Recorded 26 May 1972
From the disk in the Victoria University Library, transcribed by Mary Ellen Kappler. Date from the label of the disk. This is a conversation with Charlotte Tansey, Cathleen Going, Martin O’Hara, and Eric O’Connor for the seminar “Science Policy and the Quality of Life,” which took place in the Bonaventure Hotel, Montreal, 27–28 May 1972. The seminar was organized by the Thomas More Institute, a Montreal institute for the education of Catholic laymen of which Eric O’Connor, S.J., was president and with which the others were associated. See correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 45, file 5. O’Connor was a mathematician, Going a teacher of theology, O’Hara a professor of English, and Tansey a director and former president of the institute. Background comments indicate that the interview was conducted by phone with Frye in Toronto; at the end it appears that the questioners were being televised.
[Frye and Martin O’Hara speak to each other, while the tape is being set up, about Frye’s plans to attend a convocation ceremony at the University of Waterloo on the following day.]
O’HARA: One of the quotes I have in front of me is from The Bush Garden [ii; C, 413], where you say that the central images of everyone’s life are formed in childhood. [Relates an anecdote about a four-year old child who asked him if a lake was polluted.] It struck me that it means that here’s a formation of something in childhood that is going to alter the young person’s perception of what water is, and the baptismal, the salvific, notions of water. The first question becomes, “Is it polluted?” which is a very unnatural one.
FRYE: Well, I don’t know. I think that pollution, in that context, is really something that a child of four hardly understands; it’s really just a word. As a concept, it’s something with a very complicated scientific and political context, but at the core it’s really a myth. It’s the old myth of original sin. What is really strange about the notion is the separation of ideas. That is, when we do certain things to the natural environment we call it pollution, and when we do precisely the same kind of things to the human environment, we call it development. The notion of pollution as something that extends also to our highways and our mean streets and that kind of thing is something that brings the whole context of Songs of Experience into the world, as well as the Songs of Innocence.
O’HARA: Yes. I’m thinking too of the slogans all around currently—things like “the water you drink you can’t swim in,” which, again, has this notion. But you would say that’s altering it at a mythic level?
FRYE: Well, I think that the core of the conception “pollution” is really a mythical core, and it’s something that has to enter a mind sooner or later, if it’s to be a realistic mind. As far as the impact on a child’s mind is concerned, one has to remember the extent to which a child recreates his world. I got all my own archetypes in the city of Sherbrooke, where I spent the first five years of my life, and heaven, for example, is still the other side of the St. Francis River, which goes up on a hill. But when I go back to that part of the world, I realize that all my archetypes take place in a world which I’ve recreated, and which not only isn’t there now but never was there.
O’HARA: Yes, yes, I see. I have another question that’s related to this. [Tells about teaching Wallace Stevens’s Anecdote of the Jar to fourth-year university students, some of whom read the poem as being about culture dominating nature in a destructive and polluting way, and suggests that this is similar to the child’s preoccupation with pollution.]
FRYE: I think that what is happening there is a kind of extension of the Romantic and partly Rousseauist tradition which has brought the word “artificial” into disrepute. That is, the notion that whatever man does to nature is wrong, which, of course, is half the truth. And the other half—that man’s perception of nature is a creative act, not just selective, and that art could also be seen as the fulfilment of nature, rather than as a kind of military conquest of nature—is what Wallace Stevens is trying to express in the poem. But it’s a more difficult and subtle notion, and the obvious thing to see first is the domination, the imperialistic domination of nature by civilization.
O’HARA: It seemed to me such a wildly wrong interpretation of what Stevens was saying, though. And I was startled that the reaction of so many of these students, who were at a level where they can read poetry, I thought, in a fairly sophisticated way, should be dominated by this sort of current attitude about chain-making and road-making.
FRYE: Well, they’re dominated by it because it’s a foreground attitude. The obviousness of the polluted world is what’s confronting them on all sides. Of course Wallace Stevens also says what they’re saying in other poems, like The Man on the Dump. There’s no question that that’s part of reality too, but the notion of art as a kind of emancipation of nature is a much subtler idea.
O’HARA: Yes, and this was missed entirely, even with the forceful image of a jar, which somehow can give the meaning.
FRYE: Yes.
TANSEY: [Says that she is interested in Frye’s ideas, expressed in The Bush Garden, about the unconsciousness of nature and the Canadian fear of nature (BG, 139–41; C, 34–5). She then suggests a contrast between the cyclic images of nature found in Japanese poetry and Judaeo-Christian notions, suggesting that the former indicate an entrapment in nature, while the latter offer freedom from nature.]
