Filmed 7, 8, 10 June 1988
From the sound track of filmmaker Harry Rasky’s film Northrop Frye: The Great Teacher, transcribed by Mary Ellen Kappler. Dated by Jane Widdicombe’s list, which reveals that it was filmed at Hart House, the student athletic and recreational facility. Shown over CBC Television, 10 February 1990. The film consists of extensive interviews between Rasky and Frye, interspersed with imagery and music. The main emphasis is on ideas in The Great Code, to which (unless otherwise indicated) page numbers in the text refer. At the beginning are images of nature with the superimposed caption, “‘And the trees shall clap their hands’ [Isaiah 55:12].”
FRYE (voiceover): I think of a nature that got along for billions of years without man, but I don’t think of creation as a factor. Somebody talking about the origin of the universe would be better advised not to use the word “creation” in that context. He’s talking about a natural process. The conception of creation for me, as a term, only begins to make sense when there is a consciousness responding to it.
RASKY: Is it important that the first words be “In the beginning,” do you think, in the Bible? Could you imagine a Bible that started any other way?
FRYE: No. That’s one of the reasons why I think there is such a highly developed narrative sense in the Bible. You can’t start a narrative more logically than with the words “In the beginning.” [Images of a boys’ choir, an image from Blake, nature scenes. Voiceover reading from Genesis. Images of Victoria College, covers of Frye’s books, Frye teaching a class, an image from Blake, stained glass windows. Voiceover introduction and background information about Frye.]
RASKY: You say at one point that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads. What do you mean by that?
FRYE: Well, that remark came out of my earliest teaching experiences, where I was teaching Paradise Lost and trying to write a book about Blake. Milton and Blake are Biblical writers, and I found that my undergraduate students couldn’t respond to allusions made to the Bible in the way that a previous generation had been able to. So I complained to the head of my department about my difficulties in reaching them, and he said, “Well, you can’t teach Paradise Lost to students who can’t tell a Philistine from a Pharisee.”
RASKY: Is there a simple answer to “who wrote the Bible”?
FRYE: That is a very complex question. It seems to have been founded on earlier literature, a great deal of which was poetry, as earlier literatures always are. And there seemed to have been a process at work that squeezed the essence out of that literature. The Bible is not a work of authorship, it’s a work of editing.
RASKY: Well, how about the fundamentalists who say it was all written by God and that those people were stenographers or something in between?
FRYE: Yes, well, that’s a possible view. But it overlooks certain difficulties which the historical and textual scholars have been working with for at least a hundred and fifty years. And you find that even the view of direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit can’t have lapses of memory, or inconsistencies in attitude. [Images of nature and from Blake, and voiceover readings from the creation account in Genesis, punctuate the conversation about the Biblical creation.]
FRYE: I’m not a Biblical scholar. I’m a critic and student of English literature who regards the Bible as indispensable in understanding that subject, and somebody, a sort of door-to-door salesman, trying to explain the importance of the Bible to a more secular-minded audience.
RASKY: You say in the introduction [to GC], “The years have brought me an elastic conscience” [xxiii/17]. What does that mean in terms of your own development, that you have an “elastic conscience”?
FRYE: I suppose it means primarily that at the age of seventy-five I no longer give a damn what anybody says about me.
RASKY: Has it taken you that long to come to that conclusion, would you say?
FRYE: Well, scholars, as a rule, have rather twitchy skins.
RASKY: Do you find as you get older that there are more questions than answers?
FRYE: I think that they’re all questions; I don’t think there are any answers. I think that the answer cheats you out of the right to ask the question and that the function of the answer is to make you formulate a better question.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” That suggests an event, that in the beginning, God did something and the words are there to tell you about it. But you have to turn that inside out, I think. It’s a metaphor, meaning something to do with the awakening of human consciousness into a world that made sense. And that is why, in the act of creation, the word precedes the act: “God said let there be light and there was light.” The word comes first, the object follows it.
RASKY: What existed before existence?
FRYE: There is never a moment of time you could think of where you can’t raise the question of what was before that. And that question made St. Augustine so irritable that he said that before the creation God was preparing a hell for people who asked that question.1 But that was just St. Augustine’s philosophical difficulties with the fact that you can’t take it in. You can talk about the beginning of time endlessly but you can’t really realize it. You can only think of time as an indefinite category without a beginning and without an end.
RASKY: Is the Bible fact or fiction? Can one answer that?
FRYE: No.
RASKY: No? There’s no answer to that?
FRYE: In the Bible the distinction between fact and fiction has ceased to exist.
RASKY: Is it more fact than fiction?
FRYE: No. Fact is objective, and fiction is a human construct. The Bible is neither. It’s something beyond both. If you say “fact” you’re saying that the Bible is historically accurate. And one glance at the Bible and you’re not in accurate history, you’re in something else, a different kind of world altogether. On the other hand, you’re not in the world of novels or romances. You’re in the realm of narratives and stories, but that’s rather different.
RASKY: You write that Genesis presents the creation as the sudden coming into being of the world through articulate speech, conscious perception, light, and stability. Does that mean “flash,” and it’s suddenly there?
