Conducted 24 August 1988
Interview with Bill Moyers, from “Northrop Frye: Canadian Literary Critic,” in his A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future, ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 494–505. Dated from Jane Widdicombe’s list. Bill Moyers is a well-known American TV journalist and supporter of liberal and environmental causes, whose previous activities include serving as special assistant to Lyndon Johnson and acting as deputy director of the Peace Corps. He had founded the company Public Affairs Television in 1986, and was the producer of many programs of an informational nature. His book is a transcript of conversations with forty-one thinkers for a PBS series called A World of Ideas in the election year of 1988, on the theme “American Values.” Frye was one of only four non-Americans interviewed; his interview was broadcast over PBS on 28 October 1988. It is available on video-cassette in NFF, 1992, box 5.
MOYERS: Does it bother Canadians that the United States pays them so little attention? Or do you just consider yourselves lucky?
FRYE: Well, there is a good deal of resentment about the Americans’ ignorance of things Canadian, considering that the first thing the American learns about his own country is that it’s bounded on the north by Canada. At the same time, the American policy of taking Canada more or less for granted rather suits the Canadian temperament.
MOYERS: Poor Mexico has to wake up every morning wondering what good deed the United States is going to do to it that day.
FRYE: Exactly, yes. But Mexico has a different language and a radically different culture. It’s quite a different situation.
MOYERS: Some stereotypes of Canada appeared recently in an American humour magazine called Spy. One was that obedience is in the Canadian blood, that every citizen knows the thrill of being a follower, and that Canadians won’t cross against a red light even if there’s no traffic coming and a dog is chasing them. Now what do you say about that caricature?
FRYE: Well, it has this much to be said for it: that historically Canada was developed in a very different way from the United States. For example, we don’t have the tradition of the bad men, the outlaws in the West. We started out with the British military occupation of Quebec, and then went on to the Northwest Mounted Police. The violence in Canadian history has been mostly repressive violence, mostly from the top down. That has made us, to some extent, a country that puts up with pragmatic compromises. But I don’t know that it’s any different from the way that Americans follow their donkeys’ carrots in elections.
MOYERS: Canada didn’t become a nation until 1867. By then the United States was a nation almost a hundred years old.
FRYE: Canada, of course, had spent the eighteenth century with the English and French battering down each other’s forts. In other words, we didn’t have any eighteenth century, and we have nothing corresponding to culture heroes like Washington or Franklin or Jefferson.
MOYERS: Is there a dominant figure in the Canadian idea similar to Washington or to Lincoln?
FRYE: There really isn’t. The closest we have are leaders like Sir John A. Macdonald, who was the architect of Confederation, and later on, Sir Wilfrid Laurier. But we don’t have a father of the country.
MOYERS: What about the stereotype in the United States that Canadians are so friendly that they even say thank you to the bank machine?
FRYE: Well, that could be true. I remember a Chicago taxi driver who heard me say something like, “Sorry,” or “Beg your pardon,” to something I didn’t hear, and it impressed him for the rest of the morning.1
MOYERS: There’s also an old saw about a culture that thrives on Valium—that although the United States and Canada share a 3,968-mile border, Canada doesn’t keep troops on that border because Canadians know that if the United States invaded, you would win by simply boring us to death in the first three days.
FRYE: Yes, or scaring you to death. After all, we won several battles in the War of 1812 with about thirty Indians scattered through the woods.
MOYERS: What do you think is the dominant image of Canada in the United States?
FRYE: I think it’s a bit dim. They regard it as a neighbour they can more or less take for granted, and otherwise don’t think too much about it. It’s very reassuring to the United States to feel that there’s a country in which most people speak the same language they do and have a great deal of their culture in common.
MOYERS: One of your intellectuals, the novelist Mordecai Richler, says that most new ideas and energy come from the States.2 Canadians find that they’re subject to the finest in American culture as well as to the worst. People here are brought up on American literature and American films. When all is said and done, therefore, Canadians and Americans are all North Americans. Do you think that’s a fair assessment?
