Broadcast 19 February 1969
From WGS, 5–22. This was a discussion with Eli Mandel, poet and professor of English and Humanities at York University. It was part of a six-week series on language broadcast on the CBC’s Ideas every week night beginning 10 February, and covering a wide range of topics such as bilingualism, Chomsky’s revolution, and Hebrew literature. Dated from the CBC Times.
MANDEL: If we’re going to be talking about the limits of dialogue, one place to begin is to ask about both of the limits. That’s perhaps a naive way to begin, but I wonder whether there are not upper limits and lower limits. What I have in mind as an example of a lower limit would be ignorance—ignorance of language, the inability to speak at all because one didn’t know anything, one didn’t know the words. At the other extreme, I have in mind what George Steiner refers to in Language and Silence as the upper limits of language for poets: light, music, and silence. He says that the language of the Paradiso moves from language to light, light itself being beyond words; that the Orphic vision moves toward music, which is beyond words; and that some poets (I think he mentions Rilke) move toward silence and finally become quiet.1 Are these the limits of dialogue—upper and lower?
FRYE: I should think that along with ignorance there is also the pooling of ignorance, the kind of thing that goes on in most conversations where at least one person is invariably talking nonsense and where the contributions, so to speak, are invariably tentative. Dialogue of that kind is the natural form of satire. That’s why so many of Plato’s dialogues (I suppose Plato really invented the conception) are satires of that kind. Some-body’s talking nonsense and gets refuted by Socrates, and only when a real subject—something that Plato would call a dialectic—is introduced, and the whole situation suddenly becomes structured, does any real conversation start.
MANDEL: I have the uneasy feeling that if the subject begins to take over, perhaps the dialogue is ended. Is there really a difference between dialectic and dialogue in that sense?
FRYE: I think that the entrance of a genuine subject, a dialectic, does a very different thing to the dialogue. Up to that point, everything that has been said has been tentative. The silly things are just as acceptable socially as the shrewd or penetrating things. The situation is usually that of a symposium—that is, a drinking party—because you’ve got to have liquor to persuade the members of such a group to believe in their own wit. And as soon as the genuine subject is present, of course, it really doesn’t matter whether there is a group discussion going on, as there is in Plato’s Symposium, or whether one person is doing all the talking and the others are simply reduced to punctuation. If Socrates takes over and the others just say “yes” and “no” when they’re supposed to, that doesn’t mean the dialogue has turned into a monologue. It means that Socrates has hit the trail of something and is going right down that trail with the other people following him.
MANDEL: Is there a distinction here between drunken dialogue and sober dialogue? Do you have to be sober?
FRYE: Not necessarily. Most forms of participating dialogue are more or less drunk.
MANDEL: And the sober ones—are they systematic and structured? What I’m getting at is the strength that comes into your sense of the subject when you say that Socrates is now on the trail, that something has taken over. Is there a kind of systematic, ordered procedure here that is opposed to the tentative? And is this better than the tentative?
FRYE: There is something that is continuous and sequential that has taken over—yes. But the real structure, of course, comes from the shape of what it is that Socrates has discovered. It doesn’t come from him. Consequently, it’s not an authoritarian thing. It’s the sharing in a common vision of something that has a shape. The upper limit of dialogue is reached when one reaches the possession of that kind of subject, and that becomes a silence because possession is silence.
MANDEL: There are moments in Socrates’ life, as we know it, when there are these silences. He’s the one who stood on the hill and meditated about Apollo, uttered a prayer in the morning, and then walked away. What about prayer? Is this in any way related to the Socratic dialectic that you’re talking about? That is, if one is in dialogue with God, is there a dialectic as well as a dialogue?
FRYE: Many religious thinkers are convinced that there is. For example, Martin Buber, in speaking of the I–Thou relationship in religion, says that the dialogue is really the central form of religious experience. It seems to me that this doesn’t happen only in religion. It happens whenever anybody writes a book and presents it to the public. It looks as though a book written entirely by one person is a dictatorial or authoritarian kind of monologue, where the writer is simply holding your buttonhole and not letting you go until he’s finished. But actually the written, sequential treatise is a very democratic form of dialogue with the reader. The author is putting all his cards on the table in front of you. He has made his response to the subject with which he has been in dialogue. He is now transmitting the possibility of dialogue to his reader. If he has really retreated into the upper limits of silence, then he will not write continuously. He will write in separate paragraphs, that is, in aphorisms, or detached oracular utterances. Oracular writers, from Heraclitus to Marshall McLuhan, have always written prose of that kind, that is, in separated sentences, where every sentence is surrounded by a big packet of silence.
