Conducted 20 February 1986
From “Interview with Northrop Frye,” Acta Victoriana, 110, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 23–5. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Prepared by Cheryl Carter, Stephen Gaebel, and Karen Vinke, editors of the magazine, for a special issue on the media.
INTERVIEWER: Some people would say that popular culture arises only out of its definition. Could you distinguish between popular culture and high culture?
FRYE: The distinction between popular culture and highbrow culture assumes that there are two different kinds of people, and I think that’s extremely dubious. I don’t see the virginal purity of highbrow literature trying to keep itself unsullied from the pollutions of popular culture. Umberto Eco wasn’t any less a semiotics scholar for writing a bestselling romance [The Name of the Rose]. There isn’t a qualitative distinction. It just doesn’t exist. And I think that the tendency on the part of the mass media as a whole is to abolish this distinction.
INTERVIEWER: Reading and writing have been described as being very powerful promoters of the imagination and of creativity. Is this restricted to works of “high art”? And is popular culture, on the other hand, merely entertainment?
FRYE: Well, again that assumes the distinction which I’m not very clear about. I think that the maturity of any nation’s culture depends a great deal on minimizing that antithesis. There are people who talk about wanting to be passively entertained, but that’s a state of mind that doesn’t necessarily postulate anything. I think that practically anybody who goes to a play or reads a book or turns on the television wants both entertainment and something that won’t insult his intelligence.
INTERVIEWER: But most people see high art as having a more overtly instructive value attached to it.
FRYE: Yes, well they do. I don’t know how one defines a classic except in truly pragmatic terms as (in literature, for example) a work that simply won’t go away. Shakespeare was a mixture of popular culture and highbrow culture in his day. That is, some of his audience was made up of courtly people or students at the Inns of Court, and some of them were patrons of the popular theatre. People like Ben Jonson were often regarded as more serious by the highbrow. But Shakespeare just sat down on the stage and refused to budge, and that’s why he’s a classic. He just won’t go away.
INTERVIEWER: So you don’t see popular culture as being distinguished by a certain transience—that it’s what is here today and gone tomorrow?
FRYE: Well, a certain amount of it follows trends, but there’s nothing very sinister about that—it’s just something that happens.
INTERVIEWER: Do you see any place in the university for the study of popular culture? Is it something that students and faculty are made to recognize—or want to recognize?
FRYE: Of course you’re talking to a literary critic. The formulas of popular literature are the same formulas which underlie James Joyce or Henry James. I’ve always said, for example, that an elementary school teacher does no good telling a youngster that the battered old movie he saw on television the night before is inferior to the kind of thing he’s going to study now. That is, if he prefers the battered old movie, the better teaching technique is to point out the structural similarities between what he’s interested in and what he’s supposed to be studying. And you find out that they’re much the same structures.
INTERVIEWER: Could you discuss the notion of popular culture more specifically with reference to Marshall McLuhan?
FRYE: Well, as I understand it McLuhan started out with the thesis that print is a linear medium—the pages follow one after the other—and that the electronic media make an impact on a great many senses all at once. On that basis he drew a distinction between two kinds of mental response. That distinction, I think, is totally wrong, and I think he himself realized that very quickly, but by that time he was caught up in a public relations blender and he couldn’t do anything about it. But the print medium is not linear, because the book stays around and presents the same words no matter how often you consult it. So the book becomes a focus for a community. And it’s really the electronic media that are the linear ones, because they are very much harder to remember. If you forget what’s in a book, you can pick it up and consult it. But if you forget what was on last night’s television, then it’s gone into outer space.
INTERVIEWER: What about McLuhan’s distinction between the visual and the aural societies?
FRYE: It’s very difficult to avoid metaphors. If, for example, you’re reading something, you frequently use metaphors of the ear. And that’s what critics like Jacques Derrida are attacking: the convention that somebody is speaking. But still, when you’re following a narrative, you are in a sense listening. And then at the end you get a sort of Gestalt: you “see” what it means. When somebody tells a joke, he leads in by saying, “Have you heard this one?” and then, if he’s lucky, by the end you see what he means. But these are just metaphors. The hearing is something associated with sequence and time; the seeing is something associated with the simultaneous and the spatial.
INTERVIEWER: We have chosen the title of “Mediascape” for our theme issue. How are we living in a mediascape today?
FRYE: Well, if you mean that people live within a cosmos essentially constructed out of the formulas of television, it is only in the extreme that some people do. That’s one reason why you get those extraordinary stories of people on the street all standing around with their hands in their pockets watching someone being attacked. It’s because they see everything as happening on television, and so it seems that nothing is really happening. But the impulse to self-preservation is very strong in the human race, and the tendency to try to break out of the mediascape is correspondingly strong. Every responsible citizen breaks out of the mediascape.
INTERVIEWER: How might the mediascape—television—reshape the methods of perception and cognition of our culture?
FRYE: Television does not necessarily blur our sense of reality. It depends on how completely you accept the conventions of mass media and apply the mediascape to the actual environment. In a stage play the illusion and the reality are the same thing. At the same time that you are living in a world of mediascape, if you are going to be a sane and responsible person you have to realize how much of it is illusion. And to realize how much of it, on the other hand, can contribute towards your mental construct, which is actually all you can get from reality. There is no natural environment in human consciousness except what the human consciousness has constructed. Television does have some rigid conventions that possess a certain projective power. The fact that the great land mass of Canada, which made so little sense in the nineteenth century, is being brought together partly by air travel and partly by television is proof of this. If you see, for example, the Inuit people on television, they no longer are abstractions wrapped up in seal skins. They are people like ourselves. We have the possibility of humanizing the abstract into something relatively real, as long as we don’t fall into the kind of hypnosis I spoke of a moment ago, where we can’t take part in anything because it’s all “television.”
INTERVIEWER: Do you see the media age as evoking a new mythology, one which helps us to come to terms with the advances of science, and with our new conceptions of the universe?
FRYE: A myth is really a structure of human concerns, of human anxieties and hopes and ambitions. As such, it is not a science, so it really can’t be set aside by science or have very much contact with science. There are certain types of myth that develop certain cosmologies which do come into contact with science and have to be replaced by scientific explanations. But the pure myth is a literary structure—not pseudoscientific information.
I see the media age as reshaping the old myths—there aren’t any new ones. No matter what the mechanical devices employed, mythologies are transmitting words and pictures, which is what the human race has transmitted since Palaeolithic times.