Filmed 18–21 October 1983
From WGS, 259–68. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. This is the soundtrack of the film The Scholar in Society: Northrop Frye in Conversation (Montreal: National Film Board, 1984), transcribed by Robert D. Denham. The film was directed by interviewer Donald Winkler, director and writer of documentaries at the NFB from 1967 to 1995. It is available on videocassette in NFF, 1988, box 33.
WINKLER: Could we begin with your understanding of the role which the university plays in society?
FRYE: I think that the university stands for a certain attitude to society, which is an attitude of detachment without withdrawal. That sense of detachment from partisanship, at the same time being fully aware of everything that’s going on in society and concerned about it, is really the model for the citizen of a democracy. The university, I think, does provide the nearest thing to a model community for the student that human nature permits. Once he has graduated, then he is the university wherever he is. I’ve always been impressed by the loyalty and affection of so large a proportion of the alumni to the place where they took their first degree. It’s as though they realized that something very crucial happened to them at that point.
WINKLER: You have said that “of all the superstitions that have bedevilled the human mind, one of the most dismal and fatuous is the notion that education is a preparation for life.”1
FRYE: Education is not a preparation for life because life won’t stay around to get prepared for. If the student is not alive when he’s getting an education, I don’t know when he’s going to be. What the student is doing when he’s getting educated is living—very intensely—in society. To the extent that it’s a preparation for anything, it’s a preparation for an anticlimax, for how to live with a lower rate of intellectual intensity.
WINKLER: On the other hand, there seems to be a consensus nowadays among those concerned for the quality of education that this generation of students cannot expect to be as well educated as previous generations have been.
FRYE: The word “education,” of course, is such a versatile word and applies to a great many things. I’ve always told the students who are about to teach that what a teacher of, say, English is concerned with is the entire verbal experience of his students and not simply with that one per cent of it which we call literature. That verbal experience comes to you through gossip with your classmates, through the films and television you see, from remarks picked up off the street, and so on. I think that students may get a variety of impressions in that way without quite realizing what has happened to them; so that while a student may know less about the things that I would expect him to know about by the time he got to college, I’m not too concerned about that. What I’m concerned with is a certain amount of good will and the willingness to acquire the habit of reading. If you teach the habit of reading, that’s all you need to do. What he doesn’t know you can fill in.
WINKLER: Do you feel quite simply that education in language skills has deteriorated over the past decade?
FRYE: It’s awfully hard to say whether or not there has been a general deterioration in the use of language. It depends so much on what kinds of standards one applies. There are, for example, forms of colloquial speech which are formally ungrammatical and yet convey meaning much more intensely than other forms do. A small child usually speaks in a kind of uninhibited burble, and the right way to teach a student like that is just to listen to the burble and try to clarify it at certain points. So many schools tend to teach formal grammatical English as though it were a dead language. We grow up with the superstition like that of Molière’s Jourdain, who says he’s been speaking prose all his life.2 Well, prose is actually very difficult to speak. Yet students come to university convinced that prose is the language of ordinary speech, when they can’t speak it and they certainly can’t write it. I think that kind of discrimination is very important and that, again, a young student should not be taught to write as though he were deciphering a dead language, because a language that has no connection with his ordinary speaking habits is a dead language.
WINKLER: Yet there seems to be a feeling that students are less and less able to use their own language, and the instinct seems to be to “return to basics.”
FRYE: I distrust all slogans of the “back to basics” type because I distrust anything that starts with “back to.” That is, I know that what is called a pastoral myth is operating—that at one time people were much better taught than they are now. I simply don’t believe that.
WINKLER: You don’t believe that?
FRYE: No. I think that people have always had difficulty expressing themselves, that people were just as illiterate at the age of ten in 1883 as they are in 1983. The student today faces a much more complicated world than he did a hundred years ago, when he could get by with certain conventional formulas. In a world where he can no longer do that, his failures of expression become much more noticeable. I think the development of writing workshops indicates a greater concern about this. It’s a matter of ordinary survival to learn to read and write. All the government of a country is interested in is to produce docile citizens. That is, you read and write passively. You read things like traffic signs and you cipher well enough to make out your income tax, and that’s as much as society is interested in. What goes on in the university is using reading and writing as instruments of freedom, and that means a great advance in articulateness.
WINKLER: You’ve said there is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.3
FRYE: The remark was inspired primarily by George Orwell’s 1984, where he puts his finger on Newspeak as the essential instrument of a tyranny which would turn human life into an indefinite hell. The reason is that jargon—Newspeak—is a pseudological simplifying of language, which actually turns language into something automatic, like a squirrel’s chatter. You could use it without being a conscious being. Nothing a politician says is to be taken as a statement of fact. We assume that if questions are asked in the Houses of Parliament, they are not to get information but to embarrass the government, and we assume that the government’s replies are not to give information back again but to defend themselves. As long as we allow for that element of irony in all the language that we use, we can still function as a free society.
WINKLER: What do you mean by irony in that context?
