Conducted July 1986
From “Northrop Frye: An Interview with David Lawton,” AUMLA, the journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 66 (November 1986): 249–59. Frye’s summer trip to Australia and New Zealand, 17 June–7 August, included a number of speaking engagements and a seminar at the Australian National University, the fruits of which may be seen in the other scholars’ papers included in this “special Northrop Frye number” of AUMLA. Tragically, the trip concluded with the death of Helen Frye at the Great Barrier Reef area. This interview was conducted at the University of Sydney, where Frye had a visiting professorship in English, 7–24 July; he also spent 23–27 June in Sydney. Interviewer David Lawton was a professor of English and a scholar of the Bible at Sydney University, later at Washington University in St. Louis.
LAWTON: During a question-and-answer session in Sydney I heard you say, “I rather resent being known as that man who does archetypes and myths.” Do you accept archetypal criticism as a good label for the sort of work that you do?
FRYE: On the understanding that “archetypal” means recurrent patterns in literary experience which give unity to the criticism of literature, I would consider that it was all right. I use the term “archetypal” in its Neoplatonic sense, only as something immanent and not as something belonging to another world and generating things in a lower world. But I used the word “archetype” without realizing how completely Jung had taken it over and, while ultimately Jung seems to mean much the same thing by archetype that I do, in practice his archetypes are psychological entities, which would have the effect of turning the whole of literature into a gigantic allegory of Jungian individuation.
LAWTON: Do you prefer the word “archetypal” to the word “symbolic”?
FRYE: I thought that “archetypal” at least did have this conception of something which, if not exactly a model, was at any rate repetitive. Symbol seems to me so very vague a word. I think that symbol really has two meanings. There’s symbolon, which means a ticket or check—something you can break in two and recognize by the identity of the break. That’s the symbol related to something outside itself which completes it. Then there’s also the word symbolos, which means a portent or augury—which makes it a metonymic thing, something that refers to a larger pattern within it. I don’t object to the word “symbol,” but the kind of thing that I am doing I think is more accurately described by “archetypal.”
LAWTON: What I am exploring is the importance for you of something beyond language. Faced with the two accounts of creation, a later (Genesis 1–2:4) and an earlier account in the rest of Genesis 2, the early Church Fathers and particularly the Alexandrian ones, presumably based on Jewish exegesis, came up with the idea of a sort of Platonic archetype or prototype for the human world (including human language) in the first account, and the actual human world and actual human language in the account of Genesis 2. Do you find that kind of space important for your own criticism: the notion that there is something beyond language that Saussurean linguistics doesn’t concede is there?
FRYE: Yes. I think there is, and that’s one of the reasons for using the term “archetypal.” The Platonic, or Neoplatonic, exegesis which comes through in Clement of Alexandria and Origen thinks in terms of a world which generates models or copies in this world, and I regard that as something of a figure of speech. You have in our day people like Mircea Eliade finding that conception of archetype among various primitive societies where they speak of a mythical time which existed before our time, the events of which we keep repeating in what we know as time. That’s all right, but I think of the archetype as, as I say, immanent, as working within time. I don’t object to a feeling that there is something about the archetype which is not removed to another world but at any rate inexhaustible in this one; something which can’t ever be completely analysed or understood. There’s a residual mystery about it.
LAWTON: It is a fairly clear dividing point, isn’t it, between you and linguistically inspired critics: the notion that there is in some sense behind language a set of forms which generates individual languages as we use them—rather than the languages in some ways dictating what we think, what we do, and what we construct?
FRYE: Yes. You are thinking of Chomsky and the way in which the grammatical process is generated. I have no doubt that that’s a good deal of the truth as far as the evolution of language is concerned. The thing is that once man starts to use language, all kinds of unpredictable things begin to hitch themselves on to the use of language, such as puns and ambiguities and the associations of words, which may be arbitrary but nevertheless condition our thinking for all that. That’s what sometimes gives the impression that behind the set of generating forms there is some kind of power—not necessarily a power beyond humanity but a power that gets tapped like electricity—that tends to take the speaking human being over.
