Northrop Frye (1912–1991)

While carefully distinguishing the Bible from the various categories of secular literature, Northrop Frye applies the techniques and perspectives of his work in literary criticism to it in The Great Code. (The title phrase, like most of Frye's, is a quote from Blake.) The book works in an exploratory fashion that proceeds from the atomic level of language, through myth and metaphor, to the continuities involved in biblical typology. Then he traces the same arc in reverse, to integrate what show more he had previously analyzed.

Frye makes no pleas on behalf of supernatural agency or religious institutions. He discusses the Bible as a textual curiosity, and works to demonstrate the worth it can have for thoughtful readers, as well as the contributions that it has made to the mental infrastructure of our civilization. In the denouement of this volume, the first of several he would eventually write about the Bible, Frye cites Nietzsche and Feuerbach, and muses about magic and sexuality. As always, he is a lively and elegant writer.

I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys serious literature, and yet is tempted to dismiss the Bible as an anthology of ancient superstitions. It may also be a useful tonic for those who view the Bible as their own sectarian playground--although it is less likely to endear itself to them. For me, it mostly served as a convenient review and lucid exposition of ideas I had previously considered; but there were definitely fresh nuggets to be discovered throughout. show less

The Great Code (a term borrowed from William Blake, who wrote that the Old and New Testaments are the great code of art) is one of the most interesting and challenging books about the Bible that I’ve come across. It doesn’t deal with matters of faith or doctrine but with “the impact of the Bible on the creative imagination.” Frye’s experience as a teacher convinced him that “a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is show more going on in what he reads.” Yet he distinguishes his work from the plethora of “Bible as literature” courses and books that had become fashionable by the time that he wrote. He does not treat the Bible as an anthology of Ancient Near Eastern texts. Yet, as the book’s subtitle, The Bible and Literature suggests, his approach is not far removed. Frye states his aim at the outset: to “study the Bible from the point of view of a literary critic.”

This requires, first, treating the collection of writings contained in the Bible not as an anthology but as a unit. He does this not only because the Bible has traditionally been read in this way, but more importantly, because it does have something very much like a plot, with a beginning and a conclusion, and because it contains “a body of concrete images,” which “recur so often that they clearly indicate some kind of unifying principle.”

Frye’s analysis is organized according to language, myth, metaphor, and typology. They are treated in that order in the four chapters of Part One, then in reverse order in Part Two, in which these topics are applied more directly to the Bible. Frye calls this structure a “double-mirror.” I thought the structure apt, since so many of the thought units of the Bible have a chiastic structure.

Having read Frye’s earlier book, Anatomy of Criticism, some of his terminology was familiar to me, as well as his adoption of Vico’s ages (mythical, heroic, vulgar), which Frye calls the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic, each with its typical kind of language (metaphorical, allegorical or metonymic, and descriptive). Some other key terms are centripetal/centrifugal, categories of metaphor (importantly, the “royal metaphor,” which unites the individual and the group), and the ladder of polysemous sense.

The book is sprinkled with observations that go beyond the topic of the Bible and literature, such as: “A good deal of human activity is wasted on perverted energy, making war, feeding a parasitic class, building monuments to paranoid conquerors, and the like.” Plus ça change!

Implicit in the course of the book is a running controversy with “literalists.” I was one when this book appeared in 1982. I wonder what I would have made of it if I had read it then.

In this book, as in Anatomy, Frye faults those who rush to make judgments of quality. Yet he clearly has his standards of excellence — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake. His distaste for evaluation as a subordinate activity would probably mean he would take a dim view of an entire website with star ratings. Nevertheless, I’ll give this a full five stars. Usually, that means I feel any reader could profit by reading. That may not be the case with this book, but I hadn’t gotten far in reading a copy borrowed from the library before deciding it’s one I know I’ll want on my shelf and refer to often. show less

"The Great Code" really re-configured the way that I conceive of the Bible as a literary document. After two centuries of historical criticism (or narrative criticism as it's called when applied to the Bible), it is refreshing to see a whole new interpretive methodology which looks inward at the Bible, instead of trying to test its significance by how well it correlates to something outside of itself. And that is the central thesis to Frye's argument - that the Bible is a unified mythology, show more replete with its own literary devices, that hardly needs confirmation from history or archaeology to successfully tell the story (mythos) that it tells. Because of this, the book has been the target of a number of appropriate historicist critiques, all claiming that one can't cut wholly separate the work of literature from its social and cultural context. Although these criticisms aren't all fair themselves, as Frye even considers the structure of certain metaphors (like the ubiquitous flood myth) modulate themselves repeatedly via literary transmission into new texts.

