Recorded 7 January 1985
From the CBC transcript, reference no. 850214. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list. Frye’s remarks occurred during a program in CBC Radio’s Ideas series with the above title, broadcast 14 February 1985. The purpose of the program, according to host Lister Sinclair, was to explore “words and mirrors, words as mirrors, and the way they are distorted in the looking-glass world of nuclear discourse.” Interviewer Tim Wilson spoke with, among others, philosopher Jacques Derrida, author Jonathan Schell, graduate student Shelly Youngblut, professor Derrick de Kerckhove, and Frye.
[Wilson refers to a speech Derrida gave at a colloquium on nuclear language at Cornell University. Before Frye’s comments, a segment of this speech is heard in which Derrida remarks on the fact that nuclear war is a “fabulously textual” phenomenon to the extent that it has not yet taken place, but is talked and written about; “some might call it a fable, then a pure invention.” Then there is a reading of the passage in Alice in Wonderland in which Humpty Dumpty asserts that a word means whatever he chooses it to mean; and Youngblut maintains that the loss of clear, unambiguous meaning associated with postructuralism is profoundly influenced by the bomb.]
FRYE: People have been drunk with words ever since they began to use them.
WILSON: This is Dr. Northrop Frye, the eminent literary critic. He’s written voluminously on language, most recently in his book The Great Code: The Bible and Literature.
FRYE: And I suppose that the model for what Derrida is talking about is Finnegans Wake, where every word has a number of supplements in addition to its surface meaning, whatever it is, and where you don’t follow a plot, but you simply follow a number of allusions into a verbal world. Well, I think this conception of a verbal world is a very useful one. In fact that was one of the first things I began talking about myself as a critic. But once the verbal world becomes a containing thing, then of course it’s dangerous, because there is a point at which words become mere words. And the thing is that you can’t go back to the old referentiality theory; that is, it isn’t good enough to say that words, after all, relate to external things. One has to think in terms of a possession of language, which is still not being imprisoned within it. Our conventional notion of language has always been Cartesian—the ego confronts the object and the word means the thing. With the Derridian universe of words, now, and with the conception of the linguistic model that preceded that, we’ve more or less realized the possibility of getting past what Blake calls the cloven fiction [E268], the subject–object split. That means, I think, getting into a phase of experience where you are—well, the theological way of putting it would be identification with the Word, with a capital “W,” and the realization that man doesn’t wholly use the Word, the Word uses man if man lets it do so.
WILSON: The Word here being what?
FRYE: Something on the other side of the mere word. The word is the product of human consciousness, and consequently it’s not a dead thing, it’s something with a life of its own. And the poet who finds that his poem has suddenly taken shape in his mind is dealing with the fact that words have a life and a power of their own. In The Great Code [18/36] I mention Goethe’s Faust, who looked at the phrase “In the beginning was the Word,” and just couldn’t stand it. And so eventually he said the true translation is, “In the beginning was the deed or the act,” of which the word is the servomechanism. Well, that actually is the translation that the whole Christian church has given to the opening of John. In the beginning, God did something, He created the world, and the word comes along as the servomechanism that interprets that to us. I think it’s really time the human race got into a different frame of mind. “In the beginning was the Word,” and the beginning is consciousness. Not necessarily a chronological beginning, but every beginning that matters is verbal and conscious.
[Sinclair reads the verses from Genesis 11:1–9, which describe the building and destruction of the tower of Babel.]
DERRIDA: Seventh missile, seventh missive, the end. The name of nuclear war is the name of the first war which can be fought in the name of the name alone, that is, of everything and of nothing. Today, in the perspective of a remainderless destruction, without meaning and without symbolicity, those who contemplate launching such a catastrophe do so no doubt in the name of what is worth more in their eyes than life. “Better dead than Red,” for instance. On the other hand, those who want nothing to do with that catastrophe are ready to prefer any sort of life at all. Life above all, life as the only value worthy to be affirmed. But nuclear war as a hypothesis, a phantasm of total self-destruction, nuclear war can only come about in the name of what is worth more than life, of that which, giving its value to life, has greater value than life. Thus, it is indeed waged in the name of. That, in any case, is the story that the war-makers always tell.
WILSON: Again, this is Derrida at the end of his lecture. He talks about going to war in the “name” of something, or making these threats in the name of—in the name of what? What can there be a possible name of that is greater than life?
FRYE: It doesn’t matter what it’s called, as long as there’s a formula there. “Our interests demand that”—that sort of formula. And as I say, the human mind confronted with the actual threat of extinction may follow the formula of the Book of Deuteronomy: “I have set before you life and death … therefore choose life” [30:19]. “Therefore” is not a logical “therefore” but it’s—
WILSON: A command.
FRYE: Yes.
[Youngblut laments the all-encompassing nature of death by nuclear destruction, in which there is not even the consolation found in the death of individuals in the thought of the creative works they had left behind them. She comments on the possibility of becoming whole again under the shadow of the bomb, alluding to Beckett’s Endgame and its sense of illogically going on.]
FRYE: It’s just the way the human mind is built. I think the contemplation of nothing is really impossible. “Nothing” means “not anything,” but whenever anybody talks about “nothing,” it’s always about something which I am calling “nothing.” And you can’t really look into the face of nothingness. It’s a contradiction of existence.
WILSON: And yet we’re being almost taken by the scruff of the neck and forced to look into nothingness, to look at the brink, every day now, if we choose to consider … the present situation.
FRYE: Yes, but we would never do this voluntarily. We certainly wouldn’t do it for pleasure. And so I think that’s what I meant when I said a while ago that the confrontation with nothingness, with obliteration, which was forced on us is perhaps the only way that will shock and startle us into, well, into breaking with our present diplomatic routines.