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SEMEIA 89
© 2002
by the Society of Biblical Literature
Published Quarterly by
THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE
825 Houston Mill Road
Atlanta, GA 30329
CONTENTS
Contributors to This Issue ....................................................................................v
Introduction
James M. Kee ..........................................................................................1
ESSAYS
RESPONSES
David Gay
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E5
CANADA
david.gay@ualberta.ca
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 contribu-
tions 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 his-
toriography 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 opportu-
nity, members of the Departments of English and Religious Studies at
McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, organized an interna-
tional 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 stand-
point 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 self-
understanding 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.
-1-
2 semeia
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 roman-
tic 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 crit-
ical 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 understand-
ing (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 literary-
critical 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 sympatheti-
cally 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 historical-
critical 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 para-
digmatic 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.
kee: introduction 3
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 misread-
ings 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 unques-
tionably 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 tran-
scend 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
kee: introduction 5
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.
6 semeia
Ricoeur, Paul
1981 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and
Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge 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, dis-
closes 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 litera-
ture’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 mis-
represent 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 con-
ception 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 “mytholog-
ical 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 his-
tory: “[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 charac-
ter 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 pro-
visional definition of the literary as “a verbal structure existing for its own
-9-
10 semeia
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 fig-
uration in the Bible as evidence of its self-referential literary character. This
assertion, which is central to The Great Code, is vulnerable from two direc-
tions—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 con-
ceived, 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 assump-
tion 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 exam-
ples from both ancient and modern literature, that metaphor, far from being
directed toward the system of language, is very often a more precise instru-
ment of reference to the world of nature and experience than ordinary,
nonfigurative language. When Job, in the great death-wish poem that pre-
cedes 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 some-
thing 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 dis-
covery 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 Wal-
lace 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 pre-
dominant 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,
alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 11
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 prose-
poetry 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 charac-
ters 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 elab-
oration. 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 inter-
mediaries, 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 men-
strual 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 sol-
dier’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
12 semeia
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 point-
ing 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 real-
ization 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 sub-
stitution 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 ele-
gant 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 symp-
tomatic 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
alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 13
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 expres-
sive 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 lit-
erature, 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 rein-
forced and complicated by Blake’s strong mythopoeic reading of Scripture.)
Frye prominently uses both “typology” and “archetype” as terms of analy-
sis, 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 manifes-
tations 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 uncon-
scious 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 con-
firmation of the general pattern, and hence it has no adequate instruments
of attention for the compelling or surprising peculiarities of the individual
alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 15
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 famil-
iar. 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 Christ-
ian 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 orna-
mented 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 par-
ticular 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 lan-
guage 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
16 semeia
over the face of the deep, but even that seems intended as a setting of the
actual physical scene of the primordial realm just before God begins to
speak the world into being.
Interpretive matters are made considerably worse by the insistence on
archetypes. Thus, we are invited to contemplate the “traces” of an Oedipal
plot “in the story of Adam, whose ‘mother,’ in so far as he had one, was the
feminine adamah or dust of the ground, to whose body he returned after
breaking the link with his father” (156). The ingenuity of the reading must
be conceded, but it is extremely far-fetched. There is nothing in the story
that would allow one to imagine Adam aspiring to kill or displace God, who
in any case is not figured in it as a father. Moreover, the adamah out of which
Adam is fashioned is clearly represented by the writer not as a mother but
as the raw material from which God shapes him: the verb used for the
making of the first man is the one usually attached to the activity of the
potter, and if there is any metaphor in this second version of the creation of
humankind, it is drawn from manufacture, not biology. The fact that adamah
is a feminine noun is scarcely evidence for discovering a mother figure in
this primordial soil. All Hebrew nouns are either masculine or feminine,
and by this line of grammatico-psychoanalytic reasoning, the recurrent bib-
lical image of the “devouring sword” could end up being read, because the
Hebrew for “sword,” ˙erev, is feminine, as a figure of vagina edentata.
The most crucial aspect of biblical literature that is skewed by arche-
typal reading is its representation of character. Individual character was one
of the profound discoveries of the ancient Hebrew prose-writers. Perhaps
they may have been encouraged in their representation of insistent, some-
times unfathomable individuality by their belief in the idea that each human
is created in the image of God, like God not subject to stereotype, formula,
or prediction. In the patriarchal tales, such figures as Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph,
Judah, Tamar, even a scoundrel like Laban, are splendidly, stubbornly, their
own peculiar selves. The story of David offers us the greatest representation
of an individual life evolving through time in all of ancient literature, and
even its incidental characters—the shrewd and resourceful Abigail, the
impetuous Abishai, the pathetically devoted Paltiel, the two-faced
Shimei—are memorably etched individuals. But individuality of character
and the specificity of relationships between individuals evaporate when
every personage is assimilated to an archetype. Let me offer a final example
from The Great Code that is especially symptomatic of its interpretive bias.
David, we recall, after conquering Jerusalem from the Jebusites, brings up
the ark of the covenant to his new capital, dancing and gyrating in the tri-
umphal procession. His first wife, Michal the daughter of Saul, who has
been given back to him on his insistence after years of forced separation,
observes him from the palace window with withering scorn. There ensues
an angry confrontation between the two in which Michal excoriates David
20 semeia
for exposing himself to the slave-girls, and he responds that he, after all, is
God’s chosen ruler and he is the one who will decide what is honorable and
what is disgraceful. Oddly enough, Frye associates this scene with a pur-
ported practice among the Babylonians in which the king underwent an
annual ritual of humiliation, being slapped in the face, “in order to renew
his title to the kingdom” (90). This move of comparative anthropology
enables Frye to associate the story in 2 Samuel 6 with the story of the humil-
iation of the King of Kings in the Gospels. The compelling interest of
individual lives played out in the theater of politics in the David story dis-
appears in a fog of archetypes. The narrative in Samuel contains not the
slightest hint that a ritual of royal humiliation is being enacted. The story of
Michal and David is a story of politics and love. At its beginning, we are
told that she loves him, and she risks her neck to help him escape from her
father’s assassins. About David’s early feelings toward Michal we are told
nothing, though we can infer that the marriage is politically useful to him.
He surely has political utility in mind when he makes it a condition of the
peace treaty with the Saulide forces that Michal be returned to him, though
by this point he has collected other wives. At the moment of her return, we
are also made aware of the love her second husband, Paltiel, feels for her.
When the great explosion of Michal’s feelings takes place after David’s
dancing before the ark, there is both an edge of sexual jealousy in her
words—her anger over his exposing himself to the slave-girls—and a politi-
cal chasm between them: Michal now identifies herself with her father’s
house and accuses David of behaving in a manner unfit for a king, while his
sharp rejoinder is that God has chosen him instead of Saul to reign over
Israel. The last moment of this story is the report that Michal had no child
till her dying day. Is this divine punishment, or a simple consequence of
permanent estrangement of the spouses, or perhaps even a punitive frustra-
tion of David’s political ambition, whereby he might have reinforced his
claim to found a dynasty by fathering a child with the daughter of his pred-
ecessor on the throne?1 All such fascinating psychological and political
complexities of this remarkable story vanish when the confrontation
between husband and wife is explained as a type of the humiliated king.
There is, I think, a lesson to be learned here about literary interpretation
that goes beyond considerations of reading the Bible. The revelatory power
of the literary imagination manifests itself in the intricate weave of details of
each individual text. On occasion it can be quite useful to see the larger
frameworks of convention, genre, mythology, and recurring plot shared by
different texts. The identification of overarching patterns was Frye’s great
1 I owe the last of these three possibilities to Rabbi Israel C. Stein, written communication.
alter: northrop frye between archetype and typology 21
WORKS CONSULTED
Frye, Northrop
1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
1963 Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
Pardes, Ilana
2000 The Biography of Ancient Israel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Speiser, E. A.
1964 Genesis. AB 1. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
TOWARDS RECONCILING THE SOLITUDES
Joe Velaidum
McMaster University
abstract
Frye’s writings on the Bible and religion have not had the influence in reli-
gious studies that his writings on literary criticism have had in literary
theory. In fact, scholars of religion and those in literary criticism generally
do not engage each other concerning Frye’s studies of the Bible. Biblical
scholars often categorize Frye’s method as lacking a basis in biblical history
and as being full of unstated theological assumptions. They fail to under-
stand that Frye’s method of interpreting the Bible grows out of his larger
theoretical principles for literary criticism. Conversely, those from literary
studies who know Frye’s work categorize the criticisms levied against him
by biblical scholars as foreign to Frye’s purposes and therefore irrelevant.
They fail to appreciate, however, that these criticisms in turn reflect princi-
ples for reading the Bible that have long been dominant in the field of
biblical studies—and that have proven fruitful. In order to foster a true dia-
logue between these two disciplines, this essay explicates the epistemology
that underlies Frye’s critical thought and how it shapes his understanding
of God and the Bible. Once we understand the overall meaning of Frye’s
criticism, we can better situate his principles for interpreting the Bible and
begin to evaluate their worth in the academic study of the Bible.
The majority of the papers in this volume were first presented at a con-
ference at McMaster University whose intended purpose was to explore the
religious dimensions of Northrop Frye’s criticism. The representatives from
the departments co-hosting the conference (Religious Studies and English
Literature) realized that, while Frye ranks among the most important liter-
ary critics of the twentieth century, his writings on the Bible and religion are
not widely studied in religious studies, and they remain the most neglected
topic in the secondary literature devoted to Frye’s writings. The consider-
able excitement generated by the topic, the quality of papers analyzing
various aspects of Frye’s understanding of religion, and the lively and con-
genial dialogues they engendered made for a truly successful conference.
All of this, however, obfuscates a problem that emerged at many points
during the conference but was never fully articulated or directly addressed.
Many religious-studies scholars in attendance were quite impressed by the
papers that offered critiques of Frye’s use of the Bible and were perplexed
with the rebuttals from those who were more sympathetic to Frye’s work.
-23-
24 semeia
From the point of view of religious studies, these rebuttals did not account
for what they saw as the obvious methodological problems inherent in Frye’s
interpretation of the Bible. Conversely, those who attempted to explicate
Frye’s understanding of religion within the context of his literary-critical
principles defended Frye against what they saw as an incorrect evaluation of
Frye’s reading of the Bible in terms of a methodology not applicable to his
aims. The result was a respectful silence between these two academic fields.
The silence was unsettling, given the mandate for the conference and the fact
that Frye, as the most important modern literary critic interested in the Bible,
offers a place where true interdisciplinary dialogue might occur.
The underlying problem results not from the shortcomings of one group
or the other but from a lack of understanding on both sides. It is true that
Frye scholars for the most part do not understand that Frye’s methodology
runs contrary to many of the larger theoretical principles of biblical studies.
It is also true that many biblical scholars who have read only The Great Code
and Words with Power do not understand that Frye’s approach to the Bible is
informed by his own larger theoretical principles.
In order to find a place where genuine dialogue between religious-
studies scholars and literary critics on the topic of Frye’s understanding of
religion might be possible, the oeuvre of Frye’s criticism must be considered.
Once we understand how Frye envisions reality and the place of religion
within that context, we can begin to comprehend more fully Frye’s method
in studying the Bible.
Frye’s larger theoretical principles hinge on the most common spatial
metaphor in his writings: ascent and descent. In one of his notebooks he
writes that he is fixated on “meander-and-descent patterns” and that much
of what interests him in literature is “katabasis” (1964:356). Throughout his
published writings, Frye constantly alludes to a world above the regular
world we inhabit now. It is not a separate world but rather a perspective on
this world where boundless imaginative energy creates infinite possibilities
for humanity. He also describes a world below the one we inhabit now. This
too is not a separate world but rather a perception of this world as a sub-
human world of nature, which for Frye means a world of cruelty and tyranny.
This metaphorical elevator, up to a world above and down to a world
below, is found with many variations in Frye’s works. It appears in his dis-
cussion of the development of society in The Educated Imagination, where
civilization develops from a primitive identification with the brutalities of
nature to a utopian vision where the imagination is left free to contemplate
the best form of human society. In the second half of Words with Power, the
main focus is the movement of consciousness upwards and downwards. In
his discussion of his theological beliefs in The Double Vision, he continually
looks down to a single vision of nature, space, time, and God, and up to the
double vision of these things. In his first book, Fearful Symmetry, his masterful
velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 25
study of William Blake, Frye outlines Blake’s vision of hell (Ulro), nature
(Generation), Paradise (Beulah), and finally Eden as a movement from
memory or abstraction, to sensation, and, at last, to vision.
While this vertical image is present in Frye’s earliest writings, he identi-
fies its place in the history of ideas only late in his career when he writes that
“the journey of consciousness to higher and lower worlds” is a “vertical
image of the axis mundi” (1990b:95). The axis mundi is the traditional name
given to the various symbols that unite “heaven,” “earth,” and “hell.”
According to Mircea Eliade, the most widespread of these symbols are the
cosmic mountain, which usually symbolizes the origin of creation and there-
fore the center of the world; the cosmic pillar, which is the center post of a
cultic house and connects heaven to earth; and the cosmic tree, whose roots
extend to the underworld, whose branches represent the planes of earthly
existence, and whose uppermost region represents the Divine (1954:12–16;
1961:50; Sullivan: 20). According to Frye, his axis should be thought of as a
world-tree, as he tells us in Words with Power:
the trunk extending from the surface of the earth into the sky is nourished
by roots below, and the intensifying of consciousness represented by images
of ascent is unintelligible without its dark and invisible counterpart. (232)
For Frye, the axis is a metaphor that encapsulates how consciousness can
either receive reality passively or create reality actively.
Frye’s specific understanding of these alternatives comes from his explo-
ration of William Blake. Blake is not simply a poet for Frye but is rather an
intellectual and spiritual guide for Frye’s critical interests. Frye himself stated
that he “learned everything [he] knew from Blake” (1986:32). This is most
apparent when reading Frye’s first book alongside his last one. Published in
1947, Fearful Symmetry is a study of the thought and poetry of William Blake,
and The Double Vision, published posthumously in 1991, aims to give a clear
understanding of Frye’s view of the religious nature of reality. What we find
in The Double Vision, however, is a retelling of Fearful Symmetry, with the
noted difference that Fearful Symmetry explicates Blake’s artistic vision while
The Double Vision articulates Frye’s own personal religious views.
Indeed, Frye confesses to unconsciously modeling his personal life after
Blake’s, who removed all elements of incident in his life in order to remain
focused on the “germination” of his thought. He recommends that such a
mimesis should inform all literary scholarship:
I think it advisable for every critic proposing to devote his life to literary
scholarship to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual precep-
tor for himself, whatever the subject of his thesis. . . . [G]rowing up inside a
mind so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irre-
placeable experience in humane studies. . . . I notice that at the age of sixty,
I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to
26 semeia
me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me. . . .
And it is clear to me, though not demonstrable to anyone else, that this has
been imitated, on a level that consciousness and memory cannot reach,
from Blake, who similarly obliterated incident in his own life and for simi-
lar reasons. (1976b:15–16)
1 Presumably, this is what Frye is alluding to when he writes: “That an eighteenth century
English poet should be interested in contemporary theories of knowledge is hardly surprising”
(1947:14).
2 Locke, however, does give a cosmological argument for the existence of God in his phi-
losophy. He argues that since the existence of a human perceiver is beyond doubt, and since
something cannot come from nothing, there must be a God who is eternal (619–30).
velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 27
Thus, ideas are produced by the qualities found in objects. The crucial issue
for the differentiation between subject and object here is found in Locke’s
next differentiation between two types of qualities. Those qualities found in
objects that cannot be separated from their objects Locke calls “primary,”
and they give rise to ideas (215). Primary qualities of objects are quantifiable
and are therefore the only true domain of scientific analysis. Secondary
qualities are those characteristics in objects that produce sensations, and
since they can be separated from the objects they reside in they are not
essential to the object and are not conducive to true science. These second-
ary qualities, furthermore, require the perceiver in order to be realized,
while primary qualities inhere in things, independent of the perceiver.
Therefore, for Locke, true knowledge comes from the primary qualities of
objects and therefore comes only from what can be objectified.4
Blake, however, accepts innate ideas: “Innate Ideas are in Every Man,
Born with him, they are truly Himself” (648). As Frye notes, Blake is here
following George Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s empiricism:
3 Michael Ferber thus concludes: “So many Blakean positions nonetheless bear a family
resemblance to those taken by the Dissenting interest—the critique of clericalism and mystery,
the liberty of conscience, praise of ‘industry,’ abhorrence of war” (25).
4 Locke goes as far as to claim that secondary qualities of bodies would disappear if we
could discover the primary ones of their minute parts (301).
28 semeia
The chief attack on Locke in the eighteenth century came from the ide-
alist Berkeley, and as idealism is a doctrine congenial to poets, we
should expect Blake’s attitude to have some points in common with
Berkeley’s, particularly on the subject of the mental nature of reality,
expressed by Berkeley in the phrase esse est percipi: “to be is to be per-
ceived.” (1947:14)
Reflection on sensation is concerned only with the mere memory of the sen-
sation, and Blake always refers to Locke’s reflection as “memory.” Memory
of an image must always be less than the perception of the image. . . . Sensa-
tion is always in the plural: when we see a tree we see a multitude of
particular facts about the tree, and the more intently we look the more there
are to see. . . . The first point in Blake to get clear, then, is the infinite superi-
ority of the distinct perception of things to the attempt of the memory to
classify them into general principles. (1947:15–16)
Blake and Locke agree that knowledge can emerge only from experi-
ence. For Blake this experience originates in the perceiver who actively
creates the experience and therefore actively creates reality, while Locke
emphasizes the way in which reality offers experience to the human per-
ceiver. Despite their epistemological differences, both Locke and Blake must
account for how we can obtain an idea of categories of things if all knowl-
edge is specific. Since it is true that “Every Eye sees differently,” and if
reality is known by experience, in either case, how can we go from knowing
a “man” to knowing “Mankind,” for example?
Locke accounts for our ability to form generalized concepts as either
bringing separate ideas together into a relational whole or as the act of
velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 29
Perception for Blake is not passively received and then generalized to form
concepts but is rather the active creation of reality by the human perceiver.
Specifically, it is the imagination that guides perception in its creation of
reality. Therefore, it is not reason itself that is inadequate, but rather reason
that is not guided by the imagination that leads to creative impotence:
5 He writes: “The acts of the mind wherein it exerts its power over its simple ideas are
chiefly these three: (1) Combining several simple ideas into one compound one; and thus all com-
pound ideas are made. (2) The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex together,
and setting them by one another, so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into
one; by which way it gets all its ideas of relations. (3) The third is separating them from all other
ideas that accompany them in their real existence; this is called abstraction” (163).
30 semeia
the world of vision, the world of sight and the world of memory: the world
we create, the world we live in and the world we run away to. The world of
memory is an unreal world of reflection and abstract ideas; the world of
sight is a potentially real world of subject and objects; the world of vision is
a world of creators and creatures. In the world of memory we see nothing;
in the world of sight we see what we have to see; in the world of vision we
see what we want to see. . . . [The] imagination creates reality, and as desire
is part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we
passively accept. (1947:26–27)
When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a
Guinea? O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host
crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty. I question not my Cor-
poreal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window
concerning a Sight, I look thro it & not with it. (566)
illuminates the essential role God plays in Frye’s system. For Frye, as for
Blake, perception at its highest level is intimately connected to God, and
thus religion plays a crucial role in their constructions of reality. If existence
is perception, the higher humanity perceives, the higher the level of exis-
tence. There is no existence higher than that of God. By implication,
therefore, the highest level of perception is also the perception of God.
According to Blake, Frye tells us: “Man in his creative acts and perceptions
is God, and God is Man. God is the eternal Self, and the worship of God is
self-development” (1947:30).
We misunderstand, however, if we think that God is understood merely
through perception. Rather, God is the act of unified perception. If humanity
creates existence through perception, then humanity itself must also gain its
existence from perception. Interpreting Blake, Frye writes:
Just as the perceived object derives its reality from being not only perceived
but related to the unified imagination, so the perceiver must derive his real-
ity from being related to the universal perception of God. If God is the only
Creator, he is the only Perceiver as well. In every act of perception, then, the
act of perception is universal and the perceived object particular. (1947:31)
Thus we are confronted with two forces: a human world that gives existence
to objective reality, and a God who gives existence to us.
God is universal perception; in every act of universal perception we per-
ceive as God perceives. When the imagination is at the peak of its power as a
unifying instrument, there comes a point, for Frye, where one realizes that
there is not only a human agent at work in the journey of consciousness but
also “an infinitely active personality that both enters us and eludes us,” illu-
minating the “mysterium tremendum, the mystery that is really a revelation”
(1990a:107). For Frye, God in some sense remains distant from humanity
since he gives us our existence. But since God is the universal act of unified
perception, we can access God only through our own acts of unified percep-
tion. We must, then, at the level of the imagination be willing to view God as
both “a being surrounded by experience as it descends from creation to the
final identity of incarnation” and as an aspect of “human consciousness sur-
rounding experience, as it ascends from its ‘fallen’ state towards what it was
designed to be” (1980:47). If we do not view God in a manner that recognizes
both an external and internal reality, united as it is in the imagination, we
end up like Narcissus, staring back at our own reflection (1976a:61).
So when Frye claims that God is a “spiritual Other” we must under-
stand that this does not simply mean that God is an external reality
(1991:20). We must connect this to the type of experience that is engen-
dered at each level of the axis. If God, as a spiritual Other, is understood at
the level of nature, then we have idolatry. The Other at this level is nature,
“red in tooth and claw,” and therefore there is nothing to admire, nothing
velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 33
worth aspiring toward. It is for this reason that Frye finds little redeeming
value in Natural Theology, with the possible exception of Teilhard de
Chardin (1980:15–16). If God as Other is understood at the level of human
civilization and work, then self-idolatry ensues—the worshiping of human
accomplishments and structures, including the idolatry of art and any
other human creation, even the Bible (1991:39). It is only when the Other-
ness of God is equated with the human imagination that, in Frye’s words,
the “otherness of the spirit . . . may become ourselves” (1976b:96), and that
“one strives with God only by striving with or through oneself to obtain
a spiritual vision of God” (1991:79). Only in this act of imaginative percep-
tion is humanity able to break free from the single vision that chains us to what
both nature and civilization offer: in the unified perception of the greatest
art, Guernica, or Finnegan’s Wake; in the unified perception of great science
such as Einstein’s insights into space and time in his general and special
theories of relativity, or the elegance of Newtonian mechanics; in the
unified theories of literature and art of Aristotle, and, some would say,
the theories of Frye himself, humans are able to imaginatively re-create
the world, overcome the subject/object bifurcation that pervades the
level of civilization or the level of nature, and mimic the unified percep-
tion of God.
