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emeia is an experimental journal devoted to the exploration of new and emergent areas and methods of biblical criticism. Proposals for volumes employing the methods, models, and findings of linguistics, folklore studies, contemporary literary criticism, structuralism, social anthropology, and other such disciplines and approaches are invited. Although experimental in both form and content, Semeia proposes to publish work that reflects a well-defined methodology that is appropriate to the material being interpreted. Semeia is complemented by Semeia Studies, also published by the Society of Biblical Literature. As a monograph series, Semeia Studies encourages publication of more elaborate explorations of new and emergent approaches to the study of the Bible. founding editor (1974–1980): general editor: editor for Semeia Studies:
Robert W. Funk David Jobling, St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon Danna Nolan Fewell, Theological School, Drew University
associate editors: Sheila Briggs, University of Southern California; Musa Dube, University of Botswana; Danna Nolan Fewell (Semeia Studies Editor), Theological School, Drew University; David M. Gunn, Texas Christian University; Richard A. Horsley, University of Massachusetts; Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, Graduate Theological Union; Stephen D. Moore, Theological School, Drew University; Tina Pippin, Agnes Scott College; Fernando Segovia, Vanderbilt University; Yvonne M. Sherwood, Glasgow University; Abraham Smith, Andover Newton Theological School; R. S. Sugirtharajah, University of Birmingham, UK; Gerald O. West, University of Natal; Gale A. Yee, Episcopal Divinity School. assistant to the general editor: Audrey Swan, University of Saskatchewan Issues of Semeia are unified around a central theme and edited by members of the editorial board or guest editors. Future themes and editors are given at the back of each issue of Semeia. Inquiries or volume proposals should be sent to the General Editor: David Jobling, St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon, SK S7N OW3, Canada. Inquiries or manuscripts for Semeia Studies should be sent to the series editor: Danna Nolan Fewell, Theological School, Drew University, Madison, NJ 07940. Semeia and Semeia Studies are published by the Society of Biblical Literature as part of its research and publications program. A subscription unit to Semeia consists of four consecutive issues, and costs $25 for SBL members; $50 for non-members. Members and subscribers outside the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are requested to pay a postal surcharge. All payments should be in U.S. currency or its equivalency. Single issues are $19.95. Institutional subscription inquiries, subscription orders and orders for single issues (including multiple copy orders) should be sent to the Society of Biblical Literature, P.O. Box 2243, Williston, VT 05495-2243. Phone: (877) 725-3334 (toll free); Fax: (802) 864-7626.
SEMEIA 89
NORTHROP FRYE AND THE AFTERLIFE OF THE WORD
Guest Editor: James M. Kee Board Editor: Adele Reinhartz
© 2002 by the Society of Biblical Literature
Published Quarterly by THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE 825 Houston Mill Road Atlanta, GA 30329
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
NORTHROP FRYE AND THE AFTERLIFE OF THE WORD
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CONTENTS Contributors to This Issue ....................................................................................v Introduction James M. Kee ..........................................................................................1 ESSAYS 1.
Northrop Frye between Archetype and Typology Robert Alter ............................................................................................9
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Towards Reconciling the Solitudes Joe Velaidum ........................................................................................23
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“The Humanized God”: Biblical Paradigms of Recognition in Frye's Final Three Books David Gay ............................................................................................39
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The Ashes of the Stars: Northrop Frye and the Trickster-God Michael Dolzani ..................................................................................59
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Northrop Frye and the Poetry in Biblical Hermeneutics James M. Kee ........................................................................................75
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Early Modern Women’s Words with Power: Absence and Presence Patricia Demers....................................................................................89
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From Archetype to Antitype: A Look at Frygian Archetypology Margaret Burgess ..............................................................................103
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Modeling Biblical Narrative: Frye and D. H. Lawrence William Robins ..................................................................................125 RESPONSES
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Biblical Studies on a More Capacious Canvas: A Response to Joe Velaidum and James M. Kee David Jobling ....................................................................................139
10. Reconfiguring the Liberal Imagination: A Response to Margaret Burgess, Patricia Demers, and William Robins J. Russell Perkin ................................................................................147 11. The “Something More” in the Bible: A Response to Robert Alter, David Gay, and Michael Dolzani Robert Cording ..................................................................................155
CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE
Robert Alter Department of Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720
[email protected] David Jobling St. Andrew’s College Saskatoon, SK S7N 0W3 CANADA
[email protected] Margaret Burgess Northrop Frye Centre Victoria College 73 Queen’s Park Crescent Toronto, ON M5S 1K7 CANADA
[email protected] James M. Kee Department of English College of the Holy Cross Worcester, MA 01610
[email protected] Robert Cording Department of English College of the Holy Cross Worcester, MA 01610
