Conducted 16 December 1970
From WGS, 119–26. Transcribed by Robert D. Denham from CBC audiotape no. 572, released by the Centre for Cassette Studies, 1975. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Frye was interviewed by John J. Teunissen, head of the English department at the University of Manitoba, on a program produced by Robert Zend; like no. 24, it was part of the series On Man and Cosmos broadcast in 1971.
TEUNISSEN: One of the things I’ve been interested in is the role that chaos plays in the great epic, or perhaps tragic, poem, and I’ve called it an archetype. I wonder if the word “archetype” is a legitimate label to attach to it.
FRYE: Yes, it is a legitimate label, because an archetype is an image that recurs throughout literary experience. Chaos comes into the first verse of the Book of Genesis and keeps on going long past Melville.
TEUNISSEN: Is it legitimate to go back to Hesiod—who in my experience, at least, is one of the very first poets to utilize this material—and to suggest that if the element of chaos is present in a cosmological structure, then we could expect a modern poet to come up with associated archetypal material, such as the Promethean myth?
FRYE: Oh, yes, he would come up with the same archetypes, though he’d put them in a different context. There are many aspects of Prometheus, and certainly the Prometheus crucified by the wrath of the sky-god and released by Hercules, the Prometheus whose name traditionally means intelligence and foresight, is part of a recurring structure in religion.
TEUNISSEN: Does chaos play a significant part in Prometheus Unbound, or has it been resolved some way?
FRYE: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound gives you a cosmology which is more or less Milton’s upside down. In Milton the stars and their courses represent the divine creation and chaos is at the bottom of creation, that is, something which is strictly controlled by God; whereas in Shelley everything that is good comes bubbling up from below and is associated with volcanoes and springs. Prometheus for him is imprisoned under the earth and his only friend there is Mother Earth. He’s man in revolt against alienation. In Shelley the source of alienation is in the sky, whereas in Milton it is exactly the opposite.
TEUNISSEN: Shelley, then, picks up at exactly the point at which Aeschylus concludes. At least in the play we have, Prometheus makes a kind of invocation to chaos at that point where he says something like “I hate you all, you gods,” and then he’s buried, as I recall.
FRYE: Yes. But in Shelley, of course, Prometheus can only become free when Jupiter is destroyed; whereas in Aeschylus, Prometheus can only become free when he makes a deal with Zeus.
TEUNISSEN: So that there is more of that element I call diplomacy involved in the Aeschylean version.
FRYE: Yes. The Aeschylean version is conservative and maintains the authority of the sky-god.
TEUNISSEN: I’m interested in what a theologian might say about the presence of chaos in Paradise Lost. Is it absolutely outrageous to suggest that chaos could be considered coeternal with an eternal God?
FRYE: Well, I think not for Milton. That of course was the problem Milton returned to in his Christian Doctrine. Milton was very bothered by the dilemma of the creation myth. If you say that the world was created from nothing, you’re involved in a mathematical paradox—that you can multiply by nothing and still get something. If God made the world out of something, then that something must be coeternal with God. So Milton decided to solve that by talking about the creation de Deo as an emanation from God as God, extending his empire out of chaos. So that chaos is simply that to which God’s presence has not yet come.
TEUNISSEN: It’s not something that must always remain?
FRYE: No. It’s not a thing in itself. It’s simply the absence of God’s presence.
TEUNISSEN: Perhaps I’ve overstressed the personality of chaos in my reading of the poem.
FRYE: It becomes a personality, of course, after the fall of Satan, because it gets integrated then into the chain of being. So you have this curious world in the second book of Paradise Lost where you never know whether you’re up against an abstract personification or a person.
TEUNISSEN: Yes, and it seems to me that most critics prefer an allegorical reading of chaos rather than a reading which really makes it part of Milton’s cosmos—an active part. It may be to avoid the possibility of this being a heretical position that Milton has chosen. I’m not sure.
FRYE: Well, I think that Milton intends you to waver. I think that he intends you to be uncertain of all your landmarks when you’re in chaos.
TEUNISSEN: The Promethean figure then, to get back to Shelley for a moment, is, as a cosmic archetype, obviously very adaptable to political views—to move from a cosmic to a social vision.
FRYE: Oh, yes, certainly from the Romantic period on.
TEUNISSEN: It depends, doesn’t it, greatly upon your idea about how important it is to have a strong central government, whether or not you look upon the Promethean figure as a heroic rebel or as an irresponsible anarchist? So after the French Revolution, I suppose, the Promethean figure could be nothing but heroic for Shelley, even in the face of what happened in that revolution.