FRYE: It reads a little like that, yes. The account in Genesis spends very little time on the original chaos. But first of all there is the great primordial light that comes into being. And the modern line, of course, thinking of all those billions of years where nothing very cheerful was happening, is apt to think of the creation as something of a revolution which brings consciousness into the world, and the sense of a subject and object. [Cosmological and natural images, images from Blake.]
RASKY: When you read scientific items, as we all do, in the paper about billions of years, does that in any way affect your idea of creation, of God’s creation?
FRYE: Not really, no. Because I think of creation as starting, really, with the human perception of order and system in the world, and love and beauty in the world. Michelangelo’s Sistine painting of God creating Adam—whenever I look at that picture I turn it inside out mentally, and think of Adam as waking up to a world which has things by God in it.
RASKY: I guess feminists have a very good point: the whole idea of creation, as expressed in the Bible, is a very masculine-dominated event, according to the way it was written, correct?
FRYE: That’s right. When you open the Bible you find apparently a male God, creating apparently a male Adam, then taking a woman out of his body, and then saying that because the woman took the lead in the fall there will be patriarchal societies which are really patriarchalism gone mad. But if you take the perspective of the entire Bible I think you get a very different impression. Again, there’s a very intricate metaphorical language involved. The Bible, as I see it, does represent, to some extent, a reaction against some of the earth-goddess mother cults. And the reason is that the mother is the parent that you have to break away from in order to get born.
RASKY: So there’s a reason for it, because the earlier literature before the Bible was so maternal?
FRYE: Yes, and that means that it’s completely wrapped up in the goddess Nature, so that man remains a kind of embryo, in a sense, unborn. He can’t get out from under his surrounding of nature. The symbolism of a sky-father is, I think, there to enable men and women to escape from that kind of embryonic position.
RASKY: A sky-father? What does that mean?
FRYE: Well, God is called a father consistently through the Bible, and he is usually associated with the heavens. He’s said to ride around the sky, actually, on the back of a cherub [2 Samuel 22:11; Psalm 18:10]. And the reasons for having God associated both with the sky and with father-hood have to do with the sense of the world as a system or order, something to be responded to by intelligence, and also by love, which is a factor of very high intelligence.
RASKY: I don’t know if you were totally in jest when you said everything that follows the creation of woman in the Bible is two thousand pages of anticlimax.2 Is that just a joke, or is there some truth in that?
FRYE: That’s what I hope would be a joke with some truth in it.
RASKY: The whole question of Adam and Eve suddenly acquiring knowledge, is that what makes us all semi-neurotics today, would you say?
FRYE: I think it’s an attempt to define, in metaphorical terms, the nature of the human neurosis, yes. And the creation of woman is the great climax of the creation account in Genesis. And the fact that woman took the initiative in the fall means that she takes the initiative in going back again.
RASKY: In going back again?
FRYE: Yes. I don’t think that the fundamental antagonism is really between good and evil, because so much of “good” is what society has decided is good. The real contrast is between life and death. That’s the contrast that, according to Deuteronomy, is the one that God makes: “I have set before you life and death … therefore choose life” [30:19]. [Readings from the Genesis account of the fall; images from Blake.]
FRYE: No master really understands his slave, and our attitude to nature is overwhelmingly one of mastery and of exploitation. The point about the story of the garden of Eden is that ideally man should be in the position of loving nature. And whatever is loved is the equal of the lover.
RASKY: And therefore man obviously isn’t a great lover. He keeps destroying nature.
FRYE: That’s right.
RASKY: I’ve always been fascinated with the fact that so much Christian writing concentrates on the fall. Why is that?
FRYE: Well, it’s because the Bible actually begins with the creation by a God who looked at what he did and saw that it was good. And, as Shaw says somewhere, “What would He say now?”3 But of course the answer is that this isn’t the world God made, so you have to have the fall myth.
RASKY: In the fall, man acquired this sexual knowledge, of good and evil. But the possibility is always that the concentration on this by the evangelists will be on that sin, sin, sin and it becomes a perversion of what is meant in the Bible.
FRYE: I think that what Adam and Eve acquired at the fall was a moral sense founded on a sexual repressiveness, and human beings have been struggling with that neurosis ever since. The person who talks about the sin of the fall very frequently thinks in his heart that God ought to have been ashamed of himself for having thought up the idea of sex in the first place. If you can’t explicitly say that, nevertheless you should be referring to it as little as possible. That’s all part of exactly what the Bible’s trying to say.
RASKY: To say what?
FRYE: That man got everything screwed up when they had their fall, including his notions of sex.
RASKY: However, God made these various contracts with all these individuals—Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Noah. Why is the contract an important device in the Bible, would you say?
FRYE: It’s important to suggest the conception of continuity, the continuity of Israel. And, incidentally, that’s an exact reversal of thinking that the sexual thing was something we should have avoided altogether, because the sense of being fruitful and multiplying is certainly part of God’s intention in regard to Israel throughout—all the contracts imply and suggest that.
RASKY: Why do you think that in the Bible, as a metaphor, the ear is so much more used than the eye?
FRYE: Because the eye sees the object, and God is not an object. If you hear a voice, that is both something that comes from outside and something that comes from inside; that is, the distinction between the outside and the inside is not clear-cut. So there’s no difficulty about hearing God’s voice. But once you see God, then you’re limiting him to a natural object.