FRYE: Well, I think it’s very largely true. It’s a trifle oversimplified—there are differences in temperament that he isn’t altogether taking account of. But it is true that Canadians are sometimes apt to talk rather glibly about the Americanizing of Canadian culture, forgetting that the features they disapprove of are also at work in America itself, and that the United States has to struggle between its best culture and its worst culture.
MOYERS: What do you see as the best of United States culture?
FRYE: It’s the same as the best in any culture, I suppose: the arts themselves, and the respect for freedom and individuality that makes the American ideal something real. There’s a Canadian novelist, Frederick Philip Grove, who wrote a book called A Search for America. Grove says there are two Americas, one connected with Whitman and Lincoln, and the other with selling encyclopedias from door to door, which is the job he had. And he says in a footnote at the end of the book that he thinks that the former way of life has been better preserved in Canada. But that is not a statement I would buy, particularly.
MOYERS: What do you think is the worst aspect of American culture?
FRYE: The worst aspect, I suppose, is what anybody would say was the worst: the violence, the lawlessness, the corruption and greed and so forth—all the human vices.
MOYERS: You don’t seem to have the crime here that we do.
FRYE: Well, that’s the elementary arithmetic of original sin—twenty million people can’t get up to all the hell that two hundred million people can get up to.
MOYERS: But although you don’t have this mythological idea of a nation that the United States has, there seems to be more obeisance to the obligations of society, to the sense of community.
FRYE: That’s because the sense of community in Canada is more complex than it is in many countries. The oscillation of national feeling and regional feeling makes for rather a quieter setup in general. And that is why, I think, various ethnic groups in a city like Toronto can get along with each other to a degree that doesn’t seem possible in a comparable American city.
MOYERS: The homogeneity of Canada is changing, is it not? When I came into the airport last night, I was struck by the number of people arriving, either as visitors or as potentially new citizens, who were of ethnically diverse backgrounds.
FRYE: The Toronto that I’m living in in 1988 is a totally different city from the Toronto I entered in 1929. Then it was still “Hogtown,” and still entirely a WASP city controlled by the Orange Order. There’s almost nothing of that left now. There’s no room for it.
MOYERS: Is there a sense that Canada is becoming more like the United States, not only in this regard but in others as well?
FRYE: It’s bound to become more like the United States for a rather paradoxical reason: that the more diverse it becomes, the more homogeneous the continent becomes. The statement that you quoted from Mordecai Richler is quite right on that point.
MOYERS: Someone said that you gave us Saul Bellow and we gave you the Cosby show. You exchange a great intellectual and novelist for a sitcom mass-produced in Hollywood.
FRYE: But again, that’s one of these rather simplistic contrasts, where the side of American culture that you can’t praise very highly is something which is just as lethal to American culture as it is to Canadian culture.
MOYERS: Lethal?
FRYE: In the sense that it creates a market, which to some degree curtails the richness and variety and scope of the genuinely creative people in the country.
MOYERS: You once talked about Canada as being an anti-intellectual society.3 Of course, that’s a common lament made in the United States, too. Do you think that’s still true?
FRYE: Oh, I think it’s true in most countries. Actually, it’s less true in Canada than in many other places, and it’s becoming less true in proportion as more and more Canadians begin to realize that the creative people in Canada are the people to be prized, the people who are actually defining the country at its best and producing the best image of it.
MOYERS: Eighty-five per cent of all Canadians live within a hundred miles of the United States border. That’s close enough to hear Ed Koch even when the television set is not on.4 Is Canada a kind of cultural colony of the United States?
FRYE: Canada may very well be the only genuine colony left in the world. The degree of economic and to some extent political penetration by the United States is of course very great, and the reasons for it are quite obvious.
MOYERS: But does the mindset of the colony exist here—that there is a great paternalistic and pervasive force shaping the culture from the outside?
FRYE: I don’t think Canada has ever thought of the United States as in any sense a mother country or a country that would shape its imagination. It has regarded the United States as a friendly ally, but always on equal terms with itself. There’s nothing corresponding to the somewhat romantic views that nineteenth-century Canadians had about Great Britain or French Canadians about France. The Americans were simply the Whigs who won the revolution, and the Canadians were the Tories who lost it.