MANDEL: Such writers tend to talk about the form itself: their subject is silence. Wittgenstein, for example, ultimately comes through his oracular utterances to the point that he says there are some things we cannot and ought not talk about.2 Is there value in silence? Or is it submission of some sort? Is the end of dialogue a victory or a defeat? When Socrates has been taken over by the subject and has followed it to the end, has he triumphantly produced the notion of the good? Has he won or lost? Or does that matter?
FRYE: I think it’s very clearly marked in Plato when he wins and when he loses. In some of the more satiric and ironic dialogues he simply ends with a confession of ignorance, which is, of course, itself ironic. But the most common symbol indicating when he’s won is the myth or the story. The Republic, for example, ends with the myth of the transmigration of souls, and a myth like that in Plato, I think, indicates the possession of what the dialectic is about.
MANDEL: When we get to story, we’ve left dialogue, and I begin thinking no longer of the Socratic form but of the more mythic form of the dialogue itself. I’m thinking of the kind you get in the seventeenth century—the dialogue of the self and soul. Is there something more than the struggle between the body and the soul, something that’s taking over the poet as he tries to reconcile these divided parts of himself?
FRYE: Oh, sure. Everything that goes on in a society is also going on inside the individual. Just as you have the confused and tentative discussions in conversation, so you have within the individual mind all this unshaped and compulsive babble that continually goes on, which may be spoken aloud or simply thought to oneself. The attempt to construct a dialogue of body and soul, or self and soul, is an attempt to find some kind of structure within the mind that can be approached by different aspects of the mind. I think that traditionally, from Plato’s time until fairly recently, people thought of the structure of the wise man’s mind as a kind of inner dictatorship. That is, reason was in control, the appetite was underneath, and the will acted as a kind of thought-police which hunted down all the subversive elements. We today don’t think of the wise man’s mind as a dictatorship. In fact, we don’t think of the wise man’s mind at all. We think of the mind as a conflict of forces, with the ego fighting for its life to preserve its sanity; in short, we think of the mind today as a kind of participating democracy.
MANDEL: But don’t we think of the mind too as a kind of theatre in which parts of the mind are playing various roles? There is a dialogue of the self with the self, rather like the way existential psychiatrists talk about it—a self talking to a false-self system—or like the way Sartre talks about the man who is imitating himself.3 This highly theatrical situation I find very typical of the contemporary mind—the acting out within oneself all kinds of roles.
FRYE: I think the conception of the role is very strong, and one can see in every kind of demonstration people throwing themselves into roles with the greatest enthusiasm. The trouble is, of course, that the role is usually a part in somebody else’s play. Consequently, the sense of autonomy and of freedom and of individual independence is continually being threatened by this process.
MANDEL: Yes, I think it’s precisely a part in somebody else’s play because one doesn’t feel that one is oneself. This is the meaning of the false-self system that R.D. Laing talks about in The Divided Self and The Self and Others.
FRYE: And with role, of course, the question of sincerity is no longer relevant, because the actor’s sincerity consists in putting on a good show, not in believing what he says.
MANDEL: This is something that really interests me. The theatre of the absurd can be thought of as a parody form of dialogue. In other words, you don’t have dialogue with any content; you simply have the form of dialogue, as in Waiting for Godot.
FRYE: The parody there, I take it, would be the act that killed vaudeville, that is, the endless kind of cross-fire talk between the stooge and his feed. The two clowns come on stage and will say anything to avoid going off the stage.
