Recorded 18 March 1982
From CBC audiotapes, reference nos. 820406-1 and 820407-1, transcribed by Carrie O’Grady. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1982 for an appointment with producer Robert Prowse. Frye was interviewed by Don Harron in connection with the publication on 10 February 1982 of The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), to which the page numbers in the text refer, giving first the original and then the Collected Works page number. The interview was broadcast in five parts on the CBC’s Morningside, 5–9 April 1982.
HARRON: Where does the term “The Great Code” come from?
FRYE: It comes from a series of aphorisms that Blake wrote around the margins of an engraving he did of the Laocoön, and …
HARRON: That’s those three guys all tied up together.
FRYE: Yes, that’s right. And he had several remarks there about the Bible, and in the course of it he says that the Old and the New Testaments are the “Great Code of Art.” Of course originally “code” was a word that had rather specific reference to the Bible itself, whereas now it means communication theory, so I’m simply using the title for all it’s worth: for all its echoes together.
HARRON: What is the extra meaning that the Bible had?
FRYE: Well, it’s closely connected with the conception of a Scripture as a code of laws, and the original manuscripts of the Bible, at least the earliest ones we have, are mostly codexes. That’s almost the last word used in my book.
HARRON: What is the last word used in the book?
FRYE: Well, I’m not sure just what the very last word is, but I do stop with an Anglo-Saxon riddle that talks about the preparation of a Biblical codex in Anglo-Saxon times. 1
HARRON: Is your point that the Bible is a pivotal influence in our cultural life as well as our spiritual life? Is that the point that Blake was making?
FRYE: Yes, yes it was. He was very anxious to see the Bible absorbed into Western culture in an imaginative way, as well as a doctrinal way, and that was why he called it the “Great Code of Art,” because it was something that influences the creative imagination.
HARRON: Now are we talking about the Bible meant to be read as living literature (which is a title I remember from the ‘40s or the ‘30s)?
FRYE: Well, that tends to lead one to think of the Bible as literature, and that is not really what I’m after, nor what I think Blake meant. I think that the Bible has literary qualities—it must have, or it would not have influenced literature so precisely and specifically as it has done—but it’s more a matter of seeing how poets traditionally have read the Bible, why they would read the Bible, and assuming that they had to read it for other reasons, how they would read it as poets.
HARRON: I assume that John Bunyan read the Bible because he probably didn’t get to read any other book. Is that why he wrote like the Bible?
FRYE: That’s very largely the reason, yes. His education was certainly Bible-centred. And yet when he says in the Preface to the Pilgrim’s Progress, in that little verse poem that he writes introducing it, “I did it my own self to gratify,” he’s talking very much as a poet would do.
HARRON: There are two passages I’m always puzzled about. One is the beginning of the Old Testament (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”) and the other is the first verse of the Gospel according to St. John (“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”). Is there a significance between those two passages? Do they reflect on each other?
FRYE: I think the opening of John is intended to be a kind of Christian gloss on the opening of Genesis. In the account of creation in Genesis, one of the first things said is, “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” In other words, it’s the saying, the word of God, that is the creative agent.
HARRON: You mean that the world was created by one word from God?
FRYE: That is the way it’s explained in the opening of Genesis, that God speaks, and things come into being. That suggested to me that creation has more to do with human consciousness than it has to do with the beginning of the order of nature.
HARRON: You say in your book that the concept of God can be considered as a verb, not a noun [17/35]. Could you explain that?
FRYE: Well, God introduces himself to Moses in the burning bush; he gives himself a name, but he also says that his real name is “I am that I am.” The scholars say that should really be rendered as “I will be that I will be” or “what I will be,” and that suggests that our ordinary noun thinking, where we associate God with things and objects, is not really adequate. It’s more a process completing itself that is involved in the conception “God,” and so we would understand what God was more clearly if we tended to think of him more as a verb than as a noun.
HARRON: Is the Bible that we read today adequate, because it’s a book that’s been translated, and it’s been edited, and it’s been expurgated—what do we get of the original?
FRYE: Well, we get quite a mixture of things. I keep quoting from the King James version in my book, because it is not only the most accessible and familiar version, but it’s also the version which was intended by its translators in 1611 to be a traditional rather than a new translation. They say that very clearly in their address to the reader. That means in practice that it’s very close to the Vulgate tradition which is at the centre of the Catholic tradition, and that’s one reason why I use it. It’s essentially a Vulgate translation, so it comes close to the Bible that has always been used from the beginning on.
