Conducted 3 and 16 April 1980
From “Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye,” Descant, 12, no. 32-3 (1981): 216-26. Reprinted in WGS, 211-20. Dated by entries in Frye’s daybook for 1980. Interviewer Deborah Shackleton, then a Vancouver photographer, went on to become an associate professor of Communication Design at the Emily Carr Institute. She interviewed Frye in his office at Massey College as part of a series of interviews on the topic of Canada’s cultural sector. The series appeared in the Toronto Star and Contemporary Canadian Photography as well as in Descant, a literary magazine then co-edited by Donna Bennett and Russell Brown that publishes new Canadian literature. Frye was able to check over the text before typesetting (see NFF, 1988, box 60, file 2).
SHACKLETON: Do you draw a distinction between your roles as scholar and teacher, or do you view them as being integrated?
FRYE: I think that there is a difference in practice, though there shouldn’t be in theory, between a scholar and a teacher. And it’s only recently that it’s dawned on me that all of my books have essentially been teachers’ manuals rather than works of scholarship. Of course the two things overlap a good deal, but the scholar is a person who gathers material and does research. He puts everything he has in front of the reader. And a typical scholar trains his students in techniques of scholarship. I’ve never felt that I was any good at that. Also my writing technique is different; I use secondary sources much less than the typical scholar. I think of the teacher, not as a person who knows something instructing someone who doesn’t know something, but rather as a person who attempts to be a transparent medium for his subject; whose goal it is to produce a response in the student or reader, “Well, now that you put it that way I can understand it.” He may be intensely personal but because of his need to be a transparent medium for his subject, he has to keep something in reserve.
SHACKLETON: I recall reading a Toronto Star article on Eric McLuhan and the Centre of Culture and Technology in which he states that “the private individual of early Greek times can’t exist any more. The rational world of the left brain is dominated by the impulsive, irrational right brain.” He cites television and the electronic media, right-brain orientations, as being responsible for turning Westerners into Orientals. Do you feel that it is no longer possible for the literate, rational, private individual of Greek times to exist any more?
FRYE: As long as there are two lobes in the brain, there are going to be the two possibilities of Western and Oriental thinking. And I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a “counter-environment.” That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university; there is always something of Mark Hopkins and the log.1 There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities. I suspect that no teaching is worth doing unless it has a militant quality to it.
SHACKLETON: Have you found it to be a problem that the arts student thinks solely in terms of self-expression, subjectivity, and in-jokes as opposed to seeing the validity of coming from an historical base and the forms and conventions therein that are quantifiable? Is it that we have been so influenced by the media with our instant breakfasts and our instant SX-70 exhibitions2 that we no longer feel the need to pursue the classics and classical thought?
FRYE: Oh, there’s a great deal of what you refer to as instant as a reflection of the mass-processing techniques of our civilization. If I were to be asked what my definition of a classic was, I would say it was a work that won’t go away. It just stands in front of you until you deal with it. It’s the angel that every Jacob has to wrestle with. What you’re speaking of has something to do with the scale of maturity or maturation of the creative mind. Often creative people begin with the sense of a small school to which they belong and they write manifestos defending that school. However, as they get more authority, they tend to break away from the school and speak more and more with their own voice. As the maturing process goes on, the voice becomes steadily more impersonal. If it’s a great creative mind, it moves in the direction of speaking with the authority of the art behind it. I’ve often drawn the distinction between listening to music, say, on the level of Tchaikowsky, where you feel that this is a very skilful, ingenious, and interesting composer, and music ont he level of Mozart or Bach, where you feel that this is the voice of music. And that’s not to say that the music is impersonal because it obviously couldn’t be anybody but Mozart or Bach. Nevertheless, the feeling is one of having transcended that ego which is no longer opaque but completely transparent for revealing the authority of the art itself.
SHACKLETON: Earlier you mentioned that no teaching was worth doing unless it had a militant quality in it. Could you define your use of the word “militant” as it relates to teaching?
FRYE: As I’ve already said, teaching is not a matter of somebody who has the information presenting it to somebody who does not have it. That’s a very simplistic notion of what goes on in the teaching process. From the days of Socrates it’s been realized that the teacher’s function is to remove the blinkers of repression from the student which prevent him from knowing what he potentially already knows. In order to do that you’re really engaged in a militant operation against the forces that are creating all these blinkers, repressions, clichés, and prejudices.
SHACKLETON: In the course of conversation you’ve mentioned two definitive phrases—“transparent medium” and “voice of authority.” With respect to your teaching, how do you relate one to the other?
FRYE: In the first place, one distinguishes between the egocentric personality and the real personality. You’ll notice that the strongest characters are the people like saints who’ve forgotten about their egos. When you’re teaching, there’s always the tendency for students to be influenced by the accidental personality of the teacher—“Oh, isn’t he wonderful.” That’s the thing you have to avoid at all costs because the teacher as ego has no authority. Only the subject he teaches has the authority. To the extent that you try to train yourself to let the subject speak through you, you also acquire your own genuine personality.
