Conducted 20 September 1982
From the transcription by Robert D. Denham in NFF, 1988, box 48, file 1. Frye was interviewed by telephone by Stan Correy, a producer with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and Don Anderson, for broadcast later. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. Printed in WGS, 221–35. A sound cassette of the interview is also available in NFF, 1991, box 64.
INTERVIEWER: Professor Frye, could I first ask you why you chose the Bible as a subject for literary analysis when there is already a vast canon of works on Biblical scholarship?
FRYE: Well, I found myself as an English teacher first of all engaged in trying to explain poems like Paradise Lost to students who didn’t know one end of the Bible from the other. And so the importance of studying the Bible as a guide to the study of English literature was impressed on me for a long time. It’s true that there has been a great deal written on the Bible, but for the most part it has been scholarship in a rather different field. When I first started seriously to think about a book on the Bible as a literary critic would see it, I really didn’t know of any other book that covered that ground at all. Since then—in the last ten years or so—there have been a number of very distinguished literary critics who have come along in that field, but even so it’s a small field, and the vast libraries of literary criticism really deal with quite different issues.
INTERVIEWER: You make a distinction in the introduction to your book that it’s not really the Bible as literature that you’re looking at but the Bible and literature [GC, xii/6, xvi/10]. Could you expand on that distinction?
FRYE: I was confronted with the difficulty that the Bible seemed to have all the characteristics of literature, such as the use of myth and metaphor, and yet at the same time it was clearly not intended to be a work of literature. On the other hand, no book could have had its influence, a very specific influence, on literature, without having literary qualities. Those were the qualities I wanted to isolate in the study of the Bible.
INTERVIEWER: This may relate The Great Code to what I take to be your major work, Anatomy of Criticism. You say in the introduction to The Great Code that man lives not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals but within a mythological universe [xviii/12], which is, I think, what you’re also telling us in Anatomy of Criticism. Would you like to expand on this?
FRYE: It seems to me obvious, as I think I said, that there are no noble savages; that is to say, there are no purely natural men who simply live within nature. All human societies live within some kind of transparent envelope of customs and habits and traditions and myths and legends. That is the primary imagination, so to speak, the primary constructive efforts that man makes with words. Later on more sophisticated developments of philosophy and science take place, but literature is dedicated to recreating that original mythical and metaphorical form of construction.
INTERVIEWER: I take it that what might also happen eventually is that men’s recreation of that might run down. You say, again at the beginning of the book, that “What I am concerned with at present is not the question of whether God is dead or obsolete, but with the question of what resources of language may be dead or obsolete [17/35].” I wonder if you’d expand on that for us?
FRYE: Well, I’ve read a fair number of books lately in the popular science field that indicate that there is a growing chorus of dissatisfaction with what some of them call the Cartesian paradigm, that is, the conception of a world clearly split into a subject and an object, and pleas for more holistic approaches. That’s one area where it seems to be reaching a general public. Of course, there are all kinds of attacks on the scholarly front towards a new conception of language. I’m very interested in seeing this new conception of language develop. I would just like to make sure that, as it does develop, it doesn’t lose anything essential to itself which it has produced.
INTERVIEWER: What do you mean by this new conception of language losing something?
FRYE: Man begins with large metaphorical pictures of the world where subject and object are not very clearly separated and he goes on to other forms of verbal construct. Right now he is dealing with a subject–object relationship which has outlived its usefulness in many fields. I think it’s possible to develop a more holistic view of language which would incorporate descriptive language, as I call it, but would also incorporate the earlier forms of rhetoric and grammatical expression which are being recreated by our poets.
INTERVIEWER: You find this in the Bible. Is that one of the reasons you chose The Great Code as the title for your book? That in the Bible can be found the beginnings of Western literary imagination?
FRYE: Yes. The word “code,” of course, has an enormous number of ramifications in the English language. I chose that title because Blake had said in one of his aphorisms that the Old and New Testaments are the great code of art [E274], meaning that the Bible is not in itself a work of art but that it contained endless ideas and suggestions for people who were working in the arts.
