Conducted 2 May 1980
From Aurora: New Canadian Writing, 1980, ed. Morris Wolfe (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1980), 5–15. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. The interview, a joint venture between the literary annual Aurora and the CBC, was heard on the CBC’s program Anthology in the fall of 1980 and published at about the same time. Reprinted in The “Anthology” Anthology, ed. Robert Weaver (Toronto: Macmillan, 1984), 62–72, and in WGS, 183–194. Frye was interviewed by Robert Fulford, editor of Saturday Night magazine and frequent arts commentator.
FULFORD: Culture in Canada in the 1970s expanded enormously in numbers, in everything from the number of books of poetry published to the number of dancers employed. But as the decade ended there was a sense of—maybe not despair, but certainly disappointment that somehow things hadn’t worked out as everyone had hoped or expected. Did you get that feeling?
FRYE: I’m not so sure. I think there are other factors such as the growing recognition of Canadian literature outside Canada, and a growing response to it which I find almost miraculous. I don’t understand what people on the continent of Europe get out of Canadian literature, but they certainly get something out of it, and it registers as a kind of unified statement to them. With us it’s the ordinary entropy which seems to set in with almost any cultural movement after a few years. Perhaps we’ll be refreshed by seeing our mirror images coming back to us from other countries.
FULFORD: When I read about the culture of various periods, usually in Europe but to some extent in America, I see again and again the well-to-do playing a part—the person, say, who founds a dance company with her father’s millions. Is there something that keeps Canadian private money from being interested in the arts? You don’t have in this country the families—one thinks of the Guggenheims or the Rockefellers—who in the United States pour in millions of dollars. One thinks of patrons of the arts throughout European history. Nothing like that seems to happen here.
FRYE: No, it doesn’t happen. I think we are basically a country of deficit financing, and we tend to look to government agencies to subsidize culture just as we look to government agencies to set up a broadcasting commission or a national railway or a national film board. Consequently, private business seems to feel that’s something they pay taxes for anyway and don’t need to support further. I think a peculiar feature of Canadian cultural life is its dependence on government assistance.
FULFORD: Peculiar for a democracy anyway. In a democracy it’s unusual to find the government as the mainstay, without a powerful equivalent in the private sector. It seems to me, though, that in the period we’re talking about, the 1970s, government has not been as much help as it might have been, even though the federal government spent a lot more money than ever before. The government really hasn’t demonstrated strong leadership. I wonder if it would have been different if Pierre Trudeau had been as interested in the development of Canadian culture as he was in renewed federalism and the constitution.
FRYE: I have a notion that the government’s attitude to culture should be a fairly relaxed one. It’s more a matter of trying to let the cultural imagery of the country emerge than providing leadership for it. I’m not just sure where government leadership would take it. I think that as a culture matures, it becomes more regional anyway. And whatever a culture does, if it’s worth doing, there’s going to be a strongly unpredictable element in it. I think the best and wisest government policy is to allow for a certain leeway, to allow for the spontaneity of cultural expression. In the natural course of events the real initiative comes from the creative people themselves. They know what they want to do, and they can go to a foundation, whether it’s a government one or a private one as in the States, and say, “Look, I’ve got a wonderful idea,” and the foundation’s job is to evaluate the idea and to respond accordingly.
[Fulford argues that things like the creation of the Canada Council, along with the governmen’s determination of its size, show that governments “are crucially involved at least in a quantitative sense.”]
FRYE: They’re involved in the quantitative sense but there’s a fine line, I think, between laissez-faire, saying the culture can look after itself, which in our case would mean that culture would still be at a pretty undeveloped state, and assuming leadership, actually providing the cultural ideas.
FULFORD: It seems to me in looking at the 1970s that one of the most striking features is the diminishing role of some of our major cultural institutions. Even though some of them have grown larger, they seem less visible. * * * I’m thinking of the National Film Board, which at times seems to vanish from sight; of the Canada Council, which seems dispirited and defensive even though it has grown considerably; of the National Gallery, which, to anyone who goes in to see their exhibitions, seems to be a shambles. Major cultural institutions to which we looked for some kind of leadership, or coherence, some way of making our culture accessible and understandable—they seem to be slipping into the background.
