Conducted May or early June 1979
Translated by Nella Cotrupi from “Ho cercato di rompere le croste dello storicismo,” Tuttolibri (Turin), 9 June 1979. Interviewer Claudio Gorlier was a professor of English at the University of Turin; he refers to Frye’s having been in Milan, 14–16 May.
GORLIER: The role of history is one of the most debated aspects of your theoretical framework. This is especially so in a country where historicism and the historical approach are still very much in evidence. Can you comment on this?
FRYE: I don’t know much about the historical approach to criticism in Italy. When I attended university, there was a strong historical slant to literary criticism, especially at a very mechanical level. In other words, a literary-historical perspective emerged which could be reduced in substance to the proposition that one author came after another, and that therefore one had to examine the influences that predecessors had on an author and so on. I broke away from this approach, and I want you to note that even the English criticism of the twentieth century that was most divergent and “New,” say that of William Empson, was not entirely free of this hold. My appeal for a typological approach that follows neither a rigidly chronological structure, nor a limitation to specific cultural domains, was, in fact, an attempt to break out of this shell.
GORLIER: What about the historic “immobility” of your perspective?
FRYE: I don’t think you can speak about fixity or immobility. The models are recycled and reshaped according to the historical context. The English sixteenth century, for example, can use an archetype according to the “fluid” paradigm of romance with its adventures and actions typical of poetic or dramatic types of the dominant, aristocratic culture. On the other hand, in other narratives of the same period, emerging from the rising middle class, these will be transposed to a realistic level. A few centuries later, narrative is given over to the now dominant notions of the middle class, as this level reaches its peak of articulation.
GORLIER: Can you say the same about Shakespeare?
FRYE: Of course. Take, for instance, The Winter’s Tale and see how certain models are taken up and utilized. Here the same type of verbal analysis could be adopted. One of the most frequently used words in the text, “grace,” has different values depending on the transformation of the archetype.
GORLIER: So, these models, these archetypes, pre-exist platonically?
FRYE: In some senses, yes. They are linked to myth, to ritual; they are constants that then undergo transformations, that intertwine and replicate.
GORLIER: Do you think, then, that going from one archetype to another we eventually arrive at God, at a fixed universe? Some have suggested that you are actually doing theology.
FRYE: I think this is too rigid an interpretation. I realize that theology enters into my work. But I am very well aware of when it does and does not.
GORLIER: Let’s go back to Shakespeare and one of your favourite plays, The Tempest. In the panel that you participated in in Milan [14 May], Nemi d’Agnostino maintained that you gave an interpretation that was too comforting, ignoring all the painful implications of the play.
FRYE: As I have written,1 at the end of The Tempest you reach a cycle, a process of rebirth, a paradise in which spring and autumn coexist. Pros-pero’s vision of the world becomes the world itself. This is not to say that Prospero, who before his exile was a very incompetent Duke of Milan, will not be, on his return to Milan, even more incompetent.
GORLIER: Please excuse the rough schema, but, assuming that there could be a precise distinction, an opposition, between formal and sociological criticism, on which side would you be?
“FRYE: I don’t see that they should be mutually exclusive. They are complementary, so that, going beyond schematization, they are both basic tools of criticism.
GORLIER: For some decades, Dante has represented an essential point of reference for Anglo-Saxon culture. Is this so for you too?
FRYE: Certainly, the Paradiso in particular represents an essential touch-stone for me.
GORLIER: During the Milan panel discussion, Portinari stated, paradoxically, that Anatomy is in its diversity a creative work: in effect, a novel.
FRYE: That there is a creative dimension—though probably not in a narrow sense—may be supposed. A novel? A novel needs characters, and in Anatomy the only character is me.
GORLIER: The book on Blake and the Anatomy represent crucial points of departure. Can you trace any precise lines of development since then?
FRYE: I feel like a dog that at a certain moment sniffed out a trail and followed it. I continue to follow that trail.