MOYERS: And burned the White House in the process of the war that followed the revolution.
FRYE: But you know why they burned the White House—because the Americans burned Toronto a year before. The Americans burned York, as Toronto was called then, in the middle of the winter, and half of York got pneumonia. In reprisal for that, the British shelled Washington the next year.
MOYERS: It’s fascinating to me that the United States won its independence from Britain and then fought with Canada, and yet among no nations of the world do more amicable sentiments manifest themselves than between these three societies.
FRYE: That’s true. Canada, of course, had its civil war first, with the British and the French. The War of 1812, however stupid a war it was, was something of a war of independence for Canada. It meant that Canada was going to go its own way. At the same time, it never seems to have left any legacy of bitterness behind it, the way the American Civil War did in the South.
MOYERS: Do those wars of Canada’s history play the role in the mind of your country that our war of revolution and our Civil War play in our mind?
FRYE: It’s not nearly as intense. Canadians really know very little about the War of 1812 and care less. The eighteenth-century struggle for the country is still remembered with a good deal of heart-burning in the French part of Canada. They speak of 1759 as l’année terrible—the year of disaster. But that’s something they more or less get out of the history books. I’m not sure how much they feel it.
MOYERS: So much of American history has taken on mythological proportions in our society—the city set upon a hill, frontier, the manifest destiny to make the world safe for democracy. Mythology plays a powerful role in the American consciousness.
FRYE: I rather regret that the same mythological patterns are present in Canada and yet are paid so little attention to. We also have our city on the hill, namely Quebec, the fort where the river narrows, a fort that was taken and retaken about five or six times. And we also have our Macca-bean victories in the War of 1812 and the Fenian raids later, and so on. We have all that mythology potentially. But because Americans started with a revolution and a Constitution, they brought the myth right into the foreground of their lives in a way that has never happened with Canada.
MOYERS: We talk about the American dream, but I don’t hear anyone talking about the Canadian dream. Does mythology play a part in the Canadian’s sense of himself or herself?
FRYE: Mythology does play a part, but it’s a different kind of mythology. The Americans started with a revolution, and a revolution tends to impose a deductive pattern on a society, so you get phrases like “one hundred per cent American.” Of course, nobody ever can find out what one hundred per cent Canadian is. To start with, you’ve got the Anglo-French division. Every Canadian feels himself part of a federal unity, but he also feels himself very intensely a part of a more regional unity. Very often in Canadian elections he’ll vote one way federally and the opposite way provincially. All of that means that the Canadian dream is very much more complex than the American dream. In American terms, it’s much more Jeffersonian.
MOYERS: So it appeals more to the romantic idea of individualism.
FRYE: I don’t know that it gets as far as individualism, but it gets as far as regionalism.
MOYERS: What role does the imagination play in the shaping of a nation’s sense of itself?
FRYE: It builds up the sense of the empire expanding without limit, the inscriptions from Assyria saying “the king of kings, the king of the world,” and so forth. That’s an imagination that gets out of touch with reality. Then eventually you begin to see how the historical process works, that there are always other societies in the world. The imagination takes on other constructs, such as the rise and fall idea—Herodotus explaining that the Greek resistance defeated that tremendous Persian machine because the gods don’t like big empires.5
MOYERS: I’ve often thought that one of the secrets of Ronald Reagan’s appeal was that he was able to make Americans feel as if we were still the mighty giant of the world, still an empire, even as around the world we were having to retreat from the old presumptions that governed us for the last fifty years. Did you see any of that in the Reagan appeal?
FRYE: Oh yes, very much so. It’s the only thing that explains the Reagan charisma. In fact, I think that what has been most important about Americans since the war is that they have been saying a lot of foolish things—the Evil Empire, for example—but doing all the right ones.6 I think nobody but Nixon could have organized a deal with China, for example.
MOYERS: Well now, what does that say about a society, that it says one thing even as it must do another?
