Notes from CBC's "The Ideas of Northrop Fyre - Part II"

The following notes are from Part 2 of a 2012 CBC Ideas broadcast, The Ideas of Northrop Frye. Podcast time frames, shown in brackets, are approximate.

Frye on Education

[01:31] Culture is the only power.

"Culture is the ultimate authority in society, even if culture may be impotent to impose its authority and be effectively false to itself if it did so. Mao Tse-tung says that power comes out of the barrel of a gun. Now if that is your conception of power, the human race is not going to survive the 21st century....[Culture] is utterly weak physically but it's the only power there is, the only surviving power there is."

[04:56] Schools are the "engine rooms of society"

 "Teaching of undergraduates seems to me to be where the action is, that's where minds are being opened and admitted to what I've always called the engine room of society, where all the working is going on, and I feel that the graduate school is the place where the good people ought to be teaching themselves; anyway, its also highly pluralistic and specialized, also competitive in these days, school, cut throat competition, so I find the undergraduate classroom really the education centre."

 [06:07] The educational contract 

"In the educational contract there is a relationship of teacher and student in which paradoxically the student knows less than the teacher but the teacher asks most of the questions, and the process going on is the Socratic process in which the relation of student/teacher as such is a somewhat embarrassing one and you try to get over it as fast as possible in order to make a community of searchers and that's how the contract takes shape."

[07:28] The only authority in a classroom is the authority of the subject being taught

"If I'm lecturing on Milton, for example, the only presence that has any business being in that room is Milton and if I become an opaque presence in myself, if people listen to me instead of listening to Milton through me then I'm becoming some sort of fake priest. The only authority in the classroom is the authority of the subject taught, not the teacher and when I teach I try to transmute myself into a kind of transparent medium so that the room in theory is full of the presence of what I'm teaching, Milton or whatever, from one end behind me to the other end behind the students and it's a long, slow process for the students to realize that they are in effect within the personality of Milton, that they're not being talked to by me....[P]eople have talked a good deal bout the long pauses in my lectures and the thing they don't notice is that the long pauses come partly out of respect for the students. I'm listening to the echo of Milton from my students and that takes a long time for that to penetrate, percolate through my students....[W]hen my Blake book [Fearful Symmetry] came out a lot of reviewers complained that they couldn't tell where Blake stopped and I began, well that was the way I wanted it. "

Frye on Criticism

[09:30] A new type of criticism

"Incidentally, Marshall McLuhan wrote a quite appreciative review of the Blake book in which he said that this was a new type of criticism, that people were going to have to get used to, the transmission of a poet through the entire personality of the writer."

[15:08] How to know what you're doing

"There is no antithesis between freedom and necessity. If you're playing the piano and exercising your free will about whether you'll play the right notes or the wrong notes you're not playing worth a damn. You only know what you're doing when what you want to do and what you have to do are exactly the same thing."

Frye on Student Activism in the 1960's

[16:00] Sixties activism was anti-intellectual with anarchist and neo-fascist leanings

"The student activism of the sixties was something I had really very little sympathy with. It started out with a group of students in Berkeley feeling that they were not being paid attention to as students, something that I could profoundly sympathize with. As it went on and on it became more and more attracted by the cliches of revolutionary ideology and then they turned into something which was no longer intellectual, in fact that was the thing that sickened me about the student movement, that it was an anti-intellectual movement, in the one place in society where it had no business being. And once a student gets on a self-righteous kick he becomes utterly impervious to argument because he's still to young and insecure to listen to anything except the applause of his own conscious and I knew that that movement would fall dead in a very short time because it had no social roots, it wasn't like feminism or black emancipation or anything of that sort, with a real social cause behind it....

It was anti-intellectual in that it used anarchist and neo-fascist tactics of breaking up meetings, occupying buildings and that kind of thing. They felt they were doing something while they were doing this kind of nonsense....It was a counter unreality that they were trusting to and what I find hopeful about the present [1990] political situation all across the world is the gradual loss of belief in the validity of ideological qua ideology...

All this stuff is going in a neo-fascist direction. The Nazi's talked about target knowledge, that came to mean sooner or later that "useful" [relevant] meant " essentially", essential for waging war and that attitude to the arts and sciences not only destroyed art and science in Germany for a whole generation but it helped materially in losing the war for them."

Frye on Universities today

[19:21] Universities have become places of specialized scholarship

"It [university] has changed as society has changed. The 19th century university was the very small college which was the training ground for young gentlemen. That meant that all relationships were personal, tutor and student, with their private hours and as the university has begun to reflect more and more the vast industrial and technological conditions and the world has of course [become] irremediably pluralistic in both the arts and sciences it has to be a world of specialists, it can't function otherwise, so you get a great deal of highly specialized scholarship which makes a problem for the person who still is teaching undergraduates and is still in that personal relationship and it throws more of the responsibility on the undergraduate...

The university as I would like it does not exist, the only thing you can do is to fight rearguard actions in small corners....

It was always an ideal, really, but where you have a small intimate college with teachers and students personally known to one another you have the possibility, the training ground for something closer to the ideal as I would see it."

