Taped 6 February 1978
From WGS, 127–61. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list; available on cassette in NFF. This interview was taped for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and broadcast in five parts on the CBC program Morningside, 17–21 April 1978. Interviewer Don Harron, a well-known Canadian actor, was a friend and former student of Frye’s.
HARRON: Professor Frye, there’s a lot of talk these days about a return to religion. The flower children have gone to seed, and the counter-revolution seems to be here. People are born again. Is there any real meaning in a return to religion? Does it ever leave?
FRYE: I think it springs from the fact that we all belong to something before we are anything; that is, we’re conditioned to be people in a certain social context even before we’re born. I think that people consequently have certain feelings of loyalty built into them, and there are times when the institutions that command loyalty don’t seem to command it; things seem to modulate. Either the political unit or the religious unit to which you’re attached at birth doesn’t command your loyalties and you shift over to something else. I think a natural human tendency is to be loyal to the smallest unit that makes sense.
HARRON: One’s mother, you mean?
FRYE: It starts with one’s mother and one’s immediate family, and it goes on to the small gang that you’re attached to as a child or adolescent, but when you get to things like Stoicism you realize that you’re in a rather tired world, because nobody becomes loyal to the universe if there’s anything else he can be loyal to.
HARRON: What accounts for young people today joining things like the Moon groups?1
FRYE: There’s a great relaxation, a great emotional release, I think, in joining a group that asks you no questions on the understanding that you don’t ask it any questions. That completely uncritical acceptance of something, a return to a dialectical womb, so to speak, has a very strong appeal to a lot of young people, especially in the period where they’re just emerging from adolescence and where the loyalty to the group is a very strong one.
HARRON: So joining, say, the Hare Krishna is not really adopting Eastern culture, but finding another group like a summer camp?2
FRYE: Yes, I think so. I don’t think there is really anything Oriental about the Hare Krishna, the Moon cult, most of the Zen people. They perhaps have a teacher who comes from Asia, but by the time it gets here it settles down into something very recognizable as a North American pattern.
HARRON: You said that we’re preconditioned to get into a social group even before we are born. Would you care to elaborate on that?
FRYE: Well, I was a middle-class, mid-twentieth-century Canadian nine months before I was born, and I think it’s true of everybody that they are, as Heidegger says, “thrown” into the world,3 that they don’t choose to be what they are, they don’t choose their context. They have a certain colour of skin, they have a certain nationality, and they have a certain context in religion and politics and other things.
HARRON: Is that what’s meant by the Christian doctrine of original sin?
FRYE: Original sin is not that you belong to something, but that you ought to belong to something as fast as possible, namely, the Christian church, and get baptized at the earliest opportunity in order to clear up original sin. That’s the theory. Original sin really means that man is born with a kind of entropy in him. That is, he’s a being heading toward death. He’s a person who’s going to die, and his finiteness, his mortality, means that there’s a limit beyond which he can’t attain his own ideals.
HARRON: And this sin is wiped away by the Christian ritual of baptism?
FRYE: That was the idea, yes. Once you get adopted into the sacramental machinery of Christianity, it puts you into a group with a divine centre at the middle of it which enables you to get back something of what, according to the theory again, man had before he had original sin.
HARRON: What is a ritual?
FRYE: A ritual is an action with a specific and specialized meaning that has to do with turning the corners of one’s life. That is, first of all there are certain rituals, such as a wedding, which have to do with special stages of your life, and then secondly there are rituals connected with certain times of the year, Sunday or the Sabbath coming around in the week, or Christmas or Easter coming around once a year, which tend to mark the course of time by moments of specific focusing of attention.
HARRON: So ritual marks something? A passage through life?
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: Does it explain something? Where does this come from? I feel, for example, that a baptism or a wedding or a funeral is an acting out of something. What is the something that it acts out?
FRYE: In most setups, I think, a ritual is an appearance in action of some kind of myth or story. That is, the ritual of the funeral recreates the Christian teaching about death, and weddings and baptisms and the sacramental occasions likewise. It’s not so much that the myth explains the ritual, though that is what anthropologists used to say, as that the ritual is a kind of manifestation of myth in action.
HARRON: Anthropologists also say that primitive society is highly ritualized. Are they more ritualized than we in our contemporary world?
FRYE: Oh, I shouldn’t think so. I think our lives are a mass of rituals from beginning to end. And people adopt their own rituals, like turning on the television at eight o’clock. That is, we keep punctuating our lives by sub-rituals.
HARRON: That’s not a habit, it’s a ritual?
FRYE: Well, the boundary line between a habit and a ritual is not very easy to determine. But there are some habits that have to do with marking certain times. And I think that those shade insensibly into rituals.
HARRON: I’ve never heard of anybody trying to kick a ritual.
FRYE: Well, I don’t know. Certainly the reactions against the work ethic by young people in the 1960s were in effect saying that the work ethic is a ritual; it’s a ritual persisting out of habit which is no longer being examined or looked at. And that is practically the definition of superstition—something that you go on doing without knowing or caring why you’re doing it. They were trying to kick a ritual. They adopted a lot of new ones in the process, of course.
HARRON: Now that there’s up to eight per cent unemployment, do you think they’re still trying to kick the work ethic? Or does a little bit of unemployment cure one of that?
FRYE: Yes, I think it stops very quickly. That’s perhaps not a very good example. It was just one that occurred to me. But I think that people do kick rituals. They change their religions and get into new patterns; they change their political loyalties and the rituals that go with them.
HARRON: I think it’s a very good example, because the period of the late ’60s seems to me to be unique. Suddenly the world changed. The miniskirt came in and long hair. I know that long hair has been around for most of our history, but it seemed to me to be a very different period, one that lasted at the most for about ten years. Now are there any other parallels in history to that period?
FRYE: I suppose that kind of thing goes with a certain degree of nostalgia. I think of the oscillation between long hair and beards and short hair as more or less recapitulating the Cavalier-Roundhead business in seventeenth-century England, where the Roundheads with the short, cropped hair represented the middle classes that were on the make, and the Cavaliers represented an aristocracy that had already lost its social effectiveness.
HARRON: Would you say we’re entering a Cromwellian period now?
FRYE: I think that periods alternate much more quickly than they used to do. And we have with us a curious mixture of Cromwellian tendencies and Restoration tendencies. The sudden permissiveness in speech, for example, as we have it in drama and fiction—that kind of thing goes in the opposite direction perhaps.
HARRON: The young people today seem to be anti-historical. They think none of this has ever happened before. Anything that happens, they think, is for the first time. Is that a strange phenomenon? Or has that happened before—that people think it’s never happened before?
FRYE: Oh, I think it’s always happening. People think the world begins when they did. I have talked to students, for example, who thought it was an outrage to have to study anything before the year of their own birth. The feeling that there is no history before your own time is a very ancient one. One of the oldest histories we have is Thucydides’ history of the war between Sparta and Athens. He begins his history by saying that before about a hundred years ago, nothing much had happened in the world.