FRYE: There are several processes at work there. One is that anyone handling so expensive a medium as television or film tends to get mired in real estate, bureaucracy, and vested interest. I hesitate to draw the inference that there is a connection between limited funds and liveliness of intellect, but it is true that when these things started (the National Film Board, CBC Television) there was a feeling, not merely of starting something new, but of defining oneself over against society. I think culture always has to have a feeling of cult about it. And again I hesitate to say that complete public tolerance of, say, the art of painting, would tend to make painting rather decorative—that is, it would become simply a function of society and not the voice of a creative impulse that is stirring and prodding the society. I think that those things have set in in many respects. The golden days of the National Film Board had a lot to do with its defining itself as an entity in the Grierson days. And similarly with the CBC, where the level in radio, I think, is much higher than the level in television simply because it is more of a minority medium.
FULFORD: What you’re suggesting is that one has to have some kind of outsider status in order to come to life. You can’t be totally accepted and still remain culturally alive.
FRYE: I think the question of defining oneself as a presence over or against a society is pretty essential for the creative life. I think that it’s been an immense advantage to the writers and creative people in Quebec to feel that they were fighting for a beleaguered and threatened language. And I think that separatism is a very unattractive combination of a progressive cultural movement and a regressive political one—and that the cultural side is the genuine part of it.
FULFORD: It seems to me that in the 1970s regionalism became the dominating force in the culture. Maybe it was always so, and became a lot more visible in the 1970s.
FRYE: Regionalism is an inevitable part of the maturing of the culture of a society like ours. I think that in this “instant world of communications,” as it’s called, there is a kind of uniform international way of seeing and thinking which is derived from the fact that everybody is involved in the same technology. Regional developments are a way of escaping from that, developing something more creative. If you want to learn about American life from its literature, for example, you learn about it inferentially from what Faulkner tells you about Mississippi and what others tell you about New England or the Middle West. That is becoming increasingly true of Canada, where the conception of Canada doesn’t really make all that much sense. “Canada” is a political entity; the cultural counterpart that we call “Canada” is really a federation not of provinces but of regions and communities.
FULFORD: To me it was very striking that in the 1970s one began to be able to read poetry and guess what region the poet was from without reading the poet’s biography. I don’t think that was true ten or fifteen years before.
FRYE: It’s an inevitable part of the maturing of the culture. One area after another becomes culturally articulate through its writers. If you want to know about Canada from its culture, look to see what Jack Hodgins has to say about Vancouver Island, or James Reaney or Robertson Davies about southwestern Ontario, or Roger Lemelin about Quebec. If you add up the cultural communities you get a sense of the vitality and variety of Canadian culture.
FULFORD: Can you see a time when there’ll be national cultural figures? In my lifetime the only people who have done it have been the Group of Seven. They created a kind of art that has strong adherents in every region, and in both language groups.
FRYE: The Group of Seven were really pre-Canadian in the sense that they were imaginative explorers. Their literary counterpart would not be our established writers so much as people like David Thompson and Samuel Hearne. [The Group of Seven] were the end of a long period of exploratory and documentary painting which plunged into the country in the wake of the voyageur. I think the country we know as Canada will, in the foreseeable future, be a federation of regions culturally, rather than a single nation. I think cultural nationalism gets confused about its units and tends to introduce unreal forms of casuistry, that is, what is truly Canadian and so on. The question can be answered more precisely in different terms.
FULFORD: When I’ve lectured in a different part of the country from the one I live in, Toronto, and when some element of what I regard as cultural nationalism comes into what I’m saying, there’s always an objection. I remember a painter in Halifax telling me that my point of view was that of Ontario politics, not Canadian nationalism at all. It had nothing to do with Halifax, he said.
FRYE: I can understand that reaction very well. I was brought up in the Maritimes myself. I think it’s been of an immense benefit to Canada, first that it went from a prenational phase to a postnational phase without ever quite becoming a nation, and second that it never tried to be homogeneous, a melting pot. It always let ethnic groups have their own head, culturally speaking, and I think that is of tremendous benefit to the variety of our culture. To some extent the melting pot, the homogeneity, occurs anyway in response to certain social conditions, and it happens all the better if it isn’t too much forced from the outside. The process takes longer. There are many elements in Canadian life—I’m thinking of the Ukrainians and the Icelandics, of the Mennonites on the prairies—they have all made a distinctive appearance in our literature and our painting which, I think, is all to the good. Of course, I see it as a minority movement.
