Composed 5 December 1979
From the typescript in NFF, 1988, box 39, file 10. In the same file is correspondence that reveals that Yugoslavian Frye student Maja Herman-SekuliĆ (who had written an M.A. thesis on Frye’s theory of myth) wished to interview Frye in connection with the recent publication of the Serbo-Croatian translation of Anatomy of Criticism by Giga Graĉan (Zagreb: Naprijed, 1979). Herman-SekuliĆ mailed Frye a series of questions, and he sent back a typescript including questions and answers. The interview appeared in Serbo-Croatian in NIN (a political weekly) in shortened form, 30 December 1979, and in its entirety in Književost (Literature), fall 1980, with the title “Put Kritike.”
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: Mr. Frye, your book Anatomy of Criticism, a classic of contemporary literary criticism, translated into many foreign languages, even into Japanese, finally appeared in a Yugoslav edition thanks to the efforts of the publishing house Naprijed of Zagreb. We waited long—the first edition of Anatomy was in 1957—to see your book translated into Serbo-Croatian, but we are happy that it has seen the light of day in our bookstores in quite a good translation and an attractive edition. Do you know of any reason for such a late publication in Yugoslavia? Was it just another case of a certain indolence on the part of the publishers or were there some other reasons?
FRYE: Naturally I know nothing about publishing conditions in Yugoslavia, but I would assume that the translating of so long and complex a book would normally be delayed, because of the small number of people interested in reading it who would be unable to read it in some other language. (There are French, German, and Italian translations as well as English.)
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: Are you satisfied with the edition?
FRYE: I have not yet seen the edition, but would be glad to do so. My reading knowledge of Serbo-Croatian is nonexistent in any case so I shall have to take the accuracy of the translation on faith.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: How could you explain the lack of the notes and index in this edition?
FRYE: I am sorry if there is no index to the book: the usefulness of such a book is greatly reduced without one. The same thing would apply to the footnotes which I supplied, if they also are omitted.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: There were certain misunderstandings in translating some of your terms. You said once that you prefer “to compromise with the present confused terminology than to increase the difficulties … by introducing too many new terms” [AC, 248/230]. You used some terms from other fields of knowledge, e.g., psychology, giving them new meanings to avoid further complications in already chaotic critical terminology. But difficulties and misunderstandings still remain. What are the major problems of the contemporary terminology of the theory of criticism and literature?
FRYE: The only way to answer this question is to say that while critical terminology was underdeveloped twenty years ago, when the book was published, it is now overdeveloped and is in utter and impenetrable chaos. Whenever possible, I tried to use the words in a sense closely connected with their familiar and traditional use, such as “romance” and “irony.” I had hoped also that the term “archetype” was being used in its traditional sense, but Jung seems to have taken over that word, and misunderstandings inevitably resulted.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: Is there a chance for them to be solved? What would be, in your opinion, the best solution to the problem? Do you believe in the possibility of a universal language of criticism of literature?
FRYE: I think a generally agreed-on terminology ought to be attainable in literary criticism as well as in other subjects. There are other subjects, such as psychology, where the terminology is still pretty chaotic. In my view, critical terminology should be based primarily on the practice of criticism, and the use of terms belonging to philosophy or psychology increases the confusion. On the other hand, there has been an inevitable complication of the issue by the fact that problems in linguistics, with all its terminology, are now inseparable from those of literary criticism.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: Mr. Frye, today, almost a quarter of a century after the first edition of Anatomy of Criticism, if you look back to it from your present position, could you tell us what is its place and role in your own opus and in contemporary criticism?
FRYE: In relation to my own work the Anatomy was a consolidation of theoretical ideas derived very largely from an intensive study of the poetic practice of William Blake. Since then, I have written mainly briefer essays either in practical criticism or in social criticism. I am now at the stage of life, I suppose, when I should make some effort to pull all this together.
As for its relation to the history of criticism generally, it seems to me that the Anatomy was extremely useful to students of literature who felt that the New Criticism was not only getting to be a dead end, but was getting away from a sense of proportion and perspective about literature as a whole. The book is often described too as a pioneering work instructuralism, which perhaps it is.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: After Anatomy, a work of “pure critical theory,” a “Bible of modern criticism” as some critics called it, after writing the book that is in this century probably the closest to poetics in Aristotle’s meaning of the word, you turned to concrete literary works as you did in your book on Blake that preceded Anatomy, and on the other hand to the questions that go beyond the field of literature, narrowly conceived, into the wide region of education and society. How could you explain this “critical path” of yours?