LAWTON: What happens to history in an archetypal account? If I temporarily wear the hat of a historical materialist I would complain, would I not, that an archetypal account is somehow de-historicizing?
FRYE: That’s often said, and, as a matter of fact, here in Australia when I was expounding on this point, somebody, quite obviously a Marxist critic, said, “How would you historicize what you have just said?” Well, I thought I had historicized it. But, to me, in the first place, I am, as a literary critic, dealing with the history of literature, and the history of literature is not something that yields itself entirely to a historicized study. That is, the history of current ideologies, the history of origins and influences, things that can be documented—all that aspect of history is extremely legitimate; but there is also a factor in literary tradition which is very much more elusive than that, which has to be reconstructed by comparative generic criticism, and I don’t see that as being anti-historical—I see it as being what Derrida would call a supplement to history.1
LAWTON: So part of the answer is that you simply don’t deal with some more historical aspects which you accept to be valid when dealt with by others?
FRYE: I leave them to other people who are more interested in that and more competent to do it; I just feel that there are aspects of history that most historians don’t recognize as history. But then, of course, I was brought up in the school that said that history was a branch of the humanities, and that the best way to write history was to write it rhetorically, like Thucydides. I’ve been told many times that my view of the Bible in The Great Code is anti-historical, and my answer—which is a snap and irritated answer—was that I didn’t think I was anti-historical, but the Bible certainly was, and I had to explain why it was. The Bible is not strictly anti-historical, but it does use historical material in a way which infuriates and exasperates the conscientious historian. In other words, supplementary methods must be used to bring out the real history in the Bible.
LAWTON: Since we have moved on to the Bible, one of the problems that I have constantly met when I work on it is deciding whether I think that the problems I meet in the Bible are simply the concentrated problems that I meet everywhere else, or whether in fact the Bible presents a completely special lot of problems as well as, or rather than, those others. When I read The Great Code it occurs to me, not necessarily that you have the same problem, but that you’re aware of this ambiguity in one’s response to the Bible. I wondered if you’d like to say more about it.
FRYE: I would say that they are typical human problems in a special context: the problem, for example, about the historical Jesus, the figure behind the Gospels. The original twelve disciples had just as much trouble with that problem as we have, and they missed everything that was happening to them because they were looking for the historical Christ and getting nowhere, instead of accepting the unique mythical experience that was being handed them. What they were given an opportunity to do was to concentrate the ordinary human experience in a very special unique context.
LAWTON: Is the Bible perhaps the last place where one needs the criterion of truth?
FRYE: The criterion of truth?
LAWTON: Where one can use the criterion of truth?
FRYE: That depends on the meaning of verbal “truth.” The truth of correspondence, of the verbal structure related to a body of phenomena which it is allegedly describing, is not anything primary in the Bible. The Bible is quite obviously passing over that in favour of something else. The kind of truth that it’s after is an inner truth, which arises from the resonances and inner complexities of the verbal pattern of what’s being said. Nothing happens in the Bible except verbal events, but it’s the interplay among those verbal events in which the truth emerges. Afterwards it is inexhaustible. That’s why mystery is sometimes used in a demonic context in the New Testament—the mystery of iniquity. It is also sometimes used in a good sense: “And thus it is given to you to understand the mysteries of the kingdom of God.”2 What mysteries mean there, I think, is something which, if not unknowable, or unknown, is something unlimited.
LAWTON: I wonder whether we have particular problems when we use the English language: that is to say, languages which can talk about histoire are in a rather fortunate position. There is no primary need to distinguish at the basic level of interpretation between fact and fiction, which English does force on one.
FRYE: On the other hand, I would always feel greatly handicapped if I weren’t working with a language that distinguished a history from a story, because I don’t believe that the Bible is a history in the sense in which that term is usually applied, but everybody agrees that it tells a story.
