Recorded 24 April 1984
From the untitled National Public Radio tape no. 840424, transcribed by Robert D. Denham. This interview with NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg was conducted on 24 April 1984, when Frye was in Washington, D.C. to give a paper at the Library of Congress. It was aired on the All Things Considered program, of which Stamberg was the co-host.
STAMBERG: Northrop Frye, one of the world’s most distinguished literary critics, is giving a lecture at the Library of Congress this evening. His topic is “The Social Authority of the Writer.” Frye’s authority as a critic was established with his now classic book, Anatomy of Criticism, praised for raising the level of the critic to that of the artist.
FRYE: The Anatomy of Criticism is now thirty years old,1 and at that time there was still a lot of feeling around that literary criticism was a parasitic subject, that the literary critic was somebody who profited by the poets without contributing anything creative of his own.
STAMBERG: Well, it’s the same thing they say about drama critics or movie critics: if you know so much how come you’re not in the movies instead of watching the movies?
FRYE: Yes, that’s what I mean. Since then, I think, there has been an increasing feeling that the critic has his own specific job to do. There are contemporary critics in the Derrida school at Yale and elsewhere who go much further than I do, saying that there is really no gap between creation and criticism at all because every criticism, every reading of a poem, is in fact a recreation of it.2
STAMBERG: By anybody who reads the poem?
FRYE: Anybody who reads the poem is going to produce his reading and not somebody else’s simply because he isn’t all the other people who’ve read the poem. Consequently, you do to some extent translate it into your own idiom.
STAMBERG: Does the fact that we can read criticism about a poem ever get in the way of our appreciation of the poem, or can it only enhance it?
FRYE: Well, that’s a question that a lot of students have asked me, particularly students who wanted to get out of as much reading as they could. I always say that the end of critical reading is to possess the poem, to make it a part of your own life. To possess somebody else’s poem means that a certain death-and-rebirth process has to be gone through. So if they tell me that it kills a poem to analyse it, I can only say that somebody has to kill it if he’s going to bring it back to life again.
STAMBERG: And you may as well do it in an educated way?
FRYE: Yes.
STAMBERG: You were saying that your own Anatomy of Criticism is thirty years old now and that criticism has been taken in different directions today. How? Improved? Better? More complicated? More difficult?
FRYE: More complicated and difficult certainly, more specialized, and very much closer to linguistics and semiotics.
STAMBERG: Those are words, especially semiotics, which are so difficult for people to understand. Does that push us further away from the work of art itself, do you think?
FRYE: I do think that criticism is going through a phase which it will not stay in for very long—a very technical preoccupation with a lot of complex disciplines. After all, if you talk about linguistics or semiotics or phenomenological philosophy to an undergraduate classroom their eyes are going to glaze over pretty fast. The strength of this is, of course, that the criticism of literature is gradually becoming a more systematic affair. The disadvantage is the remoteness of the kind of thing they do from experiencing the literature directly.
STAMBERG: Your book was called Anatomy of Criticism. They are now through their criticism anatomizing literature to death almost.
FRYE: Yes, but all criticism has to anatomize to some degree.
STAMBERG: Otherwise, it wouldn’t exist.
FRYE: Yes.