MANDEL: Yes, what are we doing right now, by the way? Waiting for Godot, or saying anything to keep from going off the stage. But isn’t the vaudeville act an abstract form of dialogue itself? If it is a parody of dialogue, then is that a kind of criticism of the Socratic dialectic? I mean that quite seriously. When one character talks to another character in a Pinter play and there’s no apparent connection, we have a parody of the form of dialogue rather than a parody of its content. Perhaps the parody of dialogue we find in theatre of the absurd suggests something about historical development—that we have moved from the dialectic of Socrates to a world in which we can no longer be seized by the form of the subject. We can never get beyond the tentative beginning, beyond the first part of the Socratic dialogue, because we’re always playing roles rather than allowing ourselves to be absorbed by the subject. Is the parody dialogue of the theatre of the absurd suggesting a failure in our own sensibility that is connected with the false-self system?
FRYE: Yes, I think there is a great deal in the theatre of the absurd that mirrors the particular kind of exhibitionistic moral rearmament which occupies so very large a part of the contemporary scene.
MANDEL: What are the students who want to participate, rather than talk, telling us? Or to phrase the question in another way, can criticism be participation and response rather than analysis and system? Students want to stop at participation. They don’t want to go to analysis. They don’t want to go to systematic structures of any kind. It seems to me that much of what you’ve been saying about dialogue is about some kind of structure that takes over the trivial, the superficial, the synthetic in the human being—that we finally give ourselves to something that is larger than we, that we discover a subject bigger than we are. I think this is what education is. But it is precisely this kind of feeling that there is a good deal of reaction against among young people today.
FRYE: There’s a medieval story about a group of people who were celebrating and dancing. Through some form of magical retribution, they found themselves going around in a circle until they finally sank into the ground. The song they kept singing was “Why Go We Not?” If you think of the last few words of Waiting for Godot—where one says, “Yes, let’s go,” and then the final stage direction is “They do not move”—you’ve got exactly the state of mind of somebody who wishes to participate but not enter a structure. I don’t believe it is possible to discover anything within oneself which is not a response to something within a structure of intelligence or imagination. If this resistance to the objective correlative, to the thing out there, is your only means of self-discovery, it cuts off the whole educational procedure.
MANDEL: I wonder whether one always discovers something out there. Perhaps we discover it in here. Let’s take the example of a psychoanalytic dialogue. What is it that one is concerned with in the dialogue if it is a genuine one? Presumably, one talks and talks and talks, so that finally one can hear oneself. Now that seems like a ludicrous thing to do—to keep talking so that you can hear yourself. I can imagine other ways of doing it. One could be quiet to hear oneself, or one could talk so that one could hear what one’s words are. For me, writing is an obsessive act. I write so that I can see what it is that I want to say. Now I’m not sure that’s entering into a larger structure. It’s turning inward to discover my own self. Does that make any sense?
FRYE: Oh, yes, it makes a great deal of sense. But I think that the act of writing and the whole psychoanalytic dialogue are rather different processes from the educational procedure. In writing or in talking to a psychiatrist, the attempt really is to try to break through some kind of block and to release some current or stream of energy in the mind. But in the educational procedure, it seems to me, there is a body of thought of which the basis is information. One cannot just think at random. Thinking is an acquired skill, like playing the piano. It depends on habit and on practice. To think is to enter into a body of thought and to try to add your own thinking to it. No discovery, no progress, no mental adventure is possible without throwing this line across—the line of correspondence between your own mind and the subject.
MANDEL: I think you’re avoiding the word “reason” here. I wonder whether the poet thinks in the way you’re describing “thinking” here. Isn’t it more random at times? Now I’m very much impressed by literary convention, about which you’ve written so much, and you’ve influenced me in your writing on literary convention. But there seems to me surely much more than the convention, than the larger structure of poetic thought which I enter into. There is the random kind of association in my own mind, the babble that you’ve talked about, too, that I use to discover and order. It could be that’s the collective unconscious muttering away inside me.
FRYE: No, I don’t think it is the collective unconscious. One reason why I avoid the term “reason” is that the whole operation has just as much to do with the emotion or the imagination as with the reason. It certainly does in the case of poets. I feel very strongly, as you know, that what the poet does really is to hitch himself onto the imaginative body of poetry and find his individual voice within that community of poetry.
MANDEL: He wouldn’t write poetry unless he knew what poetry was.
FRYE: He wouldn’t write poetry unless he knew what poetry was. I’ve read several tons of poetry written by people who didn’t know what was being written around them, and it was all bad.