Instead, Frye treats the Bible typologically, stating that the Bible’s meaning
must be found in its final unified symbolism:
This typological way of reading the Bible is indicated too often and explic-
itly in the New Testament itself for us to be in any doubt that this is the
“right” way of reading it—”right” in the only sense that criticism can rec-
ognize, as the way that conforms to the intentionality of the book itself and
to the conventions it assumes and requires. (1982:79–80)
Here we can plainly see how Blake’s epistemology plays into Frye’s biblical
interpretation. If Blake’s epistemology lies at the root of Frye’s criticism,
which I firmly believe it does, then Frye’s attempt to unify the Bible through
understanding its typological shape is more readily contextualized. To
understand the Bible as a historical artifact, as many modern biblical schol-
ars do, is to reflect, in Blake’s words, on the “ratio.” Frye’s epistemology as
it is related to the Bible is concerned with the active unification of the vari-
ous texts into imaginative unity, not with a reflection or description of its
original contexts and meanings.
The source of many criticisms against Frye’s interpretation of the Bible
rests precisely in his lack of attention to the Bible’s historical elements. Here
I will cite examples from three highly influential authors interested in vari-
ous aspects of the Bible. Robert Alter finds that Frye’s treatment of the Bible
as a single unit ignores the particularities of biblical texts:
Individual literary texts, of course, cannot be read in isolation. Literature is
certainly a cumulative tradition and, as Frye has so often argued, an end-
lessly cross-referential system. But by fixing above all on the system, we
may forget to look for what the individual text gives us that is fresh, sur-
prising, subtly innovative, and that, alas, is the fault illustrated page after
page in The Great Code. (22)
Peter Richardson maintains that Frye’s work on the Bible is of limited value
to the experienced reader of biblical texts:
Northrop Frye provides an entrée into what he considers the main struc-
tures of the biblical narrative. Those with a good knowledge of the Bible,
who value its understanding of history, and who are aware of the need to
approach it critically may well be distressed by The Great Code. (400)
For Richardson, The Great Code is actually a modern apologetic in the sense
that it seeks to authenticate the validity of Christian scripture. However,
Richardson also believes that this apologetic motive is not intended by Frye
and that his goal was to show the main structure of the Bible itself. Richard-
son then concludes:
The book itself sounds as if Frye believes he has actually grasped the essen-
tial character of the bible, not as if he is trying to make it appealing to
velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 35
outsiders [the apologetic motive]. In the end, the intention of the author is
important. This makes reading of the volume a sad experience for I suspect
that Frye achieved something he did not set out to achieve, and that he
failed to achieve what he thought he had. (407)
David Jeffery writes that the subtitle of The Great Code, “The Bible and Litera-
ture,” belies the content of the book and that it is more akin to the
hermeneutical theology of Hegel, Derrida, and Kenneth Burke than it is to the
study of the Bible and literature. As such, the book is a useful addition to
understanding Frye’s own thought because it elucidates more fully various
aspects of his delineations of metaphor and rhetoric. As an “authoritative pro-
nouncement” on the study of the Bible and literature, however, Jeffery claims
that The Great Code fails because Frye too often ignores, misrepresents, or
seemingly unknowingly contradicts what is generally known and accepted
about the original intentions of biblical authors (135–41).
We can now better understand why Frye’s readings of the Bible have
been rejected by many modern biblical scholars. While Frye’s interpretation
is in the lineage of Romanticism in his search for unity and wholeness,
modern biblical scholarship is a product of the Enlightenment (Lockean)
principles of breaking things into their constituent parts because biblical
texts are understood as objective historical artifacts to be dissected in order
to find their most original form and meaning. So it is true that Frye’s typo-
logical structure elevates typology at the expense of history, the unity of the
Bible as a whole at the expense of the great diversity of specific texts, and
faith in the unified potential of the Bible at the expense of faith based in
actual historical events. These criticisms, however, important as they may be
for the academic study of the Bible generally, only demonstrate that Frye’s
use of biblical material is sometimes suspect. They do not show that his
overall perspective on the Bible is without merit.
Frye scholars must also realize that these criticisms from biblical schol-
ars are not simply driven by different personal beliefs about the Bible but
by a long history of biblical exegesis. However little knowledge some bibli-
cal scholars might have of the underlying structure of Frye’s epistemology,
they do know the degree to which Frye’s interpretation of specific elements
of the Bible is flawed. While these criticisms attempt to show the inadequa-
cies of Frye’s work as biblical scholarship, they must also be accompanied
by a critique of Frye’s overall epistemology in order to be complete. This
type of scholarship would acknowledge that while Frye’s interpretive
stance is foreign to most biblical scholars, the only way to evaluate his posi-
tion, or anyone else’s, is, as Daniel Patte has argued, to make explicit the
reasons for the “analytical,” “hermeneutical,” and “contextual” categories
of his interpretative practice (12–18). Such studies would identify and dis-
cuss how and why Frye chooses his critical categories for the study of the
36 semeia
Bible (analytical); how and why Frye actually interprets biblical texts
(hermeneutical); and whether or not Frye ultimately does provide mean-
ingful interpretations of the text (contextual). This article takes some early
steps within such an endeavor. It has laid bare the epistemology that
underlies Frye’s thought and his understanding of the Bible and religion,
and it thereby gives biblical scholars the necessary tools to answer the
“why” questions above. Further studies by biblical scholars are now needed
to show “how” Frye’s epistemology is connected to his understanding of
the Bible and the degree to which this further helps or hinders reading bib-
lical texts. In this way, Frye’s contributions to biblical studies can be
ascertained either positively or negatively, and his efforts may be given
their rightful place within biblical studies.
WORKS CONSULTED
Alter, Robert
1983 Review of Frye, 1982. Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 17:20–22.
Blake, William
1965 The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New York:
Doubleday.
Eliade, Mircea
1954 The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Pan-
theon.
1961 Images and Symbols. Trans. Phillip Mairet. London: Harvill.
Ferber, Michael
1985 The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
Frye, Northrop
1947 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.
1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
1963 The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
1964 Notebook 19. To be published as part of The Collected Works of Northrop
Frye by the University of Toronto Press.
1976a The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1976b Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press.
velaidum: towards reconciling the solitudes 37
abstract
Recognition is a recurring critical and theoretical premise throughout Frye’s
work. The culminating focus of recognition in Frye’s final three books is the
humanized God. By equating the humanized God with a release of human
imaginative power, Frye identifies criticism with the work of transforming
and renovating society. Three biblical narratives are paradigms for the
recognition of the humanized God: Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac; Gene-
sis 32, Jacob’s struggle with the angel; and the book of Job. Of these three,
the book of Job functions as a microcosm of the entire Bible in Frye’s final
three books. Frye assimilates William Blake’s interpretation of the book of
Job to the structure and purpose of his final books in order to demonstrate
for his readers the release of imaginative power needed to undertake cre-
ative and restorative work in the spheres of culture, education, and religion.
In the preface to Words with Power, Frye remarks that much of his
“critical thinking has turned on the double meaning of Aristotle’s term anag-
norisis, which can mean ‘discovery’ or ‘recognition,’ depending on whether
the emphasis falls on the newness of the appearance or on its reappearance.
Of course every true discovery must in some sense relate to what has always
been true, and so all genuine knowledge includes recognition, however
interpreted” (1990b:xxiii). This statement illustrates many of the intellectual
habits and commitments that shape Frye’s criticism. It constructs, for
example, a relationship between Frye and an influential predecessor by
re-creating and expanding upon Aristotle’s definition in a contemporary
context; it also defines knowledge in terms of relationships that link the past
and the present within an ongoing, dynamic body of criticism; it is ulti-
mately conscious of the value of teaching by suggesting the function of
criticism in education, or the pursuit of “genuine knowledge.”
As it occurs in the second of Frye’s final three books, Frye’s reflection on
the centrality of recognition in his thinking alerts us to its specific place in the
critical relationship that is the subject of his final statements: the relationship
between the Bible and literature. This specific context would, of course, be
unknown to Aristotle, for whom the concept of anagnorisis is a defining event
in a tragic mythos that is in turn extrinsic to, and problematic for, the study of
-39-
40 semeia
the crisis and climax of each poem. Thus, in the closing movement of book 4
of Jerusalem, the awakening Albion, who represents Britain, sees Jesus as the
Good Shepherd:
The seven attempts made by God to awaken Albion divide history into
seven great periods, each with a dominating religion. These Blake identifies
with the “Seven Eyes of God” mentioned in Zechariah, and he gives these
“eyes” the names of Lucifer, Moloch, the Elohim, Shaddai, Pachad, Jehovah
and Jesus. The “eighth eye” he occasionally speaks of as the apocalypse or
awakening of Albion himself. (Frye, 1947:128)1
1 Frye notes Zech 3:9 as a source for the seven eyes: “For behold the stone that I have laid
before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof,
saith the Lord of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.”
42 semeia
eighth eye, subdivided into two distinct forms of apocalypse that comprise
the seventh and eighth phases. The seventh consists of a “panoramic” apoc-
alypse, or the idea of apocalypse as an objective, perceivable spectacle; the
eighth becomes the “participatory” visionary apocalypse that signals the
awakening of the reader in Albion’s place. Thus “the reader completes the
visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along
with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the
ego has disappeared” (1982:138).
Although Frye suggests that no improvement takes place through the
seven phases of revelation, an increasing comprehension of the power of the
humanized God does emerge through a process of dialectical tension. Emer-
gence is perhaps an operative term in Frye’s clarification of the humanized
God. In the second, participatory apocalypse “the creator-creature, divine-
human antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the
transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our
vision. After the ‘Last Judgment,’ the Law loses its last hold on us, which is
the hold of the legal vision that ends there” (1982:137). Like Blake’s Albion,
the reader emerges from the restricted view of legality as a mechanism of
condemnation (a view too often superficially equated with Old Testament
“law” in some Christian writings) and gains, from the typological perspec-
tive of the apocalypse, a wider view of Torah as a vehicle of community.
Frye is therefore linking the phases of gospel and apocalypse in the same
way that Blake links Jesus and Albion: the first is the historical incarnation
of god-as-man; the second is the potential manifestation of the humanized
God in the present. All seven phases, like the significance of sevens in
Zechariah and Revelation, make the processes of recreation and restoration
in the course of time the antitypes of the seven days of creation in Genesis.
As I will later demonstrate, the typology of creation and re-creation is cen-
tral to Frye’s reading of Job.
The disavowal of progress as improvement in the sequence of the bibli-
cal canon also declines any sense of the absolute superiority of one phase of
revelation over another; instead, the seven phases gain their significance in
the context of their various relationships. This context is analogous to the
intertextual, signifying relationships that elevate biblical myth and
metaphor to the level of kerygma, the rhetoric of proclamation that has as its
ultimate message the identity of the divine and the human. The disavowal
of a naïve form of progress leads Frye to repudiate terms such as optimism or
pessimism as descriptions of his own religious thinking. His final book, The
Double Vision, does, however, anticipate a better future. He speaks, for
example, of gaining a “growing insight into our own conditioned limits,” a
phrase that connects Frye to the purposes of much contemporary critical
theory. And he imagines a Christianity no longer burdened by the demonic
aspects of its past: “I think immense changes could be brought about by a
gay: the “humanized god” 43
Christianity that was no longer a ghost with the chains of a foul historical
record of cruelty clanking behind it, that was no longer crippled by notions
of heresy, infallibility, or exclusiveness of a kind that should be totally
renounced and not rationalized to the slightest degree” (1991:58). This
vision of organized Christianity functioning freely enough to reciprocate its
own emancipation with the emancipation of others is not a vision of naïve
optimism but of a more solid hope, a word that echoes throughout The
Double Vision as an evocation of Heb 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” As I will argue, this social
vision of emancipation is grounded in Frye’s hope for, and reading of, an
emancipated scripture. The emancipation of scripture he argues for is clari-
fied in the biblical paradigm of recognition he develops.
In “The Humanized God,” which comprises the final section of The
Double Vision, Frye surveys a sequence of anthropomorphic conceptions and
images of God in their biblical-canonical sequence. The sequence comprises
a flexible amalgam of the seven phases of revelation explored in The Great
Code and the seven eyes of God outlined in Fearful Symmetry. Frye notes that
nowhere “does the Bible seem to be afraid of the word anthropomorphic”
(1991:76). Anthropomorphism, which characterizes much of the imagery of
the Bible in its depiction of God, is distinct from the complete humanization
Frye works toward in the conclusion to this book. An anthropomorphic
deity can serve as a projection of human cruelty and unpredictability. Thus
the Jehovah of the Old Testament is an “intensely humanized figure, as vio-
lent and unpredictable as King Lear” (1991:74). An anthropomorphic god
can, on the surface, appear erratic and inconstant: “What, for example, are
we to do with a God who drowns the world in a fit of anger and repeoples it
in a fit of remorse, promising never to do it again (Gen 9:11); a God who
curses the ground Adam is forced to cultivate after his fall, but removes the
curse after Noah makes a tremendous holocaust of animals, the smell of
their burning flesh being grateful to his nose (Gen 8:21)” (1991:74). The
anthropomorphic god also shows what Frye calls strong “trickster affinities”
in his command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and in his exposure of Job to
an arbitrary testing.
The sequence, as it proceeds through the prophets to the parables of the
New Testament, is figured as a “purgatorial journey” that leads from natu-
ral to spiritual perception dichotomized in 1 Cor 2:14, the biblical locus of
double vision. As a template of reading, the process becomes a metaphorical
“journey of understanding” that develops the dialectic of natural and spiri-
tual perception by distinguishing hell as an intensification of human evil
from heaven as the divine image purified of the reflection of human evil.
The site of the confusion of heaven and hell is, of course, our world. Hence,
“Human life appears to be a mingling of two ultimate realities, which we
call heaven and hell. Hell is the world created by man, and heaven, or at
44 semeia
least the way to it, is the world created through man by God” (1991:79). The
“mingling” Frye speaks of is a confusion of divine and demonic characteris-
tics in the human perception of God. For Frye, social and literary criticism,
in addition to literature, can be a part of the creative effort to distinguish
divine and demonic characteristics, and thus “clean up the human image of
God” (1991:xv).
The process of purifying the divine image consists of three stages:
demonic parody, redemptive power, and apocalyptic vision (1991:79–80).
On the binding of Isaac, Frye observes that the story
has a demonic basis: the sacrifice of human children that was practiced
around Israel but forbidden to the Israelites themselves. This story also sets
up a demonic situation and then moves in a redemptive direction, where
Abraham becomes aware of the uncompromising priority of God’s right to
human devotion against the closest of earthly ties. We may compare Jesus’
remark in the Gospels that he had come to bring not peace but a sword, and
cause division even among families. (80)
Even in this compressed reading of the story, Frye articulates the redemp-
tive as a countervailing movement that divides and distinguishes the divine
from the demonic in human consciousness. His reading of Genesis 32, Jacob’s
struggle with the angel, illustrates the same patterns. The demonic basis of the
story consists in its initial association of the angel with local demons or night
creatures. The struggle then initiates a redemptive countermovement as Jacob
demands a blessing from the angel. Finally, by verse 30,
we have a very strong hint that in some way and some sense Jacob has been
striving with God himself, though surely one can strive with God only by
striving with or through oneself to obtain a spiritual vision of God. So we
have, first, a demon of darkness who attacks or mutilates those who
encounter him, then a redemptive context in which Jacob demands a bless-
ing from an angel, and a final outcome in which Jacob is transformed by
divine power into Israel, the individual centre and starting point of God’s
people. (ibid.)
As in his reading of the binding of Isaac, Frye suggests that the recipro-
cal recognition of God and Jacob follows a redemptive separation of divine
and demonic elements in Jacob’s understanding of God.
The book of Genesis, from which these paradigmatic stories are taken,
can rightly be called a book of recognitions: the biblical anagnorisis begins
ironically with the opening of Adam and Eve’s eyes after they taste the for-
bidden fruit and culminates in Joseph’s revelation of himself to his brothers
in Egypt (Gen 45:4–9). The binding of Isaac is particularly dense with refer-
ences to sight and seeing leading to recognition. At the tense moment when
Isaac tells Abraham that they have no sheep for the sacrifice, Abraham
gay: the “humanized god” 45
remarks: “God will see to the sheep for the offering, my son.” In his recent
translation of Genesis, Robert Alter comments that the idiomatic force of
seeing is “providing,” but “God’s seeing lines up with Abraham’s seeing the
place from afar, his seeing the ram, and the seeing on the Mount of the Lord.
Beyond the tunnel vision of a trajectory toward child slaughter is a promise
of true vision” (1996:105n8).
Alter’s distinction between “tunnel vision” and “true vision” invites
comparison to Frye’s distinction between demonic and divine premises in
biblical narrative. The demonic stage is a threshold in a process that leads
toward the recognition of the humanized God. Abraham’s resolution holds
within it the subordination of paternal devotion to a divine command that is
demonic in its apparent negation of God’s promise to Abraham: “I will
establish my covenant between me and thee in their generations, for an
everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee” (Gen
17:7). The power of the story consists primarily in the terror of subordinated
devotion; the harsh facts of Abraham’s preparation, registered in the split-
ting of the wood and the saddling of the ass, intensify this terror without
raising expectations of a reversed outcome. The middle stage of the process,
which Frye calls the redemptive stage, consists of the three-day journey to
the mountain. It marks the difference between unreflective religious fanati-
cism, which acts without distinguishing the command and the result, and
deliberate, spiritual reflection, which seeks a broader perspective in the
dimension of time.
The journey is thus the embodiment of time in biblical narrative. Alter’s
idea of narrative “trajectory” invites comparison to Frye’s view of narrative
as a “journey of understanding” (1991:80). Trajectory and journey in turn
constitute the temporality of biblical narrative. As Alter observes, biblical
narrative “embodies the basic perception that man must live before God, in
the transforming medium of time, incessantly and perplexingly in relation
with others” (1981:22). The dynamic of transformation in the medium of
time is impelled, Alter argues, by a dialectical tension between providence
and human freedom: “the depth with which human nature is imagined in
the Bible is a function of its being conceived as caught in the powerful inter-
play of this double dialectic between design and disorder, providence and
freedom” (33). This dialectical tension explains the preoccupation of biblical
narrative with the course of providential history: “The God of Israel, as has
been observed, is above all the God of history: the working out of His pur-
poses in history is a process that compels the attention of the Hebrew
imagination, which is thus led to the most vital interest in the concrete and
differential character of historical events” (32). For Alter, working with the
primary data of biblical narrative, the “concrete and differential character of
historical events,” or the intense and realistic specificity that registers the
historicity of events, is a hallmark of the art of biblical narrative.
46 semeia
disciples after the resurrection; the apocalypse concludes with the marriage
supper of the Lamb and the return of the tree of life. As James Whedbee
argues in The Bible and the Comic Vision, the movement from tragedy to
comedy in the Hebrew Bible is “not simply sequential but includes a dialec-
tic interplay between tragedy and comedy with comedy typically having
the last word” (285).
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are non-narrative poetic texts and do not fully
illustrate the dialectical relationship between comedy and tragedy in biblical
narrative. The biblical narrative that best illustrates this dialectical opposi-
tion in Frye’s thinking is the book of Job. In The Great Code, Frye calls Job the
epitome of biblical narrative. While Job is normally classified as a poetic
wisdom text with Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, Frye treats it as biblical narra-
tive because the linear direction of time emphasized in wisdom literature is
amalgamated with the prophetic perspective of loss, deliverance, and
restoration that Frye approximates as a “U-shaped story” (1982:193). In The
Great Code, Frye considers Job a comedy through its final emphasis on the
restoration of the human community (198). In Words with Power Frye con-
cludes by exploring the reverse transformation of Job from tragedy into
comedy through Job’s participation in God’s speech at the close of the poem.
The Double Vision reiterates these readings in a compressed manner by
emphasizing the broadest alignment of the biblical vision with comedy in
the temporal movement from creation to apocalypse. Like Job, the binding
of Isaac and Jacob’s struggle with the angel emulate this pattern within
more confined narrative units. In fact, Frye concludes his discussion of Job
in The Great Code by comparing Jacob’s struggle to the double movement of
time: “The inference for the reader seems to be that the angel of time that
man clings to until daybreak (Gen 32:36) is both an enemy and an ally, a
power that both enlightens and cripples, and disappears only when all that
can be experienced has been experienced” (1982:198).
Frye notes that the book of Job is “usually classified among the tragedies,”
but he rarely elaborates in detail on the critical history of a biblical text
(1982:196). James Whedbee considers the treatment of Job as tragedy, which
includes arguments for its dependence on Greek tragedy, and includes, for
example, Terrien’s view of Job as a unique “festal tragedy” that presents the
“theme of royal expiation that centers in the vicarious suffering of the king”
(222–23). Whedbee argues that comedy explains the overarching structure of
Job, yet he asks, “How can a book so filled with agony and despair, so domi-
nated with the images of suffering and death, be considered a comedy?”