HARRON: You mentioned that the young people in denying the work ethic created superstitions or rituals of their own. Is it impossible to get away from the myth and rituals of our past?
FRYE: I think that man always perceives from inside some kind of framework or picture of the universe. I call it a mythological universe. He sees from inside certain containing factors, like creation and resurrection. He may not call them that. He may give them secular titles, but they organize his way of looking at things. I doubt if man can create or even act except inside some kind of framework of that kind.
HARRON: They organize his way of looking at things?
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: So that any man anywhere on this planet thinks in much the same way?
FRYE: Well, in the same way that your senses are set up in a certain way. As philosophers have told us for centuries, I don’t see the table in front of me; I see what my eyes report to me of the table in the way in which my body is set up to see things. I think that the same thing is true of the intellectual and imaginative world—that what we think and imagine has a great deal to do with a kind of total conditioning that we’re in.
HARRON: And do the myths that exist for all men on this planet more or less coincide?
FRYE: I don’t know whether “coincide” is the word, but I think that all the myths on this planet are ultimately intelligible to everybody. I think that however strange and bizarre one may find the manners or customs of other societies, nevertheless they are ultimately intelligible.
HARRON: Professor Frye, last time we talked you mentioned that really men’s minds are formed in such a way that they accept, generally speaking, the same kinds of myths. Am I quoting you accurately?
FRYE: Mutually intelligible myths, let’s say.
HARRON: In other words, from birth to death man sees the important things that happen to him in much the same way.
FRYE: I think that’s broadly true, yes.
HARRON: So that we Christians who have our Bible are really sharing with other people the same visions?
FRYE: Oh, yes. I think that no religion can become a missionary religion, for example, as most of the higher religions have been, unless what it has to say is intelligible to everybody it goes to talk to.
HARRON: For example, when a missionary goes to New Guinea and talks about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden there is a parallel?
FRYE: I think there’s a parallel. There’s something there which the people in New Guinea can certainly find parallels to in their own mythology and can understand for that reason.
HARRON: They certainly have snakes and they have a lot of foliage. But do they have a vision of a time when life was perfect—a golden age?
FRYE: Well, a great many myths do. Myths of an original paradise and of man’s having lost the gift of immortality—those are worldwide. Frazer has made tremendous collections of them. They’re just everywhere.
HARRON: So man not only shares a myth of the creation, but he also shares a myth of the fall.
FRYE: Yes, at least there are myths of the human situation, and they very frequently take the form of some kind of fall or separation from a paradisal state.
HARRON: One of the feelings that people who have left Christianity have about Christianity is that it blames you. They go to something like, say, Taoism, which says it isn’t anybody’s fault, it’s just the way it is—much the way Shakespeare reacts in King Lear. Tragedy—that’s the way it is. There seems to be a decided preference for that kind of philosophy today.
FRYE: I think the situation there is partly linguistic. That is, all religions say that if you’re good you’ll stop being bad. But if you get this in terms of karma and dharma, you have a feeling of discovering something and not being sent back to Sunday school.
HARRON: What about the other end of the scale, the death of the god, which we call our Crucifixion?
FRYE: Yes, I think there is something rather peculiar to the West both in the conceptions of the fall and in conceptions of the death of the god. In Buddhism, for example, Buddha leaves his life as a prince, becomes a hermit and an ascetic, eventually overcomes all the temptations of the world, and then starts to preach liberation. What you don’t get in the Buddhist myth is a notion of a final confrontation with society, such as you have in the Crucifixion and in the death of Socrates in Greek religion.
HARRON: What about other religions like the ones centred around Mithras and Adonis?
FRYE: Well, there again, they don’t seem to have the sense of a confrontation with society partly because they are, well, synchronic myths. They are not historical myths.
HARRON: Synchronic means historical?
FRYE: No, it means the opposite. It means they go around the year. That is, the birthday of the sun every year on December 25th is the basis of Mithraism. The Biblical tradition is, I think, unusual in that it has a historical dimension, and history is what creates personality. Jesus and Adonis both have dying-god myths attached to them, but Adonis is not a person and Jesus is.
HARRON: What has this done to us in the West then—this particular myth we hold?
FRYE: It’s given us a very strong sense of a meaning emerging out of human history rather than history as a meaningless series of cycles from which you have to be liberated.
HARRON: So it’s given us a kind of notion of progress?
FRYE: Well, progress can be one form of it. But it’s a rather oversimplified form. It’s more, I think, in the Biblical tradition a sense of the meaning of history as being finally revealed by the birth of Christ and consequently as progressing toward some kind of conclusion. The sense in the Biblical religions of the beginning of time and an end of time are extremely strong, whereas in the Hindu and Buddhist setup there’s much more of a sense of the cycle of time turning indefinitely.
HARRON: But the Christian myth seems to be tied up with the Aztecs and Druids, with its ritual sacrifice.
FRYE: But with the Aztecs sacrifice was an end in itself. You murdered all your prisoners of war to keep on feeding the sun. The sun would go out if you didn’t feed it corpses. That is a purely synchronic idea: it comes around every year in the same way. But in Jesus there is one sacrifice which is qualitatively different from all other sacrifices, and it’s a crucial act in history.
HARRON: But it had its origins in a very primitive, pagan ritual, didn’t it, which is cannibalism or sacrifice? In The Golden Bough Sir James Frazer talks about killing the leader before his powers go away.
FRYE: Yes, according to Frazer you have the leader of the tribe as a god-man, and when his powers are at their peak he’s going to wane, and if his powers decline then the tribe will start losing its battles and the food supply will give out. So you put him to death at the height of his powers. But there’s no use letting all that divinity go to waste, so you eat it and drink it.4 That’s the Frazer theory, and it is in a way an analogy of what happens in the Christian myth as well.
HARRON: In communion?
FRYE: Yes, you can’t identify a thing as what it started out to be. That is, an oak tree has a bit more in it than an acorn has.
HARRON: I was thinking of the oak tree and the Druids.
FRYE: Well, yes. We don’t know much about the Druids, but they again seem to have had a synchronic mythology and, according to some, a belief in reincarnation. We don’t know.
HARRON: The pattern of witchcraft in Anglo-Saxon history—I always thought that it was connected to the Druids, or at least that people tried to connect it, that it was a kind of nature-worshipping religion which was against Christianity.
FRYE: People have suggested that Christianity was a big-city religion. It moved into the big cities: Rome and Alexandria and Antioch. The word “pagan” is connected with paganus or paisant, peasant; and the word “heathen” means the person living on the heath. In other words it was the country, the rural people, who clung to their ancient gods and their ancient beliefs. There have been theories that just as Satan turned up with the horns and the tail of woodland gods, like Pan, so there was actually a cult of such a god in medieval Europe and that was what witchcraft was about. I’m not very committed to that view myself. I think you can get evidence for anything if you extract it under torture.
