Recorded 7 July 1983
From “An Interview with Northrop Frye,” Scripsi (University of Melbourne), 2, no. 4 (1984): 220–6. Reprinted under the present title in WGS, 249–57. The interview was recorded at the School of Criticism and Theory, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., where Frye was speaking on “Social Concern and the Authority of the Arts.” The interviewers, graduate students Imre Salusinszky (an Australian), Alan Roughley (Canadian), and Vijay Mishra (originally from India) added the concluding question on Wallace Stevens from an earlier, unpublished interview conducted by Salusinszky on 10 May 1982 in Toronto before publishing the ensemble in Scripsi. Salusinszky went on to teach English at the University of Melbourne and then became a senior writer with the Australian; Roughley taught in Australia and later became associate professor at Liverpool Hope University; Mishra already had a position at Murdoch University, Australia, where in 2006 he remains professor of English and Comparative Literature.
INTERVIEWER: Could we begin by discussing the relation of Fearful Symmetry to Anatomy of Criticism? You say at the end of Fearful Symmetry that the study of anagogy could provide the missing piece in contemporary thought. What’s the place of anagogy in your present work?
FRYE: The reason it took me so long to write Fearful Symmetry was that a great deal of what later became the Anatomy was being mixed up with it, and so the Anatomy did grow quite directly out of the Blake study. That, in its turn, reaches the conception of anagogic criticism, which is the theme of my work on the Bible now. It’s the apocalyptic vision, where all the images are identified with each other, and it has to do with the classless myth which I have spoken of.
INTERVIEWER: You have talked about ruling-class anxieties, and the word “anxiety” is prominent in your work. I wonder if Marxists couldn’t argue that you portray the repressive nature of society as simply a psychological condition, or psychological obstacle?
FRYE: I would certainly say that it produces that in the individual. The conception of anxiety, to me, is connected with the conception of a kind of intransitive fear, that is, a state of fear where you’re not afraid of anything—you just fear. It’s a very ancient idea: we can find it in Greek culture as well. I usually use the term to mean a kind of imaginary and undefined state of prohibitions and inhibitions that seems to surround people.
INTERVIEWER: Does the term “anxiety” also have a place in the persistent opposition in your work between imagination and ego?
FRYE: Oh yes, I think so. I think the Buddhists are right in saying that anxiety is an ego product. It’s closely connected with the waking consciousness, where everything that is repressed is still lurking around the edges.
INTERVIEWER: In Fearful Symmetry you say that, while in nature there is misery, in art there is tragedy; and you say that art allows us to undertake the “imaginative conquest” of nature [265/262]. I wonder if that’s related to your ego–imagination dialectic?
FRYE: I think it would be. I wouldn’t use the word “conquest” now. I would speak more of “identification.” I was thinking very largely of Blake’s “where man is not, nature is barren,” and of Blake’s resistance against everything that Graves means by the White Goddess: the nature that surrounds man, the thing that’s the environment but not the creation. I would put a much stronger emphasis now on the participation of man in nature. Largely through my work on Canadian literature, I’ve become more and more impressed with the Baroque hostility to nature as something mindless, as something just to be parcelled out by the consciousness. I can see how very sinister some of the results of that have been.
INTERVIEWER: In Anatomy of Criticism you provide a corrective to the idea in Hamlet that art holds the mirror up to nature, and you suggest that literature doesn’t reflect nature so much as cause it to be reflected within its containing form [84/78]. I take this to mean very much the same thing as when you talk about imagination transforming man’s hostile environment into a place which is inhabitable for him.
FRYE: Yes, I think that that is involved. The transformation seems to me now to have two stages. There is the Utopian stage, which is represented in the Bible and elsewhere by images of human work—the garden, the farm, the domesticated animals, the sheepfold, the city, and so on—and where work is an expenditure of energy with some further end in view. But the further end in view, in Blake’s innocent world, is a rehabilitated nature.
INTERVIEWER: You were talking about Canadian literature. We would be fascinated to hear your views on the similarities which have often been attributed to the Australian and the Canadian imaginations.
FRYE: Well, I don’t know Australian literature in detail. It’s largely a mass of people whom I remember having read but whom I really haven’t put together—people like Judith Wright and A.D. Hope and so on. I’ve read their poetry with great admiration but without seeing the patterns in it. I just don’t know enough about it. But I would think that the mood would alternate between the sense of exile and the sense of being the spearhead. It is just as in Canada, where all the values are way out there in Europe, and we look at them with nostalgia; but at the same time, the imperialistic thrust is coming out of Europe, through Canada. You feel you’re on the spearhead of that.
INTERVIEWER: Patrick White’s Voss would perhaps illustrate that?
