Conducted early July 1983
This previously unpublished interview was conducted, like the preceding one, at the School of Criticism and Theory at Northwestern University during Frye’s visit there, 5–8 July. Interviewer Ellen Esrock, at that time a graduate student, became associate professor of literature at Renssaelaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N.Y. I am indebted to her for the text. Drawing on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, Esrock investigates the role of mental images in our experiences of viewing art and reading literature. The present interview was one of a series asking prominent writers and critics (including Margaret Atwood and Geoffrey Hartman) about their mental processing of written texts.
ESROCK: I’m interested in your experiences as a reader reading texts. I’m particularly interested in visual images, at least in that commonsense way we talk of them. I have a few questions, so maybe you can put yourself in a meditative, rather than a programmatic frame of mind. Can you form the visual image of an apple?
FRYE: I think so.
ESROCK: Can you make it a red apple?
FRYE: Yes.
ESROCK: A green apple?
FRYE: Yes.
ESROCK: Can you turn it upside down?
FRYE: Yes.
ESROCK: That’s simply to establish something about your imagining capacities, at least your reports of it. When you are reading literature, do you form visual images?
FRYE: They’re hazy, but they’re formed all right. And if I see the movie version of a book I’ve read, it’s a quite distressing experience.
ESROCK: Do you form them continuously throughout the reading process?
FRYE: Oh, I think so, yes. If there’s anything to visualize at all I do.
ESROCK: Do you find there’s any structural relationship between the visual image and the text? Tensions? Is there anything more than a visually moving picture going on?
FRYE: Not very much more than that. Visualization is pretty primitive. I usually put characters in their houses, which is the house I lived in as a child—which doesn’t always work. It might be anything from William Faulkner to Thackeray. There is a kind of grey haze of visualization running concurrently with the writing.
ESROCK: Would you say you fill out the text with details in your visual images that are not really specified in the text itself? Do you “embellish”? That’s one way in which people have described visual imagining.
FRYE: I don’t do a great deal of that, I think. I tend to look at the book as a datum and to accept what the writer gives me.
ESROCK: You feel that your visual images complement the datum but do not exceed it in any unusual way?
FRYE: I don’t really think I add much visually to what I’m reading, unless there is something in the text which suggests that I should be doing so.
ESROCK: When you’re reading something where the sound is very important, where the author works with the sound, do you ever feel as though the visual imagining gets in the way of hearing the sound?
FRYE: If it does, it simply becomes vaguer. The little television screen of one’s mind may just become a fleck of dust.
ESROCK: Do you feel you ever visualize in response to a particular type of stimulus? Some say that visual imagining comes about when the subject matter is of a certain nature—that we visually image some things more than others—that we have an interest in seeing certain kinds of things and so we visually image.
FRYE: I daresay there is that. But I really haven’t examined my own reading processes to know what elements I am interested in. I think it depends much more on the quality of the writing than on my own personal setup. Because some writers are so much more evocative in visual imagery than others.
ESROCK: Do you visualize more when reading one kind of material than another?
FRYE: I think it depends on the kind of material it is. I think that authors differ among themselves as to the intensity of the worlds they visualize. The way they put that across to the reader determines the quality of his visualization.
ESROCK: Would you find poetry or prose the kind of medium that best elicits the visual response?
FRYE: That would be difficult to say. I should think, ordinarily, prose fiction is where you have a continuous pattern of visual response. You have to do something with the characters you’re reading about.
ESROCK: I’m also curious about the role of sound in reading—sound and any other responses you might have. Do you have kinaesthetic responses, for example?
FRYE: Rarely. Again, it depends on the subject matter. Certain forms, like the film, make a much more direct assault on the kinaesthetic response.
ESROCK: Do you have any particular feelings associated with the print on the page that contribute to the reading experience?
FRYE: I don’t know whether this is a relevant answer to you or not. Once I was assigned Huckleberrry Finn to teach, and I bought a copy and started in. There was something all wrong about the copy that I had. I couldn’t teach out of that book at all. Finally, I discovered what it was. The pages weren’t turning over in the right places. So I had to write home and get mother to send me the copy of Huckleberry Finn that I had read at the age of eight.
ESROCK: [laughter]
FRYE: This was after I had in the first place gone to work with a razor on the illustrations. I had thought they were what was bothering me. Then, after that, I had gone though the book marking all the pages that I’d turned over in my eight-year-old’s copy.
ESROCK: So you remembered where the pages had turned?
FRYE: Every time. Without that visual background, I’m pretty helpless in my memory.
ESROCK: So because of your form of memory, the entire layout of the page contributes to your ease of moving into the text.
FRYE: At the age of eight, of course, it’s absolutely clear cut. Even now, when I’m quite certain that the passage I want is at the bottom of a left-hand page, and I look through at the bottom of left-hand pages: if it turns out to be, in effect, at the bottom of a right-hand page, I still feel very insecure, as if I’m going senile. [mutual laughter]
ESROCK: When you’re reading, do you hear the sounds of the words?
FRYE: Sometimes, particularly when I’m reading poetry.
ESROCK: Would you say you hear the sounds of the words all equally?
FRYE: No, not equally. It comes in and out.
ESROCK: What would that depend on?
FRYE: I suppose the intensity of the language, and some accident in the response.
ESROCK: What do you mean by “the intensity of the language”?
FRYE: There are some poems which throw more emphasis on the sound of the words. I would get it much more intensely with Tennyson than with Browning, for example.
