Conducted late April 1975
From “A Conversation with Northrop Frye, Literary Critic,” Harvard Magazine, 77 (July–August 1975): 52–6. Reprinted in OE, 206–11. This interview must have been conducted towards the end of Frye’s academic year of 1974–75 at Harvard. His visit culminated with the delivery on 7–24 April of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, subsequently published as The Secular Scripture; he returned to Toronto 30 April. Interviewer Justin Kaplan, sometime visiting professor at Harvard and award-winning biographer, prefaced the interview with a brief summary of Frye’s career, in the course of which he noted that Frye, “a mild-mannered and modest man,” was “a dazzling public lecturer” and, “judging from the enthusiasm with which his Norton Lectures were greeted, a contemporary culture hero.”
FRYE: I am preoccupied at the moment with a very large and complicated book on the Bible and the way in which the Bible set up the mythological framework within which Western culture operated for many centuries.
KAPLAN: And continues to operate?
FRYE: I think it does. There is hardly anything else with which to work. There is in secular literature—more particularly what I call romance—a curious kind of shadow effect. I have been looking at romance as consisting of a number of themes or narrative units, which make up the same kind of legend of the universe that religion also has, and which has certain recurring themes and images.
Every society has a body of stories that it regards as more important than others, and particularly important in explaining that society’s customs and rituals and social structure. These stories become myths, as I call them, and they form the kernel of the kind of thing that the Bible is in Western culture. I’m trying to show that the traditional way of reading the Bible as a book with a beginning, middle, and end is the right way. Despite all the appearance of a hodgepodge that it presents when you open it, the Bible is actually a pretty well unified book. What unifies it is not doctrine and not history, but a certain narrative outline that runs from creation to apocalypse. There are also a number of other stories that have been recounted for entertainment. These become what I call fables, and they are the ancestor of romance.
KAPLAN: Fable being of a somewhat smaller order of magnitude than myth?
FRYE: It’s a matter of social function. Myth and fable are the same structurally; they can tell the same kind of story. However, in social function and in authority, myth is higher in social acceptance, as a rule. Thus, myth is what defines culture; it takes root in a specific culture. It’s the Bible that makes Hebrew culture; it’s Homer that makes Greek culture; and so on. Then, as a culture develops, the folk tales and the fables that have been circulating around the world nomadically also begin to take root and contribute to the heritage of allusion, so that you get Dante and Milton writing in the Biblical area and Shakespeare and Chaucer in the romance area.
The theme of the Edenic paradise, the fall of man, and so forth, is central in American literature just because it is central in all Western literature. I can certainly see that many stories about the American West, for example, are a development of the pastoral convention, and I don’t have any difficulty with the theses of books like R.W.B. Lewis’s The American Adam or Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden.1 These all make quite good sense really. But I think it might be found that there are other aspects of mythology that are also important in American literature. There is a great deal in Melville’s books, for instance, that has much more to do with the tower of Babel and that kind of thing.
KAPLAN: Since we recognize a decline in our sense of community, Babel may be more to the point now than Eden.
FRYE: I don’t know. In technology you get a continually increasing speed, and an increase in speed means an increase in introversion and a breaking down of personal relationships. But one of the things that attracts me about romance is its pastoral, Arcadian atmosphere. You find yourself in a world greatly reduced in numbers, where the emphasis is on the individual, the handful of shepherds, the pairs of lovers, and so on. Something of Adam and Eve wandering in the garden of Eden comes back when you begin to think of that pastoral kind of human ideal.
KAPLAN: The extraordinary reception you’ve been having here—does this suggest to you any comparisons or contrasts with Canada?
FRYE: I think there is a certain difference in temperament, which is more the result of social conditioning than of anything inborn. Canadian students are not conditioned from infancy to be members of a great imperial power. They belong to a small, observant country on the sidelines of history. I find that responses are more personal and more direct in the United States as a rule.
I have been very fortunate in the particular generation I came to teach. If I had come here in 1968 or 1969, my reception would have been very different, I imagine. There is now much more of a sense of the genuineness of history and of tradition. A country, like an individual, is senile if it has no memory. While there is a great deal of self-contempt of a kind that rather distresses me about the attitude of this country, say, to the Bicentennial [of the United States], there is nevertheless a basis of pretty solid and serious feeling on the part of the students I meet. Still, there is something about American attitudes toward the eighteenth century that has always puzzled me. The Bicentennial is seen not as a celebration of 1975—it is a celebration of 1775. The United States achieved its identity in the Age of Enlightenment and seems to have been revolving ever since around the kind of mentality that produced Jefferson and Franklin. I don’t say that that is a bad thing. It merely strikes me as curious, coming as I do from a country that had no eighteenth century.
KAPLAN: In that same century Dr. Johnson was referring rather confidently to literary allusion in general as the parole of learned men, a lingua franca.2 Very few people speak this language any longer.
FRYE: It is certainly a declining market, I believe as a result of the ignorance and incompetence of professional educators. I would use an even stronger word than incompetence—what has been called le trahison des clercs, a betrayal.3
One reason I have so little difficulty with students is that they know they have been cheated. They are very serious people, and they rise to a challenge. There is also a strong self-preservative instinct in the human mind that makes them pick up the things they have been cheated of. If teachers are too dumb, too incompetent, to give their students some kind of coherent historical organization in their teaching, the students will pick it up themselves. The cheating begins when a teacher avoids his essential job. There is a certain body of what you might call initiatory education—that is, a certain objective body of information, knowledge, and facts that you need in order to participate in a society as complex as this. To refuse to give that to students is to cheat them. Education is a long, repetitive thing. I went through all the hysteria of the late ’60s, when there was a great vogue for teach-ins and importing people at immense expense from other countries to come talk to students. Great enthusiasm was generated. What I said at the time was that these things were entertaining, and they were even quite useful, but they were not educational. Education is in the repetitive process—it is something that has to go on and on and on. Things should break into the continuum from time to time, but the continuum is the education.