FRYE: It means that the mythological imagination functions on two levels. There is the superficial level of the stereotype, and there’s another and very much more realistic one, where you actually do the things that promote self-preservation and survival.
MOYERS: Is it really superficial? Isn’t the myth a binding power, an integrating force, for people? What people believe becomes what holds them together, even as they’re having to operate more realistically?
FRYE: Yes, it’s the function of myth to make a binding force in society. But if that other, more realistic level in mythology is not there, then the stereotype runs away with the realism, and you’re heading for disaster. That’s the Nazi direction.
MOYERS: When we talk about myth this way, what do we mean?
FRYE: We mean a story extrapolated from history which takes the form of an ideology. That is, because of the American Revolution and the American Constitution, there is such a thing as an American way of life. The American myth becomes the American ideology.
MOYERS: So to know the American story is to buy into the American way of life.
FRYE: I think so.
MOYERS: And why is that important? You say you wish Canada had more of the story, more of the myth.
FRYE: Well, I just wish that the imagination in Canada had something more coherent to work on, that’s all. We’ve always got along on an Edmund Burke type of pragmatic compromise. The conquest of Quebec by the British, for example, was not really a conquest, and they had to make compromises as a result. The Quebec Act was a very humane document by eighteenth-century standards, but it meant that every episode of Canadian history is a crisis in which the country seems to be falling apart at the seams. It never quite does. There is always some ad hoc compromise or arrangement. It’s an entirely different attitude from the deductive, revolutionary American model.
MOYERS: How do you see our myth?
FRYE: I see it as the myth of a social unification that is geared to the idea of a progress through time. There are passages in Walt Whitman, for example, where he compares American democracy to something very like an express train—he doesn’t use that image, but that’s what he means.7 The country’s just going ahead. But since Vietnam, the American imagination has become much more like the Canadian imagination in that it realizes that no imperial power, however great or however wealthy, is immortal.
MOYERS: And you see this since Vietnam, the war America lost?
FRYE: It was the beginning of a sense of mortality about a certain part of American history.
MOYERS: I agree with you. Now there are even books being written about “the decline of the United States,” and Americans—except for Ronald Reagan—are talking with a fatalism that is new in my country. Does it strike you as ominous or just mature?
FRYE: To the extent that it’s fatalism, it’s ominous. But to the extent that it’s an acceptance of certain historical processes, it’s very healthy and realistic. Every empire has to get to the point where it loses its swelled head and begins to get a sense of proportion about its role in the world. The British Empire began to do that after the Boer War, and the Soviet Union has been doing it in the last twenty to twenty-five years.
MOYERS: Does American society strike you as acting fairly maturely at this moment?
FRYE: It’s acting as maturely as it has done in its history. I don’t feel uneasy about the climate of opinion in the United States, to the extent that I felt uneasy about it during the Joe McCarthy period, for example, when the stereotype was running away with the reality.
MOYERS: I think that we are showing some signs of maturity at the moment, although the rhetoric sometimes reminds one of the worst excesses of American pretension.
FRYE: Yes, but there’s another streak that doesn’t take the rhetoric too seriously.
MOYERS: We’ve been through the season of American politics. How does it strike you?
FRYE: It’s a process that has become like a sporting event. That’s really what keeps it going and what keeps the public interested in it. I listen to the discussions on American television and notice how they ascribe mental processes to things that don’t strike me as mental processes at all. That kind of discussion—building up the speeches of George Bush and others as though they were all part of a great intellectual debate—all that seems to me to be extremely healthy. It’s a way of getting people to participate in their own democracy.
MOYERS: But do you see much evidence of a genuine debate about ideas and policies?
FRYE: I see evidence not in the politicians themselves, but in the people who talk about the politicians.
MOYERS: The politicians play the storytelling role, while the real making of the life of the country goes on, including the intellectual life of the country.
FRYE: Yes. If you watch a Japanese puppet play long enough, you start thinking that the puppets are saying the lines themselves.
MOYERS: Is it different here in Canada?