ESROCK: This isn’t on my list of questions, but I’m interested in it. When you’re hearing the sound of a word and that sound has some relationship to other sounds in a poem, how would you describe that experience of “knowing” there is a relationship to other sounds? The knowledge that the sound is related to other sounds seems to influence the actual hearing of the sound in some way.
FRYE: If you’re reading poetry, there are, in the first place, certain obvious things, like rhyme and assonance. Then you notice there are all sorts of other assonantal relationships, which you wouldn’t have noticed if [the others] hadn’t been there to guide you. But I have a rather quick eye for repetition of sound, of phrases, which indicate the kind of sound pattern that’s emerging. In poetry the sound occupies such a large aspect of the meaning that you have to attend to it.
ESROCK: I’m interested in what that attending amounts to. Someone might claim that you simply recognize the patterns—take note of them. You work out the meaning and you use that with sound simply as a cue. Someone else might say that the point of the sound pattern is to read the work actually “hearing” these relationships. In one case, the point of the reading experience is to experience the sounds “as sounds” and know that they’re related to meaning. In another, the point is only to “decipher” them.
FRYE: I suppose, again, that depends on your state of mind. I have often had the experience—I had this experience when I first discovered T.S. Eliot when I was seventeen—that I had read and unconsciously memorized nearly all of the poems up to The Waste Land without having made any conscious effort to do so, and without having even begun to think about what they meant.
ESROCK: I had a similar but less impressive experience with Eliot, with Four Quartets. I didn’t understand what it meant but I loved the sound. To me, that experience, of being moved by the sound, is very important. It wouldn’t satisfy me just to know that the sound is there. Does this distinction make sense to you?
FRYE: Yes, I understand the distinction. I think it depends so much on the quality of poetry you’re reading and also the mood that you’re in. Light verse depends very heavily on rigorous sound patterns. There, I think you are almost expected to consciously recognize the sounds patterns, rather than having the song come as the primary experience.
ESROCK: I suppose my ideal would be to have both.
FRYE: Oh, yes.
ESROCK: I feel most of the time the movement in criticism, and reflected in general literary education as well, is to emphasize the knowledge of the pattern, without ever taking that knowledge back to the experiencing of the poem. Does this criticism sound reasonable to you?
FRYE: The conscious knowledge of the poem’s meaning, if it stops there, is a substitute for literary experience, and to be drowned in the sound, uncritically, is another kind of substitute for literary experience. I’ve often said that when you’re reading a poem, you’re following the poem in time, and that’s a precritical stage, and when you’ve finished reading then it becomes the critical icon—the simultaneous pattern that you analyse. But you have to keep rereading it, recreating the experience.
ESROCK: I’m curious about a conventional distinction we have between pornography and sensuality in literature. With fine erotic literature, the proper aesthetic attitude involves a kind of “disinterested interest.” I’m rather sceptical of such clear-cut distinction—not in terms of what the author wants to do but in terms of the reader’s interest in the text.
FRYE: Well, I did say in my Harvard lectures that a lot of people with censorious minds tend to identify the erotic and the pornographic. The difference in my mind is that pornography is intended to stun and numb the reader and the function of erotic writing is to wake him up.
ESROCK: Ah, so you think that a reader who has been awakened sensually is not an improper literary reader. That’s nice.
FRYE: I think that in hardcore pornography there is no story, no characters, no comment, no nothing—just a steady prodding of reflexes. After awhile you begin to resent getting your reflexes prodded and feel that as a free human being you have a right to an active response, rather than simply a passive, knee-jerk response.
ESROCK: Do you find this view shared by other people? I find that distinction still rather cut and dried—that there’s a distancing of response that is necessary.
FRYE: I wouldn’t call it distancing of response … it’s the difference between straight passivity in responding automatically and an active response. But I wouldn’t say that the active response was necessarily a disinterested one.
ESROCK: Maybe we could call it an “active voyeurism.”
FRYE: I remember a cartoon I saw with somebody looking at a picture of an extremely luscious youth, reading the title, Study in Vertical Planes, and saying, “Who’s he think he’s kidding?”
[laughter]
ESROCK: I interviewed Jack Hawkes after a public lecture he gave on his book Virginie, a work that plays on pornographic material. In his public lectures Jack was adamant about the reader’s not responding erotically to the work but placing emphasis on the writing. But then in the private interview, I heard the other side (which was not contradictory). His interest was in the visual and his appetite was for a certain kind of excitement.
FRYE: Yes, he wants that from his reader, too. Only he doesn’t want the wrong kind of response.
ESROCK: Yes, but it’s difficult to figure out what that wrong kind of response is. What about slightly different verbal formulations that produce the “same” visual image?
FRYE: I feel the image invoked by other [verbal] formulations would be coloured by the differences in those other formulations.
ESROCK: Want to comment on what it means to be “coloured by”?
FRYE: Well, a red image is different from a green image.
ESROCK: That’s cheating?
FRYE: Is it?
ESROCK: I’m interested in what it means for something to be coloured by how we experience it. We have ways of talking about that semantically: we say, “The semantic fields overlap.” But that doesn’t reflect our experiencing of how something overlaps.
FRYE: I think we’re back to something like Locke’s primary and secondary qualities. The primary ones are primary because we can’t see them. If you look at it in another way, there’s really nothing but an assemblage of secondary qualities. So if colour changes the essence changes.
ESROCK: Yes, and now I must let you go. Thank you very much.