LAWTON: The question is, I suppose, whether history ever does anything else but tell a story?
FRYE: Sure, if you mean by history simply a story, but not raising a question that history is true story whereas story is fictional story. I would say the Bible tells a story which is not the less true for being unhistorical.
LAWTON: What you have said about the resonance of the text and the words, the verbal structures, is a necessarily reader-oriented, interpreter-oriented entry to the Bible, is it not? I suppose that’s the absolutely basic argument with the fundamentalists that you have: it really denies the idea that there is any perspective from which one can distinguish, at least easily, between what one sees and what, in fact, there is.
FRYE: The difficulty in that is that the Bible is an extraordinary example of what is true, really, of all books: that you can never make a definitive response to any work of literature because you’re not all the other people who read it. The work is a focus of a community and the community extends through the centuries. We can’t simply step into the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New Testament without all the differences between supersubstantial bread and daily bread and apostle and bishop and so forth rolling around in our minds.
LAWTON: But even after we have done that …? I’m very struck by the limitations of Old Testament Form-Criticism. At the end of the day one perhaps knows less, but I’m not sure if one knows more.
FRYE: You said it.
LAWTON: You don’t care to comment?
FRYE: Well, I always feel there is something getting away from me in all this, that Robert Alter and his kind know things that I don’t know—I don’t know what, I haven’t yet discovered what they are from their books.
LAWTON: It seems to me that a lot of your critical position on the Bible and your sense of the relation of the work on the Bible to other critical activity is probably best called Coleridgean.
FRYE: I think that if I believed in anything like reincarnation I would feel that maybe I was commissioned to write Coleridge’s book of the Logos which he kept hugging to his bosom in the form of fifty-seven notebooks that a colleague of mine has tried to edit.3
LAWTON: Is Coleridge prominent in your new book?
FRYE: He’s prominent in my thinking about the new book, and I daresay there will be a fair amount of the typology stuff in the Friend and elsewhere, because Coleridge’s instincts in the matter, I think, were very sound and very central—just with the exception that he was a lazy bastard and didn’t write them out.
LAWTON: What happened to the place of the Bible, in talk about literature, between the times of Coleridge and Frye? Why is it that until The Great Code, on the whole, the Bible had edged further and further away from the centre of literary-critical thinking?
FRYE: I suppose the reason was that the analytic school took over, and in between Coleridge and Frye there was first of all Strauss’s Life of Jesus and the whole attitude to the Bible laid out in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I think of myself as kind of another Casaubon in some respects, though I hope I have a better sense of perspective.4 I think that there was the same kind of schizophrenia that you have in literature between the extreme naturalists of the Zola school and the symbolistes of the Mallarmé school. You have very analytic and textual critics of the Bible disintegrating it, and then you have all the Blavatskys and occult people, who are not working with the Bible at all, who are working with symbolic patterns which are rather like it: and of course, they’re poles apart—they never get together.
LAWTON: Is there any way in which that can happen now? Is there any way in which we need literary critics to tell Biblical scholars what frame of reference they should bring to how they expound what they know? Is there a possibility of a common discourse again in a world as increasingly specialized as ours is?
FRYE: I would rather tell literary critics what they could use from the literary aspects of the Bible than Biblical scholars, but I know what you mean. I know that the critical approach to the Bible when I came to it as a student is very out of date now, and I’m not quoting it as contemporary scholarship, but back in the 1930s everybody was saying that Mark was closer to being a biography of Jesus than John was, whereas any literary critic would have known that that was nonsense.
LAWTON: I’m struck by the fact that our view of criticism as an activity in the Western world developed, if from the ancient Greeks at all, then via first and second century Alexandria. I play—I don’t know whether I can do any more than this—with the idea of Jacques Derrida as a kind of modern Origen, an enormous allegorical exegete, with the idea that critical activity, particularly of the French kind, is in fact locked into a tremendously allegorical process. I’m pursuing a fugitive connection here with what went on in the earliest days, when you have Origen really teaching Western Christian Europe how to read, not how to read the Bible, but how to read anything. There seems to have been an extraordinary ricorso in Derrida, in the deconstructionists: looking at any other meaning than the “obvious” one, in effect—which is what Origen did if you reduce it to a simple technique—without any of that sort of integrating sense of a discourse through which all those other readings become culturally possible.