[email protected] J. Russell Perkin Department of English Saint Mary’s University Halifax, NS B3H 3C3 CANADA
[email protected] Patricia Demers Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 CANADA
[email protected] William Robins Victoria College University of Toronto 73 Queen’s Park Crescent Toronto, ON M5S 1K7 CANADA
[email protected] Michael Dolzani Department of English Baldwin-Wallace College 275 Eastland Road Berea, Ohio 44130
[email protected] Joe Velaidum Department of Religious Studies McMaster University Hamilton, ON L8S 4K1 CANADA
[email protected] David Gay Department of English University of Alberta Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5 CANADA
[email protected] INTRODUCTION James M. Kee College of the Holy Cross
Northrop Frye was without question one of the most important literary scholars and critics of the twentieth century. The range of authors and periods on which he wrote is extraordinary. The boldness and scope of his contributions to literary theory may be unmatched among his contemporaries. Not without reason is his Anatomy of Criticism one of the few literary-critical books that has been mentioned in the company of Aristotle’s Poetics. Its influence has often extended beyond the boundaries of literary criticism per se to historiography and other disciplines on occasions when their practitioners have reflected critically upon the structures of their discourse. During the last decade of his life, Frye published three books that dealt explicitly with the Bible and its relationship to literature: The Great Code (1982), Words with Power (1990), and The Double Vision (1991). These works enable scholars to address, to a degree never before possible, the “religious context” of Frye’s entire corpus. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, members of the Departments of English and Religious Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, organized an international conference on “Frye and the Word,” which was held at McMaster in May, 2000. Participants focused upon the following questions: (1) what is the legacy of Frye’s work for literary and religious studies? and (2) what work might scholars now take up in light of that legacy? As Joe Velaidum notes, however, in the essay he has contributed to this volume (Velaidum was one of the organizers of the conference), genuine dialogue on these questions was often difficult to achieve. From the standpoint of many in religious studies, Frye’s insistence upon the fundamentally mythical and metaphorical character of the Bible—explicitly described by him as “counter-historical” (1991:17)—was unintelligible given the selfunderstanding of biblical traditions and the achievements of modern critical-historical methods. Those more persuaded by Frye’s work felt, in contrast, that his critics failed adequately to take note of the “limitations” that Frye rightly found in their “historical perspective” (1991:16), limitations that, in part, motivated his emphasis on myth and metaphor. This volume of essays, all initially presented at the conference on “Frye and the Word,” is offered in the hope that fruitful conversation, in Gadamer’s sense (367–69, 383–89), on these and related matters is not only possible but called for, despite the gulfs that such a conversation must somehow bridge.
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For the difficulties faced by the participants in the conference are not new. They are at least as old as the “aporias,” as Paul Ricoeur calls them, that have plagued modern hermeneutics since its beginnings: tensions between romantic and critical imperatives with which Schleiermacher and Dilthey wrestled are still felt in the contrast between truth and method that Gadamer addresses (Ricoeur: 43–62). Both of these imperatives arise from a common experience: processes of historical change have left us feeling distanced, if not outright alienated, from traditionally important texts. And both call upon us to overcome, in some sense, this distance. The “romantic” imperative does so by calling for an imaginative, intuitive act of understanding that would restore fullness of life to the dead words of tradition. Those who would respond to this imperative fear that forms of critique, left to themselves, will ultimately “murder to dissect” (Wordsworth: 107, line 28). Those who would respond to the “critical” imperative, however, see little hope for overcoming historical distance in ways that are at best unsystematic and at worst hopelessly subjective. They would overcome such distance by critically reconstructing texts as historical objects. They see the need, furthermore, to guard vigilantly against the blind spots in tradition. Ricoeur, in his own work, has sought to find ways beyond such aporias by establishing a dialogue, if not a dialectic, between these romantic and critical imperatives. There can be no question, ultimately, of responding to one by excluding the other. Indeed, “distanciation,” according to Ricoeur, can provide conditions for the critical development of sympathetic understanding (131–44). The back-and-forth movement of thought that characterizes such development has suggested the order in which the essays in this volume are presented. The first essay is written by Robert Alter, one of the few literary scholars who might be said to rank with Frye as a student of the Bible and literature. Alter offers the most far-reaching critique of Frye’s work contained in the volume, one that argues, finally, on both literarycritical and historical-critical grounds, that Frye’s work ought not to provide occasion for reviving an inherently “typological” style of reading the Bible. Alter’s essay is followed by four essays that seek sympathetically to explicate or develop Frye’s insights. The first three of these deal with Frye’s relationship to the Romantic revolution and especially to Blake. Joe Velaidum seeks to bridge the gulf between Frye and historicalcritical scholars by demonstrating how Frye’s readings of the Bible are informed by a Blakean epistemology. David Gay focuses similarly on the presence of Blake in Frye’s work, demonstrating affinities between paradigmatic moments of recognition in both Frye’s and Blake’s readings of biblical books such as Job. Michael Dolzani argues that while the early Northrop Frye may essentially have been a Blakean revolutionary, the late Frye differentiates himself from the dilemmas of such a romanticism by focusing upon the trickster-God found in stories such as Jacob’s and Job’s.
