Filmed 5 October 1977
From the TVO videocassette, transcribed by Leslie Barnes. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. The interview was one of a series with host Mike McManus broadcast over TV Ontario, the educational television station for Ontario.
MCMANUS: He explains a medieval legend in which the souls of the dead had to keep running day and night or crumble to dust. This, he says, is a parable for modern society [MC, 22–3; NFMC, 11]. My guest: one of the leading literary critics of the Western world, Dr. Northrop Frye. Our subject: A Man for All Seasons. And my name’s McManus.
Dr. Northrop Frye, I quoted in my opening from a book that you wrote in 1968 called The Modern Century. In it you told how we’re being reduced to despair by the steadily increasing speed of total movement. This you call the alienation of progress. I’m wondering, since some of the frenzy of the 1960s has gone, if you’d change that diagnosis at all.
FRYE: I wouldn’t change the diagnosis as far as the general rhythm of society is concerned. I think that more and more there’s been a revolt against that, simply out of self-preservation. There’s been a great deal more gathering into one’s self and trying to just turn your back on the express-train mentality which mechanical and technological progress has built up.
MCMANUS: So this is a more reflective time, a more inward-turning time, than the ’60s?
FRYE: I would say so, yes. I think that the time in the ’60s was actually very introverted as well, but it expressed itself in different ways.
MCMANUS: You also write of the city becoming increasingly hideous and nightmarish. You describe us as ants in the body of a dying dragon [MC, 37; NMFC, 19]. That too is late ’60s. What for you today remains the most hideous aspect of our cities?
FRYE: I suppose the insecurity and the constant humiliation of people having to live with that insecurity; and the growing violence which makes the cities even more unmanageable and uninhabitable now than they were ten years ago.
MCMANUS: What would be the cause of the insecurity? What’s the relationship between the insecurity and the modern city?
FRYE: It’s a simple matter of constant fear of violence. The hesitation on the part of people in New York or Detroit to go out in the evenings for entertainment or to ride on the subways after dark, that kind of thing.
MCMANUS: You say that in our society today mass art is brutal because those who write and sell it think of their readers as the mob?
FRYE: I think that a good deal of art of that kind is mass produced, because it’s very economical to produce that way. You find that violence in television, for example, is really a by-product of a certain kind of economic process. That means, of course, that it does appeal to reflexes rather than to anything that you could call the mind or the imagination. The mob is simply an aggregate of people who are moved by a common reflex.
MCMANUS: You feel that this kind of reflex action leads to resentment and panic and finally to anarchy?
FRYE: On the part of whom, the viewer?
MCMANUS: The viewer.
FRYE: Perhaps so, yes. I think, perhaps, the viewer gets a bit bludgeoned and rather numbed as a result. I had to sum up a CRTC symposium on violence recently. I suggested there that television also has a profoundly civilizing role to play in that it brings the camera right up against people and exposes them as human beings instead of as stereotypes.1
MCMANUS: But where it does lead to violence, are you talking about content or just the fact that it’s not a two-way kind of communication?
MCMANUS: So it’s a kind of invasion of privacy?
FRYE: I think that that’s a pejorative phrase and one can take it in different ways. I think that it does get through defences to the extent that no other art has been able to do.
MCMANUS: Marshall McLuhan, if I’ve understood him correctly, says or feels that the ultimate effect on the viewer of mass doses of television is one of apathy. That is not your conclusion, Dr. Frye. It’s more anarchy and violence.
FRYE: I think it’s partly the conclusion. Apathy is a very important and central response [cf. MC, 20; NMFC, 9]. One can see that in the behaviour of people in the cities, where an act of violence can go on under their eyes and they just stand around with their hands in their pockets. That is the result of apathy. Marshall also speaks of “civil defence against media fallout,” which I think is a very accurate phrase in that connection.2
MCMANUS: Vandalism and terrorism. You wouldn’t lay the blame for the violence of our age totally with television? Would you put it under a larger umbrella of the whole of technology?
FRYE: People always look for causes of social problems and feel if they’ve located the cause they’ve more or less solved the problem. The trouble is that every cause that you locate turns out to be just one more effect. Television is an effect of violence and not a cause of it, though it may be a contributory cause in a kind of vicious-circle development.
MCMANUS: One last question about Dr. McLuhan: some years ago he was predicting that television would replace the book, the print medium. I don’t know what he’s saying now. Would that be your feeling?