FULFORD: But television is the most pervasive conveyor of culture and, many people believe, the most important one. Yet in this period, despite what we’ve said about regionalism, and in a period which has been characterized as nationalistic, Canadians have watched less and less Canadian television and more and more American television. Do you think this is, in any significant way, the fault of the government, or of the CRTC, of which you were a member? Or is it simply a function of North Americanism? Was it inevitable, no matter what we did?
FRYE: I think it was inevitable. I joined the CRTC in 1968, when the new Broadcasting Act made a good deal of sense. And then what happened was the practically autonomous development—through microwave and cable satellite and pay TV—of new technology that tends to follow the centralizing political and economic rhythms rather than the decentralizing cultural ones. And every new medium seems to have to recapitulate a history from a very archaic phase to a very sophisticated one. I think in radio and film we’re a long way now from Amos ’n’ Andy and the Keystone Kops.1 Television is still pretty formulaic. But mass culture is just that—it’s what the vast majority of people want. If we speak of Canada being flooded with American programs, we find that the Canadian viewer is a fish, not somebody who wants to get into a Canadian ark, floating on top.
FULFORD: What happened was that the technology had control of the CRTC, rather than the CRTC having control of the technology.
FRYE: The technology took the bit in its teeth, and there wasn’t much that any government regulatory agency could do about it.
FULFORD: Cable made all this American programming available, the people gobbled it up, and nothing you could have done would have changed that.
FRYE: I don’t think that anything could really have changed that. But there will be other technological developments in Canada that will again regionalize things, and bring smaller communities into focus.
FULFORD: Then you see the development of a more sophisticated form of television which will encourage a more sophisticated form of culture, namely regionalism?
FRYE: I think it’s inevitable that as any medium matures it tends to become more directly an expression of human beings, rather than an expression of mass formulae.
FULFORD: Certainly we can see that with phonograph records. * * * But I’m interested in pursuing your idea that as culture becomes more sophisticated it also becomes more local or regional. It seems to me that’s the opposite of many people’s view of culture. Those people see big cities and the development of communication as making it possible to centralize culture.
FRYE: I see increasing regionalism as a way for the creative mind to escape from a centralizing uniformity. I was in New Zealand recently, and in Guyana for a week, and when I looked into the literature of New Zealand and of the Caribbean, I noticed intense regionalism alongside certain ways of handling time and space and characterization which reminded me strikingly of what I’ve seen in Canadian as well as British and American literature. I think we can take the centralizing aspect of contemporary culture for granted. But it’s at that point that the growth towards more and more regionalism begins. If you get on a jet plane, you can’t expect a different culture in the place where the plane lands, but you will find different people, and the creative people will be aware of the differences.
FULFORD: In other words, if you go to Guyana you may find as you glance around first of all that everyone watches American television, or American films, but then you will also find an intense local expression.
FRYE: Yes. Although Guyana is not really a clear example, because they don’t get American television. But if they did, it would be the same thing as you have here: the mass response is for the mass culture, but within that, little creative pockets form.
FULFORD: I saw an Australian film last year, Newsfront, about people working in newsreels in Melbourne—and it was astoundingly like Toronto. People I’ve known for twenty years were in that film, except they were speaking with an Australian accent and had different faces. They were the same people with the same attitudes and the same views and the same resentment of Los Angeles and the same hope—to create something uniquely their own. That feeling of resistance towards a distant metropolis which is really in control of mass culture came through very strongly.
FRYE: Yes, that’s part of the general uniformity of attitude, I think.
FULFORD: A curious thing has happened in a field which I take a special interest in, and that’s making films for theatrical distribution. It seems to me that Canada has actually stepped back from the position it held, very shakily, a decade ago, before the Canadian Film Development Corporation came along. * * * In a curious way the government has helped to set up an imitation Hollywood in Canada. We’re making movies that almost no one, even the producers, would claim have anything to do with Canada. Work has been provided for some people. That’s about all that can be said for it.
FRYE: I think there’s a powerful undertow in both film and television which follows the centralizing political and economic rhythms of the country rather than the decentralizing cultural rhythms. Certainly that undertow has been very evident in both film and television in Canada. The CRTC Canadian content regulations look rather unreal now. And yet I think that the tendency which is built into the technology and into the quality of response has to work itself out, and one shouldn’t be too discouraged by finding that these media from time to time relapse into commercial formulas and mass productivity.