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This trickster-God is a positive symbol for the mysterious divine Other. Finally, my essay seeks to clarify just what Frye means when he argues that the letter of the biblical text is radically metaphorical and to argue that Frye envisions a biblical hermeneutic in which poetic traditions must be seen as playing a constitutive role. The next three essays in the volume return the conversation to its critical imperatives. Patricia Demers focuses upon Frye’s lament for the absence of a critical language that deals adequately with the traditionally female symbols of the Bible. She finds this lament ironic in that Frye ignores a notable number of early modern female writers who interpreted their experiences in light of biblical paradigms and in doing so developed a rich symbology that illuminated their status as women within their communities. Margaret Burgess also criticizes Frye’s inadequate attention to female mythical symbols. She turns Frye’s play with the figurations of typology against him, arguing that the type-antitype relationship must be allowed to extend beyond both the beginning and the end of the Bible. By recollecting forms of the divine feminine that belonged to prebiblical myths, she anticipates speculatively the reemergence of the “Goddess-Woman” as a supplement to biblical figurations of the divine. William Robins offers a critique of Frye’s approach to understanding the relationship between the Bible and literature that draws inspiration from, among other sources, the work of Robert Alter. Robins focuses upon the novel Aaron’s Rod by D. H. Lawrence in order to argue that Frye’s interpretive paradigms are biased toward a visionary poetics and not well suited to interpreting the biblical resources important to novelists. The responses to these essays keep the back-and-forth movement of the dialogue going. David Jobling addresses two of the essays that offer sympathetic explications of Frye’s project, Joe Velaidum’s and my own. General Editor of Semeia and a long-time practitioner of experimental forms of biblical scholarship, Jobling makes use of the occasion to think through his own ambivalent relationship to Frye’s work. He finds within these two essays resources for appropriating Frye’s socially engaged, imaginatively expansive approach to the Bible while still being critical of Frye’s desire for a “transcendental perspective” that ultimately subordinates the “Old Testament” to the “New.” With Velaidum and me, Jobling calls for “a biblical studies with a Frygian vision rather than a Frygian biblical studies.” J. Russell Perkin considers collectively the critiques of Frye offered by Demers, Burgess, and Robins. Each of them, he argues, diagnoses a similar defect in Frye’s approach, one rooted in Frye’s understanding of the liberal imagination. Perkin argues that for Frye’s own project to be pursued successfully, it does indeed need to incorporate modes of critique such as those brought to bear on it by Demers, Burgess, and Robins. Finally, Robert Cording considers together the critique of Frye offered by Alter and the sympathetic
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expositions found in the essays by Gay and Dolzani. Based upon his own close reading of Frye’s last three books, Cording defends Frye against Alter’s charges, claiming that they are based upon unsympathetic misreadings of Frye’s texts and intentions. Cording argues that Frye’s intentions are, in fact, often deeply consonant with Alter’s own as these are presented in Alter’s books on the Bible. He then analyzes Gay’s and Dolzani’s essays in order to evoke the distinctly spiritual dimensions in Frye’s relationship to the Bible—dimensions, he argues, that Alter misses. Since the final page of this volume is not intended to mark the close of the dialogue, I would like to raise some questions that might suggest ways to continue the conversational inquiry. First, need the opposition between myth and history be as sharply drawn as it often seems to be by both Frye and his critics, or are there ways in which the opposition can be mediated? While Frye counts himself among those who have come to think that “mythological thinking cannot be superseded, because it forms the framework and context for all thinking” (1990:xvi), it would be profoundly incorrect to say that his work is not informed by critical-historical awareness. The meanings of “myth” and “history” and their relationship to one another need to be explored more critically. Secondly, just what is the identity of the Bible? Is it the historically reconstructed collection of books that, as we now know, were written over a period of more than a millennium under a variety of vastly different circumstances? Or is its identity in some sense a function of the ways in which these books have been shaped into canons and read within a variety of traditions? How are these different identities that the Bible unquestionably has today to be related to one another? Finally, does the meaning of “typology”—a figure central to Frye’s understanding of the Bible as well as to the way in which his Christian tradition read the Bible for 1800 years— necessarily imply a supersessionist understanding of the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible? Or does “typology,” freed from the narrow confines of a certain type of exegetical practice and understood as a poetic figure, harbor dialectical possibilities that might transcend the supersessionism of Christian exegetical practice? Such dialectical possibilities, I would argue, are implied by A. C. Charity’s analysis of “the dialectic of Christian typology” in Events and Their Afterlife. I have entitled this volume “Northrop Frye and the Afterlife of the Word” in the hope that Frye’s understanding of typology need not necessitate supersessionism. Northrop Frye never tried to hide the place from which his writings on the Bible and literature emerged. He was not writing “a work of Biblical scholarship” but “express[ing] only [his] own personal encounter with the Bible” (1982:xi). At no point does he seek to speak “with the authority of a scholarly consensus.” He also insisted, however, that any understanding of the Bible would involve such a concerned personal dimension. The Bible, finally, is about mysteries “that can never be objectified” (1990:312). We
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must engage it as “participants” if we hope to understand; we cannot, ultimately, be mere “observers” (1990:75). Frye devoted considerable imaginative and intellectual energies to the study of the Bible in the hope that the kerygmatic character of its rhetoric might again be experienced, that the Bible’s words might once more be heard as “words with power,” the power to evoke our response. While Frye’s engagements with the Bible cannot be understood without acknowledging this personal dimension, it would be shortsighted to interpret “personal” here to mean “individualistically subjective.” Northrop Frye was one of the most capacious, imaginative, and learned readers of the twentieth century. Each of his many works shows him deeply, passionately, engaged with pressing intellectual, cultural, and social issues of his era. He pursued these engagements, moreover, within a remarkably expansive historical horizon. As Frye noted in one of his last published utterances, the opinions he presents in his final books “should not be read as proceeding from a judgment seat of final conviction, but from a rest stop on a pilgrimage, however near the pilgrimage may now be to its close” (1991:xvii–xviii). I would suggest that we do well to respond to Frye’s works on the Bible in the spirit in which they were presented. They call for neither idolatrous worship of Frye nor casual dismissal of him, but for the kind of personal engagement with their subject matter that genuine conversation requires of us.