FRYE: It’s not my feeling and I doubt very much that it’s his. I think that there is the aspect which he isolated, the linear aspect in reading a book from the top left-hand corner of page one to the bottom right-hand corner of the last page. But the book, the printed medium, has a unique power of staying where it is so that it can be consulted again and it always presents the same words. To that extent it can become a focus of a community. It’s not just a linear, express-train thing.
MCMANUS: How would you differ, though, in what he says the book does to us, what reading does to us: that it separates us from the community and that it individualizes us and makes us more competitive and more isolated?
FRYE: Yes, but not all isolation is a bad thing. We began by saying that people are alienated by the linear technological progress of our time and that introversion and turning away from the panic of keeping on going is perhaps one of the ways of saving one’s imaginative life.
MCMANUS: The book, then, accentuates a sense of privacy?
FRYE: The book is a safeguard of privacy, yes.
MCMANUS: The role of literature today, Dr. Frye. You’ve been quoted as saying that it’s necessary to a democratic society.
FRYE: Yes, I think that’s true, although I was speaking rather of the public access to information. The public access to information is made possible by the printing press. So I think that the book is the technological instrument that makes it possible for democracy to function.3
MCMANUS: And you believe that great literature belongs to everyone?
FRYE: Oh, yes.
MCMANUS: Why do you think that students and certain of us adults feel a certain hostility or at least an intimidation when faced with highbrow literature? Is that a fault of our teaching?
FRYE: It’s social conditioning, very largely. A gap grows up in a student’s mind at a very early age between what he is told he ought to want by some people and what he is told he really does want by certain other people. Now, neither of these things is true, but a certain schizophrenia does tend to make a kind of civil war between the highbrow arts and the popular arts. Whenever you have a genuine piece of entertainment you find that distinction breaking down. I think you’ll find that television itself steadily moves in the direction of destroying the distinction between an elitist audience and a mass audience: that notion is out of date. Last weekend I was looking at the series of York Biblical plays written in the fourteenth century; over forty-seven of them put on on the weekend here on the front campus. What struck me about that was the fact that there were not only all kinds of professors of medieval literature there, but there were also four-year-old kids sprawled out over the stage and getting in everybody’s way. They assumed that the show was theirs.
MCMANUS: You’ve tried to overcome this intimidation by a book called Anatomy of Criticism, which has had an influence right across North America on the whole teaching and curriculum of English. What exactly were you trying to do with Anatomy of Criticism?
FRYE: I was trying to help people to see literature as an intelligible area of study: that it’s not just a matter of reading one book after another or one play after another or one poem after another, but that there is a kind of total intelligible unity to be gained from the study of literature, to which any work of literature can lead you. I didn’t really get interested in literature as a scholar and a teacher until I saw that there were ways of introducing it to very young people. As a result of that book there’s a series of texts now published in the United States for grades 7–12, but I think even that is older than it needs to be.4 I think the main principles of my book are so simple that they could be started much earlier.
MCMANUS: Could you say a little more about the principles?
FRYE: One of the main principles is that there are four types of story: romance, tragedy, comedy, and irony or satire. The nature of these stories can be taught to any child as soon as he can listen to a story at all. The curve up at the end of comedy, the curve down at the end of tragedy are quite unmistakable even to very young children.
MCMANUS: So one could, then, begin to see the structure in a drama on television last night, or in a play or great novel?
FRYE: I am very keen on emphasizing the similarities rather than the differences between a Shakespearean comedy and the old movie that you saw on television last night.
MCMANUS: And this would allow a reader or a teacher then to read a work and see whether those elements were there or were not there and evaluate it accordingly?
FRYE: Not quite that, because in the first place those elements always are there. They’re elements of structure. Any story that has a beginning and a middle and an end will show a structural type. I’m not so much concerned with evaluation. I think that that’s a byproduct of what the critic does rather that the actual end or aim. Because the principles of evaluation come from your social historical context and they tend to grow out of date in another century or so. It’s better to study what is there rather than to say this is good whereas that which you may like better is bad.
MCMANUS: So you wanted us to keep away from value judgments in literary criticism?
FRYE: I’d be cautious and sparing of them and, especially teaching young people, rather tentative about them.
MCMANUS: Is this a possible criticism, then, that taking all value judgments out of criticism would thus equate great literature with popular literature?—or is that what you would want?
FRYE: It would illustrate the structural similarity between great literature and popular literature and would therefore explain something which people find great difficulty in explaining, which is the fact that great literature always grows out of popular literature. In certain social conditions, popular literature can be artificially debased—we were talking about that a few minutes ago—but it doesn’t have to be.