(224). Here we need to consider that Frye’s approach to Job as a comedy of
restoration depends heavily on William Blake’s interpretation of Job in his
illustrations to the book. In his study of Blake’s illustrations, Frye observes
that Job is “technically comedy by virtue of Job’s restoration in the last few
verses, but the comic conclusion seems so wrenched and arbitrary that it is
gay: the “humanized god” 49
But for the book we have, restoration for an individual alone could only be
an arbitrary act of a deity separate from Job, and a somewhat vulgar act at
that, because of its elimination of love. Even in a society as patriarchal as
Job’s, three new daughters would hardly make up for the loss of the previ-
ous daughters. (241)
In spite of these and other disconcerting issues that perplex readers of the
book of Job, Blake found in this narrative a “microcosm of the entire biblical
story” (234) and a comic conclusion that is inevitable rather than arbitrary
(230–31). Frye’s assumption of Blake’s interpretation of Job is so complete that
Job becomes a microcosm of the Bible in Frye’s final three books and a para-
digm for the specifically comic form of recognition he explores in the
conclusion of The Double Vision.
Frye takes at least three premises from Blake’s reading of Job. The first is
the premise that the Bible progresses towards a recognition of the “human-
ized” God. In “Blake’s Bible,” Frye argues that Blake “never believed,
strictly speaking, either in God or in man; the beginning and end of all his
work was what he calls the ‘Divine Humanity.’ He accepted the Christian
position because Christianity holds to the union of divine and human in the
figure of Christ, and, in its conception of resurrection, to the infinite self-
surpassing of human limitations” (1990a:270). Christ is thus the human
outcome of a progressive revelation realized in Job’s consciousness when
“God as a projected old man in the sky turns into Christ, God as Man, God
as the essence of Job himself” (1976:236). In the conclusion to The Double
Vision, Frye subsumes Blake’s sequential perception of the humanized God
into a summary of anthropomorphic conceptions of the deity; he then asso-
ciates his concept of resurrection, not with the objective image of a risen
Christ, but with a “growing insight into our own conditioned limits” that is
pursued by the critical imagination and that is identical with the release of
creative and imaginative power within the individual, which is “the essence
of Job himself.” Thus, in a passage that anticipates Frye’s reading of Genesis
32, Frye states that Blake’s Bible tells us “not that man fell into chaos, but
that he can climb out of it if he uses all his creative capacities to do so. This
means using everything he has that is imaginative, and the imagination,
Blake says, is the human existence itself” (1990a:285).
A second premise Frye takes from Blake is that Job is a second book of
Genesis. Frye states that the books from Genesis to Esther “are concerned
with history, law, and ritual; those from Job to Malachi with poetry,
prophecy, and wisdom. In this sequence, Job occupies the place of a poetic
50 semeia
2 In Fearful Symmetry, Frye selected plate 20 to represent the sixth crisis in Blake’s cyclic
myth, the “recovery of the unfallen state” (1947:434). As in Damon’s commentary (50), Frye
sees Job as “raised to the unfallen world” and united with the “creative Word of God”
(1947:434).
gay: the “humanized god” 53
fully experience the sense of redemption.” Hence, in plate 20, “Job’s arms,
outspread over his daughters, show that he with his daughters forms part of
a larger human body” (1976:242). The larger human body is a metaphor for
the redeemed community. In developing this metaphor in The Great Code,
Frye selects the name of one of Job’s daughters to further identify redemp-
tion and recognition: “One of Job’s beautiful new daughters has a name
meaning a box of eye shadow. Perhaps if we were to see Job in his restored
state, we should see, not beautiful daughters or sixteen thousand sheep, but
only a man who has seen something we have not seen, and knows some-
thing that we do not know” (1982:197).
The polarization of the cosmos that organizes Frye’s reading of Job
occurs in both time and space. Polarization in time occurs in the distinction
between the first and second creation as it is represented to Job in language.
This polarization locates Job in the continuum of fallen time but affirms his
role as an active participant in the re-creative and redemptive movement of
providence within that continuum. The temporal movement is the emphasis
of Frye’s reading of Job in The Great Code. Frye emphasizes the polarization
of space in Words with Power. Here, Job “has reached the end of his narrative
in his present situation, and must now look up and down. What he sees is
the good creation in its original, unspoiled form: at one pole there is the
intelligible harmony when the morning stars sang together; at the other is
the leviathan who is king over all the children of pride (41:34). After this
vision of a polarized cosmos Job can be restored to his original state because
God has restored himself, so to speak, to his original state” (1990b:311). The
polarization of time and space in their full extension demonstrates both how
the book of Job functions as a microcosm of the entire Bible for both Blake
and Frye and how Frye assimilates Blake’s biblical poetics to the structure of
his biblical criticism. For Blake, recognition is triggered by a crisis of vision
that succeeds the comprehensive, epic exploration of time and space by the
poetic imagination. In Blake’s Milton, Los, who represents time as the “Spirit
of Prophecy” (120), calls for the apocalypse when this process of exploration
is complete:
Fellow Labourers! The Great Vintage & Harvest is now upon Earth
The whole extent of the Globe is explored: Every scatterd Atom
Of Human Intellect now is flocking to the sound of the Trumpet. (120)
In the same manner, God’s speech from the whirlwind completes Job’s
exploration of the fallen world in both space and time. The Great Code and
Words with Power are similarly works of extension. The Great Code extends
the Bible in time through a horizontal typological sequence from creation to
apocalypse; Words with Power extends the Bible in space through a vertical
survey of imagery from the furnace to the mountain. In Frye’s assimilation
of Blake’s poetics, The Great Code and Words with Power are to The Double
gay: the “humanized god” 55
WORKS CONSULTED
Alter, Robert
1981 The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books.
1996 Genesis: Translation and Commentary. New York: Norton.
Aristotle
1984 Poetics. Pp. 63–124 in Literary Criticism from Plato to Dryden. Ed. Allan H.
Gilbert. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Blake, William
1988 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David Erdman. New
York: Doubleday.
Damon, S. Foster
1966 Blake’s Job: William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. Providence, R.I.:
Brown University Press.
Frye, Northrop
1947 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.
1957 The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
1967 Fools of Time: Studies in Shakespearean Tragedy. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
1976 “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job.” Pp. 228–44 in Spiritus Mundi: Essays
on Literature, Myth and Society. Richmond Hill: Fitzhenry & Whiteside.
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.
1990a “Blake’s Bible.” Pp. 270–88 in Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays. Ed.
Robert Denham. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
1990b Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.”
Toronto: Penguin.
gay: the “humanized god” 57
1991 The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Schreiner, Susan
1994 Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and
Modern Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Whedbee, James
1998 The Bible and the Comic Vision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
THE ASHES OF THE STARS:
NORTHROP FRYE AND THE TRICKSTER-GOD
Michael Dolzani
Baldwin-Wallace College
abstract
In both his final books on the Bible and religion, Northrop Frye was
haunted by the image of a trickster-God, an ambiguous figure like the God
of the book of Job, with whom he felt it was his duty to struggle like Jacob
with the angel. He began his career identifying with the Romantic revolu-
tionary solution of Blake, who rejected the negative trickster-God as a
symbol of false authority and found the true trickster deity in the creative
spirit of humanity. But in his late works, Frye supplements such a solution
with the vision of a positive trickster-God as a mysterious Other who may
liberate us by breaking through the egocentric limitations of our own ambi-
tions and desires. Ultimately, these alternative visions become imaginative
contraries in a process he calls the dialectic of Word and Spirit.
Upon the ashes of stars, the undivided ones of the family, lay the poor
character, after having drunk the drop of nothingness lacking to the
sea. . . . Nothingness having departed, there remains the castle of purity.
Mallarmé, Igitur (trans. Mary Ann Caws)
It was within days of his death that Carl Jung gave the following
answer to an interviewer who asked him for his definition of God: “To
this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my
willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective
views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or
worse” (Edinger: 101). Edward Edinger, who reports Jung’s response in
Ego and Archetype, comments that “Jung is calling God what most people
call chance or accident. He experiences apparently arbitrary happenings
as meaningful rather than meaningless.”According to this way of think-
ing, “all the vicissitudes of the outer and inner life have a meaning and
-59-
60 semeia
1 Throughout this essay “Notes” refers to a set of Frye’s typed notes and “NB” to one of his
unpublished notebooks. Both are currently being edited for publication as part of The Collected
Works of Northrop Frye.
dolzani: the ashes of the stars 61
a God, some numinous presence, as the source of that secret order. But
what a God! Edinger is right to associate him with the God of Job.
Throughout his trials, Job keeps challenging God to step out from behind
the curtains and answer him. Perhaps he was thinking of something like
Blake’s “How do you know but that ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is
an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (35, plate 5). But
Blake’s aphorism is what he would have called an augury of innocence,
and Job is not in the land of innocence. Be careful what you wish for, espe-
cially if it is a vision of God; when God finally turns from deus absconditus
into deus ex machina, he speaks as a storm god out of a whirlwind. His
speech does indeed unfold a world of delight, a sabbath vision of creation
in which the morning stars sang together—but it ends unpredictably,
when God hangs Leviathan in front of Job’s nose and says, in effect, he
who made the lamb also made this: draw your own conclusions. True, he
restores everything Job has lost; but that seems to be because he has bet on
Job like a gangster on a racehorse and is in a magnanimous mood after the
bet pays off.
Nor is this Godfather confined to the book of Job. In the traditional
interpretation of the atonement, God gives his Son’s life over to Satan as
payment for his previous lost bet on Adam and Eve; typical mobster, he
cheats, because this is the one life over which death has no power. When the
Christians cheat Shylock of a death in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, their
modus operandi is that of their own God—and Shylock cannot complain,
because he has himself invoked as precedent for his financial practices some
of the shadier wheelings and dealings of the Old Testament trickster Jacob,
of whom more in a moment.
But the God of Job is also the God of our own lives. Most of the Old
Testament is preoccupied with the deeds of the chosen ones, the tribal lead-
ers and judges and kings and prophets and wise men who make history. But
Job is just an ordinary guy, though an affluent and successful one, not even
an Israelite; as an Edomite, he is perhaps by implication in the position of
Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in the society of Dublin. His God is the God of
Robert Altman’s film Short Cuts, who will throw a child suddenly in front of
Lily Tomlin’s car on her way home from work; who will rock Los Angeles,
city of angels, with an earthquake, apparently for no greater reason than
that it is Los Angeles, thereby distracting its occupants momentarily from
their preoccupation with their own neuroses. I find myself wondering what
the readers of Good Housekeeping Magazine, where the interview with Jung
was published, made of his comment, for his is definitely not a God of good
housekeeping. In fact, he’s a homewrecker, as Job himself found out and as
Frye says in an unpublished note: “Jehovah is not a theologian’s God; he’s
an intensely humanized figure as violent and unpredictable as King Lear.
He does silly and vicious things; as a human being we wouldn’t let him into
62 semeia
our front parlors” (Notes 54.1, par. 22). (He is even destructive of the gram-
mar in that last sentence.)
He is in short a trickster-God, and the fact that he is featured in crucial
passages in both of Frye’s final works shows Frye’s preoccupation with him
during the final years of his life. In The Double Vision, Frye asks (74–75):
What, for example, are we to do with a God who drowns the world in a fit
of anger and repeoples it in a fit of remorse, promising never to do it again
(Gen 9:11); a God who curses the ground Adam is forced to cultivate after
his fall, but removes the curse after Noah makes a tremendous holocaust of
animals, the smell of their burning flesh being grateful to his nose (Gen
8:21); a God who rejects Saul as king after he spares his enemy Agag out of
human decency (because he should have been offered to God as a sacrifice)
and inspires Samuel to hew Agag in pieces and tell Saul that he has com-
mitted an unforgivable sin (1 Sam 15); a God who observes children
mocking the prophet Elisha and sends bears to eat up the children (2 Kgs
2:23), and so on? All mythologies have a trickster God, and Jehovah’s treat-
ment of the Exodus Pharaoh (hardening his heart), of Abraham, perhaps
even of Job, shows clear trickster affinities. Some of the most horrendous of
his capers, such as the sacrifice of Isaac, are tests or trials of faith, implying
a lack of knowledge of what is already in Abraham’s mind and will.
An almost verbatim passage in Words with Power adds (106–7) the “long bar-
gaining scene with Abraham about the number of righteous men needed to
save Sodom.”
If you have such a God on your hands, you are going to have to strug-
gle. In Frye’s later work, this struggle is what he means by the purgatorial;
its telos is re-creation, one of the keys to his thought. Frye’s Bible books
struggle with the Word in an attempt to re-create both its aspects: as text
and as vision of God. The following unpublished note indicates how his role
model was the figure who was lamed in a wrestling match with God, but
was compensated by a visionary dream of the axis mundi that is the organiz-
ing image of Words with Power: “Powerful pull toward the primitive
submission to doctrine: I’ve always been attracted to those who took reli-
gion seriously enough to use it as a basis, but then struggled with it like
Jacob with the angel. Blake, Emily Dickinson, Yeats, perhaps Rimbaud,
certainly Baudelaire. Nobody gets converted to Protestantism: it doesn’t
provide the right primitive basis. It provides only a medium for struggle”
(Notes 53, par. 103). Far from being the struggle of Frye alone, however, re-
creation becomes the dialectical evolution of religious consciousness: “The
central image of man trying to make his divine creature into a decent God is
Jacob (Israel) wrestling with the angel” (Notes 54.1, par. 66). This is Heils-
geschichte, the shape of sacred history: “Purgatorio in history is the wrestling
of Jacob or Israel with the angel or God. The swallowing of the sky-bugger”
(Notes 54.1, par. 3). Thus in the exercise of our imagination or re-creative
dolzani: the ashes of the stars 63
us that all our illusions of presence are a desperate defense against the real-
ity of loss in its various forms of difference in space and deferring in time,
the ultimate denial being, as Ernest Becker said, the denial of death. We are
such things as dreams are made on, says Prospero in The Tempest. Milton’s
Paradise Regained is explicitly modeled on the book of Job, but Christ’s rejec-
tion of Satan’s temptations in it also has overtones of the Preacher’s “Vanity
of vanities” in Ecclesiastes. Again and again in the notebooks these two
works are grouped with a third, Blake’s Milton, as a kind of purgatorial
triad; in the latter poem, Milton descends from eternity to clarify his own
vision, and this involves both standing in his own shadow and wrestling
with Urizen, the sky-bugger version of God, on the banks of the Jordan, thus
recapitulating the wrestling of Jacob with the angel on the banks of the
Jabbok, a tributary of the Jordan (112, plate 19).
Frye of course learned his Jacobean wrestling-moves from Blake, who,
like the rest of the Romantic revolution, saw that a perfectly good God who
nevertheless signs off on all the miseries of human history is only a projec-
tion of an authoritarian ideology, the trickster-God pressed into the service
of the status quo. The cosmos of authority pushes all the blame on us: the
agony of the human condition results from our failure to obey, original sin,
innate depravity. But these are just the ploys of power; if there is anything
truly creative, and therefore deserving of the epithet “divine,” it is the
power of the human imagination that has brought everything into being,
including God himself, who is only a projection of human creative power
into the sky. Chapter 7 of Words with Power recapitulates what Frye has
explained often before, how, beginning with the Romantics, the imaginative
cosmos or symbolic universe has been inverted so that the quest for a divine
vision is now downward and inward; the top of the ladder is now merely
the vision of alienation.
A consequence of this reversal is the transfer of the trickster persona: the
real trickster now is creative man, Prometheus, Blake’s rebel-hero Orc. All
the imagery of the trickster-shaman is transferred over to a figure of uprising
revolutionary energy, whose ideological implications are expounded politi-
cally by Marx; psychologically by Freud, or at least by the sixties revisionists
of Freud, whose revolutionary sentiments were sympatico with all the merry
pranksterism of that era; artistically by poète maudit figures whose manic-
depressive responses range from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell to Un Saison
en Enfer. This is the trickster-God’s first rehabilitation, as he turns from alien
other into a mask of Promethean humanity in its revolt against social con-
ventions whose repressive uniformity, according to the power-structure, is
necessary for our security, even our survival, and is therefore inscribed in
both natural and supernatural law: “Predictable history is the one great hope
of primary societies. God being interested in the individual, he’s a trickster, a
lying spirit, a genius of the unpredictable” (Notes 53, par. 232).
dolzani: the ashes of the stars 65
When Blake spoke of composing his own Bible of hell, he knew that it
would not be a mere contradiction but would have its roots in the shadow-
side of the Bible itself. Frye believed that the Romantics were the first
culturally ascendant manifestation of a permanent phase of religious con-
sciousness, an everlasting nay that begins in the Bible’s own revolutionary
basis. In some of the unpublished notebooks, he calls this the second aware-
ness, locked in a cyclical historical conflict with a conservative and
authoritarian first awareness; usually these just go around in a circle resem-
bling Blake’s Orc cycle, but there is always the possibility of a resolving
third awareness, whose advent would usher in Joachim of Floris’s third Age
of the Spirit.
As for Classical parallels, there is of course Prometheus, the titan who
defies the gods to be friend to man. There is also a generic parallel: in
“Romance As Masque” (1976b) Frye traces the affinities of the idealizing
forms of naïve romance and Classical New Comedy with the Christian com-
media, then goes on to suggest that the revolutionary contrary of such a
plot-pattern would bear some kinship to the agon-structure of Old Comedy.
As the Iliad was an influence on later tragedy, the Odyssey is said to be an
influence on the later development of romance and New Comedy. But in
one brilliant flash in the notebooks, Frye speaks of “the Odyssey as a narra-
tive Old Comedy, labyrinth followed by dialectic emergence of identity of
Odysseus at Ithaca” (NB 12, par. 143). If the daylight side of the Odyssey is
New Comedy and romance, its underside is Old Comedy, and its hero is
one of the great trickster-figures in all literature.
Romanticism, or at least its more Blakean forms, emerged out of the far-
left inner-light wing of the great second-awareness upheaval known as
Protestantism. Those of us who came to Frye before his three Bible books
were written knew his religious views primarily through Fearful Symmetry,
and perhaps some of us tended to assume that Frye was of the devil’s party
and knew it. A deep identification with Blake is certainly there, early and
late; when asked in an interview by David Cayley, “You’re with Blake?”
Frye immediately responds, “Oh, yes” (1992:100). And in the privacy of the
notebooks he is capable of sounding every bit as antinomian as his mentor:
in Notebook 12, the ordained United Church minister says that “The effect
of organized and institutional religion on society, for the most part, is evil. It
isn’t just reactionary or superstitious; it is evil, and stinks in the nose of
God” (par. 347). Elsewhere, he says that “there’s a special viciousness in reli-
gion that’s found nowhere else” (Notes 53, par. 25).
Therefore it seemed mildly astounding to hear Frye say, in a review of
Blake studies in 1957, “The student interested in Blake’s religious views
should first get what few contemporary critics have, a coherent idea of
Protestantism, and then investigate the doctrine technically known as pre-
existence: the doctrine that Christ’s humanity is coeternal with his divinity.
66 semeia
This doctrine is not strictly a heresy, in the sense of being a doctrine incon-
sistent with Christian tradition (a little before Blake’s day it was held by
Isaac Watts), but it is the only unusual feature of Blake’s religious beliefs
granted his Protestant premises” (1966:19). To most Christians, Blake’s view
that the creation and the fall were the same event, in which part of God fell
along with man, and in which redemptive power is identified with the cre-
ative imagination, might seem just a wee bit unusual. But we get a more
coherent view of Frye’s Protestantism when, in the same review article, he
criticizes one Blake scholar for having “a somewhat pedestrian concept of
orthodoxy which leaves little room for paradox in statement” (19). The stan-
dard of orthodoxy is the true Christianity that Blake called the everlasting
gospel, and not the pronouncements of the ideological establishment that
some notebook entries dismiss as “the magisterium.”
For all that, between Blake and Frye there would seem to be, borrowing
a phrase from Coleridge that Frye was fond of, a distinction without divi-
sion. For Romanticism is a tragically failed project, and it is because it failed
that we have lived the two centuries of alienation, irony, and nihilism that
we have been living, the nightmare of history from which we have utterly
failed to awake. The very first chapter of Fearful Symmetry tells us that the
reason for the continued failure to realize primary concerns in human life is
not merely a repressive social order or even deep psychological hang-ups:
these are symptoms of the real limitation of the human condition, the
subject-object division that Blake in his trickster mode calls a cloven fiction.
Blake’s solution, at least early on, was basically phenomenological: a phrase
like Berkeley’s “To be is to be perceived” suggests that expansion of percep-
tion in the narrowly constricted ego-subject will result in a transformation,
indeed in the ultimate elimination, of an alienated external world. “As the
Eye, Such the Object,” and in this mode Blake speaks about cleansing the
doors of perception. As opposed to what? As opposed to rejecting the
phenomenal in order to find some hidden reality behind it: the ideal is to
transform the phenomenal itself, expanding it from a minimal ego-center of
consciousness to a maximal level of apocalyptic vision. Following Blake, the
younger Frye had little use for the alternative strain of hidden-reality
Romanticism, mainly (yuck) German, whose line runs from Jakob Boehme
and the occult tradition via Kant’s noumenal reality to Heidegger and Jung.
He expresses his impatience in his 1947 article “Yeats and the Language of
Symbolism” (Frye, 1963)—significantly, one of the few pieces of writing
whose formulations he later regretted and expressed the wish to revise.
Some of Frye’s later religious formulations remain close to the Blakean
mode of expression, for instance his oft-repeated re-creation of the Christian
virtues of faith, hope, and love. He begins with hope, which he defines as
having a particular relation to the arts, providing as they potentially do the
models of a world of gratified desire (and of its anxious opposites) from
dolzani: the ashes of the stars 67
which anyone may find a “myth to live by.” This link with hope in the sense
that the arts begin with fictions of desire that are known to be illusions is the
core of truth in Freud’s idea that art (along with religion) is a kind of wish-
fulfillment. But faith, when it takes over from hope, is not the belief in what
you know ain’t so but is rather the creative process itself, committing itself
to a fictional and illusory model as a myth to live by and going on to realize
it in experience. Frye’s example of the Wright brothers getting a plane off
the ground when everybody knows, or else should know, that if God
wanted human beings to fly he’d have given them wings, is not so stock as
it seems: there are eloquent passages in Mircea Eliade about flight as one of
the oldest and most powerful symbols of human transcendence, the trick-
ster-shaman’s “flight of the wild gander.”2 Forty years later, engineers
swore that it was aerodynamically impossible to break the sound barrier,
and less scientific types, according to the film The Right Stuff, spoke of
demons that would tear your plane apart as you approached Mach 1. Since
this essay is into hermetic number-symbolism, it should be pointed out that
Chuck Yaeger broke the sound barrier, mostly by ignoring the doubters, in
1947, the year Fearful Symmetry was published.
