Held 25 April 1978
Published in CEA Critic, 42, no. 2 (January 1980): 32–42. Dated by introductory remarks in the Critic. The present text is largely indebted to the re-edited version in WGS, 195–210, which makes sense of a number of misheard names and words. The CEA Critic, the organ of the College English Association of the United States, was published at Texas A&M University. When Frye visited that university on 25 April 1978 to give a lecture, he was interviewed by Elizabeth Cowan, Gregory Cowan, Richard Costa, and David Stewart, all members of the English department, on the application of his theories to classroom teaching. The whole issue of the Critic was devoted to Frye.
[E. Cowan begins by describing the books upon which the discussion will be based: Literature: Uses of the Imagination, a series of thirteen anthologies published by Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich in 1972–74 with Frye as supervisory editor. Designed to be used in teaching literature from approximately grades 7 to 12, they organized their selections not chronologically but structurally, so as to provide an ever-deepening view of the literary universe, with its recurring imagery, character types, and narrative patterns.1 Cowan concludes by asking Frye, “Considering the demands on your time, your academic and scholarly obligations, et cetera, what was your reason for agreeing to do this series of textbooks?”]
FRYE: There are several subordinate reasons, one being that Bill Jovanovich is a person with a very compelling personality, and after I got a few letters from him saying things like, “Will the real Northrop Frye please stand up,” I had to do something to respond. But the real reason I got interested in it is that my approach to literature has always been a teaching approach—I have always been a teacher rather than a scholar; my books have been teachers’ books.
In a way, I really didn’t believe in my own theories until I found a way in which they could be taught to young students, and I began to consult people who are experienced in elementary and high-school teaching. They said first that the place to begin this kind of thing is about grade 9. Since then I’ve been suspecting that one should keep pushing it back further and further, that perhaps the right place to begin it is pre-kindergarten because actually the principle on which everything turns is the principle of listening to a story. It seems to me that that’s fundamental—what Wordsworth calls wise passiveness, a fundamental suspending of judgment which we all have up to age three.2Then we go to school and we lose it, and we spend all the rest of our lives trying to get it back again. The centre of my biggest and most difficult book, the Anatomy of Criticism, is actually a very simple centre. It’s organized around the principle that there are four fundamental story types and that it’s possible to get the general characteristics of these story types very early. It’s of course possible to say that that is a very oversimplified view of literature. The multiplication tables are a very simplified approach to integral calculus, but you have to start somewhere.
G. COWAN: I’d like to know how you applied that perception of literature to this series of literature for children. It seems to me an incredible accomplishment and task, and I wonder how you went about that.
FRYE: Actually I did most of it by leaving it to some highly competent people. Will Jewkes got the point very quickly that he carried out by himself. Then there were other books, like Wish and Nightmare, that were done by a man who was vice-president at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and his wife.3 They were both ex-students of mine, and they also understood very clearly the main principles involved. All I had to do was to explain what I wanted done and then leave them to it, because they did understand the central intuition.
G. COWAN: How clear were you about what you wanted? How did you achieve clarity about that goal for this series?
FRYE: About a year after the Anatomy of Criticism was published, a very old and well-loved friend, who was also a distinguished Canadian poet, came into my office. After telling me how slow and stupid he was and how long it took him to get acquainted with the thing, he opened the Anatomy of Criticism, and it fell open at the page where I was describing what I call the circle of mythoi in romance, irony, tragedy, and comedy. And he said, “If you can establish that, then the book is made.” At that point, I realized that that really was the centre of the book. And that at the centre was what Jung and his cohorts called the mandala, a circular diagram that anybody at any age could be exposed to. The difficulty from there is in trying to circumvent the lazy teacher who wants to present this as a substitute for the experience of literature, and to try to reach the teacher who realizes that this is more like the lens of field glasses, so that you can see through what you’re experiencing.
COSTA: Most of us who teach literature have some problem at some time or other with form and content. We find quickly that students are less interested in how something works than what is going on: in other words, less interested in formalism or form than they are in what the story or poem is about. I would like to ask you if, behind your eleven volumes, there wasn’t the idea that this teaching of patterns will force the teacher to get the student reading and will hit the student where he is most sensitive in content and material?