MANDEL: This makes structure in poetry very important. Does it make poetry a part of dialogue?
FRYE: Well, there are certainly dialogue elements. I suppose that a poet writes as a kind of response to experience. He has an experience which demands the poetic response. This is just another way of saying that he writes poetry because he must.
MANDEL: Ah, yes, this is a lovely way around what I thought was an impasse. I’ve become very interested in the notion of the poet as a liar. It’s an old charge against the poet, and there are various ways it can be answered. Most defences of poetry are dialogues with those who call the poet a liar. As a liar, the poet doesn’t enter into the community of discourse, into what we’ve been calling dialectic. He is solely in the world of appearances. I’m not saying that the poet as a liar is opposed to the poet as teller of truth. I’m saying that the poet is a liar in precisely the sense that Laing says he’s a liar—self-deceiver, hypocrite, dissembler. He plays with illusions. What if I want to live with the world of illusions? Can I carry on a dialogue with anyone else?
FRYE: The sense in which the poet lies is the sense in which the horses in Gulliver’s Travels say that the lie is “the thing which is not.”4 The discourse person, the philosopher, the historian, are concerned with the world of things, while the poet is always concerned with the things surrounded by nothing, by the silence.
MANDEL: Perhaps that’s why I grudgingly come into the world of structure. Perhaps as a poet I’m trying to be in a world of emptiness and in that world to create, “to give to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name.”5
FRYE: Socrates indicates his possession of his dialectic when he tells his story, when he has his myth. It seems to me that that’s the area in which the poet is operating. The myth is a story which is neither true nor not true.
MANDEL: The poet becomes possessed, and the possessed man has passed the limits of dialogue. Earlier I was suggesting that our culture, our young people, might be possessed and therefore beyond dialogue. Is the psychedelic movement the pursuit of madness, or possession, and therefore beyond dialogue?
FRYE: I suppose everybody is really fighting to be taken over by something, and there are various things that can take you over. One is a structure of thought, one is a lunatic, one is the incarnation of a lunatic, like Hitler. All of these things are more or less goals at which various people are aiming.
MANDEL: Let’s say that as poet I’m aiming for lunacy, that I want to be a poet madman. From the point of view of the Socratic dialectician, I suppose you would have to dismiss me. But what if I’m not dismissed by the community? Leonard Cohen, for example, is probably quite a sensible young man and very much in possession of his senses. Yet he keeps insisting that something speaks through him. He doesn’t say, “I speak.” And what seems to speak through him is a Dionysiac voice, a lunatic voice, from certain points of view.
FRYE: I said earlier that I was avoiding words like “reason” because I was very anxious to insist on the validity of the emotional and the imaginative, as well as the rational, approaches to structure. I’m thinking of the fact that the first word in European poetry is the word “madness.” In the first words of the Iliad Homer says, “I’m going to sing about madness.”6And the result is one of the most beautifully structured and symmetrical poems that the human imagination has ever completed.
MANDEL: Yes, but Leonard Cohen isn’t Homer.
FRYE: He isn’t Homer, but he is being taken over by something which is a creating and structuring power. So are you.
MANDEL: In The Modern Century you use the phrase “Freudian proletariat” to describe madness in poetry and contemporary culture. The point you make about the Freudian proletariat is that it’s fundamentally antisocial. You do admit at one point that society itself is a worn-out convention that needs to be thrown aside.7 But the other implication of your argument in The Modern Century is surely that the Freudian proletariat is in some sense antisocial in a rather trivial and silly way, and that education is the means by which we can subsume its silliness into society and take the best of its creativity.
FRYE: Yes, I think that the death and rebirth process is a much more serious process than disintegration, one which only education is serious enough to carry on.
MANDEL: I have an objection to the argument you were using in The Modern Century when you say that education is a cooling-off process.8 I suppose its dialogue is one in which we distance or detach ourselves from certain destructive forces, and this is related to the whole idea of a subject or structure that’s bigger than ourselves. You said, for example, that Satan becomes something else when he’s regarded not as an angel of light, but as a contribution to modern thought. I wonder if there is not a serious objection to be raised about the detaching, cooling-off process of education. It’s the kind of objection George Steiner speaks against in Language and Silence, where he argues that detachment itself may be enervating, that by becoming cooled-off we may as a matter of fact become less human than we were before. As he puts it, the cry in the book may sound more loudly than the cry in the street.9
FRYE: I think there’s a lot to be said for the view that the cry in the book does sound more loudly than the cry in the street.