MCMANUS: I want to move on now to myth and archetype. You say that we all live in a mythological world. Now a lot of us have the feeling that when we use the word “myth”—for instance, when somebody says, “One race is stronger than another race,” and somebody else says, “That’s a myth”—what we’re really saying is, “That’s a lie.” That is not what you mean by myth.
FRYE: It’s part of what I mean by myth. I think that a myth to me fundamentally is a story. Most of the great myths are very early stories; they’ve been around for a long time and they’re stories about gods. They are told in order to tell a society what it needs to know about its structure and social origin and so forth. But a myth, being a story, fits into another, larger pattern. We all look at the world from inside some kind of framework. Now that framework can be either true or false. I think we’re conditioned to accept a lot of false mythology from our social surroundings as we grow up. That is really a parody of the genuine forms that you get.
MCMANUS: Would you give an example of the kind of false myths that we’re forced to grow up with?
FRYE: “I just live to get away from this rat race where I can get away from it all, at the cottage, in the country.” That’s the pastoral myth. It’s not particularly a false myth but it’s a parody of the conception of an idealized life which forms a value judgment on the life that we’re actually leading. Or the notion of an aristocracy: that people by their birth or blood are superior to other people. That is a perfectly comprehensible myth, but it’s false and in our day, of course, it’s pernicious.
MCMANUS: Now you have dwelt for many, many years both as a professor and in your studies on myth in the Bible. There you talk about archetypes, symbols, and myths, which we know now are stories. Could you say something about archetypes and symbols?
FRYE: To me an archetype is simply a repeating unit in literature. You find that you’re running into the same themes over and over again. If you examine the Bible you find that while it looks like a great chaos, an accumulation of books, nevertheless it has made its impact on Western culture as a unified book. If you look at the things that unify it, you find that first of all it has a narrative unity: it starts at the beginning of time; it ends at the end of time; it tells the stories of Adam and Israel in between. Then there are certain symbols or images like city and hill and river and tree. Those are repeated in such a way as to indicate that they are forming a unified picture of the world. So it’s by the symbols or the images and by the story it tells that you can see it as a unity. When you see it as a unity you begin to understand how it has affected Western culture, both philosophy and imagination.
MCMANUS: Would you say something about archetypes?
FRYE: The archetype is the repeating unit. That is the fact that you have in the Bible the idealized pastoral life: the Lord is my Shepherd; Jesus calls himself a good shepherd. In Classical literature, without any influence from the Bible, you get a pastoral development where the poet pretends to be a shepherd. The life is a simplified, idealized life. The modern Western story, except that [the author] uses cattle instead of sheep, is also a pastoral myth of the same kind.
MCMANUS: That author, influenced by the Bible?
FRYE: Not necessarily. He may very well have been but these things don’t depend on direct influence.
MCMANUS: The story of the prodigal son, an archetype that appears throughout the Bible and also in secular literature?
FRYE: Yes. The general shape of that story is a “U” shape. You start in a condition of relative peace and prosperity. You then go into exile or bondage or humiliation and then you’re brought back to something like the original state. It’s the same as the story of Job. It’s the same that you get in hundreds of thousands of comic structures in literature.
MCMANUS: Would this kind of knowledge and understanding destroy someone’s faith in the Bible or is it a passage to liberation?
FRYE: I think the question of belief is partly a linguistic question. Most beliefs are expressed in language of dogma, of proposition: “I believe this,” and so on. That only unites the people who do believe it. It’s exclusive and shuts out the people who don’t. But when you’re talking about images you’re talking about something you can’t argue with. Consequently you include everybody. I’ve taught this course on the Bible to all kinds of people, and have found that the differences in their attitudes and their commitments was much less important than having an area of study that was withdrawn from commitment of that excluding kind.
MCMANUS: In 1947 you published Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake, and there too you were looking for patterns and structure in his work. It took you almost fifteen years, off and on, I understand, to write that book. In 1976 you published The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, once again searching for structures, patterns. What are you working on right now, Dr. Frye?
FRYE: I’ve finally come to grips with the book that’s been haunting me all my life. That’s the book on the Bible and its relationship to Western culture which informed the mythological framework. I think we’ve derived all our philosophy and all our literature from the kind of setup which we got from Greek and Hebrew origins, and the Bible is the centre of that.
MCMANUS: You’ve called this book your last phase. I’m wondering why.