FRYE: Yes, and I think that the normal reader who does read, as you say, for content—for the plot—doesn’t need too much encouragement to go along with that. That’s what drives him to reading in the first place, what sustains his interest. The thing is, while he is doing that, he is building up a systematic learning process just as he is when he is reading one book after another in political science or in the physical sciences. The difference is that, for the most part, he doesn’t know that, so he tends to think of literature as reading one book after another, and one story after another, even though he does realize, if he picks up a detective story, that he has read this type of story many times before. So that the function of the teacher is to bring out the continuous process which is actually a part of what he has been doing without being fully conscious of it.
COSTA: I’d like to read a sentence from the review Elizabeth quoted, which I think is very perceptive: “To students, all sound criticism must begin in close scrutiny of the text. The problem, as we all know, is that human energy is finite and often cannot absorb details and broad perspectives at the same time.”4 If the student is involved in the teacher’s presentation of these books as a kind of an organized interrelated whole is there any possible danger that the student will not be able to handle the large concepts, or perhaps that he may lose both the large concept and, in trying to work the large concept, will lose himself or the smaller concept of each individual work?
FRYE: Of course, there’s no critical method that can be foolproof, and as I say, you always have to circumvent the teacher who is an inspired teacher in reverse—always teaching the wrong things instead of the right things. I think that the word “concept” might be a little misleading in that context: I’m not sure that they are really concepts. I think that they are really illustrative patterns. It’s a matter of seeing a picture rather than of understanding a conception. The principle is that a picture is worth a thousand words. Perhaps one might say that a diagram like this may focus many thousand words and perhaps be in the long run a much simpler operation.5 I remember that as an undergraduate at college I had to read Thomas Hardy’s novels and was always having to pass examinations on Thomas Hardy’s conception of fate. That again was a large concept hovering around the shadows of Thomas Hardy’s novels. Of course, Thomas Hardy didn’t have a concept of fate. What he had was a technique of writing stories in a certain tragic formula. If one goes for that essential diagram rather than for the larger concept, one actually simplifies what is in front of him.
STEWART: You said children see literature one way until they’re three or four and then they go to school and something happens [p. 401, above; cf. WE, 438], and that does seem to be a widespread phenomenon in this country and Canada, too. It is not so widespread in parts of the world. Apparently children arrive at age ten or fifteen still liking literature.
FRYE: That hits right in the bull’s-eye, and if I had the answer to it, I’d be a very useful member of society. I was actually asked the same question many years ago by an inspector of schools in Ontario who said in grade 4 nearly all the children are enthusiastic about poetry, and in the adult world hardly anybody bothers to read it. I think that one of the things that happens is the pressure of a technological society. There is the pressure of the vast masses of verbiage written in prose—or what passes for prose—and a certain sense of panic about having to cover all that. The thing about reading poetry is that you cannot read it properly as long as you have a panic about time, about the ticking of the clock. The rhythm of poetry is something that breaks right through the rhythm of time, and that kind of detachment—which is leisure in the very best sense of the word—is extraordinarily difficult to attain in contemporary civilization, where we have this subcutaneous sense of panic about time every moment of our lives. And I think that, perhaps, is as near to an answer as I can get to what happens. You drop out of poetry as soon as you drop out of the child’s timeless world.
STEWART: There is apparently a discussion going on about whether there is such a thing as children’s literature. Some say there are books specifically for children. Some say there aren’t: there are just good books—some read by children, some not. Where do you come out on that?
FRYE: I think perhaps there is such a thing as children’s literature, and there is such a thing as a book aimed at a specific age group, that is, allowing for the fact that there is an enormous variety of human beings. It may be true, ideally, that the greatest children’s books are those that really make no difference between the child reader and the adult reader, such as Alice in Wonderland. And there are bad children’s books which are actually addressed to adult readers under the pretence of addressing children.