HARRON: But there is evidence of covens of witches today, and Alastair Crowley made it popular about fifty years ago. It’s been very current, I think, in the last twenty years—the so-called free spirit. Is it a kind of anti-Christianity?
FRYE: It’s a kind of primordial symbol-making process in the human mind, which has served as a root out of which Christianity has grown. I think that the historical evidence for the covens of witches and the like doesn’t matter quite so much. The witch finders and heresy hunters, the people who tortured witches and forced them to confess to certain things, were actually digging things out of their own subconscious.
HARRON: The ritual of the mass also contains the ritual of the black mass, which is the opposite. They say the Bible backwards and they make human sacrifice, which was one way the nuns got rid of their unwanted babies. Am I being a bit like Hieronymus Bosch here?
FRYE: No, I think it’s a bit later than that. I think the black mass was very largely a nineteenth-century invention. There is a tradition in Christianity which has always explained the resemblance between Christianity and pagan myths as due to the fact that the pagan myths were the devil’s parodies of the Christian myths. That is the tradition which incorporates things like witchcraft, mythology, the black mass, and so on. But the black mass seems to me an extremely literary notion and a rather second-rate literary notion. Alastair Crowley is a good example of the level it operates on.
HARRON: So what we have left today is Mardi Gras, Halloween, and Fasching in Germany?
FRYE: Yes, some of these rituals persist out of habit and they become what you might call a kind of voluntary superstition. That is, kids go around collecting on Halloween not because they actually believe in witches, but because it has become something set up for them to do, and some of our rituals are survivals of that kind. There’s a remark in one of Thomas Hardy’s novels which describes a St. George play, and he says you can always tell the authentic folk ritual because it always bores the hell out of the people who are doing it.5
HARRON: But Halloween is the night before All Hallows Day, isn’t it?
FRYE: Yes, it was originally the feast of the dead. The original primitive year in Europe had the two points of November the 1st and May the 1st. They survive in Celtic legend as the Samhain and the Beltane, and in the Brocken spectres—May the 1st, and the witches’ dance in Germany—Halloween. The Christian church tried to obliterate the feast of the dead by first making it All Souls’ Day and then making the next day All Saints’ Day.6 But it still kept on going and became modulated into a historical disguise with Guy Fawkes.
HARRON: Really?
FRYE: Well, Guy Fawkes Day is the fifth of November, which is around that time of year, but the figure of Guy Fawkes is really a Halloween figure.
HARRON: He is in England, that’s true. I just thought he was a political minority.
FRYE: Oh, sure he is. But that’s the way in which a very ancient ritual can suddenly get stuck on to some kind of historical character.
HARRON: There always seems to be the pattern of a night of wild libation before the holy period. I’m thinking of Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday.
FRYE: Yes, the period of licence before the period of spiritual concentration. You get drunk Saturday night so you can have a nice contemplative hangover on Sunday morning. That’s the principle of Carnival and Lent.
HARRON: Is that general among people?
FRYE: Yes, I think so. The man who has written so much on this subject, Mircea Eliade, has a whole book on the period of licence, the period of the dissolving of social standards, just before the new year begins.
HARRON: What’s his book called?
FRYE: Well, he has a dozen books. One is called The Myth of the Eternal Return, which I think has most of this.
HARRON: That sounds like a Christian concept—the eternal return, the belief in the Resurrection.
FRYE: Yes, except that return in some respects is almost the opposite of resurrection, because although resurrection is celebrated at Easter, which is a return, what it means is a sort of leap from one world to another world; whereas the return means the same world coming back again.
HARRON: The sun will come back, the seasons will return, the snow will go away.
FRYE: Yes, it’s a cyclical world.
HARRON: Has our ritual and myth world brought us the neuroses of the present day?
FRYE: Well, I wouldn’t put it into a causal pattern. I think that man is a neurotic animal, and his ritual patterns will express neurosis just as much as they will express the opposite.
HARRON: Professor Frye, you talked last time about a final confrontation which Christianity provides in the crucifixion myth but which other religions don’t really have—for example, Buddhism.
FRYE: Yes, I think that that’s rather a distinguishing characteristic of the Biblical tradition. It starts with the story of Israel in the Old Testament. The story of Israel begins with God appearing in a burning bush to Moses and saying, “The Hebrews are being exploited in Egypt, and I’m going to do something about it.” So he first of all appears, giving himself a name and a highly partisan role in history and announcing that he’s going to be on the side of the oppressed people against the social establishment. That’s something that carries on into Christianity with the Crucifixion, where the final meaning of Christ’s life on earth is that he was the one person that no society could endure. They had to get rid of him.
HARRON: Is religion always nationalistic?
FRYE: Oh, no, I don’t think so. There are national religions; they’re not very pleasant things.
HARRON: Old Testament religion seems to be very nationalistic. It’s them against us, and we’ve got God on our side.
FRYE: There’s a great deal of that—the sense of the specific society of Israel. On the other hand, of course, Israel gets more lumps than any other nation because it has more responsibilities and ought to know better. You also get a great deal of very broad, humane, cosmopolitan feeling, as in the Book of Ruth and the Book of Jonah.
HARRON: Is one of the reasons for the prevalence of anti-Semitism that the Hebrews called themselves the chosen people, that they elevated themselves above other tribes?
FRYE: Perhaps so. The sources of anti-Semitism are very complex. I myself think that anti-Semitism among Christians is always, sooner or later, a disguised form of anti-Christianity. It’s your own religion you hate, and you project it on something else.
HARRON: So that you can get rid of your own religion by castigating another tribe?
FRYE: Yes, by calling it something else.
HARRON: We hear a lot of the word “apocalypse” now. It’s being used almost commercially, as in the film Apocalypse Now, which is about the Vietnam War. What actually is the apocalypse?
FRYE: The original apocalypse is the unveiling, the revelation of the world as God originally made it, that is, before man fell into sin and a state of confusion. It got to acquire the meaning of an end of history. Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”7 That sense of history as a nightmare from which man is trying to awake is the basis of the apocalyptic feeling, the feeling that some event almost anytime will lift you right out of the whole process of history.
HARRON: So the Bible begins with a myth of an age of perfection in the garden of Eden and ends with the same vision?
FRYE: Yes, it does. There’s a return to the original state. It’s symbolized in the Bible by the tree and the water of life, which man lost in the garden of Eden and gets back again with the apocalypse.
HARRON: So is that, in a sense, breaking the binding habit of history—getting outside time?