HARRON: But it is a translation, and you say there are very important puns in the Bible which would surely get lost in translation.
FRYE: They do get lost; they’re only mentioned in the margins, but the translator has to take account of them, and of course that means what it always means in literature (and any structure of words), that translation is a settling for a second best.
HARRON: Puns you don’t think of as being serious. They’re sometimes a deflection of the original course of a thought. But are they important to the Bible?
FRYE: Puns are absolutely essential to poetic thinking, because the poet is establishing the powers of words rather than defining things. When he uses words he uses them in as many senses as possible; that is, ambiguity is merely a difficulty and an annoyance in scientific writing, but it’s a structural principle in poetic writing, and so the notion that puns are not serious goes along with the notion of poetry as not serious.
HARRON: You say in your book that poetry came before prose [209/230].
FRYE: Always, yes.
HARRON: Do you mean written poetry or spoken poetry?
FRYE: I mean in this case spoken, because writing was very largely used for commercial purposes before it extended into anything that we call literature.
HARRON: But do you mean that when man found human speech, he was poetic before he was prosaic?
FRYE: Well, I think that the kind of language that emerges as having a certain kind of cultural ascendancy must have been in the first place poetic, because poetry depends on rather simple schemata like rhyme and alliteration and rhythm, and consequently it’s much easier to remember than prose is. If you look at the Anglo-Saxon kings, you find that their names all begin with the same letter, and that’s very largely so that the poet could hitch them into alliterative verse.
HARRON: You say that there are three ages of literature, exemplified by Homer, Socrates (or Plato, his biographer in a sense), and Francis Bacon [6–15/23–33]. Would you like to elaborate on that?
FRYE: Well, I think of these as phases in the culturally ascendant language. That is, you start off with a poetic language where the subject and the object are not very clearly separated, so that the—
HARRON: That’s how God can be a verb and a noun at the same time?
FRYE: Yes. It’s in some respects a primitive use of language, but then every human mind, including twentieth-century minds, is a primitive mind. That’s the bedrock of our language. Then we begin to get a language of abstraction, where words are thought of as following from thoughts, and the thoughts in their turn follow from the logos, from the word.
HARRON: Thought rather than felt, maybe?
FRYE: Yes. This conception of language used abstractly dominates from Plato and Aristotle’s time down to Kant and Hegel, because for one thing it’s an instrument of authority.
HARRON: So we get Socratic dialogues—questions rather than statements—is that it?
FRYE: Well, the Socratic dialogues mark the beginning of a revolution in language from the metaphorical to the dialectic. That is, it horrified Plato that poets were the great teachers (including Homer), and he thought philosophers ought to be the teachers. The Socratic dialogues are a form of his propaganda.
HARRON: Plato was wrong?
FRYE: Not wrong, no, but he was initiating another social use of language, and what that social use was comes out much more clearly in books like the Laws, where Socrates doesn’t appear.
HARRON: Do we see these different forms reflected in the Bible—the Homeric and the Socratic?
FRYE: To some degree we do, but the Bible has always avoided abstract language, even in the New Testament. There are no true abstract arguments in the Bible, and it’s held its social function partly because it’s so concrete, and so close to poetry. While it’s close to poetry, its intentions are not purely or wholly poetical. It’s more a form of rhetoric, of oratory, of something that’s addressed directly to the reader in a way that the poet doesn’t address people.
HARRON: How about Francis Bacon? Was he a “Renaissance man”?
FRYE: Yes, Bacon was the initiator, or one of the initiators, of a descriptive approach to language, where the word is evoked by the thing, and that means that the criterion for the word has to be found in nature. That tends to make the culturally ascendant use of language from the sixteenth century onward increasingly a reflection of nature.
HARRON: So is Bacon writing history, as opposed to poetry?
FRYE: Well, history would be included. But he was really more interested in inductive science.
HARRON: What’s the difference between the Bible and history?
FRYE: In history, you have a set of words which are paralleling a set of events in time, so that history relates primarily to the past. In the Bible you have what I call myth, which is an abstraction from history, which gives you historical events so that they relate to the present and to the experiences of the people who are reading the story.
HARRON: You have said in your book The Great Code that the Bible is a gigantic myth. Now a lot of people would be offended by that but you obviously have another meaning for the word “myth.”