At the same time, I think there is a natural sequence in one’s reading. And this is one of the reasons why I attach so much importance to the subject of continuity in the reading process and in realizing that you are reading the same convention, the same story type, over and over again. Some ways of telling a story can get very complex, such as the later novels of Henry James, which are certainly not children’s literature, and yet they do follow the same formulas as stories that are. The same thing is true of poetry. The poetry can be addressed to children as long as the teacher understands that poetry has a very immediate, a very primitive connection with dancing and singing. The very subtle poems one gets in Wallace Stevens, again, are not poetry for children. But there is such a thing as a sequence that is characteristic of the eager, intelligent child who is always leaping ahead of what is supposed to be his age group.
G. COWAN: I would like to know whether young people are closer to the mythic experience or are more receptive to responding to that than adults are. You suggested that living in the timeless world of children contributes in that and in other ways to making them responsive to the mythic experience.
FRYE: Yes, I think that adults get away from the central function of words. You have this [writing on board; cf. GC, 57–8/75–6]—A—as the structure of words, whatever it is. It may be a poem, or a newspaper, or a textbook on gardening, but it consists of words. When you’re reading, you are simultaneously trying to do two things. You’re trying to link the words together into a pattern, and at the same time there is a world outside which you are trying to connect these words with. That is, you are continually remembering in practice what all these words mean. When you do that, you’re looking for the meaning of the words as something outside what you’re reading. If you’re reading something in a language you don’t know and have to look up every word in the dictionary, you can see that the source of this kind of meaning is outside what you’re actually reading. So that you have really two directions of attention, and they both go on at the same time, no matter what you’re reading, always.
The difference is that, at a certain point, you begin to suspect in some things you’re reading that there is a kind of pattern formatting itself here corresponding to the pattern there. And, if that is true, then what you’re reading is descriptive, and its intention is not literary. The intention is to set up a verbal pattern corresponding to a body of phenomena outside, and that brings in the criterion of truth because truth means correspondence of the verbal pattern with the pattern outside. What you’re reading is true if it’s a satisfactory verbal replica of what you want to know about. But if you are attending primarily to the inner structure of words, then the meaning of that is primarily a literary one, and instead of a narrative which tells you about something outside, you get a self-contained narrative, which is what I mean by the word “myth.”
If you look at the history of language, you will see that poetry always comes first. You have no society so primitive that it doesn’t produce poetry. But prose is always a very much later development. So that what language was first of all created for and what words still do most powerfully and above all, is hang together. It’s much more important that they should hang together than that they should be true descriptively. And that is something the child understands. He can keep repeating words to himself and get a terrific kick out of doing so even if they don’t make any sense because he knows what T.S. Eliot knows: that making sense, truth, is the burglar’s piece of meat to shut off the watch dog.6 To that extent the young person, the child particularly, has the capacity to respond to the directness of the mythical experience, the self-contained verbal experience. And I think that that is encouraged by things like the development of film. I think of all the arts, film has an extraordinary immediacy for bringing out the essential and symbolic integrity of the story, of what you’re reading. And I’ve noticed that among the students that I’ve been teaching over the last forty years, to the extent that they change at all, they have taken the mythical experience more and more for granted—something that I find very encouraging.
STEWART: Can you accommodate persuasive language in your diagram?
FRYE: I think that in the history of language you get things arranged the way the holy temple in Jerusalem was. That is, you have a holy of holies in the middle, which is poetry, that is, words arranged centrifugally in their most powerful and direct immediacy. And then there’s the outer court for the Gentiles and the unbelievers, which Jesus called the den of thieves. This is the world of descriptive prose where words are encountering the outside world. In between comes the middle area of rhetoric or oratory. And in rhetoric or oratory, what you’re doing is using the figurative resources of poetry, that is, alliteration, assonance, simile, and metaphor, in order to draw your audience into a closer unity. And so oratory, which is one of the means of holding society together by words, is something which comes in between the poetic, which is disinterested, and the descriptive. That is why in Shakespeare’s day, for example, they went to school and were trained in rhetoric—because most of the people going to school were clergymen or lawyers. In either case, they would need some training in oratory, but rhetoric was also admirable training for the poet. That’s one of the reasons why it was a great age of poetry.
