Conducted 26 October 1981
From “Acta Interview: Northrop Frye,” Acta Victoriana, 106 (Fall 1981): 58–70. Dated by an entry in Frye ’s daybook for 1981. The article was introduced by the explanation that “Recently, Professor Frye was keynote speaker at the January 1981 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science where he read an address entitled ’The Bridge of Language “ [NFMC, 315–29] Acta editors John Cargill and Angela Esterhammer (the latter to become Distinguished University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario) interviewed Frye on a major theme of that address, the relation between the arts and sciences.
INTERVIEWER: Professor Frye, your first published book was a study of William Blake. Blake is emblematic, for many people, of the poet’s antipathy towards the sciences. What was it that Blake saw in science that would lead him to say, “May God us keep / From single vision and Newton’s sleep!”?1
FRYE: It wasn’t what he saw in science, it was what he saw in politics. He saw a kind of death impulse trying to get control of science and the death impulse was the thing that had caused the Napoleonic Wars. He had started out as a partisan of the French Revolution but when the French Revolution just turned into imperialism he realized that there was something much more sinister going on than a desire for freedom.
INTERVIEWER: What about the animosity, which you talked about in “The Bridge of Language,” between artists and scientists?
FRYE: Well, that springs first of all from the humanist vision. If you look at something so unbearably hideous as the outskirts of a modern city, you realize that there must be something wrong with any organism that could construct a carapace of this kind. Ruskin in the nineteenth century, for example, attacks the squalor and the ugliness of civilization. But that is not just an aesthetic judgment. He relates it very specifically to the exploiting of workers.2 So the protest against civilization and technology is not a protest against science. It is a protest against polluting the earth through activities which begin with men exploiting other men and end with men exploiting nature. Nobody ever dreamed that the exploiting of nature by man was evil except the poets.
INTERVIEWER: What about the animosity that goes the other way? That is, scientists who consider that the study of the humanities is worthless and doesn’t contribute to the advancement of civilization?
FRYE: Yes. But they’re just clunkheads. I think that’s all one can say about that attitude.
INTERVIEWER: Do you ever come across any of this animosity in your own work as a literary critic?
FRYE: I have almost never met any indifference or contempt for the arts on the part of scientists. It is always people who know nothing about either art or science who take that view of things.
INTERVIEWER: One chapter of Fearful Symmetry is entitled “Tradition and Experiment.” What is the role of experiment in the arts and how does it differ from experiment in the sciences?
FRYE: Well, the experiment in sciences, of course, is designed to be a repeatable experiment; that is, if it can be repeated by someone else then it becomes a basis for prediction and prediction is an extremely important element in the sciences. What Blake meant by experiment was rather the attempt to make every work of art or imagination unique. Then it would operate more or less upon Darwinian lines; that is, if the experiment had survival value then it would last.
INTERVIEWER: You are saying that scientific theories must be supported by the evidence of repeatable experiments. Is there anything analogous in art: can art be right or wrong?
FRYE: No, it can’t be right or wrong, but as I say, some works of art can have survival value. In Shakespeare’s day most of the serious drama critics assumed that Ben Jonson was a much more serious artist than Shakespeare was and what happened was not that they were proven wrong, but simply that Jonson gradually faded off the stage, except for one or two plays, and Shakespeare just stayed stuck on the stage and refused to budge.
INTERVIEWER: In “The Bridge of Language” you contrast the development of a “global unity” in the sciences with decentralization or regionalism in the arts. Why do the arts tend, as you put it, “to bring increasingly small areas into articulateness” [NFMC, 318]?
FRYE: Well, that seems to be what has happened. The example that I give in “The Bridge of Language” is that there is no such thing as American literature, there is Mississippi literature and New England literature and Western literature. There is something vegetable about the creative imagination that needs a rather limited environment. Consequently you learn about America through its imagination, through its literature, by adding up these various regional writers, and the same thing has been emphatically true of Canada in the last twenty years. It’s simply that the imagination can never be discarnate or dehumanized so as to take a sort of global perspective.
INTERVIEWER: You have said that the scientist quantifies his data while the poet qualifies his [NFMC, 320]. Could you elaborate on this?
