Conducted 7 February 1977
From Interchange, 7, no. 4 (1976–77): 32–8. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1977. Interchange was a scholarly journal with particular emphasis on educational theory and its integration with empirical research. Interestingly, given Frye’s acerbic remarks below, it was published by OISE; Hugh Oliver, the interviewer and managing editor of Interchange, was the editor-in-chief of OISE Press. Correspondence in NFF, 1988, box 13, file 14 reveals that Frye saw a transcript of this interview before publication, and answered an additional question (see note 2).
OLIVER: Literacy is a term that seems to be open to a range of interpretations—from the mechanical ability to read and write to an understanding and a familiarity with literature. First I should like to consider the more mechanical aspects, especially writing, because the inability of students to express themselves in writing has recently caused such a fuss around the country. What are your own feelings about this? Do you think standards have deteriorated?
FRYE: Certain kinds of standards have. I think it’s very seldom realized that the mechanical ability to read and write, especially to read, has no particular social value except that it enables one to participate in a very complicated civilization. Society is set up in such a way that what you learn to read are traffic signs and advertisements and it is only when you start producing verbal structures yourself that you’re capable of any sort of freedom or responsibility. I also think that people suffer from two fallacies about writing. One is that prose is the language of ordinary speech, which it is not. And the other is that there is such a thing as a substantial idea, that you can have ideas without being able to put them into words. Both of these are completely wrong and they lead to a great deal of illiteracy at other levels.
OLIVER: But why is there so much criticism at the present time? Do you think the permissive trend in education has made students more illiterate?
FRYE: I think there was a time when certain normative standards were associated with what was essentially a kind of open class system—that is, it was assumed that the working class spoke one way and the middle class spoke another; and as long as you have that assumption, then middle-class children will learn to speak in middle-class idioms from very early ages onwards. But now, of course, you have the feeling that these things ought not to be attached to a class structure, with the result that nobody quite knows what the guidelines are.
OLIVER: Whereas I am familiar with the class structure in England, I am much less aware of it in Canada.
FRYE: It’s more open in Canada but it exists just as much, and it takes the form of people being very defensive about their grammar. If I’m picked up in the morning by somebody driving a car, I have to be careful not to say I’m a professor of English because the rejoinder will always be, “Well, I’ll have to watch my grammar,” and that is really a kind of class remark.
OLIVER: Do you think any of the ideas in the book Design for Learning had beneficial effects on the teaching of English?
FRYE: I think they would have had some if the government hadn’t descended with this avuncular avalanche of OISE, which completely obliterated what I was interested in because I thought it was a grassroots movement.
OLIVER: You are referring to the Curriculum Institute?
FRYE: Yes. And the Curriculum Institute was really uniting teachers at the elementary, secondary, and university levels. It was just about to get somewhere when that thing hit.1
OLIVER: As a member of “that thing,” I am curious. Why should the absorption of the Curriculum Institute by OISE have obliterated everything you were interested in?
FRYE: Well, a big institute that is built and financed by the government and staffed by Americans is not going to be a grass-roots movement in Ontario education.
OLIVER: I cannot entirely agree with you. For example, less than a quarter of staff members are American. But such an argument would have little to do with literacy. So … how do you think people should be taught the skills of writing?
FRYE: The skill of writing is a very difficult one. It’s part of a very complex process of which, I think, the root is learning to speak—and learning to speak in a mixture of prose and associative rhythms so that what you say is an integral part of your personality and yet isn’t just a bumbling associative structure like Gertrude Stein’s writing. A lot of university students have acquired the notion that prose is the language of ordinary speech, disregarding the fact that they still cannot speak it and certainly cannot write it. Articulate speech in prose is a difficult and sophisticated acquirement. Not realizing this is what I call the Jourdain fallacy—the man in Molière who thought he had been speaking prose all his life.2Writing takes practice, and it takes still more practice to be able to assimilate your writing style to a good speaking style.
OLIVER: I must say the notion of learning how to speak is not one I have ever associated with writing. Do you envisage the teacher correcting students in the way they express themselves as a move toward writing better?
FRYE: I think that a certain amount of training in oral composition does have to be done, though it’s a very difficult and tricky thing to teach. I am not underestimating the difficulties for a moment.
OLIVER: In what way is it being done? Yes, I suppose a teacher or parent might correct what a child says. Is that what you mean?
FRYE: Of course, correction implies steering a middle course. There have to be certain agreed-on conventions for society to communicate. On the one hand, I think you need to avoid the extreme of purely associative speech, which has no clarity or articulateness in it at all, and, on the other hand, you must avoid speaking, or still more writing, in prose as though it were a dead language. That is what the matter is with most composition in elementary and high schools: students write English as though it were a dead language. They never associate it with their speech rhythms, and usually for very good reasons; but the result is that you get a kind of pseudo-monumental style with no relation to any form of articulate expression.