FRYE: That’s part of it, yes. I think that that feeling is very deeply rooted in Western consciousness. In the last generation the whole movement of Marxism had an apocalyptic quality to it which it doesn’t have with the same intensity now. But there was a feeling that certain historical movements were taking place that were going to lead us beyond history. Now we’re getting the same kind of thing in more disparate ways, some of them assimilated to the Oriental conception of enlightenment, something that lifts you out of the wheel of death and rebirth.
HARRON: Is that what you get from Mao Tse-tung’s Little Red Book, for example?
FRYE: In Mao Tse-tung’s writings there is a good deal of a progression towards a state of society which is free of class distinction and exploitation and consequently has none of the characteristics of history as man has always known it.
HARRON: The Russian version of Marxism seems to have become ritualized into an almost Christian form, with the people lining up to visit Lenin’s tomb. Isn’t that like a Catholic church?
FRYE: Once you have a revolution and a certain group comes to power, one thing they’ve got to stop is any sense of transcendence of what they are. That is, what has to go on in Russia now must be in conformity with the people who are now in power. The same thing happened with the medieval church. You had various visionaries proclaiming the age of the Holy Spirit which would transcend the age of medieval Christendom.8The church had to put the lid on that because the Christian revolution has already occurred; you can’t have anything transcending that.
HARRON: The historian Arnold Toynbee said that civilizations decline not from without, but from within by not being able to respond to the challenges, and he thought that our barbarians would come from within. And, of course, the young people with the long hair look like the Goths and the Visigoths that brought down Rome. Is there any validity in that parallel?
FRYE: I don’t know. That’s the Spengler parallel. He [Spengler] said that history consists of cultures that, like organisms, grow and flourish and then exhaust their possibilities and eventually die or at least become moribund, that is, persisting just out of habit. He draws many parallels between what he calls the decline of the West in the twentieth century of Europe and the Roman Empire—the same enormous cities and the same annihilation wars and dictatorships and the great rootless masses moving around in the population. I think that those parallels are there. It’s perhaps an aspect of history rather than the real key to history.
HARRON: But Toynbee’s refinement on Spengler was to say that if you got a universal religion out of the dying bowels of the old civilization—for example, Christianity came out of the decline of Rome—you renew your civilization.
FRYE: Yes, I think that that has a lot to be said for it. He says that there’s an internal and an external proletariat and that they combine to form the church out of which the new culture emerges.9 One trouble with the twentieth century is that we don’t really have an external proletariat; that is, the world has become a global unit. We have really a different kind of problem to consider, I think. Spengler talks about the second religiousness as a growth that takes place in the late stages of a culture or civilization.10 Certainly what he calls a second religiousness is all around us.
HARRON: A second religiousness?
FRYE: Yes, as distinct from the real age of faith in the Middle Ages, you get an age of cults. You had an enormous number of cults in the Roman Empire, of which Judaism and Christianity were at one time just two tiny splinters. You have the same variety of cults now.
HARRON: What about these crusades, like the Billy Graham crusade in which an enormous number of people gather and declare for Christ? When you check on it six months later, very few of them have actually committed themselves.
FRYE: I think that all religions have taught that anything like what the Eastern religions call enlightenment and what the Western religions call salvation is a very complex process. It involves the intellect as well as the emotions. If you have a chronic drunk saying he will never touch a drop of liquor again as long as he lives, you don’t necessarily believe what he says. There has to be quite a complex pattern of re-educating going on there before anything permanent is likely to happen.
HARRON: Do you imply that the Graham crusades, for example, whip people up into a kind of state of enthusiasm so that they are somewhat possessed?
FRYE: I think a lot of revivalism does do that and possibly his crusade does that for perhaps the majority of people who go to it. I don’t know. I haven’t been to one of his meetings. But it’s highly probable that that kind of approach to religion for most people works on a very temporary and emotional basis.
HARRON: Now the president of the United States [Jimmy Carter] is a born-again Christian. It seems that it’s the fundamentalist sects that are stronger these days than, say, the Anglo-Catholics or the Presbyterians.
FRYE: Yes. I think that that is true. It is partly the Protestant strain in American life which leads to a very heavy emphasis on the individual, and the notion of the reborn individual is, of course, a very strongly individualized conception of religion. There have always been two tendencies struggling with each other in religion. One is the tendency to order and liturgy and fixed doctrine and things which establish and structure, and then there’s the other tendency, which the Greeks have called the Dionysiac tendency, to a kind of emotional release. The word “enthusiasm” originally meant possession by a god. But of course the god was Dionysus. He was a wine god, too, which made it a little more concrete.
HARRON: But Jesus himself was really outside the church in a sense. His group was an anti-establishment faction.
FRYE: Yes they were, but almost instantly after the Ascension and the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament they start structuring the church.
HARRON: Who did this? Peter, you mean?
FRYE: Well, Peter and Paul. After all, Paul’s letters were all written, and Paul himself was dead, before the earliest Gospel appeared. So when the Gospels were written, they were written within the structure of a church that was already there.
HARRON: People are continually saying, “I believe in Jesus but not his church.” Shaw said, “I don’t believe in Crosstianity.”11
FRYE: What Shaw believed in, or said he believed in, was creative evolution, which is something else again. That’s something emerging out of nature. What that means, I suppose, is that Jesus might be regarded as an eternal person but that his institutions are mortal. That’s a comprehensible point of view, certainly.
HARRON: The book Act of God, by Charles Templeton, created a lot of stir by hinting that the bones of Jesus could be found, implying his mortality rather than his divinity.
FRYE: I once wrote in one of my books that the doctrine that Christ died is the most difficult of all Christian doctrines to disbelieve [FT, 117]. It wouldn’t bother me if the bones of Jesus were discovered, because it’s already said by Paul in the New Testament that what is raised is the spiritual body and not a natural body [1 Corinthians 15:44].
HARRON: The Catholic Church has a doctrine of transubstantiation.
FRYE: Well, that’s the bread and wine changing to the body and blood of Christ—yes.
HARRON: Is that a symbolic act?
FRYE: It’s regarded, I think, as part of the doctrine of the real presence, and it’s worked out by a conception of substance—that what appears is the spiritual substance.
HARRON: You used the word “Dionysian” to imply chaos as opposed to order. What’s the other equivalent?
FRYE: Not necessarily chaos, but something which works on the level below consciousness, which bypasses the reason and bypasses the intellect.
HARRON: What’s the other thing called then?
FRYE: It’s been called Apollonian, because of Apollo the sun-god, but I think that those two tendencies, whether you give them those names or not, have been present all through the history of religion.
HARRON: Man’s instinct and his reason?
FRYE: Well, a tendency to seek religion as a source of structure and order and a tendency to see religion as a form of emotional release.
HARRON: Is that the same thing we were talking about, that man has to go out and have a good time and the next day atone for it—the two sides of his nature?
FRYE: Well, yes, but for many people the emotional release is more an end in itself. It’s not something that necessarily alternates within the same person.