When Frye says to David Cayley that “The criterion for faith to me is a
pragmatic rather than a dogmatic one. Faith is something that works. . . . It’s
a process of turning into reality what has been either a matter of hope or a
matter of illusion” (1992:190–91), he is being even more accurate than he may
seem. His frequent reference to “the faith defined by the schoolboy when he
said, ‘Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true’” comes
from William James’s famous essay “The Will to Believe”—the wording I
have just quoted is in fact James’s (1956b:29). In his follow-up essay, “Is Life
Worth Living?” James is very much in the Romantic trickster tradition when
he says that it feels “as if there were something really wild in the universe
which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem;
and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a
half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted” (1956a:61).
But the problem with the phenomenological-expansion version of re-
creation is that, without a contrary, it will result in what Jung called inflation,
when the ego puffs itself up into a transcendental ego that is merely, in Wal-
lace Stevens’s phrase, “A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (209). The only thing
that can follow, in a manic-depressive cycle, is deflation. In the Cayley inter-
views, Frye says, “Human nature is corrupt at the source, because it has
2 See, for example, Eliade, 1967; also his “Brancusi and Mythology,” which speaks of how,
in Brancusi’s sculpture, the image of a bird in flight merges with that of the axis mundi, both
symbolizing “the ecstatic experience of absolute freedom” and the desire “to recover the forgot-
ten bliss of an existence freed from any and every system of conditionings” (1986:100).
68 semeia
grown out of physical nature. It has various ideals and hopes and wishes
and concerns, but its attempts to realize these things are often abominable,
cruel, and psychotic. I feel there must be something that transcends all this,
or else.” Cayley asks, “Or else what?” Frye responds: “Or else despair. . . . I
think if I didn’t read the Bible and were confronted with all these dire
prophecies about the possibility of the human race disappearing from the
planet, I would be inclined to say, ‘The sooner the better.’ It’s like in the
question asked Job: what is there in life for him unless he has a vision of
something else?” (1992:189–90). This sounds much more orthodox and less
Promethean, because it implies that the project of making ourselves into
God by building monuments of unaging intellect is only another version of
the tower of Babel and is due for a collapse.
Hence Frye begins to be interested in a line of thinking he was ambiva-
lent about before. Early evidence of this includes the gusto of the essay on
Beddoes in A Study of English Romanticism and, in the notebooks, a great
influx of commentary on Boehme, Schelling, the second part of Goethe’s
Faust with its descent to the Mothers, Sartre, Heidegger, and above all
Hegel, who may have complained that Schelling’s Absolute was the night in
which all cows are black but whose own version of a climb toward the
vision of the Absolute Spirit in plenitude, of God as “all in all,” goes through
the valley of negation. Subject and object, along with all the subsidiary
cloven fictions that ramify from their division, have to be negated or decre-
ated; re-creation can then be only the negation of a negation, a concept in
Hegel that Frye believes was influenced by Boehme. The German tradition
was supplemented by French symbolisme and above all by Mallarmé.
The end result of Frye’s attempt to turn the mythologies of authority
and revolution into a Yeatsian double gyre is the dialectic of Word and
Spirit that is the heart of Words with Power. Here, the transforming human
creative power we have been speaking of is revealed as the Spirit, the inner
light or divine spark of creativity in the darkness of our corruption. But that
is not the whole story, for the Spirit cries out like Job for an answering
response and, like Job, receives one as the Word descends in a vision of
order, pattern, and meaning that in-forms the human imagination and pro-
vides the Logos or paradigm from which it works. The trickster-God
descends again, but this time, as a result of our striving, he has been trans-
figured, as Jung says the trickster-spirit Mercurius is transfigured in
alchemy from the spirit of chaos to the lapis itself. Out of absurdity, he is the
wonderful counterabsurdity of order and pattern that is all we know of the
true, the beautiful, and the good, and all we need to know. The Word
descends and becomes the substance of things hoped for. If there is such a
thing as a paradoxical orthodoxy, Frye is shooting for it here. The descend-
ing Word satisfies our need for what the Preface to Spiritus Mundi calls
“otherness, what the imagination is not and has to struggle with,” or again,
dolzani: the ashes of the stars 69
many, and not all of them are conventionally respectable. This is his mode of
survival, of living by his wits, in a dangerous world whose emblem is Pro-
teus. He knows he is in for a Job-like ordeal, but he cries out on Calypso’s
island, “Let the trial come” (5.233). And sure enough, he has to go by the way
of vacancy—it is the provision of the Cyclops’s curse that he shall lose every-
thing, like Job—and he does so, even down to his identity, becoming
“Noman.” But by doing so he earns the response of two trickster deities,
Hermes and Athena; from the latter he gets the unparalleled comment, “Two
of a kind, we are,/contrivers, both” (13.379–380). And it is Athena’s help that
enables him to pull off his miracle, turning a beat-up beggar into the long-
lost ruler, father, and lover.
For in love everyone is a trickster: inexplicable, exasperating, sometimes
hurtful to the beloved, whether intentionally, inadvertently, or despite one-
self. When it is our own turn to be on the receiving end, the only possible
response if we choose to continue to love is Cordelia’s “No cause, no cause.”
Cordelia is not masochistically deluding herself about Lear, like some
abused housewife. She loves Lear as we love anyone truly: sometimes blam-
ing and angry (though she mostly leaves that up to Kent); sometimes
because the very unpredictability of “otherness” is fascinating, full of an
excitement and attraction; sometimes out of a sense of identification with a
kindred spirit. At any rate, the only possible response in love is: I love you,
nevertheless. You are my contrary, and thus bring out a hidden energy from
me, often by your very contrariness. Buber’s I and Thou was one of the
works that Frye regarded as truly kerygmatic, and our loving response to
the trickster deity may be, in the end if not in the beginning, “No cause, no
cause.” This does not so much solve the problem of theodicy as leap over it
like the bull-leapers in Minoan frescoes.
Contraries are the unfolded form of the final, enfolded form Frye calls
interpenetration. Again the best way to approach the unapproachable is via
the analogy with human love. The center of “orthodox” or relatively conser-
vative Christianity is the incarnation, in which agape or divine love repeats the
original creation as a vision of descending order. Revolutionary Christianity
insists, however, on the creative contrary of incarnation, the resurrection,
which repeats the Exodus and prefigures the total resurrection of the apoca-
lypse. The individual and inward antitype of the resurrection is, in Frye’s
Protestant tradition, conversion. Just as resurrection means more than a
coming back to life or immortality, conversion means more than becoming a
believer or joining a church. It means metamorphosis, re-creation, transfigu-
ration, inner illumination—but even those words fall far short of the
ultimate implications of Paul’s “We shall be changed,” whether we are
thinking about change in our inner life or our afterlife.
In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, often linked by Frye with the
Odyssey because of the shared pattern of the disguised ruler reclaiming his
dolzani: the ashes of the stars 71
hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered
leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another” (par.
464). Donne’s metaphor is a superb translation of Frye’s own vision of an
order of words. At the same time, it is a vision of community, like Dante’s in
the Paradiso, of a kind not possible except to the love that believeth all
things, hopeth all things. But Frye’s immediate reason for quoting it is per-
sonal; the “Elizabethan” passage continues: “Not one atom of my feeling for
Helen has changed: neither is my feeling that we’re linked somehow in the
spiritual world. But my notions of spiritual union may have been clarified:
there is no spiritual marriage because marriage has to be ego-centered and a
mutual possession. In that world all books lie open to one another.”
That union which is beyond all the divorces and translations of this
world is not between egos: “Two egos identifying would be like two billiard
balls copulating,” he says dryly (par. 428). To adapt a sentence from Words
with Power (141), “So far as we can see, a complete redemption of this kind is
entirely impossible, and is therefore one of the proper studies of faith.”
Thus, the moral of this story seems to be that it may be useful to have a
trickster-God to get us out of the impasses of our own contradictory and
impossible desires, for often they are the very thing from which we need to
be redeemed. Even if, as Jung said, he has to cross our willful path violently
and recklessly, upset our plans and intentions, and change the course of our
lives for better or worse. Is this true? I don’t know. Well, then, why am I
saying it? It’s the only way it makes sense.
WORKS CONSULTED
Blake, William
1982 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman.
Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Denham, Robert D.
1999 “Interpenetration As a Key Concept in Frye’s Critical Vision.” Pp. 140–
63 in Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works. Ed. David
Boyd and Imre Salusinszky. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Edinger, Edward F.
1972 Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche.
Boston and London: Shambala.
Eliade, Mircea
1967 “The Magic Flight.” Pp. 99–110 in Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The
Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. Trans. Philip
Mairet. New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks.
1986 “Brancusi and Mythology.” Pp. 93–101 in Symbolism, the Sacred, and the
Arts. Ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. New York: Crossroads.
dolzani: the ashes of the stars 73
abstract
Northrop Frye’s three last books, all of which deal explicitly with the Bible
and its relationship to literature, argue for a conception of biblical
hermeneutics more capacious than the historical-critical one that has
shaped interpretation of the Bible for the last two centuries. Frye envisions
a hermeneutic in which poetry plays an essential role. Three assertions lie at
the heart of Frye’s argument. First, Frye claims that the letter of the biblical
text is radically metaphorical in its mode of symbolization. Secondly, he
argues that, for the course of much of its history, biblical language has been
subjected to “metonymic” and “descriptive” criteria of truth that do not
pay adequate attention to the Bible’s metaphorical mode. Thirdly, he
asserts that it is thus the primary function of literature, and especially
poetry, to re-create the metaphorical vitality of the Bible’s language in
epochs when metonymic and descriptive norms are culturally dominant.
The essay seeks to evoke the significance of this argument by attending to
the varied ways in which poems by Dante, Langland, and Milton interpret
the Bible.
From the time that Northrop Frye published his first book, Fearful Sym-
metry, which transformed our capacity to understand the poetry of William
Blake, he has been recognized as a critic for whom the Bible was an
immensely important text. For most of his career the presence of the Bible in
his work was implicit. During the last decade of his life, however, Frye pub-
lished three books that dealt explicitly with the Bible and its relationship to
literature: The Great Code, Words with Power, and The Double Vision. While
these works provide an immense range of resources for recognizing rela-
tionships between Western literary texts and the Bible, they also suggest a
conception of biblical hermeneutics more capacious than the historical-
critical one that has shaped interpretation of the Bible for the last two
centuries, a conception in which poetry plays an essential role. In this essay
I would like to describe some of the new dimensions of biblical hermeneu-
tics that are suggested by Frye’s work.
I come to this topic as a literary critic with a special concern for older
poems that are intimately linked to the Bible, such as Dante’s Commedia,
-75-
76 semeia
Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. These poems can prod
one, not just to want to understand them, but to ask about the nature of the
understanding one seeks. Somehow understanding these works seems to
call for more than discerning what their authors intended or describing how
their parts fit together into formal unities. The word “hermeneutics” refers
to a rich tradition of reflection upon problems such as these, one that
derives, in part, from the challenges of understanding the Bible. Twentieth-
century thinkers belonging to this tradition include Heidegger, Gadamer,
Ricoeur, and, more recently, Gerald Bruns.
From this hermeneutical tradition we have learned that understanding
does indeed involve more than reconstructing an author’s ideas or arriving
at a grasp of formal unities. It means experiencing a happening of truth,
taking part in a historical event that will inevitably involve both disclosures
and concealments—both insights and blind spots, as De Man might say. To
be sure, the search for understanding requires us to attend to the contexts in
which a work was written, but it also calls upon us to attend to the contexts
in which we encounter the work today as well as the variety of ways in
which it has been transmitted and received.
Although Northrop Frye is not conventionally associated with this
tradition, his work on the Bible and literature offers hermeneutical resources
for understanding poems such as those mentioned above. In his literary-
critical efforts Frye had always sought to defend the imaginative, the poetic,
the literary against efforts to construe them in terms of something else,
including religion. In The Great Code, however, he began to confront explicitly
the relationship between his insights into the poetic and his understanding of
the Bible. He sought to identify an irreducibly poetic element in the Bible’s
language. He thereby opened up possibilities for understanding the Bible in
ways mediated by the poetic traditions that derive from it.
Several features of Frye’s argument in The Great Code can instruct us how
better to read poets such as Dante, Langland, and Milton in relation to each
other and to the Bible. The first is Frye’s claim that, in the literary traditions
associated with the Christian Bible, the Bible was traditionally read as a uni-
fied narrative having a beginning, a middle, and an end—whatever the
results of the modern critical-historical study of it (1982:xiii). One can hardly
overestimate how intensely poets have sought to understand the Bible’s
vision of the Whole in its unity. Second is Frye’s assertion that the literal level
of the biblical narrative is radically metaphorical (1982:24). While this is not
the place to take up the numerous problems associated with the Bible’s his-
toricity, let me hasten to emphasize that Frye’s claim does not lead
necessarily to a denial of, say, the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. The claim
means primarily that the most important experiences brought to language in
the Bible can only be articulated in poetic language. This language, therefore,
should not be subjected to extraneous, nonpoetic criteria of truthfulness. For
kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 77
Biblical hermeneutics, therefore, ought to take seriously the roles that poems
have played in the historical processes of transmission and interpretation
that constitute the biblical traditions.
Of course, Frye’s grand narrative concerning Western langage can be
criticized as disarmingly simple. We have become proficient at offering such
critiques, and for good reasons, reasons that I respect. Nevertheless, it may
very well be that, as historical beings, we should not and finally cannot
banish such narrative impulses. We must allow them to animate our imagi-
nations even as we seek to do so more humbly than we have in the past,
guarding against the forms of blindness that they can impose. The value of
78 semeia
Frye’s schema lies in the ways it helps us better to engage poems like the
Commedia, Piers Plowman, and Paradise Lost and to see, in particular, how
their poetic forms and strategies reflect their different places within the bib-
lical traditions.
Let me briefly indicate how. As the theologian Hans Frei has argued in
The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Christians who lived before the development
of critical-historical consciousness were challenged existentially by the con-
viction of their tradition that the Bible was a unified narrative. If the world
unfolded in the biblical narrative “was indeed the one and only real world,
it must in principle embrace the experience of any present age and reader”
(3). The believer, therefore, had to come to understand how the shape of his
or her life—how the shape of his or her epoch—fit into the world unfolded
in the biblical story. The events of one’s life and times had to be read as
types of the biblical events; the biblical events, in turn, provided metaphori-
cal schemas within which to try to make sense of one’s life and times.
Dante makes such an effort when, in the middle of “our life,” as he calls
it, he finds himself lost in a “dark wood” (1982:1.1–2). He writes a poem char-
acteristic of Frye’s second phase of langage, the phase in which metaphorical
language is subordinated to metonymic or conceptual language. That is, he
writes an allegory in which, to quote Frye, “a metaphorical narrative runs par-
allel with a conceptual one but defers to it” (1982:24). Although conceptual
language is, finally, authoritative for Dante in a way that his poem does
acknowledge, the poem’s metaphorical narrative does not merely “dress up”
the conceptual, so to speak. It generates a disclosive power that is absolutely
essential to the poem’s conceptual luminosity and vitality.
Dante’s first dream in Canto IX of the Purgatorio may serve initially to
illustrate the way in which the conceptual and metaphorical poles of the
allegory interact in the poem as a whole (1984:9.13–69). Dante is still just
outside Purgatory proper, unable to continue his journey up the mountain
because night has fallen. He sleeps, and at an hour close to dawn, when
“our intellect’s envisionings become almost divine,” he dreams that an
eagle, “terrible as lightning,” swoops down and snatches him, carrying him
in a terrifying flight up to the sphere of fire, just below the moon. The
“imagined conflagration scorched [him] so” that he was awakened. When
he awakens, utterly disoriented and still terrified, his experience is
redescribed to him by Virgil, his guide. Saint Lucia, part of the chain of fig-
ures who has mediated divine grace to Dante from the start, had taken hold
of him while he slept and carried him into Purgatory proper to speed him
along. “Have no fear,” Virgil tells him; “be confident, for we are well along
our way.”
Conceptually, the episode illustrates how Dante’s journey toward the
freedom that will make him capable of seeing God requires the assistance
of divine grace—especially when he arrives at certain thresholds on the
kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 79
by many features indicating that the effort has required Milton to be respon-
sive to a criterion of truth belonging to descriptive language.
According to Frye, the “cultural ascendancy” of descriptive language at
the beginning of the modern epoch is part of a larger process, an index of a
transformed way in which human beings understand themselves, the
world, and their relationship to that world. The process “start[s] with”
a clear separation of subject and object, in which the subject exposes itself, in
sense experience, to the impact of an objective world. The objective world is
the order of nature; thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense
experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection. (1982:13)
1 See Heidegger’s analysis of the modern epoch in terms of the “transformation of truth to
certainty” and the emergence of human being as the subject of knowledge (1973:19–32). Hei-
degger argues that human being has not always served as the “subject” of knowledge—i.e., the
subiectum, that which “has been placed under” and thus “takes over the role of the ground” (27).
He traces the emergence of human being as subject on pp. 26–28.
2 Frye’s claim that descriptive language is culturally ascendant in the modern epoch also
receives support from Timothy Reiss’s analysis of the “discourse of modernism.” See in partic-
ular Reiss’s description of what he calls “analytico-referential discourse” (31–54).
3 For a fuller development of the argument, see Kee: 156–64.
kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 83
7 Frye’s conception of the metaphorical can be better understood when his works are read
together with Paul Ricoeur’s studies of “the rule of metaphor” (1977). Similarly, his conception
of typology is illuminated by A. C. Charity’s analysis of “the dialectics of Christian typology.”
8 In the passage quoted, I have followed the lead of David Farrell Krell and modified Hof-
stadter’s otherwise excellent translation. Hofstadter’s text reads, “to create is to cause [my
emphasis] something to emerge as a thing that has been brought forth.” For Krell’s modifica-
tion, see Heidegger, 1977:180. Given Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of causality (see,
e.g., Heidegger, 1973:10–20), the connotations associated with “cause” are misleading for trans-
lating an activity that Heidegger is repeatedly describing in terms of the verb lassen (to let, to
allow) and its related forms. The original reads, “können wir das Schaffen als das Hervorgehenlassen
in ein Hervorgebrachtes kennzeichnen” (1963:49).
86 semeia
being without those who preserve it. (The German verb translated as “pre-
serve” is bewahren [1963:54], which is etymologically related to Wahrheit,
German for “truth.”) Interpreted hermeneutically, we might say that
Frye’s The Great Code understands poets such as Dante, Langland, and
Milton as interpreters who seek to preserve the truth of the biblical narra-
tive by re-creating its metaphorical power within the different discursive
conditions of their epochs. By providing us with a speculative schema
within which to read these poems, Frye helps us today to engage in the
same work of preservation.
WORKS CONSULTED
Alighieri, Dante
1982 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum.
Toronto: Bantam.
1984 The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Purgatorio. Trans. Allen Mandel-
baum. Toronto: Bantam.
Bergin, Thomas Goddard, and Max Harold Fisch, trans.
1968 The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Bruns, Gerald R.
1984 “Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Hermeneutics.” Diacritics 14:12–23.
1992 Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press.
Charity, A. C.
1966 Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible
and Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Man, Paul
1971 Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Eliot, T. S.
1971 “Burnt Norton.” Pp. 13–20 in Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich. [Orig. 1943]
Frei, Hans W.
1974 The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Cen-
tury Hermeneutics. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Frye, Northrop
1970 Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press. [Orig. 1947]
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich.
kee: frye and the poetry in biblical hermeneutics 87
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
1980 Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato. Trans.
P. Christopher Smith. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
1989 Truth and Method. 2d ed. Trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall. New York: Crossroad.
Heidegger, Martin
1963 “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” Pp. 7–68 in Holzwege. 4th ed. Frank-
furt: Klostermann.
1971 “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Pp. 15–87 in Poetry, Language, Thought.
Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row.
1973 “Metaphysics As History of Being.” Pp. 1–54 in The End of Philosophy.
Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row.
1977 Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row.
Kee, James M.
1990 “Typology and Tradition: Refiguring the Bible in Milton’s Paradise
Lost.” Semeia 51:155–75.
Langland, William
1995 The Vision of Piers Plowman. Ed. A. V. C. Schmidt. 2d ed. London: J. M.
Dent.
Milton, John
1981 Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press.
[Orig. 1962]
Reiss, Timothy
1982 The Discourse of Modernism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul
1977 The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning
in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John
Costello. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
1981 Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and
Interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S WORDS WITH POWER:
ABSENCE AND PRESENCE
Patricia Demers
University of Alberta
abstract
By opening up Frye’s ironic lament for the absence of a “critical language” for
the “mythical and metaphorical relations of the traditionally female symbols
of the Bible,” this essay explores a representative sampling of the interpreta-
tive work of early modern women writers whom Frye ignores. Their
complex symbology extends an understanding of selfhood from femaleness
to androgyny, sisterly collaborations to bold declarations. Their membership
in a human community addresses shifting and fraught religio-political
dynamics. Their symbolic link to nature and redemption also recognizes the
sacralization of the immediate political moment, in the work of the female
spirit in the world. The psalmic paraphrases of Lady Mary Sidney Herbert,
biblical marginalia of Royalist Elizabeth Warren, prophetic political com-
mentary of Fifth Monarchists Anna Trapnel and Mary Cary, visions of the
Quaker autobiographer Mary Penington, and rhapsodic chronicles of the
Behmenist Jane Lead expand the Frygian survey field. A re-vision of his liter-
ary biblical analysis to include early modern women enlarges our grasp of
the diversity of subjects in the early modern community.
