Conducted June 1979
When in Rome, 1–6 June 1979, Frye spent considerable time with Gilbert Reid of the Canadian embassy, who interviewed him for a small Italian-language promotional magazine Reid was publishing for the Canadian embassy, Canada contemporaneo. The interview appeared, translated into Italian, in the first issue, no. 1 (January–February 1980): 8–9, 11, accompanied by biographical and bibliographical notes and two photographs. However, the following text is taken, courtesy of Gilbert Reid (later a writer and broadcaster in Canada), from his original English notes.
REID: What do you think characterizes you as a literary critic?
FRYE: My own interests have always been centred upon literature itself, and upon what might be called the social context of literature, its real function in society. I was educated in the authentic philistine tradition: literature was something you only concerned yourself with after the day’s work, that is, after you’d earned your living and had success. Literature was a luxury article, a thing one could easily do without, an amusement to be cultivated only after the real problems had been resolved. However, when I started to study a truly primitive culture, for example, the culture of the Inuit, a culture in which their problems of survival, of food, and of shelter, are very serious and direct, I noted that both poetry and the poetic tradition were for them of vital importance. The more primitive the society, the more important poetry is for its survival. In contemporary societies, complex and sophisticated as they are, literature and life are suffocated under a vast weight of false priorities.
So I decided to study the original functions of literature in order to discover what literature can still do for us today. In fact, I think an individual participates in society principally through his or her imagination. In the last hundred years there has been a fracture between appearance and reality, between language and reality. In the Middle Ages, this division—or fracture—did not exist: symbol and reality, language and reality, were one and the same. You just have to think of the “realism” of St. Thomas Aquinas. However, from Rousseau, Marx, and Freud, we have learned not to trust appearances: we’ve learned to look for the reality which is hidden behind the façade of society and of language. We have learned to refuse to believe the myths imposed by the authorities because they are patently false and absurd. The collapse of the myths which make society and authority cohesive has, in turn, provoked a collapse of commitment and faith. Now it seems to me that literature can help us to discover, behind and beyond the various façades offered by society, the real sources and structures of our personal and collective imagination, and thus of commitment and faith.
So literature itself has always been at the centre of my interests, and that makes me somewhat rare among contemporary literary critics. Much interesting progress in recent literary criticism, in fact, has come from nonliterary fields, from sectors such as linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and so on. Critics such as Roland Barthes, who adopt the conceptual instruments from these sectors, often stray from literature and from criticism—in the narrow sense of the word—towards these other parallel fields. But I have remained centred on literature—on its role in the creation and transmission of our personal and collective imagination.
REID: You’re now working on a book on the Bible. Is this project linked to what you’ve just told me?
FRYE: I believe that language developed from an initial metaphorical stage, a stage in which the distinction between subject and object was very confused, certainly not as clear as it is today. The Bible rose during this metaphorical stage of language, and cannot be studied using modern criteria regarding language and the relation of language to reality. Literature continually recreates the metaphorical function of language. Poets, precisely because they are constantly rediscovering this function, are often considered “atavistic” or “primitive.” But I believe that the metaphorical functions of language are essential, today perhaps more than ever before. In fact, most of the “existential” problems of life can be considered aspects of the problem of “identity,” a problem which the metaphorical function of language to a considerable extent resolves. In the metaphor A = B, A is still A, and B is still B; metaphor therefore creates a unity without creating uniformity. Through metaphorical identification, one overcomes the split between nature and man. Man rediscovers himself and places himself in a natural and social world. In our culture, the Bible is the work which provides the fundamental mythical context for the metaphorical functions of language, for the stories which we tell ourselves. The Bible helps us to rediscover ourselves, to quest for and discover our individual and collective identities.
REID: “Identity” is a key concept in your system. Is this interest in identity rooted in your experience as a Canadian? It’s known, even in Italy, that Canadians have often been preoccupied with discovering their identity.
FRYE: You know, I didn’t realize how profoundly both my consciousness and my work were rooted in my experience as a Canadian until I worked with the CBC on a program called Journey without Arrival. Suddenly I discovered how great was my interest in the Canadian environment. When the first white colonists came to this immense country, they brought with them a Baroque European consciousness and a mathematical approach; their mentality and methods aimed at dominating the land, not at uniting with it. Engaged as they were in dominating the landscape, these first colonists were incapable of loving the land and its features. Theirs was that type of Cartesian mentality which considered animals only as potential providers of fur. This left a deep sense of guilt in the conscience of Canadians. The death of an animal is often the source or subject of images of intense emotion, among the most beautiful in Canadian poetry.