FRYE: Irony is something that arises wherever you say what everybody knows you don’t mean, but also understands why you’re saying it. One of the essential roles of any form of education, whatever it’s concerned with, is to make the student more and more aware of these different levels of meaning in what is said. All advertising, for example, is ironic. Nobody believes literally what advertising says. If you did, you’d be so gullible you could hardly look after your own affairs.
WINKLER: What are the differences between active and passive attitudes to culture?
FRYE: A passive attitude is one that tends to repeat clichés or habitual prefabricated statements. The kind of remarks that you can overhear on the street or the subway are very frequently not the product of the speaker’s mind at all; they’re simply echoes of whatever he has picked up. It’s the attempt to become aware of the degree to which you’re being conditioned in your speech by forces external to yourself that seems to me to be at the centre of the educational process wherever it’s carried on.
WINKLER: How do you teach someone to recognize that in himself and to take a critical attitude towards the ideas around him?
FRYE: I think it’s possible in dealing with students to say, “Look, is this what you say or think, or is it merely what you think ought to be said at this point?” If you read an undergraduate essay you find it frequently written in the kind of jargon that represents the student’s notion of the way professors write—and the way some of them do write. You have to say, “Look, you’re not supposed to be an echo; you’re supposed to find out your own phrases for these things and say what is in your mind.”
WINKLER: One gets the feeling that this sort of education is important to an individual’s proper functioning in a democracy.
FRYE: I think that a democracy simply cannot function without articulate citizens. There is a very strong anti-intellectual current in society always trying to pull the level down as far as it will go, and that anti-intellectual current is, of course, found among professional educators just as it’s found among everybody else. The whole educational operation, for that reason, is a militant one. It’s a continual fight, it’s a continual crusade to develop in people the kind of informed and articulate speech that you need to participate in a society with any freedom in it.
WINKLER: How is the battle going?
FRYE: The battle is always just on the point of being lost. The point is that it never stops.
WINKLER: How was your discovery of Blake a turning point in your intellectual development? Does it cast any light on your own cultural inheritance?
FRYE: I belong to a middle-class, English-speaking, white, Protestant, Canadian society. My grandfather was a Methodist circuit rider, and he was still very much in evidence when I was a child. You don’t have to be Freud to see that you keep revolving around your childhood all your life. There’s always the tendency, if you’re brought up in an evangelical background, to think very largely in terms of inhibitions, distrusting your own impulses because they might carry you too far—without being very clear about what “too far” is. Because you’re a human being, subject to original sin, everything you do is probably all wrong anyway, so you embark on a progressive spiritual impoverishment. The sudden realization that one didn’t have to do that, and could still keep a wide-open perspective on whatever words like “infinite” and “eternal” mean, was the revelation that Blake was to me. He had had the same kind of middle-class, Anglophone Biblical training that I had had. He saw structures in it that made human sense and didn’t discourage the full use of the human faculties. He was such a civilized person as a poet and as a painter.
WINKLER: I know that there’s a close relationship between your teaching and your writing.
FRYE: I’ve always thought that my teaching and my writing fed into each other. My writing tends to get pretty obscure unless it has been preceded by an interval in which I’ve tried out the ideas on some kind of audience and got some kind of reaction from them. I find that trying to explain what I think to people of the usual sort of undergraduate age and level of experience is extraordinarily important for me in getting those ideas to the point at which I can actually believe them myself. All the great teachers, including Jesus, have known that you really only teach by parable: that’s the only way that a free man can understand anything. The great writers, like Shakespeare, are writers who are extremely moral—morally coherent—but they never moralize. It’s the obliqueness of teaching by example, I think, which reflects to some extent on the teacher as well. Certainly the influence of my teachers on me was not directly through anything they taught me, but the impression they gave that the life of a scholar was worth living.
WINKLER: To what degree can art and culture have a beneficent influence on human society?
FRYE: Training in literature won’t make you a better person unless you are already determined to be a better person. I think that the confusion about value judgments is very much bound up in this. People are always horrified when they find that the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp can have a cultivated taste in literature and music. But if he had a cultivated taste in organic chemistry, there wouldn’t be any shock. I don’t think that the arts work by magic, and I don’t think they can make anyone a better person. If the person wants to be a better person, the arts can certainly help. When I see people on the subway coping with books by Margaret Atwood and Joy Kogawa and Thomas Pynchon, I know that the human instinct for self-preservation is still there in spite of all the work of television and film and so on.
WINKLER: There are those who are concerned with the fate of the book in our day.
FRYE: Well, there are people who used to be concerned with the fate of the book. I think that’s rather waned of late years. The tremendous efficiency and economy of the book has once again demonstrated itself. It’s the world’s most patient medium, for one thing. It doesn’t go away. It comes back with exactly the same message no matter how often you consult it.
WINKLER: Could you talk a bit more about the book as technology?