OLIVER: Often, I suppose, the teacher suffers from the same problem.
FRYE: The teacher suffers from the same problem, and the ability to become genuinely articulate is something you can only really catch from the community. It’s a hard thing to learn in a teacher–student relationship.
OLIVER: It requires a great deal of practice, I assume?
FRYE: It requires incessant practice, and I’ve often pointed out in my writings on the subject how the culture of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists and poets was based on relentless training in rhetoric in school and endless translations and re-translations from Latin into English and back again.
OLIVER: You would regard translation as a valuable exercise?
FRYE: The translation is essential because of the way in which it teaches you that there is a grammar to a language and that the grammar is not a series of unbreakable rules. If you’re bouncing one language off another, you begin to realize that there is such a thing as grammar and that it is something to be used and not something to take over.
OLIVER: This “back to the basics” cry is often interpreted as back to learning grammar. And, as I remember from my school days, learning grammar was a discipline that seemed very remote from the actual process of writing. Indeed, it could easily turn one off from attempting to write at all.
FRYE: But there’s a fallacy, you see, in the phrase “learning grammar.” You don’t learn grammar. What you learn is a language that has a grammatical structure.
OLIVER: Sure. But you are taught grammatical terms, are you not? You learn what a gerundive is and that sort of thing.
FRYE: You pick these things up, yes. But the nomenclature is not itself an end, and the whole emphasis has to be as practical as possible.
OLIVER: Often, I reckon, learning the nomenclature does tend to become an end in itself. However, to what extent do university professors correct the writing and grammar in the essays they get from students? Do you think they should be responsible for doing this? Or are they, like many teachers, at a loss when it comes to criticizing written expression?
FRYE: You remind me of what happened recently in this university when a student turned in an essay in political economy, and added a note saying please do not take off marks for grammar and spelling because I never claimed to be an English scholar. And that of course is again a fallacy—the notion that English is just a subject like other subjects instead of the means of expressing yourself in all subjects. I don’t know how sensitive people are in other departments, but I think there’s a very strong tendency in most universities to feel that, unless you’re in the Department of English, you don’t need to bother too much about style; and style, of course, looked at in that light is yet another fallacy.
OLIVER: Is this the opinion of the professors as well as the students?
FRYE: I think it’s both: it’s a working agreement on an anti-intellectual basis.
OLIVER: In terms of categories of writing, I suppose you can distinguish between descriptive writing and metaphorical writing. Do you think this distinction is meaningful in teaching people how to write?
FRYE: I doubt if it’s possible to break it down into categories of that kind. I would tend to look at it more sociologically and say that learning to read traffic signs and advertisements is learning to read a series of directions and exhortations to conform, and that the essence of teaching writing is to encourage the student’s own speech and own thinking to emerge.
OLIVER: Do you see the educational scene in Canada as presenting special problems in the teaching of writing? I am referring to the multicultural aspect of Canadian society.
FRYE: I don’t know what to say about that. I should think that theoretically the advantages of a bilingual country ought to be enormous, but that of course takes in the question of the quality of teaching. In Canada there’s a great deal of self-deprecation now about belonging to the bourgeois class—that is, people feel ashamed to adopt the principle, which I think they might very well adopt, that bourgeois equals human being and anything else is strictly out of the trees. But this is something that takes on a kind of academic self-deprecation as you go on in the educational process, and when you add to that the Canadian self-deprecation, then you’ve really got quite a lot of castration anxiety.
OLIVER: This, though, is not necessarily an ethnic problem.
FRYE: In Toronto, as I’ve been watching it grow from a homogeneous WASP town into a cosmopolitan city with a great number of ethnic groups, I’ve observed the tendency among the first generation ethnics to conform as closely as possible to what they feel is the native norm and to renounce their own indigenous culture. It then takes another generation or two before they see the importance of drawing on what they’ve brought with them or what their grandparents brought.
OLIVER: But in terms of handling words, it seems hard enough to master one language well.
FRYE: It’s not quite so hard in early childhood perhaps.
OLIVER: I once interviewed Wilder Penfield and he was very caught up on that.3
FRYE: Yes. As far as I know, early childhood is the time when there are fewest inhibitions; and what is a relatively simple matter for a child—if you’ve got a Yugoslavian aunt, you just make a different set of noises when the aunt turns up—is a much more inhibitive business for adults.