RASKY: Of course, God is never seen, correct?
FRYE: Never really fully seen, no. There are visions of God in Isaiah and Ezekiel, but they’re always something else rather than visions. [Images of masks from different cultures. Voiceover reading of the prohibition on graven images in Exodus 20:4.]
RASKY: In your discussion of God in your book you suggest that maybe we could understand God if we thought of him as a verb rather than a noun [17/35]. Can you help me a little bit with that?
FRYE: The noun is normally the name of a thing. There’s no such thing as God, because God is not a thing. You’re pointing to something very vague and approximate when you use “God” as a noun, as though he were an object.
RASKY: Or as a person. People tend to think of him as a person—a wise old man like Northrop Frye or something like that.
FRYE: Yes. God is personal, but not a person.
RASKY: So if you think of God as a verb, then where does that carry you?
FRYE: It carries you into the point of thinking that the word “God” implies a process which is there from the beginning rather than something you reach at the end. [Images of nature.]
RASKY: The crossing of the bridge from “gods” to “God,” which has already taken place in the Bible, is felt as a release from the tyranny of nature.
FRYE: Well, man develops a conception of gods out of nature and his earliest gods are probably things like tree-spirits and mountain-spirits and river-spirits. And then as society gets more organized, they tend to become an aristocracy, and man is related to them as social inferiors are to a warrior class. And all these gods, being really founded on a conception of a nature which is thought of as bigger than man, and as to some extent alien from him, have the capriciousness that goes with elements in nature. The gods can lose their temper, just as you get thunderstorms. They can be ferocious and destructive, just as some animals can be. When you get to the conception of God you’re free of the notion of a kind of personality evolving out of nature. You’re in the realm of something which is still personal but contains both humanity and nature.
RASKY: Is it that simple? To think of God as a kind of a parent?
FRYE: It’s an intelligible metaphor, indicating that God is, among other things, the entire past of the human race.
RASKY: Is there any easy way of defining God?
FRYE: You can’t define him at all. It’s not a definable word.
RASKY: I remember asking Chagall that question and he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, even Einstein couldn’t define that.”
FRYE: Einstein wouldn’t try.
RASKY: You say at one point that the Bible is a violently partisan book, even propaganda [40/58]. Now that might shock some people. Why do you say it’s a partisan book?
FRYE: It’s pretty clear in the accounts, say, of the kings of Israel and Judah. The kings are, quite simply, good if they promoted the cult of Jehovah and bad if they didn’t.
RASKY: I suppose it’s really that idea that whatever side God was on was the right side, is that it?
FRYE: Yes, and by a coincidence, the right side was always the Israelite side.
RASKY: Why did it end up that one group did do it and another group didn’t? Do we know that?
FRYE: Well, again, it’s that mystery about language. Israel were the people with the book, and they had control of the language. And that means that what they had, their versions of things, and their attitudes about things, are what have survived. [Images of the Middle East and Hebrew writing on an ancient scroll.]
RASKY: I think you referred to Ozymandias. Other people have pyramids and great towers and so on, but the Israelites had the words. That’s their power, I suppose.
FRYE: All those tremendous stone monuments disappeared under the sand, and the little papyrus scrolls are still in reasonably good shape.
RASKY: Therefore the word is stronger than the physical, created things, would you say?
FRYE: It certainly looks as though it were, yes. [Images of ruins. Voiceover reading of Shelley’s Ozymandias.]
FRYE: Man has made many discoveries and improved his technology and his social organization and so on, but he’s just as violent and cruel and beastly as ever.
RASKY: Can we still have a personal connection with God? [Images of Abraham and Moses.] Abraham was supposed to have talked to God, and Moses had this conversation with God, but if God is not this kind of noun that we think of him as, is it still possible to do that?
FRYE: I think it’s what makes it possible really, because God is always shown in action in the Bible, and the verb is particularly the word of action.
RASKY: Do you think in fact they did have those conversations, or do you think that was poetic imagery that was invented later?
FRYE: It could be either, and it would mean the same thing, whichever it was.
RASKY: It doesn’t matter, whether they did or didn’t?
FRYE: I find myself getting more and more distrustful of either/or situations. I always think it’s a both/and situation. I think Abraham was (a) talking with God, and (b) hallucinating. I think both things are going on at the same time.
RASKY: And of course today people say that we can’t have those conversations because, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “God is dead.” Where do you stand on that controversy, if that is what it is?
FRYE: Even Nietzsche had to say that it was going to be awfully hard to get rid of God as long as we continue to believe in grammar.4 And I would alter that to say that you can never get rid of God as long as you continue to use words, because all words are part of the Word.
RASKY: All words are part of the Word?
FRYE: A part of the consciousness which we’ve been stuck with as human beings.
RASKY: Even though parts of the Bible are such great poetry, much of it is violence. People think of television as being violent, but the Bible is a very violent document. Why do you think the authors of the Bible thought it so important to pour that violence in, wars and so on? [Images of ancient violence.]
FRYE: Well, they didn’t put it in. It was there from the beginning. That’s what human life is like. And the violence is, again, part of the fact that man is part of nature and nature has a titanic quality. It’s not all sheep and pasture grass, by any means.
