a very high status to the noun. But it is true insofar as honesty and clarity of description are certainly one of the fundamental tasks of language. Also the development of euphemism, of speaking of unpleasant things as though they were pleasant—that kind of weaseling speech is certainly something that deliberately creates social disaster. An undeclared war, for example, is called an “incident,” and the Nazis spoke of the massacre of the Jews as “the Jewish question.”
MICKLEBURGH: Notices go home from school that say, “In case of inclement weather …” A weather forecaster speaks of “a severe degree of precipitation,” which almost makes one want to go down to the store and order “an anti-precipitation garment.”
FRYE: Exactly. This is all part of the psychology of jargon, which is to wrap up everything in cotton wool and to produce shock absorbers for everything and to rock the whole civilization in the cradle of advertising and official communiqués.
MICKLEBURGH: I mention this because I notice that very often in your writing you insist on working out a definition, whether it’s of a given genre in literature or of the term “myth,” and so on. I believe you attach a great deal of importance to definitions. Would you care to comment on the currently modish term “the language arts”? What’s the difference between that and the old term, “English”?
FRYE: I suspect that there isn’t any difference, except that a term like “language arts” (a euphemism of the kind I’ve just mentioned) makes people feel that they are really up on things like theory of communication and the world of the global village and electronic stimuli, as well as the teaching of language and literature, and that they’ve got things in the right context. I’m not sure whether that’s a necessary consolation to a person teaching literature or not.
MICKLEBURGH: Is English a bundle of disciplines? If so, how many sticks are in the bundle? What possible relationship do they have to each other?
FRYE: I think that English is an area arbitrarily marked off because of a single language, an area of literature, and that literature exists on various levels. There is the level of ordinary literacy or the elementary level: the ability to read and write. Naturally the ability to read and write is a necessary form of education because without it you can’t take any part in your society. But learning to read and write in itself can only produce the docile and adjusted citizen. The next stage is to read with some sense of direction and to write with some clarity and articulateness. Before long you’re into the study of literature in the more customary, proper sense. It seems to me that English is essentially one discipline with its own structure, just like mathematics, although it is often taught as a loose bundle because so many people don’t understand that it is in fact a subject to be taught and learned.
MICKLEBURGH: You have said, I think, that what you experience is literature, but what you teach is criticism [cf. AC, 11/13, 27–8/28–9]. What do you mean by criticism in that sense?
FRYE: Criticism is the whole apparatus set up to talk about literature. There is a sense in which the work of literature, the poem or novel or whatever, does not speak. That is, it speaks only in the particular words which are in that poem or novel, and the writer does not mean anything but what he has said. If he had meant anything else, he would have said something else. So there is a sense in which a work of literature is an object of contemplation, an object of study, and it doesn’t talk about itself, just as a work of music or painting doesn’t talk about itself. But because it is an object of study, it can also be taught and learned. Once you set up the apparatus of teaching and learning you have criticism. Everything that has to do with the teaching and the learning of literature is criticism.
MICKLEBURGH: You’ve tried to make a contribution to the establishment of literary criticism as a discipline. Do you feel that this effort has made progress?
FRYE: I think it’s made progress, because criticism itself has advanced immeasurably in its sense of confidence about the genuineness and worthwhileness of what it’s doing. I don’t quite understand why the whole movement of the nineteenth century which grew up around philology, mainly in Germany, didn’t maintain its original head start. There seemed to be a regression in the early part of the twentieth century towards a kind of dilettantism in the study of literature, where there was a certain social status attached to being as tentative and amateurish as possible in talking about literature. The criticism of the last twenty-five years has got over a great deal of that, and there has been a great resurgence of criticism as a subject, first in the United States and Great Britain, and now on the continent as well.
MICKLEBURGH: What sequence, what general plan would you propose for the teaching of criticism in the school? Should you begin with young children so they might really get well grounded in literary criticism?
FRYE: Yes, although I would not want to see the teaching of criticism, as a methodological course, introduced much below the university level. As I say, the teaching of literature itself is a form of criticism, and it seems to me that it is following the natural curve of a child’s mind to begin with something fairly concrete: with poetry, which lays a heavy emphasis on physical movement and on rhythm, and with stories which are told simply as stories, so that the child gets a sense of the actual shape of the story as it begins and develops and ends. From there one can go on to more and more analytic procedures as the student becomes older.
MICKLEBURGH: What place do you see for the teaching of myth in the school?
