Recorded 12 January 1970 ff.
Professor Glenna Davis Sloan, then a doctoral student at Teachers College, Columbia University, who was also lecturing at Queens College, CUNY, interviewed Frye on 12 January, 23 February, and 27 August 1970 in connection with her dissertation on literacy development. This thesis argued against the dominant trend of focusing on the mechanics of learning to read and advanced the proposition that the critical consideration of the literature used is crucial to teaching reading and writing at the elementary level. Specifically, it demonstrated how literary criticism such as Frye’s could inform good practice. The study was published as The Child as Critic (New York: Teachers College Press, 1975 and subsequent eds.) with an introduction by Frye (see WE, 476–8), from which the present title is drawn. Sloan, who later became a professor at Queens College, kindly put together the text below from transcripts of the interviews.
SLOAN: A perennial question that children and even my students at Queens College ask is, “Why study literature?” I’d add a question, “How do you go about the study?”
FRYE: You start off with reading and writing because of course you can’t take any part in your society without it. Eventually you realize that there is a difference between learning to read and write at the minimum standards of literacy and learning to write with some power of articulateness and read with some sense of direction. So, in fact, the teaching of literature is the teaching of reading and writing.
SLOAN: Children in elementary school are taught to read with the mediocre material typically found in basal readers. Shouldn’t they learn from the best?
FRYE: I don’t know that I would stress the studying of the great rather than the mediocre, although in all learning, especially of this kind, there is a certain amount of learning from models. I have always taken the view that one shouldn’t start too early the civil war between what is really worthwhile in literature and what is trash. The child is very likely to prefer the trash and I don’t think it is any good trying to force standards on him, which he might accept externally but doesn’t feel. I think that the effort of training ought to be towards showing the resemblance between what he likes to read or look at on television and the central patterns of literature. The value judgments will take care of themselves in due course.
SLOAN: Can you talk further about these “central patterns”?
FRYE: One principle which emerges from literature is that there are certain patterns of storytelling—conventional ways of beginning, developing, and finishing it off. And also there are stories that seem in some odd way to be central, like the story of Job, where somebody who is in prosperity gets the book thrown at him and then is eventually restored to prosperity. That story shape seems to be fundamental. And because of the general tendency to start with simple patterns in simple societies, those are the ones which have been preserved in our myths and legends and our folk tales. They help to give the child, who recapitulates the history of the race in his own development, the sense of what the central patterns are, what really evokes echoes in one’s mind.
SLOAN: That is so far from the notions most elementary teachers have about literature. For the most part, it seems to me, they see literary works as tools to teach reading or socialization skills. A key word today is “relevance.” Teachers ask, “Are the stories instructing the children about today’s world?”
FRYE: Well, it’s difficult to explain the principles of literature to somebody who thinks they know what they are and has got them all wrong. And I think it’s also very hard to discuss the matter on the basis of a word like “relevance” because relevance means vogue or fashion, and whatever is fashionable this year will be in the garbage can next year. All education has to avoid relevance in that sense. Of course the people who talked it up in this century were the Nazis; it’s the same psychosis.
SLOAN: Writers for children these days attempt to deal with issues of the time, to tell it like it is. To be relevant, I suppose.
FRYE: I think the good books are very often written by people who have some sense of the kind of structure that a child responds to. The basis of teaching when I grew up and many decades before that was really concentrating on the realistic detail: you’d take some work of art because it had a venerable name attached to it and you would pick out this and that and the other that was true to life, like what you knew, and so forth. This is relating the known to the less known. It seemed to me that one thing this kind of teaching never can do is develop any sense of the total structure of what’s being read. It’s bitty and piecy and never gets to any sense of perspective. I don’t know a great deal about contemporary children’s literature, but the little I’ve looked at that seems to be the most competent, written with a knowledge of children, is the type that concentrates on the structure of the story and doesn’t try to be cute or piecemeal.
SLOAN: Or didactic.
FRYE: Or didactic. Mind you, the adults may be following the child’s taste in these matters. I think children go in for a rather priggish didacticism at a certain stage—say nine to eleven—around there.
SLOAN: Some writers for children do insist that they don’t set out necessarily to cater for children’s tastes or preferences. Maurice Sendak1 said in a presentation at Queens College that he wrote for the child within himself.
FRYE: That’s an excellent description of the really great children’s classics. They were all written by adults for the child within themselves, I think.
SLOAN: Now back to the process of teaching literature. There’s the question of where and how to begin. We want young children to grasp the structure of stories. How can you do this beyond just telling them stories?
FRYE: One thing that I have learned by talking to teachers around Toronto is that the more gifted and imaginative teachers take their own line and don’t get swallowed up in this bloody leviathan of OISE. Some years ago it was said that the place to start the study of mythology was grade 9. Then, I was later told that the place to introduce mythical stories can go further and further back, even as far as grade 2 or 3. So obviously teachers who know more realize that children can take in the structural outlines of a simple story at earlier and earlier levels. In fact, I think it’s the first thing a child can do. And what’s more, the young child wants the story as an unchangeable verbal pattern—the same story again and again. They concentrate on the story as a whole, not in bits and pieces.