FRYE: I certainly do. I think that the tendency to think that myth means something not really true goes with a contempt for poetry; there’s a traditional belief that poets are a form of licensed liars, and naturally I have no use for that view of literature, having taught it all my life. To me, a myth is the exact opposite of a story which is not really true.
HARRON: You mean it’s more than true?
FRYE: Well, in a sense it’s more than true, because it involves the lives of the people who are reading it. In other words, a myth is a story of particular concern and importance for its society.
HARRON: What do you make of people like Velikovsky, who’s now coming back into fashion? He’s the man who takes the Bible myths and attempts to prove them scientifically: that the sun did stand still for Joshua. 2
FRYE: Yes. Well, I don’t particularly object to that, I don’t dismiss it out of hand; if his evidence holds up, then it’s evidence. The only thing I would say is that if you accept a criterion of truth external to the Bible to prove the truth of the Bible, you’re applying a standard that the Bible itself does not recognize.
HARRON: You have an interesting quote—and I hope I get it accurately—“There is no historical evidence that Jesus ever lived.” 3
FRYE: I don’t know that I would say it quite as blatantly as that; I would say that there is no evidence for Jesus as a major historical figure outside the New Testament. There are references to him outside the New Testament, but they would hardly amount to making him a world-changing figure. That is entirely within the New Testament, as far as I can see.
HARRON: But is the fact that he is rarely mentioned irrelevant?
FRYE: No. I think it’s clear that the writers of the New Testament preferred it that way; they preferred to keep the evidence for Jesus sealed within the Bible itself, because they didn’t bother looking for evidence for the historical existence of Jesus, which they could easily have found. The only kind of evidence they were interested in was the agreement between what the Old Testament, as they read it, said would happen to the Messiah, and what the Gospels record as having happened to Jesus.
HARRON: And do those two accounts conform?
FRYE: Well, they keep pointing out the resemblances, and through the account of the Crucifixion, for example, there are certain specific references to the Psalms: the fact that his bones are not broken on the Cross, the fact that he says, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—those are from Psalm 22. The Gospel writers don’t just make these echoes, they also quote specifically, and say, “This is what is said in the Scriptures,” and are urging you to look up the reference yourself.
HARRON: So are we dealing with prophecy or editing?
FRYE: We’re dealing with both. We’re dealing with an editing process which regards the life of Christ as a fulfilling of a prophecy.
HARRON: So the New Testament fulfils the Old Testament?
FRYE: That is the view in the New Testament itself; the New Testament itself regards itself as the key to the Old Testament, as explaining what it really means.
HARRON: And what does the Old Testament regard itself as?
FRYE: In the Old Testament itself you have a work of the Revelation of God, and it consists of various aspects, law and prophecy and wisdom and the like.
HARRON: You’ve divided the Bible into seven phases—I assume it’s you?
FRYE: Yes.
HARRON: Could we just enumerate them? The first is creation; and then there’s revolution; then the law; then after the law comes wisdom; and then prophecy, then gospel, and finally apocalypse. Now, how do these correspond to the various books of the Bible? Do they follow in a linear direction?
FRYE: They’re more or less linear. Creation, of course, comes in Genesis. What I mean by revolution is Israel and Egypt in Exodus, which is the second book.
HARRON: Oh, you don’t mean kicking out of the garden, then?
FRYE: Not that, no. That’s not a revolutionary movement, that’s the fall of man, which was part of the creation. Then that is followed by law, because when the Israelites get out of Egypt they wander in the wilderness and the law is given to them there. And then we have wisdom which is the individual response to the law, which is in the various books associated with Solomon.
HARRON: The Koran has a system of law too. Is there a connection?
FRYE: There is a connection, yes, because the Koran is related to the Bible. The Koran really is a work of prophecy which incorporates a certain amount of law—
HARRON: Different laws from the Bible?
FRYE: Some of them are from the Bible, some of them are peculiar to the Koran. But it’s like Christianity in regarding the Old Testament as primarily a work of prophecy.
HARRON: Is the Bible then a kind of social code of human organization?
FRYE: It’s that among other things, yes.
HARRON: What about wisdom? Is that Solomon? Everybody thinks of him as the wise man. FRYE: Well, Solomon is the typical wise man so he is associated with a number of the books of the Bible that are called wisdom books—although I don’t think that any scholar would claim that he wrote them all—and the real meaning of wisdom to me is the permeation of law into the individual life, as the individual’s response to law.