RASKY: Was the phrase “history is the nightmare from which we’re all trying to wake up”?
FRYE: That’s in Joyce’s Ulysses. I think Byron said it more neatly when he said that history is the devil’s scripture.5
RASKY: I wonder if I would be prying if I said, Does Northrop Frye talk to God?
FRYE: Yes. [Images of nature.]
RASKY: Does the Bible mean one thing? The “Great Code”: does it all add up to one thing in the end? That’s a tough question, I know, but how would you tackle it?
FRYE: Well, it adds up to a unifying of experience, yes, I’d say that, but when Isaiah says that “all the trees … shall clap their hands” [55:12], the reader’s instinct is to say, “Well of course we can’t take this literally, but…” In other words, something is being said that’s important. It’s what follows the “but” that is important.
RASKY: What did he mean when he said “all the trees shall clap their hands”? It’s such a lovely phrase. [Images of trees.]
FRYE: He’s speaking of a natural creation bursting into the praise of its creator. And that’s something you can only do in pure language, because that is not a description of a scientific process.
RASKY: What in fact are the basic images of the Bible?
FRYE: The paradisal images of trees and rivers and fountains and fruits. Then there are agricultural images of harvest and vintage, and wedding images of bridegroom and bride. And there are urban images of the city with the temple at the centre. [Images of crops, weddings, and a domed temple.]
RASKY: The tree, what does the tree keep personifying in the Bible? It keeps referring over and over again to the tree. [Images of trees.]
FRYE: Well, the tree is one of the images of what appears all through the mythology of the world as the axis, connecting this world with a higher world. Of course, it’s only metaphorically higher. But the tree of life is the crucial tree in the garden of Eden, and I think it’s thought of there as the axis that symbolizes the relationship of God and man.
RASKY: You mean because it physically points to heaven, is that it?
FRYE: Yes.
RASKY: Just the physical being of the tree.
FRYE: Yes. You can get other images of ascent, like Jacob’s ladder or towers or mountains, but the tree is a very central image of something that is alive and grows upwards into a higher world. There are the two trees: metaphorically they’re the same tree, but in the narrative they have to be two. [Images of a ladder, a tower, a mountain and trees.]
RASKY: How can the same tree cause both life and the possible expulsion from paradise?
FRYE: Well, one is the parody of the other. One is the tree of life, the other is the tree of death, and the tree of knowledge which brought about what D.H. Lawrence would call “sex in the head.”6
RASKY: “Sex in the head”?
FRYE: Yes, the sense of self-consciousness about the sexual act was evidently a kind of genuine knowledge which was dangerous in that particular context because we’re not told that the tree of life is forbidden to man before he ate from the wrong tree, but only afterwards.
RASKY: And water. What is the symbolism of water in the Bible? What does that mean? [Images of water.]
FRYE: Well, water is, again, one of the symbols of life, like air or spirit. All of the images in the Bible have a benevolent side and a malevolent side. There’s the water of life, which, again, means immortality, like the tree of life, and there’s the water of death, which you get in Noah’s flood, and the crossing of the Red Sea, which drowns you.
RASKY: So that contrast that occurs with every symbol.
FRYE: Yes.
RASKY: Then we have the bride and the groom—they appear frequently. What do they mean in the Biblical context?
FRYE: Well, they’re again a very ancient and worldwide symbol. The sacred marriage, the wedding. Very frequently it’s the heaven and the earth that are married, but in the Bible, it’s God and his people. [Images of weddings, female nudes and flowers. Voiceover reading from the Song of Songs.]
FRYE: In the Song of Songs you have a bride and a bridegroom, and they expand into King Solomon and his land—or his queen, or whatever—and that in turn expands into a sense of God and his people. His people, in this case, would be both the society and the country. It would be both the Israel bride and the land, the nature bride. [A boys’ choir singing Blake’s Jerusalem, and images of Jerusalem.]
RASKY: What does the city represent in the Bible?
FRYE: The city is the centre of the people. After David took Jerusalem, the imagery of the Bible becomes very urban, and the city with the Temple in the middle of it is the image of the relation of God to his people. The New Testament was written shortly after the emperor Titus had sacked and looted Jerusalem, so for it, Jerusalem is no longer a place, it’s a state of being. But still, there is a physical Jerusalem all through the Old Testament, which is often forsaken, as in the Babylonian captivity, but is always still there to be rebuilt. But in the Book of Revelation, and elsewhere in the New Testament, you’re giving up the idea of rebuilding Jerusalem, or centring things there.
RASKY: The symbols in the New Testament seem to mimic the symbols in the Old Testament, like the twelve tribes, twelve disciples.
FRYE: There is no image in the New Testament that doesn’t have its counterpart in the Old.
RASKY: Does that mean that the New Testament is just plagiarizing the Old Testament?
FRYE: It means that it’s a kind of mirror reflection of the Old Testament. The early Christians, when they found difficulty in understanding what to them were new doctrines, like the Resurrection, were simply told to go and read the Old Testament, but read it differently.
RASKY: Sometimes in hotel rooms, when I’ve been travelling, I see that that they have only the New Testament. It seems kind of strange that they’ve discarded the Old Testament. So in fact if people read only the New, they’ve missed out the source in many ways?