FRYE: Yes, Voss has the same sense that so much Canadian literature has of probing into the distance, and of the sheer size of the country as an imaginative challenge. The fundamental challenge of penetration in this case is that people are explorers. Voss picks up the same theme that you get in Canadian literature, the feeling of the country itself being penetrated, not only physically by the explorers, but imaginatively as well; and of the people back home not being able to know quite what to make of this sense of a crusade within their own country.
INTERVIEWER: Both of our literatures have been affected by not being the products of a revolutionary culture like America.
FRYE: We have always been a relative culture, in the sense that we were built up from dispossessed Tories, whereas the American revolution was a Whig revolution.
INTERVIEWER: There is a passage in one of your essays on Canadian culture where you suggest that the difference in attitude between Canadians and Americans to the thrust of European influence is that Canadians seem to be trying to achieve the same thing that America achieved but without the revolution.1
FRYE: The revolution, I’ve tried to explain, sets up a deductive pattern in society: you set up a constitution; you derive things from that. So you have your inspired document, your Book of Genesis, in American culture. In Canadian culture you have the inductive, Burke tradition of limping along from precedent to precedent.
INTERVIEWER: Would you see the recent patriation of the Canadian Constitution as a change? Or is that a continuation?
FRYE: I would see it as a continuation, though it is partly an assimilation to an American pattern. There’s very little difference between the deductive revolutionary mentality in America, and the kind of Jesuit-trained Collège Classique mentality in Quebec, which is what Trudeau emerges from.
INTERVIEWER: Literature in America is so heavily affected by the ideology of the original revolutionary act upon which American culture is based. Literature is constantly making that act new.
FRYE: Yes, I think so. The Constitution itself is an inspired document that is constantly reinterpreted and amended, but never scrapped. I think that has affected the whole temper of American literature very strongly.
INTERVIEWER: So is republicanism a possible cultural bonus in Canada and Australia, simply because it would bring Canadianness and Australianness to the forefront of the imagination?
FRYE: The idea of a Commonwealth is a very attractive idea to me, now that it no longer has an imperialistic basis. I think the symbol of royalty as something that nobody can possibly earn but that you can only get by accident is still something that I would buy. Otherwise, the whole of society becomes open to competition. If you have a symbol that’s beyond the competition, it seems to me to be a very powerful kind of community image.
INTERVIEWER: One of the major issues that was raised in Canada during the debate about the Constitution was the problems raised by native leaders in their attempts to get their aboriginal rights enshrined. Several Canadian writers have commented that Canadians will find their identity only through the identity of the native peoples.
FRYE: You find that in Canadian culture increasingly. To some extent, it’s a voluntary thing, but I don’t know that it’s any less genuine for being that. The feeling of Susan Musgrave continuing a Haida tradition is, I think, very strong, and the same thing is true of John Newlove. That is something that is bound to increase and become more and more articulate in Canada—the fact that you can’t found a culture on the pure destruction of another culture; otherwise, you’ll be haunted by guilt feelings all the time. You have to establish some kind of continuity with it. The moment that the indigenous people seem to be at their last gasp politically and economically is the point at which the cultural backlash begins, just as it has done in French Canada. It may get confused with political and economic movements, but it’s fundamentally a cultural movement.
INTERVIEWER: In Australia the spearhead of American imperialism is advertising and television. In The Modern Century and elsewhere you’ve mused on literature as a spearhead against the degrading effect upon imagination of some of these cultural forms.
FRYE: There is an element in culture which is a mass culture, which follows the economic, centralizing forces of marketing and distribution and so on, and out of that may crystallize something which begins to move in a different direction. Those nine bloody years I spent as an advisory member of the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, I was trying to keep abreast of the CRTC’s policy of not selling out the mass media entirely to the American market, in which of course it had to fight the whole of Canadian public opinion as well as the American interests. The CBC seems to have let us down rather badly in that regard. At the same time, I think the film has not done so. There seems to be almost a general correlation between films and radio and television programs produced on a shoestring budget and the creativity that goes into them. It seems to me to have something to do with this backlash against the economic.
INTERVIEWER: In his autobiography, Patrick White makes a lot out of the specific nature of the artistic consciousness as an isolated and almost androgynous consciousness.2 That is very much a Romantic myth that still exists in Australia.
FRYE: There is, I think, the possibility of a recreation of an earlier way of cultural thinking, which is something beyond simply getting caught in it. I don’t think Patrick White is really caught in it. He’s aware of it. He’s too aware of it to be wholly confined by it. The sense of the isolation of the writer in the community is just as strong in the twentieth-century environment as it was in the nineteenth, though for somewhat different reasons. They are the ones which have to do with the source of authority in the writer. It’s not a privileged authority; it’s not a class thing; it’s a matter of commitment.
INTERVIEWER: The teacher, too, is in an increasingly outcast role, in a militant role, as you’ve put it.3 Has television helped to bring that about? What are the real bases of it?