INTERVIEWER: Would one of the worrying developments in language theory that we were talking about a moment ago be, say, the recent developments in semiotics which insist on the arbitrariness of the sign? Do you think that that’s leading us into some sort of intellectual dead end?
FRYE: Well, it could be. These issues are being raised and there are bound to be a great many trial-and-error attempts. Some of them will lead to dead ends, others won’t. The arbitrariness of the sign, I suppose, is something that has been pretty well agreed on since Saussure anyway.1 That is something that would be incorporated into a theory of language and get us away from the pitfalls in the magical use of words.
INTERVIEWER: I have a sort of second half to that question, which is that in the chapter on language in The Great Code, and I think comparably in Anatomy of Criticism, a considerable amount of your rhetoric is derived from late medieval rhetoric and the rhetoric of the church: “Oratory,” you say, “on the highest level of oracle, exhortation, kerygma, or whatever the most appropriate term is” [29/47]. Would you care to talk both about what kerygma is and again whether you are in many important ways rediscovering medieval rhetoric for us?
FRYE: Kerygma is a word I took from Rudolph Bultmann, who has used it in the sense of the proclamation of the gospel. I thought it could be extended to the entire Bible, and I used it as a way of explaining why the Bible is essentially a rhetorical book. It uses all the devices of language without committing itself to a literary intention, which is precisely what rhetoric does. I am interested in the late medieval, Victorine typological tradition,2 and further back, Augustine and Gregory, and also in certain forms of Reformation commentary. That represents a use of language that I hope again would not be overlooked by contemporary students of language as they continue to rebuild the science of language.
INTERVIEWER: I would like to agree with that, because I’ve seen your Anatomy of Criticism both as a continuation of that work and as a critical response to modernism’s rediscovery of that sort of work. James Joyce made Anatomy of Criticism necessary. I myself see a connection back through modernism to the sort of medieval discourse we’re talking about. I don’t know whether you see that.
FRYE: Well, certainly Joyce would agree with you very strongly. There’s no question about the influence of medieval rhetoric on him.
INTERVIEWER: Could I ask what will be my final question about language? You say very properly in The Great Code that the Bible is a work to which we come always and perforce through translation [3–4/21–2], whether it be the Vulgate or the Douai or the Authorized Version or the recent Reader’s Digest Condensed Version. That seems to me eminently true as a statement of fact. I wonder if it’s also true somehow as a grand metaphor. Do you think our relation not only to the Bible but to the world the Bible represents is a relation of translation, that somehow our connection with the word and the world has to be translated for us?
FRYE: Well, I suppose you’re really translating everything you read, even if it’s a personal letter from a friend. Certainly a book as remote in its cultural orbit as the original Bible is from us can only be translated even when it is read in Hebrew and Greek. One has to watch and make sure that this translating process doesn’t go so far as to kidnap the whole Bible into our particular cultural orbit. It’s the same problem that you get with the study of English literature.
INTERVIEWER: We’ve been generally talking, Professor Frye, about the importance of the Bible, but in The Great Code you actually ask the question and then go on to answer it—a question about the attraction of the Bible to poets and other creative artists. You talk about the seven phases of revelation. I wonder if we could discuss some of these phases. Could you give examples of what you mean by those particular phases? * * *
FRYE: Well, it seems to me that there is a sequence in the Bible as you read it of different phases of what is traditionally called revelation. It seems to me that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis is most intelligently approached as a phase of revelation, that is, as a manifesting to human consciousness of what Heidegger says is the first question of all philosophy, “Why are there things rather than nothing?”3 I don’t think that the creation story is an account of the beginning of the order of nature, and I don’t think it was ever intended to be that. If it had been it would have been a little cleverer and not had the trees created before the sun was. If you see it in terms of the first awakening of human consciousness it begins to make sense, and its place at the beginning of the Bible begins to illuminate.
INTERVIEWER: Do you see it as the beginning of a tradition of narrative, the beginning with birth as the beginning of storytelling? What is the significance of the Bible’s beginning with creation?