FRYE: Myth to me is the actual constructive or informing principle of literature. That is, myth is what gives shape to works of literature as they move in time—the particular shape that we speak of as narrative. Myth begins in the whole complex or body of stories which are told in a society before writing is developed. Such stories are often committed to memory for centuries. Among these there is usually a central group which are regarded as having a peculiar kind of importance. That is, they explain certain facts about the society, they account for the origin of rituals or for the origin of social classes or for natural phenomena, or they tell the central legends of society, of its great victories, its great heroes of the past, and so on. These particularly important, central stories are what I mean by myths. They have the same form or shape as folk tales and legends, but legends and folk tales are nomadic, travelling all over the world and interchanging their themes and motifs, whereas myths seem to take root in a specific culture and grow up with that culture.
MICKLEBURGH: You have argued in favour of teaching the Bible as myth or literature.14 This is a point which is easily misunderstood, so I wonder if you could clarify the point you are getting at here.
FRYE: If I’m right about myths, then certain things happen to myths. In the first place, because of their particular importance, they tend to stick together and to form a mythology, that is, a coherent body of stories of particular importance. As society grows and becomes more complex, and as writing develops, these stories become expanded in literature, so that every literature in effect inherits a mythology, and the particular mythology it inherits is going to be the one that lies immediately before it historically. For our Western society, in Europe and in North America, the mythologies which we have inherited are the Classical and the Biblical. Consequently, an early study of the Classical myths and the Bible is, to me, essential in getting a grasp of the shape of literature.
[Mickleburgh alludes to Richard Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy, which argues that, far from ushering in the hoped-for millennium, the spread of literacy has made people more vulnerable. He asks whether literary criticism has a part to play in making people invulnerable.]
FRYE: Criticism certainly has a part to play in developing one’s sense of literature, and of course the only way to develop a sense of literature is to make it more active and more and more one’s own particular possession. I think that teachers faced with a restless and often inattentive class tend to become magicians. There is a great deal of belief in magic in teaching. I have sat in committee meetings in the Department of English at the university where we have discussed for hours whether putting ABCD in the form ADCB wouldn’t create a kind of magical response on the part of the student. The magical belief that literacy is going to transform civilization that Richard Hoggart speaks of is simply an illusion of that kind. The fact is that the ability to read and write is just as useful to a tyranny as it is to a free civilization, and that any tyranny or any totalitarian state would want its citizens to be able to read its handouts. The thing is, of course, that it would block them, that as soon as the desire for contact with the great imaginations of culture began to become operative, that would be the point at which you would cut off the learning process in a police state. That’s been set out very well in Orwell’s 1984, which I think says more clearly than almost any other book I know that there is always the possibility of freedom as long as the words that can express freedom are there, and that the only way permanently to create a slave state is to smash language and debase it until it becomes a kind of mechanical gabble.
MICKLEBURGH: Humpty Dumpty said, “A word means exactly what I choose it to mean.”15 I hear it rumoured that some people who call themselves structural linguists have been saying something like that. * * * Is it fair to accuse the structural linguists of the assault on English?
FRYE: I don’t know. The linguists began with a descriptive attitude to language, trying to take the traditional value judgments out of it, and this, of course, is what they should have done. They said that you can’t take a single inflected language like Latin as a kind of norm of what a language ought to be and, further, that what a language does is determined by usage. I think it is possible to make that into a catchword, into a cliché. It’s possible to make every kind of procedure into something prefabricated. I think that every language develops extremely subtle and precise distinctions, and that it’s the business of a critic, and a student and teacher of literature, to try to fight for the advantages which his language already has, and to try to fight against the debasing and the blurring of distinctions in language. I don’t see that there is anything quixotic in doing that. Not to do that is to betray the subject.
MICKLEBURGH: I heard a man who was the head of a curriculum branch (he was trying to illustrate how progressive that branch really was) make the following statement: “As soon as The Research showed that there was no necessary connection between the study of formal grammar and effective written or oral communication, we dropped the grammar.” There are many people today who say, “Why study grammar?” As an editor on the receiving end of an increasing number of manuscripts that betray an appalling lack of grammar, I’m concerned. Do you believe that what is called traditional or formal grammar is passé?
