Northrop Frye in Conversation

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

These conversations with Canada’s leading intellectual and cultural
critic were recorded for the CBC shortly before Frye’s death. There
have, of course, in addition to Frye’s own books, been a number of
expository accounts of his ideas. This book adds little that is new to
informed students of Frye’s criticism, but it may well be the best
introductory account for thoughtful readers new to his work. Cayley is
an unusually well-prepared and highly intelligent interviewer, who takes
care, for the benefit of beginners, to ask some fairly elementary
questions; he serves as an admirable mediator between guru and
(possible) initiate.

The book is invaluable, then, as a simplified introduction to Frye’s
dogmatic position. But it also allows the not-yet-converted to test the
validity of some of his assertions. “Blake himself said that he had to
create a system or be enslaved by another man’s,” as Frye notes. But
does Frye take over Blake’s system (“Read Blake or go to Hell,” he
wrote as a young man)? And should we take over his? Frye’s notorious
position on value judgments is once again rehearsed—and perhaps
clarified and even modified. In addition, the awkward question of his
transcending of ideology (if he does so) is debated.

Cayley allows Frye to speak out without challenging him too far, and
without accepting him too readily. The Frye who wanted to speak to the
nonspecialist is prominent here, and there are few traces of the awed
deference that can be troublesome in his unctuous disciples. Frye was a
mind-expanding teacher even for those who cannot accept his position
lock, stock, and barrel. It is the intellectually stimulating, witty,
often droll, unusually relaxed Frye who comes across so well here. An
admirable reconstruction not so much of the mythical magus as of the
whole man.