FRYE: Well, you have storytelling because, in an age where subject and object are not too clearly separated and where the imagination is extremely concrete and abstraction has not really developed, about the only way of communicating sacrosanct meaning is through stories. I have always stuck to the original meaning of the term “myth” as meaning mythos, that is, a story or a narrative.
INTERVIEWER: That is, in fact, as I’m sure you’re aware, what has interested recent critics such as Frank Kermode and Robert Alter.4 They’ve been turning their attention from secular narratives to Biblical narratives. You also are interested in it. You say, for example, “The narrative framework of the Bible is a part of its emphasis on the shape of history and the specific collision with temporal movement that its revelation is assumed to make” [198/219]. And you contrast it, for example, with Buddhist sutras and the Koran, which you say have very little narrative. Has Biblical narrative imposed on us in the West a sense of what narrative ought to be?
FRYE: I daresay we have derived our whole sense of narrative from the Bible’s narrative shape. I think that the relationship that Dante saw when he called his poem a comedy is one that has really etched itself into the Western mind, and we can hardly avoid thinking of narrative except in relationship to a structure that moves into and out of time the way that the Bible does.
INTERVIEWER: Have these structures, such as the narrative structures and the seven phases of revelation, become necessary qualities of the Western mind, qualities we can’t escape from?
FRYE: I think they are conditioning factors. It seems to me one of the practical values of literary criticism in the West would be to make us more aware of our mythological conditioning. Whether we can escape from it or not, it surely can’t do any harm to know that it’s there.
INTERVIEWER: We’ve only mentioned one of those phases. Could we talk about the other phases of revelation you discuss? And could you perhaps give some examples of what you mean by them?
FRYE: Well, the second one is Israel and Egypt, the fact that the Bible imposes a dialectical way of thinking, in which you have to take one side or the other and the neutral ground is abolished. Certain of the characteristics of the revolutionary type of mind—the trust in the historical beginning of a movement, the sense of the canonical text, the definition of the man next to you as a heretic if his views are slightly different, and all that attitude of mind—seem to me to be something that we derive directly from the Bible, and it has a very different shape, if it exists at all, in the Eastern world.
INTERVIEWER: I have a different sort of question about narrative. There is a recent book by two American feminist critics, called The Madwoman in the Attic, which asserts that all narrative is essentially patriarchal.5 You quite rightly raise in your current book the question of why the deity is so intolerably patriarchal, and you explain that. Would you care to comment on the relationship between narrative and patriarchy?
FRYE: I suppose in the development of human society you have a centripetal rhythm going towards the hearth, which is female-centred, and a centrifugal rhythm going outward towards the hunt, which is male-centred. All our notions of the quest—that the hero starts from his home plate, so to speak, then goes out and does something and then returns—that movement out and back again is perhaps a rhythm which has been derived from the whole sociological setup in the relations of men and women in primitive society.
INTERVIEWER: And that has determined narrative, I take it. How would one break out of that pattern? Would one have to be parodic to break out of it?
FRYE: That’s one way of breaking out. I suppose a narrative like Joyce’s Ulysses which picks up the Odyssey nostos rhythm, where the one thing that you want to do is to get back to mamma, is a way of incorporating the whole centripetal movement back to the hearth again in with the quest story, and so making the whole narrative structure to that degree androgynous.
INTERVIEWER: You seem to be stating in making comments about the Bible’s influence on literature that it has also had a great influence in shaping our ideas about things other than religion. In reading The Great Code I was struck by the way you took comments about the Bible and related them to social and political concepts. Was this a conscious effort? Were you trying to talk about the Bible’s influence not only on the imagination but also on the way we think about many other things?
FRYE: The thing that I was aware of almost always was the universality of the Bible’s influence on Western thinking. While I didn’t go consciously out to make a comprehensive survey about this, when something walked into the book and demanded to be there I couldn’t keep it out.
INTERVIEWER: How did this occur? Could you give particular examples?