FRYE: Yes, it’s utterly impossible to understand a word of the New Testament without having the Old.
RASKY: Where did the idea of Jesus being a fisherman come from?
FRYE: We all live in what is symbolically a kind of submarine existence. That is, for most of us, Noah’s flood has never really receded. We’re still more or less under water. So any attempt to redeem us has to descend into the water. It’s the type of the story of Jonah, who was thrown into the sea and swallowed by a great fish. He spent a submarine existence for three days and then came out of it. Jesus accepts that as an image of his own ministry, where he descends to a lower world for three days, then comes up. [Images of sheep and shepherds.]
RASKY: Also, the image of the shepherd is very prevalent in the Bible, right?
FRYE: Oh yes. The pastoral world is idealized in the Bible. The agricultural world was much more likely to be contaminated by heathen influences. So it’s Abel, the martyred shepherd, who is the ideal figure, and “the Lord is my shepherd” in the twenty-third Psalm. Christ is the Good Shepherd. [Voiceover reading of the twenty-third Psalm. Images of a soprano singing, Blake’s images of the Passion and Resurrection.]
FRYE: The purpose of the Bible is to go a step beyond that and rearrange the whole way that you live. The Gospels, for example, are not out to teach a new doctrine, they’re not out simply to tell you a story, but to rearrange the pattern of your life, the way you see things.
RASKY: Could you explain that a little bit more?
FRYE: I think that if, for example, the Crucifixion of Christ, which is a historical event—I assume it is, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be one—but if it’s a primarily historical event, then Jesus is simply one of all those poor wretches who suffered that very cruel and hideous death. And it becomes a historical fact in the general nightmare of history which Byron calls “the devil’s scripture.” Presented as it is in the Gospels, as a myth, it becomes “the” Crucifixion. It didn’t occur in the past, it’s occurring now in the present.
RASKY: It’s occurring in the present?
FRYE: Well, it’s something that keeps confronting the reader. It’s something that is happening now. Its significance is not exhausted by what happened two thousand years ago.
RASKY: The message of the Crucifixion keeps going on? Or the event itself?
FRYE: The event itself keeps confronting you. This is what we’re like. This is what we would still do to God if we could catch him.
RASKY: Are you suggesting that if Jesus came back today he would probably be crucified all over again?
FRYE: Not necessarily crucified, but he would certainly be made an unperson, if it would be possible to do so.
RASKY: An “unperson”?
FRYE: Well that’s the phrase from Orwell’s 1984.
RASKY: Oh yes. So does that mean that we aren’t improving as a race, or as a breed?
FRYE: I don’t know just how we’re improving. I think that for me, the moral is the same as the one in the Epilogue to Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, where everybody kneels and praises St. Joan, and she says, “That’s fine, can I come back into the world now?” and they start to shuffle off.
RASKY: Is that a great human failing, that we can’t accept the ideal?
FRYE: I think so. We can’t really tolerate a complete individual. The individual must conform to the standards of society around him and somebody who is obviously standing beyond those standards and values is somebody we instinctively hate. [Images of stained glass.]
RASKY: But I would like to ask some personal questions now. You have this passion for music. Where did that come from? [Images of Frye’s childhood.]
FRYE: Well, my mother taught me a note when I was about three, and I splashed around with it myself, and started to take lessons when I was thirteen. But I’ve always been a great devotee of the piano and its literature.
RASKY: And how does that reflect itself in your life today? Do you play an instrument still, or sing?
FRYE: I keep trying to play, yes.
RASKY: And do you think you’re pretty good at it, at this stage?
FRYE: No, I’m not very good at it.
RASKY: Where were you born? And your parents, what did they do? [Images of Frye’s childhood.]
FRYE: I was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and my father was in the hardware business, and my mother was the daughter of a Methodist circuit rider.
RASKY: So that’s where the religious beginning would come from, I would think. And people want to know where the name “Northrop” came from.
FRYE: My grandmother was Sarah Ann Northrop. It’s a common New England name. She came from Lowell, and was a factory girl at the time when Lowell was one of the model flourishing towns in the United States.
RASKY: But did your fellow classmates in school call you Northrop? It seems like a long name for a child.
FRYE: I know, but nevertheless the Northrop area covers a good deal of southeastern New Brunswick. The “Norrie” one was what came in when I attended university.
RASKY: “Norrie” was your nickname. Or is still your nickname?
RASKY: And your early interest in the Bible would have been because of your grandparents?
FRYE: Well, I suppose it came through my grandfather to my mother, but I had the kind of religious and Biblical education that most nonconformist families did have in my generation.
RASKY: And you said somewhere, “I’ve been interested in religion solely as a means of expanding the mind, not of contracting it.”7 Do you think that’s what does happen as you study religion? Does it in fact expand, or does one become more and more particular and secularized?
FRYE: Well, it’s possible to go in either direction, but what interests me about words like “infinite” and “eternal” is that they do not mean, for me, time and space going on for ever.
RASKY: What do they mean?
FRYE: They mean the fact that the centre of time, the present, becomes real and becomes now. And the centre of space, the here, becomes a real place. Whereas in our ordinary existence there’s really no such time as “now.” As soon as you’ve said “now,” it’s receded into the past.
