Conducted 28 or 29 May 1987
From “Il Grande Codice: Conversazione con Northrop Frye,” Portofranco: quaderni della casa di cultura [Quarterly of the House of Culture], 2 (May 1988): 29–30, translated by Nella Cotrupi. After the Rome conference, Frye spent two days in Vicenza at the home of interviewer Roberto Plevano and his wife Carla, whom he knew already. (She had been partly responsible for the Italian translation of Fearful Symmetry.)
[The interviewer begins by noting that The Great Code has not so far had much influence in Italian intellectual circles.]
PLEVANO: There is a tension, a problem, in defining the structure and characteristics of the category of the modern in literature. The modern seems almost to be that point beyond which conventional narrative structures dissolve, or at least are put in question. In what sense can the Bible offer us an understandable model for modern narrative?
FRYE: It is a model in the sense that many contemporary narrators actually dedicate themselves to a quasi-parody, to a deliberate inversion, or to a deconstruction of the conventional forms. This means that the reader is forced to have in mind the traditional model that is being deconstructed. In other words, the reader is made to see that what is being read is its opposite. And this is why I am in favour of an educational system and a mode of instruction organized around traditional imaginative centres such as the Bible.
PLEVANO: In Western ecclesiastical history, particularly from the Middle Ages on, differing interpretations of the Biblical message have emerged for the Old and the New Testaments. On the one hand, we may isolate an immanent aspect of God’s message: God revealed in history through the actions of man; on the other hand, we have a different interpretative thread, that of the “desert,” of silence. It is difficult to reconcile the writings and doctrines of St. Dominic and St. Bonaventure, on the one hand, with the thought of Meister Eckhart on the other. How can one speak of a unitary tradition or imagery?
FRYE: There is nothing of the unitary; the images, metaphor, and myth constitute a universal language. There is the same type of structure in the Oriental tradition, outside the Christian tradition, which is that of the West; with the difference that in the East it is less rooted in a single distinct story and it has a less revolutionary character from a social perspective. The verbal structures are, however, very similar in both instances.
PLEVANO: So, in your view, cultural and even not specifically cultural phenomena typical of the modern, such as the “great narratives” of human history (the narrative of man’s emancipation by means of technology, or the story of the emancipation of the proletariat via revolution) have this metaphorical model on their back.
FRYE: They have the model of the Exodus, in which the essential paradigm that initiates the story of Israel is God, who expresses the intention to intervene in history by supporting the oppressed class against the establishment Egyptians. All of this is followed by a movement towards the Promised Land. Furthermore, throughout the Bible, there is the theme of slavery that oppresses the Hebrew race, and always the hope of the prophets that one day Israel will be restored. Then there is the evangelical thread of the prophet Jesus, completely alienated to the point of being crucified, who at the same time turns the world upside down with his revolutionary act.
PLEVANO: Nevertheless, in the history of Western culture it has always been difficult to identify unitary reference points or models; for example, today in Italy there is a tendency to speak of a neo-paganism, recuperating a line of thinking that, from the time of Giordano Bruno, moves out to libertine culture and to the Enlightenment.
FRYE: In my book I referred to the story of Japan: in the beginning there was a widespread belief in local gods and in the spirits of the ancestors; then Buddhism arrived, with its doctrine of the One, and all the Buddhist theologians maintained that the local gods and spirits of the ancestors could be considered as aspects of Buddha. In this way, in Japan, the two religions could be in perfect accord, proceeding “hand in hand.” I think that in the West we are living through the same process, but in reverse. Christians have had to sever ties with other cultures, and affirm that they possess the only truth, but at the same time that they were becoming culturally dominant, they tended to absorb rather than repulse the other religions. So, from the Renaissance on, there has been much paganism—the creation of “stories” of Venus and Jove has been much more lively in literature during the Christian period than during the period when people believed in these divinities. The American poet, Emily Dickinson, speaks of one who will dare to “refund us finally / Our confiscated gods,”1 and in some measure this has meant that the pagan god Eros, through Freud, has become an aspect of Western culture, as had Prometheus, at least the first version of the myth, through Marx, etc. It is simply a process of expansion and, at the same time, of continuity. As the central metaphorical tradition moves forward, it tends to absorb and unify rather than separate.
PLEVANO: For some time we have seen a return of interest in studies of Jewish culture. Without losing sight of the fact that the Bible is the product of a specific cultural and linguistic space, is it possible to clarify the complex question of the Bible as the source of our own tradition?
FRYE: Judaism and Christianity have more or less the same metaphorical base. They have different doctrinal foundations because one accepts the immanence of God in man, while the other does not. But their roots are intimately tied and the divergence comes only at a later time. Christianity arose as a heresy within Judaism, and also had to struggle, on the other hand, against the Gnostic movement, which favoured a complete separation of Christianity from Judaism. The Gnostics held that the God of the Old Testament was an evil being from whom Jesus had liberated humanity; this is why the first Christian church insisted adamantly on the fact that the New Testament really expressed the true meaning of the Old. In this way, the rediscovery of the Jewish roots of Christianity becomes a continual process, particularly notable in the time of Pico della Mirandola—I have in mind the Kabbalists—and again with Lessing in Germany in the eighteenth century. And naturally it is returning today: people like Buber, for example, are elaborating interpretations of the Jewish religion that come very close to Christian thinking. I am working on these issues in my new book, God as Nothing Who Seeks to Become Something, and as yet my thoughts on this issue are not very clear.
PLEVANO: In your work, which is more important, the direct reading of the Biblical text, or reading various exegetical texts?
FRYE: The reading of both, naturally.