Recorded 1 May 1981
From a transcription of the BBC program provided courtesy of the BBC’s Written Archives Centre. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1981. Frye’s comments were part of a program on McLuhan entitled “Medium and Message” written and presented by Russell Davies and produced by David Perry. Frye was thanked for his participation in a letter from Perry dated 20 May 1981 (NFF, 1991, box 41, file 2). The program was broadcast on the BBC’s Radio 3 on 25 November 1981. Frye’s comments were interspersed with those of a number of other contributors.
DAVIES: [McLuhan’s] own commitment * * * was to literacy, and in his anxiety to point out the possibility of its decay, he failed to do justice to the full powers of print technology. Such at least is the view of his Toronto colleague, the critic Northrop Frye.
FRYE: I rather wish that Marshall had come to terms with the linear nature of the book because I think he would have been a much more permanent influence if he had done. What he has said about the linear quality and the self-hypnotizing power of the eye in written books and mathematics was, I think, with all due respect to him, a half truth. There’s another side to the printed text, and that’s its uniformity, the fact that it always says the same thing, no matter how often you open it. That seems to me an equally obvious aspect of it. For example, when it came in in the sixteenth century, it had a very close association with magic. You can see that in Shakespeare’s Tempest when Caliban says of Prospero, “Burn but his books, because without them he is just as big a fool as I am.”1 And that capacity for the printed word to create a kind of instant hallucination is distinct from the merely remembered thing of oral culture. There are so many aspects of the written word which were there right in front of him and which he knew about, and I rather wish he had incorporated them. It was really the G.K. Chesterton butterslide: the notion that everything was unified in the Middle Ages and that we have been splitting and specializing ever since. * * *
What I regret in the distinction of hot and cool media is the tendency to determinism in his thinking, which made him assume that a nation would turn hot or cool as its prevailing media were hot or cool. And he might perhaps have noticed the fact that he lived in a very cool country where all the tempers are cool and consequently all the media are cool.
DAVIES: Exposure to the kind of world that was here exposing itself to him did not go without its effect on McLuhan’s work or on his expectations. Northrop Frye, who still lives and works in the quiet of Toronto, has firm feelings about this.
FRYE: I don’t think that academics ought to get on this manic-depressive roller-coaster of publicity. They are just not built for it; they are built for much longer and more leisurely rhythms. And I think he was a little confused by being blown up so much in the 1960s and even more confused by being neglected in the 1970s.
DAVIES: The operation had been for a brain tumour that had curtailed McLuhan’s activities in the mid-’70s. In 1979, he suffered a stroke.
FRYE: Being an utterly charming person whom nobody but Ebenezer Scrooge could ever have disliked, he was a very colourful presence in the community. I think most people’s feeling when he had his stroke was that the campus will now be a lot duller.