MANDEL: Well, that makes Satan a contribution to modern thought.
FRYE: Yes. I don’t think the cooler person is less human. The reason for the cooling-off process is that it is the only thing that enables any kind of progress or advance or discovery to take place. The hot emotional response is also a circular response. It’s a repetitive response. In other words, it has all the qualities of a neurosis. It keeps running around in circles. But you suggest an interesting possibility to me as a teacher. The whole teaching method has been Socratic in the sense that Socrates uses the ironic question to try to get rid of illusions, and then the leading question to try to pull students on into the discovery of the dialectic. In our day, it seems to me, the whole educational system has reversed itself into a kind of anti-Socratic mood, where the Socratic figure no longer asks the questions. He’s the cockshy. He’s the person you throw things at. This is tough enough for the teacher, but for somebody in Claude Bissell’s position10 or in Trudeau’s, it becomes almost an intolerable strain.
MANDEL: Their situation is reversed?
FRYE: Yes. The fact that a man is prime minister means that he’s a natural target for students. This was not R.B. Bennett’s conception of the prime minister, nor was it Sir Robert Falconer’s conception of a university presidency11—that is, the kind of battering that a committed public figure of responsibility takes nowadays. As this goes on, about the only refuge a person in that position has is simply to shut up, simply to retire into silence.
MANDEL: Yes, there seem to be these forces pushing at the teacher, the poet, the thinker, the intellectual at all levels—pushing toward silence. I feel it as a poet. I’m pushed toward silence.
FRYE: When I speak of the death and rebirth of society as a serious matter, and of education as the only way of carrying us through so very serious a process, I’m speaking of two things. One is the sense of the expendable, the sense that many things have come to an end, things we have to throw away, that are worn out. The other is that disintegration is not an end in itself, that something else has to take its place. Consequently, one’s attitude has to be a sequential, continuing, progressive attitude, and there has to be an opening up of the mind to fresh experiences wherever they come. This is what I take it you mean when you speak of your ambition to try to quiet down the noise and simply to listen. This is one of the things I mean essentially by education: the ability to see what is there and to hear what is there.
MANDEL: Yes, I think I do mean something like that by the notion of trying to quiet down the noise. But you’re also saying why you want to resist disintegration. I’m not always certain, you see, that I want to resist disintegration. There’s a very strong nihilistic impulse in me. I don’t mean this just personally. It’s part of a larger structure of thought, a nihilistic impulse that says, “Why not disintegrate? Why not let this structure of thought fall apart?” Let’s say it’s the outworn social convention you mention in The Modern Century. Let’s say I want to see that torn apart. Or let’s say that I want to see things disintegrate because that’s some limit, some end to things, and it’s the end of things I’m anxious for. That’s an apocalyptic desire. Now I know how horrendous this can sound. I know that the terrible things that are going on at the moment in Iraq may be part of that vision of disintegration, and I don’t really want to share in that or contribute to it.12 Yet I have to admit that I’m not always delighted by the notion of building up, of being reborn, of structuring or restructuring. I’m attracted by disintegration itself.
FRYE: As an end in itself and for its own sake?
MANDEL: I keep thinking it would be cheating if I say anything but an end in itself and for its own sake. The kind of thing that’s happening to language in the poetry of bill bissett and bp nichol is a tearing apart. Language has become shriek, sound itself, babble, as you might say, yet I find this a very rich and rewarding and exciting poetry—though one could argue about whether it’s structured or not structured. It’s the disintegrating part of it that I like.
FRYE: Yes, but a disintegration of that kind is not anything I would apply a moral judgment to and say that this is civilization going on the skids. I would never say that. I think it’s the kind of analysis that is really part of the experimental process. It’s inherent in the experimental process that everything that can die ought to die, and that everything that can wear out ought to wear out.