FRYE: Well, yes. In the Romantic social setup Prometheus is a revolutionary man certainly. In Milton, I think the Promethean side of man would be associated with Christ; that is, Christ for Milton is essentially the isolated prophet to a hostile world who is crucified like Prometheus. And if I were to look for a Promethean figure in Milton, I would look at Samson Agonistes, who was a prototype of Christ but a bound giant in the Philistine temple. For Milton, Christ descends with the fire of God and spreads it among man.
TEUNISSEN: In the early history of the church there was a debate between Tertullian and the Marcionites, named after the leader of their sect, in which one of the major arguments was whether or not Christ was a true Promethean figure. Who was the true Prometheus? I think Marcion’s writings are mostly lost and have to be reconstructed by what Tertullian had to say about this problem, but it is interesting, at least for me, that the archetype should lend itself so beautifully to a theological debate in the formative years of the church.
FRYE: Well, Marcion was a Gnostic, and what made the Gnostics heretical was their belief that the order of nature was fundamentally corrupt and that, therefore, the God who would produce this order of nature must be an evil God, whom Jesus fought against. There’s something strongly Gnostic about all Romanticism, I think, especially of the Shelleyan kind, because it recurs to this conception that the God who produced the order of nature is somebody to be got rid of. He’s a sinister god.
TEUNISSEN: Would you call Shelley a mythmaker in his setting up other cosmic possibilities in Prometheus Unbound?
FRYE: I’d certainly call him a mythopoeic poet, yes. A poet doesn’t make a myth in the sense in which he makes a poem; that is, the poem is what he makes and the myth is what he makes it out of. He makes it out of the same myths, just as all English poets make their poems out of the same language.
TEUNISSEN: Is the problem, then, in moving the myths from their original basis in ancient religions to some degree of usefulness in, say, the twentieth century? In James Joyce’s Ulysses you obviously have the archetypal materials, but they’re handled in such an ironic and frequently satiric way. Is that the necessary result now, do you think, for a mythopoeic poet?
FRYE: I think that we are in an ironic age of literature, and that all our major serious works have been for some time in an ironic or satiric mode. But that has not been the only mythical significance of them. I think that Ulysses is primarily an ironic mode—it’s based on a failure of communication. Finnegans Wake, I think, is also ironic—it goes round in a circle. Still, I think that the cycle there symbolizes something a bit more than a cycle.
TEUNISSEN: Is it possible for a twentieth-century poet to use an archetype like the Promethean one in what I might call the straight sense? Or must he use it ironically? Must he, for example, create only ironic Christ-figures?
FRYE: Well, I think that a modern poet would be bound to put his Prometheus in a fairly ironic situation. He might be in the situation of, say, Dostoevsky’s idiot.
TEUNISSEN: So that Ahab, if he’s a Promethean kind of hero, is a movement in that direction—having less knowledge than his predecessors had about the cosmos and about who indeed is responsible for his sufferings?
FRYE: Yes, Ahab has the Promethean elements about him, but you’ll notice that he gives up the central Promethean quest of the search for fire. He says the right worship of fire is defiance. But I think he lives in a universe which has been polarized without reference to the physical structure in Milton’s universe. That is, in physical structure Milton has a created order, symbolized by the stars in heaven; and chaos, which is way down there; and a kind of absolute space. But Melville’s world doesn’t have those spatial landmarks. He lives in a universe which is polarized between identity and alienation. The sea in Moby-Dick is an element of alienation. And there’s an obsessed element in Ahab which is driving him into that, so that he in a sense loves what he hates.
TEUNISSEN: He has a very difficult problem in a sense. Some critics have suggested that his pursuit of the whale is an attempt to discover the truth in the universe, as in his famous speech about all visible objects being but pasteboard masks and man’s job being to strike through the masks and discover what’s behind them [chap. 36]. If Moby Dick is an instrument of an omnipotent God in the sense that Milton presents that God, then Ahab must inevitably be destroyed by the whale. If, on the other hand, he kills the whale, he may discover that there’s nothing behind it and become a mere fisherman. He seems to be on the horns of the eternal dilemma there.
FRYE: Yes, it’s a dilemma which comes this side of Isaac Newton, I think, where the poet is living in a universe where the stars are no longer symbols of a divine purpose and order.
TEUNISSEN: And where the sea becomes a kind of symbol for the fact that we do not know our origins and we do not know which port we finally reach, if any.