OLIVER: We’ve mainly been talking about writing. Do you have any views on teaching children how to read?
FRYE: I would say that the goal of teaching children to read is to get them to acquire the habit because, if they do, then their education, or nine-tenths of it, will look after itself. As for writing, that’s a more difficult matter. To be done properly, it takes a great deal of practice on the part of the student and a great deal of supervision on the part of the teacher. And that’s why it just isn’t done in the high schools. There aren’t the mechanics for it.
OLIVER: But what about the content of students’ reading matter? Obviously it will vary from grade to grade, and is such a broad question we could likely discuss it for hours.
FRYE: Just as language is a set of conventions that society has agreed on, so there is such a thing as a cultural heritage that society has more or less agreed on. Possession of that heritage puts individuals in a very advantageous position with regard to themselves as well as to society. For this reason, I think certain books ought to be read at school. I think there should be a core of reading which takes in something of our cultural heritage. That’s not a limitation of the student’s freedom because if it’s genuine freedom, freedom and discipline are the same thing. But the rush of teachers to be in vogue means that all kinds of tripe and trash get prescribed in the hapless English course. The teachers feel they want to be with it or to get their students with it.
OLIVER: So they choose contemporary novels without much thought of literary merit?
FRYE: There’s a great deal of that, and it persists even in university where you get an instructor who will draft a course in contemporary fiction. This is an example that came to my attention some years ago. The man started with Jack Kerouac as a kind of historical background, and he went on from there to all the bestselling paperbacks that you could find in the drug store. But the students just sat back on their heels and said they wanted Joseph Conrad. They wanted something they could get their teeth into—the hell with this stuff! And that was an example of the educational process working itself out properly.
OLIVER: In the context of a cultural heritage, do you have any strong feelings, pro or con, about teaching Canadian literature?
FRYE: Well, I think that ideally (and I’m speaking of a very remote ideal) Canadian literature should not be taught at all but left to the student’s own cultivation. When I was at Oxford, the English school there stopped at the year 1830, and the theory was that if you learned the historical background, then the university had done its job, and that modern literature (which was anything in the last century or so) ought to be up to yourself to study—that is, if you wanted to be a cultivated enough person to take in the contemporary scene. I still think that theoretically that’s the best thing to do. But it’s a very remote ideal, and in the meantime I think students have to have presented to them what is going on around them—and Canadian literature does give you a sense of the country you’re living in that nothing else can give you because it tells you what the Canadian imagination has recorded and how it has reacted.
OLIVER: Of course the study of English literature is fairly recent as university disciplines go. But it still seems a bit arbitrary for Oxford to exclude modern literature.
FRYE: Yes. But the fact that you’re studying English at all means that you’re studying something modern, as distinct from the Greeks.
OLIVER: Sort of pre–Matthew Arnold?
FRYE: Yes. I suppose Matthew Arnold was really the founder of English literature as an academic subject.
OLIVER: I would like to ask you how you see yourself in this context. Your name is familiar internationally and in Canada. But I suppose in terms of the general population relatively few are familiar with your writings. When you write, to whom do you address yourself? To students or to fellow critics or to writers? Or do you have them all in mind?
FRYE: The audience I keep most centrally in my mind is that of interested readers. My writings always have a minimum of footnotes, and sometimes I have different audiences for different books. If the book has arisen from a series of public lectures, which is a very frequent form with me, that means I’m not addressing a specialized audience. And as I’ve gone on, I’ve become less and less inclined to address a specialized audience.
OLIVER: But in your early works, you were surely writing for fellow critics and students?
FRYE: My book on Blake was certainly not addressed to anybody who didn’t have a fairly sustained interest in Blake. But my approach to my writing has always been evangelical. A great deal of my writing has grown out of a teaching interest rather than research or scholarly pressures, and I’ve always tried to keep in mind the fact that no idea is really any good unless it can be explained to a fairly young person.
OLIVER: Are you ever aware of yourself as oversimplifying or popularizing your ideas? Two compartments, say? As for example with Bertrand Russell, who admitted writing popular philosophies for the layman and intellectually more demanding stuff for his peers.
FRYE: It is extremely dangerous to have two compartments because both of them tend to shrivel and you’re liable to end up as Russell did—sup porting propaganda campaigns in which he knew that what he was saying was false. But he rationalized it by arguing that when you’re involved with propaganda, you have to make positive statements.4
OLIVER: In what way do you see literature as important in this twentieth century?
FRYE: That’s a question that I frequently come back to, and was the subject of my Massey lectures [EI], which have been distributed quite widely in Canadian high schools. My general answer is that the imagination is what man constructs with; and therefore human society is essentially an imaginative construct, and it is by imagination that man participates in society. Consequently a training of the imagination, particularly through literature, is the central means of understanding one’s own social role.