FRYE: Well, it isn’t to me. The fetishism attached to good grammar as a kind of social status, as something which the well-to-do middle class are educated to talk, is, of course, silly. But grammar in itself, once you try to rid it of that social fetishism, is simply a means of finding out what the resources of your language are and the different things it can do. After all, all writing is the conveying of a meaning, and the conveying of a meaning is not possible unless there are certain conventional or agreed-upon meanings and significances. And that conventional or agreed-upon meaning not only extends to the fact that you and I mean approximately the same thing by “cat,” but also extends to phrases like “between you and me,” where the pronouns are objective for a perfectly understandable reason. It seems to me that to break down the precision and the accuracy of verbal discourse is part of the whole anti-intellectual barbarism which one has to keep fighting against.
MICKLEBURGH: If I remember correctly, you raised the question in the introduction to Design for Learning as to whether the study of rhetoric might not find a place today that it has not found for some little while. I wonder if you might define what you mean by rhetoric and illustrate the circumstances in which this question becomes pertinent today.
FRYE: That was talked about much more in the English report of that book [pp. 42, 63] than it was in my introduction. At the same time, I would agree with the general position advanced in the English report: that during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there was a great deal of study of rhetoric in which the various effects that language was capable of performing were studied and classified. As with grammar, it perhaps isn’t necessary to remember all the long names that were given to these different devices. The device that we call rhyme, for example, was called homoioteleuton in the rhetoric books, and I certainly don’t approve of burdening a ten-year-old’s mind with this kind of vocabulary. Nevertheless, the study of the resources of language—the study of what language can do—there was a very precise and intensive training in that in the Renaissance schools, and that training lies behind the work of Sidney and Spenser and Shakespeare and Milton. They didn’t just wait for a muse to come and inspire them, you know; they spent years at school doing these rhetorical exercises and finding out what language could do.
MICKLEBURGH: Is there a danger of a false social rhetoric today?
FRYE: Most social rhetoric is false, because it is bound up with the whole cotton-wool, shock-absorbing technique which I spoke of a moment ago [p. 158, above].
MICKLEBURGH: And to the danger of mob rule, I suppose.
FRYE: Yes. And the infallible sign of it is the development of a language which looks as though it were technical, but actually isn’t technical; it’s only bumbling and pretentious and polysyllabic.
MICKLEBURGH: Could you conceive of a state where we get completely surrounded by communication media and messages that would utterly insulate us from reality?
FRYE: Oh yes, I think that’s quite a possibility. And, of course, when communication forms a total environment, nothing is being communicated.
MICKLEBURGH: What happens then?
FRYE: What happens then is that you’re simply in the world of Narcissus. Everything is simply echo and reflection, and there isn’t any communication in the sense of a conveying of information from A to B any longer.
MICKLEBURGH: This would be the ideal synthetic world of Big Brother, I suppose.
FRYE: Oh, yes, but it could also be the complete fantasy world that you read about in some science fiction satire, where people go around with their heads insulated in a continuous radio and television program, where they’re simply pure solipsism and completely removed from society.
MICKLEBURGH: In a talk to the Canadian Association of School Superintendents and Inspectors, you cautioned against including in the study of literature things that do not belong there.16 I wondered what you might have meant by that.
FRYE: I think you know much better than I do how other things get tossed into the English curriculum. It’s apt to become a kind of catch-all for studies of such things as how great a man Henry Ford was. It seems to me that in literature, poetry is in the centre and imaginative prose is immediately around it. Outside of this again comes utilitarian language, the language you use for writing committee reports and that kind of thing. There is a tendency to start the wrong way around—to start with utilitarian prose (or communication arts) and then gradually work your way into novel or drama, and then, if you can get around to it, perhaps some poetry. This is backing into literature the wrong way.
MICKLEBURGH: What about modern ballads and film criticism? Some people quite strongly argue that the English department should assume a major responsibility for film criticism and for teaching such things as the Beatle records. Some people think it helps to make Beowulf contemporary if you relate the Beowulf themes to some of the Beatle records.
FRYE: I think that I’d actually prefer to let the student make those connections himself, because this is where the student can find an immediate sense of discovery on his own. If he can find that the kind of rock-and-roll records which he is going to be listening to anyway really have a family likeness in their symbolism and their imagery to the kind of literature he’s learning about at school, this creates a personal discovery which I wouldn’t want to take away from him and put into the regular curriculum. I teach a graduate course in university on literary symbolism, and I tell my students that they are to write essays on anything in literature that happens to interest them. One year I picked up two essays side by side: one was on the Gilgamesh epic of ancient Sumeria—about 3,000 years older than the Bible; the other was on the rock-and-roll group called The Mothers of Invention.17 And I thought, “Oh boy, this is it—this is exactly the spread that I want.” Naturally most of the other essays fell somewhere in between those two extremes.