HARRON: Is this the dichotomy that people find in the two sides of their nature, the Jekyll and the Hyde? Is that a myth which has persisted?
FRYE: You do have that. But I would think that you have a lot more than two sides to human nature. I think you have a great many different sides.
HARRON: Is a myth, then, a simplification of a complex problem?
FRYE: Very often it is, yes. It could be that.
HARRON: The Dionysian festivals were religions of nature in Greece. When the young people gathered at Woodstock for the rock concerts, there was the same kind of thing. They would stay all day to listen to their gods play music. Is there a connection?
FRYE: Yes, there’s a very strong connection. Woodstock was the most obviously Dionysiac phenomenon that there’s been in modern society for a long time. Just as you have some religions that proceed entirely with revivals, so you have political movements that proceed entirely in terms of rallies. There isn’t really all that much difference between a revival and a rally. Woodstock, I think, was a rather pathetic illusion that somehow or other you could, again, break through the crust of history and get into a different way of existence altogether by a kind of emotional release. Then of course you had that horrible business afterwards with the motorcycle people.
HARRON: Altamont, the other festival?
FRYE: Altamont, yes.12
HARRON: Was that a ritual killing?
FRYE: Yes, it’s the other side of Dionysus. The bacchantes in Greece used to go into emotional ecstasies and tear up goats, but sometimes they didn’t stop with goats. You get Dionysiac movements in Nazi Germany as well. They’re not all peaceful.
HARRON: What about the revival of Nazism and the National Front in England?13 We’re getting from religion into politics, but is there that much difference in terms of ritual and myth?
FRYE: No, I don’t think so. Both religious and political affiliations tend to become ritualized very strongly. The appeal in Nazism was the rather meretricious appeal of uniforms and parades and music and bands and great massed spectacles.
HARRON: Was it a revival of pre-Christian religion?
FRYE: That was a part of it, yes. And, of course, that religion had a great deal of appeal because nobody knew anything about it. So, again, you see you weren’t being sent back to Sunday School. You could discover in it whatever you wanted.
HARRON: Did the Christian church accommodate itself to things like that as they say it did in Germany?
FRYE: It doesn’t always accommodate itself fast enough. In the Middle Ages, for example, the church put so much emphasis on structuring and ordering that things like the children’s crusade and the flagellants indicated how little care was taken for the need for emotional release in the same society. There does have to be, I think, a means provided for both impulses, because they will always be there.
HARRON: You mentioned the cult of flagellation. Isn’t that an institutionalized way of providing emotional release?
FRYE: Well, it’s not a structured and ordered way. What I’m saying really is that there are two kinds of institutions, two kinds of institutional regularizings of behaviour. The revival is no less a church meeting than a mass. It’s just that it appeals to different things.
HARRON: What about the individual tradition? For example, the Old Testament is full of prophets who dwell apart, and from a high rock they live on honey and locusts and prophesy the doom of the city. What part of the tradition is that?
FRYE: The prophets are a key element in what I spoke of before, the fact that the Biblical religion seemed to move towards a final confrontation with society. The typical function of the prophet in the Bible is to denounce society, to walk into the city and say, “Whatever you’re doing you’re doing it all wrong.” That function of the prophet as a man with independent authority who speaks with the voice of his God and yet is separate from the authority of the king or the priest is something that seems to be peculiar to the Biblical tradition.
HARRON: Professor Frye, we’ve talked about myths and rituals and the churches that were built upon them, and last time we just touched upon the individual, the loner, the visionary, and his place in the structure of society. You mentioned the Old Testament prophets whose job was to walk into the city and say, “You’re doing it all wrong.”
FRYE: That was a tradition that got more or less squeezed out of Christianity in the Middle Ages. You have other people like Savonarola who came to just as bad an end as the original Biblical prophets—mostly dead.
HARRON: He was the book burner, wasn’t he?
FRYE: He was the bonfire-of-vanities man. It wasn’t necessarily books.
HARRON: And he ended up in one himself?
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: How does a figure like William Blake come in? Naturally, I know he’s in the Christian tradition because of his drawings.
FRYE: I don’t think institutional Christianity has really ever found a place for prophetic authority as distinct from secular and spiritual authority. The prophetic authority comes very largely through people like writers, that is, the people whom you think of instinctively as prophets, people like Dostoevsky, Blake, Rimbaud, Kafka. They are people, like the original Biblical prophets, with abnormal powers. They can go into certain involuntary states of mind. Some people pursue wholeness and integration, but this kind of prophet is more likely to get himself smashed up, and there are fragments emerging from the smash that are of tremendous intensity. Those people have a kind of independent authority in modern society, I think.
HARRON: Some people would say that they have a death wish, a martyr complex.
FRYE: It’s quite possible that some of them do, though I think a person can have that and still be an authentic prophet.
HARRON: Blake relied a lot on the words of Tom Paine, or at least he’s allied to him in some way.
FRYE: He had no sympathy with Paine’s intellectual position, but he felt Paine’s resistance to the establishment in England, to the Pitt government that threw up repressive measures when the war with the French began. Blake was just as much opposed to the measures of that government as Paine was, and to that extent he sympathized with Paine.
HARRON: Was Blake considered political?
FRYE: Blake didn’t really know enough about politics to have a coherent or consistent political point of view. He said that he thought princes and parliaments were something other than human life. In Milton, on the other hand, you do have a prophetic figure who was not simply a great poet, but a person who had a long and consistent role to play in politics.
HARRON: Milton, you say, is a prophetic figure?
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: You think of him as a gentleman who was blind, who was relatively immobile, writing very long poems and then a brief thing about censorship.
FRYE: The pamphlet on censorship, Areopagitica, was about the removal of constraints on the printing press, and the general direction in which that moves, I think, is the implicit recognition that there is a source of authority coming through the printing press that doesn’t come from the court, the parliament, or the church.
HARRON: And we think of Milton as the one who paved the way for Oliver Cromwell.
FRYE: Events took their own direction in Milton’s time. Milton followed the parliamentary revolution and then, when parliament split into the Cromwellian group and the anti-Cromwellians, he went along with the Cromwellians.
HARRON: And under Cromwell you got the suppression of the theatre.
FRYE: Yes. I think that Milton was a rather typical example of an intellectual caught in a revolutionary situation. What he saw, again, was the apocalypse. He saw England as moving out from an Egypt of oppression into a promised land of future liberty. But, of course, that wasn’t the way England saw it. They simply replaced Charles I with Charles II.
HARRON: This happens every election. Someone gives us a promise of the apocalypse or the garden of Eden.
FRYE: Yes, in elections the apocalyptic hope takes the form of the donkey’s carrot. There’s bound to be something new if this other man is elected.
HARRON: So that the myths have been translated into politics but they still exist—the desire in man to find the Golden Age?
FRYE: Yes, and it’s something much deeper than desire. It’s the way man perceives, it’s something built into his consciousness, I think.