FRYE: It’s different to the extent that it’s a parliamentary system. It’s becoming more and more like the American system, but there is less emphasis on the party convention, and there is still the possibility of the prime minister going down with his party. The operation of the parliamentary system is different enough to make for a slightly different climate of opinion.
MOYERS: Is television here influencing politics the way it is in the United States, making it a sporting event or entertainment?
FRYE: Very much so. I would like it better if I thought we had people who could play up to it. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter all that much who’s president of the United States. What did it matter in twentieth-century history that George Ford was a president of the United States?
MOYERS: Gerald Ford.
FRYE: Gerald Ford. Sorry.
MOYERS: Are you saying the president is the front man for a system that continues to operate irrespective of his leadership?
FRYE: I’m not sure that the pyramid myth, the notion of the man at the top of society, really conforms to the realities of twentieth-century life. There is a whole machinery that is bound to continue functioning, so that ninety-five per cent of what any president can do is already prescribed for him—unless he’s a complete lunatic. For that reason, it doesn’t seem so profoundly significant who is in the position of leadership.
MOYERS: What does that say about the role of the leader in the modern world?
FRYE: It means that the leader has to be a teammate. The charismatic leader, to the extent that he is that, is a rather dangerous person if he starts taking himself seriously. I’m a little leery about the adulation bestowed on Gorbachev. He has a very complex piece of machinery to try to help operate. The historical process works itself out in ways that really don’t allow for the emergence of a specific leader. It’s only in the army that you have the specific leader because that’s the way the military hierarchy’s set up.
MOYERS: But historical processes are the accumulated actions of autonomous individuals expressing their wills, appetites, desires, passions in the world out there. Those are subject to being changed by leaders, are they not?
FRYE: People are much more pushed around than that by the cultural conditioning in which they’re brought up and the social conditions under which they have to operate. The person who emerges as leader is really the person who is the ultimate product of that social conditioning.
MOYERS: There was an Italian Marxist in the 1920s who said that in the future, all leaders will be corporate. There will not be single leaders. Of course that was before Mussolini and before Hitler.
FRYE: He was right to the extent that the charismatic single leader turned out to be a disaster.
MOYERS: So maybe the corporate leader is not only an historical necessity, but a desirable phenomenon as well.
FRYE: He’s desirable because I think he’s essential for movement in the direction of peace. When I said that it was only the military that gives you the person on top, the supreme command, you notice that the dictators, the supreme leaders, have always been leaders of an army and have always imposed what is essentially martial law on their communities.
MOYERS: Mao, Mussolini, Hitler—
FRYE: Yes, and some of the African states.
MOYERS: I remember something you said in a sermon delivered on the 150th anniversary of the founding of Victoria College here. You said, “I seldom hear people talking about ‘systems’ with any confidence now. The world today is in so deeply revolutionary a state that all systems, whatever they’re called, are equally on the defensive, trying to prevent further change.”8 Do you still hold to that?
FRYE: Oh, I think so, yes. Doctrinaire Marxism will not work anywhere in the world—not because it’s Marxism, but because it’s doctrinaire. I don’t think anything doctrinaire will work anywhere.
MOYERS: And by “doctrinaire,” you mean—?
FRYE: I mean a simplified deductive pattern that carries out policies from major premises about ideology—
MOYERS:—instead of from the experience of the real world?
FRYE: Yes.
MOYERS: Gorbachev is trying to change his system.
FRYE: He’s trying to loosen up his system. It’s because he doesn’t have the belief in the system that the followers of Lenin did in the 1920s and ‘30s that his policies take the shape they do. It’s the same in China.
MOYERS: You’ve lived through the revolution of Russia, the Stalinist era, the Holocaust, two world wars, genocide around the world—this has been quite a century.
FRYE: It’s led me to the feeling that the historical process is a dissolving phantasmagoria. When I was young, George VI was the Emperor of India, and Hitler ruled an empire from Norway to Baghdad. All that has vanished into nothingness. That says to me that history is a process of continuing dissolution, and that the things that survive are the creative and the imaginative products.