FRYE: Everything in the Bible and in Milton’s Paradise Lost is thrown in the direction of God’s ability to command the sea, of his ability to control chaos, so it’s characteristic of a great nineteenth-century epic that the sea gets out of hand.
TEUNISSEN: There’s an interesting problem I’ve been thinking about and I wonder if you can help me with it. If a novelist begins with a social vision (could we use Jane Austen maybe?), it’s practically impossible to rise to a cosmic perspective, but if one begins with a cosmic perspective (let’s take Brontë in Wuthering Heights), one can include the social within it. In both those works what we could call perhaps the archetype is marriage, but in one it becomes a hierogamy—it is truly mythic—and in the other it is only social. Is that a possibility? That once you have chosen a limited vision you cannot blow it up?
FRYE: Well, once you’ve chosen a novel, I think you enter into a social structure, so you go in the direction of Jane Austen or Henry James or Proust with all his princes and dukes playing at aristocracy. This hierarchical structure seems to be built in to the whole form of the novel, and the fact that Melville is clearly writing something other than novels indicates a kind of anarchistic drive in him, I think, which is very close to the American revolutionary feeling. It might consolidate into democracy or fascism or into half a dozen other things, but the essential drive is a kind of anarchistic revolutionary drive. There are certain genres that can accommodate mythical structures in a much more open way. In the kind of society that the United States was building up with the frontier advancing toward the West, American prose fiction was bound to become a series of devices for avoiding the novel—which demands, again, a structure of society. Anybody who wants to devote himself to the novel, like Henry James, almost has to remove himself partly from the American scene. But Mark Twain and Melville and Hawthorne are obviously out for something else.
TEUNISSEN: When Melville, then, talks about the shock of recognition,1 I assume that he means that in reading any mythological material—the Prometheus of Aeschylus or the Bible or any other number of these things—one recognizes in the life pattern or in the cosmic structure put forth in that work something that is real within oneself. In that sense, are the types of the Old Testament prophecies not only of Christ who is to come but also of people like Samson to whom we look to explain ourselves?
FRYE: They are more than prophecies of Christ certainly, but for Milton, Christ would be the unity which holds this variety together, and Samson is a very different figure from David. And yet in Milton’s view they would both be types of Christ. In Melville you wouldn’t have quite that same view of the Bible, but he does have something of Milton’s contempt for the hysteria and the panic which tries to make people think all alike and not realize that genuine unity is a matter of variety. In such a book as Mardi the figure of Christ—he calls him Alma—is certainly present as the unifying, reconciling principle, which makes people think not alike but as they should think, individually.
TEUNISSEN: If Milton experienced the shock of recognition—I would argue that he did—did he not run the risk of becoming what one might call an idolater? Would there not be the risk of becoming a comparative mythologist rather than a Christian?
FRYE: I suppose so, but of course that danger would take you in the direction of what Blake calls the Everlasting Gospel. That is, you proceed from the point that there’s nothing in Christianity that isn’t in all other religions to the point that there’s nothing in all the other religions that isn’t in Christianity. So you arrive at a kind of Catholicism in your view of Christianity which takes in the whole spread of symbolism. I think Milton is very keenly aware of the difference between the element of devil worship in, say, Greek and Roman polytheism and the use of their gods as poetic images in counterpoint to Biblical or Christian ones.
TEUNISSEN: Which he does superbly.
FRYE: Which he does superbly and couldn’t do without a certain element of belief. But the belief is never externalized. The thing which is bad is what you just called idolatry, the thing out there, the thing objectified, like the remark in the Psalms that those who make idols are like unto them, or as Blake says, they become what they behold.2
TEUNISSEN: And that would be not just heresy but idolatry?
FRYE: Yes, that would be man giving himself away to his own creation, a sort of Frankenstein nightmare.
TEUNISSEN: Does the believer, then, construct, insofar as he’s able to with the aid of the Bible and grace, his own picture of the cosmos to suit his own life experience?
FRYE: I think Milton’s view is that the Bible is handed to the believer. If he simply enters into the structure that is there, he will find that there is something inside him which is reading the Bible and not himself, and the something inside him which is reading the Bible is, of course, the Holy Spirit or what Milton calls the Word of God in the heart.3 This takes over and works out the understanding of the Bible which is appropriate to that man. For Milton, there cannot be any essential or any dangerous disagreement among believers who are united by their common acceptance of the spirit. He says that the spirit unifies but does not make for uniformity. That is, the uniformity is the opposite of unity. In the Areopagitica, for example, he speaks of the stones of the temple of God.4 They’re not continuous but they’re contiguous. That is, each person is a stone in himself but he’s part of the building.