Conducted 28 January and 5 February 1981
This is a partial transcription of the tapes in NFF, 1991, box 64, of a four-part program “Storytelling,” written and narrated by poet Maureen Harris, broadcast on CBC’s Ideas in 1981. Dated by entries in Frye’s daybook for 1981. In NFF, 1988, box 39, file 10 is a preliminary outline and request for an interview from Maureen Harris. The host was Russ Germain, who explained that the program was part of an extended series that would explore the role of narrative forms in our experience of ourselves and the world. Throughout the episodes, readings of stories alternated with narrative, interviews, and comments. A statement from Frye was used as a general introduction:
FRYE: Man doesn’t live nakedly in nature the way that animals do. He lives inside a transparent envelope that we call his culture or his civilization. The verbal part of that culture or civilization consists of stories that express his central concerns about himself, his destiny, and his nature, and also about the origin of his society. These become theological or political arguments later on, but they begin as stories in a culture where everything is concrete. When the arguments develop, they often repress the fact that they are in fact later developments of stories.
GERMAIN: In this segment, Maureen Harris discusses the importance of stories in childhood.
HARRIS: Northrop Frye * * * has spent much of his life exploring our storytelling and mythmaking. I asked him why we told stories.
FRYE: The earlier students of myth were greatly preoccupied by the reason for creating myths. They felt that there must be some reason to account for myths, and that we’re giving up the game if we just say that myths are autonomous, that man makes myths because he makes myths and that no explanation for the cause will work. But that seems to me to be unmistakably true. Man is a creative person existing in time and so stories arise as one of his creative products. I think that in our day the shape of literature is considerably confused by the capitalist system and the sense of private property and the law of copyright. The writer has to make his story different enough from other stories to take out a patent on it, whereas in the Middle Ages a poet would say, “Hundreds of people have already told this story, but I’m going to tell it better and I’m going to get more of it in.”
[The program discusses creation stories and all the many stories that show how men and animals received their characteristics or how certain practices began.]
HARRIS: When logic and science fail us, the imagination is there to supply a story. Northrop Frye:
FRYE: In the first place there’s no scientific theory of creation: that is, you can start off with a big bang, but something happened before that. As far as science is concerned, the universe doesn’t begin or end, it’s just there, and you don’t really need a creation myth in science except by a kind of analogy. But, hell, we begin and end, so we assume that beginning and ending must be much more important in the scheme of things than nature gives us any hint of. Nature could get along perfectly well without us; it doesn’t care whether we begin or end; it cares only for the continuity of the species. But that outrages us. We feel that our beginning and our end must be something absolutely central and fundamental in the scheme of things. So whatever happens we’re going to construct creation myths and apocalyptic myths. * * *
[This segment turns to the centrality of stories in adult life, suggesting through a consideration of the story of Scheherazade that fiction, not facts, holds life together.]
HARRIS: What is the relation between fact and fiction in our lives?
FRYE: The facts are elements within a fiction and the fiction is really the controlling vision which indicates the purpose of the work you’re doing. If you take a social worker in Toronto, she is confronted with facts of deserted and broken homes, abused children, derelicts, and so forth. If she disregarded those facts she’d be totally incompetent; but she would be just as incompetent, or at least helpless, if she didn’t have somewhere in her mind a vision of a saner and cleaner and better organized Toronto. * * *
[Frye’s voice is used to introduce this segment on the reverberations of storytelling in public life:]
FRYE: If you ask a person at random on the street why he voted as he did in the last election, the answers that you’ll get have to do with the imagination. Only for exceptionally well-informed people will you get answers that are based on straight arguments or concrete examples. In other words, it’s through the imagination that we participate in society.
[Harris discusses the central myths that help to define societies, such as those linking the founding of Rome or Britain to Troy.]
FRYE: All formulations of the social contract do what John Stuart Mill called the passing off of a fiction as a fact.1 That is, once upon a time people got together and surrendered their power to a dictator—that’s Hobbes—oh, no, once upon a time people got together and delegated their power to a ruler—that’s Locke—oh, no, once upon a time people got together to form a natural society and were gypped out of it by the aggressor or the dishonest—that’s Rousseau. No matter how you formulate it you’re going to come up with some kind of myth. It seems to me that there are two very powerful myths in political life: the myth of origin, which is a version of the social contract, and the myth of ending or telos, which is going to be some form of Utopia. It doesn’t matter whether you say you believe in a social contract or Utopia—belief has nothing to do with it—the thing is that these are maintained in your mind as the frames by which you do your thinking about society.