MANDEL: If one wants to wear out those parts that ought to wear out, this is moral, this is defensible. But what if it’s the shell, the body itself one wants to wear out? That’s a kind of Rimbaud position: I will wear out my senses.
FRYE: Yes, but not one he stuck with very long. Rimbaud is really the pioneer in this business of dérèglement, of deliberately smashing and breaking down the structures.13 He knew what he was doing. He got to the end of it, and then he simply dropped everything cold and ran away from it. And the rest of his life he spoke of it with the greatest contempt.
MANDEL: I don’t suppose you could stay with it very long. That would be the point. The moments of vision might be so terrifying as a consequence that you could never go back to them again. Or they might be so intense that you could only sustain them once in a lifetime. I’m trying to say that a negative approach might be a part of a dialectic, a consistent nay-saying. All the time we’ve been talking I’ve been impelled by the coherence and power of the things you’re saying, which, I think, are part of the whole structure of thought that you yourself have entered into and have spent such a long time so brilliantly developing. These have pulled me along in a way that I don’t want, in a sense, to be pulled along. I think nay-saying is a part of it. Perhaps that’s why I keep asking questions.
FRYE: I think nay-saying is a part of it. In a civilization like ours, which is so obsessed by the sense of the metaphysical absurd, which is so obsessed with the importance of the death wish, the death impulse, the death consciousness, of life proceeding toward an identity which only death succeeds in reaching—this civilization of the absurd can perhaps go so far that it will turn into a counter-absurdity. That is, in some respects everything that I’ve been talking about, everything that is sequential and progressive and consecutive, does go on towards the end of life, towards a kind of death principle. Yeats says that “wisdom is the property of the dead.”14 I think that following out a straight, logical path always leads to suicide, not only in pessimists. It’s just inherent in the shape of things. If you go on living in spite of the logical case for suicide, then you have begun on a kind of counter-absurdity, and the next step in counter-absurdity, it seems to me, is creativity, because what could be more absurd than designing something? What could be more absurd than a story with a beginning, a development, and a conclusion? Nothing begins or ends in this world.
MANDEL: Yes, it’s like Mailer saying in Armies of the Night that when history becomes a crazy house, egotism is the only tool left for the novelist and the historian.15 The fool-hero of Armies of the Night, then, is the counter-absurdity that you’re talking about. Curiously, I suppose, by becoming the reporter and by going through dialogue with himself, Mailer does become the counter-absurdist, since in Miami and the Siege of Chicago he’s already taking up a kind of conservative position. I know that’s not entirely the implication of what you were saying, but he’s prepared to come into society in that book in a way that he wasn’t prepared to in Armies of the Night, where he wanted to celebrate the rites of passage and the assault on the Pentagon and so on. Maybe we finally live at the end of dialogue in a counter-absurdist way.
FRYE: I suspect that’s the real death and rebirth process I’m speaking of.
MANDEL: But I do believe that dialogue has ended, that as Mailer says in Armies of the Night, no matter what happens to him afterwards, these young people are forever different after their rite of passage.16 I don’t mean a generation gap. We can no longer speak to them, nor they to us, and we’ve come into a new era. It’s an epoch. This is part of what I tried to say in criticizing your approach to the cooling-off process of education. I’m sceptical about whether that will work, because I think the experience of these youngsters is so radically different from our own now.
FRYE: In what respects is it different? Does it cut off the possibility of communication?
MANDEL: This is the meaning of the rites of passage in Mailer.
FRYE: But what have they passed to?
MANDEL: We can’t know.
FRYE: Do they know?
MANDEL: Not necessarily. This is one of the meanings of silence and therefore one of the limits of dialogue. Their not knowing the ends they have in mind and not knowing where they are now and our not knowing means an end of dialogue. I think in its crudest form this gets expressed in the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and the more radical student groups who refuse to talk about ends, who talk only about means and tactics. They’re all excited about their Trotskyism and Maoism and perhaps don’t even themselves realize that the extreme New Left is involved in a silence. They’ve come to something new and they don’t understand. Now that may be just mystification.
FRYE: Is there something fundamentally different about this feeling than simply the kind of latent wish to be taken over by somebody? That is, do you feel that the Maoism of today is qualitatively different from the Stalinism and Fascism of a generation ago?