OLIVER: You emphasize the social context then?
FRYE: Yes. That’s one set of values.
OLIVER: Or there’s Eliot’s argument about unifying experience—Spinoza, the noise of a typewriter, the smell of cooking, etc.5 But you could treat that in a social context as well.
FRYE: Yes. And I also feel that society is always controlled by certain mythologies and that you have a choice between evolving your own mythology from your own cultural traditions or getting taken over by the mass clichés and stock responses which society is only too ready to provide. I see a literary training as a means of becoming aware of one’s mythological conditioning.
OLIVER: And therefore having insight into the contemporary scene?
FRYE: Yes. So you stop believing the advertising or other statements in the propaganda.
OLIVER: At a more personal level, I find value in some of the insights into behaviour that literature, and especially the novel, provide. For example, you may imagine some of your deeper feelings, your private world, to be very peculiar. And then you read about a character whose feelings are virtually identical. And you no longer feel so isolated. You realize that you are part of the human race.
FRYE: Yes. And this personal insight signifies a growing sense of detachment. I think the primitive way to establish contact with a work of literature is to identify yourself with a character you happen to like. However, you’ll very soon realize that such a process of identification is immature. It has to be outgrown, and, in proportion as you outgrow it, you get a more detached view of human behaviour. That sense of detachment, which is a mixture of irony and compassion, is, I think, what literature can provide.
OLIVER: Surely complete detachment is quite rare. Most people when they see a play or read a novel tend to identify in part with one or more of the characters. It’s a way of experiencing the action and, at the lowest level, of wanting to find out what happens because it is happening to oneself. Or perhaps I have yet to outgrow the process?
FRYE: It depends on the literary work. If you’re up against a play of Harold Pinter’s, there’s nothing there that you can permanently identify with. That is, what you identify with is some kind of normative standard in the light of which the characters appear as something broken off from you.
OLIVER: What about the historical imagination? You mentioned in a previous interview that it provides insight into a past cultural milieu.6 But so what? Why do you think that’s important? Obviously, to fully understand Shakespeare’s historical plays you need some knowledge of the Elizabethan sense of hierarchy. But of what value is that to us in the twentieth century?
FRYE: There again it’s a process of identification which is followed by detachment. The original humanist theory was that you were trained quite deliberately in the culture of dead civilizations. You were trained in Latin and Greek because they presented political and social problems that were no longer yours. They presented a religion that you didn’t believe in; they presented all kinds of things that you tried to see from the inside and yet from which you had finally to detach yourself.
OLIVER: To achieve detachment would generally be an easier process than it would be studying a contemporary work.
FRYE: It might be. But if you were being trained for a civil service job in India, say, in the early nineteenth century, a training in Classics was probably psychologically the best training you could have had, and much superior to a training in cost accounting or in diplomatic procedures, because those are things which give you no sense of perspective.
OLIVER: The Bible and Classical mythology as the foundation of a literary training—this is your particular argument, is it not? But what do you mean by a literary training of this kind and of what significance is it to most people? In a sense this is a repetitive question, but perhaps you would explore it a bit further.
FRYE: I think that man lives in two worlds. There’s the world of external nature, which I assume it’s the function of the physical sciences to study. Then there’s the world of man’s own culture and civilization, and he understands this world verbally as a mythological structure. That is, what man produces in a form which you can react to verbally is a mythological universe, and the Bible and Classical mythology in our tradition provide the essential building blocks, the essential structural principles of that universe.
OLIVER: The Bible seems obvious; Classical mythology less so. Though clearly it helps to study Classical mythology in order to understand a lot of contemporary literature. An obvious example is Joyce’s Ulysses. But that’s not what you mean, I think?
FRYE: No, though perhaps it’s the beginning of what I mean. I think that Classical civilization did develop a number of things in contrast to the Hebrew civilization. One notes the emphasis on the eye. Everything in the Bible is confined to the Word of God, the listening. What the Greeks produced were nude sculptures and the theatre, which are primarily visual experiences; and what the Greeks emphasized were such things as Eros, love rooted in the sexual instinct, which the Bible tends to be rather jittery about. There are many things absolutely essential in our imaginations that come to us through the Greek tradition.
OLIVER: And the study of Classical myth provides an underlying base on which everything else is erected—a sort of basis for the human condition?
FRYE: Yes. Myths are not just chaos. Myths are things which stick together and form a mythology, and the mythology sticks together to form a mythological universe; and our mythological universe is a combination of things derived from the Hebrew and the Greek tradition.