WORKS CONSULTED Charity, A. C. 1966 Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frye, Northrop 1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1982
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
1990
Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
1991
The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1989 Truth and Method. 2d ed. Trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.
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Ricoeur, Paul 1981 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wordsworth, William 1965 Selected Poems and Prefaces. Ed. Jack Stillinger. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
ESSAYS
NORTHROP FRYE BETWEEN ARCHETYPE AND TYPOLOGY Robert Alter University of California, Berkeley
abstract Northrop Frye’s first book on the Bible and literature, The Great Code, discloses more about the nature of Frye’s literary criticism than it does about the Bible itself. According to Frye, a literary work is “a verbal structure existing for its own sake.” It has a self-referential character. The Bible, as a text in which metaphor and other kinds of figuration predominate, is just such a structure and, as such, has served as the origin of Western literature’s “mythological universe.” Arguing from this far-reaching claim, Frye offers a series of schemata that seek to explain the design and purpose of the Bible. His claims are questionable from the point of view of both literary theory and biblical scholarship, and they lead him systematically to misrepresent biblical texts. In particular, his readings revive a form of Christian supersessionism that detaches the Hebrew Scriptures from the shifting complications of their densely particular realizations.
The Great Code may well be the most deeply instructive of Northrop Frye’s books, though the object of instruction is less the Bible itself than the nature and source of Frye’s enterprise as a critic. His uncompromising conception of mythology as the very heart of literature is grounded here in an account of the Bible as the origin of what he repeatedly calls the “mythological universe” of Western literature. It is myth, he argues, that marks the contours of a culture: “A mythology rooted in a specific society transmits a heritage of shared allusion and verbal experience in time, and so mythology helps to create cultural history” (34). It is, we should note, the internal coherence of culture through the complex reiterations of verbal experience that literature articulates, and not a response to the natural world or to history: “[T]he real interest of myth is to draw a circumference around a human community and look inward toward that community, not to inquire into the operations of nature. . . . [M]ythology is not a direct response to the natural environment; it is part of the imaginative insulation that separates us from that environment” (37). This conception of the insulating function of mythology is directly linked to Frye’s polemic stress on the autotelic character of literature, a controlling idea in Anatomy of Criticism, Fables of Identity, and elsewhere in his writing. In The Great Code, he offers what he calls a provisional definition of the literary as “a verbal structure existing for its own
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sake” (57). He immediately goes on to propose that the Bible is just such a structure, and he cites the predominance of metaphor and other kinds of figuration in the Bible as evidence of its self-referential literary character. This assertion, which is central to The Great Code, is vulnerable from two directions—from the point of view of literary theory and in regard to the descriptive claim about the nature of the Bible. Let me comment briefly on the former consideration, and then I shall go on to discuss in detail the account Frye renders of the Bible, which strikes me as imaginatively conceived, often beguiling, and based on a series of more or less systematic misrepresentations of the biblical texts. Is it true that metaphoric language implies linguistic self-referentiality, directing us centripetally from world to text? Frye posits what he calls a “descriptive phase of language” that “invokes the criterion of verifiable truth,” in part by a renunciation of metaphor (58). It is not altogether clear how this process of verification is to be implemented, and the very assumption of verifiability—is that the only way we relate to reality?—seems oddly scientistic. A plausible case can be made, with the greatest variety of examples from both ancient and modern literature, that metaphor, far from being directed toward the system of language, is very often a more precise instrument of reference to the world of nature and experience than ordinary, nonfigurative language. When Job, in the great death-wish poem that precedes the cycle of debate with his three friends, says of the day on which he was born, “let it not see the eyelids of the dawn” (3:9; this and all subsequent translations from the Bible are my own), that striking metaphor, which will be invoked again antiphonally by the Voice from the Whirlwind, is something other than an act of verbal self-reference. The first thin crack of light at daybreak is associated analogically and also causally (because light rouses the sleeper) with the fluttering open of the eyelids to take in the world. There is a suggestive mirroring of the act of observation as the eyelids lift and the world’s returning to visibility as the east begins to brighten. The metaphor thus realizes—a Russian Formalist would say, defamiliarizes— the visual aspect of dawn, an eternally repeated sight, and also endows it with a palpable emotional or even kinesthetic valence as a moment of discovery and renewal. It is all this that Job, longing for sightlessness and the enveloping womb/tomb of oblivion, would like to blot out. Metaphor, in this biblical instance and in countless others all the way to Dickens and Wallace Stevens, is not a verbal structure existing for its own sake but a vehicle for giving precise and arresting form to a certain vision of the world, to the look and feel of the world as they impress the mind and, indeed, the body of the experiencer. In any case, is it true that metaphor and other kinds of figuration are predominant in the Bible? Metaphor is of course prominent in biblical poetry, but poetry is clearly a minority genre in the Hebrew Bible, limited to Psalms,
