Conducted 13 October 1976
From “A Conversation with Northrop Frye: Education, Religion, Old Age,” The Varsity, 22 October 1976, 14–15. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1976. The Varsity is the student newspaper of the University of Toronto, noted for its radicalism in the 1960s; the interviewer was Philip Chester.
CHESTER: Dr. Frye, when you were first informed of the Varsity’s request to interview you, what was your initial reaction?
FRYE: Well, the Varsity has had a great variety of editorial policies over the last few years, and I’d normally be very pleased and honoured to have an interview from the Varsity.
CHESTER: I understand, though, that you have been interviewed before by The Varsity. Your secretary mentioned that you weren’t very pleased with what had happened. Is this true?
FRYE: What happened then was that one of the professional student organizers from the States came in in the middle of it and broke it all up so that there was no interview printed at all.
CHESTER: Why would someone break that interview up?
FRYE: Well, that’s what things were like in those days. That was a few years ago.
CHESTER: You’re almost an institution here at the U of T. You’ve seen a lot of students come and go. Have students changed? Has campus life altered over the years? Are you encouraged by what you’re seeing file into your classroom these days?
FRYE: I don’t really think that there’s been a great deal of change in students: we’re getting the same human material now that we’ve always had. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I think that various things, such as the degree of permissiveness in high-school education, go around in cycles. My experience with students is that they are always intellectually curious and lively people, and as long as they are that it is always an immense pleasure to talk to them and teach them. I don’t think I’ve noticed any long-term permanent trends in student attitudes.
CHESTER: So, in kind, students aren’t much different now than, say, thirty years ago.
FRYE: I don’t really see how they can be. I mean certain social conventions change, for example, but those things are trifles. When I was principal of Victoria there used to be a little function of having dinner for the first-class honour members of the graduating year along with the alumni of fifty and sixty years back. Those who were graduated fifty and sixty years ago knew a small Methodist college where you were not allowed to dance and where the most rigid restrictions were placed upon residence life and so on, but those were conventions and they found themselves living quite happily as far as those conventions were concerned. I don’t think that the essential nature of people has changed, and I never thought the conventions were very important anyway.
CHESTER: Given the kind of world we’re living in today, do you see a real threat to a continuation of studies in the humanities? Will that be a problem in the future?
FRYE: I think it’s a problem of the past, present, and future. The humanities have always had their backs against the wall: they’ve always been in a rather desperate last-ditch fight to preserve themselves. There have been times when for social reasons Classics would be in the ascendant because people could quote Horace to each other in parliament—that depends on the class structure—but in general the humanities have not been popular and anybody who is teaching the humanities has to be a kind of missionary. He has to explain what he’s doing and why he’s doing it, and students in my experience have enough good will to respond to that.
CHESTER: Do you see yourself sometimes as a missionary?
FRYE: Oh yes, yes. My grandfather was a Methodist circuit rider, and I still think I’m more of an evangelical person than anything else.
CHESTER: Going back to education for a moment, what exactly is going on as you see it? Is the concern for literacy and getting back to the basics a useful concern or has education become the victim of uninformed witch hunts?
FRYE: I think both of those things are true. I think that a great deal of confusion exists in the world over the nature of freedom. Free choice is something that doesn’t necessarily apply to choices of subjects. There is such a thing as a core, a basic minimum of information, that you need in order to participate in a society as complicated as ours, and to make that, say, “compulsory” in high school is not a limitation of freedom. It’s a means of achieving freedom. If you want to learn to play the piano, you have to set yourself free to play the piano and that means practice. There’s no antithesis between freedom and compulsion in that area.
CHESTER: Are you concerned with students you have now over their literacy or their ability to write a grammatical sentence?
FRYE: Oh, certainly, I’m concerned about that, but then, I always was. I think that prose is a very difficult medium. I’ve done what I can in my own field to destroy the notion that prose is the language of ordinary speech.1 It’s a language that takes a great deal of skill and discipline and practice to acquire, and yet it’s the means of making people articulate. When I mark students’ essays I feel that my function is to try to set them free to be articulate, to say what they want to say.
CHESTER: Thus far in your career, Dr. Frye, what do you consider to be your greatest achievement? Is there something you have done that you hold particularly dear?
FRYE: I don’t know that there is for me a single achievement of that kind. I see everything that I’ve done as contributing to a general pattern of teaching and writing and scholarship over the years. It seems to me a cumulative thing. I know that my book Anatomy of Criticism has sold more widely and been more widely discussed than anything else, but it’s really for other people to say what my major achievement has been.