HARRON: Is that what Carl Jung was talking about?
FRYE: He was concerned with it. He would have to be, as a psychologist. He was concerned with a specific process which he called individuation, of moving from the ego-centre to the genuinely individual centre which has come to terms with the unconscious. But that’s only one of many ways of doing it.
HARRON: What was Freud’s way?
FRYE: Freud’s way, as I understand it, was to think of the ego as something in the centre of the personality fighting for its life against impulses thrusting up from the id, the subconscious, fighting also against the impossible ideals foisted on it by the superego, and trying to achieve a kind of centre of sanity in the middle of these extremes.
HARRON: He referred to religion as an illusion.
FRYE: He rather wanted to be, perhaps, a religious lawgiver himself. I don’t think it was an accident that he was fascinated by Moses.14
HARRON: So Freud thought of himself as a lawgiver, and we all think of him as a kind of prophet who had to cry in the wilderness for a time before he achieved recognition.
FRYE: Yes, but of course Moses did, too.
HARRON: The wilderness is a very strong image, as is Freud’s notion of an id and an ego and a superego. Is that a kind of cosmology of its own?
FRYE: Oh, yes, it’s the same old cosmology that’s been around since before the Book of Genesis. Man has always lived in the middle earth. That’s not Tolkien’s discovery. It’s one of the most ancient myths we have. There’s always been a world up there, symbolized by the sun and the moon and the stars, and there’s always been a world down there, which is symbolized by the underworld or the world under the sea. Man has always lived his life between the things that he’s associated with what’s up there—the ideals, the superego—and what’s down there—the id, all the sulphurous devils running around and stinking.
HARRON: So Freud in a sense was a creative genius forming his own mythology which conforms with what we’ve always believed?
FRYE: Oh, yes, and he also gave literary critics a lead on what to do with literature because he discovered, for example, what he called the Oedipus complex, and he found it in a play by Sophocles. The implication is that one of the functions of literature is to project in front of us the states of being which we act out anyway, whether we know it or not.
HARRON: Is the Oedipus myth as universal in its application as Freud implied?
FRYE: I don’t know how universal these things are. The most I would say is that I believe that it would be universally intelligible.
HARRON: Incest taboos and the problem of incest statistically nowadays make you wonder.
FRYE: Yes, I know. I doubt if there’s any one thing that’s universal. I think that these are possible relationships, because the relationship of father and mother to son is very common and wherever it arises this possible aspect of it, the desire to kill the father and enter into sexual relations with the mother, is going to be one form of it.
HARRON: And the notion of the wilderness that we talked about—forty days or forty years?
FRYE: Just as man lives in the middle world so he lives in a middle time. He lives in a state of exile between the paradise in the past and the apocalypse in the future.
HARRON: So the wilderness is really the real world, flanked on the other side by a garden, the place from where man came, to where he hopes to return?
FRYE: Yes. And he alternates between a feeling that this world that he came from and is going to return to doesn’t exist at all and is a pure illusion, and the feeling that it is in fact the only reality.
HARRON: The Book of Revelation describes a city full of precious jewels, not a garden at all. Is there a connection between the city and the garden?
FRYE: The city and the garden are the two forms of human civilization. In the Bible they’re thought of as being originally God’s invention, something supplied to man. That is, there was a city of God before the sons of Cain started building cities, and there was a garden in Eden before man started planting gardens. The city in the Book of Revelation includes a garden. It includes, as I say, the tree and the water of life. Those two forms have always haunted the human imagination as the two forms of what man wants to do with nature, how he wants to see the world. It’s a world that makes human sense.
HARRON: The present-day concept is to get out of the city, because it’s polluted, and back to the countryside that’s sometimes a wilderness.
FRYE: But that’s a very different city from a gorgeous gingerbread city that’s glowing with gold and precious stones.
HARRON: Oz?
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: We’re laughing about it, but there must be a very deep-seated urge towards it.
FRYE: Of course there is. Man builds cities out of a quite genuine vision. Cities go through a phase where they reflect something of the vision that has produced them. Then original sin or whatever takes over, and they get too big and the life and the vitality seems to go out of them. Cities still represent some of the greatest dreams and ideals. Just think of what’s associated in one’s mind with Rome or Jerusalem or Athens.
HARRON: And Blake wanted to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, so he thought in terms of the city.
FRYE: Yes, always. He identified religion with civilized life.
HARRON: Has there been a civilization without religion?
FRYE: That would depend on how you define religion, but I would say on the whole, no. Religion has to do with a bringing together. They used to derive the word from religare, meaning to pull together. I don’t know whether that’s very sound, but whether it is or not, religion is the unifying of activities around a certain focus, and I don’t think you can have human life without that.
HARRON: So that a city is in essence a unifying of activity?
FRYE: It’s one of them, yes.
HARRON: What are the other—the hearth and the home?
FRYE: The varieties of the garden, such as the farm, the park, and, yes, the hearth, the family in the middle of the city.
HARRON: What is your definition of civilization? Some people equate it with leisure, others equate it with the arts.
FRYE: I would think of it as man living in community, which is the way man starts off. I think that the human community is really something that is prior to the individual. The individual grows out of the community, not the other way around.
HARRON: And there was a sense of community when man was living in caves or even before he lived in the cave.
FRYE: Yes, there would be a very intense sense of community then because you would be hunting together for warmth and safety.
HARRON: Is that what we’re still doing?
FRYE: Yes. Every so often the old panic returns, the sense of being beset and beleaguered with dangers around us.
HARRON: Like that nuclear satellite that landed up in the Northwest Territory?15
FRYE: Yes, that’s the other side of the apocalyptic state of mind.
HARRON: Would you care to elaborate on that?
FRYE: Well, if you’re living in a cave that you’ve taken from a bear, you naturally wonder when the bear is going to come back and retake possession. Our ideas about the future seem to run on a kind of manic-depressive cycle. We have manic people talking about the Age of Aquarius, where everything is just going to be wonderful, and then we have depressive people talking about atomic bombs and the destruction of civilization.
HARRON: Your mention of Aquarius is very apt, because people say that they believe in astrology: that the period of Pisces, which is connected with Christ, is over, and now we begin the Age of Aquarius for the next two thousand years.
FRYE: I think that’s another donkey’s carrot. There were people in the time of Christ who felt very strongly that they were entering into a new age—Virgil is one of them. What happened, of course, was that they moved into an age which was partly new and partly old. There was perhaps in the formation of Christianity something which for Christians represented a decisive break with history up to that point. But the general course of the world kept on going very much the same as it had before. I think the same thing will be true when we enter the Age of Aquarius.
HARRON: What about the revival of astrology? What does it mean?
FRYE: Again, it’s an attempt to see nature in terms that make human sense. The sense of the alienation of man from nature, of nature as having all those billions of years of history and all those billions of light years in space, forms a very profoundly alienating feeling for mankind. And I guess the natural reaction against that is to try to see it once more in terms that relate to man.