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Job, Proverbs, the Song of Songs, parts of the Prophets, and relatively brief poetic insets in the narrative books. The adoption of prose as the principal medium for narration is in fact one of the most innovative steps taken by the biblical writers, entailing profound consequences that Frye nowhere addresses. In the New Testament, moreover, the only formal poem is the Magnificat in Luke, to which one should probably add the exalted prosepoetry of the book of Revelation and the crucial emphasis on figurative language in Jesus’ parables. In the predominant prose narratives of the Hebrew Bible, only the most sparing use is made of either metaphor or simile. The very point of the narrating language often seems to be to focus our attention, without rhetorical embellishment, on the actions of the characters and so to make us ponder their moral, spiritual, psychological, historical, or political implications. Here, for example, is the report in Gen 25:34 of the consummation of Esau’s selling of his birthright to his brother Jacob: “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and he drank and he rose and he went off, and Esau spurned the birthright.” Or again, this is a biblical writer’s notion of how to convey to his audience the sequence of events of what will prove to be a fatally adulterous liaison, after David has seen Bathsheba bathing naked on her roof: “And David sent messengers and fetched her, and she came to him and he lay with her, she having cleansed herself of her impurity, and she returned to her house” (2 Sam 11:4). In this breathless progress of actions, not a moment is allowed for metaphoric elaboration. Our gaze is directed steadily at the events, and each one of them has moral or political or evidential weight in the complex articulation of the story. David sends messengers because this is the tale of a sedentary king ensconced in his palace operating through the compromising agency of intermediaries, through the emissaries of a new royal bureaucracy. Bathsheba’s voiceless compliance and the motives behind it remain an enigma, though the role she plays much later in securing her son Solomon’s succession to the throne may allow some retrospective inferences about what actuates her here. The participial phrase about Bathsheba’s having cleansed herself from her impurity is a crucial indication that she has recently completed a menstrual cycle, so that when she conceives, neither she nor David can have any doubt that her absent husband is not the father. Her return to her house at the end of the verse sets up a thematic space of two houses (the palace also being referred to simply as the king’s “house,” bayit): Uriah, summoned from the front, will refuse to go down to his house, sleeping instead outside the king’s house, and we are led to contemplate how David has violated the integrity of Uriah’s house by having the royal messengers bring the good soldier’s wife for an illicit dalliance in the king’s house. There is not even a hint of adjectival or adverbial emphasis in all this, nothing to compromise the hard focus on a series of verbs—sent, fetched, came, lay, returned—and two thematically fraught nouns, messengers and house. This verse is, of course, a
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verbal artifact, which is part of the much larger verbal artifact that is the David story, but it presents itself not as a linguistic gesture ultimately pointing to itself, or to the system of language through which it is enacted, but as a factual report of historical events that is also a strong moral and political interpretation of them, which is to say, a kind of intervention in them. Frye’s notion of literature, and of the literature of the Bible, as an autotelic activity thus runs directly against the grain of the whole literary enterprise of the Bible, which aspires to make a profound difference in history and in the realization of humanity’s potential by offering a strong representation of their actual unfolding. For the Bible’s commitment to the actual, Frye consistently substitutes an adherence to the symbolic. Let me hasten to say that he effects this substitution with remarkable interpretive resourcefulness, a quality that is one of the chief sources of what I have called the beguiling character of The Great Code. Although his eye, as we shall see, is fixed on overarching schemata, his lively and athletic intelligence does enable him on occasion to produce evocative insights into particular biblical texts. He notes, for example, that Lot’s wife is the sole instance in the Bible of a metamorphosis, triggered by her looking back into what he designates archetypically as “a demonic world.” Then, more interestingly, he goes on to observe: “The Bible . . . thinks rather in terms of a future metamorphosis of nature in an upward direction, when it will gain the power of articulateness instead of losing it,” and Isa 55:12 is happily cited as prooftext, with its imagery of the hills bursting out in song and the trees of the field clapping their hands (97). There is a certain homiletic touch in such reading because a poetic hyperbole used by Deutero-Isaiah to express a grand vision of exultation in the return to Zion is translated into a programmatic scheme of spiritual progress, part of a large mythological plot informing the whole biblical corpus. The homily, in any case, is an attractive one, proposing a suggestive horizon of meaning beyond any that the anonymous poet of the Babylonian exile was likely to have had in sight. What is most original in The Great Code—and also, I would argue, what is ultimately most misleading—is the fecundity with which it proffers elegant schemata to explain the design and purpose of the Bible. The book abounds in tables of sequenced phases of language-use, categories of imagery, graphic illustrations of a proposed U-shaped pattern of the biblical story as a whole and of its constituent parts, tabulated columns to correlate Old Testament topography with New Testament spiritual process and eschatology. The last of the schemata I have just mentioned is doubly symptomatic of Frye’s whole project. It suggests the degree to which he embraces a rather traditional Christian typological reading of the Old Testament as a prefiguration of the New—a way of reading that leads him to many odd claims about what is really going on in the Hebrew texts. Typology also