-89-
90 semeia
151). Princess Elizabeth knew the Bible and the swirling currents of theolog-
ical controversy as thoroughly as her multilingual reading of classical
literature. The biblical citations glossing the margins of the New Year’s gift
the eleven-year-old Elizabeth presented in 1545 in a hand-embroidered
cover to her stepmother, Kateryn Parr, a translation of Marguerite de
Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse as The Glass of the Sinful Soul, testify to
her mature appreciation of Scripture’s usefulness to intimate the complexi-
ties of lineage. Similarly her translation of Psalm 13 and her kissing and
pressing of the Bible in English, a gift of the Lord Mayor of London, to her
breast during her procession through the city in 1558 on the day before her
coronation, “promis[ing] the reading thereof most diligently” (Arber: 249),
show her awareness of the private and public resonances of the sacred text.
Dowager Queen Kateryn Parr’s The Lamentacion of a Synner (1547) threads a
strategic path among approved and proscribed translations and commen-
taries, synthesizing her reading of Erasmus, Coverdale, Latimer, and
Tyndale. Anne Wheathill’s forty-nine prayers, A handfull of holesome (though
homelie) hearbs (1584), illustrates the capacity of her biblical gleanings to pro-
vide food, medicine, scent, and flavour. Anne Dowriche folds biblical
allusion and invocation, along with anti-Papist animus, into her three versi-
fied discourses of Huguenot struggle, The French Historie (1589). Elizabeth
Melvill, Lady Culros, relies on biblical language of despair and triumphal-
ism to convey the depression and exuberance of her dream journey in the
sixty stanzas of Ane Godlie Dreame (1603). Throughout her prolific (more than
sixty) and syntactically eccentric tracts and in spite of repeated imprisonment
and confinement in Bedlam and the burning of her work, Lady Eleanor
Davies appropriates the model of biblical prophets to forewarn Charles I and
Archbishop Laud. Civil wars, tortures, and belittlement do not dampen the
biblical fervour of radical women. In her broadsides directed at Oxford,
Cambridge, and London, Quaker convert Hester Biddle minces no words in
transposing Old Testament cadences and trenchant excoriations to condemn
clerical neglect, profligacy, and arrogance.
This brief sampling, merely hinting at the range of early modern
women’s words with power, offers some sense of their forms and registers
of voice. It might also indicate the need to revise Frye’s schema to include
the textual traces and discontinuities of women’s actual struggles for mean-
ing. In verse and prose and a variety of genres—from metrical paraphrase to
learned essay, scathing diatribe, and dream narrative—these translators,
polemicists, prophets, and autobiographers used biblical language and
vision to move, awaken, alert, exhort, or galvanize their readers.
Each author exemplifies Frye’s claim about the conscious subject’s “not
really perceiving until it recognizes itself as part of what it perceives”
(1991:23). Though acknowledging Frye’s organizing patterns of the cyclical
and the dialectic, a symbology revised to include women’s writing would
92 semeia
1 Pembroke was a collaborator aware of her own artistic worth. The best known portrait,
completed by Simon van de Passe in 1618, showcases her role as a translator holding the open
book of the Psalms of David.
demers: early modern women’s words with power 93
demonstrates “how great weaknesse there is euen in the best and most
excellent men” (Gilby: 126). The rhetorically ornamented force of Pem-
broke’s opening stanza,
2 Margaret Hannay notes that Bèze, Calvin, Anne Lock, and the Geneva Bible “take out ref-
erences to dancing even when present in the original Hebrew” (1993:31). Anne Lock’s Sonnet
12, “Sinne and despair have so possest my hart” (Felch: 68), dwells obsessively on the weight of
sin, while petitions to cancel sin’s register impart a more buoyant, hope-filled, propulsive mood
to Pembroke’s metaphrase. The sharpest difference between Lock’s negativity and Pembroke’s
94 semeia
She blends pre- and postlapsarian moments, connecting the desire for a
divinely created cleanness to “breathing grace”:
devotional exuberance surfaces through apparent similarity. Lock describes the bones, conven-
tionally “broken,” as “broosed bones that thou with paine/Hast made to weake my feble corps
to beare”; these bones, she attests, “Shall leape for joy, to shewe myne inward chere.” Pembroke,
as Hannay observes, never suggests that God caused the “brused bones”; not content with
inward cheer, these revivified bones will show their new life by dancing “awaie their sadness”
(line 28). For further background on Lock and her circle, see Hannay (1992); Woods; and Felch
(i–lxxxvii).
3 Theodore Steinberg (7–8) cites Pembroke’s “references to cleansing the leprosy of the
mind, since the Talmudic commentaries on these verses identified leprosy as the punishment
for slander,” as reflecting her “familiarity with the Hebrew originals.”
demers: early modern women’s words with power 95
Geneva for a period to follow the preaching of John Knox and translated
selected sermons of John Calvin, the unremitting emphasis is on the dis-
abling aspect of sin: “My filth and fault are ever in my face” (line 142).
While the self-conscious ventriloquization of voice in Pembroke and
Lock hints only obliquely at political realities, women’s prose commentaries
inspired by biblical language are generally more direct and unequivocal in
their criticism, passing current events through the interpretative filter of
explicit biblical narratives and warnings. Elizabeth Warren, Anna Trapnel,
and Mary Cary Rande show an acute awareness of the political work devo-
tional and biblical commentary can perform. Suffolk schoolmistress
Elizabeth Warren combines Royalist sympathies and an extensive knowl-
edge of the Vulgate, the church fathers, and classical authors, glosses from
which fill the margins of Spiritual Thrift, to argue that the “unnaturall divi-
sions” of civil war are “a tumour” to be lanced with “a piercing sword” (35).
“Clavis est scientia scripturarum,” Warren observes: “Follow then the Scrip-
ture, as an infallible guide, which who so is led by shall never miscarry,
because it is a key which openeth the cabinet of Gods sacred counsell con-
cerning all mysteries” (80). Her lengthy periodic sentences, full of paratactic
byways, aim at spiritual improvement, using biblical language to cloak her
political stand:
Much is the trouble which at this time the Church grones under concerning
a way, which through Satans malice and mans miserable ataxie, hath min-
istred the matter of uncomfortable contests, for what can be more grievous
to godly souls then to see faithfull brethren fall out by the way, when they
that are one in fundamentall truths, shall yet be divided in circumstantiall
differences, this is not to contend for the precious faith, delivered to the
Saints in the sacred Scriptures, but rather a deviation by unnecessary bitter-
nesse, from walking in the wayes both of truth and peace, which makes the
hearts of the righteous sad and strengthens the wicked in their pride and
prophanesse, who tell it in Gath to disgrace the Gospel, and publish it in
Ashkelon to reproach our Religion. (68)
After a little while there appeared lower in the element, nearer the earth, in
an oval, transparent glass, a man and a woman (not in resemblance, but real
persons), the man wore a greater majesty and sweetness than I ever saw
with mortal: his hair was brown, his eyes black and sparkling, his complex-
ion ruddy; piercing dominion in his countenance, splendid with affability,
great gentleness and kindness. The woman resembled him in features and
complexion; but appeared tender and bashful, yet quick-sighted. . . . [W]e in
a sense of their majesty did reverence to them, . . . at which the man
ascended, but the woman came down to us, and spoke to us with great
gravity and sweetness; the words I have forgotten, but the purport of them
was that we should not be formal, nor fall out. (50–51)
The work of the woman’s spirit or principle in the world is the central
concern of the obscure London widow Jane Lead. In over a dozen
98 semeia
Wherefore it is given me to advise you, that you give way to this Live Coal
within you, that so it may burn away all the Dross and Tin, so as nothing
but the Golden Matter, for coagulation with the Deity may remain upon
this Almighty and most sublime Thing, that is concealed in your inward
Furnace. (79–80)
WORKS CONSULTED
Arber, Edward, ed.
1882 “The Passage of Our Most Dread Sovereign Lady, Queen Elizabeth
through the City of London to Westminster, the Day Before Her Coro-
nation, 1558.” Pp. 247–48 in An English Arber: Ingatherings from our
History and Literature. Vol. 4. Birmingham: E. Arber.
Cary, Mary
1647 A Word in Season to the Kingdom of England: Or, A Precise Cordiall for a
Distempered Kingdom. London: Giles Calvert.
1648 The Resurrection of the Witnesses; and Englands Fall from the Mysticall
Babylon Rome. London: Giles Calvert.
1651 A New and More Exact Mappe, or Description of New Jerusalems Glory
When Jesus Christ and His Saints with Him Shall Reign on Earth a Thousand
Years, and Possess All Kingdoms. London: W. H.
1653 Twelve Proposals to the Supreme Governours of the Three Nations Now
Assembled at Westminster, concerning the Propagation of the Gospel, New
Modling of the Universities, Reform of the Laws, Supply of the Necessities of
the Poor. London: Henry Hills.
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.
1990 Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
demers: early modern women’s words with power 101
1991 The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Gilby, Anthony, trans.
1581 Théodore de Bèze, The Psalmes of David. London: Henry Denham.
Golding, Arthur, trans.
1571 John Calvin: The Psalms of David and Others. London: H. Middleton.
Hannay, Margaret P.
1992 “ ‘Strengthening the Walles of . . . Ierusalem’: Anne Vaughan Lok’s
Dedication to the Countess of Warwick.” ANQ 5:71–75.
1993 “ ‘Unlock My Lipps’: The Miserere mei Deus of Anne Vaughan Lok and
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.” Pp. 19–36 in Privileging
Gender in Early Modern England. Ed. Jean R. Brink. Kirksville, Mo.: Six-
teenth Century Journal Publishers.
Herbert, Mary Sidney
1998 The Collected Works. Ed. M. P. Hannay, N. Kinnamon, M. Brennan.
2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hill, Christopher
1994 The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Pen-
guin.
Hinds, Hilary
1996 God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and
Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Kernan, Alvin
1999 In Plato’s Cave. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Lanham, Richard
1965 The Old Arcadia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Lead, Jane
1694 The Enochian Walks with God. London: D. Edwards.
1695 The Wonders of God’s Creation. London: T. Sowle.
1696 The Tree of Faith. London: J. Bradford.
1696–1701 A Fountain of Gardens. 3 vols. London: J. Bradford.
1699 The Ascent to the Mount of Vision. London: J. Bradford.
Matchinske, Megan
1998 Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and
the Female Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meeks, Wayne A.
1974 “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest
Christianity.” History of Religions 13:165–203.
102 semeia
abstract
Northrop Frye significantly, if unsystematically, expands upon the tradi-
tional conception of typology, which regards the Bible as a self-contained
unity, by suggesting that the Old Testament provides antitypes of which
prebiblical mythologies are the types, and that New Testament antitypes
will themselves become types of new, postbiblical antitypes. This study
explores the implications of Frye’s archetypological theory for our under-
standing of both the origins of our existing biblically derived mythology
and possible metamorphoses that this mythology may undergo in the
future. Extrapolating from the typological principle that the Old Testament
anticipates and prefigures the New while the New Testament reveals and
fulfils the Old, the essay asks whether the older might anticipate the
newer—in other words, whether prebiblical mythologies might represent
adumbrations, or indications in faint outline, of myths and mythologies yet
to come.
* I would like to thank Janet Ritch, Michael Dolzani, James Kee, Adele Reinhartz, and Bob
Buller for reading this paper and offering valuable comments and suggestions.
-103-
104 semeia
1 An eighth phase is referred to, but not so named, in The Great Code, where Frye states that
“two forms of apocalyptic vision are postulated, making eight in all” (xxii).
burgess: from archetype to antitype 105
One is hardly prepared for the violence of this depiction by the atmos-
phere of charged and pregnant calm suggested by the opening lines of
Genesis. “Oh,” said one young woman commenting on the passage during a
tutorial discussion, “you mean a rape!” What I propose to argue here is that
what is represented in this particular myth is the destruction of the Great
Goddess who had dominated Near Eastern mythology up until the begin-
ning of the patriarchal period and that the myth constitutes the prebiblical
equivalent of the apocalyptic destruction and re-creation that Frye refers to
as the “antitype of antitypes” at the culmination of his explication of the
phases of revelation (1982:138). The first part of this argument is, of course,
well supported in existing literature. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, for example, in
2 For additional parallels not discussed here, such as the creation of the heavenly bodies
and of dry land, see Heidel, esp. ch. 3 on “Old Testament Parallels.”
3 For Frye’s discussion of this myth, see 1982:146.
burgess: from archetype to antitype 107
her book In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Trans-
formation of Pagan Myth, describes Tiamat’s role in the Creation Epic as
representing “the ancient order which Marduk must defeat in order to
become king of the gods” (75); Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, in The Myth
of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, devote an entire chapter to “Tiamat of
Babylon: The Defeat of the Goddess” (273–98); and John A. Phillips writes in
Eve: The History of an Idea that “the great creation stories of ancient Near
Eastern cultures . . . all presuppose or describe power struggles between
masculine and feminine deities, usually with the masculine deities gaining
the upper hand” and says of the book of Genesis that “its writers may be
said to be a step beyond the Enuma Elish in the religious revolution [in that]
here it is taken for granted that the Goddess is dead, and there is no san-
guine procreation story to even tell of her demise” (6, 7). The second part, as
Alvin Lee notes in his introduction to Northrop Frye on Religion (Frye,
2000a:xxix), is prepared for by Frye (1) in Creation and Recreation, where he
writes that for Blake “the creation of the world, the fall of man, and the
deluge of Noah were all the same event, and the fall was a fall of the divine
as well as the human nature. Hence what has traditionally been called the cre-
ation is actually a ruin, and there is no creation except human recreation”
(1980:56–57 = 2000a:70; emphasis mine), and also (2) in the Late Notebooks,
where Frye observes that “the Bible owes its peculiarly piercing insight to
the fact that it’s at the end of a long mythological process, not the beginning
of one” (2:446–47).
It will be asked at this point what the dragon has to do with the god-
dess. This is admittedly somewhat difficult for the modern mind to grasp.
Because the myth is presented as a battle with cosmic forces, it is hard to
reproduce the identification in the so-called primitive mind of cosmological
attribution and divine personification. Frye himself is equivocal on this
point: “Tiamat is not said explicitly to be a monster,” he says, “but she
breeds monsters, and they must have got their heredity from somewhere”
(1982:146–47). It might appear that Tiamat’s attribution as a dragon or mon-
ster has as much to do with her personification of the salt or “bitter” waters
and with the attitude of her opponents toward these elements in nature as
it does with her representation as a goddess, yet it remains a fact that drag-
ons frequently appear in association with more humanized manifestations
of the goddess.4 In Classical mythology—in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for
4 It should perhaps be noted here for those who may be unfamiliar with the myth that
Tiamat’s consort Apsu, who represented the fresh or “sweet” waters, had been slain earlier by
the younger gods, seemingly without event. Apsu was presumably also a dragon; however,
either because he represented the fresh or beneficent waters or because he was male and less
powerful than the goddess, he seems to have been regarded as much less of a threat. Moreover,
108 semeia
the Babylonian Tiamat is preceded in Sumerian mythology by the primordial mother Nammu,
a benign creator figure (Frymer-Kensky: 71, 222).
5 This quotation appears as part of the explanation of the frontispiece that appears at the
beginning of all Shambhala Dragon Editions of Eastern sacred texts.
6 The brief summary of the proceedings presented here is based primarily on Frankfort:
313–33. According to Frankfort, the New Year’s festival was celebrated in Babylon in the spring,
whereas in Ur and Erech it was celebrated both in the spring and in the fall, when the return of
the autumn rains signaled the end of the summer drought, and Frankfort emphasizes the
importance in Mesopotamia of the spring as well as the autumn rains (314). Baring and Cash-
ford, however, write of “the great serpent or dragon that was the image of the winding rivers
and the fierce, inundating floods of winter, which turned the Babylonian plain into a watery
chaos” (275).
burgess: from archetype to antitype 109
the Creation Epic itself derive from a relatively late date in the historical
period—according to Pritchard, none of them antedates the first millennium
B.C.E. (60)—and it has been suggested by Henri Frankfort, for example, that
the role of the god Marduk was originally played by the storm god Enlil
(234). Moreover, according to Frankfort the ritual of the sacred marriage was
enacted only by some kings, and then apparently only at the behest of the
goddess, upon whose immeasurably greater power and authority the semi-
divine status of the king was then conferred (297). The goddess in this case
was the goddess Ishtar or one of her derivatives or equivalents in the vari-
ous Babylonian city-states, and the Babylonian Ishtar in turn takes her
lineage from the Sumerian Inanna. The occasion for the change from the
invariable enactment of the sacred marriage would appear to be marked by
the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh, king of Uruk or Erech, refuses
the invitation of Ishtar to be her bridegroom—an interpretation supported
by Sumerologist and Assyriologist Tikva Frymer-Kensky, who suggests that
Gilgamesh’s rejection of Ishtar “may be a reflection of the rejection of the
entire philosophy of kingship of the Akkadian and Ur III periods” (ca.
2300–2100 B.C.E. and ca. 2100–2000 B.C.E.). “During the Old Babylonian period”
(the early part of the second millennium B.C.E.), she writes, “the sacred mar-
riage disappeared, and with it, all the ideas of divinity-in-kingship,” and as
the later kings “began to reenact the part of Marduk in the military and
kingly role related by the Enuma Elish . . . [they] took part in a ritual that cel-
ebrated stability rather than fertility, order rather than union, monarchy
rather than renewal” (77, 76).
In light of the extant documentation of the proceedings, there would
therefore seem to be a number of misunderstandings prevalent in the gener-
ally accepted interpretations of the myths—including Frye’s. One of these
would appear to be in the depiction by Herodotus, remarked upon by Frye
on several occasions in the Late Notebooks and in Words with Power, of the
bed-chamber at the top of the ziggurat in which the bride of the god is said
to have been laid out to await his descent from the heavens (1990:153, 206–7;
2000b:2:483, 492, 517, 583, 584).7 For, according to the information just given,
even with a human priestess playing the part of the goddess, it would have
been the mortal king preparing to receive the blessing of divine kingship
through his union with her who would have ascended the ziggurat to meet
the descended goddess.8 That this is the true and original form of the myth is
suggested by the verse with which a poem celebrating the sacred marriage
culminates, in which the mortal queen who has played the part of Inanna in
the rite is transposed into the goddess as the newly risen evening star:
priestess, and the king achieved a divine or quasi-divine status in the ritual (51, 238). Thorkild
Jacobsen translates nugig (literally “sacred”/“taboo” person) as “holy one” and further explains
that Inanna herself “belonged to this class of women and typified the women belonging to it”
(1987:6).
9 For an alternate rendering, see Jacobsen, 1987:124.
10 As Baring and Cashford explain it, “in the goddess culture the conception of the relation
between creator and creation was expressed in the image of the Mother as zoe, the eternal
source, giving birth to the son as bios, the created life in time which lives and dies back into the
source” (274).
112 semeia
if you and I should be lovers, should not I be served in the same fashion as
all these others whom you loved once?” (Sandars: 86, 87).11 Ishtar is replaced
in Gilgamesh’s affections by Enkidu, of whom it is predicted that Gilgamesh
will “love him as a woman” and will never be forsaken by him (66), and
who declares upon his arrival that he has “come to change the old order”
(65, 68). Together the two embark on a quest to make for themselves an
“enduring name” (73), and when Enkidu is killed the grieving Gilgamesh
sets out on a further journey to the garden of the gods in a search for the
secret of “everlasting life” (97–107)—or, in other words, for an immortality
that is not dependent on the goddess.
The final defeat of the goddess is, of course, not immediate, and for a
time both gods and goddesses are accorded their places in the various pan-
theons. During this period, however, there is increasing enmity between
them, and the gods are depicted as promiscuous and/or bisexual, like Zeus
and Apollo, or, as renunciant and celibate, like Yahweh. In the case of Zeus
especially, promiscuity is clearly part of a larger game of conquest, as shrine
after shrine of the goddess is captured and taken over by the god. And in
ancient Babylonia as well, the roles and powers of the goddess were gradu-
ally being conquered. Ishtar, the goddess of love, is, of course, never
identified or even remotely connected in the myths with Tiamat, the sup-
posed “monster” of the watery deeps, and yet the connection is there, as I
will try to show.
In all of the so-called fertility myths, the goddess represents the tomb as
well as the womb of life, its end as well as its source; consequently, the
period of dormancy and decline is her domain as much as the season of life
and growth. We see this fact reflected in the earlier Sumerian myth of the
Descent of Inanna, which I personally am inclined to read as the predecessor
of the conquest of chaos by Marduk depicted in the Babylonian Creation
11 The catalogue of the previous lovers of Ishtar named by Gilgamesh in the epic seems to
be largely poetic, as it includes the many-colored roller (a bird), the lion, the stallion magnificent
in battle, the shepherd of the flock, and Ishullanu the gardener as well as Tammuz, the “lover of
[her] youth, for whom [she] decreed wailing, year after year” (Sandars: 86–87). Frymer-Kensky,
however, sheds a rather different light on the situation in her discussion of early Sumerian epics
that treat the rivalry between several of the Sumerian city-states (all of whom claimed Inanna as
their patron) in terms of the ability of their king to retain the favor of the goddess, and especially
in her description of the devastation experienced by Enmerkar, Lord of Kullab, who interpreted
his failure in battle against Aratta as an indication that Inanna had deserted him and no longer
desired him as a partner (62–63). The result of this, she says, is that although the kings of Akkad
might have attributed their victory to Inanna/Ishtar, the religion of later Sumer envisions a
world in which such historical rise and fall depends on the god Enlil rather than on the goddess
(66). Strikingly, Gilgamesh’s name is preceded on the Sumerian King List by that of Dumuzi,
the Sumerian equivalent of the Babylonian or Akkadian Tammuz (Jakobsen: 1939:142 and table
1, following p. 180).
burgess: from archetype to antitype 113
Epic. In this poem Inanna, already the “Queen of Heaven and Earth,”
endeavors to extend her dominion to include the underworld by undertak-
ing a perilous descent. The reasons for this descent are not explicitly stated;
however, as the poem ends in Inanna’s rescue and return followed by her
decree that her consort Dumuzi and his sister Geshtinanna should take
turns serving as ransom for her in roles comparable to that of Persephone in
Greek myth, it is difficult not to conclude that it is the same renewal of the
seasonal cycle that is involved and that the “descent” and contest with the
forces of death undertaken by the god in the Creation Epic were originally
undertaken at the initiative of the goddess. Significantly, however, there is
no externalized or objectified entity with whom Inanna contends or does
battle; rather, in an anticipation of the crucifixion and harrowing of hell of
Jesus, the goddess herself undergoes a three-day death and resurrection
while in the underworld, and the boon that she brings back to life with her
along with the renewal of nature is greater wisdom and power. Hence, the
usurpation by the male deity of a function that was originally performed by
the goddess and its transformation into an act of violence against a personi-
fied feminine attribute of nature, even though one markedly different from
her humanized form, is a reflection of an early stage in the process of her
ultimate defeat.