MANDEL: Yes. I’m much impressed by Godard’s version of these young people in his films. This is a case for me of life imitating art. Godard’s version of these young people reaches its climactic point in a much-praised scene where the old revolutionary talks to the young revolutionary, and the young girl who has just assassinated the wrong man and gone back and assassinated another one is talking to the old revolutionary, and they don’t understand one another at all.17 It’s not the same revolution. There’s something radically different here. The sources of it are what I’d be interested in discovering, if I could. I suspect—and I’ve tried to argue this—that the sources are in the enormous revulsion these young people feel toward the wars and atrocities of the past fifty years—World War II, the concentration camps, the Vietnam War. I think they are so enormously repulsed by this that, in a sense, they participate in it to act out its violence for us. This is a new thing.
FRYE: That’s very interesting to me, except that I’m revolted by these things, too, so I find their moral revulsion eminently intelligible. I don’t feel that that really cuts off the possibility of communication.
MANDEL: But you said in The Modern Century that one of the odd things about the antisocial attitudes of the Freudian proletariat was their inability to define their ends [85–6; NFMC, 48].
FRYE: I may have said that. I was thinking, of course, of the extremely teleological sense of the Stalinist-Communists, who, when I was a student, were defining the revolutionary goals entirely in terms of the next step. That is, everything they did was one step on the march of the workers’ victory. The collapse and disappearance of that teleological sense has somewhat mystified me.
MANDEL: Well, it’s that mystification that I feel myself and that I’m referring to when I talk about the silence. Silence is for me a metaphor for that mystification. Incidentally, there’s another form of silence that comes to mind here, and so perhaps another limit of dialogue. Steiner is partly the source for this, but also George Orwell, who I think is becoming more and more a prophetic figure in our time.
FRYE: Yes, I think so, too.
MANDEL: I mean the silence that comes about because, to follow Steiner’s argument, the poets no longer want to use a language that has been used for such terrible purposes as ours has been. The poets no longer want to use a debased language, because language itself has been debased. Is this another end of dialogue?
FRYE: I don’t get that. Hitler’s language is debased by Hitler, but I don’t see that the German language is debased.
MANDEL: Steiner’s argument, which first appeared in Encounter, provoked a good deal of controversy, and the general line of argument against him was the one that you’re using, that is, that Hitler’s language is Hitler’s language. But why is Hitler’s language not part of a larger structure of thought or a dialectic—the German language? If my language as poet can’t be private to me but is part of the larger language, poetry, then Hitler’s language is part of that larger language he uses, German. And insofar as he debases language, he debased German language. Pound’s argument that the poet is exploring the possibilities of language suggests that the poet using language increases its possibilities, opens it up, enriches it, makes it more viable. But if he debases it, he debases language. That’s Orwell’s argument, isn’t it?
FRYE: Well, yes, but Orwell draws a very clear distinction between the people who debase language, because they are themselves debased, and the people whose function it is to recreate language.
MANDEL: He also says it goes both ways. The man who debases language is debased by his use of language, and then others become debased by his debased use. I suppose the creative person is the poet, the writer, the thinker who opposes this debasement. In 1984 if Winston isn’t an anti-hero, a fool, the proles, who only sing old songs that are themselves …
FRYE: Well, 1984 is a picture of a society that has been wholly debased beyond the possibility of recreation. You spoke a moment ago of poets such as bill bissett and bp nichol experimenting with a kind of disintegrating language. This is the way the poet rights the real kind of debasing, the weasel words and the clotted abstractions and the tones of menace and abuse and all the nauseating aspects of propaganda—that kind of demonic language.
MANDEL: That’s interesting because it suggests the direction such poets are taking is one that, in a sense, is imposed on them by dialogue, by a dialectic—by their own dialogue with language. They can no longer use certain words because they have been ruined—“interpersonal relationship” instead of “love” and so on.
FRYE: Yes, it’s pretty hard to hitch that into metre. Of course, that’s the point about weasel language: it hasn’t any rhythm.
MANDEL: “Lay your sleeping head, my interpersonal relationship …”
FRYE: Yes, exactly.