Frye - The Educated Imagination

THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION

NORTHROP FRYE

Copyright 1963 Northrop Frye and the Canadian Broadcast Company

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges kind permission to reprint excerpts from the following:
(pp. 44, 93, and 95) I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions by
Louis Owens, 2001 University of Oklahoma Press. Used by permission. (p. 62) The Halfbreed Blues by Andrea Menard, words and music 2000 Andrea Menard, SOCAN. Used by permission.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Frye, Northrop, 1912-1991
The educated imagination
(CBC Massey lectures series; 1962)
Text of 6 radio lectures broadcast in fall 1962.
eISBN 978-0-88784-881-0
1. Literature Philosophy. 2. Literature Study and teaching. I. Title. II. Series.
PN45.F7 1998 801 C93-094487-9

Cover design and photography: Bill Douglas at The Bang

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

FOR THE PAST TWENTY-FIVE years I have been teaching and studying English literature in a university. As in any other job, certain questions stick in ones mind, not because people keep asking them, but because theyre the questions inspired by the very fact of being in such a place. What good is the study of literature? Does it help us to think more clearly, or feel more sensitively, or live a better life than we could without it? What is the function of the teacher and scholar, or of the person who calls himself, as I do, a literary critic? What difference does the study of literature make in our social or political or religious attitude? In my early days I thought very little about such questions, not because I had any of the answers, but because I assumed that anybody who asked them was nave. I think now that the simplest questions are not only the hardest to answer, but the most important to ask, so Im going to raise them and try to suggest what my present answers are. I say try to suggest, because there are only more or less inadequate answers to such questions there arent any right answers. The kind of problem that literature raises is not the kind that you ever solve. Whether my answers are any good or not, they represent a fair amount of thinking about the questions. As I cant see my audience, I have to choose my rhetorical style in the dark, and Im taking the classroom style, because an audience of students is the one I feel easiest with.

There are two things in particular that I want to discuss with you. In school, and in university, theres a subject called English in English-speaking countries. English means, in the first place, the mother tongue. As that, its the most practical subject in the world: you cant understand anything or take any part in your society without it. Wherever illiteracy is a problem, its as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep. The native language takes precedence over every other subject of study: nothing else can compare with it in usefulness. But then you find that every mother tongue, in any developed or civilized society, turns into something called literature. If you keep on studying English, you find yourself trying to read Shakespeare and Milton. Literature, were told, is one of the arts, along with painting and music, and, after youve looked up all the hard words and the Classical allusions and learned what words like imagery and diction are supposed to mean, what you use in understanding it, or so youre told, is your imagination. Here you dont seem to be in quite the same practical and useful area: Shakespeare and Milton, whatever their merits, are not the kind of thing you must know to hold any place in society at all. A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people dont mind being that. Every child realizes that literature is taking him in a different direction from the immediately useful, and a good many children complain loudly about this. Two questions I want to deal with, then, are, first: what is the relation of English as the mother tongue to English as a literature? Second: what is the social value of the study of literature, and what is the place of the imagination that literature addresses itself to, in the learning process?

Lets start with the different ways there are of dealing with the world were living in. Suppose youre shipwrecked on an uninhabited island in the South Seas. The first thing you do is to take a long look at the world around you, a world of sky and sea and earth and stars and trees and hills. You see this world as objective, as something set over against you and not yourself or related to you in any way. And you notice two things about this objective world. In the first place, it doesnt have any conversation. Its full of animals and plants and insects going on with their own business, but theres nothing that responds to you: it has no morals and no intelligence, or at least none that you can grasp. It may have a shape and a meaning, but it doesnt seem to be a human shape or a human meaning. Even if theres enough to eat and no dangerous animals, you feel lonely and frightened and unwanted in such a world.

In the second place, you find that looking at the world, as something set over against you, splits your mind in two. You have an intellect that feels curious about it and wants to study it, and you have feelings or emotions that see it as beautiful or austere or terrible. You know that both these attitudes have some reality, at least for you. If the ship you were wrecked in was a Western ship, youd probably feel that your intellect tells you more about whats really there in the outer world, and that your emotions tell you more about whats going on inside you. If your background were Oriental, youd be more likely to reverse this and say that the beauty or terror was what was really there, and that your instinct to count and classify and measure and pull to pieces was what was inside your mind. But whether your point of view is Western or Eastern, intellect and emotion never get together in your mind as long as youre simply looking at the world. They alternate, and keep you divided between them.

The language you use on this level of the mind is the language of consciousness or awareness. Its largely a language of nouns and adjectives. You have to have names for things, and you need qualities like wet or green or beautiful to describe how things seem to you. This is the speculative or contemplative position of the mind, the position in which the arts and sciences begin, although they dont stay there very long. The sciences begin by accepting the facts and the evidence about an outside world without trying to alter them. Science proceeds by accurate measurement and description, and follows the demands of the reason rather than the emotions. What it deals with is there, whether we like it or not. The emotions are unreasonable: for them its what they like and dont like that comes first. Wed be naturally inclined to think that the arts follow the path of emotion, in contrast to the sciences. Up to a point they do, but theres a complicating factor.