In the biblical context, of course, the pagan gods as well as the god-
desses are condemned, this time as expressions of “idolatry”—by which is
understood both the worship of presences held to be divine in nature and
their objectification in the form of concrete images. “For the Bible,” Frye
writes, “there is nothing numinous, no holy or divine presence within
nature itself” (1980:21 = 2000a:48), and “the gods take shape as projections of
human hopes and anxieties into the more mysterious aspects of nature”
(1991:59 = 2000a:214). “Nature is a fellow creature of man”; therefore, “to
discover divine presences in nature is superstition, and to worship them is
idolatry” (1980:21 = 2000a:48), an idol being essentially “a visual image of
something authoritative or numinous in nature” (2000a:12).
It is striking in this regard, although I have never come across evidence of
any etymological connection between the two, that the Greek word anathema,
which in current use is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an
accursed thing, a thing devoted to evil” but which originally meant “an offer-
ing, a thing set up to the gods,”12 recalls the name of the much-reviled
12 The Oxford Companion to the Bible explains the word anathema as “designating an object
dedicated or devoted to a deity either for consecration or to be cursed (devoted to destruction).
In the former sense, objects were dedicated to God and belonged to him. . . . Most occurrences of
the term, however, describe something or someone accursed or given to God for destruction”
(Metzger and Coogan: 26).
114 semeia
Canaanite goddess Anath or Anat. Anat is never named in the Bible, but
throughout the Old Testament there are numerous exhortations against “wor-
shiping the Baals and the Asherahs” (Judg 3:7 NRSV; cf. NIV), the stylized
wooden trees that were the sacred images of the Canaanite religion, and it has
been suggested that the Canaanite mother goddess Asherah or Astarte (Ash-
toreth or Ashtaroth in the AV) may at one time even have been worshiped in
the temple of Jerusalem as a consort of Yahweh (Metzger and Coogan: 64, 62).
The main “curse” from the biblical point of view, however, is clearly
that said to have been brought upon the entire human race by Eve through
her dealings with the serpent in the second, Jahwist, creation account in Gen
2:4–3:24. What it is important to note about this account for my purposes
here is that it involves another encounter with a so-called demonic animal
and that this encounter also reflects a parallel with Sumerian and Akkadian
mythology. For on Mesopotamian cylinder seals and other artifacts dating
back to as early as the third millennium B.C.E. there are numerous carved
illustrations reminiscent of the primal scene in the garden of Eden in which
images of a goddess, serpents, and a tree of life are juxtaposed. Joseph
Campbell, in a section entitled “The Mother Goddess Eve” contained in a
chapter devoted to “The Serpent’s Bride” in his book The Masks of God: Occi-
dental Mythology, writes that
13 Campbell identifies the female figure as “almost certainly the goddess Gula-Bau (a
counterpart . . . of Demeter and Persephone),” and the male, whose identity as a god is indicated
by his horned lunar crown, as her beloved son-husband Dumuzi, “Son of the Abyss: Lord of the
Tree of Life” (14). Anne Baring and Jules Cashford do not name the figures but give the date of
the seal as ca. 2500 B.C.E. (43). Tikva Frymer-Kensky does not discuss the seal but explains that
Inanna is sometimes called Baba or Ba’u in the context of the sacred marriage hymns and iden-
tifies Gula as a counterpart of Baba/Ba’u, who occupied the same position in the Sumerian
pantheon (221). It should be pointed out also that the drawing of the cylinder seal used here by
Campbell, rather strikingly, depicts only one serpent, the one standing behind the goddess, as
burgess: from archetype to antitype 115
Lagash that depicts two serpents intertwined in the form of a caduceus and
is dedicated to a late Sumerian manifestation of this consort of the goddess
under his title Ningizzida, “Lord of the Tree of Truth” (9).
John Phillips, writing in his book Eve: The History of an Idea, further elab-
orates that “the Mother Goddess of ancient Near Eastern religions, by
whatever name she was called, was honored and worshipped with the title
‘the Mother of All the Living,’ ” which is “the meaning of Hawwah, or Eve,
the name given by Adam to the first woman” (3). Moreover, commenting on
the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib, he notes that “in Sumerian
religion the cuneiform signs NIN.TI could be read as either ‘lady of life’ (a
title for a goddess) or ‘lady of the rib’” (28).
Under the circumstances, the words given by Milton to Eve’s tempter in
the garden in Paradise Lost assume the utmost irony:
does his discussion of the seal; in a later book, however, he includes a photographic reproduc-
tion showing both (1974:295), as do Baring and Cashford (43).
116 semeia
14 Frye touches upon this fact in passing in The Great Code (70) but does not otherwise take
it into consideration.
burgess: from archetype to antitype 117
what he refers to as, in a phrase borrowed from Emily Dickinson, “the con-
fiscated gods” (2:548).15 Nowhere, however, does he consider a similar
treatment of the “confiscated goddesses”—his repeated references to the
virgin goddess Diana are frankly obscene (e.g., 1:345)—and occasional spec-
ulations that the divine should contain a feminine as well as a masculine
component are generally discarded: “I suppose the Spirit should have both
sexes, a male god who carries the female body of the redeemed with him.
This is not a fruitful line of investigation” (2:585).16
What is deeply disturbing about the sexual symbolism that Frye does
employ is that it is founded in the rampantly misogynist thinking evident in
some quarters at the dawn of the Christian era.17 He cites, for example, the
passage from the Gospel of Thomas in which Simon Peter says to Jesus, “Make
Mary leave us, for females don’t deserve life,”18 and Jesus’ answer that he
“will guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit
resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter
the domain of heaven” (114:1–2; qtd. from Miller: 322)—and he notes as he
does so the “form-male matter-female metaphor” that the editor of the edi-
tion he is using cites to explain the passage: “it was a philosophical cliché
that the material constituent of an entity was ‘female,’ while its form (or
ideal form) was ‘male’” (2000b:2:393–94, 836; qtd. from Layton: 399). On one
occasion Frye voices some doubt as to the efficacy of this kind of sexual
symbolism, but he immediately overrides it—“I think I should say that
15 “If ‘All is possible with’ him/As he besides concedes/He will refund us finally/Our
confiscated Gods—” (qtd. in Frye, 1963:209; cf. also 1990:134–35).
16 Speaking specifically about poets, however, in an introduction to an anthology that was
to have been published by Harcourt, Brace and World, Frye writes: “During a time when sexual
sublimation was about the most highly approved of all social acts, it would not be surprising, on
the face of it, that poets, deprived of what Emily Dickinson calls ‘our confiscated gods,’ should
have decided that, while they could get along without Jupiter, certainly without Mars, the loss of
Venus was intolerable” (Frye, 2002:112).
17 In addition to the passage from the extracanonical Gospel of Thomas cited here, I have in
mind the following instances: (a) comments in the Pistis Sophia attributed, as in the Gospel of
Thomas, to Peter, e.g.: “My Lord, we will not endure this woman [Mary Magdalene], for she
taketh the opportunity from us and hath let none of us speak, but she discourseth many times”
(Mead: 47); (b) Paul’s statement in 1 Tim 2:11–12: “Let a woman learn in silence with all submis-
siveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent”; (c) the
statement attributed to Jesus in the second century by Clement of Alexandria in the Stromateis:
“They say that the Savior himself said: ‘I come to undo the works of women,’ meaning by this
‘female,’ sexual desire, and by ‘work,’ birth and the corruption of death” (qtd. in Brown: 85).
18 The commentary on this verse in The Complete Gospels (Miller: 323) notes that “in the
extra-canonical tradition Peter is portrayed as critical of Mary in particular (e.g. in the Gospel of
Mary and the Pistis Sophia),” indicating that the Mary referred to is Mary Magdalene; however,
Frye may be reading the passage as referring to the Virgin Mary, as this would help to explain
his theory of “redeemable man . . . conceived in female form as the Virgin Mary” (2000b:2:444).
burgess: from archetype to antitype 119
making male & female sexes the symbols of human subject and natural
object was confusing & perhaps wrong, but we’re stuck with it”
(2000b:1:333)—with the result that he is left musing on such imponderables
as man “whoring around” as woman (2:453) and his “theory that
redeemable man is symbolically woman” (2:464, 573).
Also disturbing is the way in which earthly nature merges in Frye’s
thought with physical human nature. “Why do we call both art and nature
beautiful?” he asks in one notebook entry. “It seems absurd on the face of it
to apply the same term to a Mozart divertimento and some cutie in a bathing
suit” (2:622; emphasis mine). Both forms of nature are, to his way of think-
ing, equally in need of redemption, the reason for this being that in his
model of the old four-level cosmos of authority the original paradisal nature
was held to have fallen to its present lower level simultaneously with the
fall of Adam. Thus, according to Frye, “human history is the record of the
only animal in nature more repulsive than nature,” and “we can hope for
nothing in either man or nature: there has to be an apocalypse within man”
(1:368). Thus also his preoccupation with the cultural productions of art and
literature—“human creativity has in it the quality of re-creation, of salvaging
something with a human meaning out of the alienation of nature”
(1982:138)—and his especial emphasis on the written message of the Bible.
The Bible is, to me, the body of words through which I can see the world as a
cosmos, as an order, and where I can see human nature as something
redeemable, something with a right to survive. Otherwise you’re left with
human nature and physical nature. Physical nature doesn’t seem to have very
much conversation. It’s a totally inarticulate world. Human nature is corrupt
at the source because it’s grown out of physical nature. (1991–1992:10)
split, along with the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, occurred pre-
cisely as a result of the invention of writing and the changes from right-brain
to left-brain consciousness produced by literacy. “A feature of nonverbal
communication,” he observes, “is that no symbolization interferes with the
direct appreciation of reality” (19), and the introduction of the mediated sym-
bolization that writing represents disrupts this directness of apprehension.
To be able to leap from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract
has allowed us to create art, logic, science, and philosophy. But this skill
tore us out of the rich matrix of nature. The part torn away became the ego.
The left brain cleaved the right brain’s integrated sense of wholeness into a
duality that resulted in humans creating a distinction between me-in-here
and world-out-there. The ego requires duality to gain perspective. (22)
than in the old, worn-out gendered terms. Frye himself notes that “a stabi-
lized male-female relationship within the psyche is the basis for imaginative
progress” (2000b:1:224), and the privileging of one gender at the expense of
the other—even on a “purely” symbolic level, if that is in fact possible—no
longer seems acceptable.
Albert Einstein predicted that the religion of the future will be a cosmic
religion: “Covering both the natural and the spiritual,” he speculated, it will
be “based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natu-
ral and spiritual as a meaningful unity” (qtd. in Das: 1; emphasis mine). And
what this will entail is a healing in the collective human consciousness of the
masculine-feminine, mind-body, flesh-spirit, subject-object split.
In his later writings, of course, Frye does speak of an imaginative tran-
scendence of this split: “literature always assumes, in its metaphors, a
relation between human consciousness and its natural environment that
passes beyond—in fact, outrages and violates—the ordinary common sense
based on a permanent separation of subject and object” (1990:71). He seems
to see this more as a transcendence, however, than as an integration, and
more as imaginative than as experiential. For in the new creation that
becomes manifest in the second or “participating” apocalypse that consti-
tutes Frye’s personal enlightenment vision in the seventh/eighth phase of
revelation, human beings become participants by being “redeemed, or sepa-
rated from the predatory and destructive elements acquired from [their]
origin in nature.” As “the subject-object cleavage becomes increasingly
unsatisfactory, subject and object merge in an intermediate verbal world,
where a Word not our own, though also our own, proclaims and a Spirit not
our own, though also our own, responds” (1990:135, 118; emphasis mine).
Moreover, for Frye there is a significant difference between the Buddhist
and the Christian enlightenments in that the latter is more militant and
human beings have “to fight [their] way out of history and not simply awaken
from it” (1982:133). Central to Frye’s conception of typology as a “figure of
speech that moves in time” is this combination of a movement from the type
of body and flesh to the antitype of spirit, or from the soma psychikon or phys-
ical or “natural” body to the soma pneumatikon or spiritual body, with a
“vertical lift” that would take the process “out of the future and put an end to
history” (2000b:1:183, 194, 358). Yet even this is ambiguous, as he also indi-
cates that this movement is to be understood figuratively—for “what is
symbolized by the destruction of the order of nature is the destruction of the
way of seeing that order that keeps man confined to the world of time and
history as we know them” (1982:136; emphasis mine). Buddhism, he says, is
WORKS CONSULTED
Baring, Anne, and Jules Cashford
1991 The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Viking.
Blake, William
1988 The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman.
Rev. ed. New York: Doubleday.
Brown, Peter
1988 The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Campbell, Joseph
1964 The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. Harmondsworth, England: Pen-
guin.
1974 The Mythic Image. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Catullus
1995 Poems 61–68. Ed. and trans. John Godwin. Warminster, England: Aris &
Phillips.
Das, Surya
1997 Awakening the Buddha Within: Eight Steps to Enlightenment: Tibetan
Wisdom for the Western World. New York: Broadway.
Frankfort, Henri
1948 Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion As the
Integration of Society and Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Frazer, Sir James George
1976 The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan.
[Orig. 1922]
burgess: from archetype to antitype 123
Jacobsen, Thorkild
1939 The Sumerian King List. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1987 The Harps That Once. . . : Sumerian Poetry in Translation. New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press.
Layton, Bentley, ed. and trans.
1987 The Gnostic Scriptures. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.
Mead, G. R. S.
1974 Pistis Sophia: Challenge to Early Christianity. Secaucus, N.J.: University
Books.
Metzger, Bruce M., and Michael D. Coogan, eds.
1993 The Oxford Companion to the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miller, Robert J., ed.
1994 The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version. Rev. and expanded ed.
San Francisco: Harper Collins.
Milton, John
1962 Paradise Lost. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Ovid
1977 Metamorphoses. Vol. 1. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. 3d ed., rev. G. P.
Goold. LCL. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
1986 Metamorphoses. Trans. A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Phillips, John A.
1984 Eve: The History of an Idea. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Pound, Ezra
1964 The Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber.
Pritchard, James B., ed.
1955 Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 2d ed. Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Sandars, N. K., trans. and introd.
1972 The Epic of Gilgamesh. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.
Shlain, Leonard
1998 The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image.
Harmondsworth, England: Viking Penguin.
Wolkstein, Diane, and Samuel Noah Kramer
1983 Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Legends from Sumer.
New York: Harper & Row.
MODELING BIBLICAL NARRATIVE:
FRYE AND D. H. LAWRENCE
William Robins
University of Toronto
abstract
Is Northrop Frye’s approach to studying the Bible and literature equally
valid for different kinds of literary production, or does it extrapolate inap-
propriately from the biblical intertextuality of visionary poetics? This essay
argues that Frye’s criticism is not fully suited to interpreting the biblical
resources important to novelists. It takes as a test-case the novel Aaron’s Rod
by D. H. Lawrence. In Aaron’s Rod two ways of engaging with biblical nar-
rative are found to be in conflict. One involves attention to the archetypal
narrativity of the Bible, such as Frye’s criticism is concerned with. The other
involves attention to the novelistic narrativity of the Bible, for which critics
other than Frye are more useful guides. Because it shows this conflict so
clearly, Lawrence’s work can help us understand where Frye’s scheme
might be appropriate to the task of literary elucidation and where it might
actually be misleading.
-125-
126 semeia
Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all
our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were
all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; And did all eat the
same spiritual meat; And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they
drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.
(1 Cor 10:1–4)
Given the archetypal narrative of loss and salvation, the typological recapit-
ulation of the Christian story of salvation, the clustering of familiar biblical
symbols, and the achievement of a kind of “apocalyptic” vision on the part
of the main character, Aaron’s Rod seems to confirm the general validity of
Frye’s model of biblical intertextuality.
There are, however, two difficulties. The first concerns the divergent
kinds of visionary truth unleashed by the myth of rebirth. Lawrence gives
his novel a proto-fascist conclusion: realize the truth of the world, dissolve
your own concern for your ego, and you will joyfully submit to a greater
man’s power. Frye’s apocalypticism encodes his own United Church liber-
alism: cleanse the doors of perception and you will break free of ideologies.
Frye is adamant that any visionary claim that leads to fascism is a false
vision, but this remains a point of faith on Frye’s part. For Lawrence, any
spiritual growth that found fulfillment in democracy was spiritually false.
Even if most of us following in Frye’s wake are sympathetic to his moral
stance, and would like to believe that the imagination ultimately reveals
truths that are palatable, nevertheless, the archetypal narrativity of the bibli-
cal tradition does not necessarily always take liberal forms.
The second difficulty is posed by the structure of this novel. A plot of
continual deferral animates the first twenty of the twenty-one chapters of
Aaron’s Rod, and bringing that plot to a formal closure presented Lawrence
with a significant difficulty; in a letter he admits: “I did more than half of
Aaron’s Rod, but can’t end it: the flowering end missing, I suppose”
(1984:626). When he does conclude the novel, he does so by veering sharply
away from the picaresque genre of Sisson’s wandering. The consensus of its
readers is that this closing chapter stands in stark disharmony with the rest
of Aaron’s Rod, both in the sentiments expressed and in the preacherly mode
of delivery. Daleski is typical in seeing it as Lawrence’s attempt “to blatantly
force Aaron into a yielding which would negate a great deal of what has
gone before. . . . [I]t is not clear why yielding in the name of ‘life-submission’
should not be as much a ‘cul-de-sac’ as less pretentious forms of surrender”
(207). In other words, this conclusion, which seems to align Aaron’s Rod with
a Frygian understanding of biblical narrative, is inappropriately imposed
upon the rest of the novel, which seems to bring into play different narrative
robins: modeling biblical narrative 129
expectations and, as we will see, a different mode of engaging with the text
of the Bible.
In modeling his novel upon the story of the Israelites’ wandering in the
wilderness, and especially upon the story of Aaron’s difficult priesthood,
Lawrence adopts a technique that I will speak of as “parallel tracking.” He
has approached the biblical text of Exodus and Numbers as a series of dis-
crete episodes strung together according to an irregular rhythm of the
appearance and disappearance of a vital connection to God. With the plot of
the exodus stripped to these narrative bones, the skeleton has been taken up
by Lawrence to provide the scaffolding for his novel. This parallel tracking
is represented schematically in my accompanying table (table 1).
Table 1
Correspondences of Aaron’s Rod with Exodus and Numbers
21 ? ?
The first eleven chapters of Aaron’s Rod align themselves with the
sequence of episodes in the book of Exodus, beginning with the captivity of
130 semeia
render into English and German respectively the names of Jethro’s two sons,
Gershom and Eliezer, who join the Israelites in Exodus 18. These and other
muted echoes are so unobtrusive that they cannot be meant to serve as cru-
cial signals for the novel’s readers, appearing instead almost as traces
remaining from the construction of the novel. Kermode has noted similarly
muted allusions in Lawrence’s apocalypticism: “sometimes his allusions are
so inexplicit that only if you are a naïve fundamentalist (in which case you
probably won’t be reading Lawrence) or are on the lookout (in which case
you are reading abnormally) will you pick them up” (158). Even if, as Baker
claims, “one can scarcely scan a single page of Aaron’s Rod without encoun-
tering some reference, however oblique, to the biblical legend [of Moses and
the wandering chosen people]” (46), yet the kind of biblical engagement that
links Aaron’s Rod to Exodus and Numbers is not primarily one of citational
allusion but of narrative disposition, following a deeply embedded sequen-
tial logic that breaks the allusive surface only in oblique ways.
Aaron’s Rod follows the narrative texture of the exodus story in order to
present a modern tale of a man who is, like the biblical Aaron, the priest of
an unknown God. What is constantly in doubt, for both the main character
and the readers, is access to any perspective that would explain the course
of one’s life. This essential uncertainty is what makes the closing chapter of
the novel so inappropriate aesthetically and thematically. It is also what
makes the novel as a whole resistant to interpretation in Frye’s terms.
Escape from captivity leads to another stage of captivity, not to redemption.
Such is a response to the books of Exodus and Numbers read as novelistic
texts in their own right. Christian typology and apocalyptic symbolism are
felt to betray the central meaning of such a narrative of wandering.
What alternative paradigms for speaking about the Bible and literature
might provide more help than Frye’s for describing the intertextuality of
Lawrence’s novel? The approach associated with readers like Erich Auer-
bach and Robert Alter would be more suited to attending to the biblical
story as a plot of uncertainty. These readers pay close attention to the
specifics of narrative texture rather than dismissing such specifics as sym-
bolic settings for the Christian mythos of redemption. From this perspective,
biblical characters are seen to act out the effects of religious impulses in
ways that are open-ended and morally complex. “Indeed,” writes Alter, “an
essential aim of the innovative technique of fiction worked out by the
ancient Hebrew writers was to produce a certain indeterminacy of meaning,
especially in regard to motive, moral character, and psychology” (12). Bibli-
cal narration—reticent, abrupt, ambiguous, “fraught with background”
(Auerbach: 12)—conveys the problematic claims made upon individuals by
a divine covenant. Such elaboration of how we are “enmeshed in uncer-
tainty” is much more a constitutive feature of the Hebrew Bible than of the
Christian Bible (Josipovici: 87).
132 semeia
novel gets up and walks away with the nail” (1936:528). Although Lawrence
here has in mind novels like Tolstoy’s, that prescribe a doctrine of Christian
self-sacrifice, Aaron’s Rod proves that a credo of the innate Holy Ghost can
be just as doctrinaire, and just as contradictory to the real thrust of the work.
