Conducted 6 January 1983
This previously unpublished interview is recorded in Gilbert Reid’s notes, to which I am indebted. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1983. In his introductory remarks Reid notes that this second interview with Frye was not as easy as the first (no. 47) for several reasons: in place of Italy’s sunshine, he was confronted with Toronto’s icy, grey winter; Frye was recovering from a bad flu; and Reid had not found the recently published The Great Code easy. After the interview, Frye turned to Reid and said, “Critics of the book have focused on the question of whether I believe in God or not; but that is irrelevant; that is not the point at all.”
REID: At the beginning of The Great Code, you explain that the book rose out of your teaching experience and that it was aimed at overcoming a series of “repressions” in the minds of the students. Teaching, you point out, should help students to realize what they already know [xv/9]. What exactly did you mean by that?
FRYE: Well, many scholars hate the guts of this book, and the reason, I think, is simple: every scholarly establishment creates its own institutions and conventions, its own canons of what is acceptable and what is not, and these rapidly become a repressive mechanism. Specialized knowledge is possessed knowledge, knowledge which excludes others, and it is thus repressive knowledge. It is for this reason that a pretence of naiveté is valuable, and that we need fools who will come in from outside and trespass on the specialist terrain. Otherwise, we have increasing compartmentalization, jealousy, repression, and mutual and collective impoverishment of our culture, our spirits, and our minds.
REID: How do the Bible and The Great Code fit into this picture?
FRYE: I think we are ready to repossess the Bible. We can now approach it in a critical spirit, without being loyal to a particular creed or social institution. If we reappropriate the imagery and mythology of the Bible we will be reappropriating a large part of our own sensibility, and thus increasing our freedom.
REID: Do you think this will help us recapture a general sense of the sacredness of life, the numinous sense of presence, which in a way seems to have disappeared with paganism and animism?
FRYE: Yes, it is true that the historical development of language and of religion which I sketch at the beginning of The Great Code reflects a progressive dispossession of the world or separation between the human sensibility and the world surrounding it. When the Bible attacks idolatry, it is attacking the unconscious projection of human energies and capabilities into the objects of nature. Projection itself, when it is conscious, becomes an aspect of freedom. It can be playful, flexible, nonalienated, and it helps to make us at home in the world by emotionally and conceptually uniting us to the objects and landscapes in the world around us. This unification is one of the essential functions of metaphor, in which A = B, and one of the essential qualities of language itself, the poetic or hieroglyphic phase of language, in which subject–word–object are felt to be largely indistinguishable. Of course, projection is essential to poetry, and one of the functions of poetry is to return us to the metaphorical roots of language, to make the world inhabitable for our sensibility. By approaching the Bible critically we can see how it is central to the symbolic systems of our culture; we can make its symbolism more readily available to us, and more permeable to other symbolic systems. We can break down the spiritual exclusiveness and xenophobia which has often marred the role of the Bible—and of Christianity—in history. This should help encourage the free play of projection, and liberate human imaginative energies. The free, nonalienated projection of human energy and of the capacities of the human spirit was, of course, one of Blake’s great themes.
REID: You have said that Christianity has often been a willful and exclusive religion.1 Does this not make it a dangerous force in history?
FRYE: Yes, very. The Bible was a product of this history of ancient Israel. Israel was a relatively unsuccessful state, surrounded by powerful empires and commercial seaboard states, and Israel went through a series of cyclical and traumatic vicissitudes. The Bible—Israel’s book—which purports to give form to history, has therefore a revolutionary and messianic quality: the other empires will collapse and die; Israel’s hour will come. The revengeful, voluntaristic side of the Old Testament comes, in part, from this sense of frustration and jealousy. In addition, Israel desperately needed to mark itself off culturally from the tribes and nations surrounding it and to assure its own internal cultural cohesion. This fact explains, I think, many of the taboos surrounding Old Testament practices: key practices of close and competing groups were made taboo in order to provide a clear demarcation line between Israel and the other nations. These taboos enshrine and perpetuate Israel’s xenophobia as a minor, threatened nation, often in vassalage to others. The Bible’s messianic quality and its xenophobia have made it a dangerous and revolutionary book. At the time of Christ, a world empire was being established under the Caesars, and the emperor was about to be deified. Therefore, though Jesus tried to separate what was due to God from what was due to Caesar, this dichotomy was made impossible by the universal and divine pretensions of Caesar; Christianity was therefore forced to become a universal and revolutionary or subversive religion. This, added to the messianic and xenophobic qualities of the Old Testament, have made it potentially very dangerous. But Christianity has always had a safeguard in the concept of charity, which later analogues and descendants of Christianity, such as Marxism, lack.
REID: How are your study of Biblical typology and your theory of language meant to influence our attitude to the Bible itself?
FRYE: Well, as I just mentioned, I hope to help make the fundamental structures of the Bible more permeable to elements from other traditions and more accessible to our imaginations. The general thesis is that there are powers in the human imagination implicit in the Christian tradition—such as eros or sexual love—which only begin to emerge through contact with other traditions. For example, some elements were allowed to emerge because of the influence of Classical literature. These progressive transformations or liberations will be part of the subject of the next volume, which will deal with the role of the Bible in literature. The Bible and its underlying structures are central to our tradition, and I hope to make that role explicit and clear. Demonstrating its central role may help to reduce what might be called the xenophobia of the Bible towards other traditions.
REID: Your book is not only scholarly then. It has a program?
FRYE: Yes, the program is to put the Bible explicitly in the middle of the literary tradition, where it belongs and where it has always in fact been. By doing this, I hope to aid a long-term shift in sensibility, to help create a sharper and more universal ethical sensibility, without the exclusivities and xenophobias of the past. After all, it is clear that we live in one interdependent world.
REID: You are now working on the second volume?
FRYE: Yes. My research is now taking two directions. A historical direction, to show the gradual permeation of the literary tradition by the Bible and the penetration of the literary tradition into the Bible. The other direction is taking me deeper into the Bible itself.
REID: The extent to which The Great Code deals with problems of method is perhaps surprising. Is this concentration on methodology perhaps partly a symptom of your struggle to come to terms with the rather explosive issues surrounding the Bible and its role in our civilization?
FRYE: Yes. It was a struggle with myself. We carry the tradition within us, and teaching—or learning—is, as I have said, a lifting of repressions, a form of self-discovery and self-knowledge. Since working on Blake in the 1930s I have been dealing with the same problems, and the title of the book comes from a statement by Blake: “The Bible is the Great Code of Art” [cf. E274]. I am still exploring the implications of that single statement. But, in order to do so, I had to deal with all sorts of questions regarding the status of the Bible, questions concerning concepts of meaning, metaphor, myth, language, and typology. Only in this way could I free myself for an examination of the role of the Great Code: of how it has created us, and of how we go on creating, and recreating it.