FRYE: It seems to me that it is a natural expansion from the Anatomy, which says in its preface that it could do with a supplementary volume devoted to practical criticism. Many people have also totally misunderstood the book as holding a view of literature which removes it from social conditioning or social problems. Naturally I’d try to set that record a bit straighter.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: I liked some of your sharp and witty statements. For example, when you said that you resemble Maud Bodkin, and other exponents of so-called Jungian criticism, “about as closely as I resemble the late Sarah Bernhardt” [CP, 16]. Still, archetype and myth play very important roles in your critical language and your scheme of the literary world. Every attentive reader of your books should agree that you gave these terms new and original meanings. It would be very interesting to hear from you what in your opinion are the basic differences between your theory of myths, of “mythical or archetypal criticism,” and so-called “myth criticism”?
FRYE: I think that Maud Bodkin’s book,1 like much of Kenneth Burke’s work in a different way, seems to depend on psychology in a way that tends to make literary criticism a derivation from psychology. I will have nothing to do with this: I strongly resist all determinisms, whether psychological or economic, that ground the real principles of literary criticism in some other subject. The real grounds of literary criticism are in the practice of poets, and nowhere else. Consequently, “myth” to me means first of all narrative or story; “archetype” means first of all a repeating unit in a literary structure.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: It is known that you had certain disagreements with New Critics. The best known is probably René Wellek’s disagreement with your statement that the theory of literature is not directly concerned with value judgments.2 Some critics think that you took the first step beyond New Criticism. On the other hand some of their fundamental principles are the initial steps in your critical approach to literature. How do you see your role in relation to New Criticism?
FRYE: My interest in literature as a total form, which provides a context for every individual work of literature, gives me a primary interest in such structural questions as convention and genre. My primary disagreement with the New Critics was, first, that they tended to ignore generic and conventional factors, second, that they assumed that “texture” was the content of the critical operation and that structure was not. With regard to value judgments, I have always maintained that they were tentative working assumptions, many of which would be confirmed in practice, but some of which could be subject to revision. Everyone accepts the value judgment that Shakespeare was a great poet; everyone finds this value judgment confirmed in practice; but no Shakespearean scholarship whatever is founded on that value judgment.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: The fact that you wrote Anatomy of Criticism before any important work of the French structuralists was published is not as well known, in my opinion, as it should be. Still, there are critics that consider you as one of the forerunners of structuralism in the theory of literature. Would you agree with them? In what way could you have anticipated such a theoretical orientation, or become part of it?
FRYE: It seems to be an occupational disease among the French to add the suffix “ism” to everything they are interested in. I think structure is an essential element of literature; I am well aware that this is really a metaphor from architecture, and I do not for the life of me see why one cannot be interested in structure without becoming a “structuralist.” I am interested in my own existence too, but I don’t necessarily have to be an existentialist.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: What, in your opinion, are the major trends in the theory of literature today? In what direction is literary criticism heading now?
FRYE: I think that the word “direction” is over-optimistic. I think there is a good deal of mining and blowing up being done, and that after the dust settles the context of a foundation may become visible. I think Lacan’s conception of the subconscious as linguistically structured is worth following up; so is Derrida’s conception of metaphysical presence;3 and there are many things that interest me in the work of the new Marxist critics who have got away from the old notion that ideology is something that only non-Marxists have.4 But I am not capable of making a unifying theory out of all this mess, and I doubt if anyone else is either.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: You have written about the masterpieces of world literature. You have also written very inspiring essays on the forms of popular literature. As a Canadian author you have not neglected Canadian literature. It would be interesting to hear from you in what measure such a literature as the Canadian could influence some of your critical views.
FRYE: I have described my work in Canadian literature as a kind of “field work” like that of anthropologists [BG, viii; C, 148], in which I could see trends of world literature extending to and settling into a rather peripheral, even provincial development of literature. Without a sense of what was going on in my own cultural environment I think I should have lacked the power to bring things together to the extent that I may have done in the Anatomy and later essays. If one comes from a relatively small country culturally, that smallness provides a perspective difficult to explain. I should have been a totally different kind of critic as an American, just as, say, Kierkegaard would have been totally different as a German.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: Yugoslav literature has some resemblances to Canadian. In both literatures there is a certain tension between different languages and cultures. Did you, by any chance, have any contacts with Yugoslav literature?
FRYE: I have had no direct contact with Yugoslav literature, as I do not read the language. I know something of how very lively a literary culture it is, and there are various Yugoslavs working in Canada, such as Darko Suvin at McGill, who have indicated to me something of this. But I quite understand the parallel with Canada: I recently felt that there was such a parallel even with the larger and more populous country of Italy.
HERMAN-SEKULIĆ: Finally, I would like to pose you a “classic” question: What are you doing now? Are you preparing a new book?
FRYE: I am trying to write a large book on the relation of the Bible to the conventions of Western literature. I am trying to analyse the narrative and imagery of the Bible in such a way as to show that it set up a mythological framework for European writers down to about the eighteenth century.