HARRON: Does that mean a man who doesn’t need the law to remind him of what he should do?
FRYE: Well—perhaps in a sense it does, yes, but it means also a continuous study of law, and guiding your life by precedent and tradition from the past, and by what is called in the King James Bible “prudence,” in relation to the future.
HARRON: And after that comes prophecy. You say the whole of the Bible, of the Old Testament, is a prophecy?
FRYE: That’s how Christianity thinks of the Old Testament, yes.
HARRON: A Judaic scholar would disagree.
FRYE: I think in Judaism the Old Testament is regarded as primarily the Torah, which is a word we often translate as “law,” although it includes a good deal that is not law. It would include prophecy, certainly. But the notion that the Old Testament is essentially a number of prophetic anticipations of what is revealed in Christ is of course peculiar to Christianity.
HARRON: Do you mean the prophets all said, “Some day, He will come”?
FRYE: That is how Christianity read the prophets, yes.
HARRON: And do you read them the same way, as a Christian?
FRYE: Well, I read them that way because I’m concerned with the Christian Bible, and I’m concerned with the Christian Bible because it’s the one that has been important for Western culture ever since.
HARRON: And what about the gospel—that’s the beginning of the New Testament, is it?
FRYE: Yes, the gospel is the revelation of all the phases that have preceded, and it consequently internalizes the law and wisdom and prophecy.
HARRON: And “apocalypse”—that’s a word that strikes terror into the hearts of people who read it, if they’ve seen Apocalypse Now—it means the end, to some people! Is that right?
FRYE: Well, it can mean that, although I prefer not to think of the apocalypse as a big show of fireworks starting next Tuesday. I’d prefer to think of it as the ultimate expanding of human consciousness, which, as I see it, is what is meant by the term “revelation” as applied to the Bible.
HARRON: You mention in your book that other cultures weren’t nearly as interested in words as the Hebrews were. The Egyptians, for example [201/221].
FRYE: Yes. The Egyptians didn’t seem to have so much interest in recording their mythology, and what they did record seems to be confined to temples, pretty well. The Isis–Osiris myth, obviously, was central to Egyptian life for thousands of years, but we don’t seem to have a continuous account of it before Plutarch, who was a Greek traveller.
HARRON: Were they content to build things like pyramids, and make their statement that way?
FRYE: I suppose most of their cultural energy went into monuments, yes.
HARRON: You say the Hebrews were not very good builders, that Solomon’s temple was probably built by imported labour [200/221]?
FRYE: Yes, I think that’s true. There was a kind of joke about the Hebrews being an unhandy sort of people, who are not famous for their artefacts. It’s something that Josephus glances at in the course of his history. 4
HARRON: Is he a Roman historian?
FRYE: He was Jewish, but he has a Roman name, and he was writing around the time of the destruction of Judah by the Roman armies.
HARRON: I got the impression from your book and from history that they weren’t good at anything except words.
FRYE: Well, certainly they were politically generally losers. They formed a crossroad between more powerful empires, and the only periods of relative prosperity they had were in the intervals between the decline of one world empire and the rise of the next one.
HARRON: But they were always commenting on these events?
FRYE: They commented on them to the extent of working out a version of history, which anticipates revolutionary theories of history in that the important events of history are the ones that are still to happen.
HARRON: I see. Well, weren’t they winners at some time? What about King David, wasn’t he a winner?
FRYE: That was one of the two periods of relative independence and prosperity, because David and Solomon rose at the time that the Egyptian power had declined, and the Assyrian power had not yet arisen in full strength. The second time was the Maccabaean period, between the Syrian Empire and the Roman Empire.
HARRON: They’re those heroes who rose up and said, “We’re not going to take this any more”?
FRYE: Yes, they were the ones who established independence for Judaea from the Seleucids.
HARRON: One of your statements is that the Bible is a divine comedy [169/190]. Perhaps you’d better explain, before we get letters and phone calls.
FRYE: I think of the narrative of the Bible as having roughly the shape of a U, that is, you get a great many stories repeated over and over again in the Bible: some protagonist, usually Israel, is in a state of relative independence and prosperity, then goes in for disobedience, and consequently is overwhelmed by enemies and is occupied and enslaved and humiliated. Then a deliverer comes and brings it back to the state it was in before. That is particularly obvious in the Book of Judges; but it contains the entire Bible, and it’s a shape that’s close to the shape of comedy.