FRYE: I think that you have an antithesis there which should have synthesized: that is, you have a Greek tradition which hit on some extraordinary central notions, like the notion of reconciliation—the Bible as the total summation of knowledge, which I think is still something that I am chasing myself; and then opposed to that is the Latin tradition, which is working with a legal language, and keeps abstracting and tying down, and defining. Somehow or other the richness of the one and the precision of the other never seemed quite to get together.
LAWTON: At what point do you think they came decisively unstuck?
FRYE: I suppose all things happen from the second century on, since the condemnation of Origen.
LAWTON: There seems to me to be in that answer a dream of an integrating humane scholarship. It’s almost as if you have revived the idea of an integrating approach based in the humanities which goes all the way from criticism to social organization. Your answer, “Any time after the condemnation of Origen,” almost denies the possibility of this in any kind of society or culture we’ve actually known.
FRYE: Except when it breaks out in things like the Victorines.5 And even there, of course, it’s very carefully guided and ruled. The Romanization of Christianity imposed something like what the doctrinaire Marxists imposed, say, in the Soviet Union: the thaws are just ways of permitting a certain amount of flexibility—but only as long as you don’t forget that the Holy Church is still infallible, whether Communist or Catholic.
LAWTON: To take the historical question from another angle: do you feel the need to distinguish sharply, and do you in fact distinguish sharply, between the Christian Bible and the Jewish Bible?
FRYE: I find that very difficult to answer. I feel that it’s ideological and propositional language that divides, and that symbolism and imagery are a universal language. In imagery and in metaphor it seems to me that Judaism and Christianity are identical. But doctrinally a religion which accepts incarnation is very different from a religion which does not, and while I think I can come to terms with the Jewish conception of the Bible, it’s just possibly the prejudices of my upbringing that I feel that the Bible is beheaded if it doesn’t have the New Testament. I just can’t get over that.
LAWTON: This is a problem I experience. I feel much more ashamed in front of a Jewish student who raises this point than I do in front of the denunciations of any fundamentalist student, because I feel that at least the fundamentalist and I have had an honest disagreement, but the Jewish student is accusing me of an act of complicity in a two-thousand-year-old act of theft.
FRYE: Yes, I think I managed to get over the gap in the course on the Bible I taught at Harvard, where I had something like four hundred and twenty students and a fair number of them were Jews. I tried to explain something of the difference between the two conceptions and the way in which Christianity had used Jewish conceptions in ways that Jews would think intolerable but nevertheless did fit consistently the structure of Christianity. They went off and held special sessions themselves to discuss the Christian interpretation of the Jewish scriptures, and they’d come out shaking their heads and saying, “Clever buggers these Christians.”
LAWTON: To accept that, though, puts a level of ideology into one’s own work with a text at a point earlier than one is prepared to accept that it ought to be there. Is that a fair comment?
FRYE: I suppose so, yes, and in the same way I can’t imagine what I would do with the Bible if the Koran were tacked onto it as a still more sacred text.
LAWTON: When you talk about the Bible, you’re clearly talking about adherence to the Christian Bible rather than the Jewish Bible or Islamic Bible. This would mark you as a very Christian reader. Do you accept this description, and how do you think your Christianity as a reader, Christianity or not, would reflect on your definition of good criticism, which would seem to me to be highly ethical?