Unlike the United States, Canada never had a single frontier moving continuously towards the West. Canada is simply too vast, broken up by geography and geology, and surrounded by frontiers on all sides. This situation created what I call the “garrison mentality” (C, 351). Thus, isolated from nature and from the landscape, isolated from each other, Canadians have always had to fight their isolation, or at least understand it. And this explains, I think, their great interest in communications. The concept of communications is fundamental for historians and theorists like Harold Innis, George Grant, and Marshall McLuhan. The concept of communications is also basic to my own work. Literature, in fact, is an indirect form of communication. Literary myths, and the general mythologies of which they are part, constitute the heart of a community, and form the general context of all communications within that community. It is from this context that the members of a community receive their identities and their values. A particular and intense interest in this theme is, naturally, a very Canadian characteristic.
REID: What role do you think your book on the Bible will play?
FRYE: My book on the Bible, like my book on romance, aims at providing a general perspective on the myths from which our literature descends. Myths aggregate among themselves, forming a single, more or less homogeneous, mythological corpus. My book will become, I think, two books. The first will analyse the Bible as a literary work, as a global, all-inclusive myth. The second will analyse the way in which the Western world has interpreted and absorbed this myth in the different periods of its literary tradition.
REID: You have written a great deal on Canadian literature and you have had considerable influence on many Canadian writers. Do you think that Canadian literature is too provincial, too much concentrated on local problems, to arouse interest in other countries?
FRYE: There is a paradoxical and mysterious law regarding culture and in particular literature: the more intensely local and provincial a work is, the more universal is its message. In American literature, for instance, you just have to think of Faulkner. In Canada, we have works which are universally known, such as Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business, and many others. These works are both intensely local and widely read and appreciated outside their local context.
REID: What, according to you, is the relationship between English Canadian and French Canadian or Quebec literature?
FRYE: I believe that French Canadians discovered their own identity first. The French Canadian intellectuals and writers, including Quebeckers, understood, almost from the beginning, what their function and role should be. They should be the defenders and the heralds of a language and a culture in a continual state of siege; it is precisely this which allowed them to define, with maximum clarity, their own identity. English Canadian writers, when they in turn discovered their identity in the 1960s, did it, as it were, by rebound, as a reaction to the problems posed by the French Canadians.
REID: In Italy, both the intellectual tradition and popular consciousness are impregnated with history which, for Italians, is an obsession. Crocean Idealism, Italian Marxism, Italian Catholicism, Italian Fascism, are all impregnated, in different ways, with a sense of history. Can your system, which is largely a taxonomy, be considered ahistoric, or antihistoric?
FRYE: No, I don’t think so. My system begins and ends with history. Anatomy of Criticism was intended to be, in part, a history of literature, which I conceived as a history of the various literary genres and traditions, of their metamorphoses and transformations. These traditions and these genres renew themselves continuously, in function above all of the class structure of the society in which they operate and the transformations of that class structure. Some have said that this is a rather naive conception of literature and of literary history. But I don’t think so. For example, when I said that the recent ironic phase of literature would bring us to a mythic phase and that this would then be transformed into a romance phase, I didn’t know about Tolkien and many other contemporary writers. In the ironic phase, the public considers with disdain literary norms, traditions, and myths, while being extremely conscious, albeit with ironic distance, of these substrata and deep structures of literature. In the mythic phase, these structures are explicitly adopted by the writers themselves, and the new liberty they thus acquire opens the road to a new romance period, where fables, science fiction, and fantasy dominate. Since I first formulated this tendency, it has in fact appeared on schedule.
REID: What do you think will be the main tendencies of the end of the 1970s and of the 1980s?
FRYE: I think that the neo-Romantic period which we have entered, with people like Ginsberg and Tolkien, is very different from the first half of the century, which was dominated by giants of the calibre of Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Valéry, and Proust. Now literature has become more democratic, more collective. Poetry is often sung and listened to by masses of people. This would have been inconceivable in the first part of the century. Everywhere, if you look around you, a literary consciousness exists. Look, for instance, in newsstands or bookstores. There are shelves and shelves of books on the tarot, on alchemy, on astrology, all systems which have a close affinity to the metaphorical and symbolic schemata used by poets.
REID: Doesn’t this open the door to new and perhaps very dangerous forms of irrationality, such as those analysed by Lukács early in the century?
FRYE: I don’t think so. The real danger doesn’t come from these systems. There are too many of them, and as structures of faith they more or less cancel each other out. No, the real danger comes from the modern techniques of propaganda, from charismatic leaders, from totalitarian ideologies. In reality, the most important thing is that human beings discover who they are, and that they continue to create and recreate themselves. In this process literature plays a role of the first importance.