COSTA: As recently as the class today, I had difficulty about feeling right in using the word “archetype.” I know that Jung uses it in one sense; you in the Anatomy of Criticism use it in a sense related to Jung’s. Could you explain the crucial meaning of archetype in Anatomy of Criticism?
FRYE: The word “archetype” is Platonic in its origin. Plato used it—or at least the Neoplatonists used it—to mean the forming, creative principles of a work, and in that sense it was used in a great deal of traditional criticism as late as the eighteenth century.7 When I used the term, I used it because it had been a traditional term in the criticism of literature, because so much of our traditional criticism in literature has been Platonic and Neoplatonic.
I didn’t really realize at the time how much Jung had cornered the field with his use of archetype in his own highly idiosyncratic sense. Jung is a psychologist whose private myth is a myth of individuation, where you start out with the ego and you end up with the individual, which is the same thing, only much profounder. And when you move from the ego to the individual, a number of autonomous forces are let loose in the psyche, and these he calls archetypes. He knows how to use illustrative material from literature in such a way as to suggest that the whole of literature is a gigantic allegory of the Jungian individuation process. Well, that’s all right—that’s his business. It’s his own use of archetype; it’s not mine.
I’m trying to use it in its traditional Platonic way as something which is what you might call the instrument of continuous creation. That is, in practice it is the repeating unit in literary experience. To give a minor example: there is a ritual in Mediterranean religion about the elegy of a dying god—Adonis—and invariably, some red or purple flower was thought to spurt from the blood of the dying god. That turns up in the earliest Greek hymns to the death of Adonis, and it keeps turning up in all pastoral elegies—Milton’s Lycidas has the hyacinth, in the same way. Then you have Whitman, who theoretically wants to turn his back on archetypes and do something new and more democratic. But, being a genuine poet instead of a bad theorist, he also wrote an elegy on the death of Lincoln, and the lilac just turns up automatically.8 It’s got to—it’s the only thing that fits. Similar red and purple flowers keep turning up in Eliot and Dylan Thomas and so forth, and will keep turning up as long as there are red flowers and people die prematurely. That’s what I mean by an archetype—a unit which repeats from one work of literature to another and helps to establish the continuity we bring to the process.
G. COWAN: There is a lot of talk about a crisis in literacy. Do you think there is such a thing?
FRYE: I hope so. I think there’s always a crisis in literacy. I don’t think there will be a strong social force getting serious about the humanities unless they have their backs to the wall, and I think the humanities always have their backs to the wall. The reason—I think—is what Ezra Pound got so exercised about, his conception of Usura. Once the moral, religious, and political standards and values of a society begin to loosen or disintegrate, the first sign of it is always the debasing of value, debasing the currency of words. It’s the moral of George Orwell’s 1984. If you want to smash human freedom, the first thing you have to do is smash language, because people will always be free as long as they have the words to form ideas freely. And that’s Plato’s answer—if you want to abolish freedom, that’s the way to do it. Consequently, if you want to keep freedom, that’s what you have to preserve. The teaching of literature is a militant activity. It’s carried on in the teeth of ignorance and stupidity and prejudice.
A STUDENT: We learn to recognize the conventions of narrative, the conventions of poetry, by reading. By reading a lot, we learn to see what patterns are used in the works. Criticism—that is, the formal procedure of criticism—seems to be an attempt to approximate this procedure in a formal way. In classes we try to teach criticism, that is, an attention to the text, the patterns of the text. It’s often at that point that we find the hardest going. What is the relationship between criticism as a conscious process of reading and pattern acquisition as an unconscious process?