MICKLEBURGH: Where does film criticism belong?
FRYE: Film criticism is simply making its way, surely and not too slowly, into the teaching curriculum—certainly at the university level. I know a man at an American university who had been teaching a course in creative writing for a couple of years and has now turned it into a course in filmmaking because this is what his students are mostly interested in. That is something that is bound to increase very rapidly in the study of literature.
MICKLEBURGH: There seems to be a great deal of concern at the moment about the possible lethal effects of television on young people, and about the need to arm young people with critical weapons to face the television screen.
FRYE: I think it is one of the major responsibilities of education to make the student an active and responsible citizen. This means that education is not just a process; it is also a fight; it is a crusade—you have an enemy. The particular enemy, as I see it, is passivity, the inertia of mind that tends to take what’s handed to it. The more you can build up resistance to that, the better. Of course, resistance is not a matter of pointing to the television program and saying, “That’s bad, avoid it.” Resistance is a matter of cultivating in the student an active and critical response to whatever it is he happens to be looking at.
MICKLEBURGH: The consequences of success in doing that could be quite devastating. For example, consider a billboard with a pink convertible against a black velvet background. Draped across the hood of the convertible is a blonde who is created by the advertising agencies, the never-never blonde. Beneath all this is the name of the brand of car and the words, “The sweet look of success.” There is an appeal to bestiality here rather than an appeal to what we like to think is civilized in man. But this car sells …
FRYE: Oh, yes.
MICKLEBURGH: It sells and sells and sells, despite the fact that it’s built to wear out.
FRYE: So is the blonde, of course.
MICKLEBURGH: There’s little consideration of the mechanical advantages of the car, of the value of the product, of its usefulness, of the extent to which it would lighten your life.
FRYE: We spoke a moment ago of the importance of studying rhetoric, and it seems to me that one reason for studying rhetoric is to show the student how advertising is a form of rhetoric and what its means of rhetorical persuasion are. Most sensible adults take advertising rather ironically as a kind of game. They respond to it all right—they’ll buy the car—but I think they can distinguish reality from illusion to that extent. I should think, though, that for somebody at the age of ten or twelve it might come as something of a shock of disillusionment to find out that advertising does not in fact mean what it says, is never intended to mean what it says. It seems to me that’s the age level at which one can bring about a revolution in one’s attitude to language far deeper than conventional literature can actually make at that age.
MICKLEBURGH: How would you go about doing that?
FRYE: I would simply give them advertisements—the technique of Marshall McLuhan’s Mechanical Bride. Just say, “Now what forms of persuasion are being used in this ad? What sort of person are they trying to make you pretend you are?”
MICKLEBURGH: There is a question today of the relevance of the past in literature. Some teachers ask, for example, what possible relationship the study of Chaucer has to the lives that my students are living today? They believe they have to concentrate on The Catcher in the Rye and various other, more contemporary books.
FRYE: Historical imagination is a difficult thing to develop, and I’m not surprised that people shrink from trying to do it. But I’m always terrified when I hear the word “relevance” applied to education, because I can never forget that it was one of the jargon terms of the Nazis, and particularly the Nazi youth, around 1933 to 1934. That is, the professors around the universities that were being shouted down and hounded out of the place because they didn’t like Hitler were the people who didn’t understand the relevance of everything that was being studied to the Nazi movement. With any great writer like Chaucer there are two relations, or rather two centres of gravity. There is, in the first place, his relation to his own time, and there is, in the second place, the communicating power by which he reaches us. It’s the communicating power of Chaucer or Shakespeare, the way they can speak to us across all these centuries, that makes them immediately relevant. But the study of what they meant in their own time introduces us to ways of thinking that are unfamiliar, ways which expand our own habits and our own attitudes. Consequently, it’s the irrelevant side of them that’s the really liberal and emancipating side. That’s the side that takes us into the total world of the human imagination and not just this muddy, squalid little segment of it that we have in the mid-twentieth century.
MICKLEBURGH: If we could understand Chaucer better, we might be able to understand the Chinese better—is that it?
FRYE: It would be a start, certainly. Mind you, in the nineteenth century Great Britain was sending people off to the civil service in India and trained them in the Classics. This is thought of now as being wildly and even perversely irrelevant, and yet I think that the study of an alien civilization was perhaps a very good training for civil service in India.