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enables his understanding of the Bible as a predominantly metaphoric book. If the narrative prose does not offer much in the way of metaphor on the microtextual level, metaphor may be conjured up from the settings and the material circumstances of the stories: the Sinai wilderness in which the Hebrew refugees from Egypt wander for forty years is less a geographical space between Egypt and Canaan than the stage in a spiritual progress, and hence can be appropriately aligned with Dante’s Purgatory; the Red Sea, associated by the Bible itself with birth-imagery, as Ilana Pardes has recently shown (16–39), is read as a type of baptism. Sequence, as one might expect from a typological critic, is one of Frye’s favorite terms. He sketches out a “structure of imagery” in the Bible that moves from the first garden through pastoral to agricultural to urban, “all contained in and infused by the oasis imagery of trees and water that suggests a higher mode of life altogether” (139). Frye is one of the great architectonic critics of the twentieth century, repeatedly exhibiting a kind of imaginative exuberance in eliciting large patterns from a welter of literary data. It is precisely this gift and this conceptual orientation that enabled him to make important contributions to the theory of genre. In The Great Code, one is often left wondering whether these lovely designs are intrinsic to the texts or rather artifacts of interpretation. The Bible, after all, is an anthology of disparate texts by very different writers spanning a millennium of literary activity, as Frye himself at one point concedes, and, whatever the compositional ingenuity of its Christian or Jewish editors, it seems doubtful that its variegated components really generate the sort of continuous symbolic plot that Frye proposes. Events are represented as taking place at oases or in deserts or in walled towns because these were the real available settings of the ancient Near Eastern world. And in the imagery of the biblical poems, rivers and seas, gardens and fields, flocks of sheep and cattle are repeatedly invoked, though by no means in a patterned sequence, because they were prominent elements of the realia familiar both to the poets and their audiences. Had the Hebrew poets inhabited a reality in which plumbing, bicycles, and e-mail were common, they would surely have used them in their metaphors. As it is, their figurative language is not in the least limited to what can be easily transposed into archetypes: Amos uses plumb lines, Jeremiah baskets of summer fruit and boiling pots, and the endlessly fecund Job-poet draws on cheese-making, weaving, grinding, business contracts, and courtroom proceedings for his imagery. Frye repeatedly refers to the approach to the Bible he is proposing as a literary approach, but his very use of the term in connection with the Bible suggests the rather peculiar conception of literature that he fostered. At a few points, Frye intimates that what he aspires to do is to read the Bible as poets through the ages have read it. This aspiration involves a fundamental confusion of purposes. It is the very nature of poetry to make the freest
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imaginative use of antecedent literature, and one more or less expects that the antecedent texts will often be drastically recontextualized, semantically flipped. The business of the poet, after all, is not necessarily to provide a persuasive or plausible reading of the earlier text but to use it as an expressive resource for making new literature. We need have no qualms, then, about Dante’s or Milton’s typological use of Hebrew Scriptures. It is quite another matter when a critic purports to show us how the Bible works as literature, which is what Frye claims to do. The elision between the project of poetry and the project of criticism is facilitated for him because, as we have already noted, literature is conceived above all as a self-reflexive system encompassing a sequence of mythological patterns. What The Great Code makes clear is that the ultimate source of this comprehensive conception of literature is the Christian typological reading of the Bible, which it seeks to rehabilitate. (Frye’s early training as a seminarian appears to have had a profound and enduring effect on his conception of both literature and the Bible. The traditional apparatus of Christian typology has in turn been reinforced and complicated by Blake’s strong mythopoeic reading of Scripture.) Frye prominently uses both “typology” and “archetype” as terms of analysis, and in the course of The Great Code it becomes evident that the symbolic equivalence between Old Testament type and New Testament antitype offers him a model for the symbolic equivalence between different manifestations of the same archetype in all literature. One may infer why he objects to what he views as the peculiarity of Jung’s use of the concept of archetype. For Frye, the archetype is not the product of a conjectured collective unconscious but is rather a lexical item in the symbolic vocabulary of a literary corpus, as each articulated image, figure, or event in the Old Testament is seen to be reflected in the literary mirror of the New Testament. Beyond the Bible, Western literature is seen as a quasi-biblical arrangement of mirroring structures that exhibit elaborate symbolic equivalencies analogous to those identified in Frye’s typological account of the Bible, as when he observes, “the garden of Eden, the Promised Land, Jerusalem, and Mount Zion are interchangeable synonyms for the home of the soul, and in Christian imagery they are all identical in their ‘spiritual’ form . . . with the kingdom of God spoken by Jesus” (171). It is worth noting how uncompromising Frye’s typological language is. These different moments of the biblical corpus in his formulation “are all identical,” “interchangeable,” “synonyms” of each other. I shall argue that just as languages have no true synonyms, there is no such thing as a truly synonymous narrative event or literary articulation. The essential weakness of Frye’s critical system, which is particularly transparent in his treatment of the Bible, is that it is interested in the individual literary text chiefly as a confirmation of the general pattern, and hence it has no adequate instruments of attention for the compelling or surprising peculiarities of the individual