FRYE: The conception of man as a creature of the cycle of nature is something that has very primitive roots, but is actually a fairly sophisticated development. You get it in things like Stoicism. It seems to me that in the Japanese tradition there’s a very important element of human consciousness as somehow or other the creator, or at least the place where the creative power in the cycle of nature is really located. In some of the haikus and so on they describe nature, but not in any sense a subjection to nature. It’s the watching, the observant mind, that’s the focus of all of that, and to some extent the whole cyclical activity, the cherry blossoms and the chrysanthemums, is going on inside the mind that perceives it.
TANSEY: You don’t feel, though, the imagination on a kind of wheel? You don’t think history makes a difference? This is almost a reversal of something that is on Martin’s mind, as being free of the burden of history, which you have also said, with the poetic imagination. But how would you see the other freedom which history gives?
FRYE: I don’t know about Shinto, but I would think that in Buddhism, and particularly in Zen Buddhism, there’s a very strong emphasis on the thrust, or the leap, of the mind that makes it clear of the wheel of nature, but which also enables the emancipated mind to see nature turning, so to speak, below him.
TANSEY: Yes, so that, in another way, the Oriental seems to me never free from … can’t be in an imagination that hasn’t got pictures.
FRYE: No. Or at least …
TANSEY: No. I would think that, there again, we’re more sophisticated …. We know that there’s a level of abstraction where one doesn’t expect pictures.
FRYE: Yes, but you also get that in the Orient. That is, there are pictures of the whole process of enlightenment where one picture in the series is a complete blank. And there is, I think, a similar feeling that what you arrive at is a pitch of consciousness in which you are no longer a subject. That is, you are no longer subjected to the involuntary perception of the cycle of nature.
TANSEY: Yes. Now about history, could you …
FRYE: Well, there’s a sharper sense of history in the West. I think that the reason is that in the Biblical tradition you have the structure of the Bible, which from the literary point of view is a comic structure—it’s what Dante called it, a commedia. Like other comedies, it turns on a recognition scene where the saviour and the redeemer of Israel turns out to be a person with a specific name and historical role and function. And that means that the recognition scene occurs within a dramatic context, and a historical context. Whereas it seems to me that Buddhism in particular is almost all recognition; that is, there’s the leap from the subjected consciousness to the liberated consciousness, and there isn’t the previous sense of the unfolding of a dramatic pattern. It’s that sense that gives a much sharper feeling of history to the Western mind.
TANSEY: Yes, perhaps I’ll come in again in a few minutes.
FRYE: I’m sorry, am I not answering your question?
TANSEY: I’m not sure, so I think I’ll … I think it’s somehow related with the social again, isn’t it? The entry of the social into the whole dramatic picture is different in the East and the West.
FRYE: What I see in the mythical tradition is the record of a country that was never lucky at the game of Empire and consequently thinks in terms of a force in history which is also counter-historical, and that’s different from the sort of immanent Hegel–Marx conception of history, which is a sort of donkey’s carrot view of it.
O’HARA: When you speak in that context of the imaginative element in works of art that lifts them clear of the bondage of history, I’m thinking of the ecologist who might at this point say, but is that not simply using the imagination as a kind of escapism?
FRYE: Well, it’s possible to use the imagination as escapism. We have that distinction in our language, about the distinction between the imaginative and the imaginary. If you contrast the visions of an ideal world with its images of garden and city and so on with the laziest and idlest of daydreams, you’ll find that there’s the same pattern of images in both. But in the daydream the work is all assigned to somebody else, such as God.
O’HARA: So that there’s a question of social responsibility. Is this something that becomes part of the mature imagination?
FRYE: Oh yes. And social responsibility, of course, is inseparable from the individual’s assumption of that responsibility.
O’HARA: Could you imagine, which at the moment I can’t, a valid social responsibility without a certain quality of imagination?
FRYE: Oh, I think that it is your imagination that attaches you to society, and that to assume responsibility is the product of a certain vision of society. No, I couldn’t imagine that either.
O’HARA: Yes, yes. I was just separating out something that was starting to blur on me, and that’s helped.
CATHLEEN GOING: [Asks in what sense Frye believes the modern imagination to be religious, with particular reference to science policy and “quality of life.”]
FRYE: Well, I think that, in the first place, the religious perspective is the only one that doesn’t give the human mind claustrophobia. That is, it’s the only one that suggests some kind of functional use for words like “infinite” and “eternal,” and the only one that keeps, so to speak, the fact of death in proportion, instead of being the fundamental and central [break in recording]. And I think that the attempt to look for that kind of imagination is very deep in our time. But what we call a crisis in belief, I don’t think is really a crisis in belief. I think it’s a crisis in understanding what the language of belief in the modern world actually is.