SHACKLETON: With respect to your writing, you mentioned that it’s only dawned on you recently that your books have essentially been teachers’ manuals rather than works of scholarship. If you believe that the teacher is a transparent medium, how do you merge that with the concept of authority and authorship?
FRYE: I think that the same principles that would hold true for oral teaching would also hold true for writing and for the scholar. It’s never true that the facts speak for themselves. Nothing speaks except the words. Still, the rhetorical pretence that the facts are speaking for themselves is perhaps essential for a scholarly writer. In a way, the scholar is in the position of the scientist; he appeals to the authority which is beyond controversy. A scientist will perform an experiment and say, “These are the results; if you don’t believe me, go do the experiment yourself.” That kind of authority attempts to escape from controversy. It appeals to the established facts, to the power of repeating an experiment. And I think the same thing holds true for scholarship in the humanities. The emphasis with the teacher is different because the teacher is concerned with the social crusade of delivering the student from the blinkers of social prejudice.
SHACKLETON: From the humanist viewpoint, how do we separate scholarship from personal interpretation? Isn’t this a very fine line?
FRYE: Well, it is a fine line. You can’t distinguish it from interpretation, but there is a psychological difference that people realize, in practice, between the egocentric interpretation and the interpretation which tries, at any rate, to follow what is suggested by the data.
SHACKLETON: With the developments in contemporary writing, are we laying a foundation for what you term a classic?
FRYE: Today there are a great many things happening. The Romantic movement brought in a certain mystique of creativity which was founded on the perfectly valid assumption that, in a sense, the poet is the hero of everything he writes. That built up the notion that the creative person was somehow qualitatively different from other people. There’s been a considerable shift in the centre of gravity away from the writer and towards the reader. Now the reader is the hero of what he reads. Culturally, for anyone interested in the verbal arts, it’s quite an exciting time to live in.
There’s always been a difference between writing poetry, drama, or fiction (the practice of literature) and writing criticism or scholarship (the theory of literature). Traditionally the critical functions have been something of a parasitic activity; the literature is produced and the scholar comes along and comments on it. What I see happening now is a reshaping of critical theory around religion, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, and so on. This means that the theory and the practice of the use of words is beginning to form a dialectic in which one is recreating the other. I feel that that has a genuine future.
Too, there’s still a capacity to recognize the voice of impersonal authority when it comes. It’s a capacity to know when one is being spoken to. It’s quite easy to recognize the voice that lacks authority because it doesn’t speak to you; it’s speaking from him or her. The sense of the response to the authoritative statement in the verbal arts may take a while to percolate but when it is recognized, it’s generally recognized in the same way. For example, when Ulysses and The Waste Land came out in 1922 people said that these were cultural Bolsheviks out to destroy everything that was traditional in the arts. But in proportion as these works became recognized, they became recognized as traditional and belonging to the sequence of classics.
SHACKLETON: In terms of that percolation, where would you place contemporary Canadian fiction?
FRYE: There’s been an immense increase in the sheer quantity of literary production in Canada in the last twenty years. At a certain point a quantitative increase brings about a qualitative change. As a whole, Canadian literature has an authority which it certainly didn’t have back in 1930. Other countries are beginning to recognize that. Furthermore, the sheer amount of serious literary work published in this country in the last twenty years is an astonishing achievement when you consider the handicaps, such as the division in language.
SHACKLETON: You mentioned the development of a dialectic between criticism and creativity. What is the role of the critic in contemporary Canadian society, and why is criticism no longer a parasitic function?
FRYE: It’s a question of maturity. In a mature culture there is less worry about the poet doing something and then the critic coming along, a kind of middleman taking half the profits, and explaining to the public what the poet is doing. There are obvious things that a critic cannot and should not do with literature; he has no business telling the poet how to write; he has no business being a frustrated poet himself and pointing to someone who represents his own frustration and saying, “There’s the man who’s doing what should be done.” These are the aberrations of a criticism. The writer (practice) and the critic (theory) work in different conceptual frameworks. As a culture matures, both its literature and its criticism mature and find each other increasingly useful. Social criticism could conceivably get along without literature, though it shouldn’t try. And literature could conceivably get along without criticism, though, again, it shouldn’t try. In a mature civilization the two things keep reflecting one another. Within the last fifteen or twenty years in Canada this has happened.
SHACKLETON: What do you see as the role of the poet in contemporary Canadian society?
FRYE: I think that the poet is part of the creative imagination of the country, and the creative imagination tells you things about an environment which nothing else can tell you. That’s always the function of the creative imagination in a society. And that’s why you find expertise in economics, politics, industry, etc., and finding out what’s going on in the processes there, however useful and essential, still has to be corrected by some kind of creative imagination to put it into perspective. In that regard, writers are a kind of resource.
SHACKLETON: In The Bush Garden you use the term “separatism,” not specifically as a French phenomenon, but as a regional one [iv; C, 415]. If it’s true in literature that the more provincial, regional, and limited the subject matter becomes, the more universally it communicates, couldn’t this form of separatism in Canada be harnessed and channelled to create universal impact?