The first part of the book consists of a highly condensed theory of language which Frye employs in the second half. I found this part just as useful, yet often elided in critical reviews. According to Frye, his own ideas are highly influenced by Vico's "Scienza Nuova" which posits the idea of a cyclical theory of language wherein each human epoch uses language in a unique, irreducible way. In his tripartite interpretation, there is the hieroglyphic stage in which words have the pure energy of potential magic, the hieratic stage in which words begin to reflect an objective reality of a transcendent order, and the demotic stage, where prose continues its subordination to "the inductive and fact-gathering process," and seems to be the stage we remain in today. If this evolution has taken us full circle from feel the pure immediacy of metaphor, how are we supposed to read the Bible (whose language is, of course, one of pure metaphorical immediacy)? Nietzsche said that God had lost his function, but Vico (and Frye in turn) might have replied that the Bible is simply entombed in a lost part of the cycle, inaccessible and unable to be interpreted by the demotic. His neo-Viconian theory of language goes some way in offering a theory for the vulgarism that so often takes the name of Biblical interpretation: "With the general acceptance of demotic and descriptive criteria in language, such literalism becomes a feature of anti-intellectual Christian populism" (45).

The second part begins the literary criticism as one would more formally recognize it. According to Frye, the Bible can operate independently precisely because it functions and maintains its own body of rhetorical devices, including metaphor, and type, antitype, and archetype. "We clearly have to consider the possibility that metaphor is not an incidental ornament, but one of its controlling modes of thought" (54). Metaphor and trope become the sole measure of the Bible's inner verbal consistency. The "type" and "antitype" are essentially import; he construes the entire Bible as a series of musical call-and-response gestures between the Old and New Testaments: the Resurrection is the response to the Old Testament Promised Land, the baptism in the River Jordan is the New Testament's answer to the Old Testament's Red Sea. He also integrates a number of other complex typologies, including the Creation-Incarnation-Death-Descent to Hell-Harrowing of Hell-Resurrection-Ascension-Heaven motif and a nomenclature of types, including the "demonic," "analogical," and "apocalyptic." This universe - multiverse, even - of complex metaphor, meaning, and type are the ones that we continue to recognize, read, and struggle with today, which accounts for the fact that myth goes a long way in exploring who we are and what we do as a community. Notice how Frye deftly bypasses any theological or strictly philosophical concerns. As Frank Kermode would comment almost a decade after the book was published, "Just as he exiled questions of value from the Anatomy [of Criticism], he exiles from his Biblical criticism questions of belief."

I was considering giving this book four stars, because of my occasional disagreements with it (including the arguments from historicism mentioned above). But I can't in good conscience do that. Just for the interpretive vistas that it opens up, I feel that anything less than five would convey an impression that I was less than impressed, which certainly is not the case. show less

In this book, Northrop Frye sets out to further the practice of literary criticism, which has yet to progress very far, in his opinion, from Aristotle. His aim is not to eliminate various schools of criticism, whether historical and formal or what was in his day the New Criticism. Instead, he constructs a system of organization capable of containing them all, one whose orientation is not the individual literary work as much as literature as some sort of Platonic ideal (which is not simply show more the aggregate of all literary works).

The result is what Terry Eagleton calls “a mighty ‘totalization’ of all literary genres.” It is a structuralist approach, as reflected in his original title, Structural Poetics (which his editor insisted on changing). The intended title combined his debt to Aristotle’s enduring work on literary criticism, from whom he borrowed his organizing principles, and what Frye sought to bring to the discussion. The title adopted in its place also owes a telling debt: to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, one of Frye’s favorite books.

However, Frye’s structure is not imposed a priori; he works inductively, based on seemingly omnivorous yet attentive reading.

Frye combats the notion that criticism is a parasitic endeavor by citing an analogy, physics. Physics, he writes, is “an organized body of knowledge about nature. A student of it says he is learning physics, not nature.” He envisages a similar relation of criticism to literature.

It’s easy to imagine how this approach might calcify in the hands of adepts, devolving into rigid classification. Frye, however, is not a slave to his system: “Once we have learned to distinguish the modes, however, we must learn to recombine them.” Many pleasurable works have elements of more than one mode. It seems that Frye offers a typology (or system of typologies), useful for coming to grips with any work of literature.

The value of this becomes apparent when he turns to literary works in prose, for which, he notes, Aristotle and the other Greeks did not provide us with a term, as they did for other genres. Frye notes the misunderstanding caused by the everyday use of the term fiction (the opposite of fact), as well as the widespread use of the term novel, which is but one of four chief strands of fiction he identifies (the others being confession, anatomy, and romance; as always, combinations are possible and do exist). Failure to recognize these strands results in judging Wuthering Heights a less successful novel than Pride and Prejudice when it is not a novel in Frye’s estimation but a romance.

Since Frye’s terminology abounds in transliterated Greek terms, neologisms, and words commonly used in another sense in everyday parlance, I found the Glossary at the end of the book helpful.
This book was a challenging read. Many passages were enjoyable and enlightening, while others were a slog. Yet the effort I expended to stay with it was amply rewarded. It helped that the text is peppered with memorable aphorisms such as, “The axiom of criticism must be, not that the poet does not know what he is talking about, but that he cannot talk about what he knows” and, “At the centre of liberal education, something surely ought to get liberated.”

That last sentiment alone might cause this book to be removed from the library shelf in some states, so read it while you can. show less