HARRON: But isn’t it an attempt to see everything as being ordered by a power outside yourself so that you’re helpless?
FRYE: That would be what it was if you took the next step, but the reason for the belief in astrology, I think, is the desire to see patterns in nature that relate to humanity. After all, man used to be the centre of the universe. The whole world was made for him, and the whole of time turned on the creation of Adam and the deliverance of Adam. We very much resent being reduced to the rank of specks on a spinning mudball around a blast furnace.
HARRON: Does that account for the prevalence of the UFOs?
FRYE: I daresay it accounts for a good deal of that, yes—the feeling that there must be something way out there that’s not just empty space and endless resources for killing us but something like ourselves.
HARRON: Professor Frye, the last time we talked you used the phrase “specks on a mudball” to describe the earth and its people. I don’t know whether that was your phrase, but is that the way most people feel?
FRYE: Well, I was thinking of the emotional appeal of a universe such as we had in the Middle Ages, where the earth was at the centre of the entire universe and the sun revolved around it.
HARRON: The Ptolemaic universe.
FRYE: Yes. Now we’ve got unthinkable size and heat and distance. One can understand the worship of the sun. It seems to me a very natural human tendency. But when the sun is a blast furnace ninety million miles away it’s just as impressive as it ever was, though it’s not as worshipful as it was.
HARRON: So that Copernican revolution stopped man in his tracks?
FRYE: Well, it tended to dehumanize nature.
HARRON: The universe seems to be getting bigger, expanding. There are more and more galaxies, more and more billions of stars. Is that why people believe in UFOs? That there must be something out there?
FRYE: I daresay. I think we have a feeling of being alienated and isolated by all that empty space and a need to populate it somehow with something which is humanly intelligible. Just as you have movies like Star Wars that talk about distant galaxies as being united by beings that look remarkably like Hollywood actors, so you have myths about unidentified flying objects that, again, tend to indicate that there is something way out there which is like ourselves.
HARRON: Do you think it’s presumptuous to think that we alone of all the billions of planets are inhabited by thinking beings?
FRYE: I daresay it is presumptuous. It’s one of those notions you can’t do anything about. If planets on distant galaxies are inhabited by intelligent beings, that’s so far something our technology doesn’t permit us to do anything with. I would think that if they are more intelligent than we are, we probably couldn’t see them.
HARRON: Do you think people accept the Christian myths of the world today? If you asked ten people on the street today if they believed in personal immortality, how many of the ten would say they believed in it, do you think?
FRYE: I would be less interested in what people say they believe than in how people behave. I think a genuine belief is an axiom of behaviour. If you want to know what a man believes you watch him, you see what he does. What he really believes will be what his actions show that he believes. A lot of people who order their lives on assumptions of resurrection and immortality would say no if you asked them if they believed in these things.
HARRON: Some people say, well, if you could have a nice existence on a cloud with a harp, why not go to it right now, instead of living with all this sleet and snow and slush.
FRYE: That would take in another part of the mythology, which is that the life has to be completed in some form on this plane first. In other words, I think that the mythology of the cloud and the harp is a little insubstantial to suggest suicide to very many people.
HARRON: But the mythology of the cloud and the harp does persist, doesn’t it? People don’t want to think of God as a gas or as a principle of gravity. They do see that kind of green-pastures, Santa Claus–figure.16
FRYE: Oh, yes. That is what Blake kept saying—that the form of reality is a human form, and that the huge mechanism of buzzing stars and planets in the sky is somehow or another not real. It’s what we’re conditioned to see, but it’s not what’s really there.
HARRON: And even in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the visitors from outer space are sort of caricatures of ourselves. We tend to make God in our own image. Is that true?
FRYE: Man can only make things in his own image. He’s stuck with that. There’s nothing else he has material for.
HARRON: I was thinking of Hieronymus Bosch and Salvador Dali, who do strange kinds of things.
FRYE: Yes, but Hieronymus Bosch is creating a world of fantasy and of monsters, at least his paintings include that. But they’re fantasies and monsters that spring out of the human unconscious and to that extent are quite recognizably human creations.
HARRON: What about the validity of dreams? Are a lot of our myths and rituals constructed in our subconscious life through dreams?
FRYE: Oh, yes. Dreams have a curious cipher-like quality. They don’t seem to mean very much to the dreamer even. It’s very difficult to interpret one’s own dreams, yet they do have very strong analogies to works of art which do come partly out of the unconscious as well, and that is probably why Plato spoke of art as the dream for awakened minds.17
HARRON: I once had to work with a psychiatrist who couldn’t get me to free-associate. He used my dreams to make the analysis, and it was amazing some of the things he found.
FRYE: Well, they’re specially trained for that, of course.
HARRON: It’s a kind of archetypal world that exists in our sleep.
FRYE: That’s what I mean when I say we possess these mythological structures within ourselves.
HARRON: Both awake and asleep?
FRYE: Both awake and asleep.
HARRON: I don’t know who said it, but somebody has said that art is the product of our dreams.
FRYE: I think that’s a little oversimplified. Dreams are perhaps the product of an artistic impulse in ourselves, but it’s really the other way around. Man is very deeply and very profoundly and centrally a creative being, and dreams are one of the things he creates. His deeper and more central creations take in the waking world as well as the fantasy world.
HARRON: Medieval craftsmen built those incredible cathedrals and spent their lifetime worshipping God through putting stone buildings together. Is all art an attempt to do that same thing?
FRYE: All art is an attempt to transmute life into a creative process, yes.
HARRON: As when Hamlet said, “Tell my story” [5.2.349]. Is there a need to get it outside and let other people see, so it won’t be wasted?
FRYE: Oh, yes. The thing that’s unsatisfactory about the dream is, as I say, that it’s unintelligible even to the dreamer himself, whereas a work of art is a mode of communication, and communication is a way of keeping the community articulate.
HARRON: Now we are taught that there was the Middle Ages which was given over to a worship of God through art and all of a sudden there was a change. Columbus discovered America, and Copernicus said the sun was the centre of the universe, and then all of the paintings were about man. I’m sure that’s a tremendously erroneous simplification.
FRYE: Well, yes. I don’t think the Middle Ages had a very strong sense of art as a thing in itself. They were craftsmen who were employed by the church or the aristocracy for special reasons. And they built churches and castles because that was what the market was for.
HARRON: Was there an increase of individualism when people decided to paint dukes instead of doges?
FRYE: Yes, when the cultural perspective changed from the big feudal systems—of overlords and the hierarchy going up to the king—when that changed to the prince, the courtiers surrounding the prince, and the rather small nation, often just a city-state as in Italy, you get a much more concrete and immediate sense of individuality because your prince was somebody you saw in front of you all the time.