RASKY: Yes, Tennessee Williams made that point. He talked about the past, the present, and the perhaps.8 That time going so quickly is memory immediately. Did you ever actually become a minister? You studied theology, but were you preaching at any point?
FRYE: Well, except for a mission-field summer in Saskatchewan, I’ve preached mainly to students, but I am ordained.
RASKY: Sitting in this library it seems hard to me to relate to the fact that you would come from a hardware store into the vast knowledge that you’ve been able to accumulate. Do you have any easy explanation for that?
FRYE: The hardware business is a very meticulous one, with people coming in to inquire about the little dingus that fits over the whatchamacallit, and I suppose scholarly work is not really all that different.
RASKY: I was at Massey Hall recently when they had Arthur Miller speaking there, and they said that you had had your first Toronto experience by being in a typing contest which was conducted on the stage at Massey Hall. Is that right?
FRYE: That’s true, yes. With a banner over my head saying “New Brunswick.”
RASKY: And how did you make out in that contest? [Images of Frye’s adolescence.]
FRYE: I came second in the Canadian one. I came way down in the international one.
RASKY: You said that school was always a mild form of penal servitude [WE, 143].
FRYE: Elementary school I found boring. A great many children do. High school rather less so, but I didn’t really get interested in my education much until I got to university. I found that I was in a community where I had a function and that I could do things—drama, debates, editing the journal, that kind of thing—which I had never been able to do before. By myself, I would just automatically go on teaching until I dropped dead in the middle of a classroom. I find that teaching feeds my writing and the other way around. I’ve always been a teacher, and I don’t know what I’d have done without it.
RASKY: I’d like to now move on to a whole different subject. What caused you to be so interested in Blake?
FRYE: Well, in my undergraduate years, my teacher, Pelham Edgar, assigned me an essay on Blake. And what I discovered very quickly about him was that the evangelical, nonconformist background I’d been brought up in actually made a great deal of imaginative sense, because that was Blake’s background. And he turned it into something that really awakened my enthusiasm and what I had of intelligence, as well.
RASKY: Who was he? Who was William Blake? [Images of and by Blake.]
FRYE: He was the son of a shopkeeper in London in the mid-eighteenth century. He never went to school. He was apprenticed to an engraver, because in the days before photography, all books had to be engraved, or at least the illustrations had to be engraved, by hand. So you could make a living. And that brought him into a world of books and artists.
RASKY: Some people say he had a madman’s scrawl. Was he mad, do you think?
FRYE: Well, madness is a social judgment, and I’m not sure that society always has a right to make that judgment because it can’t distinguish what’s below its standards from what’s above them. Blake called himself a visionary [E715]—he didn’t call himself an illustrator—and by that he meant that he painted, for example, but without models, and he worked entirely from inner visions. The world, as he saw it, was a world in which reality is what is made, rather than what is looked at. He entered into the world of creation. He felt it was a function of the artist to recreate the original creation. His doctrine was that imagination is the human existence itself and that the imagination is what is created in man, which means that it’s really the whole of man. And it’s also for him, in religious terms, the godhood of man.
RASKY: And then there’s this question: if you’re not creative, does that mean that you cannot reach God?
FRYE: You have to be creative to be a part of God, though not necessarily a poet or a painter. Anybody who lives what has always been called a charitable life is creative. It makes sense.
RASKY: “A charitable life”? What does that mean?
FRYE: Well, that’s the technical term. “Charity” is the New Testament word for love.
RASKY: Was Blake fundamentally a painter, or was he a writer would you say? Or a poet?
FRYE: He was professionally a painter and an engraver, and that was the way he got his income. He was almost totally unknown as a poet in his lifetime. He says, “To the eye of the imagination, nature is imagination” [E702]. He has no use for the cult of natural religion, of the worship of nature, which, again, makes man an embryo, wrapped up inside nature. This is a Song of Experience called The Sick Rose. [Frye reads poem.]
RASKY: You said that there was a similarity in Blake’s thinking to your own thinking. And it seems strange to me. Looking at Blake’s drawings, they seem kind of wild. It seems quite a distance from the United Church. Can you explain that a little bit? [Violent images from Blake.]
FRYE: The Bible, and the kind of thing that Blake was interested in, is a bit bigger than the bourgeois morality that covers it over from time to time. And I just discovered in Blake somebody who made complete imaginative sense of the universality of the Bible and the kind of spiritual world that he was talking about. I’ve always thought of the rebel angels not as devils, but as very human, as something that are really a part of the untapped resources of humanity. And Blake was one of the people who saw that.
RASKY: Do you believe in angels and devils and those figures as literal forces?
FRYE: Not as objects or events, no, not that. But I think that there are powers within man that are much bigger than man ever uses. The evil powers are all there: you can see how man has created hell from the beginning of history. But there are, I think, angelic forces in him, too.
RASKY: I want to talk about Job for a minute. What is it in the story of Job that fascinates people over and over again?
FRYE: Well, it’s a sense of the inherent mystery in the relation between God and man which, in the Book of Job, turns out to be some kind of act of understanding—an understanding that incorporates and includes the mystery, but also becomes a kind of revelation. The vision of Job is the vision of a man who has seen the essential sanity of the world, in spite of the utter insanity of what has happened to him.