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text. This predilection for the pattern or archetype produces less distortion when the work under inspection—say, Shakespeare or Milton—is closer to us in time because philological difficulties are relatively marginal and the sundry cultural contexts and references of the work are still relatively familiar. Applying this strategy of reading to a body of literature largely composed more than two and a half millennia ago in a Semitic language structurally and semantically unlike our own leads to some very odd claims about what the texts mean. It is worth noting that as Frye constantly negotiates between Christian typology and mythic archetype, he enriches typology with patterns drawn from comparative anthropology and by that very act magnifies the parallax in the view of the biblical text that he proposes. Thus, he associates Joseph’s being flung into the pit by his brothers with the incarnation (that is, the descent of the divine into the flesh), which is a rather traditional maneuver of typological interpretation. To this reading, however, of Joseph as Christian figura he adds a mythic archetype: “There is in Genesis a type of such a descent [i.e., as in the incarnation], not wholly voluntary, in the story of Joseph, whose ‘coat of many colors’ suggests fertility-god imagery” (176). The identification of Joseph’s temporary imprisonment in the pit with the incarnation strikes me as a bit of a stretch, but the assignment of fertility-god imagery to the coat of many colors seems altogether arbitrary. Is there really a documented correspondence between fertility gods and particolored coats? In any case, the Hebrew term ketonet passim, despite the King James version, probably does not refer to color but to ornamental strips (pas means “strip”), hence E. A. Speiser’s rendering of the term in the Anchor Bible as “ornamented tunic” (287–90). This particular sartorial item is referred to one other time in the biblical corpus: after David’s daughter Tamar is raped by her half-brother Amnon, we are told that she was wearing a ketonet passim, “for the virgin princesses did wear such robes” (2 Sam 13:18). The ornamented tunic or coat of many colors is thus identified by the Bible itself not with pagan ritual but with social status. Frye characteristically looks past the sociology to mythology, for the social meaning of the garment would lead him away from archetype to the actual institutional arrangements of a particular culture at a particular moment in time—the narrator’s need to gloss the sartorial practice in 2 Samuel 13 suggests that it may no longer have been familiar to his audience as a marker of royal status. This sort of transmogrification of the biblical text by promoting its images and narrative events to the lofty sphere of archetype is a repeated feature of The Great Code. There are, of course, actual archetypal images, usually drawn from ancient Near Eastern mythology, in the figurative language of biblical poetry. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the primordial sea beast, variously designated as Yamm, Rahab, and Leviathan, which in Canaanite cosmogonic myth is conquered by a land god so that the
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world can be securely established against the forces of formlessness or chaos figured by the sea. Poetry, we should recall, is extravagantly conservative in its habits of expression, as the frequent recourse of Christian poets to Greco-Roman pagan imagery, more than a millennium and a half after the passing of antiquity, vividly demonstrates. In the Bible, the beastly sea god Yamm is confined within the cage of imagery of Psalms, Isaiah, and Job, but, given the monotheistic scruples of the Hebrew writers, he is not allowed to become a part of the real plot of the biblical books. In Frye’s reading, on the other hand, anything that lives in the water can be an archetypal manifestation of the primordial sea monster. In this fashion, after confirming the traditional typological identification of Jonah’s descent into the belly of the big fish with Jesus’ descent into the world, Frye can confidently announce, “We should have enough training in metaphorical thinking by now to realize that the sea, the sea monster, and the foreign island on which he lands are all the same place and mean the same thing” (191). Frye’s attachment to sameness or perfect equivalence among the disparate elements of a story has the effect of flattening the story and sometimes badly distorting its contours. Is there, to begin with, any “sea monster,” archetypal or otherwise, in the book of Jonah? The narrator refers to the creature, quite plainly, only as the “big fish” (dag gadol), not as Leviathan or even whale, and no descriptive monstrous attributes are assigned to him, apart from the implied cavernous dimensions of his belly. The ancient editor of Jonah actually proposes a different archetypal identification for the big fish by inserting, after Jonah has been swallowed, a thanksgiving psalm in which the speaker praises God for having brought him back to life from the murk of the underworld. Even more problematic is the license provided by training in “metaphorical thinking” to equate Nineveh with the big fish. Frye calls it, quite carelessly, “a foreign island” because he wants to retain metonymic contiguity with the sea, though a moment’s reflection surely would have reminded him that Nineveh is located in the Mesopotamian Valley, a few hundred miles from the sea. (In the fabulous terms of the story, Jonah, once having been cast up on the shore, would presumably have had to walk several days in order to get to his prophetic destination.) The significance, not to speak of the plot function, of the big fish and of the pagan city are anything but identical. The fish represents a near-death experience from which God rescues Jonah in order to bring him to his senses about responding to the prophetic call. The pagan city, baking under a summer sun, is the theater of Jonah’s prophecy and, in the universalistic perspective of the book, a demonstration that a traditional pagan enemy of Israel can respond to God’s call and be an object of his compassion. Where in all this is there any sea monster? Even when a biblical writer actually draws on mythological imagery extensively in the representation of a sea creature, Frye ends up construing