HARRON: I keep trying to relate it to today, because today people seem to be so confused. But is that the way they’ve always been?
FRYE: Yes, they’ve always been confused, but I think, again, it’s simply a matter of numbers—that millions of people are more confused than thousands of people.
HARRON: We went through a period of, I suppose, hedonism. The pendulum of the counter-revolution seems to be swinging back to self-denial and fundamentalist religion.
FRYE: Yes, hedonism is something built into the human animal, and it will always be there.
HARRON: It’s cyclic, like heat in other animals?
FRYE: It can be, yes. The other, the tendency to austerity and going off to practise Zen and so forth, is built into the human psyche, too.
HARRON: Zen is the religion of the absurd, it seems. I don’t mean that it’s an absurd religion, but it worships the absurdity of the universe.
FRYE: It doesn’t worship the absurdity. What it does is to try to present the world in the form in which you habitually see it as absurd, so that you break it down through absurdity. And then what you see is what’s really there, which has been hidden from you by your previous conditioning.
HARRON: You read about pupils before the master, and the master asks a question. The pupil who answers correctly is the one that broke his slipper over the master’s head.
FRYE: Well, the general idea, I think, is that your mind runs on coasters, it runs on grooves, it runs out of habit and mechanical impetus. The thing is just to derail it, smash it, stop the habitual movements of the mind. Then in that moment, the habitual way of perceiving the world falls away, and what is really there takes its place. You get similar things in the West.
HARRON: You get the visionaries, like Van Gogh, and the pioneers who suddenly make you see things in a new way and have a very difficult time. They become almost ritual sacrifices.
FRYE: Yes, they often do.
HARRON: Is there a genuine, backlash counter-revolution happening?
FRYE: I get the impression of a great many people making waves in all sorts of directions, and I would be hard put to say that there was one predominant tendency at present to the exclusion of others. I think that for almost every tendency you could mention there is an opposite tendency somewhere else.
HARRON: You’ve written so many things in so many directions. You’ve done an Anatomy of Criticism, you’ve done a study of William Blake, you’ve talked about nationalism in art—what are you working on now?
FRYE: I’m working on a large, complex book on the Bible and its relationship to Western culture generally. It came out of my belief, which I mentioned earlier, that man perceives, creates, and acts from inside a certain kind of mythological framework. And the structure of that framework, I think, has been more completely and fully set out in the Bible than anywhere else.
HARRON: Is it possible to understand Western culture without understanding the Bible?
FRYE: Not to me, no. I don’t understand how it would be.
HARRON: And yet so many people go through life now without reading the Bible.
FRYE: Yes. And that means, for example, not having much notion of what’s going on in English literature, or what a book like Paradise Lost is all about.
HARRON: Or even Shakespeare?
FRYE: Or Shakespeare. Shakespeare quotes the Bible in every play he writes.
HARRON: But people are aware of the Bible even though they’ve never read it. How does that happen?
FRYE: Partly through allusion and quotation. Even ballad writers, like Bob Dylan, are very uninhibited in their references to the Bible. People pick up a good deal of this out of the air in spite of themselves. It’s the same way if you were studying Islamic culture; you’d have to begin with the Koran. It would be silly if you didn’t. It’s possible that you might find people in Islamic countries who didn’t know the Koran, but they would hear so many quotations from it and so many phrases from it that it would get into their consciousness somehow.
HARRON: Is there a book at the centre of every culture?
FRYE: Well, there are books that are very central to the culture, but I think that the particular progression of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has a peculiar relationship to a single sacred book.
HARRON: And that’s the repository of our myths?
FRYE: It shows us how our view of the universe is structured. That’s the way I think of it.
HARRON: And whether you read it or not you’re structured the same way?
FRYE: Oh, yes. You’re structured the same way and you act out the way your view of things conditions you to act. But I think that if you did study the Bible you would become aware of your own mythological conditioning, and that would give you more freedom to act within it.
HARRON: So the atheist and the agnostic, against their wills or independent of their wills, are following the myths and rituals?
FRYE: I think they’re acting out the same mythological patterns. In fact, if you read somebody like Sartre, for example, you can see that very clearly. He is simply taking over one after another of the traditional Christian conceptions and translating them into a secular context.
HARRON: We think of Sartre as the existential philosopher. It doesn’t matter what happened yesterday, it’s now. And so many young people talk about the now generation. Do your own thing. It doesn’t matter about the future or the past. I imagine that’s the cause of a lot of drug addiction. People say it doesn’t matter. They don’t believe in an apocalypse or a golden age.
FRYE: One of the difficulties with the now cult is that there’s no such time as the present, because the instant you have said “present,” of course, it has joined the past. So that it’s really a completely phony and illogical way of looking at the world. What you’re in is a continuum of the past going into the future, and you’re drawn backwards through it facing the past towards the future that you don’t know.
HARRON: You’re dragged backwards through the future facing the past?
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: That sounds like an astronaut going to the moon.
FRYE: Or going in the opposite direction, like Jonah.
HARRON: The myth of Jonah—it’s biologically impossible for a man to be inside a whale’s belly.
FRYE: Not if the whale is also the sea that he fell into and if it is also the leviathan, the world of time and space we’re all imprisoned in, and if it is also the heathen kingdom of Nineveh he was sent to prophesy to. That’s the way the mythological mind works.
HARRON: Is that what Moby-Dick is all about?
FRYE: Oh, yes. And Melville goes out of his way to tell you that that’s what it’s about.
HARRON: There’s a Norse myth that tells you if you are pulling on that fish, you’ll pull up the whole world.
FRYE: There’s a story that the god Thor, who was the strongest god in the world, couldn’t pull the fish in because it was the world-girdling serpent, Leviathan.
HARRON: But Jonah got out of that fish.
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: Is that a resurrection myth?
FRYE: Yes, because we’re all born inside the leviathan.
HARRON: And he was in the whale for three days?
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: Which is the amount of time it took the Christ to reappear.
FRYE: Yes, and Jesus accepted the story of Jonah as a prototype of his own death and resurrection [Matthew 12:40].
HARRON: Is it possible to study myth? I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about anybody.
FRYE: Yes, it is, because myths can only exist in some kind of verbal form. They sooner or later become texts, and they can be studied like other texts.
HARRON: And obviously it’s worth studying?
FRYE: Well, as I say, the advantage of studying anything that deals with myth, like literature, is that it does help you to become aware of your own mythological conditioning. Otherwise, you are simply acting out states of mind without knowing why. Just as it’s beneficial in this age of post-Freudian psychology to become aware of some of the things that are going on in your subconscious, so I think it’s worthwhile becoming aware of some of the things that are shaping your own courses of action and belief.
HARRON: Would you recommend a book to start this process?
FRYE: If I knew of such a book, I wouldn’t be trying to write one.
HARRON: I await with great pleasure your new book.