CHESTER: Has your whole life, then, been devoted to the study of English literature and to your theory of literature in general?
FRYE: Oh, yes. I think my whole life forms a pattern. The study of literature has not been the exclusive thing in it. I’ve taken part in a great many other things—I’m on a government commission, I’m the president of a language association—one does these things.2 They’re part of one’s public service. They attach themselves to one’s career and what one does, but I think it’s really the total shape of what one achieves that’s important.
CHESTER: Are you building up to a tour de force? … Are we going to get another definitive statement from Northrop Frye?
FRYE: One hopes that every statement will be the definitive statement. I’m working now on a very large and complicated book on the Bible and its relation to English literature. My favourite book is always the one that I’m working on now. I hope that that will be a definitive statement, but as soon as you start writing a book instantly you realize that that book will be as good as you can make it and no better.
CHESTER: This may seem like a silly question, but it’s not silly to me and I don’t think it will be silly to the people who are going to read this interview. How do you see yourself? What does Northrop Frye mean to Northrop Frye? … You mention that you see yourself as a missionary sometimes … do you see yourself as a defender of some kind?
FRYE: Yes, I am a defender of certain values that I’ve always believed in. Teaching and study and research are not isolated activities, they are militant activities. They’re carried out in the teeth of human ignorance, human inertia, and human confusion. I don’t mean that I identify people with these things. It’s a state of the world. That question is more difficult to answer than it seems because it seems to me that most of us assume that we have an outward personality to the world and that we have an inner personality which is our real self. I’m not so sure that that’s true. I suspect that other people’s notions of what you are come closer to being your real self than your view of yourself. Now I know something of my reputation. I read reviews of myself. I would be sunk if I allowed that to take me over.
CHESTER: Northrop Frye, then, both in public and private is the same man.
FRYE: Isaac Newton said, “I do not know how I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem like a child playing on a beach and picking up occasional stones.”3 That, I think, is all that anybody can really ever say about himself. Everybody in his own eyes is a relatively poor creature. He has to be much sterner and stiffer and less charitable with himself than he could ever afford to be with anybody else.
CHESTER: Do you feel more at home, say, in your office surrounded by the books you love, books that you’ve written, than you do in your classroom lecturing or walking down Yonge St. just being an ordinary human being?
FRYE: I think I’m as much at home in a classroom talking to students as I am anywhere. I find I work better when I’m living at home and in my office with my own books around me—that doesn’t mean the books I’ve written because I very much dislike rereading what I’ve done, but I do like to be surrounded with familiar objects, and I have a kind of nostalgic conservatism about my surroundings. I find the extent to which Toronto has transformed itself in the last fifteen years emotionally very disturbing. I sometimes feel less at home here than I originally did, but that’s a rather superficial thing. No, I’m at home wherever I feel that I’m functioning in the way in which I’m supposed to function. I think I do that in the classroom. I’d like to teach as long as I could. My teaching feeds into my writing and vice versa.
CHESTER: Do you ever learn anything from your students?
FRYE: Yes I do, but in ways that would be very hard for me to identify. There’s something in the atmosphere that students’ questions set up so that I could never say that I have learned that from him but simply that I’ve had things churned up and reassembled and new lights thrown on what I know as a result of being with students.
CHESTER: As a professor, do you feel that teaching would become a chore for you if you did not learn anything from your students? … Or could you teach to automatons?
FRYE: Nobody could teach to automatons. A lecture, like any other public performance, can’t be indefinitely better than the quality of its hearers. A pianist can’t really play to an audience of deaf mutes. No, I couldn’t teach automatons. I never think of myself as simply stuffing information into people who haven’t got any. I think that, as I say, it’s a liberating activity. Students come to me with a certain verbal experience, and I am concerned with attempting to liberate that experience, to make it more of a power for them.
CHESTER: Walter Jackson Bate, in his book Criticism: The Major Texts, says by way of introduction to excerpts of your work that, “Frye is essentially in the Arnoldian tradition as an ‘apologist’ for literature.”4 Is this an accurate assessment of you, do you think?
FRYE: It’s an assessment that’s very often been made of me. Again, that’s something I trust other people’s opinions on more than I would trust my own. I have read Arnold a great deal and taught him, and there are things in him that are stupid enough to infuriate me. I hope that I’m not guilty of quite the same stupidity. On the other hand, there is a sensitivity that I can’t reach—he had powers as a poet that I don’t have—I think that perhaps the sense of the humanities as something that you have to struggle and fight for may be common to us.