FRYE: One of the central issues of the book is that in ordinary meaning [sic] we read a book and we assign its meaning to a world outside the book. In reading the Bible traditionally the Christian reading has been that the book, the Word of God, points to the presence of Christ first in history in the Incarnation and then in later history. It seemed to me clear that the Word of God as book and the Word of God as person of Christ were not related in that way at all, that they were being identified, that there was nothing outside the book. That total identification of the world of words is something that is being pretty widely discussed among people interested in such things now. It was an issue which I simply could not escape.
INTERVIEWER: What’s the most powerful imagery in the Bible? What aspects of the Bible exert the greatest power on the imagination and on thinking?
FRYE: It’s hard to say, because I think the Bible has an oddly cumulative force. The things that you tend to gloss over or not pay much attention to become with more frequent rereading more and more relevant. If you’re reading something like the parable of the Prodigal Son or the Good Samaritan or if you’re reading the conclusion to the Book of Job or if you’re reading the account of Joseph in Genesis, part of the immense resonating power of all this comes from all the rest of the book moving in to help it. I think that’s also true particularly of the poetic parts of the Bible, the Psalms and the wisdom literature.
INTERVIEWER: I’m worried that I didn’t really make myself very clear when I asked that earlier question about translation. If I could ask it again in the context of the question just asked. It would seem that one of the central images of the Bible is a tree, or the tree, or the tree of life. In your second chapter on metaphor you say, “Two trees are mentioned in Genesis 2:9, the tree of life and the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Metaphorically they would be the same tree, and as the forbidden tree clearly has something to do with the discovery of sexual experience as we now know it, the tree of life is one of the myths of what has been called the ‘lost phallus’” [147/167]. Now I don’t know whom you’re quoting there, though I thought it may have been Lacan,6 but that is what I meant by the question about translation. To explain that tree as a lost phallus—is not that an explanation by translation? And are we not getting further and further away from primal meanings, and again and again through language and writing are we not cast out of Eden?
FRYE: Well, I’ve said that translation is essential for reading anything from a different era or perhaps even contemporary work, and that one should try to avoid kidnapping a work as remote in time and space as the Bible into our own cultural orbit. Now it is true that when I spoke of the tree of life and the myth of its loss as to some degree the myth of the lost phallus, I was referring specifically to Jacques Lacan, because what interests me partly about the work on symbolism that one gets in the psychologists—Freud and Jung and Lacan himself—is the archaic nature of the material they seem to get hold of. And I thought it might make it easier for a twentieth-century reader to have that kind of connection. The translation was a translation which was essentially a gloss or midrash on the statement in the Bible that when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they knew that they were naked.
INTERVIEWER: The committed evangelical Christian today in many parts of the world, whether it’s in the Southern United States or in any Christian country, would see your attempt at reading many things into the Bible as heresy. You discuss this question of faith in the Bible as a received truth. Did you find when you were doing your research or studying the Bible and writing The Great Code that you were treading on dangerous ground in that you were trying to do something that Biblical scholars would probably not attempt because they see the Bible as the Word of God?
FRYE: Well, I did say in the introduction that I haven’t taught forty years in a university for nothing, and I know something of how emotionally explosive this kind of material can be [xx/14]. At the same time somebody has to say it sooner or later and say it in language that will reach a general public and hope for a certain amount of good will. I have been actually astounded by how much good will there’s been towards my book by people whom I thought would hate its guts from the start. I think as far as, say, evangelical people are concerned, everything turns there on that central issue that I mentioned a few moments ago, the fact that as I see it the Bible does not recognize any criterion in history external to itself to judge itself by. I think I could sell that to quite a number of otherwise quite conservative people.
INTERVIEWER: You certainly do raise the question in the book that “If we insist that the Bible is ‘more’ than a work of literature,” which many people do, “we ought at least to stick to the word ‘more,’ and try to see what it means” [220/241]. You begin the next paragraph, “What I think it means is that we have to turn again to the traditional but still neglected theory of ‘polysemous’ meaning,” which I take it brings us back to Dante. Would you expand on the notion of polysemous meaning for us?