RASKY: He sees the sanity of the world, not the insanity of the world?
FRYE: He sees the sanity of the world in spite of the insanity which has happened to him, which is also present too.
RASKY: And in Blake’s case you make the point that he did twenty-two plates. Does that number have any particular meaning?
FRYE: Well, one of Blake’s critics points out that there are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and Blake knew that much Hebrew, certainly. [Images of Blake’s Job illustrations. Voiceover reading, some Frye’s, from the Book of Job.]
FRYE: He simply sums up and says he doesn’t know what the case against him is. He’s confident that whatever has happened to him, there must be a framework which makes it intelligible, and that while he may have done wrong things, he hasn’t done anything as wrong as all that.
RASKY: You say that every work of literature that we continue to read and study meant something to its own time and something quite different to us. Does that mean that Paradise Lost was some specific thing in Milton’s time, but is something very different for us?
FRYE: If you ignore the seventeenth-century background of Milton, you’re just kidnapping him into your own assumptions, and if you don’t take him into your own cultural orbit than you’re just leaving him as a historical document.
RASKY: Critics say that Paradise Lost is a monument to dead ideas, and your comment is, “There are no dead ideas in literature, there are only tired readers.”9 Do you think that maybe the modern media, including this one, television, has destroyed our capacity for patience and reading such documents as Paradise Lost?
FRYE: No matter what age you’re living in, you have certain cultural obstacles to fight against and the habit of short and fragmented attention in television and other such media means that that’s just another obstacle to fight.
RASKY: Why was Milton such a favourite of yours? What was the reason for Milton being so dominant in your own thinking? [Images of Milton and scenes from Paradise Lost.]
FRYE: Well, partly because he was a person who preserved the general Christian framework that he inherited. But he was also a revolutionary thinker, and he kept trying to put together the revolutionary intuitions that he had picked up from his time, the Civil War against King Charles and so on, with his religious framework. So that he is really, to my mind, the person who combines the religious and the liberal.
RASKY: Do you think of yourself as something of a revolutionary?
FRYE: Well, not a revolutionary in the sense that I think in terms of a social upheaval as either possible or desirable. I think that at a certain point revolution goes into its other meaning of a turning wheel, and goes back to reconstituting whatever it started with. But I do believe in transcendence. I do believe in untapped possibilities.
RASKY: Transcendence? Is that what it means, in fact—untapped possibilities?
FRYE: It’s one of the things it means to me, certainly.
RASKY: I recall your quoting Sartre as saying, “Hell is other people,” and Kierkegaard in response saying, “Hell is being locked up with oneself.”10 There seem to be opposite choices there. Which is the ideal one?
FRYE: Well, they’re both right. They’re not really a contradiction because the hell in which you’re imprisoned is the hell in which you are in the lonely crowd—that is, you’re lonely because the crowd is there.
RASKY: And then you quote Proust as saying that “the only paradises are the paradises we have lost.”11 Now what did he mean by that?
FRYE: Wallace Stevens says “the imperfect is our paradise.”12 And that means that any paradise you would try to reach would be an anticlimax. The real paradise is something you can dream of but it’s no longer there.
RASKY: There’s no complete paradise, is that correct?
FRYE: Well, there’s no state one can live in which is paradise.
RASKY: I’m going to turn now to Anatomy of Criticism, because, for many people, that’s where they first heard of Northrop Frye. Could you just explain a little bit about what your ideas are of criticism?
FRYE: Well, there I was of course, by implication, attacking the view that the critic is a parasite, that his study is simply a fastening on to literature and making his own career and his reputation out of what poets have done. I think that’s a false view of criticism. I think that criticism is something with a specific cultural job to do.
RASKY: You don’t think you’re giving the critic too great a role in your estimation?
FRYE: I don’t really think so. In my experience, that phrase, “I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like,” always turns out to be that what you like is pretty dismal.
RASKY: So you should like what the critic likes, is that what you’re suggesting?
FRYE: No, I’m suggesting that there is an educational process at work and that it is possible to improve on one’s likes. If you say, “I know what I like,” then you’re cutting off a possibility of your own future advance, and that’s something that the critic might be able to help with.
RASKY: Is it possible, really, that the artist shouldn’t be the final one to say, “I did that, and that’s what it means”? That somebody should come along later and say, “No, he didn’t mean that at all”?
FRYE: Shakespeare presumably knew what he meant in 1602. But he couldn’t possibly know what he was going to mean in 1988, and it’s also possible for writers to change their minds about what their work means. I think Shaw changed his mind about Candida several times.
RASKY: And does it all mean something as a collective force? Is that what you’re saying? Rather than that the individual poem is its own little isolated thing, there is some overall pattern.
FRYE: I think there is. I think the Bible comes closer than any other work to explaining what it is, and that’s why I call it, or at least why Blake called it, “the Great Code of Art.”
RASKY: What made you come to that conclusion?
FRYE: It dawned on me when I was working on Blake. I think I’ve learned everything I know from Blake. Blake was practically the only man of his time who realized that we all live inside a big mythical and metaphorical framework of images, and that unless we become aware of that we can never change anything of the social condition—we just keep on responding to the same conditioning. That was where I derived the notion that literature, as a whole, made sense.
