Frye Northrop - Interviews with Northrop Frye

Collected Works of Northrop Frye

VOLUME 24

Interviews with Northrop Frye

The Collected Edition of the Works of Northrop Frye has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee under the aegis of Victoria University, through its Northrop Frye Centre. The purpose of the edition is to make available authoritative texts of both published and unpublished works, based on an analysis and comparison of all available materials, and supported by scholarly apparatus, including annotation and introductions. The Northrop Frye Centre gratefully acknowledges financial support, through McMaster University, from the Michael G. DeGroote family.

Editorial Committee

General Editor

Alvin A. Lee

Associate Editor

Jean OGrady

Editors

Joseph Adamson
Robert D. Denham
Michael Dolzani
A.C. Hamilton
David Staines

Advisers

Robert Brandeis
Paul Gooch
Eva Kushner
Jane Millgate
Ron Schoeffel
Clara Thomas
Jane Widdicombe

VOLUME 24

Edited by Jean OGrady

Victoria University, University of Toronto, and Jean OGrady
(preface, introduction, annotation) 2008

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-0-8020-9742-2

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Frye, Northrop, 19121991.
Interviews with Northrop Frye / edited by Jean OGrady.

(Collected works of Northrop Frye v.24)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9742-2

1. Frye, Northrop, 19121991 Interviews. 2. Literature History
and criticism Theory, etc. 3. Critics Canada Interviews. I. OGrady,
Jean, 1943. II. Title. III. Series

PN75 F7 A5 2007 801.95092 C2007-903007-6

This volume has been published with the assistance of a grant from Victoria University.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Frye photographed by Deborah Shackleton after an interview with her, April 1980 (see no. 52).

This collection aims to assemble all those interviews or discussions with Northrop Frye that were published in question-and-answer or dialogue form, or broadcast on radio or television as interviews. It cannot claim to be equally inclusive regarding unpublished interviews, but efforts have been made to discover, and include here, those additional interviews Frye granted for which the interviewer kept the tape or transcript and which have some intrinsic interest. Also included are a few brief oral pronouncements that are not really interviews (e.g., nos. 9, 28): these obviously derive from Fryes response to a question, but only the answer remains. In fact it has been difficult to define exactly an interview (so that the volume might more pedantically be titled Northrop Fryes Interviews, Dialogues, and Other Oral Pronouncements); but these semi-interviews do seem to belong in this, the only volume of the Collected Works to capture Fryes off-the-cuff, spontaneous utterances.

Not included, however, are films of Frye in which he appears as a talking head without audible questions; these are listed in Appendix A. Appendix B lists other interviews given by Frye that were written up and published in discursive form, usually incorporating some direct quotations; these include the interviews with John Ayre that were used for background and factual information for his biography. Finally, Appendix C assembles chronologically the other interviews known to have taken place but no longer available.

Several sources have been used to search for interviews with Frye. The largest number have been recorded in Robert D. Denhams Northrop Frye: An Annotated Bibliography. A collection of Correspondence relating to media projects in The Northrop Frye Fonds, 1991, box 41, files 1 and 2 at Victoria University Library indicated several more usable interviews. For each year from 1970 on, Fryes secretary Jane Widdicombe has provided a list of his major engagements which includes appointments for interviews, while the daybooks for 197090 on which these lists are based, available in the Frye Fonds, have other jottings indicating interviews. There are incidental references to interviews in the autobiographical volumes of the Collected Works, in Ayres biography, and in miscellaneous print sources. All clues have been followed up by library research, letter and personal appeal, internet searches, and a combing of the CBC Archives undertaken by Mary Ellen Kappler.

In spite of these efforts, the present collection could not be described as exhibiting the sum of Fryes efforts to contribute to intellectual fare in the media. For instance, his diaries as a young professor in the 1950s mention his taking part in a number of radio programs which have not survived on tape: these include a discussion of the H-bomb on the student radio station with philosopher Marcus Long and theoretical physicist Melwyn Preston (D, 266, 269); a planned CBC discussion of religion in 1950 which may not have taken place (D, 290, 301); and several contributions to the CBCs Citizens Forum. In 1982 (a good year from this point of view), there are clues to interviews with sixteen people: seven are included here, four resulted in known articles, and only five have not been tracked down. But in 1985, distressingly, nine of the thirteen interviews listed seem to have left no trace, including a tantalizing Steve Minuk interview for MENSA (25 March). Some missing interviews of this type were potential contributions to larger projects that had to be abandoned. Fiona McHugh, for instance, interviewed Frye on world mythology for a survey that did not eventually work out. In a scenario that will be all too familiar to researchers, she replied to a query in 2004 about her interview that she had kept the tape since 1981, but three weeks ago had finally thrown it out. People working on a topic for broadcast sometimes taped Fryes views but did not use them in the final program, as happened with Kay Armatages video Storytelling (interview of 27 June 1983) or Dennis Duffys program on historical fiction (9 October 1986); again the original tapes are no longer available. In the late 1970s the Thomas More Institute in Montreal and its offshoot Discovery Theatre in Toronto offered a course on Story based on The Secular Scripture and an interview concerning it conducted with Frye in Montreal; but the tape of this, though still in existence, apparently crumbles at a touch.

Given the length of the present collection and the inevitable repetitions, some readers may be grateful that these research efforts were not more successful. However, in spite of overlaps it was thought useful to publish each interview in full for researchers to make what use of them they wish. The introduction, p. xxxvii, makes some suggestions as to the most rewarding for the general reader interested in Fryes ideas.

The interviews have been arranged in chronological order according to the date on which Frye gave them, if this is available; if not, by date of their publication or broadcast. Thus where possible we follow the evolving sequence of ideas in Fryes life, rather than the somewhat arbitrary dates of appearance. The dates could frequently be ascertained by the Widdicombe list already mentioned, referred to in the headnotes as Jane Widdicombes list, supplemented by Fryes daybooks. Sometimes it has been possible to deduce the date of the interview from correspondence with the interviewer in files in the Frye Fonds. Finally, there is sometimes internal evidence, either in the interview itself or in the discursive introduction to it, that dates the encounter or provides historical clues.