Conducted 9 or 23 February 1988
From the section headed “Northrop Frye” in the article “What Is the Purpose of Art?” in Grammateion: The St. Michael’s College Journal of the Arts, 13 (1988): 36. Frye’s daybook for 1988 has two entries for Bert Archer; probably the first interview was cancelled. Frye was one of several artists and critics, including Robertson Davies, Alex Colville, and Robert Fulford, who responded to the question posed by Bert Archer: “What do you think is the purpose of art? Why do you create and why do we appreciate?” Archer noted that some responded orally, others in writing; Frye did so orally. Archer later became a writer and journalist.
FRYE: A great many people would say that art has no purpose, that that’s the whole point about the arts. I think myself that I prefer not to use the word “purpose,” but it does have a function. I think that humanity has certain concerns, and some of them are concerns that can be expressed verbally, such as political loyalties and religious beliefs, and others are more primary and immediate, like seeing and hearing, and also making a living and staying healthy and that kind of thing. I think that literature has a specific function among the verbal arts in that it does deal with these primary concerns along with the more ideological ones. Painting and music concentrate more on the developing of a sense experience so that becomes something creative on the part of the seer or hearer as well as the producer of the art.
“Purpose” is Aristotle’s word, and it leads to a kind of goal which I would distinguish, and did distinguish a moment ago, as ideological. Some people can’t think of art apart from its relationship to either political or religious concerns, or both. I would think that the criticism of the arts is set free when you’re not so much concerned with that kind of attachment. At the same time, there’s no point in being a critic unless you believe the arts are important.
The concept of art having a purpose goes back really to the whole Socratic revolution in thinking, where it was felt that the way to truth and the way to beauty is really through dialectic and through understanding rather than through the senses. It’s really as old as that is, I think. The Puritan side of it comes in in the emphasis on the Biblical traditions, which are again extremely verbal, and tend to be iconoclastic; that is, they make some use of music but very much less of the visual arts. That is particularly true of a certain recurrent emphasis in Christianity which came up with the seventeenth century Puritans. It came up also in the seventeenth century in France with the Jansenist movement, and both of those of course struck roots in Canada in English Canada and in Quebec.