FRYE: Well, there are two or three things there. One is that the sense of continuity I’ve suggested is a largely unconscious sense that you carry on in the sequence of things that you’re reading; consequently, the critical process has something to do with making you more conscious, aware, of that continuity. If, for example, you are trying to teach a Shakespeare play to a twelve-year-old who would much rather look at a play on television, I should think that the way to establish contact there is to get him to tell you about the play on television, and then indicate the similarities in the conventions between Shakespearean comedy and what he saw on television the night before. It is the structural similarities that seem to be the business of the teacher in that context—that are the real concerns of criticism—rather than to set up a civil war of values within literature itself, saying this is good for you, and this, God help you, is what you like. That is one thing which is involved.
Another is the protest of many intelligent students that it will kill a poem to analyse it. I understand that and I sympathize with it, but again the end of teaching literature is not to confront the student with the object over there as something he is to look at and admire. In the long run, what is taught is to be possessed by the student, and there has to be some death and rebirth process going on while the work of literature dies as something out there and then passes into the student to reappear in his inside. So that if it kills a poem to analyse it, that’s not too bad a thing as long as it revives in the student’s own possession of the work of literature. That’s a difficult thing for a teacher to accomplish. You need a teacher with a strong sense of the end of literary teaching, and a student with good will, which fortunately most students do have. Then there is the possibility of reconciling the dilemma you speak of.
E. COWAN: I’m struck by the irony of the contrast between your reputation as being extremely erudite and the difficulty of your books, on the one hand, and the simplicity of your ideas which are beautifully easy to understand in this series, on the other. You’ve just said this afternoon that they are simple ideas to grasp. Does that strike you as ironic?
FRYE: I don’t know. It’s the irony of the creative process generally. One of the things a critic has to do is to reflect the characteristics of literature as he finds it, and I think you find in the greatest of the arts—in the music of Bach or the poetry of Dante—extremely complex means used to arrive at an end of massive simplicity. The critic has to catch fire from what is after all the practice of the greatest artists and do the best he can in his own field in the same way. The trick, of course, is to keep one’s vision fixed on the end, which is a simple end. That is why I said in the beginning in response to your opening question that I’ve always felt that I could hardly believe in my own theories until I could figure out a way in which they could be taught to very young people of very limited literary experience.
STEWART: There’s a contradiction between your sense of the chronological age of the student or child for whom certain kinds of stories are appropriate, and your thematic approach. It seems to me you have chronology going one way, and you’ve got theme going the other way, the implication being that the difference between an adult story and a child story is only complication—formal complication. Is that a clear statement?
FRYE: Yes, apart from native suspicion about any sense of the word “only,” I think you’re probably right. The important distinction between a very difficult, complex story, like Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, and something much simpler, like Jane Eyre, which is very close to fairy tale, is very largely one of complication of the means. Sorry, I missed the point of contradiction.
STEWART: Thematic approach versus the chronological approach, where you set up stories in terms of the age of the mind that is receiving them.
FRYE: Yes, that kind of chronology. It’s just a matter—a very pragmatic matter—of selecting, given the age or the taste and preference of the people that you are teaching. There’s a great variety of books on the shelf in front of you and you feel that maybe this one would be the right one to use. So it’s only to that extent one applies a chronological sequence.
COSTA: One of those wonderful coincidences: Did any of you see The Magic Flute last night? I had just read for class the tail end of your 1951 article—and a review about it—which closes with an analysis of comedy and tragedy and you set up categories.9 I didn’t fully understand them, but seeing The Magic Flute and putting them together, I feel that I understand perfectly now what you were talking about, because The Magic Flute illustrated the vegetable world in the comic vision as a tree of life—the rose, the lotus; the animal world in the comic vision as a community of domesticated animals—lamb, the flock of sheep, the gentler birds; and then the human world. The qualities of the archetype of comedy were gorgeously and vividly illustrated.
FRYE: That was put on not long ago in Toronto, and I remember reading the review of The Magic Flute in a Toronto newspaper where the disgruntled reviewer said the damn thing’s all about symbolism. Then he went on to say, “No wonder it seems to be one of the favourite operas of Northrop Frye.”10 There again is the difference between the complexity of the meanings and the tremendous simplicity of what is actually being portrayed. The Magic Flute is a fairy tale and is comprehensible to anybody who’ll listen to a fairy tale.