The biblical inheritance exerts two different kinds of pressure upon
Lawrence as he shapes this novel. On the one hand, as a novelist concerned
with the complex interrelatedness of human beings to all aspects of their
world, Lawrence takes inspiration from the narrative techniques in the stories
of the Hebrew Bible. Lawrence admitted to preferring the books of the Old
Testament to the Gospels as novels, for there is “too much Sermon-on-the-
mounting” in the Gospels, while “Greater novels, to my mind, are the books
of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Kings, by authors whose pur-
pose was so big, it didn’t quarrel with their passionate inspiration” (1968:418).
On the other hand, as a preacher, Lawrence was deeply committed to identi-
fying the nameless flame that might reawaken modern man; in this task he
espouses a transformed Christianity (resurrection without the sacrifice) by
adopting the “Sermon-on-the-mounting” and the didactic “nailing down”
that he knows go against the grain of the novel as an art form. This apostolic
Lawrence makes common cause with the archetypal narrativity of the Christ-
ian Bible, in which all stories converge in a lesson of personal conversion.
The sharp disjunction felt in Aaron’s Rod shows that attention dedicated
either to novelistic or to archetypal designs will illuminate only one aspect
of what Lawrence is trying to do, thereby falsifying the complexity of
Lawrence’s contest with the Bible. Lawrence inherited two distinct tradi-
tions for reading the Bible. As he became intent upon turning the modern
novel into a biblically inspired literary form, these traditions offered power-
ful assumptions about the logic of biblical narrative, and Lawrence, it seems,
could feel entirely comfortable with neither. The result is a novel so deeply
conflicted as to be, in a sense, about the competing pressures exerted by
these two different ways of reading biblical narrative.
Frye’s approach to the Bible and literature overlooks what I have here
called the novelistic narrativity of the Bible, and the consequence is that
Frye’s paradigms, however useful for speaking about the poems of Milton
and Blake, may fall wide of the mark when brought to bear upon novelistic
writings. With regard to Lawrence in particular, Frye’s criticism will leave
important dimensions of Lawrence’s struggle with the Bible unaccounted
for. Frye was appalled by the proto-Nazi tendencies of the novels of
Lawrence’s middle period, Aaron’s Rod and The Plumed Serpent, and he iden-
tified Lawrence’s The Man Who Died as an unsuccessful attempt to unite an
archetypal movement of ascent with an oppressive ideology (1976:151).
Nevertheless, Lawrence is not just somebody who tried to draw upon the
Bible but got it wrong (i.e., put it into fascist terms). Rather, Lawrence is
a writer for whom there were two different, at times conflicting ways of
134 semeia
WORKS CONSULTED
Aldington, Richard
1950 “Introduction.” Pp. 7–10 in Aaron’s Rod. By D. H. Lawrence. Har-
mondsworth, England: Penguin.
Alter, Robert
1981 The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books.
Auerbach, Erich
1953 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans.
Willard R. Trask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Baker, Paul G.
1983 “Biblical Analogue and Symbolism in Aaron’s Rod.” Pp. 39–60 in A
Reassessment of D. H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod. Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press.
Daleski, H. M.
1965 The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. London: Faber & Faber.
robins: modeling biblical narrative 135
Ford, George H.
1965 The Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence.
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Frye, Northrop
1976 The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard 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.
Hyde, Virginia
1992 The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
Josipovici, Gabriel
1988 The Book of God: A Response to the Bible. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Kalnins, Mara
1988 “Introduction.” Pp. xvii–xliv in Lawrence, 1988.
Kermode, Frank
1971 “D. H. Lawrence and the Apocalyptic Types.” Pp. 153–81 in Modern
Essays. London: Collins. [Partly reprinted as “Lawrence and Apocalyp-
tic Types.” Pp. 59–71 in Modern Critical Views: D. H. Lawrence. Ed.
Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.]
Lawrence, D. H.
1936 “Morality and the Novel.” Pp. 527–32 in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers
of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Edward D. McDonald. London: Heinemann.
1968 “The Novel.” Pp. 416–26 in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished and
Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T.
Moore. New York: Viking.
1984 The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 3: October 1916–June 1921. Ed. James T.
Boulton and Andrew Robertson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
1988 Aaron’s Rod. Ed. Mara Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
RESPONSES
BIBLICAL STUDIES ON A MORE CAPACIOUS CANVAS:
A RESPONSE TO JOE VELAIDUM AND JAMES M. KEE
David Jobling
St. Andrew’s College, Saskatoon
I was sadly unable to attend the McMaster conference out of which this
volume came and am correspondingly glad to be invited to become, as it
were, a participant at second hand. This invitation has made me confront
my own relationship to and use of Northrop Frye, and I find it paradoxical.
Given the many ways and the long time that he has been a significant pres-
ence for me, my direct use of him has been strangely small. Like Frye
(though in my case adoptively) I am Canadian. I serve professionally the
United Church of Canada, the Christian denomination in which he was,
long ago, an ordained minister. The United Church is, among the Canadian
denominations, the one most defined by its social engagement, and in this
respect Frye’s association with it is far from accidental.
When The Great Code came out in 1982, I devoted a month to it in a sem-
inary course on “Emerging Approaches in Biblical Studies,” but I have not
used Frye in such depth since; the appearance of Words with Power or The
Double Vision had no impact on my teaching. The one part of Frye’s biblical
work that I continue to use, and have incorporated into my introductory
course on the Jewish Bible, is chapter 5 of The Great Code, “Phases of Revela-
tion.” Here Frye argues that the (Christian) Bible, taken as a whole, can and
must be read as a single literary work. This invites the question of how the
Jewish Bible might function as a single literary work, and with what conse-
quences. I shall return to this in a moment.
Actually, my personal “Frye” was formed mainly before 1982 and is not
directly related to his biblical trilogy. When in the early 1970s I made the key
turn in my career, to structuralism, I read some Frye, especially Anatomy of
Criticism. I don’t recall who suggested him to me, but I recognized in him
many affinities to the theoreticians I was mostly reading at that time:
V. Propp, Claude Lévi-Strauss, A. J. Greimas. Yet it was these (and others),
rather than Frye, who came to shape my work. Writing this response has
made me ask myself, in particular, why, in my constant insistence that the
Bible needs to be read as myth (see, e.g., Jobling, 1998:5–6 and passim), I
have always invoked Lévi-Strauss—who, as it happens, denies that the Bible
can be myth in his sense (1963:631–32)!—rather than Frye.
The single work that has most formed my view of Frye came out, as it
happened, the year before The Great Code: Fredric Jameson’s The Political
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140 semeia
Unconscious (1981). (At just that time, as it further happened, I spent a month
in Toronto at the International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural
Studies and first saw the portrait of Frye, seated in an armchair which rests
on clouds, that dominates the library of Victoria College.) Jameson’s thesis is
that literature is formed by and forms societies, providing a way of dealing
with “contradictions” (in the Marxist sense) within and between social for-
mations and “modes of production.” This thesis he argues on the largest
possible historical scale, from ancient and traditional literatures to the
modern novel. As a Marxist, he is not only descriptive but also theorizes the
conditions for a “Utopian” transformation of society. Literature symbolizes
“the destiny of community” (70).
Jameson repeatedly acknowledges (esp. 12–13, 285) a number of privi-
leged sites and figures for his investigation, his “precursors.” These include
Freud, Lukács, Bakhtin, Ernst Bloch, major semioticians and structuralists
(esp. Greimas and Lévi-Strauss), and also “a certain Christian hermeneu-
tics” (12), by which he means the medieval fourfold scheme of interpretation
(literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical; 31). In this great tradition he emphat-
ically includes Frye, whom he discusses at length (esp. 68–74, 104–7, 110–13,
129–30).
What Jameson above all values in Frye is his social vision:
The greatness of Frye, and the radical difference between his work and
that of the great bulk of garden-variety myth criticism, lies in his willing-
ness to raise the issue of community and to draw basic, essentially social,
interpretive consequences from the nature of religion as collective repre-
sentation. (69)
modern texts. Reading his work on Dante, Langland, and Milton was for me
primarily an experience of learning. But I fully affirm the hermeneutical
implication that he intends this work to have for biblical studies. The ques-
tion that arises is this: Is what Kee is doing “biblical studies,” in the sense
that this sort of thing should be included in biblical studies’ regular and
normal self-definition? The answer, for me, is a resounding Yes.
Kee’s choice of subjects makes us see the Bible functioning within a
large reach of history, from the early fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury, and in a variety of social and political circumstances. True to “the
irreducibly social character” of Frye’s hermeneutic, he insists on reading his
texts in their specific social and political contexts, and shows us how these
find expression in the works themselves: not by simple “reflection,” but in
ways discernible only by subtle analysis. This resembles Jameson’s
approach and insights.
If Kee did no more, these would be substantial accomplishments. But he
goes further. By the brilliant organization of his essay, he puts a significant
question to Frye, and helps me with my own ambiguity about Frye.
Dante operates with ontological confidence out of a vision of cosmic
unity, and his control over his work expresses this (he is contemporary, of
course, with the heyday of the fourfold biblical hermeneutic so important to
Jameson; this was a time that “knew” how to read the Bible). For Langland,
the unity and confidence are fading; for Milton, they are gone; and in both,
authorial control has correspondingly become a critical issue. Langland
must mend by metaphor the allegorical assurance that has been broken, and
Milton can make at best a “heroic attempt” to control his material at all.
These dynamics can be translated into political terms. Langland (as I learned
from Kee) “is engaged with the personal, social, and historical disorders of
his day in intensely concrete ways,” and the same could surely be said of
Milton with at least equal truth. In their modes of political engagement they
again differ from Dante, for whom political roles, from pope and emperor
down, are “divinely ordained” (Kee: 80).
What Kee does is to make Langland and Milton deconstruct Dante and
then, in a parallel move, make a hermeneutician like Gerald Bruns decon-
struct Frye’s straining for the Dantesque unity—all the while acknowledging
that it is Frye himself who provides the framework within which such
changes can be rung! (I have called this sort of thing “friendly deconstruc-
tion”; Derrida does it to Marx.) By reading Frye against himself, Kee reveals
a Frye who “knows” the limits of the oneness that he passionately projects
for the mending of society, whose method carries him into “indeterminate
Two-ness” (84).
Both Velaidum and Kee expressly desire renewal in biblical studies and
draw on Frye to express their desire. They don’t want exactly what Frye
wanted—Kee especially distances himself from Frye—but both acknowledge
jobling: biblical studies on a more capacious canvas 145
how Frye himself has shaped their wish-lists. What they imply, and I pro-
foundly agree, is that we need a biblical studies with Frygian vision, rather
than a Frygian biblical studies! What is annoying, and even tragic, about
Frye’s critics in biblical studies is that they consistently objectify (Jameson
would say “reify”) his work in terms of what they are already doing, rather
that imagining how his work could add to theirs. In doing so they exactly
miss the point and reenact the very dynamics (of reason and imagination)
that Velaidum expounds in his treatment of Blake and Locke. The idea actu-
ally visited me that Frye’s contribution to biblical studies might have been
more salutary if he hadn’t written his specifically biblical books. This is per-
haps an outrageous thought, but it fits with my own experience that Frye
made his contribution to transforming my biblical work before he published
those books.
To conclude: The canvas of biblical studies is enlarged by these essays,
and by all the essays in this volume. This is to the good. We are still, in my
view, in a period when sheer proliferation is a positive. New voices are
being heard in biblical studies, and what they are saying really is new. And
at least some of the older voices are letting themselves be renewed. How-
ever, the need is growing for critical conversation about methods old and
new, the serious meeting of minds that Velaidum sought and missed at the
conference. Where, given the cornucopia, does our ethical responsibility—
”our attempt to participate . . . responsibly” (Kee: 84)—as “public scholars”
lie? It was a wonderful bonus for me at the end of Velaidum’s essay—like
turning a corner at the end of a long walk and sighting one’s destination—
that he invoked Daniel Patte, my own main mentor and my predecessor as
General Editor of this journal (whom just a few days before this writing we
honored with a special session and a Festschrift at the Society of Biblical Lit-
erature Annual Meeting). Velaidum is right: Patte shows us better than any
other recent biblical scholar how we may “process,” as the social and ethical
beings that Frye insisted we be, the myriad methodological options cur-
rently available for biblical studies.
WORKS CONSULTED
Derrida, Jacques
1994 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Intro. Bernd Magnus and Stephen
Cullenberg. New York and London: Routledge.
Frye, Northrop
1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1976 The Secular Scripture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
146 semeia
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Jameson, Fredric
1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative As a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Jobling, David
1988 “The Canon of the Hebrew Bible As a Literary Work.” Unpublished
paper delivered at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies Annual
Meeting, University of Windsor, Ontario.
1998 1 Samuel. Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry. Col-
legeville, Minn.: Liturgical.
Josipovici, Gabriel
1988 The Book of God. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
1963 “Réponse à quelques questions.” Esprit 31:628–53.
Parker, Kim Ian
1996 “John Locke and the Enlightenment Metanarrative: A Biblical Correc-
tive to a Reasoned World.” SJT 49:57–73.
Patte, Daniel
1998 “Critical Biblical Studies from a Semiotic Perspective.” Semeia 81:3–23.
RECONFIGURING THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION:
A RESPONSE TO MARGARET BURGESS, PATRICIA
DEMERS, AND WILLIAM ROBINS
J. Russell Perkin
Saint Mary’s University
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148 semeia
No one would question that the two tales that Frye cites are part of the
overall vision of The Canterbury Tales, though there is plenty of room to
argue about whether The Parson’s Tale articulates the fundamental standard
that underlies all of the other tales. Similarly, Rochester and Bunyan repre-
sent the two poles of Restoration culture, between which the liberal-minded
might wish to find a middle way. With Sade the issue becomes more prob-
lematic, as one wonders whether he is, or should be, part of “culture.”
Perhaps my doubt arises because in its biblical context, the idea of a lion
lying down with a lamb is an image of the transcendence of violence and
bloodshed, whereas in the context of Sade and Jane Austen it is hard to
avoid the suggestion of Frye’s aggressively masculine sense of humour, con-
templating with amusement the idea of the two writers in a sexual
juxtaposition. Austen, of course, was far less tolerant of the figure of the
rake, as several of her novels reveal. Without becoming an advocate of cen-
sorship, it may be possible to quibble with Frye’s use of the word “equally”
and to suggest that his masculine viewpoint sometimes constitutes a blind
spot in Frye’s liberal humanism. My own idea of liberal education would
make far more room for Jane Austen than for Sade. Bogdan has her own list
of problematic passages in Frye (92, 94n17)—to which Burgess adds one or
two more examples (see, e.g., 116, 118–19)—and she argues against Frye that
“literary experience could be negative as well as positive” (88). Such a ques-
tioning and qualifying of Frye’s liberalism as an adequate basis for biblical
hermeneutics unites each of the three essays under consideration here. The
150 semeia
need for such efforts is brought home poignantly by William Robins’s con-
clusion that Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod arrives at its “fascism” as “a result of
adhering to the archetypal narrativity of the Christian Bible” (134; emphasis
added). Frye tended, without thorough scrutiny, to associate this structure
of thinking only with liberal creative freedom (Robins: 128).
Frye was certainly a more robust liberal than Matthew Arnold, and he
sometimes notes the lacunae in Arnold’s liberalism (e.g., Cayley: 117).
Arnold ridicules the racial theories of Emile Burnouf in Literature and Dogma,
but as Frye observed in a marginal annotation in his own copy of that work,
“yet Arnold expresses a sneaking fondness for this sort of thing in, I think,
Celtic Lit.” (Arnold, 1877:119; Frye is referring to Arnold’s collection of
essays on Celtic literature, which sometimes indulge in speculation about
racial characteristics: see Arnold, 1867). Frye regarded John Stuart Mill as a
more genuine liberal than Arnold. Frye’s moments of unreflective masculin-
ity are one weakness in his own liberalism; another may be the way that he
was unwilling or unable to see—perhaps because of the very power of his
own imaginative response to literature—that others could put literary texts
to very different uses in a manner that could be resisted only by evaluative
criticism. In this context, Arnold’s insistence on the critic’s task as “a disin-
terested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and
thought in the world” (1992:602) may be preferable to Frye’s rejection of the
critical task of evaluation. I referred earlier to the susceptibility of liberal the-
ology to becoming an expression of the fashionable ideas of the moment. In
the nineteenth century, it was vulnerable to accommodation with racial the-
orizing, as a number of scholarly studies have demonstrated (e.g., Davies,
1975, 1980; Heschel) and as Frye implies in his marginal comment on
Arnold’s Literature and Dogma. Robins notes a related case in his discussion
of Lawrence’s fascistic reformulation of Christianity (128, 133–34). Typology
separated from its original historical and doctrinal matrix is indeed a dan-
gerous model for the interpreter.
Robins suggests that Frye’s archetypal approach is less applicable to
modernist fiction than the more novelistic approach to the Bible of inter-
preters like Robert Alter. It is interesting in this context that Frye was never
very interested in the realist tradition in European fiction, and his major
examples of figural typology come from poetry and romance. Robins’s dis-
cussion could be developed further by a consideration of James Joyce,
whose poetics of course owe a great debt to the Catholic sacramental tradi-
tion, even though he rejected its doctrinal basis. Joyce’s fiction is full of
parodic typology, but it is also dense with realistic detail of a kind that
relates it more to the “novelistic narrativity” that Robins associates with
Alter’s commentary on the Jewish scriptures and that could as well be associ-
ated with Frank Kermode’s literary analysis of the Gospels. (Kermode
includes a discussion of Ulysses as well as the Gospel narratives in The Genesis
perkin: reconfiguring the liberal imagination 151
WORKS CONSULTED
Aquinas, St. Thomas
1992 “From the Nature and Domain of Sacred Doctrine.” Pp. 117–19 in Crit-
ical Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Rev. ed. Fort Worth:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Arnold, Matthew
1867 On the Study of Celtic Literature. London: Smith, Elder.
1877 Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the
Bible. New York: Macmillan. (Frye’s copy with his marginal annota-
tions, in the Northrop Frye Collection, E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria
College, no. 334.)
1992 “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Pp. 592–603 in Critical
Theory since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Rev. ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.
perkin: reconfiguring the liberal imagination 153
Ayre, John
1989 Northrop Frye: A Biography. Toronto: Random House.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M.
1981 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bogdan, Deanne
1994 “The (Re)Educated Imagination.” Pp. 84–96 in The Legacy of Northrop
Frye. Ed. Alvin A. Lee and Robert D. Denham. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Cayley, David
1992 Northrop Frye in Conversation. Toronto: Anansi.
Davies, Alan T.
1975 “The Aryan Christ: A Motif in Christian Anti-Semitism.” Journal of Ecu-
menical Studies 12:569–79.
1980 “Racism and German Protestant Theology: A Prelude to the Holo-
caust.” Pp. 20–34 in Reflections on the Holocaust: Historical, Philosophical,
and Educational Dimensions. Ed. Irene G. Shur, Franklin H. Littell, and
Marvin E. Wolfgang. Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 450. Philadelphia: AAPSS.
Frye, Northrop
1957 Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press.
1982 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Toronto: Academic Press.
1990 Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.”
Markham: Viking.
1991 The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
2000 “The Double Mirror.” Pp. 83–90 in Northrop Frye on Religion. Ed. Alvin A.
Lee and Jean O’Grady. Vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Heschel, Suzanne
1994 “The Image of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Christian New Testa-
ment Scholarship in Germany.” Pp. 215–40 in Jewish-Christian Encounters
over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue. Ed. Marvin
Perry and Frederick Schweitzer. New York: Peter Lang.
Kermode, Frank
1979 The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
New and Recent Titles
Robert Cording
College of the Holy Cross
In his review of The Literary Guide to the Bible for The New Yorker, George
Steiner warned against the separation “made in the name of current ration-
alism and agnosticism” between a “theological religious experiencing of
biblical texts and a literary one” (97). Steiner argued instead for writing that
would help us “to understand in what ways the Bible and the demands of
answerability it puts upon us” (96–97) are unlike other literary texts.
Northrop Frye’s The Great Code and the two books that followed, Words with
Power and The Double Vision, all address the complicated problems of
“answerability” that the Bible presents to its readers. Although Frye explic-
itly states that his approach to the Bible is that of a literary critic, and
although these works certainly provide a critical apparatus for recognizing
relationships between Western literary texts and the Bible, Frye’s task from
the outset has been to establish how the Bible is “more” than a work of liter-
ature, “whatever more means” (1982:xvi). My response to articles by Robert
Alter, David Gay, and Michael Dolzani will keep the complex nature of that
“more” as its focus. In all three essays the significant issue is how the Bible
is encountered by Frye. For Alter, Frye’s penchant for systematizing ignores
the disparate, concrete particulars of individual texts and what David Dam-
rosch, in his book The Narrative Covenant, has called the Bible’s “purposeful
patchwork” (324); Gay’s and Dolzani’s essays look at the purgatorial jour-
ney that Frye undertakes as he tries to re-create the Bible both as a myth and
as a myth to live by.
For Frye, the way in which the Bible is “more” than a work of literature
begins with his concept—certainly not new with him, as Frye acknowl-
edges—of “metaphorical literalism” (1991:69; called “literary literalism” in
Words with Power). Frye understands the paradoxical nature of his claim.
While the narrative the Bible tells, stretching from creation to apocalypse, is
literal and true, the true literal meaning is imaginative and poetic. Frye is
quick to point out the usual fallacy of what is meant by literally true, namely,
what is “descriptively accurate” (1991:14). Literalism of this kind is what
Paul calls the letter that kills (2 Cor 3:6). Such literalism is simply false and
connected, for Frye, to the worst elements of organized religions—bigotry,
cruelty, intolerance, hatred. While not denying the historicity of biblical
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156 semeia
events and persons, what Frye calls for, then, is an “imaginative literalism”
that recognizes that the “literal basis of faith in Christianity is a mythical and
metaphorical basis, not one founded on historical facts or logical propositions”
(1991:17). For Frye, myth and metaphor are a “primitive form of awareness,
established long before the distinction of subject and object became normal”
(1990:xviii). Just as myth is neither historical nor antihistorical, but counter-
historical, metaphor is neither logical nor illogical, but counterlogical. As
such, the question we should bring to biblical stories is not the objective—did
the events happen just as we are told?—but rather: how do we stand with
respect to the events’ revelation of God? If we approach the Bible solely as
literary critics, then its stories, no matter how beautifully wrought in terms
of their imaginative vision and formal properties, are “simply stories, con-
sidered with the suspended judgment of the imagination without relation to
the area we vaguely describe as truth” (1991:76). Thus beyond the usual
metaphorical-literal level where stories are only stories, there is for Frye the
“polysemous” nature of the Bible in which the unity of the biblical stories
form a myth to live by, “transformed from the kind of story we can con-
struct ourselves to a spiritual story of what has created and continues to
re-create us” (1991:77).