FRYE: Well, I would be committed to Christianity in certain existential contexts. As a literary critic, I accept the Christian Bible rather than the Jewish Bible or the Koran not from religious conviction but simply because it is the Christian Bible that has actually infiltrated the literary culture that I’m interested in: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, and so on. So I really have no choice in the matter. I simply don’t know enough about the ramifications of the Jewish Bible and Jewish literature of the imagination, or the Islamic. So that as a literary critic I am constantly aware of the fact that I grew up within a Christian church as a person, and keep trying to back away as far as I can from imposing any sort of sales pitch on the reader or trying to slip in Christian dogmas disguised as critical judgments.
LAWTON: One last issue, then, which I think comes out of these. It seems to me that today Christianity is in a highly anomalous position. You and I and lots of people regard it as culturally central, historically central, yet I can’t help thinking those who most actively and dogmatically assert the values of traditional Christianity probably know the least about it. You’ve spent some time in what must be (a purely personal judgment, you understand) the most unenlightened Anglican diocese in the entire Anglican communion—the Sydney diocese. It seems to me that in terms of the values of social and political organization we no longer live in a Christian society, and I don’t know to what extent we live in a Christian culture. Would you like to comment on that, and arising from it: would that make your current enterprise somewhat anomalous too, in the same way? Or to put it positively, how would you see the core and what you’ve called the resonance of the Christian myth—that is, what you take to be timeless in it, independent of any particular social or political context—how would you see that surviving, in whatever transformed form, in the criticism and the creative writing of the future?
FRYE: I think that it would go on being a central element in the literature of the future simply because of the centrality of its structure of narratives and images. The present social situation of Christianity is so varied that almost anything you can say about it has some truth in it. In some parts of the world the churches are forced to fight on a left-wing radical side. They are, at the same time, being threatened—or they consider they are being threatened—by various movements like feminism and so on, and Christianity as a social institution has all those difficulties. I myself grew up in a culture in which the Orange Order, that is, the anti-Catholic organization, controlled everything in the city of Toronto. You could go and hear a very well-known pastor say that God was in his heaven and the only things that bothered him were the machinations of the Roman Catholic clergy.6 But there has been a very considerable growth of fairly elementary charity since then, and you wouldn’t find those remarks socially acceptable anymore. I do find that an encouraging sign. But even so, all the difficulties that Christianity is in have to do with doctrines and beliefs, and statements that this is true and therefore that is not true. I have nothing to do with that. I am concerned only with what the poet sees in a religious structure.
LAWTON: The question is whether the increasing lack of centrality of Christianity as a social institution does not drag the Christian myth, if you like, out of its central cultural position.
FRYE: It may do that, but if you think of the analogy, for example, of the use of Jupiter and Venus in medieval and Renaissance poetry: nobody built temples to them, nobody worshipped them, nobody thought they were worth anything except puerile fables of the heathen; nevertheless they took on an imaginative life of a kind they never had before. I would look forward to a tremendous emancipation of Christian imagination to the extent that it now does break down into deadlocks of fossilized belief, and going on doing the same things because we’ve always done them and therefore they’re sacred.
LAWTON: And you would expect writers of the future to tap that in some way?
FRYE: I think that they would tap it because they really have no choice. Again, a poet can only work within the conditioning framework of imagery that he inherits. Whatever the social and religious situation may be in Australia, I am rather struck with the number of Australian poets who come from a Catholic background and, whether they remain practising Catholics or not, certainly use that background in their poetry. I think this is just something they can’t help. I don’t think D.H. Lawrence had any use for his evangelical training in Nottingham, but he used it just as much as though he did.
LAWTON: Critics, however, can help it: because critics have, or are, a kind of built-in censor [sensor?]. Do you think that criticism runs a risk by turning its back, as decisively as for example some of the French critics have, on the Christian myth?
FRYE: Oh yes, I think that that’s a very dangerous form of self-mutilation. I’ve noticed it when they deal with somebody like Mallarmé, who had no religious commitments in terms of doctrine but nevertheless used Biblical images such as the martyrdom of John the Baptist and used the word verbe in practically a theological sense. You can’t just ignore all that. You’re simply bowdlerizing the text if you leave that out.