FRYE: I suppose because I passed my sixty-fifth birthday. I don’t mean anything morbid or funereal by that. Merely that it’s likely to be the last creative phase that I’ll be dealing with. I don’t mean it’s my last book by any means.
MCMANUS: You’ve said, not here tonight, but in other places, that one thing that Canada does offer us is an opportunity to be a kind of observer of the world situation;5 and you yourself have been observing patterns and looking for structures. I’m wondering if in this stage in your life you see the structure of your own professional life?
FRYE: Yes, I suppose one does. I would be rather hard put to characterize it. I think that staying in Canada during my whole professional life has been important to me because it is a watcher’s country, it’s on the sidelines of where the great decisions are made. The observer sees more than the player, very frequently.
MCMANUS: Could you articulate the structure of your own life’s work?
FRYE: I think I’ve been circling around the same points pretty well all my life. The view of literature that I put in the Anatomy of Criticism was already there in my earlier book on Blake and has been repeated since. It doesn’t mean that I’m saying the same thing every time, but that I’m going back in what has been called a spiral curriculum. Trying to get new ideas, new ways of looking at things, and yet finding that somehow or other they do hook themselves on to what I’ve done before.
MCMANUS: I want in our remaining moments together to talk a little bit about Canada and the present Canadian scene. You wrote in The Bush Garden, among many other things about the Canadian imagination, that part of our problem is in failing to realize that Canadian unity and Canadian identity are two different things [ii; C, 413]. Could you say something briefly about that: Canadian unity; Canadian identity.
FRYE: I said that political and economic developments in our world tend to centralize and build up bigger and bigger units. Our unity as Canada is a political unity that fits into a still larger unity, of which the United States is a dominating factor. I don’t think Canadians have much desire to resist the fact that they go along with the Americans economically, and to a considerable extent politically too. That seems to me to be just part of the time we’re living in. But in his imagination, in his creative power, man is a bit of a vegetable; he needs to strike roots and deal with a fairly limited community. If you look at American writers you find that they turn out to be Mississippi writers, and New England writers, and Paris expatriate writers, and so on. Similarly with Canada you find that more and more small communities in Canada are becoming articulate through their writers and their painters.
MCMANUS: So when we search for our own identity it’s going to be a regional identity?
FRYE: It’s going to a pluralistic identity, and a regional one, yes.
MCMANUS: On the question of separation, and we’re talking about the separation of Quebec, you’ve said that separation is a betrayal of the intellectual and that Quebec intellectuals have been socially and politically irresponsible.6
FRYE: Oh, well, if I … Did I say that, in so many words? [smiles] I don’t think I would say that they had been politically irresponsible. I do feel that separatism in Quebec is very largely an intellectual movement and consequently one that doesn’t have to consider the actual political or economic consequences as primary. My own view is that culturally we’re all instinctively separatists.
MCMANUS: That comes back to the regional identity.
FRYE: Yes, it does. Politically and economically it’s a great mistake to hitch that on to a separating, decentralizing cultural movement. When you do that you’re likely to get something rather ingrown and introverted and provincial.
MCMANUS: Do you think they’re liable to do it?
FRYE: I don’t think that in a world like ours Quebec has all that much liberty. I think that it can only choose between being a province of Canada and being an outcropping of the United States, that is, economically.
MCMANUS: Dr. Frye, we didn’t get a chance to talk about your own life other than your professional life. You were born in Sherbrooke, Quebec and went to Moncton, New Brunswick for your grade school and high school; came to Toronto for a typing course; came second and stayed and went to Victoria College; 1936: ordained in the United Church as a minister. Then to Oxford for your M.A. in English and then back to Vic and the U of T. In parting: religion and the student today, could you say something about that?
FRYE: I said in one of my essays on the disturbances of the late ’60s that I thought that the students at that time were intensely and even desperately religious, but weren’t quite certain what they were looking for.7They had rather stronger views about what they were repudiating than what they were accepting.
MCMANUS: And today?
FRYE: I think today the situation is still roughly the same except that there is less of a sense of panic, perhaps. There is a very strong desire to get at what is regarded as the core of religion, the essential thing, a kind of consciousness that has broken out of all the categories that our world of time and space puts on it. The institutional manifesting of the religion is much less important to contemporary students.
MCMANUS: I wish we had more time. I know that, to be here with us tonight, you have taken your time, which is very precious, from the great labour that you’re under. I’m very grateful to you. The audience might be happy to know that Dr. Northrop Frye, in high school, was bored. Thank you, Dr. Frye.