Conducted late May 1987
Frye was in Rome 23–28 May to attend the conference “Portrait of Northrop Frye,” 25–27 May. During this time he was interviewed by Loretta Innocenti, who shortly afterwards became professor of English literature at the University of Venice. The interview was conducted in English though translated into Italian by Innocenti for publication under the title “Frye, critica letteraria” in Alfabeta, 100 (September 1987): 28–9, prefaced by some general remarks on Frye. The original English questions and answers in the following text were sent to Robert D. Denham by Innocenti, 12 September 1987.
INNOCENTI: Your criticism deals mainly with the search for the basic elements of literature—those of formal structure (myths) and those of imagery (archetypes). If these are the common components of different literary works, how can the critic capture the specificity of a single text and of its individual and autonomous meaning?
FRYE: I think of criticism as a structure of knowledge about literature. If it isn’t that it’s not anything worth pursuing. Uniqueness and individuality are elements of experience, not elements of knowledge. We cannot know the unique, or even the individual, as such: knowledge is of likenesses within differences. In any structure of knowledge, meaning is derived from context, and understanding literature involves among other things understanding the conventions and genres that link works of literature together.
INNOCENTI: In literary studies you stressed the autonomy of the text, which should be analysed systematically in itself and in its relations with literary conventions. Historical, social, and cultural contexts are secondary. How can the critic consider the importance of these contexts in determining and conditioning literary creation? In other words, how can the unchangeable substance of myths and archetypes be reconciled with the dynamic evolution and transformation of the context?
FRYE: An author means something in his own time: that’s what makes him intelligible to his contemporaries and even to himself. He also means something to us, and we may admire him for reasons that would have been unintelligible to him. His relevance to us, across what are often the thickest barriers of time and space and language and cultural situation, can, in my view, be made comprehensible only by studying his context in literature. His social context is essential too, but it makes a different aspect of him intelligible. Myths and archetypes have no unchangeable substance: they are infinitely flexible and adaptable. If they lose their identity they turn into other myths. I think the examples I have given, such as the unknown origin of the hero as it comes down from the birth of Moses to the plots of Tom Jones and Oliver Twist, illustrate this.
INNOCENTI: In The Stubborn Structure you wrote that the world has a mathematical form because scientists applied it [47; WE, 251]. Don’t you think it is the same with the literary world and our patterns of interpretation? I mean, what is or what should be the relationship between objective knowledge and subjective interpretation in criticism?
FRYE: A work of literature is the focus of a community. Different people will read it differently, agree and disagree about it, and eventually some kind of consensus emerges. This consensus is the objective residue, what remains after the subjectivity of individual approaches becomes increasingly dated. Much the same thing happens in the sciences—for example, Einstein made invaluable contributions to the contemporary picture of the physical world although he never really accepted the quantum randomness which is also now a part of that picture.
INNOCENTI: Some new trends in criticism, such as deconstruction, deny that we can reach the meaning of a literary work or even that there is a meaning. All efforts to interpret are ways to proliferate structures and senses in an infinite chain of nuances and differences. In my opinion, this sceptical position reduces all criticism to a solipsistic and narcissistic exercise. In your opinion, do literature and criticism possess a sense that might be saved from nihilism?
FRYE: The deconstructionists will have to speak for themselves, but I think the “anything goes” stage is headed for the dustbin already. Derrida himself has a “construal” basis of interpretation that he starts from, and I think his followers will soon discover that there is a finite number of “supplements” that can be based on that.1 In another decade they should have rediscovered the polysemous scheme of Dante, or something very like it.
INNOCENTI: You have written that you don’t believe in a plurality of critical methods. What do you mean exactly?
FRYE: I don’t remember having said that I don’t believe in a plurality of critical methods: if I did I expressed myself carelessly, as it’s obvious that there is such a plurality.2 What I don’t believe in are mutually exclusive methods: I think a valid critical method owes its validity to a rough consistency with other valid methods. I think of validity as something to be established by experience, with certain approaches proving more useful than others, not by theory.
INNOCENTI: What is the function of criticism in the contemporary world?
FRYE: Criticism and literature are related as theory to practice, and the function of criticism is to explain the social function and relevance of literature. Also to deal with the relationships of different kinds of verbal experience often, in practice, spoken of as “outside” literature.
INNOCENTI: According to you, value judgments should be avoided in analysing a text. Sometimes negative evaluations have had remarkable consequences for certain authors such as Milton, who was much abused by critics. Do you think there are writers who have been as much abused and deserve a critical re-evaluation?
FRYE: As long as I believe criticism to be a structure of knowledge, I don’t see how value judgments can be anything but tentative and provisional assumptions. One approaches Shakespeare with an assumption that his reputation is based on something that will make him rewarding to work with: one finds this assumption confirmed in one’s experience, but no actual scholarship can ever be based on the value judgment. “Wrong” value judgments are not errors in taste: they are expressions of inadequate knowledge about literature. The negative value judgments about Milton two generations ago did nothing either for Milton or for the advance of criticism. They were really political and moral judgments, and are as dead as the dinosaurs now. I don’t say that a classic writer can never lose his original position: Cicero certainly lost something of his after the social climate of early humanism changed, but he didn’t lose it because anybody made out a case against him. “Re-evaluation,” I keep insisting, is leisure-class gossip, not the study of literature.
INNOCENTI: What are you working on now?
FRYE: I am trying to follow up my study of the Bible and literature, The Great Code, with a successor that will take in more critical theory and more of the Bible’s actual infiltration into Western literature. Anyone studying Islamic culture would almost certainly start with the Koran; I’d like to see if a similar procedure wouldn’t work with the Bible and Western literature.