MOYERS:—the mind, the life of the mind.
FRYE:—the arts and the sciences.
MOYERS: Thirty years ago, you wrote that the hope of democracy rests entirely on the earnest student and the dedicated teacher.9 Do you still believe that?
FRYE: Yes, I do. That is the only stable and permanent thing in human society. I’m not bringing in religious perspectives at this point, but insofar as we’re speaking of human beings constituting a human society, that is what stabilizes and makes permanent the whole structure of society.
MOYERS: The “earnest student”—how do you differentiate the earnest student from the student who’s not earnest?
FRYE: The student who’s not earnest is simply a middle-class product. He’s a member of a privileged class who takes his privileges because he thinks it’s the thing to do. But his is a career without discovery. And a career without a discovery is going to move within the prison of his social conditioning. He’s never going to see a crack in it anywhere.
MOYERS: And what’s the dedicated teacher as opposed to the teacher who’s not dedicated?
FRYE: The teacher who is not dedicated is a mass man, and he gets a mass product. He teaches largely because he has particular certainties that he wants to implant in the minds of his students. But the dedicated teacher realizes that the end of education is to get yourself detached from society without withdrawing from it. If a man is teaching English literature, for example, he’s in contact with the entire verbal experience of his students. Now nine tenths of that verbal experience is picked up from prejudice and cliché and things the student hears on the street corners, on the playgrounds, and from his family and his home, and so forth. The dedicated teacher tries to detach from all that and to look into it as something objective. It’s not something he can withdraw from, because it’s his own society, but it’s something that he can cultivate a free and individual approach to.
MOYERS: Doesn’t this lead to a lonely life, the life of a dissenter, the life of someone who’s always questioning instead of affirming?
FRYE: Except that the next person who is also doing this can form a very intimate society with you.
MOYERS: You said that “the mind best fitted for survival in any world is the mind that has discovered how knowledge can be joyful, leading to the friendship with wisdom that is pure delight, and is ready to tackle any kind of knowledge with clarity of perception and intentness of will.”10 There’s a difference between a trained mind and a dedicated mind.
FRYE: I was suggesting that the trained mind has acquired techniques which, in a world like ours, will probably be out of date in ten or fifteen years. Training is not the important thing, it’s the readiness to take on training. That’s what I mean by the dedicated mind.
MOYERS: As the world dissolves, you learn to swim to the next ship.
FRYE: That’s right.
MOYERS: I noticed that the inscription on Victoria College is the same as the inscription on the main tower of my alma mater, the University of Texas. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” [John 8:32]. What kind of truth?
FRYE: In its original context in the Gospel of John, Jesus says that he is the truth, meaning that the truth is a personality and not a set of propositions, and that the truth about him was the union of divine and human natures. The feeling that the human destiny is inseparably involved with something divine is for Jesus what makes one free.
MOYERS: Is that true for Northrop Frye?
FRYE: Yes.
MOYERS: No separation of the secular and the sacred—even in learning?
FRYE: Oh, there are separations, yes. But the separations are in many contexts much less important than the things they have in common. Everything in religion has a secular aspect. Everything in secular life has a religious aspect.
MOYERS: What do you mean by the divine?
FRYE: That’s quite a big question. I think that in human terms it means that there is no limit toward the expansion of the mind or of the freedom and liberty of mankind. Now, of course there are aspects of freedom and liberty, such as wanting to do what you like—which really means being pushed around by your social conditioning.
MOYERS:—your appetites, as well.
FRYE: Yes. But the feeling that the genuine things you want, like freedom, are inexhaustible and that you never come to the end of them—that’s the beginning of the experience of the divine, for me.
MOYERS: And you said that the truth that makes one free must be shared. It can’t be owned.
FRYE: Truth is not a possession. If it’s a possession, it becomes a secret and becomes untrue. If a scientist makes a new discovery, the first thing he wants to do is publish it. If a novelist has a new imaginative model for a story in his mind, the first thing he wants to do is publish it.
MOYERS: As Jesus said to his disciples, “Go publish the good news” [Mark 13:10].