MICKLEBURGH: The dramatic example of that is an Oxford graduate who had no other basis except his Classical education being sent off to be consul, I believe, in Zanzibar. There he was, the lone Britisher at this centre of Arab slave-trading empires, with great deals going on and power plays and struggles, sending his highly perspicacious dispatches back to the Colonial Office at the same time he was wheeling and dealing with all these people. And it was all based on his Classical education.
FRYE: Yes, because his Classical education had presented him with a civilization which he could study as he could study in a laboratory, without committing himself to its values or beliefs—and that provides a certain objectivity and detachment when you’re in Zanzibar.
MICKLEBURGH: Do you believe that the cultivation of this sense of detachment can in the final analysis prove effective against the doomsday weapon?
FRYE: It’s one of the weapons, one of the things we have to fight with. We hear a great deal about commitment and engagement in our society. Commitment and engagement, of course, are aimed at the community. Consequently, commitment and engagement are uncritical. That is, they don’t see absurdities in what they’re committed to, and they tend to rationalize absurdities. The other pole of development, it seems to me, is the detachment of the individual. Of course the individual is detached from his society but never withdrawn from it. He is never a mature or completed individual until he has come to terms with his society, and his detachment is still operating within the society.
MICKLEBURGH: You have suggested that a function of literature is to constantly recreate for each generation a social vision of what this world can be.18
FRYE: That illustrates the range of the literary universe. The literary universe is constructed by the human imagination, and this means that its poles are the poles of desire. At one extreme is the ideal, and at the other is the nightmare, the thing we try to get away from. Around the ideal cluster the romances; around the nightmare cluster the ironies; and other things, like the tragedies and comedies, come in between. The value of the study of literature is in part to compare the civilization around us with the civilization which the human imagination envisages, which extends from the heaven of human imagination to the hell of human imagination—which is much bigger than the actual world extends.
MICKLEBURGH: I once heard Louis Dudek discussing modern literature with a group of high-school teachers, who reported that their students much favoured Romantic literature, that they wanted to have a much more favourable view of the world than was presented by Joyce and Eliot. Dudek argued very hard that if the teacher doesn’t make accessible to the student The Waste Land and similar works of modern literature, then he’s disarming the student in the face of his subsequent life experiences. He posed it as a rough, tough, necessary, difficult task.
FRYE: I would agree with Dudek entirely on that point.
MICKLEBURGH: What social vision do you think is being recreated by literature today? Is it a new myth that is arising?
FRYE: Contemporary literature tends to be ironic in its general attitude. It is more concerned with trying to define the dangers of the world, and picturing the world that we want to get away from, than with envisaging the ideal. It tends to distrust formulated ideals and tends rather to formulate the misery, the squalor, the degradation, the absurdity, the loneliness in modern civilization. This means, of course, among other things, that the twentieth century is a tough century to learn literature in, especially if you hold that you ought to study mostly contemporary literature.
MICKLEBURGH: Are the humanities optimistic?
FRYE: The humanities are not in themselves either optimistic or pessimistic. The humanities present reality in terms of human desire, and I suppose they are optimistic to the extent that they show desire as having its own kind of reality. But the humanities would include both comedies, which end hopefully, and tragedies, which end pretty bleakly. The humanities simply give you the imaginative picture that man has of his world.
MICKLEBURGH: What place does literature occupy in the scheme of the humanities?
FRYE: It seems to me that literature is at the centre of the humanities. There are really two worlds and two kinds of study. There is the world around us, a world we call nature, the physical environment, and I take it that science, particularly natural science, begins in the study and the exploration of the world that man lives in. But there is also the world that man is trying to make, the world of his own culture, his own civilization, and this is something which the humanities are concerned with. Consequently, the humanities can never be right or wrong in the way an answer to a scientific problem can be right or wrong, and they can never rid themselves of the quest, the search for values of a kind which we are now calling existential. I would call these subjects which deal with the world that man is trying to build, rather than the world that man lives in, the concerned subjects, the mythological subjects. Literature is at the centre of those because literature is the great laboratory of myths, that is, the statement of reality in terms of man’s hopes and desires and fears. Literature is at the centre, and then around it come religion and very large areas of history and political theory and psychology and philosophy and so on. All those subjects would need a good deal of internal division, but in general those are the two broad areas.
MICKLEBURGH: Would you say also that literature is the language of the imagination?
FRYE: Well, of course it is, yes—or at least it is one of the languages of the imagination, along with painting and music.
MICKLEBURGH: How do you define the imagination?
FRYE: The imagination is in general the creative power. It is the power which is concerned with man’s building his own human world.
MICKLEBURGH: What place do the intellect and the emotions have in the imagination?