FRYE: It’s a matter of common knowledge, I think, that the work of the scientist may begin with the same sort of hunch or intuition that the work of the artist does. Still, he himself can’t take it seriously until he has reduced it to some kind of mathematical formulation, some kind of equation. But for the poet or the painter the aim is to convey directly the essence of what was being seen, which is unique for everybody who sees it, and so can never be quantified. In science what you end with is something like a – b = 0; in literature what you end with is something like a = b. Although a and b are different things, nevertheless they are asserted to be the same thing. It is that metaphorical imagination that gives you a sense of quality in the sense of the whatness of the thing.
INTERVIEWER: Professor Moffat commented that in the process of scientifically quantifying an intuition it may happen that all of a sudden something works out wrong and you have to scrap years and years of work.3 So scientific work is really a gamble. Do you see anything analogous in the work of the artist?
FRYE: Oh yes. Balzac has a story called Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, “The Unknown Masterpiece,” of a man who worked all his life on what to everybody else was just a meaningless tangle of lines. There have been all kinds of examples of that in the history of the arts; although Balzac wasn’t consciously prophetic, he didn’t realize that this was the kind of thing people would be looking at one hundred years after his day. But it is true that artists may mistake their own abilities and waste years trying to do things that the inner voice inside them doesn’t want to do.
INTERVIEWER: I suppose the same thing could hold true for the critic.
FRYE: Yes, it certainly could.
INTERVIEWER: In 1938 Einstein said that “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.”4 Did Einstein’s recognition of the fictional, or, if you like, mythical status of physical concepts open up a new common ground between the activity of the scientist and the activity of the poet?
FRYE: Oh, I think so, yes, and I think Einstein knew that. He was really saying that science is a mental fiction just as the arts are and that the question of what is really there underneath the construct we put on it is only a kind of working consensus. If a painter looks at railway tracks stretching out to the horizon he will see them meeting at the horizon. But, as Margaret Avison says, “a train doesn’t run pigeon-toed.”5 You wouldn’t get on the train if you knew that was really true; so that what is really there is a matter of a working consensus. Similarly, you can prove mathematically the atomic construction of protons and neutrons and electrons inside an object like this desk, but as a matter of ordinary social working consensus you keep on bumping into it.
INTERVIEWER: I wanted to talk for a moment about your Anatomy of Criticism, which is interesting for our topic simply because you have called it an “anatomy.” To what extent does this title indicate that you have used scientific principles in the study of literature?
FRYE: Well, “anatomy” in the seventeenth century meant a kind of dissection and it also extended itself to becoming the name of a literary form. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is one of my favourite books. It is ostensibly a medical treatise on the disease of melancholy, but actually it’s an artistic reaction to the human experience. Similarly with Lyly’s The Anatomy of Wit, which has a slightly deprecating quality, meaning that it’s closer to satire. It’s the use of a scientific term by literature to summon up the idea of something analytic yet at the same time comprehensive that I had in mind when writing the Anatomy of Criticism.
INTERVIEWER: In the Anatomy of Criticism you suggest that “criticism” must be understood as an organized body of knowledge about art in the same way that “physics” is understood as an organized body of knowledge about nature [11/13]. If this understanding of criticism is generally accepted in the intellectual community, will humanists and scientists find themselves in a more fruitful dialogue?
FRYE: Yes, I think they would. With the big revolution in physics that began with Einstein and Planck you have the principle established that it’s no longer sufficient to work in a world where the scientist is the subject and the world that he’s watching is the object, because the scientist is an object too; the act of observation alters what you are observing. That of course does bring the arts and sciences close together in a common meeting ground. The social sciences, which are very largely twentieth-century in origin, are entirely founded on the need to observe the observer. I think of criticism as ultimately a form of social science. Of course, that cuts across a lot of conditioned reflexes, and I first said that in the days when my humanist colleagues thought that what characterized the social scientist was that he wrote very badly. Well, an awful lot of literary critics write very badly too, so that’s not a very safe dividing point. I think that criticism can never be a science in the physical scientist’s orbit, that is, it can never be quantified experimentally and lead to prediction. It’s something else; it’s more like a kind of cultural anthropology or certain forms of psychology.
INTERVIEWER: Some people seem to fear the intrusion of any kind of scientific ways of working into art or criticism. Have you encountered this?
FRYE: Well, of course there’s always fear, and the fear is more on the part of the people who have spent their lives with pen and pencil. There are certain aspects of literary criticism that you need a computer for and there is no point in running away from the fact; it doesn’t make literary criticism dehumanized. In fact, the thing I’ve been attacking all my life is the notion that the humanities have a monopoly on what is genuinely human. That is an illusion by which certain types of humanists try to fortify themselves but it just doesn’t work.