FRYE: Yes. And also, if you invest your talents, you’re doing something sensible. If you bury them, you’re committing suicide.
MOYERS: You said once that the differences over faith are far less important than the agreement on charity.11 Is this what you’re talking about—this sharing impulse, this sense of solidarity with others, this need to help others?
FRYE: Yes, I think so. The word “faith” is so often associated with assent to propositions, usually without enough evidence, and wherever you have that, of course, you have disagreement.
MOYERS: If I think a statement means one thing, you’re going to think it means something else.
FRYE: That’s right. And if one person is Christian and the other Jewish, it means they differ on certain doctrines, like incarnation. But when it comes to things that make for the freedom and happiness of mankind, they can be solidly united.
MOYERS: Propositions create holy wars because people differ over them.
FRYE: That’s right.
MOYERS: So you’re saying we need an agreement on charity.
FRYE: Yes. Charity is not only the greatest of the virtues, but the only virtue there is.
MOYERS: What do you mean by charity?
FRYE: Agape, the New Testament sense of love.
MOYERS: Don’t you sometimes feel like Isaac Newton’s imagined child playing with pebbles on a beach while there’s an undiscovered ocean out there?12 There’s so much to know and so little time.
FRYE: Oh yes. Everyone feels that who has ever collided with any serious subject at all.
MOYERS: Do you still feel that in your own field of literature and culture?
FRYE: I still feel it very strongly, except that I don’t think that the ocean has to remain undiscovered. I think one can go on exploring it indefinitely, and that it wants to be explored.
MOYERS: In The Educated Imagination, you say that the Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it [46; EICT, 475]. Why the Bible?
FRYE: Because the Bible is the definitive mythology in the Western world, which the imagination has incorporated into a social life. The Bible to me is not a structure of doctrine, not a structure of propositions, but a collection of stories making up one single story, and that’s the interrelationship of God and man. You can understand the importance of that interpenetration without necessarily believing in God.
MOYERS: But in your case, it points toward God, does it not?
FRYE: Oh yes. Yes.
MOYERS: Mankind’s creation, mankind’s fall, mankind’s constant restless search to get back to the paradise lost. Do you think that’s the controlling vision in most of our lives?
FRYE: I think it is a very fundamental vision. It may come out in some very queer ways, like the man who just lives to get out of this rat race and go to a summer cottage. But in its way, even that is a kind of paradisal myth.
MOYERS: What does one come to grips with when the Bible has sunk to the bottom of one’s mind?
FRYE: One comes to grips with the essential questions of human nature and human destiny. When you develop a knowledge of nature, as science does, you’re really looking into a structure of intelligibility that you’ve constructed yourself. In other words, you’re a narcissist, falling in love with your own reflection. That wonderful book of Martin Buber’s, I and Thou, talks about the feeling of the divine as the “thou” which gets you out of the prison of looking at your own reflection. You’re still looking at your own reflection when you’re talking to him or her on equal terms.
MOYERS: In the Bible story, you also look at the face of God, which is the least narcissistic glance one can cast.
FRYE: Yes.
MOYERS: Do you think we can find in literature a vision of the society we want to live in?
FRYE: That, to my mind, is what the paradisal vision is. We’ve been living with this myth, which I think is a sound myth, for thousands of years—that we’re living in a world that is not the world either that man wants or that God intended for him, and that there is another world that we can get to, though not necessarily the world we enter at death. It’s a different kind of thing altogether.
MOYERS: As I was watching the Democratic and Republican conventions, I thought that politics, too, is trying to create out of the world we live in a world we would like to live in. And while I admire the aspiration, I’m reminded by the Bible that it’s an almost hopeless quest.
FRYE: It may be almost hopeless, but we have to keep on doing it. The voter has to say to himself, “Now, which of these visions corresponds more closely to my own paradisal vision?”
MOYERS:—of getting back into paradise, creating heaven on earth.
FRYE: He knows that ninety-nine per cent of this is nonsense, and yet, nevertheless, what else keeps him going?