FRYE: The imaginative faculty seems to me to be one in which the human mind is totally engaged. The intellect and the emotions are different aspects of that which can be separated in analysis but which cannot be separated in the actual production. I don’t see how, in the writing of King Lear, for example, or in the total response to it, you can distinguish an intellectual from an emotional factor. You might in other areas, but the world of imagination seems to me to incorporate everything which is at once feeling and logic.
MICKLEBURGH: A writer in the magazine Edge criticized the schools for tending to separate the intellect from the emotions, which he saw as a fateful and destructive process. He said the characteristic North American virtue then becomes the ability not to vomit,19 and he had some words to say about Franz Boas’s idea of one-sided rationalism.20
FRYE: One-sided rationalism would be a danger, certainly, just as one-sided emotionalism would be. It’s the function of criticism—the teaching of literature—to bring out the very tough kind of rationality that lies behind great works of literature. But it is also concerned, of course, with showing that emotion is not a vague and cloudy thing, as most people think, but an infinitely subtle and precise thing. People like myself who teach literature are often referred to as intellectuals because we wear glasses, but actually I think we’d be much more accurately described as emotionals. We are just as much concerned with trying to stimulate a feeling response to literature as a logical one.
MICKLEBURGH: I don’t know any other book about educating the imagination except the one you named The Educated Imagination. The consideration of the imagination as such is almost a neglected subject in discussions of education theory. Do you think this is accidental, the product of neglect, or is there a reason for it?
FRYE: I think it’s just ordinary cultural lag. The term “imagination” was developed by the Romantics because the Romantics were really the first to think of literature as part of man’s creation of his own civilization. Consequently, they felt they needed a separate word for what man was doing when he was producing literature. They didn’t need the separate word up to that point. The Romantic movement has only been around for about 160 years, and it will perhaps be another couple of centuries before the educational theory catches up with it.
MICKLEBURGH: Someone said, “Literature is content.” He made an argument in favour of it; he was mainly striking a blow against what he conceived of as a formalism in the teaching of literature.
FRYE: The statement that literature is content strikes me as a kind of bourgeois version of the Marxist view of socialist realism—that you demand of the artist that he protest against society before the Marxist revolution has taken place, and that he devote himself to panegyric after that. It seems to me that literature is something that has to be approached in terms of its form. That is, literature, as literature, is practically all structure, like mathematics, and what is content is not really the content of literature, but it’s rather the social context of literature. That would include, of course, the artist’s life, his biography, the social milieu in which he grew up, the particular slant given him by his period in time, his class origin, and so forth. The statement that literature is content seems to me to be one hundred per cent wrong.
[Mickleburgh says that perhaps the writer’s main point was to distinguish between literature and entertainment: if a work is not entertainment, then it is literature.]
FRYE: That’s an awfully dangerous distinction to make. If literature ever lost its connection with entertainment, then it would have had it as literature.
MICKLEBURGH: The old formulation that the task of literature is to instruct and delight catches the two sides of it. Frederick Philip Grove * * * adjured the Canadian writer not to fall into the U.S. trap of writing for entertainment only.21
FRYE: My trouble with that is that when you say it instructs and delights, you imply that literature is doing two different things to us, and I don’t think that is psychologically right. I think that literature expands the mind with a feeling of exhilaration which has both aspects.
MICKLEBURGH: The original psychedelic experience?
FRYE: Yes. What Grove means by mere entertainment is something that you receive passively. I can imagine a Shakespearean comedy being mere entertainment just as I can imagine a television show being literature.
MICKLEBURGH: This takes us full circle back to the active response.
FRYE: Yes, it’s the response that’s important.
MICKLEBURGH: Do you care to speculate in conclusion about what you have called the hare-and-tortoise race between mob rule and education [EI, 55; EICT, 483]?
FRYE: One of the reasons why I call it a hare-and-tortoise race is that the powers of mob rule are always just on the point of winning and the powers of freedom and intelligence are always in a desperate situation, yet somehow or other mob rule never quite wins and the intellect and the intelligence are still there. This rather desperate situation, where all the probabilities seem to be utterly hopeless and despairing, and where nevertheless the values of the intelligence and the imagination and the disciplined emotions keep on functioning—I think that this will continue. At least the hope that it will continue is the only thing surely that keeps people teaching and studying and writing and reading and doing all the other things they ought to be doing.
MICKLEBURGH: I suppose we’re talking about the prophetic role of the school.
FRYE: The school does have a prophetic role, certainly.