HARRON: You mean we’re up, we’re down, and then by the end of act 3 we’re up again?
FRYE: By the end of act 5, usually.
HARRON: So are you saying that the Resurrection is a kind of comic finish?
FRYE: It’s a comedy in the sense in which Dante called his big sacred poem a comedy. That is, it deals with the rising rhythm of ascent, and there’s a hint of that at the end of comedy, where the hero and the heroine are allowed to marry in spite of the obstructions, just as the hero of the Bible, the Messiah, redeems his bride, who is the Church, and a new society is crystallized in the final act.
HARRON: And this pattern is repeated all through the Bible—up, and down, and up again. Are there any tragic figures in the Bible, people who don’t get up again?
FRYE: There are, but the Bible’s view of tragedy is rather oblique, because it doesn’t accept what is really essential, at any rate to Greek tragedy, and that’s the conception of the semi-divine hero. The most tragic figure in the Bible, I think, is King Saul, David’s predecessor, who starts out as a man of great physical strength and courage, and a fair-minded man with a good deal of shrewdness and wisdom, but who never seems to be able to do anything right, and finally disintegrates in somewhat the same way that Macbeth does.
HARRON: But by the end of the apocalypse it is an upper, not a downer.
FRYE: Yes, the Bible begins practically on page 1 with man being supplied with the tree and the water of life, which he loses; the last page talks about the restoring of the tree and the water of life to man.
HARRON: In dealing with the imagery in the Bible, you talk about types and antitypes. What do you mean by those terms?
FRYE: Well, I’m speaking of the traditional way in which Christianity has read the Old Testament as a series of anticipations of what is more clearly revealed in the New Testament. St. Augustine said that in the Old Testament, the New Testament is concealed, and in the New Testament, the Old Testament is revealed.5 It’s the concealing of the New Testament in the Old that makes what happens in it “types” of what are revealed—in the Christian view—in the New Testament, which are therefore called “antitypes.”
HARRON: Can you give me an example?
FRYE: The story of Noah’s ark, which comes to rest on top of Mount Ararat in the middle of a drowned world—according to St. Augustine, that’s a type of the founding of the Christian church. 6
FRYE: And then, when Moses dies outside the Promised Land, the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land is carried out by his successor Joshua, and Joshua has the same name as Jesus (that’s merely the Greek form of the word “Joshua”), so that Joshua’s conquest of Canaan is a type of Jesus’ conquest of the Promised Land for mankind, the spiritual kingdom.
HARRON: You mentioned that parody is sometimes used in the Bible.
FRYE: The Bible has a binary system of imagery, of which part refers to an ideal world, or what I call in the book the apocalyptic or revealed world, and then there are also demonic images, which are concerned with tyranny: the kingdoms of Egypt and Babylon, and other symbols of alien power in the world. Those are of two different kinds: there’s the temporary prosperity of Egypt and Assyria, which employs the same images that are used for the ideal world, but they are only going to last a short time and then they’ll collapse. And then there’s another set of demonic images, which are the “You just wait” demonic, which tells you what is going to happen to these kingdoms eventually.
HARRON: Small boys love to look through the Bible to find the dirty parts, and I did that, and I used to find (I think) Isaiah 36:12, in which a bunch of men sat on a wall, and drank their own urine, and ate their own dung. Now what does that mean, in the Bible?
FRYE: That comes from a speech by the Assyrian general who was trying to capture Jerusalem, and he was making a speech to the Jews to try to persuade them to surrender. This was his version of what they got by being independent. He goes on, and within a few verses there are some much more savoury images about gardens and paradise and bread and wine, which you will get if you join Assyria.
HARRON: Do you mean that the excrement is a parody of the Christian communion?
FRYE: A Christian reader would regard it as a demonic parody of communion, and this of course is an example of a demonic figure, Rabshaketh of Assyria, expressing the parody himself, though unintentionally in a different context.
HARRON: Is there a significant change in imagery between the Old and New Testaments? Frye: I wouldn’t say that there was a change in imagery, because you get for example pastoral imagery—“the Lord is my shepherd,” and the martyred shepherd Abel, and all kinds of sheepfold, pastor, and flock imagery—in the Old Testament, but it turns up in the New unchanged.