[After some further remarks on the central Judaeo-Christian myth of exile and return, Harris comments on the problem of making our collective stories more inclusive and universal, and of the difficulties of seeming to question them.]
HARRIS: We need to see that we are the mythmakers and storytellers, so that our own involvement becomes clearer. Northrop Frye:
FRYE: The essence of a myth is the human construct. If Venus, for example, is a goddess to whom a temple is built, sacrifices made, and prayers addressed, all that is a projecting activity. When you stop believing in Venus, then she really does become the goddess of love and beauty and the poets know what to do with her. Whereas if she’s a projected pseudoreality there’s something about her that hasn’t emerged very clearly—except when the artist does what the sculptor of the Venus de Milo does: just ignores the projection, and treats her as a human construct. * * *
HARRIS: We don’t entirely trust politicians as storytellers, but they are not going to stop telling stories. In fact, they may do so more deliberately as they become more aware of the importance of the imagination in reaching the voter. Northrop Frye:
FRYE: Politicians themselves have been involuntarily forced to consider it, partly because of the importance of television. Within the last quarter of a century there’s been a great deal of talk about how a political party is going to improve its image and so on. They say that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; this cult of the image is a tribute of the same kind to the importance of the role of the imagination in the fluctuations of opinion polls and that sort of thing.
[A discussion of Plato’s belief in the power of stories, and of his desire to control the type of stories told in his ideal republic, leads to a general consideration of the tension between art and politics.]
HARRIS: Politics is concerned with maintaining a stable society, while art concerns itself with the variety and totality of individual human experience. We find it difficult to understand the relation between them because we confuse them. We think they move in the same way instead of in opposing directions.
FRYE: I think the normal tendency of culture is to decentralize. The human imagination has something vegetable about it; it likes to send down roots and work within a limited environment. We have to distinguish the way culture operates from the way political and economic movements operate. If you hitch on a political or economic development to cultural decentralizing you get something that might very well go in the direction of fascism. You notice how separatist movements are often linked with terrorism. On the other hand, if you hitch a cultural movement on to the centralizing rhythms of politics and economics you get a pompous imperialistic art that means nothing to anybody. It’s because Faulkner stuck to one county in Mississippi that he’s intelligible all over the world, whereas if he’d just written about the human race or human destiny or human problems he would have been nowhere. * * *
HARRIS: In Canada in some way we still have to fashion our story or stories.
FRYE: Canada has always had its famous problem of identity and a problem of diffidence. The result is that it’s not a nation that places much trust in heroic leaders. The attitude to Mackenzie King in every election was, “Oh my God, do we have to go out and vote for that guy again?”—but they always did. Then, when Trudeau came along … I’ve been convinced that the enormous outburst of creative activity in English Canada from about 1960 on was the result of the previous Quiet Revolution in Quebec; it was a response to the fact that French Canada had developed and was conscious of an identity of its own. I think people in 1968 saw Trudeau as the person who united those two forms of consciousness. But no golden age lasts, and the Canadian habit, like the habits of any country, will reassert itself sooner or later. So now we’re back at the stage of, “Oh my God, do we have to go out and vote for that guy again?”
[Harris emphasizes the importance of understanding the way our imagination responds to different versions of stories.]
FRYE: Well, there is no possible way of eliminating the imagination. You have only the choice between making a proper and a pathological use of it. There’s no use talking about getting rid of the imagination—it just won’t go away.
[This episode deals with the role of story in religious thought. Its very Frye- or Blake-like theme is that the imagination with its images and myths can overcome the dualistic view of life in which subject and object, spirit and flesh, inner and outer, are seen as warring opposites. Harris stresses, as Frye does, that religion should be approached not as a body of belief and rules of conduct, but as enriching mythology.]
HARRIS: The world is a story unfolding. Within the story of the world, the story of our lives unfolds. If we can learn to recognize and to understand our own storytelling, we may find ourselves in place, located in relationship with the world and other people.
FRYE: First of all, you think of God or the gods as objective, as out there somewhere or up there somewhere. Then you realize that you can keep going for billions of miles and it isn’t going to get you anywhere, that there’s no god in outer space. So you think you have to go back home and look, as we say, within. But the subjective is just as much a fallacy as the objective. Projecting is wrong but injecting is really no better. So you have to go back home but avoiding the subjective or psychologizing fallacy. You can’t be reduced to something that’s going on inside your skull. Because man belongs to something before he is anything and it’s really a community united in a common vision that he has to turn to.