INTERVIEWER: In the Anatomy you said that “one is forced to wonder whether [literary] scholars realize the implications of the fact that their work is scientific” [8/10]. How does the situation stand twenty-five years after the publication of the Anatomy?
FRYE: There has been a lot of double-talk written since then, and also a great many other areas like semiotics and linguistics have developed. The Anatomy, published in 1957, begins to look like a sort of blazed trail through a forest. Now it’s a paved road. I said in the Anatomy that either criticism is scientific or hundreds of people are wasting their lives in a pseudoscience like palmistry. I think that is quantitatively much more true now than it was then.
INTERVIEWER: I wanted to bring up the question of education and teaching in the humanities and sciences. When you study physics you must first spend years and years learning the math before you can really approach physics. There is, so to speak, a language barrier to cross before your studies can begin. Do you see anything analogous for the study of literature?
FRYE: It seems to me that the human race has developed two languages, the language of words and the language of numbers. Mathematics is increasingly the primary language in the sciences so you can’t study the sciences until you have studied the language in which they are written and with which the scientist thinks. Similarly, you can’t write until you’ve studied language to the point at which you know what you’re doing when you use words.
INTERVIEWER: Of course, most people learn a language when they are two or three years old. Is there something beyond that which you must learn to prepare you for work in criticism?
FRYE: Oh yes. The reason why we have compulsory education and compel children to read and write and count is that we have to have, in this very complex civilization, a world of docile and adjusted and obedient citizens. That is, you read in order to read traffic signs and you count in order to make out your income tax. But if you are going to use these languages with any freedom or any responsibility or independence there’s a long process ahead of you yet.
INTERVIEWER: A book like James Joyce’s Ulysses seems to require that the reader learn a special “artistic code” before the book can begin to make any sense. The same thing might be said of modern painting. Is it going to become increasingly the case that a special sort of training will be required to understand modern art?
FRYE: Not necessarily. When someone says he “understands” abstract painting he may mean that he can respond to it. For most of the arts that is what is really primary. You may feel a response without being totally aware of all the details of what you are responding to. One thing, of course, is that it’s what the creative person does now that the rest of society will be doing a hundred years later. That curious sort of prophetic quality in the arts is something that I think a lot of people respond to.
INTERVIEWER: You have said that literature, unlike history, does not tell us what happened but rather what happens [AC, 83/76]. That is to say, it reveals the universal forms of human experience in and through the representation of particular experiences. Now science also relates particular experiences to general laws. Does this mean that science and literature may be understood as two different ways of mediating between the particular and the universal in human experience?
FRYE: I would think that there was certainly something more than an analogy connecting the two things. From something that goes on in the synapses of a rat learning a maze you can learn something about the way the nervous system operates. Faulkner can confine his energies to an unpronounceable county in Mississippi and get the Nobel prize in Sweden because there seems to be a law of literature that the more particular and specific your subject matter the more universal its appeal is.
INTERVIEWER: The central metaphor that Professor Moffat used to describe the activity of the scientist was “imagination in a straitjacket.” Is there a straitjacket upon the imagination of the artist?
FRYE: Actually, looking at what the nuclear physicists did in the first half of the twentieth century I’d have said it was very largely speculative cosmology, and the amount of “straitjacketing” it had to fit into was applied at a very much later stage. The wildest dreams seem to me to have come out of that period–Paul Dirac’s conception of antimatter, for example. I think the same thing is true of the arts. You can have an imagination as far out as Salvador Dali or Edgar Allan Poe but once you start to write a specific story or paint a specific picture then you’re in a very strictly limited area.
INTERVIEWER: Today it seems an established thing that at least by the time a person gets to university he has either chosen to go into the humanities or the sciences. Do you think that it is possible or worthwhile to get a joint humanistic and scientific education today?
FRYE: I think that what it is essential to do is to get the feeling that wherever you happen to be is the centre of all knowledge and that no matter what it is you’re studying in detail you’re not excluding anything else; you’re right in the middle of it, you’re right where the action is. One doesn’t need to be in a hurry about establishing connections with things that seem most remote from whatever it is that you’re specializing in. I think it’s perfectly normal for a person to devote their energies to the study of literature or the study of a science and realize that for the time being their knowledge of what they’re not studying is a bit hazy but still relevant. It’s when you start saying that it’s not relevant that you’ve really had it. If you realize that it is relevant then there’s nothing to stop you from branching out into it.