FRYE: I would think so. Separatism is a very healthy movement within culture. It’s a disastrous movement within politics and economics. Of course the difficult area is in radio, television, movies, and so on, which are a mixture of economic centralizing developments and culturally decentralizing elements.
SHACKLETON: Is there such a thing as “Canadianism” in our literature?
FRYE: There’s no such thing as “Canadianism,” but there are a number of poets working within a specific environment with a specific kind of historical background and that, I think, will influence and give a distinctive quality to their work if they don’t pay too much attention to it. The thing is that you can’t aim at something. It’s only the ego that aims at something. The genuine writer simply writes as he has to write; he writes out what takes shape in his mind and the “Canadianism” of what he writes will look after itself if he does that and has the talent. That’s why you need the critic to translate what he’s doing into another conceptual framework. Insofar as Canada is a distinctive environment, with dimensions both in time and space, that is, in both history and geography, it does present certain unique qualities.
SHACKLETON: Why do you think that we in Canada have the tendency to say things like, “Well, after all, we’re still a young country, and, therefore, couldn’t possibly have the cultural development of a European country”?
FRYE: Those types of excuses are disguised forms of anti-intellectualism. They are really a hatred for the intellect and imagination. It’s certainly part of the responsibility of the critic who is primarily a social critic to point out that these excuses are all completely phony and that Canada is the same age as any other bourgeois democracy with a capitalist economy.
SHACKLETON: On a more personal note, what attracted you to the verbal arts?
FRYE: Well, it would be a very complicated process. I think that all such things have to do with environmental influences that go back to infancy. The home that I was brought up in was certainly a verbal home. My grandfather was a clergyman, and being brought up in small towns that were not university towns at that time, I had a strong attraction to the ministry simply because that was the central sort of cultural symbol. While I came to feel that this was not my vocation, I did retain the feeling of commitment to the verbal area of expression.
SHACKLETON: If creativity comes out of confusion, how does confusion relate to your writing process?
FRYE: In my experience you start out with what William James calls the buzzing and blooming confusion in the mind,3 and out of all that eventually something crystallizes. My own writing is developed out of a number of discontinuous aphorisms. When I’m in the routine of teaching I find that my writing becomes extremely furtive; I scribble notes; that’s where the aphoristic side of my writing develops. When I have to settle down to a sustained piece of narrative writing, I pull in on myself, sometimes to a frightening degree, in order to pull the aphorisms together in the right sequence, to produce the right sort of connective tissue. I’ve said quite frequently and meant it very intensely that I don’t run my writing operation, my writing operation runs me. Whatever it wants is what I’ve got to produce. What it doesn’t want is what a novelist or a poet can produce. I can remember spending two days in a great fever of excitement writing a long introduction to an article I was preoccupied with, and at the end of two days a little voice said in my ear, “You can keep one sentence of it.” Well, I fought against this, protested and squawked, but there was no arguing. It had to go.
SHACKLETON: What is your relationship to writing?
FRYE: I’m really building everything around a highly personal vision, a vision that I think I’ve had since I was a child. Consciousness of it came in various stages. I suppose it began to take its present form in my undergraduate years at university. That’s partly because when I encountered the university I realized that I wanted to spend my life there. I’ve always had a temperamental affinity with the Blakes that have stayed in one place rather than the Byrons who’ve wandered. I understand very well how Emily Dickinson made it with just a hymnbook and a dictionary.
SHACKLETON: With respect to the democratization of the arts, how do we then establish a niveau, an ideal of excellence? “We are all created equal,” being entitled to the same opportunity, usually means an equalization downward rather than upward. Personally I find the disparity hard to deal with.
FRYE: Yes, I find that difficult to deal with because for me the statement that “all men are equal” is really a religious statement. Except that all men are equal in the sight of God and have equal rights before the law, I don’t see that it really makes any sense. My own feeling is that in a properly organized society everybody would belong to some kind of elite because everybody would be in a group making a contribution to that society that nobody else could make in the same kind of way—the plumber, the barber, the writer, and so on. Each would have some kind of skill or expertise. I’m not against the conception of elitism; I’d just like to see it universalized, to see it identified with social function. It’s one of those semi-paranoid words like “establishment” that really refer to something that isn’t there any more, but is still pretended to be a danger.
SHACKLETON: It’s curious. Elitism, if identified with social function, is something that would improve the quality of life, and yet we tend to put it into a political construct. I guess that pursuit of higher ideals really has to be left up to the individual.
FRYE: I suppose in the long run it has to be. I don’t think you can form committees preventing equalization from meaning levelling down, which is what it means in most social terms. If you’re going to level up, your unit almost has to be the individual.
SHACKLETON: Given our mass-processing techniques, is the existence of that individual inconceivable?
FRYE: It’s not inconceivable. Society comes first and the individual grows out of society. You don’t get society by aggregating individuals. The fact that man is an individual means that his society has gotten to a certain level of civilization. It’s his responsibility to develop and diversify that civilization by being an individual.
SHACKLETON: Are we the best of Romantic and Classical thought?
FRYE: The best is there. Our job is not to cheat ourselves.