SLOAN: Your idea of studying literary works as entities within an interrelated structure is to me new and exciting. It makes so much more sense to me than putting individual works under a microscope for examination. Most teachers are not familiar with Anatomy of Criticism or even The Educated Imagination. My hope is that I can present this perspective in an accessible way in my paper.
FRYE: This presents a challenge because it does involve reversing the whole perspective of most English education. In genuine literary studies poetry is in the middle and fictional prose and all the rest are outside it, together with the prose of communication, a decidedly peripheral prose. Teachers have all been taught to back into this study the wrong way: start with the art of communication and then go back to novels, poetry, and plays by way of relaxation. Poetry is there at the centre but many approach it as though it were a cauldron of boiling oil.
SLOAN: These ideas of yours about the principles of literature: I hope they are being taught in college courses where teachers are enrolled.
FRYE: They belong to an area that is very much talked about and discussed. In fact, there is more talk than illumination. The whole study of literature developed out of philology a hundred years ago and became gradually focused on historical or linguistic aspects. People got bored with that approach and developed critical or explicatory criticism. All this gives the feeling that there was an avoidance of the true centre of this study. And of course we’re going through an age of hysteria now. Everybody is shouting about relevance to either this or that. I’ve been rather violently attacked myself for taking literature away from somebody else’s anxieties.
SLOAN: I think you’re saying that we have to go beyond the mere close reading of individual texts, is that correct? Especially with poetry, we analyse it to destruction and students learn to hate the process.
FRYE: Well, yes. There is, however, an attraction for puzzle solving as long as it is recognized as that. I once suggested to a teacher that he might get his kids to write two poems on the same theme: one in a strict metrical form and the other in free verse. I said that the free verse poem in almost every case would be the better poem. But the child might have more fun working out the other one. There is something about puzzle solving that can hold one’s interest. But what is wrong with this approach for poetry [close analysis of text] is, I imagine, that it assumes prose is the natural way to talk and think instead of being what it is, an extremely artificial and sophisticated way of talking and thinking. Verse is a much more primitive and direct way of talking and thinking. But we are brought up in a prose-based civilization inclined to feel that verse is just a perverse way of distorting prose. So we ask the students to work a poem all out and reduce it to its prose statement. This is one part that I think bores the hell out of kids.
SLOAN: Obviously, teachers, especially elementary teachers, need to be re-educated in the process of teaching literature.
FRYE: Well, yes. It’s the elementary teachers who really have to be shown these things, because it seems to me if you really got a child started properly on reading by grade 5 or even before, there is a limit to how much damage you can do to him afterwards. But the training of a teacher of literature is literature.
SLOAN: You talk of the relationship in story of content and structure. Please say something more about this. In my experience as a student, content is always emphasized in literary study. Isn’t it true that you can’t divorce structure and content?
FRYE: Well, yes. But literature is a structural subject like mathematics. There is a sense in which there isn’t any content in it. It’s a matter, if it’s a story, for example, of concentrating on what is being told. This sounds like a content thing, but it’s actually a matter of, “Where does the story begin?” “Why does it begin there?” “Where’s the crisis or turning point in the plot?” and that kind of thing. This of course can become a new kind of pedantry in its turn. But I think that you need to keep relating everything to the overall structure [as you read].
SLOAN: I still find the notion of thinking of a story more in terms of structure than content difficult to grasp.
FRYE: This is why I keep insisting on capitalizing on and exploiting a small child’s attention when you’re telling him a story, because to hold that attention until the entire story is told is a very rare mental achievement for an adult. Children can do it and if you can persuade a child to keep doing it he won’t have any trouble with literature. But instead of that, children get switched over to the values of the prose-based civilization and the conception of content so they become trained to look at every work of literature or every painting, for that matter, or even a piece of music, and ask, “What’s in it for me? What can I grab and carry off?” Or they look at an abstract painting and say, “What does it mean? Explain it to me; then I’ll be able to ‘get something out of it.’” The very simple childish response is to just stare at the picture. That’s what the painter wants you to do.
SLOAN: So we are confusing art with the utilitarian?
FRYE: “What good is it to me?” we ask; or, “How does this relate to me?” “What’s its relevance?” See how it all fits together? The fundamental act of criticism is simply staring at the picture or listening to the story. But the end of literacy education is not just admiration of a work either. I often quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, who says that the correct response to great creative masterpieces is to do whatever you can creatively, not necessarily writing.2 An oral response can be creative.
SLOAN: To work out curriculum for elementary school based on your ideas, I need your help with a scope and sequence plan. From my reading of your work, I know that you suggest beginning literary study with Biblical stories and Classical myth. What comes next?
FRYE: Well, then you work your way into literature, folk and fairy tales and classics and contemporary stories, always looking for and pointing out the resemblances in everything you read. Explaining the unknown by the previously known.
SLOAN: Quantities of so-called realistic fiction are being written these days for children. Some feel that fantasy does a better job of educating the imagination. What do you say?
FRYE: I believe children should have as mixed a bag as possible. I think a child can read everything and that we should expose him to a great many different kinds of things, tentatively, so the child can develop his own pattern of preference. Some people will go through life wanting realistic stories and others will go through life wanting science fiction.