RASKY: Does it mean that there’s nothing new in literature too, or does that not follow?
FRYE: It means that everything is new in literature, and that nothing is new.
RASKY: Can you explain that a little bit?
FRYE: Well, the example that I generally use is that of a human being. The mother’s pride in her baby is based on the fact that it’s a new and unique individual, but she wouldn’t be proud of it unless it conformed to the convention and was recognizably human.
RASKY: And so every new poem is like a new baby in that sense.
FRYE: In that sense, yes. It’s recognizable as a poem.
RASKY: I want to turn to Shakespeare now. At the beginning of your fascinating book on Shakespeare, you observe Ben Jonson’s line, “He was not of an age but for all time” [NFS, 1], and you say that perhaps he should have said, “Not only of an age.” Well, what’s the difference?
FRYE: I don’t think Jonson really intended to say that Shakespeare was not intelligible to his own age, because he goes on to say that he was. And I think that that simply illustrates what I was saying a moment ago, that the poet belongs both to his own time and to our time, and that we shouldn’t kidnap him into our time, and we shouldn’t leave him wholly in his.
RASKY: Where do you stand on this whole debate about who Shakespeare really was?
FRYE: Well, my favourite solution to that problem is that of a rather bewildered person who said that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by William Shakespeare but by somebody else whose name was William Shakespeare. I don’t think its possible to improve on that.
RASKY: But you think he was that character that we see the image of with the bald head and the little beard and so on? [Images of Shakespeare.]
FRYE: Yes, I think so. All the evidence indicates that he was, and there’s no evidence of any other kind.
RASKY: And what was it that made him so fantastic? What made the difference?
FRYE: You’re up against something there there’s no quick answer to. He just was what he was. [Images of Shakespearean scenes.]
RASKY: You say that in every play Shakespeare wrote, the hero or central character is the theatre itself. What does that mean?
FRYE: Well, simply that Shakespeare devoted himself totally to the theatre and to the show that he was putting on. And if you had said, “Look, this play, The Taming of the Shrew, is a bit sexist,” or, “This play, Titus Andronicus, is a bit violent or brutal, and this play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, is pretty sloppy and chaotic,” he wouldn’t have listened to any of that. He was listening only to the show he was putting on at the moment. I think its fair to say he’s the world’s greatest poet, but I think of him as a dramatist who used poetry rather than as a poet who used the drama.
RASKY: We’ve talked about the Bible, we’ve talked about literature, now we’re on to Shakespeare. What do you think that Shakespeare has to say to the modern world that perhaps no other poet can tell us?
FRYE: I don’t think that Shakespeare says anything. I think he presents you with the plays, and the plays are unlike anything else that God or man ever made.
RASKY: How about passages of Shakespeare that you feel reach the greatest heights?
FRYE: If I wanted favourite passages I think I would read the sonnets rather than the plays.
RASKY: Okay, I think at this point what I’d like to do is then have you do some reading.
[Frye reads Sonnet 146. Images of ancient and modern statues and carvings, mummies, a religious procession, and pictures by Blake.]
RASKY: You make several statements towards the end of The Great Code, and I’d like to talk about one. You say that death is a leveller, not because everyone dies, but because nobody understands what death means [230/251]. But the fact is, of course—isn’t the question we don’t know what life means?
FRYE: Yes, that’s true, but at least we can assume that we’re alive. We can’t make any assumptions about death.
RASKY: We can’t assume what happens after death?
FRYE: We can’t assume what’s on the other side, so to speak, or whether there is any other side.
RASKY: Then we have the Apocalypse, and you write that “anyone coming cold to the Book of Revelation, without context of any kind, would probably regard it as simply an insane rhapsody” [137/156–7].
FRYE: I think I may quote there: I think it was Calvin who said that Revelation is a book that either finds a man mad or leaves him so.13 And the reason is, of course, that it’s talking about the mental transcending of the categories of time and space. And at present the only people that can do that are lunatics. [Images of Blake’s pictures and atomic bombs exploding. Voiceover quotations from Blake and Oppenheimer.]
RASKY: Shaw said there’s only one religion and everything else is a variation on it. Why do you think it is so hard for people to get over that fringe difference; why do the variations tend to blind us?
FRYE: Well, it’s a by-product of the hostility and aggressiveness that seem to be partly built into human nature. I don’t think they have to be there, but they have been there from the New Stone Age, at least. And so we get to projecting enemies and we make religious differences a pretext for constructing enemies.
RASKY: But if things don’t improve, does that leave you optimistic or pessimistic about the human condition? You’ve been through these seventy-five years now, and you’ve examined it very closely, but where does that leave you in judgment, if I can ask that?
FRYE: Well, in history, it doesn’t look as though we were any closer to the Millennium, which, according to the seventeenth-century theologians, is going to come in 1996. I don’t think it’s going to come in 1996, and so I think that history is Joyce’s nightmare from which we’re trying to awake and it’s going to go on being a nightmare. But there is also the constant attempt to awaken from it, and that’s what produces all the love and the beauty in the world.
[Doxology sung; Jerusalem.]