GOING: Would you say that the shift in all areas to the mythical and imaginative is a shift to the religious?1
FRYE: Well, it wouldn’t necessarily be that, but I think it’s quite consistent with the turn to religion.
GOING: It wouldn’t be that if it is a shift to the closed mythical, is that …
FRYE: Well the closed mythical, of course, is the substitute. It’s the attempt to crawl back into the womb, so to speak.
GOING: [Asks how students of religion can adopt an attitude that is both religious and critical, and whether or not “openness” is the way to do this.]
FRYE: Well, openness is very important. And I think that anything in the structure of belief which tends to exclusiveness, that is, which makes any kind of candid or open contact between people of different religions and different cultural traditions impossible, is something that is quite rightly regarded with more and more distrust. And when people use words like “dogma” in an unfavourable context I think that’s really what they mean, the closing off of the possibility of dialogue.
GOING: And is that unfavourable context what you are suggesting when you talk about the shift from the doctrinal to the mythical?
FRYE: Yes. The shift from the doctrinal to the mythical doesn’t necessarily remove the dogma, but it does mean that the way of understanding it is a way which renders one more open to alternative approaches.
GOING: [Asks if a “concern for quality” would constitute “an opening of the myths that sustain scientific endeavour.”]
FRYE: Oh yes, I think that the concern for quality, which is really derived from an imaginative vision of some kind of life in an ideal context, is something which can draw people together. But then, when people say that “there is only one way to achieve this, and that is by” etc., etc., then you get a kind of dogmatic closing off of the agreement.
O’HARA: And you would mean, would you, that that could come in, not necessarily as a religious dogma, but just as even a political dogma or any other dogma?
FRYE: Oh yes.
GOING: [Asks what the “concern for quality” does for scientific questions.]
FRYE: Well, it attaches the scientific vision to a social vision. Science qua science is like any other kind of scholarship. That is, it’s pluralistic, and it tends to specialization, so that you tend to know a smaller and smaller speciality and there are very few other people that even understand your language. But you’re still united with other people, not through the scholarship, but through the fact that you’re all citizens of the same society. It’s the common social vision that unites.
GOING: As the common religious vision united in more obviously religious terms in another day. Could one say that?
FRYE: Yes. That is, it united parts of the world and not other parts. If you take for example a sixteenth-century Spaniard and a sixteenth-century Turk, they didn’t know anything about each other’s religion, but they were both quite sure that it was damnably wrong.
GOING: [Asks if an interest in primitive religion is comparable to what Frye calls the nineteenth century’s “museum” stage of culture in The Modern Century (94; NFMC, 52–3).]
FRYE: Yes, I think so, and I think that the study of, for example, the art of painting became rather narrowly evolutionary and progressive in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was felt that artists were getting out of the barbaric and the primitive towards something very much more refined. And we today don’t take that view of art; we feel that the primitive is actually a very living, vital mainspring of our cultural tradition. The same thing is true of religion. Instead of thinking that we’re getting steadily more and more reasonable and more and more reconciled to science and that kind of thing, we recognize that what Kierkegaard calls “the absurd” is still very strongly an element in consciousness. And that what corresponds to the primitive in art, the primitive in religion, can actually describe a kind of experience which is much more real than our amiable sense of progress.
GOING: And one would certainly misunderstand you badly if, in what you say about religion, one didn’t notice at all your link of the mythical and the real?
FRYE: Oh yes.
GOING: We’d be back in the realm of reading your statements as though you were talking about the imaginary again.
FRYE: Well, of course myth to me means, fundamentally, narrative, or plot, or story. And to me the Western, the Judaeo-Christian, tradition is rather important because of its emphasis on the story. And the word “myth” is like the words “fable” and “fiction,” which are words of literary structure which have acquired a secondary colouring of something untrue or unreal because people don’t realize the seriousness of the language of myth and fable and fiction.
GOING: So it certainly would be wrong to simply equate what we were just speaking about, the primitive religion, with your sense of the mythical, which depends upon an articulate and a literary culture.
FRYE: Yes, but the articulate and literary culture is something which grew out of the primitive, and which still, to the extent that it is articulate, retains some kind of vital connection with it.
GOING: [Asks where “the wise man” can be found in the re-emergence of a vital tradition or experience.]