CHESTER: As a result, do you see yourself sometimes as a sentinel against the incursion of certain elements in our society that might try to destroy and distort the humanities in general?
FRYE: Sentinel is a very good word. Any teacher who is a teacher has to be on guard constantly against that kind of thing in all its manifestations.
CHESTER: Why do you say Arnold was quite stupid at times?
FRYE: Well, he was frightened by a lot of things. He was frightened politically by things like giving the vote in the second Reform Bill to so many people. He thought they wouldn’t have enough education to use it. He was timid and frightened about things like Biblical criticism, and he was contemptuous to a degree that I don’t think he should have been about various liberal movements. I feel that there were occasions where he just didn’t pull his weight as a liberal.
CHESTER: Do you see the period of time in which Arnold lived as a crisis in confidence?
FRYE: Yes, but every age has that.
CHESTER: What’s our crisis in confidence?
FRYE: In this North American complex that we’re in there’s a crisis of confidence perhaps in our own liberal and democratic values, and I think that that’s partly a political and economic thing. It’s almost a repetition of what happened after 1929 when I was a freshman here. There was a great wave of buoyant confidence which was really infantile, based entirely on credit. Then there was a great stock market crash. Then there was a tremendous reassessment of the values of capitalism and out of that emerged the Roosevelt period. I think that something like that is happening now. We’re going through a crisis of confidence not so much in capitalism as in democracy.
CHESTER: Can you tell us something about this book you’re presently writing?
FRYE: It’s a study of the Bible and the way in which it has helped to shape the whole framework of English literature as well as European literature generally. I don’t think the book itself is likely to get beyond the Bible. I’ve been teaching a course in the Bible for a great many years, and I’ve written about poets who are intensely Biblical like Milton and Blake. It’s always fascinated me not for reasons of belief but for reasons of criticism. The Bible seems to me to be an utterly unique structure for a critic to tackle and a structure of unique importance for our own world. So I’m in the middle of that now.
CHESTER: Isn’t your system of analysis, by definition, absolutist?
FRYE: Why should it be?
CHESTER: Doesn’t the idea that, as you see it, literature cannot be taught but …
FRYE: Yes, that is true. Literature is something that you study but do not study directly. The analogy that I make is with a student of physics who says he’s studying physics, not that he’s studying nature, although physics in itself is a way of studying nature [AC, 11/13]. I think that what is directly taught and learned is the criticism of literature. Literature itself is something that is experienced rather than taught and learned.
CHESTER: How does the book that you’re writing now stack up against your previous ones? Will it conclude your earlier works or is it a study all by itself?
FRYE: Well, it’s bound to be to some extent a summary of the general critical views that I’ve always held because it does deal with a subject that I’ve been rotating around. I would hope to have some new readers for it. One always hopes for new things to say. I find that my own critical attitude has not changed a great deal over the years. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. It’s just what I’m stuck with. I do find myself revolving in a spiral around the same issues.
CHESTER: In chapter 5 of The Educated Imagination, you state that with regard to the teaching of literature, the Bible “should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it” [46; EICT, 475]. If you had the power, Dr. Frye, would you make the teaching of the Bible compulsory in secondary school English classes?
FRYE: There again, you see, I would consider that the Bible belongs to what you would call a core curriculum. I think it’s part of the kind of thing you have to know in order to participate in modern society. If it were absolutely clear what I said earlier, that I don’t think in terms of an antithesis of freedom and compulsion, I don’t think that if you made the Bible part of a core curriculum it would be a limitation on freedom. It would be if you taught it in terms of belief, and if you made academic status depend on a profession of belief. That’s a violation of academic freedom and you can’t have that at any price. But the Bible has never been that to me. It’s been a guide and key to human imagination over the last thousand years or more. It’s just as essential as the multiplication table is to mathematics.
CHESTER: What you’re saying, then, is that anyone who doesn’t have a firm grasp of the Bible itself is not entitled to an opinion on poets like Milton and Blake.
FRYE: Well, he’s entitled to opinions but he doesn’t know what the hell’s going on in Paradise Lost or Blake either.
CHESTER: Then you can never really remove an art object from the period in which it was written or from the sources of information that gave rise to it?
FRYE: Milton himself would have been horrified if he thought that any reader of Paradise Lost was ignorant of the Bible.
CHESTER: What favourite poets of yours, if they could come alive today, would be horrified at what they might see?
FRYE: I think that all the poets I respect would be horrified at, say, things like racism, the atomic bomb, the rise of tyranny and dictatorship. All the poets I respect fought against those things in different ways. In the early twentieth century you had poets who thought they were conservative but I think their essential values were, again, humanist values. They were fighting for humanity against the death impulse in humanity.