FRYE: There are two elements to the book. One is reading it. The other is using it afterwards. While you’re reading it, you’re following out a linear line of narrative from page one to page “the end.” That was the aspect of it that interested Marshall McLuhan. He spoke of the book as a linear medium in contrast to the simultaneous media which the electronic forms of communication were developing. But there’s another side to the book. It becomes, besides being read, the focus for a community. It can be given to a class and referred to over and over again. You can always go back to a certain point. Consequently, it is not a linear medium primarily. It is the most continuous of all media.
WINKLER: You’ve claimed that the electronic media are in fact the linear media.
FRYE: I think they are the linear media because you have to follow them as they go along. Then they disappear, and you can’t refer to them afterwards except by very special efforts, so that the experience of them is discontinuous, as McLuhan said. But it’s also linear. It’s television that makes you live in a clock.
WINKLER: You’ve talked of the dilemma of our age being in part the loss of a sense of continuity in time [CP, 153–5, 163].
FRYE: I think that the continuity of institutions was, if you look at the nineteenth century, a very major source of support—in the church, the state, the legal traditions, and so on. But the twentieth century has seen so many revolutionary changes that it’s becoming more and more clear that institutions are not really continuous but are part of a dissolving pageant. I pointed to the university as about the only thing that was left that seemed to preserve some semblance of continuity. The churches are putting up a gallant fight, but I think it’s obvious that religion is a very poor basis for a state anywhere. If you look at some of the Moslem states now and Christian ones before them, it’s always been the wrong choice. The university is perhaps the most coherent institution that I can think of in society, partly because it, in a sense, pretends to less than either religion or law.
WINKLER: What sort of authority can it wield, then?
FRYE: The authority it wields is a kind of spiritual authority, as Milton defined it. That is, it hasn’t any police force or powers of prosecuting or jailing. It hasn’t the temporal power. It does have the authority that comes from the appeal to observation and repeated experiment in science and the appeal to imaginative experience in literature—the only kind of authority, in short, that one really respects, the only kind of authority that increases your freedom by a day.
WINKLER: You talk about the mythological conditioning to which one is subject in society.
FRYE: In every society—like that of, say, America today—you have a certain mythology about democracy and about equal rights for all citizens and the right to privacy and so on, which, although I call it mythology, is as genuine a thing as we have. One only wants to strengthen it. But there is also the parody of this. Every mythology gets kidnapped by an ascendant class and turned into the opposite of itself. The conception of freedom, for example, as something which only the individual can experience but which society has to have up to a certain approximate point before the individual can be free, is a very genuine social ideal. But when laissez-faire and what is called private enterprise are identified with freedom, that is a very different matter. There’s a democratic tendency in American life, for example, and there’s also an oligarchic tendency to build up huge fortunes at the expense of the rest of the population. One is the parody of the other. The process of verbal education has to do with bringing out the genuine mythology and exposing the fraudulent one.
WINKLER: You contrast what you call an open mythology with a closed mythology [CP, 106–7].
FRYE: A closed mythology is when an existing ascendant class or political power says that this is our ideology and you’ve got to say you believe it or else. That can be a very powerful instrument of social coherence, given the right circumstances, but it’s entirely the wrong one for us. An open mythology is a mythology where the fundamental principles are agreed upon but not imposed. In the United States, for example, there is a very deep respect for the democratic process and for rights of the individual, and nobody can fail to respect those feelings precisely because they are not imposed. Nobody is told he must agree with these things or else.
WINKLER: So you feel that it is possible for an open mythology of this sort to hold a society together effectively?
FRYE: I think that it is possible. That is really what the democracies are all about.
WINKLER: Why does it seem so hard to create and maintain an open mythology? Why do people seem to crave an imposed, rigorous ideology?
FRYE: Well, because the rigorous, imposed ideology does away with, or at least gives the illusion of doing away with, the sense of self-conflict. The more free you are, the more responsibility you have to take on. Of course, people dread responsibility and the kind of maturity that goes with that. It’s much simpler to have a charismatic leader who gives you all the answers so that you can pretend to be a machine. The machine fascinates us because it does work without self-conflict, or so they tell me.
WINKLER: Finally, why is cultural tradition so important?
FRYE: I feel that senility is exactly the same in society as it is in individuals: you lose your memory and you’ve had it. If you lose your sense of tradition and the sense of what is behind you as a dimension of your own life, then you are simply floating in some kind of ether. There is a continuity of cultural rhythm. One of the things that most interests me about literature is the way in which, for example, characters in the comedy of Aristophanes in the fifth century B.C. turn up as the same types without change in twentieth-century drama.
WINKLER: I’ve sometimes wondered if your work could be regarded in part as an attempt to encapsulate the cultural tradition that we have?
FRYE: I would like to feel that I was contributing to that. When the world moved from the fall of the Roman Empire into a new civilization, there were a number of people, like Boethius, who did more or less hold traditional culture together in that way and passed it on to the next age. Boethius got his head cut off by a stupid king. I trust I’ll have a better end than that, but I wouldn’t mind having somewhat the same historical role.