FRYE: We’ve inherited from the Middle Ages a conception of meaning on different levels, but with the Reformation there came a great deal of suspicion of that way of reading the Bible, not just from the Protestant reformers but from the Catholic tradition as well. It was felt that if you interpreted passages of scripture in more than one sense, you were leaving the road open to any kind of irresponsible, subjective criticism. It seemed to me that one could take the conception of polysemous meaning out of Dante’s medieval context7 and look at it more or less along Hegelian lines as a kind of expanding dialectic that grew in the reader’s mind as he continued to read and study the book in front of him; so that what you have is not different levels of meaning and different senses but a single sense that keeps growing and expanding in its range of significance.
INTERVIEWER: You spoke earlier of the responses to your book. What kind of responses were they? What did these people say, who you thought would have reacted in a different way?
FRYE: Well, it was just a general sort of friendliness. The book seemed to impress the people who read it that I talked to as a book of good will which was not setting up an attitude of hostility to anyone. Considering how very hostile religious arguments get at times, I was astonished that there was so little of it visited on me.
INTERVIEWER: I understand from one of my colleagues who’s recently been in Toronto that one of the ways you’ve disseminated the results of your teaching is a series of video-cassettes that you distribute among American colleges. Could you tell us about that?
FRYE: Well, the Toronto Media Centre attached to the university here videotaped my lectures as I gave them for a couple of years and then edited them and attached brief discussions with students to the end of each one. There are thirty of them altogether. As archival material for students to use in university libraries, I think they might be quite useful.
INTERVIEWER: You say in the introduction to The Great Code that your interest in the Bible came out of teaching pursuits rather than scholarly pursuits, and you actually make a few comments about the distinction between the teacher and the academic [xi–xii/5–6, xiv–xv/8–9]. I wonder if you could expand on that distinction, because that seems to be important in the way you approach a book like the Bible.
FRYE: I saw from the beginning that it was no use my writing a scholarly book on the Bible. I was not a Biblical scholar to begin with. If I had made myself a scholar in some field, what I have to say would be specialized in that field. I had found from experience the value of a teaching course on the Bible of the kind that has got into my book. I sensed something of its importance for students, and so I thought there was room for a teacher’s book on the Bible which would relate it first of all to the undergraduate classroom.
INTERVIEWER: What lessons then do you want the students to take from the course you’ve set out for them?
FRYE: Mainly awareness of what is in the Bible, awareness of the way in which the Bible raises questions about the use of language generally, and of course the extent to which it has been used as a source of allusion and reference by writers, more particularly in English literature from Anglo-Saxon times right to our own day.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think the students try to find answers in the Bible? Most people when they use it as a religious book use it to find answers to questions in their own lives. In a literary way can it be used in the same fashion?
FRYE: I daresay it might. I tend to stress a rather different approach myself. The fact that every verse of the Bible, as I see it, echoes every other verse, and that a vast network of contexts arises around every passage in the Bible that you may be looking to as a guidance for life, that is not an area in which I can venture with much authority either as a scholar or as a teacher. I can only point out the inner coherence of the book and the way in which if you look for guidance in life you get a great deal more than you actually bargain for.
INTERVIEWER: There is an inner coherence to the book, yet in The Great Code you mention that while the Bible does have a unified structure it also is a bit of an encyclopedia and a mosaic of different structures that have been joined together over time. Perhaps the reason why people can read so many different meanings in the Bible is that it goes in so many different directions, even though it does have a unity, in that it begins with creation and ends with apocalypse.
FRYE: Yes, it has a unity, but it’s not a confining unity. That’s the distinction between the Bible, I think, and literary works. In literary works unity is an ultimately defining quality, it seems to me. There are exceptions, but that’s the general rule. In the Bible we seem to pass through unity into something else that is not in conflict with it.
INTERVIEWER: Again, if I could come to the topic of the book having grown out of your teaching. In your introduction you have a moving defence of teaching in terms of Platonic anamnesis [xv/9]. My feeling is that much of your writing has grown out of teaching, which is one of the things that makes it such a pleasure to read. Towards the conclusion of the Anatomy you say quite rightly that “it is a commonplace of criticism that art does not evolve or improve …. What does improve in the arts is the comprehension of them, and the refining of society that results from it” [344/320]. I take it that’s part of the function of criticism, of teaching, and of reading? Is that what we are doing?