OLIVER: And is this universe being continually recreated?
FRYE: It keeps recreating itself, yes, although I think the structural principles remain fairly constant. That’s a thing which there is great resistance to on the part of students when I tell them. It’s not a thing that I would have welcomed myself, but I did discover through my own experience that literary genres, for example, change remarkably little from one millennium to another.
OLIVER: What would you regard as a literate person in the context we’re discussing? Someone who is familiar with what?
FRYE: I think a literate person is first and foremost an articulate person, one who has the power to say what he means, which sounds simple but is immensely difficult.
OLIVER: But wouldn’t you extend the concept of literacy to being familiar with certain books?
FRYE: In practice it is impossible to be articulate and to say what you mean without a pretty wide and deep familiarity with the verbal cultural tradition.
OLIVER: To go back a bit, how much influence do you think reading has on one’s writing skills?
FRYE: I think the extent to which one’s reading has an influence on one’s writing is very hard to verbalize. We’re tied up in words the wrong way, and we often assume that whatever we can’t put into words is unreal; but there’s no question that one’s reading puts fuel on the fire and keeps it burning.
OLIVER: But what about the imitative influence, of being exposed to a style that you find particularly seductive? Might that not cramp originality?
FRYE: You get imitation when the consciousness is focused on what you’re reading, but that doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes when you read, unconscious influences are making impressions on your mind without your being quite aware of what is happening. When you look back and focus your attention, then you’re imitating. And that can be a very essential thing to do at certain times.
OLIVER: These days, it seems the imaginative world is largely dominated by the television set. And I recall Johnny Bassett once telling me that one should pitch one’s TV scripts at the level of the Saskatchewan farmer.7
FRYE: I had a mission field one summer in Saskatchewan and I got a rather high impression of the intelligence of Saskatchewan farmers.
OLIVER: That may be, but I don’t think it was the message that Bassett was intending to convey. Quite the contrary. More germane, however—what are your views on television?
FRYE: I think there’s a great pressure in all mass media toward mediocrity. The particular problem of television is that it represents such a vast block of time, and like a shark’s maw it devours everything that’s thrown into it. At the same time I would think that the unselected audience ought to be a fairly healthy thing. As I say, I suspect that the Saskatchewan farmer may be more intelligent than John Bassett and sooner or later the people exposed to idiot programs get rather tired. It takes a while, and every new medium has to go through a rather archaic phase. When the movies began they went through an extraordinarily primitive period, and the same thing has been true of radio and television.
OLIVER: Looking ahead fifty years, do you see programs getting any better?
FRYE: Yes. I don’t know that it will even take fifty years. I think that the real impact of television when it hit us in the ’60s was profoundly demoralizing. It brought on all kinds of confusion and unrest. But in the 1970s we’re starting to absorb the medium and I think we’ll go on absorbing it.
OLIVER: And as a result the quality of the programs will improve?
FRYE: The quality of programs may improve, but I think that whether they do or not it will sort itself out. Society has absorbed the newspaper, for example. There’s a great deal of the newspaper that’s tripe and a great deal that’s irrelevant. People have developed a capacity for using the newspaper as they want, and I think the same thing will happen with the other media.
OLIVER: This question is a bit removed from the point, but these days there seems to be a lack of giants on the literary scene. And considering world population growth and more widespread literacy, this strikes me as odd. But I wonder if each generation feels this way, and it is only after a century or so, looking back retrospectively, that the giants begin to emerge.
FRYE: I think that’s true. One’s immediate contemporaries all look pretty well the same size, and it takes quite a long time before you get enough distance for certain ones to stand out from the others. At the same time, I do think from 1920 to 1950 was one our great verbal periods in Western culture. What’s happened from 1950 on has been a certain democratizing of literary qualities, which means they are more diffused in the population and are less dependent on people of overwhelming genius. The revival of oral and popular poetry, for example—the notion that poetry could be popular, that it could be read to a listening audience to the background of music (as it was in Homer’s or Beowulf’s time)—is something relatively new.
OLIVER: When you refer to the period 1920 to 1950, who do you have in mind?
FRYE: I could name people, but it would take a crystal ball to say which are going to be permanent ones; and it’s not a question I find of particular importance because a cultivated interest in the contemporary does regard people as roughly the same size.
OLIVER: Is there anything else on the subject of literacy that you feel strongly about?
FRYE: I don’t think so. I think I’ve stated most of my guiding principles on the subject.
OLIVER: You must get interviewed very frequently and have acquired a repertoire of stock responses.
FRYE: I think over the years one does acquire certain basic responses. As Blake says, you change your opinions but not your principles.8