FRYE: Well, I think that if one compares wisdom and knowledge, one would say that knowledge was of the actual, and wisdom is rather a sense of the potential. Think of the great religious leaders, Jesus or Buddha: you don’t think of them as knowledgeable men, but you do think of them as wise men. And you think of them as people whose knowledge is, as the Buddhists say, “unborn.” That is, it’s the sense of the potential rather than of the actual.
GOING: So that really ties with the openness that we were talking about at the beginning. The wise men, in some way, are the agents of openness within a society.
FRYE: If you examine a primitive mind and its religion in terms of any formulated beliefs, the formulated beliefs are probably absurd, or superstitious, but if you examine it in terms of openness to experience you get a very different result.
ERIC O’CONNOR: [Asks Frye to clarify his earlier comments about pollution and development.]
FRYE: Well, I was thinking of a situation in the city of Toronto, for example, where citizens have to keep fighting to preserve any sense of beauty or proportion in the city and where the implications of the word “development” are simply the unrestricted growth of an utterly hideous urban sprawl.
O’CONNOR: It’s the urge of growth as such?
FRYE: Yes.
O’CONNOR: [Explains that his question relates to the idea that adult education should be based on a “structure of questions” instead of a “systematic idea of the universe,” then begins to outline the basic situation of Athol Fugard’s play The Blood Knot, with particular reference to the sado-masochistic elements within the play. He suggests that “these words are the result of an analogy between what one knows about sex in our civilization,” and that it is “only a structure of questioning that makes this analogy pop up.” After the tape is changed, he resumes his remarks, saying that one of the “roles of teaching adults is to make such analogies visible,” and that repetition also does this. He then asks how one can reach people and engage their imaginations.]
FRYE: I was reading a book the other day on Joyce’s Ulysses, by Dick Ell-mann, and he happened to remark that the centre of the young person’s mental experience is discovery, whereas for the older person it’s coincidence.2 And that is certainly true of my own experience as a teacher with the young. The young are looking for answers. Consequently there is always some slight danger of their falling into the whole sadomasochistic cycle, because the answer is either something that stimulates aggression, as words like “positivism” indicate, or something that throws them the other way, into assuming that some political body or some church or other has all the answers. So the search for the answer and the search for discovery are, I think, interconnected. And in teaching the young one always has to keep in mind the fact that they will become older, and there are other things they will be looking for. It seems to me that as one gets older the sense of repetition, of coincidence, of things turning up over and over again, becomes the middle-aged form of the sense of discovery. That of course doesn’t have that danger of becoming either positivistic or masochistic in one’s approach because there the emphasis is rather on the question than on the answer. In fact there’s almost a sense that having an answer cheats you out of the right to ask the question, and it [the question] tends to move you from the knowledgeable, from the possession of the secret magic formula, to the conception of what I just meant now by wisdom, a sense of the potential.
O’CONNOR: You mean there is a mild, but very strong, deep underlying questioning in this?
FRYE: Yes.
O’CONNOR: But it’s not questioning that’s looking for a formula. It’s looking for further connections.
FRYE: Further connections, and, essentially, in the long run, for the right to keep on repeating the question. The context of the question may be new each time, but the new situation leads to the reformulation of the question, rather than to the brand-new which is there for all time once discovered.
O’CONNOR: [Suggests that Frye’s idea that leisure or play is just as important as work is given contemporary expression in phrases such as “do your own thing” and in sensitivity training, but that these fail to bring things together, to relate things, or to recognize coincidences. He then asks whether the “myths” of work and play are as important to older people as to the young.]
FRYE: Oh, I think they must be, yes. As one goes on, one begins to recognize that the relationship of work to play is perhaps very closely connected with the relationship of content to form. That is, I have to make a speech at a convocation tomorrow, and the occasion of the convocation is play. It’s a “let’s pretend” occasion, but at the same time I’m serious about what I want to say, and I work at the speech. And so the seriousness of the work goes into the content, of which the form is really a “let’s pretend,” dramatic, ritualistic form. And I think that the cult of “doing one’s own thing” is analogous to the rather facile and rather irresponsible formalism in the arts which tends to erode the sense of seriousness or responsibility in the arts.
O’CONNOR: Do you mean that it says there can be form without any content at all?
FRYE: Well, there’s the attempt to develop a form without relation to content, that is, to make the whole activity one of pure play.
O’CONNOR: Now looking for pattern and exploring pattern is of course content, is it not?
FRYE: Well, looking for pattern could be a way of looking for similarities in form.
O’CONNOR: So that becomes then content.
[O’Hara, Tansey, Going, and O’Connor thank Frye, and good-byes are exchanged.]