FRYE: Yes, I think so. I don’t think the quality or the intensity of art necessarily varies from one age to another, or if it does, it does so by accident. But the understanding of what literature is doing in society and the variety of things it could do is something that can grow and progress. That is why I found myself more and more fascinated by the hypnotic gaze of the Bible: because that seemed to point toward so many of those critical problems I struggled with in secular literature.
INTERVIEWER: Again, I think it’s in Fables of Identity, you quote Coleridge, who says that there are two types of critics, Iliad critics and Odyssey critics, and Odyssey critics are critics who tend towards works of comedy and romance.8 You categorize yourself as an Odyssey critic. Can you tell me how the Odyssey came to the Bible?
FRYE: The Bible is, again in Dante’s phrase, a divine comedy. It’s a movement of exile toward home, and it passes through the tragedy of history on its way to get there, but the tragedy, even the tragedy of the Crucifixion, is not ultimate or final. The final thing is the return. Consequently, the Bible seems to be in the great romance tradition of the Odyssey and the Aeneid rather than in the tradition of the Iliad, where there is a more detached view of the human situation.
INTERVIEWER: Joyce, who wrote one of our great comedies, was of the opinion that comedy was a saner form (“saner” is his word) than tragedy. And his comedy of course includes both Homer and the Bible. Do you feel an affinity with Joyce’s work?
FRYE: Yes, I do. I feel quite a strong affinity with it. I think perhaps more with Finnegans Wake than with anything else in Joyce. There, of course, there are two worlds simultaneously. There’s the world of the cycle, where the last page swings around to the first page again, and then there’s another world over against the cycle of which only the cyclical world can give us an idea. It’s that final subtlety and refusal to find an easy solution that fascinates me about Finnegans Wake.
INTERVIEWER: Though the title of The Great Code comes from Blake, I think, though I haven’t counted accurately, that the poet most quoted in the book is Wallace Stevens. I just wonder what Wallace Stevens offers us.
FRYE: I wondered that too. I found myself haunted by phrases from Stevens, and I really didn’t realize that Stevens was so much in the forefront of my mind. I have of course written essays on Stevens and he’s always been a writer who fascinates me, but I was surprised myself to find so many of his phrases turning up. I think it has something to do perhaps with his being the kind of New England mind that’s rather close to my own cultural orbit. Perhaps I discovered affinities there that I wasn’t consciously aware of.
INTERVIEWER: You don’t think that Stevens might be offering us in the twentieth century a secular scripture?
FRYE: Stevens does say that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poetry of earth has yet to be written.9 I think that Stevens makes a great deal of sense in his conception of imagery and metaphor and the theory of poetry generally.
INTERVIEWER: Would you take him as revivifying through language the concerns that you’ve found continuous since the writing of the Bible?
FRYE: I would take them, yes, as revivifying, just as I would the phrases of any poet who seems to me to be very centrally in that imaginative Biblical tradition. I suppose it’s partly that I had passed through the absorption of Milton and Blake and others that had gone so far I couldn’t absorb any more. That may be one reason why Stevens stuck out as he does.
INTERVIEWER: The Great Code is a very different book, say, from the Twickenham [edition of] Pope or editions of Spenser, which assist students by having footnotes explaining who Ahab was or who Eve was. How do you see the difference between your book and that sort of annotated edition?
FRYE: I started out with a footnote book myself in the sense that when I first began to teach a course in the Bible and literature I had thought of it very largely as a kind of allusion and reference course that would enable people to see the kind of references that had been made to the Bible by writers, but that seemed to me a very bitty and piecey approach and very confusing to a student. The footnote is a bit of a mudhole for a student to step into, and I thought it was better to give him a large structure where he could see the general sense of the Bible and of how poets had used it as kind of general theory. Then he might find the footnote references in the Variorum Spenser and the like less difficult and less irrelevant.