Recorded 15 April 1982
From an audiotape transcribed by Elisabeth Oliver. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. This was an interview with journalist and radio host Hélène Gougeon recorded for broadcast on radio station CFRB, possibly on the same day, in connection with the publication of The Great Code.
GOUGEON: Professor Frye, should it be surprising to anyone to realize that a university course on the Bible is attracting students and other teachers from every corner of the world?
FRYE: It’s not surprising to me as a teacher because I’ve been aware for a good many years that students were not getting trained in the Bible at an early age. They realized they were being gypped, because when they came to read English literature and struggled with things like Paradise Lost, they realized how clueless they were. So naturally, the intelligent people wanted to know something about the Bible.
GOUGEON: Of course, most people’s first confrontation with the Bible is often in a negative frame of reference. One could think of the average child growing up in a home where, perhaps, there is a fundamentalist teaching, or they feel bored because it’s a duty.
FRYE: Oh, that certainly happens, and I think it’s really quite a discovery for many students to realize that it can suddenly reverse itself and turn inside out into a very positive experience.
GOUGEON: Someone, in writing about you, has said that you felt there was a need to make some sense out of the Bible, and this presumably is what you’ve done in The Great Code.
FRYE: Well, I’ve tried to. The sense that I was trying to make was specifically an imaginative sense. That is, it grew out of a course that I had taught mainly for students of literature. I was trying to explain why poets would read the Bible and how they would read the Bible. Of course, that is parallel to a number of theological developments as well, but it’s not the same thing.
GOUGEON: Do you meet with many students who have made any sense of it prior to your courses?
FRYE: Yes I have. Some of them, of course, are my intellectual grandchildren. That is, they’ve been taught by students of mine. But I find that there are always quite a number each year for whom it comes as something of a surprise.
GOUGEON: Actually, they’ve never met with it before.
FRYE: No, and they’ve never associated anything as positive as the creative imagination with the Bible.
GOUGEON: Now, though you are an ordained minister, your intention is not to turn them on to the Bible in a religious way.
FRYE: You can’t do that if you’re a teacher, of course, under the general heading of academic freedom in a classroom, where you’ve got everything from Greek Orthodox to Communist.
GOUGEON: But is this sometimes the inevitable fallout?
FRYE: Well, I’ve had people very disturbed, very worried. But I think the great majority of my students understand what’s going on.
GOUGEON: One of your comments has to do with the purpose of a university education. It’s no longer an entrée to a job. We all know that, though a lot of people used to think that it was. You’ve said that you don’t like the idea that education is a preparation for life.1 What is it? What should it be?
FRYE: The reason why I say it’s not a preparation for life is that life won’t stay there to get prepared for. By the time you’ve prepared for it, it’s a different kind of life altogether. So, education is simply a means of sharpening your wits, by which you participate in society. It isn’t a preparation for a job either. That’s another way of saying that the university is not just a middle-class playground.
GOUGEON: Professor Frye, while other teachers have been glad to quit the classroom just a little past middle age, you’re still there dealing with younger people. What keeps you there, at the front of the class?
FRYE: Well, I suppose teaching has always been rather a vocation with me. I find that it clarifies my own mind, for one thing. If I can make a point clear to a class of undergraduates, I’m well on the way to making it clear to myself.
GOUGEON: Do you pride yourself on being able to present ideas understandably and reasonably simply?
FRYE: I don’t know if it’s a matter of priding myself. It certainly is a thing I struggle to do very hard and I’m always conscious when I feel that I’ve failed to do it.
GOUGEON: So many people cannot do that, though: impart their knowledge.
FRYE: Well, some people take the view that students have to come to the teacher’s level and there are some very good forms of teaching that are of that kind, but they are for a rather specialized group.
GOUGEON: Do you still have time to talk to students? I’m sure in the early days, students were knocking on your door.
FRYE: Yes, that is true, there’s bound to be a certain barrier. The barrier is partly the generation gap and it’s partly one’s reputation and partly one’s extremely full schedule. But students are fundamentally people of good will. They know they can talk to me if it’s important.
GOUGEON: Can they surmount that sort of fear that one could have in asking Northrop Frye a question?
FRYE: Well, many of them do and of course I generally try, as far as I can, to insist on having questions asked in the classroom.
GOUGEON: This is done, of course, in the series of video lectures that you did for the University of Toronto which is being circulated around the world.2
FRYE: Yes. Yes, it was a little different from the actual classroom conditions, but it was the same format.
GOUGEON: And it does give us a good picture of what it is like to be in one of your classes.
GOUGEON: If you had an opportunity to see or hear some of the great minds that went before yours, would there be one person in particular you would have liked to have seen on a video?
FRYE: Well, I don’t know. There are quite a number of people that I would like to see, recognizing that a lot of them would have been an anticlimax. Perhaps it’s sometimes better to form an impression of a great man from what he’s left behind.
GOUGEON: Yes. Someone once told me, “Never try to meet the person you admire because he often proves to be less than you had anticipated.”
FRYE: Well, less, or at any rate, different. The fact that every creative person has two personalities is very hard to come to terms with.
GOUGEON: And clay feet.
FRYE: Yes.
GOUGEON: Are you aware, do you think, of the problems that students face today compared with the problems they might have faced when you were a student?
FRYE: I think they are fundamentally the same problems [rest of sentence is inaudible]. It’s a matter of going in circles. One thing that I’ve picked up from the wisdom of the ages is the fact that everything goes in cycles and if you don’t like what’s happening, just wait.
GOUGEON: Yes, you’ve said something about looking through the rear-view mirror if you want to know what’s going to happen.3
FRYE: Yes. I think that’s true.