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that representation as the constituent of a mythic plot nowhere in evidence in the biblical text. The awesome invocation of the Leviathan at the end of Job, of which Melville would make so much, of course exploits the myth of the primordial sea beast, Lotan, familiar to the poet from Canaanite poetry, of which we have recovered some vestiges in the Ugaritic texts. Job’s Leviathan, I would suggest, sits on the border between the mythological and the zoological. He is a brilliantly hyperbolic representation of the Egyptian crocodile, a strange, ferocious creature that neither the Hebrew poet nor his audience would have actually seen but about which they might have heard some report through travelers’ yarns. This Leviathan is in no way a force contending with God and associated with an opposed realm, like his Canaanite antecedent Lotan, but, quite the contrary, is a manifestation of the fierce and unfathomable beauty of God’s creation that the mere human Job cannot grasp. From Frye’s archetypal perspective, however, Leviathan is identified with the “realm of the demonic”: “Job lives in enemy territory, in the embrace of heathen and Satanic power which is symbolically the belly of the leviathan, the endless extent of time and space” (195). This sentence has a grand ring, but every significant term reflects a serious misperception, all of them dictated by the commitment to reading a mythological plot into the book. There are no heathens anywhere in Job, just glib monotheists (the three friends and Elihu) and one tormented, struggling monotheist. There is equally nothing “Satanic” in the book of Job. The satán (always with the definite article in the Hebrew because it is a common noun) means simply the adversary, as Frye recognizes at one point but then conveniently forgets, and that dramatic personage of a spirit of opposition remains at a considerable distance of literary evolution from the properly diabolic figure of Satan that later Jewish and Christian tradition would construct. The notion that the world of time and space is dominated by demonic powers is the exact antithesis of the vision of existence put forth by the book of Job. The principal argument of the Voice from the Whirlwind is that the whole vast creation in all its impenetrable contradictions of violence and beauty is God’s doing and under his providential care in ways that humankind cannot fathom. In this scheme of creation, there is no place for the demonic-mythological version of Leviathan Frye proposes, and the notion of the “belly” of Leviathan is purely the product of the bad habit of metaphorical thinking—the Hebrew poet never so much as alludes to the belly of the beast, and Job himself, far from being trapped in that cavity, symbolically or otherwise, is invited by the Voice from the Whirlwind to visually contemplate Leviathan/crocodile from a distance as a magnificently powerful creature he cannot control or understand. The distorting effects of equating every figure or event in a literary text with an archetype is a good deal more transparent in Frye’s treatment of the Bible than it is in his discussions of later works because his grasp of the
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philological issues and of the concrete historical contexts of Scripture is a little shaky. He has done a certain amount of homework on the subject, though it is noteworthy that The Great Code makes virtually no reference to specific items of biblical scholarship. But if one is constantly looking for the link between Old Testament and New and between both and some general item in the lexicon of mythology, there is always a temptation to fudge the facts of philology and literary articulation in order to get the overarching pattern, even if careful attention to the text and to a dictionary or concordance might instruct one otherwise. In his initial chapter on language, for example, Frye tells us that the Hebrew Bible, like the languages into which it was translated (he is thinking first of all of the Vulgate), has two terms that distinguish between soul and spirit, nefesh and rua˙ (20). In point of fact, there is no word for soul in biblical Hebrew, and the body-soul distinction is alien to the biblical worldview. Both nefesh and rua˙ mean “life-breath,” though rua˙ can also mean “wind.” Nefesh is connected with a verb of the same root that means something like to draw a long breath of relief after hard labor. By metonymy, nefesh also occasionally means “throat,” the passageway for the breath. To sublimate this concrete term into anima is still another gesture of Christianizing Hebrew Scripture. Elsewhere, as Frye is sketching one of his ingenious patterns, in this instance an interaction of air and light or fire as the process of creation (actually not in evidence in the Bible), he claims that Ecclesiastes’ favorite word hevel (“vanity” in the King James Version) sometimes means “dense fog” (124). But hevel means “vapor,” never “dense fog,” the very point of its metaphoric use by Ecclesiastes being its insubstantiality, its wispiness—the very opposite of density. Beyond such tweaking of terms, Frye’s commitment to metaphorical thinking often makes his reading of biblical texts arbitrary. Sometimes it is merely fanciful and often it is downright misleading. One can see the fancifulness in his meditation on the first words of Genesis. “We realize,” he claims, “that the central metaphor underlying ‘beginning’ is not really birth at all. It is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being” (108). Having seized the metaphorical ball, Frye runs with it, contending that “this metaphor of awakening may be the real reason for the emphasis on ‘days’ ” in the story of creation that ensues. All this reflects the response of a sensitive and thoughtful reader, and it has a certain charm, but it is hard to see where in the opening words of Genesis there is any hint of a theme or metaphor of awakening. The underlying problem is the assumption that this passage, and all others, must be controlled by a metaphor—if not birth, then awakening. The text itself presents the creation as a series of performative speech acts—hence the apt rabbinic epithet for God as “He who spoke the world into being,” mi she,amar vehayah ha