I want, for a moment, to read Frye’s ideas of “metaphorical literalism”
in the context of Gerald Bruns’s book Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern,
specifically his chapter on Luther. Luther argues first and foremost that
Scripture “does not tolerate the division of letter and Spirit” (Bruns: 144).
Spirit here means something like a mode of being, a state of living in God’s
Spirit, as opposed to an intellectual state “of conceptual agreement with
what the text says (not a philosophical state of knowledge or theological
state of doctrinal assent).” As Luther put it, he did not wish to understand
Scripture by his spirit or others’ but solely by its spirit. Scripture, then, is not
“so much an object of understanding as a component of it; what one under-
stands when one understands the Scriptural texts is not anything conceptual
and extractable as a meaning” (Bruns: 144–45). What does one understand?
The life of faith that seeks understanding as informed by the Scriptures. As
in Augustine, one must already have understood a text (in the sense of that
which it teaches) to be able to interpret its language. As Bruns formulates it,
the hermeneutical situation that Luther describes is one in which “the reader
is not so much the interpreter as the interpreted” (146). This is Luther’s great
reform: to encounter the Bible in the spirit in which it was written, an
encounter that is not concerned with deciphering a text’s meanings but with
“the event of the interpretation itself.” Scripture must be experienced. The
reader cannot be a “disengaged rational subject” (149). As opposed to the
idea of a text as a purely analytical object on which interpretation is done,
Luther posits a text that inscribes itself in the reader. In Frye, too, the text is
something that confronts the reader: “sooner or later we have to study . . . our
cording: the “something more” in the bible 157
own experience in reading it” (1990:75); the reader in Frye is exposed to the
Bible, made vulnerable by a God who “drowns the world in a fit of anger
and repeoples it in a fit of remorse,” a trickster-God who calls all our human
formulations into question. Frye’s “double vision” entails both a growing
insight into our conditioned limits and the growing ability (as we are trans-
formed by the biblical myth) to separate our human mirror of God from
God’s reality (1991:83).
Frye’s “double vision” requires, as it did for Luther, the rehabilitation of
Scripture as a “pneumatic text” in which the meaning of a word “is its
force” (Bruns: 147). While the Bible is written in the language of literature, in
the language of myth and metaphor, its language, according to Frye, is
intended to convey a vision of spiritual life; its “metaphors become, as
purely literary metaphors cannot, metaphors to live in” (1991:17). As
Gabriel Josipovici puts it in The Book of God, the Bible wants to “draw me out
of myself” (14). Understandably, then, Frye’s great hope in both The Great
Code and Words with Power is that we have come to a new phase in our
understanding of language and, subsequently, are in a position to restore
some of the original resources of language in which words were “words
with power.” More than anything else, Frye seeks to understand the linguis-
tic idiom of the Bible, a form of expression for which he adopts the term
kerygma. Kerygma is a mode of rhetoric that must be seen, Frye says, from
“both of its two aspects—metaphor and concern” (1982:29). “Concern” is
best glossed by Frye: “in concerned address a much more comprehensive
response from all aspects of the personality is called for” (1982:29). Though
it would have been helpful if Frye had written more specifically about his
understanding of kerygma, what Bruns says about Luther’s hermeneutics
might be applied here: it “presupposes a relationship to the Scripture that is
not a grammarian’s relationship to a textual object but that of a listener to a
voice” (147). To restore our sense of “words with power” requires an expe-
riencing of metaphor and myth that is not an intellectual hunt for
archetypes and typologies (though Frye’s charts may sometimes make it feel
this way to readers like Alter), but rather a radically metaphorical disclosure
of the “truth” of the biblical narrative.
To help with this restoration, Frye, employing a schema from Vico’s
New Science, divides the history of Western langage into three phases. The
first phase is poetic or metaphorical discourse in which the later distinction
between figured and literal language hardly exists. The second phase (from
around the time of Plato) is called the metonymic phase by Frye; in this
phase words become the outward expression of inner thoughts, and
metaphorical discourse becomes subordinate to the truth of metonymic or
conceptual discourse. The third phase dates from the sixteenth century; in
this phase both metaphorical and metonymic language are subject to the
truth of language that is primarily descriptive of an objective natural order.
158 semeia
Frye lays out this schema for two reasons: our understanding of the Bible
today depends in part on understanding how the Bible has been inter-
preted within a tradition in which the criteria for truthfulness have
privileged discursive discourse over metaphorical discourse. The result is
that we are left with myths that have become purely literary. Though Frye
admits that much of the Bible is “contemporary with the second-phase sep-
aration of the dialectical from the poetic” (1982:27), he argues that the
Bible’s origins lie in the first, metaphorical phase. Biblical language never
falls “wholly into the conventions of the second phase” because there are
“no true rational arguments in the Bible” (1982:27). For Frye biblical
Hebrew is an “obsessively concrete language” that eschews abstraction;
and the New Testament, despite its late date, shares this attitude toward
language. Such concreteness is a trait, Frye argues, that belongs to the
metaphorical phase of language. Once we recognize the Bible’s essentially
metaphorical language despite the “domination” (1982:23) of the later
phases, we can begin the arduous task of finding our way back to a God
who “may not be so much dead as entombed in a dead language”
(1982:18). Thus Frye’s task in The Great Code and Words with Power is to
restore the mythical and metaphorical basis of the Bible (and in so doing
restore, paradoxically, the literal basis of faith).
With this admittedly simplified background in mind, I will turn now to
Robert Alter’s essay, “Northrop Frye between Archetype and Typology.”
Alter’s books, especially The World of Biblical Literature, are interested in the
same question as Frye—how is the Bible a unique work of literature? Alter
and Frye agree that historical criticism of the Bible is rooted “in a view of
truth associated with nineteenth century positivism that does not sit well
with any sense of the moral or spiritual authority of Scripture” (Alter: 203).
Alter and Frye, that is, both share the same interest in closing the distance
between reader and text that I spoke about earlier. Finally, Alter’s interest in
bringing the tools of literary analysis to bear on the Bible, like Frye’s, is in
the service of “opening ourselves to something that deserves to be called
their authority, whether we attribute that authority solely to the power of
the human imagination or to a transcendent source of illumination that kin-
dled the imagination of the writers to express itself through . . . particular
literary means” (Alter: 204, emphasis mine). But here is also the place where
the two part company. Alter, who, perhaps, more than any recent writer on
the Bible has taught us how to attend to the poetic and narrative properties
of the Bible, is not only content with that “or” but is highly suspicious of
anyone who would push for “more.” As Alter concludes: “the covenantal
urgency of the biblical writers impelled them on a bold and finally impossi-
ble project: they sought to use literature to go irrevocably beyond itself”
(46). To Alter, Frye’s “imaginative refurbishing of Christian typology as a
beautifully interlocked system of symmetrically arranged archetypes,”
cording: the “something more” in the bible 159
proves only that the Bible is an “extreme and exemplary instance of litera-
ture in general” (26). We might say that, in the end, Alter is comfortable
with interpretation that attends with acumen and a generous spirit to the
infinite particularities of the Bible’s poetic and narrative authority. Frye, on
the other hand, despite the systematizing that Alter limits him to, wants to
attend to the “event of the interpretation itself.” As Bruns says about
Luther’s hermeneutics: “interpretation is an event that moves in two direc-
tions. It is not possible to interpret a text without being interpreted by it in
turn” (156). It is this latter aspect that Alter ignores in Frye or at least does
not see as the motivating force of his “systematizing.”
In this essay for Semeia, Alter renews this earlier suspicion. He takes
issue with what he sees as Frye’s premises in The Great Code: one, that Frye’s
“conception of the insulating function of mythology is directly linked to
Frye’s polemic stress on the autotelic character of literature”; and two, that
the Bible’s “self-referential literary character” is made evident by what Frye
cites as “the predominance of metaphor and other kinds of figuration in the
Bible” (10). In the first instance, Alter seems to ignore the context of Frye’s
remarks regarding mythology. Frye makes his remark about the “imagina-
tive insulation of myth” (1982:37) in the context of explaining why we
cannot talk about the Bible in simple either/or terms (history or fiction).
Myth is neither history nor fiction; mythic knowledge is always a matter of
recognition—myths’ proclamation, as Frye says, is not “so much this is true
as this is what you must know” (1990:31). Myths are stories that “tell a soci-
ety what is important for it to know” (1982:33). Myth’s haunting power for
Frye is linked to the way it is not a literal explanation of something in the
world (this is why he stresses what Alter quotes about the “imaginative
insulation” of myths that separate us from the environment), but an expres-
sion of the primitive, in the sense that the primitive expresses a
“fundamental and persisting link with reality” (1982:37). Frye situates both
his Viconian schema and his discussion of myth and metaphor beside the
debate between Peacock and Shelley. Frye agrees with Shelley’s claim that
“ ‘progress’ is always a progress toward disaster,” since such progress
ignores what poets have always known: “every mind is a primitive mind”
(1982:37). The Viconian schema of the metaphorical-metonymic-descriptive
sequence is provided for us so that we recognize that such a sequence is not
progress, but rather a means of occluding the very nature of metaphor and
myth, of poetry and the arts of which mythology is a part. As Frye points
out, “literature always assumes, in its metaphors, a relation between human
consciousness and its natural environment that passes beyond—in fact, out-
rages and violates—the ordinary common sense based on a permanent
separation of subject and object” (1990:71). Although Alter charges Frye with
directing us toward his “system of language” (10), Frye is, in fact, directing
us precisely toward what Alter realizes is the great gift of metaphor: to
160 semeia
“defamiliarize” so that the world can be seen again in its uniqueness. Frye
notes the creative and imaginative quality of myth because he sees a link
between myth and the primary function of literature: “to keep re-creating
the first or metaphorical phase of language” (1982:23). In Frye, literary his-
tory is the constant attempt on the part of poets to restore our original
relationship to what Wallace Stevens called the “muddy center” (1954:383).
As Frye understands, the poet’s task is always, as Eliot said, to purify the
language of the tribe so that we might see what kind of world we are really
in, so that we might have, as Stevens said, the “intensest rendezvous with
the world” (1954:524).
Myths are autonomous, then, because they are creative and imaginative,
because their truth is inside their verbal structure, not outside it. But this is
only half the picture, as Frye well knows. Just as the oratorical style of the
Bible united the poetic and the concerned for Frye, myth also unites both its
poetic aspect as a story with its social function. In both its poetic and its
social aspects, myth is a “program of action for a specific society.” More
importantly for Frye, in both these aspects myth “relates not to the actual
but to the possible.” Myth and the mythic mode of the Bible are crucial
because they keep confronting us with fundamental realities that are not of
our own making. To move toward the “possible” involves, as Frye says,
seeing “an element of illusion in what is really there, and something real in
fantasies about what might be there instead.” It is here that the imaginative
and the concerned “begin to unite” (1982:50).
Alter seems to collapse Frye’s understanding of how the imaginative
and the concerned are always united in the linguistic idiom of the Bible.
Summing up his reading of the David and Bathsheba story, Alter states this
objection against Frye:
This verse is, of course, a 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 dif-
ference in history and in the realization of humanity’s potential by offering
a strong representation of their actual unfolding. (11–12)
would agree with Alter’s key point regarding the literary enterprise of the
Bible: “to make a profound difference in history and in the realization of
humanity’s potential.” Here’s Frye: “The general principle involved here
(the kernel of actual history in biblical stories) is that if anything historically
true is in the Bible, it is there not because it is historically true but for differ-
ent reasons. The reasons have presumably to do with spiritual profundity or
significance” (1982:40). Frye’s point is simply that proving the historicity of
biblical passages is a fruitless enterprise when weighed against their signifi-
cance as stories that teach us more about the “possible” than the actual.
Alter’s objections to Frye have mostly to do with Alter’s limiting sense
of what Frye means by metaphor and the metaphorical phase of language
in his Viconian schema. Metaphor for Frye is the vehicle for those dual
aspects—the poetic and the concerned—of myth. For Frye, remember, the
letter of the biblical text is radically metaphorical. Alter seems to confuse
the Bible’s use of individual literary metaphors with Frye’s idea that the ori-
gins of the Bible’s mode of discourse are metaphorical (see Alter’s
discussion of the Esau and Jacob, David and Bathsheba passages). Alter’s
argument against Frye revolves around this question: “is it true that
metaphor and other kinds of figuration are predominant in the Bible
[Frye’s claim, according to Alter]?” (10). Alter’s answer is emphatically no;
in fact, “in the predominant prose narratives of the Hebrew Bible, only the
most sparing use is made of either metaphor or simile” (11). True enough,
and again Frye would not disagree. But when Frye argues that the Bible’s
origins are connected to the metaphorical phase of language, he is not talk-
ing about the use of metaphors (of figurations that embellish a narrative),
but rather pointing out the Bible’s “mode of symbolization” (see James
Kee’s discussion of Frye’s understanding of metaphor in his essay included
in this volume [85]). It is not important that the David and Bathsheba story
contains very little figuration; what is important is the way even the histor-
ically rooted David story is itself radically metaphorical in its complex
articulation. “Radically” because the story is not simply a part of some
self-reflective system of interlocking archetypes that Alter would limit Frye
to, but rather a story that contains the power to interpret us, to make us see
past our own conditioned limits and help us toward a truer understanding
of the mysteries of our living and dying. While it may be true that Frye
looks for patterns and that such a search is less interested in the representa-
tion of individual character (19), Frye’s goal is much closer to Alter’s than
Alter realizes. Frye, too, wants to address the “unfathomable individuality”
(19) of David. Far from disappearing in a “fog of archetypes” (20), David
and the events of David’s life as seen by Frye provide a metaphorical
schema within which we try to make sense of our own lives. What is
important is the way David’s and our self-identity is interrupted by the
unfolding of the story’s events.
162 semeia
God reveals to Job in the whirlwind but “symbolically” the alienated state of
Job’s “egocentric perception” before God speaks from the whirlwind. Caught
within the legal framework of cause-and-effect logic, Job does indeed belong
at first to “the endless extent of time and space.”
The book of Job also figures prominently in David Gay’s essay, “ ‘The
Humanized God’: Biblical Paradigms of Recognition in Frye’s Final Three
Books.” Part of Gay’s concern is with the way the book of Job, as Frye him-
self says in The Great Code, functions as a kind of paradigm of the U-shaped
narrative of the Bible. In addition, Gay wants to situate Frye’s reading of
Job, and the Bible in general, alongside William Blake’s. Gay’s focus is the
way Frye applies Aristotle’s concept of recognition and Blake’s exhortation
to his readers to “actualize his or her divine humanity” to a biblical context
whereby the reader becomes an active participant in the Bible’s vision of a
“humanized” God. The “humanized God” of Gay’s title is the final section
title of chapter 4 of Frye’s last book, The Double Vision. To Gay, Frye’s
humanized God is identical “with a release of human imaginative power”
(39) and the actualization of one’s own divine humanity. Finally, Gay
locates the humanized God within Frye’s social vision of the “educated
imagination” in which the “emancipation of scripture” (43) (from the wrong
forms of literalism) is part of criticism’s “work of transforming and renovat-
ing society” (39).
Three biblical narratives act as paradigms for the humanized God: Gene-
sis 22, the binding of Isaac; Genesis 32, Jacob’s struggle with the angel; and
the book of Job. Gay argues that in these three paradigmatic biblical stories,
the humanized God is “not an object of sense perception but the perceptual
power of the creative imagination itself, a condition that Frye and Blake
equate with the term ‘vision’” (40). “Vision” here is related to a shift in the
“cognitive disposition of the reader from passive receptor to active partici-
pant” (40). The question of course is how the reader’s creative imagination is
awakened and how one’s “vision” escapes the charges of being personal and
solipsistic. In what to me is the weakest part of Gay’s essay, Gay struggles to
connect the process of Albion’s awakening in Blake (the seven attempts
made by God to awaken Albion) to the seven phases of revelation in The
Great Code. The aim here, I take it, is to demonstrate how a kind of
Coleridgean Primary Act of the Imagination has to occur if we are, like
Albion, to escape the “continuum of fallen history” (41). The problem is how
this process of awakening occurs: through a “progression of antitypes” at
one moment, through a “process of dialectal tension” at another (41–42). The
process itself is never adequately explained. Similarly, the distinction that
Gay draws between a “sequence” of phases that is not progressive but cre-
ates “a wider and clearer perspective” (41) remains equally unsatisfying.
But when Gay turns to the biblical paradigms, the essay reaches firmer
ground. Gay rightly sets these three stories in the context of Frye’s effort in
164 semeia
his last three books to distinguish between “divine and demonic character-
istics in the human perception of God” (44). This effort is connected, as I
mentioned earlier, to Frye’s “double vision,” which entails the recognition of
our own “conditioned limits” and a separating of our human mirror of God
from God’s reality. As Gay points out, this process of “purifying the divine
image” is connected to the way these paradigmatic Bible stories exhibit the
three levels Frye spoke of in connection with Milton’s Paradise Regained:
demonic parody, redemptive power, and apocalyptic vision. While Gay ade-
quately explains these stages as they are seen in the stories of Abraham and
Isaac and Jacob and the angel, and, later in the essay, in the story of Job, his
essay veers away somewhat from the central issue: how the demonic level is
connected to our imprisonment in what Frye calls our single vision that
“sees in him (God) the reflection of human panic and rage, its love of cruelty
and domination, and, when it accepts such a God, calls on him to justify the
maintaining of these things in human life” (1991:83). The demonic state of
being is always connected to a lack of awareness of our own “conditioned
limits.” We see, as Job first saw, a God who should be (we think) but is not
acting according to human standards of justice. That God of course is what
Frye calls the “human mirror.” The redemptive level cannot begin until we
allow ourselves to be questioned, until we run up against what cannot be
explained by any human formulation. As Simone Weil understands, the
“contradictions the mind comes up against—these are the only realities:
they are the criterion of the real” (151). When contradictions are experienced
at the very depths of our being, according to Weil, “it is the cross.” The
cross, where the dying of our human understanding of God takes place, is
the threshold of the apocalyptic state or what Frye sometimes calls the
“ecstatic” state and is linked to his “double vision” in which we recognize at
last, as Job recognized, we have taken the “face of God in vain” (1991:83).
The strength of David Gay’s essay lies in the way he sees, as Alter does
not, what lies behind all of Frye’s charts, graphs, and comparative tables.
Gay recognizes how Frye’s final books go together quite well, and elo-
quently:
The Great Code extends the Bible in time through a horizontal typological
sequence from creation to apocalypse; Words with Power extends the Bible in
space through a vertical survey of imagery from the furnace to the moun-
tain. . . . The Double Vision identifies . . . the crises in language, nature, time,
and ultimately in the human perception of God . . . that create the condi-
tions of recognition. (54–55)
As Dolzani nicely puts it: “if you have such a God on your hands, you are
going to have to struggle.” The struggle in Frye, as Dolzani understands, is
“with the Word in an attempt to re-create both its aspects: as text and as
vision of God” (62).
Such a struggle involves what Heidegger called “undergoing an experi-
ence of language.” Here is Heidegger in his essay “The Nature of Language”:
“To undergo an experience with something—be it a thing, a person, or a
god—means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us and
transforms us.... [T]he experience is not of our own making” (57). The Bible,
for Frye, is kergymatic because rather than persuade, it proclaims, taking “one
out of oneself.” Frye goes on to note that such an “utterance” is “one charged
with such intensity, urgency or authority that it penetrates the defenses of the
166 semeia
WORKS CONSULTED
Alter, Robert
1992 The World of Biblical Literature. New York: Basic Books.
Bruns, Gerald
1992 Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press.
Damrosch, David
1987 The Narrative Covenant. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Frye, Northrop
1964 The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana 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.” New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
1991 The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Heidegger, Martin
1971 “The Nature of Language.” Pp. 57–108 in On the Way to Language. San
Francisco: Harper & Row.
Josipovici, Gabriel
1988 The Book of God. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Steiner, George
1988 “The Good Books.” The New Yorker, January 11:94–98.
cording: the “something more” in the bible 169
Stevens, Wallace
1942 “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” Pp. 1–36 in The Necessary
Angel. New York: Vintage.
1954 Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf.
Weil, Simone
1963 “Contradiction.” Pp. 151–56 in Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge.
New and Recent Titles
Dynamics of Diselection
Ambiguity in Genesis 12–36 and Ethnic
Boundaries in Post-Exilic Judah
R. Christopher Heard
Code: 060639 224 pages 2001
Paper: $29.95ISBN: 1-58983-001-6
Knowing Kings
Knowledge, Power, and Narcissism in the
Hebrew Bible
Stuart Lasine
“Stuart Lasine skillfully guides his readers
through the labyrinthine and largely unexplored
tunnel system connecting the courts of the
biblical kings and their heavenly counterpart,
Yahweh, with those of a dizzying array of other
monarchs across a broad range of cultures and
historical epochs. In the process, our under-
standing of biblical kings, both human and
divine, is deepened and thoroughly
defamiliarized. This is a consummately literate
and erudite study that richly repays reading and Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical
rereading.”—Stephen D. Moore, The Theological Scholarship
School, Drew University An Introduction
Code: 060640 360 pages 2001 Barbara Green
Paper: $39.95ISBN: 1-58983-004-0
Code: 060638 216 pages 2000
Paper: $24.95ISBN: 0-88414-020-2
Semeia: An Experimental Journal for Biblical Criticism (ISSN 0095-571X) is published by the
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