SLOAN: You write about the forms and structures in literature recurring in stories, but I find that some of the recent novels written for children have an apparent formlessness, no actual beginning, middle, and end.
FRYE: Well, there are traditional story shapes, but there is a traditional shapelessness as well. In stories, there is a series of displacements from myths and the ironic displacement is the farthest away. Most twentieth-century literature is written in the ironic mode and the ironic mode has always made a feature of a kind of pretence of shapelessness or amorphousness. Modern writers use the same paradigms and structures as their ancestors and they always will as long as literature goes on being recognizably literature. Young writers read their contemporaries and when they do that they write in the convention they find there. When they develop enough originality to find their own style, they may be ready to read farther back in the history of literature.
I should say, by the way, that when I speak of myth, I’m speaking of the structural, the formal principle of the work of literature. If you are reading a story in which a man falls in love with his own image in the mirror, you say, “This isn’t Narcissus, but this is myth, a story pattern.”
SLOAN: How much of this theory is appropriate for direct teaching to children? I would think very little.
FRYE: Well, the cyclical and dialectic structures, and other major principles of literature, should certainly be things that the teacher understands. This understanding provides her with a deductive framework for teaching while the student proceeds inductively, through a process of discovery. The teacher has a fairly elaborate schematic in her mind, but the child should be put in the position of discovering things. That’s one reason why the teacher shouldn’t talk too much. Leave the questioning to the children. Surely a child with any intellectual curiosity will bring up things that puzzle him, given the opportunity, of course.
SLOAN: Is there any approach that you would want teachers to avoid when teaching literature?
FRYE: What I would steer away from is any kind of examination of the student that is based on content and memorization. I don’t mean memorizing a poem—that’s another thing altogether. I think the study of content is always incidental and the study of structure is primary, and other things have to be related to that, the form. Form, of course, embraces content. It’s going to take in all the content, but not as content. When I say “steer away from content,” what I am really saying is to steer away from unrelated detail. If you make the structure primary, then everything which will otherwise be content becomes related to the form or structure and so becomes relevant through it.
There are archetypes, elements such as plot patterns, characters, and the like that recur in literature from its very beginnings. And literature itself proves to be a series of displacements from the earliest stories. Literary study is an attempt to see what the literary context of the work of literature is. It’s a generally accepted idea that you get the meaning of anything through context. A building, say: you have to see whether it’s a church or a theatre—in other words, know its context or its function—before you can say much of anything about it. For anything that works, there are two contexts; for literature there is the context of ordinary discourse and the context of literature itself. In talking about literature, which is criticism, most critics take the context of ordinary discourse to be the primary context of a work of literature, although in fact it’s always the secondary context. That’s where you get the idea that the meaning of literature is what you can get out of a paraphrase. But in archetypal criticism, you go first of all to the literary context, to see what meaning can be thrown on an individual work from its context in the whole of literature itself. The archetypal approach allows you to stand back, to see the recurring patterns and associations.
SLOAN: You have said that “The critic may want to know something of the social sciences, but there can be no such thing as, for instance, a sociological approach to literature” [AC, 19/20]. In my experience, most criticism of literature is content-oriented and often takes a sociological or psychological approach.
FRYE: Yes. That’s a reality but that doesn’t make it right. You need to remember also that a theory, literary or otherwise, isn’t any good unless it explains facts. A psychological theory can explain psychological facts but literary facts can only be explained by literary theory. While realizing that you will find yourself picking up analogies with psychology and anthropology, perhaps, as you read literature, you need to keep your centre of attention on the literature and not be taken over by them.
SLOAN: You say that poetry should be central to a literary education. But in my experience elementary teachers find poetry a difficult form and avoid it. When they do teach it, they take an analytical approach. People expect poetry to be hard to understand, I think.
FRYE: The real difficulty with modern poetry is that it is so very simple. The language couldn’t possibly be simpler. Readers themselves make it difficult. The same is true of painting, where you hear people say, “If someone would explain it to me, I would understand.” But the painter would say, “Well, hell, just look at the picture.”
SLOAN: Then “teaching poetry” to the young should mostly be the experiencing of a wide range of poetry?
FRYE: Yes. I’ve always attacked the practice of putting “talky” poets into books for young people because they write versified prose. Instead, if you put emphasis on springy rhythm, imagery, and that kind of thing, you have poetry based on the assumption that poetry is a natural expression, older and more primitive than prose.
SLOAN: The same for “teaching” story? Experiencing stories of all kinds?
FRYE: As to teaching, I would try to talk about the content of a story as far as possible in terms of form and structure. If the child says, “I don’t like the way this author works out the relationship between the boy and his mother,” the teacher says, “You tell me the story your way or rewrite the story in which you work out the relationship as you think it should be done.”
SLOAN: Very often, too often, the study of literature is reserved for the “best” students, the bookish ones.
FRYE: That’s nonsense.
SLOAN: You would not agree that the less bookish students should receive a practical literary education, working mostly with the practical prose of communication?
FRYE: I would not agree. That’s exactly the opposite of what I would say.