CHESTER: Is there a death impulse in humanity now? Is it stronger now than it ever was?
FRYE: I don’t know that it is stronger, but the power of organization is greater. I don’t know that the actual will to go to war is any stronger now than it was, but I think that the destructiveness of war is certainly much greater.
CHESTER: Dr. Frye, you studied theology at Emmanuel College and were ordained in the United Church of Canada in 1936. Have you ever held a pastoral charge?
FRYE: No, except a mission field in Saskatchewan one summer. I came to college as a church student. I realized during my undergraduate time that my real vocation was to teach literature in a university and not to be a clergyman. Being a clergyman required qualities of personality and administration that I just didn’t possess, so I assumed very quickly that this would be my pastoral charge. I’m on a permanent leave of absence arrangement from the Maritime Conference.5
CHESTER: Do you feel that the work you have done and continue to do in the field of literary criticism and in your theory of literature in general has been a kind of ministry for you?
FRYE: Yes, I think it has been a kind of ministry. Religion to me, again, is something that liberates. It’s something that relieves man of claustrophobia. If you don’t have words like “infinite” and “eternal” in your mind somewhere you do find yourself banging your head against a wall. It’s only because of its liberating aspect that I’m interested in it.
CHESTER: But other religions have liberating aspects to them.
FRYE: Oh, sure.
CHESTER: Why the United Church of Canada in particular, then?
FRYE: Well, it was what I grew up in. I’m United Church of Canada for the same reason I’m Canadian and not American or Zulu. I just happened to be here.
CHESTER: Are you a nationalist in a sense? Are you gung-ho on being Canadian?
FRYE: I’m very deeply interested in Canada. When I first began to get offers to go to the United States, I thought of my religious commitments (to the United Church of Canada), and my political commitments (which at the time were the CCF)—those are two ideas I can’t even translate into American terms. I felt that to move to another country would mean tearing up a great many roots. In short, I really belonged here.
CHESTER: Just to get back to the United Church of Canada again—do you think the role of the ministry had changed over the years? And has it changed for the better or for the worse?
FRYE: The general relationship of organized religion to society as a whole has declined very considerably not only in the United Church but in everything else. Certainly Protestant religion in Canada forty years ago was putting all its eggs into a middle-class basket. Also it got hung up with certain anxieties—drinking and liquor and that sort of thing—and people began to think that it just wasn’t very serious and was really rather frivolous. The fact that we see the drug stores so full of books on Zen Buddhism and occultism means, I think, that people are still very deeply and almost desperately religious in their yearnings, their ideals, their wishes and desires. But I don’t think they have much confidence in the institutions and organizations of religion in contemporary society around them.
CHESTER: What was your feeling about the attempt to amalgamate the Anglican Church of Canada to the United Church of Canada?6 How did you view that proposal?
FRYE: It’s the normal destiny of man to unite rather than divide. I think, if I could use a religious phrase, that the spirit unites: what divides people are human things. Who’s going to be boss, who’s going to run the organization, what kind of organization there is going to be—that’s what keeps people apart.
CHESTER: Would you like to see the amalgamation?
FRYE: Yes, I think I would.
CHESTER: Would it make much difference anyway?
FRYE: Perhaps it wouldn’t except as a testimony to the fact that, as I say, it is the destiny of man to unite. The spiritual force is a uniting force. One could, of course, keep any kind of organization. I don’t think it matters much to Canada whether Quebec separates or not. That kind of separate ness , I think, matters even less than the union would. The union would be very important as a symbol.
CHESTER: Do you have any fears about the destiny of man? Do you have fears that someday we may blow ourselves up?
FRYE: That’s always a possibility. Man would be foolish if he just tunes that out. There are always two kinds of reactions to the present-day world at any time. One is the warning reaction—watch out or you’ll meet with disaster—and the other is the opportunity reaction—you’re at this position now, this is what you could do if you wanted to. By temperament and for other reasons, I’ve always been one of the opportunity people. I feel that there is no lack of people who like to warn.
CHESTER: And how long will Northrop Frye be at the U of T? Are you hoping that you’ll be able to teach until you are physically incapable of teaching?
FRYE: I reach the age of sixty-five next year. That means another year after that, and then it’s in the hands of the administration what I do. Left to myself I would like to go on teaching indefinitely until I drop in my tracks. I always like teaching. I like students. I find the relationship a very fulfilling one. At the same time I can understand that there are young people who need jobs.