HARRON: The ninety and nine and that sort of thing?
FRYE: Yes, and you also get harvest and vintage imagery in both Old and New Testaments.
HARRON: You mentioned that sexual imagery, the man/woman thing, is also treated as a God/man parallel [154/175].
FRYE: Yes. The difficulty in visualizing there is the fact that you cannot think of an ideal society in human terms, except by alternating the sense of being alone, with nobody else to bother you, and belonging to a society.
Harron: “All one body we”? 7
FRYE: Yes. But if the body never disappears, and you never have a sense of solitude, you miss something essential to human freedom. Of course if society disappears then you go crazy in the other direction.
HARRON: But God allows you to be alone and yet not alone, is that the idea?
FRYE: Yes, there has to be an alternation of the individual and the social. What the Bible does to unite the two is to use a sexual image, whereby the Messiah, the Christ figure, is symbolically the only male in the world, and he is the bridegroom of all his followers, who are symbolically all female: the Church.
HARRON: And that’s why nuns become the brides of Christ?
FRYE: Well, that is included in that kind of imagery, yes.
HARRON: But isn’t there a change between the Old and New Testaments in the image of God himself, as kind of a vengeful, rather cruel, cranky old patriarch in the Old Testament, and isn’t he more like his son in the New Testament? Am I reading something into that?
FRYE: That is often said, and yet while there are certainly more emphases on the power and wisdom of God in the Old Testament than on his love, still, there is a great deal about his very deep concern for his people. In a book like Hosea, for example, Hosea is told to go and marry two whores, one after the other. The reason he does this is symbolic: the two whores are the unfaithful harlots, Northern Israel and Southern Judah, whom God still loves even though they are unfaithful to him. Considering the mores of an ordinary patriarchal society I think that ascribes a tremendous amount of concerned and loving imagination to God.
HARRON: Aside from its role as a religious code, what is the point of the Bible?
FRYE: I think the point of the Bible, from the point of view of its reader, is that it communicates what has traditionally been called revelation, which I think of not primarily as conveying information in signal language from A to B, but rather as a program of the expanding of human consciousness. It seems to me that if you look at the very last page of the Bible, at the end of Revelation, it’s a very open-ended conclusion, almost as though the writer were simply handing you the Bible and saying, “Now it’s complete, and now it’s yours; now you start.”
HARRON: How is that different from the treatment in Islam, or Buddhism?
FRYE: I don’t know that it is essentially different. I think all religions are really concerned with the expanding of human consciousness. There are degrees of emphasis, and there has always been what seems to me an unnecessarily nervous tendency on the part of many religions to regard their sacred books as something closed off, so that the reader has to accept them, believe everything they say, but not actually absorb them into his own consciousness.
HARRON: But the direction of the Bible seems to be a little bit like Mr. Micawber, in David Copperfield. He’s hourly expecting something good to turn up.
FRYE: That’s right. And that expectation of something good that will turn up is still going strong on the very last page of the Bible, where the tree of life and the water of life are restored to man; but when the book is handed over to the reader, the only thing that is now going to turn up is going to turn up inside the reader.
HARRON: What relation does this have to Marxism, which seems to be pointing to the future and the withering away of the State?
FRYE: I think that Marxism is a conception which really keeps what I call its antitypes, its real forms, steadily in the future, and consequently acts as something of an obvious carrot; that is, if you have to make moves now that seem to be in the direction of the enforcing of power or of tyranny, still this is all a means to an end, and the end is in the future. The Biblical end, the Second Coming, is more concerned with the annihilation of history as we have known it, and consequently there’s less of that donkey’s-carrot feeling, of being asked to make sacrifices for the sake of a progeny who may or may not know that you’ve made them.
HARRON: And the annihilation of history doesn’t mean the annihilation of mankind?
FRYE: It could mean that, and all the threats and the warnings in the Bible have to do with that possibility. The other thing it could mean is the expanding of human consciousness into the world, where, according tothe story of Adam and the garden of Eden, it always ought to have been.
HARRON: You have an interesting quote from the poet Wallace Stevens: “The imperfect is our paradise” [168/189].
FRYE: When Stevens wrote that, he was writing a poem called Sunday Morning, in which a woman stays home from church and tries to rationalize the fact that she doesn’t want to go to church.8 One of the things she comes up with is the feeling that you cannot imagine complete happiness or complete beauty apart from change, and that in the world as we know it, change ends inevitably in death. It is true that the imperfect is our paradise, but most religions, including Christianity, say that all change doesn’t have to be a change in the direction of death.