FULFORD: In a curious way, what has happened in the Canadian film industry is that it’s become an inferior Hollywood. It hasn’t developed that edge of creativity which you see in a number of current American filmmakers such as Coppola and Altman. * * * It’s all been imitative, and imitating something that someone saw four years ago.
FRYE: A great many people make the same remark about Canadian television. They would say that it is bad American television and that the best American television is far better.
FULFORD: The matter of films and television opens up the larger question of the Americanization of Canada. Some people believe that only a tiny number of Canadians are touched by anything that could be called Canadian culture. And almost everyone in the country has now been submerged by American culture.
FRYE: The phenomenon that we call mass culture is uniform in the United States and English Canada. I’m not greatly worried about what is called the Americanization of Canada. What people mean when they speak of Americanization has been just as lethal to American culture as it has been to Canadian culture. It’s a kind of levelling down which I think every concerned citizen of democracy should fight, whether he is a Canadian or an American.
FULFORD: And yet there is a choice between American and Canadian culture in some areas. For instance, I remember a friend who was teaching in a community college in southwestern Ontario when the War Measures Act was brought in, who discovered that most of what his students knew about the War Measures Act they knew from what Walter Cronkite told them.2 The fact is that Walter Cronkite, and those broadcasts, are an expression of America, even though it may be a levelled America. And so are movies. Movies can be good or bad expressions of America. They can be levelling, or they can be defining, but they are America. And they leave out the reality of Canada.
FRYE: I think that to the extent that they become genuine American cultural products, they tend more and more to speak for a smaller community than the United States of America. While Faulkner is not a part of American mass culture, he is a very articulate expression of American culture. But the American part is an inference from what he tells you about his corner of America.
FULFORD: Paradoxically, although I’m as worried as anyone about the phenomena we’ve been discussing, the curious thing is that the Canadians I know are much more Canadian today than they were twenty-five years ago. By Canadian I mean sophisticated to some extent about the different parts of Canada, interested and so on. * * * Something has happened, and I think it’s television. Television has worked for a lot of these people.
FRYE: Television does have a profoundly civilizing aspect in that it compels people to look like people. I think of what an abstract notion I had of Eskimos when I was a student at school, or even college, and how that simply disappeared as soon as one began seeing them on television.
FULFORD: You have to accept René Lévesque as a human being when you see him three times a week on the eleven o’clock news.
FRYE: You have to start whittling away your stereotypes.
FULFORD: When the 1970s began we had a crisis in the publishing business which led to a great deal of government activity. Ryerson Press was purchased by an American firm, McGraw-Hill. The Ontario government appointed a Royal Commission.3 The Canada Council threw itself into a frenzy of activity. The Secretary of State made various moves. And a publishing community of a kind was created. What’s been the result of that? Has it affected you? Has it changed what you’re reading in any way?
FRYE: I’m not sure that it has, really. The publishing and selling of books is an economic enterprise; it follows economic rhythms, rather than strictly cultural ones. It didn’t worry me too much that certain publishers in Canada were British, like Macmillan and Oxford, because they were working very hard and conscientiously to produce Canadian books. I regret the kind of nationalism that defines a Canadian publisher in artificial terms. A certain amount of takeover is almost inevitable, given the economic conditions. Canadian authors in the meantime seem to continue to get published. And it doesn’t worry me too much if a roomful of Canadian schoolchildren are asked who the prime minister of Canada is and say Jimmy Carter. What interests me is that Jimmy Carter is reading Peggy Atwood. The growth of Canada as a distinctive presence in the world scene is something that’s also going on.
FULFORD: The idea that in Italy and elsewhere there are courses in Canadian literature would have seemed outlandish ten or fifteen years ago. How do you explain that? Is Canada becoming exotic in some way?
FRYE: It’s partly that, but I think too it’s the maturing of a culture. An immature culture imports its culture. So long as Canada was a colony, the works of British and American literature were brought out to the boondocks and people tried to imitate them. But as a culture matures, it becomes a native manufacture, and eventually it’s an export. Canada is now producing a literature which has an imaginative integrity to other countries. I was talking with a professor at the University of Bordeaux who spoke eloquently about Canadian literature as the expression of a people finding its own voice. I assumed he meant French Canadian literature, but he didn’t. He meant English Canadian writers like Margaret Laurence and Timothy Findley and Jack Hodgins—writers working within a region.