G. COSTA: I have a playfully impertinent question. I think everybody who’s been exposed to Anatomy of Criticism has been surprised by it and delighted by what you accomplished, and has been continually surprised and delighted by other things you accomplished. My playfully impertinent question is: What has surprised you about what you’ve done?
FRYE: I suppose what surprises one is the thing which I quote from the experience of the poets themselves. The poets themselves always say that they are not making or shaping their poems. They feel much more like mothers from whom some kind of independent life is coming out and taking shape. Eliot talks about the poet as a catalyst who’s just there. Keats says the poet has no identity, and so on.11 And in my own way I think I’ve felt the same thing emerging. The first thing I say in Anatomy is that the book forced itself on me when I was trying to write something else—a kind of unwanted pregnancy. And eventually one realizes that the emerging form of life has its own independence and its own individuality. At whatever level that occurs, there’s always some kind of mystery.
E. COWAN: What are you working on now?
FRYE: Well, I’m in labour with a huge book on the Bible and its relationship to Western culture. That seems to be the sort of thing I have been in the one sense revolving around all my life, and in the other sense avoiding all my life. I suppose now that I’ve got a tenure appointment and I’m very close to retirement I can afford to grapple with it.
A STUDENT: I’m interested in what you said earlier about the necessity of preserving language if people are to be free. It seems to me that language is under tremendous pressure these days not merely from people who are ignorant of its rules, but also from people who feel that language needs to be changed amid desirable social change. Of course, government and advertising exert their own pressures on language. It seems, too, that English teachers are fighting a sometimes not too successful battle to preserve English. What do you see as the English teacher’s opportunity and responsibility here? In other words, what particularly do you think it is important to have saved? And can language bend without endangering the possibility of free thought?
FRYE: A very good question. Again, I say the person who has an adequate answer to that question would have the answer to just about anything one could ask. I think that the greatest enemy of language, and therefore the greatest enemy of a free society, is using language with a doubling, blinding, twisting, weasel-like kind of ambiguity. This is essentially a debasing of rhetoric, because the function of oratory is to address a group of people and pull them into a tighter group. I think the Americans just after a terrible bloody civil war felt more pulled into a unity by something like the Gettysburg Address. That’s an example of the legitimate social use of oratory. But there’s also a kind of rhetoric which regards its audience as some kind of enemy outside it. So people say you should try to use words more precisely, give them better definitions. Of course, that only applies to a certain kind of clarity.
The poetic approach to words can make a functional use of ambiguity, and what it seeks is not just precision but precision in company with power and with intensity. Once you have heard words used with genuine power and intensity, you can never again for the rest of your life pretend that you’ve not heard them used in that way. That’s the voice of authority, and that’s the kind of authority that never detracts from the dignity of anyone who assents to it. That, I think, is what the teacher of English has to present in Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth—the use of a precision which has that power and intensity, that voice of authority behind it, because the authority is that of humanity itself.
E. COWAN: One final question. Once you and I were talking about what we would order if we were ordering our last meal, and you said you would order dry cereal so that you wouldn’t mind dying. If this were to be the last time that you talked to an audience like this, what would be your final words to future teachers of literature and to present teachers of English?
FRYE: I suppose I’ve been saying that what I’m particularly interested in is in establishing the continuity of reading for the student and in breaking out the creative process of literature itself. That means that all depends on encouraging a habit of reading both in the teacher and in the students the teacher works with. There are two kinds of habit. There is the mechanical habit which you keep on doing because you don’t know how to stop. There’s also the practice habit, the repetition which you have to go through when you’re learning a language or learning to play the piano. I think that the last thing I would say to teachers is to love literature. That is not, as I think of it, a sentimental or soft focus, because it seems to me that love is a constant source of new discoveries in the thing or the person that you love. To say “love literature” is an exhortation; some may object that you can’t be commanded or exhorted to love; but I don’t think that’s true. Love is the focusing of the creative power within yourself in order to direct it upon others and to create a new kind of society out of your relation to them. That would be my last answer. The next thing would be the dry cereal.