GOUGEON: To go back to the Bible for a moment, as a child you were exposed to the Bible in your own home. How do you think that affected you?
FRYE: Well, I don’t know. Somehow or other, it affected me in wherever my creative imagination is located. I don’t remember negative reactions to the Bible itself. I certainly remember negative reactions to ministers and Sunday school teachers, but one separates that sort of thing very quickly from the real stuff.
GOUGEON: Of course many people don’t separate it … I mean, the people who read it literally and who are waiting for the apocalypse.
FRYE: Yes. But our house was always full of books. It was full of Scott and Dickens as well as the Bible, and somehow or other I managed to see that they had a family likeness.
GOUGEON: Professor Frye, do you think about the hereafter? I mean, does heaven exist for you?
FRYE: Heaven exists for me, but I always to try think of it as really the actualization of something present, rather than something to be prepared for in the future. I’m not at all sure that one takes our ordinary conception of time with us because I think our ordinary conception of time is pretty stupid.
GOUGEON: What do you mean by that?
FRYE: Well, I mean that our ordinary conception of time doesn’t exist. The past doesn’t exist anymore, the future doesn’t exist yet, the present never quite exists at all. You have to turn that inside out.
GOUGEON: You describe the Bible in one interview as, “huge, sprawling, tactless,” and I was rather curious about that word “tactless.” [The Bible] disturbs people when they read it, is that it?
FRYE: Perhaps so. I put that into my introduction in the book [GC, xviii/12] and I meant by that that it doesn’t fit the ordinary categories. Now, when the Greeks were building up their mythology they had Homer and he did fit the categories: he was a poet and everything about him fit in the conception of the creative imagination. But the Bible is always saying, “Look, there’s a lot more.” That’s what I mean by “tactless.”
GOUGEON: Is the Bible for everyone to read?
FRYE: Everyone at some level and in some area, I should think.
GOUGEON: Is there any particular Bible that you favour to read?
FRYE: I use the King James in my teaching, simply because, in the first place, it’s the most familiar and accessible version, and in the second place, it’s really in the Vulgate tradition so it’s very close to the Bible that’s always been the Bible of Western Europe. Modern translations—I find the Revised Standard Version of the 1950s a quite satisfactory one.
GOUGEON: Professor Frye, this weekend we are going to see the events in Ottawa unfold as they should, with the patriation of the Canadian Constitution. You’ve said that you are not interested in politics, but you must have some thoughts about Canada at this point.
FRYE: I’ve always felt that Canada’s identity had a lot to do with the British Commonwealth, which is no longer an empire but a community of nations with something in common in the cultural traditions. I suppose the patriation of the Constitution clears up a kind of paradoxical legal situation which needed to be cleared up.4 Otherwise, I’m not sure that I understand how much difference it’s going to make to the ordinary Canadian life.
GOUGEON: We see Quebec remaining apart from the ceremonies this week and indeed, from the negotiations. Since you were born in Quebec, I suppose you’re permitted an opinion on Quebec’s stance.
FRYE: I’ve always said that cultural developments decentralize, and political and economic ones centralize, so I think that separatism in Quebec in the cultural area is a very genuine development, but as a political and economic development, it seems to me to be nonsense.
GOUGEON: As a person who was born in Quebec, you are probably known as a Québécois in Quebec.
FRYE: I dare say. But that implies, of course, the total unreality of Canada, and it’s not an unreality for me.
GOUGEON: In the old days, you used to sit around the fire with people like Morley Callaghan and Barker Fairley, talking of ways to change the world. Do you have any thoughts about how you would change it now?
FRYE: The world is changing itself much faster than I could ever keep up with it, not being a computer expert, for example. I think it’s a useful exercise to go through a Utopian phase, in getting one’s own mind clear, but I think man affects history that he makes only to a very limited extent. A great deal of it gets by in spite of him.
GOUGEON: Wars start.
FRYE: Wars start, and technological developments throw everything out of balance. The technology of the twentieth century has introduced so many imponderable factors.
GOUGEON: Well, technology was very close to home to you in connection with The Great Code.
FRYE: Yes it was. It was my first encounter with the word processor. Again, I suppose a good many of these developments are still in what would be regarded in the twenty-first century as the dinosaur stage. Certainly, there were a lot of difficulties as well as a lot of advantages.
GOUGEON: And your book is a product of the word processor, is it not?
FRYE: It’s the product of my secretary [Jane Widdicombe] and her struggles with the word processor, yes.
GOUGEON: One last question, Professor Frye. Are you optimistic about the future? Where are we going? Looking as closely as you do at the Bible, do you find any messages in the Bible about our future?
FRYE: Well, the Bible’s message about the future is (a) that it’s going to be a hell of a mess, and (b) that things will eventually clear away and make more sense. Everything has been predicted for the year 2000, ranging from the total annihilation of the human race to the coming of the millennium. I imagine that what will actually happen will fall somewhere between those two things.
GOUGEON: Is that optimistic?
FRYE: It’s optimistic in the sense that wherever humanity is in history, there are always things to be warned against—possible disasters—and there are always possible opportunities for advance.
GOUGEON: Do you know what some of those possible disasters—aside from the bomb—are? They are within ourselves, aren’t they?
FRYE: They are entirely within ourselves. They are the tendency on the part of people in power to hold on to power, usually by seizing the technology and making it work for them instead of for the people. That’s disaster.
GOUGEON: Of course, we see this happening in Central and South America. We’re not only talking about military take-overs.
FRYE: No. That’s quite true.
GOUGEON: Professor Frye, thank you very much for giving us your precious time today.
FRYE: Thank you.