HARRON: Now today is Good Friday, and Christians are anticipating amiracle by Monday. You say poetry begins with renunciation of magic. Does magic have a connection with miracles?
FRYE: Magic has a connection primarily with nature, where the recitation of certain spells or charms is supposed to produce an objective response from nature.
HARRON: Hocus pocus.
FRYE: Yes. And then something happens, that is, you get the right kind of weather for building your boat, or something of that sort. And that is an operation on nature which has continued to haunt the mind ever since, and has now very largely migrated into science. But for the Bible, there is nothing in nature that responds to the human charm or spell in that way. The only responses are in the world of human life itself. So that it seems to me that poetry really starts when it gives up the magical element in the spell and the charm and turns it from the world of nature to the reader.
HARRON: Is that what Prospero means in The Tempest, when he says “I’ll drown my book” [5.1.57]?
FRYE: Yes, and Prospero in The Tempest is only one of hundreds of people in literature who start out as magicians and end by renouncing their magic, because magic demands the invariable formula that mustn’t change by a hair’s breadth, whereas poetry demands novelty and recreation at every step.
HARRON: So the Bible’s a book that gave up magic, and accepted poetry?
FRYE: Yes. The Bible is founded on the rejection of pre-Biblical magic, and poetry retains that same symbol of rejecting magic, on the ground that the real message is from one part of the human world to another.
HARRON: What does original sin mean in all this?
FRYE: Original sin means that man is born mortal, that is, he’s going to die, and according to some twentieth-century philosophers consciousness is primarily consciousness of death. That means that there’s an inertia built into human effort, which can be got over in various ways, but as a fact of experience, Christianity has always insisted that it was there at the centre of human operations.
HARRON: Is one of the ways “creative doubt”? That’s a phrase I read in your book [227/248].
FRYE: Yes. I am saying there that every proposition contains its own opposite. If you say there is a God, you have already suggested the possibility of saying there is no God. And some philosophers like Hegel tell us that these propositions have to combine with their opposites. It seems to me that as long as faith uses the language of propositions, it has to employ doubt as the other half of itself. Doubt is not the enemy of faith; the enemy of faith is indifference or stupidity.
HARRON: Now St. Thomas was the doubting apostle, wasn’t he? What kind of a Christian was he? An honest scientist?
FRYE: According to legend, he determined to travel further than any other disciple in order to propagate the gospel, so he went to India (that’s according to the legend), and I think that he was told at the time that he would have understood the Resurrection more clearly without looking for visible and tangible evidence. The reason for that is that visible and tangible evidence has an authority apart from the Bible which the Bible itself is not interested in and not concerned with, so that the more trustworthy the evidence, the more misleading it is.
HARRON: So he would have been better if he hadn’t doubted?
FRYE: Well, he would have understood the Resurrection more clearly if he hadn’t used visible and tangible evidence as a criterion for something that had, in effect, already happened to him.
HARRON: So he should have used faith?
FRYE: Well, faith would have involved the re-enacting of the Resurrection within himself, and Paul says that he knows the Resurrection is a fact because this happened to him.
HARRON: So the Bible is something that must happen to every one of us?
FRYE: That I think is the implication of the Bible, yes.
HARRON: And we go through all those cycles, and phases, and as they say in modern parlance, hopefully achieve a kind of resurrection ourselves?
FRYE: I think that that is what the Bible is ultimately talking about, yes.
HARRON: The current generation, I think, is growing up without reading the Bible. Are they poorer for that?
FRYE: Very much poorer, I should say—poorer in every term. That is, they miss so central a part of our cultural heritage that they don’t really know what’s going on in English literature. But there’s a great sense of self-preservation among young people, and I’ve noted that they very much want to understand the Bible, or understand something about it, just for that reason. They know they’ve been gypped, if they’ve been brought up without it.
HARRON: And what are they doing about it, do you think? Writing rock concertos about Biblical figures?
FRYE: Actually the ballad-writers and popular singers do make surprisingly erudite use of the Bible, and rather uninhibited use of it, as though it were something essential to their imaginations, as in fact it is.
HARRON: Think they can handle your book?
FRYE: Well, I would hope that too.
HARRON: I think they should look into it.