The Great Code in 1981, and Words with Power in 1990, both begin with expositions of the theory of language that respond to the growth of linguistics and semiotics in the previous decades. Language is seen to go through three phases, later expanded to four — the metaphorical, the dialectical, the rhetorical, and the descriptive — each in turn being dominant. Literature, however, keeps alive the earliest, metaphoric phase of language; and in these last major works, Frye delves into the basic source for those metaphors in the Bible. The Bible itself is written in the language of myth and metaphor, and thus it is a mistake to read it “literally” (as that phrase is commonly understood): its literal meaning is metaphorical. But the Bible’s myths and metaphors are not hypothetical, like those of literature, since they are offered as myths to live by and metaphors to live in: they attempt to influence the reader in his way of life. Unwilling to call biblical language merely rhetorical, Frye suggests a fifth type of language, the kerygmatic, which is a rhetoric of proclamation on the “other side” of myth and metaphor.
In Words with Power, Frye studies this kerygmatic or prophetic authority in both the Bible and literature. The Great Code, whose title comes from Blake’s assertion that “The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art,” lays the groundwork with a study of the Bible itself. As in the “Third Essay” of Anatomy, there are two aspects, the cyclical and the dialectical. Looked at as a plot, or mythos, the Bible is a comedy: it gives the history of mankind, under the name of Israel, from Creation in Paradise, through a fall into time and encroaching darkness, to Apocalypse and the regaining of Paradise, with a series of falls and recoveries in between.
Seen dialectically, the Bible’s imagery falls into the two categories, mentioned before, of apocalyptic and demonic imagery. Its images of desire — shepherd, lamb, bridegroom, tree of life and so on — are ultimately all identified with a single figure, which is Christ. This human figure is both the fulfilled individual and the giant form of his society. In Paul’s words, “So we, being many, are one body in Christ”; in Frye’s interpretation, “the community with which the individual is identical is no longer a whole of which he is a part, but another aspect of himself.”
Frye’s Return of Eden, a study of Milton, ends with “the realization that there is only one man, one mind, and one world, and that all walls of partition have been broken down forever.” Frye is not inculcating religious doctrine here, since, from a literary point of view, “belief” in Christ is not in question. Rather, he is pointing out that mankind’s imagination culminates in a single human figure, who is both one and many, the individual glorified as his social body.
Those familiar with Blake will recognize that Frye has come full circle back to Fearful Symmetry. Blake’s universe is populated by mighty individual figures, such as the human imagination, embodied as the chained Los; or a vengeful God, represented as Noboddady. For Blake, it is the local that becomes the universal, not some construct abstracted from many locals and resembling none. He believed in the radiance of the particular: a world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour. In so stating, I too hope to have come full circle, by a long route recalling my earlier question of the relation of the individual to his society. Society — that is, a real society — is the fulfillment of the individual, not an obliteration of him.
What of Frye himself and his relation to his society? The particular milieu he was born into was middle-class, white, Canadian, and Methodist. Methodists are supposed to undergo a “conversion,” the defining experience of their lives, when they are convinced of their utter sinfulness and of God’s ability to forgive them. It’s typical of Frye that he underwent an anti-conversion: he had been brought up by a church-going mother, but one morning, at the age of about fifteen, walking to school, he discovered, as he put it, that “the whole shitty, smelly garment of fundamentalism dropped off into the sewer and stayed there,” and he realized that he had never really believed in the vengeful God who threw some into hell and rewarded others with a permanent appointment in the heavenly choir. Nevertheless, he remained within the Protestant tradition, imbued with its Bible culture, its radical individualism, its emphasis on the spirit. However, he sought all his life to define a religion that did justice to man’s spirituality without falling into what he saw as superstitious idolatry.
The religion he defined was radical to say the least. By the time of his last book, The Double Vision (1991), he had virtually jettisoned the ideas of God the father, of the historical Jesus as an atoning figure, of the afterlife, of the Creation as a historical event, and of the Apocalypse as something that was likely to happen. As we might guess, they’re all metaphors. What remains is the figure of Jesus, who is the creative principle linking mankind with the divine, and through whose vision man sees the eternal here and now.
Often enough, in his early years, Frye felt a deficiency of the eternal at Victoria College, with its endless fuss over locking the girls into residence by 11:00 p.m. and its insistence on never serving a glass of wine; but, particularly as the multiversity developed, he stressed the vital importance of colleges with specific traditions. He felt a loyalty to his community and enjoyed being part of it, even to serving as its principal for nine years.
As for his Canadian identity, that was also something he cherished. He could no more be an American than he could be a Catholic, and he was true to his roots in not forsaking Canada for the more lucrative field of the United States. According to his reading, Canadians differed from the Americans both geographically and historically. In its history, Canada had skipped over, intellectually speaking, the rational eighteenth century, and was always the home of a more Tory, less revolutionary attitude than the American. Hence, “Americans like to make money: Canadians like to audit it.” Geographically, Canada lacked an eastern seaboard where settlement was concentrated, and the immense distances stretching out between isolated towns led to a garrison mentality in regard to nature. Such speculations on the nature of Canadianness feature largely in his celebrated “Conclusions” to the two editions of Literary History of Canada, which have become an honoured part of the literature they discuss.
Frye once defined the Canadian genius as the ability to produce strange hybrids, such as the University of Toronto in education, the United Church in religion, and Confederation in politics. He himself has some of this Canadian characteristic of contrasting entities strangely combined: the local teacher and the world celebrity; the committed Christian and the man who didn’t know whether Christ ever existed and didn’t think it much mattered; the believer in community and the shy introvert; the eloquent speaker and the tongue-tied conversationalist. On this showing, he himself was one of our most characteristic as well as our most honoured and widely quoted products.
A
A’s
I’ve spoken of the three A’s of irony, Anxiety, Alienation & Absurdity: to these one should add a fourth, Aggression.
Entry, Notebook 12 (1968–70), 490, The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972: The Critical Comedy (2002), CW, 9.
Abortion
I think that having an abortion might be a traumatic shock to a woman, and she ought to consider carefully all the factors before going into it. But I’m not prepared to say whether it is right or wrong.
“Chatelaine’s Celebrity I.D.” (1982), asked to comment on the subject of abortion, Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008), CW, 24.
Abstract Expressionism
To bring my own prejudice into the open, abstract expressionism is a genre I have always distrusted, mainly because so much of it seems to me to express a violent reactionary anarchism, a repudiating not so much of the traditions as of the community of painting.
“Introduction to Arthur Lismer” (1979), Northrop Frye on Canada (2003), CW, 12.
The