[21:46] Frye talks about why he stayed in Canada vs moving to the US

In the '60's Frye was getting "a great many offers to go elsewhere" but mainly, he felt he was "making a contribution here [in Canada], that [he] had a function [in Canada] which [he] would not have had somewhere else."

[27:36] ... on teaching and writing

"Teaching to me is a way of trying out ideas. I used to say I could never believe anything I said until I'd said it to students and watched their reaction and I've always found that teaching and writing fed into each other, that I made up my mind, almost at once, as a lecturer, that I would take no notes until after I'd given the lecture."

[29:37] ... on prose and ordinary speech

"One thing I've attacked al my critical life is the notion that prose is the language of ordinary speech. The language ordinary speech is associative and prose is a very highly skilled, sophisticated form of writing. Almost nobody speaks prose, it's a written form. People who approach it  without having trained their speaking style, I think, give the impression of deciphering something from Linear B, they write what is in effect, for them, a dead language."

[30:49] ... schools of criticism and their language

"I felt, as I went on, and more and more as deconstructive, phenomenological and other critical schools developed that they were getting to a point where they could only talk to each other, in fact I noticed that back in the Anatomy days when I said that criticism had a mystery religion but no gospel. That is why I tended to increasingly address a general cultivated public rather than the primary, the scholarly or academic audience....

[31:52] ... on writing styles

Most modes of thinking in words are founded on the subject/object split, the thing that Blake called "the cloven fiction," and a descriptive writer, besides an historian, works with a body of words and a body of events, or things out there and one reflects the other. A logical writer is writing so that one statement follows out of its predecessor, the rhetorical writer writes to produce a kinetic effect on his reader, the poet is the person who enters into a world where subject and object have become the same thing, there are different aspects of the same thing. It's a very primitive language but the poet speaks it....I keep notebooks and I write very short paragraphs in them and everything I write is the insertion of continuity into those aphorisms."

[36:14] ... on finding your context

"The longer I've lived, the more I've realized that I belong in a certain context just as a plant grows in the soil, I am in a Canadian context and the more completely I am that I think the more acceptable I am to others. It's the law in literature that I've often expressed by Faulkner's devoting his life to a county with a unpronounceable name in Mississippi and getting a Nobel prize in Sweden."

[37:30] ... on the difference between Canadian and American literature

On a trip to England, while his ship sat in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in the midst of five provinces, Frye had the realization that Canadians always feel they are surrounded by a frontier and so developed a "garrison" mentality which means we were always considering different propositions; our language was "dialectic politically" and not "instinctively" imaginative or metaphoric whereas the Americans have always had an East Coast and a Western frontier that called to their imagination.

He goes into a discussion of the difference between national, provincial and regional writing and Canadian writers' ability to "swallow international idiom[s]" and develop a set of standards and styles that are "very different from elsewhere."

 Frye on Technology and Culture

[46:44] ... on technology and the panic it causes

"There is a most pernicious tendency in the human mind to project onto machinery the qualities of external autonomy; man invents the wheel and in no time he's talking nonsense about a wheel of fate or a wheel of fortune or a wheel which is a cosmological thing which is alienating him from himself. He invents the book and he starts talking about the Book of Life in which all your sins are recorded. He invents the computer and God knows what he's projecting out of that but its all superstition....

In the technological developments that I've lived through in the 20th century, I do see that each new stage brings with it an intensifying of the introverted. That's simply a hazard which has to be overcome but it seems to be obvious that in the stage play you have an ensemble performance for an audience. The existence of the audience as a consensus, as a group, is very important. Then you move onto the movie where the audience sits in the dark, where its individualized but its still an audience. Then you move into television sets where you don't move out of your living room. Similarly when the ocean liner, that's the place where romance and endless discussion and social movements of all kind, in the jet plane you just sit there and the guy beside you sits there, and that...it's a hazard which has to be overcome.

I think that nobody quite realized during the unrest of the '60's that a great deal of it had to do with the panic caused by television and the need to absorb it. I think that as time goes on people do absorb it, bring it under control. Right now there's a similar fear that computers will create a diversion to a practically sole existing point where people will simply be locked up in their own private jails. Again, that's a hazard, its something that I think eventually we'll learn to control....

It [the panic in the '60's] was a matter of saturation with images. If you're totally dependent on visual images that causes a good deal of confusion. Is that stone dame over there Venus? or Juno? or Minerva? and if its a matter of hearing you don't have that particular problem but the saturation of images certainly dissipates one's, almost, sense of identity until you begin to get control of it.... I think in the course of time as it becomes more and more what a machine ought to be, which is an extension of a personality and not an independent personality over against you."

 [51:28] ... on a world of peace

"We've gone through history thinking of peace as meaning that war has stopped and consequently a lot of people, when you use a word like peace, say "Well, a world of peace sounds awfully dull, there'd be nothing to do if there's nothing to fight about." but what I would go for is Blake's "I will not cease from mental fight 'til we have built Jerusalem."