Students want to make up for the time that they know they have lost. This is a recent development, but it is a very much saner and better proportioned development than that utterly indiscriminate rejection of traditional authority, which I think had something schizoid about it, in the Age of Hysteria.
KAPLAN: An age that has ended?
FRYE: I suppose it ended around 1971, perhaps around the time of the closing down of the Vietnam war, although I don’t think that that was really the central thing about it. It ended with the collapse of prosperity, with the cutting down of the military commitment. A lot of it had to do with the physical impact of the television screen. The containing of television is something that is a feature of our lives now—keeping it under control, keeping it as a subordinate element of our cultural life. Television has driven many people back to the book, and that is a symptom of the fact that the human race is still motivated by self-preservation. I think university students will be driven back to the Bible and Classical mythology for exactly the same reason, for self-preservation.
It is interesting to me that so many of the balladeers and folk singers of our time are extremely uninhibited in their Biblical, even in their Classical, allusions. I’m not surprised at that—I think it is a necessary feature of all popular poetry. I’m interested for example in the fact that one of the best known of the Canadian folk singers, Leonard Cohen, started out in the 1950s with a book called Let Us Compare Mythologies. The mythologies were the Jewish, the Christian, and the Hellenic.
KAPLAN: To come back to education for a moment—you’ve expressed strong doubts about the notion of “teaching” literature to begin with.
FRYE: Literature has to be rather indirectly presented. The framework within which the teacher and the student operate is the framework of criticism, and that is what I have said consistently: what is taught and learned is the criticism of literature and not literature itself. I have always been rather distrustful of the importance attached to value judgments on the part of the New Critics and others. Values can be assumed, they can be argued about, but they cannot be demonstrated.
KAPLAN: Value judgments also encourage the arbitrary game of ranking writers.
FRYE: Well, that is the literary stock exchange. It’s an utterly vulgar and futile form of activity. The primary criterion of value is a certain sense of genuineness. The conscientious reviewer of a book of poems, for example, will try to react to the genuineness of what he is reading. The questions of greatness—whether “A” is better than “B” and whether “B” is better than “C,” and so forth—should be avoided as far as possible. I find myself browsing through anthologies, for example, and every so often I strike what seems to be a consistently interesting and intelligent mind. Then I want to look him up and read him in greater breadth and detail than the anthology gives me. It is a purely random operation. I could name a few names at random easily enough, but I would forget a lot of others. When I was about sixteen or seventeen I was excited by a great many different poets—Wallace Stevens, for one. Some of them did not stay with me. Others did. There are no reasons I can give as a critic why some of them turned out to be more permanent.
A great deal of contemporary literature that I read is Canadian literature, simply because that’s where my roots are. I suppose there are about thirty or forty poets in Canada whom I find interesting to read. The output of good, genuine poetry in Canada is really astonishing. There is a reflective quality in the Canadian consciousness that is a good breeding ground for poetic expression. The very intensity of the American temperament sometimes works against this—its expression is so intensely political.
KAPLAN: What, would you say, turned you toward literary criticism as a vocation?
FRYE: Like other subjects, literature has a theory and a practice. I seem to have been drawn temperamentally and in other ways to the theory and have never seriously attempted writing poetry or fiction. I didn’t feel that meant that I was noncreative. “Creativeness” ought not to be applied to genres but to the people working in them.
I had a rather intensively religious upbringing and thought of becoming a clergyman—which in fact I did do. But when I went to college I realized that my vocation was for university teaching. As an undergraduate I discovered Blake, which of course was exactly the right discovery for me at that point. He had all the religious—almost evangelical—presuppositions with which I had been brought up, but he turned them inside out in a way that made complete sense to me. What really interested me about him was his demonstration that the old man in the sky was actually Satan rather than God and that, consequently, anything that had to do with tyranny and repression in human life was Satanic and that there was no religion worth a second glance that hadn’t to do with the emancipation of man.
I date everything, I think, from my discovery of Blake as an undergraduate and graduate student. Everything of Blake that I could understand convinced me that his mysterious poems would be worth working at. Thus I had to try to get inside his mind as well as I could, and that meant that my critical interest had to be central and primary. When I came to write about Blake, I stressed the importance of the fact that he belonged in the eighteenth century. The historical took on a peripheral quality to me and receded to the circumference. It was relevant all right, but I had to get at the actual structure of Blake’s mind first. It’s the way I would recommend to most students of literature—to try to grow up inside the mind of a great poet and to hang the history onto that, rather than start with the history, which has a way of cutting down the great figures of poetry into a kind of circus parade.
KAPLAN: You’ve described autobiography as a form of prose fiction.4 I wonder what you make of the present state of inflamed interest in the study of autobiography?
FRYE: I suppose it goes along with the kind of thing that made encounter groups so popular—the feeling that the more layers of the onion you peel off, the closer you get to the centre. I think it is a fallacy myself. A person’s real self is perhaps more clearly evoked by what other people think of him than by his own analysis of himself. The “real me” may be a layer of personae, the relationships with other people.
KAPLAN: The “real me” may be the work, then, and not the person at all.
FRYE: Yes, I think that is true. Somebody was in my office the other day urging me to write my autobiography. What I couldn’t explain to him is that everything I write I consider autobiography, although nobody else would.