FRYE: Because teaching is a political act, society is never really neutral with regard to the teaching process. Society is instinctively anti-intellectual, and the higher you go in the process the more you discover that. You discover a large public opinion which doesn’t think universities ought to be there at all. So the mere act of teaching is an act of social defiance, or at least a defiance of certain aspects of society. Society will support elementary education up to a point, because it wants docile citizens. Reading and writing, which you must learn to be a part of your society, is thought of by society as a passive act: you read in order to be able to read the traffic signs, and you write in order to sign your name to your income-tax form. To transmute that passivity into an activity is what makes the genuine teaching operation militant. That is something that so many professional educators just don’t see: they think that the aim of education is to make you an adjusted citizen. The genuine teacher has to think of what he’s doing as militant, and increasingly he has to think in terms of organization. The educators talk about individuality, because they want to disintegrate any kind of social opposition.
INTERVIEWER: How do we begin to turn back the tide of the financial attack upon the universities?
FRYE: I have no pat answer for that. It’s a matter, in the first place, of articulate spokesmen for the university, who do very much more than they are believed to do. And there has to be some kind of appeal to votes, however factitious it may be. Without the universities, Canada would simply become again what it was at first: the hewer of wood and drawer of water for Americans. The whole mercantilist bit is something that Canada swallowed—hook, line, and sinker—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If it gives up its universities, it gives up its possibility to outgrow that.
INTERVIEWER: But many students these days say that they see the university simply as an avenue to professional and financial gain. Can the individual teacher fight that?
FRYE: A lot of that on the part of students is simply a product of immaturity: they say that because they don’t know what else to say. I’ve just attended the fiftieth anniversary of my class at Victoria College. We were a class of over three hundred, and after fifty years the number of people who turned up at the reunion was over a hundred and fifty. I think that indicates something of the solidarity of the social ties which come from that college. They didn’t come back to a playground of class privilege. They were older, and they knew that that was not what the university was about. Students today, whatever they say and however they talk, will know better by the time they’ve graduated, and they will certainly know better by the time they’ve been in the business world or whatever.
INTERVIEWER: Is that also true of economics or computer science, and other practical disciplines?
FRYE: Oh, yes. By the time they’re forty-five, they’ll be saying, “I wish to hell I’d got myself an education.” What they have to do is build on the education they’ve got.
INTERVIEWER: What is the function of the critical imagination in countries like Canada and Australia? Should it exist in a kind of symbiosis with the artistic imagination?
FRYE: I would hope that there was a symbiosis, though it would be one in which they didn’t get in each other’s hair. I think I have, as a critic, a function in Canadian literature, so long as I don’t tell writers how they should write. I think that a writing culture without a critical part has lost half of its articulateness: you have to have both. I know that writers do depend on critics, often very much more than they think they do: not to tell them what to do, nor for the quality of the reviews of their work, but simply to express a form of articulateness which they have nothing to do with as writers.
INTERVIEWER: Three of the newer universities in Australia have departments of comparative literature rather than English departments. Liteary theory has to be taught in comparative literature, because there is no other rationalization for comparative literature. You have said that literary theory shouldn’t be taught to undergraduates.4
FRYE: To me, the knowledge of literature is an inductive process; it’s a matter of reading one book after another. One of the things I’m always aware of with undergraduates is the immense ease with which an undergraduate will accept a theory of criticism as a substitute for the experience of literature. That seems to me to invert the whole educational process. I’m inclined to agree that comparative literature, wherever it is taught, does have along with it a theoretical component which is essential to it. I’d like to see it put off as long as possible, that’s all.
INTERVIEWER: Why has your influence been so much greater in America than in England?
FRYE: I suppose it’s partly the business of being a theoretical critic at all. The Edmund Burke inductive tradition is very strong in Great Britain. In fact, I remember reading an article by somebody who said that modern criticism had been turned inside out by three American critics: I.A. Richards, William Empson, and Northrop Frye.5 In other words, “critical theorist” equals “American.”
INTERVIEWER: Commentators have pointed to a special relationship between your criticism and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. At the 1948 meeting of the English Institute in New York, you read a paper on comedy,6 and Stevens read his paper on “Imagination as Value.” Did you meet him?
FRYE: I’m afraid that’s one of those things that happen about personal meetings. I did listen to that paper. Stevens muttered it into his shirt collar, with the avenue traffic rolling outside. I was brought up to meet him afterwards, and I racked my brains for something to say about a paper of which I had not heard one complete sentence. Stevens saw that I was embarrassed, so he put me at ease by asking me about various stockbrokers and insurance people in Toronto, whom he had met the last time he had visited Toronto, which was in 1908. As a matter of fact, I was very well aware, even at that time, of a particular relationship to Stevens. Ever since I was a teenager working in the Moncton Public Library, I’d been fascinated by Stevens more than almost any other of that group of poets. For some reason or other, the Harmonium poems had a special resonance for me.